Transcriber’s Note
This version of the text is unable to reproduce certain typographic
features. Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_.
Any text printed using “small capitals” was shifted to all upper-case.
Please see the transcriber’s notes at the end of this text for a more
complete account of any other textual issues and their resolution.
Greece
[Illustration]
[Illustration: _The Parthenon_
_South-west Corner_
_From a drawing made by H. W. Williams in 1829_]
Studies of Travel
by
Edward A. Freeman
Greece
“IN THE LIFE OF CITIES NOTHING PRESERVES LIKE EARLY OVERTHROW,
NOTHING DESTROYS LIKE CONTINUOUS LIFE.”--P. 120
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
27 & 29 West 23d Street 24 Bedford Street, Strand
The Knickerbocker Press
COPYRIGHT, 1893
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London_
BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
TO THE MEMORY
OF
MARGARET EVANS,
THE COMPANION IN GREEK TRAVEL
OF HER FATHER,
THE WRITER OF THESE PAPERS,
THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
BY HER SISTER
Preface
The papers that have been brought together in these small volumes are
the results of three several journeys made by my father in Greece
and Italy. He visited Greece for the first time in 1877, but of the
papers written in that year, which appeared in the _Saturday Review_,
only those on Corfu have been reprinted. They form part of the volume
of _Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice_, in
the preface to which work the hope was held out that some out of
many papers on the more distant Greek lands might one day be put
together. It has been thought that these papers will not prove the
less welcome that they must now lack the re-casting that my father
would undoubtedly have given to them. Since his Greek journey was made,
fresh light has been thrown on many points by the German excavations at
Olympia as well as by those conducted by the Greeks themselves on the
Athenian Akropolis, at Eleusis and elsewhere.
The papers on the two Italian journies of 1881 and 1883 also stand as
they were written with the exception of a few verbal alterations which
have seemed needful in such a reproduction of what was originally
intended for the columns of a newspaper.
I have to thank the editors of the _Saturday Review_, the _Guardian_,
and the _Pall Mall Gazette_ for their courtesy in allowing the reprint
of these articles which have appeared in their pages.
FLORENCE FREEMAN,
ALICANTE:
January 17, 1893.
Contents
PAGE
ROUND PELOPONNÊSOS 1
THE ATHENIAN AKROPOLIS 16
ATHENS BELOW THE AKROPOLIS 32
MARATHÔN 52
THE SARONIC GULF 68
TIRYNS 85
ARGOS 106
THE AKROPOLIS OF MYKÊNÊ 122
THE TREASURIES AND TREASURES OF MYKÊNÊ 140
MYKÊNÊ TO CORINTH 162
CORINTH 183
THE CORINTHIAN GULF 202
CORINTH TO ELEUSIS 220
SOUNION 239
OLYMPIA AND ITS CHURCH 257
Round Peloponnêsos.
The traveller who enters the older Hellenic world by way of Corfu,
and who leaves that island by an evening steamer, will awake the next
morning within a region which even modern geography and politics allow
to be wholly Hellenic. As long as light serves him, he still keeps
along the channel which divides free Corfu from enslaved Epeiros;
night cuts him off from the sight of the mouth of the Ambrakian
Gulf, and of the point where modern diplomacy has decreed that Greek
nationality shall, as far as diplomacy can affect such matters, come to
an end. The next morning’s dawn finds him off the mouth of the outer
Corinthian Gulf. To the east he is shown the position, on one side, of
Patras, the old Achaian city which St. Andrew a thousand years back
so manfully defended against Slave and Saracen, on the other side, of
Mesolongi, whose fame belongs wholly to our own day. We call up the
two sieges--the one where the civilian Mavrokordatos, the one hero
whom the Fanariot aristocracy gave to the cause of Greece, beat back
the Ottoman from its mud walls; the other made more famous still by
that fearful sally of the besieged, when, like the men of Ithômê or
Eira, they cut their way through the thickest bayonets of the Egyptian
invader. There may be some to whom the record of those great deeds may
be an unknown tale, but who may yet remember how Mesolongi saw the
last and worthiest days of the life of Byron. Of Patras, of Mesolongi,
however, we have hardly so much as a distant glimpse; we are told
where they are, and that is all. For a while, too, the Peloponnesian
coast itself is more distant and less attractive than the islands to
the west of it, now parts, no less than Peloponnêsos itself, of the
Hellenic realm. Yet we may remember that, as we pass by the Eleian
shore--Βουπράσιόν τε καὶ Ἤλιδα δῖαν, while we are shown where
lies the path to Olympia, we are now passing by the true _Morea_, the
land which once distinctively bore that name before it gradually spread
over the whole peninsula. The mainland as yet hardly attracts us. The
dawn has hardly given way to full sunlight as we see Ithakê fade away
in the distance, while Kephallênia lifts her bold height full before
us. Half the Odyssey rushes on our memory, and the memory of some may
be English enough to remember the happy description of our own Ælfred,
how Aulixes--his form of _Odysseus_--was king of two kingdoms, Ithakê
and something else, which he held under the _casere_ Agamemnôn. A
happy power of seeing the analogies between the institutions of his
own day and those of remote ages enabled the West-Saxon King who had
seen Rome in his childhood, the prince under whom English, Welsh, and
Danish rulers held their kingdoms, to understand the imperial position
of the lord of many islands and of all Argos better perhaps than it
was understood again till the light of comparative research broke on
our own age. We pass by, hoping for some future chance of prying into
the geographical difficulties of the Homeric Ithakê, but feeling at
all events that it is a stirring moment when we look on islands which
legend at least pictures to us as the realm of Odysseus, and in seeing
which we may take in a lesson of comparative politics from the noblest
ruler of our own people.
