her fingers to summon her slaves, and the poor girls have hastened to accomplish this prodigious piece of work.  First, the applier of cosmetics has effaced the wrinkles from the brows of her mistress, and, then, with her saliva, has prepared her rouge; then, with a needle, she has painted her mistress’ eyelashes and eyebrows, forming two well-arched and tufted lines of jetty hue, which unite at the root of the nose.  This operation completed, she has washed Sabina’s teeth with rosin from Scio, or more simply, with pulverized pumice-stone, and, finally, has overspread her entire countenance with the white powder of lead which was much used by the Romans at that early day.

Then came the ornatrix, or hairdresser.  The fair Romans dyed their hair blonde, and when the dyeing process was not sufficient, they wore wigs.  This example was followed by the artists, who put wigs on their statues; in France they would put on crinoline.  Ancient head-dresses were formidable monuments held up with pins of seven or eight inches in length.  One of these pins, found at Herculaneum, is surmounted with a Corinthian capital upon which a carved Venus is twisting her hair with both hands while she looks into a mirror that Cupid holds up before her.  The mirrors of those ancient days—­let us exhaust the subject!—­were of polished metal; the richest were composed of a plate of silver applied upon a plate of gold and sustained by a carved handle of wood or ivory; and Seneca exclaimed, in his testy indignation, “The dowry that the Senate once bestowed upon the daughter of Scipio would no longer suffice to pay for the mirror of a freedwoman!”

At length, Sabina’s hair is dressed:  Heaven grant that she may be pleased with it, and may not, in a fit of rage, plunge one of her long pins into the naked shoulder of the ornatrix!  Now comes the slave who cuts her nails, for never would a Roman lady, or a Roman gentleman either, who had any self-respect, have deigned to perform this operation with their own hands.  It was to the barber or tonsor that this office was assigned, along with the whole masculine toilet, generally speaking; that worthy shaved you, clipped you, plucked you, even washed you and rubbed your skin; perfumed you with unguents, and curried you with the strigilla if the slaves at the bath had not already done so.  Horace makes great sport of an eccentric who used to pare his own nails.

[Illustration:  Lamps of Earthenware and Bronze found at Pompeii.]

Sabina then abandons her hands to a slave who, armed with a set of small pincers and a penknife (the ancients were unacquainted with scissors), acquitted themselves skilfully of that delicate task—­a most grave affair and a tedious operation, as the Roman ladies wore no gloves.  Gesticulation was for them a science learnedly termed chironomy.  Like a skilful instrument, pantomime harmoniously accompanied the voice.  Hence, all those striking expressions that we find in authors,—­“the subtle devices of the fingers,” as Cicero has it; the “loquacious hand” of Petronius.  Recall to your memory the beautiful hands of Diana and Minerva, and these two lines of Ovid, which naturally come in here: