“Rocky brow
Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis.”
It is a bare, bold precipice, a little back from the sea, and commands
an entire view of the strait. Here sat Xerxes, “on his throne of
gold,[11] with many secretaries about him to write down the particulars
of the action.” The Athenians owed their victory to the wisdom of
Themistocles, who managed to draw the Persians into the strait (scarce a
cannon shot across just here), where only a small part of their immense
fleet could act at one time. The wind, as the wily Greek had foreseen,
rose at the same time, and rendered the lofty-built Persian ships
unmanageable; while the Athenian galleys, cut low to the water, were
easily brought into action in the most advantageous position. It is
impossible to look upon this beautiful and lovely spot and imagine the
stirring picture it presented. The wild sea-bird knows no lonelier
place. Yet on that rock once sat the son of Darius, with his royal
purple floating to the wind, and, below him, within these rocky limits,
lay “one thousand two hundred ships-of-war, and two thousand
transports,” while behind him on the shores of the Piræus, were encamped
“seven hundred thousand foot, and four hundred thousand
horse,”—“amounting,” says Potter, in his notes, “with the retinue of
women and servants that attended the Asiatic princes in their military
expeditions, to more than five millions.” How like a king must the royal
Persian have felt, when
“He counted them at break of day!”
With an hour or two of fast pulling, we opened into the broad bay of
Eleusis. The first Sabbath after the creation could not have been more
absolutely silent. Megara was away on the left, Eleusis before us at the
distance of four or five miles, and the broad plains where agriculture
was first taught by Triptolemus, the poetical home of Ceres, lay an
utter desert in the sunshine. Behind us, between the mountains,
descended the _Sacra Via_, by which the procession came to Athens to
celebrate the “Eleusinian mysteries”—a road of five or six miles,
lined, in the time of Pericles; with temples and tombs. I could half
fancy the scene, as it was presented to the eyes of the invading
Macedonians—when the procession of priests and virgins, accompanied by
the whole population of Athens, wound down into the plain, guarded by
the shining spears of the army of Alcibiades. It is still doubtful, I
believe, whether these imposing ceremonies were the pure observances of
a lofty and sincere superstition, or the orgies of licentious
saturnalia.
We landed at Eleusis, and were immediately surrounded by a crowd of
people, as simple and curious in their manners, and resembling somewhat
in their dress and complexion, the Indians of our country. The ruins of
a great city lay about us, and their huts were built promiscuously among
them. Magnificent fragments of columns and blocks of marble interrupted
the path through the village, and between two of the houses lay, half
buried, a gigantic medallion of Pentelic marble, representing, in
alto-rilievo, the body and head of a warrior in full armour. A hundred
men would move it with difficulty. Commodore Patterson attempted it six
years ago, in the “Constitution,” but his launch was found unequal to
its weight.
The people here gathered more closely round the ladies of our party,
examining their dress with childish curiosity. They were doubtless the
first females ever seen at Eleusis in European costume. One of the
ladies happening to pull off her glove, there was a general cry of
astonishment. The brown kid had clearly been taken as the colour of the
hand. Some curiosity was then shown to see their faces, which were
covered with thick green veils, as a protection against the sun. The
sight of their complexion (in any country remarkable for a dazzling
whiteness) completed the astonishment of these children of Ceres.
We, on our part, were scarcely less amused by their costumes in turn.
Over the petticoat was worn a loose jacket of white cloth reaching to
the knee, and open in front—its edges and sleeves wrought very
tastefully with red cord. The head-dress was composed entirely of
_money_. A fillet of gold sequins was first put, _à la feronière_,
around the forehead, and a close cap, with a throat-piece like the
gorget of a helmet, fitted the skull exactly, stitched with coins of all
values, folded over each other according to their sizes, like scales.
The hair was then braided and fell down the back, loaded also with
money. Of the fifty or sixty women we saw, I should think one half had
money on her head to the amount of from one to two hundred dollars. They
suffered us to examine them with perfect good-humour. The greater
proportion of pieces were _paras_, a small and thin Turkish coin of very
small value. Among the larger pieces were dollars of all nations,
five-franc pieces, Sicilian piastres, Tuscan colonati, Venetian
swansicas, &c. &c. I doubted much whether they were not the collection
of some piratical caique. There is no possibility of either spending or
getting money within many miles of Eleusis, and it seemed to be looked
upon as an ornament which they had come too lightly by to know its use.
