Greek Lands and Letters

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY: THE WIDESPREAD LAND OF HELLAS

CHAPTER II PIRÆUS, THE HARBOUR TOWN

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

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

PIRÆUS

In this harbour meet the Orient and the Occident. One may see here craft of all kinds from all parts of the Mediterranean and from beyond the Straits; modern steamers, big and little; gunboats, native or foreign; sailing vessels from the Greek islands or Turkish possessions, laden with bright cargoes of yellow lemons and Cretan oranges, great grapes purple and white, or 33“tunnies steeped in brine”; here a steamer packed with pilgrims for a religious festival on Tenos; here, perhaps, another vessel crowded with American tourists to Jerusalem.

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

The terminus of the electric railroad from Athens to Piræus is in the northwest corner of the modern town between the lines now assumed for the “Themistocles Wall” and the “Wall of Conon,” dating, respectively, from the two most significant epochs in the history of Piræus. Although the tyrant Hippias had begun to fortify the Munychia hill in the sixth century B. C., his undertaking was interrupted, and it was left for Themistocles, in the early part of the fifth century, to begin, and finally to carry well on the way to completion, the transformation into a sea-fortress of this natural vantage-ground. Later, he was for removing Athens itself to Piræus. Failing in this, he shifted 34the habitat for the new fleet from the open roadstead of Phalerum, which was nearer Athens, to the land-locked harbours of Piræus. But the return of the Persians, ten years after Marathon, surprised the Athenians with their preparations incomplete, and Athens was transferred, not indeed to Piræus, but to the “wooden walls” of the triremes themselves.

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

35Some ten years later, the Long Walls were rebuilt and the restoration of the Piræus fortifications was taken in hand. Of the remains now visible, the major part belongs to this rebuilding at the beginning of the fourth century. A little less than a century had elapsed since Marathon, and we now find Athens allied with her old enemy, Persia, against another Greek state. Conon the Athenian, victorious over the Spartans in the naval battle of Cnidus, sent back Persian gold to fortify the Piræus anew, and the circuit wall, of which such extensive remains are extant, was called by his name.

On issuing from the electric railroad station, the visitor sees before him, a few yards distant, the Great Harbour’s smaller, inner fold, known in antiquity as “The Marsh” (Port d’Halæ) or, perhaps, as the “Blind” Harbour. This inner harbour, roughly a third of a mile by a sixth in size, now furnishes ample accommodation for smaller craft and a convenient landing-place, although in Conon’s day it was probably more of a marshy barrier than a navigable sheet of water. If the whole contour of the two harbours together suggested the designation of “Cantharus,” it may have been from either the meaning “Beetle,” or that of “Two-handled Cup.” Until recently, the name was identified with the southernmost portion only of the Great Harbour. The locus classicus is the “Peace” of Aristophanes. Dædalus and Icarus with their flying-machines had long since anticipated the modern aëroplane, and in this comedy Trygæus in search of Peace 36starts out to navigate Zeus’s ether on his “beetle.”“beetle.” Then, as now, a safe landing-place for the airship was a desideratum, and Trygæus states that he will have as a safe mooring “the Cantharus harbour in Piræus.”^[4]

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

If time and energy permit, it is well worth while, instead of crossing by boat to Akte, to return to the starting-point and to saunter along the whole margin of the Great Harbour. Particularly picturesque are the great sloops, laden with lemons and oranges, moored in behind the Karaiskakis square, which only the pedestrian would be likely to discover. As one lingers along the quays, however, modern warships and all the craft for commerce and travel will give place to the memories evoked from the greater past. This harbour 37of commerce will, in imagination, be once more crowded with triremes, brought around from the two war-harbours on the other side, to be inspected one after the other by the Council of the Five Hundred. As official inspectors of the triremes, when made ready to set out for conquest or defeat, this Council held its sittings on the Choma, probably a little promontory that juts southward from the Karaiskakis Place. One may recall, with the help of Thucydides, the setting out of the ill-starred Sicilian expedition. No such vast array had ever left the harbour for so distant and protracted a warfare. All the citizens of Athens as well as of Piræus are here to witness the departure of sons and friends. High hopes of imperial expansion feed the imagination of the multitude. Some rest their confidence on divine favour sure to accompany the pious, though reluctant, Nicias; others put faith in the warrior Lamachus; more in the brilliant Alcibiades, still idolized though accused of sharing in the mutilation of the Hermæ. The great fleet of swift triremes is ready, together with the transports for heavy-armed soldiers, equipments, and supplies. Now the men are all on board and a hush falls upon the throng at a sudden blast of the trumpet. The prayers, according to established ritual, are offered by the united squadron. At a concerted sign, the mixing-bowls are crowned throughout the whole host and the men and generals pour libations from gold and silver cups. The throngs upon the land, both citizens and foreign well-wishers, join in the service. The hymn of triumph 38sung, the libations poured, the ships weigh anchor and put to sea. But before the last trireme has passed through the moles, and while the ear still catches the notes of the flute and the voice of the Keleustæ, giving the time to the crews, a revulsion of grim presentiment overmasters many of the watchers on the shore. The expedition now no longer seems what they so lightly voted in the assembly. The ever-recurrent Greek feeling that “high things annoy the god” calls up the warning words of Æschylus, uttered a generation before, in the year of the unlucky Egyptian expedition sent out on a similar venture:—

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

The mysterious mutilation of the Hermæ is fresh in mind and the fear of angered gods reasserts its sway. But no presentiment of ill could anticipate the reality of the disaster in the harbour of Syracuse or the slow tortures of living death in its stone quarries. A chance for retaliation in kind was indeed to come. In a Piræus stone quarry Syracusan captives were in turn imprisoned a few years later, but they, more lucky than the 39Athenians, cut their way to freedom from their rock-bound prison.

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

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

Leaving now the Great Harbour and our meditations on the vicissitudes of history, we resume our inspection of the fan-shaped peninsula. Without a special permit 41the visitor is excluded from the western end and from the Royal Garden which encloses the most probable site of the Tomb of Themistocles, if indeed his bones were ever brought back from burial in exile. His official tomb was in Magnesia in Caria. A public interment in his native land could not be granted to one exiled as a traitor. Thucydides knows only of a secret burial of his bones in Attica. The remains of the monument in question stand on the point of Akte near the entrance to the outermost harbour. From this tomb the great admiral’s spirit could still watch over the Athenian sea-power. Skepticism about the site is forgotten when we read the fragment, meagre as it is, of the comic poet Plato:—

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

The public road leads over the shoulder of the hill and, in descending again to the coast, offers a beautiful view to the west and south over the Saronic Gulf. The driveway then runs along the water’s edge around the promontory, keeping close inside the ruined “Wall of Conon.” Although the remains of this encircling wall rise nowhere more than about eight feet above 42ground, and usually much less, yet the very continuity of the ruins is imposing. Practically in an unbroken line the solid masonry hems the irregular rim of the peninsula from the mouth of the Great Harbour to a point not far distant from the war-harbour of Zea on the opposite side and may be traced again intermittently around to the Bay of Phalerum. Solid tower buttresses are interposed at frequent intervals. On this southern shore of Akte, where the modern town does not intrude, the spectator is free to divide his attention between the beauty of the sea view and thoughts of the past.

The picturesque land-locked harbours of Zea and Munychia next claim our interest. The pear-shaped Zea basin, now known by the Turco-Greek name of Pashalimani, makes into the neck of the peninsula between the promontory hill of Akte and the Acropolis of Munychia. Behind it and close to it was erected in the fourth century the great Arsenal, and at various points beneath its transparent water may still be seen distinct remains of 38 of the ship-ways that ran down from the ancient ship-houses where the triremes were drawn up. Inscriptions tell us that there were originally 372 in all, of which 82 were in Munychia, 94 in the Great Harbour, and the remainder in Zea. No other relic of antiquity brings us into closer touch with the naval power of Athens and her empire on the Ægean. The covered sheds themselves can only be reconstructed in imagination. Some broken columns of the ship-houses and portions of the launching piers 43remain in situ. To accommodate the 196 triremes, 130-165 feet long, assigned to the Zea Harbour, some of the houses must have been constructed so as to dock the boats in at least two tiers. At Syracuse, the formidable Piræus of the west, remains of ship-sheds have been found, and at Carthage, the bitter foe of Syracuse, they remained for Appian to describe. Dry-docks may have existed near the harbour entrance. This narrow neck of the pear-shaped harbour was still further guarded at the inner opening by projecting moles, which here also are still extant. The entrance was actually closed, in case of need, by chains extended across at the surface of the water. Of the proud warships themselves, those chargers of the sea stabled in Zea, there remains one realistic reminder. Their timbers have long since rotted away, the gulfs have washed down all such small objects of durable material as bronze nails and clamps, but some heavy plates of Parian marble have been found in the harbour. These were set into the bows of the warships, and upon them were painted the vessel’s eyes that used to keep fierce outlook for the enemy or peer through the gloom of night and storm for the first sight of the shoreward lights of Piræus. Danaus at Argos, in the “Suppliants” of Æschylus, as he sees the approaching ship, exclaims:—

44On the marble plates actually recovered the iris is painted bright red or blue, and a vacant hole in the middle suggests the head of a burnished bronze nail that served at once as the pupil of the eye and to rivet on the plate. These eyes are common in representations of ancient vessels, and only in recent years are they disappearing from use among Sicilian and Italian boatmen.

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

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

The ruins of the “Wall of Conon” can still be traced for some distance to the east after leaving the harbour of Zea, and at the southeastern promontory the ruins 45of ancient fortifications are again to be seen. The harbour of Munychia (modern Phanari) is smaller than that of Zea. Its contour is so perfect an oval as to seem artificial. It had space to accommodate only eighty-two triremes in ship-houses, scanty remains of which are here visible under the water.

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

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

The focus of the inner city life was the splendid Agora laid out by the famous architect Hippodamus. Here ended the road from Athens. This square was probably west of Munychia north of the Zea harbour, 46perhaps about where the present Athena street intersects Munychia avenue. Near it were probably grouped various sanctuaries. Xenophon tells how in the civil war the patriotic party, “the men from Phyle,” unable to exclude “the City party” from the whole of Piræus, fell back on the Munychia hill, and the men from Athens blocked up the avenue that leads to the temple of Bendis and to the sanctuary of Munychian Artemis. By this Market-place, too, houses of rich residents were probably built.

The Piræus was essentially a democratic stronghold. It was the rendezvous for the patriotic anti-Spartan party; and Plato, with all his aristocratic leanings, chose to lay at Piræus the opening scene and setting for his greatest dialogue, the “Republic.” It was the fitting propylæa for his ideal city as well as for the real Athens. “I went down yesterday,” Socrates begins, “to Piræus with Glaucon, both to make a prayer to the goddess and to take a look at the festival to see how they would carry it off, inasmuch as they are now celebrating it for the first time.” The Thracian residents, it seems, had just introduced a celebration in honour of their goddess Bendis, and the natives had united with them. The whole port was en fête with processions conducted both by the hospitable native citizens and the Thracians themselves. In the evening there was to be a torch-race followed by an all-night festival. Socrates, who was on the point of returning to Athens after witnessing the daylight processions, was easily persuaded 47by Polemarchus to stay over for the torch-race, dining first at the house of his father, the rich and hospitable old metic, Cephalus. At the house Socrates finds another son, Lysias, who was soon to become famous as an orator. For the Thirty were to plunder the property bequeathed by Cephalus to his sons, all the ready money, the shield factory, and the slaves; were to put summarily to death young Polemarchus; and were to force Lysias, reduced to sudden poverty, to betake himself to speech-writing for a living. His crowning effort was an arraignment of his brother’s murderers. Most skilful of narrators, he tells of the fate of Polemarchus; how his house was plundered; how his wife was robbed of the very ear-rings from her ears; and how after his execution, notwithstanding the just title of the family to large holdings of real estate, he was buried from a hired shed, one friend providing a robe, another a pillow, for the corpse. He tells, too, of his own arrest at his home by the emissaries of the Thirty: how he bargained for his life with a sum of ready money; how one of his captors followed him into the inner room, looked over his shoulder into the money-chest, and took not only the price agreed upon but all the contents of the strong box; how he was taken to another house of a Piræus acquaintance; and how, while his captors were keeping guard at the peristyle door in front, he had escaped by a back door to the house of a friend, the shipmaster, with the appropriate name of Archenaus. So, while his less fortunate brother, 48Polemarchus, is led off to Athens, thrown into prison, and “bidden by the Thirty their usual bidding—to drink hemlock,” Lysias, by the aid of his nautical friend, is embarked for Megara under cover of night. We should like to have fuller details of that escape of the young Lysias, yesterday a wealthy manufacturer, to-day a plundered fugitive but destined to become one of the greatest of the “ten” orators and a master architect of Attic style. Perhaps a small boat put off from some lonely spot on Akte, perhaps from the Great Harbour itself, shooting through the moles in the darkness and, wind and weather permitting, kept to starboard of the Psyttaleia reef, passed up through the strait of Salamis, on through the beautiful Bay of Eleusis, and landed the fugitive at Megara.

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

The introduction of a foreign divinity like Bendis of the Thracians was not unusual. The celebration, described at the opening of the Republic, was at least no more exotic than a St. Patrick’s day in America. Foreigners and natives united in it as they did in the celebration of the Mother of the Gods. The customs inspection of foreign deities was lenient. The Greeks 49were free traders both in art and religion, though the finished product imported was likely enough to be used as new material. Into the smelting furnace of the classic period was cast the old, the new, the foreign, and the domestic, to reappear in fairer form, stamped with the Hellenic hall-mark. Among the various imported deities, Cybele is well vouched for at Piræus where a number of marble votive shrines of the Great Mother have been found. One of these archaic Cybele reliefs, brought from Piræus to the National Museum in Athens, shows the goddess with her lion in her lap, her cymbals in her hand. The “new theology,” fostered by Euripides and domiciled in daily life by the “New Comedy,” could treat these cymbals as typical of “a creed out-worn.” One of Menander’s characters exclaims:—

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

Remains of the old gateway in the northern circuitwall, 50just where the north Long Wall joined on, are still extant. Within a century, the traces of the Long Walls themselves have been disappearing. Enough is left, however, to mark their course at various points, and the remains are particularly plain of the “South” Long Wall, where it nears the Munychia acropolis. Ascending Munychia, we may imagine the Long Walls still reaching up to Athens. We may picture them either in time of war, with defenders within and foes without, or in time of peace, with the stream of pedestrians bent upon pleasure or business. Outside the North Wall was one of the places of execution. Plato illustrates the contest between the brute in man and his higher reason by the story of a certain Leontius who one day was walking up from Piræus and saw some dead bodies fallen prostrate by the side of the executioner. He loathes the sight but is fain to look. Vulgar curiosity gains the mastery; he runs up to the dead bodies and, holding his eyelids wide open, exclaims: “There wretches! Take your fill of the fine spectacle!”

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

51Somewhere close by the north side of Zea was the famous arsenal which, though not built till near the end of the fourth century, has entirely disappeared. Luckily, however, in 1882 there was discovered near the Zea harbour a slab of Hymettus marble containing the directions given to the contractors for its construction. It was built to contain the rigging, tackle, sails, cables for undergirding the ships, etc., while the masts, spars, oars, rudders, and other wooden gear seem to have been kept in the ship-sheds themselves alongside of the ships. This arsenal of Philo replaced an older and less elaborate one. It was a large building, four hundred by five hundred feet within, and provided for a roomy arcade where the populace, screened from the burning heat without, could promenade and gaze at the suggestive evidences of their sea power.

Of the many private and public buildings, temples and colonnades mentioned by classic authors, but few can be positively located. In the Colonnade of the Exchange—the Deigma—Theophrastus, Menander’s friend and the successor of Aristotle, represents his “Boastful Man,” a shipping-merchant, as bragging about his great ventures and cargoes at sea. Meanwhile his balance at the banker’s actually amounts to about twenty cents. That this Deigma, where gossip was coined and bargains struck around the money-changers’ tables, must have been close to the edge of the Great Harbour is evident from Xenophon, who says that one day twelve Lacedæmonian ships 52swept into the harbour suddenly, landed a party and carried off from the Exchange a group of sea-captains and merchants.

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

Lastly, there was the famous Hieron or Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena. Even its site cannot now be identified, but it must have been one of the most frequented centres of Piræus life in the fifth century. An inscription records that into the treasury of this sanctuary went the tax of a drachma on every vessel that put into the port. Incidentally many a further contribution was levied on the newly landed sailor, who was as much a fish out of water among the land-sharks as is the modern Jack Tar on ship’s leave. The comic poet Diphilus tells how one of these harbour caterers used to select his victims: “For example there’s the skipper who grudgingly pays off a vow made under stress of weather when the mast went by the board or when he had snapped the rudder-sweeps of the ship or else was forced by water rising in the hold to hurl his cargo overboard. A wide berth I give to a fellow like him. Such a man will not be free-handed; my best chance is with the captain who has made a quick, safe voyage from Byzantium, who, all excitement over his gain of ten or twelve per cent for three days’ risk, is loud in 53his chatter about freights and usuries.” He’s the man for the purposes of this shark, and no sooner is he landed than our keeper of the Sailors’ Snug Retreat goes up to him, takes his hand, and reminds him that a sacrifice at the temple of Zeus Preserver would be in order. He thoughtfully relieves the skipper of any care, making the purchases, superintending the offering, and sharing the commission with the priests of the Hieron. And human nature was much the same five hundred years later, when we again meet a skipper whose performance, once he is safe at Piræus, falls far short of the vows made in storm and peril. Lucian, in his “Zeus the Tragedian,” gives details. The Olympian Father, alarmed at the signs of increasing irreligiousness and the consequent stringency in the sacrificial market, calls an assembly of the gods. After some difficult points of precedence as to order of seating have been temporarily waived and half-naturalized divinities like Mithras and our Thracian Bendis have been admitted, Zeus makes a speech. He begins fluently enough with a mosaic of oratorical phrases which he has memorized from Demosthenes. Presently, however, he exclaims: “But my Demosthenes is giving out. I must tell you in plain Greek what has troubled me.” He reminds them of the dinner in which some of them—“as many as had been invited”—had participated the day before, when “Mnesitheus, the ship-owner, had given them a Thanksgiving banquet at Piræus on account of the preservation of 54his vessel that had come within an ace of being wrecked off Eubœa.” “That evening,” he continues, “while taking a constitutional, I kept thinking over the stinginess of Mnesitheus who undertook to entertain sixteen gods by sacrificing a single cock—and that, too, a wheezy old rooster!—with four little lumps of frankincense so mouldy that they went out forthwith on the coals, without giving even the tip of my nose a whiff of the smoke. That’s what he did, though he was for promising whole hecatombs when his boat was driving on the cliff and was already encircled by reefs.”

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

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

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

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

And the Athenian of the third century, returning as we do now, from a visit to Piræus, would see these tombs as he left the harbour walls and perhaps find 56compensation for the loss of external liberty in realizing that the great sea-fortress and the maritime empire of Themistocles, of Pericles, and of Conon had buttressed well a Greater Athens; that neither Spartan jealousy and civil discord, nor even the foreign rule of Macedon itself could destroy the real power of this Mother city and obliterate her sway over the human mind. But it required the perspective of longer time and the idealism of a Shelley boldly to interpret disaster in terms of victory and to proclaim Athens as mistress of a sea wider than the Ægean:—

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

CHAPTER III ATHENS: FROM SOLON TO THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS

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

Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian columns of the Olympieum to obtain a satisfying view of the Acropolis, embedded like a crystal in its proper matrix of encompassing air and plain and sea and mountains. Future journeys in Greece will but reënforce the conviction of the noble loveliness of the Attic plain. The atmosphere is singularly clear and vibrant, and within it colour and form are sharply defined. The Ægean at its shores adds movement and space. And here more than anywhere else Sir Richard Jebb’s description of the Greek hills seems inevitable. Their forms “are at once so bold and so chastened, the onward sweep of their ranges is at once so elastic and so calm, each 58member of every group is at once so individual and so finely helpful to the ethereal expressiveness of the rest, that the harmony of their undulations and the cadences in which they fall combine the charm of sculpture with the life and variety of a sunlit sea.”

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

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

In this earlier colonization Athens participated only vicariously, but it was into this larger Hellas that Solon the lawgiver and poet was born. Fire, brought from the mother cities, was blazing on the hearths of Greek colonies from the Crimea to Sicily. The Ionians of Asia 59Minor had long since joined in the movement of expansion; they were presently to colonize the site of modern Marseilles; they were already converting to their own use the distant outposts of the “Tyrian trader.” Athens meanwhile was slowly developing. Later she would herself be mistress of the sea.

The Athenians, more than most Greeks, could boast that they were autochthonous, earth-born children of their own soil. Isocrates in his “Panegyricus” makes proudly the claim: “We dwell in the land not after expelling others, nor even finding it a desert, nor even coming as a mixed breed collected from many nations, but ... sprung from the soil and able to address our city by the same names as we give to the closest relations.” The prehistoric Greek invaders of Attica had fused with rather than driven out the former occupants, the Pelasgians or whoever they may have been. Erichthonius, Erechtheus, or Poseidon, “one form for many names,” was born of Earth but mothered on Athena, and it would have been as futile as it was impious to challenge the pedigree of the Erechtheidæ. Erechtheus-Poseidon might coil forever undisturbed beneath the sheltering shield of the Virgin-goddess. Cecrops, too, the mythical king and Attic hero, owned a perpetual ground-rent on the Acropolis and the Athenians were Cecropidæ. They were also the “Sons of Hephæstus,” who was often associated with Athena, a partnership of the heavenly wisdom with the arts and crafts. An ancient festival of the whole city, held 60in honour of Athena, became afterwards specialized among the artisans, under the name of Chalkeia, in honour of Hephæstus; and the god may yet win back as his own “Hephæsteum” the so-called “Theseum” on the hill above the classic market-place.

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

To understand the literature of the sixth century, we must remember that the ancient citadel town of the prehistoric kings had long since overflowed into the district at its immediate base, absorbing, as time went on, various original townships adjacent to the Acropolis. Although the name of king and some relics of royal authority survived in the person of the King Archon, yet, unlike the relation of Sparta to Laconia or Thebes to Bœotia, Athens was not a mere royal centre for the Attic demesmen. All Attica was Athens. 61All its free inhabitants, class by class, became included in the citizenship, albeit the republic was an aristocracy, first of birth, then of wealth. Solon’s readjustment of the laws for rich and poor determined the trend towards government by the people, and even the inevitable tyranny, postponed by Solon, only served, when it came, to retard the current and to dam up a reservoir of irresistible democratic consciousness which was to sweep away the tyrants and to render the Attica of Marathon inaccessible to the returning despot.

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

Yet Solon calls Athens a great city, and he was to make it still greater. Into that early Market-place he came and, if we accept the picturesque details handed down by tradition, feigning madness in order to violate 62with impunity the law forbidding citizens to re-open the question of conquering Salamis, he cried:—

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

Again, even more proudly, he says:—

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

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

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

Like many of his countrymen subsequently, he combined active participation in public affairs with the character of poet and writer. In literature, as in political life, he had his preferences. Perhaps nothing more distinctly places him in the old Athens than his disapprobation of the Tragedy that was born in his later years. He is said to have taken Thespis to task for the falsehood of the drama. On the other hand the direct sincerity of lyric poetry accorded with his manner of thought. From Ælian’s variegated patch-work the story drifts down to us that to Solon, seated one day 64over his wine, his nephew sang one of Sappho’s songs. Solon at once commanded the boy to teach him the song, and when a bystander asked why he was so eager, he replied: “When I have learned it, then that I may die!”

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

After years of varying fortune Pisistratus finally (540 or 539 B. C.) established himself as Tyrant of Athens. But tyranny at Athens was never more than an episode. The inbred spirit of freedom must be reckoned with. Pisistratus respected popular rights, and after the accession of his sons the suspicion of a tendency to introduce such measures as were acquiesced in, for example, at Corinth, brought death to 65the one and subsequent banishment to the other. But the result of the tyranny of Pisistratus was beneficent. Under him and his sons the city began to take on both externally and intellectually more of the characteristics which are in mind when we think of Athens. Architect, sculptor, and painter began to contribute enriching details to the Acropolis, including the first Propylæa. Engineers skilfully brought water from near and far into the old Market-place, and in front of the town spring of Callirrhoë Pisistratus built the spacious “Nine Spouts”—the Enneakrounos—where women filled their water-jars and stayed to gossip. The newer market-place, to the north of the Areopagus, was developed. A great Olympieum was begun on the site of the present columns, which date from Hadrian’s time. Gymnasium life became important and the Academy was made ready as if in anticipation of its great future. Doubtless within this lovely grove many a youth of the period might have served as a model for Aristophanes’s fifth-century picture of palæstra life in the good old times:—

66A distinctive part of Pisistratus’s policy was the encouragement of country life and of agriculture. All over the Attic plain the olive orchards were cultivated, to become an important source of revenue to the Athenian state and immeasurably to enhance the charm of its environment. Herodotus recounts that a tall, handsome woman named Phye, from the hill country, had impersonated Athena come down in mortal guise and, riding in a chariot with Pisistratus, had lent divine sanction to his original coup d’état. The Attic demesmen might still more easily accept this new measure as a command transmitted from Athena who had herself first created the olive tree and taught its culture on the Acropolis:—

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

67Pisistratus did much toward securing for Athens the intellectual hegemony of Greece. Whatever the Panathenæa, inherited from Theseus (or even from Erichthonius), may have been previously, the Greater Panathenaic festival was now solemnized every four years with more magnificence and became at Athens the necessary and dignified offset to the quadrennial games at Olympia and Delphi. Games, sacrifices, and amusements of varied character were added from time to time. Horse, chariot, torch, and foot races were included. Visitors came from abroad. But neither local nor intercantonal athletics gave the keynote. Rhapsodists recited Homer, and flute, cithara, and song were heard. Everything tended to focus itself upon the worship of Athena, who was the Athenian consciousness glorified and made objective.

Under Pisistratus or his sons (or, less probably, under Solon) Homer was recalled from Ionia and domiciled on the mainland. Whatever may be the details about a formal recension and publication at this time, recitations from Homer were made an integral part of the public festivals, and Athens became the clearing-house for an intellectual currency good throughout all Hellas. The name “Pan-Athenian,” passing even beyond Pan-Ionian, was to be equated with a culture that was Pan-Hellenic. This befitted the epic breadth transcending mere local traditions. “The Iliad was not composed for any king or tyrant. If it is aristocratic, its appeal is not to any given set of noble families, but 68to all brave men of Greek legend.” And the spirit in which this epic trust was administered tallies well with the restraint of Pisistratus in respecting, as far as possible, the laws of Solon. If there were Attic interpolations in the poems, they do not glorify his house. In the “Catalogue of the Ships” the Athenians received honourable but not excessive mention. The brief reference to the ships from Salamis, as ranged under the command of the Athenians, would seem to suggest the recent conquest of the island under Solon or even the suspicion that Solon had himself interpolated it beforehand as proof of the ancient suzerainty of Athens:—

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

The greatest and most characteristically Attic contribution of the sixth century was the fostering of the drama, in connection with the worship of Dionysus. This Thracian divinity, on his journey southwards, 69had been welcomed in the villages of Attica, where vineyard and winepress awaited his blessing. The Pisistratidæ, who have been called “the providential defenders of the faith of Dionysus” against the aristocratic disdain felt for a peasant’s god, invited him to a new temple in the Lenæa—the Marshes—below the Acropolis, where, at the time of the winter solstice, the Feast of the Winepress once more identified the capital with the country it had outgrown. But Pisistratus went further in establishing the City Dionysia, a spring festival destined to a long life and splendid renown. Instead of private performances at rural feasts, the drama now became part of the official administration of the city. The first dated performance of a play by Thespis was in 534 B. C. This may have been on the occasion of the opening of the “orchestra,” north of the Areopagus, near the new Market-place, where the spectators henceforth found seats on wooden scaffolding until the more permanent theatre was erected south of the Acropolis. Athens was now ready for the great dramatists. The wine-god looms up as a rival to Athena, as may be seen by his ubiquity on the vase paintings and his dominant presence in the Attic calendar. “In the actual religious ritual Dionysus became of more importance at Athens than Zeus, Apollo, or even Athena.”

Thus in diverse ways does Pisistratus present a fair claim for having made Athens greater, in steady progression from the wise policies of Solon. Solon himself 70must often have feared an excess of luxury and splendour. No one of his generation could have dreamed of a regretful modern desire to have seen, because of its charming simplicity, “the little earlier Athens of Pisistratus.” But many a Periclean Greek may have forestalled it. Aristophanes was forever seeking for a revival of—

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

Æschylus was fifteen when Hippias was expelled. Hipparchus had been assassinated earlier, at one of 71the celebrations of the Panathenæa, by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, but their failure to dispose of both tyrants at one blow had caused them to be ignominiously put to death and their memory ignored. Now, in the new enthusiasm for freedom, they were hailed as liberators of their city. Their memory became a cult. Their statues were set up by the Agora, and the boy Æschylus, as each anniversary of their deed came around and the Panathenaic procession wound up to the Acropolis, must have been fired by the thought of them. At twenty-five he may have lustily joined in the new drinking song which, commemorating their deed, took the town by storm. It continued to be sung for centuries. To Aristophanes it was a hackneyed classic and part of his comic stock in trade.

With the victory at Marathon Athens came of age. The struggle between Orientalism and Hellenism was just begun. Salamis and Platæa and Eurymedon were yet to be. But the Greeks with a divine improvidence discounted their ultimate success. Their twenty years 72of democratic education made impossible any compromise with despotism. Whatever necessary vagueness may still have existed at Athens in the attempted fusion of polytheistic tradition with the awakening conception of monotheism, there now stands forth in a law-abiding conscience the barrier of Law, clear and bold as the outline of Pentelicus above Marathon. The contemporary Athenian feeling is reflected by Æschylus in the answer of the old Persian men to Darius’s widowed queen, who has asked about the Greeks:—

At this time another country god was naturalized at Athens, a friend and comrade of Dionysus in secret mountain places, but not intruding upon him in the formalities of city worship. Pan had helped the Athenians at Marathon and had stopped the swift courier Pheidippides, sent to hurry reënforcements from Sparta, and bidden him ask his people “why they made no account of him, although he had been useful to them many times already and would be again.” The Athenians at once “dedicated a sanctuary to Pan under the brow of the Acropolis and in consequence of this message they propitiated him by yearly sacrifices and a torch race.” His cave at the northwest end of the Acropolis still exists to convince the sceptic. He lived on here, overlooking the Areopagus and Agora, to 73come forth, “horned, panpipe in hand, with his shaggy legs,” and greet the lady Justice sent by Zeus to investigate the charlatan philosophers of Athens in Lucian’s day. Pan gives Justice a fluent account of their frailties and is about to add certain details, when her sense of propriety cuts him short. “If I must,” says he, “tell the truth in full, without holding anything back—for I live, as you see, where I can take a bird’s-eye view—many’s the time I’ve seen scores of them, well along towards evening—” (Justice) “Stop there, Pan!”

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

CHAPTER IV THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS

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

To speak of the Acropolis of Athens with due Hellenic restraint is difficult for any one who has lived long under its habitual sway. At the first visit three sets of impressions break down the most obdurate impassiveness. The associations acquired by a study of history engender a vicarious but active sympathy with the Greeks themselves. There is an immediate impact of beauty from marble gateway and temples and sculpture which the procession of years has only incorporated more intimately with the beauty of sea and land and circumambient air. And, finally, there is the involuntary sense of coming back to one’s own—to an intellectual birthright. Even the Turkish conquerors did not fail to recognize that all western civilizations consider the Acropolis an integral part of their joint heritage. Dr. Howe quotes from an intercepted letter of Kiutahi Pashaw, the opponent of the Greek patriot, Karaiskakis, in 1826: “The citadel of Athens, as is known to you, was built of old on a high and inaccessible rock; not to be injured 75by a mine nor accessible to assault.... From it went out of yore many famous philosophers; it has many works of art very old, which make the learned men of Europe wonder; and for this reason all the Europeans and the other nations of unbelievers regard the citadel as their own house.”

RENAN ON THE ACROPOLIS
From a French painting

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

When we think of the citadel in the age of Pisistratus and the time previous to the Persian Wars we are fairly sure of the main characteristics. We can picture the old Athena temple, simple yet dignified, in the middle of the plateau, adorned with coloured sculptures (some of which may be seen in the Museum to-day), sacred 76shrines, precincts and altars with a wealth of dedicatory offerings, and also the older Propylæa let in between the massive “Pelasgic” walls and approached by a way that wound down through a complex of outworks to meet the old Agora.

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

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

When Socrates, too robust at seventy to know the fatigue of the ascent, climbed the approach to the hill he must often have been inspired by the beauty of art, as he had been by the beauty of nature on the banks of the Ilissus, to renew the prayer: “Dear Pan, and ye other gods, make me beautiful in the inward man.” Born into a generation and among a people where external and physical beauty was assumed as corollary 77to the beauty of the ideal, there escapes him, thus incidentally, the echo of his self-conquest over his own Silenus-like exterior, so out of keeping with the charm of his environment. Perhaps he went up the hill the evening before his trial to take a last look at what he had loved long and well. He knew in advance that his “apology” to the court was to be a reassertion of individual liberty of conscience that would most probably result for him in the hemlock draught. The majestic columns of the great gateways rose before him on either side, the wings extended like welcoming arms. He would turn to the left and stand in the picture gallery. Perhaps he would pause longest before Alcibiades, his pernicious disciple, pictured in arrogant beauty as victor at the Nemean games. Turning to the other side of the gateway, he would stand on the bastion before the Nike temple and would look out over the familiar city, the Attic plain and harbour-town. As he passed on now to enter the gateway, and his eye fell upon the sculptured Hermes and the Graces, little would he dream of the perplexed debate of modern critics as to a possible connection of this group with the handiwork of a young sculptor or stone-cutter, “Socrates the son of Sophroniscus.”

Under or just within the Propylæa he would note various familiar objects, and when he had passed through he would see before him to the right and left the Parthenon and the Erechtheum. The intervening space would not be as it is now a floe of marble blocks. 78Two orderly avenues of votive offerings traversed the plateau before him. Against a column of the Propylæa still stands an inscribed basis of a statue dedicated to Athena, the Giver of Health, set up by Pericles in gratitude for the recovery of one of his injured workmen, one perhaps whose skill he could ill spare in the completion of his large designs. Close by, a marble boy, made by a son or disciple of the great Myron, held out a bowl of holy water as at the entrance of a cathedral. Socrates, whose reverence exceeded that of all his accusers, would not scorn this symbol of purification, least of all when about to journey away, as he expressed it, from Athens to another life. Before him towered up the bronze Athena, the warrior goddess, whose gleaming helmet could be seen by homeward voyagers as soon as they had passed the intercepting shoulder and foot-hills of Hymettus. Near by was the Lemnian Athena, goddess of the arts of peace, held by the Greeks themselves as more beautiful even than the great gold-ivory statue within the Parthenon. The three embodied the conceptions of Phidias, as in a trilogy. Near by was a portrait-herm of Pericles himself. There, too, was the “wooden horse,” a colossal bronze, with the Greeks (not forgetting the sons of Theseus) peeping out from its side. And when, passing along this Panathenaic road, lined with statues and votive offerings, he had threaded his way around to the east front of the Parthenon, he would enter between the columns, and in the cool twilight, lit by the gleam of gold and 79ivory, he would look up to the Victory on the extended hand of Athena. Perhaps for a moment the goddess may have lifted the veil of the future to reveal that the defeat of the morrow would be a victory of far greater import than even that of Marathon or Salamis.

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

If any work of man’s hands can purge the mind of the commonplace, it is the Propylæa, imposing in its grand proportions, yet enticing by its beauty. Through this the pilgrim now passes and is alone with Greek life. Although the plateau is deserted, the temple in ruins, there is no sense of death. There is rather a sudden sense of Beauty set free from the trammels of daily life. The fortunate isolation of the hilltop contributes to this effect. Byzantine makeshifts, Turkish hovels and minarets, have all been swept away—even the intruding Roman is left outside with the disfiguring pedestal of Agrippa’s statue. The foreground of the 80modern city is sunk out of sight behind the rim of the plateau. There is to be seen on all sides only the same Attic plain, the same Ægean sea, and the same horizon of mountains, which the eyes of kings and democrats, artists, orators and philosophers have looked upon in days gone by.

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

But since Morosini’s sacrilegious bomb did its work the generations have refused to accept as the ultimate 81fact the shipwreck of this temple in which culminated the plastic arts of ancient Greece and in which were typified her loftiest ideas. Poet and philosopher have sat before it in fruitful meditation, and commoners have paced its great colonnades, unregardful of the ways and marts of men amid the austere majesty and royal repose of the Doric pillars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

83The old Erechtheus worship, the snake, the ancient image of Athena, and the allied precincts, lost none of their sanctity as time went on. From Herodotus we learn that Themistocles was materially aided before Salamis, in persuading the Athenians to abandon the city, by the sudden disappearance of the sacred snake. “The Athenians,” he gravely reports, “say that a large snake dwells in the sacred precinct as guardian of the Acropolis. And they not only say this but they make offerings to him month by month, setting them out for him as actually there. These consist of a honey-cake. Now this honey-cake, although heretofore it had always been consumed, remained at this time untasted, so the Athenians, when the priestess reported the fact, made the more eager haste to leave the city, on the ground that the goddess had abandoned her citadel.” The sacred olive tree, however, which Xerxes had burned with the rest of the precinct, put forth the very next day a new shoot one cubit long. By the time of Pausanias the guide said “two” cubits. But the essential point is the continued care of the goddess, and as for the snake, he soon resumed his dwelling on the Acropolis. In the “Lysistrata” of Aristophanes, the women who have seized and barricaded the Acropolis make excuses for leaving, complaining that they cannot sleep, one on account of the hooting of Athena’s owls, another by reason of her terror:—

When in the “Eumenides” of Æschylus the scene 84shifts from Delphi to the Acropolis, we find Orestes seated as suppliant before Athena’s most ancient image. This we may think of, in default of any other temple then existing, as placed in the old Hecatompedon, whose foundations are seen adjoining the Erechtheum on the south. This temple, burned by the Persians, but partially restored, may have been in use even after the Parthenon was dedicated in 438 B. C., twenty years after this play was brought out, and perhaps until the completion many years later of the Athena Polias chamber in the Erechtheum. An Athenian could not well conceive of his city as safe without this ancient statue; even the birds in their new Cloud-cuckoo-town must needs debate whether they shall not keep Athena Polias as their protector.

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

In one of the anonymous fragments, those riderless Pegasi of Greek literature, another comic poet combines 85the Piræus and the Parthenon in an outburst of civic pride. Nor does he forget the olive groves and radiant air:—

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

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

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

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

87If it could be granted us to have restored one portion of the Parthenon or its appurtenances, our choice would probably fall, not upon the famous gold-ivory statue of Athena, but first upon the pediment sculptures; next, it may be, upon the great continuous frieze. If its shattered fragments could be restored, and the slabs now in Paris and London could be recalled from exile and united to those still in place, it would be an easier task for the imagination to reconstruct from these than from the piecemeal references in the literature an abridged idealization of the glory of the actual Panathenaic procession. As it is, from what is left still in place there emerges something far more significant than the details of any cult or festival. The dismounted youth adjusting his sandal; the horse with leisurely nose bent to his fore-leg; the mounted horsemen; the rams and oxen led to the sacrifice, remain, like Keats’s “heifer lowing at the skies,” to tell the hurrying generations that once, at least, there has existed, and may exist again, wherever men are strong to feel and know, the harmony between the temporal and the eternal.

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

88Plutarch, a Greek gentleman of the first Christian century, speaks with enthusiasm of the creations of Pericles. “There blooms upon them a certain freshness untouched by time, as if there dwelt within them an ever-animating spirit, a life that never grows old.” In the next century, under the successors of Hadrian, who had inaugurated a new era for Athens, Pausanias, a foreigner, came and saw and was conquered by the wealth of detail on the Acropolis. At the same time, that generous citizen from Marathon, Herodes Atticus, was building against the side of the Acropolis his gorgeous Italian opera-house, while Lucian, the Syrian Atticist, with a higher, if impossible, ideal, was striving to revive the old Platonic grace by quarrying from the Pentelicus of classic literature. When, in the rôle of a “Truthful James,” he is acquitted of blasphemy against true philosophy, he enters the east door of the Parthenon to make thanksgiving to the goddess, or, more specifically, to the winged Victory, six feet high, upon her hand. His devotion takes the form of the prayer appended to three of Euripides’s dramas:—

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

S. COLONNADE OF THE PARTHENON

The charm of the Acropolis changes with the changing light. See it, if you will, at dawn from the opposite 89hillside, near the “Prison of Socrates,” as the sun rises over Hymettus and the Pentelic columns of the Parthenon change from the gray of unsympathetic silhouettes to the luminous chromes of the irradiated marbles. See it at a later hour and wonder that it does not fade into the light of common day. Or visit it when the sunset light turns to burnished copper the unadorned hills in the west, beyond Salamis, and on the choir of the encircling mountains the supramundane charm of the violet atmosphere falls like a robe with empurpling shadows in its folds. Go when the night has fallen, and sit in the mysterious darkness, lit only by the marble columns white against the dark outlines of Hymettus, until the full moon looks over the mountain’s rim, tipping architrave and capital with silver, and then, as it swings free from Hymettus, merging the wreck of the Parthenon in the beauty of the landscape to which the scarred and yawning sides of the temple seem to open with intent. Presently the whole hill-top with its moraine of prostrate columns and marble fragments is lit up and the pillars of the Propylæa flower into whiteness. Or finally, bizarre as it may sound, see it when—artificially illuminated after the Olympic Games—the ruined temple and the serrated contour of the plateau are etched in mid-air by the white light against a gulf of darkness, a veritable city of the skies.

The Acropolis, crowned with perfect art, crowded with the loftier phantoms of our elder kin, is a light-house 90for all time. Liberty and Law are its keepers. “Knowledge comes but Wisdom lingers,” and this citadel is to every thoughtful man in some sense a symbol of his goal. Its stately Propylæa welcomes all. No sincere pilgrim of Truth is an alien in the long Pancosmic procession of statesman and scientist, inventor and poet, artisan and artist that winds up the steep ascent to lay an ever freshly woven peplus at the feet of Wisdom.

CHAPTER V ATHENS: FROM THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS TO MENANDER

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

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

Euripides, also, reëchoes this word of Æschylus and denies the sack of Athens. As a matter of fact little 92remained save a few houses used as Persian headquarters. But the blackened walls of the old temple on the Acropolis still stood in grim protest against the violation of the Virgin’s home and as an appeal to the citizens to provide her with a fairer abode. The appeal was not disregarded. In the fifth century the city was extended and the Acropolis was adorned with monuments of sculpture and architecture. The gods and the public needs came first. Private dwellings in the fifth century were not imposing. The old Marathon fighters and their immediate descendants were content with private simplicity. In the fourth century, however, private luxury came uppermost. Demosthenes contrasts the unequalled splendour of the temples, statues and public buildings of the old time with the moderation in private life, which, he says, was so marked “that if any of you perchance knows what sort of a house was the dwelling of Aristides or Miltiades or any of those then eminent, he sees that it was no whit more stately than those next door—while to-day upstarts have built themselves private houses more stately than the public buildings.”

Systematically to discuss the fifth and fourth century references to specific sites—buildings public and private, stoas, temples, theatres, gymnasia, music-halls, courtrooms, sanctuaries and statues, walls and gates, the place of the Assembly, the market-place and the markets, fountains, streets, and wards, would require several volumes. And although it is possible to present 93by inference a reasonably clear picture of the environment and daily life of the citizens, yet the exact identification of the majority of the sites in the remains existing to-day is either impossible or a matter of conjecture. Apart from the Acropolis buildings but few conspicuous ruins or memorials of these two great centuries are left for actual inspection. The continuous occupation of Athens by successive generations of changing masters has obliterated or buried (perhaps for future identification) the greater part of the city that lay around the base of the Acropolis. It is only surprising that so much remains. It is not meagre except in comparison with what has disappeared.

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

In this chapter, however, we have to do directly only with the Athens of the fifth or fourth centuries. If the physical remains from this period are fragmentary, the literature, although itself but fragments of the whole, is the great bulk of existing classic Greek literature outside of the epic, the earlier philosophers, and the lyric. And this corpus of literature was in large part native Attic. At the same time the talent from without gravitated also to Athens. Herodotus from the Dorian Halicarnassus not only wrote in Ionic, but adopted the Athenian attitude so largely as to vitiate in part his value as an independent historian. Hippocrates, 94the great Ionian physician, visited Athens. The Sophists, though coming from the North, the West, or the islands, found in Athens the appropriate environment for a “circuit” faculty of an unarticulated federal university. Prose, seasoned and adorned, became henceforth an asset of the Athenian intellect and was made ready for the use of historian, orator, and philosopher. Athens, mistress of the seas, and herself producer of art and literature, needed no protective tariff against intellectual imports.

This very wealth of fifth and fourth century literature imposes limitations, more rigid than our uncertainty about this, that, or the other site, upon the effort to interpret the external Athens from the more enduring monuments of her thinkers. Nor is it true that the nexus between Athens and her literature may be made clear only by definite localization. We do not wish the conditions reversed. Although, for example, the courtrooms and the Lyceum have disappeared, we may, as we wander about Athens to-day, come much nearer the Greeks of the classic age than if, while the buildings had remained intact, the words of the orators and of the great Peripatetic could no longer reach our ears. The so-called “Theseum,” largely perfect as it is and invaluable for architectural and artistic suggestion, leaves us cold in the lack of literary association as compared with the Propylæa where many an old-time Athenian rubs elbows with us as we pass in and out between its stately columns. But in a wider sense we 95may “localize,” here on this Attic plain around the Acropolis and here under this Attic sky, the poetry and prose of the fifth and fourth centuries.

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

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

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

Comedy likewise culminated with Aristophanes in the fifth century. More flexible than tragedy, however, it could humour successfully the changing moods of 96the body politic and retain its vigour through the whole of the fourth century. Even under Macedon, Menander in the New Comedy could recast much that Euripides had tried, with varying success, to embody within the canonized limits of orthodox tragedy.

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

Oratory, an inalienable inheritance of the Hellene even before Athena coached the crafty Odysseus, received at Athens a certain finality of form, or forms, that has imposed its influence upon the occidental, whether Roman or Englishman, lawyer or epideictic speaker. The unwritten word of statesmen like Pericles, fusing the persuasion of the politician with the keener rationalism of Anaxagoras and the raucous, but not wholly unpatriotic, opportunism of demagogues like Cleon or Hyperbolus, was paired with the more decently draped pragmatism of the Sophists, and resulted in the selected group of the “ten” orators, of the fifth and fourth centuries. There was the somewhat archaic Antiphon, the dignified criminal lawyer; Andocides, who brought his rough and ready style to bear upon burning questions of contemporary politics; 97Lysias, the son of an alien, but truly Attic, the younger friend of Socrates, the lucid narrator, the relentless prosecutor; Isæus, the capable testamentary barrister; Isocrates, who both saw the building of the Erechtheum and outlived the battle of Chæronea, and whose over-finished oratory transmitted the florid adornment of Gorgias to the schools in which Cicero was trained; Demosthenes, greatest of all, whether in private suits or in his arraignment of public foes, whose terrorizing cleverness was quick to strike or counter like the flashing arms of the athlete impeded with no ounce of florid superfluity; Æschines, his great antagonist; Lycurgus; Hyperides; and Dinarchus.

Philosophy as a native Attic product matured last of all. Ionia had produced the great “physical” philosophers, and Pythagoras had gone in the sixth century to Italy; but in the first half of the fifth century the so-called “colonial” philosophers, like the foreign Sophists, influenced Athenian thought—some of them by personal visits. They came from the East and from the West. Parmenides came from Italy, and his influence was felt by Socrates and transmitted to Plato and Aristotle. The aristocratic Empedocles came on a visit from Sicily. Anaxagoras from Ionia settled at Athens in his youth. His “chaos-controlling mind”—the primal force of reason—impregnated the statesmanship of Pericles and engendered the rationalism of Euripides. The Athenians might banish the philosopher, but his “primal force of reason” was already busy 98in rearranging the chaos of traditional beliefs. It emerges clearly in Plato as intelligent Mind. Socrates, though not himself a writer, is the central figure of philosophic literature. Pre-Socratic thought focussed in him as in a burning-glass. From him shoot out the divergent rays of the Academics and Peripatetics, the Cynics and the precursors of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics. No one of his disciples reproduced his views with any exactness, but he stimulated self-examination and independent thought. Each took from him what he could or would, and developed differing or mutually exclusive schools. Like the rivers of Greece, coursing for a time through the underground “katavothras,” pre-Socratic speculative thought on physics and metaphysics flowed on beneath the open devotion of Socrates to ethical questions, and reappears in his successors.

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

Aristotle, like Anaxagoras, came as an alien and settled in Athens in his youth. After the death of his master, Plato, he left Athens, travelled, and became the 99tutor of Alexander. After the accession of his royal pupil to the throne, he established at Athens in the Lyceum a rival school to the Academy.

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

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

But to understand at all the meaning of the literature, it is also necessary to remind ourselves of some of 100the more striking features of the history of these two centuries. They are crowded with conspicuous figures and with events significant to the philosophic student of political institutions.

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

Themistocles, the hero of Salamis, was ostracized from Athens within eight years of the great sea-fight, but his spirit still animated his countrymen, and his policies were afterwards revived or expanded. His rival Aristides guided affairs at home, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades, sailed with the conquering Athenian navy. His victory at Eurymedon in 468 B. C. made it possible to fortify Athens and Piræus and to merge the Confederacy of Delos in the Athenian Empire. In seven years more Cimon in turn was ostracized, but at 101the end of another seven years the rich treasure of Delos could be transferred to Athens and the empire formally established. It was to last until the disaster at Ægospotami, in 405 B. C. Pericles, after successfully competing with the reactionary patriotism of statesmen like Thucydides, obtained, at the ostracism of the latter in 442 B. C., the controlling power at Athens, which he guided by his regal persuasion for the next fifteen years. The imperialism of Pericles realized the policy of Themistocles on the seas, reaped the harvest of the great Cimon’s victories, and transmuted the treasure of Delos into the sinews of war and the monuments of the glorified Acropolis. He reshaped the civic life, even curtailing the sacred powers of the Areopagus, and by popular changes in the complexion of Council, Assembly, and Law Courts, prepared the way for the uneven rule of demagogues after his own strong hand should be withdrawn. He had great odds to contend with. After the renewal of the Peloponnesian wars in 431 B. C., with the succession of victories and reverses, the Great Plague came to assert an unlooked-for hegemony. On the suffering and disasters of the city followed the trial and condemnation of Pericles himself. He was indeed reinstated as indispensable, but his death in the following year left Athens at the mercy of the demagogues—with Alcibiades to follow. The Sicilian expedition, the crowning venture of imperialism, issued—as was to be expected with no real successor of Pericles to direct it—in the disaster of 413 B. C., when the 102brave Syracusans, with the willing help of Sparta, dissipated the Athenian dream of vast colonial expansion.

