Cicero to A. Manlius Torquatus, written from Atticus’s estate at Ficulea (in the Sabine country a few miles north-east of Rome) shortly before 20 April 45 BC (Perseus: in Attici Ficuleano ante xii K. Mai.). It is the second surviving letter of the Torquatus consolation cluster (Fam.~6.1, 6.3, 6.4, 6.2 in their probable order of composition; the manuscript ordering is the editorial sequence used here). Torquatus is still abroad, still a Pompeian under uncertain clemency, and the war that has not yet ended on the African and Spanish fronts holds his case in suspense.

The substantive heart of the letter is the trichotomy of 2 — arms prevail, peace is restored, or everything perishes — offered as an exhaustive cover of the possible futures, so that Torquatus may have a steady disposition prepared for each. The recourse, if the third branch is what comes, to the prediction of Marcus Antonius the orator (Torquatus’s grandfather-in-law and Cicero’s lost master, whom Cicero loved to invoke as a man of foresight) is more than an ornament: it puts the present catastrophe inside a Roman moral lineage, and gives Torquatus a forebear from whom the consolation comes by inheritance. The closing assertion — that no man has a special claim to grieve over what is happening to all, and that fortune that is free from fault must be borne — is the doctrine of Fam.~6.1.4 in epigrammatic form, the form it will take across the rest of the cluster.