At whatever date the metastasis took place thus much is clear. It was no chance incidental flitting of a few scattered families, but a substantial shift of population, and it adequately accounts for the curious duplication of sanctuaries. The foreign character of one element in that population and of the cult they carried with them has been emphasized because it provides at least a possible explanation of the shift, but it must not for a moment be supposed that all the sanctuaries and sanctities were necessarily foreign. We may conclude this portion of the evidence by noting an instance of mythological duplication specially convincing because wholly incidental and undesigned, the legend of Boreas and Oreithyia.
Pausanias[331] tells us that ‘the Ilissus is the river where Oreithyia is said to have been playing when she was carried off by Boreas the North wind.’ We are a little surprised; what was the king’s daughter doing playing down by the Ilissus far from her father’s citadel, and was not the Ilissus rather a sheltered spot for the North wind? Plato[332] in the Phaedrus, as Sokrates and Phaedrus are lying under the ‘tallest plane tree’ on the bank of the Ilissus, makes Phaedrus say ‘I should like to know whether the place is not somewhere here where Boreas is said to have carried off Oreithyia;’ Sokrates says it is not far, about a quarter of a mile off, and that there is some sort of an altar there—and adds ‘there is a discrepancy however about the spot; according to another version of the story she was taken from the Areopagos and not from this place.’
We pass to our fourth source of error.
4. Confusion as to Kallirrhoë and Enneakrounos.
Misunderstanding as regards the duplicated sanctuaries was explicable, even natural, but the downward road once embarked on leads to a deeper depth. Those who believe that Thucydides is concerned to prove that the ancient city lay Southwards have to find for the Fair-Fount and Nine-Spouts of Thucydides a home other than the rock of the Pnyx; they place the ancient city well, whence the king’s daughters drew their water, outside, not only of the walls of Themistocles, but even of the later and wider enclosure of Hadrian; they place it on the Ilissus, at a distance of over half-a-mile as the crow flies from the citadel gate. If the king’s daughters really ventured out there we must not, considering the convention of the times, too severely blame the attacks of the rude Pelasgians. And assuredly, if any one will try the experiment of carrying a bucket of water from Kallirrhoë on the Ilissus to the top of the Acropolis on a hot summer’s day, he will imagine those king’s daughters as cast in more than mortal mould.
In the days when the Kallirrhoë of Thucydides could be placed on the Ilissus the conception of Athens formed by scholars was of an Athens in the days of Pericles. To speak of ancient Athens as a ‘Mycenaean’ city would then have been unmeaning, if not positively insulting. As soon as we realise the conditions of a Pelasgian burgh, with its king and his immediate dependents massed upon and close up to the citadel, we know that the citadel-well must be close at hand—the Fair-Fount of the Pnyx is already full far.
As to the Fair-Fount (Kallirrhoë) on the Ilissus, there has been and still prevails much confusion. A Kallirrhoë there certainly is on the Ilissus; the women of Athens wash their clothes there to-day[333], and the existence of this Kallirrhoë Prof. Dörpfeld has never denied. Nay, he expressly points out that even in the days of Thucydides the Kallirrhoë of the Pnyx had already lost its name, and needs to be recalled to his readers. If, as has been seen, many sanctuaries were transferred and names duplicated there is nothing (1) impossible nor (2) injurious to our theory, if the new Kallirrhoë was sometimes, like its old archetype, called Enneakrounos. Though as a matter of fact this seems not to have been the case.
Two ancient authorities, and two only, appear at first sight definitely to place the Enneakrounos on the Ilissus. These must be examined in detail. First, the Etymologicum Magnum[334], under the heading Enneakrounos, says, ‘a fountain at Athens by the Ilissus, which was formerly Kallirrhoë, to which they go to fetch the water for baths for brides.’ Unquestionably, whoever wrote this thought the Enneakrounos was on the Ilissus. But then by the time the Etymologicum Magnum was compiled the old Kallirrhoë at the Pnyx was long forgotten. The statement looks as if it had come originally from Thucydides[335], and as if the topographical ‘by the Ilissus’ had been added by some ambitious but ignorant compiler.
Against this statement of the Etymologicum Magnum, for what it is worth, we may set the statement of another lexicographer[336]. Explaining the expression ‘Wedding Baths,’ he says, ‘the baths brought from a fountain from the agora.’ The wildest topographer has never placed the agora by the Ilissus, though it might go there with quite as good reason as the ancient city well.
A second ancient literary authority seems at first sight indisputably to place the Enneakrounos near to the temple of Zeus Olympios and, if there, then, as a necessary consequence, on the Ilissus. In the preface to a treatise by Hierocles[337] on Veterinary Medicine there occurs, apropos of the age to which horses and mules live, the following statement: ‘Tarantinos narrates that the Athenians when they were building the temple of Zeus near Enneakrounos passed a decree that all the beasts of burden should be driven in from Attica to the town.’ This seems perfectly definite and circumstantial, and the passage has been eagerly seized on by all those who wished to prove that the Enneakrounos was on the Ilissus. Quite naturally, but wait a moment. It is essential that the passage be read to the end. Tarantinos goes on, ‘and a certain husbandman through fear of this decree drove in an aged mule in its eightieth year. But the people out of respect for its age enacted that the mule was to be leader of all the beasts of burden employed in the building of the temple, it was to walk in front unyoked and unspurred, and that none of the wheat-merchants or barley-merchants were to drive it away from their houses or prevent it from browsing.’