Cicero to D. Brutus, consul-designate, from Rome at the end of June 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae inter viii et iii K. Quint. a. 711 (43), i.e. between 24 and 29 June. Brutus and Plancus have at last joined forces in Gaul against Antony, and their joint dispatches to the Senate have given the city its first real news of a unified republican command on the far side of the Alps.

The letter is almost a postcard: warm, brief, deliberately so. Cicero singles out the small courtesy behind the official news — that Brutus, busy as he is, took the trouble to have Plancus excuse his silence in a covering note — and turns the praise of brevity back on itself in the close, naming Brutus his “master in brevity.” It is the next-to-last letter to Brutus that survives, and the warmth is unmistakable.