Cicero to Atticus, written from Astura on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of April — Perseus: Asturae xvii K.~Apr.~a.~709 (45). Tullia, Cicero’s only daughter, had died in mid-February of that year, perhaps a month before this letter. Cicero, refusing to return to Rome, had withdrawn to Astura on the Latian coast; from there he writes to Atticus almost every day, not because he has anything to report but because the daily letter is what is now holding him to ordinary life. The voice of this letter is the voice of those months: spare, withdrawn, businesslike on the surface, with the grief implied rather than spoken.

Two matters in front of him. The first is the dowry: with Tullia’s marriage to Dolabella formally ended and Tullia herself now dead, the money owed back to her estate has to be settled, and Balbus’s proposal to transfer the debt by assignment is on the table. Cicero presses Atticus to close it. The second, and the quiet centre of the letter, is the fanum — the shrine he intends to build to consecrate Tullia. The island at Arpinum could afford a true apoth\=eosis, he says, but its very remoteness might make the honour look smaller; his mind is now turning to a site in the suburban horti of Rome. The second section, ostensibly about which philosophers should figure in his dialogues, ends in the line that gives the letter its weight: I have nothing to write to you about, but I write all the same, to draw your letters out of me — not that I expect anything from them, but somehow I still expect.