Primitive Athens
as described by Thucydides

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Primitive Athens
as described by Thucydides

by
JANE ELLEN HARRISON,
HON. D.LITT. (DURHAM), HON. LL.D. (ABERDEEN),
STAFF LECTURER AND SOMETIME FELLOW OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

Cambridge
at the University Press
1906

Cambridge:
PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

VILHELMO DOERPFELD

HUNC QUALEMCUNQUE LIBELLUM
ANIMO SALTEM NON INGRATO
DEDICAT

J. E. H.

Πηγὴν μὲν πολύκρουνον Ἀθηναίης ἀνέφηνας
πηγὴ δ’ αὐτὸς ἔφυς καλλιρόου σοφίης.

PREFACE.

My Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens has been for some time out of print. I have decided to issue no second edition. A word of explanation is therefore needed as to the purport of the present pages.

Since my book on Athens was published Dr Frazer’s great commentary on Pausanias has appeared, and for scholars has made a second edition, so far as my book was a commentary on Pausanias, superfluous. The need for a popular handbook has been met by Professor Ernest Gardner’s Ancient Athens. It happens however that, on a question cardinal for the understanding of the early history of Athens, I hold views diametrically opposed to both these writers. These views I have felt bound to state.

This cardinal question is the interpretation of an account given by Thucydides of the character and limits of ancient Athens. Both Dr Frazer and Professor Ernest Gardner hold by an interpretation which though almost universally prevalent down to recent times has been, in my opinion, disproved by the recent excavations of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens and the explanation of their results by Professor Dörpfeld. An adequate examination of the new theory could perhaps hardly be expected in such a book as Professor Gardner’s, and it will not be found there. Dr Frazer, it is needless to say, stated Professor Dörpfeld’s view with fulness and fairness, so far as was then possible or consistent with his main purpose. But the passage of Thucydides deserves and requires a more full consideration than it could receive incidentally in an edition of Pausanias. Moreover at the time when Dr Frazer visited Athens the excavations were only in process, and the results had not been fully developed when his book was published. It was therefore impossible for Dr Frazer to give in one place such a connected account of the new evidence and theory as in a question of this magnitude seems desirable.

The view I set forth is not my own but that of Professor Dörpfeld. In the light of his examination of the passage of Thucydides what had been a mere ‘Enneakrounos Episode’ interesting only to specialists, became at once a vital question affecting the whole history of primitive Athens. Professor Dörpfeld’s views convinced me even before they were confirmed by excavation. I expressed my adhesion in my Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, but I did not then see their full significance. For English readers these views have been so far stated as heresies to be combated, or as rash speculations needing danger-signals. The danger seems to me the other way. To my mind this is a case where adherence to traditional views can only leave us in straits made desperate by the advancing tide of knowledge. I have therefore set forth Prof. Dörpfeld’s views, not apologetically, but in full confidence, as illuminating truths essentially conciliatory and constructive.

Save in the Conclusion, on the question of the metastasis, I have added to the topographical argument nothing of my own. If here and there I have been unable to resist the temptation of wandering into bye-paths of religion and mythology, I trust the reader will pardon one who is by nature no topographer. For topography all that I have done is to set forth as clearly and fully as I could a somewhat intricate argument.

This task—not very easy because alien to my own present work—has been lightened by the help of many friends. Professor Dörpfeld has found time while excavating at Pergamos to go over my proofs and to assure me that his views are correctly represented. The German Archaeological Institute has generously placed at my disposal the whole of their official publications, from which my illustrations are mainly drawn. The like facilities in the matter of the Acropolis excavations have been kindly accorded me by Dr Kabbadias. Other sources are noted in their place. In the matter of re-drawing, in restorations and the modification of plans I have again to thank Mrs Hugh Stewart for much difficult and delicate work, work which could only be done by one who is archaeologist as well as artist.

My debt, by now habitual, to Dr Verrall will appear throughout the book. Mr Gilbert Murray has written for me the Critical Note and has made many fruitful suggestions. Mr F. M. Cornford has helped me throughout, and has revised the whole of my proofs. And last, for any degree of accuracy that may have been attained in the printing, I am indebted to the skill and care of the University Press.

JANE ELLEN HARRISON.

Newnham College, Cambridge.
18 January, 1906.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTORY.

The traveller who visits Athens for the first time will naturally, if he be a classical scholar, devote himself at the outset to the realization of the city of Perikles. His task will here be beset by no serious difficulties. The Acropolis, as Perikles left it, is, both from literary and monumental evidence, adequately known to us. Archaeological investigation has now but little to add to the familiar picture, and that little in matters of quite subordinate detail. The Parthenon, the Propylaea, the temple of Nike Apteros, the Erechtheion (this last probably planned, though certainly not executed by Perikles) still remain to us; their ground-plans and their restorations are for the most part architectural certainties. Moreover, even outside the Acropolis, the situation and limits of the city of Perikles are fairly well ascertained. The Acropolis itself was, we know, a fortified sanctuary within a larger walled city. This city lay, as the oracle in Herodotus[1] said, ‘wheel-shaped’ about the axle of the sacred hill. Portions of this outside wall have come to light here and there, and the foundations of the great Dipylon Gate are clearly made out, and are marked in every guide-book. Inside the circuit of these walls, in the inner Kerameikos, whose boundary-stone still remains, lay the agora. Outside is still to be seen, with its street of tombs, the ancient cemetery.

Should the sympathies of the scholar extend to Roman times, he has still, for the making of his mental picture, all the help imagination needs. Through the twisted streets of modern Athens the beautiful Tower of the Winds is his constant land-mark; Hadrian, with his Olympieion, with his triumphal Arch, with his Library, confronts him at every turn; when he goes to the great Stadion to see ‘Olympian’ games or a revived ‘Antigone,’ when he looks down from the Acropolis into the vast Odeion, Herodes Atticus cannot well be forgotten. Moreover, if he really cares to know what Athens was in Roman days, the scholar can leave behind him his Murray and his Baedeker and take for his only guide the contemporary of Hadrian, Pausanias.

But returning, as he inevitably will, again and again to the Acropolis, the scholar will gradually become conscious, if dimly, of another and an earlier Athens. On his plan of the Acropolis he will find marked certain fragments of very early masonry, which, he is told, are ‘Pelasgian.’ As he passes to the south of the Parthenon he comes upon deep-sunk pits railed in, and within them he can see traces of these ‘Pelasgian’ walls and other masonry about which his guide-book is not over-explicit. To the south of the Propylaea, to his considerable satisfaction, he comes on a solid piece of this ‘Pelasgian’ wall, still above ground. East of the Erechtheion he will see a rock-hewn stairway which once, he learns, led down from the palace of the ancient prehistoric kings, the ‘strong house of Erechtheus.’ South of the Erechtheion he can make out with some effort the ground plan of an early temple; he is told that there exist bases of columns belonging to a yet earlier structure, and these he probably fails to find.

With all his efforts he can frame but a hazy picture of this earlier Acropolis, this citadel before the Persian wars. Probably he might drop the whole question as of merely antiquarian interest—a matter to be noted rather than realized—but that his next experience brings sudden revelation. Skilfully sunk out of sight—to avoid interfering with his realization of Periklean Athens—is the small Acropolis Museum. Entering it, he finds himself in a moment actually within that other and earlier Athens dimly discerned, and instantly he knows it, not as a world of ground-plans and fragmentary Pelasgic fortifications, but as a kingdom of art and of humanity vivid with colour and beauty.

As he passes in eager excitement through the ante-rooms he will glance, as he goes, at the great blue lion and the bull, at the tangle of rampant many-coloured snakes, at the long-winged birds with their prey still in beak and talon; he will pause to smile back at the three kindly ‘Blue-beards,’ he will be glad when he sees that the familiar Calf-Carrier has found his feet and his name, he will note the long rows of solemn votive terra-cottas, and, at last, he will stand in the presence of those Maiden-images, who, amid all that coloured architectural splendour, were consecrate to the worship of the Maiden. The Persian harried them, Perikles left them to lie beneath his feet, yet their antique loveliness is untouched and still sovran. They are alive, waiting still, in hushed, intent expectancy—but not for us. We go out from their presence as from a sanctuary, and henceforth every stone of the Pelasgian fortress where they dwelt is, for us, sacred.

But if he leave that museum aglow with a new enthusiasm, determined to know what is to be known of that antique world, the scholar will assuredly be met on the threshold of his enquiry by difficulties and disillusionment. By difficulties, because the information he seeks is scattered through a mass of foreign periodical literature, German and Greek; by disillusionment, because to the simple questions he wants to ask he can get no clear, straightforward answer. He wants to know what was the nature and extent of the ancient city, did it spread beyond the Acropolis, if so in what direction and how far? what were the primitive sanctuaries inside the Pelasgic walls, what, if any, lay outside and where? Where was the ancient city well (Kallirrhoë), where the agora, where that primitive orchestra on which, before the great theatre was built, dramatic contests took place? Straightway he finds himself plunged into a very cauldron of controversy. The ancient agora is placed by some to the north, by others to the south, by others again to the west. The question of its position is inextricably bound up, he finds to his surprise, with the question as to where lay the Enneakrounos, a fountain with which hitherto he has had no excessive familiarity; the mere mention of the Enneakrounos brings either a heated discussion or, worse, a chilling silence.

This atmosphere of controversy, electric with personal prejudice, exhilarating as it is to the professed archaeologist, plunges the scholar in a profound dejection. His concern is not jurare in verba magistri—he wants to know not who but what is right. Two questions only he asks. First, and perhaps to him unduly foremost, What, as to the primitive city, is the literary testimony of the ancients themselves, and preferably the testimony not of scholiasts and second-hand lexicographers, but of classical writers who knew and lived in Athens, of Thucydides, of Pausanias? Second, To that literary testimony, what of monumental evidence has been added by excavation?

It is to answer these two questions that the following pages are written. It is the present writer’s conviction that controversy as to the main outlines of the picture, though perhaps at the outset inevitable, is, with the material now accessible, an anachronism; that the facts stand out plain and clear and that between the literary and monumental evidence there is no discrepancy. The plan adopted will therefore be to state as simply as may be what seems the ascertained truth about the ancient city, and to state that truth unencumbered by controversy. Then, and not till then, it may be profitable to mention other current opinions, and to examine briefly what seem to be the errors in method which have led to their acceptance.

CHAPTER I.
THE ANCIENT CITY, ITS CHARACTER AND LIMITS.

By a rare good fortune we have from Thucydides himself an account of the nature and extent of the city of Athens in the time of the kingship. This account is not indeed as explicit in detail as we could wish, but in general outline it is clear and vivid. To the scholar the remembrance of this account comes as a ray of light in his darkness. If he cannot find his way in the mazes of archaeological controversy, it is at least his business to read Thucydides and his hope to understand him.

The account of primitive Athens is incidental. Thucydides is telling how, during the Peloponnesian War, when the enemy was mustering on the Isthmus and attack on Attica seemed imminent, Perikles advised the Athenians to desert their country homes and take refuge in the city. The Athenians were convinced by his arguments. They sent their sheep and cattle to Euboea and the islands; they pulled down even the wood-work of their houses, and themselves, with their wives, their children, and all their moveable property, migrated to Athens. But, says Thucydides[2], this ‘flitting’ went hard with them; and why? Because ‘they had always, most of them, been used to a country life.’

