the midday sun
At this news , which spread rapidly through the crowd , the strong men elbowed their way toward the front ranks ; the agile boys , embracing the shafts of the columns , sought to climb up to the capitals and there seat themselves ; others , not without having skinned their knees against the bark , succeeded in perching themselves comfortably enough in the Y of some tree-branch . The women lifted their little children upon their shoulders , warning them to hold tightly to their necks . Those who had the good fortune to dwell on the street along which Candaules and Nyssia were about to pass , leaned over from the summit of their roofs , or , rising on their elbows , abandoned for a time the cushions upon which they had been reclining . A murmur of satisfaction and gratified expectation ran through the crowd , which had already been waiting many long hours , for the arrows of the midday sun were commencing to sting . The heavy-armed warriors , with cuirasses of bull 's - hide covered with overlapping plates of metal , helmets adorned with plumes of horse-hair dyed red , _ knemides _ or greaves faced with tin , baldrics studded with nails , emblazoned bucklers , and swords of brass , rode behind a line of trumpeters who blew with might and main upon their long tubes , which gleamed under the sunlight . The horses of these warriors were all white as the feet of Thetis , and might have served , by reason of their noble paces and purity of breeds , as models for those which Phidias at a later day sculptured upon the metopes of the Parthenon . At the head of this troop rode Gyges , the well-named , for his name in the Lydian tongue signifies beautiful .