The Historians' History of the World 03

The work was finished in 435 B.C. It is neither the centuries nor the barbarians that have mutilated it. The Parthenon was still almost intact in 1687, when on the 27th of September Morosini bombarded the citadel. One of the projectiles, setting fire to the barrels of powder stored in the temple, blew up a part of it; then the Venetian desired that the statues should be taken down from the pediment and he broke them. Lord Elgin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, tore down the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the metopes: this was another disaster. The Ilissus or Cephisus, the Hercules or Theseus, the Charities, “vernal goddesses”—called by some the Three Fates, by others Demeter, Core, and Iris—are still, though somewhat mutilated, the most precious of our relics of antiquity. In 1812 some other Englishmen carried off the frieze of the temple of Phigalia (Bassæ), built by Ictinus. All these fragments of masterpieces were sold for hard cash, and it is under the damp and gloomy sky of England that we are reduced to admiring the remains of that which was the imperial mantle which Pericles wrapped about Pallas Athene. Thus to understand the incomparable magnificence of the Parthenon, we must render back to it in imagination what men have taken away, then place it on its lofty rock, one hundred and fifty-six metres (512 ft.) high, whence a magic panorama is unrolled before the eyes, and surround it with the buildings of the Acropolis; the Erechtheum, which exhibited all the graces of art, beside the severe grandeur of the principal temple; the bronze statue of Athene Promachus, “she who fought in the front rank,” to which the artist gave a colossal height, so that the sailors arriving from the high sea steered by the plume on her helmet and the gold tip of her lance, maris stella

; and lower down, at the only place by which the rock was accessible, the wonderful vestibule of the Propylæa and the temple of Victory which formed one of its wings; but, above all, it must be seen wrapped in the blazing light of the eastern sky, compared to which our clearest day is but a twilight.

One thing has been observed in the Parthenon which proves the profound artistic sense the Greeks possessed and how well they understood how to correct geometry by taste. In all the Parthenon there is no surface which is absolutely flat. As the columns owe their full beauty only to the fact that they exhibit towards their centre a slight outward curve, of which the eye is not aware, so the entire building, colonnades and walls, is inclined slightly inwards towards an invisible point which would be lost in the region of the clouds, and all the horizontal lines are convex. But all with such delicacy that it is sufficient to allow the eye and the light to wander gently over the surfaces and to give the monument at once the grace of art and the solidity of strength; but not enough for it to assume the compressed and heavy aspect of a truncated pyramid like the Egyptian temples. On the southern façade the rise of the curve is only one hundred and twenty-three millimetres (about 4½ inches).

The Propylæa, the masterpiece of civil and military architecture, belonged, like the Parthenon, to the Doric order, and stood at the only accessible point of the Acropolis. The architect Mnesicles disposed its various parts in such a manner as to give an aspect of grandeur to the entrance to the Holy of Holies of pagan Athens and also to secure its defence. Epaminondas would have transported it to Thebes to adorn the Cadmea: six centuries after, Pausanias admired it more than the Parthenon, and Plutarch said: “These works have preserved a freshness, a virginity which time cannot wither; they appear still bright with youth as if a breath would animate them and as if they had an immortal soul.”

Athens had other monuments which were erected at very diverse epochs: the Anaceum, the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the sale of slaves took place; the Pantheon or temple of all the gods, the work of the emperor Hadrian; the octagonal Tower of the Winds, an indifferent work built about the first century before Christ. On each of its eight sides, corresponding to the quarters of the principal winds, was sculptured the figure of one of them. This tower still exists, as well as the choragic monument erected by the choregus Lysicrates, in 334 B.C., on the occasion of the victory of the Acamantid tribe in a chorus. The remains of the theatre of Bacchus are still to be seen on the south-eastern slope of the citadel, some of the marble seats bearing very beautiful sculptures. But the Stadium beyond the Ilissus, according to Pausanias one of the wonders of Athens, has disappeared and the excavations made there produced nothing remarkable.