must just now be many witnesses either to confirm or to correct the
poet’s description. But in the solitude of modern Corinth the few
voices that are heard, whether of man or beast or fowl, seem certainly
to sound louder and shriller even than in Athens itself. Aphroditê had
one of her special homes in Corinth, though the seven massive columns
are said to belong, as surely they ought to belong, to her greater
sister Athênê. But the bird who once played Aphroditê so sorry a trick,
and the beast which carried Dionysos and Zanthias on their journey to
the lower world, call us betimes, with a power of voice which surely no
Bulgarian cock could surpass, to make our way, not to Kenchreaï, but
to its modern substitute Kalamaki--thence once more to draw near to
Athens, this time by way of the shore of Megara and of her own Salamis.
The Corinthian Gulf.
Corinth, we have said, with its mountain citadel, is truly the central
point of Greece. But we do not thoroughly feel how the Isthmus parts
asunder two different spheres of Greek life and history till we find
ourselves on the gulf which takes its name from the city on the
Isthmus. We can, if we will, make our way to Athens first of all by
way of the gulf; but we shall perhaps better understand the position
in Grecian history which is held by the shores of the gulf, if we take
them at a later stage of our journey. It may, in short, be well to
leave Greece by the Corinthian gulf, to make it our way back again to
the western islands from whence we started. It is impossible to study
Greece in strict chronological order, unless we could anyhow drop from
the clouds on the akropolis of Mykênê. But by taking the Corinthian
gulf and its shores late in our course, we shall be enabled to end
our survey with those parts of Greece which, at least in the days of
her old independence, were the last to come to the front. And by this
course we shall perhaps better understand why those parts came to the
front later than others.
Greece, the most eastern of the three great peninsulas of Europe,
begins to play its part in the history of the world earlier than
the peninsulas of Italy and Spain; and in the like sort, it is the
eastern side of Greece which begins to play its part in the history
of Greece earlier than the western side. Is it answered that the
position of Athens, the most eastern part of the Greek continent,
as a leading state in Greece, is of comparatively late date? As
far as dominion goes, Mykênê, Argos, Sparta, all came to the front
before her. But it was Athens which, in some unrecorded age, made the
first advance in Greek and in European political life by that union
which made one commonwealth--we might say, one city--of Athens and
Eleusis, of Marathôn and Sounion. Here was in truth the beginning of
political history, the foundation of a state of such happy dimensions
as to become the model of city-commonwealths for all time. And as
for the cities which came before Athens in dominion, they too lie,
if not so far east as Athens, yet on the eastern side of their own
peninsula. All the earliest greatness, the earliest history, of Greece
gathers round her Ægæan, not round her western, shores. Her colonies
go eastward and northward, covering all the eastern coast with an
Hellenic fringe, while far distant Kymê was the single outpost in the
west. Down at least to Macedonian times the eastern side of Greece
keeps its predominance; the western side is important mainly as the
road to a distinct Hellenic world in Italy and Sicily. Ever and anon
this distinct western world influences the eastern Hellenic world,
sometimes, as in the great Athenian overthrow before Syracuse, with
terrible effect. But, on the whole, the western side of Greece, the
side where Corinth was greater than either Sparta or Athens, remained
secondary in Grecian affairs, while the Greek world still further to
the west lived a life of its own, broken only by occasional dealings
with the states of the older Hellenic land. Politically the older
Greek world looks in the main eastward. It is only the great religious
centres of the nation which in any sort cast their eyes towards the
islands of the blessed. Dôdônê lies to the west, in a land whose
Hellenic character was called in question. So does Olympia within
Peloponnêsos itself, while Delphoi, if it does not look absolutely
westward, if its connexion with Thermopylai binds it in some sort
to the eastern side of Greece, still looks directly on that central
gulf which forms the great highway to the western shores. At Corinth
indeed the rule is reversed; the city of the two seas and the two
havens looks far more to her western than to her eastern outlet; but
her great Isthmian sanctuary looks to the Saronic and not to the
Corinthian gulf. The names are well chosen. The western gulf was the
true gulf of Corinth. No other city of equal rank stood on its shore,
while its waters formed the highway to the insular and quasi-insular
dominion of Corinth on the western seas, to Leukas and Korkyra and
long-lived Epidamnos, to Ambrakia, fated to be the capital of Pyrrhos,
to mightier and more distant Syracuse, fated to be the capital of whole
dynasties of tyrants and kings.
