So far we have considered the road as an approach, but it must always be remembered that historically we have to reverse our procedure. The city grows _from_ the central hill, not _towards_ it, and that outward growth is clear. It may be traced on the map in Fig. 46. The ancient agora lay in the hollow between the hills directly overlooked by the assembly place on the Pnyx; then as it outgrew these narrow limits it was forced bit by bit round the West shoulder of the Areopagus, and there turned Eastward by the hill Kolonos Agoraios, on which stands the ‘Theseion’; below that hill was the Stoa Basileios, which in the fifth century B.C. was assuredly part of the agora. The agora could not spread Westward; the hill prevented that; it was forced always Eastward, first in Hellenistic days as far as the Stoa of Attalos, then in Roman days to the Gate of the Roman Agora and the Tower of the Winds. Such is its long but simple story. If we follow the water-course of Peisistratos and its later Roman extension we shall not go wrong. The houses that covered the square in front of Nine-Spouts, and into which fragments of the well-house were built, are all of Roman date. Clear them away, and we have, as has been seen, a great quadrangular space in front of the city well, a place to which all ways converge (Fig. 46). Surely here, if anywhere, is the ancient agora, close to the city gates. * * * * * It is remarkable that, visiting Athens half a century before the excavations began, an English scholar, Christopher Wordsworth[281], by sheer light of common sense, saw that here, and here only, could the ancient agora be, and here he marked it on his quaint, rudimentary map (Fig. 45). His words are, as contrasted with later confusions, memorable. ‘In order,’ he says, ‘to obtain a distinct notion of the natural characteristics of the spot to which we refer, let us consider it in the _first place_ as abstracted from all artificial modifications; let us imagine ourselves as existing in the days of Kekrops, and looking upon the site of Athens. In a wide plain, which is enclosed by mountains except on the South, where it is bounded by the sea, rises a flat, oblong rock lying from East to West about fifty yards high, rather more than one hundred and sixty broad, and about three hundred in length. It is inaccessible on all sides but the West, on which it is approached by a steep slope. This is the future Acropolis or Citadel of Athens. We place ourselves upon this eminence and cast our eyes about us. Immediately on the West is a second hill, of irregular form, lower than that on which we stand and opposite to us. This is the Areopagus. Beneath it on the South-West is a valley neither deep nor narrow, open both at the North-West and South-East. Here was the Agora or public place of Athens. Above it to the South-West rises another hill, formed like the two others already mentioned of hard and rugged limestone,