Cornell alniversity Library

BOUGHT . WITH THE THE INCOME
FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT ee

THE GIFT OF

Henry W. Sage

1891

 

A.18/%6 | ce HEELS

 

 

1243
ornell University Library

Story of Athens;
THE STORY OF ATHENS
 

THE VARVAKION STATUETTE

A REDUCED COPY IN MARBLE OF THE CHRYSELEPHANTINE STATUE OF
ATHENA PARTHENOS BY PHIDIAS
THE
STORY OF ATHENS

A RECORD OF THE LIFE AND ART OF
THE CITY OF THE VIOLET CROWN
READ IN ITS RUINS AND IN THE
LIVES OF GREAT ATHENIANS

a BY
HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER, A.M.

LECTURER ON ARCHITECTURE IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY AND
SOMETIME FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL
OF CLASSICAL STUDIES IN ROME

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR
AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

 

 

NEW YORK
The Century Co.
1902
may
RVG \A\s

Copyright, 1902, by
THE CENTURY Co.

 

Published October, 1902,

THE DEVINNE PRESS,
FROM SHELLEY'S ‘‘ODE TO LIBERTY.”

‘Athens arose: a city such as vision
Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented clouds, as in derision
Of kingliest masonry : the ocean floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it;
Its portals are inhabited
By thunder-zoned winds, each head
Within its cloudy wings with sun-fire garlanded,
A divine work! Athens diviner yet
Gleamed with its crest of columns on the will
Of man as on a mount of diamond set;
For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill
Peopled, with forms that mock the eternal dead,
In marble immortality, that hill
Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.”
PREFACE

THE purpose of this volume is to give a simple sketch
of the life and art of Athens from its earliest beginnings
to the present time, as we find them recorded in ancient
literature and in the monuments that time has spared to
us. To this end an outline of the mythology and tradi-
tional history of the city is given in the introductory
chapter, and for the rest a background is provided on
which is traced the Story of Athens, as we read it in
ancient history and in the lives of great Athenians.
Where the thread of the narrative is broken in the ac-
counts given by the ancients, we have to depend upon the
researches of modern historians; and for our study of the
topography and art we are dependent almost entirely
upon modern criticism. But the aim of the book, in the
matter of history, is to give, as far as possible, the view
of the ancients themselves rather than to discuss the
credibility of the old historians. It will be enough for us
to quote the figures of Herodotus regarding the number
of Persians that fought in the various battles of the war
of invasion, without making digression to agree with, or
to attempt to refute the contentions of, certain modern
writers that it would have been impossible for such
numbers to have been packed into the various battle-
fields.

Against this background of historical incidents, which
depicts, in chronological order, the story of the wars, the
leagues, the changes of government, the political and
viii PREFACE

commercial enterprises in which Athens was a prominent
figure, will stand the statesmen, the politicians, the phi-
losophers, the literary men, the artists, and the few promi-
nent women whose lives make up all we know of the Story
of Athens. Their deeds, their policies, their philosophy,
and their works cannot be adequately treated in the nar-
row compass of a single volume; but the art, which is the
only material monument of that life now visible in
Athens, may be dwelt upon at greater length, and about
her masses of broken wall and shattered columns, her
collections of mutilated statues and faded vase-paintings,
may be woven the tale of her career.

For the topography, I have used the maps of Curtius
as a basis, changing them here and there in accordance
with recent discoveries or with new light shed upon the
subject.

For history and biography, I have depended, as far
as possible, upon ancient sources, having recourse when
necessary to the modern historians whose works are men-
tioned in the books for reference at the end of this volume.

The monuments speak for themselves, though, in many
instances, the researches of Dr. Dorpfeld and others, in
the field of architecture, have added greatly to their his-
torical significance; and M. Collignon’s study of the
sculpture of Athens has been of great assistance in as-
signing dates.

I have chosen to represent the monuments of architec-
ture by means of line-drawings, in order to overcome the
exaggerated perspective of photographs and to do away
with their deceptive color-scheme, by which the golden-
yellow marble of the ancient buildings is made to appear
brown or black against a white sky. The sculptures are
reproduced almost entirely by photograph.

It is well-nigh impossible to be consistent in the matter
of the spelling of Greek proper names. If one adopts the
PREFACE ix

Greek transliteration throughout, he must write Mouseion
for Museum, Kupros for Cyprus, and Thoukudides for
Thucydides; on the other hand, if the Latin form be in-
sisted upon, he would have Nice for Nike, and so on. I
have, therefore, fallen back upon the unfortunately crude
but familiar Latin form for names of divinities, places,
and people, and of objects that are well known in their
Latin form, like Dipylum, Propylaea, etc., but have re-
tained the Greek form for the titles of divinities that have
not been commonly Latinized, like Zeus Herkeios and
Athena Nike; while many names of objects that appear
in Greek form will be found to be italicized at their first
occurrence. It will be noted that the Greek « is repre-
sented by i when the long sound is pronounced, except
in names in which both letters have been retained in the
old spelling, e.g., Poseidon.

My thanks are due to the American School of Classical
Studies in Athens for the hospitalities of its library,
and for opportunities afforded for hearing the lectures
delivered under its auspices and in the other National
Schools in Athens; to Professor W. K. Prentice of
Princeton for many suggestions regarding the references
to Greek history and literature,—the drama in particu-
lar,—and for numerous translations from the ancient
texts; and to Professor J. R. Wheeler of Columbia for
the use of correspondence concerning some of the most
recent lectures of the German School in Athens.

CLASSICAL SEMINARY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY,
May 10, 1902.
CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I
II
Ill

IV

XIII
XIV
XV

XVI

THE DUSK OF THE GODS

HOMER’S ATHENS

ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS

ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE

THE PERSIANS .

THE PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE
THE GOLDEN AGE

THE GOLDEN AGE (Continued) .
AFTERGLOW .

THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY

THE AGE OF THE ORATORS

ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS.
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS .
CHRISTIAN ATHENS.

THE DARK AGE

MODERN ATHENS: THE AGE OF RECOVERY
NL) F< ge

PAGE

24
42
83

T23

. 156
. 193
225)
+ 277
. 314
- 348
- 384
. 419
» 454
+ 474
» 505
» 523
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
mhesVarvakion Statuettey "me 1 ea os aes ewe frontispiece
Athena, from an Ancient eee ne ce acu cee meme ea
Athens from the Southwest . . . Se ee ee ee)
Mount Lycabettus, from the eresenes aa 13
Cave of Apollo, Grotto of Pan, and the Sanctuary 5 Mesnice ait its
staircase. View from the Areopagus. . . . . ..... . If
Theseus and the Minotaur, from a Vase-painting . . ee eed!
Remains of Pelasgic Wall at the West End of the ‘Acropolis he ce 1G 4
Foundations of the House of Erechtheus . . . 29
The Game of Pesso7, from a Vase-painting, drawn feta a Photoerapht 38
INST, ARES egoun SjORN eG. a aon te) He Ge ARTY)
So-called Prison of Socrates . . ee re et eA)
Capital from the Temple built by Bisietratee te ese eeu eA 2
Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia . . Cae rashes eerste te Ree g Go
Archaic Fragments found upon the Meroacie: s% Gh. US
Lion’s Head from the Cornice of the Old Temple of Athens ee 56
Archaic Pedimental Relief, Heracles and the Hydra, drawn from Photo:
gtaphs: yl. = 59
Archaic Pedimental Sculptures, Heracles and the Old Mien af the Sea
drawn from Photographs . . . 61
Archaic Pedimental Sculptures, The Serpent Behidns, arava ftom Bho.
tographs. . 62

Archaic Pedimental Seulpiures) The ceeton eee fon Pheteeraons 63
Archaic Pedimental Sculptures, Bull and Lions, drawn from Photographs 64

(eC MICSCOPOS 5 8 6 OM eb 6 eo Be ba oS ote oe Te)
The Areopagus . . SO 6 8 Boe Ib tee Re wo Rm GE
The Pnyx, from the Areopagus cae ae ee es Se a LO)
ihe Bema 2. ~~ RMI a et Caner mnie atc sec rues e =) 7 ©.
Retaining-wall of the Pape ae: Pee Tae eee ee Ee ee ey ee
The Tyrannicides, from a Coin of bitens ee ees ones oy ise OS
Plan of Athens before the Persian Wars . . 84
Foundation Walls of Old Temple of Athena, ate) ieee in Vike
Background. . . . Pee Dee eae -e  r e OO
Capitals from Pisistratus’s Berenle eee 87

Athena and the Giant Pallas, from the peanene i fhe old emple of
PAC CT Uae NM Ee ees eT eRe Wess, SS wy neh se es se) Meh se OO
XIV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

A Giant, from one of the Angles of the Pediment of the Old Temple of
Athena . . Pee) (OL
Seated Statue of Acer? Possibly the Nore ee Eadaens Pee ae: meOT
Archaic Statue of the Xoanon Type. . . . . . « « «= « + «+ 100
Archaic Statue, with’ Hlimations 0 yo os.» 2 2 2 2 6 « » ~ TOL
Archaic Statue, without Himation . . . . . «© « «© «© « « « 102
ArchaiciHead wanvAthletevsas) com c-u te em epUNeCUNEM apn tel 2, 2) £04
Archaic Equestrian Statue. . . teh. ch a ach re oe ket
Fragment of an Archaic Equestrian Sian iG. fh te Go come tel
Archaic Bust of the Later Type . . . fee ary <1 100
Archaic Bust of Later Type, Showing Darial cTafaente ee terme)
‘Archaicsstatue by Amtenors (is) cy wea ee ener os en LOZ
Aqueduct of the Enneacrunus. . . Fee LOO
Statues of Harmodius and eee cane in ihe reer at Naples eae LO)
Vase-painting, by Andocides, drawn from a Photograph . . . . ~ 122
Altar, found near the Enneacrunus . . 156

Cimon’s Wall, upon the Acropolis, Showing Entablature al old Temple 163
Themistocles’s Wall, near the Dipylum, and the Postern of the Wine

Merchants . . . 166
Breach in the Wall for the ric ates, forneny? ean as tie Ganred Gate 168
Altar, found in an Ancient Dwelling below the Acropolis. . . . . 185
Bust of Pericles . . es eS
The Parthenon, West reed crave front a Bhotoeaph a eee
The Parthenon; fromthe Northeast 3 5 5 3 6 5 4 5 « =o « 253
Panathenaic Frieze of the Parthenon. Poseidon, ae and Demeter,

inthe Eastern Portico . .... . 216
Panathenaic Frieze of the Parthenon, a Secuone: in situ in ine Ww estern

Portico . . ; 218
Panathenaic Ties of ie Paneer a i Seean i in situ in fhe w estern

Portico, y HE Bee) dan b ease bee co eee eo
Phidias’s Portrait a Himself . ee eae ee et ee ro
Ruins of the Dipylum 22
Plan of the Acropolis 227
Capital of the Parthenon 228
The Temple of Athena Nike 244

One of the Slabs from the Balustrade e the eragle of ‘Athens Nike . 246

The Inner Portico of the Propylaea. . . ih as ee Ue eA O)
The Propylaea, from the Temple of Athena Nile eOS 250
Marble Statue in the National Museum. Probably a Replies, of ‘the :
Apollo Alexikakos, by Calamis 253
The Erechtheum, from the Southeast 264

Erechtheum, from the East... s 5 4 4 6 sw ew ss 8 268
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The North Porch of the Erechtheum
The Porch of the Maidens .
Bust of Euripides ;

The Temple of Hephaestus upon ihe @olonus uae
The Temple of Hephaestus, erroneously called the Theseum, eam! ie
Southwest, drawn from a Photograph
Plan of Athens from Pericles to Lycurgus.

Vand IV Centuries B.C. . ©. 2. 2. 1 1. 1 1... Facing
Bust of Socrates
View of the Acropolis, corn the ade. of Mount Lyeabetts
Scopaic Head, found in Athens :
Athletic Statue, of the School of Peaeieeles fea in ie
Demosthenes. A Head found in Athens .
Plan of the Theater and Surrounding Buildings .
Throne for the Priest of Dionysus Eleuthereus
Arm of the Central Throne ¥
The Theater, from the Base of the Acropolis Wall :
The Monument of Lysicrates .
The Stadium, from the Side of Mount Liveanerme
Ruins in the Sanctuary of Asclepius
Head of Hygeia in Marble, found in the Aeclepieur
View in the Cemetery of the Ceramicus :
Stelae of the Corcyrean Ambassadors and a Brozents :
Monument of Dexileus .
A Stele on the South of the Sacred Way
Monument of Hegeso :
Funeral Monument of a Vaues, in ihe National Meccan :
Capital in the Asclepieum .
Marble Bust, found in the Aexter aac now in ane National Museum :
Dionysiac Altar, in front of Theater .
The Olympieum, from the South, drawn fons a Phetoavaph
The Olympieum and the Acropolis, from across the Ilissus
Colonnade of Attalus IJ. Southeast corner
Head of Athena, from the Monument of meanness
Stage Reliefs. The Birth of Dionysus . 5
Stage Reliefs. The First Sacrifice to Dionysus .
Stage Reliefs, showing one Silenus zz situ ,
Stage Reliefs. Dionysus in the Theater at Athens .
Relief found in the Theater
Gateway of Athena Archegetis 3
Columns of Roman Market and the Herclogia Bi iiraranterel
Plan of Athensin Roman Times. . . . . .. . . . Facing

XV

PAGE

, 266
. 269
e277)

» 309

2310

313

eg ld)
e322
- 344
» 345
- 348
- 359
. 361
- 361
. 362
. 365
. 368
- 369
- 370
a 371
Pag 72
- 373
- 374
- 375
- 376
. 384

389

- 391
» 393
- 395
- 398
. 400
- 404
- 404
- 405
- 405
. 406
- 4II
. 412

418
xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
Monument of Philopappus, drawn from a Photograph. . . . . 426
Hadrian’s Quarter, from the Acropolis. Stadium and Mount Hiymertus
in the Distance. . . Mee er ee. 428
Arch of Hadrian, Eastern Face areata Meee ac) se tee e430.
Ruins of Propylon on North Side of the Olpmipienia Weer en m4 ok
Bust of an Athlete, found near the Olympieum . . eee e433
Column of the Portico and Part of Wall of Hadrian’s Sts ee aS,
The Acropolis, from Hadrian’s Quarter . . . + 436
Bust of Antinous, from Patras, now in the National tvinceamn’ at dahon 439
Bust of Hadrian, found near Olympieum . . . . . - - + + + 441
Head of Apollo, found near the Ilissus. . . - 442
South Side of the Acropolis. Odeum of Regilla, Celonnede of ieemene
and Asclepieum . . oe eet aS
View Looking across the Stage j in the Odeum “af Rezilla ee ne eee ne OF
Pediment of a Roman Sarcophagus, foundin Athens . . . - 450
View in the Theater, showing Stage of Phaedrus, Marble Peeper oma
Ancient Chairs. . . MO ea Re cet Ata Eek ey te Se
Fallen Column of the Olympians ee = = = 453
Fragment of Christian Bae from the Little Metragalien Bye ee co iy
Coin of Julian. . . ce) AOR
The Little emencktan: ie Old exibedeel of Athens Biff 7s
Athens during the Siege of the Venetians. Reduced from an old Past
in Fanelli’s ‘‘Atene.”? The Original Drawing was made in 1687. . 485
The Bombardment of the Acropolis by the Venetians. From an Old
Print in Fanelli’s ‘‘Atene”’. . . 487

The Acropolis after the ersberament Chowne the Forlficadons a the
Propylaea and the Odeum of Regilla. From an Old Print in Fanelli’s
“Atene” . . 489

View from the peonyieed Showing re ‘fomple at ‘Athens Nalees cit
the Hill of the Muses, the Bay of Salamis, and the Mountains of
Morea in the Distance . . 3 = © 500

The Crowd in the Stadium Weikng for ne Marsthon Runner 5 Ee eOT

WherAcropolis; fromthe Pnyx; 4 4. ; £5 i oy wy Oe SIO
THE STORY OF ATHENS
THE STORY OF ATHENS

THE DUSK OF THE GODS

“And they dwelt in Athens, a well-built town, the realm of the
noble Erechtheus, whom once Athena, daughter of Zeus,
reared up and gave a place in her own rich temple at Athens.”

ILIAD, II, 546-549.

wi IN the most distant cycles of the past,
a

long before men had begun to commit
the record of their deeds to books or
graven stones, in “the land of lost gods
and godlike men,’ a sturdy, warlike
tribe, one of those countless bands that
were wandering over the wild, unsettled
es country on the north of the great sea,
Athens, fom anavcent, came to a fertile plain, inclosed between

the mountains and the shore, and, find-
ing a bare, rocky plateau rising from the midst of the
plain, chose it for their abode. Who these men were or
whence they came we cannot say, and little indeed can we
imagine about them. They were a tribe of warrior shep-
herds led by the same impulse that was moving thou-
sands of their brethren to choose similar places for set-
tlement all along the rugged northern shores of the sea,
with its deeply indented gulfs and estuaries, and upon
the myriad islands that stand guard along its coast.

 
4 THE STORY OF ATHENS

They were not in search of an isolated crag perfectly
fortified by nature, such as would have been sought by a
piratical band of marauders, but of an elevated plateau,
which they themselves might fortify, with sufficient level
space at its summit to accommodate the modest huts of
a considerable number of herdsmen and tillers of the soil
who should find their living in the wide plain and along
the far stretching coast-line, and which would afford them
a safe retreat in times of danger. They chose this pre-
cipitous rock because it was far enough from the sea to
give them warning of the approach of an enemy in ships,
and yet near enough to make traffic with the outside world
easy. There were other rocky eminences rising from the
same plain, some higher and some lower, but that which
was to become the Acropolis of Athens was for many rea-
sons the rock best suited to the purposes of the ancient
founders. This choice alone would make it quite certain
that these earliest settlers in Attica were a tribe bound to-
gether by ties stronger than those which bind robbers for
mutual protection. They were doubtless subject to some
recognized form of government, with a prince or a chief
at their head. Religion they probably had, worshiping
the mysterious powers of the elements in symbols of
wood and stone. Their houses were rude huts of stone,
and their arms and implements were made from the same
raw material, provided by nature for her human chil-
dren; for battle-axes, arrows, and knives of stone, and
grinding utensils of the same primitive workmanship.
have been found here as in all the earliest abodes of man
in Mediterranean lands. Their customs were primitive.
They tilled their fields and reaped their harvests, and
every day, at sunset, drove their herds of cattle, of sheep
and goats, up the steep slope and within the walls of the
town, where they would be safe from piratical visitors
and from the unfriendly neighbors with whom they were
THE DUSK OF THE GODS 5

often at war. For they were great fighters, these early
settlers; and the only traditions their successors had of
them were those of warlike fame. Their life was simple,
and vaulting ambition found no place in their childlike
minds; but the seeds of empire were in their blood, and
upon the rock which they had chosen they laid the founda-
tions of a city which was to become, in time, the birth-
place of free human thought, the cradle of democratic
government, the source of law, philosophy, and art, and
forever the inspiration of human ambition. A lofty pla-
teau, precipitous on three sides and not easy of access on
the fourth, chosen by a tribe of stalwart men to be their
stronghold, and fortified by them with rude and massive
walls that encircled a group of simple huts, a rustic vil-
lage, strongly built and poorly thatched, perched upon a
mighty rock,—such was the Acropolis of Athens before it
was embellished with the art treasures of the golden age,
before it became the world’s desire, the pampered favorite
of eastern kings and western emperors, before it fell into
the hands of perhaps too zealous Christians or of the re-
lentless Moslem.

The country to which these pioneers had come was a
land where all is light, where the earth basks in an at-
mosphere so brilliant that the unaccustomed eye is dazed
almost to blindness by its effulgence, and where the naked
rock glows with ever varying radiance in the changing
effects of the slanting sun-rays; a land where earth, sky,
and sea seem to meet and mingle more closely than in any
other portion of the globe; not a land of tropical luxuri-
ance nor of fertile productiveness, but one now parched
with glowing heat, now bathed with plenteous showers;
a land where man must labor if he would live, must strive
if he would excel; a country well suited to develop the
mind and body together, to produce the highest perfection
in both.
6 THRE STORY «Ob AlHENS

The Attic plain stretches seaward far to the south, and
westward to the low ridge of Mount Daphni, which di-
vides it from the Eleusinian Bay. On the north it 1s
bounded by the gentle slopes of Mount Parnes and the
base of lofty Pentelicus. On the east the long, even wall
of Mount Hymettus forms a near and mighty barrier,
falling gradually on the south to the Aegean. Of the
nearer hills which stand about the Acropolis, Lycabettus,
the highest, raises its steep cone, like a sentinel, high above

 

Pentelicus. Lycabettus. d
Hill of the Nymphs. Areopagus. Acropolis.
Pnyx Hill. Hill of the Muses.

Athens from the Southwest.

the Hill of Pallas on the north. Toward the south the Hill
of the Muses slopes gradually up from the narrow valley
‘ between it and the Acropolis, and falls steeply toward the
sea, joined on the west by the long, level mound of the
Pnyx, which connects it with the Hill of the Nymphs.
Between this low outer range and the Acropolis, the
Areopagus rears its bare and shattered crest.
Mountains, hills, and crags, like the Acropolis rock
itself, are all mere masses of limestone arrested in various
stages of development, hardening in mighty Pentelicus
into white and glistening marble; in Hymettus, into
marble gray with shades of blue. In the Acropolis and
neighboring rocks, the stone, itself a bluish gray, takes
that violet hue, so famous in poetical descriptions, which,
shaded with browns and reds, assumes a variety of won-
THE DUSK OF THE GODS 7

drous tints with the changing effects of light. Moun-
tain, hill, and crag are almost completely bare to the bril-
lant sky,—

In naked beauty more adorned,

More lovely,—

for with the simple mediums of sun and air, the ever
varying seasons and the hours of the day vie with each
other to clothe their perfect forms with translucent ra-
diance.

These limestone masses fall into shapes unmatched for
beauty and variety of outline. The lower crags are bold,
sharp, and chasm worn, but the distant ridges take lines
of gentler grace. Here are neither the snow-clad pin-
nacled peaks of the Alps, nor the swelling, wave-like
curves of wooded mountain ranges; but simple lines of
dignified repose, typical of the Greek temperament, as if
drawn by the hand of an Attic master.

Though bare of forests and unclothed of grass, the
mountain landscape of Attica never appears desolate, like
a weary waste; for the piercing sun draws up from the
sea a delicate, vapory haze, and throws it over her lovely
form. This filmy veil is not only tinted by various effects
of light, but is changed in tone, from season to season,
by the aid of little plants which come and go, finding foot-
ing, for a brief space, among the crevices of the rock.
The spring veil is different from the autumn veil; for,
after the winter rains, myriads of minute blossoms be-
strew the slopes and add their brilliant hues to the film
that Phoebus provides. In the autumn these little plants,
parched by the summer’s heat, shed soft shades of red and
brown through the vapory fabric. Throughout the year,
scattered patches of piny brush weave thin patterns of
blue-green in the tissue, so that we never miss the ver-
dure to which our northern eyes are accustomed after we
8 THE STORY OF ATIENS

have once beheld the naked loveliness of Attica through
the diaphanous veil that clings to her form like the damp
‘drapery of a Phidian statue. No one, I trust, who has
stood upon the Acropolis at sunset and watched Mount
Hymettus, like a huge chameleon, change from red to
violet and then to deep velvety blue, has ever wished to
see those noble sides covered with the soft vesture of the
forest.

The plain that sweeps about the Acropolis, between the
mountains and the sea, was watered in centuries past by
two small rivers, the Cephissus and the Ilissus, which now
are marked by dry, rocky fissures, except when heavy
rains fall on the mountain sides. It still yields harvests
of grain, fruit, and olives; but these are scarcely to be
compared with the plenitude which for centuries main-
tained the population of a large and flourishing city.

The soft browns of the furrowed fields in early spring,
offset by snowy patches of almond blossoms; the masses
of waving golden grain in summer, partitioned off by
rows of aloes and interspersed with the gray-green squares
of olive groves and the brighter greens of vineyards and
fruit orchards, all contribute to make the plain a becom-
ing foreground for the enchanting distance, presenting
most lovely contrasts in form, as well as in color and sen-
timent.

The lower hills and mountain sides furnished, of old
as now, full vintages of Attic wine, while the verdure
of the steeper slopes afforded pasture to countless flocks
and herds; for we cannot doubt that in earlier times, when
the two rivers were flowing streams, the lower mountain
sides were covered with herbs and grasses. The moun-
tains themselves, in the prehistoric period, may have been
wooded, but that we shall never know.

About this famous rock and its neighboring craggy

pyramids and lofty mountains, the early Athenians soon
THE DUSK OF THE GODS 9

wove a maze of beautiful tales. They gave each spot
some mythical significance and peopled all the land with
heroes half divine, whose wondrous deeds, whose adven-
tures and amours, became the burden of their songs, their
legends, and traditions. So that the later Athenians
believed implicitly in the godlike character of their ances-
tors, and in the stories their fathers had told of the found-
ing of their city, until history was lost in myths.

The earliest personage of importance in the legends
of the Athenians was Cecrops, earth-born father of their
race, who represented the most ancient epoch of their
history in Achean tradition. To him, their first king, was
imputed the introduction of the first principles of civil-
ized government. He it was who founded their city, and
from his name their citadel was at first called Cecropia.
He taught his subjects to worship the gods, erecting an
altar to Zeus Herkeios, abolished their bloody forms of
human sacrifice, instituted marriage, and encouraged agri-
culture. He united twelve of the independent communi-
ties of Attica into townships with separate councils, more
or less subject to his rule.

This prince married Agraulos, daughter of Actaeus,
chief of an Attic tribe, who bore him a son, Erysichthon,
and three daughters, Agraulos, Herse, and Pandrosos,
the three sisters who figure so prominently in Athenian
legend. Whether Cecrops was an autochthonous hero or
represented an early migration from one of the more an-
cient homes of civilization—from Egypt, as was sug-
gested by a number of ancient writers, or from Asia,—it
is impossible to say. He died after a long reign, leaving
no miale issue, and was buried upon the Acropolis, near the
sacred shrine of Athena Polias, which he had set up. He
was succeeded by the autochthonous king Cranaus, who
lived in the time of Deucalion’s flood, and whose daughter
Cranae married Amphictyon, a son of Deucalion, who
10 THE STORY OF ATHENS

subsequently succeeded to the throne of Attica. The
Athenians themselves seem to have had a very vague
notion of the chronological succession of their kings. It
is only in these latter days of historical study and archeo-
logical research that cold dates and unromantic genealogi-
cal tables have assumed importance. Seven successors
of Cecrops are named by Greek writers before Aegeus,
father of Theseus; they are Cranaus, Amphictyon, Erich-
thonius, Pandion, Erechtheus, Cecrops II, and Pandion
II; but there is little agreement among the ancient authori-
ties regarding the order of their sequence.

In the somewhat later, so-called Ionic, tradition, Ce-
crops is confused with Erichthonius and he with Erech-
theus, and the personality and deeds of these heroes be-
come almost as those of one. Again, Cecrops is made a
lineal successor of Erechtheus, while a third chronology
provides a second Cecrops, as in the list given above. In
any event, Cecrops represents an epoch of the greatest an-
tiquity in Athenian history,—an epoch far older than that
of Erechtheus and the period of which Homer sings.

It was in the time of one of these heroes, according to
legend, that the worship of Athena was instituted at
Athens; but as the virgin goddess had her home on the
Acropolis at the time of Erichthonius’s mythical birth, it
seems more consistent to ascribe this honor to the more
remote age.

In the reign of one of these legendary princes, the vir-
gin daughter of Zeus contended with Poseidon for the
possession of the Attic land; their struggle took the form
of a contest before a jury of the gods of Olympus, in
which each strove to produce the gift which should be
most useful to mortals. The scene of the contest was the
Acropolis. Poseidon, having the first turn, struck the
rock with his mighty trident, causing a spring of salt
water to gush forth, and leaving three marks which are
TiS DUS OF THE GODS II

still to be seen in the Acropolis rock beneath the Erech-
theum. At the blow, forth leaped the first horse, with all
his strength and fleetness, ready to become the faithful
servant and companion of man. Athena then, in her turn,
with no show of brute strength, fashioned the homely
olive tree and described all its possibilities of usefulness
to humankind. And though Poseidon’s gift has per-
haps proved the more useful to the greater number of
the sons of men, it was certainly more in keeping with
mortal sentiment in those days that the gods should award
the victory to Athena. She became from that moment the
protectress of Cecropia, and the city exchanged its origi-
nal name for hers.

This judgment of the gods was a fortunate one for the
Cecropians. The worship of Athena, preéminent from
that time upon the Acropolis, the love and enthusiasm
for their divine protectress which animated the inhabi-
tants of the newly named city, seem to have molded all
their subsequent history and directed their destiny during
all the succeeding ages. The stately form of Athena, her
courage, her chastity, can be traced in all the dignity of
their political career, in their deeds of valor, and in the
purity of their ideals in literature and art.

Athena, daughter of Zeus, the most powerful, and of
Metis, the wisest of the gods, represented to the Greeks
a harmonious blending of might and wisdom. As off-
spring of Zeus, she represented government, a protectress
of the state; as a daughter of Metis, she symbolized the
authority of law, was patron of popular assemblies and of
the courts of justice. As such she was believed to have
instituted the court of the Areopagus at Athens, which
had its seat upon the hill just opposite the gate of the
Acropolis, and in which the first trial in the traditional
history of Athens was held, when the god Ares was
brought before a tribunal of the gods for the murder of
12 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Halirrhothius, whom he had killed for attempting to
violate Alcippe, his daughter by Agraulos.

Tradition further told that Metis had been swallowed
by the king of the gods, and that Athena, at her birth,
had sprung full armed from the head of Zeus. The
youthful warrior goddess joined her father in his war
against the giants, and by her own valor buried Enceladus
under the huge Sicilian mountain and slew Pallas, for
which deed she was given the epithet of Pallas Athena.
Thus, as goddess of war, Athena became the protectress
of the state against foreign enemies, and led the Athe-
nians to many a victory on the field of battle. She was,
moreover, a virgin goddess, against whose breast the
arrows of Eros were shot in vain. Patron of valor in men
and chastity in women, she stood before the youth of
Athens an example of the highest ideals in life, a unique
figure in the Olympian hierarchy. Besides being fore-
most in the line of battle, waging almost ceaseless wars,
Athena was patron of the fine arts and of the domestic
accomplishments of weaving and the like. From her cre-
ation of the olive tree she was considered a protecting
deity of agriculture, and was believed to have given the
plow and the olive-press to her devotees in Athens. The
serpent, the owl, and the olive tree symbolized her respec-
tive attributes, and were sacred to her throughout Greece.

Can it be doubted that the worship of so high an ideal
was largely instrumental in placing Athens at the politi-
cal head and center of Greece, in making her orators and
statesmen preéminent in the ancient world, in establishing
her schools of philosophy as the first and greatest of an-
tiquity, in producing sons foremost in valor, first in peace,
and in developing her art to a level of priority for the
whole world?

It seems to have been not long after Athena had estab-
lished her rights upon the Acropolis that Atthis, a daugh-
DPS DUSK TOR DHE GODS 13

ter of King Cranaus—from whom Attica received its
name—became the mother of a son by Hephaestus. This
infant, who turned out to be half human and half serpent,
with only the head, arms, and body of a man, was aban-

 

 

AMM

Mount Lycabettus, from the Acropolis.

doned by its mother on the Attic plain and left to die.
But the abandoned children of gods in those days seem
always to have fared well, and this one was so fortunate
as to fall under the watchful eye of the virgin goddess
who had spurned the advances of its father. She took
the babe to her home on the Acropolis, gave him the name
of Erichthonius, and placed him in a box in the seclu-
sion of her “own rich temple,” that he might be reared
in secret, giving the custody of the mysterious casket to
the daughters of Cecrops, with express instructions not
to open it.

One day the goddess went off to the mountains of
14 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Pellene to fetch a rock wherewith to buttress up her
Acropolis. In her absence the three sisters, Agraulos,
Herse, and Pandrosos, overcome by curiosity, opened the
chest and beheld the writhing form of the serpent-like
foundling. One of Athena’s ravens, who had been watch-
ing the operation, flew in haste to inform his mistress.
He met the goddess near home, bearing a huge mountain
in her arms, and told her of what was happening. Athena,
in her anger and haste, dropped her burden, which has
lain ever since where it fell, and is now known by the
name of Lycabettus, the sentinel hill of the Attic plain,
ever gazing toward the Acropolis, but destined never to
stand shoulder to shoulder with its neighbor as the divine
Athena had intended. The goddess reached home to find
her charge safe; but the maids had fled, and had dashed
themselves over the wall, mad with fear, certain of the an-
cients said. They must have picked themselves up again,
however, and recovered from their bruises, for Herse lived
to be loved by Hermes, and Agraulos to win the affection
of Ares and to die a death which made her an object of
devotion among the Athenians. For when, in after years,
during a protracted war, an oracle had announced that
Athens would prevail if some victim should become a vol-
untary sacrifice, this daughter of Cecrops leaped headlong
from the wall and was killed among the rocks, where a
sanctuary—the sacred Agraulium—was afterward es-
tablished in her memory. To this precinct the Athenian
youths came to sacrifice upon donning their first suit of
armor, swearing to defend their country with the last
drop of their blood in grateful recognition of her heroic
sacrifice. Pandrosos likewise was so greatly honored by
the Athenians as to have her sanctuary on the Acropolis,
and sacrifices were performed in her honor.

The daughter of Zeus, at any rate, must have forgiven
the sisters for their inquisitive disobedience, or she would
THE DUSK OF THE GODS 15

never have permitted them to have sanctuaries so near
her own; perhaps the goddess herself was sometimes given
to curiosity, and could therefore pardon it in others of
her sex. However this may be, 1t would not have seemed
fitting that these interesting maidens should perish like

 

Cave of Apollo, Grotto of Pan, and the Sanctuary of Agraulos,
with its staircase. View from the Areopagus.

the scriptural swine, and we certainly prefer to picture
them as they are pictured by Euripides, dancing again
“beside the long rocks on the green below the temples of
Athena,” to the piping of Pan sitting in his grotto beneath
the wall of the Acropolis opposite the hill of the Areop-
agus.

Erichthonius grew to manhood and became king of
Athens, having driven out Amphictyon, who represented
the old line of Cecrops. With his accession a new
order of things begins upon the Acropolis; a new tem-
ple was built for the patron goddess, and the Athenaea,
the great feast and procession in honor of Athena, were
16 THE STORY OF ATHENS

instituted. The new king married Pasithea, who be-
came the mother of a son, whom he called Pandion, and
a daughter, Cretisa, who was beloved by the god Apollo.
Pandion succeeded to the throne of his father, and dur-
ing his reign Dionysus and Demeter were believed to
have come to Attica, bringing increased harvests and the
culture of the vine.

While Pandion was king, Athens was attacked by some
enemy, and the king called upon Tereus, the young king
of the Thracians, for assistance, promising him the hand
of one of his two daughters, Procne and Philomela. After
delivering Athens from the enemy, Tereus took Procne in
marriage, but soon after came back for Philomela, tell-
ing her that her sister had died. He cut out the tongue
of his second wife to avoid trouble; but Philomela learned
the true situation of affairs, and managed to communicate
the truth to her sister by a few words which she wove into
a peplos. The sisters then fled, and were pursued by their
brutal husband, but when overtaken they prayed to Zeus
to change them into birds. Procne became a swallow
and Philomela a nightingale, while Tereus was turned
into a hawk. In this legend the Greeks found the origin
of three of their most familiar birds.

After Pandion the chronology of the Athenian kings
becomes confusion worse confounded. The name of the
old pre-Erechtheid prince Cecrops is repeated, and a dis-
tinction is made between Erichthonius and Erechtheus,
though both are given Pasithea as wife, and the second is
given Pandion II as grandson. This confusion is doubt-
less the result of the effort of the later grammarians, who
are our chief authorities, to give the “Ionic”? Erechtheus
precedence, without destroying the more ancient ‘Pelas-
gic” traditions, and to give Aegeus and his son Theseus
(the favorite hero of the Athenians) some connection
with the old Erechtheid stock, though it must be admitted
THE DUSK OF THE GODS 17

that they were simply foreigners, without any claim to
descent from that august line of kings. Homer knew
only the one Erechtheus.

The grammarians, we must remember, depended for
their information ultimately upon local tradition, which
we know is often contradictory and never to be relied
upon, particularly in matters of inheritance.

Aegeus ascended the throne, however, whether through
having been adopted by Pandion, as some writers suggest,
or by force, it is difficult to tell. Pandion, according to
the legend, had been deposed by his cousins the Metionids.
Aegeus disposed of the cousins, restored him to the sov-
ereignty, and became his successor. This seems very like
the explaining away of violent usurpation; but, be this
as it may, Aegeus ruled in Attica, though he did not
take up his abode in the royal palace upon the Acropolis,
but was content to hold his court on the upper Ilissus, as
is stated by Clidemus, or near the Delphinium which he
had established near the city.

During the reign of Aegeus, Androgeus, son of Minos,
the renowned king of Crete, came to Athens to compete
in the games of the Athenaic festival. Having defeated
all his opponents, he went about with such an air that
he became a nuisance in the city. When Aegeus could
endure his conduct no longer, he suggested to some one
to kill the youth, whereupon his powerful father, Minos,
made war upon Athens, and the city was obliged to sub-
mit to the humiliating conditions of sending each year
seven youths and seven maidens to be devoured by the
Minotaur, a beast half man and half bull, which Minos
kept for his amusement in the labyrinth in Crete.

Theseus, “Aegeus’ more than mortal son,’ mentioned
among the Homeric heroes as a friend of Nestor, repre-
sents the most important epoch of prehistoric Athens.

In fact, Theseus, the greatest favorite of all«their heroes,
2
18 THE STORY OF ATHENS

was very much of a reality to the Athenians, and some
modern authorities are inclined to give him real existence.
In their legend, Theseus was to the Ionic Athenians what
Heracles was to the Doric peoples of Greece. The story
of his early life runs as follows:

He was born of Aethra at Troezen, the realm of his
maternal grandfather, Pittheus. When he reached ma-
turity his mother showed him the stone under which
Aegeus had left a sword and sandals as symbols of his
fatherhood. These he took and went straightway to
Athens.

Bacchylides, a poet of Pindar’s time, describes the
coming of Theseus in the following dithyramb, which
was to be sung responsively by a company of young men
representing Athenians and a leader taking the part of
Aegeus.

Cuorus: Oh, King of holy Athens, Prince of the wealthy
Ionians, why has the trumpet’s brazen bell sounded this new
note of war? Is some one, a leader of armies, besetting our
border with hostile intent, or are robbers, devisers of mis-
chief for the herdsmen of the sheep, driving off our flocks
with violence? Speak! for thou, if any mortal, hast at thy
command a trusty band of sturdy youths, thou son of Pan-
dion and Cretisa!

AEGEUS: Just now a messenger has come hot foot over
the long road of the Isthmus, and he tells of the wonder-
ful doings of a mighty man indeed; he has slain the law-
less Sinis, who was greatest of men in strength, the off-
spring of Lytaeus (Poseidon), son of Cronus, the shaker of
the earth; he has killed the dangerous boar in the glades
of Cremmyon, and Sciron madly violent; he has put a stop
to the wrestlings of Cercyon, and the mighty hammer of
Polypemon—Procoptas dropped it when he met with a bet-
ter man. I fear where this will end.

Crtorus: Who does the messenger say he is and whence,
this man, and with what following? Does he say whether
THE DUSK OF THE GODS 19

he comes with arms of war and a numerous force, or alone
with his attendants, like a traveler journeying to foreign
lands, a strong man and a valiant, as he seems to be, and
bold, to have holden the mighty strength of such as these?
Surely a god leads him on, that he may execute judgment
upon the unrighteous: for one who is always doing, hardly
escapes mischance. All things, in the length of time, come
to an end.

AEcEuS: Two men only, the messenger says, are his com-
pany, and round his radiant shoulders he has girt a sword
with an ivory hilt: two polished darts he has in his hands,
and a helmet of Laconian make, stoutly wrought, upon the
aureole of his hair: a purple tunic about his breast he has,
and a cloak of Thessalian wool: and his eyes, like the Lem-
nian mountains, flash out tawny flames: a youth he is in the
first of his manhood, and his only thoughts are of the de-
lights of Ares, of war and the brazen din of battle: and
they say he is bound for splendor-loving Athens.?

When the “mighty man” arrived, Aegeus recognized
the tokens, and proclaimed Theseus his successor, to the
exclusion of his nephews, the sons of his brother Pallas.
These latter rebelled, but were destroyed by the young
hero, who thereupon set out to emulate the deeds of Hera-
cles, with whose marvelous exploits the Greek world was
already ringing. His first quest was the destruction of
the Minotaur, having been sent to Crete, at his own re-
quest, as one of the youths for sacrifice. We shall not
tarry to describe this famous adventure, with which are
connected the love and loss of Ariadne, the daughter of
Minos, the Cretan king—it was one of the numerous
amatory escapades of the youthful hero—but pass on to
his conflict with the Amazons. These he encountered
after their struggle with Heracles, and carried off Antiopé,
their queen, who became his bride and bore him a son,
Hippolytus. The Amazons, in return, invaded Attica and

1 Professor Prentice’s translation.
20 THE STORY OF ATHENS

assailed the very walls of the Acropolis, encamping upon
the Hill of the Muses. The warrior women were in time
completely routed by Theseus, and many of them were
left dead about the lower walls. Out of respect for the
queen, these were given the honors of burial and their
graves were marked by fitting monuments, which are
mentioned by Plutarch. Meanwhile the children of Hera-
cles were brought to Athens to be under the protection
of Theseus. When Eurystheus, Heracles’s great rival,
came to take them, Macaria, one of the daughters, saved
the whole family by sacrificing her own life. Theseus
then, with the aid of his friend Pirithous, sought out the
girl Helen, earth-born daughter of Zeus, then only six-
teen years old, in her Spartan home, and carried her off
to Attica, where she remained under the custody of his
mother, Aethra, until rescued by her brothers, the Dios-
curi, or the Anaces, as the Greeks called them, who in-
vaded Attica in Theseus’s absence. After the death of
Antiopé, Theseus had espoused Phaedra, a daughter of
Minos, king of Crete, and sister to his old love Ariadne;
a treaty of peace having been made with the island king-
dom.

By this marriage, Theseus brought into his house the
seed of domestic infelicity, from which sprang one of the
most pathetic tragedies of Athenian tradition—a_tra-
gedy immortalized by Euripides in ancient literature, and
made famous in modern drama by the “Phédre’’ of Ra-
cine—which culminated in Theseus’s becoming virtually
the murderer of his own son, and in the suicide of Phae-
dra, disgraced and in despair. For the new queen fell in
love with her stepson, and, finding him unresponsive,
hung herself, leaving behind a note in which she accused
Hippolytus of attempting her honor. Theseus, in his
rage, cursed his son in Poseidon’s name; and not long
after, while Hippolytus, downcast and depressed by his

 
fe DUSK OF THE GODS 21

father’s curse, was driving his chariot by the sea, Posei-
don sent a bull out of the waves, which frightened the
horses, and Hippolytus was dashed to his death. The
king discovered, too late, the innocence of his son, and re-
pented bitterly.

By his second marriage Theseus had another son who
was called Demophon; of him we shall hear later. In
return for the services of Pirithous in securing Helen,
Theseus was bound to accompany his friend to Hades
in his attempt to reclaim Persephone. Pirithous never
returned from the perilous adventure, and Theseus was
held for a long time in durance vile, until liberated by
his ideal, Heracles, when he returned to find his throne
usurped by Menestheus, another of Homer’s heroes, of
whom an ancient inscription in the agora said:

With Atreus’ sons this city sent of yore
Divine Menestheus to the Trojan shore;

Of all the Greeks, so Homer’s verses say,
The ablest man an army to array:

So old the title of her sons the name :
Of chiefs and champions in the field to claim.

Between his adventures Theseus had found time to ad-
minister his government well at home, and he is character-
ized by Thucydides as a wise and vigorous ruler. He
was believed to have united the twelve separate townships
of Attica, either by force or persuasion, into one organic
state, and to have increased the dignity and importance
of the festival of the Athenaea, which from his time came
to be known as the Panathenaea. At about the same time
he is said to have introduced the worship of Aphrodite
Pandemos. He divided the citizens into three classes—
the Eupatridae, the Geomori, and the Demiurgi, which
doubtless represented the nobles with large estates, the
22 THE STORY OF ATHENS

small farmers, and the laborers who worked for the com-
munity at large. He corrected many abuses, and estab-
lished a far firmer and better regulated government.

Theseus never recovered his throne, and retired to
Scyros, where he was treacherously killed by Lycomedes.
His line, however, was eventually restored in the person
of his son Demophon, with whom the purely mythical
story of Athens gives way to something more like his-
tory. The time of Theseus, in truth, comes very near
being within the pale of history; but here, as in other
cases, the historians of Athens were so affected by the
beauty of their local traditions, so religiously did they
follow their legendary lore, that it is almost impossible to
distinguish between the real and the fabulous in their
writings, to determine just how far their accounts were
based upon historical foundations. For that there was a
human prototype for many of their heroic personages, and
that their mighty deeds of valor were nothing more nor
less than a glorified picture of human acts, can scarcely
be doubted. But when those prototypes existed, or what
their deeds actually were, and how much they influenced
their own day and generation, it is difficult to say.

Herodotus mentions but three kings between Cecrops
and Theseus—Erechtheus, Pandion, and Aegeus—but it
is plain to any student of the myths or of archzology that
there must have been a long period of development be-
tween the epochs represented by “Pelasgic’’ Cecrops and
by “Ionic” Erechtheus—the one an epoch of dawning
civilization, the other an age of organization and political
development. Thucydides makes Theseus, the lawgiver,
a historical entity, relegating only his “labors” to the
realm of myth; but if we accept Theseus, ‘the wise and
vigorous ruler,’ why not Theseus, the vanquisher of the
Amazons who carried off Helen?

Though it might have served our practical and arche-
THE DUSK OF THE GODS 23

ological purposes better to have had him more exact
and critical, who would wish the Greek writer one whit
less of aromancer? It was the delightful and picturesque
imagination that was born in the Greek, that lulled his
infant mind in songs to sleep, that was instilled in his
early training and imbued in his religion, that made his
literature and art what they are—the most perfect and
lovely creations of the human mind.

It is not from history at all that we glean our earliest
historical fact. It is the pages of Homer that shed the
first ray of light through the dusk of the gods. We
know approximately the age of the Homeric poems.
_ They mention Athens, and from this we know that Athens
existed in Homer’s day. Moreover, we know that it was
an ancient city when the poems were written. What
Homer says about Athens may or may not be true, but
from his mention of the city of Athena it is an estab-
lished fact that Athens existed as a city somewhat over
one thousand years before our era. Likewise, the epi-
thets which he applies to Athens could not have been
made at random without real significance. And in these
few scattered words we have our earliest description of the
city of Athena.

Homer, indeed, has little to say about Athens. We
might wish he had said more; but the Atreids, not the
Theseids, were the chief actors in the great epics, and
naturally the city of Agamemnon, and not that of The-
seus, claims the greater share of description. But in the
very mention of the name Athenae we may read volumes,
for to this he applies the same strong descriptive words
as to famous Mycenae, and upon her palace the same
stock title, mvxivo¢ ddy0¢ (goodly house), is conferred.
IT

HOMER’S ATHENS!

«‘Then she [Athena] came to Marathon and to wide-wayed Athens,
and entered the goodly house of Erechtheus.”’
Op., VII, 80-81.

IF we might think of Homer as we may of the
other poets of ancient Greece,—if the higher
critics had not destroyed for us the familiar
image of the blind and wandering bard,—

we might picture to ourselves the Athens
Theseus and the
Minotaur, from a Of his day listening to the lines of the great

Vase-painting.

epics as they farded for the first time
on mortal ears. For in those dim ages of Greek history
Athens was a city of renown, and there is little room for
doubt that some of the minstrels whose united songs
make up what we now call the Homeric poems trod the
streets of ‘‘wide-wayed Athens,” and climbed the steep
ascent of the Acropolis to sound their lyres at the thresh-
old of the “goodly house of Erechtheus.” The city of
Theseus is reckoned by them among the great cities of
Greece, on a footing with the capitals of Perseus and
Agamemnon; and had the dust of the ages buried Ho-
meric Athens as long and as carefully as it has those
other cities, we should doubtless find here remains of that
period as wonderful and extensive as those discovered
at Tiryns and Mycenae.

  

1 Homeric Athens in these chapters is not to be considered as the Athens
of the day in which Homer lived so much as that mentioned in the Epics,
the city of the Homeric heroes.

24
HOMER’S ATHENS 25

But the Acropolis has for three thousand years been
the stage of a continuous life, more active and more far-
reaching in its influence, perhaps, than that of any other
spot in the world; and the. shifting scenes, century after
century, the repeated destructions and restorations, the
replacing of the old and crude with things more rich and
beautiful, and the embellishments of an age of luxury,
have almost completely
obliterated every ves-
tige of the city of the
heroic age.. It is only
in these latter days that
prehistoric Athens has
been brought to light
by scientific research
carried on within the
limits of the Pelasgic
city.

The first important
works done by the pre-
historic founders of Remains of Pelasgic Wall at the West
Athens after they had End of the Acropolis.
taken up their abode
upon the rock so well fortified by nature, were the build-
ing of a wall to make their fastness more defensible, the
construction. of an easier, yet well protected, approach to
it, and the erection of an abode for their prince or chief,
in which he might gather all his warriors about him.
Were there no monumental evidences of the truth of this,
we should not hesitate to affirm its probability, arguing
from what we know of other prehistoric Greek cities.
But the researches of Dr. Dorpfeld and others have
brought to light abundant remains of all three structures.
Sections of a gigantic wall of the highest antiquity are
now to be seen on all sides of the Acropolis; portions of

 
26 DUEPSSTOKM Oe ATHENS

a massive ramped ascent, coeval with the wall, are plainly
visible on its southern slope; and the substructures of an
extensive palace of about the same age are traceable at
the top, along the eastern and northern sides.

We must bear in mind that the form of the Acropolis
rock was in those times very different from that which we
see at present. A little to the east of the center of the
space inclosed by the walls rose a rough cone of rock,
which sloped down on all sides to the wall, whose lines
coincided approximately with those of the present wall,
but which varied in levels. This eminence in the earliest
times undoubtedly served the purpose it answered for
many succeeding centuries—that of an altar.

On the level next below it was erected the palace of
the prince, and in the angle between the slope and the
outer walls clustered the less pretentious huts of his re-
tainers. The ascending road, which was of necessity
strongly fortified, began at the southeast corner of the
rock and was carried on a gradual ascent along the preci-
pice below the southern wall to the west end, where an
ascending series of winding loops or terraces began, re-
doubling on one another and fortified with nine strong
gates, the last opening upon the inclosure at the summit.
Of the former section abundant evidence remains in the
enormous blocks of polygonal masonry that still form a
sort of retaining wall at the south of the Acropolis, as-
cending by easy degrees. Of the latter part—the ter-
races—naught whatever remains, but it is referred to and
described in numerous texts, and has formed the subject
of much learned discussion under the title of the ‘Nine-
gated Pelargikon.”’

Who: built these walls and outworks, we shall never
know. The ancient Athenians, in their tradition, did not
ascribe these great building operations to their godlike
warrior forefathers, but held that they were the work of

 
HOMER’S ATHENS 27

certain builders, called Pelasgoi, imported for the pur-
pose from Sicily, the land of the Homeric Cyclopes, or
one-eyed giants. These paid builders of walls and pal-
aces, whom Euripides calls ‘movers of rocks” and “build-
ers of gates,” were supposed to have lived on the slopes
of Hymettus, but what became of them nobody says.
They appear to have been imported only to be expelled
by the Ionians, as Dr. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff remarks.
Their work, however, seems to have been anterior to the
period of Theseus, for with the Ionian invasion they dis-
appear. Pausanias and Pliny even go so far as to men-
tion the chief architect, the former giving him the name
Agrolas—the rough stone—the latter Hyperbius—of
giant strength.

It is, however, the general name given to this tribe or
race of builders that has been the stumbling-block for
archeologists in their study of prehistoric Athens, and
has afforded a basis of contention among them. The an-
cients gave to these primitive fortifications the name of
Pelargikon. This is held by one camp to be another form
of the word Pelasgikon, by the other to have been the
original name, having no connection whatever with the
Pelasgians.

All this, however, is neither here nor there. It is more
interesting for us to know, as far as we may, what this
mighty defense was. From descriptions in the ancient
texts we learn that this intricate system of walls ex-
tended from the base of the Acropolis rock at its south-
eastern angle, ascending gradually along the southern
side, curving around its western extremity almost as far
as the Areopagus, then sweeping to the north and east
and joining the upper walls in the neighborhood of Pan’s
grotto. The poet Lucian describes a philosopher fisher-
man sitting on the upper walls at the corner just north of
the present propyleia, who drops his hook, baited with
28 THE STORY OF ATHENS

gold and figs, into the region below, and is asked if he will
fish up stones out of the Pelargikon. This gives us a
northern boundary, for beyond this point the rock-itself 1s
steep, and further defense would be unnecessary.

As we have already seen, the first or lowest section of
the Pelargikon is easily traceable in remains, but the por-
tion between the west end of the Acropolis and the Areop-
agus, the nine-gated outworks mentioned by Clidemus,
has totally disappeared ; for the whole contour of the west-
ern slope has been greatly altered, from time to time,—
by the Greeks themselves in the fifth century, by the later
Romans, by Franks and Turks, and recently by the con-
struction of the modern carriage road. A plan has been
made, suggesting the lines which may have been followed
by that maze of massive walls, and delineating the wind-
ing course of the road along their flank and the position of
the nine gates—a plan of impregnable fortifications and
an easy means of ascent, based upon similar prehistoric
schemes of defense. The outermost gate seems to have
been directly west of the Acropolis, not far from the
Areopagus.

The walls of the Pelargikon embraced two important
springs, so that in time of siege the Athenians were not
cut off from their water supply. One of these, the
Clepsydra, at the northwest corner of the Acropolis, is
reached from the top by a winding stair of fifty-two steps
cut in the solid rock; the other, below the south wall. in
the sanctuary of Asclepius, was also approached by steps
through a small opening in the upper wall still to be seen
near the southwest angle of the Parthenon.

Besides these two narrow means of descent from the
Acropolis, both of which opened within the inclosing
walls of the Pelargikon, there were two other postern
gates connecting with the region below, and undefended,

1 Tn article by Walter Miller, American Journal of Archaeology,
vol. viii, p. 489.
TSOVMUEIR SS) ZN INSU INS, © 29

except by their narrowness and probable secrecy. Both
were connected with the palace—one near the middle
of the north side of the Acropolis, leading down to
the sanctuary of Agraulos, which in later years betrayed
the citadel to the barbarians; and the other descending,
near the northeast angle of the wall on its northern side, to
the gardens which lay on that side. The walls, both upper
and lower, were made of the hard Acropolis limestone,
laid in the most primitive method of the style called cy-
clopean, the separate blocks varying greatly in dimen-
sions, some joined with considerable precision, others
loosely fitted together with a filling of broken pieces and
clay.

The sumptuous buildings of a later age that were
reared upon the very foundations of the Erechtheid palace
have necessarily obliterated almost every sign of the ex-
istence of that earliest of buildings upon the Acropolis.
Judging, however, from the small fragments which have
been recently recovered, and by a comparison of these
with the better preserved remains at Tiryns and Mycenae
in the palaces of Per-
seus and Agamemnon,
we need not hesitate to
assume that the house
of Erechtheus was, in
all respects, to be com-
pared with those con-
temporary seats of
royalty. Its superficial
extent was fully as
great as that of either
of the others, covering,

 

8 aA tae ¥ Foundations of the House of
as it did, a arge por- Erechtheus.

tion of the rock; the
method of construction—that of laying roughly hewn
blocks of stone together, with joints filled in with smaller
30 THE STORY OF ATHENS

chips and clay—is entirely similar to that of the remains
in Argolis, and the references to the Athenian palace in
the Homeric poems are equally flattering, though by no
means so full. Need we hesitate, then, to say that here
on the Acropolis there stood a palace, rival to those other
prehistoric abodes which have yielded up such treasures
to the archzeologist ?

If, indeed, the “goodly house” was the peer of the
stronghold of Perseus at Tiryns, we should hesitate to
call it crude or primitive in the sense that early rock-cut
abodes, adobe huts, and mud villages are crude and primi-
tive. The palace at Tiryns was far too highly developed
a structure to be called crude. Its well-articulated plan,
its arrangements of open courts and well-defined apart-
ments, its employment of the column, the threshold and
jamb, its floor covering of pebbled plaster, its painted
wall decorations, all place it on a level with structures too
well designed to be called primitive, and show that these
problems of plan and arrangement had been worked out
before in buildings that were primitive.

The “avxtvog ddp.o¢”’ of Homer, then, we may conjecture
to have been composed of a series of sets of apartments
separated by open courts and connected by doorways and
corridors. Besides its apartments for the men (éyapov )
and those for the women (‘pvatxetov), it contained the
tribal hearthstone, the focus of national life. Within its
walls was the early temple of Athena, to which Homer
refers (II., II, 546-549) as her own rich temple at Athens,
enshrining the wooden image of Athena Polias, the hea-
ven-given xoanon, most sacred treasure of the Athenians.
In the courtyard—the Pandrosium, named after the
daughter of Cecrops—stood the ancient olive tree, undy-
ing symbol of Athena’s victory over Poseidon in their
memorable contest for the Attic land, and beside it the
altar of Zeus Herkeios, the hearth and center of the state.
HOMER’S ATHENS 31

Without, on the eminence mentioned above, stood the
great altar, 6 Bmpdc, sacred to Zeus Polieus and his vir-
gin daughter, protectress of the city.

All this sacred inclosure, within the encircling wall
of the Pelasgoi, constituted the city (7 édtc) of the
Homeric era and the period immediately following. The
massive, though scattered, fragments which we have de-
scribed, the polygonal walls, the substructure of the
“goodly house,” the site of the great altar, are the only
surviving traces of the “well-built town” of Homer.
These are our only tangible record of the home of the
noble Erechtheus, the city of Theseus. These are the
walls that defied the assaults of the Amazons; and from
the parapet, now concealed beneath the temple of Nike,
it was that old Aegeus threw himself in despair, when,
watching long, he at length descried afar the black-sailed
ship of his forgetful son, Theseus, returning from the
conflict with the Minotaur. For Theseus had promised
to set white sails should he return victorious; but, though
a victor, the loss of Ariadne had made him forget the
token, and the aged father, believing Theseus dead, leaped
headlong from the wall, to be killed upon the rocks}
below, where for ages stood an altar in memory of Aegeus
the Hero.

This was the city that received the beautiful Helen
when King Menestheus opened the gates of Athens to her
brothers, after they had released their sister from her
secret confinement by Theseus, whose throne the ruler
had usurped. These are the walls and this the stately
palace which bold Menestheus left to join all the princes
of Greece in that twenty years’ conflict, all for—

The face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium,

1 Other authorities say that he leaped into the sea and thereby gave
the Aegean its name.
32 THE STORY OF ATHENS

and to gain renown in the epic lines as the best of the
Greeks, after Nestor, in arranging steeds and chariots for
battle.

These are the veritable remains of the towers that
smiled to welcome back Theseus’s son after his creditable
adventures upon the plains of Troy, where, after the fall
of Ilium, he rescued his grandmother, Aethra, who had all
these years been a captive slave to Helen. Plutarch seems
to confuse this prince with his brother Acamas, and makes
him the object of the love of Laodice and father of her
son Munychus, whom Aethra reared up in secret at Troy.
Demophon, on his return from the war, was beloved of
Phyllis, daughter of the Thracian king Sithon, to whom
he was betrothed, and then set out for Athens with a
promise to come back to consummate their nuptials; but
he tarried long, and when he returned to Thrace he found
that poor Phyllis had put an end to her life in despair.
Diomed, a prince of Argos, returning from the Trojan
war, was cast upon the coast of Attica, and, not recog-
nizing the territory, began to ravage it. He was encoun-
tered by Demophon, who took from him the sacred Pal-
ladium, Troy’s treasured statue of Athena. The con-
flict took place under cover of night, and the Athenian
king had the misfortune to kill one of his own subjects in
the mélée. For this he was tried before the court of the
Areopagus—the first mortal to stand before that august
tribunal—and was acquitted.

Through Demophon the Theseid line was perpetuated
for several generations to Thymoetes, who, in a war be-
tween Athens and Boeotia, was challenged to single com-
bat by Xanthus, the Boeotian king. Thymoetes was old
and feeble and declined to fight, pleading years and in-
firmity; but there was a brave nobleman, a guest at the
Athenian court, who stepped forward to take the old
king’s place. He killed Xanthus, and was rewarded with
HOMER’S ATHENS 33

the throne of Attica. This was Milanthus, a member of
an old Messenian family, who had been driven out of
Messene by the Dorians and had come to Athens. Thus
a new dynasty came to the throne to succeed the old line
of Theseus.

Milanthus’s son was Codrus, the last of the kings. In
his reign the Dorians invaded the Peloponnesus and
threatened Attica. An oracle had decreed that the in-
vading army could not take Athens unless they spared
the life of the king. Codrus, the purest type of a pa-
triotic monarch, clad himself in the garb of a peasant,
went into the enemy’s camp, picked a quarrel with the
soldiers, and was murdered. The Dorians, when they
learned that they had slain the king, withdrew from
Attica, and Athens was spared. The Athenians are not
known to have established a shrine to the devoted king,
as they did to Agraulos,—the first voluntary offering for
Athens,—nor to have erected a statue to him; but they
resolved that no mortal should be considered worthy to
‘sit upon the throne or wear the robes and scepter of so
good a king, and with him the royal succession came to
an end.

These later kings, after Demophon and down to Co-
drus, are post-Homeric so far as the story of the epic is
concerned, though several centuries doubtless elapsed be-
tween the self-sacrifice of Codrus and the composing of
the Homeric songs, which in all probability took place
some time after Athens had passed from a royal to a
democratic form of government. But the poets confined
their rhapsodies to tales of older days, and probably found
no more poetry in democracy than we do in these present
days. Nevertheless, the cities and the palaces that Homer
describes are unquestionably the cities and palaces of his
own day. We cannot look for archeological accuracy

on the part of those ancient bards, but the interesting fact
3
34 THESSTORY OF (AshEiENS

remains that the spade of research is yearly proving the
accuracy of Homer’s descriptions, not only with regard
to monuments that may have been contemporaneous with
the epics, but regarding objects that must certainly have
existed hundreds of years before a line of the poems could
possibly have been composed. This would seem to show
that art progressed as slowly in proportion before the his-
torical period as it did rapidly after the age of history
had dawned, and that in those days many buildings and
other works of art remained relatively unchanged for
centuries after their execution.

For if the Homeric epics were composed long after
royalty had become a thing of the past in Athens, the
“goodly house of Erechtheus,” of which the poet sings
and with which he must have been more or less familiar,
was no longer a royal residence, but a building of great
antiquity, even in those days, preserved as a sort of his-
torical and religious monument by the democratic Athe-
nians. Naturally, the intimate connection of the ancient
palace with various shrines and temples, particularly with
the temple of Athena Polias, had done much to preserve it
from annihilation and even from change; and, in the light
of the Homeric lines and of the discoveries of these latter
days, we may well believe that in Homer’s day few
changes had taken place in the ancient royal house, which
had been erected centuries before, and which, from the
massiveness of its construction and the halo of associa-
tions which enveloped it, neither required nor received
alteration.

But massive walls and fragments of palaces are not
our only tangible memorials of the heroes whose names
are so familiar to us in Homeric song. Architecture was
not the only art practised by that warrior race. Sculp-
ture and painting were perhaps even more highly devel-
oped among them and practised by the more peaceful
HOMER’S ATHENS 35

subjects. Arms, furniture, jewelry, and gems have
come down to us from that distant age, to show their
makers’ skill in carving, while pottery in a hundred
varied patterns, and even bits of decorated plaster, have
survived to prove the cunning of the earliest Greek fin-
gers with the brush; not to forget those more homely arts
of the loom and embroidery-frame which Homer loves
to describe and for which the Athenian women became
so famous in the making of Athena’s sacred peplos.

Although some of these products of art are unfortu-
nately lost to us forever through the perishableness of
their material, and others are not nearly so well preserved
among the ruins of ancient Athens as they are at other
places, existing chiefly in tiny fragments that have lodged
in the crevices of the rock, there are enough evidences
to show that these arts did exist in Homeric Athens, and
compare quite favorably with those of Agamemnon’s
princely abode.

If it is not going too far to draw one more illustration
from the better preserved monuments of the Atreid capi-
tal, we may restore a scene upon the Athenian Acropolis
with details borrowed from the ruins of Argolic palaces
and the lines of Homer.

We must picture the lordly abode of the Athenian
princes as something far more than an aggregation of
massive walls and colonnaded courts. Those walls, se-
vere and plain without, blazed within with a revetment
of curiously wrought metal or brilliantly colored plaster.

The doors, incased in beaten bronze, swung upon
hinges of the same material; the handles, too, were richly
wrought in gold or silver.

The walls were massy brass; the cornice high
Blue metals crowned in colors of the sky;
Rich plates of gold the folding doors encase;
The pillars silver on a brazen base;
36 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Silver the lintels deep projecting o’er;
And gold the ringlets that command the door.

If this famous description of the house of Alcinous, from
Homer’s ‘“‘Odyssey,”’ were our only warrant for imagin-
ing this lavish use of beaten metal with enrichments in
gold and silver, many would doubtless be disposed to say
that the Homeric picture was drawn from the realm of
pure imagery, although the very mention of these methods
of decoration and the poets’ minute description of the ex-
quisite craftsmanship with which they were applied are
enough to prove beyond a doubt the existence of such
modes of architectural adornment in their day. But these
elaborate and brilliant poetical reproductions have been
brought from the regions of doubt or mere probability
into the full light of fact by the well-known discoveries
at Mycenae. Some small plaques of embossed bronze, a
few holes on the interior surface of the stone walls cor-
responding to holes in the plaques, and a handful of bronze
nails fitting nicely into the holes in both, bear indisputable
witness to the reality of the poetic picture, which is only
enlarged and glorified by fancy. This was before the
day of soldering, and the small bronze plates, whether
used to incase the walls of a tomb or palace or applied
to cover the wooden frame of a chair, a chariot, or a
jewel-casket, were joined together by dexterous fitting,
and held in place by well-made nails or rivets.

This fashion of covering walls of stone with metal
plates, which seems to have been the most ancient form of
mural decoration in Greece—employed even before painted
plaster—and which characterizes the Homeric period of
art as an age of bronze, was in all probability imported
from the East. There is an Asiatic ring about such lavish
use of metals suggestive of Phenician art, which de-
lighted to cover everything with plates of metal sugges-

 
HOMER’S ATHENS 37

tive also of the brazen pillars and other works of brass
which Hiram, King of Tyre, made for the temple of Solo-
mon, for Hiram was a man “skilful to work in gold, in
silver, in brass, in iron, in stone and in timber, in purple,
in blue and in fine linen and in crimson; also to grave any
manner of graving.” It was, moreover, from Phcenicia
that bronze came into Greece, partly by way of Asia
Minor, but more especially by way of Cyprus.

But to return to the palace upon the Acropolis, within
whose brazen halls, relieved and softened by rich, elabo-
rately woven hangings, stand royal seats and couches of
quaintly carved wood, inlaid with dyed ivory, gold, or
amber, and studded with nails effectively disposed. In
the banquet-room, upon the tables, stand golden lamps in
form of boys supporting the receptacle for oil, golden
cups in infinite variety of forms, pots, and vases, the
multiform product of the potter’s wheel, fashioned with
infinite grace and bright with party-colored griffons,
horses, and other animals, or simple geometrical patterns,
and huge brazen caldrons embossed in high relief.

Luxurious couches are placed against the walls, which
are covered with rich stuffs woven by the dainty hands of
the queen and her noblewomen, in patterns gay with
gold, crimson, blue, and sea-dyed purple. Within these
stately halls the noble scions of the Eupatridae sit in dig-
nified conclave or sup at the festal board which Homer
so frequently describes. Their garments are rich and
finely wrought; their armor, the finest product of the en-
graver’s skill; their arms, bronze-headed spears and
swords and daggers of bronze inlaid with spirited designs
in silver and gold; their bucklers, heavily bossed or in-
laid with various colored metals in designs depicting
hideous monsters “to fright the souls of fearful adver-
saries,’ or representing the simple heraldry of the age.
When feasting is over the warriors gather in groups about
38 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the court or play at pessoi, two and two, their spears over
their shoulders and their bucklers resting against the wall
behind them. ;
But no picture would be complete that did not give a
glimpse into the gunaikeion, where stately matron and
lithe Athenian maid with fingers
deft weave many colored strands, as
if by magic, into designs of surpass-
ing beauty—rich hangings for sa-
cred shrines, bright arrases for the
chambers of the palace, finely
wrought garments for the bridal,
or somber canopies for the funeral
train. Mayhap the youthful Helen
was present at such a scene as this,
and, sitting among the maids, re-
counted the story of her abduction
by the gallant Theseus.
The Game of Pessoi from But what has become of these
a Vase-painting. 4
works of the heroic age upon the
Acropolis? If we find them elsewhere, why not at
Athens? The answer to this question has already been
given in these pages. The age of bronze was overlaid
with silver and with gold. The colossal building opera-
tions of later days, for which the rock itself was scarped
and cut to its very core, completely obliterated the remains
of the original structures. The metal objects of every age
that were not entombed with their original owners have
been sought by subsequent generations who, often in ig-
norance, made use of their material by altering their
forms. The pottery that was not likewise hidden away in
graves, on account of its perishable qualities is absolutely
lost, or found only in ancient rubbish fillings where the
unevenness of the rock has been leveled up with fragments
and debris. But were there no tombs on or about the

    
   

 
    
   
   
    
 

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HOMER’S ATHENS 39

Acropolis that corresponded with those at Mycenae?
This is a question that has been much agitated.

Tradition points to various prehistoric burials upon the
sacred hill, but tombs upon the rock itself would natu-
rally have disappeared with everything else of the pre-
historic age. It is almost certain that Attica never
boasted beehive tombs or treasuries as great as those
of Argos. But there are remains of rock-hewn cham-
bers that may have answered a similar purpose for
the princely rulers of Athens, and, in parts of Attica,
vaulted chambers underground with linteled openings
to the surface;.but these are far less pretentious than the
Argive monuments, and, if they contained objects of value
or interest, were rifled of them ages since. At Spata, not
far from Athens, at the foot of Mount Hymettus, there
were discovered several vaulted tombs which fortunately
preserved some gold cups and a few bits of carved ivory
in the form of thin plates with well-wrought reliefs,
among them the figure of a sphinx and a group repre-
senting a bull devoured by a lion. The subjects and their
treatment are not unlike those of Mycenaean art, and
they undoubtedly belong
to the earliest art-period
in Attica.

Not far from the
Acropolis, in the side of
the Hill of the Muses,
facing the rock, are sev-
eral fair-sized chambers
hewn in the living rock,
entered by well-cut Ivory Relief from Spata.
doorways. These have
long been known as the “Prison of Socrates.’ There
are three main chambers in close proximity, their en-
trances being almost equally spaced in the scarped and

 
40 THE STORY OF ATHENS

finished surface of the perpendicular rock, where evenly
disposed dowel-holes denote the former existence of
outer architectural enrichments. To the left, the re-
mains of a stair are still to be seen cut in the rock. In
the interior only two of the chambers are finished, the
third remaining only partly hewn. Of the others, that to
the left is carefully hewn to quadrilateral form, and has

   

2 So-called Prison of Socrates.

a flat ceiling, while the opposite chamber has a slanting
roof and, at the back, a narrow passage leading into ‘a
second chamber, or tholos, with curving roof. The pas-
sage was closed with two slabs of stone, one of which re-
mains. All have doubtless been altered in form since they
were first hewn out, and may have served a variety of uses
during the ages; but there can be little doubt that the
original cutting was prehistoric.

Who can tell but that these were the tombs of the
HOMER’S ATHENS 4I

earlier Athenian kings? Who knows but that here re-
posed the bones of Erechtheids or Theseids, wrapped
in rich drapery and in cloth of gold, with masks of
gold and jeweled ornaments, with precious cups for
feasting, and inlaid arms for hunting in the Elysian
Fields?

There is no room for doubt that they were tombs, for
one still bears marks upon its floor of the place of a
sarcophagus. And what other purpose might they have
served? For later burials were mostly performed accord-
ing to other methods and in another quarter—the Dipy-
lum. These half-natural, half-artificial remains, then,
may perhaps be added to our scant store of prehistoric
monuments in Athens; and it is a pleasure, upon returning
to the isolation of the Acropolis, to connect at least one
monument outside of the Pelargikon with the earliest
period of Athenian life.

But as we sit on the Acropolis of to-day, which is
essentially the Acropolis of the golden era of Pericles,
and gaze upon those purest productions of a perfected
age, the old poetic Athens of the sturdy age of bronze,
the city of the Homeric heroes, fades from us as a dream
fades before reality. It is only when we are far away,
out of sight of those glorious temples upon whose stately
colonnades and architraves the history of the western
world is written, when we read the ancient legends or
muse upon the old-time lays, that we can conjure up the
scenes of that. older life, so dim and yet so beautiful,
which the hand of time has all but erased from the scroll
of history. The Acropolis is thus like an ancient parch-
ment upon which have been written again and again the
deeds of each succeeding generation. It is only when we
have carefully removed the later, more readily deciphered
characters from the palimpsest that we may read the scant
and faded lines of the original story.
Ill

ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS

.

“‘Ye gods who in sacred Athens visit the city’s incensed centre stone,

and her famed market place of splendid ornament.”
PINDAR.

     

e257 2=22= THE age of demigods and heroes had
faded into the distant past; the des-
tiny of Athens had fallen into human
hands; the old paternal and kingly
government, by the voluntary sacri-
Capit from the Femple fice of Codrus, last of the royal line,
had been replaced by a more popular
though still aristocratic rule; Dracon, after the futile at-
tempt of Cylon to gain supreme power, about the middle
of the seventh century, had made laws for the govern-
ment and well-being of the state; and Solon, at the be-
ginning of the sixth, had modified the constitution for the
better administration of the government, when the first
of the tyrants of Athens appeared upon the scene.

For some three hundred years after the time of Codrus,
Athens was ruled by single archons or rulers, of whom
the first was Medon, son of the devoted monarch. The
first twelve archons were all of the family of the last of
the kings, and held their office for life. Under one of
them—Aeschylus—the first Olympiad is said to have been
established, fixing a chronological starting-point in Athe-
nian history—776 s.c. For the next hundred years the
archons were still chosen from the old royal family, but
for periods of only ten years. About the beginning of

42

 
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 43

the seventh century, however, there appear to have been
nine archons elected from the Eupatridae or noble fami-
lies. Of these, three held offices of special distinction:
the Archon Eponymos, who gave his name to the year
and was the civil head; the Basileus, king archon, or high
priest ; and the Polemarchos, or military chief of the state.
The other six were called Thesmothetai, and their func-
tion seems to have been chiefly judicial.

The history of Athens during these centuries is most
obscure. One of the few archons about whom we know
anything was Megacles, a member of the great family of
the Alcmaeonidae, a branch of the house of the Nelides
who were driven out of Pylos, in the Peloponnesus, at
the time of the Dorian invasion, and had settled in
Athens. Megacles came into prominence about the year
628, when Cylon attempted to make himself tyrant of
Athens. This Cylon was a scion of one of the noblest
Athenian families; he had taken the great prize in the
Olympian games in his youth, and, having won wide
popularity among the citizens, made an attempt to restore
the monarchy in his own person. With a number of fol-
lowers, he seized the Acropolis; but the citizens, aroused
by the archon Megacles to the enormity of his design,
besieged the citadel and starved the insurgents into sub-
jection. When they finally yielded, Megacles, with a
band of armed men, rushed into the sacred inclosure,
where they found Cylon and his adherents clinging to
the altars for protection, quite safe from the swords
of the enraged citizens. The refugees then fastened a
thread to Athena’s altar, and, holding it in their hands,
prepared to descend from the Acropolis. Protected by
this tiny strand, which gave them all the benefits of a
sanctuary, they passed down through the winding Pelar-
gikon and out of the last gate. But just when they were
passing the seat of the Eumenides the thread broke, and
44 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Megacles with his followers, taking this as a sign that
the goddess had abandoned them, fell upon them and
slew all except a few who flung themselves at the feet
of the archons’ wives. In the massacre the blood of
some of the refugees was shed upon the very steps of
the altar of the terrible Eumenides; and for this offense a
taint of sacrilege clung to the family of the Alcmaeonidae,
and we shall hear of it from time to time during many
succeeding generations. After this the city was con-
stantly haunted by phantoms and ghosts; weird appari-
tions and strange noises kept the people in a constant state
of fear. An oracle was consulted, which declared the
city to be under a curse in consequence of the pollution
of the altars. The Athenians therefore sent to Crete for
a man famous for his mysterious powers of purifying
and cleansing places that had been profaned. This man
was the poet Epimenides. He came to Athens, and, by
performing various religious rites and sacrifices, restored
the city to favor with the gods. In connection with the
purification of Athens, Megacles and his family were ban-
ished, and were not seen again until another attempt at
tyranny was made. The archons who had been in office
at the time of the sacrilege were also banished, and the
bones of those who had died were dug up and thrown
into the sea.

After Cylon’s attempt upon liberty, the Athenians’ dear-
est treasure, the first written code of laws appeared in
Athens. The times were turbulent and crime was becom-
ing so flagrant that Dracon drew up a code which in-
flicted the death penalty upon almost all offenders, from
petty thieves to murderers. Dracon was said to have
used blood for ink when writing out his laws, and they
are still a byword for drastic penalties, as are the laws
of the Medes and Persians for immutability.

During these years a war broke out between the Athe-
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 45

nians and the Mitylenians for the possession of Sigeum, in
the island of Lesbos. On the Lesbian side fought Alcaeus,
the famous poet; but he fought and ran away, and was
afterward disgraced and banished by his countrymen.
It may have been a weakness for Athens that caused him
to desert, for he afterward showed great courage on the
field of battle while attempting to win back his rights as
a citizen. He is believed to have come to Athens after
his failure to regain his country, and his poems were
greatly admired for many centuries by the Athenians. He
was soon followed by another famous Lesbian, perhaps the
most renowned of the lyric poets of Greece, the “clear-
toned” Sappho. Alcaeus had once been deeply in love
with Sappho, and had made his devotion known through
the medium of his verses; but she had quenched the ardor
of his passion in a poem addressed to him, and then had
married Cercolas of Andros, and gone with him to the
Cyclades. Left a widow soon after her marriage, ac-
cording to tradition, she came to Athens, in the prime
of her beauty and poetic genius, not in search of Alcaeus,
it would seem, but to join the circle of poets which was
becoming famous in the city of Pallas. Here she met
and fell in love with young Phaon, whom the later poets
describe as cold and unresponsive to her declarations of
affection. Tradition says that Phaon went away to
Sicily, and was followed by Sappho, who then addressed
to him her most celebrated ode, a prayer to Aphrodite, but
without touching his heart. The poet, in despair, finally
leaped from the Leucadian rock to end her woes and her
bright career.

In Solon’s time—594—the archons were reinforced
by a council or parliament of four hundred members
(one hundred from each of the ancient Ionic tribes), the
powers of the Areopagus were extended to administer
justice, all classes were enfranchised, and the highest
46 THE STORY OF ATHENS

offices of state were opened to free citizens according to
their wealth. The title to political power was thus estab-
lished upon a basis of property instead of one of birth,
and the first step was taken toward pure democratic rule.
In fact, the constitution as revised by Solon entitled him
to the rank of the greatest democratic lawgiver of Athens.
and as such he was honored by the Athenian statesmen
of subsequent ages. All later legislation in the direction
of democracy was but a modification of Solon’s laws.
The laws of Solon were inscribed on tablets and pre-
served upon the Acropolis.

Even before the old kingly rule had come to an end,
the hearth and center of Athenian political life had been
removed from the Acropolis to the Prytaneum, which
Theseus was believed to have established on the north side
of the hill of Pallas. This became later the home of the
chief archon, and remained such until the time of Solon.
Thus the Acropolis, shorn of part of its dignity, was
made to share its preeminence with a new religious as
well as political center on the north of the rock. At the
same time there rapidly grew up a lower town, always
second in importance to the “city,” and as yet unfortified.
This was known as the Asty.

But Solon, with all the rigidity of his constitution,
was unable to maintain a democratic form of govern-
ment in Athens. The Athenians, ever hero-worshipers,
ever fickle above all else, were easily led to place their
confidence in a single man who seemed to represent their
ideals of government. The constitution had not the
power to quench hostilities between the three great fac-
tions into which Athens found itself divided: the party of
the plain, which embraced the landed proprietors and of
which Lycurgus was leader; the party of the sea-coast,
made up largely of wealthy commoners led by Megacles,
a younger Alcmaeonid; and the party of the highlands,
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 47

comprising the poorer classes, whose best interests lay in
the hope of a more democratic form of government, but
had been for some time without a leader. It was now that
Pisistratus, a young kinsman of Solon, long a friend and
companion of the great lawgiver, placed himself at
the head of that party which represented the claims of
the poorer classes. Endowed with extraordinary per-
sonal gifts, descended from the Homeric Nestor and the
Pylian kings, noble, handsome, sagacious, Pisistratus
fulfilled the dearest ideals of the Athenian populace. Am-
bition soon discovered for the young leader the possi-
bilities of the situation, and, backed by the most numerous
party in the state, he resolved to make himself supreme.
He easily ingratiated himself with the poor by throwing
open his extensive gardens as public pleasure resorts and
by going about the streets attended by youths who dis-
tributed money among the needy citizens. Nor did he
omit to placate the wealthy who were not strongly at-
tached to one of the other parties. The military fame
which he had won in the war for the recovery of Salamis
from the Megarians, his gifts of oratory, and his tact,
accompanied by a decided gift for simulation, won many
friends for him among the upper classes, while fear or
hatred of the other parties made him with some people
the choice of two evils.

Appearing one day in the agora wounded and bleed-
ing, and with a train of mules showing signs of a high-
way attack, Pisistratus gathered the people about him and
told them that he had barely escaped with his life from
the violence of his enemies. Sympathy and admiration
for his courage at once animated his followers and drew
others to his standard, and he was thereupon voted a
band of fifty clubsmen as a guard against further moles-
tation. With this nucleus, he soon surrounded himself
with a band sufficiently strong to seize the citadel. Clubs
48 THE STORY OF ATHENS

were abandoned for spears, his leading opponents were
at once forced to leave Athens, and despite the strenuous
protestations of Solon, Pisistratus held the seat of a ty-
rant. This was in the year 560. Solon, who by orations
and poetical compositions had struggled in vain to
impress upon the people the danger of submitting to a
supreme ruler, placed his arms outside the door of his
house in token that he had done his best to defend his
country’s laws, but was now too old for service.

But this preéminence was not destined to last long for
Pisistratus. The opposing factions, under the leadership
of Megacles and Lycurgus, combined and forced his with-
drawal. The property of the exile was exposed for pub-
lic sale, and Callias, the head of a rich family, one of
his chief opponents, was the sole purchaser. Scarcely
had these leaders gained their point when disputes arose
between them, which, after more than four years of strife,
ended in the offer of Megacles, chief of the Alcmaeonid
party, to support Pisistratus in the tyranny if he would
marry his daughter Coesyra ( Pisistratus was a widower ).
Upon accepting the offer, the former tyrant returned to
Athens, and in a chariot, beside a stately woman in the
garb of the virgin goddess, was drawn up the winding
slope of the Pelargikon into the sacred inclosure of the
Acropolis, while heralds ran before his triumphant train
shouting, “Athenians, welcome Pisistratus, whom your
Athena has honored above all other men and now brings
back to her own abode!’ The stately woman who was
chosen to give grace and dignity to the triumphal entry
was no more than a beautiful garland-seller of Paeonia,
named Phya. She was afterward given in marriage to
Hipparchus, second son of the tyrant, and thus another
bond was formed between the tyrant and the populace.

Pisistratus wedded the daughter of the Alemaeonidae,
but would not suffer himself to become a father by the
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 49

daughter of a house accursed by the gods, and thus in-
curred the anger of the party that had so lately espoused
his cause. Again the new tyrant was obliged to leave the
Acropolis and flee from Athens, and the constitution of
Solon was again in force. The property of Pisistratus,
once more exposed at auction, was again purchased by
Callias, his wealthy opponent. The exile retired to
Eretria, in Euboea, where he spent ten years in prepara-
tion for his final return. He solicited pecuniary aid from
the various cities that were friendly to him, and got
possession of the great silver-mines at Laurium. With
funds thus raised, he secured the services of Argive
mercenary troops. When, after a long period of wait-
ing, the time was ripe for his great step, Pisistratus,
with his son Hippias, landed at Marathon, and with a
large body of troops, reinforced by Lygdamis and a band
of Naxians, entered Attica, marched to Athens amid the
welcoming shouts of the populace, and once more estab-
lished himself upon the Acropolis in the palace of an-
cient Erechtheus, beside the shrine of Athena Polias,
protecting goddess of the Athenians. From this period,
the time of Solon and Pisistratus, the history of Athens
becomes authentic, and though the chronology of Pisis-
tratus’s successive banishments and returns to power is
somewhat confused and misleading, the facts are unques-
tionably reliable, and after his final establishment in the
tyranny the chronology of events becomes historically
trustworthy.

Pisistratus’s first acts upon his final acquisition of
power were in the direction of establishing a firm seat—
measures which he seems to have omitted in his former
usurpations of the government. He established a stand-
ing army of mercenaries, thus laying the foundations of
future Athenian military prowess. With this new force

he subjugated Sigeum, which had long been a subject of
4
50 THE STORY OF ATHENS

dispute with the Mitylenians, and sent out an expedition,
under his son Hippias, for the suppression of piracy. He
exiled many of the leaders of the factions opposed to him,
who had not already fled, and seized the children of some
of them, placing them as hostages under the protection
of his friend Lygdamis, whom he made tyrant of Naxos.
Among those whom he exiled was Cimon, the father of
Miltiades, whom he afterward recalled to his former po-
sition and rank among the citizens. His policy at home
was rigid, but not severe. Following closely the forms
of government laid down in the constitution of Solon,
he not only enforced the laws upon all classes of his sub-
jects, but was himself an example of rectitude. To
better the condition of the poor, he enacted regulations
against idleness, and sent many of the poorer citizens
away from Athens to gain a livelihood in the agricultural
districts, supplying seeds and even cattle to those who
had no means to procure them. He moreover established
a fund which provided pensions for disabled soldiers and
the families of those killed in battle.

It was the policy of the new tyrant to keep the higher
political offices, as far as possible, in his own family; and
though this method would seem to tend even more toward
despotism, it was effectual in suppressing political jeal-
ousies among his people. Under this firm and aggressive
rule Athens rapidly increased in influence and importance,
and we soon hear of Croesus, King of Lydia, sending an
embassy to the Athenian court to ask for codperation in
opposing the increasing aggression of the Persians.
With his government firmly established, his foreign pol-
icy asserted, his subjects contented, the next step of Pisis-
tratus was to employ the superfluous energy of the citizens
in improving their city.

It was further in accordance with the taste of this
princely ruler, as later developments prove, to beautify
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 51

his realm with works of art of all kinds. Indeed, the
monumental history of Athens begins with the tyranny.
In whatever else Athens may have excelled between the
Homeric age and the age of the despots, however great
may have been her kings, like Codrus, or her lawgivers,
like Dracon, her art had certainly not kept pace with that
of the other states of Greece, though it had reached a
plane of development far higher than was supposed for
many years previous to the most recent discoveries upon
the Acropolis. Pisistratus seems to have appreciated the
backward position of Athens in this regard, and lost no
time in importing artists and works of art from the best
centers of his time. The islands of Samos and Chios,
much nearer the old art centers of Asia, had developed
schools of sculpture far in advance of the Attic school.
Paros and Aegina were making strides along artistic
lines. All these schools had advanced in technique and
the use of materials unknown in the ancient school
founded in Attica by the mythological Daedalus. Ar-
tisans were imported from all of these localities, and a
new school of art quickly sprang up in Athens, destined
in time to surpass them all.

But let us look at Athens as it stood in the beginning of
the sixth century, and restore in mind, as far as we may,
the city and its monuments as the new ruler found them.

For many centuries the architectural aspect of the city
of Pisistratus was absolutely forgotten. No data could
be derived from the ancient texts or from the remains
upon which one might build even a conjecture as to the
form of its temples or other buildings. But recent re-
search upon the Acropolis has brought to light frag-
ments, long hidden from the destroying hand of time,
from which it is possible to reconstruct the Athens of
the sixth century more perfectly than almost any other
52 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Greek city of that period. From the architectural frag-
ments, we may know that the Athenian architects had
not fallen so far behind in the race for perfection, and it
is easier to understand the marvelous rapidity with which
the Athenians reached their goal so soon after Pisis-
tratus’s time. From the sculptured bits we readily dis-
cover that the art of Daedalus was not lost upon the
Acropolis. From the few fragments of painted deco-
ration found here and there, it is evident that the old
fondness for richly hued plaster and pottery had not
died out.

 

Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia.

First and foremost upon the Acropolis stood the time-
honored temple of Athena, beside the ancient palace
which spread well over the northern and eastern quarters
of the rock, the accretion of many generations. Within
the limits of the palace, and inextricably connected with
it, was the most ancient temple of all—a threefold sanc-
tuary, sacred to Athena Polias, Poseidon, and Erech-
theus. Near by, upon the summit, we know not exactly
where, stood two, or perhaps three, other temples with
colonnaded porticos and sculptured pediments. About
these were grouped, even in this early day, a number of
ex-voto statues and other forms of votive offerings. A
large part of the remainder of the surface of the rock
was portioned off for the sanctuaries of divinities and
heroes who had no temples, with their altars and offer-
ings. Here were the sacred inclosure of Artemis Brau-
ronia and, beside the palace, the Pandrosium, shrine of
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS ae

the goddess of the dew. The grave of Cecrops was still
an honored spot. Among these temples and shrines the
sacred way wound up from the gate at the west to the
great altar just east of the temple of Athena. All were
inclosed within the great prehistoric wall, so ancient,
even then, that its foundation was considered superhu-
man, so strong that after hundreds of years of resistance
it needed no strengthening.

Since the old Homeric days, a new style of architec-
ture had sprung up on Greek soil, a style which grew up
-with Greece and became so identified with Hellas that
we have come to regard it as typical of Hellenic genius.
Tradition held that this kind of architecture had been
introduced by the Dorians, and it came to be known, in
later times, as the Doric style. No minute description of
this style is necessary for us here. The name brings be-
fore our eyes a stately portico of tapering, fluted col-
umns, set on a level stepped base, their simple swelling
capitals carrying massive beams of stone beneath a frieze
of square, sculptured slabs alternating with narrow
blocks, all surmounted by an overhanging cornice and a
simple triangular gable. This style was dignified and
simple from the first, but as time went on it took on
graces and refinements which gave it new beauty and
charm without changing its form. The earliest form
of the new style had been introduced into Athens long
before Pisistratus was born, and all of the temples of
his day, except that within the palace, were of the Doric
style.

A few years ago we had to reckon with but two tem-
ples of Athena upon the Acropolis—the Parthenon and the
Athena portion of the Erechtheum, both much later than
the time of Pisistratus; the latter, because it replaced the
most ancient shrine of Athena in Athens, was called the
old temple; but since the memorable discoveries of Dr.
54 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Do6rpfeld a third temple must be taken into account, a
temple of great antiquity, which provides us with another
shrine of Athena for the city of Pisistratus and another
old temple. And this is doubtless the sanctuary to which
the Greek writers applied that name. Between the Parthe-
non and the Erechtheum the excavations have disclosed
the well-defined remains of the foundations of a great
temple constructed of two distinct kinds of stone. The
whole plan has been made out, though none of the parts
of the superstructure remains in situ. The foundations
of the cella, the inclosed portion of the temple, were
found to be of cruder workmanship than the basement
of the peristyle or colonnade. The former was buiit
of the Acropolis rock, the latter of limestone brought
from quarries at the foot of Mount Hymettus. But this
is not all: in other diggings, on various sides of the
Acropolis, a great number of architectural fragments
have been brought to light—architrave blocks, triglyphs,
metopes, and pieces of cornice, besides drums and capi-
tals of columns, some in marble and some in poros stone,
many of them bearing traces of color.

Upon this mass of material the great archaeologist set
to work and, with patient study, evolved a complete his-
tory of a building which the eyes of man had not seen
for over two thousand years. The foundations, as we
have said, apparently belonged to two different periods
of building. The architectural fragments, too, when
pieced together, were evidently not all of the same age.
At this point the value of the minute study of details
became evident. One set of capitals was found to have
the line of the echinus, the curved portion, drawn al-
most straight up to the abacus, and rings cut on the
neck of the column, thus conforming to a type common
in the later sixth-century temples of Greece; while the
other set has a very flaring echinus and rings cut only
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 55

on the curve itself, like the capitals of some of the ear-
liest Greek temples known, which enterprising colonists
who had left Greece in the seventh century built in Sicily
and southern Italy. Nevertheless, these fragments, of dif-
ferent dates, had belonged to the same structure. The
older ones, all of poros stone, were parts of a very an-
cient temple, while the later details, some of poros stone
and some of marble, belonged to a restoration manifestly

 

Archaic Fragments found upon the Acropolis.

made under the direction of Pisistratus—a conclusion
reached by a comparison of these fragments with works
known to have been executed in his time in other parts
of Athens and at Eleusis.

Pisistratus, then, found upon the Acropolis a temple
of Athena in poros stone. How did this temple look
if the plan made out in the ruined foundation walls and
the older fragments of the superstructure belong to-
gether? From the plan, we should say that the building
had a porch at either end, which consisted either of four
free-standing columns or of two columns standing be-
tween the projecting walls of the cella; or, technically
speaking, was amphiprostyle-tetrastyle, like the temple
upon the Ilissus, or distyle-amphiantis, like that at Eleu-
sis, probably the latter. The archaic columns with their
flaring capitals, the architrave of which, with a fragment
56 THE STORY OF ATHENS

of its faenia, remains, and the triglyphs and cornice, all
in poros stone, were covered with a patena of stucco to
which a yellow stain was applied in the lower portions
and various bright hues in the details above.

The interior was divided by walls, and possibly by rows
of columns, into several chambers and aisles. Dorpfeld
conjectures that the easternmost compartment was di-
vided by two rows of columns into three aisles, and that
this was the cultus chamber of the sanctuary where the
sacred rites were performed. The western half, corre-
sponding to the opisthodomos in later temples, consisted
of a large, undivided compartment, upon which opened
two small, unlighted treasury chambers in the middle sec-
tion of the cella. Of the sculptured decorations we can
know little or nothing, but from the evidence borne by
the architectural fragments it is certain that the exterior,
at least, was bright with colored designs. Well-carved
lions’ heads, picked out in rich color, which served as
gargoyles at the cor-
ners of the roof, molded
cymas decorated with
painted designs of pal-
mettes and anthemions,
and string moldings
with patterns in color,
have been found upon
the Acropolis, but to
what temple they be-

 

Lion’s Head from the Cornice of the aie
Old Temple of Athena. longed it is hard to say.

That this was the hieka-

tompedon, the “hundred-foot” temple of the pre-Persian
inscription, can scarcely be doubted; that it was the great
temple of the Acropolis of Pisistratus’s time, second only
in age to the triple temple connected with the “goodly
house” of Homer, is absolutely certain. In this temple
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 57

Pisistratus paid his vows and sacrificed to Athena when
he ascended the Acropolis triumphant after his long
exile.

The still older temple which was replaced by the pres-
ent Erechtheum is of course irrecoverably lost. The spot
upon which it stood was hallowed by many sacred asso-
ciations, and when it was replaced by the present fourth-
century edifice it was necessarily completely removed.
It probably stood in its ancient form when Pisistratus
became tyrant of Athens, with the Pandrosium beside it,
and the tomb of Cecrops, the sacred olive tree, the altar
of Zeus Herkeios, and all the most ancient treasures of
Athens in its vicinity still intact.

