CHORUS
‘There’s no man’s name they bear as slaves and underlings.’”
At this time another country god was naturalized at Athens, a friend and comrade of Dionysus in secret mountain places, but not intruding upon him in the formalities of city worship. Pan had helped the Athenians at Marathon and had stopped the swift courier Pheidippides, sent to hurry reënforcements from Sparta, and bidden him ask his people “why they made no account of him, although he had been useful to them many times already and would be again.” The Athenians at once “dedicated a sanctuary to Pan under the brow of the Acropolis and in consequence of this message they propitiated him by yearly sacrifices and a torch race.” His cave at the northwest end of the Acropolis still exists to convince the sceptic. He lived on here, overlooking the Areopagus and Agora, to come forth, “horned, panpipe in hand, with his shaggy legs,” and greet the lady Justice sent by Zeus to investigate the charlatan philosophers of Athens in Lucian’s day. Pan gives Justice a fluent account of their frailties and is about to add certain details, when her sense of propriety cuts him short. “If I must,” says he, “tell the truth in full, without holding anything back—for I live, as you see, where I can take a bird’s-eye view—many’s the time I’ve seen scores of them, well along towards evening—” (Justice) “Stop there, Pan!”
While Pan was accumulating details of the “Private Life of the Athenians,” as they passed and repassed before his grotto, the public energy of the city was transmuted into enduring memorials above him on the calm heights of the Acropolis.
CHAPTER IV
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.”
RENAN ON THE ACROPOLIS
From a French painting