One more excursion, this time not on the Attic soil, but on the Attic sea, must be added to the Eleusinian and the MarathÔnian pilgrimage, even by those who cannot undertake to follow the keen guidance of Colonel Leake into every corner of the Attic d???. The survey of the Attic land may well be ended at the point where, in geographical accuracy, it ought, by those at least who approach by way of Syra, to have begun. But to one thus drawing nigh for the first time, Sounion is at most the beacon which points to Athens; it may even be that, if he chances to draw nigh on a dim and cloudy morning, he may fail to distinguish the marbled steep of Sounion among the other lofty points over which his eye wanders. He expects, it may well be, that the height and the temple will front him boldly as the first point of Attic ground to catch his eye. He may not thoroughly take in the fact that the promontory lies in a manner round a corner. Unless he has studied his map very carefully, he may draw near under the belief that the Attic peninsula ends in a point, in the same way in which the three southern peninsulas of PeloponnÊsos, that of Tainaros above all, certainly do. Pausanias indeed begins his picture, not only of Attica, but of all Greece, with the “height of Sounion, stretching forth from the Attic land and the mainland of Hellas towards the Kyklades and the ÆgÆan sea.” Yet it is certain that some who have approached the mainland of Hellas from the Kyklades have not been lucky enough to catch a sight of AthÊnÊ on the promontory as a harbinger of AthÊnÊ on the inland rock. Even he who is more favoured cannot, at that moment, stop to study the arrangement of the columns which still keep their ancient whiteness. Nor will he, as he sails by, find out that there too the rival of AthÊnÊ was not wholly ousted, that the sea-god kept at Sounion a secondary place, at least as important as that which he kept at Eleusis alongside of DÊmÊtÊr and her Child.

A voyage to Sounion forms then a necessary part of even a short sojourn in Athens and Attica. He who is careful about mines, old or new, might prefer a land journey which should combine Sounion with Laureion. Otherwise it may be better to put oneself under the guardianship of the lord of the dolphins, to whom men prayed on Sounion (? ???s?t??a??’, ? de?f???? ed??? S??????ate), and to trust to his golden trident to clear the way. That way leads by several striking points of coast, each cape having, as a rule, an island placed before it as a kind of outpost. Such above all is ZÔstÊr, where the narrow isthmus, as Dean Blakesley hints, tied the promontory to the shore, but where pious etymologers at a later time saw the spot where LÊtÔ loosed her girdle. Such an etymology is much of a piece with many popular etymologies in our own land. From the hill of Battle we look out on Telham, so called, says the local legend, because the advancing Norman there told his army. Not far off flows one of the “cold becks” which have given their names to so many spots from Normandy to Scotland. Here it is said to mark the spot where the Duke called back his flying men. The derivation of ZÔstÊr from LÊtÔ’s zone is a guess essentially of the same kind as these; yet there is a difference between them which is not uninstructive in comparing the history of the Greek and the English language. In the English derivations the real meaning is absolutely forgotten; wholly wrong words, having merely an accidental likeness in sound, are pressed into the service. In one of the two cases the word thus misapplied has itself in that meaning become obsolete. It is not unlikely that a new legend may arise, and that Telham, instead of the spot where William told—that is, numbered—his army, may become the spot where he told them to do this or that. But Greek had not, in the days at least when the ZÔstÊr legend was invented, been so utterly broken up as that men were likely to go off to an altogether wrong root. The tale kept within the prescribed range of tying or untying something or other; and LÊtÔ, Artemis, and ApollÔn gained a fresh seat of worship through the etymological guess. But ZÔstÊr has its place in history as well as in legend. The Persians, after Salamis, took, so says Herodotus, the three small peaks which form the peninsula for Athenian ships, and fled all the more till they found out their mistake. One sceptical historian suggests that it must have been a moonlit night. But, after all, may not this story be less legendary than that of LÊtÔ, only so far as that real actors are brought in? That the Persians took the rocks of ZÔstÊr for ships and fled all the more is the kind of mocking saying which was likely to be said at the time, whether true or false. And, even if it was a mere mocking saying, it might well have passed into serious belief before Herodotus, a four-years-old child at the time, had grown into an inquiring historian. After all, the story belongs to a class. There are the thistles which the armies took for spears after the fight of Montl’hery. There are the Welshwomen in the red cloaks, whom the French at Fishguard took for regular soldiers coming to the help of the valiant militia of Pembrokeshire. Did all these things happen, or are they all mere sayings which have found their way into history? Let comparative mythologists argue the point.

