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Here, as before, Theseus has yielded | 11 ft. broad, rising from a graduated to Hercules the most conspicuous spot basis. The summit is broken; its at the entrance of his own temple. present height is about 10 ft. This temple, therefore, possesses an interest not only from the beauty of its structure, but as a consecration of heroic friendship, and an expression of political attachment."-Wordsworth.

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7. The Pnyx.-The place of Parliament, or Assembly, of the Athenian people is, according to the opinion almost universally received, an artificial platform to the W. of the Acropolis, of which the boundary is nearly a semicircle with an obtuse-angled triangle added to it on the opposite side of the diameter, so that the whole outline has the form of a semicircular bow with the string partly drawn. The semicircular boundary towards the N.E., where anciently was the Agora, is retained by a wall of support which must at one time have been considerably higher than at present. That which remains is about 16 ft. high in the middle, or highest part, and composed of large blocks of various sizes. One stone is 10 ft. by 8 on the face: they are for the most part quadrangular. In the opposite direction the platform was bounded by a vertical excavation in the rock which is from 12 to 15 ft. high. The foot of this wall inclines towards the centre, thereby showing that originally the entire platform sloped towards the position of the orator, who stood on the celebrated Bua, or pulpit, often called the rock, & xi0os; it was a

adrangular projection of the rock,

The area of the platform was capable of containing from 7000 to 8000 persons. From 5000 to 7000 seems to have been the greatest number ever assembled. To be heard from the pulpit must indeed have been so difficult, that we need not wonder that Demosthenes found it necessary to strengthen his voice in order to qualify himself for speaking in the Pnyx.

The name is derived from the word

ПúKvos, signifying probably the throng dedicated to Jupiter. In the artificial of persons assembled. It was especially wall of rock, and on each side of the Bema, are niches, below which a number of votive offerings representing different parts of the human body, and now in the British Museum, were

found.

The question as to this site being that of the Pnyx, would be set at rest if we were sure that the walls, of which we see traces running across the top of the hill behind this second terrace, were the original city walls; but authorities differ as to this point.

"The area of the Pnyx contained about 12,000 square yards, and could therefore easily accommodate the whole of the Athenian citizens. The remark of an ancient grammarian, that it was constructed with the simplicity of ancient times (Pollux, viii. 132), is borne out by the existing remains. We know, moreover, that it was not provided with seats, with the exception of a few wooden benches in the first row (Aristoph., Acharn., 25). Hence the assembled citizens either stood or sat on the bare rock (xaμaí, Aristoph., Vesp., 43); and accordingly the Sausage-seller, when he seeks to undermine the popularity of Cleon, offers a cushion to the demus (Aristoph., Equit., 783). It was not provided, like the theatres, with any species of awning to protect the assembly from the rays of the sun; and this was doubtless one reason why the assembly was held at day-break (Mure, vol. ii. p. 63).

"It has been remarked that a traveller

8. The Agora was immediately beneath the Pnyx. It is difficult to define its exact limits; its most peculiar and central space was the hollow which lies between the Pnyx, the Areopagus, and the Acropolis, but is open towards the S.E. The Agora formed the eastern portion of the quarter called Keramicus, of which the principal feature was a street, probably the high street of Athens, which led from the gate Dipylum into the centre of the Agora. The Agora must have resembled more or less a "place," or square, and was planted with plane-trees. This street was continued beyond the Agora under another name as far as the fountain Callirrhöe.