We walked over the foundations of several large temples with the remains
of their splendour lying unvalued about them, and at a mile from the
village came to the “well of Proserpine,” whence, say the poets, the
ravished daughter of Ceres emerged from the infernal regions on her
visit to her mother. The modern Eleusinians know it only as a well of
the purest water.
On our return, we stopped at the southern point of the Piræus, to see
the tomb of Themistocles. We were directed to it by thirteen or fourteen
frusta of enormous columns, which once formed the monument to his
memory. They buried him close to the edge of the sea, opposite Salamis.
The continual beat of the waves for so many hundred years has worn away
the promontory, and his sarcophagus, which was laid in a grave cut in
the solid rock, is now filled by every swell from the Ægæan. The old
hero was brought back from his exile to be gloriously buried. He could
not lie better for the repose of his spirit (if it returned with his
bones from Argos). The sea on which he beat the haughty Persians with
his handful of galleys, sends every wave to his feet. The hollows in the
rock around his grave are full of snowy salt left by the evaporation.
You might scrape up a bushel within six feet of him. It seems a natural
tribute to his memory.[12]
On a high and lonely rock, stretching out into the midst of the sea,
stands a solitary temple. As far as the eye can reach, along the coast
of Attica and to the distant isles, there is no sign of human
habitation. There it stands, lifted into the blue sky of Greece, like
the unreal “fabric of a vision.”
Cape Colonna and its “temple of Minerva,” were familiar to my memory,
but my imagination had pictured nothing half so beautiful. As we
approached it from the sea, it seemed so strangely out of place, even
for a ruin, so far removed from what had ever been the haunt of man,
that I scarce credited my eyes. We could soon count them—thirteen
columns of sparkling marble, glittering in the sun. The sea-air keeps
them spotlessly white, and, till you approach them nearly, they have the
appearance of a structure, from its freshness, still in the sculptor’s
hands.
The boat was lowered, and the ship lay off-and-on while we landed near
the rocks where Falconer was shipwrecked, and mounted to the Temple. The
summit of the promontory is strewn with the remains of the fallen
columns, and their smooth surfaces are thickly inscribed with the names
of travellers. Among others, I noticed Byron’s and Hobhouse’s, and that
of the agreeable author of “A Year in Spain.” Byron, by the way,
mentions having narrowly escaped robbery here, by a band of Mainote
pirates. He was surprised swimming off the point, by an English vessel
containing some ladies of his acquaintance. He concludes the “Isles of
Greece” beautifully with an allusion to it by its ancient name:—
“Place me on Sunium’s marble steep,” &c.
The view from the summit is one of the finest in all Greece. The isle
where Plato was sold as a slave, and where Aristides and Demosthenes
passed their days in exile, stretches along the west; the wide Ægæan,
sprinkled with here and there a solitary rock, herbless, but beautiful
in its veil of mist, spreads away from its feet to the southern line of
the horizon, and crossing each other almost imperceptibly on the light
winds of this summer sea, the red-sailed caique of Greece, the
merchantmen from the Dardanelles, and the heavy men-of-war of England
and France, cruising wherever the wind blows fairest, are seen like
broad-winged and solitary birds, lying low with spread pinions upon the
waters. The place touched me. I shall remember it with an affection.
There is a small island close to Sunium, which was fortified by one of
the heroes of the Iliad on his return from Troy—why, heaven only knows.
It was here, too, that Phrontes, the pilot of Menelaus, died and was
buried.
We returned on board after an absence of two hours from the ship, and
are steering now straight for the Dardanelles. The plains of Marathon
are but a few hours north of our course, and I pass them unwillingly;
but what is there one would not see? Greece lies behind, and I have
realised one of my dearest dreams in rambling over its ruins. Travel is
an appetite that “grows by what it feeds on.”
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[11] So says Phanodemus, quoted by Plutarch. The commentators upon the
tragedy of Æschylus on this subject, say it was a “silver chair,” and
that it “was afterwards placed in the Temple of Minerva, at Athens, with
the golden-hilted cimeter of Mardonius.”
[12] Langhorne says in his note on Plutarch, “There is the genuine
_attic salt_ in most of the retorts and observations of themselves. His
wit seems to have been equal to his military and political capacity.”
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