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was supposed that the Deity had there a sacred precinct; but the result of recent excavation is to show that here there stood no shrine, but a stoa, which may have been the Chalcotheca of which Pausanias speaks, and which has been assigned to various spots in the enclosure. Athena Ergane must have had an altar and a cult, but that she had a temple is very doubtful. There was, finally, a statue of Athena Lemnia made by Pheidias, which Lucian, perhaps the best critic of antiquity, declares to have surpassed in grace and beauty all other works of the

master.

Next in importance to the cult of Athena was that of the Brauronian Artemis, who possessed a territory behind a wing of the Propylæa, and whose worship bore many marks of great antiquity. There stood in her temple, as we gather from an inscription in the British Museum, two statues, a more ancient seated one, and a later one by Praxiteles. The votaries of Artemis were called bears, and in early times girls clad in bearskins danced in her honour. A little stone bear found on the Acropolis illustrates the custom, which few moderns will hesitate to regard as a remnant of totem-worship. Artemis was everywhere the goddess of child-birth; so we are not surprised to learn from inscriptions that her temple became a regular wardrobe, where garments of all kinds, dedicated to the formidable deity, with mirrors and many other feminine trifles, were heaped up in profusion.

Other cults had a place, though a less prominent one, on the Acropolis; and of nearly all of them we have some remains in the form of inscriptions found on the spot. There was Aphrodite Pandemos, whose statue, the work of Scopas, was seated on a galloping goat. There were Gê Kourotrophos and Demeter Chloe, who had a little shrine by the Propylæa, and Pan, who had a cave on the side of the rock. It is, however, surprising how small a share in the sacred site fell to the higher and more dignified gods, Zeus and Apollo, Hera and Hermes. The men of Athens were content that the great centre of their worship should be their ancestral Athena, the armed Virgin, mistress alike in war and the arts of peace. The fact is remarkable. In Athens women led a secluded life, and were during all the flourishing age of the city of little account, though their influence grew with the decline. Nor was virginity after early youth regarded as either natural or pleasing to the gods. An armed woman could scarcely be more out of place anywhere than at Athens. The old saying that men make the gods in their own likeness fails singularly in this instance. The explanation is probably to be found in the identification of the Deity with her

city. It was no worship of Humanity which held the Athenians, but a worship of the beautiful and glorious city of the violet crown, a veneration for their illustrious ancestors, and a conviction that alike in arts and arms they held the lead of the whole world. The object of their cultus was an idealized and glorified embodiment of their civic life.

If, with Pausanias, we could have spent a day amid the splendid dedications and crowded statues of the Acropolis, we should have found many things to astonish us, and to widen our notions of classical art, which are far too narrow and conventional, too much shaped by the Roman copyist and the Italian restorer, by the outworn views of Winckelmann and Lessing, and the conventional proprieties of the Vatican and the Capitol. The ancient Athenians were not classical in the narrow sense in which the age of the Antonines, or the age of Louis XIV., was classical. They followed impulse freely; but the impulse in turn was kept in check by a clear perception of the conditions under which works of art of various sorts must be executed, and by a frank acceptance of traditional types, as well as by the sense of what was beautiful, and the love of what was natural. One cannot but wish that some copy or record remained to us of the statue of Diitrephes, pierced by arrows, apparently an anticipation of the S. Sebastian of Christian painters, or of the bronze figure of the Trojan horse by Strongylion, with Menestheus and Teucer, Demophon and Acamas, looking out from his side-two works of which we have the bases only. One cannot but wish that we could restore the group which represented Athena leaping full-armed from the head of Zeus, or the bronze Theseus lifting the natural rock to recover his father's sandals. One cannot but long for an hour in the Pinacotheca, amid the paintings of Polygnotus and Aglaophon, so infinitely removed from the superficialities and vulgarities of Pompeii. These things are gone for ever, and it is perhaps a poor consolation to know that we have of late become better able to appreciate their loss.

We cannot finish our tour of the Acropolis without lingering for a little while on the southern slope, where of late excavations have taken place on two sites of special interest, the Temple of Esculapius and the Theatre of Dionysus.

The admirable fooling of the Plutus of Aristophanes brings vividly before us the customs of the Esculapius-worship of Athens, the sleeping of the patients in the temple of the God, and his appearance in the dead of night to counsel and restore them. Some modern writers have tried to show that the real healing power of the temples of Esculapius lay in their salubrious

salubrious sites and gushing fountains, in the daily walks in their shady arcades, and the freedom from business and dissipation which they offered. Such a view is quite in accord with the materialism which always prevails in the great medical schools. But it is not in accordance with the facts. There were medical schools in antiquity, of which writings like those of Celsus give us a high opinion, and they probably looked on the temples of Esculapius in much the same way in which modern physicians look upon hypnotism and faith-healing. The fact appears to be that the priests of Æsculapius had no competent knowledge of medicine; and the site of the temple, at Athens at least, was anything but salubrious, hidden under the rock, and exposed to the full power of the sun. The throng which filled the halls of the God was a proof that the heart of the people was in revolt against the materialism of the profession. People came to Esculapius to be healed because they preferred divine to human aid; perhaps because human aid had done all it could for them without result. And probably the great majority went to sleep in the temple of the God with a strong faith that he would really take compassion on them, and either work a direct miracle on their diseased members, or at least give them advice by which they might profit.

