the rude foundations--the ἀργοὶ λίθοι of Pausanias--of the _peribolos_
of the temple of the two-fold Aphroditê. We are brought nearer to the
days of heathendom, heathendom in so strange a form, when we see the
niches carved in the rock to receive the votive offerings--exactly the
same fashion which has lingered on in our own times in many churches
in Southern lands--and when we see from the inscription Φίλῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ
that the Macedonian Queen really had Attic worshippers. By this time we
begin better to understand the geography of the country, and to see,
what no view from Athens itself would teach us, how strong was the
geographical barrier between Athens and Eleusis. This has been well
pointed out by Mr. Mahaffy; it is the kind of thing which Mr. Mahaffy,
so unlucky on some points, is as well able to take in as any man. In
the view from the Athenian akropolis the eye rests on the mountains
which part the Attic land from the Bœotian; it passes over the lower
range which parts the more specially Athenian land from the Eleusinian.
From that range itself, even from the pass that crosses it, we see how
completely the two districts were shut out from one another, how--no
small point in Grecian political geography--they lie out of sight of
one another. We now better understand the tales in the Hymn to Dêmêtêr
and in Solôn’s story of Tellos, which set before us Eleusis as a state
distinct from Athens, and as having its wars with Athens. We understand
how it alone among the Attic δῆμοι kept, in honour doubtless of its
sacred character, the name of πόλις, and how once in later times, after
Athens was cleared from the Thirty, it did for a moment again become
a separate state. We pass along the shore of the bay, by the Rheitoi,
the reservoir once sacred to the Eleusinian goddesses, in whose waters
only their priests might fish. Then comes the tomb of Stratôn, where
we meet with our first sign that Eleusis was a great and flourishing
town even in later Roman times. Stratôn had a wife both whose names
are Roman; and in the name of her birthplace we get one of those happy
misspellings which help us to trace the history of Greek pronunciation.
Her description, Πώλλα Μουνατία Ἡράκληα, teaches us that, when the
monument was set up, at some time after the days of Pausanias, η and
ει had already the same sound, but that Greek αυ no longer represented
Latin _au_.
We have come to Eleusis in the guise of votaries of Poseidôn; but it
is to be confessed that, when we reach the sacred city, we have to
take it on trust from Pausanias that the sea-god ever was worshipped
there. He tells us that there was at Eleusis a temple of Poseidôn
the Father; but the remains which we have to study are the remains of
the temple of the powers which were emphatically the Mother and the
Daughter. Eleusis, like other cities, began as a hill-fort; it still
has its akropolis, part of the circuit of whose wall can be traced. It
is crowned by a church and bell-tower, of no wonderful architecture
certainly, but which we trust may be allowed to abide, even though
there may be the ten-thousandth part of a chance that a stone with
two or three letters upon it might be found in their foundations. The
hill of the Eleusinian akropolis forms a long irregular ridge, rising
in the greater part of its course close above the bay, but running
a little inland at the point where it becomes an akropolis. It thus
leaves a considerable space for the lower city between the hill and
the haven. In a walk along the hill, a shattered tower of Frankish
times, standing on a nearly detached height, is a prominent object.
When reached, it presents no details for study. But in the walk thither
we look out on Salamis and the bay which it guards--a lake, as it might
seem, between the mainland and the curved island--while on the other
side we look down on the Thriasian plain, the plain so often ravaged
by Peloponnesian invaders before they crossed the ridge of Aigaleôs to
deal havoc in the neighbourhood of Athens itself. And, on the ridge
before we reach the tower, one of the smallest and humblest of churches
will not be scorned by those who deem that no aspect of the history
of the land is beneath their notice. At the foot of the hill, at the
opposite end from the tower, lay, as Athens might lie were its haven
close at hand, the holy city of the Great Goddesses. At the very end
of the ridge, keeping away, as it would seem, from the sea, are the
ruins of the temple which was once the greatest in size among the holy
places of Hellas. Little now can be made out of its vast circuit. The
confused and shattered ruins which are left are those of the temple
of Athênê Propylaia. Its plan may be made out with no difficulty; the
results may be seen in more than one book from Colonel Leake onward.
