United States or Côte d'Ivoire ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To a mind prone to contemplation, a walk through Athens must awaken the most exquisite reveries. Although "fallen from its high estate," there is enough in the tottering ruins which yet remain to recall the history of its ancient grandeur: the shattered Acropolis and the Pyraeus tell the tale of other days, in language at once pathetic and intelligible
'Where is Troy and Mycenae, and Thebes and Delos, and Persepolis and Agrigentum? continued my father, taking up his book of post-roads, which he had laid down. 'What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of Cizicum and Mitylenae? Aegina was behind me, Megara was before, Pyraeus on the right hand, Corinth on the left. What flourishing towns now prostrate upon the earth!
On this side of Europe, the barbarians were thus quieted for the present; but the Goths of the Ukraine, in three marauding expeditions of unprecedented violence, ravaged the wealthy regions of Asia Minor, as well as the islands of the Archipelago; and at length, under the guidance of deserters, landed in the port of the Pyraeus.
And as my father, whilst he was concerned in the Turkey trade, had been three or four different times in the Levant, in one of which he had stayed a whole year and an half at Zant, my uncle Toby naturally concluded, that, in some one of these periods, he had taken a trip across the Archipelago into Asia; and that all this sailing affair with Aegina behind, and Megara before, and Pyraeus on the right hand, &c. &c. was nothing more than the true course of my father's voyage and reflections.
Do not here instance in competition with this sacred herb the feather alum or the wooden tower of Pyraeus, which Lucius Sylla was never able to get burnt; for that Archelaus, governor of the town for Mithridates, King of Pontus, had plastered it all over on the outside with the said alum.
Word Of The Day