ARCADIA
“The winding valleys deep-withdrawn and ridgèd crests of Arcady.”
PINDAR.
Of the temples that once adorned the mainland and the islands of Greece
only a brave few now rear columns from the ground. Among these the
Temple of Apollo at Bassæ constrains the traveller to penetrate to the
heart of Arcadia. The rewards of the difficult journey are many, and are
enhanced by a general knowledge of the whole Arcadian territory, into
which the detached impressions of a brief stay may be sympathetically
fitted.
Homer says that the Arcadians went to Troy in vessels borrowed from
Agamemnon, because they had none of their own. The most potent fact in
the history and development of Arcadia is its isolated position as the
one inland country (save little Doris) of Greece. Only from the heights
of the encircling mountains could her people catch sight of distant
seas. Those whom the sea-spell lured with irresistible magic left their
hills to seek foreign coasts and enlist in foreign navies. The Arcadians
have rightly been called the mercenaries of Greece. Those who stayed at
home lived the restricted life of a population cut off from intercourse
with the larger world. The entire territory is composed of high land,
its lowest elevation from the sea being more than two thousand feet. In
the east are great plains of swampy ground, and lakes drained by
underground channels. Towards the west the land becomes an irregular,
hilly plateau intersected by rivers. In antiquity superb forests of oaks
and pines, coverts for many a wild beast, contributed to that general
physical wildness which prevented a people untouched by foreign ideas
from uniting in a progressive political life. Even against the
background of Greek individualism their history is conspicuously one of
separate towns. And of these towns few attained to any eminence.
Arcadia contained the oldest and the youngest of all Greek cities. The
latter, Megalopolis, is still in civic existence, and is the terminus of
the modern railroad ride from Athens for those who are on their way to
Bassæ. It was the last town founded in free Greece, and its
establishment originated in the ardent hope of Epaminondas to unite the
scattered Arcadians under one government. In the same southwestern
portion of Arcadia, near the young Megalopolis and easily reached from
it on horses, lie the ruins of old Lycosura, believed by the Greeks to
be the most ancient of all their cities and to have served as a model
for later foundations.
But the chief rôles in the political life of Arcadia were played by
Mantinea and Tegea, cities lying in the wide eastern plains. Near them
lay Pallantium, and within the territories of these three cities
flourishes the modern Tripolis, in its origin an important Turkish
stronghold and now one of the most prosperous towns of the new nation.
The sanguinary history of Tripolis in the War of Independence was worthy
of the ancient character of Mantinea and Tegea.
Although Homer called Mantinea “lovely,” her life was one of military
activity. Mantineans fought at Thermopylæ, but it is in the pages of the
historians of later periods, of Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius, that
they chiefly figure, fighting on their own territory against Sparta or
with Sparta against Thebes. This evil coalition resulted in the famous
battle of 362 B. C., in which Epaminondas fought for the last time. The
description of the battle forms the close of Xenophon’s treatise on
Greek History, and the chaotic results of the long-anticipated struggle,
whereby “neither party, though each claimed to have conquered, was seen
to gain any more in land or cities or authority than it possessed before
the battle was fought,” are set forth by him with considerable
vividness. But the momentous fact that in this battle the great Theban
commander lost his life he disposes of in a subordinate clause. This
petty injustice is the more singular because the fatal blow was
generally believed to have been struck by Xenophon’s son, Grylus, who
received a public burial and monument at Mantinea. It is Pausanias who
admits us to the last scene of a noble life, enacted among the alien,
windswept oaks of Arcadia, on the hill now known as Mytika. “When
Epaminondas received his wound, they carried him out of the line of
battle. He was still in life. He suffered much, but with his hand
pressed on his wound he kept looking hard at the fight, and the place
from which he watched it was afterwards named ‘Scope’ (the Lookout). But
when the combat ended indecisively he took his hand from the wound and
breathed his last, and they buried him on the battlefield.”
The memory of Epaminondas inspired a later hero who not only fought at
another battle of Mantinea but was himself a son of the Arcadian soil.
In the period of the Achæan League, Philopœmen, born in Megalopolis, was
eight times chosen to be the general of the united forces, and in 206 B.
C. he met and conquered at Mantinea the recalcitrant Spartans who had
refused to join the league. The description of this battle is given to
us by Polybius, his younger fellow townsman, who at the hero’s death was
the youth selected to bear his ashes to the tomb. Because all such
victories in the cause of freedom were but fitful gleams of the fire
whose flame had been quenched at Chæronea, it is the more necessary to
give heed to a character like Philopœmen, from the day of whose death,
Pausanias sadly remarks, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. He
closes the long line of Greeks who led their peoples to liberty. At one
of the Olympic festivals the whole audience in the theatre rose to greet
Themistocles, who had saved Greece from Persia. And centuries later a
similar tribute was paid to Philopœmen. Not long after his victory over
the Spartans it chanced that he was present at the competition of the
minstrels at the Nemean Games. “Pylades, a native of Megalopolis, and
the most famous minstrel of his time, who had gained a Pythian victory,
was singing an air of Timotheus, the Milesian, called ‘The Persians.’
