It has been proposed to read the sentence thus: ‘There are (ancient) sanctuaries in the citadel itself both “of the goddess Athena” and of other deities as well.’ This is true, but it is not what Thucydides says and not what he means. He does not desire to make any statement whatever about the sanctuaries of Athene or their antiquity; both propositions are for the moment irrelevant; he wishes to say what he does say, that ‘there are sanctuaries in the Acropolis itself, those of other deities as well (as The Goddess).’ It is the ‘other deities’ not ‘The Goddess’ who are the point.
Fig. 16.
But Thucydides always leaves perhaps rather much to the intelligence of his readers. It may fairly be asked, why is the existence of these sanctuaries of ‘other deities’ an argument in support of the statement that the Acropolis was the ancient city? Once fairly asked, the question answers itself. The Acropolis in the time of Thucydides was a hill sacred to Athena, it was almost her temenos; the other gods, Apollo, Zeus, Aphrodite, had their most important sanctuaries down below, all over the great ‘wheel-shaped’ city. Athena had from time immemorial, it was believed, dwelt on the hill; any statement about her shrines would prove nothing one way or the other. But in the old days, before there was any ‘down below,’ any ‘wheel-shaped’ city, if the ‘other gods’ were to be city gods at all they must have their shrines up above. Such shrines there were on the Acropolis itself; this made it additionally probable that the Acropolis was the ancient city. The reasoning is quite clear and relevant, and the argument is just the sort that an Athenian of the time of Thucydides, with his head full of the dominant Athena, and apt to forget the ‘other gods,’ would need to have recalled to his mind.
The citadel of classical days, with its ‘old Athena temple,’ Parthenon and its Erechtheion lies before us in [Fig. 16]. The ‘old Athena temple’ and the Parthenon belong to ‘The Goddess,’ where then are the ‘sanctuaries in the citadel itself which belong to other deities’ of which Thucydides is thinking?
For such we naturally look to the north side of the Acropolis, where lay the ancient king’s palace ([Fig. 2], C). About that old palace westward there lay clustered a number of early altars, ‘tokens’ (σημεῖα), sacred places and things (ἱερά). Later these were enclosed in the complex building known to us as the Erechtheion. It is by studying the plan of this later temple that we can best understand the grouping and significance of the earlier sanctuaries.
The Erechtheion as we have it now is shown in [Fig. 17]. Its plan is obviously anomalous, and has puzzled generations of architects. It was reserved for Professor Dörpfeld, with his imaginative insight, to divine that the temple, as we have it, is incomplete; and, further, to reconstruct conjecturally the complete design. In the light of this reconstruction the Erechtheion, as we now possess it, became for the first time intelligible.