Half the beauty of all civilised countries springs out of their religion. At Athens nearly everything costly or magnificent belonged to the Gods; even the Propylæa,[[248]] apparently a mere secular or military structure, probably owed its erection in so expensive a style to the circumstance of its adorning the entrance to the sacred enclosure of Athena, and the other tutelary divinities of Athens, and spanning the road by which the pomp of the Panathenaic procession descended and ascended the mount. Be this as it may, a road[[249]] which, by running zigzag up the slope, was rendered practicable for chariots, led from the lower city to the Acropolis, on the edge of the platform of which stood the Propylæa, erected by the architect Mnesicles in five years, during the administration of Pericles. A pile of architecture, similar in name, is usually found at the entrance of the court of Egyptian temples, and the Propylæa Luxor and Karnak, with their aspiring obelisks, couchant sphynxes[sphynxes], and ranges of colossal statues, may be reckoned among the most chaste and beautiful monuments in the valley of the Nile. The Propylæa of Athens, richer in design and materials, and executed with a grace and perfection unknown to the Egyptians, enjoyed in its mere site an immense advantage over their noblest works which, the pyramids and the great temple of Koom Ombos excepted, stand on a dead level, while this occupies the brow of a precipitous rock, visible on every side from afar. Pillars, architraves, pediments, walls, and roof, were all of snow-white marble, with mouldings of bright red and blue, and ceilings of azure bedropped with stars.[[250]] Externally, on either hand, were equestrian statues of the sons of Xenophon,[[251]] placed on lofty square basements; and, overlooking the whole on the left, stood the colossal statue of Athena Promachos.[[252]]
On entering through the gates of the Propylæa a scene of unparalleled grandeur and beauty burst upon the eye. No trace of human dwellings anywhere appeared, but on all sides temples of more or less elevation, of Pentelic marble, beautiful in design and exquisitely delicate in execution, sparkled like piles of alabaster in the sun. On the left stood the Erectheion or fane of Athena Polias; to the right that matchless edifice known as the Hecatompedon of old, but to later ages as the Parthenon. Other buildings, all holy to the eye of an Athenian, lay grouped around these master structures, and in the open spaces between, in whatever direction the spectators might look, appeared statues, some remarkable for their dimensions, others for their beauty, and all for the legendary sanctity which surrounded them. No city of the ancient or modern world ever rivalled Athens in the riches of art. Our best filled museums, though teeming with her spoils, are poor collections of fragments compared with that assemblage of gods and heroes which peopled the Acropolis, the genuine Olympos of the arts, where all the divinities of the pagan heaven appeared grouped in immortal youth and beauty round the Thunderer and his virgin daughter. Many volumes were written in antiquity on the pictures, statues, and architectural monuments which thronged the summit of this rock, and though those works have perished, a long and curious list might still be given of the objects of this kind which we know to have existed there.[[253]] It will, however, be sufficient to glance over a few of the more striking features of the scene.
