Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

The reign of Hadrian was a very happy period for the Greeks. A lover of both ancient and contemporary Hellas, which he visited several times, the Imperial traveller left his mark all over the country. We may gather from Pausanias, whose own wanderings began at this period, that there was scarcely a single Greek city of importance which had not received some benefit from this Emperor. Coins of Patras describe him as “the restorer of Achaia,” Megara regarded him as her “second founder,” Mantineia had to thank him for the restoration of her classical name. Alive to the want of through communication between the Peloponnese and Central Greece, he built a safe road along the Skironian cliffs, where now the tourist looks down on the azure sea from the train that takes him from Megara to Corinth. He provided the latter city with water by means of an aqueduct from Lake Stymphalos, and began the aqueduct at Athens which was completed by his successor. But this was only one of his many Athenian improvements. His affection for Athens, where he lived as a Greek among Greeks and had held the office of Archon Eponymos, like Domitian, led him to assign the revenues of Cephalonia to the Athenian treasury, to regulate the oil-trade, that important branch of Attic commerce, his edict about which may still be read on the gate of Athena Archegetis, to repair the theatre of Dionysos, and to present the city with a Pantheon, a library, contained within the Stoa which still bears his name and of which part is still standing, and a gymnasium. He also built there a temple of Hera, and completed that of Zeus Olympios, which had been begun by Peisistratos more than six centuries before and had provided Sulla with spoil. The still standing columns of this magnificent building formed the nucleus of the “new Athens,” which he founded outside “the old city of Theseus,” and to which the Arch of Hadrian, as the inscriptions upon it show, was intended as the entrance. With another of his foundations, the temple of Zeus Panhellenios, was connected the institution of the Panhellenic festival, which represented the unity of the Greek race and, like the more ancient games, had a religious basis. Hadrian called into existence a synod of “Panhellenes,” composed of members of the Greek communities on both sides of the Ægean, who met at Athens and whose treasurer was styled “Hellenotamias,” or “steward of the Hellenes”—a title borrowed from the classical Confederacy of Delos. In name, indeed, the golden age of Athens seemed to have returned, and the enthusiastic Athenians heaped one honour after another upon the head of the great Philhellene. They adored him as a god, and the President of the Panhellenic synod became his priest; his statues rose all over the city, his name was bestowed upon one of the months, a thirteenth tribe was formed and called after him, and the thirteen wedges of the repaired theatre of Dionysos contained each a bust of Hadrian; even an unworthy favourite of the Emperor was dubbed a deity with the same ease that we convert a charitable tradesman into a peer.

Hadrian’s two immediate successors continued his Philhellenic policy. Antoninus Pius erected new buildings for the use of the visitors to that fashionable health-resort, the Hieron of Epidauros; and in graceful recognition of the legend, according to which the founders of the first settlement on the Palatine were emigrants from Pallantion in Arkadia, raised that village to the rank of a city, with the privileges of self-government and immunity from taxes. Marcus Aurelius seemed to have realised the Utopian ideal of Plato, that philosophers should be kings or kings philosophers. The Imperial author of the Meditations wrote in Greek, had sat at the feet of Greek teachers, and greatly admired the products of the Greek intellect. But his reign was disturbed by warlike alarms, and it is noteworthy that at this period the first of those barbarian tribes from the North, which inflicted so much injury upon Greece in later centuries, penetrated into that country. The Greeks showed, however, that they had not in the long years of peace, forgotten how to defend themselves. At Elateia the Kostobokes—such was the name of the marauders—received a check from a local force and withdrew beyond the frontier[13]. In spite of his distant campaigns, Marcus Aurelius found time to visit Athens, restored the temple at Eleusis, was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and founded in 176 the Athenian University. It was, indeed, the heyday of Academic life, and Athens was under the Antonines the happy hunting-ground of professors, who received salaries from the Imperial exchequer, and enjoyed the privilege of exemption from costly public duties. One of their number, Herodes Atticus of Marathon, has, by his splendid gifts to the city, perpetuated his fame to our own time. His vast wealth, united to his renown as a professor of rhetoric, not only made him the most prominent man in Athens, where he held the post of President of the new Panhellenic synod, but gained him the Roman consulship, the friendship of Hadrian, and the honour of instructing the early years of Marcus Aurelius. When Verus, the colleague of the latter in the Imperial dignity, visited Athens, it was as the guest of the sophist of Marathon; when the University was founded, it was Herodes who selected the professors. The charm of his villas at Kephisia, then, as now, the suburban pleasaunce of the dust-choked Athenians, and in his native village, has been extolled by one of his pupils, while the Odeion which still bears his name was erected by him to the memory of his second wife[14]. He also restored the Stadion, which had been built by Lykourgos about five centuries earlier, and within its precincts his body was interred. There still exist remains of his temple of Fortune, a goddess of whom he had varied experiences. For his vast wealth and the sense of their own inferiority caused the Athenians to revile their benefactor, and as many of them owed him money, he was naturally regarded as their enemy until his death. Many other Greek cities benefited by his liberality; he built a theatre at Corinth and restored the bathing establishment at Thermopylæ; and he was even accused of making life too easy for his fellow-countrymen because he provided Olympia with pure water by means of an aqueduct, of which the Exedra is still visible.

