Cicero to his wife Terentia and daughter Tullia, written aboard ship in the harbour at Caieta on the seventh day before the Ides of June 49 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in portu Caietano nave conscensa vii Id. Iun. a. 705 (49)). After more than four months of paralysed indecision in his Formian villa — weighing his consular dignity, his obligation to Pompey, his promises to Caesar, his terror for his family — Cicero has at last embarked. The ship is in the harbour; the line is about to be cast off; he is sailing to join Pompey’s camp in Epirus. He will not see Italy again for almost a year, and the war he is sailing into will be lost.

The letter is short, and almost giddy with the relief of decision. The four months of agony, he declares, were bile: in the night he brought up chol\=en akraton, “pure bile,” and the moment the body purged itself the soul cleared too. Give thanks to Apollo and Aesculapius. The ship is good; he will write to friends from on board commending Terentia and Tullia to them; he need not urge them to courage, knowing them braver than any man; he expects in time to defend the commonwealth alongside men of his own kind. The closing instructions are practical to the point of domesticity — mind your health, withdraw to country houses well away from troops, the Arpinum estate will carry the town household if grain prices rise, our little Cicero sends his love. Then a doubled farewell, and the date. He has not yet sailed; he is writing between the decision and the wind.