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"let us resume our mourning and have recourse to tears. He will believe that his child died a natural death." As she said this, Apollonius entered. Observing their funeral habiliments, he asked, "Do you grieve at my return? I believe that those tears are not yours, but mine." "Alas!" replied the wicked woman, "I would to heaven that another, and not I or my husband, had to detail to you what I must say: your daughter Tharsia died suddenly." Apollonius trembled through every limb, and then stood fixed as a statue. "O woman! if my daughter be really as you describe, have her money and clothes also perished?" "Some part of both," replied Dionysias, "is of course expended; but that you may not hesitate to give faith to our assurances, we will produce testimony in our behalf. The citizens, mindful of your munificence, have raised a brazen monument to her memory, which your own eyes may see." Apollonius, thus imposed upon, said to his servants, "Go ye to the ship; I will visit the grave of my unhappy child." There he read the inscription, as we have detailed above, and then, as if imprecating a curse upon his own eyes, he exclaimed in a paroxysm of mental agony, "Hateful, cruel sources of perception! do ye now refuse tears to the memory of my lamented girl?" With expressions like these he hastened to his navy, and entreated his servants to cast him into the sea; for the world, and all that it contained, had become odious to him.
