Up this road goats were never allowed to ascend (Athen. xiii. 51). Even crows were said never to alight on the top of the sacred rock; and Chandler (ii. 61) remarks, that although he frequently saw these birds flying about the Acropolis, he never observed one on the summit. “The hooded crow, which retires from England during the summer, is a constant inhabitant of Attica, and is probably that species noticed by the ancients under the name of κορώνη. It is the word applied at present to it by the Greek peasants, who are the best commentators on the old naturalists.” Sibthorp in Walp. Mem. l. 75. Footnote 250: Wordsworth, Athens and Attica, p. 114. Footnote 251: Paus. i. 22. 4. Footnote 252: Müll. De Phid. Vit. p. 18 seq. On entering through the gates of the Propylæa a scene of unparalleled grandeur and beauty burst upon the eye. No trace of human dwellings anywhere appeared, but on all sides temples of more or less elevation, of Pentelic marble, beautiful in design and exquisitely delicate in execution, sparkled like piles of alabaster in the sun. On the left stood the Erectheion or fane of Athena Polias; to the right that matchless edifice known as the Hecatompedon of old, but to later ages as the Parthenon. Other buildings, all holy to the eye of an Athenian, lay grouped around these master structures, and in the open spaces between, in whatever direction the spectators might look, appeared statues, some remarkable for their dimensions, others for their beauty, and all for the legendary sanctity which surrounded them. No city of the ancient or modern world ever rivalled Athens in the riches of art. Our best filled museums, though teeming with her spoils, are poor collections of fragments compared with that assemblage of gods and heroes which peopled the Acropolis, the genuine Olympos of the arts, where all the divinities of the pagan heaven appeared grouped in immortal youth and beauty round the Thunderer and his virgin daughter. Many volumes were written in antiquity on the pictures, statues, and architectural monuments which thronged the summit of this rock, and though those works have perished, a long and curious list might still be given of the objects of this kind which we know to have existed there.[253] It will, however, be sufficient to glance over a few of the more striking features of the scene. Footnote 253: Somewhere in a cavern in the rock of the Acropolis was a slab called the pillar of infamy, on which were engraved the names of traitors and other public delinquents. Thrasybulos accused Leodamas of having had his name on this pillar.—Aristot. Rhet. ii. 23.