Cicero to Servius Sulpicius Rufus, proconsul of Achaia, written from Rome in 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae, ut videtur, a. 708 (46)). A thank-you letter and partial follow-on to Fam. 13.21: Servius has, in the meantime, treated Hammonius and the estate of his patron M. Aemilius Avianius generously, Hammonius has written a profuse letter of thanks back to Rome, and Cicero is now relaying that thanks to Servius. The letter doubles as a renewed light recommendation that the same beneficiaries’ remaining Achaian business be wrapped up before Servius’s proconsulship ends. The close adds a small grace note: Cicero is enjoying the company of Servius’s son (the younger Servius Sulpicius), who is in Rome and evidently spending time at Cicero’s house.

The opening is the most striking piece in the letter — a small piece of commendaticia wit addressed jurist-to-jurist. Servius was the most eminent jurist of the age, and Cicero invokes the jurists’ technical practice of the formula\,—\,the set legal pattern under which a case was framed — as a metaphor for his own recurrent letters of thanks: “as you jurists do with the formulae of legal pleading, I shall put it de eadem re alio modo” (“on the same matter, in another mode”). The clause is broken in the manuscripts (Mendelssohn marks a lacuna at this point in the Teubner text), and the precise verb completing the metaphor is lost, but the joke is clear. Cicero is performing exactly the variation he describes: same business, fresh formula. The piece is the warmest of the cluster, with the personal disclosure about Servius’s son operating as its quietly affectionate seal.