OLD GREECE IN NEW ATHENS
“Born into life!—’tis we,
And not the world, are new.”
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Travellers fresh from Italy perceive an Oriental picturesqueness in
modern Athens, but the immediate impression of its Occidental character
gained by those who come from Egypt or Constantinople is the correct
one. The old narrow streets, reminiscent of the Turkish period, are few
in number and lie on the northern side of the Acropolis. Back of them,
further to the north and west, lies a very clean and well-planned town
which boasts of being a little Paris. The substantial houses and hotels,
the dignified palaces of the royal princes and the buildings of the
University and Museum, the conventional shops and public squares, the
boulevards and gardens, give to Athens the general appearance of any
European city that is moving fast toward and beyond a population of two
hundred thousand, and is not yet disfigured by the smoke-stacks of
factories. A welcome individuality of taste is shown chiefly in the
classical architecture of the group of University buildings and of the
Museum.
Even to pilgrims and strangers the modern city reveals an eager and, in
many aspects, a charming life. But a special relationship follows in the
wake of familiarity with the new, added to knowledge of the old, Athens.
The student of Greek literature finds that he need not always seek the
ruins of antiquity or the permanent stage-setting of Nature when he
desires a sense of fellowship with the past. At any street corner this
sense may be quickened by some person or object which is an integral
part of the city’s modern life. Ancient literature not only gleams, like
“a stately palace hall, with golden pillars of song,” but also mirrors
common things, trivial or serious, which subtly unite the times of Homer
with those of Pericles, and both with our own.
Greek gentlemen conspicuously engaged in having their boots blacked
share the habits if not the politics of Aristophanes’s dicast who was
always seeking the sponge and the basin of oil-mixed pitch for his dusty
shoes. Street-venders from Rhodes, who beguile foreign ladies with
embroideries, are plying the craft of the Phœnician peddler at the home
of Eumæus, then a happy princelet and later the swineherd of Odysseus.
The peddler displayed to Eumæus’s lady mother and her maidens a golden
chain set here and there with amber beads, and “they offered him their
price.” Bargaining, the basis of all transactions, is not always as
amiable as it is in Rome. An Athenian cab-driver in search of drachmas
can be as obstinate as the corpse in Aristophanes’s “Frogs,” whom
Dionysus asked to take his luggage to Hades:—
DIONYSUS.
“You there! You dead man! You, I mean! I’m calling you.
Good fellow, wilt to Hades carry down my traps?
CORPSE.
How many?
DIONYSUS.
These.
CORPSE.
Wilt make it a two drachma job?
DIONYSUS.
Not I, by Zeus, but less.
CORPSE (_to the bearers_).
Start up the funeral, you!
DIONYSUS.
Good sir, one moment! See if we can’t come to terms.
CORPSE.
You’ll put down drachmas two, or else don’t talk to me.
DIONYSUS.
One drachma and a half? A bargain? Come, take that.
CORPSE.
May I be—resurrected, if I do!
XANTHIAS.
What airs!
The cursed scamp! Plague take him! I will go myself.”
Dionysus and his servant had made their entrance with a donkey, ridden
by Xanthias who was carrying the traps on a pole over his shoulder. No
age has allowed the donkey to escape his manifest destiny of bearing
burdens, nor has age or custom exhausted his capacity of occasional
revolt. The persevering attack of the Trojans on Ajax could be likened
only to the cudgelling by boys of a lazy ass which has strayed into a
cornfield and will not desist from wasting the deep crop—an episode as
modern as it is Homeric. But for the most part the little beasts carry
patiently everything that is portable, as they did when, in the annual
transportation of the properties used in the Eleusinian Mysteries, their
dull share in a great business became proverbial. Their panniers of
lemons and oranges and crates of water-jars are both antique and modern,
and a famous lost picture of Polygnotus comes to life in a donkey loaded
with fresh green boughs, moving toward the spectator.
That Dionysus, in search of a carrier, so conveniently saw a corpse in
the street was due to the Athenian custom of bearing the dead to the
grave on open biers. The same custom, shocking to foreign observers,
prevails to-day; and at almost any hour, in any thoroughfare, may be
seen one of these funeral processions, with the cover of the coffin
carried in front and the uncovered face exposed to the curious and the
indifferent. Thus exposed, the dead Alcestis was brought out from her
palace, and the cortège, with which the modern procession seems to
mingle, moves off the stage with prayers that Hermes and Persephone may
kindly welcome this traveller to their realm. These deities have been
forgotten, but their business is transferred to him who was once their
grim agent. To the modern Greek peasant Charon is Death. Alcestis
dreaded him as a messenger and ferryman:—
“I see, I see the two-oar’d skiff. With hand on pole
Charon, the ferryman of the dead, thus calleth me:
‘Why dost thou loiter? Hasten! Thou’rt delaying us.’
