Inside the colonnade is the cella, 194 feet long, with six columns of its own within the peristyle at each end. The interior was divided into two main parts—the Hekatompedos, exactly 100 Attic feet in length, where the great gold and ivory statue stood in solitary grandeur, with a couch near at hand for the goddess to recline on when she was tired; and the Opisthodomos, to the west of it, strictly called the Parthenon, which was a sort of museum or bank for handsome offerings. The interior seems to have been lighted only from the doors. Ionic columns were used to carry the ceiling of the Parthenon proper. The wooden ceiling itself was adorned with sunken panels brightly painted. Battered and decayed as this marble building is to-day after its centuries of use as a temple, as a church, as a mosque, as a powder magazine, and as an archæological bear-garden, it is still most wonderful in its majesty.[62] We can hardly imagine the impression it produced when it glowed with life and colour on the day of the Panathenaic festival in 438 B.C., when it was opened to the public after fifteen years of building. The sculpture seems to have been applied after the opening of the temple.
Let us glance at the principal buildings beside the Parthenon which crowned the flat-topped citadel. I suspect that most modern spectators feel a secret sense of discontent when they see a reconstruction of the Acropolis.[63] The unregenerate Goth in our bosoms cries out for spires and pinnacles upon such a splendid site, for domes and towers and battlements to fret the sky above it. Would any relics of them have stood for twenty-three centuries in that land of earthquakes?
When the Long Walls of Athens were completed there was no longer any need of fortifications to the Acropolis, though the architectural conception of the whole mass remained that of a shrine and citadel combined. The prehistoric Pelasgians had levelled the top, fortified it on the west, its only accessible end, and surrounded it with a wall. The whole plateau rises to a height of 200 feet. Approaching it from the agora to the west, the pilgrim passes up a flight of low steps to the porch, or propylæa. This was completed in 432 by Mnesicles on the site of an older and much humbler gateway of Kimon’s day. Modern investigators have shown that it was planned on a far more extensive scale than the actual execution, and that room was left for subsequent completion. It is believed that the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War was the cause of this limitation of the original scheme. Even so it was celebrated in antiquity, and is far the most impressive building erected by the Greeks for secular purposes. It consists of a gateway formed by a wall with five openings and fronted by a Doric colonnade, with gable roof and pediment, flanked on each side in the original plan by two colonnaded halls, a smaller one in front and a larger behind. This plan is clearly a development of the gateways of prehistoric citadels like Tiryns and Troy II. One of the wing chambers was used as a picture gallery, the walls being frescoed by Polygnotus and other celebrated painters. This hall is still in excellent preservation, due to its use by the Franks as a council chamber and by the Turks as the palace of their pashas. Some of the stone beams are as long as 20 feet.
The front chamber of each wing rested on an artificial stone bastion, and as that on the south was never completed the platform remained free for the erection of a lovely miniature shrine, the temple of the Wingless Victory.[64] This, though its stones were totally scattered and built into a Turkish bastion, was reconstructed in 1835 by European architects with such success that it is one of the most charming things in Athens. It must have been built soon after the abandonment of the original plan for the propylæa. It has four columns of the Ionic order at each end, surmounted with a sculptured frieze, of which four panels are in the Elgin collection. The whole shrine, which is only 18 feet by 27 feet, was surrounded by a railing supported on a marble balustrade carved with Victories in low relief. Though they are mostly headless,
Plate XLVIII. THE PARTHENON. MODERN VIEW FROM NORTH-WEST
English Photo Co., Athens
the outlines are in a good state and reveal very fine workmanship, especially in the treatment of drapery. They clearly belong to the next period after the Parthenon frieze. From the platform in front of the shrine there is a lovely view over the Attic plain towards Eleusis. Beyond it, over Salamis and the blue Saronic gulf you can see the citadel of Corinth and the distant mountains of the Argolid and the Peloponnese. It was here that old Ægeus stood watching for the sails of his dear son from Crete.