[52] Eleusis was famed for the celebration of mysteries, as they were called; which consisted in leading the aspirant through various terrific scenes and representations; after which, if his courage remained unshaken, he was instructed in a purer and more exalted system of religion than was openly taught in Greece. Secrecy on the part of the initiated was most strictly enforced. The immortality of the soul appears to have been the leading doctrine inculcated in these ceremonies; which seem traceable to the earliest periods of Grecian history, and were probably derived from Egypt. The initiated went yearly in solemn procession from Athens to Eleusis, and chaunted on these occasions the hymns alluded to. [53] The correspondence between the above story and the following Spanish legend is singularly close.—“The night before the battle was fought at the Navas de Tolosa, in the dead of the night a mighty sound was heard in the whole city of Leon, as if it had been the tramp of a whole army passing through: and it went on to the royal monastery of St. Isidro, and there was great knocking at the gate thereof; and they called to a priest who was keeping vigil in the church, and told him that the captains of the army which he heard were the Cid Ruy Diaz, and Count Ferran Gonzalez; and that they came to call up King Don Fernando the Great, who lay buried in that church, that he might go with them to deliver Spain. And on the morrow that great battle of the Navas de Tolosa was fought, wherein 60,000 of the unbelievers were slain, which was one of the greatest and noblest battles ever won over the Moors.”—Chronicle of Cid, xi. 21. It occurred A.D. 1212. [54] See Col. Leake on the Attic Demi. [55] In the Persæ, a tragedy written to celebrate the overthrow of Xerxes, and containing a magnificent description of the battle of Salamis, of which the poet was an eye–witness, having served in all the brilliant actions of the Persian war, from Marathon to Platæa. The passage is too long for the whole to be inserted, but the description of the first onset of the Greeks may furnish a specimen of its character.