M. Aemilius Lepidus to the praetors, tribunes of the plebs, the Senate, and the People and Plebs of Rome, written from Pons Argenteus on 30 May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Ponte Argenteo iii K. Iun. a. 711 (43), the date confirmed by the subscript “D.~iii Kal.~Jun.~a Ponte Argenteo.” This is the dispatch by which Lepidus, governor of Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania Citerior, formally announced to the Senate that he had merged his army with Mark Antony’s. He writes as imperator iterum and pontifex maximus, and addresses the full constitutional ladder of Rome — the magistrates, the Senate, and the populus and plebs collectively. The letter is two sections long. By the end of June he had been declared a public enemy.

The argument, stripped of its official Latin, is that Lepidus did not defect: his soldiers did. “My whole army, an uprising having broken out, kept up its accustomed practice in preserving fellow- citizens and the common peace, and compelled me to take up the cause of the safety and survival of so great a multitude of Roman citizens.” This is the classic exculpatory formula of a Roman commander who has lost control of his men — seditione facta (“an uprising having broken out”), coegit (“compelled me”). The fact that Lepidus’s army had been fraternizing across the lines with Antony’s veterans for weeks, that Lepidus had done nothing to stop it, that twelve days earlier he had written to Cicero in tones of bland competence (see 10.34) reporting Antony’s collapsing position, and that the dispatch was sent only after his junction with Antony was a fait accompli — all of this the Senate read between the lines on the day the letter arrived. The meaning of the document, in the way of such documents, sits in what cannot be said.

The historical weight of the letter is hard to overstate. With Lepidus’s seven legions and Antony’s surviving forces combined, the strategic picture of the war was inverted in a stroke: the twelve legions that Plancus and Decimus Brutus could field in Gaul were now matched, and Octavian — whose march north Plancus had still been hoping for in late July (see 10.24) — had no reason left to march. On 30 June the Senate, on Cicero’s motion, declared Lepidus a hostis publicus. In November Lepidus, Antony, and Octavian met on the island near Bononia and constituted themselves as the triumvirate rei publicae constituendae. The proscription lists were drawn up. Cicero’s name was on them within weeks; on 7 December he was killed at Formiae. The phrase nostram humanitatem in civili dissensione sceleris loco ponatis (“[do not] count our pity in a civil disagreement as a crime”) — the central plea of section 2 — is the self-justification of a man who knows he has, in fact, committed a crime, and whose only defence is to ask the Senate to redescribe it.