DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0045
CHAPTER n
THE FORTRESS-CITY
In an age which looked on war as the only liberal
profession/ the fenced city must have been the prime
concern. So the hilltops of Hellas, often for-
tiveHiii- bidding enough by nature, were turned into
frowning castles, each the seat of a Basileus lord-
ing it over a realm sometimes as wide as he could readily
watch with his own eyes, sometimes — as in Argolis —
with two or three rival royal perches within the range of
vision. Of these ancient hill-forts, the Acrocorinthos and
the Athenian Acropolis are perhaps the noblest examples —
the first, with its beetling brow a thousand feet in air,
standing sentinel at the gates of the Peloponnese; the
second hardly half as lofty, but with a matchless distinc-
tion in its free and queenly relief above the Attic Plain.
Both these rocks, however, have had too long a history to
serve our purpose as types of the Mycenaean stronghold.
On each the Hellenic race, in its more perfect bloom,
covered up in great measure the monuments of the Heroic
Age ; and on each the Roman, Frank, and Ottoman have
taken turns in wasting or burying the work of Greek
hands, historic and prehistoric alike. It was even worse
with Thebes and Megara, where the rock was cleared
1 In Homer, the agora is occasionally KvSidvtipa; but the epithet is still
the peculiar, as it must have been at an earlier day the exclusive, property of
uAxv-
THE FORTRESS-CITY
In an age which looked on war as the only liberal
profession/ the fenced city must have been the prime
concern. So the hilltops of Hellas, often for-
tiveHiii- bidding enough by nature, were turned into
frowning castles, each the seat of a Basileus lord-
ing it over a realm sometimes as wide as he could readily
watch with his own eyes, sometimes — as in Argolis —
with two or three rival royal perches within the range of
vision. Of these ancient hill-forts, the Acrocorinthos and
the Athenian Acropolis are perhaps the noblest examples —
the first, with its beetling brow a thousand feet in air,
standing sentinel at the gates of the Peloponnese; the
second hardly half as lofty, but with a matchless distinc-
tion in its free and queenly relief above the Attic Plain.
Both these rocks, however, have had too long a history to
serve our purpose as types of the Mycenaean stronghold.
On each the Hellenic race, in its more perfect bloom,
covered up in great measure the monuments of the Heroic
Age ; and on each the Roman, Frank, and Ottoman have
taken turns in wasting or burying the work of Greek
hands, historic and prehistoric alike. It was even worse
with Thebes and Megara, where the rock was cleared
1 In Homer, the agora is occasionally KvSidvtipa; but the epithet is still
the peculiar, as it must have been at an earlier day the exclusive, property of
uAxv-