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One wonders, as the tomb of a child is opened on the road out of Tanagra, near Athens, and the toys and hobby-horse and little shoes are found therein, if, after all, that father and mother were not wiser than we who, like Constance, "stuff out his vacant garments with his form." Is there not something quite unenlightened in the persistence with which we connect death with gloom?
By the light of the one lamp, which was screened from the bed, one saw dimly the fantastic shapes in the glass cases which lined the walls the little Tanagra figures with their sun-hats and flowing dress bronzes of Apollo or Hermes a bronze bull an ibex a cup wreathed with acanthus. And in the shadow at the far end rose the great Nikê.
In the mean time, the Lacedaemonians, on their return after freeing Delphi from the Phocians, encamped their army at Tanagra, whither the Athenians presently marched with design to fight them.
Everyone of the one hundred fell in the conflict. About two months after, in the early part of the year 456 B.C., the Athenians wiped off the stain of their defeat at Tanagra by a victory over the combined Theban and Boeotian forces, then in alliance with Sparta; whereby the authority and influence of Sparta were again confined to the Peloponnesus.
The victory of the Spartans at Tanagra gave strength to the Spartan party in Athens; it also inspired with fear many of the people; it was evidently desirable rather to effect a peace with Sparta than to hazard a war. Who so likely to effect that peace as the banished Cimon? Now was the time to press for his recall.
Accordingly, they did not long retain their severity toward Cimon, partly upon remembrance of his former services, and partly, perhaps, induced by the juncture of the times. For being defeated at Tanagra in a great battle, and fearing the Peloponnesians would come upon them at the opening of the spring, they recalled Cimon by a decree, of which Pericles himself was author.
But he feared to keep too long upon this highway to Tanagra, and of the dangers of the road he soon met grim warnings. First, it was a farmstead in black ruin, with the carcass of a horse half burned lying before the gate.
Here are the exquisite terra-cotta statuettes from the ancient Grecian Colony of Tanagra, which no modern work of plastic art can imitate in grace of form and delicacy of color, dating three or four hundred years before the Christian era; and in other rooms, a fabulous collection of jewels, and numberless precious vases, illustrating especially the progress of Ancient Grecian Art.
Zeuxippus, however, accompanied by a man named Stratonidas, fled by night to Tanagra; alarmed by his own conscience rather than by the assertion of men who were privy to no one circumstance of the affair. Pisistratus, despising the informers, remained at Thebes. A slave of Zeuxippus had carried messages backwards and forwards, and had been intrusted with the management of the whole business.
Barrachin, in white draperies with a crown of pink laurel, the costumes were beautiful. One graceful woman went as Tanagra. The men were some of them splendid in the garb of old Greek warriors, wearing cuirass and helmet of gold.
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