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Transcriber’s Note:
This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects.
Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_.
Footnotes have been moved to follow the paragraphs in which they are
referenced.
Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please
see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding
the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.
GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS
[Illustration:
THE PROPYLÆA
From within, looking toward Salamis. From a painting by H. R. Cross
]
GREEK LANDS AND
LETTERS
BY
FRANCIS GREENLEAF ALLINSON
(_Professor of Classical Philology in Brown University_)
AND
ANNE C. E. ALLINSON
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
=The Riverside Press Cambridge=
MDCCCCIX
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY FRANCIS G. ALLINSON
AND ANNE C. E. ALLINSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published December 1909_
TO
A. C. E.
AND
S. C. A.
PREFACE
The purpose of this book is to interpret Greek lands by literature, and
Greek literature by local associations and the physical environment.
Those who possess an intimate acquaintance with Greek or who have the
good fortune to stay long in Greece will be able to draw upon their own
resources. Many travellers, however, must curtail their visit to a few
weeks or months, and it is hoped that to them this book may prove useful
as a companion in travel, while to a wider range of readers it may prove
suggestive in appraising what is most vital in our “Hellenic heritage.”
To keep within reasonable bounds it has seemed necessary to limit our
survey to those portions of the mainland of Greece and those islands,
immediately adjacent in the Gulf of Ægina, which may be easily visited
during a short stay in Athens as headquarters. But the visitor cannot be
too strongly urged to avail himself of opportunities to visit the
remoter islands and the shores of Asia Minor, which are so beautiful a
part of the Greek world and have played so brilliant a rôle in Greek
history and literature.
In quoting or summarizing the literature the limitations of space are
obvious. Selections have been made which to us seemed most fairly to
interpret the countries and sites. It is hoped that these will not only
prove representative when taken together but will recall much that has
perforce been omitted.
Purely learned treatises in Greek have not been cited except by way of
illustration. The historical geographer Strabo, of the time of Augustus,
has offered suggestive material; and Pausanias, of the second century of
our era, the pious and often charming writer of the “Guidebook to
Greece,” has, as was inevitable, been the _cicerone_ in many places.
History it has seemed proper to use chiefly to explain the literature,
or, especially in the case of Herodotus and Thucydides, as itself part
of the noblest prose literature. But in different chapters emphasis has
been laid, to some extent, upon different elements, such as myth and
legend, prehistoric tradition, the history of certain epochs in classic
times, the demands of religion, the growth of the artistic impulse or
the bloom of the Attic period. By this means we have hoped, without too
much repetition, to suggest a fairly adequate outline of the different
factors in Greek civilization. The introductory chapter is intended to
provide the essential background for the others.
Forms of art other than literature are only incidentally touched upon.
Archæological information or discussion, except as illustration, is
precluded by the purpose of the book, which deals with the literature
and the land as being permanent possessions that are not essentially
modified by the successive data of archæology, necessarily shifting from
month to month.
In translating Greek authors it has seemed best, as a rule, to offer new
versions, rendering the thought as literally as is consistent with our
idiom or, in the case of poetry, with the exigencies of English verse.
The anapæstic dimeters and, in the dialogue parts of the drama, the
six-stress iambic verse have been retained; less uniformly the elegiac
couplet; and, occasionally only, the heroic hexameter. Elsewhere poetry
has been usually turned by rhymed verse or by rhythmic prose.
Some existing translations or paraphrases have been used, for which
credit has been given in the text or the footnotes. Moreover, in most of
the citations from Pausanias Mr. Frazer’s admirable translation has been
used without explicit mention, and for this we make acknowledgment here.
In translating Pindar many turns of expression have been taken from the
beautiful translation of Ernest Myers, although, when they are not
expressly credited, the versions have been rewritten. While it is hoped
that full credit has thus been given wherever it is due, there are
doubtless expressions here and there remaining in the memory from
numerous commentators on Greek authors that form a common stock in trade
for the translator.
In transliterating Greek names we have followed, as a rule, familiar
English usage.
Among many books of reference there are a few to which we are especially
indebted. We have used constantly Mr. J. G. Frazer’s “Commentary on
Pausanias,” which includes a wealth of outside references, as, for
example, citations from other travellers beginning with Dicæarchus, the
entertaining geographer of the fourth century b. c. We are also indebted
to Curtius’s “History of Greece” and Tozer’s “Geography of Greece”; Dr.
W. Judeich’s “Topographie von Athen” (especially for Piræus); Professor
Ernest Gardner’s “Ancient Athens,” which should be in the hands of every
visitor to Athens; and Miss J. E. Harrison’s “Primitive Athens.”
Professor J. B. Bury’s “History of Greece” has been constantly
suggestive. On modern Greece Schmidt’s “Das Volksleben der Neugriechen”
and Sir Rennell Rodd’s “Customs and Lore of Modern Greece” have
furnished definite material.
Among the numerous editions of Greek authors necessarily consulted we
are under special obligations to Professor Gildersleeve’s “Pindar, the
Olympian and Pythian Odes,” and to Professor Smyth’s “Melic Poets.”
Certain quotations in the text, not provided for in the footnotes, are
acknowledged in the Appendix, in which are also given, for the sake of
comparison, exact references to the Greek.
Our personal thanks are due to Professor J. Irving Manatt, of Brown
University, for valuable suggestions and criticism of several chapters,
and to Professor Walter G. Everett for his discussion of the section on
Greek philosophy. We are also especially indebted to Professor Herbert
Richard Cross of Washington University, St. Louis, for placing at our
disposal his water-color sketch of the Propylæa, from which the
frontispiece is taken, and to Professors C. B. Gulick and G. H. Chase of
Harvard University for assistance in obtaining the impression of the
coin upon the cover of this book.
F. G. A.
A. C. E. A.
Providence, October, 1909.
