Now the place Ceramicus gets its name from the hero Ceramus, he too
reputed to be the son of Dionysus and Ariadne; and the first portico on
the right is called the royal portico, for there the king sits during
his yearly office which is called kingdom. On the roof of this portico
are statues of earthenware, Theseus hurling Sciron into the sea, and
Aurora carrying off Cephalus, who, being most handsome, was, they say,
carried off by enamoured Aurora, and his son was Phaethon. And he made
him sacristan of the temple. All this has been told by others, and by
Hesiod in his poem about women. And near the portico are statues of
Conon and his son Timotheus, and Evagoras, the king of the Cyprians,
who got the Phœnician triremes given to Conon by King Artaxerxes;
and he acted as an Athenian and one who had ancestral connection
with Salamis, for his pedigree went up to Teucer and the daughter of
Cinyras. Here too are statues of Zeus, surnamed Eleutherius, and the
Emperor Adrian, a benefactor to all the people he ruled over, and
especially to the city of the Athenians. And the portico built behind
has paintings of the so-called twelve gods. And Democracy and Demos and
Theseus are painted on the wall beyond. The painting represents Theseus
restoring to the Athenians political equality. The popular belief has
prevailed almost universally that Theseus played into the hands of
the people, and that from his time they remained under a democratical
government, till Pisistratus rose up and became tyrant. There are
other untrue traditions current among the mass of mankind, who have no
research and take for gospel all they heard as children in the choruses
and tragedies. One such tradition is that Theseus himself was king,
and that after the death of Menestheus his descendants continued kings
even to the fourth generation. But if I had a fancy for genealogies,
I should certainly have enumerated all the kings from Melanthus to
Cleidicus the son of Æsimidas as well as these.
Here too is painted the action of the Athenians at Mantinea, who were
sent to aid the Lacedæmonians. Xenophon and others have written the
history of the entire war, the occupation of Cadmeia, and the slaughter
of the Lacedæmonians at Leuctra, and how the Bœotians made a raid into
the Peloponnese, and of the help that came to the Lacedæmonians from
the Athenians. And in the picture is the cavalry charge, the most
noted officers in which were on the Athenian side Gryllus, the son of
Xenophon, and in the Bœotian cavalry Epaminondas the Theban. These
paintings were painted for the Athenians by Euphranor, and in the
temple hard by he represented Apollo under the name Patrous. And in
front of the temple Leochares represented another Apollo, and Calamis
the Apollo who is called Averter of Evil. And they say the god got this
name by stopping from his oracle at Delphi the noisome pestilence, that
smote them at the same time as the Peloponnesian war. There is also a
temple to the Mother of the Gods wrought by Phidias, and next to it a
council chamber for those who are called The Five Hundred, who are
appointed annually. And in the council chamber are erected statues to
Zeus the Counsellor, and to Apollo (the artistic design of Pisias),
and to Demos (the work of Lyson). And the legislators were painted by
the Caunian Protogenes, but Olbiades painted Callippus, who led the
Athenians to Thermopylæ to prevent the invasion of the Galati into
Greece.