In the face of the hill fronting towards the Acropolis, the rock-chamber of the Callirrhoë spring, with its sloping entrance and the parapet within, has been suggested as the original of the famous cave in Plato’s “Republic.” The Vari Cave, on the south side of Hymettus, might have made less of a strain, as has been urged, upon Plato’s imagination. However faint the resemblance of the Callirrhoë cave to Plato’s complex setting, it is enough to emphasize the vitality of this realistic figure, which has become typical, in modern poetry and prose, of the denizens of earth watching and naming the shadows thrown by the fire-light upon the cave’s wall, unable by reason of fetters to look around at the objects moving behind them, much less to rise and climb the long ascent to the brighter light above. The innocent-looking ravine west of the Hill of the Nymphs is identified with the Barathrum. In antiquity its fame had penetrated to the underworld, where the innkeeper’s maid threatened to pitch the Pseudo-Heracles “into the Barathrum.” And Herodotus’s apocryphal story is at least _ben trovato_. He relates that, when the ambassadors of Darius came asking tokens of submission from the Greeks: “Some [the Athenians] took the messengers and threw them into the Barathrum, others [the Spartans] into a well, and bade them take earth and water from there to their King.” Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, if we are to believe the allusion in the “Gorgias,” barely escaped with a fine and banishment instead of the criminal’s end in this same pit.