Fragmento apócrifo de Pausanias / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Apocryphal Fragment from Pausanias

Theseus pursued the army of the Amazons, captured their queen and seduced her. The troop of women fled over the frozen Bosphorus, riding horses of utmost arrogance. One of them died in the place that bears her name, where Athenians remember and honor her. The fugitives were once again lost in the steppe of their birth, aided by the mist.
     An anonymous author refers to the brave acts of the son of Theseus and the captive Amazon. He dared to solicit the love of a priestess from a severe religion, dedicated to a telluric divinity, venerated and feared by Asiatic slaves.
     The licentious young man caught a rare disease of the mind and was wandering delirious through the city and its countryside, threatening to become a wolf.
     Theseus listens to the opinion of memorious travelers, habituated to the ship and the caravan, and sends for a doctor all the way to the Nile valley.
     The wise man presented himself a month later and was able to cure the delirious young man by means of the word and by wrapping him up in the smoke of a balsamic resin.
     Theseus trusted in the medicine of the Egyptians and considered them the healthiest and most long-lived people on Earth.
     The doctor left behind, in memory of his presence, an effigy of his person. I have seen it among the simulacra and essays of a rudimentary art.
     The figure of the Egyptian, with a naked skull, was displaying the patient and self-absorbed attitude of a scribe from his nation.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }