“Wretch!” and his terrible eyes burned into Pratinas’s guilty breast, so that he writhed, and held down his head, and began to mutter words inaudible.  “Can you tell the truth to save yourself the most horrible tortures human wit can devise?”

But Pratinas had nothing to say.

Again Demetrius leaped upon him.  The pirate was a frantic animal.  His fingers moved as though they were claws to pluck the truth from the offender’s heart.  He hissed his question between teeth that ground together in frenzy.

“How did you get her?  Where from?  When?”

Pratinas choked for utterance.

“Artemisia!  Daphne!  Yours!  I lost her!  Ran away at Rome!”

The words shook out of him like water from a well-filled flask.  Demetrius relaxed his hold.  A whole flood of conflicting emotions was displayed upon his manly face.  He turned to Artemisia.

“Makaira! dearest! don’t you know me?” he cried, holding outstretched his mighty arms.

“I am afraid!” sobbed poor Artemisia in dismay.

“Come!” It was Cornelia who spoke; and, with the daughter crying softly on one arm, and the father dragged along in a confused state of ecstasy on the other, she led them both out of the room.

Pratinas was on his knees before Caesar.  The Hellene was again eloquent—­eloquent as never before.  In the hour of extremity his sophistry and his rhetoric did not leave him.  His antitheses, epigrams, well-rounded maxims, figures of speech, never were at a better command.  For a time, charmed by the flow of his own language, he gathered strength and confidence, and launched out into bolder flights of subtly wrought rhetoric.  He excused, explained away each fault, vivified and magnified a hundred non-existent virtues, reared a splendid word-fabric in praise of clemency.  To what end?  Before him sat Caesar, and Drusus, and a dozen Romans more, who, with cold, unmoved Italian faces, listened to his artificial eloquence, and gave no sign of pity.  And as he went on, the sense of his hopeless position overcame the wretched man, and his skill began to leave him.  He became thick and confused of speech; his periods tripped; his thought moved backward.  Then his supple tongue failed him utterly, and, in cries and incoherent groans, he pleaded for the right to exist.

“Man,” said the Imperator, when the storm of prayers and moans was over, “you conspired against Quintus Drusus, my friend.  You failed—­that is forgiven.  You conspired, I have cause to believe, against Pompeius, my enemy, but a Roman—­that is unproved, and therefore forgiven.  You conspired with Pothinus against me—­that was an offence touching me alone, and so that, too, may be forgiven.  But to the prayers of a father you had wronged, you answered so that you might gloat over his pain.  Therefore you shall die and not live.  Take him away, guards, and strike off his head, for his body is too vile to nail to any cross.”