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On 4 September 1904, Sigmund Freud put on his best shirt and went with his brother Alexander to spend the morning on the Acropolis of Athens.’ It was the high point of a whirlwind tour undertaken on the spur of the moment when the two brothers were informed that it was not worth going to Corfu in late August (their original plan). The Lloyd Line steamer Urano took them from Trieste via Brindisi, Corfu, Patras, around the Peloponnese to Piraeus, whence they proceeded to Athens with a mere two and a half days to spend before returning home. The first afternoon was passed briefly in the Agora, where they saw the ‘Theseum’ (now thought to be a temple of Hephaestus), which Freud found ‘unvergesslich’.2 It would, in fact, have made an impression of deja vu, since on his daily walk along the Ringstrasse Freud would pass an exact replica of it in the Volksgarten of Vienna (commissioned by Napoleon I, and used that year to house an exhibit of the Ephesus excavation finds, which Freud is likely to have attended). Finally, on Sunday, the two men ascended the citadel itself, which Greek and German archaeologists had converted in the nineteenth century from a Turkish fortress (it had been the scene of desperate fighting during the Greek War of Independence) into the official classical ruin it remains today.3 Taking refuge from the rain under the portico of the closed museum, Freud wrote to his wife Martha—as Alex sat nearby on an archon's throne—that it ‘surpasses everything that we've ever seen and that one can imagine’, and that the view from the citadel was ‘herrlich’.4 The impression one gets from this letter is