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 BATTLE OF SALAMIS.-REIREAT OF XERXES. 109 nance, or too old to care for life, elsewhere, — confiding, moreover, in their own interpretation • of the wooden wall which the Pythian priestess had pronounced to be inexpugnable, — shut themselves up in the acropolis along with the administrators of the temple, obstructing the entrance or western front with wooden doors and palisades.2 When we read how great were the suffer- ings of the population of Attica near half a century afterwards, compressed for refuge within the spacious fortifications of Athens at the first outbreak of the Peloponnesian war,3 we may form some faint idea of the incalculably greater misery which over- whelmed an emigrant population, hurrying, they knew not whither, to escape the long arm of Xerxes. Little chance did Greece (London, 1825), Letters, vi, vii, x. He states, p. 92, " Three times have the Athenians emigrated in a body, and sought refuge from the sabre among the houseless rocks of Salamis. Upon these occasions, I am asstired, that many have dwelt in caverns, and many in miserable huts, constructed on the mountain-side by their own feeble hands. Many have perished too, from exposure to an intemperate climate ; many, from diseases con- tracted through the loathsomeness of their habitations ; many from hunger and misery. On the retreat of the Turks, the sur^dvors returned to their country. But to what a country did they return 1 To a land of desolation and famine ; and in fact, on the first reoccupation of Athens, after the departure of Omer Brioni, several persons are known to have subsisted for some time on grass, till a supply of com reached the Piraeus from Syra and Hydra." A century and a half ago, also, in the war between the Turks and Ve- netians, the population of Attica was forced to emigrate to Salamis, ^gina, and Corinth. M. Buchon observes, " Les troupes Albanaises, envoyees en 1688 paries Turcs (in the war against the "Venetians) se jeterent sur I'Atti- que, mettant tout a feu et k sang. En 1688, les chroniques d'Athenes racontent que ses malheureux habitants furent oblige's de se refugier a Salamine, a Egine, et k Corinthe, et que ce ne fut qu'apres trois ans qu'ils purent rentrer en partie dans leur ville et dans leurs champs. Beaucoup des villages de I'Attique sont encore habites par les descendans de ces derniers envahisseurs, et avant la demiere revolution, on n'y parloit que la langue albanaise : mais leur physionomie differe autant que leur langue de la physionomie de la race Grecque." (Buchon, La Grece Continentale et la More'e. Paris, 1843, ch. ii, p. 82.) ' Pausanias seems to consider these poor men somewhat presumptuous for pretending to understand the oracle better than Themistokles, — 'Ad^ri- vaiuv Tovq ■K7.iov ri if rbv xpri<^f^bv V QefiiaroKTi^s ddevat vofil^ovrac (i, 18, 2). • Herodot. viii, 50. a Thucyd. ii, 16, 17.