“All this pursuit of the arts has this function, even a recall of the noblest in the soul to a vision of the most excellent in the ideal.”

To speak of the Acropolis of Athens with due Hellenic restraint is difficult for any one who has lived long under its habitual sway. At the first visit three sets of impressions break down the most obdurate impassiveness. The associations acquired by a study of history engender a vicarious but active sympathy with the Greeks themselves. There is an immediate impact of beauty from marble gateway and temples and sculpture which the procession of years has only incorporated more intimately with the beauty of sea and land and circumambient air. And, finally, there is the involuntary sense of coming back to one’s own—to an intellectual birthright. Even the Turkish conquerors did not fail to recognize that all western civilizations consider the Acropolis an integral part of their joint heritage. Dr. Howe quotes from an intercepted letter of Kiutahi Pashaw, the opponent of the Greek patriot, Karaiskakis, in 1826: “The citadel of Athens, as is known to you, was built of old on a high and inaccessible rock; not to be injured by a mine nor accessible to assault.... From it went out of yore many famous philosophers; it has many works of art very old, which make the learned men of Europe wonder; and for this reason all the Europeans and the other nations of unbelievers regard the citadel as their own house.”

The attitude of the ancient Greeks toward the Acropolis is only casually expressed in their extant literature. No Greek Victor Hugo has given to men distant in place and time as vivid a picture of the Parthenon as we possess of Notre Dame. In trying to imagine what the Greeks saw, as they came up to their citadel, we must first differentiate between the main historical epochs. Of the Acropolis in the earliest age we can form a partial conception. The impressive remains of polygonal masonry still extant, in the massive citadel walls; the traces of the old “Kings’ City” around the Erechtheum, and even within the groundplan of the old Athena temple; the remains of the ancient stairway, northeast of the Erechtheum, leading to the postern gate—all fit in with and fill out a reconstruction based on our conception of other ancient strongholds, like Mycenæ or Tiryns.

When we think of the citadel in the age of Pisistratus and the time previous to the Persian Wars we are fairly sure of the main characteristics. We can picture the old Athena temple, simple yet dignified, in the middle of the plateau, adorned with coloured sculptures (some of which may be seen in the Museum to-day), sacred shrines, precincts and altars with a wealth of dedicatory offerings, and also the older Propylæa let in between the massive “Pelasgic” walls and approached by a way that wound down through a complex of outworks to meet the old Agora.

This Acropolis, far simpler than the Periclean citadel but beautiful and adorned, was devastated by the Persians. Then for more than a quarter of a century after Salamis we must imagine it as scarred and patched, with perhaps only one temple, half restored, to house the sacred image within its blackened walls.

In general, when we speak of the Acropolis, it is of the citadel as it appeared towards the close of the fifth century to Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes, to Thucydides and Xenophon, to Isocrates and Lysias, to Socrates and Plato. This citadel we can restore to our imagination from the descriptions of Pausanias (controlled by information from other sources) who, in spite of erratic omissions, fortunately describes many things with a fulness of detail quite foreign to the writers of the classical period.

When Socrates, too robust at seventy to know the fatigue of the ascent, climbed the approach to the hill he must often have been inspired by the beauty of art, as he had been by the beauty of nature on the banks of the Ilissus, to renew the prayer: “Dear Pan, and ye other gods, make me beautiful in the inward man.” Born into a generation and among a people where external and physical beauty was assumed as corollary to the beauty of the ideal, there escapes him, thus incidentally, the echo of his self-conquest over his own Silenus-like exterior, so out of keeping with the charm of his environment. Perhaps he went up the hill the evening before his trial to take a last look at what he had loved long and well. He knew in advance that his “apology” to the court was to be a reassertion of individual liberty of conscience that would most probably result for him in the hemlock draught. The majestic columns of the great gateways rose before him on either side, the wings extended like welcoming arms. He would turn to the left and stand in the picture gallery. Perhaps he would pause longest before Alcibiades, his pernicious disciple, pictured in arrogant beauty as victor at the Nemean games. Turning to the other side of the gateway, he would stand on the bastion before the Nike temple and would look out over the familiar city, the Attic plain and harbour-town. As he passed on now to enter the gateway, and his eye fell upon the sculptured Hermes and the Graces, little would he dream of the perplexed debate of modern critics as to a possible connection of this group with the handiwork of a young sculptor or stone-cutter, “Socrates the son of Sophroniscus.”

