Small scale of ancient Athens

It requires an effort to bring home to the mind the small scale of ancient Athens. It does not seem within the old walls to have exceeded a square mile, about the area of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and one-hundredth part of London. Out of this space, the Acropolis, wholly devoted to public buildings, the Areopagus, the Pnyx, and the Agora must have occupied at least one-tenth. But a few hundred acres, or the area of one of the large London parks, remained for private houses. These were mainly of wood and plaster, principally used at night. Of mansions for private citizens, of a permanent kind there is no vestige nor any reference in classical times. The normal population could hardly have exceeded 25,000 full citizens; and we cannot believe that the city and the ports together could ever have contained 200,000 souls, even counting slaves, strangers, women, and children.

Their whole life was public: their main life was spent in the open air. Their homes were shelters at night, with harems for the women and children. The climate of Athens is such that nothing to be called winter cold occurs between the end of February and the middle of December, and rain seldom falls between May and the end of October. We must imagine the Athenians of the great age as a very small class of free and privileged men, personally known to each other, living on terms of absolute equality walking tours ephesus, passing their lives in public, mainly in the porticoes, colonnades, temples, and market-places, having little serious work except in time of war, with strong civic patriotism, and in-tense local superstitions, lounging about with a noble sense of superiority like the officers of the guard in some military capital.

With all hard work committed

They were educated in certain things and in certain modes beyond the wildest dream of modern culture, with all hard work committed to slaves, all cares of the household to women: passionately keen about grace, beauty, wit, and intellect. Their culture consisted of poetry, mythology, music, gymnastics, arithmetic, the art of conversation, infinite subtlety in the use of their own language, and abnormal sensitiveness to rhythm, grace of expression, wit, and all forms of beauty. So they lived daintily, as their poet said, in a balmy flood of light, sur-rounded by temples, statues, porticoes, shrines, and paintings, and at every corner of their city dominated by the radiant majesty of the Acropolis and its divine Guardian.

It is not easy to conceive the effect of a building of Pentelic marble in that atmosphere until one has seen it on the spot. But when we behold a new marble colonnade in that pellucid air, sparkling like the Silberhorn peak of the Jungfrau in the early morning light, we instantly comprehend the peculiarities of that style. A Doric pediment in London no more enables us to understand a temple at Athens than the bronze Achilles of Hyde Park recalls to us the Athene Promachos of Pheidias. The Vestry of the Church of St. Pancras in Euston Square is not more like the Erechtheum than the pediment of St. Martin’s in the Fields is like the Parthenon. The British Museum, the only tolerable Greek building in London, looks somewhat as a Greek temple might look during the eruption of a volcano. Two thousand three hundred and twenty-five years have tinged the Parthenon and the Propylaea a deep orange or russet.