Pliny, as we have seen, states, that the practice came from Sicily. There it had been long in use. There is a curious reference to the custom in Cicero's Tusculan Questions, v. 20. Speaking of the tyrant, Dionysius he says--Quin etiam ne tonsori collum committeret, tondere suas filias docuit. Ita sordido ancillarique artificio regiæ virgines, ut tonstriculæ tondebant barbam et capillum patris. For, not liking to trust his throat to a barber, he taught his daughters to shave him, and thus these royal virgins, descending to this coarse, servile vocation, became little, she barbers, and clipped their father's beard and hair. There is a curious passage in Pliny which not only proves, that barbers' shops were common in his time, but shows the very ancient employment of cobweb, as a styptic. In lib. xxix. 36, he says--Fracto capiti aranei tela ex oleo et aceto imposita, non nisi vulnere sanato, abscedit. Hæc et vulneribus tonstrinarum sanguinem sistit. Spiders' web, with oil and vinegar, applied to a broken head, adheres, till the wound heals. This also stops the bleeding from cuts, in barbers' shops. Razors were sharpened, some two thousand years ago, very much as they are at present. Pliny devotes sec. 47, lib. xxxvi. to hones and whetstones, oil stones and water stones--quarta ratio--he says--est saliva hominis proficientium in torstrinarum officinis--the fourth kind is such as are used in the barbers' shops, and which the man softens with his saliva. Most common, proverbial sayings are, doubtless, of great antiquity. Chopping-blocks with a razor is a common illustration of the employment of a subtle ingenuity, upon coarse and uninteresting topics. Thus Goldsmith, in his Retaliation, says of Burke-- In short, 'twas his fate, unemploy'd, or in place, sir, To eat mutton cold, and chop blocks with a razor. The latter illustration is as old as Livy--_novacula cotem discindere_. The Romans made a prodigious fuss, about their beards. The first crop, called _prima barba_, and sometimes _lanugo_, was, according to Petronius, consecrated to some god. Suetonius says, in his Life of Nero, 12--Gymnico quod in septis edebat, inter buthysiæ apparatum, barbam primam posuit, conditamque in auream pyxidem, et pretiosissimis margaritis adornatam, capitolio consecravit.--During the games, which he had given in the enclosures, and in the very midst of the splendor of the sacrifice, for the first time, he laid down his beard, and having placed it in a golden box, adorned with precious stones, he made a sacred deposit thereof, in the capitol.