Cicero to M. Junius Brutus, written from Rome — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae ex.\ m.\ Mart.\ ant in.\ Apr.\ a.\ 711 (43), “end of March or beginning of April 43 BC.” This is broader than the meta date of 13 April, which has been imposed by editorial convention rather than by the dateline itself; the letter is in any case contemporaneous with the most anxious phase of the war at Mutina, before the battle of Forum Gallorum (14 April). The opening words cum haec scribebam, res existimabatur in extremum adducta discrimen — “while I was writing these lines, the situation was judged to have come to its last crisis” — and the “grim letters and reports about our friend Brutus” (i.e.\ Decimus Brutus, besieged at Mutina) place the letter at the moment when no news of any relief has yet arrived. The Perseus dateline is broader than the meta date; this is worth flagging.

The letter is short, dignified, and tightly controlled. Section 1 is Cicero’s analysis of the situation: the armies and commanders are sufficient, but the consuls’ delays — not their loyalty — have been the problem, and the most general truth in his political toolkit (quanta momenta sint in re publica temporum, “how much in public affairs hinges on timing”) is invoked to explain why measures resolved too slowly amount to no measures at all. Section 2 is Cicero’s account of himself, framed as a defence even before the charge has been brought: he has rendered to the commonwealth not only the qualities that anyone may be asked for — fides, vigilantia, patriae caritas — but the prudentia appropriate to one who has taken the helm; if his counsels prove unprofitable, he claims to deserve as much censure as if they had been disloyal. The self-portrait is a man who places himself, with deliberation, at the centre of the political action and asks to be judged by that placement. Section 3 turns to Brutus and Cassius, whose distant armies are the republican reserve: “my mind is in the line of battle,” but the majority’s eyes look East. The closing sentence is a kind of commission: either Brutus will have a better commonwealth to remake, or he will have to recover the one that is lost — a sentence the younger Brutus will still be reading when Cicero is dead and Mark Antony triumvir.