Pindar’s praise of Ægina must have been as wormwood to the Athenians, for her Dorian blood and commercial supremacy made her their natural rival, and her proximity fanned rivalry into hatred. Athens conquered in the end, and time and tourists have completed the victory by turning the island into one of the “excursions in Attica.” No longer the “eye-sore of Piræus,” as Pericles called it, it now immeasurably enhances the Attic landscape and beckons to its own shores those who day by day have watched its mountainous beauty across the estranging gulf. Only on the western side of the island, where the town of Ægina occupies the site of the ancient capital, is the coast free from steep cliffs, and the entire surface, as it is seen from Athens, consists of mountain-ridges crowned by the high peak of Oros, once sacred to Zeus Panhellenios and now bearing a chapel to Saint Elias. Toward these Æginetan hills the eye inevitably turns whether the sullen rain-clouds are gathering, as of old, about the highest summit, or Zeus unrolls his bluest canopy above the deeper azure of their slopes, or whether, against the changing sunsets, they darken into stormy purple or delicately veil themselves in amethystine, shot with rose. Ægina’s lodestone for modern travellers is the Doric temple on a hill above the Bay of Marina in the northeastern part of the island. Regular boats ply between Piræus and the harbour-town of Ægina, the route taken by Lucian’s group of friends who hired a tiny boat at four obols a head in order to see the islanders celebrating their famous Festival of Hecate. From the town the temple may be reached by a ride of several hours across the rough but fertile northern districts of the island. Excursion boats, however, for those who have but a day, cross directly from Piræus to the Bay of Marina, a route more nearly akin to that followed by the Athenian ships which began the mad expedition to Sicily by a race “as far as Ægina,” and then turned their prows toward the open sea. From the shore of the bay it is an easy walk to the isolated hill-top upon which the ruined temple stands. On an April day this approach is one of vivid beauty, the bright new green of fig trees glistening among resinous pines and the ground rioting in the colour of many flowers. The hill-top itself offers a scene which is unsurpassed even among the remoter islands of the Greek seas. The intense brilliance of the very white marble columns under the cloudless sky is tempered by the somewhat sombre green of neighbouring trees. Afar are seen the broken coast and the varied mountains of the mainland from Megara to Sunium. Below, in capricious loveliness, now a tranquil plain of ultramarine, now a restless surface of sparkling crystal, stretches the Saronic Gulf.