Cicero to L. Munatius Plancus, written at Rome around 26 May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae circ. vii K. Iun. a. 711 (43). A short reply to a now-lost dispatch of Plancus which had reached the Senate and made a strong impression there. Cicero opens with the private note — he had not been looking for thanks, but the expression of affection he received was unexpectedly pleasant — and then turns at once to the business: the Senate received Plancus’s letter, for its substance and for the weight of its language, “wonderfully well.”

The second section is the pressing peroration in miniature that the spring of 43 keeps generating from Cicero’s pen: put your shoulder to it, finish the war, crush Antony. The note that “my affection for the fatherland is hardly greater than for your glory” is the characteristic Ciceronian way of binding ambition to duty in his correspondents: the man who finishes Antony off will, by the same act, have served the commonwealth and made his name immortal. Within days, however, the news from Gaul will undo everything: Lepidus’s army will go over to Antony, and Plancus will retreat back across the Is\‘ere.