relius, Lucius Verus was struck with sudden and
mysterious disease, and died as he hastened back to Rome. His death
awoke a swarm of sinister rumours, to settle on Lucilla, jealous, it
was said, of Fabia her sister, perhaps of Faustina--on Faustina
herself, who had accompanied the imperial progress, and was anxious now
to hide a crime of her own--even on the elder brother, who, beforehand
with the treasonable designs of his colleague, should have helped him
at supper to a favourite morsel, cut with a knife poisoned ingeniously
on one side only. Aurelius, certainly, with sincere distress, his long
irritations, so dutifully concealed or repressed, turning now into a
single feeling of regret for the human creature, carried the remains
back to Rome, and demanded of the Senate a public funeral, with a
decree for the apotheosis, or canonisation, of the dead.

For three days the body lay in state in the Forum, enclosed in an open
coffin of cedar-wood, on a bed of ivory and gold, in the centre of a
sort of temporary chapel, representing the temple of his patroness
Venus Genetrix. Armed soldiers kept watch around it, while choirs of
select voices relieved one another in the chanting of hymns or
monologues from the great tragedians.

[31] At the head of the couch were displayed the various personal
decorations which had belonged to Verus in life. Like all the rest of
Rome, Marius went to gaze on the face he had seen last scarcely
disguised under the hood of a travelling-dress, as the wearer hurried,
at night-fall, along one of the streets below the palace, to some
amorous appointment. Unfamiliar as he still was with dead faces, he
was taken by surprise, and touched far beyond what he had reckoned on,
by the piteous change there; even the skill of Galen having been not
wholly successful in the process of embalming. It was as if a brother
of his own were lying low before him, with that meek and helpless
expression it would have been a sacrilege to treat rudely.

Meantime, in the centre of the Campus Martius, within the grove of
poplars which enclosed the space where the body of Augustus had been
burnt, the great funeral pyre, stuffed with shavings of various
aromatic woods, was built up in many stages, separated from each other
by a light entablature of woodwork, and adorned abundantly with carved
and tapestried images. Upon this pyramidal or flame-shaped structure
lay the corpse, hidden now under a mountain of flowers and