Around 24 April 44 BCE: To Cicero (at Puteoli) from Mark Antony (at Rome)
Mark Antony sends Cicero a very nice and/or threatening letter
My own business and your sudden departure meant that I could not raise this matter with you in person. For this reason, I fear that my absence means it will carry less weight with you. But if your good nature matches the opinion I have always held of you, I shall be glad.
I asked Caesar for the recall of Sextus Cloelius from exile.1 I got it. I had it in mind even then to only make use of this favour if you allowed it. I am all the more concerned to be able to do it with your consent, now in my own name. But if you show yourself unfeeling towards his wretched and ruined fortune, then I shall not fight you over it, although it seems to me that I ought to uphold Caesar’s decisions.
But by Hercules, if you wish to think courteously and sensibly and kindly towards me, then you will certainly show yourself well-disposed, and wish that Publius Clodius,2 a boy whom we have the highest hopes for, will think that you did not pursue his father’s friends, when you had the opportunity to. Please, let it seem like you acted as his father’s enemy for the sake of the Republic, and not because you hated his family. We lay aside enmities taken up in the name of the Republic more honourably and willingly than those that originated in our own stubbornness. Next, allow me to guide the boy to this belief now, and to persuade his impressionable mind that enmities do not have to be inherited.
Although I am certain that your fortunes, Cicero, are far removed from every danger, I nevertheless think that you would rather lead a quiet and honoured old age, than a troubled one.
Finally, it is my right to ask this favour of you; for there is nothing I have not done for your sake. Still, if I do not achieve my request, I will not grant this to Cloelius on my own, so that you understand how much your authority means to me, and on that account show yourself more easily appeased.
Read Ad Atticum 14.13A in Latin here | Check the glossary here
Sextus Cloelius was a follower and key subordinate of Cicero’s enemy Clodius Pulcher. He may have been the one to draft Clodius’ tribunician legislation, including the law exiling Cicero, who hated him enough to insult him by name in several speeches. He was condemned and exiled for inciting mob violence after the murder of Clodius in 52 BCE.
The young-ish son of Clodius Pulcher and Fulvia, and so now the step-son of Fulvia’s husband Antony.