The visible remains of the ancient city of Athens, as distinguished from the city of to-day, lie mainly to the south and west of the Acropolis, where are to be seen many distinct traces of the classic town, close around the base of the great rock and the Hill of Mars. How far the ancient city had extended around to the eastward can only be conjectured by the layman, for there exist almost no remains in that direction save the choragic monument of Lysicrates and the ruins of the temple of Olympian Zeus; while on the northern side of the Acropolis, although it is known that there once lay the agora, or market place, little is left but some porticoes of a late, if not of Roman, date. Not being bent on exact archÆology, however, it is not for us here to speculate much over the probable sites of the ancient metes and bounds, the location of the fountain of nine spouts called “Enneacrunus,” nor the famous spring of CallirrhoË, which furnish fertile ground for dissent among those skilled in the art. What must now concern us most is the mass of visible ruins, which provide the chief charm of the city to every visitor, and most of all to those possessed of the desirable historic or classical “background” to make the ruins the more interesting.

Despite her many inglorious vicissitudes, Athens has been so fortunate as to retain many of her ancient structures in such shape that even to-day a very good idea is to be had of their magnificence in the golden age of Hellenic empire. The Greek habit of building temples and fanes in high places, apart from the dwellings of men, has contributed very naturally to the preservation of much that might otherwise have been lost. The chief attractions of the classic city were set on high, and the degenerate modern town that succeeded the ancient capital did not entirely swallow them up, as was so largely the case at Rome. To be sure, the Turks did invade the sacred precincts of the Acropolis with their mosques and their munitions of war, and the latter ruined the Parthenon beyond hope of restoration when Morosini’s lamentable advisers caused the Venetian bomb to be fired at that noble edifice. 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.

The Acropolis is naturally the great focus of interest, not only for what remains in situ on its top, but because of many remnants of buildings that cluster about its base. The rock itself, if it were stripped of every building and devoid of every memory, would still be commanding and imposing, alone by sheer force of its height and steepness. As it is, with its beetling sides made the more precipitous by the artifices of Cimon and ancient engineers, whose walls reveal the use of marble column drums built into the fortifications themselves, it is doubly impressive for mere inaccessibility. Something like a hundred feet below its top it ceases to be so sheer, and spreads out into a more gradual slope, on the southern expanses of which were built the city’s theatres and a precinct sacred to Asklepios. Only on the west, however, was the crag at all approachable, and on that side to-day is the only practicable entrance to the sacred precincts.

A more magnificent approach it would be hard to conceive. One must exempt from praise the so-called “BeulÉ” gate at the very entrance, at the foot of the grand staircase, for it is a mere late patchwork of marble from other ancient monuments, and is in every way unworthy of comparison with the majestic PropylÆa at the top. It takes its name from the French explorer who unearthed it. As for its claim to interest, it must found that, if at all, on the identification of the stones which now compose it with the more ancient monument of some choragic victor. Looking up the steep incline to the PropylÆa, or fore gate of the Acropolis, the Parthenon is completely hid. Nothing is visible from this point but the walls and columns of the magnificent gateway itself, designed to be a worthy prelude to the architectural glory of the main temple of the goddess. The architect certainly succeeded admirably in achieving the desired result. He did not at all dwarf or belittle his chief creation above, yet he gave it a most admirable setting. Even to-day, with so much of the colonnade of the PropylÆa in ruins, it is a splendid and satisfying approach, not only when seen from a distance, but at close range. Not alone is it beautiful in and of itself, but it commands from its platform a grand view of the Attic plain below, of the bay of Salamis gleaming in the sun beyond, of the long cape running down to Sunium, and of the distant mountains of the Argolid, rolling like billows in the southwest far across the gulf and beyond Ægina. To pause for a moment on gaining this threshold of the Acropolis and gaze upon this imposing panorama of plain, mountain, and sea, is an admirable introduction to Greece.

