THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS
Upon the southern slope of the Acropolis, beneath the limestone
precipices and the great golden-brown walls above which the Parthenon
shows its white summit, are many ruins; among them the Theater of
Dionysus and the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian who
spent much of his money in the beautification of Athens, and who taught
rhetoric to two men who eventually became Roman emperors. The Theater of
Dionysus, in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their
dramas, is of stone and silver-white marble. Many of the seats are
arm-chairs, and are so comfortable that it is no uncommon thing to see
weary travelers, who have just come down from the Acropolis, resting in
them with almost unsuitable airs of unbridled satisfaction.
It is evident to any one who examines this great theater carefully that
the Greeks considered it important for the body to be at ease while the
mind was at work; for not only are the seats perfectly adapted to their
purpose, but ample room is given for the feet of the spectators, the
distance between each tier and the tier above it being wide enough to do
away with all fear of crowding and inconvenience. The marble arm-chairs
were assigned to priests, whose names are carved upon them. In the
theater I saw one high arm-chair, like a throne, with lion's feet. This
is Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The fronts of the seats
are pierced with small holes, which allow the rain-water to escape.
Below the stage there are some sculptured figures, most of them
headless. One which is not is a very striking and powerful, though
almost sinister, old man, in a crouching posture. His rather round
forehead resembles the very characteristic foreheads of the
Montenegrins.
Herodes Atticus restored this theater. Before his time it had been
embellished by Lycurgus of Athens, the orator, and disciple of Plato. It
is not one of the gloriously placed theaters of the Greeks, but from the
upper tiers of seats there is a view across part of the Attic plain to
the isolated grove of cypresses where the famous Schliemann is buried,
and beyond to gray Hymettus.
Standing near by is another theater, Roman-Greek, not Greek, the Odeum
of Herodes Atticus, said to have been built by him in memory of his
wife. This is not certain, and there are some authorities who think
that, like the beautiful arch near the Olympieion, this peculiar, very
picturesque structure was raised by the Emperor Hadrian, who was much
fonder of Athens than of Rome.
The contrast between the exterior, the immensely massive, three-storied
façade with Roman arches, and the interior, or, rather, what was once
the interior, of this formerly roofed-in building, is very strange. They
do not seem to belong to each other, to have any artistic connection the
one with the other.
The outer walls are barbarically huge and heavy, and superb in color.
They gleam with a fierce red-gold, and are conspicuous from afar. The
almost monstrous, but impressive, solidity of Rome, heavy and bold,
indeed almost crudely imperious, is shown forth by them--a solidity
absolutely different from the Greek massiveness, which you can study in
the Doric temples, and far less beautiful. When you pass beyond this
towering façade, which might well be a section of the Colosseum
transferred from gladiatorial Rome to intellectual Athens, you find
yourself in a theater which looks oddly, indeed, almost meanly, small
and pale and graceful. With a sort of fragile timidity it seems to be
cowering behind the flamboyant walls. When all its blanched marble seats
were crowded with spectators it contained five thousand persons. As you
approach the outer walls, you expect to find a building that might
accommodate perhaps twenty-five thousand. There is something bizarre in
the two colors, fierce and pale, in the two sizes, huge and
comparatively small, that are united in the odeum. Though very
remarkable, it seems to me to be one of the most inharmonious ruins in
Greece.
The modern Athenians are not very fond of hard exercise, and except in
the height of summer, when many of them go to Kephisia and Phalerum, and
others to the islands, or to the baths near Corinth for a "cure," they
seem well content to remain within their city. They are governed, it
seems, by fashion, like those who dwell in less-favored lands. When I
was in Athens the weather was usually magnificent and often very hot.
Yet Phalerum, perhaps half an hour by train from Constitution Square,
was deserted. In the vast hotel there I found only two or three
children, in the baths half a dozen swimmers. The pleasure-boats lay
idle by the pier. I asked the reason of this--why at evening dusty
Athens was crammed with strollers, and the pavements were black with
people taking coffee and ices, while delightful Phalerum, with its
cooler air and its limpid waters, held no one but an English traveler?
