Cicero to C. Toranius, written from Astura at the end of July (Quintilis) 45 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Asturae ex. m. Quint. a. 709 (45). The salutation CICERO TORANIO S.\ identifies the correspondent as Toranius, a Pompeian aedile of 64 (Cicero’s own consular year-of-canvass colleague) who, like the other addressees of book 6, was waiting out the post-Pharsalus settlement in exile. Astura is Cicero’s seaside retreat south of Antium, the small island-villa to which he had withdrawn after the death of his daughter Tullia in February of this year; nearly all of the De Finibus and the Tusculans are being composed there. The letter is a follow-up to one dispatched three days earlier through the slaves of Cn.\ Plancius (Fam.\ 6.21), and its keynote is patience: stay where you are until Caesar’s return makes the next step clear.

The letter divides into three movements — a practical case for not moving (§1), a brief summing-up of the same point in a different register (§2), and a philosophical close (§3) that turns the whole exchange into a small consolatio: “whatever befalls us not through our own fault we ought to bear bravely.” “Our friend Cilo” is a shared intermediary, otherwise unidentified; the indirect manner in which Toranius’s situation is referred to (si recipiet ille se ad tempus — “if he comes back to himself in time”) is the standard periphrasis of these months for Caesar’s return from Spain after Munda. The understated tetracolon “te desiderant et diligunt et colunt” — “they long for you, love you, cherish you” — closes the letter on the affection of family, the one register the political weather had not yet stripped from Cicero’s correspondents.