CONTENTS
I. THE WIDESPREAD LAND OF HELLAS 1
II. PIRÆUS, THE HARBOUR TOWN 32
III. ATHENS: FROM SOLON TO SALAMIS 57
IV. THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS 74
V. ATHENS: FROM SALAMIS TO MENANDER 91
VI. OLD GREECE IN NEW ATHENS 126
VII. ATTICA 144
VIII. ELEUSIS 171
IX. ÆGINA 186
X. MEGARA AND CORINTH: THE GULF OF CORINTH 192
XI. DELPHI 218
XII. FROM DELPHI TO THEBES 250
XIII. THEBES AND BŒOTIA 266
XIV. BŒOTIA, CONTINUED 296
XV. THERMOPYLÆ 316
XVI. ARGOLIS 323
XVII. ARCADIA 358
XVIII. OLYMPIA 388
XIX. MESSENIA 425
XX. SPARTA 431
APPENDIX 453
INDEX 463
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE PROPYLÆA _Frontispiece_
From within looking toward Salamis
_From a painting by H. R. Cross_
MAP OF GREECE AND THE ÆGEAN 1
MAP OF PIRÆUS 32
RENAN ON THE ACROPOLIS 74
_From a French painting_
S. COLONNADE OF THE PARTHENON 88
_From a photograph by R. A. Rice_
AREOPAGUS 104
STREET OF THE TOMBS 114
Monument of Hegeso
AFTER POLYGNOTUS 134
THE PANATHENÆA CONTINUED 134
MAP OF ATTICA 144
MENANDER 152
_From bust in Boston Museum of Fine Arts_
SUNIUM 162
Temple of Poseidon. _From a photograph by S. C. A._
OLIVE TREES ON THE WAY TO ELEUSIS 178
_From a photograph by E. G. Radeke_
ÆGINA 188
Temple of Aphæa
CORINTH 202
Temple of Apollo and Acrocorinth
DELPHI AND THE ROAD TO ARACHOVA 250
MAP OF BŒOTIA 266
A GALLERY OF THE ACROPOLIS OF TIRYNS 324
CALAURIA 356
Temple of Poseidon. Scene of the death of Demosthenes
OLYMPIA 388
Kronos Hill. The ruins of the Altis
TAŸGETUS 432
-------
NIKE OF SAMOTHRACE, reproduced on the front cover, is
from a coin in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.
GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS
[Illustration: Greece and the Aegean Sea]
GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY: THE WIDESPREAD LAND OF
HELLAS
“Greek literature is read by almost all nations.”
CICERO, _Pro Archia_.
Cicero, at one time studying Greek oratory in Rhodes, at another
speaking Greek as the language best adapted to a Sicilian audience,
suggests with sufficient definiteness the eastern and western boundaries
of ancient Hellas. Leaving out of consideration more remote colonies, we
may content ourselves with including in the Greater Greece of antiquity
all the Mediterranean lands and waters from Sicily and Lower Italy, in
the west, to Cyprus and the coast of Asia Minor, in the east. The
Riviera, or seaboard of the eastern side of the Ægean, is sharply
differentiated from the continuous highlands of the interior, which
suggest, a short distance inland, a boundary line between Europe and
Asia. For a maritime people like the Greeks this was a barrier more
effectual than the highway of the Bosphorus. In the early historic
times, when the sun rose over these mountains of Asia Minor he left
behind him the Oriental and looked down at once upon the Cis-montane
Greeks, and it was upon Greeks that he was still shining when his
setting splendour lit up the Bay of Naples—the “New-town” of that day—or
the ancient Cumæ and the heights of Anacapri or the islands of the
Sirens and the golden brown columns of Poseidon’s temple at Pæstum.
The seaboard, too, of Macedonia and Thrace belonged to Greece by reason
of their water-front on the Ægean. And to the south, the encroachments
of the Greeks upon the preserves of the Nile-god were so extensive for
centuries before the time of Alexander that we need not wonder either at
Egyptian reminiscences in Greek art or at the increasing evidences of
Hellenic life in Egypt.
The Greeks, compared with the hoary antiquity of the Egyptians, are late
comers. The essential difference, however, is not a matter of centuries
or millennia. The Egyptians, perhaps because the details are
foreshortened by the vast distance, seem to possess a chronology, but no
real history. There were revolutions, rather than evolution. The Greeks
were young, too, individually as well as chronologically. From Homer
down through the classic period we hear “the everlasting wonder-song of
youth.” Plato makes an Egyptian priest say to the Athenian law-giver: “O
Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever children; no Hellene is ever old!”
We find the Greeks of the historic period on the intellectual watershed
between antiquity and the modern world. From data now well established
we may push back their life far beyond recorded chronology, and, if we
anticipate even by a little the nucleus of the Homeric poems, we possess
a practically unbroken continuity of their history and language for
three thousand years down to the present day. Greek history is often
confined within perfectly arbitrary dates. In reality, the death of
Alexander in 323 B. C., the closing of the schools of philosophy in 529
A. D., and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A. D. only break its
course into convenient chapters.
The Greek language is itself one of the greatest creations of Greek art.
Discarding some superfluities, retained or over-emphasized by others of
our common Indo-European family, the Greeks developed an instrument for
the expression of thought unsurpassed, if not unequalled, among any
other people. “The whole language resembles the body of an artistically
trained athlete, in which every muscle is called into full play, where
there is no trace of flaccid tumidity, and all is power and life.” The
“common dialect” already dominated the eastern Mediterranean before the
Romans took physical possession. Its direct legatee is the modern Greek,
that had sprung up in lusty independence some three centuries before the
Turks put an end to senile Byzantium and its crabbed ecclesiastical
speech.
Of creative literature the same unbroken continuity cannot be
predicated. The early literature, beginning with Homer, extends through
the first quarter of the fifth century B. C. It includes the great epic
poetry, the elegiac and iambic, the beginnings of philosophy, and seven
of the ten greatest lyric poets. No fact in Greek literature is more
conspicuous than the shortness and the richness of the next period,
which may be conveniently called the “Attic,” although some of the
greatest writers came from outside of Attica—from Bœotia, from the
islands, from beyond the Ægean, or from Sicily. Within this brief period
of only 183 years, if we close it with the death of Menander in 292 B.
