[Cover image]
RAMBLES IN GREECE
[Illustration: The Acropolis, Athens]
RAMBLES AND STUDIES
IN
GREECE
BY
J. P. MAHAFFY
KNIGHT OF THE ORDER OF THE SAVIOUR;
AUTHOR OF “SOCIAL LIFE IN GREECE;” “A HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE;”
“GREEK LIFE AND THOUGHT FROM THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER;”
“THE GREEK WORLD UNDER ROMAN SWAY,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
PHILADELPHIA
HENRY T. COATES & CO.
1900
HUNC LIBRUM
*Edmundo Wyatt Edgell*
OB INSIGNEM
INTER CASTRA ITINERA OTIA NEGOTIA LITTERARUM AMOREM
OLIM DEDICATUM
NUNC CARISSIMI AMICI MEMORIAE
CONSECRAT AUCTOR
PREFACE.
Few men there are who having once visited Greece do not contrive to visit
it again. And yet when the returned traveller meets the ordinary friend
who asks him where he has been, the next remark is generally, “Dear me!
have you not been there before? How is it you are so fond of going to
Greece?” There are even people who imagine a trip to America far more
interesting, and who at all events look upon a trip to Spain as the same
kind of thing—southern climate, bad food, dirty inns, and general
discomfort, odious to bear, though pleasant to describe afterward in a
comfortable English home.
This is a very ignorant way of looking at the matter, for excepting
Southern Italy, there is no country which can compare with Greece in
beauty and interest to the intelligent traveller. It is not a land for
creature comforts, though the climate is splendid, and though the hotels
in Athens are as good as those in most European towns. It is not a land
for society, though the society at Athens is excellent, and far easier of
access than that of most European capitals. But if a man is fond of the
large effects of natural scenery, he will find in the Southern Alps and
fiords of Greece a variety and a richness of color which no other part of
Europe affords. If he is fond of the details of natural scenery, flowers,
shrubs, and trees, he will find the wild-flowers and flowering-trees of
Greece more varied than anything he has yet seen. If he desires to study
national character, and peculiar manners and customs, he will find in the
hardy mountaineers of Greece one of the most unreformed societies, hardly
yet affected by the great tide of sameness which is invading all Europe in
dress, fabrics, and usages. And yet, in spite of the folly still talked in
England about brigands, he will find that without troops, or police, or
patrols, or any of those melancholy safeguards which are now so obtrusive
in England and Ireland, life and property are as secure as they ever were
in our most civilized homes. Let him not know a word of history, or of
art, and he will yet be rewarded by all this natural enjoyment; perhaps
also, if he be a politician, he may study the unsatisfactory results of a
constitution made to order, and of a system of free education planted in a
nation of no political training, but of high intelligence.
Need I add that as to Cicero the whole land was one vast shrine of
hallowed memories—_quocunque incedis, historia est_—so to the man of
culture this splendor of associations has only increased with the lapse of
time and the greater appreciation of human perfection. Even were such a
land dead to all further change, and a mere record in its ruins of the
past, I know not that any man of reflection could satisfy himself with
contemplating it. Were he to revisit the Parthenon, as it stands, every
year of his life, it would always be fresh, it would always be
astonishing. But Greece is a growing country, both in its youth and in its
age. The rapid development of the nation is altering the face of the
country, establishing new roads and better communications, improving
knowledge among the people, and making many places accessible which were
before beyond the reach of brief holiday visits. The insecurity which
haunted the Turkish frontier has been pushed back to the north; new Alps
and new monasteries are brought within the range of Greece. And this is
nothing to what has been done in recovering the past. Every year there are
new excavations made, new treasures found, new problems in archæology
raised, old ones solved; and so at every visit there is a whole mass of
new matter for the student who feels he had not yet grasped what was
already there.
The traveller who revisits the country now after a lapse of four or five
years will find at Athens the Schliemann museum set up and in order, where
the unmatched treasures of Mycenæ are now displayed before his astonished
eyes. He will find an Egyptian museum of extraordinary merit—the gift of a
patriotic merchant of Alexandria—in which there are two figures—that of a
queen, in bronze and silver, and that of a slave kneading bread, in
wood—which alone would make the reputation of any collection throughout
Europe. In the Parthenon museum he will find the famous statuette, copied
from Phidias’s Athene, and the recent wonder, archaic statues on which the
brightness of the colors is not more astonishing than the moulding of the
figures.
And these are only the most salient novelties. It is indeed plain that
were not the new city covering the site of the old, discoveries at Athens
might be made perhaps every year, which would reform and enlarge our
knowledge of Greek life and history.
But Athens is rapidly becoming a great and rich city. It already numbers
110,000, without counting the Peiræus; accordingly, except in digging
foundations for new houses, it is not possible to find room for any
serious excavations. House rent is enormously high, and building is so
urgent that the ordinary mason receives eight to ten francs per day. This
rapid increase ought to be followed by an equal increase in the wealth of
the surrounding country, where all the little proprietors ought to turn
their land into market-gardens. I found that either they could not, or (as
I was told) they would not, keep pace with the increased wants of the
city. They are content with a little, and allow the city to be
supplied—badly and at great cost—from Salonica, Syra, Constantinople, and
the islands, while meat comes in tons from America. How different is the
country round Paris and London!
But this is a digression into vulgar matters, when I had merely intended
to inform the reader what intellectual novelties he would find in
revisiting Athens. For nothing is more slavish in modern travel than the
inability the student feels, for want of time in long journeys, or want of
control over his conveyance, to stop and examine something which strikes
him beside his path. And that is the main reason why Oriental—and as yet
Greek—travelling is the best and most instructive of all.
You can stop your pony or mule, you can turn aside from the track which is
called your road, you are not compelled to catch a train or a steamer at a
fixed moment. When roads and rails have been brought into Greece, hundreds
of people will go to see its beauty and its monuments, and will
congratulate themselves that the country is at last accessible. But the
real charm will be gone. There will be no more riding at dawn through
orchards of oranges and lemons, with the rich fruit lying on the ground,
and the nightingales, that will not end their exuberant melody, still
outsinging from the deep-green gloom the sounds of opening day. There will
be no more watching the glowing east cross the silver-gray glitter of dewy
meadows; no more wandering along grassy slopes, where the scarlet
anemones, all drenched with the dews of night, are striving to raise their
drooping heads and open their splendid eyes to meet the rising sun. There
will be no more watching the serpent and the tortoise, the eagle and the
vulture, and all the living things whose ways and habits animate the sunny
solitudes of the south. The Greek people now talk of going to Europe, and
coming from Europe, justly too, for Greece is still, as it always was,
part of the East. But the day is coming when enlightened politicians, like
Mr. Tricoupi, will insist on introducing through all the remotest glens
the civilization of Europe, with all its benefits forsooth, but with all
its shocking ugliness, its stupid hurry, and its slavish uniformity.
I will conclude with a warning to the archæologist, and one which applies
to all amateurs who go to visit excavations, and cannot see what has been
reported by the actual excavators. As no one is able to see what the
evidences of digging are, except the trained man, who knows not only
archæology, but architecture, and who has studied the accumulation of soil
in various places and forms, so the observer who comes to the spot after
some years, and expects to find all the evidences unchanged, commits a
blunder of the gravest kind. As Dr. Dörpfeld, now one of the highest
living authorities on such matters, observed to me, if you went to
Hissarlik expecting to find there clearly marked the various strata of
successive occupations, you would show that you were ignorant of the first
elements of practical knowledge. For in any climate, but especially in
these southern lands, Nature covers up promptly what has been exposed by
man; all sorts of plants spring up along and across the lines which in the
cutting when freshly made were clear and precise. In a few years the whole
place turns back again into a brake, or a grassy slope, and the report of
the actual diggers remains the only evidence till the soil is cut open
again in the same way. I saw myself, at Olympia, important lines
disappearing in this way. Dr. Purgold showed me where the line marking the
embankment of the stadium—it was never surrounded with any stone seats—was
rapidly becoming effaced, and where the plan of the foundations was being
covered with shrubs and grass. The day for visiting and verifying the
Trojan excavations is almost gone by. That of all the excavations will
pass away, if they are not carefully kept clear by some permanent
superintendence; and to expect this of the Greek nation, who know they
have endless more treasures to find in new places, is more than could
reasonably be expected. The proper safeguard is to do what Dr. Schliemann
does, to have with him not only the Greek ephoros or
superintendent—generally a very competent scholar, and sometimes not a
very friendly witness of foreign triumphs—but also a first-rate architect,
whose joint observation will correct any hastiness or misprision, and so
in the mouth of two or more witnesses every word will be confirmed.
In passing on I cannot but remark how strange it is that among the many
rich men in the world who profess an interest in archæology, not one can
be found to take up the work as Dr. Schliemann did, to enrich science with
splendid fields of new evidence, and illustrate art, not only with the
naïve efforts of its infancy, but with forgotten models of perfect and
peerless form.
This New Edition is framed with a view of still satisfying the demand for
the book as a traveller’s handbook, somewhat less didactic than the
official guide-books, somewhat also, I hope, more picturesque. For that
purpose I have added a new chapter on mediæval Greece, as well as many
paragraphs with new information, especially the ride over Mount
Erymanthus, pp. 343, _sqq._ I have corrected many statements which are now
antiquated by recent discoveries, and I have obliterated the traces of
controversy borne by the Second Edition. For the criticisms on the book
are dead, while the book survives. To me it is very pleasant to know that
many visitors to Greece have found it an agreeable companion.
TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN,
_February, 1892_.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION—FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE COAST 1
II. GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS AND ATTICA 30
III. ATHENS—THE MUSEUMS—THE TOMBS 55
IV. THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS 89
V. ATHENS—THE THEATRE OF DIONYSUS—THE AREOPAGUS 122
VI. EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA—COLONUS—THE HARBORS—LAURIUM—SUNIUM 152
VII. EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA—PENTELICUS—MARATHON—DAPHNE—ELEUSIS 184
VIII. FROM ATHENS TO THEBES—THE PASSES OF PARNES AND OF 215
CITHÆRON, ELEUTHERÆ, PLATÆA
IX. THE PLAIN OF ORCHOMENUS, LIVADIA, CHÆRONEA 248
X. ARACHOVA—DELPHI—THE BAY OF KIRRHA 274
XI. ELIS—OLYMPIA AND ITS GAMES—THE VALLEY OF THE 299
ALPHEUS—MOUNT ERYMANTHUS—PATRAS
XII. ARCADIA—ANDRITZENA—BASSÆ—MEGALOPOLIS—TRIPOLITZA 351
XIII. CORINTH—TIRYNS—ARGOS—NAUPLIA—HYDRA—ÆGINA—EPIDAURUS 388
XIV. KYNURIA—SPARTA—MESSENE 435
XV. MYCENÆ AND TIRYNS 456
XVI. MEDIÆVAL GREECE 492
INDEX 531
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Photogravures by A. W. ELSON & CO.
