Between Attica and Megaris we survey the Isle of Salamis--the right to which we shall find contested both by Athens and the Megarians.
VI.

Turning our eyes now to the land, we may behold, bordering Attica--from which a mountainous tract divides it--the mythological Boeotia, the domain of the Phoenician Cadmus, and the birthplace of Polynices and Oedipus.

Here rise the immemorial mountains of Helicon and Cithaeron--the haunt of the muses; here Pentheus fell beneath the raging bands of the Bacchanals, and Actaeon endured the wrath of the Goddess of the Woods; here rose the walls of Thebes to the harmony of Amphion's lyre--and still, in the time of Pausanias, the Thebans showed, to the admiration of the traveller, the place where Cadmus sowed the dragon-seed--the images of the witches sent by Juno to lengthen the pains of Alcmena--the wooden statue wrought by Daedalus-- and the chambers of Harmonia and of Semele.

No land was more sanctified by all the golden legends of poetry--and of all Greece no people was less alive to the poetical inspiration.

Devoted, for the most part, to pastoral pursuits, the Boeotians were ridiculed by their lively neighbours for an inert and sluggish disposition--a reproach which neither the song of Hesiod and Pindar, nor the glories of Thebes and Plataea, were sufficient to repel.