Dicæarchus describes also with a few graphic words the inhabitants of Anthedon, a fishing town on the Gulf of Eubœa: “They are almost all fishermen, earning their livelihood by their hooks, by the purple shell, and by sponges. They grow old on the beach, among the seaweed and in their huts. They are all men of ruddy countenance and spare figure; their nails are worn away by reason of working constantly in the sea.”[32] This town,—still lovely, it is said, when the sunset illumines the lilac hills of Eubœa and rose-colour clouds float above the little fishing-boats in the bay,—furnished to literature an important character in Glaucus, a fisherman who, by eating a certain grass, became a sea-god with the gift of prophecy. Many tales were told of him from time to time, especially by seafaring men. Æschylus wrote two plays, not now extant, with him as the central figure, and thence the subject passed into the poetic storehouse of the Alexandrian playwrights. Plato made use of the legend in one of his noblest presentations of idealism. The soul marred by its association with the body and with the evils of human life is like the old sea-god, overgrown with shellfish and seaweed, wounded and broken by the action of the waves. But if the soul would always love wisdom and pursue the divine, it would be lifted out of the sea in which it now is and be forever disencumbered of its rocky covering. Footnote 32: Translated by Frazer. South of Anthedon, on the strait of Euripus, lies Aulis, of stately memory. To us as to Odysseus it is, as it were, but “yesterday or the day before” that the Achæan ships were gathering in Aulis freighted with trouble for Priam and the Trojans, and hecatombs were being offered on the altars beneath a beautiful plane tree by a stream of bright water. Here too Iphigeneia was sacrificed at the altar of Artemis. The story is told by Euripides, in the “Iphigeneia in Aulis,” in a way to bring out the latent heroism of the young. Iphigeneia grieves to leave the sunlight and clings to her mother, but in the end with splendid daring offers herself a willing sacrifice: “Mother, hear my words,” she cries,— “Not for thyself alone, but for the Hellenes all Thou barest me.” In the lyric recital of Æschylus she is pathetically the victim:— “Father, father! thus she prayed them, But nor tears nor girl’s youth stayed them, Umpire captains keen for war. To his helpers showed her sire How, like kid, above the altar Fainting in her robes, still higher They should hold her, should not falter, And, lest curse his house should blight, Ward the fair lips, guard aright, With the mouth-gag’s muzzling might.