Ad Familiares 5.13

Cicero to Lucius Lucceius, written from Astura or Atticus’s estate at the Ficuleanum, in March or April 45 BC (Perseus: Asturae aut in Attici Ficuleano m. Mart. aut Apr. a. 709 (45)). Tullia, Cicero’s daughter, had died at Tusculum in mid-February; the weeks that followed are the deepest of Cicero’s grief and the period of his retreat from Rome — first to Astura on the coast, then to Atticus’s suburban property at the Ficuleanum — during which he was writing and receiving consolation letters from the friends of his life. Lucius Lucceius, historian and senatorial intimate (the same Lucceius whom Cicero in 56 BC had begged in Fam. 5.12 to write up his consulship as a monograph), had sent one of those consolations; this is Cicero’s reply.

The letter belongs to the same consolation cluster as the famous exchange with Servius Sulpicius (Fam. 4.5–4.6) and the lost Consolatio which Cicero was writing for himself in this same period. Its register is high and reflective: a thank-you in the philosophical mode, in which the consoled man holds up his consoler as the better practitioner of the doctrine they share. §1 praises Lucceius for the Stoic premise that the good life cannot hang on externals; §2 confesses that the storms of the last year have shaken loose what was once deeply lodged; §3, the hinge, returns the compliment of bravery with a twist — Cicero declares himself braver than his teacher, because where Lucceius still hopes for the commonwealth, Cicero, looking round at all its limbs, can find none unbroken. The closing sections settle into the warm cadence of friendship: §4 recalls their shared acts of public service (the auctore of §4 alludes to Lucceius’s role behind Cicero’s consular policy), and §5 promises that the joining of minds will keep them together whatever distances of body and health may impose.