L. Munatius Plancus to Cicero, written from Transalpine Gaul at the end of December 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Gallia Transalpina ex. m. Dec. a. 710 (44). This is the first of Plancus’s own letters to survive in the correspondence, and it answers Fam.\ 10.3 (Cicero’s substantive piece of political advice, sent earlier in December). The opening explains the delay: Plancus had heard Cicero was on his way to Greece and only learned from the letter itself that he was back in Italy.

The body is, by the conventions of late-republican correspondence, an unusually direct profession of loyalty: Plancus binds himself to Cicero with the formula “cultivating you I have set up for myself an obligation as binding as toward my country,” and promises that “whatever good things are mine \ seem to lack nothing except a good name” — meaning that his fama, his standing among good men, is what he now intends to make. He undertakes that his strength, counsel, and authority will all be at the republic’s service, and reports that he is watching closely what is happening in Cisalpine Gaul — Antony will shortly cross into the province against D. Brutus — and at Rome in the month of January, when the new tribunes and consuls take office. The local anxiety is that the Gallic peoples, seeing the disorder among the Romans, will think it their chance. The letter closes with the standard intimate sign-off: fac valeas meque mutuo diligas — “keep well, and love me in return.”