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One minute you know where you’re standing, where you’ll be going, what you will be doing the next morning. The next, as if overtaken into the air by the hand of the Winds, none matters. All the plans you have made then are left meaningless. Materiality vanishes. Your hand moves forward to grasp onto anything, to avert your fall lest you end up on the ground, but all the support you thought to be around you turns out instead to be an illusion of the mind.
With each hit my body falters. I’m not a stranger to the feeling of skin ripping apart, or the stench that arises from them. Blood is always nauseating to inhale; it’s dense and sticks onto your hand for a long time. War has been what I’ve breathed for many years, camps have become home to me long ago. I see the faces of these men around me; they’re just as familiar as that blood. Though now with my soul already at the parting door and my vision is most blurry, I can still make out the hatred and the jealousy they feel for me—it’s the courage, the audacity in those eyes that is alien to my passing consciousness.
Only against one man do they turn uncowardly!
You remember them just as much as I do, don’t you, Gnaeus, old friend? Men with little regard for what the future may hold in store for us. Those who are only concerned with keeping the status quo. But you and I, Gnaeus, we never were like them. We knew that the times had changed. The tides were turned long ago—perhaps by the hands of those brothers—never to be stopped again.
If no man came out soon to pull up that woman to whom we both gave all of our lives, she would have been taken over by those waves. We just took the initiative and did our best to satisfy her. But Roma has never been the one to send off her champions properly—either with the Gracchi or the Scipiones, but the examples don’t stop there. The men of the times of Cincinnatus are long gone; they now say one never ceases action when it’s time to get down the stage, but I had too many designs to end my speech just yet, my friend: I had gone to her with an open hand, with a burning heart to accompany, so that I could lead that woman into glory. Poems would be resung for generations. Long scrolls would be filled with lauds in my name.
But is that so bad of me, the “Great” Pompeius? I am sure you understand me the most. Show me the man who would deny the opportunity to stand among giants; to link themselves to the other “greats” of history, and to his ancestors—to Aeneas, to Venus, to Jupiter Maximus?
Then did I really deserve this, I ask myself, and you, my friend, to be strapped of what I love and care about the most—my patria?
My foot slips. No one tries to hold me then. There are no crowns offered my way, nor songs does anyone cheerfully sing about my conquests no longer. Only the sound of their knives piercing through my body I hear then, and their grunts as they commit homicide. Another rip in my flesh; it’s right on my back, between my shoulder blades, somewhat lower on my spine. My breath catches in my throat. It passed right through my ribs, but it hurts less than what I see when I turn around with the last strength I have left in me.
The face looking back at me is terrified. But it fills me with tranquility. I close my eyes for a moment, knowing that at least my dear boy still has his wits about him, after all. He might have tried to end my legacy, but through him I shall live on.
Right next to me, as I lie on the cold ground, one shadow befalls on me—the one silhouette that I’m familiar with the most.
I see your countenance; marble fails to portray the warmth with which you smiled at others back then. At least it makes your head stand tall, and the glint in your eyes remains there in the carved stone. You are still just as proud! I would have thought you’d be the only one to understand me at this moment, as I slowly lose my consciousness—for both of us found our end with the same reason: putting our trust in the goodness of those we did favors. How wrong I see I have been to think so! I would have laughed had not my strength failed my will. Because, though you are still by my side in my final moments, my dear old friend, you mock me with your expression, looking down on me once again.