Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa, written from Regium late in July 44 BC, on the same abortive voyage south whose Velian stop is the subject of 7.20. Prompted (he says) by Velia itself — the town of Trebatius’s birth, whose affection for its absent jurist Cicero had just been measuring at first hand — he had begun to compose a Latin Topics after Aristotle as soon as the ship cleared harbour. The book itself goes with the letter; this is the covering note.

The matter of the letter is half-pedagogical, half-teasing in the jurist-fostering register established across 7.20–7.22. If anything in the book seems obscure, Trebatius is to remember that no discipline whatever can be picked up from books alone without a teacher and practice — and Cicero immediately turns the point back on him: “can your civil law be learned from books?” The Perseus dateline reads iv K. Sext. (29 July), while the closing line of the letter as transmitted reads v K. Sextil. (28 July); the difference is a one-day MS variant, and the meta entry’s 29-July datestamp is here retained as the editorial default. The promise to “keep Trebatius steady” in the exercise of the new Topica is qualified by the conditional that would prove sadly real: “if I return safe, and find the state safe.”