When the Assembly of the Ekklesia was over his friends made him go forth again, that all might see him. He descended from the Pnyx, passed through the western gate of the Agora, where stood the great Hermes, guardian of the market-place, and, hard by, a bronze chariot drawn by four horses, where one stood life-like in the chariot who had won the prize for Athens more than three Olympiads ago. Ah, those four dear horses, he had come back to gaze upon them, as in the bronze they seemed to bound and leap for joy of the encounter. He was there,—not quite so full of life, perhaps, as he had been at the time of the race,—but where were they? Then, passing the Eumenia portico and the theatre of Dionysos, where his chorus had sung before the whole of Athens in the Trachiniai of Sophokles, his friends led him on by the Odeion which Perikles built, with its peaked roof made of the masts of captured Persian ships, resembling the tent of Xerxes. He remembered being taken there when he was six years old to hear the contest of musicians when Perikles opened it. Then he proceeded up the street of Tripods. Upon the temple he had himself erected stood the tripod he had gained when his chorus won the prize. Not far off, a little higher up, on a smaller temple, was still the tripod once proudly placed there by poor Nikias. Then by the north side of the steep rock of the Akropolis he passed the ancient Agraulian sanctuary, where, as a young man, he put on his first armour, and swore to defend his country to the last. So past the Anakeion, the ancient temple of the Dioskoroi, they brought him, by Apollo’s grotto, to the Agora again, to the Stoa Basileios, the Court of the King Archon, near which was the Prytaneion, where the sacred fire ever burnt, and where the Prytanes and other privileged guests dined at the state’s expense. Their dinner was preparing, as he, followed by the people who had brought him in triumph round the rock of the Akropolis, came to the Prytaneion. As a victor in the Olympic games he was entitled to his share of the meal the state provided daily for its public officers and honoured guests. Never before had he taken advantage of his privilege. He now claimed it. And the people were astonished and delighted when they saw the saviour of their country, their unconquered general, of whose luxury and indulgence so many famous tales were told, sitting amongst the citizens, enjoying the homely fare as much as any of them. His public duties finished, he was escorted to his mother’s house by all who claimed relationship with him, and they were many now. There, in the quiet of that sacred place, we, like his Athenian supporters, may leave him for awhile. Nor shall we attempt to follow all his thoughts when he left at nightfall the solitary parent who had watched and waited for him while he had fought his country’s enemies, and while he had struggled with his great temptation to return too soon to counsel and to rule his native land.