THE ACROPOLIS
[Illustration]
The visible remains of the ancient city of Athens, as distinguished from
the city of to-day, lie mainly to the south and west of the Acropolis,
where are to be seen many distinct traces of the classic town, close
around the base of the great rock and the Hill of Mars. How far the
ancient city had extended around to the eastward can only be conjectured
by the layman, for there exist almost no remains in that direction save
the choragic monument of Lysicrates and the ruins of the temple of
Olympian Zeus; while on the northern side of the Acropolis, although it
is known that there once lay the agora, or market place, little is left
but some porticoes of a late, if not of Roman, date. Not being bent on
exact archæology, however, it is not for us here to speculate much over
the probable sites of the ancient metes and bounds, the location of the
fountain of nine spouts called “Enneacrunus,” nor the famous spring of
Callirrhoë, which furnish fertile ground for dissent among those skilled
in the art. What must now concern us most is the mass of visible ruins,
which provide the chief charm of the city to every visitor, and most of
all to those possessed of the desirable historic or classical
“background” to make the ruins the more interesting.
Despite her many inglorious vicissitudes, Athens has been so fortunate
as to retain many of her ancient structures in such shape that even
to-day a very good idea is to be had of their magnificence in the golden
age of Hellenic empire. The Greek habit of building temples and fanes in
high places, apart from the dwellings of men, has contributed very
naturally to the preservation of much that might otherwise have been
lost. The chief attractions of the classic city were set on high, and
the degenerate modern town that succeeded the ancient capital did not
entirely swallow them up, as was so largely the case at Rome. To be
sure, the Turks did invade the sacred precincts of the Acropolis with
their mosques and their munitions of war, and the latter ruined the
Parthenon beyond hope of restoration when Morosini’s lamentable advisers
caused the Venetian bomb to be fired at that noble edifice. Local
vandalism and the greed of lime burners have doubtless destroyed much.
But the whole course of these depredations has failed to remove the
crowning treasures of Athens, and the Acropolis temples are still the
inspiration and the despair of architects. In passing, then, to a more
detailed and perhaps superfluous consideration of the monuments
surviving from the ancient city, it may be remarked that the visitor
will find more of the classic remains to reward and delight him than is
the case at Rome, rich as that eternal city is.
The Acropolis is naturally the great focus of interest, not only for
what remains _in situ_ on its top, but because of many remnants of
buildings that cluster about its base. The rock itself, if it were
stripped of every building and devoid of every memory, would still be
commanding and imposing, alone by sheer force of its height and
steepness. As it is, with its beetling sides made the more precipitous
by the artifices of Cimon and ancient engineers, whose walls reveal the
use of marble column drums built into the fortifications themselves, it
is doubly impressive for mere inaccessibility. Something like a hundred
feet below its top it ceases to be so sheer, and spreads out into a more
gradual slope, on the southern expanses of which were built the city’s
theatres and a precinct sacred to Asklepios. Only on the west, however,
was the crag at all approachable, and on that side to-day is the only
practicable entrance to the sacred precincts.
A more magnificent approach it would be hard to conceive. One must
exempt from praise the so-called “Beulé” gate at the very entrance, at
the foot of the grand staircase, for it is a mere late patchwork of
marble from other ancient monuments, and is in every way unworthy of
comparison with the majestic Propylæa at the top. It takes its name from
the French explorer who unearthed it. As for its claim to interest, it
must found that, if at all, on the identification of the stones which
now compose it with the more ancient monument of some choragic victor.
