The focus of the inner city life was the splendid Agora laid out by the famous architect Hippodamus. Here ended the road from Athens. This square was probably west of Munychia north of the Zea harbour, perhaps about where the present Athena street intersects Munychia avenue. Near it were probably grouped various sanctuaries. Xenophon tells how in the civil war the patriotic party, “the men from Phyle,” unable to exclude “the City party” from the whole of Piræus, fell back on the Munychia hill, and the men from Athens blocked up the avenue that leads to the temple of Bendis and to the sanctuary of Munychian Artemis. By this Market-place, too, houses of rich residents were probably built. The Piræus was essentially a democratic stronghold. It was the rendezvous for the patriotic anti-Spartan party; and Plato, with all his aristocratic leanings, chose to lay at Piræus the opening scene and setting for his greatest dialogue, the “Republic.” It was the fitting propylæa for his ideal city as well as for the real Athens. “I went down yesterday,” Socrates begins, “to Piræus with Glaucon, both to make a prayer to the goddess and to take a look at the festival to see how they would carry it off, inasmuch as they are now celebrating it for the first time.” The Thracian residents, it seems, had just introduced a celebration in honour of their goddess Bendis, and the natives had united with them. The whole port was _en fête_ with processions conducted both by the hospitable native citizens and the Thracians themselves. In the evening there was to be a torch-race followed by an all-night festival. Socrates, who was on the point of returning to Athens after witnessing the daylight processions, was easily persuaded by Polemarchus to stay over for the torch-race, dining first at the house of his father, the rich and hospitable old metic, Cephalus. At the house Socrates finds another son, Lysias, who was soon to become famous as an orator. For the Thirty were to plunder the property bequeathed by Cephalus to his sons, all the ready money, the shield factory, and the slaves; were to put summarily to death young Polemarchus; and were to force Lysias, reduced to sudden poverty, to betake himself to speech-writing for a living. His crowning effort was an arraignment of his brother’s murderers. Most skilful of narrators, he tells of the fate of Polemarchus; how his house was plundered; how his wife was robbed of the very ear-rings from her ears; and how after his execution, notwithstanding the just title of the family to large holdings of real estate, he was buried from a hired shed, one friend providing a robe, another a pillow, for the corpse. He tells, too, of his own arrest at his home by the emissaries of the Thirty: how he bargained for his life with a sum of ready money; how one of his captors followed him into the inner room, looked over his shoulder into the money-chest, and took not only the price agreed upon but all the contents of the strong box; how