ATTICA
“The country of Cecrops, favoured of heroes, rich in its loveliness.”
ARISTOPHANES, _Clouds_.
Modern Athens climbs up around the lower slopes of Mount Lycabettus,
which rises on the east like an index finger above the Attic plain.
Although this peak is less than one thousand feet high, its isolated
position opens out an unrivalled panorama of the Cephisian plain from
Parnes and Pentelicus down to Piræus and the bay, with Salamis, the
mountains of the Megarid, the Isthmus, Argolis and Ægina beyond. In the
“Frogs” of Aristophanes Æschylus’s many-jointed compounds are likened to
“great Lycabettuses.” Athena, it is said, while carrying Lycabettus
through the air to fortify her Acropolis, dropped it suddenly in its
present exclusive position; but, if we are to believe Plato, who had a
vague inkling of the geologic truth, her rival, the earth-shaker, rent
it asunder from the Acropolis, with which it was once continuous. From
Lycabettus, it would appear, the stream of the Eridanus made its way
north of the Acropolis and flowed out by the channel now laid bare near
the Dipylon gate. The Ilissus, rising on the slopes of Hymettus, flows
south of the city and, first uniting with the Eridanus, joins, between
Athens and Piræus, the Cephisus, which draws its waters from the
Pentelicus and Parnes ranges. This configuration of the landscape, with
arable plain-land watered by mountain streams, was the important factor
in country life about Athens. Clouds on Hymettus, as Theophrastus tells
us, were a sign of rain. The altar of “Shower-giving Zeus,” whether on
Hymettus or, as Pausanias says, on Mount Parnes, would have no lack of
suppliants in times of drought. The Clouds, in a fragment of the lost
edition of Aristophanes’s play, vanish adown Lycabettus and go off to
the top of Parnes. In the play as preserved, the mock Socrates,
instructing his thick-headed scholar, points out the cloud-goddesses:—
“Now please to look here by Parnes anear, now I see they’ll be gently
descending.”
And the Clouds, leaving Bœotia behind, come over Parnes, showering down
the praises that Aristophanes delighted to bestow on the Attic country:—
“Let us, maidens, that bring fresh showers, go unto Pallas’s brilliant
land to turn our eyes on the country of Cecrops, favoured of heroes,
rich in its loveliness, there where is honour to consecrate secrets;
there where the temple that welcomes its votaries flings wide its
doors at the mysteries sacred; there where are gifts for the gods up
in heaven; stately-roofed temples and statues of splendour; there are
processionals unto the blessed ones, hallowed exceedingly; fair are
the chaplets entwining the offerings unto the deities; ever recurring
the festivals, season by season; and, when the spring cometh on,
there’s the grace of the Bromian god and incitements to choirs
melodious; aye and the Muse with the music of deep-voicèd flutings.”
Colonus, the birthplace of Sophocles, lay a little more than a mile
northwest of Athens. The hill is now disappointingly bald. Verdure and
the song of the nightingale must be sought by the banks of the Cephisus
near by, but the famous lines of Sophocles retouch the faded picture.
The chorus of old men of Attica address the aged Œdipus:—
“Thou’rt come, O guest, unto the fairest of earth’s dwellings in this
land that hath good breed of horses—this our white Colonus, where the
clear-voiced nightingale from covert of green dells sends out her
oft-repeated warblings murmurous and makes her dwelling in the
wine-dark ivy or the god’s impenetrable foliage with countless
fruitage laden; where the sun’s rays strike not nor bloweth any wind
of all the blasts of winter; where Dionysus ever in rapt frenzy fares
along, consorting with the nymphs that nursed him at the breast.
“And fed by heaven’s dew, day in, day out, blooms the narcissus
clustering fair in wreaths from days of yore inwoven for the twain
Great Goddesses; blooms, too, the crocus with its gleam of gold. Nor
ever fail the sleepless fountains of Cephisus and his wandering
streams.”
The ramparts of the city of Theseus, seen by Antigone at the opening of
the play, are for Sophocles in reality the Acropolis and walls of his
own day. Antigone describes the sacred grove to her blind father:—
“This place is sacred, for it teems with laurel, olive, and the vine.
Within its very heart a multitude of feathered nightingales make
music.”
