§1. _Noster_: our common friend. Varro was much more the friend of Atticus than of Cic., see Introd. p. 37. _Nuntiatum_: the spelling _nunciatum_ is a mistake, cf. Corssen, _Ausspr._ I. p. 51. _A M. Varrone_: _from M. Varro's house_ news came. _Audissemus_: Cic. uses the contracted forms of such subjunctives, as well as the full forms, but not intermediate forms like _audiissemus_. _Confestim_: note how artfully Cic. uses the dramatic form of the dialogue in order to magnify his attachment for Varro. _Ab eius villa_: the prep is absent from the MSS., but Wesenberg (_Em. M.T. Cic. Epistolarum_, p. 62) shows that it must be inserted. Cic. writes _abesse Roma_ (_Ad Fam._ V. 15, 4), _patria_ (_T.D._ V. 106) etc., but not _abesse officio_ (_De Off._ I. 43, where Wes. alters it) or the like. _Satis eum longo intervallo_: so all the MSS.; but Halm, after Davies, reads _se visentum_ for _satis eum_, quoting _Ad Att._ I. 4, Madv. _tum_ for _eum_ (Baiter and Halm's ed. of 1861, p. 854). The text is sound; the repetition of pronouns (_illum_, _eum_) is quite Ciceronian. The emphatic _ille_ is often repeated by the unemphatic _is_, cf. _T.D._ III. 71, and _M.D.F._ V. 22. I may note that the separation of _satis_ from _longo_ by the word _eum_ is quite in Cicero's style (see my note on 25 _quanta id magis_). Some editors stumble (Goerenz miserably) by taking _intervallo_ of distance in space, instead of duration in time, while others wrongly press _satis_, which only means "tolerably," to mean "sufficiently." The words _satis longo intervallo_ simply = "after a tolerably long halt." For the clause _ut mos_, etc., cf. _De Or._ II. 13.