and sail to Athens with them. He easily lifted the stone, but determined
not to go to Athens by sea, though the voyage was a safe and easy one,
and though his mother and his grandfather implored him to go that way.
By land it was a difficult matter to reach Athens, as the whole way was
infested with robbers and bandits. That time, it seems, produced men of
great and unwearied strength and swiftness, who made no good use of
these powers, but treated all men with overbearing insolence, taking
advantage of their strength to overpower and slay all who fell into
their hands, and disregarding justice and right and kindly feeling,
which they said were only approved of by those who dared not do injury
to others, or feared to be injured themselves, while men who could get
the upper hand by force might disregard them. Of these ruffians,
Herakles in his wanderings cut off a good many, but others had escaped
him by concealing themselves, or had been contemptuously spared by him
on account of their insignificance. But Herakles had the misfortune to
kill Iphitus, and thereupon sailed to Lydia and was for a long time a
slave in that country under Omphale, which condition he had imposed upon
himself as a penance for the murder of his friend. During this period
the country of Lydia enjoyed peace and repose; but in Greece the old
plague of brigandage broke out afresh, as there was now no one to put it
down. So that the journey overland to Athens from Peloponnesus was full
of peril; and Pittheus, by relating to Theseus who each of these
evildoers was, and how they treated strangers, tried to prevail upon him
to go by sea. But it appears that Theseus had for a long time in his
heart been excited by the renown of Herakles for courage: he thought
more of him than of any one else, and loved above all to listen to those
who talked of him, especially if they had seen and spoken to him. Now he
could no longer conceal that he was in the same condition as
Themistokles in later times, when he said that the trophy of Miltiades
would not let him sleep. Just so did the admiration which Theseus