Cicero to Publius Silius, propraetor of Bithynia and Pontus, undated — placed by Perseus’s tradition shortly after Fam. 13.64, in the season of Cicero’s proconsulship of Cilicia (51–50 BC). The man recommended is P. Terentius Hispo, an equestrian pro magistro, the deputy manager of one of the great tax-farming partnerships — specifically the societas scripturae, which held the publican contract on the pasturage-tax of the Asian provinces. Hispo’s task was to negotiate pactiones, fixed-sum settlements, with each Greek city; his professional standing depended on closing them.

Cicero himself had failed to obtain a pactio from Ephesus and, characteristically of this cluster of letters, leans on Silius to succeed where he could not. The double commendation — Hispo himself, and the wider societas behind him — shows Cicero’s habitual care to reinforce private bonds with multiple anchorages: the partnership is in his fides, most of the partners are personal friends, the deputy manager is an intimate of long standing. The closing assurance that nothing in Silius’s whole command would be more welcome to Cicero is the recurring sign-off of the genre.