Between Jambaz and Taxim Tepe

ANTIQUE THEATRE

Trimontium’s antique theatre lies on the low ground between Jambaz and Taxim Tepe. Archaeological excavations have uncovered one of the best-preserved antique theatres in the world, built at the beginning of the 2nd c. during Emperor Trayan’s rule. The theatron, the spectators’ section, is amphitheatrical, in two semi-circles with a wide horizontal aisle in between. Each tier has 14 rows of marble seats divided into sectors by aisles. The area of the stage excels in architectural design. The skene at the back is a two-storey structure with lateral wings ending in imposing triangular pediments.

Inscriptions and exquisite statues found Antique Theatre of Philippopolis on the site have been incorporated in the architecture of the building. The theatre must have seated 5 to 7 thousand people. A fire or an earthquake at the end of the 4th c. caused irreparable damage to this remarkable antique building. The splendid skene was completely demolished, just 20 out of the 28 rows of the theatron survived. In spite of the serious destruction, archaeological research made it possible to execute a successful restoration. Now the ancient building has been entirely adapted to the contemporary cultural functions of Plovdiv and it shows various performances before an audience of 5000 people.

ANTIQUE STADIUM

The imposing remains of the stadium of Philippopolis (Trimontium) were discovered under the square west of Jumaya Mosque (Friday Mosque). Part of them is now displayed below the level of the busy street. The majestic structure measures 1000 Roman steps in length (250m) by 250 steps in width (74m). The main entrance into the stadium is below the junction of Knyaz Alexander I Street and Dr Valkovitch Street. It was designed in the solemn style of Asia Minor cities like Miletus holidays bulgaria, Ephesus and Aspendos. The seats arranged in 14 marble, amphitheatrical rows stand on supports decorated with high relief lions’ paws. The major part of the stadium is occupied by the racetrack whose length is 600 Roman steps.

It starts at the main entrance and reaches the northern side turning into a bend to accommodate chariot-racing. Part of this sector is displayed under street level and under the open sky. The marble seats and the track are clearly identifiable. In the middle of the bend there is an arched corridor leading out into a street built of large syenite slabs. You can see the impressive bases of the columns supporting the aqueduct, which fed the large reservoir on Taxim Tepe with water from the Rhodope Mountains.

During Philippopolis’ apogee (2nd -4th c.) the Antique (Roman) stadium was the venue of the traditional athletic games organized in honour of the god Apollo and Alexander of Macedon. After the Emperor Theodosius the Great suspended the games at the end of the 4th c. the Philippopolis stadium was used as a hippodrome. The final information about it comes from the Byzantine autheress Anna Comnenus (end of the 11thc.) who was deeply impressed . by what had remained of the Roman stadium. In its heyday the stadium could seat thirty thousand spectators and was one of the major public facilities in ancient Philippopolis.

Iskra library club

One of the country’s most famous cultural institutes is the Iskra library club, founded in 1873 with library, theatre, cinema, and a museum with valuable exhibits. Here is also the famous Kazanluk Thracian Tomb, a unique monument of ancient Thracian art. It is believed that a prominent Thracian chieftain was buried in the tomb in the 4th-3rd century B.C. It consists of an antechamber, a stone corridor and a domed chamber. The frescoes on the walls, the corridor ceiling and the dome are kept at constant air temperature and humidity. The tomb is under the protection of UNESCO. There is a model nearby which is open to visitors.

Hotels: Kazanluk, 3 stars, 199 rooms, tel. 2-72-10; Roza, 2 stars, 1 Tolbukhin Rlvd.; Zomitsa, 2 stars, tel. 2-23-84.

Motel: Krunska Koriya, 2 stars, restaurant, 5 km from the town.

Camp sites: Krunska Koriya, 1 star, 5 km from the town. 12 km north of Kazanluk along the E-85 road at the very foot of the Balkan Range are the golden domes of the impressive church built 1897-1902 in memory of those who died in the Russo-Turkish War of Liberation 1877-78 private tour istanbul. The iconostasis of gilded woodwork was made in Moscow as were the bells while the icons were painted at the Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece. Part of the frescoes are from 1902 while the rest were painted in 1959.

