Cicero to M. Junius Brutus, written from Rome — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae xi K. Mai., ut videtur, a. 711 (43), i.e.\ 21 April 43 BC, the day after the news of the victory at Mutina reached the city. The dateline matches the meta date. The letter belongs to the brief high-water moment of Cicero’s second political life: the consuls Hirtius and Pansa have driven Antony off from Decimus Brutus, the boy Caesar (Octavian) has played his agreed part, and Cicero on the day before the kalends-minus- eleven (xii Kal. Mai., 20 April) has been escorted by an enormous crowd up to the Capitol and placed on the Rostra to receive the city’s thanks. That triumphal day is the substantive content of section 2. The reader should hold the date in mind: Cicero does not yet know that Hirtius fell at Mutina on 21 April, the very day of writing, or that Pansa is dying of the wounds taken at Forum Gallorum. Within a week, both consuls will be dead, the political arithmetic that this letter assumes will have collapsed, and the management of the young Caesar will be a problem of a wholly different order.

The letter is in three movements. Section 1 is Cicero’s report card on his three pupils — the consuls have turned out as he had described them, and Octavian’s indoles virtutis is “extraordinary,” a judgement Cicero will live to regret. The famous half-sentence utinam tam facile eum florentem et honoribus et gratia regere ac tenere possimus quam facile adhuc tenuimus, “I only wish we may guide and hold him as easily when he is in full flower of office and popularity as we have held him so far,” is one of the most candid admissions of strategy in the correspondence: the boy is a piece on the board, and the board is changing. Section 2 records the ovation of 20 April — the only moment in Cicero’s career when a Roman crowd treated him as the saviour Catiline’s day had implied but never granted — and the equally Ciceronian gloss that “there is nothing empty in me, nor should there be.” Section 3 turns to Brutus: Cicero asks for news, warns him against being too generous (a coded reference to Brutus’s clemency toward his prisoner C. Antonius, brother of Mark Antony), and states bluntly that in his own view “the cause of the three brothers is one and the same” — Mark Antony, Lucius Antony, and Gaius Antony all deserve every penalty the law allows.