Ascending heaven:—Athens doth inherit
His corpse below.’”
If we follow up the Cephisus towards its sources we pass through the ancient deme of Acharnæ and come on the north to Decelea on the slopes of Mount Parnes, or, turning to the right, to Kephisia at the south of Pentelicus, also called Brilessus by the ancients.
Upon the Parnes range, on the northern frontier of Attica, is the partially ruined fortress of Phyle. Few places offer a more attractive combination of scenery and association. There is, as at Delphi, a union of grandeur and beauty. In addition to the view that awaits us above, the ascent amidst trees and flowers by the running stream makes this a fitting introduction to the more intimate charm of Attic landscape, and the rugged gorges, skirted by the climbing pathway, are even awe-inspiring. Once within the massive walls and towers, built on a mountain spur commanding the junction of ravines and passes between Attica and Bœotia, no extended explanation is necessary of the part played here (in 404 to 403 B. C.) during the civil war between the patriots and the Thirty Tyrants. Across the shoulder of Ægaleus the plain of the Cephisus is unrolled to view, with Athens lying below Hymettus. In the background are the Saronic Gulf and the Peloponnesian mountains. Thrasybulus, the hero of the Restoration, is great even among the great names of Greek history. We can imagine him first seizing the fortress with his handful of seventy followers, and then, through months of waiting and fighting and watching, looking down on the desired city, planning how he shall restore the exiled patriots to Athens, and Athens to herself. We can picture the fierce snow-storm, filling those wild gorges, which aided in driving back the knights and hoplites of the Thirty. Later he swoops down to Acharnæ, surprises and routs the unpatriotic Athenians together with the Spartan garrison which the Thirty, to their dishonour, had admitted to the Acropolis. Finally he descends to Piræus, joins battle with the “City Party,” breaks the power of the Thirty and makes the name of “the men from Phyle” a symbol of patriotism which, see it where we may on the pages of Lysias or Xenophon, claims the eye like illuminated initials and rubrics of honour.
At Chasia, the farming village of the foothills whence the path ascends to Phyle, women, standing in their doorways with busy distaff in hand, or energetic but courteous men, ready to discuss politics or crops, recall the simplicity and charm of country life of hill and plain known to us from Aristophanes and Menander.
Acharnæ itself must have occupied the district between Epano-Liossia, the nearest railway station to Chasia, and the charming modern village of Menidi whose unspoiled peasants, close to the outskirts of Athens, retain many a reminder of the country demesmen. The charcoal-burners of Aristophanes or Menander would now be compelled to go further up the mountain slopes to obtain the tree-stumps for their “Parnesian coals.” Nor is the famous ivy of Acharnæ now in evidence. The Acharnians, as Pausanias tells us, called Dionysus “Ivy” because the ivy plant first appeared on their soil. In the Greek Anthology we learn that Sophocles often wore a wreath of Acharnian ivy, and in an epigram of Simmias the ivy climbs over his tomb which, as it was alleged, had its place in the burying ground of the Sophocles family beside the neighbouring road to Decelea:—
“Gently, ivy, gently twine,
With pale tresses creep and seize
On the tomb of Sophocles;
Where the soft and clustering vine