Cicero to Varro, written at Rome a little after the twelfth day before the Kalends of May 46 BC (Perseus: Romae paulo post xii K.~Mai.~a.~708 (46)), that is, in the days just after the news of Thapsus had reached the city and Caesar’s victory over the last Pompeian field army in Africa was being celebrated. The light comic opening — the friend Caninius who keeps missing his rides, the night’s letter that goes stale before its courier appears — gives way at once to the political question that organizes the whole sequence: how two of the more conspicuous Pompeians left alive at Rome should hold themselves while the triumph is being prepared. Cicero’s advice is the great Epicurean tag in Latin dress: “let us avoid men’s eyes if we cannot so easily avoid their tongues.” Those who won look on us as conquered; those who lost are sorry we are still alive. He gives the candid account of why he has stayed: to leave Rome would have invited every uncharitable construction imaginable, and the daily habit of staying has, almost without his noticing, grown a callus.

The close is the manifesto of the literary turn. They will live together in their studies, from which they used to seek mere enjoyment but from which they now seek their safety. They will not refuse anyone who wants them in the work of rebuilding the commonwealth, not merely as architects but as common builders; and if no one takes them up, they will write and read of politeiai — of constitutions — and “in our writing and our books, as the most learned of the ancients did, attend to the commonwealth and inquire into customs and laws.” This sentence is the design-sketch for what becomes, over the next eighteen months, the most concentrated burst of philosophy in Latin: the Paradoxa Stoicorum, the Brutus, the Orator, eventually the De Finibus and Tusculans. Greek phrases are denser here than anywhere else in Cicero’s correspondence (heōlos, “stale”; the adverb lelēthotōs, “imperceptibly”; politeiai for De Re Publica-style constitutional inquiry); the register acknowledges Varro as a fellow Hellenist of the highest rank.