Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

Fig. 5.

The excavations on the south side of the Acropolis have yielded much that is of great value for art and for science, for our knowledge of the extent of the Pelasgian fortification, results of the first importance. The section in [Fig. 7], taken at the south-east corner of the Parthenon, shows the state of things revealed. The section should be compared with the view in [Fig. 6].

Fig. 6.

Fig. 7.

The masonry marked 2 is the foundation, deep and massive beyond all expectation, laid, not for the Parthenon as we know it, but for that earlier Parthenon begun before the Persian War, and fated never to be completed. At 4 we see the great Kimonian wall as it exists to-day, though obscured by its mediaeval casing. All this, if we want to realize primitive Athens, we must think away. The date of Kimon’s wall is of course roughly fixed as shortly after 469 B.C., the foundations of the early Parthenon are certainly before the Persian War, probably after the date of Peisistratos. We may probably, though not quite certainly, attribute them to the time of the first democracy, the activity of Kleisthenes[19], a period that saw the building of the theatre-shaped Pnyx, the establishment of the new agora in the Kerameikos, and the Stoa of the Athenians at Delphi. Laurium had just begun to yield silver from her mines. Themistocles, before and after the war, was all for fortification; the Alkmaeonid Kleisthenes may well have indulged an hereditary tendency to temple building.

Save for the clearing of our minds, the date of the early temple-foundations does not immediately concern us. Their importance is that, but for the building of the Parthenon, early and late, we should never apparently have had the great alteration and addition to the south side of the hill and the ancient Pelasgian wall would never have been covered in. Let us see how this happened[20].

We start with nothing but the natural rock, and on it the Pelasgian wall (1). Over the natural rock is a layer of earth, marked I. Whatever objects have been found in that layer date before the laying of the great foundations; these objects are chiefly fragments of pottery, many of them of ‘Mycenean’ character, and some ordinary black-figured vases.

It is decided to build a great temple, and the foundations are to be laid. The ground slopes away somewhat rapidly, so the southern side of the temple is to be founded on an artificial platform. The trench (b) is dug in the layer of earth; then, just as on the north side of the hill, no scaffolding is used, but as the foundations are laid course by course, the débris is used as a platform for the workmen. A supporting wall (2) is required and built of polygonal masonry; it rises course by course, corresponding with the platform of débris. And then, what might have been expected but was apparently not foreseen, happens. The slender wall can be raised no higher and at about the second course the débris unsupported pours over it, as seen at III.