Certain Bœotian towns illustrate other traditions of culture. Thespiæ, in the territory of Platæa, was used by Cicero to illustrate what was so little understood and so greatly scorned by the Romans—the Greek love of art. Nothing could so embitter the conquered people of Greece as to take from them or pretend to buy from them their works of art. “Believe me,” Cicero urges, “no community in the whole of Greece or Asia ever sold of its own accord to anybody any statue or picture or civic ornament. For the Greeks take marvellous delight in things which we despise. What would the Thespians take for their Eros, the only thing that attracts visitors to their town?” This was the Praxitelean statue which the sculptor himself ranked with his Faun as his best work and which Phryne obtained from him and presented to her native city. Eros was the tutelar divinity of the place, originally worshipped in the form of an unwrought stone. The statue, called forth by the æsthetic taste of a later age and passionately appreciated by the people, was taken to Rome by Caligula, returned by Claudius, stolen again by Nero. Pausanias saw only a copy when he was at Thespiæ. Now no copy like the familiar Capitoline copy of the Faun supplies us with half knowledge. But a visible symbol of Thespiæ’s other claim to remembrance has been left to us, to enrich the fragmentary wall and the few foundations that alone at present mark the ancient site. Not only did the city share in the victory of Platæa, but more daringly in earlier years, when the struggle with Persia was on the “razor’s edge” of uncertainty, she had sent her strongest men to die with Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The fragments of a stone lion similar to the lion of Chæronea are thought to mark the grave of these sons of Thespiæ who were inspired by— “An ardour not of Eros’ lips.”