The other triremes ranged themselves on either side as he came through them. With an unassumed modesty and a smiling carelessness upon his face, he could that day with difficulty conceal the emotion of his soul. Not at Selymbria, when he found himself with a few followers in the middle of a hostile town; not at the fight at Kyzikos, when the engagement was at its hottest, and he was nearly overcome by Mindaros;—never on any previous occasion—had the struggle been so hard as that one now, which called forth all his power to keep back the flow of tears. The first favoured ones who welcomed him were his cousin and many more relations. As soon as he saw them, he came from off the _Eros_ to the wharf. Cries went up to Heaven, the crowd closed round him, each one striving to take his hand, or only touch his garments. When a way was made for him it became a path of flowers. Along this triumphal road, made by the long walls from Peiræus to the city, he passed upward to the Peiræian gate, past the colonnades with their well-remembered paintings, and the heroes’ statues that he had been wont to gaze on with wonder when a boy; past the house of his friend Polytion, where a lying slave had been tortured to tell the people that he had profaned the mysteries; and past the many well-known spots where his boyhood and his early manhood had been spent—the scenes of his joys, his pleasures, and his triumphs; and the thoughts that they brought back swelled up within him, and made the struggle to restrain his tears grow ever greater. But when he came to the turning which led up to the Pnyx, where the people in their Ekklesia were now assembling to receive him, there was a pause in the procession, and an opening in the deep lines of citizens, and out from amongst them came Deinomache, his mother, grown almost blind, led by his young son Alkibiades. As he folded his mother in his arms, the tears he had so long kept down broke out. It was the first, the only, time that he was ever seen to weep. Then he went upward with his son to the Ekklesia. In spite of the enthusiastic welcome with which the city, and the whole state, received him, he had not forgotten the dread sentence which had been passed on him, and which still weighed upon him, and by the laws of Athens must be carried out, unless reversed by the same tribunal which had pronounced it. That was why the meeting of the great Assembly was held immediately on his return. That was why he made his way straight to the Pnyx. As he passed through the assembled people sitting there in silence, and ascended the stone tribune, how could he but think of the first time he had stood there and swayed their wayward mood, saving them from alliance with that oligarchic Lakedaimôn which he was afterwards to stir up against them, and then beat back in its full career of conquest?