But one feature, which is not the least instructive of all, seems
hardly to have drawn to itself any notice. Among its ruins lie capitals
of the same class as those in the baths of Antoninus, capitals in which
the traditional trammels are forsaken, and in which a wider scope is
given for representation of forms divine, human, or animal. These are
memorials of what was in truth one of the most flourishing times in
Eleusinian history; when, under the _Pax Romana_, no Tellos could fight
in warfare between Athens and Eleusis, no traitors driven from Athens
could find shelter in Eleusis, but when Athens and Eleusis flourished
side by side, the one as the university of the world, the other as one
of its chief seats of pilgrimage. Are these remains of the temple, as
rebuilt by the philosophic Marcus? In any case they are links in that
long chain of the history of art which here, as we stand in Eleusis,
carries off our thoughts to Lucca and to Wetzlar. The last age then of
the glories of Eleusis begins with the saint of heathendom, the prince
in whose days the martyrs of Lyons bore their torments and Polycarp
played the man at the stake. They were avenged when Eleusis fell before
the attack of a Christian and a Teutonic invader. The desolation which
we see around us dates from that inroad of Alaric which marked so great
an epoch in Grecian history, the great turning-point when pagan Hellas
changed into the Christian land which scorned the Hellenic name. Since
that day Eleusis has never again raised her head. A time came when
she had passed away as utterly as Tiryns or Mykênê. Not an inhabited
house was there when Spon and Wheler rode to Eleusis. A small town
which had arisen in the days of Leake had become yet smaller during the
War of Independence. And now Eleusis seems to be beginning to arise
again at the point of her circuit which lies furthest away from her
ancient sanctuary. Vessels are in the bay; a modern factory--we forget
its exact object--covers a large space between the hill and the sea.
Signs of life are to be welcomed everywhere; they are especially to be
welcomed when they show that Greece has life in other spots than her
encroaching capital. Let the factory grow and prosper; let the vessels
come in greater numbers, they will do no harm to what remains of the
temple of Dêmêtêr and Athênê; only we should be glad to be equally sure
that some æsthetic doctor, Greek or German, may not some day meditate a
raid on the churches, the campanile, and the ruined tower.
Sounion.
One more excursion, this time not on the Attic soil, but on the Attic
sea, must be added to the Eleusinian and the Marathônian pilgrimage,
even by those who cannot undertake to follow the keen guidance of
Colonel Leake into every corner of the Attic δῆμοι. The survey of the
Attic land may well be ended at the point where, in geographical
accuracy, it ought, by those at least who approach by way of Syra, to
have begun. But to one thus drawing nigh for the first time, Sounion
is at most the beacon which points to Athens; it may even be that, if
he chances to draw nigh on a dim and cloudy morning, he may fail to
distinguish the marbled steep of Sounion among the other lofty points
over which his eye wanders. He expects, it may well be, that the height
and the temple will front him boldly as the first point of Attic ground
to catch his eye. He may not thoroughly take in the fact that the
promontory lies in a manner round a corner. Unless he has studied his
map very carefully, he may draw near under the belief that the Attic
peninsula ends in a point, in the same way in which the three southern
peninsulas of Peloponnêsos, that of Tainaros above all, certainly do.
Pausanias indeed begins his picture, not only of Attica, but of all
Greece, with the “height of Sounion, stretching forth from the Attic
land and the mainland of Hellas towards the Kyklades and the Ægæan
sea.” Yet it is certain that some who have approached the mainland of
Hellas from the Kyklades have not been lucky enough to catch a sight
of Athênê on the promontory as a harbinger of Athênê on the inland
rock. Even he who is more favoured cannot, at that moment, stop to
study the arrangement of the columns which still keep their ancient
whiteness. Nor will he, as he sails by, find out that there too the
rival of Athênê was not wholly ousted, that the sea-god kept at Sounion
a secondary place, at least as important as that which he kept at
Eleusis alongside of Dêmêtêr and her Child.
A voyage to Sounion forms then a necessary part of even a short sojourn
in Athens and Attica. He who is careful about mines, old or new, might
prefer a land journey which should combine Sounion with Laureion.