The next ten years was for Athens a losing struggle at home and abroad. The short-lived oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 B. C., the strenuous but vain efforts of Theramenes to reconcile oligarchy and democracy, the civic strife and war with the powerful Lysander, the crushing defeat at Ægospotami, the intervention of Sparta, the brief but terrible régime of the Thirty Tyrants, completed, in 404 B. C., the final overthrow of imperial Athens. But Sparta, with politic generosity, while doing away with the empire, left Athens free to establish a more stable democracy that was to last through the greater part of the fourth century. Oligarchy could no more find a hearing, and, although Hellenic federations were eloquently advocated by the orators and actually formed, despotic empire was no longer feasible for the Athenians. Their new leader, Conon, however, the foe of Sparta, could succeed after Lysander’s death in making Athens independent and strong. We come upon his work now and again in Athens and in Piræus, and in the renascent civic life the intellectual life went on with new vigour. The imperial dream finally came true, but from the outside. The Macedonian, though sneered at as barbarian by Demosthenes, confirmed at the Olympic games the validity of his Hellenic claim that he had asserted at Chæronea. The fitful struggle against the sway of Macedon only resulted, under a successor less philhellenic than Philip, 103in the forced suicide of the great Demosthenes and the execution of Hypereides, whose funeral oration, pronounced over the dead heroes of the “lost cause,” carries us beyond the great speech of Pericles—pronounced on a similar but less hopeless occasion—back to the heroes of Marathon and Salamis. Speaking of the dead leader Leosthenes, he says: “In the dark under-world—suffer us to ask—who are they that will stretch forth a right hand to the captain of our dead?... There, I deem, will be Miltiades and Themistocles, and those others who made Hellas free, to the credit of their city, to the glory of their names.”^[8]

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

104Æschylus connects the old and the new Athens. Before Marathon he produced his first play; in the interval before Salamis he gained a first prize; and he brought out his greatest dramas in the time of the Renascence, of which he was a great part.

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

AREOPAGUS

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

105The god Apollo himself appears for the defendant, and when the decision goes against the Furies by Athena’s casting vote in the Areopagus Court, their bitterness against the “new” gods shoots forth like the serpents uncoiling in their hair:—

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

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

The visitor who takes his stand to-day immediately in front of the south side of the Areopagus is completely 107sequestered from the modern city. Here the Acropolis and the Areopagus rock make practically a continuous barrier to the close-built streets that on the northern side come crowding up their slopes. He is encircled with hills, and this ancient quarter of the city of Theseus lies waste and silent around him. The ground is harrowed and scarred by the spade of the archæologist. Only the foundations of sanctuaries and fountains, houses and cisterns, may be distinguished.

The rock-chambers opposite, called by courtesy the “Prison of Socrates,” will, however, recall us to classic Athens. While waiting for the return of the mission-ship from Delos to bring the day of execution, Crito and the rest listened to Socrates’s demonstrations of immortality. Plato sent his reason out as far into the invisible as reason can go. In the “Phædo,” after his half-playful periegesis of the underworld, Socrates is made to say: “Whosoever seem to have excelled in holy living, these are they who are set free and released from these earthly places as from prisons and fare upward to that pure habitation and make their dwelling-place in yonder land.... Therefore we must do our utmost to gain in life a share in virtue and wisdom. For the prize is noble and the hope is great!” or, as he adds presently, “The risk is fair.” And Socrates, like Pindar before him, finds the crowning joy of a blessed immortality neither in the unlaborious sunlit life by night and day, nor in the ocean breezes, nor in the flowers of gold blooming on trees of splendour, but in 108the company of the great and noble dead with whom to live “’twere more of happiness than tongue can tell.”

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

109In the face of the hill fronting towards the Acropolis, the rock-chamber of the Callirrhoë spring, with its sloping entrance and the parapet within, has been suggested as the original of the famous cave in Plato’s “Republic.” The Vari Cave, on the south side of Hymettus, might have made less of a strain, as has been urged, upon Plato’s imagination. However faint the resemblance of the Callirrhoë cave to Plato’s complex setting, it is enough to emphasize the vitality of this realistic figure, which has become typical, in modern poetry and prose, of the denizens of earth watching and naming the shadows thrown by the fire-light upon the cave’s wall, unable by reason of fetters to look around at the objects moving behind them, much less to rise and climb the long ascent to the brighter light above.

The innocent-looking ravine west of the Hill of the Nymphs is identified with the Barathrum. In antiquity its fame had penetrated to the underworld, where the innkeeper’s maid threatened to pitch the Pseudo-Heracles “into the Barathrum.” And Herodotus’s apocryphal story is at least ben trovato. He relates that, when the ambassadors of Darius came asking tokens of submission from the Greeks: “Some [the Athenians] took the messengers and threw them into the Barathrum, others [the Spartans] into a well, and bade them take earth and water from there to their King.” Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, if we are to believe the allusion in the “Gorgias,” barely 110escaped with a fine and banishment instead of the criminal’s end in this same pit.

If even the skeleton of the Athenian Market-place could be resurrected, like that of the Roman Forum, many scores of allusions would take on a local habitation. The Agora was the centre of life. In classic times it probably lay in the depression west of the “Theseum” hill, and extended, from the slopes of the Areopagus, northward about to the modern Hadrian street. Pindar, with no idle flattery, spoke of the “fair-famed Agora, in sacred Athens, inlaid with cunning workmanship.” Sculptor, painter, and architect gave of their best. The Prytaneum, close to, or in the Agora, was the city’s fireside. Distinguished foreigners and citizens here and in the Tholus enjoyed, temporarily or for life, the public hospitality. Socrates ironically suggests to his judges that the sentence really fitting his case would be: “Maintenance in the Prytaneum, much more so indeed than if any one of you has come off victor at Olympia with a race horse, a pair, or a four-horse team.” Plutarch relates that Aristides, far from enriching himself from the public purse, left not even enough for his funeral expenses, and that the Athenians “married off his daughters from the Prytaneum at the public cost—voting a dowry of three thousand drachmas to each.” In the stoas that faced upon the Agora the citizens heard and discussed many a new thing, from the days when the great painting of the battle of Marathon was fresh in the Painted Porch, 111to the time when the Stoics appropriated this colonnade. In time of war a man would look fearfully at the bulletin board near by, to see if his name was posted for military duty; or in time of truce would feel that yonder beautiful group of Peace with the child Wealth best reproduced to the eyes the blessings so often absent during the wearisome Peloponnesian wars,—blessings which Bacchylides, the admiring neighbour of Athens, had celebrated:—

To be near the Agora was a desideratum. The cripple, in Lysias’s oration, asking the Senate to continue his pension, refers to the fact that every one in Athens has his favourite lounging place: “One frequents the perfume-seller’s, another the barber’s, another the cobbler’s; and as a rule the most of them lounge into the shops set up nearest the Agora, and the very fewest resort to those most remote from it.” Socrates, too, seeking his audience where the crowds gravitated, was often heard talking “in the Market-place near the bankers’ tables.” Aristophanes, together with the other 112comic writers, and Lysias and Theophrastus tell not only of other resorts—like the fuller’s shop, the shield-and-spear-maker’s—but of many special sub-markets. Thus there were by the Agora the “Pottery” and the “Vegetable” Market, and, somewhere near, the “Green-cheese,” the “Garlic,” the “Wine,” the “Oil,” the “Fish” markets. Of the Bird-market we hear in some detail in Aristophanes,—the live pigeons in cages, strings of ortolans, thrushes abnormally inflated, and blackbirds with “feathers shamefully inserted in their nostrils”! In time of war the country folk thronged into town to escape the armies that were devastating Attica. In times of peace, too, they came trooping in on the first of the month, and to the oft-recurring festivals. Menander, with his blended Stoicism and Epicureanism, looks around in the crowded Agora and compares human life to a festival or market-fair:—

113A broad avenue, flanked with porticoes, ran from the Market-place northwest to the Dipylon gate. This double gateway, impressive even from the remains of its foundations, quickens the memory to recall the generations of citizens and foreigners that have passed this way. Along the roads from Colonus and the Academy and the Sacred Way from Eleusis, converging outside the gates, will come a motley throng of Athenian ghosts, gay or scurrilous, militant or philosophic, to blot out the consciousness of the modern city. Outside the Dipylon, in the “Outer Cerameicus,” is “the Street of the Tombs.” Some of the beautiful monuments are still in situ to stimulate a detailed study of the rich material in the National Museum. It was here that the Athenians usually buried their dead. The roll-call of great names stirs the imagination here as in Westminster Abbey. This is no exclusive privilege of one place or people. But there is often an appropriate genius loci. As one lingers along the Appian Way, for example, deciphering inscriptions and pausing before the weather-beaten faces on the monuments, there is a lurking pessimism and an insidious melancholy that flow in from the beauty of the Roman Campagna. Here, however, in this proastion of Athens, this Suburb of the Dead, the memorials still in place, with their unpretentious sincerity, give rather a sensation of beauty and hope in perpetuating scenes from actual life. Even a scene of parting has less of hopeless finality. The warrior on his horse, the woman with her jewel-box, 114suggests life and love, not death and lamentation. Along yonder road from Eleusis came many an initiate fresh from the Mysteries, and some may well have been ready to listen with hope to Pindar’s “trumpet-blast for immortality”:—

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

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

STREET OF THE TOMBS
Monument of Hegeso

115After the battle of Chæronea Philip sent back the ashes of the dead Athenians, and Demosthenes counted it the highest honour to deliver their funeral oration. But the noblest association with this spot is the great oration of Pericles, who was chosen in the course of the Peloponnesian War to pronounce the public eulogy over the dead warriors. These were borne along in cypress chests, with one empty litter to represent those whose bodies had not been recovered. The long speech is the incarnation of the Athenian spirit and of Pericles’s own undaunted policy. Thucydides represents him as saying:—

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

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

Thucydides describes the plague with appalling vigour. The misery and danger were aggravated by the congestion of the country folk crowding in to escape the Peloponnesian invaders. Bivouacked in stifling “shacks” during the hot summer, they died uncared-for 116and lay where they fell, dying upon one another, at home, in the streets, or by the fountains where they had tried in vain to quench their fever.

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

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

117Amidst the splendour of the public buildings the dwelling-houses long remained insignificant. The streets were dark at night. The houses had few windows to let out such light as might come from the “dim and stingy wick” of some miser watching his hoards, or from that of a perplexed father reckoning up his son’s horse-racing debts, as we find old Strepsiades doing in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes:—

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

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

The Gymnasia of Athens emphasize one of the most characteristic features of Athenian life—the close interrelation of the physical and the intellectual. Here the youths were trained in their naked beauty; here the 119philosophers collected their data; here they afterwards taught their doctrines. To-day, unhappily, we must content ourselves with recalling the natural beauty surrounding the Academy at Colonus, or reconstructing scenes like those in the “Euthydemus,” the “Charmides,” the “Laches,” or “Lysis” of Plato. At the opening of the “Lysis” Socrates is making his way close under the outside of the north wall of the city, bound from the Academy for the Lyceum, which was probably somewhere east of the present King’s Gardens. Thus the path between Plato’s Academy and the future school of Aristotle was worn by the footsteps of their great predecessor. Socrates on this occasion, however, was deflected by an eager youth to enter a new palæstra just opened near the fountain of Panops, possibly near the gate of Diochares now placed by conjecture near the intersection of the Street of the Muses and Boulè Street. He is persuaded without difficulty and holds a discussion on Friendship with the handsome youths gathered there. In the “Charmides” likewise he goes to another palæstra, Taureas, which was near the Itonian gate, probably not far from the Olympieum. He had just come back the evening before from the engagement at Potidæa, and is eagerly questioned about the battle. As usual, he guides the talk into other channels and there follows a discussion upon Temperance.

Although the sites of the courts are uncertain, we know what went on in them. The Athenian passion 120for litigation is a commonplace. Lucian’s Icaromenippus, looking down from the moon on the kingdoms of the classic world, characterizes the inhabitants thus: “I could see the nomad Scyths in their wagons; the Egyptian farming; the Cilician buccaneering; the Spartan flogging; and the Athenian pettifogging.” So, in the newly organized Bird-town of Aristophanes, one of the first visitors, following hard after the parricide, is a Law-suit-hatcher. He “cannot dig,” but is not ashamed of his blackmailing trade. He comes to the birds for wings to bear him around among the Isles as “Summoner.”

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

With the exception of the Acropolis itself, the great Dionysiac Theatre perhaps offers most to allure the visitor. Although in its present state, with the later disfigurements of Roman times, we can only with difficulty 121form a detailed picture of its structure even in the fourth century, yet the slight traces of the circular orchestra, now identified beneath it, entitle the visitor to associate with this site the classic drama and to give free play to not unnatural sentiment. It is an epitome of the Athenian drama. It interprets, and is interpreted by, a wide range of literature. Here, too, in later times were gathered popular assemblies. Here, looking over plain and sea, sat generations of citizens and guests to be moved to laughter or to tears. Here the “Shameless Man” of Theophrastus managed to get himself and his children in for nothing by manipulating the places which he had purchased for his foreign visitors.

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

122The precinct of the Asclepieum, adjoining the Theatre, was a Sanatorium where religion and faith-cures were combined with actual medical skill. In the “Plutus” of Aristophanes the blind god, Wealth, is restored to discriminating vision. His head was covered by “Panacea” with a purple cloth, and two expert snakes operated upon his eyes.^[10] This comic scene is not, it may easily be credited, too much of a burlesque upon some of the practices at such places. Magic miracles, including the “absent treatment” of recalcitrant lovers, are not unknown in other ages. But a visit to the famous health-resort of the great school of Hippocrates, on the island of Cos, will tend to inspire a respect for Greek therapeutics. The “open-air” treatment on the mountain terrace overlooking the sea may have been modern enough, and, along with the use of the sulphur spring, suggests both technical knowledge and common sense.

Close by the Theatre to the east, hemmed in by modern houses, the beautiful little circular shrine, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, reminds us of the cost and rivalry attendant upon bringing out the dramas. The weathered sculpture around the top speaks once again of the inseparable connection of Athenian life and literature. It carries us back to the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus. The pirates who kidnapped the god are here undergoing punishment; some, already half 123changed into dolphins, are diving into the sea. In the hymn the pirates, who have carried off the youth in his purple robe, deem him a rich prize for ransom. But the vine with clustering grapes that presently entwines sail and yards proclaims the god. He transformed himself into a bear, then a lion, and they at the sight,—

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

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

124A guest-present most highly prized by the Athenians is preserved in another fragment from Pindar:—

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

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

Through the transparent candour of the philosopher’s robe the soul of the poet Plato is ever shining. 125But like Æschylus he is a poet militant. If he walks by the Ilissus he interprets in terms of the spiritual the physical charm of tree and water and the chirping insect; if he goes down to Phaleron, the Ægean does not bring in for him “the eternal note of sadness,” but his soul has “sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither”; and in the heaven’s vault, overarching Attica, he sees “many ways to and fro” where drive the chariots of the gods whom “he who will and can” may follow, “for from the choir divine all grudging stands aloof!” If to Plato the Athens of the fourth century seemed imperfect, if he was even embittered by the judicial murder of his master, it was with the truest patriotism that he turned to construct an ideal state. His sense of law and order was deep-rooted. It was with lofty optimism that he urged his hearers not to rest content with politics as they are, but to look to “the pattern that is laid up in heaven for him who wills to see and, seeing, so to plant his dwelling.”

CHAPTER VI OLD GREECE IN NEW ATHENS

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

127Even to pilgrims and strangers the modern city reveals an eager and, in many aspects, a charming life. But a special relationship follows in the wake of familiarity with the new, added to knowledge of the old, Athens. The student of Greek literature finds that he need not always seek the ruins of antiquity or the permanent stage-setting of Nature when he desires a sense of fellowship with the past. At any street corner this sense may be quickened by some person or object which is an integral part of the city’s modern life. Ancient literature not only gleams, like “a stately palace hall, with golden pillars of song,” but also mirrors common things, trivial or serious, which subtly unite the times of Homer with those of Pericles, and both with our own.

Greek gentlemen conspicuously engaged in having their boots blacked share the habits if not the politics of Aristophanes’s dicast who was always seeking the sponge and the basin of oil-mixed pitch for his dusty shoes. Street-venders from Rhodes, who beguile foreign ladies with embroideries, are plying the craft of the Phœnician peddler at the home of Eumæus, then a happy princelet and later the swineherd of Odysseus. The peddler displayed to Eumæus’s lady mother and her maidens a golden chain set here and there with amber beads, and “they offered him their price.” Bargaining, the basis of all transactions, is not always as amiable as it is in Rome. An Athenian cab-driver in search of drachmas can be as obstinate as the corpse 128in Aristophanes’s “Frogs,” whom Dionysus asked to take his luggage to Hades:—

Dionysus and his servant had made their entrance with a donkey, ridden by Xanthias who was carrying 129the traps on a pole over his shoulder. No age has allowed the donkey to escape his manifest destiny of bearing burdens, nor has age or custom exhausted his capacity of occasional revolt. The persevering attack of the Trojans on Ajax could be likened only to the cudgelling by boys of a lazy ass which has strayed into a cornfield and will not desist from wasting the deep crop—an episode as modern as it is Homeric. But for the most part the little beasts carry patiently everything that is portable, as they did when, in the annual transportation of the properties used in the Eleusinian Mysteries, their dull share in a great business became proverbial. Their panniers of lemons and oranges and crates of water-jars are both antique and modern, and a famous lost picture of Polygnotus comes to life in a donkey loaded with fresh green boughs, moving toward the spectator.

That Dionysus, in search of a carrier, so conveniently saw a corpse in the street was due to the Athenian custom of bearing the dead to the grave on open biers. The same custom, shocking to foreign observers, prevails to-day; and at almost any hour, in any thoroughfare, may be seen one of these funeral processions, with the cover of the coffin carried in front and the uncovered face exposed to the curious and the indifferent. Thus exposed, the dead Alcestis was brought out from her palace, and the cortège, with which the modern procession seems to mingle, moves off the stage with prayers that Hermes and Persephone may kindly welcome 130this traveller to their realm. These deities have been forgotten, but their business is transferred to him who was once their grim agent. To the modern Greek peasant Charon is Death. Alcestis dreaded him as a messenger and ferryman:—

To-day he rides in his own might:—

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

In the guise of a young man, the herdsman of a flock, most delicate, as are the sons of kings, Athena once appeared to Odysseus. And it was to a man who was pasturing his flocks on many-fountained Ida that 131Aphrodite gave her immortal heart. Perhaps thereafter in the streets of Troy Anchises made people think suddenly of early dawns on the mountain-side when the silver car of the moon hangs low over the sea and the nightingale sings and the bleating flocks answer the pipe’s ethereal cry. In Athens a transient shepherd, with his crook and his coat of fleece, may fling the townsman’s thoughts abroad to the men he has seen among the hills of Arcadia, where as of old a misty night is hateful to shepherds and goatherds, and a bright moon their heart’s delight; or in Lesbos, where still in mountain pastures the hyacinth is trampled under foot and darkens the ground. A flock of sheep following the bellwether from the country to the town is a reminder that the Greeks before Troy were ordered about like a great flock of white ewes by the thick-fleeced leader, Odysseus; and that the astute one, in the course of his later adventures, saved himself from the wrath of blind Polyphemus by clinging face upwards and with a steady heart, beneath the shaggy belly of his best and goodliest ram. Aristophanes in the “Wasps” parodies the Homeric ram. Here it is the family donkey which, led out to be sold, is smuggling under its shaggy belly the old man imprisoned by his son to cure him of the “jury habit.” The dejected donkey is addressed by the son:—

132Athens is a bustling capital, but to the on-looker every Easter lamb becomes a Golden Fleece, and—

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

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

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

133In the same district lies the bazaar known as Shoe Lane, where cobblers and tailors and carpenters work in the open, protected by awnings. Socrates, keen-eyed for handicraft and homely illustrations, often must have watched their forebears. Not far from the shoemakers, the coppersmiths, in the same district as of old, are suitably gathered in Hephæstus Street, whence the sound of ringing hammers echoes afar. The Homeric picture of Hephæstus in his forge on Olympus is duplicated in any little forge along the modern street, when a workman rises from his anvil and with a sponge wipes his face and hand and sturdy neck and shaggy breast. In more than one part of the city the “bankers’ tables,” at which also Socrates used to seek his crowd, are reproduced in the much frequented tables of the money changers.

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

Modern Athens is too arid to afford many public fountains, but women still draw water from the meagre spring Callirrhoë, on the edge of the Ilissus, not far from the Zeus columns. This spring, in name and situation, is still identified by some experts with the town-spring of primitive Athens and the later Nine Spouts. 134The traveller who throws in his fortunes with the archæological opposition must at least find in the lesser Callirrhoë the Athenian counterpart of the fountains which in so many of the towns and villages of Greece perpetuate, in usefulness and charm, an antique life of homely activities transmuted into poetry. The townspeople of Odysseus drew their water just outside the city from a wayside spring deep in an alder thicket, where a basin had been fashioned to catch the cold stream falling from a cliff. In the old days of peace, when the plain was safe, the wives and daughters of the men of Troy had washed the family clothes in broad stone troughs beside the two springs that fed the Scamander. Nausicaä of Phæacia and her maidens did the palace washing so far from the town that the occasion involved a day’s excursion and a generous lunch-basket packed by the Queen. But there was a spring of drinking water nearer, for, when Odysseus was entering the city, Athena met him in the form of a young girl carrying a pitcher. At Eleusis, also, in the royal age, the king’s fawnlike daughters, their crocus-yellow hair dancing on their shoulders, drew water for the palace in vessels of bronze from the Maiden Well. In classical Athens, as to-day, only the poorer women went for their own water, and perhaps it was after meeting one who looked tired and hopeless that Euripides made Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, given in marriage to a peasant in Argos to further her mother’s schemes, cry aloud to the night:—

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

AFTER POLYGNOTUS

THE PANATHENÆA CONTINUED

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

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

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

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

Other seasons in Athens had their crop of mendicant carols, and the boyish custom of celebrating Apollo at one of his summer festivals by going about from house to house and singing songs of good wishes is suggested in the modern celebration of New Year’s or St. Basil’s day. It is even possible that the rough little model of a ship carried by the boys, as if to illustrate the sea-journey 137of the saint “come from Cæsarea,” is a late descendant of the ship that was carried in the Panathenaic procession, the origin of which lay in Theseus’s journey to Crete, and the sail of which was Athena’s own peplos.

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

Readers of ancient Greek literature will remember how important dances were in the religious festivals of all epochs. Their variety and their ancestral relation 138to the modern dances are subjects for technical study, but the spectator at Menidi is at liberty to let his imagination travel the Sacred Way to Eleusis, or cross the Ægean to Delos, or seek out Argos and distant Sparta. The modern inheritance is a limited one, for it recalls only the grave choral movements that originated in Sparta, and discards the license of the Dionysiac worship. And altogether preventive of any real reconstruction of the past is the fact that now only peasants at a country fair exhibit an art which once was an important element in city as well as in village religion, and which tested the grace of the gentlest born. It is a far call from a country field and the daughters of Menidi, bedight though they are with embroideries and necklaces and often fair of form and face, to the chief temple in Sparta and the choicest maidens of the Spartan state. But one certain bond there is between the girls of to-day and the princesses of yesterday. The Easter fair serves the purpose of a market for brides, and many a wedding follows it. Dancing is a part of this happy festival as it was in antiquity in all ranks of society. And were the maidens of Menidi exiled to America, they would long for the village green and the bridal feasts, even as Iphigeneia and her comrades, exiled among the northern Taurians, longed for Agamemnon’s palace and their Argive playfellows:—

Athens, like most southern cities, impresses an Anglo-Saxon as having many holidays which “interrupt business”; but only during the New Year and Easter festivals can he begin to imagine a resemblance to the civic life of ancient Athens, which was almost a continuous pageant. “The gods,” said Plato, “in pity for the life of toil, man’s natural inheritance, appointed holy festivals whereby men alternate their labour with rest.” But at certain seasons, especially in the spring and autumn, the festivals were so congested that the days of labour must have been far from burdensome. Almost all the festivals had a religious origin, celebrating deities and heroes of political importance, like Athena or Theseus, or forces of nature embodied in Dionysus or Demeter. But, like Christmas, they gave abundant opportunity both for public enjoyment and for the cultivation of communal and family sentiment. Sophocles had in mind all their human charm when he made the 140blind Œdipus lament the future of his little daughters:—

The festivals were often connected with the activities of country folk, with planting and reaping, the vintage and the winepress, and yet at the same time played an important part in a highly cultivated city life. Some of them were confined to women, like the Thesmophoria, celebrated by matrons in honour of Demeter, the patroness of fruitful marriages, and used by Aristophanes as occasion and stage-setting for an attack on the misogyny of Euripides; or like the Tauropolia, in honour of Artemis, which suggested to Menander a lover’s opportunity. Others, such as the Hermæa, at which Socrates first met the young Lysis and discoursed on friendship, were celebrated by young men at the palæstras, or by school-boys. The “Mean Man” of Theophrastus was “apt not to send his children to school when there was a festival of the Muses, but to say that they were sick, in order that they might not contribute.” Still others, like the Panathenæa, which occurred in July, the first month of the calendar year, united all classes and ages in a magnificent display of civic loyalty. Public taste at its highest made the presentation of plays the chief element in the Greater Dionysia in March, but the drama had originated in the December 141festival of the country Dionysia, which continued to be celebrated with a jollity and abandon that probably lost nothing in the descriptions of Aristophanes. The same poet also found plenty of material to his liking in the Anthesteria, another Dionysiac celebration, in which Pots and Pitchers figured in drinking competitions and in offerings to the dead. The statue of Dionysus in the Marshes was escorted to the outer Cerameicus, and by the time it was brought back again, a day later, the crowd was doubtless in the state described by the chorus of Frogs in the underworld:—

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

From the crapulous and often naked verses of Aristophanes to the austerely beautiful marbles of Phidias is a gamut that includes all the characteristics of ancient festivals, in their appeal to both the natural and the spiritual man. Religious sincerity, civic pride, and 142buffoonery, jostled one another. Music, literature, and athletics added discipline and beauty.

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

But the excited crowds that fill the city streets and make the Cathedral Square look like a deep cornfield stirred by a strong west wind, and the gathering of villagers in the open place in front of their tiny church alike betray one quality that is no more Christian and new than it is Pagan and old. An unquestioning and swift hospitality to strangers is as much in evidence as is the lighted taper borne by each man, woman, and child. In Athens this is but a proof on a crucial occasion of a temper which reveals itself in response 143to every need. By this Ionic grace, inherited from the noble civilization of Homer and eagerly exemplified by the open-minded Athenians at the height of their prosperity, the foreigner is transported back to the old city more surely than by the street names and signs in the alphabet of Xenophon, or even than by the vision, wherever his eye turns, of the ageless rock of the Acropolis.

144

ATTICA

CHAPTER VII ATTICA

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

Aristophanes, Clouds.

Modern Athens climbs up around the lower slopes of Mount Lycabettus, which rises on the east like an index finger above the Attic plain. Although this peak is less than one thousand feet high, its isolated position opens out an unrivalled panorama of the Cephisian plain from Parnes and Pentelicus down to Piræus and the bay, with Salamis, the mountains of the Megarid, the Isthmus, Argolis and Ægina beyond. In the “Frogs” of Aristophanes Æschylus’s many-jointed compounds are likened to “great Lycabettuses.” Athena, it is said, while carrying Lycabettus through the air to fortify her Acropolis, dropped it suddenly in its present exclusive position; but, if we are to believe Plato, who had a vague inkling of the geologic truth, her rival, the earth-shaker, rent it asunder from the Acropolis, with which it was once continuous. From Lycabettus, it would appear, the stream of the Eridanus made its way north of the Acropolis and flowed out by the channel now laid bare near the Dipylon gate. The Ilissus, rising on the slopes 145of Hymettus, flows south of the city and, first uniting with the Eridanus, joins, between Athens and Piræus, the Cephisus, which draws its waters from the Pentelicus and Parnes ranges. This configuration of the landscape, with arable plain-land watered by mountain streams, was the important factor in country life about Athens. Clouds on Hymettus, as Theophrastus tells us, were a sign of rain. The altar of “Shower-giving Zeus,” whether on Hymettus or, as Pausanias says, on Mount Parnes, would have no lack of suppliants in times of drought. The Clouds, in a fragment of the lost edition of Aristophanes’s play, vanish adown Lycabettus and go off to the top of Parnes. In the play as preserved, the mock Socrates, instructing his thick-headed scholar, points out the cloud-goddesses:—

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

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

“Let us, maidens, that bring fresh showers, go unto Pallas’s brilliant land to turn our eyes on the country of Cecrops, favoured of heroes, rich in its loveliness, there where is honour to consecrate secrets; there where the temple that welcomes its votaries flings wide its doors at the mysteries sacred; there where are gifts for the gods up in heaven; stately-roofed temples and statues of splendour; there are processionals unto the blessed ones, hallowed exceedingly; 146fair are the chaplets entwining the offerings unto the deities; ever recurring the festivals, season by season; and, when the spring cometh on, there’s the grace of the Bromian god and incitements to choirs melodious; aye and the Muse with the music of deep-voicèd flutings.”

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

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

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

The ramparts of the city of Theseus, seen by Antigone at the opening of the play, are for Sophocles in 147reality the Acropolis and walls of his own day. Antigone describes the sacred grove to her blind father:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?

To what sublime and starry-paven home

Floatest thou?

‘I am the image of swift Plato’s spirit

Ascending heaven:—Athens doth inherit

His corpse below.’”

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

Upon the Parnes range, on the northern frontier of Attica, is the partially ruined fortress of Phyle. Few places offer a more attractive combination of scenery and association. There is, as at Delphi, a union of grandeur and beauty. In addition to the view that awaits us above, the ascent amidst trees and flowers by the running stream makes this a fitting introduction to the more 149intimate charm of Attic landscape, and the rugged gorges, skirted by the climbing pathway, are even awe-inspiring. Once within the massive walls and towers, built on a mountain spur commanding the junction of ravines and passes between Attica and Bœotia, no extended explanation is necessary of the part played here (in 404 to 403 B. C.) during the civil war between the patriots and the Thirty Tyrants. Across the shoulder of Ægaleus the plain of the Cephisus is unrolled to view, with Athens lying below Hymettus. In the background are the Saronic Gulf and the Peloponnesian mountains. Thrasybulus, the hero of the Restoration, is great even among the great names of Greek history. We can imagine him first seizing the fortress with his handful of seventy followers, and then, through months of waiting and fighting and watching, looking down on the desired city, planning how he shall restore the exiled patriots to Athens, and Athens to herself. We can picture the fierce snow-storm, filling those wild gorges, which aided in driving back the knights and hoplites of the Thirty. Later he swoops down to Acharnæ, surprises and routs the unpatriotic Athenians together with the Spartan garrison which the Thirty, to their dishonour, had admitted to the Acropolis. Finally he descends to Piræus, joins battle with the “City Party,” breaks the power of the Thirty and makes the name of “the men from Phyle” a symbol of patriotism which, see it where we may on the pages of Lysias or Xenophon, claims the eye like illuminated initials and rubrics of honour.

150At Chasia, the farming village of the foothills whence the path ascends to Phyle, women, standing in their doorways with busy distaff in hand, or energetic but courteous men, ready to discuss politics or crops, recall the simplicity and charm of country life of hill and plain known to us from Aristophanes and Menander.

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

“Gently, ivy, gently twine,

With pale tresses creep and seize

On the tomb of Sophocles;

Where the soft and clustering vine

Droops its tendrils to the ground.

Petals of the rose, around

151Spread your fragrant anodyne

For his gracious speech profound,

Muses and the Graces blending,

Honeyed charm to wisdom lending.”

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

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

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

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

And you, lead on!”

At this juncture the chorus of Acharnian men rush in, with the bosoms of their gowns full of stones, indignant at the thought of peace when their vines have been cut by the enemy. They are a sturdy lot. They had contributed a Highland regiment at Marathon; they are regular “old Hickories,” “hardwood-charcoal men, tough as oak, hard-maple men,” and they are ready to stone Dicæopolis. He gains time, however, for a 152parley by seizing for a hostage a basket of their charcoals and dressing it up as a baby.

MENANDER

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

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

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

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

When I came on a little infant child exposed

With necklaces and some such other trumpery.”

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

“back unto my flock again

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

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

Now he had had acquaintance with me back of this,

And so we talked together.”

One of the main sources of the Cephisus is at the foot of Pentelicus. Here the village of Kephisia with its generous spring and noble plane tree still retains its charm and recalls the “Attic Nights” of Aulus Gellius. As terminus of a short railway from Athens, it is a convenient starting-place for various excursions in Attica. An easy drive northward across the plain 153brings one to Tatoï where King George has his summer residence at the ancient Decelea, which the Spartans occupied in the Peloponnesian War to cut off the grain supply which came by this way from Eubœa. But cruel memories of the contest with Sparta are forgotten amidst the unusual charm of the surroundings. The magnificent low-spreading pine trees are a surprise to many visitors unaccustomed to this variety, and, as one looks southward, Pentelicus, usually seen from Athens as a long ridge, confronts the spectator, head on, with unfamiliar and uncompromising majesty. In the near foreground olive groves and luxuriant fields of anemones and poppies invite to a long lethe.

The Oropus district on the Euripus, north of Parnes, belongs geographically to Bœotia. As one descends on the northern side of the mountain the view is more suggestive of Switzerland than of rugged Attica. The fertile plain of the Asopus is green and wooded; the Euripus winding between the hedgerows of mountains on either side seems, even from the lofty summit of Pentelicus, more like a series of inland lakes than a continuous arm of the sea; beyond, the dorsal spine of the Delph, gleaming white with snow, crowns the blue Eubœan mountains. A marble relief, found at the port of Oropus, recalls the principal literary association outside of the shifting scenes in military history. Amphiaraus, the seer and hero, is represented in his chariot as he is about to disappear in the earth and his horses 154start back from the yawning chasm. In the Æschylean story Amphiaraus “the one just man” is included against his will among the invaders, the “Seven against Thebes,” and is represented as falling with the rest at Thebes. Of him were written the famous lines which, when spoken in the Athenian theatre, turned the eyes of all the spectators upon “Aristides the Best”:—

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

A priest entombèd deep beneath this hostile soil.

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

Thus spoke the seer while brandishing his good round shield

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

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

While harvesting the fertile furrow of his mind

Wherefrom an honest crop of counsels springs to birth.”

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

Rhamnus is on the coast near the southern mouth of the Euripus, and is one of the most beautiful and secluded places in the whole peninsula. As a visit to this northeast corner is needful to complete the physical outline of Attica, so the contours of Greek character will be sharpened here in the sanctuary of Nemesis, 155the dread goddess of Retribution, whose warning presence hovered continually in the background of Greek consciousness. Her beautiful statue, made perhaps by Phidias or his pupils, was fittingly set up in this place near the mouth of the Euripus where the Persian fleet had sailed through to the crushing rebuke at Marathon. Pausanias calmly states that this statue, dedicated to “the goddess most inexorable of all towards overweening men,” was made by Phidias out of some “Parian marble which the Persians, as if the victory were already won, carried with them for the erection of a trophy.” If we could credit this statement it would enlarge the itinerary of the meagre fragments of the colossal statue now in the British Museum.

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

Unwary speech, insolent success or immoderate, though innocent, good fortune might call down the retribution of Nemesis. Like our superstitious formula, 156“Knock on wood,” it was a common device in Greek to deprecate the divine envy towards arrogant speech, by saying: “I being but human make obeisance to Adrasteia,” or, the equivalent, “to Nemesis.” Pindar describes the happy Hyperboreans as set free from this scrupulous anxiety, ever present to mortal men:—

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

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

“Thespis am I, who the tragedy strain

Shaped for the masque and was first to combine

Charms that were new when Bacchus would fain

Marshal his chorus, stained with wine.

Figs Attic grown, or a goat was the prize

Won in the contests, till new I devise.

They that come after all this will revise,

Myriad years reshape, refine,

Little it troubles me—mine are mine.”

157Nothing adventitious is needed to call forth a certain solemn elation at the first sight of the plain of Marathon. But the sunlight of a February day, when the anemones are bright by the wayside, will blend an unforgettable natural beauty with the suggestions of a great moment in human history. The level plain is hemmed in by an amphitheatre of mountains; the promontory Cynosura runs down like a natural breakwater from the north, and the shore curves gracefully inward as if enticing seafarers to beach their galleys where the blue water breaks in soft white upon the shining sand. When we climb the isolated “soros,” the great mound heaped up over the dead warriors, and pass in review the vivid details of the battle as given by Herodotus, there emerges, even after all exaggeration has been neutralized by the strictures of some modern iconoclast, a grateful and redoubled admiration for the unflinching loyalty to liberty displayed by the individual soldiers and even more for the consummate skill of the commanders. The Athenians with the help of the Platæans repelled forever the reëstablishing of a despot in Attica, and Athens herself unconsciously entered upon what was to be the intellectual and moral trusteeship of Occidental civilization. Demosthenes, more than a century later, amidst the ruins of political liberty, could foreshadow a destiny greater than material success. He cites the great words of Simonides that had drifted down from Marathon and could be used with pathetic propriety of the dead 158at Chæronea. He bids his fellow citizens bow, if need be, under the strokes of unfeeling fortune, but reject all thought of having erred in their patriotic struggle against Macedon. He bursts forth with that impassioned oath by the dead heroes that thrills each generation born to cherish, or to long for liberty: “It cannot be, it cannot be, Athenians, that ye erred in braving danger on behalf of freedom and the safety of us all. No, by those of our fathers, fore-fighters in the battle’s brunt at Marathon! No, by those who stood shoulder unto shoulder at Platæa! No, by those who fought the naval fights at Salamis or in the ships off Artemisium!”

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

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

Within the mound beneath our feet lies buried with the rest Cynegirus the valiant brother of Æschylus. The poet himself fought in the battle and lived to immortalize his city and himself by his Titanic genius. But in far off Sicily, when his death approached, ignoring his fame as a poet, he turned with eager longing to the distant day and plain of Marathon. To him the battlefield was a consecrated close, an “Alsos” like the Altis of Olympia. Almost as if envying his brother and 159other companions-in-arms, buried on the battlefield in their native land, he writes as his own epitaph:—

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

Wheatfields of Gela his tomb waving around and above;

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

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

The carriage road that leads back to Athens around the southern end of Pentelicus again combines beautiful landscape with historic association. By this road the Persians had thought to move with unimpeded might upon unwalled Athens. Instead, the soldier Eucles^[18] (or perhaps Thersippus) brought the swift news to the rejoicing city, followed soon by the Athenian army, who marched from their camp by the Marathonian Heracleum and encamped in the Cynosarges gymnasium, also dedicated to Heracles, south-west of Athens. Here looking down upon the Saronic Gulf they were ready to repel the great host of Persia which was already rounding Sunium. Games in honour of Heracles were celebrated at Marathon, 160and Euripides, in his “Heracleidæ,” alludes, though vaguely, to the Marathonian tetrapolis as one of the great Attic centres of the worship of Heracles. The Platæans by their presence at Marathon won the lasting and active friendship of Athens, and it was their city that gave the name to the final crushing defeat of the Persians under the combined Greek allies. The Spartans, detained at home by convenient scruples until the full moon gave them the signal to start, arrived at Athens too late for the battle of Marathon, but, as Herodotus charmingly remarks, “they none the less wished to take a look at the Medes and, going out to Marathon, they had a look.”

On the east coast of Attica, between Marathon and Sunium, are Brauron, “lovely” Prasiæ, and Thoricus. These with Markopoulo and other sites in the southern inland plain, Mesogia, have been yielding a wealth of prehistoric remains that fill out more and more the dim background of antiquity. Thoricus, a bay some six miles north of Sunium, was the birthplace of Philonis, “the daughter of the morning star,” and grandmother of Thamyris, the Thracian bard who dared to contend with the Muses. The inhabitants were not unmindful of their traditions and built a theatre, unique by reason of its oval orchestra. It is in ruins, but the absence of all traces of a stage seem to date it as of the best classic period. Laurium, just below, is the terminus of the railroad. Its silver mines, now worked 161chiefly for lead, play an important rôle in Greek history. The chorus in the “Persians” of Æschylus explains to Queen Atossa that the source of the Athenian sinews of war is—

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

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

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

Little Lauriotic owlets shall be always flocking in.

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

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

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

The promontory of Sunium, the prow of Attica, breasts the Ægean, and the white temple columns, beautiful in their ruin, stand up boldly like the Samothracian Nike upon an advancing trireme. The view from the precipitous bluff is one of surpassing beauty, with the glistening white of the marble against the nearer foreground of green and against the blue of the overarching sky and of the wide expanse of water. The eye 162sweeps from Ægina to the opposite shore of Argolis and around to the “glittering Cyclades” scattered over the Ægean, while far to the south, seventy miles away, Mount St. Elias on Melos in clear weather lifts its lofty cone into view, the outline of the island being sunk, like a vessel’s hull, below the horizon. On the Acropolis at Athens was preserved the memory of the contest between Athena and Poseidon, and at Sunium each of these divinities had a temple. Poseidon has here retained the supremacy, as was fitting, and only the foundation walls remain of Athena’s temple on the lower terrace. The Athenians dedicated at Sunium to Poseidon one of the triremes captured at Salamis, and here, on occasion of the quadrennial festival held in honour of the sea-god, the Æginetans seized the festal galley full of Athenian dignitaries. A defendant, in one of Lysias’s speeches, tells how he had “won in the trireme race off Sunium,” which was part of the panegyris. In Aristophanes the chorus of Knights cry out to “Poseidon, lord of horses, rejoicing in the bronze-shod hoof-beats and the neigh of steeds and swift blue prows of triremes,”—

“Come hither to our chorus,

Raise thy golden trident for us,

Thee at Sunium we praise

Whom the dolphin band obeys.”

SUNIUM
Temple of Poseidon. The Ægean Sea

To catalogue the ships, famous in Greek story, that have sighted or rounded this headland would cause to pass in review a mighty and a motley fleet. Nestor 163tells Telemachus how, sailing home with Menelaus from Troy, they lost their pilot,—

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

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

“O there I would I might be,

Where Sunium’s spreading foreland

Hangs over the surge of the sea,

That straightway our Athens, the holy,

Might be greeted and hailed by me.”

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

On the west coast of Attica the place of chief interest, in connection with Greek letters, is Vari, near the promontory of Zoster, where Mount Hymettus comes down to the sea. Herodotus tells us that the frightened Persians, escaping from Salamis, thought 164that the long rocks running out at Zoster were some more hostile ships and “went fleeing for a long distance” until they recognised their mistake. Some little distance inland on the side of Hymettus, back of the town of Vari, is a grotto dedicated to the Nymphs and also sacred to the Graces, to Pan, and to Apollo. There is a tradition that the infant Plato was taken to Hymettus by his parents, who there sacrificed on his behalf to Pan, the Nymphs and Apollo.

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

The ancestral hero of Salamis was Aias (“Ajax”), the son of Telamon. Pausanias saw a stone near the harbour upon which Telamon sat, as it was said, looking after his children departing to join the Greek fleet at Aulis. When Aias fell upon his sword before Troy 165the hyacinth, according to the usual tale, sprang up inscribed with the exclamation of woe “Ai! ai!” the first syllable of his name. But, as Pausanias would have it, a local flower, different from the hyacinth, made its appearance in Salamis inscribed with the same letters. Ajax, as was to be expected, appeared and offered divine aid to the Greeks at the battle of Salamis. In his honour the “Aianteia” festival was celebrated, and the young Athenian ephebi used to go over annually to contend at Salamis in friendly rivalry with the Salaminian youth in foot-races and in boat-races resembling those rowed from Munychia to the Cantharus harbour in Piræus. In addition to the Ajax traditions, here, as elsewhere, other sagas were invented or reshaped to give personification to the remote past and to be handed down to satisfy the pride of succeeding generations. Solon was a more tangible memory, and Demosthenes, in speaking of his statue standing in the market-place of Salamis, quotes the Salaminians as saying: “This statue was set up not yet fifty years ago.”

But the dominant memory evoked by the name of Salamis is, naturally, the defeat of the Persians in the narrow straits. For the Athenians everything was at stake. The wives and children who had not been sent to the Peloponnesus were on the island. Euripides, according to an enticing tradition, was born there at the time of the battle. Xerxes sat on his throne on the mainland to overawe disaffection and to watch the 166spectacle. He had no doubt as to the outcome. His fleet was numerous enough to allow him to detach the Egyptian squadron for guarding the narrow exit of the northwest channel and still to leave more ships than could be used for closing in the eastern approaches. The Greeks were thus hemmed in, and the unwilling allies from the Peloponnesus were forced to remain and give battle instead of withdrawing to the Isthmus. Themistocles, the great admiral, had his will.

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

“An island lies before the shores of Salamis;

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

Sea-swept, dance-loving Pan frequents.”

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

Beyond Psyttaleia and overlapping it is the long spit of land Cynosura (“Dog’s-tail”), like in name and shape to the promontory at Marathon. The result of the contest in this narrow channel is not so surprising as is the foresight of Themistocles and the courage of 167the Greeks in availing themselves with irresistible daring of the overconfidence of Xerxes. Æschylus’s account betrays the vivid memories of an actual eye-witness. The vessels took position by night. Across the desolated plain of Attica the new Day, “by white steeds drawn, her radiance fair to see, held all the land.” To the astonishment of the Persians, the Greeks, instead of fleeing, raised high their shout of happy omen, and Echo, mate of dance-loving Pan, “back from the island rock returned a shrill and pealing cry of joy.” The Persian messenger continues:—

“Fell fear on all of us barbarians, deceived

In expectation. For the Greeks a noble hymn

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

Starting for battle with courageous heart. And then

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

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

The brine and quickly all of them were visible.

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

Came out and on the armament entire. Aye then,

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

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

Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of gods

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

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

“Until the water was no longer to be seen,

With wreckage of slain men and splintered vessels packed.

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

Whether dead or alive the Persians found no refuge upon land. Aristides with his men, instead of the 168picked Persians, was now on Psyttaleia to save or to destroy. The chorus of Persian women, as they hear the news, imagine their dead now floating with the tide, now, like struggling swimmers, rising to the waves. The leader cries:—

“Woe, woe is me!

Our dear ones lost,

By the sea’s swell tossed

Their bodies, borne along the main,

Rise and dip, and rise again!”

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

“When rose the brilliant light of Helios, we see

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

With wrecks of ships and corpses of Achæan men.”

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

The “Persæ” of Timotheus, a sensational find of 169the year 1902, with its fantastic and overloaded epithets and the half-comic scene of the drowning Persian spitting out bitter brine and reproaches together, is a curious scholium upon Æschylus’s poem. The description of the dead upon the sea is thus retouched:—

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

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

It may be that the visitor to Salamis, as his little craft scuds swiftly home past Cynosura and Psyttaleia, sees the dark clouds, from which but now came rain, roll off towards Eleusis, while Attica, the islands, and the western mountains merge once more in the accustomed beauty of the translucent atmosphere. He may, 170perhaps, harbour the thought that under such a sky, when the war-clouds had finally withdrawn, the demesmen of country and of town came back to their devastated but ransomed Attica.

CHAPTER VIII ELEUSIS

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

Eleusis, like Delphi, was a centre of Greek religious life, but its Panhellenism was of a later date and a direct consequence of the power of Athens within whose territory it lay. Although the worship of nature’s productivity, under the form of Demeter losing her daughter Persephone within the earth and recovering her again, was indigenous among the early Pelasgic dwellers in Eleusis, and although upon this native cult were grafted religious beliefs and practices imported from Thrace, it is yet true that the Eleusinian Mysteries waxed famous only as Athens waxed great. Once established by the most powerful city of Greece as its highest expression of religious feeling, they drew 172to their modest birthplace in the recurring Septembers of many centuries the pious and the curious from all Greek lands. The right of initiation, originally open only to citizens of Attica, was extended to all Greeks and later to their Roman conquerors. In this repudiation of “barbarians” Eleusis resembled Olympia rather than Delphi, where Persian or Scyth or African might consult Apollo.

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

Except for the proximity of Eleusis to Athens there was nothing in the physical qualities of the town to make the Eleusinian mysteries greater than any others. 173Its loveliness befitted rather than promoted the worship of the Earth Goddesses. Their story clung also to the seaward looking ledges of “steep Cnidos,” where was found the noble statue of Demeter that is now in the British Museum, and to the blossoming fields of Sicilian Enna. The Corn-Mother had her shrines on Bœotian farms and in the mountain caverns of Arcadia, and in more than one locality her worship was as mysterious and secret as the processes of nature. And yet the religious genius of Athens could have had no more exquisite stage than Eleusis for its larger operations. Sheltered by hills, washed by the sea and commanding a goodly plain, it is still, even in its poverty, one of the fairest places in Greece. The Thriasian plain, in the southwestern portion of which, on a low hill, lies the town, is separated from the plain of Athens by the long ridge of Mount Ægaleus and from the plain of Megara by the chain of hills that ends in the twin peaks of the Kerata, or “Horns,” familiar objects in the westward view from the Acropolis of Athens. The mountains of Salamis also seem to contribute to the girdling of Eleusis, so near do they rise across the curving and almost landlocked bay. Empurpled by shadows, the mountains and the sea are like the deep blue robe of the mourning Demeter. Subdued to the delicate and luminous tint of the sky they seem like the veil within whose folds gleamed the cornlike yellow of her hair. Near the sea, close around Eleusis, there are still fertile grain fields to recall that—

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

In this theological poetry the position of power was held by the long Homeric Hymn to Demeter, although it antedates the presence of Iacchus at Eleusis and at least overlooks the importance of Triptolemus, the young prince of the city, to whom the Earth-Mother gave the first seed-corn and the commission to teach the art of husbandry throughout the world. The representation of this act was left for fifth century sculpture, if we may so interpret the beautiful relief discovered at Eleusis and preserved in the National Museum. 175Nor is there more than casual mention of Eumolpus, the legendary first priest and the eponymous ancestor of the priestly family in Athens which was charged with the care of Demeter’s worship. But the Hymn told flawlessly the central story of Demeter and Persephone: the ravishment of Persephone by Hades as she was picking roses and crocuses, violets and irises and the marvelous narcissus which the earth bore to be her snare; the grief of Demeter as she heard the mountain peaks and the deep sea echo her child’s cry, her wandering search, her unrecognised sojourn at fragrant Eleusis in the courteous household of the king, and her retarding of the fruits of the earth; the reunion of mother and daughter for two thirds of the year, and the sending up once more of the grain from the rich fields and the burgeoning of the leaves and flowers; and, finally, the command of the Goddess that the people of Eleusis should build her a great temple and an altar below the town and the steep wall, above the spring Callichorus on the jutting rock.

Homer himself had not known this story. Hesiod had lacked the Ionic gift to tell it. Euripides, in a later generation, was led astray by his strain of Orphic imagination which needed the roar of rivers and the thunder of the sea, the wail of flutes and the clatter of the tambourine to mark the frenzy of a suffering godhead. The Greeks as a people preferred a story in which nature perishes and blooms again, in which grief and love fight with death, while the dignity of life 176is unassailed, and the beauty of hills and sea, flowers and welling springs irradiates its tragedies.