C., all the additional types of the literature either culminated or
originated.
The next period of 150 years, commonly known as the Alexandrian period,
has within its early limits the name of Theocritus, whose quality
entitles him to rank with the writers of the Classic period, as does
that of his two legatees, Bion and Moschus, and also Herodas, whose
writings, recovered in the fortunate year 1891, have now made him a part
of the Greek Classics. But in the Alexandrian period, and in the
Græco-Roman period from 146 B. C. to 529 A. D., the great names are, as
a rule, not so great, and they are spread over a long time. Few of them,
except Lucian in the second century of our era, and Plutarch immediately
preceding him, successfully compete for a prominent place as writers of
pure literature.
With a few exceptions, the great original work in Greek literature had
been done before the death of Menander. The Greek anthology, however,
must not be ignored. It ranges over more than one thousand years and
leaves no century in all that time without at least some minor
representative of great beauty. Like a cord twisted of dull strands and
golden, it binds together the Attic age with the whole of the subsequent
time down to the year 550 of our era, the golden strand reappearing
sufficiently often to assure us of its continuity. The next nine
centuries of Byzantine Greek, ecclesiastical and profane, are little
known to most classical scholars. The contributions of the modern Greek,
before and since the days of Byron, are significant, and the friends of
the new kingdom await with cordial expectation the rise of new writers
to give to the lore of the peasant and the struggles of the patriot a
worthy literary form. Of the lacunæ in the literature, in spite of the
continuity of the language, Professor Hatzidakis of Athens has well
said: “The Greek language is as little to be blamed for this as could be
the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus, because in those times no one
fashioned from them a Hermes of Praxiteles or a Venus of Melos.”
A glance at the map will show how accessible was the mainland of Greece,
upon the east and south, to seafaring visitors from across the Ægean,
who would naturally find here their first landing-places. Except for the
great gash of the Corinthian Gulf, the western coast is indented only
with smaller, though good, harbours, while the whole southern and
eastern seaboard from Messenia in the southwest to Thrace is a ragged
fringe of promontories, large and small, welcoming into the interior the
waters that suggested sea-business of war and commerce.
But this interlacing of land and water, that brought the insinuating
“call of the sea,” was not the only factor that predetermined the
character of the Greek cantons. The Greeks were mountaineers as well as
mariners. One is, indeed, almost tempted to speak of Greece as
consisting of only mountains and _marina_. There are of course some
relatively large plains, notably the fertile granary of Thessaly, but
the general impression of the land from any bird’s-eye view is a
succession of lofty ridges, peaks, and spurs. Only by many shiftings of
the place of outlook do these partially resolve themselves into ranges
continuous in certain general directions, though with many sharp angles
and curves and buttressed by uncompromising cross ridges. These mountain
barriers make clear the history of the Greek peoples, both how they
combined temporarily to resist foreign invasion and, above all, why they
developed and cherished in tiny cantons their characteristic
individualism, which has been by turns a bane and a blessing.
Thessaly and Mount Olympus to the north belong geographically to the
Kingdom of Greece. On either side of Thessaly irregular mountain chains
run southward and preserve a general connection through Central Greece
and Attica, and, despite the submerging water, may be identified as
reappearing in the islands far out in the Ægean. Olympus on the
northeast—hardly interrupted by the river Peneius, which has rent its
way through the precipitous cañon known as the “Vale” of Tempe—is
continued along the east coast by Mount Ossa and Mount Pelion. Then
across the narrow entrance to the Pagasæan and Malian gulfs the system
is continued by the sharp dorsal fins of the island of Eubœa, that
stretches like a sea-monster along the shores of Locris, Bœotia, and
Attica, to reappear at intervals far to the southeast in the islands
Andros, Tenos, Myconos, Delos, Naxos, Amorgos, and Astypalæa. On the
west of Thessaly the great Pindus ridge, descending through the centre
of northern Greece, details on the rugged system of peaks and ranges
which fill central Greece southward to the Gulf of Corinth and which in
general run from west to east. One of these ranges, called the Othrys
Mountains, bounds the Thessalian countries on the south and ends at the
Gulf of Pagasæ. Another, Mount Œta, is continued by the high mountains
that shut off Thermopylæ to the north and runs on as the boundary
between Locris and Bœotia. Still another range, running out of the
central complex, has its culmination in Parnassus, 8070 feet high, and
is continued, though more interrupted and with a more irregular course,
by Mount Helicon in Bœotia and the frontier hills of Attica, from
Helicon to Parnes, and bends around into the massive ridge of Mount
Pentelicus, from whose summit the spectator can see the prolongation in
the islands of Ceos, Cythnos, Seriphos, and others beyond.
The narrow neck that divides the Corinthian from the Saronic Gulf and
connects Attica and Bœotia with the Peloponnesus, lifts up among its
rugged hills in Megara the picturesque twin peaks of the Kerata. South
of the isthmus itself, with its narrow plain and the deep cutting
necessary for the canal, rises the splendid acropolis of Acrocorinth,
keeping guard at the entrance to the “Island of Pelops.”
The Peloponnesus, or Morea, is a rugged complex of mountains that by
turns shut out and admit the sea. Of its four irregular peninsulas,
jutting out southward in the Argolis and in Laconia and Messenia, each
has its mountain system; the more broken hills in the Argolid plain; the
ridge of Parnon to the east of the plain of Lacedæmon; the imposing
barrier of Taygetus between Sparta and Messenia. In Messenia itself are
fertile plains. One is in the midland, as the name Messenia originally
implied, among offshoots of the Arcadian Lycæus; while the great
mountain fortress of Ithome, 2600 feet high, where crops could be reared
and an army supported, towering above the hills and plains of central
Messenia, looks down on another larger plain, almost tropical in its
products, that stretches southward to the gulf.
