[34] “It is related, as an authentic story, that a group of Suliote women assembled on one of the precipices adjoining the modern seraglio, and threw their infants into the chasm below, that they might not become the slaves of the enemy.”—Holland’s Travels, &c.
[35] The ruins of Sparta, near the modern town of Mistra, are very inconsiderable, and only sufficient to mark the site of the ancient city. The scenery around them is described by travellers as very striking.
[36] The inscription composed by Simonides for the Spartan monument in the pass of Thermopylæ has been thus translated:—“Stranger, go tell the Lacedemonians that we have obeyed their laws, and that we lie here.”
[37] “In the Eurotas I observed abundance of those famous reeds which were known in the earliest ages; and all the rivers and marshes of Greece are replete with rose-laurels, while the springs and rivulets are covered with lilies, tuberoses, hyacinths, and narcissus orientalis.”—Pouqueville’s Travels in the Morea.
[38] It was usual for suppliants to carry an olive branch bound with wool.
[39] The olive, according to Pouqueville, is still regarded with veneration by the people of the Morea.
[40] It was customary at Eleusis, on the fifth day of the festival, for men and women to run about with torches in their hands, and also to dedicate torches to Ceres, and to contend who should present the largest. This was done in memory of the journey of Ceres in search of Proserpine, during which she was lighted by a torch kindled in the flames of Etna.—Porter’s Antiquities of Greece, vol. i. p. 392.
[41] The fountains of Oblivion and Memory, with the Hercynian fountain, are still to be seen amongst the rocks near Livadia, though the situation of the cave of Trophonius, in their vicinity, cannot be exactly ascertained.—See Holland’s Travels.
[42] Elis was anciently a sacred territory, its inhabitants being considered as consecrated to the service of Jupiter. All armies marching through it delivered up their weapons, and received them again when they had passed its boundary.
[43] “We are assured by Thucydides that Attica was the province of Greece in which population first became settled, and where the earliest progress was made toward civilisation.”—Mitford’s Greece, vol. i. p. 35.