It was at this period, too, that the traveller Pausanias wrote his famous Description of Greece, a work which gives a faithful account of that country as it struck his observant eyes. Compared with what it had been in Strabo’s time, the land seemed prosperous in the age of the Antonines, though some districts had never recovered from the ravages of the Roman wars. Much of Bœotia was still in the desolate state in which Sulla had left it; Ætolia had not been inhabited since Octavian carried off its population to Nikopolis; the lower town of Thebes was quite deserted, and the ancient name was then, as now, confined to the ancient Akropolis, while the sole occupants of Delos were the Athenians sent to guard the temple. But Delphi was in a flourishing condition, the Roman colonies of Patras and Corinth continued to prosper, and among the ancient cities of the Peloponnese, Argos and Sparta still held the foremost rank, while the much more modern Megalopolis, upon which such high hopes had been built, shared the fate of Tiryns and Mycenæ. Moreover, despite the robbery of statues by Romans from Mummius to Nero, Pausanias found a vast number of ancient masterpieces all over the country, and even the paintings, with which Polygnotos had adorned the Stoa Poikile at Athens, were still visible. As for the relics of classical lore and prehistoric legend, they abounded in every city that could boast of a hero, and the remark of Cicero was as true in the time of Pausanias, that in a Greek town one came upon the traces of history at every step. In the second century, too, good Doric was still spoken by the Messenians; and, if the pure Attic of Plato had been somewhat corrupted at Athens by the presence of many foreign students, it was still preserved in all its glory by the peasants of Attica. The writings of Lucian at this period show how even a Syrian could, by long residence at Athens, acquire a masterly gift of Attic prose. The illusion of a classical revival was further kept up by the continuance of ancient institutions, even though they had lost the reality of power. Pausanias mentions the existence, and describes the composition, of the Amphiktyonic Council in his time, when it was still the guardian of the Delphic oracle. The Court of the Areopagos preserved its ancient forms at Athens; the Ephors and other Spartan authorities had survived the disapproval of Nero; the Confederacy of the Free Laconians, though reduced in size, still included eighteen cities; Bœotia and Phokis enjoyed the privilege of local assemblies. The great games still attracted competitors and spectators; the great oracles still found some believers, who consulted them; and the old religion, if it had little moral force, was, at least in externals, still that of the majority, though philosophers regretted it and enlightened persons like Pausanias inclined to a rational interpretation of the myths, and told stories of bribes administered to the Pythian priestess. Christianity had made little progress in Greece during the three generations that had elapsed since the last visit of St Paul. Mention is, indeed, made by the Christian historian, Eusebius, of large communities at Larissa, Sparta, and in Crete; but Corinth still remained the chief seat of the new faith, and the Corinthian Christians still retained that factious spirit which St Paul had rebuked. Athens, as the home of philosophy, was little favourable to the simplicity of the Gospel; but the celebrated Athenian philosopher, Aristides, was not only converted to Christianity, but presented an Apology for that creed to Hadrian during his residence in the city; while another Athenian, Hyginos, was chosen Pope in the age of the Antonines. Anacletos, the second (or, in other lists, fourth) Bishop of Rome after St Peter, is said to have been a native of Athens, and a third, Xystos, perished, as Pope Sixtus II, in the persecution of Valerian. The tradition that Dionysios the Areopagite, became first Bishop of Athens[15], and there gained the crown of martyrdom, and that St Andrew suffered death at Patras, has been cherished, and in the case of Patras has had a considerable historical influence.

