Cicero to his wife Terentia, written from Brundisium on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of Quintilis 47 BC — 15 June (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Brundisi xvii K.\ Quint.\ a.\ 707 (47)). Cicero has been pinned in Brundisium since his return from Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, waiting on Caesar, estranged from Antony’s authority in Italy, and increasingly preoccupied with the slow ruin of Tullia’s marriage to Dolabella. Three days before this letter Tullia herself arrived in Brundisium; the same event opens Att.\ 11.17 to Atticus.

The letter is one section and almost entirely formula — the greeting si vales, bene est; valeo, an injunction to mind her health, a date — but the middle carries the same charge as the matching report to Atticus. Tullia’s courage and humanity have only sharpened his grief that, through “our” negligence (the wife-version of the summa culpa mea he writes to Atticus), her circumstances fall so far short of what her character and standing deserved. He has it in mind to send young Cicero to Caesar, with Gnaeus Sallustius for company; if the boy actually sets out, Terentia will hear of it.