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Book II.13A:17-58

HIS WISHES FOR HIS FUNERAL

Propertius

When death closes my eyes at last, then, listen what will serve as my funeral. No long spread-out procession of images for me, then: no empty trumpeting wailing my end. Don’t smooth out a bed, there, on ivory posts for me, no corpse on a couch, pressing down mounds of Attalic cloth of gold. Leave out the line of perfumed dishes for me: put in the limited offerings of a plebeian rite.

Enough for me, and more than enough: if three little books form my procession that I take as my greatest gift to Persephone.

And surely you’ll follow: scratches on your bare breasts; never wearying of calling my name; and place the last kiss on my frozen lips, when the onyx jar with its Syrian nard is granted me. Then when the fire beneath turns me to ashes, let the little jar receive my shade, and over my poor tomb add in a laurel, to cast a shade on the place where my flame went out, and let there be this couplet:

HE WHO LIES HERE, NOW, BUT COARSE DUST,
ONCE SERVED ONE LOVE, AND ONE ALONE.

So the fame of my tomb will be no less than that of the grave of blood, of Achilles the hero. And when you too come near your end, remember: come, grey-haired, this way, to the stones of memory. For the rest, beware of being unkind to my tomb: earth is aware and is not wholly ignorant of the truth.

How I wish that any one of the Three Sisters had ordered me to give up my breath at the first, in my cradle. Why is the spirit preserved, still, for an unknown hour? Nestor’s pyre was seen after three past generations: yet, if some Phrygian soldier, from the walls of Troy, had cut short his fated old age, he would have never have seen his son, Antilochus, interred, or cried out: ‘O Death, why do you come so slowly to me?’

Yet you, when a friend is lost, will sometimes weep: it’s a law of the gods, to care for past men. Witness the fierce wild boar that once struck down white Adonis, hunting the ridge of Ida; there in the marsh, they say, his beauty lay, and you, Venus, ran there with out-spread hair. But you will call back my voiceless shade in vain, Cynthia: what power will my poor bones have to speak?