The agitations of the soul of the listener up to this point had been delineated with fearful distinctness. But when told that his wife and child had been killed, his head suddenly fell forward on his breast and rested there, after vibrating four or five times in lessening degrees on the pivot of the neck, as if utterly abandoned to itself. It was marvellously expressive of the exhausted state, the woe-begone despair, of one who had received a shock too great to be borne, a shock which, had it been a little severer, would have prostrated his whole figure, but, as it was, simply prostrated his head. Deprived of all his kindred and of all hope, alone on the flinty earth, rage and recklessness now seize the desolate Thracian, and he resolves to sacrifice his captive, the niece of the prætor, in retaliation for the slaughter of his own family; but a nobler sentiment restrains him, and he dismisses her to her father. In this passage he displayed the agony of generous grief subduing the desire of vengeance with a power which, as a prominent English critic said, reminded the beholder of the head of Laocoön struggling in the folds of the serpent, or of the head of Hercules writhing under the torture of the poisoned shirt. The prætor in return for his daughter sends Spartacus an offer of pardon if he will surrender. Disdainfully rejecting the overture, he has the horses in his camp slain, and sets everything on the chance of one more battle, but against such odds as he knows can result only in his defeat. With a frenzied thirst for vengeance he fights his way to the presence of the Roman general, and, in the very act of striking him down, exhausted from the accumulated wounds received in his passage of blood, grows faint, reels, falls in the exact attitude of the immortal statue of the Dying Gladiator, and expires.