The honor of discovering the site of the old Athena
temple belongs to Dr. Dorpfeld, but the praise of having
discovered the former existence of the other temples
which have already been mentioned is due properly to
the Greeks themselves, to M. Kavvadias, the director of
the Athenian school. The existence of the old temple
was hinted at, to say the least, in the texts, though it was
always confused with the Erechtheum; the two other
pre-Persian temples that have recently come to light are
not mentioned, nor is their existence even implied, in
ancient literature. Moreover, even now that the Acrop-
olis has been scraped clean to bed-rock in every quarter,
no remnants of temple foundations have been found other
than those already known.

That these temples existed is proved, and proved be-
yond the possibility of a doubt, by the discovery of two
sets of archaic pediment reliefs in the filling between the
natural rock and the fifth-century wall of the Acropolis
to the southeast of the Parthenon. That the four pedi-
ments form two sets is clear from a comparison of their
measurements, their style and technique. Each set may
be assumed to have adorned the tympanums of an amphi-
58 THE STORY OF ATHENS

prostyle, or two-porched temple. All are in poros stone,
treated with a patena, and brightly colored. They rep-
resent the most ancient pediment sculptures in existence,
and fix a date for the employment of sculpture in this
mode far earlier than was formerly admitted. Both are
much older than the time of Pisistratus, but were un-
doubtedly in existence and well preserved when he as-
sumed the tyranny.

The pair of reliefs which, from its lowness and the
crudeness of its execution, is judged to be the older,
measures about twenty-five feet in length, and stands a
little over three feet high. It might thus have belonged
to an amphiprostyle temple some thirty-five feet wide.
Where this temple stood it is now impossible to tell; pos-
sibly its site was where the Parthenon now stands. It is
also impossible to distinguish, among the archaic archi-
tectural fragments scattered along the south wall, those
which might have belonged to this temple. It was un-
doubtedly in the most archaic style, with low, stout col-
umns and swelling, broad capitals, highly colored. The
subjects of the pediment reliefs represent two of the la-
bors of Heracles, and for this reason the temple is conjec-
tured to have been sacred to this hero, who, at the time
of the building of the temple and the execution of the
reliefs, was worshiped with divine honors at Athens. At
a later time, when the Athenians began to consider them-
selves of purely Ionic origin, the worship of Theseus
supplanted that of Heracles, who was essentially a Doric
hero; but, before the time of Pisistratus, Heracles had
been quite as popular a divinity in Attica as in the Pelo-
ponnesus, and it is by no means an incredible thing that
the Athenians should have erected a temple in his honor
upon the sacred hill.

But to return to the pedimental sculptures. The first
two were executed in quite flat relief upon poros stone.
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 59

Each pediment is composed of six slabs, but the subject
is continuous and the figures often cover portions of two
slabs. The better preserved of the two groups repre-
sents the combat of Heracles with the Lernaean hydra,
a favorite subject of early black-figured vases. The hero
of the scene does not occupy the exact center of the
group, as was common in the later archaic pediment
sculptures, but, armed with breastplate, bow, and quiver,
advances from the left side of the middle toward the
right wing, which is filled with the writhing snake-like
coils of the hydra, whose many waving, hissing heads,
with mouths wide open, surge toward the combat. To
the left, behind Heracles, his faithful companion Iolaus

 

Archaic Pedimental Relief, Heracles and the Hydra.

mounts his chariot, drawn by two well-executed horses,
who bend their necks to sniff at the giant crab, which
Hera sent to aid the hydra, in the extreme angle of the
gable. The whole design is executed with wonderful free-
dom and in excellent proportions, and is quite remarkable
for archaic work. The scene is depicted precisely as it is
on early vases, although the sloping sides of the gable de-
manded a slight rearrangement at the ends. Even at this
early date the sculptor evinces that wonderful aptitude for
conforming groups of statuary to the triangular pediment
form, which the later work illustrates so well. In this
composition the horses, which must be represented as
facing the angle to conform to the accepted design on
vases, bow their heads toward the hideous crab-like mon-
ster and bring the lines of the group to the desired angle,
Contrary to the general rule for polychromatic schemes in
60 THE STORY OF ATHENS

early reliefs, the background of this pediment is not col-
ored. The nude portions of the two men are painted
in a color true to nature. Their hair, beard, and eyes are
black. The body of the hydra is painted a bright green,
while its open mouths are a fiery red. The accessories
of the picture—the shield of Heracles, the chariot, and
the horses—are treated in flat tones of red or reddish
brown. The companion relief has for its theme the fight
between Heracles and Triton, or the Old Man of the Sea,
another favorite subject for vase-painting and used as an
architectural decoration in the frieze of the temple of
Assos. This subject is cleverly chosen in the present
instance; for what other group could so well match the
struggle of the hero with the serpent coils of the hydra
as his encounter with the snaky form of the great fish
monster? The slabs are much broken and defaced, but
the group is easily made out. Heracles, in the attitude
characteristic of this theme, has thrown himself upon the
body of the sea monster and has his left arm around the
monster’s neck; with his right he clasps his other hand,
and prepares thus to crush out the life of his adversary.
Triton strikes out but feebly with one hand, and stretches
the other in supplication to the god or gods, who may
easily be restored in our minds, and who were doubtless
represented in the missing portions of the group, which
occupied the left wing of the gable. The execution of
this relief, the proportions and action, the figures, and
the polychromy are all similar to that which belonged to
the opposite gable.

The second temple, whose pre-Persian existence is
known only from the discovery of its gable sculptures,
is no more easily located than the former. Its archi-
tectural form is no more easily determined, but we may
safely conjecture that it had a porch at either end, and
was somewhat larger than that which we have called
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 61

the Heracleum, because its pediments were a little broader.
The subjects of this pair of reliefs are not so clear an
index to the cultus of the temple which they adorned as
are the others. One of them represents a labor of Hera-
cles—a reproduction, in fact, of the second of the Hera-
cleum pediments; the other, a combat 1n which Zeus and
his earth-born son, the great Doric hero, make onslaught
upon the vulcanic forces of nature, represented in the

 

Archaic Pedimental Sculptures, Heracles and the Old Man of the Sea.

triple-bodied Typhon. It has been suggested, in view of
the presence of Zeus in one gable, that the temple may
have been sacred to Zeus Polieus, who we know had
a shrine upon the Acropolis; yet the reliefs may have be-
longed to the old temple of Athena. Here again the re-
liefs are in poros stone, but are executed almost in the
round. In the first of them the combatants and spectators
are preserved, at least in part. Heracles and the sea mon-
ster occupy the left wing of the pediment. The hero
braces himself with his right knee and foot upon the
ground, and grasps his enemy about the neck or chest.
The heads of both figures are lost, but the snaky body of
the Triton coils away toward the angle of the gable. In
the right wing stood a figure, man above and snake below,
holding in his hand an eagle—emblem of royalty. This
personage is doubtless no other than Cecrops, the autoch-
thonous father of the Athenians, represented as half ser-
pent to signify his earth-sprung origin. The life-size
62 THE STORY OF ATEENS

figure of Heracles is the most remarkable. It is a figure
from one of the early Doric black-figured vases of the
sixth century, executed in round sculpture. The massive
back, the thick, muscular leg, small at the knee and
ankle, but swelling to heavy proportions in the thigh
and calf, are entirely like those early paintings. The
undulating body of the Triton heaves in massive folds.
Both figures, though so badly broken, are full of action
and physical force, well proportioned, and carefully com-
posed to fit the triangular shape of the gable.

 

Archaic Pedimental Sculptures, The Serpent Echidna.

Of the corresponding pediment little remains save the
marvelous figure of Typhon and fragments of Echidna,
his serpent spouse. His three busts, with their heads and
arms, are well preserved; the wings and coiling bodies,
uniting at last in one, are also sufficiently complete to
give us a perfect notion of the monster’s original appear-
ance. The first and second busts face almost directly the
center of the pediment; the second is set further forward
than the others; the third turns slightly to face the fore-
ground. One wing of the foremost is thrown to the
front, while that of the last drops down upon the body.
The left arm and hand of each are present, drawn up to
the breast, while the right arm of the central figure is
also shown, a little more elevated. All the heads are
similarly treated. All have long, crinkled hair and
pointed, curly beards. They wear that bland expres-
sion so characteristic of archaic works, with flat, wide-
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 63

open eyes very wide apart, and broad, smiling lips, sur-
mounted by curling mustaches. The chisel of the sculptor
has elaborated all the details with great minuteness,
depicting the curls of the hair and beard in a series of
elongated ringlets, and denoting the separate feathers
of the wings by means of delicate, regular, incised lines.
The foremost of these figures holds in his hand a frag-
ment serrated with wavy lines. This has been described
as a portion of a thunderbolt which the vulcanic monster

nth a

io It
pais

   
   

Archaic Pedimental Sculptures, The Typhon.

wielded. At first sight these figures are most suggestive
of the sculptures of the Assyrians, and the bland look, the
treatment of hair and beard are certainly full of Oriental
suggestion; but the modeling of the flesh parts, the free
and varied execution of the arms and hands, are much
more lifelike than the best Assyrian work, and much
nearer our Greek ideal.

In both groups the sculptor has done his utmost with
the tools and materials at his disposal. He has carried
out a familiar composition with remarkable freedom of
design and has executed the details with delicacy and
precision; but it remained for the painter to complete the
masterpiece. With his limited palette, upon which were
found red, blue, black, yellow, and green, besides a pe-
culiar brownish color, he has used all his skill to bring
out the force of the composition, rendering the human
64 AMEHD, (SIVOIR WY (OM AVINISUEINS)

figures more natural, the creations of fancy more terrible
and repulsive. Red and blue are his favorite colors.
These he employs upon the scaly body of the Triton.
Heracles’s body is painted a light red, which was doubt-
less meant for flesh color, and is, indeed, not far from
nature. Red and blue are used again upon the coils of
Typhon in three longitudinal bands, one of blue between
two of red. The bodies of Typhon are painted a reddish
hue, but the heads are treated in colors far from nature’s.
The hair and beards are a violent blue. The third figure
has been nicknamed ‘‘Bluebeard.”” The whites of the
eyes are yellow, and the iris a brilliant green; only the
eyebrows are given the black of nature, and the pupil is
picked out in black. It 1s, of course, difficult to bring
ourselves to see great beauty in sculpture so violently
colored; but when we take into consideration the bril-
liant polychromy of the buildings which it adorned and
the radiance of the sky under which they existed, we may
imagine that they were somewhat toned down, and that
the eye was not offended by their vividness as it may be
now in the subdued light of a museum.

 

Archaic Pedimental Sculptures, Bull and Lions.

One other archaic group in high relief of poros stone
remains. It may easily have belonged also to a temple
pediment. It is that which we see before us as we enter
the first room of the Acropolis museum, much restored
in plaster, but still showing a vigorous decorative com-
position. The theme is that of a powerful bull over-
come by two lions. Considerable portions of the bull
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 65

remain. Crushed to earth by the overpowering weight
of his devourers, he has fallen upon his knees in front;
one hind leg is doubled under his body, and the other,
with his tail, is dragged out behind by the claws of one
of the lions; his neck is bent in complete submission, the
head pressed to the ground, with staring eyes and half-
open mouth. Of the lions, only the massive paws and
powerful claws are in evidence. If the bodies of the
lions carried out the spirit seen in their tenacious claws
and compared favorably with the expression of the dying
bull, the composition must have been a very spirited one.
The design is indeed archaic, but well advanced in free-
dom and action. The artist shows powers of composition
and vigorous execution, rather than grace or delicacy
of treatment. Here are no longer the wild, impossible
designs in which the early Mycenaean artists treated the
same theme, nor the almost grotesque scene of the
Spata relief, with the long, waving horns of the bull,
and the wild, bulging eyes of the lion, but a highly
naturalistic picture full of well-expressed realism. No
one has ventured to place this relief, and no companion
for it has been discovered. It is on a large scale, and
doubtless adorned a temple of considerable magnitude.
It is not an unthinkable proposition that it may have he-
longed to the old temple of Athena, which Pisistratus
enlarged and beautified, and may have been discarded at
the time of Pisistratus’s renovation.

So much for the buildings and their sculptured en-
richments which Pisistratus found upon the Athenian
Acropolis when Athena “received him to her own abode.”
But it would be a mistake to think of the hill of Pallas
as crowned simply with an ancient palace and a number
of small, richly ornamented temples and girt about with
its massive cyclopean wall. The crest of the rock was

bedecked, even when the tyrant came, with a host of
5
66 THE STORY OF ATHENS

votive offerings. Its sacred avenue was lined with statues
of various sizes, some in stone, some in bronze, and doubt-
Jess many in highly painted wood. The three hundred
votive inscriptions, in letters dating from the first half
of the sixth century, cut upon statue bases which have
come to light upon the
Acropolis, are probably
only a very small num-
ber of the original early
inscriptions. Before the
time of Pisistratus the
greater number of stat-
ues was probably of
poros stone treated in
a manner somewhat sim-
ilar to the pediment re-
liefs though doubtless
with less freedom, con-
forming to the fixed
canon for votive of-
ferings—a rather stiff
and conventional canon
that obtained through-
out the sixth century
even in the advanced
archaic style under the
sons of Pisistratus. Only
one statue in marble has been found that can be cer-
tainly dated before the last quarter of the sixth century;
that is the well-known figure of the Moscophorus, or
calf-bearer—a votive statue, with an inscription, repre-
senting the donor of the er voto, in the rdle of “mas-
ter of the sacrifices,’ bearing the sacrificial victim
upon his shoulders to the altar of Athena. The name
of the giver of the statue, which should perpetuate his

 

The Moscophorus.

 
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 67

pious act to all generations, as the inscription says,
was Combus, son of Pales. The letters date from a
period anterior to 550 B.c.; the material is the blue-gray
marble of Hymettus, proving that this indigenous me-
dium was employed by sculptors even before the begin-
ning of the tyranny. The figure is well wrought, though
the new material must have offered strong resistance to
the chisel of the sculptor. The legs are destroyed, but the
body and arms, which grasp the legs of the young bull,
are strongly molded, with muscles well expressed in the
technique employed for softer stone. A strange sort of
garment, which clings to the figure, is an interesting point
about this, perhaps the earliest statue in native marble
preserved to us on the Acropolis. A mantle seems to
have covered the shoulders, falling down on either side
of the legs, leaving the fore parts of the body nude. The
whole design depended largely upon the painter for com-
plete expression, and the surface is beautifully finished
for the work of the brush, which must have made the
statue and its fellows, which are no more, a very effec-
tive embellishment of the sacred inclosure.

The cupidity of man has swept away all signs of the
sculptures in bronze that adorned the Acropolis of this
early day, and the statues in wood were either burned
by the barbarians or have long since returned to the ele-
ments; but the inscribed bases are a sufficient index to
the great collection of statues which graced the shrines
and the borders of the sacred way. Our picture of the
Acropolis of Pisistratus, then, must include not only the
group of heavy, brightly colored archaic temples, its
smaller shrines and altars garlanded with sacred em-
blems, but also a host of gaily tinted statues, the pious
gifts of generations of Athena’s devotees, standing guard
along the sacred way and grouped about the great altar
and the steps of the temples. Through this forest of
68 ANHUE, SAROIRA? (Ola) ZMINEUEINGS

stately archaic figures beaming with their ever-present
smile, after his repeated exiles, after struggles and re-
verses, at last triumphant, the man of the century was
borne, while the walls of the temples echoed back the wel-

5

{ie
nL

   

 

The Areopagus.

coming cry, “Athenians, receive Pisistratus, whom your
Athena has honored above all men.”

But what of the city outside the ancient Pelargikon,
the Asty that had grown up about the foot of the Acrop-
olis rock since the far-off time of Theseus? In front of
the gates, almost joined to the Acropolis by the cyclopean
outworks, the rock of the Areopagus was still, as it had
been for centuries, the great seat of criminal justice—the
avenging court of the Eumenides, whom the people called
by this euphemistic title, “the gracious,’ because they
feared to call them by their real name. The steps which
were cut in the rock and led up to the summit from two
sides are certainly older than the sixth century. Across
the narrow valley still further to the west, on the eastern
slope of the low ridge between the Museum and Nym-
pheum hills, stood the ancient Pnyx, the scene of the
early public assemblies, the theater of great historical
events, where Dracon gave laws to the early Athenians.
where Solon harangued the people with orations and
poetical compositions when he would dissuade them from
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 69

following Pisistratus. This earliest of parliament houses,
which contained the famous bema, or speaking platform,
sacred to the Athenians as was the rostrum to the later
Romans, was long a subject of archaeological controversy.
The place of assembly was sacred to the gods, just as
the theater was, and had its altar. There was, moreover,
a distinct resemblance in form between the place of as-
sembly and the ancient theater. The remains now pretty
generally accepted to be those of the ancient Pnyx and
Bema fulfil precisely the requirements of the ancient de-
scriptions, none of which are especially early. To begin
with the Bema, we have, first, a high, perpendicular wall
scarped down in the natural rock at the crest of the hill.
This is not in a continuous line, but on two lines forming
a very obtuse angle. At the center a broad, cubical block,
like an altar, with steps leading up on three sides to
the narrow platform about it, stands out from the wall.
This is also cut from the living rock. Behind the altar

 

The Pnyx, from the Areopagus.

and above it, at the top of the wall, three rows of seats
are hewn out. These have been recognized as the places
of the Prytanes, who are known to have sat facing the
people. Behind these may be traced the remains of a
70 THE STORY OF ATHENS

heavy polygonal wall, which extended the full length of
the terrace, set a little back from the edge. To the rear
of this again, on axis with the Bema, are the foundations
of a second great altar.

The place for the people is, at first sight, less readily
recognized, but a closer examination of the remains and
the exercise of a little archaeological imagination will
serve to restore a complete artificial koilon. From one
end to the other of the rock-cut wall, a heavy polygonal
wall may easily be traced, sweeping in a broad curve,
deeper than a semicircle, toward the Areopagus. This
forms the outer boundary of the koilon, but just here is
the crux, for the ground, instead of sloping up from the
Bema, as in a theater, falls quite steeply toward the re-
mains of the great outer wall. Of course, such a dispo-
sition of the ground would have been absolutely unsuited
for the purposes of an audience, for the sound of the
voice of the orators would rise and be lost. And why
should the Athenians have chosen such a location, where

  

HgR HH
a seven i a

    

The Bema.

the natural conditions were the reverse of the require-
ments? We may easily imagine that at the earliest period,
when the assemblies were small, there was enough level
space at the top to accommodate all the people; that this
spot, sacred to the special divinity of assemblies, was
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 71

so hallowed by associations that the later Athenians could
not move to a place better suited to accommodate the
growing population. So, to make up for the natural
deficiencies of the site, the great wall was built, much
higher of course originally, and the intervening space was

 

Retaining-wall of the Pnyx.

filled up so high that the ground sloped upward from the
Bema to its summit. This sloping surface was probably
not provided with seats, but was “arranged according
to antique simplicity, not with the complexity of a thea-
ter,” as Pollux says. The people, then, arranged them-
selves upon the sloping ground and looked downward
upon the Bema, where the orators, standing, faced the
sacred hill. The sustaining wall was not “Pelasgic,” but
belonged to an early Hellenic period. Some of its blocks
are of enormous dimensions, and all are carefully dressed
on the edges. When the wall had its full height, the
assembly sitting at the top of the koilon seemed to the
people below, or across the valley upon the Acropolis, to
be perching upon the rocks, as they are described in
ancient literature.

To the north of the Acropolis, we know not exactly
where, stood the ancient Prytaneum, founded by royal
72 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Theseus and perpetuated by the democratic Athenians.
Here lived the chief archon, and here the ambassadors
of foreign states were entertained at public cost.

Further west, on the northern slope of the Acropolis,
was the ancient sanctuary of Theseus, where the Council
of Five Hundred occasionally met, and where the Thes-
mothetae annually presided at certain elections. Here
Pisistratus, once at least, addressed an assembly of the
people.

In the same neighborhood was the Anaceum, or sanc-
tuary of the Dioscuri, for after their visit to Athens the
twin brothers were worshiped with heroic honors by the
people. It stood just below the Agraulium, which we
know was situated at the foot of the northern wall of the
Acropolis, where Agraulos, the daughter of Cecrops,
leaped down—that is, as near as we can place it. On the
same slope, between the northwestern foot of the Acropolis
and the Areopagus, the Metroon, the shrine of the mother
of the gods, embraced a considerable area. On the other
side of the Areopagus was the Eleusinium, where parts
of the sacred mysteries of Eleusis were performed. Fur-
ther toward the east lay the Diogeneum, and somewhere
on the north or east of the Acropolis, we know not ex-
actly where, still stood the Delphinium which Aegeus, the
father of Theseus, founded in the dim ages of early
Ionian Athens, and where Theseus sacrificed the Mara-
thonian bull. Near the market was the Lanaeum, where
one of the festivals of Dionysus was celebrated, and where
a large circle of stone was built at a very early period
for the dancing of choruses. :

Thus we see at once that Athens, at the middle of
the sixth century, did not lack for holy places. The
sanctuaries of divinities and heroes had begun to multi-
ply from the distant days of Cecrops, and the Athenians
seem not to have been contented with consecrating a
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 73

single sanctuary for some of their divinities. There
were at least two precincts of Dionysus within the Asty
—the Lanaeum and the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleu-
thereus—and, under Pisistratus, two to Apollo and two
to Zeus Olympios, for in the most ancient times there
was a precinct of the Olympian Zeus, below the north
wall of the Acropolis near the cave of Apollo, where
Deucalion had built one of the most ancient shrines in
Athenian tradition. Not far away, probably in connec-
tion with the cave of Apollo, where the god met Creusa,
was the ancient Pythium, the sacred precinct of Apollo;
from the altar of Zeus Astrapaios, above this precinct, the
watchers used to look toward Harma for the flashes of
lightning which were the signal from the great shrine
of Apollo at Delphi.

Beyond the limits of the town, to the east near the
Ilyssus, was another important precinct of Apollo—the
Lyceum—and across the river, on a beautiful hill called
Helicon, a sanctuary of Huntress Artemis, with an altar
to Heliconian Poseidon. Even at this early day the men
of Athens must have been “‘very religious.”

The Athenians had long ceased to live upon the
Acropolis when Pisistratus took up his abode in soli-
tary state upon the sacred rock;—not wholly solitary,
though, for the priests and priestesses attached to the
several shrines and temples also had their abodes beside
Athena’s temples; but the people of all classes had, ages
before, moved their habitations down to the plain, where
water was more accessible, and where each family might
have its own vine and fig-tree—its own herd of goats,
perhaps. Athens had extended her power over all Attica,
and fear for safety no longer disturbed the settlers below
the frowning cliffs of the Acropolis. In the long period
between the age which Homer describes and the advent
of Pisistratus, when kingly sway had become a thing of

 
74 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the past and the nobles were the real power in the state,
it had become the fashion for the Eupatridae to live in
the country in the neighborhood of Athens, where they
had extensive villas, with all the luxuries of suburban
life. This was the condition at the time of Hesiod, who
describes this class of nobles as going to town only upon
urgent business. Political officials, however, whose duties
might require their constant presence in town, trades-
men, craftsmen, and artisans would naturally live within
the city limits. Between the Pnyx hill and the Areop-
agus, at a very early period, a domestic settlement had
sprung up, which by the time of the tyrant had become
a veritable town, with narrow, crooked streets which
even in ruins remind one strongly of a modern Euro-
pean village. This district has only lately been unearthed.
The remains are chiefly of house walls, in which may be
traced the plan of the early domestic abode of the Athe-
nians. The walls.themselves are made of stone laid in
the styles of ‘different periods, from the earliest polygonal
to a highly developed quadrated work. They are sel-
dom over five or six feet in height, and quite level at the
top, indicating that the upper portions of the walls were
made of sun-dried brick (which has long since disin-
tegrated ), a fashion which has been perpetuated in Greece
to this day. A doorway, sometimes with marble sill
and jambs, opens upon the street; within are rooms of
fair size, often grouped about an open court. The floors
are sometimes of pebbled plaster, sometimes of large peb-
bles fitted together in mosaic form; again, they are of
ordinary mosaic. The walls inside were covered with
plaster and painted, as the remnants prove. They often
show several layers of plaster and designs of widely dif-
ferent ages. Many of the houses are provided with deep
wells stoned up with polygonal masonry, and nearly all
have convenient cisterns and granaries in the form of
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 75

great earthenware jars buried to their small necks in the
soil. Many of these are perfectly preserved.

In the wider streets are public wells of great depth,
covered by stone slabs, with small apertures, the necks of
which are well furrowed by the ropes which for centuries
have drawn the dripping buckets from their cool depths.
Some of these are again in use. A breath of life is given
to this city of the dead when an Athenian woman is seen
wandering through the ancient streets to fill her jar with
water from a well out of which Solon, descending from
a stormy tirade upon the Pnyx, may have quenched his
thirst. The household altars, the fragments of columns
and marble moldings, which are seen on all sides, belong
to a much later era, and, with the mosaics and more
recent painted wall patterns, indicate that this residential
portion of Athens was occupied for many generations
after the day of Pisistratus. But the bottom of the val-
ley soon found itself too crowded, and the houses began
to spread up the slopes of the Areopagus and the Museum
hill. Chambers were excavated at different levels in the
slanting rock, leaving narrow, natural partitions between
them; then, as the sides were not high enough, a wall
of stone or brick was added to the natural wall, stairs
were cut to connect different levels, and probably to con-
nect stories. At intervals in the streets, curving exedras
have been found, also hewn out, where the wayfarer
might rest, where the philosopher might lecture to his
disciples, or the rhapsodist read Homer to a group of
admirers.

In this narrow inhabited valley, where it opens to the
north below the Areopagus, lay the agora. It is not
possible to say when this early market-place was estab-
lished, but it is certain that at the time of the tyrant’s
usurpation it had become an important commercial and
forensic center. It was here that, in very ancient times,
76 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the industry of the potters developed so extensively as to
give to the whole district of the agora the name of Cera-
micus, which it retained throughout its history.

Great transformations had come over the city during
the centuries since the heroic days of Theseus and the
kings. The Acropolis was again the seat of the ruler—
not a crowned king, to be sure, but a tyrant who lived
in regal state. The homes of the citizens were no longer
crowded into the sacred inclosure, but clustered about
the base of the Acropolis. Beside the massive palace
built of huge uncut boulders, long and low and grim, there
stood upon the Acropolis a cluster of brightly colored tem-
ples with graceful porches surrounded with gaily painted
statues. The houses in the lower city were no longer
brown, thatched huts, but well-built houses, probably
whitewashed without and roofed with red-clay tiles.
Colonnades were common now, giving an open, airy ef-
fect to the market-place. Athens was no longer a primi-
tive village of semi-barbarous mountaineers, as it had
been at the beginning, nor yet the stronghold of a he-
roic prince, as it had been at the dawn of history, but
had become a modern city, with all the elements of a
highly developed metropolitan life, with its religious,
political, commercial, and artistic sides: the priest, the
statesman, the warrior, the artist, and the tradesman had
each his part to play; each had his own home, his friends,
his amusements.

If great changes had taken place in the monumental
aspect of Athens since the old Homeric days, equal modi-
fications certainly marked the social aspect of the citv.
These phases are nowhere better discovered than in the
tone of the literary products of the later age. The old
epic style of composition had been replaced by the lyrics
of a new school. The highly imaginative songs of the
Homeric poets were superseded by the personal poetry
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 77.

of Archilochus, Sappho, and Alcaeus. The poet no longer
dilates upon the deeds of gods and heroes, nor fashions
his lays to the luxurious pleasing of the ears of kings
and princesses, but tells an unvarnished tale of life—his
own life often—that gives a clear picture of his day.
He no longer sings for his bread in the banquet-halls
of princes, extolling the bravery of their ancestors. He
now addresses the people, his equals, face to face, and
reflects the doings of every-day life. We discern at
once a new social system with two distinct classes—the
rich and the poor—and the poems picture for us the op-
pression of the lower classes by the higher, and their
mutual hatred and distrust. But this is not all. The
nobles themselves are divided by factions—as yet the un-
born hope of the lower classes—and jealousies and party
strife are rife. Education had become a requisite in
the life of the citizen, for every free-born Athenian was
expected to take an active part in the affairs of the
city. The training of the youth was now a matter of
systematic regimen. At the age of six the Athenian boy
was torn from the nursery, where, with his little sisters,
he had played with toys not unlike the playthings of
modern children; was emancipated from the nurse’s sto-
ries of bogies and from the maternal sandal, and sent
to school, in charge of a watchful slave. Unlike the chil-
dren of Sparta, who, boys and girls alike, were consid-
ered the property of the state and subjected to the most
vigorous physical training, to the exclusion of their in-
tellectual education, the Athenian boys were trained ac-
cording to their fathers’ direction, the law insisting only
that they be taught to read and to swim. The girls
learned only what their mothers taught them. At school
the boy remained until sixteen, learning letters, music,
and gymnastics. The first included the three great rudi-
mentary branches; the second consisted usually in play-
78 THE STORY OF ATHENS

ing the lyre—the flute was sometimes taken up, but was
usually objected to because it distorted the face; the third
was always insisted upon as contributing not only to phy-
sical strength but also to physical beauty. When the youth
had learned to read, he was introduced to the poets.
Homer was the center of literary training, not only as a
compendium of useful knowledge, but also as a fountain
of religious information and moral guidance. When
school-days were over, the boy stood on the threshold of
manhood. The gymnasium was ready to receive him.
Here he indulged in healthful exercise, competing in vari-
ous games and in listening, if his tastes so led him, to the
learned discourses of older men. The sophists had not
yet appeared.

In the gymnasium the boys formed those stanch and
lifelong friendships that are the treasured products of
our modern university life, but there were certain phases
of their devotion to one another which are in amusing
contrast to our boyish friendships. They loved with a
passionate ardor that is known only under southern skies,
and their jealousies were as ardent as their loves. As
hero-worshipers they went much further than we do;
for everybody, men and boys alike, of every rank and
age, paid court to the best athlete of the hour or the
leading beauty of his class. We have a pathetic picture
of Athenian hero-worship carried to its extreme in the
story of two boys—Meletus and Timagoras. Meletus
was well born, and the son of a wealthy father, but shy
and not particularly conspicuous for beauty or athletic
prowess. In the academy he met Timagoras, the prize
athlete and the foremost beauty of his gymnasium. Mele-
tus wanted to know the favored youth, and strove mod-
estly to win his affection. One day he brought to the
gymnasium a beautiful pair of game-cocks, the pride of
his heart, and offered them as a present to Timagoras.
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 79

The proffered gift was carelessly rejected, and poor little
Meletus’s soul was so sorely wounded that he went
straightway up to the Acropolis and leaped to his death.
Timagoras’s heart was not of stone, and when he heard
of what had happened he took up the rejected present
and followed his devoted friend. The Athenians found
their bruised bodies lying side by side among the rocks,
and in memory of their devotion set up, by the shady
entrance of the gymnasium, an altar of “Love Returned”
and a statue of a boy holding two game-cocks.

When the eighteenth year had passed, the youth was
reckoned among the epheboi, and began the serious part
of his education which was to fit him for a soldier and
a citizen. His eighteenth birthday was both a solemn
and a festive occasion. The celebration of the day began
with a drink-offering to Heracles; then the youth’s hair
was cut, and the locks dedicated to Apollo. After these
ceremonies, he entertained his friends with feasting and
with wine. He was then examined as to his physical
condition and as to his rights to become a citizen. The
examination passed, he was enrolled with his tribe and,
armed with spear and shield, was presented to the assem-
bly of the people. Next in order came the dedication of a
cup in the sanctuary of Agraulos, where the solemn oath
was taken, after which he was a full-fledged ephebos. The
next year was spent at hard work in the gymnasium,
and then, clad in chlamys and petasos, he took up his arms
and served his country, for one year more, as a frontier
guardsman.

The religious attitude of Athens has greatly altered
since Homer’s day. In place of the low polytheism of
the rhapsodists, with its hierarchy of immoral, vacillat-
ing, selfish divinities, with more weaknesses than their
human subjects, the lyric poets reverence an impersonal
deity whose sway, though inscrutable, is all-powerful.
80 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Life is treated in a very different vein—in fact, the lyri-
cists, without the remotest intention of being so, are of a
decidedly philosophical turn of mind, mediating between
faith and rationalism, and their works paved the way
for the teachings of Anaxagoras and Plato. The ethics
of their time are in a sense loftier, more practical, and
far better suited to the development of character than
those illustrated in the epics. They still approve selfish-
ness and deceit, and their views of personal bravery are
even less exalted, but love with them is an entirely differ-
ent sentiment. The love of the Homeric hero, like that
of the Olympian gods, was little more than an animal
passion, though we find something a little different in
the attachment of Achilles for Patroclus, and in the
homely devotion between Hector and Andromache; but
in the lyric age a high-minded, unselfish, manly attach-
ment between men and between the opposite sexes is com-
mon, and for this reason the position of woman is ele-
vated. The position of queens and princesses in the epics
—like Clytaemnestra, Helen, and Arete—is of course by
no means secluded, and we find them taking a prominent
and dignified place in the-social life of the court; but this
situation can hardly be considered as applying to women
of all classes, especially where Asiatic influence was
strong. But in the time of Sappho, woman often seems
to have been counted the equal of man just as far as
she chose to be, particularly in the rdle of poet or teacher.
The virtuous and modest gentlewoman is lauded by the
lyricists; equally, too, the tidy and frugal housewife of
the middle class, whose household duties demand of her
a share of homely work.

The manners of the day appear to have softened much.
The Homeric feast, in which heavy eating, to the music
of the rhapsodists, seems to have been the chief feature, is
replaced by a lighter banquet, accompanied by intelligent
ATHENS OF PISISTRATUS 81

and brilliant conversation. Drunkenness was ever an
offense to Greek taste. Bacchus in the company of three
nymphs—wine with three parts of water—was held to be
the suitable potation for conviviality at all Greek ban-
quets. Hospitality, which was looked upon as an obli-
gation in the heroic age, is deemed a privilege in the
period just preceding the tyranny, when, as Herodotus
tells us, the elder Miltiades, who was ‘“‘a man of great
importance, being of a house that kept a four-in-hand,”
sat at his door, and seeing the Doloncian envoys coming
by, dressed in foreign garb, called out to them and of-
fered them lodging and good cheer.

The poetical works of Solon, the great lawgiver, which
are known only in fragments, are illustrative of most of
these social tendencies. Solon understood well the social
and economic conditions of his day; he clearly saw that the
state of affairs at Athens could not go on; he deprecated
the insolent attitude of the nobles and the sufferings of
the poor; he had done much to ameliorate the condition
of the lower classes, and his immortal laws were designed
not only to rebuke crime, but also to bring about social re-
form. But though Solon’s laws,and the constitution as in-
terpreted by him were theoretically perfect and admirably
calculated to transform Athens and make her a power in
Greece, as she could never become while torn by dissen-
sions between the classes and within the classes them-
selves, they were impracticable under the existing condi-
tions, and it was impossible to enforce them. There is a
grain of good sense in the criticism of Solon’s contempo-
raries when they taunted him for not seizing the tyranny.
However good, however simple laws may be, they need
a powerful hand to enforce them in a community to
which they are a novelty. “A free constitution,” as
Mahaffy says, “is perfectly absurd, if the opinion of the

majority is incompetent,” and the Athenian community
6
82 THE STORY OF ATHENS

was worse than incompetent. Whatever our opinions of
despotism to-day, all must recognize that until a nation
is educated by long experience to systematic government,
it needs a firm and resolute hand—a single hand—upon
the helm of state.

When Solon modestly refused to take the helm and
to make the constitution a real governing force, Pisis-
tratus, doubtless not wholly moved by patriotism, came
forward with readiness to take his place,—and this is not
an idle expression, for Pisistratus did take Solon’s place
as far as it was possible for one man to take the place of
another in such a case. Appreciating fully the value of
Solon’s theories, the tyrant extended the constitution of
the great lawgiver to its ultimate possibilities under the
existing conditions, and enforced his laws with an im-
partial hand. The effect was almost instantaneous: the
nobles ceased their quarreling, the lower class was pro-
tected against their rapacity, the poor were encouraged
and materially helped. Solon, who, despite his bitter
opposition to the theory of despotism, was allowed to
remain at Athens and enjoy the fruits of his enforced
constitution, must have acknowledged in his heart, at
least, the wisdom of Pisistratus’s rule, and have softened
his extreme bitterness toward the tyrant.

 

 
IV

ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE

‘‘O bright and famous Athens,
Pillar of Greece !"’
PINDAR.

HAVING taken a glimpse of Athens as the city
(RY stood at the middle of the sixth century,
a) when Pisistratus made himself tyrant, let us
KS '§ now survey the period of the tyranny, and

look at the city as it was at the end of the
century, improved by the public works
and embellished with the works of art
The Tyrannicides, from Which Pisistratus and his sons under-

a Coin of Athens.

took.

A renaissance in literature and art, one might almost
say, was the direct and immediate result of the change of
government at Athens. Poets from all parts of Greece,
from Ionia and the islands, were received at the Athe-
nian court. The literary products of past centuries were
revived. The songs of Homer, existing only in dis-
jointed fragments, were collected and written in con-
secutive form under the direction of the tyrant. Dramatic
entertainments were introduced, and music was culti-
vated.

Art began to flourish in many forms; the painting of
vases revived in new and beautiful styles; and the new
coinage was placed in the hands of artists and appeared
with the head of Athena on one side and her sacred owl
on the reverse. These were the earliest coins of Athens
to bear the image of the patron goddess.

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ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 85

Sculptors flocked from all the flourishing plastic schools
of the Greek world to carry out the designs of the new
rulers for the enrichment of their capital, while archi-
tects labored to externalize their colossal schemes for re-
building the ancient city of Theseus. These great works
were not only undertaken upon the Acropolis itself, but
were extended over the entire city round about, and even
to Piraeus and Eleusis on the seaward confines of the
Attic plain.

We may take it for granted that the first work of reno-
vation instituted by Pisistratus was the remodeling of
Athena’s temple. It was natural that, after his restora-
tion to power by the goddess, after having publicly ac-
knowledged his indebtedness to Athena and giving her
the position of honor in his triumph, he should repay
his debt of gratitude by adding new beauty to her an-
cient shrine.

The old temple of Pisistratus’s time, as we have seen,
was of the form known as distyle-amphiantis, without
a peristyle. Its cella walls were undoubtedly of stone.
The structure was raised upon a stylobate of but one
step. It was probably not unlike the other temples of its
time upon the Acropolis. The new tyrant’s desire was
to make the temple of the patron deity the largest and
richest in Athens—to place it beyond the possible rivalry
of her neighbors.

The fashion of having the temple cella surrounded
with a colonnade, or peristyle, had come very much
into vogue throughout the Greek world during the past
century, and Pisistratus, who was presumably prevented
by popular sentiment and priestly veneration for the time-
honored edifice from completely rebuilding it, or from
erecting another structure upon a new site, devised the
plan of surrounding the old cella and its porticos with a
rich outer colonnade. Just how much of the original
86 THE STORY OF ATHENS

structure was spared it is of course impossible to say,
but we may conjecture that the alterations covered only
the roof and such portions of the entablature as were to
be architecturally connected with the new peristyle,
which was elevated upon a single step, like the Heraeum
at Olympia and other archaic temples.1_ At the south and
east the stylobate or base was laid upon the living rock;
but, as the ground sloped rapidly away at the opposite

 

Foundation Walls of Oid Temple of Athena, Later Erechtheum
in the Background.

angle, a heavy retaining wall was constructed to sup-
port it. This wall constitutes the most conspicuous por-
tion of the remains, rising directly before us as we enter
the Propylaea. It is constructed of Acropolis rock, well
built in horizontal courses, each laid in polygonal fash-
ion. The stylobate itself was of quadrated Piraeus lime-
stone. The colonnade consisted of six columns at either
end and twelve on either side, counting the corner col-
umn twice, of course. The columns were of the devel-
oped archaic type, with annuli upon the shaft below the
capital. The line of the echinus was drawn out at a

1 Prof. J. R. Wheeler has called my attention to the latest theory of Dr.
Dérpfeld, in which the old temple of Athena, of the time of Pisistr atus, is
given prostyle-tetrastyle porches, of the Tonic order, within the Doric peri-
style. In this latest reconstruction, the Triton and Typhon sculptures are
placed together in one of the pediments of the pre-Pisistratic temple, and

the ancient Tonic capitals upon the Acropolis, hitherto unplaced, are
accounted for
TENSOR TH PISISTRATIDAT 87

bold angle quite straight from the neck, and then curved
steeply up to the heavy abacus, as may be seen in the
fragments to be found along the south wall of the Acrop-
olis and shown in the drawing. The architrave was deep
and heavy; above it the triglyphs and metopes were fash-
ioned in excellent proportions. Up to this point all had
been of poros stone, but the metopes were made of white
marble, better to receive enrichment either by chisel or
brush. The cy- :;
mas, geisa, and i ie Ge
other upper :
moldings, with
the roof, seem
to have been
made of mar-
ble, these being
the portions
most expr sed Capitals from Pisistratus’s Peristyle.

to the weather ;

but the whole structure was colored, the poros parts upon
a preparation of stucco, so that the diversity of materials
was not noticeable.

In its enlarged and embellished form the old temple
of Athena was a dignified and beautiful monument, wor-
thy of the guardian goddess of the Athenians and credit-
able to the taste of her adoptive son. To complete the
dignity of the design and enrich the severe beauty of its
lines, in accordance with the common custom at Athens,
the gables were filled—one of them, at least—with elab-
orate sculptures. The subject chosen for the group, the
largest and finest of its day, we may readily believe, was
that scene in which the patron goddess first distinguished
herself after she had sprung full-armed from the head
of Zeus—the battle of the gods and giants. Naturally,
the particular moment of action should be that in which
Athena wins the laurels of her earliest title, when she

      
88 THE STORY OF ATHENS

has thrown the mighty form of Pallas upon the earth
and, grasping him by the hair, leans forward slightly,
with her spear poised high above her right shoulder, pre-
pared to drive it through the monstrous body of her ad-
versary. Fortunately, a sufficient number of articulate
fragments of this wonderful group have been found for
us to know that this was true, and Athena, in her death-
dealing attitude above the fallen giant, may still be seen
among the archaic sculptures of the Acropolis museum.

Like the other carved enrichments of the temple, the
pediment group was executed in marble—white marble,
imported from Paros—and, as is important to notice, in
the round. Four badly mutilated figures survive—those
of Athena and three giants. The first figure is unmis-
takable: the beautiful head, with close-fitting Attic hel-
met, bearing holes for the fastening on of metal orna-
ments; the characteristic aegis over the shoulders, with
its writhing serpent fringe; the warlike pose,—all speak
of the renowned goddess of war. The vanquished giant
sits upon the ground, with knees drawn up toward his
body, and struggles to defend himself with his arms
(which exist only in fragments). The head is missing.
The other giant figures, judging from their positions,
occupied the angles of the gable. Each is crouching
upon one knee, with the other massive leg and foot ex-
tended behind him bracing his body, and at the same
time pressing his mighty frame forward. The upper
parts of the bodies are scarcely more than mutilated tor-
sos. The arms were apparently stretched forward in
the struggle of combat. The head of one is sadly broken,
but the other is well placed upon the shoulders, over
which the crinkly hair falls in massive ringlets. The
ears are well executed, and the face, though mutilated,
shows a wide-open, fixed, staring eye.

All the figures, with the exception of Athena, though
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 89

executed in marble, show only slight advance over the
old sculptures in poros stone. The pose of the two
giants reproduces that of Heracles in the Triton pediment

 

Athena and the Giant Pallas, from the Pediment of the
Old Temple of Athena.

(see page 61), with which the artist was familiar, and
the anatomy and modeling of the flesh show little origi-
nality except in the treatment of the muscles of the ae
domen and about the knee. All the rest is in that smooth,
heavy, rounded style which had long been employed by
go THE STORY OF ATHENS

the successors of Daedalus. The pose of the giant Pallas
is somewhat more of an innovation, though the forward
twist of the upper part of the body is the same as that
employed by more ancient sculptors. Only in the figure
of Athena do we find a decided improvement in con-
ception as well as technique. Her pose is at once pow-
erful and free; far freer than that of much later repre-
sentations of divinities, even in the Aegina sculptures,
where Athena stands in a rigid, ungraceful attitude in
the exact center of the pediment. Here she stood in the
center of the group, it is true, but in action, bending for-
ward and a little te one side as she threatens her foe.
The face, though archaic with its placid smile, is full of
exultant expression; the lips, cheeks, and chin are beau-
tifully fashioned. Only the eyes are suggestive of the
more archaic heads, but these wide-open and prominent
orbs would have a far softer and more humane expres-
sion when seen, as intended, far above the line of
sight, at the top of the lofty gable. The drapery still falls
in archaic folds, but, like the aegis, is finely wrought.
The limbs, which are represented in the action of rapid
forward motion, are full of vigor, and the drapery here
shows some suggestion of the form beneath it. Although
the figure of Athena is in many technical respects supe-
rior to that in the Aegina pediment, neither this nor the
forms of the giants can be compared with the other
Aegina sculptures, with which they are so often com-
pared, for anatomical accuracy, suppleness of action, or
minuteness of detail. The flesh shows no sign of the
muscular system beneath it, and there is no evidence of
strength in their inert massiveness. With the fleshy por-
tions toned to a pinkish ivory, the hair, features, and the
drapery brought out in brighter contrast, the arms and
ornaments supplied in burnished metal, this group rep-
resented the beginnings of a new school of sculpture in
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE gI

Attica that, less than a century later, should ripen in the
great sculptures of the Parthenon.

With the temple of Athena practically renewed in its
outward form, with the new pediment sculptures in place,
Pisistratus could in no way further glorify the name of
his patron goddess in monuments of stone. Only one
other means of celebrating her fame remained: this was
in the festival by which the Athenians had long propi-
tiated her favor. At this time the Panathenaea, insti-
tuted in the far-off days of prehistoric heroes and en-
riched by Theseus, was an occasion of only a little more
pomp than the festal days of other divinities. Pisistratus
now resolved to make Athena’s festival outshine those

 

A Giant, from one of the Angles of the Pediment of the
Old Temple of Athena.

of the other gods, as did her temple. The importance
of the yearly games was greatly increased by the addi-
tion to the original equestrian events—the horse races
92 THE STORY OF ATHENS

and the chariot race—of a series of athletic contests which
included all the traditional events of the Olympian games.
The procession was elevated to the dignity of a splendid
pageant, the most important innovation being the introduc-
tion of a huge ship which, manned by youths and maidens
and garlanded with flowers, moved majestically, of its
own accord, along the line of the procession. The sail
which was flung to the breeze from the mast of this won-
derful vessel was formed of the sacred peplos, the presen-
tation of which to Athena Pisistratus had initiated as a
feature in the gorgeous carnival. Tradition and reli-
gious veneration forbade Pisistratus, whatever his artis-
tic instincts’ may have prompted, from substituting a
new statue in marble or in precious metals for the vener-
able xoanon, the primitive wooden statue of Athena,
which inhabited her shrine; but by covering its shapeless
and discolored form with the richest of embroidered gar-
ments, the defects of the old figure might be atoned for.
The making and presentation of this rich saffron-colored
garment, embroidered by Athenian dames and damsels
with scenes from the battle of the gods and giants, was
made a feature of each successive celebration of the Pan-
athenaic feast, and was perpetuated for many centuries.

The festival was inaugurated by the observance of the
sixteenth of Hekatombaion (July-August), the anni-
versary of the Synoecia, or union of the Attic demes
under Theseus. Soon after this date the great festival
commenced, culminating on the twenty-eighth of the
month, the birthday of Athena. A celebration was held
each year, but the grand Panathenaea was celebrated only
once in five years. About the twenty-fourth were held
the gymnastic contests and the athletic games which
Pisistratus had established. It is not known where
these took place; perhaps the plain to the south of the
Acropolis or the spacious field of the Lyceum may have
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 93

been the scene of that interesting spectacle. Running,
leaping, boxing, and a variety of other events formed
the basis of competition. In almost every event the
contestants were divided into three classes—boys, youths,
and men. The prizes were simple crowns of olive
leaves from Athena’s sacred tree and oil from her groves
of olive, in richly decorated amphorae, bearing on one
side an image of the goddess and on the reverse a figure
representative of the event—a runner, a jumper or a
pancratiast, as the case might be. These games may
have lasted two days; then came the trials of horses
and horsemanship, all kinds of equestrian events, of
which the chariot race was the chief. Again the prizes
were crowns of olive and amphorae of oil. The follow-
ing day was one of excitement for the youth of Athens,
for in the morning the riders in the coming procession
were chosen according to their height and personal beauty.
When this selection, which was called the ewandria, had
been made, the remainder of the day was given over to
the Pyrrhic dances, in which the young warriors took
part, wearing their helmet, sword, and shield, but other-
wise nude. Their evolutions were a rhythmical re-
production of the poses, passes, and thrusts of the
sword-fight, leaping, lunging, dodging, avoiding—all in
concert to music with well-marked time.

Hesychius tells us that the regular events of the cal-
endar were interspersed with dinner-parties and similar
functions of a purely social character, at which the Athe-
nian nobility entertained the ambassadors from foreign
states and other guests of distinction.

The eve of the twenty-eighth was spent in preparation
for the procession of the morrow. At dawn a vast con-
course could be seen gathering outside the Ceramicus,
gradually being marshaled into processional form by the
ten stewards who had been chosen at the last anniver-
94 THE STORY OF ATHENS

sary. By the middle of the morning the pageant began
to move, passing majestically through the Agora, de-
serted now by all except slaves and unimportant foreign-
ers, but luxuriant like a garden with garlands, boughs,
and flowers, with which the stately colonnades, the shops,
and the house fronts had been adorned.

Slowly they began the easy ascent toward the Acrop-
olis, passing through the Eleusinium, below the mighty
wall of the Pelargicon, until the first gate was entered.
Here the ascent became more steep, as the throng filled
the winding way between the walls, until the last gate
was reached. Then a halt was called as the first to enter
the ancient portal waited to offer sacrifice at the altar of
Athena Hygeia (Health Athena).

Let us pause just within the massive gate as the pro-
cession moves on again, and review the vast assemblage
as it enters the holy precinct. First come the victors in
the contests of the past great festival, wearing the faded
emblems of their prowess. The boys are quite men now,
and the youths are still broader chested and sturdier than
they were five years ago; only the men have not changed.
All doubtless have been partakers in this year’s contests,
and not a few are wearing fresh crowns of olive won in
a higher class. Next come the leaders of the sacrifices,
the xowmetc, gorgeous in their official robes. Now we
hear the trampling of hoofs, the champing of steeds, and
the horsemen enter, reining in their impetuous mounts.
Each man, in bright armor and plumed crest, wears a
richly colored mantle that unfolds gracefully in the soft
breeze. These are the advance-guard of the grave, erect
officers of the army, some of whom are scarred with
the battles of many campaigns, others fresh and buoyant
with the hope of campaigns to come. Then pass the
elders of the Athenians, the archons and legislators, the
chiefs of the people, gray-hearded, clad in long, white
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 95

robes. They bear long branches of gray-green olive with
unripe berries, small like the mistletoe. At the side of
each walks an attendant bearing a sacrificial basin.
After these come the women, not because of lesser dig-
nity, but in order that they might have a longer time to
prepare—the stately dames and maids of Athens—the
canephori, bearing upon their heads the baskets of sac-
rificial cakes, attended by foreign-born women, who, like
servants, bear the umbrella and stool of the Athenian
lady and are thus permitted to attend the great feast.
Finally the gates are crowded and the inclosure is
thronged as the host of unofficial citizens, marshaled ac-
cording to their tribes, marches through. When all are
at last within the gates a hush falls upon the expectant
multitude as the grand master of the sacrifices, standing
by the great altar, lifts his knife on high in token that
the ceremonial has begun. Then follow the sacrifices of
bulls and oxen, bloody, in our eyes, as all ancient blood
propitiations must have been. The hecatomb has been
prepared, a mighty column of smoke curls up from the
‘great altar toward the deep blue of the Athenian sky,
and is wafted out over the city in a gray cloud borne
on the gentle sea breeze toward the violet-colored hills.
A rich odor of burning flesh, mixed with the fragrance
of spices and flowers, pervades the sacred precinct and
is borne through the garlanded colonnade into the shrine
of the benign goddess. The nostrils of the venerable
Polias inhale the savors, the smiling lips seem to smile
more perceptibly, and Athena blesses her devoted people.
Then the priestesses come forth from the shrine, and,
upon the steps of the portico, receive the marvelous
peplos from the hands of the citizens. They return to
bestow one more favor upon the delighted goddess. The
garment of the last festival year is gently removed, and
the statue is now clothed in a robe even more beautiful
96 THE STORY OF ATHENS

than the last; for the Athenian women vied with one
another from year to year to surpass all former creations
of the loom and needle.

Darkness comes on; feasting follows the sacrifices.
As the evening advances, sweet strains of music are
heard floating across the Acropolis as the older priest-
esses chant their litanies:

Chant thanksgiving for Athena’s birth,
Chant her praises in the field of war,
Chant her bounty to life-giving earth,
Renowned, victorious, worshipped near and far.

Night wears on, and the strain is taken up in merrier
measure by the younger priestesses, who perform the sa-
ered Pannychis by songs and dances, robed in their quaint
attire. Midnight is passed, the note becomes deeper and
still more gay as the men and boys begin their choruses.
Thus the feast is prolonged with unabated zeal until
Phoebus in streaks of ashen pink pierces the gray above
Hymettus, and the dawn of another working day sends
the tired reveler to his home again.

The gable sculptures in marble were but a single phase
of growth and development of the art of sculpture which
sprang up at Athens under the rule of Pisistratus and
his sons. As we have said, marble was introduced as
a medium by the Attic school just before the time of the
tyranny. The native marble of Hymettus is the only
material of this sort which is known to have been em-
ployed. But with the influx of artists from foreign
schools, other materials, marbles better suited for the de-
velopment of the art, were introduced from the islands
where these schools had attained a finer technique, largely
through the influence of the mediums at their disposal.
The quarries of Paros produced the finest medium for
the chisel, and the island boasted of one of the most flour-
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 97

ishing schools of plastic art. Samos and Naxos were
her rivals. These and other islands of the archipelago
were closely allied with Ionia in art as well as tradition.
lonia, in turn, was in touch with the great art centers of
the East through the Persians and Phenicians, so that
with the advent of Ionian artists from the islands and
from the mainland a new
and lively influence was in-
troduced into Athens.
Among the earliest sculp-
tors mentioned as working
at Athens was Endoeus,
often called an Athenian,
though doubtless to be re-
garded as an Ionian in the
light of works ascribed to
his hand at Ephesus and
other cities of Ionia. En-
doios’s specialty seems to
have been seated female fig-
ures with abundant drapery,
a type specifically Ionian;
he is known to have exe-
cuted such a figure of Arte-
mis for the Ephesians and Seated Statue of Athena, Possibly
one of Athena Polias for the Be re ote adae ys.
Erythraeans of Asia Minor, and is reputed to have made
a seated statue of Athena for the Acropolis at Athens.
This statue was dedicated by Callias, son of Phianippus,
one of the chief opponents of Pisistratus. Many years
ago there was discovered in the debris at the north side
of the Acropolis an archaic seated statue, now in the
Acropolis museum, which, on account of its attributes,
could be taken for no other than the figure of Athena.
The pose, treatment, and probable age of this statue ful-
7

 
98 THE STORY (OF ATHENS

fil all the requirements of the case, and no objections
have been suggested to prevent its being assigned to
Endoeus; so, without further discussion, we shall call this
early specimen of Ionian art upon the Acropolis the work
of that famous sculptor. The marble is Parian. The
head of the figure is missing, and the.arms are badly
broken. The body is poised slightly forward; one foot
is drawn back, as if the figure were about to rise. A
heavy drapery falls from breast to feet ; over the shoulders
the aegis is plainly to be traced, and the Gorgon’s head,
though mutilated, may still be distinguished upon the
breast. The drapery falling over the limbs is rendered
light in texture by the use of wavy incised lines; it clings
to the form so as to show its contours. In this respect
the treatment is far in advance of that in the figure of
Athena which adorned the pediment of the great temple,
where only the faintest effort is made to disclose the form
beneath the folds of the drapery.

Another monument of foreign workmanship, which
represents a type of statue somewhat different from that
illustrated in the work of Endoeus, is to be seen in the
Acropolis museum, not far from the above seated statue
of Athena. This is a standing figure, executed in a pure
white crystalline marble, posed in a stiff archaic atti-
tude, and much mutilated above the breast. It is a female
figure, with long folds of drapery wrought in even, in-
cised lines and showing little of the form which it covers.
This statue, from its striking resemblance to the famous
statue called the “Hera of Samos,” is conjectured to have
been the work of a Samian artist, and was in all proba-
bility either imported in its finished state from that island
or executed at Athens by one of the immigrant artists.
For, from the inscribed bases, we know the names of
Samian sculptors who worked at Athens, and this may
have been the work of one of them. The texts, more-
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE — 99

over, and the inscribed bases have given us the names of a
goodly number of artists who came to Athens under the
patronage of the tyrants. Aristion of Paros, Callon and
Onatas of Aegina, Theodorus of Samos, Archermus of
Chios—some of whom have long been known from an-
cient literature, others known only from the bases—were
among the men who came to lay the foundations of the
future school of Attic sculpture that was soon to surpass
all other schools. The ateliers of Athens were filled with
eager students, and, during the short years of the tyranny,
turned out a host of sculptors who seem to have worked
prodigiously, if the remains of pre-Persian sculpture
found at Athens are an index of their productiveness.
Fifteen years ago practically nothing was known of the
productions of this wonderful period of art activity in
Athens. The Persians, it was believed, had swept every
trace of them forever from the eyes of man. But, as it
turned out, the Persians were largely responsible for the
preservation of a marvelous set of sculptures that carries
us back, with amazing reality, to the studios of Athens
at the end of the sixth century. I refer to the discoveries
of M. Cavvadias, made in 1886, that striking group of
sculptures called by the Germans by the affectionate title
of die Tanten.

When the barbarians sacked the city and devastated
the Acropolis, they found a little host of slender maidens,
daintily clad, with neatly plaited tresses and shining morn-
ing faces, standing in sweet silence about the shrines of
Athena. Figures of youthful priestesses they were, placed
there in memory of their service to the virgin goddess,
waiting with gifts in their hands, ever ready to do her
bidding. The soldiers of Xerxes ruthlessly threw these
gentle images from off their pedestals, tore their jewelry
from them, and mutilated their slender forms. When
the Athenians returned they found their little priestesses
100 THE STORY OF ATHENS

broken beyond repair. Carefully they took them up, and
tenderly they laid them in a deep grave between the Erech-
theum and the north wall of the Acropolis. Here they
have lain until the great archaeologist of the Greeks
brought their delicate forms
again to the light of day, with
all their archaic charm, radiant
with rich color, almost breath-
ing in lifelike beauty. The Per-
sians thus, by partially mutilat-
ing these charming _ statues,
caused them to be carefully
stowed away for more than two
thousand years, protected from
all decay, preserving their color
as it never could otherwise have
been preserved.

These little women are the
most convincing evidence of the
strong influence of the Ionian

 

RMB schools at Athens, reproducing
eee Stanelenihe in refined and highly developed
Xoanon Type. form that group of Chiote mar-

bles found at Delos. The pose,
the facial type, the costume, all are pervaded with an Ori-
ental softness which is suggestive only of Asiatic Greece.
The fourteen well-preserved figures present a sequence in
the matter of execution. That which is generally believed
to be the oldest preserves the xoanon form, while those
conjectured to be the latest are almost free enough from
archaic trammels to belong to the next century. Though
the “family resemblance” among them is very remark-
able, they exhibit the greatest variety of personal char-
acteristics in expression and pose and in matters of dress,
particularly for statues of a period which was hampered
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 101

by many conventions and limited to a comparatively
small number of types. All stand with their feet close
together, with heads erect, and eyes looking straight be-
fore them. Many of them hold the drapery free from
the feet by one hand, while the other was extended for-
ward from the elbow, holding some gift or emblem. The
hair is dressed in the most intricate scheme of plaits,
waves, and ringlets, showing the infinite patience of the
Athenian maid and the great love of the Athenian lady,
before the Periclean age, for elaborate head-dress. In
some cases crowns of metal were used to enhance the
beauty of the well-poised heads.

The costumes are elaborate and varied, the best illus-
trations extant of the cos-
tume of Grecian women
before the Persian wars.
The nether garment is in
every case the long Ionian
chiton, which falls from the
shoulders to the feet. It
seems to have been of
soft material, which clings
closely to the form. In
front it was enriched by a
vertical embroidered band
of fretted pattern. Over
this is usually worn the
chitonisque, a heavier gar-
ment, probably often of
wool and frequently with
sleeves. This was the gar-
ment worn for warmth.
It seldom falls below the thighs. It is represented in
these statues as of a crinkly material, like woolen, indi-
cated in wavy lines. The third piece in the Ionian toilet

 

Archaic Statue, with Himation.
102 THESSIORY OF ATHENS

was the himation, a sort of mantle worn for effect as well
as for protection. This was the robe in the wearing of
which the Grecian maiden had widest scope for the display
of her own taste. One of these little ladies wears hers
over her right shoulder, looped
across her breast, and passing un-
der her left arm. Its folds fall
gracefully over the right arm,
which is bent at the elbow, and
in regular plaits down over the
the breast and at the sides over
the hips. Another wears her
peplos (for so it may be called)
draped evenly over both shoul-
ders, while a third dispenses with
it altogether, and seems content
with a simple sleeved chitonisque
which shows off her stately form
to good advantage. In all except
the xoanon type the contours of
the limbs are well indicated in the
. ; treatment of the drapery, and the
Archaic Statue, without : ’ :

Himation. greatest differences exist in the
execution of the folds of the

drapery itself. But what an advance is marked at once
in the design and execution of these monuments of
the Renaissance under the Pisistratidae! What breadth
of idea, what grace of conception, what dexterity of
execution has the Athenian sculptor learned since Callias
dedicated the Moscophorus! With what art does he draw
the magnificent curves of back and shoulder, with what
skill does he pose the majestic head! What boldness he
has acquired to set the arm free in graceful pose to catch
up the filmy drapery! But one point bespeaks timidity—
the extended arm is always inserted as a separate piece
of marble, separately carved. And what a transforma-

 
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 103

tion is seen in the soft, harmonious polychromy, which
makes these figures unique in the world and has settled
forever the disputed question of the use of color upon
sculptures by the Greeks. Look at any one of these fig-
ures, and see how the master of the brush has empha-
sized the sculptor’s skill: the beautifully rounded cheek
and chin are rendered soft, warm, and flesh-like; the
blank white eyes become tender and full of expression;
the pale lips grow red and sensitive. The well-carved
drapery, falling in its conventional folds, is now em-
broidered with rich bands of colored patterns, and fig-
ures are picked out over the surface of the wavy peplos.
As has been already intimated, the crowns, the bracelets,
and the earrings are frequently executed in metal, and the
ends of the long ringlets were held in place by small
buttons of gold or silver, all of which have of course dis-
appeared. It is difficult to describe these marvelous crea-
tions and do them credit. One must see them to feel
their exquisite beauty, and I daresay that no one who has
seen them has been ‘disappointed.

But the sculptures of the new Attic school are not
fully represented by these purely Ionian types. There
was another influence at work in Athens—older even,
but less aggressive, perhaps, than the Ionian school—des-
tined to play a very important role in the future develop-
ment of Attic sculpture. This school, or collection of
schools, related to the Doric schools of the Peloponnesus,
was characterized by a type quite the counterpart of the
other—a type rather more robust, crude at first, but finally
ripening into the forms which evolved that wonderful
type known as the athletic prize statue. The subjects
are almost universally of virile type—young men stripped
for exercise, such types as competed in the periodical
games, the highest product of the palaestra and the gym-
nasiums. The nude male type is well known to have been
the characteristic product of the Peloponnesian schools
104 THE STORY OF ATHENS

of sculpture, and has been designated as specifically Do-
rian. Now Peloponnesian artists are known to have
worked at Athens under
Pisistratus, along with
the more advanced ex-
ponents of the Ionian
school. Gorgias of La-
conia and Aristocles,
who is believed to have
come from Sicyon, the
home of the greatest of
the old Dorian masters,
Ageladas, are known
from statue bases bear-
ing their names. Un-
fortunately, it was not
the lot of the virile
statues upon the Acrop-
olis to be tenderly laid
away by loving hands,
as were the little Tan-
ten. No complete sta-
tue of this type has been found at Athens, but frag-
ments and figures smaller than nature are abundant. By
means of these it is not difficult to trace the current of
Dorian influence that flowed side by side with the Ionian
stream at Athens about the year 525. The male heads
that have been discovered are plainly analogous to those
found in the Peloponnesus. The stalwart torsos and sta-
tuettes of athletic victors are all strongly Dorian, and ina
way more like the later ideal which we have come to con-
sider essentially Greek, than the products of the purely
Ionian artists. It is further interesting to note that the
figures of animals were especially studied by those Doric
sculptors. The horse, as executed by these artists and
preserved in fragments in the Acropolis museum, was a

 

Archaic Head, an Athlete.
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 105

marvel of spirited de-
sign. The type is well
known from a number
of designs upon a series
of famous Doric vases
of the time of Pisistra-
tus,—with head erect,
alert, full of fire, with
distended nostrils and
parted mouth. Of the
riders who rode _ these
gay little beasts to vic-
tory only the legs of
two remain. One figure
was apparently that of
aboy. His feet are shod

 

Fragment of an Archaic Equestrian Statue.

 

Archaic Equestrian Statue.

with close-fitting pink
shoes, and his limbs
are incased in party-
colored tights, giving
great antiquity to the
circus-rider’s costume
of our own day.

That a coalescence
took place between
these two influences,
coming from different
directions, 1s certain.
The type of each,
though preserved in-
tact for a time, is
plainly modified by
the influence of the
other. It seems to me
that this is nowhere
more perfectly illus-
106 THE STORY OF ATHENS

trated than in two of
the most famous of
the Tanten figures,
produced doubtless at
the very end of the
pre-Persian period.
These statues, it
would seem, though in
all respects following
the example of their
predecessors in points
of pose and demeanor,
are almost of a dif-
ferent race; the fa-
cial cast is absolutely
changed, the neck is
shorter, and the bod-
ily form more round-
Archaic Bust of the Later Type. ed, one might say
more athletic. The
Tonian maiden has certainly taken hints from her Dor-
ian cousin. As time advanced, we find artists trained
in one school abandoning the types and methods of that
school for those of the other, as in the case of An-
tenor, a young Athenian who is known to have made one
of the most majestic of the stately female statues. This
statue is well preserved, except the face. The base of
the statue has been found, and bears the inscription:
“Nearchos . . . has consecrated this to Athena.
Antenor son of Eumares made the statue.” The sculp-
tor, even in this early work, manifests a leaning toward
Doric robustness for his figures, but the statue is in all
respects a product of the insular schools. In after years,
as we shall see, Antenor produced the virile athletic form
with equal grace and ease, unfettered by sacerdotal con-
ventionalities.

 
ATHENS OF

Thus, under the pat-
ronage of Pisistratus
and his sons, were laid
the foundations of the
great Attic school of
sculpture, which soon
surpassed all the
schools of Greece.
The native Dorian ma-
terial, inwrought at
this time with the best
foreign elements, was
molded later by Phi-
dias to the highest per-
fection of form and
infused with spiritual
and intellectual grace
by Praxiteles.

 

Archaic Statue,
by Antenor.

THE PISISTRATIDAE _ 107

 

Archaic Bust of Later Type,
Showing Dorian Influence.

Extensive as were the embel-
lishments with which Pisistratus
adorned the Acropolis, the hill of
Pallas, where the worship of
Athena dominated all other cults,
was not the sole object of his at-
tention. The polytheism of the
Greeks in Athens, as in all the
states of Greece, demanded the
fitting worship of all the court
of Olympus. Temples or altars
sacred to Zeus, to the Pythian
Apollo, and doubtless to many
other deities existed at this time
in Athens, as we have seen; but
108 THE STORY OF ATHENS

all these were insignificant beside the shrine of Athena.
Pisistratus undertook to propitiate the favor of other di-
vinities by erecting a great altar to the twelve gods of
Olympus in the agora, and by dedicating a new sanc-
tuary for the Pythian Apollo beside the Ilissus. He
founded a gymnasium in the ancient precinct of Apollo
Lycéus, the first of the great institutions which were
to put Athens in the front rank at all athletic contests
and to train and foster the greatest philosophers and
literary men in Greece. He further erected a temple
to Dionysus in the precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus, im-
mediately to the south of the Acropolis, besides lay-
ing the foundations of a great temple to Zeus Olym-
pios on the banks of the Ilissus. The site of the Altar
of the Twelve Gods has not been fixed, for the agora
has as yet not been excavated, but the foundations of a
little temple are still i situ just in front of the Diony-
siac theater, and the substructure of the Olympieum of
Pisistratus has recently been brought to light not far
from the massive cluster of columns which marks the
site of the later temple of Zeus. Besides the substructure,
a number of huge column drums have been found below
the bases of the great standing columns of the later tem-
ple, which must have belonged to the first Olympieum
that was built for Pisistratus by his architects Antis-
tates, Callaeschrus, Antimachides, and Porinus, whose
names are given us by Vitruvius. It will never be known
how far the temple of Zeus was carried toward comple-
tion ; if finished, it must have been ruined during the Per-
sian wars, for ancient literature makes little mention of
its existence until several centuries later, when an entirely
new structure was begun. The foundations of the little
temple of Dionysus, which Pisistratus built, abut the
somewhat later stage buildings of the theater; the hard
Acropolis rock of which they are built and the clamps
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 109

which bind the blocks of stone together are a sufficient
indication of its pre-Persian origin. The temple was
dedicated to the Eleutheraean Dionysus and enshrined
a statue of the god.

Extensive public works for the improvement of the
town and the convenience of the citizens were also inau-
gurated by  Pisistratus
and carried on by his
sons, which made Athens
at the end of the sixth
century the most beauti-
ful and best ordered city
in the Greek world. The |
ancient agora was com-
pletely renewed and
cleared of the encum-
brances which centuries
had accumulated, and the
water of Callirrhoe, a
spring in the bed of the
Ilissus, was conducted by Aqueduct of the Enneacrunus.

a well-built aqueduct,

through the valley between the Pnyx and the Acropolis,
to the Ceramicus, or market-place. The water was distrib-
uted for public use in a fountain with nine pipes, called the
Enneacrunus. The name of this fountain was long a
mystery, and was a subject of much controversy among
archaeologists. It was supposed to be a separate spring,
like Clepsydra and Callirrhoe, but the most recent research
seems to have cleared up all doubt. The excavations in the
deep valley between the Acropolis and the Pnyx have re-
vealed an ancient conduit, partly cut in the rock and faced
with large quadrated blocks of Piraeic limestone. The
line of the aqueduct has been traced from the bed of the
Ilissus almost to the agora. There is also an early Athe-

 
110 THE STORY OF ATHENS

nian vase-painting that has thrown light upon the subject.
It represents a fountain with nine spouts, and an inscrip-
tion above the fountain reads, “Callirrhoe.” This and
other evidence seems to have proved that the Enneacru-
nus of the texts was not an independent source, but the
name of the fountain, or the aqueduct and fountain,
through which the water of Callirrhoe was brought from
its spring and distributed for public use in the heart of
the lower city.

The city, thus extended and beautified through the
untiring efforts of the tyrant, was filled with a curiously
mixed population. The number of true Athenians with
full rights of citizenship was comparatively small. There
were many Greeks from other states, drawn by the in-
creasing wealth and prosperity of the city, and a host of
foreigners, craftsmen and artisans, who plied their trades
to supply the increasing demands of the Athenians for
luxuries, besides a large number of slaves of many races.

Among the inhabitants of Athens during the tyranny
was a young itinerant actor, Thespis by name, a native
of one of the neighboring Attic demes. He appeared
soon after Pisistratus had assumed the tyranny, and
shortly after his arrival became famous for the innova-
tions and improvements which he introduced into the
old cyclic choruses and dances that were performed in
honor of the god Dionysus and constituted the dramatic
entertainments of the day. The early history of the
Greek drama is most obscure, and it is very difficult to
reconstruct the earliest dramatic productions in Athens;
but the dramatic art, like every other, was developed from
most primitive beginnings, by slow growth, through suc-
ceeding ages, with the development of Dionysiac worship.
Its origin was thus of a distinctly religious character.
No theater, of course, was required for these primitive
performances, which were produced by a chorus dancing
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 111

in a circle about which the audience grouped itself. The
chorus, a group of young men, clad in little but their
coarse tunics—or clothed, perhaps, in goatskins, with
painted faces, and with their long hair crowned with gar-
lands—danced, sung, and shouted in a merry revel, while
the simple crowd, representing all ages and conditions,
looked on in wonder, half devout and half laughing. To
them this was a religious ceremony; yet they could not
but be amused at the antics of the wild group of rev-
elers. It is not known where these entertainments were
given in Athens. Some of the classical writers infer that
they took place in the agora. Hesychius mentions an
orchestra in the market, ‘‘where the rhapsodists and harp-
ists contended before the theater was built.’’ Others state
expressly that performances were held in the Lanaeum,
one of the two sacred precincts of Dionysus.

When Thespis came to Athens the drama was in the
earliest stages of development. The Roman poet Horace
relates that the father of Greek drama journeyed to
Athens in a wagon, in which he was accustomed to travel
about Attica, reciting his own plays from this movable
stage. In Athens he was generally believed, by his suc-
cessors in the dramatic art, to have been the first to re-
lieve the chorus by the introduction, at intervals, of a
single actor, he himself taking the monologue parts.
For this purpose he invented a table or platform upon
which to raise the single speaker. This was the first ap-
pearance of the dramatic stage. The Athenians ascribed
also to Thespis the invention of the mask, by means of
which the actor was enabled to change quickly from one
impersonation to another. With these new departures
there was required, in addition to the dancing-place for
the chorus and the raised platform for the leader or
actor, a booth or tent, to and from which he could make
his exits and entrances and in which he could change his

 
112 THE STORY OF ATHENS

mask and costume; for we may believe that even in this
most primitive period of mise-en-scéne some attempt at
costume was made. Thus early in the history of the
Attic drama we may be sure of our orchestra, or dancing
circle, our logeion, or speaking-place, and our skene, the
earliest of the stage buildings. The skene, of course,
prevented the audience from arranging itself, as of old,
in a circle, as one third of the view was obstructed by it,
but from two thirds of the perimeter of the orchestra
the performance could be seen to advantage. This stage
and scene were of course temporary, probably portable,
since performances seem to have been given at different
places. Plato, in his ‘“‘Republic,’’ would not have tragic
actors set up their theaters in the market-place, and this
shows that this custom was a public nuisance in Athens
even after permanent theaters had been built. But great
periodical productions connected with the celebration
of the Dionysiac festivals, were doubtless held from an
early period within the Lanaeum and in the sanctuary
of Dionysus, where the present theater is. Whether
there was a temporary arrangement of seats on those
occasions, during the Thespian period of the drama, we
cannot say; but there must very soon have risen, like
steps, about the unobstructed two thirds of the orchestra,
tiers of benches from which equally good views of actor
and dancers could be had. These were necessarily at
first of wood and temporary. When raised seats were in-
vented, it was no longer necessary for the actor to stand
on an elevated stage, and it is probable that at this time
the platform was abandoned. In 535 B.c. Thespis inau-
gurated Greek tragedy in Athens; just ten years later,
Aeschylus was born.

Out on the Attic plain, six stadia from Athens, on the
banks of the Cephissus, was a wooded knoll, a favorite
resort of the people on warm summer afternoons when
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 113

the heat and dust of the city became unbearable. In very
ancient times this retreat, destined to become the nur-
sery of Greek poetry and philosophy, received the name
of the Academy. It was now chiefly a pleasure resort.
Hipparchus surrounded this place with a wall, and his
friends aided him in beautifying it. Charmus dedicated
an altar to Love beside the entrance, and others soon
followed in adding altars and statues to grace—

The olive grove of Academe
Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.

Charmus’s altar, which became a landmark, bore this
characteristic inscription: “To thee, O changing Love,
Charmus dedicates this altar, at the shady borders of
the gymnasium.” Near by was an altar of Prometheus,
at which in very early times the runners in the torch-race
kindled their torches.

Despite the prosperity and rapid growth of Athens
under the Pisistratidae, not all her citizens were con-
tented with the government. As at all times and in all
places the world over, there was now in Athens a class
of people who chafed under the concentration of power
in one man or one family. This seemed despotism to
them, whether the rule was despotic or not. After the
death of Pisistratus, in 527, his sons, Hippias and Hip-
parchus, administered the government with the same mod-
eration that had characterized the rule of their father;
the constitution and laws of Solon were upheld and en-
forced with impartiality. Hipparchus inherited the artis-
tic and literary tastes of his father, and patronized archi-
‘tects, sculptors, and poets, surrounding himself with men
of taste and letters. Under his patronage, Lasus of Her-

mione came to’ Athens and founded a school of lyric
8
114 THE STORY OF ATHENS

poetry. One of his pupils a few years later was a young
Theban, named Pindar, whose dithyrambs were soon to
be the delight of the Greek world. The lyricists Simon-
ides of Ceos and Anacreon of Teos, and Theognis, the
elegist of Megara, were also among the poets of the Athe-
nian court. Among the tragedians was Phrynichus, an
Athenian by birth, who won his first prize in 511. There
were doubtless many other tragic poets in Athens during
these years, preparing the way for the giants of the tragic
art who appeared within the next quarter of a century.
The sons of Pisistratus were proud men, born to the
purple, one might say, though both had shared the hard-
ships which their father suffered during the ten years
of his last exile. Among the disaffected party at Athens
were two young men named Harmodius and Aristogiton.
They were deeply attached to one another, and, idling
much about the market-place, listened to the plaintive
wail of the lyricists harping on oppression and misrule,
and were taught by the older wiseacre loafers to hate
their rulers, whom they came to regard as oppressors.
Harmodius was famous for his personal charm, and had
attracted the notice of the tyrant Hipparchus. He might
have become a member of the brilliant court had he chosen
to accept the overtures of the tyrant, but, with youthful
indifference bred of scorn, he coolly ignored the atten-
tions of his superior. Hipparchus, piqued at his rebuff
and burning with revenge, resolved to humble the youth,
and carried his plan into execution by declaring Har-
modius’s sister unworthy to act as basket-bearer in the
Panathenaic procession, an honor which might be con-
ferred upon any free-born Athenian maiden. Harmodius,
stung by the insult thus put upon his house, and urged on
by Aristogiton, who is said to have been jealous of the
tyrant’s interest in his companion, entered into a con-
spiracy with Aristogiton and others to rid Athens of the
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 115

imaginary oppression of her rulers. The end of the
month Hekatombaion, in the year 514, was drawing
nigh, and with it the festival rites of the Panathenaea.
The conspirators resolved to carry out their plot on the
day of the great procession, when the tyrants mingled
with the people more freely than ordinarily. Accord-
ingly, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, while the
grand cortége was being marshaled outside the agora,
the two youths appeared, like the other citizens, with twigs
of myrtle, but with short, sharp daggers concealed in
the leafy branches. When Hipparchus, busily engaged in
marshaling the archons and other dignitaries, entered the
agora, he scarcely noticed the two youths waiting there
in silence with their festive myrtle boughs. The pulses
of the two young conspirators leaped as the object of
their hatred came nearer, and in the excitement of the
moment they did not wait for the signal that.was to bring
the rest of the band to their assistance, but lunged for-
ward together, striking Hipparchus down with a few well-
directed thrusts. A turmoil instantly ensued, in which the
beautiful Harmodius received a mortal wound and his
friend was secured and bound by the guard. Hippias at
once, on hearing of his brother’s assassination, sought
refuge at one of the neighboring altars, and surrounded
himself with his most trusted guards. That no general
riot followed the murder would seem to show that the
conspirators were few and the disaffection confined to a
small number. In due time Aristogiton was put to the
torture to reveal the names of his accomplices, and named
some of Hippias’s closest friends, who, with the tyranni-
cide, were promptly put to death. From the moment of
the assassination the relation between the remaining ty-
rant and the people of Athens was radically altered. Hip-
pias, in constant terror for his life, became morose and
cruel. Still thirsting for revenge, he had a beautiful
116 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Athenian girl, the sweetheart of Harmodius, tortured
in order to force from her the names of others of her
lover’s accomplices. But Lanaea held her tongue, and
died under the hands of her torturers.

During the three years that followed, Hippias grew
more and more severe, more suspicious, and more cruel.
In this short time the name of “‘tyrant”’ took on the oppro-
brium in Athens which has clung to it through centu-
ries in all lands that derived their civilization or their
forms of government from ancient Greek sources. There
was now real cause for disaffection, and the citizens re-
belled openly until all Greece knew that the Athenians
were anxious for a revolution. But still the party in power
was strong enough to maintain itself against the oppos-
ing faction, led by the Alemaeonids, the old family rivals
of the Pisistratidae. The revolutionary party increased
rapidly in numbers and the cause of liberty grew in popu-
larity. The Delphic oracle was bribed to favor the popu-
lar movement, and repeatedly bade the Spartans assist
the oppressed Athenians to throw off the yoke of tyranny.
In 510 the Spartan king Cleomenes, with a small army,
was welcomed by the waiting Athenians. The augment-
ing force, with the armed men of the opposing faction,
proved too strong for Hippias and his rapidly dwindling
support. His children were seized by Cleomenes, and he
was quickly forced to yield the Acropolis and to flee from
the fury of the citizens, in whose minds success enkindled
fresh animosity. No sooner had the tyrant and his fam-
ily withdrawn from Athens than the public assembly
voted a decree of perpetual banishment against them all.

The head of the Alemaeonid faction at this time was
Clisthenes, son of old Megacles. Fortunately, this man
was something more than a politician, having true abil-
ity as a statesman. He was in no wise deficient in the
former role, however ; for, finding that he could not easily
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 117

remain at the helm of state without the support of the
poorer class, he began to increase the political power of
the masses by every means possible, making friends with
the people, as Herodotus says. In this way the influence
of his rival, Isagoras, was decreased, and the son of
Megacles soon found himself alone at the head of a
strong party. His first act was to promulgate a new
constitution, founded on that of Solon, the chief inno-
vation being the division of Attica into communes or
demes. From these he organized ten tribes in such a
way that each tribe included demes from each of the
three local factions of the people—the faction of the
plain, that of the shore, and that of the mountains—
making the supremacy of one faction forever impossible.
This new arrangement necessitated the expansion of the
boulé from three hundred to five hundred members of the
duties and privileges of the members of this body were
definitely expressed in the new constitution, and rules
for the meetings were drawn up. The general assembly
of the whole people was provided for, at which all citi-
zens had opportunity to express themselves upon politi-
cal questions. This was an institution of great antiquity,
and had held its meetings upon the Pnyx from time im-
memorial. Solon had made regulations for it, but it
was now given greater prominence, and began the career
which it later assumed as the sole controlling power in
the state. One of its new powers was the ostracism, a
regulation by which the citizens, by casting a sufficient
number of “ostraki” (voting-tablets) inscribed with the
name of a suspected citizen, could banish him for ten
years without bringing him to open trial. Tyranny was
forever quashed by the constitution, oligarchy was made
impossible, and the way for a real democracy was opened.

In 509 Clisthenes succeeded in freeing Athens from
the constant and humiliating interference of Sparta.
118 TRE SPORY OF ATHENS

Two years later he undertook a war against the feder-
ated Boeotians and Chalcidians, and brought it speedily
to a victorious close.

With the fall of the tyranny the great public works
instituted by the Pisistratidae seem to have come to a
standstill, but the sculptor’s art was employed by Clis-
thenes to crystallize the enthusiasm of the people for their
new-found liberty. Antenor, whose early work we have
seen in one of the later Tanten figures, was commissioned
to make a statue of the tyrannicides. This was speedily
executed in bronze and set up above the agora, beside
the road leading up to the Pelargikon. This statue was
carried away, a few years later, by the Persians, but an-
other was made at once to take its place, and an ancient
replica of this is preserved in marble in the Museo Na-
zionale at Naples. This doubtless gives us a sufficiently
correct idea of Antenor’s group. The well-known Na-
ples monument is in late archaic style. Its effect is some-
what impaired by the substitution of a head of much later
date for the missing member of one of the figures. The
group represents two finely made athletic youths advanc-
ing with daggers in both hands. Their forms are well
executed, the muscles, carefully treated under the smooth
flesh, showing a considerable advance over the works of
sculptors of the middle of the century.

The martyrs of liberty were further commemorated
by the erection of a monument to Lanaea, the brave girl
who died for keeping her lover’s confided secrets. The
subject chosen by Amphicrates, the sculptor, to perpetu-
ate the memory of this womanly heroism was a tongueless
lioness, for a statue of a woman of her class could not
lawfully be erected. This was executed in bronze and
set up on the Acropolis. That his own services to the
state might not be forgotten, and that the people might
see their latest exploits extolled, Clisthenes set up another
 

Statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton, in the Museum at Naples.
120 THE STORY OF ATHENS

monument on the Acropolis just within the gate—a huge
bronze quadriga, which was paid for by the ransom of
the Boeotian and Chalcidian prisoners taken in the late
war, at two minae ($35.00) per man.

Literature, so assiduously cultivated by the late tyrants,
continued to flourish under the new democracy. The
drama had assumed a new form, and its presentation took
on more and more of a literary character. The writing
and performing of tragedies were invariably in connection
with competitions held yearly in honor of Dionysus, on
the feast-days of that god. A host of dramatic poets
sprang up in Athens, and a lively interest was taken in
the contests. The competitors at each festival brought
out their own plays, and were practically the managers
of their own productions, training their choruses and
often taking the speaking parts themselves. Among the
dramatists in Athens at this time were Choerilus, Phryni-
chus, Cratinus, and Pratinas. Little is known of the
works of these men, but they were doubtless great men
in their day and generation. Phrynichus, who had taken
a prize in 511, had reorganized the construction of the
drama by grouping the chorus into bands to represent
groups of old men, maidens, and the like. Pratinas was
essentially a comic poet, and was the recognized author
of the satyr-drama.

With the evening shades of the sixth century, a star
had appeared in the dramatic heavens that gradually in-
creased in brilliancy until the old constellations paled be-
fore its light. Almost a quarter of a century had elapsed
since a young boy, falling asleep while watching his
father’s grape-vines, down by the sea at Eleusis, had been
awakened by the god of the vine and told that he should
be a composer of verses in his honor. The boy, whose
name was Aeschylus, had left the vines, had studied sing-
ing and composition, and had now entered the lists with
ATHENS OF THE PISISTRATIDAE 121

older and tried men. Pratinas and Choerilus were his
chief adversaries. It was on the occasion of one of these
contests, in the year 499, that the audience portion of the
temporary theater collapsed, and a large number of
people were crushed among the timbers and in the panic
that ensued. This catastrophe gave to Athens its first
permanent theater. The old wooden structure had
proved itself inadequate to accommodate the crowds of
spectators which the increasing popularity of the drama
brought each year into the city, and it was decided to
make a more durable theater in the sanctuary of the
Eleutheraean Dionysus, on the site of an old orches-
tra, between the temple of Dionysus and the Acropolis
rock. Suidas distinctly states that the Athenians built
their theater in the seventieth Olympiad (500-496),
and there is little doubt that this structure occupied the
site of the present theater of Dionysus, but whether any
portion of the building of Clisthenes remains in the ruins
of to-day it is impossible to say. Though the great public
contests were held in the theater only during the annual
festivals, though plays were prepared anew each year in
honor of Dionysus, and though plays were seldom re-
peated until much later times, the drama played a very im-
portant part in the life of Athens, as is shown by the char-
acter of the dramatists she produced. The Athenians were
as familiar with the works of their great tragic writers as
we are with Shakspere,—perhaps more so, in spite of the
superior facilities which the printing-press has given us,—
and we cannot but marvel at a state of society in which the
current literature was so universally known. In the dia-
logues between ancient Athenians, preserved for us in
the writings of Plato, we find frequent quotations from
contemporaneous plays so naturally uttered that we can-
not but believe the custom to have been an ordinary one.
Books could not have been plentiful, though we know that
122 PHS opORY OR “ATHENS

they were not expensive, and the men of that day must
have depended largely upon their prodigious memories to
have quoted thus familiarly from plays that they had seen
enacted but once; to this was added that tremendous
enthusiasm for art which made almost anything pos-
sible for them, and that was to build up, in the next cen-
tury, a literature unmatched in its perfection, and works
of art that have never been surpassed.

 

 

 

 

Vase-Painting,
by Andocides.
Vv

THE PERSIANS

‘Greatly to die, if this be glory’s height.
For the fair meed we owe our fortune kind;
For Greece and Liberty we plunged to-night,
And left a never dying name behind.”
SIMONIDES.

gE IT is a notable fact that, in the history of
A, mations, periods of glory and high achieve-
ment are often preceded by great calamities,
by times of distress, when the nation seems to
be on the very brink of ruin. It has also fre-
quently been noticed that the greatest national
crises call forth whatever there is of valor in
a people, and raise up men with not only the
will but also the ability to do great deeds.

The century which was to prove the most glorious for
events and achievements in the history of Athens was
overshadowed at its opening by a cloud that threatened
to blot out the very memory of her name from history
—nay, even to sweep all traces of budding Greek civil-
ization from the face of the earth. Persia, heir to all
the glories of the ancient empires of the East, inherit-
ing the accumulated treasures of Chaldea, Babylonia,
and Assyria, having extended her sway to north and
south, was now turning her greedy eyes westward. A
large portion of the Greek world had already yielded to
the power of Oriental despotism. Ionia, the oldest her-
itage of the Greeks in Asia, where Homer had lived
and sung, was now a Persian satrapy. Darius Hystaspes

123

 
124 TEP SlORY OR sir ENS

was on the throne, and Artaphernes, his brother, was
satrap of Sardis—that is to say, of Ionia.

It was about the year 500 that a portion of the Asiatic
Greeks, under the leadership of Aristagoras of Miletus,
revolted from Persian dominion, and called upon the
Spartans and Athenians to aid their cause. Sparta re-
fused to interfere, but Athens came to the relief of the
Ionians with twenty ships and a body of soldiers. After
Darius had succeeded in suppressing the revolt, he set
about to punish the Athenians for the part they had
taken in the insurrection, and issued a decree that Athens
must be destroyed. This sounded like the death-knell
of Athenian liberty and Greek civilization. The hordes
of Asia were to be poured into Greece; the vast armies
of Persia, a mighty kingdom bound together by the
strongest chains of empire, and the well-paid merce-
naries of numerous tributaries were to be marshaled
against the petty independent states of Greece, each jeal-
ous of the other and always unmindful of the value of
cooperation and concerted action. Athens, having cut
loose from Spartan leading-strings, could look no longer
for Spartan protection. Her generals were brave men, it
is true, trained in the highest arts of war; her citizens
were all soldiers, willing and ready to fight; her wealth
was all at the disposal of the state, to provide for defense
when it should be required; but what were all these,
compared with the countless armies, the untold wealth of
the greatest of Oriental empires that was to be her an-
tagonist ?

Mardonius, a son-in-law of the Persian king, was ap-
pointed general-in-chief of the operations against Athens.
Eretria in Euboea was counted in with Athens for an-
nihilation. In 492 a great fleet was under way from the
Asian shore with its prows set toward Attica. A mighty
army had landed on the Thracian coast, and was push-
THE PERSIANS 125

ing its way toward Athens. But a respite was decreed
by the gods for the doomed cities. Poseidon met the Per-
sian ships off Mount Athos, and most of them were swal-
lowed up in the wake of his chariot. The army, making
its way over strange country, was almost completely de-
stroyed by the half-savage tribes of Macedonia, and Mar-
donius was compelled to return to the Persian capital to
devise vaster schemes for the subjugation of Greece.
Athens, meanwhile, aware of her approaching doom,
was making preparations to face what seemed to be
overwhelming odds. Attica, “the dry nurse of lions,”
with Liberty for a protecting goddess, had nurtured a litter
of whelps, unmatched for courage, of whom little had
as yet been heard. Miltiades, the eldest of the group,
had been trained in the days of Pisistratus; in fact, he
had accompanied Darius, the Persian king, on an earlier
expedition into Europe against the Scythians, on which
occasion he was left with other Greeks to guard a
bridge over the Danube while Darius proceeded to the
interior. When Darius did not return at the time pre-
arranged, Miltiades suggested to his compatriots that
they destroy the bridge and abandon Darius, a proposi-
tion that added fuel to the fire of Persian resentment
against the Greeks. Aristides, son of an ancient noble
Athenian family, was already recognized as a warrior.
To these two men were intrusted the military prepara-
tions of Athens. Themistocles and Cimon were younger :
the former, impetuous, ambitious, and endowed with ex-
traordinary gifts of intellect and personal magnetism,
destined to be the foremost leader in the final struggle;
the latter, inheriting the mighty spirit of his father
Miltiades, the future scourge of Persia, the precursor of
Pericles and the golden age of Athenian prowess. The
spirit of these men and of other Athenians of their time,
whose names are less celebrated, knew no bounds. If no
126 THE STORY OF ATHENS

other people came to their assistance, if no leagues were
formed among the Greek states, they were quite ready to
meet the Persian hordes single-handed.

In Susa, Darius was busy fitting his army and fleet for
a crushing campaign. At his court was an old man, a
Greek, who was of great service to the monarch in giv-
ing advice and information, as he himself had taken part
in warlike expeditions against Athens, and with success.
This man was no other than the ex-tyrant Hippias, who,
after his expulsion from Athens, had repaired to the court
of Persia and had spent his declining years in urging
the king to make conquest of Athens. Many of the an-
cient writers are inclined to give a feeling of bitter re-
vengefulness as Hippias’s sole motive for urging Darius
to attack his native city, and for his willingness to betray
her into the hands of barbarians. But it is not at all
impossible that the wily Oriental, taking advantage of
the trying situation in which his guest was placed, had
promised to restore him to his own and, by arms, to
enforce upon the Athenians the rule of the rejected Pisis-
tratidae. We may hope that the aged Hippias, whose
house in times past had been a bulwark to Athens when
she was assailed by other foes, was moved by some other
impulse than that of spite to the betrayal of his fair
mother.

Datis, a distinguished general of the Medes, and Arta-
phernes, a young prince, son of Artaphernes the satrap
of Sardis, and thus nephew to the king, were chosen to
command the Persian forces. The defeated Mardonius
was left to chafe in his humiliation. It was midsummer
of the year 490 before the army of over one hundred
thousand men was assembled in Cilicia, and the fleet of
six hundred galleys, with transports for the cavalry, was
ready, and the campaign was under way. The Persians
crossed the Aegean and landed on the Euboean coast,
THE PERSIANS 127

stormed Eretria, and, after six days of hard fighting, cap-
tured the city and razed it, taking the inhabitants pris-
oners. They then crossed from the island to the coast
of Attica, landing on the plains of Marathon, just where
Athena set her foot on the way to Athens in the Homeric
account, and where the banished Pisistratus had begun
his operations for the recovery of the city and the tyranny.

The Athenians, with an army of ten thousand hoplites,
under the constitutional leadership of ten generals, one
for each of the tribes, marched northward and took up
their position on the heights to the southwest of the
Marathonian plain, in order to guard the passage toward
the city through the Mesogia, which would be the natu-
ral route for the enemy to follow. It was the custom for
the Athenian generals to take command of the entire
force by turns on different days, but nine withdrew
their claims, giving entire control for every day to Mil-
tiades. The twelfth of August came; the Athenians lay
waiting to begin the battle, when a reinforcement of one
thousand heavily armed Plataeans arrived, and the Greeks
determined to make the onset at once. Herodotus gives
a graphic description of the battle which followed, but
none of the ancient writers describes the exact posi-
tions of the various divisions of the army or their move-
ments. The enemy was thunderstruck at the audacity
of their plainly inferior opponents, and their line ad-
vanced with less spirit. The wings fell back before
the desperate onslaught of the Athenian ranks, but the
closely packed ranks of the center broke through the
Greek line by sheer force of numbers. Ma§ltiades there-
upon recalled the victorious wings already in pursuit of
the flying Persian flanks, and, massing his entire force,
reformed against the center of the Persian line, and was
soon driving it back. Charge after charge followed,
until the Athenians, victorious on every side, paused to
128 THE STORY OF ATHENS

recover breath, while the enemy was running for the
shore, where their boats lay drawn up in a long line.
But before they could tumble into their galleys and push
off from the beach the Athenians were upon them, some
holding the boats while others renewed the attack. All
was confusion, and men were falling on both sides. Cy-
naegirus, a young soldier, brother of the poet Aeschy-
lus, was holding a galley with his right hand; a Persian
battle-ax hacked it off, but he hung on with his left;
when this too had been severed from its arm, the brave
fellow clung to the side of the vessel with his teeth.
Many were the deeds of personal heroism on that day, but
the Greeks lost a surprisingly small number of men. The
Athenian dead numbered but one hundred and _ ninety-
two, while the victors counted over six thousand slain
on the side of the enemy.

