Whether the second oath, on the Acropolis, was taken actually in the cave-sanctuary cannot be certainly decided; the votive tablets make it probable and they make quite certain that the cave-sanctuary was officially used by the archons. This fact it is necessary to emphasize. Until these inscriptions were brought to light Apollo’s cave was thought to be of but little importance, curious and primitive but practically negligible. Now that it is clear that the archons selected it as their memorial chapel, such a view is no longer possible. It was a sanctuary not merely of Apollo Below-the-Heights but of the ancestral god, the Apollo Patroös of the archons. Moreover—a fact all important—this Apollo ‘Below-the-Heights’ being Apollo Patroös was also Apollo Pythios. Demosthenes in the _de Corona_[165], calling to witness his country’s gods, says ‘I call on all the gods and goddesses who hold the land of Attica and on Apollo the Pythian, who is ancestral (πατρῷος) to the state.’ The sanctuary in the cave was a Pythion. Apollo coming as he did to Athens from Pytho was always Pythian whatever additional title he might take, and every sanctuary of his was a Pythion; his most venerable sanctuary was not a temple but a hollowed rock. * * * * * The Pythion lies before us securely fixed, primitive, convincing. With the ‘sanctuary of Zeus Olympios’ it is alas! far otherwise. Given that the Pythion is fixed at the North-West corner of the Acropolis, and given that, according to Strabo (see p. 69), it was so near the Olympieion that the place of an altar could be described as ‘between’ them, then it follows that somewhere near to that North-West corner the sanctuary of Zeus Olympios must have lain. We may further say that as Thucydides, it will be seen, notes the various sanctuaries and the city-well in the order from East to West, and begins with the sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, it lay presumably somewhat to the East of the Pythion. To the East of the Pythion, near to the supposed site of the temenos of Aglauros, was found an inscription[166] with a dedication to Zeus, but, as inscriptions are easily moveable, no great importance can be attached to this isolated fact. Of definite monumental evidence for the existence of a sanctuary of Zeus where we seek it, we must frankly own at the outset there is nothing certain[167]. It must stand or fall with the Pythion.