Cicero, proconsul of Cilicia, to the consuls, praetors, tribunes of the plebs, and senate of Rome. The dispatch was written in the field on or about the 19th of September 51 BC, on the borders of Lycaonia and Cappadocia as Cicero’s army marched toward the Taurus (the manuscript dateline: Scr. in Cilicia xiii K. Oct. a. 703). It is one of the very few surviving specimens of Cicero’s official prose as a Roman magistrate addressing the Senate by letter — the litterae publice missae of a serving proconsul. The register is distinct from everything else in the correspondence: the formulaic health-greeting S. v. v. h. e. e. q. v. (“if you are in good health it is well; I myself am in good health”) opens the letter; the periods are longer and more architected; the personal voice is disciplined into the impersonal posture of the magistrate reporting.

The news is grave. Pacorus, son of Orodes the Parthian king, has crossed the Euphrates with a great Parthian cavalry force and a large mixed levy and has pitched camp at Tyba; Syria is in alarm; the Parthian campaign that the consular M. Crassus had opened with his disaster at Carrhae two years earlier is now coming out the other way, against a Roman East that has not been re-equipped. Cicero has the news from three independent sources — King Antiochus of Commagene’s envoys, Tarcondimotus the trans-Tauran prince, and Iamblichus the Arab phylarch — and reports each in turn. He has marched his army toward the Taurus rather than withdrawing, both to put down the Cilician tribes still in arms and to show the enemy in Syria that the Roman force is advancing. The body of the dispatch (sections 4–5) is a structured appeal: the provinces must be reinforced, the local levy is useless, the allies are either too feeble or too alienated by the abuses of Roman rule (propter acerbitatem atque iniurias imperi nostri) to be relied on; M. Bibulus, the proconsul of Syria with shared responsibility for the war, refused a levy in Asia when he had the authority for one, which Cicero offers as a judgement on the quality of provincial recruits. Section 6 closes on the kings of the East — Deiotarus loyal, Cappadocia empty, the rest neither in resources nor in will sufficient — and on a closing line that will become famous in Roman Stoic memory: utinam saluti nostrae consulere possimus! dignitati certe consulemus. The plain shape of the Latin is preserved: he hopes for survival, he is certain of honour. Bibulus, in the event, would not reach Syria for another month.