But the robbers were to obtain no permanent success, either in the market-place or in Myrtilus’s house, which was diagonally opposite to the palaestra; for General Satyrus, at the first tidings of their approach, had collected all the troops at his disposal and the crews of several war galleys, and imprisoned the division in the market-place as though in a mouse-trap.  The bands to which the woman belonged were forced by the cavalry into the palaestra and the neighbouring Maander, and kept there until Eumedes brought re-enforcements and compelled the Gauls to surrender.

The King sent from Memphis the order to take the vanquished men to the tongue of land where they now were, and could easily be imprisoned between the sea and the Sebennytic inland lake.  They were guilty of death to the last man, and starvation was to perform the executioner’s office upon them.

He, Eumedes, the admiral concluded, was in the King’s service, and must do what his commander in chief ordered.

“Duty,” sighed Philippus; “yet what a punishment!”

He held out his hand to his son as he spoke, but the Lady Thyone shook her head mournfully, saying:  “There are four thousand over yonder; and the philosopher and historian on the throne, the admirable art critic who bestows upon his capital and Egypt all the gifts of peace, who understands how to guard and develop it better than any one else—­yet what influence the gloomy powers exert upon him!”

Here she hesitated, and went on in a low whisper:  “The blood of two brothers stains his hand and his conscience.  The oldest, to whom the throne would have belonged, he exiled.  And our friend, Demetrius Phalereus, his father’s noble councillor!  Because you, Philippus, interceded for him—­though you were in a position of command, because Ptolemy knows your ability—­you were sent to distant Pelusium, and there we should be still—­”

“Guard your tongue, wife!” interrupted the old general in a tone of grave rebuke.  “The vipers on the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt symbolize the King’s swift power over life and death.  To the Egyptians the Philadelphi, Ptolemy and Arsinoe, are gods, and what cause have we to reproach them except that they use their omnipotence?”

“And, mother,” Eumedes eagerly added, “do not the royal pair on the throne merely follow the example of far greater ones among the immortal gods?  When the very Gauls who are devoted to death yonder, greedy for booty, attacked Delphi, four years ago, it was the august brother and sister, Apollo and Artemis, who sent them to Hades with their arrows, while Zeus hurled his thunderbolts at them and ordered heavy boulders to fall upon them from the shaken mountains.  Many of the men over there fled from destruction at Delphi.  Unconverted, they added new crimes to the old ones, but now retribution will overtake them.  The worse the crime, the more bloody the vengeance.