THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS
“All this pursuit of the arts has this function, even a recall
of the noblest in the soul to a vision of the most excellent in
the ideal.”
PLATO, _Republic_.
To speak of the Acropolis of Athens with due Hellenic restraint is
difficult for any one who has lived long under its habitual sway. At the
first visit three sets of impressions break down the most obdurate
impassiveness. The associations acquired by a study of history engender
a vicarious but active sympathy with the Greeks themselves. There is an
immediate impact of beauty from marble gateway and temples and sculpture
which the procession of years has only incorporated more intimately with
the beauty of sea and land and circumambient air. And, finally, there is
the involuntary sense of coming back to one’s own—to an intellectual
birthright. Even the Turkish conquerors did not fail to recognize that
all western civilizations consider the Acropolis an integral part of
their joint heritage. Dr. Howe quotes from an intercepted letter of
Kiutahi Pashaw, the opponent of the Greek patriot, Karaiskakis, in 1826:
“The citadel of Athens, as is known to you, was built of old on a high
and inaccessible rock; not to be injured by a mine nor accessible to
assault.... From it went out of yore many famous philosophers; it has
many works of art very old, which make the learned men of Europe wonder;
and for this reason all the Europeans and the other nations of
unbelievers regard the citadel as their own house.”
[Illustration:
RENAN ON THE ACROPOLIS
From a French painting
]
The attitude of the ancient Greeks toward the Acropolis is only casually
expressed in their extant literature. No Greek Victor Hugo has given to
men distant in place and time as vivid a picture of the Parthenon as we
possess of Notre Dame. In trying to imagine what the Greeks saw, as they
came up to their citadel, we must first differentiate between the main
historical epochs. Of the Acropolis in the earliest age we can form a
partial conception. The impressive remains of polygonal masonry still
extant, in the massive citadel walls; the traces of the old “Kings’
City” around the Erechtheum, and even within the groundplan of the old
Athena temple; the remains of the ancient stairway, northeast of the
Erechtheum, leading to the postern gate—all fit in with and fill out a
reconstruction based on our conception of other ancient strongholds,
like Mycenæ or Tiryns.
When we think of the citadel in the age of Pisistratus and the time
previous to the Persian Wars we are fairly sure of the main
characteristics. We can picture the old Athena temple, simple yet
dignified, in the middle of the plateau, adorned with coloured
sculptures (some of which may be seen in the Museum to-day), sacred
shrines, precincts and altars with a wealth of dedicatory offerings, and
also the older Propylæa let in between the massive “Pelasgic” walls and
approached by a way that wound down through a complex of outworks to
meet the old Agora.
This Acropolis, far simpler than the Periclean citadel but beautiful and
adorned, was devastated by the Persians. Then for more than a quarter of
a century after Salamis we must imagine it as scarred and patched, with
perhaps only one temple, half restored, to house the sacred image within
its blackened walls.
In general, when we speak of the Acropolis, it is of the citadel as it
appeared towards the close of the fifth century to Sophocles and
Euripides and Aristophanes, to Thucydides and Xenophon, to Isocrates and
Lysias, to Socrates and Plato. This citadel we can restore to our
imagination from the descriptions of Pausanias (controlled by
information from other sources) who, in spite of erratic omissions,
fortunately describes many things with a fulness of detail quite foreign
to the writers of the classical period.
When Socrates, too robust at seventy to know the fatigue of the ascent,
climbed the approach to the hill he must often have been inspired by the
beauty of art, as he had been by the beauty of nature on the banks of
the Ilissus, to renew the prayer: “Dear Pan, and ye other gods, make me
beautiful in the inward man.” Born into a generation and among a people
where external and physical beauty was assumed as corollary to the
beauty of the ideal, there escapes him, thus incidentally, the echo of
his self-conquest over his own Silenus-like exterior, so out of keeping
with the charm of his environment. Perhaps he went up the hill the
evening before his trial to take a last look at what he had loved long
and well. He knew in advance that his “apology” to the court was to be a
reassertion of individual liberty of conscience that would most probably
result for him in the hemlock draught. The majestic columns of the great
gateways rose before him on either side, the wings extended like
welcoming arms. He would turn to the left and stand in the picture
gallery. Perhaps he would pause longest before Alcibiades, his
pernicious disciple, pictured in arrogant beauty as victor at the Nemean
games. Turning to the other side of the gateway, he would stand on the
bastion before the Nike temple and would look out over the familiar
city, the Attic plain and harbour-town. As he passed on now to enter the
gateway, and his eye fell upon the sculptured Hermes and the Graces,
little would he dream of the perplexed debate of modern critics as to a
possible connection of this group with the handiwork of a young sculptor
or stone-cutter, “Socrates the son of Sophroniscus.”