PAGE
THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS _Frontispiece_
ALONG THE COAST FROM THE THRONE OF XERXES 30
THE ERECHTHEUM FROM THE WEST, ATHENS 36
A TOMB FROM THE VIA SACRA, ATHENS 78
PART OF THE WEST FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, ATHENS 110
THEATRE OF DIONYSUS, ATHENS 122
MARS’ HILL, ATHENS 140
THE PEIRÆUS 160
LAURIUM 168
MOUNT LYCABETTUS, ATHENS 188
LOOKING TOWARD THE SEA FROM THE SOROS, MARATHON 198
SALAMIS, FROM ACROSS THE BAY 206
TEMPLE OF MYSTERIES, ELEUSIS 212
A GREEK SHEPHERD, OLYMPIA 274
THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO, DELPHI 284
THE BANKS OF THE KLADEUS 302
STATUE OF NIKÉ, BY PÆONIUS 306
KRONION HILL, OLYMPIA 318
ENTRANCE TO THE STADIUM, OLYMPIA 330
THE VALLEY OF THE ALPHEUS 342
A GREEK PEASANT IN NATIONAL COSTUME 380
TEMPLE OF CORINTH 392
SCENE NEAR CORINTH, THE ACRO-CORINTHUS IN THE 395
DISTANCE
GALLERY AT TIRYNS 406
THE PALAMEDI, NAUPLIA 424
SCULPTURED LION, NAUPLIA 428
LANGADA PASS 446
ARCADIAN GATEWAY, MESSENE 452
THE ARGIVE PLAIN 458
LION GATE, MYCENÆ 472
GREECE.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION—FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE COAST.
A voyage to Greece does not at first sight seem a great undertaking. We
all go to and fro to Italy as we used to go to France. A trip to Rome, or
even to Naples, is now an Easter holiday affair. And is not Greece very
close to Italy on the map? What signifies the narrow sea that divides
them? This is what a man might say who only considered geography, and did
not regard the teaching of history. For the student of history cannot look
upon these two peninsulas without being struck with the fact that they
are, historically speaking, turned back to back; that while the face of
Italy is turned westward, and looks towards France and Spain, and across
to us, the face of Greece looks eastward, towards Asia Minor and towards
Egypt. Every great city in Italy, except Venice, approaches or borders the
Western Sea—Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples. All the older history of
Rome, its development, its glories, lie on the west of the Apennines. When
you cross them you come to what is called the back of Italy; and you feel
that in that flat country, and that straight coast-line, you are separated
from its true beauty and charm.(1) Contrariwise, in Greece, the whole
weight and dignity of its history gravitate towards the eastern coast. All
its great cities—Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Sparta—are on that side.
Their nearest neighbors were the coast cities of Asia Minor and of the
Cyclades, but the western coasts were to them harborless and strange. If
you pass Cape Malea, they said, then forget your home.
So it happens that the coasts of Italy and Greece, which look so near, are
outlying and out-of-the way parts of the countries to which they belong;
and if you want to go straight from real Italy to real Greece, the longest
way is that from Brindisi to Corfu, for you must still journey across
Italy to Brindisi, and from Corfu to Athens. The shortest way is to take
ship at Naples, and to be carried round Italy and round Greece, from the
centres of culture on the west of Italy to the centres of culture (such as
they are) on the east of Greece. But this is no trifling passage. When the
ship has left the coasts of Calabria, and steers into the open sea, you
feel that you have at last left the west of Europe, and are setting sail
for the Eastern Seas. You are, moreover, in an open sea—the furious
Adriatic—in which I have seen storms which would be creditable to the
Atlantic Ocean, and which at times forbid even steam navigation.
I may anticipate for a moment here, and say that even now the face of
Athens is turned, as of old, to the East. Her trade and her communications
are through the Levant. Her chief intercourse is with Constantinople, and
Smyrna, and Syra, and Alexandria.
This curious parallel between ancient and modern geographical attitudes in
Greece is, no doubt, greatly due to the now bygone Turkish rule. In
addition to other contrasts, Mohammedan rule and Eastern jealousy—long
unknown in Western Europe—first jarred upon the traveller when he touched
the coasts of Greece; and this dependency was once really part of a great
Asiatic Empire, where all the interests and communications gravitated
eastward, and away from the Christian and better civilized West. The
revolution which expelled the Turks was unable to root out the ideas which
their subjects had learned; and so, in spite of Greek hatred of the Turk,
his influence still lives through Greece in a thousand ways.
For many hours after the coasts of Calabria had faded into the night, and
even after the snowy dome of Etna was lost to view, our ship steamed
through the open sea, with no land in sight; but we were told that early
in the morning, at the very break of dawn, the coasts of Greece would be
visible. So, while others slept, I started up at half-past three, eager to
get the earliest possible sight of the land which still occupies so large
a place in our thoughts. It was a soft gray morning; the sky was covered
with light, broken clouds; the deck was wet with a passing shower, of
which the last drops were still flying in the air; and before us, some ten
miles away, the coasts and promontories of the Peloponnesus were reaching
southward into the quiet sea. These long serrated ridges did not look
lofty, in spite of their snow-clad peaks, nor did they look inhospitable,
in spite of their rough outline, but were all toned in harmonious color—a
deep purple blue, with here and there, on the far Arcadian peaks, and on
the ridge of Mount Taygetus, patches of pure snow. In contrast to the
large sweeps of the Italian coast, its open seas, its long waves of
mountain, all was here broken, and rugged, and varied. The sea was studded
with rocky islands, and the land indented with deep, narrow bays. I can
never forget the strong and peculiar impression of that first sight of
Greece; nor can I cease to wonder at the strange likeness which rose in my
mind, and which made me think of the bays and rocky coasts of the west and
south-west of Ireland. There was the same cloudy, showery sky, which is so
common there; there was the same serrated outline of hills, the same
richness in promontories, and rocky islands, and land-locked bays. Nowhere
have I seen a light purple color, except in the wilds of Kerry and
Connemara; and though the general height of the Greek mountains, as the
snow in May testified, was far greater than that of the Irish hills, yet
on that morning, and in that light, they looked low and homely, not
displaying their grandeur, or commanding awe and wonder, but rather
attracting the sight by their wonderful grace, and by their variety and
richness of outline and color.
