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GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

THE PROPYLÆA
From within, looking toward Salamis. From a painting by H. R. Cross

GREEK LANDS AND

LETTERS

BY

FRANCIS GREENLEAF ALLINSON

(Professor of Classical Philology in Brown University)

AND

ANNE C. E. ALLINSON

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

MDCCCCIX

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY FRANCIS G. ALLINSON

AND ANNE C. E. ALLINSON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published December 1909

TO

A. C. E.

AND

S. C. A.

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to interpret Greek lands by literature, and Greek literature by local associations and the physical environment. Those who possess an intimate acquaintance with Greek or who have the good fortune to stay long in Greece will be able to draw upon their own resources. Many travellers, however, must curtail their visit to a few weeks or months, and it is hoped that to them this book may prove useful as a companion in travel, while to a wider range of readers it may prove suggestive in appraising what is most vital in our “Hellenic heritage.”

To keep within reasonable bounds it has seemed necessary to limit our survey to those portions of the mainland of Greece and those islands, immediately adjacent in the Gulf of Ægina, which may be easily visited during a short stay in Athens as headquarters. But the visitor cannot be too strongly urged to avail himself of opportunities to visit the remoter islands and the shores of Asia Minor, which are so beautiful a part of the Greek world and have played so brilliant a rôle in Greek history and literature.

In quoting or summarizing the literature the limitations of space are obvious. Selections have been made which to us seemed most fairly to interpret the countries and sites. It is hoped that these will not only prove representative when taken together but will recall much that has perforce been omitted.

Purely learned treatises in Greek have not been cited except by way of illustration. The historical geographer Strabo, of the time of Augustus, has offered suggestive material; and Pausanias, of the second century of our era, the pious and often charming writer of the “Guidebook to Greece,” has, as was inevitable, been the cicerone in many places.

History it has seemed proper to use chiefly to explain the literature, or, especially in the case of Herodotus and Thucydides, as itself part of the noblest prose literature. But in different chapters emphasis has been laid, to some extent, upon different elements, such as myth and legend, prehistoric tradition, the history of certain epochs in classic times, the demands of religion, the growth of the artistic impulse or the bloom of the Attic period. By this means we have hoped, without too much repetition, to suggest a fairly adequate outline of the different factors in Greek civilization. The introductory chapter is intended to provide the essential background for the others.

Forms of art other than literature are only incidentally touched upon. Archæological information or discussion, except as illustration, is precluded by the purpose of the book, which deals with the literature and the land as being permanent possessions that are not essentially modified by the successive data of archæology, necessarily shifting from month to month.

In translating Greek authors it has seemed best, as a rule, to offer new versions, rendering the thought as literally as is consistent with our idiom or, in the case of poetry, with the exigencies of English verse. The anapæstic dimeters and, in the dialogue parts of the drama, the six-stress iambic verse have been retained; less uniformly the elegiac couplet; and, occasionally only, the heroic hexameter. Elsewhere poetry has been usually turned by rhymed verse or by rhythmic prose.

Some existing translations or paraphrases have been used, for which credit has been given in the text or the footnotes. Moreover, in most of the citations from Pausanias Mr. Frazer’s admirable translation has been used without explicit mention, and for this we make acknowledgment here. In translating Pindar many turns of expression have been taken from the beautiful translation of Ernest Myers, although, when they are not expressly credited, the versions have been rewritten. While it is hoped that full credit has thus been given wherever it is due, there are doubtless expressions here and there remaining in the memory from numerous commentators on Greek authors that form a common stock in trade for the translator.

In transliterating Greek names we have followed, as a rule, familiar English usage.

Among many books of reference there are a few to which we are especially indebted. We have used constantly Mr. J. G. Frazer’s “Commentary on Pausanias,” which includes a wealth of outside references, as, for example, citations from other travellers beginning with Dicæarchus, the entertaining geographer of the fourth century b. c. We are also indebted to Curtius’s “History of Greece” and Tozer’s “Geography of Greece”; Dr. W. Judeich’s “Topographie von Athen” (especially for Piræus); Professor Ernest Gardner’s “Ancient Athens,” which should be in the hands of every visitor to Athens; and Miss J. E. Harrison’s “Primitive Athens.” Professor J. B. Bury’s “History of Greece” has been constantly suggestive. On modern Greece Schmidt’s “Das Volksleben der Neugriechen” and Sir Rennell Rodd’s “Customs and Lore of Modern Greece” have furnished definite material.

Among the numerous editions of Greek authors necessarily consulted we are under special obligations to Professor Gildersleeve’s “Pindar, the Olympian and Pythian Odes,” and to Professor Smyth’s “Melic Poets.” Certain quotations in the text, not provided for in the footnotes, are acknowledged in the Appendix, in which are also given, for the sake of comparison, exact references to the Greek.

Our personal thanks are due to Professor J. Irving Manatt, of Brown University, for valuable suggestions and criticism of several chapters, and to Professor Walter G. Everett for his discussion of the section on Greek philosophy. We are also especially indebted to Professor Herbert Richard Cross of Washington University, St. Louis, for placing at our disposal his water-color sketch of the Propylæa, from which the frontispiece is taken, and to Professors C. B. Gulick and G. H. Chase of Harvard University for assistance in obtaining the impression of the coin upon the cover of this book.

F. G. A.

A. C. E. A.

Providence, October, 1909.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Nike of Samothrace, reproduced on the front cover, is

from a coin in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY: THE WIDESPREAD LAND OF
HELLAS

“Greek literature is read by almost all nations.”

Cicero, Pro Archia.

Cicero, at one time studying Greek oratory in Rhodes, at another speaking Greek as the language best adapted to a Sicilian audience, suggests with sufficient definiteness the eastern and western boundaries of ancient Hellas. Leaving out of consideration more remote colonies, we may content ourselves with including in the Greater Greece of antiquity all the Mediterranean lands and waters from Sicily and Lower Italy, in the west, to Cyprus and the coast of Asia Minor, in the east. The Riviera, or seaboard of the eastern side of the Ægean, is sharply differentiated from the continuous highlands of the interior, which suggest, a short distance inland, a boundary line between Europe and Asia. For a maritime people like the Greeks this was a barrier more effectual than the highway of the Bosphorus. In the early historic times, when the sun rose over these mountains of Asia Minor he left behind him the Oriental and looked down at once upon the Cis-montane Greeks, and it was upon Greeks that he was still shining when his setting splendour lit up the Bay of Naples—the “New-town” of that day—or the ancient Cumæ and the heights of Anacapri or the islands of the Sirens and the golden brown columns of Poseidon’s temple at Pæstum.

The seaboard, too, of Macedonia and Thrace belonged to Greece by reason of their water-front on the Ægean. And to the south, the encroachments of the Greeks upon the preserves of the Nile-god were so extensive for centuries before the time of Alexander that we need not wonder either at Egyptian reminiscences in Greek art or at the increasing evidences of Hellenic life in Egypt.

The Greeks, compared with the hoary antiquity of the Egyptians, are late comers. The essential difference, however, is not a matter of centuries or millennia. The Egyptians, perhaps because the details are foreshortened by the vast distance, seem to possess a chronology, but no real history. There were revolutions, rather than evolution. The Greeks were young, too, individually as well as chronologically. From Homer down through the classic period we hear “the everlasting wonder-song of youth.” Plato makes an Egyptian priest say to the Athenian law-giver: “O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever children; no Hellene is ever old!” We find the Greeks of the historic period on the intellectual watershed between antiquity and the modern world. From data now well established we may push back their life far beyond recorded chronology, and, if we anticipate even by a little the nucleus of the Homeric poems, we possess a practically unbroken continuity of their history and language for three thousand years down to the present day. Greek history is often confined within perfectly arbitrary dates. In reality, the death of Alexander in 323 B. C., the closing of the schools of philosophy in 529 A. D., and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A. D. only break its course into convenient chapters.

The Greek language is itself one of the greatest creations of Greek art. Discarding some superfluities, retained or over-emphasized by others of our common Indo-European family, the Greeks developed an instrument for the expression of thought unsurpassed, if not unequalled, among any other people. “The whole language resembles the body of an artistically trained athlete, in which every muscle is called into full play, where there is no trace of flaccid tumidity, and all is power and life.” The “common dialect” already dominated the eastern Mediterranean before the Romans took physical possession. Its direct legatee is the modern Greek, that had sprung up in lusty independence some three centuries before the Turks put an end to senile Byzantium and its crabbed ecclesiastical speech.

Of creative literature the same unbroken continuity cannot be predicated. The early literature, beginning with Homer, extends through the first quarter of the fifth century B. C. It includes the great epic poetry, the elegiac and iambic, the beginnings of philosophy, and seven of the ten greatest lyric poets. No fact in Greek literature is more conspicuous than the shortness and the richness of the next period, which may be conveniently called the “Attic,” although some of the greatest writers came from outside of Attica—from Bœotia, from the islands, from beyond the Ægean, or from Sicily. Within this brief period of only 183 years, if we close it with the death of Menander in 292 B. C., all the additional types of the literature either culminated or originated.

The next period of 150 years, commonly known as the Alexandrian period, has within its early limits the name of Theocritus, whose quality entitles him to rank with the writers of the Classic period, as does that of his two legatees, Bion and Moschus, and also Herodas, whose writings, recovered in the fortunate year 1891, have now made him a part of the Greek Classics. But in the Alexandrian period, and in the Græco-Roman period from 146 B. C. to 529 A. D., the great names are, as a rule, not so great, and they are spread over a long time. Few of them, except Lucian in the second century of our era, and Plutarch immediately preceding him, successfully compete for a prominent place as writers of pure literature.

With a few exceptions, the great original work in Greek literature had been done before the death of Menander. The Greek anthology, however, must not be ignored. It ranges over more than one thousand years and leaves no century in all that time without at least some minor representative of great beauty. Like a cord twisted of dull strands and golden, it binds together the Attic age with the whole of the subsequent time down to the year 550 of our era, the golden strand reappearing sufficiently often to assure us of its continuity. The next nine centuries of Byzantine Greek, ecclesiastical and profane, are little known to most classical scholars. The contributions of the modern Greek, before and since the days of Byron, are significant, and the friends of the new kingdom await with cordial expectation the rise of new writers to give to the lore of the peasant and the struggles of the patriot a worthy literary form. Of the lacunæ in the literature, in spite of the continuity of the language, Professor Hatzidakis of Athens has well said: “The Greek language is as little to be blamed for this as could be the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus, because in those times no one fashioned from them a Hermes of Praxiteles or a Venus of Melos.”

A glance at the map will show how accessible was the mainland of Greece, upon the east and south, to seafaring visitors from across the Ægean, who would naturally find here their first landing-places. Except for the great gash of the Corinthian Gulf, the western coast is indented only with smaller, though good, harbours, while the whole southern and eastern seaboard from Messenia in the southwest to Thrace is a ragged fringe of promontories, large and small, welcoming into the interior the waters that suggested sea-business of war and commerce.

But this interlacing of land and water, that brought the insinuating “call of the sea,” was not the only factor that predetermined the character of the Greek cantons. The Greeks were mountaineers as well as mariners. One is, indeed, almost tempted to speak of Greece as consisting of only mountains and marina. There are of course some relatively large plains, notably the fertile granary of Thessaly, but the general impression of the land from any bird’s-eye view is a succession of lofty ridges, peaks, and spurs. Only by many shiftings of the place of outlook do these partially resolve themselves into ranges continuous in certain general directions, though with many sharp angles and curves and buttressed by uncompromising cross ridges. These mountain barriers make clear the history of the Greek peoples, both how they combined temporarily to resist foreign invasion and, above all, why they developed and cherished in tiny cantons their characteristic individualism, which has been by turns a bane and a blessing.

Thessaly and Mount Olympus to the north belong geographically to the Kingdom of Greece. On either side of Thessaly irregular mountain chains run southward and preserve a general connection through Central Greece and Attica, and, despite the submerging water, may be identified as reappearing in the islands far out in the Ægean. Olympus on the northeast—hardly interrupted by the river Peneius, which has rent its way through the precipitous cañon known as the “Vale” of Tempe—is continued along the east coast by Mount Ossa and Mount Pelion. Then across the narrow entrance to the Pagasæan and Malian gulfs the system is continued by the sharp dorsal fins of the island of Eubœa, that stretches like a sea-monster along the shores of Locris, Bœotia, and Attica, to reappear at intervals far to the southeast in the islands Andros, Tenos, Myconos, Delos, Naxos, Amorgos, and Astypalæa. On the west of Thessaly the great Pindus ridge, descending through the centre of northern Greece, details on the rugged system of peaks and ranges which fill central Greece southward to the Gulf of Corinth and which in general run from west to east. One of these ranges, called the Othrys Mountains, bounds the Thessalian countries on the south and ends at the Gulf of Pagasæ. Another, Mount Œta, is continued by the high mountains that shut off Thermopylæ to the north and runs on as the boundary between Locris and Bœotia. Still another range, running out of the central complex, has its culmination in Parnassus, 8070 feet high, and is continued, though more interrupted and with a more irregular course, by Mount Helicon in Bœotia and the frontier hills of Attica, from Helicon to Parnes, and bends around into the massive ridge of Mount Pentelicus, from whose summit the spectator can see the prolongation in the islands of Ceos, Cythnos, Seriphos, and others beyond.

The narrow neck that divides the Corinthian from the Saronic Gulf and connects Attica and Bœotia with the Peloponnesus, lifts up among its rugged hills in Megara the picturesque twin peaks of the Kerata. South of the isthmus itself, with its narrow plain and the deep cutting necessary for the canal, rises the splendid acropolis of Acrocorinth, keeping guard at the entrance to the “Island of Pelops.”

The Peloponnesus, or Morea, is a rugged complex of mountains that by turns shut out and admit the sea. Of its four irregular peninsulas, jutting out southward in the Argolis and in Laconia and Messenia, each has its mountain system; the more broken hills in the Argolid plain; the ridge of Parnon to the east of the plain of Lacedæmon; the imposing barrier of Taygetus between Sparta and Messenia. In Messenia itself are fertile plains. One is in the midland, as the name Messenia originally implied, among offshoots of the Arcadian Lycæus; while the great mountain fortress of Ithome, 2600 feet high, where crops could be reared and an army supported, towering above the hills and plains of central Messenia, looks down on another larger plain, almost tropical in its products, that stretches southward to the gulf.

The centre and west of the Peloponnesus is a mass of peaks and mountain ridges tangled up at abrupt angles but bounded on the north by a formidable chain, generally parallel with the Gulf of Corinth and dominated by Erymanthus and Cyllene to the west and east respectively. Around and against this chain great mountains are piled up like petrified billows. In this part of Greece plains few but important are interspersed, as at Megalopolis or Olympia. Along the northwest coast there is the wider sea-margin of “Hollow” Elis, while along the Corinthian Gulf Ægialus, the “coast-land,” seems often little more than a grudging marina subjacent to the foothills of Erymanthus and Cyllene.

From north to south, from east to west the Greek landscape lends itself to panoramic views. Lucian in his “Charon” makes Hermes seat himself on one of the twin peaks of Parnassus and Charon upon the other. With eyes anointed with Homeric eye-salve, the Ferryman, on his furlough from the under-world, is able to see not only the Greater Greece outspread around him,—from Asia Minor to Sicily, from the Danube to Crete,—but to look off beyond to the Orient and to Egypt. These wide outlooks are enhanced by the distinctness of the sky-line, everywhere an important factor. “The hard limestone of which the mountains are composed is apt to break away, and thus produces those sharply-cut outlines which stand out so clearly against the transparent sky of Greece.”

So large a troupe of actors played their parts in Greek history that the imagination demands a roomy stage. But the country is small. Were it not for the mountain barriers, the scale of distances would seem trivial. It is, for example, only some thirty miles in an air line from Thermopylæ to the Gulf of Corinth. Even on the leisurely and winding Piræus, Athens, and Peloponnesus Railway, it is only one day’s ride from Athens via the Isthmus down to Kalamata on the Bay of Messenia. The degrees of latitude that include the mainland of Central and Southern Greece span in the west only the Lipari Islands and Sicily; the thirty-eighth parallel that passes south of Palermo and the straits of Messina runs a little north of Athens; while the thirty-seventh parallel, running just south of Syracuse, passes still farther south of Kalamata and Sparta.

Not only is the mainland of Greece contained in narrow geographical limits, but the Ægean itself is almost an inland lake enclosed within neighbouring coasts. In clear weather the sailor, without adventuring upon open sea, might pass from mainland to mainland as he watched from his advancing prow another island lift above the horizon before losing sight of the harbour left astern. In Greek literature there is no more striking reminder of the contiguity of the Asian coast to Greece proper than the well-known passage in the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus describing the swift telegraphy of the beacon signals that brought to Argos the news of the capture of Troy. The ten years’ absence of Agamemnon’s host tends to an instinctive extension of the distance, if the imagination is not checked by the actual scale of miles. Troy seems farther from Argos than the Holy Land from the homes of the Crusaders.

Beacon telegraphy is a time-honored device. Many bright beacons doubtless blazed before Agamemnon, as well as since his time. Commentators have been at pains to justify by modern experiments with beacon fires on lofty heights the severest strain upon our optic nerves which Æschylus makes in the case of the light that leaped from Mount Athos to the high ridges of Eubœa. The distance is more than 100 miles, but, bearing in mind that the Eubœan mountain is some 4000 feet high and Athos more than 6000, we need not apply for any special license for our poet’s imagination. The devious course of the fire signals from Eubœa to Argos is one of the best illustrations of the jagged surface that Greece lifts skywards. As one stands on Mount Pentelicus and looks across to Eubœa, the intervening arm of the sea is hemmed in for the eye into narrow inland lakes. And Æschylus, sufficiently, though not officiously, realistic, makes the firelight zigzag irregularly to dodge the interfering ridges till it falls upon the palace roof at Argos,—not at Mycenæ, as is the not infrequent misrepresentation of the Æschylean story.

Clytemnestra, to the chorus asking who could have brought the news so quickly, replies:—

“Hephæstus, on from Ida sending brilliant gleam,

And hither beacon beacon sped with courier flame.

First Ida to the Hermæan crag of Lemnos sent,

Then from the island was received the mighty flame

By Athos, Zeus’s mount, as third: this over-passed—

So that it skimmed the sea’s broad back,—the torch’s might,

A joyous traveller, the pine’s gold gleam, sun-like,

To watching Mount Macistus brought its flashing news.

Macistus then, delaying not, nor foolishly

Foredone with sleep, as messenger pass’d on his share.

The beacon’s gleam unto Euripus flowing far

Then came and signal to Messapium’s pickets made.

They too gave back a flame and ever onward sent

The news by lighting up a heap of heather gray.

The Torch then, strong to run, nor dimm’d as yet, leap’d on

Like radiant moon across Asopus and his plain

And came unto Cithæron’s crags, awaking there

A new relay of courier flame: nor did the guard

Disown the far-escorted light, but escort flame

In turn made soar aloft into the ether high.

Then over Lake Gorgopis smote the gleam and came

Unto Mount Ægiplanctus urging that the flame

Ordain’d should fail not. Lighting with ungrudging strength

They send a mighty beard of fire. O’er the height

That overlooks the Saronic Gulf it onward flared,

Until, when it had reach’d the Arachnæan steep,

It lighted on the outposts neighbour to our town;

Then on this roof of the Atreidæ falls this light,

The long-descended grandchild of the Idæan flame!”

From the very smallness of Greece results the overcrowding of associations that almost oppress the spectator standing at one or another place of vantage. But if his historic horizon is as clearly defined as the physical he will come back to the sea-level with a clearer understanding of the interdependence between the scene and the action of the great dramas here enacted. The country is not only a background but a cause for the literature. Neither can be fully understood without the other.

It must not be assumed from the smallness of the land that the spurs to the imagination of the Greeks were few. On the contrary, within their narrow borders, nature was prodigal of her inspiration. In the few miles from Thessaly to the Messenian Gulf are offered a variety of climate and an alternation of products well-nigh unparalleled for such a limited area. The warm air of the sea penetrating into sheltered valleys favours an almost tropical vegetation, while the lofty mountain ridges offer almost an Alpine climate. In Attica, in early spring, snow may occasionally be seen sprinkled on Hymettus and glistening white on Mount Pentelicus, while oranges hang on the trees in Athens. Taygetus in the south maybe a snow-covered mountain even as late as May while in the Messenian plain below grows the palm and, more rarely, the edible date. In the Argolis are groves of lemons and oranges, and in Naxos, in the same latitude as Sparta, the tender lime ripens in the gardens. The gray-green olive is familiar throughout Central and Southern Greece. If we extend the survey farther north, the beeches of the Pindus range, west of Thessaly, are surrounded by the vegetation rather of northern Europe; in the interior of Thessaly the olive tree does not flourish; the northern shores of the Ægean have the climate of Central Germany, while Mount Athos, whose marble walls jut far out into the Ægean and rise 6400 feet above the sea, offers on its slopes nearly all species of European trees in succession.

The different parts of Greece offer a varying development in literature. In this particular some districts, like Acarnania, Ætolia, and Achæa, though possessed of great natural beauty, are negligible. Arcadia, though itself unproductive, inspired poetry; others, also, like Phocis, Locris, and Messenia, are inevitably drawn into the associations of literature and history. In Epirus we find at Dodona the first known sanctuary of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks. In Thessaly the earliest Greeks, or Achæans, may have first forged in the fire of their young imagination the tempered steel of the hexameter. Here was the home of Achilles, and here, perhaps, we must look for the kernel of the Iliad. Here most fitly, close to Olympus where dwelt the immortals, could the sons of men be “near-gods.”

From the north and northwest successive waves of population descended into lower Greece to conquer, merge with, or become subject to the previous comers. But prehistoric peoples, whether alien or Greek, like the Eteo-Cretans, the Pelasgi, the Minyæ, the Leleges, the Hellenes, the Achæans, and even great movements like the Dorian and Ionian migrations, are all foreshortened on a scenic background, as equidistant to the Greeks of the classic periods as is the vault of heaven to the eyes of children. One star, indeed, differed from another. The Dorian, for example, was of the first magnitude. But the relations of apparent magnitude and real distance were ignored or naïvely confused in the fanciful constellations of myth and saga, distant yet ever present, bending around them to their explored horizon. Heroic figures impalpable but real as the gods themselves intervened continually, controlling decisions, shaping policies, or determining disputed boundaries among even the most intellectual of the Greeks. Royalty, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny alike must reckon with personified tradition.

When we emerge into the light of more authentic records it is well, in the confusing maze of inter-cantonal contentions, to focus the mind, for the purpose of appreciating the literature, upon certain broader relations and more clearly defined epochs in Greek history, like the so-called “Age of the Despots” within the seventh and sixth centuries, the Persian wars, and the conflicts between Attica as a pivot and the Peloponnese, Thebes, and Macedon.

It might be expected from the variety of natural charm offered by Hellenic lands, from Ilium to Sicily, from Mount Olympus to Crete, that the Greeks would show in their literature a pervasive love of nature. This was, in fact, the case. The modern eye has not been the first to discover the beauty of form and colour in the Greek flowers and birds, mountains, sky and sea. Modern critics, ignoring all historical perspective and assuming as a procrustean standard the one-sided and sophisticated attitude that has played a leading rôle in modern literature, announced as axiomatic that ancient Greek poets had no feeling for nature and found no pleasure in looking at the beauties of a landscape. This superficial idea still keeps cropping up, although thoughtful readers of Greek literature have long since pointed out the necessity both of a chronological analysis of the literature and of a more inclusive statement of the various forms in which a sentiment for the natural world is evinced.[^[1]] It is a far cry from Homer to Theocritus, and, as might well be expected in a range of six centuries and more, new elements appear from time to time, due both to changing conditions of life and civilization and also to the personal equation.

A naïve feeling for nature is uppermost in the descriptive comparisons and similes of Homer and, generally speaking, in the myth-making of the Greeks. The concrete embodiment of natural phenomena and objects in some Nature-divinity often obviated the necessity for elaborate description and summarized their conceptions as if by an algebraic formula. The mystical element was not lacking, but by this myth-making process it became objective and real. The sympathetic feeling for nature becomes more and more apparent in lyric poetry and the drama until in Euripides there emerges, almost suddenly, the “modern” romanticism. In the Hellenistic and imperial times, finally, the sentimental element is natural to men who turn to the country for relief from the stress of life in a city. One generalization for the classic periods may be safely made. Although the Greeks from Homer to Euripides thought of the world as the environment of man, yet they stopped short of a sentimental self-analysis. Charles Eliot Norton, more than thirty years ago, pointed out that the expression of a sentiment like Wordsworth’s—

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—

is foreign to the clear-eyed Hellene, reared amongst the distinct outlines of his mountains and from the cradle to the grave at home upon the blue and windswept Ægean. Certainly this is true until the speculative questionings of the Ionic philosophers had time to react upon literature. As the Greeks accepted their pedigrees from the gods and heroes, so they accepted their environment of beauty. They were not unlike the child, content to betray by a stray word or caress his unanalyzed admiration for his mother’s face.

Emphasis has often been laid, and rightly, upon the keen sensitiveness of the Greeks to beauty of form in sculpture, architecture, and literature. It is urged that they made this sense of form and proportion so paramount that they were blind to the beauty of colouring and indifferent to the prodigal variety of Nature’s compositions. It may be readily admitted that this is a vital distinction between the ancient and modern attitudes. Both the craving for perfection of form and the preference given to man before nature come out in the preëminent development of sculpture by the Greeks. Their admiration of the beauty of the human form, unlike the sensitive shrinking of moderns, was extended even to the lifeless body. Æschylus speaks of the warriors who have found graves before Troy as still “fair of form.”

But a prevailing tendency does not necessarily exclude other elements. However meagre the vocabulary of the Greeks in sharp distinction of shades of colour, their love for a bright colour-scheme is shown not only by the brilliancy of their clothing and their use of colouring in statuary and architecture,—for even in these mere form was not enough,—but in unnumbered expressions like Alcman’s “sea-purple bird of the springtime.”

A few of the more obvious passages, illustrating the Greek attitude toward nature, are here given in general historic sequence. Others will be found in the subsequent chapters in connection with particular landscapes. Very often such references are casual and subordinate to some controlling idea, but they none the less reflect habitual observation. Even when we speak of Homeric “tags,” like the “saffron-robed” or “rosy-fingered,” or of Sappho’s “golden-sandalled” Dawn, as “standing epithets,” we are implying that these epithets made a general appeal. The naïve insertions in Homer of comparisons drawn from birds and beasts, from night and storm and other familiar elements of nature, would seem like an intrusive delay of the story did they not carry with them the conviction that both poet and hearers alike were well content to linger by the way and observe the objects of daily life indoors and out. Thus in the Odyssey:—

“The lion mountain-bred, with eyes agleam, fares onward in the rain and wind to fall upon the oxen or the sheep or wilding deer.”

Or, again:—

“Hermes sped along the waves like sea-mew hunting fish in awesome hollows of the sea unharvested and wetting his thick plumage in the brine.”

One of the longer and best known comparisons is the description in the Iliad of the Trojan encampment by night:—

“Now they with hearts exultant through the livelong night sat by the space that bridged the moat of war, their watch-fires multitudinous alight. And just as in the sky the stars around the radiant moon shine clear; when windless is the air; when all the peaks stand out, the lofty forelands and the glades; when breaketh open from the sky the ether infinite and all the stars are seen and make the shepherds glad at heart—so manifold appeared the watch-fires kindled by the Trojan men in front of Ilios betwixt the streams of Xanthus and the ships. So then a thousand fires burned upon the plain and fifty warriors by the side of each were seated in the blazing fire’s gleam the while the horses by the chariots stood and champed white barley and the spelt and waited for the throned Dawn.”