On either side of the stairway by which one climbs to the PropylÆa are buttresses of rock, on one of which stands an object worthy of long contemplation. At the right, on a platform leveled from the solid rock, stands the tiny temple of NikÉ Apteros (the Wingless Victory), “restored” it is true, but nevertheless one of the most perfect little buildings imaginable. At one time entirely removed to make room for a Turkish watch-tower, it has been re-created by careful hands out of its original marbles; and it stands to-day, as it stood of old, on its narrow parapet beside the grand stairway of Athena. The process of rebuilding has not, indeed, been able to give the unbroken lines of the old temple. The stones are chipped at the corners here and there, and there are places where entirely new blocks have been required. But in the main everything, even to the delicately carved frieze around its top, is in place; and for once at least the oft-berated “restorer” of ancient buildings has triumphed and has silenced all his critics. The remnants of the incomparable carved balustrade, which once served as a railing for the parapet, are to be seen in the small museum of the Acropolis, revealing the extreme grace which the Greek sculptors had achieved in the modeling of exquisite figures in high relief. The slab, particularly, which has come to be known as “NikÉ binding her sandal” seems to be the favorite of all, though the others, even in their headless and armless state, are scarcely less lovely.

As for the isolated pedestal on the other side of the stairway, known as the “pedestal of Agrippa,” it is not only devoid of any statue to give it continued excuse for being, but it is in such a state of decrepitude as to cause the uncomfortable thought that it is about to fall, and seems an object rather for removal than for perpetuation, although it serves to balance the effect produced by the NikÉ bastion.

Standing on the NikÉ platform, the visitor finds the noble columns of the PropylÆa towering above him close at hand. These Doric pillars give one for the first time an adequate idea of the perfection to which the column was carried by Ictinus and the builders and architects of his time; for although each pillar is built up drum upon drum, it is still true in many cases that the joints between them are almost invisible, so perfect are they, despite the lapse of ages and the ravages of war, not to mention the frequent earthquake shocks to which the whole region has been subjected. 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. Stony as is the place, it still affords soil enough to support a growth of grasses and struggling bits of greenery to cradle the many fallen drums. But one has eyes only for the Parthenon, the western front of which now appears for the first time in its full effect. From its western end, the havoc wrought in its midst being concealed, the Parthenon appears almost perfect. The pedimental sculptures, it is true, are gone save for a fragment or two, having been carried off to England. But the massive Doric columns still stand in an unbroken double row before one; the walls of the cella appear to be intact; the pediment rises almost unbroken above; frieze, triglyphs, and metopes remain in sufficient degree to give an idea of the ancient magnificence of the shrine—and all conspire to compel instant and unstinted admiration. Speculation as to the ethics of the removal of the Parthenon sculptures by Lord Elgin has become an academic matter, and therefore one quite beyond our present purpose. Doubtless to-day no such removal would be countenanced for a moment. It is no longer possible to say, as former critics have said, that the local regard for the treasures of the place is so slight as to endanger their safety. The present custodianship of the priceless relics of antiquity in Athens is admirably careful and satisfactory. If, therefore, Greece had only come into her own a century or so earlier than she did, the famous sculptures of the miraculous birth of Athena, springing full grown from the head of Zeus, and the colossal representation of the strife between Athena and Poseidon for possession of the Attic land, might still adorn as of yore the eastern and western gables of the great temple; or if not that, might still be seen in the very excellent museum at the other end of the city. It is enough for us to know, however, that they are not in Athens but in London, and that there is no probability they will ever return to Greek soil; and to know, also, that had they not been removed as they were, they might never have been preserved at all. That is the one comfortable state of mind in which to view the vacant pediments of the Parthenon. To work up a Byronic frenzy over what cannot be helped, and may, after all, be for the best, is of no benefit.

Writers on Athens have often called attention to the curved stylobate of the Parthenon—a feature which is by no means confined to this temple, but which is to be noticed in almost every considerable ruin of the sort. The base of the building curves sufficiently to make the device visible, rising from either end to the centre of the sides; and the curious may easily prove it by placing a hat at one extremity and trying to see it from the other, sighting along the line of the basic stones. The curve was necessary to cure an optical defect, for a straight or level base would have produced the illusion of a decided sagging Similarly it has long been recognized that the columns must swell at the middle drums, lest they appear to the eye to be concaved. In fact, as Professor Gardner has pointed out, there is actually hardly a really straight line in the Parthenon—yet the effect is of absolute straightness everywhere.

