Cicero to Terentia, written from the Venusian district on the Kalends of October 47 BC — 1 October, by the Perseus dateline (Scr. de Venusino K. Oct. a. 707 (47)). The eleven-month Brundisium captivity is over. Caesar has at last come back across the Adriatic; the meeting at Tarentum has happened (the formal notio registered in Att. 11.20); Cicero has been released to go home. He is on the road up the Via Appia, near Venusia, four or five days short of his Tusculan villa.

The note is six lines. He expects to arrive on the Nones or the day after. Have everything ready — there may be a small party with him, and they will be staying a while. If there is no tub in the bathhouse, have one put in; likewise whatever else is needed for food and for health. After the long catastrophe and the long waiting, the first surviving letter of the homecoming is about a bath and a household. Read in sequence with what came before, the ordinariness is the point.