Looking up the steep incline to the Propylæa, or fore gate of the
Acropolis, the Parthenon is completely hid. Nothing is visible from this
point but the walls and columns of the magnificent gateway itself,
designed to be a worthy prelude to the architectural glory of the main
temple of the goddess. The architect certainly succeeded admirably in
achieving the desired result. He did not at all dwarf or belittle his
chief creation above, yet he gave it a most admirable setting. Even
to-day, with so much of the colonnade of the Propylæa in ruins, it is a
splendid and satisfying approach, not only when seen from a distance,
but at close range. Not alone is it beautiful in and of itself, but it
commands from its platform a grand view of the Attic plain below, of the
bay of Salamis gleaming in the sun beyond, of the long cape running down
to Sunium, and of the distant mountains of the Argolid, rolling like
billows in the southwest far across the gulf and beyond Ægina. To pause
for a moment on gaining this threshold of the Acropolis and gaze upon
this imposing panorama of plain, mountain, and sea, is an admirable
introduction to Greece.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF NIKÉ APTEROS]
On either side of the stairway by which one climbs to the Propylæa are
buttresses of rock, on one of which stands an object worthy of long
contemplation. At the right, on a platform leveled from the solid rock,
stands the tiny temple of Niké Apteros (the Wingless Victory),
“restored” it is true, but nevertheless one of the most perfect little
buildings imaginable. At one time entirely removed to make room for a
Turkish watch-tower, it has been re-created by careful hands out of its
original marbles; and it stands to-day, as it stood of old, on its
narrow parapet beside the grand stairway of Athena. The process of
rebuilding has not, indeed, been able to give the unbroken lines of the
old temple. The stones are chipped at the corners here and there, and
there are places where entirely new blocks have been required. But in
the main everything, even to the delicately carved frieze around its
top, is in place; and for once at least the oft-berated “restorer” of
ancient buildings has triumphed and has silenced all his critics. The
remnants of the incomparable carved balustrade, which once served as a
railing for the parapet, are to be seen in the small museum of the
Acropolis, revealing the extreme grace which the Greek sculptors had
achieved in the modeling of exquisite figures in high relief. The slab,
particularly, which has come to be known as “Niké binding her sandal”
seems to be the favorite of all, though the others, even in their
headless and armless state, are scarcely less lovely.
As for the isolated pedestal on the other side of the stairway, known as
the “pedestal of Agrippa,” it is not only devoid of any statue to give
it continued excuse for being, but it is in such a state of decrepitude
as to cause the uncomfortable thought that it is about to fall, and
seems an object rather for removal than for perpetuation, although it
serves to balance the effect produced by the Niké bastion.
Standing on the Niké platform, the visitor finds the noble columns of
the Propylæa towering above him close at hand. These Doric pillars give
one for the first time an adequate idea of the perfection to which the
column was carried by Ictinus and the builders and architects of his
time; for although each pillar is built up drum upon drum, it is still
true in many cases that the joints between them are almost invisible, so
perfect are they, despite the lapse of ages and the ravages of war, not
to mention the frequent earthquake shocks to which the whole region has
been subjected. Age has been kind also to the Pentelic marble, softening
its original whiteness to a golden brown without destroying its
exquisite satin texture. Nothing more charming can well be imagined than
the contrast of the blue Athenian sky with these stately old columns, as
one looks outward or inward through their majestic rows.
The rock rises sharply as one passes within the precinct of the
Acropolis, and the surface of it appears to have been grooved to give a
more secure footing to pedestrians. Stony as is the place, it still
affords soil enough to support a growth of grasses and struggling bits
of greenery to cradle the many fallen drums. But one has eyes only for
the Parthenon, the western front of which now appears for the first time
in its full effect. From its western end, the havoc wrought in its midst
being concealed, the Parthenon appears almost perfect. The pedimental
sculptures, it is true, are gone save for a fragment or two, having been
carried off to England. But the massive Doric columns still stand in an
unbroken double row before one; the walls of the cella appear to be
intact; the pediment rises almost unbroken above; frieze, triglyphs, and
metopes remain in sufficient degree to give an idea of the ancient
magnificence of the shrine—and all conspire to compel instant and
unstinted admiration. Speculation as to the ethics of the removal of the
Parthenon sculptures by Lord Elgin has become an academic matter, and
therefore one quite beyond our present purpose. Doubtless to-day no such
removal would be countenanced for a moment. It is no longer possible to
say, as former critics have said, that the local regard for the
treasures of the place is so slight as to endanger their safety. The
present custodianship of the priceless relics of antiquity in Athens is
admirably careful and satisfactory. If, therefore, Greece had only come
into her own a century or so earlier than she did, the famous sculptures
of the miraculous birth of Athena, springing full grown from the head of
Zeus, and the colossal representation of the strife between Athena and
Poseidon for possession of the Attic land, might still adorn as of yore
the eastern and western gables of the great temple; or if not that,
might still be seen in the very excellent museum at the other end of the
city. It is enough for us to know, however, that they are not in Athens
but in London, and that there is no probability they will ever return to
Greek soil; and to know, also, that had they not been removed as they
were, they might never have been preserved at all. That is the one
comfortable state of mind in which to view the vacant pediments of the
Parthenon. To work up a Byronic frenzy over what cannot be helped, and
may, after all, be for the best, is of no benefit.
