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.