Scarcely had he struck up the song, ‘The glorious crown of freedom who
giveth to Greece,’ when all the people turned and looked at Philopœmen,
and with clapping of hands signified that the song referred to him.”
Few men in history are more interesting than Philopœmen. From youth to a
hale old age he lived the life of his choice, combining rugged and
fearless sincerity with keen military knowledge, and uniting in an
unusual degree the reckless impulsiveness of a freebooter with the
patient power of a skilful general. When one term of his generalship had
expired, he hurried over to Crete to help in a war which in no way
concerned him; but his countrymen, accustomed to depend upon his
ability, summoned him back, and he arrived on the mainland just in time
to find that the Romans had fitted out a fleet against Sparta, and to
plunge into the fray. Being no sailor, however, he unwittingly embarked
in a leaky galley, which reminded the Romans and their allies (in those
days every man had read his classics at school) of the verses in the
Catalogue in which Homer speaks of the Arcadians as ignorant of the sea.
After eight successful generalships and many brilliant exploits, when he
was more than seventy years old, Philopœmen was captured and poisoned by
the Messenians. In him Arcadia lost her greatest son, in whom had lived
her own wildness and her own patience, her own flaming spirit and her
own honourable austerity. According to Polybius, he had harboured no
illusions about the future of his country and of Hellas, but had chosen
to offer his life, while it lasted, as a bulwark against the inevitable.
“I know full well,” he said in answer to Aristænus’s criticism of his
policy of resisting all unjust encroachments from Rome, “that there will
hereafter come a time when the Greeks will have to yield obedience under
compulsion to every order issued to them. But would one wish to see this
time come as quickly as possible or, on the contrary, postponed as late
as possible? Methinks as late as possible! In this, then, the policy of
Aristænus differs from my own. He is eager to see the inevitable come as
quickly as possible and he helps it on to the best of his ability,
whereas I to the best of my power resist and thrust it back.” One false
hope, according to Pausanias, he did treasure: “He would fain have
modelled his life on the pattern set by the character and deeds of
Epaminondas, but could not equal him in all things, for while the temper
of Epaminondas was very gentle, that of the Arcadian was passionate.”
Although Arcadia’s part in the Persian wars was not heroic, Tegea, like
Mantinea, proved her bravery at Thermopylæ, and at Platæa, according to
Herodotus, her citizens struggled with the Athenians for the foremost
post in the battle. Later wars, civil and foreign, kept her busy through
several centuries. But the arts of peace also flourished within her
walls, and Tegea must be honoured for having erected one of the most
distinguished temples not only of the Peloponnesus but of all Greece.
This was the Temple of Athena Alea, built by Scopas early in the fourth
century. Only a few traces are left of its mingled Doric, Ionic, and
Corinthian columns. More important are the fragments preserved in the
National Museum at Athens of sculptures from the hand of Scopas himself,
portraying the Calydonian boar-hunt, the heroine of which was the
Arcadian maiden Atalanta. The same Museum contains marble reliefs from
Mantinea, coming probably from the time, if not the workshop, of
Praxiteles, and very interesting sculptures of disputed date from old
Lycosura. The Arcadians, whose native gift was music, did not lag behind
the rest of the Greeks in their appreciation of the plastic arts.
Pallantium was not important in Arcadian history, but was reverenced by
the Romans as the home of Evander, whose enterprizing colonization of
the Palatine Hill was immortalized by Virgil. In filial remembrance of
the adventurer the town was rebuilt by Antoninus Pius.
To the north of the great plain of Mantinea and Tegea lay another marshy
plain containing three other important cities, Orchomenus, Pheneus, and
Stymphalus. But the train from Athens sweeps far toward the south, and
ruined cities slip out of mind among the “winding valleys deep-withdrawn
and ridgèd crests of Arcady.” The real significance of Arcadia lay in
its landscape rather than in its towns. If the country contributed few
large centres and few splendid deeds to Greek history, it offered its
mountains and streams to be peopled by the divine progeny of Greek
imagination. Pan himself was born amid the “wind-tossed mountain trees
of steep Cyllene,” and from many another Arcadian hillside thereafter
his pipes reached the ears of shepherds tending their flocks in upland
pastures. Artemis, making her pastime the chase of boars and swift deer,
fairer than the fair wild wood-nymphs attending her, took especial
pleasure in the ridges of Erymanthus and became the reverently
worshipped Maiden of the Arcadian country.
