L. Munatius Plancus, imperator and consul-designate, to the consuls, praetors, tribunes of the plebs, the Senate, the Roman people and plebs, written from Transalpine Gaul shortly after the middle of March 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Gallia Transalpina paulo post med. Mart. a. 711 (43). This is the formal public dispatch which the brief covering note Fam. 10.7 was sent on top of. It is by far the longest letter in the Plancus correspondence, the most carefully composed, and one of the principal public documents of the spring of 43.

Plancus’s situation is delicate. He is the designated consul for 42 and the holder of Transalpine Gaul, with five legions of his own and a province whose communities had been pre-bribed under Antony’s Lex Cornelia of November 44; he had been a Caesarian for ten years; his brother Plotius is in Rome; his colleague-elect Decimus Brutus is under siege at Mutina. He has been slow to declare himself, and the slowness has drawn comment in the Senate. The letter’s first task is to defend the slowness as deliberate strategy — “thoughts of the soundest mind long since formed” — not as the opportunism of a man waiting to see which way the wind blows. The argument runs: an early profession would have made the army harder to steady, the bribed Gallic communities harder to pull back, the neighbouring governors (Lepidus above all) harder to draw into a partnership; premature denuntiatio would have been ruinous, as it had proved for his colleague — Decimus Brutus, now besieged. So he “feigned much unwillingly and dissembled much with pain” to keep his options open while building up his force.

The structure of the letter is rhetorically careful: the apologia of sections 1–2; the catalogue of preparation in section 3 (the army, the provincial communities, the neighbouring commanders); the candid admission of dissimulation in section 4; the reference to the secret oral commissions carried by C. Furnius in section 5; and the public declaration in section 6 — five legions, a province in consensus, cavalry and auxiliaries, and a governor prepared for anything from defending his province to dying in its cause. The closing section recommends those who have followed his lead in Gaul to the Senate’s protection, and frames the whole as an intervention to be judged aequis iudicibus, “by fair judges,” against the slander of envy — already, before the campaign opens, a glance at the faction-fighting that will swallow him later in the year when he goes over to Antony at Lepidus’s camp.