The venerable olive trees, self propagated through generations from the
parent stump, are, indeed, a feature in the Attic landscape. Sophocles
does not fail to include them in his catalogue of Attic blessings:—
“There’s no such shoot on the Asian coast, of none such do I hear in
Doris great, in Pelops-isle—a plant unvanquished, self-renewing,
terror unto foemen’s spears—nay, none like this, child-nurturing, that
groweth greatest in our land, the gray-green olive’s foliage.”
And in the neighbouring Academy the youths ran off their races beneath
the sacred olive trees. To the joyous associations that for nearly two
centuries had been accumulating about the Academy Plato added the
overshadowing greatness of his own name and teaching. He has
incidentally perpetuated the name of the original modest freeholder,
Academus, to be a part of the vocabulary of every school-boy. Near the
Academy, making a fitting goal for the avenue leading from the Dipylon
gate between the monuments of illustrious dead, the Athenians gave Plato
magnificent interment. An epigram by Antipater transfers to Plato the
indifference expressed by Socrates in regard to his untenanted body when
he says in the prison death-scene:—
“Bury me however you will,—if you can catch me—for, when I drink the
poison, I shall not remain here with you, but shall make my way to a
blissful life with the Blessed.... So don’t let Crito be vexed on my
behalf when he sees my body being burnt or buried as though I were
having some awful experience.”
Shelley in his fine paraphrase of the epigram inexactly substitutes
Athens for Attica and fails to include the epithet “earth-born,” the
conventional boast of the autochthonous men of Attica:—
“Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb?
To what sublime and starry-paven home
Floatest thou?
‘I am the image of swift Plato’s spirit
Ascending heaven:—Athens doth inherit
His corpse below.’”
If we follow up the Cephisus towards its sources we pass through the
ancient deme of Acharnæ and come on the north to Decelea on the slopes
of Mount Parnes, or, turning to the right, to Kephisia at the south of
Pentelicus, also called Brilessus by the ancients.
Upon the Parnes range, on the northern frontier of Attica, is the
partially ruined fortress of Phyle. Few places offer a more attractive
combination of scenery and association. There is, as at Delphi, a union
of grandeur and beauty. In addition to the view that awaits us above,
the ascent amidst trees and flowers by the running stream makes this a
fitting introduction to the more intimate charm of Attic landscape, and
the rugged gorges, skirted by the climbing pathway, are even
awe-inspiring. Once within the massive walls and towers, built on a
mountain spur commanding the junction of ravines and passes between
Attica and Bœotia, no extended explanation is necessary of the part
played here (in 404 to 403 B. C.) during the civil war between the
patriots and the Thirty Tyrants. Across the shoulder of Ægaleus the
plain of the Cephisus is unrolled to view, with Athens lying below
Hymettus. In the background are the Saronic Gulf and the Peloponnesian
mountains. Thrasybulus, the hero of the Restoration, is great even among
the great names of Greek history. We can imagine him first seizing the
fortress with his handful of seventy followers, and then, through months
of waiting and fighting and watching, looking down on the desired city,
planning how he shall restore the exiled patriots to Athens, and Athens
to herself. We can picture the fierce snow-storm, filling those wild
gorges, which aided in driving back the knights and hoplites of the
Thirty. Later he swoops down to Acharnæ, surprises and routs the
unpatriotic Athenians together with the Spartan garrison which the
Thirty, to their dishonour, had admitted to the Acropolis. Finally he
descends to Piræus, joins battle with the “City Party,” breaks the power
of the Thirty and makes the name of “the men from Phyle” a symbol of
patriotism which, see it where we may on the pages of Lysias or
Xenophon, claims the eye like illuminated initials and rubrics of
honour.
At Chasia, the farming village of the foothills whence the path ascends
to Phyle, women, standing in their doorways with busy distaff in hand,
or energetic but courteous men, ready to discuss politics or crops,
recall the simplicity and charm of country life of hill and plain known
to us from Aristophanes and Menander.
Acharnæ itself must have occupied the district between Epano-Liossia,
the nearest railway station to Chasia, and the charming modern village
of Menidi whose unspoiled peasants, close to the outskirts of Athens,
retain many a reminder of the country demesmen. The charcoal-burners of
Aristophanes or Menander would now be compelled to go further up the
mountain slopes to obtain the tree-stumps for their “Parnesian coals.”
Nor is the famous ivy of Acharnæ now in evidence. The Acharnians, as
Pausanias tells us, called Dionysus =“Ivy”= because the ivy plant first
appeared on their soil. In the Greek Anthology we learn that Sophocles
often wore a wreath of Acharnian ivy, and in an epigram of Simmias the
ivy climbs over his tomb which, as it was alleged, had its place in the
burying ground of the Sophocles family beside the neighbouring road to
Decelea:—
“Gently, ivy, gently twine,
With pale tresses creep and seize
On the tomb of Sophocles;
Where the soft and clustering vine
Droops its tendrils to the ground.
Petals of the rose, around
Spread your fragrant anodyne
For his gracious speech profound,
Muses and the Graces blending,
Honeyed charm to wisdom lending.”
In the “Acharnians” of Aristophanes the demesman Dicæopolis, shut up in
the city by the war, grows tired of hearing: “Buy, buy!” when he would
have “coals, vinegar or oil,” commodities to be had for nothing at home
in the country. He therefore makes a private and personal treaty of
peace, goes back to Acharnæ and proceeds to celebrate the rural
Dinoysia. The revel is on and the wife and mother warns the daughter,
who is to officiate as basket-bearer, to take precautions,—
“Lest some one ere you know it nibble off your gold.”
To-day the peasant girls of Menidi without fear display on their persons
at the Easter dances their abundant dowries of gold and silver. As the
Phallic procession moves off, Dicæopolis wisely sends his pretty wife to
a place of safety:—
“You, wife, up with you to the roof and watch from there;
And _you_, lead on!”
At this juncture the chorus of Acharnian men rush in, with the bosoms of
their gowns full of stones, indignant at the thought of peace when their
vines have been cut by the enemy. They are a sturdy lot. They had
contributed a Highland regiment at Marathon; they are regular “old
Hickories,” “hardwood-charcoal men, tough as oak, hard-maple men,” and
they are ready to stone Dicæopolis. He gains time, however, for a parley
by seizing for a hostage a basket of their charcoals and dressing it up
as a baby.
[Illustration: MENANDER]
Menander, also, in his recently discovered “Arbitration” scene, gives
details of an encounter between a shepherd and a charcoal man somewhere
in this Acharnæ district, evidently in the public “clearings” lying
between the farm-lands and the undisturbed forests. The shepherd Daos
tells a well-to-do property owner, who happens by and is selected to
arbitrate the dispute, how,—
“Within this bushy thicket here, hard by this place,
My flock I was a-herding, now, perhaps, good sir,
Some thirty days gone by, and I was all alone,
When I came on a little infant child exposed
With necklaces and some such other trumpery.”
He debates whether he can afford to save and rear the child. Next
morning, still perplexed, “I go,” he says,—
“back unto my flock again
At daybreak. Comes this fellow—he’s a charcoal-man—
Unto this self-same place to cut out stumps of trees.
Now he had had acquaintance with me back of this,
And so we talked together.”
One of the main sources of the Cephisus is at the foot of Pentelicus.
Here the village of Kephisia with its generous spring and noble plane
tree still retains its charm and recalls the “Attic Nights” of Aulus
Gellius. As terminus of a short railway from Athens, it is a convenient
starting-place for various excursions in Attica. An easy drive northward
across the plain brings one to Tatoï where King George has his summer
residence at the ancient Decelea, which the Spartans occupied in the
Peloponnesian War to cut off the grain supply which came by this way
from Eubœa. But cruel memories of the contest with Sparta are forgotten
amidst the unusual charm of the surroundings. The magnificent
low-spreading pine trees are a surprise to many visitors unaccustomed to
this variety, and, as one looks southward, Pentelicus, usually seen from
Athens as a long ridge, confronts the spectator, head on, with
unfamiliar and uncompromising majesty. In the near foreground olive
groves and luxuriant fields of anemones and poppies invite to a long
lethe.
The Oropus district on the Euripus, north of Parnes, belongs
geographically to Bœotia. As one descends on the northern side of the
mountain the view is more suggestive of Switzerland than of rugged
Attica. The fertile plain of the Asopus is green and wooded; the Euripus
winding between the hedgerows of mountains on either side seems, even
from the lofty summit of Pentelicus, more like a series of inland lakes
than a continuous arm of the sea; beyond, the dorsal spine of the Delph,
gleaming white with snow, crowns the blue Eubœan mountains. A marble
relief, found at the port of Oropus, recalls the principal literary
association outside of the shifting scenes in military history.
