Cicero to D. Junius Brutus Albinus, from Rome on 18 June 43 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. Romae xiv K. Quint. a. 711 (43). Lupus, a courier already shuttling between Rome and Brutus’s army, has appeared at Cicero’s door asking for a dispatch on the spot. The senate’s official gazette is going out separately; Cicero, with nothing fresh to report, makes the letter a study in restraint.

The note is light in tone but freighted with anxiety. “In you and your colleague” — D. Brutus and Plancus, consuls-designate for 42 — rests all hope. About M. Junius Brutus in Macedonia there is still no firm news, though Cicero is following D. Brutus’s standing instruction and writing to him privately to bring his army into the common cause. The “inward evil of the city” is no small one — the unnamed reference is to Octavian’s increasingly open manoeuvring in Rome through that month, which would come to a head in his march on the city in late July. Cicero catches himself spilling onto a second page in spite of his correspondent’s much-vaunted Laconic brevity, signs off vince et vale, and dates the letter to the day fourteen before the Kalends of Quintilis (18 June).