Greek Lands and LettersAllinson, Anne C. E. (Anne Crosby Emery)
History
Greek Lands and Letters
Allinson, Anne C. E. (Anne Crosby Emery)
Greece -- Description and travel; Greek literature -- History and criticism
The barren precinct of Artemis Brauronia adjoins the south corner of the
Propylæa, and a small dedicatory bear, found somewhere near, now sits in
the Acropolis Museum, brooding in stony silence over by-gone glories at
the Brauronia. But the maiden with the saffron robe and all her girl
companions have long since disappeared “down the back entry of time.”
If it could be granted us to have restored one portion of the Parthenon
or its appurtenances, our choice would probably fall, not upon the
famous gold-ivory statue of Athena, but first upon the pediment
sculptures; next, it may be, upon the great continuous frieze. If its
shattered fragments could be restored, and the slabs now in Paris and
London could be recalled from exile and united to those still in place,
it would be an easier task for the imagination to reconstruct from these
than from the piecemeal references in the literature an abridged
idealization of the glory of the actual Panathenaic procession. As it
is, from what is left still in place there emerges something far more
significant than the details of any cult or festival. The dismounted
youth adjusting his sandal; the horse with leisurely nose bent to his
fore-leg; the mounted horsemen; the rams and oxen led to the sacrifice,
remain, like Keats’s “heifer lowing at the skies,” to tell the hurrying
generations that once, at least, there has existed, and may exist again,
wherever men are strong to feel and know, the harmony between the
temporal and the eternal.
The Parthenon remained practically intact for centuries, lending its
inspiration both to the creative Greeks and to the imagination of the
Romans, the executors of the Hellenic realty. Even the chryselephantine
Athena seems to have held undisturbed possession of her temple for more
than eight centuries, from the dedication in 438 B. C. to about 430 A.
D., when it disappears from Athenian records.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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