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 eighth and last surviving letter of the Acilius cluster (Fam.\ 13.30–39). The beneficiary is Marcus Titurnius Rufus — the sole surviving member, as Cicero notes, of an old family with which he has held a hereditary tie of connection. The Titurnii are otherwise obscure; the letter is the only mention of the line in the surviving corpus.

Among the shortest of the cluster, and the most formulaic. The phrasing is built almost entirely of the genre’s set markers — commendo in maiorem modum, magno adiumento fuisse, vehementer gratum — with one striking turn at the centre: est igitur in tua potestate ut ille in me satis sibi praesidi putet esse, which makes explicit the otherwise tacit logic of the commendaticia. The protection Rufus enjoys through Cicero is real only in proportion to the proconsul’s willingness to honour it, and Cicero notes that fact without softening. The closing formula matches the ones used in 13.32, 13.35, 13.37, and 13.38 nearly word for word, marking the cluster as a unit of craft as well as of subject.