The centre and west of the Peloponnesus is a mass of peaks and mountain
ridges tangled up at abrupt angles but bounded on the north by a
formidable chain, generally parallel with the Gulf of Corinth and
dominated by Erymanthus and Cyllene to the west and east respectively.
Around and against this chain great mountains are piled up like
petrified billows. In this part of Greece plains few but important are
interspersed, as at Megalopolis or Olympia. Along the northwest coast
there is the wider sea-margin of “Hollow” Elis, while along the
Corinthian Gulf Ægialus, the “coast-land,” seems often little more than
a grudging _marina_ subjacent to the foothills of Erymanthus and
Cyllene.
From north to south, from east to west the Greek landscape lends itself
to panoramic views. Lucian in his “Charon” makes Hermes seat himself on
one of the twin peaks of Parnassus and Charon upon the other. With eyes
anointed with Homeric eye-salve, the Ferryman, on his furlough from the
under-world, is able to see not only the Greater Greece outspread around
him,—from Asia Minor to Sicily, from the Danube to Crete,—but to look
off beyond to the Orient and to Egypt. These wide outlooks are enhanced
by the distinctness of the sky-line, everywhere an important factor.
“The hard limestone of which the mountains are composed is apt to break
away, and thus produces those sharply-cut outlines which stand out so
clearly against the transparent sky of Greece.”
So large a troupe of actors played their parts in Greek history that the
imagination demands a roomy stage. But the country is small. Were it not
for the mountain barriers, the scale of distances would seem trivial. It
is, for example, only some thirty miles in an air line from Thermopylæ
to the Gulf of Corinth. Even on the leisurely and winding Piræus,
Athens, and Peloponnesus Railway, it is only one day’s ride from Athens
via the Isthmus down to Kalamata on the Bay of Messenia. The degrees of
latitude that include the mainland of Central and Southern Greece span
in the west only the Lipari Islands and Sicily; the thirty-eighth
parallel that passes south of Palermo and the straits of Messina runs a
little north of Athens; while the thirty-seventh parallel, running just
south of Syracuse, passes still farther south of Kalamata and Sparta.
Not only is the mainland of Greece contained in narrow geographical
limits, but the Ægean itself is almost an inland lake enclosed within
neighbouring coasts. In clear weather the sailor, without adventuring
upon open sea, might pass from mainland to mainland as he watched from
his advancing prow another island lift above the horizon before losing
sight of the harbour left astern. In Greek literature there is no more
striking reminder of the contiguity of the Asian coast to Greece proper
than the well-known passage in the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus describing
the swift telegraphy of the beacon signals that brought to Argos the
news of the capture of Troy. The ten years’ absence of Agamemnon’s host
tends to an instinctive extension of the distance, if the imagination is
not checked by the actual scale of miles. Troy seems farther from Argos
than the Holy Land from the homes of the Crusaders.
Beacon telegraphy is a time-honored device. Many bright beacons
doubtless blazed before Agamemnon, as well as since his time.
Commentators have been at pains to justify by modern experiments with
beacon fires on lofty heights the severest strain upon our optic nerves
which Æschylus makes in the case of the light that leaped from Mount
Athos to the high ridges of Eubœa. The distance is more than 100 miles,
but, bearing in mind that the Eubœan mountain is some 4000 feet high and
Athos more than 6000, we need not apply for any special license for our
poet’s imagination. The devious course of the fire signals from Eubœa to
Argos is one of the best illustrations of the jagged surface that Greece
lifts skywards. As one stands on Mount Pentelicus and looks across to
Eubœa, the intervening arm of the sea is hemmed in for the eye into
narrow inland lakes. And Æschylus, sufficiently, though not officiously,
realistic, makes the firelight zigzag irregularly to dodge the
interfering ridges till it falls upon the palace roof at Argos,—not at
Mycenæ, as is the not infrequent misrepresentation of the Æschylean
story.
Clytemnestra, to the chorus asking who could have brought the news so
quickly, replies:—
“Hephæstus, on from Ida sending brilliant gleam,
And hither beacon beacon sped with courier flame.
First Ida to the Hermæan crag of Lemnos sent,
Then from the island was received the mighty flame
By Athos, Zeus’s mount, as third: this over-passed—
So that it skimmed the sea’s broad back,—the torch’s might,
A joyous traveller, the pine’s gold gleam, sun-like,
To watching Mount Macistus brought its flashing news.
Macistus then, delaying not, nor foolishly
Foredone with sleep, as messenger pass’d on his share.
The beacon’s gleam unto Euripus flowing far
Then came and signal to Messapium’s pickets made.
They too gave back a flame and ever onward sent
The news by lighting up a heap of heather gray.
The Torch then, strong to run, nor dimm’d as yet, leap’d on
Like radiant moon across Asopus and his plain
And came unto Cithæron’s crags, awaking there
A new relay of courier flame: nor did the guard
Disown the far-escorted light, but escort flame
In turn made soar aloft into the ether high.
Then over Lake Gorgopis smote the gleam and came
Unto Mount Ægiplanctus urging that the flame
Ordain’d should fail not. Lighting with ungrudging strength
They send a mighty beard of fire. O’er the height
That overlooks the Saronic Gulf it onward flared,
Until, when it had reach’d the Arachnæan steep,
It lighted on the outposts neighbour to our town;
Then on this roof of the Atreidæ falls this light,
The long-descended grandchild of the Idæan flame!”
From the very smallness of Greece results the overcrowding of
associations that almost oppress the spectator standing at one or
another place of vantage. But if his historic horizon is as clearly
defined as the physical he will come back to the sea-level with a
clearer understanding of the interdependence between the scene and the
action of the great dramas here enacted. The country is not only a
background but a cause for the literature. Neither can be fully
understood without the other.
