the fortification of Sounion. This was done with the special object of supplying a defence to the corn ships which brought in the foreign food that Athens needed more than ever when the Peloponnesians were at Dekeleia. A large part of the wall which cut off the promontory is still to be traced, a wall of the best Hellenic masonry, strengthened by square towers at intervals. Within this military circuit again we come to the remains of the Propylaia, the entrance, as at Eleusis and at Athens itself, to the immediate sacred precinct. But the summit of all, crowning the promontory and immediately overlooking the sea, is the temple itself. And when we come carefully to study its plan, we see the meaning of the anomalous square object which seemed so puzzling from below. The temple was one _in antis_, and the square object is the end of one of the walls of the _cella_. The fellow to it may be traced, though it does not rise high enough to make a feature in the general view. One of the columns ranging with the _antæ_, two on the northern side towards the land and nine on the southern or seaside, are still standing with their architraves; but the eastern and western fronts, with their columns and pediments, have perished. It is indeed a spot to stand and gaze, though now with quite other and happier feelings than those which Byron put into the mouth of his imaginary Greek poet. The impulse is to gaze on the sea and the islands, the realm of Athens, the realm which her fortress on Sounion was to guard. But it is well to look landward also, and a short walk from the temple will show that Athênê was not the only power that was worshipped on Sounion. That the sea-god, lord of the Sounion dolphins, was worshipped there is plain from Aristophanes. The jokes in the Birds, where the god is addressed, Ὦ Σουνιέρακε χαῖρ’ ἄναξ Πελαργικέ, give us another title of the sea-god. Poseidôn at Sounion, like Zeus at Dodônê, was prayed to as Pelasgian. The comic poet, when he had once got into Nephelokokkygia, does not scruple to change the epithets of the deity into “hawky” and “storky.” We might be sure from this that Colonel Leake was misled in fancying that Poseidôn had nothing more than a mere altar on Sounion. We come down from the temple of Athênê, we pass the Propylaia; we pass the ruins of the wall; we reach the little isthmus--for the site of the temple is peninsular--and on a lower height we find remains, not enough to enable us to make out the plan of any building, but enough to show that a building of some importance must have stood there. Surely here we have the site of the temple of the god who was prayed to on Sounion. Poseidôn is here, as well as at Corinth, at home on his isthmus. The men of Sounion are the subject of an allusion of the poet Anaxandridês, quoted by Athênaios, which at first sight is not very clear:-- πολλοὶ δὲ νῦν μέν εἰσιν οὐκ ἐλεύθεροι, εἰς αὔριον δὲ Σουνιεῖς, εἶτ’ εἰς τρίτην ἀγορᾷ κέκρηνται.