Cicero to L. Munatius Plancus, written from Rome shortly after 19 September 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae paulo post xiii K. Oct. a. 710 (44). This is the opening letter of Book 10 of the Ad Familiares and the first surviving piece of the Plancus correspondence, which will run through the Mutina campaign and the catastrophe of 43. Plancus, designated consul for 42 BC and currently governor of Transalpine Gaul, is one of the handful of men with armies in the field who might still be brought to the side of the republic; in the months that follow Cicero will write him repeatedly trying to fix him there.

The diagnosis of the political situation is among the bleakest Cicero ever set down: Antony’s defect is not “arrogance — that is a common enough vice” but “monstrousness”; the republic has “neither Senate nor people \ nor laws, nor courts, nor in short any image or trace at all of a civic state.” Plancus’s distant consulship — two years off, in 42 — is the only horizon of hope, and Cicero closes by commending the courier Furnius, who has been carrying messages between them and will be a recurring figure in the correspondence.