the fiercest struggles of the War of Independence. Each of the passes,
each of the heights, was held and stoutly contested in the August
of 1822, when the men of Peloponnêsos beat back the Turkish host of
Dramali in utter defeat. On our immediate path the ground rises and
falls, but we are led over no special heights till, as we descend, the
plain of Nemea breaks upon us. The columns rise in all the stateliness
of solitude. Beyond rise the hills in which the ancients placed the
cave of the Nemeian lion. This then is one of the seats of Pan-hellenic
religion and Pan-hellenic festive gathering. If its glory did not reach
that of Olympia or Delphi or even of the Isthmus, it is the first of
the four to which our journey leads us, and we remember that Nemeian
victories called forth the song of Pindar, and that Alkibiadês did
not disdain either to win triumphs there, or to have those triumphs
recorded in the choicest art of the sculpture of his day. There is
the temple in the plain, a plain well fitted for the purposes of the
games, and, cut out of one of the hills to the right as in the Larissa
of Argos, we see where the theatre of Nemea once was. Though the place
hardly ranks among sites of first-rate interest, though it calls up
no such primæval associations as Mykênê which we have left, no such
later associations as Corinth to which we are going, there is much to
muse upon in the plain of Nemea. The legend of the lion comes home to
us all the more strongly after seeing the sculptured forms which the
world has agreed to call lions in the Mykênêan akropolis. Science and
scholarship going hand in hand have given him a new interest. The lion,
whose cave we cannot see, though we see the mountain side in which
it is hollowed, may be mythical in his own person, but he is no mere
creature of fiction. If, with Mr. Dawkins, we trace out the retreat
of the lion from Europe, we see at Nemea one very important stage in
his retreat. We trace him from the day when he made his lair in the
caves of Mendip to the day when Herodotus so accurately marked out
his geographical limits within the European continent. In his day the
lion was still found in the region which stretched from the Achelôos
to the Nestos; and when we look at the evidently careful nature of the
notice itself, and when we go on to put that notice in its right place
among other notices, we shall not be tempted for one moment to think
that the lions of Herodotus were other than real lions. Some indeed
have suggested that Herodotus was so poor a naturalist as to mistake
lynxes or wild cats for lions. No one will be likely to think this when
he has once put the whole evidence in its right order. Just as we can
believe in a Mykênaian empire without pledging ourselves to a personal
Agamemnôn, so we can believe in lions in Peloponnêsos without pledging
ourselves to a personal Hêraklês. The constant references to the lion
in the Homeric poems must come from actual knowledge or from very
recent tradition. The beast has a two-fold name; he is not only λέων
but λῖς, and we are tempted, though it is slightly dangerous, to carry
our thoughts on a little further with regard to his name. We ourselves
seem never to have called him by anything but a name borrowed from the
Latin; but are not _Löwe_ and λῖς strictly cognate, signs of a time
when the king of beasts had a name common to the whole Aryan family?
Anyhow we may be sure that primitive legend would not have quartered
the lion at Nemea, that primitive art would not have sculptured him at
Mykênê, except at times when his presence in Peloponnêsos was, if a
thing of the past at all, a thing of a very recent past.
The modern fauna of Nemea, as it strikes the passer-by, is of a
lowlier and more harmless kind. The shepherdesses are there with their
goats among the ruins, and a draught of their milk in the Greek May
is a refreshment not to be scorned. And he who uses his eyes as he
passes along may have the same luck as the infant Hermês when he met
the tortoise in his path. The tortoise of that adventure willingly
sacrificed himself for the good of mankind, that the baby-god might
make a lyre out of his shell. The tortoise kept his place in the human
nursery speech of Greece, and we may still ask the question of the
Greek girls,
χελὶ χελώνη, τί ποεῖς ἐν τῷ μέσω;
There is a temptation to carry him off as a living memorial of the
spot; but the way from Nemea to Britain is long.
But we must not forget man and his works when we are in one of the
chief seats of Hellenic worship. Here is the temple of Nemeian Zeus,
standing desolate in the plain, almost as some of our Cistercian
abbeys stand in their valleys. The history of the holy place is
characteristic of Greek religion and of Greek politics. As Elis wrested
the possession of Olympia from Pisa, so Argos wrested the possession
of Nemea from Kleônai. In each case the possession of the temple and
all that belonged to it was a source of dignity and political power.