Mount Shipka

A road leads up Mount Shipka to the granite monument to the handful of Russians and Bulgarians defending the Shipka Pass against the 35.000-strong army of Suleiman Pasha. The monument contains the remains of the defenders of the pass.

The neighbouring peak, Bouzloudja, has a huge monument to Communism and Socialism.

East along E-772 is the village of Muglizh (pop. 5,500; where the September uprising against fascism broke out in 1923. Sliven (pop. 98,000) is situated at the foot of the Eastern Balkan Range. The Blue Stones (a picturesque rock area) tower over the town. Sliven was first mentioned in the journal of the Arabian traveller, Idrissi, 1153, but archaeological studies in the area show there was a settlement in Roman times. Bulgaria’s first textile mills were opened here in 1834.

Tourist attractions:

Monument to Hadji Dimiter in the town centre.

Monument to the Soviet Army stands on Haman Bair hill in a park south of the town.

Bust of Dobri Zhelyazkov in the town centre.

Bust of Dobri Chintoulov in Hadji Dimiter’s Square.

Bust of Subi Dimitrov — Sliven’s favourite who when sur-rounded by police in 1941 killed himself so as not to fall into their hands.

Boyansko Hanche

Bulgarian restaurants: Boyansko Hanche, Boyana District—telephone 56-30-16; Goroublyansko Hanche, Goroublyane District — telephone 78-12-60; Shoumako, Simeonovo District; Vodenicharski Mehani, Dragalevtsi District — telephone 66-50-88; Zlatna Ribka — 26 kilometres from Sofia on the road leading to Borovets winter resort; Chemata Kotka — 13 kilometres south-east of Sofia on the E-80 road.

Restaurants: Roubin, Lenin Square; Kristal — 119 Rakov- ski Street; Krim — 2 Dobroudja Street, telephone 87-01-31; Botevgradska Sreshta — 1 Pozitano Street, telephone 87-05-14;

Gambrinous — 80 Tsar Simeon Street, telephone 83-5 L74; Bu- dapeshta — 145 Rakovski Street, telephone 87-27-50; Ropota- mo — 73 Lenin Blvd, telephone 72-25-16; Havana — Vitosha Blvd.

Coffee houses

Coffee houses: Brazilia — 24 Vitosha Blvd.; telephone 88-28-39; Bulgaria — 2 Rousski Blvd., telephone 87-19-77; Co-lombia — 4 Levski Street, telephone 8743-03; Havana — 151 Rakovski Street, telephone 87-48-94; Roza — 4 Sofiiska Ko- mouna Street, telephone 88-40-87; Praga — 145 Rakovski Street, telephone 87-52-76; Opera — 113 Rakovski Street, telephone 87-40-89; Havana — Vitosha Blvd.

Souvenir shops: Sredets Souvenir Centre opposite Rila Hotel; Prizma — 2 Rousski Blvd., telephone 88-15-67; Sofia — 16 Georgi Dimitrov Blvd., telephone 83-29-58; Union of Bulgarian Artists souvenir shop, 6 Rousski Blvd., telephone 88-39-37; Mineralsouvenir — 10 Rousski Blvd.

Photographic materials: 3 Alexander StamboliiskiBlvd., telephone 87-72-74; Central Department Store, fourth floor, telephone 87-96-21.

Optician’s: 14, Vitosha Blvd., telephone 87-18-11; 7 Graf Ignatiev Street daily sofia tour, telephone 87-29-43.

Florist’s: 8 Pozitano Street, telephone 87-01-26; 11 Vito- sha Blvd., telephone 88-20-46,

Bookshops: the Victor Hugo bookshop for foreign and Bulgarian books, 6 Rousski Blvd., telephone 88-43-08.

