Plutarch, a Greek gentleman of the first Christian century, speaks with enthusiasm of the creations of Pericles. “There blooms upon them a certain freshness untouched by time, as if there dwelt within them an ever-animating spirit, a life that never grows old.” In the next century, under the successors of Hadrian, who had inaugurated a new era for Athens, Pausanias, a foreigner, came and saw and was conquered by the wealth of detail on the Acropolis. At the same time, that generous citizen from Marathon, Herodes Atticus, was building against the side of the Acropolis his gorgeous Italian opera-house, while Lucian, the Syrian Atticist, with a higher, if impossible, ideal, was striving to revive the old Platonic grace by quarrying from the Pentelicus of classic literature. When, in the rôle of a “Truthful James,” he is acquitted of blasphemy against true philosophy, he enters the east door of the Parthenon to make thanksgiving to the goddess, or, more specifically, to the winged Victory, six feet high, upon her hand. His devotion takes the form of the prayer appended to three of Euripides’s dramas:— “O majestical Victory, shelter my life Neath thy covert of wings. Aye, cease not to grant me thy crowning.” Thus, like many another later foreigner, he pays the time-honoured tribute to the outward embodiment of the ideal. [Illustration: S. COLONNADE OF THE PARTHENON] The charm of the Acropolis changes with the changing light. See it, if you will, at dawn from the opposite hillside, near the “Prison of Socrates,” as the sun rises over Hymettus and the Pentelic columns of the Parthenon change from the gray of unsympathetic silhouettes to the luminous chromes of the irradiated marbles. See it at a later hour and wonder that it does not fade into the light of common day. Or visit it when the sunset light turns to burnished copper the unadorned hills in the west, beyond Salamis, and on the choir of the encircling mountains the supramundane charm of the violet atmosphere falls like a robe with empurpling shadows in its folds. Go when the night has fallen, and sit in the mysterious darkness, lit only by the marble columns white against the dark outlines of Hymettus, until the full moon looks over the mountain’s rim, tipping architrave and capital with silver, and then, as it swings free from Hymettus, merging the wreck of the Parthenon in the beauty of the landscape to which the scarred and yawning sides of the temple seem to open with intent. Presently the whole hill-top with its moraine of prostrate columns and marble fragments is lit up and the pillars of the Propylæa flower into whiteness. Or finally, bizarre as it may sound, see it when—artificially illuminated after the Olympic Games—the ruined temple and the serrated contour of the plateau are etched in mid-air by the white light against a gulf of darkness, a veritable city of the skies.