This habit of ‘living in the fields,’ this country life was, Thucydides goes on to explain, no affair of yesterday; it had been so from the earliest times. All through the days of the kingship from Kekrops to Theseus the people had lived scattered about in small communities—‘village communities’ we expect to hear him say, for he is insisting on the habit of country life; but, though he knows the word ‘village’ (κώμη) and employs it in discussing Laconia elsewhere[3], he does not use it here. He says the inhabitants of Athens lived ‘in towns’ (κατὰ πόλεις), or, as it would be safer to translate it, ‘in burghs.’

It is necessary at the outset to understand clearly what the word polis here means. We use the word ‘town’ in contradistinction to country, but from the account of Thucydides it is clear that people could live in a polis and yet lead a country life. Our word city is still less appropriate; ‘city’ to us means a very large town, a place where people live crowded together. A polis, as Thucydides here uses the word, was a community of people living on and immediately about a fortified hill or citadel—a citadel-community. The life lived in such a community was essentially a country life. A polis was a citadel, only that our word ‘citadel’ is over-weighted with military association.

Athens then, in the days of Kekrops and the other kings down to Theseus, was one among many other citadel-communities or burghs. Like the other scattered burghs, like Aphidna, like Thoricus, like Eleusis, it had its own local government, its own council-house, its own magistrates. So independent were these citadel-communities that, Thucydides tells us, on one occasion Eleusis under Eumolpos actually made war on Athens under Erechtheus.

So things went on till the reign of Theseus and his famous Synoikismos, the Dwelling-together or Unification. Theseus, Thucydides says, was a man of ideas and of the force of character necessary to carry them out. He substituted the one for the many; he put an end to the little local councils and council-houses and centralized the government of Attica in Athens. Where the government is, thither naturally population will flock. People began to gather into Athens, and for a certain percentage of the population town-life became fashionable. Then, and not till then, did the city become ‘great,’ and that ‘great’ city Theseus handed down to posterity. ‘And from that time down to the present day the Athenians celebrate to the Goddess at the public expense a festival called the Dwelling-together[4].’

One unified city and one goddess, the goddess who needs no name. Their unity and their greatness the Athenians are not likely to forget, but will they remember the time before the union, when Athens was but Kekropia, but one among the many scattered citadel-communities? Will they remember how small was their own beginning, how limited their burgh, how impossible—for that is the immediate point—that it should have contained in its narrow circuit a large town population? Thucydides clearly is afraid they will not. There was much to prevent accurate realization. The walls of Themistocles, when Thucydides wrote, enclosed a polis that was not very much smaller than the modern town; the walls of the earlier community, the old small burgh, were in part ruined. It was necessary therefore, if the historian would make clear his point, namely, the smallness of the ancient burgh and its inadequacy for town-life, that he should define its limits. This straightway he proceeds to do. Our whole discussion will centre round his definition and description, and at the outset the passage must be given in full. Immediately after his notice of the festival of the ‘Dwelling-together,’ celebrated to ‘the Goddess,’ Thucydides[5] writes as follows:

‘Before this, what is now the citadel was the city, together with what is below it towards about south. The evidence is this. The sanctuaries are in the citadel itself, those of other deities as well[6] (as the Goddess). And those that are outside are placed towards this part of the city more (than elsewhere). Such are the sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, and the Pythion, and the sanctuary of Ge, and that of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes (to whom is celebrated the more ancient Dionysiac Festival on the 12th day in the month Anthesterion, as is also the custom down to the present day with the Ionian descendants of the Athenians); and other ancient sanctuaries also are placed here. And the spring which is now called Nine-Spouts, from the form given it by the despots, but which formerly, when the sources were open, was named Fair-Fount—this spring (I say), being near, they used for the most important purposes, and even now it is still the custom derived from the ancient (habit) to use the water before weddings and for other sacred purposes. Because of the ancient settlement here, the citadel (as well as the present city) is still to this day called by the Athenians the City.’

In spite of certain obscurities, which are mainly due to a characteristically Thucydidean over-condensation of style, the main purport of the argument is clear. Thucydides, it will be remembered, wants to prove that the city before Theseus was, because of its small size, incapable of holding a large town population. This small size not being evident to the contemporaries of Thucydides, he proceeds to define the limits of the ancient city. He makes a statement and supports it by fourfold evidence.

The statement that he makes is that the ancient city comprised the present citadel together with what is below it towards about south. The fourfold evidence is as follows:

1. The sanctuaries are in the citadel itself, those of other deities as well as the Goddess.

2. Those ancient sanctuaries that are outside are placed towards this part of the present city more than elsewhere. Four instances of such outside shrines are adduced.

3. There is a spring near at hand used from of old for the most important purposes, and still so used on sacred occasions.

4. The citadel, as well as the present city, was still in the time of Thucydides called the ‘city.’

We begin with the statement as to the limits of the city. Not till we clearly understand exactly what Thucydides states, how much and how little, can we properly weigh the fourfold evidence he offers in support of his statement.

‘Before this what is now the citadel was the city, together with what is below it towards about south.’ The city before Theseus was the citadel or acropolis of the days of Thucydides, plus something else. The citadel or acropolis needed then, and needs now, no further definition. By it is clearly meant not the whole hill to the base, but the plateau on the summit enclosed by the walls of Themistocles and Kimon together with the fortification out-works on the west slope still extant in the days of Thucydides. But the second and secondary part of the statement is less clearly defined. The words neither give nor suggest, to us at least, any circumscribing line; only a direction, and that vague enough, ‘towards about south.’ It is a point at which the scholar naturally asks, whether archaeology has anything to say?

But before that question is asked and answered, it should be noted that from the shape of the sentence alone something may be inferred. That the present citadel is coextensive with the old city is the main contention. We feel that Thucydides might have stopped there and yet made his point, namely, the smallness of that ancient city. But Thucydides is a careful man, he remembers that the two were not quite coextensive. To the old city must be reckoned an additional portion below the citadel (τὸ ὑπ’ αὐτήν), a portion that, as will later be seen, his readers might be peculiarly apt to forget; so he adds it to his statement. But, by the way it is hung on, we should naturally figure that portion as ‘not only subordinate to the acropolis, but in some way closely incorporated with it. In relation to the acropolis, this additional area, to justify the arrangement of the words of Thucydides, should be a part neither large nor independent[7].’

Thus much can be gathered from the text; it is time to see what additional evidence is brought by archaeology.

Thucydides was, according to his lights, scrupulously exact. It happens, however, that in the nature of things he could not, as regards the limits of the ancient city, be strictly precise. The necessary monuments were by his time hidden deep below the ground. His first and main statement, that one portion of the old city was coextensive with the citadel of his day, is not quite true. This upper portion of the old burgh was a good deal smaller; all the better for his argument, had he known it! Thanks to systematic excavation we know more about the limits of the old city than Thucydides himself, and it happens curiously enough that this more exact and very recent knowledge, while it leads us to convict Thucydides of a real and unavoidable inexactness, gives us also the reason for his caution. It explains to us why, appended to his statement about the city and the citadel, he is careful to put in the somewhat vague addendum, ‘together with what is below it towards about south.’

To us to-day the top of the Acropolis appears as a smooth plateau sloping gently westwards towards the Propylaea, and this plateau is surrounded by fortification walls, whose clean, straight lines show them to be artificial. Very similar in all essentials was the appearance presented by the hill to the contemporaries of Thucydides, but such was not the ancient Acropolis. What manner of thing the primitive hill was has been shown by the excavations carried on by the Greek Government from 1885-1889. The excavators, save when they were prevented by the foundations of buildings, have everywhere dug down to the living rock, every handful of the débris exposed has been carefully examined, and nothing more now remains for discovery.

When the traveller first reaches Athens he is so impressed by the unexpected height and dominant situation of Lycabettus, that he wonders why it plays so small a part in classical record. Plato[8] seems to have felt that it was hard for Lycabettus to be left out. In his description of primitive Athens he says, ‘in old days the hill of the Acropolis extended to the Eridanus and Ilissus, and included the Pnyx on one side and Lycabettus as a boundary on the opposite side of the hill,’ and there is a certain rough geological justice about Plato’s description. All these hills are spurs of that last offshoot of Pentelicus, known in modern times as Turkovouni. Yet to the wise Athena, Lycabettus was but building material; she was carrying the hill through the air to fortify her Acropolis, when she met the crow[9] who told her that the disobedient sisters had opened the chest, and then and there she dropped Lycabettus and left it ... to the crows.

A moment’s reflection will show why the Acropolis was chosen and Lycabettus left. Lycabettus is a good hill to climb and see a sunset from. It has not level space enough for a settlement. The Acropolis has the two desiderata of an ancient burgh, space on which to settle, and easy defensibility.

The Acropolis, as in neolithic days the first settlers found it, was, it will be seen in [Fig. 1], a long, rocky ridge, broken at intervals[10]. It could only be climbed with ease on the west and south-west sides, the remaining sides being everywhere precipitous, though in places not absolutely inaccessible. For a primitive settlement it was an ideal situation. Two things remained for the settlers to do: first, they had to level the surface by hewing away jagged rocks and filling up cracks with earth and stones to make sites for their houses and their sanctuaries; and second, they had to supplement what nature had already done in the way of fortification; here and there to make the steep rocks steeper, build a wall round their settlement, and, above all, fortify that accessible west and south-west end and build an impregnable gateway. Kleidemos[11], writing in the fifth century B.C., says, ‘they levelled the Acropolis and made the Pelasgicon, which they built round it nine-gated.’ They levelled the surface, they built a wall round it, they furnished the fortification wall with gates. We begin for convenience sake with the wall. In tracing its course the process of levelling is most plainly seen. The question of the gates will be taken last.

Fig. 1.

In the plan in [Fig. 2] is shown what excavations have laid bare of the ancient Pelasgic fortress. We see instantly the inexactness of the main statement of Thucydides. It is not ‘what is now the Citadel’ that was the main part of the old burgh, but something substantially smaller, smaller by about one-fifth of the total area. We see also that this Thucydides could not know. The Pelasgic wall following the broken outline of the natural rock was in his days covered over by the artificial platform reaching everywhere to the wall of Kimon. At one place, and one only, in the days of Thucydides, did the Pelasgic wall come into sight, and there it still remains above ground, as it has always been, save when temporarily covered by Turkish out-works. This visible piece is the large fragment (A), 6 metres broad, to the south of the present Propylaea and close to the earlier gateway (G). In the days of Thucydides it stood several metres high. Of this we have definite monumental evidence. The south-east corner of the wall of the south-west wing of the present Propylaea is bevelled away[12] so as to fit against this Pelasgic wall, and the bevelling can be seen to-day. This portion of the Pelasgic wall is of exceptional strength and thickness, doubtless because it was part of the gateway fortifications, the natural point of attack.

Fig. 2.

