, and out to the land of Circe; and heard the Sirens
sing, and abode on Calypso's fairy isle; and saw the maiden Nausicaa
and her maids at the ball-play on the marge of the stream. But it was
sorry work; for ever and again the dream-woven mist would break, and
the present--stern, unchanging, joyless--she would see, and that only.

Cornelia was thrown more and more back on her books. In fact, had she
been deprived of that diversion, she must have succumbed in sheer
wretchedness; but Phaon, for all his crafty guile, did not realize
that a roll of AEschylus did almost as much to undo his jailer's work
as a traitor among his underlings.

The library was a capacious, well-lighted room, prettily frescoed, and
provided with comfortably upholstered couches. In the niches were a
few choice busts: a Sophocles, a Xenophon, an Ennius, and one or two
others. Around the room in wooden presses were the rolled volumes on
Egyptian papyrus, each labelled with author and title in bright red
marked on the tablet attached to the cylinder of the roll. Here were
the poets and historians of Hellas; the works of Plato, Aristotle,
Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius and the later Greek philosophers.
Here, too, were books which the Greek-hating young lady loved best of
all--the rough metres of Livius Andronicus and Cnaeus Naevius, whose
uncouth lines of the old Saturnian verse breathed of the hale, hearty,
uncultured, uncorrupted life of the period of the First Punic War.
Beside them were the other great Latinists: Ennius, Plautus, Terence,
and furthermore, Pacuvius and Cato Major, Lucilius, the memoirs of
Sulla, the orations of Antonius "the orator" and Gracchus, and the
histories of Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antias.

The library became virtually Cornelia's prison. She read tragedy,
comedy, history, philosophy,--anything to drive from her breast her
arch enemy, thought. But if, for example, she turned to Apollonius
Rhodius and read--

"Amidst them all, the son of AEson chief
Shone forth divinely in his comeliness,
And graces of his form. On him the maid
Looked still askance, and gazed him o'er;"[163]

[163] Elton, translator.

straightway she herself became Medea, Jason took on the form of
Drusus, and she would read no more; "while," as the next line of the
learned poet had it, "grief consumed her heart."

Only one other recreation was left her. Artemisia had not been taken
away by Phaon, who decided that the girl was qui