I stood there, I know not how long—without guide or map—telling myself the
name of each mountain and promontory, and so filling out the idle names
and outlines of many books with the fresh reality itself. There was the
west coast of Elis, as far north as the eye could reach—the least
interesting part of the view, as it was of the history, of Greece; then
the richer and more varied outline of Messene, with its bay, thrice famous
at great intervals, and yet for long ages feeding idly on that fame;
Pylos, Sphacteria, Navarino—each a foremost name in Hellenic history.
Above the bay could be seen those rich slopes which the Spartans coveted
of old, and which, as I saw them, were covered with golden corn. The three
headlands which give to the Peloponnesus “its plane-leaf form,”(2) were as
yet lying parallel before us, and their outline confused; but the great
crowd of heights and intersecting chains, which told at once the Alpine
character of the peninsula, called to mind the other remark of the
geographer, in which he calls it the Acropolis of Greece. The words of old
Herodotus, too, rise in the mind with new reality, when he talks of the
poor and stony soil of the country as a “rugged nurse of liberty.”
For the nearer the ship approaches, the more this feature comes out;
increased, no doubt, greatly in later days by depopulation and general
decay, when many arable tracts have lain desolate, but still at all times
necessary, when a large proportion of the country consists of rocky peaks
and precipices, where a goat may graze, but where the eagle builds secure
from the hand of man. The coast, once teeming with traffic, is now lonely
and deserted. A single sail in the large gulf of Koron, and a few
miserable huts, discernible with a telescope, only added to the feeling of
solitude. It was, indeed, “Greece, but living Greece no more.” Even the
pirates, who sheltered in these creeks and mountains, have abandoned this
region, in which there is nothing now to plunder.(3)
But as we crossed the mouth of the gulf, the eye fastened with delight on
distant white houses along the high ground of the eastern side—in other
words, along the mountain slopes which run out into the promontory of
Tainaron; and a telescope soon brought them into distinctness, and gave us
the first opportunity of discussing modern Greek life. We stood off the
coast of Maina—the home of those Mainotes whom Byron has made so famous as
pirates, as heroes, as lovers, as murderers; and even now, when the
stirring days of war and of piracy have passed away, the whole district
retains the aspect of a country in a state of siege or of perpetual
danger. Instead of villages surrounded by peaceful homesteads, each
Mainote house, though standing alone, was walled in, and in the centre was
a high square tower, in which, according to trustworthy travellers, the
Mainote men used to spend their day watching their enemies, while only the
women and children ventured out to till the fields. For these fierce
mountaineers were not only perpetually defying the Turkish power, which
was never able to subdue them thoroughly, but they were all engaged at
home with internecine feuds, of which the origin was often forgotten, but
of which the consequences remained in the form of vengeance due for the
life of a kinsman. When this was exacted on one side, the obligation
changed to the other; and so for generation after generation they spent
their lives in either seeking or avoiding vengeance. This more than
Corsican _vendetta_(4) was, by a sort of mediæval chivalry, prohibited to
the women and children, who were thus in perfect safety, while their
husbands and fathers were in daily and deadly danger.
They are considered the purest in blood of all the Greeks, though it does
not appear that their dialect approaches old Greek nearer than those of
their neighbors; but for beauty of person, and independence of spirit,
they rank first among the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, and most
certainly they must have among them a good deal of the old Messenian
blood. Most of the country is barren, but there are orange woods, which
yield the most delicious fruit—a fruit so large and rich that it makes all
other oranges appear small and tasteless. The country is now perfectly
safe for visitors, and the people extremely hospitable, though the diet is
not very palatable to the northern traveller.
So with talk and anecdote about the Mainotes—for every one was now upon
deck and sight-seeing—we neared the classic headland of Tainaron, almost
the southern point of Europe, once the site of a great temple of
Poseidon—not preserved to us, like its sister monument on Sunium—and once,
too, the entry to the regions of the dead. And, as if to remind us of its
most beautiful legend, the dolphins, which had befriended Arion of old,
and carried him here to land, rose in the calm summer sea, and came
playing round the ship, showing their quaint forms above the water, and
keeping with our course, as it were an escort into the homely seas and
islands of truer Greece. Strangely enough, in many other journeys through
Greek waters, once again only did we see these dolphins; and here as
elsewhere, the old legend, I suppose, based itself upon the fact that
this, of all their wide domain, was the favorite resort of these
creatures, with which the poets of old felt so strong a sympathy.