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

The “Mysteries” lasted nine days, the time of Demeter’s wanderings. Prior to them the youths—ephebi—of Athens went to Eleusis and brought thence certain sacred objects which were to be used in the later procession. On the 15th of Boedromion, or September, near the time of sowing, the “mystæ,” who in the early spring month of Anthesterion, the season 177of planting, had participated in the Lesser Mysteries in a suburb of Athens, were assembled at the Stoa Pœcile to listen to sundry proclamations. The following day was one of purification. The cry went out, “seawards, O mystæ,” and every candidate washed himself and his sacrificial pig in the bay near Eleusis, following the Greek feeling that the sea purges from the evils of earth. For two more days sacrifices were carried on at Athens. And then on the 19th or the 20th came the great procession to escort the image of the child Iacchus, myrtle-crowned and carrying in his hand a torch, back to his Eleusinian home. The day was a public holiday. Great crowds gathered along the Sacred Way to watch the long line of ephebi, mystics, priests and officials, who, wearing myrtle and bearing torches, left the Dipylon Gate early in the morning and reached the precinct at Eleusis after nightfall, when the mysterious shadows were dispelled only by the yellow glare of thousands upon thousands of torches and by the lights that streamed from the sacred buildings.

The modern highroad follows very nearly the Sacred Way. Few travellers now brave the heat and dust of an Attic September, but in some “month of flowers” gain their impressions of the beauty of the road, which still leads over the Cephisus, past gray-green olive groves, up through the pine-clad pass of Mount Ægaleus, and down again to wind closely beside the curved shore of the sea. In antiquity the Sacred Way was 178lined with tombs and temples and shrines. Moderns are detained only by the lovely mediæval Convent of Daphne, at the top of the pass, but the ancient procession lingered not only at the Temple of Apollo which occupied this spot, but at many other sacred stations, to offer sacrifices, sing hymns, and engage in dances, solemn or joyous or wild. This was the reason for leaving Athens so early to cover only thirteen miles before another sunrise. The last part of the way followed the “torchlit strand” by night. The “voices of the night,” the moving feet of the multitude owned Iacchus as lord, with whom the stars also danced, the stars whose breath is fire. And to the stars of Sophocles Euripides added the elemental joy of moon and sea:—

OLIVE TREES ON THE WAY TO ELEUSIS

The singing of the vast throngs, breaking out at sunrise, changing its themes in fresh enthusiasms through the long day and swelling by night into triumphant volume, must have been unforgettable. Herodotus relates that in the gloomy time when Athens was abandoned, and its plain laid waste by Xerxes, even a Medizing exile was haunted by its ghostly echoes. 179Dicæus of Athens chanced to be in the Thriasian plain with Demaratus of Sparta, and saw a cloud of dust advancing from Eleusis, such as a host of thirty thousand men might raise. As he was wondering who the men could possibly be, a sound reached his ear and he thought that he recognised the mystic hymn of Iacchus. Even as they looked, the dust became a cloud and sailed away to Salamis, making for the station of the Grecian fleet. This was a sign to the Athenian that the gods of Eleusis would destroy the fleet of Xerxes. To us an echo of the singing comes through the serious lyrics in the “Frogs” of Aristophanes. At the portals of Hades a band of mystics sing over again the processional hymns they had often sung on earth, beginning with the sunrise summons to Iacchus to leave his Athenian shrine:—

The days at Eleusis were probably only pauses between the “great nights” of the worship of Demeter. The nightly proceedings seem to have consisted of three elements. The first was an imitation of Demeter’s 180wanderings. The initiates went up and down the shore by the sea, their restless torches appearing from a distance like great “swarms of fireflies.” They sat too upon the Joyless Rock, and by meditation endeavoured to enter into the passion of the Goddess. The second element was some sacrament of food and drink in commemoration of the fact that Demeter was finally persuaded by the merry Iambe to break her fast. Finally came a series of dramatic representations in the great Hall of Initiation, by means of which the divine story was unfolded.

It would be a mistake to suppose that if we knew more details about these celebrations we should understand more clearly the influence that they exerted on the minds and spirits of the celebrants. In the mysteries, we are assured by Aristotle, the initiates did not learn anything precisely, but received impressions, were put into a certain frame of mind for which they had been prepared. The value of subtle influences like these can never be apprehended save by those who have been subjected to them. In no age, under no sanction, have men been able to create sacred rites, whether secret or open, that could not be construed as mummery, not only by those of a different age but even by contemporaries who stood outside the circle of the elect. Were every “secret” of the Eleusinian Mysteries to be recovered, we should still be uninitiated into their higher wisdom. We should still be thrown back, as we are at present, upon a vicarious sympathy with those who 181have borne witness to the quickening of their spirits in the Eleusinian nights. Fortunately this testimony comes from a few of the most gifted among the Greeks. The often quoted statement of Cicero, that initiation taught men not only to live happily but to die with a fairer hope, only repeats what was said by his literary master, Isocrates: “Those who have participated in the mysteries possess sweeter hopes about death and about the whole of life.” Strangely enough, Æschylus, who was born in Eleusis and whose plays in later times were acted there because of their religious character, seems never to have been initiated. But Pindar and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes harboured personal hopes that those who knew the mysteries were “blessed” in the hour of death and in the life to come. In the “Frogs” the dead mystics end their song in solemn peace:—

The impulse that was derived from Eleusis to lead the earthly life aright must have had as many different results as there were temperaments among the initiates. Andocides, merchant and orator, reminded the Athenian 182judges that they had contemplated the sacred rites in order that they might punish the guilty and save the innocent. Plato felt that he whose memory of initiation was still fresh and who at Eleusis had been the spectator of “many glories in the other world” must see in every beautiful face or form that he encountered an imitation of divine or absolute beauty toward which his spirit would go out in reverential love.

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

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

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

The mysteries ended on the 24th, with a public festival. At Athens games were held, called the Eleusinia, offering as a prize a measure of barley reaped from the field of Rharos close to the walls of Eleusis where the first seed corn had fructified. In later times, with the general increase of holidays, this festival was prolonged, but in the greatest days of Athens the procession of mystics returned to the city on the 25th, with ceremonies of farewell to Persephone now leaving her mother to return to her gloomy lord, like summer nearing the embrace of winter; and with some final ritual, performed, it may be, at the Dipylon Gate rather than at Eleusis, of prayer to sky and earth that the one might impregnate and the other bear. On the curb of a sacred 184well before the city gate has been found the very ancient formula, not yet outlived by the generations of men who live upon the fruits of the earth.

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

But with the crossing of the bridge the mood vanishes. The western sun is once more adorning the Athenian Acropolis. Not only Pindar and Plato faced this hill with a new reverence after their Eleusinian nights, but many a simpler man and woman must have come home comforted and hopeful to take up old burdens on the morrow. If, viewed by a Plato from the heights of “true philosophy,” thousands who came 185from Eleusis were still blind, or only partially aware of the meaning of life and death, this was but the Greek manifestation of a universal fact: “Many are the thyrsus-bearers but few are the mystics.”

CHAPTER IX ÆGINA

“Not far off from the Graces’ favour falls this island’s lot. She keepeth civic faith and hath attained to glory in the valour of the sons of Æacus. Flawless is her fame from the beginning; for she is sung as nurse of heroes, foremost in prize-winning contests numerous, foremost in swift war.”

Pindar’s praise of Ægina must have been as wormwood to the Athenians, for her Dorian blood and commercial supremacy made her their natural rival, and her proximity fanned rivalry into hatred. Athens conquered in the end, and time and tourists have completed the victory by turning the island into one of the “excursions in Attica.” No longer the “eye-sore of Piræus,” as Pericles called it, it now immeasurably enhances the Attic landscape and beckons to its own shores those who day by day have watched its mountainous beauty across the estranging gulf. Only on the western side of the island, where the town of Ægina occupies the site of the ancient capital, is the coast free from steep cliffs, and the entire surface, as it is seen from Athens, consists of mountain-ridges crowned by the high peak of Oros, once sacred to Zeus Panhellenios and now bearing a chapel to Saint Elias. Toward these Æginetan hills the eye inevitably turns 187whether the sullen rain-clouds are gathering, as of old, about the highest summit, or Zeus unrolls his bluest canopy above the deeper azure of their slopes, or whether, against the changing sunsets, they darken into stormy purple or delicately veil themselves in amethystine, shot with rose.

Ægina’s lodestone for modern travellers is the Doric temple on a hill above the Bay of Marina in the northeastern part of the island. Regular boats ply between Piræus and the harbour-town of Ægina, the route taken by Lucian’s group of friends who hired a tiny boat at four obols a head in order to see the islanders celebrating their famous Festival of Hecate. From the town the temple may be reached by a ride of several hours across the rough but fertile northern districts of the island. Excursion boats, however, for those who have but a day, cross directly from Piræus to the Bay of Marina, a route more nearly akin to that followed by the Athenian ships which began the mad expedition to Sicily by a race “as far as Ægina,” and then turned their prows toward the open sea. From the shore of the bay it is an easy walk to the isolated hill-top upon which the ruined temple stands. On an April day this approach is one of vivid beauty, the bright new green of fig trees glistening among resinous pines and the ground rioting in the colour of many flowers. The hill-top itself offers a scene which is unsurpassed even among the remoter islands of the Greek seas. The intense brilliance of the very white marble columns 188under the cloudless sky is tempered by the somewhat sombre green of neighbouring trees. Afar are seen the broken coast and the varied mountains of the mainland from Megara to Sunium. Below, in capricious loveliness, now a tranquil plain of ultramarine, now a restless surface of sparkling crystal, stretches the Saronic Gulf.

The temple was erected to Aphæa, protectress of women. Of the outer colonnade enough is intact to reveal the dignity of the original structure, but it was in the pediment sculptures that the art of Ægina was best expressed. Preserved now in the Munich Museum, they are heirs to the ancient fortune of many Æginetan products which were shipped to the north and to the south, to Egypt and to the barbarous shores of the Black Sea. These pediment groups, well known as examples of the work of the Æginetan school of sculpture in the early part of the fifth century, probably represented episodes of the Trojan War. This would seem to indicate that they were produced after the victory at Salamis which inspired so many symbolistic expressions in art and literature of the conquest of barbarians by Greeks. Ægina distinguished herself at Salamis, her sailors being awarded the first honours for valour. And her older heroes had fought conspicuously in the Trojan War, the earlier act of the long drama.

ÆGINA
Temple of Aphæa

But it was the personal bravery of the Æginetans rather than their national policy which brought them 189glory at Salamis. The island-commonwealth was inclined to aid the Persians, and it was the interference of Athens at this crisis which brought on the open war between the two maritime powers. By the middle of the fifth century Ægina was completely conquered and made a member of the Confederacy of Delos. Twenty years later the Dorian inhabitants were expelled and the island freshly settled from Attica.

Ægina’s heyday had antedated that of Athens by two centuries. Her argosies had been known in all ports where men bought or sold. Her system of coinage and of weights and measures had set the standards for the Greek world. At home her people displayed their restless energies in both industrial and artistic pursuits. In literature alone were they barren. Their claim to poetry lies only in the inspiration which one manifestation of their energy yielded to a foreign poet.

The Æginetans were remarkable athletes as well as fighters, and Pindar boasted that he held up a mirror to their noble deeds, and wrought for them a necklace of the Muses, “with white ivory and gold inlaid and coral of the lily flower gathered ’neath the ocean dew.” The young Pytheas, indeed, who won the pancratium at Nemea, was celebrated by both Pindar and Bacchylides, and in the ode of the latter poet there lurks the memory of some spring visit to Ægina when the young flowers and reeds were made into garlands, and bare-footed girls bounded like young fawns toward the flowery hills. Pindar, in the eleven extant odes which he 190wrote for Æginetan youths, mingled a “fitting draught as meed for their toil upon the highway clear of god-inspired deeds.” His willingness to use his best gifts in their behalf he explained by the ancient friendship between the island and his native city, typified by the sisterhood of the nymphs Thebe and Ægina, both beloved by Zeus. And although he praised the athletic spirit of the Æginetans and their justice, their defence of strangers, and the deliverance wrought by them at Salamis “when Zeus was showering destruction far and wide and death came thick as hail upon unnumbered men,” his most frequent theme was the glory of their legendary heroes.

The nymph Ægina had borne Æacus, who was so just a king that at his death the gods made him a judge in Hades. His sons were Peleus and Telamon, their sons were Achilles and Ajax and Teucer.

Lords of wide adventure, they drifted away from Ægina’s shores. Teucer, son of Telamon, ruled in Cyprus, a new land, and Ajax held the Salamis of his father. Peleus ruled in Thessalian Pthia. In the Euxine Sea Achilles won a “shining isle,” and his son was prince in “Epirus, famed afar, where, from Dodona on, the cattle-pasturing headlands, jutting high, lie out against 191the Ionian Sea.” But at the invocation of Pindar they gather once more in their ancient home.

Nor was the significance of human greatness absent from Pindar’s mind:—

Thus to a youth of Ægina who was lifted on the wings of hope and valour the poet gave a warning and a larger hope.

CHAPTER X MEGARA AND CORINTH—THE GULF OF CORINTH

“Cities which were great aforetime now as a rule are mean, and those formerly were small which in my day have become great. Therefore, since I know that human prosperity never remains stationary, of both alike I shall make mention.”

On the neck of land that unites Attica to the Peloponnesus two Dorian cities attained to prominence in the centuries intervening between Homeric civilization and the rivalries of Sparta and Athens, those great representatives of the Dorian and Ionian races who reduced all other cities to the position of allies or satellites. Only before the middle of the sixth century were Corinth and Megara powers of the first rank.

They are now stations on the way to Athens for those who enter Greece at Patras. The railroad journey between these cities, along the coasts of the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs, ought to be taken in one direction or the other by every visitor to Greece, for scarcely any other displays to better advantage the combination of mountain, plain, and sea, which are the triad of Greek landscape. The waters of the Corinthian Gulf, in swift response to sun, wind, and cloud, vary from pellucid blue to vivid, foam-flecked emerald, marked by strange 193bands of deep wine red. Along its northern coast the mountains pile up in restrained and harmonious masses of blue or purple, crowned in winter or in spring with snowy white. At times the west wind from the ocean sweeps up this long narrow gulf as if through a cañon, beating the waves into fury and filling the air with cold moisture, even while the sun or the moon denies the presence of a storm. On the other side of the Isthmus the Saronic Gulf pushes far asunder the coasts of Attica and the Peloponnesus and skirts on the north the littoral of Megara. From its placid evening surface the mountains of Ægina and Salamis rise in curves and sharp peaks of cool violet and rose. Beyond the Bay of Eleusis the eye that has not yet seen Athens turns inland in strained waiting for the Acropolis. Rising out of a still distant plain and bearing upon its crest the half-realized ruins of the Parthenon, the hill of the pilgrim’s desires becomes a reality—“and from a dream, behold, it is a waking vision.”

This journey, of scarcely eight hours, serves also to reveal a surprising amount of Greek territory. Taking it in the reverse direction, the train passes through Attica, Megara, the Isthmus and Argolis, and follows the entire northern coast line of Achæa. The mountains across the Corinthian Gulf include not only Helicon and Cithæron of Bœotia, and Parnassus of Phocis, but also unfamiliar peaks, barren of the Muses, belonging to Locris, Ætolia, and Acarnania. From Patras can be seen the low coast of the Ætolian bay 194on which lies Mesolonghi, the burial-place of Byron’s heart. Near it, although unseen from Patras, is Calydon, the scene of Meleager’s boar hunt, celebrated by Homer and Bacchylides, Euripides and Swinburne.

Patras, the western seaport of Greece and surpassed in commercial importance only by Athens and Piræus, is in Achæa. The name of this province evokes Homeric memories only because it was settled by Achæans from Thessaly. Its chief contribution to Greek life lay in the “Achæan League” against Rome which, as Pausanias says, rose on the ruins of Greece “like a fresh shoot on a blasted and withered trunk.” Patras itself was unimportant until the time of Augustus, and its most valuable associations are with the early history of Christianity. In physical beauty, however, it is thoroughly Greek—“beautiful Patras,” Lucian called it, by way of contrast to the knavishness of one of its inhabitants. The epithet doubtless included not only the adornments added by the Roman emperors but also the natural charms of its situation. The fruitful plain, the height of Mount Voïdia in the background, the splendid waterfront facing the mountainous Ætolian coast combine to give a suitable welcome to Greece. This entrance is never fairer than in the hour when the silver gray of dawn is obliterated by the clear bloom in the sky that heralds the rising sun. The morning light reveals outlines in naked distinctness, and tinges all surfaces with a colour so fresh and buoyant that an immediate conviction arises of the joyous nobility of 195Greek scenery and of the youthfulness which a race so nurtured might maintain.

The plain of Megara is separated from Attica by the Kerata and from the Isthmus by Mount Geraneia, a massive range extending across the Megarian territory from the Corinthian to the Saronic Gulf and interposing a rough and lofty bulwark between Central Greece and the Peloponnesus.

Megara is now an unpretentious village with very white houses which gleam from a distance among the encircling mountains. Its site is that of the ancient city, on the double summit of a hill above the plain filled with vineyards, olive orchards, and bright green fields of wheat, rye and barley. A good road leads to the coast, little more than a mile away, where once the harbour of Nisæa focused the large sea business of Megara. The name of the harbour kept alive the memory of Nisus, son of Athenian Pandion, the first king of Megara (the Ionians perhaps preceded the Dorians in its occupation), as the “island of Minoa,”^[23] now the promontory of St. George, recalled the invasion by Minos of Crete. The king’s daughter, out of love for his enemy, betrayed her father. The chorus in the “Choëphoroi” of Æschylus uses the story as a warning to Clytemnestra:—

The history of Megara was influenced now by Athens and now by Corinth. At times neighbourhood quarrels with Corinth turned her toward Athens, but in crises the bonds of race proved stronger. Her great epoch, however, was in the eighth and seventh centuries, before the balance of power had been shifted by the Athenian conquest of Salamis. During these centuries Megara rivalled Corinth in colonial expansion, and from Nisæa adventurers set sail to found Megara Hyblæa in Sicily, Heraclea on the Euxine, and above all Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which long before its christening as Constantinople had forgotten its mother city.

In arts and letters Megara’s achievements were slight, although tradition assigned to her the creation of comedy. Only one of her poets, Theognis, belongs to our canon of Greek literature. A contemporary of Solon, he exhibited the same tendency to use poetry as a medium of political discussion, but he was totally opposed to the democratic influences which in his city, as elsewhere, were making headway against the aristocracy. Oligarchy and tyranny had been succeeded by this larger struggle. Although Theognis was in the thick of the fight, his wide influence in later centuries 197was due rather to his sententious utterances on ethics, which classed him with the “gnomic poets.” Xenophon called the poetry of Theognis “a comprehensive treatment concerning men,” and as such it was used with the works of Homer and Hesiod in the educational system of fourth-century Athens. Moderns will find in the extant fragments little of the power which saves a poet’s politics and ethics from becoming in a later age either outworn or commonplace. But in the public square of the village, the old hillside market-place, we acquire a sympathy for his personal life and his love of home. Here he stood and looked down upon the fields of his confiscated estates, wasted in the riotous living of new masters. The shrill cry of a bird, announcing the autumnal harvests, reminded him that no longer for him were mules drawing the curved plough through the furrows. The sea, lying at the door of Megara, bore him into exile, and with Alcæus and Plato (and their Roman and modern imitators) he likened the State to a ship in danger, sailed by an evil crew, threatened by leaping waves.

In the Persian wars Megara made a brave show, sinking all animosity toward Athens in the great need of Hellas. But fifty years later a bitter quarrel with Athens became one of the precipitating causes of the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians had passed a decree excluding the Megarians from their markets and from all the harbours in their dominions. The Spartans demanded its revocation, and the Athenians, 198influenced by Pericles, refused. Opinions differed as to his disinterestedness. In the judgment of Thucydides he was moved solely by reasons of state. The more popular opinion that he was involved by Aspasia in a scandalous affair affecting both cities appears in Aristophanes, who also does not fail to see the comic side of a situation which forced the impoverished Megarians to work their way secretly into the Athenian markets bringing cucumbers and sucking pigs and garlic under their cloaks. The later comic poets made a butt of the Megarians, and the Megarian’s sneer about the Athenian figs and Propylæa was doubtless only one of many retorts.

After the Peloponnesian War we have a happier picture of Megara as the home of philosophy. Plato in his first grief over the death of his master went there to visit Eucleides, who had been wont to creep into Athens by night, in defiance of the decree, to talk with Socrates. And from the vivid opening scene of the “Theætetus,” a severely metaphysical dialogue written a few years later, we know that Eucleides and his philosophical friends used to meet each other in the market-place (where now the peasant women dance at Easter) or go to the harbour to greet a friend en route from Corinth to Athens, or gather at home for readings and conversations. Isocrates praised in Megara a domestic prosperity finer than the lust for empire which had ruined Athens and Sparta.

The Megarians shared the Greek lot at Chæronea. 199The later fate of the city is summed up in the reflections of the Roman governor, Sulpicius, who, coming from Ægina, gazed at its ruins from his vessel’s prow and argued from them the brevity of human glory.

In antiquity travellers by land made their way from Megara to Corinth either over the difficult heights of Geraneia or close along the shore of the Saronic Gulf. The railroad follows the direction of this coast route, and from a high bridge the old road can be seen below, skirting the foot of the precipices in which the spurs of Geraneia end. These precipices crowd so close to the sea that the space for the road is exceedingly narrow, and the resulting dangers gave to the pass in modern days the name of Kake Skala. Even in the nineteenth century robbers made use of the natural difficulties of the site as they did in Roman times. Hadrian thought it important to widen the road as much as possible. To the ancients the steep precipices were known as the Scironian Cliffs, and the Athenian story ran that a robber, Sciron, dwelt beside them and hurled every wayfarer into the sea, where a huge tortoise devoured him. Theseus killed the villain and threw him down to his old ally. The sea that surged below the road took its own toll of travellers. Among the unfortunates in the fifth century one was either rich or distinguished enough to have an inscription by Simonides upon his cenotaph:—

This spot of frequent shipwrecks had also its sea deities. The Moluriad Rock, a part of the Scironian Cliffs, was the scene of Ino’s payment of her share in the curse laid upon her father, Cadmus of Thebes. Chased by an angry husband down the mountain ridges, she plunged into the sea with her infant son Melicertes, or, as Euripides said, in comparing her to Medea, with two children in her arms:—

Ino became Leucothea, the kindly goddess of Odysseus’s journey, and Melicertes became Palæmon, the Greek representative of the Phœnician Melkart, worshipped on the Isthmus. To them, in the Anthology, sailors prayed on their way to the “sweet shore of 201Piræus” and fishermen dedicated strange sea creatures that came up in their nets or were found upon the shore.

The train keeps on its way by the Saronic Gulf, crosses the canal on a bridge and reaches New Corinth on the Corinthian Gulf.

The destiny of Corinth was so peculiarly the result of its situation that to describe the one is to foreshadow the other. Aristotle might have illustrated by this city the physical qualities which he considered desirable. It had “a native abundance of streams and fountains” to promote health, and its acropolis was one of the strongest in Greece. Most of all, it was “well situated in regard both to sea and land.” Thus it was “a strategic centre for protecting the whole district,” and was “convenient for receiving the crops and also for the bringing in of timber and any other natural products.” Corinth commanded two ports, one on either side of the Isthmus, and stood also at the entrance to the Peloponnesus. As “god-built portal of the bright island of Pelops” she controlled the land routes for the exports and imports of southern Greece, and as a city “of two seas” she was mistress of the trade of the far east and the far west. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War she urged the Dorian allies to remember that if they did not protect her seaboard they would find it difficult to carry their produce to the sea or to barter in return for the goods which the sea gives 202to the land. Already in Homer Corinth was “rich,” and her later history was one of commerce, colonization, invention, and the arts and crafts rather than of literature. For that reason the pathos of her present desolation is unrelieved by thoughts of a rescued legacy.

New Corinth, lying close to the shore of the Gulf, several miles from the ancient western harbour, is a town of hopeful energy and ambition, its railroad station and steamboat quay indicating a potential capacity for growth. Old Corinth, three and a half miles inland, consists of a few poor houses unified into a certain village dignity by a great plane tree that shadows the “public square.” These houses have gathered near the spot to which tourists make their way on foot or by carriage from the seashore town. Before the excavations of the American School were begun in 1896, they came in order to ascend the massive rock of Acrocorinth and to see the remaining monoliths of a Doric temple which antedates the classical period of Greek architecture. The excavations have added sites deserving of close attention, but without effect on the general features of the landscape. Acrocorinth rules the Isthmian plain, and its summit offers an outlook, from Strabo’s time the theme of many panegyrics, over wide-flung country and sea to the mountain crests of Delphi and Arcadia, of Attica and Bœotia. The plateau on the north and east of this acropolis was the site of the ancient city. Apollo’s columns, which saw its greatest 203power and have withstood its successive blights, alone compete with the impressiveness of the citadel. Seated on the steps of the temple and watching the mists break away from the impatient heights of Acrocorinth, we may recount to ourselves the tale “of Corinth blest, the vestibule of Isthmian Poseidon, nurse of manly splendour.”

CORINTH
Temple of Apollo, and Acrocorinth

The diversity of legends concerning the pre-Dorian origin of Corinth illustrates the hospitality of the Greek mind toward incompatible stories. Ephyre, daughter of Ocean, in Homer gave her name to the city. Sisyphus, the son of Æolus, the son of Hellen, was introduced as founder in the effort to trace historical development. The Corinthians themselves set great store by an eponymous hero, Corinthus, the son of Zeus. Their reiteration of this exasperating claim became proverbial among the other Greeks. When the Aristophanic Dionysus arrives in Hades and bids his servant take up the wraps again and carry them inside, Xanthias exclaims:—

Sisyphus and his descendants owe a long debt to the poets, if posthumous fame be a recompense for vicissitudes. Sisyphus was found by Odysseus in Hades in “strong torment,” pushing a monstrous stone up the hill only to have it roll back again. A great-great-grandson fought among the Lycians on Priam’s side at Troy and, questioned by Diomede of his ancestry, made the 204famous comparison which betrays the melancholy already lurking in the youth of Hellas:—

He also told the story of his grandfather, Bellerophon of Corinth: his refusal of a queen’s love, his hard labours in punishment, his rise to fame and power, and his ultimate failure to retain the favour of the gods, so that he ended his life far from the paths of men, devouring his own heart in desolate northern plains. Pindar took up the Homeric legend and shifted the emphasis to the winged Pegasus, tamed by Bellerophon, with Athena’s aid, at Peirene, the city fountain, and finally stabled in the stalls of Olympus, after he had aided his master “from out the desert bosom of the ether chill” to “smite and slay the woman brood of archer Amazons, Chimæra breathing fire, and the Solymi.”

In the history of Corinth two periods are of special interest and might serve as the bases for a study of important epochs in the larger history of Greece. These periods, separated by more than four hundred years, were dominated respectively by the “tyrants” and the Romans.

Although historians now avoid the restrictive term “age of the despots,” it is true that from the eighth 205to the sixth centuries tyrannies arose in Greek cities on the Asiatic coast, on the islands of the Ægean, and in Greece proper, implying the same conditions of public life. The tyranny of Corinth, beginning with Cypselus in the seventh century and ending with his grandnephew, Psammetichus, in the sixth, was one of the longest and most notorious. Any tyranny which endured until the third generation was remarkable, for, in spite of its apparent vigour, this form of government was suited to no Greek people. Everywhere democracy and oligarchy were united in hatred of an hereditary ruler. In Athens the short-lived despotism was itself greatly modified, and the picture of the tyrant in Athenian literature, in Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon, was drawn from the more violent models known from the histories of Corinth or Sicyon or Miletus, or seen contemporaneously in Syracuse. Plato not only as a philosopher but as a Greek interpreted the tyrant’s life as one of mental misery: “In good truth he turns out a pauper, if one but knows how to contemplate the soul in its entirety; and all his life long he is loaded down with fear, all a-quiver with convulsions and with pangs, at least if he is like the disposition of the state over which he holds sway, ... and he must needs, by reason of his rule, ever more and more become envious, distrusted, unjust, friendless, unholy, and of every vice the host and nurse; and by reason of all this he must first of all become unhappy and then must make like to himself those near him.”

206In Corinth Periander was the typical despot, powerful and violent, killing his wife and earning the hatred of his sons, overriding the sensibilities of his people, crushing the stronger and richer citizens. And yet by masterly statesmanship, a cultivated taste, and careful paternalism, he brought about the peaceful prosperity which more than one nation in history has preferred to liberty, and created a civilization in which brilliant achievement and temperate life were not incompatible. At no other time was Corinth so great a city. In addition to the older colonies of Syracuse and Corcyra, trading posts were obtained along the northwestern coast of Greece, controlling the commerce of the Adriatic. Rivalry with the cities of Eubœa and with Ægina was succeeded by unquestioned superiority. Alliances were contracted in Asia Minor and in Egypt. At home the enervation of luxury was guarded against by sumptuary laws. That some of these outlived the period may be gathered from a fragment of the comic poet Diphilus, a contemporary of Menander, in which, apparently, a Corinthian reproaches a foreign spendthrift who has come to town and cornered the vegetable market so that the natives have to struggle for the parsley as at the Isthmian games:—

Periander also, desirous, as Aristotle suggests, of keeping his people too busy to think, stimulated the artistic skill which they had always possessed. A persistent tradition has asserted that Corinthian architects at an early date invented the roof-tiles by means of which temple roofs could be made to slope, thus forming the pediment or “eagle.” The Temple of Apollo was probably built at Periander’s instigation. Corinthian workmanship in terra-cotta, wood, and metal was famous from prehistoric to Roman times. Periander dedicated at Olympia the chest (cypsele) in which his father Cypselus had been concealed in infancy, made of cedar wood, gold, and ivory, ornately and exquisitely carved, in Pausanias’s time still one of the finest sights of the place. No bronze was better than that dipped in Peirene, and long before the vases of Corinthian artists were imported or stolen by Roman capitalists they were a part of the conventional display of the bon vivant in Athens.

In literature Periander could accomplish little. The absence of the literary gift among the Corinthians is strikingly shown by the fact that the name of only one native poet, Eumelus, has been handed down to us, and that he belonged to the ancient oligarchy of the eighth century. Two lyric lines traditionally assigned 208to him survive, the only fragment of Corinthian literature. Their imputed authorship indicates that Eumelus was not without fame, since the Doric Messenians, even less literary than the Corinthians, chose him to compose a song to Apollo to be sung by their embassy at the great Ionian festival at Delos. But embedded in the most important literature of Greece is an element which probably came into life in Corinth under Periander’s patronage. The choruses of the drama and the so-called dithyrambs or Dionysiac songs written by such lyric poets as Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides, seem equally to go back to some outgrowth of the stray wine-songs extemporized by revellers. A favourite tradition assigned this new form to a poet called Arion, who, though a Lesbian by birth, “composed, named, and taught the dithyramb at Corinth.” Herodotus adds a story which takes Arion out of the mists of tradition and places him, a sunlit figure, on the quarter-deck of a Corinthian ship rounding Cape Tænarum on its way back from Sicily. He had gone thither and made money, and on the return journey the Corinthian sailors, in whom he had thought he could most safely confide, gave him his choice of killing himself outright, if he wished a grave on dry land, or of leaping overboard into the Ionian Sea. In this strait Arion “begged of them, since such was their determination, that they would give him leave to take his stand dressed in his full regalia on the quarter-deck, and promised that from there he would sing to them and then would make 209away with himself. To the sailors it seemed a pleasant thing if they might hear the best of living singers, and from the stern they drew off amidships. And Arion, clad in his full costume, took his cithara and, stationed on the planking, went through with the Orthian strain, and, when the strain was concluded, flung himself into the sea, just as he was, in full costume dressed. Now the ship’s crew sailed off to Corinth, but a dolphin, as they say, took up Arion and carried him to Tænarum and he, alighting, went off, regalia and all, to Corinth and told, on his arrival, everything that had befallen.”

Periander’s successor was assassinated after a brief reign, and the tyranny was succeeded by an aristocracy of merchants. Corinth joined the Spartan confederacy, and her life continued to be one of commerce and peace. Her part in the Persian wars was modest, but a recently discovered commemorative inscription for her sons who died at Salamis is of peculiar interest as an example of the “many epitaphs composed by nameless authors in those days of joy and sorrow in various parts of Greece, all marked by the simplicity of a great age, whose reserve, as has been said truly, is the pride of strong men under the semblance of modesty.” The inscription runs: “Salamis the isle of Ajax holds us now, who once dwelled in the city of Corinth between her waters.”^[24]

The brilliant and varied energies of the Cypselids 210had given way to the dulness of habitual prosperity. But a light from the past must have seemed to shine again upon Corinth when Pindar, “sailing a mere private in her ship of state,” drew upon the wealth of all her experiences in praising her as the native city of an Olympian victor:—

Thirty-three years after Pindar’s ode Euripides produced his “Medea.” This is the only Attic drama which has Corinth as its scene, and in it the local allusions are but vague. Until the writing of St. Paul’s epistles no other great literature concerned itself with Corinth.

The city’s policies and life from the Persian wars until the battle of Chæronea, though dictated by its trading interests, centred about the fortunes of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. After Chæronea followed the common Macedonian domination. The subsequent Roman occupation of Corinth constitutes the second 211great period of its history. In 146 B. C. a last effort at rebellion against Rome resulted in savage vengeance executed by Lucius Mummius. Cicero was “moved” by the “ruins” of Corinth; and Antipater of Sidon, not long after the destruction, bewailed its desolation:—

The existence of the temple of Periander’s age, if nothing else, betrays the poet’s exaggeration. Pausanias says that the remarkable objects in the city of his day included “some remains of ancient Corinth.” Most of them, however, dated from the restoration. Julius Cæsar rebuilt the city, repopulated it with freedmen from Rome, and made it the seat of the proconsul of the “province of Achæa.” Corinth is the proper centre from which to study the Romanized Greek world. In wealth the Roman city began to equal and to outstrip the Greek city. But the old moderation in private life, imposed by Periander, was gone. The Romans of the empire had outlived the precepts of their own republican Cato, and the riches easily acquired at Corinth enabled them to satisfy their coarsened desires. Greek refinement was never native to the masters 212of the world, and into a nation, once satisfied at public festivals with beautiful processions and serious dramatic representations, were imported gladiatorial shows and all the excesses of a brutalized taste. The Greek Corinth had been regarded by the Athenians as rich and immoral. The Roman Corinth would have seemed to Plato a cave filled with passion-driven men lost to the sunlight of wisdom. It was into this Corinth that Paul came “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.”

Acrocorinth saw the Roman pass and the Byzantine, the Venetian and the Turk. It may again see in “New Corinth” a powerful Greek city. The excavations at Old Corinth have uncovered but slight traces of the successive centuries of robust living, but the imaginative observer will soon perceive the archæologist’s success. Although the harbours of Lechæum and Cenchreæ are deserted and although the walls that connected them with the city are invisible, yet there are traces of a “paved street to Lechæum” with colonnades on either side, to bring to life again the crowds of sailors, merchants, and visitors from all parts of the ancient world who passed and repassed between the city and its ports. Aristotle, with characteristic distrust of cosmopolitanism, questioned the political advantage of such intercourse, but to Corinth it was the breath of life.

The trade within the city is suggested by the traces of “shops” and by the ruins of the Propylæum of the 213Agora and of fine colonnades and stoas. Of buildings almost nothing remains, and, save for the foundations of a small unidentified temple, the Temple of Apollo alone represents the numerous sacred precincts of ancient and restored Corinth. The scanty ruins of a theatre recall picturesque stories. The Corinthian theatre of the sixth century, according to Plutarch, was the scene of the discovery of the murderers of the poet Ibycus, an important figure in the history of Greek lyric. A native of Rhegium, he led an adventurous life in harmony with his passionate temperament, and was finally killed by robbers on some lonely unknown shore. In dying he called upon a flock of cranes above his head to avenge him. Their sudden appearance over the theatre at Corinth so startled the assassins that they betrayed themselves, and thus the cranes kept their promise to a poet who had sung with equal ardour of birds and flowers and of the beauty of youth. In the Roman auditorium, according to a story attributed to Lucian, Nero had his servants crush in with the sharp edges of their writing tablets the larynx of a popular professional who had the temerity to out-sing the royal amateur.

Lucian also tells a delightful story connected with the Craneum—Skull Place—a frequented suburb of Corinth, where Diogenes the Cynic had set up his jar (not the “tub” of English tradition). When the news came that Philip of Macedon was advancing on the city, the Corinthians, in a fever of anxiety, set to 214work on their defences. Diogenes, mocking their activity, girded up his blanket, and with a great show of energy went bowling his jar up and down the Craneum. When some of his intimates asked him “Why do you do this, Diogenes?” he said, “I too roll my jar so as not to be the only idle one among so many workers.”

The most fortunate result of the excavations at Corinth was the uncovering of the well-house of Peirene. This spring, compared with which the temple columns are young, shared with Acrocorinth the ancient solitude of the plain; gave its waters to the first nameless adventurers who made their way from north and east; served the city of Dorians and Romans; and before the excavators enclosed it was still being used by the washer-women of the neighbouring hamlet. From Periander to the Byzantines, the grateful inhabitants were ever and again moved to build for Peirene a suitable enclosure, and traces of six building periods have been discovered. In the fifth century B. C. the natural rock was hewn into shape. Later generations added architectural panels, façades and colonnades.

The name Peirene seems to have belonged not only to the city fountain but also to another spring, crystal clear, a little below the summit of Acrocorinth, which, like Hippocrene on Helicon, was struck out by the hoof of Pegasus. In a translation of Euripides’s “Trojan Women,” Mr. Murray goes beyond his original in specifying this upper Peirene, vividly including in the 215women’s dread anticipation of their Greek slavery the steep climb up Acrocorinth:—

Two other fountains have also been discovered in Corinth, one the spring of Glauke, Medea’s rival, and the other an unnamed well-house with bronze lion heads still in situ. It is no wonder that St. Clement in his epistle to the Corinthians, when he enumerated the blessings of God, remembered especially the perennial fountains, shaped for pleasure and health, which give their breasts to sustain the life of men.

The canal across the Isthmus recalls several periods of Corinth’s history. Periander conceived the idea of making a canal, inspired perhaps by the engineering marvels he had seen in Egypt, and probably the lack of slave labour, rather than the popular Greek feeling of impiety, prevented him from joining the “two seas” on either side of the narrow isthmus. Julius Cæsar also thought of undertaking the work, but Nero was the first to begin its execution. His vanity saw in it an opportunity for dramatic display. Suetonius relates that he appeared in person, chanted hymns in honour of the deities of the sea, and with a golden pick-axe made a few motions before the thousands of soldiers and prisoners who were to do the cutting. Troubles at Rome, however, deflected his attention, and the making 216of the canal was left for the French engineers of 1881. Two cuttings made by Nero’s workmen were still visible when the French began.

The absence of a canal in antiquity was not so inconvenient as might be supposed, for light ships could be transferred on land from one port to another by means of a portage or tramway, of which traces are still visible. This “Diolkos” was invented even before the age of the tyrants, when the Corinthians were first developing their naval resources. At Lechæum they built the first artificial harbour, and at its docks the trireme was gradually perfected through the necessity of protecting the slow and heavy merchantmen by a fighting convoy. Thucydides refers to the Diolkos in describing the events of 412 B. C., when a general revolt against Athens began under Chios. The Spartans had sent word that thirty-nine ships lying at anchor at Lechæum must be dragged across the Isthmus as quickly as possible to the port on the Gulf of Ægina and thence despatched to Chios. Twenty-one had been transferred and were eager to set sail, but the Corinthians insisted on waiting till the Isthmian Games had been celebrated. The result was that the Athenians who went to the games discovered what was going on and Athens was able to balk her enemies.

The Isthmian Games were held biennially in the Corinthian territory less than a mile southwest of the little modern town of Isthmia, at the eastern end of the canal. The Athenians frequented them especially 217because they were said to have been instituted by Theseus. Socrates visited them on the only occasion of his leaving Athens “except with the colours.” The sacred precinct, excavated by the French, has yielded small remains of the temples and statues, theatre and stadium, and Pindar’s Isthmian odes are still the noblest memorial of the ancient contests. In the Stadium, now but a natural hollow, two dramatic events took place. In 336 B. C. Alexander had himself proclaimed leader of the Greeks before his Persian expedition, and in 196 B. C. Flaminius announced to the Greeks their “freedom.” It was probably also here, at least it was at the Isthmian Games, that Nero perpetrated his mocking renewal of Greek independence.

In this Stadium, within reach of the two seas which had been highways for wealth and luxury, vigorous youths from century to century gave proof of restrained and temperate living. Even those Corinthians to whom Paul’s preaching was “foolishness” would be hospitable to his illustration:—

“Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.”

CHAPTER XI DELPHI

If leisure is the nurse of sympathetic understanding, “three radiant courses of the sun” are none too many to give to Delphi. The inner meaning of this centre of Greece needs not only to be quarried out of history and literature, but also to be garnered from the abundant beauty of a landscape which created as well as framed a unique religious life.

At the chief oracular seat of the God of Prophecy antiquarian curiosity about its early legends and primitive cults makes way for the realization of Apollo, “the Far-Darter, ruling the glorious temple wherein all men find welcome.” A modern journey is a successor to the journeys and pilgrimages undertaken through many centuries by the men and peoples who sought from his omniscience foreknowledge and advice.

Even the protagonists of shadowy antiquity were brought thither by their hopes and fears. Heracles, the 219national hero of Greece, driven by Hera to madness and murder, asked at Delphi where he should make his home, and was sent by the oracle to begin his twelve labours. Agamemnon, anxious lord of the Greek armies, sought advice of the god. Io was started on her long wanderings over the earth and through literature because her father was commanded by Apollo’s ministers to drive her from her home and her country. Because of a Delphic response, the infant son of Laius of Thebes was exposed on Mount Cithæron. Œdipus, on the fatal day when he killed Laius, was on his way back from Delphi, whither he had gone to ask if he were son of the Corinthian king who had reared him and where he had received the ambiguous answer that he was fated to slay his father. It was when, as king of Thebes, he sent to “the Pythian house of Phœbus to learn by what deed or word he might deliver his pestilence-stricken city” that he unconsciously invoked his own doom. And it was again the Delphic oracle which closed the pitiful story by prophesying Œdipus’s final reconciliation with the eternal will.

But these ancient demigods and kings move in a world only half realized by us. Their dooms and their emotions have the remote nobility, the superb universality of the Attic drama through which chiefly they are portrayed. It is in the vivacious pages of the charmingly pious Herodotus that the desires of living men and women seem to surge, in failure or fruition, about the Delphic tripod. From the foreign kingdoms of 220Asia, from Greek colonies in Africa and Italy, from rock-bound island harbours, ships were constantly spreading sails at the impulse of national distress or personal ambition, to furl them in the port that lay below Delphi. From Lacedæmon, deep in the hollow of the southern hills, from Thrace’s widespread plains, swept by the northern tempests, from the wild mountains of Arcadia, from rich Corinth and bright Athens and every other city of Hellas, men made their way in chariots, on mules, and on foot, to the knees of Apollo. Mountains and rivers, rude valleys and hostile villages offered no obstacles, nor were the suppliants repelled by the “dark sayings, dim and hard to know,” which were often their only reward. Kings hurried off embassies at the first signs of rivalry. Adventurers stopped to question the god before carrying new colonies beyond the seas. Quarrelsome states and cities asked for advice in their fratricidal plots. Wealthy cities desired to know if they could always count on their revenues. Ghost-haunted towns asked the meaning of their spectres. Agricultural communities were eager to learn how to restore dying crops. Ambitious politicians sought encouragement in their pursuit of power. Sick men prayed for health, childless men for offspring. Indeed, to the irreverent the Pythian priestess must often have seemed to carry a load of oracles as jumbled as that of Aristophanes’s sausage seller who came staggering into the market-place at Athens with “responses” to sell,—

But Aristophanes himself was at heart as conservative a believer in religion as Herodotus had been. And to piety like theirs, existing from generation to generation, was due the position that Delphi held not only as a source of knowledge but as the conscience of Greece. Sometimes in public affairs this conscience seemed to recommend prudence rather than righteousness, as in the wretched advice distributed at the time of the Persian invasion. In private affairs, such as athletics or the use of trust money, the oracle was always on the side of honour.

It must be borne in mind that along with the widespread acceptance of the oracular responses went a rationalizing independence of judgment which sometimes overruled the religious instinct. Cases of obstinate self-seeking in spite of the plain injunction of the god betray the exercise of this judgment on a low plane. But, soiled though it sometimes was by ignoble use, the mental independence of the Athenians, at least, was a magnificent possession. It saved Hellas when Crete and Argos and all the lesser brood followed the prudent warnings from Delphi. It chose an uneven fight for national freedom in the very face of the accepted conscience of the whole Greek world. Only an understanding of the noblest aspects of the rôle 222played by the Delphic oracle in Greek history and life can throw into sufficiently high relief the splendid revolt of Athens, when Persia threatened her liberty, against an ecclesiastical authority which had become debased. The historian who is the best guide to a dutiful belief in Pythian Apollo tells the story with implicit sympathy: “Not even the terrifying oracles that came from Delphi and plunged them into fear persuaded them to abandon Hellas. They plucked up courage to await the invader of their land.”

Nor is there here any inconsistency. The faithful in all religions have refused to identify the sins and follies of the priests with the will of the gods. The Persians might intimidate or buy the ministers of Apollo. The Alcmæonidæ, exiled from Athens, might bribe them to do their selfish will. Cleomenes of Sparta might purchase his throne from them. But the pious had always the refuge created by Sophocles for Iocasta when she declared the oracle was false: “It came not from Phœbus but from his servants.” When the Persians had been defeated, Athens, on the flood tide of victory, freedom, and power, raised noble memorials of her struggle in the sacred precinct of the oracle which had advised her not to fight. When the modern traveller has brought himself to see that this was not done in grim humour but in unbewildered piety, he is ready to undertake his own journey to Delphi.

Of all the possible approaches none can be happier than a drive on a moonlight night up from the little 223port of Itea, the inglorious terminus of the eight hours’ sail from Piræus through the canal and along the Gulf of Corinth. The comfortable carriage road winds through the “moon-blanched” olive orchards and vineyards of the ancient Crisæan plain, mounting gradually toward the steep slopes of Parnassus and its attendant mountains, and twisting in long courses among shadowy hillsides which only hint at rude crags and deep ravines. Perhaps it was some such night as this that led the writer of the Homeric Hymn to Artemis to see the sister of Apollo, “slackening her fair-curved bow and going to the mighty hall of Phœbus in the Delphians’ rich deme and arraying there the Muses’ and the Graces’ lovely dance.” The exquisite grace of the landscape, half hidden, half revealed through the fragile veil of silver light, seems like a gentle preparation for the epiphany, expected on the morrow, of the god of the golden blade.

The carriage passes very early by Amphissa, the capital of modern Phocis as it was of ancient Locris, and an hour later halts, to rest the horses, at a dim corner of the village of Chryso, a name which preserves that of the Crisa of antiquity. All this drowsy territory has been the stage of one of the significant dramas of history. The modern demarch hospitably presses water from the village fountain upon modern wayfarers, but the Crisæans once used their strategic position as owners of the whole wide plain to plunder pilgrims on their way to the shrine. This evil monopoly gave way, early 224in the sixth century, to the powerful confederation of twelve Greek states, known as the Delphic Amphictyony, whose representatives met at Delphi twice a year and ruled the affairs of the sacred domain. During almost one hundred and fifty years, with unquestioned right, whatever internecine wars were in progress, delegates from Thessaly and Bœotia, from Athens and Sparta, from Phocis itself and from other lesser states could pass and repass through Crisa, while the fertile plain went untilled. Even after war invaded the protected territory the existence of the Council was not endangered. But the constitution of the delegates changed with the fortunes of battles. By the middle of the fourth century the Phocians were struck from the list and the Macedonians added. Philip had become the chief actor, seizing his opportunity when the men of Delphi, at the instigation of the Athenian delegate, Æschines, attacked the men of Amphissa because they were turning the consecrated wilderness of the plain into corn-fields and olive groves and filling up the empty places with prosperous houses and busy little potteries. A series of easy steps led to the overthrow of Greek freedom.

But under the compassionate moon the sentimentalist continues his way, in wilful oblivion of the catastrophe of the drama, to the point nearest ancient Delphi. This is the tiny village of Kastri, which less than twenty years ago was plying its life on the unconscious surface of earth spread over the ruins of the sacred site. At 225great expense of money and trouble it was picked up by the French excavators and deposited, safe and whole, a little farther to the west around the sharp corner of the mountain, where, in fear of slipping into the deep valley below, it curls close to Parnassus’s side. Here lodgings may be obtained either in a conventional hostelry or, preferably, in a low-eaved peasant house, where on cool nights a wood fire glows in a big stone fireplace and the light of candles is eked out by diminutive copper lamps which would have seemed primitive to Agamemnon.

The popular time for ancient pleasure-seekers to visit Delphi was in the middle of August, when games were held in honour of Apollo. At that season, if ever, the slopes and peaks of Parnassus were accessible, but the burning heat as the rocks reflected the sun’s rays, alternating with heavy thunderstorms as the wind rushed up from the valley, must have modified the comfort of visitors. In the spring the modern traveller will find an equable and pleasant climate. And also, prepared as he may be for the solemnity and the lonely grandeur of the scenery about Delphi, he will discover unanticipated qualities in the landscape which are illuminative of certain elements in the significance of the place. A walk along the highway that leads from Kastri to and through the ruined precinct reveals both the expected and the new. Toward the southwest lies the Crisæan plain filled with olive groves. Beyond its gray-green breadth gleams the Corinthian Gulf with 226the far-off mountains of Arcadia girding the horizon. Directly in the west the snow-capped mountains of Locris, the highest in Central Greece, fret the sky. Southeastward plunges the valley of Delphi, formed by Mount Parnassus on the north and by Mount Cirphis on the south, and watered by the river Plistus which in a long line of gleaming argent seeks its westerly home in the bay of Itea.

The valley of the Plistus lies in full sight after the Crisæan plain and the gulf beyond it have been blotted out by a turn in the road which leads sharply around a large, rocky ridge, the barrier between the new town and the old. This ridge formed the western wall that isolated Delphi in lonely remoteness between the bare steep rocks of Cirphis and the cliffs of massive Parnassus, which spreads its huge buttresses over the surrounding country. Rising two thousand feet above the level of the sea, these cliffs present a magnificent expanse of gray and red limestone, and still reflect the brilliant morning sun, true to their ancient name of the “Shining Rocks.” Where they bend around, in their long course, a deep gorge is formed from which the storied spring of Castalia still issues. Above the gorge, invisible when one stands under the cliffs but conspicuous from lower levels, rise twin peaks, seeking a proud supremacy.

Superb mountains, precipitous cliffs, deep ravines, lonely valley, all are here. But here too, softening, transfiguring, some unforeseen influence is at work. 227Over the mountains a friendly, familiar sunshine casts a gentle glamour. Olive trees fearlessly silver the long slopes that stretch from the shining rocks to the glistening river. In jocund profusion, tripping through the valley and climbing up the steep places, pink and white almond trees flower like blushing dryads. The Far-Darter has chosen this hour to lay aside his bow. No longer does he come,—

but he lifts the “golden lyre” that quencheth even the lightning spear, the bolt of Zeus’s immortal fire.

Or perhaps Apollo has abdicated for a time and it is Dionysus who is concealing the terror of the oracle beneath the sparkling audacity of spring. For the worship of this multiform god had a strong hold on Delphi, and the “beat of his unseen feet” as he was wont to lead his Mænads in furious dance among the uplands of Parnassus echoes through Greek poetry. According to one set of legends, Dionysus was the first to hold the oracle. According to another, Apollo regularly departed for three months each year, leaving the more fiery god of inspiration in charge of the sacred tripod. In any case the relation between the divine brothers seems to have been very amicable. An old vase-painting represents them as affectionately shaking hands under a palm tree.

