The “Lantern of Demosthenes”—Byron’s Residence in
Athens—Temple of Jupiter Olympus, Seven Hundred Years in
Building—Superstitious Fancy of the Athenians respecting its
Ruins—Hermitage of a Greek Monk—Petarches, the Antiquary and
Poet, and his Wife, Sister to the “Maid of Athens”—Mutilation
of a Basso Rilievo by an English Officer—The Elgin Marbles—The
Caryatides—Lord Byron’s Autograph—Attachment of the Greeks to
Dr. Howe—The Sliding Stone—A Scene in the Rostrum of
Demosthenes.
Took a walk by sunset to the Ilissus. I passed, on the way, the “Lantern
of Demosthenes,” a small octagonal building of marble, adorned with
splendid columns, and a beautifully sculptured frieze, in which it is
said the orator used to shut himself for a month, with his head half
shaved, to practice his orations. The Franciscan convent, Byron’s
residence while in Athens, was built adjoining it. It is now demolished.
The poet’s name is written with his own hand on a marble slab of the
wall.
I left the city by the gate of Hadrian, and walked on to the temple of
Jupiter Olympus. It crowns a small elevation on the northern bank of the
Ilissus. It was once beyond all comparison the largest and most costly
building in the world. During seven hundred years it employed the
attention of the rulers of Greece, from Pisistratus to Hadrian, and was
never quite completed. As a ruin it is the most beautiful object I ever
saw. Thirteen columns of Pentelic marble, partly connected by a frieze,
are all that remain. They are of the flowery Corinthian order, and sixty
feet in height, exclusive of base or capital.
Three perfect columns stand separate from the rest, and lift from the
midst of that solitary plain with an effect that, to my mind, is one of
the highest sublimity. The sky might rest on them. They seem made to
sustain it. As I lay on the parched grass and gazed on them in the glory
of a Grecian sunset, they seemed to me proportioned for a continent. The
mountains I saw between them were not designed with more amplitude, nor
corresponded more nobly to the sky above.
The people of Athens have a superstitious reverence for these ruins.
Dodwell says, “The single column toward the western extremity was thrown
down, many years ago, by a Turkish voivode, for the sake of the
materials, which were employed in constructing the great mosque of the
bazaar. The Athenians relate that, after it was thrown down, the three
others nearest it were heard to lament the loss of their sister! and
these nocturnal lamentations did not cease till the sacrilegious voivode
was destroyed by poison.
Two of the columns, connected by one immense slab, are surmounted by a
small building, now in ruins, but once the hermitage of a Greek monk.
Here he passed his life, seventy feet in the air, sustained by two of
the most graceful columns of Greece. A basket, lowered by a line, was
filled by the pious every morning, but the romantic eremite was never
seen. With the lofty Acropolis crowned with temples just beyond him, the
murmuring Ilissus below, the thyme-covered sides of Hymettus to the
south, and the blue Ægæan stretching away to the west, his eye, at
least, could never tire. There are times when I could envy him his lift
above the world.
I descended to the Fountain of Callirhoe, which gushes from beneath a
rock in the bed of the Ilissus, just below the temple. It is the scene
of the death of the lovely nymph-mother of Ganymede. The twilight air
was laden with the fragrant thyme, and the songs of the Greek labourers
returning from the fields came faintly over the plains. Life seems too
short, when every breath is a pleasure. I loitered about the clear and
rocky lip of the fountain, till the pool below reflected the stars in
its trembling bosom. The lamps began to twinkle in Athens, Hesperus rose
over Mount Pentilicus like a blazing lamp, the sky over Salamis faded
down to the sober tint of night, and the columns of the Parthenon
mingled into a single mass of shade. And so, I thought, as I strolled
back to the city, concludes a day in Athens—one, at least, in my life,
for which it is worth the trouble to have lived.
I was again in the Acropolis the following morning. Mr. Hill had kindly
given me a note to Petarches, the king’s antiquary, a young Athenian,
who married the sister of the “Maid of Athens.”[9] We went together
through the ruins. They have lately made new excavations, and some
superb bassi-rilieivi are among the discoveries. One of them represented
a procession leading victims to the sacrifice, and was quite the finest
thing I ever saw. The leading figure was a superb female, from the head
of which the nose had lately been barbarously broken. The face of the
enthusiastic antiquary flushed while I was lamenting it. It was done, he
told me, but a week before, by an officer of the English squadron then
lying at the Piræus. Petarches detected it immediately, and sent word to
the admiral, who discovered the heartless goth in a nephew of an English
duke, a midshipman of his own ship. I should not have taken the trouble
to mention so revolting a circumstance if I had not seen, in a splendid
copy of the “illustrations of Byron’s Travels in Greece,” a most
virulent attack on the officers of the “Constellation,” and Americans
generally, for the same thing. Who but Englishmen have robbed Athens,
and Ægina, and all Greece? Who but Englishmen are watched like thieves
in their visits to every place of curiosity in the world? Where is the
superb caryatid of the Erechtheion? stolen, with such barbarous
carelessness, too, that the remaining statues and the superb portico
they sustained are tumbling to the ground! The insolence of England’s
laying such sins at the door of another nation is insufferable.
