Lucius Lucceius to Cicero, written at Rome on 9 May 45 BC (Perseus: Romae vii.~Id.~Mai.~a.~709 (45)). The letter is incoming, one of the surviving consolations sent to Cicero in the weeks after Tullia’s death at Tusculum in mid-February. Lucceius, historian and senator and a friend of many years (he is the same man Cicero in 56 BC had begged in Fam.~5.12 to write up his consulship as a monograph), addresses his friend with the same patrician formality the heading registers — L. Lucceius Q.~f.\ to M. Tullius M.~f.\ — but with a brisk and impatient affection, the affection of a man who has been waiting for his friend to come back to him and to himself.

The argument of the letter runs in two halves and an appeal. §1 takes the more generous reading: if Cicero has absented himself from Rome to write and to take up again the old learned occupations, Lucceius rejoices and does not find fault. But §2 turns to the other possibility, the one Lucceius plainly suspects — that Cicero has surrendered himself to tears and is doubling the anxieties his own wisdom should lighten — and the three anaphoric questions (tu solus aperta non videbis ... tu non intelleges ... non intelleges ...) press the philosopher’s reproach in the voice of a man who knows how to lean on his friend. §3 drops the argument and pleads: come back to our company, to the way of life that is either our common one or your own proper one (vel nostram communem vel tuam solius ac propriam). Cicero’s reply, the brief and grateful Fam.~5.15, was sent within days; he came back to Rome but not, as his other letters of this period show, to himself.