Cicero to D. Brutus, from Rome on 20 December 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae xiii K. Ian. a. 710 (44). Eleven days after the opening letter (11.5), written on the day of the senate session on the consuls-designate’s bodyguard. Lupus has come back, this time from Decimus’s camp at Mutina in six days, with a fresh dispatch; Decimus has also caused his own edict — declaring that he would hold the province for the Senate — to be posted at Rome on the morning of the session.

This is Cicero’s account, in real time, of the session for which the Third and Fourth Philippics were the public speech. He had meant to absent himself from the Senate until the Kalends of January, but the posting of Decimus’s edict made silence impossible: he came to the session, the senators turned out in large numbers, and he spoke “what I did in the Senate, what I said in the great public assembly” (in contione maxima, the same day’s contio). The mood is the unmistakable one of the Philippic months — a politician who has chosen his side again, working hard, conscious that he is at the head of a coalition and saying so.