Cicero to L. Silius, written at Rome around the end of March 51 BC (Perseus: ut videtur, ex. m. Martio — the year noted as 701 in the manuscript is a slip for 703). A brief recommendation of Egnatius of Sidicinum: the kind of formal letter Cicero produced in large numbers, especially as he prepared to leave Rome for his Cilician command. Egnatius will appear again in Cicero’s correspondence as a man of business closely tied to him; here he is being commended to Silius’s good offices.

The shape is the familiar one. There is no need to recommend a man Silius already loves; but Cicero will write all the same, so that Silius knows Egnatius is loved, not merely esteemed. Then the request, and then the unexplained domestic shadow that lifts the letter out of the formula: illa nostra ceciderunt — “those things of ours have fallen through.” Some shared concern, or some business, has come to nothing; the particulars are between the two men. Cicero reaches for the common consolation, “what if this is for the better,” and turns at once to the closing. Sed haec coram — “but these things in person” — is the correspondence’s stock formula for leaving a delicate subject unwritten when the writer expects to see the addressee soon. The whole sits within a few lines and yet, like many of the Familiares 13 letters of recommendation, opens a window onto a private affair the modern reader can only watch slip closed.