Cicero to C. Cassius Longinus, written from Brundisium around the middle of Sextilis — Perseus dateline Scr. Brundisii circ. med. m. Sext. a. 707 (47), that is, mid-August 47 BC. Cicero has been stuck at Brundisium for the better part of a year, ever since he came back from Pompey’s camp after Pharsalus (August 48). Caesar, after Pharsalus, has spent the intervening months tangled in the Alexandrian war, then turning to deal with Pharnaces of Pontus at Zela — whence the famous veni, vidi, vici in early Sextilis — and is at last expected back in Italy. The African war, with Cato, Scipio Nasica, and Labienus holding out at Utica, is openly impending. Cassius, future tyrannicide and at this date already detached from the lost Pompeian cause, has been writing to Cicero from Italy and — as a former legate of Pompey who had reconciled with Caesar at the Hellespont — speaks with some authority as a fellow survivor.

The letter is the political confession of a man who has staked everything on one battle and lost. The first two sections defend the original logic of going over to Pompey (“a single battle, if not deciding the whole cause, then at any rate settling our personal judgement”) and trace what went wrong — not the engagement itself, but Caesar’s inability to follow up Pharsalus quickly, the lost year of Alexandria and Pontus, and the fact that some on the losing side now “scorn the very fact of being beaten” and are regrouping in Africa. The third section is a piece of bitter self-mockery: Cicero rushed back to Italy to “urge Caesar on toward peace while he was already running,” a proverbial phrase — and then Caesar was nowhere to be seen for a year. The closing line — “would that I had obeyed those earliest letters you sent from Luceria!” — refers to Cassius’s advice, in the days just after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, not to take the Pompeian side at all; the dignity that has been worn out in the long wait at Brundisium would, on that counsel, have been preserved without any of this misery.