Cicero to Varro, written at Rome at the start of June 46 BC (Perseus: Romae in.~m.~Iun.~a.~708 (46)). The practical sequel to Fam.~9.4: Cicero settles on a date (the Nones) for their meeting and confirms his movements between the Tusculan and Cumane villas. The short central paragraph is the soberest statement in the Varro sequence about how the former Pompeians ought to feel concerning their own choices in the civil war. “What we followed was not hope but duty; what we abandoned was not duty but a lost cause.” The two opposed balances — duty and hope, duty and lost cause — are placed side by side without commentary, and the verdict on the relative positions of those who never left, those who left and never came home, and those (Cicero and Varro) who returned, is left for the reader to draw.

The harshest line is reserved not for the partisans of either side but for “the severity of the disengaged” — severitas otiosorum — the men who stayed out of the war altogether and now have moral opinions about those who fought it. Cicero closes with the famous balance: “I am more reverent toward those who fell in the war than I am anxious about these others, whom we do not satisfy because we go on living.” It is one of the gravest sentences he ever wrote about his own survival, and is followed at once, with characteristic abruptness, by the domestic detail of having the bath ready at the Cumane villa if he should arrive there first.