Cicero to Marcus Tullius Tiro, written at Cumae on the fourth day before the Ides of April. The year is uncertain: Perseus’s tradition records “a. 701,” which converts to 53 BC, the year scholars commonly assign to the cluster of brief notes Cicero sends back when Tiro is unwell. The manifest date of 55 BC may reach the next editorial pass for correction; what is firm is the day, the place, and the substance — the first surviving letter of the Tiro cycle.

Tiro is Cicero’s freedman — traditionally manumitted about 53 BC — secretary, literary collaborator, and the man to whom the family letters in book 16 are addressed. The Tiro letters have a register of their own: the household shorthand of two people who do not need to be told who is meant by what; the absence of the political reportage that fills the letters to Atticus and Quintus; the recurring tenderness of the formula si me diligis (“if you love me”) brought down to a single domestic care — get well. Here Tiro is ill, and Cicero has sent the slave Menander to him. The whole letter is the briefest of dispatch notes: I shall reckon you have given me everything if I see you well; come when you are recovered; farewell.