Whoever knew this fact could understand the cause when, as on this evening, shrieks of anguish echoed from the dark stone chambers.[H]
[H] Numerous subterranean rooms are found in the southwestern quarter of Athens, the ancient cliff-city, which is now almost uninhabited. A certain part of the eastern base of the Museium contains three entrances, the central one somewhat dilapidated, that lead to two rooms 10–11 feet in length and a well-like air-passage connected with lower corridors. These cliff-chambers now bear the name of hē fylakē tu Socratus, Socrates’ dungeon, and are marked as such by oral tradition.
Even Myrmex awoke from his indifference and spit three times on his breast to avert misfortune.
“Do as I do,” he said to his master, “keep ill-luck away.”
Hipyllos quickened his pace.
“I fear nothing for myself,” he replied “and I cannot aid the doomed man.”
His features at this moment wore a serious expression which showed that, spite of his youth, he had seen and experienced many things.
IV.
Hipyllos’ father, Chaeretades, one of the guardians of orphan children, was already advanced in life when he lost his wife, Hipyllos’ mother. After the short period of mourning, thirty days, he married a young widow named Cleobule, famed for her beauty, but about whom nothing good was said in other respects. Scarcely six months after, rumor asserted that she was carrying on an intrigue with a young Carystian who lived in the house.
The report reached Hipyllos’ ears through the slaves and, stirred to his inmost soul, he taxed Cleobule with her infamy, but she called all the gods to witness that she was unjustly suspected, and looked so pathetic and beautiful in her despairing grief that Hipyllos did not know what to believe. But, after the Carystian had left the house, the caresses which, as his step-mother, she could venture to bestow upon her husband’s son, grew warmer than was seemly and when, at the great Panathenaic festival, he returned from the procession clad in his holiday robe with a garland on his hair, she ran to meet him, embraced him, and called him her young Hippolytus, her young Theseus. He thrust her away so violently that she fell on the tiled pavement of the peristyle, and from that hour Cleobule pursued him with the bitterest hatred. As he stood alone—Chaeretades was completely in her power—this gradually developed in his nature a premature degree of firmness and resolution. Nevertheless, he was obliged to submit to many things. Cleobule finally alleged that he associated with dissolute revellers, and persuaded her husband to send him to the fleet of twenty ships with which Phormion, since the second year of the war, had guarded the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf.