From Livadia, after visiting the battlefield of Chaeronea (the birthplace of Plutarch), and also many of the almost innumerable storied and consecrated spots in the neighbourhood, the travellers proceeded to Thebes—­a poor town, containing about five hundred wooden houses, with two shabby mosques and four humble churches.  The only thing worthy of notice in it is a public clock, to which the inhabitants direct the attention of strangers as proudly as if it were indeed one of the wonders of the world.  There they still affect to show the fountain of Dirce and the ruins of the house of Pindar.  But it is unnecessary to describe the numberless relics of the famous things of Greece, which every hour, as they approached towards Athens, lay more and more in their way.  Not that many remarkable objects met their view; yet fragments of antiquity were often seen, though many of them were probably brought far from the edifices to which they had originally belonged; not for their beauty, or on account of the veneration which the sight of them inspired, but because they would burn into better lime than the coarser rock of the lulls.  Nevertheless, abased and returned into rudeness as all things were, the presence of Greece was felt, and Byron could not resist the inspirations of her genius.

   Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! 
   Immortal! though no more; though fallen, great;
   Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth
   And long-accustom’d bondage uncreate? 
   Not such thy Sons who whilom did await,
   The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
   In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait: 
   Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb!

In the course of the afternoon of the day after they had left Thebes, in attaining the summit of a mountain over which their road lay, the travellers beheld Athens at a distance, rising loftily, crowned with the Acropolis in the midst of the plain, the sea beyond, and the misty hills of Egina blue in the distance.

On a rugged rock rising abruptly on the right, near to the spot where this interesting vista first opened, they beheld the remains of the ancient walls of Phyle, a fortress which commanded one of the passes from Baeotia into Attica, and famous as the retreat of the chief patriots concerned in destroying the thirty tyrants of Athens.

   Spirit of freedom! when on Phyle’s brow
   Thou sat’st with Thrasybulus and his train,
   Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now
   Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain? 
   Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain,
   But every carle can lord it o’er thy land;
   Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
   Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed unmann’d.