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--this must be the form
of the question--the years purchased by the murder or betrayal of one
whom she loved shape themselves for her?

During the night the image of the murdered man would drive sleep from her
couch, and the Furies, the Dirx, as the Roman Antony called them, who
pursue murderers with the serpent scourge, were no idle creations of
poetic fancy, but fully symbolized the restlessness of the criminal,
driven to and fro by the pangs of conscience. The chief good, the
painless happiness of the Epicureans, was forever lost to those burdened
by such guilt.

And during the hours of the day and evening? Ay, then she would be free
to heap pleasure on pleasure. But for whom were the festivals to be
celebrated; with whom could she share them? For many a long year no