PIRÆUS, THE HARBOUR TOWN
“Returning from Asia Minor and voyaging from Ægina toward Megara
I began to look on the places round about me. Behind me was
Ægina; before me Megara; on the right Piræus; on the left
Corinth—cities once flourishing, now prostrate and in ruins.”
SERVIUS SULPICIUS _to_ Cicero.
The sail in bright sunshine up the Gulf of Ægina, the ancient Saronic
Gulf, will have fulfilled the traveller’s anticipations of the beauty of
Greece and will have quickened the historic imagination. History and
antiquity, however, will give place to the insistent claims of modern
Greek life, as the steamer enters the busy port and passes through the
narrow opening between the welcoming arms of the ancient moles which
still protect the harbour and serve at night to hold up the green and
red signal lights for mariners.
[Illustration: PIRÆUS]
In this harbour meet the Orient and the Occident. One may see here craft
of all kinds from all parts of the Mediterranean and from beyond the
Straits; modern steamers, big and little; gunboats, native or foreign;
sailing vessels from the Greek islands or Turkish possessions, laden
with bright cargoes of yellow lemons and Cretan oranges, great grapes
purple and white, or “tunnies steeped in brine”; here a steamer packed
with pilgrims for a religious festival on Tenos; here, perhaps, another
vessel crowded with American tourists to Jerusalem.
Upon landing, most visitors go immediately to Athens, but no one should
fail to return once and again to Piræus in order to see the extant
remains of the ship-houses; of the gateways and walls to the northwest
of the Great Harbour; of the walls that skirt the whole peninsula; of
the theatres and other scanty traces of the old life within the city.
Even to a traveller innocent of the facts of Greek history, the drive at
sunset along the rim of the peninsula and the indenting harbours will be
one of the best remembered experiences in the neighbourhood of Athens,
by reason of the sheer physical beauty of land and sea, islands and
distant mountains.
The terminus of the electric railroad from Athens to Piræus is in the
northwest corner of the modern town between the lines now assumed for
the “Themistocles Wall” and the “Wall of Conon,” dating, respectively,
from the two most significant epochs in the history of Piræus. Although
the tyrant Hippias had begun to fortify the Munychia hill in the sixth
century B. C., his undertaking was interrupted, and it was left for
Themistocles, in the early part of the fifth century, to begin, and
finally to carry well on the way to completion, the transformation into
a sea-fortress of this natural vantage-ground. Later, he was for
removing Athens itself to Piræus. Failing in this, he shifted the
habitat for the new fleet from the open roadstead of Phalerum, which was
nearer Athens, to the land-locked harbours of Piræus. But the return of
the Persians, ten years after Marathon, surprised the Athenians with
their preparations incomplete, and Athens was transferred, not indeed to
Piræus, but to the “wooden walls” of the triremes themselves.
When, under Pericles, Athens reached the acme of her intellectual,
artistic, and material power, around the harbours at Piræus had been
built a well-planned city, with stately avenues and dwellings for
wealthy men and wealthier gods. The port had been completely fortified
either by the restoration and carrying out of the interrupted building
or by the extension of the plans of Themistocles. A massive wall
inclosed the three harbours within its circuit, and strong moles,
lasting on into modern times, guarded their entrances. Ship-houses had
also been built, and doubtless an arsenal, though a less pretentious one
than the great structure afterwards erected. In short, all the
paraphernalia existed for offensive and defensive naval operations. The
“Long Walls,” actually built soon after the banishment of Themistocles
in 472 B. C., had united Athens and its port into a dual city. No
greater proof of the vital union of the two cities could be cited than
the rage and grief felt by the citizens when, at the end of the
Peloponnesian War, in 404 B. C., the Spartans razed the Long Walls. It
was amputating the very feet of the imperial Queen of the Ægean.
