The Prison of Socrates—Turkish Stirrups and Saddles—Plato’s
Academy—The American Missionary School at Athens—The Son of
Petarches and Nephew of “Mrs. Black of Ægina.”
ATHENS.—We dismounted at the door of Socrates’ prison. A hill between
the Areopagus and the sea, is crowned with the remains of a showy
monument to a Roman pro-consul. Just beneath it the hill forms a low
precipice, and in the face of it you see three low entrances to caverns
hewn in the solid rock. The farthest to the right was the room of the
Athenian guard, and within it is a chamber with a round ceiling, which
the sage occupied during the thirty days of his imprisonment. There are
marks of an iron door which separated it from the guard-room, and
through the bars of this he refused the assistance of his friends to
escape, and held those conversations with Crito, Plato, and others which
have made his name immortal. On the day upon which he was doomed to die,
he was removed to the chamber nearest the Acropolis, and here the
hemlock was presented to him. A shallower excavation between, held an
altar to the gods; and after his death, his body was here given to his
friends.
Nothing, except some of the touching narrations of Scripture ever seemed
to me so affecting as the history of the death of Socrates. It has been
likened (I think, not profanely), to the death of Christ. His virtuous
life, his belief in the immortality of the soul and a future state of
reward and punishment, his forgiveness of his enemies and his godlike
death, certainly prove him, in the absence of revealed light, to have
walked the “darkling path of human reason” with an almost inspired
rectitude. I stood in the chamber which had received his last breath,
not without emotion. The rocky walls about me had witnessed his
composure as he received the cup from his weeping jailer; the
roughly-hewn floor beneath my feet had sustained him, as he walked to
and fro, till the poison had chilled his limbs; his last sigh, as he
covered his head with his mantle and expired, passed forth by that low
portal. It is not easy to be indifferent on spots like these. The spirit
of the place is felt. We cannot turn back and touch the brighter links
of that “fleshly chain,” in which all human beings since the creation
have been bound alike without feeling, even through the rusty coil of
ages, the electric sympathy. Socrates died here! The great human leap
into eternity, the inevitable calamity of our race, was here taken more
nobly than elsewhere. Whether the effect be to “fright us from the
shore,” or, to nerve us by the example, to look more steadily before us,
a serious thought, almost, of course, a salutary one, lurks in the very
air.
We descended the hill and galloped our small Turkish horses at a
stirring pace over the plain. The short stirrup and high-peaked saddle
of the country, are (at least to men of my length and limb)
uncomfortable contrivances. With the knees almost up to the chin, one is
compelled, of course, to lean far over the horse’s head, and it requires
all the fulness of Turkish trousers to conceal the awkwardness of the
position. We drew rein at the entrance of the “olive-grove.” Our horses
walked leisurely along the shaded path between the trees, and we arrived
in a few minutes at the site of Plato’s Academy. The more ethereal
portion of my pleasure in seeing it must be in the recollection. The
Cephissus was dry, the noon-day sun was hot, and we were glad to stop,
with throbbing temples, under a cluster of fig-trees, and eat the
delicious fruit, forgetting all the philosophers incontinently. We sat
in our saddles, and a Greek woman, of great natural beauty, though
dressed in rags, bent down the boughs to our reach. The honey from the
over-ripe figs, dropped upon us as the wind shook the branches. Our
dark-eyed and bright-lipped Pomona served us with a grace and
cheerfulness that would draw me often to the neighbourhood of the
Academy if I lived in Athens. I venture to believe that Phryne herself,
in so mean a dress, would scarce have been more attractive. We kissed
our hand to her as our spirited horses leaped the hollow with which the
trees were encircled, and passing the mound sacred to the Furies, where
Œdipus was swallowed up, dashed over the sultry plain once more, and
were soon in Athens.
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I have passed most of my leisure hours here in a scene I certainly did
not reckon in anticipation, among the pleasures of a visit to
Athens—the American Missionary School. We have all been delighted with
it, from the commodore to the youngest midshipman. Mr. and Mrs. Hill
have been here some four or five years, and have attained their present
degree of success in the face of every difficulty. Their whole number of
scholars from the commencement, has been upwards of three hundred; at
present they have a hundred and thirty, mostly girls.
