Athens, which evoked the famous lines:--

Ancient of days, august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.
First in the race that led to glory's goal,
They won, and pass'd away: is this the whole--
A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour?

After which he reverts to his perpetually recurring moral, "Men come and
go; but the hills, and waves, and skies, and stars, endure"--

Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds;
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare;
Art, glory, freedom fail--but nature still is fair.

The duration of Lord Byron's first visit to Athens was about three months,
and it was varied by excursions to different parts of Attica; Eleusis,
Hymettus, Cape Colonna, (Sunium, the scene of Falconer's shipwreck), the
Colonus of OEdipus, and Marathon, the plain of which is said to have been
placed at his disposal for about the same sum that, thirty years later, an
American offered to give for the bark with the poet's name on the tree at
Newstead. Byron had a poor opinion of the modern Athenians, who seem to
have at this period done their best to justify the Roman satirist. He
found them superficial, cunning, and false; but, with generous historic
insight, he says that no nation in like circumstances would have been much
better; that they had the vices of ages of slavery, from which it would
require ages of freedom to emancipate them.

In the Greek capital he lodged at the house of a respectable lady, widow
of an English vice-consul, who had three daughters, the eldest of whom,
Theresa, acquired an innocent and enviable fame as the Maid of Athens,
without the dangerous glory of having taken any very firm hold of the
heart that she was asked to return. A more solid passion was the poet's
genuine indignation on the "lifting," in Border phrase, of the marbles
from the Parthenon, and their being taken to England by order of Lord
Elgin. Byron never wrote anything more sincere than the _Curse of
Minerva_; and he has recorded few incidents more pathetic than that of the
old Greek who, when the last stone was removed for exportation, shed
tears, and said "[Greek: telos]!" The question is still an open one of
ethics. There are few Englishmen of the higher rank who do not hold London
in the right hand as barely balanced by the rest of the world in the left;
a judgment in which we can hardly expect Romans, Parisians, and Athe