Amb. (in continuation).
. . . In the fourth year we reached the royal residence,
But found the Sovereign absent on a progress, 100
Gone with his army to the Golden Mountains,
To take his ease, and purge his royal person;
There he remained eight months.
Dic. When did he close
His course of medicine?
Amb. With the full of the moon
He rose, and left his seat, returning homeward:
There he admitted us to an audience,
And entertained us at a royal banquet
With a service of whole oxen baked in crust.
Dic. Oxen in crust! what lies, what trumpery! 110
Did ever am mortal hear the like?
Amb. Besides they treated us with a curious bird,
Much bigger than our own Cleonymus.
'Tis called the Chousibus.
Dic. Ay, by that same token
We're choused of our two drachmas.
Amb. Finally,
We've brought you here a nobleman, Shamartabas
By name, by rank and office the King's Eye.
Dic, God send a crow to peck it out, I say,
And yours the Ambassador's into the bargain!
Her. Let the King's Eye come forward.
Dic. Hercules! 120
What's here? an eye for the head of a ship![1] what point,
What headland is he weathering? what's your course?
What makes you steer so steadily and so slowly?
- ↑ The imaginative spirit of antiquity had transformed the head of a ship into the likeness of a human face; the keel served for a nose, a painted eye being inserted on each side, and a portion of the convex projections of the stern was coloured red, to represent a pair of cheeks, whence the epithet "red-cheeked" is applied to ships in Homer. The face thus produced was appropriated to Medusa by the addition of two snakes diverging from it, and running along the gunwale (according to Hipponax's description "as if they were going to bite the head of the steersman"). The whole vessel was thus converted into the form of a protecting amulet. It appears by what Herodotus says of the oracle addressed to the Siphnians, that the "red cheeks" must have gone out of fashion in his time; but the "eye" is still universal in the Mediterranean, and the writer of this note has seen the snake in its proper position or direction on the gunwale of small craft in the harbour of Valetta and in the Bay of Cadiz.
