History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides, Vol. 1-4. Smith, Charles Foster, translator. London and Cambridge, MA: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1919-1923.

And, finally, the Acropolis, because the Athenians had there in early times a place of habitation, is still to this day called by them Polis or city.

Because, then, of their long-continued life of independence in the country districts, most of the Athenians of early times and of their descendants down to the time of this war, from force of habit, even after their political union with the city, continued to reside, with their households, in the country where they had been born; and so they did not find it easy to move away, especially since they had only recently finished restoring their establishments after the Persian war.

They were dejected and aggrieved at having to leave their homes and the temples which had always been theirs,—relics, inherited from their fathers, of their original form of government—and at the prospect of changing their mode of life, and facing what was nothing less for each of them than forsaking his own town.

And when they came to the capital, only a few of them were provided with dwellings or places of refuge with friends or relatives, and most of them took up their abode in the vacant places of the city and the sanctuaries and the shrines of heroes, all except the Acropolis and the Eleusinium and any other precinct that could be securely closed. And the Pelargicum,[*](A fortification built by the "Pelasgians " on the west side of the Acropolis, the only side accessible to an enemy. It was to the space below and above this fortification that the curse attached.) as it was called, at the foot of the Acropolis, although it was under a curse that forbade its use for residence, and this was also prohibited by a verse-end of a Pythian oracle to the following effect:

The Pelargicum unoccupied is better,

nevertheless under stress of the emergency was completely filled with buildings. And the oracle, as it seems to me, came true, but in a sense quite the opposite of what was expected;

for it was not on account of the unlawful occupation of the place that the city was visited by the calamities, but it was on account of the war that there was the necessity of its occupation, and the oracle, although it did not mention the war, yet foresaw that the place would never be occupied for any good.