The modern highroad follows very nearly the Sacred Way. Few travellers now brave the heat and dust of an Attic September, but in some “month of flowers” gain their impressions of the beauty of the road, which still leads over the Cephisus, past gray-green olive groves, up through the pine-clad pass of Mount Ægaleus, and down again to wind closely beside the curved shore of the sea. In antiquity the Sacred Way was lined with tombs and temples and shrines. Moderns are detained only by the lovely mediæval Convent of Daphne, at the top of the pass, but the ancient procession lingered not only at the Temple of Apollo which occupied this spot, but at many other sacred stations, to offer sacrifices, sing hymns, and engage in dances, solemn or joyous or wild. This was the reason for leaving Athens so early to cover only thirteen miles before another sunrise. The last part of the way followed the “torchlit strand” by night. The “voices of the night,” the moving feet of the multitude owned Iacchus as lord, with whom the stars also danced, the stars whose breath is fire. And to the stars of Sophocles Euripides added the elemental joy of moon and sea:— “When the stars of the ether of Zeus lead out, And the moon glides on as the dancers’ queen, And the daughters of Nereus join the rout Adown the sea or along the swirl Of the rivers eternal that rush and whirl— The ether, the moon, and the streams and the sea They dance to honour Persephone, The maiden crowned with the golden sheen, And Demeter the Mother—ah, Dread is she!” [Illustration: OLIVE TREES ON THE WAY TO ELEUSIS] The singing of the vast throngs, breaking out at sunrise, changing its themes in fresh enthusiasms through the long day and swelling by night into triumphant volume, must have been unforgettable. Herodotus relates that in the gloomy time when Athens was abandoned, and its plain laid waste by Xerxes, even a Medizing exile was haunted by its ghostly echoes. Dicæus of Athens chanced to be in the Thriasian plain with Demaratus of Sparta, and saw a cloud of dust advancing from Eleusis, such as a host of thirty thousand men might raise. As he was wondering who the men could possibly be, a sound reached his ear and he thought that he recognised the mystic hymn of Iacchus. Even as they looked, the dust became a cloud and sailed away to Salamis, making for the station of the Grecian fleet. This was a sign to the Athenian that the gods of Eleusis would destroy the fleet of Xerxes. To us an echo of the singing comes through the serious lyrics in the “Frogs” of Aristophanes. At the portals of Hades a band of mystics sing over again the processional hymns they had often sung on earth, beginning with the sunrise summons to Iacchus to leave his Athenian shrine:—