Still the insular side is more prominent than the peninsular.
Zakynthos, Zante, the isle of flowers, the flower of the Levant, plays
no great part in Hellenic history, but as the height of Kephallênia
passes away, the beautiful island, with its hills, its valleys, its
city spread along the shore and climbing up the mountain-side, is the
chief object to draw the eye to itself as long as it remains in sight.
It is not till we have passed the curve of the Kyparissian gulf, not
till we have passed the great islands, that the coast itself becomes
the main object of study. For a study it is, whether in geography,
in history, or in simple contemplation of the grand coast-line with
the inland mountains soaring above all, and changing their seeming
geographical position with the various shiftings of the vessel’s
course. The snow-capped height of Pentedaktylos, once Ta getos, rises
over all, seen from this point and from that, but always suggesting
the same thought, and commonly bringing with its mention the same
answer--There lies Sparta. The shape of southern Peloponnêsos lends
itself well to a coasting survey of this kind. The three long fingers
in which the peninsula ends, and the two deep gulfs between them, allow
the whole country to be seen as in a map, and allow most objects to
be seen from several points, and therefore to assume several shapes.
From Zante to Cerigo--a name which can hardly be a corruption, but
which must have by some process supplanted the earlier Kythêra--the
coast-line is everything. Islands there are not a few, but they are
small islands near to the coast, entering into the general scenery
of the coast, and, near as they are, some of them were, like Cerigo
itself, part of the dominion of Venice and of the powers which stepped
into the place of Venice. Any map earlier than the cession of the
Ionian Islands to Greece will show a boundary passing between the
coast and several islands which seem to lie within a stone’s throw
of it. Along the whole line, the possessors of the mainland, first
Ottoman, then Greek, were hemmed in, and as it were blockaded, by a
series of floating outposts planted off their shores by the successive
possessors of the Seven Islands. One is apt, in using a map of the
days of “the Protection,” to mistake the odd-looking frontier drawn
in the sea for the probable course of the steamer. Now the frontier
is gone; the great islands and the tributary islets all form part of
the same kingdom as the mainland. All are now Hellenic in every sense,
yet the most striking object in the journey brings forcibly to the
mind how recent and artificial is the modern use of the Hellenic name.
Tainaros runs far into the sea, as it did when the temple of Poseidôn
crowned its height, and when the Helot refugee sought shelter under
his protection from his Spartan master. Behind it rises Pentedaktylos,
or rather Tainaros carries on Pentedaktylos into the sea. All the
folk of those heights called themselves Hellênes in the old days,
and all call themselves Hellênes now. But in those intermediate days
which are painted for us by the Imperial geographer, the name of
Hellênes was confined to a very narrow range indeed. The only Hellênes
whom Constantine knew, the only people who were so called by their
neighbours--for they do not seem to have borne that name on their own
tongues--were the men of Tainaros, the wild and, down almost to our
own day, unconquerable land which had in his time already got the name
of Maina. These, he tells us pointedly, were no Slaves, distinguishing
them from their Slavonic neighbours on Pentedaktylos itself. They
were called Hellênes, but it was not in distinction from the Slaves
that they were so called. They were, he says, descendants of the old
Romans. Let no one dream of colonists from the Palatine or even from
the Aventine. The “old Romans” of Constantine are what we should
call Greeks, Hellênes, in this particular case the Eleutherolakônes,
the people of the Lakonian towns set free under Roman patronage from
their subjection to Sparta. The Roman, the subject of the Empire, is
distinguished from the Slave, but these particular Romans bore the
Hellenic name because they, or at least their immediate forefathers,
clave to the Hellenic Gods. Late in the ninth century, till the
apostolic zeal of the first Basil brought them within the Christian
fold, the men of Maina still sacrificed to Poseidon and the other gods
of their fathers. Thus they were Hellênes, Hellênes in the sense which
the name bears in the New Testament, Hellênes in the sense in which
Jovianus of Korkyra despoiled the temples and altars of the Hellênes
to raise the church of the Panagia. No piece of nomenclature is more
instructive than this. The name of Hellên would have been an insult to
the Orthodox Roman of the purest Hellenic blood. It clave to the men
of Tainaros only because they clave to Hellenic idols. Yet, whether as
Eleutherolakônes, as Hellênes, or as Mainotes, the men of Tainaros have
for many ages continued to have a name of their own.
