Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/488

 456 mSTORY OF GREECE. which circulated in every city. The annual departure of the Theoric ehip from Athens to the sacred island of Delos, kept alive, in the minds of Athenians generally, the legend of Theseus and his adventurous enterprise in Krete j 1 and in like manner most of the other public rites and ceremonies were of a com- memorative character, deduced from some mythical person or incident familiarly known to natives, and forming to strangers a portion of the curiosities of the place. 2 During the period of Grecian subjection under the Romans, these curiosities, together with their works of art and their legends, were especially clung to as a set-off against present degradation. The Theban citizen who found himself restrained from the liberty enjoyed by all other Greeks, of consulting Amphiaraus as a prophet, though the sanctuary and chapel of the hero stood in his own city they probably belonged to some noble gens which traced its origin to a god or a hero. About the songs of women, see also Agathias, i. 7. p. 29, ed. Bonn. In the family of the wealthy Athenian Democrates was a legend, that his primitive ancestor (son of Zeus by the daughter of the Archegetes of the deme Aixoneis, to which he belonged) had received Herakles at his table: this legend was so rife that the old women sung it, utrep al jpalat dSovai (Plato, Lysis, p. 205). Compare also a legend of the deme 'Avayvpovf, mentioned in Suidas ad voc. " Who is this virgin V' asks Orestes from Pylades in the Iphigeneia in Tauris of Euripides (662), respecting his sister Iphigeneia, whom he doea not know as priestess of Artemis in a foreign land : Ttf iariv 7) vcuvtf ; tlf 'E/l^j/vt/cwf 'AvJypetf' rjfias rovq r' iv 'I/l/u irovovf Notrroi' r' 'A%atuv, rov r' kv olavoi oodbv Ru/l^avr', 'A^i/l/lewf r' ovvofi 1, etc. EOTIV f) %evi] yevot; 'EKettfev. 'Apyeia rif, etc. 1 Plato, Phasdo, c. 2. only the pride which the general public of Athens and Thebes took in their old mythes (Triptolemus, Boreas, and Oreithyia, the Sparti, etc.), but the way in which they treated every man who called the stories in question as a fool or as an atheist. He remarks, that if the guides who showed the anti- quities had been restrained to tell nothing but what was true, they would have died of hunger ; for the visiting strangers would not care to hear plain truth, even if they could have got it for nothing (^jyde fyuadl TUV
 * The Philopseudes of Lucian (t. iii. p. 31, Hemst. cap. 2, 3, 4) shows not