Cicero to C. Trebonius, written from Rome about 2 February 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae circ. iv Non. Febr. a. 711 (43). Trebonius, one of the conspirators of 15 March 44, is now governor of the province of Asia; he will be killed by Dolabella at Smyrna within weeks of this letter’s arrival. The opening sentence is the most famous in the corpus of letters of this period and one of the most cited in all of Cicero: quam vellem ad illas pulcherrimas epulas me Idibus Martiis invitasses! reliquiarum nihil haberemus — “How I wish you had invited me to that most beautiful banquet on the Ides of March! There would be no leftovers.” The metaphor is sustained: the banquet was the killing of Caesar, the leftovers are Antony, and Cicero’s retrospective regret is that the conspirators, by sparing the consul, left him the political work of finishing what they had begun. Trebonius is gently and unmistakably reproached in the next sentence for personally drawing Antony aside on the day so that he should not enter the senate house — quod vero a te, viro optimo, seductus est tuoque beneficio adhuc vivit haec pestis.

The body of the letter is a brisk political report written for a man who has been months in his province. Cicero dates his own resumption of leadership precisely to 20 December 44 — the meeting of the Senate, called by the tribunes, at which he delivered the Third Philippic and launched the senatorial war against Antony. “That day and my exertion and action first brought the Roman people the hope of recovering its liberty” is Cicero’s own settled account of where the resistance began, and he gives it to Trebonius in the same week that the Senate has finally declared Antony a public enemy. The roll call at section 3 is characteristic end-of-letter shorthand: a brave Senate, mixed consulars, the loss of Servius Sulpicius Rufus (who died on his embassy to Antony in late January and whose funeral oration is the Ninth Philippic), L. Iulius Caesar restrained by being Antony’s uncle, “the consuls excellent, D. Brutus splendid, the boy Caesar admirable.” The qualification on Octavian — de quo spero equidem reliqua — is the formal hope that he will continue as he has begun; the candid note that follows, that without his hasty enlistment of the veterans “no crime, no cruelty would Antony have left undone,” shows how unreservedly Cicero is, in early February, still backing the young Caesar against Antony. By the time Trebonius could have read this, both Trebonius and the diagnosis of section 3 were obsolete.