On one side of the entrance stood a chariot drawn by four horses in bronze, and directly opposite a chapel of Aphrodite, containing a bronze lioness, with a statue of the goddess herself by Calamis; a little further the eye rested on Diitrephes, pierced like St. Sebastian with arrows; two figures of the goddess Health; a youth in bronze, by Lycios, bearing the Perirrhanterion, or brush for sprinkling holy water; Myron’s group of Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, and the three Graces draped by Socrates,[[254]] son of Sophroniscos. Advancing past the chapel of Artemis Brauronia you beheld, amid numerous groups of less striking monuments, the Attic conception of the Trojan horse; Athena smiting Marsyas; Heracles strangling the serpents in his cradle; Phrixos sacrificing the ram; and Theseus, the national hero, slaughtering the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth.[[255]] Here, too, was an Athena issuing from the head of Zeus, together with the figure of a bull presented by the Senate of Areiopagos; and, a little beyond, an embodiment of a very pious and a very beautiful thought,—a figure of Earth, the mother of gods and men, praying to the ruler of Olympos for rain. Of Zeus, the Cloud-Compeller, there were numerous representations by artists of celebrity; the figure of Apollo, by Pheidias, standing before the eastern front of the Parthenon, was lighted up by the first rays of the morning. But the tutelar gods of Attica, Athena and Poseidon, the genii of political wisdom and maritime power, exhibited as struggling for the mastery over the Athenian mind, met the eye in various parts of the Acropolis,—the piety of the people delighting to reproduce with various attributes the objects of their affectionate adoration. Among these divinities, the statues of several poets, orators, and generals were found; Anacreon, Epicharmos, Phormio, Timotheus, Conon, Pericles, and Isocrates. On drawing near the Parthenon, its sculptured pediments and metopes, representing legends in the mythology and religious processions of Athens, excited admiration, and still excite it, by their original design and matchless workmanship: and, suspended from its highly painted friezes, and resting on its white marble architraves, were rows of highly burnished shields of gold.[[256]]
Technical descriptions of buildings, whether religious or civil, would be out of place in the present work; but a compendious account of the Erectheion and Parthenon, the two great sanctuaries of the Acropolis, could not with propriety be omitted. To commence with the former, as the more ancient and sacred:—this edifice, of irregular design though highly beautiful, contained three chapels, with the same number of porticoes. The chapel of Erectheus, entered through a portico of six columns, faced the east, where stood the altar of supreme Zeus, never stained by blood or libations of wine. The pavement of this portion of the edifice was raised eight feet above the level of the other chapels. Here the piety of Athens had erected altars to Erectheus, Poseidon, Butas, and Hephaistos, and pictures dedicated by the sacred family of the Eteobutadæ adorned the walls. In a subterraneous chamber beneath the floor lay the mortal remains of Ericthonios, a man sprung in a mysterious manner from the gods. The Erectheion being about twenty-four feet square, some have imagined it must have been hypæthral, unless the stone blocks of the roof were supported by pillars. But the ancients employed slabs of much greater dimensions in building and roofing their temples; for at the Egyptian quarries of Hajjar Silsilis and Essouan we observed blocks from forty-two to seventy feet in length and of suitable proportions, while others equally vast had been removed. Volney, too, as the reader will remember, found masses of no less magnitude in the walls of Syrian temples: besides, several obelisks, now on their pedestals, fall little short of a hundred feet in height.
Between the Erectheion and the chapel of Athena Polias there was no door of communication. Having surveyed the former, therefore, the stranger again issued into the open air, and turning to the left entered the stately portico leading from the north into the temple of Pandrosos, where, constructed of Pentelic marble, stood the altar of frankincense. Passing this, and traversing the Pandrosion, he entered the ancient sanctuary of Athena, unwindowed and gloomy, whither not even that “dim religious light” which contends with obscurity in our gothic cathedrals could find its way. This is the case in many Egyptian temples where the adyta are totally dark. But sunshine and the splendour of day would ill have suited the mystic rites here celebrated; for which reason these sacred recesses were lighted up with lamps, magnificent in form and materials, that shed a soft pale ray over the worshippers. The many-branched[[257]] golden candelabrum of Athena’s sanctuary was furnished with asbestos wicks, and, according to the temple-wardens, of sufficient dimensions to contain oil for a whole year. Once lighted, therefore, it burned with perennial flame, and the smoke was received and conducted to the roof by a hollow bronze palm tree reversed.
This inextinguishable lamp was kindled and kept burning, through reverence for that antique image of Athena in wood of olive which constituted one of the palladia of Attica. In honour, moreover, of this primitive statue the Panathenaic procession is said to have been instituted, during which, like the velabrum of the temple of Mekka, the peplos,[[258]] whatever this may have been, was dedicated with vast pomp and ceremony to the service of the goddess.
