Cicero to Cn. Plancius, in exile at Corcyra, written at Rome shortly after the preceding letter (4.14) — Perseus: Romae paulo post ep. xiv a. 708 (46). Plancius, the former tribune and aedile who in 54 BC had been the subject of Cicero’s surviving speech Pro Plancio, had remained loyal to Pompeius in the civil war and was now living, with many fellow Pompeians, in proscribed exile at Corcyra. He had sent Cicero a very short letter, which carried his affection intact but said almost nothing about how he was bearing his condition.

Cicero’s reply is itself only one of the shortest pieces in the corpus, and it is built on the small distinction between the two things a friend’s letter from exile can tell you — that he loves you, and that he is enduring. Plancius’s note had made the first plain and left the second a blank, and Cicero will not let the blank stand. The note’s centre of gravity is the opposition between propria fortuna and in communi sumus: there is no private misery here, only a shared one, and the consolation lies precisely in refusing to claim a peculiar share of it. The closing antithesis — “which on your side I can hope for, and on mine I can guarantee” — is the characteristic gesture of these short letters of 46, in which Cicero offers his own steadiness as the warrant for asking steadiness in return.