Scarcely had the din of battle died away among the
echoing hills, when Miltiades, pausing to wipe the sweat
from his brow and turning his eyes homeward, caught a
flash, as of lightning, from the peak of Mount Pentelicus.
For a moment he was puzzled, wondering what its mean-
ing might be, when again came the flash, and his quick
eye at the same instant noticed that the retreating Per-
sian fleet had beheld it and seemed to be making renewed
speed, as if in answer to its warning. The trained soldier
at once divined the meaning of the sign; he knew well
that it could be naught else but the flash of a burnished
shield, and he believed it to be a signal, given to the Per-
sians—by traitors in Athens, friends of the Pisistratidae
—that the city was without defense, and might easily be
taken. There was no time to spare. Athens was seven
leagues away, yet there was time to reach the threatened
city before night if the army were to make a forced march.
A small number of men was detached to care for the
wounded, to watch over the dead and the spoils, and
THE PERSIANS 129

then began one of the most famous marches in history——
a race for life, for liberty, for the salvation of homes
and altars, a race with an antagonist already well under
way and straining every nerve at a thousand oars to
speed their galleys toward the Athenian shore.

For days a terrible gloom had hung above the city
of Athens. No one remained in the city save the women
and children, the aged and crippled men, and a small
guard. Mothers and wives sat anxious in their houses,
listlessly plying the loom and needle. The priestesses
were busy preparing to hide the treasures of the temple
of Athena or fly with them to the sea. Aged men, archons
with long white beards, and soldiers of days long past
gathered in little groups to discuss the gloomy outlook
with subdued voices. Every day, from morn, when the
red sun rose over the mountains beyond which the little
Athenian band lay waiting until he slid behind the dis-
tant hills of Morea, a line of heads could be seen peering
over the rugged walls of the Pelargikon on the side
toward Pentelicus, like fledglings over the edge of a ver-
itable storks’ nest, but no news came that could relieve
the suppressed anxiety of the watchers. Every new day
seemed exactly like the last, and an occasional messenger
brought no word of comfort.

The morning of the twelfth dawned; the last runner
had brought word that the two armies would probably
meet before noon, but as yet no reinforcements had come.
Before the sun was up the watchers were again at their
post upon the wall. Before any of the rest, a crippled
youth? had toiled up the long, winding ascent to the

1 This little story of the crippled boy is not original, nor is it found in
ancient literature: it was told to me by an old Greek sailor whom I met one
morning upon the Acropolis. I never saw him afterward, and was unable to
find out where he got the story, whether he made it up, or whether it is a
local tradition. It is not commonly known among the people so far as I
could discover.

9
130 HHESSTORY “OF ATHENS

Acropolis, and had climbed upon the highest point of the
rocks. The hand of nature had restrained his body from
being with his friends, clad in armor upon the slopes
above Marathon; but his heart was there, and now his
eyes carried him as far as the forbidding mountains
would permit. Fair-haired he was, and his fine face was
bronzed by the scorching Attic sun; his eyes were full of
fire which his crooked form bade him ever suppress, and
the valor of his soul almost consumed him as his heart
and mind strained toward the scene of the approaching
conflict. The sultry day wore on, the burning sun drove
many of the watchers, one by one, to seek the shade of
the temple porticos, but the youth never changed his place
nor turned his head as hour after hour passed on.

There was little movement in the streets below. The
feeling of dread expectancy that makes people avoid one
another pervaded the city with an air of calm which be-
lied the throbbing hearts of the waiting citizens. The
solemn priestesses of Athena passed noiselessly in and out
of the temple, as they offered silent libations to invoke the
favoring presence of their benign goddess at Marathon
in this dread hour; but the revered xoanon of wood, like
the vanquishing Athena on the gable of the great temple,
only smiled her ever-present, placid smile, and gave nei-
ther hope of exultation nor cause for lamentation.

In the afternoon the usual light breeze sprang up from
the sea. It fanned the cheek of the youth, who still
sat motionless on the wall, with his chin resting on his
hands; his eyes grew glassy, and a film seemed to pass
over them as, ever straining for some object at the end
of the long, white road, he thought he could see some-
thing moving—moving at last! He rubbed his fevered
lids an instant, and then felt sure he saw a faint cloud
of white dust. Drawing himself up as far as he could, he
shouted to those below him, wildly gesticulating and
THE PERSIANS 131

pointing in the direction where all were gazing. After
an instant another and another, whose eyes were stronger
than the others,—for all except the cripple were old men,
—made signs that they too could see the tiny cloud, and a
moment later a faint speck could be seen moving along
the dusty thread. It was a runner! What news did he
bring? Every man on the walls leaped down and ran,
as fast as age or infirmity would permit, down the wind-
ing slope, through the nine gates, and then in all direc-
tions—some to meet the messenger on his way, others
to tell the waiting wives and mothers in the breathless
town. Where would he go? To the market-place, the
cripple told himself. Others who were fleeter of foot
could catch a flying word as the runner passed, but he
would await the moment until he could hear all. And
he was right; hundreds of small boys met the runner
far out on the highway; they received no word—he
could not speak—but they were reassured by his look,
for no terror was written on his drawn features, but the
radiant glow that illumines the faces of dying martyrs.
On, on he sped, a crowd of those who went out to meet
him following in his wake. At the entrance of the mar-
ket a great throng had assembled; the aged king archon
had left his seat and stood among the crowd, surrounded
by his associates. The throng parted as the runner ap-
peared; his own mother did not recognize him, so black
was he with dust and sweat. A hundred arms stretched
out to catch him. He was falling at his last bound; with
one final, superb effort he gasped, “Victory!” and then
he fell into loving and trembling arms; blood was flow-
ing from his mouth as he was borne, limp and motion-
less, to the shade of the colonnade, where water mixed
with wine and oil for his tired limbs had been prepared
for the first messenger. A wild, exultant cry arose from
the agora, not the shout of stalwart men as when a vic-
132 THE STORY OF ATHENS

torious army raises its mighty voice, but the shrill voices
of women and boys whose hearts were bursting with
pent-up feeling. The old men bent their heads; tears of
relief were shed as the paean of joy swelled across the
agora and was borne aloft to the ears of the anxious
priestesses, whose white-robed figures now filled the
places of the men watchers of the day.

We need not attempt to picture the scenes of jubilation
that transformed the silent city into a pandemonium of
delight as, through the afternoon, the messengers con-
tinued to arrive, telling first of the arrival of the Pla-
taeans, then of the swift victory of the wings, the momen-
tary reverse of the center, and the skilful management of
Miltiades by which he turned the short-lived success of
the Persians into disastrous defeat. Eyes sparkled as
they told of the mysterious shade of Theseus appearing
like a shining light upon the field, rushing, like the god
of war, into the Athenian ranks as they began to waver,
and leading his children to the renewed attack. Less
than two hundred of the Athenians had fallen, the latest
runner said; who they all were, of course he did not
know ; one or two he named as having died gallantly, and
that placid grief that seldom moved the Greeks to weep
for death stole over some hearts, and the joy they felt
over the rescue of their beloved city, their homes, and
their little ones from the relentless torch and chain of
the invader, was mixed with sad regret.

But what of the first runner, who had outstripped all
the rest just to gasp one word—one blessed word—and
then fall fainting into the arms of those whose ears he
had so thrilled? In his own home he lay, still motion-
less, still unconscious of the joy he had brought to his
native city; tender hands had done their best to restore
the spirit, but he had not stirred, and only faint heart-
beats gave sign of life within the exhausted frame. By

 
THE PERSIANS 133

his bedside sat the crippled youth, chafing the cold hands,
moistening the parched lips, and, breathless, waiting the
moment when his young hero should revive to speak some
word and hear from his own lips that he was the first to
descry the cloud of dust, then the moving speck, and
then—how long it seemed until he was actually there in
Athens with the welcome word on his tongue, the word
that had thrilled Athens like a bolt from heaven! Then
suddenly, above the sounds of happy exultation, above
the songs of victory and the anthems of thanksgiving joy,
was heard a shout from the trusty guard upon the citadel
above, who now beheld the marvelous sight of a victo-
rious army running at the end of a twenty miles’ march in
the August heat! In an instant it was known that the
victors were close at hand; all Athens ran out to wel-
come them, but the army, to the amazement of their wives
and mothers, turned suddenly from the direct road to
the city and swept out into the plain to the south; and
then all beheld the Persian ships, just rounding the point,
heading for the shore at Phalerum. Breathless, the Athe-
nian soldiers saw that they were not too late; the signal
of the shield, which had been intended for the doom of
Athens, had been her salvation—thanks to Miltiades’s
sagacity and the superhuman energy of the Athenian sol-
diers. The Persians, beholding the army that a few hours
before had routed them, again drawn up in battle array,
their armor catching the last rays of the setting sun, and
ready to repulse them a second time, turned their rud-
ders the other way and set their prows toward Asia.

On the morrow the Athenians, one and all, repaired
to the field of Marathon, there to seek out their two
hundred dead among the mutilated bodies of thousands
of hapless Persians, and to collect the spoils, to strip
the fallen Persian princes of their jewels, to gather to-
gether a vast number of brazen arms, swords and spears
134 THE STORY OF ATHENS

and shields, that were to deck the colonnades of the shrine
of the renowned goddess of war, who was at the same
time the Athenians’ own particular guardian and friend.
It was reported that among the slain the mangled body
of an aged man was found, whom some of the Athe-
nians recognized as Hippias, the exiled tyrant. This
corpse was buried without ceremony in the trench along
with the Medes and Persians, but it was never proved
that it was really the body of Hippias. The Athenian
dead were gathered and laid close together as in the ranks
of war; and when the great pyre had burned away, a
huge mound was raised over many of the bravest and
noblest of Athena’s sons.

And when the mournful task was finished, the Athe-
nians set out for home, laden with vast treasure and with
many a hero who would return to his home never to fight
again; for though in ancient times war did its work
well, and usually either spared unscathed or killed out-
right those who entered its lists, there were always some
maimed for life; even sword and javelin wounds would
not always heal, though easier by far to treat than the
shattering of shot and shell in our day.

A second time Athens had been spared the terrors of
sack and pillage; her citizens returned once more to the
pursuits and arts of peace. The invading army had been
withdrawn, and no Persians remained on Grecian soil.
The Athenians confidently believed that Darius would
profit by the lesson learned at Marathon, and would aban-
don his cherished scheme for the conquest of Greece.
Now followed funeral games in honor of the dead heroes
—probably celebrated on the spacious field of the Acad-
emy—and the erection of a monument in honor of those
who fell at Marathon. Great sacrifices were vowed to the
gods in addition to the regular sacrificial rites. At the
altar of Huntress Artemis alone, an unimportant shrine
THE PERSIANS 135

outside the city, away across the Ilissus near the little
hill called Helicon, the polemarch sacrificed each year
five hundred goats to this goddess for her share in the
victory of Marathon. With the return of peace, literature
revived. Lyric poetry and the drama flourished side by
side. Pindar, the favorite of kings, the privileged guest
of states, who had loved Athens since his early school-
days under Lasus, Agathocles, and Apollodorus, now
spent much time in the city, and received from the citi-
zens a reward of ten thousand drachmae for the ode in
which he applied to Athens the famous epithet, “Pillar
of Greece.” The drama had developed rapidly since
the days of Thespis, and had grown greatly in public
esteem. Young Aeschylus, who, with his brothers Ami-
nias and Cynaegirus, had fought with distinction at Mar-
athon, resumed his play-writing, competing with the fa-
vorite dramatists of the day at the festival of Dionysus
until 484, when he won his first victory. After this he
carried off prize after prize, winning in thirteen con-
secutive contests. During the first six years after his
appearance Aeschylus did not win; his productions were
too full of innovations, too far above popular ideals to
gain recognition at once. He was not satisfied with the
style of tragedy existing in Attica, with its coarseness
and brutality. He endeavored to substitute for these
elements more dignified action, more lofty and purer sen-
timents, and to impress his audience with awe and ad-
miration, rather than to amuse them with Bacchanalian
antics and ribald wit; and when, after repeated failure
to please the judges, he at length won first place, he felt
sufficient confidence to introduce further innovations in
method of presentation, as well as in subject and treat-
ment. So radical were the changes and departures which
he made within the short space of eighteen years that he
came to be regarded as the real founder of Attic tragedy,
136 THE STORY OF ATHENS

and his marvelous inventions were looked upon as in-
spirations from heaven. His most important innovation
was the introduction of a second actor, which made dia-
logue possible between the two chief antagonists of the
tragedy and heightened the dramatic effect. For this
purpose he employed a real stage, with back and wings.
The chorus in the new drama was made of secondary
importance, and was kept much of the time in the back-
ground. In his capacity as manager of his own produc-
tions he clothed his personages with costumes more be-
fitting their roles than the older costumes had been, and
set his play with scenery which was the marvel of the
Greek world.

In the year following the Persian invasion, Aristides
was made chief archon; the public treasury was full, and
Athens enjoyed the greatest prosperity she had known
since the days of Pisistratus. Then came that sad epi-
sode which cast a shade even over the glories of Mara-
thon. How often it has been the fate of great national
heroes in a democratic state to be their own undoing!
Marathon had scarcely been fought when the hero of that
immortal battle was seized with the unworthy ambition
of seeking revenge against a personal enemy through
public means. Miultiades, for some unknown reason, had
cherished a bitter animosity against the island of Paros:
and now, while he had the confidence of all Greece, and
while the public funds of Athens were at his disposal for
organizing defense, he determined to gratify his thirst for
revenge. He easily persuaded the Athenians to grant
him seventy ships, without telling them what he intended
to do with them. With this armament he. sailed for
Paros, laid siege to the town, and laid waste the fields
and vineyards of the island. One day, while consulting
a priestess on some superstitious question, he suddenly
thought himself about to be betrayed, and, in his haste to
THE PERSIANS 137

retire, fell, injuring his thigh. His hurt was so serious
that he raised the siege and repaired to Athens, where,
in default of any good account of his expedition, he was
impeached by Xanthippus, father of Pericles, and fined
fifty talents—the cost of his outfit. It was a sorry sight
to see the foremost hero of the greatest of Greek bat-
tles borne upon a couch into court, where his brother
Tisagoras pleaded his cause for him, condemned and
fined, and saved from execution only on the ground of ser-
vices to the state! But so republics treat their favorite
sons whom they have urged on to folly by flattery and
adulation. Miultiades was unable to pay the fine, and,
according to Plutarch, was thrown into prison—Thu-
cydides does not mention this—but he died within the
year, and the fine was paid by Cimon, his son. It is
stated by certain historians that Cimon was thrown into
prison on the death of his father (debt descending by
heredity, according to Athenian law). But Cimon had
a beautiful half-sister, Elpinice, who was loved by Cal-
lias, one of the wealthiest men of Athens. His family
had been plutocrats since the days of Pisistratus, but
Cimon did not favor the proposed alliance. When Cimon
was sent to languish in durance vile, Callias seized
the opportunity to press his suit, offering to discharge
the debt in return for the hand of Elpinice—a situation
which has been favored by writers of fiction and drama
ever since. Cimon at first refused stoutly to listen to the
proposition, but finally relented, in response to the prayers
of his sister, who was apparently not loath to become the
wife of the nabob of her native city.

The old men, who watched with interest the rising of
the new generation, now had their attention fixed upon
young Themistocles. One of his teachers had once said
to him, “My boy, you will never be anything little in
this world; you will certainly be something great, either
138 DHE STORY OF ATHENS

good or bad.” Had he added ‘or both,” his prophecy
would have been, in time, perfectly fulfilled. He first
attracted attention by his valor on the field of Marathon,
and soon after appeared in the arena of politics as the
opponent of the highest in power. The early efforts of
his ambition were so well rewarded by popular favor that
by 483 he had succeeded in turning the stream of public
opinion against Aristides the Just and having him ostra-
cized, leaving himself supreme in Athens.

Scarcely had the new era of prosperity dawned, when
war clouds rising again in the east turned all Greece to
defensive preparations. King Darius, undaunted by the
loss of a few thousand men in two unsuccessful cam-
paigns, was planning tremendous schemes for the sub-
duing of Greece and for the punishment of the little states
that had dared to oppose him; but in 485, in the midst
of his preparations, the king died, and the campaign was
for the time delayed. Xerxes now came to the throne
of his father, and proved himself a worthy successor of
the conquest-loving monarch. The first years of his
reign were employed in reducing to subjection the Egyp-
tians who had revolted from the empire on the death of
Darius. This accomplished, he turned his attention to
the lifelong desire of his father—the conquest of Europe.
In the work of planning his great campaign he was ably
assisted by Mardonius, who had failed in Darius’s first
Grecian campaign, and who was anxious to retrieve his
reputation and avenge his disgrace at the hands of the
Greeks.

With the vast preparations already made by Darius
as a nucleus, Xerxes gathered a mighty armament at
Sardis; he commanded a bridge of boats to be. built
across the Hellespont, and when this was carried away
by a storm, ordered two others constructed, side by side.
He had a canal dug across the neck of land that connects
THE PERSIANS 139

Mount Athos with the Thracian shore, that his new fleet
might not suffer, as the first one had, in rounding that
perilous point. In Athens defenses had been under way
for some time, under the direction of Themistocles.
Even before there was a rumor of war he had persuaded
the Athenians to build two hundred ships with the silver
produced from the mines at Laurium, instead of distrib-
uting it among the citizens. The old exposed harbor at
Phalerum had been abandoned, and the sheltered basin
of Piraeus had been opened and fortified.

In the spring of 480 the Persians were ready to begin
the march. The king resolved to accompany the expe-
dition himself, and not to trust entirely to his generals,
as his father had done to his sorrow. With his famous
body-guard—the ten thousand “immortals’’—Xerxes led
his army across the bridge of boats, down the coast of
Thrace to the plain of Doriscus, where they joined the
fleet and encamped beside the Hebrus. Here the forces,
according to Herodotus, numbered 1,700,000 infantry,
80,000 cavalry, and 20,000 charioteers, camel-drivers,
and grooms. The navy counted 517,610 men—presum-
ably not including the oarsmen. The galleys num-
bered 1207, beside 3000 smaller craft. This reckoning
amounted to 2,317,610 men, or, counting the allied tribes
of northern Greece and attendants, to five millions or
more. Making most liberal allowance for the inaccuracy
of the Greek historian’s figures, this was undoubtedly
one of the largest armies ever assembled at one place in
the history of the world.

As the invading host prepared to advance, the Greek
states were thrown into a panic of terror; a hasty coun-
cil was called on the Corinthian isthmus, at which the
Athenians and Spartans strove to unite the Greeks for
common defense. But most of the states north of the
isthmus were too much frightened to enter into any such
140 TEE STORY 10 ATE EINS

agreement, preferring to submit at once rather than risk
fighting in such an unequal contest. Above Athens only
the Phocians, Plataeans, and Thespians were induced to
join with the Athenians and the Peloponnesian states.
The whole number of fighting men thus mustered was
but a poor showing, but the little Greek army resolved
to do or die. Athens and Sparta—rivals from time im-
memorial—were united for the common good of Greece.
Leonidas, the Spartan king, was given command of the
land forces. The fleet was also commanded by a Spar-
tan—Eurybiades—although Athens had furnished more
than two thirds of the whole number of ships. By the
time Xerxes’s army had crossed the Hellespont, the Greek
force of ten thousand, under Euaenetus, a Spartan gen-
eral, and Themistocles, had prepared to meet the invaders
in the narrow vale of Tempe, below Mount Olympus;
but when it was considered that the Persians might land
below them, and thus cut them off from the defense of
Athens, they decided to fall back toward the south. Le-
onidas, with three hundred loyal Spartans, took up his
position at the pass of Thermopylae, while Themistocles
withdrew to the ships. At Thermopylae, Leonidas, with
his three hundred full-blooded Spartans and four thou-
sand Peloponnesian hoplites, was joined by the contin-
gents of Thespians, Thebans, and Phocians. This force,
amounting to about seven thousand men, resolved to hold
the pass against the innumerable thousands of a well-
armed foe.

On the day before the battle an embassy came from the
camp of Xerxes, demanding of the Greeks the surrender
of their arms. The messengers carried nothing back but
the famous reply of Leonidas, “Come and take them.”
The following morning the Greeks were in readiness, ex-
pecting an immediate attack. They were not disap-
pointed. The fight was opened by a body of Medes, who
THE PERSIANS 141

advanced with confidence in a solid phalanx. The Greeks
stood to meet them until they were scarcely two spear-
lengths off, and then rushed forward with spears set.
After a brief struggle the Medes were completely routed,
to the consternation of Xerxes, who sat on his lofty
throne, viewing the battle from the rear. The Persian
king at once ordered his body-guard—the ten thousand
“immortals’—to advance; and when he saw the pride of
his army likewise driven back before the wall of Greek
breastplates, he was seen to leap thrice from this throne
in impatient rage. The day closed with fortune still
smiling upon the Greek arms. The jaded Persians with-
drew to camp to devise new plans for operations upon the
morrow. Leonidas, fearing a surprise in the rear by a
path over the mountains, sent a detachment of Phocians
above to guard this secret passage. When the day
dawned, the Persians came on more slowly than before,
but in greater numbers and in better order. Fighting
had hardly begun when a scout, rushing up to the gen-
eral, told him that his fears had been realized; that a
traitor had shown the enemy the hidden path; that the
Phocians had retired before them to higher ground; and
that the Persians were about to cut off the only means of
retreat.

Leonidas quickly called a council; there was still time
to escape; some were for taking to flight at once, but
the king and his Spartan followers scorned to run away.
A large number of the Greek force withdrew, leaving
Leonidas with his three hundred Spartans and one thou-
sand Thespians and Thebans to meet what they knew
would be certain death.

That night the little band of Greeks remained in-
trenched within the pass. The following day they
marched into the open and fell upon the foremost of the
Persian lines. The whole force of Xerxes’s army was
142 THESSTORY OF ATHENS

focused toward the narrow defile, and driven by the lash
at full speed upon the Greeks. Hundreds fell before the
desperate band of Spartans. Hundreds were trampled
to death by the pressure from behind, and many fell over
the precipice as the seething stream of humanity surged
through the narrow space between the mountain and the
sea. Leonidas fell among the first; the rest, when they
saw him fall, withdrew into the defile, where they were
immediately surrounded and killed—to a man—defend-
ing themselves to the last. The Persians were now in
possession of Thermopylae, and no opposition lay be-
tween them and Athens.

On the same day with this memorable battle the Greek
fleet engaged the Persians off the promontory of Arte-
misium in Euboea, and won a signal victory. Themisto-
cles was in command of the Athenian portion of the
fleet, which had recently been reinforced by the arrival
of fifty-three additional ships from Athens. Eurybiades
was still the admiral of the fleet. At first, when he had
seen the enormous number of the Persian ships, he and
others were disposed to avoid a battle, but Themistocles
favored an engagement. A fierce discussion ensued,
during which Eurybiades shook his baton threateningly
in Themistocles’s face. “Strike, but listen,’ said the
Athenian, calmly, and won his point; the battle was
fought and a victory gained. Other naval battles were
fought, with great disaster to the Persians and consid-
erable damage to the Greek fleet. But the Greeks, on
learning of the disaster at Thermopylae, determined to
sail at once to the aid of Athens. Down the Euboean
strait they passed, around the point of Sunium, and into
the bay of Salamis. Themistocles hastened up to Athens
and advised the people to take to the ships at once and
fly to Salamis. This proposition met with great opposi-
tion among the populace, who, remembering the miracle
THE PERSIANS 143

of Marathon and still trusting to the fortune of Greek
arms, could not realize their danger. The Persians were
pressing rapidly southward, sweeping all before them.
Themistocles was in despair; entreaty was of no avail
with the stubborn Athenians. A happy idea came to him:
he hurried away to Delphi to ask the oracle what the
Athenians should do to save themselves. Back he came
with the response, “The Athenians must defend them-
selves with walls of wood.” This was just what he de-
sired. What other walls of wood had they than the walls
of their ships? “The priestess was bribed,” said a num-
ber of impious wretches, who thought the august oracle
of the Pythian Apollo could be bought. But with the
majority of the people Themistocles’s word now became
law, and the city was soon almost deserted. The few who
remained, among whom were a number of obstinate old
men and people opposed to Themistocles on principle,
repaired to the Acropolis, and there contented themselves
with throwing up a wooden barricade to fulfil more lit-
erally the admonition of the oracle. Then was made the
wonderful discovery that the sacred serpent of the shrine
of Athena and Erechtheus had disappeared,—had gone,
none knew whither,—and it was soon learned that he had
arrived in Salamis. Themistocles and the serpent cer-
tainly knew what was best for them.

The Athenians then carefully removed the sacred statue
of the Polias from its shrine, and bore it tenderly, in a
solemn procession, to one of the ships. This was the last
hope of the citadel. Scarcely had the nine gates closed
on the hurried procession, or the last boat pushed from
the shore, when the Persians swept across the Attic plain
and took up their quarters upon the Areopagus and the
Hill of the Muses. The resistance of the defenders of the
Acropolis was feeble, but the stout walls. that had been
built by the mythical Pelasgoi and had defied many an
144 THE STORY OF ATHENS

assault since the days of Theseus and the Amazons, were
impregnable to the war engines of Persia’s king. Several
days passed; the lower town, with the agora and the
clustering homes of the Athenians, the temples and the
theater, the Lyceum with its altars and gymnasium,
the unfinished temple of Zeus, had all been razed to the
ground; the sacred groves, the holy precincts had been
desolated, but the Acropolis was still untaken.

One night, while the defenders were keeping watch on
the walls, a band of Persians discovered the opening of
the secret staircase in the Aglaurium, below the north
wall, and crept stealthily up, surprising the watchers on
the walls from within. So great was the consternation of
the defenders that, before they could rally to defend the
staircase, the inclosure was filled with shouting Persians.
The Athenians still fought, until one by one the last of
them fell victim to the Persian sword. The invaders now
forced their way into the temples, and into the goodly
house of Erechtheus; but finding no booty, as all the
treasures had been taken to sea, they applied the torch to
the great dry timbers of the roofs, and the flames, mount-
ing skyward, soon told the Athenians in Salamis, hard
by, and on the ships in the bay that they had interpreted
the oracle aright, and that the feet of the barbarians
were already standing in the holy place.

The Persian fleet presently appeared in the bay of
Phalerum. The Greeks soon saw that they must fly at
once or face one more battle. As usual, sentiment was
again divided on the question of risking battle, and dis-
sension among the commanders threatened to disrupt the
fleet, until Themistocles announced that the Athenians,
who made up a large part of the flotilla, were about to
sail for Italy. This forced Eurybiades to decide on
action. Sober second thought, however, prompted the
admiral to call a council, and in conclave it was decided
THE PERSIANS 145

to sail away to the Peloponnesus. Themistocles was
again forced to resort to a trick; he despatched a slave
to the Persian commander with information that the
Greek ships were about to make their escape, and might
easily be headed off. During the night the Persian fleet
was moved out and set in a long chain from Piraeus to
Salamis, shutting in the Greeks to choose between victory
or death. Xerxes had moved his throne to a commanding
position on the western slope of Mount Aegaleos, in order
to witness the final blow about to be dealt to Athenian lib-
erty, and all the Persian host, elated at the fall of Athens,
was gloating over the spoils still to be recovered in
Salamis.

The “just” Aristides, whom Themistocles had ban-
ished, with a band of faithful followers, equipped at his
own expense, generously overlooking his wrongs, re-
solved to join the Athenians in their hour of peril, and to
fight or die with his own people. He dislodged a band
of barbarians from the little island of Psyttalea, and
reached Themistocles in time to tell him that the Persian
ships had occupied even the northwest passage into the
bay of Eleusis, thus forming a complete cordon around
the fleet.

The following morning, the 20th of September, the
Greek galleys pushed from the shore of Salamis, their
crews raising a loud paean. The strand and all the hills
of the island, on the side toward the bay, were covered
with anxious Athenians and islanders striving to find the
best point of view. There were three hundred and sev-
enty-eight ships in the Greek fleet, of which one hundred
and eighty were provided and manned by the Athenians.
Themistocles and Xanthippus were among the Athenian
commanders, while Aristides commanded his own little
squadron.

Presently the majestic galleys closed, each with its
10
146 THE STORY OF ATHENS

own antagonist, and one of the fiercest naval battles of
ancient history began. The Greeks at once showed supe-
rior speed and adroitness in their manoeuvers, while the
Persians, who far outnumbered them, moved so heavily
that a Greek galley was soon found to be a match for
two of Xerxes’s ponderous men-of-war. Dexterity was
everything in the naval warfare of those days, when ram-
ming was the chief method of offense. But other than
Persian vessels were arrayed on the side of the enemy.
Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, was there with the
fleet of Ionians. These were perhaps the only ships on
the Persian side that were a match for the Athenians and
Spartans. Wind and fortune seemed on the side of the
Greeks from the first. The enemy soon found their enor-
mous number of ships an embarrassment. Their great
galleys were too high above the water, and the powerful
brazen prows of the Greeks crashed into their sides, bring-
ing disaster and death. One after another they were sunk,
and panic began to spread among the Persians—

All the shores were strewn,

And the rough rocks, with dead, till in the end
Each ship in the barbaric host, that yet

Had oars, in most disordered flight rowed off.

The Ionian ships, excepting those of Artemisia, were
among the first to retire. They could appreciate the
wonderful superiority of their kinsmen in naval warfare,
and could withdraw from the battle unnoticed in the
confusion, while each Persian commander was person-
ally responsible to the king.

Flushed with victory, the Greeks did not tire in the
heat of battle, and when they had disabled some two
hundred of the Persians’ ships and captured many be-
side, they went in pursuit of the flying Ionians, against
THE PERSIANS 147

whom they felt a more bitter thirst for revenge than
against the defeated monarch. A story was afterward
current in Athens that Queen Artemisia, seeing her galley
pursued by one of the Greeks, hoisted a Greek banner
and began to attack a ship near her, the galley of the
King of Calydna, against whom she cherished a private
grudge, and sank it. The Greek vessel, seeing her attack
a Persian, withdrew and thus allowed her to escape.

Great was the joy in Salamis as the Greek ships turned
their victorious prows toward the shore. Great was the
consternation of the Persian court assembled about the
silver-footed throne of their monarch. Xerxes, wishing
to fight another day, took flight through Boeotia and
Thrace, with all haste, toward the Hellespont, leaving the
throne and much other superfluous furniture behind him.
The fleet accompanied him along the coast, and it was well
that it did, for on arriving at the straits he found the
bridge of boats a wreck, and was conveyed across to his
Asiatic home on one of the galleys. Mardonius was left,
with a portion of the army, to complete the subjection of
Greece early in the spring.

No sooner had the Persian galleys disappeared from
the shining bay and the Greek ships been beached upon
the shores of Salamis than the Athenian refugees on the
island prepared to set up a monument, adorned with
trophies of their great victory, and to celebrate a solemn
festival of thanksgiving and rejoicing. A day was set
apart for the ceremonial, at which the trophy was to be
dedicated and the men distinguished for gallantry were
to receive honorable rewards. Among these was Ami-
nias, brother of Aeschylus, who had been the first of the
trierarches (captains of triremes) to sink one of the
enemy’s ships. There were military processions, speeches,
and sacrifices; there was singing of triumphal choruses,
and dancing by youths chosen for grace and skill. The
148 THES StORY.OF ATHENS

leader of these last was a youth named Sophocles, then in
his sixteenth year, selected for his unusual beauty and
his skill, for he had won several wreaths in the gym-
nastic contests. He led the rhythmical dances, stripped to
display the beauty of his youthful form, and played on
the lyre as he danced. This was the first appearance in
a prominent part of the greatest master of Greek tragedy.
A prize was offered for the best elegy in praise of the
heroes who had fallen at Thermopylae, and Aeschylus
and Simonides put forth their best efforts. Simonides
carried off the prize with these beautiful lines:

In dark Thermopylae they lie.

O death of glory thus to die!

Their tomb an altar is, their name

A mighty heritage of fame;

Their dirge is triumph; cankering rust
And time that turneth all to dust,

That tomb shall never waste nor hide;
The tomb of warriors true and tried.
The full-voiced praise of Greece around
Lies buried in that sacred mound;
Where Sparta’s King Leonidas

In death eternal glory has.

When the celebrations were over, the Athenians began
to return to their ruined homes at the foot of Athena’s
rock, but many were loath to carry their treasures back
to Athens and to begin the rebuilding of their homes
while the barbarians still lingered on this side of the
Aegean, and grave fears were felt of the return of Mar-
donius. This general had tested the fighting capacity of
the Athenians to his complete satisfaction, He now
sought to entice them from their support of the cause of
Hellas by an extensive scheme of bribery, for which full
power and ample means had been left with him. To
THE PERSIANS 149

bring his proposals before the Athenians, Mardonius chose
a suitable ambassador—Alexander, King of Macedonia,
an old ally of Athens. Now, Alexander himself had
been forced to submit to Persia, and he resolutely believed
that Athens’s sole hope of salvation lay in following his
example. He came to Athens and earnestly pleaded with
the people to accept the offers of Mardonius. Athens was
to be restored at the king’s expense, and made more beau-
tiful than before. This was to tempt the true lovers of
the devastated city. Large gifts of gold were held up
to catch the eyes of the greedy. Athens was to be made
supreme over all Greece. This was the bait for ambition.
Self-government and religious liberty were to be granted
to the city, and all that was asked in return for this
munificence was that Athens should own Persian sway
and promise not to help the other states again.

Aristides had been recalled after the battle of Salamis,
and had been restored to the leadership. It fell to him
to give answer to Mardonius’s proposal. Before he had
time to reply, a second embassy arrived, one from Sparta,
to implore Athens not to desert the common cause of
Greece. They condoled with Athens in her present plight,
and offered to supply her with corn, to care for her women
and children, and to assist her in every way to regain
her pristine glory. Aristides made brief but pointed reply
to these two suitors. He was not surprised that an em-
bassy of the Persians, who had eyes for nothing but
gain, should attempt to purchase the loyalty of a state;
but he was grieved that fellow Greeks should imagine
that Athenian allegiance could be bought. No; Athens
had always been and must ever remain an enemy of
Persia.

Mardonius, seeing that the Athenians could not be
reasoned with, moved his army at an early date into
Attica. With this army outside the very walls, he sent
150 THE STORY OF ATHENS

another envoy with the same generous offers as before.
One timorous citizen ventured to express the opinion
that they had better consult their safety and yield, where-
upon he was promptly stoned to death by his fellow-
townsmen, while the women of Athens repaired to his
house and put an end to his wife and children, to prevent
the propagation of further defection. Athens was obdu-
rate, and sent the envoy respectfully back to his master.
Mardonius now prepared to retake the city, and the Athe-
nians moved again to Salamis.

If the Persians left anything in the way of devastation
undone on the occasion of their former visit, they com-
pleted it now with a liberal hand. Nothing that could
remind the Athenians of the former glory of their city
was left. Not content with having burned the temple
roofs, they now overturned the massive columns and
razed the walls. The time-honored house of Erechtheus
they stripped of its metal linings, and leveled it with the
ground. Not one of the thousands of statues was spared.
These they threw from their pedestals, and mutilated
beyond recognition. We cannot imagine what engines
they employed to dilapidate the gigantic cyclopean walls,
but when the Athenians returned they found their old
defenses sadly in need of repair.

By declining to become pensioners upon the charity
of Sparta, the Athenians had not meant to refuse Spar-
tan aid in ridding Greece of the Eastern peril. The ma-
rauding army of Mardonius was still in Greece, and none
of the states outside the Peloponnesus could reéstablish
conditions of peace while the Persians were at large in
Europe. The Spartans, on the other hand, felt compara-
tively secure in their peninsular home, with Corinth
guarding the isthmus, and were now apparently resting
upon the undying laurels won at Thermopylae, and tak-
ing no little satisfaction in the humbled estate of their
THE PERSIANS 151

greatest rival. The regent, Pausanias, had not the pen-
chant for fighting that had animated his immortal uncle
Leonidas, and was content to celebrate the glories of
Spartan achievements in the past.

The Athenians grew impatient of waiting, and pres-
ently sent an embassy to Sparta to remind the Lacedae-
monians of their necessity. The ephors seemed in no
haste to respond to the urgent call of Athens. They
were in the midst of celebrations and games in honor of
their dead heroes. The envoys were treated kindly, but
were put off from day to day on every kind of pretext.
It was not until the people themselves had noticed their
anxious faces at the games and in the streets that the
matter was looked into, and the ephors were rebuked
for their delay. Then a body of soldiers was hastily
despatched, in secret, with succor and supplies for Ath-
ens; and when the tired envoys sought another interview
they were informed that an army and provisions were
already on the way, and were in all probability at that
moment in Attica.

Soon after this a conclave of the allies was held, at
which a plan was formulated to make one grand effort
for the expulsion of the remaining Persians from Greek
soil. An army of one hundred and ten thousand Greeks,
from the Peloponnesus, Athens, and the allies bordering
upon Attica, was mustered on the shore of the bay of
Eleusis. Pausanias was to command the forces of the
Peloponnesus, and Aristides the Athenians. A fleet of
Spartan and Athenian galleys was also in readiness, the
former commanded by Leotychides and the latter by
Xanthippus. Mardonius, on hearing of these prepara-
tions, withdrew from the rugged hills of Attica to the
more open country of Boeotia. The Greeks followed, and
soon the two armies were within sight of each other.
Both sides had consulted an oracle, and had received the
152 THE STORY OF ATHENS

same response—that the side making the attack could not
win. Several days passed, with only occasional skir-
mishes between the Persian cavalry and the Greek foot-
soldiers, while all of Greece waited breathless in suspense.
Late one afternoon, the Grecian generals gave orders for
the camp to move to a post more convenient for water,
on the banks of the Asopus, not far from the town of
Plataea. This move was made under cover of night, but
word soon reached Mardonius that the Greeks had broken
camp, and he, taking their action for flight, set out early
in the morning to overtake them. The Greeks had not all
arrived at the river, and were separated into three divi-
sions. Mardonius, with the main part of his troops, en-
countered the Peloponnesian division under Pausanias, the
Boeotian allies of the Persian army overtook the Atheni-
ans, and two separate battles began at the same time, with
the third division of the Greeks far ahead and thus out of
action. The two divisions, however, resisted the on-
slaught with great courage, and soon after the battle had
begun Pausanias’s men were repulsing the Persians with
great slaughter. In the heat of battle Mardonius fell;
the Persian line instantly faltered, and the Peloponnesians
had won the day. The Athenians had held back their
antagonists bravely, but had gained little ground against
them until it was known that the Persians were routed;
then the Boeotian allies turned and fled, Aristides and
his Athenians starting in pursuit. The whole Persian
force, flying before the Greeks, reached camp and lay in-
trenched within their earthworks, which Pausanias was
vainly endeavoring to take by assault in the face of a
storm of Persian arrows, when the Athenian division
came up.

With the arrival of the Athenians, whose storming
tactics were the most renowned in all Greece, the intrench-
ments were soon passed, and the Persians fled over one
THE PERSIANS 153

side of the camp, while the Athenians swarmed over the
other.

Then rose the mingled shouts and groans of men
Slaying and slain; the earth ran red with blood,

while the Greeks hewed their way into the crowded in-
closure, and the terrified Persians fought with one an-
other in the mad struggle to escape. The Persians that
escaped were pursued by the swift Greeks until they had
dropped everything of value to expedite their flight. The
Greeks gathered up the spoils and returned to camp.
Then came the division of the booty, the richest ever won
by Greek arms—money, jewels, precious metals, furni-
ture, arms, and animals. To the Athenians’ share fell the
coveted sword of Mardonius, which was preserved for
centuries, together with the famous silver-footed throne
of Xerxes, in the shrine of Athena Polias. As usual, a
tithe was set apart for the gods, and a generous allowance
was made to each of the generals. In treasure the Greeks
were far richer for the visit of the Persians, but money
could not at once restore the devastated fields and groves
of figs and olives, nor rebuild the shrines and homes of
wasted Attica.

On the same day with the battle of Plataea, the Greek
fleet won a great victory off Mycale on the coast of Asia
Minor. The Persian fleet had retired to the eastern shores
of the Aegean after the battle of Salamis, and that por-
tion of Xerxes’s army which had escorted him back to
Asia was quartered upon the Ionians,.near the point of
Mycale. The Ionian cities were ready for another revolt,
and sent ambassadors to Athens praying the assistance
of the fleet. The Persian fleet was now at Samos, and
the Ionians urged that the Greeks sail thither at once to
destroy it. This they prepared to do, but the Persians,
learning of their approach, withdrew to Mycale, to be
154 DHESSIORY “OF ATHENS

under the protection of the army. Here they drew their
vessels up on the shore, built a stockade about them, and
prepared to resist the Greeks. Xanthippus secretly landed
his men, and, with the aid of the Ionians, drove the Per-
sians back from the coast, broke down the stockade,
destroyed the fleet, and then sailed away to search out the
last remnant of the Persian forces in Greece, still linger-
ing in the Thracian Chersonese.

The victory of Mycale practically won independence
for the cities of Ionia; for Xerxes, on learning of these
two defeats—Plataea and Mycale—left Sardis, and, with
a remnant of his forces, withdrew to Susa and aban-
doned his ideas of conquest across the Hellespont.

No sooner had Greece delivered herself from foreign
invasion, than domestic malice threatened to extinguish
the glory of her recent victories, and all on account
of petty private jealousies. After the battle of Plataea,
the unfortunate question was raised as to which of the
Greek states deserved the prize for valor in the recent
conflict. Athens and Sparta claimed first place, and
after a series of heated discussions were quite ready to
fight it out. No one deplored such a situation more
than Aristides, though he was quite unable to bridle the
passion of the Athenians on this point. Finally, how-
ever, it was proposed that the decision of the matter be
left to the other states. To this reasonable suggestion
both contestants agreed, and the conclave, rather than
encourage strife between the two greatest powers in
Greece, awarded the prize to the Plataeans. This settled
all difficulties, and the states vied with one another to do
honor to the winner. A large sum was voted to the Pla-
taeans with which to build a temple to Zeus the Liberator,
and a solemn festival and games were decreed to be per-
petually celebrated in remembrance of the deliverance of
Greece from barbarian tyranny. A golden tripod and
THE PERSIANS 155

much other spoil was sent to enrich the oracle at Delphi,
and from the arms of the enemy a bronze monument
was made, formed of three huge serpents entwined in a
column, with their three heads extending, like a triangu-
lar capital, to support the legs of the tripod. Upon the
coils of the serpents were inscribed the names of all the
cities that had sent soldiers to the war. This serpentine
column was for years preserved at Delphi, but was even-
tually carried, by Constantine or one of his successors,
to the Bosporus. It is still to be seen at Constantinople,
near the center of the open square where the famous
circus once stood. The serpent heads have long since
been broken off, but one of these was most miraculously
discovered and is preserved to-day in the safekeeping of
the Imperial Ottoman Museum. A close examination of
the monument may still discover the names of the patri-
. otic cities engraved upon the coils of the serpents. Two
of them, it will be noticed, have been inserted in their
proper positions after the original names were engraved.
These are the names of two towns which, after the monu-
ment had been completed, proved that they had reinforce-
ments on the way to Plataea, which turned back on hear-
ing of the decisive victory ; having made good their claim
to be enrolled with the others, their willing spirit was
recognized.
VI

THE PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE

“When the Athenians laid the foundations of freedom.”
PINDAR.

THE foregoing excursions into the his-
tory of Greece have been taken over
paths well beaten, to say the least; they
can never become hackneyed. Mara-
thon, Salamis, and Plataea are imbibed
with our earliest mental pabulum; we
are brought up on lessons of their sig-
nificance to the welfare of Europe and
western civilization generally, but their

Altar, found nearthe Story never grows old. They are re-

Enneacrunus. .
viewed here only that the reader may
have freshly in mind and in the pages before him an
account of the fall of Athens and a sketch of the condi-
tions from which she leaped to the very zenith of her
glory.

As we have said before, the golden age of a state often
follows close upon a period of depression and poverty;
but the golden age of military and political achievement,
the age of new prosperity, is seldom coincident with that
of art and literature, which usually follows a generation
or so later. But in Athens the conditions seem to have
been ripening for a period of full bloom just at the time
when the Persian wars came to cut back the budding
shoots; to prune them, so to speak, for stronger and more
156

 
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 157

luxuriant growth. It would be rash to say that Athens
would never have supplanted Sparta as the eye and center
of Greece; that Athenian art and literature would never
have attained so high a state of development if the Per-
sian invasion had never taken place. But we may safely
venture to assume that political and artistic supremacy
would not have been reached so soon, nor in so many
directions at once, but for the vigorous national life that
pulsated in the veins of all lovers of Athens as the direct
result of that mighty conflict.

Of the men who were to build the fabric of Athenian
greatness upon the ruins wrought by foreign invasion,
not all were either statesmen or soldiers. Aristides, The-
mistocles, Xanthippus, and Cimon were the master-build-
ers, no doubt; but there was also Ageladas, with Critias
and Nesiotes, ready to lay the foundations of the great
Athenian school of sculpture; there were Polygnotus and
Micon, the foremost painters of antiquity; there were
Anaxagoras, the philosopher, and Aeschylus, both soldier
and dramatist, Simonides, the poet laureate of the Per-
sian wars, and Sophocles, who, as a boy, had led the fes-
tive dances in the victorious celebrations at Salamis. Not
all these men were Athenians, but all drifted to Athens
to help make her great, and most of them were adopted
sons of Athena.

The above is about as famous a list of names as could
be chosen from a classical dictionary to represent poli-
tics, polemics, literature, and art; and yet all these men
lived in one city on the same day. Most of these men saw
the Persian fleets swept from the bay of Salamis, and
joined in the paeans after Plataea; but there were in their
cradles during the stirring events from Marathon to
Mycale a galaxy of prodigies whose names add even
greater luster to the shining roll. One night during these
eventful years Agariste, the wife of the admiral Xanthip-
158 THE STORY OF ATHENS

pus, dreamed that she had brought forth a lion, and soon
afterward Pericles came into the world. On the day of
the battle of Salamis, Euripides was born, and about the
same time the brothers Phidias and Panaenus first saw
the light of Attica. Athens might be laid in the dust,
but men—not monuments of stone—make a city small
or great; and with men like these to rebuild her, it would
have been strange if Athens had not become the first city
in the world.

In the mighty undertaking of rebuilding the city, the
task of renewing the Acropolis, with its walls and tem-
ples, fell to Cimon, who was now looked upon by old
Aristides as the hope of the conservative party; while to
Themistocles, the radical, were given the construction
of the lower town and the completion of the harbor and
fortifications at Piraeus. History does not tell us which
of these works was begun first; they may have been un-
dertaken at the same time, immediately after the return
of the citizens to Athens, and continued, side by side, to
completion. But history does recount a series of political
and military operations in which these two leaders were
engaged which, one would imagine, must have claimed
a great part of their attention for a number of years
after Plataea.

For two years, however, nothing of great importance
seems to have happened to draw the attention of the
Athenians from the restoration of their homes, the agora,
their temples, and their altars.

The plans which Cimon laid out for the rehabilitation
of Athena’s rock-built citadel were on a scheme so vast
that it is almost impossible for us, who know the form
of the hill only as Cimon left it, to realize how completely
it transformed that mighty mass. The sharp crest of the
towering rock, girt about with a ring of massive forti-
fications built so long before and in such a manner as to
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 159

have the appearance of being a part of nature’s work,
was to be leveled up by a stupendous retaining wall made
of well-dressed stones evenly laid, towering above the
town equally on all sides, and filled in behind so as to
form a broad and comparatively flat plateau whose entire
surface should be but a few feet lower than the summit
of the ancient altar site. To accomplish this it was neces-
sary to destroy great portions of the jagged, uneven
cyclopean wall, and to conceal other parts of it behind
the right-lined face of the new construction. For this
work, Cimon did not choose to employ the crude mate-
rials of the old walls, whose sacredness had been for-
gotten when once desecrated by the barbarians, but
brought a fine-grained limestone from quarries near
Piraeus, which served far better for the smooth and ele-
gant face which he proposed to have for the basement
of the costly temple which he had in mind as the new
shrine for the divine protectress of Athens.

On the northern side, above the agora, the rock itself
was high and precipitous; here, above the grottoes of
Pan and Apollo, the new wall, probably following the
line of the original, did not require great height to bring
it up to the desired level, but it was strengthened by a
number of square redouts. Toward its eastern end it
becomes more lofty, and the eastern side itself was made
very high, bearing away at an obtuse angle toward the
southeast far beyond the circuit of the ancient wall. At
the southeast corner it turns an acute angle that rises
high above the solid rock like the prow of a mighty vessel
upon the crest of a wave.

The long south wall is almost straight from end to
end, towering above the theater and the sanctuary of
Asclepius, where the natural rock had been scarped away
to form a precipitous defense. This was perhaps the
most imposing section of all when the majestic wall of
160 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Cimon could be seen; built of massive blocks of soft, yel-
low limestone, four-squared and perfectly jointed, in strik-
ing contrast to its base of rugged rock, violet-hued,
streaked with purple and brown; but Cimon’s construc-
tion is no longer visible, although we are told that it
is still in place, for this whole side was reinforced by a
facing wall, built of rough, uneven fragments, some time
during the middle ages, by Frankish or Genoese dukes.
Toward the west end of the Acropolis, the two great walls,
the northern and the southern, converge, leaving but a nar-
row space which was occupied by the main entrance and
its fortifications. A portion of these is preserved in the
bastion of the Nike temple, which embraces an old cyclo-
pean tower, and which doubtless formed part of the de-
fense which Cimon built to connect his wall with the
great prehistoric outworks. For there can be little doubt
that the ancient Pelargikon, which had proved too strong
for the Persians to demolish, was not destroyed in Ci-
mon’s general reconstruction: an ancient writer, later
than Cimon, declares that ‘‘all the walls [of his time]
not built by Cimon were built by the Pelasgians,” which
means that considerable portions of the Pelargikon re-
mained after Cimon’s time. The nine-gated approach
thus must have remained about as before, and was joined
to the new work where the wall of the Acropolis proper
began.

All the western side of the Acropolis has been sub-
jected to so many rebuildings that it is well nigh impos-
sible to speak, with any degree of certainty, of construc-
tions prior to the time of Pericles; but the removal, a
number of years ago, of a great Venetian tower that
stood above the Nike bastion disclosed a number of im-
portant remains. At the foot of this bastion, which is
among the best preserved of the visible portions of Ci-
mon’s wall, the ancient road turned in one of its many
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 161

windings up the steep ascent. At this point there is a
break in the modern steps, and we may see the deep
transverse grooves that were cut in the smooth rock to
provide a foothold for the horses and the sacrificial ani-
mals. Across the entrance, below the north wing of the
propylaea, is another bastion, partly the work of Cimon
and partly later. This carries us around the circuit of the
walls.

The gate which was built at this time was merely a
part of the fortifications—a narrow opening in the mas-
sive walls; a small fragment of it is still in position, for
the later portal of Mnesicles was not set exactly on the
site of the original portal, and this fragment was thus
spared. Adjoining the bit of cyclopean wall still to be
seen on the south side of the propylaea are a small section
of quadrated construction, which formed the southeast
wall of a vestibule, and a massive anta of white marble.
Below this a comparatively new-looking marble threshold
is visible. This is undoubtedly the site of Cimon’s gate,
and the small fragment can be nothing else than one side
of the first portal built after the invasion. It seems to
have been a double portal, with a square vestibule between
the outer and inner entrances. The side walls were of
quadrated limestone, adjoining the cyclopean wall, but
they appear to have been revetted with white marble.
The thresholds, as we have seen, were also of marble, and
the inner and outer openings may have consisted of mar-
ble colonnades resting upon them. The wall of the
present propylaea is built upon the very sill of the old gate,
and almost in contact with the face of the anta, all but
concealing it. This can be seen only by entering the
gateway to the Acropolis, turning to the right, and fol-
lowing the wall of the propylaea down toward the angle
and climbing up on some remnants of the cyclopean wall;

it is one of the few hidden nooks on the Acropolis.
11
162 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Cimon preserved the staircase which led down to the
Agraulium on the north side of the Acropolis, construct-
ing steps in the new wall to connect with the ancient rock-
cut steps. But the other pelasgic descent, that leading to
the gardens, was obliterated in the new construction.

It is not often that the building of a simple wall of
defense offers an opportunity to point a moral; but in this
respect the wall of the Acropolis was an exception to
the rule. The sacred inclosure was at this time filled
with a mass of architectural fragments, the remnants of
once gorgeous temples, drums and capitals of columns,
ponderous architraves, triglyph-blocks and metopes,
broken moldings heaped in confusion with gleaming bits
of painted pediment sculpture, charred beams, and frag-
ments of highly colored tiles. The disorder was hopeless ;
the glorious buildings of Pisistratus and his predecessors,
the stately lines of bright-hued statues that had graced
the avenues of the Acropolis, were now reduced to worth-
less rubbish. All this must be cleared away before
Athena’s shrine could be rebuilt or the inclosure made
fit for a place of worship. In the midst of the inarticu-
late mass lay the wreck of the pride of Athens—the
ancient temple of Athena, dismembered and _ scattered
on all sides of its mighty basement : the stately colonnades,
like ranks of fallen giants, lay stretched far beyond their
length, each drum separated from the other, their smooth
stucco casing cracked and defaced. From this heap of
ruins Cimon selected the least broken members—long
architrave pieces, and triglyph-blocks all of limestone, a
number of marble metopes and sections of the limestone
cornice with mutules still intact. These he set up in the
wall, at the northwest side, above the agora. Each
member was set in its proper position with reference to
the other, so that a complete section of the entablature of
Athena’s temple overhung the market-place, enriching the
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 163

plain, monotonous face of the solid wall, but serving a
purpose more noble than that of adornment. These ven-
erable stones, hallowed by the most sacred associations of
the Athenians, were to be a lasting monument, ever before
the eyes of the citizens, a constant reminder of their eter-
nal hatred of the nation that had desecrated their holiest
shrines, had devastated their most loved possessions.

 
       
 

    

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Cimon’s Wall, upon the Acropolis, Showing Entablature
of Old Temple.

To-day we see them, standing where Cimon put them,
against the clear sky, high above the dusty streets of mod-
ern Athens, still telling to the world the immortal story
of Europe’s deliverance from the chain of Asia, told more
forcibly by them, perhaps, than by any others of the stones
of Athens, because their history is longer, they have seen
so much more, and they were set up in their place for
the express purpose of telling a tale of history to suc-
ceeding generations of Athenians. Not all of the vener-
able entablature remains in place. A portion of the mid-
dle section either fell down or was destroyed in after
164 THE STORY OF ATHENS

ages, and the breach was built up like an ordinary wall,
but enough of it remains for it to be recognized at once.
The white metopes, shining out against the dark-toned
limestone, are conspicuous so long as their side of the
Acropolis is visible.

The other fragments of the temples were gathered to-
gether, and fitted firmly behind the wall to form a solid
bottom for the filling in of the angle between the new wall
and the uneven natural rock that was to raise the sur-
face of the inclosure to a flat plateau. Rows of fluted
column drums have been found by the excavators; capi-
tals and other details have been discovered that had not
been roughly thrown in as filling, but set firmly one upon
another. Here were found the fragments, bearing fea-
tures of different phases of the Doric style, which have
told us of several temples, varying in dimensions and
belonging to different periods, that existed upon the
Acropolis before the Persian wars. Here were brought
to light the brilliant bits of sculpture that graced these
temples and have created a new chapter in the history of
plastic art.

A portion at least of the cella of the old temple of
Athena must have been left in such a condition as to
make repairs upon it possible, for years elapsed before a
new temple was completed and another place provided
for the statue and sacred furniture of the goddess. In
fact, the burning of the ‘old temple” is mentioned al-
most a hundred years after this time, but there can be
no doubt that the colonnades were taken away and used
in building the walls. Whether they were renewed or
not, no one can absolutely affirm; but from the position
of buildings erected during the century, it would seem
that they were not. This point we shall discuss later.
In any event, Cimon and the Athenians were not satis-
fed with whatever makeshift had been made, and a grand
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 165

project was soon on foot for the building of a new and
worthy shrine.

The old site could not be employed, and a spot was
chosen immediately to the south, on the very top of the
rock. This site was originally not large enough for the
foundations of a structure of great size, but the new plan
for enlarging the upper city by building up the southern
side made it the most desirable spot on the Acropolis.
One half of the new edifice was to rest upon the solid
crest of the rock; the other must be built over the space
between the rock and the new south wall. It would not
do to rest the crepidoma of the new temple upon the ordi-
nary filling, so a great substructure was built, with its
foundations laid upon the rock far below and its summit
almost level with the top of the new wall, leaving a con-
siderable space to be filled up in the ordinary manner. In
this space between the substructure and the outer wall a
portion of the ancient wall was buried.

For the present, let us leave Cimon and his great plans
for making a new Acropolis, and descend to the lower
city, where Themistocles is busily engaged in restoring
the domestic and forensic portions of Athens.

Themistocles, too, had great projects on hand, but had
encountered opposition from an unexpected quarter. The
old soldier did not think it worth while to build a costly
monumental city, unless it were to be protected from the
assaults of enemies. Athens now promised to become a
wealthy and populous city, and it seemed a primitive sort
of defense to withdraw to the citadel in case of a sur-
prise, leaving the town to the mercy of the invaders. He
proposed to surround the entire city with a wall of de-
fense, and began preparations to carry out his scheme.

But Sparta, ever watchful and jealous of the power of
her ancient rival, sent a deputation to reason with the
Athenians for the building of a stronghold which might
166 THE STORY OF ATHENS

in after years be employed by the Persians in operations
against Greece; for since Athens had once fallen, she
might fall again, and, if defensible, might be held as a
point of vantage for the storing of arms. Themistocles
listened to their arguments, and replied that he would
come to Sparta with an embassy to discuss the matter
with the ephors themselves.

After a little delay, he set out for the Peloponnesus,

 

Themistocles’s Wall, near the Dipylum, and the Postern
of the Wine Merchants.

leaving instructions that his companions should be sent
out later and one by one. Themistocles was warmly re-
ceived by the Spartan populace. He was now the most
renowned man in all Greece. The Spartans themselves
had conferred upon him the crown of wisdom when they
crowned their own Pausanias for valor. At the recent
great Olympic games he had been received with unprece-
dented acclamations by the vast concourse of Greeks,
who rose to their feet with enthusiastic shouts as he en-
tered the stadium. In Sparta he now amused himself at
feasts and entertainments, and whenever the ephors
pressed him to confer with them on the subject at issue,
he replied that he must await the arrival of his colleagues
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 167

before he could negotiate. Meanwhile, at home the cir-
cuit wall was being pushed with all haste toward com-
pletion. Every citizen set heartily to the work. Women
and children aided as best they could; not a soul in Athens
was idle. From dawn until dark, and often into the night,
the indefatigable laborers toiled on; for they knew well
the motives that had prompted Spartan interference—
that jealousy was masquerading under the réle of the
“greatest good.”

One by one, the embassy began to appear in Sparta.
Themistocles still delayed; the policy of the great Fabius
was anticipated; the Spartans came to him with reports
that the obnoxious walls were well under way; he as-
sured them that this could not be true, and advised them
to send a trustworthy commission to report upon the case,
sending word at the same time to his people to detain
the deputies in case he and his colleagues should be held.

At length the last member of the embassy arrived;
Themistocles declared that he was ready to open nego-
tiations, and when the representatives of the two cities
met he quietly announced that their fears had not been
groundless; that the Athenians, in his absence, had car-
ried on the work instituted by him, and that the last of
the envoys had brought news of the practical completion
of the fortifications. He then went on to explain that,
according to his conception, the Spartans did not wish
to become great through the inferiority of their allies,
but through their strength. His hearers could take this
as they liked; most of them were very angry, but what
was done was done, and they decided to make the best
of it. But the Spartans did not like to be outwitted even
by one upon whom they had conferred the crown of supe-
rior wisdom, and they cherished a grudge against the
Athenians for this piece of duplicity, though many years
passed ere they had an opportunity for revenge.
168 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Themistocles returned to find the walls, in truth, al-
most finished, describing a mighty circle about the cita-
del, embracing the agora, the Pnyx, the Olympieum, the
Pythium, and all the shrines that were dearest to the
Athenian heart, so strong that no enemy ever passed them
until Sulla with his Roman eagles, more than four hun-
dred years later, thundered at the sacred gate.

Little is left now of Themistocles’s wall. The re-
douts that for centuries kept the enemy at bay could not
withstand the stone-mason’s attacks in times of peace—in

 

Breach in the Wall for the Eridanus, formerly known
as the Sacred Gate.

later centuries the walls served as a quarry, and only a
few remnants have escaped this gradual but sure de-
struction. The portions best preserved are in the lowest
part of the town, down by the Ceramicus, where the an-
cient quarter of the pot-makers gave its name to the
whole precinct, including the great cemetery which
stretched far away toward the west.

Here was the most frequented gate of the city, called
the Thriasian gate, built where the wall crossed the road
to Piraeus and the Academy, the busiest thoroughfare
of Athens, on which merchants and tradesmen from the
port jostled with poets and philosophers on the way to
the inspired groves; where somber processions of citi-
zens passed out each day to the necropolis, always return-
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 169

ing one less in number; and where, once a year, passed
the festal throng on its way to Eleusis. Not far from
this, not more than a hundred yards to the west, is the
opening in the walls through which the little Eridanus
flowed, which for years was mistaken for the “Sacred
Gate” of the ancient writers. A few steps further toward
the west is the little postern of the wine merchants. From
this point, where a spur of rock rises abruptly on the
south, a distinct line of the wall may be traced in a north-
easterly direction to the great gate mentioned above.
The ancient work can be distinguished from the later
additions of Pericles by its material and the method in
which it is built. Themistocles’s wall is of the Acropolis
rock, laid in polygonal fashion; the later constructions
are of quadrated Piraeic limestone. In fact, this fragment
of the early ring wall is one of the best specimens of
polygonal masonry in all Athens. Why it was built in
a style different from the contemporary Acropolis wall
we cannot say, unless the material discarded by Cimon
upon the Acropolis was used by the people without cut-
ting. The lower portions are laid with great care, the
joints being perfectly fitted; but the higher portions, if
they belong to the original construction, show signs of
haste, fragments of every description being employed.
In this wall, between the gates, may be seen a stone about
three feet high, bearing the inscription, p05 Xepaperxod
(precinct of the Ceramicus). This doubtless marked the
western boundary of the ancient district.

Beyond the rocky spur on the other side of the postern
gate the line of the wall has been traced by scant frag-
ments of foundations, turning suddenly to the south for
a short distance and then bending slightly eastward as it
mounts the Hill of the Nymphs. From this point it ran
along the crest of the Pnyx hill, inclosing the ancient
Bema, near which a ponderous remnant is still i situ.
170 TRE SvORY OF ATHENS

It then crossed the narrow valley, and mounted the Hill
of the Muses, passing just beyond the site of the present
monument of Philopappus, and descending to the plain
of the Ilissus and crossing the road to Phalerum by a
gate called the Itonian. From this, its extreme southern
point, it followed the right bank of the river, with many
angles and towers, embracing the site of the temple of
Zeus and describing a broad curve toward the northeast,
including the present royal gardens, near which the gate
called Diochares was located, and returning by the site
of the present Boulé and near that of the National Bank
to the principal gate again. Themistocles’s wall described
a broad circuit—one which Athens never outgrew, even
at the very height of her power. The city, within the
walls, was roughly divided into quarters with separate
names. The quarter in which the agora was situated
was now called the Inner Ceramicus, the slopes of the
Nymphs’ hill and the Pnyx were known as Melite, and
the gate here was the Melitian gate; the quarter includ-
ing the Hill of the Muses and extending eastward was
called Cydathenaeum; the most easterly quarter was Dio-
mea, and the gate below Lycabettus was called the Dio-
mean; the broad, level space north of the Acropolis was
Collytus; it extended to the northernmost gate—the
Acharnian—and was bounded on the west by the Inner
Ceramicus.

But what a field of ruins the new wall inclosed! The
unfinished temple of Zeus, which Pisistratus had begun,
was a heap of ruins; the theater, what there was of it
to destroy, had doubtless suffered; and the little temple
of Dionysus had been made a wreck.

The Pnyx, with the Bema, was one monument which
only time could pull down; this undoubtedly remained in
its massive strength, like the Pelargikon; but below it the
clustering houses had been sacked and demolished. In
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 171

the midst lay the ruins of the agora and the buildings
that stood about it. All the statues had been destroyed
or carried away. Among those taken as spoil was the
group of the Tyrannicides, the pride of the democratic
Athenians, and probably the famous statue of Hermes
of the Market. The Altar of the Twelve Gods was a
wreck; the Prytaneum had been burned. All the shrines
and sanctuaries which had been accumulating about the
foot of Athena’s rock ever since Deucalion had built that
earliest of temples to Zeus, had been devastated. Outside
the walls, the spacious Lyceum, with its shaded walks, its
sanctuary of Apollo, its gymnasium and many altars and
statues, had been laid waste. Practically nothing re-
mained of the city of the tyrants, and Themistocles was
compelled to begin a new city. We cannot tell from the
excavated remains or from history how much of the
enormous task was undertaken at once, but it is quite
certain that the theater was promptly rebuilt; for within
eight years Aeschylus brought out his famous trilogy,
the “Persians,” which, for its timely theme, was most pop-
ular with the Athenians. The agora, too, must soon have
been restored, for we have record that Cimon had it laid
out with plane-trees. It is not incredible that advantage
of the general destruction was taken to extend the agora
from the cramped position in the valley between the
Acropolis and the Pnyx, which it is conjectured to have
occupied in more ancient times, to the broader plain
north of the Areopagus, where it would seem to have
been located at a later period.

In memory of the victories over the Persians, Themis-
tocles set up, near the agora, a sanctuary and a temple
dedicated to Artemis Aristobule (good counsel), which,
as Plutarch says, “gave offense to the people because they
thought that the title given to Artemis in reality referred
to himself because he had given the best counsel to the
172 Tie eSstoOkY OF ATHENS

city.” The temple, we read, was not far from his house,
and in the direction of the place “where the public exe-
cutioners cast out the bodies of those who had been put
to death,” which must refer to the gloomy Barathron,
the site of which has been recognized in a ravine just
outside the line of the ancient wall, below the Pnyx.
The temple is identified with that of Artemis Euclaea
of other ancient references. In later times it contained a
statue of Themistocles.

The most famous sculptors of this period were Critias
and Nesiotes, who are believed to have been pupils of
Antenor, who was a prominent artist, as we remember, in
the days of Hippias, and who made the statues of the
slayers of that tyrant, under Clisthenes’s direction of the
state. These two sculptors seem to have worked almost
always together; their names have been found side by
side on statue-bases, and they are often mentioned as the
artists who designed a new group of the Tyrannicides
which the Athenians now ordered to take the place of An-
tenor’s bronzes, which the Persians had carried away. As
both had probably studied under the last of the pre-Per-
sian sculptors, and were familiar with that most popular
of all works of art in their time, it is not at all improbable
that the new group was, as nearly as possible, a replica
of the old one, a photograph of a copy of which, in
marble, has been shown on page 119. The new group
was set up on the site of the first, at the end of the agora,
beside the road which led up to the Acropolis. We know
also of other works of these partners: one was a bronze
statue of a runner in full armor which stood upon the
Acropolis. The runner’s name was Epicharmus, and the
bronze was long supposed, from mention of it in the
texts, to be the work of Critias, until the base was found
giving the names of both artists. Two statues of Athena
are also known to have been executed by them, and there
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 173

were undoubtedly many other products of their skill in
Athens and at the different shrines of Hellas. Another
sculptor of the time was Hegesius, who was believed
at one time to have made the statues of the Dioscuri
which now adorn the steps of the Capitol at Rome. It
may be that marble figures somewhat similar to these
were made for the sanctuary of the Anaces at Athens,
for no others are mentioned in ancient literature. This
artist was famous also for his figures of boys on race-
horses, a subject suggestive of the early horses, with
their fragments of riders, which have been described
among the pre-Persian sculptures. Who made the new
statue of Hermes Agoraios we do not know, but we may
be sure that the old bronze was speedily replaced, for
Hermes was indispensable to any well-ordered market-
place.

The gymnasiums were doubtless soon put in repair
with other buildings for constant public use, but neces-
sarily everything could not be done at the same time.
Themistocles was more interested in plans for defense
than in rebuilding public monuments. He urged the im-
mediate completion of extensive defenses at Piraeus, us-
ing the argument with the Athenians that even though
they should again be driven out of their city, they could,
with their ships, hold out indefinitely in a strongly forti-
fied harbor town. He further projected connecting Athens
and the Piraeus by a long wall, which would prevent their
being cut off from the port, and he is believed to have
laid the foundations of such a wall.

Themistocles and Cimon were seldom in sympathy with
each other; they represented two widely different fac-
tions, but the common good of Athens at this time kept
them working side by side without apparent friction.
On one point they were agreed: that the maritime power
of Athens should be increased by every possible means.
174 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Pursuant to this end, Themistocles persuaded the Athe-
nians to appropriate a considerable sum each year for
the increase of the navy by twenty new triremes. Plu-
tarch tells a story in this connection which would indi-
cate that Themistocles was not contented with so easy
and peaceable a means of naval aggrandizement. He
proposed to Aristides, so Plutarch says, that the Athe-
nians make an expedition to burn or capture all the
navies of the other Greek states and rule the waves alone.
Neither Aristides nor Cimon would hear of such a scheme,
and it never came before the Athenians for consideration.
After the completion of the walls the influence of The-
mistocles seems to have declined rapidly, and those who
were nearest him began to have serious doubts of his
patriotism. He was accused of appropriating the public
funds, and several other charges were preferred against
him; finally, through the influence of Cimon, he was
ostracized, and retired to Argos.

Aristides meanwhile was engaged in instituting po-
litical reforms at home and establishing a new foreign
policy. In 477 he brought about the negotiations with
a number of the islands and the Ionian cities which re-
sulted in the formation of the so-called Delian Naval
League, the terms of which stipulated that the confeder-
ated parties should contribute stated sums toward the
maintenance of a fleet for common protection. The ap-
propriations were to be deposited upon the sacred island
of Delos, and the amount to be levied upon each member
of the league was, by common consent, to be fixed by
Aristides, whose reputation for justice extended beyond
the limits of Attica.

The compact was made with great ceremony. A vast
fleet lay under the lee of the rugged shores of Delos,
while the representatives of the various states swore sol-
emn oaths of common allegiance. Huge lumps of iron
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 175

were cast into the sea, in token that the agreements should
not be broken until the iron floated. Allegiance was, of
course, sworn among themselves and to a common cause,
not to Athens or any other single state; but the naval
supremacy of Athens, under the influence of Aristides,
made her by common consent the head of the league,
and it was understood that her navy, increased and aug-
mented by a fair apportionment of the funds of the league,
would be the chief defense for all. The formation of
this league made Athens the virtual leader of the mari-
time states of Greece, and the political troubles of Sparta
left her in undisputed sway.

Pausanias, the Spartan regent, since his series of suc-
cessful operations against the barbarians, had assumed a
position unworthy of a Spartan. By a number of open
affronts, and by conducting himself in the manner of an
Oriental potentate, he had won the cordial hatred of his
fellow-citizens, and had aroused the suspicions of the
ephors, who finally succeeded in bringing him to trial.
He was soon found to be implicated in a conspiracy with
the Persian king, and was condemned for treason. Tak-
ing refuge in the temple of Athena at Sparta, he was
starved to death.

The trial and condemnation of Pausanias brought a
shock to Athens. In the course of the investigations, let-
ters were found which implicated Themistocles in the trea-
sonable designs of Pausanias, and the Spartans demanded
that he be brought to trial. Here was positive proof of
Themistocles’s disloyalty, and his many friends in Athens,
and those who had sympathized with him on account of
his great services to Athens, were obliged to admit his
guilt, and all were in favor of bringing him back to
Athens for trial. Deputies were sent to Argos to take
him, but he had been warned by a trusty friend and had
fled to Corcyra. From there he subsequently fled to the
176 THE STORY OF ATHENS

protection of the King of the Molossians, with whom he
remained until the death of Xerxes, when he repaired to
Susa, and, like Hippias before him, openly allied himself
with the Persian king, Artaxerxes, in plotting new
schemes against Athens. The king loaded him with gifts
and honors, and he lived like a prince at the Persian
court, but died before he had been of any great service
to his patron. Thus ended the career of another hero of
democracy. If they had known about degenerates in
those days, Themistocles would doubtless have been
classed in that great category, and his faults would have
been condoned; but, as it was, he died a plain traitor,
and the memory of his wisdom and his deeds of bravery
went all for naught.

How much better for him and for Miltiades if they
could have died, like Leonidas, in the high glory of their
achievements; how much sweeter would their memory
have lived in Athens, had they been laid to rest wrapped
in a shroud of untarnished fame.

With the banishment of Themistocles, Cimon became
the virtual head of the Athenian state, old Aristides, his
master, holding the nominal supremacy as chief archon.
So great was the popularity of the two Athenian leaders
with the confederate states that the hegemony of mari-
time Greece passed to Athens without a dissenting voice,
and so successful was their administration of affairs at
home that the conservative party was at the height of its
power.

Cimon had long since regained his patrimony, and had
increased his wealth in other ways, so that he was now
one of the well-to-do men of Athens. The old Academy
of the tyrant Hippias was a portion of his vast estate.
To it he added new beauty, laying out walks and plant-
ing many varieties of trees. The populace still congre-
gated there to enjoy the lavish entertainment which the
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 177

free-handed proprietor prepared for them. His private
grounds were also thrown open to the public, who were
permitted to gather fruit from his extensive orchards.
By those and other means, Cimon endeared himself to
the populace. He was tall and handsome, so the poet
Ion tells us, with long hair, black and curly. He was
generous to a fault, and ostentatious in a manner which
evoked the admiration of those whose minds were not
noble enough to reverence his loftier qualities. Still
greater prestige had been won for Athens by Cimon in
his successful expedition against the Dolopian pirates,
whom he had driven from the island of Scyros, and by
his conquests of Carystus and the island of Naxos.
Continuing his warlike operations against the Persians,
he destroyed the Persian garrison at Eion and captured
the city of Amphipolis, on the Thracian coast. After
these victories, he was permitted to dedicate three “‘stone
images’ of Hermes in the colonnade bearing the name
of that god. The Athenians allowed these to be in-
scribed with metrical inscriptions, but forbade Cimon to
insert his own name, showing that modesty was still a
virtue in Athens. One of the inscriptions, quoted by
Plutarch, read as follows:

The Athenians to their leaders this reward
For great and useful service did accord ;
Others hereafter shall, from their applause,
Learn to be valiant in their country’s cause.

The colonnade of the Hermae was undoubtedly situated
in the agora, somewhere near the statue of Hermes
Agoraios and the rows of Hermae that extended from
one side of the agora to the other, as we shall see later.
The space about it must have been large and open,

for we read of companies of cavalry recruits taking rid-
12
178 THE STORY OF ATHENS

ing-lessons in the immediate vicinity. Near by were nu-
merous shops of various kinds, at one of which, a barber’s,
the country people of Decalea were wont to gather to
gossip and to hear all the latest news of the town.

In 469 death relaxed the iron hand of noble old Aris-
tides from the helm of the Athenian state, and Cimon was
left alone to guide the destiny of the city into the sea of
golden glory. The justice and honesty of that grand old
man of Athens shone out as clearly in his death as they
had in his long and upright life, for not even a small
percentage of the enormous sums that had passed through
his hands in the administration of the funds of the Delian
League and those of the city of Athens had stuck to his
clean palms. He died a poor man, and the state that he
had served so well had the honor of defraying the ex-
penses of his funeral and of settling an annuity upon
his daughters. A few months after the death of Aris-
tides, Socrates was born.

Soon after the conclusion of the great war with Persia,
in the archonship of Phaedo, the Delphic oracle had
bidden the Athenians to transport the bones of their great
hero Theseus, who had appeared in armor upon the field
of Marathon, to Athens, and enshrine them with proper
dignities. Theseus, we remember, had been treacherously
killed in Scyros by Lycomedes, king of the Dolopians.
Cimon, after the conquest of Sevres, proposed to bring
the relics of the kingly hero to his own again, and began
elaborate preparations for the translation. Forthwith he
laid the foundations of a splendid edifice, to be called the
Heroum, at the east side of the agora in the ancient
sanctuary of Theseus, and then set out in person to con-
duct the august remains to their resting-place. For years
the piratical inhabitants of Seyros had refused to permit
any one to search for the remains of Theseus, and even
upon the arrival of Cimon there was no one who would
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 179

tell where they were buried; but, after a most diligent
search, a gigantic skeleton was found which was at once
pronounced to be that of the Athenian hero. With great
pomp, Cimon had the bones transported to his own gal-
ley, and set sail for the Piraeus.

Great excitement and genuine enthusiasm prevailed in
Athens upon the arrival of the bones of the hero who had
appeared in spirit, within the memory of living men, at
Marathon, and about whom every Athenian boy had
heard in story and in song, and of whom every youth
had read in the treasured lines of Homer. The whole
population turned out to do honor to the festive occasion,
and to join in the great pageant which Cimon had pre-
pared to grace the auspicious day.

There was a great procession, followed by games of
unusual character, embracing a torch-race and other new
events. Interest was added by the fact that the names
of the winners were to be set up in the new temple.

It is by no means certain that the torch-race was insti-
tuted at this time. It had its origin in the bringing of
holy fire from distant shrines to rekindle defiled altars;
but it is not at all improbable that it was now listed
as an athletic event for the first time in Athens, where
the feat was to carry a lighted torch from the Academy
to the city. It was performed in two ways: one was to
have a number of men kindle their torches at the altar
of Prometheus and run with them to the Temple of The-
seus or some other shrine. The man who arrived first
with his torch burning won. The other way was to
choose a larger number of men and station them in several
lines of relays, each line representing a tribe or a com-
mune, between the Academy and the city; the torches
were then lighted and passed along as rapidly as possible,
each man running only a short distance. Thus we hear
of fourteen men winning the same race.
180 THE slORY OF ATHENS

Hard upon these celebrations followed the festival of
the Dionysia, which was to be celebrated with unusual
splendor. The contestants for the prize of tragedy were
many, and it was rumored that a young man of only
twenty-seven years—Sophocles, the chorus-boy of ten
years before—was to bring out one of his own produc-
tions, a tragedy which was very likely to win, because
its subject was timely, being of patriotic turn and sure
to please both audience and judges at this particular time,
when a wave of patriotism was sweeping over Athens as
the result of the revived veneration of the hero Theseus.
The excitement of the crowds at the festival was intense,
and party feeling in the matter of the prize-winner reached
a pitch seldom known in the theater of Athens. It was
almost time for the contests to begin; the actors of the
first tragedy were ready to come upon the stage; and
dense crowds were swarming into the theater, until every
seat was occupied. A compact mass of humanity was
heaped, tier above tier, high up toward the new wall of
the Acropolis, at the summit of which a close line of faces
could be seen peering down upon the surging mass below.
The dignitaries of Athens, the priests of all the temples,
representing the divine circle of Olympus, the chiefs of the
state, the foreign representatives, and distinguished visi-
tors had taken their places, and still Apsephion, the archon
eponymos, had not sworn in the judges for the contest, so
troubled was he over the unwonted excitement and parti-
zanship. Aeschylus was there, deporting himself with the
air of an old stager, confidently displaying the laurels
of a long series of consecutive victories; and Sophocles,
nervous and high-strung, vainly striving to look com-
posed. There were other tragedians, to many of whom
repeated failure was no discouragement, and doubtless
some disgruntled ones whose expression showed that they
had lost patience with judges and popular opinion; but
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 181

the number of actual contestants was probably not more
than three.

Suddenly a hush fell upon the boisterous multitude, and
the pressing crowd opened a passage through the space
between the stage buildings and the tiers of seats as the
majestic form of Cimon, with the ten generals, entered
the first circle about the orchestra and proceeded toward
their appointed seats. The vast throng rose to their feet
to greet the hero of new victories for Athens, and Cimon
paused to acknowledge the compliment of his fellow-
citizens. He was about to move to his place when Apse-
phion stepped to his side, and, after a few hurried words
of explanation, administered to him and the other gen-
erals the customary solemn oath for judges in the Diony-
siac contests, and without further delay they passed on
to their seats, amid general expressions of popular satis-
faction. It was indeed a brilliant occasion, with Aeschy-
lus and Sophocles among the contestants. and Cimon as
one of the judges, and with great men from all parts of
Greece, present in Athens for the recent Theseus festival,
in the audience. Euripides, who had already begun to
write plays, was undoubtedly in the throng, with Anax-
agoras, his teacher in physics, and young Pericles, son of
the distinguished general Xanthippus; Thucydides, the
coming historian, Phidias, the rising sculptor, and Panae-
nus, his brother the painter, may have been present, with
a host of artists and poets who were famous then in
Athens and whose fame has survived the passing of
twenty centuries and more. The history of the world
has not afforded a possible meeting of men of so great
genius, similar to that which might have been of daily
occurrence in Athens at the dawn of the Golden Age.

The dramatic contest began and proceeded to its end.
Aeschylus’s production was perhaps his famous Orestian
tetralogy, ending with the dark and terrible ‘““Eumenides,”
182 Tk eotORY (OF ALHENS

as we shall see in the light of later developments. Sopho-
cles’s tragedy is believed to have been his “Triptolemus,”
in which he represents the Eleusinian hero as a benefi-
cent civilizer. Intense interest and keen rivalry added
to the excitement of the day. At last the judges gave
their decision, and many were greatly surprised when
the tripod was awarded to the youthful Sophocles, who
modestly received the plaudits of the multitude. With
regard to the sequel, the traditions of the ancients are
not in accord; one says that Aeschylus lost the prize be-
cause of the nature of the ‘““Eumenides” portion of his
tetralogy, which was not only so terrifying as to have
brought several women in the audience to premature
childbirth, but was a partial divulgence of the sacred mys-
teries of Eleusis. For this reason, the tradition adds, Aes-
chylus was tried on the charge of impiety and ostracized,
being saved from the fury of the populace, who would
have stoned him, by the timely arrival of his brother Cy-
naegirus, who thrust forward the stump of the arm the
hand of which had been hacked off at Marathon by a
Persian battle-ax while holding one of the boats to prevent
its escape. The other story is that the poet, angered at the
loss of his laurels, left Athens of his own accord and
sailed for Sicily, where he was welcomed at the court of
Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse.

There may be a foundation of truth for both accounts;
if the ‘““Eumenides” was presented at this time, certain it
is that Aeschylus retired to Sicily at this juncture, either
voluntarily or as the result of banishment. The tale of
ostracism is generally discredited, but it may be that the
tragedy failed to please at its first presentation, and
owing to this the prize was awarded to another. We
have record, however, that this same tetralogy won first
place ten years later, when produced in his absence or
on the occasion of a visit to his native land.
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 183

But it is altogether probable that there were other rea-
sons for Aeschylus’s downfall in the constantly recurring
contests. Sophocles, the younger poet, had struck a new
chord which appealed to a new set of auditors. Aeschylus
had played to a more heroic race, the men who were at
their prime in the days of Marathon; he represented the
highest development of pre-Persian culture in Athens,
and had done more for Attic tragedy than any other man.
He was a perfect master of his art, and for a whole gen-
eration had stood head and shoulders above his contem-
poraries in tragic composition. His lyre was noble and
exalted ; its majestic strains breathed with immortal airs,
and sounded forth the sentiments of gods who were di-
vine and of men who were heroes. Its notes were always
solemn, sometimes terrible and awe-inspiring, but always
elevated, approaching the sublime.

It was natural that a fresh sensation, still noble and
exalted, but somewhat more human and sympathetic,
should arouse the admiration of the younger generation
of Athenians, who were less mystical, religiously speak-
ing, less imaginative perhaps, than their heroic fathers.
It was something more than an appeal to patriotism or
a tendency to sympathize with the younger man that
gave Sophocles precedence on the occasion narrated above ;
it was the humanity, the sympathetic force which the
young poet had put into his work that found an answer-
ing chord in the hearts of both judges and audience.
This was the beginning of a great career for Sophocles,
whose golden notes vibrated through all the Age of Gold
in Athens.

Cimon would seem never to have been content to re-
main peaceably at home while there were Persians to be
whipped abroad, and in 466 he again set sail for Asia
Minor, and encountered the ships of Artaxerxes at the
mouth of the river Eurymedon. The Persian fleet num-
184 THE STORY OF ATHENS

bered three hundred and fifty vessels; Cimon captured
two hundred of these, and was about to set out for home
when a reinforcement of eighty Phenician ships was
seen coming to the relief of the Persians. These he met,
and, after a brief battle, succeeded in capturing or sink-
ing the entire squadron. Soon after this successful ven-
ture, Cimon was again called to take up his arms. Tha-
sos, one of the island members of the league of which
Athens was the head, revolted, and Athens sent a large
army and a fleet to reduce the island to subjection. The
Thasians were very strong, and held out well against the
Athenians; the war was prolonged, and two years elapsed
before Cimon could safely withdraw his army.

It was during the campaign in Thasos that Cimon met
the painter Polygnotus, and was charmed by the person-
ality of the artist, as well as by his masterpieces. When
the commander returned to Athens he brought the painter
with him, introduced him to his own household, and
commissioned him to decorate the walls of the new
Heroum and the porch of the Anaceum, the sanctuary of
the Dioscuri. For the former work Polygnotus chose
two subjects: the battle between the Athenians and the
Amazons, in which the hero Theseus and Queen Antiope
were the prominent figures; and a fight between Lapiths
and Centaurs, in which another great hero, Pirithous, the
friend of Theseus, was the principal subject. He adorned
the porch of the Dioscuri with scenes from the life of the
famous brothers, the chief subject being the rape of
Phoebe and Hilaira, the daughters of Leucippus, who
were betrothed to the sons of Aphareus. All of these
pictures remained intact for more than five centuries, and
were the admiration of the cultivated world. Polygnotus
was the first great painter of Greek antiquity. He is said
to have been the first to put expression into the faces of
his figures, and to have shown the lines of the form be-
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 185

neath the drapery folds. He also worked hard to de-

velop a broader color scheme, and invented a new pig-

ment of yellow from a deposit found in the silver-mines

of Laurium, and one of black from the dried refuse of
the wine-press.

Improvements were rapidly Cag

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new adornment was added to the
inclosure of the Acropolis.
Among other works in this line,
Cimon renewed the sanctuary of
Cybele, the venerable mother of
the gods, which was known as
the Metroum, where the state ar-
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covered, but it is known to have

contained a shrine at which‘the epheboi (lads) annually
dedicated cups when about to enter the army. Within
its sacred inclosure was the council-house of the Five
Hundred, with its pulpit and benches and the hearth where
official oaths were taken. It had its own priest, and con-
tained two altars—one to Counselor Zeus and one to
Counselor Athena, at which the members sacrificed upon
entering. The walls bore a picture of the lawgivers, as
we know from an ancient description. Outside, copies of
the public documents were posted on tablets of stone or
bronze, and lists of the epheboi with the honor-roll. The
tradition in Athens regarding the foundation of the Met-
roum was that a begging priest came to the town and had

 

  
  

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186 THE STORY OF ATHENS

initiated some of the women in the cult of the Mother
of the Gods; but the men, learning what had happened,
slew the priest and flung his body into a pit, whereupon
a pestilence fell upon the city. An oracle was consulted,
which responded that the trouble was caused by the mur-
der of the begging priest, and commanded, as a pro-
pitiation, that a shrine be dedicated to the Mother of the
Gods. The Athenians complied with the command, and
built also the council-house, providing it with its own
altars and priest. The priest of the council-house sacri-
ficed to the Mother of the Gods. Some curious but excel-
lent regulations were made for those who would enter the
sanctuary. One was that no one could be admitted who
had recently spiced his fare with the odoriferous garlic.

Cimon commissioned Phidias, a rising young sculptor,
to make a statue of Athena from the bronze arms taken
at Marathon. This, so far as we know, was the first
important work of the great sculptor of the Golden Age.
The statue was the first of the colossal figures made for
Athens. When completed it stood over thirty feet high.
The sculptor represented the goddess in her role as leader
of battles, the ‘“‘Promachos” or champion Athena, arrayed
in the panoply of war, advancing with firm step, bran-
dishing her mighty spear and bearing her shield upon
her arm. The colossal bronze was set upon a high pedes-
tal, in the midst of the sacred inclosure, directly in front
of the entrance, looking out over the Attic plain toward
Salamis, with the bold outline of Acrocorinthus, the
snow-clad crest of Cyllene, and the other mountains of
Morea in the far distance. Of this famous statue it was
related that the gleaming spear-point could be seen by
mariners far out at sea, even before the roofs of the tem-
ples came in view. The statue remained in situ for many
centuries, but was finally taken to Constantinople to grace
the new capital of the world, and remained there, intact,
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 187

during all the vicissitudes of the Eastern Empire, until
1203, when it was destroyed by a mob.

The base of the pedestal is still to be seen, one of the
most prominent of the smaller ruins upon the Acropolis;
it consists of a few large blocks of Pentelic marble, which
were joined together by heavy clamps of bronze.

About this time Pisianax, a wealthy citizen, enriched
the agora by the addition of a great stoa, or colonnade,
extending along the southern half of the eastern side.
The market-place was divided by a row of Hermae into
two sections, the southern half being devoted to forensic
life, the northern to commercial activity. The new col-
onnade occupied one side of the academic part of the
agora, the portion which still lies deep under the accu-
mulated debris of centuries, upon which stands a closely
crowded collection of houses of the poorer class, miser-
able hovels with narrow, winding streets between them.

The stoae, or colonnades, of the ancient Greeks were
pretty generally of one plan and design, consisting of a
long, double row of columns, raised slightly above the
ground, upon two or three steps. Behind the rows of col-
umns were often small chambers divided from one another
and opening upon the colonnade by narrow doorways.
The chambers were frequently used as shops. In many
cases the colonnades were of two stories connected by
staircases at either end. The stoa built by Pisianax was
doubtless of this well-known plan, and in massive Doric
style; but it must have been lofty and open, for in later
years we know of its having been used as a law court.
There were probably no chambers at the rear, for shops
were not wanted in that part of the agora, but an un-
broken wall inclosed the back and ends. This blank wall
was of itself not a thing of beauty, but it offered a fine
space for painted decoration, and the lavish Pisianax em-
ployed all the famous painters then working in Athens to
188 THE STORY OF ATHENS

depict historical scenes in their best style from one end of
the wall to the other. Micon, Polygnotus, and Panaenus
were soon all hard at work upon their great paintings.
The wall-paintings of this colonnade became famous
throughout the Greek and Roman world, and the col-
onnade was known in antiquity as the stoa potkile, or
painted stoa. Pausanias, the Roman traveler, saw them,
and gives us a very satisfactory description of them in
his famous “Itinerary of Greece.” Other of the ancients
mention them, but there is some confusion among them
regarding the painters of the various pictures. There
seems to be little doubt that Micon painted two great
battle scenes, one on either end wall of the stoa—the
battle of the Athenians with the Amazons and that be-
tween the Athenians and the Spartans at Oinoé. It is
also admitted that the renowned Thasian took for his
theme the Greeks after the capture of Troy, represent-
ing at least two scenes: the capture of Troy and the
Council of Princes sitting in judgment upon Ajax for the
violation of Cassandra. But the most famous scene of
all was the battle of Marathon, which has been assigned
diversely to Panaenus, Micon, and Polygnotus. It is
possible that more than one artist worked at the same
picture. Panaenus was famous for his horses, and may
have helped one of the other painters, but it is not prob-
able that all three were engaged upon the same piece.
Micon was poor and ambitious; he worked very hard,
and, by assiduous application, may have painted more
than the others. Polygnotus was well off; he painted
for love of the art and for glory. We can, of course,
have but a very vague notion of his style, but may glean
from the description of Pausanias, who deals with little
but subject matter, from the casual remarks of Cicero
and Pliny, and from the praises of Aristotle, Lucian, and
Aelian, that his drawing was broad and careful, his treat-
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 189

ment idealistic and imaginative. The Thasian painter
was made an Athenian citizen in recognition of his mas-
terly work upon the Anaceum and the stoa poikile. When
Polygnotus began his study for one of his scenes before
Troy he wanted a beautiful and stately model for his
figure of Laodice, the captive daughter of old Priam and
Queen Hecuba. He asked the fair Elpinice, sister of
Cimon, to sit for this study, and she consented. The
Athenian gossips said that the fame-loving painter was
the lover of this handsome matron, but there was cer-
tainly no impropriety in Cimon’s sister sitting for a pic-
ture to her brother’s artist friend. The story was doubt-
less invented by some of the ladies of Athens who were
not sufficiently good-looking to win so delicate a com-
pliment from the distinguished artist.

At this time an unfortunate set of circumstances co-
operated to lower the position of Cimon in popular esteem.
The Macedonians and Thracians had fallen upon some
of the Athenian colonies in the Chersonese and destroyed
them; the Athenians at home, enraged because Cimon had
not avenged these outrages, after the subjection of Tha-
sos, accused him of having taken bribes from Alexander,
king of Macedonia. He was tried and acquitted, but had
no sooner cleared himself of this difficulty than fresh trou-
ble assailed his popularity. A revolt of helots had broken
out in Sparta. Cimon persuaded the Athenians to send
assistance to their old rival, but the Athenian force, after
an unsuccessful effort to reduce the insurgents who were
intrenched within the fortress of Ithome, was insultingly
sent home. The Athenians, smarting under this rebuff,
turned against Cimon as the author of the offer. The
democratic party at this unfortunate juncture proposed
certain measures for curtailing the powers of the court
of the Areopagus, and Cimon, as the leader of the con-
servatives, was obliged to oppose them. This was the last
190 THE STORY OF ATHENS

straw, and caused the complete downfall of the noble
leader. He was promptly brought to trial and ostracized.
But as a matter of fact, Cimon was in no way responsible
for his sudden removal from power. <A series of cam-
paigns, of longer or shorter duration, had kept him much
of the time away from Athens, and his familiar figure,
his acts of generosity and magnanimity, were not so well
remembered by the people. His opponents in the party,
which his former popularity had almost completely
crushed, had taken advantage of his enforced absence to
build up anew a sentiment antagonistic to the conserv-
atism of Aristides.

Pericles, a young politician, grandnephew of Clis-
thenes, and thus heir to democratic leadership, had for
some time engaged himself in building up the popular
party and in rousing popular animosity against Cimon,
whose fall and final banishment were due almost entirely
to the efforts of this youthful antagonist. It is said that
when Cimon was first impeached for taking bribes of
King Alexander, Pericles was one of his chief accusers,
and that Elpinice, knowing of Pericles’s influence, came
to him to entreat for her brother. The young politician
turned her off, saying, “You are too old, Elpinice, much
too old to solicit in so weighty a matter’; but later, out
of consideration for her, he intervened in Cimon’s be-
half. Upon the disappearance of Cimon from the stage
of politics in Athens, Pericles became supreme as the
leader of the revived democratic party. Within five years
after the departure of Cimon, Athens found herself in-
volved in a war with Sparta, and a Spartan army lay
intrenched at Tanagra ready to invade Attica. Cimon,
learning of the situation, begged to be allowed to return
and fight for Athens at the head of his tribe, but was
refused by the hard-hearted Pericles on the ground of
fear of defection. The exiled son of Miltiades then sent
PRECURSORS OF THE GOLDEN AGE 191

word to his family and retainers, if they valued his repu-
tation, to do their best for their country. His imme-
diate dependents carried his armor into battle, and fell
about it, fighting to the last breath.

But Athens soon found that without Cimon it was use-
less to attempt negotiations with Sparta, and in 453 he
was recalled to make a treaty for five years’ peace with
the old antagonist. Pericles, on the other hand, found
that his position was not secure with Cimon in Athens,
and forthwith sent him, with a fleet of two hundred
ships, in a final expedition against the Persians. The
veteran commander undoubtedly enjoyed the prospect
of more victories over the enemy he had been whip-
ping for thirty years, and set sail for Cyprus, where he
expected to engage the Persian fleet. He laid siege to
Citium, a town on the south coast of the island, and in
an engagement received a wound which proved so serious
that he died in a few days. His disconsolate generals
started at once to carry his body back to Athens, and on
the way encountered and defeated a fleet of Cilicians and
Phenicians, following a plan of battle outlined by Cimon
just before his death; so that Cimon, even dead, proved
a terror to the allies and friends of Persia.

