PHILOTAS.

Parmenio must be among the prisoners. Send him to me! I will despatch
him.

ARIDAeUS.

Well, be it so! Come, Strato! Prince, we shall see each other soon
again!

Scene IV.

PHILOTAS.

O God! the lightning could not have struck nearer without destroying me
entirely. Wondrous gods! The flash returns! The vapour passes off, and
I was only stunned. My whole misery then was seeing how miserable I
might have become--how miserable my father through me!--Now I may
appear again before you, my father! But still with eyes cast down;
though shame alone will cast them down, and not the burning
consciousness of having drawn you down with me to destruction. Now I
need fear nothing from you but a smiling reprimand; no silent grief; no
curses stifled by the stronger power of paternal love----

But--yes, by Heavens! I am too indulgent towards myself. May I forgive
myself all the errors which Providence seems to pardon me? Shall I not
judge myself more severely than Providence and my father judge me? All
too indulgent judges! All other sad results of my imprisonment the gods
could annihilate; one only they could not--the disgrace! It is true
they could wipe out that fleeting shame, which falls from the lips of
the vulgar crowd: but not the true and lasting disgrace, which the
inner judge, my impartial self, pronounces over me!

And how easily I delude myself! Does my father then lose nothing
through me?

The weight which the capture of Polytimet must throw into the scale if
I were not a prisoner--is that nothing? Only through me does it become
nothing! Fortune would have declared for him for whom it should
declare;--the right of my father would triumph, if Polytimet was
prisoner and not Philotas and Polytimet!

And now--but what was that which I thought just now? Nay, which a god
thought within me--I must follow it up! Let me chain thee, fleeting
thought! Now I have it again! How it spreads, farther and farther; and
now it beams throughout my soul!

What did the king say? Why did he wish that I myself should send a
trustworthy messenger to my father? In order that my father should not
suspect--yes, thus ran his own words--that I had already died,
perchance, from my wounds. He thinks, then, that the affair would take
a different aspect, if I had died already from my wound. Would it do
so? A t