Pass through the wide portals of the propylæa. On your right was the marble terrace where the little girls of Athens dressed up as bears to dance in honour of Brauronian Artemis. Here was the group of Athena and Marsyas, and here Praxiteles was to make his statue of Brauronian Artemis. Beyond the Brauronian precinct was one of Athena the Craftswoman. At this point the colossal bronze Athena “Promachos” of Pheidias towered above you, 36 feet high. We have visited the Parthenon already; to the left of it, just behind the foundations of the old temple of Athena Polias, is the wonderful Erechtheum. This building, though begun soon after the Persians had burnt the old “house of Erechtheus,” and the adjoining temple of Athena built by Peisistratus, was delayed by the Peloponnesian War, and not completed till the end of the century. Here the task set to the architects was a peculiar one. To begin with, the building was not a temple, but a house—the house of an old Pelasgian hero; obviously it must not be of the Doric order. Also it had to include a number of immovable sacred objects, such as the salt spring which gushed up when Poseidon struck the rock with his trident and the sacred olive-tree with which Athena defeated him. This patriotic tree had sprung up into new life after the Persians destroyed it, and had to be treated kindly. The illustration will show how the architect overcame these problems with an unconventional building of extraordinary grace and charm. The main building has a colonnade of six Ionic columns in front, and a north porch of six Ionic columns projecting from one side; at the west end a precinct of Pandrosos (daughter of Cecrops), enclosing the sacred olive-tree, adjoined it, and on the south side the lovely little portico of the Maidens.[65] This is its most celebrated feature, from the figures of the six Athenian girls who carry the graceful Ionic entablature. One of the Caryatids was taken to London by Lord Elgin, and has been replaced by a terra-cotta copy. The capitals on their heads are designed like baskets. I have already spoken of this use of sculpture for columns in connection with the Telamones of Acragas. The name Caryatids given to these figures in later times was derived from the town of Karuæ, in Arcadia.
The Erechtheum: Modern Reconstruction
Besides the objects already mentioned, the Erechtheum contained a number of very ancient relics. There you were shown the marks of Poseidon’s trident on the rock; there were spoils taken from the Persians; an old wooden Hermes dedicated by Cecrops, a chariot by Dædalus, a lamp by Callimachus kept perpetually burning, and above all the ancient wooden image of Athena Polias.
Dörpfeld maintains that the old temple of Athena Polias was left standing even after the Erechtheum was completed. If that were true we should have to believe that the architect deliberately projected his unnecessary Caryatid porch right into
FIG. 1. THE TEMPLE OF NIKÉ APTEROS [THE WINGLESS VICTORY
FIG. 2. THE CARYATID PORCH OF THE ERECHTHEUM