From these more general considerations, into which it was perhaps necessary to enter, let us now pass to the picture antiquity has left us of the principal capitals, confining ourselves chiefly to Athens and Sparta, which may be regarded as the representatives of all the rest. The physiognomy of these, like the features of an individual, may in some respects be considered as a key to the character of the inhabitants; a remark which, with great truth, may be applied to all capitals.

In the structure of the one, external and internal,^[219] there was everywhere visible an effort to embody the principle of beauty, improving the advantages and overcoming the difficulties of position. In the other little could be discovered indicative of imaginative power, of the thirst to create, of the yearning of the mind after the ideal, of the desire of genius to breathe a soul into stone, to live and obtain a perpetuity of existence in the works of its own hands, to gaze on its own beauty reflected on all sides from its own creations as from a concave mirror. At Athens everything public, everything which had reference to the united efforts of the people wore an air of grandeur. The Acropolis inhabited only by the gods appeared worthy to be the dwelling place of immortal beings: all the poetry of architecture was there; it seemed to have owed its birth to a concentration of the best religious spirit of the ancient world, aiming at giving earth a resemblance to heaven; at peopling it with mute deities, speaking only through their beauty and surrounding these representatives of the invisible Olympos with everything most excellent, most valuable, most cherished among men. At Sparta a spirit of calculating economy entered into the very worship of the gods. They seemed, in the manner they lodged and entertained them, to have always had an eye to their common tables and their black broth. Between the temples of Athens and Sparta there was, in fact, the same contrast that now exists between St. Peter’s at Rome and a Calvinistic conventicle. Accordingly, several ancient writers have vied with each other in heaping encomiums upon Athens, which they regarded as at once the most glorious and the most beautiful of cities. Athenæus denominates it the “Museum of Greece;” Pindar, “the stay of Greece;” Thucydides, in his epigram upon Euripides, “the Greece of Greece;” and the Pythian Apollo, “the home and place of council of all Greeks.”^[220] By others it was termed “the Opulent;” though the principal part of its riches consisted in the wise and great men whom it produced, and whose achievements covered it with glory. In the same spirit the Arabs call Cairo the “Mother of cities;” and all nations concentrate more or less upon their capital, their affection and their pride.

The superior magnificence of Athens appears from this; that it was always the place to which the Greeks referred when desirous of magnifying the splendour of their own country, in comparison with what could be found elsewhere. Thus Dion Chrysostom^[221] affirms that Athens and Corinth in all that constitutes real grandeur surpassed the famous capitals of Persia, Syria, and Ecbatana, and Babylon, and the metropolis of Bactriana. Nay, in the opinion of this writer the Kraneion with its gymnasia, fountains, and shady walks, and the Acropolis with its Propylæa, antique altars, temples, and population of gods, exceeded in magnificence the palaces of the Great King, though there was something exceedingly striking in the site and structure of what may properly be called the Acropolis of Ecbatana.^[222] The city itself was unwalled, but the citadel, which probably rose in the midst of it, occupied the slopes of a conical hill, not unlike Mount Tabor, and was girt by seven walls of different colours and elevation, rising in concentric circles above each other to the summit. The circumference of the lowest is said to have equalled that of Athens including the Peiræeus. The colour of this wall was white; the next being black for the sake of contrast, was succeeded by one of light purple, which was followed by walls of sky blue, of scarlet, of silver and of gold.

In mere magnitude the great capitals of the East far exceeded Athens. The circuit, for example, of Babylon, is said to have been at least four hundred stadia, while, according to the orator Dion, that of Athens was in round numbers two hundred stadia, or twenty-five miles. Aristeides probably adopted the same calculation when he pronounced it to be a day’s journey in compass. But there is some exaggeration in these accounts; for, according to Thucydides, the total extent of the walls did not exceed one hundred and seventy-eight stadia. The area, however, of the city was not proportioned to the vast range of its fortifications, consisting of two distinct systems of buildings, the Astu, or city proper, and the Peiræeus or harbour, connected together by three walls more than four miles in length. There were other capitals in the western world equal in dimensions, as Syracuse, one hundred and eighty stadia in circumference, and Rome, which in the time of Dionysios of Halicarnassos did not command a larger circuit, though the space included within the walls was much greater.