The Corecom Foreign Trade Enterprise has shops selling goods manufactured abroad . These can be bought with convertible currency: 8 Tsar Kaloyan St. tel. 88-19-75;Novotel Evro- pa 131 Georgi Dimitrov Blvd., tel. 3-12-61; 166 Rakovski St. tel. 88-06-73; 27 Tolbukhin Blvd., tel. 88-44-50; Grand Hotel Sofia, Narodno Sobranie Square, tel. 23-01-02; Hotel Vitosha New Otani, 100 Anton Ivanov Blvd,, tel. 6241-51; Hotel Shtastlivetsa in Mount Vitosha, tel. 66-50-24,

Christianity in the spiritual life

A profound change was wrought by Christianity in the spiritual life of Thrace and Moesia in late antiquity; this religion had penetrated into the country very early on and left its imprint on both architecture and art in these lands. After Christianity had been proclaimed as the only religion of the State in the reign of Theodosius I (379—395), the church hurled itself with unheard of fanaticism upon all that was pagan or might recall paganism.

Many monuments of art were destroyed, many shrines and temples were ruined or turned into Christian churches. However, the church soon realized the tremendous part which art was to play in disseminating and introducing her ideas among the ignorant masses. In the East, sculpture was rejected as an art closer to the real image of the original. Painting, which provided greater opportunities of passing more easily over to the abstract spiritual treatment of natural forms, remained the only permitted imitative art. A new architectural form was necessary for the Church, which had established a ritual alien to the pagan ritual. This brought the religious Christian architecture into being, which, availing itself of many of the antique pagan traditions of building, created new forms in the monumental architecture of the Middle Ages.

Early Chirstian sculpture

In the Bulgarian lands only a few examples of early Chirstian sculpture are known to us. Among them a marble 4th century statue of the Good Shepherd, found at the village of Selanovtsi, near Orya- hovo, deserves mention, as well as a big 5th century bronze lamp with a handle in the form of a cross, and a cover decorated with the head of an emperor, found at Stara Zagora guided istanbul tours. The latter belongs to one of the finest and rarest types of Early Christian lamps known to archaeology. A sculptured portrait of a man in limestone, found in a place known as Kozyak Grad near the village of Obzor, not far from Pomorie, belongs to the scultpureof that period, although it is of profane and not Christian origin. The huge wide open eyes and the simplified and schematized features of the face are typical of this art. The trend of abstraction from the natural primitive form has been brought to the extreme. Only the most typical elements of a human face have been presented here.

The portrait from Kozyak Grad, which dates back to the time of Justinian, is one of the latest representatives of the free scultpure, then generally dying out in the Eastern Orthodox world as a branch of art. For the present, Early Christian painting is best represented in the necropolis around the Church of St. Sophia in Sofia. Some of the masonry tombs are ornamented with mural paintings in which plant motifs or motifs taken from Christian symbolism predominate. What impresses one in the decorative system of these tombs, however, is the presence of elements of the Hellenistic decorative art as well, viz., the division of the walls into separate rectangles, imitating marble panelling.

However, Early Christian art found extensive possibilities of development in the field of architecture. One of the main centres of this art is Serdica, in which there was, at the beginning of the 4th century, such a large Christian community that an ecumenical council was even called here. One of the oldest churches with a baptistry in our lands was found when the Party House was being built; it lay outside the walls of Serdica, near the East Gate.

CULTURAL MONUMENTS IN BULGARIA

PREHISTORIC

Among the objects preserved to our days are zoomorphic ceramic vessels, clay models of prehistoric dwellings, primitive figures of gods standing far apart from the later figures of the gods resembling man, figures of animals, etc. Worth seeing in this connection are in the first place the paintings in the Rabisha Cave and idols from the Neolithic and Aeneolithic Age made of bones and of baked clay, clay vessels, anthropomorphic vessels, etc. in the archaeological museums of Sofia and the larger towns in the country.

THRACIAN

Thracians inhabited the eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula.

