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Updated: May 28, 2025
The ships have sailed from Marathon On swift disaster's wings; And an evil dream hath fetched a groan From the heart of the king of kings. But through Pentelicus' winding vales The hymn triumphal runs, And high-shrined Athens proudly hails Her free-returning sons.
The impression which Athens made upon me was the strongest which I have ever felt. There is one and only one place in which perfection exists, and that is Athens, which outdid anything I had ever imagined. I had before my eyes the ideal of beauty crystallised in the marble of Pentelicus.
A confined triangle, perhaps fifty miles its greatest length, and thirty its greatest breadth; two elevated rocky barriers, meeting at an angle; three prominent mountains, commanding the plain, Parnes, Pentelicus, and Hymettus; an unsatisfactory soil; some streams, not always full; such is about the report which the agent of a London company would have made of Attica.
It was constructed entirely of the most beautiful white marble from Mount Pentelicus, and its dimensions were two hundred and twenty-eight feet by one hundred and two having eight Doric columns in each of the two fronts, and seventeen in each of the sides, and also an interior range of six columns in each end.
Yet much of what he sees is a revelation to him. The mountains are higher, more varied and more beautiful than he had supposed, Lycabettus and the Acropolis more imposing, Pentelicus farther away, and the plain larger, the gulf narrower, and Egina nearer and more mountainous, than he had fancied.
Rounding the point where Hymettus thrusts his huge length into the sea, the long, featureless mountain-wall of Southern Attica suddenly breaks down, and gives place to a broad expanse of fertile, and well-cultivated soil, sloping gently back with ever-narrowing bounds until it reaches the foot-hills of lofty Pentelicus.
You must put up with being moved back, and not object to the owner of such a golden snout being preferred. Aph. Then, Hermes, find me a place in the front row; I am golden. Herm. Not so, Aphrodite, if I can trust my eyes; I am purblind, or you are white marble; you were quarried, I take it, from Pentelicus, turned by Praxiteles's fancy into Aphrodite, and handed over to the Cnidians. Aph.
At no time did the Greeks extract from Pentelicus blocks at all comparable for size with those of Baalbek or of Egypt; they saw no use in doing so; on the contrary, with masses of such enormity, which it is desired to use in their entirety, the architect is himself dominated; the material, instead of being subordinate to the design of the edifice, runs counter to the design and contradicts it.
But the summits of Hymettus and Pentelicus were yet beaming as if melted gold had been poured over them, and the evening twilight was in the sky. In its light the whole Acropolis was drowned. The white walls of Propyleos, Parthenon, and Erechtheum seemed pink and as light as though the marble had lost all its weight, or as if they were apparitions of a dream.
Up and down the pleasant plain country of the Mesogia to southward, to the rolling highlands beyond Pentelicus and Parnes, to the slumbering villages by Marathon, to the fertile farm-land by Eleusis, went the proclaimers of ill-tidings. “Quit your homes, hasten to Athens, take with you what you can, but hasten, or stay as Xerxes’s slaves.”
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