It was therefore eagerly sought for, and unscrupulously seized, by
the greater city at the expense of the smaller. In the Olympian case
indeed, one ground of refusing the ancient claim of the men of Pisa
was that they had no city at all, but were mere villagers, unable and
unworthy to preside over one of the great religious solemnities of the
Greek nation. With our Northern notions, we are inclined to ask why
Olympia and Nemea did not themselves grow into cities. Why did not a
town grow up around the sanctuary? Not a few English towns, some of
them of considerable size, grew up round some venerated monastery or
other great church. A few devotees of the saint, a few dependents of
his ministers, began the settlement. Traffic, shelter, all the motives
which draw men together, increased the colony. In course of time it
either wrested municipal rights from its ecclesiastical lords or
received them as a free gift. In either case a new borough was formed,
a borough which had not been made but had grown. But in Greek ideas
a city was something which did not grow but was made. It might grow
indefinitely after it was once made; but its first making did not take
the form of growing. A new city was called into being by special and
solemn acts, and no such foundation would have been endured at Olympia
by Elis or at Nemea by either Argos or Kleônai. Some accommodation
there must have been for the ministers of the God and his worshippers,
even in ordinary times. At the great festival seasons, so we gather
from the story of the assault on the tents of the envoys of Dionysios
at Olympia, the crowds which assembled were encamped in the open plain
like an army. But such a camp did not, like so many of the camps of
Rome, grow into a permanent city. One might have fancied that it might
become an object of Pan-hellenic policy to remove these national
sanctuaries from the power of particular cities, and to place them
under some kind of management in which all who had a right to share in
the festival might be represented. But such an idea was foreign to the
Greek political mind. The presidency of the temple and the games was
essentially a privilege of this or that city. Pisa or Kleônai, Elis
or Argos, were hosts, and the rest of Greece were their guests. There
were, indeed, Amphiktionies, where a temple belonged to several cities
in common; but the action of the most famous of their number in Greek
affairs did not do much to impress the general Greek mind in favour
of that system of management. Throughout Grecian history the Delphic
Amphiktiony either does nothing or becomes the tool of some powerful
commonwealth or prince.
But, besides the memories of Nemea and the thoughts which it suggests,
there is the temple itself. There is enough left to trace out the
whole ground plan, and three columns soar above the plain, catching
the eye as a prominent object in the descent. We say “soar,” for these
are perhaps the only Doric columns which do soar. They are taller and
slenderer than any others to be seen in Greece, and they have thereby
lost much of the true Doric character. That they are of much later date
than the Attic Parthenôn none can doubt. Greek antiquaries are even
inclined to fix them as late as Macedonian times. One almost wonders
that an architect who departed so far from the primitive Doric idea in
the proportion of his columns did not venture to adopt either of the
later forms of capitals, one of which at least must have come into use
before his time. We have seen the Ionic capital in use on the Athenian
akropolis, and it certainly would have looked more in place as a finish
to the columns of Nemea than the form which seems the natural finish
at Poseidônia and even at Athens. But they are grand objects all the
same. Nothing can wholly take away the inherent majesty of the Doric
architecture, and beside them is a relic of even greater interest
than themselves. Within the precinct, built out of the remains of the
heathen sanctuary, are the ruins of a small church, clearly of early
date, one of the many instances in which the professors of the new
faith turned the holy places of the old faith to their own purposes.
A train of thoughts are suggested by the neighbourhood of the two
temples, now alike equally fallen. But on this head we shall do well to
check ourselves; a greater opportunity for musings of this kind will be
found on the western side of Peloponnêsos.
We leave the temple; we pass by the remains of the theatre; we climb
to a fountain where the women gathering around may afford a study in
the varied ornaments of their dress. We pass on; we come down again,
marking a number of quarries which supplied stone for the neighbouring
building and which have almost the look of buildings themselves. It
is to our shame that we pass by the remains of Kleônai, its akropolis
covering a low hill, without stopping for a nearer examination? Such
questions are not always decided by the traveller for himself; they are
for the most part settled for him. And he who has lingered at Mykênê in
the morning and must needs reach Corinth in the evening may be forgiven
if he fail to give Kleônai her due. A halt and a meal are taken at a
more convenient point, within sight of the hill of Kleônai, where a few
trees give shade, and where a few ruined and forsaken houses remain as
memories of the last earthquake. Of that earthquake we shall hear and
see more at Corinth. We press on to the city of the two seas and the
mountain crowned by its citadel. Before we reach them, we learn again
at once how thoroughly Greece is a land of mountains, and how near one
part of Greece is to another. Here in Peloponnêsos we see over the gulf
to the mountains of Northern Greece. The hoary head of Parnassos rises
before us,
Not in the phrensy of a dreamer’s eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through its native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty.
