C. Asinius Pollio to Cicero, written from Corduba on 8 June 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Cordubae vi Id. Iun. a. 711 (43), the date confirmed by the closing subscript “vi Idus Iun. Corduba”. Pollio, governor of Hispania Ulterior, has just watched his own quaestor, L. Cornelius Balbus the younger — nephew of the Augustan diplomat of the same name, and the first non-Italian ever to hold a Roman triumph — empty the provincial treasury, refuse to pay the legions out of it, and decamp on the Kalends of June into the kingdom of Bogudes of Mauretania. The bulk of the letter is the catalogue of outrages Balbus had committed in the months before he fled: a single coiled indictment, mounting clause by clause from peculation to mock-magistracy to the burning alive of a Roman citizen in the arena, and delivered in some of the most caustic prose Pollio left us. Of all the Pollio dispatches preserved in Book 10 this is by some margin the longest and the most unsparing.

The set-piece is the gladiatorial show at Gades. Fadius, a former Pompeian soldier pressed into Balbus’s gladiatorial school, had been made to fight twice without payment; when he refused to take the auctoramentum and threw himself on the people, Balbus first sent in Gallic cavalry to disperse the crowd that had begun to throw stones, then had the man dragged off, buried up to the neck in the sand, and burnt alive — pacing about the meanwhile, after a good lunch, barefoot, tunic loose, hands behind his back, and answering Fadius’s repeated cry “civis Romanus natus sum” with the smiling reply, “Off you go, then, go appeal to the people’s good faith.” The other exhibits are scarcely less choice. Balbus had extended his own quattuorvirate, held the elections of two years in a single forty-eight-hour stretch (declaring elected whomever he liked), recalled the exiles of Sextus Varus the proconsul under Caesar’s enemies, and put on as a festival play a praetexta drawn from his own journey to suborn the proconsul L. Lentulus — at the performance of which, Pollio adds with magnificent dryness, he wept, “stirred by the memory of his exploits.” At the games at Gades he had also presented the actor Herennius Gallus with a gold ring and seated him in the equestrian rows, after carving out fourteen such rows for the purpose. “With a monster of this kind I have had my dealings.”

Section 4 turns abruptly from the indictment to Pollio’s own position. He has three legions; Antony has been trying to buy off the Twenty-eighth at five hundred denarii a head “on the day it enters camp”; Lepidus has been pressing him by letter to send up the Thirtieth. Pollio has held them all. He insists on the strict construction of his duty — not a foot outside his province, not a soldier dispatched, deserters caught and put to death — and closes by reminding Cicero, with the slightly exasperated note of a man who feels the Senate has misread him, that “the commonwealth, if it had known me well enough, would have got a larger return from me.” The letter to Balbus that Pollio encloses for Cicero’s inspection does not survive; the praetexta he suggests Cicero borrow from Cornelius Gallus has not survived either. The reference is the first datable mention in the correspondence of the elegist Gallus, then a young officer in Pollio’s circle.