Amphiaraus, the seer and hero, is represented in his chariot as he is
about to disappear in the earth and his horses start back from the
yawning chasm. In the Æschylean story Amphiaraus “the one just man” is
included against his will among the invaders, the “Seven against
Thebes,” and is represented as falling with the rest at Thebes. Of him
were written the famous lines which, when spoken in the Athenian
theatre, turned the eyes of all the spectators upon “Aristides the
Best”:—
“‘Now as for me, know well, I shall enrich this land,
A priest entombèd deep beneath this hostile soil.
Let’s fight. No death dishonour bringing I await.’
Thus spoke the seer while brandishing his good round shield
Of solid bronze. But no device was on his shield,
For not to seem the best he wishes, but to be,
While harvesting the fertile furrow of his mind
Wherefrom an honest crop of counsels springs to birth.”
Amphiaraus was deified throughout Greece, but he had his chief sanctuary
near Oropus in a glen where the nightingales sing among the plane trees
and the oleanders. Here may be seen the remains of his temple, as god of
healing; the great altar; the sacred spring by the plane trees where the
grateful convalescents threw in their thanksgiving coins. Here were
found, in the ruined theatre, five gracefully carved chairs of honour,
like the three found at Rhamnus.
Rhamnus is on the coast near the southern mouth of the Euripus, and is
one of the most beautiful and secluded places in the whole peninsula. As
a visit to this northeast corner is needful to complete the physical
outline of Attica, so the contours of Greek character will be sharpened
here in the sanctuary of Nemesis, the dread goddess of Retribution,
whose warning presence hovered continually in the background of Greek
consciousness. Her beautiful statue, made perhaps by Phidias or his
pupils, was fittingly set up in this place near the mouth of the Euripus
where the Persian fleet had sailed through to the crushing rebuke at
Marathon. Pausanias calmly states that this statue, dedicated to “the
goddess most inexorable of all towards overweening men,” was made by
Phidias out of some “Parian marble which the Persians, as if the victory
were already won, carried with them for the erection of a trophy.” If we
could credit this statement it would enlarge the itinerary of the meagre
fragments of the colossal statue now in the British Museum.
At Rhamnus are to be seen the remains of two temples, one dedicated to
Nemesis, and the other probably to Themis, the mother of Prometheus, and
identified by Æschylus, following Attic tradition, with Mother Earth
herself—“one form for many names.” Situated at the head of a glen,
banked-up by a marble terrace and shaded by myrtle, green fir trees and
shrubbery, the ruins look down upon the marble walls and towers of the
ancient acropolis of Rhamnus occupying a rocky, self-fortified hill that
juts out into the channel. Beyond the Euripus the mountains fill in the
background.
Unwary speech, insolent success or immoderate, though innocent, good
fortune might call down the retribution of Nemesis. Like our
superstitious formula, “Knock on wood,” it was a common device in Greek
to deprecate the divine envy towards arrogant speech, by saying: “I
being but human make obeisance to Adrasteia,” or, the equivalent, “to
Nemesis.” Pindar describes the happy Hyperboreans as set free from this
scrupulous anxiety, ever present to mortal men:—
“And for that sacred race nor pestilence, nor deadening age is blended
in their lot. Apart from war and toil they dwell, acquittal winning
from exacting Nemesis.”
Near the cheerful modern village of Marathona in the valley of Avlona
above the plain of Marathon are remains of an ancient gateway to the
villa of Herodes Atticus. The inscription placed over his portal by this
beneficent humanist and teacher was: “The Gate of Immortal Unanimity.” A
few miles to the southwest, on the northern slope of Pentelicus, the
American school excavated on an upland farm, called Dionyso, the remains
of the ancient Icaria, the earliest Attic home of Dionysus and the
birthplace of Thespis, the father of Attic tragedy. An epigram in the
Anthology by Dioscorides records the claims of Thespis:—
“Thespis am I, who the tragedy strain
Shaped for the masque and was first to combine
Charms that were new when Bacchus would fain
Marshal his chorus, stained with wine.
Figs Attic grown, or a goat was the prize
Won in the contests, till new I devise.
They that come after all this will revise,
Myriad years reshape, refine,
Little it troubles me—mine are mine.”
