The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome
History
The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome
Literature -- Collections
The day on which his remains were deposited in the tomb of Augustus,
at one time exhibited the silence of perfect desolation; at another,
the uproar of vociferous lamentation; the streets of the city were
crowded, one general blaze of torches glared throughout the Campus
Martius; there the soldiers under arms, the magistrates without the
insignia of office, and the people ranged according to their tribes,
passionately exclaimed, "that the commonwealth was utterly lost, that
henceforth there remained no hope," so openly and so boldly that you
would have believed they had forgotten those who ruled over them. But
nothing pierced Tiberius more deeply than the warm interest excited
in favor of Agrippina, while they gave her such titles as "the
ornament of her country, the only blood of Augustus, an unparalleled
example of primitive virtue"; and, looking up to heaven and the gods,
they implored "the preservation of her issue, and that they might
outlive their oppressors."
There were those who missed the pomp of a public funeral, and compared
with this the superior honors and magnificence displayed by Augustus
in that of Drusus, the father of Germanicus; observing, "that he
himself had traveled, in the depth of winter, as far as Ticinus, and,
continuing by the corpse, had with it entered the city; around his
bier were crowded the images of the Claudii and Julii; he was mourned
in the forum; his encomium pronounced on the rostra; all the honors
invented by our ancestors, or added by their posterity, were heaped
upon him. But to Germanicus were denied the ordinary solemnities, and
such as were due to every distinguished Roman. Certainly his corpse
was burned in a foreign country because of the long journey, in such a
manner as it was, but afterward it was but just to have compensated
the scantiness of the first ceremony by the increased solemnity of the
last; his brother met him but one day's journey, his uncle not, even
at the gate. Where were those observances of the ancients, the
effigies of the dead laid in state on a bed, hymns composed in memory
of departed virtue, with encomiums and tears? Where at least the
ceremonial of sorrow?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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