FROM DELPHI TO THEBES
“Ye triple pathways, shrouded crypt of woodland vale,
Coppice, and narrowing pass where three roads meet! O ye
Who drank my father’s blood—my own—from these my hands,
Do ye, perchance, remember what ye saw me do?”
SOPHOCLES, _Œdipus Tyrannus_.
Œdipus on his way from Delphi and Laius on his way from Thebes met at
the Forked Roads—the “Cleft Way”—in a lonely valley. The traveller who
wishes to see the scene of the ensuing tragedy will have the opportunity
to pass through a country of extraordinary beauty and variety and also
to know the leisured charm of travel by horse or mule. With the
multiplication of railroads these opportunities are growing rarer year
by year, except for those whom adventure or professional interests lead
into the less famous parts of Greece. The major portion of the country
that attracts students of Greek life at its highest is as easy to
traverse as Italy. It is true that the days which there have long since
receded into historical perspective seem in Greece strangely mingled
with the present, because the same traveller who to-day can take the
train from Athens to Thebes was forced, ten years ago, to ride or drive
over the passes of Cithæron. But already in the books of Greek travel
written in the second half of the nineteenth century we begin to
perceive that delicate aroma of a more primitive past which pervades
Goethe’s “Italienische Reise.” In addition to railroads, the matured
police power of the government has been a transforming agency. Not only
between Athens and Corinth but practically everywhere in Greece
brigandage is now unknown. And, finally, the onslaughts of dirt and
vermin have been greatly modified, both by the increasing number of
creditable inns in the larger places and by the ability of the peasants
in remoter villages to understand the prejudices of foreigners. Not very
long ago a request for information about almost any route that led away
from Athens might have been couched in the words of Dionysus asking
about the trip to Hades:—
“And tell me too the havens, fountains, shops,
Roads, resting places, and refreshment rooms,
Towns, lodgings, hostesses with whom are found
The fewest bugs.”[28]
Footnote 28:
Aristophanes, _Frogs_, 112; translation (modified) by Rogers.
[Illustration: DELPHI AND THE ROAD TO ARACHOVA]
Now, in villages which are near important sites of antiquity, the rough
and ready traveller may meet with nothing more unfamiliar to him than
the Aristophanic flea that hops in the blankets like a dancing girl,
while those who take a dragoman, at a moderate price, and mattresses and
supplies from Athens may escape even this enemy, as well as beds of hard
boards and coarsely cooked food. A knowledge of modern Greek enables the
true Philhellene to dispense with a middleman and to receive proofs in
unexpected places of the unfailing hospitality and the alternating
integrity and guile of the Greek peasant.
Perched on the crest that forms the watershed between the eastern and
western lengths of the valley of the Plistus, the lovely village of
Arachova serves as a way-station on the pilgrimage from Kastri to the
Forked Roads. The first part of the road leads familiarly through the
precinct of Delphi, past the clump of plane trees which keep green the
memory of their ancestor planted by Agamemnon, and past Castalia, whose
waters, emerging from the gorge below the Shining Rocks, are as “sweet
to drink” as Pausanias found them and as clear as when they purified the
suppliants at the oracle and the ministering hands of the priests, or
laved the golden hair of the god himself.
Along the road that now stretches eastward the Persians streamed toward
Delphi at the time of Xerxes’s invasion. But near the temple of Athena
Pronaia, on the lower terrace, they were repulsed by terrible portents.
A storm of thunder burst over their heads; at the same time two crags
split off from Mount Parnassus and rolled down upon them with a loud
noise, crushing vast numbers beneath their weight, while from the temple
there went up the war cry and the shout of victory. The Delphians, who
were hiding in the Corycian Cave, seeing their terror, rushed down upon
them, causing great slaughter. And barbarian survivors declared
afterwards that two armed warriors, of a stature more than human,
pursued after their flying ranks, pressing them close and slaying them.
