flutes were shrill by the doorway, and the bridal torches were lit,
when Death entered, masked as a reveller, and the hymeneal song
suddenly changed into the death-dirge; and while the kinsfolk were
busy about another fire, Persephone lighted her own torch out of their
hands; with hardly an outward change--as in a processional relief on a
sarcophagus--the bridal train turns and moves to the grave with
funeral lights flaring through the darkness and sobbing voices and
wailing flutes.[18]

As tender in their fancy and with a higher note of sincerity in their
grief are the epitaphs on young mothers, dead in childbirth: Athenais
of Lesbos, the swift-footed, whose cry Artemis was too busy with her
woodland hounds to hear; Polyxena, wife of Archelus, not a year's wife
nor a month's mother, so short was all her time; Prexo, wife of
Theocritus, who takes her baby with her, content with this, and gives
blessings from her grave to all who will pray with her that the boy
she leaves on earth may live into a great old age.[19] Here tenderness
outweighs sorrow; in others a bitterer grief is uttered, the grief of
one left alone, forsaken and cast off by all that had made life sweet;
where the mother left childless among women has but the one prayer
left, that she too may quickly go whence she came, or where the morbid
imagination of a mourner over many deaths invents new forms of self-
torture in the idea that her very touch is mortal to those whom she
loves, and that fate has made her the instrument of its cruelty; or
where Theano, dying alone in Phocaea, sends a last cry over the great
gulfs of sea that divide her from her husband, and goes down into the
night with the one passionate wish that she might have but died with
her hand clasped in his hand.[20]

Into darkness, into silence: the magnificent brilliance of that