Cicero to Marcus Tullius Tiro, written from the villa at Cumae on the day before the Ides of April — 12 April 53 BC — with a postscript dashed off the same evening or the next morning, 13 April. Tiro is still ill, stranded somewhere on the road back to his patron, and Cicero is now two letters deep in an anxious vigil: 16.14 had gone out the day before, and this one tracks the next two messengers as they straggle in. Aegypta arrives first with the good news that the fever has broken; then Hermia finally appears with a letter in Tiro’s own hand, the writing unsteady from weakness.

The texture is unguarded and almost domestic. Cicero counts up the messengers, names two slaves (Aegypta and a cook he is sending back to keep house for Tiro on the road), and falls into a small chiasmus that is the heart of the note: qua si me liberaris, ego te omni cura liberabo — “if you free me from that worry, I will free you from every care.” Vacillantibus litterulis — “a tottering little hand” — is the kind of physical detail he never wastes on bigger correspondents; this is the prose of someone who has been reading Tiro’s drafts for twenty years and can see the illness in the letter shapes.