Acropolis of Athens

“ It is almost impossible to believe it as you stand on the Acropolis.
All Athens lies beneath you, pale, almost white, with hints of mauve and yellow, gray and brown, with its dominating palace, its tiny Byzantine churches, its tiled and flat roofs, its solitary cypress-trees and gardens. Lycabettus stands out, small, but bold, almost defiant. Beyond, and on every side, stretches the calm plain of Attica. That winding river of dust marks the Via Sacra, along which the great processions used to pass to Eleusis by the water. There are the dark groves of Academe, a place of rest in a bare land. ”

“ It is no infrequent sight to see a body of men and women numbering from a dozen to over a hundred, in the keeping of a voluble courier, scampering up the steps of the Propylæa, over the summit, through the two temples, in and out of the museum, and down again, amply satisfied with having spent a half hour or even less among those immortal ruins, and prepared to tell about it for the rest of their days. It is a pity, as it always is, to see a wonder of the world so cavalierly treated. Still, one hesitates to say that rather than do this, one should never visit the Acropolis of Athens. ”

“ The Acropolis of Athens.—Almost every Greek city has its own formidable citadel, its own acropolis,—for “citadel” is really all this word conveys. Corinth boasts of its “Acro-Corinthus,” Thebes of its “Cadmeia,”—but the Acropolis is in Athens. The later world will care little for any other, and the later world will be right. The Athenian stronghold has long ceased to be a fortress, though still it rises steep and strong. It is now one vast temple compound, covered with magnificent buildings. ”

“ The first entrance to Athens will thus bring to a stranger, full of the city’s fame and expectant of meeting objects of beauty at every turn, almost instant disappointment. The narrow, dirty, ill-paved streets are also very crooked. One can readily be lost in a labyrinth of filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main thoroughfares. High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the Acropolis may be towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white tinted marble of the temples, but all around seems only monotonous squalor. ”

“ The Acropolis, that towered above the homes and thoroughfares of men—a spot too sacred for human habitation—became, to use a proverbial phrase, “a city of the gods.” The citizen was everywhere to be reminded of the majesty of the STATE—his patriotism was to be increased by the pride in her beauty—his taste to be elevated by the spectacle of her splendour. Thus flocked to Athens all who throughout Greece were eminent in art. ”

“ Under a cloudy sky—and there are occasionally such skies even in sunny Greece—it is not at all easy to pick out the Acropolis, lying low in the foreground and flanked by such superior heights as Lycabettus and Pentelicus. Hence it is that the voyager, returning home from a stay in Athens, enjoys the seaward view of the receding site far more than the approaching newcomer; and it must be added that, however one may reverence the Acropolis from his reading, it can never mean so much to him as it will after a few days of personal acquaintance, when he has learned to know its every stone. ”

“ As the stranger draws near to the present entrance of the citadel, he passes before the façade of the Propylea; the old entrance to the Acropolis, between its Doric pillars, being walled up. Pausanias says, [Pg 91] "There is only one entrance to the Acropolis of Athens; it being in every remaining part of its circuit a precipice, and fortified by strong walls. This entrance was fronted by a magnificent building, called the Propylea, covered with roofs of white marble, which surpassed, for beauty and the dimensions of the marble, all that I have seen." This is now in ruins. ”

“ There is, in fact, no building on earth which can sustain the burden of such greatness, and so the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be disappointing. When the traveller reflects how all the Old World’s culture culminated in Greece—all Greece in Athens—all Athens in its Acropolis—all the Acropolis in the Parthenon—so much crowds upon the mind confusedly that we look for some enduring monument whereupon we can fasten our thoughts, and from which we can pass as from a visible starting-point [pg 90] into all this history and all this greatness. And at first we look in vain. ”

“ Yet Athens is large and is continually growing. One of the best and most complete views of it is obtained from the terrace near the Acropolis Museum, behind the Parthenon. Other fine views can be had from Lycabettus, the solitary and fierce-looking hill against whose rocks the town seems almost to surge, like a wave striving to overwhelm it, and from that other hill, immediately facing the Acropolis, on which stands the monument of Philopappos.
It is easy to ascend to the summit of the Acropolis, even in the fierce heat of a summer day. ”

“ Until this is understood, the Bema and its neighborhood form one of the hardest things in Athens to reconstruct in memory. It is from the rocky platform of this old rostrum that one gets the ideal view of the Acropolis, bringing out the perfect subordination of the Propylæa to the Parthenon, and giving even to-day a very fair idea of the appearance of the Acropolis and its temples as the ancients saw them. Fortunate, indeed, is one who may see these in the afternoon light standing out sharply against a background of opaque cloud, yet themselves colored by the glow of the declining sun. ”

“ The harmony and balance of the scenery, so varied in its details and yet so comprehensible, are sympathetic to the temperance of Greek morality, the moderation of Greek art. The radiance with which it is illuminated has all the clearness and distinction of the Attic intellect. From whatever point the plain of Athens with its semicircle of greater and lesser hills may be surveyed, it always presents a picture of dignified and lustrous beauty. The Acropolis is the centre of this landscape, splendid as a work of art with its crown of temples ”

“ All through the centuries which divide us from the age of Hadrian—centuries unfilled, as far as Athens is concerned, with memorable deeds or national activity—the Acropolis has stood uncovered to the sun. The tones of the marble of Pentelicus have daily grown more golden; decay has here and there invaded frieze and capital; war too has done its work, shattering the Parthenon in 1687 by the explosion of a powder-magazine, and the Propylæa in 1656 by a similar accident, and seaming the colonnades that still remain with cannon-balls in 1827. ”