Obviously this curvature of the base, slight though it was, imposed some engineering problems of no inconsiderable nature when it came to setting the column drums; for the columns must stand erect, and the bottom sections must be so devised as to meet the configuration of the convex stylobate. The corner columns, being set on a base that curved in both directions, must have been more difficult still to deal with. But the problem was solved successfully, and the result of this cunningly contrived structure was a temple that comes as near architectural perfection as earthly artisans are ever likely to attain. The columns were set up in an unfluted state, the fluting being added after the pillar was complete. Each drum is said to have been rotated upon its lower fellow until the joint became so exact as to be to all intents and purposes indistinguishable. In the centre of the fallen drums will be seen always a square hole, used to contain a peg of wood designed to hold the finished sections immovable, and in many cases this wooden plug has been found intact. All along the sides of the Parthenon, lying on the ground as they fell, are to be seen the fallen drums that once composed the columns of the sides, but which were blown out of position by the bomb from the Venetian fleet of Admiral Morosini. They lie like fallen heaps of dominoes or children’s building blocks, and the entire centre of the temple is a gaping void. Here and there an attempt has been made to reconstruct the fallen columns from the original portions, but the result is by no means reassuring and seems not to justify the further prosecution of the task. Better a ruined Parthenon than an obvious patchwork. The few restored columns are quite devoid of that homogeneity that marks the extant originals, and their joints are painfully felt, being chipped and uneven, where the old are all but imperceptible; so that the whole effect is of insecurity and lack of perfection entirely out of harmony with the Parthenon itself. Opinions, however, differ. Some still do advocate the rebuilding of the temple rather than leave the drums, seemingly so perfect still, lying as they now are amid the grasses of the Acropolis. It is one of those questions of taste on which debate is traditionally idle and purposeless.

For those who must demand restorations other than those constructed by the mind’s eye, there are models and drawings enough extant, and some are to be seen in the Acropolis Museum. Most interesting of the attempts are doubtless the speculations as to the pedimental sculptures, the remains of which are in the British Museum, but which are so fragmentary and so ill placed in their new home that much of the original grouping is matter for conjecture. With the aid of drawings made by a visitor long years ago, before Lord Elgin had thought of tearing them down, the two great pediments have been ingeniously reconstructed in miniature, showing a multitude of figures attending on the birth of the city’s tutelary goddess, as she sprang full armed from the head of Zeus assisted by the blow of Hephaistos’s hammer, or the concourse of deities that umpired the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the land. The Acropolis Museum has only casts of the Elgin marbles, but there is still to be seen a good proportion of the original frieze. It would be out of place in any such work as this to be drawn into anything like a detailed account of these famous sculptures, the subjects of a vast volume of available literature already and sources of a considerable volume also of controversial writing involving conflicts of the highest authority. It must therefore suffice to refer the reader interested in the detailed story of the Parthenon, its external adornment, its huge gold-and-ivory statue within, and the great Panathenaic festival which its frieze portrayed, to any one of those learned authors who have written of all these things so copiously and clearly—doubtless none more so than Dr. Ernest Gardner in his admirably lucid and readable “Ancient Athens,” or in his “Handbook of Greek Sculpture,” without which no one should visit the museum in that city.

