Athens—Ruins of the Parthenon—The Acropolis—Temple of
Theseus—The Oldest of Athenian Antiquities—Burial-Place of the
Son of Miaulis—Reflections on Standing where Plato taught, and
Demosthenes harangued—Bavarian Sentinel—Turkish Mosque,
erected within the Sanctuary of the Parthenon—Wretched
Habitations of the Modern Athenians.
ÆGÆAN SEA.—We got under way this morning, and stood towards Athens,
followed by the sloop-of-war, “John Adams,” which had come to anchor
under our stern the evening of our arrival at Ægina. The day is like
every day of the Grecian summer, heavenly. The stillness and beauty of a
new world lie about us. The ships steal on with their clouds of canvass
just filling in the light breeze of the Ægæan, and withdrawing the eye
from the lofty temple crowning the mountain on our lee, whose shining
columns shift slowly as we pass; we could believe ourselves asleep on
the sea. I have been repeating to myself the beautiful reflection of
Servius Sulpitius, which occurs in his letter of condolence to Cicero,
on the death of his daughter, written on this very spot, [8]“On my
return from Asia,” he says, “as I was sailing from Ægina toward Megara,
I began to contemplate the prospect of the countries around me. Ægina
was behind, Megara before me; Piræus on the right, Corinth on the left;
all which towns, once famous and flourishing, now lie overturned and
buried in their ruins; upon this sight, I could not but presently think
within myself, ‘Alas! how do we poor mortals fret and vex ourselves if
any of our friends happen to die or be killed, whose life is yet so
short, when the carcases of so many cities lie here exposed before me in
one view.’”
The columns of the Parthenon are easily distinguishable with the glass,
and to the right of the Acropolis, in the plain, I see a group of tall
ruins, which by the position must be near the banks of the Ilissus. I
turn the glass upon the sides of the mount Hymettus, whose beds of
thyme, “the long, long summer gilds,” and I can scarce believe that the
murmur of the bees is not stealing over the water to my ear. Can this be
Athens? Are these the same isles and mountains Alcibiades saw, returning
with his victorious galleys from the Hellespont; the same that faded on
the long gaze of the conqueror of Salamis, leaving his ungrateful
country for exile; the same that to have seen, for a Roman, was to be
complete as a man; the same whose proud dames wore the golden
grasshopper in their hair, as a boasting token that they had sprung from
the soil; the same where Pericles nursed the arts, and Socrates and
Plato taught “humanity,” and Epicurus walked with his disciples, looking
for truth? What an offset are these thrilling thoughts, with the nearing
view in my sight, to a whole calendar of common misfortune!
Dropped anchor in the Piræus, the port of Athens. The city is five miles
in the interior, and the “arms of Athens,” as the extending walls were
called, stretched in the times of the republic from the Acropolis to the
sea. The Piræus, now nearly a deserted port, with a few wretched houses,
was then a large city. It wants an hour to sunset, and I am about
starting with one of the officers to walk to Athens.
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Five miles more sacred in history than those between the Piræus and the
Acropolis do not exist in the world. We walked them in about two hours,
with a golden sunset at our backs, and the excitement inseparable from
an approach to “the eye of Greece,” giving elasticity to our steps. Near
the Parthenon, which had been glowing in a flood of saffron light before
us, the road separated, and taking the right, we entered the city by its
southern gate. A tall Greek, who was returning from the plains with a
gun on his shoulder, led us through the narrow streets of the modern
town to an hotel, where a comfortable supper, of which the most
attractive circumstance to me was some honey from Hymettus, brought us
to bed-time.
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We were standing under the colonnades of the temple of Theseus, the
oldest, and the best preserved of the antiquities of Athens, at an early
hour. We walked around it in wonder. The sun that threw inward the
shadows of its beautiful columns, had risen on that eastern porch for
more than two thousand years, and it is still the transcendent model of
the world. The Parthenon was a copy of it. The now venerable and ruined
temples of Rome, were built in its proportions when it was already an
antiquity. The modern edifices of every civilised nation are considered
faulty only as they depart from it. How little dreamed the admirable
Grecian, when its proportions rose gradually to his patient thought,
that the child of his teeming imagination would be so immortal!
The situation of the Theseion has done much to preserve it. It stands
free of the city, while the Parthenon and the other temples of the
Acropolis, being within the citadel, have been battered by every
assailant, from the Venetian to the iconoclast and the Turk. It looks at
a little distance like a modern structure, its parts are so nearly
perfect. It is only on coming close to the columns that you see the
stains in the marble to be the corrosion of the long-feeding tooth of
ages. A young Englishman is buried within the nave of the temple, and
the son of Miaulis, said to have been a young man worthy of the best
days of Greece, lies in the eastern porch, with the weeds growing rank
over his grave.
