Greek Lands and Letters

Modern Athens climbs up around the lower slopes of Mount Lycabettus, which rises on the east like an index finger above the Attic plain. Although this peak is less than one thousand feet high, its isolated position opens out an unrivalled panorama of the Cephisian plain from Parnes and Pentelicus down to Piræus and the bay, with Salamis, the mountains of the Megarid, the Isthmus, Argolis and Ægina beyond. In the “Frogs” of Aristophanes Æschylus’s many-jointed compounds are likened to “great Lycabettuses.” Athena, it is said, while carrying Lycabettus through the air to fortify her Acropolis, dropped it suddenly in its present exclusive position; but, if we are to believe Plato, who had a vague inkling of the geologic truth, her rival, the earth-shaker, rent it asunder from the Acropolis, with which it was once continuous. From Lycabettus, it would appear, the stream of the Eridanus made its way north of the Acropolis and flowed out by the channel now laid bare near the Dipylon gate. The Ilissus, rising on the slopes of Hymettus, flows south of the city and, first uniting with the Eridanus, joins, between Athens and Piræus, the Cephisus, which draws its waters from the Pentelicus and Parnes ranges. This configuration of the landscape, with arable plain-land watered by mountain streams, was the important factor in country life about Athens. Clouds on Hymettus, as Theophrastus tells us, were a sign of rain. The altar of “Shower-giving Zeus,” whether on Hymettus or, as Pausanias says, on Mount Parnes, would have no lack of suppliants in times of drought. The Clouds, in a fragment of the lost edition of Aristophanes’s play, vanish adown Lycabettus and go off to the top of Parnes. In the play as preserved, the mock Socrates, instructing his thick-headed scholar, points out the cloud-goddesses:—

And the Clouds, leaving Bœotia behind, come over Parnes, showering down the praises that Aristophanes delighted to bestow on the Attic country:—

Colonus, the birthplace of Sophocles, lay a little more than a mile northwest of Athens. The hill is now disappointingly bald. Verdure and the song of the nightingale must be sought by the banks of the Cephisus near by, but the famous lines of Sophocles retouch the faded picture. The chorus of old men of Attica address the aged Œdipus:—

The ramparts of the city of Theseus, seen by Antigone at the opening of the play, are for Sophocles in reality the Acropolis and walls of his own day. Antigone describes the sacred grove to her blind father:—

The venerable olive trees, self propagated through generations from the parent stump, are, indeed, a feature in the Attic landscape. Sophocles does not fail to include them in his catalogue of Attic blessings:—

And in the neighbouring Academy the youths ran off their races beneath the sacred olive trees. To the joyous associations that for nearly two centuries had been accumulating about the Academy Plato added the overshadowing greatness of his own name and teaching. He has incidentally perpetuated the name of the original modest freeholder, Academus, to be a part of the vocabulary of every school-boy. Near the Academy, making a fitting goal for the avenue leading from the Dipylon gate between the monuments of illustrious dead, the Athenians gave Plato magnificent interment. An epigram by Antipater transfers to Plato the indifference expressed by Socrates in regard to his untenanted body when he says in the prison death-scene:—

“Bury me however you will,—if you can catch me—for, when I drink the poison, I shall not remain here with you, but shall make my way to a blissful life with the Blessed.... So don’t let Crito be vexed on my behalf when he sees my body being burnt or buried as though I were having some awful experience.”

Shelley in his fine paraphrase of the epigram inexactly substitutes Athens for Attica and fails to include the epithet “earth-born,” the conventional boast of the autochthonous men of Attica:—

If we follow up the Cephisus towards its sources we pass through the ancient deme of Acharnæ and come on the north to Decelea on the slopes of Mount Parnes, or, turning to the right, to Kephisia at the south of Pentelicus, also called Brilessus by the ancients.

