M. Aemilius Lepidus to Cicero, written from camp at the river Argenteus around 18 May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in castris ad Pontem Argenteum circ. xv K. Iun. a. 711 (43). Lepidus writes as imperator iterum and pontifex maximus (the Latin salutation transmitted in Perseus reads PONL for what is plainly PONT., and is preserved as transmitted), reporting in the bureaucratic dispatch style of a provincial commander to a senior senator. The position he describes is the camp at Pons Argenteus on the river Argens in Gallia Narbonensis, where the remnant of Antony’s army — driven west out of Italy after the defeat at Mutina in April — has finally made contact with Lepidus’s seven legions. Antony’s forces, Lepidus reports, are visibly dwindling: men desert daily, Silanus and Culleo have come over already, and the only thing keeping Antony’s army in the field is Ventidius’s four legions and a cavalry arm of more than five thousand.

The closing sentence — “As far as this war is concerned, we shall not fail the Senate or the commonwealth” — is the assurance Cicero and the Senate had been demanding of Lepidus for weeks, and it is the assurance Lepidus would publicly repudiate twelve days later in the dispatch that survives as 10.35. By the time he writes this letter the choice between Antony and the Senate has narrowed to days; the troops on both sides — veterans of Caesar, many of them with personal ties across the line of battle — have begun fraternizing, and the chain of command on Lepidus’s side is already slipping. The cool official tone, the careful itemization of Antony’s weakness, the catalogue of defectors named one by one — all of it reads, in the light of what came on 29 May, as a man writing for the record he expects to be held against him.