The principal argument, however, against supposing the peplos to have been designed for the gold and ivory statue of the Parthenon,—that it was not needed, is of very little weight. None of the ceremonies attending its presentation were necessary. The offering was a work of devotion; and however costly in itself and elaborately adorned, may have been simply designed to protect the image from dust and the action of the air. That Pheidias represented the goddess without her peplos, is no argument that his statue needed none, but the contrary. He may have omitted it expressly that it might be supplied by the piety of the state. Besides, the sculptured metopes of the Parthenon, representing the Panathenaic procession, are themselves a strong argument for connecting the presentation of the peplos and the other ceremonies of the festival with that more splendid structure and image rather than with the Erectheion. As the Athenians supposed the Islands of the blessed and the dwelling-place of their gods to have been somewhere in the regions of the west, they were accustomed to pray with their faces turned in that direction;[[259]] and so also buried they their dead. For this reason, desiring to behold the countenance of their divinities during this religious service, the statues of the gods were generally set up with their faces eastward; and hence, too, the front of the temples looked in the same direction. This was the case with the olive-wood image of Athena Polias; and in the reign of Augustus the Athenians, rendered more superstitious than ever by their misfortunes, were vehemently terrified on finding that the goddess had turned her back upon them,[[260]] as if preparing to seek her ancient home in the Atlantic Ocean. But her real presence had forsaken the city long before the battle of Chæroneia.
But Athena, though the principal, was not the sole inhabitant of her sanctuary. On one side of the door stood a phallic statue of Hermes, originally set up by the Pelasgians,[[261]] and in later ages nearly concealed by a profusion of myrtle branches. Here, also, in a very extraordinary inmate were found traces of that animal worship which extended so widely over the ancient world. In a den constructed for its use lived a great serpent, considered as the guardian of the temple, and supposed to be animated by the soul of Ericthonios, who here performed the part assigned in the fane of Demeter to Cadmos, likewise believed to have undergone a similar transformation after death. The snake-god of the Acropolis received its daily sustenance from the priestess of Athena; and once every month was propitiated with pious offerings of cakes of the purest honey.[[262]] Relics of this worship are still found in Egypt. In a deep chasm, among the wild rocky mountains on the Arabian side of the Nile, we were shown a fissure in a hermit’s cell, whence a large reptile of this species is said to issue forth at stated days to receive the offerings of food brought him by the neighbouring peasants. This creature, as well as the guardian of the Athenian Temple, is supposed to possess a human soul, that of the holy Sheikh Haridi.
Like most other Hellenic sanctuaries, the chapel of the goddess was a kind of museum filled with memorials of Athenian victories and other remarkable objects. Here were shown curious or beautiful specimens of arms or armour, taken from the enemy; among which were the breast-plate and scimitar of Masistios,[[263]] commander of the Median cavalry at the battle of Platæa. Close beside these warlike memorials, stood a folding camp-stool, the invention, it was said, and workmanship of Dædalos; the archetype of all those portable seats borne after the maidens of Attica by the daughters of aliens in the grand Panathenaic procession.
Not the least interesting portion of this extraordinary edifice dedicated to the worship of so many gods and heroes, was the small chapel of Pandrosos, where Pandora and Thallo were said to have lived, and where the ashes of Cecrops reposed. Here dwelt the priestess, shut up for several months with the Ersephoræ. This cella may, therefore, be said to have belonged not only to Pandrosos, who was one of the earliest ministers of these rites, but to all who from her received the office. The building opened on the south into a portico, adorned with Caryatides instead of columns, and filled with ceremonial and religious associations. Here grew the Pancuphos, or sacred olive tree, which, burned by the Persians, shot up a cubit in a single night, and was thought to be endued with the power of undying vegetation, for, if the trunk were cut down, new shoots immediately succeeded. Near the sacred olive was the salt well, called the sea of Erectheus, which Poseidon is said to have produced by smiting the rock with his trident. In the hollow of this fountain, during the prevalence of the south wind, a sound like the murmuring of the waves was supposed to be heard. This well has not been discovered in modern times; but in another part of the citadel there existed a spring of brackish water, known by the name of the Clepsydra, which, about the rising of the dog-star, while the Etesian winds were blowing, overflowed; but on their cessation again subsided.[[264]]