Cicero to Tiro, written from Alyzia on the Nones of November 50 BC — 5 November — two days after the previous letter from the same voyage. Cicero has come ashore at the small Acarnanian port a hundred and twenty stadia south of Leucas; he had expected to find Tiro himself, or at least a letter through the slave Marion, waiting at the next port north, and the silence has put him in the state of mind he refuses to describe.

The note is the shortest and most uneasy of the cluster — a single section under twenty lines of Latin, the salutation now stripped down to Tullius Tironi suo s. (the family chorus of 16.1 dropped). The opening is the rhetorical gesture of a man writing against his own intention: non queo ad te nec libet scribere quo animo sim adfectus — I cannot, and do not wish to, tell you what state I am in — and the close folds the formal love-formula in on itself, asking Tiro to measure his care for his health either by his love for Cicero or by his knowledge of Cicero’s love for him, whichever weighs more.