In order, however, to convey a more complete idea of the ancient home of Democracy and the Arts, we must, as far as possible, open up a view into the interior of Athens, which, with its harbours, docks, arsenals, its market-places, bazārs, porticoes, public fountains and gymnasia, probably formed the noblest spectacle ever presented to the eye by a cluster of human dwellings. From whatever side approached, whether by land or by sea, the city appeared to be but one vast group of magnificence. In sailing up along the shore from the promontory of Sunium, the polished brazen helmet and shield of the colossal Athena,^[223] standing on the brow of the Acropolis, were beheld from afar flashing in the sun. On drawing nearer, the Parthenon, the Propylæa, the temple of Erectheus, with the other marble edifices crowning the Cecropian rock, glittered above the pinnacles of the lower city, and the deep green foliage of the encircling plain and olive groves. Among its principal ornaments in the later ages of the republic was a remarkable monument in the road to Eleusis,—the tomb of the hetaira Pythionica, who dying while her beauty still bloomed and her powers of fascination were unimpaired, the love she had inspired survived the grave and manifested itself by rearing a costly pile of marble over her ashes.^[224]

Upon sailing into the Peiræeus,^[225] where generally ships from every quarter of the ancient world lay at anchor, the stranger was immediately struck by manifestations of the people’s power and predilection for stateliness and grandeur. The entrance into the port, barely wide enough to admit a couple of galleys abreast, with their oars in full sweep, lay between two round towers, in which terminated on either hand the maritime fortifications of the city. Across the mouth vast chains were extended in time of war, rendering the Peiræeus a closed port;^[226] arrived within which, the pleased eye wandered over the spacious quays, wharfs, and long ranges of warehouses extending round the harbour, with tombs and sepulchral monuments rising here and there in open spaces between. Among them was a cenotaph in the form of an altar, raised by the repentant people in memory of Themistocles,^[227] the founder of the naval power of Athens, whose bones however it has sometimes been supposed were brought thither from Magnesia. The Peiræeus consisted of three basins, Zea, Aphrodision, which was by far the largest, and Cantharos. On the western shore were the vast docks and arsenals of the commonwealth erected by Philon,^[228] in which, during peace, all that portion of the public navy not engaged in protecting its trade in distant colonies, was drawn up in dry docks, roofed over and surrounded by massive walls. Towards the centre of the town stood the Hippodameia,^[229] an agora or market place, which appears to have resembled Covent Garden, with ranges of stalls in the area and surrounded by dwelling-houses. This building derived its name from Hippodamos of Miletos, the architect who erected it, and laid out the whole maritime city in the regular and beautiful style of which he was the inventor.^[230] Here, also, were several other market-places or bazārs, among which may be reckoned a place^[231] resembling the Laura of Samos, the Sweet Ancon of Sardis, the Street of the Happy at Alexandria, and the Tuscan Street at Rome, in which fruit, confectionary, with delicacies and luxuries of every kind were exposed for sale. In these agora, as now in the bazārs of Cairo, Damascus, and Constantinople, were beheld, in close juxtaposition, the wines of Spain and Portugal, amber from the shores of the ocean, the carpets, shawls, and jewels of the East, fruit and gold from Thasos, ivory and ostrich feathers from Africa, and beautiful female slaves from Syria, Dardania, and the southern shores of the Euxine, the Mingrelians and Georgians of the modern world.^[232] Around these singular groups the young men of Athens, in an almost oriental pomp of costume, might be seen lounging, some perhaps purchasing, others merely looking on, half in haste to return to the gymnasium or to the lectures of Socrates.

Among the public buildings^[233] in the harbour were the Deigma^[234] or Exchange, where the merchants met to transact business, bringing along with them samples of their goods; the Serangion^[235] or public baths; the superb temples of Zeus and Athena adorned with exquisite pictures and statues, where in an open court seems to have stood the celebrated altar erected by Demosthenes^[236] in commutation of his fine of thirty talents; the Long Portico which served as an agora to those living near the shore;^[237] the theatre,^[238] and the court of Phreattys^[239] on the beach, where the accused pleaded his cause from a galley lying afloat. Somewhere in the Peiræeus was an altar to “the unknown Gods,”^[240] which, notwithstanding that the plural form is used, may possibly have been that to which Saint Paul alludes in his speech to the Athenians on the hill of Areiopagos.