Nothing adventitious is needed to call forth a certain solemn elation at
the first sight of the plain of Marathon. But the sunlight of a February
day, when the anemones are bright by the wayside, will blend an
unforgettable natural beauty with the suggestions of a great moment in
human history. The level plain is hemmed in by an amphitheatre of
mountains; the promontory Cynosura runs down like a natural breakwater
from the north, and the shore curves gracefully inward as if enticing
seafarers to beach their galleys where the blue water breaks in soft
white upon the shining sand. When we climb the isolated “soros,” the
great mound heaped up over the dead warriors, and pass in review the
vivid details of the battle as given by Herodotus, there emerges, even
after all exaggeration has been neutralized by the strictures of some
modern iconoclast, a grateful and redoubled admiration for the
unflinching loyalty to liberty displayed by the individual soldiers and
even more for the consummate skill of the commanders. The Athenians with
the help of the Platæans repelled forever the reëstablishing of a despot
in Attica, and Athens herself unconsciously entered upon what was to be
the intellectual and moral trusteeship of Occidental civilization.
Demosthenes, more than a century later, amidst the ruins of political
liberty, could foreshadow a destiny greater than material success. He
cites the great words of Simonides that had drifted down from Marathon
and could be used with pathetic propriety of the dead at Chæronea. He
bids his fellow citizens bow, if need be, under the strokes of unfeeling
fortune, but reject all thought of having erred in their patriotic
struggle against Macedon. He bursts forth with that impassioned oath by
the dead heroes that thrills each generation born to cherish, or to long
for liberty: “It cannot be, it cannot be, Athenians, that ye erred in
braving danger on behalf of freedom and the safety of us all. No, by
those of our fathers, fore-fighters in the battle’s brunt at Marathon!
No, by those who stood shoulder unto shoulder at Platæa! No, by those
who fought the naval fights at Salamis or in the ships off Artemisium!”
Marathon, as opening the great contest with Persia, had given the
Athenians the proud distinction of being champions in the van for
Hellas. Simonides had so hailed them:—
“Athenians, fore-fighters for the Hellenes all, laid low at Marathon
the power of the gold-decked Medes.”
Within the mound beneath our feet lies buried with the rest Cynegirus
the valiant brother of Æschylus. The poet himself fought in the battle
and lived to immortalize his city and himself by his Titanic genius. But
in far off Sicily, when his death approached, ignoring his fame as a
poet, he turned with eager longing to the distant day and plain of
Marathon. To him the battlefield was a consecrated close, an “Alsos”
like the Altis of Olympia. Almost as if envying his brother and other
companions-in-arms, buried on the battlefield in their native land, he
writes as his own epitaph:—
“Æschylus, son of Euphorion, here an Athenian lieth,
Wheatfields of Gela his tomb waving around and above;
Marathon’s glebe-land could tell you the tale of his valour approvèd,
Aye and the long-haired Mede knew of it, knew of it well.”
The carriage road that leads back to Athens around the southern end of
Pentelicus again combines beautiful landscape with historic association.
By this road the Persians had thought to move with unimpeded might upon
unwalled Athens. Instead, the soldier Eucles[18] (or perhaps Thersippus)
brought the swift news to the rejoicing city, followed soon by the
Athenian army, who marched from their camp by the Marathonian Heracleum
and encamped in the Cynosarges gymnasium, also dedicated to Heracles,
south-west of Athens. Here looking down upon the Saronic Gulf they were
ready to repel the great host of Persia which was already rounding
Sunium. Games in honour of Heracles were celebrated at Marathon, and
Euripides, in his “Heracleidæ,” alludes, though vaguely, to the
Marathonian tetrapolis as one of the great Attic centres of the worship
of Heracles. The Platæans by their presence at Marathon won the lasting
and active friendship of Athens, and it was their city that gave the
name to the final crushing defeat of the Persians under the combined
Greek allies. The Spartans, detained at home by convenient scruples
until the full moon gave them the signal to start, arrived at Athens too
late for the battle of Marathon, but, as Herodotus charmingly remarks,
“they none the less wished to take a look at the Medes and, going out to
Marathon, they had a look.”
Footnote 18:
See chapter xviii, p. 422. This incident, not given by Herodotus, is
recorded by Plutarch (_De Gloria Atheniensium_, 3), who says that most
authorities give the name of the runner as Eucles but Heracleides
Ponticus calls him Thersippus. The soldier, as he tells us, ran the
twenty-six miles in full armour and, on reaching the city, with his
last breath exclaimed: Χαίρετε καὶ χαίρομεν, “Fare well! we are faring
well,” or—the double meaning is elusive—“Greetings! Rejoice, we too
are rejoicing!” Browning followed Lucian’s later version, which is
apparently a _contaminatio_ with the story of Phidippides, the courier
between Sparta and Athens, for which see chapter iii, p. 72.