We found the school in a new and spacious stone building on the site of
the ancient “market,” where Paul, on his visit to Athens, “disputed
daily with those that met with him.” A large court-yard, shaded partly
with a pomegranate tree, separates it from the marble portico of the
Agora, which is one of the finest remains of antiquity. Mrs. Hill was in
the midst of the little Athenians. Two or three serious-looking Greek
girls were assisting her in regulating their movements, and the new and
admirable system of combined instruction and amusement was going on
swimmingly. There were, perhaps, a hundred children in the benches,
mostly from three to six or eight years of age: dark-eyed, cheerful
little creatures, who looked as if their “birthright of the golden
grasshopper” had made them nature’s favourites as certainly as in the
days when their ancestor-mothers settled questions of philosophy. They
marched and recited, and clapped their sun-burnt hands, and sung hymns,
and I thought I never had seen a more gratifying spectacle. I looked
around in vain for one who seemed discontented or weary. Mrs. Hill’s
manner to them was most affectionate. She governs, literally with a
smile.
I selected several little favourites. One was a fine fellow of two to
three years, whose name I inquired immediately. He was Plato Petarches,
the nephew of the “Maid of Athens,” and the son of the second of the
three girls so admired by Lord Byron. Another was a girl of six or
seven, with a face, surpassing, for expressive beauty, that of any child
I ever saw. She was a Hydriote by birth, and dressed in the costume of
the islands. Her little feet were in Greek slippers; her figure was
prettily set off with an open jacket, laced with buttons from the
shoulder to the waist, and her head was enveloped in a figured
handkerchief, folded gracefully in the style of a turban, and brought
under her chin, so as to show suspended a rich metallic fringe. Her face
was full, but marked with childish dimples, and her mouth and eyes, as
beautiful as ever those expressive features were made, had a retiring
seriousness in them, indescribably sweet. She looked as if she had been
born in some scene of Turkish devastation, and had brought her mother’s
heart-ache into the world.
At noon, at the sound of a bell, they marched out, clapping their hands
in time to the instructor’s voice, and seated themselves in order upon
the portico, in front of the school. Here their baskets were given them,
and each one produced her dinner and eat it with the utmost propriety.
It was really a beautiful scene.
It is to be remembered that here are educated a class of human beings
who were else deprived of instruction by the universal custom of their
country. The females of Greece are suffered to grow up in ignorance. One
who can read and write is rarely found. The school has commenced
fortunately at the most favourable moment. The government was in process
of change, and an innovation was unnoticed in the confusion that at a
later period might have been opposed by the prejudices of custom. The
King and the President of the Regency, Count Armansperg, visited the
school frequently during their stay in Athens, and expressed their
thanks to Mrs. Hill warmly. The Countess Armansperg called repeatedly to
have the pleasure of sitting in the school-room for an hour. His
Majesty, indeed, could hardly find a more useful subject in his realm.
Mrs. Hill, with her own personal efforts, has taught _more than one
hundred children to read the Bible_! How few of us can write against our
names an equal offset to the claims of human duty?
Circumstances made me acquainted with one or two wealthy persons
residing in Athens, and I received from them a strong impression of Mr.
Hill’s usefulness and high standing. His house is the hospitable resort
of every stranger of intelligence and respectability.
Mr. King and Mr. Robinson, missionaries of the Foreign Board, are absent
at Psera. Their families are here.
I passed my last evening among the magnificent ruins on the banks of the
Ilissus. The next day was occupied in returning visits to the families
who had been polite to us, and, with a farewell of unusual regret to our
estimable missionary friends, we started on horseback to return by a
gloomy sunset to the Piræus. I am looking more for the amusing than the
useful in my rambles about the world, and I confess I should not have
gone far out of my way to visit a missionary station anywhere. But
chance has thrown this of Athens across my path, and I record it as a
moral spectacle to which no thinking person could be indifferent. I
freely say I never have met with an equal number of my fellow-creatures,
who seemed to me so indisputably and purely useful. The most cavilling
mind must applaud their devoted sense of duty, bearing up against exile
from country and friends, privations, trial of patience, and the many,
many ills inevitable to such an errand in a foreign land, while even the
coldest politician would find in their efforts the best promise for an
enlightened renovation of Greece.
Long after the twilight thickened immediately about us, the lofty
Acropolis stood up, bathed in a glow of light from the lingering sunset.
I turned back to gaze upon it with an enthusiasm I had thought laid on
the shelf with my half-forgotten classics. The intrinsic beauty of the
ruins of Greece, the loneliness of their situation, and the divine
climate in which, to use Byron’s expression, they are “buried,” invest
them with an interest which surrounds no other antiquities in the world,
I rode on, repeating to myself Milton’s beautiful description:—
“Look! on the Ægæan a city stands
Built nobly; pure the air and light the soil:
Athens—the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence; native to famous wits,
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess
City or suburban, studious walks or shades.
See, there the olive groves of Academe,
Plato’s retirement, where the attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound
Of bees’ industrious murmurs, oft invites
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls
His whispering stream; within the walls there view
The schools of ancient sages, his who bred
Great Alexander to subdue the world!”
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