“If ever,” he writes in one letter, “fortune shall restore me to my country and to you, I will certainly take care that of all my friends; none shall be more rejoiced than you.  All my duty to you, a duty which I must own in time past was sadly wanting, shall be so faithfully discharged that you will feel that I have been restored to you quite as much as I shall have been restored to my brother and to my children.  For whatever I have wronged you, and indeed because I have wronged you, pardon me; for I have wronged myself far worse.  I do not write this as not knowing that you feel the very greatest trouble on my account; but if you were and had been under the obligation to love me, as much as you actually do love me and have loved me, you never would have allowed me to lack the wise advice which you have so abundantly at your command.”  This is perhaps a little obscure, as it is certainly somewhat subtle; but Cicero means that Atticus had not interested himself in his affairs as much as he would have felt bound to do, if he (Cicero) had been less remiss in the duties of friendship.

To another correspondent, his wife Terentia, he poured out his heart yet more freely.  “Don’t think,” he writes in one of his letters to her, “that I write longer letters to others than to you, except indeed I have received some long communication which I feel I must answer.  Indeed I have nothing to write; and in these days I find it the most difficult of duties.  Writing to you and to my dearest Tullia I never can do without floods of tears.  I see you are utterly miserable, and I wanted you to be completely happy.  I might have made you so.  I could have made you had I been less timid....  My heart’s delight, my deepest regret is to think that you, to whom all used to look for help, should now be involved in such sorrow, such distress! and that I should be to blame, I who saved others only to ruin myself and mine!...  As for expenditure, let others, who can if they will, undertake it.  And if you love me, don’t distress your health, which is already, I know, feeble.  All night, all day I think of you.  I see that you are undertaking all imaginable labors on my behalf; I only fear that you will not be able to endure them.  I am aware that all depends upon you.  If we are to succeed in what you wish and are now trying to compass, take care of your health.”  In another he writes:  “Unhappy that I am! to think that one so virtuous, so loyal, so honest, so kind, should be so afflicted, and all on my account.  And my dearest Tullia, too, that she should be so unhappy about a father in whom she once found so much happiness.  And what shall I say about my dear little Cicero?  That he should feel the bitterest sorrow and trouble as soon as he began to feel any thing!  If all this was really, as you write, the work of fate, I could endure it a little more easily; but it was all brought about by my fault, thinking that I was loved by men who really were jealous of me, and keeping aloof from others who were really on my side.”