Historical Athens, Eternal Athens Plutarch's View on the City and its monuments

In the Lives, devoted to ancient Statesmen, Plutarch sometimes refers to Athens of his own time in present tense. Unlike Pausanias, he does not take present monuments or places as a starting point to tell stories of the past but goes the opposite way, sometimes to prove and confirm his narration or his character description. More often however he uses these mentions just to locate the past facts in the present urban space and draws Athens as a city both familiar to the readers and permeated by a long history. Only the Acropolis, described as "even then and at once antique, but, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought" (Per. 13) is, so to say, beyond History "untouched by time": Hellenism and Greek identity are at core of this famous passage, but, however sensitive Plutarch may be to "the unfaltering breath of an ageless spirit infused" into these masterpieces, he is still far from the "athenocentrism" demonstrated some decades later by Aristides' Panathenaic Oration.