Melite then is to the North-West and West of the Acropolis. Where is Diomeia? Its dimensions again are not exactly known, but happily its direction is certain ([Fig. 49])[300].
In the deme of Diomeia was a gymnasium and a sanctuary of Herakles, both known as Kynosarges, and from Herodotus[301] we know in what direction this Kynosarges lay. After Marathon the Persian fleet rounded Sunium with a view to landing at Phalerum, then the port of Athens. Phalerum, of course, lies almost due South of Athens. The Athenians hurry back from Marathon with all speed to protect the city. They leave the Herakleion at Marathon where they had encamped, and ‘take up their station in another Herakleion, that in Kynosarges’—Kynosarges, and with it Diomeia, must therefore lie in or command the direct road between Phalerum and Athens. Pausanias[302] visited Kynosarges and referred to the story of ‘the white dog’ immediately after the low-lying district of the ‘Gardens’ on the Ilissus before he visited the stadium.
The Herakleion of Kynosarges has shown us the direction in which Diomeia lay. Diomeia, we have seen, was colonized from Melite. We naturally ask, Was the Herakleion one of the duplicate sanctuaries? In other words, Was there a worship of Herakles in Melite?
In the Frogs—a play be it remembered performed at the Lenaia, a festival held originally ([p. 88]) in the Limnae just below the hill district of Melite—Xanthias is dressing up as Herakles; he says to Dionysos, as he is putting on the lion-skin,
‘Now watch if Xanthias-Herakles turns faint,
Or shows the same presence of mind as you’;
and Dionysos answers
‘The real old jail-bird, him from Melite.’
The careful scholiast[303] notes it was not usual to speak of a god as ‘from’ a place. The Melitean Herakles would normally be described as Herakles ‘in’ or ‘at Melite’; it was treating Herakles as a mere mortal to say Herakles from Melite. But does not the ‘from’ possibly mark an added joke? Are not the baggage and the donkey and the ‘from’ all put in to parody the real ‘flitting’ of Herakles from Melite to Diomeia? That flitting was already accomplished in the time of Aristophanes, for, later on in the play[304], when Aeacus is beating Xanthias-Herakles, and Xanthias utters an involuntary ‘whe-ew,’ Aeacus asks if he is hurt, and Xanthias recovering himself says,
‘No; I was just thinking,