ÆGINA
“Not far off from the Graces’ favour falls this island’s lot.
She keepeth civic faith and hath attained to glory in the valour
of the sons of Æacus. Flawless is her fame from the beginning;
for she is sung as nurse of heroes, foremost in prize-winning
contests numerous, foremost in swift war.”
PINDAR.
Pindar’s praise of Ægina must have been as wormwood to the Athenians,
for her Dorian blood and commercial supremacy made her their natural
rival, and her proximity fanned rivalry into hatred. Athens conquered in
the end, and time and tourists have completed the victory by turning the
island into one of the “excursions in Attica.” No longer the “eye-sore
of Piræus,” as Pericles called it, it now immeasurably enhances the
Attic landscape and beckons to its own shores those who day by day have
watched its mountainous beauty across the estranging gulf. Only on the
western side of the island, where the town of Ægina occupies the site of
the ancient capital, is the coast free from steep cliffs, and the entire
surface, as it is seen from Athens, consists of mountain-ridges crowned
by the high peak of Oros, once sacred to Zeus Panhellenios and now
bearing a chapel to Saint Elias. Toward these Æginetan hills the eye
inevitably turns whether the sullen rain-clouds are gathering, as of
old, about the highest summit, or Zeus unrolls his bluest canopy above
the deeper azure of their slopes, or whether, against the changing
sunsets, they darken into stormy purple or delicately veil themselves in
amethystine, shot with rose.
Ægina’s lodestone for modern travellers is the Doric temple on a hill
above the Bay of Marina in the northeastern part of the island. Regular
boats ply between Piræus and the harbour-town of Ægina, the route taken
by Lucian’s group of friends who hired a tiny boat at four obols a head
in order to see the islanders celebrating their famous Festival of
Hecate. From the town the temple may be reached by a ride of several
hours across the rough but fertile northern districts of the island.
Excursion boats, however, for those who have but a day, cross directly
from Piræus to the Bay of Marina, a route more nearly akin to that
followed by the Athenian ships which began the mad expedition to Sicily
by a race “as far as Ægina,” and then turned their prows toward the open
sea. From the shore of the bay it is an easy walk to the isolated
hill-top upon which the ruined temple stands. On an April day this
approach is one of vivid beauty, the bright new green of fig trees
glistening among resinous pines and the ground rioting in the colour of
many flowers. The hill-top itself offers a scene which is unsurpassed
even among the remoter islands of the Greek seas. The intense brilliance
of the very white marble columns under the cloudless sky is tempered by
the somewhat sombre green of neighbouring trees. Afar are seen the
broken coast and the varied mountains of the mainland from Megara to
Sunium. Below, in capricious loveliness, now a tranquil plain of
ultramarine, now a restless surface of sparkling crystal, stretches the
Saronic Gulf.
The temple was erected to Aphæa, protectress of women. Of the outer
colonnade enough is intact to reveal the dignity of the original
structure, but it was in the pediment sculptures that the art of Ægina
was best expressed. Preserved now in the Munich Museum, they are heirs
to the ancient fortune of many Æginetan products which were shipped to
the north and to the south, to Egypt and to the barbarous shores of the
Black Sea. These pediment groups, well known as examples of the work of
the Æginetan school of sculpture in the early part of the fifth century,
probably represented episodes of the Trojan War. This would seem to
indicate that they were produced after the victory at Salamis which
inspired so many symbolistic expressions in art and literature of the
conquest of barbarians by Greeks. Ægina distinguished herself at
Salamis, her sailors being awarded the first honours for valour. And her
older heroes had fought conspicuously in the Trojan War, the earlier act
of the long drama.
[Illustration:
ÆGINA
Temple of Aphæa
]
But it was the personal bravery of the Æginetans rather than their
national policy which brought them glory at Salamis. The
island-commonwealth was inclined to aid the Persians, and it was the
interference of Athens at this crisis which brought on the open war
between the two maritime powers. By the middle of the fifth century
Ægina was completely conquered and made a member of the Confederacy of
Delos. Twenty years later the Dorian inhabitants were expelled and the
island freshly settled from Attica.
Ægina’s heyday had antedated that of Athens by two centuries. Her
argosies had been known in all ports where men bought or sold. Her
system of coinage and of weights and measures had set the standards for
the Greek world. At home her people displayed their restless energies in
both industrial and artistic pursuits. In literature alone were they
barren. Their claim to poetry lies only in the inspiration which one
manifestation of their energy yielded to a foreign poet.
The Æginetans were remarkable athletes as well as fighters, and Pindar
boasted that he held up a mirror to their noble deeds, and wrought for
them a necklace of the Muses, “with white ivory and gold inlaid and
coral of the lily flower gathered ’neath the ocean dew.” The young
Pytheas, indeed, who won the pancratium at Nemea, was celebrated by both
Pindar and Bacchylides, and in the ode of the latter poet there lurks
the memory of some spring visit to Ægina when the young flowers and
reeds were made into garlands, and bare-footed girls bounded like young
fawns toward the flowery hills. Pindar, in the eleven extant odes which
he wrote for Æginetan youths, mingled a “fitting draught as meed for
their toil upon the highway clear of god-inspired deeds.” His
willingness to use his best gifts in their behalf he explained by the
ancient friendship between the island and his native city, typified by
the sisterhood of the nymphs Thebe and Ægina, both beloved by Zeus. And
although he praised the athletic spirit of the Æginetans and their
justice, their defence of strangers, and the deliverance wrought by them
at Salamis “when Zeus was showering destruction far and wide and death
came thick as hail upon unnumbered men,” his most frequent theme was the
glory of their legendary heroes.
The nymph Ægina had borne Æacus, who was so just a king that at his
death the gods made him a judge in Hades. His sons were Peleus and
Telamon, their sons were Achilles and Ajax and Teucer.
“Beyond the sources of the Nile and through the Hyperboreans they
pass, nor is there any city so barbarian or confused in speech that it
knoweth not the hero Peleus and his fame nor that of Ajax, son of
Telamon, whom on his ships Alcmena’s son led forth to Troy.”
Lords of wide adventure, they drifted away from Ægina’s shores. Teucer,
son of Telamon, ruled in Cyprus, a new land, and Ajax held the Salamis
of his father. Peleus ruled in Thessalian Pthia. In the Euxine Sea
Achilles won a “shining isle,” and his son was prince in “Epirus, famed
afar, where, from Dodona on, the cattle-pasturing headlands, jutting
high, lie out against the Ionian Sea.” But at the invocation of Pindar
they gather once more in their ancient home.
Nor was the significance of human greatness absent from Pindar’s mind:—
“Within a little space the joys of man spring up; so too they fall
again to earth when shaken by an adverse doom. We creatures of a day!
What’s man? What is he not?—a shadow’s dream! But when there comes a
glory sent of God there rests on men a bright light and an age
serene.”
Thus to a youth of Ægina who was lifted on the wings of hope and valour
the poet gave a warning and a larger hope.