houses--not even taking the trouble to remove their wives--to the
strangers who crowded their gay capital. And when their general found
it necessary to demand their aid on the ramparts, he could only secure
their attendance by ordering the taverns and cookshops to be removed
to the place of duty. Not yet so far sunk in sloth and debauch, the
Byzantines were nevertheless hosts eminently dangerous to the austerer
manners of their Greek visitors. The people, the women, the delicious
wine, the balm of the subduing climate served to tempt the senses
and relax the mind. Like all the Dorians, when freed from primitive
restraint, the higher class, that is, the descendants of the
colonists, were in themselves an agreeable, jovial race. They had that
strong bias to humour, to jest, to satire, which in their ancestral
Megara gave birth to the Grecian comedy, and which lurked even beneath
the pithy aphorisms and rude merry-makings of the severe Spartan.

Such were the people with whom of late Pausanias had familiarly mixed,
and with whose manners he contrasted, far too favourably for his
honour and his peace, the habits of his countrymen.

It was in one of the villas we have described, the favourite abode
of the rich Diagoras, and in an apartment connected with those more
private recesses of the house appropriated to the females, that two
persons were seated by a window which commanded a wide view of the
glittering sea below. One of these was an old man in a long robe that
reached to his feet, with a bald head and a beard in which some dark
hairs yet withstood the encroachments of the grey. In his well-cut
features and large eyes were remains of the beauty that characterised
his race; but the mouth was full and wide, the forehead low though
broad, the cheeks swollen, the chin double, and the whole form
corpulent and unwieldy. Still there was a jolly, sleek good humour