On the east coast of Attica, between Marathon and Sunium, are Brauron,
“lovely” Prasiæ, and Thoricus. These with Markopoulo and other sites in
the southern inland plain, Mesogia, have been yielding a wealth of
prehistoric remains that fill out more and more the dim background of
antiquity. Thoricus, a bay some six miles north of Sunium, was the
birthplace of Philonis, “the daughter of the morning star,” and
grandmother of Thamyris, the Thracian bard who dared to contend with the
Muses. The inhabitants were not unmindful of their traditions and built
a theatre, unique by reason of its oval orchestra. It is in ruins, but
the absence of all traces of a stage seem to date it as of the best
classic period. Laurium, just below, is the terminus of the railroad.
Its silver mines, now worked chiefly for lead, play an important rôle in
Greek history. The chorus in the “Persians” of Æschylus explains to
Queen Atossa that the source of the Athenian sinews of war is—
“A fountain running silver, treasure of the land.”
The standard coins of Athens, of various denominations, stamped with an
archaic Athena head on the obverse and the owl on the reverse, are
referred to in the “Birds” of Aristophanes as Lauriot owls:—
“First, what every Judge amongst you most of all desires to win,
Little Lauriotic owlets shall be always flocking in.
Ye shall find them all about you, as the dainty brood increases,
Building nests within your purses, hatching little silver pieces.”[19]
When the Spartans occupied Attica in 413 B. C., they cut off Athenian
access to the mines, and Plutarch tells us how a slave described a hoard
of Athenian money secreted by the Spartan Gylippus under his roof-tiles
as “numerous owls roosting under his Cerameicus.”
Footnote 19:
Translated by Rogers.
The promontory of Sunium, the prow of Attica, breasts the Ægean, and the
white temple columns, beautiful in their ruin, stand up boldly like the
Samothracian Nike upon an advancing trireme. The view from the
precipitous bluff is one of surpassing beauty, with the glistening white
of the marble against the nearer foreground of green and against the
blue of the overarching sky and of the wide expanse of water. The eye
sweeps from Ægina to the opposite shore of Argolis and around to the
“glittering Cyclades” scattered over the Ægean, while far to the south,
seventy miles away, Mount St. Elias on Melos in clear weather lifts its
lofty cone into view, the outline of the island being sunk, like a
vessel’s hull, below the horizon. On the Acropolis at Athens was
preserved the memory of the contest between Athena and Poseidon, and at
Sunium each of these divinities had a temple. Poseidon has here retained
the supremacy, as was fitting, and only the foundation walls remain of
Athena’s temple on the lower terrace. The Athenians dedicated at Sunium
to Poseidon one of the triremes captured at Salamis, and here, on
occasion of the quadrennial festival held in honour of the sea-god, the
Æginetans seized the festal galley full of Athenian dignitaries. A
defendant, in one of Lysias’s speeches, tells how he had “won in the
trireme race off Sunium,” which was part of the _panegyris_. In
Aristophanes the chorus of Knights cry out to “Poseidon, lord of horses,
rejoicing in the bronze-shod hoof-beats and the neigh of steeds and
swift blue prows of triremes,”—
“Come hither to our chorus,
Raise thy golden trident for us,
Thee at Sunium we praise
Whom the dolphin band obeys.”
[Illustration:
SUNIUM
Temple of Poseidon. The Ægean Sea
]
To catalogue the ships, famous in Greek story, that have sighted or
rounded this headland would cause to pass in review a mighty and a
motley fleet. Nestor tells Telemachus how, sailing home with Menelaus
from Troy, they lost their pilot,—
“When that we came unto Sunium sacred, the headland of Athens.”
And Sophocles’s chorus of Salaminian sailors long in Troyland for their
native shores:—
“O there I would I might be,
Where Sunium’s spreading foreland
Hangs over the surge of the sea,
That straightway our Athens, the holy,
Might be greeted and hailed by me.”
Vessels of commerce or war would double it, bound from Athens to the
Ægean or to Ionia, and grain transports sailing to Athens from the
Euxine. The Persian warships backing out from the inhospitable bay of
Marathon “sailed around Sunium, making haste to anticipate the Athenians
in arriving at the city.” The vessel of Theseus sailed past it bringing
back safe from Crete the Athenian youths and maidens, and, in after
days, the look-out, posted at Sunium, hastened back to Athens to say
that the mission-ship from Delos had been sighted and was beating its
way up the Saronic gulf to put an end, on its arrival, at once to the
sacred holiday and to the life of Socrates.
