Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

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.