[This is the first of two letters from July 27th.]
I hope from your letter that you are better, at any rate I desire it. Devote your whole energies to that, and don't have any uneasy feeling that you are acting against my wishes in staying away. You are with me if you are taking care of yourself. Therefore I would rather you were doing duty to your health than to my eyes and ears. For though it gives me pleasure both to hear and see you, it will give me much more pleasure if you are well.
I am being idle here, because I don't write without an amanuensis; but I find extreme pleasure in reading. As you are on the spot, 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.*
Look after the dinner table, as you have been doing. Tertia will come so long as Publius is not there.* Your friend Demetrius was never quite a Demetrius of Phalerum, but now he has become a regular Billienus.* 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.
Read Ad Familiares 16.22 in Latin here | Check the glossary here
Notes from the translator, E.S. Shuckburgh:
about Cato when he was four years old—A story is told by Plutarch (Cat. min. 2) of how, at the beginning of the Marsic or Social War, Pompaedius 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 will come so long as Publius is not there—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.
he has become a regular Billienus—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 Caelius (B.C. 49) was sent by Caesar 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.