This Acropolis, far simpler than the Periclean citadel but beautiful and adorned, was devastated by the Persians. Then for more than a quarter of a century after Salamis we must imagine it as scarred and patched, with perhaps only one temple, half restored, to house the sacred image within its blackened walls. In general, when we speak of the Acropolis, it is of the citadel as it appeared towards the close of the fifth century to Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes, to Thucydides and Xenophon, to Isocrates and Lysias, to Socrates and Plato. This citadel we can restore to our imagination from the descriptions of Pausanias (controlled by information from other sources) who, in spite of erratic omissions, fortunately describes many things with a fulness of detail quite foreign to the writers of the classical period. When Socrates, too robust at seventy to know the fatigue of the ascent, climbed the approach to the hill he must often have been inspired by the beauty of art, as he had been by the beauty of nature on the banks of the Ilissus, to renew the prayer: “Dear Pan, and ye other gods, make me beautiful in the inward man.” Born into a generation and among a people where external and physical beauty was assumed as corollary to the beauty of the ideal, there escapes him, thus incidentally, the echo of his self-conquest over his own Silenus-like exterior, so out of keeping with the charm of his environment. Perhaps he went up the hill the evening before his trial to take a last look at what he had loved long and well. He knew in advance that his “apology” to the court was to be a reassertion of individual liberty of conscience that would most probably result for him in the hemlock draught. The majestic columns of the great gateways rose before him on either side, the wings extended like welcoming arms. He would turn to the left and stand in the picture gallery. Perhaps he would pause longest before Alcibiades, his pernicious disciple, pictured in arrogant beauty as victor at the Nemean games. Turning to the other side of the gateway, he would stand on the bastion before the Nike temple and would look out over the familiar city, the Attic plain and harbour-town. As he passed on now to enter the gateway, and his eye fell upon the sculptured Hermes and the Graces, little would he dream of the perplexed debate of modern critics as to a possible connection of this group with the handiwork of a young sculptor or stone-cutter, “Socrates the son of Sophroniscus.”