Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

The lotus-flowers carry us back to Egypt. The rich blending of motives from the animal and vegetable kingdom is altogether ‘Mycenaean.’ Man in art, as in life, is still at home with his brothers the fish, the bird, and the flower. After this ancient fulness and warmth of life a pediment by Pheidias strikes a chill. Its sheer humanity is cold and lonely. Man has forgotten that

Earth is a covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.

There are two sorts of birds, two sorts of lotus-flowers, and there are two pediments. It is natural to suppose, with Dr Wiegand, that the eagles belonged to the east, the principal pediment. There, it will later be seen ([p. 47]), were seated the divinities of the place. Our pediment decorated the west end, the humbler seat of heroes rather than gods. There Herakles wrestled with the Triton; there old Blue-beard—surely a monster of the earlier slime—kept his watch; and over that ancient struggle of hero and monster brooded the stork.

The storks themselves are there to remind us that the old name of the citadel was Pelargikon, and that Pelargikon meant ‘stork fort’; by an easy shift it became Pelasgikon[47], and had henceforth an etymologically false association with the Pelasgoi. Etymologically false, but perhaps in fact true, for happily the analogy between the Pelargic walls and those of Mycenae is beyond dispute, and if the ‘Mycenaeans’ were Pelasgian, the walls are, after all, Pelasgic.

We have seen that both Thucydides and the official inscription write Pelargikon; their statements will repay examination.

Thucydides, after his account of the narrow limits of the city before Theseus, returns to the main burden of his narrative, the crowding of the inhabitants of Attica within the city walls. ‘Some few,’ he says[48], ‘indeed had dwelling places, and took refuge with some of their friends or relations, but the most part of them took up their abode on the waste places of the city and in the sanctuaries and hero-shrines, with the exception of the Acropolis and the Eleusinion, and any other that might be definitely closed. And what is called the Pelargikon beneath the Acropolis, to dwell in which was accursed, and was forbidden in the fag end of an actual Pythian oracle on this wise,

The Pelargikon better unused,

was, notwithstanding, in consequence of the immediate pressure thickly populated.’

The passage comes for a moment as something of a shock. We have been thinking of the Pelargikon as the Acropolis, we have traced its circuit of walls on the Acropolis, and now suddenly we find the two sharply distinguished. The Acropolis, though closed, is surely not cursed. The Acropolis is one of the definitely closed places, to which the refugees cannot get access; the Pelargikon, though accursed, is open to them, and they take possession of it; the two manifestly cannot be coincident. But happily the words ‘below the Acropolis’ bring recollection, and with it illumination. What is called the Pelargikon below the Acropolis is surely that appanage of the citadel which Thucydides in his second clause mentions so vaguely. The ancient polis comprised not only ‘what is now the citadel,’ but also together with it, ‘what is below it towards about south[49].’ Thucydides would have saved a world of trouble if he had stated that ‘what is below towards the south’ was the Pelargikon; but he does not, probably because he is concerned with dimensions, not with nomenclature.

The Pelasgikon meant originally the whole citadel, the ancient city as defined by Thucydides. This was its meaning in the days of Herodotus. In the Pelasgikon the tyrants were besieged ([p. 25]). But by the time of Thucydides the Acropolis proper, i.e. much the larger and more important part of the old city, had ceased to be ‘Pelasgic’; the old fortifications were concealed by the new retaining walls of Themistocles and Kimon. It was only at the west and south-west that the Pelasgic fortifications were still visible, hence this portion below the Acropolis took to itself the name that had belonged to the whole; but this limited use of the word was at first tentative. Thucydides says, ‘which is called the Pelargikon.’ This is quite different from the definite ‘the Pelasgian citadel’ used by Herodotus. The neuter adjectival form is, so far as I know, never used of the whole complex of the Acropolis plus what is below.