Cicero to L. Papirius Paetus, written at Rome in August 46 BC — Perseus: Romae in m.~Sext.~a.~708 (46). One of the most quoted of all Cicero’s letters, and the locus classicus for his Caesarian-era persona of the retired senator defected to the dinner table. Paetus had pelted him in a previous letter with comic-stage mala — apples flung at the buffoon velites, the skirmishers of the mimic troupe — and Cicero takes it in good part. The structural joke is unmistakable: “I have tossed away every care for the commonwealth, every meditation on what view to deliver in the Senate, every working-up of cases at law, and have flung myself into the camp of Epicurus, my adversary” (in Epicuri nos, adversari nostri, castra coniecimus). The military language — castra coniecimus — comically inverted for the philosophical school he had spent his life refuting.

The middle section keeps up the gastronomic register: he warns Paetus that the man coming to dinner is now both edax (a heavy eater) and a late-learner [Greek: opsimaths], proverbially overbearing; Paetus must forget his old little baskets (sportellae) and bread-and-cake trays; Cicero now dares dinners with Verrius and Camillus and has even given Hirtius dinner — without peacock, however. The closing section is the famous daily timetable: the morning salutatio from boni viros multos, sed tristis (many good men, but downcast) and from the laeti victores (the jubilant victors); the books; the visitors who come to hear him as “a man of learning, because I am a little more learned than they themselves”; the rest of the day given to the body. The grief-note — patriam eluxi iam et gravius et diutius quam ulla mater unicum filium, I have mourned my country more heavily and longer than ever a mother mourned her only son — sounds for one beat, then the comic threat snaps back: take care of your health, or I shall eat your goods up with you flat on your back; I have decided to spare you not even when ill.