With the death of Marcus Aurelius the series of Philhellenic Emperors ended, and the Roman civil wars in the last decade of the second century occupied the attention of the Empire. Without taking an active part in the struggle, Greece submitted to the authority of Pescennius Niger, one of the unsuccessful candidates, and this temporary error of judgment may have induced the Emperor Septimius Severus to inflict a punishment upon Athens, the cause of which is usually ascribed to a slight which he suffered during his student days there. His successor, Caracalla, by extending the Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire, gave the Greeks an opportunity, of which they were not slow to avail themselves. From that moment the doors of the Roman administration were thrown open to all the races of the Roman dominions, and the nimble-witted Greeks so obtained a predominance in that department such as they acquired much later under Turkish rule. From that moment, too, they considered themselves as “Romans,” and the name stuck to them long after the Roman Empire had passed away. But Caracalla, while he thus made them the equals of the Romans in the eyes of the law, increased the taxes which it had long been the privilege of Roman citizens to pay, while he continued to exact those which the provincials had paid previous to their admission to the citizenship. The reductions made by his successors, Macrinus and Alexander Severus, were to a large extent neutralised by the great depreciation of the currency, which began under Caracalla and continued for the next half century. The Government paid its creditors in depreciated money, but took good care that the taxes were paid in good gold pieces. The worst results followed: officials were tempted, like the modern Turkish Pashas, to recoup themselves by extortion for the diminution in their salaries; trade with foreign countries became uncertain, even the specially thriving Greek industries of marble and purple dye must have been affected, and possessors of good coin buried it in the ground. Amid this dismal scene of decay, Athens continued to preserve her reputation as a University town. Though no longer patronised by cultured Emperors, she still attracted numbers of pupils to her lecture rooms; and the name of Longinus, author of the celebrated treatise, On the Sublime, adorns the scanty Athenian annals of this period. That the drama was not neglected is clear from the inscription which records the restoration of the theatre of Dionysos by the Archon Phaidros during this period. But the philosophers and playgoers of Athens were soon to be roused by the alarm of an invasion such as their city had not experienced for many a generation.

Hitherto, with the unimportant exception of the raid of the Kostobokes as far as Elateia, Greece had never been submitted to the terrors of a barbarian inroad since the Roman Conquest, The Roman Empire had protected Achaia from foreign attack, and even the least friendly of the Emperors had allowed no one to plunder the art treasures of the Greek cities except their own occasional emissaries. Hence the Greece of the middle of the third century preserved in many respects the same external appearance as that of the same country four hundred years earlier. But this blessing of peace, which Rome had conferred upon the Greeks, had had the bad effect of training up a nation which was a stranger to the arts of war. Caracalla, indeed, had raised a couple of Spartan regiments; but the local militia of the Greek cities had had no experience of fighting, and the fortifications of the country had been allowed to fall into ruin. Such was the state of the Greek defences when in 250 the Goths crossed the Balkans and entered what is now South Bulgaria. Measures were at once taken to defend the Greek provinces. Claudius, afterwards Emperor, was ordered to occupy the historic pass of Thermopylæ, but his forces were small and most of them had been newly enrolled. The death of the Emperor Decius, fighting against the Goths, increased the alarm, and the siege of Salonika thoroughly startled the Greeks. No sooner had Valerian mounted the Imperial throne, than they signalised his reign by repairing the walls of Athens, which had been neglected since the siege of Sulla[16], and it was perhaps at the same time that a fort and a new gate were erected for the defence of the Akropolis[17]. As a second line of defence the fortifications across the Isthmus were restored, and occupied, just as by Peloponnesian troops of old on the approach of the Persian host. But these preparations did not long preserve the country from the attacks of the Goths. Distracted by the rival claims of self-styled Emperors, Valens in Achaia, and Piso in Thessaly, who had availed themselves of the general confusion to declare their independence, and visited by a terrible plague which followed in the wake of the Roman armies, the Greeks soon