Save for this one exception, the Pelasgic walls lie now, as they did in the day of Thucydides, below the level of the present hill, and their existence was, until the excavations began, only dimly suspected. Literary tradition said there was a circuit wall, but where this circuit wall ran was matter of conjecture; bygone scholars even placed it below the Acropolis. Now the outline, though far from complete, is clear enough. To the south and south-west of the Parthenon there are, as seen on the plan, substantial remains and what is gone can be easily supplied. On the north side the remains are scanty. The reason is obvious; the line of the Pelasgic fortification on the south lies well within the line of Kimon’s wall; the Pelasgic wall was covered in, but not intentionally broken down. To the north it coincided with Themistocles’ wall, and was therefore, for the most part, pulled down or used as foundation.

But none the less is it clear that the centre of gravity of the ancient settlement lay to the north of the plateau. Although the north wall was broken away, it is on this north side that the remains which may belong to a royal palace have come to light. The plan of these remains cannot in detail be made out, but the general analogy of the masonry to that of Tiryns and Mycenae leave no doubt that here we have remains of ‘Mycenaean’ date. North-east of the Erechtheion is a rock-cut stairway (B) leading down through a natural cleft in the rock to the plain below. As at Tiryns and Mycenae, the settlement on the Acropolis had not only its great entrance-gates, but a second smaller approach, accessible only to passengers on foot, and possibly reserved for the rulers only.

Incomplete though the remains of this settlement are, the certain fact of its existence, and its close analogy to the palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae are of priceless value. Ancient Athens is now no longer a thing by itself; it falls into line with all the other ancient ‘Mycenaean’ fortified hills, with Thoricus, Acharnae, Aphidna, Eleusis. The citadel of Kekrops is henceforth as the citadel of Agamemnon and as the citadel of Priam. The ‘strong house’ of Erechtheus is not a temple, but what the words plainly mean, the dwelling of a king. Moreover we are dealing not with a city, in the modern sense, of vague dimensions, but with a compact fortified burgh.

Thucydides, though certainly convicted of some inexactness as to detail, is in his main contention seen to be strictly true—‘what is now the citadel was the city.’ Grasping this firmly in our minds we may return to note his inexactness as to detail. By examining certain portions of the Pelasgic wall more closely, we shall realize how much smaller was the space it enclosed than the Acropolis as known to Thucydides.

Fig. 3.

The general shape of the hill, and its subsequent alteration, are best realized by Dr Dörpfeld’s simple illustration[13]. A vertical section of the natural rock, it is roughly of the shape of a house ([Fig. 3]) with an ordinary gable roof. The sides of the house represent the steep inaccessible cliffs to north and south and east; the lines of the roof slope like the lines of the upper part of the hill converging at the middle. Suppose the sides of the house produced upwards to the height of the roof-ridge, and the triangular space so formed filled in, we have the state of the Acropolis when Kimon’s walls were completed. The filling in of those spaces is the history of the gradual ‘levelling of the surface of the hill, the work of many successive generations.’ The section in [Fig. 4] will show that this levelling up had to be done chiefly on the north and south sides; to the east and west the living rock is near the surface.

Fig. 4.

It has already been noted that on the north side of the Acropolis the actual remains of the Pelasgian wall are few and slight; but as the wall of Themistocles which superseded it follows the contours of the rock, we may be sure that here the two were nearly coincident. The wall of Themistocles remains to this day a perpetual monument of the disaster wrought by the Persians. Built into it opposite the Erechtheum, not by accident, but for express memorial, are fragments of the architrave, triglyphs and cornice of poros stone, and the marble metopes, from the old temple of Athena which the Persians had burnt. Other memorials lay buried out of sight, and were brought to light by the excavations of 1886. The excavators[14] were clearing the ground to the north-east of the Propylaea. On the 6th of February, at a depth of from 3-4½ metres below the surface, they came upon fourteen of the ‘Maidens[15].’ The section[16] in [Fig. 5] shows the place where they had slept their long sleep. We should like to think they were laid there in all reverence for their beauty, but hard facts compel us to own that, though their burial may have been prompted in part by awe of their sanctity, yet the practical Athenian did not shrink from utilizing them as material to level up with.

The deposit, it is here clearly seen, was in three strata. Each stratum consisted of statues and fragments of statues, inscribed bases, potsherds, charred wood, stones, and earth. Each stratum, and this is the significant fact, is separated from the one above it by a thin layer of rubble, the refuse of material used in the wall of Themistocles. The conclusion to the architect is manifest. In building the wall, perhaps to save expense, no scaffolding was used; but, after a few courses were laid, the ground inside was levelled up, and for this purpose what could be better than the statues knocked down by the Persians? Headless, armless, their sanctity was gone, their beauty uncared for. In the topmost of the three strata—the stratum which yielded the first find of ‘Maidens’—a hoard of coins was found: thirty-five Attic tetradrachms, two drachmas, and twenty-three obols. All are of Solon’s time except eight of the obols, which date somewhat earlier. Besides the ‘Maidens,’ on this north side of the Acropolis other monuments came to light, many bronzes, and among them the lovely flat Athena[17], the beautiful terra-cotta plaque[18] painted with the figure of a hoplite, and countless votive terra-cottas.

Fig. 5.

The excavations on the south side of the Acropolis have yielded much that is of great value for art and for science, for our knowledge of the extent of the Pelasgian fortification, results of the first importance. The section in [Fig. 7], taken at the south-east corner of the Parthenon, shows the state of things revealed. The section should be compared with the view in [Fig. 6].

Fig. 6.

Fig. 7.

The masonry marked 2 is the foundation, deep and massive beyond all expectation, laid, not for the Parthenon as we know it, but for that earlier Parthenon begun before the Persian War, and fated never to be completed. At 4 we see the great Kimonian wall as it exists to-day, though obscured by its mediaeval casing. All this, if we want to realize primitive Athens, we must think away. The date of Kimon’s wall is of course roughly fixed as shortly after 469 B.C., the foundations of the early Parthenon are certainly before the Persian War, probably after the date of Peisistratos. We may probably, though not quite certainly, attribute them to the time of the first democracy, the activity of Kleisthenes[19], a period that saw the building of the theatre-shaped Pnyx, the establishment of the new agora in the Kerameikos, and the Stoa of the Athenians at Delphi. Laurium had just begun to yield silver from her mines. Themistocles, before and after the war, was all for fortification; the Alkmaeonid Kleisthenes may well have indulged an hereditary tendency to temple building.

Save for the clearing of our minds, the date of the early temple-foundations does not immediately concern us. Their importance is that, but for the building of the Parthenon, early and late, we should never apparently have had the great alteration and addition to the south side of the hill and the ancient Pelasgian wall would never have been covered in. Let us see how this happened[20].

We start with nothing but the natural rock, and on it the Pelasgian wall (1). Over the natural rock is a layer of earth, marked I. Whatever objects have been found in that layer date before the laying of the great foundations; these objects are chiefly fragments of pottery, many of them of ‘Mycenean’ character, and some ordinary black-figured vases.

It is decided to build a great temple, and the foundations are to be laid. The ground slopes away somewhat rapidly, so the southern side of the temple is to be founded on an artificial platform. The trench (b) is dug in the layer of earth; then, just as on the north side of the hill, no scaffolding is used, but as the foundations are laid course by course, the débris is used as a platform for the workmen. A supporting wall (2) is required and built of polygonal masonry; it rises course by course, corresponding with the platform of débris. And then, what might have been expected but was apparently not foreseen, happens. The slender wall can be raised no higher and at about the second course the débris unsupported pours over it, as seen at III.

The débris, unchecked, fell over as far as the old Pelasgian wall. How high this originally stood it is not possible now to say; but, from the fact that outside the supporting wall the layers of débris again lie horizontally, and from the analogy of another section taken further west, which need not be discussed here, it is probable that the old wall was raised by several new courses, and that the higher ones were of quadrangular blocks, as restored in [Fig. 7].

So far all that has been accomplished is the raising of the old Pelasgian wall and a levelling up of the terrace to its new height. That these terraces were raised step by step with the foundations of the Parthenon is clear. Between each layer of earth and poros fragments—just as we have seen in the similar circumstances of the north wall ([p. 15])—is interposed a layer of splinters and fragments of the stones used in the building of the foundations. This can clearly be seen at II. in the section in [Fig. 7].

It may seem strange that Kleisthenes, or whoever built the earlier Parthenon, did not at once utilize the Pelasgian wall and boldly pile up his terrace against its support. But it must be remembered that the space between the Parthenon and the Pelasgian wall was very great; an immense amount of débris would be required for the filling up of such a space, and it was probably more economical to build the polygonal supporting-wall nearer to the Parthenon. Anyhow it is quite clear that the polygonal wall was no provisional structure. Its façade shows it was meant to be seen, and that the terrace was meant for permanent use is clear from the fact that it is connected by a flight of steps with the lower terrace under the Pelasgian wall ([Fig. 8]). It is clear that whoever planned these steps never thought that the lower terrace would be levelled up.

Doubtless whoever filled in the terrace to the height of the raised Pelasgian wall believed in like manner that his work was complete. But Kimon thought otherwise. We know for certain that it was he who built the great final wall, the structure that remains to-day, though partly concealed by mediaeval casing [Fig. 7] (4). Plutarch[21] tells us that after the battle of Eurymedon (469 B.C.) so much money was raised by the sale of the spoils of the Persians that the people were able to afford to build the south wall. We know also that this wall of Kimon was at least as much a retaining wall to the great terrace as a fortification. For the filling up of the space between the Pelasgian fortification and his own wall Kimon had material sadly ample. He had the débris left by the Persians after the sacking of the Acropolis. The fragments of sculpture and architecture that bear traces of fire are found in the strata marked IV, and there only, for it is these strata only that were laid down after the Persian War[22]. The last courses of ‘Kimon’s wall’ (5) were laid by Perikles, and he it was who finally filled in the terrace to its present level (V).

Fig. 8.

The relation of the successive walls and terraces is shown by the ground-plan in [Fig. 9][23]. The double shaded lines from A to E and D show the irregular course of the old Pelasgic wall. The dotted lines from B to F show the polygonal supporting wall of the first terrace. It ran, as is seen, nearly parallel to the Parthenon. Its course is lost to sight after it passes under the new museum, but originally it certainly joined the Pelasgic wall at C. At B was the stairway joining the two terraces. Next came the time when, as the rubble fell over the wall, larger space was needed, and a portion of the Pelasgic wall was utilized and raised. This is shown by the thick black line from B to E coincident with the Pelasgic wall; the masonry here was of quadrangular poros blocks. The coincidence with the Pelasgic wall was only partial. At GH there jutted out an independent angular outpost, and again at EF the new wall is separate from the old; at FD it coincided with the earlier polygonal terrace wall. Kimon’s wall is indicated by the outside double lines, and in the space between these lines and the wall HEK lay the débris of the Persian War. Above that débris lay a still later stratum, deposited during the building operations of Perikles.

Fig. 9.

The various terraces and walls have been examined somewhat in detail, because their examination helps us to realize as nothing else could how artificial a structure is the south side of the Acropolis, and also—a point, to us, of paramount importance—how different was the early condition of the hill from its later appearance.

Before we pass to the consideration of the second clause in the historian’s statement, ‘together with what is below it towards about south,’ it is necessary to say a word as to when the old fortress walls were built and by whom. Kimon and Themistocles we know, but who were these earlier master-builders?

A red-figured vase painter of the fifth century B.C. gives us what would have seemed to a contemporary Athenian a safe and satisfactory answer—‘There were giants in those days.’ The design in [Fig. 10] is from a skyphos[24] in the Louvre Museum. Athena is about to fortify her chosen hill. She wears no aegis, for her work is peaceful; she has planted her spear in the ground perhaps as a measuring rod, and she has chosen her workman. A great giant, his name Gigas, inscribed over him, toils after her, bearing a huge ‘Cyclopean’ rock. She points with her hand where he is to lay it.

Fig. 10.

On the obverse of the same vase ([Fig. 11]) we have a scene of similar significance. To either side of a small tree, which marks the background as woodland, stands a man of rather wild and uncouth appearance. The man to the left is bearded and his name is inscribed, Phlegyas. The right-hand man is younger, and obviously resembles the giant of the obverse. He is showing to Phlegyas an object, which they both inspect with an intent, puzzled air. And well they may. It is a builder’s staphyle[25], or measuring line, weighted with knobs of lead like a cluster of grapes; hence its name. Phlegyas[26] and his giant Thessalian folk were the typical lawless bandits of antiquity; they plundered Delphi, they attacked Thebes after it had been fortified by Amphion and Zethus. But Athena has them at her hest for master-builders. All glory to Athena!

Fig. 11.

It is not only at Athens that legends of giant, fabulous workmen cluster about ‘Mycenean’ remains. Phlegyas and his giants toil for Athena, and at Tiryns too, according to tradition, the Kyklopes work for King Proetus[27], and they too built the walls and Lion-Gate of Mycenae[28]. At Thebes the Kadmeia[29] is the work of Amphion and Zethus, sons of the gods, and the fashion in which art represents Zethus as toiling is just that of our giant on the vase. The mantle that Jason wore was embroidered, Apollonius of Rhodes[30] tells us, with the building of Thebes,

Of river-born Antiope therein

The sons were woven, Zethus and his twin

Amphion, and all Thebes unlifted yet

Around them lay. They sought but now to set

The stones of her first building. Like one sore

In labour, Zethus on great shoulders bore

A stone-clad mountain’s crest; and there hard by

Amphion went his way with minstrelsy

Clanging a golden lyre, and twice as vast

The dumb rock rose and sought him as he passed.

Sisyphos, ancient king of Corinth, built on the acropolis of Corinth his great palace, the Sisypheion. He is the Corinthian double of Erechtheus with his Erechtheion. Strabo[31] was in doubt whether to call the Sisypheion palace or temple. Like the old Erechtheion, it was both fortress and sanctuary. In Hades for eternal remembrance, not, as men later thought, of his sin, but of his craft as master-builder, Sisyphos[32], like Zethus, like our giant, still rolls a huge stone up the slope. Everywhere it is the same tale. All definite record or remembrance of the building of ‘Cyclopean’ walls is lost; some hero-king built them, some god, some demi-god, some giant. Just so did the devil in ancient days build his Bridges all over England.

Tradition loves to embroider a story with names and definite details. The prudent Attic vase-painter gives us only a nameless ‘Giant.’ Others knew more. Pausanias[33] had heard the builders’ actual names and tried to fix their race. He tells us—just as he leaves the Acropolis—‘Save for the portion built by Kimon, son of Miltiades, the whole circuit of the Acropolis fortification was, they say, built by the Pelasgians, who once dwelt below the Acropolis. It is said that Agrolas and Hyperbios ... and on asking who they were, I could only learn that in origin they were Sikelians and that they migrated to Acarnania.’

Spite of the lacuna, it is clear that Agrolas and Hyperbios are the reputed builders. The reference to Sicily dates probably from a time when the Kyklopes had taken up their abode in the island. The two builder-brothers remind us of Amphion and Zethus, and of their prototypes the Dioscuri[34]. Pliny[35] tells of a similar pair, though he gives to one of them another name. ‘The brothers Euryalos and Hyperbios were the first to make brick-kilns and houses at Athens; before this they used caves in the ground for houses.’

The names of the two ‘Pelasgian’ brothers are, as we know from the evidence of vase-paintings[36], ‘giant’ names, and Hyperbios is obviously appropriate. The names leave us in the region of myth, but the tradition that the brothers were ‘Pelasgian’ deserves closer attention.

In describing the old wall we have spoken of it as ‘Pelasgian,’ and in this we follow classical tradition. Quoting from Hecataeus (circ. 500 B.C.), Herodotus[37] speaks of land under Hymettus as given to the Pelasgians ‘in payment for the fortification wall which they had formerly built round the Acropolis.’ Again, Herodotus[38] tells how when Kleomenes King of Sparta reached Athens, he, together with those of the citizens who desired to be free, besieged the despots who were shut up in the Pelasgian fortification.

A Pelasgian fortification, a constant tradition that Athens was inhabited by Pelasgians—we seem to be on solid ground. Yet on a closer examination the evidence for connecting the name of the fortification with the name ‘Pelasgian’ crumbles. In the one official[39] inscription that we possess the word is written, not Pelasgikon, but Pelargikon. In like manner, in Thucydides[40], where the word occurs twice, it is written with an r. Pelargikon is ‘stork-fort,’ not Pelasgian fort. The confusion probably began with Herodotus, who was specially interested in the Pelasgians.

Why the old citadel was called ‘stork-fort’ we cannot say—there are no storks there now—but we have one delightful piece of evidence that, to the Athenian of the sixth century B.C., ‘stork-fort’ was a reality.

Immediately to the south of the present Erechtheion lie the foundations of the ancient Doric temple[41], currently known by a pardonable Germanism as the ‘old Athena-temple.’ For its date we have a certain terminus ante quem. The colonnade was of the time of Peisistratos; it was a later addition; the cella of the temple existed before—how much before we do not know. The zeal and skill of Prof. Dörpfeld for architecture, of Dʳˢ Wiegand and Schrader for sculpture, have restored to us a picture of that ancient Doric temple all aglow with life and colour and in essentials complete[42].

Fig. 12.

Of all the marvellous fragments of early sculpture recently discovered, none is more widely known nor more justly popular than the smiling, three-headed monster known throughout Europe as the ‘Blue-beard.’ He belongs to the sculptures of the west pediment of the inner pre-Peisistratean cella of the ‘old Athena-temple,’ a portion of which is shown in [Fig. 12]. It is tempting to turn aside and discuss in detail the whole pediment composition to which he belongs. It will, however, shortly be seen ([p. 37]) that our argument forbids all detailed discussion of the sanctuaries of Athena, and the pediments of her earliest temple have therefore, for us at the moment, an interest merely incidental.

Thus much, however, for clearness sake may and must be said. The design of the western pediment fell into two parts. In one angle, that to the left of the spectator, Herakles is wrestling with Triton; the right-hand portion, not figured here, is occupied by the triple figure of ‘Blue-beard,’ whose correct mythological name is probably Typhon[43]. He is no protagonist, only a splendid smiling spectator. The centre of the pediment, where, in the art of Pheidias, we should expect the interest to culminate, was occupied by accessories, the stem of a tree on which hung, as in vase-paintings, the bow and arrows and superfluous raiment of Herakles.

It is a point of no small mythological interest that in this and two other primitive pediments the protagonist is not, as we should expect, the indigenous hero Theseus, but the semi-Oriental Herakles; but this question also we must set aside; our immediate interest is not in the sculptured figures of the pediment, but in the richly painted decoration on the pediment roof above their heads.

The recent excavations on the Acropolis yielded a large number of painted architectural fragments, the place and significance of which was at first far from clear. Of these fragments forty were adorned with two forms of lotus-flower; twenty had upon them figures of birds of two sorts. Fragmentary though the birds mostly are, the two kinds (storks and sea-eagles) are, by realism as to feathers, beak, legs, and claws, carefully distinguished. The stork (πελαργός) in the Pelargikon is a surprise and a delight. Was Aristophanes[44] thinking of this Pelargikon when to the building of his Nephelokokkygia he brought

For brickmakers a myriad flight of storks.

One of the storks is given in [Fig. 13]. The birds in the original fragments are brilliantly and delicately coloured. Their vivid red legs take us to Delphi. We remember Ion[45] with his laurel crown, his bow and arrows, his warning song to swan and eagle.

Fig. 13.

There see! the birds are up: they fly

Their nests upon Parnassus high

And hither tend. I warn you all

To golden house and marble wall

Approach not. Once again my bow

Zeus’ herald-bird, will lay thee low;

Of all that fly the mightiest thou

In talon! Lo another now

Sails hitherward—a swan! Away

Away, thou red-foot!

In days when on open-air altars sacrifice smoked, and there was abundance of sacred cakes, birds were real and very frequent presences. To the heads of numbers of statues found on the Acropolis is fixed a sharp spike to prevent the birds perching[46]. They were sacred yet profane.

The lotus-flowers carry us back to Egypt. The rich blending of motives from the animal and vegetable kingdom is altogether ‘Mycenaean.’ Man in art, as in life, is still at home with his brothers the fish, the bird, and the flower. After this ancient fulness and warmth of life a pediment by Pheidias strikes a chill. Its sheer humanity is cold and lonely. Man has forgotten that

Earth is a covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.

There are two sorts of birds, two sorts of lotus-flowers, and there are two pediments. It is natural to suppose, with Dr Wiegand, that the eagles belonged to the east, the principal pediment. There, it will later be seen ([p. 47]), were seated the divinities of the place. Our pediment decorated the west end, the humbler seat of heroes rather than gods. There Herakles wrestled with the Triton; there old Blue-beard—surely a monster of the earlier slime—kept his watch; and over that ancient struggle of hero and monster brooded the stork.

The storks themselves are there to remind us that the old name of the citadel was Pelargikon, and that Pelargikon meant ‘stork fort’; by an easy shift it became Pelasgikon[47], and had henceforth an etymologically false association with the Pelasgoi. Etymologically false, but perhaps in fact true, for happily the analogy between the Pelargic walls and those of Mycenae is beyond dispute, and if the ‘Mycenaeans’ were Pelasgian, the walls are, after all, Pelasgic.

We have seen that both Thucydides and the official inscription write Pelargikon; their statements will repay examination.

Thucydides, after his account of the narrow limits of the city before Theseus, returns to the main burden of his narrative, the crowding of the inhabitants of Attica within the city walls. ‘Some few,’ he says[48], ‘indeed had dwelling places, and took refuge with some of their friends or relations, but the most part of them took up their abode on the waste places of the city and in the sanctuaries and hero-shrines, with the exception of the Acropolis and the Eleusinion, and any other that might be definitely closed. And what is called the Pelargikon beneath the Acropolis, to dwell in which was accursed, and was forbidden in the fag end of an actual Pythian oracle on this wise,

The Pelargikon better unused,

was, notwithstanding, in consequence of the immediate pressure thickly populated.’

