There was also the tomb of Menœceus, and near by a pillar marking the scene of the duel between Eteocles and Polyneices. The immediate neighbourhood was still called the “Dragging of Antigone,” because over it Antigone had to drag her brother’s heavy body.
In addition to the great Temple of Apollo, with its statues by Phidias and Scopas, Pausanias saw the Temple of Artemis, with a statue by Scopas; the Temple of Heracles, the Champion, the gables of which held the representations by Praxiteles of the demi-god’s twelve labours; the Temple of Dionysus; and the Temple of Cybele and Pan erected by Pindar so near to his own house that he often heard the music of the vesper services. Pindar’s house is as unknown now as if it had not been twice saved when Thebes was sacked, once by the Athenians, who remembered his praises of their city, and once by Alexander, who reverenced his genius.
While these things are irretrievably lost or await the spade, streams of living water seem to link the present to the past. The little river of Hagios Johannis has but changed its ancient name of Ismenus, and the Plakiotissa, made by several streams which rise south of Thebes, is easily transformed into the “Dircæan streams.” Some old masonry and tablets bearing inscriptions mark the tanks which irrigate the neighbouring gardens. Thebes still boasts in trees and flowers a reminiscence of its ancient fame for bloom and brightness.
Dirce was the queen of Thebes who cruelly treated her husband’s niece, Antiope. Antiope’s sons, Amphion and Zethus, ordered to execute their mother’s sentence, bound Dirce instead to the violent bull. Only a brief fragment of the play by Euripides, called “Antiope,” has been preserved, but the sculptured group known as the Farnese Bull has made the story tritely familiar. Amphion also raised the walls of Thebes by the music of his lyre, a story seized upon by the poets from Homer to Tennyson.
A lively stream now called Paraporti flows into the Plakiotissa on the southwest, and Theban women use it for their washing, unconcerned with its ancient name of “Spring of Ares.” The cave near it was the Dragon’s Lair, and from the part of the acropolis that rose above it Menœceus plunged to his death. To the northeast, in the tiny suburb of Hagii Theodori, bubbles the spring of St. Theodore, anciently called the Spring of Œdipus because in it the king washed his guilty hands.
The events of the heroic age, if they are baldly catalogued in prose, lose for us their charm and their significance. Their ineffaceable reality to the historic Greeks may be illustrated by a story current in antiquity. At a conference in Arcadia an Athenian envoy taunted the Thebans and the Argives with having begotten the patricide Œdipus and the matricide Orestes. “Yes,” answered Epaminondas, “but Thebes and Argos exiled them and Athens received them.” And yet he would have rejoiced could he have known that the genius of Athens, in receiving the wandering Theban legends, had given them an immortal life.
CHAPTER XIV
BŒOTIA, CONTINUED
“Helicon maidens, the Muses! Their name be my prelude in singing!
They in their keeping have Helicon’s mountain, majestical, sacred.
There they go threading the dances by violet pools of the fountain,