II.
The place and time of the poet's birth are given with definiteness enough. He was born at Colonos, in the year B.C. 495.[1] The deme, or village so called, stood about a mile and a half to the north-west of Athens, the road from the city to the village passing the Kerameikos, the plain of the Kephisos, and the grove of Akademos, and its natives were enrolled among the Athenian citizens, though, with something like a special pride in their locality, they exulted in speaking of themselves as Coloniatæ, the men of Colonos. The name of the place, originally simply descriptive of the character of the country, "the hill," and as such applied to a rising ground within the walls of the city as well as to that outside, had been associated, as were so many other Greek local names, with a special mythus, and the men of the village loved to think that it took its name from a hero, Colonos, to whom they looked up as their founder and patron.[2] From the higher of the two hills in the valley between which it lay, about 1600 feet above the sea-level, the hills, and rocks, and temples of
- ↑ The date is arrived at from the Vita Anon., which gives the year in Olympiads, and the Parian Chronicle, which gives his age at the time of his gaining his first prize, and fixes that date by naming the Archon. Diodoros, (xiii. 103,) fixing the year of his death, gives his age as ninety. Other authorities are slightly discrepant, but the limits of variation are very narrow, and lie between B.C. 497–495.
- ↑ Œd. Col., 53–63.
