A dramatic story is selected by Herodotus to embellish his account of the battle. Two Spartan soldiers, Eurytus and Aristodemus, lay at the headquarters at Alpeni, suffering with severe ophthalmia. When the news came in of the final crisis, Eurytus, putting on his armour with the help of his helot squire, was led on his blind way into the thick of the battle and fell fighting with the rest, while the helot made good his escape. Aristodemus, as might indeed seem natural in the case of a man thus incapacitated for service, remained behind and returned home. But his fellow citizens at Sparta, incensed at the contrast between the two, refused him light to kindle fire and nicknamed him the “Trembler.” Nor did any subsequent bravery wipe out his disgrace. Even when, in the closing scene of the great drama at Platæa, he surpassed all others in the reckless daring with which he fought and died, he was still excluded from his country’s roll of honour. Thus imperative did it seem that Spartan courage and love of liberty should be proclaimed to all as the rule that knew no exception. CHAPTER XVI ARGOLIS “Few for our eyes are the homes of the heroes, Lowly these few, they scarce lift from the plain; So once I marked thee, O luckless Mycenæ, Then, as I passed thee, a desert’s domain. Never goat-pasture more lonely, thou’rt merely Something they point at, while driving a-fold. Said an old herd to me: ‘Here stood the city Built by Cyclōpes, the city of gold.’” ALPHEUS OF MITYLENE, _Greek Anthology_. In the Argolid it seems reasonable to turn aside from history, in its narrower definition, to recall the tales of heroes and the “grandeur of the dooms imagined for the mighty dead.” The turbulent and uneven course of events in which Argolis of historic times appears now as an ally, now as an enemy of other powerful states, is of less moment than the legends handed down and crystallized in great literature. Even if the sagas which may have formed the nucleus of the Iliad sprang from the older Thessalian “Argos,” the Homeric poems, as known to the classic Greeks and to us, concern themselves with the mighty fortresses of the Argolid. The Attic drama reënforced the epic tradition, and the interchanging use in Homer of Achæans, Danai, and Argives to designate the Greeks, suggests the elements which gave the later poets opportunity for varied interpretation.