The visible remains of ancient Thebes are at present very few, and although archæological research may reveal sites and fragments of great interest, we shall never see here ruins still clothed upon with beauty. Nor is the situation of the town impressive enough to attract travellers who are indifferent to memories of the past. The chief charm of the place is its view of an horizon broken by Cithæron, Helicon, and distant Parnassus; by Mount Ptoön, where men listened to Apollo, and the Mountain of the Sphinx. Fragments of walls are all that remain of the city’s fortifications. Of the gates no traces have been found. Pausanias speaks of seeing all seven gates, but he describes only three of them, and some scholars have argued that the other four were invented by the lost epic writers who first gave literary form to the Theban legends. Certainly the poets themselves, Æschylus, Euripides, and the later Alexandrians, differ in their lists. The only important ruins of a building are those recently reported to have been discovered by the Greek archæologists near the Agora. They represent a palace of the “Mycenæan” period which met its destruction by fire and which has been identified, under the name of “The House of Cadmus,” with the ruins of “the bridal chambers of Harmonia and Semele” seen by Pausanias. From the historic period nothing remains, although with the help of broken pieces of marble and stone we may try to imagine the Temple of Ismenian Apollo, second only to Delphi as the seat of this oracular god, in the place of the present church of St. Luke on the hill that rises by the river St. John. Dismantled as Thebes was in the time of Pausanias, his guides showed him many places which were associated with Pindar or with the legends embodied in the Attic drama. There was the Observatory of Tiresias, where the blind prophet had listened intently to the sharp cries and whirring wings of the prescient birds. As if ageless in sorrow, he pervades each drama on the curse of Cadmus with his futile vision of the truth,— “His robe drawn over His old, sightless head, Revolving inly The doom of Thebes.” There was also the tomb of Menœceus, and near by a pillar marking the scene of the duel between Eteocles and Polyneices. The immediate neighbourhood was still called the “Dragging of Antigone,” because over it Antigone had to drag her brother’s heavy body.