with her son, and when she had discovered the unnatural alliance, for shame and grief hanged herself.  He continued to drag a wretched life above the earth, haunted by the dreadful Furies.—­There was Leda, the wife of Tyndarus, the mother of the beautiful Helen, and of the two brave brothers, Castor and Pollux, who obtained this grace from Jove, that being dead, they should enjoy life alternately, living in pleasant places under the earth.  For Pollux had prayed that his brother Castor, who was subject to death, as the son of Tyndarus, should partake of his own immortality, which he derived from an immortal sire:  this the Fates denied; therefore Pollux was permitted to divide his immortality with his brother Castor, dying and living alternately.—­There was Iphimedeia, who bore two sons to Neptune that were giants, Otus and Ephialtes:  Earth in her prodigality never nourished bodies to such portentous size and beauty as these two children were of, except Orion.  At nine years old they had imaginations of climbing to Heaven to see what the gods were doing; they thought to make stairs of mountains, and were for piling Ossa upon Olympus, and setting Pelion upon that, and had perhaps performed it, if they had lived till they were striplings; but they were cut off by death in the infancy of their ambitious project.—­Phaedra was there, and Procris, and Ariadne, mournful for Theseus’s desertion, and Maera, and Clymene, and Eryphile, who preferred gold before wedlock faith.

But now came a mournful ghost, that late was Agamemnon, son of Atreus, the mighty leader of all the host of Greece and their confederate kings that warred against Troy.  He came with the rest to sip a little of the blood at that uncomfortable banquet.  Ulysses was moved with compassion to see him among them, and asked him what untimely fate had brought him there, if storms had overwhelmed him coming from Troy, or if he had perished in some mutiny by his own soldiers at a division of the prey.

“By none of these,” he replied, “did I come to my death; but slain at a banquet to which I was invited by AEgisthus after my return home.  He conspiring with my adulterous wife, they laid a scheme for my destruction, training me forth to a banquet as an ox goes to the slaughter, and there surrounding me they slew me with all my friends about me.

“Clytemnestra, my wicked wife, forgetting the vows which she swore to me in wedlock, would not lend a hand to close my eyes in death.  But nothing is so heaped with impieties as such a woman, who would kill her spouse that married her a maid.  When I brought her home to my house a bride, I hoped in my heart that she would be loving to me and to my children.  Now, her black treacheries have cast a foul aspersion on her whole sex.  Blest husbands will have their loving wives in suspicion for her bad deeds.”

“Alas!” said Ulysses, “there seems to be a fatality in your royal house of Atreus, and that they are hated of Jove for their wives.  For Helen’s sake, your brother Menelaus’s wife, what multitudes fell in the wars of Troy!”