the word he used
longingly, whenever he heard of any one dying without agony. Once only
in the course of the malady he seemed to lose consciousness, when he
complained of forty young men crowding around the bed to steal away
his body. More than a wandering mind, Suetonius thinks this was a
vision or premonition of an approaching event, because forty praetorian
soldiers were really to carry the bier in the funeral march. The great
man died at Nola, in the same villa and room in which his father,
Octavius, had passed away years before. His body was transported from
village to village, from city to city, along the Appian Way, by the
members of each municipal council in turn; and, to avoid the intense
heat of the Campanian and Pontine lowlands, the procession marched
only at night, the bier being kept in the local sanctuaries or town
halls during the day. Thus Bovillae (le Frattocchie, at the foot of
the Alban hills) was reached. The whole Roman knighthood was here in
attendance; the body was carried in triumph, as it were, over the last
ten miles of the road, and deposited in the vestibule of the palace on
the Palatine Hill.

[Illustration: Military funeral evolutions; from the base of the
Column of Antoninus.]

Meanwhile proposals were made and resolutions passed in the Senate,
which went far beyond anything that had ever been suggested in such
contingencies of state. One of the members recommended that the statue
of Victory which stood in the Curia should be carried before the
hearse, that lamentations should be sung by the sons and daughters of
the senators, and that the pageant, on its way to the Campus Martius,
should march through the Porta Triumphalis, which was never opened
except to victorious generals. Another member suggested that all
classes of citizens should put aside their golden ornaments and all
articles of jewelry, and wear only iron finger-rings; a third, that
the name of "August" should be transferred to the month of September,
because the lamented hero was born in the latter and had died in the
former. These exaggerated expressions of grief were suppressed,
however, and the funeral was organized with the grandest simplicity.
The body was placed in the Forum, in front of the Temple of Julius
Caesar, from the _rostra_ of which Tiberius read a panegyric. Another
oration was delivered at the opposite end of the Forum by Drusus, the
adopted son of Tiberius. Then the senators themselves placed the bier
o