A RIDE ACKOSS THE PELOPONNESE. 189 



cut out of the side of an earthen mound, the seats 

 and extremities being of stone. The seats are gone 

 now ; but the shell of the building, overgrown as it 

 is with vegetation, is still clearly visible, and the 

 stone facings remain. Between the theatre and the 

 river the site of the various public buildings is 

 marked only by a piece of masonry cropping up here 

 and there through the young corn. In one place we 

 made out the plan of a temple from fragments of the 

 Avail of the cella and a few broken columns lying 

 about. The ground was profusely strewn with old 

 pottery. It is quite possible that excavation might 

 lead to some result here, for the soft alluvial soil may 

 well have accumulated so as to leave the old level of 

 the city far below the surface. A green mound on 

 the other side of the river was pointed out to us as 

 the tomb of Philopcsmen, the greatest man that Me- 

 galopolis ever produced. That he was buried in great 

 triumph in his native city, we know from Plutarch, 

 who adds : " One of the Romans, to praise him, calls 

 him the last of the Greeks ; as if after him Greece 

 had produced no great man, nor who deserved the 

 name of Greek." 



Megalopolis, which was founded as the capital of 

 an Arcadian league, designed to counteract the influ- 

 ence of Sparta in the Peloponnese, never attained the 

 importance anticipated for it by Epaminondas. The 

 scale on which it was built was so much too large 

 for its population, that a comic poet said of it, " the 



