He was born in Colonus, in the suburbs of Athens, 495 B.C., and was the contemporary of Herodotus, of Pericles, of Pindar, of Phidias, of Socrates, of Cimon, of Euripides,the era of great men, the period of the Peloponnesian War, when everything that was elegant and intellectual culminated at Athens.

He lived to be ninety years old, and produced the most beautiful of his tragedies in his eightieth year, the "Oedipus at Colonus."

Non hic colonus domicilium habeo, sed topiarii in morem, hinc inde florem vellico, ut canis Nilum lambens.

Naufragus hic jaceo; contra, jacet ecce colonus!

Among these trees Plato himself had walked; under the shadow of that Porch Zeno had lectured to his disciples; yonder Quintus points out the "white peak of Colonus", described by Sophocles in "those sweetest lines;" while glistening on the horizon were the waves of the Phaleric harbour, which Demosthenes, Cicero's own great prototype, had outvoiced with the thunder of his declamation.

[308] By a law of the Alemanni (Tit., 57), if two sisters were heiresses to a father's estate and one married a vassal (colonus) of the King or Church and the other became the wife of a free man equal to her in rank, the latter only was allowed to hold her father's land, although the rest of the goods were divided equally.

; so the admiral Christopher Colonus, imploring the protection of Christ, safely carried himself and his people over the unknown ocean, that those Indian nations which he discovered might become citizens and inhabitants of the heavenly Jerusalem.

COLONUS, a demos of Attica, a mile NW. of Athens, the birthplace of Sophocles.

"Only the Diaconus and the Colonus eat hereyou sit at the table with the Sexton outside.

To Count Giovanni Borromeo he wrote concerning the return of Columbus from his first voyage: ...rediit ab Antipodibus occiduis Christophorus quidam Colonus, vir ligur, qui a meis regibus ad hanc provinciam tria vix impetraverat navigia, quia fabulosa, que dicebat, arbitrabantur; rediit preciosum multarum rerum sed auri precipue, qua suapte natura regiones generant tulit.

Significant is the introduction of the great navigator: Christophorus quidam Colonus, vir ligur.