The letters to TERENTIA do not fill much space in the correspondence, and are rarely interesting. Married about B.C. 80, Cicero seems to have lived in harmony with her at least till the time of his return from exile, during which unhappy period he acknowledges the activity of her exertions in support of his recall, and the drain which his ruin was making upon her resources. Terentia had a large private fortune, and apparently used it liberally in his service. Nevertheless, immediately on his return from exile, there seems to have been some cause of coldness between the husband and wife. He darkly alludes to certain domestic troubles in the first letter to Atticus written from Rome (vol i., p. 189), and repeats the hint in the next (p. 193). When he landed at Brundisium it was Tullia, not Terentia, who came to meet him (p. 187), and for some time after she appears to be presiding in his house rather than Terentia (see pp. 224, 257). Whatever the cause of this coldness was, however, it appears to have been removed for a time. He kept up a correspondence with her while he was in Cilicia (B.C. 51-50), and though he does not seem pleased at her having arranged the marriage of Tullia with Dolabella, he addresses her warmly when about to return, and was met by her on landing. During the five or six months that followed, before Cicero left Italy to join Pompey, there is no indication of any alienation: but the short notes from Pompey's camp, and in the first half of B.C. 47, are cold and conventional, and on his return to Brundisium after Pharsalia, and during his lengthened stay there, he appears to have declined to allow her to come and see him. Soon after his return to Rome, in September, B.C. 47, matters came to a climax. Perhaps some of the mischief was caused by the mismanagement or dishonesty of Terentia's steward, Philotimus, of whom we hear a good deal in the letters from Cilicia: but whatever was the origin of the quarrel, Cicero asserts that on his return he found his affairs in a state of utter disorder. It may well have been that, like other adherents to the losing cause, he had to suffer from loss of any property that could be easily laid hands on in Rome, and that Terentia had had no power to save it. But Cicero, rightly or wrongly, attributed the embarrassment which he found awaiting him to his wife. He says in a letter to Gnæus Plancius:[21] "I should not have taken any new step at a time of such general disaster had I not on my return found my private affairs in as sorry a position as the public. The fact is, that when I saw that, owing to the criminal conduct of those to whom my life and fortunes ought, in return for my never-to-be-forgotten services, to have been their dearest object, there was nothing safe within the walls of my house, nothing that was not the subject of some intrigue, I made up my mind that I must arm myself by the faithful support of new marriage