The tale runs that Candaules exposed his wife in nudity to the gaze of Gyges, his satellite and favourite, in order to convince him that her beauty as a woman was beyond compare. She, however, discovered the outrage, which it was intended to conceal from her, by chance seeing Gyges, who had been hidden in her sleeping chamber, slip out of the door. Indignant at the outrage, she received Gyges in audience the following day, and declared to him that, inasmuch as the king had taken this step and permitted Gyges to see what he ought not to have seen, he might select one of two courses, either kill the king as his punishment, and possess himself both of her and the kingdom, or himself die. Gyges selected the first alternative, and after assassinating the king mounted the throne and married the widow. On the other hand the Egyptians represented frequently, or, indeed, for the most part, their statues in the nude to the extent that the male figures merely carried an apron; and in the case of Isis the drapery was indicated by nothing more than a barely perceptible fringe round the legs. This, however, was neither due to a defective sense of shame, nor in virtue of their instinct for the beauty of organic forms. For if we consider their symbolic point of view we can only maintain that what concerned them was not the configuration of a presentment consonant with a spiritual significance, but rather the meaning, the essence and conception of that which the form was intended to present to intelligence; and they permitted the human form to be thus, without reflection upon the further and more remote adequacy of the same to Spirit, in its natural state, which they moreover copied with great closeness to life.