The impatience with which they awaited him was indescribable. They were as anxious to see the man whom they had driven from them, and who in return, his justice satisfied, had raised them from despair and misery to their old supremacy, as he was to come back to them. This had been the fixed purpose of his life for eight long years. In spite of the temptation to return at her earnest cry three years ago, he had gone on enduring dangers, imprisonment, and hardships, and adding victory to victory, till he felt his hands were full enough of blessings. Now they were so full they scarcely could hold more, and he returned to her to lay them at her feet. Collecting his great ships from Samos and the other ports where he had posted them, with all his prisoners and his prizes, he proudly sailed towards Attika. No need now to avoid hostile places; he rather diverged from his straight course, to show the world who was supreme mistress of the seas, and on the twenty-fifth of May he sighted the Peiræus. When the people heard that he was really coming, the city was deserted. All the quays and walls were lined with human beings. The sailors of Peiræus, Mounychia, and Phaleron, all who had ships or boats of any sort, crowded out upon the sea to welcome him. The sea was black with boats. Every mast swarmed with men and boys, and lucky was he thought who should first get sight of him. While the people waited on the shore in wildest expectation, there was but one thought in all their minds, one and the same subject furnished the topic of their talk with one another. Some old men were heard conversing. ‘Ah! you remember the day he set out for Sicily—just such another day as this. Would to the gods we had never let him go on that God-cursed expedition!’ ‘Rather, would to the gods we had let him stay and fight for us in Sicily! He was just beginning the great siege when we recalled him. He must surely have been victorious.’ ‘Why, then, were we not more wise? Surely some blindness must have fallen on us from the gods.’ ‘How many of our sons who perished there would have been here to-day? Or perhaps we might have been just about to welcome them, instead of ever mourning for the deaths of brave men whose unburied bodies lie underneath the sea.’ ‘They would be coming with the conqueror of Sicily, of Greece, of the barbarian, had we not been blinded for our sins.’ ‘But, think you, he would have been victorious at Syrakuse, where two armies of Athenians fell?’ ‘Why not? Has he not been victorious everywhere, wherever he has fought? Are not the Lakedaimonians better warriors than the men of Syrakuse? Has he not beaten Spartans and Persians, too, whenever he has met them?’ ‘Ay! and they say the fight at Kyzikos was greater than any could have been in Sicily, or any that our men ever fought before.’ ‘Indeed, it seems nothing can withstand his conquering arm.’