Otherwise it may be better to put oneself under the guardianship of the
lord of the dolphins, to whom men prayed on Sounion (ὦ χρυσοτρίαιν’,
ὦ δελφίνων μεδέων Σουνιάρατε), and to trust to his golden trident to
clear the way. That way leads by several striking points of coast,
each cape having, as a rule, an island placed before it as a kind of
outpost. Such above all is Zôstêr, where the narrow isthmus, as Dean
Blakesley hints, tied the promontory to the shore, but where pious
etymologers at a later time saw the spot where Lêtô loosed her girdle.
Such an etymology is much of a piece with many popular etymologies
in our own land. From the hill of Battle we look out on Telham, so
called, says the local legend, because the advancing Norman there
_told_ his army. Not far off flows one of the “cold becks” which have
given their names to so many spots from Normandy to Scotland. Here it
is said to mark the spot where the Duke _called back_ his flying men.
The derivation of Zôstêr from Lêtô’s zone is a guess essentially of
the same kind as these; yet there is a difference between them which is
not uninstructive in comparing the history of the Greek and the English
language. In the English derivations the real meaning is absolutely
forgotten; wholly wrong words, having merely an accidental likeness
in sound, are pressed into the service. In one of the two cases the
word thus misapplied has itself in that meaning become obsolete. It
is not unlikely that a new legend may arise, and that Telham, instead
of the spot where William _told_--that is, numbered--his army, may
become the spot where he _told_ them to do this or that. But Greek
had not, in the days at least when the Zôstêr legend was invented,
been so utterly broken up as that men were likely to go off to an
altogether wrong root. The tale kept within the prescribed range of
tying or untying something or other; and Lêtô, Artemis, and Apollôn
gained a fresh seat of worship through the etymological guess. But
Zôstêr has its place in history as well as in legend. The Persians,
after Salamis, took, so says Herodotus, the three small peaks which
form the peninsula for Athenian ships, and fled all the more till
they found out their mistake. One sceptical historian suggests that
it must have been a moonlit night. But, after all, may not this story
be less legendary than that of Lêtô, only so far as that real actors
are brought in? That the Persians took the rocks of Zôstêr for ships
and fled all the more is the kind of mocking saying which was likely
to be said at the time, whether true or false. And, even if it was a
mere mocking saying, it might well have passed into serious belief
before Herodotus, a four-years-old child at the time, had grown into an
inquiring historian. After all, the story belongs to a class. There
are the thistles which the armies took for spears after the fight
of Montl’hery. There are the Welshwomen in the red cloaks, whom the
French at Fishguard took for regular soldiers coming to the help of
the valiant militia of Pembrokeshire. Did all these things happen, or
are they all mere sayings which have found their way into history? Let
comparative mythologists argue the point.
But we are followed by etymologies along the whole coast. Every one who
has ever looked at the map knows the long island, immediately east of
the southern point of Attica, whose name fluctuates between the mere
description Makris and the more attractive name of Helenê. How came
Helen hither? We may be sure, with all deference to Strabo, that this
is not the Kranaê of the third book of the Iliad; that was far away
by the Lakonian shore, and the Homeric reference was commemorated by
a temple of Aphroditê with an unseemly surname. So Pausanias tells
us, though he does not explain what brought Helen to the long island
off Sounion. We will not hint that according to one Homeric story
(see Odyssey iii. 278) she must have been, if not on the island, at
least near it, in better company and at a later and better part of her
story, than that in which Strabo would bring her into these parts.
But on Attic soil or on Attic waters we must learn to feel an Attic
patriotism, and, so minded, we can give her a chance from another
quarter. We must not forget that Helen has her independent place in
Attic as well as in Peloponnesian legend. She was carried off by
Thêseus as well as by Paris. She was known at Aphidna, at Dekeleia,
and at Rhamnous; and it would be only a fair freak of etymological
invention to give her an island off the Attic as well as off the
Lakonian coast.
