At Πєρὶ φυγῆς 20.2 Favorinus introduces an unusual exemplum: if an Ethiopian king wishes to honour one of his subjects he takes off one of his own belts (ζώματα) and gives it to him: αὔτη γὰρ Αἰθιόπων στολή. As long as the recipient wears this, the king's subjects will show him respect; the moment he is deprived of it, he loses his authority. Barigazzi ad loc. notes that the anecdote is otherwise unknown. But this royal belt of the Ethiopians does emerge elsewhere in a slightly different guise. Charicleia, the heroine of Heliodorus' Aethiopica, has a silk ταινία exposed with her, embroidered with an inscription which explains her royal birth and the circumstances of her exposure (ii 31.3, cf. iv 8.6). On her return to Ethiopia she deliberately wears the belt. When about to be sacrificed, she presents it to her mother Queen Persinna, and her royal birth is conveniently established at the eleventh hour. The parallel in Favorinus is a new illustration of one of Heliodorus' characteristic techniques: he is fond of investing an obscure piece of paradoxography with a key role in the plot. A portrait of the white Andromeda determines Charicleia's skin colour at conception (iv 8.5), and makes her exposure necessary in the first place; and among her other birth-tokens is no less a stone than the Pantarbe itself (v 14). Thanks to the papyrus of Favorinus we can conclude that the most important of her inevitable γνωρίσματα is in fact an unusual but attested ‘Ethiopian’ detail of the same order.