Some ten years later, the Long Walls were rebuilt and the restoration of
the Piræus fortifications was taken in hand. Of the remains now visible,
the major part belongs to this rebuilding at the beginning of the fourth
century. A little less than a century had elapsed since Marathon, and we
now find Athens allied with her old enemy, Persia, against another Greek
state. Conon the Athenian, victorious over the Spartans in the naval
battle of Cnidus, sent back Persian gold to fortify the Piræus anew, and
the circuit wall, of which such extensive remains are extant, was called
by his name.
On issuing from the electric railroad station, the visitor sees before
him, a few yards distant, the Great Harbour’s smaller, inner fold, known
in antiquity as “The Marsh” (Port d’Halæ) or, perhaps, as the “Blind”
Harbour. This inner harbour, roughly a third of a mile by a sixth in
size, now furnishes ample accommodation for smaller craft and a
convenient landing-place, although in Conon’s day it was probably more
of a marshy barrier than a navigable sheet of water. If the whole
contour of the two harbours together suggested the designation of
“Cantharus,” it may have been from either the meaning “Beetle,” or that
of “Two-handled Cup.” Until recently, the name was identified with the
southernmost portion only of the Great Harbour. The _locus classicus_ is
the “Peace” of Aristophanes. Dædalus and Icarus with their
flying-machines had long since anticipated the modern aëroplane, and in
this comedy Trygæus in search of Peace starts out to navigate Zeus’s
ether on his “beetle.” 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]
Footnote 4:
The Cantharus, or beetle, of Trygæus is likened in the comedy to a
Naxian boat, a resemblance easily recognized in the drinking-cup
called “Cantharus,” with its two projecting handles for bow and stern.
Skirting now the northern margin of the inner harbour, the route will
follow in part the probable line of the demolished wall of Themistocles,
which extended on and reached the water outside both the peninsula of
Eetioneia and the outer bay of Krommydaru, where traces of the more
ancient fortifications are still extant. Close by the modern station of
the Larisa railway, however, will be found the very considerable ruins
of a gateway identified with the Conon walls. This alone is an ample
reward for the long détour around the harbour.
If time and energy permit, it is well worth while, instead of crossing
by boat to Akte, to return to the starting-point and to saunter along
the whole margin of the Great Harbour. Particularly picturesque are the
great sloops, laden with lemons and oranges, moored in behind the
Karaiskakis square, which only the pedestrian would be likely to
discover. As one lingers along the quays, however, modern warships and
all the craft for commerce and travel will give place to the memories
evoked from the greater past. This harbour of commerce will, in
imagination, be once more crowded with triremes, brought around from the
two war-harbours on the other side, to be inspected one after the other
by the Council of the Five Hundred. As official inspectors of the
triremes, when made ready to set out for conquest or defeat, this
Council held its sittings on the Choma, probably a little promontory
that juts southward from the Karaiskakis Place. One may recall, with the
help of Thucydides, the setting out of the ill-starred Sicilian
expedition. No such vast array had ever left the harbour for so distant
and protracted a warfare. All the citizens of Athens as well as of
Piræus are here to witness the departure of sons and friends. High hopes
of imperial expansion feed the imagination of the multitude. Some rest
their confidence on divine favour sure to accompany the pious, though
reluctant, Nicias; others put faith in the warrior Lamachus; more in the
brilliant Alcibiades, still idolized though accused of sharing in the
mutilation of the Hermæ. The great fleet of swift triremes is ready,
together with the transports for heavy-armed soldiers, equipments, and
supplies. Now the men are all on board and a hush falls upon the throng
at a sudden blast of the trumpet. The prayers, according to established
ritual, are offered by the united squadron. At a concerted sign, the
mixing-bowls are crowned throughout the whole host and the men and
generals pour libations from gold and silver cups. The throngs upon the
land, both citizens and foreign well-wishers, join in the service. The
hymn of triumph sung, the libations poured, the ships weigh anchor and
put to sea. But before the last trireme has passed through the moles,
and while the ear still catches the notes of the flute and the voice of
the _Keleustæ_, giving the time to the crews, a revulsion of grim
presentiment overmasters many of the watchers on the shore. The
expedition now no longer seems what they so lightly voted in the
assembly. The ever-recurrent Greek feeling that “high things annoy the
god” calls up the warning words of Æschylus, uttered a generation
before, in the year of the unlucky Egyptian expedition sent out on a
similar venture:—
“Grown Insolence is wont to breed
Young Insolence midst mortals’ sorrow,
Then, then, when to th’ implanted seed
There comes the birth-light’s destined morrow.”
