Horace remembered a day when he and Messala had hired at the Piraeus a boat rigged with bright canvas, and sped before the wind to Salamis, their readiness for any holiday guided by a recent reading of Herodotus and AEschylus, and by a desire to see the actual waters and shores where brute force had been compelled to put its neck beneath wisdom and courage.  The day had been a radiant one, the sky fresh and blue, although flecked here and there by clouds, and the sea and the hills and the islands rich in brilliant colour.  They had worked their way through the shipping of the harbour, and then sailed straight for the shore of Salamis.  When they passed the island of Psyttaleia, where the “dance-loving Pan had once walked up and down,” they had been able to see very plainly how the Persian and Greek fleets lay of old, to imagine the narrow strait once more choked with upturned keels, and fighting or flying triremes, to picture Greeks leaping into the sea in full armour to swim to Psyttaleia and grapple with the Persians who paced the beach in insolent assurance.  The wind whistled in their ears, freighted, as it seemed to them, with the full-throated shout which, according to the AEschylean story, rang through the battle:—­

  Sons of the Hellenes!  On!  Set free your native land! 
  Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of gods,
  And tombs of fathers’ fathers!  Now for all we strive!

A thunder-storm had arisen before they left Salamis, and their homeward sail had satisfied their love for adventure.  Clouds and sun had battled vehemently, and as they finally walked back to the city from the harbour, they had seen the Parthenon rising in grave splendour against the warring sky, a living symbol of an ancient victory.

At another time, the same group of friends had chosen a hot day of midsummer to ride on mules along the stretch of Attic road to Marathon.  The magnificent hills girdling the horizon had freshly impressed them as more sculpturesque in outline than the familiar ones about their own Rome, and the very shape of the olive trees in a large orchard by the roadside had seemed un-Italian and strange.  They had already become attuned to a Greek mood when the blue sea opened before them and they reached the large plain, stretching from the foot-hills of Pentelicon to the water’s edge.  The heat had stilled all life in the neighbourhood, and Marathon seemed hushed, after all these five hundred years, in reverence before the spirit of liberty.  Their ride home had been taken in the cool of the day, so that the hills which rose from the sea had assumed a covering of deep purple or more luminous amethyst.  From the shore of the sea they had passed into a wooded road, with a golden sky shining through the black branches.  Later the stars had come out in great clusters, and Messala, who now and then betrayed a knowledge of poetry and a gravity of thought that surprised his friends, had recited Pindar’s lines:—­