Connecticut western news., 1891-11-26
the center of Athens. Earthquakes

Lord Elgln, the English elnDaSSaQOr at Constantinople, got permission of the sultan to remove from the Acropolis fallen pieces of the building, but he took from the building to England the finest statues, removing them at an ex- pense of eight hundred thousand dol lars A storm overthrow many of the statues of the Acropolis. Morosini, the general, attempted to remove from a pediment the sculptured car and horses of Victory, but the clumsy machinery dropped it, and all was lost.
 The Turks turned the building into a powder magazine where the Venetian guns dropped fire that by explosion sent the columns flying in the air and falling cracked and splintered. But after all that time and storm and war and iconoclasm have effected, the Acropolisis the monarch of all ruins, and before it bow the learning. the genius, the poetry, the art, the history of the ages. saw it as it was thousands of years ago. had read so much about it and dreamed so much about it, that I needed no magician's wand to re- store it.
 At one wave of my hand on that clear morning in 1889 it rose before me in the glory it had when Pericles ordered it and Ictinus planned it and Phidias chiseled it and Protogines painted it and Pausanias described it. Its gates, which were carefully guarded by the ancients, open to let you in, and you ascend by sixty marble steps the propylea, which .Epaminodas wanted to transfer to Thebes, but permission, I am glad to say, could not be granted for the removal of this architectural miracle. -a..
 In the days when ten cents would do more than a dollar now, the building cost two million three hundred thou sand dollars. See it's five ornamented gates. the keys intrusted to an officer for only one day lest the temptation to go in and inappropriate the treasures mingling of blue and scarlet and green, and the walls abloom with pictures ut most in thought and coloring. Wonder is temple to goddess called Victory Without Wings" ---.-
 So many of the triumphs of the world had been followed by defeat that the Greeks wished in marble to indicate that victory for Athens had come never again to fly away, and hence this tenn pie to "Victory Without Wings'-a temple of marble, snow white and gilt tering. Yonder, behold the pedestal of Agrippa, twenty seven feet high and twelve square, But the overshadowing wonder of all the hill is the Parthenon. In days when money was ten times more valuable than now it cost four million six hundred thousand dollars. It is a Doric grandeur, having forty-six columns, each col umn thirtyfour feet high and six feet two inches in diameter. Wondrous in- tercolulnniations! Painted porticoes, architraves tinged with ocher, shields of gold hung up, lines of most delicate curve, figures of horses and men and sacrifice, statues of the deities Diony- sius, Prometheus, Hermes, De,neter, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon; in one frieze twelve divinities; centaurs in battle; weaponry from Marathon; chariot of night; chariot of the morning.; horses of the sun, the fates, the furies; statue of Jupiter holding in his right hand the thunderbolt; silver footed chair in which Xerxes watched the battle of Salamis only few miles away.
 MINERVA IN FULL ARMOR
 Here is the colossal statue of Minerva in full armor, eyes of gray colored stone, figure of a Sphinx, on her head, griffins by her side (which are lions with eagles beak), spear in one hand, statue of liberty in the other, shield carved with battle scenes, and even the slippers sculptured and tied on with thongs of gold. Far out at sea the sailors saw this statue of Minerva rising high above all the temples, glitterins in the sun. Here are statues of eques- trians, statue of a lioness, and there are the Graces and wonder a horse in bronze.
 There is a statue said in the time of Augustus to have of it's own accord turned around from east to west and spit blood; statues made out of shields conquered in battle; statue of Apollo, the expeller of locusts; statue of An acreon, drunk and singing; statue of Olympodorus, a Greek, memorable for the fact that he was cheerful when others were cast down, a trait worthy of sculpture. But walk on and around the Acropolis, and wonder you see a statue of Hygeia, and the statue of Theseus fighting the Minotaur, and the statue of Hercules staying serpents. No wonder that Petronius said it was easier to find a god than man in Athens Oh, the Acropolis. The most of it's temples and statues made from the marble quarries of Mount Penteli cum, little way from the city
 have here on my table block of the Parthenon made out of this marble, and on it is the sculpture of Phidias. l brought it from the Acropolis. This specimen has on it the dust of ages, and the marks of explosion and battle, but you can get from it some idea of the delicate luster of the AcroDolis when it was covered with mountain of this marble cut into all the exquisite shapes that genius could contrive and striped with silver and aflane with gold. The Acropolis in the morning light of those ancients must have shone as though it were an aerolite cast off from the monday sun. The temples must have looked like petrified foam. The whole Acropolis must have seemed like the white breakers of the great ocean of time.