In the spring of the following year the two households were happily established in two charming dwellings at the southern end of the Lake of Galilee. Though the friends never formally adopted the Jewish faith, they regarded it with such respect that they and their families became “Proselytes of the gate.”[81] It is needless to tell the story of their after lives. Let it suffice to say that these were singularly uneventful and singularly happy.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “Gratior et pulchro veniens in corpore virtus.”
[2] About £20.
[3] Philip, King of Macedonia, who by this time was very nearly master of Greece, had, it was said, consulted the Delphic oracle as to his plans, and had received from the priestess an answer which may be thus Englished:—
“Craft may be baffled, force may fail,
The silver spear shall still prevail.”
To the king himself a witticism of similar import was attributed: “I have never found,” he said, “a citadel impregnable, into which I could send an ass laden with silver.”
[4] This sentence was that the city of Thebes should be razed to the ground and all its territory distributed among the allies; that all the captive Thebans, with a few exceptions, should be sold as slaves; that all who had escaped might be arrested and put to death wherever they might be found.