For my own part, I cannot conceive the motive for carrying away a
fragment of a statue or a column. I should as soon think of drawing a
tooth as a specimen of some beautiful woman I had seen in my travels.
And how one dare show such a theft to any person of taste, is quite as
singular. Even when a whole column or statue is carried away, its main
charm is gone with the association of the place. I venture to presume,
that no person of classic feeling ever saw Lord Elgin’s marbles without
execrating the folly that could bring them from their bright, native
sky, to the vulgar atmosphere of London. For the love of taste, let us
discountenance such barbarisms in America.
The Erechtheion and the adjoining temple are gems of architecture. The
small portico of the caryatides (female figures, in the place of
columns, with their hands on their hips) must have been one of the most
exquisite things in Greece. One of them (fallen in consequence of Lord
Elgin’s removal of the sister statue), lies headless on the ground, and
the remaining ones are badly mutilated, but they are very, very
beautiful. I remember two in the Villa Albani, at Rome, brought from
some other temple in Greece, and considered the choicest gems of the
gallery.
We climbed up the sanctuary of the Erechtheion, in which stood the
altars to the two elements to which the temples were dedicated. The
sculpture around the cornices is still so sharp, that it might have been
finished yesterday. The young antiquary alluded to Byron’s anathema
against Lord Elgin, in “Childe Harold,” and showed me, on the inside of
the capital of one of the columns, the place where the poet had written
his name. It was, as he always wrote it, simply “Byron,” in small
letters, and would not be noticed by an ordinary observer.
If the lover, as the poet sings, was jealous of the star his mistress
gazed upon, the sister of the “Maid of Athens” may well be jealous of
the Parthenon. Petarches looks at it and talks of it with a fever in his
eyes. I could not help smiling at his enthusiasm. He is about
twenty-five, of a slender person, with downcast, melancholy eyes, and
looks the poet according to the most received standard. His reserved
manners melted toward me on discovering that I knew our countryman, Dr.
Howe, who, he tells me, was his groomsman (or the corresponding
assistant at a Greek wedding), and to whom he seems, in common with all
his countrymen, warmly attached. To a man of his taste, I can conceive
nothing more gratifying than his appointment to the care of the
Acropolis. He spends his day there with his book, attending the few
travellers who come, and when the temples are deserted, he sits down in
the shadow of a column, and reads amid the silence of the ruins he
almost worships. There are few vocations in this envious world so
separated from the jarring passions of our nature.
* * * * *
Passed the morning on horseback, visiting the antiquities without the
city. Turning by the temple of Theseus, we crossed Mars Hill, the seat
of the Areopagus, and passing a small valley, ascended the Pnyx. On the
right of the path we observed the rock of the hill worn to the polish of
enamel by friction. It was an almost perpendicular descent of six or
seven feet, and steps were cut at the sides to mount to the top. It is
the famous sliding stone, believed by the Athenians to possess the power
of determining the sex of unborn children. The preference of sons, if
the polish of the stone is to be trusted, is universal in Greece.
The rostrum of Demosthenes was above us on the side of the hill facing
from the sea. A small platform is cut into the rock, and on either side
a seat is hewn out, probably for the distinguished men of the state. The
audience stood on the side-hill, and the orator and his listeners were
in the open air. An older rostrum is cut into the summit of the hill,
facing the sea. It is said that when the maritime commerce of Greece
began to enrich the lower classes, the thirty tyrants turned the rostrum
toward the land, lest their orators should point to the ships of the
Piræus, and remind the people of their power.
Scene after scene swept through my fancy as I stood on the spot. I saw
Demosthenes, after his first unsuccessful oration, descending with a
dejected air toward the temple of Theseus, followed by old Eunomus;[10]
abandoning himself to despair, and repressing the fiery consciousness
within him as a hopeless ambition. I saw him again, with the last
glowing period of a Philippic on his lips, standing on this rocky
eminence, his arm stretched toward Macedon; his eye flashing with
success, and his ear catching the low murmur of the crowd below, which
told him he had moved his country as with the heave of an earthquake. I
saw the calm Aristides rise, with his mantle folded majestically about
him; and the handsome Alcibiades waiting with a smile on his lips to
speak; and Socrates, gazing on his wild but winning disciple with
affection and fear. How easily is this bare rock, whereon the eagle now
alights unaffrighted, repeopled with the crowding shadows of the past.
-----
[9] You will recollect what Byron says of these three girls in one of
his letters to Dr. Drury: “I had almost forgot to tell you, that I am
dying for love of three Greek girls, at Athens, sisters. I lived in the
same house. Teresa, Marcama, and Katinka, are the names of these
divinities—all under fifteen.”
[10] “However, in his first address to the people, he was laughed at and
interrupted by their clamours; for the violence of his manner threw him
into a confusion of periods, and a distortion of his argument. At last,
upon his quitting the Assembly, Eunomus, the Thriasian, a man now
extremely old, found him wandering in a dejected condition in the
Piræus, and took upon him to set him right.”—_Plutarch’s Life of
Demosthenes._
* * * * *
* * * * *