3. The duplication of certain sanctuaries and, closely connected with this,
4. Confusion as to Kallirrhoë and Enneakrounos.
1. The lie of the modern town.
A glance at the map of modern Athens will show that its centre of gravity lies not West but North of the Acropolis—the modern market lies there with its throng of narrow streets and the whole modern town, with its shops, hotels, stations, spreads out in that direction. Moreover, it is obvious that the business part of Roman Athens also lay North. To the North lies the Gate of the Roman agora[288], besides such buildings as the Tower of the Winds and Hadrian’s Library ([Fig. 49]). More than this, the agora of Hellenistic days ([Fig. 46]) lay there also, and was almost certainly bounded on its Eastern side by the Stoa of Attalos, of which there are still substantial remains[289]. Quite recently the foundations of two other colonnades have come to light[290], just below and to the East of the hill on which stands the so-called ‘Theseion.’ These two colonnades stand just at the entrance of the Greek agora; the Northern one is probably either the Basileion or the Stoa Basileios, the first building described by Pausanias on his entry into the Kerameikos. The two last colonnades played no part in attempted reconstructions of the agora, for the simple reason that they were below ground; but the Stoa of Attalos, that of the Giants, and the Gateway of the Roman agora have been regularly regarded as data with which any theorist was bound to start; they had to be fitted in somehow.
Fig. 47.
The next question was, where was the road that led from the agora to the Acropolis, the Panathenaic way? Given an agora to the North and North-East of the Areopagus, and, given that you were working at home in your study with a flat plan before you, the answer seemed obvious; the road must have passed straight from the agora round the Eastern end of the Areopagus, and so straight up to the entrance at the Propylaea. The result is a reconstruction of agora and road, like that seen in [Fig. 47], a restoration made by Prof. Curtius. So utterly is the West slope of the Acropolis ignored, that it is simply cut off as irrelevant.
Professor Dörpfeld was the first to point out that at the Eastern end of the Areopagus, though there is a footway up to the Acropolis, there is not now a carriage-road, there never was, and, unless the whole natural features of the place are altered, there never will be. The hill at that point, though short, is impracticably steep. What looks easy and obvious on paper is in actuality impossible. Long before he began his excavations, Prof. Dörpfeld, with the trained eye of the practical engineer, saw the ancient carriage-way must have followed the modern road, that is, round the West end of the Areopagus between that hill and the Pnyx. From that point by successive windings, then and now, it could climb the hill. The old road we have seen has now been found; it lies in places actually under the new and follows the same course, as natural in 500 B.C. as in 1900 A.D.
One school of topographers, headed by the great name of Curtius, placed the agora at the North side of the Acropolis. We have seen that, though wrong for the beginning of things, this is right for the end. Another school, though they knew that the Roman market lay Northwards, yet had compunctions about the earlier agora. This earlier agora they placed due South of the Acropolis, completely separated from the Roman one. The separation was in idea as well as in place. The early agora was supposed to be in some obscure way a religious, the later a political and commercial centre. Such an arrangement is shown in the plan in [Fig. 48][291]. It is purely theoretical and impossible. The Panathenaic way is made to run North of the Areopagus up the impracticable hill, and the ancient agora lies as a sort of desert island by itself, away from the Council House, the Tholos, the Stoa Basileios, and the rest. The West slope is left void. When and how the mysterious leap from old to new, from South to North, was taken no one explained. This brings us to our second source of error.