Rhamnus is on the coast near the southern mouth of the Euripus, and is one of the most beautiful and secluded places in the whole peninsula. As a visit to this northeast corner is needful to complete the physical outline of Attica, so the contours of Greek character will be sharpened here in the sanctuary of Nemesis, the dread goddess of Retribution, whose warning presence hovered continually in the background of Greek consciousness. Her beautiful statue, made perhaps by Phidias or his pupils, was fittingly set up in this place near the mouth of the Euripus where the Persian fleet had sailed through to the crushing rebuke at Marathon. Pausanias calmly states that this statue, dedicated to “the goddess most inexorable of all towards overweening men,” was made by Phidias out of some “Parian marble which the Persians, as if the victory were already won, carried with them for the erection of a trophy.” If we could credit this statement it would enlarge the itinerary of the meagre fragments of the colossal statue now in the British Museum. At Rhamnus are to be seen the remains of two temples, one dedicated to Nemesis, and the other probably to Themis, the mother of Prometheus, and identified by Æschylus, following Attic tradition, with Mother Earth herself—“one form for many names.” Situated at the head of a glen, banked-up by a marble terrace and shaded by myrtle, green fir trees and shrubbery, the ruins look down upon the marble walls and towers of the ancient acropolis of Rhamnus occupying a rocky, self-fortified hill that juts out into the channel. Beyond the Euripus the mountains fill in the background. Unwary speech, insolent success or immoderate, though innocent, good fortune might call down the retribution of Nemesis. Like our superstitious formula, “Knock on wood,” it was a common device in Greek to deprecate the divine envy towards arrogant speech, by saying: “I being but human make obeisance to Adrasteia,” or, the equivalent, “to Nemesis.” Pindar describes the happy Hyperboreans as set free from this scrupulous anxiety, ever present to mortal men:— “And for that sacred race nor pestilence, nor deadening age is blended in their lot. Apart from war and toil they dwell, acquittal winning from exacting Nemesis.” Near the cheerful modern village of Marathona in the valley of Avlona above the plain of Marathon are remains of an ancient gateway to the villa of Herodes Atticus. The inscription placed over his portal by this beneficent humanist and teacher was: “The Gate of Immortal Unanimity.” A few miles to the southwest, on the northern slope of Pentelicus, the American school excavated on an upland farm, called Dionyso, the remains of the ancient Icaria, the earliest Attic home of Dionysus and the birthplace of Thespis, the father of Attic tragedy. An epigram in the Anthology by Dioscorides records the claims of Thespis:—