Cicero to M. Fadius Gallus, written from the Tusculan villa in the intercalary month following 46 BC, and one of the most quoted of all his letters. Cicero has fled to Tusculum after ten days of bowel-trouble in town, where he could not persuade his clients he was really unwell because he had no fever; two days of strict fasting — not even water tasted — has left him spent. The body of the letter is a model of the comic juristic-medical register: Cicero dreads, he says, every illness, but particularly that on which the Stoics fasten Epicurus, who admitted that “strangurical and dysenteric afflictions” troubled him — the one a complaint of greed, the other of a more disgraceful intemperance still. Three of the four Greek phrases are clinical terms transliterated straight: strangourika kai dysenterika pathē, dysenterian, diarroia; the fourth, litotēta, “frugality,” is the elegantly philosophical label that the joke pivots on.

The joke: the sumptuary law (Caesar’s of 46) capped expenditure on meat and fish but, in good legalese, exempted terra nata, “things born of the earth.” Rome’s fashionable gourmets accordingly competed to season mushrooms, herbs, wild greens, and roots into delicacies more delicious than anything banned. At an augural dinner at Lentulus’s, Cicero — who could pass up oysters and lampreys without difficulty — was ambushed by beet and mallow; the result was as advertised. The Perseus dateline is in m. intercalari post a. 708 (46), the intercalary month after the regular year; the meta entry’s -0046-07-27 placeholder is a year-month-precision stub. Anicius, who had called and “seen me being sick,” had carried the news to Gallus; the closing is half a thank-you note, half the resolve, decidedly belated, to be more careful.