The hanging lamps in the form of ships mentioned by our poet would have carried the oil vessels round their sides. A most interesting example of a lamp of this kind is given in the _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_ (Smith and Cheetham). It represents a small vessel with a mast and sail, containing two figures, one steering, and the other looking out from the prow. These figures are either Peter and Paul or more probably Christ and Peter. The symbolism of the ship for the Church is too familiar to need comment; the mast in the centre, without which the ship is unsafe, as S. Ambrose says, typifies the cross without which the church is unable to stand. The galley form of lamp was well known also in antiquity. In the Christian era it was only one of the many beautiful and suggestive forms in which lamps were made; some resembled birds, crystal fish, or shells, others again were bowls of white or emerald glass. [Illustration: FIG. 21.--Sixth-century Candlestick.] In the sanctuary there would have been suspended large single lamps which burnt perpetually (_Akoimetoi_). A very fine single Byzantine lamp of this kind is shown in the fifteenth-century picture by Marco Marziale in the National Gallery, in which the interior of S. Mark’s figures as the temple. In Fig. 20 we give a restoration of fragments of a beautiful early Christian bowl-shaped lamp bearing a votive inscription figured by Rossi. On Mount Athos Dr. Covel noticed a lamp of beaten gold set with jewels. The treasury of S. Mark’s probably still contains lamps which hung in S. Sophia: one of especial beauty is a glass bowl with circles cut on the outside and attached to a metal rim on which is inscribed in Greek, “St. Panteleon, succour thy servant Zacchariah, Archbishop of Iberia, Amen.”[198] In illustration of the tree-like candelabra which stood above the beam of the iconostasis, and round the ambo, we may mention the well-known classical examples. A lamp-bearer in the museum at Brussels is described as “an _arbuste_ of considerable size and irregular trunk and branches with lamps suspended from the extremities of its boughs.” Anastasius mentions a “tree of bronze with candlesticks to the number of fifty in which were placed wax candles, thirty-six lamps as well hung from the boughs.” Paulinus also speaks of hanging candelabra at Nola “with branches like a vine bearing little glass cups which resembled burning fruit; when they were lighted it was like the sudden burst into life of spring flowers.” [Illustration: FIG. 22.--Candlesticks.] Besides all these oil lamps there would have been a great number of standing candlesticks in the sanctuary. The Anonymous speaks of some the height of a man. One constant type is represented in Fig. 21; this is inlaid in mother-of-pearl on the apse walls at Parenzo, and is of Justinian’s time. Fig. 22 shows two others from the _Menologium_. Wax candles, which are frequently mentioned, were patterned and coloured.