We passed a handsome portico, standing alone amid a heap of ruins. It
was the entrance to the ancient Agora. Here assembled the people of
Athens, the constituents and supporters of Pericles, the first
possessors of these godlike temples. Here were sown, in the ears of the
Athenians, the first seeds of glory and sedition, by patriots and
demagogues, in the stirring days of Platæa and Marathon. Here was it
first whispered that Aristides had been too long called “the just,” and
that Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens. And, for a lighter thought,
it was here that the wronged wife of Alcibiades, compelled to come forth
publicly and sign her divorce, was snatched up in the arms of her
brilliant, but dissolute husband, and carried forcibly home, forgiving
him, woman-like, with but half a repentance. The feeling with which I
read the story when a boy, is strangely fresh in my memory.
We hurried on to the Acropolis. The ascent is winding and difficult,
and, near the gates, encumbered with marble rubbish. Volumes have been
written on the antiquities which exist still within the walls. The
greater part of four unrivalled temples are still lifted to the sun by
this tall rock in the centre of Athens, the majestic Parthenon, visible
over half Greece, towering above all. A Bavarian soldier received our
passport at the gate. He was resting the butt of his musket on a superb
bas-relief, a fragment from the ruins. How must the blood of a Greek
boil to see a barbarian thus set to guard the very sanctuary of his
glory.
We stood under the portico of the Parthenon, and looked down on Greece.
Right through a broad gap in the mountains, as if they had been swept
away that Athens might be seen, stood the shining Acropolis of Corinth.
I strained my eyes to see Diogenes lying under the walls, and Alexander
standing in his sunshine. “Sea-born Salamis” was beneath me, but the
“ships by thousands” were not there, and the king had vanished from his
“rocky throne” with his “men and nations.” Ægina lay far down the gulf,
folded in its blue mist, and I strained my sight to see Aristides
wandering in exile on its shore. “Mars Hill” was within the sound of my
voice, but its Areopagus was deserted of its judges, and the intrepid
apostle was gone. The rostrum of Demosthenes, and the academy of Plato,
and the banks of the Ilissus, where Socrates and Zeno taught, were all
around me, but the wily orator, and the philosopher, “on whose infant
lips the bees shed honey as he slept,” and he whose death and doctrine
have been compared to those of Christ, and the self-denying stoic, were
alike departed. Silence and rain brood over all!
I walked through the nave of the Parthenon, passing a small Turkish
mosque (built sacrilegiously by the former Disdar of Athens, within its
very sanctuary), and mounted the south-eastern rampart of the Acropolis.
Through the plain beneath ran the classic Ilissus, and on its banks
stood the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Olympus, which I had
distinguished with the glass in coming up the Ægæan. The Ilissus was
nearly dry, but a small island covered with verdure divided its waters a
short distance above the temple, and near it were distinguishable the
foundations of the Lyceum. Aristotle and his Peripatetics ramble there
no more. A herd of small Turkish horses were feeding up toward Hymettus,
the only trace of life in a valley that was once alive with the
brightest of the tides of human existence.
The sun poured into the Acropolis with an intensity I have seldom felt.
The morning breeze had died away, and the glare from the bright marble
ruins was almost intolerable to the eye. I climbed around over the heaps
of fragmented columns, and maimed and fallen statues, to the
north-western corner of the citadel, and sat down in the shade of one of
the embrasures to look over toward Plato’s academy. The part of the city
below this corner of the wall was the ancient Pelasgicum. It was from
the spot where I sat that Parrhesiades, the fisherman, is represented in
Lucian to have angled for philosophers, with a hook baited with gold and
figs.
The academy (to me the most interesting spot of Athens) is still shaded
with olive groves, as in the time of Plato. The Cephissus, whose gentle
flow has mingled its murmur with so much sweet philosophy, was hidden
from my sight by the numberless trees. I looked toward the spot with
inexpressible interest. I had not yet been near enough to dispel the
illusion. To me the academy was still beneath those silvery olives in
all its poetic glory. The “Altar of Love” still stood before the
entrance; the temple of Prometheus, the sanctuary of the Muses, the
statues of Plato and of the Graces, the sacred olive, the tank in the
cool gardens, and the tower of the railing Timon, were all there. I
could almost have waited till evening to see Epicurus and Leontium,
Socrates and Aspasia, returning to Athens.
We passed the Tower of the Winds, the ancient Klepsydra or water-clock
of Athens, in returning to the hotel. The Eight Winds sculptured on the
octagonal sides, are dressed according to their temperatures, six of
them being more or less draped, and the remaining two nude. It is a
small marble building, more curious than beautiful.
Our way lay through the sultry streets of modern Athens. I can give you
an idea of it in a single sentence. It is a large village, of originally
mean houses, pulled down to the very cellars, and lying choked in its
rubbish. A large square in ruins after a fire in one of our cities,
looks like it. It has been destroyed so often by Turks and Greeks
alternately, that scarce one stone is left upon the other. The
inhabitants thatch over one corner of these wretched and dusty holes
with maize stalks and straw, and live there like beasts. The fineness of
the climate makes a roof almost unnecessary for eight months in the
year. The consuls and authorities of the place, and the missionaries,
have tolerable houses, but the paths to them are next to impracticable
for the rubbish. Nothing but a Turkish horse, which could be ridden up a
precipice, would ever pick his way through the streets.
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[8] “_Ex Asia rediens_,” &c.—I have given the Translation from
Middleton’s Cicero.
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