Sappho’s fragments are redolent of flowers; her woven verse, a “rich-red chlamys” in the sunshine, has a silver sheen in the moonlight. We hear the full-throated passion of “the herald of the spring, the nightingale”; the breeze moves the apple boughs, the wind shakes the oak trees. Her allusions to “the hyacinths, darkening the ground, when trampled under foot of shepherds”; the “fine, soft bloom of grass, trodden by the tender feet of Cretan women as they dance”; or the “golden pulse growing on the shore,”—all these seem inevitable to one who has seen the acres of bright flowers that carpet the islands or the nearby littoral of the Asian coast. Her comparison of a bridegroom to “a supple sapling” recalls how Nausicaä, vigorous, tall, and straight as the modern athletic maiden, is likened by Odysseus to the “young shaft of a palm tree” that he had once seen “springing up in Delos by Apollo’s altar.” In her Lesbian orchards the sweet quince-apple is still left hanging “solitary on the topmost bough, upon its very end”; and there is heard “cool murmuring through apple boughs while slumber floateth down from quivering leaves.” Nor need we attribute Sappho’s love of natural beauty wholly to her passionate woman’s nature. All the gentler emotions springing from an habitual observation of nature recur in poets of the sterner sex. “The Graces,” she says, “turn their faces from those who wear no garlands.” And at banquets wreaths were an essential also for masculine full-dress. Pindar, in describing Elysian happiness, leads up to the climax of the companionship with the great and noble dead by telling how “round the islands of the Blest the ocean breezes blow and flowers of gold are blooming: some from the land on trees of splendour and some the water feedeth; with wreaths whereof they twine their heads and hands.”[^[2]] Against the green background passes Evadne with her silver pitcher and her girdle of rich crimson woof, and her child is seen “hidden in the rushes of the thicket unexplored, his tender flesh all steeped in golden and deep purple light from pansy flowers.”

To follow through the poetry of the Greeks the unfailing delight in the radiance of the moon would be to follow her diurnal course as she passes over Greek lands from east to west. The full moon looked down on all the Olympian festivals and Pindar’s pages are illuminated with her glittering argentry. The Lesbian nights inspire Sappho as did all things beautiful.

“The clustering stars about the radiant moon avert their faces bright and hide, what time her orb is rounded to the full and touches earth with silver.”

Wordsworth could take this thought from Sappho: “The moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare,” but the Lesbian certainly did not finish the fragment by lamenting that “there has passed away a glory from the earth.”

The night and the day alike claimed the attention of the poets and the interchange of dusk and dawn appealed to the sculptor also. In the east gable of the Parthenon the horses of the Sun and of the Moon were at either end. Nature’s sleep is a favourite topic. Alcman’s description is unusual only for its detail:—

“Sleep the peaks and mountain clefts;

Forelands and the torrents’ rifts;

All the creeping things are sleeping,

Cherished in the black earth’s keeping;

Mountain-ranging beast and bee;

Fish in depths of the purple sea;

Wide-winged birds their pinions droop—

Sleep now all the feathered troop.”

Goethe, in his well-known paraphrase,—

“Ueber allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,”—

cannot refrain from adding the subjective conclusion of the whole matter:—

“Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.”

The great dramatists display an observation of the beauty of the external world not always sufficiently emphasized. In Æschylus an intense feeling is evident; none the less because it is subordinated to his theme or used to point, by way of contrast, some awe-inspiring or pathetic situation or some scene of blood. Clytemnestra describes how she murdered her husband. His spattering blood, she says,—

“Keeps striking me with dusky drops of murd’rous dew,

Aye, me rejoicing none the less than God’s sweet rain

Makes glad the corn-land at the birth-pangs of the buds.”

Comparisons, similes, and epithets drawn from the sea reappear continually in the warp and woof of Greek, and especially of Athenian, literature. Æschylus, like the rest, knew the sea in all its moods, terrible in storm, deceitful in calm, beautiful at all times and the pathway for commerce and for war. The returning herald in the “Agamemnon” rehearses the soldiers’ hard bivouac in summer and in winter:—

“And should one tell of winter, dealing death to birds,

What storms unbearable swept down from Ida’s snow,

Or summer’s heat when, ruffled by no rippling breeze,

Ocean slept waveless, on his midday couch laid prone.”

With the first lines of “Prometheus Bound” we are carried far from the haunts of men:—

“Unto this far horizon of earth’s plain we’ve come,

This Scythian tract, this desert by man’s foot untrod.”

Hephæstus reluctant, compelled by Zeus’s order, rivets his kin-god, the Fire-bringer, to the desolate North Sea crag and withdraws leaving Prometheus in fetters to “wrestle down the myriad years of time.” The night shuts off the warmth and light, drawing over him her “star-embroidered robe,” and the fierce sun-god returns with blazing rays to “deflower his fair skin” bared of the white counterpane of “frost of early dawn.” Not until the emissaries of Zeus have departed does Prometheus deign to speak. Then he “communes with Nature.” He has no hope of help from God, none from the “helpless creatures of a day” whom he has helped. Alone with the forces of nature he utters that outcry unsurpassed in sublimity and in pathos:—

“O upper air divine and winds on swift wings borne;

Ye river-springs; innumerous laughter of the waves

Of Ocean; thou, Earth, the mother of us all;

And thou, all-seeing orb of the Sun—to you I cry:

Behold me what I’m suffering, a god from gods!”

Sophocles, too, lets Philoctetes, in his misery and loneliness on the rocky island of Lemnos, call out to the wild beasts and the landscape:—

“Harbours and headlands; and ye mountain-ranging beasts,

Companions mine; ye gnawed and hanging cliffs! Of this

To you I cry aloud, for I have none save you—

You ever present here—to whom to make my cry.”

In his famous ode on the Attic Colonus he describes the natural beauty of his home with particularizing exactness. He has also a wealth of glittering epithet used for local colouring, for symbolism and personification. The contrast of day and night offers to him a welcome mise-en-scène. The sun’s rays are Apollo’s golden shafts and the moon’s light seems to filter through the trees as Artemis roams the uplands:—

“O God of the light, from the woven gold

Of the strings of thy bow, I am fain to behold

Thy arrows invincible, showered around,

As champions smiting our foes to the ground.

And Artemis, too, with her torches flaring,

Gleams onward through Lycian uplands faring.”

Bacchus, also, the “god of the golden snood,” “lifts his pine-knot’s sparkle” and, roaming with his Mænads, seems to visualize for men the soul of Nature.

Aristophanes with his common-sense objectivity was averse to the sentimental and romantic in Euripides, which seemed to him effeminate. His love for nature was clear-eyed and Hellenic. His lyrics shine like a bird’s white wing in the sunlight. The self-invocation of the Clouds is alive with the radiance of the Attic atmosphere. A translation can only serve to illustrate the elements used in the description:—

CHORUS OF CLOUDS

“Come ever floating, O Clouds, anew,

Let us rise with the radiant dew

Of our nature undefiled

From father Ocean’s billows wild.

The tree-fringed peak

Of hill upon lofty hill let us seek

That we may look on the cliffs far-seen,

And the sacred land’s water that lends its green

To the fruits, and the whispering rush of the rivers divine

And the clamorous roar of the dashing brine.

For Ether’s eye is flashing his light

Untired by glare as of marble bright.”

The “meteor eyes” of the sun gaze “sanguine” and unblinking upon the cloud-palisades, glaring bright as the marble of Mount Pentelicus. Readers of the Greek will recognize here and there how an Aristophanic epithet or thought has been precipitated and recombined by Shelley into new and radiant shapes that drift through his own cloud-land,—“I change but I cannot die!”

Aristophanes’s observation of nature is varied and exact. He had nothing but ridicule for the pale student within doors, and only a man who kept up an intimacy with “the open road” could have made the naturalistic painting in the “Peace” of the serenity of country life:—

“We miss the life of days gone by, the pressed fruit-cakes, the figs, the myrtles and the sweet new wine, the olive trees, the violet bed beside the well.”

Euripides in his attitude toward nature has all the qualities of the other tragedians except sublimity, to which he more rarely attains. Many qualities are much more conspicuous. His range of colour is wider. His allusions to rivers and to the plant and animal world are more detailed. Picturesque scenes and setting delight him. Beyond all this the reflection in nature of human emotion, occasional in his predecessors, plays in his verse almost a leading part. Modern romanticism, in short, is no longer exceptional.

Hippolytus, the acolyte of Artemis, and his attendants address the virgin goddess who ranges the woods and mountains and who, as Æschylus says, is “kindly unto all the young things suckled at the breast of wild-wood roaming beasts.” The “modern” element in the original loses nothing in this paraphrase by Mallock:—

“Hail, O most pure, most perfect, loveliest one!

Lo, in my hand I bear,

Woven for the circling of thy long gold hair,

Culled leaves and flowers, from places which the sun

The Spring long shines upon,

Where never shepherd hath driven flock to graze,

Nor any grass is mown;

But there sound throughout the sunny, sweet warm days,

’Mid the green holy place

The wild bee’s wings alone.”

In one of the despairing chorals of the “Trojan Women” the personification of nature blends with the spirit of mythology. The name of Tithonus, easily supplied by a Greek hearer, is inserted for English readers in Gilbert Murray’s beautiful paraphrase:—

“For Zeus—O leave it unspoken:

But alas for the love of the Morn;

Morn of the milk-white wing

The gentle, the earth-loving,

That shineth on battlements broken

In Troy, and a people forlorn!

And, lo, in her bowers Tithonus,

Our brother, yet sleeps as of old:

O, she too hath loved us and known us,

And the Steeds of her star, flashing gold,

Stooped hither and bore him above us;

Then blessed we the Gods in our joy.

But all that made them to love us

Hath perished from Troy.”

When Dionysus addresses his Bacchantes, Euripides, in lines reminiscent of Alcman, imposes upon outward nature the solemn expectancy of the inward mind:—

“Hushed was the ether; in hushed silence whispered not

Leaves in the coppice nor the blades of meadow grass;

No cry at all of any wild things had you heard.”

The formal banns of the open wedlock of man and nature were declared in Euripides. Thereafter the treatment became more and more a matter of personal equation. In Plato’s dialogues, for example, the ethical element inevitably appears. In the famous scene beside the Ilissus, Socrates and young Phædrus talk through the heated hours beneath the shade of the wide-spreading plane tree, where the agnus castus is in full bloom, where water cool to the unsandalled feet flows by, and in the branches the cicadæ, “prophets of the Muses,” contribute of their wisdom.

The Anthology, stretched through the centuries of Greek literature, links the old and the newer, the antique reserve and the fainness of modern romanticism. One of the epigrams attributed to Plato will serve to indicate the emergence of the latter:—

“On the stars thou art gazing, my Star;

Would that the sky I might be,

For then from afar

With my manifold eyes I would gaze upon thee.”

Another seems like an artist’s preliminary sketch for the picture by the Ilissus, the deeper motive not yet painted in:—

“Sit thee down by this pine tree whose twigs without number

Whisper aloft in the west wind aquiver.

Lo! here by my stream as it chattereth ever

The Panpipe enchanteth thy eyelids to slumber.”

From this we pass without break to the piping shepherds and the country charms with which Theocritus filled his Idyls for city-jaded men:—

... “There we lay

Half buried in a couch of fragrant reed

And fresh-cut vine leaves, who so glad as we?

A wealth of elm and poplar shook o’erhead;

Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on

From the Nymphs’ grot, and in the sombre boughs

The sweet cicada chirped laboriously.

Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away

The treefrog’s note was heard; the crested lark

Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan,

And o’er the fountain hung the gilded bee.”[^[3]]

Notwithstanding the variety in landscape and the lack of unified nationality in the long centuries of Greek history, there is a unity in the impression of ancient life left upon the mind by a visit to Greece. This is in part due to the comparative meagreness of remains from periods subsequent to classic times. The long obliteration of mediæval and modern constructive civilization leaves more clear the outlines of antiquity.

This is true even though the sum total of the remains of Byzantine and mediæval life, on islands and on mainland, is large and claims the attention from time to time. In Athens the traveller will come upon the small Metropolis church with its ancient Greek calendar of festivals, let in as a frieze above the entrance and metamorphosed into Byzantine sanctity by the inscribing of Christian crosses. As he journeys to and fro in Greece he may see the venerable “hundred-gated” church on the island of Paros, recalling in certain details the proscenium of an ancient theatre; Monemvasia with its vast ruins, the home of Byzantine ecclesiasticism and a splendour of court life that vied with the pomp and magnificence of western Europe; or the ivy-clad ruins of Mistra, an epitome of Græco-Byzantine art from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century; the frowning hill and castle of Karytæna that guards the approach to the mountain fastnesses of Arcadia; or the ancient acropolis of Lindus on the island of Rhodes with the impregnable fortress of the Knights of St. John.

Nor will the visitor ignore the reminders of the War of Independence and the renascence of life in modern Greece. Mesolonghi, Nauplia, and Arachova have contributed fresh chapters to human history. Aligned with ancient names are those of modern heroes in the nomenclature of the streets and of public squares, like the Karaiskakis Place that welcomes the traveller as he disembarks at Piræus.

But all of these, whether mediæval or modern, fail to blur the understanding of antiquity. They do not obtrude themselves. Often they even illustrate ancient life. The same wisdom that transferred allegiance from the Saturnalia to the Christmas festival has here also been careful to use for Byzantine churches the site of ancient shrines or temples: St. Elias is a familiar name on high mountains where once stood altars of the Olympians; the cult of Dionysus has been skilfully transformed, in vine-rearing Naxos, into that of St. Dionysius; SS. Cosmo and Damiano, patrons of medicine, and known as the “feeless” saints, have established their free dispensary in place of an Asklepieion; the twelve Apostles have replaced the “Twelve Gods”; and churches dedicated to St. Demetrius have been substituted for shrines of Demeter.

The thoughtful student of the literature of the Greeks, no matter how enthusiastic he may be, will not fail to draw warnings as well as inspiration from their history. But no defects of the Greeks nor achievements of posterity can dispossess Hellas of her peculiar lustre.

“No other nation,” as Mr. Ernest Myers has said with particular reference to the age of Pindar, “has ever before or since known what it was to stand alone immeasurably advanced at the head of the civilization of the world.”

CHAPTER II
PIRÆUS, THE HARBOUR TOWN

“Returning from Asia Minor and voyaging from Ægina toward Megara I began to look on the places round about me. Behind me was Ægina; before me Megara; on the right Piræus; on the left Corinth—cities once flourishing, now prostrate and in ruins.”

Servius Sulpicius to Cicero.

The sail in bright sunshine up the Gulf of Ægina, the ancient Saronic Gulf, will have fulfilled the traveller’s anticipations of the beauty of Greece and will have quickened the historic imagination. History and antiquity, however, will give place to the insistent claims of modern Greek life, as the steamer enters the busy port and passes through the narrow opening between the welcoming arms of the ancient moles which still protect the harbour and serve at night to hold up the green and red signal lights for mariners.

PIRÆUS

In this harbour meet the Orient and the Occident. One may see here craft of all kinds from all parts of the Mediterranean and from beyond the Straits; modern steamers, big and little; gunboats, native or foreign; sailing vessels from the Greek islands or Turkish possessions, laden with bright cargoes of yellow lemons and Cretan oranges, great grapes purple and white, or “tunnies steeped in brine”; here a steamer packed with pilgrims for a religious festival on Tenos; here, perhaps, another vessel crowded with American tourists to Jerusalem.

Upon landing, most visitors go immediately to Athens, but no one should fail to return once and again to Piræus in order to see the extant remains of the ship-houses; of the gateways and walls to the northwest of the Great Harbour; of the walls that skirt the whole peninsula; of the theatres and other scanty traces of the old life within the city. Even to a traveller innocent of the facts of Greek history, the drive at sunset along the rim of the peninsula and the indenting harbours will be one of the best remembered experiences in the neighbourhood of Athens, by reason of the sheer physical beauty of land and sea, islands and distant mountains.

The terminus of the electric railroad from Athens to Piræus is in the northwest corner of the modern town between the lines now assumed for the “Themistocles Wall” and the “Wall of Conon,” dating, respectively, from the two most significant epochs in the history of Piræus. Although the tyrant Hippias had begun to fortify the Munychia hill in the sixth century B. C., his undertaking was interrupted, and it was left for Themistocles, in the early part of the fifth century, to begin, and finally to carry well on the way to completion, the transformation into a sea-fortress of this natural vantage-ground. Later, he was for removing Athens itself to Piræus. Failing in this, he shifted the habitat for the new fleet from the open roadstead of Phalerum, which was nearer Athens, to the land-locked harbours of Piræus. But the return of the Persians, ten years after Marathon, surprised the Athenians with their preparations incomplete, and Athens was transferred, not indeed to Piræus, but to the “wooden walls” of the triremes themselves.

When, under Pericles, Athens reached the acme of her intellectual, artistic, and material power, around the harbours at Piræus had been built a well-planned city, with stately avenues and dwellings for wealthy men and wealthier gods. The port had been completely fortified either by the restoration and carrying out of the interrupted building or by the extension of the plans of Themistocles. A massive wall inclosed the three harbours within its circuit, and strong moles, lasting on into modern times, guarded their entrances. Ship-houses had also been built, and doubtless an arsenal, though a less pretentious one than the great structure afterwards erected. In short, all the paraphernalia existed for offensive and defensive naval operations. The “Long Walls,” actually built soon after the banishment of Themistocles in 472 B. C., had united Athens and its port into a dual city. No greater proof of the vital union of the two cities could be cited than the rage and grief felt by the citizens when, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, in 404 B. C., the Spartans razed the Long Walls. It was amputating the very feet of the imperial Queen of the Ægean.

Some ten years later, the Long Walls were rebuilt and the restoration of the Piræus fortifications was taken in hand. Of the remains now visible, the major part belongs to this rebuilding at the beginning of the fourth century. A little less than a century had elapsed since Marathon, and we now find Athens allied with her old enemy, Persia, against another Greek state. Conon the Athenian, victorious over the Spartans in the naval battle of Cnidus, sent back Persian gold to fortify the Piræus anew, and the circuit wall, of which such extensive remains are extant, was called by his name.

On issuing from the electric railroad station, the visitor sees before him, a few yards distant, the Great Harbour’s smaller, inner fold, known in antiquity as “The Marsh” (Port d’Halæ) or, perhaps, as the “Blind” Harbour. This inner harbour, roughly a third of a mile by a sixth in size, now furnishes ample accommodation for smaller craft and a convenient landing-place, although in Conon’s day it was probably more of a marshy barrier than a navigable sheet of water. If the whole contour of the two harbours together suggested the designation of “Cantharus,” it may have been from either the meaning “Beetle,” or that of “Two-handled Cup.” Until recently, the name was identified with the southernmost portion only of the Great Harbour. The locus classicus is the “Peace” of Aristophanes. Dædalus and Icarus with their flying-machines had long since anticipated the modern aëroplane, and in this comedy Trygæus in search of Peace starts out to navigate Zeus’s ether on his “beetle.”[“beetle.”] Then, as now, a safe landing-place for the airship was a desideratum, and Trygæus states that he will have as a safe mooring “the Cantharus harbour in Piræus.”[^[4]]

Skirting now the northern margin of the inner harbour, the route will follow in part the probable line of the demolished wall of Themistocles, which extended on and reached the water outside both the peninsula of Eetioneia and the outer bay of Krommydaru, where traces of the more ancient fortifications are still extant. Close by the modern station of the Larisa railway, however, will be found the very considerable ruins of a gateway identified with the Conon walls. This alone is an ample reward for the long détour around the harbour.

If time and energy permit, it is well worth while, instead of crossing by boat to Akte, to return to the starting-point and to saunter along the whole margin of the Great Harbour. Particularly picturesque are the great sloops, laden with lemons and oranges, moored in behind the Karaiskakis square, which only the pedestrian would be likely to discover. As one lingers along the quays, however, modern warships and all the craft for commerce and travel will give place to the memories evoked from the greater past. This harbour of commerce will, in imagination, be once more crowded with triremes, brought around from the two war-harbours on the other side, to be inspected one after the other by the Council of the Five Hundred. As official inspectors of the triremes, when made ready to set out for conquest or defeat, this Council held its sittings on the Choma, probably a little promontory that juts southward from the Karaiskakis Place. One may recall, with the help of Thucydides, the setting out of the ill-starred Sicilian expedition. No such vast array had ever left the harbour for so distant and protracted a warfare. All the citizens of Athens as well as of Piræus are here to witness the departure of sons and friends. High hopes of imperial expansion feed the imagination of the multitude. Some rest their confidence on divine favour sure to accompany the pious, though reluctant, Nicias; others put faith in the warrior Lamachus; more in the brilliant Alcibiades, still idolized though accused of sharing in the mutilation of the Hermæ. The great fleet of swift triremes is ready, together with the transports for heavy-armed soldiers, equipments, and supplies. Now the men are all on board and a hush falls upon the throng at a sudden blast of the trumpet. The prayers, according to established ritual, are offered by the united squadron. At a concerted sign, the mixing-bowls are crowned throughout the whole host and the men and generals pour libations from gold and silver cups. The throngs upon the land, both citizens and foreign well-wishers, join in the service. The hymn of triumph sung, the libations poured, the ships weigh anchor and put to sea. But before the last trireme has passed through the moles, and while the ear still catches the notes of the flute and the voice of the Keleustæ, giving the time to the crews, a revulsion of grim presentiment overmasters many of the watchers on the shore. The expedition now no longer seems what they so lightly voted in the assembly. The ever-recurrent Greek feeling that “high things annoy the god” calls up the warning words of Æschylus, uttered a generation before, in the year of the unlucky Egyptian expedition sent out on a similar venture:—

“Grown Insolence is wont to breed

Young Insolence midst mortals’ sorrow,

Then, then, when to th’ implanted seed

There comes the birth-light’s destined morrow.”

Or else his immortal lament “over the unreturning brave” comes unbidden to their lips:—

“Whom one sent forth to war one knows, but, in the stead of men, come back unto the homes of each but urns and ashes.”

The mysterious mutilation of the Hermæ is fresh in mind and the fear of angered gods reasserts its sway. But no presentiment of ill could anticipate the reality of the disaster in the harbour of Syracuse or the slow tortures of living death in its stone quarries. A chance for retaliation in kind was indeed to come. In a Piræus stone quarry Syracusan captives were in turn imprisoned a few years later, but they, more lucky than the Athenians, cut their way to freedom from their rock-bound prison.

Despite the imperious insolence of Athens and her unrighteous schemes for aggrandizement, our sympathy in the tragedy is ever fresh. By the harbour side we mourn to-day the predestined doom of the gallant squadron and the stricken city. Through the ebb and flow of hope and disaster, the thought sweeps on to the close of the war and the humiliation of Athens at the hands of Sparta; the destruction of the Long Walls, their rebuilding and the refortification of Piræus under Conon; the aftermath of Athenian power; the brilliant age of Plato and the orators; the struggle with Philip; the fall of Greek liberty; the sway of Macedon; the Roman conquest, with the long, stubborn siege of Piræus so graphically described by Appian. Sulla, exasperated by the long defence of the Mithridatic army, with whom the Athenians had cast in their lot, burnt the arsenal and docks and razed the fortifications so utterly that the Roman governor, Sulpicius, in writing to his friend Cicero in 45 B. C., could describe Piræus as the “corpse” of a great city. In the second century of our era it had resumed a semblance of commercial prosperity. Lucian, in his dialogue, “When My Ship Comes In,” goes down to Piræus with a friend to admire a great grain transport that has just put into harbour on its way from Egypt to Rome. For a merchantman it is large; some 180 feet long, 45 in beam, and over 40 feet in depth to the hold. The prow stretches out long, and at the stern is the gilded figure-head of a goose with its graceful curving neck. The two friends wonder at a sailor mounting nimbly by the swaying ropes and running out nonchalantly along the great yardarm, as he holds on by the yardsheets. But the generous cargo of grain, enough, as we are told, to feed Athens for a year, is destined for Rome. Athens was no longer the emporium of the eastern Mediterranean. She had become a way-station. No longer could she enforce the old law, mentioned by Aristotle, which required that two thirds of the cargo of every grain-ship that put into Piræus must be carried up to the metropolis.

After Roman times, in the long atrophy of the Byzantine age, Piræus dwindled to a group of fishermen’s huts. It revived somewhat under De la Roche in the fourteenth century, and thereafter, at least was known as Porto Leone from the seated figure of a marble lion that kept guard among the ruins like the majestic lion that still sentinels the battlefield of Chæronea. In the seventeenth century, the Venetians carried off this Piræus lion, and now, seated by another arsenal in another seaport, careless of the passing tourist, it looks grimly over the Adriatic where steamers come and go between the neighbouring Trieste and its native land.

Leaving now the Great Harbour and our meditations on the vicissitudes of history, we resume our inspection of the fan-shaped peninsula. Without a special permit the visitor is excluded from the western end and from the Royal Garden which encloses the most probable site of the Tomb of Themistocles, if indeed his bones were ever brought back from burial in exile. His official tomb was in Magnesia in Caria. A public interment in his native land could not be granted to one exiled as a traitor. Thucydides knows only of a secret burial of his bones in Attica. The remains of the monument in question stand on the point of Akte near the entrance to the outermost harbour. From this tomb the great admiral’s spirit could still watch over the Athenian sea-power. Skepticism about the site is forgotten when we read the fragment, meagre as it is, of the comic poet Plato:—

“Fair is the outlook where thy mounded tomb is placed.

For it will signal merchantmen from here and yon,

It will behold the sailors faring out and in,

Will be spectator of the triremes’ racing oars.”

This “contest of the triremes” may allude to the boat-race in which the course lay from Cantharus harbour around the whole peninsula to Munychia. These races in sacred ships were part of the systematic training of the Attic youths.

The public road leads over the shoulder of the hill and, in descending again to the coast, offers a beautiful view to the west and south over the Saronic Gulf. The driveway then runs along the water’s edge around the promontory, keeping close inside the ruined “Wall of Conon.” Although the remains of this encircling wall rise nowhere more than about eight feet above ground, and usually much less, yet the very continuity of the ruins is imposing. Practically in an unbroken line the solid masonry hems the irregular rim of the peninsula from the mouth of the Great Harbour to a point not far distant from the war-harbour of Zea on the opposite side and may be traced again intermittently around to the Bay of Phalerum. Solid tower buttresses are interposed at frequent intervals. On this southern shore of Akte, where the modern town does not intrude, the spectator is free to divide his attention between the beauty of the sea view and thoughts of the past.

The picturesque land-locked harbours of Zea and Munychia next claim our interest. The pear-shaped Zea basin, now known by the Turco-Greek name of Pashalimani, makes into the neck of the peninsula between the promontory hill of Akte and the Acropolis of Munychia. Behind it and close to it was erected in the fourth century the great Arsenal, and at various points beneath its transparent water may still be seen distinct remains of 38 of the ship-ways that ran down from the ancient ship-houses where the triremes were drawn up. Inscriptions tell us that there were originally 372 in all, of which 82 were in Munychia, 94 in the Great Harbour, and the remainder in Zea. No other relic of antiquity brings us into closer touch with the naval power of Athens and her empire on the Ægean. The covered sheds themselves can only be reconstructed in imagination. Some broken columns of the ship-houses and portions of the launching piers remain in situ. To accommodate the 196 triremes, 130-165 feet long, assigned to the Zea Harbour, some of the houses must have been constructed so as to dock the boats in at least two tiers. At Syracuse, the formidable Piræus of the west, remains of ship-sheds have been found, and at Carthage, the bitter foe of Syracuse, they remained for Appian to describe. Dry-docks may have existed near the harbour entrance. This narrow neck of the pear-shaped harbour was still further guarded at the inner opening by projecting moles, which here also are still extant. The entrance was actually closed, in case of need, by chains extended across at the surface of the water. Of the proud warships themselves, those chargers of the sea stabled in Zea, there remains one realistic reminder. Their timbers have long since rotted away, the gulfs have washed down all such small objects of durable material as bronze nails and clamps, but some heavy plates of Parian marble have been found in the harbour. These were set into the bows of the warships, and upon them were painted the vessel’s eyes that used to keep fierce outlook for the enemy or peer through the gloom of night and storm for the first sight of the shoreward lights of Piræus. Danaus at Argos, in the “Suppliants” of Æschylus, as he sees the approaching ship, exclaims:—

“The bellying sails I see; the ox-hide bulwarks stretched

Along the vessel’s sides; the prow that with its eyes

Peers forward o’er the course.”

