Apart from the details of the battle, the “Persians” is noticeable for the method by which the poet introduces his ethical lesson. The ghost of the great Darius suddenly appears in the orchestra and attributes the defeat of Xerxes to his presumption in fettering “like a slave” the “sacred” Hellespont. Æschylus reiterates his favourite doctrine: “When Insolence puts forth the bloom of Atè, the harvest reaped is one of many tears.” And when later Xerxes himself arrives, the chorus with un-oriental frankness says: “Xerxes has packed Hades full with Persians.” The “Persæ” of Timotheus, a sensational find of the year 1902, with its fantastic and overloaded epithets and the half-comic scene of the drowning Persian spitting out bitter brine and reproaches together, is a curious scholium upon Æschylus’s poem. The description of the dead upon the sea is thus retouched:— “Choked was the sea, star-spangled with the corpses reft of souls departing with the failing breath. The beaches were weighed down. Other some upon the jutting spits of land were seated all a-shiver in their nakedness.” The love of free men for a free country saved Attica. Euripides, despite the devastation of the country, might well call his land “unsacked,” “inviolate.” It was true of the unyielding citizens who, whether upon the mainland or self-exiled upon their triremes, refused all dealings with the despot. Plutarch tells us that Xerxes after Salamis sought to detach the Athenians from the national cause by promises of liberty and riches for themselves. The Lacedæmonians, fearing lest they might yield to the royal bribery, attempted to remonstrate, but Aristides bade the ambassadors say at Sparta: “Neither above ground nor below is there enough gold for the Athenians to accept in preference to the liberty of the Hellenes.” It may be that the visitor to Salamis, as his little craft scuds swiftly home past Cynosura and Psyttaleia, sees the dark clouds, from which but now came rain, roll off towards Eleusis, while Attica, the islands, and the western mountains merge once more in the accustomed beauty of the translucent atmosphere. He may, perhaps, harbour the thought that under such a sky, when the war-clouds had finally withdrawn, the demesmen of country and of town came back to their devastated but ransomed Attica. CHAPTER VIII ELEUSIS “That torch-lit strand whereon the Goddesses reverèd foster mystic rites and dread for mortal men whose lips the ministrant Eumolpidæ have locked in golden silence.” SOPHOCLES, _Œdipus Coloneus_.