Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/175

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SILVAE, II. vii. 110–135

earth and laughest at sepulechres; or whether on Elysian shores that thy deserts have won thee thou hast gained the blissful bower of peace, where the heroes of Pharsalus forgather, and as thy noble lay resounds a Pompey or a Cato bears thee company; or whether a mighty shade, inviolable and proud, thou visitest Tartarus and hearest afar the stripes of the guilty and beholdest Nero pale at the sight of his mother’s torch:[1] be present in shining splendour, and, since Polla calls thee, gain one day, I beg, from the gods of the silent world:[2] open is that door to husbands returning to their brides. She clothes thee not in the shape of an unreal deity, in the wantonness of lying revels, but worships thy very self and has communion with thee in her being’s inmost depths, and wins but empty solace from thy countenance which carved to thy likeness in gold shines above her couch and broods over her untroubled slumbers. Depart far hence, ye Deaths: here is the well-spring of sustaining life.[3] Let stubborn sorrow have an end, and tears of happiness now fall, and the mourning of solemn grief be turned to adoration.

  1. ↑ Nero had his mother Agrippina put to death.
  2. ↑ Statius has in mind here the story of Laodamia and Protesilaus, who was allowed to return to his wife for one day. Laodamia venerated her husband in the form of Bacchus, and seems to have feigned herself a votary of that god, to avoid a second marriage. Polla’s reverence for her husband does not need such aid. It was a contemporary custom: to honour the dead in the form of deities, cf. Silvae, v. 1. 231, Suet. Cal. 7 of the young son of Germanicus ia Agrippina, who died in early boyhood; Livia set up an image of him in the character of Cupid, cf. also Apuleius, Met. viii. 7.
  3. ↑ The Genius or vital principle, incarnate in the head of the family while he is alive, still abides for Polla in the spirit of the departed, with whom she enjoys a mystic communion.

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