But with Helen in this way to guard the eastern side of the southern
extremity of the Attic land, it is a little disappointing when we find
the real origin of the name of the much smaller island which guards its
western side. There lies the isle of Patroklos. Helen and Patroklos
seem well matched; and a charm seems to be broken when we find that
the island takes its name, not from the Homeric antitype of Jonathan,
but from the Admiral of Ptolemy Philadelphos, who there dug a trench
and threw up a wall when he came to help Athens against Antigonos
Gonatas. Such a fall from poetry to prose, from legend to history, is
really sad. Yet we may draw some small comfort. Everything is a gain
which reminds us that the history of Athens did not end with the war of
Chairôneia or with the war of Lamia, but that Ptolemy and Antigonos,
and men later by ages on ages than Ptolemy and Antigonos, had something
to do with fixing her destinies.
The island of Patroklos is the last of the series of capes and islands
between Peiraieus and Sounion. All have lost their names, unless any
one takes _Phaura_ and _Phleua_ to be forms of the same name. All the
rest have descriptive names ending in νησί--the diminutive form, which,
according to rule in modern Greek, has supplanted the older νῆσος--just
as along our own shores they might end in _holm_ or _ey_. We turn round
the last point, and now--
Σούνιον ἱρὸν ἀφικόμεθ’, ἄκρον Ἀθηνῶν.
A sceptical thought will flash across the mind. Ought we not to read
Ἀθήνης for Ἀθηνῶν? But if we stifle the thought, we have again another
witness to the way in which all Attica had even in Homeric times
already become Athens. There is the little bay fenced in by the height,
crowned by the white columns, which gives the cape its modern, its
Italian, name. The name is well applied; Sounion is before all things
the Cape of the Columns. The pure white which their marble still keeps
is striking to the eye which has been for some time accustomed to the
yellowish brownish hue of the standing columns of Athens. We say the
standing columns, because those columns of the Parthenôn which have
been thrown down are as white as those on Sounion. But for this last
fact, it would be easy to account for the difference in the hue of the
columns by the difference between the pure sea-air of Sounion and the
air of an akropolis rising above a great city. Only here comes in the
difficulty which is suggested by the whiteness of the fallen columns
at Athens. Either the discolouring of the columns which are still
standing has happened since Morosini’s siege, or else the columns that
are overthrown have regained their whiteness since their fall. We do
not pretend to explain the difficulty; we only state it. All that we
are concerned with is the striking effect of the white marble of the
columns on Sounion as contrasted either with the discoloured columns
of the Parthenôn, or with the primitive columns of rougher stone which
were covered with some kind of plaster from the beginning. The actual
material of the columns of Sounion is something intermediate between
the two. It is marble, but marble from the neighbouring hills, much
less fine than the Pentelic marble of the Parthenôn. Another point at
once strikes the eye. Thirteen architectural objects stand up, but
it is soon seen that only twelve are of the usual shape of columns.
What is the thirteenth? It looks like a square pier, such as we should
expect to find inside a basilica at Lucca, but not outside a temple
at Sounion. The appearance is puzzling until we actually reach the
site of the temple and there carefully spell out the ground plan.
But before we do this two other remains have to be studied. Sounion,
besides being a holy place, was also a fortress. When the news of the
overthrow at Syracuse came to Athens, when every means was used to prop
up the tottering commonwealth, one means of defence that was taken was
the fortification of Sounion. This was done with the special object
of supplying a defence to the corn ships which brought in the foreign
food that Athens needed more than ever when the Peloponnesians were at
Dekeleia. A large part of the wall which cut off the promontory is
still to be traced, a wall of the best Hellenic masonry, strengthened
by square towers at intervals. Within this military circuit again we
come to the remains of the Propylaia, the entrance, as at Eleusis and
at Athens itself, to the immediate sacred precinct. But the summit of
all, crowning the promontory and immediately overlooking the sea, is
the temple itself. And when we come carefully to study its plan, we see
the meaning of the anomalous square object which seemed so puzzling
from below. The temple was one _in antis_, and the square object is the
end of one of the walls of the _cella_. The fellow to it may be traced,
though it does not rise high enough to make a feature in the general
view. One of the columns ranging with the _antæ_, two on the northern
side towards the land and nine on the southern or seaside, are still
standing with their architraves; but the eastern and western fronts,
with their columns and pediments, have perished.
