Cicero to L. Lucceius son of Quintus, written from Astura a few days after the previous letter to him (Fam.\ 5.14), in December 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Asturae paucis diebus post ep. xiv a. 709 (45). Lucceius is the historian (and addressee of the famous Fam.\ 5.12, in which Cicero had asked him to write up his consulship in monograph form) and a friend of long standing, now likewise in retirement and in poor health. He had evidently written to scold Cicero, in “the most gentle and most loving words,” for his continued absence from Rome — the “one cause which you suspect” — when in fact the deeper grief was the death of Tullia in February of this year, the wound for which Cicero in the opening line confesses there is no remedy.

The letter is a small, finely shaped piece of self-portraiture. It moves through four refuges in turn and lets each fail: friends (§2), then the companionship of Lucceius himself (the rest of §2), then literary work (§3 — “those very studies seem to shut me out from their harbour”), and finally retreat from Rome itself (§4). The architecture is the central philosophical move of these months in Astura, the same move that powers the Tusculans: take stock of the remedies, find them insufficient, and continue. The parenthesis “(I would say ‘delightful,’ had I not put that word out of service for every season)” is one of the most quietly devastating lines in the correspondence — the lexicon itself has narrowed under grief. The closing promise propediem te igitur videbo (“soon, then, I shall see you”) stands at the end of a letter whose whole argument is that being together has not in fact happened, even when it was geographically simple.