Ovid

45

We buried him in December, the day before the start of the Winter Festival, in the garden of his villa outside Rome. He had no mausoleum, not even a stone, but that wasn't important: the earth was Roman earth, not the hateful frost-locked soil of Tomi. There were only four mourners, if mourners is the right word on what was after all a happy occasion: myself, my father, Perilla and his widow. The Lady Fabia Camilla watched the ceremony with vacant eyes; but when I'd lowered the small casket into the narrow hole she threw in after it a single handful of dried rosebuds. I filled the hole in, laid the cut turf on top and stamped it flat.

'Rest quietly Father,' Perilla whispered beside me. 'You're home now.'

We walked back to the house through the bare-branched orchard.

'He wrote most of his poetry here in the garden.' Perilla was smiling, as if she saw not a bleak December day but the sharp yellow of narcissi against a pale blue cloudless sky. Perhaps she did. 'He would have approved. “Every place has its own fate”.'

From her tone I knew it was a quotation, but it wasn't one I knew. Maybe one of his own lines.

'Dine with me today?' My father laid one hand on my shoulder, the other on Perilla's. She smiled.

'Yes, Father.'

Did I answer him, or was it Perilla? I can't remember now. In any case it didn't particularly matter.