But if he leave that museum aglow with a new enthusiasm, determined to know what is to be known of that antique world, the scholar will assuredly be met on the threshold of his enquiry by difficulties and disillusionment. By difficulties, because the information he seeks is scattered through a mass of foreign periodical literature, German and Greek; by disillusionment, because to the simple questions he wants to ask he can get no clear, straightforward answer. He wants to know what was the nature and extent of the ancient city, did it spread beyond the Acropolis, if so in what direction and how far? what were the primitive sanctuaries inside the Pelasgic walls, what, if any, lay outside and where? Where was the ancient city well (Kallirrhoë), where the agora, where that primitive orchestra on which, before the great theatre was built, dramatic contests took place? Straightway he finds himself plunged into a very cauldron of controversy. The ancient agora is placed by some to the north, by others to the south, by others again to the west. The question of its position is inextricably bound up, he finds to his surprise, with the question as to where lay the Enneakrounos, a fountain with which hitherto he has had no excessive familiarity; the mere mention of the Enneakrounos brings either a heated discussion or, worse, a chilling silence. This atmosphere of controversy, electric with personal prejudice, exhilarating as it is to the professed archaeologist, plunges the scholar in a profound dejection. His concern is not _jurare in verba magistri_—he wants to know not _who_ but _what_ is right. Two questions only he asks. First, and perhaps to him unduly foremost, What, as to the primitive city, is the literary testimony of the ancients themselves, and preferably the testimony not of scholiasts and second-hand lexicographers, but of classical writers who knew and lived in Athens, of Thucydides, of Pausanias? Second, To that literary testimony, what of monumental evidence has been added by excavation? * * * * * It is to answer these two questions that the following pages are written. It is the present writer’s conviction that controversy as to the main outlines of the picture, though perhaps at the outset inevitable, is, with the material now accessible, an anachronism; that the facts stand out plain and clear and that between the literary and monumental evidence there is no discrepancy. The plan adopted will therefore be to state as simply as may be what seems the ascertained truth about the ancient city, and to state that truth unencumbered by controversy. Then, and not till then, it may be profitable to mention other current opinions, and to examine briefly what seem to be the errors in method which have led to their acceptance. CHAPTER I. THE ANCIENT CITY, ITS CHARACTER AND LIMITS.