With words like these in angry haste he urgeth me.”
To-day he rides in his own might:—
“Why are the mountains so dark, and why so woebegone?
Is it the wind at war there, or does the rain-storm scourge them?
It is not the wind at war there, it is not the rain that scourges,
It is only Charon passing across them with the dead;
He drives the youths before him, the old folk drags behind,
And he bears the tender little ones in a line at his saddle-bow.”[11]
Footnote 11:
Greek peasant song, translated by Passow. Cf. Sir Rennell Rodd, _The
Customs and Lore of Modern Greece_, p. 286.
Around the next corner, especially toward the end of Lent when spring
lamb is due in the markets and shepherds troop to town, another song
from the “Alcestis” may displace the strain of melancholy. For Apollo,
Pythian lord of song, once served Admetus,—
“Like a shepherd, piping, piping,
Hymeneal echoes raising
Down along the sloping hillside
Where the woolly flocks are grazing.”
In the guise of a young man, the herdsman of a flock, most delicate, as
are the sons of kings, Athena once appeared to Odysseus. And it was to a
man who was pasturing his flocks on many-fountained Ida that Aphrodite
gave her immortal heart. Perhaps thereafter in the streets of Troy
Anchises made people think suddenly of early dawns on the mountain-side
when the silver car of the moon hangs low over the sea and the
nightingale sings and the bleating flocks answer the pipe’s ethereal
cry. In Athens a transient shepherd, with his crook and his coat of
fleece, may fling the townsman’s thoughts abroad to the men he has seen
among the hills of Arcadia, where as of old a misty night is hateful to
shepherds and goatherds, and a bright moon their heart’s delight; or in
Lesbos, where still in mountain pastures the hyacinth is trampled under
foot and darkens the ground. A flock of sheep following the bellwether
from the country to the town is a reminder that the Greeks before Troy
were ordered about like a great flock of white ewes by the thick-fleeced
leader, Odysseus; and that the astute one, in the course of his later
adventures, saved himself from the wrath of blind Polyphemus by clinging
face upwards and with a steady heart, beneath the shaggy belly of his
best and goodliest ram. Aristophanes in the “Wasps” parodies the Homeric
ram. Here it is the family donkey which, led out to be sold, is
smuggling under its shaggy belly the old man imprisoned by his son to
cure him of the “jury habit.” The dejected donkey is addressed by the
son:—
“Packass! why weepest thou? Because thou shalt be sold
To-day? Come, double-quick! Why these repeated groans
Unless, perchance, that some Odysseus thou dost bear?”
Athens is a bustling capital, but to the on-looker every Easter lamb
becomes a Golden Fleece, and—
“A story lingereth yet,
A voice of the mountains old.”[12]
The Easter feast is of great importance in Greece because the Lenten
fast is so scrupulously observed. At all times the working people are
temperate enough to have pleased Aristophanes, who liked to dwell on the
simple living of a generation before his own, when from the country
districts men trooped in to the assembly,—
“Each with his own little
Goatskin of wine,
Each with three olives, two
Onions, one loaf in his
Wallet, to dine.”[13]
But during parts of Lent even vegetables are forbidden, and a man who
has guided you up Pentelicus will accept from your lunch-basket only a
few olives and an orange to supplement his own piece of coarse bread.
The markets are in the older and most picturesque part of the city, but
only a modern Aristophanes could make them into scenes of rollicking
farce shot through with political purpose. Provincial Megarians with
pigs to sell, uncouth Bœotians bringing in vegetables and game, knavish
Athenians offering garlic and salt and anchovies from Phaleron—probably
the types are still here, dialects, morals and all, awaiting their
sacred bard.
Footnote 12:
Euripides, _Electra_, 701, translated by Gilbert Murray.
Footnote 13:
_Ecclesiazusae_, 306, translated by Rogers.
In the same district lies the bazaar known as Shoe Lane, where cobblers
and tailors and carpenters work in the open, protected by awnings.