But, while the dolphins have been occupying our attention, we have cleared
Cape Matapan, and the deep Gulf of Asine and Gythium—in fact, the Gulf of
Sparta is open to our view. We strained our eyes to discover the features
of “hollow Lacedæmon,” and to take in all the outline of this famous bay,
through which so many Spartans had held their course in the days of their
greatness. The site of Sparta is far from the sea, probably twelve or
fifteen miles; but the place is marked for every spectator, throughout all
the Peloponnesus and its coasts, by the jagged top of Mount Taygetus, even
in June covered with snow. Through the forests upon its slopes the young
Spartans would hunt all day with their famous Laconian hounds, and after a
rude supper beguile the evening with stories of their dangers and their
success. But, as might be expected, of the five villages which made up the
famous city, few vestiges remain. The old port of Gythium is still a port;
but here, too, the “wet ways,” and that sea once covered with boats, which
a Greek comic poet has called the “ants of the sea,” have been deserted.
We were a motley company on board—Russians, Greeks, Turks, French,
English; and it was not hard to find pleasant companions and diverting
conversation among them all. I turned to a Turkish gentleman, who spoke
French indifferently. “Is it not,” said I, “a great pity to see this fair
coast so desolate?” “A great pity, indeed,” said he; “but what can you
expect from these Greeks? They are all pirates and robbers; they are all
liars and knaves. Had the Turks been allowed to hold possession of the
country they would have improved it and developed its resources; but since
the Greeks became independent everything has gone to ruin. Roads are
broken up, communications abandoned; the people emigrate and disappear—in
fact, nothing prospers.”
Presently, I got beside a Greek gentleman, from whom I was anxiously
picking up the first necessary phrases and politenesses of modern Greek,
and, by way of amusement, put to him the same question. I got the answer I
expected. “Ah!” said he, “the Turks, the Turks! When I think how these
miscreants have ruined our beautiful country! How could a land thrive or
prosper under such odious tyranny?” I ventured to suggest that the Turks
were now gone five and forty years, and that it was high time to see the
fruits of recovered liberty in the Greeks. No, it was still too soon. The
Turks had cut down all the woods, and so ruined the climate; they had
destroyed the cities, broken up the roads, encouraged the bandits—in fact,
they had left the country in such a state that centuries would not cure
it.
The verdict of Europe is in favor of the Greek gentleman; but it might
have been suggested, had we been so disposed, that the greatest and the
most hopeless of all these sorrows—the utter depopulation of the
country—is not due to either modern Greeks or Turks, nor even to the Slav
hordes of the Middle Ages. It was a calamity which came upon Greece almost
suddenly, immediately after the loss of her independence, and which
historians and physiologists have as yet been only partially able to
explain.(5)
Of this very coast upon which we were then gazing, the geographer Strabo,
about the time of Christ, says, “that of old, Lacedæmon had numbered one
hundred cities; in his day there were but ten remaining.” So, then, the
sum of the crimes of both Greeks and Turks may be diminished by one. But
I, perceiving that each of them would have been extremely indignant at
this historical palliation of the other’s guilt, “kept silence, even from
good words.”
These dialogues beguiled us till we found ourselves, almost suddenly,
facing the promontory of Malea, with the island of Cythera (Cerigo) on our
right. The island is little celebrated in history. The Phœnicians seem, in
very old times, to have had a settlement there for the working of their
purple shell-fishery, for which the coasts of Laconia were celebrated; and
they doubtless founded there the worship of the Sidonian goddess, who was
transformed by the Greeks into Aphrodite (Venus). During the Peloponnesian
War we hear of the Athenians using it as a station for their fleet, when
they were ravaging the adjacent coasts. It was, in fact, used by their
naval power as the same sort of blister (_ἐπιτείχισις_) on Sparta that
Dekelea was when occupied by the Spartans in Attica.
Cape Malea is more famous. It was in olden days the limit of the homely
Greek waters, the bar to all fair weather and regular winds—a place of
storms and wrecks, and the portal to an inhospitable open sea; and we can
well imagine the delight of the adventurous trader who had dared to cross
the Western Seas, to gather silver and lead in the mines of Spain, when he
rounded the dreaded Cape, homeward bound in his heavy-laden ship, and
looked back from the quiet Ægean. The barren and rocky Cape has its new
feature now. On the very extremity there is a little platform, at some
elevation over the water, and only accessible with great difficulty from
the land by a steep goat-path. Here a hermit built himself a tiny hut,
cultivated his little plot of corn, and lived out in the lone seas, with
no society but stray passing ships.(6) When Greece was thickly peopled he
might well have been compelled to seek loneliness here; but now, when in
almost any mountain chain he could find solitude and desolation enough, it
seems as if that poetic instinct which so often guides the ignorant and
unconscious anchorite had sent him to this spot, which combines, in a
strange way, solitude and publicity, and which excites the curiosity, but
forbids the intrusion, of every careless passenger to the East.
So we passed into the Ægean, the real thoroughfare of the Greeks, the
mainstay of their communication—a sea, and yet not a sea, but the frame of
countless headlands and islands, which are ever in view to give confidence
to the sailor in the smallest boat. The most striking feature in our view
was the serrated outline of the mountains of Crete, far away to the S. E.