We owe our first information about them to Homer, who describes them in the Iliad as allies of the Troyan King Priam. But they are not the aboriginal inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula. They gradually merged with the local population and lent a Nordic culture to its population to such a degree that in the last periods of the Bronze Age the culture of the Thracians can in fact be considered as part of the culture of the European continent. A great number (16) of Thracian tombs have now been excavated in Bulgaria, which give us information about the life and art of the ancient Thracians. Among them are: the big tomb near the village of Mezek, not far from Svilengrad, the Kazanluk Tomb, the Vratsa Tomb, etc. Of particularly great interest are the Vulchitrun Gold Treasure in the Sofia Archaeological Museum tour bulgaria, the Panagyurishte Gold Treasure in the Plovdiv Museum, a copy of which is kept in the crypt of the Alexander Nevsky Memorial Cathedral in Sofia, the Vratsa Treasure, the recently excavated Yakimovo Treasure and individual objects on display in the different museums in the country. An exceedingly valuable monument are the mural paintings of the Kazanluk Thracian Tomb, a copy of which is also kept in the crypt.

PROTO-BULGARIAN

First we must mention here the capital cities of the First Bulgarian State (681-1018) – Pliska and Preslav. Ruins of churches, palaces and fortress walls and stone inscriptions have been preserved from them especially valuable are Omourtag’s column, the column of Ivan Assen II, the inscription of the Chagurbil Mostich). Then come the Madara Horseman rock relief with an inscription, and remains of buildings and fortresses near the town of Shoumen; the Bachkovo Monastery, founded in the 11th century, Veliko Tur- novo – with ruins of palaces, churches, fortress walls and monasteries from the capital of the Second Bulgarian State (1185-1396); the Boyana Church — with murals of great artistic value; the Zemen Monastery with frescoes dating from the second half of the 14th century; the Dragalevtsi Monastery – with murals from the 15thcentury, the church in the villageof Berende – with murals from the second half of the 14th century; Nessebur and its churches with interesting architecture and decorations, the Church of the Holy Virgin in Pazardjik, the Church of St Marina in Plovdiv, the Rila Monastery – with its wood carving, icons and ethnographic collections.

MEET BULGARIA

‘If Europe still has any tourist reserves, Bulgaria is the first of them.’

Professor Bernecker, Director of the Institute on Tourism, Austria.

So this year you have decided to spend your annual holiday in Bulgaria. That’s fine! You are very welcome, and we hope you’ll come again next year!

The People’s Republic of Bulgaria is a small state in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula between 41° and 44° latitude North and 22° and 28° longitude East. It occupies an area of 111,000 square kilometres and has a population of 8,730,000. Bulgaria borders to the north on the Socialist Republic of Romania (the boundary line runs along the Danube River and then over land), to the west – on the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, to the south – on Greece and Turkey, and to the east – on the Black Sea.

The relief of the country is a happy combination of sea coast, picturesque mountains and verdant plains. The predominant Drown colour on your map gives the impression that it is a purely mountainous country, although this is npt so, despite the fact that in Bulgaria there are no fewer than sixteen mountain massifs. We must first of all mention the Balkan Range, which was called Hemus in ancient times. This range, the longest in the country (555 km) cuts it into two halves as it runs from west to east and has given its name to the whole peninsula. It is the living history of Bulgaria – because in its progressive settlements and in its forests the people have fought many battles for their freedom. Fifteen of the peaks of the Balkan Range rise above 2,000 m, and the highest of them Mount Botev, is 2,376 m high daily ephesus tours. The highest mountains in Bulgaria (and in the whole Balkan Peninsula) are the Rila Mountains (with Mount Moussala – 2,925 m)and then come the Pirin Mountains with Mount Vihren — 2,915 m. East of the Pirin Mountains extends like a choppy sea the massif of the Rhodopes (with Mount Big Perelik -2,192 m). From among the other mountains we must mention the Sredna Gora (Central Mountains), running parallel to the Balkan Range (the two ranges enclosing the well-known Valley of Roses); Mount Vitosha – near the capital, Sofia; the Strandja Mountains (in south-eastern Bulgaria), Belassitsa, Ossogovo (in the southwestern part of the country), etc.

