Cicero to C. Trebatius Testa, written from Velia on 20 July 44 BC, as Cicero made his way down the Italian coast on the abortive voyage toward Greece that the south wind would soon turn back at Leucopetra. Velia was Trebatius’s birthplace, and Cicero spends the opening on the town’s affection for its absent jurist — and on Rufio, a member of Trebatius’s household whom Trebatius has hauled away to work on building projects in Rome, leaving the Velians short of him.

The substantive note — delivered as a friend’s advice in unsettled times — is that Trebatius should not sell or abandon the paternal estate, with its noble river Halaes and its Papirian house (though the lotus there might do with cutting down, for both view and prudence). A house in a healthy, remote, friendly place is the right thing to have, “especially in these times.” The closing section turns the jurist’s customary teasing back on Cicero himself: he has carried off a book of Nico the physician’s On Overeating from Nico’s pupil Sex. Fadius, and is, of course, ideally apt as a pupil in that discipline — though their friend Bassus had been hiding it from him, while apparently sharing it with Trebatius.