EstQuodFulminelungo dixit:
I find it a little curious that you highlighted (or rather
bolded) the copula only (while also admitting that it feels just right), which to me makes more sense than some of the other imperfects there.
'being' is not so simple a thing as, say, 'dying'. A thing continues to 'be' independently of our acknowledging what happened to it only one time or two times. If I say, "There was a book on the table (in my dream).", it doesn't imply that the book was there and then suddenly vanished (although I guess it might have). On the other hand, the brother in your text only
obiit the one time and, well, ceased to 'be', and the finiteness or 'perfectivity' of his being is reinforced in the following clause by
fuerit. That is, even though the
odium very probably
continued to be felt, it was nevertheless the result of a death which happened but once.
The fact is, a story (or dream) and everything inside of it is more or less timeless, so that attempting to assign to it or its parts 'perfectivity' is either senseless or just indicative of the logical problems inherent in using identical/unmarked verb-forms to express things †that are quite different. In other words, the book that was on the table in your dream continues to exist even now in the same sense that it can be said ever to have "existed", only now it is upon recollection.
A probably not-so-interesting, but somewhat relevant note is that the imperfect (indicative) in Vedic, whose ambiguities can be hugely problematic, has left linguists calling it 'timeless' because it seems to be capable of both past (imperfective) meaning and present (perfective) meaning. But it is more simply the tense 'proper to the narrative past', to paraphrase Macdonell. I don't find it impossible that this state of affairs is 'remembered' in Latin as a default. Just as in English we often
default to a simple past whereas we might as well use the 'imperfect', e.g.:
I saw this guy at the concert, and he
danced (I could just as well have said 'was dancing', but I didn't
bother distinguishing because I know that my listener will not be confused) like a madman.
†I think Lithuanian has unique forms to deal with this, and Japanese, and possibly Georgian (about which I know virtually nothing), to name a few.