Cicero to Atticus, written at sea on the run up the Italian coast toward the Pompeianum on 19 August 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. navigans ad Pompeianum xiv K. Sept. a. 710 (44). This is the turnabout letter. Having sailed south for Greece in late July (the journey he was embarking on at the end of 16.3), Cicero had got as far as Leucopetra, the southern tip of Bruttium, and on 6 August had put out across the strait toward Patrae; some three hundred stadia out, a violent south wind drove him back to the same Leucopetra. The villa was Valerius’s, and while he waited for his wind, fresh visitors arrived from Rome carrying the edict of Brutus and Cassius, the news of a full senate summoned for the Kalends, and the report that Cicero himself was missed and half-blamed for his absence. The plan to leave Italy, in which he says he had taken no pleasure even before, was thrown aside on the spot.

The bulk of the letter is a long, surprisingly raw reply to a letter from Atticus that had reached him only after he turned back — a letter in which Atticus, having earlier urged the departure, now rebuked it in Greek tags (euthanasian, scholion, the famously wounding Brutus noster silet, “our Brutus is silent”). Cicero half-defends the original decision, half welcomes its reversal, and in the central paragraph recounts the meeting that ratified everything: at Velia, on 17 August, Brutus heard he was there and came on foot from his ships at the river Heles three miles off, “and poured out all that he had kept silent before.” Brutus had been chiefly grieved that Cicero was not in the Senate on the Kalends; he praised Piso (who alone had spoken against Antony at that meeting); and above all he rejoiced that Cicero had escaped the reproach of being thought to be travelling to Olympia. The south wind, Cicero says, turned him back from a dishonour past all defence.

The closing sections turn brief and practical: the edict-war between Antony and the liberators is opening but its aim is not yet plain; Cicero does not yet come to take the state in hand (“what can be done? did anyone vote with Piso?”); credit is hard to get because everyone fears arms. The very last paragraph is the human postscript — a disturbed inquiry about Pilia’s health, which Brutus has mentioned in a phrase Cicero now turns over (Piliam peirazesthai paralysei, that she was being assailed by a stroke). Within weeks of this letter, on 2 September, Cicero will deliver the First Philippic. The turnabout at Leucopetra is, in a real sense, where the Philippics begin.