In the eastern valley of the Asopus, or Vourieni, lie the not inconsiderable remains of ancient Tanagra, a city more popularly known to-day for its artistic taste than any other Greek city, except Athens. As early as 1874 excavations of its necropolis began to yield in extraordinary abundance the small terra-cotta figures which now adorn many museums, and in copies, more or less successful, have become a staple article of modern trade. These figurines, rough in finish but scrupulously lovely in shape, were objects of familiar use to the Tanagrians, being thrown into graves at burials. Other things in the city implied more civic pride. Pausanias mentions approvingly the unusually good taste of the inhabitants in separating their religious buildings from the business and residence portions of the city. And Dicæarchus is enthusiastic over their fine houses, adorned with porticoes and encaustic paintings. Literature also had its place, for here lived Corinna, a woman of no mean poetic talent. Pausanias saw her tomb in an honoured place in the city and a picture of her in the Gymnasium binding on her head a fillet to celebrate a victory over Pindar at Thebes. With unexpected acumen he remarks that she probably owed her victory partly to the fact that she wrote in a dialect intelligible to the Bœotians, and partly to her beauty. Moderns know her through the story that she advised Pindar to use mythological allusions, and after his first experiment told him that she had meant him to sow with the hand, not with a sack; and through her own haunting fragment of song: “Among the white-armed women of Tanagra, a city made famous by sweet soprano voices.” Such evidences of culture are the more surprising when we learn from Dicæarchus that Tanagra was a town of farmers. Their bluff straightforwardness, their kindliness and their simple living greatly impressed him in comparison with the insolence and dissipation of the Thebans.