Later literature in more than one language created a visionary Arcadia
of uninterrupted pastoral charm and ease, a refuge for the weary, an
earthly dream of “unlaborious life.” The fashion began in Greek itself
in the artificial period of Alexandrian civilization when men were sated
with city life and began to write chamber poetry about the beauties of
nature. Arcadia, with its still unspoiled hills and woods and rivers,
became a convenient setting for the delicate and charming fancies of
litterateurs. But in the real Arcadia “nature” was a serious force to be
reckoned with. The frowning mountains, wild ravines, and stretches of
barren soil; the gusty storms of winter and the close heat of summer;
the difficulties of communication between village and village, and the
remoteness from the great highway of the sea, all combined to make
Arcadian life rude and elemental. Often the inhabitants were forced to a
hand to hand struggle with poverty. Sometimes they gave way, as
Herodotus indicates when he says that “some men from Arcadia who were in
need of a livelihood and wanted employment” deserted to the Persians.
But oftener the Arcadians fought it out at home, tilling what soil they
could, and patiently tending herds and flocks.
Such a people, busy with the primitive needs of life, found in Pan and
Artemis saviours and graciously intimate friends rather than fanciful
presences with which to adorn pastoral poetry. Arcadia was, indeed, a
very religious country, teeming both in its cities and on its lonelier
hillsides with sanctuaries to many of the Olympian hierarchy, and
especially to a strange, elusive divinity, known as the “Mistress.” But
the divinities of life in the open most appealed to them. It is
indicative of an important and not always recognized element in Greek
character that some of the most lovely fancies of Greek mythology should
have taken root where life was hard. The austerity of work and poverty
was never denied by the clear-eyed Greeks. But instead of seeking, like
the Celts, to escape from it into dreams of unreal and fairer worlds,
they balanced against it the palpable beauty of this world and found
much room for joy and laughter.
Pan’s birth in Arcadia was third in an interesting series of events. The
first was the birth of Zeus himself on Mount Lycæus, the isolated
mountain peak which rises northwest of Megalopolis. It is, however, no
widespread Hellenic tradition which gave to the king of the gods an
Arcadian birthplace. Of all the places that claimed that honour, perhaps
Crete most impressed herself upon the Greek world at large. But the
legend of Arcadia at least resulted in bestowing upon the ruler of
Olympus the well-known epithet “Lycæan,” and in establishing on the
summit of the mountain a sanctuary involving sacrifices and festivals.
Human sacrifices continued here astonishingly long, and the savagery of
the early Arcadians left traces also in tales of werewolves roaming
among the desert places of the mountain.
A much more engaging story, especially when it is clothed in Ionic mirth
and grace, brought Zeus as a lover to another mountain peak in Arcadia
and pictured the second divine birth in the country. The Homeric Hymn to
Hermes, whether it is read in the original or in Shelley’s inimitable
translation, is alive with that witty and audacious fancy which
furnished to naughty mortals delightful brothers among the gods. On
Mount Cyllene, towering above the other mountains of Arcadia and
bulwarking the northeastern portion of the country, dwelt Maia, a
fair-tressed nymph. Zeus loved her and—
“She gave to light a babe all babes excelling,
A schemer subtle beyond all belief,
A shepherd of thin dreams, a cow-stealing,
A night-watching, and door-waylaying thief.”
The precocity of the divine infant is the theme of the story. He is not
four days old when he starts for Thessaly to steal the cattle of Apollo.
But as he crosses the threshold of his mother’s cave he meets a tortoise
creeping along and feeding on the rich grass, a sight which moves him to
laughter and gives him a fresh idea. This is no less than the fashioning
of the lyre out of the tortoise’s shell:—
“And through the tortoise’s hard stony skin
At proper distances small holes he made,
And fastened the cut stems of reeds within,
And with a piece of leather overlaid
The open space and fixed the cubits in,
Fitting the bridge to both, and stretched o’er all
Symphonious chords of sheep-gut rhythmical.
“When he had wrought the lovely instrument,
He tried the chords, and made division meet
Preluding with the plectrum, and there went
Up from beneath his hand a tumult sweet
Of mighty sounds, and from his lips he sent
A strain of unpremeditated wit,
Joyous and wild and wanton—such you may
Hear among revellers on a holiday.”
When he has sung enough and is “seized with a sudden fancy for fresh
meat,” he hurries off to the shadowed hills of Pieria and steals fifty
of the lowing kine which are feeding there on flowering, unmown meadows.
Cunningly reversing their tracks, and making for himself sandals of
twigs and leaves that will not betray him, he drives the cattle to the
river Alpheus in Arcadia, by whose banks they munch lotus and
marsh-marigold. He kills and cooks with lusty appetite, in the serene
moonshine, and then at dawn, through a silence broken by no step of god
or man nor bark of dog, he goes back to the crests of Cyllene and enters
the cave, through the hole of the bolt,—
“Like a thin mist or an autumnal blast.”