The passage comes for a moment as something of a shock. We have been thinking of the Pelargikon as the Acropolis, we have traced its circuit of walls on the Acropolis, and now suddenly we find the two sharply distinguished. The Acropolis, though closed, is surely not cursed. The Acropolis is one of the definitely closed places, to which the refugees cannot get access; the Pelargikon, though accursed, is open to them, and they take possession of it; the two manifestly cannot be coincident. But happily the words ‘below the Acropolis’ bring recollection, and with it illumination. What is called the Pelargikon below the Acropolis is surely that appanage of the citadel which Thucydides in his second clause mentions so vaguely. The ancient polis comprised not only ‘what is now the citadel,’ but also together with it, ‘what is below it towards about south[49].’ Thucydides would have saved a world of trouble if he had stated that ‘what is below towards the south’ was the Pelargikon; but he does not, probably because he is concerned with dimensions, not with nomenclature.

The Pelasgikon meant originally the whole citadel, the ancient city as defined by Thucydides. This was its meaning in the days of Herodotus. In the Pelasgikon the tyrants were besieged ([p. 25]). But by the time of Thucydides the Acropolis proper, i.e. much the larger and more important part of the old city, had ceased to be ‘Pelasgic’; the old fortifications were concealed by the new retaining walls of Themistocles and Kimon. It was only at the west and south-west that the Pelasgic fortifications were still visible, hence this portion below the Acropolis took to itself the name that had belonged to the whole; but this limited use of the word was at first tentative. Thucydides says, ‘which is called the Pelargikon.’ This is quite different from the definite ‘the Pelasgian citadel’ used by Herodotus. The neuter adjectival form is, so far as I know, never used of the whole complex of the Acropolis plus what is below.

From Thucydides we learn only that what was called the Pelargikon was below the Acropolis. ‘Below’ means immediately, vertically below, for when, in Lucian’s Fisherman[50], Parrhesiades, after baiting his hook with figs and gold, casts down his line to fish for the false philosophers, Philosophy, seeing him hanging over, asks, ‘What are you fishing for, Parrhesiades? Stones from the Pelasgikon?’ An inscription[51] of the latter end of the fifth century confirms the curse mentioned by Thucydides, and shows us that the Pelargikon was a well-defined area, as it was the subject of special legislation. ‘The king (i.e. the magistrate of that name) is to fix the boundaries of the sanctuaries in the Pelargikon, and henceforth altars are not to be set up in the Pelargikon without the consent of the Council and the people, nor may stones be quarried from the Pelargikon, nor earth or stones had out of it. And if any man break these enactments he shall pay 500 drachmas and the king shall report him to the Council.’ Pollux[52] further tells us that there was a penalty of 3 drachmas and costs for even mowing grass within the Pelargikon, and three officers called paredroi guarded against the offence. Evidently the fortifications of the Pelargikon, partially dismantled by the Persians, had become a popular stone quarry; as evidently the state had no intention that these fortifications should fall into complete disuse. The question naturally arises, what was the purport of this surviving Pelargikon, why did it not perish with the rest of the Pelasgic fortifications?

The answer is simple: the Pelargikon remained because it was the great fortification of the citadel gates. According to Kleidemos, it will be remembered ([p. 11]), the work of the early settlers was threefold; they levelled the surface of the citadel, they built a wall round it, and they furnished the fortifications with gates. Where will those gates be? A glance at the section in [Fig. 1] shows that they must be where they are, i.e. at the only point where the rock has an approachable slope, the west or south-west. We say advisedly south-west. The great gate of Mnesicles, the Propylaea which remain to-day, face due west; but within that great gate still remain the foundations[53] of a smaller, older gate ([Fig. 2], G), built in direct connection with the great Pelasgic fortification wall, and that older gate, there before the Persian War[54], faces south-west.

Fig. 14.

This gate facing south-west stands on the summit of the hill, and is but one. Kleidemos ([p. 11]) tells us that the Pelargikon had nine gates. That there should be nine gates round the Acropolis is unthinkable, such an arrangement would weaken the fortification, not strengthen it. The successive gates must somehow have been arranged one inside the other, and the fortifications would probably be in terrace form. The west slope of the Acropolis lends itself to such an arrangement, and in Turkish days this slope was occupied by a succession of redoubts ([Fig. 14]). Fortified Turkish Athens is in some ways nearer to the old Pelasgian fortress than the Acropolis as we see it to-day. We shall probably not be far wrong if we think of the approach to the ancient citadel as a winding way ([Fig. 15]), leading gradually up by successive terraces, passing through successive fortified gates[55], and reaching at last the topmost propylon which faced south-west. These terraces, gates, fortifications, covering a large space, the limits of which will presently be defined, formed a whole known from the time of Thucydides to that of Lucian as the Pelargikon or Pelasgikon.

Fig. 15.

Lucian indeed not only affords our best evidence that, down to Roman days, a place called the Pelasgikon existed below the Acropolis, but is also our chief literary source for defining its limits. We expect those limits to be wide, otherwise the refugees would not have crowded in.

The passages about the Pelasgikon in Lucian are two. First in the ‘Double Indictment[56],’ Dike, standing on the Acropolis, sees Pan approaching, and asks who the god is with the horns and the pipe and the hairy legs. Hermes answers that Pan, who used to dwell on Mt Parthenion, had for his services been honoured with a cave below the Acropolis ‘a little beyond the Pelasgikon.’ There he lives and pays his taxes as a resident alien. The site of Pan’s cave is certainly known; close below it was the Pelasgikon. This marks the extreme limit of the Pelasgikon to the north, for the sanctuary of Aglauros ([p. 81]) by which the Persians climbed up was unquestionably outside the fortifications. Herodotus[57] distinctly says, ‘In front then of the Acropolis, but behind the gates and the ascent, where neither did anyone keep guard, nor could it be expected that anyone could climb up there, some of them ascended near the sanctuary of Aglauros, daughter of Kekrops, though the place was precipitous.’

A second passage[58] in Lucian gives us a further clue. Parrhesiades and Philosophy, from their station on the Acropolis, are watching the philosophers as they crowd up. Parrhesiades says, ‘Goodness, why, at the mere sound of the words, “a ten-pound note,” the whole way up is a mass of them shouldering each other; some are coming along the Pelasgikon, others and more of them by the Areopagos, some are at the tomb of Talos, and others have got ladders and put them against the Anakeion; and, by Jove, there’s a whole hive of them swarming up like bees.’ A description like this cannot be regarded as definite proof; but, taking the shrines in their natural order, it certainly looks as though in Lucian’s days the Pelasgikon extended from the Areopagos to the Asklepieion. The philosophers crowd up by the regular approach (ἄνοδος) to the Propylaea; there is not room for them all, so they spread to right and left, on the right to the Asklepieion, on the left to the Areopagos; some are crowded out still further on the right to the tomb of Talos[59], near the theatre of Dionysos; on the left to the Anakeion[60] on the north side of the Acropolis.

Yet one more topographical hint is left us. In a fragment of Polemon[61] (circ. 180 B.C.), preserved to us by the scholiast on the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles, we hear that Hesychos, the eponymous hero of the Hesychidae, hereditary priests of the Semnae, had a sanctuary. Its position is thus described: ‘it is alongside of the Kyloneion outside the Nine-Gates.’ It is clear that in the days of Polemon either the Nine-Gates were still standing, or their position was exactly known. It is also clear that, whatever was called the Nine-Gates was near the precinct of the Semnae. The eponymous hero of their priests must have had his shrine in or close to the sanctuary of the goddesses. Moreover the Kyloneion or hero shrine ties us to the same spot. When the fellow-conspirators of Kylon were driven from the Acropolis, where Megacles dared not kill them, they fastened themselves by a thread to the image of the goddess to keep themselves in touch; when they reached the altars of the Semnae the thread broke and they were all murdered[62]. The Kyloneion must have been erected as an expiatory shrine on the spot.

When we turn to examine actual remains of the Pelasgikon on the south slope of the Acropolis ([Fig. 2]), we are met by disappointment. Of all the various terraces and supporting walls, only one fragment (P) can definitely be pronounced Pelasgian. The remaining walls seen in [Fig. 16] date between the seventh and the fifth centuries. The walls marked G in the plan in [Fig. 16], but purposely omitted in [Fig. 2], are of good polygonal masonry, and must have been supporting walls to the successive terraces of the Pelasgikon; they are probably of the time of Peisistratos[63], but may even be earlier. It is important to note that though not ‘Pelasgic’ themselves they doubtless supplanted previous ‘Pelasgic’ structures. The line followed by the ancient road must have skirted the outermost wall of the Pelargikon; later it was diverted in order to allow of the building of the Odeion of Herodes Atticus. The Pelasgikon of Lucian’s day only extended as far as the Asklepieion; the earlier fortification must have included what was later the Asklepieion[64], as it would need to protect the important well within that precinct.

Thucydides has stated the limits of the ancient city, ‘what is now the citadel was the city together with what is below it towards about south.’ We now-a-days should not question his statement. The remains of the Pelasgian fortifications disclosed by excavation amply support his main contention, namely, that what is now the citadel was the city, the conformation of the hill and literary evidence justify his careful ‘addendum’ together with what is below it towards about south.

But, as noted before, the readers of Thucydides were not in our position, they knew less about the boundaries of the ancient city, and though they probably knew fairly well the limits of the Pelasgikon, even that was becoming rather a matter of antiquarian interest. Above all, they were citizens of the larger city of Themistocles, the Dipylon was more to them than the Enneapylon. Thucydides therefore feels that the truth about the ancient city needs driving home. He proceeds to give evidence for what was, he felt, scarcely self-evident. If we feel that the evidence is somewhat superfluous, we yet welcome it because incidentally he thereby gives us much and interesting information as to the sanctuaries of ancient Athens.

The evidence is, as above stated ([p. 8]), fourfold.

CHAPTER II.
THE SANCTUARIES IN THE CITADEL.

τὰ γὰρ ἱερὰ ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ἀκροπόλει καὶ ἄλλων θεῶν ἐστί.

There are sanctuaries in the citadel itself, those of other deities as well (as The Goddess).

Needless difficulties have been raised about this sentence, and, quite unnecessarily, a lacuna in the text has been supposed[65]. Though the form of the sentence is compressed, the plain literal meaning is clear. The first piece of evidence that Thucydides states is that in the ‘citadel itself other divinities “as well” have sanctuaries.’ To what does this ‘as well’ refer? Obviously to ‘The Goddess’ mentioned in the clause next but one before as presiding over the Synoikia, ‘The Goddess’ who was so well known that to name her was needless.

It has been proposed to read the sentence thus: ‘There are (ancient) sanctuaries in the citadel itself both “of the goddess Athena” and of other deities as well.’ This is true, but it is not what Thucydides says and not what he means. He does not desire to make any statement whatever about the sanctuaries of Athene or their antiquity; both propositions are for the moment irrelevant; he wishes to say what he does say, that ‘there are sanctuaries in the Acropolis itself, those of other deities as well (as The Goddess).’ It is the ‘other deities’ not ‘The Goddess’ who are the point.

Fig. 16.

