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Dio says she added jokes of her own. Svedomsky spends his whole craft on the face, the one place the story actually lives.

The three men met on a river island near Bononia, in guarded privacy, and spent two days trading the names of people who had to die. Octavian was nineteen; Antony and Lepidus were the other two thirds of the new arrangement; the product of the meeting was the proscription list, a public register of citizens any man could kill for a share of the estate. Plutarch says Octavian spent the first day defending one name and surrendered it on the second: Cicero, the old consul who had promoted him, advised him, and privately called him a boy to be praised, honored, and pushed aside. Antony wanted Cicero more than he wanted anyone. Cicero had spent the autumn of 44 writing fourteen speeches against him, the Philippics, and reading them aloud to Rome. The killers caught up with him on 7 December near his villa at Formiae, in a litter on the way to the sea, where a ship was waiting that he had twice boarded and twice abandoned. The squad was led by a centurion named Herennius and a tribune named Popillius, whom Cicero had once successfully defended in court. He heard them coming, told the bearers to set the litter down, and put his head out, stretching his neck for the blade. He was 63. On Antony's instructions they took the head, and the hand that had written the Philippics. What happened before the trophies reached the Forum is in Cassius Dio. Fulvia, Antony's wife, had her own account to settle: her first husband was Clodius, the street politician who had been Cicero's enemy until he was murdered on a road, and Cicero had defended the murderer with pleasure. She took the head on her knees, spat on it, and drew out the tongue that had made the jokes, and pushed her hairpins through it, adding, Dio says, jokes of her own. Then the head went where Antony ordered: nailed to the Rostra, the speaker's platform, above the spot where the voice had done its work. Romans came to look and could hardly bear it; Plutarch says what they saw there was not Cicero's face but the image of Antony's soul. The arithmetic of the aftermath took 50 years to finish. Fulvia was dead within three, Antony within thirteen, both badly. Octavian outlived the list he had signed, became Augustus, and one day caught a grandson hiding a scroll of Cicero under his cloak. He took the book, stood reading for a long time, and handed it back with the sentence Plutarch preserved: a learned man, child, a learned man and a lover of his country. Svedomsky, a Russian who worked his whole life in Rome, painted Fulvia at her ease in about 1898, the trophy on a straw mat beside the couch, the pins already placed, the room otherwise arranged for an ordinary comfortable afternoon.