These supernatural warriors were two heroes who belonged to Delphi, by
name Phylacus and Autonous. For their timely aid they received precincts
and worship, Autonous by the Castalian spring, his comrade hard by the
road, practically identical with the modern highway, which ran above the
temple of Athena. The traces of this Heroon may yet be seen, faint
reminders of old-time tumults amid to-day’s oblivious silence. A little
farther is the so-called “Logari,” or likeness of a great door chiselled
in the face of a rock, representing, perhaps, the Gate of Hell. At least
it seems to have marked the entrance to an ancient cemetery which lay
below the road along the southern slopes now given over to orchards and
to tillage. Through them a road winds down toward the silvery Plistus,
twisting in and out among the gray-green olives and the almond trees. In
antiquity this was the road to the bustling town of Ambrosus by the pass
of Dhesphina over Mount Cirphis. Now the donkeys that saunter along it
are bearing peasant girls and their bags to the mills by the river.
The road to Arachova leads in a gentle ascent close along the lower
reaches of Parnassus on the left and high above the deep valley on the
right. The muleteers may turn aside to shorter mountain paths, but the
easy highway tempts to leisure while the sun is still warm in the west
and the brilliant pageant of the valley is but lightly subdued by the
delicate reserves of the approaching evening. Either route leads in less
than three hours to the foot of high precipices rising at the back of
windy Arachova, the representative of Homer’s Anemoreia (Windswept
Town). These cliffs, now called Petrites, are, perhaps, the Look-Out
Place often alluded to in ancient literature, the point of vantage from
which Apollo, the Far-Darter, shot his arrow at the dragon in Delphi.
The town itself, two thousand feet above the sea-level, is one of the
most typical of modern Greece both in situation and in those racial
characteristics which are forming a new nation out of the roots of the
old. The houses, interspersed with vivid green trees, gather about each
other in terraces up the hill to the high-poised church of St. George,
that other dragon slayer, while in its turn the little Christian edifice
is frowned down upon by the rocky mountain-side. The stony, twisted
streets, alive with children, often become staircases of rock, up and
down which the mules indifferently clatter. Stone courtyards lead to
doorways out of which handsome men and women smile an hospitable
welcome. The inhabitants of Arachova, perhaps because they live near the
Muses of Parnassus, possess a charm and courtesy of manner that is not
duplicated among the rougher peasants of the Peloponnesus. They are also
famous for their beauty, the gift of the Greeks from the time of Helen
and Achilles through all admixtures of foreign blood. The men are tall
and slim, with the dignity of carriage and chiselled fineness of feature
which distinguishes the Greek peasantry from the livelier Italian, and
the beauty of the women is grave and tranquil. The traveller may find
himself served by a fair mother and fairer daughter, whose name of
Sappho is belied by the shy, cool loveliness of her parted hair and
innocent eyes.
The Arachovans cherish brave traditions of their part in the War of
Independence, but their relation to antiquity is revealed in certain
elements of their imaginative life. Now, as of old, natural forces are
identified with the activities of divine beings. The snowstorms and icy
winds of winter are attributed to furious battles waged high up on the
peaks of Parnassus by the spirits of the mountain. Gentler spirits of
forest and fountain seem to have descended directly from antique
prototypes. The Corycian Cave, once the haunt of Pan and his nymphs, is
still a favourite resort of the Nereids. And these “Maidens,” as the
modern like the ancient Greek often calls them, dwell in many other
pleasant places, lingering in the old trunks of olive or fig trees, like
hamadryads, or tumbling sportively in mill streams and mountain
torrents, like the daughters of ancient Nereus among the waves of the
sea. Primarily, indeed, the Nereids are still water nymphs, and the
modern Greek word for water, _nero_, so often upon the tourist’s tongue,
echoes their immortal play. Nor has the fashion of their garments
greatly changed since the pictures of antiquity represented them with
long veils, now bound upon the head, now fluttering freely in the hand.
The peasants say that their Nereids wear a head cloth, always of the
finest quality but in style like the cloths worn by their own women,
hanging down over the neck and shoulders. At Arachova the Nereids go
with uncovered head and swing the cloth in their hands, as Leucothea
loosened her veil to give it to Odysseus when she rose like a sea-gull
from the depths of ocean to save his life. The Nereids have pipe-playing
lovers known as demons, in whom Pan and the satyrs seem to live on. And
Pan has his own special representative in the protective Lord of Hares
and Wild Goats, who still ranges the slopes of Parnassus. An evil spirit
in the shape of a he-goat with long beard, who leaps on the goats to
their destruction, hints at that other aspect of Pan revealed in the
malignant power of nature.