Under or just within the Propylæa he would note various familiar objects, and when he had passed through he would see before him to the right and left the Parthenon and the Erechtheum. The intervening space would not be as it is now a floe of marble blocks. Two orderly avenues of votive offerings traversed the plateau before him. Against a column of the Propylæa still stands an inscribed basis of a statue dedicated to Athena, the Giver of Health, set up by Pericles in gratitude for the recovery of one of his injured workmen, one perhaps whose skill he could ill spare in the completion of his large designs. Close by, a marble boy, made by a son or disciple of the great Myron, held out a bowl of holy water as at the entrance of a cathedral. Socrates, whose reverence exceeded that of all his accusers, would not scorn this symbol of purification, least of all when about to journey away, as he expressed it, from Athens to another life. Before him towered up the bronze Athena, the warrior goddess, whose gleaming helmet could be seen by homeward voyagers as soon as they had passed the intercepting shoulder and foot-hills of Hymettus. Near by was the Lemnian Athena, goddess of the arts of peace, held by the Greeks themselves as more beautiful even than the great gold-ivory statue within the Parthenon. The three embodied the conceptions of Phidias, as in a trilogy. Near by was a portrait-herm of Pericles himself. There, too, was the “wooden horse,” a colossal bronze, with the Greeks (not forgetting the sons of Theseus) peeping out from its side. And when, passing along this Panathenaic road, lined with statues and votive offerings, he had threaded his way around to the east front of the Parthenon, he would enter between the columns, and in the cool twilight, lit by the gleam of gold and ivory, he would look up to the Victory on the extended hand of Athena. Perhaps for a moment the goddess may have lifted the veil of the future to reveal that the defeat of the morrow would be a victory of far greater import than even that of Marathon or Salamis.

To-day the visitor, as he goes up to the Acropolis, carries with him the accumulated associations of centuries. On the bastion of the Temple of Victory, unsurpassed in its miniature charm, he watches with Ægeus for Theseus returning in triumph from slaying the Minotaur. At the sight of the black sail, left unfurled by inadvertence, the old king plunged from the rock to his death. Ægeus and the other kings passed away and other men from this rock watched fleets hostile and friendly come and go in yonder bay and enemies scour the surrounding plain of Attica. Byron, finally, brooded here over a renascent Hellas.

If any work of man’s hands can purge the mind of the commonplace, it is the Propylæa, imposing in its grand proportions, yet enticing by its beauty. Through this the pilgrim now passes and is alone with Greek life. Although the plateau is deserted, the temple in ruins, there is no sense of death. There is rather a sudden sense of Beauty set free from the trammels of daily life. The fortunate isolation of the hilltop contributes to this effect. Byzantine makeshifts, Turkish hovels and minarets, have all been swept away—even the intruding Roman is left outside with the disfiguring pedestal of Agrippa’s statue. The foreground of the modern city is sunk out of sight behind the rim of the plateau. There is to be seen on all sides only the same Attic plain, the same Ægean sea, and the same horizon of mountains, which the eyes of kings and democrats, artists, orators and philosophers have looked upon in days gone by.

In this harmony of surroundings, the eye and thought rest undisturbed upon the Parthenon. The tributes of the centuries have probably left the visitor unprepared for his own emotion. Like a wind on the mountain, felling the strong oak trees, the heavenly Eros, Plato’s Love of Beauty, descends upon him. Bayard Taylor’s first impressions, in spite of an enthusiasm permissible fifty years ago but now well-nigh out of print, are worth recalling for the sake of a figure evoked by the appalling ruin of beauty. Beyond a sea “of hewn and sculptured marble, drums of pillars, pedestals, capitals, cornices, friezes, triglyphs and sunken panel-work,” he saw the Parthenon against the sky, and it seemed to him as if it lay “broken down to the earth in the middle like a ship which has struck and parted, with the roof, cornices and friezes mostly gone and not a single column unmutilated, and yet with the tawny gold of two thousand years staining its once spotless marble, sparkling with snow-white marks of shot and shell, and with its soaring pillars embedded in the dark blue ether.”

But since Morosini’s sacrilegious bomb did its work the generations have refused to accept as the ultimate fact the shipwreck of this temple in which culminated the plastic arts of ancient Greece and in which were typified her loftiest ideas. Poet and philosopher have sat before it in fruitful meditation, and commoners have paced its great colonnades, unregardful of the ways and marts of men amid the austere majesty and royal repose of the Doric pillars.

From the imperious beauty of the Parthenon the eye turns gratefully to the lovely Erechtheum. Although this is but a torso of the architect’s design and its complex structure defies preconceived conventions, its Ionic charm satisfies in each detail. The eastern columns, the Porch of the Maidens, the exquisite tracery of the doorway set within the perfectly proportioned northern porch present a series rather than a unity of graceful designs.

