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 fifth surviving letter of the Acilius cluster (Fam.\ 13.30–39). The beneficiary is Demetrius Megas, a Sicilian on whose behalf Cicero had previously secured a grant of Roman citizenship from Caesar through the agency of P.\ Cornelius Dolabella — the new citizen accordingly taking the name Publius Cornelius from his nominal sponsor. When Caesar afterwards ordered the public tablet of his grants of citizenship to be pulled down, in response to a scandal of trafficking in such favours by “certain disreputable men,” Cicero was at hand to hear Caesar reassure Dolabella that Megas’s grant would stand. The point of the letter is to put that protection on record with the provincial governor.

Beyond the formal recommendation, the letter is a small piece of documentary evidence: Cicero is asserting, with himself as the in-the-room witness, that Megas’s citizenship was untouched by the public scandal and the revocation that followed it. The shape of the piece reflects that double business — one section to register the legal status, one to make the standard request — and the asseverative maiore studio neminem commendarim carries the tier-marker (“with such zeal that I could commend no one with greater”) that elsewhere in the cluster Cicero uses to set a particular letter above the routine traffic.