RAMBLES IN GREECE

The Acropolis, Athens

BY
J. P. MAHAFFY
KNIGHT OF THE ORDER OF THE SAVIOUR;
AUTHOR OF “SOCIAL LIFE IN GREECE;” “A HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE;”
“GREEK LIFE AND THOUGHT FROM THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER;”
“THE GREEK WORLD UNDER ROMAN SWAY,” ETC.

HUNC LIBRUM
Edmundo Wyatt Edgell
OB INSIGNEM
INTER CASTRA ITINERA OTIA NEGOTIA LITTERARUM AMOREM
OLIM DEDICATUM
NUNC CARISSIMI AMICI MEMORIAE
CONSECRAT AUCTOR

[pg vii]

PREFACE.

Few men there are who having once visited Greece do not contrive to visit it again. And yet when the returned traveller meets the ordinary friend who asks him where he has been, the next remark is generally, “Dear me! have you not been there before? How is it you are so fond of going to Greece?” There are even people who imagine a trip to America far more interesting, and who at all events look upon a trip to Spain as the same kind of thing—southern climate, bad food, dirty inns, and general discomfort, odious to bear, though pleasant to describe afterward in a comfortable English home.

This is a very ignorant way of looking at the matter, for excepting Southern Italy, there is no country which can compare with Greece in beauty and interest to the intelligent traveller. It is not a land for creature comforts, though the climate is splendid, and though the hotels in Athens are as good as those in most European towns. It is not a land for society, though the society at Athens is excellent, and far easier of access than that of most European capitals. But if a man is fond of the large [pg viii]effects of natural scenery, he will find in the Southern Alps and fiords of Greece a variety and a richness of color which no other part of Europe affords. If he is fond of the details of natural scenery, flowers, shrubs, and trees, he will find the wild-flowers and flowering-trees of Greece more varied than anything he has yet seen. If he desires to study national character, and peculiar manners and customs, he will find in the hardy mountaineers of Greece one of the most unreformed societies, hardly yet affected by the great tide of sameness which is invading all Europe in dress, fabrics, and usages. And yet, in spite of the folly still talked in England about brigands, he will find that without troops, or police, or patrols, or any of those melancholy safeguards which are now so obtrusive in England and Ireland, life and property are as secure as they ever were in our most civilized homes. Let him not know a word of history, or of art, and he will yet be rewarded by all this natural enjoyment; perhaps also, if he be a politician, he may study the unsatisfactory results of a constitution made to order, and of a system of free education planted in a nation of no political training, but of high intelligence.

Need I add that as to Cicero the whole land was one vast shrine of hallowed memories—quocunque incedis, historia est—so to the man of culture this splendor of associations has only increased with the lapse of time and the greater appreciation of human [pg ix]perfection. Even were such a land dead to all further change, and a mere record in its ruins of the past, I know not that any man of reflection could satisfy himself with contemplating it. Were he to revisit the Parthenon, as it stands, every year of his life, it would always be fresh, it would always be astonishing. But Greece is a growing country, both in its youth and in its age. The rapid development of the nation is altering the face of the country, establishing new roads and better communications, improving knowledge among the people, and making many places accessible which were before beyond the reach of brief holiday visits. The insecurity which haunted the Turkish frontier has been pushed back to the north; new Alps and new monasteries are brought within the range of Greece. And this is nothing to what has been done in recovering the past. Every year there are new excavations made, new treasures found, new problems in archæology raised, old ones solved; and so at every visit there is a whole mass of new matter for the student who feels he had not yet grasped what was already there.

The traveller who revisits the country now after a lapse of four or five years will find at Athens the Schliemann museum set up and in order, where the unmatched treasures of Mycenæ are now displayed before his astonished eyes. He will find an Egyptian museum of extraordinary merit—the gift of a patriotic merchant of Alexandria—in which there [pg x]are two figures—that of a queen, in bronze and silver, and that of a slave kneading bread, in wood—which alone would make the reputation of any collection throughout Europe. In the Parthenon museum he will find the famous statuette, copied from Phidias’s Athene, and the recent wonder, archaic statues on which the brightness of the colors is not more astonishing than the moulding of the figures.

And these are only the most salient novelties. It is indeed plain that were not the new city covering the site of the old, discoveries at Athens might be made perhaps every year, which would reform and enlarge our knowledge of Greek life and history.

But Athens is rapidly becoming a great and rich city. It already numbers 110,000, without counting the Peiræus; accordingly, except in digging foundations for new houses, it is not possible to find room for any serious excavations. House rent is enormously high, and building is so urgent that the ordinary mason receives eight to ten francs per day. This rapid increase ought to be followed by an equal increase in the wealth of the surrounding country, where all the little proprietors ought to turn their land into market-gardens. I found that either they could not, or (as I was told) they would not, keep pace with the increased wants of the city. They are content with a little, and allow the city to be supplied—badly and at great cost—from Salonica, [pg xi]Syra, Constantinople, and the islands, while meat comes in tons from America. How different is the country round Paris and London!

But this is a digression into vulgar matters, when I had merely intended to inform the reader what intellectual novelties he would find in revisiting Athens. For nothing is more slavish in modern travel than the inability the student feels, for want of time in long journeys, or want of control over his conveyance, to stop and examine something which strikes him beside his path. And that is the main reason why Oriental—and as yet Greek—travelling is the best and most instructive of all.

You can stop your pony or mule, you can turn aside from the track which is called your road, you are not compelled to catch a train or a steamer at a fixed moment. When roads and rails have been brought into Greece, hundreds of people will go to see its beauty and its monuments, and will congratulate themselves that the country is at last accessible. But the real charm will be gone. There will be no more riding at dawn through orchards of oranges and lemons, with the rich fruit lying on the ground, and the nightingales, that will not end their exuberant melody, still outsinging from the deep-green gloom the sounds of opening day. There will be no more watching the glowing east cross the silver-gray glitter of dewy meadows; no more wandering along grassy slopes, where the scarlet anemones, all [pg xii]drenched with the dews of night, are striving to raise their drooping heads and open their splendid eyes to meet the rising sun. There will be no more watching the serpent and the tortoise, the eagle and the vulture, and all the living things whose ways and habits animate the sunny solitudes of the south. The Greek people now talk of going to Europe, and coming from Europe, justly too, for Greece is still, as it always was, part of the East. But the day is coming when enlightened politicians, like Mr. Tricoupi, will insist on introducing through all the remotest glens the civilization of Europe, with all its benefits forsooth, but with all its shocking ugliness, its stupid hurry, and its slavish uniformity.

I will conclude with a warning to the archæologist, and one which applies to all amateurs who go to visit excavations, and cannot see what has been reported by the actual excavators. As no one is able to see what the evidences of digging are, except the trained man, who knows not only archæology, but architecture, and who has studied the accumulation of soil in various places and forms, so the observer who comes to the spot after some years, and expects to find all the evidences unchanged, commits a blunder of the gravest kind. As Dr. Dörpfeld, now one of the highest living authorities on such matters, observed to me, if you went to Hissarlik expecting to find there clearly marked the various strata of successive occupations, you would show that you were [pg xiii]ignorant of the first elements of practical knowledge. For in any climate, but especially in these southern lands, Nature covers up promptly what has been exposed by man; all sorts of plants spring up along and across the lines which in the cutting when freshly made were clear and precise. In a few years the whole place turns back again into a brake, or a grassy slope, and the report of the actual diggers remains the only evidence till the soil is cut open again in the same way. I saw myself, at Olympia, important lines disappearing in this way. Dr. Purgold showed me where the line marking the embankment of the stadium—it was never surrounded with any stone seats—was rapidly becoming effaced, and where the plan of the foundations was being covered with shrubs and grass. The day for visiting and verifying the Trojan excavations is almost gone by. That of all the excavations will pass away, if they are not carefully kept clear by some permanent superintendence; and to expect this of the Greek nation, who know they have endless more treasures to find in new places, is more than could reasonably be expected. The proper safeguard is to do what Dr. Schliemann does, to have with him not only the Greek ephoros or superintendent—generally a very competent scholar, and sometimes not a very friendly witness of foreign triumphs—but also a first-rate architect, whose joint observation will correct any hastiness or misprision, [pg xiv]and so in the mouth of two or more witnesses every word will be confirmed.

In passing on I cannot but remark how strange it is that among the many rich men in the world who profess an interest in archæology, not one can be found to take up the work as Dr. Schliemann did, to enrich science with splendid fields of new evidence, and illustrate art, not only with the naïve efforts of its infancy, but with forgotten models of perfect and peerless form.

This New Edition is framed with a view of still satisfying the demand for the book as a traveller’s handbook, somewhat less didactic than the official guide-books, somewhat also, I hope, more picturesque. For that purpose I have added a new chapter on mediæval Greece, as well as many paragraphs with new information, especially the ride over Mount Erymanthus, [pp. 343], sqq. I have corrected many statements which are now antiquated by recent discoveries, and I have obliterated the traces of controversy borne by the Second Edition. For the criticisms on the book are dead, while the book survives. To me it is very pleasant to know that many visitors to Greece have found it an agreeable companion.

Trinity College, Dublin,
February, 1892.

[pg xv]

CONTENTS.

[pg xvii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Photogravures by A. W. Elson & Co.

[pg 1]

GREECE.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION—FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE COAST.

A voyage to Greece does not at first sight seem a great undertaking. We all go to and fro to Italy as we used to go to France. A trip to Rome, or even to Naples, is now an Easter holiday affair. And is not Greece very close to Italy on the map? What signifies the narrow sea that divides them? This is what a man might say who only considered geography, and did not regard the teaching of history. For the student of history cannot look upon these two peninsulas without being struck with the fact that they are, historically speaking, turned back to back; that while the face of Italy is turned westward, and looks towards France and Spain, and across to us, the face of Greece looks eastward, towards Asia Minor and towards Egypt. Every great city in Italy, except Venice, approaches or borders the Western Sea—Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples. All the older history of Rome, its [pg 2]development, its glories, lie on the west of the Apennines. When you cross them you come to what is called the back of Italy; and you feel that in that flat country, and that straight coast-line, you are separated from its true beauty and charm.[1] Contrariwise, in Greece, the whole weight and dignity of its history gravitate towards the eastern coast. All its great cities—Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Sparta—are on that side. Their nearest neighbors were the coast cities of Asia Minor and of the Cyclades, but the western coasts were to them harborless and strange. If you pass Cape Malea, they said, then forget your home.

So it happens that the coasts of Italy and Greece, which look so near, are outlying and out-of-the way parts of the countries to which they belong; and if you want to go straight from real Italy to real Greece, the longest way is that from Brindisi to Corfu, for you must still journey across Italy to Brindisi, and from Corfu to Athens. The shortest way is to take ship at Naples, and to be carried round Italy and round Greece, from the centres of culture on the west of Italy to the centres of culture (such as they are) on the east of Greece. But this [pg 3]is no trifling passage. When the ship has left the coasts of Calabria, and steers into the open sea, you feel that you have at last left the west of Europe, and are setting sail for the Eastern Seas. You are, moreover, in an open sea—the furious Adriatic—in which I have seen storms which would be creditable to the Atlantic Ocean, and which at times forbid even steam navigation.

I may anticipate for a moment here, and say that even now the face of Athens is turned, as of old, to the East. Her trade and her communications are through the Levant. Her chief intercourse is with Constantinople, and Smyrna, and Syra, and Alexandria.

This curious parallel between ancient and modern geographical attitudes in Greece is, no doubt, greatly due to the now bygone Turkish rule. In addition to other contrasts, Mohammedan rule and Eastern jealousy—long unknown in Western Europe—first jarred upon the traveller when he touched the coasts of Greece; and this dependency was once really part of a great Asiatic Empire, where all the interests and communications gravitated eastward, and away from the Christian and better civilized West. The revolution which expelled the Turks was unable to root out the ideas which their subjects had learned; and so, in spite of Greek hatred of the Turk, his influence still lives through Greece in a thousand ways.

For many hours after the coasts of Calabria had faded into the night, and even after the snowy dome of Etna was lost to view, our ship steamed through the open sea, with no land in sight; but we were told that early in the morning, at the very break of dawn, the coasts of Greece would be visible. So, while others slept, I started up at half-past three, eager to get the earliest possible sight of the land which still occupies so large a place in our thoughts. It was a soft gray morning; the sky was covered with light, broken clouds; the deck was wet with a passing shower, of which the last drops were still flying in the air; and before us, some ten miles away, the coasts and promontories of the Peloponnesus were reaching southward into the quiet sea. These long serrated ridges did not look lofty, in spite of their snow-clad peaks, nor did they look inhospitable, in spite of their rough outline, but were all toned in harmonious color—a deep purple blue, with here and there, on the far Arcadian peaks, and on the ridge of Mount Taygetus, patches of pure snow. In contrast to the large sweeps of the Italian coast, its open seas, its long waves of mountain, all was here broken, and rugged, and varied. The sea was studded with rocky islands, and the land indented with deep, narrow bays. I can never forget the strong and peculiar impression of that first sight of Greece; nor can I cease to wonder at the strange likeness which rose in my mind, and which [pg 5]made me think of the bays and rocky coasts of the west and south-west of Ireland. There was the same cloudy, showery sky, which is so common there; there was the same serrated outline of hills, the same richness in promontories, and rocky islands, and land-locked bays. Nowhere have I seen a light purple color, except in the wilds of Kerry and Connemara; and though the general height of the Greek mountains, as the snow in May testified, was far greater than that of the Irish hills, yet on that morning, and in that light, they looked low and homely, not displaying their grandeur, or commanding awe and wonder, but rather attracting the sight by their wonderful grace, and by their variety and richness of outline and color.

I stood there, I know not how long—without guide or map—telling myself the name of each mountain and promontory, and so filling out the idle names and outlines of many books with the fresh reality itself. There was the west coast of Elis, as far north as the eye could reach—the least interesting part of the view, as it was of the history, of Greece; then the richer and more varied outline of Messene, with its bay, thrice famous at great intervals, and yet for long ages feeding idly on that fame; Pylos, Sphacteria, Navarino—each a foremost name in Hellenic history. Above the bay could be seen those rich slopes which the Spartans coveted of [pg 6]old, and which, as I saw them, were covered with golden corn. The three headlands which give to the Peloponnesus “its plane-leaf form,”[2] were as yet lying parallel before us, and their outline confused; but the great crowd of heights and intersecting chains, which told at once the Alpine character of the peninsula, called to mind the other remark of the geographer, in which he calls it the Acropolis of Greece. The words of old Herodotus, too, rise in the mind with new reality, when he talks of the poor and stony soil of the country as a “rugged nurse of liberty.”

For the nearer the ship approaches, the more this feature comes out; increased, no doubt, greatly in later days by depopulation and general decay, when many arable tracts have lain desolate, but still at all times necessary, when a large proportion of the country consists of rocky peaks and precipices, where a goat may graze, but where the eagle builds secure from the hand of man. The coast, once teeming with traffic, is now lonely and deserted. A single sail in the large gulf of Koron, and a few miserable huts, discernible with a telescope, only added to the feeling of solitude. It was, indeed, “Greece, but living Greece no more.” Even the pirates, who sheltered in these creeks and moun[pg 7]tains, have abandoned this region, in which there is nothing now to plunder.[3]

But as we crossed the mouth of the gulf, the eye fastened with delight on distant white houses along the high ground of the eastern side—in other words, along the mountain slopes which run out into the promontory of Tainaron; and a telescope soon brought them into distinctness, and gave us the first opportunity of discussing modern Greek life. We stood off the coast of Maina—the home of those Mainotes whom Byron has made so famous as pirates, as heroes, as lovers, as murderers; and even now, when the stirring days of war and of piracy have passed away, the whole district retains the aspect of a country in a state of siege or of perpetual danger. Instead of villages surrounded by peaceful homesteads, each Mainote house, though standing alone, was walled in, and in the centre was a high square tower, in which, according to trustworthy travellers, the Mainote men used to spend their day watching their enemies, while only the women and children ventured out to till the fields. For these fierce mountaineers were not only perpetually defying the [pg 8]Turkish power, which was never able to subdue them thoroughly, but they were all engaged at home with internecine feuds, of which the origin was often forgotten, but of which the consequences remained in the form of vengeance due for the life of a kinsman. When this was exacted on one side, the obligation changed to the other; and so for generation after generation they spent their lives in either seeking or avoiding vengeance. This more than Corsican vendetta[4] was, by a sort of mediæval chivalry, prohibited to the women and children, who were thus in perfect safety, while their husbands and fathers were in daily and deadly danger.

They are considered the purest in blood of all the Greeks, though it does not appear that their dialect approaches old Greek nearer than those of their neighbors; but for beauty of person, and independence of spirit, they rank first among the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, and most certainly they must have among them a good deal of the old Messenian blood. Most of the country is barren, but there are orange woods, which yield the most delicious fruit—a fruit so large and rich that it makes all other oranges appear small and tasteless. The country is now perfectly safe for visitors, and the people extremely hospitable, though the diet is not very palatable to the northern traveller.

So with talk and anecdote about the Mainotes—for every one was now upon deck and sight-seeing—we neared the classic headland of Tainaron, almost the southern point of Europe, once the site of a great temple of Poseidon—not preserved to us, like its sister monument on Sunium—and once, too, the entry to the regions of the dead. And, as if to remind us of its most beautiful legend, the dolphins, which had befriended Arion of old, and carried him here to land, rose in the calm summer sea, and came playing round the ship, showing their quaint forms above the water, and keeping with our course, as it were an escort into the homely seas and islands of truer Greece. Strangely enough, in many other journeys through Greek waters, once again only did we see these dolphins; and here as elsewhere, the old legend, I suppose, based itself upon the fact that this, of all their wide domain, was the favorite resort of these creatures, with which the poets of old felt so strong a sympathy.

But, while the dolphins have been occupying our attention, we have cleared Cape Matapan, and the deep Gulf of Asine and Gythium—in fact, the Gulf of Sparta is open to our view. We strained our eyes to discover the features of “hollow Lacedæmon,” and to take in all the outline of this famous bay, through which so many Spartans had held their course in the days of their greatness. The site of Sparta is far from the sea, probably twelve or fifteen [pg 10]miles; but the place is marked for every spectator, throughout all the Peloponnesus and its coasts, by the jagged top of Mount Taygetus, even in June covered with snow. Through the forests upon its slopes the young Spartans would hunt all day with their famous Laconian hounds, and after a rude supper beguile the evening with stories of their dangers and their success. But, as might be expected, of the five villages which made up the famous city, few vestiges remain. The old port of Gythium is still a port; but here, too, the “wet ways,” and that sea once covered with boats, which a Greek comic poet has called the “ants of the sea,” have been deserted.

We were a motley company on board—Russians, Greeks, Turks, French, English; and it was not hard to find pleasant companions and diverting conversation among them all. I turned to a Turkish gentleman, who spoke French indifferently. “Is it not,” said I, “a great pity to see this fair coast so desolate?” “A great pity, indeed,” said he; “but what can you expect from these Greeks? They are all pirates and robbers; they are all liars and knaves. Had the Turks been allowed to hold possession of the country they would have improved it and developed its resources; but since the Greeks became independent everything has gone to ruin. Roads are broken up, communications abandoned; [pg 11]the people emigrate and disappear—in fact, nothing prospers.”

Presently, I got beside a Greek gentleman, from whom I was anxiously picking up the first necessary phrases and politenesses of modern Greek, and, by way of amusement, put to him the same question. I got the answer I expected. “Ah!” said he, “the Turks, the Turks! When I think how these miscreants have ruined our beautiful country! How could a land thrive or prosper under such odious tyranny?” I ventured to suggest that the Turks were now gone five and forty years, and that it was high time to see the fruits of recovered liberty in the Greeks. No, it was still too soon. The Turks had cut down all the woods, and so ruined the climate; they had destroyed the cities, broken up the roads, encouraged the bandits—in fact, they had left the country in such a state that centuries would not cure it.

The verdict of Europe is in favor of the Greek gentleman; but it might have been suggested, had we been so disposed, that the greatest and the most hopeless of all these sorrows—the utter depopulation of the country—is not due to either modern Greeks or Turks, nor even to the Slav hordes of the Middle Ages. It was a calamity which came upon Greece almost suddenly, immediately after the loss of her independence, and which historians and phys[pg 12]iologists have as yet been only partially able to explain.[5]

Of this very coast upon which we were then gazing, the geographer Strabo, about the time of Christ, says, “that of old, Lacedæmon had numbered one hundred cities; in his day there were but ten remaining.” So, then, the sum of the crimes of both Greeks and Turks may be diminished by one. But I, perceiving that each of them would have been extremely indignant at this historical palliation of the other’s guilt, “kept silence, even from good words.”

These dialogues beguiled us till we found ourselves, almost suddenly, facing the promontory of Malea, with the island of Cythera (Cerigo) on our right. The island is little celebrated in history. The Phœnicians seem, in very old times, to have had a settlement there for the working of their purple shell-fishery, for which the coasts of Laconia were celebrated; and they doubtless founded there the worship of the Sidonian goddess, who was transformed by the Greeks into Aphrodite (Venus). During the Peloponnesian War we hear of the Athenians using it as a station for their fleet, when they were ravaging the adjacent coasts. It was, in fact, used by their naval power as the same sort of [pg 13]blister (ἐπιτείχισις) on Sparta that Dekelea was when occupied by the Spartans in Attica.

Cape Malea is more famous. It was in olden days the limit of the homely Greek waters, the bar to all fair weather and regular winds—a place of storms and wrecks, and the portal to an inhospitable open sea; and we can well imagine the delight of the adventurous trader who had dared to cross the Western Seas, to gather silver and lead in the mines of Spain, when he rounded the dreaded Cape, homeward bound in his heavy-laden ship, and looked back from the quiet Ægean. The barren and rocky Cape has its new feature now. On the very extremity there is a little platform, at some elevation over the water, and only accessible with great difficulty from the land by a steep goat-path. Here a hermit built himself a tiny hut, cultivated his little plot of corn, and lived out in the lone seas, with no society but stray passing ships.[6] When Greece was thickly peopled he might well have been compelled to seek loneliness here; but now, when in almost any mountain chain he could find solitude and desolation enough, it seems as if that poetic instinct which so often guides the ignorant and unconscious anchorite had sent him to this spot, which combines, in a strange way, solitude and publicity, and which ex[pg 14]cites the curiosity, but forbids the intrusion, of every careless passenger to the East.

So we passed into the Ægean, the real thoroughfare of the Greeks, the mainstay of their communication—a sea, and yet not a sea, but the frame of countless headlands and islands, which are ever in view to give confidence to the sailor in the smallest boat. The most striking feature in our view was the serrated outline of the mountains of Crete, far away to the S. E. Though the day was gray and cloudy, the atmosphere was perfectly clear, and allowed us to see these very distant Alps, on which the snow still lay in great fields. The chain of Ida brought back to us the old legends of Minos and his island kingdom, nor could any safer seat of empire be imagined for a power coming from the south than this great long bar of mountains, to which half the islands of the Ægean could pass a fire signal in times of war or piracy.[7] The legends preserved to us of Minos—the human sacrifices to the Minotaur—the hostility to Theseus—the identification of Ariadne with the legends of Bacchus, so eastern and orgiastic in character—make us feel, with a sort of instinctive certainty, that the power of Minos was [pg 15]no Hellenic empire, but one of Phœnicians, from which, as afterwards from Carthage, they commanded distant coasts and islands, for the purposes of trade. They settled, as we know, at Corinth, at Thebes, and probably at Athens, in the days of their greatness, but they seem always to have been strangers and sojourners there, while in Crete they kept the stronghold of their power. Thucydides thinks that Minos’s main object was to put down piracy, and protect commerce; and this is probably the case, though we are without evidence on the point. The historian evidently regards this old Cretan empire as the older model of the Athenian, but settled in a far more advantageous place, and not liable to the dangers which proved the ruin of Athens.

The nearer islands were small, and of no reputation, but each like a mountain top reaching out of a submerged valley, stony and bare. Melos was farther off, but quite distinct—the old scene of Athenian violence and cruelty, to Thucydides so impressive, that he dramatizes the incidents, and passes from cold narrative and set oration to a dialogue between the oppressors and the oppressed. Melian starvation was long proverbial among the Greeks, and there the fashionable and aristocratic Alcibiades applied the arguments and carried out the very policy which the tanner Cleon could not propose without being pilloried by the great histo[pg 16]rian whom he made his foe. This and other islands, which were always looked upon by the mainland Greeks with some contempt, have of late days received special attention from archæologists. It is said that the present remains of the old Greek type are now to be found among the islanders—an observation which I found fully justified by a short sojourn at Ægina, where the very types of the Parthenon frieze can be found among the inhabitants, if the traveller will look for them diligently. The noblest and most perfect type of Greek beauty has, indeed, come to us from Melos, but not in real life. It is the celebrated Venus of Melos—the most pure and perfect image we know of that goddess, and one which puts to shame the lower ideals so much admired in the museums of Italy.[8]

Another remark should be made in justice to the islands, that the groups of Therasia and Santorin, which lie round the crater of a great active volcano, have supplied us not only with the oldest forms of the Greek alphabet in their inscriptions, but with far the oldest vestiges of inhabitants in any part of Greece. In these, beneath the lava slopes formed by a great eruption—an eruption earlier than any history, except, perhaps, Egyptian—have been found the dwellings, the implements, and the bones of men who cannot have lived there much later than 2000 [pg 17]B. C. The arts, as well as the implements, of these old dwellers in their Stone Age, have shown us how very ancient Greek forms, and even Greek decorations, are in the world’s history: and we may yet from them and from further researches, such as Schliemann’s, be able to reconstruct the state of things in Greece before the Greeks came from their Eastern homes. The special reason why these inquiries seem to me likely to lead to good result is this, that what is called neo-barbarism is less likely to mislead us here than elsewhere. Neo-barbarism means the occurrence in later times of the manners and customs which generally mark very old and primitive times. Some few things of this kind survive everywhere; thus, in the Irish Island of Arran, a group of famous savants mistook a stone donkey-shed of two years’ standing for the building of an extinct race in gray antiquity: as a matter of fact, the construction had not changed from the oldest type. But the spread of culture, and the fulness of population in the good days of Greece, make it certain that every spot about the thoroughfares was improved and civilized; and so, as I have said, there is less chance here than anywhere of our being deceived into mistaking rudeness for oldness, and raising a modern savage to the dignity of a primæval man.