Meantime Apollo, the Far-darter, has been tracking him from the
Thessalian meadows. To the fragrant Cyllenian hill he comes where sheep
are peacefully grazing, and finds the little thief wrapped once more in
swaddling bands, feet, head and hands curled into a small space,
tortoise shell clasped under his baby arm.
“Latona’s offspring, after having sought
His herds in every corner, thus did greet
Great Hermes: ‘Little cradled rogue, declare,
Of my illustrious heifers, where they are!’
. . . . . . .
“To whom thus Hermes slyly answered: ‘Son
Of great Latona, what speech is this!
Why come you here to ask me what is done
With the wild oxen which it seems you miss?
I have not seen them, nor from any one
Have heard a word of the whole business;
If you should promise an immense reward,
I could not tell more than you now have heard.
“An ox-stealer should be both tall and strong,
And I am but a little new-born thing,
Who yet, at least, can think of nothing wrong.
My business is to suck, and sleep, and fling
The cradle-clothes about me all day long,—
Or, half asleep, hear my sweet mother sing,
And to be washed in water clean and warm,
And hushed and kissed and kept secure from harm.’”
Apollo is not deceived, but is forced to laughter. Finally they agree to
put the case before Zeus on Olympus. There, after Apollo’s attack,
Hermes makes a lying and witty defence, at which his immoral and
omnipotent father laughs aloud. Both sons are sent off to find the kine,
and on the way the Cyllenian shows the Far-darter his tortoise-lyre and
entrances him with its music:—
“unconquerable
Up from beneath his hand in circling flight
The gathering music rose—and sweet as Love
The penetrating notes did live and move
“Within the heart of great Apollo. He
Listened with all his soul and laughed for pleasure.”
Hermes suggests an exchange, promising the tortoise shell to Apollo, if
he may have in return the glittering lash and drive the herd. Thus the
lyre, invented in Arcadia, passed to the rightful lord of music and to
an universal sovereignty.
The two brothers became fast friends and sealed their affection on snowy
Olympus by mutual promises. The older brother reserves for himself the
awful gift of prophecy, but in return for the lyre gives to the younger
lordship over the twisted-horned cattle and horses and toiling mules,
over the burning eyes of lions, and white-tusked boars and dogs and
sheep, and, most important of all, makes him herald to lead the dead to
Hades.
Almost imperceptibly, toward the close of the hymn, the two gods take on
something of the stateliness which clothes them in more serious poetry.
But the rollicking infant and his half-angry, half-amused victim must be
remembered to complete the idea of a religion which left a definite
place for humour. While the gravely beautiful Hermes which adorned the
temple of Hera at Olympia revealed, in perfect marble, a serious and
noble conception of divinity, it may well be that among the many wooden
or stone statues of the god which stood in orchard closes, by cool
wayside springs, and in crossways near the gray seashore, more than one
recalled his lovable and mischievous boyhood. Certainly it is tempting
to imagine the infant trickster in the Hermes of the Anthology who
guarded pleasant playgrounds and to whom boys offered marjoram and
hyacinth and fresh garlands of violets.
Hermes would seem to have frequently returned to his early Arcadian
home, and during one of these visits he fell in love with the daughter
of Dryops, and for her sweet sake became thrall of a mortal man and
shepherded the fleecy sheep. The fruit of his union with the shepherd’s
daughter was Pan, and another Homeric hymn describes his birth:—
“and she in the palace
Brought forth a son that was dear unto Hermes but strange to her seeing,
Goat-footed, two-hornèd, noise-loving, taking his pleasure in laughter.
Fleeing she darted away and her man-child the mother abandoned
For that she feared at the sight of his visage unlovely, full-bearded.
Forthwith, however, the luck-bringer, Hermes, accepted the infant.
Took him and held in his hand and the god had delight without measure.
Lightly he went with the boy to the homes of the gods ever-living,
Wrapping him well in the skins of the wild hare that runs on the
mountains,
There took his seat near to Zeus and the others, the gods ever-living,
Showed them the boy as his own and they in their hearts were delighted,
All the immortals, but chiefly the revelling god, Dionysus.
Pan then they called him because to the Pantheon all he gave joyance.”
