ATHENS AND ITS MONUMENTS INTRODUCTION SOURCES OF INFORMATION THE most important sources for our knowledge of the topography and antiquities of ancient Athens are, of course, the monuments themselves; and under monuments we include not only buildings and sculpture, but also such remains as coins and inscriptions, though the latter may also be classed as a part of our most valuable literary evidence. Happily the monumental remains are abundant, and additions are constantly being made by means of excavation and various investigations. Time, however, has dealt so harshly with most of the ruins, defacing some, destroying others, that we should be quite helpless in our effort to visualize the ancient city without the aid of the literary sources. Casual references in the writers of tragedy and comedy, in the historians, the orators, the philosophers, and many other authors, and their commentators, are of inestimable value. But we are still more indebted to special accounts of the city itself. Unfortunately the majority of these have come down to us in a very fragmentary condition. The most regrettable loss is that of the work of Polemo of Ilium (second century B.C.), who in antiquity was highly esteemed. His four books On the Votive Offerings on the Acropolis, his book On the Sacred Way, and his Record of the Namesake Heroes (Eponymi) of the Tribes and Demes, would be invaluable to us, but we have of them only scanty fragments. The few pages of a book On the Cities of Greece, which has survived under the name of Dicaearchus (published by Heracleides the Critic about 205 B.C.), contain some notes on Athens. Only disconnected excerpts have been preserved, mostly by Byzantine lexicographers, of similar works by Diodorus the Periegete (fourth century B.C.), Heliodorus of Athens (second century B.C.), and several others. But the greatest treasure of the student of Athenian topography is the extant treatise of Pausanias, in ten books. This author was a native of Asia Minor, his home probably being at or near Lydian Magnesia, in the vicinity of Mt. Sipylus; the journey on which his description seems to have been based was probably made in the period of the Antonines (138-180 A.D.). The first thirty chapters of his first book deal with the city of Athens and the demes of Phalerum and Peiraeus. Since in this book he describes the Stadium as it stood after it was completed by Herodes Atticus, in 143 A.D., and later remarks that the Odeum built by the same man in honor of his wife, who died about 161 A.D., was not built when the book was written, it must have been published between the dates mentioned, or very near the middle of the second century after Christ. Not only in respect to Athens, but also for Olympia, Delphi, and other places, the reliability of Pausanias has repeatedly been tested and not found wanting. His purpose seems to have been to compose an interesting narrative for distant readers and to provide a handbook for the traveler. Coming from Phalerum and Peiraeus and entering the city by the principal gate, he guides the reader systematically about the sites which seem to him "worth seeing." Of course we should not assume, as some have done, that Pausanias necessarily followed the same route himself, any more than this would be assumed for a modern guide-book. Second only in importance to the ancient literature are records made by late mediaeval and early modern visitors to Athens. These comprise so numerous a group that only a few can be mentioned in our survey. For about twelve centuries after the period of Pausanias the study of the antiquities of the city received slight attention. In 1395 Niccolò da Martoni tarried a day there upon his return from a crusade to the Holy Land, and left in his journal a brief account of what he saw. A generation later, in 1436 and in 1447, Cyriac of Ancona spent some time in Athens, but of his commentaries and drawings only portions have survived. Much valuable material is given in the extant records of three anonymous visitors, two Greeks and an Italian, who were in the city just after the middle of the fifteenth century. The work of Martin Kraus, a professor of Tübingen, is also valuable. References to Athens in the literature of the next two hundred years are few and unsatisfactory. About the middle of the seventeenth century, M. Giraud, consul of France and later of England, furnished material which was soon afterwards published by the scholar Guillet in his Athènes ancienne et nouvelle (1675), the first systematic account of the city to appear in modern times. To the seventeenth century belong also several plans of Athens, and especially of the Acropolis, the best being that made for the French Capuchins about 1660. The long letter from Athens of the Jesuit Babin to the Abbé Pécoil of Lyons is interesting, but not altogether trustworthy. Of greater moment are the descriptions and drawings made for the Marquis de Nointel, French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, who, with his retinue, spent some weeks in Athens in 1674. The most valuable part of the material consists of sketches, made by a Flemish painter in the company (probably not, as formerly supposed, by Jacques Carrey, the French artist) of various antiquities, notably the pedimental sculptures of the Parthenon (p. 284). Many of the originals were destined to perish a few years later; these sketches therefore are of prime importance. In the very year of De Nointel's visit, George Transfeldt, a runaway slave of a Turkish merchant, was in the city and has left a brief description. Two years later the French artist Jacob Spon and the Englishman Sir George Wheler visited Athens together, and the results of their observations form the first scientific publication of the ruins. With the end of the seventeenth century came disasters; the capture of the city by the Venetians, in 1687, was accompanied by the explosion of powder stored in the Parthenon, and followed by the demolition or removal of works of art (p. 304); yet the attention of the western world was attracted to Athens and its monuments as never before. To the Venetian expedition were due several plans and descriptions; a panorama was also made, based on the Capuchin plans. As the investigations of the seventeenth century had been mainly French, so those of the eighteenth were preëminently English. Of greatest importance is the work of the painter James Stuart and the architect Nicolas Revett. Supported by wealthy patrons, these men spent three years in Athens (1751-1754), making careful plans and measurements of the ruins and preparing sketches of ruins and of scenes in and about the city. The four sumptuous volumes of their Antiquities of Athens are epochal, and form an indispensable addition to the literature. Chandler, |