Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/117
SILVAE, II. i. 17–43
friend’s entreaty? Now shall I sing? Lo! even in my mouth my song is choked with sobs, the words are blotted by falling tears. For I myself led forth with thee the solemn line of sable mourners and the boyish bier, a crime for the City to behold; I saw the cruel heaps of incense doomed to destruction and the soul wailing above its own corpse[1]; thee too, as thou didst break through sobbing fathers and mothers that would stay thee, and didst embrace the pyre and prepare to swallow the flames, could I scarce restrain, thy comrade in like case, and offended by restraining. And now, alas! a bard of evil, my fillets unbound and the glory departed from my brow, I reverse my lyre and beat my breast with thee; but be assuaged, I pray thee, and suffer me as partner of thy mourning, if I have so deserved and shared thy sorrow. In the very hour of calamity fathers have heard my voice; by the very pyre have I sung solace to prostrate mothers and loving children—ay, to myself also, when swooning beside kindred flames I mourned, O Nature, what a father! Nor do I sternly forbid thee to lament; nay, let us mingle our tears and weep together.
Long have I sought distractedly, beloved boy, a worthy approach and prelude to thy praises. Here thy boyhood, standing on life’s threshold, calls me, there thy beauty, there a modesty beyond thy years and honour and probity too ripe for thy tender age. Ah! where is that fair complexion flushed by the glow of health, those starry orbs whose glance is radiant with heaven’s light, where the chaste com-
- ↑ The souls of those untimely dead were supposed to bewail their lot, cf. Virg. Aen. vi. 427 “infantumque animae flentes.” For souls hovering about the funeral pyre cf. Theb. v. 163, xii. 55: they are often so represented on Attic vases.
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