Cicero to his wife Terentia, his daughter Tullia, and his son Marcus, written from Brundisium on the eve of his departure across the Adriatic into exile, late April 58 BC (the body gives a. d. ii K. Mai. — 30 April — as the date of departure, and Pr. K. Mai. for the sealing of the letter; the Perseus dateline-header reads Mart. and is generally held to be a scribal error for Mai.). The first surviving letter of the fourteen letters to Terentia: ten of them from this exile, the rest from the long uneasiness of the post-exile years and the first months of the civil war. The voice is the consular’s voice as it has not been heard before in the corpus: undone, weeping, unable to write or read.

The substance of the letter: thirteen days have been spent at Brundisium with M. Laenius Flaccus, who took Cicero in despite the penalty of the lex Clodia (any harbouring of the proscribed counted as a capital offence). Cicero is sailing tomorrow for Cyzicus through Macedonia, the Thessalonican destination not yet decided; the wind and the sailors will not wait. He cannot bear to ask Terentia, whom he calls aegram et corpore et animo confectam, to come to him; nor can he bear to think of being without her; the matter must go as it goes. The poignant centre is the two children: Tullia (now married to C. Calpurnius Piso Frugi, who features in §4 as “Piso”) — “the poor little thing’s marriage and her good name must be guarded”; and the boy Cicero, “always in my bosom and embrace.” §5 closes on the great line — viximus, floruimus; non vitium nostrum sed virtus nostra nos adflixit (“we have lived, we have flourished; not our vice but our virtue has cast us down”) — and on the bare admission: “I, who am putting heart into you, cannot put it into myself.”