Thucydides, after his account of the narrow limits of the city before Theseus, returns to the main burden of his narrative, the crowding of the inhabitants of Attica within the city walls. ‘Some few,’ he says[48], ‘indeed had dwelling places, and took refuge with some of their friends or relations, but the most part of them took up their abode on the waste places of the city and in the sanctuaries and hero-shrines, with the exception of the Acropolis and the Eleusinion, and any other that might be definitely closed. And what is called the Pelargikon beneath the Acropolis, to dwell in which was accursed, and was forbidden in the fag end of an actual Pythian oracle on this wise, The Pelargikon better unused, was, notwithstanding, in consequence of the immediate pressure thickly populated.’ The passage comes for a moment as something of a shock. We have been thinking of the Pelargikon as the Acropolis, we have traced its circuit of walls _on_ the Acropolis, and now suddenly we find the two sharply distinguished. The Acropolis, though closed, is surely not cursed. The Acropolis is one of the definitely closed places, to which the refugees cannot get access; the Pelargikon, though accursed, is open to them, and they take possession of it; the two manifestly cannot be coincident. But happily the words ‘below the Acropolis’ bring recollection, and with it illumination. What is called the Pelargikon _below the Acropolis_ is surely that appanage of the citadel which Thucydides in his second clause mentions so vaguely. The ancient _polis_ comprised not only ‘_what is now the citadel_,’ but also together with it, ‘_what is below it towards about south_[49].’ Thucydides would have saved a world of trouble if he had stated that ‘what is below towards the south’ _was_ the Pelargikon; but he does not, probably because he is concerned with dimensions, not with nomenclature. The Pelasgikon meant originally the whole citadel, the ancient city as defined by Thucydides. This was its meaning in the days of Herodotus. In the Pelasgikon the tyrants were besieged (p. 25). But by the time of Thucydides the Acropolis proper, i.e. much the larger and more important part of the old city, had ceased to be ‘Pelasgic’; the old fortifications were concealed by the new retaining walls of Themistocles and Kimon. It was only at the west and south-west that the Pelasgic fortifications were still visible, hence this portion below the Acropolis took to itself the name that had belonged to the whole; but this limited use of the word was at first tentative. Thucydides says, ‘which is _called_ the Pelargikon.’ This is quite different from the definite ‘the Pelasgian citadel’ used by Herodotus. The neuter adjectival form is, so far as I know, never used of the whole complex of the Acropolis _plus_ what is below.