Primitive Athens as Described by Thucydides

Should the sympathies of the scholar extend to Roman times, he has still, for the making of his mental picture, all the help imagination needs. Through the twisted streets of modern Athens the beautiful Tower of the Winds is his constant land-mark; Hadrian, with his Olympieion, with his triumphal Arch, with his Library, confronts him at every turn; when he goes to the great Stadion to see ‘Olympian’ games or a revived ‘Antigone,’ when he looks down from the Acropolis into the vast Odeion, Herodes Atticus cannot well be forgotten. Moreover, if he really cares to know what Athens was in Roman days, the scholar can leave behind him his Murray and his Baedeker and take for his only guide the contemporary of Hadrian, Pausanias.

But returning, as he inevitably will, again and again to the Acropolis, the scholar will gradually become conscious, if dimly, of another and an earlier Athens. On his plan of the Acropolis he will find marked certain fragments of very early masonry, which, he is told, are ‘Pelasgian.’ As he passes to the south of the Parthenon he comes upon deep-sunk pits railed in, and within them he can see traces of these ‘Pelasgian’ walls and other masonry about which his guide-book is not over-explicit. To the south of the Propylaea, to his considerable satisfaction, he comes on a solid piece of this ‘Pelasgian’ wall, still above ground. East of the Erechtheion he will see a rock-hewn stairway which once, he learns, led down from the palace of the ancient prehistoric kings, the ‘strong house of Erechtheus.’ South of the Erechtheion he can make out with some effort the ground plan of an early temple; he is told that there exist bases of columns belonging to a yet earlier structure, and these he probably fails to find.

With all his efforts he can frame but a hazy picture of this earlier Acropolis, this citadel before the Persian wars. Probably he might drop the whole question as of merely antiquarian interest—a matter to be noted rather than realized—but that his next experience brings sudden revelation. Skilfully sunk out of sight—to avoid interfering with his realization of Periklean Athens—is the small Acropolis Museum. Entering it, he finds himself in a moment actually within that other and earlier Athens dimly discerned, and instantly he knows it, not as a world of ground-plans and fragmentary Pelasgic fortifications, but as a kingdom of art and of humanity vivid with colour and beauty.