Another inheritance from antiquity are the Lamiæ. One of these female
monsters dwelt in a large cavern in the side of Mount Cirphis, still
accessible at the end of a blind path beyond the Plistus, and ravaged
the country all about until a brave hero put her to death. She, and
others of her ilk, were the bugbears of children, and they still live
among the Greek peasantry as vampirish demons. The name is also used as
a term of reproach for scolding women. But in Arachova, oddly enough,
the Lamia has been transformed by some kindly alchemy into a good
spirit, and is often seen in the dusk striding through the village
streets, or spinning at a huge distaff by a fountain’s rim. Her name is
given to handsome, well-behaved women, as beautiful girls are said to be
Nereid-descended or Nereid-eyed.
The modern Greeks also believe in the Fates or Moiræ, either as three
dread sisters or as a hierarchy of twelve who delegate the care of a
specified number of men to a smaller committee. At Arachova three fates
appear within three days of an infant’s birth, two known as the bearers
of good and of ill fortune, who fight the matter out and agree upon a
destiny, and the third called the Spinner, who will weave the strands
into the web of life.
Thus under the very eyes of St. George pagan spirits make common cause
with the angels and demons of Christianity. A hoof print on the edge of
a crag may betray the presence of the lord of hares and goats or of the
unmentionable Devil. An infant who dies unbaptised may claim to be the
victim of the ruthless Spinner, or may go to join in the air the imps
who war with the angels for the souls of men. Mountains and ether,
springs and tree-trunks, are filled with the divine forces created,
under the influence of two religions, by a people always sensitive to
the intimacy between the physical and spiritual worlds.
The Cleft Way lies two hours beyond Arachova, and six hours beyond that
is Chæronea, battlefield and railroad station. On a morning in March the
moon may be bright at six o’clock when the mules beat their way out of
the rough streets of Arachova to the open. The road descends from the
village and skirts the southern sides of Parnassus, leading through
vineyards and gorges and winding over a bare and rocky valley. The amber
moon grows white, and between the opening hills to the east the rising
sun sets the sky aflame. Gradually the gold and rose give way to
intense, brilliant blue. The twin peaks of Parnassus glisten in their
covering of snow. A pastoral charm, reminiscent of Theocritus’s Sicilian
uplands, mingles with the rugged impressiveness of mountain scenery.
Steep hillsides alternate with pastures, and here and there cool streams
curl about the heedless feet of mules and muleteers. Gradually the
severity of the landscape predominates. The road from Delphi along which
Œdipus, like ourselves, was coming, descends through a wild pass
enclosed by the mighty precipices of Parnassus and Cirphis, and in a
scene of impressive loneliness meets the roads from Daulis and
Thebes.[29] The spot is now called “Stavrodromi tou Mega,” or
Cross-Roads of Megas, in memory of a hero who was killed here in the
middle of the nineteenth century while destroying a band of brigands.
The story of the ancient deed of violence is put by Sophocles into the
mouth of Œdipus himself. The Delphic oracle had declared that Thebes
could be healed of its pestilence only by the punishment of the murderer
of Laius, the former king, and Œdipus had proclaimed the requisite
sentence against the unknown. Now he has begun to realize that he was
the slayer:—
“And, wife, I’ll speak out truth to thee. When, journeying,
I came hard by this three-forked road, there met me there,
Just as thou tellest it, a herald and a man
Mounted upon a carriage that was drawn by colts.
And here the leader and the old man, too, himself,
The pair of them, would thrust me rudely from the path,
And I, enraged, strike him—the charioteer—who tried
To push me off. And then the old man, seeing this,
Fetched me a blow with two-pronged goad full on my head
As I strode by. No equal penalty he paid,
Not he. By one swift blow from staff in this my hand
He’s rolled out straightway from the car upon his back,
And I slay all of them! So, if there’s any kin
’Twixt Laius and this stranger, who is wretcheder
Than this man now before thee? Who? what man, could be
More hateful to the gods? Whom never any one,
Or foreigner or citizen, may in his house
Receive; whom none may speak to, nay, but from his house
Must thrust! And this—these curses—none except myself
Brought down upon me!”
