Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History / Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'

by James George Frazer

But though the view of the pyramidal or gable-like summit is the one which chiefly strikes the observer at Athens, Pentelicus is really a range of mountains with a number of lesser summits, extending from north-west to south-east for a distance of about four and a half miles. The ancient quarries lie on the south-western side of the highest peak. Five-and-twenty of them may be counted, one above the other; the highest is situated not far beneath the highest ridge, at a height of over three thousand three hundred feet above the sea. They are reached from the monastery of Mendeli, the wealthiest monastic establishment in Attica, which nestles in a well-watered and wooded glade at the southern foot of the mountain, about twelve hundred feet above sea level. The ground in front of the monastery is shaded by gigantic white poplars, under which flows a spring of excellent water. The name Mendeli is the modern equivalent of Pentele, the name of the ancient township, the site of which is perhaps marked by some ancient blocks and traces of walls and terraces at the chapel of the Trinity, a little to the north-east of the monastery.

The quarries are situated in the gullies above the monastery. An ancient road, very steep and rugged, leads to them up the eastern side of the principal gully. The road is roughly paved; the blocks of marble were probably brought down it on wooden slides. Square holes may be seen at intervals cut in the rock at the side of the road; the beams which supported the wooden slides may have been fastened in these holes. The road appears to end at the principal quarry, a spot now called Spilia, two thousand three hundred feet above the sea. Here the rock has been quarried away so as to leave a smooth perpendicular wall of marble, the top of which is fringed with firs. The marks, delicate and regular, of the ancient chisels may be seen in horizontal rows on the face of the rock. At the foot of this wall of marble, overgrown with shrubs and mantled with creepers, is the low entrance to a stalactite grotto, well known to visitors, as the names cut and painted on the walls suffice to prove. The entrance is partly built up with walls of the Byzantine age; to the right, roofed by the rock, is a chapel of St. Nicholas. The grotto is spacious, cool, and dark; its floor descends somewhat from the mouth inwards. About sixty paces from the entrance there is a small side-grotto with a rocky basin full of cold spring-water.

An examination of the marks on the rock shows that the ancients regularly quarried the marble in rectangular blocks, first running a groove round each block with the chisel and then forcing it out with wedges. The effect of this has been to leave the quarries in the shape of huge rectangular cuttings in the side of the mountain.

The stone extracted from these quarries is a white marble of a close fine grain. It is readily distinguished from Parian marble—the other white marble commonly used by Greek sculptors and architects—by its finer grain and opaque milky whiteness; whereas the Parian marble is composed of large transparent crystals, and is of a glistering snowy whiteness. Parian marble resembles crystallised sugar; Pentelic marble resembles solidified milk, though its surface is of course more granular. Pentelic marble, alone among all Greek marbles, contains a slight tincture of iron; hence its surface, when long exposed to the weather, acquires that rich golden-brown patina which is so much admired on the columns of the Parthenon and other buildings constructed of Pentelic marble. The Parian marble, on the other hand, though it weathers more easily than the Pentelic on account of its coarser grain, always remains dazzlingly white. Pentelic marble is always clearly stratified, and in places it is streaked with veins of silvery white, green, and reddish-violet mica. Blocks so streaked were either thrown aside by the ancients or used by them for buildings, not sculpture. But even in architecture these veins of mica entailed this disadvantage that the surfaces containing them, when long exposed to the weather, split and pealed off in flakes, as we may see on the drums of the columns of the Olympieum or Parthenon.

Besides the fine white marble already described, which is commonly known simply as Pentelic marble, there occurs on Mount Pentelicus a grey, bluish-grey, and grey-streaked marble identical in kind with the marble known as Hymettian, because the ancients quarried it on Mount Hymettus. This grey or bluish-grey marble is of more recent geological formation than the white. It does not appear to have been quarried by the ancients on Pentelicus; at least no ancient quarries of it have been discovered on the mountain. But it is now obtained in great masses in the large modern quarries to the east of Kephisia, and furnishes Athens with building material for the better class of houses and public edifices; even paving-stones are made of it.

An hour’s climb from the great quarry at Spilia takes us to the summit of Pentelicus. The path ascends slopes which not many years ago were thickly wooded, but are now bare and stony. The view from the top is the clearest and most comprehensive that can be obtained of the Attic peninsula. Conspicuous below us on the north is the sickle-shaped bay of Marathon. The snowy peak of Parnassus closes the prospect on the west; the mountains of Euboea bound it on the north; and to the south, in clear weather, the island of Melos is faintly visible at a distance of ninety to a hundred miles. On the ridge, a little below and to the south-east of the summit of Pentelicus, there is a small platform, which on three sides shows traces of having been hewn out of the rock. It is exactly in the line of the ancient paved road, which, however, comes to an end considerably lower down, at the great quarry. On this platform probably stood the image of Athena mentioned by Pausanias.