Such was the pleasant début of the god who was to make glad the hearts
of men also, bringing laughter into a world of tears, and inspiring amid
the difficulties and the ennui of civilization a wholesome passion for
life in the open air. Lord was he of every snowy crest and mountain peak
and rocky path. Soft meadows where crocuses and fragrant hyacinths
nestled in the grass knew his presence. By still pools within the green
woods he would sit contentedly, or lofty crags would tempt his lively
feet to adventurous climbing. Over the high white hills he would range
in the pursuit of wild beasts. And in the evening he would sit on some
jutting rock or by the dusky water of a wayside spring and play on his
reeds such melodies of honeyed sweetness as even the nightingale’s
spring song could not surpass. With him the mountain nymphs, the shrill
singers, went wandering with light feet, and Echo moaned along the
mountain crest. Many a lonely shepherd among the hills or tired
husbandman in the meadows must have desired to keep the god within his
hearing. A broken fragment in the Greek Anthology, embedded among frigid
Byzantine conceits, but springing one knows not out of what fresher age,
seems instinct with such prayers as theirs:—
“With lips along thy reed pipe straying,
Dear Pan, abide,
For in the sunny uplands playing
Doth Echo hide.”
Although Pan dwelt all over Hellas, his Arcadian birth was not disputed,
and more than one Arcadian mountain was especially distinguished by his
presence. Among the Nomian hills, to the south of Lycæus, he invented
the music of his pipes. Mount Mænalus, near Tripolis, he often visited,
and on Mount Parthenius he requested recognition at Athens. Over this
mountain, named for virginal Artemis, ran one of the regular passes from
the Argolis into Arcadia, a route followed to-day by the train from
Athens to Tripolis. The swift Athenian courier was passing this way when
he was delayed by the god.
In the northwestern corner of Arcadia, skirting Achæa and Elis, rises
another well-known mountain, Erymanthus, the favourite hunting ground of
Artemis, who as Leader, Saviour, and Fairest received countless shrines
from the Arcadians. The southern and lower continuation of Mount
Erymanthus was known as Mount Pholoë, to which, as we know from the
“Anabasis,” Xenophon and his sons and their guests used to come from
Elis for the pleasures of the chase. Its beautiful woodlands were fabled
to be one of the homes of the Centaurs, whose strange dual nature linked
the world of men to the world of beasts. Heracles was entertained by
them when, as one of his labours, he came to hunt the wild boar in the
Erymanthian thickets.
The forests which spread over the plains and darkened the hills of
Arcadia were filled with wild boars and bears and deer. The bear
especially gave rise to many legends. The Great Bear in the heavens was
once an Arcadian maiden, Callisto, whom jealous Hera turned into a bear
and whom Artemis, as a favour to her, shot down. But Zeus retransformed
the maiden into shining stars, the guides of mariners before and since
the night when Odysseus “kept looking ever at the Pleiades and at Boötes
setting slow and at the Bear, by surname called the Wain.” Callisto’s
son was Arcas, or Bear, and he first taught the forest dwellers, in the
country that was to inherit his name, how to raise corn and bake bread.
The great oak woods of Arcadia were responsible for the epithet
“acorn-eating,” which the riddle-loving priestess of Delphi often
applied to the inhabitants. In the time of Pausanias the Arcadian
forests were still conspicuous in all parts of the country. Driven
gradually from the plain to the mountains they are even there at last
yielding to decay.
But the waters of Arcadia are as unchanged as the hills. Both the
Alpheus and the Eurotas rise within its borders, the former turning
westward, as of old, to its haunts at Olympia, the latter winding to the
south to delight a new Sparta with its gleaming water and ripple-washed
reeds. And the Ladon, the northern branch of the Alpheus, flows on with
the impetuous charm and beautiful colour which gave it the reputation of
being the loveliest river in Greece. From out of the range of the
Erymanthian hills springs the river Erymanthus, which was especially
sacred to Pan, as if its reeds above all others could be shaped into
tuneful pipes. In the river Gortys the nymphs washed the new-born Zeus.
And by the banks of the Aroanius, which flows down a northern valley to
join the Ladon, Pausanias, in enviable leisure, awaited Arcadian music.
“Amongst the fish in the Aroanius,” he tells us, “are the so-called
spotted fish. They say that these spotted fish sing like a thrush. I saw
them after they had been caught, but I did not hear them utter a sound,
though I tarried by the river till sunset, when they were said to sing
most.”
A group of renowned Arcadian waters may be reached in one northward
excursion of three days from Tripolis. The first of these is the Lake of
Pheneus, as famous for its strangeness as for its loveliness. It is so
surrounded by hills that no stream can escape from it above ground, and
the water issues only by two katavothras. The condition of these
subterranean channels determines whether the great mountain basin of the
Pheneus is a fertile plain or a broad lake. In ancient times and in our
own the changes have succeeded each other with the fascination of
mystery. Pausanias found a plain, and knew the lake only by tradition.
From his day until the beginning of the nineteenth century there were no
records. But with the ensuing careful descriptions of geographers and
travellers come baffling alternations of a “swampy plain covered with
fields of wheat or barley” and a “wide expanse of still water deep among
the hills, reflecting black pine woods, gray crags, and sky now crimson
with sunset.”
