part of the marble on which this inscription was engraved.  It is in the form of a laudatio, or funeral encomium; yet we cannot feel sure that he actually delivered it as a speech, for throughout it he addresses, not an audience, but the lost wife herself, in a manner unique among such documents of the kind as have come down to us.  He speaks to her as though she were still living, though passed from his sight; and it is just this that makes it more real and more touching than any memorial of the dead that has come down to us from either Italy or Greece.[242]

In such a record names are of no great importance; it is no great misfortune that we do not know quite for certain who this man and his wife were.  But there is a very strong probability that her name was Turia, and that he was a certain Q. Lucretius Vespillo, who served under Pompeius in Epirus in 48 B.C., whose romantic adventures in the proscriptions of 43 are recorded by Appian,[243] and who eventually became consul under Augustus in 19 B.C.  We may venture to use these names in telling the remarkable story.  For telling it here no apology is needed, for it has never been told in English as a whole, so far as I am aware.

It begins when the pair were about to be married, probably in 49 B.C., and with a horrible family calamity, not unnatural at the moment of the outbreak of a dangerous civil war.  Both Turia’s parents were murdered suddenly and together at their country residence—­perhaps, as Mommsen suggested, by their own slaves.  Immediately afterwards Lucretius had to leave with Pompeius’ army for Epirus, and Turia was left alone, bereft of both her parents, to do what she could to secure the punishment of the murderers.  Alone as she was, or aided only by a married sister, she at once showed the courage and energy which are obvious in all we hear of her.  She seems to have succeeded in tracking the assassins and bringing them to justice:  “even if I had been there myself,” says her husband, “I could have done no more.”

But this was by no means the only dangerous task she had to undertake in those years of civil war and insecurity.  When Lucretius left her they seem to have been staying at the villa where her parents had been murdered; she had given him all her gold and pearls, and kept him supplied in his absence with money, provisions, and even slaves, which she contrived to smuggle over sea to Epirus.[244] And during the march of Caesar’s army through Italy she seems to have been threatened, either in that villa or another, by some detachment of his troops, and to have escaped only through her own courage and the clemency of one whose name is not mentioned, but who can hardly be other than the great Julius himself, a true gentleman, whose instinct and policy alike it was throughout this civil war to be merciful to opponents.

A year later, while Lucretius was still away, yet another peril came upon her.  While Caesar was operating round Dyrrhachium, there was a dangerous rising in Campania and Southern Italy, for which our giddy friend Caelius Rufus was chiefly responsible; gladiators and ruffianly shepherd slaves were enlisted, and by some of these the villa where she was staying was attacked, and successfully defended by her—­so much at least it seems possible to infer from the fragment recently discovered.