On the west coast of Attica the place of chief interest, in connection
with Greek letters, is Vari, near the promontory of Zoster, where Mount
Hymettus comes down to the sea. Herodotus tells us that the frightened
Persians, escaping from Salamis, thought that the long rocks running out
at Zoster were some more hostile ships and “went fleeing for a long
distance” until they recognised their mistake. Some little distance
inland on the side of Hymettus, back of the town of Vari, is a grotto
dedicated to the Nymphs and also sacred to the Graces, to Pan, and to
Apollo. There is a tradition that the infant Plato was taken to Hymettus
by his parents, who there sacrificed on his behalf to Pan, the Nymphs
and Apollo.
The straits which interrupt the continuity of Mount Ægaleus with Salamis
could not avail to dissever the island from Attica. The northwestern
promontory, indeed, comes even closer to the outjutting Nisæan peninsula
of the Megarid, and it was inevitable that Megara and Athens should
contend for this “island of desire.” The energy of Solon at the
beginning of the sixth century adjudicated the dispute with finality,
and Salamis was permanently incorporated as an essential part of Attica.
To a seafaring folk triremes and sailing craft could annul the
interrupting sea, and the mainland and island were still more firmly
cemented by the blood of Persian and Greek at the great sea-fight.
The ancestral hero of Salamis was Aias (“Ajax”), the son of Telamon.
Pausanias saw a stone near the harbour upon which Telamon sat, as it was
said, looking after his children departing to join the Greek fleet at
Aulis. When Aias fell upon his sword before Troy the hyacinth, according
to the usual tale, sprang up inscribed with the exclamation of woe “Ai!
ai!” the first syllable of his name. But, as Pausanias would have it, a
local flower, different from the hyacinth, made its appearance in
Salamis inscribed with the same letters. Ajax, as was to be expected,
appeared and offered divine aid to the Greeks at the battle of Salamis.
In his honour the “Aianteia” festival was celebrated, and the young
Athenian ephebi used to go over annually to contend at Salamis in
friendly rivalry with the Salaminian youth in foot-races and in
boat-races resembling those rowed from Munychia to the Cantharus harbour
in Piræus. In addition to the Ajax traditions, here, as elsewhere, other
sagas were invented or reshaped to give personification to the remote
past and to be handed down to satisfy the pride of succeeding
generations. Solon was a more tangible memory, and Demosthenes, in
speaking of his statue standing in the market-place of Salamis, quotes
the Salaminians as saying: “This statue was set up not yet fifty years
ago.”
But the dominant memory evoked by the name of Salamis is, naturally, the
defeat of the Persians in the narrow straits. For the Athenians
everything was at stake. The wives and children who had not been sent to
the Peloponnesus were on the island. Euripides, according to an enticing
tradition, was born there at the time of the battle. Xerxes sat on his
throne on the mainland to overawe disaffection and to watch the
spectacle. He had no doubt as to the outcome. His fleet was numerous
enough to allow him to detach the Egyptian squadron for guarding the
narrow exit of the northwest channel and still to leave more ships than
could be used for closing in the eastern approaches. The Greeks were
thus hemmed in, and the unwilling allies from the Peloponnesus were
forced to remain and give battle instead of withdrawing to the Isthmus.
Themistocles, the great admiral, had his will.
To-day, if one sails in a small boat across from Piræus to the harbour
of the modern Ambelaki, the details of the battle as narrated by
Æschylus and Herodotus explain themselves. The long, bare reef of
Psyttaleia cumbers the entrance to the channel. The messenger, in the
“Persians” of Æschylus, in describing to the Queen Mother the scene
enacted on this tiny island, introduces Pan, the old ally at Marathon:—
“An island lies before the shores of Salamis;
’Tis small, for ships a risky mooring, but its reef,
Sea-swept, dance-loving Pan frequents.”
Here Xerxes stationed a picked body of Persians to save their friends
and to slay the Greeks escaping from the wreckage, which, it was plain
to foresee, would come bearing down upon the reef.
Beyond Psyttaleia and overlapping it is the long spit of land Cynosura
(“Dog’s-tail”), like in name and shape to the promontory at Marathon.
