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 fifth and last letter of this sub-sequence and the direct sequel to Fam. 13.26: the recommendation on behalf of L. Mescinius Rufus has produced an immediate and more than satisfactory response from Servius, and Mescinius’s agents have reported the same back to Rome. Cicero opens with the thank-you, then promptly turns to two further concrete asks — a Roman surety on the cautio amplius eo nomine non peti (a guarantee against any further claim under the same head, the standard Roman safeguard for the heir against re-litigation), and assistance in bringing Mindius’s widow Oppia, the principal obstructor of the estate, to Rome where the senatorial-jurisdiction argument from 13.26 will bite.

The letter is the most technically legal of the five and the closest to Servius the jurist’s own register. Cicero quotes the Roman surety formula in its exact words — a deliberate compliment of jurist to jurist, and a piece of confidence that Servius will arrange the surety at his end while Cicero stands guarantor at Rome (fide mea). The portrait of Mescinius in section 2 is, by the standards of the cluster, unusually warm: he combines the conventional commendaticia virtues (virtus, probitas, summum officium, summa observantia) with something more personal — “those studies of ours, in which we formerly took delight and by which we now actually live.” That last clause is the post-civil-war note of the period: Cicero, displaced from public life under Caesar, has turned to philosophy and literature as his actual mode of existence, and he is finding Mescinius good company in that retreat.