Ancient city

“ A short railway journey landed us amidst the ruins of this ancient city, where we were in the very atmosphere not only of Rome, but of days and people long before.
The small, primitive town at the foot of the height was full of quaint outlines. Large circular doorways led to wonderful interiors; immense living-rooms in semi-obscurity; rich dark walls whose colour and tone were due to smoke and age. Here women were working and spinning and sometimes bending over a huge fire, deep in the mysteries of cooking. ”

“ The most ancient city of the world has no antiquity. This flourishing abode is older than many ruins, yet it does not possess one single memorial of the past. In vain has it conquered or been conquered. ”

“ And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. ”

“ Even to this day the stranger pauses with admiration among the still splendid ruins of this ancient city, and finds in her arches, columns and walls, and in her chance-buried medals, the solid testimonies of her early glories in art, taste and wealth. ”

“ Around the City was a wall of stone, red stone, immense bricks that had been lugged there and fitted into place by slaves of the early Martian dynasties, under the whiplash of the first great Kings of Mars.
An ancient, sun-baked City, a City set in the middle of a wasted plain, beyond groves of dead trees, a City seldom seen by Terrans—but a City studied on maps and charts in every War Office on Terra. A City that contained, for all its ancient stone and archaic towers, the ruling group of all Mars, the Council of Senior Leiters, black-clad men who governed and ruled with an iron hand. ”

“ As one looks across the miles and miles of pleasant fields, interspersed with waving windmills and tiny villages, this part of the ancient city’s history seems utterly incredible, but it is too well authenticated to be disputed. ”

“ The ancient city is for three days evacuated by all its inhabitants, high and low, every house deserted; and, as they retire, the exiled converts, many years banished from their birthplace, approach in a great body, accompanied by their allies, revisit the empty homes of their childhood, and within the short allotted space fulfil the rites of pilgrimage. ”

“ The winds of the mountains traverse the well-shod civilization of a great city. At the end of each of the long streets rises a mountain, and on the mountain rest the clouds and the sky. You walk outwards, and climb the nearest and most prominent of the heights to the Acropolis, to the mighty slabs of the marble of the Parthenon, simple and pure in the mountain air, a point of view where it is always morning, and you look down from the ancient Athens to the new. ”

“ It is incredible, that they should have built a city, so great and famous, in a place subject to be under water half of the year; still less can it be imagined that the ancient authors have forgotten so particular a place. ”

“ Not till then did Rome become, for the number and size of her temples, the magnificence of her baths, her basilicas, and her private palaces, for the beauty of her public gardens, for her size and population, the first and most marvellous city of the Empire: the portent which evokes the admiration of the whole world. ”

“ The massy and magnificent forms of the ruins that remain of ancient Thebes, the capital of Egypt, the city of Jove, the city with a hundred gates, must inspire every intelligent spectator with awe and admiration. ”

“ It is, nevertheless, a curious fact, that though the whole space within the walls of the ancient city abounds with traces of antiquity, there are no ruins which can be supposed to have belonged to places of public entertainment. ”

“ On the opposite side we can peep out of our windows, and see the Acropolis, or at least the rock on which it stands, and nearer to us the bare Areopagus; for half the ancient city was erected on barren limestone rocks, on which we still trace almost everywhere the marks of human labour, for the foundation of public and private buildings, for receptacles of grain, and probably for reservoirs of water. ”

“ These distances convey an idea of the extent of the ancient city, but fail to represent the grand proportions of the landscape, so well fitted, in its simple and majestic outlines, to inclose the most wonderful structures the world has ever seen. ”

“ Here it really seems that you are under a fortified city of the Middle Ages, and you imagine yourself in the guise of a Moor or a Goth or a soldier of Alfonso VI. From every part precipitous rocks hang over your head, crumbling walls, towers, and the ruins of ancient bastions, and higher up the last wall which encircles the city, black, crowned with enormous battlements, opened here and there by great breaches, behind which the imprisoned houses rear their heads; and as you climb higher and higher the city seems to draw back and hide itself. ”

“ Here, not a temple, nor a theatre, nor a house, but a whole city rises before us, untouched, unaltered—the very same as it was eighteen hundred years ago, when inhabited by Romans. We range through the same streets; tread the very same pavement; behold the same walls; enter the same doors; and repose in the same apartments. We are surrounded by the same objects; and out of the same windows we contemplate the same scenery. In the midst of all this, not a voice is heard—not even the sound of a foot—to disturb the loneliness of the place, or to interrupt his reflections. All around is silence ”

“ This city is an abode of opulence, learning, and pleasure;—it is the Athens of Ionia. Within the walls the city is adorned by the productions of art; and without, embellished by the riches of nature. How often have we directed our steps to the banks of the Mæander, which, after having received a multitude of rivers, and bathed the walls of various cities, rolls its waters in innumerable windings through the plain which is honoured by bearing its name, and proudly ornaments its course with the plenty it creates! ”

“ Numerous shafts of columns, which are scattered about in all directions, remains of the walls of extensive buildings, and large heaps of rubbish covered with earth and overgrown with grass, give some, though a faint, idea of the splendour, of the ancient city, which at the time of its greatest splendour, at the beginning of our era, had eighty thousand inhabitants. ”

“ Huge edifices rise from the midst of the little dwellings like giants from a crowd of dwarfs. Automobiles and trolley cars move through the streets. It is a great city; half a million, a million, two million men are crowded together there in the shadow of a thousand chimneys, surrounded on every side by an almost deserted country. ”

