" Undeterred he began a tragedy entitled "Ajax,"
and discovering his incompetence, gave it up. "And what has become
of Ajax?" a parasite asked. "Ajax threw himself on a sponge,"
replied Augustus, whose father, it is to be regretted, did not do
likewise. Nevertheless, it were pleasant to have assisted at his
funeral.
A couch of ivory and gold, ten feet high, draped with purple,
stood for a week in the atrium of the palace. Within the couch,
hidden from view, the body of the emperor lay, ravaged by poison.
Above was a statue, recumbent, in wax, made after his image and
dressed in imperial robes. Near by a little slave with a big fan
protected the statue from flies. Each day physicians came, gazed
at the closed wax mouth, and murmured, "He is worse." In the
vestibule was a pot of burning ilex, and stretching out through
the portals a branch of cypress warned the pontiffs from the
contamination of the sight of death.
At high noon on the seventh day the funeral crossed the city.
First were the flaming torches; the statues of the House of
Octavia; senators in blue; knights in scarlet; magistrates;
lictors; the pick of the praetorian guard. Then, to the
alternating choruses of boys and girls, the rotting body passed
down the Sacred Way. Behind it Tiberius in a travelling-cloak, his
hands unringed, marched meditating on the curiosities of life,
while to the rear there straggled a troop of dancing satyrs, led
by a mime dressed in resemblance of Augustus, whose defects he
caricatured, whose vices he parodied and on whom the surging crowd
closed in.
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