country when he came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he
would have been as famous as Homer, or Hesiod, or any poet."

"And what was that poem about, Critias?" said the person who addressed
him.

"About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which ought
to have been most famous, but which, through the lapse of time and the
destruction of the actors, has not come down to us."

"Tell us," said the other, "the whole story, and bow and from whom Solon
heard this veritable tradition."

He replied: "At the head of the Egyptian Delta, where the river Nile
divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of
Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the
city from which Amasis the king was sprung. And the citizens have a
deity who is their foundress: she is called in the Egyptian tongue
Neith, which is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes called
Athene. Now, the citizens of this city are great lovers of the
Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. Thither
came Solon, who was received by them with great honor; and he asked the
priests, who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and
made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything
worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, when he was
drawing them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most
ancient things in our part of the world--about Phoroneus, who is called
'the first,' and about Niobe; and, after the Deluge, to tell of the
lives of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their
descendants, and attempted to reckon bow many years old were the events