The ride from the Cleft Way to Chæronea, winding through the valley of the Platania, a tributary of the Bœotian Cephisus, is rich in interest and variety. A little to the west of Chæronea, on the border between Phocis and Bœotia, lies Hagios Vlasis, a miserable village, known to fame only because of its position under the ancient acropolis of Panopeus. The importance of Panopeus was the subject of legend and poetry rather than of history. From its clay Prometheus fashioned the human race, and from its people sprang Epeios, the inventor at Troy of the wooden horse. Here also the giant Tityos lived and died. He had violated Leto as she went up to Delphi through Panopeus “of the fair dancing places,” and for this sin Odysseus found him in Hades sprawling over nine roods of levelled ground, his liver gnawed by vultures. Pausanias was perplexed by the Homeric epithet for the town until the inhabitants explained to him that the Mænads on their way to Parnassus stopped at Panopeus for preliminary dances. Dionysus may have passed this way with his mysterious quickening, as Apollo did with his ordered inspiration. Thus the insignificant town was the legendary scene of man’s birth and of important episodes in his mental and moral development. Beyond Hagios Vlasis lies another modern village in the shadow of an ancient acropolis. Between Phocis and Bœotia there is no natural boundary, but the large plain of Chæronea sweeps westward into Phocis and eastward into Bœotia to what used to be the Copaic lake. On the north and south the plain is enclosed by barren mountains, and the town of Chæronea, unlike Panopeus, spread out from the base of its acropolis at the foot of the southern and lower hills. Its modern representative is the hamlet of Kapræna, which displays a few legacies of antiquity and from which can be seen the two peaks of Petrachus, the sharp and steep acropolis. The chapel of Panagia (the Virgin) contains a chair of white marble called the chair of Plutarch. The great biographer was born in Chæronea, and the worshipful preservation of his name in the little Christian church reminds one of the appearance of the equally respectable Plinies on the exterior of the cathedral of their native Como.