figure with "indescribable nose, bald head, round body, eyes rolling
and twinkling with good humor," scantily clad,--an incorrigible
do-nothing, windbag, and hanger-on, a later century might assert,--yet
history has given to him the name of Socrates.

Not all Athenians, of course, make such justifiable use of their
idleness. There are plenty of young men parading around in long
trailing robes, their hair oiled and curled most effeminately,
their fingers glittering with jewels,--"ring-loaded, curly-locked
coxcombs," Aristophanes, the comic poet, has called them,--and
they are here only for silly display. Also there are many of their
elders who have no philosophy or wit to justify their continuous
talking; nevertheless, all considered, it must be admitted that
the Athenian makes a use of their dearly loved "leisure," which
men of a more pragmatic race will do well to consider as the fair
equivalent of much frantic zeal for "business." Athenian "leisure" has
already given the world Pericles, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, Socrates, and Plato, not to name such artists as Phidias,
whose profession cannot exempt them from a certain manual occupation.


20. The Barber Shops.--This habit of genteel idleness naturally
develops various peculiar institutions. For example, the barber
shops are almost club rooms. Few Hellenes at this time shave their
beards[*], but to go with unkempt whiskers and with too long hair
is most disgraceful. The barber shops, booths, or little rooms let
into the street walls of the houses, are therefore much frequented.
The good tonsors have all the usual arts. They can dye gray hair
brown or black; they can wave or curl their patrons' locks (and
an artificially curled head is no disgrace to a man). Especially,