Acropolis

“ The Acropolis is the centre of this landscape, splendid as a work of art with its crown of temples; and the sea, surmounted by the long low hills of the Morea, is the boundary to which the eye is irresistibly led. Mountains and islands and plain alike are made of limestone, hardening here and there into marble, broken into delicate and varied forms, and sprinkled with a vegetation of low shrubs and brushwood so sparse and slight that the naked rock in every direction meets the light. ”

“ From the place where he stood he saw all the grandest works of human art,—the Acropolis rose before him, a lofty precipitous rock, seeming like a stone pedestal erected by nature as an appropriate platform for the perfect marble temples with which man should adorn it. ”

“ History says that the temples of the Acropolis were filled with the noblest works of Praxiteles and Phidias, and of many a great master in sculpture besides—and surely these elegant fragments attest it.
We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court beyond the Parthenon. It startled us, every now and then, to see a stony white face stare suddenly up at us out of the grass with its dead eyes. The place seemed alive with ghosts. ”

“ In addition to the great edifices of the Acropolis referred to, which were adorned with the most finished paintings and sculptures, the entire platform of the hill appears to have been covered with a vast composition of architecture and sculpture, consisting of temples, monuments, and statues of gods and heroes. The whole Acropolis was at once the fortress, the sacred enclosure, and the treasury of the Athenian people—forming the noblest museum of sculpture, the richest gallery of painting, and the best school of architecture in the world. ”

“ Passing through the E. Colonnade of the Propylæa we enter the Inner Ward of the Acropolis and ascend a gradual slope, now covered with profoundly impressive ruins. When we picture to ourselves the mighty Parthenon, on the right, and the exquisite Erechtheion on the left, in the full glory of their sculptures and colouring, surrounded by smaller sanctuaries and a forest of statues, we may well understand the enthusiastic pride of the Athenians in their unrivalled Acropolis. ”

“ The Acropolis of Athens is the most famous hill in the universe. The columns of the Parthenon are familiar to all the world. They are the remains of the most majestic monument ever erected by human hands, and did it ever occur to you that it was intended for the honor and the worship of a woman? ”

“ 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. Yet in spite of time and violence the Acropolis survives, a miracle of beauty: like an everlasting flower, through all that lapse of years it has spread its coronal of marbles to the air, unheeded. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No other fortress has embraced so much beauty and splendor within its walls, and none has witnessed a series of more startling and momentous changes in the fortunes of its possessors. Wave after wave of war and conquest has beaten against it. The city which lies at its feet has fallen beneath the assaults of the Persian, the Spartan, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Goth, the Crusader, and the Turk. Through all these and other vicissitudes the Acropolis passed, changing only in the character of its occupants, unchanged in its loveliness and splendor. ”

“ A remorseless work of destruction then ensued, involving the temples and other buildings on the Acropolis in the same fate as had befallen, or was soon to befall, the best of the houses in the city, and its walls. It seemed to the Athenians a terrible calamity at the time, but it proved to be a blessing in disguise, for it led to the restoration of the city on a scale of grandeur unknown before, and made the Acropolis one of the wonders of the world. ”

“ There are three supreme sensations, not twice to be experienced, for the traveller: when he is about to behold the ancient seats of art, of discipline, of religion,—Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. But it is not possible for the reality to equal the expectation. “There!” cried the commissionnaire, “is the Acropolis!” A small oblong hill lifting itself some three hundred and fifty feet above the city, its sides upheld by walls, its top shining with marble, an isolated fortress in appearance! ”

“ What a world of ruined sculpture was about us! Set up in rows—stacked up in piles—scattered broadcast over the wide area of the Acropolis—were hundreds of crippled statues of all sizes and of the most exquisite workmanship; and vast fragments of marble that once belonged to the entablatures, covered with bas-reliefs representing battles and sieges, ships of war with three and four tiers of oars, pageants and processions—every thing one could think of. ”

“ THE PARTHENON.
Seen from a distance, the Acropolis presents nearly the same appearance as it offered to Spartan guardsmen when they paced the ramparts of Deceleia. Nature around is unaltered. Except that more villages, enclosed with olive-groves and vineyards, were sprinkled over those bare hills in classic days, no essential change in the landscape has taken place, no transformation, for example, of equal magnitude with that which converted the Campagna of Rome from a plain of cities to a poisonous solitude. ”

“ Age has been kind also to the Pentelic marble, softening its original whiteness to a golden brown without destroying its exquisite satin texture. Nothing more charming can well be imagined than the contrast of the blue Athenian sky with these stately old columns, as one looks outward or inward through their majestic rows.
The rock rises sharply as one passes within the precinct of the Acropolis, and the surface of it appears to have been grooved to give a more secure footing to pedestrians. ”

“ Nothing in ancient Greece or Italy could be compared with the Acropolis of Athens, in its combination of beauty and grandeur, surrounded as it was by temples and theatres among its rocks, and encircled by a city abounding with monuments, some of which rivalled those of the Acropolis. ”

“ It is placed by Leake and most other authorities at the north-western angle of the Acropolis. A recent traveller remarks that "the story of the Pelasgic settlement under the north side of the Acropolis inevitably rises before us, when we see the black shade always falling upon it, as over an accursed spot, in contrast with the bright gleam of sunshine which always seems to invest the Acropolis itself; and we can imagine how naturally the gloom of the steep precipice would conspire with the remembrance of an accursed and hateful race, to make the Athenians dread the spot." ”