228The scene of the Dionysiac revels was the broad table-land which lies, more than three thousand feet above the level of the sea, between the Shining Rocks and the peaks of Parnassus. Here amid the wooded ravines and open meadows the flashing, flowing Dionysus, god of all ardent life, lord of the ichor of spring, held one of his many courts. It is significant of the unparalleled inclusiveness of Greek ideals that not only on “the topmost heights of Caucasus” and in the “vales of Lydia,” but also above Apollo’s temple where were inscribed in letters of gold the maxims of the seven sages, “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much,” the god of mad impulse and unchartered freedom should have been seen to leap and dance, and give “to his female followers the note for the Bacchic tune.” Every two years, “when spring flashed out for the first time” and sorrow might be swallowed up in joy, a torch festival was held in his honour by women of the surrounding country. Even from Attica women made their way to join in the celebration, travelling over the same “Sacred Way” by which the Athenians periodically sent their offerings to Delphi, and which Apollo had taken on his civilizing march through the wild places of men, escorted with great reverence by the road-making people of Athens. The passionate desire for the mad nocturnal revels which awaited the Bacchantes at the end of their long journey was attributed by Euripides, who must often have seen the procession starting out from Athens, to Tyrian women on their way 229to the service of Phœbus at Delphi. Detained in Thebes by the civil war of Œdipus’s sons, they tease their imaginations with visions of the rock that flasheth a splendour of light and the cloven tongue of the torches’ flame, of the vine that each morning offers up its giant cluster to brim the cup of the mystic ritual, of the snow-smitten, lonely ridges where, with souls unafraid, they might be wreathing the happy dance.^[26]

But mortal women were not the only companions of Dionysus. The exuberant play of nature, the change from death to life as winter made way for spring, not only goaded human hearts with a divine torture, but peopled the hills with lithe nymphs of untouched soul, rollicking with Pan and even with the greater god whose joy, to spirits touched to finer issues, was more terrible than sweet. Pan and the nymphs had their special dwelling-place in the Corycian Cave, which Pausanias mentions as one of the four most famous caverns of the whole world, “among a total number past finding out.” It was certainly the most remarkable one in Greece, a country abounding in “caves that open upon the beach or in the deep sea,” and in mountain caverns due to the frequent honeycombing by earthquake and subterranean currents. Very large and containing two chambers, it lies about seven miles northeast of Delphi, near the top of one of the low hills which form the northern boundary of the Parnassian uplands. According to the descriptions of travellers, the 230greater chamber has slender stalactites hanging from the roof at both ends, and at the inner end stalagmites rise from the ground to meet them. The other chamber, like a remote shrine, must be reached through a narrow passage and lies in almost total darkness. At the mouth of the cave an inscription was found containing a dedication to Pan and the nymphs. Certainly a fit abode for divine embodiments of soulless nature was this vaulted, echoing grotto, whose cavernous mouth opens upon the widespread beauty of an untamed world. Æschylus may have seen the “Corycian Rock” or he may have trusted to the eyes of others in describing its hollow loneliness, “the home of birds, and the resort of deities.”

If it is difficult to disentangle the myths which connect several gods with one place, it is still more difficult to understand the legends which hint at the infinite complexity of each god in any one of his own several spheres. In studying the Delphic Apollo, the clear outlines of the great god as he governed the Greek world will best be preserved by noticing those stories which have been preferred by the poets. It was natural that Æschylus should penetrate beyond any individualized form of divine activity to primeval forces, following the legend which made Apollo a late heir to the first owners of the oracle, to Earth herself and to her daughter, holy Law. It was equally characteristic that Euripides, with his eye for vivid detail, should have been attracted by the story which begins with Leto’s golden-haired 231son coming from the fruitful meadows of his birthplace, Delos, to the Dionysus-haunted summit of Parnassus. Under its shadow, amid the thick-leaved laurel, lay as guardian of the holy place a dragon with gleaming talons. This horrid monster the young god slew, thereafter taking his seat upon the golden tripod. Earth, appearing only as the mother of the dragon, sought to wrest from him the right of prophecy. But, swift of foot, he fled to Olympus and the throne of Zeus, and the king of the gods laughed and shook his awful hair and gave to his youthful son in perpetuity the sovereignty over the Delphic abode.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which contains the oldest account of the killing of the dragon, also relates that the god chose Cretans to be his first ministers. Whatever the historical basis of this story may be, its telling gives the riotous Ionian poet a chance to transform Phœbus Apollo into a dolphin deflecting from its course a swift ship sent out from Cretan Cnossus to Pylos on the border of the Ionian Sea. The dolphin caused it to traverse strange waters, beyond Peloponnesus and the ford of Alpheus, past the steep ridge of Ithaca and wooded Zacynthus, into the harbour of Crisa. Here the dolphin disappeared and the god leaped from the ship in the guise of a star at high noon, while sparks of frequent fire flew from him and flash of splendour reached the sky. On shore he appeared as a man, lusty and strong, and persuaded the Cretans to dance in his train and to take charge of the temple. By suggesting 232that they might use for themselves the flocks brought for sacrifice, he overcame their fear that they would fare but meagrely in a country neither vine-bearing nor rich in meadows.

The story of the hymn is too confused to be worthy of Apollo. He was no music-hall performer, making lightning transformations, but lord, in simplicity and dignity, of music and all harmonies, elder brother and guide in the paths of conduct. So at least he reveals himself on a spring morning beneath the Shining Rocks lit by his sunlight from the south.

But homelier memories also come to life. It may have been in the “fragrant dawn” of a day like this that the boy Odysseus, while he was on a visit to his grandfather, went hunting with his uncles in the windy hollows of wood-clad Parnassus and killed a great boar. From its white tusks he had received a wound which was to leave an indelible scar and years later betray his identity to his aged nurse. Certainly it must have been on such a morning that another boy, Ion the acolyte, was performing his early tasks for the temple when visitors from Athens arrived to question him about the sights. They were women who had accompanied the queen Creusa when she and her husband, like many others, came to Delphi in their childlessnesschildlessness. In her youth, before her marriage to Xuthus, she had been loved by Apollo and had borne him a son in his cave below the Athenian Acropolis. The baby had been abandoned by her, but a servant had carried it to Delphi 233and left it as a foundling with the priestess. Unknown to Creusa, he had grown into the boyish minister of his divine father. The plot of the Euripidean drama which uses the story is sensational, including attempted murders and many complications before mother and child recognize and accept each other. But the boy Ion is one of the happiest creations of a poet whom Aristophanes accused of skepticism. His unstained youth consecrates his daily work of sweeping the temple floor, adorning the doorway with fresh wreaths and laurel boughs and driving away the wild pigeons. Reared by a holy woman in the remote quiet of the sanctuary, he has become a vessel, crystal clear, to hold the purest essence of religious feeling. His morning hymn reflects the unspoiled reverence with which, among the greedy hordes, many must have turned to Delphi:—

This unstudied rapture is interrupted by the worldly women, exclaiming over the wonderful sculptured metopes of the temple. Euripides, with the usual license of the Greek dramatists, put before his legendary characters the works of art that he himself might have seen in the latter part of the fifth century before Christ, when a rich civic and artistic life was occupying the stage of the vast theatre into which, as Strabo observed, Nature had moulded the site of Delphi. The semicircular valley opens only on the east, and from it terraces, like tiers of seats, rise from the Plistus to Parnassus. The ancient city of Delphi lay in two portions along the base of the Shining Rocks. The modern highroad approximately marks the division between the upper terraces, which held the sacred precinct, and the lower, where were the houses and business buildings of the permanent inhabitants, and also, east of Castalia, a few temples and other public structures. It is the upper terraces, west of Castalia, which enchain our attention, although all that is left even here, save for the small reërected Treasury of the Athenians, made of Parian marble, are remnants of walls, low-lying foundations, 235traces of pavement, broken bases, and pieces of graven stone. But they represent sacred ways and buildings, monuments and statues which made glorious one of the richest centres of Greece, from long before the time of Euripides to the destructive epoch of Nero and beyond. Delphi became the pride of the Macedonians as it had been of the Athenians and the Spartans, and under their sovereignty the Delphic Amphictyony continued and the oracle was the centre of the new widespread Hellenic world. The Gauls attacked Delphi in the third century B. C. as vainly as the Persians had attacked it in the fifth century. Even the ruthlessness of Rome brought no immediate destruction. Æmilius Paulus, the final conqueror of Macedon, set up near Apollo’s temple, in the most conspicuous place of the entire precinct, a monument to his victory. Even Nero seems to have wished to repair the temple, but the story that he afterwards tore it down because of an oracular response which reflected upon his moral character is at least ben trovato. He divided the Crisæan plain among his soldiers and carried off an enormous number of statues from Delphi. But a still greater number was left, and the glory of the god’s dwelling place had not vanished. Under Hadrian, the imperial apostle of culture, new treasures were added, and a little later Pausanias saw more than he could describe. It was not until two more centuries had passed that the oracle itself with one last cry became dumb forever. To the ambassador of Julian the Apostate, 236who was seeking advice in his wars with the Persians, the message was given:—

Theodosius put a formal end to the Delphic cult as well as to the Olympic games.

From Apollo’s slaying of the earth-born dragon to the Byzantine emperor’s destruction of the oracle is a long stretch of centuries. Within them fell the brilliant epochs which filled Delphi with the opulence of all the arts. As Greek and barbarian brought hither their well-wrought schemes and passionate desires, so they brought also, in offerings to the god, their best skill in architecture and sculpture and painting, their rarest workmanship in marble and bronze and gold and silver. Ghostly proofs of the existence of some of these offerings the French excavators have within twenty years evoked from the reluctant soil. Gallic precision and insight have even made of ruined walls and broken stones an orderly array easily perceived by the traveller who is patient enough to follow his guidebook. The Museum supplements the ground foundations by several important sculptural details.

There were many localities and objects made holy by legendary associations, like the tomb of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s red-haired son, whose murder is described 237by Euripides and whose quadrennial worship brought crowds of Thessalians to Delphi; or like the marble Omphalos, or navel stone, flanked, in Pindar’s day, by golden eagles which marked the meeting place of the winged explorers sent east and west by Zeus in search of the exact centre of the earth. But of paramount importance in the religious life of Delphi was the Temple of Apollo, built above the deep cleft in the ground that held the sacred spring of prophecy. The Priestess sat upon a tripod in the adyton or holy of holies, directly over the fissure from which a natural vapour issued, and her ravings were transmitted by the priests in ambiguous hexameters. The site of the first primitive temple was preserved, but upon it rose successive structures. The temple that was seen by Herodotus and Thucydides, by Pindar, by Æschylus and Euripides was built in the latter half of the sixth century to replace an older one destroyed by fire. In the fourth century an earthquake necessitated still another, and it is to this one that the existing foundations are attributed, although fragments of the other are not wanting. Owing to the shifting history of the fourth century, this temple was long in building and was not yet completed when Demosthenes thundered out his scorn that the barbarian of Macedon had assumed the “honours of the temple,” to which even all the Greeks could not pretend. The work had been undertaken by an international commission, and inscriptional records of the contributions are richly suggestive of the private life 238of the times. Many individuals and some states promised first fruits. An actor and a physician of Athens sent a tithe of their earnings. Among individuals the Peloponnesians were the most pious, although contributions straggled in from Attica, Bœotia, Northern Greece, the islands, Africa, and Sicily. Collectors went from house to house, and by far the larger number of contributors gave no more than a drachma. Doubtless in many cases this modesty was due to poverty rather than to indifference, and the religious sentiment prompting the gifts must often have been comparable to that which reared the arches and illuminated the windows of the Cathedral of Chartres. For the sake of such contributors one could wish that after the Roman restorations the Delphic temple had not been allowed to crumble under earthquakes, corroding rains, and the tread of the unnumbered years. Of adyton and oracular chasm the excavators have found no smallest trace, and not even one column rises from the low foundations to give evidence of things unseen. But, at least, unlike the Parthenon and many another great shrine, it was never converted into a church of an alien faith.

Secular buildings followed in the wake of the religious importance of Delphi. The Amphictyonic Council had a hall for its meetings to the west of the sacred precinct, on or near the site now occupied by the little chapel of St. Elias. Here, in sight of the Crisæan plain, the incendiary speech of Æschines had its full effect. Within the precinct, safe from attack in times of war, public 239treasuries were erected by Asiatic kings and Greek tyrants, by Greek states in Asia Minor and colonies in Italy, and by sovereign cities like Athens and Thebes.

The erection of a treasury often followed upon some public success, but other monuments and statues also rose at the feet of Apollo to mark the tidal flow of national fortunes. A study of all such memorials, known to have existed at Delphi, would be equivalent to a detailed study of Greek history. The repulse of the Persians from the mainland and of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and the stemming of the later invasions of Gallic barbarians required thank-offerings to the Delphic god. The rise of Athens, the struggle of Ionian and Dorian, the victory of Sparta, the late hegemony of Thebes are here commemorated; and with these the lesser quarrels of Sparta with Argos and Arcadia and of Athens with Megara, and the petty warfare of Phocians and Thessalians.

A myriad of statues and monuments commemorated personal interests or feeling. From a haul of tunny fish to the discovery of stolen goods, no event was too prosaic to inspire an offering from island or village. And, throughout Greece, from Macedonia to Crete, towns delighted to express their reverence by gifts of marble and bronze. Midas from Asia Minor sent a chair of state and Crœsus sent a golden lion and silver bowls. Arcesilas of Cyrene in northern Africa, in the fifth century, celebrated a Pythian victory by the gift of a sculptured chariot and charioteer. The statue still 240remains, the most famous single object discovered at Delphi. Dominating one room in the Museum, he seems in his bronze dignity as untroubled by the chilling silence of to-day as was his living prototype, in the hippodrome in the plain below, by the noise and tumult of the day of victory. The description by Sophocles of the Delphic chariot race in which Orestes was supposed to be killed reproduces the excitement against which many a charioteer must have had to steady his nerves.^[27]

Of statues of mortals dedicated by themselves or by their admirers there was no end. Among these persons were the great rhetorician Gorgias, to whose teaching Greek prose owed its first artistic development, and Phryne, the famous courtesan of Thespiæ. With her statue, seen by men of Demosthenes’s age between the figures of the Spartan king Archidamus and Philip of Macedon, we may surrender the effort to distinguish the links in the mighty chains which, as in Plato’s vision, bound the Greek earth to a heavenly throne.

It is less difficult to understand the Greek harmony between the graver and brighter needs of the common life which added to the temples and treasuries of Delphi buildings for recreation and enjoyment. A club-house was erected by the rich Cnidians, where conversation, the favourite amusement of all Greeks, could be carried on. Centuries later Plutarch made it the scene of his dialogue on the decay of oracles. If the age of the 241Antonines showed a loss of faith, art at least held its own, and the talkers must have added to the pleasure of skeptical speculation a delight in the decorations which dated from the fifth century before Christ. They consisted of pictures by Polygnotus of the capture of Troy and Odysseus’s journey to hell. Now only bits of stucco painted blue betray their presence, and fragmentary stones alone are left of the splendid building. Little more is left of the beautiful colonnades which furnished protection from sun and rain to the frequent crowds. In fairly good preservation still is the Theatre, where, as in all the religious centres of Greece, dramatic representations added literature to the pageant of artistic gifts. Equally inevitable was a Gymnasium; but most important of all was the Stadium, in which the quadrennial games were held.

This Stadium lay far beyond the sacred precinct to the west, and occupied a lofty and magnificent situation. In what Pausanias calls “the highest part of the city” the slopes of Parnassus break sufficiently to leave a narrow shelf of flat ground. Every foot of this was used for the erection of the structure, the northern side being bounded by the precipices of the great mountain, the southern side being supported by a wall of polygonal masonry. Part of this wall is still left, and in the interior there are tiers of seats to tempt the dreamer. The marble with which Herodes Atticus is said to have faced them in the second century after Christ is now all gone. But one may yet sit on the original 242stone and see not only the valley of the Plistus far below, but westward a bright strip of the Corinthian Gulf. Here once gathered eager thousands to watch the foot races and the wrestling matches, and to hear the contesting flutes and the rival lyres. Originally, before the Crisæan war, the Pythian festival had occurred only once in eight years and had consisted of a contest in singing, to the accompaniment of the lyre, a hymn to Apollo. The early musical festival found its aftermath in the combination of musical with athletic contests in the more frequent “Games” instituted by the Amphictyons after they had taken Delphi under their common charge. This was a part of that general reorganization in the sixth century by which the Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean, and especially the Olympic games were thrown into high relief among the multitudinous festivals of Greece. At Delphi a hymn in honour of the god of the golden lyre continued to be an important part of the proceedings. Among the most conspicuous discoveries of the French are three fragments of such hymns, engraved on stone, two of them accompanied by musical notation. The hymns are late ones, of no especial merit, but their scores have furnished a key to that art which played so large a part in Greek education, literature, and philosophy, and which made the Pythian festival a reminder of the lord of music.

Of the hymns in honour of mortals victorious in the games we still have some of the greatest representatives 243in the Pythian odes of Bacchylides and Pindar. Pindar may well boast that his song of triumph was a splendour in the Pythian crown of Hiero of Syracuse; that he would come to him over the deep sea, a light shining farther than any heavenly star. For only through a victory at some one of the four great festivals of Greece was even a tyrant sure of any Panhellenic honour. The centrifugal forces of Greek life found an antidote in these expressions of common ideals. It has, indeed, been often said that the only other antidote lay in the political organization of Delphi itself. But this political unity was limited, and, if Delphi focused Greek interests in any way that even Olympia could not, the reason must be sought in facts that lay beneath a particular form of government. In the lofty Stadium men from cities whose disparate and jealous memorials lay below united in self-forgetful applause of all the victors.

Here the traveller may pause to grasp, amid the chaos of swift impressions, a picture of the Delphic life. In it religion and politics, art and amusement coalesced into a stream of almost illimitable influence. From month to month without cessation pilgrims sought the oracle. The store of information about public and private matters thus brought to the oracular seat gave to the priests a knowledge of political conditions which they could easily transmute into an apparently supernatural wisdom and a unique power in public life. Hand in hand with this political power went an ethical 244sovereignty due to the essential religiousness of the Greeks. And lastly, the more continuous influx of visitors, over against an infrequent and congested festival, may easily have rendered the artistic influence of Delphi more insistent than that of Olympia. Xerxes was better acquainted with what was worthy of note at Delphi than even with what he had left in his own house, for many of those about him were continually describing the treasures. Often the seed of such descriptions, or of actual sight, must have fallen on richer soil than an Oriental despot’s imagination. Who knows what village smithy in Thessaly or Arcadia was stimulated to a finer output by the iron stand made by Glaucus of Chios to hold the big silver bowl sent to Delphi by Crœsus’s father? Indeed, the wonderful animals and plants wrought in relief for the first time upon welded iron may have inspired many a designer in Athens and Corinth. And many a young sculptor must have taken home from his Pythian pilgrimage a knowledge of Phidias and Praxiteles and Lysippus.

Thus was the world forever pouring itself into Delphi and again, like a retreating wave, bearing something of Delphi away with it, something larger and richer even than the golden honours that were symbolized by the crown of laurel so eagerly borne home by the victors in the games. And yet there was a further significance in the fragile wreath itself, however infrequently realized by athletes and spectators, which pointed beyond the artistic and moral power of the Pythian God. The 245wreath was made of leaves brought from, the Vale of Tempe, where Apollo had plucked his own crown of victory, when, as lord of light, he had vanquished the powers of darkness and had been purified from the evil which the struggle had entailed. Laurel (or bay) trees grew in the valley of Delphi itself, lingering on until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the last one is said to have drooped and died in the little garden of the church of St. Nicholas which, before Kastri was removed, stood in front of the spring of Cassotis. This spring, not yet exhausted, was the feeder of the oracular chasm and watered the grove of Apollo, “freshening with an ever-living stream the undying gardens” from which Ion gathered his laurel broom. Not only did the acolytes use laurel in their simple tasks, but the Priestess fumigated herself with burning boughs before she sat upon the tripod, and chewed laurel leaves before she delivered her prophecies. But the meaning of Apollo’s crowning, from which the sacred uses of the laurel sprang, was beyond the reach of Ion, untroubled “worshipper within the Temple’s inner shrine.” Nor to moderns is the revelation likely to come until the Shining Rocks grow pale and night obliterates the lively daylight of the spring. Into the dark void left by the withdrawal of Apollo swings the moon, no longer compassionate but majestic. Suddenly upon the receptive imagination descends the Delphic awe. The almond trees slip into shadowy insignificance. The hills stand out dark and brooding, while their ravines deepen unfathomably. 246And through the fearful silence sounds the prophetic voice of an unseen god vaster than the consciousness of the race which created him. The quality of sublimity and awfulness now apparent in the landscape explains the influence of that ideal of omnipotent righteousness which, among a singularly intellectual people, gradually formed for itself a living centre. For an understanding of such a god at Delphi one must turn to Æschylus. To him Apollo was a god “who knew not how to do unrighteousness,” in whose hands were loosed the tangled skeins of human sin. Sophocles, in his dramas of Œdipus’s life, represented the folly and wrong-doing of a noble nature forgiven by the Pythian god after the willing endurance of a just punishment. But Æschylus, in the “Eumenides,” deals with a much subtler aspect of divine law. That its opening scene is laid at Delphi is appropriate to the overshadowing importance of its religious meaning. Orestes had been told by the oracle to kill his mother, as a divinely ordained punishment for her murder of her husband. But there is no slaying that does not involve guilt, as Apollo himself knew when he slew the foul dragoness. The awful Furies hound Orestes from Argos to the altar in the innermost shrine of the Delphic temple. Here is laid the Æschylean scene. The Furies, with their hair of coiling snakes, mutter in a savage sleep, ready at a signal to fall once more upon the wretch who has obeyed the god against the human conscience. The suppliant Orestes, doubting and hopeless, 247crouches at the altar steps. And towering over them all stands the saving God who had once, in a fair vale of purification, put upon his own head the crown of victorious goodness. He promises Orestes no easy rescue from the earthly consequences of his god-directed act. He must be pursued once more by the hateful spawn of Darkness over the sea and through sea-girt cities. But at last he shall come to Athens, a suppliant of Athena, and Apollo himself will come and gain for him freedom and the forgiveness of his kind, and justice among men shall be forever established. This is no mere praise, however splendid, of the wisdom and the justice of Athens. It is rather the embodiment of the idea which to the Greeks shone as a “far-off heavenly star” above all the expedients of practical religion, or all the necessities of worldly power. Among the hills and cliffs of Delphi dwelt a god whose ways were past finding out, whose commands led to terror but whose service led to peace.

Thus with the lengthening of day into night rises the flood tide of fragmentary realizations of ancient thought. But the tide ebbs with the sinking moon. The cold night air draws the dreamer back to the waiting fires and hospitable copper lamps of Kastri. As he makes his homeward way through the low dark ruins, which are all that the intrepid archæologists could summon from the grave of centuries, he is moved to wonder whether Delphi, save for its natural beauty by day and by night, has any place in modern thought. The ancient 248interpretation of its importance was by no means only a religious one. The Greeks cannot be understood only through an Æschylus of profound spiritual insight, or an Herodotus of intelligent piety. Thucydides, amid the bustle of its life, was as rationalizing in his ideas about Delphi as we can be amid its dead ruins. To him as to us, its oracular power was a matter of superstition. He would have attributed Socrates’s faith in it to his goodness rather than his knowledge, and doubtless anticipated the modern explanation of the wisdom of the priests. And yet Thucydides accepted without question the political and civic value of such a centre for the Greek world. Now that that value has disappeared with the world it served, we are left to find a new value in the imperishable human thoughts which were inspired by Delphi and have outlived its marbles, its silver and gold, its laurel crowns and echoing lyres. For any subsequent religion has but created, mutatis mutandis, the differing types of men through whom we know the pagan god. If the oracle is dumb, and Apollo but an antique fable, yet men of the twentieth century may still find in the poets and thinkers of Greece expressions of their own faith or their own doubt. They may find also that blending in one mind of belief born of idealism with unbelief born of experience which is familiar to the modern world. Pindar’s piety was such that “at Delphi they kept with reverence his iron chair, and the priest of Apollo cried nightly as he closed the temple, ‘Let Pindar the poet go in unto the 249supper of the god.’” And yet he uttered the universal lament:—

CHAPTER XII FROM DELPHI TO THEBES

Œdipus on his way from Delphi and Laius on his way from Thebes met at the Forked Roads—the “Cleft Way”—in a lonely valley. The traveller who wishes to see the scene of the ensuing tragedy will have the opportunity to pass through a country of extraordinary beauty and variety and also to know the leisured charm of travel by horse or mule. With the multiplication of railroads these opportunities are growing rarer year by year, except for those whom adventure or professional interests lead into the less famous parts of Greece. The major portion of the country that attracts students of Greek life at its highest is as easy to traverse as Italy. It is true that the days which there have long since receded into historical perspective seem in Greece strangely mingled with the present, because the same traveller who to-day can take the train from Athens to Thebes was forced, ten years ago, to ride or drive over the passes of Cithæron. 251But already in the books of Greek travel written in the second half of the nineteenth century we begin to perceive that delicate aroma of a more primitive past which pervades Goethe’s “Italienische Reise.” In addition to railroads, the matured police power of the government has been a transforming agency. Not only between Athens and Corinth but practically everywhere in Greece brigandage is now unknown. And, finally, the onslaughts of dirt and vermin have been greatly modified, both by the increasing number of creditable inns in the larger places and by the ability of the peasants in remoter villages to understand the prejudices of foreigners. Not very long ago a request for information about almost any route that led away from Athens might have been couched in the words of Dionysus asking about the trip to Hades:—

DELPHI AND THE ROAD TO ARACHOVA

Now, in villages which are near important sites of antiquity, the rough and ready traveller may meet with nothing more unfamiliar to him than the Aristophanic flea that hops in the blankets like a dancing girl, while those who take a dragoman, at a moderate price, and mattresses and supplies from Athens may escape even this enemy, as well as beds of hard boards and coarsely cooked food. A knowledge of modern Greek enables 252the true PhilhellenePhilhellene to dispense with a middleman and to receive proofs in unexpected places of the unfailing hospitality and the alternating integrity and guile of the Greek peasant.

Perched on the crest that forms the watershed between the eastern and western lengths of the valley of the Plistus, the lovely village of Arachova serves as a way-station on the pilgrimage from Kastri to the Forked Roads. The first part of the road leads familiarly through the precinct of Delphi, past the clump of plane trees which keep green the memory of their ancestor planted by Agamemnon, and past Castalia, whose waters, emerging from the gorge below the Shining Rocks, are as “sweet to drink” as Pausanias found them and as clear as when they purified the suppliants at the oracle and the ministering hands of the priests, or laved the golden hair of the god himself.

Along the road that now stretches eastward the Persians streamed toward Delphi at the time of Xerxes’s invasion. But near the temple of Athena Pronaia, on the lower terrace, they were repulsed by terrible portents. A storm of thunder burst over their heads; at the same time two crags split off from Mount Parnassus and rolled down upon them with a loud noise, crushing vast numbers beneath their weight, while from the temple there went up the war cry and the shout of victory. The Delphians, who were hiding in the Corycian Cave, seeing their terror, rushed down upon them, causing great slaughter. And barbarian survivors 253declared afterwards that two armed warriors, of a stature more than human, pursued after their flying ranks, pressing them close and slaying them. These supernatural warriors were two heroes who belonged to Delphi, by name Phylacus and Autonous. For their timely aid they received precincts and worship, Autonous by the Castalian spring, his comrade hard by the road, practically identical with the modern highway, which ran above the temple of Athena. The traces of this Heroon may yet be seen, faint reminders of old-time tumults amid to-day’s oblivious silence. A little farther is the so-called “Logari,” or likeness of a great door chiselled in the face of a rock, representing, perhaps, the Gate of Hell. At least it seems to have marked the entrance to an ancient cemetery which lay below the road along the southern slopes now given over to orchards and to tillage. Through them a road winds down toward the silvery Plistus, twisting in and out among the gray-green olives and the almond trees. In antiquity this was the road to the bustling town of Ambrosus by the pass of Dhesphina over Mount Cirphis. Now the donkeys that saunter along it are bearing peasant girls and their bags to the mills by the river.

The road to Arachova leads in a gentle ascent close along the lower reaches of Parnassus on the left and high above the deep valley on the right. The muleteers may turn aside to shorter mountain paths, but the easy highway tempts to leisure while the sun is still warm in the west and the brilliant pageant of the valley is but 254lightly subdued by the delicate reserves of the approaching evening. Either route leads in less than three hours to the foot of high precipices rising at the back of windy Arachova, the representative of Homer’s Anemoreia (Windswept Town). These cliffs, now called Petrites, are, perhaps, the Look-Out Place often alluded to in ancient literature, the point of vantage from which Apollo, the Far-Darter, shot his arrow at the dragon in Delphi. The town itself, two thousand feet above the sea-level, is one of the most typical of modern Greece both in situation and in those racial characteristics which are forming a new nation out of the roots of the old. The houses, interspersed with vivid green trees, gather about each other in terraces up the hill to the high-poised church of St. George, that other dragon slayer, while in its turn the little Christian edifice is frowned down upon by the rocky mountain-side. The stony, twisted streets, alive with children, often become staircases of rock, up and down which the mules indifferently clatter. Stone courtyards lead to doorways out of which handsome men and women smile an hospitable welcome. The inhabitants of Arachova, perhaps because they live near the Muses of Parnassus, possess a charm and courtesy of manner that is not duplicated among the rougher peasants of the Peloponnesus. They are also famous for their beauty, the gift of the Greeks from the time of Helen and Achilles through all admixtures of foreign blood. The men are tall and slim, with the dignity of carriage and chiselled fineness of 255feature which distinguishes the Greek peasantry from the livelier Italian, and the beauty of the women is grave and tranquil. The traveller may find himself served by a fair mother and fairer daughter, whose name of Sappho is belied by the shy, cool loveliness of her parted hair and innocent eyes.

The Arachovans cherish brave traditions of their part in the War of Independence, but their relation to antiquity is revealed in certain elements of their imaginative life. Now, as of old, natural forces are identified with the activities of divine beings. The snowstorms and icy winds of winter are attributed to furious battles waged high up on the peaks of Parnassus by the spirits of the mountain. Gentler spirits of forest and fountain seem to have descended directly from antique prototypes. The Corycian Cave, once the haunt of Pan and his nymphs, is still a favourite resort of the Nereids. And these “Maidens,” as the modern like the ancient Greek often calls them, dwell in many other pleasant places, lingering in the old trunks of olive or fig trees, like hamadryads, or tumbling sportively in mill streams and mountain torrents, like the daughters of ancient Nereus among the waves of the sea. Primarily, indeed, the Nereids are still water nymphs, and the modern Greek word for water, nero, so often upon the tourist’s tongue, echoes their immortal play. Nor has the fashion of their garments greatly changed since the pictures of antiquity represented them with long veils, now bound upon the head, now fluttering 256freely in the hand. The peasants say that their Nereids wear a head cloth, always of the finest quality but in style like the cloths worn by their own women, hanging down over the neck and shoulders. At Arachova the Nereids go with uncovered head and swing the cloth in their hands, as Leucothea loosened her veil to give it to Odysseus when she rose like a sea-gull from the depths of ocean to save his life. The Nereids have pipe-playing lovers known as demons, in whom Pan and the satyrs seem to live on. And Pan has his own special representative in the protective Lord of Hares and Wild Goats, who still ranges the slopes of Parnassus. An evil spirit in the shape of a he-goat with long beard, who leaps on the goats to their destruction, hints at that other aspect of Pan revealed in the malignant power of nature.

Another inheritance from antiquity are the Lamiæ. One of these female monsters dwelt in a large cavern in the side of Mount Cirphis, still accessible at the end of a blind path beyond the Plistus, and ravaged the country all about until a brave hero put her to death. She, and others of her ilk, were the bugbears of children, and they still live among the Greek peasantry as vampirish demons. The name is also used as a term of reproach for scolding women. But in Arachova, oddly enough, the Lamia has been transformed by some kindly alchemy into a good spirit, and is often seen in the dusk striding through the village streets, or spinning at a huge distaff by a fountain’s rim. Her 257name is given to handsome, well-behaved women, as beautiful girls are said to be Nereid-descended or Nereid-eyed.

The modern Greeks also believe in the Fates or Moiræ, either as three dread sisters or as a hierarchy of twelve who delegate the care of a specified number of men to a smaller committee. At Arachova three fates appear within three days of an infant’s birth, two known as the bearers of good and of ill fortune, who fight the matter out and agree upon a destiny, and the third called the Spinner, who will weave the strands into the web of life.

Thus under the very eyes of St. George pagan spirits make common cause with the angels and demons of Christianity. A hoof print on the edge of a crag may betray the presence of the lord of hares and goats or of the unmentionable Devil. An infant who dies unbaptised may claim to be the victim of the ruthless Spinner, or may go to join in the air the imps who war with the angels for the souls of men. Mountains and ether, springs and tree-trunks, are filled with the divine forces created, under the influence of two religions, by a people always sensitive to the intimacy between the physical and spiritual worlds.

The Cleft Way lies two hours beyond Arachova, and six hours beyond that is Chæronea, battlefield and railroad station. On a morning in March the moon may be bright at six o’clock when the mules beat their way out of the rough streets of Arachova to the open. 258The road descends from the village and skirts the southern sides of Parnassus, leading through vineyards and gorges and winding over a bare and rocky valley. The amber moon grows white, and between the opening hills to the east the rising sun sets the sky aflame. Gradually the gold and rose give way to intense, brilliant blue. The twin peaks of Parnassus glisten in their covering of snow. A pastoral charm, reminiscent of Theocritus’s Sicilian uplands, mingles with the rugged impressiveness of mountain scenery. Steep hillsides alternate with pastures, and here and there cool streams curl about the heedless feet of mules and muleteers. Gradually the severity of the landscape predominates. The road from Delphi along which Œdipus, like ourselves, was coming, descends through a wild pass enclosed by the mighty precipices of Parnassus and Cirphis, and in a scene of impressive loneliness meets the roads from Daulis and Thebes.^[29] The spot is now called “Stavrodromi tou Mega,” or Cross-Roads of Megas, in memory of a hero who was killed here in the middle of the nineteenth century while destroying a band of brigands. The story of the ancient deed of violence is put by Sophocles into the mouth of Œdipus himself. The Delphic oracle had declared that Thebes could be healed of its pestilence only by the punishment 259of the murderer of Laius, the former king, and Œdipus had proclaimed the requisite sentence against the unknown. Now he has begun to realize that he was the slayer:—

From the Forked Roads travellers who must push on to Chæronea will look regretfully at the path that leads to “lone Daulis” in “the high Cephisian vale.” The little town is situated on the uneven summit of a massive hill which rises abruptly from the glens at the eastern foot of Parnassus, and of its bowery loveliness among pomegranates and olives and almonds enticing tales are told. Here, according to a favourite Greek legend, was the first home of the nightingale and the 260scene of that “life enriched with sorrow, which her clear voice, insatiate, bemoans.” The savage Tereus, king of Daulis, had married Procne, a prehistoric princess of Athens, and after the birth of her son Itylus had cut out her tongue and claimed that she was dead. He then married her sister Philomela. The betrayed Procne, however, told Philomela the truth by means of a web into which she had embroidered her story, and the two sisters united in slaying the innocent Itylus and serving him up as a meal to his father. The gods, in anger, transformed Procne and Philomela into a nightingale and swallow, forever mourning Itylus, while Tereus became a pursuing hawk. When spring comes, whether in Daulis or Ithaca or by the “tranquil Thames,” the “pallid-olive” nightingale pours forth her music, “bewailing her dead child.”

The ride from the Cleft Way to Chæronea, winding through the valley of the Platania, a tributary of the Bœotian Cephisus, is rich in interest and variety. A little to the west of Chæronea, on the border between Phocis and Bœotia, lies Hagios Vlasis, a miserable village, known to fame only because of its position under the ancient acropolis of Panopeus. The importance of Panopeus was the subject of legend and poetry rather than of history. From its clay Prometheus fashioned the human race, and from its people sprang Epeios, the inventor at Troy of the wooden horse. Here also the giant Tityos lived and died. He had violated Leto as she went up to Delphi through 261Panopeus “of the fair dancing places,” and for this sin Odysseus found him in Hades sprawling over nine roods of levelled ground, his liver gnawed by vultures. Pausanias was perplexed by the Homeric epithet for the town until the inhabitants explained to him that the Mænads on their way to Parnassus stopped at Panopeus for preliminary dances. Dionysus may have passed this way with his mysterious quickening, as Apollo did with his ordered inspiration. Thus the insignificant town was the legendary scene of man’s birth and of important episodes in his mental and moral development.

Beyond Hagios Vlasis lies another modern village in the shadow of an ancient acropolis. Between Phocis and Bœotia there is no natural boundary, but the large plain of Chæronea sweeps westward into Phocis and eastward into Bœotia to what used to be the Copaic lake. On the north and south the plain is enclosed by barren mountains, and the town of Chæronea, unlike Panopeus, spread out from the base of its acropolis at the foot of the southern and lower hills. Its modern representative is the hamlet of Kapræna, which displays a few legacies of antiquity and from which can be seen the two peaks of Petrachus, the sharp and steep acropolis. The chapel of Panagia (the Virgin) contains a chair of white marble called the chair of Plutarch. The great biographer was born in Chæronea, and the worshipful preservation of his name in the little Christian church reminds one of the appearance 262of the equally respectable Plinies on the exterior of the cathedral of their native Como.

But the dominant interest of Chæronea is the battle which, in 338 B. C., was lost by the forces of Greece united against Philip of Macedon. No single account of the terrible defeat has been handed down by dramatist or historian, as Æschylus and Herodotus immortalized the victories of Salamis and Marathon, and only general facts in the struggle are known to us from lesser writers. Before the march to Chæronea Demosthenes had risen in the Assembly, at a terrified meeting in the cold and hopeless dawn, and persuaded the Athenians to make a hasty alliance with Thebes against the encroachments of Philip. In the battle the Athenians held the left wing while the right, the post of honour, was given to the famous Sacred Band of the Thebans. Between them were gathered the other allies. Against the Thebans at the crucial moment Philip turned his cavalry under the command of the young Alexander. As the struggle became hopeless the Athenians retreated, but the members of the Sacred Band fought until they fell, raising one last memorial to their great founder, Epaminondas, and offering one last atonement for the cowardice of Thebes in the Persian wars.

The victory of Macedon was not so much wrested from the Greek arms as it was due to ineradicable defects in the Greek political character. It was characteristic of all Greek history that the allies should have formed no united and harmonious army under one fully empowered 263leader. The intense individualism which made Greece supreme in the arts and in science and philosophy left her at the mercy of peoples able to subordinate single wills to a national purpose. In the presence of the architecture, sculpture, and literature of the Greeks it is impossible to deplore their unthwarted intellectual freedom, their keen sensibilities, their genius for personal development. But at Chæronea it is easy to see not only the disintegration, but also the demoralization of a national life which lacked the heroic sacrifice of self and the persistence of a common controlling ideal as much as it lacked administrative genius and political wisdom.

But it must be remembered that such inclusive strictures on the Greek character can be made only when we follow the prejudices of Philip’s enemies in excluding Macedon from the Greek states. In the perspective of history it is clear that Chæronea opened the way for a new Hellenic state to create a new national life in which discord should give way to unity and individualism to a world empire. Nevertheless the rise of Macedon was not continuous with the former life of Greece as were the successive hegemonies of the older states. The monarchy of Philip obliterated not only the existing commonwealths but their modes of government. Politically the loss was swallowed up in gain. Aristotle’s polity has rightly been called provincial in comparison with his pupil’s empire in which there was neither Greek nor barbarian. But in the world of ideas 264no substitution was an adequate atonement. The ideals of liberty which the older states had cherished and in which their intellectual and artistic life had been nurtured were lost at Chæronea. In this sense the Athenians were right in saying that here ended the freedom of Greece.

More than two centuries later a lesser victory was won at Chæronea by Sulla over the forces of Mithridates, king of Pontus. Two trophies were erected by the Roman general, and were afterwards seen by Pausanias. “But Philip, the son of Amyntas, set up no trophy, neither at Chæronea, nor for any other victory that he won over barbarians or Greeks, for it was not a Macedonian custom to erect trophies.” On this field the only trophy was the one erected by the defeated to the dead. The Athenians who fell were buried in the Cerameicus, and Demosthenes, who had fought in the ranks, pronounced over them a funeral oration. The Thebans were buried on the field. “No inscription,” says Pausanias, “is carved on the tomb, but a lion is placed on it, perhaps in allusion to the spirit of the men. The reason why there is no inscription I take to be that their fortune did not match their valour.”

This lion may be seen to-day about a quarter of a mile beyond Kapræna, just before one turns toward the modern railroad station of Chæronea. For centuries it had lain in fragments, but in 1902 the broken pieces were fitted together with a result extraordinarily impressive. Upon a pedestal ten feet high sits erect 265a great beast of gray stone, lifting into the free air a massive unbowed head, and rivalling in the guardianship of Chæronea the greater Inspector who, possibly after this same battle, was invoked by an unknown poet:—

The road turns at a sharp angle in front of the lion and runs in placid monotony to the station situated near the banks of the Cephisus. Pausanias closes his chapter on Chæronea by a rare reference to the common people of his own day, who gathered flowers and from them distilled “balms for the pains of men.” In a modern chapter the end comes, not with the haunting fragrance through summer fields of plucked lilies and healing roses, but with the scream of an engine as the Athens express breaks into the little station. The train goes straight through Bœotia to the bright city in the Attic plain. But on the way lies Thebes of the seven gates.

CHAPTER XIII THEBES AND BŒOTIA

“O Thebè blest, wherein delighteth most thy heart? in which of all the noble deeds wrought in thy land in days gone by? Gone by, I say, for now the Grace of olden time is fallen upon sleep.”

Of Bœotia more than of any other province of Greece is our involuntary judgment likely to be at fault, for the ancient distinction between the quick-witted Athenians and the stupid Bœotians has passed into our own proverbial language. But our inherited contempt for the Bœotian “clowns” is rather a tribute to the persistent intellectual domination of the Athenians than an accurate reflection of the truth. Indeed, if we examine the sources of the tradition, we find that the original verdict was popular and unreasoned, receiving its literary support in comedy which deliberately appealed to vulgar prejudices. “If you have good sense, you will avoid Bœotia,” was the mocking advice of Pherecrates, the distinguished forerunner of Aristophanes, and to the comic poets of the following centuries Bœotian gluttony and Bœotian clumsiness were an unfailing resource to pleasure the fickle humours of the crowd.

BOEOTIA

In the serious literature of the great periods Bœotia 267is treated with respect. Plutarch complains that Herodotus misrepresented Thebes in the Persian Wars, and warns his readers that as there are venomous insects at the heart of roses so beneath the historian’s delightful and persuasive style lurk defamation and vituperation of “the noblest and greatest cities and men of Greece.” But if Herodotus has diverged from the truth, in this instance a questionable supposition, he has at least looked upon Thebes as an enemy and not overlooked her as a boorish community. In the history of Thucydides also, and even of the bigot Xenophon, Bœotian cities make a dignified, if not always virtuous, appearance among the actors on the national stage.

In poetry Bœotia receives her full rights as a contributor to the imaginative life of Greece. In Homer not only is the Bœotian harbour of Aulis the meeting place of the Greek fleet before it sets sail for Ilium, but also Bœotian landscapes beautify heroic episodes with their rivers flowing between green banks, their open meadows and bright groves, their flocks of tame doves and grassy ways. In the Homeric Hymns Bœotian vineyards and furrows bloom under the swift feet of golden-haired Apollo and mischievous Hermes. Above all, in the Attic dramatists Bœotian Thebes is the scene of the epiphany of gods and of the sorrows of humanity. The legendary past of this city was crowded with personages whose glories and whose dooms were on so grand a scale that they became to the tragic poets of Athens, and still are to us, symbols of the unceasing conflict 268between will and destiny. The Theban legends more than any others, save those of Argos, appealed to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as fitted for their dramatic purpose of arousing “pity and terror.” In using this material they displayed a familiarity with the Thebes of their own day which is a striking proof that men of sense and feeling could delight in Bœotia. Æschylus perceived the fertility of the land and the fairness of Dirce, goodliest of streams. Sophocles seems to have heard and never forgotten the soft murmur of the river Ismenus. And Euripides knew intimately the wild ivy growing over the city towers and the berries and flowers of the city gardens, the golden wheat-fields and cooling springs of the surrounding country, the “deep pine greenery” and “fallen oak leaves” within the forests of Mount Cithæron, the mountain torrents cleaving the narrow, crag-topped glens, the gleaming snow forever resting on the mountain’s heights.

Furthermore, Bœotia had its own traditions of culture. Although creative artistic power was exemplified only in Hesiod, the originator of a new literary movement, and in Pindar, the most eminent lyric poet of Greece, there was revealed in the architecture, sculpture, and painting which enriched cities and sanctuaries, and in the poetry and music which were conspicuous at festivals, a critical taste as trustworthy as any outside of Attica. Educational ideals also tended toward a genuine if not always vigorous cultivation. Plutarch’s ripe refinement is a late but not a solitary example.

269Thus accoutred against prejudice we may hope more fairly to appraise the good and the evil in Bœotian life.

Bœotia has one of the most fortunate situations in Greece, for its frontiers are either protected by high mountains or border on two arms of the sea—the Gulf of Corinth and the Gulf of Eubœa—which in antiquity connected her with the extended maritime life of Greece and put her into easy communication with Attica and the Peloponnesus.

Within the mountain barriers the Bœotian country consists of two plains separated by hills. The flatness of the northern plain is unrelieved, and the rivers that flow into it, like the Cephisus, find no outlets except by katavothras or channels which they force for themselves under Mount Ptoön in the north. The frequent stoppage of these channels turned a large part of the plain into the famous Copaic Lake, the drainage of which moved prehistoric engineers to wonderful feats, tempted to comparative failure the less expert engineers of successive historic periods, and has finally been accomplished by modern skill. Within a few years a British company has reclaimed for the growing energies of modern Greece thousands of acres of land that will yield two crops a year.

The southern basin of Bœotia is smaller and also less homogeneous and monotonous than the northern. Thebes occupies a small plateau of its own on the northern side of a low range of hills that divides it 270from the larger part of the plain, given over to the beautiful valley of the Asopus.

The fertility and charm of Bœotia may still be appreciated. In antiquity cities and towns, busied with the industries of the soil and of the sea, gave evidence also of the practical resources supplied by Nature. And yet it must be admitted that the historical importance of Bœotia falls somewhat short of its obvious advantages. Only after Athens and Sparta had risen successively to the hegemony of Greece and again lost their power did Thebes play a leading rôle in national politics. And at no time did Bœotians vie either in energy or genius with the people of barren Attica. An explanation often given is that the unhealthful climate and heavy atmosphere of the country modified natural impulses to enterprise. The Athenians, as we have seen, laid great stress on the brilliant freshness of their own air as promoting intelligence. But another explanation takes into account the mystery of racial characteristics. Before Bœotia was conquered, sometime in the centuries, preceding Homer, by the northern race from Epirus and Thessaly which gave the country its name and began the “historic period,” there existed both in the north and in the south older peoples of evident wealth and power. For centuries Orchomenus was the leading city, not only of the northern plain but of the whole country. Its mighty kings and golden splendour were still a bright memory to Homer, and excavations have brought to life for us indications of the richness of its 271civilization. Exceptionally impressive and interesting ruins of a fortress now known as Goulas (or Gha or Gla) have been discovered on what used to be the eastern bank of the Copaic Lake. And at Thebes also we shall find traces of a people as advanced as any in prehistoric Greece. In the early ages the air of Bœotia does not seem to have prevented conspicuous progress in political power or in the arts. The northern invaders, then, would seem to have been responsible for the defects of later history, failing to construct a civilization equal to the one they had been able to destroy. In the case of the arts especially, it is significant that Pindar, the only Bœotian poet of the first order, was not of unmixed Bœotian blood, but belonged to a branch of the Ægidæ, who traced their pedigree back to the pre-Bœotian rulers of Thebes. Of this descent, distinguished in the eyes of all Greeks, Pindar was justly proud. And yet he was a loyal son of Thebes and assumed his share in the “ancient reproach” of “Bœotian swine.” We are at liberty, therefore, to emphasize his country before his blood.

Modern Thebes is huddled on the site of the ancient acropolis, its poverty serving as a reminder of the desolation which as early as Strabo’s time had fallen upon one of the great cities of Greece. Pausanias found the lower city deserted, save for the sanctuaries, the population being restricted to the acropolis, and Dio Chrysostom had seen a solitary image standing among the ruins of the old market-place. In the middle ages 272Fortune returned to Thebes from time to time, but under the Turks deserted her in apparent despair. Doubtless the town will revive as the modern nation gathers its forces. In the mean time it serves to indicate the area of the stronghold or acropolis built by the prehistoric settlers. Before the middle of the fifth century the city had grown westward to the stream of Dirce, and eastward to the river Ismenus. After that time, as is evident from remains of city walls, the area was even more extended.

The mythological past of Thebes was greater than any of its historic periods. Her early citizens shone brilliantly among those—

The story of Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes, is one of the best examples of the legends by which the Greeks reconstructed their early history. As if by “shadows of dreams” they were haunted by the memory of ancient adventures and enterprises, by movements of whole peoples and bright deeds of early heroes. And in spite of their arrogant aloofness in historic times from all “barbarians,” they admitted, in the stories into which their racial imagination shaped the formless facts of prehistoric life, a close connection 273with foreign peoples. So Cadmus was said to be a Phœnician going forth from his own land and settling in Bœotia before it was known by that name. Whatever the Phœnician connection was, whether direct or by way of Crete, whether by colonization or merely by trading stations, it is certain that a pre-Bœotian people occupied Thebes and were displaced by northern invaders, who in their turn, at one time or another, seem to have been forced on by the pressure of Illyrians from Epirus. These facts the Greek people made into a story of individual adventure, and this story Greek poets made dramatic and universal. Cadmus was son of a Phœnician king and brother of the ravished Europa. Sent by his father to find his sister, and not daring to return without her, he asked advice of the Delphic oracle. He was told to follow a cow until she should lie down. This strange behest led him through Phocis to Thebes. Here, like most heroes, including Apollo, who wished to take possession of strange earth, he was obliged to slay a dragon. Athena, his special guardian, bade him sow the dragon’s teeth, and from these sprang up an armed brood of warriors, known thereafter as the “Spartoi” or Sown Men. Cadmus watched them fight with each other until only five were left, with which doughty remnant he built up the Cadmeia, or original Acropolis of Thebes. Like Apollo again, he was forced to atone for the murder of the dragon by serving Ares for a term of years. At the end Ares gave him to wife Harmonia, his daughter by Aphrodite, and 274Cadmus began a glorious reign. But his patient bondage to Ares had won only a temporary pacification, and to his children and grandchildren passed the relentless curse. Œdipus was his direct descendant. Even in Cadmus’s lifetime two daughters and two grandsons met with violent deaths, and he and his queen Harmonia went far away to Illyria and became rulers of the Enchelians. There they were changed into serpents, “bright and aged snakes,” and were compelled by fate to lead their barbarian people in an invasion of Greece. Matthew Arnold follows Ovid in making them “among the green Illyrian hills,”—

But Euripides represents the old king as filled with evil presentiment:—

Pindar in his radiant vision of the future life beyond the foam of Acheron places Cadmus with Peleus in the 275company of the mighty dead who dwell at peace forever within the islands of the Blest. The earthly life of both heroes he uses to illustrate to Hieron, lord of Syracuse and Fortune’s favourite, the adage inherited from the men of old: “For every boon to men the gods deal double bane.”