The result of the contest in this narrow channel is not so surprising as
is the foresight of Themistocles and the courage of the Greeks in
availing themselves with irresistible daring of the overconfidence of
Xerxes. Æschylus’s account betrays the vivid memories of an actual
eye-witness. The vessels took position by night. Across the desolated
plain of Attica the new Day, “by white steeds drawn, her radiance fair
to see, held all the land.” To the astonishment of the Persians, the
Greeks, instead of fleeing, raised high their shout of happy omen, and
Echo, mate of dance-loving Pan, “back from the island rock returned a
shrill and pealing cry of joy.” The Persian messenger continues:—
“Fell fear on all of us barbarians, deceived
In expectation. For the Greeks a noble hymn
Were singing, not as though in flight, but like to men
Starting for battle with courageous heart. And then
The trumpet’s blare set all of them aflame. Therewith
The even dash of oar-blades, at the word, bit deep
The brine and quickly all of them were visible.
The right wing in good order first led forth, and next
Came out and on the armament entire. Aye then,
As they came onward, loud the cry that reached our ears:
‘Sons of the Hellenes! On! Set free your native land!
Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of gods
And tombs of fathers’ fathers! Now for all we strive!’”
The “jargon” of the Persian host rolled back reply. A Greek ship was the
first to grapple. Bronze beak smote beak. Triremes turned keel
uppermost,—
“Until the water was no longer to be seen,
With wreckage of slain men and splintered vessels packed.
The corpses beached. They filled the ridges and the shores.”
Whether dead or alive the Persians found no refuge upon land. Aristides
with his men, instead of the picked Persians, was now on Psyttaleia to
save or to destroy. The chorus of Persian women, as they hear the news,
imagine their dead now floating with the tide, now, like struggling
swimmers, rising to the waves. The leader cries:—
“Woe, woe is me!
Our dear ones lost,
By the sea’s swell tossed
Their bodies, borne along the main,
Rise and dip, and rise again!”
It was not unnatural that the ineffaceable memory of the sea covered
with wreckage and the dead should reappear, when Æschylus, in the
“Agamemnon,” describes the morning after the storm that wrecked the
ships returning from Troy:—
“When rose the brilliant light of Helios, we see
Th’ Ægean, spread out far and wide, a-blossoming
With wrecks of ships and corpses of Achæan men.”
Apart from the details of the battle, the “Persians” is noticeable for
the method by which the poet introduces his ethical lesson. The ghost of
the great Darius suddenly appears in the orchestra and attributes the
defeat of Xerxes to his presumption in fettering “like a slave” the
“sacred” Hellespont. Æschylus reiterates his favourite doctrine: “When
Insolence puts forth the bloom of Atè, the harvest reaped is one of many
tears.” And when later Xerxes himself arrives, the chorus with
un-oriental frankness says: “Xerxes has packed Hades full with
Persians.”
The “Persæ” of Timotheus, a sensational find of the year 1902, with its
fantastic and overloaded epithets and the half-comic scene of the
drowning Persian spitting out bitter brine and reproaches together, is a
curious scholium upon Æschylus’s poem. The description of the dead upon
the sea is thus retouched:—
“Choked was the sea, star-spangled with the corpses reft of souls
departing with the failing breath. The beaches were weighed down.
Other some upon the jutting spits of land were seated all a-shiver in
their nakedness.”
The love of free men for a free country saved Attica. Euripides, despite
the devastation of the country, might well call his land “unsacked,”
“inviolate.” It was true of the unyielding citizens who, whether upon
the mainland or self-exiled upon their triremes, refused all dealings
with the despot. Plutarch tells us that Xerxes after Salamis sought to
detach the Athenians from the national cause by promises of liberty and
riches for themselves. The Lacedæmonians, fearing lest they might yield
to the royal bribery, attempted to remonstrate, but Aristides bade the
ambassadors say at Sparta: “Neither above ground nor below is there
enough gold for the Athenians to accept in preference to the liberty of
the Hellenes.”
It may be that the visitor to Salamis, as his little craft scuds swiftly
home past Cynosura and Psyttaleia, sees the dark clouds, from which but
now came rain, roll off towards Eleusis, while Attica, the islands, and
the western mountains merge once more in the accustomed beauty of the
translucent atmosphere. He may, perhaps, harbour the thought that under
such a sky, when the war-clouds had finally withdrawn, the demesmen of
country and of town came back to their devastated but ransomed Attica.