In other points of view, also, the towns and villages of Attica possessed great interest. They long continued to be the seats of the primitive worship of the country, where the tutelar deities of particular districts, of earth-born race, were adored with that affectionate faith and that fervency of devotion which peculiarly belong to small religious communities. The gods they worshipped appeared almost to be their fellow citizens, and to exist only for their protection. In fact, they were the patron saints of the villages. Fabulous legends and historical traditions combined with religion to shed celebrity over the Attic demi. There was hardly in the whole land a single inhabited spot which did not figure in their poetry or in their annals as the scene of some memorable exploit. Aphidnæ[203] was renowned, for example, as the place whence the Dioscuri bore away their sister Helen, after her rape by Theseus, in revenge for which the youthful heroes devastated the whole district. “Grey Marathon,”[204] as Byron aptly terms it, was embalmed for ever in Persian blood, and rendered holy by the vast barrows raised there by the state over the ashes of its fallen warriors. Rhamnos on the Attic Dardanelles became famous for its statue of Nemesis, originally of Aphrodite, the work of Diodotos or Agoracritos of Paros, not unworthy to be compared for size and beauty with the productions of Pheidias. The irruption of the Peloponnesians conferred a melancholy celebrity on Deceleia,[205] and Phylæ obtained a place in history as the stronghold where Thrasybulos gathered together the small but gallant band which avenged the cause of freedom upon the thirty. Of Eleusis,[206] it is enough to say that there the ceremonies of initiation into the mysteries were performed. Footnote 203: Paus. i. 17. 5. Footnote 204: Paus. i. 32. 3. sqq. “We observed the long-legged plover near Marathon; the grey plover and the sand plover on the eastern coast of Attica.” Sibth. Walp. Mem. i. 76. Chandler, ii. 83. Footnote 205: Where Sophocles and his ancestors were buried. Chandler, ii. 95. Footnote 206: Clem. Alex. Protrept. § 2. t. i. p. 16. seq. where he relates the story of Demeter and Baubo.