by Terra Lewis Windham, 10/21/2001
Lucretia knew a lot of dead people. Not very well, of course, they never spoke to her, but she knew their names and when they died and what they looked like. She had read the inscriptions on their columellae. There were busts of them in the atrium and tablinium at home at home. Most of these imagines were very accurate: the sculptures even wore the same grin or whistful expressions as the dead. Lucretia always recognized them right away. She saw most of them during the Feralia, the nine day festival of the dead. Her whole living family would go down to the necropolis along the Nucerian road and have dinner in the tomb. It was a fine tomb with an actual dining room built into it. At first it would just be her own living family and their servants in the tomb; her mother and father and grandfather began to tell stories of times past, the small room would fill with shades, each appearing as their name was mentioned. The shades never spoke and, though the adults talked about them, they never addressed any of the dead directly. It had never occurred to Lucretia to wonder why, for it was the way of things had always been. She was twelve years old and the same thing happened every time her family visited the tomb. Many of the shades were very familiar to her now. Her stately grandmother was always there, reclining next to grandfather; her aunt Iulia cradeling an unnamed baby in her arms. Lucretia had vague memories of when Iulia had been alive. She remembered seeing her aunt on the funeral litter heaped with flowers, clutching her baby in her arms just as she did still. The baby had only lived two hours before it followed its mother to the Underworld. Their ashes were contained in a cherub encrusted urn which stood in one of the niches cut into the wall of the sepulchre.
The baby was always the only child amongst the shades until Lucretia discovered the secret to inviting them. One day Lucretia had been sitting on the couch between Secunda and her great uncle Gaius when she began to think about a story she had once heard the slaves whispering about. It concerned a great aunt who had died the day of her betrothal under mysterious circumstances. As Lucretia sat wondering about this she had seen something out of the corner of her eye. She turned slightly and saw standing behind her a faint shade of a girl. She was very pretty and small. A little, jeweled dagger protruded from her chest. That was how Lucretia discovered that memory called the dead. It was best if you could say their name aloud, but thinking about them was enough. After that every time Lucretia’s family visited the tomb she made a point of reading a different inscription and “inviting” that person to supper.
This year Lucretia found an inscription that said, “Hic iacat pulchre dulcisque filia Publii Lucretii. Vix XII annos vixerat. Amata omnibus, illa capta est morte invidioso, nos orbatos miserosque relinquens. Magnos animos habuit et multam sapientiam. Vale aeternum, carissima filia. Sit tibi terra levis.” (Here lies the beautiful daughter of Publius Lucretius. She had lived scarcely twelve years. Beloved by all, she was taken by envious death, leaving us bereaved and wretched. She had great courage and much wisdom. Farewell forever, dear daughter. May the earth be light upon you.) Lucretia read the words aloud and immediately the girl’s shade stood before her, silent and still, staring blankly at nothing in particular. Lucretia suddenly felt very lonely. She wondered, as she never had before, what this really was standing before her. Was it really that other girl named Lucretia, whose ashes wre buried under this column? Was she truly there? Or was this shade just an image, like a statue or painting or relief? Slowly Lucretia reached out her hand to touch the girl’s shadowy garments, but just as she came close the shade flickered and reappeared a few feet away. “What are you?” Lucretia whispered. Her words echoed in the stony sepulchre, but there came no reply. She said it again louder.
“Who are you talking to?” Lucretia spun around and saw her brother leaning against the wall.
“She’s the daughter of Publius Lucretius,” she explained.
“Who is?” Lucretia pointed and her brother looked, not at the shadowy girl, but just beyond her to the columnella. He read the inscription. “So you’re talking to the dead are you, little sister? This stupid traditions made made you superstitious I’m afraid. Don’t let father know that I told you this, but I don’t believe that anything survives after death. I’ve decided to be an epicurean. You shouldn’t worry about all those old stories. They are nonsense.”
Lucretia was confused. “But what about when our ancestors join us at these dinner?”
Marcus laughed, “You don’t mean you think the dead are literally there? It’s symbolic, a show of respect. Don’t be an idiot,”
The world seemed to be turning upside down, A cold wave of realization and terror plunged Lucretia into darkness. She awoke outside in the sunshine with her brother leaning over her.
“You spent too long in that stale air,” he said. “Maybe father will let me take you home,” he added hopefully.
“Yes, please,” Lucretia whispered desperately, “I want to get away from here.”
Lucretia spent that evening at home in the garden. She wanted more than anything to be amongst living things. For a while her fear receded among the green, growing things in the sunshine, but it threatened to wash over her again as evening came, bringing a chill and creeping shadows. She fled into the tablinum where her brother sat reading a Greek scroll.
She stood next to him for a while waiting to be noticed. Finally he said, “What do you want” He didn’t look at her, and his voice was sharp with irritation.
