ce 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 adhesion into a coherent whole. Nor have weeds
or creeping ivy invaded the glittering fragments that strew the
sacred hill. The sun's kiss alone has caused a change from white to
amber-hued or russet. Meanwhile, the exquisite adaptation of Greek
building to Greek landscape has been enhanced rather than impaired
by that 'unimaginable touch of time,' which has broken the
regularity of outline, softened the chisel-work of the sculptor, and
confounded the painter's fretwork in one tint of glowing gold. The
Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the Propylaea have become one with the
hill on which they cluster, as needful to the scenery around them as
the everlasting mountains, as sympathetic as the rest of nature to
the successions of morning and evening, which waken them to
passionate life by the magic touch of colour.

Thus there is no intrusive element in Athens to distract the mind
from memories of its most glorious past. Walk into the theatre of
Dionysus. The sculptures that support the stage--Sileni bending
beneath the weight of cornices, and lines of graceful youths and
maidens--are still in their ancient station.[1] The pavement of the
orchestra, once trodden by Athenian choruses, presents its
tessellated marbles to our feet; and we may choose the seat of
priest or archon or herald or thesmothetes, when we wish to summon
before our mind's eye the pomp of the 'Agamemnon' or the dances of
the 'Birds' and 'Clouds.' Each seat still bears some carven
name--[Greek: IEREOS TON MOUSON] or [Greek: IEREOS ASKAEPIOU]--and
that of the priest of Dionysus is beautifully wrought with Bacchic
basreliefs. One of them, inscribed [Greek: IEREOS ANTINOOU], proves
indeed that the extant chairs were placed here in the age of
Hadrian, who completed the vast temple of Zeus Olympius, and filled
its precincts with statues of his favourite, and named a new Athens
after his own name.[2] Yet we need not doubt that their position
round the orchestra is traditional, and that even in their form they
do not differ from those which the priests and officers of Athens
used from the time of AEschylus downward. Probably a slave br