The promontory of Sunium, the prow of Attica, breasts the Ægean, and the white temple columns, beautiful in their ruin, stand up boldly like the Samothracian Nike upon an advancing trireme. The view from the precipitous bluff is one of surpassing beauty, with the glistening white of the marble against the nearer foreground of green and against the blue of the overarching sky and of the wide expanse of water. The eye sweeps from Ægina to the opposite shore of Argolis and around to the “glittering Cyclades” scattered over the Ægean, while far to the south, seventy miles away, Mount St. Elias on Melos in clear weather lifts its lofty cone into view, the outline of the island being sunk, like a vessel’s hull, below the horizon. On the Acropolis at Athens was preserved the memory of the contest between Athena and Poseidon, and at Sunium each of these divinities had a temple. Poseidon has here retained the supremacy, as was fitting, and only the foundation walls remain of Athena’s temple on the lower terrace. The Athenians dedicated at Sunium to Poseidon one of the triremes captured at Salamis, and here, on occasion of the quadrennial festival held in honour of the sea-god, the Æginetans seized the festal galley full of Athenian dignitaries. A defendant, in one of Lysias’s speeches, tells how he had “won in the trireme race off Sunium,” which was part of the _panegyris_. In Aristophanes the chorus of Knights cry out to “Poseidon, lord of horses, rejoicing in the bronze-shod hoof-beats and the neigh of steeds and swift blue prows of triremes,”— “Come hither to our chorus, Raise thy golden trident for us, Thee at Sunium we praise Whom the dolphin band obeys.” [Illustration: SUNIUM Temple of Poseidon. The Ægean Sea ] To catalogue the ships, famous in Greek story, that have sighted or rounded this headland would cause to pass in review a mighty and a motley fleet. Nestor tells Telemachus how, sailing home with Menelaus from Troy, they lost their pilot,— “When that we came unto Sunium sacred, the headland of Athens.” And Sophocles’s chorus of Salaminian sailors long in Troyland for their native shores:— “O there I would I might be, Where Sunium’s spreading foreland Hangs over the surge of the sea, That straightway our Athens, the holy, Might be greeted and hailed by me.”