Cornelia was thirsty for the news from the world without. Her keepers were dumb to the most harmless inquiry. Her mother wrote more of the latest fashions than of the progress of events in the Senate and in the field; besides, Claudia—as Cornelia knew very well—never took her political notions from any one except her brother-in-law, and Cornelia noted her mother's rambling observations accordingly. Lentulus studiously refrained from adverting to politics in letters to his niece. Ahenobarbus wrote of wars and rumours of wars, but in a tone of such partisan venom and overreaching sarcasm touching all things Cæsarian, that Cornelia did not need her prejudices to tell her that Lucius was simply abusing her credulity.
Then at last all the letters stopped. Phaon had no explanation to give. He would not suffer his evil, smiling lips to tell the story of the flight of the oligarchs from Rome, and confess that Lentulus and Claudia were no farther off than Capua. The consul had ordered that his niece should not know of their proximity and its cause,—lest she pluck up hope, and all his coercion be wasted. So there was silence, and that was all. Even her mother did not write to her. Cornelia grew very, very lonely and desolate—more than words may tell. She had one consolation—Drusus was not dead, or she would have been informed of it! Proof that her lover was dead would have been a most delightful weapon in Lentulus's hands, too delightful to fail to use instantly. And so Cornelia hoped on.
She tried again to build a world of fantasy, of unreal delight, around her; to close her eyes, and wander abroad with her imagination. She roamed in reverie over land and sea, from Atlantis to Serica; and dwelt in the dull country of the Hyperboreans and saw the gold-sanded plains of the Ethiops. She took her Homer and fared with Odysseus into Polyphemus's cave, and out to the land of Circe; and heard the Sirens sing, and abode on Calypso's fairy isle; and saw the maiden Nausicaä 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 Æschylus 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 Cnæus Nævius, 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 Æson 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]
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 quite impotent to thwart his ends. Cornelia devoted much of her time to teaching the bright little Greek. The latter picked up the scraps of knowledge with a surprising readiness, and would set Cornelia a-laughing by her naïveté, when she soberly intermixed her speech with bits of grave poetical and philosophical lore, uttered more for sake of sound than sense.
As a matter of fact, however, Cornelia was fast approaching a point where her position would have been intolerable. She did not even have the stimulus that comes from an active aggressive persecution. Drusus was in the world of action, not forgetful of his sweetheart, yet not pent up to solitary broodings on his ill-fated passion. Cornelia was thrust back upon herself, and found herself a very discontented, wretched, love-lorn, and withal—despite her polite learning—ignorant young woman, who took pleasure neither in sunlight nor starlight; who saw a mocking defiance in every dimple of the sapphire bay; who saw in each new day merely a new period for impotent discontent. Something had to determine her situation, or perhaps she would not indeed have bowed her head to her uncle's will; but she certainly would have been driven to resolutions of the most desperate nature.