Whatever misgiving the Roman people may [30] have felt as to the
leadership of the younger was unexpectedly set at rest; though with
some temporary regret for the loss of what had been, after all, a
popular figure on the world's stage. Travelling fraternally in the
same litter with Aurelius, Lucius Verus was struck with sudden and
mysterious disease, and died as he hastened back to Rome. His death
awoke a swarm of sinister rumours, to settle on Lucilla, jealous, it
was said, of Fabia her sister, perhaps of Faustina--on Faustina
herself, who had accompanied the imperial progress, and was anxious
now to hide a crime of her own--even on the elder brother, who,
beforehand with the treasonable designs of his colleague, should have
helped him at supper to a favourite morsel, cut with a knife poisoned
ingeniously on one side only. Aurelius, certainly, with sincere
distress, his long irritations, so dutifully concealed or repressed,
turning now into a single feeling of regret for the human creature,
carried the remains back to Rome, and demanded of the Senate a public
funeral, with a decree for the apotheosis, or canonisation, of the
dead.

For three days the body lay in state in the Forum, enclosed in an
open coffin of cedar-wood, on a bed of ivory and gold, in the centre
of a sort of temporary chapel, representing the temple of his
patroness Venus Genetrix. Armed soldiers kept watch around it, while
choirs of select voices relieved one another in the chanting of hymns
or monologues from the great tragedians.

[31] At the head of the couch were displayed the various personal
decorations which had belonged to Verus in life. Like all the rest
of Rome, Marius went to gaze on the face he had seen last scarcely