He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity
concerning those Persian ships, coming first as merchantmen, or with
pirates on occasion, in the half-savage, wicked splendours of their
decoration, the monstrous figure-heads, their glittering freightage.
Men would hardly have trusted their women or children with that
suspicious crew, hovering through the dusk. There were soothsayers,
indeed, who had long foretold what happened soon after, giving shape
to vague, supernatural terrors. And then he had crept [160] from his
hiding-place with other lads to go view the enemies' slain at
Marathon, beside those belated Spartans, this new war with whom
seemed to be reviving the fierce local feuds of his younger days.
Paraloi and Diacrioi had ever been rivals. Very distant it all
seemed now, with all the stories he could tell; for in those
crumbling little towns, as heroic life had lingered on into the
actual, so, at an earlier date, the supernatural into the heroic.
Like mist at dawn, the last traces of its divine visitors had then
vanished from the land, where, however, they had already begotten
"our best and oldest families."
It was Theseus, uncompromising young master of the situation, in
fearless application of "the modern spirit" of his day to every phase
of life where it was applicable, who, at the expense of Attica, had
given Athens a people, reluctant enough, in truth, as Plutarch
suggests, to desert "their homes and religious usages and many good
and gracious kings of their own" for this elect youth, who thus
figures, passably, as a kind of mythic shorthand for civilisation,
making roads and the like, facilitating travel, suppressing various
forms of violence, but many innocent things as well.
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