“As the torches attend, let libations be poured,
Thus the all-seeing Zeus and the Moiræ as ward
To the people of Pallas their presence afford.
(Cry aloud now! Exult in your singing!)”
The great mass broken off from the east end of the Areopagus rock has partially blocked the cleft into which the chorus conducts home the Dread Goddesses. As the procession, chanting its hymn, sweeps around the shoulder of the hill, the faded picture of ancient Athens regains its outlines as if under some powerful reagent. Wine-press and fountain, precincts and temples, rise again from their ruins; the throbbing life of the eager citizens reappears. But the gaily-dressed people have hushed jest and carping under the sense of awe evoked by Æschylus. The Athenians were then, as St. Paul on this same Areopagus called them long afterwards, “very scrupulous,” and it was no unworthy superstition that made it imperative to harmonize the cruder conceptions of the immutable laws of Retribution with the new and expansive wisdom of Athena. Swinburne, with keen insight into the universal application of the great drama, brings the “shadows of our deeds” under wisdom’s searching but not unkindly light:—
“Light whose law bids home those childless children of eternal night,
Soothed and reconciled and mastered and transmuted in men’s sight
Who behold their own souls, clothed with darkness once, now clothed with light.”
The visitor who takes his stand to-day immediately in front of the south side of the Areopagus is completely sequestered from the modern city. Here the Acropolis and the Areopagus rock make practically a continuous barrier to the close-built streets that on the northern side come crowding up their slopes. He is encircled with hills, and this ancient quarter of the city of Theseus lies waste and silent around him. The ground is harrowed and scarred by the spade of the archæologist. Only the foundations of sanctuaries and fountains, houses and cisterns, may be distinguished.
The rock-chambers opposite, called by courtesy the “Prison of Socrates,” will, however, recall us to classic Athens. While waiting for the return of the mission-ship from Delos to bring the day of execution, Crito and the rest listened to Socrates’s demonstrations of immortality. Plato sent his reason out as far into the invisible as reason can go. In the “Phædo,” after his half-playful periegesis of the underworld, Socrates is made to say: “Whosoever seem to have excelled in holy living, these are they who are set free and released from these earthly places as from prisons and fare upward to that pure habitation and make their dwelling-place in yonder land.... Therefore we must do our utmost to gain in life a share in virtue and wisdom. For the prize is noble and the hope is great!” or, as he adds presently, “The risk is fair.” And Socrates, like Pindar before him, finds the crowning joy of a blessed immortality neither in the unlaborious sunlit life by night and day, nor in the ocean breezes, nor in the flowers of gold blooming on trees of splendour, but in the company of the great and noble dead with whom to live “’twere more of happiness than tongue can tell.”