Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/71

Rh Athens, where Boreas is represented as a bearded man of stern aspect, thickly clad, and wearing strong buskins ; he blows into a conch shell, which he holds in his hand as a sign of his tempestuous character. This also explains the close connection between him and this country in mytho logy, especially in the legend of Orithyia, who is the daughter of the Cephisus, thus representing the mists that rise from the streams, and whom he carries off with him and makes his wife. One of their offspring is called Chione, or the Snow Maiden. n. When we turn to the vegetation of Attica, the olive first calls for our attention. This tree, we learn from Hero dotus (v. 82), was thought at one time to have been found in that country only ; and the enthusiastic praises of Sophocles ((Ed. Col., 700) teach us that it was the land in which it nourished best. So great was the esteem in which it was held, that in the early legend of the struggle between the gods of sea and land, Poseidon and Athena, for the patronage of the country, the sea-god is represented as having to retire vanquished before the giver of the olive : and at a later period the evidences of this contention were found in an ancient olive tree in the Acropolis, together with three holes in the rock, said to have been made by the trident of Poseidon, and to be connected with a salt well hard by. The fig also found its favourite home in this country, for Demeter was said to have bestowed it as a gift on the Eleusinian Phytalus, i.e., &quot;the gardener.&quot; Both Cithasron and Parnes must have been wooded in former times ; for on the former are laid the picturesque silvan scenes in the Bacchce of Euripides, and it was from the latter that the wood came which caused the neighbour ing deme of Acharnae to be famous for its charcoal the av@pa.Kes Ilapvwrioi of the Acharniansoi Aristophanes (348). It was the thymy slopes of Hyraettus, too, from which came the famous Hymettian honey. Among the other products we must notice the marble both that of Pen- telicus, which afforded a material of unrivalled purity and whiteness for building the Athenian temples, and the blue marble of Hymettus the trabes Hymettice of Horace which used to be transported to Rome for the construction of palaces. But the richest of all the sources of wealth in Attica was the silver mines of Laureium, the yield of which was so considerable as to render silver the principal medium of exchange in Greece, so that &quot;a silver piece&quot; (apyvptov) was the Greek equivalent term for money. Hence ^Eschylus speaks of the Athenians as possessing a &quot; fountain of silver&quot; (Pers., 235), and Aristophanes makes his chorus of birds promise the audience that, if they show him favour, owls from Laureium, i.e., silver pieces with the emblem of Athens, shall never fail them (Av., 1 106). In Strabo s time, though the mines had almost ceased to yield, silver was obtained in considerable quantities from the scoriae ; and at the present day a large amount of lead is obtained in the same way, the value of what was exported in 1869 having been 177,000 sterling. Having thus noticed the general features of the country, 511. let us proceed to examine it somewhat more in detail. It has been already mentioned that the base line is formed by the chain of Cithaeron and Parnes, running from west to east ; and that from this transverse chains run southward, dividing Attica into a succession of plains. The western most of these, which is separated from the innermost bay of the Corinthian Gulf, called the Mare Alcyonium, by an offshoot of Cithseron, and is bounded on the east by a ridge which ends towards the Saronic Gulf in a striking two-horned peak called Kerata, is the plain of Megara. It is only for geographical purposes that we include this district under Attica, for both the Dorian race of the in habitants, and its dangerous proximity to Athens, caused it to be at perpetual feud with that city ; but its position as an outpost for the Peloponnesians, together with the fact of its having once been Ionian soil, sufficiently explains the bitter hostility of the Athenians towards the Megarians. The great importance of Megara arose from its commanding all the passes into the Peloponnese. These were three in number : one along the shores of the Corinthian Gulf, which, owing to the nature of the ground, makes a long detour ; the other two starting from Megara, and passing, the one by a lofty though gradual route over the ridge of Geraneia, the other along the Saronic Gulf, under the dangerous precipices of the Scironian rocks. The town of Megara, which was built on and between two low hills rising out of the plain rather more than a mile from the sea, had the command of both gulfs by means of its two ports that of Pegae on the Corinthian, and that of Nicaea on the Saronic. The necessities of the case occasionally brought the Megarians and their powerful neighbours together ; for the former greatly depended on Athens for their supplies, as we see from their famished state, &quot;as described by Aristophanes in the Acharnians (729 seq.), when excluded from the ports and markets of that country. To the east of the plain of Megara lies that of Eleusis, Plain of bounded on the one side by the chain of Kerata, and on Eleusis, the other by that of /Egaleos, through a depression in which was the line of the sacred way, where the torchlight processions from Athens used to descend to the coast, the &quot;brightly-gleaming shores&quot; (Aa/u.7ra8cs d/crat) of Sophocles (CEd. Col., 1049). Here a deep bay runs into the land, opposite to which, and separated from it by a strait, which forms a succession of graceful curves, was the rocky island of Salamis, at all times an important possession to the Athenians on account of its proximity to their city. The scene of the battle of Salamis was the narrowest part of this channel, where the island approaches the extremity of yEgaleos ; and it was on the last declivities of that moun tain that &quot; A king sate on the rocky brow &quot;Which, looks o er sea-born Salamis.&quot; The eastern portion of this plain was called the Thriasian plain, and the city of Eleusis was situated in the recesses of the bay. The coast-line of this part, between the sanctuary of Poseidon at the isthmus, which was originally Ionian, and Athens, is the principal scene of the achieve ments of Theseus, a hero who holds the same relation to the lonians of Greece proper as Hercules does to the Greeks at large, viz., that of being the great author of improvements in the country. In this instance his feats seem to describe the establishment of a safe means of communication. On the isthmus itself he destroys the monster Sinis, the &quot;ravager,&quot; otherwise called Pityocamptes, or the &quot; pine-bender,&quot; which names imply that he is the embodiment of a violent wind, though the legend grew up that he fastened his victims to the bent branches of two pines, by the rebound of which they were torn in sunder. His next exploit is near Crommyon, where he destroys a wild sow, called Phrea, or &quot; the dusky,&quot; which probably means that he checked a torrent, since violent water courses are often represented by that animal in Greek mythology. Then follows the struggle with the brigand Sciron, who signifies the dangerous wind, which blows with such violence in this district that at Athens the north-west wind received the name of Sciron from the neighbouring Scironian rocks ; the pass, which skirts the sea at the base of the cliffs, is now known by the ill-omened title of Kake Seal a, and is -still regarded as a perilous transit. Finally, between Eleusis and Athens, Theseus overcomes Procrustes, or &quot; the racker,&quot; who apparently represents the dangers of the pass between Eleusis and Athens, now called Daphne ; for the ridge of Mount yEgaleos hard by was in ancient 