But the old witticism, attributed to the incorrigible Rhodian sensualist, Xenarchus, gives quite a different reason to account for the supposed happiness of these insects: Happy the Cicadas’ lives, Since they all have voiceless wives![865] Plutarch, reasoning upon that singular Pythagorean precept which forbid the wife to admit swallows in the house, remarks: “Consider, and see whether the swallow be not odious and impious ... because she feedeth upon flesh, and, besides, killeth and devoureth especially grasshoppers (Cicadas), which are sacred and musical.”[866] The Athenians were so attached to the Cicadas, that their elders were accustomed to fasten golden images of them in their hair. Thucidides incidentally remarks that this custom ceased but a little before his time. He adds, also, that the fashion prevailed, too, for a long time with the elders of the Ionians, from their affinity to the Athenians.[867] This singular form, for their ornamental combs, seems to have been adopted originally from the predilection of the Athenians for whatever bore any affinity to themselves, who boasted of being autochthones or aboriginal. It is sung of the Athenians: Blithe race! whose mantles were bedeck’d With golden grasshoppers, in sign that they Had sprung, like those bright creatures, from the soil Whereon their endless generations dwelt. Mr. Michell supposes the Athenians to have imitated in this instance their prototypes, the Egyptians; for as they, he adds, wore their favorite symbol, the Scarabæus, in this manner, so Attic pride set up a rival in the head-dress thus introduced by Cecrops and his followers.[868] From a very ancient writer,[869] we have similar ornaments ascribed to the Samians. They also most probably derived this fashion from the early Athenians.[870] It seems, from the following lines of Asius,[871] that Cicadas were also worn as ornaments on dresses: Clad in magnificent robes, whose snow-white folds Reach’d to the ground of the extensive earth, And golden knobs on them like grasshoppers. The sound of the Cicada and that of the harp were called by the Greeks by one and the same name; and a Cicada sitting upon a harp was the usual emblem of the science of music. This was accounted for by the following very pleasing and elegant tale: Two rival musicians, Eunomis of Locris and Aristo of Rhegium, when alternately playing upon the harp, the former was so unfortunate as to break a string of his instrument, and by which accident would certainly have lost the prize, when a Cicada, flying to him and sitting upon his harp, supplied the place of the broken string with its melodious voice, and so secured to him an easy victory over his antagonist.[872]