nappropriate subject for the sculptor, in
adorning the houses of gods who were themselves but human on a
higher level; and the ritual whereby the gods were honoured was
merely an exhibition, in its strength and joyfulness, of mortal
beauty. Therefore the Panathenaic procession furnished Pheidias with
a series of sculptural motives, which he had only to express
according to the principles of his art. The frieze, three feet and
four inches in height, raised forty feet above the pavement of the
peristyle, ran for five hundred and twenty-four continuous feet
round the outside wall of the cella of the Parthenon. The whole of
this long line was wrought with carving of exquisite delicacy and
supreme vigour, in such low relief as its peculiar position, far
above the heads of the spectators, and only illuminated by light
reflected from below, required. Each figure, each attitude, and each
fold of drapery in its countless groups is a study; yet the whole
was a transcript from actual contemporary Athenian life. Truly in
matters of art we are but infants to the Greeks.

The topographical certainty which invests the ruins of the Acropolis
with such peculiar interest, belongs in a less degree to the whole
of Athens. Although the most recent researches have thrown fresh
doubt upon the exact site of the Pnyx, and though no traces of the
agora remain, yet we may be sure that the Bema from which Pericles
sustained the courage of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war,
was placed upon the northern slope looking towards the Propylaea,
while the wide irregular space between this hill, the Acropolis, the
Areopagus, and the Theseum, must have formed the meeting-ground for
amusement and discussion of the citizens at leisure. About
Areopagus, with its tribunal hollowed in the native rock, and the
deep cleft beneath, where the shrine of the Eumenides was built,
there is no question. The extreme insignificance of this little
mound may at first indeed excite incredulity and wonder; but a few
hours in Athens accustom the traveller to a smallness of scale which
at first sight seemed ridiculous. Colonus, for example, the Colonus
which every student of Sophocles has pictured to himself in the
solitude of unshorn meadows, where groves of cypresses and olives
bent unpruned above wild tangles of narcissus flowers and crocuses,
and where the nightingale sang undisturbed by city noise or labour
of the husbandman, turns out to be a scarcely appreciable