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 seventh surviving letter of the Acilius cluster (Fam.\ 13.30–39). The beneficiary is Lucius Bruttius, a young Roman knight with property in Sicily, whose father had been a friend of Cicero’s from his quaestorship at Lilybaeum (75 BC). Bruttius himself is at Rome; what needs the proconsul’s attention is the estate left under the management of agents in the province.

Notable for the explicit appeal to Cicero’s Sicilian quaestorship as the root of the connection — the office, more than two decades behind him, that had given him a permanent client-base on the island and furnished the material for the prosecution of Verres in 70 BC. The letter belongs to a recurring pattern in the Ad Familiares: an Italian principal at home, an estate and a roster of named or unnamed agents in the province, and a proconsul asked to extend protection to the second through regard for the first. The closing formula id quod ei recepi (“what I undertook to him for”) is a delicate touch: Cicero has already promised Bruttius that the letter will produce its effect, and is putting the proconsul on notice of the promise.