The greed thus fed, but not satiated, seemed to turn the brains of the conquerors and to transform them into veritable barbarians, as the Greeks denominated them. Works of art were ruthlessly destroyed, bronze statues were melted for the sake of their metal, and rarest marbles broken in the abandon of resuscitated savagery. Thus perished the colossal figure of Juno from Samos, so large that it required four oxen to carry away its head; the statue of Paris presenting the apple of discord to Venus; the famous obelisk surmounted by a female figure that turned with the wind, and covered with exquisite bas-reliefs; the equestrian statue of Pegasus; the “Hercules” of Lysippus, whose thumb was the size of a living man’s waist; the bronze ass which Augustus Cæsar had ordered to commemorate the victory of Antium; the ancient group of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus; and the statue of Helen of Troy. Out of the ruin of such inestimable treasures of art the four horses which now adorn the porticos of St. Mark’s in Venice were saved from the general wreck, to stand as a monument among the Venetians not of the glory, but of the vandalism of their ancestors. But more than the spoils of art and treasure, the sacred relics stored in Constantinople excited the saintly cupidity of the conquerors. In their greed for these objects men utterly forgot the divine law, and silenced the last remonstrance of human conscience. Martin Litz, Abbot of Basel, worming his way through the pillage piles in a church, came upon an old Greek monk at prayer. “Your relics or your life!” was the alternative offered him. Martin thus procured the key to an iron safe and rifled it of bones and jewels, without thought that the eighth commandment held good as between a Romanist and heretics. Gunther, a German monk, telling the story of what he witnessed at this time, rejoices that thus was secured a piece of the True Cross, the skeleton of John the Baptist, and an arm of St. James. As the transportation of these articles to the West was accomplished without their having been again stolen by some shrewder saint or sunk to the bottom of the sea, Gunther believed that they had been watched over by angels especially sent from heaven to convoy the treasure. It would seem that some ghostly intervention must have restrained John the Baptist and St. James from visiting their wrath upon these unconscionable robbers of their bones. The abbey of Cluny received thus the head of St. Clement; the cathedral of Amiens the head of John the Baptist; and the various churches of Europe such articles as Jacob’s pillow at Bethel, the rod of Moses, the wood of the True Cross, the drops of blood shed in Gethsemane, the sponge and reed of Calvary, the first tooth and locks of the infant Jesus, a piece of the bread of the Last Supper, a tear of our Lord, a thorn from His crown, the finger which Thomas thrust into His side, the shirt and girdle of the Virgin Mary. But these did not satisfy the relic-hunters.