On the marble plates actually recovered the iris is painted bright red or blue, and a vacant hole in the middle suggests the head of a burnished bronze nail that served at once as the pupil of the eye and to rivet on the plate. These eyes are common in representations of ancient vessels, and only in recent years are they disappearing from use among Sicilian and Italian boatmen.

The most casual survey of this protected haven will justify the sagacity of Themistocles in concentrating his energy upon Piræus. His proposition to transfer Athens altogether to the seaport was strategically wise. The extent of the Long Walls, uniting the two into a double city, was a source of weakness, as it drained the defenders away from both towns. But it was a true instinct of the Athenians, which posterity endorses, to cling to the sentiments evoked by their ancient city and in it to develop to the full their intellectual empire.

It is probable that the extant traces of the ship-sheds in the two war-harbours date back only as far as the fourth century B. C., but the number and size fairly represent the older Periclean constructions. The Thirty Tyrants destroyed the former ship-sheds, as Isocrates tells us, and sold for three talents (about $3100) the material of these buildings upon which the city had spent more than one thousand talents.

The ruins of the “Wall of Conon” can still be traced for some distance to the east after leaving the harbour of Zea, and at the southeastern promontory the ruins of ancient fortifications are again to be seen. The harbour of Munychia (modern Phanari) is smaller than that of Zea. Its contour is so perfect an oval as to seem artificial. It had space to accommodate only eighty-two triremes in ship-houses, scanty remains of which are here visible under the water.

At the east side the ruined wall may again be traced to the Bay of Phalērum or (Greek) Phàleron, and beyond, curving around the Munychia acropolis to complete the circuit to the north of the town.

Further east, on the open bay of Phaleron, is New Phaleron, a bathing resort as frankly modern as the Lido at Venice. The exact site of Old Phaleron is open to dispute, but the walk between it and Athens was a favourite constitutional in Plato’s time. Many a classic conversation was held here on the way. In the “Symposium” of Plato, Glaucon asks Apollodorus: “Isn’t the road to Athens just made for conversation?” Now the banality and the bareness of the city’s outskirts intrude sadly upon the pedestrian’s philosophic equipoise, both here and on the other road between Athens and Piræus where Lucian and his friend, in the second century of our era, could still find shelter from the hot sun under some olive trees by the wayside and “sit down to rest upon an overturned stelé.”

The focus of the inner city life was the splendid Agora laid out by the famous architect Hippodamus. Here ended the road from Athens. This square was probably west of Munychia north of the Zea harbour, perhaps about where the present Athena street intersects Munychia avenue. Near it were probably grouped various sanctuaries. Xenophon tells how in the civil war the patriotic party, “the men from Phyle,” unable to exclude “the City party” from the whole of Piræus, fell back on the Munychia hill, and the men from Athens blocked up the avenue that leads to the temple of Bendis and to the sanctuary of Munychian Artemis. By this Market-place, too, houses of rich residents were probably built.

The Piræus was essentially a democratic stronghold. It was the rendezvous for the patriotic anti-Spartan party; and Plato, with all his aristocratic leanings, chose to lay at Piræus the opening scene and setting for his greatest dialogue, the “Republic.” It was the fitting propylæa for his ideal city as well as for the real Athens. “I went down yesterday,” Socrates begins, “to Piræus with Glaucon, both to make a prayer to the goddess and to take a look at the festival to see how they would carry it off, inasmuch as they are now celebrating it for the first time.” The Thracian residents, it seems, had just introduced a celebration in honour of their goddess Bendis, and the natives had united with them. The whole port was en fête with processions conducted both by the hospitable native citizens and the Thracians themselves. In the evening there was to be a torch-race followed by an all-night festival. Socrates, who was on the point of returning to Athens after witnessing the daylight processions, was easily persuaded by Polemarchus to stay over for the torch-race, dining first at the house of his father, the rich and hospitable old metic, Cephalus. At the house Socrates finds another son, Lysias, who was soon to become famous as an orator. For the Thirty were to plunder the property bequeathed by Cephalus to his sons, all the ready money, the shield factory, and the slaves; were to put summarily to death young Polemarchus; and were to force Lysias, reduced to sudden poverty, to betake himself to speech-writing for a living. His crowning effort was an arraignment of his brother’s murderers. Most skilful of narrators, he tells of the fate of Polemarchus; how his house was plundered; how his wife was robbed of the very ear-rings from her ears; and how after his execution, notwithstanding the just title of the family to large holdings of real estate, he was buried from a hired shed, one friend providing a robe, another a pillow, for the corpse. He tells, too, of his own arrest at his home by the emissaries of the Thirty: how he bargained for his life with a sum of ready money; how one of his captors followed him into the inner room, looked over his shoulder into the money-chest, and took not only the price agreed upon but all the contents of the strong box; how he was taken to another house of a Piræus acquaintance; and how, while his captors were keeping guard at the peristyle door in front, he had escaped by a back door to the house of a friend, the shipmaster, with the appropriate name of Archenaus. So, while his less fortunate brother, Polemarchus, is led off to Athens, thrown into prison, and “bidden by the Thirty their usual bidding—to drink hemlock,” Lysias, by the aid of his nautical friend, is embarked for Megara under cover of night. We should like to have fuller details of that escape of the young Lysias, yesterday a wealthy manufacturer, to-day a plundered fugitive but destined to become one of the greatest of the “ten” orators and a master architect of Attic style. Perhaps a small boat put off from some lonely spot on Akte, perhaps from the Great Harbour itself, shooting through the moles in the darkness and, wind and weather permitting, kept to starboard of the Psyttaleia reef, passed up through the strait of Salamis, on through the beautiful Bay of Eleusis, and landed the fugitive at Megara.

Plato’s account of the visit of Socrates to the Piræus homestead carries us back to the days of security before the reign of the Thirty. We see old Cephalus welcoming Socrates cordially, delivering a monologue on his own gracious old age, telling a story about Sophocles in his later years, and finally withdrawing to supervise a sacrifice to the gods.

The introduction of a foreign divinity like Bendis of the Thracians was not unusual. The celebration, described at the opening of the Republic, was at least no more exotic than a St. Patrick’s day in America. Foreigners and natives united in it as they did in the celebration of the Mother of the Gods. The customs inspection of foreign deities was lenient. The Greeks were free traders both in art and religion, though the finished product imported was likely enough to be used as new material. Into the smelting furnace of the classic period was cast the old, the new, the foreign, and the domestic, to reappear in fairer form, stamped with the Hellenic hall-mark. Among the various imported deities, Cybele is well vouched for at Piræus where a number of marble votive shrines of the Great Mother have been found. One of these archaic Cybele reliefs, brought from Piræus to the National Museum in Athens, shows the goddess with her lion in her lap, her cymbals in her hand. The “new theology,” fostered by Euripides and domiciled in daily life by the “New Comedy,” could treat these cymbals as typical of “a creed out-worn.” One of Menander’s characters exclaims:—

“No god, my wife, saves one man through another’s help,

For if a human being can by cymbals’ clash

Deflect the god to whatsoever is desired,

Then greater than the god is he that doeth this.”

Among various resident colonists who may have occupied distinct sections of the city, like a mediæval Ghetto or a modern Italian quarter, the worship of home divinities was kept alive. It is known, for example, that the Egyptian resident merchants, perhaps as early as the end of the fifth century, had received a special license to erect an Isis sanctuary and the Cyprians instituted a similar cult of Adonis and Aphrodite.

Remains of the old gateway in the northern circuitwall, just where the north Long Wall joined on, are still extant. Within a century, the traces of the Long Walls themselves have been disappearing. Enough is left, however, to mark their course at various points, and the remains are particularly plain of the “South” Long Wall, where it nears the Munychia acropolis. Ascending Munychia, we may imagine the Long Walls still reaching up to Athens. We may picture them either in time of war, with defenders within and foes without, or in time of peace, with the stream of pedestrians bent upon pleasure or business. Outside the North Wall was one of the places of execution. Plato illustrates the contest between the brute in man and his higher reason by the story of a certain Leontius who one day was walking up from Piræus and saw some dead bodies fallen prostrate by the side of the executioner. He loathes the sight but is fain to look. Vulgar curiosity gains the mastery; he runs up to the dead bodies and, holding his eyelids wide open, exclaims: “There wretches! Take your fill of the fine spectacle!”

Turning from the course of the Long Walls, the eye surveys the whole panorama of the harbours and the city. Just within the old wall, on the west slope of the Munychia hill, is the old Theatre in a ruined condition. But we can think of the harbour folk in days of peace enjoying on these same rising seats the plays of a Menander or Euripides or see convened there in the times of grim civil strife a hurried assembly of the patriotic party.

Somewhere close by the north side of Zea was the famous arsenal which, though not built till near the end of the fourth century, has entirely disappeared. Luckily, however, in 1882 there was discovered near the Zea harbour a slab of Hymettus marble containing the directions given to the contractors for its construction. It was built to contain the rigging, tackle, sails, cables for undergirding the ships, etc., while the masts, spars, oars, rudders, and other wooden gear seem to have been kept in the ship-sheds themselves alongside of the ships. This arsenal of Philo replaced an older and less elaborate one. It was a large building, four hundred by five hundred feet within, and provided for a roomy arcade where the populace, screened from the burning heat without, could promenade and gaze at the suggestive evidences of their sea power.

Of the many private and public buildings, temples and colonnades mentioned by classic authors, but few can be positively located. In the Colonnade of the Exchange—the Deigma—Theophrastus, Menander’s friend and the successor of Aristotle, represents his “Boastful Man,” a shipping-merchant, as bragging about his great ventures and cargoes at sea. Meanwhile his balance at the banker’s actually amounts to about twenty cents. That this Deigma, where gossip was coined and bargains struck around the money-changers’ tables, must have been close to the edge of the Great Harbour is evident from Xenophon, who says that one day twelve Lacedæmonian ships swept into the harbour suddenly, landed a party and carried off from the Exchange a group of sea-captains and merchants.

The site of the Asklepieion, partly church, partly sanatorium, has been identified in the remains west of Zea. Aphrodite, born of the foam, is a popular goddess with sailor-folk. To her were dedicated, it would seem, no less than three sanctuaries at Piræus.

Lastly, there was the famous Hieron or Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena. Even its site cannot now be identified, but it must have been one of the most frequented centres of Piræus life in the fifth century. An inscription records that into the treasury of this sanctuary went the tax of a drachma on every vessel that put into the port. Incidentally many a further contribution was levied on the newly landed sailor, who was as much a fish out of water among the land-sharks as is the modern Jack Tar on ship’s leave. The comic poet Diphilus tells how one of these harbour caterers used to select his victims: “For example there’s the skipper who grudgingly pays off a vow made under stress of weather when the mast went by the board or when he had snapped the rudder-sweeps of the ship or else was forced by water rising in the hold to hurl his cargo overboard. A wide berth I give to a fellow like him. Such a man will not be free-handed; my best chance is with the captain who has made a quick, safe voyage from Byzantium, who, all excitement over his gain of ten or twelve per cent for three days’ risk, is loud in his chatter about freights and usuries.” He’s the man for the purposes of this shark, and no sooner is he landed than our keeper of the Sailors’ Snug Retreat goes up to him, takes his hand, and reminds him that a sacrifice at the temple of Zeus Preserver would be in order. He thoughtfully relieves the skipper of any care, making the purchases, superintending the offering, and sharing the commission with the priests of the Hieron. And human nature was much the same five hundred years later, when we again meet a skipper whose performance, once he is safe at Piræus, falls far short of the vows made in storm and peril. Lucian, in his “Zeus the Tragedian,” gives details. The Olympian Father, alarmed at the signs of increasing irreligiousness and the consequent stringency in the sacrificial market, calls an assembly of the gods. After some difficult points of precedence as to order of seating have been temporarily waived and half-naturalized divinities like Mithras and our Thracian Bendis have been admitted, Zeus makes a speech. He begins fluently enough with a mosaic of oratorical phrases which he has memorized from Demosthenes. Presently, however, he exclaims: “But my Demosthenes is giving out. I must tell you in plain Greek what has troubled me.” He reminds them of the dinner in which some of them—“as many as had been invited”—had participated the day before, when “Mnesitheus, the ship-owner, had given them a Thanksgiving banquet at Piræus on account of the preservation of his vessel that had come within an ace of being wrecked off Eubœa.” “That evening,” he continues, “while taking a constitutional, I kept thinking over the stinginess of Mnesitheus who undertook to entertain sixteen gods by sacrificing a single cock—and that, too, a wheezy old rooster!—with four little lumps of frankincense so mouldy that they went out forthwith on the coals, without giving even the tip of my nose a whiff of the smoke. That’s what he did, though he was for promising whole hecatombs when his boat was driving on the cliff and was already encircled by reefs.”

Sometimes the fisher-folk preferred to go up to Athens and dedicate votive offerings in the Parthenon. Lucian, in “The Fisher,” when angling over the edge of the Acropolis for the scaly philosophers of the second century, borrows of the Priestess of the Parthenon a rod, hook, and line that “the fisherman from Piræus had dedicated” as a thank-offering.

Of the many epigrams in the Greek Anthology on shipwrecked mariners, the most appropriate to our harbour town is perhaps the one written by Antipater of Sidon for the tomb of a certain Aristagoras who was drowned after reaching harbour at Scarphe. We are reminded of the Piræus temple to Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage by the bitterness with which the poet uses the epithet:—

“Ever the sea is the sea. It is idle to blame

Cyclades’ waves or the Needles or Narrows of Helle;

Them I escaped to be drowned in the harbour of Scarphe.

Vain is their fame.

Pray, if you will, for a fair voyaging homeward, but say:

Here in his tomb Aristagoras knows of the sea and its way—

Ever the same.”

It requires no great stretch of the imagination to reproduce the thrill of pride and delight with which the Attic demesman, whether sailor or soldier, fisherman or merchant, returning from abroad sighted the heights of Akte and the Munychia acropolis and sailed up to the beautiful, dignified city built around its strong, fortified harbours. Even after independent Athens had been incorporated in the Macedonian empire, Menander could record this patriotic delight. In a fragment from his “Fishers” a sailor, returning perhaps to Piræus, falls down and kisses the earth, exclaiming:—

“Greeting, O dear my country, long the time gone by

Till now I see and kiss thee. Not to every land

Would I do this, but only when I see my own,

The land that bred me is a goddess in my eyes.”

We think of Menander himself as a frequent visitor to the harbour town. Tradition says that he was drowned while bathing at the harbour and his countrymen gave him a tomb and an epitaph on the road from Piræus to Athens by the Long Walls. There, too, was the cenotaph of Euripides, who had sailed away to the court of the Macedonian king, never again to enter through the harbour’s arms that welcomed so many returning voyagers.

And the Athenian of the third century, returning as we do now, from a visit to Piræus, would see these tombs as he left the harbour walls and perhaps find compensation for the loss of external liberty in realizing that the great sea-fortress and the maritime empire of Themistocles, of Pericles, and of Conon had buttressed well a Greater Athens; that neither Spartan jealousy and civil discord, nor even the foreign rule of Macedon itself could destroy the real power of this Mother city and obliterate her sway over the human mind. But it required the perspective of longer time and the idealism of a Shelley boldly to interpret disaster in terms of victory and to proclaim Athens as mistress of a sea wider than the Ægean:—

“Greece and her foundations are

Laid below the tides of war,

Based on the crystalline sea

Of thought and its eternity.”

The launching-ways of the ancient triremes, still seen beneath the clear water, symbolize that continued hegemony.

CHAPTER III
ATHENS: FROM SOLON TO THE BATTLE OF
SALAMIS

“Here, stranger, seek no tyrant. This our state is ruled Not of one man. ’Tis free. The people year by year As kings succeed each other, never yield they most To Wealth, but even he that’s poor has equal share.”

Euripides, Supplices.

Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian columns of the Olympieum to obtain a satisfying view of the Acropolis, embedded like a crystal in its proper matrix of encompassing air and plain and sea and mountains. Future journeys in Greece will but reënforce the conviction of the noble loveliness of the Attic plain. The atmosphere is singularly clear and vibrant, and within it colour and form are sharply defined. The Ægean at its shores adds movement and space. And here more than anywhere else Sir Richard Jebb’s description of the Greek hills seems inevitable. Their forms “are at once so bold and so chastened, the onward sweep of their ranges is at once so elastic and so calm, each member of every group is at once so individual and so finely helpful to the ethereal expressiveness of the rest, that the harmony of their undulations and the cadences in which they fall combine the charm of sculpture with the life and variety of a sunlit sea.”

In making such a study of this city as is demanded for turning the quick appreciation of its external charm into the more permanent possession of its underlying qualities, we must submit to some analysis of the great moments in its history and its literature.

When Athenian literature begins with Solon, in the sixth century, B. C., the Greeks have emerged from a dim antiquity. In the two preceding centuries, the mother cities of Achæan and Dorian Greece had been sending out colonists east and west, not merely in a spirit of Phœnician commercialism, but also with adventuresome, intellectual curiosity. The heroes of their earliest traditional literature sailed with them. Associations half slumbering in the popular consciousness thrilled them as they steered again over the course of the Argo or as they followed once more the later track of Odysseus to the west, and in lower Italy and Sicily reëstablished Great Hellas as an integral part of Hellenic civilization.

In this earlier colonization Athens participated only vicariously, but it was into this larger Hellas that Solon the lawgiver and poet was born. Fire, brought from the mother cities, was blazing on the hearths of Greek colonies from the Crimea to Sicily. The Ionians of Asia Minor had long since joined in the movement of expansion; they were presently to colonize the site of modern Marseilles; they were already converting to their own use the distant outposts of the “Tyrian trader.” Athens meanwhile was slowly developing. Later she would herself be mistress of the sea.

The Athenians, more than most Greeks, could boast that they were autochthonous, earth-born children of their own soil. Isocrates in his “Panegyricus” makes proudly the claim: “We dwell in the land not after expelling others, nor even finding it a desert, nor even coming as a mixed breed collected from many nations, but ... sprung from the soil and able to address our city by the same names as we give to the closest relations.” The prehistoric Greek invaders of Attica had fused with rather than driven out the former occupants, the Pelasgians or whoever they may have been. Erichthonius, Erechtheus, or Poseidon, “one form for many names,” was born of Earth but mothered on Athena, and it would have been as futile as it was impious to challenge the pedigree of the Erechtheidæ. Erechtheus-Poseidon might coil forever undisturbed beneath the sheltering shield of the Virgin-goddess. Cecrops, too, the mythical king and Attic hero, owned a perpetual ground-rent on the Acropolis and the Athenians were Cecropidæ. They were also the “Sons of Hephæstus,” who was often associated with Athena, a partnership of the heavenly wisdom with the arts and crafts. An ancient festival of the whole city, held in honour of Athena, became afterwards specialized among the artisans, under the name of Chalkeia, in honour of Hephæstus; and the god may yet win back as his own “Hephæsteum” the so-called “Theseum” on the hill above the classic market-place.

The age of the heroes merges with that of the Kings. Theseus moves, a grandiose figure, through art and literature. Thus when the “Hill party” of Pisistratus became preëminent, Theseus, the aristocrat, came into prominence in vase painting. He appears in all the forms of didactic sculpture, and the “City of Theseus,” the older Athens, is recalled again in the Roman renaissance by the Arch of Hadrian. This still offers to the modern pilgrim, on the west side facing the Acropolis, the inscription: “This is the Athens of Theseus, the old city,” and on the other, facing the Olympieum of Hadrian: “This is the City of Hadrian and not the City of Theseus.” Thus meet the old and the new, with classic Athens ignored.

To understand the literature of the sixth century, we must remember that the ancient citadel town of the prehistoric kings had long since overflowed into the district at its immediate base, absorbing, as time went on, various original townships adjacent to the Acropolis. Although the name of king and some relics of royal authority survived in the person of the King Archon, yet, unlike the relation of Sparta to Laconia or Thebes to Bœotia, Athens was not a mere royal centre for the Attic demesmen. All Attica was Athens. All its free inhabitants, class by class, became included in the citizenship, albeit the republic was an aristocracy, first of birth, then of wealth. Solon’s readjustment of the laws for rich and poor determined the trend towards government by the people, and even the inevitable tyranny, postponed by Solon, only served, when it came, to retard the current and to dam up a reservoir of irresistible democratic consciousness which was to sweep away the tyrants and to render the Attica of Marathon inaccessible to the returning despot.

The picture of the old city of Theseus is vague to our imagination, but the Athens of Solon’s administration emerges somewhat more clearly as we take away, one after another, some of the prominent features of the later Athens that we know best. The Acropolis lacked the Propylæa, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheum, its barrenness being relieved by little save the “old” temple of Athena Polias. Not only the Dionysiac theatre, but even its earliest forerunner were things of the future. The drama was yet unborn. The Market-place of later centuries, adorned with statues and stoas, was represented by a simpler centre of civic life at the west end of the Acropolis, where were the public buildings of administration, the communal winepress of the Lenæum and the old Callirrhoë spring.

Yet Solon calls Athens a great city, and he was to make it still greater. Into that early Market-place he came and, if we accept the picturesque details handed down by tradition, feigning madness in order to violate with impunity the law forbidding citizens to re-open the question of conquering Salamis, he cried:—

“Forward to Salamis, forward, to fight for the isle that we yearn for,

Thrusting dishonour aside, casting off grievous disgrace.”

The Athenians were aroused. They went with him across the narrow strait, and Salamis, the “lovely island,” thenceforward was their own, destined to serve them as refuge in their hour of greatest need. Solon used his popularity, thus acquired, in no self-seeking way. Chosen archon and virtual dictator he moulded proletariat and noble to his own noble will. Again and again his verse reënforces his pedestrian arguments. “The black earth is enslaved,” he says, and presently the mortgage stones, dotted over the farms, are mere cancelled records. Many such, of a later date, have been found. The “Penurious Man” in Theophrastus “inspects his boundary stones daily to make sure that they are in place.” Solon proudly appeals to the constituency of the future to justify his laws:—

“Be witness unto this before the bar of time,

Thou greatest Mother of the gods Olympian—

Aye witness best—black Earth, whose mortgage border-stones

Fixed here and there on every side, I took away,

And she who erst was slave is set at liberty.”

Again, even more proudly, he says:—

“I set myself as border stone inscribed betwixt

Contending factions.”

The citizens, he says, by their folly and their greed would themselves destroy the city, but Athena, the Watcher, is there upon the hill:—

“Never by Zeus’s decree nor by will of the blessed immortals

Ruin shall come to our town, causing our city to fall.

Never, while yonder that great-hearted Guardian, sired majestic,

Pallas Athena above stretches her sheltering hands.”

In the Athenian memory as well as in these vigorous elegiacs he embedded the epithet of “Guardian” (ἐπίσκοπος) that would in after days lend significance to the great bronze statue, overlooking the city and sea, and would remain after Macedon had come and gone as a semi-official title of the goddess.

Legend tells us that Solon in his old age, when the tyranny had now come, piled his armour in front of his house door—probably near the Market-place of Pisistratus—and turned from politics to a serene enjoyment of the pleasures of ear and eye and intellect to which he had, indeed, never been a stranger. His life had always been consistent with his own epigram:—

“And still as I age, learning many a lesson.”

Like many of his countrymen subsequently, he combined active participation in public affairs with the character of poet and writer. In literature, as in political life, he had his preferences. Perhaps nothing more distinctly places him in the old Athens than his disapprobation of the Tragedy that was born in his later years. He is said to have taken Thespis to task for the falsehood of the drama. On the other hand the direct sincerity of lyric poetry accorded with his manner of thought. From Ælian’s variegated patch-work the story drifts down to us that to Solon, seated one day over his wine, his nephew sang one of Sappho’s songs. Solon at once commanded the boy to teach him the song, and when a bystander asked why he was so eager, he replied: “When I have learned it, then that I may die!”

To subsequent generations he seemed the embodiment of wisdom over against excess, and readers of Herodotus who were not troubled by the chronological difficulties must have especially enjoyed the story of his interview with Crœsus and his reproof of the rich king for his exultation in his wealth. The famous apothegm, “One must wait for the end before praising,” was repeated in one form or another by Simonides, Æschylus, and Sophocles. Of Solon’s own end a dramatic story is mentioned by Plutarch, although he refuses to lend it his credence: “That his ashes, after his body was burned, were scattered about the island of Salamis is a story absolutely mythical and incredible by reason of its outlandishness. It stands recorded, however, both by other noteworthy men and by Aristotle the philosopher.”

After years of varying fortune Pisistratus finally (540 or 539 B. C.) established himself as Tyrant of Athens. But tyranny at Athens was never more than an episode. The inbred spirit of freedom must be reckoned with. Pisistratus respected popular rights, and after the accession of his sons the suspicion of a tendency to introduce such measures as were acquiesced in, for example, at Corinth, brought death to the one and subsequent banishment to the other. But the result of the tyranny of Pisistratus was beneficent. Under him and his sons the city began to take on both externally and intellectually more of the characteristics which are in mind when we think of Athens. Architect, sculptor, and painter began to contribute enriching details to the Acropolis, including the first Propylæa. Engineers skilfully brought water from near and far into the old Market-place, and in front of the town spring of Callirrhoë Pisistratus built the spacious “Nine Spouts”—the Enneakrounos—where women filled their water-jars and stayed to gossip. The newer market-place, to the north of the Areopagus, was developed. A great Olympieum was begun on the site of the present columns, which date from Hadrian’s time. Gymnasium life became important and the Academy was made ready as if in anticipation of its great future. Doubtless within this lovely grove many a youth of the period might have served as a model for Aristophanes’s fifth-century picture of palæstra life in the good old times:—

“But you will go enter as Academe sprinter and under the olives contend

With your chaplet of reed, in a contest of speed with some excellent rival and friend:

All fragrant with yew and leisure time too, and the leaf which the white poplars fling

When the plane whispers love to the elm in the grove in the beautiful season of spring.”[^[5]]

A distinctive part of Pisistratus’s policy was the encouragement of country life and of agriculture. All over the Attic plain the olive orchards were cultivated, to become an important source of revenue to the Athenian state and immeasurably to enhance the charm of its environment. Herodotus recounts that a tall, handsome woman named Phye, from the hill country, had impersonated Athena come down in mortal guise and, riding in a chariot with Pisistratus, had lent divine sanction to his original coup d’état. The Attic demesmen might still more easily accept this new measure as a command transmitted from Athena who had herself first created the olive tree and taught its culture on the Acropolis:—

“A heaven-sent grey-gleaming crown for her Athens,

Her city of light.”

Aristotle, in his “Constitution of Athens,” lays great stress on the effort of Pisistratus to develop the prosperity of the farmers. He tells how Pisistratus, walking in the country and seeing one digging among the rocks, asked what sort of a crop grew there, and the man, unaware that it was the Tyrant, replied: “Such a crop of evils and pain that it were right that Pisistratus should have his tithe of them.” Pisistratus, pleased both with his industry and his free speech, relieved the farmer of his burdens. And so, Aristotle continues, he was not troubled during his reign but could secure peace and quiet and “the word was often on the lips of many that the tyranny of Pisistratus was a regular life under Kronos,” or Golden Age.