We at last then bid farewell to Athens and Attica; and, in bidding
farewell to Athens and Attica, we bid farewell to something more. We
pass from one Hellenic world to another. We once more cross the head
of the Saronic gulf to Kalamaki; thence carriages bear us, it may be
to New Corinth, it may be to Loutraki to the north of it, according
to exigencies of which the landsman is a poor judge. In either case
we are carried far more distinctly away from one geographical and
historical region to another than when we simply cross from one side of
the Saronic gulf to another. As we are borne over the Isthmian hills,
we look to Peloponnêsos on one side, to Northern Greece on the other;
we look forward on the Corinthian gulf, and we are borne along to all
that it suggests in the further West. On the East we have turned our
backs; and we feel that we have done something more than turn our backs
in the way which the physical necessities of travel compel us to do. We
begin to understand that the northern, the southern, and the western
view really make up a system in which the lands and seas which we
leave behind us have no share. And when we once find ourselves on the
waters of the Corinthian gulf, we begin to feel ourselves in another
world from the world of the eastern Hellas, the world of Athens and
Sparta. In both of the great divisions of the inland sea, within and
without the straits, in the gulf of Krissa and in the gulf of Patrai,
we feel that we have left the Greece of Herodotus, Thucydides, and
Xenophôn behind us. We are in a world which their history touches
only by fits and starts; we have sailed into the Greece of Polybios.
We have made our way from the world of city-commonwealths into the
world of federations; as we pass along, the lands of the two great
Leagues lie on either side of us. Through nearly the whole of our
journey we skirt the Achaian shore to the south, and what, in later
times at least, became the Aitôlian shore to the north of us. Lesser
Leagues, Boiôtia--for in those later times Boiôtia must count among
lesser Leagues--Phôkis, and Lokris, fill up whatever space Aitôlia
left unannexed. And, when we have cleared the gulf and are fairly in
the western sea, we draw near to another federal land on the shores of
Akarnania. We may even cast, if not our eyes, at least our thoughts,
to the great northern mainland which in those days had become both
Hellenic and federal as the Confederation of Epeiros. Here then is a
world where we go by many spots which call up both earlier and later
associations, but where the main interest as distinctly belongs to
the second and third centuries before our æra as the main interest of
the lands washed by the Ægæan belongs to the fourth, fifth, and sixth
centuries before our æra.
We should be the last to shut out either the earlier or the later
associations. We do not forget that Aitôlia, poor in early history,
is rich in yet earlier legend, or that it reached the height of its
legendary fame when the divine Epeians gave way to the Aitôlian colony
which was to grow into the Eleian guardians of Olympia, the special
servants of Zeus. As we skirt the inner bay of Krissa, we may think of
all the sacred wars from Solôn to Aischinês. Naupaktos has its place
alike in legend and in history; in the waters of the outer gulf we
remember alike Phormiôn of Athens and Don John of Austria. As we pass
by Patras, we remember how well St. Andrew fought for his city against
Slave and Saracen. As we look on the southern shore, we remember that
there were once Frank Princes of Achaia no less than Frank Dukes of
Athens. As we look to the northern shore, we remember that there was
a day when the Empire of Servia stretched, without a break, from the
Danube to the Corinthian gulf. And, beyond all this, as we skirt the
northern shore of the outer gulf, we pass by a spot whose fame in later
times outshines every other association from Meleagros to Don John. We
pass by Mesolongi, the city of the two immortal sieges, of the long
defence where the Fanariot Mavrokordatos, alone among his class, placed
his name alongside of the men of Souli and the men of Hydra--of the
night of the great sally which places the name of Mesolongi alongside
of Ithomê and Eira, of Saguntum, of Numantea, and of Zaragoza. All
these memories go to make up the history of the shores along which
we pass; still they lie outside its main and special interest. They
come either before or after the days when the two shores of the gulf
formed the main centre of Hellenic history. The Achaian cities line
the shore, and, with our usual protest against vain attempts to call
back a past which is gone for ever, for a moment we hardly regret that
Slavonic Vostizza has again become Hellenic Aigion. But before we reach
the older Achaian shore, we pass by the territory of the city but for
whose help those Achaian cities, whose place in earlier history is so
