72 CONSTANTINOPLE. 
GHAr. now in the Bodleian were originally in his pos- 
• session; particularly a most exquisite copy of 
the Four Gospels, of the tenth or eleventh 
century, written throughout, upon vellum, in 
the same minute and beautiful characters. 
Athieicv. The exercises of the Athletce, whether derived 
or not by the Turhs from the subjugated Greeks, 
are still preserved, and often exhibited, in dif- 
ferent towns of the empire'. The combatants 
(l) " The combats of wrestling, which I have witnessed near 
Smyrna, are the 5ame as those which the antient writers describe ; 
and nothins^ strikes a traveller in the East more than the evident 
adherence to customs of remote ages. 
'The habit of 'girding the loins' was not formerly more 
general than it is now, in the countries of the Levant. The effect of 
this on the form of the body cannot fail of being observed at the baths, 
in which the waists of the persons employed there are remarkable for 
their smallness. The long sleeve worn at this time in all the East is 
mentioned by Strabo, and Herodotus, lib. vii. The head was shorn 
formerly, as now ; and the persons of common rank wore a lower sort 
of turban, and those of dignity a high one ; as is the case to this day 
in Turkey. {Salm. Plin. Exc. 393.) The following passage in 
Plutarch {Vit. Themist.) describes a custom with which every one is 
acquainted: The Persians carefully watch not only their wives, but 
their slaves and concubines ; so that they are seen hy no one : at home, 
they live shut up ; and ivhen on a journey, they ride in chariots covered 
in on all sides' We find that antimony, the stibium of Pliny, wLich 
is now employed by the women in the East, who draw a small wire 
dipped in it between the two eye-lids, and give the eye an expression 
much admired by them, was used in former times. Jezabel ' put her 
eyes in paint,' (2 Kings, ix. 30.) and Xenophon calls this, oip^dX/aav 
v7ra'Y^a(pr,. (f)e Cyri Jnst.) The corn is now trodden out by oxen or 
horses, in an open area, as in the time of Homer ; (//. T. v. 4D5.) 
and a passage of that poet, relating to fishing, would have been under- 
stood, 