But we must not allow speculations to spoil our observations, nor waste the precious moments given [pg 18]us to take in once for all the general outline of the Greek coasts. While the long string of islands, from Melos up to the point of Attica, framed in our view to the right, to the left the great bay of Argolis opened far into the land, making a sort of vista into the Peloponnesus, so that the mountains of Arcadia could be seen far to the west standing out against the setting sun; for the day was now clearer—the clouds began to break, and let us feel touches of the sun’s heat towards evening. As we passed Hydra, the night began to close about us, and we were obliged to make out the rest of our geography with the aid of a rich full moon.

But these Attic waters, if I may so call them, will be mentioned again and again in the course of our voyage, and need not now be described in detail. The reader will, I think, get the clearest notion of the size of Greece by reflecting upon the time required to sail round the Peloponnesus in a good steamer. The ship in which we made the journey—the Donnai, of the French Messagerie Company,—made about eight miles an hour. Coming within close range of the coast of Messene, about five o’clock in the morning, we rounded all the headlands, and arrived at the Peiræus about eleven o’clock the same night. So, then, the Peloponnesus is a small peninsula, but even to an outside view “very large for its size;” for the actual climbing up and down of constant mountains, in any land [pg 19]journey from place to place, makes the distance in miles very much greater than the line as the crow flies. If I said that every ordinary distance, as measured on the map, is doubled in the journey, I believe I should be under the mark.

It may be well to add a word here upon the other route into Greece, that by Brindisi and the Ionian Islands. It is fully as picturesque, in some respects more so, for there is no more beautiful bay than the long fiord leading up to Corinth, which passes Patras, Vostitza, and Itea, the port of Delphi. The Akrokeraunian mountains, which are the first point of the Albanian coast seen by the traveller, are also very striking, and no one can forget the charms and beauties of Corfu. I think a market-day in Corfu, with those royal-looking peasant lads, who come clothed in sheepskins from the coast, and spend their day handling knives and revolvers with peculiar interest at the stalls, is among the most picturesque sights to be seen in Europe. The lofty mountains of Ithaca and its greater sister, and then the rich belt of verdure along the east side of Zante—all these features make this journey one of surpassing beauty and interest. Yet notwithstanding all these advantages, there is not the same excitement in first approaching semi-Greek or outlying Greek settlements, and only gradually arriving at the real centres of historic interest. Such at least was the feeling (shared by other observers) which I had in approach[pg 20]ing Greece by this more varied route. No traveller, however, is likely to miss either, as it is obviously best to enter by one route and depart by the other, in a voyage not intended to reach beyond Greece. But from what I have said, it may be seen that I prefer to enter by the direct route from Naples, and to leave by the Gulf of Corinth and the Ionian Islands. I trust that ere long arrangements may be made for permitting travellers who cross the isthmus to make an excursion to the Akrokorinthus—the great citadel of Corinth—which they are now compelled to hurry past, in order to catch the boat for Athens.

The modern Patras, still a thriving port, is now the main point of contact between Greece and the rest of Europe. For, as a railway has now been opened from Patras to Athens, all the steamers from Brindisi, Venice, and Trieste put in there, and from thence the stream of travellers proceeds by the new line to the capital. The old plan of steaming up the long fiord to Corinth is abandoned; still more the once popular route round the Morea, which, if somewhat slower, at least saved the unshipping at Lechæum, the drive in omnibuses across the isthmus, and reshipment at Cenchreæ—all done with much confusion, and with loss and damage to luggage and temper. Not that there is no longer confusion. The railway station at Patras, and that at Athens, are the most curious bear-gardens in which business ever was [pg 21]done. The traveller (I speak of the year of our Lord 1889) is informed that unless he is there an hour before the time he will not get his luggage weighed and despatched. And when he comes down from his comfortable hotel to find out what it all means, he meets the whole population of the town in possession of the station. Everybody who has nothing to do gets in the way of those who have; everything is full of noise and confusion.

At last the train steams out of the station, and takes its deliberate way along the coast, through woods of fir trees, bushes of arbutus and mastic, and the many flowers which stud the earth. And here already the traveller, looking out of the window, can form an idea of the delights of real Greek travel, by which he must understand mounting a mule or pony, and making his way along woody paths, or beside the quiet sea, or up the steep side of a rocky defile. Every half-hour the train crosses torrents coming from the mountains, which in flood times color the sea for some distance with the brilliant brick-red of the clay they carry with them from their banks. The peacock blue of the open sea bounds this red water with a definite line, and the contrast in the bright sun is something very startling. Shallow banks of sand also reflect their pale yellow in many places, so that the brilliancy of this gulf exceeds anything I had ever seen in sea or lake. We pass the sites of Ægion, now Vostitza, [pg 22]once famous as the capital or centre (politically) of the Achæan League. We pass Sicyon, the home of Aratus, the great regenerator, the mean destroyer of that League, as you can still read in Plutarch’s fascinating life of the man. But these places, like so many others in Greece, once famous, have now no trace of their greatness left above ground. The day may, however, still come when another Schliemann will unearth the records and fragments of a civilization distinguished even in Greece for refinement. Sicyon was a famous school of art. Painting and sculpture flourished there, and there was a special school of Sicyon, whose features we can still recognize in extant copies of the famous statues they produced. There is a statue known as the Canon Statue, a model of human proportions, which was the work of the famous Polycleitus of Sicyon, and which we know from various imitations preserved at Rome and elsewhere. But we shall return in due time to Greek sculpture as a whole, and shall not interrupt our journey at this moment.

All that we have passed through hitherto may be classed under the title of “first impressions.” The wild northern coast shows us but one inlet, of the Gulf of Salona, with a little port of Itea at its mouth. This was the old highway to ascend to the oracle of Delphi on the snowy Parnassus, which we shall approach better from the Bœotian side. But now we strain our eyes to behold the great rock of [pg 23]Corinth, and to invade this, the first great centre of Greek life, which closes the long bay at its westernmost end.

I will add a word upon the form and scope of the following work. My aim is to bring the living features of Greece home to the student, by connecting them, as far as possible, with the facts of older history, which are so familiar to most of us. I shall also have a good deal to say about the modern politics of Greece, and the character of the modern population. A long and careful survey of the extant literature of ancient Greece has convinced me that the pictures usually drawn of the old Greeks are idealized, and that the real people were of a very different—if you please, of a much lower—type. I may mention, as a very remarkable confirmation of my judgment, that intelligent people at Athens, who had read my opinions elsewhere set forth upon the subject,[9] were so much struck with the close resemblance of my pictures of the old Greeks to the present inhabitants, that they concluded that I must have visited the country before writing these opinions, and that I was, in fact, drawing my classical people from the life of the moderns. If this is not a proof of the justice of these views, it at least strongly suggests that they may be true, and is a powerful support in arguing the matter on the perfectly independent ground of the inferences from old literature. After [pg 24]all, national characteristics are very permanent, and very hard to shake off, and it would seem strange, indeed, if both these and the Greek language should have remained almost intact, and yet the race have either changed, or been saturated with foreign blood. Foreign invasions and foreign conquests of Greece were common enough; but here, as elsewhere, the climate and circumstances which have formed a race seem to conspire to preserve it, and to absorb foreign types and features, rather than to permit the extinction or total change of the older race.

I feel much fortified in my judgment of Greek character by finding that a very smart, though too sarcastic, observer, M. E. About, in his well-known Grèce contemporaine, estimates the people very nearly as I am disposed to estimate the common people of ancient Greece. He notices, in the second and succeeding chapters of his book, a series of features which make this nationality a very distinct one in Europe. Starting from the question of national beauty, and holding rightly that the beauty of the men is greater than that of the women, he touches on a point which told very deeply upon all the history of Greek art. At the present day, the Greek men are much more particular about their appearance, and more vain of it, than the women. The most striking beauty among them is that of young men; and as to the care of figure, as About well observes, in Greece it is the men who pinch [pg 25]their waists—a fashion unknown among Greek women. Along with this handsome appearance, the people are, without doubt, a very temperate people; although they make a great deal of strong wine, they seldom drink much, and are far more critical about good water than wine. Indeed, in so warm a climate, wine is disagreeable even to the northern traveller; and, as Herodotus remarked long ago, very likely to produce insanity, the rarest form of disease among the Greeks. In fact, they are not a passionate race—having at all ages been gifted with a very bright intellect, and a great reasonableness; they have an intellectual insight into things, which is inconsistent with the storms of wilder passion.

They are, probably, as clever a people as can be found in the world, and fit for any mental work whatever. This they have proved, not only by getting into their hands all the trade of the Eastern Mediterranean, but by holding their own perfectly among English merchants in England. As yet they have not found any encouragement in other directions; but there can be no doubt that, if settled among a great people, and weaned from the follies and jealousies of Greek politics, they would (like the Jews) outrun many of us, both in politics and in science. However that may be—and perhaps such a development requires moral qualities in which they seem deficient—it is certain that their work[pg 26]men learn trades with extraordinary quickness; while their young commercial or professional men acquire languages, and the amount of knowledge necessary for making money, with the most singular aptness. But as yet they are stimulated chiefly by the love of gain.

Besides this, they have great national pride, and, as M. About remarks, we need never despair of a people who are at the same time intelligent and proud. They are very fond of displaying their knowledge on all points—I noted especially their pride in exhibiting their acquaintance with old Greek history and legend. When I asked them whether they believed the old mythical stories which they repeated, they seemed afraid of being thought simple if they confessed that they did, and of injuring the reputation of their ancestors if they declared they did not. So they used to preserve a discreet neutrality.

The instinct of liberty appears to me as strong in the nation now as it ever was. In fact, the people have never been really enslaved. The eternal refuge for liberty afforded by the sea and the mountains has saved them from this fate; and, even beneath the heavy yoke of the Turks, a large part of the nation was not subdued, but, in the guise of bandits and pirates, enjoyed the great privilege for which their ancestors had contended so earnestly. The Mainotes, for example, of whom I have just [pg 27]spoken as occupying the coast of Messene, never tolerated any resident Turkish magistrate among them, but “handed to a trembling tax-collector a little purse of gold pieces, hung on the end of a naked sword.”[10] Now, the whole nation is more intensely and thoroughly democratic than any other in Europe. They acknowledge no nobility save that of descent from the chiefs who fought in the war of liberation; they will allow no distinction of classes; every common mule-boy is a gentleman (κύριος), and fully your equal. He sits in the room at meals, and joins in the conversation at dinner. They only tolerate a king because they cannot endure one of themselves as their superior. This jealousy is, unfortunately, a mainspring of Greek politics, and when combined with a dislike of agriculture, as a stupid and unintellectual occupation, fills all the country with politicians, merchants, and journalists. Moreover, they want the spirit of subordination of their great ancestors, and are often accused of lack of honesty—a very grave feature, and the greatest obstacle to progress in all ages. It is better, however, to let points of character come out gradually in the course of our studies than to bring them together into an official portrait. It is impossible to wander through the country without seeing and understanding the inhabitants; for the traveller is [pg 28]in constant contact with them, and they have no scruple in displaying all their character.

M. About has earned the profound hatred and contempt of the nation by his picture, and I do not wonder at it, seeing that the tone in which he writes is flippant and ill-natured, and seems to betoken certain private animosities, of which the Greeks tell numerous anecdotes.

I have no such excuse for being severe or ill-natured, as I found nothing but kindness and hospitality everywhere, and sincerely hope that my free judgments may not hurt any sensitive Greek who may chance to see them. Even the great Finlay—one of their best friends—is constantly censured by them for his writings about Modern Greece.

But, surely, any real lover of Greece must feel that plain speaking about the faults of the nation is much wanted. The worship lavished upon them by Byron and his school has done its good, and can now only do harm. On the other hand, I must confess that a longer and more intimate intercourse with the Greeks of the interior and of the mountains leads a fair observer to change his earlier estimate, and think more highly of the nation than at first acquaintance. Unfortunately, the Greeks known to most of us are sailors—mongrel villains from the ports of the Levant, having very little in common with the bold, honest, independent peasant who lives under his vine and his fig-tree in the valleys of Arcadia [pg 29]or of Phocis. It was, no doubt, an intimate knowledge of the sound core of the nation which inspired Byron with that enthusiasm which many now think extravagant and misplaced. But here, as elsewhere, the folly of a great genius has more truth in it than the wisdom of his feebler critics.

[pg 30]

CHAPTER II.

GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS AND ATTICA.

There is probably no more exciting voyage, to any educated man, than the approach to Athens from the sea. Every promontory, every island, every bay, has its history. If he knows the map of Greece, he needs no guide-book or guide to distract him; if he does not, he needs little Greek to ask of any one near him the name of this or that object; and the mere names are sufficient to stir up all his classical recollections. But he must make up his mind not to be shocked at Ægina or Phalerum, and even to be told that he is utterly wrong in his way of pronouncing them.

It was our fortune to come into Greece by night, with a splendid moon shining upon the summer sea. The varied outlines of Sunium on the one side, and Ægina on the other, were very clear, but in the deep shadows there was mystery enough to feed the burning impatience to see it all in the light of common day; and though we had passed Ægina, and had come over against the rocky Salamis, as yet there was no sign of Peiræus. Then came the light on Psyttalea, and they told us that the harbor was right [pg 31]opposite. Yet we came nearer and nearer, and no harbor could be seen. The barren rocks of the coast seemed to form one unbroken line, and nowhere was there a sign of indentation or of break in the land. But, suddenly, as we turned from gazing on Psyttalea, where the flower of the Persian nobles had once stood in despair, looking upon their fate gathering about them, the vessel had turned eastward, and discovered to us the crowded lights and thronging ships of the famous harbor. Small it looked, very small, but evidently deep to the water’s edge, for great ships seemed touching the shore; and so narrow is the mouth that we almost wondered how they had made their entrance in safety. But we saw it some weeks later, with nine men-of-war towering above all its merchant shipping and its steamers, and among them crowds of ferry-boats skimming about in the breeze with their wing-like sails. Then we found out that, like the rest of Greece, the Peiræus was far larger than it looked.

Along the Coast from the Throne of Xerxes

It differed little, alas! from more vulgar harbors in the noise and confusion of disembarking; in the delays of its custom house; in the extortion and insolence of its boatmen. It is still, as in Plato’s day, “the haunt of sailors, where good manners are unknown.” But when we had escaped the turmoil, and were seated silently on the way to Athens, almost along the very road of classical days, all our [pg 32]classical notions, which had been scared away by vulgar bargaining and protesting, regained their sway. We had sailed in through the narrow passage where almost every great Greek that ever lived had sometime passed; now we went along the line, hardly less certain, which had seen all these great ones going to and fro between the city and the port. The present road is shaded with great silver poplars and plane trees, and the moon had set, so that our approach to Athens was even more mysterious than our approach to the Peiræus. We were, moreover, perplexed at our carriage stopping under some large plane trees, though we had driven but two miles, and the night was far spent. Our coachman would listen to no advice or persuasion. We learned afterwards that every carriage going to and from the Peiræus stops at this half-way house, that the horses may drink, and the coachman take “Turkish delight” and water. There is no exception made to this custom, and the traveller is bound to submit. At last we entered the unpretending ill-built streets at the west of Athens.

The stillness of the night is a phenomenon hardly known in that city. No sooner have men and horses gone to rest than all the dogs and cats of the town come out to bark and yell about the thoroughfares. Athens, like all parts of modern Greece, abounds in dogs. You cannot pass a sailing boat in the Levant without seeing a dog looking angrily [pg 33]over the taffrail, and barking at you as you pass. Every ship in the Peiræus has at least one, often a great many, on board. I suppose every house in Athens is provided with one. These creatures seem to make it their business to prevent silence and rest all the night long. They were ably seconded by cats and crowing cocks, as well as by an occasional wakeful donkey; and both cats and donkeys seemed to have voices of almost tropical violence.

So the night wore away under rapidly growing adverse impressions. How is a man to admire art and revere antiquity if he is robbed of his repose? The Greeks sleep so much in the day that they seem indifferent about nightly disturbances; and, perhaps, after many years’ habit, even Athenian caterwauling may fail to rouse the sleeper. But what chance has the passing traveller? Even the strongest ejaculations are but a narrow outlet for his feelings.

In this state of mind, then, I rose at the break of dawn to see whether the window would afford any prospect to serve as a requital for angry sleeplessness. And there, right opposite, stood the rock which of all rocks in the world’s history has done most for literature and art—the rock which poets, and orators, and architects, and historians have ever glorified, and cannot stay their praise—which is ever new and ever old, ever fresh in its decay, ever [pg 34]perfect in its ruin, ever living in its death—the Acropolis of Athens.

When I saw my dream and longing of many years fulfilled, the first rays of the rising sun had just touched the heights, while the town below was still hid in gloom. Rock, and rampart, and ruined fanes—all were colored in uniform tints; the lights were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows of dark crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was no variety in color between what nature and what man had set there. No whiteness shone from the marble, no smoothness showed upon the hewn and polished blocks; but the whole mass of orange and crimson stood out together into the pale, pure Attic air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, still perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek history, of magnificence and meanness—of loftiness and lowness—as well in outer life as in inward motive. And, as it were in illustration of that art of which it was the most perfect bloom, and which lasted in perfection but a day of history, I saw it again and again, in sunlight and in shade, in daylight and at night, but never again in this perfect and singular beauty.

If we except the Acropolis, there are only two striking buildings of classical antiquity within the modern town of Athens—the Temple of Theseus and the few standing columns of Hadrian’s great temple to Zeus. The latter is, indeed, very remarkable. [pg 35]The pillars stand on a vacant platform, once the site of the gigantic temple; the Acropolis forms a noble background; away towards Phalerum stretch undulating hills which hide the sea; to the left (if we look from the town), Mount Hymettus raises its barren slopes; and in the valley, immediately below the pillars, flows the famous little Ilisus,[11] glorified for ever by the poetry of Plato, and in its summer-dry bed the fountain Callirrhoe, from which the Athenian maidens still draw water as of old—water the purest and best in the city. It wells out from under a great limestone rock, all plumed with the rich Capillus Veneris, which seems to find out and frame with its delicate green every natural spring in Greece.

But the pillars of the Temple of Zeus, though very stately and massive, and with their summits bridged together by huge blocks of architrave, are still not Athenian, not Attic, not (if I may say so) genuine Greek work; for the Corinthian capitals, which are here seen perhaps in their greatest perfection, cannot be called pure Greek taste. As is well known, they were hardly ever used, and never used prominently, till the Græco-Roman stage of [pg 36]art. The older Greeks seem to have had a fixed objection to intricate ornamentation in their larger temples. All the greater temples of Greece and Greek Italy are of the Doric Order, with its perfectly plain capital. Groups of figures were admitted upon the pediments and metopes, because these groups formed clear and massive designs visible from a distance. But such intricacies as those of the Corinthian capital were not approved, except in small monuments, which were merely intended for close inspection, and where delicate ornament gave grace to a building which could not lay claim to grandeur. Such is clearly the case with the only purely Greek (as opposed to Græco-Roman) monument of the Corinthian Order, which is still standing—the Choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens.[12] It was also the case with that beautiful little temple, or group of temples, known as the Erechtheum, which, standing beside the great massive Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, presents [pg 37]the very contrasts upon which I am insisting. It is small and essentially graceful, being built in the Ionic style, with rich ornamentation; while the Parthenon is massive, and, in spite of much ornamentation, very severe in its plainer Doric style.

The Erechtheum from the West, Athens

But to return to the pillars of Hadrian’s Temple. They are about fifty-five feet high, by six and a half feet in diameter, and no Corinthian pillar of this colossal size would ever have been set up by the Greeks in their better days. So, then, in spite of the grandeur of these isolated remains—a grandeur not destroyed, perhaps even not diminished, by coffee tables, and inquiring waiters, and military bands, and a vulgar crowd about their base—to the student of really Greek art they are not of the highest interest; nay, they even suggest to him what the Periclean Greeks would have done had they, with such resources, completed the great temple due to the munificence of the Roman Emperor.

Let us turn, in preference, to the Temple of Theseus, at the opposite extremity of the town, it too standing upon a clear platform, and striking the traveller with its symmetry and its completeness, as he approaches from the Peiræus. It is in every way a contrast to the temple of which we have just spoken. It is very small—in fact so small in comparison with the Parthenon, or the great temple at Pæstum, that we are disappointed with it; and yet it is built, not in the richly-decorated Ionic style of [pg 38]the Erechtheum, but in severe Doric; and though small and plain, it is very perfect—as perfect as any such relic that we have. It is many centuries older than Hadrian’s great temple. It could have been destroyed with one-tenth of the trouble, and yet it still stands almost in its perfection. The reason is simply this. Few of the great classical temples suffered much from wanton destruction till the Middle Ages. Now, in the Middle Ages this temple, as well as the Parthenon, was usurped by the Greek Church, and turned into a place of Christian worship. So, then, the little Temple of Theseus has escaped the ravages which the last few centuries—worse than all that went before—have made in the remains of a noble antiquity. To those who desire to study the effect of the Doric Order this temple appears to me an admirable specimen. From its small size and clear position, all its points are very easily taken in. “Such,” says Bishop Wordsworth, “is the integrity of its structure, and the distinctness of its details, that it requires no description beyond that which a few glances might supply. Its beauty defies all: its solid yet graceful form is, indeed, admirable; and the loveliness of its coloring is such that, from the rich mellow hue which the marble has now assumed, it looks as if it had been quarried, not from the bed of a rocky mountain, but from the golden light of an Athenian sunset.” And in like terms many others have spoken.

I have only one reservation to make. The Doric Order being essentially massive, it seems to me that this beautiful temple lacks one essential feature of that order, and therefore, after the first survey, after a single walk about it, it loses to the traveller who has seen Pæstum, and who presently cannot fail to see the Parthenon, that peculiar effect of massiveness—of almost Egyptian solidity—which is ever present, and ever imposing, in these huger Doric temples. It seems as if the Athenians themselves felt this—that the plain simplicity of its style was not effective without size—and accordingly decorated this structure with colors more richly than their other temples. All the reliefs and raised ornaments seem to have been painted; other decorations were added in color on the flat surfaces, so that the whole temple must have been a mass of rich variegated hues, of which blue, green, and red are still distinguishable—or were in Stuart’s time—and in which bronze and gilding certainly played an important part.

We are thus brought naturally face to face with one of the peculiarities of old Greek art most difficult to realize, and still more to appreciate.[13] We can recognize in Egyptian and in Assyrian art the [pg 40]richness and appropriateness of much coloring. Modern painters are becoming so alive to this, that among the most striking pictures in our Royal Academy in London have been seen, for some years back, scenes from old Egyptian and Assyrian life, in which the rich coloring of the architecture has been quite a prominent feature.

But in Greek art—in the perfect symmetry of the Greek temple, in the perfect grace of the Greek statue—we come to think form of such paramount importance, that we look on the beautiful Parian and Pentelic marbles as specially suited for the expression of form apart from color. There is even something in unity of tone that delights the modern eye. Thus, though we feel that the old Greek temples have lost all their original brightness, yet, as I have myself said, and as I have quoted from Bishop Wordsworth, the rich mellow hue which tones all these ruins has to us its peculiar charm. The same rich yellow brown, almost the color of the Roman travertine, is one of the most striking features in the splendid remains which have made Pæstum unique in all Italy. This color contrasts beautifully with the blue sky of southern Europe; it lights up with extraordinary richness in the rising or setting sun. We can easily conceive that were it proposed to restore the Attic temples to their pristine whiteness, we should feel a severe shock, and beg to have these venerable buildings left in the soberness of their [pg 41]acquired color. Still more does it shock us to be told that great sculptors, with Parian marble at hand, preferred to set up images of the gods in gold and ivory, or, still worse, with parts of gold and ivory; and that they thought it right to fill out the eyes with precious stones, and set gilded wreaths upon colored hair.

When we first come to realize these things, we are likely to exclaim against such a jumble, as we should call it, of painting and architecture—still worse, of painting and sculpture. Nor is it possible or reasonable that we should at once submit to such a revolution in our artistic ideas, and bow without criticism to these shocking features in Greek art. But if blind obedience to these our great masters in the laws of beauty is not to be commended, neither is an absolute resistance to all argument on the question to be respected; nor do I acknowledge the good sense or the good taste of that critic who insists that nothing can possibly equal the color and texture of white marble, and that all coloring of such a substance is the mere remains of barbarism. For, say what we will, the Greeks were certainly, as a nation, the best judges of beauty the world has yet seen. And this is not all. The beauty of which they were evidently the most fond was beauty of form—harmony of proportions, symmetry of design. They always hated the tawdry and the extravagant. As to their literature, there is no poetry, no oratory, no [pg 42]history, which is less decorated with the flowers of rhetoric: it is all pure in design, chaste in detail. So with their dress; so with their dwellings. We cannot but feel that, had the effect of painted temples and statues been tawdry, there is no people on earth who would have felt it so keenly, and disliked it so much. There must, then, have been strong reasons why this bright coloring did not strike their eye as it would the eye of sober moderns.

To any one who has seen the country, and thought about the question there, many such reasons present themselves. In the first place, all through southern Europe, and more especially in Greece, there is an amount of bright color in nature, which prevents almost any artificial coloring from producing a startling effect. Where all the landscape, the sea, and the air are exceedingly bright, we find the inhabitants increasing the brightness of their dress and houses, as it were to correspond with nature. Thus, in Italy, they paint their houses green, and pink, and yellow, and so give to their towns and villas that rich and warm effect which we miss so keenly among the gray and sooty streets of northern Europe. So also in their dress, these people wear scarlet, and white, and rich blue, not so much in patterns as in large patches, and a festival in Sicily or Greece fills the streets with intense color. We know that the coloring of the old Greek dress was quite of the same character as that of the modern, [pg 43]though in design it has completely changed. We must, therefore, imagine the old Greek crowd before their temples, or in their market-places, a very white crowd, with patches of scarlet and various blue; perhaps altogether white in processions, if we except scarlet shoe-straps and other such slight relief. One cannot but feel that a richly colored temple—that pillars of blue and red—that friezes of gilding, and other ornament, upon a white marble ground, and in white marble framing, must have been a splendid and appropriate background, a genial feature, in such a sky and with such costume. We must get accustomed to such combinations—we must dwell upon them in imagination, or ask our good painters to restore them for us, and let us look upon them constantly and calmly.

