“Nay, then, righteous and gracious in mind to our land, Come, come, O ye Dread Ones, take joy in our band. (Cry aloud now! Exult in your singing!) “As the torches attend, let libations be poured, Thus the all-seeing Zeus and the Moiræ as ward To the people of Pallas their presence afford. (Cry aloud now! Exult in your singing!)” The great mass broken off from the east end of the Areopagus rock has partially blocked the cleft into which the chorus conducts home the Dread Goddesses. As the procession, chanting its hymn, sweeps around the shoulder of the hill, the faded picture of ancient Athens regains its outlines as if under some powerful reagent. Wine-press and fountain, precincts and temples, rise again from their ruins; the throbbing life of the eager citizens reappears. But the gaily-dressed people have hushed jest and carping under the sense of awe evoked by Æschylus. The Athenians were then, as St. Paul on this same Areopagus called them long afterwards, “very scrupulous,” and it was no unworthy superstition that made it imperative to harmonize the cruder conceptions of the immutable laws of Retribution with the new and expansive wisdom of Athena. Swinburne, with keen insight into the universal application of the great drama, brings the “shadows of our deeds” under wisdom’s searching but not unkindly light:— “Light whose law bids home those childless children of eternal night, Soothed and reconciled and mastered and transmuted in men’s sight Who behold their own souls, clothed with darkness once, now clothed with light.” The visitor who takes his stand to-day immediately in front of the south side of the Areopagus is completely sequestered from the modern city. Here the Acropolis and the Areopagus rock make practically a continuous barrier to the close-built streets that on the northern side come crowding up their slopes. He is encircled with hills, and this ancient quarter of the city of Theseus lies waste and silent around him. The ground is harrowed and scarred by the spade of the archæologist. Only the foundations of sanctuaries and fountains, houses and cisterns, may be distinguished.