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From their exclusion it might be inferred that horses could not be the sacred animals or embodiments of the god of the grove. But the inference would be rash. Yet the goat was neither sacrificed to her as a rule, nor allowed to enter her great sanctuary, the Acropolis at Athens. The reason alleged for this was that the goat injured the olive, the sacred tree of Athena.

About the same time Carew started his homeward ride, and when he reached the base of the Acropolis Hill he gave his horse to the runner who had gone with him to carry some books for Ailsa Grenville, and climbed a little way into the hill to remark a point of investigation he had been discussing with Grenville; and, quite suddenly, round a sharp piece of masonry, he came upon Meryl Pym.

Although he subsequently sought to evade all responsibility for the desolation that ensued, it was Morosini who directed his batteries to hurl their fatal burdens against the Acropolis, and it was he who afterward robbed it of many of its treasures.

"If a man wants to build a house here he has only to dig for the material, for not far down he will find the stone and brick of the structures that crumbled into the earth after the death of the great emperor. We are now approaching the fortress, or the citadel as it is oftener called. It is a sort of acropolis, for it contains palaces, mosques, halls of justice, and other buildings."

"By all the Gods," said the man, "what are you children doing out here at this time of the night?" "The Stranger! Anaxagoras!" cried Daphne. "Oh, I knew Athena would help us!" and the two children threw themselves into his arms, so great was their relief and joy. They told him the whole story of their adventure on the Acropolis and why they wanted to find the house of Hipponicus.

What a world of ruined sculpture was about us! Set up in rows stacked up in piles scattered broadcast over the wide area of the Acropolis were hundreds of crippled statues of all sizes and of the most exquisite workmanship; and vast fragments of marble that once belonged to the entablatures, covered with bas-reliefs representing battles and sieges, ships of war with three and four tiers of oars, pageants and processions every thing one could think of.

Round the acropolis Vauban had built a citadel whose steep, green-black walls struck root in the mean streets and narrow lanes on the slopes. Sunless by-ways, ill-paved and sour with the odor of surface drainage, led to it. Always picturesque, the old town now and then took on a real beauty.

But it is in the fact, that being called to Rome especially to adorn the palace of the so-called head of the Church, and called as the chief representative of the Christian artists of his time, Raphael had neither religion nor originality enough to trace the spirit of poetry and the spirit of philosophy to the inspiration of the true God, as well as that of theology; but that, on the contrary, he elevated the creations of fancy on the one wall, to the same rank as the objects of faith upon the other; that in deliberate, balanced opposition to the Rock of the Mount Zion, he reared the rock of Parnassus, and the rock of the Acropolis; that, among the masters of poetry we find him enthroning Petrarch and Pindar, but not Isaiah nor David, and for lords over the domain of philosophy we find the masters of the school of Athens, but neither of those greater masters by the last of whom that school was rebuked, those who received their wisdom from heaven itself, in the vision of Gibeon, and the lightning of Damascus.

The shadow rose and climbed up the Acropolis, on which the shield of Pallas still gleamed as the aegis of the city. Before the vari-coloured colonnade stood a group of men who had assembled before the semi-circular marble seat called the Hemicyklion; they appeared to be awaiting someone's arrival before they sat down.

The hill, which was to become the Acropolis of the new town, was surrounded by the new-comers with a wall several feet thick, of which the foundations consisted of unhewn stones; whilst the upper part was made of artificially baked bricks, the baking having been done after they were put in place, by large fires lit in vacant places left at regular intervals; an arrangement recalling what we have said in speaking of vitrified forts.