Cimon was buried, with great pomp, in a tomb, which
was seen by Plutarch nearly five hundred years later,
- just outside the sacred gate on the road to Eleusis. By
his will he bequeathed the Academy, the ancient home
of literature and the future haunt of philosophy, to the
Athenians.

Cimon’s death was a serious loss to Athens; his in-
fluence had been the strongest bond that held the allies
in allegiance. Now that the advanced party was in power,
the rule of Athens was found burdensome, and rupture
threatened on every side. In 447 the Boeotians, chafing
under the new régime, suddenly revolted against the
192 THE STORY OF ATHENS

democratic government that had been forced upon them,
and openly declared against Athens.

The Athenians were taken quite unawares, with a very
small force ready for action. Tolmides, a man of 1m-
petuous nature, happened to be general at the time; he
was anxious to set out at once for the north. Pericles
urged more deliberate action and a short delay, until
better preparations could be made and a stronger force
sent into the field. But in the assembly Tolmides won
his point, and hastened with the forces at his disposal to
quell the revolt. The Athenians reached the borders of
Boeotia, and were surprised by the rebels at Coronea,
where they were completely routed, Tolmides and many
others being slain, and a large number taken prisoners.
Athens was in a great state of agitation, for every town
in Boeotia was in revolt, and the flower of the army were
prisoners of war. The situation must have been grave
indeed, for, without further effort to prosecute the war,
Athens consented to abandon Boeotia on condition of the
return of the prisoners. The Boeotian oligarchs were at
once returned to power and the old government restored.
with its center at Thebes. Megara was already gone, and
this latest loss deprived Athens of her last ally on the
mainland.

But, aside from the humiliation, the loss of her land
empire was not a serious one for Athens. The sea was
her real domain, and with the islands in allegiance she
could be mistress of as much of the Mediterranean as she
chose, could control the commerce of a hundred distant
ports, and, what was still more important, could effec-
tually check the expansion of any other power. The
Dorian peoples of the mainland were much harder for
her to control than those of Ionian stock, who now made
up the Confederacy; and the allies which still remained
to her were sufficient to keep her rich, powerful, and
respected.
VII

THE GOLDEN AGE

“Come, blessed Jove, the high and mighty head,
The friend of hospitality.”
CRATINUS.

4a \ THE sun had set upon the Marathonian age,
ES to rise upon the Golden Age of Athenian
greatness. A mighty constellation of stars
of the first magnitude—Themistocles, Ci-
mon, Aeschylus, and Pindar— had sunk be-
hind the horizon as the golden orb of Peri-
cles ascended to its zenith, and a second
(ec. ff constellation that counted such names as
ee Thucydides, Socrates, Sophocles, Euripi-
Bust of Pericles. es’ and Phidias, rose in the east.

With the dawn of the new era a day of transformation
broke over the city of Athens: the old conservatism of
the Athens of Aristides had passed away, and a new ideal
—an ideal of progress, of expansion, and material wel-
fare—was set before the minds of the Athenians.

A complete change had come over the political aspect
of the city during the last few years, and popular senti-
ment, which had placed its faith and confidence in what
might be called aristocratic institutions during the period
while the influence of Aristides and Cimon was felt in
Athens, had now gradually swung to the other extreme
under the persuasive eloquence of Pericles.

The new leader could hardly be called a born devotee

13 193

  
194 THE STORY OF ATHENS

of democracy: although his mother was a niece of Clis-
thenes, his father was related to the family of Pisistratus,
and the chief fear of the young politician in his early ca-
reer was that this relationship would be an offense to his
democratic followers. He is also said to have had the
features and voice of that great family of tyrants. But
Pericles’s phenomenal gifts of tact and eloquence, his
persuasive manner, and his power of personal magnet-
ism, though remarkably like those of Pisistratus, over-
came all obstacles, and it was entirely through his influ-
ence with the popular party, as in the case of the great
tyrant before him, that he ascended to the position of
supremacy in Athens. Pericles had been fittingly trained
for the high position he was to hold so long as pilot of
the Athenian state. Anaxagoras, the great philosopher
and physicist of Clazomenae, had been his guide and
friend. Zeno the Elean had taught him to debate; he
had been schooled by the best teachers of rhetoric and
eloquence, and had studied music with Damon. He was
tall and handsome, and of fine and dignified presence; we
have portraits of him, that are doubtless true, showing a
strong, intelligent face, with keen, though kindly eyes, a
refined and sensitive mouth, though firm withal, and a
straight nose of the type considered typically Grecian.
The ancient writers who describe his appearance, and
the comic poets who looked for some point at which they
could direct their shafts of wit, say that his, head was
of an abnormal shape, and the satirists called him the
“onion-headed.” For this reason, it is said, his portraits
were always provided with a helmet, and in the busts
that have come down to us through the hands of ancient
Roman antiquity collectors, the supposed defect is con-
cealed in this manner. But all this is of little impor-
tance: looking at the face, T think we all may feel that
we are in the presence of a man of high mind and noble
THE GOLDEN AGE 195

character, a man of taste and refinement. Whether some
might read further than that, and, not knowing the bust,
could guess that this was one of the foremost men of all
the world, may be left to individual powers of imagi-
nation. The face is represented, as in all Greek portraits
of its day, in calm repose; imagine it, if you will, kindled
with fire when the famous thunderings of his eloquence
burst forth, or glowing with genial warmth when per-
suasion sat upon those placid lips, as Eupolis said.

It was plain from the first that Pericles had a political
model before him after which he molded his own views
and actions. His ambition for Athenian supremacy over
all Greece was the same as that which Themistocles had
treasured; not that Pericles admired or countenanced the
moral side of Themistocles’s life, for he was himself an
example of uprightness and honor, but his highest aspi-
ration was to make the Greek world tributary to Athens.
Themistocles would have accomplished this at any cost,
by fair means or foul. Pericles set out to attain the same
object by honorable means. The material for laying the
foundations of Athenian empire Pericles found at hand
in the allied states and islands of the Delian League. The
task before him was to work this material into a solid
and homogeneous structure. The various steps that were
taken to accomplish this end are not to be traced in his-
tory, and the dates of the various coups d’état, by which
the confederated states of the Aegean became the empire
of Athens, are not known; but we do know that within
twenty years after the death of Aristides a great trans-
formation had taken place, by which Athens was changed
from president of a league into mistress of an empire.
Pericles was undoubtedly largely responsible for this
transformation, for during those years his hand had
guided the policy of the Athenian state. Many were the
charges of tyranny brought against him for this policy
196 THE STORY OF ATHENS

by his opponents in his own day, and many have been
the criticisms of it by historians ever since; but Pericles
was ever ready to defend his policy, and his answers to
more recent judgments may be read between the lines
of the criticisms written by his contemporary historians.
The allies of the league were bound together by the most
solemn vows that religious superstition could invent.
Those vows had been taken for all time. They had rec-
ognized that the league must have a head, and had ac-
knowledged that Athens was, for every reason, the only
member of the league capable of taking and maintaining
the leadership. The league had been formed with a defi-
nite purpose,—the common defense against the encroach-
ments of Persia,—and now that that purpose was growing
more and more unnecessary with the decline of Persian
aggression, the question was raised again and again:
“What bond shall hold the allies together and in sub-
ordination to Athens?” The inefficacy of the solemn
vow as a bond had already been shown by the revolt
of two members of the league—Naxos and Thasos.
These states had said, and others were beginning to say:
“Why should we continue to pay large revenues for
defense from a danger which no longer exists?” ‘Must
we render tribute to Athens with which she may enrich
herself, now that it is no longer needed to fit out large
fleets and armies?” Pericles had answered these ques-
tionings with the reply that the danger had decreased only
because of the naval strength of the league, and might
threaten again the moment that power was diminished ;
that the allies paid stipulated sums for the protection of
their homes and their commerce, and were being pro-
tected as much in time of nominal peace as in time of
war ; that peace existed solely because these revenues kept
the head of the league in opulence and ready at a mo-
ment’s notice to check hostilities from foreign foes; that,
THE GOLDEN AGE 197

under the conditions, it was not to be asked of Athens
what she did with the revenues, so long as she held the
world in awe. But behind all this the historians see the
desire for power which they believe to have been the real
motive force of Pericles’s policy, and in the details of his
treatment of the allies one may see the workings of this
force. The condition of the islands, whose aspirations
to freedom had been crushed, afforded a basis for the
proposed tributary empire. Originally each of the allies
had held the right to a vote at the Delian conclave.
Those who had revolted from the league and had been
brought to a state of obedience by force were deprived of
that privilege, and were represented by Athens. Not
only had their fortifications been razed and Athenian
garrisons quartered upon them, but they had been forced
to pay large indemnities—the cost of the campaign that
had reduced them to subjection—besides their annual
tribute. In both cases Athenian citizens had been sent
to settle in the subdued islands. These were not colo-
nists, for Athenian colonies were quite independent of
the mother state; they rented those lands which had been
forcibly taken from the subjected states, and thus in-
creased the revenues of Athens. Loud protests were
raised by the unfortunate tributaries and the conservative
party in Athens against the cruelty and injustice of this
policy, but Cimon, the idol of the anti-imperialist party,
and not Pericles, had been responsible for the conquest
of these states and for the humiliating condition that had
been imposed upon them.

As a matter of fact, so far as we may judge, the allies
had small reason to complain. In the first place, the re-
volted allies were not the only ones who had had Athe-
nian garrisons quartered upon them; for the garrisoning
of a place depended entirely upon its strategic importance,
and many of the most loyal of the allies had submitted to
198 DHE STORY OF ATHENS

this burden without complaint. Besides this, the condi-
tion of peace under the league was such as the allies had
never before known, for not only were they safe from
Persian aggression, from which they had suffered for
generations, but they were prevented from fighting among
themselves. Their commerce, protected from foreign in-
terference and from the pirates by the flying squadrons
of Athens, reached a degree of prosperity that long out-
lasted the Delian League. In every way they appear to
have been more prosperous than they had ever been, or
ever were to be again; but they longed for independence.

If each of the allies had broken its vows and had been
forced to submission, like Naxos and Thasos, the tribu-
tary condition might have extended over all of them with
some show of justice; but there were states that had not
revolted, and the task of bringing them all, refractory and
obedient, into a more nearly equal tributary condition,
without injustice to some, was a very difficult one for
Pericles. An important step had been taken in the re-
moval of the league’s treasury from the ancient and
revered custody of the temple at Delos to Athens, where
it was deposited in the treasury chamber of the old temple
of Athena. This had been done, it is averred, on the
motion of Samos, on the ground of greater security. By
a gradual but effective process, the government of each
of the old allied states was reorganized, and then, as a
later move, the more important legal procedure was trans-
ferred from the local courts to the tribunals of Athens.
No doubt these cases received more equable adjudication
at the hands of the professional juries of Athens than
they would have had in the insular courts; but the former
allies felt that they were gradually being deprived of
their liberty, to say nothing of their independence, and
all could see that the old Delian League was already a
thing of the past, and that an empire had taken its place.
THE GOLDEN AGE 199

The Athenians, on the other hand, showed no dispo-
sition to adopt the members of their new empire, whether
refractory or not, into the Athenian state, nor to antici-
pate the policy of Rome by extending to worthy subjects
the privileges of citizenship. On the contrary, the lines
of the full franchise were drawn in, at Athens itself,
during the supremacy of Pericles, and various laws were
passed by which the “Tyrant Demos” partook more and
more of the nature of an oligarchy—that is, of course, if
the empire be regarded as the state, an idea which was
furthest from the minds of the Athenians. Just how
far the essential policy of Pericles was carried out in the
attitude of Athens toward her tributaries we are unable
to judge precisely. We know that the general assembly
was supreme in matters of that kind; we know, also, that
Pericles was supreme in the assembly, but to what extent
he felt obliged to give that body a free rein and how
far he was able to guide it by the force of his eloquence
in the path that his own will dictated, will never he
known. It is evident that his influence was thrown on
the side of moderation in the treatment of the subject
states, for after his death the Athenians imposed a far
heavier yoke upon them.

The prospectus of Pericles for the extension of the
Athenian empire was bounded by the limits of the old
Delian League; there were in the state ambitious spirits
who were for making conquest of Sicily and southern
Italy and other western countries, but the leader dissuaded
the popular mind from such chimerical schemes. He was
for establishing a homogeneous Ionian nation, of which
Athens, with her boasted Ionian descent, should be the
head. The lines of the Delian League coincided very
nearly with those of the Ionian nationality, if such it could
be considered.

The attitude of Athens toward the rest of Greece, and
200 THE STORY OF ATHENS

toward Sparta in particular, was another question. Upon
this point there were two widely different opinions in
Athens. The old political party of Cimon was in favor of
friendly relations with the Lacedaemonian kingdom, be-
lieving in the theory of their late leader that Greece de-
pended upon both Athens and Sparta as the body upon
two legs,—if both were not maintained in equal strength
she must go lame,—and depending upon Spartan conser-
vatism for support of its particular political principles.
The head of this party—the old conservative régime—
was Thucydides, son of Melesias,—not the historian,—
who, ever since the death of Cimon, had led the opposi-
tion in the assembly against Pericles and his party, who
favored hostility as the normal attitude toward Sparta.
Pericles was well aware of the divergence of aim between
Athens and Sparta; he had seen the impossibility of their
cooperation in a common cause clearly demonstrated; he
believed war between the two powers to be inevitable;
but it is difficult to harmonize his theory of perpetual
hostility with his attitude on the subject of an Ionian
empire. He could hardly have anticipated a constant
state of warfare with any degree of hopefulness for
Athens; in those days hostility was bound to end at last
in supremacy for one party or the other, and if that were
to be the lot of Athens, she must extend her empire into
the Peloponnese. But Pericles, while he believed war
with Sparta to be inevitable, seems to have conceived of
a war in which Athens might maintain an exclusively
defensive position, so that Sparta, remaining supreme
upon the mainland, might be convinced of the futility of
assailing the maritime empire of Athens—a war, in other
words, which might adjust the balance of power with-
out precipitating the downfall of either side. But what-
ever was foreseen or unforeseen by Pericles in his anti-
Spartan policy, he manifested the most wonderful ability
THE GOLDEN AGE 201

in the way in which he prepared Athens for the approach-
ing struggle.

Pericles’s domestic policy was, first, that of Athens
for Athenians: to cut down, as far as possible, the num-
ber of citizens with full privileges, and to make it almost
impossible for other Greeks or for foreigners to gain civic
rights; secondly, to extend the principles of democracy,
for that limited number of free citizens, to their ultimate
possibilities of execution. To this end the mighty Court
of the Areopagus, the oldest judicial and administrative
body in Athens, which, with the boulé, was regarded by
Solon as one of the anchors of the state, was shorn of
its powers, and the general assembly became henceforth
the real source of power, administrative and executive,
political, military, and judicial. The first steps in strip-
ping the ancient Court of the Eumenides of its functions
were taken by Ephialtes, a prominent democratic leader,
even before Pericles had become the great power in the
assembly. Ephialtes was a vigorous politician of unim-
peachable character and a partizan of Pericles; he was
assassinated in the midst of his war against that most
revered and feared institution, but after his death his
policy was carried out by the new leader, and the Coun-
cil of the Areopagus ceased to be the “overseer of all
things and the guardian of the laws,” and remained only
a shell so long as the democracy lasted, existing solely
as a tribunal for murder cases; for homicide, being an
offense against religion, could not easily be tried by the
people in general. To signify that the laws were now to
be in the custody of the citizens themselves, and no
longer held aloft in the keeping of the priestesses, the
laws of Solon were brought down from the treasury of
Athena and deposited in the Prytaneum. The Council
of Five Hundred—the boulé—was also made to bow to
the “Tyrant Demos,” and, like the Areopagus, became a
202 THESSTORY OF ATHENS

passive instrument in the hands of the people assembled
in the ecclesia.

The ecclesia of this time was an assembly of the people
in its truest sense; it represented the will of the citizens
to a man, and its will was indisputable. But the Athe-
nian populace, like every other, could be guided by a
man of sufficient force and popularity. The opinion and
wishes of a great throng of voters are in a state of chaos
until given shape by some master mind or minds; thus
majorities are made. Oratory had ever held a magic
influence over the Greek mind, as we may see even in
Homer. A great orator could do what he pleased with
a Greek audience. In democratic Athens the will of the
people was the sole source of power, but he who could
direct that will was the real governing force. Pericles
was the mightiest orator of his day, and he chose to use
his powers on the assembly. The people, under the sway
of his words, were as clay in the hands of the potter, and
thus the son of old Xanthippus became the ‘“‘first man
in the state’’—the real ruler of Athens.

With the thinning out of the roll of citizens, Pericles
directed the administration of public affairs in such a
way as to make almost every citizen a servant of the
state in one capacity or another, and all in the pay of the
government. There were, in addition to the large number
on the pay-rolls of the army and the navy, the Council of
Five Hundred and a host of major and minor adminis-
trative officers, a body of six thousand jurymen; for,
under the new régime, the juries received payment for
their services like other official bodies.

But the most characteristic point about the Athenian
democracy was the election of all these officials by lot.
The custom was an old one in Athens, and had prevailed
even in old tyranny days, when the power of the Areop-
agus was a check upon haphazard legislation; but now
THE GOLDEN AGE 203

that the check had been removed, the system seemed to
further the idea of universal equality among the citizens,
and that was the chief aim of the democracy. The ballot
was used, it is true, in certain cases, when the appoint-
ment was fraught with great concern for the state. The
ten generals were chosen by popular vote, for in this
choice the importance of personal qualifications was rec-
ognized: a series of unfortunate elections by lot to those
offices might easily be the ruin of Athens; but election
by acclamation of the people in so weighty a matter seems
to us democratic enough.

But there were in Athens at this time many thousands
outside the pale of citizenship who were not provided for
by the generous administration of the public funds, and
who must be taken care of. The great non-citizen popu-
lation, which far outnumbered the electorate, comprised
two general classes—the metics and the slaves. The
former were, generally speaking, the tradesfolk. It was
largely from the taxes levied upon these people that the
army was kept in the field, that the fleet was maintained
on the sea, and that the magistrates and other officials
were kept in pay. What was to be done to keep them
contented and well enough supplied with the world’s
goods to pay their rates without oppression? The fer-
tile mind of Pericles devised various answers for this
question; his keen eye had been ready to see that brisk
trade and extensive commerce were of the highest im-
portance to the Athenian state, and Athens was rapidly
becoming the commercial center of the world.

The Athenian citizens of the time of Pericles, as a
rule, considered themselves a little above mercantile pur-
suits, though a century and a half before trade had not
been beneath their distinguished consideration. Solon
himself was a trader; but in those days the state had not
provided soft places for all the citizens at public expense.
204 THE eSiORY OF ATHENS

“Poverty,” Pericles said, ‘is no disgrace, but that idle-
ness which makes no effort to better its condition.” And
Pericles would have no one idle if he could avoid it.
Employment was provided for all classes and grades of
the population. The extensive commerce which centered
at Piraeus under the administration of Pericles soon
made the port of Athens the chief commercial city of the
Mediterranean, and afforded occupation for a host of ship-
owners, ship-builders, and sailors, besides the merchants
and venders whose wares were brought from foreign
lands, and a variety of new mercantile pursuits sprang
up with the introduction of imported materials. Mines
of various metals, precious and base, were owned and
worked by Athenians in different parts of the Greek
world, and the handling of these metals through all the
stages between the mining of the raw material and the
sale of objects made from it gave employment to a great
number of miners, shippers, smelters, molders, artists,
and merchants. Every trade was encouraged by Peri-
cles, for we find in Plutarch: ‘‘The use of different mate-
rials . . . afforded employment to carpenters, ma-
sons, braziers, goldsmiths, painters, and other artificers;
the conveyance of them by sea employed merchants and
sailors, and by land wheelwrights, wagoners, carriers,
rope-makers, leather-workers, pavers, and iron-founders;
and every art had a number of lower people, ranged in
proper subordination, to execute it, like soldiers under
the command of an officer. Thus, by the exercise of
different trades, plenty was diffused among persons of
every rank and condition.” But in addition to these
manifold trades and occupations, which were the natural
outgrowth of a rapidly growing commercial life, and
which provided labor for a large portion of the popula-
tion, Pericles instituted a scheme of public works upon a
gigantic scale, which would provide labor for all classes
THE GOLDEN AGE 205

of artists, artisans, and laborers, from the highest de-
signers to the lowest carriers and drivers, leaving no one
an excuse for idleness. Under Pericles, as we know,
the great architectural works were undertaken which, ere
he died, clothed Athens with a splendor that outshone
all the other cities of his time, and has scarcely been at-
tained by any other city in the history of the world.

The greater number of those employed in commerce,
in the trades, and upon the public works of Athens were
undoubtedly of the non-citizen classes,—the metics and
the slaves,—though we may be sure that there were many
merchants and business proprietors who were citizens,
and we know that the great architects and sculptors of
the Golden Age were citizens, either by birth or adop-
tion, and held highly honored positions in the state, how-
ever disparagingly Plutarch, imbued with practical Ro-
man ideas, may speak of their calling.

But we must not think of the great class of citizens
with full rights in that aristocratic democracy as idling
away their time in luxury while the lower classes labored
to make their city the queen of Greece. Luxury and idle-
ness found little room in Athens at this period. Besides
the numerous important offices, military and political,
which the state conferred by lot upon her citizens, and
the host of minor commissions and magistracies which
only citizens could hold, to say nothing of the rank and
file of the army and navy, which were recruited from
the body of free-born Athenians, there were many occu-
pations in which the citizens busied themselves. The law
business of the city was entirely in their hands. Some
of them, as we have seen, were architects and sculptors;
others indulged in literary pursuits; but the ancient and
honorable occupation of the upper class, even during the
Golden Age, continued to be farming. True, the devel-
opment of the democratic spirit and the growth of po-
206 THE STORY OF ATHENS

litical and forensic life had drawn large numbers of the
younger generation to the city; every citizen was bound
to serve his country under arms for a longer or shorter
period; and every one was quite likely to be drawn on
state duty one or more times in his life: but there still
prevailed, especially among the old conservative families,
a deeply rooted affection for rural pursuits. This love
of country life had been the salvation of the Athenians;
trained and nurtured in the simplicity of outdoor ex-
ercise, strong of body and healthy of mind, they were
far better fitted for military and forensic service, and the
decline in national life in Athens which followed hard
upon the age of Pericles is coincident with the with-
drawal of the citizens from their farms, their spreading
fields and vineyards, and their noble olive groves to the
narrow limits of the agora.

The most remarkable and the most durable of the
products of Pericles and his age are unquestionably the
mighty works in stone with which he adorned the city.
Historians have said that the Athenian democracy had no
important effect upon the history of the world, but no one
will deny that the monuments of the Golden Age in Ath-
ens, both of architecture and sculpture, set a mark of flood
tide in the history of art which all succeeding waves of
art development have striven in vain to surpass. It is
not to be wondered at that these arts attained a point
so near perfection at this particular stage of Greek history,
nor that the acme of their development was reached in
this particular part of Greece. The conditions, the times,
were exactly favorable for such attainment in Athens,
and in Athens alone. There was, first, a great free popu-
lation in which was born, as in all Greeks, a love and
appreciation of beauty and symmetry. To their innate
love of beauty was added the gift of extraordinary dex-
terity, and to this every opportunity of education and
THE GOLDEN AGE 207

training that a free constitution could offer. The latent
creative ability in the people as a whole had full scope
to express itself, and the outcome of such conditions was,
logically, a free and natural art. A rich, vigorous, and
unbroken development in art had been in process in
Greece for more than a century. Its growth had been
fostered in Athens not only by an appreciative and art-
loving people, but by the occasional concentration of
power in single men who, as it happened, represented
these qualities of the people in a refined degree, and had
drawn to Athens all that was best in art from all Greece.
Then had come the great burst of national enthusiasm,
in consequence of success in arms, the narrow escape
from despotism, and the sudden increase in wealth and
power. The inborn ability, free and unhampered, taught
by long and careful training, was given unlimited means
to express itself, and the result was what one might
expect.

The early part of the century had seen the laying of
the foundations for many of the great public works which
Pericles undertook when once he found himself master
of Athens. Cimon had rebuilt the citadel, and had trans-
formed it from a fortress into a mighty pedestal for a
temple which he had only begun when the tide of un-
popularity had borne him away from his beloved city.
This massive basement stood ready now to receive a
crown far more splendid than Cimon had dreamed of.
Not only was there to be a new temple for the Parthenos,
but a second shrine—a triple edifice—was to restore the
time-honored “goodly house” of Erechtheus. The old
gate of entrance to the Acropolis was to be replaced by a
gorgeous portal with spacious vestibules and _porticos.
Far out over the winding loops of the Pelargikon, upon
one of the mighty bastions of the old wall, was to stand
a special shrine for the Victorious Athena. Thus every
208 THES STORY “OF ATHENS

hallowed spot upon the sacred hill was to have a glory
‘of its own.

In the plain below, the walls built by Themistocles
were to be strengthened wherever it seemed necessary.
The city gates were to be rebuilt with greater dignity,
and the long walls, stretching away to the sea, which
had been projected and perhaps begun in Cimon’s time,
were to be completed. Within the city and at various
places in the suburbs, even so far away as Eleusis, every
shrine was to receive new adornment. Public colonnades,
gymnasiums, and libraries were planned, and a new thea-
ter, reserved especially for musical performances, was to
be erected.

All this and more the sumptuous taste of Pericles had
planned to grace his City of the Violet Crown, but Pericles
the general, the political leader, could not turn from his
duties on the field of war and upon the bema to devote
his time to the externalization of these vast schemes.
There lived in Athens at this time a man of about Peri-
cles’s age, a loyal citizen, well known at home and
abroad, an enthusiastic supporter of the popular party
and a warm friend of Pericles. This man was an artist,
and his name was Phidias. He had first been brought to
public notice by Cimon, for whom he had made the famous
statue of Athena Promachos and a remarkable group
which he had set up at Delphi in memory of Marathon.
Later, he is believed to have designed the new temple of
Theseus. In every way he had shown great ability as a
sculptor and some skill as an architect, and Pericles saw
in him the mind to execute his own monumental projects.
Phidias thus became a sort of minister of public works,
and under his guidance the old Athens of wood and stone
became the new Athens of marble, of gold and ivory.

But the great artist who is reckoned by common con-
sent the foremost sculptor of history was far more than
THE GOLDEN AGE 209

a subordinate officer of the man of power, far more even
than his expert adviser. The art-loving statesman and
the patriot artist worked hand in hand for the glory of
Athens; together they builded her beauty and her fame,
and in the end the artist died for the friendship of the
statesman. Phidias secured the services of the best archi-
tects of his day, and surrounded himself with a school
of young sculptors whom he trained to carry out his
great designs. So great already was the fame of Phidias
in the Greek world that the first artists of the land did
not hesitate to place themselves under his direction in
the great work of building Athens, and yet he would not
or could not arrogate to himself all the glory of the works
done under his superintendence. The names of other
artists shine out with only slightly less splendor.

The first and greatest work to be undertaken was the
building of the new temple of Athena Parthenos. For
this work Cimon had laid a magnificent foundation, and
had begun the superstructure, ait a considerable amount
of material had been quarried and cut for use, but work
had apparently been suspended for some time when Peri-
cles and Phidias took up the task of completion. The
architects chosen for the work were Ictinus and Calli-
crates. The former must have been the real designer of
the temple, for his name is often mentioned alone in
connection with the work, and he is known to have de-
signed other important edifices in Greece. Callicrates
was perhaps the engineer or the master-builder.

What training for their work architects of the fifth
century may have had, it is difficult to know. They seem
in many cases to have been instructed in the art of sculp-
ture as well as that of architectural design; and indeed
the character of the architecture of the Greeks, which
depended in its dignified simplicity upon effects of line

and of light and shade rather than upon varied composi-
14
210 THESSTORY ‘OF ATHENS

tion or superficial decorations, demanded a thorough un-
derstanding of all plastic art to fit the architect for his
subtle craft. Ictinus was undoubtedly a great artist ; how-
ever much his work may have been under the supervision
of Phidias, we may be sure that it is to his eye and to
his taste that we owe the perfect form of the foremost
of Greek temples. The architect undoubtedly consulted
often with Phidias and Pericles before the work was ac-
tually begun, and we may believe he was not satisfied
with the plans of Cimon’s architect, for a new scheme was
adopted which differed in certain important details from
the original plan. Forthwith the crepidoma, or base, of
Cimon’s structure and whatever of the superstructure
was in process of construction were removed, only the
great sub-basement being retained; and such portions of
the material as could not be recut to the new require-
ments were thrown into the filling. In this way we may
account for the presence of unfinished column drums and
capitals among the older debris of the pre-Persian tem-
ples. Cimon had chosen the marble of Pentelicus as the
material of his temple, and Ictinus, knowing that no
finer medium was to be had, resolved to employ the prod-
uct of those famous quarries. The Parthenon was not
long in building; it was begun in 447, and was complete
as a building within ten years: but, aside from the time
consumed in the actual execution of the work—the man-
ual part—it would seem as if the study of such a problem,
the visualizing of such a subtle composition, must have
taken much longer. For it is impossible to suppose that
the edifice was the result of miraculous inspiration, or
that such a production could have been fortuitous: either
Ictinus had a plan at hand on which he had spent years
of patient study, or he was given longer time to work
out his design than we are led to suppose by the ancient
writers. He was complete master of the mental picture
THE GOLDEN AGE 211

which he wished to externalize in marble. The minutest
points of detail must have been thoroughly wrought out
on paper before a stone was cut. How thrilling it would
be for the architects of to-day if they could see his pre-
liminary sketches, each sentient curve drawn again and
again until his marvelous eye was satisfied. For from the
time of the pyramids until now there has been but one

 

The Parthenon, West Fagade.

way for the architect to think, and that is with the simple
aid of paper and pencil. The sculptor may mold his
forms and change them by slight touches to suit his fancy,
but the architect cannot build successfully and compose
as he builds. All must first be expressed in two dimen-
sions; the effect of the third may be only hinted at. But
something more than an inventive mind, a plastic touch,
and a sensitive eye were required to create the highest
type of the Greek temple. Ictinus must have had a broad
experience, and have understood well the historical de-
velopment of the Doric style, to have given it the final
touch of perfection; he was, of course, familiar with the
monuments existing in his day, and these illustrated a
212 THE STORY OF ATHENS

wonderful growth in which a single ideal had sprung,
sprouted, budded, and expanded, and was to burst into
full bloom in his hands. He was doubtless familiar
with the ancient temple at Corinth, and, with all the
Greek world, must have visited the temples of Hera and
Zeus at Olympia and that of Apollo at Delphi; and he un-
doubtedly had studied the edifice which the Athenians had
built on the island of Aegina, that shone out among the
pines across the Saronic Gulf. In these edifices, whose
dates of building covered the whole development of the
Doric style, was his history of art; he needed nothing
better. Proportion and beauty of form had been the es-
sential qualities of Greek style from its inception. The
Greeks were masters of the theory of optics before the
simple mechanical proposition of the arch had dawned
upon their ideal minds. Beauty of proportion and of
form had reached a high stage of development in a num-
ber of monuments. Ictinus was to bring these qualities
to a culmination.

And it was not only the edifice, as a creation by itself,
that was considered by this great architect. No one, [|
think, who has ever studied the Parthenon from a distance
and from different points of view will hesitate to say
that the building was proportioned with the most care-
ful regard to its ancient setting. Let the reader imagine
for a moment a long, low temple, like that which this
same architect designed for the Phigalaeans at Bassae, set
upon the foundations of the Parthenon, or a more lofty,
attenuated structure of Roman design in its place, and he
will recognize at once how admirably Ictinus’s Parthe-
non, which is so readily restored in a distant view, was
adapted to its pedestal.

Ictinus’s plan was for a peripteral temple, in which he
wished to produce a large and imposing effect without
giving it an exaggerated scale. It was therefore designed
THE GOLDEN AGE 213

with eight columns of moderate dimensions at either end,
instead of six gigantic ones, which would have been re-
quired for the same space. Seventeen was chosen as the
number of columns for each side to secure the desired
proportion, the columns at the ends being ranged in a
closer file than those in the flanks. The intercolumnia-
tions at the four angles were narrower than those adjoin-

 

The Parthenon, from the Northeast.

ing them on the ends and sides, and were spaced with spe-
cial design to give greater solidity to the corners. The
pteroma—the space between the columns and the cella—
was unusually narrow. The octostyle porches made it
possible to depart from the usual design for pronaos and
epinaos—the open vestibules at either end of the cella—
and, instead of the common form (distyle in antis), to
provide broad, open, hexastyle porticos within the oc-
tostyle facades. The cella had but two divisions within—-
a spacious naos and a rather small chamber. The for-
mer, the cultus chamber at the eastern end, was of course
divided, by two rows of small columns, into a broad
central and two narrower side aisles. These columns,
which were carried across the western end of the chamber,
in front of the division wall, bore a second colonnade,
which probably formed a gallery on three sides of the
214 THEVSTORY OF ATHENS

naos. The rear chamber seems to have been divided into
aisles by two pairs of columns.

The design of the superstructure—the peristyle of col-
umns, the architrave, with its frieze of triglyphs and
metopes, the pediments at either end, and the low-lying
roof—was a consummation of the lofty ideals and highly
refined tendencies of the Doric style. There are no words
in any language to describe the indefinable charm of its
_ faultless completeness. There is a finality about its per-
fect proportions which cannot be explained, but which
leaves no doubt in the mind that this is of all buildings
of man’s hands the most flawless. The architect secured
this degree of perfection by a variety of means. Not
only were the proportions of height to breadth and length,
and of part to part, the subject of devoted study, but the
subtle theory of optics, the delicate art of making things
look as they should by making them what they should
not look, was applied in a hundred different ways to
impart suppleness and vigor to a style which would be
flat and dead without it. In the application of this theory
to the Parthenon, Ictinus went further than any other
architect had gone before him, or has attempted to go
since his time. It is said that there is not a straight
line in the whole structure. The long, horizontal lines
of the stylobate and the corona of the pediment are curved
gently upward to prevent the appearance of sagging. The
visibly perpendicular lines slant inward. The swelling
entasis of the columns is the most delicate curve known.
This is best appreciated at the southeast angle of the
temple, where one can take such a position that the two
end columns of the east facade inclose an expanse of
sky; then, by looking not at the lines of the columns,
but at the section of blue, he realizes at once that the
sides of the figures are far from straight. The line of
the echinos is perhaps the most insinuating in the whole
THE GOLDEN AGE 215

design. It gives the key-note to the entire composition ;
being drawn out from the neck of the column with a bold
upward stroke, almost straight, with four delicate annu-
lets at its base, until it comes almost under the edge of
the abacus, and is then turned sharply up, hooking back
under the edge of the rectangular member.

To marvelous perfection of proportion and extraordi-
nary refinement of design were added the most wonderful
precision and delicacy of mechanical execution. Never
had such perfection of finish been lavished upon a build-
ing. The profiles of the moldings, the arrises of the col-
umn flutings, the most minute edges, within and without,
were cut with almost microscopic precision; the drums of
the columns were doweled together by blocks of wood and
then revolved one upon another, with fine sand between,
until their joints were scarcely perceptible; the lower
drums were similarly adjusted to the stylobate.

The Parthenon of Pericles, when completed, exhibited
no features that were new to the Doric style, and yet it
stood a monument by itself, and presented a new phase
of that style which has been designated as Attic-Doric.
Every one of its essential details, one might say, was to
be found in the simple Doric structures of earlier date:
but it had a distinctive quality, which set it above the
other Doric temples, and which finds a parallel in the supe-
riority of Attic drama over the dramatic productions of
the rest of Greece. This distinction may be due partly
to the super-refinement of the Attic temperament and
partly to the admixture of Ionic blood with the Doric
stock of Attica, which produced a delicacy of feeling in
a broad and lofty mind.

Ictinus did not fail to appreciate the importance of
his marvelous creation, and wrote a monograph upon it
which is mentioned by Vitruvius, the great Roman archi-
tect, although it is, unfortunately, not quoted by him.
216 THES StORY (OF TATMENS

The Parthenon had not long been under way before
Phidias began to devise a wondrous scheme of sculptured
adornment for it. Sculpture was the art nearest his
heart, and he resolved that the temple of Athena, built
under his supervision, should be the richest temple in

 

Panathenaic Frieze of the Parthenon.
Poseidon, Apollo, and Demeter, in the Eastern Portico.

the world in works of this particular branch of art.
There were ordinarily but two portions of the Greek tem-
ple where sculpture was used—the pediments at either
end and the metopes of the frieze, and very few temples
were so rich as to have all of the metopes sculptured.
Phidias intended to fill all of these spaces, and then, in
place of the triglyphal frieze that was employed around
the cella wall of certain archaic temples, he designed a
continuous frieze of figures which, though it could not
be fully appreciated from below, would be a sumptuous
enrichment worthy of so splendid a shrine.

But what should be the subjects of so vast a scheme
THE GOLDEN AGE 2A,

of decoration in figure-sculpture? Each design must sug-
gest Athena, and Athena could suggest a variety of
themes. The original idea of the Greek sculptures of
Pisistratus’s temple group—the battle of the gods and
giants—did not seem dignified enough; and, after all,
Athena had not been the most prominent figure in that
conflict. Phidias chose for the eastern gable the scene
of the birth of Athena; for the western pediment, the
famous contest between Athena and Poseidon for the
possession of Attica; these were to be executed in the
round. For the metopes was chosen a variety of subjects
with which Athena had more or less connection; those
at the eastern end represented the battles of the giants;
those of the two long sides portrayed the combats be-
tween the Lapiths and the Centaurs; while on the western
end men contended on the little squares, but whether these
be Persians and Greeks or Amazons and Athenians, the
badly weathered condition of the reliefs forbids to know.
Around the magnificent frieze the sculptor pictured in
relief the festal procession of the goddess—the Pan-
athenaea—representing, as an objective point, the open-
ing sacrifice, with the principal gods in passive atten-
dance: above the eastern entrance of the temple and
sweeping toward that point along both sides, the festive
train of priests and priestesses, matrons and virgins, bear-
ers of utensils, sacrificial animals, musicians, athletic vic-
tors, citizens, horses and chariots, with their riders and
drivers, the movement of the procession increasing from
the meeting-place at the east backward through the ma-
jestic cortége on both sides to the western end, where
horses are being bridled and youths are preparing them-
selves to fall into line. The whole design, a majestic
theme from beginning to end, full of dignified repose.
yet breathing with graceful movement, depended for ef-
fect not upon gorgeous accessories nor brilliant accoutre-
218 THETSTORY OF ATHENS

 

 

 

Panathenaic Frieze of the Parthenon, a Section in Situ in
the Western Portico.

ments, but upon ease, grace, and simple physical beauty,
which was the chief inspiration of the Greek sculptor.
The designing of so vast a scheme of sculptured deco-
ration was sufficient to claim the entire attention of one
man for a long time, to say nothing of its execution in
marble; but Phidias had by this time a great school of
workers of greater or less skill, and to them was intrusted
the greater part of the manual labor of crystallizing the
marvelous conceptions of their master. The work mani-
fested the varying degrees of skill represented in Phi-
dias’s great atelier, the strongest contrast appearing in
a comparison of the execution of the gable sculptures
with that of the metope reliefs, which the hand of the
master sculptor could scarcely have touched nor his eye
have minutely criticized.

These sculptures, especially those of the gables, were
unique in the history of temple decoration, and have re-
mained for all time the most glorious ornaments that
man has ever fashioned to grace the temples of his reli-
gious faith or the shrines of his patriotic devotion. But
the most important work remained still to be done. It
seems never to have been the intention of Pericles or
Phidias to place the ancient statue of Athena—the hea-
ven-given xoanon—in the new temple. Where it was
kept at this time—between the destruction of the archaic
shrine and the building of the new Erechtheum, at the
end of the century—it is impossible to say; but either

 
THE GOLDEN AGE 219

 

 

Panathenaic Frieze of the  .rthenon, a Section in Situ in
the Western Portico.

Pericles or the priests had another plan in mind for the
enshrining of that most sacred symbol, which represented
the goddess to the Athenians in her character as pro-
tectress of the city—the Polias—while the new temple
was to be dedicated to the Parthenos—the virgin god-
dess. Pericles therefore commissioned the great sculptor
to make a statue of the goddess which should embody the
expression of her highest attributes, adding that no pains
and no expense should be spared to make it the largest,
the most gorgeous, and the most precious representation
of her in the world. Phidias was one of the few really
great men in this world who had boundless enthusiasm
for his work and unlimited means at his disposal to ex-
press his stupendous conceptions. He turned to the °
crowning work of his glorious labors for his native city,
so bright and famous, with admirable love and zeal; he
conceived a design of sublime majesty, and executed it
with consummate skill in materials the most precious
that he knew. The gold-and-ivory Athena! What an
image of majestic divinity it represented to the Greek
mind; what a symbol it was of the puissance, the worth,
the purity of the virgin goddess! It is almost beyond
our modern powers of imagination to visualize so vast
a display of material wealth without some taint of vul-
garity or tawdriness; yet Phidias’s Athena Parthenos
could have suggested nothing but imposing dignity and
loveliness. (See Frontispiece. )
220 THE STORY OF ATHENS

All that we know of this noble statue is derived from
a few lines in the ancient texts and from two late minia-
ture copies of the famous work of art, now preserved in
the National Museum at Athens—the Varvakion statue,
a modest work without great artistic merit, and a mis-
erable statuette, a crude and careless parody. But with
these as suggestions, and the actual work of Phidias still
to be seen in the British Museum, one may in some mea-
sure restore the form of the most famous statue of an-
tiquity. The colossal figure stood about forty feet high,
wearing the accustomed helmet and aegis, bearing in the
right hand a winged Victory, and resting the other upon
her doughty shield; the famous spear leaned against her
left shoulder, while behind the shield coiled the serpent
of Erichthonius. The arms and the vesture were of
purest gold; the flesh portions were of 8 leaming ivory,
which Pinas knew how to mold in such a fashion that
no joints were visible in its smooth surface.

Athena’s head was nobly poised, and the close-fitting
casque that she wore bore a sphinx between two winged
steeds, the three beasts serving to support the triple crest
of her helmet. Her attitude was one of repose, and cre-
ated a new type of Athena statue, in strong contrast to
the old warrior Athena of Pisistratus’s gable sculptures
to the archaic seated Athena, to the common represen-
tations of the goddess leaping at her birth, with a mighty
war-shout, from the head of Zeus, and even to Phidias’s

earlier conception, set forth in the bronze Promachos,
which still hailed the processions as they entered the
gates of the Acropolis and signaled sailors far out at
sea. The Victory which she held in her extended hand
turned toward her with a wreath of golden leaves. The
shield and the base of the statue were marvels of seule
ture in relief, the former executed in gold, the latter

marble. The sculptures of the shield were famous 7
THE GOLDEN AGE 221

more than one reason, as we shall see later. On the in-
side Phidias represented a gigantomachia, and on the
front, around the Gorgon’s head, a battle with Amazons,
in which he cleverly introduced his own portrait and
perhaps that of Pericles, the one represented as an old
man wielding a mighty hammer, the other as
a helmeted soldier whose upraised arm con-
cealed the lower part of his face. Our know-
ledge of the design of the shield we have
from a fragment in marble, found in Athens pyjaias’s Portrait
and now in the British Museum, which corre- of Himself.
sponds to the descriptions of ancient writers.

This superb statue was set upon a low pedestal in the
rear part of the naos of the new temple, facing the east,
in the manner of ali Greek cultus statues; and arrange-
ments were pushed rapidly toward the formal dedica-
tion to Athena of the great combined works of Pericles,
Phidias, and Ictinus, three of the greatest men of the
Golden Age of Athens. Meanwhile the temple was in
the hands of painters and gilders, who, under the direc-
tion of Phidias, were accentuating the grace and beauty
of the architect's delicate lines and the sculptor’s noble
figures with brilliant touches of pigment and gold. It is
difficult for us, whose eyes are accustomed to nothing
more brilliant in architecture than the somber grays and
soft browns of granite, limestone, or sandstone, or at
most the dazzling white of marble that is presently toned
by the smoke of a thousand chimneys, to regard the
polychromy of the Greeks with the admiration which
we accord to every other branch of Greek art. To be
sure, our northern clime, with its subdued light and, in
many places, its wealth of greenery, is not the place for
the display of striking color contrasts in architecture;
whereas the radiant atmosphere of Greece, glowing with
brilliant hues, would neutralize, in a measure, the most

 
222 THE STORY OF ATHENS

violent contrasts. After all, it was not the whole temple
that was treated in strong colors; the columns and wall
surfaces even in marble buildings were tinted, it is true,
but with a soft, rich ivory which must certainly have
relieved the glaring white of the new marble and given
an effect not unlike the superb golden hue which time has
imparted to the ruins. It was only the minor details
and the sculptures that were emphasized with positive
tones. The triglyphs, with their regulas and mutules,
were colored blue, and the trunnels were gilded. The flat
surfaces of the metopes and the pediment, which formed
a background for sculpture, were red. The continuous
moldings were decorated with patterns in these same vivid
colors, the flat bands usually with the meander in various
intricate forms, the curved moldings with leaves so con-
ventionally treated as to resemble the egg and dart of
carved decorations; the gutter was adorned with an-
themions. The abacus usually received a meander orna-
ment, like other narrow, flat surfaces; the curved echinos
bore the egg and dart. Color was usually applied to the
figure-sculptures to enhance the beauty of the drapery.
The flesh parts of Phidias’s sculptures, like those of the
archaic priestesses of Antenor’s time, were tinted a soft,
golden ivory. The hair of the men and women was
generally colored to nature’s hues, but that of the gods
was gilded. Their garments doubtless shone with rich
primary colors. In the flat reliefs draperies were often
suggested only by color. All the enrichment was soft-
ened by light and shadow, and toned by the full light of
the sun into manifold shades and tints. We have but
to look at the famous sarcophagus, called that of Alex-
ander, in the Imperial Museum of Constantinople, to see
the real beauty of Greek polychromy when applied to
architecture and sculpture. This wonderful monument
was made only a little over a hundred years after the
THE GOLDEN AGE 223

completion of the Parthenon, and it must present almost
the same color scheme that was used in the great temples
of the country. Time has, of course, lent a certain ten-
derness to the colors, but the effect would be no less beau-
tiful should we imagine them many times more brilliant ;
the light and shade wrought by the relief, with the bril-
liance of the sun, seem to melt them into a diffused, opa-
lescent harmony.

When the Parthenon had been begun, Pericles turned
his attention to the embellishment of the lower city. The
long walls to Piraeus and Phalerum had been completed
by Callicrates, the architect, in pursuance of the old pol-
icy of Themistocles, that Athens might be connected
with the seaport in such a way that access could never
be cut off. Socrates said that he heard Pericles propose
the measure in the ecclesia. And now Pericles added
a third wall, joining the city with the little harbor of
Munychia. The circuit wall of the city was reinforced,
as may be seen at the northwest, where, adjoining the
south side of the so-called sacred gate, a huge bastion of
quadrated limestone still stands. And to the north of it,
outside of Themistocles’s wall, the foundations of a wall
fourteen feet thick, faced with quadrated blocks of con-
glomerate, may be traced.

The ancient Thriasian gate was remodeled upon a
more modern plan of defense. It was now made a double
gate, and became the historic Dipylum of Athens, one
gate being in the wall, the other one hundred feet or
so within, with walls on either side connecting the two
and inclosing a small courtyard between them. Both
gates consisted of two openings, separated by a pier, and
both were flanked by massive towers. Though built of
limestone, they seem to have been originally revetted with
marble.

Very few remains of the Dipylum were found when the
224 THESSTORY OF ATHENS

site was excavated in 1872-74. Only a sufficient por-
tion of the foundations remains to determine its plan,
and this seems to belong to the age of Pericles. Stand-
ing against the inside face of the pier of the inner gate
was found an altar of Zeus, where strangers sacrificed
on entering this the most important portal of the city.
Opening upon the same gateway was a small building

 

 

Ruins of the Dipylum,

inclosing a fountain fed by an aqueduct; this is paved
with well-worn blocks of Hymettus marble. Between
the Dipylum and the smaller opening to the west stood
a large building, called the Pompieum, where prepara-
tions for the Panathenaic procession were made, and
where the sacred ship of Athena was kept.

Colonnades lined the road that connected the great
gate with the agora. Whether these were built by Peri-
cles or were later than his time we do not know; but,
in view of the improvements which he carried out in this
quarter of the city, it is not unreasonable to suppose that
they were a part of his plan.

It would be interesting to know if Herodotus, who is
believed to have come to Athens in 446, passed through
this gate on his way to the Prytaneum, where so distin-
THE GOLDEN AGE 228

guished a stranger would be most likely to have been
entertained.

In the midst of these domestic undertakings, Pericles’s
attention was forcibly withdrawn from the embellishment
of the city to the more urgent needs of the empire. The
successful revolt of Boeotia had set a bad example to the
allies, who were not altogether happy under Athenian
supremacy, and other members of the old league were
ready to emulate her success. Euboea, one of the origi-
nal members of the league and a very important ally of
Athens, suddenly broke loose and declared herself in
revolt. Pericles, unwilling to intrust the interests of the
state to another general, as he had in the case of Tol-
mides, went himself with an army to suppress the defec-
tion. But scarcely had he begun the campaign when a
more grave danger threatened the empire from the south.
The five years’ truce with Sparta had elapsed; Megara
had made overtures to the arch enemy, had succeeded in
securing the aid of the Lacedaemonians and Corinthians,
and with their assistance had taken advantage of the
absence of Pericles and the army to drive the Athenian
garrison out of the city and declare herself on the side
of Sparta. But the trouble did not end there: the Spar-
tans, led by their king, Plistoanax, had entered Attica
and were marching directly upon Athens. Pericles,
upon being informed of all this, began a hasty return
march, and in short order arrived for the defense of the
city. And now happened a mysterious thing which has
never been fully cleared up in history: Plistoanax, with
his strong force almost in view of Athens, halted and
returned quietly to the Peloponnesus. The universal im-
pression at the time seems to have been that Pericles had
thrown a barrier of gold between the king and the object
of conquest; in other words, had bribed him to abandon

the attack. At all events, Plistoanax was suspected by his
15
226 THESSTORY OF ATHENS

subjects, brought to trial, and sentenced to pay a fine of
fifteen talents. Being unwilling to part with his ill-gotten
gains, he fled to Arcadia and lived there, an exile, for
twenty years. On the other side, Pericles, in accounting
for certain expenditures for the state, set down a large
sum for “a necessary purpose.” The Athenian general
now returned to Euboea, and after a brief but vigorous
campaign brought the island to complete subjection, and
compelled it to accept the same humiliating terms that
had- been forced upon Thasos and Naxos after their
attempts at rebellion. All rights were denied the Eu-
boeans as members of the fast waning league. Democ-
racy was made their form of government, tribute was
exacted, and lands were wrested from the inhabitants of
the northern part of the island and given over to Athe-
nian citizens. An old inscription is still in existence which
gives the terms of an oath which the people of Chalcis
were obliged to swear if they would avoid deportation;
and more humiliating conditions could hardly be con-
ceived than those which bound these subjects to their
mistress.

At the close of these wars both Athens and Sparta
seemed willing to cease hostilities for a time: the former
reduced in military strength from her recent struggles to
retain her continental empire, the latter disturbed by do-
mestic troubles. In 445, much to the surprise of all
Greece, a treaty of peace was concluded between the old
rivals, by the terms of which Athens relinquished all con-
trol of her tributaries on the mainland outside of Attica.

Pericles could now devote his entire time to his cher-
ished scheme for making Athens the artistic center of
Greece, and at this time the great activity in art and
letters began at Athens which made her the school of the
world for art, literature, and philosophy.
 

 

AGRAULIUM

      
    

      

 

 

 

 

BASE of h i
ENA fy

a Oa eereeenes

CHOS =

12 0 Athena
aud Temp i

 

 

ASCLEPIEUM

18

    

   

THEATER

 

Plan of the Acropolis.

 
VIII

THE GOLDEN AGE (Continued)

“‘ Mistress of all, revered city of the Athenians.
How beautiful are thy docks!

How fair the Parthenon and the Piraeus.”
ANON. FRAG.

ALTHOUGH despoiled of her tributaries
on the mainland, Athens was still the
richest state in Greece, and, at sea,
the strongest power in the world. The
subject islands poured in their reven-
; ues, and the colonies, which she con-
i | tt ,, trolled from the coast of Pontus to the
: western shore of Italy, increased her
resources to an extent that no Greek
state had ever known before. Athens
was now on the crest of. the golden wave and, for
a few short years, poised in undiminished splendor ‘‘on
a sea of glory.” Let us pause at this point to review
the characters who made up the passengers and crew of
the great ship at this supreme moment. Her helmsman
we have already briefly discussed; we know something
of his appearance, we have had glimpses of his character
in public affairs, but nothing has been said of his private
life, or of his associations with the men of his day, ex-
cept in his official relations with Phidias, his helper and
friend. Those who stood nearest Pericles at the height
of his career were this great artist, the most famous
sculptor of his own or any other age, and Aspasia, the
228

  

Capital of the Parthenon.
THE GOLDEN AGE 229

most famous woman of the Greek world: the one, his
minister, through whom he was able to carry out his
magnificent ideas for the adornment of Athens, the other
his counselor and guide, the inspiration of his ambitions,
the encouragement of his darker hours. Next to these,
in their intimacy with Pericles, had stood his teachers:
Anaxagoras, who had trained him in the lofty philosophy
of the Ionian school, and Damon, who, in the guise of a
music teacher, had instructed Pericles, in his younger
days, in forensic and political arts. His chief opponents
were Thucydides, a politician, leader of the old conser-
vative and aristocratical party, a man of force and elo-
quence, and Cleon, a demagogue of the deepest dye. In
the world of art and letters of the time there were many
of the most brilliant lights of history residing in Athens,
with whom the chief figure in the state was doubtless
more or less familiar. Besides Phidias and his brother
Panaenus, there were Cresilas, Myron, and Lycius among
the sculptors, and the renowned painters Polygnotus and
Aglaophon, all working for the glory of Athens, and
spreading their masterpieces throughout the length and
breadth of Greece. Among the poets, old Simonides
had still tuned his lyre while Pericles was a youth. His
muse was still so fresh and beautiful that in his eightieth
year he had won his fifty-sixth prize, carrying off the
victory with a dithyrambic chorus, and had only recently
died in Sicily. In the semi-annual dramatic contests,
Sophocles, now in the glory of his prime, contended with
Euripides and the jovial Ion. Among the comic writers
were Cratinus and a man named Plato. The writers
of prose were Thucydides and, during a few short years,
Herodotus, who came to Athens on one of his long jour-
neys. The schools of philosophy were presided over
mainly by foreigners—Parmenides and Zeno, who came
from Italy, Protagoras of Thrace, and Anaxagoras the
230 THESSTORY OF ATHENS

Ionian—until Socrates abandoned his artistic life as a
sculptor to become the most renowned exponent of phi-
losophy that Greece had yet seen. In this bright constel-
lation the genius of Pericles shone out in undiminished
splendor. Pericles was the marvel of the men of his day,
who, for the dignity of his life, the elevation of his senti-
ments, the gravity of his countenance, called him the
“Olympian.” In loftiness and purity of style he sur-
passed all the orators of the bema and was hailed as Zeus
by the poets of his day; for although he ordinarily ex-
pressed his sublime sentiments, tinged with “the rich
colors of philosophy” and brightened by a lofty imagina-
tion, in a firm and even tone of voice, yet, when the oc-
casion moved him, “he thundered and lhghtened, and
turned Greece upside down,” as Aristophanes afterward
put it. His stately calm, his dignified reserve were
doubtless the direct result of the philosophical spirit that
had been inculcated in him by Anaxagoras. He repre-
sented the new and healthy school of thought that had
freed itself from religious superstition and materialism
before it had been lost in the vague doctrines of the
Sophists; for although he was emancipated from the
terrors of belief in portents and omens in natural phe-
nomena, and from all fear of cruel or avenging deities,
he, nevertheless, used always to pray to the gods before
mounting the bema, “that not a word might escape him,
unawares, unsuitable to the occasion.”’

Anaxagoras, in harmony, at one point at least, with
the philosophers of his time, attempted to understand the
world without reference to supernatural causes, and
taught that matter could not be explained in terms of
matter, but that the basis of all was intelligence, or
“nous” as he called it; and, relieving his followers from
the “frightful extravagances of superstition,” implanted
in them “‘a sober piety, supplemented by a rational hope”
THE GOLDEN AGE 231

(to quote from Plutarch again). He led Pericles along
the heights of sublime speculation and gave him that
broad view of life which raised him above all petty broils
and vulgar disputes, and imparted to him that serenity
of spirit. which brooked all slander and every scurrilous
attack.

The influence of Zeno, the Elean, upon Pericles seems
to have been less pervasive. From the lectures of that
famous natural philosopher he gained a knowledge of the
universe which he is known to have used frequently in
his oratory. Pericles admired him also for his dialecti-
cal skill and may be believed to have learned much from
hearing him speak, for, as Timon the Phliasian asks,

Have you not heard of Zeno’s mighty powers,
Who could change sides, yet changing triumphed still ?

Zeno, on his part, was charmed with the personality and
powers of his pupil, and “desired,” as Plutarch says,
“those who called the gravity of Pericles pride and arro-
gance, to be proud in the same way, telling them the very
acting of an excellent part might insensibly produce a love
and real imitation of it.” Damon, although he posed as
Pericles’s music teacher, was generally believed to have
instructed him in political philosophy. Plutarch says
that ‘the trained Pericles for his political contests as a
trainer prepares an athlete for the games”; and this
suspicion called forth the lines of the poet Plato:

Inform me, Damon, first, does fame say true
And wast thou really Pericles’s Chiron?

The “musician” was not a favorite with the people, who
suspected him of urging his pupil to adopt despotic mea-
sures, and was eventually ostracized “as a busybody and
a friend of despotism.”
232 THE SORRY OF ATHENS

Pericles mingled little with the citizens, great or small.
He lived in comparative seclusion. He appeared seldom
in the agora, and only occasionally in the assembly.
He was present but once at social festivities, and that at
the marriage of his sister’s son, when Athenian etiquette
demanded his presence. But even then his stay was
brief, and he soon left the scene of merriment for the
seclusion of his study. For this some people judged him
haughty and proud, but, with the populace, his rare ap-
pearance in public lent impressiveness to his person and
he was always hailed with enthusiasm in the assembly.
His chief and constant resort was the house of Aspasia,
even during his married life, for in his youth he had
married a relation, the divorced wife of Hipponicus, son
of Callias, who had fought at Marathon. This marriage
had not been a happy one, though his wife had borne him
two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus. After a time he
“handed her over” to a third husband, and for the rest
of his life lived in real conjugal happiness with Aspasia.

As is often the case with men of austere character, Peri-
cles prided himself upon his frugality. He had managed
his paternal estate with such economy that it had greatly
increased in value. His estates were administered by a
steward named Evangelus, whom Pericles had trained
with great care, under whose scrupulous exactness the
income was applied to expenses in such a way that Peri-
cles’s family chafed bitterly at his parsimonious economy.
The chief complainer was Xanthippus, his elder son,
who was the very opposite of his father, wasteful and
prodigal; and then, too, he had married a very extrava-
gant wife. Xanthippus frequently quarreled with his
father about the pittance that was regularly doled out to
him, but without effect. He gradually became involved
in debts, and finally borrowed money in his father’s name
to discharge them. When his creditor came to Pericles
THE GOLDEN AGE 22305

for settlement, he was not only refused payment, but was
prosecuted for demanding it. This was the final break
between father and son. From that time Xanthippus
seemed to hate his father, and spread the most disgraceful
calumnies about him. We know little about his other
son, Paralus, of whom he seems to have been very fond.
All his hopes were centered about this younger boy. An-
other member of the household was a young relative
and ward of Pericles, an orphan boy named Alcibiades,
a fine, handsome lad of the greatest promise. He had a
considerable fortune, which Pericles administered.

The position of Aspasia in the social life of Athens finds
no parallel in modern history unless, perhaps, in the story
of Agnes Sorel and her relations with Charles VII. She
belonged to a class that had assumed large proportions
in Greece at the time of Pericles, and that counted in its
ranks all sorts of women, of all grades of character, from
the highest to the most degraded. This class, which was
known as the /ictairai, was in great measure, the product
of the status of gentlewomen in all parts of Greece and
especially in Athens, where customs half Oriental, in re-
gard to the position of women, had supplanted the true
Greek ideals of a hundred years before. The free-born
Athenian woman was now little more than a chattel in
the house of her father; she was kept in the closest seclu-
sion, in a separate part of the house, with others of her
sex; she was denied education, and seldom could either
read or write. She was rarely permitted to appear in
public, except on the occasion of a great festival like the
Panathenaea, when all the women of rank joined in the
procession. When she had arrived at the marriageable
age she was practically sold, without being consulted, to
a man, usually twice her age, whom she had never seen.

Anything like romance in the life of the Athenian maid
was rare indeed; though a story is told as a great excep-
234 THESSTORY OF ATHENS

tion. Cydippe was the beautiful daughter of a rich
Athenian noble. On the occasion of one of the great
festivals at Delos she went with her family to the holy isle
to offer sacrifices and vows. It was the festival of Ar-
temis, and Cydippe went with her nurse to sacrifice at the
altar of the maiden goddess. On the way to the temple
she was seen by Acontius, a handsome youth of Chios,
who fell madly in love with her; but the strict etiquette
of the time forbade his speaking to her. Fearing that
she would soon be taken back to Athens and that he
might never see her again, he resolved upon the following
trick: He took an apple and cut upon it a solemn vow.
Then when he next saw the object of his love, out walk-
ing with her nurse, he threw the apple in her path. The
nurse picked it up and gave it to her mistress, who read
in solemn tones: “I swear by the sanctuary of Artemis to
marry Acontius.”” She did not know who Acontius was;
perhaps she had never noticed him; but she had pro-
nounced an oath under the very shadow of Artemis’s
temple. Cydippe went back to Athens and the love-sick
youth returned to his island home in despair. Ere long
Cydippe’s father arranged a splendid marriage for her;
but when the day for the wedding came the bride-to-be
was taken suddenly ill. Three times this experience
was repeated. The father became alarmed and went to
Delphi to consult the oracle. The priestess responded
that the divine Artemis was directing her arrows at the
maid on account of her perfidy. When he returned,
amazed at what he had heard, his daughter told him about
the incident at Delos. Acontius had by this time ar-
rived in Athens in pursuit of his unknown lady-love. He
soon found out where she was and came to claim the
promise. The father was enraged, as we should expect,
but, after the inevitable parental storm, there was the
usual reconciliation, and Acontius took the fair Cydippe
away to Chios.
THE GOLDEN AGE 235

When a woman had become a wife, her position was
little better. Her husband had married her, not because
he cared anything for her personally, but rather as a
duty to his name and to the state. She was regarded
as a useful person to have about, to keep the house and
rear the children to an age when they could be taken
from her, as one of the poets of Athens frankly admits.
The wife, although completely subject to her husband,
remained under the guardianship of her father or his
representative. Her new lord could put her away at
will; yet she was powerless to separate herself from
him. In Euripides’s play, the wretched Medea exclaims:
“For divorce is a shame for a woman, nor may she re-
nounce her husband.’”’ The most important provision in
Athenian law, in cases of divorcement, seems to have been
that the dowry should revert to the father.

This Oriental seclusion, this complete subordination
and inferior training, of course rendered the Athenian
wife utterly unsuitable to become the intellectual com-
panion of her husband, and a general contempt for the
intelligence of women was the natural result. Plato's
statement, that the most intelligent of women is the
equal of only a second-rate man, was not the expression —
of the sentiments of a woman-hater, but the honest opinion
of a man who, like others of his time in Athens, knew the
woman citizen only as a veiled, unlettered, uninteresting
being, fitted, by her training, only to keep house and nurse
children. It was impossible for an Athenian gentleman,
statesman, poet, or artist, to find, in a wife of this type,
that sympathy and inspiration which every cultivated
man seeks in companionship with the opposite sex. The
men deprecated this situation of affairs, as we may know
from the writings of the time. Sophocles, Euripides,
Plato, all protest against it; and the women, if they
thought about it at all, doubtless deprecated it too.
236 THE STORY OF ATHENS

It was in supplying this lack of agreeable female society
that the class of hetairai played so important a role in the
Athenian society of the Periclean age. The same class,
known as meretrices in Rome, and as the demi-monde in
our day, has existed in every age and society, but nowhere
has it assumed so important a part as in Periclean Athens,
where its existence was not only condoned but accepted,
and, in some cases, all but respected by the convention
of the time. The hetairai were usually free-born women
of foreign birth, who could not become citizens, and there-
fore could not be lawfully wedded to Athenians. Their
number, of course, embraced then, as now, a large propor-
tion of degraded creatures who traded their honor for a
livelihood; but it counted also a group of brilliant, edu-
cated, and high-souled women, who were the only cul-
tured ladies of their day, and in whom the great men of
Athens found their sole feminine friendships. To this
group belonged Aspasia.

She was a Miletian by birth, the daughter of Axiochus.
She was of surpassing beauty and unusual mental ac-
complishments. Coming to Athens in the prime of her
life, she at once attracted the attention of Pericles, who,
unhappy in his home life and lonely in his natural reserve,
found in her both lofty inspiration and sympathetic com-
panionship. There can be no doubt that he soon fell
deeply in love with this beautiful woman, who presented
to him a new type of intellectuality, a feminine type
clothed with a grace and tenderness he had never known
before, and she was undoubtedly of the greatest service
to him politically, in his oratory. Anaxagoras had trained
his philosophical side—his head; Zeno had taught him
adroitness of speech: but from Aspasia he learned those
sympathetic arts which a man learns only by association
with the feminine mind, through which he reached the
hearts ef his hearers—Aspasia had trained his heart.
THE GOLDEN AGE 237

It has been hinted above that the status of Aspasia was
all but respected. This could, perhaps, not be inferred
alone from the encomiums of some of the greatest men of
her day; but when we consider that some of these men are
known to have taken their citizen wives to her salon, that
they might profit by her discourse, the statement seems
more plausible. But Aspasia’s position was a delicate
one, however considered. She could not penetrate beneath
the crust of society by any means whatever. Athenian
law debarred her from all rights, social or other, and when
the enemies of Pericles chose her as a means through
which to attack him, she had no opportunity of appeal
for the redress of her wrongs. The satirists called her
‘“Omphale,” the woman who bewitched Heracles, and the
opponents of Pericles often assailed her in a most shame-
ful manner, finding this the surest way to annoy him;
but to the great mass of the people she was Hera, the
Olympian consort. After Pericles had put away his wife
he formed a union with Aspasia which was as near law-
ful wedlock as was possible under the Athenian law, and
which was far nearer the ideal marriage relation than
most legal marriages of the time. In her he found that
sympathy which most great men crave; and so devoted
to her was he, during the long years of their life together,
that, as Plutarch relates, he never left his house without
kissing her.

Pericles’s chief political rival, as we have seen, was
Thucydides—not the famous historian of the same
name, who was a somewhat younger man, but the conser-
vative successor of Cimon. Thucydides, though bitterly
opposed to Pericles’s political tenets, was a man of suf-
ficiently generous spirit to appreciate the extraordi-
nary gifts of the democratic leader. On one occasion,
when asked by the Spartan king Archidamus, who was
the better wrestler, Pericles or he, he replied, “When I
238 THE STORY OF ATHENS

throw him, he insists he was never down, and persuades
the very spectators to believe so.” The fight between
these two leaders was long and bitterly contested. Thu-
cydides’s chief criticism of his rival was that he wasted
the public funds to bedeck the city. No man ever ven-
tured to say that he had enriched himself by so much as
a drachma. In the assembly one day Thucydides had
made his usual complaint, and Pericles, turning to the
people, asked them if he had spent too much upon the
city, and when the Pnyx had rung with “‘yeas” he replied:
“Very well, then, charge it all to my account; but see
to it that the buildings are inscribed with the name of
Pericles and not that of Athenians.’ At this the throng,
which he ever wielded as the wind bends the rushes,
cried out: “Spend as much of the treasure as you will
and spare nothing!” This tale is from Plutarch, but
doubtless is founded on fact. As time passed and the
enmity between the two parties waxed intolerable, it be-
came evident that a crisis was at hand, and that one
leader or the other must submit to the ostracism. When
the test came Thucydides was the loser and, in 443, he
retired from Athens, leaving Pericles master of the situa-
tion. From this moment, for fifteen years Athens was
governed by one man, who, by sheer force of character
and eloquence, ruled as a monarch, and indeed his power
exceeded that of many kings and tyrants, as Thucydides,
the historian, observes: ‘The revenue, the army, the
navy, the islands, and the sea, a most extensive territory,
peopled by barbarians as well as Greeks, fortified with the
obedience of subject nations, the friendship of kings and
the alliance of princes, were all at his command,” and
all this was delegated to him by the will of the people,
whose confidence he held perhaps not so much by his
convincing eloquence as by the conviction of an upright
political life. The archonships and various magistracies
THE GOLDEN AGE 239

were filled each year by lot as usual. There was no at-
tempt on Pericles’s part to unite any of these offices
in himself, but by singular tact he managed to have
supervision of all. He held the high office of general
fifteen times, and during these years acquitted himself
with distinction in the field. The people of Athens seemed
happy and contented under their supreme ruler, with
plenty of work provided for them by the generous hand
of Pericles. But it was of first importance that they
should be kept in good humor. To this end the drama
was greatly encouraged and musical productions were
raised in importance. At the suggestion of Pericles
a decree was passed adding a prize in music to the list of
Panathenaic awards, and a musical theater, called the
Odeum, was built beneath the southeastern angle of the
Acropolis, not far from the old theater, where these con-
tests were held. This building was quite famous in an-
tiquity, but no trace of it has ever been found. It con-
tained many pillars and rows of seats, says an ancient
description, but the roof attracted the widest fame. This
was of conical shape, as the roof of any building of Greek
theater plan would naturally be. The Athenians called it
“Xerxes’s tent,’ perhaps because it resembled the “pa-
vilion” of that monarch, or, more likely, because the tim-
bers were supposed to have been originally the masts of
the Persian ships captured at Salamis.

The theater, however, remained the chief source of
amusement in Athens. The leading exponents of the
drama were, of course, Sophocles and Euripides. The
former, since the death of Aeschylus (456) had held
almost unrivaled preéminence in the art of tragedy. His
pure and elevated style had won for him the title of the
Attic Homer. Since his first memorable victory over
Aeschylus he had continued in the same lofty yet sympa-
thetic style that had given him first place in his early
240 THE STORY OF ATHENS

years. His improvements over the older style, in method
of presentation, were limited to the introduction of three
and even four actors (Aeschylus had employed three in
but one play), and the further suppression of the choral
parts. His principal rival in the dramatic field was
Euripides, who had made his first appearance in the year
after Aeschylus’s death, when he had brought out a trag-
edy called ‘‘Peliades.”’ Euripides was a very young man
at that time, having been born, as we remember, on the
day of the battle of Salamis. He had been very carefully
educated by his father, who, while his son was yet a child,
dreamed he should see him crowned with myrtle. He
had placed him under the instruction of Anaxagoras,
the philosopher, and of Protagoras, a teacher so much in
demand in his time that, to the disgust of his fellow wise
men, he received as much as one hundred minas for his
services. The boy had at first shown considerable artis-
tic skill, and his paintings were favorably commented
upon; but he soon took up the lyre, and, after a few years,
became a tragic writer of merited popularity. His career
was somewhat overshadowed by the gigantic form of
Sophocles, who encouraged and helped him, we may
believe. At last, in 441, after fifteen years of hard work,
with repeated failures to win, he received the first prize
and took rank with the great poets of the greatest age of
the drama, when Aeschylus had just left the world and
Aristophanes had just come into it. Stimulated perhaps
by the success of his young rival, Sophocles brought out,
in the following year, his “‘Antigone,”’ one of the greatest
and most successful of his tragedies, which took Athens
by storm and, by its high patriotic sentiments, so roused
the enthusiasm of the people that he was elected one of
the ten generals for the year.

Euripides’s productions differed from those of his great
contemporaries in both form and style; he had not the
THE GOLDEN AGE 2AI

exalted grandeur of Aeschylus, nor the finished elegance
of Sophocles; but in the portrayal of human passions he
surpassed them both. <Aeschylus’s dramatis personae
had been only gods and heroes of the most sublime type.
Sophocles had retained the same lofty plane for characters
of this kind, but had introduced men and women who
were human. Euripides dared to bring down the gods
to a level quite human and introduced men of more than
brutal passions. This was, no doubt, the result of the
growing spirit of the time to sneer at the gods whom
earlier generations had revered. Euripides had been
carried much further than Sophocles by the wave of new-
born skepticism, and his deeper drafts of philosophy
are evident on every page of his works. Sophocles rep-
resented a happy combination of piety and enlighten-
ment; while Euripides shocked the more devout people
of his time by his contempt of sacred things.

Almost totally eclipsed by these two great luminaries,
completely outshone by their effulgence, was Ion, the poet
of Chios, who had come to Athens when Cimon was in
power and had been a friend of Aeschylus. Jon was one
of the bohemians of Athens in his day. He had once
taken the dithyrambic and tragic prize, and on that aus-
picious occasion his jovial soul had prompted him to
treat every citizen of Athens to a pitcher of Chian wine,
and we may believe a night of good cheer followed in
Athens. The poet was sometimes ridiculed by his satiri-
cal companions for too deep attachment to the bowl that
flows, and indeed did not hesitate to confess, in his own
poems, a weakness of that kind.

In the year 440, while Sophocles was one of the Athe-
nian generals, the wealthy and prosperous island of
Samos, which was second only to Athens as a naval
power, and which had been a tributary of Athens ever

since the battle of Mycale, took occasion to strike for in-
16
242 THE STORY OF ATHENS

dependence. The exact cause of the revolt is not ap-
parent, for the historians of the time do not agree with
regard to it, and the friends and the enemies of Pericles
gave very different reasons for it. From the comic
writers, who were the journalists of the day, we glean
the same divergent and unsatisfactory opinions. Some
laid it at the door of Aspasia, saying that she had
prompted Pericles to such despotic measures with the isl-
anders that rebellion was the natural result. Aristophanes
blames Cleon, the demagogue. But it is probably fairer
to charge it to the Athenians en masse and their drastic
treatment of the allies in general. Pericles was, as usual,
the chief of the ten generals, and he and Sophocles set out
for Samos. It was a costly war, though it took but nine
months to reduce the island, and a great number of noble
young Athenians left home with high hopes of fame never
to return again. The outcome was inevitable, and the
Samians were treated with the same sweeping policy
that had been administered to Thasos and Naxos, and the
victorious army returned to Athens for nine years of un-
disturbed peace.

On his return to Athens, Pericles prepared to celebrate
the funeral games, for those who had fallen in Samos,
with more than customary pomp, and delivered a splendid
oration in honor of the dead. It was one of Pericles’s
most brilliant efforts; a good portion of it has come
down to us through Thucydides. The speech was a pane-
gyric of Athenian greatness. He extolled the glory of
the democracy and the splendor of the empire; and when
he descended from the bema the citizens thronged to
congratulate him. Women brought garlands and chap-
lets to crown him “like a champion returning victorious
from the lists.” But Elpinice, remembering her brother’s
fate, brought no flowers and, as he passed her, said:
“Are these things worthy of crowns and garlands that
THE GOLDEN AGE 243

have robbed us of so many brave citizens—not in a war
against Phenicians or Medes, such as my brother Cimon
waged, but against a people of the same blood as our-
selves?” Pericles only smiled and passed on with the
soft rejoinder, quoted from Archilochus :

“Why lavish ointments on a head that ’s gray?”

The years following the subjugation of Samos were
the most prolific in works of art and literature of the
Golden Age. In 438 the coronation of imperial Athens—
the dedication of the Parthenon—took place. The temple
was finished but for some minor details of sculpture and
painting; the great statue of Athena in gold and ivory
now filled the naos with splendor; the trophies of many
battles had been hung upon the walls, within and without,
to delight the renowned goddess of war. It remained
only for the Athenians formally to consecrate the shrine
and the statue—the most magnificent offering ever dedi-
cated to a pagan divinity—to their great protectress.

The solemn ceremony was performed, with sacrifices
of bulls, as the crowning feature of the great Panathenaic
festival, amid the acclamations of joy and thanksgiving
of the people. But even the new temple could not conve-
niently hold the vast spoils of Athenian prowess in war,
so to the west of the temple, on lower ground, a large
simple building of limestone was built to hold the trophies
of bronze and other base materials. This building, one
of the largest (in superficial area) on the Acropolis, was
called the chalkotheka.

The following year Pericles and Phidias undertook
to provide a more fitting entrance to the Acropolis; the
old gate of Cimon was cramped and insufficient to the
needs of the great festival procession, which was growing
year by year in size and magnificence. The dignity of
the new temple and the beauty of its surroundings de-
manded a more impressive entrance, and the problem was
244 THE STORY OF ATHENS

given to the architect Mnesicles to design a portal and
vestibule that should be in keeping with the grandeur of
the temple to which it was to be an introduction.
Mnesicles’s plan was for a stupendous structure involving
considerable alteration in the old fortification walls which
still remained at the west end of the Acropolis. The

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old gate of Cimon’s time was quite ignored, and it was
proposed to throw the new entrance farther to the north
and carry it entirely across this narrower end of the in-
closure. The plan left outside the portal, on the south-
ern side above one of Cimon’s bastions, the ancient shrine
of Athena Nike, with its venerable wooden statue, and
the shrine of Hecate. It was now proposed to build a
fitting shrine for the old image of Athena in her character
of Victory,—a small structure, just large enough to hold
the sacred statue,—and to place it directly upon the Cimo-
nian tower, on a level with the new Propylaea. Who the

 
THE GOLDEN AGE 245

architect of this building was we do not know, but he
designed one of the most charming monuments that the
Golden Age produced, a little gem, perfection in itself,
and perfectly adjusted to its imposing surroundings. The
Ionic style had come rapidly into vogue during the latter
half of the century, and the artist chose that soft and
graceful order for his delicate task. A miniature temple
he made, a tiny cella with four-columned porch at either
end and a dainty frieze encircling its entablature. The
cella opened, without doors, to the east, and within it was
placed the sacred statue of Athena represented with the
attributes of Victory, but without wings. The story is
told that a stranger once asked why the Athenians rep-
resented their victorious goddess as wingless, and received
the answer that they wished Victory to abide continually
with them, and therefore did not provide her with the
means of flight. It was, of course, necessary for the
statue to be properly oriented, but it has always seemed to
me a pity that an exception could not have been made in
this case, and the temple made opening to the west, that
the Victory, who could not fly away, might at least
feast her eyes upon one of the most glorious views in the
world, with the bay of Salamis, the scene of the Persian
defeat, and the Corinthian gulf, the theater of equally
remarkable victories for Athens, spread out before her.
The Ionic style provided for a narrow frieze above the
architrave, and this little shrine complied with every de-
tail of the fashion. The frieze is still in position, though
four sections of it are plaster casts taken from the origi-
nals, which Lord Elgin took to London. The scenes de-
picted in delicate relief are a council of the gods, which
was placed over the eastern porch, and two stirring
battle scenes in which Athenians fight Persians on one
side and other Greeks on the opposite side. The themes
are all highly suitable for the adornment of a temple built
 

One of the Slabs from the Balustrade of the Temple
of Athena Nike.
THE GOLDEN AGE 247

in commemoration of the recent victories of Athens over
the Persians and the traitorous Boeotians, as this temple
was undoubtedly intended to be. About the edge of the
bastion, on which this little jewel stood, was placed a
high marble parapet, adorned, on the outside, with relief
sculptures representing Victories in various attitudes—
erecting trophies, bearing Persian spoils, leading bulls to
sacrifice in honor of Athena. The greater portion of
this balustrade is lost, but four slabs remain, which are
among the chief treasures of the Acropolis Museum. We
do not know what the name of the sculptor was, but his
art was matchless. These little figures are perhaps the
most delicate and lovely examples of golden era sculp-
ture in Greece. Their grace, their sweeping motion,
their vigorous poses, are the creation of a Phidias, their
soft, sensitive forms are the work of a Praxiteles, while
their wavy, diaphanous, wrinkled drapery stands alone
for the artist who made it.

Within five years after the laying of its foundation,
Mnesicles had brought the Propylaea to completion. It
was indeed a vestibule worthy of Ictinus’s masterpiece,
and only second to it in grace and beauty. Though not
nearly so large as the Parthenon, it was far more intri-
cate in plan and far more complicated in structure; yet
it was executed with equal exactness and exquisiteness
of detail and combined the Doric and Ionic orders. The
main, central division of the building was a temple-like
structure, Doric without and Ionic within, with hexa-
style Doric porticos at either end, connected by the side
walls, and divided by two rows of graceful Ionic col-
umns which flanked the roadway. The columns of the
two porches were widely spaced, at the center, for the
passage of this road. Just within the eastern portico
a wall was thrown across the entire building in which
were the five gates of the Acropolis—a broad central
248 THE STORY OF ATHENS

opening with two smaller doorways on either hand,
those nearer the central portal being somewhat larger
than the side doors, and all four approached by a low
flight of steps, for the eastern portico stood on a level
several feet higher than that toward the west. The road
sloped rapidly down from the inner portal so that the
two rows of Ionic columns stood, as they do now, on
either side of a deep defile. Over the roadway, from one
row of columns to the other, were laid those enormous
beams of marble that are one of the wonders of the Acrop-
olis. Adjoining the front porch were two wings pro-
jecting toward the west, connected with the porch at
either of its ends and consisting of two smaller Doric
porches facing each other. Both porches were inclosed
at the sides, but here the symmetry ceased; for while the
northern wing by itself was like a little temple in antis,
with a chamber opening upon a pronaos by means of a
door and two windows, the southern wing consisted
only of a deep portico. The reasons assigned for this
asymmetry are various. This south wing jutted into a
fragment of the old Pelasgic wall which formed the west-
ern boundary of the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia.
Somewhere below the wall, to the west, in the little angle
between it and the Nike temple, was the sanctuary of
Hecate. It is not improbable that even after operations
had been begun, the priests of the one cult or the other
had objected to the encroachments of the new structure,
and symmetry had to give way before veneration. For
the east side of the northern wing an open colonnade was
projected, but this was never carried beyond the founda-
tions. How this stately entrance was approached we can-
not tell; the steps, the remains of which we see to-day,
are additions of a very much later date. The whole
slope of the rock and the line of the old road have been
completely altered, but the rough limestone foundations
THE GOLDEN AGE 249

below the greater and the lesser colonnades were unques-
tionably concealed either by steps or by filling, and the
little temple of Nike was connected with the main ap-
proach by a flight of steps of its own, portions of which
are still in situ.

Outside of this glorious display of marble colonnades
the ancient and revered Pelargikon, massive, crude, and
brown, still connected the Acropolis with the distant
past. It could not have been destroyed; for Aristophanes
speaks of it in ‘““The Birds’’ some years after the comple-
tion of the Propylaea,and Polemon, a traveler, saw it with
its nine gates over two hundred years later. A curse had
been pronounced upon any man who should erect a build-
ing within its sacred precinct; but it was full of sacred
shrines and holy places.

The Propylaea is one of the earliest buildings which
show us that the Greek architects were as clever at de-
signing highly articulated structures and adapting their
plans to requirements and surroundings, as they were at

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Inner Portico of the Propylaea.
‘ONIN vuay yy Jo apdwuayp ayy woay ‘avpAdoag ayy

 

 

 

  

. SS
ME

 

 
THE GOLDEN AGE 251

the more conventional type of building which is illustrated
in their temples. When completed, the monumental
gateway of Mnesicles was the most magnificent building
of its kind in the world. It was destitute of figure sculp-
tures and depended for effect solely upon its perfect
proportions and simple dignity. The whole was roofed
with a marble roof which was the marvel of the ancients;
fragments of its coffered ceiling, which are still to be
seen within the Acropolis, show faded remains of painted
designs—each coffer embracing a star originally of gold.
The northern wing of the Propylaea was decorated, a few
years after its completion, by some of the most famous
artists of the time and received the name of Pinakotheka.
Of these paintings we shall speak later.

If there was any question as to whether the divine
Athena felt any pangs of jealousy at the erection of a
secular building of so great beauty so near her shrine,
it was fully answered during the construction of the
Propylaea. The story goes that, when the great gate-
way was nearing completion, one of the chief artisans
fell from the roof and lay dying where he fell. Pericles,
in great consternation, for fear the mishap would be taken
as a sign of Athena’s displeasure, besought the aid of the
goddess, who appeared to him and showed him a tiny
plant which she had caused to spring up on the Acropolis
and bade him apply it to the wounds of the dying artificer.
This he did without delay and the man was at once re-
stored. The plant—called the parthenia—still grows in
abundance on the sacred hill, its delicate white blossoms
covering the Acropolis with a galaxy of minute stars
when the spring sun warms the rock. In memory of this
cure Pericles set up a bronze statue of Athena Hygiea
(the Health Athena) beside her ancient altar just within
the portals, where many pious offerings were placed,
before the eyes of all who entered the sacred precinct.
252 THEBSlORY “OF ATHENS

The mighty genius of Phidias overshadowed, to a cer-
tain extent, the talents of other sculptors of his day; and
the fact that so many of his productions have been pre-
served, while all the works of the other sculptors of the
Attic school have perished, makes him seem to us the only
sculptor of the Periclean age. But there were a host of
sculptors plying their art in Athens, whose works were
as highly prized as those of Pericles’s favorite, some older
and some younger that Phidias; but their productions
disappeared hundreds of years ago, and we know of them
only through the descriptions of ancient classic writers.
There was Myron, the Boeotian, who belonged to the old
Doric school of sculpture rather than to the new Attic
school, a combination of Dorian and Ionian elements,
which Phidias represented. Myron devoted himself
principally to bronze work and was especially successful
with athletic statues and animals. His “Ladas,” the ex-
piring runner or “breather,” as the ancients called him,
was one of the most remarkable pieces of physiological
realism that had ever been attempted; while his celebrated
bronze cow, so natural that she seemed to breathe, was
the famous subject of no less than forty classic epigrams
and was long remembered by all who visited Athens
during many centuries. Another great sculptor of the
time, whom we know only by name, was Calamis, who
studied religious themes and made most beautiful statues
of the gods. He had been employed by Pindar to make a
statue of Zeus Ammon, which the poet dedicated at Olym-
pia, and made an Aphrodite for the Acropolis, which
went by the name of “Sosandra’” and was the subject of
the poet Lucian’s most unqualified praise. He also made
several Apollos, the most famous of which was the Apollo
Alexikakos which he made for Athens. This statue,
which represented the god as the averter of evil, is be-
lieved to have held a bow in one hand and a branch of
THE GOLDEN AGE 253

laurel in the other, as we find the treatment of the same
subject upon ancient coins; a replica of it has been recog-
nized in the
marble statue,
now in the Na-
tional Muse-
um, which was
long errone-
ously called
the “Apollo of
the § Ompha-
los.” The
statue is well
preserved and
is of great
beauty; only
the arms and
feet are miss-
ing, and the
nose has been
badly broken.
M. Collignon,
the distin-
guished au-
thority upon
Greek — sculp-
ture, does not
hesitate to call

the replica a= Marble Statue in the National Museum. Probably
work of the a Replica of the Apollo Alexikakos, by Calamis.

 

Attic school,
nor to make it contemporaneous with the original master,
dating it between 460 and 450 B.c.

The older school was still represented by Cresilas, who
was a portrait sculptor of such merit that his marble
254 THE STORY OF ATHENS

statue of Pericles became one of the most famous portraits
of antiquity. He also made votive statues, and was
represented on the Acropolis by a statue of Diitrephes, the
classic Sebastian, pierced with arrows.

Among these great artists Socrates began his early
career. His work was not without merit, for his handi-
craft found representation on the Acropolis in a group of
Hermes and the Graces which stood behind the pedestal
of the Athena Promachos. A small relief answering to
the above title has been found upon the Acropolis—a sort
of stele—and is still to be seen in the museum; but this can
hardly be conjectured to have been the work of the embryo
philosopher unless we wish to believe that the sage, who
rather favored the old school of Athenian politics, was
striving to perpetuate the art of Pisistratus’s palmy days.
Prominent among the younger men was Lycius, the son
and pupil of Myron, who made two equestrian statues
which were dedicated by the victorious cavalrymen with
the spoils taken from the Euboeans in Pericles’s late
campaign, and set up, one on either side of the west
fagade of the new Propylaea. The base of one of these
statues, with its inscription, is still in situ on the south
side, in front of the Nike temple. Among other of his
works were two bronze boys that stood at the entrance of
the sanctuary of Artemis, to the right after one entered
the Propylaea. The boys were connected with the sacred
rites; one of them held up a large basin of holy water
and seemed to struggle under its weight; the other held
a censer in which he strove to blow the dying embers
into living fire. The physical action of enforced breath
which this figure represented Lycius had learned to
depict from his father, who had represented the expiring
Ladas in very much the same way. Others of the
younger generation of sculptors were Pyrrhus, of whose
work we hear later, and Alcamenes, who was considered
one of Phidias’s most accomplished pupils.
THE GOLDEN AGE 255

Phidias himself did not, by any means, confine his work
to the sculptures of the Parthenon. Since his earlier
works upon the Acropolis—the famous Athena Proma-
chos and the Athena Lemnia, which he made for the Athe-
nian colonists in Lemnos and which was considered by the
ancients the most beautiful of all his works—he had made
a statue of the mother of the gods for the Metroum.
Although Pausanias and Arrian both assign this work
to Phidias, Pliny ascribes it to Agoracritus, a pupil of his;
but we know that the great master often allowed his own
works to bear his pupils’ names. This famous statue,
which doubtless followed a canon for figures of this
kind, was seated, cymbals in hand, upon a throne resting
upon two lions. Phidias, according to Pausanias, also
made a statue of the Heavenly Aphrodite for her sanc-
tuary, and one of Apollo Parnopios, the destroyer of
locusts.

The activity of the sculptors in Athens was amazing.
The Acropolis and the agora were rapidly becoming
crowded with statues, the most beautiful that the world
has seen. It is well-nigh impossible for us to picture
such a forest of beautiful works of art as the public places
of Athens became during the Golden Age, or to recon-
struct a society in which there would be a demand for such
a display. But this seems to have been the only means
the Athenians of the Periclean age had of displaying
their piety or advertising their wealth, for it was before
the days of hospitals, colleges, and foundling asylums.
Modern art owes a great deal to this fad of the Greeks
of the fifth century; for this wealth of artistic productions
was transmitted to our civilization through the agency
of Rome, and upon it was based all the best sculpture of
the Renaissance.

The first paintings that were taken to adorn the walls of
the north wing of the Propylaea were two of Polygnotus’s
most famous works. They could not have been executed
256 THESStORY OF ATHENS

upon the wall itself, for the artist died before the building
was begun; and in any event the walls were never pre-
pared to receive paintings. They were easel pictures then,
or done on boards, for they must have been portable. In
one picture Neoptolemus was represented in the act of
sacrificing the unfortunate Polyxena to the shade of his
father Achilles, who had been her lover; in the other the
youthful Achilles was depicted among the maidens at
Scyros. Both paintings were greatly admired through-
out antiquity.

WHEN the sun has reached his zenith he may not tarry
there on high—noontide is passed in blazing splendor,
and then the gradual descent must begin, and it is after-
noon. It would be difficult to fix the hour, the day, or the
year of the high noon of the Golden Age. It fell some-
where between the dedication of the Parthenon and the
completion of the Propylaea.

The morning had been bright and clear; but the golden
afternoon was not old before clouds appeared upon the
calm horizon which told of a brewing storm. These
clouds arose from different quarters: one vapory mass
from the southwest, where the vapors of Spartan jealousy
had been drawn up by Pericles’s bright sun, another from
Attica itsel{—from the pools of religious fanaticism and
party strife; both were borne along by a power resistless
as the wind, and it was evident that they would break over
the violet-crowned city. The man at the helm was not
surprised at the sudden darkening of the sky. From his
high place he had long foreseen signs of a tempest; he
had foretold it to the Athenians long before; and had
made no more effort to prevent its coming than a good
mariner would attempt to hold back a storm, but silently
and watchfully made preparations to meet it. :

This is not the place to discuss the origins of the Pelo-
THE GOLDEN AGE 287

ponnesian War or to enter into a discussion of the intri-
cate process by which Athens was drawn, willingly or
unwillingly, into that most disastrous struggle. It will
suffice to say that the thirty years’ peace had proved weari-
some to Sparta and her allies, who could not sit calmly
by and watch Athens grow richer and more powerful
every day without feeling the bitterest jealousy and
hatred for her. Sparta and Corinth, who were now
bosom friends, were only waiting for an opportunity to
break the truce, and when that opportunity came they
did all they could to lay the blame for the rupture upon
Athens and to pose as the injured parties. I do not say
that Athens was or was not to blame, but Pericles’s
course would seem to have been the only one open to him
if he would maintain his own policy and defend the honor
of Athens. The fire was kindled by the minor states in
two different quarters. The island of Corcyra, which
had hitherto remained free from any alliances, had been
assaulted by Corinth and had called upon Athens for as-
sistance; this Athens had rendered and had thereby
aroused still fiercer animosity in Corinth. In the north
the Thebans had laid hold of Plataea, the little town on
the Boeotian frontier that had long been a bone of conten-
tion between Thebes and Athens; this latter step had cut
the bonds of the truce, and the dogs of war were loose.
Sparta had then offered terms which she knew Athens
would not and could not accept: one of them was that
they ‘‘drive out the curse of the gods” —a shaft hurled at
Pericles, whom the Spartans, for their own reasons,
wished to connect with the Alcmaeonids and the tradi-
tional curse. Athens had responded with demands
equally impossible, and the war was inevitable.

War was not welcome to the Athenians; they had no
particular grudge against Sparta and were well contented

with things as they were. It took all the eloquence of
17
258 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Pericles, in a wonderful speech in the ecclesia, to persuade
the Athenians that they could not honorably comply
with the demands of Sparta; that to yield now would be
only to confess weakness, and compliance would be fol-
lowed by more demands; that Sparta meant to humble
Athens or to have war, and the sooner Athens resolved
to face the latter alternative the greater would be her
chances of success. Thus the “foremost man in the
state’”’ seemed to take upon his own shoulders the respon-
sibility for the coming conflict. This he was prepared to
do, and he faced the issue, awaiting the result with his
usual calm.

