He debates whether he can afford to save and rear the child. Next morning, still perplexed, “I go,” he says,—
“back unto my flock again
At daybreak. Comes this fellow—he’s a charcoal-man—
Unto this self-same place to cut out stumps of trees.
Now he had had acquaintance with me back of this,
And so we talked together.”
One of the main sources of the Cephisus is at the foot of Pentelicus. Here the village of Kephisia with its generous spring and noble plane tree still retains its charm and recalls the “Attic Nights” of Aulus Gellius. As terminus of a short railway from Athens, it is a convenient starting-place for various excursions in Attica. An easy drive northward across the plain brings one to Tatoï where King George has his summer residence at the ancient Decelea, which the Spartans occupied in the Peloponnesian War to cut off the grain supply which came by this way from Eubœa. But cruel memories of the contest with Sparta are forgotten amidst the unusual charm of the surroundings. The magnificent low-spreading pine trees are a surprise to many visitors unaccustomed to this variety, and, as one looks southward, Pentelicus, usually seen from Athens as a long ridge, confronts the spectator, head on, with unfamiliar and uncompromising majesty. In the near foreground olive groves and luxuriant fields of anemones and poppies invite to a long lethe.
The Oropus district on the Euripus, north of Parnes, belongs geographically to Bœotia. As one descends on the northern side of the mountain the view is more suggestive of Switzerland than of rugged Attica. The fertile plain of the Asopus is green and wooded; the Euripus winding between the hedgerows of mountains on either side seems, even from the lofty summit of Pentelicus, more like a series of inland lakes than a continuous arm of the sea; beyond, the dorsal spine of the Delph, gleaming white with snow, crowns the blue Eubœan mountains. A marble relief, found at the port of Oropus, recalls the principal literary association outside of the shifting scenes in military history. Amphiaraus, the seer and hero, is represented in his chariot as he is about to disappear in the earth and his horses start back from the yawning chasm. In the Æschylean story Amphiaraus “the one just man” is included against his will among the invaders, the “Seven against Thebes,” and is represented as falling with the rest at Thebes. Of him were written the famous lines which, when spoken in the Athenian theatre, turned the eyes of all the spectators upon “Aristides the Best”:—
“‘Now as for me, know well, I shall enrich this land,
A priest entombèd deep beneath this hostile soil.