Colonus, the birthplace of Sophocles, lay a little more than a mile northwest of Athens. The hill is now disappointingly bald. Verdure and the song of the nightingale must be sought by the banks of the Cephisus near by, but the famous lines of Sophocles retouch the faded picture. The chorus of old men of Attica address the aged Œdipus:— “Thou’rt come, O guest, unto the fairest of earth’s dwellings in this land that hath good breed of horses—this our white Colonus, where the clear-voiced nightingale from covert of green dells sends out her oft-repeated warblings murmurous and makes her dwelling in the wine-dark ivy or the god’s impenetrable foliage with countless fruitage laden; where the sun’s rays strike not nor bloweth any wind of all the blasts of winter; where Dionysus ever in rapt frenzy fares along, consorting with the nymphs that nursed him at the breast. “And fed by heaven’s dew, day in, day out, blooms the narcissus clustering fair in wreaths from days of yore inwoven for the twain Great Goddesses; blooms, too, the crocus with its gleam of gold. Nor ever fail the sleepless fountains of Cephisus and his wandering streams.” The ramparts of the city of Theseus, seen by Antigone at the opening of the play, are for Sophocles in reality the Acropolis and walls of his own day. Antigone describes the sacred grove to her blind father:— “This place is sacred, for it teems with laurel, olive, and the vine. Within its very heart a multitude of feathered nightingales make music.” The venerable olive trees, self propagated through generations from the parent stump, are, indeed, a feature in the Attic landscape. Sophocles does not fail to include them in his catalogue of Attic blessings:— “There’s no such shoot on the Asian coast, of none such do I hear in Doris great, in Pelops-isle—a plant unvanquished, self-renewing, terror unto foemen’s spears—nay, none like this, child-nurturing, that groweth greatest in our land, the gray-green olive’s foliage.” And in the neighbouring Academy the youths ran off their races beneath the sacred olive trees. To the joyous associations that for nearly two centuries had been accumulating about the Academy Plato added the overshadowing greatness of his own name and teaching. He has incidentally perpetuated the name of the original modest freeholder, Academus, to be a part of the vocabulary of every school-boy. Near the Academy, making a fitting goal for the avenue leading from the Dipylon gate between the monuments of illustrious dead, the Athenians gave Plato magnificent interment. An epigram by Antipater transfers to Plato the indifference expressed by Socrates in regard to his untenanted body when he says in the prison death-scene:—