le, the Colonus
which every student of Sophocles has pictured to himself in the
solitude of unshorn meadows, where groves of cypresses and olives
bent unpruned above wild tangles of narcissus flowers and crocuses,
and where the nightingale sang undisturbed by city noise or labour
of the husbandman, turns out to be a scarcely appreciable mound,
gently swelling from the cultivated land of the Cephissus. The
Cephissus even in a rainy season may be crossed dryshod by an active
jumper; and the Ilissus, where it flows beneath the walls of the
Olympieion, is now dedicated to washerwomen instead of water-nymphs.
Nature herself remains, on the whole, unaltered. Most notable are
still the white poplars dedicated of old to Herakles, and the
spreading planes which whisper to the limes in spring. In the midst
of so arid and bare a landscape, these umbrageous trees are
singularly grateful to the eye and to the sense oppressed with heat
and splendour. Nightingales have not ceased to crowd the gardens in
such numbers as to justify the tradition of their Attic origin, nor
have the bees of Hymettus forgotten their labours: the honey of
Athens can still boast a quality superior to that of Hybla or any
other famous haunt of hives.

Tradition points out one spot which commands a beautiful distant
view of Athens and the hills, as the garden of the Academy. The
place is not unworthy of Plato and his companions. Very old olives
grow in abundance, to remind us of those sacred trees beneath which
the boys of Aristophanes ran races; and reeds with which they might
crown their foreheads are thickly scattered through the grass.
Abeles interlace their murmuring branches overhead, and the planes
are as leafy as that which invited Socrates and Phaedrus on the
morning when they talked of love. In such a place we comprehend how
philosophy went hand in hand at Athens with gymnastics, and why the
poplar and the plane were dedicated to athletic gods. For the
wrestling-grounds were built in groves like these, and their cool
peristyles, the meeting-places of young men and boys, supplied the
sages not only with an eager audience, but also with the leisure and
the shade that learning loves.

It was very characteristic of Greek life that speculative philosophy
should not have chosen 'to walk the studious cloister pale,' but
should rather have sought out places where 'the busy hum of men' was
loudest, and where youthful voices echoed. The Athenian transacted