Epistulae

and ingratitude? You would indeed have been safe and unhurt; not because you deserved it, but in consequence of my softness and good-nature. But I would have satiated my eyes with the blood of that harlot; and you, the slave of her sorceries, should have beheld the tragedy. I would have been Medea to Medea. If you, O just Jupiter, hear from heaven the prayers of injured love, may this base intruder into my chaste bed groan under the same pangs which I now feel, and herself experience that treachery of which she has set the first example; and, as I, a wife and the mother of twins, am left destitute and forlorn, may she also be ravished from her husband and children: may she soon lose and shamefully abandon these ill-gotten trophies; exiled, and wandering a fugitive over all the earth! What sister she was to her brother, what daughter to her parent, such a mother and wife may she prove to her children and husband! When she has traversed the earth and sea, let her attempt the air, till, destitute and hopeless, she end a miserable life by her own hand. These are the prayers of the disappointed and injured daughter of Thoas. May you live an execrable pair, the partners of a devoted bed!