small, could never have risen to become one of the two leading powers
of Greece. There is the land of Sikyôn, city of Aratos, deliverer and
betrayer of Corinth to the right--the man who taught the cities to
the left the art of Themistoklês, the art which teaches how a small
state may become a great one. And we see plainly written on the two
shores, why, in the warfare of those times, the League of the North
was commonly the aggressor, the League of the South was commonly the
victim. Save here and there some more favoured spot, the shore of
Aitôlia seems bare beyond the common bareness of Grecian hills; the
shore of Achaia seems rich with a richness the like of which we have
hardly seen on any other part of the Hellenic mainland. The narrow
strait, the strait by which Phormiôn won his glory, brings into that
close neighbourhood which is so characteristic of Greek geography--a
neighbourhood as near as that of Euboia to Boiôtia at one point and
to Northern Achaia at another--two races as unlike one another as any
could be who worshipped the same ancestral gods and spoke dialects of
the same ancestral tongue. The development and the rivalry of those
two powers give us our second lesson in Grecian history, the lesson
of the days when, if the scale of men is smaller, the scale of things
is larger, when cities have grown into federations, when the range of
Grecian politics is no longer shut up within the Grecian seas, but when
Macedonia and Pergamos, Syria and Egypt, Carthage and Rome herself,
have begun to appear as actors on the scene. The seas of Eastern Greece
belong to the days of her more brilliant yet narrower fame, when
Greece was her own world, when the teachings of her history are mainly
teachings of example and analogy. The seas of Central and Western
Greece belong to the days when Greece, less free it may be, less
brilliant, less rich in great deeds and mighty men, had become part of
a greater world, and when her destinies had become connected with the
destinies of later days by a direct chain of cause and effect. The
historical position of the Corinthian gulf is that it is, above all the
waters of Hellas, the sea which washes the shores of the Federal lands.
As we get clear of the gulf, by the mouth of Achelôos, the White River
of later nomenclature, we are again among the Western islands, though
we now see them from wholly different points, and in wholly different
relations to one another from those in which we saw them as we first
made our way from Corfu round Peloponnêsos. Our course is somewhat
erratic; but it enables us to see a coast which has a character of its
own and a history of its own. We skirt the shore of Akarnania. Here is
a land which has no place in the Homeric Catalogue--a land therefore
which has no place in the Hellas of those days, so far as we have any
right in these days to make use of the name of Hellas at all. It was
then the _Epeiros_, the nameless mainland, the non-Hellenic shore, as
opposed to the Hellenic islands, the realms of Megês and of Odysseus.
In the Federal age we find it a Federal commonwealth, weak besides its
robber neighbours of Aitôlia, but holding the first place in Greece
for what Livy calls the “fides insita genti,” the people who never
broke their faith to either friend or enemy. Yet they had enough of
worldly wisdom to plead their absence from the Catalogue as a merit
in Roman eyes. Aitôlians, Achaians, all the rest, had a share in the
overthrow of the mother city of Rome; Akarnania was guiltless. Here is
a special history, and the coast has a special character. It is, like
other Grecian coasts, a coast of bays and islands and peninsulas; but
nowhere else have we seen such a crowd of small islands, mere spots of
rock some of them, among which we thread our way, reminding us less
of anything that we have seen in Greece than of the northern and more
desolate part of the Dalmatian archipelago. There are the Echinades,
the Oxeiai, the sharp islands, the urchin islands of later times;
but can these dots be Doulichion and the holy Echinai, islands which
sent forty ships to the war of Ilios? We pass in and out among them,
steering northward between Leukas and the mainland, with the Epeirot
mountains in the distant view; but we ourselves do not even reach the
channel--after so many changes it is a channel--which divides Leukas or
Santa Maura from the mainland. We turn; above the smaller islands rises
Ithakê; above Ithakê rises Kephallênia. We enter the haven, as we would
believe, of the realm of Odysseus, but not without feeling a difficulty
how an island which clearly lies to the north-east can be said to lie
πρὸς ζόφον. We pass in and in, hardly dreaming beforehand of the
windings of the deep bay which so truly bears the name of Bathy.
Scepticism vanishes for a time, and we cannot keep ourselves from
greeting the men of Ithakê as countrymen of the elder Odysseus.
