EPIDAURUS
[Illustration]
We were awakened in the morning by an unaccustomed sound,—a subdued,
rapid, rhythmic cadence coming up from the esplanade below, accompanied
by the monotonous undertone of a voice saying something in time with the
shuffle of marching feet, the whole punctuated now and then by a word of
command and less frequently by the unmistakable clang of arms. The
soldiers from the fortress were having their morning drill. The words of
command sounded strangely natural, although presumably in Greek,
doubtless because military men the world over fall into the habit of
uttering “commands of execution” in a sort of unintelligible grunt. The
counting of “fours” sounded natural, too, despite the more marked
Hellenism of the numbers. So far from being a disturbance, the muffled
tread of the troops was rather soporific, which is fortunate, because I
have been in Nauplia on several occasions, and this early drill appears
to be the regular thing under the windows of the Hôtel des Étrangers.
The fine open space along the water front makes a tempting
parade-ground, and at other hours an attractive place for general
assemblage, especially at evening, when the people of Nauplia are to be
seen lounging along the wharves or drinking their coffee in the shade
under the white line of buildings. The quay curves for a long distance
around the bay, and alongside it are moored many of those curious hollow
schooners that do the coastwise carrying in Greece. Nauplia appears
still to be something of a port, although infinitely smaller and less
busy than either the Piræus or Patras. Her name, of course, is redolent
of the sea. The beauty of her situation has often reminded visitors of
Naples, but it is only a faint resemblance to the Italian city. In size
she is little indeed. Scenically, however, her prospects are
magnificent, with their inclusion of a panorama of distant and imposing
peaks towering far away across the inner bay, so admirably sheltered
from the outer seas by the massive promontory, on the inner shelf of
which the city stands. The town is forced to be narrow because of the
little space between the water and the great cliff rising precipitously
behind. There is room for little more than three parallel streets, and
in consequence Nauplia is forced to make up in length what she lacks in
breadth, and strings along eastward in a dwindling line of buildings to
the point where the marshy shore curves around toward Tiryns, or loses
herself in the barren country that lies in the gray valleys that lead
inland to Epidaurus.
From the windows of the hotel the most conspicuous object in the middle
distance was a picturesque islet in the midst of the bay, almost
entirely covered by a yellow fort of diminutive size and Venetian
appearance—the home of an interesting functionary, though a gruesome
one; to wit, the national executioner. For Nauplia at the present day is
above all else the Sing-Sing of Hellas,—the site of the national prison,
where are confined the principal criminals of the kingdom, and more
especially those who are under sentence of death. The medieval
fortifications on the summit behind the town have been converted to the
base uses of a jail, and are locally known as the Palamide. We did not
make the ascent to the prison, although it cannot be a hard climb, but
contented ourselves with purchasing the small wares that are vended by
street dealers in the lower town,—strings of “conversation beads,” odd
knives, and such like things, which you are assured were made by
“brigands” confined in the prison above. Somehow a string of beads made
by a Greek “brigand” seems a possession to be coveted.
“M. de Nauplia,” if that is the proper way of referring to the headsman,
is a criminal himself. He is generally, and probably always, one who has
been convicted of murder, but who has accepted the post of executioner
as the price of escaping the extreme penalty of the law. It is no small
price to pay, for while it saves the neck of the victim it means virtual
exile during the term of the service, and aversion of all good people
forever. We were told that the executioner at the time was a man who had
indulged in a perfect carnival of homicide—so much so that in almost any
other country he would have been deemed violently and irreclaimably
insane and would have escaped death by confinement in an asylum. But not
so he. Instead he was sentenced to a richly deserved beheading by the
guillotine, and the penalty was only commuted by his agreement to assume
the unwelcome task of dispatching others of his kind—an office carrying
with it virtual solitary imprisonment for a term variously stated as
from five to eight years, and coupled with lasting odium. For all those
years he must live on the executioner’s island, unattended save by the
corporal’s guard of soldiers from the fort, which guard is changed every
day or two, lest the men be contaminated or corrupted into conniving at
the prisoner’s escape. Others told us that the term of his sanguinary
employ was as long as twenty-five years, but this was far greater than
the average story set as his limit. On liberation, it is said to be the
ordinary practice for these unhappy men to go abroad and seek spots
where their condition is unknown. On days when death sentences are to be
executed the headsman is conveyed with solemn military pomp to the
Palamide prison above the city, and there in the prison yard the
guillotine is found set up and waiting for the hand that releases its
death-dealing knife. Whether or not the executioner is paid a stated
pittance in any event, or whether, as we were told by some, he was paid
so much “per head,” we never found out. Meantime the executioner’s
island undeniably proves one of the features of Nauplia, quaint to see,
and shrouded with a sort of awesome mystery.