To the east of Pheneus and separated from it only by a mountain ridge
the Lake of Stymphalus is sunk in placid beauty within towering hills.
It was the scene of the fifth labour of Heracles, who killed the
monstrous man-eating birds that haunted it. They typified, probably, the
pestilence which would arise whenever the underground channel that
served as an outlet for the lake became stopped. Heracles was the
master-engineer of mythological times. Later engineers also experimented
with the water which flows into the Stymphalian Lake from the
surrounding mountains and especially from Cyllene. Its purity and
abundance led Hadrian to have a supply of it carried by an aqueduct to
Corinth. And to-day the Athenians are contemplating importing it into
their arid city.
From the prosperous village of Solos vigorous and patient pedestrians
may reach the most famous of all the waters of Arcadia, and the most
characteristic also of a country in which gentle charms, however real,
are always subsidiary to a primitive wildness. These waters are the
Falls of the Styx, as familiar in English as in Greek literature. They
descend over a perpendicular cliff amid scenery which some consider
grander and more imposing than that at Delphi. The surroundings so
impressed themselves on the sensitive Greek imagination that from the
time of Homer the Styx was one of the dread rivers of death and the
lower world, fit companion-piece to nether darkness and the monstrous
hound of hell, fit invocation even for gods when on their oath. “Let
earth be witness unto this and heaven broad and yon down-flowing water
of the Styx, which is the oath the greatest and most terrible among the
blessed gods,” the immortals, from Zeus to Calypso, are ever exclaiming.
Hesiod contributed the fancy that Iris, in a vessel of gold, brought
water from the Styx to Olympus, so that the gods might swear by its
material presence. The spray of the falls is said to take on at midday
the lovely colors of the rainbow, which had its divine personification
in the fair messenger of the gods. And it has also been pointed out that
Hesiod, in addition to describing accurately the Styx as trickling down
from a high and steep rock, by a fine figure suggests a view in winter
when huge icicles form over the cliff and the clouds settle down so
closely upon its summit that the water looks as if it were descending
straight from the sky. The Styx, he says, dwelt in “glorious chambers,
vaulted with long rocks, and round about a colonnade of silver pillars
reared against the sky.” To him also as to Homer the dweller in this
icicled palace was “terrible, hated by all the immortals.”
The traveller who must sacrifice the lakes and rivers of Arcadia to
seeing the temple of Apollo comes directly by train from Athens to
Megalopolis in the great south-western plain. Here he is detained only
by a fourth century theatre and other more fragmentary remains of the
ancient city before turning northward by carriage or horse.
If he is obliged to ride for several hours and meet a carriage at
Karytæna, the grim guardian of the mountainous road to Andritsena, where
he is to spend the night, he will have cause to be thankful for an
experience that has put him on more familiar terms with rude Arcadia,
and has made him more sensitive to the change from monotonous lowland to
vast, solitary mountains and deep ravines. The town of Karytæna lies on
the slopes of one of the low hills that form the northern boundary of
the plain of Megalopolis. Above it, on the hill’s summit, loom the ruins
of an old Frankish castle, once the seat of a barony which contributed
many a romantic story to the history of the Peloponnesus in the Middle
Ages. Rarely in Greece is the harmony of historical impression
interrupted. But here, like highwaymen to challenge intellectual
security, feudalism and the mediæval world stalk out upon the unwary.
The spectacle is unique. Karytæna stands at the point where the flat
plain startlingly breaks into almost terrifying mountains. Mount Lycæus
towers on the left, and all around serrated heights rise grandly above
the castle, without detracting from its own defiant dignity. Past the
foot of the hill flows, on its way to Elis, the Alpheus, here spanned by
a striking bridge of six arches, bearing a Frankish inscription. The
ruins of the old barony of Geoffrey de Villehardouin equal any feudal
remains in Europe in their reminiscent suggestiveness of the romantic
and violent life of the Middle Ages. But even while the traveller fears
that he will become confused among memories of the Frankish dukes and
princes of the Peloponnesus, of donjons and keeps, of chivalry and
knighthood, of all the insignia and the emotions and the ideals which
make the thirteenth century A. D. seem more remote from us than the
fifth century B. C., he finds himself restrained and pacified. Whatever
Greece lays her hands upon seems to lose its ephemeral or unrelated
character and to take its place, individual, to be sure, but tributary
in an harmonious whole. The ruined mediæval castle fits into the
surrounding landscape as no disturbing factor, but rather as an integral
part of what had helped also to shape the ancient life of Arcadia into
its distinguishing forms. The age when the autochthonous Arcadians were
resisting the inroads of Sparta and the age when the Slavic inhabitants
were yielding to the attacks of the irresistible Franks seem to have had
a common parentage in physical conditions. And the brawling stream of
the Alpheus below seems to make the jousts and the romances of Geoffrey
de Karytena’s court as much their own as were the festivals of Zeus and
the love affairs of Pan and the nymphs.