Under or just within the Propylæa he would note various familiar
objects, and when he had passed through he would see before him to the
right and left the Parthenon and the Erechtheum. The intervening space
would not be as it is now a floe of marble blocks. Two orderly avenues
of votive offerings traversed the plateau before him. Against a column
of the Propylæa still stands an inscribed basis of a statue dedicated to
Athena, the Giver of Health, set up by Pericles in gratitude for the
recovery of one of his injured workmen, one perhaps whose skill he could
ill spare in the completion of his large designs. Close by, a marble
boy, made by a son or disciple of the great Myron, held out a bowl of
holy water as at the entrance of a cathedral. Socrates, whose reverence
exceeded that of all his accusers, would not scorn this symbol of
purification, least of all when about to journey away, as he expressed
it, from Athens to another life. Before him towered up the bronze
Athena, the warrior goddess, whose gleaming helmet could be seen by
homeward voyagers as soon as they had passed the intercepting shoulder
and foot-hills of Hymettus. Near by was the Lemnian Athena, goddess of
the arts of peace, held by the Greeks themselves as more beautiful even
than the great gold-ivory statue within the Parthenon. The three
embodied the conceptions of Phidias, as in a trilogy. Near by was a
portrait-herm of Pericles himself. There, too, was the “wooden horse,” a
colossal bronze, with the Greeks (not forgetting the sons of Theseus)
peeping out from its side. And when, passing along this Panathenaic
road, lined with statues and votive offerings, he had threaded his way
around to the east front of the Parthenon, he would enter between the
columns, and in the cool twilight, lit by the gleam of gold and ivory,
he would look up to the Victory on the extended hand of Athena. Perhaps
for a moment the goddess may have lifted the veil of the future to
reveal that the defeat of the morrow would be a victory of far greater
import than even that of Marathon or Salamis.
To-day the visitor, as he goes up to the Acropolis, carries with him the
accumulated associations of centuries. On the bastion of the Temple of
Victory, unsurpassed in its miniature charm, he watches with Ægeus for
Theseus returning in triumph from slaying the Minotaur. At the sight of
the black sail, left unfurled by inadvertence, the old king plunged from
the rock to his death. Ægeus and the other kings passed away and other
men from this rock watched fleets hostile and friendly come and go in
yonder bay and enemies scour the surrounding plain of Attica. Byron,
finally, brooded here over a renascent Hellas.
If any work of man’s hands can purge the mind of the commonplace, it is
the Propylæa, imposing in its grand proportions, yet enticing by its
beauty. Through this the pilgrim now passes and is alone with Greek
life. Although the plateau is deserted, the temple in ruins, there is no
sense of death. There is rather a sudden sense of Beauty set free from
the trammels of daily life. The fortunate isolation of the hilltop
contributes to this effect. Byzantine makeshifts, Turkish hovels and
minarets, have all been swept away—even the intruding Roman is left
outside with the disfiguring pedestal of Agrippa’s statue. The
foreground of the modern city is sunk out of sight behind the rim of the
plateau. There is to be seen on all sides only the same Attic plain, the
same Ægean sea, and the same horizon of mountains, which the eyes of
kings and democrats, artists, orators and philosophers have looked upon
in days gone by.
In this harmony of surroundings, the eye and thought rest undisturbed
upon the Parthenon. The tributes of the centuries have probably left the
visitor unprepared for his own emotion. Like a wind on the mountain,
felling the strong oak trees, the heavenly Eros, Plato’s Love of Beauty,
descends upon him. Bayard Taylor’s first impressions, in spite of an
enthusiasm permissible fifty years ago but now well-nigh out of print,
are worth recalling for the sake of a figure evoked by the appalling
ruin of beauty. Beyond a sea “of hewn and sculptured marble, drums of
pillars, pedestals, capitals, cornices, friezes, triglyphs and sunken
panel-work,” he saw the Parthenon against the sky, and it seemed to him
as if it lay “broken down to the earth in the middle like a ship which
has struck and parted, with the roof, cornices and friezes mostly gone
and not a single column unmutilated, and yet with the tawny gold of two
thousand years staining its once spotless marble, sparkling with
snow-white marks of shot and shell, and with its soaring pillars
embedded in the dark blue ether.”
