We have come to Eleusis in the guise of votaries of Poseidôn; but it is to be confessed that, when we reach the sacred city, we have to take it on trust from Pausanias that the sea-god ever was worshipped there. He tells us that there was at Eleusis a temple of Poseidôn the Father; but the remains which we have to study are the remains of the temple of the powers which were emphatically the Mother and the Daughter. Eleusis, like other cities, began as a hill-fort; it still has its akropolis, part of the circuit of whose wall can be traced. It is crowned by a church and bell-tower, of no wonderful architecture certainly, but which we trust may be allowed to abide, even though there may be the ten-thousandth part of a chance that a stone with two or three letters upon it might be found in their foundations. The hill of the Eleusinian akropolis forms a long irregular ridge, rising in the greater part of its course close above the bay, but running a little inland at the point where it becomes an akropolis. It thus leaves a considerable space for the lower city between the hill and the haven. In a walk along the hill, a shattered tower of Frankish times, standing on a nearly detached height, is a prominent object. When reached, it presents no details for study. But in the walk thither we look out on Salamis and the bay which it guards--a lake, as it might seem, between the mainland and the curved island--while on the other side we look down on the Thriasian plain, the plain so often ravaged by Peloponnesian invaders before they crossed the ridge of Aigaleôs to deal havoc in the neighbourhood of Athens itself. And, on the ridge before we reach the tower, one of the smallest and humblest of churches will not be scorned by those who deem that no aspect of the history of the land is beneath their notice. At the foot of the hill, at the opposite end from the tower, lay, as Athens might lie were its haven close at hand, the holy city of the Great Goddesses. At the very end of the ridge, keeping away, as it would seem, from the sea, are the ruins of the temple which was once the greatest in size among the holy places of Hellas. Little now can be made out of its vast circuit. The confused and shattered ruins which are left are those of the temple of Athênê Propylaia. Its plan may be made out with no difficulty; the results may be seen in more than one book from Colonel Leake onward. But one feature, which is not the least instructive of all, seems hardly to have drawn to itself any notice. Among its ruins lie capitals of the same class as those in the baths of Antoninus, capitals in which the traditional trammels are forsaken, and in which a wider scope is given for representation of forms divine, human, or animal. These are memorials of what was in truth one of the most flourishing times in Eleusinian history; when, under the _Pax Romana_, no Tellos could fight in warfare between Athens and Eleusis, no traitors driven from Athens