Lustrum Read Free Page A

the threads of his thoughts. But he could not weave them together into anything coherent, and shortly before sunset he called again for his cloak and boots.
    I had assumed his intention was to take a turn in the public gardens not far from the house, where he often went when he was composing a speech. But as we reached the brow of the hill, instead of turning right he pressed on towards the Esquiline Gate, and I realised to my amazement that he intended to go outside the sacred boundary to the place where the corpses were burned – a spot he usually avoided at all costs. We passed the porters with their handcarts waiting for work just beyond the gate, and the squat official residence of the carnifex, who, as public executioner, was forbidden to live within the precincts of the city. Finally we entered the sacred grove of Libitina, filled with cawing crows, and approached the temple. In those days this was the headquarters of the undertakers' guild: the place where one could buy all that was needed for a funeral, from the utensils with which to anoint a body to the bed on which the corpse was cremated. Cicero asked me for some money and went ahead and spoke to a priest. He handed him the purse, and a couple of official mourners appeared. Cicero beckoned me over. 'We are just in time,' he said.
    What a curious party we must have made as we crossed the Esquiline Field in single file, the mourners first, carrying jarsof incense, then the consul-elect, then me. All around us in the dusk were the dancing flames of funeral pyres, the cries of the bereaved, and the sickly smell of incense – strong, yet not quite strong enough to disguise the stink of burning death. The mourners led us to the public
ustrina
, where a pile of corpses on a handcart were waiting to be thrown on to the flames. Devoid of clothes and shoes, these unclaimed bodies were as destitute in death as they had been in life. Only the murdered boy's was covered: I recognised it by the sailcloth shroud into which it had now been tightly sewn. As a couple of attendants tossed it easily on to the metal grille, Cicero bowed his head and the hired mourners set up a particularly noisy lamentation, no doubt in the hope of a good tip. The flames roared and flattened in the wind, and very quickly that was it: he had gone to whatever fate awaits us all.
    It was a scene I have never forgotten.
    Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die – how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words.
    And with this in mind, and in the renewed hope that I may live long enough to see the task through, I shall now relate the extraordinary story of Cicero's year in office as consul of the Roman republic, and what befell him in the four years afterwards – a span of time we mortals call a lustrum, but which to the gods is no more than the blinking of an eye.

II
    The following day, inaugural eve, it snowed – a heavy fall, of the sort one normally sees only in the mountains. It clad the temples of the Capitol in soft white marble and laid a shroud as thick as a man's hand across the whole of the city. I had never witnessed such a phenomenon before, and nor, despite my great age, have I heard of the like again. Snow in Rome? This surely had to be an omen. But of what?
    Cicero stayed firmly in his study, beside a small coal fire, and continued to work on his speech. He placed no faith in portents. When I burst in and told him of the snow, he merely shrugged, 'What of it?' and when tentatively I began to advance the argument of the stoics in defence of augury – that if there are gods, they