Besides the Peiræeus, Athens possessed two other harbours Munychia and Phaleron, which were enclosed by the same line of fortifications, and in process of time formed but one city, superior in extent to the Astu itself. Of these the latter was the most ancient, and from hence Mnestheus sailed for Troy and Theseus for Crete.^[241] The Munychian promontory,^[242] abounding in hollows and artificial excavations, and connected by a narrow neck of land with the continent, was the strongest position on the coast, and may be regarded as the key of Athens, since whoever held possession of it could command the city. In this Demos stood the Bendideion^[243] where shows were exhibited in honour of Bendis the Thracian Artemis, to behold which Socrates and his friends came down from the city, when at the house of Cephalos that conversation took place with Glaucon and Adimantos, out of which arose the Republic of Plato. This division of the port likewise possessed its theatre,^[244] and here were fought some of those battles with the thirty that re-established the liberty of the commonwealth.

Proceeding inland towards the Astu or city of Athens proper, the stranger beheld before him a straight street upwards of five miles in length, extending from the Peiræeus to the foot of the Acropolis, between walls^[245] of immense elevation and thickness, flanked by square towers at equal distances. Along the summit of these vast piles of masonry a terrace was carried, commanding superb views of the Saronic bay and distant coasts of Peloponnesos; and, on the other hand, of the city relieved against the green slopes of Lycabettos^[246]. The space between the long walls abounded with remarkable monuments. Here were the tombs of Diopethes, Menander, and Euripides, the temple of Hera, burned by the Persians, and left in ruins as a memento to revenge, and numerous cenotaphs and statues of illustrious men.

Spacious and lofty gates admitted you into the Astu, through a belt of impregnable fortifications: and the appearance of the interior,^[247] though the streets for military purposes were mostly narrow and winding, and the houses low, projecting over the pavement or concealed by elevated front-walls, surpassed in all probability the promise of its distant aspect. The grandeur which peculiarly belonged to the Athenian democracy was visible at every step. But it would weary the reader to lead him in succession through all the public places—the Pnyx, the Agora, the Cerameicos: let us ascend the Acropolis, from whose ramparts the plan of the whole city will unfold itself before us like a map.

Half the beauty of all civilised countries springs out of their religion. At Athens nearly everything costly or magnificent belonged to the Gods; even the Propylæa,^[248] apparently a mere secular or military structure, probably owed its erection in so expensive a style to the circumstance of its adorning the entrance to the sacred enclosure of Athena, and the other tutelary divinities of Athens, and spanning the road by which the pomp of the Panathenaic procession descended and ascended the mount. Be this as it may, a road^[249] which, by running zigzag up the slope, was rendered practicable for chariots, led from the lower city to the Acropolis, on the edge of the platform of which stood the Propylæa, erected by the architect Mnesicles in five years, during the administration of Pericles. A pile of architecture, similar in name, is usually found at the entrance of the court of Egyptian temples, and the Propylæa Luxor and Karnak, with their aspiring obelisks, couchant sphynxessphynxes, and ranges of colossal statues, may be reckoned among the most chaste and beautiful monuments in the valley of the Nile. The Propylæa of Athens, richer in design and materials, and executed with a grace and perfection unknown to the Egyptians, enjoyed in its mere site an immense advantage over their noblest works which, the pyramids and the great temple of Koom Ombos excepted, stand on a dead level, while this occupies the brow of a precipitous rock, visible on every side from afar. Pillars, architraves, pediments, walls, and roof, were all of snow-white marble, with mouldings of bright red and blue, and ceilings of azure bedropped with stars.^[250] Externally, on either hand, were equestrian statues of the sons of Xenophon,^[251] placed on lofty square basements; and, overlooking the whole on the left, stood the colossal statue of Athena Promachos.^[252]

On entering through the gates of the Propylæa a scene of unparalleled grandeur and beauty burst upon the eye. No trace of human dwellings anywhere appeared, but on all sides temples of more or less elevation, of Pentelic marble, beautiful in design and exquisitely delicate in execution, sparkled like piles of alabaster in the sun. On the left stood the Erectheion or fane of Athena Polias; to the right that matchless edifice known as the Hecatompedon of old, but to later ages as the Parthenon. Other buildings, all holy to the eye of an Athenian, lay grouped around these master structures, and in the open spaces between, in whatever direction the spectators might look, appeared statues, some remarkable for their dimensions, others for their beauty, and all for the legendary sanctity which surrounded them. No city of the ancient or modern world ever rivalled Athens in the riches of art. Our best filled museums, though teeming with her spoils, are poor collections of fragments compared with that assemblage of gods and heroes which peopled the Acropolis, the genuine Olympos of the arts, where all the divinities of the pagan heaven appeared grouped in immortal youth and beauty round the Thunderer and his virgin daughter. Many volumes were written in antiquity on the pictures, statues, and architectural monuments which thronged the summit of this rock, and though those works have perished, a long and curious list might still be given of the objects of this kind which we know to have existed there.^[253] It will, however, be sufficient to glance over a few of the more striking features of the scene.