“I want you to tell me more things,” she said. “So, just as you and your friends stand around Apollodorus in the palaestra waiting for him to speak, so I stand here waiting for you to tell me more.”
Marcus looked up at her amused. “You would make a good politician if you were a man,” he said. “You know how to flatter. So, since I am your rhetor, what do you want to learn from me?”
“If no one sees the shades of the dead then why are there so many stories about them? Homer tells about people meeting shades, doesn’t he?”
“And as Plato points out to us, Homer is full of lies,” said Marcus.
“What about Furies, who comes to father’s dinner parties. He often tells stories about meeting the dead.”
“Furies is nothing but a parasite, who tells amusing stories so he can fill his belly with other people’s food. The only people who see shades are either crazy or drunk,”
Lucretia considered this a moment. “How much wine does it take to get drunk?” she asked.
Marcus grinned, “Now what makes you think I’d know about that?”
“No,” thought Lucretia. “I didn’t have any wine this morning before I saw that girl. I must be crazy, then,” she concluded. “Or maybe Marcus just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” This was her worst realization yet. If Marcus was wrong, then Apollodorus, a Greek, must be wrong, too. She had lived all her life with the comfortable assumption that her father knew everything about this world, and the Greeks knew everything about the other one. That seemed to be the way it worked. But now it appeared she knew something that they didn’t. And she didn’t understand anything!
“No one knows anything,” she thought. It was stunning and terrifying.
She heard Marcus speaking to her, from somewhere far away it seemed — from that far away place where the world makes sense.
“Are you all right, Lucretia? You aren’t going to faint again are you?” He led her to a couch and called to a slave to bring her some water.
“I’m okay. Just stay here with me please, and talk to me some more. Read some Greek to me — the part in Homer when Odysseus goes to the Underworld.” She kept her voice just weak enough to keep him feeling sorry for her. It worked. He brough the scroll and began reading to her in Greek just the way she liked. Reading the beautiful Greek words first, and then translating into Latin for her. He didn’t know that she had learned quite a bit of Greek this way, and understood some of what he said without a translation.
She listened closely as her read and thought to herself, “I must be somehow more clever that Odysseus, for he had to travel far to see the dead, while I only go to the necropolis just outside the city walls.” She was beginning to recover from the initial shock and to think of her unusual sight as a singular talent. Like the other Lucretia she had seen in the morning, she too had magnos animos, high spirits, great courage, an open heart. She listened closely to what Homer said about the dead, She was beginning to think that the poets were more trustworthy than the philosophers.
[Marcus reads aloud in Greek, about Odysseus using animal blood to entice the shades of the dead to appear.]
Lucretia sat up suddenly, “Blood,” she exclaimed. “They can talk to you if you give them blood!” Marcus was confused and somewhat startled. Lucretia thought fast. “I understood that,” she explained. “I think I’m beginning to understand some Greek.”
“Well, that is something to be excited about,” said Marcus. “What a clever sister I have.”
“I have had a great teacher,” said Lucretia. “Thank you, brother. I think I will go to bed now. I have had an eventful day.”
********
Lucretia lay awake turning over her plan in her mind. She had decided to look for some answers herself. “I may be able to find out things that few other people can,” she thought. “I ought to try.” But where to get the blood? Odysseus used sheep’s blood. Lucretia didn’t feel up to slaughtering a sheep. They were big and made a lot of noise. She wondered if dormice would do. There was a wicker cage full of them down in the kitchen where they were being fattened in preparation for her father’s next dinner party. She waited until the house was quiet, then she crept through the atrium and along the peristylium to the kitchen, where the cook was snoring on a table. Dormice are not actually mice but nocturnal squirrels, so Lucretia heard them stirring restlessly in their cage. The one she pulled out resisted only slightly, having thoroughly glutted itself. She found a bowl and knife, then carried her victim out to the garden to perform the sacrifice. She hesitated for a moment held back by a pang of guilt. Surely ony of the slave boys would be beaten when the dormouse turned up missing. Besides, it was a cute little thing. Lucretia had eaten many of the creatures before — stuffed dormouse was one of her favorite dishes — but she had never had to kill one herself. Her mind sought some way to steel her resolve. It had already unwittingly traversed much of the history of philosophy that day, and it finally made its way to Nietzsche.
