Thus she met Bomaro, a young Iberian merchant from Zacynthus, who had come to Athens with three ships laden with hides. The courtesan was attracted by his sweetness, which contrasted with the rudeness of the other merchants brutalized by their contact with the great ports. He spoke little and blushed, as if the silence of his long stays at sea had given him the timidity of a virgin. If she forced him to relate his adventures as a navigator he did so with simplicity, without mentioning the dangers he encountered. He displayed particularly a childish admiration for Grecian culture. Myrrhina, during the supper at which she saw him for the first time, surprised his eyes fixed on her with the expression of tenderness and respect of one gazing at a goddess impossible of possession. The navigator, reared among barbarians, in a remote colony scarcely retaining traces of its mother Greece, began to interest the courtesan more than the young Athenians and opulent merchants who surrounded her. Tremulous and hesitant he craved the grace of a single night, and spent it near her with more admiration than enjoyment, adoring her regal beauty, thrilled by her voice, put to sleep by it like a warm maternal lullaby, accompanied by the lyre. When he awoke he begged to turn over to her the entire product of his cargo; but Myrrhina, hardly knowing why, refused to accept it, in spite of his urging. He was rich; he had no parents; far away in that land of barbarians he possessed immense flocks, hundreds of slaves who cultivated his fields or worked in his mines; great potteries, and many ships like the three which awaited him in the Piræus; and seeing that the courtesan, with kindly smile, treated him like a generous boy, declining to accept his money, he bought in the Street of the Goldsmiths a prodigious collar of pearls, the despair of the hetæræ, and sent it to Myrrhina before he left the city. Afterwards he came back many times. He could not decide to return to his country. He set sail with his flotilla, but in the next port he took on a cargo for Athens, paying no regard to the price, and scarcely came to anchor in the Piræus before he rushed to the courtesan's house, nor could resolve to leave until he suspected Myrrhina's weariness of his presence. The courtesan finally became accustomed to this submissive lover, ever at her feet, who was ready to die for her, showing his adoration with the fervor of a foreigner, so different from the cynical and mocking courtesy of the Athenians. She called him "little brother," and this word, which the hetæræ used with young lovers, gradually took on her lips a warmth of sincere affection. When he was delayed in returning from the islands she longed for his presence, and when she saw him at the door she ran to him with outstretched arms, in a transport of joy such as her other friends never witnessed.