Or else his immortal lament “over the unreturning brave” comes unbidden
to their lips:—
“Whom one sent forth to war one knows, but, in the stead of men, come
back unto the homes of each but urns and ashes.”
The mysterious mutilation of the Hermæ is fresh in mind and the fear of
angered gods reasserts its sway. But no presentiment of ill could
anticipate the reality of the disaster in the harbour of Syracuse or the
slow tortures of living death in its stone quarries. A chance for
retaliation in kind was indeed to come. In a Piræus stone quarry
Syracusan captives were in turn imprisoned a few years later, but they,
more lucky than the Athenians, cut their way to freedom from their
rock-bound prison.
Despite the imperious insolence of Athens and her unrighteous schemes
for aggrandizement, our sympathy in the tragedy is ever fresh. By the
harbour side we mourn to-day the predestined doom of the gallant
squadron and the stricken city. Through the ebb and flow of hope and
disaster, the thought sweeps on to the close of the war and the
humiliation of Athens at the hands of Sparta; the destruction of the
Long Walls, their rebuilding and the refortification of Piræus under
Conon; the aftermath of Athenian power; the brilliant age of Plato and
the orators; the struggle with Philip; the fall of Greek liberty; the
sway of Macedon; the Roman conquest, with the long, stubborn siege of
Piræus so graphically described by Appian. Sulla, exasperated by the
long defence of the Mithridatic army, with whom the Athenians had cast
in their lot, burnt the arsenal and docks and razed the fortifications
so utterly that the Roman governor, Sulpicius, in writing to his friend
Cicero in 45 B. C., could describe Piræus as the “corpse” of a great
city. In the second century of our era it had resumed a semblance of
commercial prosperity. Lucian, in his dialogue, “When My Ship Comes In,”
goes down to Piræus with a friend to admire a great grain transport that
has just put into harbour on its way from Egypt to Rome. For a
merchantman it is large; some 180 feet long, 45 in beam, and over 40
feet in depth to the hold. The prow stretches out long, and at the stern
is the gilded figure-head of a goose with its graceful curving neck. The
two friends wonder at a sailor mounting nimbly by the swaying ropes and
running out nonchalantly along the great yardarm, as he holds on by the
yardsheets. But the generous cargo of grain, enough, as we are told, to
feed Athens for a year, is destined for Rome. Athens was no longer the
emporium of the eastern Mediterranean. She had become a way-station. No
longer could she enforce the old law, mentioned by Aristotle, which
required that two thirds of the cargo of every grain-ship that put into
Piræus must be carried up to the metropolis.
After Roman times, in the long atrophy of the Byzantine age, Piræus
dwindled to a group of fishermen’s huts. It revived somewhat under De la
Roche in the fourteenth century, and thereafter, at least was known as
Porto Leone from the seated figure of a marble lion that kept guard
among the ruins like the majestic lion that still sentinels the
battlefield of Chæronea. In the seventeenth century, the Venetians
carried off this Piræus lion, and now, seated by another arsenal in
another seaport, careless of the passing tourist, it looks grimly over
the Adriatic where steamers come and go between the neighbouring Trieste
and its native land.
Leaving now the Great Harbour and our meditations on the vicissitudes of
history, we resume our inspection of the fan-shaped peninsula. Without a
special permit the visitor is excluded from the western end and from the
Royal Garden which encloses the most probable site of the Tomb of
Themistocles, if indeed his bones were ever brought back from burial in
exile. His official tomb was in Magnesia in Caria. A public interment in
his native land could not be granted to one exiled as a traitor.