One must remember that the Parthenon and the other features of the Acropolis are monuments of the age of Pericles, and not of an earlier day. The Persians who invaded Greece in 480 B.C. succeeded in obtaining possession of Athens and of the whole Attic plain, the inhabitants fleeing to the island of Salamis. The hordes of barbarians brought in by Xerxes were opposed by a very few of the citizens, some of whom erected a stockade around the Acropolis, thinking that thereby they satisfied the oracle which had promised the city salvation through the impregnability of its “Wooden Walls.” The Persians massed their forces on Mars Hill, just west of the larger rock, and a hot fight took place, the invaders attempting to fire the stockade by means of arrows carrying burning tow, while the besieged made use of round stones with considerable effect. Eventually the enemy discovered an unsuspected means of access to the citadel and took it by storm, after which they burned its temples and left it a sorry ruin. The rest of the Athenians with the allied navy at Salamis repulsed the Persian fleet, and Xerxes, disgusted, withdrew,—despite the fact that it would seem to have been quite possible for him to pursue his successes on land. It left Athens a waste, but on that waste grew up a city that for architectural beauty has never, in all probability, been surpassed. The reaction from the horrors of war gave us the Parthenon, the PropylÆa, and the Erechtheum, all dating, perhaps, from the fifth century before Christ.

The Erechtheum, while properly entitled to the epithet “elegant” as a building, seems decidedly less a favorite than the Parthenon. It is extremely beautiful, no doubt, in a delicate and elaborate way, and its ornamentation is certainly of a high order. Unlike the Parthenon, it is not surrounded by a colonnade, but possesses pillars only in its several porticoes. The columns are not Doric, but Ionic. As for its general plan, it is so complicated and devoted to so many obscure purposes that the lay visitor doubtless will find it an extremely difficult place to understand. There appear to have been at least three precincts involved in it, and the name it bears is the ancient one, given it because in part it was a temple of Erechtheus. That deity was of the demi-god type. He was an ancient Attic hero, who had received apotheosis and become highly esteemed, doubtless because in part he had instituted the worship of Athena in the city and had devised the celebrated Panathenaic festival. Tradition says that he was brought up by Athena herself, and that she intrusted him as a babe, secreted in a chest, to the daughters of Cecrops to guard. They were enjoined not to open the chest, but being overcome with curiosity they disobeyed, and discovered the babe entwined with serpents—whereat, terrified beyond measure, they rushed to the steeper part of the Acropolis and threw themselves down from the rock. Therein they were not alone, for it is also related that the father of Theseus had also thrown himself down from this eminence in despair, because he beheld his son’s ship returning from Crete with black sails, imagining therefrom that the Minotaur had triumphed over his heroic son, when the reverse was the fact.

The complicated character of the Erechtheum is further emphasized by the fact that a portion of it was supposed to shelter the gash made by Poseidon with his trident when he was contending with Athena for the land, as well as the olive tree that Athena caused to grow out of the rock. The two relics were naturally held in veneration, and it was the story that in the cleft made by the trident there was a salt spring, or “sea” as Herodotus calls it, which gave forth to the ear a murmuring like that of the ocean. The cleft is still there. The olive tree, unfortunately, has disappeared. It was there when the Persian horde came to Athens, however, if we may believe Herodotus; and tradition says that after the invaders had burned the Acropolis over, the tree-stump immediately put forth a shoot which was in length a cubit, as a sign that the deity had not abandoned the city. It had been the custom of the place to deposit a cake of honey at stated intervals in the temple door for the food of the sacred serpents; and when, on the arrival of the Persians, this cake remained untouched, the inhabitants were convinced that even the god had left the Acropolis and that naught remained but ruin. The renewed and miraculous life of the olive tree dispelled this error. The Erechtheum in part overlaps the oldest precinct sacred to Athena, where stood an earlier temple supposed to have contained the sacred image of the goddess, made of wood, which came down from heaven. For exact and detailed descriptions of the Erechtheum and its uses, the reader must once again turn to the archÆologists. As for its external features, the most famous of all is unquestionably the caryatid portico, in which the roof is borne up by a row of graceful, but undeniably sturdy, marble maidens. The use of the caryatid, always unnatural, is here rather successful on the whole, for the beholder derives no sensation that the maidens are restive under the weight imposed on them. They are entirely free from any indictment of grotesqueness. Nevertheless, it is questionable whether the portico is altogether pleasing. One of the figures is, as is well known, a reproduction of the one Lord Elgin carried away to the British Museum, but the remainder of the six are the original members.

