resplendent
in all his jewels, at the head of his mail-clad chivalry, rashly
charged the flying hordes of the Ephthalite Huns, and in the very act
of falling into the vast pitfall (engulfing him, his sons, and* his
bravest nobles), into which he had been lured by their feigned retreat,
tore from his right-ear this glory of his reign, and cast it, before
himself, into the abyss, there to be eternally lost amidst the hideous
chaos of crushed man and horse—comforted in death with the assurance
of thus cheating the foe of the most precious trophy of their victory.
Nor could the Huns, though stimulated to the search by the enormous
offers of his Byzantine rival in pomp, the Emperor Anas-tasius, who
promised five hundred weight of gold pieces to the finder, ever succeed
in recovering from the pit of death the so highly-coveted jewel. And
four centuries later the Byzantine historians lament more bitterly over
the single matchless Pearl which fell into the hands of the Turks when
Romanus Diogenes was taken prisoner by Alp Arslan, than for the loss of
all the Asiatic provinces of the Empire, the immediate consequence of
the same disaster.
As
no two Pearls were ever found exactly alike, this circumstance gave
origin to the name " Unio " (unique). But in Low Latin, " Margarita(um)
" and "Perla" became a generic name, " Unio " being restricted to the
fine, spherical specimens. Although the latter were then, as ever, the
most prized, yet the pear-shaped were also admired. These were termed
" Eleuchi." Ladies wore them fastened to their finger-rings ; or two or
three in a cluster in their ears, in which capacity they got the name
of " crotalia" (rattles), from the musical sound they produced in
clashing together. Even "the poorer * classes
* The ancient paste-maters, despite their wonderful skill, must have deemed the Orient of the Pearl beyond the reach of their art, for they
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