“Musing thus upon the staircase of the Propylæa we may say with truth that all our modern art is but as child’s play to that of the Greeks. Very soul-subduing is the gloom of a cathedral like the Milanese Duomo when the incense rises in blue clouds athwart the bands of sunlight falling from the dome, and the crying of choirs upborne on the wings of organ music fills the whole vast space with a mystery of melody. Yet such ceremonial pomps as this are but as dreams and shapes of visions when compared with the clearly defined splendors of a Greek procession through marble peristyles in open air beneath the sun and sky. That spectacle combined the harmonies of perfect human forms in movement with the divine shapes of statues, the radiance of carefully selected vestments with hues inwrought upon pure marble. The rhythms and melodies of the Doric mood were sympathetic to the proportions of the Doric colonnades. The grove of pillars through which the pageant passed grew from the living rocks into shapes of beauty, fulfilling by the inbreathed spirit of man nature’s blind yearning after absolute completion. The sun itself, not thwarted by artificial gloom or tricked with alien colors of stained glass, was made to minister in all his strength to a pomp the pride of which was a display of form in manifold magnificence. The ritual of the Greeks was the ritual of a race at one with nature, glorying in its affiliation to the mighty mother of all life, and striving to add by human art the coping stone and final touch to her achievement.” The Propylæa stretched in all about one hundred and seventy feet across the western side of the citadel, and was entirely built of Pentelic marble. In the centre was a portico sixty feet broad of six fluted Doric columns, each column thirty feet in height, and all supporting a noble pediment. From this portico projected on either side a wing, entered through three Ionic columns. Six Ionic columns assisted in supporting the roof of the vestibule. The marble beams of this roof were from seventeen to twenty-two feet in length and correspondingly solid. The ceiling was richly carved and ornamented. Immediately in the rear of the Ionic columns and at the end facing the Acropolis stood the terminal wall, with its five bronze gates, the centre one, which was the largest, being sufficiently broad to allow the passage of a chariot or other such vehicle. Beyond this wall and its gates was the posticum, adding eighteen feet to the depth of forty-three feet which the building otherwise possessed. The temple of the “Wingless Victory,” and the “Painted Chamber,” containing the finest works of the painter Polygnotus, as they have been named, formed the wings, which presented unbroken walls to the front, relieved only by the four Ionic columns that supported the graceful entablature and pediment of the temple of Niké Apteros on the right.