/a-variation-on-the-theme-of-athena-the-palladium-as-viewed-by-pausanias-on-the-acropolis-of-athens/

This reconstruction does not reproduce the point of vies of someone emerging from the Propylaea but that of a viewer standing to the south-west, roughly at the corner of the precinct of Artemis Brauronia. In this perspective, the background is filled in with the upper part of the Erechtheum. Another reconstruction by the same author, Gorham P. Stevens, shows instead behind the great bronze Athena simply a void where the temple of Athena Polias had been. Such a picture reflects the then-prevailing opinion that after the Persian Sack the ruin of the ancient temple had been razed and the temple never reconstructed. I wish to point to an alternate reconstruction, first proposed by Wilhelm Dörpfeld, proposing that the “ruin,” in whatever burned and battered state, was preserved and integrated in the reconstruction of the Acropolis, and survived to the end of antiquity and probably well beyond.