Cicero to Atticus, written at the Puteolan villa on 2 November 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Puteolano iv Non. Nov. a. 710 (44). The months between this letter and 16.7 have collapsed in the surviving correspondence: Cicero has been back, has delivered the First Philippic on 2 September, has weathered Antony’s furious reply of 19 September, and has retreated to the Bay of Naples to write the Second Philippic (still unpublished at this date) and the second book of the De Officiis. The news this letter carries is that Octavian, nineteen years old, has begun to recruit Caesar’s veterans for himself — five hundred denarii apiece to the men of Casilinum and Calatia, with the rest of the Campanian colonies to follow — and to assemble a private army with which to wage war on Antony.

Octavian has asked for a secret meeting with Cicero at or near Capua (“a childish thing, if he thinks it can be done in secret”); he has sent the Volaterran Caecina with the news that Antony is marching on Rome with the Alauda legion, demanding moneys of the towns, and that the three Macedonian legions on the upper sea have refused Antony’s donative and walked out on him. The famous cry of the letter is quem autem sequamur? vide nomen, vide aetatem — “but whom are we to follow? Look at the name, look at the age.” The name is Caesar; the age is nineteen. The closing question — Rome, Puteoli, or Arpinum? — frames the political vertigo: “never have I been in greater aporia.”