Cicero at Rome to P. Servilius Isauricus, proconsul of Asia, written in the course of 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae, ut videtur, a. 708), probably in the spring or early summer, when Servilius was newly out in his province. The salutation hails Servilius as conlega — “my colleague” — the formal Roman address-title that marks ex- consular peerage: Servilius had been consul with Caesar in 48 BC, Cicero himself in 63 BC, and the formula is the one register reserved for men who had stood in that highest of magistracies.

The letter is a follow-up to a recommendation Cicero had made in person, in Servilius’s gardens at Rome before the proconsul’s departure, on behalf of Caerellia — a wealthy and cultivated Roman woman, a close friend of Cicero, who held debts, business interests, and landed property in Asia. Cicero’s tone is the easy one of an old colleague calling in a promise already given. The technical lever he points to is a senatus consultum concerning the heirs of one C. Vennonius, evidently some recent ruling that bore on Asian creditors; Cicero, with the deference proper to the cluster’s politics, leaves the interpretation of the decree to Servilius’s own sapientia and to his standing respect for the Senate’s authority. The Perseus dateline is year-precision; meta/works.yaml may carry a year-precision placeholder consistent with the file prefix 046bc-.