But Thucydides always leaves perhaps rather much to the intelligence of his readers. It may fairly be asked, why is the existence of these sanctuaries of ‘other deities’ an argument in support of the statement that the Acropolis was the ancient city? Once fairly asked, the question answers itself. The Acropolis in the time of Thucydides was a hill sacred to Athena, it was almost her temenos; the other gods, Apollo, Zeus, Aphrodite, had their most important sanctuaries down below, all over the great ‘wheel-shaped’ city. Athena had from time immemorial, it was believed, dwelt on the hill; any statement about her shrines would prove nothing one way or the other. But in the old days, before there was any ‘down below,’ any ‘wheel-shaped’ city, if the ‘other gods’ were to be city gods at all they must have their shrines up above. Such shrines there were on the Acropolis itself; this made it additionally probable that the Acropolis was the ancient city. The reasoning is quite clear and relevant, and the argument is just the sort that an Athenian of the time of Thucydides, with his head full of the dominant Athena, and apt to forget the ‘other gods,’ would need to have recalled to his mind.

The citadel of classical days, with its ‘old Athena temple,’ Parthenon and its Erechtheion lies before us in [Fig. 16]. The ‘old Athena temple’ and the Parthenon belong to ‘The Goddess,’ where then are the ‘sanctuaries in the citadel itself which belong to other deities’ of which Thucydides is thinking?

For such we naturally look to the north side of the Acropolis, where lay the ancient king’s palace ([Fig. 2], C). About that old palace westward there lay clustered a number of early altars, ‘tokens’ (σημεῖα), sacred places and things (ἱερά). Later these were enclosed in the complex building known to us as the Erechtheion. It is by studying the plan of this later temple that we can best understand the grouping and significance of the earlier sanctuaries.

The Erechtheion as we have it now is shown in [Fig. 17]. Its plan is obviously anomalous, and has puzzled generations of architects. It was reserved for Professor Dörpfeld, with his imaginative insight, to divine that the temple, as we have it, is incomplete; and, further, to reconstruct conjecturally the complete design. In the light of this reconstruction the Erechtheion, as we now possess it, became for the first time intelligible.

Fig. 17.

Fig. 18.

This reconstruction is shown in [Fig. 18]. The temple in the original plan was intended to consist of two cellas, each furnished with a pronaos; the east cella is marked on the plan ‘Athena-Polias Tempel,’ the west cella is marked ‘opisthodom,’ i.e. opisthodomos or back chamber. Between these two cellas is a building divided into three chambers, marked in the plan ‘Poseidon-Erechth(eus)-Tempel.’ The middle chamber of the three is entered by two porches, a large one to the north, a smaller one—the famous Karyatid porch—to the south. This middle chamber alone of the three was probably provided with a low roof as shown in the sketch in [Fig. 19]. A building so complex cries aloud for explanation. It has become symmetrical, but what is its significance? What for us its connection with the sanctuaries of ‘other deities as well’?

Fig. 19.

To understand the new temple we must go back to the times before it was built[66]. It was intended—though ultimately this intention was not fully accomplished—to replace other existing sanctuaries, and these were first the old temple of Athena, and second the old temple of Erechtheus. The ‘old temple of Athena’ appears on the plan ([Fig. 18]) to the south of the Erechtheion; the very scanty remains of the old temple of Poseidon-Erechtheus are seen running diagonally under the western part of the new Erechtheion.

The ‘old temple of Athena’ consisted, it is clear, of two parts: to the east the actual cella of the goddess; to the west, divided into three chambers, the opisthodomos or treasure-house. We are concerned wholly, it must be noted, with the ‘other deities,’ not with Athena; for from the consideration of Athena and her sanctuaries Thucydides has dispensed us; but the arrangement of the new Erechtheion cannot be understood without some reference to the disposition of the old temple of Athena.

Perikles intended to demolish not only the old Erechtheion but also the old temple of Athena, and to supplant them by a common sanctuary. The east cella in the old Athena temple was to be replaced by an east cella for the goddess in the new; the opisthodomos to the west of the old temple by an opisthodomos to the west of the new. Between these parts of the old Athena temple three chambers were to be devoted to replacing the old Erechtheion. It is difficult by help of ground-plans to realize the different levels of the temple, but those who have been on the spot will remember that the new cella of Athena is on the same level as the old. The Erechtheion with its different levels is a striking contrast to the Parthenon, where, as we have already seen, the slope of the ground was levelled up and that at enormous expense. This preservation of different levels in the Erechtheion is in itself sufficient evidence of the sanctity of the different cults to be enshrined. The longer complex structure, with its different levels and its five chambers, was intended, as Perikles planned it, to be entered by the two porches, north and south. Structurally these would reduce the effect of undue length, but they had also another purpose—the north porch contained the trident mark of Poseidon, the south the grave of Kekrops.

The plan of Perikles was never completed. By some one’s machinations, whether of architect, priest, or politician we do not know, he was—as before in the building of the Propylaea—frustrated, and obliged to be content with a truncated scheme. The new Erechtheion almost certainly had been begun before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. When Perikles found that his plan was not accepted in full, he did not design a new temple but made a compromise obviously intended to be provisional. He was again frustrated in the execution even of this modified scheme, which was not completed till much later. The Erechtheion that we know has the east cella for Athena complete and the two porches, but two only of the three intended midway chambers were built, and the westernmost one, as appears on the plan, is slightly reduced in size. The west cella was never even begun. It is probable that Perikles never succeeded in transferring the image of Athena from her old temple to the new cella, but this question[67] it is not necessary we should here decide.

Setting aside those portions of the Erechtheion which were intended to supply the place of the old temple of Athena, namely the east cella and the proposed opisthodomos to the west, we have now to consider what were the ancient sanctities (ἱερά) of ‘other deities’ which the three central chambers and the two porches were planned to enshrine. They are as follows:—

1. The hero-tomb of Kekrops.

2. The Pandroseion.

3. Three ‘tokens’ (σημεῖα).

a. A sacred olive tree.

b. A ‘sea’ called after Erechtheus.

c. A trident mark sacred to Poseidon.

1. The hero-tomb of Kekrops.

We begin with Kekrops because, by almost uniform tradition, with Kekrops Athens began. The Parian Chronicle[68] sets him at the head of the kings of Athens, and the date assigned to him is 1582 B.C., before Kranaus, before Amphictyon, before Erechtheus. Thucydides[69] names him as the typical early Athenian king. ‘Under Kekrops and the first kings,’ he writes; Apollodorus[70] says definitely, ‘the indigenous Kekrops, whose body was compounded of man and snake, first reigned over Attica, and the country which before was called Attica was from him named Kekropia.’ Herodotus[71] looked back to a day before Athens was Athens and when there were no Athenians at all: ‘The Athenians,’ he says, ‘at the time when the Pelasgians held that which is now called Hellas, were Pelasgians and they were called Kranai; under the rule of Kekrops they were called Kekropidae; but when Erechtheus succeeded they changed their name for that of Athenians, and when Ion, son of Xuthus, became general, they took from him the name of Ionians.’

Herodotus touches the truth. Kekrops was not the first king of Athens, he was king before there was any Athens, long before. He was the ancestor of the clan of the Kekropidae. At some very early date—the Parian marble may very likely be roughly right—the Kekropidae got possession of the Acropolis and called it Kekropia. Kekropis was the name not only of one of the four original Attic tribes but also of one of the later ten[72]. But though the clan kept its old name it lost the headship of Kekropia. Kekrops had only one son, Erysichthon[73], and he died childless; that is the mythological way of saying that the kingship changed families. Then came the time when the leading clan were Erechtheidae, descendants not of Kekrops, but of Erechtheus. These are Homer’s days. He knows nothing of Kekrops and Kekropia, only of ‘the people of Erechtheus[74].’ Then still later came another change; those who once were the people of Erechtheus became the people of Athena, Athenians. But Kekrops and Kekropia were first, probably long first. Kekrops is the hero-founder, the typical old-world king. It is Kekrops whom Bdelycleon[75], tormented by modernity, invokes:

‘Kekrops, oh my king and hero, thou that hast the dragon’s feet.’

Kekrops was half man, half snake. His ‘double nature’ gave logographers and even philosophers much trouble. Was it because he had the understanding of a man and the strength of a dragon, was it because, at first a good king, he later became a tyrant, or because he knew two languages (Egyptian and Greek), or because he instituted marriage? The curious will find it all in Tzetzes[76]. Eager anthropologists have seized on Kekrops as a totem-snake, but the average orthodox mythologist is content to see in his snake-tail the symbol of the ‘earth-born’ Athenians. This interpretation grazes the truth, but just misses the point. The hybrid form is of course transitional. Kekrops is sloughing off his snake form[77] in deference to the inveterate anthropomorphism of the Greek. He was once a complete snake, not because he was a totem-snake, not because he was an ‘autochthonous hero,’ but because he was a dead man and all dead persons of importance, all heroes, become snakes.

No one has done so much to obscure the early history of Athenian religion as Athena herself, by her constant habit of taking over the attributes of other divinities[78]. The eponymous hero of each victorious tribe, Kekrops and Erechtheus in turn, is a home-keeping, home-guarding snake (οἰκουρὸς ὄφις). But by the time of Herodotus[79] the sacred snake supposed to live on and guard the Acropolis lives in the sanctuary of Athena, and is almost the embodiment of the goddess herself; when the snake refused the honey-cake it was taken as an omen that ‘the goddess had deserted the Acropolis.’ By the time of Pheidias the snake is just an attribute of the Parthenos, and was set to crouch beneath her shield. But Pausanias[80] has an inkling of the truth; he says, ‘close beside the spear is a snake: this snake is probably Erichthonios.’ The real relation of goddess and snake was simply this: the original pair of divinities worshipped in many local cults were a matriarchal goddess, a local form of earth-goddess, and the local hero of the place in snake form as her male correlative; such a pair were Demeter and the snake-king Kenchreus at Eleusis[81], such were Chryse and her home-keeping nameless guardian snake on Lemnos[82], such were Eileithyia and Sosipolis at Olympia[83], such were ‘the goddess’ and her successive heroes Kekrops and Erichthonios or Erechtheus; only, as will later be seen, in this last pair another goddess preceded Athena.

Kekrops then was a dead, divinized hero embodied as a snake; the natural place for his worship was his tomb, probably the earliest sanctuary of the Acropolis. Clement[84] of Alexandria says, ‘the tomb of Kekrops is at Athens on the Acropolis,’ and Theodoretus[85], quoting Antiochos, adds that it is ‘by the Poliouchos herself,’ the goddess of the city. We might safely assume that a hero-tomb was a sanctuary, but we have express evidence: in an honorary decree[86] respecting the ‘ephebi’ of the deme of Kekrops it is ordered that the decree shall be set up ‘in the sanctuary of Kekrops,’ and from another decree[87] we learn the name of a ‘priest of Kekrops.’