VIII. Phyle.—An expedition to the ruins of Phyle is a favourite excursion of visitors to Athens. The distance by road is about fourteen miles. Diodorus indeed estimates the distance at a hundred Greek furlongs or eleven miles. But he is wrong. Demosthenes, more correctly, says that it was over a hundred and twenty Greek furlongs. A carriage road runs as far as Chasia, a large village on the southern slopes of Mount Parnes, about ten miles from Athens. Beyond this point the way is nothing but a steep and stony bridle-path. After ascending it for half an hour we come to the meeting of two deep and savage glens. In the glen to the right or east the little monastery of Our Lady of the Defile stands romantically at the foot of sheer precipices. The path to Phyle (which is at the same time the direct road to Thebes) winds rapidly up the narrow western glen through a thin forest of firs. In places the path is hewn in the rock, and the defile is so narrow that a handful of men might make it good against an army. Phyle is reached in about an hour and three-quarters from Chasia. The fortress with its massive walls and towers crowns a high precipitous crag on the southern side of the pass, which it completely dominates. A ridge connects the crag with the higher mountains on the east; and along this ridge is the only approach to the fortress. On the west and south the sides of the crag fall away abruptly into a deep ravine, which is broken by tremendous precipices, crested with firs and tufted with shrubs and underwood. The ruins of the fortress encircle a little plateau, scarcely three hundred feet long from east to west, on the summit of the crag. The walls and towers, built of fine quadrangular blocks without mortar, are best preserved on the north-east side, where they are still standing to a height of seventeen courses. The tower at the north-east angle is round; the other two remaining towers are square. The principal gate was on the east side, approached from the ridge. There was further a postern, also approached from the ridge, near the south-east corner. From the fortress, which stands more than two thousand feet above the sea, the view is magnificent, taking in the whole of the Athenian plain with Athens itself and Hymettus, and the sea with Salamis, Aegina, and the coast of Peloponnese.

The high peak, now named Mount Pagania, which towers immediately to the north-east of Phyle in the form of a crescent-shaped wall of naked rock is probably the ancient Harma, which the augurs at Athens watched till they saw lightning flash about its summit, whereupon they sent the sacrifice to Delphi. Strabo expressly says that Harma was near Phyle. On its eastern side the peak descends in precipices into the deep glen, already mentioned, at the entrance of which is the monastery of Our Lady of the Defile.

Farther up this glen than the monastery, at a height of some hundreds of feet above the torrent (the Potami) which traverses it, there is a cavern which is sometimes visited. The direct distance of this cavern from the monastery is only about a mile and a half. But in the glen the stream, hemmed in by precipices advancing from the mountains on both sides, has scooped out for itself between them a bed so profound and rugged that to scramble along it is impossible, even when the water is at its lowest. Hence in order to reach the cavern it is needful to make a long detour round the western flanks of Mount Pagania and to come down into the glen at a point a good deal higher up. Having done so we follow the glen downward past the place where another glen opens into it, bringing its tributary stream to swell the Potami. The cave is situated high up on the eastern side of the main glen, a little below the meeting of the waters. To clamber up the steep slope to it is far from easy. The mouth of the cave is so narrow that only one person can enter it at a time; it opens at the foot of a precipice darkened by overhanging trees and flanked by two crags which project like wings on either side. In the face of the rock to the right of the entrance into the cavern are some votive niches with worn inscriptions under them. Within the cave, which may be about a hundred paces deep, water dripping from the roof has formed large stalactites and has hollowed out basins in the floor. Broken lamps and potsherds have been found in it in considerable quantities, which, with the votive niches outside, prove that this secluded spot was an ancient sanctuary. It was most probably the Nymphaeum or sanctuary of the Nymphs, which Menander mentioned as being near Phyle. Here, too, the people of Phyle probably offered the sacrifices to Pan to which Aelian refers. For one of the inscriptions on the rock outside the cave sets forth that a certain Tychander caused workmen to put up the image of Pan beside the Celadon, and that sacrifices were offered by one Trophimianus. From this inscription we learn that the Potami, which flows in the depth of the glen below the cave, went in antiquity by the name of the Celadon or ‘Roaring Stream.’

IX. The Port of Athens.—Piraeus, the port of Athens, is a rocky peninsula which runs out into the sea in a south-westerly direction for a distance of more than two miles. It is composed of two masses, each over a mile wide, which are united to each other by a somewhat low and narrow ridge or isthmus. The south-western mass, anciently known as the Acte, rises gradually on all sides to a height of nearly two hundred feet. The north-eastern mass attains a height of nearly three hundred feet in the steep rocky hill of Munychia. The ancients believed that the peninsula of Piraeus had formerly been an island, and that it had received its name because it was the land across (peran) the water. Modern observation confirms the belief that Piraeus was once an island. The peninsula is joined to the mainland by a stretch of low swampy ground, nowhere more than eight feet above the level of the sea. This stretch of low land, which the ancients called Halipedon, appears to be formed of alluvial soil brought down in the course of ages by the Cephisus, which falls into the sea a little to the east, and which has by its deposits gradually converted the rocky island into a peninsula.