Cicero to Marcus Tullius Tiro, written at his villa at Cumae on the third day before the Ides of April — 11 April 53 BC — and timed at the sixth hour, around midday. Tiro, Cicero’s freedman, was secretary, literary collaborator, and the indispensable hand of his working life; book 16 of the Familiares gathers the surviving letters to and about him, and these are the most personal correspondence in the corpus. Tiro is ill again, somewhere on the road back to Cicero, and a messenger named Andricus has just arrived a day late with a letter that did not say what Cicero wanted to hear.

The note is brief and unguarded. Cicero waives the doctor’s fee in advance, urges Tiro to keep the slave Acastus on as a nurse, and identifies the real complaint as a worry of the mind, not the body — audio te animo angi, “I hear you are troubled in mind.” The cure he prescribes is the one he most values in Tiro himself: that humanitas and learning on account of which Tiro is dear to him. The promised day in the closing line is most likely the manumission Cicero is already preparing to date forward if Tiro can only get home; the parting etiam atque etiam vale — “once more, and again, farewell” — is the formula Cicero reserves for the people he is most worried about.