The mountains into which the carriage turns from the six-arched bridge
are threaded by a long road which, despite its smoothness and safety,
runs near enough to the tops of precipices and to the sight of noisy
torrents in the gloomy ravines below to engender a mood of Arcadian
wildness. If this mountain region is reached in time, travellers will
become spectators of the charming scenes which are enacted each evening
over the hills of Greece when the bleating flocks of sheep and goats
come home to their folds. Sappho saw them in hilly Lesbos:—
“Hesperus, all things thou bringest that brightness of morning had
scattered,
Bringest the lamb and the kid, and the child bringest home to his
mother.”
Arcadia is still “rich in flocks” and the “mother of sheep,” and to meet
and greet her shepherds as they turn home from the mountain pastures
restores the world of Greek poetry. But if Karytæna is scarcely rounded
before “the sun sets and all the ways are darkened,” then pastoral
idylls make way for Arcadia’s magnificent solitariness. The mediæval
castle bravely lifts its head above the lonely country, while red clouds
stretch like tongues of flame over the mountains and the setting sun
turns into molten gold. Suddenly, perhaps, amid the awful silence of
purple crags and burning sky, one sign of life asserts itself. A little
kid is stumbling, lost and dreary, in a patch of green wheat which had
enticed it from its mother. Doubtless before the night is over one tired
shepherd who has safely enfolded his ninety and nine will climb the
steeps again to find the prodigal. But travellers must pass on in the
effort to reach Andritsena before midnight. The sky pales and cools into
night, and stars of singular brilliance emerge, using the absence of the
fair moon to “show their bright faces to men.” As one drives hour after
hour through the starlit solitude, while “from heaven breaketh open the
ether infinite,” all geographical and temporal limitations seem done
away with, and modernity and antiquity meet within the heart of nature.
But finally, as the road from time to time curves outward, the lights of
human habitations begin to twinkle. Andritsena lifts her little evening
beacons on a mountain-side to offer shelter and food to pilgrims of the
night. The village rivals Arachova in the charm of its situation, with
its outlook over the verdant hills of the Alpheus valley to the distant
pale blue heights of Erymanthus in the north. Vineyards and mountain
streams and trees add their quota. Those who have stayed several days in
the town in bright weather, or who have been snowed in, as travellers
may easily be as late as April, report many attractions out of doors,
and many hospitable entertainments within the peasant houses. Even those
whose impressions are gained from one night’s lodging may forget
physical hardships in the discovery of a Greek inheritance. A girl,
reproved for stroking the embroidered collar of a guest, says
explanatorily, “but it is so pretty,” even as the old men on the wall at
Troy said of Helen.
Beds of unyielding boards are exchanged before dawn for hard wooden
saddles. The temple of Bassæ lies two hours away, and those who wish to
see it without undue haste and yet return to Megalopolis before
night-fall must begin their ride while the stars are still alight.
Bassæ, or The Glens, should be thought of in connection with Phigalia,
although probably only those who take the long horseback ride to or from
Olympia will see the remains of this ancient city, which, measuring by
the time involved, lies as far beyond Bassæ as Bassæ is beyond
Andritsena. The surrounding country fell within its territory, but the
city itself stood on “high and mostly precipitous ground,” bounded on
the south by the deep gorge of the winding Neda, and partially encircled
on the other sides by high mountains. Here where the air was
invigorating and all healthful conditions prevailed it was natural that
Apollo should be worshipped as the Succourer (Epikourios). In the fifth
century the Phigalians were so impressed by reports of the new Parthenon
in Athens that they determined to erect by popular subscriptions a new
temple to their chief divinity and to ask Ictinus, the Parthenon’s
architect, to build it for them. Bassæ, where already a more primitive
shrine existed, was the place chosen, and thither from Andritsena in the
cool dawn modern pilgrims are taken by their peasant guides. In spite of
the promise of the stars, perhaps the day breaks slowly, dark masses of
clouds impeding the progress of the sun. For an hour and a half the
horses make their way along moderate heights, scrambling up small hills
and clattering noisily down very rocky defiles. The waysides, in March,
are bright with irises, violets, hyacinths, and white and purple
crocuses. Then the wildness of the country begins to increase, and
culminates in the stony slope of a forbidding hill. In half an hour this
is scaled by the horses, and becomes a mount of vision. In unusual
panoramic grandeur, mountains lift their nearer or more distant peaks.
