Cicero to Lentulus Spinther, written from Rome shortly after the sixth day before the Ides of February (8 February) 56 BC. The dispatch on the day Pompey collapsed in public. On 8 February (a.d. viii Idus Februarias) Pompey spoke for Milo before the people — the assembly that the tribune Clodius had called for the prosecution — and was shouted down by Clodius’s claque; and that same day in the Senate Cato attacked him to the great silence of his enemies. The result for the Egyptian question is the inverted hinge of the whole 56 BC sequence: Pompey, deeply shaken, drops the Alexandrian cause. Cicero’s reading: with Pompey out, the king will see that the only way back to Egypt is through Lentulus, and (if Pompey gives him a hint) will set out for Cilicia in person. The roll-call of consular allies is the candid one — Hortensius and Lucullus alone friends, the rest hostile in degree. The closing line — “the rush of this featherweight man (Cato) broken” — is the only ad-hominem note in the whole Lentulus correspondence and shows how thin Cicero’s tolerance of the younger Cato has become.