APPENDIX C
The following letters to Tiro, with one from Quintus in regard to his manumission, are given here because of the difficulty of dating them. The indications of time are as follows. I. Those addressed to Tiro are earlier than that of Quintus, because they refer to a promised emancipation, while that of Quintus speaks of it as accomplished. II. The letter of Quintus is after the emancipation of his own freedman Statius, which apparently took place B.C. 59. III. Quintus is at a distance from Italy, and is looking forward to rejoin his brother and family. IV. Cicero is engaged on some more than ordinary literary work. V. Pompey is visiting Cicero in his Cuman villa. Now after his return from Asia (B.C. 58), Quintus was only twice thus distant, in B.C. 57-56 in Sardinia, and in B.C. 54-53 in Britain and Gaul. In both of these periods Cicero was engaged on literary work; in the former on the de Oratore, in the latter on the de Republica. There is really no means of deciding between these two. It is even possible that they might be placed some time during the proprietorship of Quintus in Asia (B.C. 62-59), during which Cicero was engaged, among other things, on a poem on his own times and a history of his consulship. Tiro—or M. Tullius Tiro, as he was called after his emancipation—was not a young man, and may well have been emancipated even in B.C. 59. According to Hieronymus, he died in B.C. 5 in his hundredth year. He was therefore little more than a year younger than Cicero himself. The illness of Tiro must have been an earlier one than that of which we shall hear much in B.C. 50-49.