had the Gothic hosts upon them. A first raid was repulsed, only to be repeated in 267 on a far larger scale. This time the Goths and fierce Heruli arrived by sea, and, after ravaging the storied island of Skyros, captured Argos, Sparta, and the lower city of Corinth. Athens herself was surprised by the enemy, before the Emperor Gallienus, whose admiration for the ancient city had been shown by his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries and his acceptance of the Athenian citizenship with the office of Archon Eponymos, could send troops to her assistance. But at this crisis in her history, Athens showed herself worthy of her glorious past. At that time one of her leading citizens was the historian Dexippos, whose writings on the Scythian wars, preserved now only in fragments, were favourably compared by a Byzantine critic with those of Thucydides[18]. But Dexippos, if a less caustic writer, was a better general, than the historian of the Peloponnesian war. He assembled a body of Athenians, addressed them in a fiery harangue, a fragment of which still exists[19], and reminded them that the event of battles was usually decided by bravery rather than by numbers. Marshalling his troops in the Olive Grove, he accustomed them little by little to the noise of the Gothic war cries and the sight of the Gothic warriors. The arrival of a Roman fleet effected a timely diversion, and the barbarians, taken between two hostile forces, abandoned Athens and succumbed to the Emperor’s arms on their march towards the North. Fortunately they seem to have spared the monuments of the city during their occupation, and we are told that the Athenian libraries were saved from the flames by the deep policy of a shrewd Goth, who thought that the pursuit of literature would unfit the Greeks for the art of war[20]. Dexippos, who proved by his own example the compatibility of learning with strategy, has been commemorated in an inscription, which praises his merits as a writer, but is silent about his fame as a maker, of history—known to us from a single sentence of the Latin biographer of Gallienus[21]. Yet at that moment Greece needed men of action rather than men of letters. For another Gothic invasion took place two years later, and from Thessaly to Crete the vessels of the barbarians harried the coasts. But the interval had been used to put the defences of the cities into repair; and such was the ill-success of the invaders, who could not take a single town, that they did not renew the attack. For more than a century the land was spared the horrors of a fresh Gothic war. The great victory of the Emperor Claudius II over the Goths at Nish and the abandonment of what is now Roumania to them by his successor Aurelian secured the peace of Achaia. Although the three invasions had resulted in the loss of a considerable amount of moveable property and of many slaves, who had either been carried off as captives or had escaped from their Greek masters to the Gothic ranks, the recovery of Athens and Corinth seems to have been so rapid that seven years after the last raid they were among the nine cities of the Empire to which the Roman Senate wrote announcing the election of the Emperor Tacitus and bidding them direct any appeals from the Proconsul to the Prefect of the City of Rome—a clear proof of their civic importance.

But the Greeks soon looked for the fountain of justice elsewhere than on the banks of the Tiber. With the reign of Diocletian began the practice of removing the seat of Government from Rome, and that Emperor usually resided at Nicomedia. His establishment of four great administrative divisions of the Empire really separated the two Eastern, in which Greece was comprehended, from the two Western, and prepared the way for the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine and the ultimate division of the Eastern and Western Empires. Diocletian’s further increase in the number of the provinces, several of which were grouped under one of the Dioceses, into which the Empire was split up for administrative purposes, had the double effect of altering the size of the Greek provinces, and of scattering them over several Dioceses. Thus Achaia, Thessaly, “Old” Epeiros (as the region round Nikopolis was now called), and Crete, formed four separate provinces included in the Mœsian Diocese, the administrative centre of which was Sirmium, the modern Mitrovitz. The Ægean islands, on the other hand, composed one of the provinces of the Asian Diocese. The province of Achaia had, however, the privilege of being administered by a Proconsul, who was an official of more exalted rank than the great majority of provincial governors. Side by side with these arrangements, the currency reform of Diocletian and the edict by which he fixed the highest price of commodities cannot fail to have affected the trade of Greece, while his love of building benefited the Greek marble quarries.

