Cicero from his seaside villa at Astura to Tiro, who is again unwell and recuperating in Rome. The Perseus dateline is iv K. Sext. 709 (29 July 45 BC), the summer after Tullia’s death, when Cicero is shuttling between Astura and the Tusculan villa and writing at a furious rate.

The letter has two moods stacked on top of each other. The first section is a teasing literary scolding: Tiro has slipped into a loose use of fideliter (“faithfully”) in his last note — the kind of usage that Cicero’s own stylistic conscience, normally embodied by Tiro himself, would have flagged. Cicero rehearses Theophrastus’s doctrine of the “modest metaphor” (verecunda tralatio) and promises to take it up in person. The second section turns practical: Demetrius is arriving, Cicero himself is moving on, and underneath everything sits the real anxiety — Tiro’s health. The closing “count yourself as being with me, if you take care of yourself” is the same affectionate calculus that runs through the whole Tiro cluster.