Pisistratus did much toward securing for Athens the intellectual hegemony of Greece. Whatever the Panathenæa, inherited from Theseus (or even from Erichthonius), may have been previously, the Greater Panathenaic festival was now solemnized every four years with more magnificence and became at Athens the necessary and dignified offset to the quadrennial games at Olympia and Delphi. Games, sacrifices, and amusements of varied character were added from time to time. Horse, chariot, torch, and foot races were included. Visitors came from abroad. But neither local nor intercantonal athletics gave the keynote. Rhapsodists recited Homer, and flute, cithara, and song were heard. Everything tended to focus itself upon the worship of Athena, who was the Athenian consciousness glorified and made objective.

Under Pisistratus or his sons (or, less probably, under Solon) Homer was recalled from Ionia and domiciled on the mainland. Whatever may be the details about a formal recension and publication at this time, recitations from Homer were made an integral part of the public festivals, and Athens became the clearing-house for an intellectual currency good throughout all Hellas. The name “Pan-Athenian,” passing even beyond Pan-Ionian, was to be equated with a culture that was Pan-Hellenic. This befitted the epic breadth transcending mere local traditions. “The Iliad was not composed for any king or tyrant. If it is aristocratic, its appeal is not to any given set of noble families, but to all brave men of Greek legend.” And the spirit in which this epic trust was administered tallies well with the restraint of Pisistratus in respecting, as far as possible, the laws of Solon. If there were Attic interpolations in the poems, they do not glorify his house. In the “Catalogue of the Ships” the Athenians received honourable but not excessive mention. The brief reference to the ships from Salamis, as ranged under the command of the Athenians, would seem to suggest the recent conquest of the island under Solon or even the suspicion that Solon had himself interpolated it beforehand as proof of the ancient suzerainty of Athens:—

“Twelve ships from Salamis Aias commanded. He brought them and placed them there where Athenian squadrons were marshalled.”

But perhaps the easiest solution of all questions in regard to interpolations in the Homeric poems is to pin our uncritical faith to the authenticity of Lucian’s interview with Homer in Elysium: “I went up to Homer the poet, when we were both at leisure, and after making other inquiries ... I asked him further about the rejected verses, whether they were written by him. And he declared that he wrote them all!”

The greatest and most characteristically Attic contribution of the sixth century was the fostering of the drama, in connection with the worship of Dionysus. This Thracian divinity, on his journey southwards, had been welcomed in the villages of Attica, where vineyard and winepress awaited his blessing. The Pisistratidæ, who have been called “the providential defenders of the faith of Dionysus” against the aristocratic disdain felt for a peasant’s god, invited him to a new temple in the Lenæa—the Marshes—below the Acropolis, where, at the time of the winter solstice, the Feast of the Winepress once more identified the capital with the country it had outgrown. But Pisistratus went further in establishing the City Dionysia, a spring festival destined to a long life and splendid renown. Instead of private performances at rural feasts, the drama now became part of the official administration of the city. The first dated performance of a play by Thespis was in 534 B. C. This may have been on the occasion of the opening of the “orchestra,” north of the Areopagus, near the new Market-place, where the spectators henceforth found seats on wooden scaffolding until the more permanent theatre was erected south of the Acropolis. Athens was now ready for the great dramatists. The wine-god looms up as a rival to Athena, as may be seen by his ubiquity on the vase paintings and his dominant presence in the Attic calendar. “In the actual religious ritual Dionysus became of more importance at Athens than Zeus, Apollo, or even Athena.”

Thus in diverse ways does Pisistratus present a fair claim for having made Athens greater, in steady progression from the wise policies of Solon. Solon himself must often have feared an excess of luxury and splendour. No one of his generation could have dreamed of a regretful modern desire to have seen, because of its charming simplicity, “the little earlier Athens of Pisistratus.” But many a Periclean Greek may have forestalled it. Aristophanes was forever seeking for a revival of—

“the precepts which taught

The heroes of old to be hardy and bold, and the men who at Marathon fought!”[^[6]]

These were the precepts which taught Æschylus. We are apt to think of him only in his maturity, a fighter at Marathon, a seasoned warrior at Salamis, a poet of the post-Persian epoch. But his childhood fell in the time of the Pisistratidæ, and it is by no means idle to speculate on the influences which then encompassed him. The memory of Solon’s ethics and vocabulary he carried with him through life. Foreign poets also, attracted to Athens by the sons of Pisistratus, must have seemed to him important personages. Two of the “ten” lyric poets were at this time identified with the city. Anacreon, when Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, had no longer a home to offer him, was brought in triumph to Athens in a fifty-oared galley sent by Hipparchus. And Simonides of Ceos, who was to be the chief mouthpiece of liberated Greece, was well content to enjoy the patronage of the despot.

Æschylus was fifteen when Hippias was expelled. Hipparchus had been assassinated earlier, at one of the celebrations of the Panathenæa, by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, but their failure to dispose of both tyrants at one blow had caused them to be ignominiously put to death and their memory ignored. Now, in the new enthusiasm for freedom, they were hailed as liberators of their city. Their memory became a cult. Their statues were set up by the Agora, and the boy Æschylus, as each anniversary of their deed came around and the Panathenaic procession wound up to the Acropolis, must have been fired by the thought of them. At twenty-five he may have lustily joined in the new drinking song which, commemorating their deed, took the town by storm. It continued to be sung for centuries. To Aristophanes it was a hackneyed classic and part of his comic stock in trade.

“In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive,

Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,

When the twain on Athena’s day

Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.

“For aye shall your fame in the land be told,

Harmodius and Aristogeiton bold,

Who, striking the tyrant down,

Made Athens a freeman’s town.”[^[7]]

With the victory at Marathon Athens came of age. The struggle between Orientalism and Hellenism was just begun. Salamis and Platæa and Eurymedon were yet to be. But the Greeks with a divine improvidence discounted their ultimate success. Their twenty years of democratic education made impossible any compromise with despotism. Whatever necessary vagueness may still have existed at Athens in the attempted fusion of polytheistic tradition with the awakening conception of monotheism, there now stands forth in a law-abiding conscience the barrier of Law, clear and bold as the outline of Pentelicus above Marathon. The contemporary Athenian feeling is reflected by Æschylus in the answer of the old Persian men to Darius’s widowed queen, who has asked about the Greeks:—

ATOSSA

“‘And who’s their herdsman? Who the people’s overlord?’

CHORUS

‘There’s no man’s name they bear as slaves and underlings.’”

At this time another country god was naturalized at Athens, a friend and comrade of Dionysus in secret mountain places, but not intruding upon him in the formalities of city worship. Pan had helped the Athenians at Marathon and had stopped the swift courier Pheidippides, sent to hurry reënforcements from Sparta, and bidden him ask his people “why they made no account of him, although he had been useful to them many times already and would be again.” The Athenians at once “dedicated a sanctuary to Pan under the brow of the Acropolis and in consequence of this message they propitiated him by yearly sacrifices and a torch race.” His cave at the northwest end of the Acropolis still exists to convince the sceptic. He lived on here, overlooking the Areopagus and Agora, to come forth, “horned, panpipe in hand, with his shaggy legs,” and greet the lady Justice sent by Zeus to investigate the charlatan philosophers of Athens in Lucian’s day. Pan gives Justice a fluent account of their frailties and is about to add certain details, when her sense of propriety cuts him short. “If I must,” says he, “tell the truth in full, without holding anything back—for I live, as you see, where I can take a bird’s-eye view—many’s the time I’ve seen scores of them, well along towards evening—” (Justice) “Stop there, Pan!”

While Pan was accumulating details of the “Private Life of the Athenians,” as they passed and repassed before his grotto, the public energy of the city was transmuted into enduring memorials above him on the calm heights of the Acropolis.

CHAPTER IV
THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS

“All this pursuit of the arts has this function, even a recall of the noblest in the soul to a vision of the most excellent in the ideal.”

Plato, Republic.

To speak of the Acropolis of Athens with due Hellenic restraint is difficult for any one who has lived long under its habitual sway. At the first visit three sets of impressions break down the most obdurate impassiveness. The associations acquired by a study of history engender a vicarious but active sympathy with the Greeks themselves. There is an immediate impact of beauty from marble gateway and temples and sculpture which the procession of years has only incorporated more intimately with the beauty of sea and land and circumambient air. And, finally, there is the involuntary sense of coming back to one’s own—to an intellectual birthright. Even the Turkish conquerors did not fail to recognize that all western civilizations consider the Acropolis an integral part of their joint heritage. Dr. Howe quotes from an intercepted letter of Kiutahi Pashaw, the opponent of the Greek patriot, Karaiskakis, in 1826: “The citadel of Athens, as is known to you, was built of old on a high and inaccessible rock; not to be injured by a mine nor accessible to assault.... From it went out of yore many famous philosophers; it has many works of art very old, which make the learned men of Europe wonder; and for this reason all the Europeans and the other nations of unbelievers regard the citadel as their own house.”

RENAN ON THE ACROPOLIS
From a French painting

The attitude of the ancient Greeks toward the Acropolis is only casually expressed in their extant literature. No Greek Victor Hugo has given to men distant in place and time as vivid a picture of the Parthenon as we possess of Notre Dame. In trying to imagine what the Greeks saw, as they came up to their citadel, we must first differentiate between the main historical epochs. Of the Acropolis in the earliest age we can form a partial conception. The impressive remains of polygonal masonry still extant, in the massive citadel walls; the traces of the old “Kings’ City” around the Erechtheum, and even within the groundplan of the old Athena temple; the remains of the ancient stairway, northeast of the Erechtheum, leading to the postern gate—all fit in with and fill out a reconstruction based on our conception of other ancient strongholds, like Mycenæ or Tiryns.

When we think of the citadel in the age of Pisistratus and the time previous to the Persian Wars we are fairly sure of the main characteristics. We can picture the old Athena temple, simple yet dignified, in the middle of the plateau, adorned with coloured sculptures (some of which may be seen in the Museum to-day), sacred shrines, precincts and altars with a wealth of dedicatory offerings, and also the older Propylæa let in between the massive “Pelasgic” walls and approached by a way that wound down through a complex of outworks to meet the old Agora.

This Acropolis, far simpler than the Periclean citadel but beautiful and adorned, was devastated by the Persians. Then for more than a quarter of a century after Salamis we must imagine it as scarred and patched, with perhaps only one temple, half restored, to house the sacred image within its blackened walls.

In general, when we speak of the Acropolis, it is of the citadel as it appeared towards the close of the fifth century to Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes, to Thucydides and Xenophon, to Isocrates and Lysias, to Socrates and Plato. This citadel we can restore to our imagination from the descriptions of Pausanias (controlled by information from other sources) who, in spite of erratic omissions, fortunately describes many things with a fulness of detail quite foreign to the writers of the classical period.

When Socrates, too robust at seventy to know the fatigue of the ascent, climbed the approach to the hill he must often have been inspired by the beauty of art, as he had been by the beauty of nature on the banks of the Ilissus, to renew the prayer: “Dear Pan, and ye other gods, make me beautiful in the inward man.” Born into a generation and among a people where external and physical beauty was assumed as corollary to the beauty of the ideal, there escapes him, thus incidentally, the echo of his self-conquest over his own Silenus-like exterior, so out of keeping with the charm of his environment. Perhaps he went up the hill the evening before his trial to take a last look at what he had loved long and well. He knew in advance that his “apology” to the court was to be a reassertion of individual liberty of conscience that would most probably result for him in the hemlock draught. The majestic columns of the great gateways rose before him on either side, the wings extended like welcoming arms. He would turn to the left and stand in the picture gallery. Perhaps he would pause longest before Alcibiades, his pernicious disciple, pictured in arrogant beauty as victor at the Nemean games. Turning to the other side of the gateway, he would stand on the bastion before the Nike temple and would look out over the familiar city, the Attic plain and harbour-town. As he passed on now to enter the gateway, and his eye fell upon the sculptured Hermes and the Graces, little would he dream of the perplexed debate of modern critics as to a possible connection of this group with the handiwork of a young sculptor or stone-cutter, “Socrates the son of Sophroniscus.”

Under or just within the Propylæa he would note various familiar objects, and when he had passed through he would see before him to the right and left the Parthenon and the Erechtheum. The intervening space would not be as it is now a floe of marble blocks. Two orderly avenues of votive offerings traversed the plateau before him. Against a column of the Propylæa still stands an inscribed basis of a statue dedicated to Athena, the Giver of Health, set up by Pericles in gratitude for the recovery of one of his injured workmen, one perhaps whose skill he could ill spare in the completion of his large designs. Close by, a marble boy, made by a son or disciple of the great Myron, held out a bowl of holy water as at the entrance of a cathedral. Socrates, whose reverence exceeded that of all his accusers, would not scorn this symbol of purification, least of all when about to journey away, as he expressed it, from Athens to another life. Before him towered up the bronze Athena, the warrior goddess, whose gleaming helmet could be seen by homeward voyagers as soon as they had passed the intercepting shoulder and foot-hills of Hymettus. Near by was the Lemnian Athena, goddess of the arts of peace, held by the Greeks themselves as more beautiful even than the great gold-ivory statue within the Parthenon. The three embodied the conceptions of Phidias, as in a trilogy. Near by was a portrait-herm of Pericles himself. There, too, was the “wooden horse,” a colossal bronze, with the Greeks (not forgetting the sons of Theseus) peeping out from its side. And when, passing along this Panathenaic road, lined with statues and votive offerings, he had threaded his way around to the east front of the Parthenon, he would enter between the columns, and in the cool twilight, lit by the gleam of gold and ivory, he would look up to the Victory on the extended hand of Athena. Perhaps for a moment the goddess may have lifted the veil of the future to reveal that the defeat of the morrow would be a victory of far greater import than even that of Marathon or Salamis.

To-day the visitor, as he goes up to the Acropolis, carries with him the accumulated associations of centuries. On the bastion of the Temple of Victory, unsurpassed in its miniature charm, he watches with Ægeus for Theseus returning in triumph from slaying the Minotaur. At the sight of the black sail, left unfurled by inadvertence, the old king plunged from the rock to his death. Ægeus and the other kings passed away and other men from this rock watched fleets hostile and friendly come and go in yonder bay and enemies scour the surrounding plain of Attica. Byron, finally, brooded here over a renascent Hellas.

If any work of man’s hands can purge the mind of the commonplace, it is the Propylæa, imposing in its grand proportions, yet enticing by its beauty. Through this the pilgrim now passes and is alone with Greek life. Although the plateau is deserted, the temple in ruins, there is no sense of death. There is rather a sudden sense of Beauty set free from the trammels of daily life. The fortunate isolation of the hilltop contributes to this effect. Byzantine makeshifts, Turkish hovels and minarets, have all been swept away—even the intruding Roman is left outside with the disfiguring pedestal of Agrippa’s statue. The foreground of the modern city is sunk out of sight behind the rim of the plateau. There is to be seen on all sides only the same Attic plain, the same Ægean sea, and the same horizon of mountains, which the eyes of kings and democrats, artists, orators and philosophers have looked upon in days gone by.

In this harmony of surroundings, the eye and thought rest undisturbed upon the Parthenon. The tributes of the centuries have probably left the visitor unprepared for his own emotion. Like a wind on the mountain, felling the strong oak trees, the heavenly Eros, Plato’s Love of Beauty, descends upon him. Bayard Taylor’s first impressions, in spite of an enthusiasm permissible fifty years ago but now well-nigh out of print, are worth recalling for the sake of a figure evoked by the appalling ruin of beauty. Beyond a sea “of hewn and sculptured marble, drums of pillars, pedestals, capitals, cornices, friezes, triglyphs and sunken panel-work,” he saw the Parthenon against the sky, and it seemed to him as if it lay “broken down to the earth in the middle like a ship which has struck and parted, with the roof, cornices and friezes mostly gone and not a single column unmutilated, and yet with the tawny gold of two thousand years staining its once spotless marble, sparkling with snow-white marks of shot and shell, and with its soaring pillars embedded in the dark blue ether.”

But since Morosini’s sacrilegious bomb did its work the generations have refused to accept as the ultimate fact the shipwreck of this temple in which culminated the plastic arts of ancient Greece and in which were typified her loftiest ideas. Poet and philosopher have sat before it in fruitful meditation, and commoners have paced its great colonnades, unregardful of the ways and marts of men amid the austere majesty and royal repose of the Doric pillars.

From the imperious beauty of the Parthenon the eye turns gratefully to the lovely Erechtheum. Although this is but a torso of the architect’s design and its complex structure defies preconceived conventions, its Ionic charm satisfies in each detail. The eastern columns, the Porch of the Maidens, the exquisite tracery of the doorway set within the perfectly proportioned northern porch present a series rather than a unity of graceful designs.

The other remnants—fragmentary and broken—of the vanished life upon this hill must be identified with pious care. Then the thought turns to such references in literature as have been transmitted to us. These also are fragmentary, seeming sometimes like the patches of blue and red and gold not yet wholly effaced from the marbles.

The Iliad, as we know it, preserves an Athenian tradition of the prehistoric kingly Acropolis. Among the warriors bound for Troy are listed:—

“They that had Athens, the citadel goodly, the holding of great-heart Erechtheus to whom on a time, as fostering nurse, was Zeus’s daughter, Athena (though the seed-land, giver of grain, was the mother who bore him), and at Athens she made him to dwell, in her own habitation of plenty. There the Athenian youths with bulls and with rams do him honour, year after year in the seasons returning.”

And here under the Greek heaven, on this hill left lonely by men but easily accessible to gods, it would hardly seem incredible if Athena herself were suddenly to appear once more. In the Odyssey, when she had ventured to leave Odysseus to his own cunning among the Phæacians, she returned by a course, strangely devious for an air line, by way of Marathon to Athens:—

“Then with these words the bright-eyed Athena departed over the harvestless seas and behind her left Scheria lovely. She came unto Marathon then and the wide-wayed Athenian city, and entered the massive-built house of Erechtheus.”

As we look upon the meagre traces of the prehistoric city, we should like to see the princess maidens appear in the simplicity of the kingly times. Like the women described by Pherecrates, the comic poet, they had no slaves:—

“No one then possessed a Sambo, no one had a maid-slave then,

Every bit of household labour must the girls themselves perform.”

Herodotus tells us how they used to go down and out from the protecting gateways, to draw water at Callirrhoë beyond the Agora, and how the rough Pelasgians, banished from this their ancient home, would now and again rush down from Hymettus to carry them off.

The old Erechtheus worship, the snake, the ancient image of Athena, and the allied precincts, lost none of their sanctity as time went on. From Herodotus we learn that Themistocles was materially aided before Salamis, in persuading the Athenians to abandon the city, by the sudden disappearance of the sacred snake. “The Athenians,” he gravely reports, “say that a large snake dwells in the sacred precinct as guardian of the Acropolis. And they not only say this but they make offerings to him month by month, setting them out for him as actually there. These consist of a honey-cake. Now this honey-cake, although heretofore it had always been consumed, remained at this time untasted, so the Athenians, when the priestess reported the fact, made the more eager haste to leave the city, on the ground that the goddess had abandoned her citadel.” The sacred olive tree, however, which Xerxes had burned with the rest of the precinct, put forth the very next day a new shoot one cubit long. By the time of Pausanias the guide said “two” cubits. But the essential point is the continued care of the goddess, and as for the snake, he soon resumed his dwelling on the Acropolis. In the “Lysistrata” of Aristophanes, the women who have seized and barricaded the Acropolis make excuses for leaving, complaining that they cannot sleep, one on account of the hooting of Athena’s owls, another by reason of her terror:—

“Since I clapped eyes upon the snake that dwelleth there.”

When in the “Eumenides” of Æschylus the scene shifts from Delphi to the Acropolis, we find Orestes seated as suppliant before Athena’s most ancient image. This we may think of, in default of any other temple then existing, as placed in the old Hecatompedon, whose foundations are seen adjoining the Erechtheum on the south. This temple, burned by the Persians, but partially restored, may have been in use even after the Parthenon was dedicated in 438 B. C., twenty years after this play was brought out, and perhaps until the completion many years later of the Athena Polias chamber in the Erechtheum. An Athenian could not well conceive of his city as safe without this ancient statue; even the birds in their new Cloud-cuckoo-town must needs debate whether they shall not keep Athena Polias as their protector.

No Roman Catholic ever accepted more loyally the established glory of St. Peter’s and the Vatican than the Athenians accepted their citadel. The new gateways were spoken of with undisguised pride. A comic poet, Phœnicides of neighbouring Megara, when ridiculing Athens, incidentally admits that the Athenians cared as much for their Propylæa as their palates. He says:—

“Of myrtle berries and their honey, too, they talk,

And praise their Propylæa. Last, not least, dried figs.

I sailed and forthwith had a taste of all of these,

Including Propylæa! Not one single thing

Upon this bill of fare could ever match our grouse!”

In one of the anonymous fragments, those riderless Pegasi of Greek literature, another comic poet combines the Piræus and the Parthenon in an outburst of civic pride. Nor does he forget the olive groves and radiant air:—

“Mistress of all, Queen City of Athenians,

How fair thy docks, how fair to view thy Parthenon!

And thy Piræus, too, is fair. And then again

What other city ever yet had groves like thine?

And, as they say, the very sky, thy sky, is fair.”

And Demosthenes, not deterred by any shrinking from hackneyed allusion, refers expressly to the Propylæa and the Parthenon, when he speaks of “those things upon which we all naturally pride ourselves.” Aristophanes, seeking to recall his fellow-citizens to the ideals of Marathon days, shows us in his “Knights” the Propylæa and the freshly boiled-over and rejuvenated Demos,—the avatar of true Democracy,—seated within the unclosing doors of the gateway, dressed in the brilliant garb of a gentleman of the good old Marathon type: “Just such as he used to be when he messed with Aristides and Miltiades,” his hair caught up with the golden cicada pin, emblem of Attic autochthony.

In the “Lysistrata” the Athenian men, ignorant that at a future day their Parliament was to be controlled by suffragettes, feel that the limit of the legitimate boycott is over-passed when the women seize and barricade their Acropolis. The old chorus leader says:—

“In life’s long stretch of time, are many things unlooked for—Woe is me! For who had ever thought to hear that women whom we keep (a mischief manifest) should get Athena’s sacred image in their hands; should seize my citadel; the Propylæa barricade with bolts and bars?”

In this play, too, we catch a glimpse of the more intimate interweaving of an Athenian maiden’s life with the Acropolis ritual. One of this same sans-culotte garrison looks about her and reviews her girlhood; how she had been selected among the best-born girls to carry the mysterious burden in the Arrephoria, had ground the meal for the sacred cakes for Athena Archegetis; had impersonated a bear in the worship of Artemis; and, finally, had gained the coveted privilege of being basket-bearer in the Panathenaic procession. Explaining her personal gratitude to the city, the woman says:—

“When seven years old an Arrephoros I;

And when I was ten

I ground the meal for our Lady-on-High;

In my next rôle then

I figured as Bear in Brauronian show,

And the saffron wore;

Then as full-grown maid—quite pretty you know—

The Basket I bore.”

The barren precinct of Artemis Brauronia adjoins the south corner of the Propylæa, and a small dedicatory bear, found somewhere near, now sits in the Acropolis Museum, brooding in stony silence over by-gone glories at the Brauronia. But the maiden with the saffron robe and all her girl companions have long since disappeared “down the back entry of time.”

If it could be granted us to have restored one portion of the Parthenon or its appurtenances, our choice would probably fall, not upon the famous gold-ivory statue of Athena, but first upon the pediment sculptures; next, it may be, upon the great continuous frieze. If its shattered fragments could be restored, and the slabs now in Paris and London could be recalled from exile and united to those still in place, it would be an easier task for the imagination to reconstruct from these than from the piecemeal references in the literature an abridged idealization of the glory of the actual Panathenaic procession. As it is, from what is left still in place there emerges something far more significant than the details of any cult or festival. The dismounted youth adjusting his sandal; the horse with leisurely nose bent to his fore-leg; the mounted horsemen; the rams and oxen led to the sacrifice, remain, like Keats’s “heifer lowing at the skies,” to tell the hurrying generations that once, at least, there has existed, and may exist again, wherever men are strong to feel and know, the harmony between the temporal and the eternal.

The Parthenon remained practically intact for centuries, lending its inspiration both to the creative Greeks and to the imagination of the Romans, the executors of the Hellenic realty. Even the chryselephantine Athena seems to have held undisturbed possession of her temple for more than eight centuries, from the dedication in 438 B. C. to about 430 A. D., when it disappears from Athenian records.

Plutarch, a Greek gentleman of the first Christian century, speaks with enthusiasm of the creations of Pericles. “There blooms upon them a certain freshness untouched by time, as if there dwelt within them an ever-animating spirit, a life that never grows old.” In the next century, under the successors of Hadrian, who had inaugurated a new era for Athens, Pausanias, a foreigner, came and saw and was conquered by the wealth of detail on the Acropolis. At the same time, that generous citizen from Marathon, Herodes Atticus, was building against the side of the Acropolis his gorgeous Italian opera-house, while Lucian, the Syrian Atticist, with a higher, if impossible, ideal, was striving to revive the old Platonic grace by quarrying from the Pentelicus of classic literature. When, in the rôle of a “Truthful James,” he is acquitted of blasphemy against true philosophy, he enters the east door of the Parthenon to make thanksgiving to the goddess, or, more specifically, to the winged Victory, six feet high, upon her hand. His devotion takes the form of the prayer appended to three of Euripides’s dramas:—

“O majestical Victory, shelter my life

Neath thy covert of wings.

Aye, cease not to grant me thy crowning.”

Thus, like many another later foreigner, he pays the time-honoured tribute to the outward embodiment of the ideal.

S. COLONNADE OF THE PARTHENON

The charm of the Acropolis changes with the changing light. See it, if you will, at dawn from the opposite hillside, near the “Prison of Socrates,” as the sun rises over Hymettus and the Pentelic columns of the Parthenon change from the gray of unsympathetic silhouettes to the luminous chromes of the irradiated marbles. See it at a later hour and wonder that it does not fade into the light of common day. Or visit it when the sunset light turns to burnished copper the unadorned hills in the west, beyond Salamis, and on the choir of the encircling mountains the supramundane charm of the violet atmosphere falls like a robe with empurpling shadows in its folds. Go when the night has fallen, and sit in the mysterious darkness, lit only by the marble columns white against the dark outlines of Hymettus, until the full moon looks over the mountain’s rim, tipping architrave and capital with silver, and then, as it swings free from Hymettus, merging the wreck of the Parthenon in the beauty of the landscape to which the scarred and yawning sides of the temple seem to open with intent. Presently the whole hill-top with its moraine of prostrate columns and marble fragments is lit up and the pillars of the Propylæa flower into whiteness. Or finally, bizarre as it may sound, see it when—artificially illuminated after the Olympic Games—the ruined temple and the serrated contour of the plateau are etched in mid-air by the white light against a gulf of darkness, a veritable city of the skies.

The Acropolis, crowned with perfect art, crowded with the loftier phantoms of our elder kin, is a light-house for all time. Liberty and Law are its keepers. “Knowledge comes but Wisdom lingers,” and this citadel is to every thoughtful man in some sense a symbol of his goal. Its stately Propylæa welcomes all. No sincere pilgrim of Truth is an alien in the long Pancosmic procession of statesman and scientist, inventor and poet, artisan and artist that winds up the steep ascent to lay an ever freshly woven peplus at the feet of Wisdom.

