Jane Ellen Harrison

“ Athena, it is evident, is the later intruder, but we have had no evidence of Poseidon. Poseidon’s position at Athens is a very peculiar one. Unlike Erechtheus, he has no temple called after him, he cannot give his name even to a salt sea-well, his trident-mark is probably to begin with a thunder-smitten rock; unlike Athena he never gets the people called after him, and yet, spite of all this, his worship is ancient and deep-rooted, and from him rather than from Zeus or Athena the old nobility of Athens claimed to be descended. ”

“ One unified city and one goddess, the goddess who needs no [7] 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 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? ”

“ It is inaccessible on all sides but the West, on which it is approached by a steep slope. This is the future Acropolis or Citadel of Athens. We place ourselves upon this eminence and cast our eyes about us. Immediately on the West is a second hill, of irregular form, lower than that on which we stand and opposite to us. This is the Areopagus. Beneath it on the South-West is a valley neither deep nor narrow, open both at the North-West and South-East. Here was the Agora or public place of Athens. ”

“ Possibly at this point, if the reader knows modern Athens, the words ‘the unknown site’ of the Olympion will rouse an instinctive protest. Surely the site of the Olympieion, with its familiar cluster of Corinthian columns, is of all things most certain and familiar. It lies South-East of the Acropolis not far from the Ilissos (see Fig. 49) . A moment’s consideration will however show that this Olympieion, though familiar, is irrelevant, nay impossible. It is too remote to be described as towards the ancient city, it is too recent to be accounted an ancient sanctuary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [54] 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] . ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one’s feelings are hurt; the snake of the Peloponnesos is merely affiliated to the local Athenian hero-snake, the same offerings are due to both, the pelanoi, the votive limbs. But the new-comer is too strong; Asklepios waxes, Amynos wanes—into an adjective. Asklepios outgrows the little precinct and betakes himself to a new and grander sanctuary on the South slope. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the days when the Kallirrhoë of Thucydides could be placed on the Ilissus the conception of Athens formed by scholars was of an Athens in the days of Pericles. To speak of ancient Athens as a ‘Mycenaean’ city would then have been unmeaning, if not positively insulting. As soon as we realise the conditions of a Pelasgian burgh, with its king and his immediate dependents massed upon and close up to the citadel, we know that the citadel-well must be close at hand—the Fair-Fount of the Pnyx is already full far. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our Olympion at the North-West corner of the Acropolis would fit the scene somewhat better than the great temple near the Ilissos; but that is all, the passage proves nothing.
A question more important perhaps than any topographical issue remains. Do we know anything of the nature of the god worshipped in the ancient sanctuary, or of the character of his ritual? The question may seem to some superfluous. Zeus is surely Zeus everywhere and for all time, his cloud-compelling nature and his splendid sacrificial feasts familiar from Homer downwards. ”

“ Pausanias is distinguishing it from the other sanctuary of Apollo near at hand, the Delphinion [294] .
Sanctuaries so late as these could not fairly be used to prove even the direction of the city of Kekrops; but, as already shown, it is not direction, but size with which Thucydides is concerned. To give sanctuaries like the Olympieion and Pythion, which lay outside even the city of Themistocles, as evidence of the smallness of an ancient ‘Mycenaean’ city, a Pelasgic fortress, is an absurdity so manifest that statement is refutation. We are brought face to face with the third source of error. ”

“ 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 [45] 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 ”

“ We have a cave, an altar: round the altar three nymphs are dancing, usually led by Hermes, and, perched on the side of the cave or looking through a hole, Pan is piping to them. The three nymphs, three daughters of Kekrops, were then dancing on the Long Rocks long before Pan came to pipe to them. Concerned as we are for the present with Apollo and his Pythion, it is only necessary to note that their shrine, the sanctuary of Aglauros, must have been near the cave of Pan, somewhere to the East. ”

“ To the East of the Pythion, near to the supposed site of the temenos of Aglauros, was found an inscription [166] with a dedication to Zeus, but, as inscriptions are easily moveable, no great importance can be attached to this isolated fact. Of definite monumental evidence for the existence of a sanctuary of Zeus where we seek it, [77] we must frankly own at the outset there is nothing certain [167] . It must stand or fall with the Pythion.
Before examining such literary evidence as exists it is necessary to note clearly that Thucydides mentions not a temple but a sanctuary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Zeus had altars on the Acropolis itself; Apollo, great though he was, never forced an entrance there. The fact is surely significant. Herodotus [176] , it will be remembered, marks the successive stages of the development of Athens: under Kekrops they were Kekropidai, under Erechtheus they were Athenians, and last, ‘when Ion, son of Xuthos, became their leader, from him they were called Ionians.’ Ion was the first Athenian polemarch [177] .
One thing is clear, Ion marks the incoming of a new race, a race with Zeus and Apollo for their gods. ”

“ The fact is borne in upon any one and every one who has made even a brief exploration, he feels himself unquestionably exploring what must have been the main artificial water-supply of ancient Athens, and here, if such a supply were needed, must have been the centre of the ancient city life.
The aqueduct is dated securely by comparison with the work of Eupalinos at Samos as of the time of the despots. Two striking analogies are observable between the aqueduct of Peisistratos at Athens and that of Polycrates at Samos. These are the character of the pipes, and the system of shafts. ”