The most historic spot, however, in the whole voyage is reached some
while before we come to Tainaros. Pentedaktylos, the specially Slavonic
mountain of Constantine’s day, suggests its Hellenic neighbours, and
Pentedaktylos comes in sight before we have doubled the first of the
three great Peloponnesian promontories. Among the islands which lie
along the coast is one which at first sight is hardly known to be an
island. Sphagia keeps close watch over the haven of Navarino--watch
so close that the whole length of Sphagia has to be passed before we
see the narrow mouth which leads into the landlocked harbour which saw
the last great sea-fight fought in Hellenic waters. Sphagia is there;
Navarino is there; but some have ventured to doubt whether Sphagia is
Sphaktêria, and whether Navarino is Pylos. Some have held that, in the
changes of the coast, what was Sphaktêria has now become part of the
mainland, and that the island which we now see is not that where Sparta
endured her first great humiliation, where Kleôn and Dêmosthenês, in
the teeth of all expectation, of every seeming impossibility, brought
back “the men,” the Spartan captives, in triumph to the harbour of
Peiraieus. Such questions as this cannot be settled by one who sees the
sites only as the power of steam hurries him alongside of them. In this
general view the question is of no great moment. There is the coast,
whatever may be the exact spot, where the legend makes Nestor entertain
Têlemachos, and whence Têlemachos and Peisistratos drove a carriage
and pair in two days from Pylos to Sparta. Now whether Têlemachos
and Peisistratos be real men or mere creations of fancy, the road at
least is no creation of fancy. The poet would not have ventured to
make his heroes perform such a drive, as something perfectly easy and
usual unless Peloponnêsos had been better supplied with roads in his
day than it is in our own. Here then we get a kind of history out of
the legend. There again is the coast, whatever may be the exact spot,
where happened the most remarkable episode of the Peloponnesian war,
the occupation of Pylos-the Lacedæmonian Koryphasion-and all that came
of it. With yet more certain knowledge of the exact spot, we can point
to the harbour where the fetters of Greece were broken, and where the
might of Turk and Egyptian fell before the combined powers of Orthodox
Russia, Catholic France, and Protestant England.
We pass on from promontory to promontory, the gulfs taking different
shapes and bringing different objects into sight at every moment. At
last
Slow sinks, more lovely ere his work is done,
Behind Morea’s hills the setting sun.
Pentedaktylos and Tainaros are lighted up, as the sun, in Greek phrase,
reigns (βασιλεύει) over the heavens from which he is about to sink
into his golden cup. Cerigo and Malea are seen only by the help of the
lesser lights, but we can still see the long harbourless coast of
Lakonia stretching away to the Argolic lands, and we have found out
too the site of the Lakonian Epidauros, more famous in later days as
Monembasia. As we woke one morning about the islands of the West, so we
wake the next along the islands of the Ægæan. Tênos, Andros, Mykonos,
Mêlos, Naxos, Dêlos itself, come into view at different points, till we
stand before the haven which has in modern times made itself the centre
of the commerce and navigation of these seas. The isle of Syros stands
before us, bleak and barren. There is the steep conical hill, covered,
every inch of it, with houses rising up to the church of St. George,
the cathedral church of Latin Syra, the mediæval city, the city of
refuge in days when men were driven to fall back on the hill-fortresses
of the earliest day. On the shore, on the site of ancient Syros, but
spreading over the adjoining hills, is the modern Hermoupolis, the busy
mart of all the islands. Another night, a fair starry night, on the
deep, and we reach the goal of the whole pilgrimage. Day has hardly
dawned enough to see clearly Sounion and its marble columns, but there,
however dimly seen, is the shore of Attica, and the thought comes that
came into the heart of the sailors of Salaminian Aias, that before long
προσείποιμ’ αν Ἀθάνας.
The Athenian Akropolis.
