tender cooing of the dove; there were, in the groves around, the tones of the flute, the instrument which sounds the call to pleasure, and summons to the banquet chamber the festive procession and the bridal train.  Beneath the shelter of tents, or of light booths with walls formed by the skilful interlacing of a green mass of boughs, through which the myrtle and the laurel spread their odours, dwelt the fair slaves of the goddess, those whom Pindar called, in the drinking-song which he composed for Theoxenus of Corinth, ‘the handmaids of persuasion.’"[635] Here and there in the precincts, sacred processions took their prescribed way; ablutions were performed; victims led up to the temple; votive offerings hung on the trees; festal dances, it may be, performed; while in the cloister which skirted the peribolus, dealers in shrines and images chaffered with their customers, erotic poets sang their lays, lovers whispered, fortune-tellers plied their trade, and a throng of pilgrims walked lazily along, or sat on the ground, breathing in the soft, moist air, feasting their eyes upon the beauty of upspringing fountain and flowering shrub, and lofty tree, while their ears drank in the cadences of the falling waters, the song of the birds, and the gay music which floated lightly on the summer breeze.

Phoenician temples had sometimes adjuncts, as cathedrals have their chapter-houses and muniment rooms, which were at once interesting and important.  There has been discovered at Athienau in Cyprus—­the supposed site of Golgi—­a ruined edifice, which some have taken for a temple,[636] but which appears to have been rather a repository for votive offerings, a sort of ecclesiastical museum.  A picture of the edifice, as he conceives it to have stood in its original condition, has been drawn by one of its earliest visitants.  “The building,” he says,[637] “was constructed of sun-dried bricks, forming four walls, the base of which rested upon a substruction of solid stone-work.  The walls were covered, as are the houses of the Cypriot peasants of to-day, with a stucco which was either white or coloured, and which was impenetrable by rain.  Wooden pillars with stone capitals supported internally a pointed roof, which sloped at a low angle.  It formed thus a sort of terrace, like the roofs that we see in Cyprus at the present day.  This roof was composed of a number of wooden rafters placed very near each other, above which was spread a layer of rushes and coarse mats, covered with a thick bed of earth well pressed together, equally effective against the entrance of moisture and against the sun’s rays.  Externally the building must have presented a very simple appearance.  In the interior, which received no light except from the wide doorways in the walls, an immovable and silent crowd of figures in stone, with features and garments made more striking by the employment of paint, surrounded, as with a perpetual worship, the mystic cone.  Stone lamps, shaped like diminutive temples, illumined in the corners