We have perhaps too long lingered among the dusky recesses of this ancient fane, spell-bound by the charms of a beautiful mythology. We emerge now into the light of history, and approach that matchless structure erected by Ictinos where the Athenian people offered up their daily prayers to heaven.[[265]] The Parthenon occupies the most elevated platform of the Acropolis, the pavement of its peristyle being on a level with the capitals of the columns of the Propylæa. It was constructed entirely of white Pentelic marble,[[266]] and consisted of a cella surrounded by a Doric peristyle having eight columns on either front, and seventeen on the sides. These pillars, thirty-four feet in height, sprang from a pavement elevated three steps above the rocky platform, from whence the total height of the building was about sixty-five feet. The arrangement of the interior like that of the great temples of Egypt had reference rather to utility and the convenience of public worship, than to the effect which long ranges of lofty pillars, extending through unencumbered space, would have produced upon the mind: for the cella, sixty-two feet in breadth, was divided into two chambers of unequal size,—the western about forty-four feet in length, the eastern nearly one hundred. In both these chambers the ceiling was supported by columns.
Colonel Leake, to whose elaborate work I beg to refer the reader desirous of entering into minute details, concludes his general description as follows:—"Such was the simple construction of this magnificent building, which, by its united excellencies of materials, design, and decoration was the most perfect ever erected. Its dimensions of two hundred and twenty-eight feet by a hundred and two, with a height of sixty-eight feet to the top of the pediment, were sufficiently great to give an impression of grandeur and sublimity, which was not disturbed by any obtrusive division of parts, such as is found to diminish the effect of some larger modern buildings. In the Parthenon, whether viewed at a small or at a great distance, there was nothing to divert the spectator’s contemplation from the simplicity and majesty of mass and outline which forms the first and most remarkable object of admiration in a Greek temple; and it was not until the eye was satiated with the contemplation of the entire edifice that the spectator was tempted to examine the decorations with which this building was so profusely adorned; for the statues of the pediments the only elevation which was very conspicuous by its magnitude and position, being enclosed within frames, which formed an essential part of the design of either front, had no more obtrusive effect than an ornamental capital has to a single column."[[267]]
That object of art, whatever its dimensions, is sufficiently great, which fills the mind with high ideas of grandeur and beauty. There is, moreover, in mere size, a point, beyond which if we proceed, the eye will fail to grasp the whole at a glance, and create a feeling of want of unity; but, in proportion as we fall short of that point will be our sense of the absence of sublimity. In this predicament, perhaps, the temples of Greece too generally stood. Considerations of expense, which in the end affected their habits of thinking, cramped the ideas of the architects, or forced them to direct their studies towards beauty of form unconnected with that grandeur which springs out of mass and elevation.
Among the barbarous nations of the East, where the whole resources of the country lay at the disposal of the monarch or of the priestly caste, as in Hindùstân, Persia, and Egypt, full scope, on the contrary, was given to the imagination of the architect, who, if his invention were equal to it, might give his structures the elevation of a mountain and the spaciousness of a vast city. Hence, the grandeur arising from magnitude, is, in most cases, found to belong to the sacred edifices of Egypt;[[268]] and in some instances a feeling of symmetry, a sense of the beautiful, appears to have restrained the artist within due bounds, as in the great temple of Apollinopolis Magna, which, whatever may be the imperfections of its architectural details, is invested, as a whole, with an air of genuine magnificence and sublimity. Proceeding from the contemplation of these to the religious structures of Greece, there would be found, I imagine, in most minds a slight feeling of disappointment, and though afterwards, the delight imparted by the presence of extreme beauty,—a delight serene, soft, and inexpressibly soothing, may more than compensate for the want of awe and wondering admiration, their absence will still be felt.
