Imposing as the procession was at all times from its numbers and from the wild devotion of those who formed it, it was trebly so on this occasion from the added spectacle of the strong, silent soldiers who lined the way, and the splendid cavalcade of knights who went before and followed in the rear of it, and from the recollection of the seven past melancholy years, when the multitude had kept mournfully at home, fearing to go to offer their observances to the great goddesses until the saviour of the city had returned to make that possible. It seemed as if he on this day was the high-priest of Demeter, as well as their chief general. The dreaded Spartan king, while he was there, kept prudently behind his walls, nor dared, for all his power, to show himself, or seek to interrupt them. Though they had started at mid-day, so much time was taken up in the various observances along the way that the September sun had sunk behind the Akropolis long before they reached Eleusis. As the night grew dark, torches were lit one by one. The light handed on from one torch to another gave a weird look to the great throng, until the whole mass was lighted up; and thus, with wild waving of the torches, amid a blaze of light, and with cries and chants to Iakchos, ever growing louder and more wild, they reached the holy temple. So passed the festival beneath the ægis of Alkibiades; and on the last day of the proceedings, when the games were held, the gathering was attended, as of old, by the famous athletes of Greece, who came to strive for prizes and to behold the invincible Athenian. He had a twofold object in waiting for the festival. If the Spartans had come out of Dekeleia, which was not more than fifteen miles from the sacred way, he would have found an opportunity of meeting his old opponent Agis; if, as the event proved, the Spartan feared to meet him, the power which compelled such enemies to keep themselves shut up within their fortress would be made manifest. His popularity with the mass of the Athenians had reached what might have seemed its highest point even before this; afterwards it became something like idolatry. This free people forgot even their love of liberty in their fanatic zeal to show fresh proofs of their blind confidence in him. Only religious fervour, warmed by the recent worship of the goddess, and worked up by ceremonial observances and strange, half-maddening rites within the temple, can explain the step which a large number of them were prepared to take. To gain a faint conception of what these religious feelings were we must, as far as possible, put ourselves in the place of the initiated, and of those who were about to go through the process of initiation—almost the sole religious teaching of the age, the guide which taught them how to obtain the blessings of well-being here, and of an eternity of peace and happiness in the Elysian regions after death.