Cicero to Plancus, written from Rome on 5 May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae iii Non. Mai. a. 711 (43). A brief, almost exclamatory note. News has reached Rome of an earlier dispatch from Plancus offering his army’s aid to the consuls before Mutina; that dispatch, Cicero says, arrived two days before the victory itself (the consul Hirtius defeated Antony at Mutina on 21 April; news reached Rome on 26 April). The double cause for celebration — Plancus’s loyalty and the victory — runs through the opening exclamation.

The substance is a renewal of the same pressure Cicero is applying everywhere in this month: finish him. Antony has been beaten but not destroyed; he is retreating across the Alps toward Lepidus’s province; Lepidus’s hand is still unread. Cicero’s hope — expressed here almost as a prayer — is that Lepidus will hold, that Plancus will close in, and that “not a spark of this most loathsome of wars” will be left. It is the rhetorical move of the second Philippic and the surviving consular dispatches of the spring, compressed to a paragraph.