Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/361

 k 1920 THE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE 353 so that the workmen no sooner touched them than these beautiful sculptures fell in pieces upon the ground. Morosini, coolly announcing this disaster in a dispatch to the senate, expressed satisfaction that none of the workmen had been injured, and announced his decision to carry off instead a marble lioness without a head ; but the head, as he added in a sentence worthy of Mummius, ' can be perfectly replaced by another piece '. His secretary, San Gallo, took away, however, the Victory's head, which Laborde purchased in 1840 from a Venetian antiquary, while other fragments were picked up from the ruins by other Venetian, Danish, and Hessian officers. Morosini did not content himself with the headless lioness alone ; he carried off the great lion, which had given to the Piraeus its medieval name, and a third lion which had stood near the temple of Theseus, where it was seen by Babin and Spon ; a fourth, a lioness, which bears the inscription Anno Corcurae liberatae, did not reach Venice till 1716, the year of Schulenburg's deliverance of Corfu, and, therefore, does not figure in Fanelli's ^ previous plate of the lions before the arsenal, where they may still be seen. This done, the Venetian forces abandoned Athens on 4 April, and five days later the last detachment set sail for Poros. The net result of the Venetian capture of Athens had been disastrous. It had done irreparable damage to the Parthenon without any permanent military or political gain ; it had injured the inhabitants, who had been forced to leave their homes ; it had spread disease and discontent among the allies. To set against these disadvantages Venice acquired four marble lions and Morosini the fame of having temporarily held the famous city. To us Verneda's plans are the only satisfactory result of its siege. It remains to describe the fate of the exiled Athenians and of the conquerors of Athens. The unhappy natives had left on 24 March, and some even earlier. Tliree boat-loads went to the Venetian island of Zante, others to the Venetian possessions in the Morea, especially to Nauplia, but most (under the leadership of the brothers Gaspari) to Aegina and, like their ancestors at the time of the Persian invasion, to Salamis (' Culuris ', as it was still called), where, as the famous ' Fragments ' from the monastery of the Anargyroi (SS. Cosmas and Damian) at Athens inform us,^ they built houses and churches at Ambelaki, while ' Attica remained deserted for about three years ' except for a few stragglers on the Akropolis and in some towers of the town. This is the passage upon which Fallmerayer based his theory of the desertion of Athens for nearly 400 years from the time ' Kampouroglos, MvrjufTa, i. 43 ; Philadelpheus, 'laropia tSjv 'kBr,viiv, ii. 315 ; AtArtoK, V. 545. VOL. XXXV. — NO. OXXXIX. A a
 * Atene Attica, p. 344.