Remetente desconhecido → Marcus Tullius Cicero

Although I know that I shall bring you news that is not at all pleasant, nevertheless, since chance and nature hold dominion over us, it seemed necessary to inform you of the situation, however things stood. On the twenty-third of May, having sailed from Epidaurus to the Piraeus, I met Marcus Marcellus, our colleague, there, and spent that day with him. The next day, after I had parted from him with the intention of going from Athens to Boeotia to complete the rest of my judicial circuit, he was intending, as he said, to sail past Malea toward Italy. Three days after that day, when I was planning to set out from Athens, at about the tenth hour of the night Publius Postumius, an intimate friend of his, came to me and reported that Marcus Marcellus, our colleague, had been stabbed with a dagger after dinner by Publius Magius Cilo, an intimate of his, and had received two wounds, one in the stomach, the other in the head near the ear; that there was hope, however, that he might survive; that Magius had afterward killed himself; and that he had been sent to me by Marcellus to report these things and to ask that I assemble physicians. I assembled them and set out immediately at first light. When I was not far from the Piraeus, a boy of Acidinus met me with a letter, in which was written that shortly before dawn Marcellus had died. Thus a most distinguished man was struck down in the cruelest death by the vilest of men, and the man whom his enemies had spared on account of his dignity found a friend who would bring him death. I nevertheless proceeded to his quarters: I found two freedmen and a handful of slaves; the rest, they said, had fled in terror because their master had been killed in front of the quarters. I was compelled to carry him into the city in the same litter in which I myself had been carried, and by my own litter-bearers, and there, with such resources as were available in Athens, I saw to it that a sufficiently grand funeral was arranged for him. I was unable to obtain from the Athenians a burial place within the city, because they said they were prevented by religious scruple, nor indeed had they ever previously granted this to anyone. They did grant us the next best thing: that we might bury him in whatever gymnasium we wished. We chose a spot in the most renowned gymnasium in the world, the Academy, and there we cremated him, and afterward we arranged for those same Athenians to contract for a marble monument to be made for him in the same place. Thus all the duties that were ours by virtue of our collegial and family bond, we performed for him both in life and in death. Farewell. Dated the day before the Kalends of June, at Athens.