“I;m not like the other people,” Lucretia thought. “I am special. I have to do certain things that other people shouldn’t.” In the following momentary rush of uplift Lucretia lifted her knife and plunged it into the warm squirming body of the dormouse. She caught as much blood as she could in the bowl and washed her hands in the garden fountain. She immediately started feeling guilty again about the likely fate of the kitchen boys. “I’ll put the body next to one of the cats,” she decided. “That’s the best I can do.” She reflected that a sense of purpose does little to keep the Furies at bay. “Like Orestes,” she thought. “Apollo himself told Orestes to avenge his father by killing his mother Clytemnestra, but he still felt guilty about it and took responsibility for what he had done.” Having moved on to Sartre, Lucretia proceeded to frame the cats, and start off on her mission. She had never left her home after dark before. She ought to have been terrified, but there is something about going off to meet with ghosts that makes cutthroats and bandits seem somewhat ho-hum. This is strange, really. Cutthroats are really more likely to kill you. But what Lucretia was facing was greater than the specific fear of a violent death. She was going to encounter Fear itself, pure and stark. Carefully holding the bowl of blood and an unlit lantern beneath her cloak, Lucretia made her way along the Via Nuceria, avoiding criminals and watchmen alike, out of the city to the Necropolis. Homeless people dwelt amongst and sometimes in the tombs that lined the road. Lucretia knew that they were often insane and would usually cut your throat for a denarius. She kept to the shadows avoiding any sound or flicker of a campfire. Finally she made it to the family sepulchre of the Lucretii. She heard noises in the dining room on the side, but the crypt itself was unoccupied. Lucretia set the bowl of blood on the ground and lit the lantern illuminating the columellae, urns and sarcophagi that surrounded her. She recalled what Odysseus had said when surrounded by the dead, “green fear seized me.” Lucretia knew exactly how he felt. “But he didn’t run away,” she reminded herself. She decided to speak to the other Lucretia again. It seemed less scary to talk to another young girl. She read the epitaph again, and again the smoky image of a girl appeared. This time she did not stare blankly at the wall, however. She made straight for the blood. As soo as she had drained the bowl she looked straight at Lucretia.
“Um,” said Lucretia. The standard greeting of “be well” seemed inappropriate for someone who was dead. She decided to try “pax sit tecum” (peace be with you) instead. The shade girl looked like someone who is waking up in a strange bed after a night of odd dreams. “Who are you?”
“My name is Lucretia, too. I am your brother’s great granddaughter, I think.”
“My brother is married?”
“Well, yes, He was, I mean.” Lucretia glanced over at the image of her great grandfather engraved on the shield which marked where his ashes lay. The shade girl followed her gaze.
“Oh,” she said. There was an uncomfortable silence.
Lucretia bit her bottom lip calling up all her courage. “What is it like to be dead?” she blurted out.
“I didn’t know what it was like when I was, but now that I can think about it I know that it is cold and lonely and dark.”
“Is that all?”
“So far. It seems like there will be something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about being dead. Please don’t do this to me again.” The shade began to fade and finally disappeared.
“I certainly won’t,” thought Lucretia. “She was entirely unhelpful. She has no idea what’s coming and doesn’t want to think about it — no better than a living person really.”
Lucretia looked around, wondering who could tell her something. “I wonder where the stabbed girl is?” Lucretia wondered. Immediately the faint shade appeared before her. It moved towards the back of the tomb to where a fine sarcophagus stood. It almost obscured a niche behind it where Lucretia could just see the top of something. With great effort she moved the sarcophagus far enough to reach in and pull out the object, which turned out to be a small urn. “Your cinerary urn,” Lucretia whispered to the ghost. The urn was plain bearing only the inscription: “Filiae Gaii Lucretii.” Inside were ashes, a golden ring, and the solid counterpart of the phantom dagger in the shades chest. “She might be able to tell me something,” Lucretia thought. “If only I had more blood…” Her eyes fell on the dagger. She acted before she had time to fear, making a small vut in her wrist. Immediately she felt icy fingers grip her arm. She began to feel weak and tore herself away, falling against the opposite wall of the tomb. The ghost began to move towards her gazing at her wound with hungry eyes. Lucretia quickly tore off the hem of her garment and bound her wrist. The ghost stopped. “We have something in common,” it said. “We are not afraid to harm ourselves if we feel it is necessary, like our great ancestress who killed herself to conquer shame.”
“Why did you do it?”
The shade looked over at the dagger laying now on the ground, stained with Lucretia’s blood. “I don’t think I wanted to die, so much as to make them all sorry. I wanted my father to have spent all that money on the stupid wedding for nothing. I wanted to put them out, to cause a stir, to have some control for once.”
“Are you glad you did it?”
“No. I want to be alive.” The ghost looked greedily at the red staining linen around Lucretia’s wrist. It began to move towards her again. Lucretia ran; she stumbled over a drunk sleeping on the road and ran right past two city guards, but she never looked back. She didn’t stop until she was home in her own bed. “Never again,” was her only thought. She wanted no more dealings with the dead. Life seldom heeds our wishes, though. This first time would not be the last.
“Much is expected of those to whom much is given,” they say, and this is true, even if you are given something you don’t want.
