Well, be it so! Come, Strato! Prince, we shall see each other soon again!
Scene IV.
PHILOTAS.
O God! the lightning could not have struck nearer without destroying me entirely. Wondrous gods! The flash returns! The vapour passes off, and I was only stunned. My whole misery then was seeing how miserable I might have become--how miserable my father through me!--Now I may appear again before you, my father! But still with eyes cast down; though shame alone will cast them down, and not the burning consciousness of having drawn you down with me to destruction. Now I need fear nothing from you but a smiling reprimand; no silent grief; no curses stifled by the stronger power of paternal love----
But--yes, by Heavens! I am too indulgent towards myself. May I forgive myself all the errors which Providence seems to pardon me? Shall I not judge myself more severely than Providence and my father judge me? All too indulgent judges! All other sad results of my imprisonment the gods could annihilate; one only they could not--the disgrace! It is true they could wipe out that fleeting shame, which falls from the lips of the vulgar crowd: but not the true and lasting disgrace, which the inner judge, my impartial self, pronounces over me!
And how easily I delude myself! Does my father then lose nothing through me?
The weight which the capture of Polytimet must throw into the scale if I were not a prisoner--is that nothing? Only through me does it become nothing! Fortune would have declared for him for whom it should declare;--the right of my father would triumph, if Polytimet was prisoner and not Philotas and Polytimet!
And now--but what was that which I thought just now? Nay, which a god thought within me--I must follow it up! Let me chain thee, fleeting thought! Now I have it again! How it spreads, farther and farther; and now it beams throughout my soul!
What did the king say? Why did he wish that I myself should send a trustworthy messenger to my father? In order that my father should not suspect--yes, thus ran his own words--that I had already died, perchance, from my wounds. He thinks, then, that the affair would take a different aspect, if I had died already from my wound. Would it do so? A thousand thanks for this intelligence. A thousand thanks! Of course it is so. For my father would then have a prince as his prisoner, for whom he could make any claim; and the king, his enemy, would have the body of a captured prince, for which he could demand nothing; which he must have buried or burned, if it should not become an object of disgust to him.
Good! I see that! Consequently, if I, I the wretched prisoner, will still turn the victory into my father's hands--on what does it depend? on death? On nothing more? O truly--the man is mightier than he thinks, the man who knows how to die!