Another community in which altruism is unusual and discredited is Judæa just before the birth of Christ. Herod the king is a masterful ruler and a benefactor; but the end justifies the means that he adopts, and he is no respecter of persons. He does not even respect the person of his wife. The love of Mariamne is the one sure rock upon which he can rest when the earthquake, threatening at every moment, comes to shatter his throne and engulf him. He loves her too with a passion which dreams of union so perfect that death cannot break it, so perfect that one of them would wish to die at the moment when the soul of the other left the body. This is Mariamne's dream also, but Herod cannot trust her to fulfil it. Not once, but twice, upon going to the wars, he leaves orders that Mariamne shall be slain if he is killed; and these orders are an assassination of her soul. The community can execute an individual; but one individual can only assassinate another. In the ancient orient a wife was a precious possession, entirely subject to the will of her husband, and liable to be burned in his funeral pyre. Herod represents such an ancient, oriental point of view; but Judæa is on the eve of becoming occidental and modern. Herod represents the law and has the power to crush the insurgent personality of Mariamne: he has not the power to slay the infant Savior, nor to hinder the coming of the day when every human soul is known to be an object of divine concern. That play of Hebbel's in which the dualism of all being is most conspicuously tragic is _Agnes Bernauer_. Agnes is the daughter of a barber and surgeon, and is so beautiful that she is commonly known as the angel of Augsburg. Albrecht, the son and sole heir of the reigning duke Ernst, comes to Augsburg, falls in love with her, and, in spite of friendly warning, marries her; for she has loved him at first sight, too. As persons, they do what is right for them to do; their marriage has been performed by a priest of the church; and they feel that it has divine sanction. But Albrecht is not an ordinary person; he is the heir to the throne, and public exigencies require that the succession shall be guaranteed. This marriage, however, is illegal--a board of incorruptible judges so finds it; it causes sedition and threatens interminable strife. Duke Ernst is deliberate and patient in dealing with the unprecedented case. He waits until he can wait no longer. Albrecht will not give up Agnes, nor Agnes give up him; Ernst respects the sacrament of wedlock by which they are united, and only after two and a half years does he sign the warrant by which Agnes was duly condemned to death. Agnes dies in perfect innocence and constancy, a victim of social convention. But Albrecht, whose disregard of this convention was rebellion, and whose vengeance for his wife's death brings him to the point of parricide, is made to see, not merely because excommunication accompanies the ban of the empire on him as a rebel, but