HOW ATHENS ROSE FROM ITS ASHES. 187

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 gar-
dens destroyed, its temples burned. The city itself,
and the citadel and sacred structures of its Acropo-
lis, 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 re-
turned to the ashes of their city not in woe and dis-
may, but in pride and exultation. They were vic-
tors over the greatest empire then on the face of the
earth, the admired of the nations, the leading power
in Greece, and their small loss weighed but lightly
against their great glory.

The Athens that rose in place of the old city was
a marvel of beauty and art, adorned with hall and
temple, court and gymnasium, colonnade and theatre,
while under the active labors of its sculptors it be-
came so filled with marble inmates that they almost
equalled in numbers its living inhabitants. Such
sculptors as Phidias and such painters as Xeuxis
adorned the city with the noblest products of their
art. The great theatre of Dionysus was completed,
and to it was added a new one, called the Odeon,
for musical and poetical representations. On the
Acropolis rose the Parthenon, the splendid temple to