On one side of the entrance stood a chariot drawn by four horses in bronze, and directly opposite a chapel of Aphrodite, containing a bronze lioness, with a statue of the goddess herself by Calamis; a little further the eye rested on Diitrephes, pierced like St. Sebastian with arrows; two figures of the goddess Health; a youth in bronze, by Lycios, bearing the Perirrhanterion, or brush for sprinkling holy water; Myron’s group of Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, and the three Graces draped by Socrates,^[254] son of Sophroniscos. Advancing past the chapel of Artemis Brauronia you beheld, amid numerous groups of less striking monuments, the Attic conception of the Trojan horse; Athena smiting Marsyas; Heracles strangling the serpents in his cradle; Phrixos sacrificing the ram; and Theseus, the national hero, slaughtering the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth.^[255] Here, too, was an Athena issuing from the head of Zeus, together with the figure of a bull presented by the Senate of Areiopagos; and, a little beyond, an embodiment of a very pious and a very beautiful thought,—a figure of Earth, the mother of gods and men, praying to the ruler of Olympos for rain. Of Zeus, the Cloud-Compeller, there were numerous representations by artists of celebrity; the figure of Apollo, by Pheidias, standing before the eastern front of the Parthenon, was lighted up by the first rays of the morning. But the tutelar gods of Attica, Athena and Poseidon, the genii of political wisdom and maritime power, exhibited as struggling for the mastery over the Athenian mind, met the eye in various parts of the Acropolis,—the piety of the people delighting to reproduce with various attributes the objects of their affectionate adoration. Among these divinities, the statues of several poets, orators, and generals were found; Anacreon, Epicharmos, Phormio, Timotheus, Conon, Pericles, and Isocrates. On drawing near the Parthenon, its sculptured pediments and metopes, representing legends in the mythology and religious processions of Athens, excited admiration, and still excite it, by their original design and matchless workmanship: and, suspended from its highly painted friezes, and resting on its white marble architraves, were rows of highly burnished shields of gold.^[256]

Technical descriptions of buildings, whether religious or civil, would be out of place in the present work; but a compendious account of the Erectheion and Parthenon, the two great sanctuaries of the Acropolis, could not with propriety be omitted. To commence with the former, as the more ancient and sacred:—this edifice, of irregular design though highly beautiful, contained three chapels, with the same number of porticoes. The chapel of Erectheus, entered through a portico of six columns, faced the east, where stood the altar of supreme Zeus, never stained by blood or libations of wine. The pavement of this portion of the edifice was raised eight feet above the level of the other chapels. Here the piety of Athens had erected altars to Erectheus, Poseidon, Butas, and Hephaistos, and pictures dedicated by the sacred family of the Eteobutadæ adorned the walls. In a subterraneous chamber beneath the floor lay the mortal remains of Ericthonios, a man sprung in a mysterious manner from the gods. The Erectheion being about twenty-four feet square, some have imagined it must have been hypæthral, unless the stone blocks of the roof were supported by pillars. But the ancients employed slabs of much greater dimensions in building and roofing their temples; for at the Egyptian quarries of Hajjar Silsilis and Essouan we observed blocks from forty-two to seventy feet in length and of suitable proportions, while others equally vast had been removed. Volney, too, as the reader will remember, found masses of no less magnitude in the walls of Syrian temples: besides, several obelisks, now on their pedestals, fall little short of a hundred feet in height.

Between the Erectheion and the chapel of Athena Polias there was no door of communication. Having surveyed the former, therefore, the stranger again issued into the open air, and turning to the left entered the stately portico leading from the north into the temple of Pandrosos, where, constructed of Pentelic marble, stood the altar of frankincense. Passing this, and traversing the Pandrosion, he entered the ancient sanctuary of Athena, unwindowed and gloomy, whither not even that “dim religious light” which contends with obscurity in our gothic cathedrals could find its way. This is the case in many Egyptian temples where the adyta are totally dark. But sunshine and the splendour of day would ill have suited the mystic rites here celebrated; for which reason these sacred recesses were lighted up with lamps, magnificent in form and materials, that shed a soft pale ray over the worshippers. The many-branched^[257] golden candelabrum of Athena’s sanctuary was furnished with asbestos wicks, and, according to the temple-wardens, of sufficient dimensions to contain oil for a whole year. Once lighted, therefore, it burned with perennial flame, and the smoke was received and conducted to the roof by a hollow bronze palm tree reversed.