Socrates, keen-eyed for handicraft and homely illustrations, often must
have watched their forebears. Not far from the shoemakers, the
coppersmiths, in the same district as of old, are suitably gathered in
Hephæstus Street, whence the sound of ringing hammers echoes afar. The
Homeric picture of Hephæstus in his forge on Olympus is duplicated in
any little forge along the modern street, when a workman rises from his
anvil and with a sponge wipes his face and hand and sturdy neck and
shaggy breast. In more than one part of the city the “bankers’ tables,”
at which also Socrates used to seek his crowd, are reproduced in the
much frequented tables of the money changers.
The open-air bakeries of his day also exist again and tempt with their
bread and plain cakes the exhausted sight-seer, whatever his philosophy.
But a Platonist is deterred at the threshold of a pastry-cook’s in the
fashionable shopping district by the remembrance that in the ideal life
there is no place for “those celebrated delicacies, the Athenian
confectionery.”
Modern Athens is too arid to afford many public fountains, but women
still draw water from the meagre spring Callirrhoë, on the edge of the
Ilissus, not far from the Zeus columns. This spring, in name and
situation, is still identified by some experts with the town-spring of
primitive Athens and the later Nine Spouts. The traveller who throws in
his fortunes with the archæological opposition must at least find in the
lesser Callirrhoë the Athenian counterpart of the fountains which in so
many of the towns and villages of Greece perpetuate, in usefulness and
charm, an antique life of homely activities transmuted into poetry. The
townspeople of Odysseus drew their water just outside the city from a
wayside spring deep in an alder thicket, where a basin had been
fashioned to catch the cold stream falling from a cliff. In the old days
of peace, when the plain was safe, the wives and daughters of the men of
Troy had washed the family clothes in broad stone troughs beside the two
springs that fed the Scamander. Nausicaä of Phæacia and her maidens did
the palace washing so far from the town that the occasion involved a
day’s excursion and a generous lunch-basket packed by the Queen. But
there was a spring of drinking water nearer, for, when Odysseus was
entering the city, Athena met him in the form of a young girl carrying a
pitcher. At Eleusis, also, in the royal age, the king’s fawnlike
daughters, their crocus-yellow hair dancing on their shoulders, drew
water for the palace in vessels of bronze from the Maiden Well. In
classical Athens, as to-day, only the poorer women went for their own
water, and perhaps it was after meeting one who looked tired and
hopeless that Euripides made Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, given in
marriage to a peasant in Argos to further her mother’s schemes, cry
aloud to the night:—
“O Night, dark foster-mother of the golden stars,
Thy shelter folds me while this jar bows low my head
As to and from the river-springs I come and go.”
Only in the Panathenaic procession did the carrying of water-jars become
ennobled. To-day a working girl may be seen in a pose suggesting that of
the maidens of the Phidian frieze.
[Illustration: AFTER POLYGNOTUS]
[Illustration: THE PANATHENÆA CONTINUED]
The folk-lore and customs of modern Greece, as heirs of the past, have
been carefully scrutinized. Any knowledge that can be culled from
special treatises will everywhere increase the traveller’s sense of
historic continuity and will enrich his pleasure in meeting the country
folk. But by means of only a modicum of Greek poetry he may discover for
himself in Athens certain ancient beliefs and practices. On the first of
March, associated like the May Day of colder climates with the
blossoming of spring, bands of boys go about the streets carrying the
wooden image of a bird, singing a carol which announces the arrival of
the swallow, and begging gifts. One of these songs from Thessaly
begins:—
“She is here, she is here, the swallow!
Cometh another of honey’d song,
She percheth, twittereth all day long,
Sweet are her notes that follow.”
That the same custom, no newer than the recurrence of Nature’s happiest
gifts, enchanted the boys of ancient Athens we may infer from our
knowledge of it in “seagirt” Rhodes. There the carol began:—
“She is here, she is here, the swallow!
Fair seasons bringing, fair years to follow!
Her belly is white,
Her back black as night!
From your rich house
Roll forth to us
Tarts, wines and cheese:
Or if not these,
Oatmeal and barley cake
The swallow deigns to take.”[14]
When the spring was late, Aristophanes’s peevish old man was probably
not the only one to say: “Zeus! is the swallow never going to come?” Nor
under a punctual March sun was his sneak thief the only one to talk
about the weather:—
“Haunting about the butcher’s shops, the weather being mild,
‘See, boys,’ says I, ‘the swallow there! why, summer’s come,’ I say,
And when they turned to gape and stare I snatched a steak away.”[15]
Footnote 14:
Translated by J. A. Symonds.
