Cicero to Atticus, written from the Puteolan villa on 10 July 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Puteolano vi Id. Quint. a. 710 (44). Cicero is still on the bay of Naples, working his way south by sea toward Brundisium and embarkation for Greece. The letter is a day’s news from Nesis: he has been to see Brutus, who is wounded to the quick by the reception of his Apollinarian games on the Nones of July — so much so that he is arranging to have the beast-hunt re-advertised under a different date. Libo arrives with a letter from Sextus Pompey, addressed only to the consuls; Cicero and the others insist on the address being broadened to praetors, tribunes, and Senate so that the consuls cannot suppress it.

News from Spain follows: Sextus has taken Baria with a single legion and a swell of popular feeling, but has fallen back on the six legions he kept in reserve in Further Spain, demanding as the price of any settlement that all armies everywhere be disbanded. The Buthrotian land question — Atticus’s perennial worry — yields nothing definite from inquiry: one report says the settlers have been massacred, another that Plancus has absconded with the money. The letter closes with travel arithmetic: the land road to Brundisium is closed by troop movements, so Cicero will sail in convoy with Brutus, whose squadron of two-banked vessels (his own and Domitius’s, plus the lighter craft of Sestius and Bucilianus) is in better trim than report had suggested. Cassius’s flotilla is already past the strait. The one remaining trouble is that Brutus is in no hurry — but a slow voyage, Cicero decides, beats no voyage at all.