The narrow streets of Nauplia furnished diversion for a short time. They
proved to be fairly clean, and the morning hours revealed a picturesque
array of barbaric colored blankets and rugs hung out of the upper
balconies to air. In one street a dense throng about an open door drew
attention to the morning session of the municipal court. The men roaming
the streets were mainly in European dress, although here and there a
peasant from the suburbs displayed his quaint capote and pomponed shoes.
It was one of these native-garbed gentry who approached us with a grin
and stated in excellent English, that sorted strangely with his Hellenic
clothes, that he was once employed in an electric light plant in
Cincinnati. Did he like it? Oh, yes! In fact, he was quite ready to go
back there, where pay was better than in Nauplia. And with an expressive
shrug and comprehensive gesture that took in the whole broad sweep of
the ancient kingdom of the Atreidai, he added, “Argos is broke; no
good!” One other such deserves mention, perhaps; one who broke in on a
reverential reverie one day, as we were contemplating a Greek dance in a
classic neighborhood, with some English that savored of the Bowery
brand, informing us that he had been in America and had traveled all
over that land of plenty in the peregrinations of Barnum’s circus,
adding as a most convincing passport to our friendship, "I was wit' old
man Barnum w'en he died." Greeks who speak English are plentiful in the
Peloponnesus, and even those who make no other pretensions to knowledge
of the tongue are proud of being able to say “all right” in response to
labored efforts at pidgin Greek.
[Illustration: WOMAN SPINNING ON THE ROAD TO EPIDAURUS]
It did not take long to exhaust the interest of the city of Nauplia
itself, including a survey of the massive walls that survive from the
Middle Ages. And it was fortunate, too, because we had planned to spend
the day at Epidaurus, which lies eighteen miles or so away, and was to
be reached only by a long and arduous ride in a carriage—the same highly
respectable old landau in which we had ridden the length of Agamemnon’s
kingdom the day before. Owing to the grade and the considerable solidity
of our party a third horse was in some miraculous way attached by ropes
to the carriage, the lunch was loaded in the hood forward, and we
rattled away through the narrow streets toward the open country east of
the town—a country that we soon discovered to be made up of narrow
valleys winding among gray and treeless hills, whose height increased
steadily as the highway wound along. It was a good highway—the distances
being marked in “stadia,” as the Greek classically terms his kilometres,
and the stadium posts constantly reminding us that this was an “Odos
Ethniké,” or national road. But we missed sadly the large trees that are
to be seen in the close neighborhood of the city as we jogged out on the
dusty road in the heat of the increasing April day.
