August 45 BCE: To Marcus Fabius Gallus (at Rome) from Cicero (at Tusculum)
A different take on Caesar's 'Anticato'?
You lament having torn up the letter: don't vex yourself, it is all safe. You can get it from my house whenever you please. For the warning you give me I am much obliged, and I beg you will always act thus. For you seem to fear that, unless I keep on good terms with him, I may laugh ‘a real Sardinian laugh.’*
But look out for yourself. Hands off: our master is coming sooner than we thought. I fear we Catonian blockheads may find ourselves on the block.*
My dear Gallus, don't imagine that anything could be better than that part of your letter which begins: ‘Everything else is slipping away.’ This in your ear in confidence: keep it to yourself: don't tell even your freed-man Apelles. Besides us two no one talks in that tone. Whether it is well or ill to do so, that is my look-out: but whatever it is, it is our speciality.
Work on then, and don't stir a nail's breadth, as they say, from the pen; for it is the creator of eloquence:* and for my part I now devote a considerable part of the night to it also.
Read Ad Familiares 7.25 in Latin here | Check the glossary here
‘a real Sardinian laugh.’—A ‘laugh on the wrong side of my mouth,’ from a herb found in Sardinia which was said to contort the features with a grin of pain.
we Catonian blockheads may find ourselves on the block—Keeping the MS. word catomum, said to refer to the hoisting of boys on a man's shoulders to be flogged, as in the well-known picture from Pompeii (κατ᾽ ὤμων). Others read catonium, explaining it to mean the ‘world below’ (κάτω), ‘Hades.’ The ‘master’ is, of course, Caesar; and the metaphor of a school is kept by manus de tabula, (perhaps) ‘No more scribbling—here comes the schoolmaster,’ i.e., we had better stop writing ‘Catos’ now Caesar is back home.
for it is the creator of eloquence—In the de Orat. 33, he says, ‘the pen, the best producer and master of eloquence.’ See Quint. Inst. Orat. 10.3.1-4.