“Greeting, O dear my country, long the time gone by Till now I see and kiss thee. Not to every land Would I do this, but only when I see my own, The land that bred me is a goddess in my eyes.” We think of Menander himself as a frequent visitor to the harbour town. Tradition says that he was drowned while bathing at the harbour and his countrymen gave him a tomb and an epitaph on the road from Piræus to Athens by the Long Walls. There, too, was the cenotaph of Euripides, who had sailed away to the court of the Macedonian king, never again to enter through the harbour’s arms that welcomed so many returning voyagers. And the Athenian of the third century, returning as we do now, from a visit to Piræus, would see these tombs as he left the harbour walls and perhaps find compensation for the loss of external liberty in realizing that the great sea-fortress and the maritime empire of Themistocles, of Pericles, and of Conon had buttressed well a Greater Athens; that neither Spartan jealousy and civil discord, nor even the foreign rule of Macedon itself could destroy the real power of this Mother city and obliterate her sway over the human mind. But it required the perspective of longer time and the idealism of a Shelley boldly to interpret disaster in terms of victory and to proclaim Athens as mistress of a sea wider than the Ægean:— “Greece and her foundations are Laid below the tides of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity.” The launching-ways of the ancient triremes, still seen beneath the clear water, symbolize that continued hegemony. CHAPTER III ATHENS: FROM SOLON TO THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS “Here, stranger, seek no tyrant. This our state is ruled Not of one man. ’Tis free. The people year by year As kings succeed each other, never yield they most To Wealth, but even he that’s poor has equal share.” EURIPIDES, _Supplices_.