Upon the Parnes range, on the northern frontier of Attica, is the partially ruined fortress of Phyle. Few places offer a more attractive combination of scenery and association. There is, as at Delphi, a union of grandeur and beauty. In addition to the view that awaits us above, the ascent amidst trees and flowers by the running stream makes this a fitting introduction to the more intimate charm of Attic landscape, and the rugged gorges, skirted by the climbing pathway, are even awe-inspiring. Once within the massive walls and towers, built on a mountain spur commanding the junction of ravines and passes between Attica and Bœotia, no extended explanation is necessary of the part played here (in 404 to 403 B. C.) during the civil war between the patriots and the Thirty Tyrants. Across the shoulder of Ægaleus the plain of the Cephisus is unrolled to view, with Athens lying below Hymettus. In the background are the Saronic Gulf and the Peloponnesian mountains. Thrasybulus, the hero of the Restoration, is great even among the great names of Greek history. We can imagine him first seizing the fortress with his handful of seventy followers, and then, through months of waiting and fighting and watching, looking down on the desired city, planning how he shall restore the exiled patriots to Athens, and Athens to herself. We can picture the fierce snow-storm, filling those wild gorges, which aided in driving back the knights and hoplites of the Thirty. Later he swoops down to Acharnæ, surprises and routs the unpatriotic Athenians together with the Spartan garrison which the Thirty, to their dishonour, had admitted to the Acropolis. Finally he descends to Piræus, joins battle with the “City Party,” breaks the power of the Thirty and makes the name of “the men from Phyle” a symbol of patriotism which, see it where we may on the pages of Lysias or Xenophon, claims the eye like illuminated initials and rubrics of honour.

At Chasia, the farming village of the foothills whence the path ascends to Phyle, women, standing in their doorways with busy distaff in hand, or energetic but courteous men, ready to discuss politics or crops, recall the simplicity and charm of country life of hill and plain known to us from Aristophanes and Menander.

Acharnæ itself must have occupied the district between Epano-Liossia, the nearest railway station to Chasia, and the charming modern village of Menidi whose unspoiled peasants, close to the outskirts of Athens, retain many a reminder of the country demesmen. The charcoal-burners of Aristophanes or Menander would now be compelled to go further up the mountain slopes to obtain the tree-stumps for their “Parnesian coals.” Nor is the famous ivy of Acharnæ now in evidence. The Acharnians, as Pausanias tells us, called Dionysus “Ivy” because the ivy plant first appeared on their soil. In the Greek Anthology we learn that Sophocles often wore a wreath of Acharnian ivy, and in an epigram of Simmias the ivy climbs over his tomb which, as it was alleged, had its place in the burying ground of the Sophocles family beside the neighbouring road to Decelea:—

In the “Acharnians” of Aristophanes the demesman Dicæopolis, shut up in the city by the war, grows tired of hearing: “Buy, buy!” when he would have “coals, vinegar or oil,” commodities to be had for nothing at home in the country. He therefore makes a private and personal treaty of peace, goes back to Acharnæ and proceeds to celebrate the rural Dinoysia. The revel is on and the wife and mother warns the daughter, who is to officiate as basket-bearer, to take precautions,—

To-day the peasant girls of Menidi without fear display on their persons at the Easter dances their abundant dowries of gold and silver. As the Phallic procession moves off, Dicæopolis wisely sends his pretty wife to a place of safety:—

At this juncture the chorus of Acharnian men rush in, with the bosoms of their gowns full of stones, indignant at the thought of peace when their vines have been cut by the enemy. They are a sturdy lot. They had contributed a Highland regiment at Marathon; they are regular “old Hickories,” “hardwood-charcoal men, tough as oak, hard-maple men,” and they are ready to stone Dicæopolis. He gains time, however, for a parley by seizing for a hostage a basket of their charcoals and dressing it up as a baby.

Menander, also, in his recently discovered “Arbitration” scene, gives details of an encounter between a shepherd and a charcoal man somewhere in this Acharnæ district, evidently in the public “clearings” lying between the farm-lands and the undisturbed forests. The shepherd Daos tells a well-to-do property owner, who happens by and is selected to arbitrate the dispute, how,—

He debates whether he can afford to save and rear the child. Next morning, still perplexed, “I go,” he says,—

One of the main sources of the Cephisus is at the foot of Pentelicus. Here the village of Kephisia with its generous spring and noble plane tree still retains its charm and recalls the “Attic Nights” of Aulus Gellius. As terminus of a short railway from Athens, it is a convenient starting-place for various excursions in Attica. An easy drive northward across the plain brings one to Tatoï where King George has his summer residence at the ancient Decelea, which the Spartans occupied in the Peloponnesian War to cut off the grain supply which came by this way from Eubœa. But cruel memories of the contest with Sparta are forgotten amidst the unusual charm of the surroundings. The magnificent low-spreading pine trees are a surprise to many visitors unaccustomed to this variety, and, as one looks southward, Pentelicus, usually seen from Athens as a long ridge, confronts the spectator, head on, with unfamiliar and uncompromising majesty. In the near foreground olive groves and luxuriant fields of anemones and poppies invite to a long lethe.

