Cicero to Varro, written at the Tusculan villa between the eighth and the fourth day before the Ides of June 46 BC (Perseus: in Tusculano inter viii et iv Id.~Iun.~a.~708 (46)). The shortest letter of the Varro sequence and the densest in Greek philosophical vocabulary — a one-paragraph joke from one polymath to another about whether the addressee is, technically, going to come. The framework is the classic Hellenistic debate over modal logic: Diodorus Cronus held the so-called Master Argument, on which only what either is or will be is possible (peri dynatōn, “on possibles”), so that if you are going to come, your coming is necessary, and if not, your coming is impossible (adynatōn). Chrysippus the Stoic disputed this and allowed a wider sense of the possible. The teacher Diodotus, Cicero’s old Stoic friend who lived in his house and had recently died, “could never quite digest” Diodorus’s position.

The lightness of the surface should not disguise how much the letter is doing. Cicero is signalling to Varro that the informal philosophical correspondence between them is up and running — “of these things too we shall talk when we have leisure” — and that his retreat at Tusculum is fully a working library; the close pleads for Varro to come, and promises that if he does not, Cicero will come to him, provided only that the house has a garden as well as a library. The line si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil — “if you have a garden along with your library, nothing will be wanting” — has become one of the proverbial Latin tags for the contemplative life.