But, he is asked, if the prospect be indeed so cheerful, at all events for the just, why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self-destruction?--Tois anthrôpois, mê hosion einai, autous heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergetên.+ His consistent piety straightway suggests the solution of that paradox: we are the property, slaves, of the gods. Now no slave has any sort of right to destroy himself; to take a life that does not really belong to him. Comfort himself and his friends, however, as he may, it does tax all his resources of moral and physical courage to do what is at last required of him: and it was something quite new, unseen [87] before in Greece, inspiring a new note in literature--this attitude of Socrates in the condemned cell, where, fulfilling his own prediction, multitudes, of a wisdom and piety, after all, so different from his, have ever since assisted so admiringly, this anticipation of the Christian way of dying for an opinion, when, as Plato says simply, he consumed the poison in the prison--to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtêriô.+ It was amid larger consolations, we must admit, that Christian heroes did that kind of thing. But bravery, you need hardly be reminded, was ever one of the specially characteristic virtues of the pagan world-- loyalty even unto death. It had been loyalty however hitherto to one's country, one's home in the world, one's visible companions; not to a wholly invisible claimant, in this way, upon one, upon one's self.