L. Munatius Plancus to Cicero, written from camp on 28 July 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in castris v K. Sext. a. 711 (43), the date confirmed by the closing subscript “v.~K.~Sext. ex castris”. This is the last surviving letter of Plancus’s correspondence with Cicero, and one of the most clear- sighted political documents of the late summer of 43. By the time of writing, Plancus has joined his army to that of Decimus Brutus, ten legions are camped together in Gaul against Lepidus and Antony, and the situation is paradoxically the worst it has been: Octavian, on whose march north all the republican hopes turn, has stopped marching.

The arithmetic of the war is the heart of the letter. Plancus has three veteran legions in his own camp and one fine legion of recruits; Decimus Brutus has one veteran, one of two years’ service, and eight of recruits — a total “very large in numbers, but slight in reliability,” which is a candid admission for a commander to commit to paper. The Africanus exercitus, the four veteran legions from Africa under Q. Cornificius, is one of the two forces that could tip the balance; the other is Octavian, the closer and more obvious. Plancus has written, Furnius has been sent in person with letters and instructions, Octavian has assured him he is coming without delay — and then has turned aside to “other plans,” which Plancus identifies in section 6 with painful precision: the demand for a two-month consulship extorted from the city “with the utmost terror and in tasteless form.” That demand will be granted on 19 August. The triumvirate is two months in the future as Plancus writes; the bitter sentence “Antony is alive today, Lepidus is at his side, they have armies, they have hope, they dare — they can charge it all to Caesar’s account” is the clearest contemporary diagnosis of what is happening.

The personal frame is unsparingly careful. Section 1 is a courtly thank-you for senatorial attentions, qualified by the diffidence of a man who knows that the formal vote is the cheap currency he is forced to use; section 5 is the disclaimer that he, like Cicero, has been a friend to the young Caesar in good faith, on grounds Plancus is at pains to list (his intimacy with the elder Caesar; the young man’s moderate disposition; the propriety of treating an adopted son with the affection due his father’s friend). The complaint of section 6 is thus not the complaint of an enemy. It is the complaint of an ally writing for the record — “more in sorrow than in unfriendliness” — as the alliance between the Senate and its young Caesarian commander begins visibly to dissolve. Within a month of this letter Octavian would march on Rome; within four months Plancus, like Lepidus before him, would be in the triumviral camp; within five, Cicero would be dead. The Perseus text in section 3 carries an unresolved crux at “talis victoriae,” here preserved as “a victory of such a kind.”