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He admired the Erechtheum at Athens; but Spurgeon's Tabernacle in the Old Kent Road built upon the same model would have irritated him. For a Grecian temple you wanted Grecian skies and Grecian girls. He said that, even as it was, Westminster Abbey in the season was an eyesore to him.
The teachings of the Christian Church are having their salutary effect and Chinamen are beginning to learn the value of a woman's life from the Biblical standpoint, and the daughters of the Flowery Kingdom will, as time goes on, become more and more like the polished corners of the Temple, or the Caryatides supporting the entablature of the Erechtheum at Athens.
To him Athens owed the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, left unfinished at his death, the Propylæa, the Odeum, and numberless other public and sacred edifices; he also liberally encouraged music and the drama; and during his life, industry and commerce were in so flourishing a condition that prosperity was universal in Attica.
On the northern edge was the Erechtheum, an Ionic temple of extraordinary beauty. The Propylcea, approached by sixty marble steps, was a noble gateway: it stood on the western end of the acropolis, which it magnificently adorned. It shows how an Athenian looked upon his city. "It is true that we are called a democracy; for the administration is in the hands of the many, and not of the few.
If, as the schoolmaster tells us, the Greek writing is as complete as the Greek art; if an ode of Pindar is as glittering and pure as the Temple of Victory; or a discourse of Plato as polished and calm as yonder mystical portico of the Erechtheum: what treasures of the senses and delights of the imagination have those lost to whom the Greek books are as good as sealed!
In one of the oldest temples on the Acropolis, called the Erechtheum, there was an ancient wooden statue of Athena which the Athenians believed had fallen from heaven. It was very sacred in their eyes, and every year they celebrated a festival when the robes and ornaments of the statue were taken off and cleaned.
"I don't know," said Daphne. "Anywhere away from here! Let's go back to the Erechtheum. Perhaps Father will be there looking for us." They went all round the old temple, which was partly in ruins, and when they found no trace of their Father, sat down miserably upon the steps of the great porch of the Maidens on the southern side.
connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of the wave-power in the sea itself, which is always expressed by the serpentine bodies either of the sea-gods or of the sea-horse; and when Athena carries, as she does often in later work, a serpent for her shield-sign, it is not so much the repetition of her own ægis-snakes as the further expression of her power over the sea-wave; which, finally, Vergil gives in its perfect unity with her own anger, in the approach of the serpents against Laocoön from the sea; and then, finally, when her own storm-power is fully put forth on the ocean also, and the madness of the ægis-snake is give to the wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the devouring hound at the waist of Scylla, and Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest; while yet her beneficent and essential power on the ocean, in making navigation possible, is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival by her peplus being carried to the Erechtheum suspended from the mast of a ship.
The same anomaly in scale occurred in the Akropolis at Athens, where the vast figure of Athene Promachos must have reduced the beautiful Caryatides of the Erechtheum to insignificance. M. Choisy makes a gallant effort to show that this want of relationship in scale, and also in the siting of the temples, was deliberate and considered.
There is also a building called the Erechtheum, and in the vestibule is an altar of Supreme Zeus, where they offer no living sacrifice, but cakes without the usual libation of wine. And on the walls are paintings of the family of Butes. The building is a double one; and inside there is sea-water in a well.
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