The grade, while not steep, was mainly upward through the long valleys,
making the journey a matter of more than three hours under the most
favorable of conditions; and the general sameness of the scenery made it
a rather monotonous drive. Of human habitation there was almost none,
for although here and there one might find a vineyard, the greater part
of the adjacent land is little more than rocky pasture. It soon
developed, however, that the modern Greek shepherd is not afraid to play
his pipes at noonday through any fear of exciting the wrath or jealousy
of Pan, as was once the case; for from the mountain-sides and from under
the scanty shade of isolated olive trees we kept hearing the plaintive
wailing of the pipes, faint and far away, where some tender of the
flocks was beguiling the time in music. This distant piping is
indescribable. The tone is hardly to be called shrill, for it is so only
in the sense that its pitch is high like the ordinary human whistling;
in quality it is a soft note, apparently following no particular tune
but wavering up and down, and generally ending in a minor wail that soon
grows pleasant to hear. Besides, it recalls the idyls of Theocritus, and
the pastorals and bucolics take on a new meaning to anybody who has
heard the music of the shepherd lads of Greece. Nothing would do but we
must buy pipes and learn to play upon them; so a zealous inquiry was
instituted among the wayfaring men we met, with a view to securing the
same. It was not on this day, however, but on the next that we finally
succeeded in buying what certainly looked like pipes, but which turned
out to be delusions and snares so far as music was concerned. They were
straight wooden tubes, in which holes had been burned out at regular
intervals to form “stops” for varying the tone. No reed was inserted in
them, and if they were to be played upon at all it must be by reason of
a most accomplished “lip.” We derived considerable amusement from them,
however, by attempting to reproduce on them the mellifluous whistling of
the natives; but the nearest approach to awakening any sound at all
which any of our party achieved was so lugubriously melancholy that he
was solemnly enjoined and commanded never to try it again, on pain of
being turned over to “M. de Nauplia” as the only fitting punishment.
Later we found that the flute-like notes that we heard floating down
over the vales from invisible shepherds came from a very different sort
of wind instrument—a reed pipe of bamboo not unlike the American boy’s
willow whistle, with six or seven stops bored out of the tube.
The wayfarers were decidedly the most interesting sights on the
Epidaurus road. Several stadia out of Nauplia a stalwart man came
striding down a hill from his flocks and took the road to town. He was
dressed in the peasant garb, and across his shoulders he bore a yoke,
from either end of which depended large yellow sacks containing freshly
made cheese, the moisture draining through the meshes of the cloth as he
walked along to market. These cheeses we had met with in the little
markets at Athens and found not unpleasant, once one grows accustomed to
the goat’s milk flavor and the “freshness;” although it is probable that
a taste for Greek cheese, like that for the resinated wine, is an
acquired one.
Groups of shepherds were encountered now and then, especially at the few
points along the way where buildings and shade were to be found. They
were all picturesque in their country dress, but more especially the
women, who spin flax as they walk and who probably ply a trade as old as
Hellenic civilization itself in about the same general way that their
most remote ancestors plied it. These little knots of peasants readily
enough posed for the camera, and were contented with a penny apiece for
drink-money. Not the least curious feature of these peasant herdsmen was
the type of crook carried—not the large, curved crook that the ordinary
preconceived ideal pictures, but straight sticks with a queer little
narrow quirk in the end, with which the shepherd catches the agile and
elusive goat or lamb by the hind leg and thus holds it until he is able
to seize the animal in some more suitable part. These herdsmen proved
hospitable folk, ready enough with offers of milk fresh from the herd,
which is esteemed a delicacy by them, whatever it might have seemed to
our uneducated palates.
[Illustration: EPIDAURIAN SHEPHERDS]
Perhaps halfway out to Epidaurus one passes another remnant of the most
remote time—a lofty fortification on a deserted hill. It is of polygonal
masonry—that is, of angular stones fitted together without mortar,
instead of being squared after the manner of the Cyclopes. Hard by,
spanning a ravine which has been worn by centuries of winter torrents,
there was a Cyclopean bridge, made of huge rocks so arranged as to form
an enduring arch, and on this once ran no doubt the great highway from
Epidaurus to the plain of Argos.