But we are followed by etymologies along the whole coast. Every one who has ever looked at the map knows the long island, immediately east of the southern point of Attica, whose name fluctuates between the mere description Makris and the more attractive name of HelenÊ. How came Helen hither? We may be sure, with all deference to Strabo, that this is not the KranaÊ of the third book of the Iliad; that was far away by the Lakonian shore, and the Homeric reference was commemorated by a temple of AphroditÊ with an unseemly surname. So Pausanias tells us, though he does not explain what brought Helen to the long island off Sounion. We will not hint that according to one Homeric story (see Odyssey iii. 278) she must have been, if not on the island, at least near it, in better company and at a later and better part of her story, than that in which Strabo would bring her into these parts. But on Attic soil or on Attic waters we must learn to feel an Attic patriotism, and, so minded, we can give her a chance from another quarter. We must not forget that Helen has her independent place in Attic as well as in Peloponnesian legend. She was carried off by ThÊseus as well as by Paris. She was known at Aphidna, at Dekeleia, and at Rhamnous; and it would be only a fair freak of etymological invention to give her an island off the Attic as well as off the Lakonian coast.

But with Helen in this way to guard the eastern side of the southern extremity of the Attic land, it is a little disappointing when we find the real origin of the name of the much smaller island which guards its western side. There lies the isle of Patroklos. Helen and Patroklos seem well matched; and a charm seems to be broken when we find that the island takes its name, not from the Homeric antitype of Jonathan, but from the Admiral of Ptolemy Philadelphos, who there dug a trench and threw up a wall when he came to help Athens against Antigonos Gonatas. Such a fall from poetry to prose, from legend to history, is really sad. Yet we may draw some small comfort. Everything is a gain which reminds us that the history of Athens did not end with the war of ChairÔneia or with the war of Lamia, but that Ptolemy and Antigonos, and men later by ages on ages than Ptolemy and Antigonos, had something to do with fixing her destinies.

The island of Patroklos is the last of the series of capes and islands between Peiraieus and Sounion. All have lost their names, unless any one takes Phaura and Phleua to be forms of the same name. All the rest have descriptive names ending in ??s?—the diminutive form, which, according to rule in modern Greek, has supplanted the older ??s??—just as along our own shores they might end in holm or ey. We turn round the last point, and now—

S?????? ???? ?f???e?’, ????? ??????.

