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Updated: June 13, 2025
During the first week of Gorgo's captivity he was still awake and full of life, but later a heavy torpor came upon him. He perched himself on one spot, like the other eagles, and stared at vacancy. He no longer knew how the days passed. One morning when Gorgo sat in his usual torpor, he heard some one call to him from below.
When the old man who was as emotional as a boy ceased speaking, his white beard was wet with tears, and seeing that even Damia's and Gorgo's eyes were moist, he was preparing to address them again; but Porphyrius interposed. He gave him time only to press his lips to Datnia's hand and to bid Gorgo farewell. "You were born into stirring times," he said to her, "but under a good sign.
Gorgo's eyes fell; but presently she looked up again and said: "You do not know what that poor soul had suffered.
Damia had definitively given up all hope, and hardly heeded this part of his story, while on Gorgo's mind it had a startling effect. She loved Constantine with all the fervor of a first, and only, and long-suppressed passion; she had repented long since of her little fit of suspicion, and it would have cost her no perceptible effort to humble her pride, to fly to him and pray for forgiveness.
Then the dream changed she saw a scattered flock of ravens flying in wide circles, at an unattainable height, against the clouds; suddenly they vanished and she saw, in a grey mist, the monument to Porphyrius' wife, Gorgo's long-departed mother.
But after all she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades, like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo's sorrow could not at any rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand it was coming slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer and nearer every hour.
Demetrius whispered a few words of enthusiastic praise of the little singer into Gorgo's ear; then the carriage moved on again.
Few, to be sure, of the high-priest's friends had allowed themselves to be so far scared as to betray their terrors frankly; on the contrary, when the crack of doom really seemed to have sounded, rhetoric and argument grew even more eager than before round Olympius' table; and Gorgo's opinion of her fellow-heathen might not have been much raised if she could have heard Helladius, the famous philologist and biographer, reciting verses from "Prometheus bound," his knees quaking and lips quivering as he heard the thunder; or seen Ammonius, another grammarian who had written a celebrated work on "The Differences of Synonyms," rending his robe and presenting his bared breast as a target to the lightning, with a glance round at the company to challenge their admiration.
Do not I entreat you; drop the subject or else. . ." "Or else?" "Or else I must die, mother and you know you love me." Her tone was soft but firm; her words referred to the future, but that future was as clear to Gorgo's view as if it were past.
Demetrius whispered a few words of enthusiastic praise of the little singer into Gorgo's ear; then the carriage moved on again.
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