There in truth it soars, as no figure of speech, but as the mountain
which guarded a Pan-hellenic sanctuary greater than that of Nemea.
Presently we reach a winding descent, and a flat meadow alone lies
between us and Akrokorinthos. The hills of Tiryns, Mykênê, and
Kleônai, the Athenian akropolis itself, are as nothing to the Larissa
of Argos; but the Argive height itself yields utterly to the great
Corinthian steep. Still, as yet we see only the hinder side, the
land side, of the mountain; we see the highest point of the fortress
which crowns it, but we do not yet see how Akrokorinthos stands to
Corinth, New and Old, and to the seas on either side of it. We have
yet to study one of the sites of Greece than which none is of higher
interest in general history, a site which has to tell a tale of ruin,
of restoration, and of renewed ruin, of a different kind from any with
which we have as yet met.
Corinth.
Thus far on our Hellenic journey we have been able to contrast cities
which were swept away for ever in days which we call ancient with
cities which have kept on an uninterrupted being to our own day.
The city of the two seas, the city which guards the Isthmus, the
city beside whose hill-fortresses all rival hill-fortresses seem as
molehills, has a history which is unlike either, a history which,
among the great cities of Greece, is wholly her own. And, as none of
the great cities of Greece has seen such ups and downs of fortune as
Corinth, so none has won for itself a more varied fame. There is no
Greek city whose name has entered into more familiar sayings; it even
sank to be a kind of a byword in very modern times. Holding, never
a first, but always a high secondary place, alike in Grecian legend
and in the most brilliant times of Grecian history, Corinth came to
be the centre of all Grecian history in the days of the second birth
of Grecian freedom; it was swept from the earth by Roman vengeance as
none other of the great Grecian cities ever was; it arose afresh as
a Roman colony, again under the influence of sky and soil to change
into a Greek city; it kept on its Greek character through the ages of
Slavonic invasion, to become one of the points most fiercely struggled
for in the warfare of Turk and Venetian, to be taken and retaken by
the patriots and the oppressors of yet later warfare. And now, after
so long and so busy a life, after the endurance of so many blows at
the hand of man, the last blow has been dealt by the hand of nature.
The last of many earthquakes has sealed the doom of Corinth yet more
effectually than it was sealed when Mummius swept it with the besom
of destruction. Mummius simply destroyed, and what Mummius destroyed
Cæsar could restore. But the last overthrow of Corinth has given her a
neighbour and a rival. Old Corinth is forsaken; New Corinth has sprung
up by the shore. New Corinth may well grow, and she may have ages of
prosperity in store for her. But while New Corinth grows and flourishes
by the shore, the only chance for Old Corinth at the foot of the
mountain is that New Corinth may grow to such a degree as some day to
annex the venerable site as one of its suburbs.
Those who believe in Semitic or other foreign settlements in Greece
are apt, though they have no legend like those of Pelops or Kekrops to
help them, to quarter a Phœnician settlement on Akrokorinthos. A name
or two is all that they have to show, and a hill called φοινίκαιον,
and an Ἀθήνη Φοινίκη do not prove much. No site can be more thoroughly
Greek; the hill-top, near the sea, but not on it, is the ideal position
for a Greek coast town of the earliest type; and at Corinth we have
the mightiest of hilltops, near but not on, not one sea only, but two.
It is the central point of Hellas, looking all ways, commanding her
coasts and her mountains on every side. Its earliest name of Ephyrê
is one scattered over many sites of central and northern Greece, from
Argolis and Sikyonia to Thessaly and Thesprotia. Semitic elements may
have mingled with the local worship of Aphroditê without supporting
any Semitic occupation. Corinth traded with all the world, and she
may have learned many things from Phœnician visitors without Phœnician
settlers ever occupying her soil. The most Hellenic in its position of
all Hellenic cities cannot be given up to the barbarian. Instead of a
Phœnician origin, the votaries of the East must be satisfied with the
most striking of Phœnician analogies. If Corinth and Carthage were not
sisters in origin, they were at least sisters in destiny. They perished
together, and they rose again together, if the foundation of the
Roman colony can be called a rising again of either the Greek or the
Phœnician city.
