Cicero at Rome to Ser. Sulpicius Rufus, proconsul of Achaia and acclaimed imperator by his troops, written during the first of Caesar’s two intercalary months in late 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae mense intere. pr. a. 708). The opening of the salutation is textually corrupt — the Perseus reading is M. CICERO S. D. n SVLPICIO IMfl, in which “IMfl” is plainly IMP. (imperator) and the stray “n” is most likely a misread praenomen abbreviation (Servius = Ser.). The reading here is restored, on the convention of this cluster’s other letters to Sulpicius, to Cicero Sulpicio Imp. s.

Three pieces of business in one short letter. First, Cicero reports that, although he has been keeping away from the Senate house in these dispirited months, he forced himself to attend in order to vote in person for the supplicatio (public thanksgiving) decreed on Sulpicius’s behalf, and he asks that Sulpicius’s friends be told of his good will so that they may freely call on him. Second, he recommends M. Bolanus, an old friend, to Sulpicius’s notice. Third — and the most striking turn — he asks Sulpicius to help recover Dionysius, the slave who had managed Cicero’s library, who absconded after pilfering a considerable number of books and was now passing himself off as a freedman at Narona on the Illyrian coast. The note “the matter in itself is small, but the pain to my mind is great” is the most personal sentence in this short note, and one of the few glimpses in the correspondence of how seriously Cicero took the violation of his books. The Perseus dateline pins the letter to an intercalary month — almost certainly the first of the two inserted before Caesar’s calendar reform took effect; meta/works.yaml may carry a year-precision placeholder, which is consistent with the file prefix 046bc-.