One must remember that the Parthenon and the other features of the Acropolis are monuments of the age of Pericles, and not of an earlier day. The Persians who invaded Greece in 480 B.C. succeeded in obtaining possession of Athens and of the whole Attic plain, the inhabitants fleeing to the island of Salamis. The hordes of barbarians brought in by Xerxes were opposed by a very few of the citizens, some of whom erected a stockade around the Acropolis, thinking that thereby they satisfied the oracle which had promised the city salvation through the impregnability of its “Wooden Walls.” The Persians massed their forces on Mars Hill, just west of the larger rock, and a hot fight took place, the invaders attempting to fire the stockade by means of arrows carrying burning tow, while the besieged made use of round stones with considerable effect. Eventually the enemy discovered an unsuspected means of access to the citadel and took it by storm, after which they burned its temples and left it a sorry ruin. The rest of the Athenians with the allied navy at Salamis repulsed the Persian fleet, and Xerxes, disgusted, withdrew,—despite the fact that it would seem to have been quite possible for him to pursue his successes on land. It left Athens a waste, but on that waste grew up a city that for architectural beauty has never, in all probability, been surpassed. The reaction from the horrors of war gave us the Parthenon, the Propylæa, and the Erechtheum, all dating, perhaps, from the fifth century before Christ.
The Erechtheum, while properly entitled to the epithet “elegant” as a building, seems decidedly less a favorite than the Parthenon. It is extremely beautiful, no doubt, in a delicate and elaborate way, and its ornamentation is certainly of a high order. Unlike the Parthenon, it is not surrounded by a colonnade, but possesses pillars only in its several porticoes. The columns are not Doric, but Ionic. As for its general plan, it is so complicated and devoted to so many obscure purposes that the lay visitor doubtless will find it an extremely difficult place to understand. There appear to have been at least three precincts involved in it, and the name it bears is the ancient one, given it because in part it was a temple of Erechtheus. That deity was of the demi-god type. He was an ancient Attic hero, who had received apotheosis and become highly esteemed, doubtless because in part he had instituted the worship of Athena in the city and had devised the celebrated Panathenaic festival. Tradition says that he was brought up by Athena herself, and that she intrusted him as a babe, secreted in a chest, to the daughters of Cecrops to guard. They were enjoined not to open the chest, but being overcome with curiosity they disobeyed, and discovered the babe entwined with serpents—whereat, terrified beyond measure, they rushed to the steeper part of the Acropolis and threw themselves down from the rock. Therein they were not alone, for it is also related that the father of Theseus had also thrown himself down from this eminence in despair, because he beheld his son’s ship returning from Crete with black sails, imagining therefrom that the Minotaur had triumphed over his heroic son, when the reverse was the fact.
The complicated character of the Erechtheum is further emphasized by the fact that a portion of it was supposed to shelter the gash made by Poseidon with his trident when he was contending with Athena for the land, as well as the olive tree that Athena caused to grow out of the rock. The two relics were naturally held in veneration, and it was the story that in the cleft made by the trident there was a salt spring, or “sea” as Herodotus calls it, which gave forth to the ear a murmuring like that of the ocean. The cleft is still there. The olive tree, unfortunately, has disappeared. It was there when the Persian horde came to Athens, however, if we may believe Herodotus; and tradition says that after the invaders had burned the Acropolis over, the tree-stump immediately put forth a shoot which was in length a cubit, as a sign that the deity had not abandoned the city. It had been the custom of the place to deposit a cake of honey at stated intervals in the temple door for the food of the sacred serpents; and when, on the arrival of the Persians, this cake remained untouched, the inhabitants were convinced that even the god had left the Acropolis and that naught remained but ruin. The renewed and miraculous life of the olive tree dispelled this error. The Erechtheum in part overlaps the oldest precinct sacred to Athena, where stood an earlier temple supposed to have contained the sacred image of the goddess, made of wood, which came down from heaven. For exact and detailed descriptions of the Erechtheum and its uses, the reader must once again turn to the archæologists. As for its external features, the most famous of all is unquestionably the caryatid portico, in which the roof is borne up by a row of graceful, but undeniably sturdy, marble maidens. The use of the caryatid, always unnatural, is here rather successful on the whole, for the beholder derives no sensation that the maidens are restive under the weight imposed on them. They are entirely free from any indictment of grotesqueness. Nevertheless, it is questionable whether the portico is altogether pleasing. One of the figures is, as is well known, a reproduction of the one Lord Elgin carried away to the British Museum, but the remainder of the six are the original members.