It must not be assumed from the smallness of the land that the spurs to
the imagination of the Greeks were few. On the contrary, within their
narrow borders, nature was prodigal of her inspiration. In the few miles
from Thessaly to the Messenian Gulf are offered a variety of climate and
an alternation of products well-nigh unparalleled for such a limited
area. The warm air of the sea penetrating into sheltered valleys favours
an almost tropical vegetation, while the lofty mountain ridges offer
almost an Alpine climate. In Attica, in early spring, snow may
occasionally be seen sprinkled on Hymettus and glistening white on Mount
Pentelicus, while oranges hang on the trees in Athens. Taygetus in the
south maybe a snow-covered mountain even as late as May while in the
Messenian plain below grows the palm and, more rarely, the edible date.
In the Argolis are groves of lemons and oranges, and in Naxos, in the
same latitude as Sparta, the tender lime ripens in the gardens. The
gray-green olive is familiar throughout Central and Southern Greece. If
we extend the survey farther north, the beeches of the Pindus range,
west of Thessaly, are surrounded by the vegetation rather of northern
Europe; in the interior of Thessaly the olive tree does not flourish;
the northern shores of the Ægean have the climate of Central Germany,
while Mount Athos, whose marble walls jut far out into the Ægean and
rise 6400 feet above the sea, offers on its slopes nearly all species of
European trees in succession.
The different parts of Greece offer a varying development in literature.
In this particular some districts, like Acarnania, Ætolia, and Achæa,
though possessed of great natural beauty, are negligible. Arcadia,
though itself unproductive, inspired poetry; others, also, like Phocis,
Locris, and Messenia, are inevitably drawn into the associations of
literature and history. In Epirus we find at Dodona the first known
sanctuary of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks. In Thessaly the
earliest Greeks, or Achæans, may have first forged in the fire of their
young imagination the tempered steel of the hexameter. Here was the home
of Achilles, and here, perhaps, we must look for the kernel of the
Iliad. Here most fitly, close to Olympus where dwelt the immortals,
could the sons of men be “near-gods.”
From the north and northwest successive waves of population descended
into lower Greece to conquer, merge with, or become subject to the
previous comers. But prehistoric peoples, whether alien or Greek, like
the Eteo-Cretans, the Pelasgi, the Minyæ, the Leleges, the Hellenes, the
Achæans, and even great movements like the Dorian and Ionian migrations,
are all foreshortened on a scenic background, as equidistant to the
Greeks of the classic periods as is the vault of heaven to the eyes of
children. One star, indeed, differed from another. The Dorian, for
example, was of the first magnitude. But the relations of apparent
magnitude and real distance were ignored or naïvely confused in the
fanciful constellations of myth and saga, distant yet ever present,
bending around them to their explored horizon. Heroic figures impalpable
but real as the gods themselves intervened continually, controlling
decisions, shaping policies, or determining disputed boundaries among
even the most intellectual of the Greeks. Royalty, oligarchy, democracy,
and tyranny alike must reckon with personified tradition.
When we emerge into the light of more authentic records it is well, in
the confusing maze of inter-cantonal contentions, to focus the mind, for
the purpose of appreciating the literature, upon certain broader
relations and more clearly defined epochs in Greek history, like the
so-called “Age of the Despots” within the seventh and sixth centuries,
the Persian wars, and the conflicts between Attica as a pivot and the
Peloponnese, Thebes, and Macedon.
It might be expected from the variety of natural charm offered by
Hellenic lands, from Ilium to Sicily, from Mount Olympus to Crete, that
the Greeks would show in their literature a pervasive love of nature.
This was, in fact, the case. The modern eye has not been the first to
discover the beauty of form and colour in the Greek flowers and birds,
mountains, sky and sea. Modern critics, ignoring all historical
perspective and assuming as a procrustean standard the one-sided and
sophisticated attitude that has played a leading rôle in modern
literature, announced as axiomatic that ancient Greek poets had no
feeling for nature and found no pleasure in looking at the beauties of a
landscape. This superficial idea still keeps cropping up, although
thoughtful readers of Greek literature have long since pointed out the
necessity both of a chronological analysis of the literature and of a
more inclusive statement of the various forms in which a sentiment for
the natural world is evinced.[1] It is a far cry from Homer to
Theocritus, and, as might well be expected in a range of six centuries
and more, new elements appear from time to time, due both to changing
conditions of life and civilization and also to the personal equation.
Footnote 1:
Cf. Fairclough, _The Attitude of the Greek Tragedians toward Nature_.
A naïve feeling for nature is uppermost in the descriptive comparisons
and similes of Homer and, generally speaking, in the myth-making of the
Greeks. The concrete embodiment of natural phenomena and objects in some
Nature-divinity often obviated the necessity for elaborate description
and summarized their conceptions as if by an algebraic formula. The
mystical element was not lacking, but by this myth-making process it
became objective and real. The sympathetic feeling for nature becomes
more and more apparent in lyric poetry and the drama until in Euripides
there emerges, almost suddenly, the “modern” romanticism. In the
Hellenistic and imperial times, finally, the sentimental element is
natural to men who turn to the country for relief from the stress of
life in a city. One generalization for the classic periods may be safely
made. Although the Greeks from Homer to Euripides thought of the world
as the environment of man, yet they stopped short of a sentimental
self-analysis. Charles Eliot Norton, more than thirty years ago, pointed
out that the expression of a sentiment like Wordsworth’s—
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—
is foreign to the clear-eyed Hellene, reared amongst the distinct
outlines of his mountains and from the cradle to the grave at home upon
the blue and windswept Ægean. Certainly this is true until the
speculative questionings of the Ionic philosophers had time to react
upon literature. As the Greeks accepted their pedigrees from the gods
and heroes, so they accepted their environment of beauty. They were not
unlike the child, content to betray by a stray word or caress his
unanalyzed admiration for his mother’s face.
