Page:Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam.djvu/25

Rh Athens, where the men were as gods and the gods very like the men. Encircling the Acropolis hill—most ancient cities had their central hill—the city owes its grandeur to the many temples dedicated to the Olympian deities by the men who made them, made both deities and temples, that long line of philosophers the sublimity of whose thoughts civilization fed on and found expression in the genius of now and then a Pericles or a Phidias.

Twenty times Rome suffered, each time worse than ever befell an American city, the débris of destruction overspreading her sacred soil some fathoms deep, yet all the while mistress of the world.

The Moors in Spain reconstructed and embellished many cities, and built many entire. To them Spain owes her finest specimens of art and architecture, as Seville, Cordova, and the Alhambra. In Naples the mediæval still overshadows the modern. The city needs