Such was the Acropolis of the fifth century B.C. But now the statues and the altars have disappeared, the columns are broken, and the temples stand in ruins. Is it just the lapse of time that has wrought such destruction on those matchless buildings? When Plutarch saw them, they had been standing for about five hundred years, and he said that there was still a bloom of newness upon them that seemed to preserve them from the touch of time, as if the hand that had wrought such buildings gave them the spirit of eternal youth. At the beginning of the fifth century A.D. Alaric the Goth invaded Greece, but he left Athens undisturbed. The great statue of Athena Promachos was still standing, and the story was told later that as the barbarian chieftain approached the Acropolis, the goddess Athena appeared before him, clad in mail, with her spear outstretched in defence of her city. He was so much awed by the {285} vision that he withdrew and troubled Athens no more, and he sent messengers to the Roman rulers of the city and made peace with them. Not long after, an edict was passed ordering all pagan temples in the Roman Empire, for Greece then formed part of it, to be closed or else converted into Christian churches, and from that time onwards nothing has been heard of the statue of Athena Parthenos, though a small copy of it was found later. The Parthenon itself was changed into a Christian church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and it remained so until Athens was captured by the Turks in 1458. They changed the Christian church into a Turkish mosque and built a minaret at one corner. No further changes took place until the end of the seventeenth century, when during a war of the Turks with Venice, the Venetians were bombarding the Acropolis. The Venetians were told that powder was being stored in the Acropolis, and for several days they directed their fire against it. At first there was no result, even the guns, it was said, refusing to do such deadly work on so glorious a building. But at length a shell was thrown into it, the powder exploded, the roof crashed in and a part of the walls collapsed. The Parthenon was nothing but a ruin, and for more than a hundred years the sculptures of Pheidias lay neglected on the ground, broken and defaced. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century the attention of Lord Elgin, who was British Ambassador at Constantinople, was called to the danger that threatened them from the ignorance and {286} indifference of the Turks and the unscrupulousness of travellers and visitors, who often defaced and carried off pieces of sculpture, and he made arrangements by which the British Government was allowed to buy the Parthenon sculptures and remove them to the British Museum.