Danubian Plain

Of course, side by side with the brown patches on the map of Bulgaria there are also green ones. They stand for our plains, lowlands and valleys. The most important ones are: the Danubian Plain (between the Danube and the Balkan Range) and Dobroudja — two granaries of Bulgaria; the Thracian Plain (in southern Bulgaria), which got its name from the Thracians who inhabited it in antiquity and which is renowned today for its vineyards, vegetable gardens and tobacco plantations; the Valley of Roses, which we have already mentioned; the Kyustendil Plain – Bulgaria’s orchard, etc.

There are also many rivers in Bulgaria, but most of them are seasonal and carry little water most of the time. The largest river, excluding the Danube, is the Maritsa. It springs from the Rila Mountains, crosses the Thracian Plain, and flows into the Aegean Sea. The rivers Toundja and Arda are tributaries of the Maritsa. The Strouma and Mesta also flow into the Aegean. Among the Bulgarian tributaries of the Danube the most important are the Isker, the Ogosta and the Yantra, and the rivers Kamchiya and Ropotamo flow into the Black Sea.

Since the lakes on the Danube bank were drained (only Srebuma Lake was left as a reservation) Bulgaria now has three kinds of lakes: coastal, in the limestone mountains and Alpine. The largest coastal lakes are that of Blatnitsa and of Shabla, the Varna and Gebedje and the Atanassovsko. The most important among those in limestone rocks is Rabisha Lake, and the high- mountain lakes are mainly in the Rila and Pirin Mountains (in the Rila Mountains alone there are 189 corrie lakes and in the Pirin Mountains 176).

Water by a commercial company

Water, like the roadway, is a public not a private concern. Neither water, air, nor soil are manufactures like bread, clothes, and gas. A man should be no more charged personally for water by a commercial company than he should be charged a toll for walking over London Bridge, or taking the air in Hyde Park. It concerns the health of us all that no family should be stinted in their water supply, or even should stint themselves. Roadways, streets, bridges, parks, embankments, the free use of air and earth, ought to be secured 11s by public bodies, under public control, making no private profit, and having no private interest, and supported by common rates and taxes, and so ought the free use of water to be.

Water we want unstinted and under absolute public control for cooking, cleaning, and washing in our homes, for cleansing the streets, for fire defence, for wash-houses and public baths, for adornment and recreation. And on every one of these grounds, for the same reason that it would be criminal to make Hyde Park a private company and let them charge a toll at the gates — on all these grounds we require Water to be a public and not a private interest, a common advantage of a civilised community, and not a commodity for shareholders to speculate with and to sell to the needy.

Some day, I trust, we shall take in hand our rivers. We have already done much. There is a vast deal more to do. There is no positive reason why the Thames as it flows by Westminster Palace should not be as bright as when it reflects Hampton Court on its surface. Factories, works, drainage, refuse, will no longer, in secret and in defiance of Parliament, pollute its stream; the southern shores will be embanked like the northern; and the surface drainage of this metropolitan area and its whole sewage will not be discharged pell-mell into a tidal river private guide turkey. Some day, I believe, our two or three millions of chimneys will no longer pour out their endless pall of sulphur and soot. No poisonous gas will ever enter a house; for mechanical contrivances will suck down the products of refuse, instead of, as they now do, force them up into our homes.

Great problem of health which death presents to us

Nor need we doubt that we shall one day face the great problem of health which death presents to us, in the only way in which these vast modern cities can face it — by the system of cremation. All who have studied the facts of cremation well know how idle are the objections on the score of propriety, decency, solemnity, or the concealment of crime. They know that cremation alone affords the absolutely safe means of bestowing the 80,000 corpses which each year casts upon our sorrowing hands.

