But Athens suffered from other causes besides its own imperial pride and the enmity of other Greek states. As Æschylus is said to have foreseen, the virtual abolition in a political sense of the court of Areopagus, the great representative of traditional authority, and the failure to provide any other adequate safeguards against democratic excesses, could not fail sooner or later to be attended with evil consequences. That the appointment to public offices should have been made by lot, as a general rule, and that no one, however eminent for ability and experience, should have been eligible as a member of the Council more than twice, shows how the public interests of the state were sacrificed to the theory of personal equality among the citizens. Even the high level of culture at Athens could not justify such a disregard for the inevitable diversity of natural gifts and acquired habits in every community. Moreover, the love of wealth and the taste for luxury, which resulted from the increasing prosperity of the city, tended to the deterioration of character both among the leading men, who were too open to bribes from foreign powers, even those at war with their country, and among the citizens at large, who were apt to become demoralised by their wholesale payment as dicasts, and were not content with largess at the Dionysiac festivals only. The self-denial which led the citizens in the time of Themistocles to forgo their claim on the proceeds of the silver mines of Laurium, amounting to ten drachms per head, in order that an addition might be made to their naval armament, would not have been so readily found at the close of the fourth century, when the “Theoric Fund” had come to be spoken of as “the cement of the democracy.”
While there are scarcely any monuments of the Macedonian period now to be seen in Athens, it is different as regards the age of Roman supremacy.
To the left, part of the aqueduct which supplied the water-clock; in the background, the north side of the Acropolis, surmounted by the wall of Themistocles.
One of the oldest of the tributes of respect then paid by foreigners to the famous but decaying city, is the stoa of Attalus, erected by the second king of Pergamus of that name (159-138 B.C.). The Stoa, which formed part of the eastern boundary of the Market-place (by that time commonly called the Cerameicus), consisted of two stories, the lower façade having a row of forty-five Doric columns in front, with an inner row of twenty-two Ionic columns. The latter divided the enclosed space into two aisles, where buying and selling went on, while farther in, behind the inner aisle, there were rooms for storing goods. The upper story did not extend so far back, and had only one row of Doric columns, connected by a lattice balustrade of Pentelic marble—the material of which the columns were also made.
In the same neighbourhood may be seen one of the best preserved monuments in Athens. It is an octagonal marble building, called the Tower of the Winds, standing fully 40 feet high, with a diameter of 26 feet. On each of its eight sides there is an emblematic figure, representing the wind which blows in that direction. On the top of the tower there was once a bronze Triton, which pointed to the picture of the wind that was blowing at the time. Under each figure is a sun-dial, and there was also an ingenious system of waterworks within the tower, to show the time in any weather, by night or by day. The tower was erected in the first century B.C. by a Syrian named Andronicus.