Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

The careful engineering of the road, its elaborate drainage, the way it is close packed on either side with houses and sanctuaries leave us no doubt but that in it we have the one and, it appears, the only chariot-way from the agora to the Acropolis. The shrines that line this regular approach lie essentially and emphatically towards that part of the city.

So far we have considered the road as an approach, but it must always be remembered that historically we have to reverse our procedure. The city grows from the central hill, not towards it, and that outward growth is clear. It may be traced on the map in [Fig. 46]. The ancient agora lay in the hollow between the hills directly overlooked by the assembly place on the Pnyx; then as it outgrew these narrow limits it was forced bit by bit round the West shoulder of the Areopagus, and there turned Eastward by the hill Kolonos Agoraios, on which stands the ‘Theseion’; below that hill was the Stoa Basileios, which in the fifth century B.C. was assuredly part of the agora. The agora could not spread Westward; the hill prevented that; it was forced always Eastward, first in Hellenistic days as far as the Stoa of Attalos, then in Roman days to the Gate of the Roman Agora and the Tower of the Winds. Such is its long but simple story. If we follow the water-course of Peisistratos and its later Roman extension we shall not go wrong.

The houses that covered the square in front of Nine-Spouts, and into which fragments of the well-house were built, are all of Roman date. Clear them away, and we have, as has been seen, a great quadrangular space in front of the city well, a place to which all ways converge ([Fig. 46]). Surely here, if anywhere, is the ancient agora, close to the city gates.

It is remarkable that, visiting Athens half a century before the excavations began, an English scholar, Christopher Wordsworth[281], by sheer light of common sense, saw that here, and here only, could the ancient agora be, and here he marked it on his quaint, rudimentary map ([Fig. 45]). His words are, as contrasted with later confusions, memorable. ‘In order,’ he says, ‘to obtain a distinct notion of the natural characteristics of the spot to which we refer, let us consider it in the first place as abstracted from all artificial modifications; let us imagine ourselves as existing in the days of Kekrops, and looking upon the site of Athens. In a wide plain, which is enclosed by mountains except on the South, where it is bounded by the sea, rises a flat, oblong rock lying from East to West about fifty yards high, rather more than one hundred and sixty broad, and about three hundred in length. It is inaccessible on all sides but the West, on which it is approached by a steep slope. This is the future Acropolis or Citadel of Athens. We place ourselves upon this eminence and cast our eyes about us. Immediately on the West is a second hill, of irregular form, lower than that on which we stand and opposite to us. This is the Areopagus. Beneath it on the South-West is a valley neither deep nor narrow, open both at the North-West and South-East. Here was the Agora or public place of Athens. Above it to the South-West rises another hill, formed like the two others already mentioned of hard and rugged limestone, clothed here and there with a scanty covering of herbage. On this hill the popular assemblies of the future citizens of Athens will be held. It will be called the Pnyx. To the South of it is a fourth hill, of similar kind, known in after-ages as the Museum. Thus a group of four hills is presented to our view, which nearly enclose the space wherein the Athenian Agora existed, as the Forum of Rome lay between the hills of the Capitol and the Palatine.’

Fig. 45.

The secret of Dr Wordsworth’s insight lies in the words, ‘we place ourselves upon the eminence and cast our eyes about us.’ He stood on the actual hill, realized, as Thucydides did, that that was the beginning of things, noted the shape of the hill and its only possible approach, and saw that the developments of the city must lie that way, towards that part, as Thucydides would say. Half a century later Prof. Dörpfeld, coming with the trained eye of the engineer and architect, made, quite independently of Dr Wordsworth, the same observation. The valley enclosed by the Acropolis, Areopagus, Pnyx, and Mouseion, was then utterly barren of visible remains; other archaeologists had placed their agora where ancient remains were visible, North or South of the Acropolis; Prof. Dörpfeld, in defiance of orthodox tradition, placed it West, and there his excavations, as we have seen, brought to light the sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes, the ‘Nine-Spouts,’ the Panathenaic Way, and the host of sanctuaries, houses, wine-presses, wells, and water-courses that encompassed the ancient agora.

Later we shall have to examine what it was that led other scholars and archaeologists astray; for the present we must return to Thucydides. He never mentions the agora, his thoughts never for a moment stray from his city before Theseus. He has shown its meagre extent and the immediate proximity of its most ancient sanctuaries, and to clinch his argument he returns to the citadel itself and its ancient name; he resumes the whole argument (see [p. 8]) in its last and most emphatic clause.

Because of the ancient settlement here, the citadel as well (as the present city) is still to this day called the city.

Thucydides is strictly correct both as regards official and literary usage. An examination of official inscriptions shows that down to the Peace of Antalcidas (387-6 B.C.) the Acropolis was officially known as polis[282]. The new form ‘in the Acropolis’ first appears in the year of the peace[283], and from then on is in regular use. In literature, both in prose and verse, polis is still uniformly used after a local preposition, e.g. towards the polis, in the polis; but when there is no local preposition the word acropolis is employed. Thus, in the Knights of Aristophanes[284], when the Sausage-Seller sees the Goddess herself coming from the polis with her owl perched on her, and there is no shadow of doubt that Athena is coming from the Acropolis; but Lysistrata[285] says, ‘to-day we shall seize the Acropolis,’ where there is no local preposition, though the sense would have been clear with polis. As Dr Wyse[286] has pointed out, it was easy for the word polis to go on being used for the Acropolis, because the Athenians had another word (ἄστυ), which they used in such phrases as ‘in town,’ ‘to town.’