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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.


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