who mounts the bema of the Pnyx | Pnyx, that it is impossible to believe may safely say, what perhaps cannot that it could ever have been used as be said with equal certainty of any the ordinary assembly of the citizens; other spot, and of any other body of and it is much more probable that it great men in antiquity-Here have served for purposes connected with stood Demosthenes, Pericles, Themi- the great assembly in the Pnyx below, stocles, Aristides, and Solon. This being perhaps covered in part with remark, however, would not be true buildings or booths for the convenience in its full extent, if we were to give of the Prytanes, scribes, and other credence to a passage of Plutarch public functionaries.”- - Dr. Smith's (Them. 19), who relates that the bema Dict., p. 283. originally looked towards the sea, and that it was afterwards removed by the Thirty Tyrants so as to face the land, because the sovereignty of the sea was the origin of the democracy, while the pursuit of agriculture was favourable to the oligarchy. But from no part of the present Pnyx could the sea be seen, and it is evident, from the existing remains, that it is of much more ancient date than the age of the Thirty Tyrants. Moreover, it is quite incredible that a work of such gigantic proportions should have been erected by the Thirty, who never even summoned an assembly of the citizens. And even if they had effected such a change in the place of meeting for the citizens, would not the latter, in the restoration of the democracy, have returned to the former site? We have therefore no hesitation in rejecting the whole story along with Forchhammer and Mure, and of regarding it with the latter writer as one of the many anecdotes of what may be called the The following short moral and political mythology of account by Dr. Wordsworth will show Greece, invented to give zest to the what were the principal objects, and narrative of interesting events, or what were their purposes; but the the actions and characters of illus- determination of the sites must be trious men. considered in many instances hypo“Wordsworth, however, accepts Plu-thetical. At the same time they could tarch's story, and points out remains not, for the most part, have been fur which he considers to be those of the from the sites here assigned. ancient Pnyx a little behind the present bema. It is true that there is behind the existing bema, and on the summit of the rock, an esplanade and terrace, which has evidently been artificially levelled; and near one of its extremities are appearances on the ground which have been supposed to betoken the existence of a former bema. This esplanade, however, is so much smaller than the present

The accounts of ancient authors do not enable us to fix the exact sites of most of the monuments of the Agora, and there are no actual traces either to help our inquiry or to call for description.

"It is evident that the site of the Pnyx would have been so selected that it should be of easy access to the people who were assembled there. It would therefore be placed near the Agora. Accordingly, we find that the Agora was in the valley immediately beneath it. Again, there would be a presumption that the Senate-house was in the neighbourhood of the Pnyx. For a similar reason we should

peium.

infer, that, as the existing laws were "We return to the Metroum, and frequently appealed to by the orators proceed westward from that point. in the Pnyx, the depository of those Near this temple to the mother of the laws would be of easy access from that Gods, was that of the father-deity of place. The facts are so. Both the Senate- the Athenians-of Apollo Patrous. It house (BovλeuTnpiov) and that deposi- was on the N.W. of the Metroum. tory (the MnTpov), as can be shown Farther in the same direction was the from Pausanias, were placed in the spot chosen by Plato for the scene of valley of the Agora below the Pnyx." Euthyphro's dialogue with Socrates. [Not long ago the discovery of a It was the porch in which sat the number of laws inscribed on slabs of Archon who took cognizance of relimarble near the so-called Gate of the gious suits, and from him was called Agora led some persons to think that Stoa Basileios. Parallel and contiguous the Bouleuterium was on the N. side to it was another porch much freof the Acropolis, but, as the excava- quented by the same philosopher, tions advanced, and no traces of any Socrates; this was the Stoa of Jupiter building were discovered, this new Eleutherius. Not far to the N.W. of theory respecting the Bouleuterium this stoa, as Pausanias informs us, fell to the ground.] "The Council of was the western wall of the city, and the Areopagus was called the 'Higher a city-gate in the wall; a little to Senate (ἡ ἄνω βουλή). Hence we the E. of which, and therefore within should infer that the lower senate met the city, were two buildings, one the at no great distance from it. Accord-temple of Ceres, the other the Pomingly, the senate-house was at the foot of the Areopagus hill. Again, the Prytanes, as presiding in the Pnyx, and as members of the senate, would have their official residence near to both. Their residence (the óλos) was so. It was close to the senatehouse. The altar of the Twelve Gods was the milliarium aureum from which the roads of Attica were measured. It would therefore stand in some central spot, as did its counterpart at Rome; and, in fact, the altar in question stood in the Athenian Agora, probably in its centre. A little to the E. of the Tholus stood the statues of the Ten heroes (the envuμoi) who gave names to the twelve Athenian tribes. To these statues the programmes of laws were attached for public inspection, before they were discussed in the Assembly. The situation of these statues illustrates that practice. They stood in the Agora, in the centre of the political quarter of Athens. Mars, at the southern foot of his own hill, occupied a temple between the statues of those Ten Heroes on the W. and those of Harmodius and Aristogeiton on the E.; and thus we are brought to the western foot of the Acropolis, at which point, as has before been noticed, these two statues stood.

"The Pompeium, as its name indicates, served as a depository for the objects employed in the sacred Пoural or processions, namely, in the Panathenaic procession, and in that to Eleusis. Such a building must necessarily have stood in a spot by which those processions passed . . . and that spot was the Dipylum gate."

