It is fortunate for us that Thucydides was so explicit about the fountain. He gives us not merely a fountain called Fair-Fount but a fountain called Fair-Fount that was turned into Nine-Spouts. This is fortunate, because the word translated ‘Fair-Fount,’ _Kallirrhoë_, is a term so general that it might be applied to almost any spring. If in travelling through Greece to-day you stop to drink from a spring and ask your guide its name, he will, three times out of four, tell you it is _Mavromati_, _Black-Eye_, because that is a term so general as to be safely applicable. So at Athens there was, certainly in later days and possibly even in the time of Thucydides, another Kallirrhoë far away on the Ilissus. As Socrates, in the _Axiochos_[262], was going out towards Kynosarges and had reached the Ilissos he heard some one shouting to him, and turning round he saw Kleinias running towards Kallirrhoë. Clearly this was another Kallirrhoë, not the one near the Pnyx. How this duplication of Kallirrhoës at Athens arose will later (p. 143) be considered. The Kallirrhoë we are in search of is the Fair-Fount _which became the Nine-Spouts_, that and no other. It is worth noticing how quickly the spring lost its old name. People were, no doubt, very proud of the new _Nine-Spouts_. Herodotus[263] naively assumes that in the days of the Pelasgians _Fair-Fount_ was called _Nine-Spouts_. The Athenians said that their expulsion of the Pelasgians from Attica was justified, for ‘the Pelasgians who were settled under Hymettus used to make excursions thence and do lawless deeds. Their daughters used constantly to go to the Enneakrounos for water, for at that time the Greeks had no household servants, and whenever they came the Pelasgians used to offer them violence out of insolence and contempt.’ There must have been people alive in the days of Thucydides whose fathers remembered the change made by the despots, yet the name _Fair-Fount_ was, when Thucydides wrote, evidently a matter of antiquarian knowledge. * * * * * The question now before us is, Have we evidence that a spring, naturally small but reinforced and rearranged at the time of the despots, existed in the district enclosed by the Pnyx, Areopagos, and Acropolis? A glance at the plan in Fig. 35 will show that such evidence does indeed exist. In the Pnyx rock at the point marked Y is the spring Kallirrhoë, Fair-Fount. It has been reinforced by water from the district of the Ilissus, brought in the conduit of Peisistratos. In front of the ancient Kallirrhoë once stood a Fountain-House, also of the date of the despots, the Fountain-House called Nine-Spouts, Enneakrounos. The evidence for this threefold statement must be examined in detail. But first a word must be said as to the geological conditions of the site so far as they bear on the water-supply of Athens. * * * * *