CHAPTER V
ATHENS: FROM THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS TO
MENANDER

“Know that our city has the greatest name amongst all men because she never yields to her misfortunes. And even should we ever be compelled to yield a little—for it is nature’s way that all things bloom to suffer loss—there will abide a memory that we made our dwelling-place to be a city dowered with all things, and the mightiest of all.”

Thucydides, Oration of Pericles in the Assembly.

After the battles of Salamis and Platæa the Athenians brought back their families to Attica. Athens was a scene of desolation: the walls destroyed, the dwelling-houses ruined heaps, the sanctuaries burnt, the statues and other dedicatory offerings broken or carried off by the Persians. But the invaders had not carried off Athena Nike. Æschylus puts his own triumphant feeling into the mouth of the Persian messenger who brings the news of the defeat of Xerxes to Queen Atossa:—

“The city of the goddess Pallas gods preserve.

(QUEEN)

What say’st? The city? Athens? Is it still unsacked?

(MESSENGER)

Yes, in its living men its bulwark stands secure.”

Euripides, also, reëchoes this word of Æschylus and denies the sack of Athens. As a matter of fact little remained save a few houses used as Persian headquarters. But the blackened walls of the old temple on the Acropolis still stood in grim protest against the violation of the Virgin’s home and as an appeal to the citizens to provide her with a fairer abode. The appeal was not disregarded. In the fifth century the city was extended and the Acropolis was adorned with monuments of sculpture and architecture. The gods and the public needs came first. Private dwellings in the fifth century were not imposing. The old Marathon fighters and their immediate descendants were content with private simplicity. In the fourth century, however, private luxury came uppermost. Demosthenes contrasts the unequalled splendour of the temples, statues and public buildings of the old time with the moderation in private life, which, he says, was so marked “that if any of you perchance knows what sort of a house was the dwelling of Aristides or Miltiades or any of those then eminent, he sees that it was no whit more stately than those next door—while to-day upstarts have built themselves private houses more stately than the public buildings.”

Systematically to discuss the fifth and fourth century references to specific sites—buildings public and private, stoas, temples, theatres, gymnasia, music-halls, courtrooms, sanctuaries and statues, walls and gates, the place of the Assembly, the market-place and the markets, fountains, streets, and wards, would require several volumes. And although it is possible to present by inference a reasonably clear picture of the environment and daily life of the citizens, yet the exact identification of the majority of the sites in the remains existing to-day is either impossible or a matter of conjecture. Apart from the Acropolis buildings but few conspicuous ruins or memorials of these two great centuries are left for actual inspection. The continuous occupation of Athens by successive generations of changing masters has obliterated or buried (perhaps for future identification) the greater part of the city that lay around the base of the Acropolis. It is only surprising that so much remains. It is not meagre except in comparison with what has disappeared.

Around or over all that is left of Classic, Hellenistic, or Roman Athens is the modern city, effacing itself in patches at the behest of the archæologist, or developing slowly in accordance with its own needs.

In this chapter, however, we have to do directly only with the Athens of the fifth or fourth centuries. If the physical remains from this period are fragmentary, the literature, although itself but fragments of the whole, is the great bulk of existing classic Greek literature outside of the epic, the earlier philosophers, and the lyric. And this corpus of literature was in large part native Attic. At the same time the talent from without gravitated also to Athens. Herodotus from the Dorian Halicarnassus not only wrote in Ionic, but adopted the Athenian attitude so largely as to vitiate in part his value as an independent historian. Hippocrates, the great Ionian physician, visited Athens. The Sophists, though coming from the North, the West, or the islands, found in Athens the appropriate environment for a “circuit” faculty of an unarticulated federal university. Prose, seasoned and adorned, became henceforth an asset of the Athenian intellect and was made ready for the use of historian, orator, and philosopher. Athens, mistress of the seas, and herself producer of art and literature, needed no protective tariff against intellectual imports.

This very wealth of fifth and fourth century literature imposes limitations, more rigid than our uncertainty about this, that, or the other site, upon the effort to interpret the external Athens from the more enduring monuments of her thinkers. Nor is it true that the nexus between Athens and her literature may be made clear only by definite localization. We do not wish the conditions reversed. Although, for example, the courtrooms and the Lyceum have disappeared, we may, as we wander about Athens to-day, come much nearer the Greeks of the classic age than if, while the buildings had remained intact, the words of the orators and of the great Peripatetic could no longer reach our ears. The so-called “Theseum,” largely perfect as it is and invaluable for architectural and artistic suggestion, leaves us cold in the lack of literary association as compared with the Propylæa where many an old-time Athenian rubs elbows with us as we pass in and out between its stately columns. But in a wider sense we may “localize,” here on this Attic plain around the Acropolis and here under this Attic sky, the poetry and prose of the fifth and fourth centuries.

A brief summary of this poetry and prose will perhaps suggest more clearly the larger pattern from which, almost arbitrarily, selections may be made.

In the fifth century, lyric was brought to its perfection by singers not of Athens. But Ceos, the birthplace of two of them, was moored close to Attica. Simonides, the poet-laureate of the Persian wars, was much in Athens, and his nephew Bacchylides took the Attic Theseus for the theme of two of his extant poems, wrote one of his epinician odes in honour of an Athenian victor, and composed another poem expressly in laudation of Athens. Pindar himself studied in Athens, and afterwards, to his own townspeople’s disgust, praised her in no grudging terms. The Athenian drama itself, in the chorals of tragedy and of Aristophanes, contributed much of the greatest lyric extant in Greek literature.

Tragedy in the fifth century grew from infancy to maturity at Athens. When Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had completed their work it had received its final form for the Greeks, and was so transmitted to the great actors and the lesser playwrights of the fourth century.

Comedy likewise culminated with Aristophanes in the fifth century. More flexible than tragedy, however, it could humour successfully the changing moods of the body politic and retain its vigour through the whole of the fourth century. Even under Macedon, Menander in the New Comedy could recast much that Euripides had tried, with varying success, to embody within the canonized limits of orthodox tragedy.

History was the gift of the fifth century. Herodotus after the Persian wars bridged with his epic prose the Ægean, and we reach terra firma in Thucydides’s history in the latter part of the century. In the first part of the fourth century we have Xenophon, the historian, biographer, essay-writer, and historical novelist. These were precursors of a line of historians appearing sporadically even down through Byzantine times.

Oratory, an inalienable inheritance of the Hellene even before Athena coached the crafty Odysseus, received at Athens a certain finality of form, or forms, that has imposed its influence upon the occidental, whether Roman or Englishman, lawyer or epideictic speaker. The unwritten word of statesmen like Pericles, fusing the persuasion of the politician with the keener rationalism of Anaxagoras and the raucous, but not wholly unpatriotic, opportunism of demagogues like Cleon or Hyperbolus, was paired with the more decently draped pragmatism of the Sophists, and resulted in the selected group of the “ten” orators, of the fifth and fourth centuries. There was the somewhat archaic Antiphon, the dignified criminal lawyer; Andocides, who brought his rough and ready style to bear upon burning questions of contemporary politics; Lysias, the son of an alien, but truly Attic, the younger friend of Socrates, the lucid narrator, the relentless prosecutor; Isæus, the capable testamentary barrister; Isocrates, who both saw the building of the Erechtheum and outlived the battle of Chæronea, and whose over-finished oratory transmitted the florid adornment of Gorgias to the schools in which Cicero was trained; Demosthenes, greatest of all, whether in private suits or in his arraignment of public foes, whose terrorizing cleverness was quick to strike or counter like the flashing arms of the athlete impeded with no ounce of florid superfluity; Æschines, his great antagonist; Lycurgus; Hyperides; and Dinarchus.

Philosophy as a native Attic product matured last of all. Ionia had produced the great “physical” philosophers, and Pythagoras had gone in the sixth century to Italy; but in the first half of the fifth century the so-called “colonial” philosophers, like the foreign Sophists, influenced Athenian thought—some of them by personal visits. They came from the East and from the West. Parmenides came from Italy, and his influence was felt by Socrates and transmitted to Plato and Aristotle. The aristocratic Empedocles came on a visit from Sicily. Anaxagoras from Ionia settled at Athens in his youth. His “chaos-controlling mind”—the primal force of reason—impregnated the statesmanship of Pericles and engendered the rationalism of Euripides. The Athenians might banish the philosopher, but his “primal force of reason” was already busy in rearranging the chaos of traditional beliefs. It emerges clearly in Plato as intelligent Mind. Socrates, though not himself a writer, is the central figure of philosophic literature. Pre-Socratic thought focussed in him as in a burning-glass. From him shoot out the divergent rays of the Academics and Peripatetics, the Cynics and the precursors of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics. No one of his disciples reproduced his views with any exactness, but he stimulated self-examination and independent thought. Each took from him what he could or would, and developed differing or mutually exclusive schools. Like the rivers of Greece, coursing for a time through the underground “katavothras,” pre-Socratic speculative thought on physics and metaphysics flowed on beneath the open devotion of Socrates to ethical questions, and reappears in his successors.

Plato in the fourth century constituted himself the ethical and philosophic executor of Socrates. Loyalty and a wide vision alike combined to perpetuate his master’s name in the intellectual output of the great Platonic dialogues. It has been the work of centuries to disentangle the real views of this sleeping partner from those of Plato’s own constructive intellect, which built, pulled down, and reared anew the dwelling-places for the minds of many men in many generations.

Aristotle, like Anaxagoras, came as an alien and settled in Athens in his youth. After the death of his master, Plato, he left Athens, travelled, and became the tutor of Alexander. After the accession of his royal pupil to the throne, he established at Athens in the Lyceum a rival school to the Academy.

Antisthenes, half Athenian, half Thracian, the faithful follower of Socrates, had before this established the Cynic school in another gymnasium, the Cynosarges, where the victors fresh from Marathon had encamped. Socrates, the barefoot friar, the new avatar of Heracles, was his patron saint. Later in the century Zeno the Stoic set up his eclectic school in the Painted Porch of the Agora, and Epicurus, of an Attic father though born at Samos, established his school in his own Gardens near the Dipylon.

Theophrastus, the friend of Epicurus and of Menander, gives us in his “Characters,” at the close of this period, vivid portraits of Athenian life which supplement the fragments of Menander and the other writers of the New Comedy, and also, as pupil and successor of Aristotle, carried on his master’s teachings in the Lyceum. Thus one pupil busied himself in transmitting through his intellectual heirs the esoteric thought of his master, while Alexander, another pupil, had constructed on lines that paralleled the intellectual imperialism of his teacher a material organon of Empire (utterly at variance with his master’s conception of the ideal state) that no successor could wield alone until Rome reached forth and grasped it in her iron hand.

But to understand at all the meaning of the literature, it is also necessary to remind ourselves of some of the more striking features of the history of these two centuries. They are crowded with conspicuous figures and with events significant to the philosophic student of political institutions.

In general the fifth century exhibits the rise and downfall of the imperialistic policy, the fourth century the rehabilitation of a chastened democracy, with sporadic echoes of a federalizing ideal. But no one policy can be predicated of the fifth century. It varied with the great leaders, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, and others—the old in conflict with the new; conservative, aristocratic democracy against imperialism; democracy against oligarchy; ochlocracy against democracy. When the Persian peril was thrust back, the irrepressible conflict between Sparta and Athens emerged. The struggle for the hegemony between them, or between varying combinations of the Greek states, was to continue at intervals until the time when all the old powers of Greece were to succumb to Macedon.

Themistocles, the hero of Salamis, was ostracized from Athens within eight years of the great sea-fight, but his spirit still animated his countrymen, and his policies were afterwards revived or expanded. His rival Aristides guided affairs at home, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades, sailed with the conquering Athenian navy. His victory at Eurymedon in 468 B. C. made it possible to fortify Athens and Piræus and to merge the Confederacy of Delos in the Athenian Empire. In seven years more Cimon in turn was ostracized, but at the end of another seven years the rich treasure of Delos could be transferred to Athens and the empire formally established. It was to last until the disaster at Ægospotami, in 405 B. C. Pericles, after successfully competing with the reactionary patriotism of statesmen like Thucydides, obtained, at the ostracism of the latter in 442 B. C., the controlling power at Athens, which he guided by his regal persuasion for the next fifteen years. The imperialism of Pericles realized the policy of Themistocles on the seas, reaped the harvest of the great Cimon’s victories, and transmuted the treasure of Delos into the sinews of war and the monuments of the glorified Acropolis. He reshaped the civic life, even curtailing the sacred powers of the Areopagus, and by popular changes in the complexion of Council, Assembly, and Law Courts, prepared the way for the uneven rule of demagogues after his own strong hand should be withdrawn. He had great odds to contend with. After the renewal of the Peloponnesian wars in 431 B. C., with the succession of victories and reverses, the Great Plague came to assert an unlooked-for hegemony. On the suffering and disasters of the city followed the trial and condemnation of Pericles himself. He was indeed reinstated as indispensable, but his death in the following year left Athens at the mercy of the demagogues—with Alcibiades to follow. The Sicilian expedition, the crowning venture of imperialism, issued—as was to be expected with no real successor of Pericles to direct it—in the disaster of 413 B. C., when the brave Syracusans, with the willing help of Sparta, dissipated the Athenian dream of vast colonial expansion.

The next ten years was for Athens a losing struggle at home and abroad. The short-lived oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 B. C., the strenuous but vain efforts of Theramenes to reconcile oligarchy and democracy, the civic strife and war with the powerful Lysander, the crushing defeat at Ægospotami, the intervention of Sparta, the brief but terrible régime of the Thirty Tyrants, completed, in 404 B. C., the final overthrow of imperial Athens. But Sparta, with politic generosity, while doing away with the empire, left Athens free to establish a more stable democracy that was to last through the greater part of the fourth century. Oligarchy could no more find a hearing, and, although Hellenic federations were eloquently advocated by the orators and actually formed, despotic empire was no longer feasible for the Athenians. Their new leader, Conon, however, the foe of Sparta, could succeed after Lysander’s death in making Athens independent and strong. We come upon his work now and again in Athens and in Piræus, and in the renascent civic life the intellectual life went on with new vigour. The imperial dream finally came true, but from the outside. The Macedonian, though sneered at as barbarian by Demosthenes, confirmed at the Olympic games the validity of his Hellenic claim that he had asserted at Chæronea. The fitful struggle against the sway of Macedon only resulted, under a successor less philhellenic than Philip, in the forced suicide of the great Demosthenes and the execution of Hypereides, whose funeral oration, pronounced over the dead heroes of the “lost cause,” carries us beyond the great speech of Pericles—pronounced on a similar but less hopeless occasion—back to the heroes of Marathon and Salamis. Speaking of the dead leader Leosthenes, he says: “In the dark under-world—suffer us to ask—who are they that will stretch forth a right hand to the captain of our dead?... There, I deem, will be Miltiades and Themistocles, and those others who made Hellas free, to the credit of their city, to the glory of their names.”[^[8]]

We sit to-day beneath a Greek sky on the rising tiers of the modern centuries, and the drama of Athenian life is reproduced before our eyes. The greater protagonists of literature and life play out their rôles. Many another actor plays his less prominent but essential part. The “mutes” contribute. The chorus of democracy is seldom absent from the scene. The binoculars of modern historians penetrate behind paint and mask and robe, and the squalor of the real actor is at times laid bare. We may choose, however, to ignore minutiæ and to give ourselves up to the more satisfying perspective of the literature, and to let sweep before us the bright procession of form and colour, the song and saga, the Dionysiac revel and tragic mimicry that fill out the real drama of life.

Æschylus connects the old and the new Athens. Before Marathon he produced his first play; in the interval before Salamis he gained a first prize; and he brought out his greatest dramas in the time of the Renascence, of which he was a great part.

The bare hill of the Areopagus claims attention as we descend from the Propylæa. It rises as a physical barrier between the deserted site of the old city of Theseus and that of Classic or of Modern Athens. With the sanctity attaching to the time-honoured prerogatives of its venerable court it was also a moral barrier between the old and the new in the days when Pericles was reshaping the civic life. And Æschylus in his “Eumenides,” the third play of his great trilogy, strove as best he could to reconcile old traditions with the inevitable readjustment to the life of imperial Athens. He spoke with the authority of a Hebrew prophet. Whatever else was changed, blood-guiltiness must be judged. Only within the mysterious gloom of the cleft beneath the Areopagus could the dread and ancient Furies, spawn of Night, be transformed into willing coadjutors of the goddess of Wisdom.

AREOPAGUS

The Furies in hot haste have pursued from Delphi Orestes, the mother-murderer. Confidently anticipating the verdict, they cry:—

“Over the victim thus we chaunt,

A frenzy and madness his mind to daunt,

A hymn of the Furies to fetter the mind,

A withering blight to human kind.”

The god Apollo himself appears for the defendant, and when the decision goes against the Furies by Athena’s casting vote in the Areopagus Court, their bitterness against the “new” gods shoots forth like the serpents uncoiling in their hair:—

“Ah upstart gods and parvenu!

My ancient laws your hoof-beats spurn.

Ye wrested them from out my hand,

Alas for you!

I, though dishonoured and distressed,

Upon this land

The grievous weight of my wrath shall turn

And from my breast

Shoot venom on venom, woe for woe,

Drop upon drop of a poison flow

For Earth unbearable, unblest.”

Athena pacifies the Furies by promising them a local sanctuary and the reverence of the citizens for all time. The old order is reconciled with the new, and the Furies, now the Eumenides—the Propitious Ones—are escorted to their dwelling in the cleft of the Areopagus by Athena’s own attendants, boys, maidens, and matrons, with ceremonious honour equal to the Panathenaic procession:—

“Fare ye on to your home in your emulous might

With our loyal attendance, ye children of Night.

(O my countrymen, bless them and praise them!)

“In the caverns of eld, in the womb of the Earth

With the offerings of honour befitting your worth.

(O my demesmen, now bless them and praise them!)

“Nay, then, righteous and gracious in mind to our land,

Come, come, O ye Dread Ones, take joy in our band.

(Cry aloud now! Exult in your singing!)

“As the torches attend, let libations be poured,

Thus the all-seeing Zeus and the Moiræ as ward

To the people of Pallas their presence afford.

(Cry aloud now! Exult in your singing!)”

The great mass broken off from the east end of the Areopagus rock has partially blocked the cleft into which the chorus conducts home the Dread Goddesses. As the procession, chanting its hymn, sweeps around the shoulder of the hill, the faded picture of ancient Athens regains its outlines as if under some powerful reagent. Wine-press and fountain, precincts and temples, rise again from their ruins; the throbbing life of the eager citizens reappears. But the gaily-dressed people have hushed jest and carping under the sense of awe evoked by Æschylus. The Athenians were then, as St. Paul on this same Areopagus called them long afterwards, “very scrupulous,” and it was no unworthy superstition that made it imperative to harmonize the cruder conceptions of the immutable laws of Retribution with the new and expansive wisdom of Athena. Swinburne, with keen insight into the universal application of the great drama, brings the “shadows of our deeds” under wisdom’s searching but not unkindly light:—

“Light whose law bids home those childless children of eternal night,

Soothed and reconciled and mastered and transmuted in men’s sight

Who behold their own souls, clothed with darkness once, now clothed with light.”

The visitor who takes his stand to-day immediately in front of the south side of the Areopagus is completely sequestered from the modern city. Here the Acropolis and the Areopagus rock make practically a continuous barrier to the close-built streets that on the northern side come crowding up their slopes. He is encircled with hills, and this ancient quarter of the city of Theseus lies waste and silent around him. The ground is harrowed and scarred by the spade of the archæologist. Only the foundations of sanctuaries and fountains, houses and cisterns, may be distinguished.

The rock-chambers opposite, called by courtesy the “Prison of Socrates,” will, however, recall us to classic Athens. While waiting for the return of the mission-ship from Delos to bring the day of execution, Crito and the rest listened to Socrates’s demonstrations of immortality. Plato sent his reason out as far into the invisible as reason can go. In the “Phædo,” after his half-playful periegesis of the underworld, Socrates is made to say: “Whosoever seem to have excelled in holy living, these are they who are set free and released from these earthly places as from prisons and fare upward to that pure habitation and make their dwelling-place in yonder land.... Therefore we must do our utmost to gain in life a share in virtue and wisdom. For the prize is noble and the hope is great!” or, as he adds presently, “The risk is fair.” And Socrates, like Pindar before him, finds the crowning joy of a blessed immortality neither in the unlaborious sunlit life by night and day, nor in the ocean breezes, nor in the flowers of gold blooming on trees of splendour, but in the company of the great and noble dead with whom to live “’twere more of happiness than tongue can tell.”

On the Pnyx hill we may recall the Athenian Assembly, and may turn in fancy the voluminous pages of Congressional Records filled with patriotism and jealousy; we listen to Pericles and his persuasive schemes for imperial expansion; or to Socrates, president for the day, refusing, amidst the clamours of demos and demagogues, to put to vote the illegal proposition to condemn in a body the ten generals; or to Demosthenes pleading, denouncing, planning for the welfare of the city. Or in the half-light before dawn we may see the suffragettes of Aristophanes’s “Ecclesiazusæ” filing up the hill. More wily than their modern sisters, they have disguised themselves with beards and have dressed in the shoes and cloaks distrained from their husbands, imprisoned at home by naked necessity. With no man to oppose, the women quickly transfer the whole control of the State to themselves, and institute reforms that would put to shame the most radical of modern socialists. A slave, in the “Wasps” of Aristophanes, once had a dream by no means respectful to the Athenian legislature. Some sheep, with cloaks and staves, sat huddled together like just so many Athenians on the seats of the Pnyx, holding an Assembly. To-day the hill is left lonely, and the wandering goats, with their solemn faces and long beards, might renew the sittings unmolested.

In the face of the hill fronting towards the Acropolis, the rock-chamber of the Callirrhoë spring, with its sloping entrance and the parapet within, has been suggested as the original of the famous cave in Plato’s “Republic.” The Vari Cave, on the south side of Hymettus, might have made less of a strain, as has been urged, upon Plato’s imagination. However faint the resemblance of the Callirrhoë cave to Plato’s complex setting, it is enough to emphasize the vitality of this realistic figure, which has become typical, in modern poetry and prose, of the denizens of earth watching and naming the shadows thrown by the fire-light upon the cave’s wall, unable by reason of fetters to look around at the objects moving behind them, much less to rise and climb the long ascent to the brighter light above.

The innocent-looking ravine west of the Hill of the Nymphs is identified with the Barathrum. In antiquity its fame had penetrated to the underworld, where the innkeeper’s maid threatened to pitch the Pseudo-Heracles “into the Barathrum.” And Herodotus’s apocryphal story is at least ben trovato. He relates that, when the ambassadors of Darius came asking tokens of submission from the Greeks: “Some [the Athenians] took the messengers and threw them into the Barathrum, others [the Spartans] into a well, and bade them take earth and water from there to their King.” Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, if we are to believe the allusion in the “Gorgias,” barely escaped with a fine and banishment instead of the criminal’s end in this same pit.

If even the skeleton of the Athenian Market-place could be resurrected, like that of the Roman Forum, many scores of allusions would take on a local habitation. The Agora was the centre of life. In classic times it probably lay in the depression west of the “Theseum” hill, and extended, from the slopes of the Areopagus, northward about to the modern Hadrian street. Pindar, with no idle flattery, spoke of the “fair-famed Agora, in sacred Athens, inlaid with cunning workmanship.” Sculptor, painter, and architect gave of their best. The Prytaneum, close to, or in the Agora, was the city’s fireside. Distinguished foreigners and citizens here and in the Tholus enjoyed, temporarily or for life, the public hospitality. Socrates ironically suggests to his judges that the sentence really fitting his case would be: “Maintenance in the Prytaneum, much more so indeed than if any one of you has come off victor at Olympia with a race horse, a pair, or a four-horse team.” Plutarch relates that Aristides, far from enriching himself from the public purse, left not even enough for his funeral expenses, and that the Athenians “married off his daughters from the Prytaneum at the public cost—voting a dowry of three thousand drachmas to each.” In the stoas that faced upon the Agora the citizens heard and discussed many a new thing, from the days when the great painting of the battle of Marathon was fresh in the Painted Porch, to the time when the Stoics appropriated this colonnade. In time of war a man would look fearfully at the bulletin board near by, to see if his name was posted for military duty; or in time of truce would feel that yonder beautiful group of Peace with the child Wealth best reproduced to the eyes the blessings so often absent during the wearisome Peloponnesian wars,—blessings which Bacchylides, the admiring neighbour of Athens, had celebrated:—

“And now for mortals Peace, the mighty mother, giveth birth

To Wealth and bears culled flowers of honey’d minstrelsy.

She makes on sculptured altars of the gods to blaze

Thigh pieces, in the yellow flame, of bullocks and of thick-fleeced lambs,

And lets the youths give thought to athletes’ toil and flutes and revelry.

Now in the steel-bound hand-loops of the shield

Are stretched the dusk-red spiders’ woven tapestries;

The barbèd spears, the two-edged swords are cankered o’er;

The trumpet’s brazen blare is still.”

To be near the Agora was a desideratum. The cripple, in Lysias’s oration, asking the Senate to continue his pension, refers to the fact that every one in Athens has his favourite lounging place: “One frequents the perfume-seller’s, another the barber’s, another the cobbler’s; and as a rule the most of them lounge into the shops set up nearest the Agora, and the very fewest resort to those most remote from it.” Socrates, too, seeking his audience where the crowds gravitated, was often heard talking “in the Market-place near the bankers’ tables.” Aristophanes, together with the other comic writers, and Lysias and Theophrastus tell not only of other resorts—like the fuller’s shop, the shield-and-spear-maker’s—but of many special sub-markets. Thus there were by the Agora the “Pottery” and the “Vegetable” Market, and, somewhere near, the “Green-cheese,” the “Garlic,” the “Wine,” the “Oil,” the “Fish” markets. Of the Bird-market we hear in some detail in Aristophanes,—the live pigeons in cages, strings of ortolans, thrushes abnormally inflated, and blackbirds with “feathers shamefully inserted in their nostrils”! In time of war the country folk thronged into town to escape the armies that were devastating Attica. In times of peace, too, they came trooping in on the first of the month, and to the oft-recurring festivals. Menander, with his blended Stoicism and Epicureanism, looks around in the crowded Agora and compares human life to a festival or market-fair:—

“That man, O Parmeno, I count most fortunate

Who quickly whence he came returns, when he, unvexed,

Has looked on these majestic sights—the common sun,

Water and clouds, the stars and fire. If thou shalt live

An hundred years, or if a very few, thou’lt always see

These same sights present, grander ones thou’lt ne’er behold.

So reckon thou this time I’m speaking of as though

Some market-fair or trip to town, where one may see

The crowd, the market, dice and loungers’ haunts;

Then, if thou’rt first unto thy lodgings, with more gold

Thou’lt go upon thy travels and shalt pick no brawl;

While he that tarries longer, worn, his money gone,

Grows old and wretched, and forever knows some lack,

A wandering vagrant finding enemies and plots,

And gains no death that’s easy, staying out his time.”

