alistic ring (which
he is said to have found hidden within the flanks of a brazen horse
in the midst of some forest) lost its virtue, and suddenly ceasing to
render its owner invisible, betrayed him to the astonished eyes of some
innocent husband, who had deemed himself alone in his conjugal chamber?'

'Perhaps he has been wasting his talents and his drachmas at the game of
Palamedes, or else it may be that he is disappointed at not having
won the prize at the Olympian games. He had great faith in his horse
Hyperion.'

No one of these conjectures was true. A fact is never guessed.

After the battalion commanded by Gyges, there came young boys crowned
with myrtle-wreaths, and singing epithalamic hymns after the Lydian
manner, accompanying themselves upon lyres of ivory, which they played
with bows. All were clad in rose-coloured tunics ornamented with
a silver Greek border, and their long hair flowed down over their
shoulders in thick curls.

They preceded the gift-bearers, strong slaves whose half-nude bodies
exposed to view such interlacements of muscle as the stoutest athletes
might have envied.

Upon brancards, supported by two or four men or more, according to
the weight of the objects borne, were placed enormous brazen cratera,
chiselled by the most famous artists; vases of gold and silver whose
sides were adorned with bas-reliefs and whose hands were elegantly
worked into chimeras, foliage, and nude women; magnificent ewers to be
used in washing the feet of illustrious guests; flagons encrusted with
precious stones and containing the rarest perfumes; myrrh from Arabia,
cinnamon from the Indies, spikenard from Persia, essence of roses from
Smyrna; kamklins or perfuming pans, with perforated covers; cedar-wood
or ivory coffers of marvellous workmanship, which opened with a secret
spring that none save the inventor could find, and which contained
bracelets wrought from the gold of Ophir, necklaces of the most lustrous
pearls, mantle-brooches constellated with rubies and carbuncles;
toilet-boxes, containing blond sponges, curling-irons, sea-wolves' teeth
to polish the nails, the green rouge of Egypt, which turns to a most
beautiful pink on touching the skin, powders to darken the eyelashes and
eyebrows, and all the refinements that feminine coquetry could invent.
Other litters were freighted with purple robes of the finest linen and
of all possible shades from the incarnadine hue of the rose to the deep
crimson