With this chastening of his imagination the traveller may turn his attention to the few discoveries which up to this time have been made. By far the most significant of these are fragmentary remains of the temple of Athena Chalkiœkos and of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. Athena’s Brazen House, existing in some form from a very early epoch, was so associated with the public life of the city that it became known to foreigners as an object of peculiar national sentiment. Euripides makes the Trojan women attribute to Helen a desire to see it once more when, praying to die at sea before the consummation of their captivity, they seek to involve her in their own fate:— “And, God, may Helen be there, With mirrors of gold, Decking her face so fair, Girl-like; and hear and stare And turn death cold, Never, ah, never more The hearth of her home to see, Nor sand of the Spartan shore, Nor tombs where her fathers be Nor Athena’s Brazen Dwelling Nor the towers of Pitane.”[43] The discovery of the Temple of Artemis is of great importance, not only because it was the pivot of the religious life of Sparta but because its eighth century foundations, excavated beneath the traces of a sixth century structure, may belong to the earliest temple in Greece. The image, called Orthia because it had been found “upright” in a thicket of willows, was believed by the Spartans to be the ancient wooden one brought by Orestes and Iphigeneia from the land of the Taurians, where Iphigeneia, rescued by Artemis from the sacrificial altar at Aulis, had been its priestess and guardian. Euripides naturally preserves the Athenian tradition that the image was brought to Brauron. But Pausanias presses the Spartan claim and explains the hoary custom of annually scourging the boys in front of the image by the “relish for blood” that it had acquired in the days when human sacrifices were offered to it in a barbarian land. Footnote 43: Translated by Gilbert Murray.