“His companions went home no more sober than that one.  He is a pretty boy, and pretty Chloes lover besides—­she will look for him in vain this morning.”

“And to-morrow too perhaps,” answered another; “for if the fat king sees her, poor Damon will have seen the last of her.”

But the fat king, as Euergetes was called by the Alexandrians, and, following their example, by all the rest of Egypt, was not just then thinking of Chloe, nor of any such person; he was in the bath attached to his splendidly fitted residence.  Divested of all clothing, he was standing in the tepid fluid which completely filled a huge basin of white marble.  The clear surface of the perfumed water mirrored statues of nymphs fleeing from the pursuit of satyrs, and reflected the shimmering light of numbers of lamps suspended from the ceiling.  At the upper end of the bath reclined the bearded and stalwart statue of the Nile, over whom the sixteen infant figures—­representing the number of ells to which the great Egyptian stream must rise to secure a favorable inundation—­clambered and played to the delight of their noble father Nile and of themselves.  From the vase which supported the arm of the venerable god flowed an abundant stream of cold water, which five pretty lads received in slender alabaster vases, and poured over the head and the enormously prominent muscles of the breast, the back and the arms of the young king who was taking his bath.

“More, more—­again and again,” cried Euergetes, as the boys began to pause in bringing and pouring the water; and then, when they threw a fresh stream over him, he snorted and plunged with satisfaction, and a perfect shower of jets splashed off him as the blast of his breath sputtered away the water that fell over his face.

At last he shouted out:  “Enough!” flung himself with all his force into the water, that spurted up as if a huge block of stone had been thrown into it, held his head for a long time under water, and then went up the marble steps of the bath shaking his head violently and mischievously in his boyish insolence, so as thoroughly to wet his friends and servants who were standing round the margin of the basin; he suffered himself to be wrapped in snowy-white sheets of the thinnest and finest linen, to be sprinkled with costly essences of delicate odor, and then he withdrew into a small room hung all round with gaudy hangings.

There he flung himself on a mound of soft cushions, and said with a deep-drawn breath:  “Now I am happy; and I am as sober again as a baby that has never tasted anything but its mother’s milk.  Pindar is right! there is nothing better than water! and it slakes that raging fire which wine lights up in our brain and blood.  Did I talk much nonsense just now, Hierax?”

The man thus addressed, the commander-in-chief of the royal troops, and the king’s particular friend, cast a hesitating glance at the bystanders; but, Euergetes desiring him to speak without reserve, he replied: