But Theseus stopped them there, and
conquered them, and took Hippolute their queen to be his wife.
Then he went out to fight against the Lapithai, and Peirithoos
their famous king: but when the two heroes came face to face they
loved each other, and embraced, and became noble friends; so that
the friendship of Theseus and Peirithoos is a proverb even now.
And he gathered (so the Athenians say) all the boroughs of the land
together, and knit them into one strong people, while before they
were all parted and weak: and many another wise thing he did, so
that his people honoured him after he was dead, for many a hundred
years, as the father of their freedom and their laws. And six
hundred years after his death, in the famous fight at Marathon, men
said that they saw the ghost of Theseus, with his mighty brazen
club, fighting in the van of battle against the invading Persians,
for the country which he loved. And twenty years after Marathon
his bones (they say) were found in Scuros, an isle beyond the sea;
and they were bigger than the bones of mortal man. So the
Athenians brought them home in triumph; and all the people came out
to welcome them; and they built over them a noble temple, and
adorned it with sculptures and paintings in which we are told all
the noble deeds of Theseus, and the Centaurs, and the Lapithai, and
the Amazons; and the ruins of it are standing still.
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