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The reasons, my dear Cicero, why I was unable to pursue Antony at once are these. I had no cavalry, no pack animals. I did not know of Hirtius’s death. I did not trust Caesar until I had met and talked to him. So the first day passed. Early on the next I had a message from Pansa summoning me to Bononia. As I was on my way, I received the report of his death. I hastened back to my own apology for an army. It is most sadly reduced and in very bad shape through lack of all the necessities. Antony got two days’ start of me and made far longer marches as the pursued than I as the pursuer, for he went helter-skelter, while I moved in regular order. Wherever he went he opened up the slave barracks and carried off the men, stopping nowhere until he reached Vada. He seems to have made up a pretty sizeable body. He may go to Lepidus.

If Caesar had listened to me and crossed the Apennines I should have put Antony in so tight a corner that he would have been finished by lack of supplies rather than cold steel. But there is no giving orders to Caesar, nor by Caesar to his army – both very bad things. What alarms me is how this situation can be straightened out. I cannot any longer feed my men.

The third letter was written a day after the second and dispatched from the foothills of the Alps: Antony is on the march. He is going to Lepidus. Please look to future action in Rome. You will counter the world’s malice towards me if you can.

‘He has let him get away,’ said Cicero, resting his head in his hand and reading the letters through again. ‘He has let him get away! And now he says that Octavian can’t or won’t obey him as commander-in-chief. Well, this is a pretty mess!’

He wrote a letter at once for the courier to take back to Decimus:

From what you write, the flames of war, so far from having been extinguished, seem to be blazing higher. We understood that Antony had fled in despair with a few unarmed and demoralised followers. If in fact his condition is such that a clash with him will be a dangerous matter, I do not regard him as having fled from Mutina at all but as having shifted the war to another theatre.

The next day, the funeral cortège of Hirtius and Pansa reached Rome, escorted by an honour guard of cavalry sent by Octavian. It passed through the streets to the Forum at dusk, watched by hushed and sombre crowds. At the base of the rostra the Senate, all in black togas, waited by torchlight to receive it. Cornutus gave a eulogy that Cicero had written for him, and then the vast assembly walked behind the biers to the Field of Mars, where the pyres had been prepared. As a mark of patriotic respect the undertakers, actors and musicians refused to take any payment; Cicero joked that when an undertaker won’t take your money, you know you are a hero. But beneath his public show of bravado, in private he was profoundly troubled. As the torches were put to the base of the pyres, and the flames shot up, Cicero’s face in the firelight looked old and hollowed with worry.