CHAPTER XXIV
THE EVACUATION OF ATHENS
It had come at last,—the hour wise men had dreaded, fools had scoffed at, cowards had dared not face. The Barbarian was within five days’ march of Attica. The Athenians must bow the knee to the world monarch or go forth exiles from their country.
In the morning after the night of terror came another courier, not this time from Thermopylæ. He bore a letter from Themistocles, who was returning from Eubœa with the whole allied Grecian fleet. The reading of the letter in the Agora was the first rift in the cloud above the city.
“Be strong, prove yourselves sons of Athens. Do what a year ago you so boldly voted. Prepare to evacuate Attica. All is not lost. In three days I will be with you.”
There was no time for an assembly at the Pnyx, but the Five Hundred and the Areopagus council acted for the people. It was ordered to remove the entire population of Attica, with all their movable goods, across the bay to Salamis or to the friendly Peloponnesus, and that same noon the heralds went over the land to bear the direful summons.
To Hermione, who in the calm after-years looked back on all this year of agony and stress as on an unreal thing, one time always was stamped on memory as no dream, but vivid, unforgetable,—these days of the great evacuation. Up and down the pleasant plain country of the Mesogia to [pg 265]southward, to the rolling highlands beyond Pentelicus and Parnes, to the slumbering villages by Marathon, to the fertile farm-land by Eleusis, went the proclaimers of ill-tidings.
“Quit your homes, hasten to Athens, take with you what you can, but hasten, or stay as Xerxes’s slaves.”