Cicero to Servius Sulpicius Rufus, proconsul of Achaia, written from Rome around the beginning of December 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae, ut videtur, a. 708 (46)). Part of the Servius-recommendation sheaf (Fam.\ 13.17–28), and the longest letter of the cluster. The beneficiary is Lyso of Patrae, Cicero’s guest-friend of long standing and (as the letter emphasises) more than that — a man who had spent nearly a year living almost in Cicero’s own household at Rome. Lyso had been on the Pompeian side in the civil war and was therefore politically exposed under Caesar’s dispensation; the letter records, in passing, that the intercession on his behalf has succeeded and that Caesar has sent Servius a covering letter restoring Lyso’s position. A separate sub-recommendation is interleaved for Lyso’s son, whom Cicero’s own client C. Maenius Gemellus had adopted at Patrae and whose inheritance right Cicero asks Servius to safeguard.

The letter sits at the top of the commendaticia register. Cicero’s intimacy with Lyso is the most explicit and personal of any in the Servius sheaf — nihil sit familiaritate nostra coniunctius, “nothing is more tightly knit than the friendship between us” — and the closing turn is unusually candid about the patronage stakes: if Servius fails to deliver, Cicero’s standing with Lyso will be diminished, not Servius’s standing with Cicero. That inversion of the usual flow of obligation, in which the patron protects the writer’s authority over his client, is the precise calculus of a recommendation between equals.