Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/72

 48 fflSTOKY OF GREECE. partisans in arms and took possession of the Old Town, — a strong post which had been superseded in course of time by the more modern city on the sea-shore, less protected though more convenient.! But no Athenians appeared, and without them he was unable to maintain his footing : he was obliged to make his escape from the island after witnessing the complete defeat of his partisans, — a large body of whom, seven hundred in number, fell into the hands of the government, and were led out for exe- cution. One man alone among these prisoners burst his chains, fled to the sanctuary of Demeter Thesmophorus, and was fortu- nate enough to seize the handle of the door before he was over- taken. In spite of every effort to drag him away by force, he clung to it with convulsive grasp : his pursuers did not venture to put him to death in such a position, but they severed the hands from the body and then executed him, leaving the hands still hanging to and grasping'^ the door-handle, where they seem to have long remained without being taken off. Destruction of the seven hundred prisoners does not seem to have drawn down upon the ^ginetan oligarchy either vengeance from the gods or cen- sure from their contemporaries ; but the violation of sanctuary, in the case of that one unfortunate man whose hands were cut off, was a crime which the goddess Demeter never forgave. More than fifty years afterwards, in the first year of the Peloponnesian war, the -ZEginetans, having been previously conquered by Athens, were finally expelled from their island : such expulsion was the divine judgment upon them for this ancient impiety, which half a ' See Thucyd. i, 8. The acropolis at Athens, having been the primitive city inhabited, bore the name of The City even in the time of Thucydides (ii, 15), at a time when Athens and Peirseus covered so large a region around and near it. ^ Herodot. vi, 91. x^^P^^ ^^ nelvai kfnze<pVK.vlaL tjaav Tolai ETcianaaTfipct,. The word Kelvai for eKelvai, " those hands," appears so little suitable in this phrase, that I rather imagine the real reading to have been Keival (the Ionic dialect for Ksval), " the hands with nothing attached to them :" com- pare a phrase not very unlike, Homer, Iliad, iii, 376, keiv^ 6e Tpv(puXeia (ill' ianeTo, etc. Compare the narrative of the arrest of the Spartan king Pausanias, and of the manner in which he was treated when in sanctuary at the temple of Athene Chalkioekos (Thucyd. i, 134).