It may not seem easy to say anything new on so well-worn a subject as
Athens and her Akropolis, but of all subjects in the world there is
none which has been more steadily looked at from a single inadequate
point of view. It is moreover a subject whose history is not yet ended,
and which supplies new points of view by the fact that new pages in
its history are still happening. Nowhere is the unity of history more
needed to be taught as a practical lesson than on the spot where we
may fairly say that the political history of the world begins. There,
on the spot whose history begins before the beginning of recorded
history, we feel perhaps more keenly than anywhere else how blind
and narrow is the way in which the history of that spot has been so
commonly looked at, how large a part of the true interest, the true
life, of the spot is lopped away, if we look only at some two or three
centuries of its long and varied history. In the city of Athens, as
a whole, we are painfully struck by the glaring contrast of extreme
antiquity and extreme newness. There are buildings of yesterday; there
are buildings of a thousand years back; there are buildings of two
thousand years back, but the three classes stand out in marked and
indeed unpleasant contrast to one another. There are no intermediate
links such as there are at Rome, binding the great classes of objects
together, and making them all fit into their places as members of one
unbroken series. Hence, while at Rome we never forget that we are at
Rome, at Athens we may sometimes forget that we are at Athens, That
so it is no fault of the Athenians, old or new. It comes of the fact
that the Turk once ruled in Athens, and therefore had to be driven out
of Athens; while, as the Turk never ruled in Rome, he never had to be
driven out of Rome. If this is true of the city in general, it is far
less true of the Akropolis. There we can never forget that we are in
Athens; and, if we use our eyes aright, we can never forget that the
Athens in which we stand did not exist, as some seem to fancy, only
for two or three centuries two thousand years back, but that its long
history spans the whole range from our first glimpses of civilized
Europe down to the warfare in which men still living have borne a
part. It is but a narrow view of the Akropolis of Athens to look on it
simply as the place where the great works of the age of Periklês may
be seen as models in a museum. A truer and a wider view will begin
earlier and will go on later. The Parthenôn and the Propylaia are but
the records of one stage, though doubtless the most brilliant stage, in
the history of a city which ought equally to number among its records
the primæval wall which was venerable and mysterious in the days of
Thucydides and the bulwarks which were raised by the last Odysseus in
warfare with the Turkish oppressor. In the eye of the true historian
those earliest and those latest records, and the records of the long
ages which passed between them, all have, perhaps not all an equal
value, but at least value enough to stamp them all as alike parts of
the history of the city, all alike entitled to respect and veneration
from every one in whose eyes the history of the city is precious.
On the hill of the Akropolis and its buildings the whole history
of Athens, from its earliest to its latest days, has been clearly
written, and there it may still be clearly read wherever the barbarism
of classical pedantry has not wiped out the record. The primæval wall,
the wall of Themistoklês, the wall of Kimôn, all come within the
charmed period. No one is likely to damage them. It needs, however,
a wider view than that of the mere student of the writings, the mere
admirer of the art, of two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, to
take in the full meaning even of the works of those arbitrarily chosen
centuries. Those remains of the earliest masonry, for which we have to
search behind the great buildings of the days of the democracy, those
stones which rival aught at Argos or at Tiryns, have a tale to tell
such as Argos and Tiryns cannot tell. Why was Athens Athens? How came
that one city to fill that particular place in the world’s history
which no other city ever did fill? In the Homeric catalogue Athens
stands alone; all Attica is already Athens, while every other part of
the catalogue is crowded with the names of those smaller towns many of
which passed away before recorded history begins. Marathon and Eleusis
find no place in the great record. The work had already been done, be
the name of the doer of it Thêseus or any other, which made Athens all
that Athens was--which fused together into one commonwealth the largest
extent of territory, the largest number of citizens which, according
to Greek political ideas, could act together as members of a single
commonwealth. Athens could become all that she did become, because, in
an unrecorded age, in an age of which those rude stones at least are
the only record, all Attica became Athens. To that great revolution,
none the less certain because in its own nature unrecorded, it is
alike owing that Athens in one age could rear the trophy of Marathôn,
and that in another she was chosen to be the head of regenerate Greece.
The oldest wall--we may call it the wall of Thêseus--and the latest
wall of Odysseus are but the earliest and the latest pages of one
story, bound together by the direct tie of cause and effect.
If then, fully to take in the historic greatness of the Athenian
Akropolis, we must look to facts and their records alike far earlier
and far later than the days of Periklês, the works of the days of
Periklês lose half their value if we look at them simply as the
works of the age of Periklês, and do not bear in mind the long ages,
the stirring events, of their later history. The house of Athênê is
emphatically the _Parthenôn_. When Dêmêtrios the Besieger was lodged
in its _opisthodomos_, the satirical remark was made that he and his
following were by no means fitting guests for its virgin owner. It
should, however, be remembered that that ancient temple has remained
the house of the Virgin under three distinct forms of worship. The
classical purist might disdain to notice---or, if he noticed, he might
be eager to wipe out such a memory--that on the walls of the _cella_
may still be seen the paintings, the εἰκόνες of another creed,
another form of art, from those of Pheidias and Iktinos. Yet those
painted forms tell us of one of the great moments in the history of
South-Eastern Europe--one might rather say one of the great moments
in the history of the world. It speaks of the day when the New Rome
was again queen of all the nations, from Crete to the Danube, from the
Euphrates to the Bay of Naples, when the Slayer of the Bulgarians, in
the moment of his triumph, chose, out of all the holy places of his
Empire, the church of the Panagia on the rock of Athens as the scene
of his thanksgiving for the great salvation which his arms had wrought.