Thucydides knows only of a secret burial of his bones in Attica. The
remains of the monument in question stand on the point of Akte near the
entrance to the outermost harbour. From this tomb the great admiral’s
spirit could still watch over the Athenian sea-power. Skepticism about
the site is forgotten when we read the fragment, meagre as it is, of the
comic poet Plato:—
“Fair is the outlook where thy mounded tomb is placed.
For it will signal merchantmen from here and yon,
It will behold the sailors faring out and in,
Will be spectator of the triremes’ racing oars.”
This “contest of the triremes” may allude to the boat-race in which the
course lay from Cantharus harbour around the whole peninsula to
Munychia. These races in sacred ships were part of the systematic
training of the Attic youths.
The public road leads over the shoulder of the hill and, in descending
again to the coast, offers a beautiful view to the west and south over
the Saronic Gulf. The driveway then runs along the water’s edge around
the promontory, keeping close inside the ruined “Wall of Conon.”
Although the remains of this encircling wall rise nowhere more than
about eight feet above ground, and usually much less, yet the very
continuity of the ruins is imposing. Practically in an unbroken line the
solid masonry hems the irregular rim of the peninsula from the mouth of
the Great Harbour to a point not far distant from the war-harbour of Zea
on the opposite side and may be traced again intermittently around to
the Bay of Phalerum. Solid tower buttresses are interposed at frequent
intervals. On this southern shore of Akte, where the modern town does
not intrude, the spectator is free to divide his attention between the
beauty of the sea view and thoughts of the past.
The picturesque land-locked harbours of Zea and Munychia next claim our
interest. The pear-shaped Zea basin, now known by the Turco-Greek name
of Pashalimani, makes into the neck of the peninsula between the
promontory hill of Akte and the Acropolis of Munychia. Behind it and
close to it was erected in the fourth century the great Arsenal, and at
various points beneath its transparent water may still be seen distinct
remains of 38 of the ship-ways that ran down from the ancient
ship-houses where the triremes were drawn up. Inscriptions tell us that
there were originally 372 in all, of which 82 were in Munychia, 94 in
the Great Harbour, and the remainder in Zea. No other relic of antiquity
brings us into closer touch with the naval power of Athens and her
empire on the Ægean. The covered sheds themselves can only be
reconstructed in imagination. Some broken columns of the ship-houses and
portions of the launching piers remain _in situ_. To accommodate the 196
triremes, 130-165 feet long, assigned to the Zea Harbour, some of the
houses must have been constructed so as to dock the boats in at least
two tiers. At Syracuse, the formidable Piræus of the west, remains of
ship-sheds have been found, and at Carthage, the bitter foe of Syracuse,
they remained for Appian to describe. Dry-docks may have existed near
the harbour entrance. This narrow neck of the pear-shaped harbour was
still further guarded at the inner opening by projecting moles, which
here also are still extant. The entrance was actually closed, in case of
need, by chains extended across at the surface of the water. Of the
proud warships themselves, those chargers of the sea stabled in Zea,
there remains one realistic reminder. Their timbers have long since
rotted away, the gulfs have washed down all such small objects of
durable material as bronze nails and clamps, but some heavy plates of
Parian marble have been found in the harbour. These were set into the
bows of the warships, and upon them were painted the vessel’s eyes that
used to keep fierce outlook for the enemy or peer through the gloom of
night and storm for the first sight of the shoreward lights of Piræus.
Danaus at Argos, in the “Suppliants” of Æschylus, as he sees the
approaching ship, exclaims:—
“The bellying sails I see; the ox-hide bulwarks stretched
Along the vessel’s sides; the prow that with its eyes
Peers forward o’er the course.”
On the marble plates actually recovered the iris is painted bright red
or blue, and a vacant hole in the middle suggests the head of a
burnished bronze nail that served at once as the pupil of the eye and to
rivet on the plate. These eyes are common in representations of ancient
vessels, and only in recent years are they disappearing from use among
Sicilian and Italian boatmen.
The most casual survey of this protected haven will justify the sagacity
of Themistocles in concentrating his energy upon Piræus. His proposition
to transfer Athens altogether to the seaport was strategically wise. The
extent of the Long Walls, uniting the two into a double city, was a
source of weakness, as it drained the defenders away from both towns.
