Cicero to Marcus Rutilius, written from Rome not before mid-October 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr.\ Romae non ante med.\ m.\ Oct.\ a.\ 709 (45)). Rutilius, like Valerius Orca and Cluvius addressed in the immediately surrounding letters, is on Caesarian land-commissioner business in 45 BC, parcelling out land for veteran settlement. The request comes to Cicero at one remove: P. Sestius, his old client and friend, asked him to intervene on behalf of his son’s maternal grandfather, the senator C. Albinius.

The case is unusually legalistic for the recommendation genre, and Cicero deploys it sharply. The estates in question — the so-called Laberian holdings — had originally been Plotian property; Caesar sold them to Laberius, and Laberius then transferred them at valuation to Albinius. To redistribute them now would not just hurt Albinius: it would undermine Caesar’s own title-clearing programme, which leans on the validity of the Sullan sales as a precedent for the validity of Caesar’s own. Cicero refuses to develop the argument (docere te videar, non rogare); he merely sets out the implication and trusts Rutilius’s good judgement. The personal triangulation in section 1 — I owe Sestius, Sestius owes Albinius, therefore I am asking on Albinius’s behalf — is one of the cleaner specimens of Cicero’s social arithmetic.