Every sixty years all Bœotia, its big and little cities, its farmsteads and fishing towns, united in the Great Dædala. The crowds gathered at Platæa. Long processions, representing each town, bore their own wooden images to the summit of Cithæron, seeking a narrow plateau where the snows had melted. Here altars were built and victims burned. And at night the great flames rose into the sky and were seen from afar, so that the young men in Attica and beyond the Gulfs doubtless said to each other, “Bœotia is celebrating as our fathers said,” and the old men shook their heads and remembered brighter fires. Zeus and Hera have been long forgotten, nor are the feet of Dionysus heard upon the mountain, but still winter gives way to spring and the heart of man is glad. The hard-working people of modern Bœotia keep holiday when spring blooms anew, and Mount Cithæron gives them as of old the soft green of its budding oak leaves, the vivacious laughter of its loosened waters. CHAPTER XV THERMOPYLÆ “Dic, hospes, Spartæ nos te hic vidisse iacentes Dum sanctis patriæ legibus obsequimur.” CICERO, _translation of a Greek Epitaph_.[33] Thermopylæ lies due north from Delphi, less than twenty-five miles distant in an air line, but between them lie “many o’ershadowing mountains,” as Achilles might say, or, to be more exact, the great Parnassus cluster and the continuation of the Œta range, the watershed between the Bœotian Cephisus and the Malian Spercheius. Just where Doris and Phocis on the south meet Trachian Malis and Epicnemidian Locris on the north Mount Kallidromos is set like a boundary stone. The ridge that unites it with Mount Œta proper is now pierced by the Larissa railway-tunnel, opened in the summer of 1908, through which the northern express carries the traveller into the gorge and along the steep cliffs of the Asopus, the river that flowed down between Xerxes and Leonidas. To the east of the river’s outlet into the Malian gulf was the narrow gangway between cliffs and water, called “Hot-Gates” from the local “Thermal,” or hot springs, and the “Pylai,” or fortified gateways. Footnote 33: Cicero, in this translation of the famous epigram (see below) attributed to Simonides, apparently follows a version slightly different from that transmitted by Herodotus. A charming old German translation is preserved in a Heidelberg manuscript:— “Sag, frembder gast, dem Spartenn land, Wir liegen fast hie inn dem sannd, Dass wir so schon inn dem gefecht Gehalten hon satzung unnd recht.”