But it was a true instinct of the Athenians, which posterity endorses,
to cling to the sentiments evoked by their ancient city and in it to
develop to the full their intellectual empire.
It is probable that the extant traces of the ship-sheds in the two
war-harbours date back only as far as the fourth century B. C., but the
number and size fairly represent the older Periclean constructions. The
Thirty Tyrants destroyed the former ship-sheds, as Isocrates tells us,
and sold for three talents (about $3100) the material of these buildings
upon which the city had spent more than one thousand talents.
The ruins of the “Wall of Conon” can still be traced for some distance
to the east after leaving the harbour of Zea, and at the southeastern
promontory the ruins of ancient fortifications are again to be seen. The
harbour of Munychia (modern _Phanari_) is smaller than that of Zea. Its
contour is so perfect an oval as to seem artificial. It had space to
accommodate only eighty-two triremes in ship-houses, scanty remains of
which are here visible under the water.
At the east side the ruined wall may again be traced to the Bay of
Phalērum or (Greek) Phàleron, and beyond, curving around the Munychia
acropolis to complete the circuit to the north of the town.
Further east, on the open bay of Phaleron, is New Phaleron, a bathing
resort as frankly modern as the Lido at Venice. The exact site of Old
Phaleron is open to dispute, but the walk between it and Athens was a
favourite constitutional in Plato’s time. Many a classic conversation
was held here on the way. In the “Symposium” of Plato, Glaucon asks
Apollodorus: “Isn’t the road to Athens just made for conversation?” Now
the banality and the bareness of the city’s outskirts intrude sadly upon
the pedestrian’s philosophic equipoise, both here and on the other road
between Athens and Piræus where Lucian and his friend, in the second
century of our era, could still find shelter from the hot sun under some
olive trees by the wayside and “sit down to rest upon an overturned
stelé.”
The focus of the inner city life was the splendid Agora laid out by the
famous architect Hippodamus. Here ended the road from Athens. This
square was probably west of Munychia north of the Zea harbour, perhaps
about where the present Athena street intersects Munychia avenue. Near
it were probably grouped various sanctuaries. Xenophon tells how in the
civil war the patriotic party, “the men from Phyle,” unable to exclude
“the City party” from the whole of Piræus, fell back on the Munychia
hill, and the men from Athens blocked up the avenue that leads to the
temple of Bendis and to the sanctuary of Munychian Artemis. By this
Market-place, too, houses of rich residents were probably built.
The Piræus was essentially a democratic stronghold. It was the
rendezvous for the patriotic anti-Spartan party; and Plato, with all his
aristocratic leanings, chose to lay at Piræus the opening scene and
setting for his greatest dialogue, the “Republic.” It was the fitting
propylæa for his ideal city as well as for the real Athens. “I went down
yesterday,” Socrates begins, “to Piræus with Glaucon, both to make a
prayer to the goddess and to take a look at the festival to see how they
would carry it off, inasmuch as they are now celebrating it for the
first time.” The Thracian residents, it seems, had just introduced a
celebration in honour of their goddess Bendis, and the natives had
united with them. The whole port was _en fête_ with processions
conducted both by the hospitable native citizens and the Thracians
themselves. In the evening there was to be a torch-race followed by an
all-night festival. Socrates, who was on the point of returning to
Athens after witnessing the daylight processions, was easily persuaded
by Polemarchus to stay over for the torch-race, dining first at the
house of his father, the rich and hospitable old metic, Cephalus. At the
house Socrates finds another son, Lysias, who was soon to become famous
as an orator. For the Thirty were to plunder the property bequeathed by
Cephalus to his sons, all the ready money, the shield factory, and the
slaves; were to put summarily to death young Polemarchus; and were to
force Lysias, reduced to sudden poverty, to betake himself to
speech-writing for a living. His crowning effort was an arraignment of
his brother’s murderers. Most skilful of narrators, he tells of the fate
of Polemarchus; how his house was plundered; how his wife was robbed of
the very ear-rings from her ears; and how after his execution,
notwithstanding the just title of the family to large holdings of real
estate, he was buried from a hired shed, one friend providing a robe,