This inextinguishable lamp was kindled and kept burning, through reverence for that antique image of Athena in wood of olive which constituted one of the palladia of Attica. In honour, moreover, of this primitive statue the Panathenaic procession is said to have been instituted, during which, like the velabrum of the temple of Mekka, the peplos,^[258] whatever this may have been, was dedicated with vast pomp and ceremony to the service of the goddess.

The principal argument, however, against supposing the peplos to have been designed for the gold and ivory statue of the Parthenon,—that it was not needed, is of very little weight. None of the ceremonies attending its presentation were necessary. The offering was a work of devotion; and however costly in itself and elaborately adorned, may have been simply designed to protect the image from dust and the action of the air. That Pheidias represented the goddess without her peplos, is no argument that his statue needed none, but the contrary. He may have omitted it expressly that it might be supplied by the piety of the state. Besides, the sculptured metopes of the Parthenon, representing the Panathenaic procession, are themselves a strong argument for connecting the presentation of the peplos and the other ceremonies of the festival with that more splendid structure and image rather than with the Erectheion. As the Athenians supposed the Islands of the blessed and the dwelling-place of their gods to have been somewhere in the regions of the west, they were accustomed to pray with their faces turned in that direction;^[259] and so also buried they their dead. For this reason, desiring to behold the countenance of their divinities during this religious service, the statues of the gods were generally set up with their faces eastward; and hence, too, the front of the temples looked in the same direction. This was the case with the olive-wood image of Athena Polias; and in the reign of Augustus the Athenians, rendered more superstitious than ever by their misfortunes, were vehemently terrified on finding that the goddess had turned her back upon them,^[260] as if preparing to seek her ancient home in the Atlantic Ocean. But her real presence had forsaken the city long before the battle of Chæroneia.

But Athena, though the principal, was not the sole inhabitant of her sanctuary. On one side of the door stood a phallic statue of Hermes, originally set up by the Pelasgians,^[261] and in later ages nearly concealed by a profusion of myrtle branches. Here, also, in a very extraordinary inmate were found traces of that animal worship which extended so widely over the ancient world. In a den constructed for its use lived a great serpent, considered as the guardian of the temple, and supposed to be animated by the soul of Ericthonios, who here performed the part assigned in the fane of Demeter to Cadmos, likewise believed to have undergone a similar transformation after death. The snake-god of the Acropolis received its daily sustenance from the priestess of Athena; and once every month was propitiated with pious offerings of cakes of the purest honey.^[262] Relics of this worship are still found in Egypt. In a deep chasm, among the wild rocky mountains on the Arabian side of the Nile, we were shown a fissure in a hermit’s cell, whence a large reptile of this species is said to issue forth at stated days to receive the offerings of food brought him by the neighbouring peasants. This creature, as well as the guardian of the Athenian Temple, is supposed to possess a human soul, that of the holy Sheikh Haridi.

Like most other Hellenic sanctuaries, the chapel of the goddess was a kind of museum filled with memorials of Athenian victories and other remarkable objects. Here were shown curious or beautiful specimens of arms or armour, taken from the enemy; among which were the breast-plate and scimitar of Masistios,^[263] commander of the Median cavalry at the battle of Platæa. Close beside these warlike memorials, stood a folding camp-stool, the invention, it was said, and workmanship of Dædalos; the archetype of all those portable seats borne after the maidens of Attica by the daughters of aliens in the grand Panathenaic procession.

