C. Asinius Pollio to Cicero, written from Corduba on 16 March 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Cordubae xvii K. Apr. a. 711 (43). This is Pollio’s first surviving letter to Cicero. He is governor of Hispania Ulterior, with one veteran legion (the Thirtieth) and an army that includes recent recruits; between him and Italy stand the Alps, the army and province of M. Aemilius Lepidus in Narbonese Gaul, and Lepidus’s open declaration that he is in agreement with Antony. The letter is written the day after the first anniversary of Caesar’s assassination and addresses a man who has known the writer only by reputation; Pollio is positioning himself, carefully and on the record, in the moment before he has any real news of Mutina.

The prose is Pollio’s own — the prose of the man whose “Pollionian” style ancient critics set against Cicero’s middle style as a denser, more clipped, more self-consciously austere idiom. The sentences are short where Cicero’s would build; the political ironies are tight (“the man whom, though no one wants to look at him, men nonetheless do not hate as he deserves” for Antony in section 2); the self-justifications are placed exactly. He is at pains to construct a record: that he was forced into the Caesarian camp by having enemies on both sides; that he did under orders only what he could not avoid, and visibly against his will; that he declared in his provincial assembly at Corduba that he would deliver the province to no one but a senatorial commissioner; that he resisted the demand to surrender the Thirtieth Legion, with reasons; that his nature and his studies (natura autem mea et studia — the literary man’s defence) draw him to peace and to liberty.

The crucial admission is section 4: the consuls had sent him no instructions, only Pansa’s single private letter after the Ides urging him to declare for the Senate. With Lepidus haranguing in public that he was with Antony, the roads searched and the couriers detained, Pollio could not march into Italy through Lepidus’s province even if he wished to. The closing decision in section 6 is therefore taken on his own initiative and in the abstract: that, since legions are now wanted more than provinces, he has resolved to set out with the army. Within months Pollio would in fact, like Lepidus and Plancus, throw in with Antony rather than with the Senate; the letter is the most careful contemporary record of how a Caesarian provincial governor of literary ambitions positioned himself in the spring of 43, before events forced his hand.