iriasis, devoured
by vermin and lice; as before him died L. Sylla, Pherecydes the Syrian, the
preceptor of Pythagoras, the Greek poet Alcmaeon, and others--and
foreseeing that the Jews would make bonfires at his death, caused all the
nobles and magistrates to be summoned to his seraglio out of all the
cities, towns, and castles of Judaea, fraudulently pretending that he had
some things of moment to impart to them. They made their personal
appearance; whereupon he caused them all to be shut up in the hippodrome of
the seraglio; then said to his sister Salome and Alexander her husband: I
am certain that the Jews will rejoice at my death; but if you will observe
and perform what I tell you, my funeral shall be honourable, and there will
be a general mourning. As soon as you see me dead, let my guards, to whom
I have already given strict commission to that purpose, kill all the
noblemen and magistrates that are secured in the hippodrome. By these
means all Jewry shall, in spite of themselves, be obliged to mourn and
lament, and foreigners will imagine it to be for my death, as if some
heroic soul had left her body. A desperate tyrant wished as much when he
said, When I die, let earth and fire be mixed together; which was as good
as to say, let the whole world perish. Which saying the tyrant Nero
altered, saying, While I live, as Suetonius affirms it. This detestable
saying, of which Cicero, lib. De Finib., and Seneca, lib. 2, De Clementia,
make mention, is ascribed to the Emperor Tiberius by Dion Nicaeus and
Suidas.

Chapter 4.XXVII.

Pantagruel's discourse of the decease of heroic souls; and of the dreadful
prodigies that happened before the death of the late Lord de Langey.

I would not, continued Pantagruel, have missed the storm that hath thus
disordered us, were I also to have missed the relation of these things told
us by this good Macrobius. Neither am I unwilling to believe what he said
of a comet that appears in the sky some days before such a decease. For
some of those souls are so noble, so precious, and so heroic that heaven
gives us notice of their departing some days before it happens. And as a
prudent physician, seeing by some symptoms that his patient draws towards
his end, some days before gives notice of it to his wife, children,
kindred, and friends, that, in that little time he hath yet to live, they
may admonish him to settle all things in his family, to tutor and instruct
his children a