Cicero to Varro, written at Rome at the end of May 46 BC (Perseus: Romae ex.~m.~Maio a.~708 (46)). The canonical numbering of book 9 places this letter after Fam.~9.6, but the Perseus dateline puts it earlier in the calendar than either Fam.~9.5 (early June) or Fam.~9.6 (last week of June); chronologically it falls before both. The substance bears this out: Caesar’s return from Africa is still being mapped out ("when, by what route, where, we know nothing as yet"), whereas in 9.6 his arrival is being looked for any day. The letter is the first of the Varro sequence in which the war is openly behind them and the question is how the regime will treat its returned opponents: Cicero has heard about the killing of the younger Lucius Caesar in Africa, says to himself “What will this fellow do to me, given what he did to his own father?” — and goes on dining, all the same, at the houses of “these men who are now masters.” tempori serviendum est: one must serve the time.

The letter is the densest cluster of Greek and verse tag-ends in the surviving Varro correspondence. The half-line from Iliad 10.224 (Diomedes to Nestor, “when two go together”) stands in for Cicero’s wish to be at Varro’s side for whatever was coming; the Ennian hexameter on the bristling land of Africa marks the recent campaign; the Stoic technical apoproēgmena (“dispreferred,” the negative half of the indifferents) names the whole present situation in one word; and the proverbial polloi mathētai kreissones didaskalōn, “many pupils outdo their teachers,” is turned, with light irony, on Dolabella as the latest source of regime news. The register is that of two of the most learned Romans alive trading shorthand across a political vacuum.