We stand on the rock, and run over in our minds the long ages between
Periklês returning from the recovery of Samos, and Basil returning from
the recovery of Ochrida. We look down upon the lands which endured the
ravages of the last Philip in the cause of Rome, on the city which
endured the storm of Sulla in the cause of Mithridatês. We look down
on the works of Hadrian and the works of Hêrôdês, and the eye wanders
to a spot where the monument of a Syrian prince is the most prominent
object on an Athenian hill. We think how long Athens remained the
school of Rome, how the Goth turned away from her walls, how Justinian
at once strengthened her as a fortress and took away from her her crown
as the seat of heathen philosophy and heathen worship. Yet we mark
the slight lingering of ancient memories which, in re-dedicating her
ancient temples to the new faith, still kept a certain analogy between
their older and their newer functions. We mark how the Parthenôn still
remained the Parthenôn; how the temple of the heathen warrior Thêseus
became the church of the Christian warrior George. We think--Athens
is not expressly mentioned in the tale, but she can hardly be deemed
to have lagged behind her fellows--how the Greeks, the Ἑλλαδικοί, as
the Byzantine writer scornfully calls them, set forth on their strange
and bootless errand of delivering Constantinople from Isaurian and
Iconoclastic rule. Below us lie the churches of Eirênê, monuments of
days when Athens and Constantinople were united in a common orthodoxy,
when Athens had given an Empress to the Eastern world, and when men
again dreamed of a union of East and West by the marriage of an
Athenian and a Frank. All these memories lead up naturally to the great
scene of Basil’s day of triumph, when a prince who might be deemed at
once Roman, Greek, and Slave, chose Athens and her still abiding
Parthenôn for the greatest ceremony of his long reign of warfare and
of victory. We pass on to another age. The spirit which will hardly
endure the memory of a Greek-speaking Cæsar on the holy hill of Athênê
will find times even less to its taste when an Italian prince, in his
will drawn up in the Italian tongue, bequeaths the city of Athens to
the Church of St. Mary. Things had indeed changed, alike from the days
of Periklês and from the days of Basil, yet Athens under the French
and Italian Dukes had in some sort come back nearer to her ancient
place than when she beheld the thanksgiving of the Macedonian Emperor.
Athens, by that name, was again one of the powers of the world, no
longer a mere province of Rome, either in her older or her newer
seat. It was indeed a time of foreign rule. A Latin Duke had made
his palace in the Propylaia of Periklês; a Latin Bishop had displaced
the Orthodox rite of Basil’s day in the church which was still the
Parthenôn. Yet those were days when Athens was the seat of a brilliant
court, when the fame of her princes was spread through Europe. The
formula of our own Shakespeare, so strange in the ears of many, when he
speaks of Thêseus Duke of Athens, is a mark of days when her Kings and
Archons had been forgotten, but the memory of her Dukes still lived in
the minds of men. But the wanton barbarism of classical exclusiveness
will not endure the memory or the record or the monuments of days like
these. Only yesterday the tower of the Dukes of Athens was standing.
Its stern and heavy mass well broke the horizontal lines of the Greek
architecture, and gave to the whole group somewhat of that outline
which the hill of Laon has, and which the hill of Athens has not. But
the tower was late; it was barbarous; it did not belong to the two or
three favoured ages; it was a reminder of times which the exclusive
votaries of those two or three favoured ages would fain wipe out from
the records of mankind. Mr. Mahaffy, indeed, who cannot distinguish
between the taking of Constantinople in 1204 and the taking of Athens
in 1687, believed that Morosini had found time to build this massive
tower during the few weeks of his occupation. Mr. Mahaffy, who looks
on the Akropolis as so sacred that it was a sin to bombard it, even to
drive the Turks out of it--who seems to think freedom and national
being something of less moment than the preservation of this or that
statue or column--calls for its destruction in his text and crows over
its completed destruction in a note. Of this piece of wanton barbarism
Dr. Schliemann must bear the blame. Who, if any, were his Greek
accomplices, we have forborne to ask. But the tower is gone; a most
striking memorial of one age in the history of Athens has been swept
away, under the paltry pretext that inscriptions might be found among
its materials. By a righteous Nemesis, when the destroyers had finished
their work of havoc, they found nothing to reward them.
We can conceive nothing more paltry, nothing more narrow, nothing more
opposed to the true spirit of scholarship, than these attempts to wipe
out the history of any age. So far from destroying the ducal tower,
we would have kept the Turkish minaret. For the Parthenôn, already the
temple of heathendom and of two forms of Christianity, became in the
end the temple of Islam. A mosque had of course its minaret. Its lower
part is still there in the form of a staircase, but the characteristic
upper part has vanished. We know not how it vanished, whether through
wanton destruction or in one of the sieges in the seventeenth or the
nineteenth century. In any case, we should have been well pleased to
see both minaret and tower breaking the outline, and speaking of days
which have been, but which have passed away. Greece is free; the rule
both of the Frank and of the Turk is gone; but that is no reason why
the memorials of either Frank or Turk should be swept away. A higher
national feeling would keep them carefully as trophies of victory. At
all events, let not men, calling themselves scholars, lend themselves
to such deeds of wanton destruction. The name of Morosini is unfairly
held up to execration because an accident of warfare, which he could
not control, made him the destroyer of the Parthenôn. A far heavier
blame rests on those who were the deliberate destroyers of the ducal
tower. On them indeed may well fall the words of withering scorn in
which Byron so well couples the destroying names of Eratostratos and
Elgin.