Not the least interesting portion of this extraordinary edifice dedicated to the worship of so many gods and heroes, was the small chapel of Pandrosos, where Pandora and Thallo were said to have lived, and where the ashes of Cecrops reposed. Here dwelt the priestess, shut up for several months with the Ersephoræ. This cella may, therefore, be said to have belonged not only to Pandrosos, who was one of the earliest ministers of these rites, but to all who from her received the office. The building opened on the south into a portico, adorned with Caryatides instead of columns, and filled with ceremonial and religious associations. Here grew the Pancuphos, or sacred olive tree, which, burned by the Persians, shot up a cubit in a single night, and was thought to be endued with the power of undying vegetation, for, if the trunk were cut down, new shoots immediately succeeded. Near the sacred olive was the salt well, called the sea of Erectheus, which Poseidon is said to have produced by smiting the rock with his trident. In the hollow of this fountain, during the prevalence of the south wind, a sound like the murmuring of the waves was supposed to be heard. This well has not been discovered in modern times; but in another part of the citadel there existed a spring of brackish water, known by the name of the Clepsydra, which, about the rising of the dog-star, while the Etesian winds were blowing, overflowed; but on their cessation again subsided.^[264]

We have perhaps too long lingered among the dusky recesses of this ancient fane, spell-bound by the charms of a beautiful mythology. We emerge now into the light of history, and approach that matchless structure erected by Ictinos where the Athenian people offered up their daily prayers to heaven.^[265] The Parthenon occupies the most elevated platform of the Acropolis, the pavement of its peristyle being on a level with the capitals of the columns of the Propylæa. It was constructed entirely of white Pentelic marble,^[266] and consisted of a cella surrounded by a Doric peristyle having eight columns on either front, and seventeen on the sides. These pillars, thirty-four feet in height, sprang from a pavement elevated three steps above the rocky platform, from whence the total height of the building was about sixty-five feet. The arrangement of the interior like that of the great temples of Egypt had reference rather to utility and the convenience of public worship, than to the effect which long ranges of lofty pillars, extending through unencumbered space, would have produced upon the mind: for the cella, sixty-two feet in breadth, was divided into two chambers of unequal size,—the western about forty-four feet in length, the eastern nearly one hundred. In both these chambers the ceiling was supported by columns.

Colonel Leake, to whose elaborate work I beg to refer the reader desirous of entering into minute details, concludes his general description as follows:—"Such was the simple construction of this magnificent building, which, by its united excellencies of materials, design, and decoration was the most perfect ever erected. Its dimensions of two hundred and twenty-eight feet by a hundred and two, with a height of sixty-eight feet to the top of the pediment, were sufficiently great to give an impression of grandeur and sublimity, which was not disturbed by any obtrusive division of parts, such as is found to diminish the effect of some larger modern buildings. In the Parthenon, whether viewed at a small or at a great distance, there was nothing to divert the spectator’s contemplation from the simplicity and majesty of mass and outline which forms the first and most remarkable object of admiration in a Greek temple; and it was not until the eye was satiated with the contemplation of the entire edifice that the spectator was tempted to examine the decorations with which this building was so profusely adorned; for the statues of the pediments the only elevation which was very conspicuous by its magnitude and position, being enclosed within frames, which formed an essential part of the design of either front, had no more obtrusive effect than an ornamental capital has to a single column."^[267]

That object of art, whatever its dimensions, is sufficiently great, which fills the mind with high ideas of grandeur and beauty. There is, moreover, in mere size, a point, beyond which if we proceed, the eye will fail to grasp the whole at a glance, and create a feeling of want of unity; but, in proportion as we fall short of that point will be our sense of the absence of sublimity. In this predicament, perhaps, the temples of Greece too generally stood. Considerations of expense, which in the end affected their habits of thinking, cramped the ideas of the architects, or forced them to direct their studies towards beauty of form unconnected with that grandeur which springs out of mass and elevation.

Among the barbarous nations of the East, where the whole resources of the country lay at the disposal of the monarch or of the priestly caste, as in Hindùstân, Persia, and Egypt, full scope, on the contrary, was given to the imagination of the architect, who, if his invention were equal to it, might give his structures the elevation of a mountain and the spaciousness of a vast city. Hence, the grandeur arising from magnitude, is, in most cases, found to belong to the sacred edifices of Egypt;^[268] and in some instances a feeling of symmetry, a sense of the beautiful, appears to have restrained the artist within due bounds, as in the great temple of Apollinopolis Magna, which, whatever may be the imperfections of its architectural details, is invested, as a whole, with an air of genuine magnificence and sublimity. Proceeding from the contemplation of these to the religious structures of Greece, there would be found, I imagine, in most minds a slight feeling of disappointment, and though afterwards, the delight imparted by the presence of extreme beauty,—a delight serene, soft, and inexpressibly soothing, may more than compensate for the want of awe and wondering admiration, their absence will still be felt.

