C. Asinius Pollio to Cicero, written from Corduba in the last days of May or the first days of June 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Cordubae vel ex. m. Maio vel in. Iun. a. 711 (43), a range deliberately left open because the letter itself reports the news of the Mutina battles as received only after a forty-day delay, and the chronology of Pollio’s dispatches has to be worked back from the date Lepidus detained his couriers. Pollio, governor of Hispania Ulterior with three veteran legions, is the southernmost commander on the republican side. He has just learned of the deaths of both consuls and of the destruction of the Martian legion; he has also been told — erroneously — that Octavian has fallen. The letter is a longer, more reflective companion to Fam.~10.32: where 10.32 was the sketch of Balbus’s outrages, this one is Pollio attempting, with elaborate care, to lay out his political position.

The position is the awkward one of a Caesarian who has been left, by accidents of distance and timing, on the senatorial side. The letter opens with the forty-day lag in news — Lepidus held Pollio’s couriers for nine days, which Pollio reports as a fact and explains by Lepidus’s wish to keep him in the dark — and circles back to it at the close. In between come the two main pleas. First: had the Senate’s recall, which brought Plancus and Lepidus into Italy, extended to him as well, the catastrophe at Mutina might have been avoided. Second: he could not move toward Lepidus without flattering him, given the letters Lepidus has been writing and the speeches he is said to have made at Narbo, because his supplies on the march would otherwise have been cut off; and he could not move freely on his own initiative without giving his detractors at Rome — who know his earlier friendship with Antony — the chance to read the move the wrong way. The recital of the Mutina news in section 4 is the longest connected piece of military reporting in the Pollio correspondence: it carries the news of Pansa and Hirtius dead, the Fourth legion cut to pieces after taking Antony’s camp, Ventidius joining Antony with three more legions, Parma sacked, L. Antonius across the Alpine passes. The report that Octavian has been killed is the one substantial inaccuracy; Pollio’s grief at it (“which, if it be true, and may the gods forbid, grieves me beyond measure”) is one of the more striking expressions of personal loyalty to the young Caesar that survive from the side of Cicero’s allies.

The closing sentence — “I wish neither to fail the commonwealth nor to outlive it” — is the formulation by which Pollio has been remembered. Within six months he would join Antony, then enter Octavian’s camp; he would survive both consulships and the proscriptions, and would be writing the history of the civil wars decades later. The Perseus dateline’s range (vel ex.\ m.\ Maio vel in.\ Iun.) sits awkwardly against the day-precision -0043-06-13 carried for this letter in the project manifest; the manifest entry likely wants relaxing to month precision or to a range spanning the last week of May into the first week of June. The salutation as transmitted, POLLIO CICERONI S.~N, is preserved verbatim from the Latin file — the standard expansion is salutem nuntiat, “Pollio sends greeting to Cicero,” though the reconstruction is not certain. The closing prayer di prohibeant (“may the gods forbid”) is here the wish that the report of Octavian’s death prove false.