On the Pnyx hill we may recall the Athenian Assembly, and may turn in fancy the voluminous pages of Congressional Records filled with patriotism and jealousy; we listen to Pericles and his persuasive schemes for imperial expansion; or to Socrates, president for the day, refusing, amidst the clamours of demos and demagogues, to put to vote the illegal proposition to condemn in a body the ten generals; or to Demosthenes pleading, denouncing, planning for the welfare of the city. Or in the half-light before dawn we may see the suffragettes of Aristophanes’s “Ecclesiazusæ” filing up the hill. More wily than their modern sisters, they have disguised themselves with beards and have dressed in the shoes and cloaks distrained from their husbands, imprisoned at home by naked necessity. With no man to oppose, the women quickly transfer the whole control of the State to themselves, and institute reforms that would put to shame the most radical of modern socialists. A slave, in the “Wasps” of Aristophanes, once had a dream by no means respectful to the Athenian legislature. Some sheep, with cloaks and staves, sat huddled together like just so many Athenians on the seats of the Pnyx, holding an Assembly. To-day the hill is left lonely, and the wandering goats, with their solemn faces and long beards, might renew the sittings unmolested.
In the face of the hill fronting towards the Acropolis, the rock-chamber of the Callirrhoë spring, with its sloping entrance and the parapet within, has been suggested as the original of the famous cave in Plato’s “Republic.” The Vari Cave, on the south side of Hymettus, might have made less of a strain, as has been urged, upon Plato’s imagination. However faint the resemblance of the Callirrhoë cave to Plato’s complex setting, it is enough to emphasize the vitality of this realistic figure, which has become typical, in modern poetry and prose, of the denizens of earth watching and naming the shadows thrown by the fire-light upon the cave’s wall, unable by reason of fetters to look around at the objects moving behind them, much less to rise and climb the long ascent to the brighter light above.
The innocent-looking ravine west of the Hill of the Nymphs is identified with the Barathrum. In antiquity its fame had penetrated to the underworld, where the innkeeper’s maid threatened to pitch the Pseudo-Heracles “into the Barathrum.” And Herodotus’s apocryphal story is at least ben trovato. He relates that, when the ambassadors of Darius came asking tokens of submission from the Greeks: “Some [the Athenians] took the messengers and threw them into the Barathrum, others [the Spartans] into a well, and bade them take earth and water from there to their King.” Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, if we are to believe the allusion in the “Gorgias,” barely escaped with a fine and banishment instead of the criminal’s end in this same pit.
If even the skeleton of the Athenian Market-place could be resurrected, like that of the Roman Forum, many scores of allusions would take on a local habitation. The Agora was the centre of life. In classic times it probably lay in the depression west of the “Theseum” hill, and extended, from the slopes of the Areopagus, northward about to the modern Hadrian street. Pindar, with no idle flattery, spoke of the “fair-famed Agora, in sacred Athens, inlaid with cunning workmanship.” Sculptor, painter, and architect gave of their best. The Prytaneum, close to, or in the Agora, was the city’s fireside. Distinguished foreigners and citizens here and in the Tholus enjoyed, temporarily or for life, the public hospitality. Socrates ironically suggests to his judges that the sentence really fitting his case would be: “Maintenance in the Prytaneum, much more so indeed than if any one of you has come off victor at Olympia with a race horse, a pair, or a four-horse team.” Plutarch relates that Aristides, far from enriching himself from the public purse, left not even enough for his funeral expenses, and that the Athenians “married off his daughters from the Prytaneum at the public cost—voting a dowry of three thousand drachmas to each.” In the stoas that faced upon the Agora the citizens heard and discussed many a new thing, from the days when the great painting of the battle of Marathon was fresh in the Painted Porch, to the time when the Stoics appropriated this colonnade. In time of war a man would look fearfully at the bulletin board near by, to see if his name was posted for military duty; or in time of truce would feel that yonder beautiful group of Peace with the child Wealth best reproduced to the eyes the blessings so often absent during the wearisome Peloponnesian wars,—blessings which Bacchylides, the admiring neighbour of Athens, had celebrated:—
“And now for mortals Peace, the mighty mother, giveth birth
To Wealth and bears culled flowers of honey’d minstrelsy.
She makes on sculptured altars of the gods to blaze
Thigh pieces, in the yellow flame, of bullocks and of thick-fleeced lambs,
And lets the youths give thought to athletes’ toil and flutes and revelry.
Now in the steel-bound hand-loops of the shield