Cicero to Varro, written at Rome a little before Fam.~9.2 (Perseus: Romae paulo ante ep.~2), that is, on or about 19 April 46 BC. A short note sent in Caninius’s hand on the eve of his next departure, when Cicero, as he says, has nothing in particular to write but does not want the courier to arrive empty-handed. The substance is the same as the longer letter that follows: the propriety of two former Pompeians retiring together to the country in the very season of Caesar’s African triumph, and Cicero’s answer to it. They will not be seen to live differently in retirement than they did in business — their way of life and way of eating is the same wherever they are — and even if they will be talked about, the talk of people wallowing in their own crimes is no measure of how to live.

The closing turn is the most concentrated statement in the early correspondence of the consolation that philosophy was becoming for Cicero in this year: “though our condition is wretched — as wretched as can be — still our pursuits, somehow, seem now to bear richer fruit than they once bore.” Either because nothing else now offers rest, or because the gravity of the disease is what makes us know the medicine. The sentence is Cicero turning over, in real time, the discovery that will produce, over the next eighteen months, the Hortensius, the Academica, the De Finibus and the Tusculans. He breaks off with one of his elegant compliments to Varro the polymath — “why am I telling you these things, in whose own house they are home-born?” — closing with the Greek proverb glauk’ eis Athēnas, “owls to Athens,” the ancient equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle.