DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9184#0253
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CHAPTER VIII.
the excavation of the athenian acropolis.
It is only by slow degrees that the modern world has
learned how much is left of ancient Athens. To the
great scholars of the Renaissance, Athens was a name in
history but not in geography, a vanished city like Baby-
lon and Jerusalem. From the days when Ciriaco of
Ancona, in 1447, first brought it to the knowledge of the
learned world that though the jewels were gone, valuable
fragments of the casket still remained, down to the
present year, archaeological research has pressed closer
and closer at Athens on the heels of the ravages of time
and barbarism, until it may fairly be said that as Athens
is almost the most interesting of ancient cities, so the
remains which it has left us are more extensive and
suggestive than those of any other place, with the possible
exception of Rome. And this is only natural. Jerusalem
has left an invisible record in the spiritual life of man-
kind ; but the genius of the Athenians was pre-eminently
plastic. What they thought and felt they worked out
in their exquisite native marble, and the rocky soil and
dry air of Attica have preserved at least some remains
of their admirable creations through the political vicissi-
tudes of twenty-five centuries.
The modern Athenians are possessed by a curious
passion, intelligible but quite unhistorical. They are de-
termined to obliterate so far as they can the whole tract
CHAPTER VIII.
the excavation of the athenian acropolis.
It is only by slow degrees that the modern world has
learned how much is left of ancient Athens. To the
great scholars of the Renaissance, Athens was a name in
history but not in geography, a vanished city like Baby-
lon and Jerusalem. From the days when Ciriaco of
Ancona, in 1447, first brought it to the knowledge of the
learned world that though the jewels were gone, valuable
fragments of the casket still remained, down to the
present year, archaeological research has pressed closer
and closer at Athens on the heels of the ravages of time
and barbarism, until it may fairly be said that as Athens
is almost the most interesting of ancient cities, so the
remains which it has left us are more extensive and
suggestive than those of any other place, with the possible
exception of Rome. And this is only natural. Jerusalem
has left an invisible record in the spiritual life of man-
kind ; but the genius of the Athenians was pre-eminently
plastic. What they thought and felt they worked out
in their exquisite native marble, and the rocky soil and
dry air of Attica have preserved at least some remains
of their admirable creations through the political vicissi-
tudes of twenty-five centuries.
The modern Athenians are possessed by a curious
passion, intelligible but quite unhistorical. They are de-
termined to obliterate so far as they can the whole tract