So ghosts really do exist! Death isn’t the end of it all, it seems some pallid shadow escapes, defeating the pyre –
for I just saw Cynthia, buried in a quiet spot far from the noisy highway,
I saw Cynthia leaning over me.
I’d only now returned from the funeral and sadly had the whole cold bed to myself
(unhappy king of a frigid new domain),
an uneasy sleep of erotic dreams descended on me tentatively.
Her hair was the same as when they carried her away,
her eyes too, but the fire’d scorched her dress on one side.
The heat had dulled and cracked the beryl she always wore on her finger.
Her lips had shriveled back a little from the touch of Lethe water,
but awareness still breathed through her and sent forth a voice
— though the fingers of her flame-desiccated hand made a grating sound.
“You bastard! not much hope you’ll be nicer to another girl —
look at you, fast asleep and me just this minute buried!
Have you already forgotten our stolen gaudy nights in the after-hours taverns?
My windowsill worn smooth from all the times I lowered myself by a rope, hand over hand, into your arms?
How many times did we worship Venus at the crossroads, body hot against body, paving-stones warming under your back?
But the loyalty was somewhat less than a tacit understanding — or maybe the south wind, that neither hears nor cares, just blew your lies away!
No one screamed my name when my eyes began to close —
If you’d called out to me, I might have wheedled at least one further day of life —
and no one hired a watcher to sit by my corpse all night with a rattle to scare off soul-stealing demons.
That cheap undertaker propped my head up with a piece of broken roof-tile that made a gash in my scalp.
But the worst is: no one saw you doubled over with grief, or soaking your toga with hot real tears.
If it was too much trouble to follow the mourners beyond the gate, you could at least have ordered them to slow down a bit!
Couldn’t you have even expressed the conventional wish that the winds should fan my pyre
to release my soul quickly from its corpse?
Ingrate! and why didn’t you sprinkle some incense on my bier to sweeten the flames?
Would it have strained your finances to pluck a few wild hyacinths and toss them on?
To shatter a jar of common wine at the graveside to honor my demise?
I want to sear that slave Lygdamus, heat a knife and torture out the truth—
when he gave me that cup of greenish wine I should have known it was a trap!
Or maybe it was the housekeeper, Nomas? Say she already ditched the secret fatal flavoring she slipped in my food,
a heated shard of crockery sizzling into her skin will make her damn her own guilty hands!
She used to be displayed in front of a brothel, and not that long ago, for nights of pleasure, cheap.
But now she’ll scarcely honor the humble ground with the trailing golden hem of her gown!
Yet for all that, she still makes sure, as she hands out unfair wool-baskets for the evening’s spinning,
that an extra-heavy one goes to any maid so loose-tongued as to comment on how pretty I was.
And she made sure old Petala felt her wrists roped tight to the filthy whipping post
for hanging wreaths on my gravestone, and Lalaga
was tied upright, her long braids bound to an overhanging beam,
and beaten — because she asked a favor with the phrase Cynthia always used to let me. . .
And this same Nomas, as soon as I was dead, you allowed to take that gold portrait bust of me
and use it for her dowry, why you practically melted it down for money in the flames of my pyre!
But, much as you deserve it, Propertius, I’m not going to keep harassing you.
Long was my rule in the realm of your poems.
I swear by the song the Fates chant, which brings events into irrevocable being
— so may the three-headed hell-hound bark softly in my hearing —
I was always true to you. If I lie may vipers slip
hissing through my tomb and nap curled around my bones!
The proof is: there are two abodes assigned along that nasty river;
large as the crowd of shadows is, they’ve only two possible directions to row.
This way the wave leads to the husband-killing adulteress Clytemnestra, and the Cretan queen Pasiphae, who hid naked
in a hollow wooden cow to see what it was like to get crammed by a bull;
but to where I am, the other half flies in a yacht festooned with flowers,
here holy breezes stroke the roses of Elysium
in a harmony of harps, to the round bronze cymbals
of Cybele, among the turbaned Lydian mystics
plucking lyres as they dance: these are the initiates.
There’s Andromeda, who almost ended up fish-bait; Hypermestra, who alone out of fifty sisters,
didn’t gut her husband on the group-wedding night
(she actually did love the man she’d just married).
These heroic blameless wives don’t mind retelling the famous moments of their lives.
Andromeda describes how, served up for the sea monster, her wrists were bruised by chains her own mother’d locked on,
it felt cold, that wet rock, beneath her innocent fingers.
Hypermestra modestly asserts it was only lack of courage
that kept her from daring to go along with her sisters in their supposedly noble deed.
Thus we continue, though dead, to hallow with our tears the loves we knew in life.
And me, I keep quiet — about all your vicious betrayals!
Now I’m giving you some instructions, that is, if you still feel anything for me,
if that bitch Choris’ love-potions don’t control you utterly:
see to it my nurse Parthenia, shaky with age, doesn’t want for anything
(she never made you bribe her to get in to see me, though she surely had the chance),
and my dear maid Felicity — my “perfect felicity” — free her. I don’t want her handing
another mistress the mirror. And any of your poems
that gained an easy dactyl from my name – burn them, a sacrifice to me!
Why should you get a free ride from my reputation?
And pull that ivy off my tomb! I don’t want its twisty tendrils eating into my tender skeleton as it swells its berries. Ah, my sweet grave,
where the orchard-bordered river Anio stretches sleepily out among the fields
in a landscape sacred to Hercules, through whose magic power the air’s so pure that ivory never discolors there.
I want you to honor me by setting up a column, inscribing ’round its middle these brief but well-earned verses –
and carve them large enough so a messenger running from Rome can read them as he gallops past:
Here, in the soil of Tivoli, lies magnificent Cynthia,
adding, River Anio, new glory to your banks.
Don’t dismiss this dream that comes through the gate of holy visions!
Such dreams are truthful, sacred and weighty!
By night we ghosts are wafted off to wander, night frees the shut-in shades, and once the bolt shoots back
even Cerberus roves. But the eternal law of daylight commands us return to Lethe lagoon.
A careful Charon counts the whole boatload, back we go.
Other women may have you now, but soon you’re mine alone.
Sexual craving, an immortal force, shall make our bodies jog together even after death
in an awful and inanimate copulation
till the dry grind of bone on bone at last confounds us into one common heap of dust.”
When she’d run through every complaint in this indictment,
she vanished and my arms hugged nothingness.
This excerpt is from Brumby’s book Devil Girls of Ancient Rome, available from our bookstore here.