most illustrious of ancient statesmen and
patriots, and one of the most virtuous public men of any age or nation.
He died so poor that it is said he did not leave enough money to pay his
funeral expenses, and for several generations his descendants were kept
at the charge of the state.

_HOW ATHENS ROSE FROM ITS ASHES._

The torch of Xerxes and Mardonius left Athens a heap of ashes. But, like
the new birth of the fabled phoenix, there rose out of these ashes a
city that became the wonder of the world, and whose time-worn ruins are
still worshipped by the pilgrims of art. We cannot proceed with our work
without pausing awhile to contemplate this remarkable spectacle.

The old Athens bore to the new much the same relation that the chrysalis
bears to the butterfly. It was little more than an ordinary country
town, the capital of a district comparable in size to a modern county.
Pisistratus and his sons had built some temples, and had completed a
part of the Dionysiac theatre, but the city itself was simply a cluster
of villages surrounded by a wall; while the citadel had for defence
nothing stronger than a wooden rampart. The giving of this city to the
torch was no serious loss; in reality it was a gain, since it cleared
the ground for the far nobler city of later days.

It is not often that a whole nation removes from its home, and its
possessions are completely swept away. But such had been the case with
the Attic state. For a time all Attica was afloat, the people of city
and country alike taking to their ships; while a locust flight of
Persians passed over their lands, ravaging and destroying all before
them, and leaving nothing but the bare soil. Such was what remained to
the people of Attica on their return from Salamis and the adjacent
isles.

Athens lay before them a heap of ashes and ruin, its walls flung down,
its dwellings vanished, its gardens destroyed, its temples burned. The
city itself, and the citadel and sacred structures of its Acropolis,
were swept away, and the business of life on that ravaged soil had to be
begun afresh.

Yet Attica as a state was greater than ever before. It was a victor on
land and sea, the recognized savior of Greece; and the people of Athens
returned to the ashes of their city not in woe and dismay, but in pride
and exultation. They were victors over the greatest empire then on the
face of the earth, the admired of the nations, the leading power in
Greece, and their