Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/20

Rh of the Acropolis, and entering through the Propyloea, he describes in order each object which adorned the summit, with an accuracy fully borne out by recent excavations. His last walk in Athens (ch. xxviii. 4, xxix. 1) con ducts us through the various buildings at the western base of the Acropolis. From the temple of the Semnns he passes to the court of the Areopagus, and the mention of this leads him to speak of the other judicial courts of Athens. The rest of his first book is occupied with an account of the suburbs of Athens the Academy, the sacred way to Eleusis, &amp;lt;fcc., and the topography of Attica in general. Subsequent A few words may suffice to describe the ultimate fate of history of Athens. In the reign of Valerian the northern barbarians first appeared in the north of Greece, where they laid siege to Thessalonica. This extraordinary apparition having alarmed all Greece, the Athenians restored their city wall, which Sulla had dismantled, and otherwise placed the town in a state of defence sufficient to secure it against a coup- de-main. But under Gallienus, the next emperor, Athens was besieged, and the archonship abolished, upon which the strategos or general, who had previously acted as inspector of the Agora, became the chief magistrate. Under Claudius the city was taken, but recovered soon afterwards. Constantino the Great gloried in the title of General of Athens, which had been conferred upon him, and expressed high satisfaction on obtaining from the people the honour of a statue with an inscription, a dis tinction which he acknowledged by sending to the city a yearly gratuity of grain. He also conferred on the governor of Attica and Athens the title of Mcyas Aou, or Grand Duke, which soon became hereditary ; and his son Constans bestowed several islands on the city, in order to supply it with corn. In the time of Theodosius I., that is, towards the end of the 4th century, the Goths laid waste Thessaly and Epirus ; but Theodorus, general of the Greeks, acted with so much prudence, that he saved the Greek cities from pillage and the inhabitants from captivity, a service which was most gratefully acknowledged. But this deliver ance proved only temporary. The fatal period was now fast approaching, and, in a real barbarian, Athens was doomed to experience a conqueror yet more remorseless than Sulla. This was Alaric, king of the Goths, who, under the Emperors Arcadius and Honorius, overran both Italy and Greece, sacking, pillaging, and destroying. Never, indeed, did the fury even of barbarian conquest discharge itself in a fiercer or more desolating tempest. The Peloponnesian cities were overturned ; Arcadia and Lacedaemon were both laid waste ; the gulfs of Lepanto and ^Egina were illuminated with the flames of Corinth ; and the Athenian matrons were dragged in chains to satisfy the brutal desires of the barbarians. The invaluable treasures of antiquity were removed ; stately and magni ficent structures were reduced to heaps of ruin ; and Athens, stripped of the monuments of her ancient splendour, was compared by Synesius, a writer of that age, to a victim of which the body had been consumed, and the skin only remained. After this dreadful visitation Athens sank into insigni ficance, and became as obscure as it had once been illustrious. We are indeed informed that the cities of Hellas were put in a state of defenca by Justinian, who repaired the walls of Corinth, which had been overturned by an earthquake, and those of Athens, which had fallen into decay through age. But from the time of this emperor a chasm of nearly seven centuries ensues in its history ; except that, about the year 1130, it furnished Roger, the first king of Sicily, with a number of artificers, who there introduced the culture of silk, which afterwards passed into Italy. The worms, it seems, had been brought from India to Con stantinople in the reign of Justinian. Doomed, apparently, to become the prey of every spoiler, Athens again emerges from oblivion in the 13th century, under Baldwin and his crusaders, at a time when it was besieged by a general of Theodorus Lascaris, the Greek emperor. In 1427 it was taken by Sultan Amurath II. ; but some time afterwards it was recovered from the infidels by another body of crusaders under the marquis of Montferrat, a powerful baron of the West, who bestowed it, along with Thebes, on Otho de la Roche, one of his principal followers. For a considerable time both cities were governed by Otho and his descendants, with the title of dukes ; but being unable to maintain themselves in their Greek principality, they were at length succeeded by Walter of Brienne, who, soon after his succession, was expelled by his new subjects, aided by the Spaniards of Catalonia. The next rulers of Athens were the Acciajuoli, an opulent family of Florence, in whose possession it remained until 1455, when it was taken by Omar, a general of Mahomet II., and thus fell a second time into the hands of the barbarians. The victorious sultan settled a Mahometan colony in his new conquest, which he incorporated with the Ottoman empire ; and Athens, as well as Greece, continued to form an integral part of the Turkish dominions, until the treaty of Adrianople in 1829, following up the provisions and stipulations of the treaty of London, 7th July 1827, estab lished within certain limits the new state of Greece, of which Athens is now the capital. From the period of the Ottoman conquest to the com- mencement of the insurrection i-i 1821, Athens was only known in history by two attempts, on the part of the Venetians, to expel the Turks and make themselves masters of the city. The first of these took place in 1464, only nine years after its capture by the Osmanlis, and proved an entire failure. But the second, which was undertaken in 1687, more than two centuries later, was crowned with a temporary and fatal success. In the month of September of that year, Count Konigsmark, a Swede in the service of Venice, having disembarked at the Piraeus a force of 8000 foot and 870 horse, forming part of the armament under Francesco Morosini, afterwards doge, marched to Athens, and having summoned the citadel without effect, he erected a battery of heavy ordnance on the hill of the Pnyx, and placing two mortars near the Latin convent at the western foot of the Acropolis, bombarded it for several days. The fire of the cannon was chiefly directed against the Propyloea, and the modern defences below that edifice, whilst the mortars continued, without intermission, to throw shells into the citadel. The consequence was, that the beautiful little temple of Nike Apteros, the frieze of which is now in the British Museum, was completely destroyed by the breaching battery ; and the Parthenon, besides being greatly injured by the bursting of the shells, was, towards the close of the attack, almost rent in pieces by the explosion of a powder magazine, which reduced the middle of the temple to a heap of ruins, threw down the whole of the wall at the eastern extremity, and precipitated to the ground every statue on the eastern pediment. The western extremity was fortunately less injured, and a part of the Opisthodomos was still left standing, together with some of the lateral columns of the peristyle adjoining to the cell. But the shock was nevertheless abundantly disastrous ; and when the Turks afterwards regained possession of the citadel (from which, on this occasion, they were expelled), they did all in their power to complete the destruction which the Venetians had so vigorously begun, by defacing, mutilating, or burning for lime every fragment of the edifice within their reach. In the course of the revolutionary war Athens sus tained three sieges. The first was laid by the Greeks in 1822. Having carried the town by storm, and driven 