Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/29

Rh striking as his yoking swift-footed steeds to his chariot. Poseidon Hippios, the Neptune of Horses, was not for the Athenian mind a strange or incongruous combination. The presence of a shrine of the fire-bearer, the Titan Prometheus, probably indicates that the men of the deme were iron-workers, or brass-founders as well. But above all, at Colonos there was the sacred grove of the Eumenides, where the common foot might never tread, the maze with its many paths, the low stone wall which served at once as a boundary and a defence, the descent into sepulchral darkness, of which it was believed that it led down into Hades itself, the shadow-world of the departed. There by the basin in the rock, and the hollow pear-tree, was the record of the friendship of Peirithöos and the great Attic hero Theseus, who had themselves descended to that shadow-world. There the Erinnyes, the stern avenging ones, daughters of darkness, dogging the footsteps of the doer of evil, were thought of as with a new character, under a new name. They were the Gentle Ones, the Eumenides, who might be approached with solemn rites of penitence and purification, and who would then be found placable and