Pindar’s song of praise “flitting like a bee from tale to tale” paused often upon the legends of his “mother Thebes.” Among others he tells the story of Heracles’s birth at Thebes and of his speedy slaying, while yet in swaddling clothes, of monstrous snakes that approached his cradle. The most tragic episode of Heracles’s life, his madness and his murder of his children, also occurred at Thebes, according to the version of the legend used by Euripides in his drama of “The 276Mad Heracles.” But this play is of little poetic importance in comparison with the plays that deal with the curse-haunted house of Cadmus. Neither Euripides nor Sophocles, in their single extant experiments with the tragedy of Heracles, display the sympathetic genius which has given permanent value to the stories of Pentheus and Œdipus. The two plays, however, which rest upon these legends are famous for antipodal reasons. The “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles was selected by Aristotle as the most perfect specimen, in technical construction, of the Greek drama, and is treasured now as the model of what is most restrained, most profound yet clear, most “Hellenic” in Greek literature. The “Bacchæ” of Euripides, on the other hand, is more “un-Hellenic” than any play or poem that has come down to us, more resplendent in fancy, more wild in theme, more incomprehensible in purpose.

Pentheus was the son of Agave and the grandson and successor of Cadmus. But his fame was born of his futile conflict with another daughter’s greater son. Semele, loved by Zeus and at her own request visited by him in the full panoply of his splendour, had been consumed in the lightning’s fire, and her child Dionysus had been snatched from her womb by its divine father and hidden within his own thigh to issue in time as the strangest of all the gods. Popularly known as the “god of wine,” he was in reality a Lord of Many Voices, a Spirit of Guiding Fire, a Mountain Bull, a Snake of a Hundred Heads, a Master of the Voices of 277the Night, a Lover of Peace, a Giver of Good Gifts, a God, a Beast, a Mystery. His worship, originating among the gloomy Thracians and the mystical yet sensuous Orientals, was late in winning its place in cultivated Athens. Only with very great difficulty can we discover the threads of belief which made out of the newcomer a gracious lord of the vintage, a dispeller of care and teacher of mirth, a prophet, a guide in all the arts of civilization and, more mysteriously still, a suffering god, both redeemer and redeemed, a companion at Eleusis of Demeter and Persephone. Because, however, of the persistent clarity of the Greek imagination, the god now and again emerges from amid the chaos of functions and attributes in a concrete form of beauty. In the Homeric Hymn written in his praise he is a youth with dark hair and dark and smiling eyes standing on a headland that juts above the unharvested sea, while the ocean winds blow about his shoulders a purple robe. To Euripides he is—

The distinguishing feature of all Dionysiac worship was the frenzied raving of its votaries. Women especially were mastered by the strange desire to join in the revels, and, since the intellectualized life of Athens was hostile to insane manifestations of religious fervor, Athenian women made frequent pilgrimages to places 278where the wildness of nature welcomed the wildness in the heart of man. We have already seen them travelling to the uplands of Parnassus. Mount Cithæron was another favourite gathering place. The women in Aristophanes’s “Thesmophoriazusæ” cry aloud:—

Perhaps the most adventurous would sometimes make their way to the bleak hills near Pella, the capital of Macedonia, where queen and peasant met in Bacchic excesses. Euripides spent the last years of his life at Pella, and it has been thought that there he conceived the idea of writing a play to portray Dionysus’s triumphal entrance into Thebes against the will of Pentheus. Be this as it may, certainly Thebes and Cithæron are more than a perfunctory mise-en-scène for the “Bacchæ.” In no other Greek play is the reader so conscious of the presence of landscape.

Dionysus comes from the East to defend his mother’s memory and to establish his worship in her city. Pentheus opposes him in spite of the wisdom of Cadmus and the warnings of the soothsayer Tiresias. The god constrains the women of Thebes, including Pentheus’s mother and her sisters, who long ago had tempted the young Semele to her destruction, to follow him to Mount Cithæron. Pentheus is then led to spy 279upon their revels. They take him for a wild beast and his own mother tears him to pieces. At the end, restored to an agonized reason, she becomes an exile from her home. Cadmus goes to his fate among the Illyrians. Dionysus is rapt from mortal sight in a cloud. It is a disputed question whether Euripides was moved to this portrayal of a cruel godhead by the subtlest impiety, or by a belated desire to be considered orthodox, or by a realization of the savage power that lies at the heart of life and cannot be gainsaid. At any rate he has woven into the plot the pathos of which he is master, in the reiterated suggestions of the tie between parent and child: the young god stirred to triumphant action by the memory of his dead mother; the living mother wildly bringing her son’s head in from the mountain, and calling upon him to come and glory in her lion-hunting; the old father deciding to lead his daughter back from the shadows of madness, even if the path of truth ends in grief and pain. And the whole nexus of religion, pathos, and inherited curse is spread before us in colours of flame.

The play is pervaded by the dances and the songs of the Mænads who have followed Dionysus—

and who irresistibly draw to their ranks the matrons and maidens of Thebes:—

The picture of the women as they finally have taken possession of Cithæron is painted for Pentheus by a shepherd. Upon this passage and a few others in the play rests Mr. Symonds’s discriminating statement that “the ‘Bacchæ,’ like the ‘Birds,’ proves what otherwise we might have hardly known, that there lacked not Greeks for whom the ‘Tempest’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would have been intelligible.” And for this magic not only Euripides’s brilliant fancy but also Mount Cithæron itself is responsible.

281The lowing kine awake them and they gird on their dappled fawn-skins:—

The curse laid upon Cadmus destroyed all his daughters, and among his grandchildren not only Pentheus but also Actæon who, because he saw Artemis at her bath in one of Cithæron’s still pools, was torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. Cadmus’s only son, Polydorus, and his son’s son, Labdacus, were strangely spared. Then once more Nemesis rose to the pursuit. The son of Labdacus was Laius, who was unwittingly murdered by his son, Œdipus, and the doom of Œdipus is the subject of the “Œdipus Tyrannus.”

Cithæron still towers on the horizon; in its “winding glens” the infant Œdipus had been exposed and rescued by a vagrant hireling in charge of mountain flocks. But the play takes us back to the city, with its royal palace and temples and market-place. As usual, it is the Thebes of Sophocles’s day that is used for scenery. The drama opens when the fruitful country has 282been laid waste by a pestilence and her citizens are praying to Artemis, whose temple stands in the Agora, to Apollo at his oracular seat by the river Ismenus, and to all the gods by the altar in front of the royal palace. But in these few hints all localized interest is exhausted. The austere and disciplined beauty of the dramatic structure throws into high relief the pitifulness and the terror of a father’s sin at work in the third and fourth generation, and of the human struggle against destiny. The universal truth of the tragedy as apprehended by Sophocles was as independent of the walls of Thebes as of the confines of the theatre in Athens. And yet in modern Thebes, itself the shadow of a greater past, we may realize afresh the catastrophe that befell the ancient king. He had saved the city by guessing the riddle of the Sphinx and thus destroying her. He had been acclaimed as king in place of Laius, slain by an unknown hand, and had married Iocasta, Laius’s queen. Now he promises to save his people from the pestilence by obeying the Delphic command that the slayer of Laius shall be found and exiled. He discovers that he is the murderer, and, in a crescendo of horror, that he is the son both of the man he murdered and of his own wife. In spite of their effort to kill him in his infancy, he has reappeared, the innocent agent of their destruction, as the irrefutable god of prophecy had foretold. Iocasta hangs herself. Œdipus’s children face a world that will remember against them the sin of their father. He puts out his eyes, and goes into 283voluntary exile, defeated by fate, a broken-hearted fugitive, not yet conscious that in the surrender of his will to God he may atone and be at peace. Borne from afar upon the quiet air of to-day we may hear ghostly echoes of the songs of the people that watched him. He was an example of the emptiness of life:—

And he also exemplified the truth of Solon’s aphorism that no one should be congratulated before the end:—

In spite of the repentance of Œdipus, the ancient curse fell upon his children, and their dooms also became the subjects of dramas. Æschylus, in the “Seven against Thebes,” deals with the story of Eteocles and Polyneices, whose own folly was the immediate cause of their ruin. They had agreed to rule Thebes alternately, but Eteocles once in possession refused to abdicate. 284Polyneices raises in Argos an army led by Adrastus, with which he advances against his country. Civil war follows, and the brothers kill each other. This story gave Æschylus two dramatic opportunities peculiarly suited to his genius. One was the handling of the theme of Nemesis, not with grave calm like Sophocles, but with gigantic vigour, with rough-hewn figures of triple-crested waves of evil, harvests of blood, chilling frosts of fear, with a penetrating insistence upon the “black and full-grown curse” which shadows city and citizens. Within its gloom Eteocles fights only with the ardour of despair:—

To relieve this gloom Æschylus uses his other dramatic opportunity, that of describing with Homeric eloquence the seven Argive warriors stationed at the seven gates and the Theban defenders sent to meet them. In the full-mouthed trimeters of the messenger who has seen the enemy, and of Eteocles who is undaunted by his report, echo stirringly the epic clash of arms, neighing of steeds, and war-cries of men. Shields of many devices and crested helmets bedeck the heroes. Courage adorns them all, from Amphiaraus, who foresees disaster, to Parthenopæus, the Arcadian metic, repaying to Argos the cost of his nurture:—

Euripides used the same story in his “Tyrian Women,” but openly scorned the Homeric note of Æschylus. With the enemy at the gates there is no time to describe the warriors, and the emphasis is shifted from the horror of the curse to the burden on Iocasta’s heart. Still living, she seeks to reconcile her sons, and at last kills herself on their dead bodies. Polyneices is not only his country’s enemy but a homesick man whose eyes grow wet when he sees the familiar altars and Dirce and the old gymnasium, and who begs his mother just before he dies to bury him in Thebes. Antigone is brave enough to support her mother, comfort her father, and promise to bury her brother, but so tenderly young that an old servant helps her up a cedarn stairway to the palace roof that she may see the Argive army in the plain. Another vision of brave 286youth is given in the character of Menœceus, last virgin descendant of the Sown Men. Informed by Tiresias that by a voluntary death he can save Thebes, he evades his father and makes one of the patriotic speeches that never failed to thrill an Athenian audience in the Dionysiac theatre:—

The fame of Antigone was secured by Sophocles. Thebes seems to have been always noted for the beauty of its women, from Semele, the bride of Zeus, to the tall yellow-haired ladies admired by Dicæarchus, and Æschylus suggests the loveliness of Antigone as Euripides suggests her youthfulness. But through Sophocles we know her unadorned as the embodiment of loyalty and courage. On the sunny morning that followed the defeat of the Argives, when the eye of golden day had at last arisen over Dirce’s stream, she buried her brother and defied Creon’s edict, which forbade burial to an enemy of the country, in a noble speech of justification:—

287The Athenian reverence for Law made natural an even more magnificent reiteration of this idea in the “Œdipus Tyrannus:”—

Beneath a neighbouring hill Antigone was walled up in one of the rock-cut caverns that abound in Greece. Her lover Hæmon, Creon’s son, kills himself within the door. His mother takes her life, and Creon is left to a late and impotent knowledge of the truth. Before the end the chorus of Theban girls think of Antigone’s betrothal and in a famous hymn to Love flash brief fire upon the lonely moral heights of the play. But suddenly the song dissolves into a lamentation which still haunts the ear in Thebes:—

In historic Thebes heroism had lost its lustre. When Greece was tested, the result in this city is revealed in the laconic words of Herodotus, that among the Greeks who sent earth and water to Xerxes were the Thebans and the other Bœotians, except the Platæans and the 288Thespians. “The grace of the olden time is fallen upon sleep,” Pindar complained after recounting the “noble deeds” of the heroic age. His own sympathy with the national cause is clearly seen in another ode written after the expulsion of the Persians: “Some god has turned aside the stone of Tantalus from overhead, a load that Hellas might not brook.”

Later, when it was regarded as a political asset to have opposed the Persians, the Thebans defended their failure on the ground that they had had neither constitutional government nor popular freedom. A cabal of selfish nobles had forced them into an action abhorrent to themselves. Certainly it is true that Thebes was always aristocratic rather than democratic. And it is worth noting that Pindar in his art was the true son of such a city. The great festivals of Greece were the immediate inspiration of his extant odes, while his life in Athens and his journeys to Sicily and to the eastern islands furnished him with much poetic material. But as far as the “soaring eagle” is to be identified with a birthplace, we may ascribe to his aristocratic origin and early environment his persistent selection of the things that were distinguished and splendid.

At the time of the Peloponnesian War Thebes appears as the bitter opponent of Athens. But later the shifting politics of the time brought about an alliance between these two ancient enemies and set Thebes against Sparta. Her position, however, was one of difficulty and humiliation, buffeted about as she was 289between the greater powers. Finally, in the first quarter of the fourth century, under the influence of one man, Thebes entered upon a period of power and distinction. Brief as it was, it served to awaken the sleeping glory of the old days and to make men once more mindful of Thebes of the golden shield. Epaminondas inspired a young Bœotian party, roused the Theban people, opposed Sparta and defeated her by new strategic skill at Leuctra in 371 B. C., renewed the ancient confederacy of Bœotian towns, won the support of neighbouring states and the sympathy of Delphi, and finally marched into the Peloponnesus to oppose the unrighteous designs of Sparta. At the battle of Mantinea in Arcadia he lost his life, before his work for Thebes and Hellas was finished. It is greatly to be regretted that a career so admirable and a personality so original should not have been interpreted by some adequate historian or poet. He lived too late for the enthusiasm of Herodotus or the justice of Thucydides. That Xenophon, through his hatred of Thebes, failed to talk much of the Theban general is no great loss to our imaginative understanding of a great man. Pausanias in his sincere admiration contributes something: “Of the famous captains of Greece Epaminondas may well rank as the first or at least as second to none. For whereas the Lacedæmonian and Athenian generals were seconded by the ancient glories of their countries as well as by soldiers of a temper to match, Epaminondas found his country disheartened and submissive to foreign dictation, yet 290he soon raised them to the highest place.” Plutarch’s “Life of Epaminondas” has not been preserved, but this loss is partially repaired by his “Life of Pelopidas,” the companion in arms and the passionate imitator of the hero, and by his return now and again in other writings to a contemplation of the character of Epaminondas. Out of slight sketches like these and out of the second-rate histories we must fashion our portrait.

Epaminondas was a great soldier and a leader of men. These facts need not be obscured by the other fact that he did not, probably could not, establish a national unity strong enough to live on after him. With him died the hopes of Thebes. His fear of this must have been his heaviest burden. Patriotism with him not only excluded satisfaction in his own power, but included patience under attack. To us, familiarized with magnanimous patriotism in many nations, this seems more admirable than strange. But against the background of Greek history the statesmen are conspicuous who could have entirely understood the obedient spirit in which Socrates accepted condemnation from the city he had tried to serve. In Epaminondas also appear some of those qualities which his contemporary Plato thought essential to a wise king. He loved philosophy more than power, and his early training had been intellectual and moral rather than martial. Like Pindar, he belonged to the oldest nobility of Thebes, tracing his pedigree to Cadmus, but his family had long lived modestly, dissociated from the more vulgar aristocracy, 291and devoted to the intellectual life. Philosophers exiled from Southern Italy came to Thebes as well as Athens, and among them Lysis of Tarentum exercised a great influence upon the young Epaminondas. The boy’s gentle nature and hardy will furnished an ideal soil for the seeds of the Pythagorean doctrine, which, before the days of St. Francis of Assisi, taught the beauty of poverty, of temperance, and of humility, and insisted upon a moral earnestness and devotion to duty. Epaminondas, the conqueror and liberator, was at all times a “practical” follower of the religion in which he had been nurtured. And with something of his own fervour he inflamed the Sacred Band, that company of “friends” like Epaminondas and Pelopidas, who inspired each other to valour and to virtue and were united in the cause of patriotism. In this appeal to the chivalric gallantry of youth Epaminondas was thoroughly Greek. In the unmarred consistency of his own life he was unapproached even by his closest followers. As Pindar in his generation was “heavy at heart” over Thebes, so the martial leader must often have brooded in lonely impotence over the same city. To travellers he may appear, as dusk comes on, in the guise in which men found him on an ancient holiday, walking aloof, ungarlanded and thoughtful. “I am keeping guard,” he said, “that all of you may be drunk and revel securely.”

The visible remains of ancient Thebes are at present very few, and although archæological research may 292reveal sites and fragments of great interest, we shall never see here ruins still clothed upon with beauty. Nor is the situation of the town impressive enough to attract travellers who are indifferent to memories of the past. The chief charm of the place is its view of an horizon broken by Cithæron, Helicon, and distant Parnassus; by Mount Ptoön, where men listened to Apollo, and the Mountain of the Sphinx.

Fragments of walls are all that remain of the city’s fortifications. Of the gates no traces have been found. Pausanias speaks of seeing all seven gates, but he describes only three of them, and some scholars have argued that the other four were invented by the lost epic writers who first gave literary form to the Theban legends. Certainly the poets themselves, Æschylus, Euripides, and the later Alexandrians, differ in their lists. The only important ruins of a building are those recently reported to have been discovered by the Greek archæologists near the Agora. They represent a palace of the “Mycenæan” period which met its destruction by fire and which has been identified, under the name of “The House of Cadmus,” with the ruins of “the bridal chambers of Harmonia and Semele” seen by Pausanias. From the historic period nothing remains, although with the help of broken pieces of marble and stone we may try to imagine the Temple of Ismenian Apollo, second only to Delphi as the seat of this oracular god, in the place of the present church of St. Luke on the hill that rises by the river St. John.

293Dismantled as Thebes was in the time of Pausanias, his guides showed him many places which were associated with Pindar or with the legends embodied in the Attic drama. There was the Observatory of Tiresias, where the blind prophet had listened intently to the sharp cries and whirring wings of the prescient birds. As if ageless in sorrow, he pervades each drama on the curse of Cadmus with his futile vision of the truth,—

There was also the tomb of Menœceus, and near by a pillar marking the scene of the duel between Eteocles and Polyneices. The immediate neighbourhood was still called the “Dragging of Antigone,” because over it Antigone had to drag her brother’s heavy body.

In addition to the great Temple of Apollo, with its statues by Phidias and Scopas, Pausanias saw the Temple of Artemis, with a statue by Scopas; the Temple of Heracles, the Champion, the gables of which held the representations by Praxiteles of the demi-god’s twelve labours; the Temple of Dionysus; and the Temple of Cybele and Pan erected by Pindar so near to his own house that he often heard the music of the vesper services. Pindar’s house is as unknown now as if it had not been twice saved when Thebes was sacked, once by the Athenians, who remembered his praises of their city, and once by Alexander, who reverenced his genius.

294While these things are irretrievably lost or await the spade, streams of living water seem to link the present to the past. The little river of Hagios Johannis has but changed its ancient name of Ismenus, and the Plakiotissa, made by several streams which rise south of Thebes, is easily transformed into the “Dircæan streams.” Some old masonry and tablets bearing inscriptions mark the tanks which irrigate the neighbouring gardens. Thebes still boasts in trees and flowers a reminiscence of its ancient fame for bloom and brightness.

Dirce was the queen of Thebes who cruelly treated her husband’s niece, Antiope. Antiope’s sons, Amphion and Zethus, ordered to execute their mother’s sentence, bound Dirce instead to the violent bull. Only a brief fragment of the play by Euripides, called “Antiope,” has been preserved, but the sculptured group known as the Farnese Bull has made the story tritely familiar. Amphion also raised the walls of Thebes by the music of his lyre, a story seized upon by the poets from Homer to Tennyson.

A lively stream now called Paraporti flows into the Plakiotissa on the southwest, and Theban women use it for their washing, unconcerned with its ancient name of “Spring of Ares.” The cave near it was the Dragon’s Lair, and from the part of the acropolis that rose above it Menœceus plunged to his death. To the northeast, in the tiny suburb of Hagii Theodori, bubbles the spring of St. Theodore, anciently called the Spring 295of Œdipus because in it the king washed his guilty hands.

The events of the heroic age, if they are baldly catalogued in prose, lose for us their charm and their significance. Their ineffaceable reality to the historic Greeks may be illustrated by a story current in antiquity. At a conference in Arcadia an Athenian envoy taunted the Thebans and the Argives with having begotten the patricide Œdipus and the matricide Orestes. “Yes,” answered Epaminondas, “but Thebes and Argos exiled them and Athens received them.” And yet he would have rejoiced could he have known that the genius of Athens, in receiving the wandering Theban legends, had given them an immortal life.

CHAPTER XIV BŒOTIA, CONTINUED

Epaminondas told the Bœotians that their country was the stage of Ares, and several battles fought on their soil were of national significance. At Leuctra Epaminondas defeated Sparta. At Tanagra Athenians and Spartans first tried their strength against each other. At Delium the Athenians were defeated by the Bœotians in a struggle in which Alcibiades and Socrates took part. Alcibiades, who saved his master’s life, afterwards told their friends that in the retreat Socrates behaved exactly as he did in the streets of Athens, “turning his eyes observantly from side to side, though drenched with rain, and calmly looking about on friend and foe.” Above all, at Chæronea and Platæa occurred momentous events.

Late in September of the year 479 B. C., one hundred and forty-one years before Greek liberty was surrendered at Chæronea, there was fought near Platæa, in the plain between Cithæron and the Asopus, the last 297of the battles “wherein the Medes of the crooked bows were overthrown.” The work begun at Marathon was here completed. “The rest of the army died in Bœotia” was an Æschylean line calculated to arouse an Athenian audience. And an exquisite Herodotean story was fostered if not created by the desire of the Greeks to believe that the Persians had a foreboding of their disaster. Herodotus had the story from Thersander of Orchomenus. A Theban gave a dinner to Mardonius and fifty Persian nobles. The Persian who shared Thersander’s couch said to him:—

“‘Since here at table thou hast shared my food and my libation, I would leave with thee a memorial of my judgment that thou too, informed beforehand, mayest know how to plan for thy advantage. Dost see these Persians feasting here, and that host which we left encamping by the river? Of all these within brief space of time thou wilt behold a few survivors only.’ And as the Persian spoke these words he let fall many tears. Whereat Thersander, struck with wonder at his speech, replied: ‘Well, then, ’t were fitting to say this to Mardonius and to those next after him in honour.’ To that the other said: ‘My friend, what needs must happen by the will of God it is not possible for man to turn aside, and then, too, none is wont to yield to warnings, however credible, and many of us Persians, although our eyes are opened, follow on, constrained by necessity. This pang is bitterest of all, for men to know much and to have power over naught.’”

298The battle of Platæa occurred because Mardonius, the general of Xerxes, undertook to oppose the Spartan Pausanias, commander of the Greek allies, as he was making his way from the south, over the passes of Cithæron, to attack disloyal Thebes. The Platæans, true to the patriotism they had displayed at Marathon and Artemisium, joined the Greeks. The battle lasted for some days and was, as usual, retarded and complicated by the inability of the Greeks to coöperate; but it ended in the defeat and death of Mardonius, the capture of the luxurious Persian camp, and the final discouragement of the Orient. Herodotus’s account of the battle not only contains strategic details but is full of episodes which, even if they are but traditional or the creations of his own audacious vivacity, illustrate the truth that the conflict was one of civilizations and of ideals. The Persian cavalry leader, Macistius, glows in scarlet and gold, and when he is killed his men fill all Bœotia with the clamour of their grief. The Greek officers show his naked body to their soldiers because it is “worth seeing for its stature and beauty.” Mardonius gallops in on his snow-white charger where the fight is hottest and leads to death the picked guard of one thousand men, the flower of the Persian army. A Spartan kills him, but Pausanias refuses to maltreat his dead body even though the Persians had crucified the body of the Spartan Leonidas at Thermopylæ. In the camp of Mardonius are found a silver throne, a brass manger for the horses, and countless utensils of 299Oriental luxury. Pausanias orders served on the same spot a Spartan supper.

Modern historians have complained that Herodotus perpetuated and “consecrated” the illusion of the Athenians that they played a worthy part in the battle, while in reality they were but half-hearted and the battle was won by the “discipline and prowess of the Spartan hoplites.” Herodotus did, however, admit that though the Athenians fought well the Lacedæmonians fought better, and when, with characteristic Greek emphasis on individuals, he discussed which single men were most courageous, he assigned the first four places to Spartans.

In any case the Spartans did not fail to receive full credit for the victory from their contemporaries. Pindar called Platæa the glory of the Lacedæmonians as Salamis was the glory of the Athenians. And Æschylus, even within the Dionysiac theatre, attributed the Persian defeat to the “Dorian spear.” Perhaps no one regretted that both the Athenian and Spartan dead who were buried on the battlefield were honoured in epitaphs by Simonides. For the Athenians he wrote with dignity:—

300But the Spartans inspired his finer eloquence:—

When Platæa next appears in a great passage of literature she is shorn of her glory, the helpless prey of a foreign enemy and a hostile neighbour. During the Peloponnesian War, in 431 B. C., the Spartans conquered the city and, to please the Thebans, razed it to the ground. Thucydides’s account of the tragic occurrence includes the speeches made to the Spartans by the Platæans, who prayed for their lives, and by the Thebans, who urged their murder. That no speeches in Thucydides are more dramatic has been generally conceded from the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They have made it bitter even now to remember that the selfish opportunism and merciless rancour of the Thebans prevailed against the memories of “the great days of old,” invoked by the Platæans: “Look yonder to the sepulchres of your fathers slain by the Medes and buried in this land. Them we have honoured year by year with public offerings of raiment and such other things as usage calls for.... Pausanias gave them burial here because he felt that he was placing them with friends and in a friendly land. But you, if you 301shall slay us and shall make Platæa Theban land, what do you else in this than leave your fathers and your kinsmen, bereft of honours that are theirs, among murderers and in a hostile land? Nay more, you will actually enslave a country in which the Hellenes won their liberty and bring to desolation sanctuaries of the gods in which they prayed before they gained mastery over the Medes.”

The desolation fell. Later the little town was rebuilt, destroyed once more, and finally restored, though somewhat meanly, in the time of Alexander. Now not even a modern village brings life to the ancient site. Only ruins of the Alexandrian walls remain.

Bœotia had several important religious centres outside of Thebes. More penetrating than the trumpet of war were the voices that called the Greeks of north and south, and even the barbarians of the east, to the sanctuary of oracular Apollo on the slopes of Mount Ptoön, or to the oracle of Trophonius (a local deity probably to be identified with Zeus) at Lebadeia, which is beautifully situated on the western side of the Copaic plain looking toward Helicon and Parnassus. The Ptoön precinct was already abandoned in Plutarch’s time, and even more deserted than it is to-day when archæologists outnumber the occasional shepherds in search of mountain pasture. But the oracle of Lebadeia retained its sanctity into Roman times and was consulted by both Plutarch and Pausanias. In our day the same river in which the suppliants used to bathe, in preparation for the difficult sacred rites, 302turns the mills and factories of one of the busiest industrial centres of northern Greece.

Religion in Bœotia, as everywhere in Greece, furnished an artistic impulse. Contests of poetry and music were held at almost every centre. Architecture, sculpture, and painting were represented by the most famous masters. A temple renowned for its beauty was that of the Graces at Orchomenus. Within it, on a happy day in the fifth century, a chorus of boys lustily sang an ode written by Pindar for one of their fellows who had won a foot-race in Pisa’s famous valley. The young champion had doubtless illustrated the influence of his native divinities whom the poet celebrates:—

To moderns the most familiar of all the shrines of Bœotia is that of the Muses on Mount Helicon. So familiar, indeed, has it become through tradition and poetry that its geographical position is as unimportant as that of Raphael’s Parnassus. It almost perplexes us 303to localize Helicon as the eastern peak, now called Zagora, of the southern portion of the group of mountains that lie between the Copaic plain and the Gulf of Corinth; and to know that at the northern foot of this peak still nestles the valley, green and shady and traversed by a mountain stream, where once foregathered the iris-haired, golden-snooded Muses. Hippocrene even, struck out by the hoof of Pegasus as he flew toward heaven, is identified with the modern Kryopegadi, a very cold and clear perennial spring high up on the eastern side of the mountain within a little green glade encircled by fir trees. Helicon is still the home of fir-woods, oak groves and strawberry shrubs. Pausanias said that nowhere else could the goats find sweeter berries, and nowhere else could be found so many healing herbs. Hellebore, the ancient cure for madness, grew here in abundance.

In spite of the almost incalculable importance of the worship of the Muses and their pervasive presence in poetry, Greek literature scarcely concerns itself with their localized abode. Sophocles breaks the strain of the “Œdipus Tyrannus” by a fleeting vision of the nymphs sporting with Dionysus on the far-off heights of Helicon. And Hesiod was inspired to write his “Theogony” by a vision of the Muses that came to him as he slept on the mountain “majestical, sacred:”—

For the most part it is only in Alexandrian poetry, from which Roman poetry derived a large part of the material which it passed on to modern poetry, that we find Helicon and Hippocrene figuratively used as sources of inspiration.

Certain Bœotian towns illustrate other traditions of culture. Thespiæ, in the territory of Platæa, was used by Cicero to illustrate what was so little understood and so greatly scorned by the Romans—the Greek love of art. Nothing could so embitter the conquered people of Greece as to take from them or pretend to buy from them their works of art. “Believe me,” Cicero urges, “no community in the whole of Greece or Asia ever sold of its own accord to anybody any statue or picture or civic ornament. For the Greeks take marvellous delight in things which we despise. What would the Thespians take for their Eros, the only thing that attracts visitors to their town?” This was the Praxitelean statue which the sculptor himself ranked with his Faun as his best work and which Phryne obtained from him and presented to her native city. Eros was the tutelar divinity of the place, originally worshipped in the form of an unwrought stone. The statue, called forth by the æsthetic taste of a later age and passionately appreciated by the people, was taken to Rome by Caligula, returned by Claudius, stolen again by Nero. Pausanias saw only a copy when he was at Thespiæ. Now no copy like the 305familiar Capitoline copy of the Faun supplies us with half knowledge. But a visible symbol of Thespiæ’s other claim to remembrance has been left to us, to enrich the fragmentary wall and the few foundations that alone at present mark the ancient site. Not only did the city share in the victory of Platæa, but more daringly in earlier years, when the struggle with Persia was on the “razor’s edge” of uncertainty, she had sent her strongest men to die with Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The fragments of a stone lion similar to the lion of Chæronea are thought to mark the grave of these sons of Thespiæ who were inspired by—

In the eastern valley of the Asopus, or Vourieni, lie the not inconsiderable remains of ancient Tanagra, a city more popularly known to-day for its artistic taste than any other Greek city, except Athens. As early as 1874 excavations of its necropolis began to yield in extraordinary abundance the small terra-cotta figures which now adorn many museums, and in copies, more or less successful, have become a staple article of modern trade. These figurines, rough in finish but scrupulously lovely in shape, were objects of familiar use to the Tanagrians, being thrown into graves at burials. Other things in the city implied more civic pride. Pausanias mentions approvingly the unusually good taste of the inhabitants in separating their religious buildings from the business and residence portions 306of the city. And Dicæarchus is enthusiastic over their fine houses, adorned with porticoes and encaustic paintings. Literature also had its place, for here lived Corinna, a woman of no mean poetic talent. Pausanias saw her tomb in an honoured place in the city and a picture of her in the Gymnasium binding on her head a fillet to celebrate a victory over Pindar at Thebes. With unexpected acumen he remarks that she probably owed her victory partly to the fact that she wrote in a dialect intelligible to the Bœotians, and partly to her beauty. Moderns know her through the story that she advised Pindar to use mythological allusions, and after his first experiment told him that she had meant him to sow with the hand, not with a sack; and through her own haunting fragment of song: “Among the white-armed women of Tanagra, a city made famous by sweet soprano voices.” Such evidences of culture are the more surprising when we learn from Dicæarchus that Tanagra was a town of farmers. Their bluff straightforwardness, their kindliness and their simple living greatly impressed him in comparison with the insolence and dissipation of the Thebans.

Dicæarchus describes also with a few graphic words the inhabitants of Anthedon, a fishing town on the Gulf of Eubœa: “They are almost all fishermen, earning their livelihood by their hooks, by the purple shell, and by sponges. They grow old on the beach, among the seaweed and in their huts. They are all men of ruddy countenance and spare figure; their nails are 307worn away by reason of working constantly in the sea.”^[32] This town,—still lovely, it is said, when the sunset illumines the lilac hills of Eubœa and rose-colour clouds float above the little fishing-boats in the bay,—furnished to literature an important character in Glaucus, a fisherman who, by eating a certain grass, became a sea-god with the gift of prophecy. Many tales were told of him from time to time, especially by seafaring men. Æschylus wrote two plays, not now extant, with him as the central figure, and thence the subject passed into the poetic storehouse of the Alexandrian playwrights. Plato made use of the legend in one of his noblest presentations of idealism. The soul marred by its association with the body and with the evils of human life is like the old sea-god, overgrown with shellfish and seaweed, wounded and broken by the action of the waves. But if the soul would always love wisdom and pursue the divine, it would be lifted out of the sea in which it now is and be forever disencumbered of its rocky covering.

South of Anthedon, on the strait of Euripus, lies Aulis, of stately memory. To us as to Odysseus it is, as it were, but “yesterday or the day before” that the Achæan ships were gathering in Aulis freighted with trouble for Priam and the Trojans, and hecatombs were being offered on the altars beneath a beautiful plane tree by a stream of bright water. Here too Iphigeneia was sacrificed at the altar of Artemis. The story 308is told by Euripides, in the “Iphigeneia in Aulis,” in a way to bring out the latent heroism of the young. Iphigeneia grieves to leave the sunlight and clings to her mother, but in the end with splendid daring offers herself a willing sacrifice: “Mother, hear my words,” she cries,—

In the lyric recital of Æschylus she is pathetically the victim:—

309Pausanias saw the temple of Artemis, and within it as a revered relic a piece of the wood from the Homeric plane tree. The spring was also pointed out to him, and on a neighbouring hill the threshold of Agamemnon’s hut. Those were happy days for sight-seers. To-day a traveller can find only a few remains of the temple, near the ruined chapel of St. Nicholas, a little distance up the valley which stretches inland from the shore. But he may stand on the beach and watch tides as strange and irregular as they were when Æschylus described the Achæan host, troubled and held fast—

The heart of Bœotia’s literature lies in the Hesiodic poetry. Hesiod has a dual personality. As a half mythical “titulary president” of a school of poetry localized near Mount Helicon and rivalling the epic school, in Asia Minor and the islands, whose eponymous hero was Homer; as traditional author of the “Theogony,” which was the manual of mythology for the Greeks, ranking in educational value almost with the Iliad and Odyssey, and of the “Works and Days,” which was a collection of widely accepted ethical maxims, he seems to lose his home in Bœotia and to belong like Homer to the whole of Greece. But unlike Homer he is universally believed to have existed, and to have written a definite body of poetry which only later came to include many additions by unknown hands. We 310may, then, for our purposes, justly consider him as an individual with local habitation and a name. His family, either before his birth or while he was a child, immigrated from an Æolian colony in Asia Minor to Æolian Bœotia. They were farmers and lived in the little town of Ascra, which was perched on a conical hill opposite the larger mass of Helicon, to the north of the entrance to the valley of the Muses. It was destroyed by Thespiæ, and was deserted in Pausanias’s time. But “the tower” was standing which is still a conspicuous landmark and gives to the entire hill the name of Pyrgaki. Modern travellers are attracted by the wide and beautiful view which the hill commands.

Ascra itself, in Hesiod’s peevish opinion, was a miserable village, bad in winter, abominable in summer, good at no time. He could, however, when a boy, tend his sheep on the slopes of Helicon and see the Muses in his dreams. At some time he had a lawsuit with his brother about his inheritance, and became embittered by disappointment. This and the difficulties of his life as a husbandman led him to see the world in the hard colours of uncorrected realism. Only a few enthusiasts pretend to find in his “Works and Days” the beauty of the “Georgics,” in which Virgil was his avowed imitator. The Roman poet combined with a delicate temperament the education of his age, and tried to show to his countrymen, the already weary masters of the world, the victims of an over-luxurious civilization, that in farming lay a potent charm and a remedial grace. But Hesiod 311lived in the eighth century B. C. and farmed for his living. To us, grown more democratic than the later Greeks and Romans, his chief appeal is that of the “mouthpiece of obscure handworkers in the earliest centuries of Greek history, the poet of their daily labours, sufferings and wrongs, the singer of their doubts and infantine reflections on the world in which they had to toil.”

As agricultural life is concerned with certain permanent factors in human experience and is also proverbially conservative, Hesiod’s picture of it is probably true, in its broad outlines, of after centuries and of many another place than Bœotia. Later Greek writers were not attracted by the homely subject, and the “Works and Days” is the sole specimen in Greece of a kind of literature which is practically born out of the soil and out of nature’s varied processes.

In this didactic poem we are introduced to a community whose work and pleasures were governed by the seasons. The white blossoms of the spring, the swallow lifting her wing at dawn, the song of the cuckoo, the tender green of the fig tree, the early rains, all meant the planting and nursing of the seeds. The summer heat that brought the cicada’s shrill cry brought, too, a little leisure for picnicking in the shade of a rock by a stream, off creamy cake and goat’s milk and wine. But in the cooler hours the corn had to be threshed on the stone floors, and the hay stored in the barns. In the autumn the falling leaves and the crane’s migratory call showed that wood must 312be cut, ploughshares made, the proper servants and steers procured, and the grapes gathered and pressed. In the winter the industrious man had to look after his household store, much as he was tempted to linger by the forge and saunter in the warm porticoes. For in January the whirlwind of the north often swept down from Thrace, the Earth howled and long and loud the forests roared. The oaks and pines were hurled from hilltops. The beasts of the wild wood crept low to escape the drifting snow, the oxen and goats cowered in their stalls. Only the young daughter in her pretty chamber under her mother’s roof was safe. The farmer had to put on thicker underclothing and a woollen coat and oxhide shoes lined with thick socks, and pull his cap down over his ears as he hurried home at nightfall. Thus intertwined in Hesiod’s Bœotian mind were poetry and prudence. And prudence predominated in his catalogue of the lucky and unlucky days which next to the seasons regulated the farmer’s life. From sheep-shearing to marriage everything must have its proper day. This was true also of seafaring life, for which Hesiod gives rather grudging directions. Sailors and fishermen, potters and smiths mingled in friendly intercourse with the husbandmen. Beggars and vagrants came and went. And news of the distant world and a kindling of dull fancy came with the wandering minstrels. Standards in such a world were simple. Men ate asphodel and mallows and had a creed as pleasing and as natural: to work hard and save a little 313every year, to be hospitable and neighbourly, to be good to one’s parents and faithful to one’s wife, never to abuse a trust and to sacrifice to the gods with clean hands and a pure heart.

Hesiod has little to say of holidays, but as Bœotia grew older celebrations of all kinds seem to have flourished conspicuously, even for Greece, which took so kindly to the bright colours, lively crowds, and stately processions of feast days. Many of these, occurring quadrennially, attracted delegates and visitors from other states, even from contemptuous Athens. Such were the Musæa, the great national contests in poetry and music on Mount Helicon in the valley of the Muses; the games and literary competitions at Apollo’s sanctuary on Mount Ptoön; and the Eleutheria, the Games of Freedom, at Platæa. More local festivals, also, like the athletic and musical contests at Thespiæ known as the Games of Love, and the Royal Games at Lebadeia in honour of King Zeus, often drew crowds of visitors. But many of us, could we have known ancient Bœotia, would have chosen homelier occasions for our visits. We would have sought out Tanagra on the feast day of Hermes, the Ram-bearer, when the handsomest boy of the town, in memory of a similar service rendered by Hermes at the time of a plague, bore a lamb on his shoulders about the city walls. And in the autumn at Platæa we would have attended the annual memorial service for those who died in the great battle. At daybreak 314myrrh and garlands were carried to the tombs, young boys chosen for their free birth bore jars of oil and precious ointment and of wine and milk, and the chief magistrate put on a purple robe and poured out a libation, saying, “I drink to those who lost their lives for the liberty of Greece.” Or at the sanctuary of Demeter at Mycalessus we would have watched the people from the surrounding farms lay at the feet of her image all kinds of autumn fruits, which they knew would keep fresh the whole year through.

This festival of Thanksgiving was doubtless of very ancient origin, as was also the spring festival of the Little Dædala, celebrated every few years in many Bœotian communities. The peasants and townspeople poured into the woods and chose, from certain signs, an oak tree out of which they made an image; and this image they set up and worshipped to the accompaniment of festal merriment. The custom originated in Platæa, if we may judge from the story believed by the common people. Hera, in a not unwonted fit of temper, had withdrawn to Eubœa, and Zeus could not persuade her to come back. But old Cithæron, lord of Platæa, advised him to play on her jealousy by dressing up a wooden image and telling her that he was going to marry Platæa, the wife of Asopus. Hera flew back, and in memory of the divine reunion the “Little Dædala” was instituted.

Every sixty years all Bœotia, its big and little cities, its farmsteads and fishing towns, united in the Great 315Dædala. The crowds gathered at Platæa. Long processions, representing each town, bore their own wooden images to the summit of Cithæron, seeking a narrow plateau where the snows had melted. Here altars were built and victims burned. And at night the great flames rose into the sky and were seen from afar, so that the young men in Attica and beyond the Gulfs doubtless said to each other, “Bœotia is celebrating as our fathers said,” and the old men shook their heads and remembered brighter fires.

Zeus and Hera have been long forgotten, nor are the feet of Dionysus heard upon the mountain, but still winter gives way to spring and the heart of man is glad. The hard-working people of modern Bœotia keep holiday when spring blooms anew, and Mount Cithæron gives them as of old the soft green of its budding oak leaves, the vivacious laughter of its loosened waters.

CHAPTER XV THERMOPYLÆ

Thermopylæ lies due north from Delphi, less than twenty-five miles distant in an air line, but between them lie “many o’ershadowing mountains,” as Achilles might say, or, to be more exact, the great Parnassus cluster and the continuation of the Œta range, the watershed between the Bœotian Cephisus and the Malian Spercheius. Just where Doris and Phocis on the south meet Trachian Malis and Epicnemidian Locris on the north Mount Kallidromos is set like a boundary stone. The ridge that unites it with Mount Œta proper is now pierced by the Larissa railway-tunnel, opened in the summer of 1908, through which the northern express 317carries the traveller into the gorge and along the steep cliffs of the Asopus, the river that flowed down between Xerxes and Leonidas. To the east of the river’s outlet into the Malian gulf was the narrow gangway between cliffs and water, called “Hot-Gates” from the local “Thermal,” or hot springs, and the “Pylai,” or fortified gateways.

It is not unnatural that the story of Thermopylæ should have found in the imagination of men a place more secure than have even the victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa. The very tragedy of defeat stands out more conspicuously against the background of the moral victory. The physical surroundings, too, are more picturesque. At the narrow entrance between cliffs and sea individual daring emerges, as in the defence of a mediæval portcullis, and in the memory remain the details of the by-path over Mount Kallidromos; the leaves under foot rustling in the darkness and betraying the ascent of the Persians to the Phocian rear-guard; the dawn breaking over the blue sea at the foot of the cliffs; and the Persian Immortals descending swiftly upon the rear of the few resolute men below. Then the long struggle in the narrow pass comes to an end and Leonidas and his men move out into the wider part before the pass. The “strength of the hills” was rendered futile by the traitor guide; the water, faithful ally during the preceding days, would now vainly strive to engulf the invaders. The Sun, god of both armies, beat down indiscriminately upon the Oriental worshippers 318of his heavenly fire and on the heaps of dead Greeks. Somewhere amongst them lay the unaffrighted soldier Dieneces, who had welcomed with Laconic humour the sun-obscuring Persian arrows as a grateful shade in the heat of battle.

It is disappointing, indeed, that now on the spot the actual scene requires certain stage directions. The modern coast line has been pushed far out into the bay by earthquakes and the detritus of the streams. The Spercheius now flows through a plain some two miles wide between the precipices and the sea. But the configuration of the land was still essentially unchanged when, under Brennus and his Gauls, in the third century B. C., there was another invasion hardly less formidable than that of the Persians. Before the Gauls reached Delphi there was here at Thermopylæ a repetition of the more famous struggle. The coast line still lay close to the cliffs. The Athenian fleet stood in near enough, despite the rapidly shoaling water, to harass the flank of the enemy, while the other Greeks in the narrow pass repeated the stubborn resistance of the Spartans and their allies just two hundred years before. Other details, too, were duplicated. The Gauls, unable to force the pass, resorted, as had the Persians, to the mountain path. Again it was the Phocians who strove to stop them, but the invaders, pushing by, descended on the rear of the Greeks, who were saved from the fate of Leonidas only by the presence of the Athenian fleet.

319The exact topography of Thermopylæ is still a matter of controversy, and a liberal discount has long since been made from the fabulous total, given by Herodotus, of Xerxes’s host. Just who and how many of the allies remained and died after Leonidas sent the others away is also uncertain. Among those remaining with the Spartans of their own free will Pausanias mentions only the seven hundred Thespians and the eighty men from Mycenæ. The inscription written avowedly for all the Peloponnesian soldiers exaggerates the number of the Persians and fails to state definitely that all of the four thousand fought to the finish:—

But all restrictions, made in the interest of historic truth, only serve to eliminate the miraculous element. They leave undisturbed the picture of a heroism combined with military skill which, if properly supplemented, might well have kept Xerxes shut out from lower Greece indefinitely, or as long as the Greek fleet, aided by the elements, could have restrained him from moving south by the sea.

The allies of Sparta, both those who fell in the four days before the betrayal of the pathway and those who fell at the end, were duly praised, but Leonidas and his three hundred have always received, and justly, the lion’s share of honour. They represented the Lacedæmonians at their best. The moral prestige that the 320Spartans had temporarily forfeited by their absence from Marathon was now regained, to be still further emphasized at Platæa. Over the Spartans buried at Thermopylæ was inscribed:—

In Lacedæmon also the names of the three hundred were inscribed upon a pillar, still existing in the time of Pausanias. On the hill at Thermopylæ, where the Spartans made their last stand, was set up a marble lion to honour the name of Leonidas. In an epigram, said to have been written for the monument by Simonides, the lion is represented as saying to the passers-by:—

From the longer “encomium” by Simonides on the dead at Thermopylæ is handed down a fragment worthily translated by Sterling:—

321In addition to Leonidas there was also singled out for individual honour and remembrance the seer Megistias of Acarnania, who claimed descent, proud as that of the Levitical priesthood, from the Homeric seer Melampus. From sacrifices made before sunrise on that last day, the priest gave out in advance the certainty of their impending doom. Presently deserters and scouts came in saying that the Persians had forced the heights. Leonidas, recognizing that when they were attacked in the rear also death was a foregone conclusion, commanded Megistias and the greater part of the allies to withdraw while there was still time. But the priest, refusing to depart, remained to die with Leonidas and set the seal of religious sanction on the struggle for liberty, as the modern priesthood of Greece, in the war with the Turks, by their words and blood inspired and sanctioned the patriotism of the people.

The epitaph for the priest was written by Simonides, not by public commission as poet laureate, but, as Herodotus states, by reason of guest-friendship. Even this special inscription, however, on the tomb of the Acarnanian seer, closes with a complimentary reference to Sparta. It was Sparta’s day.

A dramatic story is selected by Herodotus to embellish his account of the battle. Two Spartan soldiers, 322Eurytus and Aristodemus, lay at the headquarters at Alpeni, suffering with severe ophthalmia. When the news came in of the final crisis, Eurytus, putting on his armour with the help of his helot squire, was led on his blind way into the thick of the battle and fell fighting with the rest, while the helot made good his escape. Aristodemus, as might indeed seem natural in the case of a man thus incapacitated for service, remained behind and returned home. But his fellow citizens at Sparta, incensed at the contrast between the two, refused him light to kindle fire and nicknamed him the “Trembler.” Nor did any subsequent bravery wipe out his disgrace. Even when, in the closing scene of the great drama at Platæa, he surpassed all others in the reckless daring with which he fought and died, he was still excluded from his country’s roll of honour. Thus imperative did it seem that Spartan courage and love of liberty should be proclaimed to all as the rule that knew no exception.

CHAPTER XVI ARGOLIS

In the Argolid it seems reasonable to turn aside from history, in its narrower definition, to recall the tales of heroes and the “grandeur of the dooms imagined for the mighty dead.” The turbulent and uneven course of events in which Argolis of historic times appears now as an ally, now as an enemy of other powerful states, is of less moment than the legends handed down and crystallized in great literature. Even if the sagas which may have formed the nucleus of the Iliad sprang from the older Thessalian “Argos,” the Homeric poems, as known to the classic Greeks and to us, concern themselves with the mighty fortresses of the Argolid. The Attic drama reënforced the epic tradition, and the interchanging use in Homer of Achæans, Danai, and Argives to designate the Greeks, suggests 324the elements which gave the later poets opportunity for varied interpretation.

Argolis was the outpost of the Peloponnesus, and even of the whole Greek mainland, for the prehistoric invaders and traders from Crete, the southern Ægean or Phœnicia. The rugged eastern peninsula of Laconia, indeed, extends southward nearly a whole degree of latitude further than Argolis, but the dangerous promontory, Malea, did not so often entice mariners to double it as it served for a beacon to direct their course northward into the deep shelter of the beautiful Gulf of Argos. It is easy to understand how naturally the early captains of commerce or conquest would be guided up the long coast until they beached their boats under the impregnable rock of Nauplia and the low hill of Tiryns levelled, as it seemed, by the footprint of some god at whose bidding the “Cyclopes” reared its prehistoric and superhuman walls.

A GALLERY OF THE ACROPOLIS OF TIRYNS

But the southward-facing gulf was not the only approach to Argolis. The earth’s crust, pushed up into a ridged peninsula between the Saronic and Argolic gulfs, falls away also at the north to the Corinthian Gulf and the Isthmus. From this direction migrating bands of Achæans came overland to mingle with the more numerous “Pelasgians” and to dominate them by their intellectual power and by their rich and conquering Greek speech. When, after the lapse of long years, Achæan imagination, combined with the highly developed “Pelasgian” skill in building, had reared or 325developed a fortress on the acropolis of Mycenæ, robber barons could control the mountain gateway. And with the probably earlier Larisa, the acropolis of Argos, and with the fortresses of Tiryns and of Midea, they could take their toll of all who would enter the Argive plain from the north or the south. The masters of these palace castles, as their wealth and their wants increased, could afford to be hospitable to Cretan art or to the contributions from the Ægean or Asia. They may, perhaps, as time went on, have visualized the spoken word in the new characters of the alphabet, whatever its provenance, whether brought over seas to Nauplia by some Palamedes, who might pose as its inventor, or by the Phœnician traders, middlemen between the Greeks and the men of Crete and the Ægean who, centuries before, had developed writing from their picture script.

The blended prehistoric civilization, with its epochs checked off in centuries or millennia, and, thanks to the archæologists, to-day rapidly emerging throughout the Greek world in Attica, Bœotia, Asia Minor, the islands and the Peloponnesus, has received not unnaturally, if prematurely, the general name “Mycenæan” from the great royal tombs and smaller graves and the strong walls of Mycenæ and from the rich and amazing treasure recovered from the graves excavated within the Gateway of the Lions. Accumulating evidence has indicated the insufficiency of the term to include both the art and the architecture. Successive periods and various origins must yet be disentangled. But Mycenæ 326and Tiryns, as being the most impressive in their entirety, continue to represent this prehistoric civilization to the majority of visitors, and the term “Mycenæan” may serve until some happier names are suggested to distinguish at once between the home-bred and the imported.

