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Show ROMANCE ROBBED. I cannot conclude this chapter on the third, the burnt city, without examining once more the question whether this pretty little town, with its brick walls, which can hardly have housed three thousand inhabitants, could have been identical with the great Homeric Ilios? of immortal renown, which withstood for ten long years the heroic efforts of the united Greek army of one hundred and ten thousand men, and which could only at last be captured by a stratagem. First, as regards the size of all the prehistoric cities. I repeat that they were but very small. In fact, we can hardly too much contrast our ideas of the dimensions of those primeval cities. So, according to the Attic tradition, Athens was built by the Pelasgians, and was limited to the small rock of the Acropolis, whose plateau is of oval form, 900 feet long and 100 feet broad at its broadest part; but it was much smaller still until Cimon? enlarged it by building the wall on its eastern declivity, and leveling the slope within by means of debris. The Ionians, having captured the city, forced the Pelasgians to settle at the southern foot of the Acropolis. According to the Thucydides, Athens was only enlarged by the coalescences of the Attic demi there effected by Thesene. In like manner Athens, Thebes, Mycenes? and all the other cities whose names are of the plural form, were probably at first limited to their stronghold, called polis, and had their names in the singular; but the cities having been enlarged, they received the plural name, the citadel being then called Acropolis, and the lower town polis. The most striking proof of this is the name of the valley" Polis' in Ithaca, which is not derived from a real city or acropolis - for my excavations there have proved that this single fertile valley in the island can never have been the site of a city - but from a natural rock, which has never been touched by the hand of man. This rock, however, having precisely the shape of a citadel, is for this reason now called castron, and was no doubt in ancient times called Polis, which name has been transferred to the valley. The ancient Polis or Asty was the ordinary habitation of the town chief or king, with his family and dependants, as well as the richer classes of the people; it was the site of the Agora and the temples, and the general piece of refuge in time of danger. We have traces of this fact in the extended sense of the Italian castello, to embrace a town, and in the Anglo-Saxon burb also as professor Virchow suggests to me, in the Slavish gardhortas (Bergwall), "What, indeed," says Mr. Gladstone, "have we to say when we find that, in the period of the ?[incunabula] of Rome, the Romans on the Palatine were probably faced by the Sabines on the hill of the capitol?" It is, therefore, not the smallness of the third; the burnt city, which can prevent us from identifying it with the Homeric Troy, because Homer is not a historian, but an epic poet. -Dr. Schliemann's "Ilios." |