The nymph Ægina had borne Æacus, who was so just a king that at his death the gods made him a judge in Hades. His sons were Peleus and Telamon, their sons were Achilles and Ajax and Teucer.
“Beyond the sources of the Nile and through the Hyperboreans they pass, nor is there any city so barbarian or confused in speech that it knoweth not the hero Peleus and his fame nor that of Ajax, son of Telamon, whom on his ships Alcmena’s son led forth to Troy.”
Lords of wide adventure, they drifted away from Ægina’s shores. Teucer, son of Telamon, ruled in Cyprus, a new land, and Ajax held the Salamis of his father. Peleus ruled in Thessalian Pthia. In the Euxine Sea Achilles won a “shining isle,” and his son was prince in “Epirus, famed afar, where, from Dodona on, the cattle-pasturing headlands, jutting high, lie out against the Ionian Sea.” But at the invocation of Pindar they gather once more in their ancient home.
Nor was the significance of human greatness absent from Pindar’s mind:—
“Within a little space the joys of man spring up; so too they fall again to earth when shaken by an adverse doom. We creatures of a day! What’s man? What is he not?—a shadow’s dream! But when there comes a glory sent of God there rests on men a bright light and an age serene.”
Thus to a youth of Ægina who was lifted on the wings of hope and valour the poet gave a warning and a larger hope.
CHAPTER X
MEGARA AND CORINTH—THE GULF OF CORINTH
“Cities which were great aforetime now as a rule are mean, and those formerly were small which in my day have become great. Therefore, since I know that human prosperity never remains stationary, of both alike I shall make mention.”
Herodotus.
On the neck of land that unites Attica to the Peloponnesus two Dorian cities attained to prominence in the centuries intervening between Homeric civilization and the rivalries of Sparta and Athens, those great representatives of the Dorian and Ionian races who reduced all other cities to the position of allies or satellites. Only before the middle of the sixth century were Corinth and Megara powers of the first rank.