On the borderland between mere shadowy tradition and an approximately exact chronology two events seemed to the Greeks themselves of preëminent importance and were referred by them to the twelfth century B. C.—the Fall of Troy, and the Return of the Heracleidæ, or the Dorian conquest, as we should now describe this movement. Although Thucydides states that “in the eightieth year after the Trojan War the Dorians, led by the Heracleidæ, conquered the Peloponnesus,” it may be found necessary to assume a much longer interval, especially if we allow for a series of Dorian conquests.

The Dorians were one of the Greek clans pushed down from further north into central Greece in prehistoric times. They have left, as the memorial of this period, their name attached to little Doris wedged in between Parnassus and Mount Œta. When they were impelled to move still further south, whether by external pressure or the desire to send out colonies, the Achæans already held the land approach to the Peloponnesus and also the littoral of Achæa on the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf. They were thus forced to take to the sea, and the Dorian settlements in Crete, Thera, Melos, 327and Asia Minor seem to have been followed by Dorian invasions of the Peloponnesus from the south and east, especially in Laconia and Argolis. In Laconia the invaders established themselves as conquerors and retained their own character almost unchanged, while in Argolis they amalgamated with the people already in possession. In readjusting pedigrees it was more agreeable to native pride to assume that these invaders were themselves of good old Peloponnesian stock, rather than foreign Dorians, and incidentally to localize the spreading fame of Heracles. Both of these objects were provided for in Argolis when Heracles proved to be of the Perseid line, the original and most distinguished Argive dynasty. Under his grandchildren the invaders merely came back to their own. Thus the Dorian invasions came to be described by the senseless and confusing name of the Return of the Heracleidæ. With this event is perhaps to be associated the sudden destruction of Mycenæ and Tiryns by fire and the reinstatement of Argos and the Larisa citadel as supreme.

By way of acquiring the chief poet as well as the chief hero of Greece, Argos claimed, with other cities, to be the birthplace of Homer—an echo, doubtless, of the dimly remembered sagas of Achæan Argos in Thessaly. In reality, Argolis, like other Dorian cantons, contributed more subject matter for poets than poetry itself. Yet it was not wholly parasitical. It partially balanced the Dorian debt by sending to Athens two poet-musicians 328whose activity cannot be justly appraised from the meagre fragments that have come down to us. The Dorian contributions to music must be kept in mind. The Argives, we are told, furnished many of the famous musicians of Greece.

From Hermione on the southern shore of the peninsula came Lasus, who, as a theoretical and practical musician, did much to develop the dithyramb. He was the teacher of Pindar and, under the cultivated tyrant Hipparchus, was a rival of Simonides in Athens. The other poet, Pratinas, came from Phlius, geographically within the northwestern corner of Argolis, although the independent Phliasians long maintained their autonomy. The city lay in green meadowlands high among the mountains on the grassy banks of the Sicyonian Asopus which, according to local belief, was generated by the Carian Meander coming under the sea to link the two sides of the Ægean together, as the Alpheus, on the other side, united Sicily to the mother land. Although Pratinas was inevitably drawn by the lure of the intellectual to live at Athens, he stands out as a Dorian poet. He is known as the first writer of the satyr dramas, one of which it was for a while the custom to add to the trilogy of tragedies, and he competed even with Æschylus.

The literature of Ionian Athens lacked one element which developed among the Æolians and Dorians. The more independent life of Dorian women called forth two poetesses in the Peloponnesus. One of 329these lived at Sicyon. This city, lying on the Asopus, which comes tumbling down through the deep ravine from Phlius, early became Dorian. Once included in the widespread kingdom of the Agamemnon of tradition, it was now independent, now dependent on Argos or on Sparta. With the mountains of the Peloponnesus around it and the Corinthian Gulf and Parnassus in front, it is beautiful for situation. Its rich treasure-houses were among the notable sights at Delphi and Olympia, and it was famous for its schools of painting and of sculpture. Here Praxilla, the Dorian poetess par excellence, lived in the fifth century B. C. The fame of her dithyrambs, a few fragments of which have reached us, survived her, and she was deemed worthy of a bronze statue by Lysippus, a later compatriot.

In aristocratic Argos itself another woman, Telesilla, was honoured both as a writer of choral hymns for maidens and as a heroine in war. Pausanias adds to the Herodotean account of the Argive men massacred by the Spartans in Hera’s grove the story of how Telesilla manned the walls with old men, boys, and slaves, and then drew up the Argive women for actual conflict with the Spartans and repulsed them, partly by stout fighting, partly by the shame inspired in them by the thought of contending with women. Pausanias saw, furthermore, a carved relief representing the warrior poetess, her scrolls scattered at her feet as she gazes at a helmet which she is about to put on.

Kydias, also from Hermione the home of Lasus, 330wrote, in the first half of the fifth century, love songs highly esteemed by Plato.

The Argolid contains more than a dozen places prominent in Greek literature and in history. Among the northern mountains were Phlius, Cleonæ, and Nemea; overlooking or on the Argive Gulf were Mycenæ, the Heræum, Argos and the Larisa acropolis, Midea, Tiryns, Nauplia, and Lerna; on the eastern coast of Akte, the old name for the promontory that with other parts merged its name in that of Argos, were Epidaurus, Troezen, and Calauria, with Hermione on the south coast; and on the west side of the gulf was the narrow strip of land, Cynuria, bone of contention between Sparta and the Wolf of Argos. Of all these places the famous group on the Argive Gulf, together with Epidaurus, is most easily accessible from Athens, and travellers who cannot go farther afield may gain from this brief excursion in the Argolid an adequate impression both of its prehistoric interest and of its natural beauties.

Herodotus, in leading up to his account of the Persian War, selects as the origin of the rivalry between the Orient and Greece the rape by Phœnicians of Io, daughter of Inachus, the personified Argive river. This was doubtless a typical scene on the shores of the Mediterranean. The seamen landed and “undid their corded bales;” the native women crowded about the bargain counter at the vessel’s stern; it was easy for the sailors 331to seize the handsomest and, launching their vessel, to bear them away. The Phœnicians, however, were merely an episode, and the early “Outlanders” came into the Argolid over the northern mountains.

If one were entering Argolis neither by the modern railway nor in company with one of these instalments of prehistoric Achæans that descended from the north, but were faring along the good highroad from Corinth in the days of Mycenæ’s glory, he would follow up the Longopotamo River, which flows down west of Acrocorinth into the Corinthian Gulf. Before crossing the watershed that slopes to the Argolic plain he would have come to Homer’s “well-built” Cleonæ in a semi-circle of wooded mountains. Here the ancient roads part, one going east of Mount Treton more directly to Mycenæ, the other making a detour to the west to the Argive plain and then to Mycenæ, stationed like a huge spider at the centre of its web. When Lucian’s Charon, off on a day’s furlough from the Ferry, asks Hermes to point out the famous cities of antiquity, the latter shows him Babylon and then adds: “But Mycenæ and Cleonæ I am ashamed to point out to you, and Ilium above all. For when you go down home again you’ll certainly be throttling Homer for his big boasts. Long ago, to be sure, they were prosperous, but now they are dead and gone. For cities, Ferryman, die out just like people, and, queerest of all, whole rivers. For instance, there’s not so much as a ditch left of the Inachus in Argos now-a-days.” Lucian forgets his quasi sixth century 332perspective in this pessimistic outlook and descends to things as they were in his own time, when his contemporary Pausanias explained the “summer-dried” condition of the Inachus as due to Poseidon’s anger because Hera had been given the preference to himself in the Argive land. But not even the Lynceus vision, temporarily put at the disposal of Charon by an Homeric incantation, could have been expected to reveal, beneath the oblivious Argive soil of the second century of our era, the rich treasures of Mycenæ, to which the X-rays of the archæologists have now penetrated.

Before descending along the bed of the northern tributary of the Inachus into the plain we turn aside to the precinct of Nemea. This lies in a valley of its own between those of Phlius and Cleonæ and, like them, on a stream, the Nemea, which also flows down to the Corinthian Gulf. The deep grass, fed by the overflowing waters, gave the name Nemea, “pasture-land.” The biennial Nemean games, celebrated on the high watershed at this entrance to the peninsula, were especially pan-Peloponnesian. They were instituted, according to a charming story, by Adrastus and the rest of the “Seven” on their way to Thebes, as an atonement for the death of the child Opheltes, carelessly left by his nurse on a bed of wild parsley (or celery) and slain by a dragon while she fetched water for the warriors. The solemn funereal origin of the games was kept before the mind by the dun-colored raiment worn 333by the umpires and emphasized by the cypress grove which in antiquity surrounded the temple. Pindar seems to reflect this feeling when he refers to the “solemn plains” in connection with Adrastus. Elsewhere he speaks of the “lovely contests of Nemea.” Where the little Opheltes died on his bed of wild parsley and the Argive champions passed by to Thebes are the lonely ruins of the Temple of Zeus. Three slender columns still stand to watch over their fallen companions, stretched upon the ground by the Earthshaker whose envy has shaken down so many temples of rivals while, by the cunning of Athena in sharing with him her precinct, he has left the great rock in Athens unmoved. Zeus, the virile god of the Achæans, is lord and master at Nemea, while Hera presides in the Argive plain as she did originally at Olympia.

The cave of the Nemean lion slain by Heracles at the bidding of Eurystheus, king of Mycenæ or Tiryns, cannot be identified with certainty. Indeed, the king of beasts himself, so far as Argolis is concerned, has been now confined by the excavators within the narrow limits of a Phrygian gem. Heracles, in his search for rare fauna, flora, and other exhibits, completed six of his twelve labours in the Peloponnesus, two of them within the borders of Argolis, before he was compelled to go abroad for the fruit of the Hesperides or the three-headed hound of Hades. He had already killed a lion on Mount Cithæron and assumed its skin as his conventional uniform, and when the spoils of the Nemean 334lion were delivered at Mycenæ the king might well, it may be thought, have deemed it suitable to commemorate by a “totem” on the Gate of the Acropolis the subjugation of this original autochthon of Mount Treton, which dominated the two highways leading to the fortress.

In the Homeric poems it is Mycenæ, “rich in gold,” and “well-walled” Tiryns that are predominant in Argolis. The legendary kingdom of the Atreidæ extended over a large part of the Peloponnesus, and it was pleasing to Argive pride to reserve Mycenæ as headquarters for Agamemnon, king of men, and to parcel off Lacedæmon to Menelaus when he was not represented as also living in Argolis. Mycenæ commanded the mountain roads to the Corinthian Gulf and the Isthmus, and a prehistoric network of roadbeds that focus at Mycenæ lifts out of the realm of mere legend the controlling influence of the mighty fortress over the territory to the northward. To the south of the mountains it was connected with Tiryns and Argos in a varying sequence of leagues and rivalries.

Mycenæ is now as familiar to the modern world as the Acropolis of Athens. Its resurrection within our own times has called forth manifold accounts and pictures of the “beehive tombs,” the Cyclopean walls, the Gate of the Lions (never, indeed, wholly buried), the circle of shaft graves on the acropolis and the treasure found within them.

335The three great dramatists all dealt with scenes from the family history of the Atreidæ or Pelopidæ, the illustrious but blood-stained dynasty that for a few generations only (if we allow the Heracleidæ their pedigree) broke in upon the continuity of the Perseid line, descended through Danaus from Inachus. When Eurystheus was slain, as Thucydides records, by the Heracleidæ in Attica, the kingdom passed to his mother’s half-brother Atreus, the son of Pelops. Agamemnon, his son, or his grandson, is described by the historian as “the greatest naval potentate of his time,” and he cites the Iliad which speaks of him as “lording it over many ships and over all Argos,” that is, over all the Argolid.

Although Æschylus, by reason of a contemporary rapprochement between the Athenians and the Argives, explicitly lays the scene of his “Agamemnon” at Argos, the traditional association with Mycenæ, handed down from Homer, has usually prevailed. Sophocles returned to it, and in his “Electra” assumes Mycenæ as the home of the royal pair, while Euripides, in his “Electra,” loosely refers to both cities, although in other plays Mycenæ is uppermost in his mind. Thus Iphigeneia at Aulis, about to be sacrificed, exclaims:—

And amongst the Taurians, overjoyed at her reunion with her brother, her thoughts likewise revert to Mycenæ:—

Pausanias speaks of Agamemnon and others of the family as buried within the walls of Mycenæ, and places the tombs of Clytemnestra and her paramour without. The various attempts to identify with literary tradition the beehive tombs below or the shaft graves discovered by Schliemann on the acropolis above involve varying degrees of improbability or of contradiction, and from these ingenious attempts to reconcile facts it is a relief to turn to the realities of pure fiction.

The “Agamemnon” of Æschylus, the greatest of extant Greek dramas, opens with a soldier posted on the palace roof at Argos continuing the ten years’ watch for the beacon signal^[34] that is to flash across the Ægean the news of the capture of Troy, in order that the guilty Clytemnestra may not be taken unawares. Presently the beacon flashes out on Mount Arachneum, seen, as the watcher looks eastward across the plain, between the Heræum and Tiryns. The long chorals contain the kernel of the poet’s thought. The Argive elders enter chanting their anapæsts:—

The old men even in the hour of victory are filled with strange foreboding of coming ill and with fear of a still unadjusted Nemesis. A curse is inbred in the royal house. “The fearsome wrath, recurrent, house-haunting, guileful, unforgetting, exacting vengeance for the children” more than hints at the grim story of Thyestes fed by Atreus on the flesh of his children. Iphigeneia’s sacrifice at Aulis by Agamemnon^[35] is skilfully introduced to complicate the ethical situation by giving Clytemnestra a plausible justification for her unfaithfulness and for the secret plottings of which the chorus is not unaware.

Clytemnestra, intoxicated with the thought that Agamemnon is about to fall into her snare, tells the chorus how the beacons, her “racers with the torch,” have brought the news, and then breaks forth with a recital, swift and vivid, reminding them how, even while she speaks, the Argive warriors are stalking triumphant through the streets of Troy:—

The captive Trojan women “from throats no longer free” bewail their dead, while the Argives plunder as they shout or seat themselves at an impromptu breakfast:—

Agamemnon enters in his chariot, with Cassandra, the captive princess of Troy, in his retinue, driving up from Nauplia. He addresses Argos and the gods. He boasts of the capture of Ilium. The interval necessary for the Ægean voyage is minimized—Troy’s ruins still smoulder sulkily:—

From the ruined wealth of Troy the thought is turned to the traditional costly splendour of the Argive palaces. Clytemnestra cunningly avails herself of Agamemnon’s only half-concealed vanity to cover her own murderous intent and, if possible, to transfer to his account, in the eyes of the gods, a certain debit to Nemesis. She would persuade him to enter the palace treading presumptuously upon royal purple tapestries, and with grim ambiguity she says:—

Agamemnon, flattered, makes a show of resistance, and finally, to ward off the evil consequences of presumption, 339compromises by bidding the slaves unloose his shoes:—

As he yields there surges before the vision of the exultant Clytemnestra another sea:—

As she turns to follow her victim she prays:—

The captive Cassandra is left without. Before her searching but futile insight pass by-gone scenes in the bloodguilty palace to which she has just come as a stranger. She points to the murdered infants of Thyestes and their “roasted flesh upon which their father banqueted.” Then her prophetic vision forecasts the details presently to be enacted: Agamemnon’s death and her own, the welcoming bath, the ensnaring robe, “hand after hand outstretching blow on blow.” As she goes in to her death she utters lines unsurpassed in Greek tragedy, if anywhere, for the pathos of self-abnegating contrast between the littleness of the individual and the wider aspects of the universal:—

340Two solitary outcries from Agamemnon, struck down within the palace, float out on the waiting silence as the chorus ceases its chant. To the elders in their consternation appears Clytemnestra, exultant, glorified by success, standing over the dead Agamemnon and Cassandra. One might reconstruct the scene from the palace bathroom uncovered at Tiryns. She speaks:—

A lyrical dialogue between the Queen and the chorus follows: exultation and execration; justification and lamentation. Clytemnestra, to the indignant question of the chorus, “Who is to bury him?” replies that he is her dead and adroitly takes refuge once and again in the necessity of avenging Iphigeneia. The climax of bitterness is reached when she flings forth the taunting suggestion that the murdered child will most appropriately welcome her dear father as he disembarks at Charon’s ferry. The chorus, bemoaning him “laid low in the bath, on his pallet bedding of silver,” asks again:—

341And Clytemnestra replies:—

The plays by the three dramatists dealing with the slaying of Clytemnestra by her son and the meeting and recognition of Orestes and his older sister Electra fill out many a detail of the Argive land and cities as they were seen or imagined in the fifth century. Although Sophocles lays the scene of his “Electra” at “opulent Mycenæ,” his allusions to the “renowned temple of Hera,” to the “Lycæan agora of the wolf-slaying god,” and to the “grove of the frenzied daughters of Inachus”—all as part of the immediate environment—seem to imply stage-setting which brought before the spectator the Heræum and Argos itself as well as Mycenæ. In all three plays the tomb of Agamemnon, around which the action goes on, seems to be outside of the city.

The scene of the “Electra” of Euripides is laid on the mountain frontier, by which way the exiled Orestes would naturally arrive from Phocis. Not only does this play give a feeling for the Argive landscape, changing little while Mycenæ rose and fell, but the simple and dignified peasant farmer, Electra’s husband in name only, is one of the dramatist’s noblest creations. The 342suggestion of his high-born though remote ancestry only emphasizes the chivalry, far removed from servility, with which he reverences his nominal wife as a princess of the land. When Electra, in the shadow of the “Night, dark foster mother of the golden stars,” goes to fetch water, like any peasant girl, with the water-jar poised on her head, he remonstrates with her, but divining her mood, withdraws his objection:—

In this play the horror of the mother-murder in the peasant home is sensibly heightened by the background of simple hospitality. The deed seems more inevitable in the “Choëphoroi” of Æschylus, in which Orestes goes in to slay his mother just where she had slain his father, and the knocking, knocking at the palace doors seems more like the hand of fate, or like the two outcries of the king in the “Agamemnon.” The play closes, as it should, just as the “wrathful hounds” of his mother have appeared to the matricide.^[36] No assurance of the chorus that they are unreal fancies of his confused brain can help him. He must away over the mountains and the Isthmus by the long pathway to Delphi to seek the restoring purification of Apollo:—

343Homer lets Hera, wrangling with Zeus, in regard to Troy, exclaim: “Verily three are the dearest to me among cities: wide-wayed Mycenæ and Sparta and Argos.” The Heræum, the ancient sanctuary of the goddess, once belonged to Mycenæ, and traces of the Cyclopean road that connected them are still visible. Here the “kings” took the oath of allegiance before sailing to Troy with Agamemnon and Menelaus. Here on their return the Argives dedicated the Trojan spoils to Hera. The herald in the “Agamemnon” says:—

Among the spoils was the shield of the Trojan hero Euphorbus, slain by Menelaus. In the sixth century, Pythagoras, to prove that in a previous round of existence he had been Euphorbus, entered the Heræum and instantly identified the shield as his own.

From Argos to the Heræum it was a distance of more than five miles. Herodotus relates how a woman of Argos, wishing to be present at Hera’s festival, was unable to start because the oxen were not forthcoming in season to draw her car. Her two athlete sons put on the yoke and drew the heavy car quickly across the plain and up the hill. When the Argive women congratulated her on being mother of such sons, she, “exultant over their deed and fame, stood before the statue of Hera and prayed that to her sons, Cleobis and Biton, 344who had honoured her greatly, the goddess would give whatever gift is best for man to have. And the youths, after sacrifice and banquet, lay down to sleep in the sacred precinct itself and rose up no more.” This answer of the goddess so impressed the Argives that they set up the statues of the young men at Delphi. It pleases the imagination to identify with these the two archaic statues there excavated by the French; and a beautiful Parian marble head of Hera, found by the American excavators of the Heræum, has preserved to us the gracious presentation of the goddess by some great sculptor of the fifth century.

The dramatis personæ of the “Suppliants” of Æschylus vaguely suggest a chapter in the early history of Argolis. Danaus with his fifty daughters comes from the south, fleeing over the sea from his brother Ægyptus and his fifty sons. The early Pelasgian inhabitants of Argos are represented by the king, Pelasgus, who receives the suppliant fugitives into the safe refuge of his Cyclopean walls, which we may identify with the prehistoric Larisa citadel above Argos: “Go get ye to my city fenced with goodly walls, fast locked within the lofty ramparts, subtly wrought.” Henceforward, as in Homer, the Argives and Danai are convertible names. All objection to the newcomers as foreigners is neutralized by realizing that they have only returned to their original home. Inachus, the river god, was the father of Io, who, half transformed into a heifer by the jealousy of Hera, had been made to wander frenzied over land 345and water until in Egypt she brought forth a son, the great-grandfather of this same Danaus.

In the sequel to the “Suppliants” Æschylus gave his interpretation of the story of the Danaides and their trial for the forty-nine murders of that Saint Bartholomew wedding night. Only fragments of this play remain, and the romance of Hypermnestra is familiar to the modern world chiefly from Horace’s incomparable ode. In the “Prometheus,” however, Æschylus both tells the Io story at length and briefly sketches the story of Hypermnestra, which, with the “lovely tale” of Danaë and the infant Perseus, sheds around the Perseid dynasty of Argos a fragrant aroma of romance in striking contrast to the gruesome annals of the Pelopid family, which waft now and again to our nostrils the scent of human blood and the breath of the charnel vault. Prometheus prophesies to Io that, in the fifth generation from her Egyptian-born son, fifty maidens, daughters of Danaus,—

Lynceus is saved, under cover of night, by Hypermnestra, and escaping, as Pausanias tells us, by the Diras gate, he signals back to her his safety by means of a beacon light on Mount Lyrcea, and she replies by another from Larisa. On this Larisa mountain, rising above the plain, there is lavished as a setting for the picturesque ancient and mediæval ruins a colour scheme of green, rich reds and brown that delights the artist’s eye.

Argos itself, continuously inhabited through the centuries, offers few reminders of antiquity except the steep seats of the theatre. The beautiful wolf head on the extant Argive drachmas reminds us of the Wolf Agora of Sophocles and of the Wolf Apollo dedicated by Danaus when he had ungratefully snapped away the kingdom from his Pelasgian host. We are glad to leave to Pausanias the description of the sights of historic Argos and to follow Amymone, one of the Danaids, as she goes down the plain of “thirsty Argos,” water-jar on head, to fetch water at Lerna. She went to the fountain once too often, if we may trust the legend. Lucian describes how Poseidon, inflamed by Triton’s account of her beauty, too impetuous to wait for his royal team, had thrown himself hastily on the fastest dolphin available and had come riding up the bay. Amymone, as she is carried off, cries out: “Fellow, where are you 347carrying me off to? You’re a kidnapper sent after us, I suppose, by uncle Ægyptus. I’ll call my father!” (Triton) “Hush, Amymone, it’s Poseidon.” (Amymone) “What Poseidon are you talking of? Fellow, why do you drag me and force me into the sea? I’ll choke, poor me, as I go down!” Poseidon comforts her by telling her that she shall escape, as his bride, not only her daily five-mile walk as a water-carrier in Argos but her sisters’ futile task in Hades of carrying water in a sieve. He promises her also a fountain, called by her name. This promise was kept; by leaving the railroad at Myli, the second station below Argos, we can still see the fountain. Here Heracles, her sister’s descendant, slew the Lernæan hydra.

If we coast down the west side of the bay we come to Cynuria, whose autochthonous inhabitants would seem to have belonged, like their Arcadian neighbours, to the pre-Dorian “Pelasgic” stock. Herodotus gives a dramatic account of one of the contests for the possession of this territory between Spartans and Argives, in the sixth century, which might serve as a pendant for the Roman story of the Horatii and the Curiatii. Three hundred Spartans and three hundred Argives, chosen as champions, engaged while the main armies withdrew. Two Argives only survived, and they, thinking the Spartans all dead, ran off home to announce the victory. One half-dead Spartan, however, Othryades, was able to write with his blood his name upon a trophy which he erected of Argive armour. Each side claimed 348the victory, with the result that the full armies engaged and the Spartans conquered. Othryades, however, ashamed to survive his comrades, killed himself on the field.

Nauplia, across the bay from Lerna, is full of suggestion for the prehistoric settlement of Argolis, and of associations with modern history. It has fewer direct points of contact with classic literature. Nauplius, the founder, according to tradition, was the son of Amymone and of Poseidon, who was here able to assert himself against the predominance of Hera further inland. Hera, indeed, had the Achæan Zeus to curb on the north and may have been glad to compromise with Poseidon for a safe-conduct permitting her to make her necessary annual visit to the baths of Kanathos, east of Nauplia. By way of Nauplia, as we have seen, the alphabet may have entered Greece, and here the less valuable but costly cargoes of Trojan spoils were landed, bringing one and another hint and pattern of trans-Ægean art. Here Menelaus, detained by storm long after his brother, finally landed:—

No more beautiful mooring-place for home-coming warriors could be found than the water-front of Nauplia, lying beneath the majestic rock of Palamidi, guard of the sea-entrance to the Argolid.

On the low acropolis of Tiryns recent excavations 349have uncovered the “Lower Castle” to the north of the Middle and Upper fortresses already known. Pausanias attributed the founding of Tiryns to members of the Danaus family, Acrisius remaining in Argos and Prœtus taking as his share the Heræum, Midea, Tiryns, and the coast of Argolis. Acrisius, to forestall an oracle, according to which he was to be slain by a grandson, shut up Danaë, his daughter, in a tower of bronze. Zeus descended to her in a shower of gold, and when Perseus was born Acrisius committed to the sea mother and child in a chest. The translation by John Addington Symonds of a fragment from Simonides describing this event fully preserves the pathos for which Simonides was famous:—

The Nereids, charmed with the beauty of the child, 350guided the chest safely into the net of the fishermen of the little island of Seriphos. Perseus, on his return to Argos, went up to Larisa, to which Acrisius had retired, and while displaying his skill with the quoit accidentally killed his grandfather. Thus was fulfilled the doom to avoid which Acrisius had shut up Danaë in the bronze tower at Argos. Perseus, ashamed at this homicide, and perhaps disliking Argos by reason of his mother’s ill-treatment, persuaded the son of Prœtus to change kingdoms with him, and so he came to live at Tiryns, and from there went up the plain and founded Mycenæ where a mushroom (mykes) that he pulled up when thirsty gave him a draught of water. The greater antiquity of Tiryns implied in this legend is not inconsistent with archæological evidence, and the fable that PrœtusPrœtus, the first king of Tiryns, imported from Lycia seven Cyclopes as builders is a vague record of the foreign contribution made to this ancient centre. The Cyclopean walls in Argolis, often alluded to in the fifth century, were at least as conspicuous at Tiryns as elsewhere, and this acropolis near the sea would fit the situation in the “Trojan Women” of Euripides where the captive, lamenting her dead husband deprived of burial rites, anticipates with dread the landing at Nauplia:—

To-day, in the spring, the hill of Tiryns is covered with slender stalks of asphodel, while amidst flowers delicate and shadowy as these, along the pathways of the “asphodel meadows” below, steal the ghosts of the ancient masters of these Cyclopean walls and galleries.

Mycenæ and Tiryns, linked in tradition with the name of Perseus, both sent men to Platæa to fight against the Persians. In a little more than a decade thereafter they were both captured and destroyed by Argos, jealous of their proximity and of their place on the national roll of honour from which she had excluded herself. At the end of another decade Æschylus chose to flatter the Argives, just then the allies of Athens, by transferring from Mycenæ to their town the scene of the “Agamemnon.”

In addition to the plain of Argolis the “Akte,” or peninsula proper, has its own history and associations. Leaving Tiryns and Nauplia behind, the road to the inland Epidaurus sanctuary is overlooked from the north by the naked ridge of Mount Arachneum, from which flashed to the palace roof at Argos the last relay of flame in the chain of beacons. The Epidaurian Asclepieum claimed the honour of the birth of the god of healing, the foundling son of Apollo, who was suckled by a goat. From this parent sanatorium others 352were established throughout Greece. The Athenians even called “Epidauria” one of the days used for the worship of Asclepius. In a fragmentary hymn to the god, found at Athens, reference is made to the oracle quoted by Pausanias as beginning: “Great joy for mortals all thy birth, Asclepius! Thou, love-child of Koronis and my own, wast born in rugged Epidaurus!” In the precinct of this famous health-resort was found a tablet inscribed with a hymn by Isyllus, an Epidaurian poet, containing the genealogy of the god’s mother and telling how Apollo named the child and called him “Destroyer of disease, Health-giver, mighty Gift to men.” Homer’s epithet for Epidaurus is “abounding in vines,” and in later days Dionysus was not neglected. The auditorium, with the circle of the orchestra still completely marked by a sunken rim of stone, is the most beautiful and the best preserved of the theatres in Greece, and one may here better than at Athens imagine the mise-en-scène of the great dramas for which the Argolid furnished so largely the subject matter. The opening scene of the “Ion” of Plato brings before us the star rhapsodist of his day, relating how he is just back from the Asclepius festival at Epidaurus where the Epidaurians held a contest, not only in his own specialty of reciting Homer but in lyric poetry besides. In Epidaurus were celebrated the usual games, as the well-preserved Stadium testifies and as we know from more than one passage of Pindar. In the Abaton, now more fully excavated, have been found some of the 353tablets dedicated by grateful patients who had been cured by sleeping in the precinct. Cures of blindness, palsy, ulcers, dropsy, internal maladies and external wounds are recorded in this medical literature, which Strabo tells us was here displayed in great abundance, as in the great Sanatorium of Hippocrates on the island of Cos.

Troezen, far down the eastern side of the peninsula, both geographically and by its associations, historical and mythological, turns our thoughts away from Dorian Argos and across the Saronic Gulf to Athens. It was here that some of the Athenian women and children found a place of refuge during the Persian invasion. In a colonnade of the market-place Pausanias saw portrait statues of those refugees whose rank and wealth permitted this expression of their gratitude. Here in the harbour the Greek fleet assembled before sailing to take its position in the Straits of Salamis. The ruined remains of the acropolis are insignificant, but our vision, like that of the refugees, may range over the wonderful landscape—Parnassus beyond the Isthmus and gulf, mountains and headlands, and the Ægean set with island jewels—back to the fertile plain below, which in modern times has welcomed the beauty of the orange and the lemon to replace the vanished glory of the kings and heroes of antiquity.

Plutarch, in his “Life of Theseus,” relates the well-known story that the young prince in the dawning vigour of manhood is taken by his mother to test his 354strength on the great rock beneath which lie concealed the tokens left by his father to guarantee his royal birth. He lifts the rock and takes the sword and the sandals. Emulous of the fame of Heracles, he rejects the suggestion of the easy voyage across the Saronic Gulf, and by the dangerous land route, where wild beasts and giants must be met and slain, he makes his way past the ill-famed Scironian rocks to Athens, and claims the paternity of Ægeus and becomes the national hero of his father’s land.

In the “Hippolytus” of Euripides we find Theseus, self-exiled from Athens for a year, again in Troezen, the realm of Pittheus, his maternal grandfather, who has had the rearing of his son, Hippolytus. The handsome youth has been seen at Eleusis by Phædra, his young stepmother, who then and there falls in love with him. He is, however, a somewhat intractable compound of a Jehu and a Joseph, wholly absorbed in colourless devotion to Artemis and inaccessible to the blandishments of Aphrodite, who uses the unlucky Phædra as a cat’s-paw to punish the intrusion of the divine huntress into the sphere of influence rightfully belonging to the goddess of love. Phædra, despairing and mortified at her rejection by Hippolytus, very properly hangs herself, but by way of securing her posthumous justification leaves a note for her husband, accusing the innocent Hippolytus. Theseus, in his rage, banishes his son and invokes a curse by Poseidon. Faring forth in his chariot Hippolytus, though an excellent whip, is unable to cope 355with the great bull sent up from the sea. This so terrifies the horses that their driver is thrown upon the rocks and dies, after Artemis, a somewhat tardy dea ex machina, has appeared to the now remorseful Theseus and has exonerated his son. This favourite drama, in addition to the admirable drawing of Phædra’s character, combines the grandeur of the sea as it roars up in a tidal wave, envisaging the terrible sea-bull, and the loveliness of the Troezenian meadows where Hippolytus, a replica of the young Ion in Apollo’s temple, presented the vision of human beauty, so dear to Greek eyes, in its appropriate setting of nature’s lonely charm.^[37]

In addition to these more superficial attractions there was at Troezen one of the most popular entrances to the lower world. Here Heracles fetched up Cerberus, and by this route Dionysus brought back his mother Semele. It is also reasonable to suppose that Theseus, from a sense of local pride, must have passed down this way when he assisted his friend Pirithöus in carrying off Persephone.

Troezen, however, had a rival in this underground traffic. Hermione, the home of the poets Lasus and Kydias, on the south coast of the peninsula, claimed the rather dubious advantage of the closest proximity to Hades. Strabo, the geographer, records the boast of the people of Hermione that on their short line Charon’s obol is not exacted of the passengers, “and 356therefore,” he adds, “they do not here put in a fare for the corpse.” The cost of travel to Hermione would have overbalanced for people at a distance the Ferryman’s very moderate fee, or perhaps the route may have been open for local traffic only. At all events this exception was not known in Greece generally. We find in Lucian’s dialogues that the Cynic Menippus, with never an obol to his mouth, takes his chance as a stowaway or offers to Charon to work his passage, while the corpse of the poor cobbler Micyllus, also unprovided with the necessary fee, heedless, since he is dead already, of the risk of drowning, starts in to swim.

CALAURIA
Temple of Poseidon. Scene of the death of Demosthenes

Close to the Troezen shore is the island of Calauria, the modern Poros, where “outrageous Fortune” shot home one of her most virulent arrows. On a high plateau near the middle of the island are the remains of the ancient precinct and temple of Poseidon. Here, where he could look over to Sunium, the “headland of Athens,” Demosthenes, a fugitive from the wrath of Macedon, waited for his pursuers. Plutarch relates that, discrediting the promises of safety made to lure him from sanctuary, he withdrew within the temple and, after taking the poison which he had secreted, tottered forth to die outside in order to avoid defiling the sacred precinct. The Athenians later set up his statue in bronze, and on it was inscribed:—

357The great orator whose powerful will had first, as it was said, won control over his unruly tongue and weak voice amidst the roar of the sea, and who by his words had controlled the still more turbulent populace, died here with unbroken will under the gray shadow of Poseidon’s sanctuary. This was one of the oldest stone temples in Greece, probably contemporary with the sixth century temple of the sea-god at Posidonia, the modern Pæstum. Already dignified by time its columns looked down on the fleet that put forth for Salamis from the neighbouring Troezen, relying now for the sea-fight on the help of Poseidon rather than upon the goddess of the Heræum who had presided over the start for Troy, at the time of the preliminary clash, still unforgotten, of Asia with Greece.

CHAPTER XVII ARCADIA

Of the temples that once adorned the mainland and the islands of Greece only a brave few now rear columns from the ground. Among these the Temple of Apollo at Bassæ constrains the traveller to penetrate to the heart of Arcadia. The rewards of the difficult journey are many, and are enhanced by a general knowledge of the whole Arcadian territory, into which the detached impressions of a brief stay may be sympathetically fitted.

Homer says that the Arcadians went to Troy in vessels borrowed from Agamemnon, because they had none of their own. The most potent fact in the history and development of Arcadia is its isolated position as the one inland country (save little Doris) of Greece. Only from the heights of the encircling mountains could her people catch sight of distant seas. Those whom the sea-spell lured with irresistible magic left their hills to seek foreign coasts and enlist in foreign navies. The Arcadians have rightly been called the mercenaries of Greece. Those who stayed at home lived the 359restricted life of a population cut off from intercourse with the larger world. The entire territory is composed of high land, its lowest elevation from the sea being more than two thousand feet. In the east are great plains of swampy ground, and lakes drained by underground channels. Towards the west the land becomes an irregular, hilly plateau intersected by rivers. In antiquity superb forests of oaks and pines, coverts for many a wild beast, contributed to that general physical wildness which prevented a people untouched by foreign ideas from uniting in a progressive political life. Even against the background of Greek individualism their history is conspicuously one of separate towns. And of these towns few attained to any eminence.

Arcadia contained the oldest and the youngest of all Greek cities. The latter, Megalopolis, is still in civic existence, and is the terminus of the modern railroad ride from Athens for those who are on their way to Bassæ. It was the last town founded in free Greece, and its establishment originated in the ardent hope of Epaminondas to unite the scattered Arcadians under one government. In the same southwestern portion of Arcadia, near the young Megalopolis and easily reached from it on horses, lie the ruins of old Lycosura, believed by the Greeks to be the most ancient of all their cities and to have served as a model for later foundations.

But the chief rôles in the political life of Arcadia were played by Mantinea and Tegea, cities lying in the wide 360eastern plains. Near them lay Pallantium, and within the territories of these three cities flourishes the modern Tripolis, in its origin an important Turkish stronghold and now one of the most prosperous towns of the new nation. The sanguinary history of Tripolis in the War of Independence was worthy of the ancient character of Mantinea and Tegea.

Although Homer called Mantinea “lovely,” her life was one of military activity. Mantineans fought at Thermopylæ, but it is in the pages of the historians of later periods, of Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius, that they chiefly figure, fighting on their own territory against Sparta or with Sparta against Thebes. This evil coalition resulted in the famous battle of 362 B. C., in which Epaminondas fought for the last time. The description of the battle forms the close of Xenophon’s treatise on Greek History, and the chaotic results of the long-anticipated struggle, whereby “neither party, though each claimed to have conquered, was seen to gain any more in land or cities or authority than it possessed before the battle was fought,” are set forth by him with considerable vividness. But the momentous fact that in this battle the great Theban commander lost his life he disposes of in a subordinate clause. This petty injustice is the more singular because the fatal blow was generally believed to have been struck by Xenophon’s son, Grylus, who received a public burial and monument at Mantinea. It is Pausanias who admits us to the last scene of a noble life, enacted among 361the alien, windswept oaks of Arcadia, on the hill now known as Mytika. “When Epaminondas received his wound, they carried him out of the line of battle. He was still in life. He suffered much, but with his hand pressed on his wound he kept looking hard at the fight, and the place from which he watched it was afterwards named ‘Scope’ (the Lookout). But when the combat ended indecisively he took his hand from the wound and breathed his last, and they buried him on the battlefield.”

The memory of Epaminondas inspired a later hero who not only fought at another battle of Mantinea but was himself a son of the Arcadian soil. In the period of the Achæan League, Philopœmen, born in Megalopolis, was eight times chosen to be the general of the united forces, and in 206 B. C. he met and conquered at Mantinea the recalcitrant Spartans who had refused to join the league. The description of this battle is given to us by Polybius, his younger fellow townsman, who at the hero’s death was the youth selected to bear his ashes to the tomb. Because all such victories in the cause of freedom were but fitful gleams of the fire whose flame had been quenched at Chæronea, it is the more necessary to give heed to a character like Philopœmen, from the day of whose death, Pausanias sadly remarks, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. He closes the long line of Greeks who led their peoples to liberty. At one of the Olympic festivals the whole audience in the theatre rose to greet Themistocles, who 362had saved Greece from Persia. And centuries later a similar tribute was paid to Philopœmen. Not long after his victory over the Spartans it chanced that he was present at the competition of the minstrels at the Nemean Games. “Pylades, a native of Megalopolis, and the most famous minstrel of his time, who had gained a Pythian victory, was singing an air of Timotheus, the Milesian, called ‘The Persians.’ Scarcely had he struck up the song, ‘The glorious crown of freedom who giveth to Greece,’ when all the people turned and looked at Philopœmen, and with clapping of hands signified that the song referred to him.”

Few men in history are more interesting than Philopœmen. From youth to a hale old age he lived the life of his choice, combining rugged and fearless sincerity with keen military knowledge, and uniting in an unusual degree the reckless impulsiveness of a freebooter with the patient power of a skilful general. When one term of his generalship had expired, he hurried over to Crete to help in a war which in no way concerned him; but his countrymen, accustomed to depend upon his ability, summoned him back, and he arrived on the mainland just in time to find that the Romans had fitted out a fleet against Sparta, and to plunge into the fray. Being no sailor, however, he unwittingly embarked in a leaky galley, which reminded the Romans and their allies (in those days every man had read his classics at school) of the verses in the Catalogue in which Homer speaks of the Arcadians as ignorant of 363the sea. After eight successful generalships and many brilliant exploits, when he was more than seventy years old, Philopœmen was captured and poisoned by the Messenians. In him Arcadia lost her greatest son, in whom had lived her own wildness and her own patience, her own flaming spirit and her own honourable austerity. According to Polybius, he had harboured no illusions about the future of his country and of Hellas, but had chosen to offer his life, while it lasted, as a bulwark against the inevitable. “I know full well,” he said in answer to Aristænus’s criticism of his policy of resisting all unjust encroachments from Rome, “that there will hereafter come a time when the Greeks will have to yield obedience under compulsion to every order issued to them. But would one wish to see this time come as quickly as possible or, on the contrary, postponed as late as possible? Methinks as late as possible! In this, then, the policy of Aristænus differs from my own. He is eager to see the inevitable come as quickly as possible and he helps it on to the best of his ability, whereas I to the best of my power resist and thrust it back.” One false hope, according to Pausanias, he did treasure: “He would fain have modelled his life on the pattern set by the character and deeds of Epaminondas, but could not equal him in all things, for while the temper of Epaminondas was very gentle, that of the Arcadian was passionate.”

Although Arcadia’s part in the Persian wars was not heroic, Tegea, like Mantinea, proved her bravery at 364Thermopylæ, and at Platæa, according to Herodotus, her citizens struggled with the Athenians for the foremost post in the battle. Later wars, civil and foreign, kept her busy through several centuries. But the arts of peace also flourished within her walls, and Tegea must be honoured for having erected one of the most distinguished temples not only of the Peloponnesus but of all Greece. This was the Temple of Athena Alea, built by Scopas early in the fourth century. Only a few traces are left of its mingled Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns. More important are the fragments preserved in the National Museum at Athens of sculptures from the hand of Scopas himself, portraying the Calydonian boar-hunt, the heroine of which was the Arcadian maiden Atalanta. The same Museum contains marble reliefs from Mantinea, coming probably from the time, if not the workshop, of Praxiteles, and very interesting sculptures of disputed date from old Lycosura. The Arcadians, whose native gift was music, did not lag behind the rest of the Greeks in their appreciation of the plastic arts.

Pallantium was not important in Arcadian history, but was reverenced by the Romans as the home of Evander, whose enterprizing colonization of the Palatine Hill was immortalized by Virgil. In filial remembrance of the adventurer the town was rebuilt by Antoninus Pius.

To the north of the great plain of Mantinea and Tegea lay another marshy plain containing three other 365important cities, Orchomenus, Pheneus, and Stymphalus. But the train from Athens sweeps far toward the south, and ruined cities slip out of mind among the “winding valleys deep-withdrawn and ridgèd crests of Arcady.” The real significance of Arcadia lay in its landscape rather than in its towns. If the country contributed few large centres and few splendid deeds to Greek history, it offered its mountains and streams to be peopled by the divine progeny of Greek imagination. Pan himself was born amid the “wind-tossed mountain trees of steep Cyllene,” and from many another Arcadian hillside thereafter his pipes reached the ears of shepherds tending their flocks in upland pastures. Artemis, making her pastime the chase of boars and swift deer, fairer than the fair wild wood-nymphs attending her, took especial pleasure in the ridges of Erymanthus and became the reverently worshipped Maiden of the Arcadian country.

Later literature in more than one language created a visionary Arcadia of uninterrupted pastoral charm and ease, a refuge for the weary, an earthly dream of “unlaborious life.” The fashion began in Greek itself in the artificial period of Alexandrian civilization when men were sated with city life and began to write chamber poetry about the beauties of nature. Arcadia, with its still unspoiled hills and woods and rivers, became a convenient setting for the delicate and charming fancies of litterateurs. But in the real Arcadia “nature” was a serious force to be reckoned with. The frowning 366mountains, wild ravines, and stretches of barren soil; the gusty storms of winter and the close heat of summer; the difficulties of communication between village and village, and the remoteness from the great highway of the sea, all combined to make Arcadian life rude and elemental. Often the inhabitants were forced to a hand to hand struggle with poverty. Sometimes they gave way, as Herodotus indicates when he says that “some men from Arcadia who were in need of a livelihood and wanted employment” deserted to the Persians. But oftener the Arcadians fought it out at home, tilling what soil they could, and patiently tending herds and flocks.

Such a people, busy with the primitive needs of life, found in Pan and Artemis saviours and graciously intimate friends rather than fanciful presences with which to adorn pastoral poetry. Arcadia was, indeed, a very religious country, teeming both in its cities and on its lonelier hillsides with sanctuaries to many of the Olympian hierarchy, and especially to a strange, elusive divinity, known as the “Mistress.” But the divinities of life in the open most appealed to them. It is indicative of an important and not always recognized element in Greek character that some of the most lovely fancies of Greek mythology should have taken root where life was hard. The austerity of work and poverty was never denied by the clear-eyed Greeks. But instead of seeking, like the Celts, to escape from it into dreams of unreal and fairer worlds, they balanced against it the 367palpable beauty of this world and found much room for joy and laughter.

Pan’s birth in Arcadia was third in an interesting series of events. The first was the birth of Zeus himself on Mount Lycæus, the isolated mountain peak which rises northwest of Megalopolis. It is, however, no widespread Hellenic tradition which gave to the king of the gods an Arcadian birthplace. Of all the places that claimed that honour, perhaps Crete most impressed herself upon the Greek world at large. But the legend of Arcadia at least resulted in bestowing upon the ruler of Olympus the well-known epithet “Lycæan,” and in establishing on the summit of the mountain a sanctuary involving sacrifices and festivals. Human sacrifices continued here astonishingly long, and the savagery of the early Arcadians left traces also in tales of werewolves roaming among the desert places of the mountain.

A much more engaging story, especially when it is clothed in Ionic mirth and grace, brought Zeus as a lover to another mountain peak in Arcadia and pictured the second divine birth in the country. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, whether it is read in the original or in Shelley’s inimitable translation, is alive with that witty and audacious fancy which furnished to naughty mortals delightful brothers among the gods. On Mount Cyllene, towering above the other mountains of Arcadia and bulwarking the northeastern portion of the country, dwelt Maia, a fair-tressed nymph. Zeus loved her and—

The precocity of the divine infant is the theme of the story. He is not four days old when he starts for Thessaly to steal the cattle of Apollo. But as he crosses the threshold of his mother’s cave he meets a tortoise creeping along and feeding on the rich grass, a sight which moves him to laughter and gives him a fresh idea. This is no less than the fashioning of the lyre out of the tortoise’s shell:—

When he has sung enough and is “seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat,” he hurries off to the shadowed hills of Pieria and steals fifty of the lowing kine which are feeding there on flowering, unmown meadows. Cunningly reversing their tracks, and making 369for himself sandals of twigs and leaves that will not betray him, he drives the cattle to the river Alpheus in Arcadia, by whose banks they munch lotus and marsh-marigold. He kills and cooks with lusty appetite, in the serene moonshine, and then at dawn, through a silence broken by no step of god or man nor bark of dog, he goes back to the crests of Cyllene and enters the cave, through the hole of the bolt,—

Meantime Apollo, the Far-darter, has been tracking him from the Thessalian meadows. To the fragrant Cyllenian hill he comes where sheep are peacefully grazing, and finds the little thief wrapped once more in swaddling bands, feet, head and hands curled into a small space, tortoise shell clasped under his baby arm.

Apollo is not deceived, but is forced to laughter. Finally they agree to put the case before Zeus on Olympus. There, after Apollo’s attack, Hermes makes a lying and witty defence, at which his immoral and omnipotent father laughs aloud. Both sons are sent off to find the kine, and on the way the Cyllenian shows the Far-darter his tortoise-lyre and entrances him with its music:—

Hermes suggests an exchange, promising the tortoise shell to Apollo, if he may have in return the glittering lash and drive the herd. Thus the lyre, invented in Arcadia, passed to the rightful lord of music and to an universal sovereignty.

The two brothers became fast friends and sealed their affection on snowy Olympus by mutual promises. The older brother reserves for himself the awful gift of prophecy, but in return for the lyre gives to the younger lordship over the twisted-horned cattle and horses and toiling mules, over the burning eyes of lions, and white-tusked boars and dogs and sheep, and, 371most important of all, makes him herald to lead the dead to Hades.

Almost imperceptibly, toward the close of the hymn, the two gods take on something of the stateliness which clothes them in more serious poetry. But the rollicking infant and his half-angry, half-amused victim must be remembered to complete the idea of a religion which left a definite place for humour. While the gravely beautiful Hermes which adorned the temple of Hera at Olympia revealed, in perfect marble, a serious and noble conception of divinity, it may well be that among the many wooden or stone statues of the god which stood in orchard closes, by cool wayside springs, and in crossways near the gray seashore, more than one recalled his lovable and mischievous boyhood. Certainly it is tempting to imagine the infant trickster in the Hermes of the Anthology who guarded pleasant playgrounds and to whom boys offered marjoram and hyacinth and fresh garlands of violets.

Hermes would seem to have frequently returned to his early Arcadian home, and during one of these visits he fell in love with the daughter of Dryops, and for her sweet sake became thrall of a mortal man and shepherded the fleecy sheep. The fruit of his union with the shepherd’s daughter was Pan, and another Homeric hymn describes his birth:—

Such was the pleasant début of the god who was to make glad the hearts of men also, bringing laughter into a world of tears, and inspiring amid the difficulties and the ennui of civilization a wholesome passion for life in the open air. Lord was he of every snowy crest and mountain peak and rocky path. Soft meadows where crocuses and fragrant hyacinths nestled in the grass knew his presence. By still pools within the green woods he would sit contentedly, or lofty crags would tempt his lively feet to adventurous climbing. Over the high white hills he would range in the pursuit of wild beasts. And in the evening he would sit on some jutting rock or by the dusky water of a wayside spring and play on his reeds such melodies of honeyed sweetness as even the nightingale’s spring song could not surpass. With him the mountain nymphs, the shrill singers, went wandering with light feet, and Echo moaned along the mountain crest. Many a lonely shepherd among 373the hills or tired husbandman in the meadows must have desired to keep the god within his hearing. A broken fragment in the Greek Anthology, embedded among frigid Byzantine conceits, but springing one knows not out of what fresher age, seems instinct with such prayers as theirs:—

Although Pan dwelt all over Hellas, his Arcadian birth was not disputed, and more than one Arcadian mountain was especially distinguished by his presence. Among the Nomian hills, to the south of Lycæus, he invented the music of his pipes. Mount Mænalus, near Tripolis, he often visited, and on Mount Parthenius he requested recognition at Athens. Over this mountain, named for virginal Artemis, ran one of the regular passes from the Argolis into Arcadia, a route followed to-day by the train from Athens to Tripolis. The swift Athenian courier was passing this way when he was delayed by the god.

