Cicero to L. Papirius Paetus, written at Rome before the middle of February 43 BC (Perseus: ante mcd. m. Febr.). The date places the letter in the thick of the Philippic period: the First Philippic had been delivered in September 44, the Fourteenth followed in late April 43, and the senatorial campaign that eventually produced the disaster at Mutina is in full motion. This is among the last surviving letters in Book 9 to Paetus, the Campanian eques and literary friend with whom Cicero had exchanged the long, jocular dinner-letters of 46 and 45 BC.

The letter has two registers, joined by a hinge. The first section transacts business: Rufus, a friend of Paetus, has shown concern for Cicero’s safety; plots against Cicero at Aquinum and Fabrateria have been thwarted in part because of Paetus’s earlier warnings, and so the recommendation Paetus has now sent twice is already redundant from love. The middle section drops into the old tone of teasing about dinners: Paetus has stopped going out, and Cicero — with Spurinna the haruspex as the deadpan medical authority — pretends to a grave Republican peril if Paetus does not resume his old habits when the west wind (Favonius) blows. Then the philosophical hinge, with the Greek pair symposia / syndeipna contrasted with the Latin convivia: the Romans were wiser to name the meal not by drink or food but by the sharing of life. The closing turn pulls the register up sharply — “in this care and administration if my life must be laid down, I shall reckon that things have turned out splendidly for me” — and gives the letter its valedictory weight.