"The season is over," was the only reply I received, delivered with a
grave air of finality. I tried to argue the matter, and suggested that
anxiety about the war had something to do with it. But I was informed
that the "season" closed on a certain day, and that after that day the
Athenians gave up going to Phalerum.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ÆGINA]
The season for many things seemed "over" when I was in Athens. Round
about the city, and within easy reach of it, there is fascinating
country--country that seems to call you with a smiling decision to enjoy
all Arcadian delights; country, too, that has great associations
connected with it. From Athens you can go to picnic at Marathon or at
Salamis, or you can carry a tea-basket to the pine-woods which slope
down to the Convent of Daphni, and come back to it after paying a visit
to Eleusis. Or, if you are not afraid of a "long day," you can motor out
and lunch in the lonely home of the sea-god under the columns at Sunium.
If you wish to go where a king goes, you can spend the day in the thick
woods at Tatoï. If you are full of social ambition, and aim at
"climbing," a train in not many minutes will set you down at Kephisia,
the summer home of "the fifty-two" on the slope of a spur of Mount
Pentelicus.
Thither I went one bright day. But, as at Phalerum, I found a deserted
paradise. The charming gardens and arbors were empty. The villas,
Russian, Egyptian, Swiss, English, French, and even now and then Greek
in style, were shuttered and closed. All in vain the waterfalls sang,
all in vain the silver poplars and the yellow-green pines gave their
shade. No one was there. I went at length to a restaurant to get
something to eat. Its door was unlocked, and I entered a large, deserted
room, with many tables, a piano, and a terrace. No one came. I called,
knocked, stamped, and at length evoked a thin elderly lady in a gray
shawl, who seemed alarmed at the sight of me, and in a frail voice
begged to know what I wanted. When I told her, she said there was
nothing to eat except what they were going to have themselves. The
season was over. Eventually she brought me _mastika_ and part of her own
dinner to the terrace, which overlooked a luxuriant and deserted garden.
And there I spent two happy, golden hours. I had sought the heart of
fashion, and found the exquisite peace that comes to places when fashion
has left them. Henceforth I shall always associate beautiful Kephisia
with silence, flowers, and one thin old woman in a gray shawl.
[Illustration: THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS, ATHENS]
Greece, though sparsely inhabited, is in the main a very
cheerful-looking country. The loneliness of much of it is not
depressing, the bareness of much of it is not sad. I began to understand
this on the day when I went to the plain of Marathon, which,
fortunately, lies away from railroads. One must go there by carriage or
motor or on horseback. The road is bad both for beasts and machinery,
but it passes through country which is typical of Greece, and through
which it would be foolish to go in haste. Go quietly to Marathon, spend
two hours there, or more, and when you return in the evening to Athens
you will have tasted a new joy. You will have lived for a little while
in an exquisite pastoral--a pastoral through which, it is true, no pipes
of Pan have fluted to you,--I heard little music in Greece,--but which
has been full of that lightness, brightness, simplicity, and delicacy
peculiar to Greece. The soil of the land is light, and I believe, though
Hellenes have told me that in this belief I am wrong, that the heart of
the people is light. Certainly the heart of one traveler was as he made
his way to Marathon along a white road thickly powdered with dust.
Has not each land its representative tree? America has its maple.
England its oak, France its poplar, Italy its olive, Turkey its cypress,
Egypt its palm, and so on. The representative tree of Greece is the
pine. I do not forget the wild olive, from which in past days the crowns
were made, nor the fact that the guide-books say that in a Greek
landscape the masses of color are usually formed by the silver-green
olive-trees. It seemed to me, and it seems to me still in remembrance,
that the lovely little pine is the most precious ornament of the Grecian
scene.
Marathon that day was a pastoral of yellow and blue, of pines and sea.
On the way I passed through great olive-groves, in one of which long
since some countrymen of mine were taken by brigands and carried away to
be done to death. And there were mighty fig-trees, and mulberry-trees,
and acres and acres of vines, with here and there an almost black
cypress among them. But the pines, more yellow than green, and the
bright blue sea made the picture that lives in my memory.