But to proceed: in rich and elaborate decorations the Parthenon resembled the temple of Tentyris. Every part of its exterior, where ornament was admissible, presented to the eye some creation of Hellenic taste and fancy, figures in high and low relief, grouped in action or repose, conceived and executed in a style worthy of the prince of the mimetic art.^[269] Many wrecks of these matchless compositions are now protected from further defacements in the metropolis of Great Britain, but withal so mutilated and decayed that none but a practised eye can discern, through the ravages of age, all the sunshine of beauty and loveliness which beamed from them when fresh from the Pheidian chisel. One of the greatest works of this artist filled the interior of the Parthenon with the emanations of its beauty, the statue of Athena in ivory and gold,^[270] which, representing a form distinguished for all the softness and roundness belonging to womanhood, and a countenance radiant with the highest intellect, must in some respects have borne away the palm from the Olympian Zeus; for in the latter, after all, nothing beyond masculine energy, dignity, majesty could have existed. These indeed were so blended, so subdued into a glorious and god-like serenity, that this creation of human genius, like the august being of which it was a mute type, possessed in a degree the celestial power of chasing away sadness and sorrow, and shedding benignity and happiness over all who beheld it.^[271] But for men at least, the Zeus must have lacked some attributes possessed by the Athena. She was in all her etherial loveliness, a woman still, but without a woman’s weakness, or a single taint of earth. The Athenians paid the highest possible compliment to womanhood when they gave wisdom a female form; and the delicacy of the thought was enhanced by surrounding this mythological creation with an atmosphere of purity which no other divinity of the pagan heaven could lay claim to. Nor in beauty did Athena yield even to Aphrodite herself. Her charms partook indeed of that noble severity which belongs to virtue; and to intimate that she was rather of heaven than of earth, her eyes were of the colour of the firmament. Yet this spiritual elevation above the reach of the passions, only appears to have enhanced, in the estimation of the Athenians, the splendour of her personal beauty, which shed its chastening and ennobling influence among her worshippers like the droppings of a summer cloud.

According to Philochoros,^[272] this colossus was set up during the archonship of Theodoros, that is, in the third year of the eighty-fifth Olympiad. The Athenians, it has been ingeniously conjectured, seized for the dedication of the statue, on the period of the celebration of the most gorgeous festival in their calendar, the greater Panathenaia, which like a kind of jubilee occurred but once in an Olympiad.^[273] What length of time Pheidias employed in finishing this statue we possess no means of determining; but as the Parthenon itself is supposed not to have been completed in less than ten years, the artist need not have been hurried in his work.^[274]

In the temple of Zeus at Olympia and in every sacred structure we visited in Egypt and Nubia, there was a staircase conducting to the roof. No positive testimony remains to prove this to have been the case in the Parthenon, though antiquarians, with much probability, have supposed it to have been so.^[275] Let us therefore assume the fact, and ascending to the summit of the edifice survey the surrounding scene and the superb city encircling the rock at our feet. Few landscapes in the world are more rich or varied, none more deeply interesting. History has peopled every spot within the circle of vision with spirit-stirring associations; or if history has passed over any, there has poetry been busy, building up her legends from the scattered fragments of tradition. Carrying our eye along the distant edge of the horizon we behold the promontory of Sunium, Ægina rising out of the Myrtoan sea, Trœzen, the birth-place of Theseus the national hero, the mountains of Argolis, the hostile citadel of Corinth, with Phylæ and Deceleia rendered too famous by the Peloponnesian war. Nearer the shore is “sea-born” Salamis, and that low headland where the barbarian took his seat to view the battle in the straits. Yonder at the extremity of the long walls are the ports of Munychia, Phaleron and Peiræeus; on our left is Hymettos with its bee swarms and odoriferous slopes;^[276] to the right Colonos, the grove of the terrible Erinnyes, and the chasm in the rock by which the wretched Œdipus, having reached the end of his career, descended to the infernal world.^[277] Beyond lies Eleusis and the Sacred Way.^[278] Yonder in the midst of groves is the Academy; here is the Cerameicos^[279] filled with the monuments which the republic erected to its heroes, there the Cynosarges and the Lyceium. The hill of Areiopagos, contiguous to the rock of the Acropolis, divides the Pnyx from the Agora planted by Conon with plane trees. Near at hand, encircled by ordinary dwellings, are the Leocorion, the temple of Theseus, the Odeion, the Stoa Pœcile, and the Dionysiac theatre, with various other monuments remarkable for their beauty or historical importance.^[280]