Cicero to Aulus Allienus, written from Rome at the beginning of 46 BC (the manuscript dateline: Scr. Romae in. a. 708 (46)). Allienus was an old associate of Cicero’s; he succeeded Manius Acilius Glabrio as proconsul of Sicily early in 45 BC, and this letter looks toward that command, so although Perseus prints an early-46 date the occasion belongs to the threshold between Acilius’s tenure and Allienus’s. The piece thus stands in succession to the Acilius cluster of Fam.\ 13.30–39, on which Cicero had drawn for the same province a few months before.

The beneficiary is Democritus of Sicyon, named in the opening sentence with a notice on his standing as a Greek host: a rare degree of personal closeness on Cicero’s part to a man of that nation, and a tier-marker within Cicero’s own register of recommendations (quod non multis contigit, Graecis praesertim). He is called nearly the foremost man of Achaea — paene Achaiae principem — a regional epithet that places him at the top rank of the province. The formal opening of the second section, “I merely open the way and clear the approach to your acquaintance” (aditum ad tuam cognitionem patefacio et munio), is one of Cicero’s recurring metaphors for the introductory commendation; the close, with its sequence “embrace him, hold him dear, count him among your own,” moves the request into the warmest tier of the genre.