As you go from the theatre to the Acropolis is the tomb of Calus. This Calus, his sister’s son and art-pupil, Dædalus murdered and fled to Crete: and afterwards escaped into Sicily to Cocalus. And the temple of Æsculapius, in regard to the statues of the god and his sons and also the paintings, is well worth seeing. And there is in it a spring, in which they say Halirrhothius the son of Poseidon was drowned by Ares for having seduced his daughter, and this was the first case of trial for murder. Here too among other things is a Sarmatic coat of mail: anyone looking at it will say that the Sarmatians come not a whit behind the Greeks in the arts. For they have neither iron that they can dig nor do they import it, for they have less idea of barter than any of the barbarians in those parts. This deficiency they meet by the following invention. On their spears they have bone points instead of iron, and bows and arrows of cornel wood, and bone points to their arrows: and they throw lassoes at the enemy they meet in battle, and gallop away and upset them when they are entangled in these lassoes. And they make their coats of mail in the following manner. Everyone rears a great many mares, being as they are a nomadic tribe, the land not being divided into private allotments, and indeed growing nothing but forest timber. These mares they use not only for war, and sacrifice to the gods of the country, but also for food. And after getting together a collection of hoofs they clean them and cut them in two, and make of them something like dragons’ scales. And whoever has not seen a dragon has at any rate seen a pine nut still green: anyone therefore comparing the state of the hoof to the incisions apparent on pine nuts would get a good idea of what I mean. These they perforate, and having sewn them together with ligaments of horses and oxen make them into coats of mail no less handsome and strong than Greek coats of mail: for indeed whether they are struck point-blank or shot at they are proof. But linen coats of mail are not equally useful for combatants, for they admit the keen thrust of steel, but are some protection to hunters, for the teeth of lions and panthers break off against them. And you may see linen coats of mail hung up in other temples and in the Gryneum, where is a most beautiful grove of Apollo, where the trees both cultivated and wild please equally both nose and eye. CHAPTER XXII.