The Acropolis Museum serves to house a great many interesting fragments found on the spot, including a host of archaic representations of Athena, still bearing ample traces of the paint which the Greeks used so lavishly on their marble statues. This use of pigment might seem to have been a very doubtful exhibition of taste, as judged by modern standards, not only in its application to statues, but in the decoration of marble temples as well. It is hard for us to-day, accustomed to pure white marble sculpture, to imagine any added beauty from painting the hair, eyes, and garments of a statue; or to conceive how the polychromy so commonly made use of in bedecking such masterpieces as the Parthenon could have been anything but a blemish. Nevertheless, the fact that the Greeks did it, and that they were in all else so consummately tasteful, makes it entirely probable that their finished statues and edifices thus adorned were perfectly congruous—especially under that brilliant sky and surrounded by so many brilliant costumes. From the surviving multitude of statues of Athena, it is evident that the Greeks conceived her as a woman of majestic mien, rather almond-eyed, and possessed of abundant braids of the ruddy hair later vouchsafed to Queen Elizabeth. The more rudimentary figure of the “Typhon,” also preserved in this museum, which was doubtless a pedimental sculpture from some earlier acropolitan temple, bears abundant traces of paint on its body and on the beards of its triple head. It is too grotesque to furnish much of an idea of the use of paint on such statues as the great masters later produced. The remnants of the Parthenon frieze give little or no trace of any of the blue background, such as was commonly laid on to bring out the figures carved on such ornaments, nor are there any traces remaining of polychrome decoration on the Parthenon itself.

The Acropolis, of course, has not escaped the common fate of all similar celebrated places—that of being “done” now and then by parties of tourists in absurdly hasty fashion, that to the lover of the spot seems little less than sacrilege. 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. It is better to have looked for a moment than never to have looked at all. The Acropolis is no place to hurry through. Rather is it a spot to visit again and again, chiefly toward sunset, not merely to wander through the ruins, or to rest on the steps of the Parthenon musing over the remote past to which this place belongs, but also to see the sun sink to the west as Plato and Socrates must often have seen it sink from this very place, behind the rugged sky-line of the Argolid, which never changes, lengthening the purple shadows of the hills on the peaceful plain and touching the golden-brown of the temples with that afterglow which, once seen, can never be forgotten.

The gates of the Acropolis are closed at sunset by the guards, and lingering visitors are insistently herded into groups and driven downward to the gate like sheep by the little band of blue-coated custodians. Still, they are not hard-hearted, and if a belated visitor finds the outer gates locked a trifle before sunset, as often happens with the idea of preventing needless ascent, a plea for “pende lepta” (five minutes) is likely to be honored even without a petty bribe. But at last every one must go, and the holy hill of Athena is left untenanted for one more of its endless round of nights. A visit to the Acropolis by moonlight is traditionally worth while, and the needful permission is not difficult to obtain once the municipal office dealing with such things is located. The Parthenon on a clear, moonlit night must be indescribably lovely, even in its lamentable ruin.

Other sights of Athens, ancient and modern, are interesting, and many are magnificent. But the Acropolis is unquestionably the best that Athens has to show, and the Parthenon is incomparably the best of the Acropolis. It is the first and the last spot to seek in visiting Athena’s famous city, and the last glimpse the departing voyager—very likely with a not unmanly tear—catches from his ship as it sails out into the blue Ægean is of this hoary temple reposing in calm and serene indifference to mankind on its rocky height. It has seen the worship of Athena Parthenos give way to the reverence of another Virgin—a holier ideal of Wisdom set up in its own precincts, and worshiped there on the very spot where once the youth of Athens did honor to the pagan goddess. Gods and religions have risen and departed, despots have come and gone; but the Parthenon has stood unchanging, the unrivaled embodiment of architectural beauty to-day, as it was when Ictinus, Mnesicles, Pheidias, and those who were with them created it out of their combined and colossal genius, under the wise ordainment of Pericles.