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"A thousand thanks," said Valeria, languidly, "hand them to Pisander. I will have him read them. A little more white lead, Arsinoë, I am too tanned; make me paler. Just run over the veins of my temples with a touch of blue paint. Now a tint of antimony on my eyelids." "Your ladyship seems in wonderfully good spirits this morning," insinuated Pratinas.
As he spoke he felled Pisander from his chariot to the earth, smiting him on the chest with his spear, so that he lay face uppermost upon the ground. Hippolochus fled, but him too did Agamemnon smite; he cut off his hands and his head which he sent rolling in among the crowd as though it were a ball.
Besides, though not a slave or freedman, he fared in the household much worse sometimes than they. A slave stole the dainties, and drained a beaker of costly wine on the sly. Pisander, like Thales, who was so intent looking at the stars that he fell into a well, "was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before his feet."
Then King Agamemnon took the two sons of Antimachus, Pisander and brave Hippolochus. It was Antimachus who had been foremost in preventing Helen's being restored to Menelaus, for he was largely bribed by Alexandrus; and now Agamemnon took his two sons, both in the same chariot, trying to bring their horses to a stand for they had lost hold of the reins and the horses were mad with fear.
"Yes," said Valeria, with a sigh, "I endure the woes of life as should one who is consoled by philosophy." "Shall I continue the Plato?" edged in poor Pisander, who was raging inwardly to think that Pratinas should dare to assume the name of a "lover of learning." "When you are needed, I can tell you," snapped Valeria, sharply, at the feeble remonstrance. "Now, Semiramis, you may arrange my hair."
Agesilaus having gained Thermopylae, and passed quietly through Phocis, as soon as he had entered Boeotia, and pitched his camp near Chaeronea, at once met with an eclipse of the sun, and with ill news from the navy, Pisander, the Spartan admiral, being beaten and slain at Cnidos, by Pharnabazus and Conon. He was much moved at it, both upon his own and the public account.
Then Automedon yoked the horses to the chariot, Bayard and Piebald, and with them in the side harness, Pedasus; and they two were deathless steeds, but he was mortal. Meanwhile Achilles had called the Myrmidons to battle. Fifty ships had he brought to Troy, and in each there were fifty men. Five leaders they had, and the bravest of the five was Pisander.
Eurydamas's two men returned with some earrings fashioned into three brilliant pendants which glistened most beautifully; while king Pisander son of Polyctor gave her a necklace of the rarest workmanship, and every one else brought her a beautiful present of some kind. Then the queen went back to her room upstairs, and her maids brought the presents after her.
And Pisander, whose spareness of living arose more from a lack of means than from a philosophic aversion to food and good cheer, was soon seated on a bench in one of the cheap restaurants that abounded in the city, balancing a very large goblet, and receiving a volley of questions which Agias was discharging about Valeria's eccentricities, Calatinus's canvass, Arsinoë, Semiramis, and the rest of the household of which he had been a member.
"Pisander, read Pratinas that little poem of Archilochus, whose sentiment I so much admired, when I happened on it yesterday." Pisander fumbled among his rolls, then read, perhaps throwing a bit of sarcasm into his tone: "Gyges' wealth and honours great Come not nigh to me! Heavenly pow'r, or tyrant's state, I'll not envy thee. Swift let any sordid prize Fade and vanish from my eyes!"
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