Footnote 15:
_Knights_, 570, translated by Frere.
In graver poetry the dusky swallow of Simonides shared with the
lovely-voiced nightingale of Sappho the honour of announcing the
fragrant spring.
Other seasons in Athens had their crop of mendicant carols, and the
boyish custom of celebrating Apollo at one of his summer festivals by
going about from house to house and singing songs of good wishes is
suggested in the modern celebration of New Year’s or St. Basil’s day. It
is even possible that the rough little model of a ship carried by the
boys, as if to illustrate the sea-journey of the saint “come from
Cæsarea,” is a late descendant of the ship that was carried in the
Panathenaic procession, the origin of which lay in Theseus’s journey to
Crete, and the sail of which was Athena’s own peplos.
With Easter come the most elaborate of the peasant dances that accompany
all kinds of local religious festivals. Close at hand are the famous
dances of Megara, but in defiance of tradition the Athenian sojourner
may elect to visit those at Menidi, a large village about three miles to
the north, whose _panegyris_ or fair is not overrun by non-participants.
There are several varieties of peasant dances, and a technical knowledge
of the accompanying music will be of great service in interpreting them;
but whatever their particular measure may be, and whether they are
performed by men and women together or by women alone, they all possess
a dignity and gravity which mark them off as something quite different
from the gratification of a lively humour. The religious impulse is not
wholly forgotten in the delights of a carnal holiday, and the dances are
the expression, in unison, of a public feeling which in origin, at
least, was reverential. Save for the leader, no individual assumes
liberty of movement. In long lines or semi-circles the dancers link
hands and sway in monotonous harmony.
Readers of ancient Greek literature will remember how important dances
were in the religious festivals of all epochs. Their variety and their
ancestral relation to the modern dances are subjects for technical
study, but the spectator at Menidi is at liberty to let his imagination
travel the Sacred Way to Eleusis, or cross the Ægean to Delos, or seek
out Argos and distant Sparta. The modern inheritance is a limited one,
for it recalls only the grave choral movements that originated in
Sparta, and discards the license of the Dionysiac worship. And
altogether preventive of any real reconstruction of the past is the fact
that now only peasants at a country fair exhibit an art which once was
an important element in city as well as in village religion, and which
tested the grace of the gentlest born. It is a far call from a country
field and the daughters of Menidi, bedight though they are with
embroideries and necklaces and often fair of form and face, to the chief
temple in Sparta and the choicest maidens of the Spartan state. But one
certain bond there is between the girls of to-day and the princesses of
yesterday. The Easter fair serves the purpose of a market for brides,
and many a wedding follows it. Dancing is a part of this happy festival
as it was in antiquity in all ranks of society. And were the maidens of
Menidi exiled to America, they would long for the village green and the
bridal feasts, even as Iphigeneia and her comrades, exiled among the
northern Taurians, longed for Agamemnon’s palace and their Argive
playfellows:—
“And it’s O! that I could soar down the splendour-litten floor
Where the sun drives the chariot steeds of light.
And it’s O! that I were come o’er the chambers of my home,
And were folding the swift pinions of my flight.
And that, where at royal wedding the bridesmaids’ feet are treading
Through the measure, I were gliding in the dance;
Through its maze of circles sweeping,
With mine older playmates keeping
Truest time with waving arms and feet that glance.
And it’s O! for the loving rivalry,
For the sweet forms costly arrayed,
For the raiment of cunningest broidery,
For the challenge of maid to maid,
For the veil light tossing, the loose curl crossing
My cheek with its flicker of shade.”[16]
Footnote 16:
Euripides, _Iphigeneia among the Taurians_, 1137. Paraphrased by Way.
Athens, like most southern cities, impresses an Anglo-Saxon as having
many holidays which “interrupt business”; but only during the New Year
and Easter festivals can he begin to imagine a resemblance to the civic
life of ancient Athens, which was almost a continuous pageant. “The
gods,” said Plato, “in pity for the life of toil, man’s natural
inheritance, appointed holy festivals whereby men alternate their labour
with rest.” But at certain seasons, especially in the spring and autumn,
the festivals were so congested that the days of labour must have been
far from burdensome. Almost all the festivals had a religious origin,
celebrating deities and heroes of political importance, like Athena or
Theseus, or forces of nature embodied in Dionysus or Demeter. But, like
Christmas, they gave abundant opportunity both for public enjoyment and
for the cultivation of communal and family sentiment. Sophocles had in
mind all their human charm when he made the blind Œdipus lament the
future of his little daughters:—
“For to what gath’rings of your townsfolk shall you come,
Or to what festivals from whence you shall not turn
Back homeward bathed in tears, instead of any share
In all the holiday?”