Though ready to face the war and abide by its conse-
quences, Pericles was not prepared to meet the storm of
opposition that assailed him from his own countrymen.
There had always been the old conservative party which,
since the banishment of Thucydides, had been without
a leader and had raised but little opposition; but there
was now defection in his own party, which had been
stirred up by Cleon, the demagogue, who would have the
democracy more democratic, and a more serious opposi-
tion on the part of the priestly class, who felt that their
importance in the state was being diminished by Pericles.
The religious spirit of the times was waning, it is true,
and skepticism was rife. Pericles was always guarded
in matters of this kind, and had never expressed a word
that could give offense to the most devout supporters of
the old religion; but it was enough for the fanatics that
he was a friend of Anaxagoras, the speculative thinker,
and others of his kind. There was also a considerable
number who were jealous of Pericles’s friendship for
Phidias and of the prominent place he had given the artist
in the department of public works. No one dared to
attack Pericles openly, for all knew too well that he
could acquit himself by a word in the assembly; so the
THE GOLDEN AGE 259

malcontents joined forces and began to assail those near-
est and dearest to the real object of their spleen. Anax-
agoras was the first. He was accused of impiety, the
impeachment being made by Cleon and a priest named
Diopithes, who had prevailed upon the assembly to pass
a law making traitors of all who refused to indorse the
religion of the state. Anaxagoras, some time before
this, had caused a clash between science and religion by
giving a scientific explanation of a curious phenomenon
which the priests had treated as supernatural. The story
is told by Plutarch: There had been brought to Pericles
from one of his farms a ram’s head, a freak of nature, with
a single horn growing out from the middle of its forehead.
Lampo, a diviner, had seen it and had interpreted the
prodigy as an omen that the two parties in the state, that
of Pericles and that of Thucydides, would unite and con-
fer the power upon the man in whose possession the ram
had been found; but Anaxagoras had taken the skull and
opened it to find that the brain did not fill its cavity,
but was over-developed on one side, preventing the
growth of one horn and causing the other to become un-
usually large. The spectators at the time—who were
perhaps skeptically inclined—admired the sagacity of
the scientist; but afterward, when the prophecy of
Lampo had come true, when Thucydides had been ban-
ished and Pericles had become supreme, the priests did
not fail to use the situation to their own advantage.
This is, no doubt, an example of the sort of thing that
was going on in Athens every day. We do not doubt
that the philosopher came into collision with fanaticism
whenever he attempted to show natural causes for the
various phenomena which the priests had long employed
as means of keeping the ignorant in awe. The priests
feared lest they should lose both influence and occupation
if men like Anaxagoras were listened to, and at last a
260 THE STORY OF ATHENS

grand effort was made by them to rid Athens of irreligion,
and themselves, incidentally, of a dangerous rival. Peri-
cles was greatly surprised when the attack was made upon
his teacher. Keeping aloof from the people as he did,
he could not realize how great animosity the priests had
raised against his friend until the trial came on. Then
he found that all his eloquence, all his influence, would
hardly suffice to save the philosopher’s life. As it turned
out, Anaxagoras was forced to quit Athens and to pay a
fine of five talents. He retired to Lampsacus, where he
died a few years later. Pericles possibly did not appre-
ciate the fact that this first blow had been directed at
him; the second struck nearer home. Phidias was sin-
gled out as the next object of attack by the disaffected
party. A plot was hatched by which the sculptor was
brought to trial for embezzlement in the matter of the
gold appropriated for the great statue of the Parthenos;
but the scheme failed absolutely, for Phidias had con-
structed the statue in such a manner that the masses of
gold could be easily removed in case of danger, and Peri-
cles now ordered the plates to be removed and weighed.
The balances proved a most valuable witness for the de-
fense, showing that the amount of gold tallied with the
appropriation to an ounce. But trouble did not end
there. Within a few months a new accusation was
brought against the friend of Pericles—a more dangerous
accusation, that of impiety. The sculptor, we remem-
ber, had introduced his own portrait and that of Pericles
upon Athena’s famous shield. An old law had forbidden
the setting up of representations of living men in sacred
places. The enemies of the two men now revived the
ancient statute, and poor Phidias again faced his accusers,
this time to his own undoing. The eloquence of Pericles
went all for naught; the defendant was condemned to
pay a heavy fine and was thrown into prison. His ene-
THE GOLDEN AGE 261

mies would not banish him to create new glories for some
rival state, but confined him within a cell in the city he
had crowned with the matchless splendor of his genius.
How long he remained in durance vile we do not know;
but soon, disgraced and broken-hearted, he sickened and
died, another victim of democratic caprice. That the
charge was a mere pretext was shown by the fact that
the offensive portraits were not effaced from Athena’s
golden shield, for they were left to be seen by generations
of Athenians and described by Roman travelers hundreds
of years after the sculptor’s tragic end. There is no
record that the Athenians ever raised a monument to the
first and most perfect flower of Attic genius, but he had
made one for himself, the most splendid that any man has
ever had, which devoted pilgrims, in countless thousands,
have venerated for a score and more of centuries.
Pericles felt keenly this terrible blow to art, to Athens,
and to himself; but the bitter thirst of his enemies for
vengeance had not yet been quenched. Another thrust
was made, and this at the woman he loved. Aspasia was
a woman of too great force of character to be popular
with the demagogues and fanatics of Athens. She rep-
resented a new departure in Greek womanhood, a type
which, if emulated by the Athenian women, would carry
great weight in the state. She believed in a broader,
higher life for her sex, and cultivated the society of phi-
losophers and scientists. She is believed to have had the
greatest influence over Pericles, not only politically but in
matters of thought. She had long had enemies, or, rather,
the enemies of Pericles had often assailed her in various
ways. The comic poets of the party opposed to Pericles
had often held her up to ridicule and had charged her
with responsibility for many of his unpopular acts. The
Samian war had been laid at her door, and for this reason
she had urged Pericles to make his great funeral speech,
262 THE STORY OF ATHENS

and, it is believed, even helped him to prepare it. Now a
more serious and more direct attack was made upon her.
Like Phidias, she was brought before the assembly to
answer a charge of impiety—contempt of the gods and
corruption of the Athenian women being the specific ac-
cusation. Demagogues and fanatics again were the accus-
ers. It was a terrible day for Pericles when the central
object of his affections was brought into court. A wide-
spread and bitter animosity against Aspasia had been
sown among the populace by her accusers, and when the
trial opened Pericles was in despair of saving her from
the fury of the Athenians. Death was the only sentence
likely to be pronounced in case of a verdict of guilty, and
everything seemed to point to a fatal verdict. The
speeches of the prosecution were full of fierce invective,
and wrought the mighty assembly into a frenzy of hatred
toward the woman who was represented as a contemner
of the most sacred things in their religion, as the inspirer
of the war which had deprived them of their sons, as a
corrupter of the morals of their wives and daughters.
When Pericles arose to speak in her defense, he was pow-
erless to stem the flood of bitterness which the inventions
of the opposition had aroused. His denials were met
with scoffing ; his protests, with scorn. The cause seemed
hopeless; for the first time in his life his calm reserve
forsook him and he wept. The crowd was struck dumb.
The vast assemblage had been inflexible until it beheld
the Olympian ice dissolved in hot tears. Had the heavens
fallen, the crowd could not have been more astonished.
The pitiful spectacle of their “blessed Jove,” whose icy
calm they had wondered at all these years, bowed down
with grief and weeping, touched their hearts, and expres-
sions of compassion could be heard on every side. None
of the great orations with which he had swayed the as-
sembly in times gone by had ever touched his hearers
THE GOLDEN AGE 263

as had these simple tears. Few words were needed now
to change the tide, and Aspasia was acquitted. Pericles
had triumphed once more, but not by his usual means.

Cleon and his followers were enraged. They resolved
to waste no more energy in making indirect attacks, and
within a short time after the acquittal of Aspasia they had
summoned up courage to bait the lion himself. They
charged him before the assembly with embezzlement of
the public funds, and compelled him to stand trial; but the
attack proved futile. Whatever his opponents thought
of Pericles as a political tyrant, they all knew him to be
a man of honor, and the charges fell flat. Although
Pericles suffered nothing from this attempt upon his su-
premacy, it being understood that the whole affair was
the result of political intrigue, he nevertheless had been
made to feel the strength and audacity of his opponents,
and it was something of a humiliation to have been
impeached.

Despite the impending war and the disaffection at
home, Pericles continued to execute his plans for the
city’s improvement and for the erection of rare and costly
monuments. The site of the ruined house of Erechtheus,
where the shrine of the Polias had stood since the found-
ing of the city, was cleared for the building of a temple
of surpassing beauty. Surely, if Pericles wished to
make an appeal to the religious side of Athenian life or
to ingratiate himself again with those whose faith his
companions had shocked, he could not have chosen a more
pious task than the rebuilding of this, the most ancient and
most revered temple in Athens. The site was a difficult
one to build upon, for a number of sacred places that
could not be disturbed had to be taken into account. The
plan presented a curious problem, since two separate
shrines were to be embraced under the same roof. Only
a narrow strip between the high foundation walls of the
264 THE STORY OF ATHENS

old temple of Athena and the circuit wall of the Acropolis
was available for a site. To the west stood the Pandro-
sium with the sacred olive tree, the sanctuary of Zeus
Herkeios, and the venerated tomb of Cecrops, all crowded
together and fixing one boundary of the new temple.

 

 

The Erechtheum, from the Southeast.

On the north was the time-honored rock bearing the three
marks of Poseidon’s trident. This must be included in
the new edifice, although it stood in close contact with
the Acropolis wall. The southern side was shut in by
the ruins of the old temple of Athena, so that only on the
eastern side was there space to extend the new temple.
Two distinct cults apparently were to be accommodated:
a shrine must be made for the ancient xoanon, the focus
of Athenian worship, which Themistocles had taken to
sea before the fall of Athens; a home must be provided
for the sacred serpent of Erichthonius, which the priest-
esses fed with honey cakes once a year; and at the same
time the historical salt-spring and trident marks of Po-
seidon must be housed. We do not know who the archi-
tect was; but the problem he had to face—the designing of
a suitable building without trespassing upon the sacred
soil of other sanctuaries—was even more complex than
that which had confronted Mnesicles when he planned the
Propylaea, a problem which would seem to have been
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Erechtheum, from the East.

 
266 THE STORY OF ATHENS

unique in Greek temple architecture. With the limited
space at his disposal and the intricate requirements of
the case, he evolved a temple of marvelous beauty, the
wonder of his age and the delight of succeeding genera-
tions. The main body of the building, which was to be
devoted in part to the shrine of the Polias, was, of course,

 

The North Porch of the Erechtheum.

set on an axis running east and west, so that the main
portico was placed at the eastern end, and the statue, when
put in place, would face the rising sun. This portico
stood upon the, upper level—the level of the old Hekatom-
pedon. The cella was carried directly back to the limits
of the Pandrosium and terminated near the tomb of Ce-
crops. But not all of it was to be devoted to the worship
of the Polias. Less than half of it was partitioned off
for the cultus chamber of the Protectress, the remaining
portion being divided we know not exactly how, and
having its floor on a lower level. Some authorities hold
that there were at least two divisions for two separate
THE GOLDEN AGE 267.

cults; others, that it was portioned off only by piers or
columns and used by several different cults in common.
In any event, a cavern was provided for the sacred snake
and two entrances were introduced well to the west, one
on the north and one on the south side, the former on the
lower level, the latter on the higher, each having its own
porch,—there being thus three porticos and one flat
end to the temple. The staid and simple Doric order
would not lend itself easily to such a complexity of plan
as the double or triple temple presented; so the architect
turned to the graceful and more flexible Ionic for the
carrying out of his scheme. The eastern portico was
given six columns, and a triple portal opened from the
pronaos. The northern porch had also six, but only
four were placed in front—the porch, being very deep, had
room for one on either side. But the doorway was set in
the extreme western end of the north wall, and in order to
make the porch symmetrical with it, a section of wall was
carried toward the west beyond the end wall of the cella.
The columns were arranged with reference to this and
given an appearance of perfect symmetry. This deep
north portico, by the way, was built directly above the rock
bearing the trident marks. <A hole was left in its marble
flooring so that the credulous might be shown the relic
without being taken through the subterranean passage
which connected it with the serpent’s den.

Opposite the northern portico, on the other side of the
temple and on the upper level, another porch was de-
signed—a structure unique in classic architecture and one
of the most universally admired. This was the so-called
Porch of the Maidens. It is almost inclosed by a high
parapet upon which stand the lovely figures of six maid-
ens, arranged like the columns of the north portico, four
in front and one on either side, carrying the simple archi-
trave on their well-poised heads. The only entrance to
268 DHEA SlORY (OF ATHENS

this porch is a very narrow one adjoining the wall of the
temple; within it, a narrow stair leads down to the lower
level. The roof of this little building was formed of two
great slabs of marble carved on the lower surface to repre-
sent a coffered ceiling. No one knows for what purpose
this lovely structure was designed, whether it had some
special significance or was simply the creation of an ar-
tist’s caprice. It goes without saying that it is one of the
most charming monuments in the entire range of Greek
architecture. The maids may be taken to represent the
basket-bearers of the Panathenaic festival; for each bears
a basket on her head—at least,the echinus may be taken as
a conventionalized basket. The pose of each is worthy of
careful attention, so full of repose and tireless strength;
each rests firmly on one leg, the knee of the other pro-
jecting in restful grace—the outer leg of both corner
figures being perfectly straight to give an appearance of
solidity. The arms have been seriously damaged, but
it is not difficult to see that they fell in reposeful attitudes.
The drapery falls in fine straight lines, like the flutings
of the Ionic shaft. Again we see, as in the little tanten
figures of a century earlier, the long chiton and the grace-
ful himation. Again the locks are plaited and brought
forward of the shoulder on either side, while a more
elaborate coiffure falls at the back of the neck. In fact,
they are quite the same little ladies that Pisistratus ad-
mired; no longer Dorian or Ionian now, but Attic of the
highest type. Such was the temple as designed under
the eye of Pericles, but work upon it had hardly begun
when the deluge of war descended, and Pericles did not
live to see the building completed.

The last envoy of Archidamus, the King of Sparta,
had come to Athens only to be denied entrance at the
gates; this was the final signal for hostilities to begin.
Archidamus, with his army, marched to the isthmus and
THE GOLDEN AGE 269

a general alarm was sent throughout Attica. The people
were not unprepared, and at once made arrangements to
abandon their country homes, their farms and little vil-
lages, and to move, with their families, their household
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every direction from the city, a continuous train of these
poor refugees could be seen—heavily laden carts, don-
keys with great burdens, men and women carrying packs,
little children walking wearily along the dusty highway,
or balancing a light burden on one side of a capacious
saddle-bag. Here a fine lady was borne on her litter, car-
rying the jewel-casket on her lap; there a peasant woman
mounted on a minute donkey, clasping her baby to her
breast. Huge loads of furniture and even of woodwork
270 LAR Ss lORY OP ATHENS

from the houses made the road perilous. There was no
haste, for to all the danger seemed still a long way off ;
but for days the unhappy train poured into the city to
seek protection behind the walls which their grandsires
had built with their own hands, under the direction of
the great Themistocles, when a seemingly far greater peril
threatened Athens. It was summer, and the sad train
of nature-loving farmers looked wistfully at their ripen-
ing crops; the fruit trees heavy with unripe figs and
pomegranates ; the groves hanging with new-formed olive
berries, all of which must be abandoned to the enemy
if worse came to worst. But they said little, trudging on
in silence and the dust, with little sound but the occasional
wail of a child. They were stout-hearted, these simple
country folk, and took their trials with philosophy; but
little they knew the gravity of the hardships and priva-
tions they were about to suffer. Many hoped to be able
to secure houses for their families, or, at least, to find
space where they might erect temporary shelter ; but when
once inside the gates they began to realize the seriousness
of the situation. When all Attica had crowded within
the walls of Themistocles there was, as we may imagine,
little more than standing room. Every available spot in
the city was soon occupied by wretched families sitting
among their goods and chattels. They crowded into the
angles of the walls, up the slopes of the Acropolis, even
within the outworks of the Pelargikon, although an oracle
had forbidden men to live there. The narrow space be-
tween the long walls to Piraeus was soon filled. People
were finally huddled together in the sacred inclosures;
comfort was soon lost sight of in the struggle for a place
in which to exist.

Meanwhile, Archidamus and his army entered the plain
of Eleusis, marched along the shores of the bay, and
presently appeared upon the ridge below Mount Daphni.
THE GOLDEN AGE 271

For a time the Spartan delayed his descent upon the Attic
plain, hoping to draw the Athenians out to battle for the
defense of their crops, but in this he was disappointed.
Pericles well knew the strength of the Peloponnesian
forces on land; the flower of the Athenian army had been
sent to sea; he also knew that Archidamus could do no
more than devastate the plain, and that the fleet would
keep the granaries at Piraeus full of supplies, plundered
from the coast towns of the Peloponnesus. With no
fear of famine, the Athenians had comparatively little to
lose and much blood to save by remaining within the
walls. But the country folk did not feel that way: it
would be the greatest humiliation to them to see their
fields, orchards, and vineyards despoiled before their very
eyes and not lift a hand to protect them; so‘it was with
the utmost difficulty that Pericles kept down their smol-
dering rage and restrained them from rushing out of the
city. At last Archidamus and his followers grew weary
of waiting, the host marched down and, like an army of
locusts, swept the fair plain, up to the very walls of the
city, clean of everything that could be destroyed or car-
ried away. Then, finding that nothing was to be gained
by keeping his army in Attica, he withdrew to the Pelo-
ponnesus and active hostilities ceased for the remainder
of the year.

In the city itself the condition of affairs was growing .
daily more intolerable. The regular population was not
accustomed to idleness, and the farming class, which now
found itself shut up behind walls of stone, chafed under
the confinement and privation. Trade and business of
all kinds were at a standstill in the general confusion and
anxiety, and Pericles was at his wits’ end to keep the
minds and hands of the populace employed. As soon
as it was safe to venture across the plain again and the
quarries could be worked he urged the resumption of work
272 THEESTORY "OR ATHENS

upon the public buildings. The war had cost but little as
yet, and the treasury was full. It may be that at this time
the temple of Hephaestus, long known as the Theseum,
was begun. The sanctuary of the god of fire was situ-
ated on a little hill rising east of the agora, in the direc-
tion of the Dipylum gate. The new temple was designed
on a scale much smaller than the Parthenon, but on the
same beautiful and dignified lines, and remains to us the
best preserved and one of the most beautiful of all Greek
temples. The revival of work had a salutary effect upon
the people and restored their confidence in Pericles, who
already had begun to show the effects of the terrible strain
put upon him. He was no longer young, having reached
his sixty-fourth year; he was not well, and the dreary
outlook offered little to rouse his drooping spirits. In
the second year of the war the Spartans again entered
Attica, and again the people took refuge behind the walls.

But an unforeseen foe far more deadly than the allied
torces of revengeful Sparta and spiteful Corinth, a foe
which neither armies nor fleets could combat, had crept
stealthily within the walls of Athens, and, all at once,
stood terrible and unseen in the market-place, in the
streets, and in the very houses. The plague had found
its way from the East and sprung up in a hundred places
in the beleaguered city, a frightful form of that dread
malady, which smote young and old, rich and poor alike,
filling the city with frightful panic, then crushing it with
gloomy despondency. Whatever may have been the
sanitary conditions of Athens before the war, when it
seems to have been a healthy city, they were not suited
to the sudden increase of population and were doubtless
in an appalling state after a year of the city’s plethora,
and it is not surprising that some horrible form of disease
should have been the result. So rapid was the spread of
the malady after its appearance, that it was soon beyond
THE GOLDEN AGE 273

the control of the physicians, many of whom were the first
to fall. Athens was frantic. She prayed to the gods,
but they would not hear; she besought advice of the ora-
cle, but found no comfort there; then she fell into a stupor
of despondency, all hope abandoned. Thucydides, the
historian of the war, who was himself stricken with the
disease, gives a marvelous picture of the city suffering
from this awful curse, describing the horrors of the dis-
ease, the difficulty of disposing of the dead, the frightful
anarchy among the living, and the blackness of the gloom
which settled over all. The disease was sudden and
rapid; a parching fever brought with it an unquenchable
thirst which drove men to crawl about to die at the foun-
tains or to plunge bodily into the cisterns. If one sur-
vived the fever, his strength was so completely exhausted
that he was helpless for many weeks. The streets, and
even the temples, were full of dead, among whom the
dying lay. People fought at the funeral pyre, throwing
off one body to cast another upon the pile. Moral an-
archy was complete. The horrors of lawlessness and
crime are too terrible to describe. The city was stunned,
wondering what they had done to deserve such a visita-
tion. . Finally the cry went up, “The Lacedaemonians have
poisoned the wells!” There was no opportunity now for
revenge; for the Spartans, having heard that the plague
was in Athens, kept on the farthest confines of the plain.
The whole stream of Athenian hate and vengeance was
turned upon Pericles. Ill, weak, broken in health, he
called for an assembly and once more addressed the peo-
ple. It was the last and, perhaps, the greatest effort of
his life. In his usual calm manner, he reasoned with
the people, drawing a wonderful picture of the sufferings
and the undaunted spirit of their ancestors. He held up
to them their own greatness and dignity, and besought
them to have courage and steadfastness. The crowd

18
274 TAESSTtORY OF ATHENS

listened and was moved. The citizens went back to their
plague-stricken homes with determination to continue in
their policy to the bitter end. That was Pericles’s last
stroke for the dignity of Athens and the policy which he
believed to be for her glory—it was the beginning of the
end.

His sister, to whom he was devotedly attached, soon
after fell a victim to the plague, and then his two legitt-
mate sons were taken, one after the other. Xanthippus,
the elder, had always been a discredit to him, but he loved
Paralus as his own soul. When it fell to the stout-hearted
old general to lay the wreath upon the bier of his last
fond hope, he broke down completely and was the Olym-
pian Pericles no more. In the elections which followed
presently he was not elected general; but Athens soon
found herself lost without her “blessed Jove” at the helm,
and promptly elected him to the office he had held so
long, placing him again in full control of affairs. He
used his remaining weeks of power to propose a bill to
legitimatize his son Pericles, whom Aspasia had borne
him,,and this was passed without a dissenting voice. It
is doubtful if Pericles was himself a sufferer from the
plague. His illness seems to have been some lingering
malady. Plutarch tells us that one day, when a friend
called upon him, he showed him an amulet which he had
about his neck, as if to say, See what I have come to!

After this a ray of hope broke through the clouds
that lowered about Athens: a victory was gained away
up on the Macedonian coast, where the city of Potidaea
had at last capitulated to the Athenian army after a
long and weary siege. But the good news had little
effect upon Pericles, who lay dying, watched over by
his devoted Aspasia. We have one glimpse into his
sick-chamber during the last days of his life. A few
friends, prominent citizens, had gathered in the house and
THE GOLDEN AGE 275

sat not far from his bed, discussing his extraordinary
gifts, his brilliant achievements in peace and war, think-
ing him too far gone to hear what they were saying.
Pericles, however, was listening, and when there was a
patise in the conversation his feeble voice was heard.
All listened intently, and what he said was this: “You
have not mentioned the one thing in my career of which
I am most proud: that no citizen, on my account, has
ever put on mourning.” He referred, of course, not to
his wars, but rather to his career in politics, in which he
had never shown resentment toward any one, and no.
blood could be found on his hands.

A few days after this Pericles breathed his last, and
with its maker died the Athenian empire. Soon after
the death of Pericles, news came from Lampsacus that
old Anaxagoras, his teacher and friend, had died. When
this wonderful old man was at the point of death, they
asked him what he would like to have done at his funeral.
“Let the school-boys have a holiday,” he replied; and from
the day of his death, every year, a festival for the school-
boys was held on that day, which they called the Anaxa-
goreia.

And now came the news of another victory for the
Athenians, that had been gained at the far end of the
Corinthian Gulf, where Phormio, the Athenian admiral,
won one of the most memorable victories in the history
of Hellas. Phormio was stationed, with a small fleet of
twenty vessels, near the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth,
when a squadron of forty-seven Corinthian ships ap-
peared, heading for the coast of Acarnania. It seemed
a perilous situation; but Phormio, disregarding the in-
equality of numbers, sailed out to meet the Corinthian
fleet. The superior training of the Athenians more than
made up for the small number of their ships, for they
won a victory, driving the enemy into the port of Patrae
276 THESSVORY Ol ALTnENS

and capturing or destroying twelve of their vessels. But
this was only half of the glory, for presently reinforce-
ments of Spartan ships arrived to join the Corinthians.
One of these ships was commanded by a young Spartan
named Brasidas, who was to become the most famous of
Spartan admirals. No succor came to Phormio, but he
never considered flight for a moment. The Peloponne-
sians, with seventy-seven ships, succeeded in forcing the
twenty Athenian galleys into shallow water, where nine of
them were driven aground. The remaining eleven es-
caped into the harbor of Naupactus, followed by the
whole Peloponnesian fleet, strung out in a long line,
with crews already raising the victorious paean. At a
signal from Phormio, the Athenian vessels returned to
the open and, heading for the enemy, dashed their prows
into the foremost of their ships, causing a panic. Then
came the extraordinary sight of a slender fleet of Athe-
nians spreading terror in a mighty squadron seven times
its size, and presently driving it before in wild confusion.
Phormio recaptured all his own vessels and took six of
the enemy’s. Could Sparta have wished for a clearer
demonstration of the superiority of Athens as a sea
power?
IX

AFTERGLOW

“Thou that art called the city of great Pallas—
Athens, of all cities the most honored.”
SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus, 107.

THE political history of Athens during the
remaining quarter of the fifth century is a
chapter of unbridled recklessness and vio-
lence. The Athenian democracy, unre-
strained by the firm rein and resolute hand
of its governor, rushed madly into the war
like a wild and riderless horse toward a prec-
ipice, to leap at last from the brink into
the prison-quarries of Syracuse, where ten

thousand of the flower of her manhood languished in

misery and died. During this mad career, the allies were
driven to revolt, the best advisers of the state were ban-
ished, victorious generals were executed, trusted officers
dared treason. The war was fought with varying for-
tunes until the Athenians, delirious with exultation over

a momentary success, launched out upon the wild enter-
prise that was to be their final undoing. Demagogues
were the masters of the situation, and for a time fortune
played into their hands. The period was not barren of
success for the Athenian arms on land, and Nicias, the

best of the generals, spread terror along the coast of

Peloponnesus with the fleet. But the democracy was too
severe with the vanquished and ordered the prompt exe-

277

 

Bust of Euripides.
278 THESSTORY JOR LENS

cution of its prisoners. It oppressed the tributaries, and
Lesbos was the first to revolt. Had Sparta been quick-
witted enough to have sent aid to Lesbos at once, she
might have given a death-blow, then and there, to Athens;
but her assistance arrived too late—the Athenians had
taken Mitylene and subjugated the whole island.

Since the death of Pericles, the democratic party in
Athens had found its leader in the person of Cleon the
demagogue. He was in no sense a statesman, but gained
great influence among the people by impassioned oratory
and the basest forms of flattery. He was the son of a
tanner of the lowest origin, and wholly without the cul-
ture that had characterized the former leaders of the state.
Coarse and brutal in his nature, he appealed to the basest
element among the people, which at this time, alas,
seemed to be gaining preponderance. His fawning’ flat-
tery of the lowest characters was disgusting to the better
class, even among the friends of democracy, and _ his
cruelty shocked even his immediate followers. When,
after the revolt of Lesbos, a thousand prisoners, with
their Spartan leader, were brought to Athens, this brute
influenced the assembly to decree execution not only for
the prisoners of war, but for ali the adult male population
of the island, amounting to several thousand souls. He
despatched a ship the following day to Mitylene with this
bloody order for massacre; but his own adherents, when
they had talked the matter over among themselves, re-
volted at such a crime, and called a meeting of the ecclesia,
next day, at which the decree was rescinded, and a swift
trireme was sent off with all haste to overtake Cleon’s
messengers and save the Lesbians. It can easily be seen
that Cleon’s popularity was confined to the ignorant and
the base, for even dispassionate Thucydides, the historian
of the war, who almost never shows the slightest personal
animosity in his writings, takes occasion, in speaking of
AFTERGLOW 279

him, to indulge his righteous indignation. The theater
was thronged with men who went to see him held up to
scorn and ridicule upon the stage. Aristophanes, who
had already gained repute as a writer of comedy, brought
out his famous play, “The Knights,” apparently for the
sole purpose of scoring Cleon. So revolting did he make
the character of the demagogue, and yet so true to life,
that his mask-maker, for fear, refused to design the mask;
Aristophanes himself, therefore, besmeared his face with
wine lees and essayed the role, by which he hoped to dis-
gust the people with their leader. Cleon, in retaliation,
trumped up several accusations against the dramatist to
deprive him of his civic rights, but without success.

Two years had passed since the suppression of the re-
volt of Lesbos, without any particular advantage being
gained by either Athens or Sparta. The former, still
treasuring the chimerical scheme of gaining a foothold
in Sicily and thereby depriving Corinth of her most im-
portant corn-market, had sent out an expedition by sea,
under command of a general named Eurymedon. De-
mosthenes—not the great orator of the same name, but
one of the most distinguished of the Athenian generals—
was also a member of the expedition. Driven by a storm
to seek protection upon the western coast of the Pelo-
ponnesus, the Athenians had seized and fortified the in-
accessible promontory of Pylos, and, a little later, had
blockaded the neighboring island of Sphacteria. Sparta
had sent an army to the spot, but was unable to dis-
lodge the Athenians or to raise the blockade, which, in
spite of every effort on the part of the Spartan army,
was protracted for weeks. At length the Spartans sued
for peace, sending an embassy to Athens. Cleon and the
ultra-democratic party would not listen to the terms
offered by the Lacedaemonians, and the demagogue him-
self, in a wild harangue before the ecclesia, declared that
280 THES Slo y Or ATHENS

the generals were to blame for the delay at Pylos, adding
that, if he were in command, Sphacteria would have been
captured long ago. At this the Pnyx resounded with
laughter and shouts of derision from the opposition ; but
Nicias, the conservative general, arose and formally, but
with infinite sarcasm, offered his command to Cleon.
More laughter followed, and Cleon attempted to take back
what he had said and to force Nicias to retain his com-
mand, but the assembly insisted upon Cleon’s standing by
his own words. ‘Sensible men at Athens,” says Thu-
cydides, “thought they would now gain one of two good
things: either that Cleon would fail and be forever polit-
ically extinguished ; or else, if he succeeded, a heavy blow
would be inflicted upon Sparta.’ Cleon, forthwith, set
out for Pylos, and within a short time, contrary to all
expectations, captured Sphacteria and routed the Spar-
tans. Demosthenes had planned the battle and had done
the fighting, but Cleon took to himself all the credit of
having inflicted upon Sparta the most serious blow that
she had sustained since the war began. Before Cleon’s
victory, Athens could easily have made honorable peace
with Sparta, but the demagogue had readily induced the
large ultra-democratic party in the assembly to continue
the war; for he had a glib tongue, and, although he had
been Pericles’s most bitter enemy, he now made it appear
to many that he was carrying out the policy of the great
statesman. There can be no doubt that this man im-
pelled Athens upon the downward road that led eventu-
ally to her political ruin.

Elated by Cleon’s success, the Athenians now under-
took a campaign of invasion in Boeotia. Socrates and
Xenophon were members of this expedition, of which
Demosthenes and Hippocrates were the commanders;
but the undertaking proved disastrous, and at Delium
the Athenians met with a severe defeat. This was
AFTERGLOW 281

the first check Athens had received since the death of
Pericles.

As recognized leader of the war party, Cleon, in the
tenth year of the war, succeeded in securing command
of an army and proceeded to Macedonia, where the Spar-
tans were attacking the cities of the allies of Athens.
Brasidas, the one great Spartan general of the whole war,
had taken possession of Amphipolis, and Cleon now at-
tempted to win back that important stronghold.

Not far from the coast, just off the island of Thasos,
lay a small fleet of Athenian ships under command of
Thucydides, the great historian, now serving his country
under arms. When Amphipolis was first besieged, the
Athenians in the city sent for Thucydides to come to
their assistance, but he was delayed in reaching the coast,
arrived too late to be of service, and was afterward sen-
tenced by the assembly of the people to twenty years of
exile in punishment for inattention to duty. It is due
to this decree of banishment, perhaps, that we owe the
renowned history of the war. Soon after the arrival of
Cleon at Amphipolis, a terrible battle was fought under
the walls of the city, and the Athenians were worsted, los-
ing several thousand men. But the two leaders, Cleon and
Brasidas, were among the slain; and the two foremost
promoters of the war were thus removed at one stroke.

It was now time for Nicias, the oldest of the Athenian
generals and leader of the conservative party in the
state, to exert his influence for peace. He fought hard
with the opposing factions in the assembly for discon-
tinuance of the war, but was unable to persuade the peo-
ple to offer unconditioned terms of peace. After many
prolonged debates he was able to make a treaty with
Sparta, limited to fifty years, a condition which showed
that the old policy of Pericles, that war and not peace
was the normal condition between Athens and Sparta,
282 THE STORY OF ATHENS

was still alive in the minds of the people. It was a truce,
then, rather than a treaty of peace, that Nicias carried
through the ecclesia, and the warlike triremes rested on
their oars.

During the first ten years of war, a young soldier had
been conspicuous for bravery and daring. He could be
easily distinguished amid the ranks of war by the shield
which he carried. It was inlaid with gold and ivory and
bore as a device the figure of Zeus hurling a thunder-
bolt. Alcibiades was his name—the youth who, upon
the death of his parents, had been reared in the home of
his uncle Pericles. A large fortune was his by inheri-
tance; and he had married Hipparete, a daughter of a
member of the wealthy family of Callias. He was gifted
as he was brilliant, handsome as he was profligate, and ex-
travagant as he was rich. Not content with entering a
single chariot in the lists at Olympia, as other rich young
men did, he sent seven and won three prizes. His youth,
indeed, had been spent in most riotous living; but his
extraordinary genius had come under the eye of Socrates,
who believed he had in him the makings of a great man.
The youth admired the stanch and hardy sage, nearly
twenty years his senior, who could endure the frosts of
a winter campaign in the mountains of Thrace, bare-
foot and without extra clothing; and when, in the battle
of Potidaea, he had fallen wounded and the brave phi-
losopher had saved his life, he felt that he could never
repay the devotion of Socrates—until, on the fateful field
of Delium, he had an opportunity to do the same service
for his old companion. After this, they were great
friends. The wild youth listened eagerly to the wise say-
ings of his comrade, and came under his powerful in-
fluence. But Socrates, with all his logic and reasoning,
was able to get possession of but one of Alcibiades’s
selves; a constant struggle would seem to have been
AFTERGLOW 283

fought between the two sides of his nature—his admira-
tion for the virtues which Socrates held up before him,
and his love of the vices which, by indulgence, had early
won the mastery of him. It was with this double nature—
two selves struggling within for the upper hand—that
Alcibiades entered the arena of politics after the death
of Cleon. His masterful oratory soon won him promi-
nence, while his influence and lavishness brought him
popularity. His evil side was quickly in evidence in his
jealous antagonism toward Nicias, which prompted him
to oppose peace because it was the policy of his rival. The
party of ultra-democracy—the war party—soon found
in him a leader who had many of the good qualities of
Pericles and some of the evil traits of Cleon. But for
nearly three years the truce was preserved.

Perhaps the most remarkable phase of the history of
the Peloponnesian war was the tranquillity which pre-
vailed within the walls of Athens while her youth were
pouring out their blood on land and sea, and her politi-
clans were making the ancient Pnyx resound with violent
harangues and impassioned oratory. While strife exter-
nal and malice domestic would seem to have been the
order of the day in the city, when viewed from without
and from the standpoint of her greatest historian, how
different were the real conditions in the lives of those
who were making the true glory of Athens, if one look
within the walls, in the agora, the theater, and the gym-
nasiums. What solace the sober-minded citizens were
finding in philosophy, in literature, and in art, while dem-
agogues were impelling the state to political ruin!—as if
they already had foreseen that Athens must eventually
find her true glory and undying fame in these achieve-
ments of peace, rather than in the conquests of empire.
During all these bloody years the recurring festivals were
celebrated with the customary pomp and ceremony.
284 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Athena’s procession was as imposing as ever, her festival
games were as well contested. Each year the feast of
Dionysus saw the theater thronged, and new plays, more
brilliant, if possible, than ever, were brought out by those
mighty masters of the drama who were now in the prime
of their years.

In the first year of the war, immediately before the
outbreak of the plague, the last great play of Aeschylus
was reproduced under the direction of his son Euphorion.
The “Eumenides,” which had failed to please a more re-
ligious audience over thirty years before——though it had
taken a prize ten years afterward,—now took a more
skeptical audience by storm, and the masterpiece of the
old master won another prize, and that over the two
greatest living exponents of the drama—Sophocles and
Euripides. After this, these two giants contended at
every festival, producing some of their most famous
works. Sophocles, ‘even tempered in the world above
and in the world below,” as Aristophanes said of him,
brought out his marvelous ‘Oedipus Tyrannus’; while
Euripides introduced to the world the tragic and pathetic
figure of “Medea.” Aristophanes, in lighter vein,
amused the people with grotesque impersonations of pol-
iticians and philosophers, teaching them, meanwhile, a
useful moral lesson. In his “Knights” he scored Cleon,
as we have seen. In the “Clouds” he ridiculed Socrates
and the sophists of the day. In the ‘““Wasps” he made
sport of the prevalent craze for litigation and for flying
to the courts with the most trivial matters. The highest
pitch of Greek drama was reached at this time in Athens,
while she was plunged in her death struggle as a world
power. A lesser light in the constellation of Dionysus
was Agathon, who, in a way, had taken the place which
Ion had filled in the earlier part of the century. He must,
however, have been a more respectable person than that
AFTERGLOW 285

jovial poet, for Plato speaks highly of him and his works
as well as of his personal good looks. His first triumph
was won, Plato says, in 416, before an audience of thirty
thousand spectators; and to celebrate the day of his
crowning he gave a great dinner party which the phi-
losopher immortalized in his “Symposium.”

This also was the time

When music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung.

Timotheus was the leading musician of the day. He
had come from Miletus, bringing an instrument of his
own invention, a cithera with eleven strings, and gave
instrumental performances without the aid of the voice.
When the Athenians gathered in Pericles’s Odeum to
hear the new artist, fond as they were of novelty, they
failed to appreciate his first effort and hissed him off the
stage. And here we have one of the most delightful pic-
tures of the artistic life of Athens. Euripides, already
crowned with honors, was in the audience. He saw
the young musician, covered with confusion, ‘leave the
stage, and hastened to find him. Placing his arm reas-
suringly around the young man’s neck, he encouraged
him in every way he could, predicting that ere long he
would have the public at his feet. Timotheus persevered,
and in time the prophecy came true: the Miletian player
soon became the most popular musician in Athens. How
often history has repeated itself since that day!

The sculptors and painters continued at work within
the city quite as if no enemy had ever threatened to as-
sail the ‘walls. Pyrrhus, the most important of the
younger sculptors of the time, made a beautiful bronze
statue of Athena Hygeia—the health-giving Athena—
which the citizens dedicated and set up just within the
286 THE sTORY OF ATHENS

inner porch of the Propylaea, near the old altar of Health
Athena, where offerings were made by the priests in the
great festival procession. The base of the statue, with
its inscription and holes for the insertion of the bronze
feet of the statue, may still be seen, in its original place,
just to the left as one enters the inclosure. By the inscrip-
tion we learn that the Athenians dedicated the statue and
that Pyrrhus made it.

Aglaophon the painter was also busy in Athens. He
was a grandson of an old Thasian painter of the same
name, who was the father of Polygnotus; so the younger
artist, now working in Athens, was a nephew of the first
great painter that Athens had known. His most impor-
tant pictures were two which he had painted, under the
direction of Alcibiades, for the Pinakotheka of the Pro-
pylaea, where they were to be placed near the works of his
famous uncle. The subjects of these paintings were
something of a novelty, especially for such a position.
Both represented Alcibiades in the rdle of an athletic vic-
tor. In one of them, two figures representing Olympia
and Pythia—the genii of the Olympian and Pythian
games—were pictured in the act of crowning Alcibiades.
In the other, Nemea—the genius of the Nemean games—
was represented holding the victor in her lap. The pic-
tures called forth a storm of criticism. The Athenians
said that the face of Alcibiades was fairer than any of
the others. A question also was raised as to where the
models had been found; for there was a law prohibiting
the setting up in a sacred place of any statue or picture
of a hetaira or a female slave, and no women outside of
these classes would have been likely to act as models.
But Aglaophon’s pictures remained in the Propylaea to be
admired for many centuries.

Athens, however, was no longer the seat of the leading
schools of painting, as she had been in the days of Polyg-
AFTERGLOW 287

notus. The war, we may believe, had led the great
painters of the day to settle in other cities; and Ephesus
and Sicyon were now the homes of such great masters
as Zeuxis and Timanthes. Besides Aglaophon, there was
at work in Athens a Samian artist named Agatharchus.
He was primarily a scene-painter in the theater; but he
had introduced principles of perspective and certain illu-
sory effects that could not but influence the higher art of
painting. Ere the century had closed, however, Athens
produced her first great native painter, in the person of
Apollodorus, who made a new epoch in the art of the
brush. Apollodorus was universally acknowledged to be
the inventor of chiaroscuro, and of what the Greeks called
tévoc, or tone—the heightening of effect by the grada-
tion of tints. This he effected by the use of the pencil
instead of the cestrum which his predecessors had em-
ployed. Pliny calls him the first master of illusion, an
effect which he had doubtless derived from the scenic
work of Agatharchus, applying to the painting of figures
the principles invented by the scene-painter in his effec-
tive architectural pieces. Unfortunately, we have only
the briefest accounts of his works. Two companion pic-
tures of his are mentioned—a worshiping priest, and
Ajax stricken by the thunderbolt, the former portraying
piety ; the latter, blasphemy.

But philosophy would seem to have been the greatest
solace for thoughtful minds during these long years of
strife and commotion. Socrates was the central figure
of Athens at this time. He was no politician, his high
sense of right and wrong recoiling from the dema-
goguery of the day. He was not a great soldier, though
he had acquitted himself with distinction as a hoplite
in the Thracian campaign. But as soon as his military
duties were over he was to be seen again in the streets of
Athens, in the agora, in the gymnasiums, or in the shops,
288 THE STORY OF ATHENS

always surrounded by a little cluster of men and youths
who were eager to hear his words of unpretending wis-
dom. His ugly face, with its flat nose, thick lips, and pro-
truding eyes, which gave him the looks of the traditional
Silenus or satyr, was anything but attractive to the
beauty-loving Athenians; but his quiet conversation, so
full of wit and wisdom, drew to his side a large band
of disciples, which embraced some of the greatest spirits
of the age. Besides the gifted Alcibiades, who was al-
ways willing to listen but not to learn, there were Xen-
ophon, the young soldier; Criton, a rich Athenian; Cri-
tias, who was another disappointment to his teacher; and
the boy Plato, who hung upon the philosopher’s words
and took to heart every maxim that he heard. The story
was told that Socrates one night dreamed he had a cyg-
net on his lap; all at once its wings sprouted and a
swan soared aloft, filling the heavens with a melodious
song delightful to both gods and men. The next day he
met young Plato. Socrates did not open a school. He
preferred to take men at work or at play and give them
the benefit of his reflection in easy, offhand conversation.
One day, when the philosopher was out on one of his daily
walks, he turned into a narrow street and saw, coming
toward him, a bright-faced, handsome youth. He play-
fully barred the passage of the narrow way with his staff,
and inquired of the lad where different kinds of pro-
visions could be found. Receiving ready answers to these
questions, he asked, ‘““And where a noble character?” and
when the youth hesitated, he added, ‘Come with me and
I will teach you.” The young man was Xenophon, who
from this first meeting became one of Socrates’s most de-
voted followers.

He was not given to public oratory, but his peripatetic
teaching was incessant. He seldom discussed the politics
of the day, but was unsparing of his criticism of all
AFTERGLOW 289

parties. He especially detested the pride of knowledge
which was rampant in Athens at the time, and disparaged
the superficial learning with which many of his fellow-
citizens were puffed up. It was not his mission to teach
so much as to help men to think aright: to argue with
them in such a way as to make them take the proper view
of a moral question of their own accord, or condemn
themselves by their own words. As he himself said, he
was the midwife of men’s thoughts, performing mentally
the act which his mother before him had practised in
a physical capacity; but, more than that, he stayed by,
like a good physician, and nursed the new-born idea
until it could go by itself. In some of his teachings, he
made attacks upon certain questions which drew upon
him the criticism of many influential citizens. He must
in some way have offended Aristophanes, the comic poet,
for in his play “The Clouds” the dramatist ridiculed
the philosopher with most bitter irony. However this
may be, we have the authority of contemporary writers
that in private life Socrates and Aristophanes were the
best of friends. But the former was a man mentally and
morally far above his generation, a grave thinker, a mor-
alist, and an open denouncer of the ways of men about
him; while Aristophanes was essentially a man of the
world, who believed in letting men think and act for
themselves. We see the same outward contentions going
on to-day between the busy reformer and the easy-going
man of the world, though at the club the two may be on
the best of terms. Aristophanes, however, was himself
a reformer, but went about his work in a very different
way. He reveled in satires upon the corrupt politics of
the time, presenting to the people in the theater the most
loathsome pictures of local political immorality—pictures
of their fondest idols, and of themselves, for that mat-

ter, so disgusting that we are amazed to learn that his
19
290 THE STORY OF ATHENS

audiences did not stone him on the spot. But he offered
no remedy for the public ills that he depicted, and seems
to have regarded even the cures which the philosophers
of the day offered as false and misguiding; and when
he chose to satirize the sophists, who were the ruling
teachers of the day, he represented Socrates, caught up
to the clouds in a basket, as the leading spirit of the school,
which, as a matter of fact, that philosopher was farthest
from following.

Another interesting figure in Athens at this time,
though hardly a familiar public figure, was Timon, the
misanthrope, later made famous in the Roman world by
Lucian, and to our own world by the Anglo-Saxon Shak-
spere. Timon was a man who took life very seriously,
and brooded so deeply over his wrongs and disappoint-
ments that he shut himself up in a tower in the Academy,
secluded from the world about him, and refused to see
anybody but his friend Alcibiades. Lucian thus de-
scribes Timon in a soliloquy which he puts into the mouth
of the misanthrope upon his finding the treasure-trove.
After hanging up his spade and blanket as an offering
to Pan, he says: “I will buy some secluded bit of
ground and there build me a tower over my treasure,
and live for myself only; this shall be my dwelling-place,
and when I die this tower shall be my tomb. Henceforth
it is my fixed intention to have no intercourse with hu-
manity, but to despise and avoid it. . . . Men shall
be to me but as so many statues of bronze or stone; my
retreat shall be a boundary to separate us forever. Fam-
ily, friends, native land, are but empty names that fools
may honor. Let Timon be rich alone, despising the rest
of the world. . . . Alone let him sacrifice to the
gods, alone hold festival, be neighbor to himself, and his
own companion. Alone I am resolved to live and die,
and when I die my own hand shall place the funeral
AFTERGLOW 291

wreath upon my head; the name that pleases me best is
that of misanthrope.”” But Alcibiades could have found
but little time to spend with the man-hater at the present
stage of his own career. The admonitions of Socrates
had been flung to the winds when Alcibiades realized
that the ultra-democratic party needed a leader. With |
all the force of his headstrong character, he threw himself
into the political whirlpool, and soon found himself at
its center, with all Athens revolving about him. Nicias
the aristocrat was still at the head of the conservative
party, and was using all his powers to defend the peace
which he had consummated with so much difficulty. The
new democratic leader saw that, to crush his rival, he
must favor war. He knew well how to manage the baser
element in the city, and soon, by bribes and flattery, had
that element on his side. His wonderful personal mag-
netism did the rest. Wuthin a few months after he had
really entered the arena of politics, he was without a rival
as the head man in the state. His first act in the direction
of abrogating the treaty was to make a tour of the Pelo-
ponnesus, where he stirred up the states and cities to
revolt from Spartan allegiance. All his political efforts,
from the first, were crowned with brilliant success; the
crowd at Athens applauded his achievements; his head
was turned; and Attica presently became too confined
for his ambitions. Conquest suggested itself to his mind,
already intoxicated with success and wild ambition. He
thought of Carthage and of Magna Graecia as possible
fields for an unlimited career of glory, but especially of
Sicily, whither the commercial ambitions of Athens had
long been turning a greedy eye.

Sparta, roused at length from her lethargy, had quelled
the revolt which Alcibiades had started by defeating her
rebellious allies at Mantinea; but this set-back does not
seem to have affected him. And now a golden opportu-
292 THE StlORY OF ATHENS

nity to make his fame was offered him. Segesta, a state
of western Sicily, some time before this had complained
to Athens of the encroachments of her neighbor Selinus,
and asked for redress of her wrongs. All of Sicily was
more or less involved in the quarrel. Here was Alcibi-
ades’s opening. Setting aside at once the question at
issue,—a mere question of boundaries,—he saw an op-
portunity for a great foreign campaign. If he could only
get an army and a fleet to Sicily, what could prevent his
taking the whole island in the name of Athens? The
question was brought before the assembly. Poor Nicias
pleaded for peace, and tried to dissuade the people from
embarking upon such a hazardous enterprise, depicting
the dangers and difficulties that it would involve; but Alci-
biades, by his wonderful address, carried the day. The
assembly voted for the war, and preparations for a new
and great expedition to Sicily were at once set on foot.
The die was cast: Athens had chosen to steer straight for
the breakers.

“I fear your own mistakes more than the wiles of your
enemies,” had been one of Pericles’s last utterances; but
those mistakes were far more greatly to be feared at
this time than when the great statesman had spoken this
warning. The attitude of the nation in political matters
had changed greatly within a decade and a half. Patriot-
ism in its truest sense had entirely given way before party
feeling. Athens represented democracy; Sparta, aristoc-
racy; and it made little difference now, to the average
citizen, which of the two was victorious, so long as his
particular party was in the ascendant. After the sudden
rise of Alcibiades and the overwhelming defeat of the
conservative party, there were Athenians of that per-
suasion who would gladly have welcomed a Spartan army
at the gates of Athens, solely because Sparta would give
them oligarchy. Secret societies were formed, and the
AFTERGLOW 293

faction that could not hold its own in public debate
stooped to every underhand scheme for its own resto-
ration, regardless of patriotic feeling. It is enough to
make one weep to read Thucydides’s description of the
political and moral anarchy that had been brought upon
Hellas by this party strife. To this he attributes all the
immorality, public and private, that ravaged Greece during
im Peloponnesian war. “Thus revolution,” he says,
“gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas.”

From the day the assembly declared for war, every-
thing in Athens gave way to preparations for the ex-
pedition. Artisans and tradesmen were busy equipping
the soldiers; merchants were bringing in supplies; carts
and pack-animals were driven hastily back and forth upon
the dusty road to the port, where ship-builders, carpenters,
and sail-makers were busily engaged fitting out the fleet.
All was activity from morn till night. The city pre-
sented a livelier sight than it had in many long years. All
the citizens seemed happy and confident in the prospect
of commercial aggrandizement; for comparatively few
had any misgivings about the outcome of the enterprise.
There were many good-bys to be said; for all the youth
of Athens were bent on embarking with the fleet, to win
fame and glory in far-away Sicily. Every night farewell
dinner- Oaries and drinking-bouts were held ths the offi-
cers and young soldiers as the day for their departure
drew nigh. A few nights before the expedition was to
sail, a party of young men met at the magnificent house
of Pulytion, down in the Ceramicus, just beyond the gym-
nasium of Hermes, on the road to the Dipylum. When
the feast was over, and the flowing cylix had been
drained again and again, until the party was in a frenzy
of spirits, some one proposed that they celebrate the Mys-
teries of Eleusis. The suggestion was received with ap-
plause, and they proceeded to perform the sacred rites in
204 THE STORY OF ATHENS

drunken revel. To us, in our day, this does not seem
such a very sacrilegious thing to have done; but for them
it was a very different matter. In the Eleusinian Mys-
teries were bound up all the holiest associations of the
religion of the Greeks; and, after reverence for the old
polytheism of their ancestors had become a thing of the
past, those who had been initiated into these rites trea-
sured such sublime doctrines as the unity of God and the
immortality of the soul. We may not know just what they
did on that night of revelry ; nobody but those present ever
knew: but it was afterward learned that they had paro-
died, in drunken play, rites which were too hallowed for
them to have spoken of in soberness, and had been guilty
of a contempt of divine things for which they would
have suffered instant death had they been caught at it.
When the boisterous revelers had tired of their mockery,
they sallied forth into the street to suffuse the town with
that roseate hue which one hears of even in our time. A
little while later, Dioclides, a peaceable citizen, having
risen a great while before dawn to start for Laurium,
heard a weird sound as he was passing the theater, and
crept quietly within to see what was going on. Crouch-
ing down between a marble column and a bronze statue,
he saw a large crowd of men in gay attire come down
from the Music Hall to dance madly about the orches-
tra in the full light of the moon. The next morning the
citizens of Athens were shocked to find all the Hermae
mutilated: the guardian figures of Hermes in front of
the houses and colonnades and the boundary statues of
the agora had been defaced or broken. The people were
horrified: the peace-loving citizens were outraged; the
religious were shocked; the superstitious looked upon
the deed as an awful omen. No one could tell who had
perpetrated the crime; but stories were soon circulated
about the revelers of the past night, and people began
AFTERGLOW 295

to put two and two together. Various names were men-
tioned by casual witnesses, and among them those of
Alcibiades, Pulytion, and Andocides, a dissolute Athenian
orator of noble birth. In a short time the scandal-mon-
gers had constructed a complete story of the night before,
with a full account of the parody, in which Alcibiades had
acted the part of hierophant, and Pulytion had played
the torch-bearer. The wrath of the populace was turned
against these men. Andocides was arrested and impris-
oned ; but as there was no substantial evidence against any
one, and the expedition was ready to set sail, no steps
were taken to prevent Alcibiades’s departure with it.
But, hearing of the charges that were being whispered
against him, he demanded an immediate investigation.
His enemies, however, preferred to work up the accusa-
tion in his absence, when he and his military friends were
well out of the way, and the matter was dropped for the
mioment.

The morning of departure found all Athens at the
Piraeus. The docks and all the shores were thronged
with a half-sad, half-joyous multitude,—mothers, wives,
fathers, brothers, all hopeful and expectant,—who had
come to see the sailing of the ships. The last good-bys
had been said, the soldiers had all embarked, everything
was ready for the signal to start, when a mighty fanfare
of trumpets sounded out over the shining bay and echoed
along the rocky shores until it resounded back from the
gray sides of Mount Aegaleos. At the sound of the
trumpet-blast the vast assemblage on the galleys and on
the land turned to face the Acropolis, and, as one man,
prayed to their gods, invoking a blessing on the expedi-
tion and asking for protection for those at home. When
the invocation and the prayer were finished another trum-
pet-call gave signal for the start. The bright-hued sails
were spread to the breeze, and the long oars broke the
296 THE SUORY OF ATHENS

glassy surface of the bay and lashed it into foam. A great
shout went up from the mighty host as the triremes passed
out of the narrow gate of the harbor into the open sea.
The eyes of many loved ones watched the receding ships
as they sailed by little Psyttalea and passed Salamis, with
the trophy of former Athenian prowess shining on the
height above the sea, until behind the island of Aegina
they disappeared from view. Little the watchers im-
agined that hardly one of that vast army would ever see
the Attic shore again.

The great armament reached Sicily with high hopes,
and, without delay, directed warlike operations against
the great city of Syracuse. The Syracusans were filled
with awe and terror at the approach of so vast and so
powerful an enemy, and shut themselves up within the
walls of their town. ° Fortune seemed to be smiling upon
the Athenians when a trireme from home arrived with a
message demanding the immediate return of Alcibiades
to stand trial. Huis opponents had by this time prepared
a formal charge accusing him of parodying the sacred
mysteries, and holding him responsible for the acts of
desecration that preceded the departure of the expedition.
The accusers, who were made up chiefly of members of
the secret clubs that had been founded in the interests of
oligarchy, found ready support among the superstitious ;
and the accused knew very well that he would have little
chance for his life in their hands. He bade the trireme
return with word to the assembly that he would follow.
He presently set sail from Syracuse, breaking his home-
ward journey at Thurii, where he decided to remain for a
while. Here ambition seized him again. The Sicilian
campaign had ended for him before it had begun. Where
could he turn now to look for fame? The desire for
revenge that burned within him suggested Sparta. If
Sparta would give him free rein, in return for the infor-
AFTERGLOW 297

mation he could give her, he could vanquish her greatest
enemy and take vengeance upon his own country at the
same time, and might yet become the first man in Greece.
He repaired to the Peloponnesus and placed himself at the
disposal of the Lacedaemonians. He was well received
by the Spartans, who were eager to profit by the informa-
tion that he could give, and was given a prominent place
in the deliberations of the ephors regarding the war.
Meanwhile, Nicias, who was the chief in command of the
Athenians at Syracuse, despite his violent opposition to
the war, was beginning the campaign with bright prom-
ise. The city had been blockaded by sea, a force had been
landed, and siege laid. Great earthworks and a wall had
been begun upon the heights of Epipolae to cut off every
means of escape. Deep despondency prevailed within
the walls, and corresponding elation among the builders
of the wall of circumvallation.

When the Athenians heard of Alcibiades’s presence
in Sparta as persona grata, they passed a sentence of
death upon him and confiscated his estates. Ando-
cides was released from prison upon turning state’s evi-
dence. The news reached Alcibiades in Sparta. He at
once determined to betray his native country, and per-
suaded the Spartans to interfere in behalf of Syracuse, ex-
plaining all the weaker points of the Athenian strategy in
Sicily, and advising the establishment of a Spartan gar-
rison in Attica, which might keep Athens in constant
dread and encourage the slaves to insurrection. A small
force was forthwith despatched to the northern part of
Attica and established itself at Decelea; while a second
detachment was sent to Sicily under command of Gylip-
pus, the most progressive general in the Spartan army.
The Athenians had begun a brilliant campaign against
Syracuse, and had found themselves more than a match
for their Sicilian opponents on sea and land; but with
298 TE StORY “OF ATHENS

the appearance of the arch enemy upon the scene, both
Nicias and his army seemed to lose heart, and they were
unable to prevent the Spartans from making connection
with the beleaguered city. From the moment Gylfppus
entered the gates of Syracuse the attitude of the unfor-
tunate defenders was changed. Hope took the place of
dread, and fear was turned into courage. With the Spar-
tan leader at their head, the Syracusans made a sally and
took an important outpost, which completely frustrated
Nicias’s plans for the siege. The Athenian army was
disheartened and ill fed, their general was ill and de-
spondent ; the strain of carrying on a war which he disap-
proved was telling upon him, and he was growing slack
and inactive. He sent a piteous appeal to Athens for re-
inforcements, and waited for news.

The democracy, never doubting its own wisdom nor
counting the cost, at once raised another army and de-
spatched it to Syracuse under command of Demosthenes,
one of their most trusted generals. This general arrived
in Syracuse as soon as could have been expected, with
seventy-three new triremes and a large number of per-
fectly fresh troops. A breath of activity was infused into
the worn-out ranks of the Athenian besiegers, and for a
time the prospect looked brighter to them. But the inert-
ness and delay of Nicias had already had their effect.
The Syracusans had gained both strength and confidence,
while his army was losing its discipline and his fleet get-
ting sadly out of repair. After the first check that he re-
ceived, Demosthenes took time to investigate the strength
of his opponents, and, having satisfied himself of the hope-
lessness of his position, with the courage of his convic-
tions advised retreat. But Nicias, though despairing of
success, feared the democracy too much to take this wise
view of affairs, and insisted on remaining. At last, how-
ever, he was persuaded to make discretion the better
AFTERGLOW 299

part of valor, and gave the command for an orderly re-
treat. Evening was chosen as the best hour for departure.
The ships were made ready in the afternoon, and at sun-
set the army stood on the shore, ready to embark. The
order to take ship had been given, and the oarsmen were
in their places, when Nicias perceived that the moon was
about to be eclipsed. Now Nicias was a superstitious
Greek of -the old school, and believed in every kind of
portent and omen. Nothing could persuade him to let
the army embark under such circumstances until he had
consulted a diviner, who told him that the gods were
clearly showing their disapproval of his action, and ad-
vised him to delay the retreat until the next full moon.
Then, under the pressure of increasing danger depicted
by Demosthenes and some of his lieutenants, his reso-
lution gave way, and a second time the order to man
the boats was sounded. But it was too late. The Syra-
cusans had got wind of the intended flight, and brought
specially equipped boats to bar the entrance of the all
but land-locked harbor. The Athenian fleet, with seams
gaping open, helms stiff, and crews dispirited, found
it impossible to cope with the new ships of the enemy,
elated now at finding their besiegers ready to give up.
The army was forced to make a landing and seek some
other means of escape. Had they beat a retreat by land
at once, they might have saved themselves and the
honor of Athens; but Nicias was again duped into a
day’s delay, so that when he came to lead the army out
on the way to Camarina, on the following morning, he
found every road blocked by Syracusan troops. Then
began a disorderly, aimless flight which, for six days, took
the army in any direction where the enemy was scarcest
or the supply of provisions most plentiful. At last De-
mosthenes’s detachment was cut off by the cavalry of the
enemy, and he was forced to surrender the bulk of his
300 THE SvORY OF ATHENS

force, some six thousand men; a great number having been
killed in the six days’ skirmishing, or overcome by hunger
and thirst in the parching August heat. Nicias, with a
somewhat smaller force, was still at large, vainly looking
for an avenue of escape, and suffering untold misery for
want of food and water, even when not harassed by his
pursuers. Finally, the wretched band was overtaken at
the river Asinarus, where the soldiers had flung them-
selves, like madmen, into the water in their wild desire
to slake their thirst. No resistance was made while hun-
dreds of bodies were piled upon the banks, and the river
was becoming red with blood and choked with corpses.
Nicias and the survivors were taken prisoners. The two
Athenian generals were promptly put to death, and the
soldiers, nearly ten thousand in number, were conducted
out to the barren slopes beside the sea and driven, like
a herd of cattle, down into the deep quarry-pits from
which the great city of Syracuse had been built. The
latomic, as they are called, are quite the reverse of our
ideal of a prison—a dark, gloomy dungeon with massive
doors bolted and barred. They consist of broad, deep
cuttings in the solid rock, irregular in plan and open to
the sky. In some places the rock has been cut under,
making an overhanging cliff which affords a little shelter.
Here the ten thousand Athenians, confined in hopeless
captivity, ill fed and scantily supplied with water, were
left to die. Around them rose high, perpendicular walls,
above them was the blazing Sicilian sky, under their feet
were rock-dust and broken stone. A small number of men
might have existed here, even with little food: but the
poor Athenians were crowded together like rats in a trap,
and unsanitary conditions soon produced fevers and dis-
eases of the most dreadful kind. It would be impossible
to describe the horrors of this imprisonment. Men suf-
fered the most excruciating tortures of hunger, thirst,
AFTERGLOW 301

and disease, until madness benumbed their sensibilities
and death came at last to set them free. From the first
they knew there could be no hope, and they settled down
to a dogged silence, broken only by the ravings of some
dying man. Their captors came to the brink of the pits to
jeer at them, and the rabble of the city pelted them with
small stones and taunted them with brutal sarcasm:
“Where is the mistress of the sea now?” “Is this the
Tyrant Demos?” And when the mocking crowd went
away the vultures came and scoffed at them. After ten
weeks the allies and foreigners in the army were taken
from the quarries and sold into slavery; but the proud
citizens of Athens were left to rot in their charnel-house
prison until their bones lay whitening upon the bottom of
the pit. The pride of Athens, the bright hope of the
democracy, thus perished in misery and disgrace, far from
home, far from the sight of their beloved city and the
violet-wreathed Acropolis.

The blow found Athens totally unprepared. She was
stunned, amazed, grief-stricken. It would have seemed
as 1f her cup of bitterness was full, with the generals dead,
her fleet and army gone, her favorite son a traitor. But
there were still a few drops to be added before the cup
should run over. These had already been prepared by
Alcibiades, who had been traveling rapidly from island
to island, inducing the allies to revolt. Less than a year
had elapsed since the terrible catastrophe in Sicily before
the two most powerful allies, Lesbos and Chios, seceded ;
and these leaders were soon followed by Thasos, Rhodes,
Euboea, and several of the allied cities of Asia Minor.
Had Sparta been intelligent enough to follow up her ad-
vantage at once, she could have put an end to the war,
could have humbled her great antagonist and have saved
herself many severe blows that Athens was yet to give
her in the final struggle. But the Spartans were by this
302 THE STORY OF ATHENS

time growing suspicious and jealous of their ex-Athenian
guest, and did not choose to drive home the blow to
Athens under his direction; they hesitated and, ere long,
had cause to regret their delay. Alcibiades, having dis-
cerned a plot to assassinate him, left Sparta; and we next
hear of him in Persian territory. He soon won a position
of great influence with Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap,
and entered upon a life of Oriental luxury which he
doubtless found a pleasant change after his strenuous
existence among the Spartans. While here, either over-
come with remorse at his treachery toward his mother
country, or prompted by his never-slumbering ambition,
he conceived the plan of returning to Athens; but this he
resolved not to do until he had done something to atone
for the wrongs which he had brought upon his home.
Whether this was a real desire for expiation or because
he knew that Athens could have no career for him with-
out atonement of some sort, we cannot judge, but within
the next few years he devoted himself assiduously to the
interests of his first love. Athens, meanwhile, though
wounded and bleeding, had not bowed her neck to her an-
tagonist. Her fleet and army had been lost, her revenues
had been largely reduced by the revolt of the allies, but
the state’s reserve of ten thousand talents still remained
in the safe keeping of the temple of Athena. This she
must draw upon if she was ever to rise and right herself.
With this reimbursement the state fitted out a new army
and constructed a new fleet and sent them off to Samos
to prevent further defection among the ranks of the allies.
Thrasybulus, a man of whom we shall hear more later,
was in command of one of the galleys at this time.
During the absence of the fleet a strange turn of events
took place in Athens. The secret societies of the oligar-
chical party were emboldened to assert themselves, partly
through the connivance of Alcibiades, and by a series of
AFTERGLOW 303

traitorous acts succeeded in overturning the democracy
and setting up a government by a council of four hundred
men. Alcibiades, it is said, encouraged the establish-
ment of the oligarchy in Athens, in order that he might
return as the champion of democracy. The revolutionary
party was on the point of opening the gates of Athens
to the Spartans, when a cry went up from the minority in
the city and the army in Samos, who asserted themselves
as the real Demos of Athens. The situation was indeed
a perilous one; and the young army was in a sorry plight,
when Alcibiades appeared upon the scene. He seemed
to be the only man strong enough to take the lead and
save Athens from final overthrow. Thrasybulus had
aroused the patriotic enthusiasm of the camp at Samos
by calling upon all the Athenians there to swear allegiance
to the democracy. The camp forthwith constituted itself
an assembly and elected him general for the year; and
he in turn used his new authority to procure the recall
and pardon of his friend Alcibiades, who was elected a
general for the year, and undertook to lead the Athenians
once more to battle with the old enemy. Through the
influence of Alcibiades, the Council of Four Hundred,
whose appointment he was believed to have instigated,
was deposed, and democracy was again established.

The operations of Alcibiades against Sparta were
crowned with signal success. The soldiers rallied with
their old-time dash and courage under the inspiration of
this singularly magnetic leader, and in the battles of Cy-
nossema and Cyzicus won splendid victories for Athens.
At last, in 407, Alcibiades turned his prow toward the
city he had disgraced and, not without some feelings of
trepidation, made his way to Athens. The astonishment
of the citizens knew no bounds—perhaps they admired his
audacity. They received him with enthusiasm, and made
him again the first man in the state. One of his first
304 THE STORY OF ATHENS

acts was the celebration of the Sacred Mysteries of Eleu-
sis, which he conducted with more than ordinary pomp
and ceremony.

The following year Socrates was elected to the old
Council of Five Hundred. A brighter day seemed to have
dawned upon Athens than she had known since the death
of Pericles. And now, from Macedonia, came the sad
news of the death of Euripides, who had retired some
years before to the court of King Archelaus to escape
the intrigues and broils of life in Athens, and had been
received with the greatest distinction and loaded with
gifts and honors. When the death of Euripides was an-
nounced, Athens was full of sorrow. The aged Sopho-
cles put on mourning and obliged his actors to lay aside
their crowns and appear in black upon the stage. Sopho-
cles was now almost ninety years old. He had written
one hundred and thirty dramas, and yet there was no
falling off in his dramatic power. The pride and joy of
his declining years was his grandson Sophocles, a son
of his son Ariston, a rising dramatist. His devotion to
this young man, upon whom he looked as his successor,
excited the jealousy of Iophon, his second son, who was
another poet of the family. JIophon feared that his aged
father would bequeath his property to this favorite grand-
son, and wished to have him adjudged incapable of mak-
ing a will. The old man was brought before the body
which sat upon such cases, and listened quietly to the
statement of the case. He made no reply, but drew from
his breast a roll and read the magnificent parodos to his
play “Oedipus at Colonus,” which he had just completed.
No further argument was needed. The case was dis-
missed with a sound rebuke for the undutiful Iophon.
A few months later, this greatest of all the masters of
Greek tragedy passed away, leaving Aristophanes the sole
survivor of the mighty trio that had delighted Athens for
a score of years.
AFTERGLOW 305

On the death of Sophocles, the Theban poet Simmias,
whom Plato makes the principal speaker in his “Phaedo,”
composed these lines, given here in Addison’s translation :

Wind, gentle evergreen, to form a shade
Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid.

Sweet ivy, lend thine aid and intertwine
With blushing roses and the clustering vine.

Thus shall your lasting leaves, with beauties hung,
Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung.

Not long afterward Sophocles II brought out his father’s
great play “Oedipus at Colonus,” and scored one of the
greatest victories in the history of Greek tragedy.

A little more than four years of tranquillity remained
for Athens; but this was only superficial. The political
clubs, in sympathy with Sparta, were doing their best
to undermine the sadly shattered state. In the beginning
of the year 406, Alcibiades lost an important naval battle,
was deprived of his command, and soon found that the
opposition against him was so strong that he decided to
retire for the present to his castle in Thrace. In the
same year the Athenians won a brilliant victory at sea
over the Spartans near the Arginusae, when Pericles,
the young son of the great Pericles and Aspasia, was one
of the ten commanders. Just after the victory a storm
came up which made it impossible for the Athenians to
save those of their number who were clinging to the
wrecks of the twenty-five ships which they had lost, or
to collect the bodies of their dead. Now the Greeks had
a particularly strong religious sentiment about the .con-
duct of the victors toward the dead and wounded, and,
although the victory meant much to Athens, her citizens
were greatly shocked at the behavior of their generals.
The secret clubs sought to make political gain by means
of this handle, and worked the people up to such a pitch,

on the score of impious negligence, that they brought the
20
306 THE STORY OF ATHENS

commanders to trial and condemned the ten to death, and
with them the unfortunate son of Pericles, whom the
great statesman had made an Athenian citizen by special
legislation on his death-bed. The voice of Socrates led
the dissenting outcry in the assembly against this crime.
He was the only one of the prytany who persisted, in
spite of all intimidation, in refusing to allow such a
question to be put before the ecclesia; but, disregarding
constitutional precedents, the others put it without his
concurrence. The act was nothing more nor less than
wilful murder, sanctioned by law on an accusation
trumped up by the enemies of the democracy. But a
speedy retribution was in store for Athens for this deed
of horror. When next the Athenians met the Spartans
on the sea, off Aegospotami, their generals had little re-
ward to hope for from their country which had just
executed ten victorious generals, and they fought with
little of the old spirit. Their enemies were completely
victorious, destroying one hundred and eighty triremes,
almost the whole naval force of Athens. Lysander, the
Spartan commander, then ordered the blockade of the
port of Athens, while a Spartan army cut off all ap-
proach to the city by land. Surrounded by a Spartan
army without, and full of Spartan sympathizers within,
it was hopeless for the city to attempt to stand a siege.
In the year 404, the gates were opened to the enemy.
Lysander entered in triumph, while Athens bowed her
proud head to her ancient rival. Then began a reign
of terror in Athens which lasted eight months, known
in history as the Rule of the Thirty Tyrants. Democ-
racy was abolished and oligarchy established. The long
walls of Athens were demolished to the sound of the
flute, and the docks and arsenals at Piraeus were de-
stroyed. Some of the Spartans were in favor of razing
the whole city, but the idea was abandoned, Hundreds
AFTERGLOW 397

of loyal Athenians were exiled, while the streets flowed
with blood. We are told that in the Stoa poikile alone
fourteen hundred persons were massacred. The great
men of Athens were the special objects of the persecu-
tions of the thirty tyrants. Many of the philosophers,
artists, and poets were forced to fly. Socrates remained
at his post, but was constantly tormented by Critias and
Characles, although the former had once been a pupil of
his. A decree which was passed forbidding the teaching
of oratory was especially aimed at Socrates’s public
teaching. The Spartans plundered the treasuries of
the temples; and Gylippus, the hero of Syracuse, was
deputed by Lysander to carry the spoils to Sparta. The
crafty general, however, managed to extract enough gold
from the sacks, while in transit, to place himself beyond
the fear of an impecunious old age, but was found out
and banished by his countrymen.

But the spirit of the democracy and of Athenian lib-
erty was still alive in the hearts of the exiles who had
gathered about Thrasybulus, the general who had already
distinguished himself in the overthrow of the Four Hun-
dred only seven years before. This little band of patriots
intrenched themselves at Phyle, a mountain fortress in a
pass of Mount Parnes, built by the Athenians some years
before as a base of operations against Boeotia. In this
redoubtable castle, perched upon the pinnacle of a crag,
high above a deep ravine, in full view of the whole
Attic plain, the city with its bright jewel shining out in
bold relief upon its purple rock, the desire of all their
hearts, the exiles could hold their own indefinitely, but
could do little to relieve Athens. Alcibiades had been
murdered in his castle by the Spartans, so they could not
look to him. But Thebes was near at hand and was
already jealous of Sparta’s conquests. With the aid of
this old enemy of Athens, the exiles mustered courage to
308 THE STGRY OF ATHENS

leave their mountain fastness and descend toward Athens.
The thirty tyrants had been replaced by a government of
ten, even worse, if possible, than the thirty. The forces
of the oligarchy were met and defeated; Thrasybulus,
with one thousand followers, seized the Piraeus, and, af-
ter a few weeks of fighting, finally entered Athens in
triumph, and the democracy was again restored.

Thus ended the bloody struggle for the supremacy of
Hellas, that had harassed Greece for twenty-seven weary
years, and in which neither side was permanently success-
ful. Sparta had triumphed, had humbled Athens, but had
not destroyed her democratic institutions, and the su-
premacy of Greece was hers but for a moment. In the
long contest the two great antagonists had shown the
widely different characters of their people. Sparta pos-
sessed endurance and dogged determination; Athens, in-
telligence to grasp a situation and swiftness of action, to-
gether with wonderful recuperative powers. Which was
the better possession it is hard to say. In this case the
game resulted most unsatisfactorily; for presently a
third party stepped in and carried off the prize for which
both had been struggling for upward of two hundred
years.

A third of the life span of a man seems a long time for
a state to be at war; and as we read the history of Athens
during the period of the Peloponnesian war, it would
seem as if every other pursuit must have been given up
to the bloody struggle. But, as has already been in-
timated in this chapter, there was another life in Athens
that moved on peacefully and quietly within the city, even
amid the din of war. The last few years of the conflict,
just before and during the rule of the thirty tyrants, were
too hot even for that serene existence which was to keep
Athens from utter annihilation, and many of her more
gifted citizens were moved to leave, even if they were
AFTERGLOW 309

not exiled during Spartan supremacy in the city. But
those twenty-seven years were by no means barren of the
products of thought and art.

Thucydides, whose period of banishment (twenty
years) had just expired, now returned to the city to find
it considerably improved in many ways. The triple tem-
ple of the Acropolis—the Erechtheum—had just been
completed and stood fresh and beautiful beside the glori-

 

The Temple of Hephaestus upon the Colonus Agoraeus.

ous temple of Parthenos. The new temple of Hephaes-
tus, on the hill above the agora, was finished and ready
to receive the statue of its patron deity. It was a typical
Attic production, combining certain features of the Ionic
style with the strong and virile Doric, and made the little
Colonus Agoraeus seem quite like a diminutive Acropolis.
A temple to Dionysus Eleuthereus had been built near the
theater, beside the ancient shrine which Pisistratus had
erected. It was a small structure, not much larger than
the old one. Naught remains of it to-day but the founda-
tions, which differ from those of the older shrine in that
they are built of breccia, without clamps. Ancient de-
scriptions of the new temple state that its walls—the in-
terior walls presumably—were decorated with paintings;
one representing Dionysus taking Hephaestus up to
310 THE STORY OF ATHENS

heaven, and another depicting Ariadne asleep on the sea-
shore and Theseus putting out to sea. This may have been
the Theseus of Parrhasius, which will be referred to later.
The temple enshrined a statue of the wine-god in gold and
ivory, by the artist Alcamenes, one of the most proficient
pupils of Phidias. The statue was a marvel of beauty and
skill.

It is generally believed that the temple of Ares was

 

The Temple of Hephaestus, erroneously called the Theseum,
from the Southwest.

either built or renovated at this time. The sanctuary of
the god of war was a very old one, situated on the north-
ern slope of the Areopagus. The temple stood upon the
site of the present ruined chapel of Dionysius, on a ledge
of the rock of the Areopagus, close beside the steep preci-
pice below the summit. Whether the temple was built de
novo at this time, or only restored, we shall probably
never know, but we do know that Alcamenes made a
statue for it which became very famous in Roman copies :
and it has been suggested that a late reproduction of it
may be seen in the Borghese Ares in the Louvre. Alca-
AFTERGLOW 311

menes seems to have been very productive of statues of
divinities. He is known to have made a lovely statue of
Aphrodite which was given a place upon the Acropolis.
A copy of this statue is believed to have been taken to
Rome by Julius Caesar, where it received the title of
Venus Genetrix, and was set up in Caesar’s forum. A
famous group was executed at this time which possibly
may also be ascribed to the hand of Alcamenes, consider-
ing his fame as a sculptor of divine subjects. This was
the group in the new Hephaestium, which represented
Athena standing beside her brother the fire-god. Pau-
sanias says that in this group Athena was given blue eyes,
which recalls to his mind the ‘Libyan Story” that Athena
and Hephaestus were born of the Tritonian lake by Pos.
Cicero remarks that the statue of Hephaestus was so fash-
ioned as to conceal his lameness.

In the first year of the Sicilian expedition, while Athens
was full of pride and hope, Strongylion the sculptor had
made a great bronze horse in memory of the wooden steed
which the Greeks had set up on the plain of Troy. This
was erected upon the Acropolis as a dedicatory offering
of Charidemus, and is mentioned by Aristophanes in the
“Birds.” Six blocks of its pedestal and the inscription
have been found. At the same time sculptors were at
work on the little frieze and the metopes of the new tem-
ple of Hephaestus. These sculptures are believed to have
been the work of some one of Myron’s pupils, and they
have the sturdy, sinewy look of bronzes. The subjects
have little to do with the legends of the god of fire, for
the metopes represent the labors of Heracles, and the two
friezes, one within each portico, represent battles between
Greeks and Lapiths.

With such an array of works of art to show for the
trying period of the Peloponnesian war,—and these are
doubtless only the smallest fragment of the full art pro-
312 THE STORY OF ATHENS

duction of that time,—we cannot feel that Athens had
lost much in that field. We have already seen that there
had been no falling off in letters, and that philosophy had
really only awakened during those long years of dread
and anxiety.

In these things Athens had a possession which no enemy
could take from her, and upon these as foundations she
was to build the fabric of her future greatness.

We are accustomed to think of ancient history as mov-
ing with slow and dignified tread when compared with
the rapid strides of more recent centuries; but let us look
back for a moment over the history of Athens during the
century which we have just reviewed. At the beginning
of the century she was a small, unimportant state, with
few people and little wealth. In the vear 500 B.c. the
great ruler of the most powerful kingdom in the world
had decreed her destruction. At the end of the first quar-
ter of the century Athens had swept the fleets of Persia
from the sea, had wrested provinces from Persian sway,
and was the chief member of a powerful confederacy.
When the first half had been reached the little state had
become the eye and center not only of Greece, but of all
the Mediterranean world, mistress of the sea and of a
large empire, the recipient of rich tithes from many tribu-
tary states. Her art had been raised from the crudest
beginnings to a place that has never been equaled; her
literature had become a model for all succeeding gener-
ations; her schools of thought had opened the book of
philosophy for the whole world. Fifty years more and
her empire was gone, her fleets destroyed, her wealth all
dissipated, and she had fallen back to the level of a sec-
ondary state to foster those arts and schools which were
henceforth to be her empire and her wealth.
 

 

     

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V and IV Centuries B.c.
PLAN oF ATHENS FROM PERICLES TO LycuRGUS

COMI AKEwWH A

V AND IV CENTURIES B.C.

Old Temple of Athena.

Great Altar.

Erechtheum.

Statue of Athena Promachos.
Propylaea.

Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia.
Sanctuary of Athena Ergane.
Temple of Athena Nike.
Clepsydra.

Monument of Nicias.

. Grotto of Pan.

Cave of Apollo.
Altar of the Eumenides.

. Statues of the Tyrannicides.

Enneacrunus.

. Altar of the Twelve Gods.

Altar on Pnyx.

. Statue of Hermes of the Market.
. Monument of Thrasyllus.

.- Temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus.
. Tomb of Hippolytus.

mm Existing walls and buildings.

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Foundations im situ.

[ Conjectured sites and buildings
T.=Temple. S.=Sanctuary or shrine.
Xx

THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY

“(O thou, our Athens, violet wreathed
and brilliant, most enviable city.”
ARISTOPHANES.

“IN the afternoon they came unto a land in
which it seemed always afternoon.” The
fierce heat of the noonday was passed and
Athens, at the beginning of the fourth cen-
tury, found herself in the placid calm of
waning day, in the sweet retrospect of an
afternoon which knows no setting sun: for,
though her sky was to be darkened again
and again by clouds of war and trouble, her

Acropolis could never be engulfed in the shades of night

so long as the world should stand. Doomed never again

to be mistress of an empire, queen of the sea, the pillar of

Greece, she could yet content herself with the proud title,
“Mother of Arts and Eloquence,” still ‘‘violet wreathed
and brilliant.” The final blow to her ambition for con-

quest had practically ended her military career, though
she was still to produce great soldiers, but for defense,

not for aggression. The failure of her schemes for com-
mercial supremacy had cut off her aspirations to great
material prosperity. Thus the two chief obstacles in the
way of speculative and artistic pursuits were removed, and
she settled down to apply herself to the cultivation of
those gifts which were already hers by nature, and which
were eventually to bring Rome to her feet and make her
314

 

Bust of Socrates.
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY © 315

the intellectual mistress of the world. During the cen-
tury which followed that of the rise and fall of Athens
as a world power, her vague, uncertain gropings after
truth were to take form in those highly developed schools
of thought which, molded by Plato and Aristotle, were
to form the basis of the world’s philosophy; her political
interests, centering at home and stirred by the stimulus
of self-preservation, were to produce, in the person of
Demosthenes, the highest exponent of political eloquence.
Fer art, always glorious in form and grace of expression,
was to be spiritualized by Praxiteles the sculptor and
Apollodorus the painter.

A fertile field for the new intellectual development that
was so assiduously cultivated in Athens at this time
was naturally found in the colonnades and shady groves
of the gymnasiums. The Academy and the Lyceum had,
for generations, been seats of learning, the retreats of
philosophers, the haunts of men of letters. Every young
Athenian was expected to spend his allotted term of years
in one or the other, under the tutelage of appointed teach-
ers and lecturers, and was brought, at the same time, into
the company of the best minds of the day. The Athenians
loved discussion and speculation above all things, so that
a man who had anything to say was always sure of his
audience, whether he sat beneath the olives of one of the
gymnasiums or took his seat in an exedra or colonnade
in the busy agora. Of course, there was always a great
deal of idle talk and gossip to be heard in both places;
but from the time of Anaxagoras, Pericles’s old teacher,
and probably long before, there had always been men who
frequented the homes of learning for the purpose of
engaging the young in learned conversation, if only to
advertise their wares, for many of them sought private
pupils by whom they were often well paid. It was neces-
sary in a state like Athens, where each individual citizen
316 THE STORY OF ATHENS

was sure to be given prominence in some capacity sooner
or later, for every man to be trained in rhetoric to a cer-
tain extent, and versed in law and philosophy. It might
fall to any man’s lot to be president of the Senate or a
legislator of some sort. If a man became involved in a
lawsuit, he would have to appear in court, whether
plaintiff or defendant, to argue his own case. And
though he might have his speech written for him, it was
far better if he could speak easily and to the point from
his own knowledge. Hence the system of perfect equality
rendered it necessary for every Athenian to be well
educated, which meant that he must know how to address
himself to the public, must be familiar with Homer and
the best poets of Greece,—for apt quotation was fully
equal to argument in power of convincing,—must know
sufficient natural philosophy to grace his utterances with
simile and metaphor, and be well enough versed in the
sophistry of the day to give an effect of profundity to
his logic. But with the appearance of Socrates upon the
intellectual feld, a different turn had been given to the
trend of education. He soon showed the self-satisfied
Athenians how very little they really knew. A few
moments’ walk or talk with the sage convinced the most
brilliant product of the old system that he knew very
little indeed, and yet without any display of ostentatious
pride on Socrates’s part. And when the priestess at Del-
phi had pronounced him the wisest of men, there was no
gainsaying his superior knowledge. His method was
simply to ask questions, as 1f for his own enlightenment ;
but the questions were so put as to make the person inter-
rogated either contradict himself or confess utter ignor-
ance.

Plato gives a number of most interesting glimpses into
the student life of Athens as it came into contact with the
great teacher of men. The gymnasium is full, it is the
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY © 317

hour of recreation, youths of varying ages, full of health
and spirits, may be seen on every hand. A large number
are at their exercises, running, leaping, boxing ; some are
quietly strolling under the shade of the trees; others are
lounging upon the grass or sitting in the exedras, lis-
tening to some poet reading his latest poem, or conversing
among themselves. Socrates comes in, quietly surveys
the situation, and then singles out a complacent-looking
young man and presently engages him in conversation.
The youth, of course, recognizes the philosopher and suits
his language to the occasion. In the course of his high-
flown discourse he uses the word “holiness.” Socrates
stops him and asks: “But just what is holiness?” “That
which is pleasing to the gods,” is the reply. “But there
are many gods, suppose a thing is pleasing to one god
and not to another, what then?” “Holiness is a thing that
is pleasing to all the gods.”’ Socrates looks pleased, but
is not satisfied; with a puzzled look he inquires again:
“Ts a thing holy because it is pleasing to the gods, or
does it please the gods because it is holy?” The youth
thinks hard for a moment and then changes his defini-
tion. Socrates would follow up with other questions, but
the baffled youth has fled. In this way the philosopher
undertook to check the promiscuous use of words of ethi-
cal significance by men who had no idea of their true
meaning. Definitions of words, Aristotle says, are
among Socrates’s most valuable contributions to the
world of thought.

We may readily perceive that Socrates’s method was by
no means flattering to those whom he would teach. It
required a very noble soul to take this kind of humiliation
in good part, and it was doubtless due to his untiring ef-
forts to confute men’s pretensions to knowledge that so
many were found to be against him when he was finally
brought to trial for impiety and heresy. But there can
318 JES SORyY OF ATHENS

be no doubt that Socrates was acting according to the
dictates of a pure conscience. He was perhaps the first
man in Greece to hear, or at least to heed, the “‘still small
voice.” He believed that his was a divine mission to
help men in the search for truth, to help them to know
themselves, as the great oracle had advised, and to insist
upon morality, public and private. Those of his hearers
whose characters were strong enough to endure the ini-
tiatory thrusts of his scalpel, and to submit themselves
to his teachings, became devotedly attached to him. No
great teacher ever had more devoted disciples. There
were many other public teachers to be seen in the stoas
and gymnasiums of Athens at this time, but Socrates
was probably the only one who never took pay for his
instruction. Protagoras, who had been one of the
first to call himself a sophist, we are told, often received
as much as one hundred minae (seventeen hundred and
fifty dollars) from a single pupil; and Plato adds that he
made more money than Phidias and ten other sculptors
put together.

Among the endless dialogues between Socrates and his
friends recorded by Xenophon, there is one which gives
a fair idea of the lot of a married woman in Athens, or,
at least, of the 7deal matron of this time. It is needless
to say that the woman in question was not Socrates's
own wife, Xanthippe; for it was a common joke in
Athens that he had married her that he might have a
constant test for his patience; and once, when asked why
he had chosen such a helpmeet, he answered that a man
did not enjoy driving a perfectly docile horse; one high-
strung and difficult to manage was far more amusing.
The conversation referred to above came about in this
way: Socrates had heard of a young man named Is-
chomachus whom all the world praised as both ‘beau-
tiful and good.” The sage found him one day, seated in
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY © 319

the colonnade of Dionysus Eleuthereus. He sat down
beside him and they fell a-talking. Ischomachus had re-
cently taken unto himself a wife, and the conversation
naturally soon fell upon the subject of the bride, whom
the young husband praised as being able to take care of all
their domestic affairs without his aid. “Did you train her
yourself?’ asked Socrates, ‘or was she already’ well
skilled when you brought her from her home?’ “Well
skilled?’ was the reply; “what skill was she likely to
bring with her at not quite fifteen, and having been care-
fully brought up to see and hear as little as possible, and
to ask the fewest questions?’ He then proceeded to tell
how he had educated the poor little girl to be a model
housewife. In kindly, but most superior tone, he lays
down the law in lengthy disquisitions upon the duties of a
wife. She answers in short and modest sentences, taking
his oracular words as heaven-given truths; seeming proud
and delighted to be considered worthy to receive such
valuable instruction. He tells her that her duties all lie
within doors, although she is the wife of a gentleman
farmer; but these cares are quite enough for one person.
She is to superintend the storing away and the daily ap-
portionment of supplies, the grinding of the grain for
home use, the carding of the wool, the spinning and the
making of clothes for the family and the servants. She is
to train the women slaves, to bestow rewards upon the
faithful, and to mete out punishment to the unprofitable.
Fortunately, she was provided with a housekeeper who
was to be entirely under her directions.

In course of his narrative he gives an interesting ac-
count of their house and furniture, and how they are kept
in order. In their own bedroom were their choicest
carpets, draperies, and other furniture. The living-
rooms were beautifully fitted up for coolness in summer
and heat in winter; there were warm, dry storerooms for
320 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the breadstuffs, and a chill-cellar for the wine. There
were elaborate separate apartments for the men servants
and the women servants. The furniture and other effects
were to be kept in perfect order by the wife and divided
into classes. There were the ornaments and holiday
attire of the wife, and Ischomachus’s clothes for feast-
days and for war, the bedding, the shoes and sandals, the
arms and armor, the cooking-utensils and those for the
bath, the table service for every-day use and for enter-
taining; and a host of other things, all to be stored in
their own places and placed in charge of the house-
keeper, who must know exactly where everything is and
be able to produce it at a moment’s notice. Poor house-
keeper! In the end he tells her that all the cares which
he has enumerated at great length are imposed upon her
because she is his helpmeet and an equal sharer of all his
possessions. To which she replies that all these tasks will
be easy because she will be pleasing him and at the same
time caring for things that are her very own. After
hearing her reply Socrates exclaimed, “By Hera, a brave
and masculine intelligence the lady has. I would far
rather hear about a living woman’s virtues than that
Zeuxis should show me the portrait of the loveliest
woman he has ever painted.” Ischomachus then goes on
to tell how one day he found his wife “enamelled with
white lead, rouged with alkanet, and wearing high-
heeled shoes.” He does not doubt for a moment that all
this is for his benefit. He did not chide her, but asked
her how she would like it if he should boast to her of un-
real possessions, bring her false money, or present her
with sham necklaces. She blushingly takes the hint, and
says she would not like it. Then, after a long disquisition
of his upon the beauty of natural charms, she naively
asks him how she can improve her looks by natural meth-
ods; and when he recommends the healthy exercise of
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY _ 321

walking about in the supervision of the household and tak-
ing an occasional turn at kneading the dough, rolling the
pastry, and making the beds, she modestly accepts his
recipe as a sure beautifier and patent “bloom of youth.”
There is something quite sad in this picture of domestic
wifely simplicity. The husband never implies that he
wishes: to make his wife his intellectual companion, or a
sharer in his worldly ambitions, yet he seems to have
not only admiration, but real affection for her. Ischom-
achus, however, is an Athenian of the old school, who
finds in agriculture a paying and enjoyable occupation,
and who has few of the ambitions of the politicians or
statesmen of his day, and, perhaps, for that reason, is
in love with his unlettered, frugal, but true and gentl
wife.
The two famous seats of learning, the Academy and
the Lyceum, were reserved exclusively for the sons of
Athenian citizens; but there was a large and wealthy
class of townsmen who were not Athenians born, or who
had married wives that were not Athenians, and whose
sons, therefore, were not eligible to the privileges of those
old historic institutions. For the accommodation of
these boys, many of whom were doubtless in all respects
the intellectual equals of the young Athenians, another
gymnasium had grown up, to the northeast of the city,
on the sunny slopes of Mount Lycabettus. It was called
the Cynosarges. The site was a beautiful one, overlook-
ing the gardens of the city, with a perfect view of the
plain and the sea and its many islands, and of the majes-
tic Acropolis, with its shining jewel in bold relief against
the deep purple mountains of the Morea. Here, among the
olives and the pines, Antisthenes taught the non-citizen
boys the maxim he had learned from Socrates, that virtue
is the one thing needful. Antisthenes was himself the son

of a Thracian mother, though he was born at Athens.
21
322 THE STORY OF ATHENS

He was one of Socrates’s closest followers, and never
left him while he lived. His doctrine was one of pure
morality, relegating all speculation to those who found
it amusing; but he founded a school of thought which
his successors developed into a system whose adherents
took their name from Antisthenes’s gymnasium, the
Cynosarges, for they were called Cynics.

 

 

View of the Acropolis, from the side of Mount Lycabettus.

The gymnasiums and the stoas of the agora afforded
an ample field for the studious, the literary, and the philo-
sophically inclined. The artists found plenty to do in a
community ever demanding new shrines and _ statues.
The Pnyx and the courts of law held out a career to those
whose tastes led them to take up a political or forensic
life. The theater and the ever recurring festivals fur-
nished diversion for all. But, since the close of the long
war, the restoration of peace, and the reéstablishment of
the democracy by Thrasybulus, there was a considerable
class of men in Athens whose occupation was gone; these
were the professional soldiers, whose early manhood had
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY — 323

been spent in the thick of the Peloponnesian war. Ac-
customed to campaigns and the excitement of active army
life, the city held out few attractions for them, and gar-
rison duty would be worse still. In this class was Xeno-
phon, who had not yet begun the literary career which
was to give him far greater fame than all of his military
exploits. He was fond of intellectual pursuits, and was
a sincere admirer of Socrates, but he was restless and dis-
satisfied with the life he was leading at Athens, and
longed for some broader field of activity. Three years
had passed since the expulsion of the thirty tyrants, when
an invitation came to Xenophon from his Boeotian friend
Proxenus to come over to Sardis and enter upon a career
of adventure in the service of Cyrus, a younger brother
of Artaxerxes, the Persian king. No one knew what Cy-
rus was attempting to do, but he was busy raising an army
and securing the services of mercenary troops from vari-
ous parts of the Greek world. The letter was very entic-
ing: it offered just the sort of experience that Xenophon
craved, and it held out many possibilities of adventure and
perhaps of gain. He was sorely tempted to accept at once,
but decided to consult his mentor, Socrates, before taking
any decisive steps. The philosopher heard the proposals
with interest; but the matter seemed to involve serious
complications. He finally advised his friend to seek
divine counsel; and Xenophon, always religious to the
verge of superstition, repaired without delay to the ora-
cle. But even in so solemn a quest his ambition was fa-
ther to his query; for he asked, not whether he should go,
but what divinity he should propitiate in order to secure
success. On learning of this, Socrates reprimanded him
severely for begging the question; but Xenophon de-
cided to go, and finally set out with the philosopher’s
approval.

It is scarcely worth our while to follow the adventurer
324 DAES STORY OF ATHENS

in his extraordinary experiences in Asia. Every one who
remembers his early struggles with the Attic tongue, re-
calls the story of the Anabasis; how the Greeks joined the
army of Cyrus and followed him toward the capital, even
when they had learned that his quest was the overthrow
of his brother and the usurpation of the throne of Per-
sia; how Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa; and how the Greeks,
when their leaders had been treacherously slain, were
obliged to find their way home as best they could. It was
then that fortune played into Xenophon’s hand; for, al-
though he had originally joined the expedition as a mere
hanger-on, his shrewdness, courage, and persuasive pow-
ers soon set him at the head of the ten thousand, and he
undertook to lead them back to Europe. ‘Evteb@ev e&:habver,
parasang by parasang, through incredible hardships
along the Euphrates, through Armenia and Asia Minor
to the Black Sea. Q@dAartra, Od&dkatta! cry the Greek sol-
diers, who have not seen their own element for many
long months, and rush madly down to the shore. Xen-
ophon eventually brings his army back to the shores of the
Aegean, turns it over to Agesilaus, the Spartan king,
who is about to undertake an Asiatic campaign, and sets
out for home, the possessor of a comfortable fortune,
taken in booty during his expedition in Asia.

The first news that he hears on his return is that Soc-
rates has been put to death. His master, whom he truly
idolized, had been brought to trial for impiety, had been
condemned by a prejudiced jury, and had drunk the
fatal hemlock. He should never hear his noble voice
nor see his kindly eyes again. He was filled with grief
and resentment, and resolved to make Athens his home
no more. But first he must find some of his old friends
and fellow followers of Socrates and hear from them
the details of the triai and death of his beloved master.
We may not know from whom he heard the sad tale of
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY © 325

martyrdom, which sounds like that of some early church
father: it may have been from Crito, who did all he
could to save Socrates, or Plato, or Antisthenes, who
was with him to the last; but what he heard served only
to exalt his love and admiration for his teacher and to
increase his hatred and scorn of the men in power in his
native city. We do not know even if he reached Athens
at all. Some accounts bring him as far as Megara, others
leave him upon the Asiatic shore; but, wherever he halted,
the news of Socrates’s death must have been a great blow
to him.

