How Things End

“As Joshua Foa Dienstag reminds us, the essential tragedy of being human (or being anything, for that matter) stems from the passage of time.”

The historian Appian of Alexandria, in his second century A.D. work Roman History, tells of the death of Cicero, which came about as a result of the statesman’s opposition to Mark Antony specifically and, more broadly, from his efforts to preserve the Roman Republic amid its slide toward dictatorship. Appian writes:

“It is well established that [Cicero’s] slaves were ready to fight for him bravely and faithfully, but that he ordered them to put down the litter and endure with patience whatever an adverse fate should compel. As he leaned out of the litter and offered his neck unmoved, his head was cut off. Nor did this satisfy the senseless cruelty of the soldiers. They cut off his hands, also, for the offence of having written something against Antony. Thus the head was brought to Antony and placed by his order between the two hands on the rostra, where, often as consul, often as a consular, and, that very year against Antony, he had been heard with admiration of his eloquence, the like of which no other human voice ever uttered. The people, raising their eyes bedimmed with tears, could scarcely bear the sight of his dismembered parts.”

As if that were not enough, Appian also invokes the historian Dio Cassius’ further description of Fulvia, the wife of Marc Antony, taking the decapitated head of Cicero, pulling out its tongue, and ramming through pins “she used in dressing her hair, all the time heaping disgusting epithets upon it.”

It was surely a most gruesome and unbecoming end for one of history’s great statesmen and philosophers.