The Precinct, the beloved Precinct itself, where men brought grateful gifts to the god. What a mockery! Were these wistful worshippers all deceived? Did Apollo sit in Olympos and laugh at them?
And Theria was wretchedly lonely. Hour-long, hour-long, with nothing to do, not even spinning. The home faces, home voices, not a thousand paces distant, were all to her as far as the pillars of Heracles. Farther—farther! for it is conceivable that loved ones might return thence, but her dear ones could not come to her.
And while she sat mid the windowless walls there happened without her knowledge the most glorious single deed of Greece.
Sparta was ever grudging. She did not much care to bar the Persians out of all Greece. She would have preferred to meet them on the borders of her own Lakonia. If all her sister states should then perish why should Sparta care?
But one Spartan cared supremely to keep them out of Greece. Her king, Leonidas. So Leonidas, with the few soldiers which the Ephors grudgingly allowed him, marched for Thermopylæ.
Nikander, Lycophron, Dryas, Eëtíon—all the men of Delphi—saw one day the file of bronze-clad soldiers coming up the Delphi road, led by the twinkling flame of their sacred fire. They came with set faces under their helmets, their new polished shields glancing in the sun.
They paused only to do honour to Apollo, then moved onward up the Parnassian road. Three hundred men and a few timid allies to meet a million Persians at the narrow pass!
Those who saw them never forgot them. Nor has the world forgot.
But Theria within her walls knew nothing of these things. Theria had come upon a new dilemma.