The Oropus district on the Euripus, north of Parnes, belongs geographically to Bœotia. As one descends on the northern side of the mountain the view is more suggestive of Switzerland than of rugged Attica. The fertile plain of the Asopus is green and wooded; the Euripus winding between the hedgerows of mountains on either side seems, even from the lofty summit of Pentelicus, more like a series of inland lakes than a continuous arm of the sea; beyond, the dorsal spine of the Delph, gleaming white with snow, crowns the blue Eubœan mountains. A marble relief, found at the port of Oropus, recalls the principal literary association outside of the shifting scenes in military history. Amphiaraus, the seer and hero, is represented in his chariot as he is about to disappear in the earth and his horses start back from the yawning chasm. In the Æschylean story Amphiaraus “the one just man” is included against his will among the invaders, the “Seven against Thebes,” and is represented as falling with the rest at Thebes. Of him were written the famous lines which, when spoken in the Athenian theatre, turned the eyes of all the spectators upon “Aristides the Best”:—

Amphiaraus was deified throughout Greece, but he had his chief sanctuary near Oropus in a glen where the nightingales sing among the plane trees and the oleanders. Here may be seen the remains of his temple, as god of healing; the great altar; the sacred spring by the plane trees where the grateful convalescents threw in their thanksgiving coins. Here were found, in the ruined theatre, five gracefully carved chairs of honour, like the three found at Rhamnus.

Rhamnus is on the coast near the southern mouth of the Euripus, and is one of the most beautiful and secluded places in the whole peninsula. As a visit to this northeast corner is needful to complete the physical outline of Attica, so the contours of Greek character will be sharpened here in the sanctuary of Nemesis, the dread goddess of Retribution, whose warning presence hovered continually in the background of Greek consciousness. Her beautiful statue, made perhaps by Phidias or his pupils, was fittingly set up in this place near the mouth of the Euripus where the Persian fleet had sailed through to the crushing rebuke at Marathon. Pausanias calmly states that this statue, dedicated to “the goddess most inexorable of all towards overweening men,” was made by Phidias out of some “Parian marble which the Persians, as if the victory were already won, carried with them for the erection of a trophy.” If we could credit this statement it would enlarge the itinerary of the meagre fragments of the colossal statue now in the British Museum.

At Rhamnus are to be seen the remains of two temples, one dedicated to Nemesis, and the other probably to Themis, the mother of Prometheus, and identified by Æschylus, following Attic tradition, with Mother Earth herself—“one form for many names.” Situated at the head of a glen, banked-up by a marble terrace and shaded by myrtle, green fir trees and shrubbery, the ruins look down upon the marble walls and towers of the ancient acropolis of Rhamnus occupying a rocky, self-fortified hill that juts out into the channel. Beyond the Euripus the mountains fill in the background.

Unwary speech, insolent success or immoderate, though innocent, good fortune might call down the retribution of Nemesis. Like our superstitious formula, “Knock on wood,” it was a common device in Greek to deprecate the divine envy towards arrogant speech, by saying: “I being but human make obeisance to Adrasteia,” or, the equivalent, “to Nemesis.” Pindar describes the happy Hyperboreans as set free from this scrupulous anxiety, ever present to mortal men:—

Near the cheerful modern village of Marathona in the valley of Avlona above the plain of Marathon are remains of an ancient gateway to the villa of Herodes Atticus. The inscription placed over his portal by this beneficent humanist and teacher was: “The Gate of Immortal Unanimity.” A few miles to the southwest, on the northern slope of Pentelicus, the American school excavated on an upland farm, called Dionyso, the remains of the ancient Icaria, the earliest Attic home of Dionysus and the birthplace of Thespis, the father of Attic tragedy. An epigram in the Anthology by Dioscorides records the claims of Thespis:—