Not very long after we were clear of the town we passed not far from the
village of "Louis," who won the first Marathon race that was run under
King George's scepter, Marousi, where the delicious water is found that
Athens loves to drink. And then away we went through the groves and the
little villages, where dusty soldiers were buying up mules for the
coming war; and Greek priests were reading newspapers; and olive-skinned
children, with bright, yet not ungentle, eyes, were coming from school;
and outside of ramshackle cafés, a huddle of wood, a vine, a couple of
tables, and a few bottles, old gentlemen, some of them in native dress,
with the white fustanella, a sort of short skirt not reaching to the
knees, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels,
were busily talking politics. Carts, not covered with absurd but lively
pictures, as they are in Sicily, lumbered by in the dust. Peasants,
sitting sidewise with dangling feet, met us on trotting donkeys. Now
and then a white dog dashed out, or a flock of thin turkeys gobbled and
stretched their necks nervously as they gave us passage. Women, with
rather dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads, were working in the
vineyards or washing clothes here and there beside thin runlets of
water. Two German beggars, with matted hair uncovered to the sun, red
faces, and fingers with nails like the claws of birds, tramped by, going
to Athens. And farther on we met a few Turkish Gipsies, swarthy and full
of a lively malice, whose tents were visible on a hillside at a little
distance, in the midst of a grove of pines. All the country smiled at us
in the sunshine. One jovial man in a fustanella leaned down from a cart
as we passed, and shouted in Greek: "Enjoy yourselves! Enjoy
yourselves!" And the gentle hills, the olive- and pine-groves, the
stretching vineyards, seemed to echo his cry.
What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it that gives to you a
sensation of being gently released from the cares of life and the
boredom of modern civilization, with its often unmeaning complications,
its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self-satisfactions? This is not the
tremendous, the spectacular release of the desert, an almost savage
tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw is savage; scarcely
anything is spectacular. But, oh, the bright simplicity of the life and
the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an early world. One
looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like the Turkish
Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are small,
exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as if it had been
deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over the slopes with a
lightness almost of foam cresting a wave. Their color is quite lovely.
The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well, the little pine-trees of
Greece are the color of happiness. You smile involuntarily when you see
them. And when, descending among them, you are greeted by the shining of
the brilliant-blue sea, which stretches along the edge of the plain of
Marathon, you know radiance purged of fierceness.
The road winds down among the pines till, at right angles to it, appears
another road, or rough track just wide enough for a carriage. This leads
to a large mound which bars the way. Upon this mound a habitation was
perched. It was raised high above the ground upon a sort of tripod of
poles. It had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor of brushwood
and maize. A ladder gave access to it, and from it there was a wide
outlook over the whole crescent-shaped plain of Marathon. This dwelling
belonged to a guardian of the vineyards, and the mound is the tomb of
those who died in the great battle.
[Illustration: THE PLAIN OF MARATHON]
I sat for a long time on this strange tomb, in the shadow of the rustic
watch-house, and looked out over the plain. It is quite flat, and is now
cultivated, though there are some bare tracts of unfruitful ground. In
all directions I saw straggling vines. Not far away was one low,
red-tiled house belonging to a peasant, whose three small, dirty, and
unhealthy-looking children presently approached, and gazed at me from
below. In the distance a man on a white horse rode slowly toward the
pine-woods, and to my left I saw a group of women bending mysteriously
to accomplish some task unknown to me. No other figures could I see
between me and the bright-blue waters that once bore up the fleet of
Persia. Behind me were stony and not very high hills, ending in the
slopes down which Miltiades made his soldiers advance "at a running
pace." One hundred and ninety-two brave men gone to dust beneath me;
instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch-house of brushwood
and wheat and maize; silence the only epitaph. The mound, of hard,
sun-baked earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a few rusty-looking
thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But about it grew aloes, and the wild
oleander, with its bright-pink flowers, and near by were many great
fig-trees. A river intersects the plain, and its course is marked by
sedges and tall reeds. Where the land is bare, it takes a tawny-yellow
hue. Some clustering low houses far off under the hills form the
Albanian village of Marathon. Just twenty-two miles from Athens, this
place of an ancient glory, this tomb of men who, I suppose, will not be
forgotten so long as the Hellenic kingdom lasts, seems very far away,
hidden from the world between woods and waters, solitary, but not sad.
