Colonus

Certain · a mile north of ancient Athens

A knoll and sacred grove of the Eumenides just outside Athens, deme of Sophocles’ own birth. His last play brings blind Oedipus here to die: the chorus’s ode on Colonus — the nightingales, the wine-dark ivy, the olive no invader’s hand destroys — is antiquity’s most famous praise of an Attic landscape, written by its ninety-year-old native son as Athens itself was falling.