his banishment from Lesbos, and that his brother Antimenidas entered the service of the king of Babylon. In the same way two Englishmen in the times of the Edwards might have travelled in Germany or become soldiers of the Republic of Florence. Of the Greek oligarch who lent his sword to Nebuchadnezzar--in his wars, perhaps, against Jehoiakim or Pharaoh-Necho--we get a curious glimpse. Alcæus greeted him on his return in a poem of which we possess a fragment, and which may be paraphrased thus: From the ends of the earth thou art come Back to thy home; The ivory hilt of thy blade With gold is embossed and inlaid; Since for Babylon's host a great deed Thou didst work in their need, Slaying a warrior, an athlete of might, Royal, whose height Lacked of five cubits one span-- A terrible man. We can fancy with what delight and curiosity Alcæus, who, as may be gathered from his poems, was an amateur of armor, examined this sword-handle, wrought perhaps from Ethiopian tusks by Egyptian artists, with lotos-flowers or patterns of crocodiles, monkeys, and lions. This story of the polished Greek citizen's adventure among the Jews and Egyptians, known to us through Holy Writ, touches our imagination with the same strange sense of novelty as when we read of the Persian poet Sâdy, a slave in the camp of Richard Coeur de Lion's Crusaders. Considering the life Alcæus led, it is not strange that he should have sung of arms and civic struggles. Many fragments, preserved in all probability from the _Stasiotica_, or Songs of Sedition, which were very popular among the ancients, throw light upon the stormier passages of his history. One of these pieces[93] describes the poet's armory--his polished helmets and white horse-hair plumes, the burnished brazen greaves that hang upon the wall, the linen breastplates and bucklers thrown in heaps about the floor, with Chalkidian blades and girdles and tunics. The most striking point about this fragment is its foppery. Alcæus spares no pains to make us know how bright his armor is, how carefully his greaves are fixed against the wall by pegs you cannot see (#passalois kryptoisi perikeimenai#), how carelessly the girdles and small gear are tossed about in sumptuous disarray. The poem seems to reveal a luxurious nature delighting in military millinery. No Dorian would have described his weapons from this point of view, but would have rather told us how often they had been used with effect in the field. The Æolian character is here tempered with Orientalism. Of the erotic poems of Alcæus, only a very few and inconsiderable fragments have survived. Horace says of them, addressing his lyre: Lesbio primum modulate civi, Qui ferox bello, tamen inter arma, Sive jactatam religârat udo Littore navim, Liberum et Musas Veneremque et illi Semper hærentem puerum canebat; Et Lycum nigris oculis nigroque Crine decorum.[94]