B.C. 45, ÆT. 61 if there is anything in my handwriting which the copyists can't make out, please instruct them. There is at least one inserted passage somewhat difficult to decipher, which I often find it hard to make out myself—about Cato when he was four years old.[1] Look after the dinner table, as you have been doing. Tertia will come so long as Publius is not there.[2] Your friend Demetrius was never quite a Demetrius of Phalerum, but now he has become a regular Billienus.[3] Accordingly, I appoint you my representative: you will look after him. Although, after all: about those men—you know the rest. However, if you do have any conversation with him, write and tell me, that I may have something to put into a letter, and may have as long a one as possible from you to read. Take care of your health, my dear Tiro: you can't oblige me more than by doing that.
- ↑ A story is told by Plutarch (Cat. min. 2) of how, at the beginning of the Marsic or Social War, Pompædius Silo, staying in the house of Cato's uncle Drusus, suggested to the boy that he should ask his uncle to side with the allies, and when he refused, picked him up and, holding him out of the window, threatened to drop him down if he didn't. But the boy held out. As Cato was just four years old then (b. B.C. 95) this is probably the story, and the book alluded to Cicero's Cato, published in B.C. 46, of which the librarii would be making fresh copies. Schmidt, however, reads de quadrivio Catonis, and refers it to Cato's exposition of the Stoic philosophy in the de Finibus.
- ↑ Tertia was sister of Brutus and wife of Cassius. Who Publius was and why she objected to meet him we cannot tell. Dolabella is suggested.
- ↑ Demetrius is unknown, except from these letters to Tiro, but it is likely that Cicero found him tiresome. He is not, he says, quite a "Demetrius of Phalerum," i.e., the philosophic and eloquent governor of Athens in the later Macedonian period (B.C. 317-307). Billienus was the slave of this or another Demetrius: he murdered a certain Domitius at Ventimiglia, which led to an outbreak which Cælius (B.C. 49) was sent by Cæsar to quiet (see vol. ii., p. 299). There is also a Demetrius, a freedman of Pompey (vol. i., p. 253), who may be the Demetrius meant. Why Cicero should say that Demetrius has become a Billienus is not clear. Some have suggested a pun on bilis, as though he were ill-tempered.
