n. Glaucon gave
his right hand to Themistocles, his left to Simonides. Fifty men were
ready to man the pinnace to take him ashore. On the beach the _Nausicaae's_
people saw him stand an instant, as he turned his face upward to the
"dawn-facing" gods of Hellas, praying for strength and swiftness.

"Apollo speed you!" called two hundred after him. He answered from the
beach with a wave of his beautiful arms. A moment later he was hid behind
a clump of olives. The _Nausicaae's_ people knew the ordeal before him, but
many a man said Glaucon had the easier task. He could run till life failed
him. They now could only fold their hands and wait.

* * * * * * *

It was long past noon when Glaucon left the desolate village of Oropus
behind him. The day was hot, but after the manner of Greece not sultry,
and the brisk breeze was stirring on the hill slopes. Over the distant
mountains hung a tint of deep violet. It was early in Boedromion.(14) The
fields--where indeed the Barbarian cavalry men had not deliberately burned
them--were seared brown by the long dry summer. Here and there great black
crows were picking, and a red fox would whisk out of a thicket and go with
long bounds across the unharvested fields to some safer refuge. Glaucon
knew his route. Three hundred and sixty stadia lay before him, and those
not over the well-beaten course in the gymnasium, but by rocky goat trails
and by-paths that made his task no easier. He started off slowly. He was
too good an athlete to waste his speed by one fierce burst at the outset.
At first his road was no bad one, for he skirted the willow-hung Asopus,
the boundary stream betwixt Attica and Boeotia. 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. Next, it was the body of a woman, three days
slain, and in the centre of the road,--no pleasant sight, for the crows had
been at their banquet,--and hardened though the Alcmaeonid was to war, he
stopped long enough to cast the ceremonial handful of dust on the poor
remains, as symbolic burial, and sped a wish to King Pluto to give peace
to the wanderer's spirit. Next, people met him: an old man, his wife, his
young son,--wretched shepherd-folk dressed in sheepskins,--the boy helping
his elders as they tottered along on their staves toward