Cicero to Manius Acilius Glabrio, proconsul of Sicily, written from Rome in 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae, ut videtur, a. 708 (46)). The second of the surviving cluster of recommendations to Acilius (Fam.\ 13.30–39). The beneficiary is Gnaeus Otacilius Naso — a Roman businessman of equestrian rank, otherwise obscure, with commercial interests in Sicily managed on the ground by his freedmen Hilarus, Antigonus, and Demostratus. Cicero stands in close personal regard of him at Rome and asks the proconsul to extend the same favour to Naso’s affairs and to his agents.

The letter is among the most compressed of the commendaticiae: a single paragraph that gestures briefly at the sketch of the man (humanity, uprightness, daily intimacy), waives the formal rehearsal of his merits as already implied by that intimacy, names the agents who stand in for him in the province, and closes with the standard request that the recommendation be felt to have weighed with the addressee. The economy is itself the point. The genre had become a set form, and Cicero handles its formulae with a craftsman’s lightness, varying the touch from letter to letter without ever straying from the shape.