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 last of the four surviving Servius-recommendations in Book 13 (Fam. 13.20–23). The principal is the freedman L. Cossinius Anchialus, recommended on behalf of his patron L. Cossinius — whom Cicero introduces not only as his own old intimate but as a fellow tribulis of Servius (a member of the same Roman voting tribe), and as one whom Atticus has brought further into Cicero’s circle. The Atticus connection is what makes this letter readable as one of a series: the same Atticus who in 51 had pressed Cicero on Patro’s behalf at Athens is still, five years later, the quiet broker behind Cicero’s Greek-business patronage.

The rhetorical move is the one Cicero used for Hammonius in 13.21 and reuses here: he commends the freedman as if the freedman were his own. "If he were my own freedman, and stood in the same place with me in which he stands with his own patron, I could not commend him with greater earnestness." Under Roman patronage law that is again the strongest possible endorsement: to identify oneself with another man’s manumission bond is to assume the corresponding obligation. The phrasing is more compact than in 13.21 but no less load-bearing, and the close — "deeply welcome to me and afterwards agreeable to you" — is the standard reciprocal seal of the commendaticia.