What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it that gives to you
a sensation of being gently released from the cares of life and the
boredom of modern civilization, with its often unmeaning complications,
its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self-satisfactions? This is not
the tremendous, the spectacular release of the desert, an almost
savage tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw is savage;
scarcely anything is spectacular. But, oh, the bright simplicity of
the life and the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an
early world. One looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like
the Turkish Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are
small, exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as though
it had been deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over
the slopes with a lightness almost of foam cresting a wave. Their
color is quite lovely. The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well,
the little pine-trees of Greece are the color of happiness. You smile
involuntarily when you see them. And when, descending among them, you
are greeted by the shining of the brilliant-blue sea, which stretches
along the edge of the plain of Marathon, you know radiance purged of
fierceness.
The road winds down among the pines till, at right angles to it,
appears another road, or rough track just wide enough for a carriage.
This leads to a large mound which bars the way. Upon this mound a
habitation was perched. It was raised high above the ground upon a sort
of tripod of poles. It had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor
of brushwood and maize. A ladder gave access to it, and from it there
was a wide outlook over the whole crescent-shaped plain of Marathon.
This dwelling belonged to a guardian of the vineyards, and the mound is
the tomb of those who died in the great battle.
I sat for a long time on this strange tomb, in the shadow of the
rustic watch-house, and looked out over the plain. It is quite flat,
and is now cultivated, though there are some bare tracts of unfruitful
ground. In all directions I saw straggling vines. Not far away was
one low, red-tiled house belonging to a peasant, whose three small,
dirty, and unhealthy-looking children presently approached, and gazed
at me from below. In the distance a man on a white horse rode slowly
toward the pine-woods, and to my left I saw a group of women bending
mysteriously to accomplish some task unknown to me. No other figures
could I see between me and the bright-blue waters that once bore up
the fleet of Persia. Behind me were stony and not very high hills,
ending in the slopes down which Miltiades made his soldiers advance
“at a running pace.” One hundred and ninety-two brave men gone to dust
beneath me; instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch-house
of brushwood and wheat and maize, silence the only epitaph. The
mound, of hard, sun-baked earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a
few rusty-looking thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But about it grew
aloes, and the wild oleander, with its bright-pink flowers, and near
by were many great fig-trees. A river intersects the plain, and its
course is marked by sedges and tall reeds. Where the land is bare, it
takes a tawny-yellow hue. Some clustering low houses far off under the
hills form the Albanian village of Marathon. Just twenty-two miles
from Athens, this place of an ancient glory, this tomb of men who, I
suppose, will not be forgotten so long as the Hellenic kingdom lasts,
seems very far away, hidden from the world between woods and waters,
solitary, but not sad. Beyond the plain and the sea are ranges of
mountains and the island of Eubœa.
A figure slowly approaches. It is the guardian of the vineyards,
coming back to his watch-house above the grave of his countrymen,
smiling, with a cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls
out “Addio!” Then he mounts his ladder carefully and withdraws to his
easy work. How strange to be a watcher of vineyards upon the tumulus of
Marathon!
If you care at all for life in the open, if you have the love of
camping in your blood, Greece will call to you at every moment to throw
off the dullness of houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be
happy. Yet I suppose the season for all such joys was over when I was
in Greece, for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure
in the surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large
town, when the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of
friends making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or men
dreaming idly in nooks that might have made old Omar’s delight, shaded,
and sung to by a stream. In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in
the country, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, goatherds,
Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking generally, “sons of the soil.”
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ÆGINA