A broad avenue, flanked with porticoes, ran from the Market-place northwest to the Dipylon gate. This double gateway, impressive even from the remains of its foundations, quickens the memory to recall the generations of citizens and foreigners that have passed this way. Along the roads from Colonus and the Academy and the Sacred Way from Eleusis, converging outside the gates, will come a motley throng of Athenian ghosts, gay or scurrilous, militant or philosophic, to blot out the consciousness of the modern city. Outside the Dipylon, in the “Outer Cerameicus,” is “the Street of the Tombs.” Some of the beautiful monuments are still in situ to stimulate a detailed study of the rich material in the National Museum. It was here that the Athenians usually buried their dead. The roll-call of great names stirs the imagination here as in Westminster Abbey. This is no exclusive privilege of one place or people. But there is often an appropriate genius loci. As one lingers along the Appian Way, for example, deciphering inscriptions and pausing before the weather-beaten faces on the monuments, there is a lurking pessimism and an insidious melancholy that flow in from the beauty of the Roman Campagna. Here, however, in this proastion of Athens, this Suburb of the Dead, the memorials still in place, with their unpretentious sincerity, give rather a sensation of beauty and hope in perpetuating scenes from actual life. Even a scene of parting has less of hopeless finality. The warrior on his horse, the woman with her jewel-box, suggests life and love, not death and lamentation. Along yonder road from Eleusis came many an initiate fresh from the Mysteries, and some may well have been ready to listen with hope to Pindar’s “trumpet-blast for immortality”:—

“For them the night all through,

In that broad realm below,

The splendour of the sun spreads endless light;

’Mid rosy meadows bright,

Their city of the tombs with incense-trees,

And golden chalices

Of flowers, and fruitage fair,

Scenting the breezy air,

Is laden. There with horses and with play,

With games and lyres, they while the hours away.”[^[9]]

Whether or no we choose to identify with Charon the old man in the boat, represented on one of the stelæ still standing, Death and Life here confront each other. Æschylus, in his early allusion to Charon’s boat, draws the contrast by an antithesis of the black sails of the ship of Theseus to the god of Light, and speaks of the “rowing” of the mourners’ arms causing—

“that dark-sailed mission-ship, upon whose deck Apollo treads not and the sunlight falls not, through Acheron to pass unto that shore unseen where all must lodging find.”

And Euripides prepares his audience for the pathetic departure of Alcestis to the underworld by a sharp dialogue between Apollo and Death, who is at once as old and as lusty as Death in the Morality plays.

STREET OF THE TOMBS
Monument of Hegeso

After the battle of Chæronea Philip sent back the ashes of the dead Athenians, and Demosthenes counted it the highest honour to deliver their funeral oration. But the noblest association with this spot is the great oration of Pericles, who was chosen in the course of the Peloponnesian War to pronounce the public eulogy over the dead warriors. These were borne along in cypress chests, with one empty litter to represent those whose bodies had not been recovered. The long speech is the incarnation of the Athenian spirit and of Pericles’s own undaunted policy. Thucydides represents him as saying:—

“They received praise that grows not old and a most illustrious tomb; not that in which they here are laid but wherever, as occasion arises, there remaineth the ever-living glory of their word and work. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men, and not only in their own land does an inscription upon columns tell of it, but in other lands an unwritten memory dwells within the mind of all.”

The “Cerameicus” was soon to receive Pericles. The great plague carried off the orator’s sons, and, overcome by grief and the shipwreck of his plans, he died himself in the next year.

Thucydides describes the plague with appalling vigour. The misery and danger were aggravated by the congestion of the country folk crowding in to escape the Peloponnesian invaders. Bivouacked in stifling “shacks” during the hot summer, they died uncared-for and lay where they fell, dying upon one another, at home, in the streets, or by the fountains where they had tried in vain to quench their fever.

In the “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles the plague at Thebes is pictured in terms certainly reminiscent, at least here and there, of what must have been the most awful memory of the poet’s life. The blight that has fallen alike on the land and on its inhabitants is described by the Chorus:—

“Nay, for no longer the glorious Earth

Yieldeth her young; nor by ever a birth

Of a child do our women change sorrow to mirth.

You may see how they’re flocking like birds of unrest

Or swifter than fire’s unquenchable quest,

Afar to the shore of the God in the West.

“They are unnumbered, dead and dying,

The city’s children, unpitied they’re lying,

With no one to mourn them, outstretched on the ground,

Death and pestilence spreading around.”

Thucydides relates, too, that the Athenians discussed an ancient oracle which told how a “Dorian war will befall and a pestilence come as companion”; and that in the midst of their despair they could debate whether the oracle said “pestilence” (λοιμός) or “famine” (λιμός), either word being appropriate enough. History repeats itself. At Athens in 1906, during a virulent outbreak of smallpox, with the pest-houses overflowing, the newspapers calmly turned to the really vital question of the proper Greek word for the disease—whether it should be evloyiá (εὐλογιά), or effloyiá (εὐφλογιά).

Amidst the splendour of the public buildings the dwelling-houses long remained insignificant. The streets were dark at night. The houses had few windows to let out such light as might come from the “dim and stingy wick” of some miser watching his hoards, or from that of a perplexed father reckoning up his son’s horse-racing debts, as we find old Strepsiades doing in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes:—

“The month’s end’s coming and the interest rolling up.

I say, slave, light a lamp and bring my ledger here.

. . . . . . . . .

Slave (entering).

There’s scarce a drop of oil in this here lamp of ours.

Strepsiades.

O my! Why did you, tell me, light that thirsty lamp?

Come here that you may get a weeping!

Slave.

And why so?

Strepsiades.

Because you put in one of those fat, greedy wicks.”

In the “Wasps” the jurors, out before dawn to secure a job at the court-room, pick their way along the dark streets with only the link-boys to guard them against stumbling-stones and refuse.

Member of Chorus.

“Let’s march by the lamp and everywhere look well about, around us,

Lest here or there should be some stone to trip us and confound us.

Boy.

Watch out there, father, father, for this dirt, watch out!

Member of Chorus.

Pick up a chip here from the ground and snuff the lamp.

Boy.

No, with my finger thus I choose to snuff the lamp!

Member of Chorus.

What’s got into your head, with hand to shove the wick,

And that when oil’s so scanty? There, you fool, take that!”

The flat-roofed houses were low. Highwaymen could sit on the roofs and jump down on their victims. Burglars, who preferred a change from the conventional method of digging through the soft bricks, could climb over the house-wall. The street-mire and “Apaches” were familiar in violet-crowned Athens. Demosthenes on occasion loads his terrible Gatling gun with details picked up from the street. In his oration “Against Conon” he describes a brawl. The plaintiff recites how the said Conon and his crew had met him near the Leocorion at the Agora, tripped up his legs, trampled him in the mire, cut his lip, and bunged up his eyes; how, finally, as he lay there, Conon was egged on by the others to flap his arms like wings and to crow over him like a victorious rooster.

The Gymnasia of Athens emphasize one of the most characteristic features of Athenian life—the close interrelation of the physical and the intellectual. Here the youths were trained in their naked beauty; here the philosophers collected their data; here they afterwards taught their doctrines. To-day, unhappily, we must content ourselves with recalling the natural beauty surrounding the Academy at Colonus, or reconstructing scenes like those in the “Euthydemus,” the “Charmides,” the “Laches,” or “Lysis” of Plato. At the opening of the “Lysis” Socrates is making his way close under the outside of the north wall of the city, bound from the Academy for the Lyceum, which was probably somewhere east of the present King’s Gardens. Thus the path between Plato’s Academy and the future school of Aristotle was worn by the footsteps of their great predecessor. Socrates on this occasion, however, was deflected by an eager youth to enter a new palæstra just opened near the fountain of Panops, possibly near the gate of Diochares now placed by conjecture near the intersection of the Street of the Muses and Boulè Street. He is persuaded without difficulty and holds a discussion on Friendship with the handsome youths gathered there. In the “Charmides” likewise he goes to another palæstra, Taureas, which was near the Itonian gate, probably not far from the Olympieum. He had just come back the evening before from the engagement at Potidæa, and is eagerly questioned about the battle. As usual, he guides the talk into other channels and there follows a discussion upon Temperance.

Although the sites of the courts are uncertain, we know what went on in them. The Athenian passion for litigation is a commonplace. Lucian’s Icaromenippus, looking down from the moon on the kingdoms of the classic world, characterizes the inhabitants thus: “I could see the nomad Scyths in their wagons; the Egyptian farming; the Cilician buccaneering; the Spartan flogging; and the Athenian pettifogging.” So, in the newly organized Bird-town of Aristophanes, one of the first visitors, following hard after the parricide, is a Law-suit-hatcher. He “cannot dig,” but is not ashamed of his blackmailing trade. He comes to the birds for wings to bear him around among the Isles as “Summoner.”

The “Wasps” is a comedy directed against this frailty of the Athenians. The old Philocleon (demagogue-lover), on account of his inordinate passion for sitting on juries, is forcibly detained at home by his son who, to console his father, arranges a trial of the dog Labes (Snap) who has rushed into the kitchen and devoured a Sicilian cheese. The trial is conducted with detailed and rigorous conventionality. The defendant is finally acquitted, thanks to the puppies, who are brought into court and “whining beg him off, entreat and weep!”—a parody on the common but illegal method of influencing a jury, which Socrates scorned to adopt when on trial for his life.

With the exception of the Acropolis itself, the great Dionysiac Theatre perhaps offers most to allure the visitor. Although in its present state, with the later disfigurements of Roman times, we can only with difficulty form a detailed picture of its structure even in the fourth century, yet the slight traces of the circular orchestra, now identified beneath it, entitle the visitor to associate with this site the classic drama and to give free play to not unnatural sentiment. It is an epitome of the Athenian drama. It interprets, and is interpreted by, a wide range of literature. Here, too, in later times were gathered popular assemblies. Here, looking over plain and sea, sat generations of citizens and guests to be moved to laughter or to tears. Here the “Shameless Man” of Theophrastus managed to get himself and his children in for nothing by manipulating the places which he had purchased for his foreign visitors.

And not only could the philosopher Theophrastus find subjects for his character sketches among the theatre-goers, and turn the critics into material for his critique, but his friend, the playwright Menander, could in his comedy use the dramatic troupe as matter for his sententious characterization. Already in the time of Aristophanes the chorus was unequally constituted: some members trained as star performers to take a more active part, others to move as mutes in the background. Menander utilizes this custom to illustrate, in a fragment preserved to us, the workers and the drones of life:—

“Just as in choruses not every one doth sing,

But certain two or three mere speechless dummies stand

Filling the rows, so here ’tis somehow similar:

These fill a space, while these, to whom God grants it, live!”

The precinct of the Asclepieum, adjoining the Theatre, was a Sanatorium where religion and faith-cures were combined with actual medical skill. In the “Plutus” of Aristophanes the blind god, Wealth, is restored to discriminating vision. His head was covered by “Panacea” with a purple cloth, and two expert snakes operated upon his eyes.[^[10]] This comic scene is not, it may easily be credited, too much of a burlesque upon some of the practices at such places. Magic miracles, including the “absent treatment” of recalcitrant lovers, are not unknown in other ages. But a visit to the famous health-resort of the great school of Hippocrates, on the island of Cos, will tend to inspire a respect for Greek therapeutics. The “open-air” treatment on the mountain terrace overlooking the sea may have been modern enough, and, along with the use of the sulphur spring, suggests both technical knowledge and common sense.

Close by the Theatre to the east, hemmed in by modern houses, the beautiful little circular shrine, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, reminds us of the cost and rivalry attendant upon bringing out the dramas. The weathered sculpture around the top speaks once again of the inseparable connection of Athenian life and literature. It carries us back to the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus. The pirates who kidnapped the god are here undergoing punishment; some, already half changed into dolphins, are diving into the sea. In the hymn the pirates, who have carried off the youth in his purple robe, deem him a rich prize for ransom. But the vine with clustering grapes that presently entwines sail and yards proclaims the god. He transformed himself into a bear, then a lion, and they at the sight,—

“All of them shunning the doom that was on them, together out-springing,

Leaped to the water divine and, leaping, were turned into dolphins.”

The combination at Athens of natural beauty and material splendour with moral and intellectual worth called forth praise from both guests and citizens. To Bacchylides of Ceos the city is “spacious Athens,” “splendour-loving.” The Graces “wreath-winning and violet-eyed” are to dower his songs with honour when he addresses himself to its specific praise:—

“Brooding thought of the Cean isle

Poet’s care men praised erst-while,

Weave me now a web of song

Resplendent, fit for Athens strong

Where love and loveliness belong.”

And Pindar, fresh from the gardens of Thebes, was impressed by the beauty of Athens at the vernal Dionysia:—

“The portals of the chamber of the Hours open wide, and growing plants, now nectar sweet, perceive the advent of the fragrant Spring; then, then on earth immortal shower the lovely tufts of violets, then in the hair the roses are entwined.”

A guest-present most highly prized by the Athenians is preserved in another fragment from Pindar:—

“Radiant, violet-crowned, by minstrels sung,

Bulwark of Hellas, Athens illustrious.”

But Aristides the Just might have as easily escaped ostracism as could this overworked epithet, “violet-crowned,” escape the irreverence of Aristophanes. Whenever foreign envoys, he says, wish to cheat us Athenians, they call us “violet-crowned,” and forthwith we are all attention.

Among all the native poets no one has given freer expression to his feeling for the beauty of Athens than Euripides, unhappy in his personal life and iconoclastic in his attitude towards old traditions. He breathes the air, stainless and of a more ethereal violet than the sea, and sings of the concord of Wisdom and the Heavenly Aphrodite:—

“Blest are the children of Erechtheus of the olden time, the children of the happy gods, who from a land inviolate and sacred feed on wisdom famed afar, and go upon their way forever, daintily enfolded by that bright, bright air.

“And Cypris, drawing water from Cephīsus flowing fair, breathes down upon the land the gentle breath of winds with sweetness laden and ever with her hair encompassed with blown roses’ fragrant coronals keeps sending down the Loves who have their seat by side of Wisdom, coadjutors they of Virtue manifold.”

Through the transparent candour of the philosopher’s robe the soul of the poet Plato is ever shining. But like Æschylus he is a poet militant. If he walks by the Ilissus he interprets in terms of the spiritual the physical charm of tree and water and the chirping insect; if he goes down to Phaleron, the Ægean does not bring in for him “the eternal note of sadness,” but his soul has “sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither”; and in the heaven’s vault, overarching Attica, he sees “many ways to and fro” where drive the chariots of the gods whom “he who will and can” may follow, “for from the choir divine all grudging stands aloof!” If to Plato the Athens of the fourth century seemed imperfect, if he was even embittered by the judicial murder of his master, it was with the truest patriotism that he turned to construct an ideal state. His sense of law and order was deep-rooted. It was with lofty optimism that he urged his hearers not to rest content with politics as they are, but to look to “the pattern that is laid up in heaven for him who wills to see and, seeing, so to plant his dwelling.”

CHAPTER VI
OLD GREECE IN NEW ATHENS

“Born into life!—’tis we,

And not the world, are new.”

Matthew Arnold.

Travellers fresh from Italy perceive an Oriental picturesqueness in modern Athens, but the immediate impression of its Occidental character gained by those who come from Egypt or Constantinople is the correct one. The old narrow streets, reminiscent of the Turkish period, are few in number and lie on the northern side of the Acropolis. Back of them, further to the north and west, lies a very clean and well-planned town which boasts of being a little Paris. The substantial houses and hotels, the dignified palaces of the royal princes and the buildings of the University and Museum, the conventional shops and public squares, the boulevards and gardens, give to Athens the general appearance of any European city that is moving fast toward and beyond a population of two hundred thousand, and is not yet disfigured by the smoke-stacks of factories. A welcome individuality of taste is shown chiefly in the classical architecture of the group of University buildings and of the Museum.

Even to pilgrims and strangers the modern city reveals an eager and, in many aspects, a charming life. But a special relationship follows in the wake of familiarity with the new, added to knowledge of the old, Athens. The student of Greek literature finds that he need not always seek the ruins of antiquity or the permanent stage-setting of Nature when he desires a sense of fellowship with the past. At any street corner this sense may be quickened by some person or object which is an integral part of the city’s modern life. Ancient literature not only gleams, like “a stately palace hall, with golden pillars of song,” but also mirrors common things, trivial or serious, which subtly unite the times of Homer with those of Pericles, and both with our own.

Greek gentlemen conspicuously engaged in having their boots blacked share the habits if not the politics of Aristophanes’s dicast who was always seeking the sponge and the basin of oil-mixed pitch for his dusty shoes. Street-venders from Rhodes, who beguile foreign ladies with embroideries, are plying the craft of the Phœnician peddler at the home of Eumæus, then a happy princelet and later the swineherd of Odysseus. The peddler displayed to Eumæus’s lady mother and her maidens a golden chain set here and there with amber beads, and “they offered him their price.” Bargaining, the basis of all transactions, is not always as amiable as it is in Rome. An Athenian cab-driver in search of drachmas can be as obstinate as the corpse in Aristophanes’s “Frogs,” whom Dionysus asked to take his luggage to Hades:—

Dionysus.

“You there! You dead man! You, I mean! I’m calling you.

Good fellow, wilt to Hades carry down my traps?

Corpse.

How many?

Dionysus.

These.

Corpse.

Wilt make it a two drachma job?

Dionysus.

Not I, by Zeus, but less.

Corpse (to the bearers).

Start up the funeral, you!

Dionysus.

Good sir, one moment! See if we can’t come to terms.

Corpse.

You’ll put down drachmas two, or else don’t talk to me.

Dionysus.

One drachma and a half? A bargain? Come, take that.

Corpse.

May I be—resurrected, if I do!

Xanthias.

What airs!

The cursed scamp! Plague take him! I will go myself.”

Dionysus and his servant had made their entrance with a donkey, ridden by Xanthias who was carrying the traps on a pole over his shoulder. No age has allowed the donkey to escape his manifest destiny of bearing burdens, nor has age or custom exhausted his capacity of occasional revolt. The persevering attack of the Trojans on Ajax could be likened only to the cudgelling by boys of a lazy ass which has strayed into a cornfield and will not desist from wasting the deep crop—an episode as modern as it is Homeric. But for the most part the little beasts carry patiently everything that is portable, as they did when, in the annual transportation of the properties used in the Eleusinian Mysteries, their dull share in a great business became proverbial. Their panniers of lemons and oranges and crates of water-jars are both antique and modern, and a famous lost picture of Polygnotus comes to life in a donkey loaded with fresh green boughs, moving toward the spectator.

That Dionysus, in search of a carrier, so conveniently saw a corpse in the street was due to the Athenian custom of bearing the dead to the grave on open biers. The same custom, shocking to foreign observers, prevails to-day; and at almost any hour, in any thoroughfare, may be seen one of these funeral processions, with the cover of the coffin carried in front and the uncovered face exposed to the curious and the indifferent. Thus exposed, the dead Alcestis was brought out from her palace, and the cortège, with which the modern procession seems to mingle, moves off the stage with prayers that Hermes and Persephone may kindly welcome this traveller to their realm. These deities have been forgotten, but their business is transferred to him who was once their grim agent. To the modern Greek peasant Charon is Death. Alcestis dreaded him as a messenger and ferryman:—

“I see, I see the two-oar’d skiff. With hand on pole

Charon, the ferryman of the dead, thus calleth me:

‘Why dost thou loiter? Hasten! Thou’rt delaying us.’

With words like these in angry haste he urgeth me.”

To-day he rides in his own might:—

“Why are the mountains so dark, and why so woebegone?

Is it the wind at war there, or does the rain-storm scourge them?

It is not the wind at war there, it is not the rain that scourges,

It is only Charon passing across them with the dead;

He drives the youths before him, the old folk drags behind,

And he bears the tender little ones in a line at his saddle-bow.”[^[11]]

Around the next corner, especially toward the end of Lent when spring lamb is due in the markets and shepherds troop to town, another song from the “Alcestis” may displace the strain of melancholy. For Apollo, Pythian lord of song, once served Admetus,—

“Like a shepherd, piping, piping,

Hymeneal echoes raising

Down along the sloping hillside

Where the woolly flocks are grazing.”

In the guise of a young man, the herdsman of a flock, most delicate, as are the sons of kings, Athena once appeared to Odysseus. And it was to a man who was pasturing his flocks on many-fountained Ida that Aphrodite gave her immortal heart. Perhaps thereafter in the streets of Troy Anchises made people think suddenly of early dawns on the mountain-side when the silver car of the moon hangs low over the sea and the nightingale sings and the bleating flocks answer the pipe’s ethereal cry. In Athens a transient shepherd, with his crook and his coat of fleece, may fling the townsman’s thoughts abroad to the men he has seen among the hills of Arcadia, where as of old a misty night is hateful to shepherds and goatherds, and a bright moon their heart’s delight; or in Lesbos, where still in mountain pastures the hyacinth is trampled under foot and darkens the ground. A flock of sheep following the bellwether from the country to the town is a reminder that the Greeks before Troy were ordered about like a great flock of white ewes by the thick-fleeced leader, Odysseus; and that the astute one, in the course of his later adventures, saved himself from the wrath of blind Polyphemus by clinging face upwards and with a steady heart, beneath the shaggy belly of his best and goodliest ram. Aristophanes in the “Wasps” parodies the Homeric ram. Here it is the family donkey which, led out to be sold, is smuggling under its shaggy belly the old man imprisoned by his son to cure him of the “jury habit.” The dejected donkey is addressed by the son:—

“Packass! why weepest thou? Because thou shalt be sold

To-day? Come, double-quick! Why these repeated groans

Unless, perchance, that some Odysseus thou dost bear?”

Athens is a bustling capital, but to the on-looker every Easter lamb becomes a Golden Fleece, and—

“A story lingereth yet,

A voice of the mountains old.”[^[12]]

The Easter feast is of great importance in Greece because the Lenten fast is so scrupulously observed. At all times the working people are temperate enough to have pleased Aristophanes, who liked to dwell on the simple living of a generation before his own, when from the country districts men trooped in to the assembly,—

“Each with his own little

Goatskin of wine,

Each with three olives, two

Onions, one loaf in his

Wallet, to dine.”[^[13]]

But during parts of Lent even vegetables are forbidden, and a man who has guided you up Pentelicus will accept from your lunch-basket only a few olives and an orange to supplement his own piece of coarse bread.

The markets are in the older and most picturesque part of the city, but only a modern Aristophanes could make them into scenes of rollicking farce shot through with political purpose. Provincial Megarians with pigs to sell, uncouth Bœotians bringing in vegetables and game, knavish Athenians offering garlic and salt and anchovies from Phaleron—probably the types are still here, dialects, morals and all, awaiting their sacred bard.

In the same district lies the bazaar known as Shoe Lane, where cobblers and tailors and carpenters work in the open, protected by awnings. Socrates, keen-eyed for handicraft and homely illustrations, often must have watched their forebears. Not far from the shoemakers, the coppersmiths, in the same district as of old, are suitably gathered in Hephæstus Street, whence the sound of ringing hammers echoes afar. The Homeric picture of Hephæstus in his forge on Olympus is duplicated in any little forge along the modern street, when a workman rises from his anvil and with a sponge wipes his face and hand and sturdy neck and shaggy breast. In more than one part of the city the “bankers’ tables,” at which also Socrates used to seek his crowd, are reproduced in the much frequented tables of the money changers.

The open-air bakeries of his day also exist again and tempt with their bread and plain cakes the exhausted sight-seer, whatever his philosophy. But a Platonist is deterred at the threshold of a pastry-cook’s in the fashionable shopping district by the remembrance that in the ideal life there is no place for “those celebrated delicacies, the Athenian confectionery.”

Modern Athens is too arid to afford many public fountains, but women still draw water from the meagre spring Callirrhoë, on the edge of the Ilissus, not far from the Zeus columns. This spring, in name and situation, is still identified by some experts with the town-spring of primitive Athens and the later Nine Spouts. The traveller who throws in his fortunes with the archæological opposition must at least find in the lesser Callirrhoë the Athenian counterpart of the fountains which in so many of the towns and villages of Greece perpetuate, in usefulness and charm, an antique life of homely activities transmuted into poetry. The townspeople of Odysseus drew their water just outside the city from a wayside spring deep in an alder thicket, where a basin had been fashioned to catch the cold stream falling from a cliff. In the old days of peace, when the plain was safe, the wives and daughters of the men of Troy had washed the family clothes in broad stone troughs beside the two springs that fed the Scamander. Nausicaä of Phæacia and her maidens did the palace washing so far from the town that the occasion involved a day’s excursion and a generous lunch-basket packed by the Queen. But there was a spring of drinking water nearer, for, when Odysseus was entering the city, Athena met him in the form of a young girl carrying a pitcher. At Eleusis, also, in the royal age, the king’s fawnlike daughters, their crocus-yellow hair dancing on their shoulders, drew water for the palace in vessels of bronze from the Maiden Well. In classical Athens, as to-day, only the poorer women went for their own water, and perhaps it was after meeting one who looked tired and hopeless that Euripides made Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, given in marriage to a peasant in Argos to further her mother’s schemes, cry aloud to the night:—

“O Night, dark foster-mother of the golden stars,

Thy shelter folds me while this jar bows low my head

As to and from the river-springs I come and go.”

Only in the Panathenaic procession did the carrying of water-jars become ennobled. To-day a working girl may be seen in a pose suggesting that of the maidens of the Phidian frieze.

AFTER POLYGNOTUS

THE PANATHENÆA CONTINUED

The folk-lore and customs of modern Greece, as heirs of the past, have been carefully scrutinized. Any knowledge that can be culled from special treatises will everywhere increase the traveller’s sense of historic continuity and will enrich his pleasure in meeting the country folk. But by means of only a modicum of Greek poetry he may discover for himself in Athens certain ancient beliefs and practices. On the first of March, associated like the May Day of colder climates with the blossoming of spring, bands of boys go about the streets carrying the wooden image of a bird, singing a carol which announces the arrival of the swallow, and begging gifts. One of these songs from Thessaly begins:—

“She is here, she is here, the swallow!

Cometh another of honey’d song,

She percheth, twittereth all day long,

Sweet are her notes that follow.”

That the same custom, no newer than the recurrence of Nature’s happiest gifts, enchanted the boys of ancient Athens we may infer from our knowledge of it in “seagirt” Rhodes. There the carol began:—

“She is here, she is here, the swallow!

Fair seasons bringing, fair years to follow!

Her belly is white,

Her back black as night!

From your rich house

Roll forth to us

Tarts, wines and cheese:

Or if not these,

Oatmeal and barley cake

The swallow deigns to take.”[^[14]]

When the spring was late, Aristophanes’s peevish old man was probably not the only one to say: “Zeus! is the swallow never going to come?” Nor under a punctual March sun was his sneak thief the only one to talk about the weather:—

“Haunting about the butcher’s shops, the weather being mild,

‘See, boys,’ says I, ‘the swallow there! why, summer’s come,’ I say,

And when they turned to gape and stare I snatched a steak away.”[^[15]]

In graver poetry the dusky swallow of Simonides shared with the lovely-voiced nightingale of Sappho the honour of announcing the fragrant spring.

Other seasons in Athens had their crop of mendicant carols, and the boyish custom of celebrating Apollo at one of his summer festivals by going about from house to house and singing songs of good wishes is suggested in the modern celebration of New Year’s or St. Basil’s day. It is even possible that the rough little model of a ship carried by the boys, as if to illustrate the sea-journey of the saint “come from Cæsarea,” is a late descendant of the ship that was carried in the Panathenaic procession, the origin of which lay in Theseus’s journey to Crete, and the sail of which was Athena’s own peplos.

With Easter come the most elaborate of the peasant dances that accompany all kinds of local religious festivals. Close at hand are the famous dances of Megara, but in defiance of tradition the Athenian sojourner may elect to visit those at Menidi, a large village about three miles to the north, whose panegyris or fair is not overrun by non-participants. There are several varieties of peasant dances, and a technical knowledge of the accompanying music will be of great service in interpreting them; but whatever their particular measure may be, and whether they are performed by men and women together or by women alone, they all possess a dignity and gravity which mark them off as something quite different from the gratification of a lively humour. The religious impulse is not wholly forgotten in the delights of a carnal holiday, and the dances are the expression, in unison, of a public feeling which in origin, at least, was reverential. Save for the leader, no individual assumes liberty of movement. In long lines or semi-circles the dancers link hands and sway in monotonous harmony.

Readers of ancient Greek literature will remember how important dances were in the religious festivals of all epochs. Their variety and their ancestral relation to the modern dances are subjects for technical study, but the spectator at Menidi is at liberty to let his imagination travel the Sacred Way to Eleusis, or cross the Ægean to Delos, or seek out Argos and distant Sparta. The modern inheritance is a limited one, for it recalls only the grave choral movements that originated in Sparta, and discards the license of the Dionysiac worship. And altogether preventive of any real reconstruction of the past is the fact that now only peasants at a country fair exhibit an art which once was an important element in city as well as in village religion, and which tested the grace of the gentlest born. It is a far call from a country field and the daughters of Menidi, bedight though they are with embroideries and necklaces and often fair of form and face, to the chief temple in Sparta and the choicest maidens of the Spartan state. But one certain bond there is between the girls of to-day and the princesses of yesterday. The Easter fair serves the purpose of a market for brides, and many a wedding follows it. Dancing is a part of this happy festival as it was in antiquity in all ranks of society. And were the maidens of Menidi exiled to America, they would long for the village green and the bridal feasts, even as Iphigeneia and her comrades, exiled among the northern Taurians, longed for Agamemnon’s palace and their Argive playfellows:—

“And it’s O! that I could soar down the splendour-litten floor

Where the sun drives the chariot steeds of light.

And it’s O! that I were come o’er the chambers of my home,

And were folding the swift pinions of my flight.

And that, where at royal wedding the bridesmaids’ feet are treading

Through the measure, I were gliding in the dance;

Through its maze of circles sweeping,

With mine older playmates keeping

Truest time with waving arms and feet that glance.

And it’s O! for the loving rivalry,

For the sweet forms costly arrayed,

For the raiment of cunningest broidery,

For the challenge of maid to maid,

For the veil light tossing, the loose curl crossing

My cheek with its flicker of shade.”[^[16]]

Athens, like most southern cities, impresses an Anglo-Saxon as having many holidays which “interrupt business”; but only during the New Year and Easter festivals can he begin to imagine a resemblance to the civic life of ancient Athens, which was almost a continuous pageant. “The gods,” said Plato, “in pity for the life of toil, man’s natural inheritance, appointed holy festivals whereby men alternate their labour with rest.” But at certain seasons, especially in the spring and autumn, the festivals were so congested that the days of labour must have been far from burdensome. Almost all the festivals had a religious origin, celebrating deities and heroes of political importance, like Athena or Theseus, or forces of nature embodied in Dionysus or Demeter. But, like Christmas, they gave abundant opportunity both for public enjoyment and for the cultivation of communal and family sentiment. Sophocles had in mind all their human charm when he made the blind Œdipus lament the future of his little daughters:—

“For to what gath’rings of your townsfolk shall you come,

Or to what festivals from whence you shall not turn

Back homeward bathed in tears, instead of any share

In all the holiday?”

The festivals were often connected with the activities of country folk, with planting and reaping, the vintage and the winepress, and yet at the same time played an important part in a highly cultivated city life. Some of them were confined to women, like the Thesmophoria, celebrated by matrons in honour of Demeter, the patroness of fruitful marriages, and used by Aristophanes as occasion and stage-setting for an attack on the misogyny of Euripides; or like the Tauropolia, in honour of Artemis, which suggested to Menander a lover’s opportunity. Others, such as the Hermæa, at which Socrates first met the young Lysis and discoursed on friendship, were celebrated by young men at the palæstras, or by school-boys. The “Mean Man” of Theophrastus was “apt not to send his children to school when there was a festival of the Muses, but to say that they were sick, in order that they might not contribute.” Still others, like the Panathenæa, which occurred in July, the first month of the calendar year, united all classes and ages in a magnificent display of civic loyalty. Public taste at its highest made the presentation of plays the chief element in the Greater Dionysia in March, but the drama had originated in the December festival of the country Dionysia, which continued to be celebrated with a jollity and abandon that probably lost nothing in the descriptions of Aristophanes. The same poet also found plenty of material to his liking in the Anthesteria, another Dionysiac celebration, in which Pots and Pitchers figured in drinking competitions and in offerings to the dead. The statue of Dionysus in the Marshes was escorted to the outer Cerameicus, and by the time it was brought back again, a day later, the crowd was doubtless in the state described by the chorus of Frogs in the underworld:—

“The song we used to love in the Marshland up above

In praise of Dionysus to produce,

Of Nysæan Dionysus, son of Zeus,

When the revel tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay,

To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day.

Brekekekex, ko-ax ko-ax.”[^[17]]

The license of some of the Dionysiac holidays was in reality a break in the even tenor of Athenian temperance. At other times there seems to have been little more drunkenness among them than among the Spartans, whose uninterrupted self-restraint aroused the admiration of Plato.

From the crapulous and often naked verses of Aristophanes to the austerely beautiful marbles of Phidias is a gamut that includes all the characteristics of ancient festivals, in their appeal to both the natural and the spiritual man. Religious sincerity, civic pride, and buffoonery, jostled one another. Music, literature, and athletics added discipline and beauty.

These things as a coherent whole are long since dead. The Easter festival of to-day, like the Panathenæa, absorbs the entire city and has its hours of gaiety as well as its hours of solemnity, but it lacks the attendant contests in music, poetry, and gymnastics. If, however, it includes less of a citizen’s life than Athena’s festival, it is more Panhellenic than even the Eleusinian Mysteries, its prototype in religious significance. The Mysteries appealed to all Greeks, but invited them to gather at one spot. Those who have seen Easter ushered in at midnight by King and Metropolitan in front of the Cathedral of Athens, and who have also shared with peasant and parish priest in the announcement within some village church on a lone island of the Ægean, realize that in every part of modern Greece as never in old Greece all classes and conditions of men are at the same hour engaged in a common observance.

But the excited crowds that fill the city streets and make the Cathedral Square look like a deep cornfield stirred by a strong west wind, and the gathering of villagers in the open place in front of their tiny church alike betray one quality that is no more Christian and new than it is Pagan and old. An unquestioning and swift hospitality to strangers is as much in evidence as is the lighted taper borne by each man, woman, and child. In Athens this is but a proof on a crucial occasion of a temper which reveals itself in response to every need. By this Ionic grace, inherited from the noble civilization of Homer and eagerly exemplified by the open-minded Athenians at the height of their prosperity, the foreigner is transported back to the old city more surely than by the street names and signs in the alphabet of Xenophon, or even than by the vision, wherever his eye turns, of the ageless rock of the Acropolis.

ATTICA

CHAPTER VII
ATTICA

“The country of Cecrops, favoured of heroes, rich in its loveliness.”

Aristophanes, Clouds.

Modern Athens climbs up around the lower slopes of Mount Lycabettus, which rises on the east like an index finger above the Attic plain. Although this peak is less than one thousand feet high, its isolated position opens out an unrivalled panorama of the Cephisian plain from Parnes and Pentelicus down to Piræus and the bay, with Salamis, the mountains of the Megarid, the Isthmus, Argolis and Ægina beyond. In the “Frogs” of Aristophanes Æschylus’s many-jointed compounds are likened to “great Lycabettuses.” Athena, it is said, while carrying Lycabettus through the air to fortify her Acropolis, dropped it suddenly in its present exclusive position; but, if we are to believe Plato, who had a vague inkling of the geologic truth, her rival, the earth-shaker, rent it asunder from the Acropolis, with which it was once continuous. From Lycabettus, it would appear, the stream of the Eridanus made its way north of the Acropolis and flowed out by the channel now laid bare near the Dipylon gate. The Ilissus, rising on the slopes of Hymettus, flows south of the city and, first uniting with the Eridanus, joins, between Athens and Piræus, the Cephisus, which draws its waters from the Pentelicus and Parnes ranges. This configuration of the landscape, with arable plain-land watered by mountain streams, was the important factor in country life about Athens. Clouds on Hymettus, as Theophrastus tells us, were a sign of rain. The altar of “Shower-giving Zeus,” whether on Hymettus or, as Pausanias says, on Mount Parnes, would have no lack of suppliants in times of drought. The Clouds, in a fragment of the lost edition of Aristophanes’s play, vanish adown Lycabettus and go off to the top of Parnes. In the play as preserved, the mock Socrates, instructing his thick-headed scholar, points out the cloud-goddesses:—

“Now please to look here by Parnes anear, now I see they’ll be gently descending.”

And the Clouds, leaving Bœotia behind, come over Parnes, showering down the praises that Aristophanes delighted to bestow on the Attic country:—

“Let us, maidens, that bring fresh showers, go unto Pallas’s brilliant land to turn our eyes on the country of Cecrops, favoured of heroes, rich in its loveliness, there where is honour to consecrate secrets; there where the temple that welcomes its votaries flings wide its doors at the mysteries sacred; there where are gifts for the gods up in heaven; stately-roofed temples and statues of splendour; there are processionals unto the blessed ones, hallowed exceedingly; fair are the chaplets entwining the offerings unto the deities; ever recurring the festivals, season by season; and, when the spring cometh on, there’s the grace of the Bromian god and incitements to choirs melodious; aye and the Muse with the music of deep-voicèd flutings.”

Colonus, the birthplace of Sophocles, lay a little more than a mile northwest of Athens. The hill is now disappointingly bald. Verdure and the song of the nightingale must be sought by the banks of the Cephisus near by, but the famous lines of Sophocles retouch the faded picture. The chorus of old men of Attica address the aged Œdipus:—

“Thou’rt come, O guest, unto the fairest of earth’s dwellings in this land that hath good breed of horses—this our white Colonus, where the clear-voiced nightingale from covert of green dells sends out her oft-repeated warblings murmurous and makes her dwelling in the wine-dark ivy or the god’s impenetrable foliage with countless fruitage laden; where the sun’s rays strike not nor bloweth any wind of all the blasts of winter; where Dionysus ever in rapt frenzy fares along, consorting with the nymphs that nursed him at the breast.

“And fed by heaven’s dew, day in, day out, blooms the narcissus clustering fair in wreaths from days of yore inwoven for the twain Great Goddesses; blooms, too, the crocus with its gleam of gold. Nor ever fail the sleepless fountains of Cephisus and his wandering streams.”

The ramparts of the city of Theseus, seen by Antigone at the opening of the play, are for Sophocles in reality the Acropolis and walls of his own day. Antigone describes the sacred grove to her blind father:—

“This place is sacred, for it teems with laurel, olive, and the vine. Within its very heart a multitude of feathered nightingales make music.”

The venerable olive trees, self propagated through generations from the parent stump, are, indeed, a feature in the Attic landscape. Sophocles does not fail to include them in his catalogue of Attic blessings:—

“There’s no such shoot on the Asian coast, of none such do I hear in Doris great, in Pelops-isle—a plant unvanquished, self-renewing, terror unto foemen’s spears—nay, none like this, child-nurturing, that groweth greatest in our land, the gray-green olive’s foliage.”

And in the neighbouring Academy the youths ran off their races beneath the sacred olive trees. To the joyous associations that for nearly two centuries had been accumulating about the Academy Plato added the overshadowing greatness of his own name and teaching. He has incidentally perpetuated the name of the original modest freeholder, Academus, to be a part of the vocabulary of every school-boy. Near the Academy, making a fitting goal for the avenue leading from the Dipylon gate between the monuments of illustrious dead, the Athenians gave Plato magnificent interment. An epigram by Antipater transfers to Plato the indifference expressed by Socrates in regard to his untenanted body when he says in the prison death-scene:—

“Bury me however you will,—if you can catch me—for, when I drink the poison, I shall not remain here with you, but shall make my way to a blissful life with the Blessed.... So don’t let Crito be vexed on my behalf when he sees my body being burnt or buried as though I were having some awful experience.”

Shelley in his fine paraphrase of the epigram inexactly substitutes Athens for Attica and fails to include the epithet “earth-born,” the conventional boast of the autochthonous men of Attica:—

“Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?

To what sublime and starry-paven home

Floatest thou?

‘I am the image of swift Plato’s spirit

Ascending heaven:—Athens doth inherit

His corpse below.’”

If we follow up the Cephisus towards its sources we pass through the ancient deme of Acharnæ and come on the north to Decelea on the slopes of Mount Parnes, or, turning to the right, to Kephisia at the south of Pentelicus, also called Brilessus by the ancients.

Upon the Parnes range, on the northern frontier of Attica, is the partially ruined fortress of Phyle. Few places offer a more attractive combination of scenery and association. There is, as at Delphi, a union of grandeur and beauty. In addition to the view that awaits us above, the ascent amidst trees and flowers by the running stream makes this a fitting introduction to the more intimate charm of Attic landscape, and the rugged gorges, skirted by the climbing pathway, are even awe-inspiring. Once within the massive walls and towers, built on a mountain spur commanding the junction of ravines and passes between Attica and Bœotia, no extended explanation is necessary of the part played here (in 404 to 403 B. C.) during the civil war between the patriots and the Thirty Tyrants. Across the shoulder of Ægaleus the plain of the Cephisus is unrolled to view, with Athens lying below Hymettus. In the background are the Saronic Gulf and the Peloponnesian mountains. Thrasybulus, the hero of the Restoration, is great even among the great names of Greek history. We can imagine him first seizing the fortress with his handful of seventy followers, and then, through months of waiting and fighting and watching, looking down on the desired city, planning how he shall restore the exiled patriots to Athens, and Athens to herself. We can picture the fierce snow-storm, filling those wild gorges, which aided in driving back the knights and hoplites of the Thirty. Later he swoops down to Acharnæ, surprises and routs the unpatriotic Athenians together with the Spartan garrison which the Thirty, to their dishonour, had admitted to the Acropolis. Finally he descends to Piræus, joins battle with the “City Party,” breaks the power of the Thirty and makes the name of “the men from Phyle” a symbol of patriotism which, see it where we may on the pages of Lysias or Xenophon, claims the eye like illuminated initials and rubrics of honour.

At Chasia, the farming village of the foothills whence the path ascends to Phyle, women, standing in their doorways with busy distaff in hand, or energetic but courteous men, ready to discuss politics or crops, recall the simplicity and charm of country life of hill and plain known to us from Aristophanes and Menander.

Acharnæ itself must have occupied the district between Epano-Liossia, the nearest railway station to Chasia, and the charming modern village of Menidi whose unspoiled peasants, close to the outskirts of Athens, retain many a reminder of the country demesmen. The charcoal-burners of Aristophanes or Menander would now be compelled to go further up the mountain slopes to obtain the tree-stumps for their “Parnesian coals.” Nor is the famous ivy of Acharnæ now in evidence. The Acharnians, as Pausanias tells us, called Dionysus “Ivy” because the ivy plant first appeared on their soil. In the Greek Anthology we learn that Sophocles often wore a wreath of Acharnian ivy, and in an epigram of Simmias the ivy climbs over his tomb which, as it was alleged, had its place in the burying ground of the Sophocles family beside the neighbouring road to Decelea:—

“Gently, ivy, gently twine,

With pale tresses creep and seize

On the tomb of Sophocles;

Where the soft and clustering vine

Droops its tendrils to the ground.

Petals of the rose, around

Spread your fragrant anodyne

For his gracious speech profound,

Muses and the Graces blending,

Honeyed charm to wisdom lending.”

In the “Acharnians” of Aristophanes the demesman Dicæopolis, shut up in the city by the war, grows tired of hearing: “Buy, buy!” when he would have “coals, vinegar or oil,” commodities to be had for nothing at home in the country. He therefore makes a private and personal treaty of peace, goes back to Acharnæ and proceeds to celebrate the rural Dinoysia. The revel is on and the wife and mother warns the daughter, who is to officiate as basket-bearer, to take precautions,—

“Lest some one ere you know it nibble off your gold.”

To-day the peasant girls of Menidi without fear display on their persons at the Easter dances their abundant dowries of gold and silver. As the Phallic procession moves off, Dicæopolis wisely sends his pretty wife to a place of safety:—

“You, wife, up with you to the roof and watch from there;

And you, lead on!”

At this juncture the chorus of Acharnian men rush in, with the bosoms of their gowns full of stones, indignant at the thought of peace when their vines have been cut by the enemy. They are a sturdy lot. They had contributed a Highland regiment at Marathon; they are regular “old Hickories,” “hardwood-charcoal men, tough as oak, hard-maple men,” and they are ready to stone Dicæopolis. He gains time, however, for a parley by seizing for a hostage a basket of their charcoals and dressing it up as a baby.

MENANDER

Menander, also, in his recently discovered “Arbitration” scene, gives details of an encounter between a shepherd and a charcoal man somewhere in this Acharnæ district, evidently in the public “clearings” lying between the farm-lands and the undisturbed forests. The shepherd Daos tells a well-to-do property owner, who happens by and is selected to arbitrate the dispute, how,—

“Within this bushy thicket here, hard by this place,

My flock I was a-herding, now, perhaps, good sir,

Some thirty days gone by, and I was all alone,

When I came on a little infant child exposed

With necklaces and some such other trumpery.”

He debates whether he can afford to save and rear the child. Next morning, still perplexed, “I go,” he says,—

“back unto my flock again

At daybreak. Comes this fellow—he’s a charcoal-man—

Unto this self-same place to cut out stumps of trees.

Now he had had acquaintance with me back of this,

And so we talked together.”

One of the main sources of the Cephisus is at the foot of Pentelicus. Here the village of Kephisia with its generous spring and noble plane tree still retains its charm and recalls the “Attic Nights” of Aulus Gellius. As terminus of a short railway from Athens, it is a convenient starting-place for various excursions in Attica. An easy drive northward across the plain brings one to Tatoï where King George has his summer residence at the ancient Decelea, which the Spartans occupied in the Peloponnesian War to cut off the grain supply which came by this way from Eubœa. But cruel memories of the contest with Sparta are forgotten amidst the unusual charm of the surroundings. The magnificent low-spreading pine trees are a surprise to many visitors unaccustomed to this variety, and, as one looks southward, Pentelicus, usually seen from Athens as a long ridge, confronts the spectator, head on, with unfamiliar and uncompromising majesty. In the near foreground olive groves and luxuriant fields of anemones and poppies invite to a long lethe.

The Oropus district on the Euripus, north of Parnes, belongs geographically to Bœotia. As one descends on the northern side of the mountain the view is more suggestive of Switzerland than of rugged Attica. The fertile plain of the Asopus is green and wooded; the Euripus winding between the hedgerows of mountains on either side seems, even from the lofty summit of Pentelicus, more like a series of inland lakes than a continuous arm of the sea; beyond, the dorsal spine of the Delph, gleaming white with snow, crowns the blue Eubœan mountains. A marble relief, found at the port of Oropus, recalls the principal literary association outside of the shifting scenes in military history. Amphiaraus, the seer and hero, is represented in his chariot as he is about to disappear in the earth and his horses start back from the yawning chasm. In the Æschylean story Amphiaraus “the one just man” is included against his will among the invaders, the “Seven against Thebes,” and is represented as falling with the rest at Thebes. Of him were written the famous lines which, when spoken in the Athenian theatre, turned the eyes of all the spectators upon “Aristides the Best”:—

“‘Now as for me, know well, I shall enrich this land,

A priest entombèd deep beneath this hostile soil.

Let’s fight. No death dishonour bringing I await.’

Thus spoke the seer while brandishing his good round shield

Of solid bronze. But no device was on his shield,

For not to seem the best he wishes, but to be,

While harvesting the fertile furrow of his mind

Wherefrom an honest crop of counsels springs to birth.”

Amphiaraus was deified throughout Greece, but he had his chief sanctuary near Oropus in a glen where the nightingales sing among the plane trees and the oleanders. Here may be seen the remains of his temple, as god of healing; the great altar; the sacred spring by the plane trees where the grateful convalescents threw in their thanksgiving coins. Here were found, in the ruined theatre, five gracefully carved chairs of honour, like the three found at Rhamnus.

Rhamnus is on the coast near the southern mouth of the Euripus, and is one of the most beautiful and secluded places in the whole peninsula. As a visit to this northeast corner is needful to complete the physical outline of Attica, so the contours of Greek character will be sharpened here in the sanctuary of Nemesis, the dread goddess of Retribution, whose warning presence hovered continually in the background of Greek consciousness. Her beautiful statue, made perhaps by Phidias or his pupils, was fittingly set up in this place near the mouth of the Euripus where the Persian fleet had sailed through to the crushing rebuke at Marathon. Pausanias calmly states that this statue, dedicated to “the goddess most inexorable of all towards overweening men,” was made by Phidias out of some “Parian marble which the Persians, as if the victory were already won, carried with them for the erection of a trophy.” If we could credit this statement it would enlarge the itinerary of the meagre fragments of the colossal statue now in the British Museum.

At Rhamnus are to be seen the remains of two temples, one dedicated to Nemesis, and the other probably to Themis, the mother of Prometheus, and identified by Æschylus, following Attic tradition, with Mother Earth herself—“one form for many names.” Situated at the head of a glen, banked-up by a marble terrace and shaded by myrtle, green fir trees and shrubbery, the ruins look down upon the marble walls and towers of the ancient acropolis of Rhamnus occupying a rocky, self-fortified hill that juts out into the channel. Beyond the Euripus the mountains fill in the background.

Unwary speech, insolent success or immoderate, though innocent, good fortune might call down the retribution of Nemesis. Like our superstitious formula, “Knock on wood,” it was a common device in Greek to deprecate the divine envy towards arrogant speech, by saying: “I being but human make obeisance to Adrasteia,” or, the equivalent, “to Nemesis.” Pindar describes the happy Hyperboreans as set free from this scrupulous anxiety, ever present to mortal men:—

“And for that sacred race nor pestilence, nor deadening age is blended in their lot. Apart from war and toil they dwell, acquittal winning from exacting Nemesis.”

Near the cheerful modern village of Marathona in the valley of Avlona above the plain of Marathon are remains of an ancient gateway to the villa of Herodes Atticus. The inscription placed over his portal by this beneficent humanist and teacher was: “The Gate of Immortal Unanimity.” A few miles to the southwest, on the northern slope of Pentelicus, the American school excavated on an upland farm, called Dionyso, the remains of the ancient Icaria, the earliest Attic home of Dionysus and the birthplace of Thespis, the father of Attic tragedy. An epigram in the Anthology by Dioscorides records the claims of Thespis:—

“Thespis am I, who the tragedy strain

Shaped for the masque and was first to combine

Charms that were new when Bacchus would fain

Marshal his chorus, stained with wine.

Figs Attic grown, or a goat was the prize

Won in the contests, till new I devise.

They that come after all this will revise,

Myriad years reshape, refine,

Little it troubles me—mine are mine.”

Nothing adventitious is needed to call forth a certain solemn elation at the first sight of the plain of Marathon. But the sunlight of a February day, when the anemones are bright by the wayside, will blend an unforgettable natural beauty with the suggestions of a great moment in human history. The level plain is hemmed in by an amphitheatre of mountains; the promontory Cynosura runs down like a natural breakwater from the north, and the shore curves gracefully inward as if enticing seafarers to beach their galleys where the blue water breaks in soft white upon the shining sand. When we climb the isolated “soros,” the great mound heaped up over the dead warriors, and pass in review the vivid details of the battle as given by Herodotus, there emerges, even after all exaggeration has been neutralized by the strictures of some modern iconoclast, a grateful and redoubled admiration for the unflinching loyalty to liberty displayed by the individual soldiers and even more for the consummate skill of the commanders. The Athenians with the help of the Platæans repelled forever the reëstablishing of a despot in Attica, and Athens herself unconsciously entered upon what was to be the intellectual and moral trusteeship of Occidental civilization. Demosthenes, more than a century later, amidst the ruins of political liberty, could foreshadow a destiny greater than material success. He cites the great words of Simonides that had drifted down from Marathon and could be used with pathetic propriety of the dead at Chæronea. He bids his fellow citizens bow, if need be, under the strokes of unfeeling fortune, but reject all thought of having erred in their patriotic struggle against Macedon. He bursts forth with that impassioned oath by the dead heroes that thrills each generation born to cherish, or to long for liberty: “It cannot be, it cannot be, Athenians, that ye erred in braving danger on behalf of freedom and the safety of us all. No, by those of our fathers, fore-fighters in the battle’s brunt at Marathon! No, by those who stood shoulder unto shoulder at Platæa! No, by those who fought the naval fights at Salamis or in the ships off Artemisium!”

Marathon, as opening the great contest with Persia, had given the Athenians the proud distinction of being champions in the van for Hellas. Simonides had so hailed them:—

“Athenians, fore-fighters for the Hellenes all, laid low at Marathon the power of the gold-decked Medes.”

Within the mound beneath our feet lies buried with the rest Cynegirus the valiant brother of Æschylus. The poet himself fought in the battle and lived to immortalize his city and himself by his Titanic genius. But in far off Sicily, when his death approached, ignoring his fame as a poet, he turned with eager longing to the distant day and plain of Marathon. To him the battlefield was a consecrated close, an “Alsos” like the Altis of Olympia. Almost as if envying his brother and other companions-in-arms, buried on the battlefield in their native land, he writes as his own epitaph:—

“Æschylus, son of Euphorion, here an Athenian lieth,

Wheatfields of Gela his tomb waving around and above;

Marathon’s glebe-land could tell you the tale of his valour approvèd,

Aye and the long-haired Mede knew of it, knew of it well.”

The carriage road that leads back to Athens around the southern end of Pentelicus again combines beautiful landscape with historic association. By this road the Persians had thought to move with unimpeded might upon unwalled Athens. Instead, the soldier Eucles[^[18]] (or perhaps Thersippus) brought the swift news to the rejoicing city, followed soon by the Athenian army, who marched from their camp by the Marathonian Heracleum and encamped in the Cynosarges gymnasium, also dedicated to Heracles, south-west of Athens. Here looking down upon the Saronic Gulf they were ready to repel the great host of Persia which was already rounding Sunium. Games in honour of Heracles were celebrated at Marathon, and Euripides, in his “Heracleidæ,” alludes, though vaguely, to the Marathonian tetrapolis as one of the great Attic centres of the worship of Heracles. The Platæans by their presence at Marathon won the lasting and active friendship of Athens, and it was their city that gave the name to the final crushing defeat of the Persians under the combined Greek allies. The Spartans, detained at home by convenient scruples until the full moon gave them the signal to start, arrived at Athens too late for the battle of Marathon, but, as Herodotus charmingly remarks, “they none the less wished to take a look at the Medes and, going out to Marathon, they had a look.”

On the east coast of Attica, between Marathon and Sunium, are Brauron, “lovely” Prasiæ, and Thoricus. These with Markopoulo and other sites in the southern inland plain, Mesogia, have been yielding a wealth of prehistoric remains that fill out more and more the dim background of antiquity. Thoricus, a bay some six miles north of Sunium, was the birthplace of Philonis, “the daughter of the morning star,” and grandmother of Thamyris, the Thracian bard who dared to contend with the Muses. The inhabitants were not unmindful of their traditions and built a theatre, unique by reason of its oval orchestra. It is in ruins, but the absence of all traces of a stage seem to date it as of the best classic period. Laurium, just below, is the terminus of the railroad. Its silver mines, now worked chiefly for lead, play an important rôle in Greek history. The chorus in the “Persians” of Æschylus explains to Queen Atossa that the source of the Athenian sinews of war is—

“A fountain running silver, treasure of the land.”

The standard coins of Athens, of various denominations, stamped with an archaic Athena head on the obverse and the owl on the reverse, are referred to in the “Birds” of Aristophanes as Lauriot owls:—

“First, what every Judge amongst you most of all desires to win,

Little Lauriotic owlets shall be always flocking in.