In the northwestern corner of Arcadia, skirting Achæa and Elis, rises another well-known mountain, Erymanthus, the favourite hunting ground of Artemis, who as Leader, Saviour, and Fairest received countless shrines from the Arcadians. The southern and lower continuation of Mount Erymanthus was known as Mount Pholoë, to which, as we know from the “Anabasis,” 374Xenophon and his sons and their guests used to come from Elis for the pleasures of the chase. Its beautiful woodlands were fabled to be one of the homes of the Centaurs, whose strange dual nature linked the world of men to the world of beasts. Heracles was entertained by them when, as one of his labours, he came to hunt the wild boar in the Erymanthian thickets.

The forests which spread over the plains and darkened the hills of Arcadia were filled with wild boars and bears and deer. The bear especially gave rise to many legends. The Great Bear in the heavens was once an Arcadian maiden, Callisto, whom jealous Hera turned into a bear and whom Artemis, as a favour to her, shot down. But Zeus retransformed the maiden into shining stars, the guides of mariners before and since the night when Odysseus “kept looking ever at the Pleiades and at Boötes setting slow and at the Bear, by surname called the Wain.” Callisto’s son was Arcas, or Bear, and he first taught the forest dwellers, in the country that was to inherit his name, how to raise corn and bake bread. The great oak woods of Arcadia were responsible for the epithet “acorn-eating,” which the riddle-loving priestess of Delphi often applied to the inhabitants. In the time of Pausanias the Arcadian forests were still conspicuous in all parts of the country. Driven gradually from the plain to the mountains they are even there at last yielding to decay.

But the waters of Arcadia are as unchanged as the 375hills. Both the Alpheus and the Eurotas rise within its borders, the former turning westward, as of old, to its haunts at Olympia, the latter winding to the south to delight a new Sparta with its gleaming water and ripple-washed reeds. And the Ladon, the northern branch of the Alpheus, flows on with the impetuous charm and beautiful colour which gave it the reputation of being the loveliest river in Greece. From out of the range of the Erymanthian hills springs the river Erymanthus, which was especially sacred to Pan, as if its reeds above all others could be shaped into tuneful pipes. In the river Gortys the nymphs washed the new-born Zeus. And by the banks of the Aroanius, which flows down a northern valley to join the Ladon, Pausanias, in enviable leisure, awaited Arcadian music. “Amongst the fish in the Aroanius,” he tells us, “are the so-called spotted fish. They say that these spotted fish sing like a thrush. I saw them after they had been caught, but I did not hear them utter a sound, though I tarried by the river till sunset, when they were said to sing most.”

A group of renowned Arcadian waters may be reached in one northward excursion of three days from Tripolis. The first of these is the Lake of Pheneus, as famous for its strangeness as for its loveliness. It is so surrounded by hills that no stream can escape from it above ground, and the water issues only by two katavothras. The condition of these subterranean channels determines whether the great mountain basin of the Pheneus is a fertile plain or a broad lake. In ancient 376times and in our own the changes have succeeded each other with the fascination of mystery. Pausanias found a plain, and knew the lake only by tradition. From his day until the beginning of the nineteenth century there were no records. But with the ensuing careful descriptions of geographers and travellers come baffling alternations of a “swampy plain covered with fields of wheat or barley” and a “wide expanse of still water deep among the hills, reflecting black pine woods, gray crags, and sky now crimson with sunset.”

To the east of Pheneus and separated from it only by a mountain ridge the Lake of Stymphalus is sunk in placid beauty within towering hills. It was the scene of the fifth labour of Heracles, who killed the monstrous man-eating birds that haunted it. They typified, probably, the pestilence which would arise whenever the underground channel that served as an outlet for the lake became stopped. Heracles was the master-engineer of mythological times. Later engineers also experimented with the water which flows into the Stymphalian Lake from the surrounding mountains and especially from Cyllene. Its purity and abundance led Hadrian to have a supply of it carried by an aqueduct to Corinth. And to-day the Athenians are contemplating importing it into their arid city.

From the prosperous village of Solos vigorous and patient pedestrians may reach the most famous of all the waters of Arcadia, and the most characteristic also of a country in which gentle charms, however real, are 377always subsidiary to a primitive wildness. These waters are the Falls of the Styx, as familiar in English as in Greek literature. They descend over a perpendicular cliff amid scenery which some consider grander and more imposing than that at Delphi. The surroundings so impressed themselves on the sensitive Greek imagination that from the time of Homer the Styx was one of the dread rivers of death and the lower world, fit companion-piece to nether darkness and the monstrous hound of hell, fit invocation even for gods when on their oath. “Let earth be witness unto this and heaven broad and yon down-flowing water of the Styx, which is the oath the greatest and most terrible among the blessed gods,” the immortals, from Zeus to Calypso, are ever exclaiming. Hesiod contributed the fancy that Iris, in a vessel of gold, brought water from the Styx to Olympus, so that the gods might swear by its material presence. The spray of the falls is said to take on at midday the lovely colors of the rainbow, which had its divine personification in the fair messenger of the gods. And it has also been pointed out that Hesiod, in addition to describing accurately the Styx as trickling down from a high and steep rock, by a fine figure suggests a view in winter when huge icicles form over the cliff and the clouds settle down so closely upon its summit that the water looks as if it were descending straight from the sky. The Styx, he says, dwelt in “glorious chambers, vaulted with long rocks, and round about a colonnade of silver pillars reared against the sky.” To 378him also as to Homer the dweller in this icicled palace was “terrible, hated by all the immortals.”

The traveller who must sacrifice the lakes and rivers of Arcadia to seeing the temple of Apollo comes directly by train from Athens to Megalopolis in the great south-western plain. Here he is detained only by a fourth century theatre and other more fragmentary remains of the ancient city before turning northward by carriage or horse.

If he is obliged to ride for several hours and meet a carriage at Karytæna, the grim guardian of the mountainous road to Andritsena, where he is to spend the night, he will have cause to be thankful for an experience that has put him on more familiar terms with rude Arcadia, and has made him more sensitive to the change from monotonous lowland to vast, solitary mountains and deep ravines. The town of Karytæna lies on the slopes of one of the low hills that form the northern boundary of the plain of Megalopolis. Above it, on the hill’s summit, loom the ruins of an old Frankish castle, once the seat of a barony which contributed many a romantic story to the history of the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages. Rarely in Greece is the harmony of historical impression interrupted. But here, like highwaymen to challenge intellectual security, feudalism and the mediæval world stalk out upon the unwary. The spectacle is unique. Karytæna stands at the point where the flat plain startlingly breaks into almost terrifying mountains. Mount Lycæus towers on the left, and all 379around serrated heights rise grandly above the castle, without detracting from its own defiant dignity. Past the foot of the hill flows, on its way to Elis, the Alpheus, here spanned by a striking bridge of six arches, bearing a Frankish inscription. The ruins of the old barony of Geoffrey de Villehardouin equal any feudal remains in Europe in their reminiscent suggestiveness of the romantic and violent life of the Middle Ages. But even while the traveller fears that he will become confused among memories of the Frankish dukes and princes of the Peloponnesus, of donjons and keeps, of chivalry and knighthood, of all the insignia and the emotions and the ideals which make the thirteenth century A. D. seem more remote from us than the fifth century B. C., he finds himself restrained and pacified. Whatever Greece lays her hands upon seems to lose its ephemeral or unrelated character and to take its place, individual, to be sure, but tributary in an harmonious whole. The ruined mediæval castle fits into the surrounding landscape as no disturbing factor, but rather as an integral part of what had helped also to shape the ancient life of Arcadia into its distinguishing forms. The age when the autochthonous Arcadians were resisting the inroads of Sparta and the age when the Slavic inhabitants were yielding to the attacks of the irresistible Franks seem to have had a common parentage in physical conditions. And the brawling stream of the Alpheus below seems to make the jousts and the romances of Geoffrey de Karytena’s court as much their own as were the 380festivals of Zeus and the love affairs of Pan and the nymphs.

The mountains into which the carriage turns from the six-arched bridge are threaded by a long road which, despite its smoothness and safety, runs near enough to the tops of precipices and to the sight of noisy torrents in the gloomy ravines below to engender a mood of Arcadian wildness. If this mountain region is reached in time, travellers will become spectators of the charming scenes which are enacted each evening over the hills of Greece when the bleating flocks of sheep and goats come home to their folds. Sappho saw them in hilly Lesbos:—

Arcadia is still “rich in flocks” and the “mother of sheep,” and to meet and greet her shepherds as they turn home from the mountain pastures restores the world of Greek poetry. But if Karytæna is scarcely rounded before “the sun sets and all the ways are darkened,” then pastoral idylls make way for Arcadia’s magnificent solitariness. The mediæval castle bravely lifts its head above the lonely country, while red clouds stretch like tongues of flame over the mountains and the setting sun turns into molten gold. Suddenly, perhaps, amid the awful silence of purple crags and burning sky, one sign of life asserts itself. A little kid is 381stumbling, lost and dreary, in a patch of green wheat which had enticed it from its mother. Doubtless before the night is over one tired shepherd who has safely enfolded his ninety and nine will climb the steeps again to find the prodigal. But travellers must pass on in the effort to reach Andritsena before midnight. The sky pales and cools into night, and stars of singular brilliance emerge, using the absence of the fair moon to “show their bright faces to men.” As one drives hour after hour through the starlit solitude, while “from heaven breaketh open the ether infinite,” all geographical and temporal limitations seem done away with, and modernity and antiquity meet within the heart of nature. But finally, as the road from time to time curves outward, the lights of human habitations begin to twinkle. Andritsena lifts her little evening beacons on a mountain-side to offer shelter and food to pilgrims of the night. The village rivals Arachova in the charm of its situation, with its outlook over the verdant hills of the Alpheus valley to the distant pale blue heights of Erymanthus in the north. Vineyards and mountain streams and trees add their quota. Those who have stayed several days in the town in bright weather, or who have been snowed in, as travellers may easily be as late as April, report many attractions out of doors, and many hospitable entertainments within the peasant houses. Even those whose impressions are gained from one night’s lodging may forget physical hardships in the discovery of a Greek inheritance. A girl, reproved 382for stroking the embroidered collar of a guest, says explanatorily, “but it is so pretty,” even as the old men on the wall at Troy said of Helen.

Beds of unyielding boards are exchanged before dawn for hard wooden saddles. The temple of Bassæ lies two hours away, and those who wish to see it without undue haste and yet return to Megalopolis before night-fall must begin their ride while the stars are still alight.

Bassæ, or The Glens, should be thought of in connection with Phigalia, although probably only those who take the long horseback ride to or from Olympia will see the remains of this ancient city, which, measuring by the time involved, lies as far beyond Bassæ as Bassæ is beyond Andritsena. The surrounding country fell within its territory, but the city itself stood on “high and mostly precipitous ground,” bounded on the south by the deep gorge of the winding Neda, and partially encircled on the other sides by high mountains. Here where the air was invigorating and all healthful conditions prevailed it was natural that Apollo should be worshipped as the Succourer (Epikourios). In the fifth century the Phigalians were so impressed by reports of the new Parthenon in Athens that they determined to erect by popular subscriptions a new temple to their chief divinity and to ask Ictinus, the Parthenon’s architect, to build it for them. Bassæ, where already a more primitive shrine existed, was the place chosen, and thither from Andritsena in the cool dawn modern pilgrims are taken by their peasant guides. In spite of the 383promise of the stars, perhaps the day breaks slowly, dark masses of clouds impeding the progress of the sun. For an hour and a half the horses make their way along moderate heights, scrambling up small hills and clattering noisily down very rocky defiles. The waysides, in March, are bright with irises, violets, hyacinths, and white and purple crocuses. Then the wildness of the country begins to increase, and culminates in the stony slope of a forbidding hill. In half an hour this is scaled by the horses, and becomes a mount of vision. In unusual panoramic grandeur, mountains lift their nearer or more distant peaks. On the east are the barren hills that form the western spurs of Mount Lycæus. Farther to the south, beyond the valley of the Neda, are the more thickly wooded slopes of the Nomian hills, and beyond them are seen the snowy summits of the range of Taygetus. To the north Erymanthus and Cyllene show their crests. And directly in front, far to the south, Mount Ithome, rising out of the Messenian plain, proudly breaks the horizon line. Nor is the sea wholly wanting, for along the southwestern horizon, as if flowing into the sky itself, stretches a shining length of the Ionian waters.

Perhaps from this hill Ictinus looked down upon the place assigned to him by the Phigalians. Even then the situation must have seemed impressively secluded. Now, certainly, on descending the easy slope, a modern is almost overwhelmed, as if by the appearance of a god laying claim to nature’s secrets, by the sudden 384sight of a majestic Doric peristyle. The temple is built on a narrow plateau on the southern side of a hill called Cotilius by the ancients. Ictinus’s first approach must have been from Phigalia (where he would have talked with the municipal authorities) up the valley of the Neda, over picturesque and well-wooded hills and dales. But he must have studied the situation from all possible points of vantage. Perhaps for him, too, some special revelation came when out of dark and threatening clouds the sun, at last divinely swift, cleft the darkness, and he saw how effectively massive columns of gray limestone would be illumined by Apollo’s radiant shafts. Probably the architect’s taste and the Phigalians’ desire united to choose as the material of the temple the native rock that could be quarried in the neighbourhood. Marble was imported for the capitals of the inner pillars, for the ceilings of the north and south porticoes, for the roof tiles and for the sculptured frieze which now honours the British Museum. The columns of the peristyle and the architrave, barren of adornment, are singularly noble. They look as if they had sprung from the rocks about them and belonged more to the mountains overshadowing them than to men. Indeed, for many centuries, men forgot the existence of the temple. Pausanias, in his day, six hundred years after its building, could still describe it as surpassing all the temples in the Peloponnesus, save the one at Tegea built a hundred years later, for the beauty of its stone and the symmetry of its proportions. But in 385time earthquakes and iconoclasm wrought their deadly work, and through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the remaining ruins were known only to shepherds. The temple was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, but not until the present time were any efforts made to reërect some of the interior portions from the fragments lying on the ground. In the wake of the archæologist follows the tourist, and now any one who will may intrude upon Apollo’s long solitude.

Unlike other temples erected to the gods, whom Æschylus describes as “facing the dawn” and flashing back to the worshippers from their “gleaming eyes” the sun’s early rays, the temple at Bassæ lay from north to south instead of from east to west. But this was due only to the character of the situation and the exigencies of the soil. Long before Ictinus’s day a primitive shrine had existed facing the east in the usual manner. And the new temple seems to have had a special door built in its cella in order that the main statue of Apollo, facing the rising sun, might still be approached from the side of dawn. The old statue, like the old shrine, was supplanted by a finer one. Later the great bronze Apollo was sent to adorn Megalopolis. But when Ictinus lived it may well have formed the centre of his noble architectural design, an incarnation of the ideal of physical and of spiritual wholeness realized through beauty.

One further fact about the Temple in the Glens has been emphasized by the great topographer Leake: “That which forms, on reflection, the most striking 386circumstance of all is the nature of the surrounding country, capable of producing little else than pasture for cattle and offering no conveniences for the display of commercial industry either by sea or land. If it excites our astonishment that the inhabitants of such a district should have had the refinement to delight in works of this kind, it is still more wonderful that they should have had the means to execute them. This can only be accounted for by what Horace says of the early Romans:—

This is the true secret of national power, which cannot be equally effective in an age of selfish luxury.”

But it must also be pointed out that although the Phigalians had taste and patriotism, no architect or artist rose among them to shape their stone. Ictinus and his fellow artists must come from Athens worthily to incarnate their desires. So a generation earlier they had been obliged to persuade Onatas, the master of the Æginetan school of sculpture, to carve for them a statue of Demeter. Nor were the Phigalians less skilled than other Arcadians. Scopas had to come from Paros to build the temple to Athena at Tegea. And it was foreign poets who turned the legends of Cyllenian Hermes and Pan into literature, and later enshrined in pastoral verse the tossing mountain forests and the cool rivers of Arcady.

This was Arcadia’s destiny, to offer the raw material 387of her domain to the shaping hand of more gifted races. Her greatest son was a soldier. Her own deeds were deeds of blood and strife, her own life was one of work and poverty. But because poets and artists of other blood wrought for her, her name and her inherent beauty have become forever domiciled in our own literature, even in our daily speech and commoner affections.

CHAPTER XVIII OLYMPIA

“What time the mid-month moon in golden car flamed back her light and lit the eye of Evening full, pure judgment of Great Games did Heracles ordain and fifth year’s festival beside Alphēus and his holy banks.”

Whatever may be the final decision of archæologists, it was natural for Pausanias to identify the reclining figures in the east gable of the Zeus temple at Olympia as the Alpheus and Cladeus. The right angle made by the junction of these rivers is in a fertile plain where the Altis, the sacred enclosure of Olympia, lies at the foot of the Kronos hill. The Alpheus river is inseparably connected in Greek literature with the Great Games. For more than one thousand summers successively the full moon looked down upon the myriads of visitors who came from inland or from island homes, from Tenedos in the East, or from Sicily in the West. By the Alpheus they encamped and sank into dreamless sleep after their journeyings or, it may be, one or another, himself a competitor or an anxious relative, would be roused up by nightmares and outriders of grim Taraxippus, the Horse Frightener, whose ghost long held in mortmain the critical turning point in the Hippodrome. 389When the contests were ended, the same moon would silver the weather-beaten columns of the old Heræum or light up with its benignant splendour the new and stately shafts of the Zeus temple, the gray-green sacred olive tree, the great wings of the hovering Victory, the Parian marbles and the burnished bronzes, or still more beautiful, the naked ivory of the athletes’ limbs. And then, crowning all, the epinician hymn, newborn from Pindar’s brain, rose up on the wings of victorious music to the very summit of the Kronos hill.

OLYMPIA
Kronos Hill. The ruins of the Altis

The athletes had not far to journey from their last training place in Elis. The spectators had come from various directions, some from the sea-coast, some, as do the majority of modern visitors, from Patras on the coast of Achæa. But then, as now, the direct artery from the heart of Greece was the green valley of the Alpheus. The river clamps Arcadia and Elis together. Down this valley year by year in antiquity pilgrims journeyed to see the games and to attend the great Fair; here in modern times bands of tourists still pick their way up and down over smooth roads and rocky torrent-beds and cross the ford of the swollen stream; and a projected railroad, connecting (on paper) Megalopolis and Olympia, also follows the general course of the Alpheus. The river has two main sources. Its northern branch, the Ladon, draws its water from the rugged mountains of northern Arcadia. The other branch comes flowing down from the northwest end of Taygetus, curves through the plain of Megalopolis, plunges 390through the ravine of Karytæna and joins the Ladon near the western border of Arcadia, and the two united make their way through Elis to the Ionian sea. Nor even there is its end. In pursuit of the fountain nymph, Arethusa, Alpheus must needs reach Sicily. To the Greeks the Mediterranean was their highway, not the “salt, estranging sea.” According to Lucian, as Alpheus enters the sea, Poseidon, brimming over with curiosity, stops him and enquires: “What’s this, Alpheus? You alone of all rivers don’t go in for dissipation, and you keep your waters fresh and free from brine as you hurry on?”

(Alpheus) “It’s a love affair, Poseidon, so don’t cross-question me. You’ve been in love yourself and often too!”

The sea-god on learning of the object of Alpheus’s passion expresses much approval. But Alpheus cuts him short: “I am pressed with engagements. You detain me, Poseidon, by your superfluous questions!”

(Poseidon) “You’re right. Be off to your Beloved. Rise up from the water, mingle with the fountain and be ye twain one stream.”

Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias is troubled with no doubts, and solemnly reaffirms the wedlock of Alpheus and Arethusa, although the more sceptical Strabo in the preceding century had naïvely argued against the credibility of the popular belief that a cup thrown into the Alpheus reappears in the fountain at Syracuse. Antigonus Carystus had stoutly maintained that “when 391the entrails of the victims are thrown into the Alpheus the waters of Arethusa in Sicily grow turbid.”

Be all that as it may, Alpheus mingling his waters with the Sicilian fountain is typical of the stream of competitors who were constantly returning from the Olympic games to Magna Græcia. Of Pindar’s fourteen Olympic odes nine were written for Sicilian or Italian victors. In general one of the most noteworthy facts in the history of the games is the widespread distribution of the clientèle. The competitors and visitors converging from Greece; the innumerable votive offerings here dedicated; the common motives of religion here illustrated in art and literature generated a centripetal national spirit that could retard though not destroy the centrifugal individualism of the Greeks.

The only fact more conspicuous than the wide territory represented is the longevity of the Olympic celebrations. The Great Games were continued both under Macedonian rule and even for long years after the Hellenic world, east and west, subjugated, dismembered, and rearranged like parti-colored bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, had fallen into place in the imperial pattern of the great Roman mosaic. The splendid Philippeum at Olympia was witness to the eagerness with which Philip and Alexander made good their legitimate claim to Hellenic blood. Roman emperors, like Tiberius and Nero, by their very presence, however arrogant, gave one more sign of the Greeks’ intellectual suzerainty over their captors.

392Although Elis, even in October after the long hot summer, presents a contrast to the burnt plains and hills about Athens, yet the traveller will be best rewarded if he comes to Olympia by the end of February or early in March. If he comes from Patras and will penetrate a little inland from the railroad near the river Stimana, the ancient Larisos, he will find himself in the midst of beautiful woodland scenery. The whole country, with its fine oak trees, reminded the traveller Mure of “the wilder parts of Windsor Park.” Even at the little stations are seen shepherds in their shaggy coats, with conversation-beads and staffs and flocks of sheep. At Olympia itself the new green of the trees and grass, the pink of the almond blossoms on the banks of the Alpheus, and all the awakening of the early spring help to dissipate the melancholy that is wont to invade the mind in a lonely site amidst ruins which record some by-gone efflorescence of human activity. This Olympian plain, through which the Alpheus sweeps down to the sea between fields and vineyards, offered ample room for the vast throngs of visitors. There was no city accommodation. They must encamp in the open as they do to-day at many a modern festival. But the smiling valley was a fit place to worship Zeus, the god of the open sky. Xenophon, who lived on his estate just beyond the hills which bound the plain to the south, tells in the “Anabasis” how the returning Greeks, when they sighted the Euxine sea from the mountain ridge, held impromptu games 393and races on an impossible slope where men and horses tumbled amidst the jeers of the spectators. The plain of the Alpheus was perfectly adapted both for the games and all that the festival implied. It is easy to see how contests would become popular here before they were instituted on the narrow ledges of Parnassus at Delphi.

For the Greeks of the classical period the mythical founding of the games in prehistoric times threw back the first contests into a conveniently dim perspective. In this penumbra of Greek mythology like-named replicas of gods, heroes, or mortals now blend together, now assert their independence. The Cretan Heracles is said to have brought the infant Zeus from Mount Ida to the Kronos hill in the Golden Age and to have first instituted the games. Then again it is the national hero Heracles, himself Zeus-descended, who cleanses the stables of King Augeas in Elis with the help of the Alpheus and the Cladeus river-gods, and thereupon founds the games.

To the reverent Greek his mythology was not an entertaining treasury of mere fairy tales. The stories of two contests were selected with intent as the theme for the sculptures most prominent of all in the sacred enclosure. In the east gable of the Zeus temple was represented Hippodameia, the daughter of Œnomaus. Her father has already in his swift chariot overtaken and slain many suitors who had failed to outspeed him while contending for his daughter’s hand. At the side of Hippodameia stands Pelops just starting to win, by 394the favour of Zeus and the treachery of Œnomaus’s charioteer, a prehistoric Olympic victory.

In the west gable was the contest between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. The latter are represented as invading the festival at the marriage of another Hippodameia to Pirithous, whose friend and ally of old was the hero, Theseus of Athens. The brute Centaurs presumably symbolize the barbaric power of the Persians, whose defeat by Athens and her allies was here fittingly celebrated as another Olympic victory. This may be taken as the official expression, at the supreme moment of Greek history, of one of the wider meanings of the games.

The first view of the excavations at Olympia is disappointing and bewildering to the amateur visitor, and a mere topographical survey hopelesslyhopelessly confounds history. Even a superficial appreciation of the ruins presupposes a more special preparation than is necessary, for example, at Pompeii. At Olympia, although it, too, was overwhelmed, being destroyed by earthquakes and buried in soft earth by the loyal river-gods, the imagination must concern itself with various epochs: the prehistoric; the period from the first Olympiad to the Persian wars; the age of Pericles; the following century; the Macedonian period; and, finally, that of the Greek world under Roman sway.

All the buildings for the athletes and for the contests—the Palæstra, the Gymnasium, the Stadium, and the Hippodrome—lay outside of the sacred enclosure, 395while the Altis itself was reserved for the real purpose of this consecrated spot, the worship of Zeus, under all his manifold activities, and of the other gods who helped to round out and to satisfy the aspirations, the hopes, and fears of the Greek heart that was “in all things very religious.” To cover all possible oversights there was at Olympia, as by the Areopagus of St. Paul’s day, or at Phalerum, an altar to Unknown Gods. Just as the drama was a religious spectacle, so the games were conducted by the real Greek in the same spirit. The athletes went forth from the Altis to the contest, the victors reëntered it to receive the olive crown, and within it their statues and offerings were set up in the immediate presence of the gods.

In the Altis the ancient Heræum, with its indications of an earlier wooden structure, carries back the thought far beyond the first Olympiad in the eighth century B. C. The new god Zeus was just emerging from the tutelage of his predecessor on the Kronos hill above. In this early age he seems hardly more than a Prince Consort by the side of Hera who, in Pindar’s sixth Olympian, is invoked as the “Maiden” or ever Zeus had led her to the bridal chamber. One of the least obtrusive ruins in the Altis marks the site near the Heræum of the great altar of Zeus or, possibly, the common shrine of Zeus and Hera. Annually the priests kneaded with water from the Alpheus the ashes of the thighs of victims offered, as in the Iliad, to the god, and plastered a layer upon this primitive altar. Only the 396water of the Alpheus was acceptable to the god in preparing this clay, and thus year by year was cemented the union between the visible and the unseen, the beneficent river-god of the land and the Olympian god whose dome overarched the widespread land of Hellas.

Approaching historic records we read that Iphitus in 793 B. C. or, by the usual reckoning, in 776 B. C., four hundred and eight years after the traditional capture of Troy, renewed the games which had been discontinued for twenty-eight Olympiads after the time of Pelops and Heracles. The Heræum, until recently known as the most ancient temple in Greece, certainly existed at this time, although differing in material and in contents from the temple that Pausanias describes. Both the ground structure and enough of the lower part of the walls remain to enable the expert to reconstruct in imagination the whole building up to the gable upon which rested the terra-cotta acroterion now preserved in the Museum. At the west end of the cella we see the base of the great statues of Hera and Zeus. Suitably enough, while Zeus has disappeared the archaic head of Hera was found and is now in the Museum. And, prostrate before one of the side niches, just where Pausanias describes it, was found the Hermes of Praxiteles with the infant Dionysus on his arm. This beautiful statue alone would have repaid the cost of the whole excavation. It unites the beauty of the athlete’s body with the Greek conception of divinity in frank, idealizing anthropomorphism.

397The catholicity of Greek polytheism may be illustrated by the rest of the company within the Heræum as described by Pausanias. It was not that every god “had his day,” like the rotation in office of the Athenian prytanes, but there was a precinct and a function for each and every manifestation of pulsating life, from the humblest Nereid to Olympian Hera. “Known to each other are all the immortal gods,” as Homer says. They were all entered in their Almanach de Gotha and could upon occasion live in harmony, except when some Eris threw her apple of discord in their midst or “golden” Aphrodite struggled in the Council of the Gods for precedence over the mere bigness of the Colossus of Rhodes. At any rate, in Hera’s temple were placed statues of the Seasons and of Themis, their mother, personifying orderly and unchanging Law; the five Hesperides, stimulating the eager Hellenic mind to reach out after the unknown; Athena, goddess in peace and war; the Maid and Demeter, embodying the fruitful beneficence of nature and the mysteries of the unseen; Apollo and Artemis, welcomed or feared by turns for their arrows of light or shafts of destruction; Latona, their mother, whose Delian refuge was firmly moored to every other sacred shrine in Greece. Here too was Fortune, who had a not insignificant rôle in Greek as in Roman life, and Dionysus, god of Tragedy and of Comedy, was represented as accompanied by a winged Victory.

The Prytaneum of the Eleans, trustees of the land 398and of the games, was enclosed within the Altis at the northwest corner of the Heræum. It was built over in Roman times, but the Greek structure beneath seems to have been of very early date. Here were sung ancient songs in the Doric dialect, and here, in the banquet-hall, the Olympic victors were feasted.

Next in historic order come the remains of a row of twelve treasuries, ranged along close to the Kronos hill from the Heræum to the Stadium entrance. They are ascribed to the sixth century B. C. or, in the case of part of the most easterly one, to the beginning of the fifth century. These little buildings are of great architectonic and historic import. Half of them were dedicated by communities from over the seas; five by Italian and Sicilian Greeks. The fragments from the treasury of Selinus recall at once the archaic temples and sculpture on the shore of Sicily that faces Carthage. The Syracusan Treasury was re-named “Carthaginian” by reason of spoils, taken by the Syracusans from their Punic enemies in the battle of Himera and placed here to unite at this common shrine the victors of Salamis with their brothers in the west.

In the fifth century B. C. the flush of victory at Salamis not only lit up the Acropolis at Athens but spread to this green valley in Elis. The great Zeus temple was built. Its pediments, as we have already seen, were adorned with sculptured myths appealing at once to local pride and to wider Hellenic patriotism. In the eastern gable Zeus stood upright as arbiter in the 399chariot contest of Pelops; in the western gable the archaic yet majestic Apollo appeared as the defender against the Centaurs, the barbarian invaders. To emphasize the honour due to Athens there was painted on the throne within the temple a representation of Pirithöus, the bridegroom of Hippodameia, and his friend, the Athenian Theseus. The victories over the Persians were again symbolized by the contest between Theseus and the Amazons wrought upon the footstool of the seated god, and, as if to put the meaning beyond all doubt, here too were Greece and Salamis personified, the latter holding in her hand the figurehead of a ship. The metope sculptures represented the labours of Heracles who, as founder of the games, typified to patriot and athlete bodily powers and indomitable will. The cella of the temple was reserved for the great gold-ivory statue of Zeus, who was seated while others stood. Phidias established his workshop by the sacred enclosure and wrought. And the result of his handiwork was a world’s wonder for long centuries. Into his creation were breathed Homeric dignity, Attic beauty, and Hellenic pride. Dio Chrysostom in the first century of the Christian era could say of it: “Methinks that if any one who is heavy-laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortunes and sorrows in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that are incidental to the life of man.”

Time and earthquakes and plunderers have worked 400almost utter ruin. But the ground plan of the temple remains to tell a detailed story, and some of the great shafts lie prostrate where they fell. In the Museum is preserved, more or less complete, the major part of the gable sculptures, fortunately including the very noble figure of Apollo, and the mutilated but beautiful metopes. The gold-ivory statue has disappeared long since. It is possible that it may have been destroyed when the temple was burnt in the reign of Theodosius II, but a Byzantine historian claims that the statue was still standing in a palace at Constantinople when it was consumed by fire in 475 A. D. In front of the Zeus temple are still to be seen some blocks of the lofty triangular column over which Pæonius caused his winged Nike to hover. The statue itself, in large part intact, is set up in the Museum and belongs to the more beautiful of our inheritances from antiquity.

If now we add, in imagination, the great council hall, possibly lying southeast from the temple, and the older colonnade bounding the east side of the Altis, and if we add the pentagonal Pelopion and the minor sanctuaries, and fill in the forest of statues of athletes and of gods, we shall have the more salient features of the sacred enclosure down through the great period immediately following the Persian wars. To the beginning of the fourth century is attributed the little temple of the Mother of the Gods east of the Heræum. Running in a line from this up to the very entrance of the Stadium is a long row of pedestals. Upon these stood the 401Zanes, or bronze statues of Zeus, which were erected from fines imposed upon offenders against the rules of the games. They stood where the contestants must see them just as they passed from the Altis into the Stadium. It is significant that the first recorded serious violation of athletic honour did not occur until 388 B. C., only a half century before free Greece was crushed at Chæronea, and that the next occasion was in the 112th Olympiad, six years after Macedonian rule was established. This second time it was an Athenian who had bribed his competitors, and the Athenians, like some modern sympathizers with athletic criminals, were shameless enough to press the Eleans to remit the fine. But the god at Delphi compelled the Athenians to submit. Standing before the Opisthodomus, the rear porch of the Zeus temple, from which poet, historian, and philosopher were wont to utter high words on noble themes, the crowd may have looked up at the great Apollo with his hand outstretched and imagined him dictating the inscription placed, on a similar occasion, upon the base of one of the Zanes: “An Olympic victory is to be gained not by money but by fleetness of foot and strength of body.”

Macedon also left its records. When Philip had defeated the Greeks at Chæronea in 338 B. C., his first care was to prove that he was Hellene and not the barbarian that Demosthenes considered him. The Philippeum was dedicated, and in it were erected gold-ivory statues of Philip’s father Amyntas, of Philip, of the 402mother and grandmother of Alexander, and of Alexander himself. Alexander’s right to contend at the games was vindicated. In this period also was added on the eastern side of the Altis the beautiful Echo colonnade with its sevenfold echo.

When Greece came under Roman rule, no longer could free-born Greeks boast of exclusive right to participate at Olympia. Champions from all parts of the empire, Tiberius and Nero among them, took part in the games. Pausanias speaks of a statue of Augustus, made of amber, and a statue of Trajan, dedicated by the Greek nation, and also of one of Hadrian set up by the Achæan confederacy. Nero, who contended both in the Olympic and Pythian games, dedicated four crowns in the Zeus temple. Under the Antonines the external splendour of the Altis and the comfort of the visiting throngs were enhanced by the public-spirited Herodes Atticus, a Greek from Marathon and the preceptor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Lucian, who was repeatedly at the Games, gives in his “Life’s End of Peregrinus” a vivid picture of one of the quadrennial celebrations in the time of the Antonines. In place of the deserted ruins of to-day we can see the temples, statues, marble exedra, the echo colonnade, the athletes, and the thronging crowds gossiping, wrangling, gaping after novelty. As the Cynic partisan harangues the people from the pulpit of the Opisthodomus we realize how for centuries Greek life had focused in these gatherings. The festival had become a Greek Exchange. Here, if 403we are to believe Lucian, Herodotus first gave to the public his history, the great epinician epic that recounted the triumphs of the Greek over the barbarian. Among his audience would be some whose brothers or fathers had fought at Thermopylæ, and all would hear with pride how Xerxes asked: “What are the Greeks doing?” and how he was answered: “They are holding the Olympic games, seeing the athletic sports and the chariot races;” and then, when Xerxes was told that the prize was a mere olive wreath, how a Persian exclaimed: “What manner of men are these who contend with one another not for money but for honour!” Brain and brawn were alike praised at Olympia. The sophist Hippias was Elis-born, and the statue of Gorgias from Sicily was erected among those of the athletes. And here rhetoricians from Gorgias to Lucian delivered their epideictic speeches; artists, painters, and musicians appealed to the eye or the ear; philosophies new or old were hotly debated.

But no Roman patronage could galvanize into real life the dying spirit of freedom. Professionalism grew apace. Christianity, established in the eastern empire, extinguished the fire on the ancient altar of Zeus. The fitful return to polytheism under Julian the Apostate only served to show its decadence, and in 393 A. D. the emperor Theodosius finally suppressed the Olympic games. When the “truce” of the Olympic god no longer interposed a defence, the Altis itself became a Byzantine fortress and the monuments were partially 404destroyed to build its walls. Amongst the ruins of the Palæstra and the Workshop of Phidias can be seen the remains of a Byzantine church. Earthquakes in the sixth century threw down the Zeus temple, and in this and the following century the Cladeus and the Alpheus, the only gods who still retained their power, united in preserving under deep layers of earth the mutilated monuments for a kindlier age to uncover and to honour. After this destruction and burial, for more than one thousand years the summer moons waxed and waned above the desolated valley disturbed only by the hoof-beats of the horses ridden by the vassal bands of the Dukes of the Morea. Here, as elsewhere in Greece, temples robbed of their acolytes and statues, no longer symbols of a living religion, forgot the incense of a happy past and could look forward to no festal renascence. Sterling, in his “Dædalus,” pictures these orphaned children of Olympus in a loneliness only less pathetic than their irksome imprisonment within unsympathetic Museum walls:—

In 1875 the German government subsidized the systematic excavations that restored to the modern world some of its most valued treasures and laid bare the greater part of the ruined Altis, the adjacent buildings and the entrance to the Stadium.

405The remains excavated outside the Altis bring us to the contests themselves. Close to the western wall of the Altis were the elaborate Palæstra and Gymnasium, where the athletes could keep themselves in form for the contests. From the northeastern corner of the sacred enclosure leads the covered way into the Stadium, which has been only partially excavated at the two ends. To the south, or possibly east, of the Stadium lay the Hippodrome by the bank of the Alpheus. Frazer, contrary to the usual belief, thinks it possible that it may still be intact north of the new bed of the river. From Pausanias, who fortunately described the Hippodrome minutely, we can in imagination reconstruct the scene: the rising tiers of spectators; the bronze turning-posts, on which respectively stood statues of Pelops and of Hippodameia, at each end of the course around which the chariots drove twelve times; the umpires at the goal; the chariots waiting ready for the signal given at the hoisting of the bronze eagle and the dropping of the dolphin. For a typical chariot race of the best period we may turn to the “Electra” of Sophocles, although the scene of the race is laid at Delphi, not at Olympia. Sophocles, who himself embodied the Greek perfection of manly beauty, knew how to give essential details to critical hearers. The danger involved and the skill required on the race track made the owner of the victorious team, provided he was his own charioteer, a worthy recipient of Olympic honours. There are ten contestants in all, two of 406them Libyan Greeks. They draw lots for the assignment of inner and outer tracks and take their stations at command of the judges, and then—

Both the Olympic and Pythian games were held every four years. The Nemean and Isthmian came every two years. In all four the prize was similar: the wreath of wild olive at Olympia; of mountain bay at Delphi; of parsley or of native pine at Nemea; of parsley at Corinth. We are, indeed, justified in emphasizing, until the period of decadence, the absence of professionalism. The athlete, after undergoing the severest training, contested, with no degradation of gate-money, merely to win the honour of a simple wreath. But we need not shut our eyes to the fact that the honour did not fade with the wreath. It belonged to the athlete’s native place and to all his fellow-citizens. Thinking of the evanescent glory of the Isthmian parsley and with the long race in the stadium of Eternity in mind, the apostle Paul might indeed point the contrast for his hearers between a “corruptible crown” and “one that fadeth not away;” yet for the shorter race-course of life the emoluments of honour and preferment were secure. And, in addition to all these honours, an Olympian victor had a post-mortem value. He might be worshipped as a divinity and his statue might heal diseases, 408like the bones of a mediæval saint. Thus Lucian’s Momus, the god of critics, reminds Zeus that their own prestige is endangered by these new faith-cures: “Actually,” he says, “the statues of the athlete Polydamas at Olympia and of Theagenes at Thasus are curing fever-stricken patients.”

The athlete’s ambition might issue in a selfish “opportunism,” or it might be of the nobler kind to which Pindar, thinking perhaps of the altar dedicated in the Altis to the god “Opportunity” (καιρός), would lift the contestant’s ideal in his second Olympian:—

There was a sacred truce from hostilities amongst all Greeks for a month, to allow time for distant competitors and visitors to go and come in safety. The games were held in summer at the time of a full moon, whether in July or August is uncertain. The September full moon, in fact, has been suggested as the date in the even Olympiads. At this later moon the heat might be almost as great as at the summer solstice, but it may be that the earlier date, with the longer day, was in vogue as long as the contests were all held upon one day. At any rate, the longest midsummer day was too short for the increasing number of events, and after 472 B. C. we hear of five days. The order of the contests is uncertain. At first, it would appear, the foot-races 409had been the only event. Later it seems probable that the foot-races, the long race, the short race, and the double course, came upon one day; on a second day, the wrestling, boxing, and pancratium. The chariot-races and the pentathlum came on one and the same day. The pentathlum was justly popular as calculated to secure an all-round development of the human form. It included leaping, the foot-race, discus-throwing, javelin-throwing, and wrestling. The Spartans, who were never charged with being effeminate, were said to favour it while discountenancing the more brutal pancratium. We certainly are not much attracted by the license of the latter, evidently considered legitimate, as we read of two athletes habitually winning this event by bending back their antagonists’ fingers. One of them, Sostratus, was surnamed “Finger-bender.” But the judges presided with absolute authority and enforced severe penalties against violations of the rules.

Women were prohibited under pain of death from even crossing the river and entering the sacred precinct during the time of the games. Pausanias records one violation. Kallipateira, or Pherenike (“Victoria”), the daughter of Diagoras, the Rhodian victor immortalized by Pindar, anxious to see her son compete, disguised herself as a trainer. In her exultation at her son’s success she betrayed her sex. The penalty attached was to be hurled from the Typæum rock on a mountain south of the Alpheus. In deference to the victories won by her father, her brothers, and her son, she was pardoned, 410but thereafter the trainers were compelled to enter naked like the athletes themselves.

The priestess of Demeter, however, was present ex officio, and Pausanias expressly states that virgins also were admitted as spectators. This statement is usually rejected, but it may have been true for certain times under the influence of Sparta, whose customs threw the sanction of public sentiment around the athletic contests of their maidens, the future mothers of their fighting men.

Although the modern reader is apt to think of the chariot-races in connection with Sicilian tyrants, they were, as we have seen from Sophocles, an integral part of Greek life. Herodotus, in the midst of his account of the battle of Marathon, calmly suspends hostilities while he tells how Cimon, father of Miltiades, won three successive Olympic victories with the same mares and, as fitting climax, adds that the mares were buried on the stately avenue of Athenian tombs, facing the grave of Cimon himself. If Herodotus really read this at Olympia the incident would not have seemed to his audience an intrusive digression.

In addition to the four-horse and two-horse chariot-races there was the race with mules—no mean animals in Greece and the Orient. Pindar repeatedly celebrates them in his Olympian odes. There was also the single race-horse ridden by a jockey. One horse from Syracuse, Pherenicus (“Victor”), was celebrated in song both by Pindar and Bacchylides. Pindar tells how he 411“ran the course, his body by the goad unurged” and brought victory to Hieron. Bacchylides, reminding us that the horse-races opened the events of the day, exclaims:—

Pausanias tells of a Corinthian race-horse, Aura (“Breeze”), perhaps one of the famous “Koppa”^[38] breed, sired by Pegasus. The jockey was thrown at the beginning of the race, but the mare continued without breaking form, rounded the turning stake, quickened her pace at the sound of the trumpet, reached the umpires 412first, knew that she had won, and stopped. The owner of the riderless horse was proclaimed victor.

It would be very unsafe to assert that the eager Greeks, if called back to our own age of ingenious mechanisms, would turn uninterested from the vicarious competition by motor-cars, or feel nothing but disgust at human forms crooked into the semblance of brutes over a flying bicycle, but it is safe to emphasize that all their contests, whether exhibiting the development of the perfect human body or the beauty of the horse, ministered to that sure sense of form and proportion which they demanded and obtained from poet, painter, and musician, sculptor, architect, and athlete. But horse and chariot-racing involved certain special temptations. As time went on, the “anything to win” spirit was sure, now and then, to assert itself. The legend of the lynch-pin withdrawn from the chariot of Œnomaus by the bribery of Pelops must have called for strenuous casuistry from the priests of Zeus when it was necessary to punish offenders for shady practices towards rivals. Pindar magnificently ignores the thought of treachery. With him it is a god that—

Although in later times the peripatetic professional developed and could claim as precedent the victories repeatedly won at various centres by the athletes of old, 413yet, at least for their own times, Pindar and Bacchylides were justified in assuming, alike for their Sicilian princes or for their boyish winners in the foot-race, the genuine amateur spirit of athletic rivalry. In the fourth century B. C. a Cretan, victor in the long race, was bribed to transfer his citizenship to Ephesus. The Olympian athlete had not then become, like the modern base-ball pitcher, a legitimate commodity of interstate commerce, and the Cretans with justifiable indignation pronounced the sentence of perpetual exile against Sotades the offender.

For Pindar, indeed, it was necessary that every song should rise above the sordid, either in belief or practice. He was at once a supreme artist and a herald of the ideal. He even expurgates canonical mythology to infuse into his odes some deeper, nobler lesson suggested by the external and physical victory. And this, although several of his odes were addressed to rich tyrants like Hieron of Syracuse, at whose court were welcomed and honoured Æschylus, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides and many more. “He was to them in some measure what Augustus was to Virgil and Horace, what Lorenzo de’ Medici was to the members of the Florentine Academy.”^[39] Pindar honestly regarded him as the patron of letters and as a bulwark against the barbarians. He had fought under Gelon against the Carthaginians, and, soon after the battles of Himera and Salamis, the Etruscans, who were also threatening Greek supremacy, were, 414in 474 B. C., defeated by him. Early in the nineteenth century, from a partial excavation at Olympia, a bronze helmet of Etruscan make found its way to the British Museum. On it is the inscription: “Hieron, son of Deinomenes, and the Syracusans (dedicated) to Zeus these Tyrrhene spoils from Cumæ.” It tantalizes with the sequence of historic associations. From lips within this helmet came words of war in the dead Etruscan tongue that still baffles linguistic classification; on it were inscribed Greek words in the dialect of the proud Greek colonists in Sicily; mingled Greek dialects greeted it when dedicated in the sacred centre of the motherland; and now it is again held as spoils by another and mightier island folk.

Pindar could not prophesy the fatal conflict between the tyrants of the west and the greedy imperialism of Athenian demagogues. He could not peer into the stone quarries at Syracuse and see the legatees of Salamis scorched under the lidless eye of a Sicilian sun. He could not foresee a Macedonian ruling over Hellas nor forecast the Greek world under Roman sway. He could not have understood how even Plato, with the additional perspective of another half century, crowded with disturbing shifts of value both in literature and government, would seek relief from the spectre of tyranny not in democracy but by converting the baser metal of the despot into the pure gold of the philosophic King. Yet Pindar is not without his misgivings. In words none too vague he warns the ruler, whose gold called forth 415his songs, of the dangers inherent in power. In the first Olympian he tells Hieron:—

With better right and greater force Æschylus, himself warrior of Marathon and Salamis, in the “Agamemnon” covertly warns his Athenian contemporaries, then engaged in imperial schemes of expansion in Egypt and elsewhere, against the haughty spirit that goeth before a fall. His words easily connect themselves with this Pindaric ode because the return of the Greek host from Troy brings out on Clytemnestra’s lips the metaphor drawn from the double racecourse—the δίαυλος. Ilium is but the turning-post at the farther end; Argos is both the starting-point and the goal; the stadium is the Ægean sea:—

To make selections from Pindar is to pry out jewels from an antique setting. But his Olympic odes give the best interpretation of the best meaning of the games. Some were impromptu odes crystallized under the stress of the victory and sung in the Altis while the full 416moon shone upon the hero of the day. Some were longer and written at leisure for the supplementary celebration at the victor’s home. But in any case the thought was not impromptu. The Theban eagle soared habitually and paused for a moment only at Olympia, sent by—

Yet with all his soaring Pindar never forgot the gracious beauty of human life. The Graces are ever near. Victory, he tells us, by the Graces’ aid is won, and the charioteers—

Pindar calls his song “a writing tally of the Muses.” Not he that runs may read, but whoever will be at pains to wrap the Greek scroll around the tally-stick can read the cypher and can find the clue to lead him safely through “the sounding labyrinths of song.”^[40] Pindar could presuppose an acquaintance with mythology at least as familiar as was to every child of a generation ago the knowledge of the Old Testament. Conflicting myths lived side by side in the popular consciousness. The sculptor and the poet could choose or reject at will. However recondite may seem at times the application of the myth to the Olympic victor in question, the 417pages of Pindar are constantly illuminated by some flash-light that photographs upon the particular a glimpse of the universal. From Olympia in Elis we are transported to Olympus. Heracles brought from Olympus the charter for the games; there, too, is both the starting-line and finish of the poet’s courser: “Pegasus is stabled in Olympus.” Pindar does not belittle the mysteries of the unseen. When the fame of Theron of Acragas (Girgenti) is said to over-pass Sicily and to touch the pillars of Heracles, the thought of the pathless ocean suggests a wider and uncharted Cosmos. His search-light projects for a moment its stare into infinity, but it is forthwith checked with characteristic restraint:—

Pindar’s description of the ancient consecration of the Altis may serve to justify the Labours of Heracles carved upon the Zeus temple:—

His praise of the discus victor comes to mind when we see a copy of Myron’s Discobolus or the graceful throw of a contemporary Greek in the Stadium of modern Athens:—

And we seem ourselves to share in the evening celebration in the Altis when—

We can share too in the undertone of pathos in Pindar’s reference to the dead father of a young athlete. Asopichus is winner in the boys’ footrace, and the news of his victory is sent to his father in Hades. The Arcadian nymph Echo is the messenger:—

Perhaps the most radiant picture of “festal mirth” is called up by Pindar’s seventh Olympian, written for Diagoras of Rhodes. Diagoras’s two sons and his grandson were also Olympic victors. This acted, on at least two occasions, as a family prophylactic. His daughter, as we have seen, was pardoned by reason of this for her intrusion in disguise at the Olympic games, and Dorieus, his son, when captured by the Athenians in a sea-fight, escaped the only alternatives usual in the case of a prisoner of war. He was neither put to death nor forced to pay a ransom, but set free, just as 419Balaustion, the Rhodian girl, was set free by the Syracusans because she delighted her captors by repeating a new drama of Euripides. And the Rhodians wrote up Pindar’s ode in letters of gold in the Athena temple on the acropolis of Lindus. The modern visitor to this enchanting island climbs up the lofty headland that rises abruptly between the shining water of the two indenting bays, and, before he passes through the ruins of the ancient propylæa and the still imposing portals of the fortress of the Knights of St. John, he sees upon the solid rock the after part of a huge trireme with the steering-oar and the rippling water carved in stone. He can imagine a trireme of a former day entering the harbour below with triumphal sweep of oars, bringing Diagoras and his victory back to his townsfolk in this far-off corner of the Greek world. He can picture the procession of Lindians to Athena’s temple; the brilliant colouring of robes and chitons; the choral music; the exultation in their townsman’s physical prowess and their intoxication of delight because the greatest of lyric poets is reaching out to them, as to the bridegroom at a wedding-feast, a chalice of pure gold resplendent, brimming with the “distilled nectar” of his song.

But Pindar soars beyond the pride of life even as he universalizes the individual experience. It was not only St. Paul’s idealism that perceived the great contest in which humanity is forever engaged. In Pindar’s second Olympian the athlete’s triumph suggests the victory over Death, and the Kronos hill becomes the “tower 420of Kronos” to which the victor travels over “the highway of Olympian Zeus.” So the arch-idealist Plato, in closing his great constructive vision of the Ideal State, can find no more fitting comparison for him that overcometh than by likening him to the victors in the Games: “If we take my advice, believing that the soul is immortal, we shall ever hold to that upward pathway and at every turn shall practice justice joined to intelligence that we may be at once friends of ourselves and of the gods and may fare well ... both while we abide here and when, like the prize-winners, we come to gather in the prizes of the games.”