The other remnants—fragmentary and broken—of the vanished life upon this hill must be identified with pious care. Then the thought turns to such references in literature as have been transmitted to us. These also are fragmentary, seeming sometimes like the patches of blue and red and gold not yet wholly effaced from the marbles.

The Iliad, as we know it, preserves an Athenian tradition of the prehistoric kingly Acropolis. Among the warriors bound for Troy are listed:—

And here under the Greek heaven, on this hill left lonely by men but easily accessible to gods, it would hardly seem incredible if Athena herself were suddenly to appear once more. In the Odyssey, when she had ventured to leave Odysseus to his own cunning among the Phæacians, she returned by a course, strangely devious for an air line, by way of Marathon to Athens:—

As we look upon the meagre traces of the prehistoric city, we should like to see the princess maidens appear in the simplicity of the kingly times. Like the women described by Pherecrates, the comic poet, they had no slaves:—

Herodotus tells us how they used to go down and out from the protecting gateways, to draw water at Callirrhoë beyond the Agora, and how the rough Pelasgians, banished from this their ancient home, would now and again rush down from Hymettus to carry them off.

The old Erechtheus worship, the snake, the ancient image of Athena, and the allied precincts, lost none of their sanctity as time went on. From Herodotus we learn that Themistocles was materially aided before Salamis, in persuading the Athenians to abandon the city, by the sudden disappearance of the sacred snake. “The Athenians,” he gravely reports, “say that a large snake dwells in the sacred precinct as guardian of the Acropolis. And they not only say this but they make offerings to him month by month, setting them out for him as actually there. These consist of a honey-cake. Now this honey-cake, although heretofore it had always been consumed, remained at this time untasted, so the Athenians, when the priestess reported the fact, made the more eager haste to leave the city, on the ground that the goddess had abandoned her citadel.” The sacred olive tree, however, which Xerxes had burned with the rest of the precinct, put forth the very next day a new shoot one cubit long. By the time of Pausanias the guide said “two” cubits. But the essential point is the continued care of the goddess, and as for the snake, he soon resumed his dwelling on the Acropolis. In the “Lysistrata” of Aristophanes, the women who have seized and barricaded the Acropolis make excuses for leaving, complaining that they cannot sleep, one on account of the hooting of Athena’s owls, another by reason of her terror:—

When in the “Eumenides” of Æschylus the scene shifts from Delphi to the Acropolis, we find Orestes seated as suppliant before Athena’s most ancient image. This we may think of, in default of any other temple then existing, as placed in the old Hecatompedon, whose foundations are seen adjoining the Erechtheum on the south. This temple, burned by the Persians, but partially restored, may have been in use even after the Parthenon was dedicated in 438 B. C., twenty years after this play was brought out, and perhaps until the completion many years later of the Athena Polias chamber in the Erechtheum. An Athenian could not well conceive of his city as safe without this ancient statue; even the birds in their new Cloud-cuckoo-town must needs debate whether they shall not keep Athena Polias as their protector.

No Roman Catholic ever accepted more loyally the established glory of St. Peter’s and the Vatican than the Athenians accepted their citadel. The new gateways were spoken of with undisguised pride. A comic poet, Phœnicides of neighbouring Megara, when ridiculing Athens, incidentally admits that the Athenians cared as much for their Propylæa as their palates. He says:—

In one of the anonymous fragments, those riderless Pegasi of Greek literature, another comic poet combines the Piræus and the Parthenon in an outburst of civic pride. Nor does he forget the olive groves and radiant air:—

And Demosthenes, not deterred by any shrinking from hackneyed allusion, refers expressly to the Propylæa and the Parthenon, when he speaks of “those things upon which we all naturally pride ourselves.” Aristophanes, seeking to recall his fellow-citizens to the ideals of Marathon days, shows us in his “Knights” the Propylæa and the freshly boiled-over and rejuvenated Demos,—the avatar of true Democracy,—seated within the unclosing doors of the gateway, dressed in the brilliant garb of a gentleman of the good old Marathon type: “Just such as he used to be when he messed with Aristides and Miltiades,” his hair caught up with the golden cicada pin, emblem of Attic autochthony.

