Contrary to the fashion prevalent in modern times the bosom, however, was always closely covered, because being extremely full shaped it began very early to lose its firmness and beauty.[227] Earrings, set with Red-Sea pearls of great price, depended from their ears, and an orbicular crown studded with Indian jewels surmounted and contrasted strikingly with their dark locks. Add to these the jewelled throat bands, and costly and glittering necklaces. Their cheeks though sometimes pale by nature, blushed with rouge,[228] and they even possessed the art to superinduce over this artificial complexion that peach-like purple bloom which belongs to the very earliest, dewiest dawn of beauty. To the tint of the rose they could likewise add that of the lily. White paint was in common use,[229] not merely among unmarried women, and ladies of equivocal reputation, but with matrons the chastest and most prudent in Athens, for we find that pattern of an Attic gentlewoman, the wife of Ischomachos, practising after marriage every delusive art of the toilette.[230] ----- Footnote 227: Lucian. Amor. § 41. Homer in numerous passages celebrates the deep bosoms of his country women, and Anacreon, also, touches more than once on the same topic. Footnote 228: Anchusa. Theoph. Hist. Plant. vii. 8. 3. Dion. Chrysost. i. 262. Poll. vii. 95. Aristoph. Lysist. 46. et Schol. Muret. Not. in Xen. Cyrop. p. 743, seq. Xen. Cyrop. i. 3. 2. Footnote 229: Poll. v. 101, vii. 95. Footnote 230: Xenoph. Œconom. x. 2, 60. ----- It by no means follows that all this attention[231] to dress had any other object than to please their husbands; for the Turkish Sultanas who pass their lives in the most rigid seclusion are no less sumptuous in their apparel; but we know that at Athens, as in London, much of this care was designed to excite admiration out of doors. For it is highly erroneous to transfer to Athens the ideas of female seclusion acquired from travellers in the East, where no such rigid seclusion was ever known. Husbands, indeed, who had cause, or supposed they had, to be jealous, might be put on the rack by beholding the crowds of admirers who flocked around their wives the moment they issued into the streets. But there was no remedy. The laws and customs of the country often forced the women abroad to assist at processions and perform their devotions at the shrines of various goddesses.[232] ----- Footnote 231: Cf. Xen. de Vect. iv. 8. Footnote 232: