The secret of Dr Wordsworth’s insight lies in the words, ‘we place ourselves upon the eminence and cast our eyes about us.’ He stood on the actual hill, realized, as Thucydides did, that that was the beginning of things, noted the shape of the hill and its only possible approach, and saw that the developments of the city must lie that way, towards that part, as Thucydides would say. Half a century later Prof. Dörpfeld, coming with the trained eye of the engineer and architect, made, quite independently of Dr Wordsworth, the same observation. The valley enclosed by the Acropolis, Areopagus, Pnyx, and Mouseion, was then utterly barren of visible remains; other archaeologists had placed their agora where ancient remains were visible, North or South of the Acropolis; Prof. Dörpfeld, in defiance of orthodox tradition, placed it West, and there his excavations, as we have seen, brought to light the sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes, the ‘Nine-Spouts,’ the Panathenaic Way, and the host of sanctuaries, houses, wine-presses, wells, and water-courses that encompassed the ancient agora.

Later we shall have to examine what it was that led other scholars and archaeologists astray; for the present we must return to Thucydides. He never mentions the agora, his thoughts never for a moment stray from his city before Theseus. He has shown its meagre extent and the immediate proximity of its most ancient sanctuaries, and to clinch his argument he returns to the citadel itself and its ancient name; he resumes the whole argument (see p. 8) in its last and most emphatic clause.

Because of the ancient settlement here, the citadel as well (as the present city) is still to this day called the city.

Thucydides is strictly correct both as regards official and literary usage. An examination of official inscriptions shows that down to the Peace of Antalcidas (387-6 B.C.) the Acropolis was officially known as polis[282]. The new form ‘in the Acropolis’ first appears in the year of the peace[283], and from then on is in regular use. In literature, both in prose and verse, polis is still uniformly used after a local preposition, e.g. towards the polis, in the polis; but when there is no local preposition the word acropolis is employed. Thus, in the Knights of Aristophanes[284], when the Sausage-Seller sees the Goddess herself coming from the polis with her owl perched on her, and there is no shadow of doubt that Athena is coming from the Acropolis; but Lysistrata[285] says, ‘to-day we shall seize the Acropolis,’ where there is no local preposition, though the sense would have been clear with polis. As Dr Wyse[286] has pointed out, it was easy for the word polis to go on being used for the Acropolis, because the Athenians had another word (ἄστυ), which they used in such phrases as ‘in town,’ ‘to town.’

We have learnt from Thucydides all he has to tell us, and in the light of recent excavations he seems to have spoken clearly enough. The limits of his ancient city have been confirmed by the discovery of the old Pelasgic fortifications. We have seen with our own eyes two of the ancient sanctuaries which lay towards his city, the Pythion and the sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes; and from literary evidence inferred the two others, the Olympieion and the sanctuary of Ge. We have noted that, in the order in which Thucydides names them, they occur in succession from East to West; and, most convincing of all, near to the last-named sanctuary we have found Nine-Spouts, and not only Nine-Spouts, but the old Fair-Fount that was before it. Thus all seems clear and simple; Thucydides, Pausanias, and modern excavations tell the same harmonious tale.