another a pillow, for the corpse. He tells, too, of his own arrest at
his home by the emissaries of the Thirty: how he bargained for his life
with a sum of ready money; how one of his captors followed him into the
inner room, looked over his shoulder into the money-chest, and took not
only the price agreed upon but all the contents of the strong box; how
he was taken to another house of a Piræus acquaintance; and how, while
his captors were keeping guard at the peristyle door in front, he had
escaped by a back door to the house of a friend, the shipmaster, with
the appropriate name of Archenaus. So, while his less fortunate brother,
Polemarchus, is led off to Athens, thrown into prison, and “bidden by
the Thirty their usual bidding—to drink hemlock,” Lysias, by the aid of
his nautical friend, is embarked for Megara under cover of night. We
should like to have fuller details of that escape of the young Lysias,
yesterday a wealthy manufacturer, to-day a plundered fugitive but
destined to become one of the greatest of the “ten” orators and a master
architect of Attic style. Perhaps a small boat put off from some lonely
spot on Akte, perhaps from the Great Harbour itself, shooting through
the moles in the darkness and, wind and weather permitting, kept to
starboard of the Psyttaleia reef, passed up through the strait of
Salamis, on through the beautiful Bay of Eleusis, and landed the
fugitive at Megara.
Plato’s account of the visit of Socrates to the Piræus homestead carries
us back to the days of security before the reign of the Thirty. We see
old Cephalus welcoming Socrates cordially, delivering a monologue on his
own gracious old age, telling a story about Sophocles in his later
years, and finally withdrawing to supervise a sacrifice to the gods.
The introduction of a foreign divinity like Bendis of the Thracians was
not unusual. The celebration, described at the opening of the Republic,
was at least no more exotic than a St. Patrick’s day in America.
Foreigners and natives united in it as they did in the celebration of
the Mother of the Gods. The customs inspection of foreign deities was
lenient. The Greeks were free traders both in art and religion, though
the finished product imported was likely enough to be used as new
material. Into the smelting furnace of the classic period was cast the
old, the new, the foreign, and the domestic, to reappear in fairer form,
stamped with the Hellenic hall-mark. Among the various imported deities,
Cybele is well vouched for at Piræus where a number of marble votive
shrines of the Great Mother have been found. One of these archaic Cybele
reliefs, brought from Piræus to the National Museum in Athens, shows the
goddess with her lion in her lap, her cymbals in her hand. The “new
theology,” fostered by Euripides and domiciled in daily life by the “New
Comedy,” could treat these cymbals as typical of “a creed out-worn.” One
of Menander’s characters exclaims:—
“No god, my wife, saves one man through another’s help,
For if a human being can by cymbals’ clash
Deflect the god to whatsoever is desired,
Then greater than the god is he that doeth this.”
Among various resident colonists who may have occupied distinct sections
of the city, like a mediæval Ghetto or a modern Italian quarter, the
worship of home divinities was kept alive. It is known, for example,
that the Egyptian resident merchants, perhaps as early as the end of the
fifth century, had received a special license to erect an Isis sanctuary
and the Cyprians instituted a similar cult of Adonis and Aphrodite.
Remains of the old gateway in the northern circuitwall, just where the
north Long Wall joined on, are still extant. Within a century, the
traces of the Long Walls themselves have been disappearing. Enough is
left, however, to mark their course at various points, and the remains
are particularly plain of the “South” Long Wall, where it nears the
Munychia acropolis. Ascending Munychia, we may imagine the Long Walls
still reaching up to Athens. We may picture them either in time of war,
with defenders within and foes without, or in time of peace, with the
stream of pedestrians bent upon pleasure or business. Outside the North
Wall was one of the places of execution. Plato illustrates the contest
between the brute in man and his higher reason by the story of a certain
Leontius who one day was walking up from Piræus and saw some dead bodies
fallen prostrate by the side of the executioner. He loathes the sight
but is fain to look. Vulgar curiosity gains the mastery; he runs up to
the dead bodies and, holding his eyelids wide open, exclaims: “There
wretches! Take your fill of the fine spectacle!”