But I will not seek to persuade; let us merely state the case fairly, and put the reader in a position to judge for himself. So much for the painted architecture. I will but add, the most remarkable specimen of a richly painted front to which we can now appeal is also really one of the most beautiful in Europe—the front of S. Mark’s at Venice. The rich frescoes and profuse gilding on this splendid front, of which photographs give a very false idea, should be studied by all who desire to judge fairly of this side of Greek taste.

But I must say a word, before passing on, concerning the statues. No doubt, the painting of [pg 44]statues, and the use of gold and ivory upon them, were derived from a rude age, when no images existed but rude wooden work—at first a mere block, then roughly altered and reduced to shape, probably requiring some coloring to produce any effect whatever. To a public accustomed from childhood to such painted, and often richly dressed images, a pure white marble statue must appear utterly cold and lifeless. So it does to us, when we have become accustomed to the mellow tints of old and even weather-stained Greek statues; and it should be here noticed that this mellow skin-surface on antique statues is not the mere result of age, but of an artificial process, whereby they burnt into the surface a composition of wax and oil, which gave a yellowish tone to the marble, as well as also that peculiar surface which so accurately represents the texture of the human skin. But if we imagine all the marble surfaces and reliefs in the temple colored for architectural richness’ sake, we can feel even more strongly how cold and out-of-place would be a perfectly colorless statue in the centre of all this pattern.

I will go further, and say we can point out cases where coloring greatly heightens the effect and beauty of sculpture. The first is from the bronzes found at Herculaneum, now in the museum at Naples. Though they are not marble, they are suitable for our purpose, being naturally of a single [pg 45]dark brown hue, which is indeed even more unfavorable (we should think) for such treatment. In some of the finest of these bronzes—especially in the two young men starting for a race—the eyeballs are inserted in white, with iris and pupil colored. Nothing can be conceived more striking and lifelike than the effect produced. There is in the Varvakion at Athens a marble mask, found in the Temple of Æsculapius under the south side of the Acropolis, probably an ex voto offered for a recovery from some disease of the eyes. This marble face also has its eyes colored in the most striking and lifelike way, and is one of the most curious objects found in the late excavations.

I will add one remarkable modern example—the monument at Florence to a young Indian prince, who visited England and this country some years ago, and died of fever during his homeward voyage. They have set up to him a richly colored and gilded baldachin, in the open air, and in a quiet, wooded park. Under this covering is a life-sized bust of the prince, in his richest state dress. The whole bust—the turban, the face, the drapery—all is colored to the life, and the dress, of course, of the most gorgeous variety. The turban is chiefly white, striped with gold, in strong contrast to the mahogany complexion and raven hair of the actual head; the robe is gold and green, and covered with ornament. The general effect is, from the very first [pg 46]moment, striking and beautiful. The longer it is studied, the better it appears; and there is hardly a reasonable spectator who will not confess that, were we to replace the present bust with a copy of it in white marble, the beauty and harmony of the monument would be utterly marred. To those who have the opportunity of visiting Greece or Italy, I strongly commend these specimens of colored buildings and sculpture. When they have seen them, they will hesitate to condemn what we still hear called the curiously bad taste of the old Greeks in their use of color in the plastic arts.

But these archæological discussions are truly ἐκβολαὶ λόγου, digressions—in themselves necessary, yet only tolerable if they are not too long. I revert to the general state of the antiquities at Athens, always reserving the Acropolis for a special chapter. As I said, the isolated pillars of Hadrian’s Temple of Zeus, and the so-called Temple of Theseus, are the only very striking objects.[14] There are, of [pg 47]course, many other buildings, or remains of buildings. There is the monument of Lysicrates—a small and very graceful round chamber, adorned with Corinthian engaged pillars, and with friezes of the school of Scopas, and intended to carry on its summit the tripod Lysicrates had gained in a musical and dramatic contest (334 B. C.) at Athens. There is the later Temple of the Winds, as it is called—a sort of public clock, with sundials and fine reliefs of the Wind-gods on its outward surfaces, and arrangements for a water-clock within. There are two portals, or gateways—one leading into the old agora, or market-place, the other leading from old Athens into the Athens of Hadrian.

But all these buildings are either miserably defaced, or of such late date and decayed taste as to make them unworthy specimens of pure Greek art. A single century ago there was much to be seen and admired which has since disappeared; and even to-day the majority of the population are careless as to the treatment of ancient monuments, and sometimes even mischievous in wantonly defacing them. Thus, I saw the marble tombs of Ottfried Müller and Charles Lenormant—tombs which, though modern, were yet erected at the cost of the nation to men who were eminent lovers and students of Greek art—I saw these tombs used as common targets by [pg 48]the neighborhood, and all peppered with marks of shot and of bullets. I saw them, too, all but blown up by workmen blasting for building-stones close beside them.[15] I saw, also, from the Acropolis, a young gentleman practising with a pistol at a piece of old carved marble work in the Theatre of Dionysus. His object seemed to be to chip off a piece from the edge at every shot. Happily, on this occasion, our vantage ground enabled us to take the law into our own hands; and after in vain appealing to a custodian to interfere, we adopted the tactics of Apollo at Delphi, and by detaching stones from the top of our precipice, we put to flight the wretched barbarian who had come to ravage the treasures of that most sacred place.

These unhappy examples of the defacing of architectural monuments,[16] which can hardly be removed, naturally suggest to the traveller in Greece the kindred question how all the smaller and movable antiquities that are found should be distributed so as best to promote the love and knowledge of art.

On this point it seems to me that we have gone to one extreme, and the Greeks to the other, and [pg 49]that neither of us have done our best to make known what we acknowledge ought to be known as widely as possible. The tendency in England, at least of later years, has been to swallow up all lesser and all private collections in the great national Museum in London, which has accordingly become so enormous and so bewildering that no one can profit by it except the trained specialist, who goes in with his eyes shut, and will not open them till he has arrived at the special class of objects he intends to examine. But to the ordinary public, and even the generally enlightened public (if such an expression be not a contradiction in terms), there is nothing so utterly bewildering, and therefore so unprofitable, as a visit to the myriad treasures of that great world of curiosities.

In the last century many private persons—many noblemen of wealth and culture—possessed remarkable collections of antiquities. These have mostly been swallowed up by what is called “the nation,” and new private collections are very rare indeed.

In Greece the very opposite course is being now pursued. By a special law it is forbidden to sell out of the country, or even to remove from a district, any antiquities whatever; and in consequence little museums have been established in every village in Greece—nay, sometimes even in places where there is no village, in order that every district may pos[pg 50]sess its own riches, and become worth a visit from the traveller and the antiquary. I have seen such museums at Eleusis, some fifteen miles from Athens, at Thebes, now an unimportant town, at Livadia, at Chæronea, at Argos, at Olympia, and even in the wild plains of Orchomenus, in a little chapel, with no town within miles.[17] If I add to this that most of these museums were mere dark outhouses, only lighted through the door, the reader will have some notion what a task it would be to visit and criticise, with any attempt at completeness, the ever-increasing remnants of classical Greece.

The traveller is at first disposed to complain that even the portable antiquities found in various parts of Greece are not brought to Athens, and gathered into one vast national museum. Further reflection shows such a proceeding to be not only impossible, but highly inexpedient. I will not speak of the great waste of objects of interest when they are brought together in such vast masses that the visitor is rather oppressed than enlightened. Any one who has gone to the British Museum will know what I mean. Nor will I give the smallest weight to the selfish local argument, that compelling visitors to [pg 51]wander from place to place brings traffic and money into the country. Until proper roads and clean inns are established, such an argument is both unfair and unlikely to produce results worth considering. But fortunately most of the famous things in Greece are sites, ruined buildings, forts which cannot be removed from their place, if at all, without destruction, and of which the very details cannot be understood without seeing the place for which they were intended. Even the Parthenon sculptures in London would have lost most of their interest, if the building itself at Athens did not show us their application, and glorify them with its splendor. He who sees the gold of Mycenæ at Athens, knows little of its meaning, if he has not visited the giant forts where its owners once dwelt and exercised their sway; and if, as has been done at Olympia, some patriotic Greek had built a safe museum at Mycenæ to contain them, they would be more deeply interesting and instructive than they now are.

In such a town as Athens, on the contrary, it seems to me that the true solution of the problem has been attained, though it will probably be shortly abandoned for a central museum. There are (or were) at Athens at least six separate museums of antiquities—one at the University, one called the Varvakion, one in the Theseum, one, or rather two, on the Acropolis, one in the Ministry of Public Instruction, and lastly, the new National Museum, [pg 52]as it is called, in Patissia Street—devoted to its special treasures. If these several storehouses were thoroughly kept,—if the objects were carefully numbered and catalogued,—I can conceive no better arrangement for studying separately and in detail the various monuments, which must always bewilder and fatigue when crowded together in one vast exhibition. If the British Museum were in this way severed into many branches, and the different classes of objects it contains were placed in separate buildings, and in different parts of London, I believe most of us would acquire a far greater knowledge of what it contains, and hence it would attain a greater usefulness in educating the nation. To visit any one of the Athenian museums is a comparatively short and easy task, where a man can see the end of his labor before him, and hence will not hesitate to delay long over such things as are worth a careful study.

It may be said that all this digression about the mere placing of monuments is delaying the reader too long from what he desires to know—something about the monuments themselves. But this little book, to copy an expression of Herodotus, particularly affects digressions. I desire to wander through the subject exactly in the way which naturally suggests itself to me. After all, the reflections on a journey ought to be more valuable than its mere description.

Before passing into Attica and leaving Athens, something more must, of course, be said of the museums, then of the newer diggings, and especially of the splendid tombs found in the Kerameikus. We will then mount the Acropolis, and wander leisurely about its marvellous ruins. From it we can look out upon the general shape and disposition of Attica, and plan our shorter excursions.

As some of the suggestions in my first edition have found favor at Athens, I venture to point out here the great benefit which the Greek archæologists would confer on all Europe if they would publish an official guide to Athens, with some moderately complete account of the immense riches of its museums. Such a book, which might appear under the sanction of M. Rousopoulos, or Professor Koumanoudis, might be promoted either by the Greek Parliament or the University of Athens. Were it even published in modern Greek, its sale must be large and certain; and, by appendices, or new editions, it could be kept up to the level of the new discoveries. The catalogues of Kekulé and of Heydemann are already wholly inadequate, and unless one has the privilege of knowing personally one of the gentlemen above named, it is very difficult indeed to obtain any proper notion of the history, or of the original sites, of the various objects which excite curiosity or admiration at every step. Such a book as I suggest would be hailed by every Hellenist in [pg 54]Europe as an inestimable boon. But in a land where the able men are perpetually engaged in making or observing new discoveries, they will naturally despise the task of cataloguing what they know. Hence, I suggest that some promising young scholar might undertake the book, and have his work revised by his masters in the sober and practical school of Athens.[18]

CHAPTER III.

ATHENS—THE MUSEUMS—THE TOMBS.

Nothing is more melancholy and more disappointing than the first view of the Athenian museums. Almost every traveller sees them after passing through Italy, where everything—indeed far too much—has been done to make the relics of antiquity perfect and complete. Missing noses, and arms, and feet have been restored; probable or possible names have been assigned to every statue; they are set up, generally, in handsome galleries, with suitable decoration; the visitor is provided with full descriptive catalogues. Nothing of all this is found in Greece. The fragments are merely sorted: many of the mutilated statues are lying prostrate, and, of course, in no way restored. Everything is, however, in process of being arranged. But there is room to apprehend that in fifty years things will still be found changing their places, and still in process of being arranged. It is not fair to complain of these things in a nation which is fully occupied with its political and commercial development, and where new classical remains are constantly added to the museums. Every nerve is being strained by the Greeks to obtain [pg 56]their proper rights in the possible break-up of the Ottoman Empire. Great efforts are, besides, being made to develop not only the ports, but the manufactures of the country. The building of new roads is more vital to the nation than the saving and ordering of artistic remains. Thus we must trust to private enterprise and generosity to settle these things; and these have hitherto not been wanting among the Greeks. But their resources are small, and they require help both in money and in sympathy. So, then, unless foreign influences be continuously brought to bear,—all the foreign schools act unselfishly at their own expense,—I fear that all of us who visit Athens will be doomed to that first feeling of disappointment.

But I am bound to add that every patient observer who sets to work in spite of his disappointment, and examines with honest care these “disjecta membra” of Attic art—any one who will replace in imagination the tips of noses—any one who will stoop over lying statues, and guess at the context of broken limbs—such an observer will find his vexation gradually changing into wonder, and will at last come to see that all the smoothly-restored Greek work in Italian museums is not worth a tithe of the shattered fragments in the real home and citadel of pure art. This is especially true of the museum on the Acropolis. It is, however, also true of the other museums, and more obviously true of the reliefs [pg 57]upon the tombs. The assistance of an experienced Athenian antiquary is also required, who knows his way among the fragments, and who can tell the history of the discovery, and the theories of the purport of each. There are a good many men of ability and learning connected with the University of Athens, who describe each object in the antiquarian papers as it is discovered. But when I asked whether I could buy or subscribe to any recognized organ for such information, I was told (as I might have expected) that no single paper or periodical was so recognized. Clashing interests and personal friendships determine where each discovery is to be announced; so that often the professedly archæological journals contain no mention of such things, while the common daily papers secure the information.

Here, again, we feel the want of some stronger government—some despotic assertion of a law of gravitation to a common centre—to counteract the strong centrifugal forces acting all through Greek society. The old autonomy of the Greeks—that old assertion of local independence which was at once their greatness and their ruin—this strong instinct has lasted undiminished to the present day. They seem even now to hate pulling together, as we say. They seem always ready to assert their individual rights and claims against those of the community or the public. The old Greeks had as a safeguard [pg 58]their divisions into little cities and territories; so that their passion for autonomy was expended on their city interests, in which the individual could forget himself. But as the old Greeks were often too selfish for this, and asserted their personal autonomy against their own city, so the modern Greek, who has not this safety-valve, finds it difficult to rise to the height of acting in the interests of the nation at large; and though he converses much and brilliantly about Hellenic unity, he generally allows smaller interests to outweigh this splendid general conception. I will here add a most annoying example of this particularist feeling, which obtrudes itself upon every visitor to Athens. The most trying thing in the streets is the want of shade, and the consequent glare of the houses and roadway. Yet along every street there are planted pepper-trees of graceful growth and of delicious scent. But why are they all so wretchedly small and bare? Because each inhabitant chooses to hack away the growing branches in front of his own door. The Prime Minister, who deplored this curious Vandalism, said he was powerless to check it. Until, however, the Athenians learn to control themselves, and let their trees grow, Athens will be an ugly and disagreeable city.

So, then, the Greeks will not even agree to tell us where we may find a complete list of newly-discovered antiquities. Nor, indeed, does the Athenian [pg 59]public care very much, beyond a certain vague pride, for such things, if we except one peculiar kind, which has taken among them somewhat the place of old china among us. There have been found in many Greek cemeteries—in Megara, in Cyrene, and of late in great abundance and excellence at Tanagra, in Bœotia—little figures of terra cotta, often delicately modelled and richly colored both in dress and limbs. These figures are ordinarily from eight to twelve inches high, and represent ladies both sitting and standing in graceful attitudes, young men in pastoral life, and other such subjects. I was informed that some had been found in various places through Greece, but the main source of them—and a very rich source—is the Necropolis at Tanagra. There are several collections of these figures on cup-boards and in cabinets in private houses at Athens, all remarkable for the marvellous modernness of their appearance. The graceful drapery of the ladies especially is very like modern dress, and many have on their heads flat round hats, quite similar in design to the gipsy hats much worn among ladies of late years. But above all, the hair was drawn back from the forehead, not at all in what is considered Greek style, but rather à l’ Eugénie, as we used to say when we were young. Many hold in their hands large fans, like those which we make of peacocks’ feathers. No conclusive theory has yet been started, so far as I know, concerning the [pg 60]object or intention of these figures. So many of them are female figures, that it seems unlikely they were portraits of the deceased; and the frequent occurrence of two figures together, especially one woman being carried by another, seems almost to dissuade us from such a theory. They seem to be the figures called Κόραι by many old Greeks, which were used as toys by children, and, perhaps, as ornaments. The large class of tradesmen who made them were called Κορόπλαθοι, and were held in contempt by real sculptors. Most of them are, indeed, badly modelled, and evidently the work of ignorant tradesmen. If it could be shown that they were only found in the graves of children, it would be a touching sign of that world-wide feeling among the human race, to bury with the dead friend whatever he loved and enjoyed in his life on earth, that he might not feel lonely in his cold and gloomy grave.[19] But it seems unlikely that this limitation can ever be proved.

There is an equal difficulty as to their age. The [pg 61]Greeks say that the tombs in which they are found are not later than the second century B. C., and it is, indeed, hard to conceive at what later period there was enough wealth and art to produce such often elegant, and often costly, results. Tanagra and Thespiæ were, indeed, in Strabo’s day (lib. ix. 2) the only remaining cities of Bœotia; the rest, he says, were but ruins and names. But we may be certain that in that time of universal decay the remaining towns must have been as poor and insignificant as they now are. Thus, we seem thrown back into classical or Alexandrian days for the origin of these figures, which in their bright coloring—pink and blue dresses, often gilded fringes, the hair always fair, so far as I could find—are, indeed, like what we know of old Greek statuary, but in other respects surprisingly modern.[20] If their antiquity can be strictly demonstrated, it will but show another case of the versatility of the Greeks in all things relating to art: how, with the simplest material, and at a long distance from the great art centres, they produced a type of exceeding grace and refinement totally foreign to their great old models, varying in dress, attitude—in every point of style—from ordinary Greek sculpture, and anticipating much of the modern ideals of beauty and elegance.

But it is necessary to suspend our judgment, and wait for further and closer investigation. The workmen at Tanagra are now forbidden to sell these objects to private fanciers; and in consequence, their price has risen so enormously, that those in the market, if of real elegance and artistic merit, cannot be obtained for less than from £40 to £60. As much as 2000 francs has been paid for one, when they were less common. From this price downward they can still be bought in Athens, the rude and badly finished specimens being cheap enough. The only other method of procuring them, or of procuring them more cheaply, is to make diligent inquiries when travelling in the interior, where they may often be bought from poor people, either at Megara, Tanagra, or elsewhere, who have chanced to find them, and are willing enough to part with them after a certain amount of bargaining.

It is convenient to dispose of this peculiar and distinct kind of Greek antiquities, because they seem foreign to the rest, and cannot be brought under any other head. These figurines have now found their way into most European museums.[21]

I pass to the public collections at Athens, in which we find few of these figures, and which [pg 63]rather contain the usual products of Greek plastic art—statues, reliefs, as well as pottery, and inscriptions. As I have said, the statues are in the most lamentable condition, shattered into fragments, without any attempt at restoring even such losses as can be supplied with certainty. What mischief might be done by such wholesale restoration as was practised in Italy some fifty years ago, it is hard to say. But perhaps the reaction against that error has driven us to an opposite extreme.

There is, indeed, one—a naked athlete, with his cloak hanging over the left shoulder, and coiled round the left forearm—which seems almost as good as any strong male figure which we now possess. While it has almost exactly the same treatment of the cloak on the left arm which we see in the celebrated Hermes of the Vatican,[22] the proportions of the figure are nearer the celebrated Discobolus (numbered 126, Braccio Nuovo). There are two other copies at Florence, and one at Naples. These repetitions point to some very celebrated original, which the critics consider to be of the older school of Polycletus, and even imagine may possibly be a copy of his Doryphorus, which was called the Canon statue, or model of the perfect manly form. The Hermes has too strong a likeness to Lysippus’s Apoxyomenos not to be recognized as of the newer school. What [pg 64]we have, then, in this Attic statue seems an intermediate type between the earlier and stronger school of Polycletus and the more elegant and newer school of Lysippus in Alexander’s day.

There can, however, be no doubt that it does not date from the older and severer age of sculpture, of which Phidias and Polycletus were the highest representatives. Any one who studies Greek art perceives how remarkably not only the style of dress and ornament, but even the proportions of the figure change, as we come down from generation to generation in the long line of Greek sculptors. The friezes of Selinus (now at Palermo), and those of Ægina (now in Munich), which are among our earliest classical specimens, are remarkable for short, thick-set forms. The men are men five feet seven, or, at most, eight inches high, and their figures are squat even for that height. In the specimens we have of the days of Phidias and Polycletus these proportions are altered. The head of the Doryphorus, if we can depend upon our supposed copies, is still heavy, and the figure bulky, though taller in proportion. He looks a man of five feet ten inches at least. The statue we are just considering is even taller, and is like the copies we have of Lysippus’s work, the figure apparently of a man of six feet high; but his head is not so small, nor is he so slender and light as this type is usually found.

It is not very easy to give a full account of this change. There is, of course, one general reason well known—the art of the Greeks, like almost all such developments, went through stiffness and clumsiness into dignity and strength, to which it presently added that grace which raises strength into majesty. But in time the seeking after grace becomes too prominent, and so strength, and with it, of course, the majesty which requires strength as well as grace, is gradually lost. Thus we arrive at a period when the forms are merely elegant or voluptuous, without any assertion of power. I will speak of a similar development among female figures in connection with another subject which will naturally suggest it.

This can only be made plain by a series of illustrations. Of course, the difficulty of obtaining really archaic statues was very great.[23] They were mostly sacred images of the gods, esteemed venerable and interesting by the Greeks, but seldom copied. Happily, the Romans, when they set themselves to admire and procure Greek statues, had fits of what we now call pre-Raphaelitism—fits of admiration for the archaic and devout, even if ungraceful, in preference to the more perfect forms of later art. Hence, we find in Italy a number of [pg 66]statues which, if not really archaic, are at least archaistic, as the critics call it—imitations or copies of archaic statues. With these we need now no longer be content. And we may pause a moment on the question of archaic Greek art, because, apart from the imitations of the time of Augustus and Hadrian, we had already some really genuine fragments in the little museum in the Acropolis—fragments saved, not from the present Parthenon, but rather from about the ruins of the older Parthenon. This temple was destroyed by the Persians, and the materials were built into the surrounding wall of the Acropolis by the Athenians, when they began to strengthen and beautify it at the opening of their career of dominion and wealth. The stains of fire are said to be still visible on these drums of pillars now built into the fortification, and there can be no doubt of their belonging to the old temple, as it is well attested.[24] But I do not agree with the statement that these older materials were so used in order to nurse a perpetual hatred against the Persians in the minds of the people, who saw daily before them the evidence of the ancient wrong done to their temples.[25] I believe this sentimental twaddle to be [pg 67]quite foreign to all Greek feeling. The materials were used in the wall because they were unsuitable for the newer temples, and because they must otherwise be greatly in the way on the limited surface of the Acropolis.

A fair specimen of the old sculptures first found is a very stiff, and, to us, comical figure, which has lost its legs, but is otherwise fairly preserved, and which depicts a male figure with curious conventional hair, and still more conventional beard, holding by its four legs a bull or calf, which he is carrying on his shoulders. The eyes are now hollow, and were evidently once filled with something different from the marble of which the statue is made. The whole pose and style of the work is stiff and expressionless, and it is one of the most characteristic remains of the older Attic art still in existence.

Happily there is little doubt what the statue means. It is the votive offering of the Marathonians, which Pausanias saw in the Acropolis, and which commemorated the legend of Theseus having driven the wild [pg 68]bull, sent against them by Minos, from Marathon to the Acropolis, where he sacrificed it. Pausanias does not say how Theseus was represented with the bull; but it certainly was not a group—such a thing is clearly beyond the narrow and timid conceptions of the artists of that day. It being difficult to represent this hero and bull together except by representing the man carrying the bull, the artist has made the animal full grown in type, but as small as a calf, and has, of course, not attempted any expression of hostility between the two. The peaceful look, which merely arises from the inability of the artist to render expression, has led many good art critics to call it not a Theseus but a Hermes. Such being the obscure history of the statue, it is not difficult to note its characteristics. We see the conventional treatment of the hair, the curious transparent garments lying close to the skin, and the very heavy muscular forms of the arms and body. The whole figure is stiff and expressionless, and strictly in what is called the hieratic or old religious style, as opposed to an ideal or artistic conception.

There are two full-length reliefs—one which I first saw in a little church near Orchomenus, and a couple more at Athens in the Theseon—which are plainly of the same epoch and style of art. The most complete Athenian one is ascribed as the stele of Aristion, and as the work of Aristocles,[26] [pg 69]doubtless an artist known as contemporary with those who fought at the battle of Marathon. Thus we obtain a very good clue to the date at which this art flourished. There is also the head of a similar figure, with the hair long and fastened in a knot behind, and with a discus raised above the shoulder, so as to look like a nimbus round the head, which is one of the most interesting objects in the Varvakion. But of the rest the pedestal only is preserved. Any impartial observer will see in these figures strong traces of the influence of Asiatic style. This influence seems about as certain, and almost as much disputed, as the Egyptian influences on the Doric style of architecture. To an unbiassed observer these influences speak so plainly, that, in the absence of strict demonstration to the contrary, one feels bound to admit them—the more so, as we know that the Greeks, like all other people of genius, were ever ready and anxious to borrow from others. It should be often repeated, because it is usually ignored, that it is a most original gift to know how to borrow; and that those only who feel wanting in originality are anxious to assert it. Thus the Romans, who borrowed without assimilating, are always asserting their originality; the Greeks, who borrowed more and better, because they made what they borrowed their own, never care to do so. The hackneyed parallel of Shakespeare will occur to all.

Unfortunately, the museums of Athens show us [pg 70]but few examples of the transition state of art between this and the perfect work of Phidias’s school. The Æginetan marbles are less developed than Phidias’s work; but from the relief of Aristion, and the Theseus of the Acropolis, to these, is a wide gulf in artistic feeling. The former is the work of children shackled by their material, still more by conventional rules; the latter the work of men. There is also the well-known Apollo of Thera; a similar Apollo found at Athens, with very conventional curls, and now in the National Museum; and two or three small sitting statues of Athene which, though very archaic, begin to approach the grace of artistic sculpture. But Italy is sufficiently rich in imitations of this very period. There are four very remarkable statues in a small room of the Villa Albani, near Rome, which are not photographed, because the public would, doubtless, think them bad art, but which, could I procure copies and reproduce them, would illustrate clearly what I desire. We have also among the bronzes found at Pompeii statues precisely of this style, evidently copies from old Greek originals, and made to satisfy the pre-Raphaelitism (as I have already called it) of Italian amateurs. I select a bronze Artemis as an interesting example of this antiquarian taste in a later age. The statuette maintains in the face the very features which we think so comical when looking at the relief of Aristion, or the women [pg 71]of the Acropolis. They are, no doubt, softened and less exaggerated, but still they are there. The so-called Greek profile is not yet attained. The general features of the old Greek face in monuments were a retreating forehead, a peaked nose, slightly turned up at the end, the mouth drawn in, and the corners turned up, flat elongated eyes (especially full in the profiles of reliefs), a prominent angular chin, lank cheeks, and high ears. These lovely features can be found on hundreds of vases, because, vase-making being rather a trade than an art, men kept close to the old models long after great sculptors and painters had, like Polygnotus, begun to depart from the antique stiffness of the countenance.[27] The Artemis in question has, however, these very features, which are very clear when we can see her in profile. But the head-dress and draping are elaborate, and though formal and somewhat rigid, not wanting in grace. The pose of the arms is stiff, and the attitude that of a woman stepping forward, which is very usual in archaic figures—I suppose because it enlarged the base of the statue, and made it stand more firmly in its place. The absence of any girdle or delaying fold in the garments is one of the most marked contrasts with the later draping of such figures.

But now at last we can show the reader how far the antiquarians of later days were able to imitate [pg 72]archaic sculpture. Another characteristic archaic statue was one of the seventeen found in 1885–86 on the Acropolis,[28] where they had been piled together with portions of pillars and other stones to extend the platform for new buildings. The style and the mutilation of all these statues, which, from their uniform type, are more probably votive offerings than sacred images, point to their being the actual statues which the Persians overthrew when ravaging the Acropolis (480 B. C.). They were so broken and spoiled that the Athenians, when restoring and rebuilding their temples, determined to use them for rubbish. Thus we have now a perfectly authentic group of works showing us the art of the older Athens before the Persian Wars. They are each made of several pieces of marble, apparently Parian, dowelled together like wooden work, and the figure here reproduced has a bronze pin protruding from the head, apparently to hold a nimbus or covering of metal. They were all richly colored, as many traces upon them still show.[29]

Let us now leave this archaic art and go to the street of tombs, where we can find such specimens as the world can hardly equal, and in such condition [pg 74]as to be easily intelligible. A good many of these tombs, and some of them very fine, have lately been removed to the National Museum, where they are no doubt safer, and more easily studied and compared, though there is something lost in not having them upon their original site, with some at least of their original surroundings. What I have said of the museums is, even so, disappointing, as indeed it should be, if the feelings of the visitor are to be faithfully reproduced. But I must not fail to add, before turning to other places, that in inscriptions these museums are very rich, as well as also in Attic vases, and lamps, and other articles of great importance in our estimate of old Greek life. The professors of the University have been particularly diligent in deciphering and explaining the inscriptions, and with the aid of the Germans, who have collected, and are still collecting, these scattered documents in a complete publication, we are daily having new light thrown upon Greek history. Thus Kohler has been able from the recovered Attic tribute-lists to construct a map of the Athenian maritime empire with its dependencies, which tells the student more in five minutes than hours of laborious reading. The study of vases and lamps is beyond my present scope; and the former so wide and complicated a subject, that it cannot be mastered without long study and trouble.[30]

I pass, therefore, from the museums to the street of tombs, which Thucydides tells us to find in the fairest suburb of the city, as we go out westward towards the groves of Academe, and before we turn slightly to the south on our way to the Peiræus. Thucydides has described with some care the funeral ceremonies held in this famous place, and has composed for us a very noble funeral oration, which he has put in the mouth of Pericles.[31] It is with this oration, probably the finest passage in Thucydides’s great history, in our minds, that we approach the avenue where the Athenians laid their dead. We have to pass through the poorest portion of modern Athens, through wretched bazaars and dirty markets, which abut upon the main street. Amid all this squalor and poverty, all this complete denial of art and leisure, there are [pg 76]still features which faintly echo old Greek life. There is the bright color of the dresses—the predominance of white, and red, and blue, of which the old Athenians were so fond; and there is among the lowest classes a great deal of that striking beauty which recalls to us the old statues. More especially in the form of the head, and in the expression, of the children, we see types not to be found elsewhere in Europe, and which, if not derived from classical Greece, are at all events very beautiful.

We then come on to the railway station, which is, indeed, in this place, as elsewhere, very offensive. With its grimy smoke, its shrill sounds, and all its other hard unloveliness, it is not a meet neighbor for the tombs of the old Greeks, which are close to it on all sides.

They lie—as almost all old ruins do—far below the present level of the ground, and have, therefore, to be exhumed by careful digging. When this has been done they are covered with a rude door, to protect their sculptured face; and when I first saw them were standing about, without any order or regularity, close to the spots where they had been found.

A proper estimate of these tombs cannot be attained without appreciating the feelings with which the survivors set them up. And we must consider not only the general attitude of Greek literature on the all-important question of the state of man after death, but also the thousands of inscriptions upon [pg 77]tombs, both with and without sculptured reliefs, if we will form a sure opinion about the feelings of the bereaved in these bygone days.

We know from Homer and from Mimnermus that in the earlier periods, though the Greeks were unable to shake off a belief in life after death, they could not conceive that state as anything but a shadowy and wretched echo of the real life upon earth. It was a gloomy existence, burdened with the memory of lost happiness and the longing for lost enjoyment. To the Homeric Greeks death was a dark unavoidable fate, without hope and without reward. It is, indeed, true that we find in Pindar thoughts and aspirations of a very different kind. We have in the fragments of his poetry more than one passage asserting the rewards of the just, and the splendors of a future life far happier than that which we now enjoy. But, notwithstanding these noble visions, such high expectation laid no hold upon the imagination of the Greek world. The poems of Pindar, we are told, soon ceased to be popular, and his visions are but a streak of light amid general gloom. The kingdom of the dead in Æschylus is evidently, as in Homer, but a weary echo of this life, where honor can only be attained by the pious service of loving kinsfolk, whose duty paid to the dead affects him in his gloomier state, and raises him in the esteem of his less-remembered fellows. Sophocles says nothing to clear away the night; nay [pg 78]rather his deepest and maturest contemplation regards death as the worst of ills to the happy man—a sorry refuge to the miserable. Euripides longs that there may be no future state; and Plato only secures the immortality of the soul by severing it from the person—the man, and all his interests.

It is plain, from this evidence, that the Greeks must have looked upon the death of those they loved with unmixed sorrow. It was the final parting, when all the good and pleasant things are remembered; when men seek, as it were, to increase the pang, by clothing the dead in all his sweetest and dearest presence. But this was not done by pompous inscriptions, or by a vain enumeration of all the deceased had performed—inscriptions which, among us, tell more of the vanity than of the grief of the survivors. The commonest epitaph was a simple χαῖρε, or farewell; and it is this single word, so full and deep in its meaning to those who love, which is pictured in the tomb reliefs. They are simple parting scenes, expressing the grief of the survivors, and the great sadness of the sufferer, who is going to his long home.

Nevertheless, what strikes us forcibly in these remarkable monuments is the chastened modest expression of sorrow which they display. There is no violence, no despair, no extravagance—all is simple and noble; thus combining purity of art with a far deeper pathos—a far nobler grief—than that of the [pg 79]exaggerated paintings and sculptures which seek to express mourning in later and less cultivated ages.[32] We may defy any art to produce truer or more poignant pictures of real sorrow—a sorrow, as I have explained, far deeper and more hopeless than any Christian sorrow; and yet there is no wringing of hands, no swooning, no defacing with sackcloth and ashes.[33] Sometimes, indeed, as in the celebrated tomb of Dexileos, a mere portrait of the dead in active life was put upon his tomb, and private grief would not assert itself in presence of the record of his public services.

A Tomb from the Via Sacra, Athens

I know not that any other remnants of Greek art bring home to us more plainly one of its eternal and divine features—or shall I rather say, one of its eternal and human features?—the greatest, if not the main feature, which has made it the ever new and ever lasting lawgiver to men in their efforts to represent the ideal.

If I am to permit myself any digression whatever, we cannot do better than conclude this chapter with some reflections on this subject, and we may there[pg 80]fore turn, by suggestion of the Athenian tombs, to a few general remarks on the reserve of Greek art—I mean the reserve in the displaying emotion, in the portraying of the fierce outbursts of joy or grief; and again, more generally, the reserve in the exhibiting of peculiar or personal features, passing interests, or momentary emotions.

In a philosophy now rather forgotten than extinct, and which once commanded no small attention, Adam Smith was led to analyze the indirect effects of sympathy, from which, as a single principle, he desired to deduce all the rules of ethics. While straining many points unduly, he must be confessed to have explained with great justice the origin of good taste or tact in ordinary life, which he saw to be the careful watching of the interest of others in our own affairs, and the feeling that we must not force upon them what concerns ourselves, except we are sure to carry with us their active sympathy. Good breeding, he says, consists in a delicate perception how far this will go, and in suppressing those of our feelings which, though they affect us strongly, cannot be expected to affect in like manner our neighbor, whose sympathy should be the measure and limit of our outspokenness. There can be no doubt that whatever other elements come in, this analysis is true, so far as it goes, and recommends itself at once to the convictions of any educated man. The very same principle applies still more [pg 81]strongly and universally in art. As tragedy is bound to treat ideal griefs and joys of so large and broad a kind that every spectator may merge in them his petty troubles, so ideal sculpture and painting are only ideal so far as they represent those large and eternal features in human nature which must always command the sympathy of every pure human heart.

Let us dispose at once of an apparent exception—the mediæval pictures of the Passion of Christ, and the sorrows of the Virgin Mary. Here the artist allowed himself the most extreme treatment, because the objects were necessarily the centre of the very highest sympathy. No expression of the grief of Christ could be thought exaggerated in the Middle Ages, because in this very exaggeration lay the centre point of men’s religion. But when no such object of universal and all-absorbing sympathy can be found (and there was none such in pagan life), then the Greek artist must attain by his treatment of the object what the Christian artist obtained by the object itself. Assuming, then, a mastery over his material, and sufficient power of execution, the next feature to be looked for in Greek art, and especially in Greek sculpture, is a certain modesty and reserve in expression, which will not portray slight defects in picturing a man, but represent that eternal or ideal character in him which remains in our memory when he is gone. Such, for example, is the famous portrait-statue of Sophocles.

Such are also all that great series of ideal figures which meet us in the galleries of ancient art. They seldom show us any violent emotion; they are seldom even in so special an attitude that critics cannot interpret it in several different ways, or as suitable to several myths. It is not passing states of feeling, but the eternal and ideal beauty of human nature, which Greek sculpture seeks to represent; and for this reason it has held its sway through all the centuries which have since gone by. This was the calm art of Phidias, and Polycletus, and Polygnotus, in sentiment not differing from the rigid awkwardness of their predecessors, but in mastery of proportions and of difficulties attaining the grace in which the others had failed. To this general law there are, no doubt, exceptions, and perhaps very brilliant ones; yet they are exceptions, and even in them, if we consider them attentively, we can see the universal features and the points of sympathy for all mankind. But if the appeal for sympathy is indeed overstrained, then, however successful in its own society and its own social atmosphere, the work of art loses power when offered to another generation. Thus Euripides, though justly considered in his own society the most tragic of poets, has for this very reason ceased to appeal to us as Æschylus still appeals. For Æschylus kept within the proper bounds dictated by the reserve of art; Euripides often did [pg 83]not, and his work, though great and full of genius, suffered accordingly.

It seems to me that the tombs before us are remarkable as exemplifying, with the tact of genius, this true and perfect reserve. They are simple pictures of the grief of parting—of the recollection of pleasant days of love and friendship—of the gloom of the unknown future. But there is no exaggeration, nor speciality—no individuality, I had almost said—in the picture. I feel no curiosity to inquire who these people are—what were their names—even what was the relationship of the deceased.[34] For I am perfectly satisfied with an ideal portrait of the grief of parting—a grief that comes to us all, and lays bitter hold of us at some season of life; and it is this universal sorrow—this great common flaw in our lives—which the Greek artist has brought before us, and which calls forth our deepest sympathy. There will be future occasion to come back upon this all-important feature in connection with the action in Greek sculpture, and even with the draping of their statues—in all of which the calm and chaste reserve of the better Greek art contrasts strangely with the Michael Angelos, and Berninis, [pg 84]and Canovas, of other days; nay, even with the Greek sculpture of a no less brilliant but less refined age.

But, in concluding this digression, I will call attention to a modern parallel in the portraiture of grief, and of grief at final parting. This parallel is not a piece of sculpture, but a poem, perhaps the most remarkable poem of our generation—the In Memoriam of Lord Tennyson. Though written from personal feeling, and to commemorate a special person—Arthur Hallam—whom some of us even knew, has this poem laid hold of the imagination of men strongly and lastingly owing to the poet’s special loss? Certainly not. I do not even think that this great dirge—this magnificent funeral poem—has excited in most of us any strong interest in Arthur Hallam. In fact, any other friend of the poet’s would have suited the general reader equally well as the exciting cause of a poem, which we delight in because it puts into great words the ever-recurring and permanent features in such grief—those dark longings about the future; those suggestions of despair, of discontent with the providence of the world, of wild speculation about its laws; those struggles to reconcile our own loss, and that of the human race, with some larger law of wisdom and of benevolence. To the poet, of course, his own particular friend was the great centre point of the whole. But to us, in reading it, there is a wide [pg 85]distinction between the personal passages—I mean those which give family details, and special circumstances in Hallam’s life, or his intimacy with the poet—and the purely poetical or artistic passages, which soar away into a region far above all special detail, and sing of the great gloom which hangs over the future, and of the vehement beating of the human soul against the bars of its prison house, when one is taken, and another left, not merely at apparent random, but with apparent injustice and damage to mankind. Hence, every man in grief for a lost friend will read the poem to his great comfort, and will then only see clearly what it means; and he will find it speak to him specially and particularly, not in its personal passages, but in its general features; in its hard metaphysics; in its mystical theology; in its angry and uncertain ethics. For even the commonest mind is forced by grief out of its commonness, and attacks the world-problems, which at other times it has no power or taste to approach.

By this illustration, then, the distinction between the universal and the personal features of grief can be clearly seen; and the reader will admit that, though it would be most unreasonable to dictate to the poet, or to imagine that he should have omitted the stanzas which refer specially to his friend, and which were to him of vital importance, yet to us it is no loss to forget that name and those circum[pg 86]stances, and hold fast to the really eternal (and because eternal, really artistic) features, in that very noble symphony—shall I say of half-resolved discords, or of suspended harmonies, which faith may reconcile, but which reason can hardly analyze or understand?[35]

Within a few minutes’ walk of these splendid records of the dead, the traveller who returns to the town across the Observatory Hill will find a very different cemetery. For here he suddenly comes up to a long cleft in the rock, running parallel with the road below, and therefore quite invisible from it. The rising ground towards the city hides it equally from the Acropolis, and accordingly from all Athens. This gorge, some two hundred yards long, sixty wide, and over thirty feet deep, is the notorious Barathrum, the place of execution in old days; the place where criminals were cast out, and where the public executioner resided. It has been falsely inferred by the old scholiasts that the Athenians cast men alive into the pit. It is not nearly deep enough now to cause death in this way, and there seems no reason why its original depth should have been diminished by any accumulation of rubbish, such as is common on inhabited sites. “Casting [pg 87]into the Barathrum” referred rather to the refusing the rights of burial to executed criminals—an additional disgrace, and to the Greeks a grave additional penalty. Honor among the dead was held to follow in exact proportion to the continued honors paid by surviving friends.

Here, then, out of view of all the temples and hallowed sites of the city, dwelt the public slave, with his instruments of death, perhaps in a cave or grotto, still to be seen in the higher wall of the gorge, and situated close to the point where an old path leads over the hill towards the city. Plato speaks of young men turning aside, as they came from Peiræus, to see the dead lying in charge of this official; and there must have been times in the older history of Athens when this cleft in the rock was a place of carnage and of horror. The gentler law of later days seems to have felt this outrage on human feeling, and instead of casting the dead into the Barathrum, it was merely added to the sentence that the body should not be buried within the boundaries of Attica. Yet, though the Barathrum may have been no longer used, the accursed gate (ἱερὰ πύλη) still led to it from the city, and the old associations clung about its gloomy seclusion. Even in the last century, the Turks, whether acting from instinct, or led by old tradition, still used it as a place of execution.

In the present day, all traces of this hideous his[pg 88]tory have long passed away, and I found a little field of corn waving upon the level ground beneath, which had once been the Aceldama of Athens. But even now there seemed a certain loneliness and weirdness about the place—silent and deserted in the midst of thoroughfares, hidden from the haunts of men, and hiding them from view by its massive walls. Nay, as if to bring back the dark memories of the past, great scarlet poppies stained the ground in patches as it were with slaughter, and hawks and ravens were still circling about overhead, as their ancestors did in the days of blood; attached, I suppose, by hereditary instinct to this fatal place, “for where the carcase is, there shall the eagles be gathered together.”

[pg 89]

CHAPTER IV.

THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS.

I suppose there can be no doubt whatever that the ruins on the Acropolis of Athens are the most remarkable in the world. There are ruins far larger, such as the pyramids, and the remains of Karnak. There are ruins far more perfectly preserved, such as the great Temple at Pæstum. There are ruins more picturesque, such as the ivy-clad walls of mediæval abbeys beside the rivers in the rich valleys of England. But there is no ruin, all the world over, which combines so much striking beauty, so distinct a type, so vast a volume of history, so great a pageant of immortal memories. There is, in fact, no building on earth which can sustain the burden of such greatness, and so the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be disappointing. When the traveller reflects how all the Old World’s culture culminated in Greece—all Greece in Athens—all Athens in its Acropolis—all the Acropolis in the Parthenon—so much crowds upon the mind confusedly that we look for some enduring monument whereupon we can fasten our thoughts, and from which we can pass as from a visible starting-point [pg 90]into all this history and all this greatness. And at first we look in vain. The shattered pillars and the torn pediments will not bear so great a strain: and the traveller feels forced to admit a sense of disappointment, sore against his will. He has come a long journey into the remoter parts of Europe; he has reached at last what his soul had longed for many years in vain: and as is wont to be the case with all great human longings, the truth does not fulfil his desire. The pang of disappointment is all the greater when he sees that the tooth of time and the shock of earthquake have done but little harm. It is the hand of man—of reckless foe and ruthless lover—which has robbed him of his hope. This is the feeling, I am sure, of more than have confessed it, when they first wound their way through the fields of great blue aloes, and passed up through the Propylæa into the presence of the Parthenon. But to those who have not given way to these feelings—who have gone again and again and sat upon the rock, and watched the ruins at every hour of the day, and in the brightness of a moonlight night—to those who have dwelt among them, and meditated upon them with love and awe—there first come back the remembered glories of Athens’s greatness, when Olympian Pericles stood upon this rock with careworn Phidias, and reckless Alcibiades with Pious Nicias and fervent Demosthenes with caustic Phocion—when such men peopled the temples [pg 91]in their worship, and all the fluted pillars and sculptured friezes were bright with scarlet, and blue, and gold. And then the glory of remembered history casts its hue over the war-stained remnants. Every touch of human hand, every fluting, and drop, and triglyph, and cornice recalls the master minds which produced this splendor; and so at last we tear ourselves from it as from a thing of beauty, which even now we can never know, and love, and meditate upon to our hearts’ content.

Nothing is more vexatious than the reflection, how lately these splendid remains have been reduced to their present state. The Parthenon, being used as a Greek church, remained untouched and perfect all through the Middle Ages. Then it became a mosque, and the Erechtheum a seraglio, and in this way survived with little damage till 1687, when, in the bombardment by the Venetians under Morosini, a shell dropped into the Parthenon, where the Turks had their powder stored, and blew out the whole centre of the building. Eight or nine pillars at each side have been thrown down, and have left a large gap, which so severs the front and rear of the temple, that from the city below they look like the remains of two different buildings. The great drums of these pillars are yet lying there, in their order, just as they fell, and some money and care might set them all up again in their places; yet there is not in Greece the patriotism or even the common [pg 92]sense to enrich the country by this restoration, matchless in its certainty as well as in its splendor.

But the Venetians were not content with their exploit. They were, about this time, when they held possession of most of Greece, emulating the Pisan taste for Greek sculptures; and the four fine lions standing at the gate of the arsenal at Venice still testify to their zeal in carrying home Greek trophies to adorn their capital. Morosini wished to take down the sculptures of Phidias from the eastern pediment, but his workmen attempted it so clumsily that the figures fell from their place, and were dashed to pieces on the ground. The Italians also left their lasting mark on the place by building a high square tower of wretched patched masonry at the right side of the entrance gate, which had of late years become such an eyesore to the better educated public, that when I was first at Athens there was a subscription on foot to have it taken down—not only in order to remove an obtrusive reminiscence of the invaders, but in the hope of bringing to light some pillars of the Propylæa built into it, as well as many inscribed stones, broken off and carried away from their places as building material. This expectation has not been verified by the results. The tower was taken down by the liberality of M. Schliemann, and there were hardly any inscriptions or sculptures discovered.

A writer in the Saturday Review (No. 1134) [pg 93]attacks this removal of the Venetian tower, and my approval of it, as a piece of ignorant and barbarous pedantry, which from love of the old Greek work, and its sanctity, desires to destroy the later history of the place, and efface the monuments of its fortunes in after ages.[36] This writer, whose personality is unmistakable, thinks that even the Turkish additions to the Parthenon should have been left untouched, so that the student of to-day could meditate upon all these incongruities, and draw from them historical lessons. And, assuredly, of all lessons conveyed, that of a victory over the Turks would be to this writer the most important and the most delightful.

If this great man will not silence us with his authority, but let us argue with him, we might suggest that there are, no doubt, cases where the interests of art and of history are conflicting, and where a restoration of pristine beauty must take away from the evidences of later history. The real question is then, whether the gain in art is greater than the loss in history. In the case of the Parthenon I think it is, now especially, when records and drawings of the inferior additions can be secured. [pg 94]It may be historically important to note the special work and character of every generation of men; but surely for the education of the human race in the laws of beauty, and in general culture, some ages are worth nothing, and others worth everything; and I will not admit that this sort of education is one whit less important than education in the facts of history.

Of course, artistic restorations are often carried too far; a certain age may be arbitrarily assumed as the canon of perfection, and everything else destroyed to make way for it. There are few ages which can lay claim to such pre-eminence as the age of Pericles; yet even in this case, were the mediæval additions really beautiful, we should, of course, hesitate to disturb them. But the Venetian tower, though a picturesque addition to the rock when seen from a distance, so much so, that I felt its loss when I saw the Acropolis again, had no claim to architectural beauty; it was set up in a place sacred to greater associations, and besides there was every reasonable prospect that its removal would subserve historical ends of far more importance than the Venetian occupation of the Acropolis. A few inscriptions of the date of Pericles, containing treaties or other such public matter, would, in my opinion, have perfectly justified its removal, even though it did signify a victory of Christians over Turks.

In any case, it seems to me unfair that if every generation is to express its knowledge by material results, we should not be permitted to record our conviction that old Greek art or old Greek history is far greater and nobler than either Turkish or Venetian history, and to testify this opinion by making their monuments give way to it. This is the mark of our generation on the earth. Thus the eighteenth century was, no doubt, a most important time in the history even of art, but where noble thirteenth century churches have been dressed up and loaded with eighteenth century additions, I cannot think the historical value of these additions, as evidence of the taste or the history of their age, counterbalances their artistic mischievousness, and I sympathize with the nations who take them away. Of course, this principle may be overdriven, and has been often abused. Against such abuses the remarks of the great critic to whom I refer are a very salutary protest. But that any barbarous or unsightly deforming of great artistic monuments is to be protected on historical grounds—this is a principle of which neither his genius nor his sneers will convince me. As for the charge of pedantry, no charge is more easily made, but no charge is more easily retorted.

Strangely enough, his theory of the absolute sanctity of old brick and mortar nearly agrees in results with the absolute carelessness about such [pg 96]things, which is the peculiarity of his special enemies, the Turks. The Turks, according to Dodwell, who is a most trustworthy witness, never destroyed the old buildings unless they wanted them for masonry. He tells us not to believe that the figures of the remaining pediment were used as targets by the Turkish soldiers—a statement often made in his day. However that may be, I have little doubt, from what I saw myself, that Greek soldiers in the present day might so use them. But the Turks did take down some pillars of the Propylæa while Dodwell was there, for building purposes, an occurrence which gave that excellent observer the opportunity of noting the old Greek way of fitting the drums of the pillars together. He even got into his possession one of the pieces of cypress wood used as plugs between the stone masses, and has given a drawing of it, and explained the method of its use, in his admirable book.[37]

But the same traveller was also present when a far more determined and systematic attack was made upon the remaining ruins of the Parthenon. While he was travelling in the interior, Lord Elgin had obtained his famous firman from the Sultan to take down and remove any antiquities or sculptured stones he might require, and the infuriated Dodwell [pg 97]saw a set of ignorant workmen, under equally ignorant overseers, let loose upon the splendid ruins of the age of Pericles. He speaks with much good sense and feeling of this proceeding. He is fully aware that the world would derive inestimable benefit from the transplanting of these splendid fragments to a more accessible place, but he cannot find language strong enough to express his disgust at the way in which the thing was done. Incredible as it may appear, Lord Elgin himself seems not to have superintended the work, but to have left it to paid contractors, who undertook the job for a fixed sum. Little as either Turks or Greeks cared for the ruins, Dodwell says that a pang of grief was felt through all Athens at the desecration, and that the contractors were obliged to bribe workmen with additional wages to undertake the ungrateful task. He will not even mention Lord Elgin by name, but speaks of him with disgust as “the person” who defaced the Parthenon. He believes that had this person been at Athens himself, his underlings could hardly have behaved in the reckless way they did, pulling down more than they wanted, and taking no care to prop up and save the work from which they had taken the supports.

He especially notices their scandalous proceeding upon taking up one of the great white marble blocks which form the floor or stylobate of the temple. They wanted to see what was underneath, and Dod[pg 98]well, who was there, saw the foundation—a substructure of Peiræic sandstone. But when they had finished their inspection they actually left the block they had removed, without putting it back into its place. So this beautiful pavement, made merely of closely-fitting blocks, without any artificial or foreign joinings, was ripped up, and the work of its destruction begun. I am happy to add that, though a considerable rent was then made, most of it is still intact, and the traveller of to-day may still walk on the very stones which bore the tread of every great Athenian.

The question has often been discussed, whether Lord Elgin was justified in carrying off this pediment, the metopes, and the friezes, from their place; and the Greeks of to-day hope confidently that the day will come when England will restore these treasures to their place. This is, of course, absurd, and it may fairly be argued that people who would bombard their antiquities in a revolution are not fit custodians of them in the intervals of domestic quiet. This was my reply to an old Greek gentleman who assailed the memory of Lord Elgin with reproaches. I told him that I was credibly informed the Greeks had themselves bombarded the Turks in the Acropolis during the war of liberation, as several great pieces knocked out and starred on the western front testify. He confessed, to my amusement, that he had himself been one of the [pg 99]assailants, and excused the act by the necessities of war. I replied that, as the country seemed then (1875) on the verge of a revolution, the sculptures might at least remain in the British Museum until a secure government was established. And this is the general verdict of learned men on the matter. They are agreed that it was on the whole a gain to science to remove the figures, but all stigmatize as barbarous and shameful the reckless way in which the work was carried out.

I confess I approved of this removal until I came home from Greece, and went again to see the spoil in its place in our great Museum. Though there treated with every care—though shown to the best advantage, and explained by excellent models of the whole building, and clear descriptions of their place on it—notwithstanding all this, the loss that these wonderful fragments had sustained by being separated from their place was so terribly manifest—they looked so unmeaning in an English room, away from their temple, their country, and their lovely atmosphere,—that one earnestly wished they had never been taken from their place, even at the risk of being made a target by the Greeks or the Turks. I am convinced, too, that the few who would have seen them, as intelligent travellers, on their famous rock, would have gained in quality the advantage now diffused among many, but weakened and almost destroyed by the wrench in associations, when the [pg 100]ornament is severed from its surface, and the decoration of a temple exhibited apart from the temple itself. We may admit, then, that it had been better if Lord Elgin had never taken away these marbles. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to send them back, as has recently been advocated (in 1890) by some ignorant English sentimentalists. But I do think that the museum on the Acropolis should be provided with a better set of casts of the figures than those which are now to be seen there. They look very wretched, and carelessly prepared.

There are, indeed, preserved in the little museum on the Acropolis the broken remains of the figures of the eastern pediment, which Morosini and his Venetians endeavored to take down, as I have already told. They are little more than pieces of drapery, of some use in reconstructing the composition, but of none in judging the effect of that famous group.

But we must not yet enter into this little museum, which is most properly put out of sight, at the lowest or east corner of the rock, and which we do not reach till we have passed through all the ruins. As the traveller stands at the inner gate of the Propylæa, he notices at once all the perfect features of the buildings. Over his head are the enormous architrave-stones of the Propylæa—blocks of white marble over twenty-two feet long, which span the gateway from pillar to pillar. Opposite, above him [pg 101]and a little to the right, is the mighty Parthenon, not identical in orientation, as the architects have observed, with the gateway, but varying from it slightly, so that sun and shade would play upon it at moments differing from the rest, and thus produce a perpetual variety of lights. This principle is observed in the setting of the Erechtheum also. To the left, and directly over the town, stands that beautifully decorated little Ionic temple, or combination of temples, with the stately Caryatids looking inwards and towards the Parthenon. These two buildings are the most perfect examples we have of their respective styles. We see at first sight the object of the artists who built them. The one is the embodiment of majesty, the other of grace. The very ornaments of the Parthenon are large and massive; those of the Erechtheum for the most part intricate and delicate. Accordingly, the Parthenon is in the Doric style, or rather in the Doric style so refined and adorned as to be properly called the Attic style.

For the more we study old Athenian art—nay, even old Athenian character generally—the more are we convinced that its greatness consists in the combination of Doric sternness and Ionic grace. It is hardly a mediation between them; it is the adoption of the finer elements of both, and the union of them into a higher harmony. The most obvious illustration of this is the drama, where the [pg 102]Ionic element of recitation and the Doric choral hymn were combined—and let me observe that the Ionic element was more modified than the Doric. In the same way Attic architecture used the strength and majesty of the older style which we see at Corinth and Pæstum; but relieved it, partly by lighter proportions, partly by rich decorations, which gave the nearer observer an additional and different delight, while from afar the large features were of the old Doric majesty. Even in the separate decorations, such as the metopes and friezes, the graceful women and the long-flowing draperies of the Ionic school were combined with the muscular nakedness of the Doric athlete, as represented by Doric masters. Individual Attic masters worked out these contrasted types completely, as we may see by the Discobolus of Myron, a contemporary of Phidias, and the Apollo Musagetes of Scopas, who lived somewhat later.[38]

In fact, all Athenian character, in its best days, combined the versatility, and luxury, and fondness of pleasure, which marked the Ionian, with the energy, the public spirit, and the simplicity which was said to mark the better Doric states. The Parthenon and Erechtheum express all this in visible clearness. The Athenians felt that the Ionic elegance and luxury of style was best suited to a small [pg 103]building; and so they lavished ornament and color upon this beautiful little house, but made the Doric temple the main object of all the sacred height.

It is worth while to consult the professional architects, like Revett,[39] who have examined these buildings with a critical eye. Not only were the old Athenian architects perfect masters of their materials, of accurate measurement, of precise correspondence, of all calculations as to strain and pressure—they even for artistic, as well as for practical purposes, deviated systematically from accuracy, in order that the harmony of the building might profit by this imperceptible discord. They gave and took, like a tuner tempering the chords of a musical instrument. The stylobate is not exactly level, but curved so as to rise four inches in the centre; the pillars, which themselves swell slightly in the middle, are not set perpendicularly, but with a slight incline inwards: and this effect is given in the Caryatids by making them rest their weight on [pg 104]the outer foot at each corner, as Viollet-le-duc has admirably explained. Again, the separation of the pillars is less at the corners, and gradually increases as you approach the centre of the building. The base of the pediment is not a right line, but is curved downward. It is not my province to go into minute details on such points, which can only be adequately discussed by architects. What I have here to note is, that the old Greek builders had gone beyond mere mathematical accuracy and regularity. They knew a higher law than the slavish repetition of accurate distances or intervals; they had learned to calculate effects, to allow for optical illusions; they knew how to sacrifice real for ideal symmetry.

The sculptures of the Parthenon have given rise to a very considerable literature—so considerable that the books and treatises upon them now amount to a respectable library. The example was set by the architect of the building itself, Ictinus, who wrote a special treatise on his masterpiece. As is well known, it was sketched in chalk by the French painter, Jacques Carrey, a few years before the explosion of 1687; and though he had but very imperfect notions of Greek art, and introduced a good deal of seventeenth century style into the chaste designs of Phidias, still these drawings, of which there are copies in the British Museum, are of great [pg 105]value in helping us to put together the broken and imperfect fragments which remain.[40]

The sculptured decorations of the building are of three kinds, or applied in three distinct places. In the first place, the two triangular pediments over the east and west front were each filled with a group of statues more than life-size—the one representing the birth of Athene, and the other her contest with Poseidon for the patronage of Athens. Some of the figures from one of these are the great draped headless women in the centre of the Parthenon room of the British Museum: other fragments of those broken by the Venetians are preserved at Athens. There are, secondly, the metopes, or plaques of stone inserted into the frieze between the triglyphs, and carved in relief with a single small group on each. The height of these surfaces does not exceed four feet. There was, thirdly, a band of reliefs running all around the external wall at the top of the cella, inside the surrounding pillars, and opposite to them, and this is known as the frieze of the cella. It consists of a great Panathenaic procession, starting from the western front, and proceeding in two divisions along the parallel north and south walls, till they meet on the eastern front, which was the proper front of the temple. Among the Elgin marbles there are a good many of the metopes, and also of [pg 106]the pieces of the cella frieze preserved. Several other pieces of the frieze are preserved at Athens, and altogether we can reconstruct fully three-fourths of this magnificent composition.

There seems to me the greatest possible difference in merit between the metopes and the other two parts of the ornament. The majority of the metopes which I have seen represent either a Greek and an Amazon or a Centaur and Lapith, in violent conflict. It appeared plainly to me that the main object of these contorted groups was to break in upon the squareness and straightness of all the other members of the Doric frieze and architrave. This is admirably done, as there is no conceivable design which more completely breaks the stiff rectangles of the entablature than the various and violent curves of wrestling figures. But, otherwise, these groups do not appear to me very interesting, except so far as everything in such a place, and the work of such hands, must be interesting.

It is very different with the others. Of these the pediment sculptures—which were, of course, the most important, and which were probably the finest groups ever designed—are so much destroyed or mutilated that the effect of the composition is entirely lost, and we can only admire the matchless power and grace of the torsos which remain. The grouping of the figures was limited, and indicated by the triangular shape of the surface to be deco[pg 107]rated—standing figures occupying the centre, while recumbent or stooping figures occupied the ends. But, as in poetry, where the shackles of rhyme and metre, which encumber the thoughts of ordinary writers, are the very source which produces in the true poet the highest and most precious beauties of expression; so in sculpture and painting, fixed conditions seem not to injure, but to enhance and perfect, the beauty and symmetry attainable in the highest art. We have apparently in the famous Niobe group, preserved in Florence, the elements of a similar composition, perhaps intended to fill the triangular tympanum of a temple; and even in these weak Roman copies of a Greek masterpiece we can see how beautifully the limited space given to the sculpture determined the beauty and variety of the figures, and their attitudes. It was in this genius of grouping that I fancy Phidias chiefly excelled all his contemporaries: single statues of Polycletus are said to have been preferred in competitions. To us the art of the Discobolus of Myron seems fully as great as that of any of the figures of the Parthenon; but no other artist seems to have possessed the same architectonic power of adapting large subjects and processions of figures to their places as Phidias.[41] How far he was helped or [pg 108]advised by Ictinus, or even by Pericles, it is not easy to say. But I do not fancy that Greek statesmen in those days studied everything else in the world besides statecraft, and were known as antiquaries, and linguists, and connoisseurs of china and paintings, and theologians, and novelists—in fact, everything under the sun. This many-sidedness, as they now call it, which the Greeks called πολυπραγμοσύνη and thought to be meddlesomeness, was not likely to infect Pericles. He was very intimate with Phidias, and is said to have constantly watched his work—hardly, I fancy, as an adviser, but rather as an humble and enthusiastic admirer of an art which did realize its ideal, while he himself was striving in vain with rebel forces to attain his object in politics.

The extraordinary power of grouping in the designs of Phidias is, however, very completely shown us in the better preserved band of the cella frieze, along which the splendid Panathenaic procession winds its triumphal way. Over the eastern doorway were twelve noble sitting figures on either side of the officiating priest, presenting the state robe, or peplos, for the vestment of Athene. These figures are explained as gods by the critics; but they do not in either beauty or dignity, excel those [pg 109]of many of the Athenians forming the procession. A very fine slab, containing three of these figures, is now to be seen in the little museum in the Acropolis. This group over the main entrance is the end and summary of all the procession, and corresponds with the yearly ceremony in this way, that, as the state entrance, or Propylæa, led into the Acropolis at the west end, or rear of the Parthenon, the procession in all probability separated into two, which went along both sides of the colonnade, and met again at the eastern door. Accordingly, over the western end, or rear, the first preparations of the procession are being made, which then starts along the north and south walls; the southern being chiefly occupied with the cavalcade of the Athenian knights, the northern with the carrying of sacred vessels and leading of victims for the sacrifice. The frieze over the western door is still in its place; but, having lost its bright coloring, and being in any case at a great height, and only visible from close underneath, on account of the pillars and architrave in front, it produces no effect, and is hardly discernible. Indeed it evidently was never more than an architectural ornament, in spite of all its artistic beauty.

The greater number of the pieces carried away by Lord Elgin seem taken from the equestrian portion, in which groups of cantering and curveting horses, and men in the act of mounting, and striving to curb restive steeds, are brought together with extra[pg 110]ordinary effect. We can see plainly how important a part of Athenian splendor depended upon their knights, and how true are the hints of Aristophanes about their social standing and aristocratic tone. The reins and armor, or at least portions of it, were laid on in metal, and have accordingly been long since plundered; nor has any obvious trace remained of the rich colors with which the whole was painted. There appears no systematic uniform, some of the riders being dressed in helmets and cuirasses, some in felt wide-awakes, and short flying cloaks. It must remain uncertain whether the artist did not seek to obtain variety by this deviation from a fixed dress. There can be no doubt that Greek art was very bold and free in such matters. On the other hand, the type of the faces does not exhibit much variety. At the elevation above the spectator which this frieze occupied, individual expression would have been thrown away on figures of three feet in height: the general dress, and the attitudes, may have been, when colored, easily discernible.

But I confess that this equestrian procession does not appear to me so beautiful as the rows of figures on foot (carrying pitchers and other implements, leading victims, and playing pipes), which seem to come from the north wall, and of which the most beautiful slabs are preserved at Athens. Here we can see best of all that peculiar stamp which shows the age of Phidias to have been the most perfect in the whole [pg 111]of Greek sculpture. This statement will not be accepted readily by the general public. The Apollo Belvedere, the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gladiator—these are what we have been usually taught to regard as the greatest wonders of Greek plastic art; and those who have accustomed themselves to this realistic and sensuous beauty will not easily see the greatness and the perfection of the solemn and chaste art of Phidias.

Part of the West Frieze of the Parthenon, Athens

Nevertheless, it will always be held by men who have thought long enough on the subject, that the epoch when Myron and Phidias, Polycletus and Polygnotus, broke loose from archaic stiffness into flowing grace was, indeed, the climax of the arts. There seems a sort of natural law—of slow and painful origin—of growing development—of sudden bloom into perfection—of luxury and effeminacy—of gradual debasement and decay—which affects almost all the arts as well as most of the growths of nature. In Greek art particularly this phenomenon perpetually reappears. There can be little doubt that the Iliad of Homer was the first and earliest long creation in poetry, the first attempt, possibly with the aid of writing, to rise from short disconnected lays to the greatness of a formal epic. And despite all its defects of plan, its want of firm consistency, and its obvious incongruities, this greatest of all poems has held its place against the more finished and interesting Odyssey, the more elaborated [pg 112]Cyclic poems, the more learned Alexandrian epics—in fact, the first full bloom of the art was by far the most perfect. It is the same thing with Greek tragedy. No sooner had the art escaped from the rude wagon, or stage, or whatever it was, of Thespis, than we find Æschylus, with imperfect appliances, with want of experience, with many crudenesses and defects, a tragic poet never equalled again in Greek history. Of course the modern critics of his own country preferred, first Sophocles, and then Euripides—great poets, as Praxiteles and Lysippus were great sculptors, and like them, perhaps, greater masters of human passion and of soul-stirring pathos. But for all that, Æschylus is the tragic poet of the Greeks—the poet who has reached beyond his age and nation, and fascinated the greatest men even of our century, who seek not to turn back upon his great but not equal rivals. Shelley and Mr. Swinburne have both made Æschylus their master, and to his inspiration owe the most splendid of their works.

I will not prosecute these considerations further, though there may be other examples in the history of art. But I will say this much concerning the psychological reasons of so strange a phenomenon. It may, of course, be assumed that the man who breaks through the old, stiff conventional style which has bound his predecessors with its shackles is necessarily a man of strong and original genius. Thus, when we are distinctly told of Polygnotus that [pg 113]he first began to vary the features of the human face from their archaic stiffness, we have before us a man of bold originality, who quarrelled with the tradition of centuries, and probably set against him all the prejudices and the consciences of the graver public. But to us, far different features seem prominent. For in spite of all his boldness, when we compare him with his forerunners, we are struck with his modesty and devoutness, as compared with his successors. There is in him, first, a devoutness toward his work, an old-fashioned piety, which they had not; and as art in this shape is almost always a handmaid of religion, this devoutness is a prominent feature. Next, there is a certain reticence and modesty in such a man, which arises partly from the former feeling, but still more from a conservative fear of violent change, and a healthy desire to make his work not merely a contrast to, but a development of, the older traditions. Then the old draped goddess of religious days, such as the Venus Genitrix in Florence, made way for the splendid but yet more human handling which we may see in the Venus of Melos, now in the Louvre. This half-draped but yet thoroughly new and chaste conception leads naturally to the type said to have been first dared by Praxiteles, who did not disguise the use of very unworthy human models to produce his famous, or perhaps infamous ideal, which is best known in the Venus de Medici, but perhaps more perfectly repre[pg 114]sented in the Venus of the Capitol. There is, too, in the earlier artist that limited mastery over materials, which, like the laws of the poet’s language, only condenses and intensifies the beauty of his work.

Such reserve, as compared with the later phases of the art, is nowhere so strongly shown as in the matter of expression. This is, indeed, the rock on which most arts have ultimately made shipwreck. When the power over materials and effects becomes complete, so that the artist can as it were perform feats of conquest; when at the same time the feeling has died out that he is treading upon holy ground, we have splendid achievements in the way of intense expression, whether physical or mental, of force, of momentary action, of grief or joy, which are good and great, but which lead imitators into a false track, and so ruin the art which they were thought to perfect. Thus over-reaching itself, art becomes an anxious striving after display, and, like an affected and meretricious woman, repels the sounder natures which had else been attracted by her beauty. In Greek art especially, as I have already noticed in discussing the Attic tomb reliefs, this excess of expression was long and well avoided, and there is no stronger and more marked feature in its good epochs than the reserve of which I have spoken. It is the chief quality which makes the school of Phidias matchless. There is in it beauty of form, there is a good deal of action, there is in the frieze [pg 115]an almost endless variety; but withal there is the strictest symmetry, the closest adherence to fixed types, the absence of all attempt at expressing passing emotion. There is still the flavor of the old stiff simplicity about the faces, about the folds of the robes, about the type of the horses; but the feeling of the artist shines through the archaic simplicity with much clearer light than it does in the more ambitious attempts of the later school. The greatest works of Phidias—his statue of Zeus at Elis, and his Athene in the Parthenon—are lost to us; but the ancients are unanimous that for simple and sustained majesty no succeeding sculptor, however brilliant, had approached his ideal.[42]

We may say almost the same of the great temple which he adorned with his genius. It is just that perfection of the Doric temple which has escaped from the somewhat ponderous massiveness and simplicity of the older architecture, while it sacrificed no element of majesty to that grace and delicacy which marks, later and more developed Greek architecture. On this Acropolis the Athenians determined to show what architecture could reach in majesty and what in delicacy. So they set up the [pg 116]Parthenon in that absolute perfection where strength and solidity come out enhanced, but in no way overlaid, with ornament. They also built the Erechtheum, where they adopted the Ionic Order, and covered their entablature with bands of small and delicate tracing, which, with its gilding and coloring, was a thing to be studied minutely and from the nearest distance. Though the inner columns of the Propylæa were Ionic (and they were very large), it appears that large temples in that Order were not known in Attica. But for small and graceful buildings it was commonly used, and of these the Erechtheum was the most perfect.

In its great days, and even as Pausanias saw it, the Acropolis was covered with statues, as well as with shrines. It was not merely an Holy of Holies in religion; it was also a palace and museum of art. At every step and turn the traveller met new objects of interest. There were archaic specimens, chiefly interesting to the antiquarian and the devotee; there were the great masterpieces which were the joint admiration of the artist and the vulgar. Even all the sides and slopes of the great rock were honeycombed into sacred grottos, with their altars and their gods, or studded with votive monuments. All these lesser things are fallen away and gone; the sacred caves are filled with rubbish and desecrated with worse than neglect. The grotto of Pan and Apollo is difficult of access, and was, when I first [pg 117]saw it, an object of disgust rather than of interest. There are left but the remnants of the surrounding wall, and the ruins of the three principal buildings, which were the envy and wonder of all the civilized world.

The walls are particularly well worth studying, as there are to be found in them specimens of all kinds of building, beginning from prehistoric times. There is even plain evidence that the builders of the age of Pericles were not by any means the best wall builders; for the masonry of the wall called the Wall of Themistocles, which is well preserved in the lowest part of the course along the north slope, is by far the most beautifully finished work of the kind which can anywhere be seen: and it seems to correspond accurately to the lower strata of the foundations on which the Parthenon was built. The builders of Pericles’s time added a couple of layers of stone to raise the site of the temple, and their work contrasts curiously in its roughness with the older platform. Any one who will note the evident admiration of Thucydides for the walls built round the Peiræus by the men of an earlier generation will see good reason for this feeling when they examine these details.

The beautiful little temple of Athena Nike, though outside the Propylæa—thrust out as it were on a sort of great bastion high on the right as you enter—must still be called a part, and a very striking [pg 118]part, of the Acropolis. It is only of late years that the site has been cleared of rubbish and modern stonework, and the temple rebuilt from the original materials, thus destroying, no doubt, some precious traces of Turkish occupation which the fastidious historian may regret, but realizing to us a beautiful Greek temple of the Ionic Order in some completeness. The peculiarity of this building, which is perched upon a platform of stone and commands a splendid prospect, is, that its tiny peribolus, or sacred enclosure, was surrounded by a parapet of stone slabs covered with exquisite reliefs of winged Victories, in various attitudes. Some of these slabs are now in the Museum of the Acropolis, and are of great interest—apparently less severe than the school of Phidias, and therefore later in date, but still of the best epoch and of marvellous grace. The position of this temple also is not parallel with the Propylæa, but turned slightly outward, so that the light strikes it at moments when the other building is not illuminated. At the opposite side is a very well preserved chamber, and a fine colonnade at right angles with the gate, which looks like a guard-room. This is the chamber commonly called the Pinacotheca, where Pausanias saw pictures of frescoes by Polygnotus.

Of the two museums on the Acropolis, the principal one requires little comment and is very easily seen and appreciated. In an ante-room are the [pg 119]archaic figures of which I have already spoken, with the remains taken from about the Parthenon, together with casts of the Elgin marbles, and many small and beautiful reliefs, apparently belonging to votive monuments. There are also two figures of young men, with the heads and feet lost, which are of peculiarly beautiful Parian marble, and of very fine workmanship. But the visitor is very likely to pass by the little Turkish house, which is well worth a visit, for here are the cypress plugs from the pillars of the Parthenon or Propylæa; here are also splendid specimens of archaic vases, such as are very hard indeed to find in any other collection. The large jars from Melos which are here to be seen have the most striking resemblance in their decoration to the fragment of a similar vessel, with a row of armed figures round it, which was found at Mycenæ, and is now in the Ministry of Public Instruction. Lastly, there stands in the window a very delicately worked little Satyr, as the pointed ears and tail show, but of voluptuous form—rather of the hermaphrodite type: there is hardly a better preserved statuette than this anywhere at Athens. It seemed a pity that such a gem should be hidden away in so obscure a place; and I hope that by this time it has been brought into the larger and official museum.

I will venture to conclude this chapter with a curious comparison. It was my good fortune, a few [pg 120]months after I had seen the Acropolis, to visit a rock in Ireland, which, to my great surprise, bore many curious analogies to it—I mean the rock of Cashel. Both were strongholds of religion—honored and hallowed above all other places in their respective countries—both were covered with buildings of various dates, each representing peculiar ages and styles in art. And as the Greeks, I suppose for effect’s sake, have varied the posture of their temples, so that the sun illumines them at different moments, the old Irish have varied the orientation of their churches that the sun might rise directly over against the east window on the anniversary of the patron saint. There is at Cashel the great Cathedral—in loftiness and grandeur the Parthenon of the place; there is the smaller and more beautiful Cormac’s Chapel, the holiest of all, like the Erechtheum at Athens. Again, the great sanctuary upon the Rock of Cashel was surrounded by a cluster of abbeys about its base, which were founded there by pious men on account of the greatness and holiness of the archiepiscopal seat. Of these, one remains, like the Theseum at Athens, eclipsed by the splendor of the Acropolis.

The prospect from the Irish sanctuary has, indeed, endless contrasts to that from the pagan stronghold, but they are suggestive contrasts, and such as are not without a certain harmony. The plains around both are framed by mountains, of which the Irish [pg 121]are probably the more picturesque; and if the light upon the Greek hills is the fairest, the native color of the Irish is infinitely more rich. So, again, the soil of Attica is light and dusty, whereas the Golden Vale of Tipperary is among the richest and greenest in the world. Still, both places were the noblest homes, each in their own country, of religions which civilized, humanized, and exalted the human race; and if the Irish Acropolis is left in dim obscurity by the historical splendor of the Parthenon, on the other hand, the gods of the Athenian stronghold have faded out before the moral greatness of the faith preached from the Rock of Cashel.

[pg 122]

CHAPTER V.

ATHENS—THE THEATRE OF DIONYSUS—THE AREOPAGUS.

There are few recent excavations about Athens which have been so productive as those along the south slope of the Acropolis. In the conflicts and the wear of ages a vast quantity of earth, and walls, and fragments of buildings has either been cast, or has rolled, down this steep descent, so that it was with a certainty of good results that the Archæological Society of Athens undertook to clear this side of the rock of all the accumulated rubbish. Several precious inscriptions were found, which had been thrown down from the rock; and in April, 1884, the whole plan of the temple of Æsculapius had been uncovered, and another step attained in fixing the much disputed topography of this part of Athens.

And yet we can hardly call this a beginning. Some twenty-five years ago, a very extensive and splendidly successful excavation was made on an adjoining site, when a party of German archæologists laid bare the Theatre of Dionysus—the great theatre in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought [pg 123]out their immortal plays before an immortal audience. There is nothing more delightful than to descend from the Acropolis, and rest awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs with which the front row of the circuit is occupied. They are of the pattern usual with the sitting portrait statues of the Greeks—very deep, and with a curved back, which exceeds both in comfort and in grace any chairs designed by modern workmen.[43] Each chair has the name of a priest inscribed on it, showing how the theatre among the Greeks corresponded to our cathedral, and this front row to the stalls of canons and prebendaries.

Theatre of Dionysus, Athens

But unfortunately all this sacerdotal prominence is probably the work of the later restorers of the theatre. For after having been first beautified and adorned with statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes’s time), it was again restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or about his time, so that the theatre, as we now have it, can only be called the building of the second or third century after Christ. The front wall of the stage, which is raised some feet above the level of the empty pit, is adorned with a row of very elegant sculptures, amongst which one—a shaggy old man, in a stooping posture, [pg 124]represented as coming out from within, and holding up the stone above him—is particularly striking. Some Greek is said to have knocked off, by way of amusement, the heads of most of these figures since they were discovered, but this I do not know upon any better authority than ordinary report. The pit or centre of the theatre is empty, and was never in Greek days occupied by seats, but a wooden structure was set up in advance of the stage, and on this the chorus performed their dances and sang their odes. But now there is a circuit of upright slabs of stone close to the front seats, which can hardly have been an arrangement of the old Greek theatre. They are generally supposed to have been added when the building came to be used for contests of gladiators, which Dion Chrysostom tells us were imported from Corinth in his day.

All these later additions and details are, I fear, calculated to detract from the reader’s interest in this theatre, which I should indeed regret—for nothing can be more certain than that this is the veritable stone theatre which was built when the wooden one broke down, at the great competition of Æschylus and Pratinas; and though front seats may have been added, and slight modifications introduced, the general structure can never have required alteration. The main body of the curved rows of seats have no backs, but are so deep as to leave plenty of room for the feet of the people next above; and I [pg 125]fancy that in the old times the προεδρία or right of sitting in the front rows was not given to priests, but to foreign embassies, along with the chief magistrates of Athens. The cost of admission was two obols to all the seats of the house not specially reserved, and such reservation was only for persons of official rank, and by no means for richer people, or for a higher entrance money—a thing which would not have been tolerated, I believe, for an instant by the Athenian democracy.[44] When the state treasury grew full with the tribute of the subject cities, the citizens had this sum, and at times even more, distributed to them in order that no one might be excluded from the annual feast, and so the whole free population of Athens came together without expense to worship the gods by enjoying themselves in this great theatre.

It is indeed very large, though exaggerated statements have been made about its size. It is generally stated that the enormous number of thirty thousand people could fit into it—a statement I think incredible;[45] and it is not nearly as large as other [pg 126]theatres I have seen, at Syracuse, at Megalopolis, or even at Argos. This also is certain, that any one speaking on the stage, as it now is, can be easily and distinctly heard by people sitting on the highest row of seats now visible, which cannot, I fancy, have been far from the original top of the house. Such a thing were impossible where thirty thousand people, or a crowd approaching that number, were seated. We hear, however, that the old actors had recourse to various artificial means of increasing the range of their voices, which shows that in some theatres the difficulty was felt; and in the extant plays, asides are so rare[46] that it must have been difficult to give them with effect.

In one respect, however, the voice must have been more easily heard through the old house than it now is through the ruins. The back of the stage was built up with a high wooden structure to represent fixed scenes, and even a sort of upper story on which gods and flying figures sometimes appeared—an arrangement which of course threw the voice forward into the theatre. There used to be an old idea, not perhaps yet extinct, that the Greek audiences had the lovely natural scenery of their country for their stage decoration, and that they embraced in one view the characters on the stage, and the coasts [pg 127]and islands for miles behind them. Nothing can be more absurd, or more opposed to Greek feeling on such matters. In the first place, as is well known, a feeling for the beauty of landscape as such was almost foreign to the Greeks, who never speak of the picturesque in their literature without special relation to the sounds of nature, or to the intelligences which were believed to pervade and animate it: a fine view as such had little attraction for them. In the second place, they came to the theatre to enjoy poetry, and the poetry of character, of passion, of the relation of man and his destiny to the course of Divine Providence and Divine justice—in short, to assume a frame of mind perfectly inconsistent with the distractions of landscape. For that purpose they had their stage, as we now know, filled in at the back with high painted scenes, which in earlier days were made of light woodwork and canvas, to bear easy removal, or change, but which in most Græco-Roman theatres, like the very perfect one at Aspendus, or indeed that of Herodes Atticus close by at Athens, were a solid structure of at least two stories high, which absolutely excluded all prospect.

But even had the Athenians not been protected by this arrangement from outer disturbance, I found by personal investigation that there was no view for them to enjoy! Except from the highest tiers, and therefore from the worst places, the sea and islands [pg 128]are not visible, and the only view to be obtained, supposing that houses did not obstruct it, would have been the dull, somewhat bleak, undulating hills which stretch between the theatre and Phalerum.

The back scenes of the Greek theatres were painted as ours are, and at first, I suppose, very rudely indeed, for we hear particularly of a certain Agatharchus, who developed the art of scene-painting by adopting perspective.[47] The other appurtenances of the Greek theatre were equally rude, or perhaps I should say equally stiff and conventional, and removed from any attempt to reproduce ordinary life—at least this was the case with their tragedy, their satyric dramas, and their older comedy, which dealt in masks, in fixed stage dresses, in tragic padding, and stuffing-out to an unnatural size, in comic distortions and indecent emblems—in all manner of conventional ugliness, we should say, handed down from the first religious origin of these performances, and maintained with that strict conservatism which marks the course of all great Greek art. The stage was long and narrow, the means of changing scenes cumbrous and not frequently employed; the number of the actors in tragedy strictly limited—four is an unusual number, exceptionally employed in the second Œdipus of Sophocles. In fact, we cannot [pg 129]say that the Greek drama ever became externally like ours till the comedies of Menander and his school. These poets, living in an age when serious interests had decayed, when tragedy had ceased to be religious, and comedy political, when neither was looked upon any longer as a great public engine of instruction or of censure, turned to pictures of social life, not unlike our genteel comedy; and in this species of drama we may assert that the Greeks, except perhaps for masks, imitated the course of ordinary life.

It is indeed said of Euripides, the real father of this new comedy, that he brought down the tragic stage from ideal heroism to the passions and meannesses of ordinary men; and Sophocles, his rival, the supposed perfection of an Attic tragedian, is reputed to have observed that he himself had represented men as they ought to be, Euripides as they were. But any honest reader of Euripides will see at once how far he too is removed from the ordinary realisms of life. He saw, indeed, that human passion is the subject, of all others, which will permanently interest human thought; he felt that the insoluble problems of Free Will and Fate, of the mercy and the cruelty of Providence, were too abstract on the one hand, and too specially Greek on the other; that, after all, human nature as such is the great universal field on which any age can reach the sympathy and the interest of its remotest successors. [pg 130]But the passions painted by Euripides were no ordinary passions—they were great and unnatural crimes, forced upon suffering mortals by the action of hostile deities; the virtues of Euripides were no ordinary virtues—they were great heroic self-sacrifices, and showed the Divine element in our nature, which no tyranny of circumstances can efface. His Phædra and Medea on the one hand, his Alcestis and Iphigenia on the other, were strictly characters as they ought to be in tragedy, and not as they commonly are in life; and in outward performance Euripides did not depart from the conventional stiffness, from the regular development, from the somewhat pompous and artificial dress in which tragedy had been handed down to him by his masters.

They, too, had not despised human nature—how could they? Both Æschylus and Sophocles were great painters of human character, as well in its passions as in its reasonings. But the former had made it accessory, so to speak, to the great religious lessons which he taught; the latter had at least affected to do so, or imagined that he did, while really the labyrinths of human character had enticed and held him in their endless maze. Thus, all through Greek tragedy there was on the one hand a strong element of conventional stiffness, of adherence to fixed subjects, and scenes, and masks, and dresses—of adherence to fixed metres, and regular dialogues, where question and answer were balanced line for line, and the [pg 131]cast of characters was as uniform as it is in the ordinary Italian operas of our own day. But on the other hand, these tragic poets were great masters of expression, profound students not only of the great world problems, but of the problems of human nature, exquisite masters too of their language, not only in its dramatic force, but in its lyric sweetness; they summed up in their day all that was great and beautiful in Greek poetry, and became the fullest and ripest fruit of that wonderful tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which even now makes those that taste it to be as gods.

Such, then, were the general features of the tragedy which the Athenian public, and the married women, including many strangers, assembled to witness in broad daylight under the Attic sky. They were not sparing of their time. They ate a good breakfast before they came. They ate sweetmeats in the theatre when the acting was bad. Each play was short, and there was doubtless an interval of rest. But it is certain that each poet contended as a rule with four plays against his competitors; and as there were certainly three of them, there must have been twelve plays acted; this seems to exceed the endurance of any public, even allowing two days for the performance. We are not fully informed on these points. We do not even know how Sophocles, who contended with single plays, managed to compete against Euripides, who con[pg 132]tended with sets of four. But we know that the judges were chosen by lot, and we strongly suspect, from the records of their decisions, that they often decided wrongly. We also know that the poets sought to please the audience by political and patriotic allusions, and to convey their dislike of opposed cities or parties by drawing their representatives in odious colors on the stage. Thus Euripides is never tired of traducing the Spartans in the character of Menelaus. Æschylus fights the battle of the Areopagus in his Eumenides.

But besides all this, it seems that tragic poets were regarded as the proper teachers of morality, and that the stage among the Greeks occupied somewhat the place of the modern pulpit. This is the very attitude which Racine assumes in the Preface to his Phèdre. He suggests that it ought to be considered the best of his plays, because there is none in which he has so strictly rewarded virtue and punished vice.[48] He [pg 133]alters, in his Iphigénie, the Greek argument from which he copied, because as he tells us (again in the Preface) it would never do to have so virtuous a person as Iphigenia sacrificed. This, however, would not have been a stumbling-block to the Greek poet, whose capricious and spiteful gods, or whose deep conviction of the stain of an ancestral curse, would justify catastrophies which the Christian poet, with his trust in a benevolent Providence, could not admit. But, indeed, in most other points the so-called imitations of the Greek drama by Racine and his school are anything but imitations. The main characters and the general outline of the plot are no doubt borrowed. The elegance and power of the dialogue are more or less successfully copied. But the natural and familiar scenes, which would have been shocking to the court of Louis XIV.—“ces scenes entremêlées de bas comique, et ces fréquents exemples de mauvais ton et d’une [pg 134]familiarité choquante,” as Barthélémy says—such characters as the guard in the Antigone, the nurse in the Choephorœ, the Phrygian in the Orestes, were carefully expunged. Moreover, love affairs and court intrigues were everywhere introduced, and the language was never allowed to descend from its pomp and grandeur. Most of the French dramatists were indeed bad Greek scholars,[49] and knew the plays from which they copied either through very poor translations, or through the rhetorical travesties surviving under the name of Seneca, which were long thought fully equal to the great and simple originals.

So the French of the seventeenth century, starting from these half-understood models, and applying rigidly the laws of tragedy which they had deduced, with questionable logic, from that very untrustworthy guide, our text of the Poetics of Aristotle, created a drama which became so unlike what it professed to imitate, that most good modern French critics have occupied themselves with showing the contrasts of old Greek tragedy to that of the modern stage. They are always praising the naiveté, the familiarity, the irregularity of the old dramatists; they are always noting touches of common life and of ordinary motive quite foreign to the dignity of Racine, and Voltaire, and Alfieri.[50] They think that the real [pg 135]parallel is to be found not among them, but in Shakespeare. Thus their education makes them emphasize the very qualities which we admit, but should not cite, as the peculiarities of Greek tragedy. We are rather struck with its conventionalities, with its strict adherence to fixed form, with its somewhat stilted diction, and we wonder how it came to be so great and natural within these trammels.

Happily the tendency in our own day to reproduce antiquity faithfully, and not in modern recasting, has led to the translating, and even to the representing, of Greek tragedies in their purity, and it does not require a knowledge of Greek to obtain some real acquaintance with these great masterpieces. Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Dean Milman, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Whitelaw, and many others, have placed faithful and elegant versions within our reach. But since I have cautioned the reader not versed in Greek against adopting Racine’s or Alfieri’s plays as adequate substitutes, I venture to give the same advice concerning the more Greek and antique plays of Mr. Swinburne, which, in spite of their splendor, are still not really Greek plays, but modern plays based on Greek models. The relief produced by ordinary [pg 136]talk from ordinary characters, which has been already noticed, is greatly wanting in his very lofty, and perhaps even strained, dialogue. Nor are his choruses the voice of the vulgar public, combining high sentiments with practical meanness, but elaborate and very difficult speculations, which comment metaphysically on the general problems of the play. There is nothing better worth reading than the Atalanta in Calydon. The Greek scholar sees everywhere how thoroughly imbued the author is with Greek models. But it will not give to the mere English reader any accurate idea of a real Greek tragedy. He must go to Balaustion’s Adventure, or Aristophanes’s Apology, or some other professed translation, and follow it line for line, adding some such general reviews as the Etudes of M. Patin.

As for revivals of Greek plays, it seems to me not likely that they will ever succeed. The French imitations of Racine laid hold of the public because they were not imitations. And as for us nowadays, who are more familiar with the originals, a faithless reproduction would shock us, while a literal one would weary us. This at least is the effect which the Antigone produces, even with the modern choruses of Mendelssohn to relieve the slowness of the action. But, of course, a reproduction of the old chorus would be simply impossible. The whole pit in the theatre of Dionysus seems to have been left empty. A part somewhat larger than our orchestra [pg 137]was covered with a raised platform, though still lower than the stage.[51] Upon this the chorus danced and sang and looked on at the actors, as in the play within the play in Hamlet. Above all, they constantly prayed to their gods, and this religious side of the performance has of course no effect upon us.[52]

As to old Attic comedy, it would be even more impossible to recover it for a modern public. Its local and political allusions, its broad and coarse humor, its fantastic dresses, were features which made it not merely ancient and Greek, but Athenian, and Athenian of a certain epoch. Without the Alexandrian scholiasts, who came in time to recover and note down most of the allusions, these comedies would be to the Greek scholar of to-day hardly intelligible. The new Attic comedy, of which Terence is a copy, is indeed on a modern basis, and may be faithfully reproduced, if not admired, in our day. But here, alas! the great originals of Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus are lost to us, and we must be content with the Latin accommodations.

But I have delayed too long over these Greek [pg 138]plays, and must apologize for leading away the reader from the actual theatre in which he is sitting. Yet there is hardly a place in Athens which calls back the mind so strongly to the old days, when all the crowd came jostling in, and settled down in their seats, to hear the great novelties of the year from Sophocles or Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals and claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the supporters of the old, and the lovers of the new, devotees and skeptics, wondering foreigners and self-complacent citizens. They little thought how we should come, not only to sit in the seats they occupied, but to reverse the judgments which they pronounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, of passion, and of pride.

Plato makes Socrates say, in his Apologia (pro vita sua), that a copy of Anaxagoras could be bought on the orchestra, when very dear, for a drachme, that is to say for about 9d. of our money, which may then have represented our half-crown or three shillings in value.[53] The commentators have made desperate attempts to explain this. Some say the orchestra was used as a book-stall when plays were not going on—an assumption justified by no [pg 139]other hint in Greek literature. Others have far more absurdly imagined that Plato really meant you could pay a drachme for the best seat in the theatre, and read the writings of Anaxagoras in a fashionable play of Euripides, who was his friend and follower. Verily a wonderful interpretation!

If the reader will walk with me from the theatre of Dionysus past the newly excavated site of the temple of Æsculapius, and past the Roman-Greek theatre which was erected by Hadrian or Herodes Atticus, I will show him what Plato meant. Of course, this later theatre, with its solid Roman back scenes of masonry, is equally interesting with the Theatre of Dionysus to the advocates of the unity of history! But to us who are content to study Greek Athens, it need not afford any irrelevant delays. Passing round the approach to the Acropolis, we come on to a lesser hill, separated from it by a very short saddle, so that it looks like a sort of outpost or spur sent out from the rock of the Acropolis. This is the Areopagus—Mars’ Hill—which we can ascend in a few minutes. There are marks of old staircases cut in the rock. There are underneath, on our left and right, as we go up, deep black caverns, once the home of the Eumenides. On the flat top there are still some signs of a rude smoothing of the stone for seats. Under us, to the north-west, is the site of the old agora, once surrounded with colonnades, the crowded market-place of all those [pg 140]who bought and sold and talked. But on the descent from the Areopagus, and, now at least, not much higher than the level of the market-place beneath, there is a small semicircular platform, backed by the rising rock. This, or some platform close to it, which may now be hidden by accumulated soil, was the old orchestra, possibly the site of the oldest theatre, but in historical times a sort of reserved platform, where the Athenians, who had their town bristling with statues, allowed no monument to be erected save the figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton, which were carried into Persia, replaced by others, afterwards recovered, and of which we may have a copy in the two fighting figures, of archaic character, now in the Museum of Naples. It was doubtless on this orchestra, just above the bustle and thoroughfare of the agora, that booksellers kept their stalls, and here it was that the book of Anaxagoras could be bought for a drachme.

Here then was the place where that physical philosophy was disseminated which first gained a few advanced thinkers; then, through Euripides, leavened the drama, once the exponent of ancient piety; then, through the stage, the Athenian public, till we arrive at those Stoics and Epicureans who came to teach philosophy and religion not as a faith, but as a system, and to spend their time with the rest of the public in seeking out novelties of creed and of opinion as mere fashions with which people choose [pg 141]to dress their minds. And it was on this very Areopagus, where we are now standing, that these philosophers of fashion came into contact with the thorough earnestness, the profound convictions, the red-hot zeal of the Apostle Paul. The memory of that great scene still lingers about the place, and every guide will show you the exact place where the Apostle stood, and in what direction he addressed his audience. There are, I believe, even some respectable commentators, who transfer their own estimate of S. Paul’s importance to the Athenian public, and hold that it was before the court of the Areopagus that he was asked to expound his views.[54] This is [pg 142]more than doubtful. The blases philosophers, who probably yawned over their own lectures, hearing of a new lay preacher, eager to teach and apparently convinced of the truth of what he said, thought the novelty too delicious to be neglected, and brought him forthwith out of the chatter and bustle of the crowd, probably past the very orchestra where Anaxagoras’s books had been proselytizing before him, and where the stiff old heroes of Athenian history stood, a monument of the escape from political slavery. It is even possible that the curious knot of idlers did not bring him higher than this platform, which might well be called part of Mars’ Hill. But if they choose to bring him to the top, there was no hindrance, for the venerable court held its sittings in the open air, on stone seats; and when not thus occupied the top of the rock may well have been a convenient place of retirement for people who did not want to be disturbed by new acquaintances and the constant eddies of new gossip in the market-place.

Mars’ Hill, Athens

It is, however, of far less import to know on what spot of the Areopagus Paul stood, than to understand clearly what he said, and how he sought to conciliate as well as to refute the philosophers who, no doubt, looked down upon him as an intellectual [pg 143]inferior. He starts naturally enough from the extraordinary crowd of votive statues and offerings, for which Athens was remarkable above all other cities of Greece. He says, with a touch of irony, that he finds them very religious indeed,[55] so religious that he even found an altar to a God professedly unknown, or perhaps unknowable.[56] Probably S. Paul meant to pass from the latter sense of the word ἄγνωστος, which was, I fancy, what the inscription meant, to the former, which gave him an excellent introduction to his argument. Even the use of the singular may have been an intentional variation from the strict text, for Pausanias twice over speaks of altars to the gods who are called the ἄγνωστοι (or mysterious), but I cannot find any citation of the inscription in the singular form. However that may be, our version does not preserve the neatness of S. Paul’s point: “I find an altar,” he says, “to an unknown God. Whom then ye unknowingly worship, [pg 144]Him I announce to you.” But then he develops a conception of the great One God, not at all from the special Jewish, but from the Stoic point of view. He was preaching to Epicureans and to Stoics—to the advocates of prudence as the means, and pleasure as the end, of a happy life, on the one hand; on the other, to the advocates of duty, and of life in harmony with the Providence which governs the world for good. There could be no doubt to which side the man of Tarsus must incline. Though the Stoics of the market-place of Athens might be mere dilettanti, mere talkers about the ἀγαθόν and the great soul of the world, we know that this system of philosophy produced at Tarsus as well as at Rome the most splendid constancy, the most heroic endurance—I had almost said the most Christian benevolence. It was this stern and earnest theory which attracted all serious minds in the decay of heathenism.

Accordingly, S. Paul makes no secret of his sympathy with its nobler features. He describes the God whom he preaches as the benevolent Author of the beauty and fruitfulness of Nature, the great Benefactor of mankind by His providence, and not without constant and obtrusive witnesses of His greatness and His goodness. But he goes much further, and treads close upon the Stoic pantheism when he not only asserts, in the words of Aratus, that we are His offspring, but that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”

His first conclusion, that the Godhead should not be worshipped or even imaged in stone or in bronze, was no doubt quite in accordance with more enlightened Athenian philosophy. But it was when he proceeded to preach the Resurrection of the Dead, that even those who were attracted by him, and sympathized with him, turned away in contempt. The Epicureans thought death the end of all things. The Stoics thought that the human soul, the offspring—nay, rather an offshoot—of the Divine world-soul, would be absorbed into its parent essence. Neither could believe the assertion of S. Paul. When they first heard him talk of Jesus and Anastasis they thought them some new pair of Oriental deities. But when they learned that Jesus was a man ordained by God to judge the world, and that Anastasis was merely the Anastasis of the dead, they were greatly disappointed; so some mocked, and some excused themselves from further listening.

Thus ended, to all appearance ignominiously, the first heralding of the faith which was to supplant all the temples and altars and statues with which Athens had earned its renown as a beautiful city, which was to overthrow the schools of the sneering philosophers, and even to remodel all the society and the policy of the world. And yet, in spite of this great and decisive triumph of Christianity there was something curiously prophetic in the contemptuous rejection of its apostle at Athens. Was it not the [pg 146]first expression of the feeling which still possesses the visitor who wanders through its ruins, and which still dominates the educated world?—the feeling that while other cities owe to the triumph of Christianity all their beauty and their interest, Athens has to this day resisted this influence; and that while the Christian monuments of Athens would elsewhere excite no small attention, here they are passed by as of no import compared with its heathen splendor.[57] [pg 147]There are very old and very beautiful little churches in Athens, “ces délicieuses petites églises byzantines,” [pg 148]as M. Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, and unlike what one generally sees in Europe. [pg 149]They strike the observer with their quaintness and smallness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model [pg 150]of that unique and splendid building, the cathedral of S. Mark at Venice. But yet it is surprising how little we notice them at Athens. I was even told—I sincerely hope it was false—that public opinion at Athens was gravitating toward the total removal of one, and that the most perfect, of these churches, which stands in the middle of a main street, and so breaks the regularity of the modern boulevard! Let us hope that the man who lashes himself into rage at the destruction of the Venetian tower may set his face in time against this real piece of barbarism, if indeed it ever ventures to assert itself in act.[58]

I have now concluded a review of the most important old Greek buildings to be seen about Athens. To treat them exhaustively would require a far longer discussion, or special knowledge which I do not possess; and there are, moreover, smaller buildings, like the so-called Lantern of Demosthenes, which is really the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, and the Temple of the Winds, which are well worth [pg 151]a visit, but which the traveller can find without a guide, and study without difficulty. But incompleteness must be an unavoidable defect in describing any city in which new discoveries are being made, I may say, monthly, and when the museums and excavations of to-day may be any day completely eclipsed by materials now unknown, or scattered through the country. Thus, on my second visit to Athens, I found in the National Bank the wonderful treasures exhumed by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, which are in themselves enough to induce any student of Greek antiquity to revisit the town, however well he may have examined it in former years. On my third visit, they were arranged and catalogued, but we have not yet attained to any certainty about the race that left them there, and how remote the antiquity of the tombs. These considerations tend not only to vindicate the inadequateness of this review, but perhaps even to justify it in the eyes of the exacting reader, who may have expected a more thorough survey.

[pg 152]

CHAPTER VI.

EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA—COLONUS—THE HARBORS—LAURIUM—SUNIUM.

There are two modern towns which, in natural features, resemble Athens. The irregular ridge of greater Acropolis and lesser Areopagus remind one of the castle and the Mönchsberg of Salzburg, one of the few towns in Europe more beautifully situated than Athens. The relation of the Acropolis to the more lofty Lycabettus suggests the castle of Edinburgh and Arthur’s Seat. But here the advantage is greatly on the side of Athens.

When you stand on the Acropolis and look round upon Attica, a great part of its history becomes immediately unravelled and clear. You see at once that you are placed in the principal plain of the country, surrounded with chains of mountains in such a way that it is easy to understand the old stories of wars with Eleusis, or with Marathon, or with any of the outlying valleys. Looking inland on the north side, as you stand beside the Erechtheum, you see straight before you, at a distance of some ten miles, Mount Pentelicus, from which all the splendid marble was once carried to the rock [pg 153]around you. This Pentelicus is a sort of intermediate cross-chain between two main lines which diverge from either side of it, and gradually widen so as to form the plain of Athens. The left or north-western chain is Mount Parnes; the right or eastern is Mount Hymettus. This latter, however, is only the inner margin of a large mountainous tract which spreads all over the rest of South Attica down to the Cape of Sunium. There are, of course, little valleys, and two or three villages, one of them the old deme Brauron, which they now pronounce Vravron. There is the town of Thorikos, near the mines of Laurium; there are two modern villages called Marcopoulos; but on the whole, both in ancient and modern times, this south-eastern part of Attica, south of Hymettus, was, with the exception of Laurium, of little moment. There is a gap between Pentelicus and Hymettus, nearly due north, through which the way leads out to Marathon; and you can see the spot where the bandits surprised in 1870 the unfortunate gentlemen who fell victims to the vacillation and incompetence of people in power at that time.

On the left side of Pentelicus you see the chain of Parnes, which almost closes with it at a far distance, and which stretches down all the north-west side of Attica till it runs into the sea as Mount Corydallus, opposite to the island of Salamis. In this long chain of Parnes (which can only be [pg 154]avoided by going up to the northern coast at Oropus, and passing into Bœotia close by the sea) there are three passes or lower points, one far to the north—that by Dekelea, where the present king has his country palace, but where of old Alcibiades planted the Spartan garrison which tormented and ruined the farmers of Attica. This pass leads you out to Tanagra in Bœotia. Next to the south, some miles nearer, is the even more famous pass of Phyle, from which Thrasybulus and his brave fellows recovered Athens and its liberty. This pass, when you reach its summit, looks into the northern point of the Thriasian plain, and also into the wilder regions of Cithæron, which border Bœotia. The third pass, and the lowest—but a few miles beyond the groves of Academe—is the pass of Daphne, which was the high road to Eleusis, along which the sacred processions passed in the times of the Mysteries; and in this pass you still see the numerous niches in which native tablets had been set by the worshippers at a famous temple of Aphrodite.

