Cicero to D. Brutus, from Rome on 9 December 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae paulo post v Id. Dec. a. 710 (44), written just after Cicero’s return to the city. The opening of the letter explains the silence: Lupus, Decimus’s courier, had carried Brutus’s dispatch (11.4) to Rome and waited some days for an answer, but Cicero had been keeping out of the city for safety; Lupus was forced to ride back without a reply, and the present letter follows as the formal opening of the active correspondence.

This is the first of the long series of letters in which Cicero attaches himself unreservedly to Decimus’s cause. The substantive argument is that the republic now depends on Decimus holding the province against Antony (iste of $§$~2, “that man”), and that Cicero will be the political voice in the city for what Decimus does in the field. The phrasing of $§$~2 — in te aliquando reciperandae libertatis omnem spem ponere, “in you all hope of one day recovering liberty” — recurs through the surviving letters to Decimus and states the public position from which the Philippics will not retreat.