Emphasis has often been laid, and rightly, upon the keen sensitiveness
of the Greeks to beauty of form in sculpture, architecture, and
literature. It is urged that they made this sense of form and proportion
so paramount that they were blind to the beauty of colouring and
indifferent to the prodigal variety of Nature’s compositions. It may be
readily admitted that this is a vital distinction between the ancient
and modern attitudes. Both the craving for perfection of form and the
preference given to man before nature come out in the preëminent
development of sculpture by the Greeks. Their admiration of the beauty
of the human form, unlike the sensitive shrinking of moderns, was
extended even to the lifeless body. Æschylus speaks of the warriors who
have found graves before Troy as still “fair of form.”
But a prevailing tendency does not necessarily exclude other elements.
However meagre the vocabulary of the Greeks in sharp distinction of
shades of colour, their love for a bright colour-scheme is shown not
only by the brilliancy of their clothing and their use of colouring in
statuary and architecture,—for even in these mere form was not
enough,—but in unnumbered expressions like Alcman’s “sea-purple bird of
the springtime.”
A few of the more obvious passages, illustrating the Greek attitude
toward nature, are here given in general historic sequence. Others will
be found in the subsequent chapters in connection with particular
landscapes. Very often such references are casual and subordinate to
some controlling idea, but they none the less reflect habitual
observation. Even when we speak of Homeric “tags,” like the
“saffron-robed” or “rosy-fingered,” or of Sappho’s “golden-sandalled”
Dawn, as “standing epithets,” we are implying that these epithets made a
general appeal. The naïve insertions in Homer of comparisons drawn from
birds and beasts, from night and storm and other familiar elements of
nature, would seem like an intrusive delay of the story did they not
carry with them the conviction that both poet and hearers alike were
well content to linger by the way and observe the objects of daily life
indoors and out. Thus in the Odyssey:—
“The lion mountain-bred, with eyes agleam, fares onward in the rain
and wind to fall upon the oxen or the sheep or wilding deer.”
Or, again:—
“Hermes sped along the waves like sea-mew hunting fish in awesome
hollows of the sea unharvested and wetting his thick plumage in the
brine.”
One of the longer and best known comparisons is the description in the
Iliad of the Trojan encampment by night:—
“Now they with hearts exultant through the livelong night sat by the
space that bridged the moat of war, their watch-fires multitudinous
alight. And just as in the sky the stars around the radiant moon shine
clear; when windless is the air; when all the peaks stand out, the
lofty forelands and the glades; when breaketh open from the sky the
ether infinite and all the stars are seen and make the shepherds glad
at heart—so manifold appeared the watch-fires kindled by the Trojan
men in front of Ilios betwixt the streams of Xanthus and the ships. So
then a thousand fires burned upon the plain and fifty warriors by the
side of each were seated in the blazing fire’s gleam the while the
horses by the chariots stood and champed white barley and the spelt
and waited for the throned Dawn.”
Sappho’s fragments are redolent of flowers; her woven verse, a “rich-red
chlamys” in the sunshine, has a silver sheen in the moonlight. We hear
the full-throated passion of “the herald of the spring, the
nightingale”; the breeze moves the apple boughs, the wind shakes the oak
trees. Her allusions to “the hyacinths, darkening the ground, when
trampled under foot of shepherds”; the “fine, soft bloom of grass,
trodden by the tender feet of Cretan women as they dance”; or the
“golden pulse growing on the shore,”—all these seem inevitable to one
who has seen the acres of bright flowers that carpet the islands or the
nearby littoral of the Asian coast. Her comparison of a bridegroom to “a
supple sapling” recalls how Nausicaä, vigorous, tall, and straight as
the modern athletic maiden, is likened by Odysseus to the “young shaft
of a palm tree” that he had once seen “springing up in Delos by Apollo’s
altar.” In her Lesbian orchards the sweet quince-apple is still left
hanging “solitary on the topmost bough, upon its very end”; and there is
heard “cool murmuring through apple boughs while slumber floateth down
from quivering leaves.” Nor need we attribute Sappho’s love of natural
beauty wholly to her passionate woman’s nature. All the gentler emotions
springing from an habitual observation of nature recur in poets of the
sterner sex. “The Graces,” she says, “turn their faces from those who
wear no garlands.” And at banquets wreaths were an essential also for
masculine full-dress. Pindar, in describing Elysian happiness, leads up
to the climax of the companionship with the great and noble dead by
telling how “round the islands of the Blest the ocean breezes blow and
flowers of gold are blooming: some from the land on trees of splendour
and some the water feedeth; with wreaths whereof they twine their heads
and hands.”[2] Against the green background passes Evadne with her
silver pitcher and her girdle of rich crimson woof, and her child is
seen “hidden in the rushes of the thicket unexplored, his tender flesh
all steeped in golden and deep purple light from pansy flowers.”
Footnote 2:
Translation (modified) by E. Myers.
To follow through the poetry of the Greeks the unfailing delight in the
radiance of the moon would be to follow her diurnal course as she passes
over Greek lands from east to west. The full moon looked down on all the
Olympian festivals and Pindar’s pages are illuminated with her
glittering argentry. The Lesbian nights inspire Sappho as did all things
beautiful.
“The clustering stars about the radiant moon avert their faces bright
and hide, what time her orb is rounded to the full and touches earth
with silver.”
Wordsworth could take this thought from Sappho: “The moon doth with
delight look round her when the heavens are bare,” but the Lesbian
certainly did not finish the fragment by lamenting that “there has
passed away a glory from the earth.”
The night and the day alike claimed the attention of the poets and the
interchange of dusk and dawn appealed to the sculptor also. In the east
gable of the Parthenon the horses of the Sun and of the Moon were at
either end. Nature’s sleep is a favourite topic. Alcman’s description is
unusual only for its detail:—
“Sleep the peaks and mountain clefts;
Forelands and the torrents’ rifts;
All the creeping things are sleeping,
Cherished in the black earth’s keeping;
Mountain-ranging beast and bee;
Fish in depths of the purple sea;
Wide-winged birds their pinions droop—
Sleep now all the feathered troop.”