Turning from the course of the Long Walls, the eye surveys the whole
panorama of the harbours and the city. Just within the old wall, on the
west slope of the Munychia hill, is the old Theatre in a ruined
condition. But we can think of the harbour folk in days of peace
enjoying on these same rising seats the plays of a Menander or Euripides
or see convened there in the times of grim civil strife a hurried
assembly of the patriotic party.
Somewhere close by the north side of Zea was the famous arsenal which,
though not built till near the end of the fourth century, has entirely
disappeared. Luckily, however, in 1882 there was discovered near the Zea
harbour a slab of Hymettus marble containing the directions given to the
contractors for its construction. It was built to contain the rigging,
tackle, sails, cables for undergirding the ships, etc., while the masts,
spars, oars, rudders, and other wooden gear seem to have been kept in
the ship-sheds themselves alongside of the ships. This arsenal of Philo
replaced an older and less elaborate one. It was a large building, four
hundred by five hundred feet within, and provided for a roomy arcade
where the populace, screened from the burning heat without, could
promenade and gaze at the suggestive evidences of their sea power.
Of the many private and public buildings, temples and colonnades
mentioned by classic authors, but few can be positively located. In the
Colonnade of the Exchange—the Deigma—Theophrastus, Menander’s friend and
the successor of Aristotle, represents his “Boastful Man,” a
shipping-merchant, as bragging about his great ventures and cargoes at
sea. Meanwhile his balance at the banker’s actually amounts to about
twenty cents. That this Deigma, where gossip was coined and bargains
struck around the money-changers’ tables, must have been close to the
edge of the Great Harbour is evident from Xenophon, who says that one
day twelve Lacedæmonian ships swept into the harbour suddenly, landed a
party and carried off from the Exchange a group of sea-captains and
merchants.
The site of the Asklepieion, partly church, partly sanatorium, has been
identified in the remains west of Zea. Aphrodite, born of the foam, is a
popular goddess with sailor-folk. To her were dedicated, it would seem,
no less than three sanctuaries at Piræus.
Lastly, there was the famous _Hieron_ or Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena.
Even its site cannot now be identified, but it must have been one of the
most frequented centres of Piræus life in the fifth century. An
inscription records that into the treasury of this sanctuary went the
tax of a drachma on every vessel that put into the port. Incidentally
many a further contribution was levied on the newly landed sailor, who
was as much a fish out of water among the land-sharks as is the modern
Jack Tar on ship’s leave. The comic poet Diphilus tells how one of these
harbour caterers used to select his victims: “For example there’s the
skipper who grudgingly pays off a vow made under stress of weather when
the mast went by the board or when he had snapped the rudder-sweeps of
the ship or else was forced by water rising in the hold to hurl his
cargo overboard. A wide berth I give to a fellow like him. Such a man
will not be free-handed; my best chance is with the captain who has made
a quick, safe voyage from Byzantium, who, all excitement over his gain
of ten or twelve per cent for three days’ risk, is loud in his chatter
about freights and usuries.” He’s the man for the purposes of this
shark, and no sooner is he landed than our keeper of the Sailors’ Snug
Retreat goes up to him, takes his hand, and reminds him that a sacrifice
at the temple of Zeus Preserver would be in order. He thoughtfully
relieves the skipper of any care, making the purchases, superintending
the offering, and sharing the commission with the priests of the Hieron.
And human nature was much the same five hundred years later, when we
again meet a skipper whose performance, once he is safe at Piræus, falls
far short of the vows made in storm and peril. Lucian, in his “Zeus the
Tragedian,” gives details. The Olympian Father, alarmed at the signs of
increasing irreligiousness and the consequent stringency in the
sacrificial market, calls an assembly of the gods. After some difficult
points of precedence as to order of seating have been temporarily waived
and half-naturalized divinities like Mithras and our Thracian Bendis
have been admitted, Zeus makes a speech. He begins fluently enough with
a mosaic of oratorical phrases which he has memorized from Demosthenes.