But since Morosini’s sacrilegious bomb did its work the generations have
refused to accept as the ultimate fact the shipwreck of this temple in
which culminated the plastic arts of ancient Greece and in which were
typified her loftiest ideas. Poet and philosopher have sat before it in
fruitful meditation, and commoners have paced its great colonnades,
unregardful of the ways and marts of men amid the austere majesty and
royal repose of the Doric pillars.
From the imperious beauty of the Parthenon the eye turns gratefully to
the lovely Erechtheum. Although this is but a torso of the architect’s
design and its complex structure defies preconceived conventions, its
Ionic charm satisfies in each detail. The eastern columns, the Porch of
the Maidens, the exquisite tracery of the doorway set within the
perfectly proportioned northern porch present a series rather than a
unity of graceful designs.
The other remnants—fragmentary and broken—of the vanished life upon this
hill must be identified with pious care. Then the thought turns to such
references in literature as have been transmitted to us. These also are
fragmentary, seeming sometimes like the patches of blue and red and gold
not yet wholly effaced from the marbles.
The Iliad, as we know it, preserves an Athenian tradition of the
prehistoric kingly Acropolis. Among the warriors bound for Troy are
listed:—
“They that had Athens, the citadel goodly, the holding of great-heart
Erechtheus to whom on a time, as fostering nurse, was Zeus’s daughter,
Athena (though the seed-land, giver of grain, was the mother who bore
him), and at Athens she made him to dwell, in her own habitation of
plenty. There the Athenian youths with bulls and with rams do him
honour, year after year in the seasons returning.”
And here under the Greek heaven, on this hill left lonely by men but
easily accessible to gods, it would hardly seem incredible if Athena
herself were suddenly to appear once more. In the Odyssey, when she had
ventured to leave Odysseus to his own cunning among the Phæacians, she
returned by a course, strangely devious for an air line, by way of
Marathon to Athens:—
“Then with these words the bright-eyed Athena departed over the
harvestless seas and behind her left Scheria lovely. She came unto
Marathon then and the wide-wayed Athenian city, and entered the
massive-built house of Erechtheus.”
As we look upon the meagre traces of the prehistoric city, we should
like to see the princess maidens appear in the simplicity of the kingly
times. Like the women described by Pherecrates, the comic poet, they had
no slaves:—
“No one then possessed a Sambo, no one had a maid-slave then,
Every bit of household labour must the girls themselves perform.”
Herodotus tells us how they used to go down and out from the protecting
gateways, to draw water at Callirrhoë beyond the Agora, and how the
rough Pelasgians, banished from this their ancient home, would now and
again rush down from Hymettus to carry them off.
The old Erechtheus worship, the snake, the ancient image of Athena, and
the allied precincts, lost none of their sanctity as time went on. From
Herodotus we learn that Themistocles was materially aided before
Salamis, in persuading the Athenians to abandon the city, by the sudden
disappearance of the sacred snake. “The Athenians,” he gravely reports,
“say that a large snake dwells in the sacred precinct as guardian of the
Acropolis. And they not only say this but they make offerings to him
month by month, setting them out for him as actually there. These
consist of a honey-cake. Now this honey-cake, although heretofore it had
always been consumed, remained at this time untasted, so the Athenians,
when the priestess reported the fact, made the more eager haste to leave
the city, on the ground that the goddess had abandoned her citadel.” The
sacred olive tree, however, which Xerxes had burned with the rest of the
precinct, put forth the very next day a new shoot one cubit long. By the
time of Pausanias the guide said “two” cubits. But the essential point
is the continued care of the goddess, and as for the snake, he soon
resumed his dwelling on the Acropolis. In the “Lysistrata” of
Aristophanes, the women who have seized and barricaded the Acropolis
make excuses for leaving, complaining that they cannot sleep, one on
account of the hooting of Athena’s owls, another by reason of her
terror:—
“Since I clapped eyes upon the snake that dwelleth there.”
