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"Bravo, my noble comrade!" said Harpax, in a tone of affected rapture, always lowering his voice, however, as respecting the slumbers of the Varangian.
Both Harpax and Mephistophiles suggest to their victims that they have power to destroy their enemies, but neither of them is able to exercise it. Faust can torment, but not kill, his would-be murderers; and Springius and Hircius are powerless to take Dorothea's life.
"I cannot tell," answered Stephanos; "but it gnaws at my heart like the worm that dieth not, to see this beggarly foreigner betray the noblest blood in the land, not to mention the best athlete in the Palaestra, and move off not only without punishment for his treachery, but with praise, honour, and preferment." "True," said Harpax; "but observe, my friend, that he does move off to purpose.
"But still but still," said Sebastes of Mitylene, the young Greek aforesaid, "were the Emperor to discover" "Ass!" replied Harpax, "he cannot discover, if he had all the eyes of Argus's tail. Here are twelve of us sworn according to the rules of the watch, to abide in the same story. The companions of the watch, surely!" "Quite the contrary," said Sebastes.
The dramatists of the period make frequent references to this belief, but nearly always by way of ridicule. It is hardly to be expected that they would share in the grosser opinions held by the common people in those times common, whether king or clown. In "The Virgin Martyr," Harpax is made to say
Sylvan, accompanied by one or two Varangians, who led him in a sort of captivity, took his way to the vaults of the Blacquernal, which were in fact his proper habitation. Upon the road to the city, Harpax, the notorious corporal of the Immortal Guards, held a discourse with one or two of his own soldiers, and of the citizens who had been members of the late conspiracy.
The voices, therefore, of the bulky Stephanos, of Harpax the centurion, and other rebels, both of the camp and city, were the first to thunder forth their gratitude for the clemency of the Emperor, and their thanks to Heaven for his preservation.
They could appear in the likeness of an ordinary human being, as Harpax and Mephistopheles do, creating thereby the most embarrassing complications in questions of identity; and if this belief is borne in mind, the charge of being a devil, so freely made, in the times of which we write, and before alluded to, against persons who performed extraordinary feats of valour, or behaved in a manner discreditable and deserving of general reprobation, loses much of its barbarous grotesqueness.
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