Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 3OI
establish there your own Naupactus, well supplied by you
of the interior with food, timber, tools, raw materials,
and everything that a stirring Irish Naupactus might
require.
Meantime at home, the Dorian Boul^, the Chiefs of the
Nation, having consulted deeply with- travelled men and
sailor-merchants, decided upon Elis in the Peloponnesus
as the site of the first settlement. They sent ambassadors
thither and arranged terms with the Eleans. The great
Hellenic expansions, the ^olian, the Ionian, and now the
Dorian, were, upon the whole, peaceful, conducted
everywhere mainly by treaty, presents, exchanges, and
contracts.
When all was settled and the sanction of the God at
Delphi obtained, the new nation, perfectly organised from
the start, equipped already as a Sovereign State, lacking
only land, with hearts glad yet sad, left the little valley
and climbed the mountain passes leading towards Nau-
pactus.
I call attention to a religious feature of the emigrant
procession, not this time to the sacred fire which was
there, too, taken from the ever-burning National Dorian
fire of the Tetrapolis, but to something else of a religious
nature not so easily understood in our time. At the head
of the bright, many-hued column which wound its way
through the brown mountain passes, was borne on high
an upright severed section of a tree trunk, always in the
van. It was upheld upon a frame through which long
poles passed and the whole rude structure carried upon
men's shoulders. There were no roads here, only foot-