When in the “Eumenides” of Æschylus the scene shifts from Delphi to the
Acropolis, we find Orestes seated as suppliant before Athena’s most
ancient image. This we may think of, in default of any other temple then
existing, as placed in the old Hecatompedon, whose foundations are seen
adjoining the Erechtheum on the south. This temple, burned by the
Persians, but partially restored, may have been in use even after the
Parthenon was dedicated in 438 B. C., twenty years after this play was
brought out, and perhaps until the completion many years later of the
Athena Polias chamber in the Erechtheum. An Athenian could not well
conceive of his city as safe without this ancient statue; even the birds
in their new Cloud-cuckoo-town must needs debate whether they shall not
keep Athena Polias as their protector.
No Roman Catholic ever accepted more loyally the established glory of
St. Peter’s and the Vatican than the Athenians accepted their citadel.
The new gateways were spoken of with undisguised pride. A comic poet,
Phœnicides of neighbouring Megara, when ridiculing Athens, incidentally
admits that the Athenians cared as much for their Propylæa as their
palates. He says:—
“Of myrtle berries and their honey, too, they talk,
And praise their Propylæa. Last, not least, dried figs.
I sailed and forthwith had a taste of all of these,
Including Propylæa! Not one single thing
Upon this bill of fare could ever match our grouse!”
In one of the anonymous fragments, those riderless Pegasi of Greek
literature, another comic poet combines the Piræus and the Parthenon in
an outburst of civic pride. Nor does he forget the olive groves and
radiant air:—
“Mistress of all, Queen City of Athenians,
How fair thy docks, how fair to view thy Parthenon!
And thy Piræus, too, is fair. And then again
What other city ever yet had groves like thine?
And, as they say, the very sky, thy sky, is fair.”
And Demosthenes, not deterred by any shrinking from hackneyed allusion,
refers expressly to the Propylæa and the Parthenon, when he speaks of
“those things upon which we all naturally pride ourselves.”
Aristophanes, seeking to recall his fellow-citizens to the ideals of
Marathon days, shows us in his “Knights” the Propylæa and the freshly
boiled-over and rejuvenated Demos,—the avatar of true Democracy,—seated
within the unclosing doors of the gateway, dressed in the brilliant garb
of a gentleman of the good old Marathon type: “Just such as he used to
be when he messed with Aristides and Miltiades,” his hair caught up with
the golden cicada pin, emblem of Attic autochthony.
In the “Lysistrata” the Athenian men, ignorant that at a future day
their Parliament was to be controlled by suffragettes, feel that the
limit of the legitimate boycott is over-passed when the women seize and
barricade their Acropolis. The old chorus leader says:—
“In life’s long stretch of time, are many things unlooked for—Woe is
me! For who had ever thought to hear that women whom we keep (a
mischief manifest) should get Athena’s sacred image in their hands;
should seize my citadel; the Propylæa barricade with bolts and bars?”
In this play, too, we catch a glimpse of the more intimate interweaving
of an Athenian maiden’s life with the Acropolis ritual. One of this same
_sans-culotte_ garrison looks about her and reviews her girlhood; how
she had been selected among the best-born girls to carry the mysterious
burden in the Arrephoria, had ground the meal for the sacred cakes for
Athena Archegetis; had impersonated a bear in the worship of Artemis;
and, finally, had gained the coveted privilege of being basket-bearer in
the Panathenaic procession. Explaining her personal gratitude to the
city, the woman says:—
“When seven years old an Arrephoros I;
And when I was ten
I ground the meal for our Lady-on-High;
In my next rôle then
I figured as Bear in Brauronian show,
And the saffron wore;
Then as full-grown maid—quite pretty you know—
The Basket I bore.”
The barren precinct of Artemis Brauronia adjoins the south corner of the
Propylæa, and a small dedicatory bear, found somewhere near, now sits in
the Acropolis Museum, brooding in stony silence over by-gone glories at
the Brauronia. But the maiden with the saffron robe and all her girl
companions have long since disappeared “down the back entry of time.”
