DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53553#0325
291
escaped the fury of the overwhelming mountain, you will
have perceived above our forum, I erected at my own ex-
pence to Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris, great and good.
The terror and disgust which the tenets of my cousin had
created in my mind at the idea of animal corruption, toge-
ther with other secret motives, which my oath forbids di-
vulging, suggested to my thoughts the possibility of my pre-
servation after death, by means of extreme cold, without
the process of embalming, an art totally and lamentably
neglected in this country. With this view I built the vault
and sarcophagus from which you have extricated me, and
filled it with ice purposely sent for from Mount /Etna. There
I had ordered my corpse to be deposited after my decease,
and a plain inscription, which perhaps you may have noticed
over the low entrance, was simply to record my name and my
age. Alas ! I little thought, when the statuary fixed the mar-
ble in my presence, that six weeks afterwards that chamber
would serve to bury me alive: but so it was. On the 9th of the
kalends of September *, a company of Greek players, who had
recently arrived from Syracuse, were to perform, for the first
time, Sophocles’ tragedy of (Edipus. A fit of the gout con-
fined me to my room; Plotiila, my dear wife, went to the
house of Accia Hispulla to meet some female friends to go
to the play together. She had not been gone a quarter of
an hour, when, as I lay reading on my couch, I heard a hol-
low rumbling, which 1 took for a peal of thunder, although
in sound it was infinitely more violent, and although the se-
renity of the sky had not previously been obscured by one
single cloud. On limping to the window, I beheld a dense
column, of smoke as it appeared, rise perpendicularly from
Mount Vesuvius, its top expanding on all sides of the co-
lumn like the head of a mushroom, or a pine-tree. I had no
* 23d August.
p p 2 time
escaped the fury of the overwhelming mountain, you will
have perceived above our forum, I erected at my own ex-
pence to Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris, great and good.
The terror and disgust which the tenets of my cousin had
created in my mind at the idea of animal corruption, toge-
ther with other secret motives, which my oath forbids di-
vulging, suggested to my thoughts the possibility of my pre-
servation after death, by means of extreme cold, without
the process of embalming, an art totally and lamentably
neglected in this country. With this view I built the vault
and sarcophagus from which you have extricated me, and
filled it with ice purposely sent for from Mount /Etna. There
I had ordered my corpse to be deposited after my decease,
and a plain inscription, which perhaps you may have noticed
over the low entrance, was simply to record my name and my
age. Alas ! I little thought, when the statuary fixed the mar-
ble in my presence, that six weeks afterwards that chamber
would serve to bury me alive: but so it was. On the 9th of the
kalends of September *, a company of Greek players, who had
recently arrived from Syracuse, were to perform, for the first
time, Sophocles’ tragedy of (Edipus. A fit of the gout con-
fined me to my room; Plotiila, my dear wife, went to the
house of Accia Hispulla to meet some female friends to go
to the play together. She had not been gone a quarter of
an hour, when, as I lay reading on my couch, I heard a hol-
low rumbling, which 1 took for a peal of thunder, although
in sound it was infinitely more violent, and although the se-
renity of the sky had not previously been obscured by one
single cloud. On limping to the window, I beheld a dense
column, of smoke as it appeared, rise perpendicularly from
Mount Vesuvius, its top expanding on all sides of the co-
lumn like the head of a mushroom, or a pine-tree. I had no
* 23d August.
p p 2 time