After some difficult points of precedence as to order of seating have been temporarily waived and half-naturalized divinities like Mithras and our Thracian Bendis have been admitted, Zeus makes a speech. He begins fluently enough with a mosaic of oratorical phrases which he has memorized from Demosthenes. Presently, however, he exclaims: “But my Demosthenes is giving out. I must tell you in plain Greek what has troubled me.” He reminds them of the dinner in which some of them—“as many as had been invited”—had participated the day before, when “Mnesitheus, the ship-owner, had given them a Thanksgiving banquet at Piræus on account of the preservation of his vessel that had come within an ace of being wrecked off Eubœa.” “That evening,” he continues, “while taking a constitutional, I kept thinking over the stinginess of Mnesitheus who undertook to entertain sixteen gods by sacrificing a single cock—and that, too, a wheezy old rooster!—with four little lumps of frankincense so mouldy that they went out forthwith on the coals, without giving even the tip of my nose a whiff of the smoke. That’s what he did, though he was for promising whole hecatombs when his boat was driving on the cliff and was already encircled by reefs.” Sometimes the fisher-folk preferred to go up to Athens and dedicate votive offerings in the Parthenon. Lucian, in “The Fisher,” when angling over the edge of the Acropolis for the scaly philosophers of the second century, borrows of the Priestess of the Parthenon a rod, hook, and line that “the fisherman from Piræus had dedicated” as a thank-offering. Of the many epigrams in the Greek Anthology on shipwrecked mariners, the most appropriate to our harbour town is perhaps the one written by Antipater of Sidon for the tomb of a certain Aristagoras who was drowned after reaching harbour at Scarphe. We are reminded of the Piræus temple to Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage by the bitterness with which the poet uses the epithet:— “Ever the sea is the sea. It is idle to blame Cyclades’ waves or the Needles or Narrows of Helle; Them I escaped to be drowned in the harbour of Scarphe. Vain is their fame. Pray, if you will, for a fair voyaging homeward, but say: Here in his tomb Aristagoras knows of the sea and its way— Ever the same.” It requires no great stretch of the imagination to reproduce the thrill of pride and delight with which the Attic demesman, whether sailor or soldier, fisherman or merchant, returning from abroad sighted the heights of Akte and the Munychia acropolis and sailed up to the beautiful, dignified city built around its strong, fortified harbours. Even after independent Athens had been incorporated in the Macedonian empire, Menander could record this patriotic delight. In a fragment from his “Fishers” a sailor, returning perhaps to Piræus, falls down and kisses the earth, exclaiming:—