Cicero to M. Aemilius Lepidus, from Rome on the evening of 20 March 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae xiii K. Apr. vesperi a. 711 (43). Lepidus is governor of Hispania Citerior and Narbonensis and has, in February, written to the Senate urging a negotiated peace with Antony. The Senate has just adorned him with the honours that section 1 alludes to (a gilded equestrian statue on the Rostra, voted on 30 December 44 and again celebrated in early 43), and the present letter is Cicero’s reply to a man who has accepted the honours without thanking the body that bestowed them.

The letter is two short paragraphs of cold, exact diplomacy. The opening compliment is genuine — Cicero has supported Lepidus’s standing on the floor and in the Philippics — but every sentence after the first is a warning. The fork in section 1 is the moral hinge of the letter: peace separated from servitude serves the state; peace that restores Antony to “utterly intolerable despotism” restores the worst master Rome has ever known. The closing line “you, in your prudence, will see what is best to be done” ($tu pro tua prudentia quid optimum factu sit videbis$) is the polite formula stripped of its warmth: a public man writing to another public man on the record, putting him on notice that the Senate, the people, and “every honest man” will read what he does next. Months later Lepidus would defect to Antony; the wariness in this letter is already visible.