Beyond the plain and the sea are ranges of mountains and the island of
Euboea.
A figure slowly approaches. It is the guardian of the vineyards, coming
back to his watch-house above the grave of his countrymen, smiling, with
a cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls out "Addio!" Then
he mounts his ladder carefully and withdraws to his easy work. How
strange to be a watcher of vineyards upon the tumulus of Marathon!
If you care at all for life in the open, if you have the love of camping
in your blood, Greece will call to you at every moment to throw off the
dullness of houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be happy. Yet
I suppose the season for all such joys was over when I was in Greece,
for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the
surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large town, when
the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of friends
making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or men
dreaming idly in nooks that might have made old Omar's delight, shaded,
and sung to by a stream. In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in the
country, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, goatherds,
Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking generally, "sons of the soil."
In the very height of summer, I am told, the Athenians do condescend to
go to the pine-woods. They sleep during part of the day, and stay out of
doors at night, often driving into the country, and eating under the
trees or by the sea. But even in the heat of a rainless September, if I
may judge by my own experience, they prefer Constitution Square and "the
Dardanelles" to any more pastoral pleasures.
I did not imitate them, but followed the Via Sacra one morning, past the
oldest olive-tree in Greece, a small and corrugated veteran said to have
been planted in the time of Pericles, to the Convent of Daphni, now
fallen into a sort of poetic decay.
Once more I was among pine-trees. They thronged the almost park-like
slopes under Ægaleos. They crowded toward the little Byzantine church,
which stands on the left of the road on the site of a vanished temple of
Apollo, with remains of its once strongly fortified walls about it.
Lonely, but smiling, as though with a radiant satisfaction at its own
shining peace, is the country in whose bosom the church lies. A few
sheep, small, with shaggy coats of brown and white, were grazing near
it; a dog lay stretched out in the sun; and some lean, long-tailed
horses were standing with bowed heads, as if drowsing. An ancient and
very deep well was close by. In the marble well-head the friction of
many drawn cords has cut grooves, some of them nearly an inch in depth.
The court of the convent is roughly paved and is inclosed within rough
walls. In it are a few trees, an acacia or two, a wild pepper-tree, and
one gigantic cypress. From a branch near the entrance a big bell hung by
a chain. But the only sound of bells came to me from without the walls,
where some hidden goats were moving to a pasture. Fragments of broken
columns and two or three sarcophagi lay on the hot ground at my feet. To
my right, close to the church, a flight of very old marble steps led to
a rustic loggia with wooden supports, full of red geraniums and the
flowers of a plant like a very small convolvulus. From the loggia, which
fronted her abiding-place, a cheerful, kindly-faced woman came down and
let me into the church and left me with two companions, a black kitten
playing with a bee under the gilded cupola.
[Illustration: A MONASTERY AT THE FOOT OF HYMETTUS]
The church, like almost all the Byzantine churches I saw in Greece, is
very small, but it is tremendously solid and has a tall belfry. The
exterior, stained by weather, is now a sort of earthy yellow; the
cupola is covered with red tiles. The interior walls look very
ancient, and are blackened in many places by the fingers of Time. Made
more than eight hundred years ago, the remains of the Byzantine mosaics
are very curious and interesting. In the cupola, on a gold ground, is a
very large head of a Christ ("Christos Pantokrator"), which looks as if
it were just finished. The face is sinister and repellent, but
expressive. There are several other mosaics, of the apostles, of
episodes in the life of the Virgin, and of angels. None of them seemed
to me beautiful, though perhaps not one looks so wicked as the Christos,
which dominates the whole church. Until comparatively recent times there
were monks attached to this convent, but now they are gone.
I passed through a doorway and came into a sort of tiny cloister, shaded
by a huge and evidently very ancient fig-tree with enormous leaves. Here
I found the remains of an old staircase of stone. As I returned to the
dim and massive little church, glimmering with gold where the sunlight
fell upon the mosaics, the eyes of the Christos seemed to rebuke me from
the lofty cupola. The good-natured woman locked the door behind me with
a large key, handed to me a bunch of the flowers I had noticed growing
in the loggia, and bade me "Addio!" And soon the sound of the goat-bells
died away from my ears as I went on my way back to Eleusis.