But there is still one spot of the mainland to be seen. Before we
leave the Hellenic islands, we have still to make another, a more
momentary, incursion on the Peloponnêsian mainland. We have seen the
sites of Isthmian and Nemeian games; we have still to take a glimpse
of the scene of the great festival of Zeus himself. We have passed
by the Aitôlian shore; we must visit the great Aitôlian colony. Our
last record of Hellenic travel must draw its inspiration from the spot
where--
... κραίνων ἐφετμὰς
Ἡρακλέος προτέρας,
ἀτρεκὴς Ἑλλανοδίκας γλεφάρων
Αἰτωλὸς ἀνὴρ ὑψόθεν
ἀμφὶ κόμαισι βάλοι γλαυκόχροα
κόσμον ἐλαίας.
It is hard to conceive the rude Aitôlian discharging such a duty.
We may be inclined to fall back on the doctrine of oppressed
nationalities, to say,
ἦτοι Πίσα μὲν Διός,
but to deny all place as his ministers to strangers from the northern
shore of the gulf. What if we make our way to Olympia, under the belief
that the Olympiad of B.C. 364, held by genuine Pisatans under the
protection of Arkadian spears, was the only lawful celebration of the
festival within historic times?
Corinth to Eleusis.
We could never understand why Lord Palmerston called the horse-races at
Epsom “our Isthmian Games” rather than Olympic, Pythian, or Nemeian.
But, as it was Lord Palmerston who said it, the saying was accepted
as having some special point; as doubtless many people believed on
the same authority that Gothic architecture was a style specially
appropriate to Jesuit colleges. The only point of special connexion
between Epsom and the games of the Isthmus would seem to be that these
last were dedicated to Poseidôn, Ποσειδὼν ἵππιος, and might therefore
perhaps seem to be in some way more specially “horsey” than the
others. Anyhow the connexion with Poseidôn was a connexion with Thêseus
and with Athens, and Athens always claimed a special right in the
Isthmian festival, alongside of Corinth its proper president. It was
somewhat strange then that, during the century when Corinth was not,
the presidency of the games was bestowed on Sikyôn, rather than on
Athens, the cherished ally of Rome. But in any case the games supply a
link between Corinth and Athens. It is well then that the road--we were
going to say between the two cities, but we must now rather say between
the village and the capital--lies by the site of the games. We tread
the path across the Isthmus which looks so flat from the mountain top,
but which we now find to have its ups and downs. We pass by the traces
of the _stadium_; we pass by the foundations of the great temple of
Poseidôn; we see traces of the wall which in so many ages has proved
so vain a barrier; we see signs of the canal which has been so often
no less vainly tried as a means to make the Isle of Pelops truly an
island. Now that Athens and Corinth are no longer enemies, the work
is more needful than ever. No small amount of commerce which now goes
elsewhere would, we are told, pass at once through an Isthmian canal to
the haven of Peiraieus. We leave the site of Kenchreia to the right,
and take ship again at the modern Kalamaki; we thus better see that
northern part of the Saronic Gulf which we saw only in the distance as
we passed from Peiraieus to Nauplia. We skirt the shore of Megaris; we
better take in the outline of Salamis and its satellite Psyttaleia,
the scene of the bloody exploit of Aristeidês. We land once more; we
pass along the now familiar road, this time perhaps less anxious than
before to catch the first glimpse of the holy rock of Athênê. We may
perhaps rather feel that, as we near the olive groves of Kolônos, we
are still within the domain of Poseidôn. We may perhaps rather fix our
eyes on the lowlier and more perfect Thêseion than on the mightier and
more shattered Parthenôn. Fresh from the site of the Isthmia, we are
inclined to dwell on the legend which tells us how near Athens once was
to being Poseidônia. The sea-god thus follows us on our way back from
Corinth to Athens. He will follow us through some of the journeys which
we must make in Attica itself, before we steer our course back again
to the western shores of Peloponnêsos and to the islands more western
still. He who cannot see the whole of the Attic land, he who must be
satisfied with picturing to himself from the Athenian akropolis how
Agis sent forth his plundering bands from Dekeleia, and how the spirit
of freedom set with Thrasyboulos on the brow of Phylê, must at least
make his way by the Sacred Way to the holy place of Christendom at
Daphnê, and to the holy place of heathendom at Eleusis. He must muse on
the mound of Marathôn, not to dream that Greece may yet be free, but to
wonder and to hope how soon the freedom which stops at Othrys may reach
at the very least to Olympos. He must stand too on the marbled steep
of Sounion, no longer to shrink from the land on which he stands as a
land of slaves. And on two at least of these three journeys he will
still find himself in the company of the same deity who reigned on the
Isthmus and on Kolônos. If Dêmêtêr and her child held the first place
at Eleusis, yet by the bay which is guarded by Salamis, the sea-god
was not forgotten, and on the height of Sounion the two powers who
strove for the rule of Athens divided the sacred spot between them.
