CHAPTER III.
Now the place Ceramicus gets its name from the hero Ceramus, he too reputed to be the son of Dionysus and Ariadne; and the first portico on the right is called the royal portico, for there the king sits during his yearly office which is called kingdom. On the roof of this portico are statues of earthenware, Theseus hurling Sciron into the sea, and Aurora carrying off Cephalus, who, being most handsome, was, they say, carried off by enamoured Aurora, and his son was Phaethon. And he made him sacristan of the temple. All this has been told by others, and by Hesiod in his poem about women. And near the portico are statues of Conon and his son Timotheus, and Evagoras, the king of the Cyprians, who got the Phœnician triremes given to Conon by King Artaxerxes; and he acted as an Athenian and one who had ancestral connection with Salamis, for his pedigree went up to Teucer and the daughter of Cinyras. Here too are statues of Zeus, surnamed Eleutherius, and the Emperor Adrian, a benefactor to all the people he ruled over, and especially to the city of the Athenians. And the portico built behind has paintings of the so-called twelve gods. And Democracy and Demos and Theseus are painted on the wall beyond. The painting represents Theseus restoring to the Athenians political equality. The popular belief has prevailed almost universally that Theseus played into the hands of the people, and that from his time they remained under a democratical government, till Pisistratus rose up and became tyrant. There are other untrue traditions current among the mass of mankind, who have no research and take for gospel all they heard as children in the choruses and tragedies. One such tradition is that Theseus himself was king, and that after the death of Menestheus his descendants continued kings even to the fourth generation. But if I had a fancy for genealogies, I should certainly have enumerated all the kings from Melanthus to Cleidicus the son of Æsimidas as well as these.
Here too is painted the action of the Athenians at Mantinea, who were sent to aid the Lacedæmonians. Xenophon and others have written the history of the entire war, the occupation of Cadmeia, and the slaughter of the Lacedæmonians at Leuctra, and how the Bœotians made a raid into the Peloponnese, and of the help that came to the Lacedæmonians from the Athenians. And in the picture is the cavalry charge, the most noted officers in which were on the Athenian side Gryllus, the son of Xenophon, and in the Bœotian cavalry Epaminondas the Theban. These paintings were painted for the Athenians by Euphranor, and in the temple hard by he represented Apollo under the name Patrous. And in front of the temple Leochares represented another Apollo, and Calamis the Apollo who is called Averter of Evil. And they say the god got this name by stopping from his oracle at Delphi the noisome pestilence, that smote them at the same time as the Peloponnesian war. There is also a temple to the Mother of the Gods wrought by Phidias, and next to it a council chamber for those who are called The Five Hundred, who are appointed annually. And in the council chamber are erected statues to Zeus the Counsellor, and to Apollo (the artistic design of Pisias), and to Demos (the work of Lyson). And the legislators were painted by the Caunian Protogenes, but Olbiades painted Callippus, who led the Athenians to Thermopylæ to prevent the invasion of the Galati into Greece.