Though the day was gray and cloudy, the atmosphere was perfectly clear,
and allowed us to see these very distant Alps, on which the snow still lay
in great fields. The chain of Ida brought back to us the old legends of
Minos and his island kingdom, nor could any safer seat of empire be
imagined for a power coming from the south than this great long bar of
mountains, to which half the islands of the Ægean could pass a fire signal
in times of war or piracy.(7) The legends preserved to us of Minos—the
human sacrifices to the Minotaur—the hostility to Theseus—the
identification of Ariadne with the legends of Bacchus, so eastern and
orgiastic in character—make us feel, with a sort of instinctive certainty,
that the power of Minos was no Hellenic empire, but one of Phœnicians,
from which, as afterwards from Carthage, they commanded distant coasts and
islands, for the purposes of trade. They settled, as we know, at Corinth,
at Thebes, and probably at Athens, in the days of their greatness, but
they seem always to have been strangers and sojourners there, while in
Crete they kept the stronghold of their power. Thucydides thinks that
Minos’s main object was to put down piracy, and protect commerce; and this
is probably the case, though we are without evidence on the point. The
historian evidently regards this old Cretan empire as the older model of
the Athenian, but settled in a far more advantageous place, and not liable
to the dangers which proved the ruin of Athens.
The nearer islands were small, and of no reputation, but each like a
mountain top reaching out of a submerged valley, stony and bare. Melos was
farther off, but quite distinct—the old scene of Athenian violence and
cruelty, to Thucydides so impressive, that he dramatizes the incidents,
and passes from cold narrative and set oration to a dialogue between the
oppressors and the oppressed. Melian starvation was long proverbial among
the Greeks, and there the fashionable and aristocratic Alcibiades applied
the arguments and carried out the very policy which the tanner Cleon could
not propose without being pilloried by the great historian whom he made
his foe. This and other islands, which were always looked upon by the
mainland Greeks with some contempt, have of late days received special
attention from archæologists. It is said that the present remains of the
old Greek type are now to be found among the islanders—an observation
which I found fully justified by a short sojourn at Ægina, where the very
types of the Parthenon frieze can be found among the inhabitants, if the
traveller will look for them diligently. The noblest and most perfect type
of Greek beauty has, indeed, come to us from Melos, but not in real life.
It is the celebrated Venus of Melos—the most pure and perfect image we
know of that goddess, and one which puts to shame the lower ideals so much
admired in the museums of Italy.(8)
Another remark should be made in justice to the islands, that the groups
of Therasia and Santorin, which lie round the crater of a great active
volcano, have supplied us not only with the oldest forms of the Greek
alphabet in their inscriptions, but with far the oldest vestiges of
inhabitants in any part of Greece. In these, beneath the lava slopes
formed by a great eruption—an eruption earlier than any history, except,
perhaps, Egyptian—have been found the dwellings, the implements, and the
bones of men who cannot have lived there much later than 2000 B. C. The
arts, as well as the implements, of these old dwellers in their Stone Age,
have shown us how very ancient Greek forms, and even Greek decorations,
are in the world’s history: and we may yet from them and from further
researches, such as Schliemann’s, be able to reconstruct the state of
things in Greece before the Greeks came from their Eastern homes. The
special reason why these inquiries seem to me likely to lead to good
result is this, that what is called neo-barbarism is less likely to
mislead us here than elsewhere. Neo-barbarism means the occurrence in
later times of the manners and customs which generally mark very old and
primitive times. Some few things of this kind survive everywhere; thus, in
the Irish Island of Arran, a group of famous _savants_ mistook a stone
donkey-shed of two years’ standing for the building of an extinct race in
gray antiquity: as a matter of fact, the construction had not changed from
the oldest type. But the spread of culture, and the fulness of population
in the good days of Greece, make it certain that every spot about the
thoroughfares was improved and civilized; and so, as I have said, there is
less chance here than anywhere of our being deceived into mistaking
rudeness for oldness, and raising a modern savage to the dignity of a
primæval man.
But we must not allow speculations to spoil our observations, nor waste
the precious moments given us to take in once for all the general outline
of the Greek coasts. While the long string of islands, from Melos up to
the point of Attica, framed in our view to the right, to the left the
great bay of Argolis opened far into the land, making a sort of vista into
the Peloponnesus, so that the mountains of Arcadia could be seen far to
the west standing out against the setting sun; for the day was now
clearer—the clouds began to break, and let us feel touches of the sun’s
heat towards evening. As we passed Hydra, the night began to close about
us, and we were obliged to make out the rest of our geography with the aid
of a rich full moon.
But these Attic waters, if I may so call them, will be mentioned again and
again in the course of our voyage, and need not now be described in
detail. The reader will, I think, get the clearest notion of the size of
Greece by reflecting upon the time required to sail round the Peloponnesus
in a good steamer. The ship in which we made the journey—the _Donnai_, of
the French Messagerie Company,—made about eight miles an hour. Coming
within close range of the coast of Messene, about five o’clock in the
morning, we rounded all the headlands, and arrived at the Peiræus about
eleven o’clock the same night. So, then, the Peloponnesus is a small
peninsula, but even to an outside view “very large for its size;” for the
actual climbing up and down of constant mountains, in any land journey
from place to place, makes the distance in miles very much greater than
the line as the crow flies. If I said that every ordinary distance, as
measured on the map, is doubled in the journey, I believe I should be
under the mark.
