M. Junius Brutus to Cicero, written from Dyrrachium on the kalends of April 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr.\ Dyrrach.\ i K.\ Apr.\ a.\ 711 (43), confirmed by the closing subscript Kalend.\ Apr.\ Dyrrhachio. The meta entry carries the impossible date -0043-03-32 (32 March); the Perseus dateline fixes it as 1 April 43 BC, and the corrected date is used in the parallel sidecar. Brutus is writing from Dyrrachium, where he has consolidated his hold on the Balkan provinces after taking over Hortensius’s legions and capturing C. Antonius, Mark Antony’s brother, at Apollonia. News of the murder of Trebonius by Dolabella at Smyrna has reached him; news of Mutina has not.

The voice is Brutus’s: short clauses, plain verbs, the soldier’s directness. The six sections divide into three pairs of practical questions. Section 1 acknowledges the loss of Asia along with Trebonius, with the lapidary observation that the province can be recovered but a recovery after the fact is no less disgraceful for being possible. Section 2 raises the matter that will dominate this correspondence: what to do with the captive C.\ Antonius, whom Brutus is plainly considering sparing — “his entreaties move me” — against the wishes of others (the aliquorum furor of section 2 is the senatorial party in Rome and Cicero himself, who wants him executed). Section 3 reports Cassius’s seizure of Syria with the Syrian legions under Murcus and Marcius, and notes the discretion Brutus has used in containing the news at the family level until he hears Cicero’s view. Section 4 is the warm and slightly teasing acknowledgement of Cicero’s two recent speeches (Philippic V on the kalends of January, and a defence against Calenus): Brutus concedes the joke and grants Cicero the title Philippicae for his consular orations. Section 5 turns to logistics — money and supplement — and to the grief of Asia’s loss. Section 6 closes with the unaffected praise of Cicero’s son, then on Brutus’s staff: a father’s son, who will earn his honours on his own footing. The letter is one of the most characteristic short specimens of Brutus’s prose — terse, candid, unornamented, written by a commander to a statesman whom he treats as an equal.