Athens Below the Akropolis.
The main characteristic of modern Athens, and one of its chief points
of contrast with Rome, is that whatever is not very old is so very
new. But the visitor is apt at once to press this characteristic
further than strict truth warrants, and to draw a more strongly marked
geographical limit between old and new than strict truth warrants
either. At first sight we are apt to fancy that everything that is old
stands above, and that everything that is new lies below. The fact
that the greatest work of all, the temple of Olympian Zeus, happens
to lie below, hardly makes a practical exception. By the loss of so
many of its columns it has ceased to be in appearance the greatest
work of all, and, what is more to the point, it has practically ceased
to be part of the city. It lies outside and alone, apart both from
the Akropolis and the modern city. It joins indeed to make one of the
best and most familiar views of the Akropolis, but it joins only as a
foreground to a distant object. To take Mr. Mahaffy’s illustration, it
has come to stand to the Akropolis as Hoar Abbey stands to the Rock of
Cashel. On another side, the Thêseion, in its absolute perfection as
it is seen in any general view, stands as a kind of intermediate link
between the upper and the lower region. Otherwise the impression given
by the general view of Athens is that the old things are all above, as,
with one or two exceptions which need not be dwelled on, the new things
undoubtedly are below. The Akropolis seems to throw out the hill of
the Mouseion with the monument of Philopappos as a kind of outwork;
and, if we take in objects which cannot be seen at the first glance,
the most remarkable and venerable objects, the remains of the ancient
walls, the tombs cut in the rock, the seats of the Pnyx, the steps on
the hill of Arês, all lie on the upper ground. Against these, setting
aside very recent diggings, the low city seems to have nothing to set,
except a mass of modern and ugly houses and one modern house bigger and
uglier than the rest.
This impression is not untrue as regards the general aspect of the
city, but it breaks down when we come to examine things somewhat more
in detail. There is more of antiquity in the modern city of Athens than
one thinks at first sight; still the comparative rarity of ancient
remains, and the strong contrast between such as there are and the
modern buildings, form a distinct feature in the character of Athens,
as distinguished from cities which present to us an unbroken series
of monuments from the earlier times to the latest. Again, it is true
that, of such ancient remains as there are, the greater part seem, as
it were, to shelter themselves under the shadow of the Akropolis, and
but few of them belong to the most brilliant times of Athenian history.
The Thêseion, standing as a link between the upper and the lower city,
has a position of its own. The most perfect of existing Greek temples,
it might alone make the fortune of Athens as a place of artistic
pilgrimage, even were there nothing else there to see. In the general
view it seems to be absolutely perfect. The one small change which it
has undergone reminds us at once of a living page of history and of
the folly of those who labour in vain to wipe out history. The temple,
like its greater fellow on the Akropolis, became a church, but in its
new character it still kept a certain appropriate remembrance of its
older use. As the house of the Virgin still remained the house of the
Virgin, so the house of the warrior hero remained, as the church of
St. George, the house of a warrior saint. If, as some say, the older
dedication was really not to Thêseus but to Hêraklês, the parallel is
in no way weakened, but rather strengthened. Thêseus indeed overthrew
the Marathonian bull; but Hêraklês and St. George were alike victorious
over dragons. To fit the building for its new use, no change seems to
have been needed, beyond taking down two columns of the inner range of
the eastern front to make room for the apse of the converted basilica.
The caprice of a generation back took away the apse without restoring
the columns, and so left the building in a state which would seem
incomplete in the eyes of either its heathen or its Christian patrons.
Thêseus might ask for his columns; George might ask for his apse; and
the common robber of both would be hard put to for an answer. Now, as
one of the many detached museums of Athens, the Thêseion contains a
collection of sculptures, inscriptions, and architectural fragments,
pre-eminent among which is the archaic statue wrought by Aristiôn,
which looks so unpleasantly like a specimen of barbaric art. Still, why
may we not hold that in sculpture, as in so many other things, likeness
does not prove direct connexion, but merely analogy of stage? At all
events, Assyria never made anything better than the work of Aristiôn,
while Athens went on and grew from the stage of Aristiôn into the stage
of Pheidias.