It is indeed a spot to stand and gaze, though now with quite other
and happier feelings than those which Byron put into the mouth of
his imaginary Greek poet. The impulse is to gaze on the sea and the
islands, the realm of Athens, the realm which her fortress on Sounion
was to guard. But it is well to look landward also, and a short walk
from the temple will show that Athênê was not the only power that was
worshipped on Sounion. That the sea-god, lord of the Sounion dolphins,
was worshipped there is plain from Aristophanes. The jokes in the
Birds, where the god is addressed,
Ὦ Σουνιέρακε χαῖρ’ ἄναξ Πελαργικέ,
give us another title of the sea-god. Poseidôn at Sounion, like Zeus
at Dodônê, was prayed to as Pelasgian. The comic poet, when he had
once got into Nephelokokkygia, does not scruple to change the epithets
of the deity into “hawky” and “storky.” We might be sure from this
that Colonel Leake was misled in fancying that Poseidôn had nothing
more than a mere altar on Sounion. We come down from the temple of
Athênê, we pass the Propylaia; we pass the ruins of the wall; we reach
the little isthmus--for the site of the temple is peninsular--and on
a lower height we find remains, not enough to enable us to make out
the plan of any building, but enough to show that a building of some
importance must have stood there. Surely here we have the site of the
temple of the god who was prayed to on Sounion. Poseidôn is here, as
well as at Corinth, at home on his isthmus.
The men of Sounion are the subject of an allusion of the poet
Anaxandridês, quoted by Athênaios, which at first sight is not very
clear:--
πολλοὶ δὲ νῦν μέν εἰσιν οὐκ ἐλεύθεροι, εἰς αὔριον δὲ Σουνιεῖς, εἶτ’ εἰς
τρίτην ἀγορᾷ κέκρηνται.
Some say that this refers to their prosperity as living near the
mines of Laureion. The words in themselves would seem rather to point
to a class intermediate between the slave and the full citizen. But
how could there be such in any part of Attica after the union of the
Attic towns? Of their modern successors, a few might be seen near the
mouth of a cave by the sea, some contemplating the strangers, others
following the useful occupation of Nausikaa. The whole scene--the
little bay, with its beach beside the blue waters; the hills behind,
with their white columns against the sky; the cave, suggesting endless
Homeric remembrances of nymphs and sea-gods--even the homely work
going on by the shore--all seems in harmony; all seems to carry us back
to the days when the powers which had striven for Athens seem to have
agreed to hold Sounion as a joint possession.
Olympia and its Church.
Olympia, when the German diggers have fled before the heat of a Greek
summer, when they have left all the statues and other beautiful things
that they have found sealed up against all men, Greek and barbarian,
may seem to be, even literally, Olympia with the spring taken out of
its year. But Olympia can, for all general historical purposes, be
Olympia without them; some minds may not greatly regret their absence.
To some minds galleries, museums, collections of all kinds, are
simply wearisome. The weariness is one which may be well endured for
the sake of the knowledge which may be gained through it; still the
contemplation of objects in rows and cases, catalogued and numbered,
is weariness compared with the pure pleasure of contemplating the same
objects, each in its right place, each forming part of the whole of
which it was meant to form part. Better one statue without a nose, in
the place where the sculptor first put it than ten statues with noses
set up apart from their context in any collection in Athens, Rome, or
London. No blame of course attaches to the diggers at Olympia. The
objects which they found were not in their places, and could not be
kept in their places. They can only be kept in a museum; and to our
minds that museum should not only not be at Berlin or London--an evil
of which Greek law forbids all danger--but it should be at Olympia
and not at Athens. The little collection at Eleusis is in its right
place; it is at Eleusis; so it should be with the greater collection at
Olympia. But the feeling that a museum, with all that it teaches, is in
itself a bore, that its lessons are painful lessons, somewhat tempers
the traveller’s disappointment at finding that the relics are all
shut up, and that the key is somewhere in Germany. For the buildings
themselves are not carried away; they can be studied without let or
hindrance, and perhaps with even a deeper feeling of thankfulness to
those whose untiring zeal and energy have uncovered them. And the plain
of Altis, the stream of Alpheios, the hill of Kronos, the mightier
Arkadian mountains, are there in any case. And they, with the immortal
remembrances of the spot, are the true Olympia.