Cicero to his wife Terentia, written from Brundisium on the day before the Nones of January 47 BC — 4 January, by the Perseus dateline (pr. Non. Ian.). The letter belongs to the same midwinter trough as Fam. 14.17 and the catastrophe-letters to Atticus: Pharsalus lost, Pompey dead, Caesar still in the East, Cicero stranded at Brundisium with no political cover and his domestic life unravelling.

The letter is short and bitter. Volumnia — the actress Volumnia Cytheris, mistress of Mark Antony and a connection on whom Terentia had evidently been relying for some piece of business — failed to do what was owed and did what she did do carelessly. But that is the lesser grievance: “there are other matters that concern us more and that we grieve over more.” These wear Cicero down, he says, to exactly the state those men wanted who pushed him out of his own resolve — the friends, beginning with Pompey, who had urged him into the Republican camp at Pharsalus and so into the ruin he is now sitting in. The closing instruction is one terse line: cura ut valeas, “take care of your health.”