We passed a handsome portico, standing alone amid a heap of ruins. It was the entrance to the ancient Agora. Here assembled the people of Athens, the constituents and supporters of Pericles, the first possessors of these godlike temples. Here were sown, in the ears of the Athenians, the first seeds of glory and sedition, by patriots and demagogues, in the stirring days of Platæa and Marathon. Here was it first whispered that Aristides had been too long called “the just,” and that Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens. And, for a lighter thought, it was here that the wronged wife of Alcibiades, compelled to come forth publicly and sign her divorce, was snatched up in the arms of her brilliant, but dissolute husband, and carried forcibly home, forgiving him, woman-like, with but half a repentance. The feeling with which I read the story when a boy, is strangely fresh in my memory.
We hurried on to the Acropolis. The ascent is winding and difficult, and, near the gates, encumbered with marble rubbish. Volumes have been written on the antiquities which exist still within the walls. The greater part of four unrivalled temples are still lifted to the sun by this tall rock in the centre of Athens, the majestic Parthenon, visible over half Greece, towering above all. A Bavarian soldier received our passport at the gate. He was resting the butt of his musket on a superb bas-relief, a fragment from the ruins. How must the blood of a Greek boil to see a barbarian thus set to guard the very sanctuary of his glory.
We stood under the portico of the Parthenon, and looked down on Greece. Right through a broad gap in the mountains, as if they had been swept away that Athens might be seen, stood the shining Acropolis of Corinth. I strained my eyes to see Diogenes lying under the walls, and Alexander standing in his sunshine. “Sea-born Salamis” was beneath me, but the “ships by thousands” were not there, and the king had vanished from his “rocky throne” with his “men and nations.” Ægina lay far down the gulf, folded in its blue mist, and I strained my sight to see Aristides wandering in exile on its shore. “Mars Hill” was within the sound of my voice, but its Areopagus was deserted of its judges, and the intrepid apostle was gone. The rostrum of Demosthenes, and the academy of Plato, and the banks of the Ilissus, where Socrates and Zeno taught, were all around me, but the wily orator, and the philosopher, “on whose infant lips the bees shed honey as he slept,” and he whose death and doctrine have been compared to those of Christ, and the self-denying stoic, were alike departed. Silence and rain brood over all!