“ Where is the ancient way.
And the remembered city
Where once I used to play ? "
" You stand within the kingdom,
You walk the city's street,
And still there throng about you
The folk you used to meet." ”

“ Evidently the fortune of the ancient city was great, for its heir of to-day is certainly in affluent circumstances,—so that there is nothing of the sadness which envelops so many of the ancient towns of the Republic, and yet few, if any, of them preserve intact so much that belongs to the Middle Ages. ”

“ We must not, however, take for granted, that because the city was so crowded during the earlier period of the Byzantine empire, the number of inhabitants was necessarily much larger than at present; for till the Latin conquest, much of the space of the ancient city was occupied by churches, monasteries, palaces, and other public buildings. ”

“ To-day is given to the world a description of the fire-scathed ruins of that city whose fate inspired the immortal first-fruits of Greek poetry, and from these remains are brought to light thousands of facts bearing upon the origin and history of the inhabitants, and illustrating their religion and language, their wealth and civilization. ”

“ Artists have made pictures of the ruins, and scholars have written books about them. But it is a great task to uncover a whole city that is buried ten or twelve feet deep. The excavation is not yet finished. Perhaps when you are old men and women the work will be completed, and a whole Roman city will be open to your eyes.
But even as it is to-day, that ghost of a city is among the world’s wonders. There is the thick stone wall that goes all about the town. On its wide top the soldiers used to stand to fight in ancient days. ”

“ We must also know something of ancient literature, philosophy, and art. Especially do we need to learn about the private life of the classical peoples—their manners, customs, occupations, and amusements. This life centered in the city.
ORIGIN OF THE CITY A Greek or a Roman city usually grew up about a hill of refuge (acropolis, capitolium) , to which the people of the surrounding district could flee in time of danger. The hill would be crowned with a fortress and the temples of the gods. ”

“ And inasmuch as there is an Alexandria, not to speak of innumerable modern "villes" with well-known surnames for prefixes, it need not be thought a thing entirely incredible that the ancient city was really called after the man who established its importance. ”

“ Amid these objects and scenes, rural and ordinary, rise the three temples, like the mausoleums of the ruined city, dark, silent, and majestic117.
“Majestic fanes of deities unknown! Ages have roll’d since here ye stood—alone;— Since your walls echoed to the sacred choir, Or blazed your altars sacrificial fire. And now—the wandering classic pilgrim sees The wild bird nestling in the sculptured frieze; Each fluted shaft by desert weeds embraced, Triglyphs, obscured entablatures defaced; Sees ill-timed verdure clothe each awful pile, While Nature lends her melancholy smile ”

“ The road is in the middle of a beautiful plain, covered with vineyards and olive trees, which, being bounded on one side by mountains, and on the other by the sea, affords a most delightful prospect. Before your entrance into the city, the first monument of antiquity that presents itself to your view, is the temple of Theseus, built by the Athenians, in honour of that hero, soon after the battle of Marathon. ”

“ Situations favorable for defence determined the location of ancient cities, as with the Greek colonies on a promontory or an island, the Etruscan cities on hill tops, Athens with the Acropolis, Rome on seven hills, Paris on an island and London in the midst of swamps. ”

“ It would require volumes to speak of modern, aside from ancient Rome, with its one hundred and fifty thousand population, now largely augmented by foreigners from every clime; its three hundred churches, rich in sculpture, paintings, and frescoes; its three hundred and thirty-five palaces, and thirty villas; its five hundred streets and two hundred and seventy-three lanes; its one hundred and forty-eight public piazzas or squares; its aqueducts, bridges, and twelve Egyptian obelisks, aside from its fifty public fountains, more bountifully supplied with water than perhaps any city in the world. ”

“ On the other hand, could that vast city have grown and renovated itself so rapidly in the last century, and have found accommodation for the countless multitudes which throng to it from all the corners of the world, if those who built it had troubled themselves to observe the rules formulated by the great architects of the sixteenth century, in the days when it took as much time to build a palace and a church as it now does to construct a city? ”

“ If we look to the boundaries of this desolation, the prospect is equally mournful. At one end we have the hill of the Capitol; on the summit of which, instead of the temple of Jupiter, the wonder of the world, we have the palace of the solitary senator. [Pg 246] If we wish to ascend this eminence, we have, on one side, the most ancient structure in Rome, and that a prison; on the other, the ruins of a temple, which seems to have been amongst the finest in the city, and the name of which is not known. ”

“ One city having been uncovered, it is found by lifting the floors of temples and other buildings, and the pavement of public squares, that this city, although very ancient, is built upon the ruins of a more ancient one, which in turn covers the ruins of one still older. ”

“ After ^ye had gone 2 leagues, we came to an ancient building like a fortress, and a league beyond this we found another, and yet another a little farther on, and beyond these we found an ancient city, very large, entirely destroyed, although a large part of the wall was standing, which was six times as tall as a man, the wall well made of good worked stone, with gates and gutters like a city in Castile. ”

“ If it were cleared of the rubbish about it, and laid open to view, it would afford an astonishing idea of the magnificence of a city, whose treasures were so great, that its inhabitants ranked amongst the most voluptuous and effeminate people of all Greece. The stone-work is entirely of that massive kind, which denotes a very high degree of antiquity. ”

“ We could not help being struck with the fact that the ancient landmarks of this old world city are fast disappearing, and old buildings being pulled down and new palatial ones being erected on all hands. The crumbling walls of the middle ages are fallen ”