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The Defence of the Acropolis and the Panic Before Salamis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

W. F. J. Knight
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Extract

The Persian army, moving on Athens after Thermopylae, found the city deserted, but the Acropolis held by temple servants and ‘a few poor men’: who, remembering the oracle of the ‘wooden walls,’ ‘for a long time’ defended wooden breastworks against the Persians, but were in the end overpowered.

Dr. G. B. Grundy, having recounted thus far the Herodotean story, writes (The Great Persian War, p. 357):

‘But the strangest part of the whole story is the account of the impression created in the fleet by the news of the capture. The inconsistency between the description of the garrison and its defensive works, and the alarm created by the capture of the fortification, is so glaring as to be irreconcilable, and modern historians have naturally been led to form conjectures as to what actually took place.’

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , November 1931 , pp. 174 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1931

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References

1 Even at Delphi the agency of a protective Athena seems to have been supposed: for the miracle which saved the precinct of Apollo is said both by Herodotus (VIII. 37–39) and by Diodorus (XI. 14, 3) to have occurred when the Persians reached the temple of Athena Προναία.

2 Cf. some suggestions which I made in Classical Philology, XXV. (1930), pp. 358 ff.

3 Mahlow, G., Neue Wege durch die Griechische Sprache und Dichtung, p. 419Google Scholar.

4 Nilsson, C. M., Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Religion, pp. 419–30Google Scholar: id., History of Greek Religion, pp. 26–28.

5 Vorgriechische Ortsnamen, p. 95.

6 The epithet Alea is referred e.g. by Lewis and Short to the Arcadian King Aleus or city Alea—a typical inversion, as the connexion between Aleus and the apotropaic Athena at Tegea at once suggests. Cf. Sir James Frazer's note on Apollodorus II. 7, 3, (citing Alcidamas, , Odyss., 1476, pp. 179 sq. Blass.)Google Scholar, where the maidenhood of the defensive Athena seems involved. The relevance of this I hope to investigate in a subsequent paper.

7 In 480 the Areopagus had just recovered from the disparaging results of Peisistratid ‘packing’ (Wade-Gery, H. T. in C.Q. XXV. [1931], p. 81)Google Scholar.