The other remnants—fragmentary and broken—of the vanished life upon this hill must be identified with pious care. Then the thought turns to such references in literature as have been transmitted to us. These also are fragmentary, seeming sometimes like the patches of blue and red and gold not yet wholly effaced from the marbles. The Iliad, as we know it, preserves an Athenian tradition of the prehistoric kingly Acropolis. Among the warriors bound for Troy are listed:— “They that had Athens, the citadel goodly, the holding of great-heart Erechtheus to whom on a time, as fostering nurse, was Zeus’s daughter, Athena (though the seed-land, giver of grain, was the mother who bore him), and at Athens she made him to dwell, in her own habitation of plenty. There the Athenian youths with bulls and with rams do him honour, year after year in the seasons returning.” And here under the Greek heaven, on this hill left lonely by men but easily accessible to gods, it would hardly seem incredible if Athena herself were suddenly to appear once more. In the Odyssey, when she had ventured to leave Odysseus to his own cunning among the Phæacians, she returned by a course, strangely devious for an air line, by way of Marathon to Athens:— “Then with these words the bright-eyed Athena departed over the harvestless seas and behind her left Scheria lovely. She came unto Marathon then and the wide-wayed Athenian city, and entered the massive-built house of Erechtheus.” As we look upon the meagre traces of the prehistoric city, we should like to see the princess maidens appear in the simplicity of the kingly times. Like the women described by Pherecrates, the comic poet, they had no slaves:— “No one then possessed a Sambo, no one had a maid-slave then, Every bit of household labour must the girls themselves perform.” Herodotus tells us how they used to go down and out from the protecting gateways, to draw water at Callirrhoë beyond the Agora, and how the rough Pelasgians, banished from this their ancient home, would now and again rush down from Hymettus to carry them off.