Cicero to D. Brutus, imperator and consul- designate, from Rome on 1 June 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae x iiii K. Iun. a. 711 (43). The dateline is corrupt in the manuscript (literally “14 days before the Kalends of June” = 19 May, which is impossible given the contents); the standard reading, following Shackleton Bailey, takes the closing x iiii K. Iun. as prid. K. Iun., the eve of the Kalends, and dates the letter to 31 May or 1 June 43 BC. The reply is to a set of instructions Brutus had sent to the Senate by his legates Galba and Volumnius, urging caution.

Cicero is at his most public-Roman here. The Senate, he tells Brutus, will not be patronised: it judges him the bravest man of any who ever lived, and resents being read in return as faint of heart. But by the time this letter reaches camp the ground will already have shifted under it. Lepidus’s army has gone over to Antony at the bridge over the Argenteus on 30 May; the senatus consultum ultimum declaring Lepidus a public enemy will follow on 30 June. Cicero’s rhetorical question — “who could think him so frenzied that, in the most longed-for peace, he would declare war on the state?” — is being answered in Narbonese Gaul as he writes. The third paragraph’s closing tricolon — that the state lacks neither counsel, nor courage, nor a commander while Brutus lives — is the public note Cicero will keep sounding through June, even as the private letters grow sharper.