pressed by the Carthaginians and her king was in captivity, he rallied her defeated forces and ended the war in triumph. “And because the fatal order demands it so shall be, The fates gave him this path to dominion.... Blind chance sways the silly toiling of men; Our world is the plaything and sport of the gods.” The king thereupon abdicated in favor of _Patricida_, whom he addressed in these words, “O youth, on whose birth, if there is any power in the stars, a favorable horoscope looked down.” The mother rejoiced to hear of her son’s success, and marveled at the correctness of the astrologer’s prediction, but was now the more troubled as to her husband’s fate. He noticed her distraction and at last induced her to tell him its cause. But then, instead of being angry at the deception which she had practiced upon him, and instead of being alarmed at the prospect of his own death, he, too, rejoiced in his son’s success, and said that he would die happy, if he could but see and embrace him. He accordingly made himself known to his son and told him how he had once ordered his death but had been thwarted by the eternal predestined order of events, and how some day his son would slay him, not of evil intent but compelled by the courses of the stars. “And manifest is the fault of the gods in that you cannot be kinder to your father.” The son thereupon determines that he will evade the decree of the stars by committing suicide. He is represented as soliloquizing as follows: “How is our mind akin to the ethereal stars, If it suffers the sad necessity of harsh Lachesis? In vain we possess a particle of the divine mind, If our reason cannot make provision for itself. God so made the elements, so made the fiery stars, That man is not subject to the stars.” Patricida accordingly summons all the Romans together, and, after inducing them by an eloquent rehearsal of his great services in their behalf to grant him any boon that he may ask, says that his wish is to die; and at this point the poem ends, leaving us uninformed whether the last part of the astrologer’s prediction remained unfulfilled, or whether Patricida’s suicide caused his father’s death, or whether possibly some solution was found in a play upon the word _Patricida_. Hauréau, however, believed that the poem is complete as it stands. [Sidenote: Different interpretations put upon the _Mathematicus_.]