Socrates had always had enemies—those whom he had
made in his career as a critic of morals, and the proud
whom he had put to shame for their ignorance, besides his
political enemies, who knew well his oligarchical sym-
pathies which he never attempted to conceal. His chief
enemy was a wealthy man named Anytus, who, in his
younger days, had been a pupil of Socrates and had par-
taken freely of his intellectual bounty. This man was an
ardent partizan of democracy, had been a member of
Thrasybulus’s band at Phyle, and an influential mover in
the restoration of the old régime. Anytus now came for-
ward as Socrates’s chief accuser. The point upon which
his enemies wished to fix the specific charges appears to
have been this: He had met a young man, the son of a
once wealthy tanner, and finding him of more than or-
dinary intellectual ability, had persuaded him not to fol-
low his father’s occupation, but to devote himself to men-
tal pursuits. With the aid of Lycon, an orator, Anytus
persuaded a man named Meletus to bring action against
Socrates in the name of the state. As was usually the case
in Athens, the specific action was soon lost sight of, and
Socrates was brought to trial on a charge of corrupting
the youth and despising the deities accepted by the state.
The charge was inspired by political animosity, the jury
326 Tie SiORvaiOr ATHENS

was a packed body, and Socrates knew he had little
chance for his life. But when the time came he made his
own defense with great power and dignity. The jury
of five hundred and fifty-six men, by a small majority,
brought in a verdict of guilty and passed a sentence of
death, then left it to Socrates to say if he could offer a
substitute; between these the court would decide. With
infinite sarcasm the philosopher replied that he could
think of no other alternative unless that they should
give him a seat at the public table for the rest of his days;
if that would not answer, he could raise a mina, which his
friends would increase to thirty (five hundred and thirty
dollars). It was not surprising that the court immedi-
ately passed a sentence of death by a majority of eighty.
Socrates accepted the sentence calmly, with the remark
that he was satisfied with the conduct of his trial, which
would be sure to raise up apostolic followers, and that he
was thankful to have lived so long to carry on his mission
in a state where freedom of thought was tolerated as it
had been in Athens.

The Athenian galley had not returned from the yearly
theoric mission to Delos, and the Jaw provided that no
criminal could be executed during its absence. Thirty
days, therefore, remained to Socrates, which were spent
in chains and in prison, but not without the society of
his friends, Plato, Crito, Antisthenes, Euclides, and
others, by whom these last hours were afterward held
particularly sacred. The doomed man spoke unceasingly
in his usual lofty vein, but with even greater exaltation,
discoursing upon the virtue of obedience to the laws of
the state, and upon the subject of the immortality of the
soul. When the thirty days were passed he took the fa-
tal hemlock with calm serenity. ‘‘Thus,” says Plato,
“died the man who, of all with whom we were ac-
quainted, was in death the noblest, in life the wisest and
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY © 327

most just.” With their master gone, Athens had little
charm for his devoted pupils. FEuclides had already de-
parted for Megara, where he set up a school which in later
years became famous as a philosophical center; Isocra-
tes had gone to Chios and opened a school; many others
had gone away, and now Plato and Xenophon too (if
he had returned to Athens) decided to leave the city. The
former repaired to Megara, where he remained with his
fellow disciple, Euclides, until he set out on his ten years’
journeyings, which took him to southern Italy, to Sicily,
and, according to some accounts, to Egypt. Xenophon
went directly to Agesilaus, the King of Sparta, to offer
his services in the campaign against Persia. The eccle-
sia of Athens passed a sentence of banishment against
him; after a few years we hear of him fighting on the
Spartan side, against his native state.

A day of prosperity was now in store for Athens. For
several years she had been without a leader; and this,
as we have seen before, was a helpless condition. But a
leader was coming now, and from an unexpected quar-
ter. Conon, the general who had held a command in
the late war, had been made chief general to supersede
Alcibiades in 406, had been one of the commanders in
the terrible defeat at Aegospotami, and had recently won
great renown in the Persian service against Sparta,
turned at last to his native city and found her ready and
glad to welcome him. Conon was a strong man, with a
wide reputation for bravery and uprightness. He soon
took the lead in Athenian affairs, and, with the great
wealth which he had gained in the service of Artaxerxes,
was in a position to repair the ravages which the long
war with Sparta had wrought upon the city. He at once
began the rebuilding of the city walls and the long walls,
and then undertook the restoration of the fortifications
and docks at Piraeus. The hero of Cnidus, who in that
328 THE STORY OF ATHENS

memorable battle had avenged some at least of Athens’s
wrongs at the hands of Sparta, was hailed by the Atheni-
ans as their deliverer and the restorer of their city. Co-
non was well supported by another general, Iphicrates,
who was at this time employed in rehabilitating the Athe-
nian army. This general had also distinguished himself
in the battle of Cnidus by capturing a Spartan trierarch.
In the Lyceum was a large inclosure used as a parade-
ground; here Iphicrates drilled the infantry and cavalry;
we have record that ten troops of horse could exercise here
at the same time, which gives us some conception of the
extent of the grounds of the famous gymnasium. In the
course of his reconstruction of the army, Iphicrates intro-
duced a new type of infantry, which was neither hoplite
nor light infantry, but combined the advantages of both.
He replaced the heavy, unwieldy shield, that had been em-
ployed for centuries, by a small target; he exchanged the
coat of mail for a linen corselet, and gave his men a
longer sword than they could use before, when they
were weighed down with armor. At the head of a
small body of his newly equipped men, he met and de-
stroyed a whole Spartan mora—a body composed of
one sixth of all the full-blooded Spartans under arms—
and received the plaudits of the Greek world. Conon,
Iphicrates, and Thrasybulus, the hero of Phyle, now
stood for the political and military leadership of Ath-
ens; all were tried men, and under their direction the
shattered state regained self-respect, to say the least.
Athenian arms, allied with other states, were frequently
brought to face the Spartans, and usually with success.
The interest of Athens in Byzantium and along the coast
of Thrace was reinstated and retained. But, as had al-
ways been the case in Athens, the democracy was very
suspicious of good men and false witnesses were plenty.
In time, both Conon and Iphicrates were impeached

 
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY © 329

falsely and banished treacherously. The former died an
exile in Cyprus, and the latter was eventually restored to
favor with the state. Thrasybulus died in his country’s
service at Aspendus, where he was assassinated by the
natives.

In the year 387 a peace was made between Persia and
Greece in general, through the influence of a Spartan
named Antalcidas. This peace, which bore the name of
its framer, was not wholly satisfactory to Athens; but
she was forced to accept it. By its terms, all the cities
in Asia Minor were given over to the Persian king.
Athens retained only the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and
Scyros. After this no more wars with Persia are heard
of until Macedonia, having subdued all the rest of Greece,
makes conquest of the Persian Empire.

About this time (385-382) two of Athens’s most re-
nowned devotees and one of her greatest enemies came
into the world: Demosthenes, the last great product of
Athenian genius; Aristotle, the Macedonian, who became
her last great philosopher; and Philip of Macedon, who
was to place his royal foot upon her unwilling neck.
Almost fifty years of independence still remained to
Athens, a half-century which will always be remembered
as one of the most remarkable in her history for those
things in which she had so long excelled. Philos-
ophy and art, flourishing side by side on the same
stalk, reached the ripeness of full bloom, the fruit of
which was not to reach maturity for nearly two thousand
years.

Plato returned to the city of his youth imbued with
the doctrines of the Pythagoreans and other schools with
which he had come in touch during his long sojourn in
other lands. He opened a school, not far from the
Academy, and near the house of Timon the misanthrope,
who bore his occasional visits “with benignity.” From
330 THE STORY OF ATHENS

his teaching in the Academy, he was the first to receive
the title of Academic Philosopher.

Isocrates comes back from Chios and also opens a
school—one for the teaching of rhetoric. He wins great
favor at once, and soon has a hundred pupils at one thou-
sand drachmae each. Besides this, he derives consider-
able income from writing orations for other people: the
King of Cyprus was said to have paid him the enormous
sum of twenty talents for one of them. Both Plato and
Isocrates were writing works which are among our most
precious treasures of Greek literature. Plato at once took
up the defense of his late master, Socrates, and in his
“Apology” vindicated the martyred sage before the
world. Almost all of his works are in the form of dia-
logue, in which Socrates is often made the principal
speaker. In the mouth of the great teacher of men Plato
puts many of his own philosophical theories, clothing
them with a grace and vivacity that made his style the
most admired of any writer who has attempted to ex-
pound the enigmas of philosophy. He was a poet-philos-
opher, “gracing the thoughts of a Socrates with the ex-
uberant imagery of a Homer.” This is hardly the place
to discuss the doctrines of the academic philosophy. It
is enough to say that Plato insisted upon the non-reality
of matter; he adhered to the Socratic teaching that virtue
is a science—a matter of instruction; he believed in the
immortality of the soul, and in future punishments and
rewards. But he applied philosophy to the conduct of
every-day affairs; and in his ‘Republic’ sets forth a
scheme for political and private life which will ever be
famous as the first Utopia. The state he would make
supreme. All individual interests are to be merged in
the commonwealth, and all domestic relations are to be
sacrificed on the altar of the state. Education and em-
ployment are to be under the state’s supervision, and a
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY 331

community of wives and of property is to do away with
all domestic troubles. Sincerity, frankness, and purity of
ideal make up the tenor of Plato’s writings, and had
much to do with their popularity among the Greeks and
even among the early Christian doctors. Isocrates’s lit-
erary productions were of quite different character; he
was by profession a rhetorician, and his extant writings
are all in the form of orations. He was an ardent lover
of his country, imbued with pride in her greatness. His
most famous oration was a panegyric upon Athens in
which he extolled the services of his native city to Greece
through all her history. It is said that Isocrates spent ten
years in perfecting this oration, so complete and highly
finished was his style. Another of Socrates’s pupils, re-
siding in Athens, was Aristippus, who observed the tenets
of the Socratic doctrine by opposites. To him, whatever
conduced to pleasure was accounted virtue. He lived
in luxury and the indulgence of his passions; yet prided
himself on being able to extract pleasure from prosperity
and adversity alike. There was no shame, he said, in
indulgence, but in not being able to abstain. Aristippus
seems to have been one of the wits of his time. When
Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, asked him how it was that
the philosophers were forever attending upon the great,
while the great were never found waiting upon the phi-
losophers, he replied: ‘‘Because physicians always attend
the sick.” One day a friend boasted to him of having
read a great deal, and he remarked: “It is no sign of
health to eat more than you can digest.”’ Hus doctrine
that pleasure was the greatest good and pain the chief
of evils was reduced to a system by his grandson, who
bore his name. It was called the Cyrenaic philosophy
because Aristippus had come to Athens from Cyrene.

In this varied harvest of thinkers and teachers, which
had sprung up from the seed sown by Socrates, there
332 THE STORY OF ATHENS

were many curious and interesting personalities. Per-
haps none was more “peculiar” or amusing than that of
Diogenes the Cynic, the man of the tub, who went about
with a lantern in broad daylight looking for a “man.”
Diogenes represented a reaction against the pride, the
luxury, and effeminacy that had come upon the Athenians
since the “good old days,’ and he took the most ex-
traordinary means of showing it. He was not a direct
disciple of Socrates, but a curious product of the Cyno-
sarges, where he had been a pupil of Socrates’s follower,
Antisthenes. He was never of attractive appearance,
and when at first he applied for admission to the gym-
nasium, Antisthenes roughly drove him from the door,
threatening him with his staff. “Strike, if you will,”
replied the would-be philosopher; “you cannot find a
stick hard enough to drive me away so long as you speak
that which I wish to hear.’”’, When he had completed his
course at the Cynosarges, he was a cynic gone mad. With
utter contempt for the common amenities of life, he
dressed in unseemly rags and slept either in the open col-
onnades of the market, or in a tub which stood inside the
inclosure of the Metroum. It was also said that he car-
ried a tub with him from place to place. He taught in
the streets and in the agora, speaking with painful plain-
ness and often with disgusting vulgarity, but with apt and
ready wit. Hus great cry was for a ‘man’; children he
had seen in Sparta, and women in Athens, but a man he
had never found. He loved to ridicule Plato and the
dignified learning of the Academy. Plato had defined
man, so the story went, as a two-legged animal without
feathers. Diogenes plucked a fowl and set it loose in the
grove of the Academy, saying, “Behold one of Plato's
men!” Once, while Plato was giving a splendid enter-
tainment, the Cynic appeared unbidden and stamped his
dirty feet upon the rich carpets of the banquet-hall, crying,
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY © 333

“Thus I trample on the pride of Plato!” The great
academician, without wincing at the remark or even at
the soiled carpets, calmly replied: “But with greater
pride, O Diogenes.’ Perfectly insensible to insults, a
voluntary outcast, unkempt, grumbling, and surly, he
truly led the life of a dog; and it is no wonder that his
system of philosophy, which was called the Cynic School,
was later supposed to have derived its name directly from
the Greek word for dog, though it had really come from
Cynosarges, the sanctuary of the “White Bitch,” the
name of the gymnasium where it originated.

The divergences between the different religious sects
of our day cannot present contrasts half so confusing to
the youth who would follow a life of piety, as did the
contradictions among the schools of thought to the young
Athenian of the generation following the death of Soc-
rates. Each of these schools claimed descent, more or
less remote, from the unwritten teachings of Socrates;
yet here we have Plato, the elegant and honorable gentle-
man, insisting on the virtue of temperance and justice;
Aristippus, the voluptuary, extolling the virtue of plea-
sure; and Diogenes, the tramp, disregarding the simplest
decencies of society, and finding fault with everybody.
Speculation had run wild, and all faith in the old reli-
gion of Greece had been thrown to the winds.

Under the administration of Conon and his noble son,
Timotheus, the political affairs of Athens had taken an
upward course again. Iphicrates was sent with an army
to Egypt to aid Pharnabazus, the Persian satrap, in the
suppression of a revolt. In 378, Timotheus and Iphi-
crates were elected generals and provided with a large
fleet which was to cruise about among the islands, and
from one coast town to another, on the peaceful mission
of establishing the second Attic naval league. Timo-
theus was especially gifted as a diplomat and succeeded
334 THE STORY OF ATHENS

in enlisting the support of a large number of allies. The
terms of the new league were quite similar to those of the
old Attic-Delian naval league: each of the allied states
was to be independent politically, and the affairs which
they had in common were to be administered by a body of
deputies meeting at Athens, where the treasury was lo-
cated. Three years later, Timotheus was given command
of sixty triremes, with which he was to harry the coasts
of Peloponnesus and visit various islands in the cause
of the confederacy. In this undertaking he was again
successful, and by the end of the year the new league was
materially strengthened. In several encounters with
Spartan fleets, he was so successful that Sparta was glad
to sue for peace. The general was then recalled, but be-
fore he reached Piraeus he offended the Spartans in some
way and war was again declared. In 373 the Spartan
allies had again seized upon the island of Corcyra, and
the same circumstances that had forced the outbreak of
the Peloponnesian war sixty years before now called the
Athenian fleets from the Aegean to the Ionian Sea. Ti-
motheus and Iphicrates were in command. The former
seems to have had the responsibility of the undertaking
upon his shoulders; for, while cruising about among the
allied islands, raising funds and men, he was deprived of
his command on the ground of too long delay. Iphicrates
then sailed to Corcyra, defeated the fleet of Syracusan
triremes which Dionysius had sent to join the allies of the
Spartans, and brought the island over to the Attic con-
federacy. Meanwhile, Timotheus was brought to trial
in Athens, acquitted, and promptly put in command
of two successive expeditions, one to Egypt and one to
Asia Minor. Both were highly successful, redounding
to the fame of the general and adding strength to the
position of Athens. On the second expedition he at-
tacked Samos, as a side issue, on his own initiative, and
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY 335

brought that great island, which had revolted during the
late war, once more to Athenian allegiance. It must have
seemed like the old days of Cimon and Pericles in Athens,
to hear again of conquest and of Athenian prowess on
land and sea. This son of Conon was a Greek soldier
of the old school, who would have fought well among the
heroes of Plataea; he combined the fighting qualities of
Cimon with the justness of Aristides, and seems to have
been trusted and respected by the allies of Athens as the
founder of the first naval league had been. So great was
his reputation in the city that the Athenians erected a
bronze group of Timotheus and his father, Conon, upon
the Acropolis,—the first statues to be so exalted since the
group of the tyrannicides.

But another and still greater actor was now preparing
for the political stage of Athens. In one of the gymna-
siums was the boy Demosthenes, who had been left an or-
phan at the early age of seven. Demosthenes the father
had left a considerable property, consisting of real estate
and a large manufactory of bedsteads and cutlery, amount-
ing in all to about fourteen talents (fourteen thousand
dollars), a moderate fortune in those days, and had made
a will appointing three of his friends as executors and
guardians of the boy and his little sister. The will fur-
ther provided that one of the executors should marry the
widow, that another should marry the daughter when she
reached a suitable age, giving each a small dowry, and
that the third should have an interest in a certain portion
of the remainder until the son should come of age. De-
mosthenes was given the advantage of an education suit-
able to a youth of his rank and fortune. He is believed
to have been a pupil of the orator Issaeus. As soon as
he was old enough to understand legal affairs, he inquired
into the matter of his father’s will, to discover that his
guardians had not only failed to comply with the require-
336 THE STORY OF ATHENS

ments of the will concerning the marriages, but had ap-
propriated large portions of the estate to themselves, leav-
ing for him a patrimony of only seventy minae (twelve
hundred dollars) instead of the original fortune, largely
increased, as it should have been. In 366, Demosthenes
became of age and at once instituted proceedings for the
recovery of his patrimony; and though the court of ar-
bitration before which the case was tried decided twice
in his favor, the matter was not settled for two years.
Then the young orator brought an action against one of
the guardians alone; he singled out Aphobus, who was
apparently the richest of the three, and prepared a most
careful case, modelled upon the pleas of his great teacher
Issaeus. The suit was decided in favor of Demosthenes,
and Aphobus was compelled to pay over ten talents
(about ten thousand dollars) of all his ill-gotten gain.
The first oratorical efforts of Demosthenes, which are
preserved to us in the orations composed for the prose-
cution of the guardians, though they lack the force and
fire which the greatest of all orators afterward put into
his speeches, are still wonderful productions for a youth of
twenty or twenty-one years, remarkable for clearness of
statement, unerring logic, and a thorough understanding
of the legal principles involved. Those who heard these
maiden efforts of Demosthenes were persuaded of the
uncommon gifts of the young orator, and he was highly
complimented by the archon and other dignitaries upon
the soundness of his judgment, the clearness of his rea-
soning powers, and the perfection of his style; so that he
felt greatly encouraged to take up public speaking as a
career, and was finally persuaded to do this by Satyrus
the actor, who undertook to give him lessons in declama-
tion. Although Demosthenes had all the mental gifts
of a great orator, he had physical impediments which
had to be overcome before his success upon the bema
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY — 337

could be complete. His voice was not strong, and it is
said that his enunciation was defective; some writers even
go so far as to say that he stammered. It was in over-
coming these natural obstacles that we hear of him de-
claiming with pebbles in his mouth, reciting as he ran up-
hill to strengthen his voice, and speaking out over the
waves from the shore at Phalerum to accustom himself
to the noise and confusion of the assembly. His hard
work and determination deserved all the rewards that
the near and distant future had in store for him. It is
said that, when he began his career, he would shut himself
up for days, spending the whole time in copying out Thu-
cydides, in order to perfect the foundations of his own
style. But Demosthenes’s power lay not so much in his
logic, nor in his method of presenting facts, nor in the
style which he acquired, as in his splendid devotion to his
native land, in his complete forgetfulness of self and his
enthusiasm for the cause which he was advocating; but
the patriotic side of his oratory was not called forth until
later in his career. He gained the favor of the people
on his merits, as an orator of the prevailing school.
His first triumphs in the assembly came ten years after
he had won his first case. These years had been spent
in the severest kind of training and hard work, and they
had not been wasted; for, on mounting the bema, De-
mosthenes found that he could play upon the vast as-
sembly as an accomplished musician plays his instrument.
No one had ever so swayed the ecclesia of Athens since
the days of Pericles; but the new orator was a far
greater political speaker than the old orator of the Golden
Age; his wonderful adaptability in suiting his style to the
occasion, his translucent clearness, his passionate appeals
to the feelings, and, above all, his pure and noble senti-
ment, made him the first orator of his own or any other
age. His private life harmonized perfectly with his pub-

22
338 THE STORY OF ATHENS

lic utterances, upright, noble, a little austere, perhaps; but
it must have been difficult for a man in Athens at that
time to mediate between folly and austerity, for we find
that most of the truly great men of Athens lived a life of
serene dignity, apart from the life of the times.

About the time that Demosthenes was preparing to
plead his first case, Aristotle came to Athens. The fame
of Plato’s school and of his public teaching in the Acad-
emy had spread throughout the Grecian world, and the
young Macedonian student had come to place himself
under the direct influence of the great philosopher. His
student career was brilliant from the first, and Plato
called him the “intellect of his school.’ Aristotle was
of noble Macedonian stock; his father was private physi-
cian to King Amyntas, the father of Philip, and through
his influence at the Macedonian court this future philoso-
pher was able to do Athens a good turn when the time
came; for Macedonia, young, vigorous, and alert, was
rapidly outgrowing the semi-barbarism in which she had
lived for centuries, and was reaching forth to Greece for
enlightenment and culture. For fifty years her kings had
encouraged poets and artists from all parts to settle at
their court. Sophocles and Euripides had both made
prolonged visits to Macedonia under royal patronage,
and now the Macedonian youths were being sent abroad
to be educated. Philip, having set aside the claims of
his little nephew, Amyntas, had now established himself
firmly upon the throne. He had received all the ad-
vantages of Hellenic training and education at Thebes,
and when he assumed the royal title it was with the full
intention of making his kingdom a power, if not the
first power, in Greece. He turned his attention at once
to the reorganization of the army. Hellenic culture had
done its work in Macedonia. In addition to the desire
for knowledge, it had awakened an ambition for power.
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY — 339

She had little to lose and everything to gain. She had
the advantage of youthful strength and energy which
had not suffered from long generations of luxurious liv-
ing. It was thus that Macedonia, in the person of Philip,
became a real menace to the liberties of Athens and of
all Greece. Although, at the time of which we are speak-
ing, there was no anticipation in Athens of the impending
danger from the north, it is interesting to notice that
while Philip, perhaps unwittingly, was preparing the
doom of Athenian freedom in his Macedonian home,
Demosthenes, with equal ignorance of the future, was
fitting himself to resist the coming danger with the
mighty force of his eloquence; and though the contest
was to be an unequal one, and Demosthenes was to lose in
the end, the gigantic efforts of the orator were to re-
dound none the less to his undying fame and to the glory
of Athens.

In the interval which remained before the encroach-
ments of Philip, three wars were waged, which, though
they engaged the military activity of Athens, had little
lasting influence upon the city or the life of her citizens.
In 360, Athens went to war with the Olynthians for the
possession of Amphipolis, a quest which had called forth
her arms on at least two previous occasions, and for the
first time came into collision with the forces of Macedonia.
The undertaking was not successful; but two years later,
when the Thebans had sent an army into Euboea and
Athens had been called upon for aid, the Athenian arms
were crowned with success. Within five days after the ap-
peal had come, Timotheus and Iphicrates were in Euboea,
with fleet and army, and in less than a month the Thebans
had been forced to evacuate. In the next year came a
revolt of the allies, Chios, Rhodes, and Byzantium, and
the so-called Social War followed. At about the same
time the Phocians seized Delphi and the Sacred War
340 THE STORY OF ATHENS

began. The Social War saw the end of Timotheus’s bril-
liant career. He was appointed general with Iphicrates
and a man named Chares. They agreed to begin opera-
tions with the fleet at Byzantium; whereupon the Chians
and Rhodians raised the siege of Samos and came to meet
the Athenians. All preparations were made for a battle,
but just before the engagement a storm came up. Timo-
theus and Iphicrates decided to defer action. Chares,
on the other hand, would not listen to counsel, and gave
orders to his ships to move forward. They were imme-
diately driven back, and Chares in a rage sent messengers
to Athens, accusing his colleagues of desertion and of
having accepted bribes from the allies. The two generals
were promptly recalled and brought to trial. Iphi-
crates was acquitted, but Timotheus, whose pride had
been an offense to the populace, was condemned to pay a
fine of one hundred talents, the largest fine ever imposed
at Athens. Considering the good name which this gen-
eral had always borne, and the evil reputation of Chares,
there is little doubt of his innocence, but he retired to
Chalcis, where he died soon afterward. After his death,
his son Conon compromised with the state by paying ten
talents to be used for completing the restoration of the
walls which his grandfather had begun. In 355, the
wealthy orator Isocrates was elected trierarch, but re-
fused to accept the office. He was severely criticized for
his niggardliness, for the office was one requiring large
outlays of private funds. The following year, Athens
made peace with the former allies, and Demosthenes, hay-
ing already received the title of “rhetor,’’ was made a
member of the boulé. Again the lot for the trierarchy
fell upon Isocrates; this time he accepted and discharged
his duties with great credit and splendid liberality, thus
regaining his popularity. Demosthenes, having been
brought into public prominence, celebrated his election
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY 341

to the ancient Council of Five Hundred by generously of-
fering to bear the expense of the choregia of his tribe,
which for two years had been unable to furnish the usual
share in the celebrations of the Dionysiac festivals. Now
Demosthenes had a bitter enemy, a man by the name of
Midias, whose jealousy was so aroused by the public
spirit and consequent popularity of the young orator that
he broke into the shop where Demosthenes had ordered
some golden crowns for his chorus, and attempted not
only to destroy the crowns, but to beat the unoffending
goldsmith. Demosthenes let this display of spleen pass
unnoticed, but when he appeared in the theater to perform
the sacred duties of his office as choregus, clad in the
official robes, he was attacked by this Midias, who beat
him and tore the sacred vestments. The orator was re-
strained by the solemnity of the occasion from retaliating
on the spot; but brought an action against the offender
for assault. Midias attempted to intimidate the object of
his hatred, but without success; however, the suit was
eventually called off, on Midias’s payment of thirty minae,
a circumstance which provided other enemies of Demos-
thenes with grounds for the reproach that he had taken
money for blows. From this time, however, Demosthenes
enjoyed the highest public esteem; his orations became
widely known and his debates upon political questions car-
ried great weight among the people. He was presently
given the distinction of the leadership of the state depu-
tation which Athens sent to the festival of the Nemean
Zeus, and for twenty years to come remained the central
figure in Athenian affairs.

Much has been said in this chapter of the men of Ath-
ens and their deeds during the first half of the fourth
century; but what of the monuments, what of art, in
the early years of Athens’s afternoon? Architecture, one
might say, had reached a period of rest. There is but one
342 THE STORY OF ATHENS

important building which is assigned with certainty to
this period: the colonnade of Zeus, which was built on the
west side of the agora, opposite the painted colonnade,
and added one more beautiful monument to the “famed
market-place of splendid ornament.” But sculpture and
painting flourished, even as in the days of Pericles, and
both branches of art reached the culmination of their de-
velopment. If the age of Pericles is called the Golden Era
of Athenian art, the period which followed may be styled
the Age of Gold and Ivory; for the art of Athens, like
the image of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, was part weak
and part strong. To the purity and perfection of Phi-
dian art had been added a delicate softness, verging upon
effeminacy, which brought with it a tenderness of senti-
ment, a feeling of spirituality that appealed to the hearts
of men, where the older art had appealed only to their
minds. Scopas, Praxiteles, and Euphranor are names
to conjure with; these three men worked in neighbor-
ing studios in the city of Athens at the middle of the
fourth century. But let us go back for a moment to the
beginning of the century, to names less great than these,
that the artistic succession may not be broken. Cephi-
sodotus was an Athenian, the father and master of Praxi-
teles ; he may be considered as a sculptor of the transition.
We have a copy of one of his works in the Munich group
of ‘“Iréne and the infant Plutus,” the original of which
stood in the agora at Athens. It shows all the grandeur,
nobility, and purity of the older school; but has taken on
an expression of deeper spiritual feeling and of pathos,
which are not found in the works of Phidias and Myron.
This sculptor worked chiefly in marble and seems to
have made a specialty of religious subjects. The art of
engraving had come greatly into vogue at this time, and
we hear of Mys engraving the shield of Athena Proma-
chos, which Phidias had left quite plain, from designs
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY — 343

by the painter Parrhasius of Ephesus. This Parrha-
sis, by the way, was an artist of considerable importance.
He had come over from Ephesus to paint a picture of
the Athenian Demos, which seems to have been repre-
sented by a group; for Pliny describes it as depicting a
great variety of passions, such as anger, injustice, incon-
stancy, together with kindness, compassion, baseness, and
folly, which in a single face or form could have been but
a confusing caricature. It was Parrhasius who became
the great rival of Zeuxis and painted the famous curtain
which deceived the other painter, who had boasted that
the birds came to peck at his picture of some grapes. He
became probably the most conceited man of his time.
Assuming the title of King of Art, he wore a diadem of
gold and went about robed in the purple of royalty. He
called himself Habrodiaetus,—the high-liver,—and_ re-
ceived the nickname of Rhabdodiaetus,—the brush-man.
No sculptor, architect, or poet had ever made such a fool
of himself; but great painters were less common than
masters in the other arts, and it was probably the fact
that he was a “rara avis in terris’” that made him so
proud of himself.

It is a great misfortune that Roman greed and the
medieval lime-kiln have deprived us of almost all ex-
amples of the work of the two greatest sculptors of the
period of full bloom in Attic sculpture. Of the works
of Praxiteles, the most famous of modern discoveries
has given us one masterpiece,—the “‘Hermes of Olympia,”
—for which the world is duly grateful. Of the numerous
statues of Scopas, nothing has come down to us but a few
fragments and mutilated heads, and we are thrown al-
most entirely upon the writings of the ancients for our
estimate of his style. There is a somewhat mutilated
head in the National Museum at Athens which con-
forms very closely to the style of Scopas as we know
344 THE STORY OF ATHENS

it in the famous sculptures from Halicarnassus, and of
which so eminent an authority as M. Collignon says that
one would not be too rash if he ascribed it to the hand
of the master himself. A photograph of the head is
given herewith. It was found
in Athens, on the. southern
slope of the Acropolis, and
for that reason is of special
interest to us. Despite its
injured condition, one may
readily appreciate its beauty,
the graceful poise of the
head, the soft, delicate lines
of the brow and cheek, the
tender expression of the eyes,
and the life-like parted
mouth, which, though bro-
ken, looks as if it were about
to sing. It was at the sight
of Scopas’s “Raging Bac-
chante” that the Athenian
orator Callistratus, the friend of Demosthenes, was struck
speechless; so overcome was he by the passionate facial
expression of a soul stung to madness. Warmth of feel-
ing, delicacy of expression, and passionate excitement,
when it was required, seem to have been within the power
of this sculptor’s chisel. His calmer inspiration seems
to have found expression in his “Apollo Kitharoidos,”
a statue which he made for the temple of Nemesis at
Rhamnus, representing the god of beauty and of song
rapturously singing to his own accompaniment upon the
cithara. The statue of the same name now to be seen in
the Vatican at Rome may give us a shadowgraph of his
famous masterpiece.

Praxiteles, like Scopas, devoted himself largely to stat-

 

Scopaic Head, found in
Athens.
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY § 345

ues of the gods.

His works seem to have been inspired

by the ideal beauty of youth. He could idealize the virile
strength of young manhood, as we see by his ‘“‘Hermes,”

or the tender
beauty of pam-
pered boyhood,
as is illustrated
in copies of his
“Apollo Saurok-
tonos’’—the liz-
ard-killer.

The youthful
athletic type was
equally well
treated by his
marvelous ge-
nius. An inter-
esting illustra-
tion of this class
of work is per-
haps to be found
in a remarkable
statue recently
discovered in
Athens, consist-
ing of a torso
and a perfectly
preserved head,

 

Athletic Statue, of the School of Praxiteles,
found in Athens.

a little less than life-size. The figure is robust and per-
fectly proportioned, yet there is a delicate softness in the
contours and in the treatment of the flesh that compares
very favorably with this sculptor’s treatment of the fa-
mous statue of Hermes. The spirituality of the some-
what pensive expression of the face is also in keeping
with this great sculptor’s method of putting sentiment
346 THE STORY OF ATHENS

into his faces. This statue is certainly anterior to the
school that followed immediately after that of Praxi-
teles, and if not of sufficient importance as a subject to
have been the work of the master, it may certainly have
been executed by one of his pupils.

Not less than five figures of Aphrodite were executed
by him, one of which—the famous statue at Cnidus—
was reckoned among the wonders of the world. He
also carved a beautiful statue of his mistress, Phryne,
to contrast ideal, divine beauty with the perfection of
earthly loveliness. His treatment of the boy-god, Eros,
was a new departure and a revelation to the artists of
his time. The god of love was given a character of
soft and almost effeminate beauty. He is no longer the
prankish, cruel, flint-hearted boy, but a dreamy, volup-
tuous creature who wounds “not with the arrow, but with
the eye.” His satyrs were of the same general type as
the “Eros” and of equally bewitching beauty, as we may
judge by the “Marble Faun” and other. well-known
copies. It is said that Praxiteles, wishing to present one
of his statues to Phryne, gave her her choice between
“Eros” and the “Satyr,” refusing to tell her which was
his own favorite. She delayed making her choice for
a few days, and in the meantime arranged to have an
alarm given that Praxiteles’s studio was on fire. “Have
they saved my ‘Eros’?” was the great artist’s first excla-
mation, and Phryne, on the strength of that, chose the
statue of Love.

The third member of this great group of artists was the
painter-sculptor of the Isthmus, Euphranor. He was
more of a painter than a sculptor, although he is known
to have worked in marble. His most important work in
Athens would seem to have been the decoration of the
new colonnade of Zeus, in which he painted a large
composition representing the twelve Olympian gods with
THE AGE OF GOLD AND IVORY 347

Theseus, Demos, and the People as one piece, and the
battle of Mantinea as another. We have an interesting
commentary on this artist’s work in a comparison which
he himself made between his own figure of Theseus and
that of Parrhasius, which, he said, looked as if it had
been fed on roses, while his own showed that it had been
fed on beef; which may be taken to mean that Euphranor
had found a deeper, more realistic flesh-tint and could
give a greater effect of rotundity to his drawing. An
ancient critic of his picture of the twelve gods admires
Hera’s hair and says that Poseidon was more majestic
than Zeus.
XI

THE AGE OF THE ORATORS

“Wherefore the goddess, who wasa lover of both war and wisdom,
selected and first settled that spot that was most likely to produce

men likest to herself.”

 

Demosthenes.
A Head found in Athens.

PLATO.

IN the year 347, Plato bade
his last farewell to the olive
groves of the Academy,
where he had disseminated
truth and encouraged virtue
for nearly forty years. The
closing days of his long and
eventful life were spent in
tranquillity, in his favorite
haunts, still surrounded by a
large number of disciples.
He had spent some time in
revising his earlier works,
and had dedicated a sanctu-
ary and an altar to the Muses

beneath the shade of his beloved Academy. The Athe-
nians gave him a splendid funeral, says Olympiodorus,
and carved this couplet on his tomb:

Apollo created both Asclepius and Plato; the former that
he might save men’s bodies, the latter that he might save

their souls.

On the death of the great philosopher, his two most bril-
liant pupils, Aristotle and Nenocrates, betook themselves

348
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 349

to Sicily. Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, succeeded him
as president of the Academy. A little later we learn of
Aristotle returning to his native Macedonia, at the re-
quest of King Philip, in order to take charge of the edu-
cation of the young prince Alexander—a step natural and
simple enough in itself, but one fraught with great impor-
tance to Athens, as it turned out. Theophrastus, another
important pupil of Plato, seems to have remained in
Athens, where he not only continued his philosophic stud-
ies, but took a great interest in the politics of the city,
although he was by birth a Lesbian.

For ten years Demosthenes, like a guard on the watch-
tower, had kept his eyes turned toward the north. He was
suspicious of the designs of Philip, while each day was
bringing substance to the ground of his suspicion. Philip
had taken Amphipolis, Potidaea, and other towns on the
Thracian coast. The Sacred War had given him an ex-
cuse for bringing an army into Greece. Demosthenes
had not only the keen perception to see through the designs
of the Macedonian king, but the courage to place himself
and all the powers of his oratory in opposition to them.
It was in these efforts that he delivered his great series
of orations against the encroachments of Philip, known
as the ‘“‘Philippics,’ which brought out all the patriotic
ardor and lofty devotion of this greatest of all orators.
The first of these orations had been delivered in 352.
Three years later, Philip attacked the Olynthians, who
were now bound to Athens by a treaty. The unfortunate
Olynthians cried to Athens for help, and Demosthenes,
by his great Olynthiac orations, stirred the people to make
every endeavor on their behalf. All efforts failed, how-
ever; Philip took the city, destroyed it, and sold the in-
habitants into slavery. The king then signified his desire
to make an alliance with Athens. Demosthenes and Aes-
chines, one of the leading politicians of the time, were

 
350 THE STORY OF ATHENS

members of the embassy which Athens sent to open
negotiations. Philip appears to have evaded the demand
of the Athenian ambassadors that Phocis, then an ally of
Athens, should be included in the terms of the treaty.
The embassy returned and was quickly followed by one
from Philip. The alliance was discussed at two meetings
of the ecclesia, and when the terms were finally satis-
factory to Athens, they were agreed to, and the Macedo-
nian ambassadors took the solemn oath customary on such
occasions ; but the treaty would not be binding upon Mace-
donia until the oath had been administered to Philip.
Demosthenes, with Aeschines and others, was sent to
Philip to secure the oath which would make the alliance
an assured fact. They found Philip absent, on an expedi-
tion to the Bosporos, and waited three months for his
return. When they finally met him he deferred the rati-
fication of the treaty and set out for Thessaly, followed by
the Athenian ambassadors. The oath was not taken until
Phocis was almost in sight, and then the Phocians were
omitted from the treaty. On the return of the embassy,
Demosthenes accused his colleagues of having accepted
bribes, and, from that moment, Athens was divided into
two rival factions. Demosthenes took the lead of the
anti-Macedonian party and strove to the utmost of his
powers to arouse Athens to a full sense of her danger.
There were many good citizens in Athens who could not
believe that Philip had designs upon the liberties of
Greece, and were for maintaining an alliance. Among
these was old Isocrates, who believed that an alliance with
Macedonia could not but strengthen the position of Ath-
ens. But Philip had already conquered Phocis and was
continuing his encroachments in Acarnania, Thrace, and
the Peloponnesus. Demosthenes was unwearied in his
labors to thwart his plans, and the second and third Phi-
lippics were noble efforts in behalf of Grecian liberty.
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 351

Philip’s intrigues reached a culminating point when his
partizans elected him to the command of the Amphic-
tyonic forces. He at once took advantage of the situa-
tion and marched with a large army to Elatea. The first
real threat had been made. The news reached Athens
at evening; consternation filled the city; Demosthenes
was on the Pnyx by daybreak and, in one of his greatest
speeches, depicted the situation to the Athenian populace.
His plea for safety was an immediate alliance with Thebes.
The assembly was carried away by his words and filled
with confidence in his wisdom. The proposal was carried
by acclamation. Demosthenes set out at once for Thebes,
where the alliance was concluded, and the allied armies
marched northward without delay.

Then followed the terrible battle of Chaeronea, in
’ which the forces of Athens and Thebes were most disas-
trously defeated. The news brought Athens to the
verge of despair. When the word came to Isocrates, his
eyes were fully opened to the designs of Philip, whom
he had trusted as a noble prince though a barbarian; it
was too much for his advanced years, and he fell dead at
the blow. Demosthenes, on the other hand, did not lose
heart, and put forth every effort to calm the people, who
showed that their confidence in him was not shaken, by
choosing him to deliver the oration for those who had
fallen on the field of Chaeronea. This sad duty accom-
plished, he was elected to superintend the strengthening
of the fortifications in anticipation of an immediate at-
tack. There were those, however, who were opposed to
Demosthenes and his policy. This faction, headed by
Aeschines, did all they could to vex and harass the un-
tiring orator. To bring these annoying demonstrations
of spleen to a head and test the feelings of the people, a
friend of Demosthenes named Ctesiphon proposed in the
assembly that the orator be presented with a golden
352 THE STORY OF ATHENS

crown, in acknowledgment of his services to the state, in
the theater at the coming festival of Dionysus. It was
customary, before putting the matter to vote, to leave the
question open for a few days, during which time it was
possible to prosecute the mover of the question for illegal
proposal. Aeschines took advantage of this provision of
the law to arrest the proceedings by prosecuting Ctesi-
phon, aiming his indictment, of course, at Demosthenes.
The trial, which was to call the orator to account for the
whole of his political career, was unaccountably postponed
for eight years.

Philip, for some reason, did not follow up the advan-
tage of his victory at Chaeronea by an immediate assault
upon Athens, and the expected blow was awaited for two
long years. At the end of that time Athens breathed a
sigh of relief on hearing that Philip had been assassinated
at the marriage-feast of his daughter.

The reviving hopes which that sigh of relief had her-
alded were soon to be crushed when the Athenians and all
the Greek world learned of what sort of stuff young Alex-
ander was made. Ina rising of the states which followed
a rumor of the young king’s death, Thebes prepared to
throw off the Macedonian yoke, and Demosthenes sent a
supply of arms, at his own expense, to aid the cause; but
Alexander, far from being dead, appeared before the un-
fortunate city and razed it to the ground, sparing only
the house of Pindar. What had Athens to expect if she
showed untoward longings for independence? But one
may readily believe that a conqueror who would spare the
house of a poet on sentimental grounds could easily be
persuaded by his friend and teacher to deal gently with
a city in which that friend had made his fame. Aristotle
at once returned to Athens and had the Lyceum assigned
to him by the state, and began his great career as a teacher
of philosophy with such pupils as Theophrastus among the
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 353

large number of scholars who assembled to hear the wis-
dom of this greatest disciple of Plato. The new president
of the famous gymnasium gave two courses of lectures
each day. In the forenoon he lectured to a more select
circle of hearers upon the more abstruse doctrines of phi-
losophy, physics, and dialectics. In the afternoon a more
promiscuous class listened to discourses upon sophistic
topics, rhetoric, and politics. Among other innovations,
the distinguished Macedonian introduced the fashion of
walking up and down the shady paths of the gymnasium
while lecturing, instead of sitting as other lecturers were
accustomed to do. This habit of his gave the name of
peripatetic to his school of thought.

The Academy was presided over by Xenocrates, who
had returned from abroad, Speusippus having retired
from the presidency. The haunt of Plato lost none of its
popularity under the management of its new director, and
the olive groves were thronged with enthusiastic scholars.
One day a wild and dissipated youth named Polemon, in
a drunken revel at the head of a boisterous band, burst in
upon the classic quiet of the gymnasium while Xenocrates
was, by chance, lecturing on temperance. The lecturer
did not pause in his discourse, despite the interruption,
and Polemon, in a lucid moment, heard something that
arrested his distracted attention. Slowly he sank into a
seat and concentrated his mind upon the words of the
speaker. Presently he raised his hand and tore off the
garland which bound his locks; he heard the lecture to
the end, and from that day abandoned his profligate life
to become a devoted pupil of Xenocrates.

Ten years and more of peace and of virtual indepen-
dence remained for Athens, and although her politicians
did not rest from plotting new schemes for complete free-
dom from Macedon, the citizens enjoyed a life of calm

tranquillity. The fame of Athens for art and learning
23
354 THE STORY OF ATHENS

brought many visitors to the Piraeus. It is interesting
to read the impressions of a traveler in Athens at this
time, gleaned from a fragment of an unknown author.
It is like a leaf from the journal of a modern tourist:
“The city is not well supplied with water and has very
crooked streets on account of its antiquity. The houses
of the people are rather poor and insignificant; so that
a stranger would at first hardly believe that he was in
the celebrated city of Athens. But when he has beheld
the superb theater, the costly temple of Athena, called
the Parthenon, overhanging the theater; the great Olym-
pieum, which, though incomplete, fills the beholder with
astonishment by the grandeur of its plan; the three gym-
nasiums,—the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Cynosarges,
—all of them shaded with trees and covered with luxuri-
ant grass; having witnessed the haunts of philosophers,
the various schools and the festive amusements by which
care is driven away, he would have another impression
and would believe that this was really the famous city of
Athens. The hospitalities of the people make pleasant
the visit of a stranger. The city abounds with supplies
for every want and means for gratifying every desire.
The neighboring towns are but suburbs of Athens. The
citizens are quick to recognize the worth of any artist;
and though, among the people of Attica, there may be
busybodies and gossips, who spend their time in spying
out the life of strangers, yet the true Athenians are broad-
minded, simple in their manners, good friends, and able
critics. In fact, Athens excels other cities in art as other
cities excel the country in the means of enjoyment.”
These are the impressions made by Athens upon a man
of the world, a lover of city life with its manifold in-
terests and pleasures. Athens was indeed the city par
excellence for sight-seeing. It is not necessary to enu-
merate the splendid temples and the great buildings which
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 355

have already been described in these chapters, the glories
of which so delighted the writer of the above fragment;
there were many other wonders to be seen in Athens
which the passage quoted does not include. The agora,
for instance,—the center of Athenian life,—was, by itself,
an epitome of the history of Athens, full of beautiful
buildings and statues of the greatest historic interest. Its
open space, much longer than wide, began at the western
slope of the Areopagus and extended, we know not how
far, toward the north and east. On one side, part way
up the slope of the Areopagus, were the Metroum, the
Council House, and the Tholos, a circular structure with
a conical, tiled roof which the ancients called the ‘‘skias,”’
or umbrella, where the presidents of the Council of Five
Hundred dined each day at public expense. On the same
side, near the winding road which led up to the Acropolis,
were the famous statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton
—the Tyrannicides—and a long row of statues represent-
ing the eponymous heroes of the Attic tribes, where the
names of the youths drawn for military service were
posted, according to their tribes. On the east side of the
market the traveler would visit the painted colonnade to
see the celebrated pictures by Polygnotus. On the west
there seem to have been no less than three important
buildings. That farthest south was the temple of Pater-
nal Apollo, where the true-born Athenian children were
publicly introduced by their parents. Next to this tem-
ple stood the colonnade dedicated to Zeus of Freedom,
which had recently been decorated by the famous painter
Euphranor, and in which was a favorite corner where
Plato and his followers had often sat discussing philoso-
phy and the public questions of the day. The third build-
ing on the west side of the market-place was a colonnade
where the king archons sat. It was called the Royal Col-
onnade, and seems to have been a veritable museum: here
356 THE STORY OF ATHENS

were golden statues of the king archons, the sacred stone
on which oaths were taken, and a number of great chests
containing important public documents; among which,
besides Solon’s laws, which seem to have been moved
from the Prytaneum, there were Drakon’s Jaws on homi-
cide and, according to some accounts, the official copies of
the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In the
center of the agora was the Leocorium, where visitors
were shown the spot where the tyrant Hipparchus fell.
There were numerous altars about the agora, including, in
addition to the ancient Altar of the Twelve Gods, altars
of Mercy, Modesty, Rumor, and many others. Near the
painted colonnade was the famous bronze statue of
Hermes of the Market, and from this statue a long line of
Hermae which reached from the stoa poikile to the Royal
Colonnade, dividing the open space of the market into two
sections, one of which seems to have been devoted to mat-
ters of state, while the other was given over to business.
Above the market towered the Areopagus and the temple
of Ares, and higher still, against the sky, the mighty wall
of the Acropolis, the splendid colonnades of the Propylaea,
and the delicate outlines of the Nike temple, like a frozen
cloud against the blue. How wonderful and awe-inspir=
ing it must have been, and how delightful withal,—the
rising tiers of massive purple rock and glorious temples,
heaped up and up above the gay market, bright with col-
onnades, garlanded altars, and splendid statues; thronged
with well-built men and beautiful youths clad in soft dra-
peries of brilliant hues, chatting, laughing, buying and
selling, all in the sonorous tones of their Attic tongue!
Where else in the world’s history can we find such a
stage setting and such dramatis personac! On the other
side of the Areopagus, near the Eleusinium, on the west-
ern slope of the Acropolis was the temple of Ge and
Demeter Chloé, which is mentioned by Aristophanes,
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 357

and just below it the temples of Aphrodite Pandemos
and Themis. Still farther around, somewhere toward
the east of the Acropolis, was the temple of Ilithyia, which
Plato mentions.

It would seem as if the city of Athens were already as
perfect as monuments could make it; but this period of
rest under the reign of Alexander produced Lycurgus,
who ranks next to Pericles as an embellisher of the city.
Lycurgus was an orator, a partizan of Demosthenes, with
whom he had been sent on several embassies to King
Philip. He was greatly beloved by the people, who hon-
ored him by making him thrice the treasurer of the public
funds. He was also made superintendent of public works ;
and it was in this capacity that he left his most brilliant
record to posterity. Of temples and sanctuaries there was
already a wealth which amounted to embarrassment; but
the only enrichment that the Acropolis had received for
some time was a gift of twenty-six Persian shields, which
Alexander had presented to Athena Parthenos after the
battle of Granicus, and which had been used to adorn the
architrave of her temple. In festive architecture the city
did not equal a number of other Grecian cities. Her
theater was the same old structure of the days of the
tyrants, and there was no suitable place for the celebration
of public games. Many other cities had their stadiums
and hippodromes, but Athens still celebrated her festival
games on the fields of one of the gymnasiums. Lycurgus
was to remedy these deficiencies and made elaborate plans
for the reconstruction of the theater and the building of
a great stadium.

It is, of course, beyond the possibilities of archaeologi-
cal research to discover in what particulars the Dionysiac
theater required renovation at this time, or to what extent
the time-honored structure was remodeled by Lycurgus.
The questions of the date and the original form of the
358 THE, STORY, OF ATHENS

theater are subjects of great difficulty, over which pitched
battles among archaeologists have been waged almost
constantly since the location of the theater by Chandler
in 1860. The complete restoration by Lycurgus toward
the close of the fourth century B.c., the extensive alter-
ations of the structure under Roman rule, in the first
century B.c., and a third renovation in the third cen-
tury, together with the ruin caused by violence and
time, have left very little which can be definitely as-
signed to the original permanent theater of Aeschylus’s
time. Some authorities have gone so far as to say
that there was no stone theater—or at least no seats
of stone—before the time of Lycurgus, but this seems
hardly a tenable position when we consider the antiquity
of stone theaters in other cities of Greece of less impor-
tance than Athens, particularly as a dramatic center.
Athens was the city of Dionysus par excellence; her dram-
atists, her actors, her festival were the most famous in
all Greece; and it is difficult to believe that the ‘‘first per-
manent theater,” the theater in which Aeschylus, Sopho-
cles, and Euripides brought out their masterpieces, con-
sisted of nothing but a sloping bank of earth provided
with wooden benches. But, supposing that the theater
built in the seventieth Olympiad had been of stone
throughout, two hundred years of constant war, the
tramping of hundreds of thousands of boisterous feet, to
say nothing of the terrible months of the plague, during
which people were forced to live within the sanctuaries
of the gods, and the times of war and tumult when the
thirty tyrants browbeat the citizens in the theater with
a Spartan army at their backs: all this would have tended
to put the old theater in sore need of repair, and we may
believe that Lycurgus altered the original form of the
building only in minor details. What the orator found
in the way of a theater we may only conjecture; but what
 

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Plan of the Theater and Surrounding Buildings.

 
360 THE SlORY OF ATHENS

he left may be more easily determined. The Attic theater,
as we have seen before, consisted of three general divi-
sions: the koilon, or auditorium ; the orchestra, or dancing
circle, around two thirds of which the koilon curved;
and the skene, the stage building, which closed the re-
maining third of the circle. The koilon of the theater
of Athens is slightly irregular in plan. Its outer curve,
after describing two thirds of a circle, is broken out into
almost parallel lines; while the innermost curve of seats
—that about the orchestra—takes the form of a semi-
circle with ends prolonged in parallel lines. This great
curved hollow was partly excavated and partly built.
Two retaining walls, rising by steps from the level of the
orchestra to that of the highest seats, marked the ends of
the koilon, and at either side the outer curve was sustained
by a heavy wall. From the top of the excavated portion
and the augmenting wall a filling of earth and stone was
graded down to the orchestra; upon this the seats of stone
were laid in a hundred or more concentric rows. Twenty
of these rows are still to be seen, some of them in place
and others lying loosely upon the slope. Each seat, as
may be seen, had three parts, the long continuous bench,
well curved underneath, a depression behind it for the feet
of the people sitting next above, and a narrow ledge be-
neath the overhanging portion of the bench above: all
three parts were cut in one block of stone, except the
highest seats of all, which were cut in the solid Acropolis
rock. There were no backs to the ordinary seats, which
were all alike from bottom to top. These seats were
divided radially, by fourteen staircases,—k/imakes,—into
thirteen wedge-shaped blocks called kerkides. The upper
portions of the house were again divided into upper and
lower tiers by a curving aisle known as the diasoma.
The staircases consisted of only a single deep step to each
row of seats. Each step slanted upward and was provided

 
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 361

with grooves to make the ascent more easy. The first
row, being the place of honor, differed from all the rest.
This was slightly elevated above jy>-~s ee
the orchestra and consisted of j,;} ran “We

a set of carved marble chairs PRN Hh

with high backs, curving around YAS D-
the shoulders, and so carved as
to represent the backs and legs
of wooden chairs. These or-
chestra chairs were reserved for
the distinguished personages of
the audience, and in later years
bore upon their front panels the °
names of the officials for whom

they were intended. The cen-

tral chair of this row, a richly carved marble throne for
the priest of Dionysus Eleuthereus,—the patron deity
of the drama,—was a marvel of beauty, and remains
in its place, one of the best preserved of all. Upon
the back are two satyrs carved in low relief; on the
outer face of the great arms, two figures of Eros, of typ-
ical Greek beauty, are to be seen, kneeling upon one knee
and holding each a game-cock in readiness for the cock-
fight which was celebrated in
the theater annually after the
Persian wars. Upon the front
of the throne, just below the
seat, is an imitation of some of
the Persian reliefs: Arimaspi, or

     
 

 
 

Throne for the Priest of
Dionysus Eleuthereus.

      

  

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surely seem to have been exe-
cuted in Lycurgus’s time, by an
artist who had been out on one of the Asiatic campaigns
and was familiar with the carved decorations of the

Arm of the Central Throne.
362 THE STORY OF ATHENS

palaces at Persepolis. The vast auditorium is said by
Plato to have held thirty thousand persons, and our
conservative modern critics are willing to admit seven-
teen thousand as the number which could be accom-
modated.

The orchestra, which could not be injured by time or
use, was undoubtedly left as it was, a broad circle of hard-
beaten earth with the thymele or altar of Dionysus, in its
center. It was upon this altar that the libation, which

 

The Theater, from the Base of the Acropolis Wall.

was the opening ceremony of every dramatic festival, was
poured; about it danced the choruses; it was, in fact,
the very pivot of Dionysiac worship.

When we come to the skene we have reached the bone
of all the archaeological contentions, a building about
which most learned treatises have been written to prove
opposite theories. We had better refrain from any
lengthy discussion of so delicate a question, contenting
ourselves with what is definitely known about it, and, for
the rest, taking up the views of Dr. Dorpfeld, whose great
work on the subject is the most exhaustive study of the
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 363

question yet presented to the world. The stage building
was completely detached from the koilon by a passage
on either side several feet in width, which was the com-
mon entrance to the theater. It was a long, narrow
edifice, high as the highest row of seats. At either end
was a wing which jutted out toward the end walls of
the koilon. A line connecting the two wings would be
approximately tangent to the circle of the orchestra. Be-
tween these wings was the logeion, or speaking-place,
upon which three great portals opened from the stage
building. Of this much we may be reasonably sure, but as
to the logeion—the stage—whether it was high or low,
narrow or broad, we may take the word of the eminent
scholar mentioned above, and he says that there was no
stage at all in the accepted sense of the word; that the
actors of the Sophoclean period and that of which we
are speaking stood upon the orchestra level; and that
the elevated stage is a Roman invention. The action
then was not confined to the space between the wings of
the skene; for the principal actors had the whole orchestra
before them, and could advance and mingle with the
chorus so far as the play allowed. When the chorus was
not in evidence, the actors undoubtedly carried on their
dialogue well forward of the logeion.

Great enthusiasm was shown by the people of Athens
when Lycurgus commenced the work of renovation. A
wealthy Plataean, Eudemus by name, lent one thousand
yoke of oxen to help on the good cause; and when the
theater was completed Lycurgus adorned it with statues
of the great tragic writers Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euri-
pides, and other famous Athenians besides, such as Mil-
tiades and Themistocles.

Above the theater is a cave, cut in the solid rock of
the Acropolis. Here a monument was built in 320 B.c.,
in honor of Thrasyllus, surmounted by a tripod repre-
364 THE STORY OF ATHENS

senting, in relief, the scene of Apollo and Artemis in
the act of destroying the children of Niobe, the boast-
ful mother who prided herself on having a large num-
ber of children, while Leto, the mother of Apollo and
Artemis, had only two. The cave is still to be seen,
but the monument perished early in the last century
during the siege of the Acropolis by the Turks. It
was seen by Stewart shortly before its destruction, and,
thanks to him, we have a restoration of the monument
and copies of its inscriptions. The face of the rock at the
entrance to the cave was hewn to a smooth perpendicular
surface, as we see it to-day; a facade of Pentelic marble
was then built up in front of the opening. This was a
simple structure composed of two broad pilasters like the
antae of a temple, with a narrow pilaster between them.
Above these was laid a simple entablature and probably
a triangular pediment which carried the tripod. The
frieze of the entablature was adorned with a row of laurel
wreaths, and the architrave bore an inscription which says
that Thrasyllus, who dedicated the monument, was vic-
tor, as choregus, with the men of the tribe of Hippothoon;
that Eyius the Chalcidian played the flute; that Neaech-
mus was archon; and that Carchidamus the Sotian taught
the chorus.

At the other end of this southern side of the Acropolis,
below the Nike temple, was another choragic monument
dedicated by one Nicias. This monument was taken
down in Roman times and built into the Roman gate
below the Propylaea, where many of its parts and its
inscriptions are still to be found. The building seems to
have been not unlike the monument of Thrasyllus, and
was built in the same year (320-319). It probably was
a simple facade applied to the surface of the Acropolis
rock, and consisted of six Doric columns supporting an
entablature and a pediment. The inscription upon the
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 365

architrave read as follows: ‘‘Nicias, son of Nicodemus
of Xupete, dedicated [this monument], having obtained
a victory as choregus with the boys of the tribe of Ce-
cropis; Pantaleon of Sicyon played the flute; the piece
was the ‘Elpenor’ of Timotheus. Neaechmus was
archon.”

From the theater, around the eastern end of the Acrop-
olis as far as the Pryta-
neum, led a street called
the Street of the Tripods
from the fact that on
either side of it the vic-
tors in the Dionysiac con- <
test were wont to set
up their trophies, which
were always in the form
of tripods of bronze. It
had long since become
the custom of these men
to erect suitable monu-
ments as pedestals for
their trophies, and by the
time of which we are
speaking these pedestals
had become monuments
of great beauty. There are various accounts of these
choragic monuments, as they are called, which show
that the best architects and sculptors of the day were
employed to build and beautify them. The famous
“Satyr” of Praxiteles is said to have adorned one of
them. Only one has come down to us: the well-known
monument of Lysicrates, called in earlier modern times
the Lantern of Demosthenes. We know little about
this Lysicrates besides what the inscription tells us:
that he was choregus when the boy-chorus of the deme

 

The Monument of Lysicrates,
366 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Acamantis won the prize; that Theon was the flute-
player and Lysiades of Athens trained the chorus; and
that Euaenetus was archon; which fixes the date as 335
B.c., or during the rebuilding of the theater. One wishes,
since only one of these monuments was to be spared, that
it might have been the work of some of the famous ar-
tists; but fate decreed otherwise, and we must be content
with this beautiful little bit of architecture, which may
be taken as a sample of the closely crowded ranks of
similar structures that lined the Street of the Tripods.
The form of this little building is almost too well known
to require description, with its square base of Piraeic lime-
stone, its overhanging cornice of Eleusinian marble, and
its ‘‘lantern’’—the circular structure with six engaged col-
umns, dainty frieze, and corrugated roof surmounted by
a rich acanthus ornament for the support of the tripod,
all made of the marble of Pentelicus. Two points, how-
ever, arrest our attention: the columns and the frieze.
These engaged columns are of a style which was compara-
tively new in Athens at this time. Callimachus is believed
to have invented the Corinthian order in this same cen-
tury. Monuments in the new style had been built in other
parts of Greece and perhaps in Athens; but the monument
of Lysicrates is the earliest building still existing in the
city which bears the sign of Callimachus’s elaborated de-
sign. In the new order the shaft of the column was made
even longer than in the Ionic, and the capital was said by
some to have been suggested to the inventor by an ordi-
nary column bound at the top with a bunch of acanthus
leaves, but Vitruvius, the Roman architectural writer, tells
a more poetical story of its origin. There was a beautiful
maid of Corinth, he says, who died on the eve of her wed-
ding day. It was winter time, and after the body had been
laid in the cold, moist earth, the old nurse of the dead
girl, grieving sorely over the death of her young mistress

cae
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 367

gathered together all her toys and the various little things
she had loved in childhood, and, putting them in a tall
basket, placed them upon her grave, laying a broad, square
tile over the basket to keep out the rain. The basket,
it would seem, had been set upon the dormant root of an
acanthus plant, and when the warm spring sun began to
wake the sleeping root, it pushed forth its leaves on all
sides of the basket, stretching up along its sides until it
reached the projecting angles of the tile, beneath which
it curled over in four graceful volutes. Callimachus hap-
pened to be passing by the lonely little grave, and, seeing
the basket with its acanthus adornment, was prompted
to copy the picture in a capital of stone, thus originating
the Corinthian style.

It was a style admirably suited to festive designs, but
ere long, when the old love for simplicity and dignity
had given way to a passion for richness and sumptuous
display, it gained favor for the mightiest of structures.
The frieze, though sadly defaced by time, represents a
scene, in low relief, in which Dionysus punishes the Tyr-
rhenian pirates, two of whom, half turned to dolphins,
leap headlong into the sea. The legend here depicted is
the theme of the sixth Homeric hymn, which may have
been selected for the performance of the chorus.

Another structure of importance undertaken by Ly-
curgus was the stadium. Out across the Ilissus, between
the hill called Helicon and a knoll to the east of it, was
a little valley terminating toward the south in a cul-de-sac.
This was the place chosen by the famous orator for the
erection of a suitable structure in which the ever-recurring
festival games could be held—a building where an enor-
mous number of spectators could comfortably witness
a great series of games and athletic sports. The stadium
was not a new sort of building in Greece, but Athens had
never possessed one. It was soon found that by deepening
368 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the little valley referred to above, and building up two
walls, like the end walls of the koilon of the theater at
its opening, an ideal place could be made for the specta-
tors on the sloping banks which faced each other and
were joined at one end by a curve like the koilon of a
theater; with ample room for a running track in the
space—six hundred and ten feet long and one hundred
and nine feet broad—between the two sloping sides. The

 

 

The Stadium, from the Side of Mount Lycabettus.

track was separated from the seats by a low marble para-
pet, between which and the seats was a continuous passage
for the movement of the vast assemblage. The front row
of seats was necessarily raised high enough for spectators
to be able to see over the heads of the passers-by, and
flights of steps at regular intervals led from the passage
to the seats. There would seem to have been about sixty
rows of seats, which would accommodate an audience of
fifty thousand persons. As a matter of fact, little build-
ing up was necessary, except at the open end of the sta-
dium, where two huge retaining walls with outer stair-
cases for reaching the higher seats were constructed. Eu-
demus again lent his one thousand yoke of oxen, and,
when the Panathenaea were celebrated again, the Athe-
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 369

nians assembled in the beautiful new stadium, with its
gently curving sides, its broad, sweeping koilon at the end,
its statues of Hermes to mark the goals, and everything
which could make the scene of Athena’s games as splendid
as that of Zeus at Olympia or of Apollo at Delphi.

 

Ruins in the Sanctuary of Asclepius.

It was about this time that the ancient sanctuary of
Asclepius was taken in hand and embellished with
new and beautiful buildings. The sanctuary of the
“Blameless Physician,” as we already know, was situ-
ated upon a terrace beneath the south wall of the Acrop-
olis, where the natural rock was scarped away to make it
more precipitous. It extended from the theater almost to
the sanctuary of Aegeus the Hero, just below the Nike
temple, and was bounded on the south by a portion of the
Pelasgic wall. Near the center of the terrace are the
ancient foundations of a little temple which must have
contained the statue of the healing god. Between this

and the theater ran a colonnade one hundred and fifty-two
24
370 THE STORY OF ATHENS

feet in length, which belongs to the period under discus-
sion. It was built of Hymettian marble in simple Doric
style, and was in all probability used as a shelter for those
who came hither to be healed. On the other side of the
temple is an ancient well lined up with fine polygonal
masonry. Here was also the home of the sacred ser-
pent, which, as the symbol of
renovation, was always asso-
ciated with the worship of
Asclepius. Besides the statue
in the temple there were stat-
ues of the children of the god
and especially of Hygeia, his
daughter, who tended the sa-
cred serpent and was recog-
nized as the goddess of health.
A female head, which is called
that of Hygeia, was found in
this sanctuary and is now in
the National Museum. It
represents the goddess as a
stately young woman, coif-
fured in a style which gives
her the air of a lady of the court of Louis XIV.
Lycurgus set up many statues besides those in the thea-
ter. Near the Dipylum was a statue of Socrates which
Lysippus the sculptor made at his suggestion, and near the
temple of Demeter, in the same neighborhood, were statues
of Demeter and Persephone, both works of Praxiteles,
which belong to the period of Lycurgus’s embellishments.
Lysippus was the most prolific sculptor of the century. He
introduced a new canon of physical proportions, and his
athletic statues, with small, well-rounded heads and long,
graceful limbs, became very famous in Athens and in all
Greece. He strove after striking effects, making colossal

 

Head of Hygeia in Marble,
found in the Asclepieum.
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 371

statues like the Farnese Hercules in Naples, which is said
to be a copy of one of his works; and composed striking
groups like his famous portrayal of Alexander in the
battle of Granicus. In fact, Alexander was his chief
patron, and is said to have made a decree that no one
should paint him but Apelles, and no one represent him in
marble but Lysippus. Another famous Athenian portrait
sculptor of the time was Silanion, who is known to have

anne $ eho

a

    

 

View in the Cemetery of the Ceramicus.

made a wonderful statue of Plato for a Persian admirer
of the philosopher, named Mithridates, which was set up
in the Academy. His portrait of the passionate sculptor
Apollodorus was famous in its portrayal of a sudden
burst of rage; while his statue of Sappho, which was seen
in distant Syracuse by Cicero three hundred years later,
was greatly admired. The numerous portrait busts by
these sculptors, and the great number of portrait statues
which were being set up in Athens at this time, show the
trend of artistic activity toward domestic and civic sub-
jects. This new tendency is nowhere better illustrated
than in the Ceramicus, the great cemetery of Athens, out-
side the Dipylum gate. A walk in one of the cemeteries
of our day—even one of the most beautiful—would not
be likely to inspire one with artistic enthusiasm; but a
stroll among the monuments of dead Athenians during
372 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the time of Demosthenes would certainly have been like a
visit to some great art gallery. Passing out of the Sacred
Gate, one would have found himself in a forest of tomb-
stones so full of artistic beauty, so suggestive of life, that
the grave and its terrors are quite forgotten amid the pic-
tured simplicity and beauty of the life of the Athenians
and the contemplative sweetness of their farewells. Most

 

Stelae of the Corcyrean Ambassadors and a Proxenus.

of these monuments are marble stelae, sculptured with
scenes in relief—scenes of battle, scenes of home life,
scenes of parting; most of these have been carried
away to the National Museum for preservation; but
a sufficient number remains in place to make a jour-
ney to the Dipylum well worth one’s while. On pass-
-ing through the gate we encounter, first, two tall stelae
of older, simpler style; these are monuments which
the Athenians erected to two Corcyrean ambassadors
and to a Proxenus of the same country. Passing along,
and ascending quite suddenly to a level about seventeen
feet higher than that of the so-called Sacred Gate, we
see on the right a large slab of marble, in form not unlike
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 373

a sarcophagus, which an inscription indicates as the rest-
ing-place of Hipparete, wife of the younger Alcibiades.
On the left is a spirited relief representing a youthful
warrior, mounted on a splendid horse, in the act of spear-
ing one of the enemy, who strives to strike back with his
sword. This is the mon-
ument of Dexileus—a
young cavalryman of
twenty years, who dis-
tinguished himself in the
battle of Corinth in 394.
The composition is full
of animation, like one of
pes from the
With the

ms eand trappings
mine were supplied in
metal, and the soft col-
oring which brought out
the details, it must have
been a beautiful work of
art. In the same inclo-
sure are two stelae of
the tall form, which
marked the tombs of
other members of the
family. In the next plot
is a tall stele adorned at the top with a most graceful
treatment of acanthus leaf in the form of an acroterium. °
Next to this is a little aedicula, a temple-like structure,
which still bears traces of a painted design. Further
along is a tall monument surmounted by the figure of a
bull, and in front of this another aedicula with remains
of color in its more protected corners. Then comes the
figure of the Molossian hound in soft gray marble, and

   
 

Monument of Dexileus.
374 THE STORY OF ATHENS

then the grave of a seaman, over which a relief depicts
the family of the deceased sitting by the seaside. Behind
this line of monuments are several interesting reliefs
among the shattered frag-
ments of funeral vases,
sarcophagi, and cippi. One
is the figure of a beautiful
young girl holding a small
pitcher at her side, exe-
cuted in high relief; the
lovely face, the majestic
pose, the rich drapery, all
combine to make this one
of the loveliest graye sculp-
tures in the worldy# nd-
ing our way among™the
ruins of countless grave-
stones back toward thegate,
we find a life-size group,
almost in the round, repre-
senting two women—De-
metria and Pamphile—in
calm repose, one seated
upon a large chair with
A Genie onthe South wot the high back and arms, the
Sacred Way. other standing by her side:

both women are holding

the drapery which falls from the top of their heads in one
hand, as if for a moment unveiling their faces to the
public gaze. Returning to the main street of tombs, we
cross it, and opposite the grave of the seamen encounter
one of the most beautiful of all these monuments—the
low relief of the lovely Hegeso seated in her high-backed
chair, with her feet upon a little stool, attended by her
gentle slave, who meekly holds a jewel-casket from which

 
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 375

her proud mistress ‘selects the adornments for her final
repose. Leaving the road, we come upon a pathetic scene,
in which a father and mother and one other grown-up

appear to be taking leave
ofachild. Not far from
this spot stood the stele
of Aristion, representing
a nude youth in conversa-
tion with a slave boy.
Above the group is the
figure of a harpy with
folded wings ready to
bear the soul away. For
the rest of these beauti-
ful monuments we must
go to the National Mu-
seum, where room after
room is lined with these
beautiful reliefs from the
Dipylum. All represent
incidents of- every-day
life or scenes of part-
ing. The simple words
XApnoré yaipe—‘‘Dear one,
farewell’’—written upon
so many of them, is often

the only indication of their sad purpose.

 

Monument of Hegeso.

There are

figures of nude youths hale and hearty, as if they had
just come from the palaestra; many of them have their
pets with them: dogs of various breeds are numerous, as
the companions of the youths; one holds a rabbit, another
strokes his horse’s head, while another has a cat, one
of the very rare representations of this animal in Greek
art. A large number of the groups depict the most ordi-
nary scenes of domestic life. A noble lady is attended by
376 THE STORY OF ATHENS

two slave girls, one of whom adjusts her sandal, while
the other holds her jewel-box ; another grand dame makes
her toilet, waited upon by her maid; while a third sits
upon a seat of carved marble, holding a mirror in her lap.
An old warrior leans upon his shield, and a younger
soldier is represented in full armor rushing to battle. But
the great majority of the stelae are scenes of parting
which denote, not the sentiment of eternal separation, but
such farewells as are said on the eve of a long journey.
We do not know how many of these Athenians believed
in immortality, but none of the reliefs show the despair
or grief which might be felt at hopeless death. An old
man bids a calm and sweet good-by to his spouse of many
long and faithful years, holding her hand in placid re-
pose. A mother greets her husband for the last time,
while her little baby is held up for a parting glance, yet
both the husband and
wife are of tranquil
mind. A boy leans upon
the back of his dying
mother’s chair, while his
father holds her hand in
mute resignation. The
deepest note of pathos
is perhaps struck in those
reliefs where aged men
must see their stalwart
sons pass while they are
left to a lonely old age.
In one of these, the
youth, quite nude, leans
easily against a col-
umn, while the old fa-

 

Funeral Monument of a Youth, ther rests his elbow upon
in the National Museum, his staff and his chin
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 377

upon his hand, gazing wistfully at his son. The faithful
hound droops his head—all is reposeful thus far, but in
a corner a little urchin sits with his head bowed upon his
knees and gives way to a torrent of tears. This child is
the only figure in all the collection which displays the pas-
sion of grief; older people were too philosophical to weep.
Although these people were all mysterious in their reli-
gion, they were not at all so about death. All are calm
and self-restrained, sad, but not bowed down with grief.
Surely these monuments are true pictures of their attitude
toward death. The beauty of the last resting-place of the
noble Athenians was further enhanced by the tall, grace-
ful vases of pottery and of marble which stood above some
of the graves. The former were painted with funeral
scenes, and were, some of them, of the greatest antiquity.
The latter were of most slender and beautiful proportions,
with swelling bodies and long, thin necks spreading to
flower-like lips. On either side of the neck curling han-
dles in broad volutes lent richness and beauty to the de-
sign. Not a few of these vases were adorned with low
reliefs of delicate beauty. Such was the chief burial
ground of Athens, which, in the old days, was bright
with color and the dark, shining leaves of the ivy vine—
not a city of the dead, but a picture-gallery full of tableaux
which portrayed the serene life and philosophical mien of
her true citizens.

Little is known of the residence portion of Athens at
this time; the old quarter upon the Pnyx, outside the walls,
which was one of the earliest residential sections of the
city, seems at the close of the Peloponnesian war to have
been wholly deserted, and we have record that one Ti-
marchus proposed a plan for recolonizing it.

While Lycurgus was employed in enriching the city
with costly buildings and statues, a number of the citi-
zens were busy plotting against Macedonian dominion.
378 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Demetrius, a young orator from the deme of Phalerum,
was among the warmest friends of liberty and democracy.
Demosthenes the while worked hard to preserve an
equilibrium: in the state, but ever kept liberty before his
eyes. The opposite party was represented by Demades,
a servile adherent of Macedonian supremacy, who had
moved that Philip be worshiped with divine honors, and
had been supported by the large Macedonian party in
Athens to the point of having him reverenced as a god
at the Cynosarges. Later, he had proposed that Alex-
ander be made the thirteenth Olympian deity; but the
Athenians had revolted at this and had fined Demades;
nevertheless, Alexander was hailed with the title of Diony-
sus, which was the next best thing.

After eight years of delay the time was now approach-
ing for the trial of Ctesiphon, which meant the condem-
nation or vindication of Demosthenes himself. As the
annual festival of the Dionysia approached, Aeschines
and Demosthenes prepared themselves for the great con-
test, which was bound to be lost or won by oratory alone.
When the day arrived, the city was thronged with people.
Those who had come from afar to witness the celebra-
tion of the Bacchic feast in the new theater, soon dis-
covered that a far greater spectacle was in store for them
upon the ancient Pnyx. When Aeschines mounted the
bema, the place of assembly was crowded to its full capa-
city, and the whole hill was thronged with an expectant
multitude. The trial, in truth, was not the trial of Ctesi-
phon, nor yet of Demosthenes; it was a question of still
greater moment—a question of Athenian liberty versus
Macedonian supremacy; for the two eminent orators rep-
resented these two policies. Aeschines was a man of
great distinction, and had the advantage of Macedonian
support, which was now in the ascendant in the city,
owing to the brilliant successes of Alexander in Asia. He

 
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 379

had the further advantage of a splendid voice, well-trained
action, a keen grasp of legal principles, and a fine power of
invective, heightened by resentment from past conflicts.
The mighty assemblage heard his oration; his friends were
elated, his opponents amazed, while neutral persons were
struck with his distinguished ability. But Demosthenes
arose, conscious of his long life of devotion to his coun-
try, full of confidence in his own powers and in the peo-
ple who were to hear him. He stated the case in the
clearest narrative; he opened fire upon his opponent in the
fiercest personal attack; he drove each argument home
with irresistible conclusiveness. His forceful use of il-
lustration aroused the enthusiasm of his friends; his di-
rect attack dismayed his enemies: but when he burst forth
in his sublime apostrophe to the heroes of Marathon,
Salamis, and Plataea, the inspiring sentiments of his every
word carried all before them. Judges and audience were
alike affected; and when the ballot was taken, Aeschines
did not receive enough votes to save him from prosecution
as a malicious accuser, and he was obliged to quit Athens
with all haste. Demosthenes, already supreme in Athens,
was now without a rival, and for five years guided the
state as only a Demosthenes could guide it. But trouble
was still in store for the state and her helmsman, for the
power of Macedonia was too mighty to be overcome by
the force of one delicate, nervous man.

In 325 an officer in Alexander’s army, Harpalus by
name, who had been left at Babylon in charge of a vast
treasure while Alexander pushed farther east, betrayed
his trust and came straightway to Athens, where he dis-
tributed his ill-gotten gain among the leaders of the popu-
lar party, hoping to win their support. But the hand of
Macedon is at once laid upon the city for the punishment
of the leaders, and the enemies of Demosthenes make
haste to bring accusation against him as one of those who
380 THE STORY OF ATHENS

had accepted the gold of Harpalus. Although not a ray
of evidence was found against him, the old patriot was
condemned and thrown into prison, but was permitted to
escape, with the connivance of the officials, and fled, first
to Troezen, then to Aegina, where he spent his days look-
ing longingly over the sea toward his beloved Athens.
Then came the death of Alexander, now called the Great,
and the revival of the hopes of Greece. A decree was
immediately passed at Athens recalling the exiled orator,
and a public trireme was sent over to Aegina to bring
him to his own. All Athens assembled at the Piraeus to
welcome back Demosthenes and, with acclamations of
joy, to show their repentance for having submitted to his
banishment. The old patriot entered Athens in triumph,
and saw the happiest day of his life, while the citizens
made the city ring with their shouts of welcome. The
struggle for liberty is renewed. Leosthenes leads the
Athenian forces to victory at Lamia, near Thermopylae;
but success does not remain with the Athenian arms and
victory speedily gives place to defeat when the Greek
army meets that of Antipater at Crannon in Thessaly.
This victory for the Macedonian regent is followed up
by his advance on Athens. The gates are opened and a
Macedonian garrison occupies the city. The leaders of
both parties were treated with equal severity; many of
them were brutally murdered in Athens. Even Demades,
who would have deified both Philip and Alexander, was
not spared, and was despatched to serve his beloved mas-
ters in the lower world. Demosthenes managed to escape
to Calaurea, carrying a vial of poison on his person. He
took refuge in the temple of Poseidon, among the pines
of the little island: but the sanctuary of a temple meant
nothing to the relentless emissaries of Antipater; they
followed Demosthenes to his place of refuge, but he
escaped their brutal hands by taking the poison which he
had provided for such an emergency.
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 381

Once more and for the last time Athens bowed her neck
to a conquering foe. Macedon is supreme and Macedo-
nian soldiers rule the city with iron sway. At this time
came a curious turn in the fortunes of Demetrius the
Phalerean, who had been so great a champion of the
anti-Macedonian party. By some strange lot, Demetrius
became reconciled to his former enemies, and when Cas-
sander came to the throne of Macedonia and was the
virtual ruler of Athens, he appointed the Phalerean gov-
ernor of Attica, supported by a Macedonian garrison.
This was in 317 B.c. Demetrius might have made a
model ruler but for his extravagant vanity; as it was, he
ruled with moderation for ten years. He had been a pu-
pil of Theophrastus, and on the death of Aristotle saw his
former teacher established at the head of the Lyceum.
Aristotle had named Theophrastus as his successor, and
left to him his great library of valuable books, which con-
tained the original copies of his own works. Soon after
the death of Aristotle, Xenocrates, the president of the
Academy, also passed away, and Polemon, the dissipated
youth of a few years before, took up the exalted position
of head of the greatest gymnasium. Demetrius, as we
have said, was not a wholly bad ruler, although he squan-
dered the public revenues in wanton dissipation. He was
a patron of philosophy, of the drama, and of art. Epi-
curus, the founder of a new philosophy, began teaching
under his patronage, and Menander, the last great prod-
uct of the Attic drama, came forward during his rule.
Menander, the most important exponent of the New
Comedy, as it was called, undertook to purge the Old
Comedy of Aristophanes’s time of its coarseness and
vulgarity, and to infuse a new element of pathos, which
he dexterously mingled with mirth, and thus, by contrast,
gave his audiences increased delight.: He was a warm
friend of the Phalerean ruler, and was honored by having
his statue made by the sculptor brothers Cephistodotus
382 THE STORY OF ATHENS

and Timarchus, sons of the famous Praxiteles, and set
up in the theater beside those of Sophocles and Euripides.
Under Demetrius the architect Philon undertook great
improvements at Piraeus and Eleusis, and Protogenes
left his ship-painting in Rhodes to become an artist at the
court of Athens. This painter was a protegé of the great
Apelles, who, upon seeing the exquisite pains and elabo-
ration with which Protogenes finished his work, encour-
aged him to paint pictures and gave him a great reputation
among the Rhodians by paying the enormous sum of fifty
talents for one of his works. At Athens Protogenes
painted the famous ‘‘Paralus” and “Harmonias,” in the
Propylaea, which were so much admired in after years by
Cicero. These pictures represented two important war-
ships; as paintings, they manifested the artist’s power of
technique and of drawing rather than any ideal qualities.

But the fawning flattery of the Athenians, who set up
in his honor as many portrait statues of their new ruler
as their year had days, turned Demetrius’s head; and he
could be seen every morning walking, like a god, in the
Street of the Tripods, to be admired and flattered by the
foolish populace. He at last went so far as to take up
his abode in the Parthenon, and no one said him nay. In
307 the luxurious Phalerean was ousted from his com-
fortable place by his namesake, Demetrius Poliorcetes—
the besieger of cities—son of Antigonus, who in the first
division of the Macedonian Empire had received Asia
Minor as his share, but who was now extending his sway
wherever he could. The besieger of cities one day ar-
rived in the harbor of Piraeus, with his fleet, which, being
taken for that of Egypt, met with no resistance, and in
a short time lay before the city of Athens, prepared
to take it as he had done many another city. Demetrius
the Phalerean fled, and Demetrius Polisrcetes entered the
city with the announcement that the ancient democratic
THE AGE OF THE ORATORS 383

institutions were to be once more restored, while corn was
distributed to the needy citizens and ship timber was
promised them for the future. The three hundred and
sixty statues of the Phalerean were forthwith demolished
by the populace, who now turned their flattery upon the
new Demetrius, whom they hailed as ‘‘Soter’’—the deliv-
erer. But his stay was a short one, as he was busy with
other conquests. He departed to join his father in Cy-
prus, where, after a successful campaign, both father and
son assumed the title of king. He then crossed over to
Egypt; but presently, the power of Cassander again
threatening Athens, Poliorcetes returned and was again
hailed with honors by the populace. Gilded statues of
Demetrius and his father, Antigonus, were erected beside
those of Harmodius and Aristogiton and they were wor-
shiped as gods and deliverers. Two new demes were
added to the existing ten: one was given the name of
Antigonias, the other Demetrias. If the Phalerean had
resided with Athena in the Parthenon, why should not
the new deified deliverer of Athens? This he did, pol-
luting the sacred shrine with disgraceful debaucheries.
Again the besieger of cities was called to the assistance of
his father, and again he responded to the call. On the
expedition which followed, old Antigonus was killed and
his kingdom crumbled before the eyes of his ambitious
son. Demetrius set out for Athens with a small remnant
of his army; but was met by an Athenian galley carrying
envoys with the news that his presence was not required |
there.
XII

ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS

“ For once it was our principle, inherited from our fathers, to be the
leaders of Greece and champions of liberty against tyrants. This
principle was instituted by Miltiades, perfected under Themistocles,
descended to Cimon, maintained by Pericles, revered by Alcibiades.”

IN the above fragment quoted from an
imaginary oration of Demosthenes,
written by Himerius for declamations
in the schools of Athens, we have an

epitome of the spirit of the Athenians
Capital in the Ascle. | Who lived after the death of all the fa-

Be mous statesmen. Living in the glory of
the past, they had not the energy to strive to excel the
greatness of their ancestors, nor did they even attempt to
emulate it. Content to bask in the light of former splen-
dor, Athens remained the intellectual center of the world,
producing men who, though they did little to advance lit-
erature, philosophy, or art, were able to impart the accom-
plishments of the past to all who came to them. In this
role she was courted and favored by many kings of the

East, who found their chief delight in the intellectual

_ treats which the city afforded; and Athens began her long

humdrum existence as schoolmistress of the world.

After Demetrius the besieger had received the rebuff
of the Athenian convoys, he repaired to Syria, where he
succeeded in forming an alliance with King Seleucus by

giving him his daughter in marriage. This gave him a

new lease of power, and he forthwith set sail for Greece.

After a long siege, he reéstablished his reputation. The

384

 
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 385

city again fell into his hands; but Athens was never any-
thing more than a convenient stopping-place for the wan-
dering warrior. His third appearance had little effect
upon the city.

During the years which followed, Athens saw the rise
of two new and important schools of philosophy: that of
the much-maligned Epicurus, and that of Zeno of Cyprus.
At the same time a second Timon—Timon the skeptic—
flourished. Epicurus’s teachings and his manner of life
were far from being what the later significance of the
name Epicurean would seem to imply; for the sz-
mum bonum which he extolled was not the pleasure of
sensual indulgence, but that peace of mind which comes
from the practice of the highest virtues. In the beautiful
garden which he purchased at Athens he taught his
followers that virtue was to be cultivated for the reason
that it conduced to happiness, and happiness was the high-
est good. It was a dangerous doctrine, as future practice
of it among his professed followers proved; but to offset
its tendency, Zeno sat daily in the stoa poikile, beneath
the great wall-paintings of Polygnotus, teaching that vir-
tue should be practised for its own sake, irrespective of the
happiness it might bring. From the place where Zeno
chose to lecture to his pupils, his disciples early received
the name of Stoics, and his school of thought was called
the Stoic philosophy. He taught for over half a century
in Athens, and enjoyed the patronage of many distin-
guished men, among whom was Antigonus Gonatas, a
son of Demetrius Poliorcetes.

It seems to have been at about this time—the beginning
of the third century—that the stage buildings of the Dio-
nysiac theater were again altered. Among the ruins of
the four successive stage constructions still in evidence,
it is difficult to distinguish those which belong to this

period from those of Lycurgus’s building; but it is plain
25
386 THE STORY OF ATHENS

that the projecting wings at either end of the logeion were
shortened after Lycurgus’s time and before the Roman
period. For the study of the other alterations of this time
we must depend not upon the remodeled skene of Athens,
but upon the remains at Epidaurus, where portions of an
original Hellenic stage building still exist. Here we find
that a row of columns connected the two wings of the
stage, forming a portico in front of the skene wall, which
was covered with a wooden roof. This would seem to
have been the case in Athens also; for the foundations of
such a colonnade are to be seen between the ends of the
shortened wings. (CC in plan on page 359.)

Now, as in a very large portion of the Greek dramas
the scene is laid before a temple or palace, such a portico
would have easily represented the facade of either; and
when some other scene was required, a painted curtain
might be dropped in front of it. When Antigone, in the
“Phenicians,’”’ mounts the palace roof to view the agora
and the camp; when, in the last act of the ‘Orestes,’ Her-
mione and Orestes are seen upon the roof of the palace;
and when, in the “Clouds,” Strepsiades scales the ladder
to set fire to the roof, these personages simply mounted to
the roof of the shallow portico by a ladder or from the
wings. The space above the portico, between the wings,
was provided with another, higher roof, beneath which
were concealed the drop scenes and the elaborate mechan-
ical devices which are known to have existed to operate the
apparitions of the gods and of ghosts. Such a plan is
simple enough to have fulfilled all the requirements of
Athenian taste.

In the year 271 a man named Thrasycles won a vic-
tory in the theater as agonothete. This Thrasycles was
a son of Thrasyllus who had set up the choragic monu-
ment above the theater some sixty years before. Being
of frugal turn of mind, we may imagine, he determined
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 387

to set up his own memorial in the form of an addition to
his father’s monument. Forthwith he had the pediment
of the old fagade removed, and substituted for it an attic
story of Hymettian marble. This attic story formed a
pedestal at either end, and was built in three steps in the
middle, between the pedestals. Thrasycles was obliged,
it seems, to set up two tripods, one for a boy chorus and
one for men; he therefore placed a tripod upon each of the
pedestals, and a suitable inscription upon the die of the
pedestal itself. In the middle, above the three steps, was
placed a seated statue of Dionysus, now in the British
Museum. What was done with the tripod of old Thra-
syllus, we do not know, unless it was placed in the lap of
Dionysus, as has been suggested. All the details of this
description are based upon the drawings of Stewart and
upon a comparison of the inscriptions.

Attracted by the intellectual fame of Athens, the royal
scholar Ptolemy, king of Egypt (285-247), known in
history as Ptolemy Philadelphus—the brother-loving—
because, as they say, he put his two brothers to death,
visited the city and established a new gymnasium within
its walls, to which he gave his name. The gymnasium
of Ptolemy has not been located as yet by excava-
tions, but it is described as having stood below the sanc-
tuary of Theseus, and was probably not far eastward
from the agora. The munificent gift of the princely
lover of literature and science was a sort of literary insti-
tute for lads combined with a large place for exercise. It
was undoubtedly furnished with a well-equipped library ;
for its founder is well known to have been a great lover
of books and to have established the renowned library
and museum of Alexandria. These were among the first
of a series of sumptuous gifts which Eastern kings and
Western emperors showered upon the famous city. Ptol-
emy is further believed to have introduced the worship of
388 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Serapis into Athens, and a temple dedicated to this divin-
ity, and called the Serapeum, was built to the eastward
of the Acropolis, by the Athenians, probably in honor of
the munificent king of Egypt.

Before the third century closed, Attalus I, King of Per-
gamus, had bestowed a number of marble groups upon
the city of Athena, which were erected on the southeast
angle of the Acropolis. These groups carried out the
scenes depicted upon the metopes of the Parthenon—the
battle between the gods and the giants, the war between
the Amazons and the Athenians, the defeat of the Per-
sians at Marathon. To these was added, as a final scene
of Hellenic glory, the victory of Attalus himself over the
Gauls. A number of separate statues from these great
groups have been identified in the different museums of
Europe. These are all half the size of nature, as they are
described by Pausanias. They include figures from the
gigantomachia, of which the dead giant in Naples is
one; from the battle of the Amazons, one of which is
also in Naples; from the Marathon group, of which
three exist in Naples and Rome; and from the battle with
the Gauls, of which no less than five Gauls have been
located at Paris, Naples, and Venice. The Greeks would
naturally be much harder to distinguish among the hosts
of statues of Grecian warriors; but the other figures are
identified by the peculiar treatment of non-Greek subjects
which obtained after the time of Lysippus. The careful
characterization in portraiture which that sculptor had
introduced was applied to the study of foreign types to the
minutest details. In the earlier periods of Greek sculp-
ture, barbarians had been denoted as such by the treat-
ment of their costume, arms, and accoutrements; but after
Lysippus, absolute truthfulness in matters of personal and
racial peculiarities was given careful study. Thus, we
have in these members of Attalus’s groups the distinctive
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 389

Persian and the distinctive Gaulish type, the latter of
which is perhaps best illustrated in the well-known figure
of the dying Gaul, erroneously called the “dying gladia-
tor,’ of the Capitol in Rome, which is a member of a
group set up by Attalus at Pergamus, and of which the
Athens groups were reduced copies, in part at least.
These groups, arguing from the five existing statues of
Gauls, and reckoning equal numbers of victors and van-
quished in each group, must have numbered, in all, more
than forty figures. These probably were placed about the
pedestal of a large monument which may have been sur-
mounted by a statue of Attalus himself, or one of Athena,
who had given the victory in each of these combats. The
monument seems to have stood very near the south
wall of the Acropolis; for it is recorded that during a
severe thunder-storm one
of the figures in the gi-
gantomachia was hurled
into the Dionysiac thea-
ter at the base of the
rock. None of the fig-
ures that composed these
famous groups is now in
Athens; but a remarkable
head was found in the
theater that illustrates
perfectly the trend of
portraiture in the Athe-
nian sculpture of this
period. I refer to that
well-known head in the
National Museum which
bears such a striking re-
semblance to the Christ Marble Bust, found in the Theater and
type of Renaissance art. now in the National Museum.

 
390 THE SLORY OF ATHENS

With the opening of the second century, Athens came
in touch with the rising mistress of the world, that claimed
descent from Trojan heroes, on the banks of the Tiber,
for the first time since the far-off days when an embassy
from the founders of the Roman republic came to Ath-
ens with the request that they be allowed to copy the
Solonian constitution, upon which they eventually based
the famous ten tables of their laws. The Macedonian
master of Athens, Philip V, had lent his aid to the Car-
thaginians in their war with Rome, and she in turn had
thrown her influence on the side of the Romans, thus call-
ing down upon her head the wrath of Philip. The king
came in haste to punish his wayward subjects, and arrived
before the walls of Athens. The citizens put up a stubborn
resistance, and when Philip finally got through the outer
wall, near the Dipylum, and had his soldiers closely packed
between the two walls, they made it so hot for him that he
was obliged to withdraw with heavy loss. He then turned
his attention to the devastation of the Attic plain. The
groves of the Academy were cut down; the Lyceum was
burned ; the temples outside the walls and the tombs of the
Attic heroes were all destroyed: but before the city was
compelled to surrender, a Roman fleet appeared in the
harbor of Piraeus, and Philip took flight with his army.
Soon after this, the last of the Macedonian Philips was
disastrously defeated by a Roman -my at Cynoce-
phalae; and at the Isthmian games which followed hard
upon the defeat of Macedon, the Roman consul Flamin-
ius declared Greece free. Rome conferred numerous
privileges upon the city of Athens for her share in the war
with Carthage, and restored three of her lost islands—
Hiliartos, Delos, and Lemnos—to her dominion. A cen-
tury later, we hear of a cult of the goddess Roma in
Athens.

Eumenes IT, King of Pergamus, the friend of the Ro-
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 391

mans, the son and successor of Attalus, the friend of
Athens, now makes the city the recipient of his royal
favor. The only monument of his good will which exists
among the ruins of the city is the long series of retaining
arches between the Dionysiac theater and the later
Odeum, which Herodes
built, a century after,
below the southern wing
of the Propylaea. This
was the colonnade of
Eumenes, which that
monarch built to form a
covered way reaching
from the crowded part
of the city at the western
end of the Acropolis to
the theater, which at this
time was being used
more and more as a place
for the public assemblies.
The remains of this great
structure, which was the longest colonnade in Athens, con-
sist only of the wall of arches—the earliest arches in the
ruins of Athens—which supported the terrace of the As-
clepieum and formed the back of the colonnade. This por-
tion is built of breccia and was faced with limestone and
Hymettian marble. In front of this wall were two rows of
columns, probably of Hymettian marble with white marble
capitals and bases, which supported a wooden roof. This
is the colonnade which a later writer describes as furnish-
ing shelter to the theater-goers in case of rain. In the
sanctuary of Dionysus, just before the theater, stands a
circular altar which has been assigned to this period.
It is of white marble and is exquisitely decorated with
Silenus masks and rich garlands of flowers and fruit in

 

Dionysiac Altar, in front of Theater.
392 THE STORY OF ATHENS

high relief; while its elaborately carved moldings are
among the most beautiful examples of their kind in
Athens.

