In poetry Bœotia receives her full rights as a contributor to the imaginative life of Greece. In Homer not only is the Bœotian harbour of Aulis the meeting place of the Greek fleet before it sets sail for Ilium, but also Bœotian landscapes beautify heroic episodes with their rivers flowing between green banks, their open meadows and bright groves, their flocks of tame doves and grassy ways. In the Homeric Hymns Bœotian vineyards and furrows bloom under the swift feet of golden-haired Apollo and mischievous Hermes. Above all, in the Attic dramatists Bœotian Thebes is the scene of the epiphany of gods and of the sorrows of humanity. The legendary past of this city was crowded with personages whose glories and whose dooms were on so grand a scale that they became to the tragic poets of Athens, and still are to us, symbols of the unceasing conflict between will and destiny. The Theban legends more than any others, save those of Argos, appealed to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as fitted for their dramatic purpose of arousing “pity and terror.” In using this material they displayed a familiarity with the Thebes of their own day which is a striking proof that men of sense and feeling could delight in Bœotia. Æschylus perceived the fertility of the land and the fairness of Dirce, goodliest of streams. Sophocles seems to have heard and never forgotten the soft murmur of the river Ismenus. And Euripides knew intimately the wild ivy growing over the city towers and the berries and flowers of the city gardens, the golden wheat-fields and cooling springs of the surrounding country, the “deep pine greenery” and “fallen oak leaves” within the forests of Mount Cithæron, the mountain torrents cleaving the narrow, crag-topped glens, the gleaming snow forever resting on the mountain’s heights. Furthermore, Bœotia had its own traditions of culture. Although creative artistic power was exemplified only in Hesiod, the originator of a new literary movement, and in Pindar, the most eminent lyric poet of Greece, there was revealed in the architecture, sculpture, and painting which enriched cities and sanctuaries, and in the poetry and music which were conspicuous at festivals, a critical taste as trustworthy as any outside of Attica. Educational ideals also tended toward a genuine if not always vigorous cultivation. Plutarch’s ripe refinement is a late but not a solitary example. Thus accoutred against prejudice we may hope more fairly to appraise the good and the evil in Bœotian life. Bœotia has one of the most fortunate situations in Greece, for its frontiers are either protected by high mountains or border on two arms of the sea—the Gulf of Corinth and the Gulf of Eubœa—which in antiquity connected her with the extended maritime life of Greece and put her into easy communication with Attica and the Peloponnesus.