," replied Bias modestly, "which to a short-sighted
fool like myself--may the great goddess not bear me a grudge for
it!--never seemed just in her. Even the mortal who succumbs in a fair
fight ought not to be enraged against the victor. At least, so I was
taught. But what, I ask myself, when I think of the stones which were
flung at Hermon's struggling Maenads, could be less suited for imitation
than two women, one of whom strikes the other?"

"The woman who in her desperation at that blow desires to hang herself,
must produce a still more horrible impression," replied Stephanion.
"Probably she will be represented as Athene releases her from the noose
rather than when, as a punishment for her insolence, she transforms
Arachne into a spider."

"That she might be permitted, in the form of an insect, to make artistic
webs until the end of her life," the slave, now sufficiently well
informed, added importantly. "Since that transformation, as you know, the
spider has been called by the Greeks Arachne. Perhaps--I always thought
so--Hermon will represent her twisting the rope with which she is to kill
herself. You have seen many of our works, and know that we love the
terrible."

"Oh, let me go into your studio!" the maid now entreated no less urgently
than her mistress had done a short time before, but her wish, too,
remained ungratified.

"The sculptors," Bias truthfully asserted, "always kept their workrooms
carefully locked." They were as inaccessible as the strongest fortress,
and it was wise, less on account of curious spectators, from whom there
was nothing to fear, than of the thievish propensities of the people. The
statues, by Archias's orders, were to be executed in chryselephantine
work, and the gold and ivory which this required might only too easily
awaken the vice of cupidity in the honest and frugal Biamites. So nothing
could be done about it, not to mention the fact that he was forbidden, on
pain of being sold to work in a stone quarry, to open the studio to any
one without his master's consent.

So the maid, too, was obliged to submit, and the sacrifice was rendered
easier for her because, just at that moment, a young female slave called
her back to the tent where Chrysilla, Daphne's companion, a matron who
belonged to a distinguished Greek family, needed her services.

Bias, rejoicing that he had at last learned, without exposing his own
ignorance, the story of the much-discussed Arachne, returned to t