After the abdication of Diocletian the Christians of Greece were visited by another of those persecutions, of which they had had experience under the Emperor Decius half a century earlier. But on neither occasion were the martyrdoms numerous, except in Crete, and it would appear that Christianity in Greece was less prosperous, or less progressive, than the same creed in the great cities of the East, where the victims were far more numerous. Constantine’s toleration made him as popular with the Greek Christians as his marked respect for the Athenian University made him with the Greek philosophers, and it is, therefore, no wonder that in his final struggle against his rival, Licinius, he was able to collect a Greek fleet, which mustered in the harbour of the Piræus, then once more an important station, and forced for him the passage of the Dardanelles. But the reign of Constantine, although he found a biographer in the young Athenian historian, Praxagoras[22], was not conducive to the national development of Greece. Adopting the administrative system of Diocletian, he continued the practice of dividing the Empire into four great “Prefectures,” as they were now called, each of which was subdivided into Dioceses, and the latter again into provinces. The four Greek provinces of Thessaly, Achaia (including some of the Cyclades and some of the Ionian Islands), Old Epeiros (including Corfù and Ithake), and Crete (of which Gortyna was the capital), formed part of the Diocese of Macedonia in the Prefecture of Illyricum, whereas the rest of the Greek islands composed a distinct province of the Asian Diocese in the Prefecture of the Orient. Thus, the Greek race continued to be split into fragments, while at the same time the levelling tendency of Constantine’s administration gradually swept away those Greek municipal institutions, which had hitherto survived all changes, and thus the inhabitants of different parts of the country began to lose their peculiar characteristics. A few time-honoured vestiges of ancient Greek freedom existed for some time longer; thus the Areopagos and the Archons of Athens and the provincial assembly of Achaia may be traced on into the fifth century. But their place was taken by the new local senates, composed of so-called Decuriones, who were chosen from the richest landowners, and who had to collect, and were held personally responsible for, the amount of the land-tax. This onerous office was made hereditary, and there was no means of escaping it except by death or flight to a monastic cell; even a journey outside the country required a special permit from the governor, and the rich Decurio, like the mediæval serf, was tied down to the land which he was so unfortunate as to own. Even an Irish landlord’s lot seems happy compared with that of a Greek Decurio, nor was the provincial who escaped the unpleasant privilege of serving the State in that capacity greatly to be envied. The exaction of taxes became at once more stringent and more regular—a combination peculiarly objectionable to the Oriental mind—and the re-assessment of their burdens every fifteen years led the people to calculate time by the “Indictions,” or edicts in which, with all the solemnity of purple ink, the Emperor fixed the amount of the imposts for this new cycle of taxation. That the ruler himself became conscious of the inequalities of his subjects’ contributions was evident half a century later when Valentinian I allowed the citizens of each municipality to elect an official, styled Defensor, whose duty it was to defend his fellow-citizens before the Emperor against the fiscal exactions of the authorities.

The transference of the capital to Constantinople, enormous as its ultimate results have proved to be, was at first a disadvantage to the inhabitants of Greece. We are accustomed to look on the centre of the Byzantine Empire as a largely Greek city, but it must be remembered that, at the outset, it was Roman in conception and that its language was Latin. Almost immediately, however, it began to drain Greece of its population, attracted by the prospects of work and the certainty of “bread and games” in the New Rome. In the days of Demosthenes Byzantium had been the granary of Athens; now Attica, always unproductive of wheat, began to find that Constantine’s growing capital had to import bread-stuffs for its own use, and the Athenians were thankful for an annual grant of corn from the Emperor. The founder wanted, too, Greek works of art to adorn his city, and 427 statues were placed in Sta Sophia alone; the Muses of Helikon were carried off to the palace of the Emperor; the serpent column, which the grateful Greeks had dedicated at Delphi after the battle of Platæa, was set up in the Hippodrome, where one of its three heads was struck off by the battle-axe of Mohammed II.

