By the time of the Julio-Claudian emperors, the patron/client relationship was very different from that during the Republic. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, tutor to the emperor Nero in the first century C.E., expresses a more jaded assessment of this system than Cicero had done nearly a century earlier.

Your clients? But none of these men courts you for yourself; they merely court something from you. People used to hunt friends, but now they hunt pelf; if a lonely old man changes his will, the morning-caller transfers himself to. another door.

Source: Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger), Epistulae morales ad Lucilium 19.4. translated by Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917).