Cicero to M. Brutus, from Rome, early July 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr.~Romae.~in.~Quint.~...ut videtur a.~711 (43), i.e. “written at Rome at the beginning of July (Quintilis), 43 BC, as it seems.” The meta/works.yaml entry carries the placeholder date -0043-02-26 at year precision, which is plainly wrong: the dateline’s in.~Quint. places the letter at the start of July, with the rest of the 1.9–1.14 cluster. The Perseus date is used in the parallel sidecar (year-precision: -0043-07).

This is a letter of condolence. Brutus’s wife Porcia — Cato’s daughter, and a figure of more than ordinary moral weight in Brutus’s circle — has died. Cicero turns the office of consolation around: when he lost Tullia, Brutus had been his consoler, and stern with him when his grief was thought unbecoming. Now Cicero returns the obligation, but with a Roman insistence that Brutus, of all men, must be seen to bear his loss with composure. The argument of section 2 is the central note: “my duty was to office and to nature only; for you now it is to the people and to the stage, as the saying goes, that you must do service.” Populo et scaenae — “the people and the stage” — the cause is publicly visible, the liberator must perform the role. Section 3 closes abruptly, with the political agenda surfacing through the grief: “We are awaiting you and your army.” The fuller dispatch on the state of the commonwealth is to follow by “our old friend” — the vetus noster who reappears as the courier in 1.12.