The old memories of far-distant Poseidônia come again on the mind--not
unfittingly in a place where Poseidôn was so highly honoured--when we
look on the one surviving building of the lower city. Old Corinth is
now a mere village of a few houses. A few memorials of Roman times
are there; but, as at Poseidônia, they have to be looked for. The one
ancient building which strikes the eye and gives a character to the
place is the shattered temple, where seven columns still stand in all
the stern majesty of the earliest and severest Doric. Corinth gives her
name to the latest, the richest, the most graceful form of architecture
of Greece. But her one surviving relic is, of all buildings on old
Hellenic soil, the one which is furthest removed from the character
of her own order. The birthplace, so men deemed, of painting, one of
the chosen seats of sculpture, a city crowded with splendid temples
of later date, has now nothing to show but these half-fallen columns,
carrying us back to the earliest days of the historical being of the
city. Young as they seem beside the gates and vanished columns of
Mykênê, the Parthenôn is young beside them. They carry us back to the
days of Bacchiads and Kypselids, the days when Corinth was the mistress
of the Western seas, and sent forth her colonists and artists to follow
on the peninsular of Korkyra the models which she had reared at the
foot of her own guardian mountain.
The columns stand over the modern village, over a site almost as
desolate as that over which they must have stood in the hundred years
between Mummius and Cæsar. The other fragments, Greek and Roman, hardly
come into the view. But the lower city is not the true Corinth. It is
the mountain citadel round which the great associations of the city
gather. As we look on from far, as we climb up its steep sides, we
think of the two great moments of its deliverance, the day
When first Timoleon’s brother bled,
and the night when Aratos, in his earlier and nobler days, climbed
up that steep in the teeth of Macedonian guards and baying dogs, and
made Corinth once more a free Hellenic city. We picture him the next
morning in the _agorê_, leaning wearied on his spear, and telling
to the citizens whom he had delivered the tale of the night’s work
which had set them free. And with such a scene before us, we are not
tempted to dwell on the darker day when the deliverer undid his own
work, when, rather than divide the possession of Peloponnêsos with a
Spartan rival, he could give back the mount of Corinth to a Macedonian
lord. High indeed the mount soars above the city, as high above the
Larissa of Argos as the Larissa of Argos soars above the little hill of
Tiryns. Stern and bare it rises above the city; stern and bare it rises
above the open land on either side. But where the mountain sinks more
gently towards the lesser height on its Sikyonian side, we may climb
the winding path; we may enter the gateway of the forsaken fortress;
and here indeed we find the history of Corinth, the history of Hellas,
written legibly in stone. The fortress which, but fifty-five years
back, was so fiercely disputed between the men of the land and their
barbarian masters is now a fortress only in name. The warder keeps the
gate; but he keeps it only as a form. The walls shelter only ruins. But
they are ruins which tell their tale, fragments which tell how
Many a vanish’d year and age,
And tempest’s breath, and battle’s rage,
Have swept o’er Corinth.
Every age, from the earliest to the latest, has left its living and
speaking memorials on that memorable hill, and no classical barbarian
has yet taken in hand the cruel work of wiping out that long and
wondrous history. Here, in the very gateway, is a primæval wall,
reared, it may well be, before Corinth was Dorian, a wall of stones
such as Corinth’s own Sisyphos might have been set to roll up the
mountainside. Hard by is an arch of the thirteenth century of our era,
an arch, not of Venetian, but of genuine French work, work of the days
when there were Latin Princes of Achaia and Latin Emperors of the New
Rome. We pass on among the fortifications, the dwellings, the temples,
of all the creeds and races which Corinth has seen as citizens or as
masters. Here is work of Hellenic days, of days when Corinth sent forth
her colonies on her one sea and met the Persian in arms on the other.
Here are traces of the temples of the Roman colony, traces of the
Corinth where Paul taught and which Alaric entered as the first armed
disciple of Paul’s teaching. Here is the Byzantine church, witness of
the long years when Corinth stood as an outpost of Christendom, in one
age against the heathen Slave, in another against the Mahometan Turk.
Here is the Turkish mosque, the Turkish dwelling, telling of the long
struggle when the Turk wrested the fortress from the Greek, when the
Venetian wrested it back from the Turk, when the Turk wrested it once
more from the Venetian, till the happier day when the fetter of Hellas,
the horn of Peloponnêsos, again passed into the hands of her sons. All
are in ruins, all are fittingly in ruins, seeing that all are memorials
of powers which have passed away. But as ruins let them be guarded and
revered, as ruins which tell their tale, the tale of Corinthian and
Hellenic history. The blind fury of the destroyer has decreed that the
history of Athens shall no longer be read on the akropolis of Athens.
Let Corinth harbour no such enemies. Let not a wall be touched, let not
a stone be swept away, which still lives to tell how many times and by
how many hands
Was Corinth lost and won.
