The conquerors, secure against all danger of interruption, plundered Thebes at their leisure.

I pass the rest; the year was fully mourn'd, And Palamon long since to Thebes returned: When, by the Grecians' general consent, At Athens Theseus held his parliament: Among the laws that pass'd, it was decreed, That conquer'd Thebes from bondage should be freed; Reserving homage to the Athenian throne, 1010 To which the sovereign summon'd Palamon.

"On turning the point of a chain of mountains which forms a kind of promontory, we saw all at once ancient Thebes in its full extentthat Thebes whose magnitude has been pictured to us by a single word in Homer, hundred-gated, a poetical and unmeaning expression which has been so confidently repeated ever since.

* O mother, Thebe of the golden shield, thy service will I set even above the matter that was in my hand.

And among their dissolving views, there I saw the scorched soil of Africa, and upon that soil Thebes with its hundred gates, more splendid than the most splendid of all the existing cities of the world; Thebes, the pride of old Egypt, the first metropolis of arts and sciences, and the mysterious cradle of so many doctrines which still rule mankind in different shapes, though it has long forgotten their source.