Writers on Athens have often called attention to the curved stylobate of
the Parthenon—a feature which is by no means confined to this temple,
but which is to be noticed in almost every considerable ruin of the
sort. The base of the building curves sufficiently to make the device
visible, rising from either end to the centre of the sides; and the
curious may easily prove it by placing a hat at one extremity and trying
to see it from the other, sighting along the line of the basic stones.
The curve was necessary to cure an optical defect, for a straight or
level base would have produced the illusion of a decided sagging
Similarly it has long been recognized that the columns must swell at the
middle drums, lest they appear to the eye to be concaved. In fact, as
Professor Gardner has pointed out, there is actually hardly a really
straight line in the Parthenon—yet the effect is of absolute
straightness everywhere.
Obviously this curvature of the base, slight though it was, imposed some
engineering problems of no inconsiderable nature when it came to setting
the column drums; for the columns must stand erect, and the bottom
sections must be so devised as to meet the configuration of the convex
stylobate. The corner columns, being set on a base that curved in both
directions, must have been more difficult still to deal with. But the
problem was solved successfully, and the result of this cunningly
contrived structure was a temple that comes as near architectural
perfection as earthly artisans are ever likely to attain. The columns
were set up in an unfluted state, the fluting being added after the
pillar was complete. Each drum is said to have been rotated upon its
lower fellow until the joint became so exact as to be to all intents and
purposes indistinguishable. In the centre of the fallen drums will be
seen always a square hole, used to contain a peg of wood designed to
hold the finished sections immovable, and in many cases this wooden plug
has been found intact. All along the sides of the Parthenon, lying on
the ground as they fell, are to be seen the fallen drums that once
composed the columns of the sides, but which were blown out of position
by the bomb from the Venetian fleet of Admiral Morosini. They lie like
fallen heaps of dominoes or children’s building blocks, and the entire
centre of the temple is a gaping void. Here and there an attempt has
been made to reconstruct the fallen columns from the original portions,
but the result is by no means reassuring and seems not to justify the
further prosecution of the task. Better a ruined Parthenon than an
obvious patchwork. The few restored columns are quite devoid of that
homogeneity that marks the extant originals, and their joints are
painfully felt, being chipped and uneven, where the old are all but
imperceptible; so that the whole effect is of insecurity and lack of
perfection entirely out of harmony with the Parthenon itself. Opinions,
however, differ. Some still do advocate the rebuilding of the temple
rather than leave the drums, seemingly so perfect still, lying as they
now are amid the grasses of the Acropolis. It is one of those questions
of taste on which debate is traditionally idle and purposeless.
[Illustration: THE PARTHENON, WEST PEDIMENT]
For those who must demand restorations other than those constructed by
the mind’s eye, there are models and drawings enough extant, and some
are to be seen in the Acropolis Museum. Most interesting of the attempts
are doubtless the speculations as to the pedimental sculptures, the
remains of which are in the British Museum, but which are so fragmentary
and so ill placed in their new home that much of the original grouping
is matter for conjecture. With the aid of drawings made by a visitor
long years ago, before Lord Elgin had thought of tearing them down, the
two great pediments have been ingeniously reconstructed in miniature,
showing a multitude of figures attending on the birth of the city’s
tutelary goddess, as she sprang full armed from the head of Zeus
assisted by the blow of Hephaistos’s hammer, or the concourse of deities
that umpired the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the land. The
Acropolis Museum has only casts of the Elgin marbles, but there is still
to be seen a good proportion of the original frieze. It would be out of
place in any such work as this to be drawn into anything like a detailed
account of these famous sculptures, the subjects of a vast volume of
available literature already and sources of a considerable volume also
of controversial writing involving conflicts of the highest authority.
It must therefore suffice to refer the reader interested in the detailed
story of the Parthenon, its external adornment, its huge gold-and-ivory
statue within, and the great Panathenaic festival which its frieze
portrayed, to any one of those learned authors who have written of all
these things so copiously and clearly—doubtless none more so than Dr.
Ernest Gardner in his admirably lucid and readable “Ancient Athens,” or
in his “Handbook of Greek Sculpture,” without which no one should visit
the museum in that city.