Presently, however, he exclaims: “But my Demosthenes is giving out. I
must tell you in plain Greek what has troubled me.” He reminds them of
the dinner in which some of them—“as many as had been invited”—had
participated the day before, when “Mnesitheus, the ship-owner, had given
them a Thanksgiving banquet at Piræus on account of the preservation of
his vessel that had come within an ace of being wrecked off Eubœa.”
“That evening,” he continues, “while taking a constitutional, I kept
thinking over the stinginess of Mnesitheus who undertook to entertain
sixteen gods by sacrificing a single cock—and that, too, a wheezy old
rooster!—with four little lumps of frankincense so mouldy that they went
out forthwith on the coals, without giving even the tip of my nose a
whiff of the smoke. That’s what he did, though he was for promising
whole hecatombs when his boat was driving on the cliff and was already
encircled by reefs.”
Sometimes the fisher-folk preferred to go up to Athens and dedicate
votive offerings in the Parthenon. Lucian, in “The Fisher,” when angling
over the edge of the Acropolis for the scaly philosophers of the second
century, borrows of the Priestess of the Parthenon a rod, hook, and line
that “the fisherman from Piræus had dedicated” as a thank-offering.
Of the many epigrams in the Greek Anthology on shipwrecked mariners, the
most appropriate to our harbour town is perhaps the one written by
Antipater of Sidon for the tomb of a certain Aristagoras who was drowned
after reaching harbour at Scarphe. We are reminded of the Piræus temple
to Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage by the bitterness with which the poet
uses the epithet:—
“Ever the sea is the sea. It is idle to blame
Cyclades’ waves or the Needles or Narrows of Helle;
Them I escaped to be drowned in the harbour of Scarphe.
Vain is their fame.
Pray, if you will, for a fair voyaging homeward, but say:
Here in his tomb Aristagoras knows of the sea and its way—
Ever the same.”
It requires no great stretch of the imagination to reproduce the thrill
of pride and delight with which the Attic demesman, whether sailor or
soldier, fisherman or merchant, returning from abroad sighted the
heights of Akte and the Munychia acropolis and sailed up to the
beautiful, dignified city built around its strong, fortified harbours.
Even after independent Athens had been incorporated in the Macedonian
empire, Menander could record this patriotic delight. In a fragment from
his “Fishers” a sailor, returning perhaps to Piræus, falls down and
kisses the earth, exclaiming:—
“Greeting, O dear my country, long the time gone by
Till now I see and kiss thee. Not to every land
Would I do this, but only when I see my own,
The land that bred me is a goddess in my eyes.”
We think of Menander himself as a frequent visitor to the harbour town.
Tradition says that he was drowned while bathing at the harbour and his
countrymen gave him a tomb and an epitaph on the road from Piræus to
Athens by the Long Walls. There, too, was the cenotaph of Euripides, who
had sailed away to the court of the Macedonian king, never again to
enter through the harbour’s arms that welcomed so many returning
voyagers.
And the Athenian of the third century, returning as we do now, from a
visit to Piræus, would see these tombs as he left the harbour walls and
perhaps find compensation for the loss of external liberty in realizing
that the great sea-fortress and the maritime empire of Themistocles, of
Pericles, and of Conon had buttressed well a Greater Athens; that
neither Spartan jealousy and civil discord, nor even the foreign rule of
Macedon itself could destroy the real power of this Mother city and
obliterate her sway over the human mind. But it required the perspective
of longer time and the idealism of a Shelley boldly to interpret
disaster in terms of victory and to proclaim Athens as mistress of a sea
wider than the Ægean:—
“Greece and her foundations are
Laid below the tides of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.”
The launching-ways of the ancient triremes, still seen beneath the clear
water, symbolize that continued hegemony.