“ And there, right opposite, stood the rock which of all rocks in the world's history has done most for literature and art—the rock which poets, and orators, and architects, and historians have ever glorified, and can not stay their praise—which is ever new and ever old, ever fresh in its decay, ever perfect in its ruin, ever living in its death—the Acropolis of Athens. ”

“ In some such spirit soothing came to the quiet man on the top of the Acropolis Hill, whispering to him that, after all, this was his country, and if the beloved dead did indeed seem so far away in fact, in spirit he was perhaps nearer to his Empire-builders than he had ever been before. ”

“ Here a plate of lokumia, a sweetmeat something like fig-paste, and glasses of fresh water, were brought out and offered to us. Soon we came in sight of the Acropolis, not without an indescribable puzzle at beholding, in commonplace existence, one of those dreams whose mystical beauty we never expect to realize, and fear to dissipate. Now we drive through many streets and squares, and finally stop at a hotel in front of one of the prettiest of the latter, from whose door our chief issues to welcome us. ”

“ Each succeeding architectural feature is larger and more beautiful than that which precedes it. As you view the acropolis from above the portico, your eye is drawn on and on, past the symmetrical forecourt and the great Court of the Altar, under delicately chiseled arches and graceful cornices, through the Triple Gate and the temple portal, up to the culmination of it all—the six tall columns which still rise above the ruins of the Temple of the Sun. ”

“ He proceeds to give the reasons for his view: The presence of the ancient temples on the Acropolis itself, the fact that the ancient precincts outside the Acropolis were προς τουτο το μέρος της πολεως, and the neighborhood of the fountain Enneacrounus. We know, that the Acropolis was still officially called πολις in Thucydides' day; and πόλις so used would have no meaning if the Acropolis itself was not the ancient city. Προς τουτο το μέρος, in the passage quoted, refers to the city of Cecrops, the Acropolis and Pelasgicum taken together ”

“ Would anything survive mutilation with the serene confidence in its fragmentary but everywhere penetrating interest which seems to pervade the most fractured fraction of a Greek relief on the Athenian acropolis? ”

“ Architecture erected the Coliseum, but Sculpture like a funeral pall, mantles this human slaughterhouse of Rome;—not a stone of which, from the base to the ruined cornice, but has an historic voice that speaks, as from the Arimathean Sepulchre of our Religion, of the final Resurrection of those early martyrs to the Faith of Christ!
The humble gravestone of the village churchyard [41] is received as legal evidence of death,—it speaks a name, a date, and burial,—the Acropolis, as the tomb of Athens, can do no more, save that it is the record of a nation's downfall, and not a peasant's. ”

“ The Miscellaneous reliefs found in and about the Acropolis are chiefly relics of much older buildings; they are generally in the rough, gritty stone of the country, and have some resemblance to early Greek work, especially to the sculptures from Assos. Their chief subjects are a lion devouring a deer, and a satyr, the size of life, running along the ground. ”

“ The Acropolis inhabited only by the gods appeared worthy to be the dwelling place of immortal beings: all the poetry of architecture was there; it seemed to have owed its birth to a concentration of the best religious spirit of the ancient world, aiming at giving 71earth a resemblance to heaven; at peopling it with mute deities, speaking only through their beauty and surrounding these representatives of the invisible Olympos with everything most excellent, most valuable, most cherished among men. At Sparta a spirit of calculating economy entered into the very worship of the gods. ”

“ All the old classic grace and beauty have been preserved in the same pure-white pentelican marble, of which it is estimated that there is enough to last any city five thousand years. Corinthian, Ionic, and Doric columns that might have come from the Acropolis itself—and did, in design—adorn and support these new edifices as they did the old, and lend their ineffable glory to the rehabilitation of Greece. ”

“ Under the blows of the iconoclasts, the pulse of artistic life had almost ceased to beat. But, though the fire of genius seemed extinct, there was still vitality in its dying embers. The light which came from the Acropolis gave its illumination to the Renaissance. Without an Athens there had been no Florence; without a Phidias no Michael Angelo.
PORTAL OF THE ERECTHEUM.
Almost as interesting as a visit to the summit of the Acropolis is a walk around its base. ”

“ From this point a magnificent view of the Acropolis is obtained, and few are the sights presented to the traveller, which surpass in historic interest or actual beauty that meeting his eye, to whichever point of the compass he may turn when standing at the foot of this remarkably picturesque monument.
MONUMENT OF PHILOPAPPUS.
The ages which produced these marvellous works in architecture had other and different glories. Painting and sculpture reached the highest perfection; and poetry exhibited all the grace and vigor of the Athenian imagination. ”

“ Let the dust and the desolation of the Acropolis be undisturbed for ever; let them be left to be the school of our moral feelings, not of our mechanical perceptions: the line and rule of the prying carpenter should not come into the quiet and holy places of the earth. ”

“ Its magnificence consisted in its decorations and the vast quantity of gold and precious woods used in its varied ornaments, and vessels of gold, so as to make it one of the most costly edifices ever erected to the worship of God. The Acropolis, which was the fortress of the Temple, combined the strength of a castle with the magnificence of a palace, and was like a city in extent, towering seventy cubits above the elevated rock upon which it was built. ”