Cicero at Rome to P. Servilius Isauricus, proconsul of Asia, written at the end of January or the beginning of February 45 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae vel ex. m. Ian. vel in. Febr. a. 709). Servilius had been Caesar’s consular colleague in 48 BC; the formula conlegae, which Cicero uses elsewhere in this cluster (13.68, 13.72), is the Roman address-title that marks ex-consular peerage, since Cicero had himself held the consulship in 63 BC. Here the salutation is the simpler M. Cicero P. Servilio s. The letter is a recommendation on behalf of A. Caecina, son of Cicero’s old friend and client of the Caecinae — an Etruscan family long attached to the Servilii. The younger Caecina had been a partisan of Pompey and the author of a pamphlet against Caesar, for which he had been condemned and exiled; after surrendering himself to Servilius’s iustitia he had crossed to the safer ground of the province of Asia, and Cicero asks Servilius both to help him gather in what is left of his old business interests and to protect him in everything else, against the hope that “the clemency of your colleague” — that is, of Caesar — may yet restore him outright.

The date sits painfully near the death of Cicero’s daughter Tullia, which fell about the middle of February 45 BC. If, as the day-precision range suggests, the letter belongs to early February, it was written within days — on either side — of that loss. The letter itself betrays no grief; it is a workmanlike act of patronage, undertaken for a family Cicero owed, in a register that elsewhere in the same months he could not always sustain. The Perseus dateline is range-precision; meta/works.yaml may carry a year-precision placeholder of -0045-01-01 that should be tightened toward -0045-02-01 (or similar) with the file prefix kept at 045bc-.