Cicero to C. Cassius, from his Pompeian villa on 3 May 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Pompeiano v Non. Mai. a. 710 (44). The opening letter of the Cassius correspondence after the Ides, and the one that delivers the line for which the season will be remembered: “we seem to have been liberated not from the kingship but from the king.” Caesar is dead; his measures and forged “memoranda” are not. Cicero, seven weeks out from the Ides, has watched Antony post edicts, grant exemptions, recall exiles, and reassign vast sums under cover of the murdered dictator’s name, and writes to Cassius in the level pressing voice of a man who sees that the Liberators stopped one act short.

The letter pivots on a quiet hinge of hope: Dolabella, Cicero’s former son-in-law and now consul-suffect, has just put down a riot in the Forum around the pseudo-altar to the deified Caesar (the illud malum urbanum), and Cicero takes this as evidence that the city is not yet lost. But the work proper still falls to Cassius and the two Bruti: the state, he says, has been avenged of its wrongs in the killing of the tyrant — “nothing more” — and the ornaments it lost have not been restored. The closing assurance — tuam dignitatem is his deepest care — is the standing register of a Cicero who is already, in May, writing to the Liberators as a partisan.