Servius Sulpicius Galba to Cicero, written from camp at Mutina on 15 April 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in castris ad Mutinam a. d. xvii K. Mai. a. 711 (43). Galba is one of the conspirators of the Ides (the great-grandfather of the future emperor) and at this date a senior officer with the consul Pansa’s army. He is writing the morning after the battle of Forum Gallorum (14 April 43), the first of the two engagements — with the larger battle of Mutina a week later on 21 April — that ended Antony’s siege of Decimus Brutus and broke his army. It is one of the very few first-person eyewitness accounts of a Roman battle anywhere in the surviving Latin corpus, and the only one written for publication purposes none, by a senior officer to a political principal at Rome who needed an exact picture of what had happened.

The register is military and reportorial, not Ciceronian. The sentences are short, the chronology is strict, the technical detail is unflinching — legions and cohorts named by number (the Second, the Thirty-Fifth, the Martian), the praetorian cohorts of Antony, of Silanus, and of Caesar (Octavian) tracked separately, the topography of marsh, woods, and the Aemilian Way given as a soldier would need them. Galba commands the eight cohorts of his old Martian Legion on the right wing of Pansa’s force; he routs the Thirty-Fifth at first onset, finds himself overshot beyond his own line, has to wheel back to deal with flanking Moorish cavalry, and in section 3 finds himself suddenly behind enemy lines — the celebrated moment in which he charges back toward his own raw recruits with his shield flung behind him, and is saved “by I know not what fate” because his own men recognize him before they throw their javelins. The understatement is the point: the senior commander writing in soldier’s prose about almost being killed by his own legion.

Section 4 records what would prove decisive — Hirtius’s arrival with twenty veteran cohorts after Antony, thinking himself victorious, had pursued Pansa’s broken left wing back to the camp. Hirtius cut Antony’s veterans to pieces at the very ground of the morning’s battle, and Antony got back to Mutina with only the cavalry, at the fourth hour of the night. The losses on the senatorial side are owned in the same plain register: praetorian cohorts gone, the Martian Legion bled, two eagles and sixty standards taken. The closing res bene gesta est — “the business has been well managed” — is the official communiqué’s formula, the senatorial reply to which would be the granting of a public thanksgiving. Pansa was carried from the field seriously wounded and died of those wounds about a week later; Hirtius himself fell at Mutina on 21 April; both consuls dead in a week, the army intact in the field but ownerless, was the structural opening that Octavian would exploit through the summer.