But aside from lofty thoughts like these, native to the greater interpretative intelligences of Greece, the recently discovered poems of Bacchylides tell us much of the actual spirit of the games. Bacchylides was nephew of Simonides, the poet-laureate of the nation from Thermopylæ to Platæa, and he was also the grandson and namesake of a famous athlete. He was qualified to sing both the Games and the Graces. And the native of the little island of Ceos did not hesitate to enter the contest with the splendidly arrogant Theban who could compare his inferior rivals to “crows that chatter against the divine bird of Zeus.”^[41]

Of the twelve epinician odes of Bacchylides three were addressed to Hieron, at whose court he enjoyed especial favour. Two Olympic odes were written for Lachon, a young athlete from the poet’s native island. 421One of these is a short serenade sung before the victor’s own house by his fellow-citizens. Nothing could better illustrate the intensity of local pride and enthusiasm. Now the victorious athlete is praised, now his very identity is merged in the personification of his native land. It is Ceos herself that has won the boxing and the foot-race. Lachon, as the ode reminds us, has already been greeted by the impromptu choral sung at Olympia on the evening of his triumph. Now he is welcomed at home by another choral for which there has been ample time to make ready. Bacchylides may well have written this little serenade not as a paid commission but as a spontaneous outburst of patriotic pride and affection for his country and his fellow countrymen. We should prefer to have it so. In any case we feel a human interest in the young athlete whose strong body and swift feet have won the prize:—

422From little Ceos, the second in order of those bright stepping-stones that dot the Ægean from Attica to Rhodes, we may quickly cross to the mainland and find our way to Marathon. From there to Athens we trace that greatest of all ancient race-courses over which the Greek runner ran in full armour to give with his dying breath the warning and the news of victory, and to win a memorial beside which the olive-wreath might well turn pale.^[42]

When the modern Athenians revived the Olympic Games the chariot-races were beyond their resources. Contests of personal, physical strength and skill constitute the fitting nucleus of the games held in the old Stadium, now newly covered with marble from the “mountain that looks on Marathon.” And it was a happy and natural thought to add as the closing event the great Marathon race. While perpetuating the glory of the Athenians it reënforces the loyalty of all the Greeks to their national capital. In this race centres the chief ambition of the Greeks. The other events are of secondary importance. If fanciful critics demand any further excuse for the change of venue from Olympia to Athens, it may be enough to remind them that Heracles (according to one tradition) brought in the first place from the banks of the Ilissus the original graft of the sacred olive-tree from which, at Olympia, the victor’s crown was cut with the golden sickle. With graceful sentiment, however, the olive 423sprigs are now in turn brought to Athens from Olympia.

Despite all the modern barnacles that encrust the ancient torso, the student of old Greek life can find much to stimulate him in the revival of contests inherited, or directly developed, from ancient times—such as the foot-race, short and long distance; javelin-throwing; leaping; and, chief of all, the discus-throw in the ancient style. The interest of the Greeks to-day in this latter event is second only to that in the Marathon race.

A modern, seated in the Stadium at Athens, has cause for meditation. Behind the gaudy hats and parasols of women, the more sombre clothing of men, or the brilliant uniforms of officials gleams Pentelic marble. Over many tens of thousands of spectators, gathered from all Greece and Europe and from beyond the Atlantic, float the flags of powerful nations: of Turkey; of the lands that look upon the northern seas; of the mighty spawn of the Anglo-Roman; and of the New Atlantis. None of these nations had emerged from barbarism when this same choir of encircling hills sang together the triumph song of Salamis. Prometheus, the incarnation of human self-assertion, rebel to the rule of Zeus, pinioned on a crag overlooking those same northern seas, is made by the Greek prophet to utter the pessimistic cry: “New gods rule Olympus.” Now, as a modern Greek remarked to an American visitor, “the old gods have migrated to a new Olympus.”

424But although the gold-ivory statue of Zeus cannot reappear from the ruins of Olympia, yet “the godhead of supernal song” remains in the literature of the Greeks, interpreting and interpreted by the contributions of the archæologists. Swinburne’s words are not mere poetic license:—

CHAPTER XIX MESSENIA

Telemachus, in search of his father, sailed down the western coast of the Peloponnesus, landed at “sandy Pylos,” the home of Nestor, and by this old friend was sent across country to Menelaus at Lacedæmon. The long drive was broken by a night at Pheræ. According to a tradition that still has its supporters the modern site of Pylos is Navarino, in the centre of the western coast of Messenia, while Pheræ is represented by Kalamata, on the northeastern shore of the Messenian Gulf. A growing tendency to push Nestor’s realm further up the coast, out of Messenia, and to place Pheræ in Arcadia is due, in part, to the discrepancy between the lot of modern travellers on their way from Kalamata to Sparta and that of the two young princes of the Homeric story. Telemachus and the son of Nestor mounted an inlaid chariot at early dawn, their two horses, touched lightly by the whip, flew eagerly onward, and at sunset, as all the ways were 426darkening, the wheat-bearing plain of Lacedæmon opened before their eyes. Moderns, whether merchants or sightseers, must spend an equally long or longer day in riding on mules or plodding horses over the difficult paths of Mount Taygetus, whose massive bulk forms an almost impenetrable barrier between Messenia and Laconia. The narrow bridle paths of the Gorge of the Nedon, which is the trade route, and the savage beauty of the Langada Gorge exclude highways for royal cars and on-rushing steeds.

Whether or no Kalamata was once an insignificant way-station between two princely domains, it is now one of the most prosperous towns of the new nation, separated from Athens only by a day’s ride in an express train, and the natural starting point for excursions in Messenia.

From this rich southern plain it is easy to reach the confines of the more northern plain, which was the country’s heart. Here was the capital of its prehistoric kings, and here about the mountain fortresses of Ithome and Eira occurred the chief events of its pitiable historic life. Ithome is one of the highest fortified mountains in Greece, but can be ascended by roadways which only below the fortress peaks change to rocky paths, insecure even for mountain horses. From this summit, by the favour of Zeus of the open sky whose sanctuary it once was, all Messenia can be overlooked. It is indeed a lovely country. The mountain ranges to the north and east have reserved their sterner influences 427for other peoples, while the open sea along the western and southern coasts bestows the largess of a perfect climate. The country between Kalamata and Ithome is one of great fertility and beauty. Orchards of gray-green olives are broken by dark cypresses, while lemon and orange groves, unknown to Euripides, add their peculiar radiance to the landscape. In the spring, almond trees delicately lift their pink blossoms above long hedges of glistening green cactus, and the green grass of the wayside fields nurses buttercups and scarlet anemones, purple and yellow irises, and thick clusters of deep blue flowers.

The loveliness of Messenia decided her history, which was one of passionate and futile resistance to foreign greed. The Spartan poet Tyrtæus said that the soil of Messenia was “good to plough and good to plant.” Long before his day the Spartans had stretched out their hands for it, and from the eighth century to the fourth they never relinquished their grasp. During the more important epochs of Greek history Messenia was but a province of Laconia.

But it was a province capable at any time of revolt. The two early “Messenian Wars,” of the eighth and seventh centuries, were the stepping stones by which Sparta rose to a place of power in the Peloponnesus. Beset by agrarian difficulties, she needed more land, and the most fertile land of Greece was to be had for a little blood. Of the second war we have a few fragmentary memorials in the contemporaneous martial verses 428of Tyrtæus. But in general both wars would be almost obliterated from history were it not for the fact that Pausanias, having access to some late prose and poetry which repeated the native legends, in an unwonted mood of imaginative sympathy gave himself up to recounting the pathetic efforts of Messenia toward freedom. There is the usual material: heroes and fortresses, Aristodemus and Ithome in the first war, Aristomenes and Eira in the second; oracles and portents; fair maidens and faithless wives; kings and cowherd lovers; storms and marvellous escapes; courage and despair. Aristomenes, as Pausanias says, shines out like Achilles in the Iliad, “the first and greatest glory of the Messenian name.” But in spite of his heroic and prolonged defence of Eira, the Messenians by the sixth century were serfs of the Spartans, paying to their masters a half of all the produce raised by their own hands from their own farms,—asses, Tyrtæus called them, worn by intolerable loads.

In the fifth century they took advantage of an earthquake and an insurrection of slaves at Sparta to rise once more and encamp on Ithome. They were defeated and obliged to choose between serfdom and exile. But by this time their petty rebellions had become important in the affairs of the greater powers of Greece. Ithome was the rock on which the political life of Cimon of Athens suffered shipwreck.

During the next ninety years the nationalism of Messenia was a homeless and restless force, seeking, 429wherever it might, to harm Sparta and to glorify itself. During the Peloponnesian War the Messenians by their knowledge of the country materially aided the Athenians in the dramatic battle of Sphacteria off the Messenian Pylos, and the surrender of the Spartans, Thucydides says, amazed all Hellas.

At last, about 370 B. C., the “Poland of Greece” found a friend in the man whose practical idealism was dominating the period. Epaminondas, in pursuance of his policy of weakening Sparta by reviving other Peloponnesian states, determined to found a new capital of Messenia, Messene by name, on the slopes of Ithome. Ruins of this city still exist, and the most imposing of them, the fortification known as the Arcadian Gateway, is famous as an example of skilful Greek engineering. Lying toward Megalopolis, also a beneficiary of Epaminondas, it seemed to reunite in a new hope the old Arcadia and the old Messenia whose friendship had been so futile. To-day, still a strangely impressive monument, it may serve as a symbol of Messenia’s share in the spirit of Greece. Impotent in literature and art and unsuccessful even in war, the men of this country conserved through many generations and vicissitudes that intense national feeling which existed at the core of every Greek state, shaping Greek history and penetrating Greek literature. Wherever history became large and literature became universal the force of national consciousness was likely to become diffused, but in a state like Messenia it was 430obscured neither by other national gifts nor by its own success.

The Messenians, Pausanias tells us, “wandered for nearly three hundred years far from Peloponnese, and in all that time they are known to have dropped none of their native customs, nor did they unlearn their Doric tongue.” After the victory at Leuctra “the Thebans sent messengers to Italy, Sicily and the Euesperitæ inviting all Messenians in any part of the world whither they had strayed to return to Peloponnese. They assembled faster than could have been expected, for they yearned towards the land of their fathers and hatred of Sparta still rankled in their breasts.” And for them Epaminondas made a new city, sending “men who were skilled in laying out streets, building houses and sanctuaries and erecting city walls.” The Arcadians sent victims for the sacrifices. The exiles, home at last, prayed to their ancient gods and called upon their ancient heroes to come and dwell among them. “But loudest of all was the cry for Aristomenes, and the whole people joined in it.” This call from his own people has been, we may hope, full compensation to his dead ears for the dumb or sneering lips of history.

CHAPTER XX SPARTA

In the Spartans’ theory of life adventures abroad or the welcome of strangers into their own territory had no place. Perhaps nothing more sharply differentiated them from the Athenians, whose love of roving was equalled only by their delight in seeing the rest of the world drawn to their city. The instinctive and reasoned reserve of the Spartans was reënforced by the physical conditions of their country. Laconia is bulwarked on three sides by mountains, through which, in antiquity, all entrances but one were difficult, and its southern boundary is the open and stormy sea. The Laconian Gulf splits the country into two peninsulas, ending in the famous promontories of Tænarum and Malea, in rounding which so many sailors, from the days of Menelaus and Agamemnon and Odysseus, have looked for violent winds.

Far inland, within the rifts of the northern hills, lies the plain of Sparta. By those to whom the sea is not an essential element in Greek landscape this city is held to be more beautifully situated than any other in 432Greece. The brilliant luxuriousness of a southern lowland is combined with the austere grandeur of mountain scenery. Some twenty miles in length, the plain is only five miles broad between the ranges of Taygetus and of Parnon, whose bases show extraordinary caverns and fissures. Taygetus stretches along the whole western side of Laconia, but rears the highest of its long line of summits just over Sparta. These magnificent summits, covered with snow for two thirds of the year, ennoble many a landscape outside of Laconia. Below them extend the wide tracts of forest where Artemis once took her pleasure, and Spartan hunters tracked the wild boar with dogs that shared their “bravery” and “love of toil” and won a guerdon of praise from Pindar and Sophocles. In front of these woodlands rise the five peaks which have given to the mountain the modern name of Pentedactylon.

It is characteristic of the Greek attitude toward nature that the mountain is not praised in poetry as much as is the beautiful plain, richly fertilized by the river Eurotas on its way from Arcadia to the sea. Telemachus, in spite of his greater affection for the rough goat-pastures of his native Ithaca, appreciated the wide courses and the meadowland of Sparta where “aboundeth the clover, the marsh grass, the wheat and the rye and the broad white ears of the barley.” Euripides knew that the reedy bed of the Eurotas, the trees and meadow flowers of its banks, its hungry foam in the season of heavy rain and the lovely gleam of its calmer 433waters would haunt the homesick hearts of Helen and the Spartan maidens who shared Iphigeneia’s exile among the Taurians.

TAYGETUS

Modern Sparta, founded after the War of Independence, lies in the southern district of the Sparta of antiquity. Mediæval Sparta, called Mistra, lay some distance west of the old site, very near the entrance to the Langada Pass. Homeric Sparta lay to the southeast, across the Eurotas, at Therapne, later a suburb of the Doric city. Here flourished that noble court which amazed the young Ithacan and the tale of which is still to us “a fountain of immortal drink.” Telemachus arrived just as Menelaus was marrying his son to a native princess, and his daughter, the inheritor of her mother’s loveliness, to Thessalian Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son. Never could the great vaulted hall of the palace have displayed a gayer splendour. The son of Odysseus has grown up in no mean castle, but this gleam of gold and silver, like sun and moon, this flashing bronze and shining ivory and glowing amber make him feel as if he were on Olympus at the court of Zeus. Tumblers perform wonderful tricks. A divine minstrel sings. Silver basins and golden ewers are passed around. Supper is served on a polished table in dishes of gold. Menelaus, noticing the boy’s charming admiration, tells him how he has gathered his wealth in Cyprus and Phœnicia and Egypt, but how it means little to him over against the loss of his old comrades and friends. And as they talk Helen comes in, like Artemis of the golden 434arrows, and her willing servants bring her a carved chair and cover it with a rug of soft wool. And sitting there, her white hands busied with the deep blue wool wound about her golden distaff and with the dressed yarn heaped in her silver basket that runs on little wheels and is rimmed with gold, she talks with them of what happened once in Troy and of Odysseus of the hardy heart and, quite easily, of how she had wanted to come home again to her own country and her child and to her lord “who was lacking in naught, nor wisdom, nor beauty of manhood.” And into their drinking cups she put a drug and “they drank of it, quenching all anger and pain and all of their sorrows forgetting.”

The memory of the royal pair never died in Sparta. Therapne contained a sanctuary called the “Menelaeion,” where prayers were offered for the physical beauty which was keenly desired by an athletic people. Helen sometimes walked abroad to bestow in turn the gift she had received from Aphrodite. At least, Herodotus tells a story of a nurse taking a very ugly girl baby to the temple and meeting a strange woman who insisted upon seeing the child and who then gently stroked its head and said, “One day this child shall be the fairest lady in Sparta.” And from that very day her looks began to change and the ugly baby became the beauty of the town and married the king.

It is not difficult to prolong the associations with Homeric Laconia by following Helen on her guilty flight southward; lingering to see Amyclæ, a rich city 435in Homeric times, and the beehive tomb of Vaphio, which in 1889 yielded up two incomparable vessels of gold now in the Museum at Athens; and going on to the busy seaport town of Gytheion, from whose docks Paris took his stolen bride to the little island of Cranaë, now Marathonisi, before spreading his defiant sails for the longer voyage. But sooner or later the fact of the Dorian invasion must be reckoned with, and the resultant birth at Sparta of a civilization totally at odds with that which it displaced.

In Laconia the invasion was one of conquest and subjection, and the victors prided themselves on keeping their blood pure, much as the Laconian Maniotes of modern times have clung fiercely to their Spartan descent. Sparta became the Dorian city par excellence, the protagonist of Dorian ideals, the natural leader of the forces which both in war and peace were in opposition to the Ionic elements in Greek life. The historical events in this development are so interwoven with the history of the other states of Greece, especially with that of Athens, that they will already have become familiar to travellers who visit Sparta last. The conquest of Messenia first increased her resources. By the middle of the sixth century she won signal victories over Tegea and Argos and became the head of the Peloponnesian Confederacy, which included every state in the Peloponnesus except Achæa and Argos. Before the end of the century she was the leading state of Greece, for Thessaly was losing ground and Athens 436had not yet risen. In the first part of the fifth century Sparta was the natural leader of the Greek allies against Persia, and in the autumn of 481 B. C. was the head of the congress at the Isthmus. To her generals was given the command of both the army and the navy. But her conduct of the wars at best did not increase her prestige, nor did she afterwards exhibit any skill in using new conditions. This was the opportunity of Ionic Athens to create the greatest period of Greek history. But Sparta was also strong and possessed in Brasidas a general unparalleled among the Laconians for eager enterprise, trustworthiness and personal popularity. A final struggle was inevitable. The Dorians won, and, at the end of the fifth century, once more for a generation held the balance of power in Greece. But Sparta’s despotism within the Peloponnesus and her desire for foreign aggrandizement created new hostilities. Early in the fourth century Persia undermined her maritime power, and Greek friendships as strange as the Æschylean truce between fire and water were formed to her detriment. Athens and Thebes, Corinth and Argos forgot old enmities in hatred of Sparta, but she maintained her supremacy and forced upon Greece the arbitration of the Persian king. For fifteen years Greek politics veered hither and thither, and then at Leuctra Epaminondas conquered Sparta and won the leadership of Greece for Thebes. His death gave one more opportunity to Athens, but before she could use it Macedon arose and at Chæronea united her with 437Sparta in a common humiliation. Never again did either Dorian or Ionian state have power to alarm the other.

Thucydides described Sparta as a straggling village like the ancient towns of Hellas. Polybius added that it was roughly circular in shape and level, although it inclosed certain uneven and hilly places. It had no real acropolis, but the highest of its several hills received this conventional name; and it was not fortified by walls until long after the greatest days of its history. Four districts or wards, Pitane, apparently the aristocratic quarter, Limnæ, Cynosura, and Mesoa, perhaps represented an early group of villages which later were united in one city.

This city was extraordinarily barren of artistic adornment. The citizens of no other leading state in the whole of Greece were so indifferent to the value of architecture and sculpture, nor is it likely that they were perturbed by the prophecy of Thucydides: “If the community of Lacedæmon should become a desert with only the temples and ground foundations remaining, I think that, after the lapse of much time, men of the future would be very slow to believe that the power of the Lacedæmonians was equal to their fame. And yet they possess two of the five divisions of the Peloponnesus and hold the hegemony of the whole and of many outside allies. But this community is not a city regularly built with costly temples and edifices and would seem rather insignificant.”

438Temples and edifices of course there were for the business of life and of religion, but the need for them was not, as in Athens, or even in certain cities of rude Arcadia, identified with the larger need of inspiring or importing the genius of architect, sculptor, and painter. Sparta had an early school of sculpture, influenced by Cretan teachers, specimens of whose work may be seen in the Museum. But the impulse shrivelled and died in an uncongenial atmosphere. Nor do we find the Spartans in the great artistic centuries clamouring for the work of foreign artists as did the towns of “stupid” Bœotia. The British School of Archæology is successfully engaged in the exploration of Sparta, but we cannot anticipate the discovery of statues like the Hermes of Olympia or the restoration of buildings like the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi.

With this chastening of his imagination the traveller may turn his attention to the few discoveries which up to this time have been made. By far the most significant of these are fragmentary remains of the temple of Athena Chalkiœkos and of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. Athena’s Brazen House, existing in some form from a very early epoch, was so associated with the public life of the city that it became known to foreigners as an object of peculiar national sentiment. Euripides makes the Trojan women attribute to Helen a desire to see it once more when, praying to die at sea before the consummation of their captivity, they seek to involve her in their own fate:—

The discovery of the Temple of Artemis is of great importance, not only because it was the pivot of the religious life of Sparta but because its eighth century foundations, excavated beneath the traces of a sixth century structure, may belong to the earliest temple in Greece. The image, called Orthia because it had been found “upright” in a thicket of willows, was believed by the Spartans to be the ancient wooden one brought by Orestes and Iphigeneia from the land of the Taurians, where Iphigeneia, rescued by Artemis from the sacrificial altar at Aulis, had been its priestess and guardian. Euripides naturally preserves the Athenian tradition that the image was brought to Brauron. But Pausanias presses the Spartan claim and explains the hoary custom of annually scourging the boys in front of the image by the “relish for blood” that it had acquired in the days when human sacrifices were offered to it in a barbarian land.

The brutality in the training of Spartan youth has 440bulked so large in tradition that local associations with it perhaps impress the traveller more sharply than any others. In the southwestern region of the town, near the large ruins of a Roman bath, lay, it is thought, the Dromos or race course, and the Platanistas or Plane-tree Grove, surrounded by a moat and entered by two bridges, where the boys, as a part of their education, fought very savage battles. This grove is an excellent illustration of the danger of claiming too much for the influence on the mind of external forms. Plato held that even the shapes of trees might influence the spirit of those who walked among them, and Walter Pater, in his study of Lacedæmon, compresses the idea into a definite application by describing the plane tree, the characteristic tree of Sparta, as “a very tranquil and tranquillizing object, regally spreading its level or gravely curved masses on the air.” Yet within a circle of these tranquillizing objects Cicero, and later Lucian and Pausanias, saw the Spartan boys fighting with incredible fury, kicking, scratching, biting, and dying rather than confess themselves beaten.

In literature as well as in the plastic arts the Spartans failed to express themselves. Only four poets of any widespread fame had their homes in Sparta, and no one of these was a native born. Significantly, too, they all lived at least as early as the seventh century, at the only period when Spartan life showed any pliability. Individual freedom was not wholly repressed, and an acknowledgment of the graces of life was at times permitted. 441Only under these conditions could art live at all, and poetry outran sculpture in permanent achievement. This was, perhaps, due to its immediate connection with music (including dancing), the only art which the later Spartans, although they did not give it a place in their educational curriculum, seem to have appreciated.

According to tradition, Sparta’s poets all came to her in response to a call for foreign aid in her domestic broils. Terpander of Lesbos and Thaletas of Crete successively founded two musical epochs in a city that was intent upon controlling its serfs and developing its soil. Terpander’s service was almost incalculable, for he modified the existing lyre into an instrument which was universally used until the fifth century and which gave the first great impulse to vocal music. But “the strings he fingered are all gone,” and of the verses that he wrote we have only a few fragments to recall his life in Sparta, his invocations at public festivals of Apollo, the chief god of the city, and of Castor and Polydeuces, the city’s heroes, and his praise of the city herself:—

Thaletas, coming from an island where the dance had been important from prehistoric times, and finding in Sparta the same friendly atmosphere of open Dorian 442life, introduced the festival of the Gymnopædia, in which boys displayed the perfected beauty of their naked bodies in athletic dances and, by means of formal songs in unison, began the “choral lyric.” This poetic form, passing far beyond its birthplace, became everywhere in Greece the chief expression of public worship of gods and heroes and stimulated the powers of such poets as Simonides and Pindar and Bacchylides. Thaletas was lost sight of in his greater successor Alcman, who not only was credited with the creation as well as with the cultivation of the choral lyric, but also was adjudged so successful in all his work that Alexandrian scholars included him in their canon of the melic poets, with Pindar and Sappho.

Terpander and Thaletas are little more than names, familiar only to those who study origins. Alcman and Tyrtæus, the poet of the Messenian War, are representatives of the vital poetry which Sparta cherished in her supple youth before her ideals had matured and her life had irreparably settled into its narrow grooves. Tyrtæus was probably an Athenian, even if it is mere legend that he was a lame schoolmaster sent by Athens in derision when Sparta appealed for help in the second Messenian War. Alcman was born in Sardis, though probably of Hellenic blood. If our traditional dates are correct, some years at least of their lives must have coincided. Their poetry in general represented different modes, Tyrtæus being the earliest master, outside of Ionia, of the flute-accompanied elegiac distich, the 443lusty heir of the Homeric hexameter, while Alcman established many of the more delicate measures permitted by the versatile lyre. Their poetic purposes, however, were influenced in common by the Dorian atmosphere in which they lived.

In Tyrtæus this showed itself in the creation of martial verse, which seems to have been powerfully influential in arousing into active service, at a time of need, the courage and the perseverance ingrained in the Doric character. But his own racial gift made it impossible that his poetry should be confined to one country. In all parts of Greece, through many centuries, it expressed the ideal of courage. One of his anapæstic songs, intended to be sung by Spartan soldiers as they marched to battle, has been called the Marseillaise of Greece. A fragment of it still stirs the blood:—

The Dorian element that appealed to Alcman was the publicity of the daily life. Men lived in common, ate at large public tables, trained their children in groups, and believed always in the sacrifice of the individual to the necessities of the state. Hence they took kindly to public festivals where choruses of men and women, boys and girls could sing hymns that gave 444expression to common and national sentiments. These hymns Alcman wrote in great numbers. Especially famous and never displaced by later poets were his partheneia, written for the choruses of Spartan maidens whose share in the athletic training of their brothers made them the most beautiful in Greece. Travellers in Sparta who look at the lifeless ruins of the Temple of Artemis will rejoice that among the broken fragments of Alcman’s poetry exist seven complete strophes of a partheneion which probably was sung before the temple at one of the festivals of the goddess. Helen as a child had danced at such a festival, and doubtless many a girl in Alcman’s chorus was pointed out by the surrounding crowd as her fit successor. In his vigour the poet must often himself have led the dances of these tall, straight maidens. In his old age, too stiff to keep pace with their lithe movements, he added to a song he wrote for them “des images aimables” of gallant regret:—

Verses like these betray an un-Dorian element in Alcman’s genius which came from his Æolian ancestry. It crept into his choral lyrics and claimed its own in his lighter verses. Love and feasting and Bacchic joy furnished him with subjects. No other set of lyric fragments 445contains so many traces of the consciousness of natural beauties. If all his poetry were preserved, it would not surprise us to find in it a complete and sensitive response to the extraordinary loveliness amid which he lived. We know already that by night in the valley of the Eurotas he watched sleep descend upon the crests and crags of Taygetus and the waiting earth,^[44] was aware of the dew of moonlit evenings and the songs of birds, and felt the charms of the alternating seasons, especially the invigorating bloom of spring.

After the seventh century Sparta entered the Greek world with an offering that excluded art and the consciousness of external beauty. This was her mode of life, dedicated to one austere end. The citizens of Sparta were a small body of men, of pure Dorian blood, freed from the cares of self-support by the serfs or helots who were descendants of the original possessors of the soil they tilled. The whole time of the masters could be devoted to the state, and the pivotal demand of the state was for strong, brave and skilful soldiers. All life was a vast system of education directed toward the end of military efficiency. This explains each one of their customs: the exposure of sickly infants on the slopes of Mount Taygetus; the savage training of their boys and the severe training of their girls, who were to be the mothers of soldiers; the repression of personal luxury, the equalizing of rich and poor, the detailed elimination of individual pursuits. Conservatism was 446the breath of their life. Their institutions were of very ancient origin, although Lycurgus is now regarded as merely a legendary designer, and, once in possession of their imaginations, could not be shaken off or essentially modified. At the crucial period following the Peloponnesian War their inability to use new conditions played havoc with their political opportunities. Exclusiveness and reserve were corollaries of their single purpose. Indifference to the arts of peace was inevitable in a nation consecrated to preparation for war.

The spectacle presented by the Spartans never failed to excite the lively interest of the other Greeks. Men as diverse as Xenophon and Aristotle wrote about their institutions, and popular judgments were always in evidence. An opinion which was probably held by many just before the Peloponnesian War is contained in Thucydides’s rehearsal of a speech made in Sparta by a Corinthian delegate to the conference which the allies had forced upon her. Impatiently he tells the Spartans that they do not know how utterly unlike them the Athenians are:—

“They are revolutionary and swift to plan and to execute whatever they conceive, but you are all for conserving the existing state of things, inventing no new policy and in action not even coming up to what necessity demands. Again, they are daring beyond their strength and run risks contrary to their judgment, and in the midst of terrors they are full of hope. Whereas your way is to act within your strength, to have confidence 447not even in your best secured plans and, when terrors threaten, to think that you will never be set free from them. Nay, they are energetic and you are laggards; they go abroad while you cling to home.”

The Spartan king, Archidamus, justified his nation in a speech made in a private session:—

“We have ever dwelt in a free and most illustrious state, and this policy of conservative self-control may well be equivalent to sound reason. We have become good warriors and wise in counsel by our careful discipline; good warriors, because self-control best quickens the sense of honour, and from this noble sense of shame springs courage; wise in counsel, because we are too unlettered to be superior to the laws, too severely self-controlled to disobey them.”

A generation earlier Herodotus had paid his tribute to the Spartan loyalty to law in his story of the conversation between Xerxes, meditating his attack on Greece, and Demaratus, the ruined Spartan king who had fled to the court of Darius. Want, the exile tells the monarch, had always been a fellow-dweller in his land, but courage was an ally they had gained by wisdom and laws. “The Lacedæmonians even when fighting man for man are inferior to none, but in a body they are the best of all. For although they are free they are not wholly free, for over them there is a master, Law, whom they fear far more than thine fear thee. At any rate, they always do his bidding.” And that the Athenians, with their reverence for law, were by no means unwilling 448to attribute to the law-abiding Spartans a love of liberty as passionate as their own is seen in another story of Herodotus. Two young nobles volunteered to go to Xerxes and offer their lives in atonement for the murder of his father’s heralds. On their way to Persia they were entertained by the governor Hydarnes, who, calling attention to his own prosperity, urged them to make their submission to the king. “Hydarnes,” they answered, “thy advice to us is one-sided. Thou hast tried the one side, but art inexperienced in the other. For thou knowest how to be a slave, but liberty thou hast not tried as yet, whether it be sweet or no. Shouldst thou taste it, thou wouldst urge us to fight for it not only with the spear but also with the battle-axe.”

One base alloy historians and poets alike found in the character of the Spartans. This was their corruptibility, their sordid greed of gain, as Aristophanes called it when angered by their rejection of peace. To the same political period belong savage attacks of Euripides on Spartan treachery and dishonesty. He also takes occasion to question the chastity of the daughters of Sparta:—

Probably this exactly expressed the sentiment of the average Athenian theatre-goer, accustomed to identify 449the virtue of women with their obedience to conventional restrictions, which men in the fifth century insisted upon as well as the husband in Menander’s play:—

Men possessed of these ideas could not appreciate that in Sparta, in the great periods, freedom and sobriety went hand in hand. Aristotle, in his arraignment of the license and luxury of the Spartan women as one of the defects of the Spartan system, may have been dealing with some special facts of his own day. In the fourth century Sparta had in certain ways deteriorated.

But this deterioration could not do more than blur the outlines of a system of life which for three centuries had stood before the world, a “whole serene creation.” Comic writers might show up the boorishness of the unlearned Spartans, and irritable tragic poets might vent their spleen on their country’s enemy, but in the end Spartan institutions had to be respected and admired. Indeed, many Athenians affected a special predilection for qualities unlike their own and “laconized” in dress, manner, and speech. Philosophy flourished in Sparta, Plato tells us, and with it a rare skill in conversation. The typical Spartan, after pretending 450that he could not talk, would throw into the discussion, “like a clever javelin-thrower,” a remark “worth listening to, brief, compressed.”

Thinkers as well as Laconomaniacs displayed enthusiasm for Spartan ideas. Aristotle, to be sure, while praising the love of education among the Lacedæmonians, deplored their absorption in one object and also complained that they preferred the good they gained to the virtue by means of which they gained it. But, true as this may be, the nobility of the effort, the flawless harmony of details, the perfect adjustment of the system to the use for which it was intended, resulted in a product as truly Greek as is a Doric temple or an Attic trilogy. It is not strange that its apotheosis is found in the ideal state of the great visionary of Athens. Plato’s “Republic” is Sparta idealized and interpreted by an Athenian.

A state combining the character of the Dorians and the genius of the Ionians history has failed to produce. Isocrates cherished a hope that Athens and Sparta might divide the headship of a gloriously united Greece. After Chæronea he was even far-sighted enough to plead for the willing union of Hellas under Philip of Macedon. Hopes like these proved either futile or too mean. But his pride in the spiritual achievements of his own city has been approved by Time, “the Inspector-General of men’s deeds.” The institutions of Sparta like every other product of the Greek mind went into the crucible of Athens. And this city, triumphing 451beyond the orator’s boast, “has caused the name of Hellene to seem to be matter no longer of birth but of intellect, and has made them bear it whose claim is that of culture rather than of origins.”

APPENDIX

Chapter I. Page 2 (third paragraph) Cf. Curtius, Greek History, I, p. 23 and passim. Plato, Timæus, 22 B. 3 Quotation from Curtius, Greek History, I, p. 32. 5 Hatzidakis, Neugriechische Grammatik, p. 4. 9 Quotation from Tozer, Geography of Greece, p. 44. Cf. passim. 10-12 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 281. 17-18 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 454. 19 Homer, Odyssey, VI, 130; V, 51; Iliad, VIII, 553. 20 Homer, Odyssey, VI, 162. Pindar, Olymp., II, 70. 21 Pindar, Olymp., VI, 54. 22 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 1390. 23 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 563; Prometheus, I, 88. 24 Sophocles, Philoctetes, 936; Œdipus Tyrannus, 204. 25 Aristophanes, Clouds, 275. 26 Aristophanes, Peace, 571. Æschylus, Agamemnon, 142. Euripides, Hippolytus, 70. 27 Euripides, Trojan Women, 845; Bacchæ, 1084. Plato, Phædrus, 229, 230. 28 Greek Anthology, Pal., VII, 669. Very probably by Plato; App. Plan., 13, attributed to Plato, but probably of later date. Theocritus, Idyl, VII, 134.

Chapter II. Page 37 Thucydides, VI, 30. 38 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 763; 433. 39 Lucian, When My Ship Comes In (Navigium), 5. 43 Æschylus, Suppliants, 715. 44 Isocrates, Areopagiticus, 66. 45 Plato, Symposium, 173 B. Lucian, Navigium, 35. 46 Xenophon, Hellenica, II, 4, 11. 47-48 Lysias, Against Eratosthenes, 4. 49 Menander, Fragments. 50 Plato, Republic, 439, E. 54 Greek Anthology, Pal., VII, 639.

454Chapter III. Page 57 Euripides: Suppliants, 403-408. Jebb, Modern Greece, p. 70. 59 Isocrates, Panegyricus, 23, 24. 62 Ælian, apud Stob. Serm., XXIV, 53. For Solon’s apothegm cf. Herodotus, I, 32; Æschylus, Agamemnon, 928. 63 “The Guardian,” cf. Lucian: The Fisher, 21. 64 Plutarch, Life of Solon (end). 66 Euripides, Trojan Women, 801. 67 G. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 173. 68 Homer, Iliad, II, 557-558. Lucian, True History, II, 20. 69 Dyer, The Gods in Greece, p. 125. See Gardner and Jevons, Greek Antiquities, p. 296. 72 Æschylus, Persians, 241-242. Herodotus, VII, 105. 73 Lucian, Twice Accused, 11.

Chapter IV. Page 74 Plato, Republic, 532, C. Howe, Greek Revolution (1828), p. 340. 76 Plato, Phædrus, 279 B. 78 Cf. Gardner, Ancient Athens, p. 256. 80 Bayard Taylor, Travels in Greece and Russia (1859), p. 39. 81 Homer, Iliad, II, 546-551. 82 Homer, Odyssey, VII, 78. Herodotus, VI, 137. 83 Herodotus, VIII, 41; 55. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 758. 84 Aristophanes, Birds, 828. 85 Demosthenes, 597, 8. Aristophanes, Knights, 1321. 85-86 Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 256, 641. 88 Plutarch, Life of Pericles, 13. Lucian, The Fisher, 39.

Chapter V. Page 91 Thucydides, II, 64. 92 Æschylus, Persians, 347. Euripides, Medea, 826. Demosthenes, Olynthiac, III, 25, 29. 103 Second paragraph, cf. Lucian, Cock, 26. 104 Æschylus, Eumenides, 328. 105 Æschylus, Eumenides, 778; and 1032. 106 Cf. J. I. Manatt, The Pauline Areopagus, Andover Rev., 1892. 107 Plato, Phædo, 114, C. ff. Pindar, Olymp., II. 108 Plato, Apology, 41, C. Aristophanes, Wasps, 31 ff. 109 Plato, Republic, 514. See note on p. 129 of J. Harrison’s Primitive Athens, and cf. J. H. Wright, Harv. Stud. Class. Phil., 1906, pp. 131-142. See also below, chap, vii, p. 164. 455Barathrum. See Aristophanes, Frogs, 574; Herodotus, VII, 133; Plato, Gorgias, 516, E. 110 Cf. Gardner, Ancient Athens, p. 127; Plato, Apology, 36, D; Plutarch, Aristides, 27. 110-111 Aristophanes, Peace, 1183; Birds, 450. 111 Bacchylides, Fragments. Lysias, Or. XXIV, 20. 112 Aristophanes, passim, and Birds, 1080-1081. Menander, Fragments. 114 Æschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 854. 115 Thucydides, II, 34. 115-116 Thucydides, II, 52, 54; Sophocles, Œdipus Tyrannus, 171. 117 Aristophanes, Clouds, 17, 18 & 56; Wasps, 246. 118 Demosthenes, Against Conon, 9. 120 Lucian, Icaromenippus, 16. Aristophanes, Birds, 1421; Wasps, 835. 123 Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, 51. Bacchylides, XIX, 5. 123-124 Pindar, Fragments. Aristophanes, Acharnians, 636. Euripides, Medea, 824. 125 Plato, Phædrus, 247, A; Republic, 592, A, B.

Chapter VI. Page 127 Pindar, Olymp., VI, 1. Aristophanes, Wasps, 600. Homer, Odyssey, XV, 459. 128 Aristophanes, Frogs, 171. 129 Homer, Iliad, XI, 558. 130 Euripides, Alcestis, 252, 433, 575. Homer, Odyssey, XIII, 221. 131 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Euripides (?), Rhesus, 546. Homer, Iliad, III, 10; VIII, 555; III, 198. Homer, Odyssey, XI, 444. Aristophanes, Wasps, 179. 133 Homer, Iliad, XVIII, 414. Plato, Republic, III, 404. 134 Homer, Odyssey, XVII, 205. Homer, Iliad, XXII, 147. Homer, Odyssey, VI, 70; VII, 19. Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 105. 135 Euripides, Electra, 54. 136 Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusæ, I. 139 Plato, Laws, 653. 140 Sophocles, Œdipus Tyrannus, 1489. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusæ. Menander, Epitrepontes. Plato, Lysis.

Chapter VII. Page 144 Aristophanes, Clouds, 300. Aristophanes, Frogs, 1056. Plato, Critias, 112. 145 Theophrastus, 456De Signis Tempestatum, I, 20, 24. Aristophanes, Clouds, 299-313; and see chap, i, p. 25. 146-147 Sophocles, Œdipus Coloneus, 668-687; 16-18; 694-701. 147 Cf. chap. iii, p. 65. 148 Plato, Phædo, 115, C. Antipater, Anth. Græca, ed. ab De Bosch, Lib. III, Tit. xxxii. 149 Xenophon, Hellenica, II, 4, 2-4. 150 Simmias, Anth. Pal., VII, 22. 151 Aristophanes, Acharnians, 34-36; 179; 257-263; 325-348. 152 Menander. Parts of four comedies of Menander were found in Egypt 1905, published 1907 (Lefebvre). For translation of this scene see N. Y. Nation, p. 266, Mar. 19, 1908. 154 Æschylus, Seven against Thebes, 587. 156 Plato, Republic, 451, A; Pindar, Pyth., X, 41-44. Dioscorides, Anth. Pal., VII, 410. 158 Demosthenes, De Corona, 208. 159 Epitaph of Æschylus. See Vita Æschyli, Medicean MS. Cynosarges Gymnasium. The site is now put somewhere near the present American and British Schools. Cf. Gardner, Anc. Ath., 528. 160 Herodotus, VI, 120. 161 Æschylus, Persians, 238. Plutarch, Lysander, XVI. 162 Lysias, XXI, 5. Aristophanes, Knights, 550-560. 163 Homer, Odyssey, III, 278. Sophocles, Ajax, 1216 ff. Herod., VI, 115. Plato, Crito, 43, and Phædo, 58, B. 164 Zoster: Herodotus, VIII, 107. Vari: cf. Frazer on Paus., I, xxxii, and see note on chap. v, p. 109. Solon: cf. chap. iii, p. 58. 165 Demosthenes, De Falsa Legatione, 251. 166-168 Æschylus, Persians, 447-449; 386 passim to 421; 274-277; 821-822; 923; Agamemnon, 658-660. 169 Timotheus, Persæ, 105. Plutarch, Aristides, X.

Chapter VIII. Page 174 Euripides, Suppliants, 30. 175 Euripides, Helena, 1301. 176 Strabo, X, 3, 9. 178 Sophocles, Œdipus Coloneus, 1146. Euripides, Ion, 1078. Herodotus, VIII, 65. 179 Aristophanes, Frogs, 341. 180 Aristotle, fragment, quoted by Synesius. 181 Pindar, fragment. Sophocles, fragment. Euripides, Hercules 457Furens, 613. Isocrates, Panegyricus, 28. Aristophanes, Frogs, 455. 182 Andocides, On the Mysteries, 31. Plato, Phædrus, 251 A. 183 Alcman (probably). 184 Aristophanes, Frogs, 338, 397. 185 Plato, Phædo, 69 C.

Chapter IX. Page 186 Pindar, Pyth., VIII, 21. Plutarch, Life of Pericles, 156. 187 Lucian, Navigium, 15. Thucydides, VI, 32. 189 Pindar, Nem., VII, 78. Bacchylides, Epinician Odes, 13. 190 Pindar, Isth., IV, 23; VII, 16; IV, 49; V, 23. Pindar, Nem., V, 23. 191 Pindar, Pyth., VIII, 92.

Chapter X. Page 192 Herodotus, I, 5. 193 Pindar, Olymp., XIII, 65. 194 Homer, Iliad, IX, 529. Bacchylides, Epinician Odes, 5. Euripides, Meleager (not extant). Lucian, Life’s-end of Peregrinus, 30. 196 Æschylus, Choëphoroi, 602. 197 Theognis, 667, 825, 1197. 198 Thucydides, I, 140. Aristophanes, Acharnians, 509. Isocrates, De Pace, 117. 199 Greek Anthology, Pal., VII, 496. 200 Lucian, Marine Dialogues, 9. Euripides, Medea, 1282. 201 Greek Anthology, Pal., VI, 349; VI, 223. Aristotle, Politics, 1327 a, 1330 b. Bacchylides, Fragment. 202 Homer, Iliad, II, 570. 203 Pindar, Olymp., XIII, 4. Aristophanes, Frogs, 439. Homer, Odyssey, XI, 593. 204 Homer, Iliad, VI, 144. Pindar, Olymp., XIII, 63. 205 Plato, Republic, IX, 579 E. 208 Herodotus, I, 24. 210 Pindar, Olymp., XIII, 6. 211 Greek Anthology, Pal., IX, 151. 213 Plutarch, On Garrulity, XIV. Lucian, How to Write History, 3. 215 Euripides, Trojan Women, 205. 216 Thucydides, VIII, 7.

Chapter XI. Page 218 Euripides, Andromache, 1085. Pindar, Pyth., VIII, 61. 219 Homer, Odyssey, VIII, 79. Æschylus, Prometheus, 679. Sophocles, Œdipus Tyr., 70; Œdipus Col., 84. 220 Homer, Odyssey, IV, 1. Æschylus, Persians, 568. Æschylus, Prometheus, 680. Herodotus, 458passim. 221 Aristophanes, Knights, 1007. 222 Herodotus, VII, 139. Sophocles, Œdipus Tyr., 711. 224 Æschines, Against Ctesiphon, 115. 227 Homer, Iliad, I, 44. Pindar, Pyth., I, 1. 228 Himerius, quoted in Wharton’s Sappho, p. 165. Æschylus, Eumenides, 13. Plato, Protagoras, 343. 230 Æschylus, Eumenides, 23, 1. Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris, 1234. 232 Homer, Odyssey, XIX, 392. Euripides, Ion, 82. 234 Strabo, IX, 3. 237 Euripides, Andromache, 1085. Pindar, Pyth., IV, 4. Demosthenes, Philippics, III. 240 Plato, Republic, X, 616. 243 Pindar, Pyth., III, 75. 244 Herodotus, VIII, 35. 248 Cf. Myers, Pindar, p. 10. 249 Pindar, Olymp., XII, 5.

Chapter XII. Page 250 Sophocles, Œdipus Tyr., 1398. 251 Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusæ, 1180. 252 Herodotus, VIII, 37. 259 Sophocles, Œdipus Tyr., 800. 260 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 1111. Homer, Odyssey, XIX, 518. 261 Homer, Odyssey, XI, 576. 262 Demosthenes, On the Crown, 218. 265 Greek Anthology, Pal., VII, 245.

Chapter XIII. Page 266 Pindar, Isth., VI, 1. 267 Plutarch, On the Malice of Herodotus. Homer, Iliad, IV, 384; II, 495. Homeric Hymns to Apollo and Hermes. 268 Æschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 296. Sophocles, Antigone, 1124. Euripides, Bacchæ, passim. 271 Pindar, Olymp., VI, 89. 275 Pindar, Pyth., III, 87; Isth., I, 1; Nem., I, 33. 276 Sophocles, Trachiniæ. Sophocles, Antigone, 1148; Euripides, Bacchæ, passim. 277 Euripides, Bacchæ, 233. 278 Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusæ, 990. 279 Euripides, Bacchæ, 64, 105, 677. 281 Sophocles, Œdipus Tyr., 1026. 283 Sophocles, Œdipus Tyr., 1186, 1524. 284 Æschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 524, 686. 286 Euripides, Phoinissæ, 1009. Sophocles, Antigone, 459450. 287 Sophocles, Œdipus Tyr., 867. Sophocles, Antigone, 781, 800. 288 Pindar, Isth., VII, 5. 291 Pindar, Isth., VII, 5. Plutarch, Apothegms. 293 Pindar, Pyth., III, 79. 295 Plutarch, Apothegms.

Chapter XIV. Page 296 Hesiod, Theogony, I. Plato, Symposium, 221 A. 297 Pindar, Pyth., I, 78. Æschylus, Persians, 484. Herodotus, IX, 16. 298 Herodotus, IX, 25. 299 Pindar, Pyth., I, 77. Æschylus, Persians, 813. Simonides, Greek Anthology, Pal., VII, 253, 251. 300 Thucydides, III, 53. 301 Plutarch, On the decay of oracles. On the dæmon of Socrates. A friend of Plutarch, not Plutarch himself, visited the oracle of Trophonius. 302 Pindar, Olymp., XIV, 1. 304 Cicero, Against Verres, IV, 2, 59. 307 Plato, Republic, X, 611. Homer, Iliad, II, 303. 308 Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis, 1386. Æschylus, Agamemnon, 220. 309 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 181. 310 Hesiod, Works and Days, 640. 311 Cf. Symonds’ Greek Poets, I, chap. 5. 314 Plutarch, Life of Aristides, 21.

Chapter XV. Page 316 Iliad, I, 156. 317-322 Herodotus, VII, 210-233. 318 Cf. Pausanias, I, 4, 1-4; X, xix-xxiii.

Chapter XVI. Page 323 Alpheus of Mitylene, Anth. Pal., IX, 101; sometimes attributed to Antipater of Thessalonica. 330 Herodotus, I, 1. 331 Lucian, Charon, 23. 332 Pausanias, II, 15, with Frazer’s notes. 333 Pindar, Nemean, X, 28; VI, 12. 335 Thucydides, I, 9; Iliad, II, 108. Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aul., 1498. Iphigeneia in T., 845-846. 336-343 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 40-47; 320; 154; 334-337; 818-820; 905-911; 947; 958-962; passim, 973; 1327-1330; 1379-1387; 1548-1559; 577-579. 341 Cf. Browning’s Agamemnon for several phrases. 342 Euripides, Electra, 54; 77. Æschylus, Choëph. 1061. 343 Iliad, IV, 52. Pythagoras: Horace, Od., I, 28, 46011. Iamblichus, Life of Pythag., 63, and see Lucian, Cock, 16, 17. Herodotus, I, 31. 344 Æschylus, Suppliants, 954-956. 345 Æschylus, Prometheus, 854-869. 346 Lucian, Marine Dialogues, 6. 347 Herodotus, I, 82; Lucian, Charon, 24. 348 Euripides, Orestes, 53-55. 349-350 Lucian, Marine Dialogues, 12. Euripides, Trojan Women, 1081-1088. 352 Isyllus, cf. Smyth, Melic Poets, p. 528. 355 Strabo, VII, cap. 6, 12. 356 Lucian, Cataplus, 18. Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes, XXX.

Chapter XVII. Page 358 Pindar, Olymp., III, 27. Homer, Iliad, II, 612. 360 Homer, Iliad, II, 607. 361 Polybius, XXIV, 15. 365 Greek Anthology, App. Plan., 188. 366 Herodotus, VIII, 26. 371 Greek Anthology, Pal., IX, 314; App. Plan. 188. 374 Xenophon, Anabasis, 5, 3, 10. Homer, Odyssey, V, 272. 377 Hesiod, Theogony, 775. 380 Pindar, Olymp., VI, 100. Homeric Hymn to Pan, 30. Homer, Odyssey, III, 497. 381 Sappho; Homer. See chap. i, 19, 21. 385 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 519.

Chapter XVIII. Page 388 Pindar, Olymp., III, 19. 390 Lucian, Marine Dialog., 3. Strabo, VI, cap. 2, 4. 391 Antigonus Carystus, Historia Mirab., 140 (155). 392 Xenophon, Anabasis, IV, viii, 26. 397 Odyssey, V, 79; Lucian, Jupiter as Tragedian, 10, 11. 403 Lucian, Herodotus, I. Herodotus, VIII, 26. 408 Lucian, Council of the Gods, 12. Pindar, Olymp., II, 51. 410 Herodotus, VI, 103. 411 Pindar, Olymp., I, 18. Bacchylides, V, 37-45, and 178-186. 412 Pindar, Olymp., I, 86. 413 Pindar, Olymp., I, 28. 415 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 341. 416 Pindar, Olymp., IV, 1; VI, 75; VI, 91. 417 Pindar, Olymp., XIII, 92; III, 44; XI (X), 45. 418 Pindar, Olymp., XI (X), 72; 73-76; XIV, 20. 419 Pindar, Olymp., VII. 420 Plato, Republic, 621, C, D. 421 Bacchylides, VI. 423 Æschylus, Prometheus, 95.

461Chapter XIX. Page 425 Homer, Odyssey, III, 491. 429 Thucydides, IV, 40.

Chapter XX. Page 431 Homer, Odyssey, IV, 1. 432 Pindar, fragment. Sophocles, Ajax, 8. Homer, Odyssey, IV, 603. Euripides, Helen, 348; Iphigeneia in Tauris, 132. 433-434 Homer, Odyssey, IV. Herodotus, VI, 61. 436 Æschylus, Agamemnon, 650. 437 Thucydides, I, 10. Polybius, V, 22. 440 Lucian, Anacharsis, 38. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5, 27. 446 Thucydides, I, 70. 447 Herodotus, VII, 104, 135. 448 Euripides, Andromache, 595. 449 Plato, Protagoras, 342. 450 Aristotle, Politics, 1271 B. Isocrates, Letter to Philip; Panegyricus, 51.

Note on pages 154-5 ‘Euripus.’ Strictly speaking, this applies only to the narrower channel between Aulis and Chalkis. Also used of the whole southern channel: see Bury’s and Frazer’s Maps of Attica. 462[Blank Page]

INDEX