It may be well to add a word here upon the other route into Greece, that
by Brindisi and the Ionian Islands. It is fully as picturesque, in some
respects more so, for there is no more beautiful bay than the long fiord
leading up to Corinth, which passes Patras, Vostitza, and Itea, the port
of Delphi. The Akrokeraunian mountains, which are the first point of the
Albanian coast seen by the traveller, are also very striking, and no one
can forget the charms and beauties of Corfu. I think a market-day in
Corfu, with those royal-looking peasant lads, who come clothed in
sheepskins from the coast, and spend their day handling knives and
revolvers with peculiar interest at the stalls, is among the most
picturesque sights to be seen in Europe. The lofty mountains of Ithaca and
its greater sister, and then the rich belt of verdure along the east side
of Zante—all these features make this journey one of surpassing beauty and
interest. Yet notwithstanding all these advantages, there is not the same
excitement in first approaching semi-Greek or outlying Greek settlements,
and only gradually arriving at the real centres of historic interest. Such
at least was the feeling (shared by other observers) which I had in
approaching Greece by this more varied route. No traveller, however, is
likely to miss either, as it is obviously best to enter by one route and
depart by the other, in a voyage not intended to reach beyond Greece. But
from what I have said, it may be seen that I prefer to enter by the direct
route from Naples, and to leave by the Gulf of Corinth and the Ionian
Islands. I trust that ere long arrangements may be made for permitting
travellers who cross the isthmus to make an excursion to the
Akrokorinthus—the great citadel of Corinth—which they are now compelled to
hurry past, in order to catch the boat for Athens.
The modern Patras, still a thriving port, is now the main point of contact
between Greece and the rest of Europe. For, as a railway has now been
opened from Patras to Athens, all the steamers from Brindisi, Venice, and
Trieste put in there, and from thence the stream of travellers proceeds by
the new line to the capital. The old plan of steaming up the long fiord to
Corinth is abandoned; still more the once popular route round the Morea,
which, if somewhat slower, at least saved the unshipping at Lechæum, the
drive in omnibuses across the isthmus, and reshipment at Cenchreæ—all done
with much confusion, and with loss and damage to luggage and temper. Not
that there is no longer confusion. The railway station at Patras, and that
at Athens, are the most curious bear-gardens in which business ever was
done. The traveller (I speak of the year of our Lord 1889) is informed
that unless he is there an hour before the time he will not get his
luggage weighed and despatched. And when he comes down from his
comfortable hotel to find out what it all means, he meets the whole
population of the town in possession of the station. Everybody who has
nothing to do gets in the way of those who have; everything is full of
noise and confusion.
At last the train steams out of the station, and takes its deliberate way
along the coast, through woods of fir trees, bushes of arbutus and mastic,
and the many flowers which stud the earth. And here already the traveller,
looking out of the window, can form an idea of the delights of real Greek
travel, by which he must understand mounting a mule or pony, and making
his way along woody paths, or beside the quiet sea, or up the steep side
of a rocky defile. Every half-hour the train crosses torrents coming from
the mountains, which in flood times color the sea for some distance with
the brilliant brick-red of the clay they carry with them from their banks.
The peacock blue of the open sea bounds this red water with a definite
line, and the contrast in the bright sun is something very startling.
Shallow banks of sand also reflect their pale yellow in many places, so
that the brilliancy of this gulf exceeds anything I had ever seen in sea
or lake. We pass the sites of Ægion, now Vostitza, once famous as the
capital or centre (politically) of the Achæan League. We pass Sicyon, the
home of Aratus, the great regenerator, the mean destroyer of that League,
as you can still read in Plutarch’s fascinating life of the man. But these
places, like so many others in Greece, once famous, have now no trace of
their greatness left above ground. The day may, however, still come when
another Schliemann will unearth the records and fragments of a
civilization distinguished even in Greece for refinement. Sicyon was a
famous school of art. Painting and sculpture flourished there, and there
was a special school of Sicyon, whose features we can still recognize in
extant copies of the famous statues they produced. There is a statue known
as the Canon Statue, a model of human proportions, which was the work of
the famous Polycleitus of Sicyon, and which we know from various
imitations preserved at Rome and elsewhere. But we shall return in due
time to Greek sculpture as a whole, and shall not interrupt our journey at
this moment.
All that we have passed through hitherto may be classed under the title of
“first impressions.” The wild northern coast shows us but one inlet, of
the Gulf of Salona, with a little port of Itea at its mouth. This was the
old highway to ascend to the oracle of Delphi on the snowy Parnassus,
which we shall approach better from the Bœotian side. But now we strain
our eyes to behold the great rock of Corinth, and to invade this, the
first great centre of Greek life, which closes the long bay at its
westernmost end.
I will add a word upon the form and scope of the following work. My aim is
to bring the living features of Greece home to the student, by connecting
them, as far as possible, with the facts of older history, which are so
familiar to most of us. I shall also have a good deal to say about the
modern politics of Greece, and the character of the modern population. A
long and careful survey of the extant literature of ancient Greece has
convinced me that the pictures usually drawn of the old Greeks are
idealized, and that the real people were of a very different—if you
please, of a much lower—type. I may mention, as a very remarkable
confirmation of my judgment, that intelligent people at Athens, who had
read my opinions elsewhere set forth upon the subject,(9) were so much
struck with the close resemblance of my pictures of the old Greeks to the
present inhabitants, that they concluded that I must have visited the
country before writing these opinions, and that I was, in fact, drawing my
classical people from the life of the moderns. If this is not a proof of
the justice of these views, it at least strongly suggests that they may be
true, and is a powerful support in arguing the matter on the perfectly
independent ground of the inferences from old literature. After all,
national characteristics are very permanent, and very hard to shake off,
and it would seem strange, indeed, if both these and the Greek language
should have remained almost intact, and yet the race have either changed,
or been saturated with foreign blood. Foreign invasions and foreign
conquests of Greece were common enough; but here, as elsewhere, the
climate and circumstances which have formed a race seem to conspire to
preserve it, and to absorb foreign types and features, rather than to
permit the extinction or total change of the older race.
