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By the brilliancy of his eyes and the insecurity of his step he seemed to be intoxicated. He wore on his head a crown of withered roses. Myrrhina divined that he was a distinguished citizen coming from a banquet. It was the poet Simalion, a young aristocrat who had won a crown in the Olympian games, and in whom Athens saw revived the inspiration of Anacreon.
He was rich; he had no parents; far away in that land of barbarians he possessed immense flocks, hundreds of slaves who cultivated his fields or worked in his mines; great potteries, and many ships like the three which awaited him in the Piræus; and seeing that the courtesan, with kindly smile, treated him like a generous boy, declining to accept his money, he bought in the Street of the Goldsmiths a prodigious collar of pearls, the despair of the hetæræ, and sent it to Myrrhina before he left the city.
Myrrhina, in her desire to propitiate him who gave himself up to her so completely, wished to leave her whole past behind. She proposed to be a new woman, to put away her sinister cognomen, and begging Bomaro to repeat the most beautiful names of the Iberian women, she chose that of Sónnica as the most pleasing to her ears.
All were nude, the dark and velvety skin of the Egyptians contrasting with the pale countenance of the Greeks and the white and silky flesh of the Asiatics. Sónnica, who was at that time called Myrrhina, wearied of the life of the dicterion. All the women there were slaves whom the Bœotian beat when they allowed a customer to leave discontented.
Coming from one of these orgies he met Myrrhina, and contemplating in the moonlight her youthful beauty, undimmed and almost childlike there in a place frequented by the filthy lupas, he raised his hand to his eyes as if he feared he were being deceived by the aberrations of intoxication.
When he awoke he begged to turn over to her the entire product of his cargo; but Myrrhina, hardly knowing why, refused to accept it, in spite of his urging.
Myrrhina, during the supper at which she saw him for the first time, surprised his eyes fixed on her with the expression of tenderness and respect of one gazing at a goddess impossible of possession.
Faithful to Simalion from gratitude at first, and finally enamored of the poet and of his works, Myrrhina adored him as teacher as well as lover.
Thus two years passed, until one autumn afternoon, stretched on the lawn in his garden, his head resting on the knees of his beautiful inamorata, he heard his verses sung for the last time by the clear voice of Myrrhina, accompanied by the fluttering of her white fingers over the chords of the lyre.
The old courtesans whispered into one another's ears, with a degree of respect, that a petty Asiatic king, on passing through Athens, had given Myrrhina two talents for one visit as much as any republic in Greece would spend in a year and that the beautiful hetæra, unmoved by such a fortune, had suffered his presence only while her clepsydra emptied itself once, for, tired of men, she measured prurience by her water-clock.
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