Cicero at Rome to P. Servilius Isauricus, proconsul of Asia, written about the middle of early September 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae circ. med. in. Sept. a. 708). Servilius had been consul with Caesar in 48 BC — the “colleague” (conlega) of the salutation — and had now gone out to govern the senatorial province of Asia for the Caesarian regime. The first paragraph thanks him for a letter reporting the legs of his voyage out, and asks for fuller news of provincial conditions and policy; the second touches, with a careful glance at the danger of frank letters being intercepted, on Cicero’s faint hope that “our colleague” Caesar will leave some sort of commonwealth at all, and accepts that Servilius’s post is the right one for him; the third closes with a promise to attend to Servilius’s interests at Rome, and in particular to his father — the elder Servilius, princeps senatus and one of the most senior Optimate survivors.

This is the opening letter in the small Servilius cluster preserved at the end of Ad Familiares 13: a personal exchange between two ex-consuls (Cicero himself had been consul in 63, Servilius in 48, and the formula conlegae hails that shared dignity), followed by a sequence of recommendations (13.69–72) sent to Servilius in his Asian capacity. The piece is plain and short, but the brittleness behind it is audible: “what I think on the largest questions of the commonwealth, on account of the danger of letters of that sort, I shall not often write,” and the half-hope — “Caesar, our colleague, will see to it that we have some sort of commonwealth at all” — is the most one could safely write down in the autumn of 46. The Perseus dateline sets the letter to mid-early September 46 BC; meta/works.yaml carries a year-precision placeholder of -0046-01-25 that should be corrected to -0046-09-05 (or similar) and the file prefix kept at 046bc-.