Three caves cluster on the northwestern slope, all three identifiable by ancient testimony and modern excavation. The middle cave, Cave C, is dated to the 5th century and was likely sacred to Zeus Olympios or Zeus Keraunios, based on readings of Thucydides and Strabo. The next cave to the east, Cave B, was Apollo's: Apollo Hypoakraios, Apollo Under the High Rocks. By tradition, this is where Apollo united with Erechtheus' daughter Kreousa and where their son Ion, the founding hero of the Ionian Greeks, was born. The cave farthest east, called Cave D, was Pan's. The story of Pan's arrival in Athens is unusually specific. In 490 BCE, before the Battle of Marathon, the runner Pheidippides reported that Pan met him on the road to Sparta and offered to help the Greeks. After the Persians fled in panic, the Athenians believed Pan had caused that panic himself, the very word coined from the god's name. They thanked him with this cave on the Acropolis. Two votive reliefs were found inside, one showing Pan playing pipes for a nymph, the other showing him among other deities. In Christian times the easternmost niche, Cave D2, was converted into a chapel of Saint Athanasius. Traces of Christian frescoes still cling to the rock.

Continue around to the northern face and you reach a terrace 30 by 14 meters wide. Oscar Broneer excavated it in 1932 and identified it as the Sanctuary of Aphrodite and Eros. Two inscriptions cut into the southwest corner, dated roughly 450 to 430 BCE, dedicate the place to Aphrodite and to a spring festival sacred to Eros. The objects found there suggest something more intimate than civic worship. Marble reliefs of male and female genitals. A fragment of a relief showing nine Erotes carrying cult paraphernalia from the late 4th century. And, found one hundred meters down the slope, a marble thesaurus, a treasury jar inscribed: Treasury for prenuptial offerings to Aphrodite Ourania. Brides came here, before their weddings, to leave gifts. The shrine was private. The donations were private. Four hundred and fifty years before Christ, Athenian women were climbing this slope with marble in their hands and asking the goddess for the thing they were about to do.

On the eastern slope yawns the Aglaureion, the largest of the Acropolis caves at 14 meters across the mouth. Aglauros was a daughter of King Cecrops, and the Delphic oracle declared that Athens could only be saved if she sacrificed herself. According to the legend, she leapt from this cliff to fulfill the prophecy. The sanctuary was finally identified in 1980 when a stele was found bearing an inscription that mentioned the priestess Timokrite, honored by the Athenians. The same eastern slope is where Herodotus says the Persians scaled the Acropolis in 480 BCE during their sack of the city. The shrine was a women's cult, but the ephebes, young men taking their oath as new citizens, also came here for the Aglauria, a ceremony in which they swore allegiance to the city and received their weapons. A girl who jumped to save Athens, and centuries of young men making the promise to defend it, on the same patch of stone.

On the southern slope, west of the Asklepieion, a Mycenaean spring had been enclosed in a spring house since the archaic period. A 1st century BCE inscription found at the site lists the gods worshipped there: Hermes, Pan, Aphrodite, the Nymphs, and Isis. Yes, Isis, the Egyptian goddess imported into Athenian devotion alongside the home-grown deities. A small Greek-style temple, dating to the 2nd century CE, was identified as hers. Pausanias mentions a temple of Themis here too, set behind a monument to the hero Hippolytus. Votive niches were chiseled at random into the bedrock west of the Asklepieion. None of this was state-sponsored. None of it was monumental. It looks like the religious equivalent of foot traffic, layered up over centuries by people who stopped, prayed, left something behind.

Below the later Odeon of Herodes Atticus lies the Sanctuary of the Nymphe, an open-air shrine excavated between 1955 and 1960. Nymphe is an obscure figure in the Greek pantheon, a protector of marriage and wedding ceremonies. Inside the precinct were an altar, an oval structure, an apsidal building, and a remarkable concentration of black-figure pottery from the 6th century BC. A boundary stone inscribed boundary of the sanctuary of Nymphe confirmed the identification. Brides came here to fetch water from the Kallirrhoe spring near the Ilissos river for their prenuptial bath, the loutrophoria. The sanctuary lasted until the 1st century CE, when the precinct was destroyed. Whether one or two shrines to Aphrodite stood on the southern slope is still argued. What is certain is that the slopes around the Acropolis held a quieter, more domestic religion, the religion of marriage and birth and personal request, threaded into the cracks below the temples on the summit.