L. Munatius Plancus to Cicero, written on the march to join Lepidus around the 18th or 19th of May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in itinere ad Lepidum xiv aut x iiii K. Iun., a. 711 (43). The dispatch reports a tightening situation in Transalpine Gaul after Mutina: Antony, with his advance units, has reached Forum Iulii (Fr\’ejus) on the Ides of May, with Ventidius two days behind him; Lepidus has established his camp at Forum Voconii, twenty-four miles inland, and has written to Plancus that he will wait there for him. The whole campaign now turns on whether Lepidus is in fact going to fight Antony, hold his army together, and let Plancus’s legions march in — or whether he will be absorbed.

The second section is the one Plancus needed to write in his own voice: an apology for sending his brother L. Plotius Plancus, recovering from a near-fatal exhaustion, back to Rome rather than keeping him at his side in camp. With the consuls Hirtius and Pansa both dead from the Mutina fighting, the city has been left “stripped bare” of senior magistrates, and the urban praetor’s chair needs a citizen of weight; Plancus has reasoned that his sick brother will serve the state better at Rome than in the field. He asks the Senate to lay any blame for the decision on his own want of foresight, not on his brother’s loyalty. The third section reports that Lepidus has finally sent him a hostage for good faith, Apella, and commends to Cicero L. Gellius, his go-between in those negotiations — whose name carries a daggered crux (“de tribus fratribus Segaviano”), an uncertain phrase from a corrupt passage in the manuscripts.

The dispatch is the immediate forerunner of 10.18 (the report from the field of his own march toward Forum Voconii) and shows the cautious confidence of a commander who still believes Lepidus can be made to act: “if he and fortune together keep everything intact for me, I undertake to you that I shall bring the business to a successful conclusion swiftly.” Within ten days Lepidus’s army will have gone over to Antony, and Plancus will be writing very different letters.