Nothing adventitious is needed to call forth a certain solemn elation at the first sight of the plain of Marathon. But the sunlight of a February day, when the anemones are bright by the wayside, will blend an unforgettable natural beauty with the suggestions of a great moment in human history. The level plain is hemmed in by an amphitheatre of mountains; the promontory Cynosura runs down like a natural breakwater from the north, and the shore curves gracefully inward as if enticing seafarers to beach their galleys where the blue water breaks in soft white upon the shining sand. When we climb the isolated “soros,” the great mound heaped up over the dead warriors, and pass in review the vivid details of the battle as given by Herodotus, there emerges, even after all exaggeration has been neutralized by the strictures of some modern iconoclast, a grateful and redoubled admiration for the unflinching loyalty to liberty displayed by the individual soldiers and even more for the consummate skill of the commanders. The Athenians with the help of the Platæans repelled forever the reëstablishing of a despot in Attica, and Athens herself unconsciously entered upon what was to be the intellectual and moral trusteeship of Occidental civilization. Demosthenes, more than a century later, amidst the ruins of political liberty, could foreshadow a destiny greater than material success. He cites the great words of Simonides that had drifted down from Marathon and could be used with pathetic propriety of the dead at Chæronea. He bids his fellow citizens bow, if need be, under the strokes of unfeeling fortune, but reject all thought of having erred in their patriotic struggle against Macedon. He bursts forth with that impassioned oath by the dead heroes that thrills each generation born to cherish, or to long for liberty: “It cannot be, it cannot be, Athenians, that ye erred in braving danger on behalf of freedom and the safety of us all. No, by those of our fathers, fore-fighters in the battle’s brunt at Marathon! No, by those who stood shoulder unto shoulder at Platæa! No, by those who fought the naval fights at Salamis or in the ships off Artemisium!”

Marathon, as opening the great contest with Persia, had given the Athenians the proud distinction of being champions in the van for Hellas. Simonides had so hailed them:—

Within the mound beneath our feet lies buried with the rest Cynegirus the valiant brother of Æschylus. The poet himself fought in the battle and lived to immortalize his city and himself by his Titanic genius. But in far off Sicily, when his death approached, ignoring his fame as a poet, he turned with eager longing to the distant day and plain of Marathon. To him the battlefield was a consecrated close, an “Alsos” like the Altis of Olympia. Almost as if envying his brother and other companions-in-arms, buried on the battlefield in their native land, he writes as his own epitaph:—

The carriage road that leads back to Athens around the southern end of Pentelicus again combines beautiful landscape with historic association. By this road the Persians had thought to move with unimpeded might upon unwalled Athens. Instead, the soldier Eucles^[18] (or perhaps Thersippus) brought the swift news to the rejoicing city, followed soon by the Athenian army, who marched from their camp by the Marathonian Heracleum and encamped in the Cynosarges gymnasium, also dedicated to Heracles, south-west of Athens. Here looking down upon the Saronic Gulf they were ready to repel the great host of Persia which was already rounding Sunium. Games in honour of Heracles were celebrated at Marathon, and Euripides, in his “Heracleidæ,” alludes, though vaguely, to the Marathonian tetrapolis as one of the great Attic centres of the worship of Heracles. The Platæans by their presence at Marathon won the lasting and active friendship of Athens, and it was their city that gave the name to the final crushing defeat of the Persians under the combined Greek allies. The Spartans, detained at home by convenient scruples until the full moon gave them the signal to start, arrived at Athens too late for the battle of Marathon, but, as Herodotus charmingly remarks, “they none the less wished to take a look at the Medes and, going out to Marathon, they had a look.”

On the east coast of Attica, between Marathon and Sunium, are Brauron, “lovely” Prasiæ, and Thoricus. These with Markopoulo and other sites in the southern inland plain, Mesogia, have been yielding a wealth of prehistoric remains that fill out more and more the dim background of antiquity. Thoricus, a bay some six miles north of Sunium, was the birthplace of Philonis, “the daughter of the morning star,” and grandmother of Thamyris, the Thracian bard who dared to contend with the Muses. The inhabitants were not unmindful of their traditions and built a theatre, unique by reason of its oval orchestra. It is in ruins, but the absence of all traces of a stage seem to date it as of the best classic period. Laurium, just below, is the terminus of the railroad. Its silver mines, now worked chiefly for lead, play an important rôle in Greek history. The chorus in the “Persians” of Æschylus explains to Queen Atossa that the source of the Athenian sinews of war is—

The standard coins of Athens, of various denominations, stamped with an archaic Athena head on the obverse and the owl on the reverse, are referred to in the “Birds” of Aristophanes as Lauriot owls:—

When the Spartans occupied Attica in 413 B. C., they cut off Athenian access to the mines, and Plutarch tells us how a slave described a hoard of Athenian money secreted by the Spartan Gylippus under his roof-tiles as “numerous owls roosting under his Cerameicus.”

