Cicero to Terentia, written from Brundisium on the Nones of November 48 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Brundisi Non. Novemb. a. 706 (48); the body’s sign-off, “pr. Non. Nov.,” is the despatch a day later). This is essentially the moment of the Brundisium homecoming itself — the same week as Att. 11.5 of 4 November. Pharsalus has been lost since August; Pompey is dead at Pelusium; Cicero, having refused to take over what was left of the Pompeian command in Greece, has crossed back to Italy without Caesar’s leave and is now stranded in Brundisium under a cloud, awaiting he does not know what.

The note to Terentia is six lines of bare anxiety. He acknowledges her gladness that he is back, then immediately undercuts it: shaken in mind by grief and wrongs, he fears the course they have taken cannot easily be undone. He asks her to help, and in the same breath admits he cannot think how. He tells her not to come — the road is long and unsafe and he does not see what good her presence would do. The flatness of the close, “vale,” is the register of a man who has nothing more to say and nothing he can promise.