Megara is now an unpretentious village with very white houses which gleam from a distance among the encircling mountains. Its site is that of the ancient city, on the double summit of a hill above the plain filled with vineyards, olive orchards, and bright green fields of wheat, rye and barley. A good road leads to the coast, little more than a mile away, where once the harbour of Nisæa focused the large sea business of Megara. The name of the harbour kept alive the memory of Nisus, son of Athenian Pandion, the first king of Megara (the Ionians perhaps preceded the Dorians in its occupation), as the “island of Minoa,”[23] now the promontory of St. George, recalled the invasion by Minos of Crete. The king’s daughter, out of love for his enemy, betrayed her father. The chorus in the “Choëphoroi” of Æschylus uses the story as a warning to Clytemnestra:— “Another murd’rous maid is sung in story and calls forth our hate. Led on by foeman lover, won by gifts of Minos, gold-wrought Cretan necklaces, she slew a man beloved and sheared the lock immortal from the head of Nisus while he breathed in unsuspecting sleep. But Hermes overtook her!” Footnote 23: The frequent occurrence of Minoa as a place name in Greece both indicates the widespread influences of Crete in prehistoric times and is also one of the arguments for the adoption, at least tentatively, of the technical term “Minoan” civilization. The history of Megara was influenced now by Athens and now by Corinth. At times neighbourhood quarrels with Corinth turned her toward Athens, but in crises the bonds of race proved stronger. Her great epoch, however, was in the eighth and seventh centuries, before the balance of power had been shifted by the Athenian conquest of Salamis. During these centuries Megara rivalled Corinth in colonial expansion, and from Nisæa adventurers set sail to found Megara Hyblæa in Sicily, Heraclea on the Euxine, and above all Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which long before its christening as Constantinople had forgotten its mother city.