The King of Syria was not to be outdone by the kings
of Pergamus as a suitor of Athens; and soon after the
year 175, Antiochus IV, called Epiphanes, came to the
city to see what he could do to add to her teeming splen-
dor. The great scheme undertaken by Pisistratus in the
earliest history of the city, for the erection of a temple
to the Olympian Zeus which should be the largest and
most magnificent temple in the world, had never been
carried out. The Persians had demolished most of the
early work, and Pericles does not seem to have taken
it up. Since the Golden Age the Athenians had been too
impoverished by foreign and domestic wars to undertake
the completion of the vast plan. This Antiochus re-
solved to do with the enormous wealth which he had
gained in a number of successful wars. Cossutius was
the architect whom he chose for the work. Neither time
nor repeated wars could destroy the massive crepidoma, or
sub-basement, which Pisistratus had built above the banks
of the Ilissus. If any other portions of the old tyrant’s
construction still remained, they were cleared entirely
away; for in Pisistratus’s time limestone alone was used
for the columns and entablatures of temples, but since
the Periclean age, marble had become the chief of ma-
terials for buildings of size or importance. To the south
and east of the mighty foundations the ground sloped
rapidly away toward the river, so that a gigantic retain-
ing wall was constructed on these sides, which, when filled
in, afforded a broad level space about the temple. Upon
the ancient sub-basement, which had waited so long for its
crowning shrine, the architect prepared to erect a temple
which should be the largest in Greece, and, with the ex-
ception of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the greatest
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 393

in the world: a peripteral temple with upward of a hun-
dred columns, all of Pentelic marble. The style chosen
by the royal builder and his architect for the temple of
the king of the gods was the new and sumptuous Corin-
thian. It had been used in Athens before, but never any-

 

The Olympieum, from the South.

where in the world on so grand a scale. The mighty col-
umns soon began to rise above the lofty stylobate; each
had a high, square plinth beneath its richly molded base,
which raised the bottom of the deeply fluted shaft to the
height of a man’s shoulder above the pavement. The
shafts themselves soared over fifty feet, not in a single
stone, but in enormous drums five feet and a half in
diameter. A delicate outward curve tapering upward,
less pronounced than in the old Doric, prevented the shaft
from appearing too weak as it rose. The deep chan-
nelings, with flat arrises between, appear to have been cut
after the drums had been set in place; for they are mar-
velously true, each fitting so nicely to the other that
394 THE SLORY “OF, ATHENS

in many cases the joint is scarcely to be distinguished.
The columns were crowned with giant capitals, each
made in two pieces, with rows of deeply carved acanthus
leaves beneath broad curling volutes, giving ample scope
for the play of brilliant light and deep shade. The carv-
ing is rich and elaborate, executed in fine technique, yet on
such a scale that, in spite of the tremendous height, the
details of the foliage are not lost. The exterior columns
were arranged in a double row of twenty on each side,
with triple ranges of ten at either end, making one hun-
dred and sixteen in all. From column to column, three
long beams of stone were thrown which bound the mighty
shafts together and formed the support of the great roof.
The frieze was rich with elaborate carvings, and above
this was placed a cornice supported by highly ornate con-
soles. Of all this splendor only sixteen columns remain
upon the massive basement. Thirteen of these, which
still stand in a group with their architraves above them,
formed the southeast angle of the temple, which was
originally over three hundred and fifty feet long and one
hundred and thirty-four feet wide. The three others stood
quite apart and were members of the inner row on the
south side. Fifty years ago these three veterans were
standing side by side; but in 1852 a bolt from heaven
felled the central member of the trio of giants, and it lies
prone upon the crepidoma, each drum severed from its
neighbor like a line of dominos which a child stands up
and then throws down by pushing over the end of the line.
The huge base is tipped forward toward the fallen col-
umn, and the two parts of the capital lie disjointed but
not far separated. All the rest is gone; all the fallen col-
umns, all the fragments, even the steps of the basement,
went to the lime-kiln during the middle ages or the days
of the Turkish occupation. But these remains, scant as
they seem when compared to the mass of the original
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 395

structure, form the most splendid remains in Athens be-
low the Acropolis, and constitute in their majestic gran-
deur one of the most imposing ruins in all the world.
There are few ruins outside of Egypt which make a man
feel his own insignificance more than do the massy col-
umns of the Olympieum. There is certainly none in
Europe which time has made more lovely. The exquisite

 

The Olympieum and the Acropolis, from across the Ilissus.

tone of the mellowed marble, which has assumed the soft
golden hues of the Parthenon, offset by the deep green
of neighboring cypress trees, gives an effect of the rarest
beauty. On one side they may be viewed with the sea
and its dark-lined islands as a background. Take another
position and you will see them reaching up to the Parthe-
non, their slender shafts strongly outlined against the
violet-tinted Acropolis rock. Change your point of view
once again and they will seem to vie with lofty Lycabet-
tus, and the downy pines on its slope afford another be-
coming background. It would be hard to say which view
is the most delightful; for, however seen, the ruin is the
embodiment of grace and grandeur, perfect in line and
color scheme. One might think that its site was a poor
one, when compared with that of Athena’s temple; but
for this temple, as it was and as it is, the location could
not be improved: no pedestal of natural grandeur is
396 THE STORY OF ATHENS

required to enhance its majesty—it makes its own site and
the varied forms of the Attic landscape lend only the
charm of an effective comparison. The scheme, however,
was too vast to'be undertaken by one man who had al-
ready reached middle age; and ere the stupendous beams
of the roof had been fashioned to cover the sublime image
of the father of heaven, Antiochus the Illustrious had
gone the way of all flesh. To the theater Antiochus
presented, in 174, a gigantic gilded aegis with its serpent
fringe and terrible gorgon’s head, richly wrought, but
frightful to behold. This was hung upon the wall of
the Acropolis, above the monument of Thrasyllus, and
added further splendor to the theater and its surroundings.
Meanwhile, the increasing number of patients who
sought healing within the sanctuary of Asclepius de-
manded extended accommodations, and a second col-
onnade was erected on the upper terrace of the sanctuary,
below the steep southern wall of the Acropolis. The
remains of this structure consist only of foundations; but
architectural fragments of all kinds and in all styles,
many of them of great beauty as bits of carving, lie in
heaps within the limits of the ancient sacred inclosure.
One royal lover of the divine city was scarcely cold in
his grave before another appeared at her door. This
time it was another king of Pergamus—Attalus I[I]—a son
of Attalus I, who had erected the votive groups of statu-
ary at the southeast angle of the Acropolis inclosure. The
son was a friend of the Romans, as his father had been,
and likewise a patron of art and letters. His gift to
Athens, by which his name was immortalized in con-
nection with the city, was a great colonnade which occu-
pied a portion of the eastern side of the agora. If we are
correct in locating the ancient painted colonnade, no
remains of which have as yet been unearthed, on the
southern half of the east side of the market-place; and
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 397

if the colonnade of Attalus, which has been excavated,
stood next to the old painted colonnade, there can be no
doubt as to the topography of the agora of the Periclean
and post-Periclean periods; but, unfortunately, none of
the older buildings of the market-place has been brought
to light, and the earth to the south of Attalus’s stoa has
filled in to a depth of thirty feet and is covered with
houses closely packed together. Our ancient descriptions *
do not say that this colonnade stood next to the stoa poi-
kile; but in the opinion of many of the most eminent
scholars, this was its position. If this be the case, the stoa
of Attalus formed the eastern boundary of the commer-
cial end of the agora, and was undoubtedly built to re-
place one or more buildings of a similar kind that had
fallen to decay or were not of sufficient beauty to grace
the dignified frontage which the market-place of Athens
offered. The new colonnade was purely commercial in
purpose, but was highly dignified and, we may add, very
beautiful for its position. The structure is about three
hundred and seventy feet long. It was built in two stories
and consisted of a long row of chambers opening upon
two rows of columns twenty feet apart. Taking the col-
onnade as a sort of prototype of the modern bazaar of
the Orient, we may argue that the twenty-one chambers
were the strong-rooms of the merchants, where they
placed their wares for safe-keeping at night; that the
space between the front wall and the inner row of col-
umns was used for the display of merchandise in the day-
time; and that between the inner and outer rows of col-
umns was the shaded passageway where customers could
walk. The columns were raised above the level of the
market by three marble steps, in front of which was a stone
gutter. The outer row of columns numbered forty-four.
They were of Pentelic marble and of the Doric order.
The inner row had only twenty-two and were in the Ionic
398 THE STORY OF ATHENS

style. The architrave of the front row was, of course,
of marble and bore a long inscription; but the beams
within, from the great distance between the columns,
must have been of wood. What the arrangement of the
upper story may have been, we can only conjecture ; that
there was an upper story, the remains of a staircase at

 

Colonnade of Attalus II. Southeast Corner.

the southern end attest. It was, no doubt, very like the
lower story and was provided with a balustrade in front.
It is not impossible that the shopkeepers lived in this part
of the colonnade, and that their wives and little ones
could be seen leaning over the balustrade watching the
animated scenes of the agora below them. Some notion
of the construction of this building may be gained in the
southern extremity of the excavations, where the front
wall of the shop part of the stoa, with three doorways in it,
the end wall of the colonnade, with an anta of the Doric
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 399

colonnade, and a portion of the three continuous steps
may still be seen. As I have tried to indicate in the draw-
ing, the materials combine highly finished limestone with
marble. The deep foundations are of breccia, and a glance
will show how well they are laid, header upon header.
The steps are of white marble all through, showing that
the risers and treaders are not merely a veneer. The anta
is of white marble, while the walls are of finely dressed
limestone blocks laid in alternating broad and narrow
courses. The gray marble of Hymettus is used as a dado
all around the outside of the walls, and for the trim of the
great doorways which incline slightly toward the top.
The drawing was made without the mass of inarticulate
fragments which were strewn within the colonnade, and
minus the arches of brick which have been added to hold
the lintels in place; but the parapet of marble blocks which
is shown in front of the doorway on the left is a later
structure. It requires only a little imagination to restore
this huge building, with its fagade of white Pentelic mar-
ble, its walls of soft yellow limestone trimmed with the
blue-gray marble of Hymettus. It is probable that the
protected surfaces of the limestone were originally plas-
tered over and painted; but if they were not, the exqui-
site finish which was given them would have blended well
with the two shades of marble employed. At the far
northern end of the structure, in a niche in the end wall,
is a comfortable seat carved in Hymettian marble, which
gives an air of habitableness to the great ruin, fresh from
its grave of centuries; for if many of these luxuries were
provided in such a building, what a very pleasant place,
on a sunny afternoon, a shady Athenian stoa must have
been !

The sculpture of the middle of the second century in
Athens is well illustrated by a number of fragments—
busts and torsos—which are preserved in the National
400 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Museum. Of these, the most interesting are those which
were found in excavations not far from the Dipylum, amid
the ruins of a monument which, from an ancient inscrip-
tion, is known to have been made by one Eubulides. The
monument seems to have stood in a femenos sacred to Di-
onysus Melpomenus and not
far from the house of Puly-
tion, where the revelers par-
odied the Eleusinian myster-
ies on the eve of the departure
of the Sicilian expedition.
Whether these fragments be-
longed to the monument of
Eubulides described by Pau-
sanias, with its statues of
Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and
the Muses, it is impossible to
say; certain it is that one of
the heads found here is that
of Athena, and the colossal
torso may be a Muse as well
as any other personage. The
head, which is shown in the
illustration, is remarkably
beautiful, of stately poise and serene expression of coun-
tenance. The top of the head is not finished, as it was
surmounted by the usual Corinthian helmet. But charm-
ing as they may be as works of sculpture, the head and
the torso of the so-called Muse are plainly copies of fifth-
century works of the school of Phidias. M. Collignon
does not hesitate to place their date at 130 B.c.

Athens, meanwhile, in league with the rest of Greece,
had been getting herself into trouble with the mistress
of the world. In 146 the Roman consul Mummius con-
quered the forces of Macedonia and the Achean league,

 

Head of Athena, from the
Monument of Eubulides.
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 401

and made the old kingdom of Philip, together with all
Greece, a Roman province under the name of Achaia;
wherefore the doughty consul received the surname of
Achaicus. Mummius destroyed Corinth completely, but
Athens was spared and the change of government had lit-
tle effect upon the city.

Two centuries of Athenian history after the death of
the last great man of Athens barely make half a chapter,
and another century will not more than suffice to com-
plete it. The story of Athens has become a mere chron-
icle of the visits of foreign patrons to the famous city,
of which her monuments are memorials; and as such it
must continue, century after century, to the dawn of our
own day. Sixty years after Greece had become the prov-
ince of Achaia, we find Athens, in concert with the rest
of Greece, feebly trying to cast off the yoke of Rome,
which was becoming more and more of a burden. In the
beginning of the first century B.c., Rome began her great
struggle with Mithridates, king of Pontus. Athens had
thrown her slender influence upon the side of Rome’s
great enemy; but for a weak state there was little choice
between the tyranny of one great power and a friendly
alliance with another. Scarcely had Athens allied herself
with Mithridates before one of her citizens, an orator
named Aristion, was suffered to make himself tyrant of
Athens, and was held in that position by the powerful
ally. Friendship with Mithridates, as might have been
expected, brought disaster upon Athens. In the year 86
Sulla arrived in the Piraeus and marched directly upon
Athens. The city prepared to resist, and was besieged
by the Roman army—the first army of the new mistress
of the world to assail the walls of the ancient mistress.
Sulla ravaged Attica and cut down the trees of the Acad-
emy and the Lyceum, which had enjoyed a century of
growth since the war with Philip V, to build engines of

26
402 THE STORY OF ATHENS

war for the battering down of the walls. A deputation
was sent out from the city to plead with the crusty general.
They were a party of orators, who pleaded earnestly for
their beloved city. They dwelt upon her former greatness,
her unbounded services to the cause of science, of art, and
of literature; her ancient prowess in the great conflicts
with the Persians at Marathon and Plataea: but Sulla
heard all this with impatience and sarcastically replied that
he had come to Athens not to learn history but to punish
rebels; so the poor orators returned sadly to the belea-
guered city, while the storming of the walls was renewed.
At length a breach was made between the Dipylum and the
Sacred Gate. Sulla and his army entered in triumph, and
terror reigned supreme. Aristion, having burned Peri-
cles’s Odeum for fear it would aid Sulla in taking the
Acropolis, had fled to that citadel with a small army; and
again the old fortress proved its strength. Scribonius,
Sulla’s lieutenant, then laid a second siege, but could not
take the old stronghold, even with the aid of the new en-
gines which had been made. The garrison, however, was
ill supplied with food and finally capitulated. Aristion the
tyrant was promptly seized and put to death. Many other
orators and men of importance were executed, and a gen-
eral massacre of the citizens, according to ancient ac-
counts, filled the agora of the Ceramicus, inside the
Dipylum, with Athenian blood. Sulla spared the Acrop-
olis and the ancient temples and shrines of the gods; but
the unfinished Olympieum was the object of his greed.
He took a number of the columns down—interior ones,
probably—and shipped them to Rome to be used in
the reconstruction of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus,
which had recently been destroyed by fire. Having taken
a large amount of treasure—fifty pounds of gold and six
hundred pounds of silver—from Athena's treasury, he
retired to the Piraeus; where, before embarking, he com-

 
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 403

pletely destroyed the docks and warehouses, and the long
walls from Athens to the port, which Conon had rebuilt,
were again leveled to the ground. Sulla inflicted a blow
upon the commerce of Athens from which she never fully
recovered; but his depredations on the plain were soon
repaired. The Academy and the Lyceum were restored,
and the ruined groves were replanted; for when Cicero
came to Athens, a few years later, the ancient haunt of
Plato was in full swing, and by the time Horace appeared
“to search for truth in Academus’ woods,” the groves
must have begun again to cast their classic shade.
During the early Roman period, the theater was again
remodeled, in part at least. The stage buildings seem to
have been altered to some extent; but the Roman stage,
which is still im situ, does not belong to this period. Nev-
ertheless, it is probable that a stage was built at this time,
while Roman fashions of all kinds were coming more and
more into vogue, though there are no visible signs of its
construction. The theory of the building of an elevated
stage at this time is supported by sculptural rather than
architectural evidence; for the sculptures which we now
see built into the latest of all the stage constructions—
a third-century structure—are believed by the most
eminent authorities upon the subject to have been ex-
ecuted early in the first century B.c. It is probable that
the theater suffered during Sulla’s siege of the Acropolis,
in 86 B.c., and it is not improbable that the Roman stage
was introduced in the restorations which followed the
siege. The line of the first Roman stage is believed to
have been somewhat in advance of the last Hellenic struc-
ture, but decidedly behind the line of the third-century
stage. It must have been a splendid structure, judging
from the sculptures which adorned it. These consist of
four marble slabs carved in high relief, and a figure of
a Silenus posed as Atlas. They now appear in the right
404 THE STORY OF ATHENS

half of the front wall of the third-century logeion, of
which the other half is gone, the giant Silenus being
placed between

two of the re-
liefs, as if sup-
porting the floor
*’ of the stage, and
(, all may occupy
if positions some-
what similar to
’ their original ar-

/ rangement.
The first re-
lief on the left
represents the
birth of Diony-
sus. Zeus is seated at the right of the center; in front of
him stands Hermes, partially draped, holding the infant
Dionysus upon his arm; at either end of the slab is a nude
male figure bearing a shield: these are. the two Cre-
tan Curetes who performed the Pyrrhic dance at the
birth of the god. The next slab represents the first
sacrifice to Dionysus;
in the middle stands
an altar beside a luxu-
riant grape-vine; to the
right of the altar is Di-
onysus, fully clad, at-
tended by a_ youth
partly draped; on the
left stands the rustic
Icarius, with his dog:
Wee he is leading the goat
Stage Reliefs. The First Sacrifice lrigone to the sacrifice,
to Dionysus. followed by Maera, who

   

— Peni rare —_——

Stage Reliefs. The Birth of Dionysus.

    

eg titniinamiemmeay

 

Teh a Se oneneaatl
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 4os

brings a plate of sacrificial cakes. Both Icarius and Maera
are fully clad. The figures of the fourth slab have not

 

Stage Reliefs, showing one Silenus 77 s7tz.

been satisfactorily identified. There were originally four
here as well as in the others, but one of them has been
chiseled off ; of the remaining three one is a man and two
are women. The fourth group, also of four figures,
shows Dionysus seated on a carved marble throne in his
own theater, with the columns of the Parthenon, rising
above the Acropolis
wall, indicated in the
background. He 1s
seated at the extreme
right; the figure at the
opposite end of the
slab is Iréne with her
cornucopia. The two
intermediate figures
are a male and a fe-
male, and have been

i ith
designated, oe Stage Reliefs. Dionysus in the
any particularly good Theater at Athens.

   
406 THE STORY OF ATHENS

reason, as Theseus and Hestia. [very one of these figures
is headless; in other respects, they are wonderfully pre-
served and extremely beautiful, though each is doubtless
a reduced copy of some familiar statue. Zeus is like
the Zeus of the Parthenon frieze, [réne is the famous

s Iréne of Cephisodo-
on tus, while Hermes is
not unlike the well-
known statue of that
god by  Praxiteles.
Taken together, they
form one of the most
interesting sets of sculp-
tures in Athens.

To the same period
M. Collignon assigns
the two reliefs of dan-
cers found in the thea-
f ter and now in the Na-
y’ tional Museum. The
"relief in these two frag-
ments is quite low, and
they are conjectured to
have belonged to a bal-
ustrade of some sort.
As examples of spirited

 

Relief found in the Theater. designs, they ale
celled ; their movements
are animated and graceful, the, sweep of the wealth of
drapery is light and airy; but the technique has not the
exquisite finish of the balustrade reliefs of the Nike tem-
ple, nor does it reproduce the sensuous beauty of those
wonderful sculptures of the Golden Age.
From the time of Sulla’s conquest, Athens must be
reckoned as a Roman city, not only politically as a con-
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 407

quered subject, but as the favorite resort of the most dis-
tinguished men of Rome, who found in her studious re-
treats a haven of rest from political broils, in which their
own city was continually involved. The most brilliant
Roman youths were sent hither to be instructed in phi-
losophy at its fountainhead, to learn rhetoric, and to
associate with men of letters amid the scenes of the noble
literary past. To older men, whose tastes were artistic
and literary, who did not enjoy the exciting life of the
capital, Athens afforded a delightful home, a life urban
yet free from the mad distractions of the forum. Such
a Roman was Quintus Caecilius Pomponianus, surnamed
Atticus on account of his long residence in Athens and
his familiar acquaintance with the Attic language and
literature. Atticus maintained a splendid house in Athens,
which was the resort of the most distinguished men of
the time. He entertained both Caesar and Pompey; for,
having no political affiliations, he was a friend to all the
great. It was at Athens that Cicero met Atticus and
became his warm friend and ardent admirer. The cor-
respondence between these two lovers of Athens, which
has been preserved to us in the “Letters of Cicero,’’ is
one of the most delightful and entertaining remnants of
classical literature that have come down to us. Cicero’s
brother Quintus married Pomponia, a sister of Atticus,
and thus a closer bond was formed between the two men.
Atticus was an Epicurean of the true sort; his philosophy
was of a lofty, ideal type; and though happiness to him
was the theoretical summum bonuim, yet, when he was
attacked by an incurable disease, he starved himself to
death with the calm resignation of a Stoic. But Roman
knights had not yet entirely supplanted the kings of the
East in Athena’s favor. About the middle of the century,
Ariobarzanes, King of Cappadocia, surnamed Philopator,
came to Athens and, as a mark of his devotion to the city,
408 THE STORY OF ATHENS

rebuilt the Odeum of Pericles, which Aristion, in terror
of Sulla, had burned to the ground.

In 47, young Quintus Horatius Flaccus came from
Rome to complete his studies in the old seats of Athenian
learning. The poet was at this time eighteen years old;
he had received the best education that Rome could afford ;
for his father, though not a rich man, had spared nothing
to give his boy every advantage. The Roman youth
surely applied himself, under the inspiring influence of the
Muses of the Academy; for his poems breathe with Attic
feeling. At the same time Cicero’s only son, Marcus,
was placed at school in Athens under the tutelage of
Gorgias, the famous Athenian rhetorician. These youths
were only two out of a large number of young Roman
nobles then in Athens whose names we do not know.
The change from the life of Rome to that of Athens
must have been a delicious experience for youths of re-
fined tastes and ideal minds, and an excellent preparation
for the strenuous career of a Roman gentleman. What
a solace it was to Cicero, weary and jaded with political
strife in Rome, to retire to Tusculum and there steep
himself in the studies which he had begun in Athens; or,
upon receiving a letter from Atticus, to lose himself in
reveries of blissful days spent beneath the Acropolis!
Sulpicius, another warm friend of Cicero’s, also resided in
Athens while holding the office of proconsul of Achaia.
It was here that Sulpicius heard of the death of Tullia,
Cicero’s beautiful and accomplished daughter, and from
here he wrote his touching letter of sympathetic condo-
lence to his bereaved friend.

On the ides of March in the year 44, ‘the foremost man
of all this world” was felled by the hands of over-zealous
champions of liberty. Brutus and Cassius, the brother
tyrannicides, fled at once to Greece and came straight-
way to the city of Harmodius and Aristogiton. The
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 409

Athenians, ever clinging to their love of the past, ever
devotees of freedom, hailed these latest tyrant-slayers
with delight, and, it is said, raised statues in their honor
which were given a place with the two other groups of
heroes that stood beside the old revered figures of
Athens’s first champions, the tyrannicides. The final
struggle between the old: Roman republic and the rising
empire of Rome was fought out on Grecian soil. Octa-
vianus—the future Augustus—and Antony came swiftly
to chastise the assassins of Caesar. Horace hastily left his
studies in classic Athens, and with Cicero’s son hastened
to join Brutus and the friends of the doomed republic.
Both young men were given the rank of military tribunes,
and Horace received command of a legion—a high com-
mission for a youth just out of school, as he wrote, many
years after, to a friend: “The troublous times removed me
from that pleasant spot (bonae Athenaec); and the tide
of a civil war carried me away, inexperienced as I was,
into arms which were not likely to prove a match for
the sinews of Caesar Augustus.” At the decisive battle
of Philippi, where the old republic gasped her last breath,
after Brutus and Cassius had both fallen, Horace shared
in the general flight of the republican army. The poet
in after years playfully alludes to his flight, and tells
how he threw away his shield to expedite his escape.
Both Horace and Cicero’s son were eventually pardoned
by Augustus.

Athens had become not only the school for the noble
scions of Rome, but their playground as well. When mad
Mark Antony, intoxicated by excesses and wild dissipa-
tion, had cut loose from Rome and given himself over to
Oriental luxury and the charms of his mysteriously fas-
cinating “Serpent of old Nile,’”’ he made an excursion to
Athens. There is something mock-heroic, perhaps melo-
dramatic, in the coming of the Egyptian galley, with its
410 THE STORY OF ATHENS

purple silken sails, bearing that world-renowned pair of
lovers and their gorgeous Oriental court to the city of
great Pallas. Athens is turned into a great pleasure
palace; Antony holds a mock triumph, and the degraded
Athenians permit him to wed Athena with great splen-
dor in the sacred shrine of the Polias.. He then is crowned
and worshiped as a second Dionysus, while Cleopatra is
enthroned as goddess in the Parthenon; the weird strains
of Egyptian music take the place of the singing of Ath-
ena’s priestesses, and the sinuous contortions of Oriental
dancers are substituted for the solemn dances of the
sacred pannychis. The Athenians, as was now their
wont, fawned upon and flattered the self-deified god and
goddess, and went so far as to present Antony with a
million drachmae. Antony’s visit did no harm to Athens,
but to lower the Athenian populace in their self-degra-
dation. We cannot but believe that there were still men
in Athens who revolted at such disgusting behavior.
This early period of Roman influence in Athens was by
no means devoid of monuments—not temples of stupen-
dous proportions like that which the king of Syria had be-
gun, but buildings of good workmanship, chiefly of a
commercial character, which, even in their ruins, show
that architecture did not come to a standstill even after
Sulla had stamped his foot upon the proudest city of
Greece. Toward the end of the last century before the
birth of Christ, while the foundations of the Roman em-
pire were being laid by Augustus, the Athenians built a
spacious new market-place a short distance east of the
old agora, about due north of the Acropolis. <A large
space was cleared on the level ground, a few feet higher
than the old market-place; and a symmetrical parallelo-
gram, not on axis with the old market as marked by the
stoa of Attalus, but lying almost northwest by southeast,
was laid out as a great open court, surrounded by a fine
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 41!

colonnade of white marble columns in the Roman Tonic
style, 7.¢., with unfluted shafts. Behind these were small
shops, the rear walls of which formed an inclosure about
the market, unbroken except at the east and west, where
two monumental gateways afforded entrance to the open

 

Gateway of Athena Archegetis.

square. At the west a street seems to have led up from
the agora, passing between the stoa of Attalus and the
stoa poikile. This street terminated at the middle of the
west side of the new or Roman market, where a dignified
propylon formed the main entrance. The market-gate,
as it is called, consisted of a Doric portico of four col-
umns, tall, like all the columns of the later Doric style.
The central columns were widely spaced (eleven feet) for
the entrance of vehicles; while the spaces at the ends were
412 THE STORY OF ATHENS

quite narrow, being the entrance for pedestrians. Within
the portico was a large vestibule, walled on either side
and opening upon the market through three great portals.
The whole of the Doric portico is still in existence, and the
space about it has been considerably cleared up of recent
_ years, so that it gives quite an impression of magnificence.

 

Columns of Roman Market and the Horologium of Andronicus.

On its architrave is an inscription which dedicates the
portico to Athena Archegetis, and records the fact that
the gateway was built by the Athenians with funds given
by Julius Caesar and Augustus. It is then a token of
esteem for Athens from the great dictator and his impe-
rial nephew. Passing through the gate, one found him-
self in the midst of the great colonnaded court, with fully
thirty columns on its longer side. Not all the chambers
back of the colonnade were closed by doors, for there seem
to have been spaces like exedras provided with an inner
colonnade; but a solid wall surrounded the whole struc-
ture and carried one side of the continuous roofs of the
shops and colonnades. Only one angle of this market-
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 413

place has been excavated; but from this one may easily
restore the whole. The commercial purpose of these
colonnades may be seen in the official measures of length
‘cut upon the marble, and in an inscription, of a somewhat
later date, regulating the price of oil and salt. At the
eastern end of the inclosure, not on the central axis, was
another gateway, not so pretentious as Caesar’s gate, but
well built and handsome. One may still see the huge
antae of the portals and the unfluted shafts of large col-
umns which flanked the entrance. The ground rises at
this point so that broad steps were provided in the vesti-
bule, that only pedestrians could make use of this en-
trance. Immediately opposite this portal is a broad flight
of ascending steps surmounted by an arcade supported
upon piers, and, to the left, the familiar ‘““Tower of the
Winds,” a well-preserved monument built about the same
time as the market by one Andronicus of Cyrrhus, a
city of Syria, another foreign devotee of Athens. This
interesting little structure was a horologium: it accom-
modated not only a water-clock, but a sun-dial and a
weather-vane. It is of octagonal plan, its sides facing the
points of the compass, and it is raised on a little crepi-
doma of three steps. Two of its sides, the northeast and
the northwest, are provided with portals, in front of which
are the remains of two-columned porches. On the south
is a circular bay, built out from the wall, which was the
cistern for the water that operated the clock. The whole
structure, from the steps at its base to the huge wedge-
shaped slabs which converged at a common center to form
its roof, is of Pentelic marble. The lower courses of the
walls are quite plain, but around the top is a deep frieze
made up of figures in relief, one on each face, representing
the eight winds of heaven. Beginning at the north, we
have cold Boreas, a weather-beaten old man of sinister
expression. Next to him, on the east, is Caicias, another
414 THE STORY OF ATHENS

old fellow shaking hailstones out of a shield. The east
wind is Apeliotes, a youth with ears of corn; but Eurus,
the southeast wind, is again an old man enveloped in a
cloak. Notus, the gentle bringer of rain from the south,
is a youth bearing a large water-vessel.. Next comes
Lips, the mariner’s wind, with a ship’s prow in his hand.
Soft Zephyrus is a boy holding the flowers of spring in
the folds of his drapery, while Sciron, the last of the eight,
is a man of mature-years holding an upturned vase. The
figures are all winged and extremely interesting; but,
although they are well executed, they are badly drawn
and very ungainly; for Attic sculpture had now reached
a period of decline. Below each plaque of the frieze may
be seen the lines of ancient sun-dials, and the apex of the
roof, so old Roman writers tell us, was crowned with
a bronze figure of a Triton so pivoted that he turned his
face with every change of the wind. The arcaded por-
tico of the building immediately south of the horologium
is of early Roman date. It is built of the gray marble of
Hymettus; the arched openings between its piers are in
reality only lintels with semicircles cut in them, without
any relation to the principle of the arch. Below this
arcade runs the covered aqueduct which carried water
from the spring Clepsydra to the cistern of the horo-
logium.

After the empire had been firmly established in Rome,
Agrippa, Augustus’s lifelong friend and afterward his
son-in-law, one of the foremost men in the Roman state,
paid a visit to Athens. Not to be outdone by the famous
visitors who had preceded him, he laid the foundations
of a new music-hall on the site of the very ancient orches-
tra near the market. This building was speedily carried
to completion and was called the Agrippeum in honor
of its founder. In return for this munificence the people
of Athens erected a splendid statue to the distinguished
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 415

Roman, and set it just before the entrance to the Acrop-
olis, upon the tall pedestal of Hymettian marble which
is still such a conspicuous monument standing beside
the northern wing of the great Propylaea of Mnesicles,
called the pinakotheka. It is supposed to have been a
statue of bronze and was probably mounted in a chariot
drawn by two or more horses. The top of the pedestal
is amply large for a quadriga.

In the year 20 B.c. the poet Vergil came to Greece in
search of local coloring for his “Aeneid,” which he was
then writing. He stopped for a time in Athens, where
Ovid had just completed his legal education and had set
out on a tour of Asiatic Greece with the Roman poet
Macer. In Athens, Vergil met Augustus, returning from
the island of Samos, where he had spent the winter.
Augustus’s visit was a memorable occasion for the Athe-
nians. They received him with great pomp and loaded
him with honors; but we cannot imagine the reserved
emperor allowing himself to receive the disgusting flat-
teries which had been showered upon other potentates.
The Roma cult was revived and extended to include the
name of Augustus, and preparations were made to build
a temple to Roma-Augustus upon the Acropolis. Vari-
ous statues were erected in his honor and one to Livia
his wife, which was called “Augusta Hygeia,’”’ and was
placed just within the Propylaea near the ancient altar
of Athena Hygeia and Pyrrhus’s bronze statue of that
divinity. Asa result of Augustus’s visit to Athens, the
subject kings and states which made up the eastern por-
tion of the Roman Empire proposed to complete the great
temple of the Olympian Zeus, which Pisistratus had be-
gun in the sixth century and Antiochus had all but fin-
ished in the second, and dedicate it to the genius of Au-
gustus; but the plan did not materialize.

Within a few years the temple of Roma-Augustus was
416 THE STORY OF ATHENS —

finished and the new cult now threatened to become a
serious rival of Athena upon her own sacred hill. The
new temple was built directly to the east of the Parthe-
non, axis upon axis. It was a small temple, of circular
plan, only twenty feet in diameter at its base. As may
be seen from the inarticulate fragments which lie about
its foundations, the superstructure consisted of a peristyle
of nine Ionic columns which supported the inscribed archi-
trave. Its size may have been insignificant ; but its impor-
tance and dignity rivaled those of the Parthenon. The
great altar at the summit of the Acropolis rock answered
for Roma as well as for the Polias; the great festival of
the Panathenaea was shared between Athena and the
founder of the Roman Empire.

With the ever-increasing number of distinguished visi-
tors, the demand for portrait statues, to be set up in the
city, soon far exceeded the supply. The inventive Athe-
nians then evolved a ghastly though somewhat amusing
way out of the difficulty. There stood upon the Acropo-
lis and in the lower town countless thousands of statues
of divinities, of heroes, of great public men, besides the
less important portraits of ancestors. Many of these had
lost value and interest except as works of art; why not
rechristen them with the names of the Roman senators
and knights who were demanding statues in public places?
The ludicrous scheme seems at first to have worked to a
charm; new bases were provided for the works of the old
masters, or the original inscriptions were effaced; the
names of the proud Romans were inserted and they were
highly satisfied. When Germanicus came to Athens, the
citizens felt that they must do something by way of a
memorial for him. They chose one of the two bronze
equestrian statues which Lycius the sculptor had made
for the cavalry officers, and which had been set up, one
on either side of the Propylaea, away back in Pericles’s
ATHENS UNDER FOREIGN PATRONS 417

time; they turned its base about so that the old inscription
would not be seen, and they inscribed the names and titles
of Germanicus below the old bronze horseman. In time,
this plan failed to please the exacting Roman gentlemen;
they did not like to see their rugged features represented
by the serene faces of the old Greek statues; they wanted
real portraits. Nothing easier, replied the Athenian cli-
ents, who then proceeded to knock off the heads of those
sublime creations of the Attic masters and set in their
places heads which portrayed every feature of the hard-
faced Romans in perfect portraiture. This arrangement
proved highly successful; when a portrait was required of
a man of unusual importance, the statue of some deity
might be decapitated; when some less distinguished
patron wished to have his memory handed down to pos-
terity in this way, the statue of a demigod or hero could
be employed; and if the person to be thus immortalized
in Athens were an ordinary visitor, the portrait of an old
Athenian general or archon could be beheaded for the
purpose. Thus time and expense were saved and all
parties were pleased. When Vitruvius, the great archi-
tectural writer of the time of Augustus, came to Athens,
he must have experienced the most inspiring event of his
life. The city was at the height of her glory in architec-
tural display; there was every facility for studying the
works of the greatest masters of many periods and in
many styles. Upon his return to Rome he was able to
present to the emperor a compendium by which he might
judge by the highest standards all the works which had
been executed for him. Vitruvius’s mention of the Olym-
pieum, the colonnade of Eumenes, and the horologium of
Andronicus is important to the dating of those structures.

27
PLAN or AtuENS IN ROMAN TIMES

t. Monument of Attalus I.

2. Statue of Athena Promachos.

3. Sanctuary of Athena Ergane.

4. Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia.
5. Temple of Athena Nike.

6. Statue of Agrippa.

7. Clepsydra.

8. Roman Gate.

9g. Monument of Nicias.
10. Sacred Spring.

t1. Dionysiac Altar.

12. Monument of Thrasyllus.

13. Choragic Columns.

14. Grotto of Pan.

15. Cave of Apollo.

16. Altar of Eumenides.

17. Altar of the Twelve Gods.

18. Statue of Hermes of the Market.
tg. Enneacrunus.

20. Altar on Pnyx.

21. Gate of Athena Archegetis.

22. Medieval Cathedral.

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XIII

ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS

““Ye men of Athens, in all things I perceive that ye are somewhat religious.”
SAINT PAUL.

 

if _ WHEN the decree went out from Caesar Au-
Mel yx) gustus that all the world should be taxed, that
U () decree applied to Greece as well as to Pales-

  

tine; and we may imagine the inhabitants of
Attica going up to their capital to be taxed,
just as the people of Judea were going up
to Jerusalem, when the greatest event in
human history took place; for Attica and
Judea now were both members of a vast organism—the
Roman Empire. A new era was ushered into the his-
tory of the world, in far-away Bethlehem—an era fraught
with the greatest importance to the destiny of that em- .
pire. Paganism, and, in fact, all forms of religious belief,
were already on the wane when the Saviour of mankind
came into the world. Thirty years later, Christ was
lifted up on the cross of Calvary, and a new religion was
born which at once began the sure but gradual transfor-
mation of Rome; but four centuries were to pass ere that
cross should be set up on the Acropolis of Athens, where
Athena had been worshiped for at least fifteen hundred
years.

It was in the reign of Tiberius that the Roman citizen
Saul of Tarsus, “breathing out threatenings and slaugh-
ter’ against the followers of the recently crucified Christ,
419
420 GHESSTORY OF ATHENS

Was journeying from Jerusalem to Damascus in quest of
persecution, and saw “the light from heaven” and heard
the voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”
which turned him from his threatenings to become the
most faithful follower of the great Teacher whose dis-
ciples he had put to the sword.

Twenty years passed, and Nero had just been crowned
Emperor of Rome, when the Great Apostle to the Gentiles
came to Athens. There is no stronger link in the chain
that binds us to the city of great Pallas than that forged
by Saint Paul during his brief and comparatively in-
effectual visit. He had come to Athens alone; he at
first walked about the streets unheeded; he visited the
agora, and doubtless the Acropolis, everywhere seeing
magnificent temples and statues to the gods of Greece,
and reading dedicatory inscriptions to pagan divinities,
until at length he found the little synagogue in the ghetto
of Athens where the Athenian Jews worshiped Jehovah.
Ere long he was drawn into disputes with these members
of his own race, not only in the synagogue, but in the
agora, with those that met him on his way. Thus it
happened that he was overheard by the Epicureans and
Stoics, who sat in the exedras and colonnades of the
market, and was invited by them to explain the new doc-
trine whereof he spoke; for ‘all the Athenians and
strangers sojourning there spent their time in nothing
else, but either to tell, or to hear, some new thing.”” The
philosophers heard with interest all he had to tell them,
and finally asked him to give a public lecture upon his new
philosophy. He mounted with them to the Areopagus,
away from the noise and confusion of the market, and
when they had seated themselves he expounded to them
the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. ‘‘And Paul
stood in the midst of the Areopagus,” says the account
in the Acts of the Apostles, and began, ''Ye men of Ath-
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 421

ens, in all things I perceive that ye are somewhat reli-
gious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of
your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription :
TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. What therefore ye wor-
ship in ignorance, this set I forth unto you.”” Then, turn-
ing his eyes up toward the Acropolis, crowned with the
glorious creations of men’s hands, he continued, ““The God
that made the world and all things therein, he, be-
ing Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples
made with hands.” Then setting forth fis God as the
creator and regulator of the universe, and the father
of mankind, impressing his words upon his hearers by
an apt quotation from one of their own poets, he recalls
to mind the wonderful statues which he has beheld in
the temples, and continues: “Being then the offspring of
God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto
gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and device of
man”; and then he preaches repentance and judgment,
giving as a pledge of authority the resurrection of the
righteous Judge. All had listened with rapt attention,
for the Athenians were the best listeners in the world,
until he came to the “anastasis” ; then some of his hearers
mocked, and the meeting was broken up; but others said,
“We will hear thee concerning this yet again.”

Athens was the city of all others where a man like
Paul, burning with enthusiasm for a new doctrine, would
be likely to be welcomed ; a city where freedom of thought
and of speech had been encouraged for centuries, and
where speculation was the dearest delight of the gifted
inhabitants : but it was not a city which one would expect
to take kindly to the idea of simple faith in unprovable
mysteries such as Paul preached. The Athenians were
too self-satisfied, too given over to pride of knowledge,
to accept such truths as the incarnation and the resur-
rection of the dead without demonstration. They were
422 THE STORY OF ATHENS

as proud of their wisdom as they were in the days when
Socrates sought to disabuse them of it, and Christianity
has never been a religion for those who are wise in their
own conceit.

Paul’s spirit was stirred within him because he saw
the city wholly given over to “idolatry,” but he respected
the Athenians in their devotion to such a religion as
they had, and in their endless searching after truth, their
blind groping after a God whom they did not know.
The Athenians, on the other hand, were not only glad to
listen to Paul as the preacher of a new and strange and
therefore interesting doctrine, but respected him as a
searcher after truth absolutely sincere and fired with
conviction. He was, moreover, a man of learning, well
versed in the literature and philosophy of Greece, by
which, as an educated man, he could not but be influ-
enced; having been born and brought up at Tarsus, a
Greek city of Cilicia, scarcely less than second in im-
portance to Athens itself as a center of learning.

Saint Paul’s sermon upon the Areopagus, as recorded,
is of course only a fragment of his oration, and a mere
suggestion of all he said to the Athenians during his
sojourn with them. But taking this as an example of
his talks and considering the philosophical tone of his
epistles, we may rest assured that he manifested a thor-
ough acquaintance with the best products of Greek
thought, and by his eloquent use of the Greek language
won the admiration, if not the support, of those Athenians
who heard him, as the judgment of a later Greek writer,
himself not a Christian, would attest. In enumerating
the most brilliant representatives of Hellenic eloquence,
after naming Demosthenes, Lysias, Aeschines, Aristides,
Timarchus, Isocrates, and Xenophon, Longinus writes:
“To these IT would add Paul of Tarsus, one of the first
founders of an unproved doctrine.”
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 423

Although Saint Paul’s success in converting men to
the Christian faith was small in Athens, compared with
that which resulted from his visits to Corinth and other
Greek cities, his brief sojourn was not wholly with-
out fruit. He had come rather by accident than by de-
sign, and departed, after a few days, to Corinth. ‘‘How-
beit,” as the Biblical account says, “certain men clave
unto him and believed: among the which was Dionysius
the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others
with them.” It would seem that all had not scoffed,
even at the doctrine of the resurrection, and in this
little company, we know not how small, was founded
the Athenian church. Dionysius, who, according to all
accounts, was a man of great learning, having studied
at Rome and at Heliopolis in Egypt, and who, from the
position of influence which he held in Athens, must have
been a man of considerable importance, was placed by
Saint Paul at the head of the little company of Chris-
tians, and is believed to have received, at the hands of
the Saint, the apostolic succession as the first Bishop of
Athens. Of his later life we know nothing. Many books
of a theological nature, imbued with Alexandrian Plato-
nism, were ascribed to him in the sixth century; but
serious doubts have been cast upon their authenticity.
The traditions of the church ascribe to him a martyr’s
death; but as to the manner of his martyrdom nothing
is known. Of Damaris and the other converts we know
nothing. If friends of the Areopagite, as we may readily
believe many of them to have been, their number doubt-
less included men of learning and distinction. If Saint
Paul kept in touch with his little flock under the shadow
of the Acropolis, and wrote letters to them as he did to
some of his other churches, all records of them have
been lost. But the church seems to have been kept alive
until the time of Constantine, when a small Christian
424 THE STORY OF ATHENS

community still existed in Athens, which, during the cen-
turies following, became a large and influential body.

During the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius
in Rome, Athens had enjoyed peace and comparative
prosperity; but under Nero the systematic plundering
of Greek cities began, and many monuments of Attic
sculpture were borne away to grace the palaces and pub-
lic buildings of the imperial city: many of them to be
lost forever in the various sacks of Rome which fol-
lowed the breaking up of the empire in- after centuries;
others, fortunately, to be preserved to us in the copies
that were made by Roman artists and taken out to the
Alban Hills to adorn the sumptuous villas of Roman sen-
ators and generals. Myron’s famous cow, which had
stood patiently upon the Acropolis since the day of
Pericles, was one of the many bronzes that perished for-
ever in the destruction of Rome; while the “Satyr” of
Praxiteles, his “Disc-thrower,’’ and one of his statues of
Aphrodite are to be numbered among those of which
copies, of more or less artistic merit, were made in Rome,
and in this way handed down for our study and delight.
It is interesting to note that, in 1900, a number of statues
in bronze and marble were found at the bottom of the sea
by some sponge-divers near the island of Cythera. It
is not impossible that they formed part of the cargo of
one of the ships that were carrying marbles and bronzes
from Athens to Rome in the reign of Nero; as the wreck
lies not far from the track which vessels would have
followed in sailing around the southern point of Greece.
These figures and fragments seem to belong to the period
immediately after Praxiteles—the school of Lysippus—
and some of them may have been executed by that great
sculptor himself.

Though the reign of Nero was a time of taking away
rather than of building up monuments, there are some
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 425

writers who assign the building of the first Roman stage
in the theater to this period, in spite of the strong evi-
dence given by the sculptured decorations of that build-
ing, which would seem to belong to a considerably earlier
period, as we have seen in the last chapter. Neverthe-
less, it is quite probable that certain changes were effected
at this time; for the pavement of the orchestra, with its
great diamond of richly colored marble slabs and its de-
pression in the middle for the recepticn of the base of
the thymele or altar, are to be assigned to the first years
of the first century of our era.

The two familiar columns which stand upon their high
perch above the cave which formed a part of the monu-
ment of Thrasyllus, stretching up toward the top of the
Acropolis wall, are of Roman date, but the letters upon
them seem to be later than Nero’s reign. These columns,
with their stepped pedestals and Ionic bases, have three-
cornered capitals of the Corinthian order, which were
probably intended to receive tripods, and must therefore
have been a late form of choragic monument.

The next century—the second of our era—saw an
artistic revival in Athens under the patronage of foreign
rulers. When Philopappus, the last of the kings of
Commagene, was driven from his throne by Vespasian,
he came to Athens and took up his residence there, bring-
ing with him a large fortune. Philopappus was a grand-
son of Antiochus Epiphanes, who had been such a lover
of Athens, and knew that he would be welcome among
her citizens. He was soon enrolled as an Athenian citi-
zen, and entered upon all the duties and responsibilities
of citizenship, though he retained the title of king so long
as he lived. In the year 100 a.p. he was made consul by
the Roman government, and during his long residence
held many other offices of distinction, spending money
upon the city of his adoption with a liberal hand, and
426 THE STORY OF ATHENS

endearing himself to all the citizens, who respected him
as a fellow-citizen and honored him as a_ hereditary
prince. A monument was raised to his memory which
is one of the most conspicuous landmarks of the ancient
city, perched on the sum-
mit of the steep Hill of
the Muses, which has
since changed its name
for his. The monument
itself should not be com-
pared with the works of
the Golden Age in Ath-
ens; but it is a good ex-
ample of Greco-Roman
art. It was built in two
distinct stories and on the
plan of a shallow exedra
—hbeing slightly concave.
It stands face toward the
Acropolis. The lower
Monument of Philopappus. story consists of a base

of limestone and a solid

wall, flanked by pilasters and adorned with a large frieze
in high relief representing the official progress of Philo-
pappus, in his chariot, clad in the insignia of consular
dignity. About two thirds of this portion of the monu-
ment stand in their place, though sadly defaced by the rav-
ages of war and the vandalism of tourists. The second
story is composed of three large niches which contained
three portrait statues in life-size. The central figure
was a seated statue of Philopappus himself, represented
as an Athenian citizen, of the deme of Besa, and wear-
ing the insignia of a Roman consul. An inscription
bears out the testimony of the statue. In the niche to the
left is a portrait statue of Antiochus Epiphanes, the

 
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 427

grandfather of Philopappus, and in that to the right,
which is now destroyed, was one of King Seleucus Nica-
tor, the founder of the Commagene dynasty. In the rear
of the monument, overlooking the plain and the sea, was
the inclosure where Philopappus and his family were
buried.

During the early years of the first century, Dion Chry-
sostom was in Athens. He was a rhetorician and _phi-
losopher and left a large number of works, of which about
eighty orations are still extant. These are rather essays
on politics and general moral subjects. In one of them
he puts into the mouth of Phidias—the famous sculptor
of the Golden Age—an explanation of his great statue
of Zeus. Dion preaches Socrates and Diogenes, and
favors the simplicity of life and manners which these old
philosophers stood for. It is interesting to find him
railing at the common practice of beheading ancient
statues and transforming them into portraits of modern
men of distinction.

Hadrian, the Philhellenic emperor of Rome, made
Athens his favorite, and became almost more Athenian
than Roman during his protracted visits to the city,
which he seems to have loved far more dearly than the
majestic seat of his empire upon the Tiber. While
Hadrian was making his grand tour of his dominions,
through Gaul to distant Britain, where he built the fa-
mous wall which, extending from the Solway Firth to the
mouth of Tyne, was to keep the wild Picts and Scots from
ravaging Britannia Romana; back through Spain to
the northern coast of Africa, to Greece, Ionia, Syria,
Arabia, and Egypt; he rested in Athens and for three
years enjoyed a life quite free from the cares of empire,
surrounded by all those things which he liked best, for he
was a true lover of art and of literature, being himself
a writer of no inconsiderable merit. It was a great day
428 THE STORY OF ATHENS

for the Athenians when their munificent lord and master
set foot in Athens. They celebrated his coming with
all pomp and splendor, they created a new tribe which
they named after his name, they initiated him into the

 

Hadrian’s Quarter, from the Acropolis. Stadium and Mount
Hymettus in the Distance.

solemn mysteries of Eleusis; they made him archon
and showered him with every honor that was theirs to
bestow. Hadrian, not so much in return for the good will
of the citizens as out of real respect and love for the
ancient mother of art and letters, loaded the city with
gifts and filled it with beautiful and costly monuments.
He cleared the southeastern portion, the part of least
historic importance, and laid out a new quarter, sepa-
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 429

rating it from the old city by a line marked by a mon-
umental arch which formed the entrance to the new
ward, and inscribed upon its western face, “THIS Is
THE ANCIENT CITY, THE CITY OF THESEUS,” and on
the eastern side: “THIS IS THE CITY OF HADRIAN AND
NOT OF THESEUS.” He completed the great temple of
Zeus Olympios whose foundations had been laid by
Pisistratus, and whose mighty columns had been erected
by Antiochus, the illustrious king of Syria; he instituted
a magnificent festival with splendid Panhellenic games
in honor of Zeus; constructed an aqueduct which reme-
died the city’s one defect; built a magnificent library
and a gymnasium; and founded a Pantheon; in fact,
made himself the Pericles of the lower city. Not
all of Hadrian’s buildings were erected to adorn the
quarter which was to bear his own name. This quar-
ter included the Olympieum, it is true; the stately gate-
way and sumptuous villas and baths belonged naturally
to the “City of Hadrian”; but the great library and
gymnasium were erected on the other side of the Acrop-
olis, just east of the agora, near the Roman market-place,
whose gate was a monument of the first two Caesars.
Hadrian’s gate is a simple and beautiful monument of
Roman art adorned with Grecian grace. An arch, broad,
severe, and plain, spans the ancient roadway, flanked by
two massive pilaster buttresses, with rich Corinthian cap-
itals, and supported on either side by small pilasters of
the same order. Above the arch is the plain frieze which
bears the inscriptions, and above this is a deep over-
hanging cornice with a delicate dentil molding beneath
it. This completes the ground story of the arch, whose
two faces are exactly similar. The upper story consists
of an open, airy design of columns and pilasters which
form three broad, open spaces, above which is a second
entablature with cornice and dentil molding, and, over
430 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the central space, a fine little pediment on either face,
which the entablature breaks out to receive. These pedi-
ments are supported each by two beautiful little Co-
rinthian columns, while the entablature on either hand

 

Arch of Hadrian, Eastern Face.

rests upon slender paneled pilasters with Corinthian
caps. It would appear as if there had originally been
a curtain wall separating the open spaces below the
two pediments, which formed two niches for statuary.
It is not impossible that one of these held a statue of
Theseus and the other a statue of Hadrian. The arch
is a monument of unusual beauty and refinement, totally
unlike the huge and bulky arches which the Roman em-
perors set up in Italy as trophies of triumph, and much
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 431

more like the monumental arches which we find in the
East. There is no attempt at grandiose effect, no over-
loading with sculptural decorations and minute carving
—only a broad and elegant design, free, graceful, and
festive, such a monument as we might expect to see
Athenian artists of the older school erect to the proud
emperor of a world-wide empire. Two lovely vistas
may be had through the gate of Hadrianopolis. From

 

Ruins of Propylon on North Side of the Olympieum,

the western side it frames the sturdy group of golden-
tinted columns which stand for the Olympieum ; the gray-
green pines of the public gardens and the soft blue slopes
of Mount Hymettus making a background of perfect
harmony. From the east one may see, beneath its noble
curve, the dainty little monument of Lysicrates, at the
end of a long, narrow street, and the rugged violet
rock of the Acropolis with the even courses in golden
brown of Cimon’s wall. The arch still forms the prin-
cipal gate to the ruins of the Olympieum, which has
been already described. But, as may be remembered,
the great temple was not finished by the well-disposed
432 THE STORY OF ATHENS

king of Syria, nor by the later kings and states who
would have made it a monument to the founder of the
Roman Empire. In Hadrian’s day it was probably
still roofless and incomplete in many minor details. The
emperor not only finished the temple itself, but sur-
rounded its oblong temenos with a wall within which
he built a beautiful colonnade of marble, all around its
four sides, forming a sort of cloister walk about the
whole inclosure; on the northern side was built an im-
posing portal and vestibule connecting the temenos with
his new quarter of the city. Within the cella of the tem-
ple, he placed a large statue of the Olympian Zeus in gold
and ivory, and, behind it, a colossal statue of himself
which was surpassed in size only by the famous colossus
of Rhodes and the gigantic statue of Nero at Rome. The
temenos was soon a forest of votive statues which the
faithful from far and near set up, besides many which
were the gift of the emperor. These included a great
number of portraits of Hadrian himself; figures repre-
senting the provinces of the empire; portraits of the great
Athenians of the past, like Demosthenes and Isocrates;
statues representing Industry, Prudence, and other vir-
tues, and a host of athletic prize statues. An example
of the last is to be seen in the bust of an athlete found
near the Olympieum, and now in the National Museum.
The bust is in a perfect state of preservation, and is very
interesting in comparison with the older athletic statues
in Athens.

It is essentially a portrait, showing little attempt at
idealization—a truthful portrayal, no doubt, of the fine
open face and noble expression of a robust youth of
Hadrian’s time. What strikes us most, perhaps, about
this portrait of an athletic hero of eighteen hundred years
ago is its modern air. Imagine it with a sweater about
its muscular neck and shoulders, and you will have an
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 433

up-to-date collegian fresh from the football field or
track.

From the grand portal in the north wall of the temenos,
on the gradual slope which stretches away toward the
north as far as the foot of Mount Lycabettus, extended
the Roman city with its luxurious villas and gardens.
Here were undoubtedly
the emperor’s palace and
the residences of many
Roman nobles. Naught
is to be seen of these
magnificent structures but
some low foundation
walls and a number of
mosaic pavements, in va-
ried and beautiful geo-
metrical designs, which
may be found among the
palms and shrubs of the
public gardens and the
gardens of the royal pal-
ace. For the conveni-
ence of the new quarter,
Hadrian built a fine aque-
duct, which brought an
ample supply of water for Bust ea Ble and near
the new city and the old
from away out toward Mount Pentelicus. This aqueduct
is still in use. The channel which lies along the foot of
Mount Lycabettus is the ancient conduit, and in the gar-
dens of the royal palace ruins of arches may be seen which
carried the water out to Hadrian’s quarter.

In the heart of the modern city, surrounded with
narrow shady streets and quaint bazaars, are the discon-

nected ruins of Hadrian’s other great building. The
28

 
434 THE STORY OF ATHENS

gymnasium or library of Hadrian, which doubtless served
both purposes, was a huge colonnaded structure not unlike
the market of Augustus’s time in plan. It was surrounded
with a massive buttressed wall built of huge blocks of

 

 

 

 

Column ef the Portico and Part of Wall of Hadrian’s Stoa.

limestone, parts of which are visible on its northern and
eastern sides. Toward the west was a large open portico,
from which a street led straight to the Dipylum. The
portico consisted of four large columns of the Corinthian
order, and, on either side of it, the west wall of the
inclosure was faced with white marble and adorned with
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 435

columns standing free, supported upon pedestals, and
carrying a rich entablature. The whole northern half
of this wall, with one of the columns.of the portico, still
stands in an excellent state of preservation, and is locally
known as the Stoa of Hadrian. The single preserved col-
umn of the portico is of white marble and of pure Corin-
thian style, while the decorative columns are of a smaller
order and are in Roman Corinthian style, with unfluted
shafts of the green and white marble which in Italy is
called cipollino, and rich capitals and well-molded bases in
the pure white marble of Pentelicus. This ruin, though
in a squalid part of the modern city, facing a dirty street
and flanked by a horrid prison, is still a delightful study
of Roman magnificence, and is particularly interesting
as an example of the means by which the Roman artists
provided pleasing color effects by the use of variegated
marbles instead of putting color upon white marble—
one of the few improvements, according to our modern
taste, which the Romans made upon the architecture of
the Greeks. The great inclosure was provided within
with colonnades on all sides, and semicircular and square
exedras on two sides. At the east end was a large
building with not less than five spacious compartments,
which may have constituted the gymnasium. In the
center of the grand court stood a large structure, central
in plan, with a fine portico to the west. This was per-
haps the library proper, “adorned with gilded roof and
alabaster,’ and with columns of Phrygian marble. Only
portions of it remain im situ, and these have suffered badly
from fire. Near it, the marble pavement of the court
is well preserved. In describing this elaborate building,
Pausanias, a few years later, says, ‘“Most splendid of all
are the hundred columns,” and, to the great traveler’s
Roman taste, it was undoubtedly the most beautiful build-
ing in Athens. I am not so sure that, if we had not been
436 THE STORY OF ATHENS

taught to consider the Parthenon as the norm of beauty,
it would not have seemed so to our taste, too.

Of the Pantheon which Hadrian founded nothing is
known, but it probably corresponded in magnificence
with the other buildings of his with which we are ac-
quainted. When the great temple of Zeus was dedicated,
the emperor instituted a Panhellenic festival with splen-

 

The Acropolis, from Hadrian’s Quarter.

did games which rivaled not only those of the Panathe-
naic festival, but even the famous games celebrated in
honor of Zeus at Olympia. To the time-honored events
of the old Greek games were added new ones of a Roman
character, wonderful spectacles, gladiatorial contests and
combats of wild beasts. The Athenians were shown the
Roman pastimes which reeked with bloodshed; for it is
recorded that one thousand wild beasts were killed at
one performance in the stadium. It must have been itself
a grand spectacle when the emperor Hadrian, surrounded
by noble Roman courtiers and waited upon by the dig-
nitaries of Athens, sat upon his marble throne in the
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 437

middle of the curving end of the stadium, beneath his
purple canopy, and watched the procession, the games, and
the shows, with all the splendors of Rome transported
to the city of great Pallas, and all displayed under the
blue sky and in the brilliant atmosphere of Greece. Ha-
drian, ever dreaming of his plan to revive the ancient cults
of Greece and restore her past glories, saw it all with
unspeakable joy, feeling that this was but a beginning
of greater things.

In the train of Hadrian was a Bithynian youth of sur-
passing beauty, a friend and favorite of his imperial
master. No one could see him without being haunted
by his lovely, pensive face, so full of beauty, yet so mys-
terious and dreamy. He witnessed the pageant, he saw
the games, he watched the bloody spectacles; yet his ex-
pression seldom changed, the sweet smile of half-pro-
phetic resignation scarcely altered. But how could he or
his royal patron or the soothsayers and diviners of the
city have foreseen that within a few short years the fair
young Bithynian would be worshiped as a god in Athens
and in every city of the Roman Empire? When Ha-
drian departed from Athens, he went to Egypt, and en-
joyed her ancient glories and mystic rites quite as much
as he had the splendors of Greece and her retreats of
philosophy and learning. At Besa an oracle predicted
the imminent death of the emperor unless some one whom
he loved dearly should offer his life as a vicarious sacri-
fice. Hadrian was greatly troubled; for he was super-
stitious above all things, and gloom fell upon the gay
court which was following its proud monarch on his
memorable journey. As they were sailing up the Nile in
a gorgeous galley, Antinous, the beautiful Bithynian
youth, who had been greatly depressed by the words of
the oracle, leaped into the river and became the voluntary
victim whose death was to save his master’s life. Such
438 THE STORY OF ATHENS

is the account as given by a majority of historians, though
there were some who insisted that Hadrian was driven
by superstitious fear to immolate his favorite in this way.
However it happened, the emperor mourned his loss as
no monarch had ever mourned. He believed that his own
life had been saved by that costly sacrifice. Antinous
was deified, the world received him as a god, a blood-
stained lotus sprang up beside the Nile, which was dedi-
cated to the new deity, a star appeared in heaven which
the emperor believed to be the soul of his lost favor-
ite, and a constellation bears his name to this day. The
old Egyptian city of Besa became the new and splen-
did Greek city of Antinoopolis. Here Antinous was
worshiped with special honors, and here he gave out ora-
cles as the former Egyptian god had done. The worship
of Antinous spread rapidly in the Greek world; and
Athens, Hadrian’s favorite city, was among the first to
establish a cult of the latest divinity to be enrolled with
the gods of Olympus. The priesthood for his service
was chosen from among the epheboi. Games were in-
stituted in his honor at Athens and at Eleusis: while
countless statues reproduced the divine form he had worn
on earth. In the Dionysiac theater a marble throne was
reserved for the priest of Antinous, and his name may
still be seen inscribed upon it. Statues of the beautiful
new god seem to have been most popular among the
ancients, not only for their religious significance, but for
their intrinsic loveliness. We find them in almost every
large museum, and most of them belong to the neohel-
lenic period, the period which Hadrian and his immediate
successors fostered. I have chosen to reproduce here one
of those which is now in Athens, though it came origi-
nally from Patras, the modern gateway of Greece for
Europeans. Though not one of the most famous statues
of the youthful god, and only a bust, it preserves all the
 

Bust of Antinous, from Patras, now in the National
Museum at Athens.
440 THE STORY OF ATHENS

most salient characteristics and charms which all the
others present: the well-developed yet sensuous form of
the shoulders and breast, the strong neck with beautifully
modeled throat, the graceful head poised slightly for-
ward, the tangled mass of hair neither curly nor straight,
and, above all, the mystic meditative face with low broad
forehead, heavy straight brows and deep-set dreamy eyes,
straight nose, softly rounded cheek and chin, and the
half-pensive, half-pouting lips which, parting, form the
loveliest mouth that sculptor ever carved. Beautiful as
the features are, the expression is still more beautiful.
It is the look of calm and thoughtful resignation in the
face which haunts one after he has left the presence of the
portrait, the mute appealing soul beneath the marble that -
speaks to our souls; and the critics tell us that this is not
a highly idealized picture, that the power of lofty ideali-
zation had been lost before the time of Antinous, and that
this is undoubtedly an almost exact likeness of the youth
whose beauty first won Hadrian’s heart and whose hero-
ism subsequently offered his own young life to save his
master’s. Let Clemens and his followers carp as they
will, there were a soul and a personality behind that face
that stand for more than an emperor’s dramatic grief,
more than canonization by Greek priests, more than the
worship of countless thousands of obedient subjects; a
soul and a personality which speak to us, after centuries
of Christian faith and moral development, telling a story
of human pain, unselfish love, and heroic devotion; attri-
butes so rare in pagan divinities, so new in the portrayals
of pagan art, that we do not wonder that this embodiment
of beauty and pathos was multiplied throughout the
length and breadth of heathendom—the last sweet flower
of classic art and of a waning faith that was to be sup-
planted by a religion of which human pity, self-sacrifice,
and vicarious atonement were the supreme attributes.
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 441

The portrait bust of Antinous brings us to the mention
of sculpture in general during the neohellenic period.
The art of sculpture had revived again in Athens as in all

Greece; but it carried
on the style, the meth-
ods, and the subjects of
the later periods of full
bloom. Portraiture was
still the leading mo-
tive, and the remains
of sculpture which
have come down to us
from that time are
chiefly in that form.
Copying, of course,
was continued; but
that can never be con-
sidered as an artistic
development in itself.
Beside the bust of An-
tinous in the Athenian
Museum, it is interest-
ing to see one of
the emperor Hadrian,
which was found near
the Olympieum. It has
a noble, high-bred face,
almost modern in type.

 

Bust of Hadrian, found near
Olympieum.

It is not difficult to see in the features and expression the
love of peace which gave the Roman empire tranquillity
during a long reign, nor the pride which adorned the
world with monuments bearing Hadrian’s name, and,
it may not be going too far to say, the thoughtful mind
that found delight in philosophical study and literary
pursuits. The same period produced the host of portraits
442 THE STORY OF ATHENS

found near the supposed site of the gymnasium of the
epheboi. These are portraits of the cosmetae, the off-
cials of the gymnasium, and appear in the form of Her-
mae with inscriptions on their rectangular bodies. A mar-
ble head, now in the National Museum and given here
in a photograph, is a good example of the copyist’s work
of the time. It was found
near the Olympieum, not
far from the site of the an-
cient Pythium, beside the
Tlissus, and is somewhat
broken. The head is usu-
ally called that of Apollo,
and its resemblance to a
number of Apollo heads in
various European museums
is certainly very striking.
It shows no unusual merit,
and was probably copied,
by an artist of mediocre

Head of Apollo, found near ability, from a then well-

pie ieee: known statue.

Shortly before his death the emperor Hadrian adopted
Antoninus Pius as his successor; and Antoninus at the
same time adopted Marcus Aurelius and L. Aurelius
Verus, who were soon afterward students in Athens.
Their teacher was Herodes Atticus, a distinguished rhet-
orician from Marathon in Attica. Under the influence
of Athenian surroundings and the guidance of his wise
preceptor, Marcus imbibed those lofty philosophical sen-
timents which afterward inspired him to write his ‘‘Medi-
tations.” Herodes was unquestionably the most distin-
guished and perhaps the wealthiest citizen of his time.
As we have seen, he was a rhetorician and a teacher
by profession; but he held many political offices and cere-

 
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 443

monial positions in the state. In 143 the emperor An-
toninus Pius appointed him to the office of consul, as
a mark of favor, perhaps on account of his services to
the emperor’s adopted sons. His wife, Regilla Annia,
was more of a Roman matron than an Athenian lady, and
was a priestess of the cult of Tyche (Fortuna). Herodes
had made many costly gifts to the city when, at one of
the great Panathenaic festivals, the citizens presented
him with a crown of honor in the stadium. He received
the gift of the state with pride and gratitude, and in his
speech of acceptance proclaimed that, when another Pan-
athenaic festival should recur, the Athenians would find
their stadium overlaid with marble and so beautiful
“that no theater could compare with it.” The promise
was speedily fulfilled: the quarries of Pentelicus were
taxed to furnish the marble seats which rose in sixty
tiers above a parapet of marble which surrounded the
running track. At the semicircular end, marble seats,
with high backs, for the dignitaries of state, were pro-
vided in the lowest tier. Steps of marble divided the
seats into blocks and led up at intervals in the wall which
raised the lower seats well above the track. At the
summit of the semicircular end, a Doric colonnade, one
hundred and fifty feet long, afforded a shaded retreat and
a protection from rain; and when the next festival came
around, the citizens could scarcely recognize the old
stadium of Lycurgus, which was now by all means the
most beautiful stadium in Greece, and, in truth, fairer
than any theater. Above the stadium, on the hill which
rises to the west, Herodes built a beautiful temple to the
goddess Fortuna. We know of this only from ancient
accounts, for it has completely disappeared, and the old
references to it give no description.

In 160 Regilla died, and Herodes’s magnificent villa in
Hadrian’s quarter was left desolate. Herodes must have
444 THE STORY OF ATHENS

loved his wife with sincere devotion, for the monument
which he erected in her memory was the most magnifi-
cent that had ever borne the name of a woman, with
the exception of one or two built in memory of empresses
or queens. It was not a massive tomb nor a vast mau-
soleum that Herodes chose for his wife’s monument, but
a great odeum—a covered theater—where music should
ever lull her soul in sleep. It stands directly below the
southwest angle of the Acropolis, beneath the little temple
of Athena Nike, and at the western end of the colonnade
of King Eumenes, which henceforth formed a covered
way between the new Hall of Music and the ancient thea-
ter of Dionysus. To make place for this structure, which
was to be of grand dimensions, it was necessary to re-
move a number of ancient landmarks. The old outworks
of the Pelargikon, the most ancient of all the monuments
of Athens, had long since begun to disappear, as builders
less reverent than old Pericles demanded building mate-
rial; but considerable portions of the mighty fortifica-
tions were still in place at this time, and these, so far as
they stood in the way of the new Odeum, were removed.
Above it stood the choragic monument of Nicias; and as
Nicias was quite forgotten and his monument perhaps
falling to decay, this too was taken away. The builders
then cut a deep semicircle in the base of the Acropolis
rock, and prepared to fit it with many tiers of marble
seats, on a steeper angle than those of the old theater,
and describing a perfect semicircle in the manner of Ro-
man theaters. These were to accommodate six thousand
spectators. The lower rows of seats were provided with
continuous backs, and were raised upon a low step above
the level of the orchestra. The orchestra, too, was a
semicircle and was paved with squares of variegated
marbles. The stage building was designed on strictly
Roman plan, and on a magnificent scale. It extended
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446 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the extreme width of the auditorium and was joined to it
by a vaulted passageway, on either side, running parallel
with the stage building, but entered from the front as we
see it to-day. The scena, for it is Roman now, rose in
three stories to the height of the highest seats, to receive

 

View Looking across the Stage in the Odeum of Regilla.

one side of the great roof of cedar beams. It was con-
structed on Roman principles: three stories of broad
arches rising one above the other, all built of well-dressed
limestone, though a few Roman bricks appear in the
piers which carry the arches. A broad recess, wide as
the orchestra itself, provided a space for the stage, which,
like all Roman stages, was raised several feet above the
orchestra level. te front of the stage building, on the
outside, were vaulted passageways and open arcades.
The whole building, outside and in, was undoubtedly
veneered with slabs of marble in true imperial style. Re-
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 447

mains of this revetment are still visible on the walls of the
vaulted passage between the auditorium and the stage
building. The floors were of marble slabs, and the stage
was embellished with a set scene composed of rich col-
umns and architraves of different colored marbles. All
these enrichments have disappeared, but the huge frame-
work still stands, the most typical Roman ruin in Athens,
and one of the best-preserved examples of the Roman
stage building in the world. At a late period the gigantic
roof of cedar was destroyed by a fire which ruined the
marble enrichments of the whole building ; but it is not dif-
ficult to reclothe the grand skeleton with its rich orna-
mentation and to restore its niches with their marble
statues. Only one of these remains, a headless figure
of a Roman official in a niche in the vaulted passage,
which stands before us as we enter, and is often pointed
out to tourists as the statue of Herodes Atticus.

One other Athenian monument is assigned, by a num-
ber of archaeologists, to this period,—one of the most fa-
miliar of all: I refer to the so-called Beulé Gate, through
which we must pass to reach the glories of the Acrop-
olis, and where we must often pause to take breath before
beginning the ascent to our goal. Without going into
a lengthy discussion of the date of this structure, we
may say that it is known to have been constructed, in
part, out of the materials taken from the choragic monu-
ment of Nicias, which is believed to have been taken down
when the Odeum of Regilla was built. The frieze and
cornice and other details were certainly second-hand when
built into the two massive towers which flank the outer
gate of the Acropolis. These two towers, which are mil-
itary enough in design, were joined to the bastions of the
Propylaea and the Nike temple by strong walls which
added to the strength of the fortress, from which we may
argue that the Acropolis was still regarded as a citadel
448 THE STORY OF ATHENS

two centuries and more after the last warlike assault upon
the ancient defenses. With the Beulé Gate may be con-
sidered the flight of Roman steps which completely trans-
formed the ancient approach to the Propylaea. These are
believed to be somewhat older than the gate, but not by
many years. The innovation was essentially Roman, con-
cealing the simple rocky base of the Propylaea, which
gave it the effect of a great temple perched upon a crag,
and giving it a formal right-lined base. The steps began
in a broad flight, the full width of the two gate-towers,
which extended about a third of the way up, at which
point it was broken on the right by the old rock-cut road
for the approach of chariots and animals, which entered
at the base of the Nike bastion. Then the ascending flight
began again in two sections, which were divided by the old
road which turned and led up between the two divisions
of the Propylaea, as it had originally, and were carried up
to the ancient steps of the main stylobate. On the right
of the steps a small staircase was let into the side of the
Nike bastion, and led directly up to the sanctuary of
Athena Nike and that of Hecate. The upper portions
of this stair are still im situ, and may be of older con-
struction than the Roman steps with which they were
made to connect. These innovations so completely altered
the entire western slope of the Acropolis that it is made
impossible for us to restore the old approach; and so
completely do they form a part of the Propylaea that one
is easily led to imagine that he is ascending the sacred
hill in the same manner as did Pericles and Demosthenes ;
although those old Athenian worthies never dreamed of
such a broad and magnificent ascent to what was to them
not only a holy place, but a stronghold to be reached only
by the tortuous windings of the time-honored Pelargi-
kon with its series of nine well-fortified gates. These
two buildings, the tower-defended gate and the great
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 449

flight of steps, were the last contribution of Rome to the
monumental splendor of Athens; and it was fitting that
the last gifts of imperial Rome should have the dignity
of leading future generations up to the glories of Im-
perial Athens.

Athens had seen the culmination and decay of her
political power many centuries before this time; she now
beheld the completion of her monumental grandeur, which,
though standing yet for many generations in undimin-
ished splendor, must sooner or later begin to crumble. But
she still retained her primacy as a world center of in-
tellectual achievement. 'When Marcus Aurelius donned
the imperial purple, true to the memory of his distin-
guished teacher Herodes, he did all in his power to
maintain the intellectual supremacy of Athens. He in-
creased the emoluments of her teachers of rhetoric and
philosophy, and summoned the foremost men in the world
of thought to positions in her university. It was at
this time that Lucian, a Syrian, the most distinguished
of the later Greek writers, having completed his wan-
derings through Asia, Egypt, Macedonia, Italy, and Gaul,
came to Athens and settled down to the serious work of
his literary career. He had been one of that host of public
lecturers that had sprung up in all parts of the Roman
world, and had already gained a considerable reputation
as a writer. But under the influence of the Academy at
Athens he assumed that varied style which was to give
him his greatest fame, adopting the old Platonic form
of dialogue, in which he found the broadest range, from
philosophical earnestness or dialectics to the keen, sharp
wit of the Attic comedy. We have already quoted from
his famous “Timon.”

In the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Pausanias, the most
famous of all ancient travelers, came to Athens and, as

the result of his two visits, wrote his descriptions, which
29
450 THE STORY OF ATHENS

have been the basis of all study for the restoration of the
classic city. Athens had at this time reached the prime
of her beauty as the most imposing city of antiquity.
Pausanias, though dry and guide-bookish in many of his
accounts, becomes almost inspired in his descriptions of
the city of great Pallas. He probably entered by the
Dipylum and passed through the agora, up through the

    
 

LP ise

Fi i M ah it

i

 
  
  

 

Pediment of a Roman Sarcophagus, found in Athens.

succession of sanctuaries, passing the temple of Apollo
Patroos, the Metroum, the Council-house, the Tholos,
and the Eleusinium, to the Acropolis. He visited all the
holy places, all the ancient public buildings of the city,
and gives most accurate descriptions of all, which are
among the most valuable contributions to history, stop-
ping now at the Altar of Mercy—the only altar to this
divinity he had ever seen—now at the Gymnasium of
Ptolemy, the Theseum, the Agraulium, or the Pryta-
neum. It is interesting to note how little the newer build-
ings and other monuments impressed him; for we find
him passing directly by important works of the neo-
hellenic period or of Roman workmanship to expatiate
upon the more ancient monuments of the Golden Age.
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 451

He was writing for a Roman public and seems to have
felt that his readers would care less to know about build-
ings and statues like those they had at home. Thus we
find no mention of the Stoa of Attalus, the Colonnade of
Eumenes, and many other important buildings of the
later epoch. We follow him past the very conspicuous
statue of Agrippa upon the steps of the Propylaea, which
he does not seem to see, to the “bronze boy’’ of Artemis’s
sanctuary, a small and inconspicuous figure which he
dwells upon at length because it was the work of an old
Greek sculptor. Even the enormous groups which At-
talus I set up are allowed only the barest mention in his
journal, while some of the smallest votive statues of the
Golden Era are given considerable space in his pages.
Step by step, through the forest of marbles within the
sacred inclosure, we may follow him as we might an un-
commonly well-informed cicerone in a modern art gal-
lery. All who love to picture to themselves the ancient
Acropolis in all its splendor should read that book of
Pausanias in which he gives such an admirable cata-
logue of the sights which so impressed him on his mem-
orable visit.

A number of years after the visit of Pausanias, in the
reign of Septimius Severus, according to the highest
authorities, the last remodeling of the theater of Diony-
sus was accomplished by a Roman governor of Attica
named Phaedrus. The half of the front wall of a stage,
which is still to be seen in the theater, is all that remains
of the stage of Phaedrus. In this final reconstruction,
the sculptures of the older Roman stage seem to have been
removed and built into a new stage front, considerably
in advance of the other, which completely blocked the
parodoi and joined the two ends of the ancient koilon.
In the middle, a flight of steps was constructed connecting
the orchestra with the stage; and, upon the top step, one
452 THE STORY OF ATHENS

may still see the inscription which Phaedrus set up, telling
how he “hewed this goodly bema,”’ which was unquestion-
ably second-hand at best. To this same period belong the
covering of the gutter which surrounds the orchestra, and
the plain marble parapet which separates the orchestra
from the passage in front of the carved marble chairs of

 

View in the Theater, showing Stage of Phaedrus, Marble
Parapet, and Ancient Chairs.

the first row. This parapet was undoubtedly built as a
necessary protection for the spectators, after the theater
had been given over largely to gladiatorial shows; for
we are told by Dion Chrysostom that, in his time, the
blood of the combatants was spattered upon the persons
of the archons and other dignitaries who sat in the front
row.

It is something of a shock to compare these scenes of
Roman amusements with those of the grand old days
when enthusiastic audiences listened all day to the ma-
jestic lines of Aeschylus and Sophocles in this same
theater; and it is difficult to realize that the Athenians
who could enjoy these pastimes of blood and_ brutality
ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS 453

were the descendants of those ideally poetical people who
took delight in such a festival as the greater Dionysia,
which they celebrated each spring by bearing the old
wooden statue of Dionysus Eleuthereus through the city
and outside the walls to a little temple of the god on the
road to the Academy, where the epheboi sacrificed, and
then carried the statue back again by torch-light, while
groups of youths and maidens representing the seasons,
the nymphs, and other poetical and mythical subjects,
danced in the merry procession. The extension of the
Roman Empire to Athens was far more than a territorial
conquest.

 

Fallen Column of the Olympieum.
XIV

CHRISTIAN ATHENS

‘Nothing is so painful as for friends to be separated from Athens and from
each other.""—GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS.

DURING the century which saw the begin-
ning of the decline of the Roman Empire,
Athens was left to pursue the even tenor of
an uneventful career, interrupted only by an
incursion of the Gothic tribes. No brilliant
luminaries arose from within to illuminate
Fragment of Chris. H€r gradually darkening path, and no great
fan Carving from potentates from without came to deck her

ropolitan. —-_colonnades with garlands, strew her streets
with palms, and leave behind them some mighty memo-
rials of their visits. Her university still thrived, however, ”
and produced a number of men whose names and some
of whose works have come down to us: invaluable his-
torical treatises, commentaries on the old philosophers
and other works, in which the writings of the older literati
are preserved in fragmentary form, or the various devel-
opments of the later schools of philosophy—Neoplato-
nism—are set forth.

Prominent in this long list of names are those of Lon-
ginus and Herennius Dexippus: the former a distin-
guished scholar who studied in the University of Athens
and won the title of “living library,” or, as we should
say, walking encyclopedia, and whose estimate of Saint
Paul as an orator was quoted in the last chapter; the
454

 

 
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 455

latter an Athenian by birth, a historian, rhetorician, and
general. In the middle of this century, the third after
Christ, the rising barbarian hordes of the North first
set foot on Grecian soil. These tribes, who are usually
referred to in history under the broad general name of
Goths, were in all probability more specifically Scyth-
ians and other peoples, semi-civilized by contact with
Rome, who had learned the value of codperation and the
principles of organized warfare, and had heard of the
wealth of the south country and set out to ravage it. In
countless thousands they swarmed down from the wild
unknown regions of northern Europe, bringing their
families, their cattle, and all their belongings, moving
slowly and sweeping everything before them—the first
great menace to the power of Imperial Rome. Pressing
southward by slow degrees, they finally reached the Dan-
ube and came into Roman territory. In 251 they were
met and checked by the armies of the emperor Decius:
but defeat meant little to people with no settled habita-
tion; within a few years they constructed a fleet and,
crossing the Euxine, laid waste the northern shores of
Asia Minor, crossed the Bosporus, and moved, in a vast
and resistless multitude, toward Greece. The fame of
the invaders, of their overwhelming numbers, their un-
daunted bravery, their brutal savagery, had come be-
fore them; all Hellas was in abject terror. Athens, as
the northernmost of the great cities of Greece and by
far the richest object for the invaders’ spoil, had perhaps
more to fear than any other city. Valerian was on the
imperial throne; he feared for the city as she feared for
herself; and, under his direction, the walls were strength-
ened and all preparations were made for the assault.
The ruins of an ancient wall which bisects the ancient
city, extending from the northern bastion of the Pro-
pylaea down along the east side of the agora and mak-
456 THE STORY OF ATHENS

ing use of the rear wall of the stoa of King Attalus, has
been ascribed to the time of Valerian’s fortifications ; but
the most recent critics now assign this wall to a much
later period and concur in the belief that this emperor did
no more than to rebuild and strengthen the old circuit
wall whose foundations had been laid by Themistocles
in the distant days of the Persian wars.

With slow but certain and resistless march, the Peril
of the North pressed toward the revered city of Athena.
Attica was soon reached; the people fled into the city,
and the invading hosts swept across the plain, sur-
rounded the walls in a mighty multitude, cutting off all
hope of escape or succor. An enemy far more terrible
than the haughty Philip of Macedon, far more cruel than
the relentless Sulla, was at the gates. No Roman army
could be spared to protect the ancient city of Theseus in
those turbulent times, and Athens saw that she must meet
her doom. In fear and despair, the ancient constitution,
the glory of old Athens, was laid aside, and the city was
placed under martial law; the archonship was abolished
and the strategus, the commanding general, was made
chief magistrate. But the citizens were not prepared to
face a long siege, and the small garrison was not strong
enough to attempt a battle with the unnumbered hosts of
the enemy; so the city fell to the crude weapons of the
men of the North. Another reign of terror filled Athens
with blood. Temples and shrines were sacked, homes
perished before the torch, the proud Athenian women
were ravaged in savage brutality, children were put to
the sword; but the greed of the enemy turned their hands
from rapine and murder to sack and pillage of the Athe-
nian treasure-houses, and, while the barbarians were busy
with plunder,—each man striving to get more than his
neighbor,—a number of the citizens escaped to the hills.
It was then that Dexippus, the man of great learning and
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 457

of noble soul, showed that he was no less a soldier than
a scholar. He gathered about him all the stout hearts
that he could muster, took up a strong position among
the hills, and prepared to save Athens from complete an-
nihilation. When the band of patriots had assembled,
the brave Dexippus addressed them as follows: “I am
resolved to share your fate in fighting for all we hold
most dear on earth. Rest assured that, through me,
the fame of Athens shall never be brought to shame. It
becomes us to remember the deeds of our fathers; to
make ourselves examples of bravery and liberty to the
other Greeks ; and to secure, among the present and future
generations, the undying glory of having proved that the
courage of the Athenians remains unshaken even in ad-
versity. We march to battle for the defense of our chil-
dren and all that is dearest to our hearts. May the gods
fight on our side.’’ His words had the desired effect; the
little army resolved to follow their noble leader and
to do or die. The city he could not take; but when all
preparations had been made, he descended upon Piraeus
and routed the portion of the enemy assembled there.
He then proceeded to cut off the barbarians within the
city from every base of supplies; Attica was too poor
to support so great a host for a long time; the little band
under Dexippus could hold out much longer than the
enemy; so that it was not long before the barbarians
were starved into making a retreat. In their exodus they
were so harassed by the little army of Athenians that
they left much of their spoil behind them. The citizens
returned to Athens and set to work to repair the damage
wrought by the Goths. They were full of gratitude to
their deliverer and conferred upon him the highest honors
that were theirs to bestow. It is impossible to say how
greatly the city had suffered from this visitation from
the North. It is quite certain that the temples and
458 THE STORY OF ATHENS

great public buildings were not injured, but it is natural
to suppose that they and all the rest of the city were pil-
laged of everything of value that could be carried away.
It is not wholly impossible that the Acropolis held out
during the occupation of the city by the barbarians; for
the statue of the Parthenos is mentioned more than a
hundred years after this siege. It would be difficult to
picture the savage tribes who had already destroyed the
great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, with their lust for
gold, in possession of the Acropolis and not despoiling
the Parthenon of its treasures. Two years later, the
Roman emperor Claudius II defeated the Goths in Moe-
sia and earned for himself the title of Gothicus. Au-
relian, his successor, also made war upon the barbarian
invaders and succeeded in driving them once more across
the Danube.

The third century ended without incident in Athens;
the barbarian hordes were kept at bay by Roman arms,
and the city enjoyed a long period of classic repose, dur-
ing which a number of rhetoricians, of whom Philostra-
tus was the most distinguished, taught and lectured in
the gymnasiums. But the fourth century opened with
great changes for the whole Roman world. The faith
that Saint Paul had preached in Athens over two hundred
years before, and which had fallen like seed on stony
soil, had met with a very different reception at the seat
of the empire, where, like the grain of mustard seed, it
had sprung up and spread its branches until it threatened
to cast its shade over the whole earth. Little by little the
church founded by Saint Peter and Saint Paul had under-
mined the ancestral faith of Rome; little by little it had
risen through the various ranks of society, from the low-
est grade where it had made its beginning to the very
highest level—the imperial household itself. Constantine
the Great had come to the throne. One of his first great
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 459

acts had been to call the church from its hiding-places
among the Catacombs, and make Christianity the re-
ligion of the state. It is well known what followed
in Rome: how the temples of the gods were conse-
crated to the service of the Christian faith; how
buildings of all kinds were rebuilt for the require-
ments of the new belief; how the shrines of pagan-
ism, with their statues, were destroyed to blot out all
memory of the ancient religion of the Romans. But in
Athens it was not so: for, while Constantine was busy
Christianizing Rome, and his mother, the devout Saint
Helena, was building churches in sacred places through-
out the Holy Land, Athens preserved her ancient religion,
or what there was left of it; her temples, her sacred
shrines, her statues of divinities, and her festivals; while
her pagan philosophers taught the same old doctrines of
Plato and Aristotle—in the dress of Neoplatonism, to be
sure, but without a suggestion of the teachings of Saint
Paul. Still Athens did not escape the notice of the first
Christian emperor, for we know how Constantine gloried
in the title of Strategus of Athens, and how proud he was
to have his statue set up in that renowned city of an-
tiquity, among those of the host of statesmen, generals,
kings, and emperors whom Athens had honored. In
fact, the emperor sent a yearly gratuity of grain to the
citizens of Athens, that the ancient mother of art, letters,
and philosophy might have a comfortable old age. Con-
stantine conferred a new title upon the governor of At-
tica—the title of Grand Duke—which was a great dis-
tinction and became hereditary after a short time. But
with all these acts, which show that his attention was
frequently called in the direction of Athens, the emperor
did not once attempt to force upon her the new faith
which he was ingrafting upon the greater part of his
empire; her temples remained the shrines of her ancient
460 THE STORY OF ATHENS

gods and her university the haunt of the followers of
her ancient philosophy. And when the seat of empire
was moved to the Bosporus, that it might be nearer
the center of its domain, and the emperor became a near
neighbor of Athena, the conditions were not changed.
Constantinople became a great Christian city; but Athens
remained the chief seat of paganism in the Roman world.
During the terrible strifes among the successors of Con-
stantine which followed hard upon the emperor’s death,
Athens remained undisturbed. Constantius, after he had
made himself undisputed lord of the East, conferred
a great favor upon the city by bestowing upon her a
number of rich islands for her supply of corn. In 348
a terrible earthquake shook Athens to her very founda-
tions and injured a number of her ancient monuments,
but we may not know the precise extent of the damage
caused at this time.

During the reign of Constantius at the new capital,
about the middle of the fourth century, there were among
the students of the University of Athens three young
men who were to make their names known to all future
generations, one of them as Roman emperor, and the
other two as saints of the church; the first as a most bit-
ter opponent of Christianity and a devotee of paganism;
the others as champions of the new faith and doctors of
the church. Julian, as a nephew of the late emperor
Constantine and a presumptive heir to the throne, had
spent a life of fearful seclusion. He had no ambition
to wear the crown and purple, but loved study and retire-
ment. Nevertheless he was suspected and jealously
watched, and lived in constant fear for his life, and with
good reason; for, upon the death of his imperial uncle,
most of his relations had been put to death and the rest
were hunted by suspicious rivals and kept in continual
dread. It was a glad day for the young prince when he
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 401

was allowed to come to Athens to pursue the study of the
ancient religion and philosophy of Greece, which he
dearly loved, not only as the products of the glorious days
of the Golden Age of Greece, but as the antithesis of those
tenets for whose sake he and his family had been per-
secuted with the severest cruelty. He had been brought
up and educated as a Christian; but it was natural that
he should not have been drawn toward a religion which,
as an imperial tool, had caused so much anguish to those
dearest to him. In Athens, Prince Julian began to pre-
pare himself for that literary career which afterward
gave him the greatest reputation as a writer of all the
later Greek literati, excepting only Lucian. In his stud-
ies he was associated with a number of young men, among
whom were Gregory, who had come from Nazianzus to
study in the Athenian seats of learning, and Basil, a
student from Caesarea. The three young men were very
nearly of the same age, Gregory being one year older than
Basil and two years older than Julian; they were fast
friends, and doubtless sat together at the same lectures,
Julian imbibing truths which drew him nearer and nearer
to the old religion of the past, while Gregory and Basil
saw the same truths in the light of Christian faith. It
is largely due to the studies which these two Christian
youths pursued in Athens, and to the advantages for
learning all the results of past philosophical speculation
which were at their disposal here, that the Christian
creeds are so thoroughly impregnated with Greek phi-
losophy ; for Gregory became one of the four fathers of
the Eastern Church and stamped his doctrine upon the
whole body of Christian dogma, while Basil stands out
in ecclesiastical history as one of the greatest champions
of orthodoxy against the Arian heresy, an acknowledged
bulwark of the early church. It would seem as if, in
spite of the fact that Athens had retained her ancient
462 THE STORY OF ATHENS

pagan religion, that a church of considerable strength
must have grown up in the city before this time, and since
the days when Athenagoras had written his “Apology for
Christianity” in the second century; a church which
would necessarily have been strengthened by the edicts
of Constantine in favor of Christianity, but which would
not have been likely to suffer persecution in a tolerant
city like Athens. Gregory and Basil were both stanch
adherents of the new faith when they came to Athens;
but they undoubtedly found a Christian community
there in which they formed companionships with those
of their own persuasion. The two youths were extremely
strict in their moral behavior, even amid the blandish-
ments of the gay pagan city; but this does not seem to
have prevented them from being very popular among
their fellow-students, who were less strict. Basil was
particularly admired by the philosophers and literary
men of Athens, both teachers and students, who did all
they could to retain him in their midst. But he was bent
upon devoting his life to the service of his Master and
resolved to quit Athens for other fields of labor. Greg-
ory, his devoted friend, afterward wrote of this separa-
tion. He, too, it would seem, had planned to leave
Athens ; but was held back by the entreaties of his friends ;
for he says: “The day of our departure and all the cir-
cumstances of our departure arrived—the farewell words,
the attendance of our friends to the ship, the parting mes-
sages, the lamentations, embraces, tears. Nothing is
so painful as for friends to be separated from Athens and
from each other. Our fellow-students and some of the
professors surrounded us and entreated that we should
desist from our purpose. With Basil it was of no use,
and he departed; while I, who felt myself torn asunder
by the separation, speedily followed him.’ It is not diffi-
cult to see why Gregory was given the title Philathenaeus.
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 463

Julian had not yet openly avowed his sympathy with the
waning faith of Greece, yet his fondest dream was to
witness a return to the old religion. There were, we
may imagine, fierce discussions between the high-minded,
thoughtful prince and his resolute Christian friends; but
his conviction, if such it was, never wavered. This pe-
riod of studious repose was destined to be short-lived
for Julian; he had scarcely become acquainted with the
life and surroundings which so delighted him, when the
obligations of his royal blood forced him to leave his
books and his congenial companions, the shady
groves of Athens,and the sunny skies of Greece
behind him, and set out for a Roman military
post in bleak Gaul. Julian had been only one
year in Athens when his cousin the emperor — Coin of

conferred upon him the title of Caesar, and Julian.

made him governor of the Gallic province. The prince
reluctantly left his sympathetic surroundings and en-
tered upon his new office with a determination to do
his best in the discharge of the duties which devolved
upon him. On the occasion of his departure, Julian
wrote a letter to the Athenians in which he says, ‘“‘What
fountains of tears did I shed, what lamentations did I
utter, stretching my hands up toward the Acropolis, when
I invoked and supplicated Athena to save and not to
abandon her servant.’’ And it would almost seem as if
the goddess had heard his prayer; for the studious prince
was transformed, as if by magic, into a wise ruler and
an able general, manifesting all those qualities in which
Athena took special delight. It was not long before he
proved that his ability to govern men was not inferior
to his intellectual gifts. He was at once recognized
as a good ruler, and for nearly five years administered
the affairs of his province with great success. It was
something of a task, as we may imagine, for the scholar,

 
404 THEP SLORY OF ATHENS

the man of studious habits, to take up the leadership of
armies; but the turbulent condition of the borders of the
empire compelled him to launch out upon a war with the
barbarians as soon as he reached his post. Again the
studious prince proved his all-round ability, and the cam-
paign was remarkably successful.

But the emperor grew jealous as the fame of the
wisdom and brilliancy of his cousin spread throughout
the empire, and resolved to deprive him of some of his
legions, even though this step would expose the province
to the inroads of the barbarians. When the message
came commanding Julian to despatch his best soldiers
to the war against Persia, the prince bade his men leave
him and obey the word of their imperial master: but the
troops were unwilling to go; they were, moreover, greatly
attached to their royal leader, and in the night sur-
rounded his palace, sent a deputation within, which
found him hiding from them, and brought him out to
be proclaimed emperor. All efforts on the part of Ju-
lian to compromise with Constantius failed, and he
soon saw that he must contend in open warfare with his
cousin for the possession of the empire. He accordingly
set out for Constantinople, the news spread throughout
the Roman world, and at Rome and in Athens Julian was
proclaimed emperor amid general rejoicings; but before
-blows were struck between the armies of the West and
East, Constantius died in Cilicia on his way home from
Syria to defend his capital. A month later Julian entered
Constantinople in triumph, undisputed ruler of the East
and West. He made it his first duty to perform the last
rites over the body of his cousin, according to Christian
ritual, and to give it burial with great pomp and solem-
nity in the Church of the Holy Apostles, above the Golden
Horn.

Upon his accession to the throne, Julian openly avowed
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 405

the religion that he had cherished in his heart for ten
long years. As lord of the empire he could now behold
the realization of his fondest dream—the restoration of
the religion of the gods of Greece. The pagan world
was thrilled with joy; while the Christians were horri-
fied at the thought of the undoing of all their latest great
achievements, and fearful of wide-spread persecution and
bloodshed in retaliation for some of the brutal acts which
the late emperors had committed in the name of Chris-
tianity. But in this they were agreeably disappointed—
Julian made an edict proclaiming religious toleration,
though favoring the supporters of the ancient religion
whenever a case arose where favoritism could be shown.
Throughout the length and breadth of the great empire,
pagan temples and shrines were restored; while the
priesthood and religious ceremonies of the old deities
were reinstated. Still the Christians were allowed to
worship in their own way, and were restrained only
from teaching their peculiar version of the ancient Greek
philosophers, and from commenting unfavorably upon -
the works of other great writers of the Golden Age of
pagan Greece.

