Let’s fight. No death dishonour bringing I await.’
Thus spoke the seer while brandishing his good round shield
Of solid bronze. But no device was on his shield,
For not to seem the best he wishes, but to be,
While harvesting the fertile furrow of his mind
Wherefrom an honest crop of counsels springs to birth.”
Amphiaraus was deified throughout Greece, but he had his chief sanctuary near Oropus in a glen where the nightingales sing among the plane trees and the oleanders. Here may be seen the remains of his temple, as god of healing; the great altar; the sacred spring by the plane trees where the grateful convalescents threw in their thanksgiving coins. Here were found, in the ruined theatre, five gracefully carved chairs of honour, like the three found at Rhamnus.
Rhamnus is on the coast near the southern mouth of the Euripus, and is one of the most beautiful and secluded places in the whole peninsula. As a visit to this northeast corner is needful to complete the physical outline of Attica, so the contours of Greek character will be sharpened here in the sanctuary of Nemesis, the dread goddess of Retribution, whose warning presence hovered continually in the background of Greek consciousness. Her beautiful statue, made perhaps by Phidias or his pupils, was fittingly set up in this place near the mouth of the Euripus where the Persian fleet had sailed through to the crushing rebuke at Marathon. Pausanias calmly states that this statue, dedicated to “the goddess most inexorable of all towards overweening men,” was made by Phidias out of some “Parian marble which the Persians, as if the victory were already won, carried with them for the erection of a trophy.” If we could credit this statement it would enlarge the itinerary of the meagre fragments of the colossal statue now in the British Museum.
At Rhamnus are to be seen the remains of two temples, one dedicated to Nemesis, and the other probably to Themis, the mother of Prometheus, and identified by Æschylus, following Attic tradition, with Mother Earth herself—“one form for many names.” Situated at the head of a glen, banked-up by a marble terrace and shaded by myrtle, green fir trees and shrubbery, the ruins look down upon the marble walls and towers of the ancient acropolis of Rhamnus occupying a rocky, self-fortified hill that juts out into the channel. Beyond the Euripus the mountains fill in the background.
Unwary speech, insolent success or immoderate, though innocent, good fortune might call down the retribution of Nemesis. Like our superstitious formula, “Knock on wood,” it was a common device in Greek to deprecate the divine envy towards arrogant speech, by saying: “I being but human make obeisance to Adrasteia,” or, the equivalent, “to Nemesis.” Pindar describes the happy Hyperboreans as set free from this scrupulous anxiety, ever present to mortal men:—