and Magians in the Rhakotis, the Egyptian quarter of
the city, twenty men would have assassinated him by poison or wily
snares; one command to the Macedonians in the guard of the Mellakes or
youths, and he would be a captive that very day, and to-morrow, if she so
ordered, on the way to Asia, whither Octavianus, as Timagenes told her,
had gone.

What prevented her from grasping the gold, giving the hint, issuing the
command?

Doubtless she thought of the magic goblet, now melted, which had
constrained him to cast aside honour, fame, and power, as worthless
rubbish, in order to obey her behest not to leave her; but though this
remembrance burdened her soul, it had no decisive influence. It was no
one thing which prisoned her hand and lips, but every fibre of her being,
every pulsation of her heart, every glance back into the past to the
confines of childhood.

Yet she listened to other thoughts also. They reminded her of her
children, the elation of power, love for the land of her ancestors, and
the peril which menaced it without her, the bliss of seeing the light,
and the darkness, the silence, the dull rigidity of death, the
destruction of the body and the mind cherished and developed with so much
care and toil, the horrible torture which might be associated with the
transition from life to death--the act of dying. And what lay before her
in the existence which lasted an eternity? When she no longer breathed
beneath the sun, even if the death hour was deferred, and she found that
not Epicurus, who believed that with death all things ended, had been
right, but the ancient teachings of the Egyptians, what would await her
in that world beyond the grave if she purchased a few more years of life
by the murder or betrayal of her lover, her husband?

Yet perhaps the punishments inflicted upon the condemned were but
bugbears invented by the priesthood, which guarded the regulation of the
state in order to curb the unruly conduct of the populace and terrify the
turbulent transgressors of the law. And, whispered the daring Greek
spirit, in the abode of the condemned, not in the Garden of Aalu, the
Elysian Fields of the Egyptians, she would meet her father and mother and
all her wicked ancestors down to Euergetes I., who was succeeded by the
infamous Philopater. Thus the thought of the other world became an
antecedent so uncertain as to permit no definite inference, and might
therefore be left out of the account. How would--