Before the diggings in the Kerameikos which have brought to light such
choice sculptures, as well as a large part of the city wall and the
Dipylon gate, the Thêseion stood almost alone as a representative of
the great days of Athens on ground lower than the Akropolis and the
hills which front it. The theatre of Dionysos and the other buildings
which have been dug out from the side of the hill are rather part of
the Akropolis itself. The temple of Olympian Zeus, and its feeble
companion, the Arch of Hadrian, stand apart and make a feeble company
by themselves. In that part, however, of the modern city which lies
nearest under the Akropolis, we still have a collection of remains
of later Greek and Roman times, while such of the Byzantine churches
as are left scattered here and there through the city form a study
of surprising interest in their own class. All the world knows the
monument of Lysikratês and the later _hôrologion_ of Andronikos
Kyrrhestês, better known as the Temple of the Eight Winds. Perhaps all
the world does not know the singular way in which they were adapted
to the uses of rival creeds, how Franciscan friars found a home under
the graceful Corinthian finial of Lysikratês, while howling dervishes
quartered themselves under the pagan symbols of Andronikos. We mourn as
we look at the graceful toy of Lysikratês, the parent of a whole class
of structures at St. Remi and Igel--is it sacrilege to add Northampton,
Geddington, and Waltham? Genuine Greek Corinthian capitals are so rare
that it is sad to see that not one is altogether perfect.
The _hôrologion_ of Andronikos--if it is lawful to speak so freely of
anything built at Athens before the Christian era--has never struck
us as anything specially graceful, but it is one of the links which
directly connect the ancient and the modern city. It stands at what
we may call the ancient end of one of the great modern streets, one
which seems to represent an ancient street and which from this monument
bears the name of Aiolos. But the quarter where the _hôrologion_ stands
is one of the quarters where these later and lesser antiquities stand
thickest on the ground. Not far off is the _Stoa_ of Hadrian, where
the Imperial architect, forsaking the fashion of his own day, tries,
like our modern architects, to call up the forms of a past time, and
reproduces the ancient Doric, of course in its slenderer form. But this
whole quarter is full of remains of one kind and another. The bazaar is
in every sense a link to past times; an ancient wall fences it in, and
the sight within, so unlike the European streets of the more polished
quarters, reminds us that Athens once was an Eastern city. Various
scraps lie around us; here are two little forsaken churches side by
side forming in a manner one building; the cupola of one is half broken
down, and its bell-gable, its κωδωνοστάσιον, is perched on a
neighbouring colonnade. Not far off are two buildings, works of
intrusive powers and intrusive architecture, both of which form part
of the history of the city, and of which the one ought to be preserved
as carefully as the other. No one is likely to propose to destroy the
colonnade of Roman Corinthian work because its capitals are not of the
same types as the capitals of Lysikratês. But it is equally needful to
keep the one mosque which remains from Turkish Athens, a building whose
style stands to that of the Byzantine churches in somewhat the same
relation in which the Roman colonnades stand to the true Grecian. The
mosque stands applied to some military purpose. A worthier use for it,
a better badge of triumph and deliverance, would have been to make it
a memorial church for some of the heroes of the War of Independence.
In the same quarter, drawing near to the Thêseion, are the remains of
the _gymnasion_ of Ptolemy, where a crowd of inscriptions of various
dates tempt us to spell them out, till we light on one which contains
the name of the wife of Hêrôdês of Marathôn. His theatre is on the
other side of the Akropolis, forming part, like the elder theatre,
of the Akropolis itself. But it is in the quarter to the north of
the Akropolis, the quarter of the new _agorê_, in which the visitor
to Athens finds more than elsewhere the opportunity for the process
so delightful in the old cities of Gaul and Germany, and Italy, the
process of prowling hither and thither, and lighting on some fragment
of antiquity--the more varied date of style the better--at every
quarter. The Akropolis is too carefully cleared of all that is new;
the modern city keeps too little that is old; here, in this quarter of
Athens, old and new are mingled together in that way which gives to the
inquirer the full interest of discovery.
But, among the later antiquities of Athens, it is the churches which
claim the highest place. To the traveller from the West they have a
special interest. As no other city of his pilgrimage gives him the
same store of buildings of pagan Greek architecture, so there is no
other which gives him such a store of buildings of the second--the
Christian-Greek architecture. Nor is their interest any the less
because of the small size of the modern Athenian churches. There is
not only nothing to rival St. Sophia, St. Vital, or St. Mark; there
is nothing to rival even their own neighbour at Daphnê. The Eastern
Church, like the ancient Church of Ireland, seems always to have been
better pleased to build a crowd of small churches rather than a single
one on the scale of the great minsters of Western Europe. One cause
of this peculiarity doubtless was the use of a single altar in the
Eastern rite, which suggested the building of several distinct churches
in cases where a Western architect would rather have built a single
large church with several chapels. Athens, therefore, is full of small
churches, the survivors, we fear, of a larger number, some of which
perished in the laying out of the modern city. A crowd of them cling,
as it were, to the roots of the Akropolis, in the region of the bazaar
and of the monument of Andronikos. The eye soon gets used to, but it
does not get tired of, their little cupolas and apses, which always
add a pleasing feature to the corners where they are found, though
none of them rival either the stateliness or the picturesque effect
of the churches of the West. A few are of greater size and of higher
architectural character, and one, without being of greater size, is one
of the greatest curiosities in Christendom. This is the metropolitan
church of Athens, surely the smallest church out of _Scotia_--we seek
for a word which shall take in both Cashel and St. Andrew’s--that ever
was designed for metropolitan or cathedral rank. It looks like a toy;
it has been wittily said that it seems meant to receive the throne
of the Boy Bishop. But it has the thorough Byzantine air; it has the
apse, the cupola of the Athenian form, the heads of the windows cutting
into the cupola--a form which stands to such cupolas as we have seen
at Corfu and Daphnê in the same relation in which a German apse or
tower with many gabled sides stands to an apse or tower of the more
usual form. The church, small as it is, is rich, covered with plates of
sculpture, some of which at least are ancient fragments used up again.