A sceptical thought will flash across the mind. Ought we not to read ?????? for ??????? But if we stifle the thought, we have again another witness to the way in which all Attica had even in Homeric times already become Athens. There is the little bay fenced in by the height, crowned by the white columns, which gives the cape its modern, its Italian, name. The name is well applied; Sounion is before all things the Cape of the Columns. The pure white which their marble still keeps is striking to the eye which has been for some time accustomed to the yellowish brownish hue of the standing columns of Athens. We say the standing columns, because those columns of the ParthenÔn which have been thrown down are as white as those on Sounion. But for this last fact, it would be easy to account for the difference in the hue of the columns by the difference between the pure sea-air of Sounion and the air of an akropolis rising above a great city. Only here comes in the difficulty which is suggested by the whiteness of the fallen columns at Athens. Either the discolouring of the columns which are still standing has happened since Morosini’s siege, or else the columns that are overthrown have regained their whiteness since their fall. We do not pretend to explain the difficulty; we only state it. All that we are concerned with is the striking effect of the white marble of the columns on Sounion as contrasted either with the discoloured columns of the ParthenÔn, or with the primitive columns of rougher stone which were covered with some kind of plaster from the beginning. The actual material of the columns of Sounion is something intermediate between the two. It is marble, but marble from the neighbouring hills, much less fine than the Pentelic marble of the ParthenÔn. Another point at once strikes the eye. Thirteen architectural objects stand up, but it is soon seen that only twelve are of the usual shape of columns. What is the thirteenth? It looks like a square pier, such as we should expect to find inside a basilica at Lucca, but not outside a temple at Sounion. The appearance is puzzling until we actually reach the site of the temple and there carefully spell out the ground plan. But before we do this two other remains have to be studied. Sounion, besides being a holy place, was also a fortress. When the news of the overthrow at Syracuse came to Athens, when every means was used to prop up the tottering commonwealth, one means of defence that was taken was the fortification of Sounion. This was done with the special object of supplying a defence to the corn ships which brought in the foreign food that Athens needed more than ever when the Peloponnesians were at Dekeleia. A large part of the wall which cut off the promontory is still to be traced, a wall of the best Hellenic masonry, strengthened by square towers at intervals. Within this military circuit again we come to the remains of the Propylaia, the entrance, as at Eleusis and at Athens itself, to the immediate sacred precinct. But the summit of all, crowning the promontory and immediately overlooking the sea, is the temple itself. And when we come carefully to study its plan, we see the meaning of the anomalous square object which seemed so puzzling from below. The temple was one in antis, and the square object is the end of one of the walls of the cella. The fellow to it may be traced, though it does not rise high enough to make a feature in the general view. One of the columns ranging with the antÆ, two on the northern side towards the land and nine on the southern or seaside, are still standing with their architraves; but the eastern and western fronts, with their columns and pediments, have perished.

It is indeed a spot to stand and gaze, though now with quite other and happier feelings than those which Byron put into the mouth of his imaginary Greek poet. The impulse is to gaze on the sea and the islands, the realm of Athens, the realm which her fortress on Sounion was to guard. But it is well to look landward also, and a short walk from the temple will show that AthÊnÊ was not the only power that was worshipped on Sounion. That the sea-god, lord of the Sounion dolphins, was worshipped there is plain from Aristophanes. The jokes in the Birds, where the god is addressed,

? S??????a?e ?a??’ ??a? ?e?a?????,

give us another title of the sea-god. PoseidÔn at Sounion, like Zeus at DodÔnÊ, was prayed to as Pelasgian. The comic poet, when he had once got into Nephelokokkygia, does not scruple to change the epithets of the deity into “hawky” and “storky.” We might be sure from this that Colonel Leake was misled in fancying that PoseidÔn had nothing more than a mere altar on Sounion. We come down from the temple of AthÊnÊ, we pass the Propylaia; we pass the ruins of the wall; we reach the little isthmus—for the site of the temple is peninsular—and on a lower height we find remains, not enough to enable us to make out the plan of any building, but enough to show that a building of some importance must have stood there. Surely here we have the site of the temple of the god who was prayed to on Sounion. PoseidÔn is here, as well as at Corinth, at home on his isthmus.

The men of Sounion are the subject of an allusion of the poet AnaxandridÊs, quoted by AthÊnaios, which at first sight is not very clear:—

p????? d? ??? ?? e?s?? ??? ??e??e???, e?? a????? d? S????e??, e?t’ e?? t??t?? ????? ??????ta?.

Some say that this refers to their prosperity as living near the mines of Laureion. The words in themselves would seem rather to point to a class intermediate between the slave and the full citizen. But how could there be such in any part of Attica after the union of the Attic towns? Of their modern successors, a few might be seen near the mouth of a cave by the sea, some contemplating the strangers, others following the useful occupation of Nausikaa. The whole scene—the little bay, with its beach beside the blue waters; the hills behind, with their white columns against the sky; the cave, suggesting endless Homeric remembrances of nymphs and sea-gods—even the homely work going on by the shore—all seems in harmony; all seems to carry us back to the days when the powers which had striven for Athens seem to have agreed to hold Sounion as a joint possession.