Arsinoe with a pale, strained face was moving about, replacing the bottles of cosmetics and perfumery in cabinets and caskets.  Pisander had been kind to Arsinoe, and had taught her to read; and there was a fairly firm friendship between the slave and the luckless man, who felt himself degraded by an equal bondage.

“Poor Agias,” muttered Pisander.

“Poor Agias,” repeated Arsinoe, mournfully; then in some scorn, “Come, Master Pisander, now is the time to console yourself with your philosophy.  Call out everything,—­your Zeno, or Parmenides, or Heraclitus, or others of the thousand nobodies I’ve heard you praise to Valeria,—­and make thereby my heart a jot the less sore, or Agias’s death the less bitter!  Don’t sit there and snap at your beard, if your philosophy is good for anything!  People used to pray to the gods in trouble, but you philosophers turn the gods into mists or thin air.  You are a man!  You are free!  Do something!  Say something!”

“But what can I do?” groaned Pisander, bursting into tears, and wishing for the instant Epicureans, Stoics, Eclectics, Peripatetics, and every other school of learning in the nethermost Hades.

“Phui! Fudge!” cried Arsinoe.  “What is life made for then, if a man who has spent all his days studying it is as good as helpless!  Look at me!  Have I not hands, feet, a head, and wits?  Am I not as well informed and naturally capable as three fine ladies out of every four?  Would I not look as handsome as they, if I had a chance to wear their dresses and jewels?  Have I any blemish, any defect, that makes me cease to be a woman, and become a thing?  Bah, master Pisander! I am only a slave, but I will talk.  Why does my blood boil at the fate of Agias, if it was not meant that it should heat up for some end?  And yet I am as much a piece of property of that woman whom I hate, as this chair or casket.  I have a right to no hope, no ambition, no desire, no reward.  I can only aspire to live without brutal treatment.  That would be a sort of Elysium.  If I was brave enough, I would kill myself, and go to sleep and forget it all.  But I am weak and cowardly, and so—­here I am.”

Pisander only groaned and went away to his room to turn over his Aristotle, and wonder why nothing in the “Nicomachean Ethics” or any other learned treatise contained the least word that made him contented over the fate of Agias or his own unhappy situation.  Arsinoe and Semiramis, when he went from them, cried, and cried again, in pity and helpless grief at their whole situation.  And so a considerable number of days passed.  Calatinus could have given joy to the hearts of several in his household if he had simply remembered that Agias had not been scourged to death, but sold.  But Calatinus feared, now that he was well out of the matter, to stir up an angry scene with his wife, by hinting that Agias had not been punished according to her orders.  Alfidius, too, and the other slaves with him, imagined that his mistress would blame them if they admitted that Agias was alive.  So the household gathered, by the silence of all concerned, that the bright Greek boy had long since passed beyond power of human torment.  Pisander recovered part of his equanimity, and Arsinoe and Semiramis began to see life a shade less darkened.