When death closes my eyes at last, then, hear what shall serve as my funeral. No long spread-out procession of images for me: no empty trumpeting to wail my end. Don’t smooth out a bed there on ivory posts for me then, no corpse on a couch, pressing down mounds of Attalic cloth of gold. Forget the line of perfumed dishes for me: include the mundane offerings of a plebeian rite.
Enough for me, and more than enough: if three little books form my procession, those I take as my greatest gift to Persephone.
And surely you’ll follow: scratches on your bare breasts; and never weary of calling my name; and place the last kiss on my frozen lips, when the onyx jar with its Syrian nard is granted. Then when the fire beneath turns me to ashes let the little jar receive my shade, and over my poor tomb add a laurel, to cast shadow on the place where my flame died, and let there be this solitary 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 approach 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 never wholly ignorant of truth.
How I wish any one of the Three Sisters had ordered me to give up my breath at the first, and in my cradle. Why is the spirit preserved, yet, for an unknown hour? Nestor’s pyre was seen after three 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, buried, or cried out: ‘O Death, why come so slowly?’
Yet you, when a friend is lost some time, will weep: it’s a law of the gods, this care for past men. Witness the fierce wild boar that once felled white Adonis, as he hunted along the ridge of Ida; there in the marsh, they say, his beauty lay, and you, Venus, ran there with out-spread hair. Yet you’ll call back my voiceless shade in vain, Cynthia: what power will my poor bones have to speak?
—Sextus Propertius
Propertius 2.13, translated by A. S. Kline
