Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

As regards the Pythion, special stress has been laid on the fact that it—not the sanctuary on the Long Rocks—is called by Pausanias the Pythion; but the explanation is easy and manifest; Pausanias is distinguishing it from the other sanctuary of Apollo near at hand, the Delphinion[294].

Sanctuaries so late as these could not fairly be used to prove even the direction of the city of Kekrops; but, as already shown, it is not direction, but size with which Thucydides is concerned. To give sanctuaries like the Olympieion and Pythion, which lay outside even the city of Themistocles, as evidence of the smallness of an ancient ‘Mycenaean’ city, a Pelasgic fortress, is an absurdity so manifest that statement is refutation. We are brought face to face with the third source of error.

3. The duplication of certain sanctuaries.

The misinterpretation of Thucydides has been helped and indeed in a large measure caused by a most curious historical fact, calculated until it was properly understood to mislead anyone. There was a duplication in two different districts of certain of the most notable Athenian sanctuaries. To the North and West of the Acropolis, as we have seen in detail, there were sanctuaries of Zeus Olympios, of Apollo Pythios, of Ge and of Dionysos, and near to them was a spring Kallirrhoë, and it is of these, if our view be correct, that Thucydides makes mention, but none the less the fact is patent to everyone who reads Pausanias and visits modern Athens, that to the South-East of the Acropolis there are sanctuaries of the same divinities, of Zeus Olympios, of Apollo Pythios, of Ge and of Dionysos, and that near these also is a spring called to this day Kallirrhoë. How did this come to be? What does it signify? The answer once stated is simple and convincing. The duplication of sanctuaries is due to a shift of population from North-West to South-East, from the district of the Pnyx to the district of the Ilissus. This shift of population is a fact historically attested.

Plutarch[295] in his treatise ‘On Banishment’ is trying to persuade us that exile is in itself no hardship. He asks, ‘Are then those Athenians to be accounted strangers and outlaws who moved from Melite to Diomeia, whence they called the month Metageitnion, and the sacrifice they offered took its name Metageitnia from this removal, since they accepted pleasantly and cheerfully their neighbourhood to new people? Surely they are not.’ Plutarch’s argument does not come to much, but we are grateful to him for recording the fact that there was this shift of population, when or why, alas! we do not certainly know, from Melite in the North-West to Diomeia in the South-East ([Fig. 49]). Did not the people when they moved take with them their old place-names, their old local legends, their Kallirrhoë? We have curious incidental evidence that they did.

Let us look for a moment at the position of the two demes. As to the position of Melite there has never been any doubt, though its exact boundaries are not clearly defined. Melite was the deme-name given to the hill district West and North-West of the Acropolis. It extended on the West to the barathron, near which cheerful site Themistocles had his home. There, Plutarch[296] tells us, in Melite, he built the sanctuary of Artemis Aristoboule which gave such umbrage to the Athenians. Melite was, we know, near the agora and on higher ground. In the opening of the Parmenides[297] Kephalos meets Adeimantos in the agora. They want to see Antiphon, and Adeimantos says it will be easy enough for Antiphon has just gone home and ‘he lives close by in Melite.’ Demosthenes[298] in the speech against Konon says that he was walking in the agora near the Leokorion when he met Ktesias, and Ktesias ‘passed on to Melite up hill.’

Finally, and for our purpose most important of all, Melite certainly included the Pnyx hill. When Meton appears in the Birds[299] and is asked who he is, and where he comes from, he answers

‘Meton am I, Greece knows me and Kolonos.’

The scholiast is concerned as to whether it could correctly be stated that Meton was of the deme Kolonos, and apropos of this, as to where a certain astronomical monument to Meton had been erected. According to one authority there was a sun-dial in the Pnyx in his memory. The scholiast then adds, ‘Is not, some say, the whole of the district in which the Pnyx is included, the Kolonos called μίσθιος? So customary has it become to call the part behind the Long Stoa, Kolonos, though it is not. For all that part is Melite, and it is so described in the boundaries of the city.’ The scholiast is, of course, primarily concerned with the name of the hill dominating the later agora, and on which stands the so-called Theseion ([Fig. 46]), but incidentally he tells that the deme Melite which included that hill included also the Pnyx. Both points, it will later be seen, are for us important.