Cicero to Tiro, written from the villa at Cumae on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of May — 17 April 53 BC. Tiro’s fever has broken; he is well enough that Cicero now worries about the relapse a difficult journey could bring on rather than about the illness itself. Acastus, the slave Cicero had urged Tiro to keep on as a nurse (see 16.14), has at last brought a letter back. The patron’s calculation in the first section is touchingly precise: two days on the road, five for the return trip, all measured against the date Cicero wants to be at Formiae — the third day before the Kalends.

The second section opens with one of the warmest jokes in the correspondence: Cicero’s litterulae meae sive nostrae, his “little pages, or rather ours,” have grown listless without their secretary, and only Acastus’s delivery has raised their eyes again. Pompey is in the house as he writes, asking after the work, and Cicero tells him plainly that without Tiro everything of his is mute. The closing promise — nostra ad diem dictam fient — is the manumission already pencilled in for the day Tiro arrives; the clinching tag, that he has long since taught Tiro the etymon of fides, is the small Greek word Cicero leaves in transliterated script and Latin grammar at once, a private joke between two men used to working in both languages.