One must remember that the Parthenon and the other features of the
Acropolis are monuments of the age of Pericles, and not of an earlier
day. The Persians who invaded Greece in 480 B.C. succeeded in obtaining
possession of Athens and of the whole Attic plain, the inhabitants
fleeing to the island of Salamis. The hordes of barbarians brought in by
Xerxes were opposed by a very few of the citizens, some of whom erected
a stockade around the Acropolis, thinking that thereby they satisfied
the oracle which had promised the city salvation through the
impregnability of its “Wooden Walls.” The Persians massed their forces
on Mars Hill, just west of the larger rock, and a hot fight took place,
the invaders attempting to fire the stockade by means of arrows carrying
burning tow, while the besieged made use of round stones with
considerable effect. Eventually the enemy discovered an unsuspected
means of access to the citadel and took it by storm, after which they
burned its temples and left it a sorry ruin. The rest of the Athenians
with the allied navy at Salamis repulsed the Persian fleet, and Xerxes,
disgusted, withdrew,—despite the fact that it would seem to have been
quite possible for him to pursue his successes on land. It left Athens a
waste, but on that waste grew up a city that for architectural beauty
has never, in all probability, been surpassed. The reaction from the
horrors of war gave us the Parthenon, the Propylæa, and the Erechtheum,
all dating, perhaps, from the fifth century before Christ.
The Erechtheum, while properly entitled to the epithet “elegant” as a
building, seems decidedly less a favorite than the Parthenon. It is
extremely beautiful, no doubt, in a delicate and elaborate way, and its
ornamentation is certainly of a high order. Unlike the Parthenon, it is
not surrounded by a colonnade, but possesses pillars only in its several
porticoes. The columns are not Doric, but Ionic. As for its general
plan, it is so complicated and devoted to so many obscure purposes that
the lay visitor doubtless will find it an extremely difficult place to
understand. There appear to have been at least three precincts involved
in it, and the name it bears is the ancient one, given it because in
part it was a temple of Erechtheus. That deity was of the demi-god type.
He was an ancient Attic hero, who had received apotheosis and become
highly esteemed, doubtless because in part he had instituted the worship
of Athena in the city and had devised the celebrated Panathenaic
festival. Tradition says that he was brought up by Athena herself, and
that she intrusted him as a babe, secreted in a chest, to the daughters
of Cecrops to guard. They were enjoined not to open the chest, but being
overcome with curiosity they disobeyed, and discovered the babe entwined
with serpents—whereat, terrified beyond measure, they rushed to the
steeper part of the Acropolis and threw themselves down from the rock.
Therein they were not alone, for it is also related that the father of
Theseus had also thrown himself down from this eminence in despair,
because he beheld his son’s ship returning from Crete with black sails,
imagining therefrom that the Minotaur had triumphed over his heroic son,
when the reverse was the fact.
The complicated character of the Erechtheum is further emphasized by the
fact that a portion of it was supposed to shelter the gash made by
Poseidon with his trident when he was contending with Athena for the
land, as well as the olive tree that Athena caused to grow out of the
rock. The two relics were naturally held in veneration, and it was the
story that in the cleft made by the trident there was a salt spring, or
“sea” as Herodotus calls it, which gave forth to the ear a murmuring
like that of the ocean. The cleft is still there. The olive tree,
unfortunately, has disappeared. It was there when the Persian horde came
to Athens, however, if we may believe Herodotus; and tradition says that
after the invaders had burned the Acropolis over, the tree-stump
immediately put forth a shoot which was in length a cubit, as a sign
that the deity had not abandoned the city. It had been the custom of the
place to deposit a cake of honey at stated intervals in the temple door
for the food of the sacred serpents; and when, on the arrival of the
Persians, this cake remained untouched, the inhabitants were convinced
that even the god had left the Acropolis and that naught remained but
ruin. The renewed and miraculous life of the olive tree dispelled this
error. The Erechtheum in part overlaps the oldest precinct sacred to
Athena, where stood an earlier temple supposed to have contained the
sacred image of the goddess, made of wood, which came down from heaven.
For exact and detailed descriptions of the Erechtheum and its uses, the
reader must once again turn to the archæologists. As for its external
features, the most famous of all is unquestionably the caryatid portico,
in which the roof is borne up by a row of graceful, but undeniably
sturdy, marble maidens. The use of the caryatid, always unnatural, is
here rather successful on the whole, for the beholder derives no
sensation that the maidens are restive under the weight imposed on them.
They are entirely free from any indictment of grotesqueness.
Nevertheless, it is questionable whether the portico is altogether
pleasing. One of the figures is, as is well known, a reproduction of the
one Lord Elgin carried away to the British Museum, but the remainder of
the six are the original members.
