It was not the victory that moved me, praiseworthy as it was. By the same report he led the race from the start, slowly left behind his brother, who pressed him in the first laps, and needed no daring trick on the final lap, but won by an even pace and a gap of his own making; a kind of modesty I approve in a rider no less than in an orator. What moved me was what followed. On the lap of honour he raised the flag of Spain, with a black ribbon tied to it in memory of those who died in the railway disaster at Urda, a town in the district of Toledo. The paper records sixty-nine dead, as was announced after the funeral mass in the church of St John the Baptist, where sixty-nine roses, one for each, were laid on the altar while neighbours, kinsfolk and magistrates gathered.

As you know, I am apt to marvel at men who, as I wrote then, "now cheer for a rag, love a rag". Here too there was a rag, and in a circus at that; but it was the cloth of the fatherland, which no man of good birth changes, not the cloth of a faction, which the fans swap as the fancy takes them. Nor did it win favour by its colour, but by that small ribbon, which bent the victor's joy towards the citizens' grief. Remember where our games began. Aeneas, as Virgil sings, held games in Sicily for his father Anchises a year after his death; and our ancestors gave the first gladiators in the Forum Boarium, when the sons of Junius Brutus honoured their father's funeral. Games, then, were born of pietas; torn from pietas, they sank into the emptiness I find so tedious, the shouting and the rag. Márquez, whether of his own accord or on the advice of others, which the paper does not say, called the race back for a moment to its origin, and made a victory that was a spectacle into a duty.

So far I praise; now I ask what you would ask too. Libertad Digital has much to say of roses and ribbons, nothing of the cause of the disaster. Earlier reports, published by the Guardian and the BBC, stated that on the line joining Madrid to Seville a train of the private company Iryo, standing still, was struck from behind by one of the public company Renfe, with five hundred and forty-four passengers on the two trains; that at least sixty-eight dead were then counted; and that this was not the only railway disaster in Spain in a single year. I remember that when I governed Bithynia I wrote to the emperor about the aqueduct at Nicomedia and the theatre at Nicaea, not to lament money lost, but to ask by whose fault it had been lost, so that it should not be lost again.

The remedy, then, is simple and not new. The rider has done his part; let the magistrates do theirs: hold an inquiry, lay the causes and those responsible before the people, and set a rule that will be carefully kept. And the rich who profit from these races, if they truly wish to honour the memory of the dead, should settle something on their children, as I settled something on the children of Comum; for one endowment for their upkeep is worth more than a thousand flags. To mourn belongs to all; to inquire belongs to the magistrates; and a city that knows how to mourn but not how to inquire gives roses to the dead, and to the living nothing. Farewell.