Note 263 — Chapter IV · CAPITAL CITIES OF GREECE.—ATHENS.

Paus. i. 27. 1. The Athenians in the age of this traveller confounded, it seems, Masistios with Mardonios, nothing very extraordinary several hundred years after the event referred to. Pausanias speaks of it as a mistake; Mr. Müller, who is less ceremonious, as a falsehood. Minerv. Pol. 29. The passion for relics, which led to the preservation of these objects, existed in all its whimsicality among the ancients. But they were scarcely so ingenious as the Roman Catholics of the continent, whose sacred treasures include a number of feathers from the wings of the angel Gabriel, a small bone of one of the cherubim, and a few rays of the star by which the wise men of the East were led to Bethlehem. They have also a small phial, containing some of the darkness that overspread the land of Egypt. (Cf. Fabric. ad Cod. Pseud. epigr. v. i. p. 93. t. 11. and Christophori Carmen, ap Boissonade ad Eunap. p. 277. seq.) In the temples of antiquity relics nearly as curious were preserved: they had an egg of Leda, possibly, as Lobeck conjectures, an ostrich’s (Aglaoph. i. 52; Paus. iii. 16. 1); the teeth of the Erymanthean boar (Paus. viii. 24. 2), whose spoils were also shown at Tegea (Lucian adv. Indoct. § 13); the teeth of the Calydonian boar were preserved at Beneventum (Procop. Bell. Goth. i. 15. 349. c); they had also the sword of Memnon (Paus. iii. 3. 6); the iron spear of Epeios (Justin. xx. 7), the brazen vessel in which Pelias was boiled, the arrows of Teucer, the chlamys of Odysseus, were preserved in the temple of Apollo at Sicyon. (Ampel. Memor. viii. 68. Beckm. Hist. of Invent. ii. 364. Germ. in Lobeck.) In the Troad the anvils were shown which Zeus suspended to the heels of Hera, when he hung her up between heaven and earth (Eustath. p. 15. l. 30); here, too, anyone might see the cithara of Paris. (Plut. Alex. § 15.) Like the Catholics, too, they showed the same thing in two or three places; for example, the hair of Isis might be seen at Koptos (Etym. Mag. v. κόπτος, 522. 12), and at Memphis. (Luc. adv. Ind. § 13.) The Romans, according to Horace (Carm. ii. 3. 21), possessed the bronze wash-hand-basin of Sisyphos. A much more extensive list may be found in Beckmann, Hist. of Inven. ii. 42. seq. Eng. Tr.