Cicero to L. Munatius Plancus, written at Rome on 29 May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae iv K. Iun. a. 711 (43). The dateline “iiii K. Iun.” is even repeated at the foot of the letter itself, in Plancus’s own hand or Cicero’s secretary’s, a rare in-text dating note. Cicero writes against a steady drumbeat of contradictory reports from Gaul: news of Lepidus is wavering — one day he is holding firm against Antony, the next he is letting Antony’s men through.

The hinge of the letter is the rumour, picked up by D. Brutus and forwarded by him to Cicero, that “Antony is not being received by Lepidus.” Cicero will not credit it until Plancus himself confirms it; Plancus, it seems, has been burned once already by a previous false report of Lepidus’s loyalty (inanis laetitia litterarum superiorum, “the empty rejoicing your earlier letters caused”), and is now reluctant to put anything sanguine in writing. The proverbial tag in the second section, “the same man at the same stone twice” (his ad eundem, short for bis ad eundem lapidem offendere — “to stub your toe twice on the same stone”), is one of the few openly proverbial flashes in this correspondence. The third section repeats Cicero’s standing claim, here in its sharpest form: whoever crushes the remnants of the war will be the one who has finished it — and he wants this man to be Plancus.

Behind the polite uncertainty about Lepidus, the shape of what is actually coming is already visible. Three days earlier (29 May, the date of this letter) was in fact the day Lepidus’s army went over to Antony at the Argenteus river. The dispatch crossed Plancus’s news in transit; within the week Cicero will know that everything the rumour mill had been hinting at was true, and Plancus is back across the Is\‘ere with a force that is now, by itself, all that stands between Antony and Italy.