On this side of Attica also, with the exception of the Thriasian plain and of Eleusis, there extends outside Mount Parnes a wild mountainous district, quite alpine in character, which severs Attica from Bœotia, not by a single row of mountains, or by a single pass, but by a succession of glens and defiles which at once explain to the classical student, when he sees them, how necessary and fundamental were [pg 155]the divisions of Greece into its separate districts, and how completely different in character the inhabitants of each were sure to be. The way from Attica into Bœotia was no ordinary high road, nor even a pass over one mountain, but through a series of glens and valleys and defiles, at any of which a hostile army could be stopped, and each of which severed the country on either side by a difficult obstacle. This truly alpine nature of Greece is only felt when we see it, and yet must ever be kept before the mind in estimating the character and energy of the race. But let us return to our view from the Acropolis.

If we turn and look southward, we see a broken country, with several low hills between us and the sea—hills tolerably well cultivated, and when I saw them in May all colored with golden stubbles, for the corn had just been reaped. But all the plain in every direction seems dry and dusty; arid, too, and not rich alluvial soil, like the plains of Bœotia. Then Thucydides’s words come back to us, when he says Attica was “undisturbed on account of the lightness of its soil” (ἀστασίαστος οὖσα διὰ τὸ λεπτόγεων), as early invaders rather looked out for richer pastures. This reflection, too, of Thucydides applies equally to the mountains of Attica round Athens, which are not covered with rich grass and dense shrubs, like Helicon, like Parnassus, like the glades of Arcadia, but seem so bare that we wonder where the bees of [pg 156]Hymettus can find food for their famous honey. It is only when the traveller ascends the rocky slopes of the mountain that he finds its rugged surface carpeted with quantities of little wild flowers, too insignificant to give the slightest color to the mountain, but sufficient for the bees, which are still making their honey as of old. This honey of Hymettus, which was our daily food at Athens, is now not very remarkable either for color or flavor. It is very dark, and not by any means so good as the honey produced in other parts of Greece—not to say on the heather hills of Scotland and Ireland. I tasted honey at Thebes and at Corinth which was much better, especially that of Corinth made in the hills toward Cleonæ, where the whole country is scented with thyme, and where thousands of bees are buzzing eagerly through the summer air. But when the old Athenians are found talking so much about honey, we must not forget that sugar was unknown to them, and that all their sweetmeats depended upon honey exclusively. Hence the culture and use of it assumed an importance not easily understood among moderns, who are in possession of the sugar-cane.

But amid all the dusty and bare features of the view, the eye fastens with delight on one great broad band of dark green, which, starting from the west side of Pentelicus, close to Mount Parnes in the north, sweeps straight down the valley, passing about [pg 157]two miles to the west of Athens, and reaching to the Peiræus. This is the plain of the Kephissus, and these are the famous olive woods which contain with them the deme Colonus, so celebrated by Sophocles, and the groves of Academe, at their nearest point to the city. The dust of Athens, and the bareness of the plain, make all walks about the town disagreeable, save either the ascent of Lycabettus, or a ramble into these olive woods. The River Kephissus, which waters them, is a respectable, though narrow river, even in summer often discharging a good deal of water, but much divided into trenches and arms, which are very convenient for irrigation.[59] So there is a strip of country, fully ten miles long, and perhaps two wide on the average, which affords delicious shade and greenness and the song of birds, instead of hot sunlight and dust and the shrill clamor of the tettix without.

I have wandered many hours in these delightful woods listening to the nightingales, which sing all day in the deep shade and solitude, as it were in a prolonged twilight, and hearing the plane-tree whispering to the elm,[60] as Aristophanes has it, and [pg 158]seeing the white poplar show its silvery leaves in the breeze, and wondering whether the huge old olive stems, so like the old pollarded stumps in Windsor Forest, could be the actual sacred trees, the μορίαι, under which the youth of Athens ran their races. The banks of the Kephissus, too, are lined with great reeds, and sedgy marsh plants, which stoop over into its sandy shallows and wave idly in the current of its stream. The ouzel and the kingfisher start from under one’s feet, and bright fish move out lazily from their sunny bay into the deeper pool. Now and then through a vista the Acropolis shows itself in a framework of green foliage, nor do I know any more enchanting view of that great ruin.

All the ground under the dense olive-trees was covered with standing corn, for here, as in Southern Italy, the shade of trees seems no hindrance to the ripening of the ear. But there was here thicker wood than in Italian corn-fields; on the other hand, there was not that rich festooning of vines which spread from tree to tree, and which give a Neapolitan summer landscape so peculiar a charm. A few homesteads there were along the roads, and even at one of the bridges a children’s school, full of those beautiful fair children whose heads remind one so strongly of the old Greek statues. But all the houses were walled in, and many of them seemed solitary and deserted. The memories of rapine and violence were still there. I was told, indeed, that [pg 159]no country in Europe was so secure, and I confess I found it so myself in my wanderings; but when we see how every disturbance or war on the frontier revives again the rumor of brigandage, I could not help feeling that the desert state of the land, and the general sense of insecurity, however irrational in the intervals of peace, was not surprising.

There is no other excursion in the immediate vicinity of Athens of any like beauty or interest. The older buildings in the Peiræus are completely gone. No trace of the docks or the deigma remains; and the splendid walls, built as Thucydides tells us with cut stone, without mortar or mud, and fastened with clamps of iron fixed with lead—this splendid structure has been almost completely destroyed. We can find, indeed, elsewhere in Attica—at Phyle—still better at Eleutheræ—specimens of this sort of building, but at the Peiræus there are only foundations remaining. Yet it is not really true that the great wall surrounding the Peiræus has totally disappeared. Even at the mouth of the harbor single stones may be seen lying along the rocky edge of the water, of which the size and the square cutting prove the use for which they were originally intended. But if the visitor to the Peiræus will take the trouble to cross the hill, and walk round the harbor of Munychia, he will find on the eastern point of the headland a neat little café, with com[pg 160]fortable seats, and with a beautiful view. The sea coast all round this headland shows the bed of the surrounding sea wall, hewn in the live rock. The actual structure is preserved in patches on the western point of this harbor, where the coast is very steep; but in the place to which I refer, we can trace the whole course of the wall a few feet above the water, cut out in the solid rock. I know no scanty specimen of Athenian work which gives a greater idea of the enormous wealth and energy of the city. The port of Munychia had its own theatre and temples, and it was here that Pausanias saw the altar to the gods called the unknown. The traces of the sea wall cease as soon as it reaches the actual narrow mouth of the little harbor. I do not know how far toward Phalerum it can be traced, but when visiting the harbor called Zea[61] on another occasion, I did not observe it. The reader will find in any ancient atlas, or in any history of Greece, a map of the harbors of Athens, so that I think it unnecessary to append one here.

The striking feature in the present Peiræus, which from the entrance of the harbor is very picturesque, is undoubtedly the rapid growth and extension of [pg 161]factories, with English machinery and overseers. When last there I found fourteen of these establishments, and their chimneys were becoming quite a normal feature in Greek landscape. Those which I visited were working up the cotton and the wool of the country into calico and other stuffs, which are unfortunately coming into fashion among the lower classes, and ousting the old costume. I was informed that boys were actually forbidden to attend school in Greek dress, a regulation which astonishes any one who knows the beauty and dignity of the national costume.

The Peiraeus

A drive to the open roadstead of Phalerum is more repaying. Here it is interesting to observe how the Athenians passed by the nearest sea, and even an open and clear roadstead, in order to join their city to the better harbor and more defensible headland of Peiræus. Phalĕrum, as they now call it, though they spell it with an η, is the favorite bathing-place of modern Athens, with an open-air theatre, and is about a mile and a half nearer the city than Peiræus. The water is shallow, and the beach is of fine sand, so that for ancient ships, which I suppose drew little water, it was a convenient landing-place, especially for the disembarking of troops, who could choose their place anywhere around a large crescent, and actually land fighting, if necessary. But the walls of Athens, the long walls to Peiræus, and its lofty fortifications, made this roadstead of no use to the [pg 162]enemy so long as Athens held the command of the sea, and could send out ships from the secure little harbors of Zea and Munychia, which are on the east side and in the centre of the headland of Peiræus. There was originally a third wall, too, to the east side of the Phaleric bay, but this seems to have been early abandoned when the second long wall, or middle wall, as it was originally called, was completed.

At the opening of the Peloponnesian war it appears that the Athenians defended against the Lacedæmonians, not the two long walls which ran close together and parallel to Peiræus, but the northern of these, and the far distant Phaleric wall. It cannot but strike any observer as extraordinary how the Athenians should undertake such an enormous task. Had the enemy attacked anywhere suddenly and with vigor, it seems hard to understand how they could have kept him out. According to Thucydides’s accurate detail,[62] the wall to Phalerum was nearly four miles, that to Peiræus four and a half. There were in addition five miles of city wall, and nearly three of Peiræus wall. That is to say, there were about seventeen miles of wall to be pro[pg 163]tected. This is not all. The circuit was not closed, but separated by about a mile of beach between Peiræus and Phalerum, so that the defenders of the two extremities could in no way promptly assist each other. Thucydides tells us that a garrison of 16,000 inferior soldiers, old men, boys, and metics, sufficed to do this work. We are forced to conclude that not only were the means of attacking walls curiously incomplete, but even the dash and enterprise of modern warfare cannot have been understood by the Greeks. For we never hear of even a bold attempt on this absurdly straggling fortification, far less of any successful attempt to force it.

But it is time that we should leave the environs of Athens,[63] and wander out beyond the borders of the Athenian plain into the wilder outlying parts of the land. Attica is, after all, a large country, if one does not apply railway measures to it. We think thirty miles by rail very little, but thirty miles by road is a long distance, and implies land enough to support a large population and to maintain many flourishing towns. We can wander thirty miles from Athens through Attica in several directions—to Eleutheræ, on the western Bœotian frontier; to Oropus, on the north; and Sunium, on [pg 164]the south. Thus it is only when one endeavors to know Attica minutely that one finds how much there is to be seen, and how long a time is required to see it. And fortunately enough there is an expedition, and that not the least important, where we can avoid the rough paths and rougher saddles of the country, and coast in a steamer along a district at all times obscure in history, and seldom known for anything except for being the road to Sunium. Strabo gives a list of the demes along this seaboard,[64] and seems only able to write one fact about them—a line from an old oracle in the days of the Persian war, which prophesied that “the women of Colias will roast their corn with oars,”[65] alluding to the wrecks driven on shore here by the northwest wind from Salamis. Even the numerous little islands along this coast were in his day, as they now are, perfectly barren. Yet with all its desolation it is exceedingly picturesque and varied in outline.

We took ship in the little steamer[66] belonging to the Sunium Mining Company, who have built a village called Ergasteria, between Thorikos and the promontory, and who were obliging enough to allow us to sail in the boat intended for their private traffic. We left the Peiræus on one of those peculiarly Greek mornings, with a blue sky and very [pg 165]bright sun, but with an east wind so strong and clear, so λαμπρός, as the old Greeks would say, that the sea was driven into long white crests, and the fishing-boats were lying over under their sails. These fresh and strong winds, which are constantly blowing in Greece, save the people very much from the bad effects of a very hot southern climate. Even when the temperature is high the weather is seldom sultry; and upon the sea, which intrudes everywhere, one can always find a cool and refreshing atmosphere. The Greeks seem not the least to fear these high winds, which are generally steady and seldom turn to squalls. The smallest boats are to be seen scudding along on great journeys from one island to another—often with a single occupant, who sits holding the helm with one hand, and the stern sheet with the other. All the ferry-boats in the Peiræus are managed in this way, and you may see their great sails, like sea-gulls’ wings, leaning over in the gale, and the spray dashing from the vessel’s prow. We met a few larger vessels coming up from Syra, but on the whole the sea was well-nigh as desert as the coast; so much so, that the faithful dog, which was on board each of those boats, thought it his serious duty to stand up on the taffrail and bark at us as a strange and doubtful company.

So, after passing many natural harbors and spacious bays, many rocky headlands and bluff islands—but all desert and abandoned by track of man, we [pg 166]approached the famous cape, from which the white pillars of the lofty old temple gleamed brilliantly in the sun. They were the first and only white marble pillars which I saw in Greece. Elsewhere, dust and age, if not the hand of man, have colored that splendid material with a dull golden hue; but here the sea breeze, while eating away much of the surface, has not soiled them with its fresh brine, and so they still remain of the color which they had when they were set up. We should fain conjecture that here, at all events, the Greeks had not applied the usual blue and red to decorate this marvellous temple; that—for the delight and benefit of the sailors, who hailed it from afar, as the first sign of Attica—its brilliant white color was left to it, to render it a brighter beacon and a clearer object in twilight and in mist. I will not yet describe it, for we paid it a special visit, and must speak of it in greater detail; but even now, when we coasted round the headland, and looked up to its shining pillars standing far aloft into the sky, it struck us with the most intense interest. It was easy, indeed, to see how Byron’s poetic mind was here inspired with some of his noblest lines.

When we turned from it seaward, we saw stretched out in échelon that chain of Cyclades, which are but a prolongation of the headland—Keos, Kyphnos, Seriphos, Siphnos, and in the far distance, Melos—Melos, the scene of Athens’s violence and [pg 167]cruelty, when she filled up, in the mind of the old historian, the full measure of her iniquity. And as we turned northward, the long island, or islet, of Helena, which stretches along the point, like Hydra off that of Argolis, could not hide from us the mountain ranges of Eubœa, still touched here and there with snow. A short run against the wind brought us to the port of Ergasteria, marked very strangely in the landscape by the smoke of its chimneys—the port where the present produce of the mines of Laurium is prepared and shipped for Scotland.

Here, at last, we found ourselves again among men; three thousand operatives, many of them with families, make quite a busy town of Ergasteria. And I could not but contrast their bold and independent looks, rough and savage as they seemed, with what must have been the appearance of the droves of slaves who worked the mines in old days. We were rowed ashore from our steamer by two men called Aristides and Epaminondas, but I cannot say that their looks betokened either the justice of the one or the culture of the other.

We found ourselves when we landed in an awkward predicament. The last English engineer remaining in the Mining Company, at whose invitation we had ventured into this wild district, had suddenly left, that morning, for Athens. His house was shut up, and we were left friendless and alone, among [pg 168]three thousand of these Aristideses and Epaminondases, whose appearance was, as I have said, anything but reassuring. We did what was best to meet the difficulty, and what was not only the best thing to do, but the only thing, and it turned out very well indeed. We went to the temporary director of the mines, a very polished gentleman, with a charming wife, both of whom spoke French excellently. We stated our case, and requested hospitality for the night. Nothing could be more friendly than our reception. This benevolent man and his wife took us into their own house, prepared rooms for us, and promised to let us see all the curiosities of the country. Thus our misfortune became, in fact, a very good fortune. The night, however, it must be confessed, was spent in a very unequal conflict with mosquitoes—an inconvenience which our good hostess in vain endeavored to obviate by giving us a strong-smelling powder to burn in our room, and shutting all the windows. But had the remedy been even successful, it is very doubtful whether it was not worse than the disease.

We started in the morning by a special train—for the company have a private line from the coast up to the mines—to ascend the wooded and hilly country into the region so celebrated of old as one of the main sources of Athenian wealth. As the train wound its way round the somewhat steep ascent, our prospect over the sea and its islands [pg 169]became larger and more varied. The wild rocks and forests of southern Eubœa—one of the few districts in Greece which seem to have been as savage and deserted in old days as they are now—detached themselves from the intervening island of Helena. We were told that wild boars were still to be found in Eubœa. In the hills about Laurium, hares, which Xenophon so loved to hunt in his Elean retreat, and turtle doves, seemed the only game attainable. All the hills were covered with stunted underwood.

Laurium

The mines of Laurium appear very suddenly in Attic history, but from that time onward are a prominent part of the wealth of the Athenians. We know that in Solon’s day there was great scarcity of money, and that he was obliged to depreciate the value of the coinage—a very violent and unprecedented measure, never repeated; for, all through later history, Attic silver was so good that it circulated at a premium in foreign parts just as English money does now. Accordingly, in Solon’s time we hear no mention of this great and almost inexhaustible source of national wealth. All through the reign of the Peisistratids there is a like silence. Suddenly, after the liberation of Athens, we hear of Themistocles persuading the people to apply the very large revenue from these mines to the building of a fleet for the purpose of the war with Ægina.[67] [pg 170]The so-called Xenophon On the Attic Revenues—a tract which is almost altogether about these mines—asserts indeed that they had been worked from remote antiquity; and there can be little doubt that here, as elsewhere in Greece, the Phœnicians had been the forerunners of the natives in the art of mining. Here, as in Thasos, I believe the Phœnicians had their settlements; and possibly a closer survey of the great underground passages, which are still there, may give us some proof by inscriptions or otherwise.

But what happened after the Semitic traders had been expelled from Greek waters?—for expelled they were, though, perhaps, far later from some remote and unexplored points than we usually imagine. I suppose that when this took place Athens was by no means in a condition to think about prosecuting trade at Sunium. Salamis, which was far closer and a more obvious possession, was only conquered in Solon’s day, after a long and [pg 171]tedious struggle; and I am perfectly certain that the Athenians could have had no power to hold an outlying dependency, separated by thirty miles of the roughest mountain country, when they had not subdued an island scarcely a mile from the Thriasian plain and not ten miles from Athens. I take it, then, that the so-called συνοικισμός, or unifying of Athens, in prehistoric times, by Theseus, or whoever did it, was not a cementing of all Attica, including these remote corners, but only of the settlements about the plains of Attica, Marathon, and Eleusis; and that the southern end of the peninsula was not included in the Athens of early days. It was, in fact, only accessible by a carefully constructed artificial road, such as we hear of afterward, or by sea. The Athenians had not either of these means of access at so early a period. And it is not a little remarkable that the first mention of their ownership of the silver mines is associated with the building of a fleet to contend with Ægina. I have no doubt that Themistocles’s advice has been preserved without his reasons for it. He persuaded the Athenians to surrender their surplus revenue from Laurium, to build ships against the Æginetans, simply because they found that without ships the Æginetans would be practically sole possessors of the mines. They were far closer to Laurium by sea than Athens was by land—closer, indeed, in every way—and I am led to suspect that, in the days before Solon, the [pg 172]mines may have been secretly worked by Ægina, and not by Athens. I cannot here enter into my full reasons, but I fancy that Peisistratus and his sons—not by conquest, but by some agreement—got practical possession of the mines, and were, perhaps, the first to make all Attica really subject to the power of Athens.[68] But no sooner are they expelled than the Æginetans renew their attacks or claims on Laurium; and it is only the Athenian fleet which secures to Athens its possession. We hear of proceedings of Hippias about coinage,[69] which are adduced by Aristotle as specimens of injustice, or sharp practice, and which may have something to do with the acquisition of the silver mines by his dynasty. But I must cut short this serious dissertation.

Our special train brought us up slowly round wooded heights, and through rich green brakes, into a lonely country, from which glimpses of the sea could, however, still be seen, and glimpses of blue islands, between the hills. And so we came to the settlements of the modern miners. The great Company, whose guests we were, had been started some [pg 173]years ago, by French and Italian speculators, and Professor Anstead had been there as geologist for some years. But the jealousy of the Greeks, when they found out that profit was rewarding foreign enterprise, caused legislation against the Company; various complications followed, so that at last they gladly sold their interest to a native Company. In 1887 this Company was still thriving; and I saw in the harbor a large vessel from Glasgow, which had come to carry the lead to Scotland, when prepared in blocks—all the produce being still bought by a single English firm.

When the Greeks discuss these negotiations about the mines they put quite a different color on the affair. They say that the French and Italians desired to evade fair payment for the ground-rent of the mines, trusting to the strength of their respective governments, and the weakness of Greece. The Company’s policy is described in Greece as an over-reaching, unscrupulous attempt to make great profits by sharp bargains with the natives, who did not know the value of their property. A great number of obscure details are adduced in favor of their arguments, and it seemed to me that the Greeks were really convinced of their truth. In such a matter it would be unfair to decide without stating both sides; and I am quite prepared to change my present conviction that the Greeks were most to blame, if proper reasons can be assigned. But the legis[pg 174]lative Acts passed in their Parliament look very ugly indeed at first sight.

The principal Laurium Company[70] never enter the mines at all, but gather the great mass of scoriæ, which the old Athenians threw out after smelting with more imperfect furnaces and less heat than ours. These scoriæ, which look like stone cinders, have been so long there that some vegetation has at last grown over them, and the traveller does not suspect that all the soil around was raised and altered by the hand of man. Owing to the power of steam, and their railway, the present miners carry down the scoriæ on trucks to the sea-coast, to Ergasteria, and there smelt them. The old Athenians had their furnaces in the middle of the mountains, where many of them are still to be seen. They sought chiefly for silver, whereas the modern Company are chiefly in pursuit of lead, and obtain but little silver from the scoriæ.

In many places you come upon the openings of the old pits, which went far into the bowels of the mountains, through miles of underground galleries and passages. Our engine-driver—an intelligent Frenchman—stopped the train to show us one of these entrances, which went down almost straight, with good steps still remaining, into the earth. He assured us that the other extremity which was known, [pg 175]all the passage being open, was some two or three miles distant, at a spot which he showed us from a hill. Hearing that inscriptions were found in these pits, and especially that the name of Nicias had been discovered there, we were very anxious to descend and inspect them. This was promised to us, for the actual pits were in the hands of another Greek Company, who were searching for new veins of silver. But when we arrived at the spot the officers of the Company were unwilling to let us into the pits. The proper overseer was away—intentionally, of course. There were no proper candles; there were no means of obtaining admission: so we were balked in our inquiry. But we went far enough into the mouth of one of them to see that these pits were on a colossal scale, well arched up; and, I suppose, had we gone far enough, we should have found the old supports, of which the Athenian law was so careful.

The quantity of scoriæ thrown out, which seems now perfectly inexhaustible, is in itself sufficient evidence of the enormous scale on which the old mining was carried on. Thus, we do not in the least wonder at hearing that Nicias had one thousand slaves working in the mines, and that the profits accruing to the State from the fines and head-rents of the mines were very large—on a moderate estimate, £8000 a year of our money, which meant in those days a great deal more.

The author of the tract on “Athenian Revenue” says that the riches of the mines were absolutely unbounded; that only a small part of the silver district had been worked out, though the digging had gone on from time immemorial; and that after innumerable laborers had been employed the mines always appeared equally rich, so that no limit need be put on the employment of capital. Still he speaks of opening a new shaft as a most risky speculation. His general estimate appears, however, somewhat exaggerated. The writer confesses that the number of laborers was in his day diminishing, and the majority of the proprietors were then beginners; so that there must have been great interruption of work during the Peloponnesian War. In the age of Philip there were loud complaints that the speculations in mining were unsuccessful; and for obtaining silver, at all events, no reasonable prospect seems to have been left. In the first century of our era, Strabo (ix. i. 23) says that these once celebrated mines were exhausted,[71] that new mining did not pay, and thus people were smelting the poorer ore, and the scoriæ from which the ancients had imperfectly separated the metal. He adds that the main product of the mining district was in his day honey, which was especially known as smokeless (ἀκάπνιστον), on ac[pg 177]count of its good preparation. This in itself shows that the mining had decayed, for now all the flowers in the neighborhood of the smelting are killed by the black fumes.

Our last mention of the place in olden times is that of Pausanias (at the end of the second century A. D.), who speaks of Laurium, with the addition that it had once been the seat of the Athenian silver mines!

There is but one more point suggested by these mines, which it is not well to pass over when we are considering the working of them in ancient times. Nothing is more poisonous than the smoke from lead-mines; and for this reason the people at Ergasteria have built a chimney more than a mile long to the top of a neighboring hill, where the smoke escapes. Even so, when the wind blows back the smoke, all the vegetation about the village is at once blighted, and there is no greater difficulty than to keep a garden within two or three miles of this chimney. As the Athenians did not take such precautions, we are not surprised to hear from them frequent notices of the unhealthiness of the district, for when there were many furnaces, and the smoke was not drawn away by high chimneys, we can hardly conceive life to have been tolerable. What then must have been the condition of the gangs of slaves which Nicias and other respectable and pious Athenians kept in these mines? Two or three allusions give us a hideous [pg 178]insight into this great social sore, which has not been laid bare, because the wild district of Laurium, and the deep mines under its surface, have concealed the facts from the ordinary observer. Nicias, we are told, let out one thousand slaves to Sosias the Thracian, at an obolus a day each—the lessee being bound to restore them to him the same in number.

The meaning of this frightful contract is only too plain. The yearly rent paid for each slave was about half the full price paid for him in the market. It follows that, if the slave lived for three years, Nicias made a profit of 50 per cent. on his outlay. No doubt, some part of this extraordinary bargain must be explained by the great profits which an experienced miner could make—a fact supported by the tract on the Revenues, which cannot date more than a generation later than the bargain of Nicias. The lessee, too, was under the additional risk of the slaves escaping in time of war, when a hostile army might make a special invasion into the mountain district for the purpose of inflicting a blow on this important part of Athenian revenue. In such cases, it may be presumed that desperate attempts were made by the slaves to escape, for although the Athenian slaves generally were the best treated in Greece, and had many holidays, it was very different with the gangs employed by the Thracian taskmaster. We are told that they had [pg 179]three hundred and sixty working days in the year. This, together with the poison of the atmosphere, tells its tale plainly enough.

And yet Nicias, the capitalist who worked this hideous trade, was the most pious and God-fearing man at Athens. So high was his reputation for integrity and religion, that the people insisted on appointing him again and again to commands for which he was wholly unfit; and when at last he ruined the great Athenian army before Syracuse, and lost his own life, by his extreme devoutness and his faith in the threats and warnings of the gods—even then the great sceptical historian, who cared for none of these things, condones all his blunders for the sake of his piety and his respectability.

Of course, however, an excursion to Laurium, interesting as it might be, were absurd without visiting the far more famous Sunium,—the promontory which had already struck us so much on our sea voyage round the point,—the temple which Byron has again hallowed with his immortal verse, and Turner with his hardly less immortal pencil. So we hired horses on our return from the mines, and set out on a very fine afternoon to ride down some seven or eight miles from Ergasteria to the famous promontory. Our route led over rolling hills, covered with arbutus and stunted firs; along valleys choked with deep, matted grass; by the [pg 180]side of the sea, upon the narrow ledge of broken rocks. Nowhere was there a road, or a vestige of human habitation, save where the telegraph wire dipped into the sea, pointing the way to the distant Syra. It was late in the day, and the sun was getting low, so we urged our horses to a canter wherever the ground would permit it. But neither the heat nor the pace could conquer the indefatigable esquire who attended us on foot to show us the way, and hold the horses when we stopped. His speed and endurance made me think of Phidippides and his run to Sparta; nor, indeed, do any of the feats recorded of the old Greeks, either in swimming or running, appear incredible when we witness the feats that are being performed almost every day by modern muscle and endurance. At last, after a delightful two hours’ roaming through the homely solitude, we found ourselves at the foot of the last hill, and over us the shining pillars of the ruined temple stood out against the sky.