The Isthmus with its games, Eleusis on its bay, Sounion on its height,
may all be fittingly taken, as nearly as may be at a glance, as being
all of them spots where the sea-god received at least a partial local
worship.
The traveller who goes from Corinth to Athens by land will take
Eleusis on his way; and those who, like the wearied Ten Thousand at
Kerasos, have had enough of their land passage, and who prefer to pass
toillessly--it may be asleep like Odysseus--over the waves, may well
make Eleusis the object of an early journey after they again find
themselves at Athens. We have come back to civilized life. From Athens
to Eleusis the journey may be made along the Sacred Way by the same
means by which the still abiding wheel-tracks tell us that it was made
of old. The journey is one of the highest interest; it is a journey
of double interest for those at least who count Daphnê and its abiding
church no less worthy of interest than Eleusis and its fallen temple.
The Sacred Way of Athens has its Roman parallel; but it is not to
be found in the Sacred Way of Rome, but in the road which bears the
name of the great Censor. The Sacred Way, like the Appian Way, like
all ways more or less, though these two seem to have been conspicuous
above others, was a street of monuments, a few of which may still be
traced. Parting from the monumental quarter of Athens, from the tombs
lately brought to light in Kerameikos, the Sacred Way started from the
Dipylon--itself brought to light with the tombs--and passed through
the olive groves, leaving Poseidôn’s hill of Kolônos to the right. The
starting-point of the modern road is not exactly the same, but the two
join at no great distance from the ancient walls. The tombs, which are
there no longer, may be studied in the itinerary of Pausanias. But one
connects itself with a monument of which some traces are to be found
further on. The most splendid of all the monuments by the Sacred Way is
that which commemorated the most worthless ashes in its whole course.
We feel that Athens had indeed fallen when the most splendid of all the
tombs was raised by the son-in-law of Phôkiôn, at the bidding and the
cost of Harpalos, to commemorate Pythionikê. Further on our journey
we come to the spot where the ancient temple of Aphroditê was turned
to the worship of Philê, Philê-Aphroditê, the wife of Dêmêtrios the
Besieger. Philê was indeed one of the noblest of women, as Pythionikê
was one of the vilest; but tomb and temple alike mark the spirit of a
time when strangers were turning the men, and even the gods, of Hellas
out of their native homes and altars. But, before we reach the temple
of Philê, we reach one of those sites where long ages of Greek history
are gathered together in a single spot. There, in the pass, was the
temple of Apollo; there, girded by its _peribolos_, standing on its
site with the foundations built out of its stones, is the monastic
church of Daphnê. It is well to gaze and study while we can. Daphnê has
once been sacked already; here, as at Athens,
Quod non fecerunt Gothi fecerunt Scoti;
here, as on the Athenian akropolis, we may curse the name of Elgin, and
bewail the columns carried off from their own place to lose beauty,
value, and interest in an English museum. And so in our own time the
modern spoilers of Athens, in their zeal to wipe out the history of
the land, may some day doom the apses, the cupola, the campanile, of
Daphnê to be swept away, in the hope of finding inscriptions among
their ruins. On a foundation of the temple-stones rises the church with
its mingled stone and brickwork, its elaborate windows, its spreading
cupola on a far greater scale than those at Corfu or at Athens. And
there, perhaps more interesting than all, is the Frankish work at the
west end, the defences of the fortified church, raised by the Latin
princes, with the contemporary cloister, all alike the work of Western
architects on Eastern soil. The barbarians who stole the columns seem
to have left something behind them besides mere fragments. An Ionic
column embedded in the wall helps to support an arch, once evidently
part of a greater number, which carries off our thoughts to the
basilicas, not of Ravenna, but of Rome.