Footnote 29:
The local guides sometimes place the Cleft Way a little further along,
in a very narrow pass, known as the “Steni.” Although this spot in
some respects better corresponds to the language of Sophocles, the
balance of authoritative opinion now supports the localization of the
story at the first cross-roads.
From the Forked Roads travellers who must push on to Chæronea will look
regretfully at the path that leads to “lone Daulis” in “the high
Cephisian vale.” The little town is situated on the uneven summit of a
massive hill which rises abruptly from the glens at the eastern foot of
Parnassus, and of its bowery loveliness among pomegranates and olives
and almonds enticing tales are told. Here, according to a favourite
Greek legend, was the first home of the nightingale and the scene of
that “life enriched with sorrow, which her clear voice, insatiate,
bemoans.” The savage Tereus, king of Daulis, had married Procne, a
prehistoric princess of Athens, and after the birth of her son Itylus
had cut out her tongue and claimed that she was dead. He then married
her sister Philomela. The betrayed Procne, however, told Philomela the
truth by means of a web into which she had embroidered her story, and
the two sisters united in slaying the innocent Itylus and serving him up
as a meal to his father. The gods, in anger, transformed Procne and
Philomela into a nightingale and swallow, forever mourning Itylus, while
Tereus became a pursuing hawk. When spring comes, whether in Daulis or
Ithaca or by the “tranquil Thames,” the “pallid-olive” nightingale pours
forth her music, “bewailing her dead child.”
The ride from the Cleft Way to Chæronea, winding through the valley of
the Platania, a tributary of the Bœotian Cephisus, is rich in interest
and variety. A little to the west of Chæronea, on the border between
Phocis and Bœotia, lies Hagios Vlasis, a miserable village, known to
fame only because of its position under the ancient acropolis of
Panopeus. The importance of Panopeus was the subject of legend and
poetry rather than of history. From its clay Prometheus fashioned the
human race, and from its people sprang Epeios, the inventor at Troy of
the wooden horse. Here also the giant Tityos lived and died. He had
violated Leto as she went up to Delphi through Panopeus “of the fair
dancing places,” and for this sin Odysseus found him in Hades sprawling
over nine roods of levelled ground, his liver gnawed by vultures.
Pausanias was perplexed by the Homeric epithet for the town until the
inhabitants explained to him that the Mænads on their way to Parnassus
stopped at Panopeus for preliminary dances. Dionysus may have passed
this way with his mysterious quickening, as Apollo did with his ordered
inspiration. Thus the insignificant town was the legendary scene of
man’s birth and of important episodes in his mental and moral
development.
Beyond Hagios Vlasis lies another modern village in the shadow of an
ancient acropolis. Between Phocis and Bœotia there is no natural
boundary, but the large plain of Chæronea sweeps westward into Phocis
and eastward into Bœotia to what used to be the Copaic lake. On the
north and south the plain is enclosed by barren mountains, and the town
of Chæronea, unlike Panopeus, spread out from the base of its acropolis
at the foot of the southern and lower hills. Its modern representative
is the hamlet of Kapræna, which displays a few legacies of antiquity and
from which can be seen the two peaks of Petrachus, the sharp and steep
acropolis. The chapel of Panagia (the Virgin) contains a chair of white
marble called the chair of Plutarch. The great biographer was born in
Chæronea, and the worshipful preservation of his name in the little
Christian church reminds one of the appearance of the equally
respectable Plinies on the exterior of the cathedral of their native
Como.
But the dominant interest of Chæronea is the battle which, in 338 B. C.,
was lost by the forces of Greece united against Philip of Macedon. No
single account of the terrible defeat has been handed down by dramatist
or historian, as Æschylus and Herodotus immortalized the victories of
Salamis and Marathon, and only general facts in the struggle are known
to us from lesser writers. Before the march to Chæronea Demosthenes had
risen in the Assembly, at a terrified meeting in the cold and hopeless
dawn, and persuaded the Athenians to make a hasty alliance with Thebes
against the encroachments of Philip. In the battle the Athenians held
the left wing while the right, the post of honour, was given to the
famous Sacred Band of the Thebans. Between them were gathered the other
allies. Against the Thebans at the crucial moment Philip turned his
cavalry under the command of the young Alexander. As the struggle became
hopeless the Athenians retreated, but the members of the Sacred Band
fought until they fell, raising one last memorial to their great
founder, Epaminondas, and offering one last atonement for the cowardice
of Thebes in the Persian wars.