The conversion of Constantine to Christianity had the natural effect of bringing within the Christian ranks those lukewarm pagans who took their religious views from the Emperor. But the comparative immunity from persecution which the Christians of Greece had enjoyed under the pagan ascendancy led them to treat their opponents with the same mildness. There was no reaction, because there had been no revolution, and the devotees of the old and the new religion went on living peaceably side by side. The even greater temptation to the subtle Greek intellect to indulge in the wearisome Arian controversy, which so long convulsed a large part of the Church in the East, was rejected owing to the fortunate unanimity of the bishops who were sent from Greece to attend the Council of Nice. Their strong and united opposition to the heresy of Arius was re-echoed by their flocks at home, and the Church, undivided on this crucial question, became more and more identified with the people. After Constantine’s death the harmony between the pagans and the Christians was temporarily disturbed. Under Constantius II the public offerings ceased, the temples were closed, the oracles fell into disuse; under Julian the Apostate a final attempt was made to rehabilitate the ancient religion. Julian seemed, indeed, to the conservative party in Greece to have restored for two brief years the silver age of Hadrian, if not the golden age of Perikles. The jealousy of Constantius, by sending him in honourable exile to Athens, had made him an enthusiastic admirer of not only the literature but the creed of the old Hellenes. It was at that time that he abjured Christianity and was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and when he took up arms against Constantius it was to the Corinthians, Lacedæmonians, and Athenians that he addressed Apologies for his conduct. These manifestoes, of which that to the Athenians is still extant among the writings of Julian, had such an effect upon the Greeks, flattered no doubt by such an attention, that they declared in his favour, and on his rival’s death they had their reward. The temples were re-opened, the altars once more smoked with the offerings of the devout, the great games were revived, including the Aktian festival of Augustus, which had fallen into decline with the falling fortunes of Nikopolis. Julian restored that city and others like it, and the Argives did not appeal in vain for a rehearing of a wearisome law-suit with Corinth to an Emperor who was steeped to the lips in classic lore. At Athens he purged the University by excluding Christians from professorial chairs, Christian students were often converted, like the Emperor, by the genius of the place, and the University became the last refuge of Hellenism in Greece, when Julian’s attempted restoration of the old order of things collapsed at his death. Throughout this period, indeed, the University of Athens was not only the chief intellectual centre of the Empire—for Rome had ceased, and the newly founded University of Constantinople had not yet begun, to attract the best intellects—but it was the all-absorbing institution of the city. Athenian trade had gone on decaying, and under Constans, the son of Constantine, the people of Athens were obliged to ask the Emperor for the grant of certain insular revenues, which he allowed them to devote to the purchase of provisions. So Athens was now solely a University town, and the ineradicable yearning of the Greeks for politics found vent, in default of a larger opening, in such academic struggles as the election of a professor or the merits of the rival corps of students. These corps, each composed as a rule of students from the same district, kept Athens alive with their disputes, which sometimes degenerated into pitched battles calling for the intervention of the Roman governor from Corinth. So keen was the competition between them, that their agents were posted at the Piræus to accost the sea-sick freshman as soon as he landed and enlist him in this or that corps. Each corps had its favourite professor, for whose class it obtained pupils, by force or argument, and whose lectures it applauded whenever the master brought out some fresh conceit or distorted the flexible Greek language into some new combination of words. The celebrated sophist Libanios, and the poetic divine, Gregory of Nazianzos, respectively the apologist and the censor of Julian, have left us a graphic sketch of the student life in their time at Athens, when the scarlet and gold garments of the lecturers and the gowns of their pupils mingled in the streets of the ancient city, which still deserved in this fourth century the proud title of “the eye of Greece.”

The triumph of paganism ceased with the death of Julian; but his successor Jovian, though he ordered the Church of the Virgin to be erected at Corfù out of the fragments of a heathen temple opposite the royal villa[23], proclaimed universal toleration. His wise example was followed by Valentinian I, who repealed Julian’s edict which had made the profession of paganism a test of professorial office at Athens, and allowed his subjects to approach heaven in what manner they pleased. The Greeks were specially exempted from the law forbidding nocturnal sacrifices because it would “make their life unendurable.” The Eleusinian mysteries were permitted to be celebrated, and Athens continued to derive much profit from those festivals. It was fortunate for the Greeks that, at the partition of the Empire between him and Valens in 364, the Prefecture of Illyricum, which included the bulk of the Greek provinces, was joined to the Western half, and thus fell to his share. His reign marked the last stage of that peaceful development which had gone on in Greece since the Gothic invasion of the previous century. A few years after his death the Emperor Theodosius I publicly proclaimed the Catholic faith to be the established creed of the Empire, and proceeded to stamp out paganism with all the zeal of a Spaniard. The Oracle of Delphi was closed for ever, the temples were shut, and in 393 the Olympic games, which had been the rallying point of the Hellenic race for untold centuries, ceased to exist. As a token of their discontinuance the statue of Zeus, which had stood in the temple of the god at Olympia, was removed to Constantinople, and the time-honoured custom of reckoning time by the Olympiads was definitely replaced by the prosaic cycle of Indictions. Yet Athens still remained a bulwark of the old religion, and the preservation of that city from the great earthquake which devastated large parts of Greece in 375 was attributed to the miraculous protection of the hero Achilles, whose statue had been placed in the Parthenon by the venerable hierophant of the Eleusinian mysteries.