Lucullus

Plutarch

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. II. Perrin, Bernadotte, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.

Of course this induced Lucullus to withdraw even more from public life. And when Cicero was banished from the city, and Cato was sent out to Cyprus, he retired altogether. Even before his death, it is said that his understanding was affected and gradually faded away. But Cornelius Nepos says that Lucullus lost his mind not from old age, nor yet from disease, but that he was disabled by drugs administered to him by one of his freedmen, Callisthenes;

that the drugs were given him by Callisthenes in order to win more of his love, in the belief that they had such a power, but they drove him from his senses and overwhelmed his reason, so that even while he was still alive, his brother managed his property. However, when he died,[*](About 57 B.C.) the people grieved just as much as if his death had come at the culmination of his military and political services, and flocked together, and tried to compel the young nobles who had carried the body into the forum to bury it in the Campus Martius, where Sulla also had been buried.

But no one had expected this, and preparations for it were not easy, and so his brother, by prayers and supplications, succeeded in persuading them to suffer the burial to take place on the estate at Tusculum, where preparations for it had been made. Nor did he himself long survive Lucullus, but, as in age and reputation he came a little behind him, so did he also in the time of his death, having been a most affectionate brother.