The ascent is long; to any but the young and active or else the
practised mountaineer it is toilsome. But the toil is broken by the
relics on which we stop to gaze on our path; it is repaid by the
mighty landscapes on which we gaze. It is not too much to say that
we look on Hellas from its centre. The small ruined church on the
height brings Akrokorinthos within the company of the sacred hills of
Christendom, the hills where a sanctuary on the height looks down on
town or city at its feet. Cashel has been seized by another hand as a
parallel to the akropolis of Athens; a miniature more like the model
is found in our own island, where the Tor of Glastonbury looks down on
the battle-fields of Western England. Nearer in size however, in the
mountain fittings of the landscape, are the twin hills of Sitten. But
the giant alps which fence in the Rhone valley of themselves hinder
the varied prospect of mountain and plain and sea and island which
meets us from the hill of Corinth. The lowlier English height really
comes nearer, both in effect and in historic sentiment, to the central
citadel of Hellas. If the Sugarloaf, as we prosaically call it--the
Pen-y-val of its own people--which so proudly guards the entrance to
the Usk valley, had the castle and church of Abergavenny on its summit
instead of at its foot, we should have a nearer approach than all to
Akrokorinthos, though it would be Akrokorinthos without its seas. But
without the seas there could be no Corinth, there could be no Hellas.
The point where the Eastern and Western seas most nearly touch is in
truth the centre, the key-stone as the poet puts it, of the whole
peninsular land south of Olympos. From the citadel of Corinth, if all
Hellas does not itself lie within our sight, yet all Hellas lies within
sight, as it were, by representation. Peloponnêsos and Attica, the land
north and south of the gulf, the shores of the two great confederacies,
the mountains of Arkadia and of Phôkis, and the snowy head of Aitolian
Korax, stand there as if to speak of the lands north and south of
them. And if the Western islands, once the special scene of Corinthian
enterprise and Corinthian dominion, are beyond our sight, we may pass
on to them in thought along the gulf over which the triremes of Corinth
were rowed to their first sea-fight with revolted Korkyra. The eastern
sea opens to the right, and the curved shore of Salamis speaks of
the nobler warfare where Corinth joined with Athens and with Aigina
to beat back the invading lord of Asia. At some favourable moment the
eye may even catch the pillared steep of the akropolis of Athens, that
Athens which Corinth once hoped to see turned into a sheep-walk, but
whose help she was so soon to crave against the very Sparta which held
back her destroying hand. From that height the Isthmus seems but a
flat plain between the two seas--the Isthmus so often fortified, so
often stormed by successive invaders. By that narrow neck Agêsilaos
and Antigonos, Mummius and Alaric, James of Avesnes and Francesco
Morosini, Amurath and Mahomet and Ali Koumourgi have all made their way
into the peninsula. But in all that long history there are two days,
not far apart in so long a tale, which stand out conspicuously above
all. There is the day of the Roman deliverer and the day of the Roman
destroyer, the day of Flamininus and the day of Mummius. Not that it
was the freedom of Greece which Flamininus proclaimed in the _agorê_ of
Corinth; such a proclamation would have been an insult to the allies of
Rome and to all those Greek states which in name at least kept their
freedom then and for ages after. But he proclaimed the freedom of
Corinth, the freedom of all the Greek lands which the last Philip held
in bondage. Fifty years later Corinth was swept from the earth; but
let no man deem that even then Achaia became a Roman province. Corinth
fell, Corinth rose again, to live a longer and a more varied life as
the foundation of Cæsar than as the foundation of Alêtês. And those
seven aged columns have stood and looked on all these changes; they
beheld the reign of Periandros; they have lived to behold the reign of
George of Denmark.
The Akrokorinthos is a mountain covered with ruins; the lower city has
sunk to a small village. A few houses are all that remain of that busy
meeting-place of two worlds; the shattered temple alone speaks of the
creeds that are fallen; one mean church and another small chapel are
all that are there to tell of the church which an Apostle founded. Yet
the single priest of Corinth and his small flock may boast themselves
that they have two epistles of the New Testament all their own, a
privilege of which those few Christian households may seem more worthy
than the mixed multitude of the modern Thessalonians. A night may be
spent in Corinth, and that unharmed by the enemies on whom the comic
poet of Athens has so grotesquely bestowed the Corinthian name. There
is no fear of the δήμαρχος ἐκ τῶν στρωμάτων--no fear that the traveller
may have to cry ἐξείρπουσιν οἱ Κορίνθιοι. But in Greece all animals
seem to send forth louder and clearer notes than in other parts of the
world; and in Corinth, the centre of Greece, they seem, though it may
be merely fancy, to be louder and shriller than in the rest of Greece.
A poet more recent than he whom we have so often quoted has sung of
The deep grey of the morning, when Bulgarian cocks are shrill.