Cicero to his freedman Tiro, written from Rome. The Perseus dateline is the very wide bracket Scr. Romae inter med. m. Oct. a. 707 (47) et Id. Mai. a. 710 (44) — somewhere between mid-October 47 and mid-May 44. The standing editorial guess, followed in meta/works.yaml and adopted here, lodges the letter in the spring of 47, while Tiro is at the Tusculan villa convalescing and Cicero is in the city. The opening sentence is a fragment of a private joke about the form of the address line — whether the salutation should read “Tullius to his Tiro” with or without “his own” (suo) tacked on — and the rest is the domestic chatter of a man who knows his correspondent’s body and his correspondent’s reading habits equally well.

Almost every line carries a Greek word, since Greek is the technical language of medicine and Tiro’s prescription is being checked off in it: a sweating-cure [Greek: diaphoresin] that has already done some good, and then the regimen to be kept up — digestion [Greek: pepsin], the loosening-rub [Greek: akopian], a measured walk [Greek: peripaton symmetron], a rubdown [Greek: tripsin], and an easy bowel [Greek: eulysian koilias]. The middle business about the gardener Parhedrus, Helico’s old lease, and the Aqua Crabra (a small stream that supplied the Tusculan estates) is estate management talk passed between owner and freedman as between equals. The closing tease — “no little books with you? or are you composing something Sophoclean?” — is Cicero teasing Tiro about his own literary ambitions, of which Cicero in fact thoroughly approved.