If it could be granted us to have restored one portion of the Parthenon
or its appurtenances, our choice would probably fall, not upon the
famous gold-ivory statue of Athena, but first upon the pediment
sculptures; next, it may be, upon the great continuous frieze. If its
shattered fragments could be restored, and the slabs now in Paris and
London could be recalled from exile and united to those still in place,
it would be an easier task for the imagination to reconstruct from these
than from the piecemeal references in the literature an abridged
idealization of the glory of the actual Panathenaic procession. As it
is, from what is left still in place there emerges something far more
significant than the details of any cult or festival. The dismounted
youth adjusting his sandal; the horse with leisurely nose bent to his
fore-leg; the mounted horsemen; the rams and oxen led to the sacrifice,
remain, like Keats’s “heifer lowing at the skies,” to tell the hurrying
generations that once, at least, there has existed, and may exist again,
wherever men are strong to feel and know, the harmony between the
temporal and the eternal.
The Parthenon remained practically intact for centuries, lending its
inspiration both to the creative Greeks and to the imagination of the
Romans, the executors of the Hellenic realty. Even the chryselephantine
Athena seems to have held undisturbed possession of her temple for more
than eight centuries, from the dedication in 438 B. C. to about 430 A.
D., when it disappears from Athenian records.
Plutarch, a Greek gentleman of the first Christian century, speaks with
enthusiasm of the creations of Pericles. “There blooms upon them a
certain freshness untouched by time, as if there dwelt within them an
ever-animating spirit, a life that never grows old.” In the next
century, under the successors of Hadrian, who had inaugurated a new era
for Athens, Pausanias, a foreigner, came and saw and was conquered by
the wealth of detail on the Acropolis. At the same time, that generous
citizen from Marathon, Herodes Atticus, was building against the side of
the Acropolis his gorgeous Italian opera-house, while Lucian, the Syrian
Atticist, with a higher, if impossible, ideal, was striving to revive
the old Platonic grace by quarrying from the Pentelicus of classic
literature. When, in the rôle of a “Truthful James,” he is acquitted of
blasphemy against true philosophy, he enters the east door of the
Parthenon to make thanksgiving to the goddess, or, more specifically, to
the winged Victory, six feet high, upon her hand. His devotion takes the
form of the prayer appended to three of Euripides’s dramas:—
“O majestical Victory, shelter my life
Neath thy covert of wings.
Aye, cease not to grant me thy crowning.”
Thus, like many another later foreigner, he pays the time-honoured
tribute to the outward embodiment of the ideal.
[Illustration: S. COLONNADE OF THE PARTHENON]
The charm of the Acropolis changes with the changing light. See it, if
you will, at dawn from the opposite hillside, near the “Prison of
Socrates,” as the sun rises over Hymettus and the Pentelic columns of
the Parthenon change from the gray of unsympathetic silhouettes to the
luminous chromes of the irradiated marbles. See it at a later hour and
wonder that it does not fade into the light of common day. Or visit it
when the sunset light turns to burnished copper the unadorned hills in
the west, beyond Salamis, and on the choir of the encircling mountains
the supramundane charm of the violet atmosphere falls like a robe with
empurpling shadows in its folds. Go when the night has fallen, and sit
in the mysterious darkness, lit only by the marble columns white against
the dark outlines of Hymettus, until the full moon looks over the
mountain’s rim, tipping architrave and capital with silver, and then, as
it swings free from Hymettus, merging the wreck of the Parthenon in the
beauty of the landscape to which the scarred and yawning sides of the
temple seem to open with intent. Presently the whole hill-top with its
moraine of prostrate columns and marble fragments is lit up and the
pillars of the Propylæa flower into whiteness. Or finally, bizarre as it
may sound, see it when—artificially illuminated after the Olympic
Games—the ruined temple and the serrated contour of the plateau are
etched in mid-air by the white light against a gulf of darkness, a
veritable city of the skies.
The Acropolis, crowned with perfect art, crowded with the loftier
phantoms of our elder kin, is a light-house for all time. Liberty and
Law are its keepers. “Knowledge comes but Wisdom lingers,” and this
citadel is to every thoughtful man in some sense a symbol of his goal.
Its stately Propylæa welcomes all. No sincere pilgrim of Truth is an
alien in the long Pancosmic procession of statesman and scientist,
inventor and poet, artisan and artist that winds up the steep ascent to
lay an ever freshly woven peplus at the feet of Wisdom.