The Acropolis Museum serves to house a great many interesting fragments
found on the spot, including a host of archaic representations of
Athena, still bearing ample traces of the paint which the Greeks used so
lavishly on their marble statues. This use of pigment might seem to have
been a very doubtful exhibition of taste, as judged by modern standards,
not only in its application to statues, but in the decoration of marble
temples as well. It is hard for us to-day, accustomed to pure white
marble sculpture, to imagine any added beauty from painting the hair,
eyes, and garments of a statue; or to conceive how the polychromy so
commonly made use of in bedecking such masterpieces as the Parthenon
could have been anything but a blemish. Nevertheless, the fact that the
Greeks did it, and that they were in all else so consummately tasteful,
makes it entirely probable that their finished statues and edifices thus
adorned were perfectly congruous—especially under that brilliant sky and
surrounded by so many brilliant costumes. From the surviving multitude
of statues of Athena, it is evident that the Greeks conceived her as a
woman of majestic mien, rather almond-eyed, and possessed of abundant
braids of the ruddy hair later vouchsafed to Queen Elizabeth. The more
rudimentary figure of the “Typhon,” also preserved in this museum, which
was doubtless a pedimental sculpture from some earlier acropolitan
temple, bears abundant traces of paint on its body and on the beards of
its triple head. It is too grotesque to furnish much of an idea of the
use of paint on such statues as the great masters later produced. The
remnants of the Parthenon frieze give little or no trace of any of the
blue background, such as was commonly laid on to bring out the figures
carved on such ornaments, nor are there any traces remaining of
polychrome decoration on the Parthenon itself.
The Acropolis, of course, has not escaped the common fate of all similar
celebrated places—that of being “done” now and then by parties of
tourists in absurdly hasty fashion, that to the lover of the spot seems
little less than sacrilege. It is no infrequent sight to see a body of
men and women numbering from a dozen to over a hundred, in the keeping
of a voluble courier, scampering up the steps of the Propylæa, over the
summit, through the two temples, in and out of the museum, and down
again, amply satisfied with having spent a half hour or even less among
those immortal ruins, and prepared to tell about it for the rest of
their days. It is a pity, as it always is, to see a wonder of the world
so cavalierly treated. Still, one hesitates to say that rather than do
this, one should never visit the Acropolis of Athens. It is better to
have looked for a moment than never to have looked at all. The Acropolis
is no place to hurry through. Rather is it a spot to visit again and
again, chiefly toward sunset, not merely to wander through the ruins, or
to rest on the steps of the Parthenon musing over the remote past to
which this place belongs, but also to see the sun sink to the west as
Plato and Socrates must often have seen it sink from this very place,
behind the rugged sky-line of the Argolid, which never changes,
lengthening the purple shadows of the hills on the peaceful plain and
touching the golden-brown of the temples with that afterglow which, once
seen, can never be forgotten.
The gates of the Acropolis are closed at sunset by the guards, and
lingering visitors are insistently herded into groups and driven
downward to the gate like sheep by the little band of blue-coated
custodians. Still, they are not hard-hearted, and if a belated visitor
finds the outer gates locked a trifle before sunset, as often happens
with the idea of preventing needless ascent, a plea for “pende lepta”
(five minutes) is likely to be honored even without a petty bribe. But
at last every one must go, and the holy hill of Athena is left
untenanted for one more of its endless round of nights. A visit to the
Acropolis by moonlight is traditionally worth while, and the needful
permission is not difficult to obtain once the municipal office dealing
with such things is located. The Parthenon on a clear, moonlit night
must be indescribably lovely, even in its lamentable ruin.
Other sights of Athens, ancient and modern, are interesting, and many
are magnificent. But the Acropolis is unquestionably the best that
Athens has to show, and the Parthenon is incomparably the best of the
Acropolis. It is the first and the last spot to seek in visiting
Athena’s famous city, and the last glimpse the departing voyager—very
likely with a not unmanly tear—catches from his ship as it sails out
into the blue Ægean is of this hoary temple reposing in calm and serene
indifference to mankind on its rocky height. It has seen the worship of
Athena Parthenos give way to the reverence of another Virgin—a holier
ideal of Wisdom set up in its own precincts, and worshiped there on the
very spot where once the youth of Athens did honor to the pagan goddess.
Gods and religions have risen and departed, despots have come and gone;
but the Parthenon has stood unchanging, the unrivaled embodiment of
architectural beauty to-day, as it was when Ictinus, Mnesicles,
Pheidias, and those who were with them created it out of their combined
and colossal genius, under the wise ordainment of Pericles.
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