carried at the ‘pompae’ in early Rome; at the high festivals they were placed in front of the Roman doorways.[37] They were sometimes of costly material.[38] But our woman seems to be standing on a platform, and the near presence of the flute-player, and the turning of her body and position of her arms, seem to indicate some difficult dance performed with the big object borne on her head in a small, limited space; hence a kind of old Etruscan dervish-dance of which we have no other knowledge. The two figures next to her are a big and a small man who are cooling their bleeding noses with sponges: the artist gives the atmosphere of the scene after the fight. On one of the other walls in this tomb the boxers are ready for action, raising their cestus-bound fists against each other, one hand closed for attack, the other open for defence, as frequently described in the ancient authors.[39] Cicero tells us that boxers sighed and groaned, in order to increase the force of the blow.[40] These cestus fights must have been terrible. The guard, nowadays less, was then more important than the blow, for it was too dangerous to take the risk of being hit by one’s opponent when attacking him, even if one was confident that one’s own blow would be the harder; one had to play for an opening, at the same time guarding against the single blow which was sufficient to knock a man out. Finally, on the extreme left of the picture (fig. 20) we meet with a scene which is repeated in another picture in the same tomb, as well as in the Tomba del Triclinio: a rider seated sideways and at the same time leading another horse. The race with a led horse was an Oriental custom, and appears for the first time on the Phoenician metal bowls of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. This seat, sideways on the horse, is of Scythian origin, and in Greek art usually characterizes the Amazons. The Etruscans, with their passion for difficult games, evidently combined the two in order to make the races as exciting as possible. [Illustration: FIG. 21. PART OF THE SMALL FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DELLE BIGHE After Arch. Jahrb. 1916] [Illustration: FIG. 22. PART OF THE SMALL FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DELLE BIGHE After Arch. Jahrb. 1916] [Illustration: FIG. 23. SYMPOSIUM IN THE TOMBA DELLE BIGHE] [Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]