The promontory of Sunium, the prow of Attica, breasts the Ægean, and the white temple columns, beautiful in their ruin, stand up boldly like the Samothracian Nike upon an advancing trireme. The view from the precipitous bluff is one of surpassing beauty, with the glistening white of the marble against the nearer foreground of green and against the blue of the overarching sky and of the wide expanse of water. The eye sweeps from Ægina to the opposite shore of Argolis and around to the “glittering Cyclades” scattered over the Ægean, while far to the south, seventy miles away, Mount St. Elias on Melos in clear weather lifts its lofty cone into view, the outline of the island being sunk, like a vessel’s hull, below the horizon. On the Acropolis at Athens was preserved the memory of the contest between Athena and Poseidon, and at Sunium each of these divinities had a temple. Poseidon has here retained the supremacy, as was fitting, and only the foundation walls remain of Athena’s temple on the lower terrace. The Athenians dedicated at Sunium to Poseidon one of the triremes captured at Salamis, and here, on occasion of the quadrennial festival held in honour of the sea-god, the Æginetans seized the festal galley full of Athenian dignitaries. A defendant, in one of Lysias’s speeches, tells how he had “won in the trireme race off Sunium,” which was part of the panegyris. In Aristophanes the chorus of Knights cry out to “Poseidon, lord of horses, rejoicing in the bronze-shod hoof-beats and the neigh of steeds and swift blue prows of triremes,”—

To catalogue the ships, famous in Greek story, that have sighted or rounded this headland would cause to pass in review a mighty and a motley fleet. Nestor tells Telemachus how, sailing home with Menelaus from Troy, they lost their pilot,—

And Sophocles’s chorus of Salaminian sailors long in Troyland for their native shores:—

Vessels of commerce or war would double it, bound from Athens to the Ægean or to Ionia, and grain transports sailing to Athens from the Euxine. The Persian warships backing out from the inhospitable bay of Marathon “sailed around Sunium, making haste to anticipate the Athenians in arriving at the city.” The vessel of Theseus sailed past it bringing back safe from Crete the Athenian youths and maidens, and, in after days, the look-out, posted at Sunium, hastened back to Athens to say that the mission-ship from Delos had been sighted and was beating its way up the Saronic gulf to put an end, on its arrival, at once to the sacred holiday and to the life of Socrates.

On the west coast of Attica the place of chief interest, in connection with Greek letters, is Vari, near the promontory of Zoster, where Mount Hymettus comes down to the sea. Herodotus tells us that the frightened Persians, escaping from Salamis, thought that the long rocks running out at Zoster were some more hostile ships and “went fleeing for a long distance” until they recognised their mistake. Some little distance inland on the side of Hymettus, back of the town of Vari, is a grotto dedicated to the Nymphs and also sacred to the Graces, to Pan, and to Apollo. There is a tradition that the infant Plato was taken to Hymettus by his parents, who there sacrificed on his behalf to Pan, the Nymphs and Apollo.

The straits which interrupt the continuity of Mount Ægaleus with Salamis could not avail to dissever the island from Attica. The northwestern promontory, indeed, comes even closer to the outjutting Nisæan peninsula of the Megarid, and it was inevitable that Megara and Athens should contend for this “island of desire.” The energy of Solon at the beginning of the sixth century adjudicated the dispute with finality, and Salamis was permanently incorporated as an essential part of Attica. To a seafaring folk triremes and sailing craft could annul the interrupting sea, and the mainland and island were still more firmly cemented by the blood of Persian and Greek at the great sea-fight.

The ancestral hero of Salamis was Aias (“Ajax”), the son of Telamon. Pausanias saw a stone near the harbour upon which Telamon sat, as it was said, looking after his children departing to join the Greek fleet at Aulis. When Aias fell upon his sword before Troy the hyacinth, according to the usual tale, sprang up inscribed with the exclamation of woe “Ai! ai!” the first syllable of his name. But, as Pausanias would have it, a local flower, different from the hyacinth, made its appearance in Salamis inscribed with the same letters. Ajax, as was to be expected, appeared and offered divine aid to the Greeks at the battle of Salamis. In his honour the “Aianteia” festival was celebrated, and the young Athenian ephebi used to go over annually to contend at Salamis in friendly rivalry with the Salaminian youth in foot-races and in boat-races resembling those rowed from Munychia to the Cantharus harbour in Piræus. In addition to the Ajax traditions, here, as elsewhere, other sagas were invented or reshaped to give personification to the remote past and to be handed down to satisfy the pride of succeeding generations. Solon was a more tangible memory, and Demosthenes, in speaking of his statue standing in the market-place of Salamis, quotes the Salaminians as saying: “This statue was set up not yet fifty years ago.”