But to proceed: in rich and elaborate decorations the Parthenon resembled the temple of Tentyris. Every part of its exterior, where ornament was admissible, presented to the eye some creation of Hellenic taste and fancy, figures in high and low relief, grouped in action or repose, conceived and executed in a style worthy of the prince of the mimetic art.[[269]] Many wrecks of these matchless compositions are now protected from further defacements in the metropolis of Great Britain, but withal so mutilated and decayed that none but a practised eye can discern, through the ravages of age, all the sunshine of beauty and loveliness which beamed from them when fresh from the Pheidian chisel. One of the greatest works of this artist filled the interior of the Parthenon with the emanations of its beauty, the statue of Athena in ivory and gold,[[270]] which, representing a form distinguished for all the softness and roundness belonging to womanhood, and a countenance radiant with the highest intellect, must in some respects have borne away the palm from the Olympian Zeus; for in the latter, after all, nothing beyond masculine energy, dignity, majesty could have existed. These indeed were so blended, so subdued into a glorious and god-like serenity, that this creation of human genius, like the august being of which it was a mute type, possessed in a degree the celestial power of chasing away sadness and sorrow, and shedding benignity and happiness over all who beheld it.[[271]] But for men at least, the Zeus must have lacked some attributes possessed by the Athena. She was in all her etherial loveliness, a woman still, but without a woman’s weakness, or a single taint of earth. The Athenians paid the highest possible compliment to womanhood when they gave wisdom a female form; and the delicacy of the thought was enhanced by surrounding this mythological creation with an atmosphere of purity which no other divinity of the pagan heaven could lay claim to. Nor in beauty did Athena yield even to Aphrodite herself. Her charms partook indeed of that noble severity which belongs to virtue; and to intimate that she was rather of heaven than of earth, her eyes were of the colour of the firmament. Yet this spiritual elevation above the reach of the passions, only appears to have enhanced, in the estimation of the Athenians, the splendour of her personal beauty, which shed its chastening and ennobling influence among her worshippers like the droppings of a summer cloud.
According to Philochoros,[[272]] this colossus was set up during the archonship of Theodoros, that is, in the third year of the eighty-fifth Olympiad. The Athenians, it has been ingeniously conjectured, seized for the dedication of the statue, on the period of the celebration of the most gorgeous festival in their calendar, the greater Panathenaia, which like a kind of jubilee occurred but once in an Olympiad.[[273]] What length of time Pheidias employed in finishing this statue we possess no means of determining; but as the Parthenon itself is supposed not to have been completed in less than ten years, the artist need not have been hurried in his work.[[274]]
In the temple of Zeus at Olympia and in every sacred structure we visited in Egypt and Nubia, there was a staircase conducting to the roof. No positive testimony remains to prove this to have been the case in the Parthenon, though antiquarians, with much probability, have supposed it to have been so.[[275]] Let us therefore assume the fact, and ascending to the summit of the edifice survey the surrounding scene and the superb city encircling the rock at our feet. Few landscapes in the world are more rich or varied, none more deeply interesting. History has peopled every spot within the circle of vision with spirit-stirring associations; or if history has passed over any, there has poetry been busy, building up her legends from the scattered fragments of tradition. Carrying our eye along the distant edge of the horizon we behold the promontory of Sunium, Ægina rising out of the Myrtoan sea, Trœzen, the birth-place of Theseus the national hero, the mountains of Argolis, the hostile citadel of Corinth, with Phylæ and Deceleia rendered too famous by the Peloponnesian war. Nearer the shore is “sea-born” Salamis, and that low headland where the barbarian took his seat to view the battle in the straits. Yonder at the extremity of the long walls are the ports of Munychia, Phaleron and Peiræeus; on our left is Hymettos with its bee swarms and odoriferous slopes;[[276]] to the right Colonos, the grove of the terrible Erinnyes, and the chasm in the rock by which the wretched Œdipus, having reached the end of his career, descended to the infernal world.[[277]] Beyond lies Eleusis and the Sacred Way.[[278]] Yonder in the midst of groves is the Academy; here is the Cerameicos[[279]] filled with the monuments which the republic erected to its heroes, there the Cynosarges and the Lyceium. The hill of Areiopagos, contiguous to the rock of the Acropolis, divides the Pnyx from the Agora planted by Conon with plane trees. Near at hand, encircled by ordinary dwellings, are the Leocorion, the temple of Theseus, the Odeion, the Stoa Pœcile, and the Dionysiac theatre, with various other monuments remarkable for their beauty or historical importance.[[280]]
[219]. Dem. Olynth. iii. 9. Palm. Exercit. in Auct. Græc. p. 622. Zander, De Luxu Athen. c. iii. 5, § 6.
[220]. Athen. v. 12. Soph. Œdip. Col. 107. seq.