Plancus to Cicero, written from the field on or shortly after 13 May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Gallia Narbonensis cis Isaram circ. iii Id. Mai. a. 711 (43). A dispatch from a moving army. Plancus, governor of Transalpine Gaul and Gallia Comata, has been edging toward open intervention against Antony since the news of Mutina; this letter reports that he has now built a bridge across the Is\‘ere in a single day, crossed his army on 12 May, and sent his brother Lucius Plancus south on 13 May with four thousand cavalry to head off Lucius Antonius at Forum Iulii (modern Fr\’ejus). He himself follows by forced marches with four light-order legions and the remaining horse.

The political news inside the military news is Lepidus. Lepidus is the wild card of the spring: his province covers Narbonese Gaul and Nearer Spain, his army is large, and his loyalties are unread. Plancus claims here, through the intermediary Marcus Iuventius Laterensis, to have secured Lepidus’s word that if he cannot keep Antony out of his province, he will fight him — and that Plancus should come to join forces. The promise will not hold: within a fortnight Lepidus’s army will go over to Antony and Lepidus himself will follow. Plancus does not yet know this, but the letter’s tone — one ruined brigand against the children, the city, and the state, with Lepidus committed by his word — is the optimistic version of a situation that will collapse. The closing line, fac valeas meque mutuo diligas, is the warm signature of one of the most accomplished political correspondents of the late republic.