After all, the story belongs to a class. There are the thistles which the armies took for spears after the fight of Montl’hery. There are the Welshwomen in the red cloaks, whom the French at Fishguard took for regular soldiers coming to the help of the valiant militia of Pembrokeshire. Did all these things happen, or are they all mere sayings which have found their way into history? Let comparative mythologists argue the point. But we are followed by etymologies along the whole coast. Every one who has ever looked at the map knows the long island, immediately east of the southern point of Attica, whose name fluctuates between the mere description Makris and the more attractive name of Helenê. How came Helen hither? We may be sure, with all deference to Strabo, that this is not the Kranaê of the third book of the Iliad; that was far away by the Lakonian shore, and the Homeric reference was commemorated by a temple of Aphroditê with an unseemly surname. So Pausanias tells us, though he does not explain what brought Helen to the long island off Sounion. We will not hint that according to one Homeric story (see Odyssey iii. 278) she must have been, if not on the island, at least near it, in better company and at a later and better part of her story, than that in which Strabo would bring her into these parts. But on Attic soil or on Attic waters we must learn to feel an Attic patriotism, and, so minded, we can give her a chance from another quarter. We must not forget that Helen has her independent place in Attic as well as in Peloponnesian legend. She was carried off by Thêseus as well as by Paris. She was known at Aphidna, at Dekeleia, and at Rhamnous; and it would be only a fair freak of etymological invention to give her an island off the Attic as well as off the Lakonian coast. But with Helen in this way to guard the eastern side of the southern extremity of the Attic land, it is a little disappointing when we find the real origin of the name of the much smaller island which guards its western side. There lies the isle of Patroklos. Helen and Patroklos seem well matched; and a charm seems to be broken when we find that the island takes its name, not from the Homeric antitype of Jonathan, but from the Admiral of Ptolemy Philadelphos, who there dug a trench and threw up a wall when he came to help Athens against Antigonos Gonatas. Such a fall from poetry to prose, from legend to history, is really sad. Yet we may draw some small comfort. Everything is a gain which reminds us that the history of Athens did not end with the war of Chairôneia or with the war of Lamia, but that Ptolemy and Antigonos, and men later by ages on ages than Ptolemy and Antigonos, had something to do with fixing her destinies.