Cicero to Servius Sulpicius Rufus, proconsul of Achaia, written from Rome in 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae, ut videtur, a. 708 (46)). The second of the four Servius-recommendations preserved in Book 13 (Fam. 13.20–23). The principals here are two: M. Aemilius Avianius, a Roman businessman of long acquaintance whose household and estate are at Sicyon but who is for the moment detained at Cibyra in Phrygia; and his freedman C. Avianius Hammonius, who is managing his patron’s affairs on the ground in Achaia. The freedman is what the letter is really about — Cicero commends him in two capacities at once, as his patron’s procurator and on his own account.

The interest of the piece is the personal claim Cicero stakes on Hammonius’s behalf: he stood by Cicero "in my most distressing season" — a transparent reference to the exile of 58–57, or perhaps to the civil-war years just past — "with such fidelity and good will, as if he had been freed by my own hand." That last phrase is the rhetorical hinge: under Roman patronage law, manumission created a lifelong bond of duty between freedman and ex-master, and to say of another man’s freedman that he behaved as if he had been Cicero’s own is the strongest form of endorsement one Roman could offer another. The letter also gives a clean small picture of how Roman commercial houses operated in the Greek East: a Roman principal based in Italy or temporarily abroad, a freedman procurator on the spot, and a Roman provincial governor whose goodwill smoothed everything.