ch to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius of the admiral; and
it could, therefore, be made more directly a compliment to him. Even
under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied an
inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he was represented
on the chairman's right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily modelled for
the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a
plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, it was
thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time when
portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was in
the opening toast, "The Dewey of Our Day," which was drunk sitting, the
guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The
chairman's opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement
of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved,
in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest
possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the
other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and
further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of
Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the
machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia
to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the
noblest tribute which could be paid to the genius of the man who had
brought them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Diogenes with
his lantern approached Themistocles, who was giving the reporters copies
of the speech he had not been asked to deliver, and, after examining his
countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accompanied him home as far
as his own tub; Athens at that time being imperfectly lighted, and the
reform government having not yet replaced the street names wantonly
obliterated under the regime of the Thirty Tyrants.

At the supper to AEschylus the tablets of the menu were inscribed with
verses from the elder poet ingeniously chosen for their imaginable
reference to the masterpiece of the younger, whose modesty was
delicately spared at every point. It was a question whether the
committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone too far in giving the
supper while Sophocles was away from Athens staging the piece at
Corinth; but there was no division of opinion as to the taste with which
some of the details had been studied. It was considered a