things appertaining to the temple at Athens called the Eleusinium, a vision in the night checked me: but what it is lawful for me to write for everybody, to this I will turn. In front of this temple, where is also a statue of Triptolemus, there is a brazen bull being led to sacrifice, and Epimenides the Gnossian is pourtrayed in a sitting posture, who is recorded to have gone into a field and entered into a cave and slept there, and woke not from that sleep till forty years had rolled by, and afterwards wrote epic poems and visited Athens and other cities. And Thales, who stopped the plague at Lacedæmon, was no relation of his, nor of the same city as Epimenides: for the latter was a Gnossian, whereas Thales is declared to have been a Gortynian by the Colyphonian Polymnastus, who wrote a poem on him for the Lacedæmonians. And a little further is the temple of Euclea, (_Fair Fame_), a votive offering for the victory over the Persians at Marathon. And I think the Athenians prided themselves not a little on this victory: Æschylus, at any rate, on his death-bed, remembered none of his other exploits, though he was so remarkable as a Dramatist and had fought both at Artemisium and Salamis: and he wrote in the Poem he then composed his own name and the name of his city, and that he had as witnesses of his prowess the grove at Marathon and the Persians who landed there. And beyond the Ceramicus and the portico called _The Royal Portico_ is a temple of Hephæstus, and that a statue of Athene was placed in it I was not at all surprised at when I remembered the story about Erichthonius. But seeing that the statue of Athene had grey eyes, I found that this was a legend of the Libyans, who record that she was the daughter of Poseidon and the Tritonian Marsh, and that therefore her eyes were grey as those of Poseidon. And near is a temple of Celestial Aphrodite, who was first worshipped by the Assyrians, and after them by the Paphians of Cyprus, and by the Phœnicians who dwell at Ascalon in Palestine. And from the Phœnicians the people of Cythera learned her worship. And among the Athenians her worship was instituted by Ægeus, thinking that he had no children, (for he had none then), and that his sisters were unfortunate, owing to the wrath of the Celestial One. And her statue is still among us of Parian stone, the design of Phidias. And the Athenians have a township of the Athmoneans, who say that Porphyrion, who reigned even before Actæus, erected among them a temple to the Celestial Aphrodite. But the traditions of townships and the dwellers in cities are widely different. CHAPTER XV.