Julian’s Christian friends were Paarl greatly
shocked at his bold stand in favor of paganism, and the
outraged church gave him the name of “the Apostate.”
Among his most prominent denouncers was his old
friend Gregory of Nazianzus, who by this time had be-
come a power in the Church of the East, surpassing all
his contemporaries in eloquence. Julian reigned but two
short years as sole lord of the Roman Empire, dying from
the effects of a wound received in battle—a strange death
for the meek Athenian student of a few years before.
But, even had he lived, he would undoubtedly have seen
that his cherished scheme for the revival of paganism

was a vain attempt to arrest the course of history by
30
466 THE STORY OF ATHENS

turning back the clock of religion. His efforts were
well meant and were prompted by the sincerest devotion
to the religion of classic Greece, for he was, at least,
a Greek of the Greeks, a lover of all that belonged
to Hellas, and he may be called the last of the true Hel-
lenes. His was the last hand raised to stay the fall of
Hellenic religion, and his the last voice to speak its
praise. Had it been within the power of mortal man
to bring back or reproduce the days of Pericles upon the
stage of history, Julian would have accomplished it in
time, but this could never be; and his death saved him
from the bitter disappointment which he must have faced
if he had been spared for many years.

Julian was not an Athenian, but he knew and loved
Athens, and I have dwelt upon his career and his attain-
ments somewhat longer perhaps than is warrantable, sim-
ply because this gifted emperor found in the city of
Athena the most satisfactory experience of his life. Her
art, her thought, and her religion were everything to him,
wherever he might be. He was her last true friend among
the great ones of this world, and with his death her doom
was sealed.

Toward the end of the century Athens witnessed two
events of importance to her history: the birth of an
empress and the second coming of the Goths, or, more
properly speaking, the Visigoths. The former event
was fraught with greater concern to the city than would
seem possible at first blush, as we shall see later. The
latter had less effect than we might at first expect. In
the year 395, Alaric, the chief of a large number of
Northern tribes, invaded Thessaly, with a host of bar-
barous and warlike followers, and swept down toward
Athens, ravaging the country far and wide as he came,
leaving death and destruction, want and misery, in his
wake. He passed Thermopylae without resistance, plun-
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 467

dered the towns and fields of Attica, and stood at length
in view of the Acropolis, whose treasures were the object
of his coming. Then, as Zozimus, a historian of the
following century, relates, a curious thing happened.
As the warrior chieftain advanced toward his prize, at the
head of his savage horde, he beheld the marvelous vision
of Athena, in full panoply of war, marching up and
down upon the walls of the citadel; doing guard duty over
the city of her choice; and by her side the figure of
Achilles, the hero terrible to behold when fired with rage,
as he is described by Homer. The savage leader was awe-
struck and filled with fear; and, instead of besieging the
city, thus guarded by goddess and hero, sent heralds to
the gates with proposals for peace. Little credence, of
course, can be given to the story as told by the old his-
torian; but it is not at all improbable that, as the bar-
barians advanced, the sun may have shone out upon the
brazen helmet and spear of the Promachos with such
effulgence as to make a spectacle more divine than the
wild warrior had ever dreamed of; that the superb statue
of Phidias seemed, to the eyes of ignorance, to be the very
person of the renowned goddess of war; and that super-
stitious fears were roused in his savage bosom by the sight.
However it was, Alaric did not attack Athens, though
he laid Eleusis in ashes ; but entered the city under a truce,
received the plaudits and hospitalities of the citizens, and
retired rich in gifts which were made as free-will offer-
ings by the magistrates and people. Again Athens had
escaped destruction, this time as if by a miracle when
we consider the fate that befell many Grecian cities at the
hands of Alaric and his Visigoths. But though she had
escaped the pillage of the barbarians, Athens lay now at
the mercy of the new imperial capital upon the Golden
Horn. With the beginning of the fifth century the system-
atic plundering of the city, which was begun under Nero,
468 THESiORY “OF ATHENS

but had ceased with the accession of Hadrian, was re-
newed to enrich the city of Constantine. It is very proba-
ble that the Promachos, which had saved the city from
the torch of Alaric, was taken at this time to adorn the cir-
cus of Constantinople, while ship-loads of other statues,
m bronze and marble, were carried from the Piraeus to
the Bosporus. Paintings, too, were not left by the im-
perial vandals; for we are told that the masterpieces of
Polygnotus were taken from the Stoa Poikile by the
imperial commissioner. Synesius, a writer of the period,
referring to the famous stoa, says, “now the painted stoa
no longer; for the proconsul took away the panels.” In
the same letter he shows us how highly Athenian culture
was still regarded. He writes: “I shall not only derive
the benefit of escaping from my present troubles by my
journey to Athens; but I shall no longer be forced to
worship, for their learning, all those who come from
thence, who are in no wise superior to us ordinary mor-
tals, especially in the comprehension of Plato and Aris-
totle. They move about among us like demigods among
mules, because they have seen the Academy, the Lyceum,
and the Stoa Poikile in which Zeno philosophized.” It
reads like the letter of one of our young men who has
just arrived at a German university.

Athens was the birthplace of very few women whose
names occupy a prominent place in history—even Aspasia,
the most famous woman of the Golden Age of Greece,
was not an Athenian born; but thus late in her career,
Athens gave birth to an empress, one of the most dis-
tinguished consorts of the imperial throne of the East.
There lived in Athens at this time a philosopher named
Leontinus, a man of great learning and of considerable
fortune. He had several sons and one daughter, whom
he called Athenais. As the girl grew up, she was uncom-
monly fair, and gifted with unusual intelligence. Her
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 409

father educated her with great care in the literature and
philosophy of pagan Athens, so that she became not only
the most beautiful, but the most brilliant maiden of her
day. A companion in her studies was young Paulinus,
a brilliant Athenian youth. When her father died he
left his fortune to his sons, providing but a hundred
pieces of gold for Athenais, stating in his will that this
amount would be enough for her, considering how much
her natural gifts and her accomplishments raised her
above other women. Athenais pleaded with her brothers
to provide a living for her, but in vain. She finally
decided to go to the capital to invoke imperial inter-
ference in her behalf. Accordingly, with an aunt, she set
out for the great and gorgeous city of Constantinople,
full of fear and misgivings. After a long delay, she
finally secured an audience with the princess Pulcheria,
the elder sister of the young emperor Theodosius II, who
held the position of regent during her brother’s minority.
Pulcheria was so won by the beauty and intelligence of
the Athenian maid that she hoped in her heart that she
might some day have her for a sister-in-law. The em-
peror was just twenty. Pulcheria was anxious to see her
brother married, and arranged for a meeting between
him and the charming maid of Athens. It was a case
of love at first sight. Theodosius made up his mind that
there was but one woman who should share his throne,
and that woman was Athenais. Religious differences,
however, seemed likely to prove a barrier to the con-
summation of this romantic love affair; for Pulcheria
was a devout Christian. But Athenais, not wholly igno-
rant of Christian doctrines, was quite willing to be con-
verted, and was baptized into the faith on the eve of her
marriage; receiving from the patriarch of Constantinople
the Christian name of Eudocia in place of the distinc-
tively pagan name which her father had given her. Two
470 THEYSTORY OF ATHENS

years later a daughter was born to the imperial pair, and
Eudocia received the title of Augusta. She used the
power conferred by her new dignity to heap coals of fire
upon the heads of her undutiful brothers by making
them consuls and prefects: but for twenty years neither
she nor Theodosius took a very active part in the gov-
ernment; for Pulcheria had great executive ability and
a taste for politics, and ruled the empire without as-
sistance. Eudocia meanwhile proved the sincerity of
her conversion by paraphrasing parts of the Old Testa-
ment in hexameter verse and composing a life of Christ in
lines taken from Homer. She surrounded herself with
men of learning and her court was famed for its intel-
lectuality. Among those who moved in the brilliant cir-
cle was Paulinus, the former companion of the empress’s
studies in Athens; but the presence of one who was pos-
sibly an old flame of his wife aroused the jealousy of the
emperor, and Paulinus was promptly banished to Cap-
padocia, where he was subsequently assassinated.

After a time, Pulcheria and Eudocia had a falling out
over a theological question, and the empress asserted her
imperial rights, Theodosius apparently leaving all mat-
ters of state to the management of the women of the fam-
ily. It was at this time that the zealous convert turned
her attention to the city of her birth. Athens was still
pagan. The pious Gregory had bemoaned the idolatry
of the city, where he said there were more images than
in any other city in Greece, and the empress’s mind was
filled with thoughts of her birthplace. In 430 the gold
and ivory statue of the Parthenos is mentioned for the
last time. We know not what became of it. A year or
two later an imperial decree ordered the destruction of
the temples of Athens; but some good fate interposed
to save those glorious creations of man’s ignorant grop-
ings after unseen gods, and in 435 the emperor ordered
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 471

the consecration of the greater temples to the service
of the Christian religion. The Olympieum was forth-
with dedicated to Christ the Saviour; the Parthenon, the
shrine of the virgin goddess of wisdom, to the Divine
Wisdom (Saint Soohiny while the Hephaesteum, com-
monly called the Theseum, became the Church of Saint
George of Cappadocia. Soon afterward the ancient
shrine of the Parthenos was rededicated to the Holy
Mother of God, the Panagia. Fortunately for us and
for the study of Greek architecture, few alterations were
found necessary in the transformation of a pagan temple
into a Christian church. The orientation, of course, had
to be reversed; and in this process the western wall of
the cella of both Parthenon and so-called Theseum were
pierced for doorways; the opisthodomos, in both cases,
becoming an atrium. Semicircular apses had to be built
in the eastern porticos of the temples to conform to the
plan of church architecture; but these, being poorly con-
structed of masonry, were easily removed in later times.
The greater part of the sculptured decorations of the tem-
ples remained undisturbed; but the central figures of the
pediments were removed, probably to make room for
statues of appropriate saints. The Christians do not seem
to have had the regard for the beauty of their church that
the devotees of Athena had had for her temple. The
exquisite smoothness of the marble columns was rudely
disfigured by crude inscriptions recording the deaths of
church functionaries; and the faithful scratched legends
and ejaculatory petitions upon them, as the earlier Chris-
tians had done in the Catacombs of Rome. We are some-
times prone to rail at the early founders of our faith for
their rough treatment of these priceless works of art; but
our resentment should be somewhat tempered by the re-
flection that, had these temples not been considered
worthy of consecration to the faith for which the early
472 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Christians were so zealous, they might have been totally
destroyed to make room for purely Christian edifices.

During the last days of Athena’s reign in her own
city, there was a fanatical old philosopher, Proclus by
name, who had his house near the sanctuary of Asclepius,
between the Odeum of Regilla and the theater of Diony-
sus. He was a Neoplatonist and taught regularly in
the city; and, though a bitter opponent of Christianity,
having written a book called “Twenty-two Arguments
against the Christians,” he lived the life of an ascetic
monk, observing fasts and vigils. He worshiped the sun
and moon, the spirits of heroes and philosophers, and
spent much time in the celebration of all the old pagan
religious festivals. One night he dreamed a dream: A
woman of radiant beauty appeared to him and bade him
prepare his house for the reception of the Queen of Ath-
ens. The dream was prophetic; for, within a short time,
the imperial decree banished Athena forever from her
ancient abode, and the sacred statue of the Parthenos,
after nine centuries of undisturbed possession, disap-
peared from its shrine and from the eyes of man. Thus
did the daughter of Athens, the imperial Eudocia, work
out the salvation of her mother city. Thus did the last
stronghold of paganism fall before the standard of the
cross.

Athens could assume the titles and don the vestments
of the new faith, but she never could become to Chris-
tianity what she had been to paganism. She was essen-
tially a classic and a pagan city, too old to change and
still be herself. The new garment did not fit, and ill
became her classic beauty. She simply accepted the
inevitable, putting on the outward signs of conversion,
but silently protesting within her heart. A century longer
the city was allowed to retain her reputation as a center
of culture; her great schools, her university, still drew
CHRISTIAN ATHENS 473

scholars to their classic porticos; but with the accession
of Justinian, the clouds which had begun to lower about
the Acropolis grew heavier, and finally inclosed the city
in the shades of darkest night. The emperor’s ambition
was to make his capital sole mistress of the world in all
things, and Athens, with her time-honored seats of learn-
ing, was a serious rival in the intellectual field. An im-
perial edict recalled the salaries of the teachers of the
University of Athens, and forbade the public teaching
of philosophy in the home of Plato. The death-blow
had been struck, the city of Athena had been lopped of all
her treasures, her power, her wealth, her art; but so
long as the heart of her literary institutions beat she
could live; these were her very vitals—touch them, and
she must die. In the year 429 B.c.—the year that Pericles
died—Athens reached the zenith of her splendor. In the
year 529 A.D. the night of oblivion closed in about her,
and classic Athens was no more. The dying fire of her
ancient glories went out, to become but a memory, in the
dead embers of the past, which are still loved and cher-
ished in the cold urns of art; while the tablets of her
literature still speak her undying fame: for ‘‘wherever
literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain—wherever
it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness
and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep
—there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal in-
fluence of Athens.”
XV
THE DARK AGE

ATHENS FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES
TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

“Age shakes Athena's tower.”
BYRON.

THE history of Athens, a thousand years
after the Golden Age, is shrouded in mys-
tery almost as obscure as that which en-
vv velops her history a thousand years before
! it. For seven hundred years after the pass-
ing of classic Athens, only an occasional
oe message comes from the clouds and thick
darkness which surrounded her grave. In
the middle of the seventh century, the em-
peror Constans IT spent the winter under the clear skies of
Athens, which were not dimmed by the clouds of ad-
versity. A hundred years later, Athens gave birth to
a second empress, more famous perhaps even than the
consort of Theodosius II. Irene, like Eudocia, was
both beautiful and accomplished; she also was left an
orphan in girlhood and was sent to Constantinople, where
she attracted the notice of Constantine V, who destined
her to become the wife of his young son—the future
emperor Leo IV. In Athens, Irene had been brought up
to worship Christian images, this much of pagan custom
having been translated into Christian ritual in the an-
cient high place of paganism and carried to a greater
474

   
 
THE DARK AGE 475

 

 

 

The Little Metropolitan, the Old Cathedral of Athens.

extreme than in almost any other city. When the_
Athenian girl became a royal princess, she was obliged
to give up her image-worship in conformity to the doc-
trines in vogue at the court. Her husband’s reign was
a short one, and before his death he appointed Irene
476 THE STORY OF ATHENS

regent during their son’s minority; and when she be-
came virtual head of the empire, she returned to the
tenets of her youth and made every effort to restore
the adoration of images in face of the strong iconoclastic
feelings of the capital. Her son, Constantine VI, es-
poused the doctrines of his father and grandfather, and
a bitter animosity sprang up between mother and son,
which ended in her having him put to death in the
most cruel manner. Irene was then supreme, and for
several years reigned with judgment and moderation.
Like Eudocia before her, Irene turned her attention to
the religious welfare of her native town and built a
number of churches for the advancement of religion. One
of the few monuments of the Byzantine period in Athens,
the church of the Panagia Gorgopiko, or the Little Metro-
politan, as it is usually called, is attributed to this age
of the Athenian church and often to the reign of the
empress Irene. This minute building, standing beside
the huge bare structure of the modern Metropolitan
church, like a wee mother that has given birth to a giant,
is the oldest Christian monument in Athens. It is built
entirely of ancient fragments of architecture and sculp-
ture, thrown together in haphazard fashion. Above the
main portal is a frieze in relief representing a calendar of
the ancient Greek festivals; at either end of the frieze are
crosses added by the Christians by way of consecration.
Corinthian capitals, a Doric triglyphal frieze with bucra-
nia in relief upon its triglyphs, crossed torches and a vase
in each metope, and ancient fragments of relief sculptures
of all ages are worked into the scheme, sometimes up-
side down. Bits of tomb reliefs and a mutilated figure of
a wrestler are added to the mélange, and the whole makes
up a combination almost grotesque in its uncouthness.
The only signs of Byzantine style are the plan and form
of the building, the tall central dome on its elevated drum,
THE DARK AGE 477

the little apses at the east, and the bizarre representa-
tions of animals in flat relief, which are truly Byzantine
in character.

Almost another century passes without a word in his-
tory concerning Athens, and then the archbishop of
Athens is made a metropolitan of the Eastern Church,
which, though only a brief word, signifies that Christian
Athens was not wholly forgotten in the growth of the
church under the patriarchate of the great Photius in
Constantinople. A century and a half elapse before we
hear of the city again; this time she is chosen as the
scene of a triumph which the emperor Basil II held to
celebrate his victory over the Bulgarians. The victory
was accompanied by some of the most brutal atrocities
that history has ever witnessed; but the triumph upon
the Acropolis was the most gorgeous pageant that the
ancient city had beheld since the days when Hadrian
filled her streets with the splendors of the Western Em-
pire. Basil gave thanks to the Blessed Virgin in her
cathedral—the Parthenon of days gone by—and filled
the ancient shrine with precious gifts, among them
a silver dove, emblematic of the Holy Ghost, which ever
hovered above the high altar.

With the gradual decay of the Eastern Empire, Athens
recedes even more deeply into the gloom; we do not hear
from her again until the Normans of Sicily, cousins of
the Normans who had just conquered England, arrive
upon the scene, under the leadership of Roger of Sicily,
who, on one of his semi-piratical expeditions, took Ath-
ens for the sake of the few treasures she still retained.
After the capture of Constantinople by the armies of the
fourth crusade, Athens began to play a part in the medi-
eval history of Europe. In 1204, Sgouros of Nauplia
took the lower city and burned it to the ground; but
failed to get possession of the Acropolis. The following
480 THE STORY OF ATHENS

provided with two stories of windows; for the interior
was fitted with a floor which divided it into two stories.
Above the ancient roof a third story was provided; and
the south wing became the base of a lofty tower from
the top of which the dukes could view the whole of their
domain and enjoy the prospect far out to sea and over to-
ward the mountains of Morea. Pericles and his architects
would not have recognized their majestic entrance to
the shrine of Athena if they could have come back to
visit the Italian dukes, and it was well for them that they
could not return to behold the desecration of their superb
monuments. The Acropolis inclosure was filled up with
barracks and magazines built in the same crude style as
the walls and tower. The summit of the outer walls was
provided with battlements, and batteries were placed upon
the top of the redouts; underground passages and deep
cisterns for water were excavated in the rock, and, in
fact, nothing was wanting to make the ancient citadel
a fortress of the most approved medieval type.

It is worth while to notice that, with all these trans-
formations, no building upon the Acropolis, at least so far
as we know, was actually destroyed. Walls and towers
were hastily constructed in the crude methods of the
day, but only to incase the ancient buildings or to fill them
up. Of course the marble suffered by this process, but
the buildings themselves were spared and, perhaps, by
being thus incorporated with medieval structures, saved
from the lime-kiln which swallowed up so many of the
sumptuous temples of antiquity.

Below the Acropolis many of the ancient buildings had
long since disappeared; but the circuit wall which had
been repaired by the emperor Valerian against the coming
of the Goths was probably in a fair defensory condition;
but the space inclosed by this wall seems to have been too
large to suit the convenience of the lords of the Acropolis,
THE DARK AGE 481

and it was at this time, according to the most recent crit-
ics, that a wall was built dividing the city in twain,—the
wall which may be traced in ruins from the northwest
angle of the Acropolis along the eastern side of the agora,
—employing the material of the dismantled stoa of King
Attalus. The line of this wall is indicated on the map
of Roman Athens.

Five successors of the first Acciajuoli ruled in Athens,
and the city seems to have been tolerably prosperous under
their sway. The population at this time is said to have
been more than fifty thousand.

The fame of the medieval Athens spread abroad in Eu-
rope and the title of Duke of Athens became familiar
words in the courts of France, Italy, and England. Dante
refers to Theseus as i] duca d’Atene, and Chaucer ap-
plies the same title to the legendary hero. Shak-
spere also introduces him as duke of Athens in his ‘‘Mid-
summer Nignht’s Dream,” showing how the reviving in-
terest in classic lore translated the life of prehistoric
Athens in terms of the Athens of the day. But how little
remains in Athens to-day to remind us of the time when
knighthood was in flower upon the Acropolis! The walls
and towers of the French and Italian dukes have dis-
appeared; only the ugly revetment of Cimon’s superb wall
remains, which, with a cistern here and there upon the
Acropolis, is all that is to be seen of them there. Far out
on the plain, in the dilapidated little convent of Daphni,
two coffins of stone with carved fleurs-de-lis upon them,
now scarcely traceable, are the most characteristic me-
morials of the men who first introduced Athens to modern
Europe.

Under Franco II, the last of the Acciajuoli, the life
of debauchery which was in vogue within the castle of
the Acropolis had its effect upon the administration of

affairs, and lawlessness pervaded the entire city. At the
31
482 THE STORY OF ATHENS

same time the Turk appeared in Europe. Constantino-
ple had fallen before the terrible assault of the sultan
Mohammed II, and the storm of conquest swept toward
the west and south. In 1456, Omar, the Turkish general
who had taken Jerusalem, arrived before the walls of
Athens, and the disorganized condition of the lower city
made it an easy prey to his army. The castle was well
provided to resist a siege, and held out for over a year;
but this also finally fell into the hands of the Turks. The
sultan, who visited the city soon afterward, was so de-
lighted with the marvelous monuments of her past, and
so charmed with the mildness and beauty of the climate,
that he was tempted to establish a royal residence in
Athens, and for that reason treated the city with great
leniency for a Turkish conqueror, and extended many
privileges to the citizens, exempting them from the ter-
rible oppression that many of the conquered cities of
Greece suffered, by appointing an official of his house-
hold as governor. Disdar-Aga took up his residence
upon the Acropolis, the Propylaea became his palace,
the Erechtheum his harem, while, as a mark of special
favor, the Parthenon was reserved for the Christians as a
house of worship. Then, having garrisoned the Acropo-
lis with Turkish troops, with many tokens of good will
the sultan took leave of Athens and set out for the
Peloponnesus. On his return, two years later, the sultan
found the Christians plotting against his government.
Having put the leaders of the conspiracy to death, he pro-
ceeded to punish the ungrateful Christians by converting
their Panagia—the Parthenon—into a mosque. The
pious Moslems speedily covered the odious pictures of
saints upon the walls with a coat of thick whitewash; but
this did not make the Parthenon a real mosque. One
thing more remained to be done: it must have a minaret.
The mute figures on the pediments must have wanted to

 
THE DARK AGE 483

hide their faces when the slender tower began to rise
at the southwest angle of the massive Doric temple.
But it was beautiful to the sultan’s eye and did no harm,
except that a doorway was rudely hacked in the west
wall of the opisthodomos, to connect the stairway of the
tower with the porch. The minaret was completed, the
Parthenon espoused its fourth religion, and now a third
tongue sounded out a new ritual when the priest of Islam
mounted the minaret to give the first call to prayer.

All this was in 1460. But the Turks had not more than
gotten comfortably settled in their new abode when the
Venetians landed a large army at Piraeus and, after a ter-
rible battle, drove them out of the city. Athens was now
so accustomed to sudden changes of both religion and gov-
ernment that she was little surprised to see the return of
the sultan, three years later, and the second establishment
of Turkish power upon her Acropolis. The second Turk-
ish rule in Athens was one of extreme moderation. A
Turkish governor and a Turkish garrison, of course, oc-
cupied the citadel, and annual tribute was exacted by the
Porte; but in the administration of the laws the Chris-
tian citizens had their own representatives. A cadi, or
judge, settled all differences between Moslems; but the
Christians elected their own magistrates, to whom they
gave the ancient title of archon. If disputes arose be-
tween Moslems and Christians, the archons constituted
the first court, from which an appeal could be made to
the cadi, and from him to the Grand Vizier. For two
hundred years the city enjoyed a measure of prosperity
under this mild Turkish régime. The Acropolis was in-
habited by Turks, but the bulk of the city’s population,
which is estimated to have been over forty thousand, was
Christian. The people tilled their fields and garnered
rich harvests of olives, from which they received a good
income through the markets of Constantinople. It is
484 THE STORY OF ATHENS

most unfortunate that this condition of affairs could not
have been perpetuated until Europe had become enlight-
ened. It is altogether probable that the Turks, during
their second occupation, either through religious fanati-
cism or for amusement, indulged in the mutilation of the
sculptures of Athens; but this form of vandalism is not a
drop in the bucket of devastation that the interference
of European powers dashed over the city. During all
this period the ‘great edifices upon the Acropolis re-
mained intact except for one most unfortunate catastro-
phe, in which Nature was the agent and the Turk only
the unwitting instrument. In 1645, we are told by de la
Rue, Isouf-Aga had a large quantity of powder stored
in his castle—the Propylaea; and one night, when the
Christians were celebrating the feast of Saint Demetrius
in his little church at the foot of the Museum Hill, the
Aga proposed to drop a few bombs upon them. One
bomb was fired with little effect, and then three pieces
were so aimed as to cover the church and destroy it
completely; but before the guns were fired a fierce thun-
derstorm swept over the Attic plain, and a bolt of light-
ning, striking the castle, ignited the powder, causing a
terrible explosion, which demolished a large portion of the
Propylaea and sent Isouf-Aga to his reward. The whole
interior of the ancient gateway of Mnesicles was a wreck;
two of the beautiful Ionic columns were completely de-
stroyed and the tops of the rest were blown off. The
wonderful marble ceiling, which had been the marvel of
generations, and the main architraves, were also demol-
ished; only the Pinakotheka, the outer walls, and the
eastern portico remained comparatively unharmed. The
Christians, of course, believed that the saint had turned
the tables against the Aga; for, from that time, their
church was called by the name of Saint Demetrius the
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486 THE STORY OF ATHENS

A few years after this Jean Jacques Carrey made a visit
to Athens and devoted his precious time to making draw-
ings of the Parthenon sculptures, as if he had been fore-
warned of their approaching doom. These drawings are
our only records of many of those masterpieces of Phi-
dias and his gifted pupils.

On September 21, 1687, Francesco Morosini, the future
Doge of Venice, after a series of victories over the Turks,
sailed into the harbor of Piraeus. The Athenians lost
no time in sending a deputation to the Venetian admiral
to tell him how earnestly they desired freedom from
the Turks. Morosini at once moved his horrid engines
to Athens, mounting his batteries on the hills of the Muses
and of the Nymphs, his mortars upon the Areopagus.
The Turks upon the Acropolis had already begun to
feel insecure with Morosini so near, and had begun elab-
orate operations for defense. They demolished the lovely
little temple of Athena Nike, built it, block for block,
into a breastwork in front of the Propylaea, and provided
this with six pieces of ordnance. The work of bombard-
ing a fortress so redoubtable was very tedious to the im-
patient Morosini. He held a consultation with his
engineers, and a fine scheme was devised by which the
Acropolis was to be undermined and the whole citadel,
temples, Turks, and all, was to be blown into eternity;
but the task proved too laborious, and Morosini returned
to his guns. One day a deserter from the Turkish side
came over to say that if the bombardment was con-
tinued the Parthenon might be destroyed, for in this the
Turks kept their powder magazine. This he said hoping
to put a stop to the devastation; he told only a half-truth,
however, for there was but one day's supply of powder in
the temple. But the deserter did not know his man.
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488 THE STORY OF ATHENS

focus, and that focus was the Parthenon. For three days
some good fate took advantage of the bad marksmanship
of the Italian gunners to save the temple of Athena—the
shrine of the Blessed Virgin—now a mosque; but on the
fourth, an evil fate sent a German lieutenant to a mortar
which had been stationed below the Acropolis, near the
little monument of Lysicrates. The lieutenant directed
the gun with deadly precision; the cord was pulled and
a terrible boom echoed from Cimon’s wall. The bomb
ascended, hissing along its graceful curve, and then fell.
We shudder to think of what happened when it descended
upon the roof of the Parthenon, crashing through the
marble tiles down into the cella where the powder was. A
mighty explosion shook the Acropolis, the crowning work
of architectural genius, the grandest monument of man’s
religious devotion, was rent asunder. The splendid roof
was sent toward heaven, the magnificent columns on either
side leaped from their basement and fell prone as we see
them still. The massive architrave, with the beautiful
metopes, and the lovely frieze toppled and fell, breaking
themselves into fragments. The whole interior was com-
pletely demolished. For two thousand years the Parthe-
non had stood in all its splendor ; a second of time sufficed
to lay it in hopeless ruins.

But the disaster did not end here; the explosion was fol-
lowed by a terrible conflagration, which raged for days
among the wooden fittings of the mosque, and spread
to the barracks and huts with which the Acropolis inclo-
sure had been crowded full. The fire spread to the other
ancient buildings which had been fitted up for habitation,
and great havoc was wrought in the Erechtheum and its
dependencies. The Turks, of course, evacuated with
heavy losses, and Morosini took possession of the citadel,
with religious celebrations of his victory. The most
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The Acropolis after the Bombardment, Showing the Fortifications of the Propylaea and
the Odeum of Regilla. From an Old Print in Fanelli’s ‘Atene.””
490 THE STORY OF ATHENS

name of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, on whose feast
day the Acropolis had surrendered. The Turks were
allowed five days to leave the city, with their families,
bag and baggage. Three thousand departed, but three
hundred others preferred to embrace Christianity rather
than quit Athens, and these were forthwith baptized into
the Church of Rome. When the fire had consumed every
particle of inflammable material within its reach, leaving
the Acropolis strewn with ashes and its sadly shattered
marble glories blackened with smoke, the captors looked
about for some suitable trophy of their victory, some mon-
ument which they might carry home to Venice as an im-
posing memorial of their prowess, like those fine bronze
horses which Constantine had carried from Rome to
the Bosporus and which Doge Dandolo of Venice had
taken away in 1204 to adorn the fagade of the Church
of Saint Mark. Morosini’s eye fell upon the four superb
marble horses which stood before the chariots of Athena
and Poseidon in the western gable of the Parthenon,
which, strange to say, had not been dislodged by the
explosion, and he was seized with a desire to possess
them. Messengers were despatched to the ships to fetch
cables and tackling and to bring a detachment of sailors
for the work of taking down the sculptures. The labor
of devastation began and the proud marble steeds were
loosened from their pediment; but, through some stupid
blunder, the tackling slipped and the sculptures fell with
a crash upon the steps of the Parthenon to be dashed into
countless fragments. Morosini then satisfied himself
with the possession of two bronze lions, which were safely
conveyed to the ship, and have been one of the sights of
Venice ever since the victor’s return. Having completed
their task, having committed more barbarous vandalism
in Athens than all the hostile armies of Spartans, Macedo-
nians, Romans, and Goths combined, having wrought
THE DARK AGE 491

far greater havoc than the lightning and tempest of two
thousand years had done, the Venetians sailed satisfied
away, leaving the poor Athenians, who had sought their
aid, to the mercy of the Turks, who immediately returned,
pitiless toward the wretches who had brought so great
disaster upon them. Large numbers of the citizens were
driven to take flight, some of them to Salamis, as in
the days of the Persians, some to Aegina, and some to
Corinth and other cities of the Peloponnesus, many of
them never to return again. Disease and death spread
terror among those who remained, and the Turks put off
reoccupation for nearly a year. Then they returned and
set fire to a large portion of the city in order to purify
it of the pestilence. The sultan, who was very well
disposed toward the rebellious Athenians, sent a free
pardon to all the citizens and remitted the tribute for
three years. The old families began gradually to re-
turn and to rebuild their homes, so that within a few
years comfort and industry were again restored.

The mosque within the Parthenon was rebuilt. The
minaret had been miraculously preserved, and a sort of
dome now rose between the severed porticos of the tem-
ple, and the work of destruction so inauspiciously intro-
duced by the Venetians went rapidly on. Entirely too
much is said, in Athens and out of it, about Turkish van-
dalism. It was not the “ignorant Turk” that began the
destruction of the monuments upon the Acropolis, but
the “enlightened Europeans’ who were at war with
him. So far as the Turks were concerned, the Parthenon
and the Erechtheum would have remained intact as mon-
uments of architecture until this day. It was their policy
to preserve these buildings for their own use, even though
they may have defaced the sculptures. But when the in-
termeddling Europeans had once given them a lesson in
destruction, they began with a will to practise what they
492 THE STORY OF ATHENS

had learned. Their poor huts, their barracks, and their
walls had been totally demolished, and must now be rebuilt
as soon as possible. The marble fragments which had been
broken from the temples by the explosion and by cannon-
balls were hastily gathered up and converted into lime
for the work of reconstruction; and when all the pieces
that could be moved had been thus requisitioned, they soon
found how easy it was to make fragments of the larger
pieces and from the portions of the buildings that were
still standing. It was then that statues, inscribed bases,
and pedestals were collected into heaps and bits of cornice
and frieze were broken off, all to be carried to the lime-kiln
for the manufacture of that material which was the most
readily handled and produced the most speedy results.
But the work of devastation had only begun. It was hard
enough to have the Turks breaking up the already shat-
tered buildings; but with the restoration of peace came
the first European tourists. The great passion for an-
tiquities had seized Europe, and now, for the first time,
broken bits of statuary began to command good prices in
European markets. The coming of the tourists and the
collectors for antiquity shops sealed the doom of the
sculptures that had escaped up to this time. As soon as
the Turks learned that these relics had a money value,
they ceased to deface them from religious scruples; but,
climbing up to the pediments and the metopes of the
temples, they broke off the heads of the figures and sold
them to the visitors for a few pieces of silver. The
trade flourished for a number of years: few travelers
came to Athens prepared to export whole statues, metope
blocks, or sections of frieze; but every comer could pack
a head or two among his luggage, with perhaps a shapely
arm or hand by way of memento. In this way almost
every statue or relief in sight was mutilated; while every
figure that came to light in the process of rebuilding the
THE DARK AGE 493

town was decapitated to catch the eye of some antiquity-
hunter. We can only marvel that anything was left.
Indeed, it is wholly due to the fact that the Turks did
not excavate or even clear away the debris, when they
wished to lay the foundations of a new house, being
content to smooth off the ground to a general level, that .
we owe the preservation of the few Athenian treasures
which the National Museum and the museum upon the
Acropolis possess. For by this simple method a small
number at least of the ancient sculptures were buried
and hidden from the greedy grasp of the antiquarians’
native agents.

It was in all probability during this period of Turkish
occupation that the greater number of monuments of
Athens, both of architecture and sculpture, perished for-
ever, the temples and other buildings being taken for
the lime industry, the reliefs and statues mutilated for
the antiquity market. It may be that this era saw the
disappearance of that large number of smaller temples
that were scattered over the lower city and spread out
into the plain, and the endless colonnades and porticos
that lined the agora and newer market-places; for this
great array of buildings, though ruined and fallen to
decay, could not have been annihilated in any other way.
It may be that in this generation the mighty temple of
Zeus was dismantled and broken up and the marble seats
of the stadium were torn up to furnish food for the
hungry lime-kiln. Certain it is that many of the reliefs
and statues came to grief at this time; for when Dalton,
the English draftsman, visited Athens in 1749, and
made his drawings of the Parthenon, more than half
of the sculptures of the ancient shrine had disappeared
from their places in the pediments, and the metopes and
the frieze were in a shocking state.

For more than sixty years “Athens, although under
494 THE STORY OF ATHENS

the Ottoman yoke, was in a flourishing condition, and
might be held up as an example to the other cities of
Greece,” to quote from one of her own later historians.
The Athenians governed themselves much as they had
done before the painful Venetian interlude. The Turkish
government was not oppressive nor were its taxes exces-
sive. After 1754 the city suffered from incursions of the
Albanians; but a good governor arose who raised an
army, composed of Turks and Athenians, and gained
a great victory over these marauders in 1777, after which
the Albanians were not heard of again in Athens. The
good governor, by this brilliant campaign, won the es-
teem of the Porte and the love of his subjects to such
a degree that his office was conferred upon him for life;
but these demonstrations seem to have spoiled him, for
he directly converted into a bad governor, oppressing
his people and misusing his powers, until the Athenians
revolted against him and had him removed. Bribery
restored him to his place for a time, but he was again
removed, only to buy his position back again. This
operation was repeated several times, until 1795, when
he was at last put to death in exile at Cos. During these
twenty years of misgovernment Athens declined in
wealth and prosperity, and the terrible pestilence of 178¢
and 1792 reduced her population, through death and
flight, by several thousands. The city was in a deplorable
condition when Lord Elgin arrived with the opening of
the nineteenth century. He spent three years laboriously
making casts and drawings of the remnants of architec-
ture and sculpture upon the Acropolis, working under
inconceivable difficulties. Then he secured a firman from
the Sublime Porte permitting him to remove, as he saw
fit, any stones bearing sculptures or inscriptions, and
began the work which robbed the temples upon the Acrop-
olis of their last treasures. It is a bitter chapter in the
THE DARK AGE 495

history of Athena’s citadel, the tearing from her embrace
of the scant residue of her ancient splendor; but we must
admit, in all fairness, that it was for the best, in the light
of subsequent history, in view of the terrible war that
wrecked the Acropolis in the last struggle that was to end
in triumph for the cause but devastation for the land.
Lord Elgin was perfectly right in removing the treasure,
which was, after all, a part of the inheritance of all civil-
ization from its Grecian mother, to the safekeeping of the
British Museum. But in the methods which he pursued,
or which were pursued in his absence, for the rescue of
that treasure, he was unquestionably wrong, and _ his
memory will be justly odious so long as civilization en-
dures; for, not content with taking the figures and reliefs
that had fallen from their places, nor yet with gathering
up the fragments of those which lay broken on all sides
of the Parthenon, he, or the rapacious vandals whom he
employed, in order to wrest the priceless metopes from
their places, tore up the gigantic cornice of the temple, and
wrenched apart the massive stones of the entablature,
dashing their superb members to pieces on the rock below.
They snatched one of the lovely caryatid maidens of the
south porch of the Erechtheum from her place with such
brutal violence that one half of the entablature and
one of the two gigantic slabs that composed the superb
coffered ceiling fell with a crash in a heap of hopeless
ruins. They removed one of the six exquisite columns
of the Erechtheum’s eastern portico—the sacred portico
of Athena Polias—leaving a meaningless row of five to
mourn the rape of their sister. All this was unnecessary
and wanton vandalism. Most of the statues which were
not a part of the Parthenon had been stolen already; but
Lord Elgin found the seated statue of Dionysus that had
crowned the choragic monument of Thrasycles above
the theater, and added that to his cargo of booty, as one
496 THE STORY OF ATHENS

’

of the “blocks of stone with figures upon them,” accord-
ing to the terms of his firman. For these acts of vandal-
ism, as I say, we can never forgive his lordship; and yet
he was instrumental in preserving to us the major part
of the Parthenon sculptures from utter destruction, per-
haps, or perhaps from some other museum in a land
where revolution and mobs are of more frequent occur-
rence than they are in England. But when we ascend to
the Acropolis, and feast our eyes upon the two glorious
porticos of Ictinus, so bare and forsaken, with only the
head of one of Helios’s horses rising from the waves in
one angle of the eastern pediment, and two lonely and
battered figures clinging hopelessly to each other above
the western portico, we cannot but yearn for the exiled
gods and heroes of Phidias, conceived in the remotest
ages of Grecian history, and fashioned by the deftest
hands of the Golden Age of Athenian art, now sen-
tenced to endless imprisonment in the stifling gloom of
the London museum; for the clear air of Attica they have
smoke, for sunshine they have mist. Who can blame the
modern Greeks, who love their past and glory in it, for
cherishing the forlorn hope that some day good, kind
England will restore Athena’s treasures to her shrine
again?

In the year 1821 the breath of patriotism passed once
more over Hellas, stirring up a wave of revolution which
increased in volume until the whole country was roused
to arms. Greeks of Greece and Greeks living in all parts
of the world joined forces and with their own services or
gifts of money lent impetus to the cause which ended in
the final liberation of Hellas. The wave of enthusiasm
reached Athens among the first of the cities of Greece,
and she, though weak and poor, roused herself for the
terrible struggle. The insurgent army entered Attica,
took Athens, and surrounded the Acropolis; but presently
THE DARK AGE 497

the Turks were relieved by the arrival of reinforcements.
The Greek army was driven out of Athens, and the city
was set on fire, while hundreds of the inhabitants were
put to the sword. As soon as the Turkish army had
withdrawn, leaving the fortress in the keeping of the
native Turks, the Greek army returned to besiege the
Acropolis. Terrible scenes followed. The Turks were
well supplied with food, but soon ran short of water, and,
after suffering untold misery, finally capitulated on June
10, 1822. The army of the Greeks at once took pos-
session, and the standard of liberty floated from the
ancient citadel. Then Odysseus, the great general of the
Greeks, erected a mighty bastion at the northwest angle
of the Acropolis, just above the Clepsydra spring. This
work of fortification, which has since been taken away,
was the last wall of defense to be built upon the rock
of the Acropolis. But peace was not to be expected so
soon as that. A year had not passed before the Turks
were again harassing Attica, at first only to murder a
few peasants, carry off a number of women, and plunder
the harvest of ripe grapes.

Then the Greek cause suffered the terrible blow of
seeing her chief general, the brave Odysseus, turn traitor.
After having made certain negotiations with the enemy,
he began open hostilities against Athens. Gouras, the
Athenian commander, was sent out against him and won
a decisive victory. Odysseus, fearing after this to in-
trust himself to the Turks, voluntarily gave himself over
to Gouras, and was taken to the Acropolis, where he was
imprisoned in the tower which the Franks had built above
the Propylaea. Soon after his incarceration, his mangled
body was found on the rocks below, and it was believed
that he had been put to death at the instigation, or at
least with the consent, of Gouras. The story of Odys-

seus, even briefly told as it is here, sounds very like that
32
498 THE STORY OF ATHENS

of some of the Athenian generals of the ancient democ-
racy; his gallant bravery, his ability to command, and his
willingness to desert his country’s cause are all sug-
gestive of the character and deeds of an Alcibiades.
The same canker at the root of Greek character of a cer-
tain type was still the greatest barrier to Grecian liberty
and Greek independence.

The early years of the last Greek struggle for freedom
saw not only a great revival in Greek national feeling,
but an awakening of a general interest in Greece through-
out Europe. Moral sympathy and material aid flowed
in from all quarters, and the great powers of Europe
began to feel the necessity of recognizing the Hellenic
nationality. It was at this time that a number of dis-
tinguished Englishmen arrived upon the scene, offer-
ing their services as soldiers and large sums for muni-
tions of war. The most famous of these was Lord
Byron, who, crushed with resentment at the real or
supposed wrongs that he had suffered at the hands of
his own countrymen, and fired with loving enthusiasm
for the cause of Greece, left the sneers of the English
critics once for all, left Italy, the scene of his amatory es-
capades and wild excesses, and fled to Athens, where, with
all the ardor of his passionate soul, he threw himself and
all the funds at his disposal upon the side of the Greeks.
In Greece, Byron strove to reconcile the warring factions
into which the national party, especially in the army,
was divided, and raised a body of Siliotes which he in-
tended for his own command. Byron had been in Ath-
ens more than ten years before this. The vividness of his
first impressions are evident in the famous lines with
which he opens the third canto of the ‘“Corsair”’:

Slow sinks more slowly ere his race be run,
Along Morea’s hills the setting sun;
THE DARK AGE 499

Not, as in northern climes, obscurely bright,

But one unclouded blaze of living light.

O’er the hush’d deep the yellow beam he throws,
Gilds the green wave, that trembles as it glows.
On old Aegina’s rock and Idra’s isle,

The god of gladness sheds his parting smile;
O’er his own regions lingering, loves to shine,
Though there his altars are no more divine.
Descending fast the mountain shadows kiss

Thy glorious gulf, unconquered Salamis ;

Their azure arches through the long expanse
More deeply purpled meet his mellowing glance,
And tenderest tints, along their summits driven,
Mark his gay course, and own the hues of heaven;
Till, darkly shaded from the land and deep,
Behind his Delphian cliff he sinks to sleep.

This is believed to depict the sunset as seen from the
southwestern angle of the Acropolis, where the poet
must have stood upon a medieval bastion covering the
spot where the little temple of Athena Nike now stands;
and, in truth, every word of the luminous description is
borne out by the scene as it may be enjoyed three hun-
dred days out of every year. Upon the occasion of his
second visit, the Athenian muse inspired Byron to write
that song which is perhaps his most familiar poem—his
farewell to the Maid of Athens. “Yay pod, ods ayanw”’
is believed to have been addressed to a beautiful Athenian
girl, the daughter of a consul, whom Byron met in Ath-
ens; but it is not incredible that, even though a maiden
of flesh and blood may have held temporary control of
his heart-strings at the time, the poet’s exalted imagina-
tion may have seen in her the genius of Athens herself,
and that to her, in part at least, his vow was made.
Byron’s endeavors for harmony among the generals
were not successful, and he soon found himself unfitted
SVULISIC, BY} UL VdIOPY JO SUILJUNOP] ay} puv "stele jo Avg oy)
‘sasn]Y 9) JO [TH 94) WM SYN vuoyy Jo adway, ayy Surmoys var[Adorg ay} woy MATA

    

        

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THE DARK AGE 501

to control the turbulent spirits of his soldiers; for, though
full of human sympathy and love for mankind in the
abstract, he was at heart a proud aristocrat. He never
forgot for a moment that he was a British peer, and could
not but look upon his Greek soldiers as beings far inferior
to himself. Such a spirit was not easily tolerated in a
country where all had cast their lot into the same basket
and were struggling as equals for one supreme idea.
Byron was deeply chagrined at his failure as a diplomat
and a soldier, and died not long afterward at Missolonghi.
Whatever his shortcomings even in the réle of champion
of Grecian liberties, the Greeks sincerely admired and
loved Byron as a friend. Twenty-one days of mourning
were observed throughout Greece, and Byron’s heart was
enshrined in a little mausoleum at Missolonghi.

Besides Lord Byron, England furnished, as champions
of Greek liberty, Lord Cochrane and General Church,
who came with ships and men and provisions to fight for
the cause; the former was to take charge of the naval
operations of the Greeks ; the other was made commander-
in-chief of all the Hellenic forces. For ten years and
more the war for independence raged in Greece, some-
times sweeping about the Acropolis, and again receding
to other parts of the country. In 1826 the terrible siege
of Athens began. The Turks had entered Attica and rav-
aged it, and finally took the city, having driven Gouras
and his little army into the citadel. Then for eleven
weary months the storm of war raged in the Attic plain
as one attempt after another was made to relieve the
Greek garrison. The greatest tragedy of the siege was
the untimely death of the brave Gouras, who was shot
one evening while making a tour of inspection around
the walls. The general was instantly killed. Grief and
dismay took possession of the garrison, and on the fol-
lowing morning, when his body was tenderly laid to rest
502 THE STORY OF ATHENS

beside the Parthenon with all the solemnity of the Greek
ritual, many of the soldiers were moved to tears; but
Gouras’s brave wife showed a stouter heart than many
of the fighting-men. The desperateness of the situation
gave her courage, while the behavior of some of the
soldiers, even before her husband’s death, filled her heart
with resentment. ‘Why do you weep?” she said. “It is
you who have caused his death by your attempts at de-
sertion. If your consciences reproach you for this deed,
amend your ways and do not cause the death of Gouras’s
wife, as you have caused his, by desertion.” The soldiers
were deeply moved and asked that they be given an op-
portunity to swear fidelity to the wife of their late com-
mander. A book of the Gospels was accordingly brought,
and a picture of Christ, upon which they took the oath,
which not one of them broke. Soon afterward this noble
woman, with her whole family and a number of Athenian
women, perished in a collapse of a part of the Erechtheum
in which they had taken refuge. All efforts to relieve the
beleaguered Acropolis were futile. The Turks main-
tained the siege and continually renewed the bombard-
ment. The few portions of monuments that had sur-
vived the fire of the Venetian guns now met their doom.
It is, of course, impossible to tell which of the horrid
scars that mar the golden fluted smoothness of the col-
umns of the Parthenon were made by Venetian and
which by Turkish cannonade; but we do know that it was
a Turkish shell that struck the superb north porch of
the Erechtheum and demolished one half of that richest
of Athenian porticos. For eleven months the Greek
garrison held out manfully against privation, shot, anc
shell, but finally surrendered, and the Acropolis fell again
and for the last time, into Turkish hands. Six years the
Turks remained in possession of the city, during whict
time the new Greek government was established upon <

c
THE DARK AGE 503

firm basis at Nauplia. In 1831 the President of Greece
was assassinated, and the European powers held a concert
at which they determined to give free Greece a govern-
ment which they themselves would maintain until it could
take care of itself. England, France, and Russia chose
young prince Otho, second son of the King of Bavaria,
to be the ruler of Greece, and in his eighteenth year
Otho was proclaimed King of Greece at Nauplia.

But Athens was the predestined seat of the new Greek
government. A Bavarian garrison was despatched to
take possession of the Acropolis, and the Turkish soldiers
quietly withdrew. A mournful spot for a capital was
Athens at the end of her turbulent career. The city,
during the dark centuries of Turkish dominion, but par-
ticularly during the closing years of the revolution, had
gone steadily downward and had reached at last the very
dregs of her existence. We are told that when Athens
was chosen to be the seat of the nation, the city contained
less than a hundred habitable houses. Her ancient build-
ings could scarcely be seen for the accumulations of
medieval and Turkish appendages that had been added
to them, and now even these were in a semi-ruinous state.
Small structures had been spared simply because they had
been built into the solid walls of some late building. Thus
the choragic monument of Lysicrates had escaped by
being included in the structure of a Capuchin convent.
Fragments of the larger buildings were saved in the same
way. The northwestern colonnade of the gymnasium
of Hadrian had been included as part of the palace of a
Turkish official. The theater, the stoa of Attalus, and
the market-place of the Caesars were buried, and their
sites long forgotten. Little of Athens’s ancient splendor
remained to add dignity and beauty to the new honor that
had been conferred upon her. But the Greeks wished
historic Athens to be the home of the independent govern-
504 THE STORY OF ATHENS

ment for which they had fought so nobly and so long
and the whole world sympathized with their wish. Thu
Athens emerged from the darkness of her night, and fron
that day the sun of prosperity has shone upon her career
In 1837 King Otho and his lovely bride, the princes
Amelia, entered Athens in triumph, passing along thi
streets embowered with triumphal arches of laurel, myrtle
and flowers. A new era of prosperity has begun fo:
Athens, and the ancient city of Athena is once more thi
center of civilization and culture for that part of the
world, the home of classic studies for all the great nation:
of the earth.
XVI
MODERN ATHENS: THE AGE OF RECOVERY

‘©O to be wafted where the wooded sea cape stands upon the laving sea;
O to pass beneath Sunium’s level summit
So that we might greet sacred Athens.”
SOPHOCLES.

within the memory of living men, and a prince
of Denmark’s royal house wields the scepter
over a far greater territory than that which
—- royal Theseus ruled—the kingdom of united
Greece. A constitution framed by Greeks of
a -— high renown regulates the privileges of her
people, and she has already taken her place as
a recognized power in Europe. Athens has
been raised from the dust and ashes of her fall to be-
come one of the most beautiful and_ best-ordered
cities of Europe. The wealth of Greeks in all parts
of the civilized world has been poured out at the foot
of the Acropolis, and appears in large and sumptuous
buildings of which many a larger and more powerful
city might well be proud. Her university, her library,
and her National Museum would do credit to the archi-
tects of any age or country, and in these the art of the
Golden Age of Athens has been revived.

Her public squares and pleasure gardens are beauti-
fully laid out with cypresses, palms, and evergreens, and
embellished with statues of her modern sons and devotees,
among them a statue of Lord Byron. Her principal
505

a THE Bavarian rule has passed away in Athens
\

  
506 THE STORY OF ATHENS

streets are broad and straight, and lined with well-de-
signed buildings. The lower stories of these are occu-
pied with shops whose capacious show-windows are so
like those of the French capital as to make this feature
of the town, at least, deserving of the title “Little Paris,”
which is ridiculously pleasing to the modern inhabitants
of the city, considering the dignity of her own great
name.

The prevailing colors of the streets are a creamy white
and a light terra-cotta, which give an effect of brilliance
that is almost too bright in the heat of summer, but which
impart an air of cleanliness to the city. The resident por-
tion of Athens where the well-to-do have their houses
is the most attractive and artistic quarter of its kind in
Europe. Its broad avenues are shaded with close-stand-
ing ranks of graceful pepper trees. The houses are sepa-
rated from the street by gardens with high fences of
open ironwork and filled with trees and flowering
shrubs and vines, which in the spring present brilliant
touches of color amid the luxuriant foliage. The houses
—or, perhaps better, the villas, for they stand free in the
midst of their gardens—are designed upon classic lines,
with graceful colonnades and porticos. They are usually
colored white or a soft yellow, the walls of the porticos
and loggias being often painted in deep classic reds, which
give depth of shadow to the covered portions.

The one serious drawback to complete comfort in Ath-
ens is the dust, which fills the streets with white swirling
clouds when the wind blows, and creates a dreadful glare
when there is no wind. Though modern Athens does
not occupy a very important portion of the ancient clas-
sic city, covering chiefly the Roman quarter of Hadrian,
it is nevertheless built upon the ruins of a city of marble,
and the white dust that makes itself so uncomfortably
conspicuous serves as a reminder of this; but it is little
THE AGE OF RECOVERY 507

comfort to reflect that one is swallowing pulverized col-
umns of classic antiquity, or that he is being blinded by
the dust of antique statuary.

Life in modern Athens as viewed by the casual ob-
server presents little that is different from that of the
younger capitals of Europe. It is more like that of Paris
or Vienna than that of Rome or Madrid, because it is
essentially more modern. There is an air of repose about
it, however, that is more in keeping with its climate than
would be found in northern Europe. The class of the
enormously rich is naturally very small, and the larger
number of the citizens seems to be on a nearly equal foot-
ing as regards wealth. For this reason there is an
absence of vain display and vulgarity which is most re-
freshing ; the absence of wretched poverty is equally con-
spicuous. An air of domesticity pervades the city that
is lacking in most modern capitals. In the evening the
cafés are crowded with family parties, who spend an hour
or two eating ices or sweets and drinking, seldom any-
thing stronger than water or coffee. On summer nights
this same crowd gathers in the public square to listen
to up-to-date music well rendered by an orchestra, and to
partake of some simple refreshment. There is, of course,
a generous admixture of officers of the army, dandies,
and coquettes on these occasions; but the general impres-
sion is that of family life transported from homes,
which may be narrow and cramped, to the brighter light
and freer air of a well-appointed restaurant, or to the cool
atmosphere of Constitution Square or some other of
the public gardens. The theaters are well attended and
well appointed. One may hear good music and see ex-
cellent plays in Athens, but these are usually supplied by
foreign talent, though native artists of unquestionable
merit are not wanting.

But all this is the modern Athens which the average
508 THE STORY OF ATHENS

tourist sees. In the winter and early spring the city is
full of foreigners, and one might think that these very
modern and Western manners and customs were assumed
for the sake of the visitors,—company manners, as it
were; but in midsummer there is no change, though
Athens is then essentially Greek,—full of Greeks from
other cities—for Athens is the summer resort of the
Greeks of Alexandria, Constantinople, and Smyrna. The
town is even gayer while the summer visitors are in
possession than during the invasion of the Northern
tribes, and the tram line to Phalerum is crowded with
parties bound for the gay plage and the bathing beach of
that most popular of Greek watering-places.

There is, however, another life in modern Athens which
the average tourist often fails to see. It is the life of the
lower classes, which is quite apart from that which I have
just described. The poorer citizens and the ignorant have
preserved their own existence to a certain extent in their
own quarter of the town, and in a form much older than
that described above, though it is colored more by the
Middle Ages and with the brilliant hues of Orientalism
than with ancient classic sentiment. To catch a view of
this other side of Athenian life one has only to stroll from
Constitution Square a short distance down Hermes Street,
and then turn to the left into the region of Hadrian’s
Stoa. He will soon find himself in a maze of narrow, tor-
tuous streets with low, wooden structures on either side
—streets too narrow for sidewalks, where the shop-fronts
or bazaars open directly upon the thoroughfare, like the
bazaars of the Orient, with all manner of articles of mer-
chandise hanging in profusion within reach of the passer-
by. These streets are often shaded with bright-colored
awnings, through which is shed a soft, subdued light.
Here is the quarter of the shoemakers, there the quarters
of the iron merchants or wood-workers and a host of
THE AGE OF RECOVERY 509

other tradesmen. The native costumes are seen more
frequently here: the fustanella, the tsaruchia, and the
fessi, or long red cap with black silken tassel, add much
to the picturesque effect. The street of the shoemakers
is perhaps the most characteristic of all, where the gay red
shoes, with tasseled upturned toes and embroidered uppers,
hang in profusion from the shop-fronts. In this quaint
corner of Athens one may hear native music and see na-
tive pantomimes and puppet-shows in which the names of
the old Athenian heroes are not forgotten; he may eat
native dishes and drink the native masticha, which is not
often seen in the modern quarters, or taste sweet Turkish
coffee in quaint and tiny cups.

An air of happiness and content pervades the scene:
the blacksmith sings at his forge, and neighboring trades-
men joke with one another good-humoredly across the
street, while the Greek equivalent of the shell-game man
goes around with his basket of pistachio nuts, inviting the
bystanders to help themselves. Almost every one takes
a handful and guesses whether the number of nuts in his
hand is odd or even; and if his guess is correct, he gets
them for nothing: otherwise he pays for the nuts he has
taken. Cleanliness is a conspicuous virtue even in this
forlorn old quarter, which inspires one with hope for the
future of Greece.

This scene, so foreign to our eyes, seems more Orien-
tal than Greek as we imagine ancient Greek scenes,
and makes us wonder whether the Oriental bazaar as we
know it is the survival of the old Greek market-place, or
whether this Athenian market of to-day was derived from
Oriental sources during the long period of Turkish occu-
pation.

This view of Athens has its own peculiar charm, but it
is not the Athens that is shaping the destiny of the
Greek nation. It is the newer, more advanced, more
510 THE STORY *OF “40h ENS

enlightened Athens that is doing this grand work—tl
region of the boulé and Constitution Square, wher
a host of small boys drive a brisk trade in newspapei
that bear the inspiring names of “‘Acropolis,’”’ “Hellas,
and the like, and spend their leisure moments porin
over the contents of their wares. Here, under the shador
of the royal palace, the life of the young kingdom cer
ters. It 1s an impressive sight when the guard at th
_ palace is relieved, and the retiring company comes dow
the street on its way to the barracks, bearing the roy:
ensign of Greece. Every man upon the sidewalks, ever
lounger in front of the cafés, even the little bootblack 1
the street, stands and salutes the blue and white cros:
the emblem of Grecian independence.

Athens, though faithful to the present and far-sighte
for the future, has remained true to her glorious pas
The monuments of her ancient glory have been tender
cared for from the first years of her infant independence
and, true to her ancient traditions, she stretches out he
hands to all the lovers of her ancient art and literatur:
beckoning them to come to her for the study of thos
things by reason of which she holds the far-famed titl
Mother of Arts and Eloquence.

Soon after Otho took up his royal seat in Athens th
recovery of the ancient monuments was begun. To th
young king is due the prevention of one great act of pre
meditated vandalism. The German architect Klenze prc
posed to erect the royal palace upon the Acropolis, br
the plan was defeated by the king himself, and the palac
was built in the far eastern quarter of the city, in th
ward of the emperor Hadrian.

The first archaeological research in Athens was unde
taken in 1833, when a modest sum was raised by popula
subscription, and a clearing was made beside the Pai
thenon. There were no important results from the exc:
THE AGE OF RECOVERY 511

vations; but two years later the government began the
work on a larger scale, under the direction of Ludwig
Ross. The debris which had covered the basement of the
Parthenon up to its second step was thoroughly over-
hauled, and an unexpectedly large number of the Parthe-
non sculptures were brought to light, consisting of por-
tions of figures from the pediments, whole metopes quite
well preserved, and a number of pieces of the zophorus.
Besides these, a number of valuable inscriptions were
found, and several interesting statue bases. The central
portion and the main porticos of the Propylaea were
cleared of the medieval walls of rough masonry which
filled up the intercolumniations and choked the central
passage and the portals. This was no easy task, as the
coarse mortar adhered to the marble with such tenacity
that the sharply cut arrises of the columns threatened to
break in its removal. This mortar may still be seen cling-
ing to the walls and columns in many places. Many of
the fortification walls which the Franks and Venetians
and Turks had built were removed, revealing various in-
teresting sites and foundations. But the most important
work carried on under Ross’s direction was the discovery
of the disjointed members of the Nike temple and their
extrication from the Turkish bastion into which they had
been built during the bombardment of the Acropolis by
the Venetians. Something of the condition of the other
monuments upon the Acropolis at that time may be in-
ferred from that of this fragile building when the Turks
took it to pieces. Almost every portion of this little
building was found stowed away in the Turkish masonry.
Piece by piece the members were removed, and piece by
piece they were fitted together upon its little crepidoma
until cella and porticos were quite perfect even to the cof-
fered slabs of the ceilings of the little porches. Only the
roof was wanting, and several pieces of the frieze, which
512 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Lord Elgin had carried to London. This elaborate wo1
of restoration, together with the general clearing up of tl
fagade of the Propylaea, quite restored the upper pa
of the western end of the Acropolis to its classic sin
plicity; but the great tower above the south wing of tt
Propylaea and the bastions below the main fagade sti
remained, and visitors still entered the Acropolis by tt
medieval approach.

In 1838 Pittakes directed the archaeological work upc
the Acropolis. He excavated in the vicinity of the Erecl
theum, and uncovered the lower portions of the templ
A few years later the mosque which the Turks had bui
upon the ruins of the Parthenon was removed, and tl
ancient pavement of the temple was laid bare. The uppe
portions of the minaret were taken down, and the Pa:
thenon began to assume the appearance of a Greek ten
ple. When all this work had been accomplished, tl
Greek government rested from its labors, and the gov
ernment of France took up the good work. In 185
M. Beulé, a member of the French School at Athens, we
given the direction of the operations of recovery. Beul
removed the mass of fortress walls which the Venetiar
and Turks had thrown across the western end of th
Acropolis, below the Propylaea, and brought to light tt
Roman steps and the tower-guarded gateway which beat
his name. The approach to the Acropolis was thus re
stored to its condition in later Roman times, and all trace
of the Middle Ages, with the exception of the great towe
disappeared.

The French were followed by the Prussians, who, unde
the supervision of Botticher, removed the Byzantine ap:
of masonry which stood in the pronaos of the Parthe
non, freeing the east end of the temple of dll its Chri:
tian appendages.

The Greeks themselves then formed the Archaeologic:
THE AGEVOR RECOVERY 513

Society of Greece, and began the series of excellent exca-
vations which they are still conducting. With funds
partly the gift of the great Dr. Schliemann, the whole
Acropolis of the Periclean age was wholly exposed to the
view of students and visitors. It was then believed that
nothing more was left to be revealed upon the stynmit of
Athena’s rock, and the archaeologists began their re-
searches in the lower city. Work here was, of necessity,
much slower and was attended with far greater difficul-
ties, owing to the greater accumulation of debris in the
lower quarters and the presence of modern houses—diffi-
culties which still stand in the way of our knowing all
there is to be known about the ancient Asty.

Soon after 1860, Chandler located the theater of Diony-
sus, for which the Odeum of Regilla had long been mis-
taken; and a year or two later Strack excavated the site
of the ancient theater, and left it in the condition in which
we see it to-day. Many interesting inscriptions and
sculptures were brought to light at this time, all of which
are now in the National Museum. Among these finds
was that beautiful head which is so suggestive of the
face of our Lord as it is represented in art. The exca-
vations in the sanctuary of Asclepius also reaped a har-
vest of sculptured fragments.

Then came the discovery of the Stoa of Attalus and
the excavation in the ancient Ceramicus which resulted
in the discovery of the ancient cemetery and that superb
set of funeral reliefs and vases which forms one of
the most beautiful and valuable collections in the world.
The number of sculptures that had come to light within
a few years necessitated the building of a suitable re-
ceptacle for them in Athens.

In 1866 plans for the museum were made, and though
years passed before the scheme was finally executed, Ath-

ens has now one of the best-appointed museums in Europe.
33
514 THE STORY OF ATHENS

Toward the end of the sixties, King George defrayed tl
expense of having the stadium cleared of debris and ru
bish, but almost no vestige of its ancient marble linir
was discovered. At the same time the Dipylum was di
covered, and the supposed site of the classic agora wi
changed from the south side of the Areopagus to tl
north side. Then the medieval tower on the Propylac
was taken down in hopes of finding fresh sculptures ar
inscriptions, but this hope was disappointed. The litt
museum upon the Acropolis was built about 1878, for tl
protection of the sculptures that had already been four
within the sacred inclosure. It was carefully designe
of low proportions, and placed in a hollow behind tl
wall of Cimon at the southeastern extremity of the Acro]
olis. The builders little dreamed of the company of di
tinguished archaic guests that would come to them withi
a few years. A short time after the erection of the Acro]
olis Museum it occurred to General Ephor Kavvadias thi
the Acropolis had not yet yielded up all her buried trea:
ures, and a plan was formed to scrape the summit of tl
rock clean in every quarter. The plan resulted in tt
richest discoveries that had ever been made upon the s:
cred hill. The whole topography of the sacred inclosu
was changed. The sites of no less than three ancie1
buildings were located, and that priceless set of pri
Persian sculptures was brought to light which made tk
collection of the Acropolis Museum unique in the work
The fragments of the most archaic temple sculptures an
their bearing upon the history of the Acropolis have bee
described in the early chapters of this book; also the bri
liant work of Dr. Doérpfeld upon the foundations an
fragments of the old temple of Athena—the Hekatompx
don; the finding of the Tanten and other archaic statue
has also been recounted, so that it is not necessary to r¢
view again this period of recovery upon the Acropoli

 
THE AGE OF RECOVERY 515

It is enough to say that bottom has been reached; the
Acropolis has no more light to shed upon the history of
Athens, except in those records which may be hidden, and
hidden forever, beneath the foundations of the Parthenon.

Since that day researches have been continued in the
lower city. The huge basement of the Olympieum has
been thoroughly cleaned up, and the foundations of a
' Pisistratic temple have been found. Dr. Dorpfeld has
made great excavations in the valley between the Areopa-
gus and the Pnyx, disclosing an ancient aqueduct which
he identifies with the Enneacrunus, and a host of houses
of all ages crowded together along narrow streets. He
has found the remains of a very ancient peribolos, or wall,
about an orchestra, far beneath the historic level of the
orchestra in the theater of Dionysus. Excavations are
continually in progress, now in the region of the agora,
where the Stoa of Attalus is being further unburied, now
in the Market of the Caesars, now in the great building
of Hadrian. All these researches are dependent upon the
government’s ability to secure the property which con-
tains the ancient monuments buried beneath the accumu-
lated soil of many generations.

A few years ago a wealthy Greek of Alexandria named
Averof, filled with love and admiration for the capital
city of Greece, and longing to see her ancient prowess re-
stored, undertook to restore the ancient stadium of Lycur-
gus and Atticus, with the hope of reviving Athenian in-
terest in athletic sports. The marble quarries of Pentel1-
cus were again asked to yield a vast amount of their
store. The lower portions of the mighty structure soon
assumed the ancient splendor of old Greco-Roman days;
and when the restoration was about one third complete,
in 1896, representatives from all the countries of the
world gathered in Athens to celebrate the six hundred
and sixty-eighth Olympiad with festive games. The
516 THE STORY OF ATHENS

greatest assemblage that Athens had seen since the days
of Roman emperors gathered in the partly restored sta-
dium to see athletes of all nations and tongues compete
for the wreath of olive from the hand of the Prince of
Greece, and to witness the finish of the Marathon run.
This last event, which marked the culmination of the fes-

 

   

ei om

The Crowd in the Stadium Waiting for the Marathon Runner.

tival, was one of the most exciting scenes that can be
imagined : the grand old spirit of the Hellenic race seemed
to burst into new fire among the assembled Greeks, and
quickly spread to the representatives of other, newer races
as the great throng beheld the foremost runner in the dis-
tance. The crowd surged toward the goal with unsup-
pressed excitement as the runner approached, and when
he came near a thundering shout went up that echoed
back from the side of Lycabettus. He was a Greek, the
winner of that great event, and all Europe and far Amer-
ica joined in the joy of Hellas over the victory.

A romantic story is told in Athens about the winner
THE AGE OF RECOVERY 517

of the Marathon run. It seems that, though highly re-
spectable, he was poor, and had fallen in love with a
maiden whose social standing was a grade higher than his
own, and for this reason his suit was hopeless. After he
had won the victory, while Athens and all Greece were
ringing with his fame, the story of his love affair reached
the ears of the king, who graciously took the necessary
steps to raise him to such a rank and fortune that he
could with all propriety seek the hand of the fair Gre-
cian maid. The romance ends as all such stories should:
the victor won, in addition to his laurels, the hand of the
“woman of his choice.

Soon after the games had concluded and Athens had
assumed her wonted role as the Mecca of students and
tourists of every land and nation, the war with Turkey
plunged Greece into a sea of trouble and anxiety. It was
at this time that M. Averof, the munificent friend of
Athens, decided to devote the sums which he had given
for the restoration of the stadium to the more immediate
needs of Athens and of Greece. The appropriations for
the monumental adornment of the city were thus con-
verted into channels for the sinews of war, and for a few
years the stadium remained only partially restored. But
upon the death of that patriotic and public-spirited son
of Hellas, which occurred in 1900, it was found that he
had made provision in his will for the complete restora-
tion of the splendid monument of Athenian glory, as well
as for a new and excellent water-supply to the city, com-
bining in his gifts the Greek taste for monumental splen-
dor of a Herodes with the Roman utilitarian spirit of
a Hadrian.

There is no city of classic antiquity, existing still as
a modern city, that impresses the visitor upon his ap-
proach as does the city of Athens. Whether we approach

overland by the modern road of iron, which carries us

34
518 THE STORY OF ATHENS

over the lowest point of the shoulder of Mount Daphni,
or by sea from Aegina’s isle, or after rounding the tem-
pled point of rocky Sunium, the effect is much the same.
The sentinel cone of Lycabettus, capped with the white
pinnacle of St. George’s chapel, salutes us first; and then,
as our eyes follow the line of its steep slope downward,
we are greeted by the vision of the most glorious monu-
ment of history and of art that time has spared to the
sight of the children of to-day—the violet-crowned
Acropolis, girt about with its golden wall and crowned
with its glistening diadem, wrought in gold and ivory
aiid surmounted by one priceless jewel that flashes out
in the sunlight, like the chiefest ornament in an imperial
crown. Nowhere else in the world, even of old, was there,
or is there now, a sight like this, where perfect nature
and consummate art have combined to paint a matchless
scene, where a rocky stronghold of ages distant and dim
still bears aloft the unrivaled monuments of historic man’s
supremest genius, where, in spite of time’s rude touch
and the devastating blows of war and tumult, the works
of that most glorious age still stand triumphant; for, as we
view the Acropolis from afar, there is nothing between us
and the time of Pericles—nothing that distance cannot
obliterate. We behold the same scene that faded upon the
sight of that great Athenian fleet which sailed for Sicily
in the days of Alcibiades, the same fair prospect that
smiled to welcome the devoted Roman emperor Hadrian,
the same bewildering sight that fell upon the eyes of
Saint Paul as his ship rounded the promontory of Sunium.
It is only when we come nearer, only when we enter the
streets of the city which our own day has brought into
being, that the veil of the present falls between us and
the past, and we are made to feel how vain it is to try
to see the past as it was, how vain it is to strive to push
THE AGE OF RECOVERY 519

away the veil in order that we may have a clearer vision
of the life that is no more. The monuments are here—

So sadly sweet, so calmly fair,
We start, for soul is wanting there.

The life that produced them is gone.
There is much in the monuments below the Acropolis

 

The Acropolis, from the Pnyx.

in modern Athens to take us back to Athens in the bloom
of her youth, if we could but see them by themselves.
The so-called Theseum is an isolate example of the art
of the Periclean age that might have rolled down from
the Acropolis and lodged where it stands; the necropolis,
outside the ancient sacred gate, is an oasis’ of artistic
beauty which belongs to the best period of Athenian art,
but which is cut off from the classic city by a railway and
by blocks of mean modern houses; the Pnyx is a sturdy
reminder of the strength and prowess of youthful Athens,
520 THE STORY OF ATHENS

and from its solid foundations the most inspiring view of
the glory of the imperial city of Athena may be had. If
one stands here after the sun has sunk behind the Del-
phian cliff, and waits until the deeper shadows infold the
sacred rock and hide the modern city from view, the
Acropolis of the Periclean era will rise from its ruins
and, catching the last rays of departing day, will stand
forth in all its splendor. The unsightly seams and gashes
in the shapely columns will be healed, the fallen blocks
of architrave and cornice will mount silently into their
places, the stately figures of the gods and goddesses will
return from their wide wanderings and assemble once
more in the pointed tympanums of the Parthenon, the
statues of the great Athenians will appear in a vast multi-
tude upon the steps of the Propylaea and within the sacred
inclosure; and then, as it grows still darker, will come a
vast crowd of old Athenians, moving in and out among
the columns and statues, ascending and descending the
broad approach. For qa few brief moments time and war
are forgotten, and he will behold, as in a dream, the
ghostly apparition of imperial Athens.

The Odeum of Regilla, like the mighty group of the
columns of the Olympieum standing upon their massive
basement, is too suggestive of the dominion of imperial
Rome to help us in picturing to ourselves the city when
at the height of her glory as a purely Hellenic creation;
but the Dionysiac theater is to many people—to those
who love the ancient dramatic poets of Athens—more in-
spiring even than the Parthenon itself. In this little hol-
low beneath the wing of the frowning rock were heard
for the first time those glorious masterpieces in which
were laid the foundations of all that we prize most in
literature; upon those rising tiers of seats have gathered
the foremost souls that have inhabited this sphere, whose
brillant lives brought history to light and made modern
civilization possible.
THE AGE OF RECOVERY 521

If one comes to Athens after having already made the
acquaintance of Greek monuments in Italy or Sicily, or in
Greece itself, at Olympia or Corinth, he will find here the
climax for which all the rest is a preparation, and will
have read the history of Hellenic art in a book of carven
stone. If the Acropolis be for him his first glimpse of
Greek art, he will have opened the book at its climax and
will be filled with a desire to read the earlier chapters.
Or if, by force of circumstances, Athens be his sole vision
of the art of classic Greece, he need not grieve; for here
is the whole story if he read aright—here is the begin-
ning and the end.
A GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MopERN BooKsS AND PAPERS BEARING
UPON THE History AND MoNuUMENTS OF ATHENS

History and Topography

Beute, L’Acropole d’Athénes.

Curtius, E., Stadtgeschichte von Athen.

Fraser, J. G., Pausanias’s Description of Greece, Vol. III.

Grote, G., History of Greece.

Mauarry, J. P., Greek World under Roman Sway.

Mauarry, J. P., History of Classical Greek Literature.

Mauarry, J. P., Social Life in Greece, from Homer to Menander.

Mitier, W., A History of the Acropolis (“American Journal of
Archaeology,” 1893, pp. 473 et seq.).

WacusmMuTH, Die Stadt Athen im Alterthum.

Witamow!11z-Mor._enporrr, U. von, Aus Kydathen, pp. 97 et seq.

Archaeology and Art

Cotticnon, M., A Manual of Greek Archaeology.

Cotticnon, M., Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque.

Conze, Die Attischen Grabreliefs.

DorpFELp, WILLIAM, Das Griechische Theater.

Fraser, J. G., Pausanias’s Description of Greece.

Garpner, E. A., A Handbook of Greek Sculpture.

Haicu, A. E., Attic Theater.

HarrisoN AND VERRALL, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient
Athens.

Latoux, V., L’Architecture Grecque.

MicuHaetis, Der Parthenon.

Murray, A. S., A History of Greek Sculpture.

Murray, A. S., Handbook of Greek Archaeology.

PENROSE, Principles of Athenian Architecture.

PERROT AND CHIPIEZ, History of Art in Primitive Greece.

Reser, F. von, History of Ancient Art.

Miscellaneous

Fraser, J. G., Pausanias and Other Studies.

Mauarry, J. P., Rambles and Studies in Greece.
Symonps, J. A., Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece.
WorpswortH, Athens and Attica.

Numerous articles upon special topics will be found in the fol-
lowing journals:

“American Journal of Archaeology.”

“Journal of Hellenic Studies.”

“Mittheilungen des R. d. Arch. Inst.—Athenische Abtheilung.”

“Revue Archéologique.”
INDEX
Y

INDEX

A

Academy, 113, 176, 191, 353, 390,
403

Acamas, 32

Acciajuoli, 478, 481

Acharnian Gate, 170

Acontius, 234

Acropolis, 4, 6, 10, 24

Actaeus, 9

Aegeus, 10, 16, 18, 22, 31

Aegina, 51

Aeschines, 349, 352, 378

Aeschylus, 112, 120, 135, 180

Aethra, 20, 32

Agariste, 157 .

Agatharchus, painter, 287

Agathon, 284

Ageladas, sculptor, 104,

Aglaophon, painter, 286

Agora, 75, 109, III, 355, 397

Agraulium, 14, 72, 144

Agraulos, 9, 14

Agrippa, 414

Agrippeum, 414

Alaric, 466

Alcaeus, 45, 77

Alcamenes, sculptor, 254, 310

Alcibiades, 282, 291, 295, 297, 302

Alcinous, house of, 36

Alcippe, 12

Alcmaeonidae, 43

Alexander, 352, 371, 378, 380

Altar (6Bduoc), 26, 31; of
Athena Hygiea, 94; of Diony-
sus, 391; of Heliconian Po-
seidon, 73; of Huntress Arte-
mis, 134; of Mercy, 356; of
Modesty, 356; of Prometheus,
113, 179; of the Twelve Gods,

157

108; of Zeus Astrapaios, 73;
of Zeus Heskeios, 30
Amazons, 19
Aminias, 147
Amphicrates, sculptor, 118
Amphictyon, 9, Io, 15
Amphipolis, 349
Anaces (Dioscuri), 20
Anaceum, 72
Anacreon, I14
Anaxagoras, 157, 229, 230, 2590
Andocides, 295
Androgeus, 17
Antenor, sculptor, 106, 118
Antigonus Gonatas, 385
Antimachides, 108
Antinous, 437
Antiochus IV, 392, 396
Antiope, 19
Antipater, 380
Antistates, architect, 108
Antisthenes, 321
Antoninus Pius, 442
Antony, 409
Aphrodite Pandemos, 21
Apollodorus, painter, 287
Aqueduct, 420, 433
Archaic sculptures, 57, 61
Archaic temples, 58
Archilochus, 77
Arch of Hadrian, 429
Archons, 42, 43, 45
Areopagus, 6, 68, 355, 420
Areopagus, court of, II, 32, 45,
189
Ares, II, 14
Ariadne, 19
Ariobarzanes, 407
Aristides, 125, 136, 145, 149, I51,
174, 178

525
526

Aristion, tyrant, 401

Aristippus, philosopher, 331

Aristophanes, 279, 284, 289

Aristotle, 338, 349, 352

Artaphernes, 126

Artemisia, 146

Art of the Golden Age, 206

Aspasia, 228, 232, 236, 261

Asty, 46, 68

Athena, 10, 11, 12; Hygiea, 94;
Polias, 9, 34; worship of, Io,
12

Athenaea, 15, 21

Athenais. See Eudocia

Attalus I, 388

Attalus II, 396

Atthis, 12

Attica, 7

Attic plain, 6, 8

Attic school of sculpture, 107

Atticus, 407

Augustus, 409, 412

Averof, 515

B

Bacchylides, 18

Barathron, 172

Basil of Caesarea, 461

Basil II, 477

Battle of Aegospotami, 306; of
Arginusae, 305; of Arteme-
sium, 142; of Chaeronea, 351;
of Cynocephalae, 390; of Cy-
nosseina, 303; of Cyzicus, 303;
of Delium, 280; of Euryme-
don, 183; of Marathon, 127;
of Mycale, 153; of Philippi,
409; of Plataea, 152; of Poti-
daea, 282; of Salamis, 145; of
Thermopylae, 140

Bema, 69, 170

Beulé, 512

Beulé Gate, 447

Boniface II, 478

Botticher, 512

Boulé, 117

Brasidas, 276, 281

Bronze boys, 254

Bronze quadriga, 120

Brutus and Cassius, 408

INDEX

Bust of Antinous, 438; of an
athlete, 433; of Hadrian, 441
Byron, 498

Cc

Caesar, 412

Calamis, 252

Callaeschrus, architect, 108

Callias, 48, 97, 137

Callicrates, architect, 209, 223

Callimachus, architect, 366

Callirrhoé, 109

Carrey, 486

Catalans, 478

Cathedral, 475

Cave of Apollo, 73

Cecropia, 9, II

Cecrops, 9, 10, 22

Cecrops II, 10

Cemetery of Athens, 371, 513

Cephisodotus, sculptor, 342

Cephissus, 8

Ceramicus, 26, 170

Chalkotheka, 243

Chandler, 513

Chares, General, 340

Chios, 57

Choerilus, 120

Choragic columns, 425

Choragic monuments, 363, 365,
386, 425

Christianity, 420, 458, 460

Cicero, 407

Cimon, 125, 137, 176, 178, 183,
189

Cimon, the elder, 50

Cleomenes, 116

Cleon, 258, 279

Cleopatra, 410

Clepsydra, 28

Clisthenes, 116, 117

Codrus, 33, 42

Coesyra, 48

Collytus, 170

Colonies, 228

Colonnade of Attalus. See Stoa
of; of Eumenes, 301; of Her-
mes, 177; of Zeus, 342, 346,

Colonnades, 76
Colonus Agoraeus, 309
Commerce, 204
INDEX

Conon, 327, 533

Constantine, 458

Constantius, 460, 464

Conversion of temples, 471

Corinthian style, 367

Cossutius, architect, 392

Costume, Io!

Council house, 185, 355

Council of Five Hundred, 201;
of Four Hundred, 45; of Four
Hundred (new), 303

Cranae, 9

Cranaus, 9, 10, 13

Cresilas, sculptor, 253

Crete, 17

Creusa, 16

Critias, sculptor, 157, 172

Croesus, 50

Cronos, 18

Ctesiphon, 351, 378

Cyclopes, 27

Cydathenaeum, 170

Cydippe, 234

Cylon, 43

Cynaegirus, 128

Cynosarges, 321

D

Daedalus, 51
Dalton, 493
Damon, 194, 229, 231
Darius Hystaspes, 123, 126, 138
Datis, 126
Daughters of Cecrops, 9, 14
Delian League, 174, 195, 200
Demes, 117
Demeter, 16
Demetrius of Phalerum, 378, 381
Demetrius Poliorcetes, 382, 384
Demiurgi, 21
Demophon, 21, 22, 32
Demosthenes, general, 208
Demosthenes, orator, 335,

349, 351, 378, 380
Deucalion, 9, 73
Deucalion’s flood, 9
Dexippus, 454, 456
Diogenes the cynic, 332
Diogeneum, 72
Diomea, 170
Diomean gate, 170
Diomed, 32

340,

527

Dion Chrysostom, 427, 452

Dionysia, 180

Dionysius the Areopagite, 423

Dionysus, 16

Dioscuri (Anaces), 20

Dipylum, 223

Disdar-Aga, 482

Divisions of Attica, 117

Dorian invasion, 43

Dorians, 33

Doric schools of sculpture, 103

Doric style, 53, 211, 214

Dracon, 42, 44

Dracon, laws of, 44

Drama, I10, 120, 121, 135, 180,
239

E

Ecclesia, 202

Education, 27, 316

Election by lot, 202

Eleusinium, 72

Elpinice, 137, 189, 190, 242

Enceladus, 12

Endoius, sculptor, 97

Engraving art, 342

Enneacrunus, 109, 515

Epheboi, 79

Epicurus, 385

Epimenides, 44

Equestrian statues, 254, 416

Erechtheum, 11, 52, 263, 502

Erechtheus, Io, 13, 16, 22

Erechthonius. See Erechtheus

Eretrea, 124, 127

Eridanus, 169

Erysichthon, 9

Euaenetus, 140

Euandria, 93

Eudemus, 363

Eudocia, 468-470

Eumenes II, 390

Eumenides, 43

Eupatridae, 21, 37

Euphorion, painter, 284

Euphranor, painter, 346

Euripides, 20, 27, 158, 181, 240,
284, 304

Eurybiades, 140, 142

Eurysthenes, 20

Expedition to Sicily, 292-301
528
F

Flaminius, 390
Florentine dukes, 479
Franks, 478

G

Gable sculptures, 87-90

Games, 92, 179, 429, 436, 515

Gate of Acropolis, 161, 447; of
Athena Archegitis, 412; of
Hadrian, 429

Geomori, 21

Germanicus, 416

“Goodly house of Erechtheus.”
See Palace of

Goths, 455, 466

Gouras, 497, 501

Grave of Cecrops, 53

Gregory of Nazianzus, 461

Gylippus, 298, 307

Gymnasium of Hadrian.
Stoa of

Gymnasium of Ptolemy, 387

Gymnasiums, 78, 173

See

H

Hadrian, 427

Halirrothius, 12

Harmodius and Aristogiton, 114

Head of Apollo, 442; of Hygiea,
370

Hegesius, sculptor, 173

Hekatompedon, 56

Helen, 20, 31, 38

Hephaestus, 13

Heracles, 18, 19

Hermes, 14

Hermes of the market, statue of,
171, 173

Herodes Atticus, 442

Herodotus, 22, 224

Heroum, 178, 184

Herse, 9, 14

Hesiod, 73

Hill of the Muses, 6, 20, 39; of
the Nymphs, 6

Hipparchus, 48, 113, 114

Hippias, 49, 113, 114, 126, 134

Hippolytus, 19, 20

INDEX

Homer, 10, 23, 24, 84

Horace, 409

Horologium of Andronicus, 413
Hospitality, 81

Hymettus, 6, 27

Ictinus, 209

Ilissus, 8, 17

Ion, 241

Ionian artists, 97
Ionians, 27

Ionic style, 245, 267
Iophon, 304

Iphicrates, 328, 333, 339
Irene, 474

Ischomachus, 318
Isocrates, 330, 340, 350, 351
Isouf-Aga, 484

Issaeus, 335

J

Julian the Apostate, 460, 463,
405,
Justinian, 473

K

Kavvadias, 514
King Seleucus, 384
Kings of Athens, 10

L

Lanaea, 116

Lanaeum, 72, III
Laodice, 32

Laurium, 139

Laws of Solon, 113
Leonidas, 140-142
Little Metropolitan, 475
Logeion, 112
Longinus, 454

Long walls, 233, 327
Lord Elgin, 494
Lucian, 27, 440
Lycabettus, 6, 14
Lyceum, 23, 171, 300, 403
Lycius, sculptor, 254
INDEX

Lycomedes, 22

Lycurgus, 46

Lycurgus, orator, 351, 370
Lysander, 306

Lysippus, sculptor, 370

M
Macaria, 20
Marathon, 49, 127, 133
Marcus Aurelius, 440
Mardonius, 124, 138,
I5I, 152
Medon, 42
Megales, 43, 46, 48
Meletus and Timagoras, story
of, 78
Melite, 170
Melitian gate, 170
Menander, 381
Menestheus, 21, 31
Mesogia, 127
Metics, 203, 205
Metionids, 17
Metis, Ii, 12
Metroum, 72, 185, 355
Micon, painter, 157
Midias, 341
Milanthus, 33
Miltiades, 50, 125, 127, 136
Minos, 17, 19
Minotaur, 17, 19
Mithridates, 401
Mnesicles, architect, 244
Monument of Dexileus, 373; of

147, 149,

Eubulides, 400; of Hegeso,
374; of Lanaea, 118; of Lysic-
rates, 365, 503; of Nicias,
364, 444, 447; of Philopap-

pus, 426; of Thrasycles, 386;
of Thrasyllus, 363, 386

Morosini, 486

Mosaics, 433

Moscophorus, 66

Mosque in Parthenon, 482, 491

Mount Aegaleus, 145

Mount Daphni, 6

Mount Hymettus, 6

Mount Lycabettus, 6

Mount Parnes, 6

Mummius, 400

Museum, 513

Museum Hill, 6

529

Museum on Acropolis, 514
Music, 239

Music hall, 414, 444
Mycenae, 24, 36

Myron, 252

Mys, 342

Mysteries of Eleusis, 293

N
Nero, 420
Nesiotes, sculptor, 157, 172
Nicias, general, 277, 207

oO

Occupations, 205

Odeum of Pericles, 239, 408
Odeum of Regilla, 444
Odysseus, 497

Olive tree, the sacred, 30
Olympiad, 42

Olympieum, 108, 392-306, 402,
415, 420, 515
Omar, 482

Oracle at Delphi, 143
Oratory, 202

Orchestra, 112

Orchestra in the agora, III
Ostracism, 117

Otho de la Roche, 478
Otho of Bavaria, 503

P
Painted colonnade. See Stoa
potkile
Painting, 34, 184, 286, 342, 346
Painting of vases, 84
Paintings of Polygnotus, 255
Palace of Erechtheus, 23, 26, 20,
34, 37
Pallas, the giant, 12
Panaenus, painter, 158
Panathenaea, 21, 91, 92-96
Pandion, 10, 16, 22
Pandion II, to
Pandrosium, 30, 52
Pandrosos, 9, 14
Pannychis, 96
Pantheon, 436
530
Parnes, 6
Paros, 51

Parrhasius, painter, 310, 343

Parthenon, 207, 209-219, 243, 482,
486

Pasithea, 16

Pausanias, Spartan, 175

Pausanias, traveler, 449

Peace of Antalcidas, 329; of
Nicias, 281; with Sparta, 226

Pelargikon, 26, 27-28, 249

Pelasgic city, 25

Pelasgic wall, 25
Pelasgoi, 27

/ Peloponessian War,
279, 283

Pentelicus, 6

Peplos, the sacred, 35, 95

Pericles, 158, 190, 193, 201, 228,
230, 238, 258, 271

Pericles II, 274, 305

Persephone, 21

Phaedra, 20

Phaedrus, stage of, 452

Phalerum, 139

Phidias, 158, 208, 255, 260

Philip of Macedon, 350, 352

Philip V of Macedon, 390

Philomela, 16

Philopappus, 425

Philostratus, 458

Phormio, 275

Phryne, 346

Phrynichus, 114, 120

Phyle, 307

Pinakotheka, 251

Pindar, 114, 135

Piraeus, 139, 158

Piraeus, walls to, 173

Pirithous, 20

Pisianax, 187

Pisistratidae, 114

Pisistratus, 47

Pittakes, 512

Pittheus, 18

Plague, 272

Plato, 288, 320, 348

Plato, philosophy of, 330

Plistoanax, 225

Pnyx, 6, 68, 71, 117, 170

Polemon, 353, 38!

Polychromy, 221

257, 260,

INDEX

Polygnotus, painter, 157, 184

Pompieum, 224

Porch of the Maidens, 267 ~

Porinus, architect, 180

Portraits, 221, 388, 432, 441

Poseidon, 10, 21

Position of women, 80, 235

Potidaea, 274, 349

Pratinas, 120

Praxiteles, sculptor, 343, 344

“Prison of Socrates,” 39

Private houses, 73, 76

Proclus, 472

Procne, 16

Procrustes, 18

Propylaea, 243,
482, 484

Protagoras, 318

Prytaneum, 46, 71

Psyttalea, 145

Ptolemy, 387

Pulcheria, 469

Pulytion, 293

Pylos, 279

Pyrrhic dances, 93

Pyrrhus, sculptor, 254, 285

Pythium, 73

248, 250, 479,

R
Regilla, 443
Relief of Hermes and the Graces,

254

Reliefs in theater, 403-406

Religion, 79, 259, 460

Revolt of Boeotia, 191; of Eu-
boea, 225, 301; of Lesbos, 278;
of Lesbos and Chios, 301; of
Samos, 241; of Thasos, 184,
301

Roger of Sicily, 477

Roma, cult of, 390, 415

Roman market, 410

Ross, 511

Royal Colonnade, 355

n

Sacred Gate, 169

Sacred War, 330, 340

St. Demetrius, church of, 484
St. Paul, 410, 421, 423
INDEX

Salamis, 142

Samos, 51

Sanctuary of Agraulos, 29; of
Apollo, 108; of Asclepius, 28,
360, 396; of Dionysus Eleu-
thereus, 73; of Huntress Ar-
temis, 73; of Pandrosos, 14;
of Theseus, 72, 178; of Zeus,

73

Sappho, 45, 77

Satyr-drama, 120

Scopas, sculptor, 343

Sculptors of Samos, 98

Sculpture, archaic, 99-107; of
Golden Age, 252

Sculptures of old temple, 87; of
the Parthenon, 216

Scyros, 22, 178

Septimius Severus, 452

Serapeum, 388

Serpentine column, 155

Sgouros of Nauplia, 477

Sigeum, 49

Simonides, 114, 123, 148, 229

Skene, 112

Slaves, 203, 205

Social life, 76

Social War, 339

Socrates, 230, 254, 282, 287, 280,
304; death of, 324; teachings
of, 316

Solon, 42, 46, 81; laws of, 81

Sophocles, 148, 180, 183, 239, 284

Sophocles IT, 304

Sparta, 151, 154, 165, 190, 225

Spata, 34

Speusippus, 349

Sphacteria, 379

Stadium, 357, 367, 443, 515, 517

Stage, III, 136, 425, 446, 452

Statue of Agrippa, 415; of Aph-
rodite, 311; of Apollo Alexi-
kakos, 252; of Ares, 310; of
Athena Hygiea, 251, 285; of
Athena by Endoius, 97; of
Athena Nike, 245; of Athena
Parthenos, 219, 458, 470, 472;
of Athena Promachos, 208; of
Augusta Hygiea, 415; of De-
meter, 370; of Eros, 346; of
Trene, 342; of the Mother of
the Gods, 255; of Persephone,

531

370; of Plato, 371; of Sappho,
371; of Socrates, 370; of Zeus,
432

Statues of Antigonus and De-
metrius, 383; of Conon and
Timotheus, 335; of the tyran-
nicides, 118, 171, 172

Stele of Aristion, 375

Steps of Propylaea, 448

Stoa of Attalus II, 396, 513; of
Hadrian, 434, 503; poikile, 187,
307, 355, 468

Stoae, 187

Stoics, 385

Strack, 513

Street of Tripods, 365

Strongylion, sculptor, 311

Suburban life, 74

Sulla, 4or1

Sword of Mardonius, 153

Synoecia, 92

Syracuse, 296

iL

Tanten, 99

Temple of Aphrodite Pandemos,
351; of Ares, 310; of Artemis
Aristobule, 171; of Artemis
Euclaea, 172; of Athena (old),
52, 54, 85, 164; of Athena
Nike, 244, 486, 511; of Diony-
sus Eleuthereus, 108, 309; of
Ge and Demeter, 356; of He-
phaestus, 272, 309; of Hera-
cles?, 58, 61-65; of Paternal
Apollo, 355; of Roma-Augus-
tus, 415; of Themis, 357; of
Tyche, 443; of Zeus Olympios.
See Olympieum

Tereus, 16

Thasos, 184

Theater of Dionysus, 121, 171,
357-363, 385, 403, 425, 438, 513

Themistocles, 125, 136, 140, 142,
145, 165, 174

Theodosius IT, 469

Theognis of Megara, 114

Theophrastus, 349, 381

Thermopylae, 140, 148

Theseum. See Temple of He-
phaestus
532

Theseus, 16, 31, 72; bones of, 178

Thesmothetat, 43

Thespis, 110

Thirty Tyrants, 306

Thrasybulus, 307

Thriasian gate, 168

Thucydides, son of Melesias,
220, 237

Thucydides the historian, 21, 182,
278, 281, 300

Thymoetes, 32

Timon the Misanthrope, 290

Timon the Skeptic, 385

Timotheus, general, 334, 339

Timotheus, musician, 285

Tiryns, 24

Torch-race, 179

“Tower of the Winds,” 413

Troezen, 18

Trojan horse, statue, 311

Turks, 482

Vv

Varvakion statue, 220
Venetians, 483
Vergil, 415
Vitruvius, 417

INDEX

WwW

Wall of Cimon, 158, 162; of The-
mistocles, 165, 168-169, 208;
to Munychia. See Long walls;
to Phalerum. See Long walls;
to Piraeus. See Long walls

Walls, 25, 27, 158, 162, 165, 168,
208, 327, 479

Walter de Brienne, 478

War with Boeotia and Chalcis,
118; with Olynthians, 339

x

Xanthippus, 137, 145, 151
Xanthus, 32

Xenocrates, 353, 381
Xenophon, 288, 323
Xerxes, 138

Xoanon, 92

Z

Zeno of Cyprus, 385

Zeno the Elean, 194, 231

Zeus Herkeios, 9; Polieus, 31
Zeuxis, 343

Zozimus, 467