from Delos: accordingly her statue has a bow. And what is hardly credible to hear, but wonderful to see, is a stadium of white marble; one can easily conjecture its size in the following manner. Above the Ilissus is a hill, and this stadium extends from the river to the hill in a crescent-shaped form. It was built by Herodes an Athenian, and most of the Pentelican quarry was used in its construction. CHAPTER XX. Now there is a way from the Prytaneum called _The Tripods_, so called from some large temples of the gods there and some brazen tripods in them, which contain many works of art especially worthy of mention. For there is a Satyr on which Praxiteles is said to have prided himself very much: and when Phryne once asked which was the finest of his works, they say that he offered to give it her like a lover, but would not say which he thought his finest work. A servant of Phryne at this moment ran up, and said that most of Praxiteles’ works were destroyed by a sudden fire that had seized the building where they were, but that they were not all burnt. Praxiteles at once rushed out of doors, and said he had nothing to show for all his labour, if the flames had consumed his Satyr and Cupid. Phryne then bade him stay and be of good cheer, for he had suffered no such loss, but it was only her artifice to make him confess which were his finest works. She then selected the Cupid. And in the neighbouring temple is a boy Satyr handing a cup to Dionysus. And there is a painting by Thymilus of Cupid standing near Dionysus. But the most ancient temple of Dionysus is at the theatre. And inside the sacred precincts are two shrines of Dionysus and two statues of him, one by Eleuthereus, and one by Alcamenes in ivory and gold. There is a painting also of Dionysus taking Hephæstus to Heaven. And this is the story the Greeks tell. Hera exposed Hephæstus on his birth, and he nursing up his grievance against her sent her as a gift a golden seat with invisible bonds, so that when she sat in it she was a prisoner, and Hephæstus would not obey any of the gods, and Dionysus, whose relations with Hephæstus were always good, made him drunk and took him to Heaven. There are paintings also of Pentheus and Lycurgus paying the penalty for their insults to Dionysus, and of Ariadne asleep, Theseus putting out to sea, and Dionysus coming to carry her off. And there is near the temple of Dionysus and the theatre a work of art, said to have been designed in imitation of Xerxes’ tent. It is a copy, for the original one was burnt by Sulla the Roman general when he took Athens. And this is how the war came about. Mithridates was king of the barbarians in the neighbourhood of the Euxine Sea. Now his pretext for fighting against the Romans, and how he crossed into Asia, and the cities he reduced by war or won over by diplomacy, let those who wish to know the whole history of Mithridates concern themselves about all this: I shall merely relate the circumstances