There is nothing mysterious about this road which leads to the site of
the Temple of the Mysteries. It winds down through the pine-woods and
rocks of the Pass of Daphni into the cheerful and well-cultivated
Thriasian plain, whence across a brilliant-blue stretch of water, which
looks like a lake, but which is the bay of Eleusis, you can see houses
and, alas! several tall chimneys pouring forth smoke. The group of
houses is Eleusis, now an Albanian settlement, and the chimneys belong
to a factory where olive-oil soap is made. The road passes between the
sea and a little salt lake, which latter seems to be prevented from
submerging it only by a raised coping of stone. The color of this lake
is a brilliant purple. In the distance is the mountainous and rocky
island of Salamis.
When I reached the village, I found it a cheery little place of small
white, yellow, and rose-colored houses, among which a few cypress-trees
grow. Although one of the most ancient places in Greece, it now looks
very modern. And it is difficult to believe, as one glances at the
chimneys of the soap factory, and at two or three black and dingy
steamers lying just off the works to take in cargo, that here Demeter
was worshiped with mysterious rites at the great festival of the
Eleusinia. Yet, according to the legend, it was here that she came,
disguised as an old hag, in search of her lost Persephone; here that
she taught Triptolemus how to sow the plain, and to reap the first
harvest of yellow wheat, as a reward for the hospitable welcome given to
her by his father Celeus.
The ruins at Eleusis are disappointing to the ordinary traveler, though
interesting to the archæologist. They have none of the pathetic romance
which, notwithstanding the scoldings of many vulgar persons set forth in
a certain visitors' book, broods gently over poetic Olympia. Above the
village is a vast confusion of broken columns, defaced capitals, bits of
wall, bits of pavement, marble steps, fallen medallions, vaults,
propylæa, substructures, scraps of architraves carved with inscriptions,
and subterranean store-rooms. In the pavement of the processional way,
by which the chariots came up to the Temple of Demeter, the chief glory
and shrine of Eleusis, are the deep ruts made by the chariot-wheels. The
remnants of the hall of the initiated bears witness to the long desire
of poor human beings in all ages to find that peace which passeth our
understanding. Of beauty there is little or none. Nevertheless, even
now, it is not possible in the midst of this tragic _débâcle_ to remain
wholly unmoved. Indeed, the very completeness of the disaster that time
and humanity have wrought here creates emotion, when one remembers that
here great men came, such men as Cicero, Sophocles, and Plato; that
here they worshiped and adored under cover of the darkness of night;
that here, seeking, they found, as has been recorded, peace and hope to
sustain them when, the august festival over, they took their way back
into the ordinary world along the shores of sea and lake. Eleusis is no
longer beautiful. It is a home of devastation. It is no longer
mysterious. A successful man is making a fortune out of soap there. But
it is a place one cannot easily forget. And just above the ruins there
is a small museum which contains several very interesting things, and
one thing that is superb.
This last is the enormous and noble upper part of the statue of a woman
wearing ear-rings. I do not know its history, though some one assured me
that it was a caryatid. It was dug up among the ruins, and the color of
it is akin to that of the earth. The roughly undulating hair is parted
in the middle of a majestic, goddess-like head. The features are pure
and grand; but the two things that most struck me, as I looked at this
great work of art, were the expression of the face, and the deep bosom,
as of the earth-mother and all her fruitfulness. In few Greek statues
have I seen such majesty and power, combined with such intensity, as
this nameless woman shows forth. There is indeed almost a suggestion of
underlying fierceness in the face, but it is the fierceness that may
sometimes leap up in an imperial nature. Are there not royal angers
which flame out of the pure furnaces of love? This noble woman seems to
me to be the present glory of Eleusis.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF THE MYSTERIES AT ELEUSIS]
The mountainous island of Salamis, long and calm, with gray and orange
rocks, lies like a sentinel keeping guard over the harbor of the Piræus.