The festivals were often connected with the activities of country folk,
with planting and reaping, the vintage and the winepress, and yet at the
same time played an important part in a highly cultivated city life.
Some of them were confined to women, like the Thesmophoria, celebrated
by matrons in honour of Demeter, the patroness of fruitful marriages,
and used by Aristophanes as occasion and stage-setting for an attack on
the misogyny of Euripides; or like the Tauropolia, in honour of Artemis,
which suggested to Menander a lover’s opportunity. Others, such as the
Hermæa, at which Socrates first met the young Lysis and discoursed on
friendship, were celebrated by young men at the palæstras, or by
school-boys. The “Mean Man” of Theophrastus was “apt not to send his
children to school when there was a festival of the Muses, but to say
that they were sick, in order that they might not contribute.” Still
others, like the Panathenæa, which occurred in July, the first month of
the calendar year, united all classes and ages in a magnificent display
of civic loyalty. Public taste at its highest made the presentation of
plays the chief element in the Greater Dionysia in March, but the drama
had originated in the December festival of the country Dionysia, which
continued to be celebrated with a jollity and abandon that probably lost
nothing in the descriptions of Aristophanes. The same poet also found
plenty of material to his liking in the Anthesteria, another Dionysiac
celebration, in which Pots and Pitchers figured in drinking competitions
and in offerings to the dead. The statue of Dionysus in the Marshes was
escorted to the outer Cerameicus, and by the time it was brought back
again, a day later, the crowd was doubtless in the state described by
the chorus of Frogs in the underworld:—
“The song we used to love in the Marshland up above
In praise of Dionysus to produce,
Of Nysæan Dionysus, son of Zeus,
When the revel tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay,
To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day.
Brekekekex, ko-ax ko-ax.”[17]
Footnote 17:
Translated by Rogers.
The license of some of the Dionysiac holidays was in reality a break in
the even tenor of Athenian temperance. At other times there seems to
have been little more drunkenness among them than among the Spartans,
whose uninterrupted self-restraint aroused the admiration of Plato.
From the crapulous and often naked verses of Aristophanes to the
austerely beautiful marbles of Phidias is a gamut that includes all the
characteristics of ancient festivals, in their appeal to both the
natural and the spiritual man. Religious sincerity, civic pride, and
buffoonery, jostled one another. Music, literature, and athletics added
discipline and beauty.
These things as a coherent whole are long since dead. The Easter
festival of to-day, like the Panathenæa, absorbs the entire city and has
its hours of gaiety as well as its hours of solemnity, but it lacks the
attendant contests in music, poetry, and gymnastics. If, however, it
includes less of a citizen’s life than Athena’s festival, it is more
Panhellenic than even the Eleusinian Mysteries, its prototype in
religious significance. The Mysteries appealed to all Greeks, but
invited them to gather at one spot. Those who have seen Easter ushered
in at midnight by King and Metropolitan in front of the Cathedral of
Athens, and who have also shared with peasant and parish priest in the
announcement within some village church on a lone island of the Ægean,
realize that in every part of modern Greece as never in old Greece all
classes and conditions of men are at the same hour engaged in a common
observance.
But the excited crowds that fill the city streets and make the Cathedral
Square look like a deep cornfield stirred by a strong west wind, and the
gathering of villagers in the open place in front of their tiny church
alike betray one quality that is no more Christian and new than it is
Pagan and old. An unquestioning and swift hospitality to strangers is as
much in evidence as is the lighted taper borne by each man, woman, and
child. In Athens this is but a proof on a crucial occasion of a temper
which reveals itself in response to every need. By this Ionic grace,
inherited from the noble civilization of Homer and eagerly exemplified
by the open-minded Athenians at the height of their prosperity, the
foreigner is transported back to the old city more surely than by the
street names and signs in the alphabet of Xenophon, or even than by the
vision, wherever his eye turns, of the ageless rock of the Acropolis.
[Illustration: ATTICA]