The Acropolis Museum serves to house a great many interesting fragments found on the spot, including a host of archaic representations of Athena, still bearing ample traces of the paint which the Greeks used so lavishly on their marble statues. This use of pigment might seem to have been a very doubtful exhibition of taste, as judged by modern standards, not only in its application to statues, but in the decoration of marble temples as well. It is hard for us to-day, accustomed to pure white marble sculpture, to imagine any added beauty from painting the hair, eyes, and garments of a statue; or to conceive how the polychromy so commonly made use of in bedecking such masterpieces as the Parthenon could have been anything but a blemish. Nevertheless, the fact that the Greeks did it, and that they were in all else so consummately tasteful, makes it entirely probable that their finished statues and edifices thus adorned were perfectly congruous—especially under that brilliant sky and surrounded by so many brilliant costumes. From the surviving multitude of statues of Athena, it is evident that the Greeks conceived her as a woman of majestic mien, rather almond-eyed, and possessed of abundant braids of the ruddy hair later vouchsafed to Queen Elizabeth. The more rudimentary figure of the “Typhon,” also preserved in this museum, which was doubtless a pedimental sculpture from some earlier acropolitan temple, bears abundant traces of paint on its body and on the beards of its triple head. It is too grotesque to furnish much of an idea of the use of paint on such statues as the great masters later produced. The remnants of the Parthenon frieze give little or no trace of any of the blue background, such as was commonly laid on to bring out the figures carved on such ornaments, nor are there any traces remaining of polychrome decoration on the Parthenon itself.
The Acropolis, of course, has not escaped the common fate of all similar celebrated places—that of being “done” now and then by parties of tourists in absurdly hasty fashion, that to the lover of the spot seems little less than sacrilege. It is no infrequent sight to see a body of men and women numbering from a dozen to over a hundred, in the keeping of a voluble courier, scampering up the steps of the Propylæa, over the summit, through the two temples, in and out of the museum, and down again, amply satisfied with having spent a half hour or even less among those immortal ruins, and prepared to tell about it for the rest of their days. It is a pity, as it always is, to see a wonder of the world so cavalierly treated. Still, one hesitates to say that rather than do this, one should never visit the Acropolis of Athens. It is better to have looked for a moment than never to have looked at all. The Acropolis is no place to hurry through. Rather is it a spot to visit again and again, chiefly toward sunset, not merely to wander through the ruins, or to rest on the steps of the Parthenon musing over the remote past to which this place belongs, but also to see the sun sink to the west as Plato and Socrates must often have seen it sink from this very place, behind the rugged sky-line of the Argolid, which never changes, lengthening the purple shadows of the hills on the peaceful plain and touching the golden-brown of the temples with that afterglow which, once seen, can never be forgotten.
The gates of the Acropolis are closed at sunset by the guards, and lingering visitors are insistently herded into groups and driven downward to the gate like sheep by the little band of blue-coated custodians. Still, they are not hard-hearted, and if a belated visitor finds the outer gates locked a trifle before sunset, as often happens with the idea of preventing needless ascent, a plea for “pende lepta” (five minutes) is likely to be honored even without a petty bribe. But at last every one must go, and the holy hill of Athena is left untenanted for one more of its endless round of nights. A visit to the Acropolis by moonlight is traditionally worth while, and the needful permission is not difficult to obtain once the municipal office dealing with such things is located. The Parthenon on a clear, moonlit night must be indescribably lovely, even in its lamentable ruin.
Other sights of Athens, ancient and modern, are interesting, and many are magnificent. But the Acropolis is unquestionably the best that Athens has to show, and the Parthenon is incomparably the best of the Acropolis. It is the first and the last spot to seek in visiting Athena’s famous city, and the last glimpse the departing voyager—very likely with a not unmanly tear—catches from his ship as it sails out into the blue Ægean is of this hoary temple reposing in calm and serene indifference to mankind on its rocky height. It has seen the worship of Athena Parthenos give way to the reverence of another Virgin—a holier ideal of Wisdom set up in its own precincts, and worshiped there on the very spot where once the youth of Athens did honor to the pagan goddess. Gods and religions have risen and departed, despots have come and gone; but the Parthenon has stood unchanging, the unrivaled embodiment of architectural beauty to-day, as it was when Ictinus, Mnesicles, Pheidias, and those who were with them created it out of their combined and colossal genius, under the wise ordainment of Pericles.
CHAPTER VI. ANCIENT ATHENS:
THE OTHER MONUMENTS
