ut to me it
is still more interesting to find it moving him in a practical matter of
which he has himself left the truth on record; for Cicero is a real
human being for whom all who are familiar with his letters must have
something in the nature of affection, and with whom, too, we feel
genuine sympathy in the calamity which now fell upon him. It was early
in 45 B.C. that he lost his only and dearly loved daughter, and the blow
to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety,
was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus
after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the
melancholy Pomptine marshes;[824] and here, if our minds are
sufficiently divested of modern ideas and trained to look on death with
Roman eyes, we may be startled to find him thinking of her as still in
some sense surviving, and as divine rather than human: as a deity or
spirit to whom a _fanum_ could be erected. He makes it clear to Atticus,
who is acting as his business agent at Rome, that he does not want a
mere tomb (_sepulcrum_), but a _fanum_, which as we have seen was the
general word for a spot of ground sacred to a deity. "I wish to have a
_fanum_ built, and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am
anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb, not so much on account of the
penalty of the law, as in order to attain as nearly as possible to an
_apotheosis_. This I could do if I built it in the villa itself, but ...
I dread the changes of owners. Wherever I construct it on the land, I
think that I could secure that posterity should respect its
sanctity."[825] The word here translated sanctity is _religio_; we may
remember that all burial places were _loca religiosa_, not consecrated
by the State, yet hallowed by the feeling of awe or scruple in
approaching them; but Cicero is probably here using the word rather in
that wider sense in which it so often expresses the presence of a deity
in some particular spot.[826]

Atticus was a man of the world and probably an Epicurean, and his
friend in two successive letters half apologises for this strong
desire. "I should not like it to be known by any other name but
_fanum_,--unreasonably, you will perhaps say." And again, "you must bear
with these silly wishes (_ineptiae_) of mine."[827] But this only makes
the intensity of his feeling about it the more plain and significant; he
really seems to want Tullia to be thought of as having passed i