It was long after the noontide hour when the gray theatre of Epidaurus,
a mere splash of stone in the distant side of a green hill, came in
sight, lying a mile or so away across a level field, in which lay
scattered the remnants of what was once the most celebrated hospital in
the world. For Epidaurus boasted herself to be the birthplace of
Æsculapius,—or, as we are on Greek soil, Asklepios,—and held his memory
in deep reverence forever after by erecting on the site a vast
establishment such as to-day we might call a “sanitarium.” After the
heat and dust of the ride it was pleasant to stretch out in the shade of
the scanty local trees, on the fragrant grass of the rising ground near
the theatre, and look back down the long valley, with its distant blue
mountains framed in a vista of massive gray hills. The nearer ones were
impressive in their height, but absolutely denuded of vegetation, like
the hills around Attica; and it was these mountains that formed the sole
scenery for the background of plays produced in the great theatre close
by. The theatre, of course, is the great and central attraction at
Epidaurus to-day, for it is in splendid preservation while all else is a
confusing mass of flat ruins. No ancient theatre is better preserved, or
can surpass this one for general grace of lines or perfection of
acoustic properties. Many were doubtless larger, but among all the old
Greek theatres Epidaurus best preserves to the modern eye the playhouse
of the ancients, circular orchestra and all. The acoustics anybody may
test easily enough. We disposed ourselves over the theatre in various
positions, high and low, along the half-a-hundred tiers of seats, and
listened to an oration dealing with the points of interest in the
theatre’s construction delivered in a very ordinary tone, from the
centre of the orchestra, but audible in the remotest tier.
The circle of the orchestra is not paved, as had been the case with the
theatres seen at Athens, but is a green lawn, in the centre of which a
stone dot reveals the site of the ancient altar. It was stated that the
circle is not actually as perfect as it looks, being shorter in one set
of radii by something like two feet. But to all appearance it is
absolutely round, and is easily the most beautiful type of the circular
orchestra in existence to-day, if indeed it is not the only perfect one.
The immense amphitheatre surrounding it was evidently largely a natural
one, which a little artificial stonework easily made complete; and it is
so perfect to-day that a very little labor would make it entirely
possible to give a play there now before a vast audience. Some such plan
was actually talked of a few years ago, but abandoned,—no doubt, because
of the apparent difficulty of getting any very considerable company of
auditors to the spot, or of housing them while there. It would be
necessary, also, to rebuild the proskenion, the foundations of which are
still to be seen behind the orchestra, and one may tremble to think of
what might happen in the process should the advocates of the stage
theory and their opponents fail to agree better than they have hitherto
done.
From the inspection of the theatre and the enjoyment of the view across
the plain to the rugged hills our dragoman called us to lunch, which was
spread in a little rustic pergola below. He had thoughtfully provided
fresh mullets, caught that morning off the Nauplia quay, and had cooked
them in the little house occupied by the local _custode_. Hunger,
however, was far less a matter of concern than thirst. We had been
warned not to drink of the waters of the sacred well of Asklepios in the
field below, and as there was no spring vouched for with that certitude
that had attended the waters of Castalia, we were thrown back, as usual,
on the bottled product of the island of Andros—a water which is not only
intrinsically pure and excellent, but well worth the price of admission
from the quaint English on its label. In rendering their panegyric on
the springs of Andros into the English tongue, the translators have
declared that it “is the equal of its superior mineral waters of
Europe.”
The sacred well of the god, however, proved later in the day that it had
not lost all its virtues even under the assaults of the modern germ
theory; for while we were wandering through the maze of ruins in the
strong heat of the early afternoon one of our company was decidedly
inconvenienced by an ordinary "nose-bleed"—which prompt applications of
the water, drawn up in an incongruous tin pail, instantly stopped. And
thus did we add what is probably the latest cure, and the only one for
some centuries, worked by the once celebrated institution patronized by
the native divinity. It is related that the god was born on the hillside
just east of the meadow, but this story is sadly in conflict with other
traditions. It seems that Asklepios was not originally a divinity, but a
mere human, as he seems to be in the Homeric poems. His deification came
later, as not infrequently happened in ancient times, and with it came a
network of legends ascribing a godlike paternity to him and assigning no
less a sire than Apollo. Indeed, it is stated by some authorities that
the worship of Asklepios did not originate in Epidaurus at all, but in
Thessaly; and that the cult was a transplanted one in its chief site in
the Peloponnesus, brought there by Thessalian adventurers.
