wever, made a request that her husband would deliver the unhappy
fugitive into her hands. She was determined, she said, to kill her. Her
husband remonstrated with her against this atrocious proposal. "It would
be a wholly useless act of cruelty," said he, "to destroy her life. She
can do us no possible harm in the future progress of the war, while to
murder her under these circumstances will only exasperate her husband
and her friends, and nerve them with new strength for the remainder of
the contest. And then, besides, she has taken refuge in a temple; and if
we violate that sanctuary, we shall incur, by such an act of sacrilege,
the implacable displeasure of Heaven. Consider, too, that she is your
sister, and for you to kill her would be to commit an unnatural and
wholly inexcusable crime."

So saying, he commanded Tryphena to say no more upon the subject, for he
would on no account consent that Cleopatra should suffer any injury
whatever.

This refusal on the part of her husband to comply with her request only
inflamed Tryphena's insane resentment and anger the more. In fact, the
earnestness with which he espoused her sister's cause, and the interest
which he seemed to feel in her fate, aroused Tryphena's jealousy. She
believed, or pretended to believe, that her husband was influenced by a
sentiment of love in so warmly defending her. The object of her hate,
from being simply an enemy, became now, in her view, a rival, and she
resolved that, at all hazards, she should be destroyed. She accordingly
ordered a body of desperate soldiers to break into the temple and seize
her. Cleopatra fled in terror to the altar, and clung to it with such
convulsive force that the soldiers cut her hands off before they could
tear her away, and then, maddened by her resistance and the sight of
blood, they stabbed her again and again upon the floor of the temple,
where she fell. The appalling shrieks with which the wretched victim
filled the air in the first moments of her flight and her terror,
subsided, as her life ebbed away, into the most awful imprecations of
the judgments of Heaven upon the head of the unnatural sister whose
implacable hate had destroyed her.

Notwithstanding the specimens that we have thus given of the character
and action of this extraordinary family, the government of this dynasty,
extending, as it did, through the reigns of thirteen sovereigns and over
a period of nearly three hundred years, has always been c