But the dominant memory evoked by the name of Salamis is, naturally, the defeat of the Persians in the narrow straits. For the Athenians everything was at stake. The wives and children who had not been sent to the Peloponnesus were on the island. Euripides, according to an enticing tradition, was born there at the time of the battle. Xerxes sat on his throne on the mainland to overawe disaffection and to watch the spectacle. He had no doubt as to the outcome. His fleet was numerous enough to allow him to detach the Egyptian squadron for guarding the narrow exit of the northwest channel and still to leave more ships than could be used for closing in the eastern approaches. The Greeks were thus hemmed in, and the unwilling allies from the Peloponnesus were forced to remain and give battle instead of withdrawing to the Isthmus. Themistocles, the great admiral, had his will.

To-day, if one sails in a small boat across from Piræus to the harbour of the modern Ambelaki, the details of the battle as narrated by Æschylus and Herodotus explain themselves. The long, bare reef of Psyttaleia cumbers the entrance to the channel. The messenger, in the “Persians” of Æschylus, in describing to the Queen Mother the scene enacted on this tiny island, introduces Pan, the old ally at Marathon:—

Here Xerxes stationed a picked body of Persians to save their friends and to slay the Greeks escaping from the wreckage, which, it was plain to foresee, would come bearing down upon the reef.

Beyond Psyttaleia and overlapping it is the long spit of land Cynosura (“Dog’s-tail”), like in name and shape to the promontory at Marathon. The result of the contest in this narrow channel is not so surprising as is the foresight of Themistocles and the courage of the Greeks in availing themselves with irresistible daring of the overconfidence of Xerxes. Æschylus’s account betrays the vivid memories of an actual eye-witness. The vessels took position by night. Across the desolated plain of Attica the new Day, “by white steeds drawn, her radiance fair to see, held all the land.” To the astonishment of the Persians, the Greeks, instead of fleeing, raised high their shout of happy omen, and Echo, mate of dance-loving Pan, “back from the island rock returned a shrill and pealing cry of joy.” The Persian messenger continues:—

The “jargon” of the Persian host rolled back reply. A Greek ship was the first to grapple. Bronze beak smote beak. Triremes turned keel uppermost,—

Whether dead or alive the Persians found no refuge upon land. Aristides with his men, instead of the picked Persians, was now on Psyttaleia to save or to destroy. The chorus of Persian women, as they hear the news, imagine their dead now floating with the tide, now, like struggling swimmers, rising to the waves. The leader cries:—

It was not unnatural that the ineffaceable memory of the sea covered with wreckage and the dead should reappear, when Æschylus, in the “Agamemnon,” describes the morning after the storm that wrecked the ships returning from Troy:—

Apart from the details of the battle, the “Persians” is noticeable for the method by which the poet introduces his ethical lesson. The ghost of the great Darius suddenly appears in the orchestra and attributes the defeat of Xerxes to his presumption in fettering “like a slave” the “sacred” Hellespont. Æschylus reiterates his favourite doctrine: “When Insolence puts forth the bloom of Atè, the harvest reaped is one of many tears.” And when later Xerxes himself arrives, the chorus with un-oriental frankness says: “Xerxes has packed Hades full with Persians.”

The “Persæ” of Timotheus, a sensational find of the year 1902, with its fantastic and overloaded epithets and the half-comic scene of the drowning Persian spitting out bitter brine and reproaches together, is a curious scholium upon Æschylus’s poem. The description of the dead upon the sea is thus retouched:—

The love of free men for a free country saved Attica. Euripides, despite the devastation of the country, might well call his land “unsacked,” “inviolate.” It was true of the unyielding citizens who, whether upon the mainland or self-exiled upon their triremes, refused all dealings with the despot. Plutarch tells us that Xerxes after Salamis sought to detach the Athenians from the national cause by promises of liberty and riches for themselves. The Lacedæmonians, fearing lest they might yield to the royal bribery, attempted to remonstrate, but Aristides bade the ambassadors say at Sparta: “Neither above ground nor below is there enough gold for the Athenians to accept in preference to the liberty of the Hellenes.”

It may be that the visitor to Salamis, as his little craft scuds swiftly home past Cynosura and Psyttaleia, sees the dark clouds, from which but now came rain, roll off towards Eleusis, while Attica, the islands, and the western mountains merge once more in the accustomed beauty of the translucent atmosphere. He may, perhaps, harbour the thought that under such a sky, when the war-clouds had finally withdrawn, the demesmen of country and of town came back to their devastated but ransomed Attica.