Within a few hundred yards of the Acropolis lies the small rocky hill called Areopagus. Although associated with the God of War in name and story, it was also the traditional scene of one of Athena’s greatest triumphs, when she held the scales of justice so wisely between the grief-stricken matricide Orestes and the avenging Erinyes or Furies who had dogged his steps all the way from Argos to Delphi and from Delphi to Athens. In the rocky cleft at the side of the hill was the awful shrine in which the relentless pursuers, otherwise called the Eumenides (“Gracious Ones”), found their quietus—the Areopagus becoming thenceforward the authorised tribunal for the trial of all cases of homicide, and superseding the savage law of blood-feud. It was on this same Mars’ Hill that the apostle of a higher faith pled with the Athenians for the recognition of the risen Christ, whom he proclaimed as the appointed representative of the “Unknown God,” whose altar he had observed in the adjacent market-place.
CHAPTER X
ATHENS AND ELEUSIS
FROM Athens to Eleusis is a journey of about twelve miles by a road which follows very much the line of the Sacred Way, along which the great procession went for the celebration of the Mysteries. The starting-point was close to the Dipylon Gate, of which there are still sufficient remains to enable us to understand its structure. It was the most strongly fortified point in the city wall, being the part most exposed to attack; and it was there that the city was taken by the Roman general Sulla, who had recourse to the erection of a mound in the neighbourhood. The gate was a double one, as its name implies, not merely in the sense of being a divided gate with a pillar in the centre, but as a combination of two separate gates with a walled court between them, so that an enemy who forced his way through the outer gate would find himself (as Philip V. of Macedonia once did) exposed to attack not only in front but also from the sides, and would be glad to make good his retreat from such an untenable position.
For miles from this point the Sacred Way was lined with tombs, especially in the immediate neighbourhood of the gate. A number of the ancient tombstones are still standing in their original place, but many have sunk out of sight, and not a few were used as materials for fortification after the Persian war, and again after the battle of Chæronea. Indeed, some of them are still to be seen built into portions of the wall. It was outside the Dipylon that the bones of those who had died in battle were interred. One of the most sacred obligations of a Greek army after an engagement was to recover the bodies of its dead, and whenever a truce for this purpose was asked by the defeated side it could not be refused without a breach both of honour and of religion. At the interment it was customary for a funeral oration to be delivered in praise of those who had given their lives for their country. On one of these occasions, as Thucydides tells us, when Pericles was the speaker, he gave such a noble address that the women mourners in their gratitude and enthusiasm crowned him with wreaths, as if he had been a conqueror.[6] Funeral honours paid to the brave dead were not a mere expression of sentiment, for provision was at the same time made out of the public funds for the support of their children till they came of age.
The existing tombstones, as a rule, depict scenes illustrative of the life of the departed, or else they