[The reader should compare the account of the course of Pausanias given by Dr. Smith (Dict.) There is certainly a great difficulty in reconciling the probability that Pausanias entered by the Piraic gate, and that therefore the Pompeium was near that gate, with the improbability that the magazine of sacred inplements should be kept in a place near which the processions never passed. Along the street, whichever it be, that Pausanias describes, were continued colonnades, σroaí open to the street, as is common in many continental towns.]

"Not far to the E. of the Theseum a building of considerable interest is supposed to have stood, the Stoa, which, from the frescoes with which it was adorned, was called the Pocile." |[These frescoes were greatly cele

sided at Athens, where he took the offices of Agonothetes and Choregus, and died about A.D. 105. The monument is of white marble, with a slightly concave front, of considerable size, but of no great architectural merit.

brated.] "The Poecilé has been iden- | sanias merely says "of a certain tified with an ancient building which Syrian," but the name is on the monustill exists in the position above speci-ment, Philopappus of Besa. He refied" [that which we have called the Gymnasium of Ptolemy]. "This opinion does not seem to me to be well founded. I should place the Poecile at the northern entrance of the Agora; for it stood near the Temple of Hephaestus, which was in the urban Colonus: and also near the Mercury Agoræus, who guarded the entrance of the Agora" (Wordsworth, p. 166 sq.).

It may be mentioned, with respect to the newly-discovered gateway which led from the eastern extremity of the Agora into the Acropolis, that the gateway and the marble wall containing it are said to be the work of a decidedly debased period; at least four hundred years later than the building of the Propylæa. The gateway is placed irregularly, and not in the line of the centre of the great flight of steps. The wall is so weak that it could not have been the external defence of the citadel: a fact which would not disagree with the conjectural restoration of these outworks, given above, p. 147.

9. The Museum.--Proceeding southward from the Pnyx to the Museum Hill, we cross the line of one of the principal roads leading between the two hills in the direction of Piræus. At the northern foot of the Museum, and opposite to the Acropolis, are three remarkable ancient excavations in the rock; that in the middle of an irregular form, the other two 11 ft. square. One leads towards another subterranean chamber of a circular form, 12 ft. in diameter at the bottom, and diminishing towards the top in the shape of a bell. This may have been a granary. They are sometimes called baths, sometimes prisons, one especially "the prison of Socrates." On the western slopes of this hill there are many traces of the foundations of houses; stairs hewn in the rock occur in several places.

On the summit of the Museum is the monument of Philopappus. Pau

There are indications of ancient walls leading down from the summit of the Museum into the valley, in the direction of the Ilissus, and

10. Callirrhöe, otherwise called Enneacrunus, from the nine pipes which conveyed the water. This fountain, according to Pausanias, supplied the only sweet running water in Athens, the rest of the supply was from wells. The water of Enneacrunus was used especially for the sacred purposes of lustrations, &c. It is now a small spring of water issuing from the foot of a ridge of rock which here crosses the bed of the Ilissus, so that in times of heavy rain the spring is lost in a small cascade of the torrent falling over the rock, but which, when the bed is in its ordinary state, that is to say dry, or nearly so, forms a pool permanent through the summer, which is resorted to by the inhabitants of the adjacent part of Athens. spring is still called, as well as the river itself, Kaλλippón.

The

On the left bank of the Ilissus, near the fountain, but a little lower down, is the site of the elegant Ionic building which was seen by Stuart, and published in his first volume, but which has since utterly perished, except the foundations of the apse of the church into which it has been converted, and called Παναγία στὴν πέτραν, οι St. Mary's on the rock. The temple was tetrastyle, amphiprostyle, the material of white marble, and the architecture Ionic, of an early and simple kind; the length and breadth on the upper step 42 ft. and 20, respectively. Leake calls this the Temple of Triptolemus; Forchhammer, that of Artemis Eucleia. Near this the bed of the Ilissus forms a small island, which is generally

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by Pausanias.

Pausanias describes an Odeum near A little farther the Enneacrunus. up the Ilissus we reach

identified with the Eleusinium men- of Ceres and Proserpine mentioned tioned by Pausanias-distinct from that connected with the great cave in the eastern part of the Acropolis rock already described- and close above it, on the 1. bank of the river, Stuart observed some traces of what he supposes to have been the temple

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11. The Panathenaic Stadium.Excavations on the site of the Pan

Panathenaic Stadium, Athens.

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