The ordinary objections which we hear are but melancholy remnants of childish superstition. There are objections of weight which I recognise to the full; all that repugnance which springs out of the hallowed memory of the buried remains, the local sanctity of the grave, and all its religious and beautiful associations. No one can respect these more than I do; no one can more heartily wish to preserve them. But those who feel them have never made real to their minds all the noble associations and resources of urn burial—-one of the most ancient, beautiful, and religious of all modes of disposing of the dead.

Cremation, in its present form, absolutely pure, effective, simple, and dignified as it is, destroys the remotest germs of deleterious power in the loved remains; but it does not annihilate the remains altogether. The solid ashes remain far more pure and perfectly than in any ancient cremation the residuum of the body, purified seven times in the fire. These ashes are appropriately closed in an urn. They can be buried, if it so be thought best, in the grave, and then the grave will contain the body, not indeed putrescent in horrible decay, but in a little harmless dust in a case. Cremation need not at all affect the practice of interment. The grave may remain undisturbed; the sacred earth may be there as now; flowers, as now, will rise up and bloom over the ashes.

The Roman Empire at Constantinople

Here we reach the last, as I venture to think, the main element of strength in the Empire of New Rome — its alliance with, or rather its possession of, the Orthodox Church. The Roman Empire at Constantinople was really, if not in style, a Holy Roman Empire. The Patriarch was one of its officials. The venerable Church of the Holy Wisdom was almost the private chapel of the Emperor; the Emperor’s palace may almost be described as the Vatican of Byzantium.

The relations between the Emperor and the Patriarch were wholly different from the relations between the Emperor at Aachen and the Pope. Instead of being separated by a thousand miles and many tribes and peoples, the Emperor of the Bosphorus resided in the same group of buildings, worshipped, and was adored in the same metropolitan temple, and sat in the same council- hall with his Patriarch, who was practically one of his great officers of State. All students of the Carolingian or of the Holy Roman Empire know how immensely Pipin, Charles, the Henries, and the Ottos were strengthened by the sup-port of the Popes from Zacharias to Victor II. But the Papacy was a very intermittent, uncertain, and exacting bulwark of the Empire, and after the advent of Hildebrand, in the eleventh century, it was usually the open or secret enemy of the Empire guided turkey tours. The Catholic Church was always the co-equal, usually the jealous rival, often the irreconcilable foe of the Emperor. It never was a State Church, and rarely, until the fourteenth century, was an official and obsequious minister of any emperor or king.

State Church

But the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, from first to last, was a State Church, part of the State, servant of the State. There were, of course, rebel patriarchs, ambitious, independent, factious, and deeply spiritual patriarchs. There were whole reigns and dynasties when Emperor and Patriarch represented opposite opinions. But all this was trifling compared with the independent and hostile attitude of the Papacy to the Temporal Power. The Catholic Church represented a Spiritual Power independent of any sovereign, with a range of influence not conterminous with that of any sovereign. That was its strength, its glory, its menace to the Temporal Power.

The Orthodox Church represented a spiritual authority, the minister of the sovereign, directing the conscience of the subjects of the sovereign, and in theory of no others. The Orthodox Church was the ideal State Church, and for a thousand years it deeply affected the history of the Byzantine Empire for evil and for good. It more than realised Dante’s dream in the De Monarchia, a dream which the essence of Catholicism and the traditions of the Papacy made impossible in the West. It constituted a real and not a titular Holy Roman Empire in the East.

Ruinous to religion, morality, and freedom as was this dependence of Church on the sovereign, it gave the sovereign an immense and permanent strength. We can see to-day what overwhelming force is given to the rulers of the two great empires of Eastern Europe, who are both absolute heads of the religious organisation of their respective dominions. Now the Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire was a more powerful spiritual authority than the Russian Church, if not quite so abject a servant of the Roman Emperor as the Russian Church is of the Czar.