But our most definite evidence as to where the tomb of Kekrops lay comes from the famous Chandler inscription[88] now in the British Museum. This inscription is exactly dated by the archonship of Diokles (409-408 B.C.). It is a statement of the exact condition in which the overseers of the unfinished temple took over the work, what part was half finished, what unwrought and unchannelled (i.e. columns), and what were completely finished but not set up in their place. The various parts of the temple are described as near or opposite to such and such an ancient shrine, and fortunately among these descriptions occur more than one mention of the Kekropion. The following[89] is decisive: ‘Concerning the porch beside the Kekropion the roof stones above the Korae must be....’ The porch of the Karyatids, or to call it by its ancient[90] name, the porch of the Korae, the Maidens, was beside, close to, the Kekropion.

So far all is certain. The tomb of Kekrops was close to the porch of the Maidens; but in which direction? We should expect it to be north-west, because in that direction, as will be immediately ([p. 48]) shown, lay the precinct of Pandrosos, daughter of Kekrops. Professor Dörpfeld[91] places it conjecturally at D ([Fig. 16]), and the site is almost certain. It has been already noted that the west wall of the present Erechtheion was set back a short distance within its original plan. It may have been to avoid trenching on the tomb of Kekrops. Moreover, at the south end of this wall there is a great gap in the ancient masonry of about 10 ft. long by 10 high. The gap is evident, though it was filled up by modern masonry. It is spanned by an enormous ancient block of stone, 15 ft. by 5. Here probably was buried the serpent king.

Fig. 19.*

With the serpent king and his prophylactic tomb clearly in our minds, we turn with new eyes to examine certain fragments of sculpture discovered in the recent excavations. Nothing perhaps caused more surprise when these fragments came to light than the size and splendour of the snake-figures. We have already seen ([p. 27]) that the western pediment of the Hecatompedon held two sea-monsters, a Triton and Typhon; the eastern pediment held two land-snakes of even greater magnificence. The design of this pediment as restored by Dr. Wiegand[92] is as follows ([Fig. 19*]). In the apex is seated Athena; to her right hand a figure seated and crowned, and therefore a king or a god; this figure survives, but the figure which must have balanced him to the left of the goddess is lost for ever. Athena is supreme; the surviving figure is usually called Zeus, but from his subordinate place it seems to me that it is more likely he is either a subordinate god, Poseidon, or a local king, Erechtheus. Possibly Athena is seated between Poseidon and Erechtheus.

It is, after all, not the seated protagonists of the pediment, be they Olympians or local kings, who most interest us, but the two great snakes who in the angles keep watch and ward. These snakes are often described as ‘decorative’ or ‘space-filling.’ But surely they are too alive, too large, too dominant to be mere accessories. One of them is shown in [Fig. 19*] in detail, so far as he can be represented by an uncoloured reproduction. In the original he is blue and orange, and his companion in the other angle is a vivid emerald green.

Herodotus[93], it is true, speaks of one snake only as guardian of the Acropolis, the snake who when the land was beset by the Persians, would not eat its honey-cake; but then Herodotus writes as if he had no personal knowledge: ‘the Athenians say there is a great snake.’ In the story of Erichthonios tradition, and good Attic tradition, knew of two. Hermes in the Ion of Euripides[94] says, referring to Erichthonios,

‘To him

What time she gave him to the Agraulid maids

Athena bound for watch two guardian snakes;

In memory whereof Erechtheus’ sons

In Athens still upon their nursing babes

Put serpents wrought of gold’;

and on the well-known vase in the British museum[95] depicting the scene, two snakes appear. We need not say that the two snakes of the pediment are a duplicated Kekrops, but we may and do say that they are two hero-snakes, guardians of the city, and we may further conjecture that they were an old pair, male and female. This conjecture brings us to the woman counterpart of Kekrops, the snake king, his ‘daughter’ Pandrosos.

2. The Pandroseion.

Kekrops and his faithful daughter Pandrosos were not far sundered. The situation of the Pandroseion is, within narrow limits, certain. It was an enclosure to the west of the present Erechtheion. The invaluable Chandler inscription[96] speaks of ‘the pillars on the wall towards the Pandroseion.’ This must refer to the west wall, on which were four engaged pillars at a height of about 12 feet from the ground. In another inscription[97], found during the pulling down of the ‘Odysseus’ Bastion, mention is made of two pediments, one towards the east and the other ‘towards the Pandroseion.’

We know, then, certainly that the Pandroseion was west of the present Erechtheion. We know also that it was close to the ‘old temple of Athena.’ Pausanias[98], in passing from the one to the other, distinctly says: ‘The temple of Pandrosos adjoins the temple of Athena.’ As Pausanias distinctly says there was a temple (ναός), not merely a temenos or sanctuary (ἱερόν), it is disappointing that excavations have yielded no trace.

In actual cultus and topography we have found Kekrops side by side with one woman figure, Pandrosos. In current mythology he has three daughters, of whom is told the thrice familiar story of the child and the chest[99]. It will repay examination.

The child Erichthonios is born from the Earth in the presence of Kekrops. His real mother, Earth, gives him up to the tendance of Athena; such is the scene familiar on terra-cottas and vase-paintings. Athena places him in a chest or wicker-basket, and gives him to the three daughters of Kekrops, Pandrosos, Herse, Aglauros, with strict orders not to open the chest. The two sisters, Herse and Aglauros (or according to some versions all three), overcome by curiosity open the chest, and see the child with a snake or snakes coiled about him. In terror at the snake, who pursues them, and fearing the anger of Athena, they cast themselves down from the Acropolis.

The story is manifestly absurd, and in some of the elements plainly aetiological.

The suicide of the disobedient sisters is easily explicable. Half way down the Acropolis, below the steepest portion of the rock, were a number of shrines and tombs. Why were they there? Clearly because the persons after whom they were named had thrown themselves down, or been thrown down, from the top. Such a shrine was the tomb of Talos[100], near the Asklepieion. Daedalos was jealous of Talos, and threw him down from the rock. Such was also the shrine of Aegeus[101], below the temple of Nike Apteros, where Aegeus in despair at the sight of the black sail cast himself down. Such was the sanctuary of Aglauros[102] on the north side of the Acropolis. Somebody must have cast herself down to account for the situation. When one sister only is mentioned she is naturally Aglauros, but all three are often allowed to commit suicide for completeness sake.

Of the three sisters, Herse was not a real person[103]; she has no shrine, she is only a heroine invented to account for the ceremony of the Hersephoria. The cult of Aglauros is below the Acropolis and manifestly separate from that of Pandrosos, and Pandrosos alone for the present need be considered.

Pausanias, after stating that the temple of Pandrosos adjoins that of Athena, says that she was ‘the only one of the sisters who was blameless in the affair of the chest intrusted to them.’ As Pandrosos had a shrine so revered it would have been awkward to make her out guilty. He then, without telling us whether or no he perceives any connection, proceeds to describe ‘a thing which caused me the greatest astonishment and is not generally known.’ The thing that so astonished Pausanias was the ceremony of the Arrephoria[104]. Maidens called Arrephoroi bore upon their heads certain sacred things covered up; these they carried by night by a natural underground passage to a precinct near to that of Aphrodite in the Gardens. There they left what they had been carrying, and brought back other things also wrapped up and unknown. From the analogy of other mystery cults we may be sure that the objects carried were some sort of fertility-charms, and they would be carried in a chest or wicker basket, a cista or a liknon, veiled that the sacred thing might not be seen. The girl-Arrephoroi might not look into the sacred chests. Why? The answer was ready, the goddess they served, Pandrosos, had also her sacred chest into which she and she only had not looked.

The personality of Pandrosos is hard to seize and fix. One thing is clear; ‘Pandrosos’ is not a mere ‘title of Athena.’ She manifestly, as daughter of Kekrops, belongs to that earlier stratum before the dominance of The Goddess. Later Athena absorbed her as she absorbed everything else. In official inscriptions she usually comes after Athena, and is clearly a separate personality. Thus the epheboi[105] offered their ‘sacrifices at departure (ἐξιτήρια) on the Acropolis to Athena Polias and to Kourotrophos and to Pandrosos,’ and women swore by her, though not so often as by Aglauros. We have one ritual particular that looked as though between her and Athene there was at some time friction. Harpocration[106] in explaining the rare word ‘ἐπίβοιον,’ ‘that which is after the ox,’ says, quoting from Philochoros, that it was the name given to a sacrifice to Pandrosos. If any one sacrificed an ox to Athena it was necessary to sacrifice a sheep to Pandrosos. Pandrosos was in danger of being effaced by Athena, and some one was determined this should not be; all that ‘The Goddess’ could secure was precedence.

We have found, then, a maiden goddess who was there before ‘The Goddess,’ nay, who may have herself been ‘The Goddess’ before Athena claimed the title. Pandrosos belongs to the early order of the Kekropidae, before the dwellers on the hill became Athenians. It is possible that her presence throws some light on the beautiful, but as yet enigmatic figures of the ‘Maidens’ who have been restored to us by the recent excavations. Who and what are they?

The ‘Maiden’ whose figure is chosen for the frontispiece of this book was found alone, somewhat later than the rest, in October, 1888, not like the others ([p. 16]) North of the Erechtheion, but near the wall of Kimon to the South, between the precinct of Artemis-Brauronia and the West front of the Parthenon. There is a certain fitness in this, because though in dress, adornments, colouring, general type, she is like the rest, her great beauty will always make her a thing apart. The torso and head were found separate, and about the torso there is nothing specially noteworthy. The unique loveliness is all of the face, and it escapes analysis. There are, however, peculiarities worth noting. The right eye is set much more obliquely than the left. This gives an irregular charm and individuality; the unusually high forehead emphasizes the austere virginal air, and the same may be said of the straight chest and long thin throat. But the secret of her beauty is still kept; standing as she does now among the other ‘Maidens,’ she is a creature from another world, and for all their beauty the rest look but a kindly mob of robust mothers and genial housewives.

The statues in question, which now number upwards of fifty, have been called by the name ‘Maidens,’ a name current among archaeologists. It is open to objection, because ‘maidens’ (κόραι) meant in the official language of the inscription already quoted[107] the ‘Caryatid’ figures of the Erechtheion. The word has, however, one great advantage, it is vague and commits the user of it to no theory as to the significance of the statues. The word korè meant to the Greek not only maiden, but doll or puppet or statue of a maiden. We need only recall the familiar epigram with the dedication to Artemis[108]:

Maid of the Mere, Timaretè here brings

Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball

To thee a Maid, her maiden offerings,

Her snood, her maiden dolls their clothes and all.

Here the korai are actual dolls, but in Attic inscriptions we find the word korè used of a statue[109], thus, ‘a korè of gold on a pillar’; or again in a dedication to Poseidon, ‘he dedicated as firstfruits this korè.’ A korè is one form of an agalma, a thing of delight.

The statues, then, may be called ‘Maidens,’ but the word is too vague to help us much as to their significance, and it is their significance, who and what they are, not their value in the history of art that here concerns us.

The question is generally put thus, Are they statues of Athena, or are they statues of mortal women dedicated to her? priestesses or merely worshippers? Statues of Athena they are, I think, certainly not; they have neither helmet, spear, shield, nor even aegis. Athena may appear sporadically without characteristic attributes, but that a series of fifty statues of Athena should be dedicated without a single hint of anything that made Athena to be Athena is scarcely possible.

