Decimus Brutus to Cicero, from Eporedia on 24 May 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Eporediae ix K. Iun. a. 711 (43). Eporedia is the modern Ivrea, at the foot of the Alps; Brutus has paused on the road, declining to cross over until he knows what is happening at Rome. The occasion is a warning brought to him by Labeo Segulius, just returned from Octavian’s camp: that the veterans are speaking dangerously of Cicero, that Octavian and Brutus have been pointedly left off the board of ten land-commissioners, and that the young Caesar himself has been heard repeating a saying attributed to Cicero — that the young man must be “praised, decorated, and lifted up” — with the dry remark that he would not let himself be “lifted out of the way.”

The pun on tollendum (“raised” / “done away with”) is Latin’s, not the translator’s: the three gerundives laudandum, ornandum, tollendum read on the surface as a tricolon of advancement, but tollere also means “to remove,” and Brutus’s gloss (se non esse commissurum ut tolli possit) shows that Octavian, or his messenger, has heard the second sense. Brutus himself is sceptical that Cicero said any such thing, and suspects Labeo of either embroidery or fabrication. The remainder of the letter is a careful piece of political counsel: meet the veterans halfway on the land-commission and on the assignments, and watch your back. The “lifted up” saying became one of the famous pieces of testimony for Cicero’s relationship with the young Caesar in the Augustan tradition — Velleius Paterculus quotes it in much the form preserved here — and is the most-cited single line in the correspondence of these last weeks of Cicero’s life. It is reported here, in the field, six months before Cicero’s killing.