Approaching the foreground, and distributed in groups, were the principal captives, and some of the heroes. Helen was sitting attended by her maids, one of whom was tying her sandal, and gazed upon by Briseis, Diomed, and Iphis. Near her, were some of both the nations whose miseries she had caused. The chief of these were the captive Trojan princesses: Andromache, with her infant, and one of her sisters, Priam’s daughter, Medisecasta, veiled; but the poor virgin Polyxena was bareheaded, with her hair gathered into a knot, as became her years. In front of the city, the groups were composed of more wretched captives still, in various attitudes; some thrown upon couches, others kneeling, some clinging to their native altars, and, chief in misery, the sad Cassandra, with her arms round the Palladium, crouched upon the earth as Ajax was drawing nigh the altar, where the Atridæ appeared ready to receive his oath. Some of the circles of the lower town were laid open where this was taking place. There, boys were seen clinging to the altars, or infants to their mothers, while Neoptolemus was continuing the work of slaughter. Such were the grand features of the picture. Some touches of common nature we find there, were, as if to give truth to the scene. For instance, the horse rolling on the sandy shore, and servants loading a beast of burden[103]. The other picture was the Descent of Ulysses, described by Pausanias with even less feeling than the first. It is, however, evident that the reedy Acheron, with Charon’s boat, occupied the foreground; and that one of the figures in the boat was a person initiated into the Eleusinian rites, by the covered basket she held, thus signifying the mysterious passage between life and death. Beyond the river, the demon Eurynomus, of an unearthly hue, was fitly placed, sitting on the skin of a vulture, and gnawing the bones of the dead[104]. Ulysses, performing the incantation, was properly conspicuous; and the rest of the picture was filled with the women and heroes whom he saw or spoke to while in the kingdom of Pluto. The clumsy way in which these pictures, and those in the Temple of Minerva, in Bœotia, are described by Pausanias, who saw them six hundred years after they were painted, has led even Fuseli to fancy that all the figures were of equal size and at equal distance from the spectator. But the inference is surely not just; for an ignorant man would probably (especially if the horizon were placed high in the picture) thus speak of one group as _above_ another instead of _beyond_ it.