Cicero to P. Cornelius Dolabella, written at Atticus’s Ficuleanum estate a little after the twelfth day before the kalends of May — Perseus: in Attici Ficuleano paulo post xii K. Mai. a.~709 (45), that is, shortly after 20 April 45 BC. Tullia had died in mid-February. Dolabella, though he and Tullia had divorced, had written Cicero a letter of condolence; this short note is Cicero’s reply. Dolabella was abroad on campaign with Caesar; Cicero was passing his bereavement between his own and Atticus’s country houses, working on the Consolatio for himself and beginning the Academica.

The letter is two short paragraphs, both bent around the same thought: gratitude to Dolabella for loving him visibly, and a frank statement that Cicero is not himself. The opening sentence is a load-bearing hyperbole — vel meo ipsius interitu mallem litteras meas desiderares, “I should rather you had missed letters from me by reason of my own death than by this calamity” — and the disavowal in the middle of section~1 is the philosophical pivot: he has not forgotten hominem me esse, that he is a man, and he does not think he must succumb to fortune; but the old cheerfulness is gone. Proelia te mea causa sustinere at the head of section~2 evidently refers to disputes in which Dolabella has defended Cicero’s name in Cicero’s absence — Cicero asks not to be vindicated so much as to be loved. The brevity is signalled at the close: he is not yet satis confirmatus ad scribendum, not yet steady enough for writing.