The way into the temple was adorned with two Propylæa—one of the classical period, and by Philo (311 B. C.), another set up by a Roman, App. Claudius Pulcher, in 48 B. C., after you had passed through the former. The great temple, raised upon a natural platform, looks out toward Salamis, and the narrow line of azure which separates it from the land. Turning to the left as you stand at the temple front, the eye wanders over the rich plain of Eleusis, now dotted over with villages, and colored (in April) with the rich brown of ploughing and the splendid green of sprouting wheat. This plain had multiplied its wealth manifold since I first saw it, and led us to hope that the peasants were waking up to the great market which is near them at Athens. The track of the old sacred way along the Thriasian plain is often visible, for much of the sea-coast is marshy, so the road was cut out in many places along the spurs of the rocky hill of Daphne. The present road goes between the curious salt-lakes (Rheitoi) and the shore—salt-lakes full of sea-fish, and evidently fed by great natural springs, for there is a perpetual strong outflow to the tideless sea. I know not whether this natural curiosity has been explained by the learned. It is, of course, the celebrated Mysteries—the _Greater Eleusinia_, as they were called—which give to the now wretched village of Eleusis, with its hopeless ruins, so deep an interest. This wonderful feast, handed down from the remotest antiquity, maintained its august splendor all through the greater ages of Greek history, down to the times of decay and trifling—when everything else in the country had become mean and contemptible. Even Cicero, who was of the initiated himself, a man of wide culture and of a skeptical turn of mind—even Cicero speaks of it as _the_ great product of the culture of Athens. “Much that is excellent and divine,” says he,(80) “does Athens seem to me to have produced and added to our life, but nothing better than those Mysteries, by which we are formed and moulded from a rude and savage life to humanity; and indeed in the Mysteries we perceive the real principles of life, and learn not only to live happily, but to die with a fairer hope.” These are the words of a man writing, as I have said; in the days of the ruin and prostration of Greece. Can we then wonder at the enthusiastic language of the Homeric Hymn,(81) of Pindar,(82) of Sophocles,(83) of Aristophanes,(84) of Plato,(85) of Isocrates,(86) of Chrysippus(87)? Every manner of writer—religious poet, worldly poet, skeptical philosopher, orator—all are of one mind about this, far the greatest of all the religious festivals of Greece.