And it was no doubt much more completely under the control of the Emperor than the imdms and softas of Stamboul are under the control of the Padishah. The Roman Emperor, in spite of his vices, origin, or character, even in the midst of the Iconoclast struggle, was invested in the eyes of his Orthodox subjects with that sacred halo which still surrounds Czar and Sultan, and which is the main source of their autocratic power. It was this sacred character, a character which the de facto Emperor possessed from the hour of his coronation in St. Sophia until the day when he died, was deposed, or blinded, which held together an empire of such strangely heterogeneous elements, permeated with such forces of anarchy and confusion. Christians in the West contemn, and perhaps with justice, the servility, idolatry, and formalism of the Greek priesthood. They may be right when they tell us that the essence of Greek ritualism is only a debased kind of paganism. But the Orthodox Church is still a great political force; and in the Byzantine Empire it was a political force perhaps greater than any other of which we have extant examples.

Pentelic marble in the sky of Athens

But a new building of Pentelic marble in the sky of Athens stands out soft, white, and dazzling with light. In the modern edifices of new Athens, built from the same quarry, we see the pearly radiance of the marble, the need and the uses of colour, the repose and coolness of these spacious colonnades and that which has been the puzzle of antiquarians—the entire absence of windozv. We are quite unable to conceive buildings without windows: we cannot work windows into Greek designs. At Athens we see that a colonnade of Pentelic marble lights itself, and in the sweetest way. The marble is semitransparent. It diffuses, reflects, and harmonises sunlight in so mysterious a manner that a marble hall is bathed in a subdued and delicious glow.

If we revive in imagination the Acropolis as it stood in its perfection, we see with new force the undoubted historic . truth, that the Athenians, in spite of their restlessness, audacity, and individuality, were intensely conservative in ideas, slavishly superstitious about spiritual evils, and as St. Paul told them on Mars’ Hill, too much bound by obsolete scruples. The condemnation to death of Socrates and of Aristotle, the extreme timidity of Aristotle’s utterances, the panic about the Hermae, the mob-fury after the battle of Arginusae prove it historically.

But it is equally patent in their art. It is obvious that a Doric temple was slowly developed out of a small shrine having beams and pillars of wood. The form was rigidly maintained when the material and the scale were changed; and, when temples were built of a vast size, they were still ornamented and designed on the old methods, however inapplicable these had become walking tours ephesus. As we stand beneath the peristyle and pediment of the Parthenon, we cannot fail to see that, in a building of those grand dimensions and towering position, the lovely frieze and even the majestic figures of the pediment, must have been sacrificed, so far as they never could be properly seen. Pheidias could not have been blind to this cruel result of antique convention. But neither he nor Pericles would have dared to transgress the sacred canons in which art was bound.

Athenians appears in their history

The superstitious bigotry of the Athenians appears in their history, their habits, their institutions, their language, and the uniformity of their architecture. Stand on the spot and recall the Acropolis in its glory, and you will feel that there must have been after all a profound monotony and rigidity in those eternal colonnades and unvarying architraves. The arch was unknown in the fine age; the temples were all built on one or two uniform patterns; it was left to Rome to develop all the uses of arch, tower, dome, the column supporting the arch, the successive stories, the hemicycle, and groined roof — all the intricate combinations which Rome suggested to modern architecture. Greece remained the slave of its traditions and canons of art. It is true that it avoided the incongruities and coarse realism of later Roman art. But it was left to Rome to make art progressive even in its corruption. Like the drama of Racine, Attic art remained perfect in its conventions. But its conventions were iron chains.

Accepting its traditional conventions, we cannot doubt that the Acropolis must have displayed in its splendour the most imposing mass of buildings ever raised by man. With Pheidias we feel in presence of the supreme artist (he was far more than sculptor) —the one perfect master in the history of art, of whose faultless genius no single side was weaker or less noble than the rest. He remains alone of men (or if not alone then it may be with Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart) one whose unerring instinct transmuted into beauty every form of the world around him.