There can be no doubt that the temple of Neptune on Mount Tænarum must have been quite as fine as to position, but the earthquakes of Laconia have made havoc of its treasures, while at Sunium, though some of the drums in the shafts of the pillars have been actually displaced several inches from their fellows above and below, so that the perfect fitting of the old Athenians has come to look like the tottering work of a giant child with marble [pg 181]bricks,—in spite of this, thirteen pillars remain,[72] a piece of architrave, and a huge platform of solid blocks; above all, a site not desecrated by modern habitations, where we can sit and think of the great old days, and of the men who set up this noble monument at the remotest corner of their land. The Greeks told us that this temple, that at Ægina, and the Parthenon, are placed exactly at the angles of a great equilateral triangle, with each side about twenty-five or thirty miles long. Our maps do not verify this belief. The distance from Athens to Sunium appears much longer than either of the other lines, nor do we find in antiquity any hint that such a principle was attended to, or that any peculiar virtue was attached to it.

We found the platform nearly complete, built with great square blocks of poros-stone, and in some places very high, though in others scarcely raised at all, according to the requirements of the ground. Over it the temple was built, not with the huge blocks which we see at Corinth and in the Parthenon, but still of perfectly white marble, and with that beautifully close fitting, without mortar, rubble, or cement, which characterizes the best and most perfect epoch of Greek architecture.[73] The stone, too, is the finest [pg 182]white marble, and, being exposed to no dust on its lofty site, has alone of all temples kept its original color—if, indeed, it was originally white, and not enriched with divers colors. The earthquake, which has displaced the stones in the middle of the pillars, has tumbled over many large pieces, which can be seen from above scattered all down the slope where they have rolled. But enough still remains for us to see the plan, and imagine the effect of the whole structure. It is in the usual simple, grand, Doric style, but lighter in proportions than the older Attic temples; and, being meant for distant effect, was probably not much decorated. Its very site gives it all the ornament any building could possibly require.

It was our good fortune to see it in a splendid sunset, with the sea a sheet of molten gold, and all the headlands and islands colored with hazy purple. The mountains of Eubœa, with their promontory of Geræstus, closed the view upon the north-east; but far down into the Ægean reached island after island, as it were striving to prolong a highway to the holy Delos. The ancient Andros, Tenos, Myconos were there, but the eye sought in vain for the home of Apollo’s shrine—the smallest and yet the greatest of the group. The parallel chain, reaching down from Sunium itself, was confused into one mass, but ex[pg 183]posed to view the distant Melos. Then came a short space of open sea, due south, which alone prevented us from imagining ourselves on some fair and quiet inland lake; and beyond to the south-west we saw the point of Hydra, the only spot in all Hellas whose recent fame exceeds the report of ancient days. The mountains of Argolis lay behind Ægina, and formed with their Arcadian neighbors a solid background, till the eye wandered round to the Acropolis of Corinth, hardly visible in the burning brightness of the sun’s decline. And all this splendid expanse of sea and mountain, and bay and cliff, seemed as utterly deserted as the wildest western coast of Scotland or Ireland. One or two little white sails, speeding in his boat some lonely fisherman, made the solitude, if possible, more speaking and more intense. There are finer views, more extensive, and perhaps even more varied, but none more exquisitely interesting and more melancholy to the student of Ancient Greece.

[pg 184]

CHAPTER VII.

EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA—PENTELICUS—MARATHON—DAPHNE—ELEUSIS.

This great loneliness is a feature that strikes the traveller almost everywhere through the country. Many centuries of insecurity, and indeed of violence, have made country life almost impossible; and now that better times have come, the love and knowledge of it are gone. The city Athenian no longer grumbles, as he did in Aristophanes’s day, that an invasion has driven him in from the rude plenty and simple luxuries of his farming life, where with his figs and his olives, his raisins and his heady wine, he made holiday before his gods, and roasted his thrush and his chestnuts with his neighbor over the fire. All this is gone. There remains, indeed, the old political lounger, the loafer of the market-place, ever seeking to obtain some shabby maintenance by sycophancy or by bullying. This type is not hard to find in modern Athens, but the old sturdy Acharnian, as well as the rich horse-breeding Alcmæonid, are things of the past. Even the large profits to be made by market-gardening will not tempt them to adopt this industry, and the great city of Athens is [pg 185]one of the worst supplied and dearest of capitals, most of its daily requirements in vegetables, fowls, eggs, etc., coming in by steamers from islands on the coast of Thessaly. No part of the country of Attica can be considered even moderately cultivated, except the Thriasian plain, and the valley of Kephissus, reaching from near Dekelea to the sea. This latter plain, with its fine olive-woods reaching down across Academus to the region of the old long walls, is fairly covered with corn and grazing cattle, with plane trees and poplars. But even here many of the homesteads are deserted; and the country seats of the Athenians were often left empty for years, whenever a band of brigands appeared in the neighboring mountains, and threatened the outlying houses with blackmail, if not with bloodier violence. Of late there is a steady improvement.

Nothing can be truer than the admirable description of Northern Attica given in M. Perrot’s book on the Attic orators. He is describing Rhamnus, the home of Antiphon, but his picture is of broader application.[74]

All these remarks are even more strongly exemplified by the beautiful country which lies between [pg 187]Pentelicus and Hymettus, and which is now covered with forest and brushwood. We passed through this [pg 188]vale one sunny morning on our way to visit Marathon. There is, indeed, a road for some miles—the road to the quarries of Pentelicus—but a very different one from what the Athenians must have had. It is now a mere broad track, cut by wheels and [pg 189]hoofs in the sward; and wherever the ruts become too deep the driver turns aside, and makes a parallel track for his own convenience. In summer days, the dust produced by this sort of road is something beyond description; and the soil being very red earth, we have an atmosphere which accounts to some extent for the remarkable color of the old buildings of Athens. The way, after turning round the steep Lycabettus, which, like Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh, commands the town close by, passes up the right side of the undulating plain of Attica, with the stony but variegated slopes of Hymettus upon the right, and Pentelicus almost straight ahead. As soon as the suburbs are passed we meet but one or two country seats, surrounded with dark cypress and pepper trees; but outside the sombre green is a tall, dazzling, white wall, which gives a peculiarly Oriental character to the landscape. There is cultivation visible when you look to the westward, where the village of Kephissia lies, among the groves which accompany the Kephissus on its course; but up toward Pentelicus, along the track which must once have been crowded with carts, and heavy teams, and shouting drivers, when all the blocks of the Parthenon were being hurried from their quarry to adorn the Acropolis—along this famous track there is hardly a sign of culture. Occasionally, a rough stubble field showed that a little corn had been cut—an occasional station, with a couple of soldiers, [pg 190]shows why more had not been sown. The fear of brigands had paralyzed industry, and even driven out the scanty rural population.

Mount Lycabettus, Athens

It strikes me, when speaking of this road, that the Greek roads cannot have been at all so well constructed as the Roman, many of which are still to be seen in England. Though I went upon the track of many of them, I but once noticed the vestige of an old Greek road. There are here and there wretched remains of Turkish roads—rough angular stones laid down across the hills, in a close irregular pavement; but of the great builders of the Parthenon and of Phyle, of Eleutheræ and of Eleusis, hardly a patch of road-work has, so far as I know, remained.

There is, indeed, one exception in this very neighborhood, to which we may now naturally turn. The traveller who has wondered at the huge blocks of the Propylæa and the Parthenon, and who has noticed the exquisite quality of the stone, and the perfect smoothness which it has preserved to the present day, will naturally desire to visit the quarry on Pentelicus from which it was brought. The marble of Paros is probably the only stone found superior to it for the purposes of sculpture. It is, however, harder and of larger grain, so that it must have been more difficult to work. Experts can tell the difference between the two marbles, but I confess that, though M. Rousopoulos endeavored to teach [pg 191]it to me from specimens in the Acropolis Museum, I was unable to attain a clear knowledge of the distinction. The large blocks of Pentelican marble, however beautiful and fine in grain, seem not unfrequently to have contained flaws, and possibly the ascertaining of this defect may of old have been one of the most difficult duties of the architect. It is supposed to have been done by sounding the block with a hammer, a process which the Greeks would call κωδωνίζειν. There are at present, close to the east front of the Parthenon, several of these rejected blocks, and the lapse of ages has brought out the flaw visibly, because damp has had time to penetrate the stone, and stain its pure whiteness with a dark seam. But when it came fresh from its native bed, and was all pure white, I presume the difficulty must have been considerable. Possibly these blocks on the Parthenon were injured in their transit, and left the quarries in sound condition. For in going up the steep road to these quarries, in more than one place a similar great block will be found tumbled aside, and left lying at the very spot where we may suppose some accident to have happened to crack it. This road, which in its highest parts has never been altered, is a steep descent, rudely paved with transverse courses of stone, like steps in pattern, and may have had wooden slides laid over it, to bring down the product of the quarries to the valley. It is well worth while going up for a night to the fine monas[pg 192]tery not far off, where there is ample shade of waving trees and plenty of falling water, in the midst of steep slopes wooded with the fir—a cool and quiet retreat in the fierce heat of summer.[75] From this place to the quarries is less than an hour’s walk. The moderns still draw stone from them, but far below the spots chosen by the ancients; and, of course, the remains of the old industry are on an infinitely grander scale.

It is a laborious climb, up a road covered with small fragments of stone. But at last, beneath a great face of marble all chipped with the work of ancient hands, there is a large cool cavern, with water dripping from the roof into ice-cold pools below, and besides it a quaint grotto chapel, with its light still burning, and stone seats around, where the traveller may rest. This place seems to have been the main source of the old Athenian buildings. The high face of the rock above it is chipped, as I have said, with small and delicate cutting, and hangs over, as if they had removed it beneath, in order to bring down the higher pieces more easily. Of course, they could not, and probably if they could, would not, have blasted the stone; and, so far as I know, we are not informed by what process they [pg 193]managed to loosen and bring down the great blocks from their sites. The surface of the rock testifies to the use of some small and delicate chisel. But whatever the process, they must have had machinery of which we have lost all record, for no amount of manual work could possibly have accomplished what they did in a few years, and accomplished it with a delicacy which shows complete control of their materials. The beautifully fitted walls of the chamber inside the left wing of the Propylæa preserve an interesting piece of detail on the face of each square block, which is perfectly fitted to its fellows; there still remains a rough knob jutting out from the centre, evidently the handle used for lifting the stone, and usually removed when all the building was completely finished. The expenses of war and the dolors of a long siege caused the Propylæa to remain unfinished, and so this piece of construction has survived.

The view from the top of Pentelicus is, of course, very striking, and those who have no time or inclination to spend a day at Marathon itself are usually content with a very fine view of the bay and the opposite mountains of Eubœa, which can thence be had. But it is indeed a pity, now that the country is generally quite safe, that after so long a journey as that from England to Athens, people should turn back without completing the additional fifteen miles [pg 194]which brings them to the site of the great battle itself.

As we leave the track which leads up to the monastery above mentioned, the country becomes gradually covered with shrubs, and then with stunted trees—generally old fir-trees, all hacked and carved and wounded for the sake of their resin, which is so painfully obtrusive in Greek wine. But in one place there is, by way of change, a picturesque bridge over a rapid rocky-bedded river, which is completely hidden with rich flowering oleanders, and in which we found sundry Attic women, of the poorer class, washing their clothes. The woods in this place were wonderfully rich and scented, and the sound of the turtle doves was heard in the land. Presently we came upon the thickly wooded corner, which was pointed out to us as the spot where our unfortunate countrymen were captured in 1870, and carried up the slopes of Pentelicus, to be sacrificed to the blundering of the English Minister or the Greek Ministry,—I could not decide which,—and more certainly to their own chivalry; for while all the captured Greeks escaped during the pursuit, our English gentlemen would not break their parole. These men are now held by the better Greeks to be martyrs for the good of Greece; for this outrage first forced the Government to take really vigorous measures for the safety of the country. The whole band were gradually captured and executed, till at [pg 195]last Takos, their chief, was caught in Peloponnesus, three or four years ago, and hanged at Athens. So it came that I found the country (on all my visits, ’75, ’77, ’84, ’89) apparently as safe as Ireland is to a traveller, and we required neither escort, nor arms, nor any precautions whatever.

We had, indeed, a missive from the Greek Prime Minister, which we presented to the Chief Police Officer of each town—a gentleman in the usual scarlet cap and white petticoats, but carrying a great dog-whip as the sign of his office. This custom, strange to say, dates from the days of Aristophanes. But the Prime Minister warned us that, though things were now safe, there was no permanent security. Any revolution in the neighborhood (such, for example, as that in Herzegovina, which at that time had not yet broken out) might, he said, send over the Turkish frontier a number of outlaws or other fugitives, who would support themselves by levying blackmail on the peasantry, and then on travellers. We were assured that the Morea, which does not afford an easy escape into Turkey, has been for years perfectly secure, and I found it so in several subsequent journeys. So, then, any traveller desirous of seeing the Peloponnesus—Sparta, Olympia, Mantinea, Argos, or even Central Greece—may count on doing so with safety. Not so the visitor to Tempe and Mount Pindus.[76] The Professors of the University [pg 196]with whom I talked were, indeed, of a more sanguine opinion. They did not anticipate any recurrence of the danger: they considered Greece one of the safest and quietest of countries. Moreover, in one point they all seemed agreed. It was perfectly certain that the presence of bandits would be at once known at Athens. Why this was so, I was not informed, nor whether travellers would be at once informed also. In any case, either M. Trikoupi or the British Minister can be perfectly relied upon for advice in this matter.

So much for the safety of travelling in Greece, which is suggested by the melancholy fate of Mr. Vyner and his friends, though that event is now so long past. But one point more. It is both idle and foolish to imagine that revolvers and daggers are the best protection against Greek bandits, should they reappear. They never attack where they are visible. The first notice given to the traveller is the sight of twenty or thirty muzzles pointed at him from the covert, with a summons to surrender. Except, therefore, the party be too numerous to be so surrounded and visé, so that some could fight, even were others shot—except in such a case, arms are only an addi[pg 197]tional prize, and a tempting one, for the clephts. It is, indeed, very seldom that the carrying of arms is to be recommended to any traveller in any land.

As we ascended the long saddle of country which lies between Pentelicus and Hymettus, we came upon a fine olive-wood, with the same enormous stems which had already excited our wonder in the groves of Academe. Indeed, some of the stems in this wood were the largest we had seen, and made us think that they may have been there since the days when the olive oil of Attica was one of its most famous products, and its export was even forbidden. Even then there were ancient stumps—μορίαι, as they were called—which were sacred, and which no man who rented or bought the land might remove; a restriction which seems hard to us, but was not so in Greece, where corn grows freely in the shade of trees, and is even habitually planted in orchards. But at all events, these old, gnarled, hollowed stumps, with their tufts of branches starting from the pollarded trunk, are a really classical feature in the country, and deserve, therefore, a passing notice.

When we had got well between the mountains a new scene unfolded itself. We began to see the famous old Euripus, with the mountains of Eubœa over against us; and down to the south, behind Hymettus, till we reach the extremity of Sunium, stretched a long tract of mountainous and barren country which never played a prominent part in [pg 198]history, but where a conical hill was pointed out to us as the site of the old deme Brauron. It is, indeed, surprising how little of Attica was ever celebrated. Close by the most famous city of the world are reaches of country which are as obscure to us as the wilds of Arcadia; and we may suspect that the shepherds who inhabited the φελλέα, or rocky pastures in the Attic hills, were not much superior to those whom we now meet herding their goats in the same region.

The plain of Marathon, as everybody knows, is a long crescent-shaped strip of land by the shore, surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills, which may be crossed conveniently in three places, but most easily toward the south-west, along the road which we travelled, and which leads directly to Athens. When the Athenians marched through this broad and easy passage they found that the Persians had landed at the northern extremity of the plain—I suppose, because the water was there sufficiently deep to let them land conveniently. Most of the shore, as you proceed southward, is lined on the seaboard by swamps. The Greek army must have marched northward along the spurs of Pentelicus, and taken up their position near the north of the plain. There was evidently much danger that the Persians would force a passage through the village of Marathon, farther toward the north-west. Had they done this, they might have rounded Pentelicus, and descended [pg 199]the main plain of Attica, from the valley below Dekelea. Perhaps, however, this pass was then guarded by an outlying fort, or by some defences at Marathon itself. The site of the battle is absolutely fixed by the great mound, upon which was placed a lion, which has been carried off, no one knows when or whither. The mound is exactly an English mile from the steep slope of one of the hills, and about half a mile from the sea at present; nor was there, when I saw it, any difficulty in walking right to the shore, though a river flows out there, which shows, by its sedgy banks and lofty reeds, a tendency to create a marshy tract in rainy weather. But the mound is so placed that, if it marks the centre of the battle, the Athenians must have faced nearly north; and if they faced the sea eastward, as is commonly stated, this mound must mark the scene of the conflict on their left wing. The mound is very large—I suppose thirty feet high—altogether of earth, so far as we could see, and bears traces of having been frequently ransacked in search of antiquities. Dr. Schliemann, its latest investigator, could find nothing there but prehistoric flint weapons.

Looking Toward the Sea from the Soros, Marathon

Like almost every view in Greece, the prospect from this mound is full of beauty and variety—everywhere broken outlines, everywhere patches of blue sea, everywhere silence and solitude. Byron is so much out of fashion now, and so much more talked about than read—though even that notice of [pg 200]him is fast disappearing—that I will venture to remind the reader of the splendid things he has said of Greece, and especially of this very plain of Marathon. He was carried away by his enthusiasm to fancy a great future possible for the country, and to believe that its desolation and the low condition of the inhabitants were simply the result of Turkish tyranny, and not of many natural causes conspiring for twenty centuries. He paints the Greek brigand or pirate as many others have painted the “noble savage,” with the omission of all his meaner vices. But in spite of all these faults, who is there who has felt as he the affecting aspects of this beautiful land—the tomb of ancient glory—the home of ancient wisdom—the mother of science, of art, of philosophy, of politics—the champion of liberty—the envy of the Persian and the Roman—the teacher, even still, of modern Europe? It is surely a great loss to our generation, and a bad sign of its culture, that the love of more modern poets has weaned them from the study of one not less great in most respects, but far greater in one at least—in that burning enthusiasm for a national cause, in that red-hot passion for liberty which, even when misapplied, or wasted upon unworthy objects, is ever one of the noblest and most stirring instincts of higher man.

But Byron may well be excused his raving about the liberty of the Greeks, for truly their old conflict at Marathon, where a few thousand ill-disciplined men [pg 201]repulsed a larger number of still worse disciplined Orientals, without any recondite tactics—perhaps even without any very extraordinary heroism—how is it that this conflict has maintained a celebrity which has not been equalled by any of the great battles of the world from that day down to our own? The courage of the Greeks, as I have elsewhere shown,[77] was not of the first order. Herodotus praises the Athenians in this very battle for being the first Greeks that dared to look the Persians in the face. Their generals all through history seem never to feel sure of victory, and always endeavor to harangue their soldiers into a fury. Instead of advising coolness, they especially incite to rage—ὀργῇ προσμίξωμεν, says one of them in Thucydides—as if any man not in this state would be sure to estimate the danger fully, and run away. It is, indeed, true that the ancient battles were hand to hand, and therefore parallel to our charges of bayonets, which are said to be very seldom carried out by two opposing lines, as one of them almost always gives way before the actual collision takes place. This must often have occurred in Greek battles, for in one fought at Amphipolis Brasidas lost seven men; at a battle at Corinth, mentioned by Xenophon—an important battle, too—the slain amounted to eight;[78] [pg 202]and these battles were fought before the days when whole armies were composed of mercenaries, who spared one another, as Ordericus Vitalis says, “for the love of God, and out of good feeling for the fraternity of arms.” So, then, the loss of 192 Athenians, including some distinguished men, was rather a severe one. As to the loss of the Persians, I so totally disbelieve the Greek accounts of such things that it is better to pass it by in silence.

Perhaps most readers will be astonished to hear of the Athenian army as undisciplined, and of the science of war as undeveloped, in those times. Yet I firmly believe this was so. The accounts of battles by almost all the historians are so utterly vague, and so childishly conventional, that it is evident that these gentlemen were not only quite ignorant of the science of war, but could not easily find any one to explain it to them. We know that the Spartans—the most admired of all Greek warriors—were chiefly so admired because they devised the system of subordinating officers to one another within the same detachment, like our gradation from colonel to corporal. Orders were passed down from officer to officer, instead of being bawled out by a herald to a whole army. But this superiority of the Spartans, who were really disciplined, and went into battle [pg 203]coolly, like brave men, certainly did not extend to strategy, but was merely a question of better drill. As soon as any real strategist met them they were helpless. Thus Iphicrates, when he devised Wellington’s plan of meeting their attacking column in line, and using missiles, succeeded against them, even without firearms: thus Epaminondas, when he devised Napoleon’s plan of massing troops on a single point, while keeping his enemy’s line occupied, defeated them without any considerable struggle. As for that general’s great battle of Mantinea, the ancient Rossbach, which seems really to have been introduced by some complicated strategical movements, we owe our partial knowledge to the grudging aid of the soldier Xenophon. But both generals were in the distant future when the battle of Marathon was being fought.

Yet what signifies all this criticism? In spite of all skepticism, in spite of all contempt, the battle of Marathon, whether badly or well fought, and the troops at Marathon, whether well or ill trained, will ever be more famous than any other battle or army, however important or gigantic its dimensions. Even in this very war, the battles of Salamis and Platæa were vastly more important and more hotly contested. The losses were greater, the results were more enduring, yet thousands have heard of Marathon to whom the other names are unknown. So much for literary ability—so much for the power of talk[pg 204]ing well about one’s deeds. Marathon was fought by Athenians; the Athenians eclipsed the other Greeks as far as the other Greeks eclipsed the rest of the world, in literary power. This battle became the literary property of the city, hymned by poet, cited by orator, told by aged nurse, lisped by stammering infant; and so it has taken its position, above all criticism, as one of the great decisive battles which assured the liberty of the West against Oriental despotism.

The plain in the present day is quite bare of trees, and, as Colonel Leake observed, appears to have been so at the time of the battle, from the vague account of its evolutions. There was a little corn and a few other crops about the great tumulus; and along the seashore, whither we went to bathe, there was a large herd of cows and oxen—a sight not very usual in Greece. When we rushed into the shallow blue water, striving to reach swimming depth, we could not but think of the scene when Kynægirus and his companions rushed in armed to stop the embarkation of the Persians. On the shore, then teeming with ships of war, with transports, with fighting and flying men, there was now no sign of life, but ourselves in the water, and the lazy cattle and their silent herdsmen looking upon us in wonder; for, though very hot, it was only May, and the modern Greek never thinks it safe to bathe till at least the end of June—in this like his Italian [pg 205]neighbor. There was not a single ship or boat in the straits; there was no sign of life or of population on the coast of Eubœa. There was everywhere that solitude which so much struck Byron, as it strikes every traveller in Modern Greece. There was not even the child or beggar, with coins and pieces of pottery, who is so troublesome about Italian ruins, and who has even lately appeared at the Parthenon, the theatre at Argos, and a few other places in Greece. We asked the herdsman for remnants of arms or pieces of money: he had seen such things picked up, but knew nothing of their value. Lord Byron tells us he was offered the purchase of the whole plain (six miles by two) for about £900. It would have been a fine speculation for an antiquarian: but I am surprised, as he was, rather at the greatness than at the smallness of the price. The Greek Government might very well, even now, grant the fee-simple to any one who would pay the ordinary taxes on property, which are not, I was told, very heavy. But still the jealousy of the nation would not tolerate a foreign speculator.

I have already spoken ([p. 154]) of the position of the pass of Daphne, and how it leads the traveller over the ridge which separates the plain of the Kephissus from the Thriasian plain. I have also spoken at length of the country about the Kephissus, with its olive woods and its nightingales. When we [pg 206]go through the pass of Daphne—of its monastery I shall speak in another chapter—a perfectly new view opens before us. We see under us the Thriasian plain, well covered with ripening corn and other crops; we see at the far side of the crescent-shaped bay the remains of Eleusis. Behind it, and all round to the right up to where we stand, is an amphitheatre of hills—the spurs of Mount Parnes, which from Phyle reach due south down to where we stand, and due west to the inland of the Thriasian plain, till they meet and are confounded with the slopes of Cithæron, which extend for miles away behind Eleusis. On the sea-side, to our left, lies the island of Salamis, so near the coast that the sea seems a calm inland lake, lying tortuously between the hills.

Many points of Greek history become plain to us by this view. We see how true was the epithet “rocky Salamis,” for the island, though it looks very insignificant on our maps, contains lofty mountains, with very bare and rocky sides. The student of Greek geography in maps should note this feature. Thus, Ithaca on the map does not suggest the real Ithaca, which from most points looks like a high and steep mountain standing out of the sea. We begin also to see how Salamis was equally convenient (as the Irish say) to both Megara and Attica, if we consider that Eleusis was strictly a part of Attica. The harbor of the Peiræus, for example, would be [pg 207]quite useless if an enemy were watching it from Salamis. But we also come to see the sense of the old legend, that Eleusis had originally a separate king or government from that of Athens, and that the two cities once carried on war against each other. The towns are but a few miles apart; but their respective plains are so distinctly and completely separated by the pass of Daphne, that not one acre of the territory of Eleusis can be seen from Athens, nor of Athens from Eleusis. So also, lastly, we come to feel how natural is the remark of Thucydides, that the population of Athens, when the Lacedæmonians invaded Attica, and came no farther than the Thriasian plain, did not feel the terrors of a hostile invasion, as the enemy was not in sight; but when he crossed the pass, and began to ravage Acharnæ and the vale of Kephissus, then indeed, though Eleusis was just as near, and just as much their own, they felt the reality of the invasion, and were for the first time deeply dejected. This is a good example of that combined farness and nearness which is so characteristic about most neighboring cities in Greece.