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Rh as the king said earlier in the play. "The gods, 'tis said, desert a conquered town." Then they must go forth—these gods who have dwelt so long in Thebes, and gotten their shrines and favourite haunts there—they must go out to seek some other resting-place, some vacant spot unoccupied by deities, desolate, and cherished by no devoted worshippers. Gods, like men, have homes which they get to love; they cling to the people who have been kind to them, and feel uneasy in a strange abode.

Then they plead the antiquity of their city. It would be sad for so venerable a city to be cast down to Hades, and for its daughters to be dragged like horses, by their hair, through the streets, with their robes torn from about them. The cruel outrages offered to women are the most prominent feature in ancient descriptions of the sufferings of a captured town. The other features are vividly described:—

"From house to house, from street to street,

The crashing flames roar round and meet;

Each way the fiery deluge preys,

And girds us with the circling blaze.