The Pnyx had no tourists but us.
The Acropolis makes a statement and it draws the crowd but it is not the only hill in Athens. A few meters away is another peak called the Pnyx. It feels like a peak of sorts climbing it in the heat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnyx
When we climbed the hill we were alone the entire time. When I found the site of the ecclesia there was no one there but us and the shades of the past. A rope and sign told me not to step on the bema, the speaker’s dais, and I respected that but I certainly could have do so had I wished.
But it was enough to be there. There Pericles and others addressed as many as twenty thousand citizens (men) at a time. With the Acropolis on his right. (If you enlarge the picture you see people all over the Acropolis.)
http://www.stoa.org/athens/sites/pnyx.html
We also slavishly followed the map to find the cell of Socrates and failed. Though in doing so we came across, by accident, the crypt of Thucydides.
When we had given up and were retiring to cooling drinks and air conditioning, only then did we come across a sign directing us to what was – ostensibly – Socrates’s cell when he drank the hemlock.
There is no certainty that this is the place but the location and layout resembles the description of the place.
http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/3/eh351.jsp?obj_id=2580
The middle one of these three is two rooms. This combination and configuration of these rooms cut into the limestone fit the descriptions of the time. I am afraid there are barred steel doors across them so it was no entry. Those steel bar doors certainly make it look like a prison.
The holes in the rock face would have been for beams to support an awning.
I do not know what else to say about Socrates. See Robert Rosselini’s film Socrate http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210296/
The film certainly conveys some of the man and the times, but I have not see it in years. Not something my local Block Buster has on the shelf.
Read my article http://www.springerlink.com/content/j02464j1671u5v40/