An extraordinary realisation of these famous and fabulous beings was afforded to the people of Stuttgard at the great Festival held in that city by the Grand-Duke of Wurtemburg on the occasion of his marriage with the Margravine of Brandenburg in the year 1609. The doings of the Festival were illustrated by Balthazar Kuchlein in a volume of 236 plates. A grand procession was a marked feature in the rejoicings, and in this procession we see three of these headless men riding on gaily caparisoned and prancing steeds, besides "Tempus" with his winged hourglass; "Labor," dressed as a rustic, and bearing in one hand a beehive, and in the other a spade; and "Fama," a winged lady-fair on horseback, and bearing scroll and trumpet. In this grand but heterogeneous cavalcade we also find, amongst many others, the counterfeit presentments of Julius Cæsar, Alexander of Macedon, Hector of Troy, Diana, Jupiter, Sol, Prudentia, Justicia, Fortitudo, and Abundancia--a strange medley, but doubtless a pageant well pleasing to the burghers of Stuttgard, and to the countless throngs drawn within their city walls.
Pliny gravely writes of the Fanesii, a tribe in the far north of Scandinavia, whose ears were so long that they could cover up their whole body with them; while the author of "Guerino Meschino" speaks of Indians with feet so large that they carried them over their heads as sunshades. Their means of locomotion must have been, under these circumstances, decidedly curious.
Amongst one-eyed people we have the Arimaspians and the Cyclops. The former were a race in Scythia, and were legendarily supposed to be in constant war with the gryphons, as elsewhere we find recorded the continuous hostilities between the pigmies and the cranes. They are referred to by Milton in his "Paradise Lost." The Cyclops were giants, whose business it was to forge for Vulcan; their single eye was placed in the centre of their foreheads. Of these the most notable was the great giant Polyphemus, the defeated and blinded foe of Ulysses:--
"Roused with the sound, the mighty family Of one-eyed brothers hasten to the shore, And gather round the bellowing Polypheme."[22]
All the departures from the ordinary human type that we have hitherto considered sink into insignificance when we come to the great Briaræus, the fifty-headed and hundred-handed giant, and his companions:--