In the “Lysistrata” the Athenian men, ignorant that at a future day their Parliament was to be controlled by suffragettes, feel that the limit of the legitimate boycott is over-passed when the women seize and barricade their Acropolis. The old chorus leader says:—

In this play, too, we catch a glimpse of the more intimate interweaving of an Athenian maiden’s life with the Acropolis ritual. One of this same sans-culotte garrison looks about her and reviews her girlhood; how she had been selected among the best-born girls to carry the mysterious burden in the Arrephoria, had ground the meal for the sacred cakes for Athena Archegetis; had impersonated a bear in the worship of Artemis; and, finally, had gained the coveted privilege of being basket-bearer in the Panathenaic procession. Explaining her personal gratitude to the city, the woman says:—

The barren precinct of Artemis Brauronia adjoins the south corner of the Propylæa, and a small dedicatory bear, found somewhere near, now sits in the Acropolis Museum, brooding in stony silence over by-gone glories at the Brauronia. But the maiden with the saffron robe and all her girl companions have long since disappeared “down the back entry of time.”

If it could be granted us to have restored one portion of the Parthenon or its appurtenances, our choice would probably fall, not upon the famous gold-ivory statue of Athena, but first upon the pediment sculptures; next, it may be, upon the great continuous frieze. If its shattered fragments could be restored, and the slabs now in Paris and London could be recalled from exile and united to those still in place, it would be an easier task for the imagination to reconstruct from these than from the piecemeal references in the literature an abridged idealization of the glory of the actual Panathenaic procession. As it is, from what is left still in place there emerges something far more significant than the details of any cult or festival. The dismounted youth adjusting his sandal; the horse with leisurely nose bent to his fore-leg; the mounted horsemen; the rams and oxen led to the sacrifice, remain, like Keats’s “heifer lowing at the skies,” to tell the hurrying generations that once, at least, there has existed, and may exist again, wherever men are strong to feel and know, the harmony between the temporal and the eternal.

The Parthenon remained practically intact for centuries, lending its inspiration both to the creative Greeks and to the imagination of the Romans, the executors of the Hellenic realty. Even the chryselephantine Athena seems to have held undisturbed possession of her temple for more than eight centuries, from the dedication in 438 B. C. to about 430 A. D., when it disappears from Athenian records.

Plutarch, a Greek gentleman of the first Christian century, speaks with enthusiasm of the creations of Pericles. “There blooms upon them a certain freshness untouched by time, as if there dwelt within them an ever-animating spirit, a life that never grows old.” In the next century, under the successors of Hadrian, who had inaugurated a new era for Athens, Pausanias, a foreigner, came and saw and was conquered by the wealth of detail on the Acropolis. At the same time, that generous citizen from Marathon, Herodes Atticus, was building against the side of the Acropolis his gorgeous Italian opera-house, while Lucian, the Syrian Atticist, with a higher, if impossible, ideal, was striving to revive the old Platonic grace by quarrying from the Pentelicus of classic literature. When, in the rôle of a “Truthful James,” he is acquitted of blasphemy against true philosophy, he enters the east door of the Parthenon to make thanksgiving to the goddess, or, more specifically, to the winged Victory, six feet high, upon her hand. His devotion takes the form of the prayer appended to three of Euripides’s dramas:—

Thus, like many another later foreigner, he pays the time-honoured tribute to the outward embodiment of the ideal.

The charm of the Acropolis changes with the changing light. See it, if you will, at dawn from the opposite hillside, near the “Prison of Socrates,” as the sun rises over Hymettus and the Pentelic columns of the Parthenon change from the gray of unsympathetic silhouettes to the luminous chromes of the irradiated marbles. See it at a later hour and wonder that it does not fade into the light of common day. Or visit it when the sunset light turns to burnished copper the unadorned hills in the west, beyond Salamis, and on the choir of the encircling mountains the supramundane charm of the violet atmosphere falls like a robe with empurpling shadows in its folds. Go when the night has fallen, and sit in the mysterious darkness, lit only by the marble columns white against the dark outlines of Hymettus, until the full moon looks over the mountain’s rim, tipping architrave and capital with silver, and then, as it swings free from Hymettus, merging the wreck of the Parthenon in the beauty of the landscape to which the scarred and yawning sides of the temple seem to open with intent. Presently the whole hill-top with its moraine of prostrate columns and marble fragments is lit up and the pillars of the Propylæa flower into whiteness. Or finally, bizarre as it may sound, see it when—artificially illuminated after the Olympic Games—the ruined temple and the serrated contour of the plateau are etched in mid-air by the white light against a gulf of darkness, a veritable city of the skies.

The Acropolis, crowned with perfect art, crowded with the loftier phantoms of our elder kin, is a light-house for all time. Liberty and Law are its keepers. “Knowledge comes but Wisdom lingers,” and this citadel is to every thoughtful man in some sense a symbol of his goal. Its stately Propylæa welcomes all. No sincere pilgrim of Truth is an alien in the long Pancosmic procession of statesman and scientist, inventor and poet, artisan and artist that winds up the steep ascent to lay an ever freshly woven peplus at the feet of Wisdom.