A. Milesian hangings line your walls, you scent
Your limbs with sweetest perfume, royal myndax[[429]]
Piled on the burning censor, fills the air
With costly fragrance.
B. Mark you that, my friend!
Knew you before of such a fumigation?[[430]]
Mention is likewise made among the ancients of purple tapestry, inwrought with pearls and gold.[[431]]
Carthage enjoyed celebrity for its manufacture of carpets and variegated pillows,[[432]] a piece of luxury which, as we have seen above, had already been introduced in the heroic ages; for Homer, in innumerable passages, speaks of rare and costly carpets, and these were not only spread over couches and seats, but over the floor likewise.[[433]] Rolled up, they would occasionally appear to have served for pillows. The manufacture of carpets had, moreover, been carried to considerable perfection, for the poet speaks of some with a soft pile on both sides, which were evidently very splendid.[[434]] Theocritus,[[435]] too, in his Adoniazusæ, enumerates, among the luxuries of the youthful God,
Carpets of purple, softer far than sleep,[[436]]
Woven in Milesian looms.