The Fall of the Athenian Empire-(A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Donald Kagan - (1987)

THE RESTORATION 261
enment, and the questioning of tradition. The experience of war, pestilence,
and defeat had produced a sobering response. It was the upper
class that studied with and supported the sophists and scientists; the
average man inclined more to a return to traditional religion, ideas,
and values and, even beyond, toward irrationalism. The war years
saw the introduction into Athens of mystical and orgiastic foreign
deities from Thrace and the east. At the very time that the rational
and scientific Hippocratic school of medicine was at its height on the
island of Cos, the Athenians imported from Epidaurus the cult of
Asclepius, the god represented by a serpent, who cured by miracles.
"This diversion of religious feelings towards foreign forms in which
could be seen the resurgence of irrational, 'primitive,' aspirations such
as the archaic period had known at the time of the rise of Dionysism
or of Orphism, went far beyond, in the direction of regression, the
conservative reaction of civic religion. " 62
Such a movement seems to provide a plausible background for the
restored democracy's decision to complete the construction, begun
after the Peace of Nicias, of the temple to Athena Polias. In that form,
as the patron goddess of the city, protectress of the Acropolis itself,
which was the earliest location of Athens, she was the oldest representation
of the state cult. Her statue, which received the sacred
garment at each Panathenaic festival, had sat in the earliest temple on
the Acropolis, which was destroyed by the Persians and never rebuilt.
The architects who planned the new structure were given a most
difficult assignment.
The area which the Erechtheion eventually occupied includes the most
ancient shrines of the Acropolis, sites connected with fertility cults, chthonic
deities, and hero cults whose origins stretched into the remote Bronze Age.
Here were the tombs of Kekrops, Erechtheus, and Bootes, early kings of
Athens; the miraculous olive tree of Athena; the trident mark and saline springs
left by Poseidon; the crevice in which the child god Erechthonios guarded
the Acropolis in serpent form; a-sanctuary of Pandrosus, the "moistener of
all," one of the three daughters of Kekrops who went mad and jumped from
the Acropolis when they beheld Erechthonios in the form of a snake-legged
child; and other shrines as well. 63
The completion of the Erechtheum, therefore, was an act of civic piety,
traditional in its intention, like the publication of the ancient laws of
62
Will, Le mondegrec, 615-616.
6JJ. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge, 1972), IJ2-IH.