seen forms, unlike the rest, of stately stature, of fair proportions,
wearing the divine lineaments of Grecian beauty. From some of these a
higher nature spoke out, not in mirth, that last mockery of supreme
woe, but in an expression of stern, grave, and disdainful melancholy;
others, on the contrary, surpassed the rest in vehemence, clamour,
and exuberant extravagance of emotion, as if their nobler physical
development only served to entitle them to that base superiority.
For health and vigour can make an aristocracy even among Helots. The
garments of these merrymakers increased the peculiar effect of their
general appearance. The Helots in military excursions naturally
relinquished the rough sheep-skin dress that characterised their
countrymen at home, the serfs of the soil. The sailors had thrown off,
for coolness, the leathern jerkins they habitually wore, and, with
their bare arms and breasts, looked as if of a race that yet shivered,
primitive and unredeemed, on the outskirts of civilization.

Strangely contrasted with their rougher comrades, were those who,
placed occasionally about the person of the Regent, were indulged with
the loose and clean robes of gay colours worn by the Asiatic slaves;
and these ever and anon glanced at their finery with an air of
conscious triumph. Altogether, it was a sight that might well have
appalled, by its solemn lessons of human change, the poet who would
have beheld in that embruted flock the descendants of the race over
whom Pelops and Atreus, and Menelaus, and Agamemnon the king of men,
had held their antique sway, and might still more have saddened the
philosopher who believed, as Menander has nobly written, 'That Nature
knows no slaves.'

Suddenly, in the midst of the confused and uproarious hubbub, the door
opened, and Alcman the Mothon entered the chamber. At this sight the