GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS AND ATTICA.
There is probably no more exciting voyage, to any educated man, than the
approach to Athens from the sea. Every promontory, every island, every
bay, has its history. If he knows the map of Greece, he needs no
guide-book or guide to distract him; if he does not, he needs little Greek
to ask of any one near him the name of this or that object; and the mere
names are sufficient to stir up all his classical recollections. But he
must make up his mind not to be shocked at _Ægina_ or _Phalerum_, and even
to be told that he is utterly wrong in his way of pronouncing them.
It was our fortune to come into Greece by night, with a splendid moon
shining upon the summer sea. The varied outlines of Sunium on the one
side, and Ægina on the other, were very clear, but in the deep shadows
there was mystery enough to feed the burning impatience to see it all in
the light of common day; and though we had passed Ægina, and had come over
against the rocky Salamis, as yet there was no sign of Peiræus. Then came
the light on Psyttalea, and they told us that the harbor was right
opposite. Yet we came nearer and nearer, and no harbor could be seen. The
barren rocks of the coast seemed to form one unbroken line, and nowhere
was there a sign of indentation or of break in the land. But, suddenly, as
we turned from gazing on Psyttalea, where the flower of the Persian nobles
had once stood in despair, looking upon their fate gathering about them,
the vessel had turned eastward, and discovered to us the crowded lights
and thronging ships of the famous harbor. Small it looked, very small, but
evidently deep to the water’s edge, for great ships seemed touching the
shore; and so narrow is the mouth that we almost wondered how they had
made their entrance in safety. But we saw it some weeks later, with nine
men-of-war towering above all its merchant shipping and its steamers, and
among them crowds of ferry-boats skimming about in the breeze with their
wing-like sails. Then we found out that, like the rest of Greece, the
Peiræus was far larger than it looked.
[Illustration: Along the Coast from the Throne of Xerxes]
It differed little, alas! from more vulgar harbors in the noise and
confusion of disembarking; in the delays of its custom house; in the
extortion and insolence of its boatmen. It is still, as in Plato’s day,
“the haunt of sailors, where good manners are unknown.” But when we had
escaped the turmoil, and were seated silently on the way to Athens, almost
along the very road of classical days, all our classical notions, which
had been scared away by vulgar bargaining and protesting, regained their
sway. We had sailed in through the narrow passage where almost every great
Greek that ever lived had sometime passed; now we went along the line,
hardly less certain, which had seen all these great ones going to and fro
between the city and the port. The present road is shaded with great
silver poplars and plane trees, and the moon had set, so that our approach
to Athens was even more mysterious than our approach to the Peiræus. We
were, moreover, perplexed at our carriage stopping under some large plane
trees, though we had driven but two miles, and the night was far spent.
Our coachman would listen to no advice or persuasion. We learned
afterwards that every carriage going to and from the Peiræus stops at this
half-way house, that the horses may drink, and the coachman take “Turkish
delight” and water. There is no exception made to this custom, and the
traveller is bound to submit. At last we entered the unpretending
ill-built streets at the west of Athens.
The stillness of the night is a phenomenon hardly known in that city. No
sooner have men and horses gone to rest than all the dogs and cats of the
town come out to bark and yell about the thoroughfares. Athens, like all
parts of modern Greece, abounds in dogs. You cannot pass a sailing boat in
the Levant without seeing a dog looking angrily over the taffrail, and
barking at you as you pass. Every ship in the Peiræus has at least one,
often a great many, on board. I suppose every house in Athens is provided
with one. These creatures seem to make it their business to prevent
silence and rest all the night long. They were ably seconded by cats and
crowing cocks, as well as by an occasional wakeful donkey; and both cats
and donkeys seemed to have voices of almost tropical violence.
So the night wore away under rapidly growing adverse impressions. How is a
man to admire art and revere antiquity if he is robbed of his repose? The
Greeks sleep so much in the day that they seem indifferent about nightly
disturbances; and, perhaps, after many years’ habit, even Athenian
caterwauling may fail to rouse the sleeper. But what chance has the
passing traveller? Even the strongest ejaculations are but a narrow outlet
for his feelings.
In this state of mind, then, I rose at the break of dawn to see whether
the window would afford any prospect to serve as a requital for angry
sleeplessness. And there, right opposite, stood the rock which of all
rocks in the world’s history has done most for literature and art—the rock
which poets, and orators, and architects, and historians have ever
glorified, and cannot stay their praise—which is ever new and ever old,
ever fresh in its decay, ever perfect in its ruin, ever living in its
death—the Acropolis of Athens.
