Imperium

Lucius’s many chronic ailments was poor digestion, which he attempted to relieve by a solution of fennel oil. Only later, when I was clearing the room, did I rub those lacy leaves with my thumb and detect the frightful, musty, dead-mouse odor of hemlock. I knew then that Lucius had tired of this life, and for whatever reason—despair at its injustices, weariness with his ailments—had chosen to die like his hero, Socrates. This information I always meant to share with Cicero and Quintus. But for some reason, in the sadness of those days, I kept it to myself, and then the proper time for disclosure had passed, and it seemed better to let them continue to believe he had died involuntarily.
    I also recall how Cicero spent such a great sum on flowers and incense that after Lucius had been cleaned and anointed and laid on his funeral couch in his finest toga, his skinny feet pointing toward the door, he seemed, even in that drab November, to be in an Elysian grove of petals and fragrant scent. I remember the surprising number, for such a solitary man, of friends and neighbors who came to pay their respects, and the funeral procession at dusk out to the Esquiline Field, with young Frugi weeping so hard he could not catch his breath. I recall the dirges and the music, and the respectful glances of the citizens along the route—for this was a Cicero they were bearing to meet his ancestors, and the name now counted for something in Rome. Out on the frozen field, the body lay on its pyre under the stars, and the great orator struggled to deliver a brief eulogy. But his words would not perform their tricks for him on that occasion, and he had to give up. He could not even collect himself sufficiently to apply the torch to ignite the wood, and passed the task instead to Quintus. As the flames shot high, the mourners threw their gifts of scent and spices onto the bonfire, and the perfumed smoke, flecked with orange sparks, curled up to the Milky Way. That night I sat with the senator in his study as he dictated a letter to Atticus, and it is surely a tribute to the affection which Lucius also inspired in that noble heart that this was the first of Cicero’s hundreds of letters which Atticus chose to preserve:
    “Knowing me as well as you do, you can appreciate better than most how deeply my cousin Lucius’s death has grieved me, and what a loss it means to me both in public and in private life. All the pleasure that one human being’s kindness and charm can give another I had from him.”

    DESPITE HAVING LIVED IN ROME for many years, Lucius had always said that he wished to have his ashes interred in the family vault in Arpinum. Accordingly, on the morning after the cremation, the Cicero brothers set off with his remains on the three-day journey east, accompanied by their wives, having sent word ahead to their father of what had happened. Naturally, I went, too, for although Cicero was in the mourning period, his legal and political correspondence could not be neglected. Nevertheless, for the first—and, I think, the only—time in all our years together, he transacted no official business on the road, but simply sat with his chin in his hand, staring at the passing countryside. He and Terentia were in one carriage, Quintus and Pomponia in another, endlessly bickering—so much so that I saw Cicero draw his brother aside and plead with him, for the sake of Atticus, if for no one else, to make the marriage work. “Well,” retorted Quintus, with some justice, “if the good opinion of Atticus is that important to you, why do you not marry her?” We stayed the first night at the villa in Tusculum and had reached as far as Ferentium on the Via Latina when a message reached the brothers from Arpinum that their father had collapsed and died the previous day.
    Given that he was in his sixties and had been ailing for many years, this was obviously less of a shock than the death of Lucius (the news of which had apparently proved the final blow to the old man’s fragile health). But to leave one house festooned with the pine and cypress boughs of mourning and to arrive at another similarly adorned was the height of melancholy, made worse by the mischance that we reached Arpinum on the twenty-fifth day of November, that date kept sacred to Proserpina, Queen of Hades, who carries into effect the curses of men upon the souls of the dead. The Ciceros’ villa lay three miles out of the town, down a winding stony road, in a