Cicero to M. Brutus, from Rome, late May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae ex. m. Mai. a. 711 (43). The meta entry assigns this to mid-May (15 May) at month precision; the dateline’s ex.~m.~Mai. (“at the end of May”) would place it a week or two later, but within the same month. The letter is a hurried postscript: Cicero has already written and sealed a previous dispatch when Brutus’s fresh news arrives. Antony has been defeated at Mutina (April), Decimus Brutus has burst out from siege, and the immediate eastern question is what Dolabella — who fled the consulship into Asia after murdering Trebonius in Smyrna — will do next. The astonishing item: Dolabella has sent five cohorts across into the Thracian Chersonese, into the teeth of M. Brutus’s five legions, cavalry, and auxiliaries. Cicero’s tone is incredulous, almost amused (“the bandit has been so far out of his senses”).

Section 2 endorses Brutus’s caution in not leaving Apollonia and Dyrrhachium before the news from Italy made the strategic picture clear, and his subsequent resolve to move east into the Chersonese. Section 3 is the one that makes the letter sting: Brutus has reported a mutiny in the Fourteenth Legion engineered by C. Antonius (Mark Antony’s brother, captured at Apollonia), and Cicero — in the polite preface “you will take this in good part” — tells Brutus bluntly that he approves the soldiers’ severity more than Brutus’s own. The letter then breaks off; the Perseus text marks the lacuna “** *”. The indulgent handling of C. Antonius is the recurring political quarrel that will shape Cicero’s last letters to Brutus over the coming weeks.