The road turns at a sharp angle in front of the lion and runs in placid monotony to the station situated near the banks of the Cephisus. Pausanias closes his chapter on Chæronea by a rare reference to the common people of his own day, who gathered flowers and from them distilled “balms for the pains of men.” In a modern chapter the end comes, not with the haunting fragrance through summer fields of plucked lilies and healing roses, but with the scream of an engine as the Athens express breaks into the little station. The train goes straight through Bœotia to the bright city in the Attic plain. But on the way lies Thebes of the seven gates. CHAPTER XIII THEBES AND BŒOTIA “O Thebè blest, wherein delighteth most thy heart? in which of all the noble deeds wrought in thy land in days gone by? Gone by, I say, for now the Grace of olden time is fallen upon sleep.” PINDAR. Of Bœotia more than of any other province of Greece is our involuntary judgment likely to be at fault, for the ancient distinction between the quick-witted Athenians and the stupid Bœotians has passed into our own proverbial language. But our inherited contempt for the Bœotian “clowns” is rather a tribute to the persistent intellectual domination of the Athenians than an accurate reflection of the truth. Indeed, if we examine the sources of the tradition, we find that the original verdict was popular and unreasoned, receiving its literary support in comedy which deliberately appealed to vulgar prejudices. “If you have good sense, you will avoid Bœotia,” was the mocking advice of Pherecrates, the distinguished forerunner of Aristophanes, and to the comic poets of the following centuries Bœotian gluttony and Bœotian clumsiness were an unfailing resource to pleasure the fickle humours of the crowd. [Illustration: BOEOTIA] In the serious literature of the great periods Bœotia is treated with respect. Plutarch complains that Herodotus misrepresented Thebes in the Persian Wars, and warns his readers that as there are venomous insects at the heart of roses so beneath the historian’s delightful and persuasive style lurk defamation and vituperation of “the noblest and greatest cities and men of Greece.” But if Herodotus has diverged from the truth, in this instance a questionable supposition, he has at least looked upon Thebes as an enemy and not overlooked her as a boorish community. In the history of Thucydides also, and even of the bigot Xenophon, Bœotian cities make a dignified, if not always virtuous, appearance among the actors on the national stage.