Superstitious, or in real regret, the
Athenians never forgot their tombs. As for Antiope, the conscience
of her perfidy remained with her, adding the pang of remorse to her
own desertion, when King Theseus, with his accustomed bad faith to
women, set her, too, aside in turn. Phaedra, the true wife, was
there, peeping suspiciously at her arrival; and even as Antiope
yielded to her lord's embraces the thought had come that a male child
might be the instrument of her anger, and one day judge her cause.
[163] In one of these doomed, decaying villages, then, King Theseus
placed the woman and her babe, hidden, yet secure, within the Attic
border, as men veil their mistakes or crimes. They might pass away,
they and their story, together with the memory of other antiquated
creatures of such places, who had had connubial dealings with the
stars. The white, paved waggon-track, a by-path of the sacred way to
Eleusis, zigzagged through sloping olive-yards, from the plain of
silvered blue, with Athens building in the distance, and passed the
door of the rude stone house, furnished scantily, which no one had
ventured to inhabit of late years till they came there.
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