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116 Who all for loathing of the day

In madness threw their lives away:

How gladly now in upper air

Contempt and beggary would they bear,

And labour's sorest pain!

Fate bars the way: around their keep

The slow unlovely waters creep,

And bind with three-fold chain."

Suicide was no crime in the early pagan creed; but Virgil has to a certain degree adopted the Platonic notion, that to take away one's own life was to desert the post of duty. It is remarkable how thoroughly he adopts Homer's view of the incomparable superiority of the life of the upper world to the best possible estate in the land of shadows. We have here again the sad lament of Achilles in the Iliad—that the life of a slave on earth was more to be desired than the colourless existence of the heroes in Elysium.

Passing from these outer circles, the travellers reach the "Mourning Fields," in which the poet places all the victims of love. If there was any doubt as to his view of the passion—that it was a lower appetite, excusable enough in man, but in a woman either to be reprobated or pitied according to circumstances—it would be set at rest by the characters of those victims with whom he peoples this unlovely region. Grouped together with such devoted wives as Evadne, who, when her husband fell in the Trojan war, slew herself for grief upon his funeral pile, and Laodamia, whose only crime was that by her too urgent prayers she won back her dead Protesilaus to her embrace for a few