Cicero to M. Brutus, written from Rome on 27 July 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae vi K. Sex., a. 711 (43), confirmed by the closing subscript “vi Kal. Sextilis.” The meta entry’s year-precision placeholder of 7 November is wrong by more than three months and is corrected here. This is one of the very latest of Cicero’s surviving letters: he has under four months to live.

The setting is a private meeting at the house of Servilia, Brutus’s mother. Two days before this letter (25 July), Servilia summoned Cicero with Casca, Labeo, and Scaptius — the inner circle of Brutus’s friends in Rome — to consult on whether Brutus should be called back from the East with his army. Cicero gave the answer the meeting wanted: yes, at once, before the cause collapses. The grim picture of section 2 — the victorious consular armies that refused to pursue Antony after Mutina, and Lepidus declaring war on the state from a position of safety, wife and children intact — is the strategic background; the answer is Brutus’s eleven legions in Macedonia. The famous central section is Cicero’s confession of his anxiety about Octavian: he has gone surety to the state for a young man of pliant age surrounded by many ready to corrupt him, and he is no longer sure he can make good on the pledge. This is the same anxiety Brutus had diagnosed in letter 1.17 some weeks earlier, now seen from the other side.

The closing material is practical and personal. Section 5 names the structural problem of the war: tributum, the property-tax levied on Roman citizens that was supposed to fund the legions, has been shamelessly under-declared by the rich and is being swallowed up in legionary bonuses; the cost of supplying Brutus’s army and the others is now beyond what taxation will reach. Cassius’s army, by contrast, will arrive adequately funded. Section 6 returns to the case of Brutus’s nephews (the sons of his sister Junia by Lepidus, recently declared a public enemy): Cicero has already, before being asked, argued for the boys in the Senate, and tells Brutus so. Within days of this letter Octavian’s army would begin its march on Rome to extort the consulship; within five months Cicero would be dead in the proscriptions; within nineteen months Brutus would be dead at Philippi. The letter is among the last where the strategic horizon of the senatorial party is still intact on paper.