Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/119

Rh Delia, and Delia only. Out of it we glean not a few notices of Roman customs—e.g., the resort of Delia to the luck of the dice-box to ascertain, before he started, the prospects her lover had of safe return, in spite of the favourable nature of which she had wept oft and ominously; the misgivings of the poet himself, based on ill omens; and the procrastination of his voyage, of which he laid the fault on the Jew's Sabbath being ill-starred for beginning a journey. Delia too consulted, we find, the fashionable goddess of Roman ladies of her period, Egyptian Isis, and clanged the brazen sistra, wherewith she was worshipped, with as much devout enthusiasm as the best of them. The poet assures himself that if her vows are heard, and the goddess answers her prayers, homage, and offerings, he shall rise from this bed of sickness, and, better than all, eschew war and its fatigues and alarms for the rest of his life-span. These, he suggests, are the indirect cause of his present serious illness; and some fine couplets contrast, in Tibullus's own view, the reigns of peaceful Saturn and his war-and-death-loving son. In a strain of mild depression he goes on to write his own epitaph as prefatory to an unfavourable termination to his malady; but it is amusing to note that he counts upon Elysium in the after-world on the score of his true love and stanchness in the present life:—