Nature was said to be like an artist who sometimes breaks an instrument of which he overstretches the chords, and sometimes leaves them too slack and can produce no tune. Now, these harmonic laws necessarily determined not only the formation but also the end of man: “There is a fixed relation of determined numbers which unites souls to bodies,” says a philosopher, “and while it subsists, the body continues to be animate, but so soon as it fails, the hidden energy which maintained this union is dissolved, and this is what we call destiny and the fatal time of life.”[309] When the term fixed by nature is reached, the soul departs without effort from the body in which it can no longer exercise its office. But when the soul is violently ejected from the body and the link connecting them is broken by an external force, it is troubled and is afflicted by an ill which will cause it pain in the Beyond. These ideas had sunk deep into the popular mind. The distinction between an end in conformity with nature and one unexpectedly provoked by extraneous intervention is often expressed in literature as well as in inscriptions. Thus the epitaph of a young woman of twenty-eight, who was believed to have been the victim of witchcraft, states that “her spirit was torn from her by violence rather than returned to nature,”[310] which had lent it to her; the Manes or the celestial gods will be the avengers of this crime. Still more frequently an opposition is found between an early death and _Fatum_. The hour of death is determined at the moment of birth: “Nascentes morimur; finisque ab origine pendet.”[311] “At the moment we are born, we die; and our end is fixed from our beginning.” He who reaches this term fixed for his life ends “on his day” (_suo die_); otherwise he dies “before his day” (_ante diem_).[312] The vulgar belief was that the intervention of a human or divine will could oppose the fated course of things and abridge the normal duration of existence. Often the expression occurs of a belief that a demon or, what is more remarkable, an evil god has carried off innocent children or young men whose life has thus been shortened.[313] But pagan theology undertook the task of re-establishing the order of nature thus disturbed by fortuitous accidents and by individual and unregulated interferences. The breaking of the laws of the universe was only apparent: a soul might by mischance or by a malevolent act be suddenly severed from its body, but, remaining obedient to Fate, it had thereafter to linger on earth until its appointed time was accomplished.