The victory of Macedon was not so much wrested from the Greek arms as it
was due to ineradicable defects in the Greek political character. It was
characteristic of all Greek history that the allies should have formed
no united and harmonious army under one fully empowered leader. The
intense individualism which made Greece supreme in the arts and in
science and philosophy left her at the mercy of peoples able to
subordinate single wills to a national purpose. In the presence of the
architecture, sculpture, and literature of the Greeks it is impossible
to deplore their unthwarted intellectual freedom, their keen
sensibilities, their genius for personal development. But at Chæronea it
is easy to see not only the disintegration, but also the demoralization
of a national life which lacked the heroic sacrifice of self and the
persistence of a common controlling ideal as much as it lacked
administrative genius and political wisdom.
But it must be remembered that such inclusive strictures on the Greek
character can be made only when we follow the prejudices of Philip’s
enemies in excluding Macedon from the Greek states. In the perspective
of history it is clear that Chæronea opened the way for a new Hellenic
state to create a new national life in which discord should give way to
unity and individualism to a world empire. Nevertheless the rise of
Macedon was not continuous with the former life of Greece as were the
successive hegemonies of the older states. The monarchy of Philip
obliterated not only the existing commonwealths but their modes of
government. Politically the loss was swallowed up in gain. Aristotle’s
polity has rightly been called provincial in comparison with his pupil’s
empire in which there was neither Greek nor barbarian. But in the world
of ideas no substitution was an adequate atonement. The ideals of
liberty which the older states had cherished and in which their
intellectual and artistic life had been nurtured were lost at Chæronea.
In this sense the Athenians were right in saying that here ended the
freedom of Greece.
More than two centuries later a lesser victory was won at Chæronea by
Sulla over the forces of Mithridates, king of Pontus. Two trophies were
erected by the Roman general, and were afterwards seen by Pausanias.
“But Philip, the son of Amyntas, set up no trophy, neither at Chæronea,
nor for any other victory that he won over barbarians or Greeks, for it
was not a Macedonian custom to erect trophies.” On this field the only
trophy was the one erected by the defeated to the dead. The Athenians
who fell were buried in the Cerameicus, and Demosthenes, who had fought
in the ranks, pronounced over them a funeral oration. The Thebans were
buried on the field. “No inscription,” says Pausanias, “is carved on the
tomb, but a lion is placed on it, perhaps in allusion to the spirit of
the men. The reason why there is no inscription I take to be that their
fortune did not match their valour.”
This lion may be seen to-day about a quarter of a mile beyond Kapræna,
just before one turns toward the modern railroad station of Chæronea.
For centuries it had lain in fragments, but in 1902 the broken pieces
were fitted together with a result extraordinarily impressive. Upon a
pedestal ten feet high sits erect a great beast of gray stone, lifting
into the free air a massive unbowed head, and rivalling in the
guardianship of Chæronea the greater Inspector who, possibly after this
same battle, was invoked by an unknown poet:—
“O guardian Time, Inspector General
Of mortals’ doings manifold,
Be herald of our fate to men, to all,
How we the holy land of Greece essayed
To save, and, dying, plains Bœotian made
Renowned in story never old.”
The road turns at a sharp angle in front of the lion and runs in placid
monotony to the station situated near the banks of the Cephisus.
Pausanias closes his chapter on Chæronea by a rare reference to the
common people of his own day, who gathered flowers and from them
distilled “balms for the pains of men.” In a modern chapter the end
comes, not with the haunting fragrance through summer fields of plucked
lilies and healing roses, but with the scream of an engine as the Athens
express breaks into the little station. The train goes straight through
Bœotia to the bright city in the Attic plain. But on the way lies Thebes
of the seven gates.