On the east are the barren hills that form the western spurs of Mount
Lycæus. Farther to the south, beyond the valley of the Neda, are the
more thickly wooded slopes of the Nomian hills, and beyond them are seen
the snowy summits of the range of Taygetus. To the north Erymanthus and
Cyllene show their crests. And directly in front, far to the south,
Mount Ithome, rising out of the Messenian plain, proudly breaks the
horizon line. Nor is the sea wholly wanting, for along the southwestern
horizon, as if flowing into the sky itself, stretches a shining length
of the Ionian waters.
Perhaps from this hill Ictinus looked down upon the place assigned to
him by the Phigalians. Even then the situation must have seemed
impressively secluded. Now, certainly, on descending the easy slope, a
modern is almost overwhelmed, as if by the appearance of a god laying
claim to nature’s secrets, by the sudden sight of a majestic Doric
peristyle. The temple is built on a narrow plateau on the southern side
of a hill called Cotilius by the ancients. Ictinus’s first approach must
have been from Phigalia (where he would have talked with the municipal
authorities) up the valley of the Neda, over picturesque and well-wooded
hills and dales. But he must have studied the situation from all
possible points of vantage. Perhaps for him, too, some special
revelation came when out of dark and threatening clouds the sun, at last
divinely swift, cleft the darkness, and he saw how effectively massive
columns of gray limestone would be illumined by Apollo’s radiant shafts.
Probably the architect’s taste and the Phigalians’ desire united to
choose as the material of the temple the native rock that could be
quarried in the neighbourhood. Marble was imported for the capitals of
the inner pillars, for the ceilings of the north and south porticoes,
for the roof tiles and for the sculptured frieze which now honours the
British Museum. The columns of the peristyle and the architrave, barren
of adornment, are singularly noble. They look as if they had sprung from
the rocks about them and belonged more to the mountains overshadowing
them than to men. Indeed, for many centuries, men forgot the existence
of the temple. Pausanias, in his day, six hundred years after its
building, could still describe it as surpassing all the temples in the
Peloponnesus, save the one at Tegea built a hundred years later, for the
beauty of its stone and the symmetry of its proportions. But in time
earthquakes and iconoclasm wrought their deadly work, and through the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance the remaining ruins were known only to
shepherds. The temple was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, but
not until the present time were any efforts made to reërect some of the
interior portions from the fragments lying on the ground. In the wake of
the archæologist follows the tourist, and now any one who will may
intrude upon Apollo’s long solitude.
Unlike other temples erected to the gods, whom Æschylus describes as
“facing the dawn” and flashing back to the worshippers from their
“gleaming eyes” the sun’s early rays, the temple at Bassæ lay from north
to south instead of from east to west. But this was due only to the
character of the situation and the exigencies of the soil. Long before
Ictinus’s day a primitive shrine had existed facing the east in the
usual manner. And the new temple seems to have had a special door built
in its cella in order that the main statue of Apollo, facing the rising
sun, might still be approached from the side of dawn. The old statue,
like the old shrine, was supplanted by a finer one. Later the great
bronze Apollo was sent to adorn Megalopolis. But when Ictinus lived it
may well have formed the centre of his noble architectural design, an
incarnation of the ideal of physical and of spiritual wholeness realized
through beauty.
One further fact about the Temple in the Glens has been emphasized by
the great topographer Leake: “That which forms, on reflection, the most
striking circumstance of all is the nature of the surrounding country,
capable of producing little else than pasture for cattle and offering no
conveniences for the display of commercial industry either by sea or
land. If it excites our astonishment that the inhabitants of such a
district should have had the refinement to delight in works of this
kind, it is still more wonderful that they should have had the means to
execute them. This can only be accounted for by what Horace says of the
early Romans:—
‘Privatus illis census erat brevis,
Commune magnum.’
This is the true secret of national power, which cannot be equally
effective in an age of selfish luxury.”
But it must also be pointed out that although the Phigalians had taste
and patriotism, no architect or artist rose among them to shape their
stone. Ictinus and his fellow artists must come from Athens worthily to
incarnate their desires. So a generation earlier they had been obliged
to persuade Onatas, the master of the Æginetan school of sculpture, to
carve for them a statue of Demeter. Nor were the Phigalians less skilled
than other Arcadians. Scopas had to come from Paros to build the temple
to Athena at Tegea. And it was foreign poets who turned the legends of
Cyllenian Hermes and Pan into literature, and later enshrined in
pastoral verse the tossing mountain forests and the cool rivers of
Arcady.
This was Arcadia’s destiny, to offer the raw material of her domain to
the shaping hand of more gifted races. Her greatest son was a soldier.
Her own deeds were deeds of blood and strife, her own life was one of
work and poverty. But because poets and artists of other blood wrought
for her, her name and her inherent beauty have become forever domiciled
in our own literature, even in our daily speech and commoner affections.