That extraordinary man, like Schliemann, a merchant by profession but
an archæologist by inclination, had already once visited Athens. In
1436 he had stayed there for a fortnight as the guest of a certain
Antonelli Balduini; but on that occasion he was too much occupied copying
inscriptions to seek an audience of the Duke. He, too, like the Capuan
notary, went to see “Aristotle’s Study”; he describes the “house” or
“palace of Hadrian”; he alludes to the statue of the Gorgon on the south
of the Akropolis. But of contemporary Athens, apart from the monuments,
he tells us little beyond the facts that it possessed four gates and
that it had “new walls”—a statement corroborated by that of another
traveller thirty years later, which might indicate the so-called wall of
Valerian as the work of the Acciajuoli[116]. Of the inhabitants he says
nothing; as living Greeks, they had for him no interest; was he not an
archæologist?
In February 1444 the worthy Cyriacus revisited Athens; and on this
occasion, accompanied by the Duke’s cousin and namesake, he went to pay
his respects to “Nerio Acciajuoli of Florence, then prince of Athens,”
whom he “found on the Akropolis, the lofty castle of the city[117].”
Again, however, the archæological overpowered the human interest; and he
hastened away from the ducal presence to inspect the Propylaia and the
Parthenon. His original drawing of the west front of the latter building
has been preserved in a manuscript, which formerly belonged to the Duke
of Hamilton, but is now in the Berlin Museum, and is the earliest known
pictorial reproduction of that splendid temple[118]. Other Athenian
sketches may be seen in the Barberini manuscript of 1465, now at the
Vatican, which contains the diagrams of San Gallo; and it seems that the
eminent architect, who took the explanatory text almost _verbatim_ from
the note-books of Cyriacus, also copied the latter’s drawings.