Cicero to L. Munatius Plancus, written from Rome on the evening of 20 March 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae xiii K. Apr. vesperia. 711 (43), and the closing line D. xiii K. Apr.\ in the Latin confirms the date of dispatch. Three months after Fam. 10.5, the political weather has changed sharply: Antony has marched on Mutina and laid siege to Decimus Brutus; the Senate has declared a tumultus and sent the consuls Hirtius and Pansa north; the Mutina campaign is opening. Plancus has sent in two pieces of news from Transalpine Gaul: an oral report by his legate G. Furnius declaring loyalty to the state, and a written letter, read out in the Senate, that talks of peace — which, in Cicero’s reading, has been drafted in coordination with Lepidus and is in effect a brief for negotiation with Antony.

The letter is one of the most concentrated pieces of political pressure in the Plancus correspondence. The opening section catches Plancus in the contradiction between Furnius’s voice and his own letter; the second applies the leverage of personal friendship; the third delivers what is in effect a public lecture on the distinction between holding the title consul and deserving the name consularis, framed around the sharp antithesis that closes the letter — “not merely no dignity but the utmost deformity.” “Detach yourself at long last from those with whom no judgement of your own but the bonds of the times have linked you” is aimed squarely at Lepidus. The reference to Plancus’s collega besieged at Mutina is to Decimus Brutus, Plancus’s colleague as consul-designate for 42, and the “foulest band of brigands” is again the standing Philippics epithet for Antony’s circle.