Alexander of course slept on a couch of gold. Great Ammon’s son deserved no less a bed; but I can hardly credit the assertion that the sovereign’s tent contained a hundred such beds, and that the tent itself was supported by fifty columns of gold. The beds however may not have been for one individual’s use, and the tent was as vast as a barracks: the couches may therefore have been for the general officers. Five hundred Persians kept guard therein. These were the _Melophores_, the “apple-bearers,” who carried a golden apple on the points of their lances, and who were the admiration of all the maid-servants of the district, attired as the Melophores were in uniforms of purple and yellow. These were surpassed by the thousand archers, in their mantles of flame-colour, violet, or celestial blue. These were irresistible; the ladies at least said so, if the enemy did _not_; but even they achieved fewer conquests (I allude less to the field than the bower) than the five hundred Macedonian Argyraspides, the corps of “silver bucklers,” behind whose shields however beat hearts more easily reached by the feathered shafts of Dan Cupido than by the javelins of the foe. The purple-robed guard of Alexander was his chosen troop, his _cent-garde_, charged with watching over his personal safety, and seeing that he got safely to bed when his divinity was exceedingly drunk. They were terrible coxcombs, were these guards, and would condescend to the folly of flinging eggs at the passers-by, as though they knew no better than military gentlemen returning from Epsom, or a wrathful curate of the district of St. Barnabas pelting an anti-puseyite. These men cared little whether Alexander were a god or not, but they had a firmly fixed idea that their tailor had a family claim upon Olympus. But what were these to Alcisthenes the Sybarite, who has been immortalized by Aristotle? This rather fast individual had a coat of such magnificent material,—the coat worn by Prince Esterhazy, and which that magnate never put on without losing I really _do not_ know how many hundred pounds’ worth of pearls and diamonds, was, in comparison, a coat for the Sybarite’s valet,—Alcisthenes had a habit, I say, of such richness, that, on the day of the festival of Juno, it was exposed on Mount Lacinium, to the veneration of the crowds who annually repaired thither from all parts of Italy. It became the most attractive feature of the festival; and the shrines were passed by, that the pilgrims might fall into ecstasy in presence of Alcisthenes’ coat. It subsequently fell into the hands of old Dionysius,—a Jew in his way, as we all know,—and he sold it for one hundred and twenty talents to the Carthaginians: it was the highest price ever realized for such a garment.