That faith in the votaries should be sometimes met by imposture on the part of the priests was natural. As to the relative proportions in the whole cult of belief and of imposture, we have insufficient means of judging, in spite of numerous recent documents recovered from Epidaurus, the chief seat in Greece proper of the worship of Esculapius. These documents record a number of miraculous cures, some even of an extravagant description, but they give us but little idea of the manner in which they were brought about. The existing remains at Athens help us to reconstruct the daily life of the patients of Esculapius, but do not offer us any material for the history of ancient medicine. Even the models of limbs which were commonly dedicated to the god by those who had been cured, and which were as common in Greek temples as they still are in the churches of Belgium and Italy, have in this case not been found.

The worship of Esculapius belongs in Greece mainly to the later age, when the decay of civic life and practical politics had left men more at leisure to study the symptoms of their own complaints, and when the people had so far fallen away from their allegiance to the great civic deities as to be ready to devote themselves to cults of a newer kind and more marked by actuality. We learn from an inscription that in the archonship Vol. 171.-No. 341.

L

of

of Lysander one Diocles_repaired the Athenian temple and precinct: this was in the Roman age; but it is likely that from the first introduction of Esculapius to Athens, about B.C. 470, not only his fame but also the extent of his buildings had been gradually increasing. They comprised apparently an older and a newer temple, filled with statues and dedications, open shady porticoes where the patients could walk or sleep, and houses for the priests and attendants, besides a sacred well, the water from which is to this day offered to visitors by an attendant.

We scarcely have the courage, so near the end of our article, to attempt the very difficult subject of the stage-arrangements of the Theatre of Dionysus, which occupies a large part of the southern slope of the Acropolis-hill. On the whole it is the most interesting spot in Athens. We can never really understand a play, until we know of what kind of representation the writer was thinking. The plays of the great Attic tragedians were dependent for their effect in a great degree on the fashion of their production on the stage. Less even than the plays of Shakspeare can they be appreciated without regard being had to it. And the modern revivals of classical tragedies at Oxford and Cambridge, charming as they have been as spectacles, have been planned rather with a view to what a modern audience will tolerate, than with a view to what Eschylus or Euripides intended. We may touch but two points. It is clear that the use of masks would make acting in the modern sense impossible; but it was for actors wearing masks that the Attic tragedians wrote, and this one fact colours every situation and every speech. And again, we know that the women's parts were acted by men, who were obliged to raise their voices to stentorian pitch to reach the ears of hearers in the back rows. In consequence of these and similar facts any approach to realism in Greek tragedies was impossible; and when modern amateurs try to infuse realism into them, they destroy their artistic character.

The main point, however, of recent controversy concerns the use and the height of the stage. It is well known that in the early age of Greek tragedy the chorus occupied a prominent position, performing their songs and dances in their orchestra at the feet of the spectators, while the actors occupied the intervals with their declamations; as has been supposed from a raised stage. But Dr. Dörpfeld has now set forth the view that during the age of the great Attic tragedians the stage was non-existent, that the actors stood at the back of the orchestra and addressed the spectators from behind the chorus, and standing on the same level with it. This view is professedly

based

based on architectural grounds, and has grown out of the recent excavations at Athens, at Epidaurus, and elsewhere. Our readers will naturally wonder how this arrangement would work, and we must refer them to Miss Harrison's report of a lecture by Dr. Dörpfeld for a notion on the subject (p. 292):

'Take the Agamemnon as an instance, and watch it free from the sorry trammels of a high and narrow Roman stage. Enter the watchman on the top of the temporary palace of Agamemnon; the whole orchestra is still clean and clear of actors and chorus; he sees the beacon fire and cries aloud, and forthwith in stream the chorus by the two broad parodoi, singing the fate of Troy; and when the long tremendous chant is ceasing, they catch sight of Clytemnestra coming from out the stage-house by the one central door, and they bid her hail. She speaks with them face to face on the orchestra, which she enters straight from the palace; there is no division of height, only a seemly space between the queen and her servants. To them enters the herald by one or other of the parodoi; he comes rushing in from afar, up the broad entrance space, not rushing down head foremost on to a narrow high stage where his haste seems precarious, but at ease along all the length of the parodos, whence the spectators, as well as chorus, could watch him coming from afar. The chorus sing again, and at last comes the entrance of Agamemnon with the captive Cassandra, and all the pageant of returning war behind him. How absurd Agamemnon and his chariot look, shot half through a side door on a modern Greek stage, many can testify. It is only the humble and touching conviction that the effect is "Greek" that enables a modern audience to support the sight without laughter. But see him come with his train sweeping up the parodos, thronging the orchestra, the chorus chanting its anapasts, swaying to either side to make room for the great procession, and we have a pomp, indeed, fit for the coming of a king. Clytemnestra, already on the orchestra, speaks to the elders round her long-drawn speech; she spreads the purple carpets, she accosts the captive silent stranger in the car, with the throng of curious citizens about, and, uttering her prayer to Zeus Teleios that he may accomplish her dread purpose, she and the King pass together into the house.'

Miss Harrison has imbibed some of Dr. Dörpfeld's faculty of overpowering the consent of readers, and it is with some regret that we confess our inability to accede to her views, and to allow the non-existence of the stage in the fifth century B.C. Mr. Haigh, in his admirable recent book on the Attic Theatre, seems to us to have successfully combated the new theory, and the view which he proposes as a substitute, that there was at that period a stage, but one of not more than five or six feet high, seems not inconsistent with the extant remains of Greek theatres, and more in accordance with the testimony of ancient

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