[Illustration: THEATRE AT EPIDAURUS]
All over the meadow below the great theatre are scattered the remains of
the ancient establishment. The ceremony of healing at Epidaurus seems to
have been in large part a faith-cure arrangement, although not entirely
so; for there is reason to believe that, as at Delphi, there was more or
less natural common sense employed in the miracle-working, and that the
priests of the healing art actually acquired not a little primitive
skill in medicine. It was a skill, however, which was attended by more
or less mummery and circumstance, useful for impressing the mind of the
patient; but this is not even to-day entirely absent from the practice
of medicine with its “placebos” and “therapeutic suggestion” elements.
The custom of sending the patient to rest in a loggia with others, where
he might expect a nocturnal visitation of the god himself, has been
referred to in these pages before, and survives even to-day in the
island of Tenos at the eve of the Annunciation. The tales of marvelous
cures at Epidaurus were doubtless as common and as well authenticated as
the similar modern stories at Lourdes and Ste. Anne de Beaupré.
In addition to the actual apartments devoted to the sleeping patients,
which were but a small part of the sanitarium’s equipment, there was the
inevitable great temple of the god himself,—a large gymnasium suggestive
of the faith the doctors placed in bodily exercise as a remedy, and a
large building said to be the first example of a hospital ward, beside
numerous incidental buildings devoted to lodgment. Satirical
commentators have called attention to the presence of shrines to the
honor of Aphrodite and Dionysus as bearing enduring witness to the part
that devotion to those divinities seems to have been thought to bear in
afflicting the human race. The presence of the magnificent theatre and
the existence of a commodious stadium testify that life at Epidaurus was
not without its diversions to relieve the tedium of the medical
treatment. And in its day it must have been a large and beautiful
agglomeration of buildings. To-day it is as much of a maze as the ruins
at Delphi or at Olympia. The non-archæological visitor will probably
find his greatest interest in the theatre and in the curious circular
"tholos"—a remarkable building, the purpose of which is not clear, made
of a number of concentric rings of stone which once bore colonnades. It
stands in the midst of the great precinct, and in its ruined state it
resembles nothing so much as the once celebrated “pigs-in-clover”
puzzle. In the little museum on the knoll above, a very successful
attempt has been made to give an idea of this beautiful temple by a
partial restoration. Being indoors, it can give no idea either of the
diameter or height of the original; but the inclusion of fragments of
architrave and columns serve to convey an impression of the general
beauty of the structure, as we had seen to be the case with similar
fractional restorations at Delphi. The extensive ruins in the precinct
itself do not lend themselves to non-technical description. They are
almost entirely flat, and the ground plans serve to identify most of the
buildings, without giving any very good idea of their appearance when
complete. Pavements still remain intact in some of the rooms, and altar
bases and exedral seats lie all about in apparent confusion.
Nevertheless the discoveries have been plotted and identified with
practical completeness, and it is easy enough with the aid of the plans
to pass through the precinct and get a very good idea of the manifold
buildings which once went to make up what must have been a populous and
attractive resort for the sick. Whatever may be thought of the religious
aspects of the worship of Asklepios, it is evident that the regimen
prescribed by the cult at Epidaurus, with its regard for pure mountain
air and healthful bodily exercise, not to mention welcome diversion and
amusement for the mind, was furthered by ample facilities in the way of
equipment of this world-famous hospital.
When we were there the Greek School of Archæology was engaged in digging
near the great temple of the god, the foundations of which have now been
completely explored to a considerable depth, and it was interesting to
see the primitive way in which the excavation was being carried on. Men
with curiously shaped picks and shovels were loosening the earth and
tossing it into baskets of wicker stuff, which in turn were borne on the
heads of women to a distance and there dumped. It was slow work, and
apparently nothing very exciting was discovered. Certainly nothing was
unearthed while we were watching this laborious toil.
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