Goethe, in his well-known paraphrase,—
“Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,”—
cannot refrain from adding the subjective conclusion of the whole
matter:—
“Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.”
The great dramatists display an observation of the beauty of the
external world not always sufficiently emphasized. In Æschylus an
intense feeling is evident; none the less because it is subordinated to
his theme or used to point, by way of contrast, some awe-inspiring or
pathetic situation or some scene of blood. Clytemnestra describes how
she murdered her husband. His spattering blood, she says,—
“Keeps striking me with dusky drops of murd’rous dew,
Aye, me rejoicing none the less than God’s sweet rain
Makes glad the corn-land at the birth-pangs of the buds.”
Comparisons, similes, and epithets drawn from the sea reappear
continually in the warp and woof of Greek, and especially of Athenian,
literature. Æschylus, like the rest, knew the sea in all its moods,
terrible in storm, deceitful in calm, beautiful at all times and the
pathway for commerce and for war. The returning herald in the
“Agamemnon” rehearses the soldiers’ hard bivouac in summer and in
winter:—
“And should one tell of winter, dealing death to birds,
What storms unbearable swept down from Ida’s snow,
Or summer’s heat when, ruffled by no rippling breeze,
Ocean slept waveless, on his midday couch laid prone.”
With the first lines of “Prometheus Bound” we are carried far from the
haunts of men:—
“Unto this far horizon of earth’s plain we’ve come,
This Scythian tract, this desert by man’s foot untrod.”
Hephæstus reluctant, compelled by Zeus’s order, rivets his kin-god, the
Fire-bringer, to the desolate North Sea crag and withdraws leaving
Prometheus in fetters to “wrestle down the myriad years of time.” The
night shuts off the warmth and light, drawing over him her
“star-embroidered robe,” and the fierce sun-god returns with blazing
rays to “deflower his fair skin” bared of the white counterpane of
“frost of early dawn.” Not until the emissaries of Zeus have departed
does Prometheus deign to speak. Then he “communes with Nature.” He has
no hope of help from God, none from the “helpless creatures of a day”
whom he has helped. Alone with the forces of nature he utters that
outcry unsurpassed in sublimity and in pathos:—
“O upper air divine and winds on swift wings borne;
Ye river-springs; innumerous laughter of the waves
Of Ocean; thou, Earth, the mother of us all;
And thou, all-seeing orb of the Sun—to you I cry:
Behold me what I’m suffering, a god from gods!”
Sophocles, too, lets Philoctetes, in his misery and loneliness on the
rocky island of Lemnos, call out to the wild beasts and the landscape:—
“Harbours and headlands; and ye mountain-ranging beasts,
Companions mine; ye gnawed and hanging cliffs! Of this
To you I cry aloud, for I have none save you—
You ever present here—to whom to make my cry.”
In his famous ode on the Attic Colonus he describes the natural beauty
of his home with particularizing exactness. He has also a wealth of
glittering epithet used for local colouring, for symbolism and
personification. The contrast of day and night offers to him a welcome
_mise-en-scène_. The sun’s rays are Apollo’s golden shafts and the
moon’s light seems to filter through the trees as Artemis roams the
uplands:—
“O God of the light, from the woven gold
Of the strings of thy bow, I am fain to behold
Thy arrows invincible, showered around,
As champions smiting our foes to the ground.
And Artemis, too, with her torches flaring,
Gleams onward through Lycian uplands faring.”
Bacchus, also, the “god of the golden snood,” “lifts his pine-knot’s
sparkle” and, roaming with his Mænads, seems to visualize for men the
soul of Nature.
Aristophanes with his common-sense objectivity was averse to the
sentimental and romantic in Euripides, which seemed to him effeminate.
His love for nature was clear-eyed and Hellenic. His lyrics shine like a
bird’s white wing in the sunlight. The self-invocation of the Clouds is
alive with the radiance of the Attic atmosphere. A translation can only
serve to illustrate the elements used in the description:—
CHORUS OF CLOUDS
“Come ever floating, O Clouds, anew,
Let us rise with the radiant dew
Of our nature undefiled
From father Ocean’s billows wild.
The tree-fringed peak
Of hill upon lofty hill let us seek
That we may look on the cliffs far-seen,
And the sacred land’s water that lends its green
To the fruits, and the whispering rush of the rivers divine
And the clamorous roar of the dashing brine.
For Ether’s eye is flashing his light
Untired by glare as of marble bright.”
The “meteor eyes” of the sun gaze “sanguine” and unblinking upon the
cloud-palisades, glaring bright as the marble of Mount Pentelicus.
Readers of the Greek will recognize here and there how an Aristophanic
epithet or thought has been precipitated and recombined by Shelley into
new and radiant shapes that drift through his own cloud-land,—“I change
but I cannot die!”
Aristophanes’s observation of nature is varied and exact. He had nothing
but ridicule for the pale student within doors, and only a man who kept
up an intimacy with “the open road” could have made the naturalistic
painting in the “Peace” of the serenity of country life:—
“We miss the life of days gone by, the pressed fruit-cakes, the figs,
the myrtles and the sweet new wine, the olive trees, the violet bed
beside the well.”
Euripides in his attitude toward nature has all the qualities of the
other tragedians except sublimity, to which he more rarely attains. Many
qualities are much more conspicuous. His range of colour is wider. His
allusions to rivers and to the plant and animal world are more detailed.
Picturesque scenes and setting delight him. Beyond all this the
reflection in nature of human emotion, occasional in his predecessors,
plays in his verse almost a leading part. Modern romanticism, in short,
is no longer exceptional.
Hippolytus, the acolyte of Artemis, and his attendants address the
virgin goddess who ranges the woods and mountains and who, as Æschylus
says, is “kindly unto all the young things suckled at the breast of
wild-wood roaming beasts.” The “modern” element in the original loses
nothing in this paraphrase by Mallock:—
“Hail, O most pure, most perfect, loveliest one!
Lo, in my hand I bear,
Woven for the circling of thy long gold hair,
Culled leaves and flowers, from places which the sun
The Spring long shines upon,
Where never shepherd hath driven flock to graze,
Nor any grass is mown;
But there sound throughout the sunny, sweet warm days,
’Mid the green holy place
The wild bee’s wings alone.”
In one of the despairing chorals of the “Trojan Women” the
personification of nature blends with the spirit of mythology. The name
of Tithonus, easily supplied by a Greek hearer, is inserted for English
readers in Gilbert Murray’s beautiful paraphrase:—
“For Zeus—O leave it unspoken:
But alas for the love of the Morn;
Morn of the milk-white wing
The gentle, the earth-loving,
That shineth on battlements broken
In Troy, and a people forlorn!
And, lo, in her bowers Tithonus,
Our brother, yet sleeps as of old:
O, she too hath loved us and known us,
And the Steeds of her star, flashing gold,
Stooped hither and bore him above us;
Then blessed we the Gods in our joy.
But all that made them to love us
Hath perished from Troy.”
When Dionysus addresses his Bacchantes, Euripides, in lines reminiscent
of Alcman, imposes upon outward nature the solemn expectancy of the
inward mind:—
“Hushed was the ether; in hushed silence whispered not
Leaves in the coppice nor the blades of meadow grass;
No cry at all of any wild things had you heard.”
The formal banns of the open wedlock of man and nature were declared in
Euripides. Thereafter the treatment became more and more a matter of
personal equation. In Plato’s dialogues, for example, the ethical
element inevitably appears. In the famous scene beside the Ilissus,
Socrates and young Phædrus talk through the heated hours beneath the
shade of the wide-spreading plane tree, where the agnus castus is in
full bloom, where water cool to the unsandalled feet flows by, and in
the branches the cicadæ, “prophets of the Muses,” contribute of their
wisdom.
The Anthology, stretched through the centuries of Greek literature,
links the old and the newer, the antique reserve and the fainness of
modern romanticism. One of the epigrams attributed to Plato will serve
to indicate the emergence of the latter:—
“On the stars thou art gazing, my Star;
Would that the sky I might be,
For then from afar
With my manifold eyes I would gaze upon thee.”
Another seems like an artist’s preliminary sketch for the picture by the
Ilissus, the deeper motive not yet painted in:—
“Sit thee down by this pine tree whose twigs without number
Whisper aloft in the west wind aquiver.
Lo! here by my stream as it chattereth ever
The Panpipe enchanteth thy eyelids to slumber.”
From this we pass without break to the piping shepherds and the country
charms with which Theocritus filled his Idyls for city-jaded men:—
... “There we lay
Half buried in a couch of fragrant reed
And fresh-cut vine leaves, who so glad as we?
A wealth of elm and poplar shook o’erhead;
Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on
From the Nymphs’ grot, and in the sombre boughs
The sweet cicada chirped laboriously.
Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away
The treefrog’s note was heard; the crested lark
Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan,
And o’er the fountain hung the gilded bee.”[3]
Footnote 3:
Translated by C. S. Calverly.
Notwithstanding the variety in landscape and the lack of unified
nationality in the long centuries of Greek history, there is a unity in
the impression of ancient life left upon the mind by a visit to Greece.
This is in part due to the comparative meagreness of remains from
periods subsequent to classic times. The long obliteration of mediæval
and modern constructive civilization leaves more clear the outlines of
antiquity.
This is true even though the sum total of the remains of Byzantine and
mediæval life, on islands and on mainland, is large and claims the
attention from time to time. In Athens the traveller will come upon the
small Metropolis church with its ancient Greek calendar of festivals,
let in as a frieze above the entrance and metamorphosed into Byzantine
sanctity by the inscribing of Christian crosses. As he journeys to and
fro in Greece he may see the venerable “hundred-gated” church on the
island of Paros, recalling in certain details the proscenium of an
ancient theatre; Monemvasia with its vast ruins, the home of Byzantine
ecclesiasticism and a splendour of court life that vied with the pomp
and magnificence of western Europe; or the ivy-clad ruins of Mistra, an
epitome of Græco-Byzantine art from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
century; the frowning hill and castle of Karytæna that guards the
approach to the mountain fastnesses of Arcadia; or the ancient acropolis
of Lindus on the island of Rhodes with the impregnable fortress of the
Knights of St. John.
Nor will the visitor ignore the reminders of the War of Independence and
the renascence of life in modern Greece. Mesolonghi, Nauplia, and
Arachova have contributed fresh chapters to human history. Aligned with
ancient names are those of modern heroes in the nomenclature of the
streets and of public squares, like the Karaiskakis Place that welcomes
the traveller as he disembarks at Piræus.
But all of these, whether mediæval or modern, fail to blur the
understanding of antiquity. They do not obtrude themselves. Often they
even illustrate ancient life. The same wisdom that transferred
allegiance from the Saturnalia to the Christmas festival has here also
been careful to use for Byzantine churches the site of ancient shrines
or temples: St. Elias is a familiar name on high mountains where once
stood altars of the Olympians; the cult of Dionysus has been skilfully
transformed, in vine-rearing Naxos, into that of St. Dionysius; SS.
Cosmo and Damiano, patrons of medicine, and known as the “feeless”
saints, have established their free dispensary in place of an
Asklepieion; the twelve Apostles have replaced the “Twelve Gods”; and
churches dedicated to St. Demetrius have been substituted for shrines of
Demeter.
The thoughtful student of the literature of the Greeks, no matter how
enthusiastic he may be, will not fail to draw warnings as well as
inspiration from their history. But no defects of the Greeks nor
achievements of posterity can dispossess Hellas of her peculiar lustre.
“No other nation,” as Mr. Ernest Myers has said with particular
reference to the age of Pindar, “has ever before or since known what it
was to stand alone immeasurably advanced at the head of the civilization
of the world.”