The Bride of Corinth

the end stanzas of Goethe's "Bride of Corinth" --1797

"But from out my coffin's prison-bounds

By a wond'rous fate I'm forced to rove,

While the blessings and the chaunting sounds

That your priests delight in, useless prove.

Water, salt, are vain

Fervent youth to chain,

Ah, e'en Earth can never cool down love!

"When that infant vow of love was spoken,

Venus' radiant temple smiled on both.

Mother! thou that promise since hast broken,

Fetter'd by a strange, deceitful oath.

Gods, though, hearken ne'er,

Should a mother swear

To deny her daughter's plighted troth.

From my grave to wander I am forc'd,

Still to seek The Good's long-sever'd link,

Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,

And the life-blood of his heart to drink;

When his race is run,

I must hasten on,

And the young must 'neath my vengeance sink,

"Beauteous youth! no longer mayst thou live;

Here must shrivel up thy form so fair;

Did not I to thee a token give,

Taking in return this lock of hair?

View it to thy sorrow!

Grey thoult be to-morrow,

Only to grow brown again when there.

"Mother, to this final prayer give ear!

Let a funeral pile be straightway dress'd;

Open then my cell so sad and drear,

That the flames may give the lovers rest!

When ascends the fire

From the glowing pyre,

To the gods of old we'll hasten, blest."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Goethe is often credited as having written the first modern vampire tale in the Bride of Corinth, but it's truer to say that it's a classic ghost tale. It's a fairly direct retelling of an ancient Greek excerpt from The Book of Marvels (and probably a folktale much older than that)-- the story of Philinnon as related by Phlegon of Tralles, a Greek freedman acting as a town official during the Roman reign of Hadrian, whose task it has been implied was to cover up the events by which Philinnon returned from the dead so as not to cause a scare. The tale goes something like this...

The only young daughter of Demostratus and Charito had fallen ill and died. Her name was Philinnon. Six months pass in the household, and they take on a guest lodger, a young man named Machates. One evening, the grieving mother Charito believes she spies a young girl who resembles her daughter entering Machate's room. On the following morning she asks Machates about this female guest he entertained so late. He said that the girl's name was Philinnon. He showed the shocked parents a ring and breastband that she had left behind, which the parents immediately recognized. Machates admitted that though he entertained the lady two nights in a row, he did not know her. Nor did he understand how this lovely lady could be the long deceased daughter of Demostratus.

The following night the parents hide and they catch a glimpse of Philinnon entering the chambers of Machete. Demostratus and Charito are so excited to see their daughter alive that they burst into the room as Philinnon and Machetes are entwined in bed.

Philinnon leaps into a fury at the parents' intrusion. She reveals that since she had died before she had tasted passion, Hades had granted her to return for three nights so that she might know the pleasure of a man... But the arrival of her parents meant that she must immediately return to the underworld. And her flesh corroded into a corpse before the eyes of her lover and family.