Better known to English readers than the sanctuary of Saviour Zeus was the altar of the Unknown God which St. Paul, and after him Pausanias, saw at Phalerum, the old port of Athens. In a dialogue attributed to Lucian, a certain Critias raps out a number of oaths by the old heathen gods and goddesses, and for each of them he is gravely taken to task by his comrade Triephon, who has just been initiated into the sublime mysteries of the Christian theology by a person of a Hebrew cast of countenance, whom he describes as a bald-pated long-nosed Galilean. At last Critias swears by the Unknown God at Athens, and this oath is allowed to pass unchallenged by Triephon, who winds up the dialogue with this edifying advice: “Let us, having found out and worshipped the Unknown God at Athens, raise our hands to heaven and give him thanks that we have been found worthy to be subject unto so great a power; but let us leave other folk to babble, satisfied ourselves with applying to them the proverb 'Hippoclides doesn’t care.'”
A little way from the shore of the great harbour was the market-place named after the Milesian architect Hippodamus, who laid out Piraeus on a regular plan. It must have been a spacious open square, for we hear of troops mustering in it. The distinguished general Timotheus had a house on the market-place, and it was here that he lodged his two royal visitors, Jason of Pherae and Alcetas king of Epirus, when they came to give evidence at his trial. The general had impaired his private fortune by his exertions in the public service, and when his illustrious visitors arrived late one evening he had to send out his Caleb Balderstone in haste to borrow some bedding and silver plate. From the market-place a street led upwards to the sanctuary of Artemis on the hill of Munychia. It must have been a wide street; for in the street-fighting at the revolution which overturned the tyranny of the Thirty and restored the democracy, the troops of the tyrants formed in order of battle in the market-place and then marched up the street, while the democratic party, led by Thrasybulus, charged down the street in battle array and met them. At one time apparently the market-place fell into disrepair, and enjoyed the dubious privilege of what is popularly known in Scotland as a ‘free coup,’ the inhabitants of the neighbouring streets using it unceremoniously as a convenient dust-hole wherein to throw away their old rags and bones and other domestic refuse. At last the authorities felt constrained to interfere and put a stop to the nuisance. So they ordered that the market-place be levelled and put in good repair, and that for the future nobody should be allowed to shoot rubbish or dump down dung in it.
The broad straight streets of the new town of Piraeus must have formed a striking contrast to the narrow and crooked streets, lined with mean houses, which Athens itself seems always to have retained. Aristotle perhaps had this contrast in his mind when he recommended for his ideal city a mixture of the two modes of building, remarking that the new straight streets in the style of Hippodamus were handsomer and more convenient, but that the old crooked streets could be better defended against an enemy. Another advantage of the older style of architecture, at least in southern cities, is the shade and coolness of narrow lanes from which, as from the bottom of a well, we look up at a narrow strip of blue sky high overhead, instead of being exposed to the pitiless glare of the sun as we pace, with blue spectacles on our eyes and a white umbrella over our head, the broad open streets which, on the model of the Parisian boulevards, are rapidly springing up in the towns of southern Europe. Still, in spite of the ravages of municipal authorities and the jerry-builder, we can even yet remark in modern Europe a contrast between the towns that have grown up irregularly in the course of ages, and those which have been created at once on a regular plan by the will of a despot. The two most regularly built towns in Europe are probably Turin and Mannheim. Turin still stands on the lines laid down by Augustus, when he founded a Roman colony on the site; Mannheim was built by the Elector Palatine, Frederick the Fourth, in 1606. Something of the same difference may also be observed between Madrid, the new capital of Spain, with its thoroughfares radiating like the spokes of a wheel from the Puerta del Sol, and the old Spanish capital Toledo, with its narrow lanes straggling up and down the rocky hill whence the white, silent, seemingly half-deserted city looks down on the gorge of the Tagus. But Madrid, a creation of Philip the Second, does not equal Turin or Mannheim in mathematical regularity of construction.
There can be no doubt that the fortification of Piraeus and the transference to it of the port of Athens from the open roadstead of Phalerum constituted one of the most momentous steps in the history of Athens. Coupled with the construction of a large permanent war-fleet it made Athens the first naval power in Greece, and so determined her subsequent history. All three measures originated in the far-seeing mind of Themistocles, who thus in a sense created Athens, and proved himself thereby one of the greatest of statesmen. He saw that Piraeus was more important to the Athenians than Athens itself, and he often advised them, if ever they were hard put to it by land, to evacuate Athens and settle at Piraeus, where with their fleet they could defy the world. If they had taken his advice, Athens might perhaps have played a still greater part in history.
The man to whom Athens owed so much died an exile in a foreign land; but, if tradition may be trusted, his bones were afterwards brought and laid, with singular felicity, beside the sea at the foot of the frowning walls of that great fortress which formed his noblest monument. The exact spot has been described by an ancient writer. “At the great harbour of Piraeus,” says Plutarch, quoting Diodorus the Periegete, “a sort of elbow juts out from the headland of Alcimus; and when you have rounded this elbow, on the inner side, where the sea is somewhat calm, there is a large basement of masonry, and the altar-like structure on it is the grave of Themistocles. And Diodorus imagines that the comic poet Plato bears him out in the following passage:
'Fair lies thy tomb
For it will speak to merchants everywhere;
It will behold the seamen sailing out and in,
And mark the contests of the ships.'”
Tradition places the site of the tomb on the shore of the Acte peninsula, near the modern lighthouse, some way to the south of the entrance to the great harbour. Here a small square space has been levelled in the rock; and its outer margin has been cut and smoothed as if to form the bed of a wall. Within this area are three graves, and just outside it, on the side away from the sea, is a large sepulchre hewn in the rock. It has been suggested that when the square space was enclosed by its wall, and the interior was filled up with rubble, it may have been the “altar-like structure” described by Diodorus the Periegete, and that the rock-hewn tomb behind it, and sheltered by it from the surf and spray of the neighbouring sea, may have been what antiquity was fain to regard as the grave of Themistocles.