Tullia found the journey difficult. She was breathless and flushed with fever, although her eyes were wide and calm and she said she felt contented: not ill, just tired. When we reached the villa, the doctor insisted she went straight to bed. Afterwards he took me to one side and said that he was fairly certain now that she was suffering from the final stages of consumption and she would not last the night: should he inform her father, or would it be better if I did it?
I said that I would do it. After I had composed myself, I found Cicero in his library. He had taken down some books but had made no attempt to unroll them. He was sitting, staring straight ahead at nothing. He didn’t even turn to look at me. He said, ‘She’s dying, isn’t she?’
‘I’m afraid she is.’
‘Does she know it?’
‘The doctor hasn’t told her, but I think she’s too clever not to realise, don’t you?’
He nodded. ‘That was why she was so keen to come here, where her memories are happiest. This is where she wants to die.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I think I shall go and sit with her now.’
I waited in the Lyceum and watched the sun sink behind the hills of Rome. Some hours later, when it was entirely dark, one of her maids came to fetch me, and conducted me by candlelight to Tullia’s room. She was unconscious, lying in bed with her hair unpinned and spread across her pillow. Cicero sat on one side, holding her hand. On her other side, her baby lay asleep. Her breathing was very shallow and rapid. There were people in the room – her maids, the baby’s nurse, the doctor – but they were in the shadows and I have no memory of their faces.
Cicero saw me and beckoned me closer. I leaned over and kissed her damp forehead, then retreated to join the others in the semi-darkness. Soon afterwards her breathing began to slow. The intervals between each breath became longer, and I kept imagining she must have died, but then she would take another gasp of air. The end when it came was different and unmistakable – a long sigh, accompanied by a slight tremor along the length of her body, and then a profound stillness as she passed into eternity.
XIII
The funeral was in Rome. Only one good thing came out of it: Cicero’s brother Quintus, from whom he had been estranged ever since that terrible scene in Patrae, came round to offer his condolences the moment we got back, and the two men sat beside the coffin, wordless, holding hands. As a mark of their reconciliation, Cicero asked Quintus to deliver the eulogy: he doubted he would be able to get through it himself.
That apart, it was one of the most melancholy occasions I have ever witnessed – the long procession out on to the Esquiline Field in the freezing winter dusk; the wail of the musicians’ dirges mingled with the cawing of the crows in the sacred grove of Libitina; the small enshrouded figure lying on its bier; the racked face of Terentia, like Niobe’s seemingly turned to stone by grief; Atticus supporting Cicero as he put the torch to the pyre; and finally the great sheet of flame that suddenly shot up, illuminating us all in its scorching red glow, our rigid expressions set like masks in a Greek tragedy.
The following day, Publilia turned up on the doorstep with her mother and uncle, sulky that she had not been invited to the funeral and determined to move back into the house. She made a little speech that had obviously been written out for her and that she had memorised: ‘Husband, I know that your daughter found my presence difficult, but now that this impediment has been removed, I hope that we can resume our married life together and that I may help you to forget your grief.’
But Cicero didn’t want to forget his grief. He wished to be enveloped by it, consumed by it. Without telling Publilia where he was going, he fled the house that same day, carrying the urn containing Tullia’s ashes. He moved in to Atticus’s place on the Quirinal, where he locked himself away in the library for days on end, seeing no one and compiling a great handbook of all that has ever been written by the philosophers and poets on how to cope with grief and dying. He called it his Consolation. He told me that while he worked, he could hear Atticus’s five-year-old daughter playing in her nursery next door, exactly as Tullia had done when he was a young advocate: ‘The sound was as sharp to my heart as a red-hot needle; that kept me at my task.’
When Publilia discovered where he was, she began to pester Atticus for admittance, so Cicero fled again, to the newest and most isolated of all his properties – a villa on the tiny island of Astura, at the mouth of a river, only a hundred yards or so from the shore of the Bay of Antium. The island was entirely deserted and covered with trees and groves, cut into shady walks. In this lonely place he shunned all human company. Early in the day he would hide himself away in the thick, thorny wood, with nothing to disturb his meditations but the cries of the birds, and would not emerge till evening. What is the soul? he asks in his Consolation. It is not moist or airy or fiery or compounded of the earth. There is nothing in these elements that accounts for the power of memory, mind or thought, that recalls the past, foresees the future or comprehends the present. Rather the soul must be counted as a fifth element – divine and therefore eternal.
I remained in Rome and handled all his affairs – financial, domestic, literary and even marital, as now it fell to me to fend off the hapless Publilia and her relatives by pretending I had no idea where he was. As the weeks passed, his absence became increasingly difficult to explain, not just to his wife but to his clients and friends, and I was aware that his reputation was suffering, it being considered unmanly to surrender to grief so completely. Many letters of condolence arrived, including a line from Caesar in Spain, and these I forwarded to Cicero.
Eventually Publilia discovered his hiding place and wrote to him announcing her intention of visiting him in the company of her mother. To escape such a fraught confrontation, he abandoned the island, ashes in hand, and finally nerved himself to write a letter to his wife setting out his desire for a divorce. No doubt it was cowardly of him not to do it face to face. But he felt that her lack of sympathy over Tullia’s death had made their ill-conceived relationship entirely untenable. He left Atticus to sort out the financial details, which entailed selling one of his houses, and then he invited me to join him in Tusculum, saying he had a project he wished to discuss.
By the time I arrived, it was the middle of May. I had not seen him for more than three months. He was seated in his Academy reading when he heard my approach, and turned to look at me with a sad smile. His appearance shocked me. He was much gaunter, especially around the neck. His hair was greyer, longer and unkempt. But the real change was beneath the surface. There was a kind of resignation about him. It showed in the slowness of his movements and the gentleness of his manner – as if he had been broken and remade.
Over dinner I asked him if he had found it painful to return to a place where he had spent so much time with Tullia.
He replied: ‘I dreaded the prospect of coming, naturally, but when I arrived it was not so bad. One deals with grief, I have come to believe, either by never thinking of it or by thinking of it all the time. I chose the latter path, and here at least I am surrounded by memories of her, and her ashes are interred in the garden. Friends have been very kind, especially those who have suffered similar losses. Did you see the letter Sulpicius wrote me?’
He passed it to me over the table:
I want to tell you of something which has brought me no slight comfort, in the hope that perhaps it may have some power to lighten your sorrow too. As I was on my way back from Asia, sailing from Aegina towards Megara, I began to gaze at the landscape around me. There behind me was Aegina, in front of me Megara, to the right Piraeus, to the left Corinth; once flourishing towns, now lying low in ruins before one’s eyes. I began to think to myself: ‘Ah! How can we manikins wax indignant if one of us dies or is killed, ephemeral creatures as we are, when the corpses of so many towns lie abandoned in a single spot? Check yourself, Servius, and remember that you were born a mortal man.’ That thought, I do assure you, strengthened me not a little. Can you really be so greatly moved by the loss of one poor little woman’s frail spirit? If her end had not come now, she must none the less have died in a few years’ time, for she was mortal.