lomon had forty thousand stalls for mules and for the horses for
his chariots, and twelve thousand for his cavalry; barley also and straw
for the horses were brought daily from the provinces. Thirty measures of
fine flour, and threescore measures of other meal; an hundred baths of
different wines; ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and
three hundred sheep, not counting harts and roebucks, and fallowdeer,
and fatted fowl,--all this, passing through the hands of twelve officers,
went daily for the table of Solomon, as well as for his court, his
retinue, and his guard. Threescore warriors, out of a number of five
hundred of the most stalwart and most valiant in all his army, held
watch by turns in the inner chambers of the palace. Five hundred
bucklers, covered with plates of gold, did the king command to be made
for his bodyguards.

CHAPTER TWO

II.

Whatsoever the eyes of the king might desire, he kept not from them; and
withheld not his heart from any joy. Seven hundred wives had the king,
and three hundred concubines, without counting slaves and dancers. And
all of them did Solomon charm with his love, for God had endowed him
with such an inexhaustible strength of passion as was not given to
ordinary men.

He loved the white-faced, black-eyed, red-lipped Hittites for their
vivid but momentary beauty, that bursts into blossom just as early and
enchantingly, and fades just as rapidly as the flower of the narcissus;
the swarthy, tall, vehement Philistines, with wiry, curly locks, who wore
golden, tinkling armlets upon their wrists, golden hoops upon their
shoulders, and broad anklets, joined by a thin little chain, upon both
ankles; gentle, diminutive, lithe Ammorites formed without a blemish,
whose faithfulness and submissiveness in love had passed into a proverb;
women out of Assyria, who put their eyes in painting to make them seem
more elongated, and who ate out with acid blue stars upon their
foreheads and cheeks; well-schooled, gay and witty daughters of Sidon,
who knew well how to sing and dance, as well as to play upon harps,
lutes and flutes, to the accompaniment of tabours; xanthochroous women
of AEgypt, indefatigable in love and insane in jealousy; voluputous
Babylonians, whose entire body underneath their raiment was as smooth
as marble, because they eradicated the hair upon it with a special
paste; virgins of Baktria, who stained their nails and hair a fiery-red
colour, and wore w