Ye shall find them all about you, as the dainty brood increases,

Building nests within your purses, hatching little silver pieces.”[^[19]]

When the Spartans occupied Attica in 413 B. C., they cut off Athenian access to the mines, and Plutarch tells us how a slave described a hoard of Athenian money secreted by the Spartan Gylippus under his roof-tiles as “numerous owls roosting under his Cerameicus.”

The promontory of Sunium, the prow of Attica, breasts the Ægean, and the white temple columns, beautiful in their ruin, stand up boldly like the Samothracian Nike upon an advancing trireme. The view from the precipitous bluff is one of surpassing beauty, with the glistening white of the marble against the nearer foreground of green and against the blue of the overarching sky and of the wide expanse of water. The eye sweeps from Ægina to the opposite shore of Argolis and around to the “glittering Cyclades” scattered over the Ægean, while far to the south, seventy miles away, Mount St. Elias on Melos in clear weather lifts its lofty cone into view, the outline of the island being sunk, like a vessel’s hull, below the horizon. On the Acropolis at Athens was preserved the memory of the contest between Athena and Poseidon, and at Sunium each of these divinities had a temple. Poseidon has here retained the supremacy, as was fitting, and only the foundation walls remain of Athena’s temple on the lower terrace. The Athenians dedicated at Sunium to Poseidon one of the triremes captured at Salamis, and here, on occasion of the quadrennial festival held in honour of the sea-god, the Æginetans seized the festal galley full of Athenian dignitaries. A defendant, in one of Lysias’s speeches, tells how he had “won in the trireme race off Sunium,” which was part of the panegyris. In Aristophanes the chorus of Knights cry out to “Poseidon, lord of horses, rejoicing in the bronze-shod hoof-beats and the neigh of steeds and swift blue prows of triremes,”—

“Come hither to our chorus,

Raise thy golden trident for us,

Thee at Sunium we praise

Whom the dolphin band obeys.”

SUNIUM
Temple of Poseidon. The Ægean Sea

To catalogue the ships, famous in Greek story, that have sighted or rounded this headland would cause to pass in review a mighty and a motley fleet. Nestor tells Telemachus how, sailing home with Menelaus from Troy, they lost their pilot,—

“When that we came unto Sunium sacred, the headland of Athens.”

And Sophocles’s chorus of Salaminian sailors long in Troyland for their native shores:—

“O there I would I might be,

Where Sunium’s spreading foreland

Hangs over the surge of the sea,

That straightway our Athens, the holy,

Might be greeted and hailed by me.”

Vessels of commerce or war would double it, bound from Athens to the Ægean or to Ionia, and grain transports sailing to Athens from the Euxine. The Persian warships backing out from the inhospitable bay of Marathon “sailed around Sunium, making haste to anticipate the Athenians in arriving at the city.” The vessel of Theseus sailed past it bringing back safe from Crete the Athenian youths and maidens, and, in after days, the look-out, posted at Sunium, hastened back to Athens to say that the mission-ship from Delos had been sighted and was beating its way up the Saronic gulf to put an end, on its arrival, at once to the sacred holiday and to the life of Socrates.

On the west coast of Attica the place of chief interest, in connection with Greek letters, is Vari, near the promontory of Zoster, where Mount Hymettus comes down to the sea. Herodotus tells us that the frightened Persians, escaping from Salamis, thought that the long rocks running out at Zoster were some more hostile ships and “went fleeing for a long distance” until they recognised their mistake. Some little distance inland on the side of Hymettus, back of the town of Vari, is a grotto dedicated to the Nymphs and also sacred to the Graces, to Pan, and to Apollo. There is a tradition that the infant Plato was taken to Hymettus by his parents, who there sacrificed on his behalf to Pan, the Nymphs and Apollo.

The straits which interrupt the continuity of Mount Ægaleus with Salamis could not avail to dissever the island from Attica. The northwestern promontory, indeed, comes even closer to the outjutting Nisæan peninsula of the Megarid, and it was inevitable that Megara and Athens should contend for this “island of desire.” The energy of Solon at the beginning of the sixth century adjudicated the dispute with finality, and Salamis was permanently incorporated as an essential part of Attica. To a seafaring folk triremes and sailing craft could annul the interrupting sea, and the mainland and island were still more firmly cemented by the blood of Persian and Greek at the great sea-fight.

The ancestral hero of Salamis was Aias (“Ajax”), the son of Telamon. Pausanias saw a stone near the harbour upon which Telamon sat, as it was said, looking after his children departing to join the Greek fleet at Aulis. When Aias fell upon his sword before Troy the hyacinth, according to the usual tale, sprang up inscribed with the exclamation of woe “Ai! ai!” the first syllable of his name. But, as Pausanias would have it, a local flower, different from the hyacinth, made its appearance in Salamis inscribed with the same letters. Ajax, as was to be expected, appeared and offered divine aid to the Greeks at the battle of Salamis. In his honour the “Aianteia” festival was celebrated, and the young Athenian ephebi used to go over annually to contend at Salamis in friendly rivalry with the Salaminian youth in foot-races and in boat-races resembling those rowed from Munychia to the Cantharus harbour in Piræus. In addition to the Ajax traditions, here, as elsewhere, other sagas were invented or reshaped to give personification to the remote past and to be handed down to satisfy the pride of succeeding generations. Solon was a more tangible memory, and Demosthenes, in speaking of his statue standing in the market-place of Salamis, quotes the Salaminians as saying: “This statue was set up not yet fifty years ago.”

But the dominant memory evoked by the name of Salamis is, naturally, the defeat of the Persians in the narrow straits. For the Athenians everything was at stake. The wives and children who had not been sent to the Peloponnesus were on the island. Euripides, according to an enticing tradition, was born there at the time of the battle. Xerxes sat on his throne on the mainland to overawe disaffection and to watch the spectacle. He had no doubt as to the outcome. His fleet was numerous enough to allow him to detach the Egyptian squadron for guarding the narrow exit of the northwest channel and still to leave more ships than could be used for closing in the eastern approaches. The Greeks were thus hemmed in, and the unwilling allies from the Peloponnesus were forced to remain and give battle instead of withdrawing to the Isthmus. Themistocles, the great admiral, had his will.

To-day, if one sails in a small boat across from Piræus to the harbour of the modern Ambelaki, the details of the battle as narrated by Æschylus and Herodotus explain themselves. The long, bare reef of Psyttaleia cumbers the entrance to the channel. The messenger, in the “Persians” of Æschylus, in describing to the Queen Mother the scene enacted on this tiny island, introduces Pan, the old ally at Marathon:—

“An island lies before the shores of Salamis;

’Tis small, for ships a risky mooring, but its reef,

Sea-swept, dance-loving Pan frequents.”

Here Xerxes stationed a picked body of Persians to save their friends and to slay the Greeks escaping from the wreckage, which, it was plain to foresee, would come bearing down upon the reef.

Beyond Psyttaleia and overlapping it is the long spit of land Cynosura (“Dog’s-tail”), like in name and shape to the promontory at Marathon. The result of the contest in this narrow channel is not so surprising as is the foresight of Themistocles and the courage of the Greeks in availing themselves with irresistible daring of the overconfidence of Xerxes. Æschylus’s account betrays the vivid memories of an actual eye-witness. The vessels took position by night. Across the desolated plain of Attica the new Day, “by white steeds drawn, her radiance fair to see, held all the land.” To the astonishment of the Persians, the Greeks, instead of fleeing, raised high their shout of happy omen, and Echo, mate of dance-loving Pan, “back from the island rock returned a shrill and pealing cry of joy.” The Persian messenger continues:—

“Fell fear on all of us barbarians, deceived

In expectation. For the Greeks a noble hymn

Were singing, not as though in flight, but like to men

Starting for battle with courageous heart. And then

The trumpet’s blare set all of them aflame. Therewith

The even dash of oar-blades, at the word, bit deep

The brine and quickly all of them were visible.

The right wing in good order first led forth, and next

Came out and on the armament entire. Aye then,

As they came onward, loud the cry that reached our ears:

‘Sons of the Hellenes! On! Set free your native land!

Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of gods

And tombs of fathers’ fathers! Now for all we strive!’”

The “jargon” of the Persian host rolled back reply. A Greek ship was the first to grapple. Bronze beak smote beak. Triremes turned keel uppermost,—

“Until the water was no longer to be seen,

With wreckage of slain men and splintered vessels packed.

The corpses beached. They filled the ridges and the shores.”

Whether dead or alive the Persians found no refuge upon land. Aristides with his men, instead of the picked Persians, was now on Psyttaleia to save or to destroy. The chorus of Persian women, as they hear the news, imagine their dead now floating with the tide, now, like struggling swimmers, rising to the waves. The leader cries:—

“Woe, woe is me!

Our dear ones lost,

By the sea’s swell tossed

Their bodies, borne along the main,

Rise and dip, and rise again!”

It was not unnatural that the ineffaceable memory of the sea covered with wreckage and the dead should reappear, when Æschylus, in the “Agamemnon,” describes the morning after the storm that wrecked the ships returning from Troy:—

“When rose the brilliant light of Helios, we see

Th’ Ægean, spread out far and wide, a-blossoming

With wrecks of ships and corpses of Achæan men.”

Apart from the details of the battle, the “Persians” is noticeable for the method by which the poet introduces his ethical lesson. The ghost of the great Darius suddenly appears in the orchestra and attributes the defeat of Xerxes to his presumption in fettering “like a slave” the “sacred” Hellespont. Æschylus reiterates his favourite doctrine: “When Insolence puts forth the bloom of Atè, the harvest reaped is one of many tears.” And when later Xerxes himself arrives, the chorus with un-oriental frankness says: “Xerxes has packed Hades full with Persians.”

The “Persæ” of Timotheus, a sensational find of the year 1902, with its fantastic and overloaded epithets and the half-comic scene of the drowning Persian spitting out bitter brine and reproaches together, is a curious scholium upon Æschylus’s poem. The description of the dead upon the sea is thus retouched:—

“Choked was the sea, star-spangled with the corpses reft of souls departing with the failing breath. The beaches were weighed down. Other some upon the jutting spits of land were seated all a-shiver in their nakedness.”

The love of free men for a free country saved Attica. Euripides, despite the devastation of the country, might well call his land “unsacked,” “inviolate.” It was true of the unyielding citizens who, whether upon the mainland or self-exiled upon their triremes, refused all dealings with the despot. Plutarch tells us that Xerxes after Salamis sought to detach the Athenians from the national cause by promises of liberty and riches for themselves. The Lacedæmonians, fearing lest they might yield to the royal bribery, attempted to remonstrate, but Aristides bade the ambassadors say at Sparta: “Neither above ground nor below is there enough gold for the Athenians to accept in preference to the liberty of the Hellenes.”

It may be that the visitor to Salamis, as his little craft scuds swiftly home past Cynosura and Psyttaleia, sees the dark clouds, from which but now came rain, roll off towards Eleusis, while Attica, the islands, and the western mountains merge once more in the accustomed beauty of the translucent atmosphere. He may, perhaps, harbour the thought that under such a sky, when the war-clouds had finally withdrawn, the demesmen of country and of town came back to their devastated but ransomed Attica.

CHAPTER VIII
ELEUSIS

“That torch-lit strand whereon the Goddesses reverèd foster mystic rites and dread for mortal men whose lips the ministrant Eumolpidæ have locked in golden silence.”

Sophocles, Œdipus Coloneus.

“Go thou to Attica,

Fail not to see those great nights of Demeter,

Mystical, holy.

There thou shalt win thee a mind that is care-free

Even while living,

And when thou joinest that major assembly

Light shall thy heart be.”

Crinagoras, Greek Anthology.

Eleusis, like Delphi, was a centre of Greek religious life, but its Panhellenism was of a later date and a direct consequence of the power of Athens within whose territory it lay. Although the worship of nature’s productivity, under the form of Demeter losing her daughter Persephone within the earth and recovering her again, was indigenous among the early Pelasgic dwellers in Eleusis, and although upon this native cult were grafted religious beliefs and practices imported from Thrace, it is yet true that the Eleusinian Mysteries waxed famous only as Athens waxed great. Once established by the most powerful city of Greece as its highest expression of religious feeling, they drew to their modest birthplace in the recurring Septembers of many centuries the pious and the curious from all Greek lands. The right of initiation, originally open only to citizens of Attica, was extended to all Greeks and later to their Roman conquerors. In this repudiation of “barbarians” Eleusis resembled Olympia rather than Delphi, where Persian or Scyth or African might consult Apollo.

But these three centres of Panhellenic life alike present a history which begins in the dim age of mythology and ends, several centuries after the beginning of our era, in the final clash of Christianity with Paganism. Perhaps the history of Eleusis best deserves the name of “sacred.” Playing no appreciable part in secular events, the town was repeatedly the scene of religious events which were of unequalled spiritual importance. Here an early nature cult, sister to savage rites in many parts of the world, became not only a beautified worship of the physical universe but also an expression of a hope in immortality. “The fable of Kore (the Daughter) is as much the image of the destiny of man after death as it is that of the reproduction of vegetative life by means of the seed committed to the earth.”[^[20]]

Except for the proximity of Eleusis to Athens there was nothing in the physical qualities of the town to make the Eleusinian mysteries greater than any others. Its loveliness befitted rather than promoted the worship of the Earth Goddesses. Their story clung also to the seaward looking ledges of “steep Cnidos,” where was found the noble statue of Demeter that is now in the British Museum, and to the blossoming fields of Sicilian Enna. The Corn-Mother had her shrines on Bœotian farms and in the mountain caverns of Arcadia, and in more than one locality her worship was as mysterious and secret as the processes of nature. And yet the religious genius of Athens could have had no more exquisite stage than Eleusis for its larger operations. Sheltered by hills, washed by the sea and commanding a goodly plain, it is still, even in its poverty, one of the fairest places in Greece. The Thriasian plain, in the southwestern portion of which, on a low hill, lies the town, is separated from the plain of Athens by the long ridge of Mount Ægaleus and from the plain of Megara by the chain of hills that ends in the twin peaks of the Kerata, or “Horns,” familiar objects in the westward view from the Acropolis of Athens. The mountains of Salamis also seem to contribute to the girdling of Eleusis, so near do they rise across the curving and almost landlocked bay. Empurpled by shadows, the mountains and the sea are like the deep blue robe of the mourning Demeter. Subdued to the delicate and luminous tint of the sky they seem like the veil within whose folds gleamed the cornlike yellow of her hair. Near the sea, close around Eleusis, there are still fertile grain fields to recall that—

“Here first the fruitful corn upreared its bristling ears.”

The historical development of the Eleusinian mysteries naturally followed the general development of Greek religious thought. To the primitive duality of Demeter and Persephone was added Dionysus, lord of the elements, when he had once been accepted by the Athens of Pisistratus. At Eleusis he appeared as the child Iacchus. Later, under the influences of the strange school of thought known as “Orphic,” at once mystical and gross, this multiple god became Zagreus, through whose savage death man, otherwise destined to be forever brute, came to partake of the divine nature. But in all periods the mysteries “were founded on the adoration of nature, its forces and phenomena, conceived rather than observed, interpreted by the imagination and not by reason, transformed into divine figures and histories by a kind of theological poetry which went off into pantheism on the one side and into anthropomorphism on the other.”

In this theological poetry the position of power was held by the long Homeric Hymn to Demeter, although it antedates the presence of Iacchus at Eleusis and at least overlooks the importance of Triptolemus, the young prince of the city, to whom the Earth-Mother gave the first seed-corn and the commission to teach the art of husbandry throughout the world. The representation of this act was left for fifth century sculpture, if we may so interpret the beautiful relief discovered at Eleusis and preserved in the National Museum. Nor is there more than casual mention of Eumolpus, the legendary first priest and the eponymous ancestor of the priestly family in Athens which was charged with the care of Demeter’s worship. But the Hymn told flawlessly the central story of Demeter and Persephone: the ravishment of Persephone by Hades as she was picking roses and crocuses, violets and irises and the marvelous narcissus which the earth bore to be her snare; the grief of Demeter as she heard the mountain peaks and the deep sea echo her child’s cry, her wandering search, her unrecognised sojourn at fragrant Eleusis in the courteous household of the king, and her retarding of the fruits of the earth; the reunion of mother and daughter for two thirds of the year, and the sending up once more of the grain from the rich fields and the burgeoning of the leaves and flowers; and, finally, the command of the Goddess that the people of Eleusis should build her a great temple and an altar below the town and the steep wall, above the spring Callichorus on the jutting rock.

Homer himself had not known this story. Hesiod had lacked the Ionic gift to tell it. Euripides, in a later generation, was led astray by his strain of Orphic imagination which needed the roar of rivers and the thunder of the sea, the wail of flutes and the clatter of the tambourine to mark the frenzy of a suffering godhead. The Greeks as a people preferred a story in which nature perishes and blooms again, in which grief and love fight with death, while the dignity of life is unassailed, and the beauty of hills and sea, flowers and welling springs irradiates its tragedies.

Only the external facts concerning the celebrations are open to us. The secrets of the two successive initiations, one preparatory to the other, were so jealously hidden by the ancient initiates that the keenest scholarship has not been able to discover them in literature or in art. Alcibiades, idolized as he was, could not secure acquittal from the suspicion of having parodied the mysteries. Silence was enjoined by religion, enforced by law. This reserve about holy things, which has appealed to some moderns as the “chief lesson and culminating grace derived from Eleusis,” was proclaimed not only as a necessary condition but also as an integral part of initiation, “imitating,” as Strabo expressed it, “the nature of the godhead which is forever eluding our senses.” Knowledge of the outward events of the festival has been painstakingly gathered from passages in Athenian literature, a few inscriptions, the excavated ruins, vases and other works of art, and from the controversial literature, both Christian and pagan, of the early centuries of our era.

The “Mysteries” lasted nine days, the time of Demeter’s wanderings. Prior to them the youths—ephebi—of Athens went to Eleusis and brought thence certain sacred objects which were to be used in the later procession. On the 15th of Boedromion, or September, near the time of sowing, the “mystæ,” who in the early spring month of Anthesterion, the season of planting, had participated in the Lesser Mysteries in a suburb of Athens, were assembled at the Stoa Pœcile to listen to sundry proclamations. The following day was one of purification. The cry went out, “seawards, O mystæ,” and every candidate washed himself and his sacrificial pig in the bay near Eleusis, following the Greek feeling that the sea purges from the evils of earth. For two more days sacrifices were carried on at Athens. And then on the 19th or the 20th came the great procession to escort the image of the child Iacchus, myrtle-crowned and carrying in his hand a torch, back to his Eleusinian home. The day was a public holiday. Great crowds gathered along the Sacred Way to watch the long line of ephebi, mystics, priests and officials, who, wearing myrtle and bearing torches, left the Dipylon Gate early in the morning and reached the precinct at Eleusis after nightfall, when the mysterious shadows were dispelled only by the yellow glare of thousands upon thousands of torches and by the lights that streamed from the sacred buildings.

The modern highroad follows very nearly the Sacred Way. Few travellers now brave the heat and dust of an Attic September, but in some “month of flowers” gain their impressions of the beauty of the road, which still leads over the Cephisus, past gray-green olive groves, up through the pine-clad pass of Mount Ægaleus, and down again to wind closely beside the curved shore of the sea. In antiquity the Sacred Way was lined with tombs and temples and shrines. Moderns are detained only by the lovely mediæval Convent of Daphne, at the top of the pass, but the ancient procession lingered not only at the Temple of Apollo which occupied this spot, but at many other sacred stations, to offer sacrifices, sing hymns, and engage in dances, solemn or joyous or wild. This was the reason for leaving Athens so early to cover only thirteen miles before another sunrise. The last part of the way followed the “torchlit strand” by night. The “voices of the night,” the moving feet of the multitude owned Iacchus as lord, with whom the stars also danced, the stars whose breath is fire. And to the stars of Sophocles Euripides added the elemental joy of moon and sea:—

“When the stars of the ether of Zeus lead out,

And the moon glides on as the dancers’ queen,

And the daughters of Nereus join the rout

Adown the sea or along the swirl

Of the rivers eternal that rush and whirl—

The ether, the moon, and the streams and the sea

They dance to honour Persephone,

The maiden crowned with the golden sheen,

And Demeter the Mother—ah, Dread is she!”

OLIVE TREES ON THE WAY TO ELEUSIS

The singing of the vast throngs, breaking out at sunrise, changing its themes in fresh enthusiasms through the long day and swelling by night into triumphant volume, must have been unforgettable. Herodotus relates that in the gloomy time when Athens was abandoned, and its plain laid waste by Xerxes, even a Medizing exile was haunted by its ghostly echoes. Dicæus of Athens chanced to be in the Thriasian plain with Demaratus of Sparta, and saw a cloud of dust advancing from Eleusis, such as a host of thirty thousand men might raise. As he was wondering who the men could possibly be, a sound reached his ear and he thought that he recognised the mystic hymn of Iacchus. Even as they looked, the dust became a cloud and sailed away to Salamis, making for the station of the Grecian fleet. This was a sign to the Athenian that the gods of Eleusis would destroy the fleet of Xerxes. To us an echo of the singing comes through the serious lyrics in the “Frogs” of Aristophanes. At the portals of Hades a band of mystics sing over again the processional hymns they had often sung on earth, beginning with the sunrise summons to Iacchus to leave his Athenian shrine:—

“O Iacchus, O Iacchus,

Morning star that shinest nightly,

Lo, the mead is blazing brightly,

Age forgets its years and sadness,

Aged knees curvet for gladness,

Lift thy flashing torches o’er us,

Marshal all thy blameless train,

Lead, O lead the way before us; lead the lovely youthful Chorus

To the marshy flowery plain.”[^[21]]

The days at Eleusis were probably only pauses between the “great nights” of the worship of Demeter. The nightly proceedings seem to have consisted of three elements. The first was an imitation of Demeter’s wanderings. The initiates went up and down the shore by the sea, their restless torches appearing from a distance like great “swarms of fireflies.” They sat too upon the Joyless Rock, and by meditation endeavoured to enter into the passion of the Goddess. The second element was some sacrament of food and drink in commemoration of the fact that Demeter was finally persuaded by the merry Iambe to break her fast. Finally came a series of dramatic representations in the great Hall of Initiation, by means of which the divine story was unfolded.

It would be a mistake to suppose that if we knew more details about these celebrations we should understand more clearly the influence that they exerted on the minds and spirits of the celebrants. In the mysteries, we are assured by Aristotle, the initiates did not learn anything precisely, but received impressions, were put into a certain frame of mind for which they had been prepared. The value of subtle influences like these can never be apprehended save by those who have been subjected to them. In no age, under no sanction, have men been able to create sacred rites, whether secret or open, that could not be construed as mummery, not only by those of a different age but even by contemporaries who stood outside the circle of the elect. Were every “secret” of the Eleusinian Mysteries to be recovered, we should still be uninitiated into their higher wisdom. We should still be thrown back, as we are at present, upon a vicarious sympathy with those who have borne witness to the quickening of their spirits in the Eleusinian nights. Fortunately this testimony comes from a few of the most gifted among the Greeks. The often quoted statement of Cicero, that initiation taught men not only to live happily but to die with a fairer hope, only repeats what was said by his literary master, Isocrates: “Those who have participated in the mysteries possess sweeter hopes about death and about the whole of life.” Strangely enough, Æschylus, who was born in Eleusis and whose plays in later times were acted there because of their religious character, seems never to have been initiated. But Pindar and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes harboured personal hopes that those who knew the mysteries were “blessed” in the hour of death and in the life to come. In the “Frogs” the dead mystics end their song in solemn peace:—

“O happy mystic chorus,

The blessed sunshine o’er us

On us alone is smiling,

In its soft sweet light;

On us who strive forever

With holy, pure endeavour

Alike by friend and stranger

To guide our steps aright.”[^[22]]

The impulse that was derived from Eleusis to lead the earthly life aright must have had as many different results as there were temperaments among the initiates. Andocides, merchant and orator, reminded the Athenian judges that they had contemplated the sacred rites in order that they might punish the guilty and save the innocent. Plato felt that he whose memory of initiation was still fresh and who at Eleusis had been the spectator of “many glories in the other world” must see in every beautiful face or form that he encountered an imitation of divine or absolute beauty toward which his spirit would go out in reverential love.

The excavated remains of ancient Eleusis consist of ground foundations or even fainter traces of buildings and porticoes dating from the “Mycenæan” period to the age of the Antonines. Pisistratus, Cimon, Pericles and Hadrian have left fragmentary records in stone of their interest in this religious centre. The Temple of the Mysteries, which was a great hall rather than a sanctuary, saw many changes in the course of the centuries. The older structure of Pisistratus’s day, destroyed by the Persians, was replaced by Pericles, perhaps according to plans by Ictinus. Left unfinished by him, it was added to by Greek and Roman until its boastful splendour aroused the anger of the Gothic monks who came south with Alaric and compassed its final ruin.

Homelier memories centre in the Spring of Fair Dances (Callichorus), now identified. Here, Pausanias tells us, “the Eleusinian women first danced and sang in honour of the goddess,” decked perhaps like the Doric maidens whose worship of the same goddess charmed the eyes of Alcman:—

“We came to great Demeter’s fane, we nine,

All maidens, all in goodly raiment clad;

In goodly raiment clad, with necklace bright

Of carven ivory, a radiant gleam.”

A fortunate dream prevented Pausanias from relating to the uninitiated what he saw within the sacred precinct. In unpoisoned content, therefore, lured by the beauty of the “white spring” which Callimachus, the Alexandrian, included among Demeter’s gifts, the modern traveller may sit on the temple steps and abandon thought, even as many an ancient mystic in the autumnal days between the holy nights must have mounted to some place of outlook whence he could watch the deep blue sea break into foam delicate and white as the face of Persephone.

The mysteries ended on the 24th, with a public festival. At Athens games were held, called the Eleusinia, offering as a prize a measure of barley reaped from the field of Rharos close to the walls of Eleusis where the first seed corn had fructified. In later times, with the general increase of holidays, this festival was prolonged, but in the greatest days of Athens the procession of mystics returned to the city on the 25th, with ceremonies of farewell to Persephone now leaving her mother to return to her gloomy lord, like summer nearing the embrace of winter; and with some final ritual, performed, it may be, at the Dipylon Gate rather than at Eleusis, of prayer to sky and earth that the one might impregnate and the other bear. On the curb of a sacred well before the city gate has been found the very ancient formula, not yet outlived by the generations of men who live upon the fruits of the earth.

The day of return gave one last opportunity for a public demonstration—this time of hilarity. Justified by the quips and cranks of Iambe, the initiates yielded to the impulse which in the natural man follows close upon exaltation. At the bridge over the Cephisus the people of the city, wearing masks, met the procession, and a carnival of scurrilous wit ensued, which was a savoury memory to Aristophanes’s mystics in the world of shadows. To us the recollection may bring a sudden distrust of the sympathy with the past which, within the unfretted silence of Eleusis, seemed completely to possess us. Like the spectators in the comedy we get a whiff of pork. The light of the torches reveals the vulgarities of a revelling crowd. The cymbals of the priests, clashed only at this spot, drown the voices “of no tone.” Is it, after all, true, as the early Christians believed, that orgies, not prayers, have busied these men and women?

But with the crossing of the bridge the mood vanishes. The western sun is once more adorning the Athenian Acropolis. Not only Pindar and Plato faced this hill with a new reverence after their Eleusinian nights, but many a simpler man and woman must have come home comforted and hopeful to take up old burdens on the morrow. If, viewed by a Plato from the heights of “true philosophy,” thousands who came from Eleusis were still blind, or only partially aware of the meaning of life and death, this was but the Greek manifestation of a universal fact: “Many are the thyrsus-bearers but few are the mystics.”

CHAPTER IX
ÆGINA