[8]	“Ex Asia rediens,” &c.—I have given the Translation from Middleton’s Cicero.

LETTER XXIV.

The “Lantern of Demosthenes”—Byron’s Residence in Athens—Temple of Jupiter Olympus, Seven Hundred Years in Building—Superstitious Fancy of the Athenians respecting its Ruins—Hermitage of a Greek Monk—Petarches, the Antiquary and Poet, and his Wife, Sister to the “Maid of Athens”—Mutilation of a Basso Rilievo by an English Officer—The Elgin Marbles—The Caryatides—Lord Byron’s Autograph—Attachment of the Greeks to Dr. Howe—The Sliding Stone—A Scene in the Rostrum of Demosthenes.

Took a walk by sunset to the Ilissus. I passed, on the way, the “Lantern of Demosthenes,” a small octagonal building of marble, adorned with splendid columns, and a beautifully sculptured frieze, in which it is said the orator used to shut himself for a month, with his head half shaved, to practice his orations. The Franciscan convent, Byron’s residence while in Athens, was built adjoining it. It is now demolished. The poet’s name is written with his own hand on a marble slab of the wall.

I left the city by the gate of Hadrian, and walked on to the temple of Jupiter Olympus. It crowns a small elevation on the northern bank of the Ilissus. It was once beyond all comparison the largest and most costly building in the world. During seven hundred years it employed the attention of the rulers of Greece, from Pisistratus to Hadrian, and was never quite completed. As a ruin it is the most beautiful object I ever saw. Thirteen columns of Pentelic marble, partly connected by a frieze, are all that remain. They are of the flowery Corinthian order, and sixty feet in height, exclusive of base or capital.

Three perfect columns stand separate from the rest, and lift from the midst of that solitary plain with an effect that, to my mind, is one of the highest sublimity. The sky might rest on them. They seem made to sustain it. As I lay on the parched grass and gazed on them in the glory of a Grecian sunset, they seemed to me proportioned for a continent. The mountains I saw between them were not designed with more amplitude, nor corresponded more nobly to the sky above.

The people of Athens have a superstitious reverence for these ruins. Dodwell says, “The single column toward the western extremity was thrown down, many years ago, by a Turkish voivode, for the sake of the materials, which were employed in constructing the great mosque of the bazaar. The Athenians relate that, after it was thrown down, the three others nearest it were heard to lament the loss of their sister! and these nocturnal lamentations did not cease till the sacrilegious voivode was destroyed by poison.