After the killers had gone, we carried Cicero’s body down to the beach and built a pyre, and at dusk we burned it. Then I made my way south to my farm on the Bay of Naples.
Little by little I learned more of what had happened.
Quintus was soon afterwards captured with his son and put to death.
Atticus emerged from hiding and was pardoned by Antony because of the help he had given Fulvia.
And much, much later, Antony committed suicide together with his mistress Cleopatra after Octavian defeated them in battle. The boy is now the Emperor Augustus.
But I have written enough.
Many years have passed since the episodes I have recounted. At first I thought I would never recover from Cicero’s death. But time wipes out everything, even grief. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that grief is almost entirely a question of perspective. For the first few years I used to sigh and think, ‘Well, he would still be in his sixties now,’ and then a decade later, with surprise, ‘My goodness, he would be seventy-five,’ but nowadays I think, ‘Well, he would be long since dead in any case, so what does it matter how he died in comparison with how he lived?’
My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too.
In the summer evenings I sit on the terrace with Agathe, my wife. She sews while I look at the stars. Always at such moments I think of Scipio’s dream of where dead statesmen dwell in On the Republic:
I gazed in every direction and all appeared wonderfully beautiful. There were stars which we never see from earth, and they were all larger than we have ever imagined. The starry spheres were much greater than the earth; indeed the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface.
‘If only you will look on high,’ the old statesman tells Scipio, ‘and contemplate this eternal home and resting place, you will no longer bother with the gossip of the common herd or put your trust in human reward for your exploits. Nor will any man’s reputation endure very long, for what men say dies with them and is blotted out with the forgetfulness of posterity.’
All that will remain of us is what is written down.