The custom of embroidering such scenes as combats and hunting-incidents seems to have lasted during a long time. According to Herodotus, certain races bordering on the Caspian Sea were accustomed to have figures of animals, flowers, and landscapes delineated on their garments. This custom is mentioned among the pagans by Philostratus, and among Christians by Clement of Alexandria. Pliny, the naturalist, who lived in the first century of our era, also alludes to it on several occasions in his works. Three hundred years later, Amasius, Bishop of Amasia, deplores the folly which “set a great value on this art of weaving, a vain and useless art, which by the combination of the warp and woof imitates painting.” “When persons thus dressed appear in the street,” adds the pious bishop, “the passers-by look at them as walking pictures, and the children point at them with their finger. We see lions, panthers, bears, rocks, woods, hunters; the religiously inclined have Christ, his disciples, and his miracles figured on their garments. Here we see the wedding of Cana, and the pitchers of water turned into wine; there we have the paralytic carrying his bed, or the sinner at the feet of Jesus, or Lazarus being raised from the dead.” We have only to look into the works of the writers of the time of Augustus to learn that the halls in the houses of the wealthy were always hung with tapestry; and that the tables, or rather the beds, upon which the guests were seated, were covered with carpets. The Attalian carpets, which were thus named because they came from the inheritance bequeathed to the Roman people by Attalus, King of Pergamos, were indescribably magnificent. Cicero, who was a connoisseur in such matters, speaks of them with enthusiasm in his works. Under Theodosius I., that is to say, at the time of the decline of the great empire which was soon to break up and be separated, and at last to merge into new nationalities, a contemporaneous historian shows us “the youth of Rome engaged in making tapestry-work.”