The rock-chambers opposite, called by courtesy the “Prison of Socrates,” will, however, recall us to classic Athens. While waiting for the return of the mission-ship from Delos to bring the day of execution, Crito and the rest listened to Socrates’s demonstrations of immortality. Plato sent his reason out as far into the invisible as reason can go. In the “Phædo,” after his half-playful periegesis of the underworld, Socrates is made to say: “Whosoever seem to have excelled in holy living, these are they who are set free and released from these earthly places as from prisons and fare upward to that pure habitation and make their dwelling-place in yonder land.... Therefore we must do our utmost to gain in life a share in virtue and wisdom. For the prize is noble and the hope is great!” or, as he adds presently, “The risk is fair.” And Socrates, like Pindar before him, finds the crowning joy of a blessed immortality neither in the unlaborious sunlit life by night and day, nor in the ocean breezes, nor in the flowers of gold blooming on trees of splendour, but in the company of the great and noble dead with whom to live “’twere more of happiness than tongue can tell.” On the Pnyx hill we may recall the Athenian Assembly, and may turn in fancy the voluminous pages of Congressional Records filled with patriotism and jealousy; we listen to Pericles and his persuasive schemes for imperial expansion; or to Socrates, president for the day, refusing, amidst the clamours of _demos_ and demagogues, to put to vote the illegal proposition to condemn in a body the ten generals; or to Demosthenes pleading, denouncing, planning for the welfare of the city. Or in the half-light before dawn we may see the suffragettes of Aristophanes’s “Ecclesiazusæ” filing up the hill. More wily than their modern sisters, they have disguised themselves with beards and have dressed in the shoes and cloaks distrained from their husbands, imprisoned at home by naked necessity. With no man to oppose, the women quickly transfer the whole control of the State to themselves, and institute reforms that would put to shame the most radical of modern socialists. A slave, in the “Wasps” of Aristophanes, once had a dream by no means respectful to the Athenian legislature. Some sheep, with cloaks and staves, sat huddled together like just so many Athenians on the seats of the Pnyx, holding an Assembly. To-day the hill is left lonely, and the wandering goats, with their solemn faces and long beards, might renew the sittings unmolested.