It is so near to the mainland that the sea between the two shores looks
like a lake, lonely and brilliant, with the two-horned peak called "the
throne of Xerxes" standing out characteristically behind the low-lying
bit of coast where the Greeks have set up an arsenal. Whether Xerxes did
really watch the famous battle from a throne placed on the hill with
which his name is associated is very doubtful. But many travelers like
to believe it, and the kind guides of Athens are quite ready to stiffen
their credulity.
The shores of this beautiful inclosed bit of sea are wild. The water is
wonderfully clear, and is shot with all sorts of exquisite colors. The
strip of mainland, against which the liquid maze of greens and blues and
purples seems to lie motionless, like a painted marvel, is a tangle of
wild myrtle and dwarf shrubs growing in a sandy soil interspersed with
rocks. Gently the land curves, forming a series of little shallow bays
and inlets, each one of which seems more delicious than the last as you
coast along in a fisherman's boat. But, unfortunately, the war-ships of
Greece often lie snug in harbor in the shadow of Salamis not far from
the arsenal, and, as I have hinted already, their commander-in-chief has
little sympathy with the inquiring traveler. I shall not easily forget
the expression that came into his face when, in reply to his question,
"What did you come here for?" I said, "To visit the scene of the
celebrated battle." A weary incredulity made him suddenly look very old;
and I believe it was then that, taking a pen, he wrote on the margin of
his report about me that I was "a very suspicious person."
It is safer, especially in war-time, to keep away from Salamis; but if
you care for smiling wild places where the sea is, where its breath
gives a vivid sense of life to the wilderness, you may easily forget her
myrtle-covered shores and the bays of violet and turquoise.
Of the many wonderful haunts of the sea which I visited in Greece, Cape
Sunium is perhaps the most memorable, though I never shall forget the
glories of the magnificent drive along the mountains between Athens and
Corinth. But Sunium has its ruined temple, standing on a great height.
And in some of us a poet has wakened a wondering consciousness of its
romance, perhaps when we sat in a Northern land beside the winter fire.
And in some of us, too, an immortal painter has roused a longing to see
it, when we never thought to be carried by our happy fate to Greece.
In going to Sunium I passed through the famous mining district of
Laurium, where now many convicts work out their sentences. In ancient
times slaves toiled there for the benefit of those citizens who had
hereditary leases granted by the state. They worked the mines for
silver, but now lead is the principal product. It happened that just as
we were in the middle of the dingy town, or village, where the miners
and their families dwell,--for only some of them are convicts,--a tire
of the motor burst. This of course delayed us, and I was able to see
something of the inhabitants. In Athens I had heard that they were a
fierce and ill-mannered population. I found them, on the contrary, as I
found almost all those whom I met in Greece, cheerful, smiling, and
polite. Happy, if rather dirty, children gathered round us, delighted to
have something to look at and wonder about. Men, going to or coming from
the works, paused to see what was the matter and to inquire where I came
from. From the windows of the low, solid-looking houses women leaned
eagerly out with delighted faces. Several of the latter talked to me. I
could not understand what they said, and all they could understand was
that I came from London, a circumstance which seemed greatly to impress
them, for they called it out from one to another up the street. We
carried on intercourse mainly by facial expression and elaborate
gesture, assisted genially by the grubby little boys. And when I got
into the car to go we were all the best of friends. The machine made the
usual irritable noises, but from the good people of Laurium came only
cries of good-will, among them that pleasant admonition which one hears
often in Greece: "Enjoy yourself! Enjoy yourself!"
When Laurium was left behind we were soon in wild and deserted country.
Now and then we passed an Albanian on horseback, with a gun over his
shoulder, a knife stuck in his belt, or we came upon a shepherd watching
his goats as they browsed on the low scrub which covered the hills. All
the people in this region are Albanians, I was told. They appeared to be
very few. As we drew near to the ancient shrine of Poseidon we left far
behind us the habitations of men. At length the car stopped in the
wilderness, and on a height to my left I saw the dazzling white marble
columns of the Temple of Sunium.
