Imaginary LIves Read Online Free PDF Page A

forehead hung a pendent stone, long and drooping between her eyes. From her blackened lips came still an aromatic vapour of embalming spices, and a green gold ring set with two pale, clouded rubies gleamed on her finger where she lay, dreaming eternally of things she had never known.
    Under the virgin whiteness of the new moon Septima crouched by her sister’s tomb, cooling her face against the sculptured garlands of white marble, her lips close to the aperture for receiving the funereal libations, and she poured out all her passions:
    “O my sister,” she began, “turn in your sleep and hear me! The little lamp of death’s first hours is lighted. We gave you an ampula of coloured glass, but you have let it slip through your fingers. Your necklace is broken and the golden beads are scattered around you. Nothing of ours is any longer yours, and he has you now, the hawk-headed one. O listen, my sister, you have power to carry my words. Fly to that heaven you know so well. Plead for me with Anteros. Implore the goddess Hathor. Beseech him, whose body once drifted safely on the seas to Babylon. Sister, pity a sorrow you never learned! By the seven stars of the magicians of Chaldea I entreat you. By those dark powers Carthage knows, by Tao, Abriao, Salbaal and Bathbaal hear my invocation. Make him love me! Sextilius, son of Dionysia, make him burn with love of me, Septima, daughter of our mother, Amœna... so that he shall burn in the night, so that he shall come to me by thy tomb, Phoinissa!
    “Or if that cannot be, let us both be plunged into the shadows. Let Anteros chill the breath of us if he must quench this fire Eros has kindled! Perfumed death, drink the libation of my voice.  Achrammachalala! ”
    Then the mummy of the virgin descended into the earth, teeth bared and gleaming.
    And Septima walked shamefully between the tombs of the dead until the second watch of the night. Her eyes followed the flight of the moon across the sky. Her throat felt the biting brine of the sea wind. When the first golden rays of dawn touched her she returned to Hadrumetum, her long blue veils floating behind her.
    Meanwhile Phoinissa sped down the infernal paths, but the hawk-faced one would not listen to her plea. Hathor only stretched herself in her painted case, unheeding. And Phoinissa could not find Anteros, for she had never known desire. But in her faded heart she felt that pity all the dead feel for the living. On the second night, at the hour when the departed return to cast their enchantments, her bandaged feet rustled again through the streets of Hadrumetum.
    Sextilius lay breathing the deep, regular breath of sleep, his face turned towards the paneled ceiling of the chamber. All wrapped in her odorous cloths of the tomb, dead Phoinissa sat down beside his bed. She had neither brain nor entrails, though her heart was there, where it had been replaced, dry, in her mummied breast.
    And at that moment Eros struck against Anteros, seizing the dead heart of Phoinissa, making her desire the body of Sextilius to sleep between her sister and herself in the house of death.
    Phoinissa put her lips to the boy’s mouth and the life went out of him like a burst bubble. In her sister’s cell she took Septima by the hand. And the kiss of Phoinissa and the clasp of Phoinissa killed them both, Septima and Sextilius, in the same hour.
    Such was the dark issue of the struggle between Eros and Anteros, wherefrom the infernal powers received a slave and a freeman.
    Sextilius rests in the Necropolis at Hadrumetum between Septima, the enchantress, and her sister Phoinissa. The words of Septima’s enchantment are inscribed upon a leaden plaque which the enchantress lowered into Phoinissa’s tomb through the little hole intended for libations.
     
     

LUCRETIUS
    Poet
     
    Lucretius belonged to a great family long retired from public life. Memories of his early days recall the dark porch of a house far up on a mountain, bleak atrium and silent