when standing on the tumulus of the two hundred (Greeks) who fell on Marathon? The principal barrow has recently been opened by Fauvel: few or no relics, as vases, etc.) were found by the excavator. The plain of Marathon[1] was offered to me for sale at the sum of sixteen thousand piastres, about nine hundred pounds! Alas!—"Expende[2]—quot libras in duce summo—invenies!"—was the dust of Miltiades worth no more? It could scarcely have fetched less if sold by weight.
Before I say anything about a city of which every body, traveller or not, has thought it necessary to say something, I will request Miss Owenson,[4] when she next borrows an Athenian heroine for her four volumes, to have the goodness to marry her to somebody more of a gentleman than a "Disdar Aga" (who by the by is not an Aga), the most
- ↑ [Byron and Hobhouse visited Marathon, January 25, 1810. The unconsidered trifle of the "plain" must have been offered to Byron during his second residence at Athens, in 1811.]
- ↑ ["Expende Annibalem—quot libras," etc. (Juvenal, x. 147), is the motto of the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, which was written April 10, 1814.—Journal, 1814; Life, p. 325.]
- ↑ [Compare letter to Hodgson, September 25, 1811: Letters, 1898, ii. 45.]
- ↑ [Miss Owenson (Sydney, Lady Morgan), 1783-1859, published her Woman, or Ida of Athens, in 4 vols., in 1812. Writing to Murray, February 20, 1818, Byron alludes to the "cruel work" which an article (attributed to Croker but, probably, written by Hookham Frere) had made with her France in the Quarterly Review (vol. xvii. p. 260); and in a note to The Two Foscari, act iii. sc. 1, he points out that his description of Venice as an "Ocean-Rome" had been anticipated by Lady Morgan in her "fearless and excellent work upon Italy." The play was completed July 9, 1821, but the work containing the phrase, "Rome of the Ocean," had not been received till August 16 (see, too, his letter to Murray, August 23, 1821). His conviction of the excellence of Lady Morgan's work was, perhaps strengthened by her outspoken eulogium.]
