Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

Cre. Why ask this? Oh the memory thou hast touched.

Ion. The Pythian honours it and the Pythian fires.

Cre. Honours it! he honours it! Curse the day I saw it.

Ion. What is it? You hate the haunts the god loves best.

Cre. Nothing. Those caves could tell a tale of shame.

But this is not what the pious Ion wants and he turns the subject.

The place at Athens dearest to the Pythian, the place his lightnings honour is on the Long Rocks, and there, we may safely assume, was the god’s earliest sanctuary.

The prologue of the same play tells us where the Long Rocks were, namely on the North of the Acropolis. Hermes, who brought Ion to Delphi, speaks[152]:

‘A citadel there is in Hellas famed,