Upon none of their weapons, however, did they bestow greater attention than on the sword, which if it did not, as among certain barbarians, constitute one of the objects of their worship,[895] was in most cases their inseparable companion through life, and descended with them even to the grave. Thus we find, that, when Cimon opened, at Scyros, the grave of Theseus, the national hero of Attica, he found beside the skeleton a spearhead and sword of brass.[896] Their blades were of many different shapes and dimensions: they had the long, sharp, double-edged rapier; the short cut and thrust; the crooked scimitar, the sabre, and the broad-sword.[897] These were generally of the finest steel, highly polished, and sometimes damaskened exactly like those blades afterwards manufactured at Damascus. The sheath was sometimes of ivory, sometimes of gold or silver or tin or other inferior metal.[898] To the first-mentioned substance we have an allusion in a saying of Diogenes, who on hearing a handsome young man make use of low language, exclaimed: “How shameless! to draw forth a sword of lead from a sheath of ivory.”[899] The hilts were often extremely superb, of costly materials, and wrought in the most fanciful shapes. We read, for example, of sword-handles studded or inlaid with gold, or even composed entirely of that metal, or of silver.[900] Ivory too, and amber,[901] and terebinth,[902] polished and black as ebony, and a variety of other woods and substances, stained black with nut-gall,[903] were employed for this purpose. The father of Demosthenes, who kept a large manufactory of arms, left behind him a considerable quantity of ivory and gall-nuts[904] which he had purchased as well for his own use as to supply other armourers in a smaller way. Of daggers there were various kinds, some of a larger size, worn suspended on the thigh with the sword, as the hunting knife was by the Persian youth; others much smaller, which seem to have been carried about concealed under the armpit, as is still the fashion in the East. To this practice Socrates alludes in his conversation with Polos of Agrigentum,[905] on the power possessed in states by tyrants, whom he compares to one who should go forth into the marketplace with an enchiridion concealed about him, and for that reason fancy it in his power to take away every man’s life, because he could undoubtedly kill any one he pleased. ----- Footnote 895: