Cicero to Terentia, written from Brundisium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of January 48 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Brundisi a. 706 (48) a. d. xvi K. Ian.). The same days that produce the long deliberation letters to Atticus — Att. 11.7 and 11.8 of 19 December, in which Cicero turns over and over whether to go forward to Caesar, to wait, or to repudiate the position altogether — this is what he writes home: four sentences.

Tullia is ill at Rome; her husband Dolabella, in Caesar’s camp, is ill too. Cicero, already crushed by his political situation, takes both pieces of news as further weight on the same load. The middle sentence is the heart of it: he has no plan and does not know what to do. The closing instruction — take care of your own health and Tullia’s — has by now become the formula of these Brundisium notes. The prose stays at the surface; the deliberation is going on in the letters to Atticus.