“ When Athens fell, her conqueror spared her with a generosity not usual in those days; so it came about that her buildings remained for many hundreds of years, and the Parthenon even lasted through the devastating ruin of the Turks, until a Venetian shell dropped upon it and blew it up (1687) . There is no use in trying to record what the Acropolis of Athens calls to mind: it is the best of what educated men know.
Fair and goodly in life, the Athenians were also fair in death. Without the gate, on the sacred road to Eleusis, lies the place of tombs. Not bare slabs are these, nor broken columns ”

“ Upon one of the most considerable of these, whose precipitous sides make it a natural fortress, stood the Acropolis, and upon [Pg 80] the group of lesser heights around and in the valleys between clustered the dwellings of ancient Athens.
It was a fitting site for the capital of a people keenly sensitive to beauty, and destined to become the leaders of the world in matters of taste, especially in the important department of the Fine Arts. Nowhere are there more charming contrasts of mountain, sea, and plain,—nowhere a more perfect harmony of picturesque effect. ”

“ Plato, Republic. To speak of the Acropolis of Athens with due Hellenic restraint is difficult for any one who has lived long under its habitual sway. At the first visit three sets of impressions break down the most obdurate impassiveness. The associations acquired by a study of history engender a vicarious but active sympathy with the Greeks themselves. There is an immediate impact of beauty from marble gateway and temples and sculpture which the procession of years has only incorporated more intimately with the beauty of sea and land and circumambient air. ”

“ The sun, a ball of glowing fire, is slowly sinking to westward over the slopes of Ægaleos; the rock of the Acropolis is glowing as if in flame; intense purple tints are creeping over all the landscape. The day is waning, and all Athenians who can possibly find leisure are heading towards the suburbs for a walk, a talk, and refreshment of soul and body at the several Gymnasia. ”

“ No city of the ancient or modern world ever rivalled Athens in the riches of art. Our best filled museums, though teeming with her spoils, are poor collections of fragments compared with that assemblage of gods and heroes which peopled the Acropolis, the genuine Olympos of the arts. ”

“ Striking ideas we have, and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with satisfying delightful effect, contains them, we seldom or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not arise from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway there. ”

“ Athens puts one in mind of Rome, from the number of fragments of architecture and sculpture everywhere scattered about. In the walls, in the court-yards, in the churches, we are continually meeting with something too trifling, or too much mutilated, to be of value in itself, but powerfully impressing the imagination with the idea of what has been.
The great treasure of Grecian architecture is in the Acropolis, where there are three buildings, of which the remains are considerable ”

“ As I left this veritable tomb and sepulchre of the great god of wine and drunkards, my guide pointed to an aperture from the heart of a hill, and said, that entrance goes to the cave where Socrates was poisoned. We then went up the most imposing ruins of Athens, the Acropolis. The temples there looked down upon the rest of the temples of Athens, like Jupiter would at the feast of gods, it was higher and more stupendous than all. There was the seats of solid blocks of white marble of the twelve judges. ”

“ We have learned to know the taste of Athenians too well to doubt their judgment in matters of pure beauty. And they are right. Under an Athenian sky temples and statues demand a wealth of color which in a somber clime would seem intolerable. The brilliant lines of the Acropolis buildings are the just answer of the Athenian to the brilliancy of Helios. ”

“ Local vandalism and the greed of lime burners have doubtless destroyed much. But the whole course of these depredations has failed to remove the crowning treasures of Athens, and the Acropolis temples are still the inspiration and the despair of architects. In passing, then, to a more detailed and perhaps superfluous consideration of the monuments surviving from the ancient city, it may be remarked that the visitor will find more of the classic remains to reward and delight him than is the case at Rome, rich as that eternal city is. ”

“ Its prosperity continued, however, under the Roman sway, and it continued to be famous as the centre of philosophy, literature, and art, many famous buildings having been erected there by foreign rulers after the decline of its power. During the Middle Ages it sunk into insignificance. It has successively belonged to the Goths, Byzantines, Bergundians, Franks, Catalans, Florentines, Venetians, and Turks. In 1687 the buildings of the Acropolis suffered severe injury in the siege of Athens by the Venetians under Morosini. In 1834 Athens was declared the capital of the kingdom of Greece. ”

“ A work of art so great, which exemplified the struggles and aspirations of a race so completely, could not but owe the largest debt to the political leader of the State. All the forces of Athens were united to beautify the Acropolis, and these were marshalled, naturally enough, not by an artist but by a politician. The real creator of the temple of Athena was Pericles. He realised that the greatness of his countrymen depended, not upon the breadth of their dominions, but upon the healthy development of every citizen, physically, mentally, and emotionally. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The people year by year As kings succeed each other, never yield they most To Wealth, but even he that’s poor has equal share.”
Euripides, Supplices. Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian columns of the Olympieum to obtain a satisfying view of the Acropolis, embedded like a crystal in its proper matrix of encompassing air and plain and sea and mountains. ”

“ The modern is curiously intermingled with the ancient; for on the right, in the fields which border the highway, are to be seen the few remaining colossal columns of the rather florid temple of Olympian Zeus and the fragmentary arch of Hadrian, the Roman emperor in whose reign that temple was at last completed. It is peculiarly fitting to enter Athens between these ruins on the one hand and the Acropolis on the other, for they are so characteristic of the great chief attraction of the place,—its immortal past. ”