I feel much fortified in my judgment of Greek character by finding that a
very smart, though too sarcastic, observer, M. E. About, in his well-known
_Grèce contemporaine_, estimates the people very nearly as I am disposed
to estimate the common people of ancient Greece. He notices, in the second
and succeeding chapters of his book, a series of features which make this
nationality a very distinct one in Europe. Starting from the question of
national beauty, and holding rightly that the beauty of the men is greater
than that of the women, he touches on a point which told very deeply upon
all the history of Greek art. At the present day, the Greek men are much
more particular about their appearance, and more vain of it, than the
women. The most striking beauty among them is that of young men; and as to
the care of figure, as About well observes, in Greece it is the men who
pinch their waists—a fashion unknown among Greek women. Along with this
handsome appearance, the people are, without doubt, a very temperate
people; although they make a great deal of strong wine, they seldom drink
much, and are far more critical about good water than wine. Indeed, in so
warm a climate, wine is disagreeable even to the northern traveller; and,
as Herodotus remarked long ago, very likely to produce insanity, the
rarest form of disease among the Greeks. In fact, they are not a
passionate race—having at all ages been gifted with a very bright
intellect, and a great reasonableness; they have an intellectual insight
into things, which is inconsistent with the storms of wilder passion.
They are, probably, as clever a people as can be found in the world, and
fit for any mental work whatever. This they have proved, not only by
getting into their hands all the trade of the Eastern Mediterranean, but
by holding their own perfectly among English merchants in England. As yet
they have not found any encouragement in other directions; but there can
be no doubt that, if settled among a great people, and weaned from the
follies and jealousies of Greek politics, they would (like the Jews)
outrun many of us, both in politics and in science. However that may
be—and perhaps such a development requires moral qualities in which they
seem deficient—it is certain that their workmen learn trades with
extraordinary quickness; while their young commercial or professional men
acquire languages, and the amount of knowledge necessary for making money,
with the most singular aptness. But as yet they are stimulated chiefly by
the love of gain.
Besides this, they have great national pride, and, as M. About remarks, we
need never despair of a people who are at the same time intelligent and
proud. They are very fond of displaying their knowledge on all points—I
noted especially their pride in exhibiting their acquaintance with old
Greek history and legend. When I asked them whether they believed the old
mythical stories which they repeated, they seemed afraid of being thought
simple if they confessed that they did, and of injuring the reputation of
their ancestors if they declared they did not. So they used to preserve a
discreet neutrality.
The instinct of liberty appears to me as strong in the nation now as it
ever was. In fact, the people have never been really enslaved. The eternal
refuge for liberty afforded by the sea and the mountains has saved them
from this fate; and, even beneath the heavy yoke of the Turks, a large
part of the nation was not subdued, but, in the guise of bandits and
pirates, enjoyed the great privilege for which their ancestors had
contended so earnestly. The Mainotes, for example, of whom I have just
spoken as occupying the coast of Messene, never tolerated any resident
Turkish magistrate among them, but “handed to a trembling tax-collector a
little purse of gold pieces, hung on the end of a naked sword.”(10) Now,
the whole nation is more intensely and thoroughly democratic than any
other in Europe. They acknowledge no nobility save that of descent from
the chiefs who fought in the war of liberation; they will allow no
distinction of classes; every common mule-boy is a gentleman (_κύριος_),
and fully your equal. He sits in the room at meals, and joins in the
conversation at dinner. They only tolerate a king because they cannot
endure one of themselves as their superior. This jealousy is,
unfortunately, a mainspring of Greek politics, and when combined with a
dislike of agriculture, as a stupid and unintellectual occupation, fills
all the country with politicians, merchants, and journalists. Moreover,
they want the spirit of subordination of their great ancestors, and are
often accused of lack of honesty—a very grave feature, and the greatest
obstacle to progress in all ages. It is better, however, to let points of
character come out gradually in the course of our studies than to bring
them together into an official portrait. It is impossible to wander
through the country without seeing and understanding the inhabitants; for
the traveller is in constant contact with them, and they have no scruple
in displaying all their character.
M. About has earned the profound hatred and contempt of the nation by his
picture, and I do not wonder at it, seeing that the tone in which he
writes is flippant and ill-natured, and seems to betoken certain private
animosities, of which the Greeks tell numerous anecdotes.
I have no such excuse for being severe or ill-natured, as I found nothing
but kindness and hospitality everywhere, and sincerely hope that my free
judgments may not hurt any sensitive Greek who may chance to see them.
Even the great Finlay—one of their best friends—is constantly censured by
them for his writings about Modern Greece.
But, surely, any real lover of Greece must feel that plain speaking about
the faults of the nation is much wanted. The worship lavished upon them by
Byron and his school has done its good, and can now only do harm. On the
other hand, I must confess that a longer and more intimate intercourse
with the Greeks of the interior and of the mountains leads a fair observer
to change his earlier estimate, and think more highly of the nation than
at first acquaintance. Unfortunately, the Greeks known to most of us are
sailors—mongrel villains from the ports of the Levant, having very little
in common with the bold, honest, independent peasant who lives under his
vine and his fig-tree in the valleys of Arcadia or of Phocis. It was, no
doubt, an intimate knowledge of the sound core of the nation which
inspired Byron with that enthusiasm which many now think extravagant and
misplaced. But here, as elsewhere, the folly of a great genius has more
truth in it than the wisdom of his feebler critics.