Almost all the ruins I saw in Greece were weather-stained. Their
original color was mottled with browns and grays, with saffron, with
gold and red-gold. But the columns of Sunium have kept their brilliant
whiteness, although they stand on a great, bare cliff above the sea,
exposed to the glare of the sun and to the buffeting of every wind of
heaven. They are raised not merely on this natural height, but also on
a great platform of the famous Poros-stone. In the time of Byron there
were sixteen columns standing. There are now eleven, with a good deal of
architrave. These columns are Doric, and are about twenty feet in
height. They have not the majesty of the Parthenon columns, but, on the
contrary, have a peculiar delicacy and even grace, which is lacking both
in the Parthenon and in the Theseum. They do not move you to awe or
overwhelm you; they charm and delight you. In their ivory-white
simplicity, standing out against the brilliant blue of sea and sky on
the white and gray platform, there is something that allures.
Upon one of the columns I found the name of Byron carved in bold
letters. But I looked in vain for the name of Turner. Byron loved the
Cape of Sunium. Fortunately, nothing has been done to make it less
wonderful since his time. It is true that fewer columns are standing to
bear witness to the old worship of the sea-god; but such places as
Sunium are not injured when some blocks of marble fall, but when men
begin to build. Still the noble promontory thrusts itself boldly forward
into the sea from the heart of an undesecrated wilderness. Still the
columns stand quite alone. All the sea-winds can come to you there, and
all the winds of the hills--winds from the Ægean and Mediterranean, from
crested Euboea, from Melos, from Hydra, from Ægina, with its beautiful
Doric temple, from Argolis and from the mountains of Arcadia. And it
seems as if all the sunshine of heaven were there to bathe you in golden
fire, as if there could be none left over for the rest of the world. The
coasts of Greece stretch away beneath you into far distances, curving in
bays, thrusting out in promontories, here tawny and volcanic, there gray
and quietly sober in color, but never cold or dreary. White sails, but
only two or three, are dreaming on the vast purple of Poseidon's
kingdom--white sails of mariners who are bound for the isles of Greece.
Poets have sung of those isles. Who has not thought of them with
emotion? Now, between the white marble columns, you can see their
mountain ranges, you can see their rocky shores.
Behind and below me I heard a slight movement. I got up and looked. And
there on a slab of white marble lay a snow-white goat warming itself in
the sun. White, gold, and blue, and far off the notes of white were
echoed not only by the mariner's sails, but by tiny Albanian villages
inland, seen over miles of bare country, over flushes of yellow, where
the pines would not be denied.
[Illustration: THE ODEUM OF HERODES ATTICUS IN ATHENS]
There is an ineffable charm in the landscape, in the atmosphere, of
Greece. No other land that I know possesses an exactly similar spell.
Wildness and calm seem woven together, a warm and almost caressing
wildness with a calm that is full of romance. There the wilderness is
indeed a haven to long after, and there the solitudes call you as if
with the voices of friends.
As I turned at last to go away from Poseidon's white marble ruin, a
one-armed man came up to me, and in English told me that he was the
guardian of the temple.
"But where do you live?" I asked him, looking over the vast solitude.
Smiling, he led the way down to a low whitewashed bungalow at a little
distance. There, in a rough but delicious loggia, paved and fronting the
sea, I found two brown women sitting with a baby among some small pots
of flowers. Remote from the world, with only the marble columns for
neighbors, with no voice but the sea's to speak to them, dwell these
four persons. The man lived and worked for many years in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where he lost his arm in some whirring machinery. Now he
has come home and entered the sea-god's service. Pittsburgh and the
Hellenic wilderness--what a contrast! But my one-armed friend takes it
philosophically. He shrugs his shoulder, points to his stump, and says,
"I guess I couldn't go on there like this, so I had to quit, and they
put me here."
They put him "here," on Cape Sunium, and on Cape Sunium he has built
himself a house and made for himself a loggia, white, cool, brightened
with flowers, face to face with the purple sea, and the isles and the
mountains of Greece. And at Sunium he intends to remain because,
unfortunately, having lost an arm, he is no longer wanted in Pittsburgh.
I gave him some money, accepted the baby's wavering but insistent hand,
and left him to his good or ill fortune in the exquisite wilderness.
DELPHI AND OLYMPIA
[Illustration: THE SITE OF ANCIENT DELPHI]