Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 3.djvu/309

Rh sacus for wine, and Myuns to furnish him with victuals. To these Athenaeus adds two more, Palæscepsis and Percope, to yield him clothing and furniture. This precisely, to this day, is the Abyssinian idea, when they conceive they are entertaining men of rank; for strangers, that come naked and vagabond among them, without name and character, or means of subsistence, such as the Greeks in Abyssinia, are always received as beggars, and neglected as such, till hunger sets their wits to work to provide for the present exigency, and low intrigues and practices are employed afterwards to maintain them in the little advancements which they have acquired, but no honour or confidence follows, or very rarely.

Abyssinia, when the prisoner is condemned in capital cases, he is not again remitted to prison, which is thought cruel, but he is immediately carried away, and the sentence executed upon him. I have given several instances of this in the annals of the country. Abba Salama, the Acab Saat, was condemned by the king the morning he entered Gondar, on his return from Tigré, and immediately hanged, in the garment of a priest, on a tree at the door of the king's palace. Chremation, brother to the usurper Socinios, was executed that same morning; Guebra Denghel, Ras Michael's son-in-law, was likewise executed that same day, immediately after judgment; and so were several others. The same was the practice in Persia, as we learn from Xenophon, and more plainly from Diodorus.