To join mine own, of whom the greater part
Among the dead doth Persephassa[1] hold;
And I, of all the last and saddest, wend
My way below, life's little span unfilled."—(P.)
And then, as Socrates, her antitype, tries to console himself and his friends "with the thought that if death he not annihilation or a dreamless sleep, he may pace Elysian fields, and converse with the spirits of the good and wise; so the maiden dwells upon the hope that in death she too may not be divided from those who were nearest and dearest to her on earth—that she may meet her father and her mother, and the brother for whom she has sacrificed everything. But then again there swells up in her heart the remembrance of the pleasant life she is about to leave:—
"Cut off from marriage-bed and marriage-song,
Untasting wife's true joy or mother's bliss,
Bereaved of friends, in utter misery,
Alive I tread the chambers of the dead.
What law of heaven have I transgressed against?
What use for me, ill-starred one, still to look
To any god for succour, or to call
On any friend for aid? For holiest deed
I bear the charge of rank unholiness.
If acts like these the gods on high approve,
We, taught by pain, shall see that we have sinned;
But if these sin [looking at Creon], I pray they suffer not
Worse evils than the wrongs they do to me."—(P.)
And then she passes from the scene. We may pity her—indeed who could not?—but we can hardly realise the extent of her self-sacrifice. Like the Decii or
- ↑ The Greek form of "Proserpine."