It is not easy, at all events for the traveller to whom Byzantine forms
are still new, to fix the exact date of the Athenian churches. Nor
can he find, at least off-hand, much to help him in easily accessible
books. Messrs. Texier and Pullan have put out a splendid book, most
valuable for the illustrations of the particular buildings which they
think good to describe, but which is useless as a general view of
Byzantine architecture, and which does not contain a single Athenian
or other Greek example. Mr. J. M. Neale, in his _History of the Holy
Eastern Church_, goes far more fully into the matter, though we are
sometimes tempted to kick at the guidance of a writer who talks about
“Arta in Ambracia,” and who attributes “a long and peaceful reign” to
the Slayer of the Bulgarians. Of the periods into which he divides
Byzantine art he places the metropolitan Church in the second, which
reaches from 537 to 1003. This takes in the time of Eirênê, the
Athenian Empress to whom Athenian tradition is fond of attributing
the churches of her native city. But most of the Athenian churches,
including the two which call for most special notice, he assigns to
his third period, 1003-1453. This period, we do not exactly know why,
is said to be one of Latin influence; but why should Latin influence
come in in 1003 of all years? and what Latin influence is there to
be seen in such buildings as the churches of St. Theodore and the
Kapnikarea? These are, on the whole, the two most striking churches in
Athens. They stand well in open places of the modern city, a relief,
though a strange contrast, among its modern forms--a contrast indeed
so strong that we have heard it whispered that their destruction has
sometimes been dreamed of. If there is any Latin element in either,
it is in the church of the Kapnikarea which has a kind of secondary
church, with a cupola of its own, alongside of the main building, with
its Greek cross and central cupola. This secondary church does not
appear at St. Theodore, but the Kapnikarea has another feature which
St. Theodore has not, in the form of a large _narthex_, which is surely
a special sign of orthodoxy. The remembrance of Peterborough flashed
across our mind as we saw this noble portico with its six arches, two
wider and four narrower, crowned by four gables. It has suffered much
in its effect from the glazing of some of the arches, as well as from
the rising of the ground, which has covered the columns up to nearly
half their height. This portico is indeed worthy of study; it is a
legitimate translation into the language of an arched style of the old
portico with its entablature, as the west front of Peterborough is
a further translation into the language of a style, not only arched,
but pointed. Joining on to the _narthex_ is also a porch on the north
side, a porch clearly forming part of the same design, with arches
resting on columns, and finished with three gabled faces. Instead of
these features, St. Theodore has a simple west front, composed, like
ordinary west fronts, of doors and windows. Its most marked external
feature is the large bell-gable perched on the south transept. Within,
the Kapnikarea has the advantage, as its cupola rests on columns with
quasi-Corinthian capitals. Those of the portico have capitals of
various forms, mostly unclassical. The material of both these churches
is mainly that later form of the alternation of stone and brick which
grew out of the earlier Roman masonry, and which we have already seen
in Corfu. These churches, and a crowd of others, smaller and less
striking, will not be passed unheeded by any one in whose eyes history,
whether political or artistic, is one unbroken tale. They are, unless
we may claim a place for their corrupt follower in the Turkish mosque,
the latest among the antiquities of Athens, and they are not less
worthy of study than the earliest. With them we will take our leave
of the city of the violet crown, and of the land of which the wisdom
of some præ-historic reformer made her more than the head. We pass
from Athens and from Attica; one stage more, one bound rather, over
the central sea of Greece, will lead us beyond the bounds of Hellas
itself. One thought more comes across us as we pass from Athens, as we
make ready to pass from Greece. Between the work of the earliest and of
the latest Grecian heroes there is a strange likeness. Thêseus--that
name will do as well as any other--brought together rival cities to
form one abiding commonwealth, and thereby to create the Athens alike
of archons, emperors, dukes, and kings. As rival cities forgot their
rivalry in the presence of Thêseus, so rival party leaders forget their
rivalries in the presence of Kanarês. The hero is gone; and while we
write this, Greece, and those who care for Greece, are wondering who
can fill his place. His place in truth no one can fill, but the lesson
taught by the close of his life ought not to pass away. If rival
leaders could work side by side at the bidding of the one man whom all
were proud to own as their master, they may go on in the same unselfish
path when the voice which calls them to union is no longer the voice of
one man, however illustrious, but the voice of their country itself.
Marathôn.