Every person is proud of his famous friends. If we know a great artist, engineer, or traveler, we think we are fortunate. Can you imagine having so many famous friends that you could not count them? This has been the good fortune of marionettes. The names of all their Egyptian friends seem to be lost. But it is not so with their Grecian friends. Archimedes, Socrates, and Plato are the names of three famous friends that have come down to us. Archimedes, the greatest inventor of his time, liked puppets, it is said, because he could devise so many clever ways of making them move and appear human. Socrates probably cared nothing for the mechanism. He enjoyed taking a puppet in his own hands, asking it clever questions, and then furnishing the equally clever answers. These most unusual conversations would soon gather about him a crowd of Athenian men and women, who were greatly interested in his humor, irony, and whimsical paradoxes. The dialogues would probably go on and on until his scolding wife, Xantippe, appeared. Plato also cared little for their mechanism, but like his great master, Socrates, was interested only when they were made to talk about the very serious things of life, or when he saw them representing the gods and heroes in the beautiful scenes of the plays given on the small stages built for them in one part of the great theaters. Kings and queens were among the famous Roman friends of puppets. You may remember that puppets were found in the tomb of the Empress Marie and that the Emperor Antiochus cared so much for them that he neglected the affairs of his great empire. He had clever puppet makers as part of his royal household, and delighted in planning the plays they were to give. He designed the stage settings, and he sometimes assisted the royal puppeteers. In India, China, and Japan, the great rulers were greatly interested in puppets, and required their presence at court. One of the most interesting stories of a royal friend of the marionettes is that of the Emperor Charles V of Spain. This strange ruler’s reason was clouded. His devoted minister tried in many ways to divert his beloved king, and finally succeeded when he found that the king could be interested in puppets. Puppet soldiers, puppet generals, puppet kings caught his imagination. The cleverest hands of Spain made them, by the hundred, for His Majesty, who handled them with such interest and pleasure that his reason was finally restored. Two other great kings could be added to the list of royal friends—they are Saladin and Louis XIV of France.