Cicero to Domitius, written from Rome in May 46 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae m. Maio a. 708 (46). The correspondent is in all likelihood Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, son of L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, the Pompeian consul of 54 who fell at Pharsalus; the surviving son had been pardoned by Caesar after the war and was now living in Italy. The appeal to “your mother, that excellent woman” fits Porcia, sister of Cato, who survived her husband and remained in Rome (Cato himself had killed himself at Utica the year before). The letter belongs to the post-Thapsus group of consolatory addresses to defeated Pompeians, a register Cicero produces almost as a genre in 46–45 BC.

The letter is brief and severely shaped: a single opening admission that there has been nothing to say, followed by a long suspended period of entreaty (“I beg and beseech you that you keep yourself safe; that you take thought ; that the lessons you have learned you put to use; and that the loss of those you bear”), and a closing pledge of practical service. The tetracolon of imperatives in §2 is the rhetorical centre of the letter; the closing antithesis “if not with an even mind, then at least with a brave one” (si non aequo animo, at forti) gives away the philosophical temper Cicero is working in — the same mode he is about to develop at length in the Tusculan Disputations. The pretext of the letter is that no letter was needed; the work the letter performs is to be present, for a man whose father and political world have both ended.