saints, no blending of the classical and mediaeval and
Renaissance influences in a bewilderment of vast antiquity. Rome,
true to her historical vocation, embraces in her ruins all ages, all
creeds, all nations. Her life has never stood still, but has
submitted to many transformations, of which the traces are still
visible. Athens, like the Greeks of history, is isolated in a sort
of self-completion: she is a thing of the past, which still exists,
because the spirit never dies, because beauty is a joy for ever.
What is truly remarkable about the city is just this, that while the
modern town is an insignificant mushroom of the present century, the
monuments of Greek art in the best period--the masterpieces of
Ictinus and Mnesicles, and the theatre on which the plays of the
tragedians were produced--survive in comparative perfection, and are
so far unencumbered with subsequent edifices that the actual Athens
of Pericles absorbs our attention. There is nothing of any
consequence intermediate between us and the fourth century B.C. Seen
from a distance the Acropolis presents nearly the same appearance as
it offered to Spartan guardsmen when they paced the ramparts of
Deceleia. Nature around is all unaltered. Except that more villages,
enclosed with olive-groves and vineyards, were sprinkled over those
bare hills in classic days, no essential change in the landscape has
taken place, no transformation, for example, of equal magnitude with
that which converted the Campagna of Rome from a plain of cities to
a poisonous solitude. All through the centuries which divide us from
the age of Hadrian--centuries unfilled, as far as Athens is
concerned, with memorable deeds or national activity--the Acropolis
has stood uncovered to the sun. The tones of the marble of
Pentelicus have daily grown more golden; decay has here and there
invaded frieze and capital; war too has done its work, shattering
the Parthenon in 1687 by the explosion of a powder magazine, and the
Propylaea in 1656 by a similar accident, and seaming the colonnades
that still remain with cannon-balls in 1827. Yet in spite of time
and violence the Acropolis survives, a miracle of beauty: like an
everlasting flower, through all that lapse of years it has spread
its coronal of marbles to the air, unheeded. And now, more than
ever, its temples seem to be incorporate with the rock they crown.
The slabs of column and basement have grown together by long
pressure or molecular ad