Are they, then, mortal maidens? For priestesses their number, restricted as they are by style to a short period of years, is too many. If they are mere mortal worshippers, it is at least strange that in the only two cases where we have inscribed bases they are dedicated by men. In one case we have the simple statement: ‘Euthydikos son of Thalearchus dedicated[110]’; on the other, Antenor, it is stated, makes the statue, Nearchos dedicates it as ‘firstfruits of his works[111].’ Would Nearchos dedicate a statue of mortal woman as ‘firstfruits of his works’? We seem to be at an impasse.

But there is surely a third solution open to us. The maidens need not be mortal because they are not Athena. There was a time before the armed maiden with spear and shield and aegis came from Libya or the East, a time when another maiden ruled upon the hill and was ‘The Goddess.’ Is it not at least possible that the maidens are made in her image, and that when the armed goddess took possession of the hill, when the ancient Kekropidae and Erechtheidae became Athenaioi, the maidens of the old order passed into the service of the maiden of the new? that we must think of their type as shaped at least for the worship of Pandrosos rather than Athena? The type of the warlike goddess was not fashionable in Greece. The Greeks, if any people, held firmly the doctrine that

A woman armed makes war upon herself.

The woman armed and disarmed, the Amazon in defeat, they made beautiful and poignantly human, but the woman armed and triumphant, Athena Nikephoros, remained a cold unreality. The korè of Eleusis is not armed, but at Corinth and at Sparta there was that strangest of all sights—the image of Aphrodite armed[112]. Whence she came is, as will later be seen ([p. 109]), not doubtful. In Cythera[113], Pausanias tells us, ‘the sanctuary of the Heavenly Goddess is most holy, and of all Greek sanctuaries of Aphrodite this is most ancient. The goddess is represented by a wooden image armed.’ The Cythereans called their armed Oriental goddess Cytherea. Did the Athenians call the same armed goddess ‘Athenaia’? Be that as it may, before her coming they worshipped the unarmed maiden.

Before we pass from Kekrops and Pandrosos to the later order under Erechtheus, the traditional events reputed of the reign of Kekrops must be noted. There are three:—

1. The contest between Athena and Poseidon, of which Kekrops acted as judge.

2. The introduction of the worship of Zeus.

3. The institution of marriage.

The discussion of the contest between Athena and Poseidon really belongs to the Erechtheid period, and must stand over till then. The introduction of the worship of Zeus and the institution of marriage are probably but the religious and social forces of the same advance, and may be taken together.

In front of the Erechtheion, Pausanias[114] tells us, was an altar dedicated to Zeus Hypatos, on which no living thing was sacrificed, but only cakes (πέλανοι). Pausanias does not here say that the altar was dedicated by Kekrops, but, in his discussion of Arcadia[115] and the human sacrifice of Lycaon, he says, ‘Kekrops was the first who gave to Zeus the title of Supreme, and he would not sacrifice anything that had life, but he burned on the altar the local cakes which the Athenians to this day call pelanoi.’ What probably happened was just the reverse of what Pausanias describes: there was an old altar to ‘the Supreme,’ the Hypatos; at some time or other this was taken over by the immigrant Zeus; the shift was attributed to Kekrops.

Zeus was essentially of the patriarchal order, i.e. of a condition of things in which the father rather than the mother is the head of the family, gives his name to the children, and holds the family property and conducts the family worship. Nothing could be more patriarchal than the constitution of the Homeric Olympus. Such a condition of things is necessarily connected with some form of the social institution known to us as marriage. Accordingly we learn from Athenaeus[116], quoting from Clearchus the pupil of Aristotle, that ‘At Athens Kekrops was the first to join one woman to one man: before connections had taken place at random and marriages were in common—hence as some think Kekrops was called “Twyformed” (διφυής) since before his day people did not know who their fathers were on account of the number’ (of possible parents). The story of the contest between Athene and Poseidon was later mixed up with the same tradition of the shift from patriarchy to matriarchy. St Augustine[117] says that the women voted for Athena, and their punishment was to be, among other things, that ‘no one was hereafter to be called by his mother’s name.’

We pass to the three tokens (σημεῖα), the first of which is

a. The sacred olive-tree.

The holy bloom of the olive, whose hoar leaf

High in the shadowy shrine of Pandrosos

Hath honour of us all.

Apollodorus[118] says, ‘After him (Poseidon) came Athena, and having made Kekrops witness of her seizure, she planted the olive which is now shown in the Pandroseion.’ A ‘seizure’ indeed, and not from Poseidon but from the elder goddess Pandrosos. Athena is manifestly an interloper; why should Pandrosos have other people’s olive trees planted in her precinct? The olive is but one of the many ‘tokens’ or attributes that Athena wrested to herself. It was there before her, Kekrops quite rightly holds it in his hand.

The olive-tree grew in the Pandroseion, it also grew in the older Erechtheion. Herodotus[119] says, ‘There is on this Acropolis a temple of Erechtheus, who is called earth-born, and in it are an olive-tree and a sea which, according to the current tradition among the Athenians, Poseidon and Athenaia planted as tokens when they contended for the country.’ There is no discrepancy, the Pandroseion must have been included in the older Erechtheion.

By a most happy chance, among the fragments of decorative sculpture left us is one on which is carved ‘the holy bloom of the olive,’ in three delicate sprays. The real sacred olive was old and stunted and crooked[120], but the artist went his own way. The fragments are grouped together in a conjectural restoration[121] in [Fig. 20]. All that is certain is that we have a Doric building and adjacent to it the wall of a precinct over which the olive is growing. Against the wall of the building is the figure of a woman in purple, wearing peplos and himation. Against the wall of the precinct once stood a man. Only one leg of him is left. The two figures might be part of a procession. The woman, standing full face, may belong to the same composition, but this is not certain. She wears a red chiton and bluish-green himation. On her head is a pad (τύλη), for she is carrying some burden. One of her arms is lifted to support it. We think instinctively of the Arrephoroi. The figure, though very rudely hewn, has something of the lovely seriousness of the other ‘maidens.’ The whole composition may have belonged to a pediment of the earlier Erechtheion, but its pictorial character makes it more probably a votive relief for dedication there, and representing some scene of worship at the ancient shrine.

Within the older Erechtheion we have further

(b) A cistern or ‘sea,’ called after Erechtheus. With it may be taken

(c) A trident-mark, sacred to Poseidon.

Fortunately about the position of these two sacred things there is no doubt. Underneath the pavement of the westernmost chamber (c) of the present Erechtheion is a large cistern[122] hewn in the rock, and at A in the North porch are the marks of the trident.

Fig. 20.

The two things together, the sea-water in the cistern and the trident-mark, were both associated with Poseidon. Pausanias[123] says they were said to be ‘the evidence produced by Poseidon in support of his claim to the country.’ Apollodorus[124] says, ‘Poseidon came first to Attica and smote with his trident in the middle of the Acropolis and produced the sea which they now call Erechtheïs.’

Athena produced the olive-tree, Poseidon the salt well and the trident-mark as ‘tokens’ or evidence of their claim. This is manifest aetiology. There had been on the Acropolis from time immemorial certain things reputed sacred, a gnarled olive-tree, a brackish well, three holes in a rock. It was the obvious policy of any divinity who wished to be worshipped at Athens to annex these tokens. Pandrosos had the olive-tree before Athena. The name of the well Erechtheïs shows that it was a ‘token’ of Erechtheus rather than of Poseidon.

Such sacred trees, such ‘seas,’ such curious marks existed elsewhere; Pausanias[125] himself notes in another inland place, Aphrodisias in Caria, there was a sea-well. What impressed him as noteworthy about the well at Athens was that when the South wind was blowing it gave forth the sound of waves, but then as he does not say if he waited for a South wind, the ‘sound of waves’ may have been a detail supplied by the guides.

The trident-mark belongs to a class of sacred things that will repay somewhat closer attention. Fresh light has been thrown upon it by a recent discovery. In examining the roof of the North Porch, with a view to repairs, it was observed that immediately above the trident-mark an opening in the roof had been purposely left. The object is clear; the sacred token had to be left open to the sky; it had to be sub divo. This is manifestly more appropriate to a sky-god than to a sea-god.

Our best analogies are drawn from Roman sources. Ovid[126] tells us that when the new Capitol was being built a whole multitude of divinities were consulted by augury as to whether they would withdraw to make place for Jupiter. They tactfully consented, all but old Terminus. He stood fast, remaining in his shrine, and still possesses a temple in common with mighty Jupiter:

And still, that he may see only heaven’s signs

In the roof above him is a little hole.

When place was wanted for an Olympian, be he Zeus or Poseidon or Athena, the elder divinities were not always so courteously consulted. We do not even know whose open air token Poseidon seized.

Servius[127], commenting on ‘the steadfast stone of the Capitol,’ tells the same story. There was a time when there was no temple of Jupiter, that is there was no Jupiter. Augury said that the Tarpeian mount was the place to build one, but on it were already a number of shrines of other divinities. Ceremonies were performed to ‘call out’ by means of sacrifice the other divinities to other temples. They all willingly migrated, only Terminus declined to move: this was taken as a sign that the Roman empire would be for all eternity, and hence in the Capitoline temple the part of the roof immediately above, which looks down on the very stone of Terminus, was open, for to Terminus it is not allowable to sacrifice save in the open air. Terminus was just a sacred stone or herm, incidentally to the practical Romans a boundary god. Another Roman god, Fidius[128], had in his temple a roof with a hole in it (perforatum tectum), and Fulgur, Caelum, Sol and Luna had all to dwell in hypaethral temples[129]. Wherever the lightning struck was in Greece holy ground, to be fenced in but open always above to the god who had sanctified it, to the ‘descender,’ Kataibates[130]. Kataibates became Zeus Kataibates, Fulgur Jupiter Fulgur, but the lightning and the ‘descender’ were there before the coming of the Olympian, and the threefold mark preceded Poseidon.

In picturing to ourselves therefore the ancient sanctities of the Acropolis, we have to begin with certain natural holy things that were there from time immemorial, that were holy in themselves, not because they were consecrated to this or that divinity. Such were the olive-tree, the salt sea-well, the trident-mark—we are back in a time rather of holy things than divine persons. Successive heroic families, in possessing themselves of the kingship, take possession of these sanctities; they are as it were the regalia. In the time of the Kekropidae, Pandrosos, daughter and paredros of Kekrops, owns the olive-tree; in the time of the Erechtheidae the well is called Erechtheïs, and all the sacred things are included in an Erechtheion. It is worth noting that though Poseidon claimed the well and the trident-mark he never gave his name to either, and though Athena boasted of the olive-tree and snake, neither was ever called after her.

The name of Erechtheus or Erechthonios marks a stage definitely later than that of Kekrops. In the reign of Kekrops we hear nothing of foreign policy. He is engaged in civilizing his people, in marrying them, in teaching them to offer bloodless sacrifice. But the reign of Erechtheus is marked by a great war. He fought with and conquered Eumolpos, king of the neighbouring burgh Eleusis. Kekropia has taken the first step towards that hegemony she was to obtain under Theseus.