Imaginary LIves Read Online Free PDF Page B

at the striped backs of the wild pigs forever nosing the earth. Emerging from a thick underbrush he came suddenly into that serene forest temple, then his eyes plunged up to the pool of blue sky and he rested.
    From that point he regarded the swarming immensity of the universe: all the stones, all the plants, the trees, the animals and the men; with their colours, their passions, their instruments and the histories of these many things, their births, their desires, their deaths. In the exact centre of all that inevitable and necessary death he saw clearly the death of his beautiful African and he wept.
    Tears, he knew, came from the action of certain small glands under the eyelids, agitated by a procession of atoms leaving the heart, while the heart itself had been struck by a series of coloured images detaching themselves from the surface of a woman’s body. He knew that love was caused by a flood of atoms desiring to join themselves to other atoms. The sadness of death he knew to be the unsoundest of all earthly delusions, for the dead feel neither sorrow nor suffering, while he who mourns, mourns but his own end. He knew, too, that we are left no shade or ghost to shed tears on those bodies of ours stretched out at our ghostly feet. Knowing as he did, the empty vanity of sorrow, love and death compared to those calm spaces in which we exist, he continued to weep and to desire love and fear death.
    That is why he returned to the bleak house of his ancestors, seeking the beautiful African, whom he found brewing something in a caldron over a fire.
    She, too, had been thinking, though her thoughts were as mysterious as the source of her smiles.
    Lucretius looked down into the bubbling brew as it cleared slowly, like a green and stormy sky. The woman trailed one finger, gently over her forehead when she handed him the cup. Lucretius drank and his reason left him as quickly, so that he forgot all the Greek words from the papyrus scroll. Then, being mad, he learned real love for the first time, and in the night, being poisoned, he learned death.
     
     

CLODIA
    Impure Woman
     
    She was a daughter of Appius Claudius Pulcher, consul. When only a few years old she was distinguished among her brothers and sisters by the burning brightness of her large eyes. Tertia, her older sister, married early, and the youngest submitted herself entirely to Clodia’s caprices. Her brothers, Appius and Caius, were already greedy for leather frogs, nutshell chariots and other toys; later they grew avaricious for silver sesterces. Pretty and feminine, Clodius became the companion of his sisters, and Clodia persuaded him to don a long sleeved tunic, a little cap with golden strings, and a supple girdle. Then they tossed a flame-coloured veil over him, carrying him away to their own chamber, where he remained with all three. Clodia was his favourite, but he took also the innocence of Tertia and of the youngest girl.
    When Clodia was eighteen her father died. Appius, her brother, then ruled the domain from their palace on Mount Palatin, while Caius prepared for public life. Delicate and beardless, Clodius remained with his sisters, who were both called Clodia. They took him secretly to the baths with them, buying the silence of the slave attendants for a few gold pieces. Clodius was treated like his sisters in their presence. Such were their pleasures before marriage. The youngest married Lucullus, who took her to Asia where he was fighting in the wars against Mithridates. For husband, Clodia chose her cousin Metellus, a dull, honest man. In those spendthrift times he preserved a spirit frugal and dour, and Clodia could not abide his simple rusticity. She was just beginning to dream of new things for her dear Clodius when Cæsar’s disapproval came to dampen their pleasure, for Clodia guessed he might compel them to separate. To evade this she made Pomponius Atticus bring Cicero to see her. Hers was a tittering, flirtatious circle. Around her were