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From thence he proceeded to Eleusis, in hopes of surprising the temple, and a fort which overlooks and surrounds it; but, finding that the watches had not been neglected, and that the fleet was coming from Piraeeus to support them, he laid aside the design, and led his troops, first to Megara, and then to Corinth; where, on hearing that the council of the Achaeans was then sitting at Argos, he went and joined the assembly, unexpected by the Achaeans.
At length, weary and sad, she sat down upon a stone, and continued sitting nine days and nights, in the open air, under the sunlight and moonlight and falling showers. It was where now stands the city of Eleusis, then the home of an old man named Celeus. He was out in the field, gathering acorns and blackberries, and sticks for his fire.
At Eleusis, in lieu of visions, there were tableaux. Persephone, beckoned by desire, straying then from Olympos, afterward fainting in the arms of Pluto, but subsequently, while preparing her own reascension, saving and embellishing all that approach, was the symbol, in an Hellenic setting, of the fall and redemption of man.
Thrice the call in vain; but at the fourth time a wave of silence swept across the Pnyx. A figure well beloved was taking the wreath and mounting the Bema. The words of Themistocles that day were to ring in his hearer’s ears till life’s end. The careless, almost sybaritic, man of the Isthmus and Eleusis seemed transfigured. For one moment he stood silent, lofty, awe-inspiring.
All hope of surprising Peiræus by a night attack was now gone, and it is said, also, that the soldiers were alarmed and terror-stricken by certain lights which gleamed from the temples at Eleusis. Sphodrias himself, now that his enterprise had so manifestly failed, lost heart, and after hurriedly seizing some unimportant plunder, led his men back to Thespiæ.
Whilst Aristeides was thus perplexed, Arimnestus, the general of the Platæans, saw a vision in his sleep. In his dreams he thought that Zeus the Preserver appeared and enquired of him what the Greeks had decided to do, and that he answered, "Lord, to-morrow we shall lead away the army to Eleusis, and fight the Persians there, according to the oracle."
According to an ancient and still popular account, the dark enigmas of Eleusis were borrowed from Egypt; the drama of the Anaglyph . But, in answer to this theory, we must observe, that even if really, at their commencement, the strange and solemn rites which they are asserted to have been mystical ceremonies grow so naturally out of the connexion between the awful and the unknown were found so generally among the savages of the ancient world howsoever dispersed and still so frequently meet the traveller on shores to which it is indeed a wild speculation to assert that the oriental wisdom ever wandered, that it is more likely that they were the offspring of the native ignorance , than the sublime importation of a symbolical philosophy utterly ungenial to the tribes to which it was communicated, and the times to which the institution is referred.
Then even the honest demarch cut short his eloquence to swell the salvo. “The beautiful to the beautiful! The gods reward well. Here is the fairest crown!” For all Eleusis loved Hermione, and would have forgiven far greater things from her than this.
He cannot comprehend what drove the fierce Heathen, cowering and humbled, into the fold of the Church; what peopled Egypt with eremites; what lined the roads of Europe and Asia with pilgrim homicides; what, in the elder world, while Jove yet reigned on Olympus, is couched in the dim traditions of the expiation of Apollo, the joy-god, descending into Hades; or why the sinner went blithe and light-hearted from the healing lustrations of Eleusis.
The tombs of the worthies of old, stretching out along the Sacred Way to Eleusis, where Solon, Clisthenes, Miltiades, and many another bulwark of Athens slept, had the last votive wreath hung lovingly upon them. And especially men sought the great temple of the “Rock,” to lift their hands to Athena Polias, and vow awful vows of how harm to the Virgin Goddess should be wiped away in blood.
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