When I saw my dream and longing of many years fulfilled, the first rays of
the rising sun had just touched the heights, while the town below was
still hid in gloom. Rock, and rampart, and ruined fanes—all were colored
in uniform tints; the lights were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows
of dark crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was no variety in
color between what nature and what man had set there. No whiteness shone
from the marble, no smoothness showed upon the hewn and polished blocks;
but the whole mass of orange and crimson stood out together into the pale,
pure Attic air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, still
perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek history, of magnificence and
meanness—of loftiness and lowness—as well in outer life as in inward
motive. And, as it were in illustration of that art of which it was the
most perfect bloom, and which lasted in perfection but a day of history, I
saw it again and again, in sunlight and in shade, in daylight and at
night, but never again in this perfect and singular beauty.
If we except the Acropolis, there are only two striking buildings of
classical antiquity within the modern town of Athens—the Temple of Theseus
and the few standing columns of Hadrian’s great temple to Zeus. The latter
is, indeed, very remarkable. The pillars stand on a vacant platform, once
the site of the gigantic temple; the Acropolis forms a noble background;
away towards Phalerum stretch undulating hills which hide the sea; to the
left (if we look from the town), Mount Hymettus raises its barren slopes;
and in the valley, immediately below the pillars, flows the famous little
Ilisus,(11) glorified for ever by the poetry of Plato, and in its
summer-dry bed the fountain Callirrhoe, from which the Athenian maidens
still draw water as of old—water the purest and best in the city. It wells
out from under a great limestone rock, all plumed with the rich _Capillus
Veneris_, which seems to find out and frame with its delicate green every
natural spring in Greece.
But the pillars of the Temple of Zeus, though very stately and massive,
and with their summits bridged together by huge blocks of architrave, are
still not Athenian, not Attic, not (if I may say so) genuine Greek work;
for the Corinthian capitals, which are here seen perhaps in their greatest
perfection, cannot be called pure Greek taste. As is well known, they were
hardly ever used, and never used prominently, till the Græco-Roman stage
of art. The older Greeks seem to have had a fixed objection to intricate
ornamentation in their larger temples. All the greater temples of Greece
and Greek Italy are of the Doric Order, with its perfectly plain capital.
Groups of figures were admitted upon the pediments and metopes, because
these groups formed clear and massive designs visible from a distance. But
such intricacies as those of the Corinthian capital were not approved,
except in small monuments, which were merely intended for close
inspection, and where delicate ornament gave grace to a building which
could not lay claim to grandeur. Such is clearly the case with the only
purely Greek (as opposed to Græco-Roman) monument of the Corinthian Order,
which is still standing—the Choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens.(12)
It was also the case with that beautiful little temple, or group of
temples, known as the Erechtheum, which, standing beside the great massive
Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, presents the very contrasts upon
which I am insisting. It is small and essentially graceful, being built in
the Ionic style, with rich ornamentation; while the Parthenon is massive,
and, in spite of much ornamentation, very severe in its plainer Doric
style.
[Illustration: The Erechtheum from the West, Athens]
But to return to the pillars of Hadrian’s Temple. They are about
fifty-five feet high, by six and a half feet in diameter, and no
Corinthian pillar of this colossal size would ever have been set up by the
Greeks in their better days. So, then, in spite of the grandeur of these
isolated remains—a grandeur not destroyed, perhaps even not diminished, by
coffee tables, and inquiring waiters, and military bands, and a vulgar
crowd about their base—to the student of really Greek art they are not of
the highest interest; nay, they even suggest to him what the Periclean
Greeks would have done had they, with such resources, completed the great
temple due to the munificence of the Roman Emperor.
Let us turn, in preference, to the Temple of Theseus, at the opposite
extremity of the town, it too standing upon a clear platform, and striking
the traveller with its symmetry and its completeness, as he approaches
from the Peiræus. It is in every way a contrast to the temple of which we
have just spoken. It is very small—in fact so small in comparison with the
Parthenon, or the great temple at Pæstum, that we are disappointed with
it; and yet it is built, not in the richly-decorated Ionic style of the
Erechtheum, but in severe Doric; and though small and plain, it is very
perfect—as perfect as any such relic that we have. It is many centuries
older than Hadrian’s great temple. It could have been destroyed with
one-tenth of the trouble, and yet it still stands almost in its
perfection. The reason is simply this. Few of the great classical temples
suffered much from wanton destruction till the Middle Ages. Now, in the
Middle Ages this temple, as well as the Parthenon, was usurped by the
Greek Church, and turned into a place of Christian worship. So, then, the
little Temple of Theseus has escaped the ravages which the last few
centuries—worse than all that went before—have made in the remains of a
noble antiquity. To those who desire to study the effect of the Doric
Order this temple appears to me an admirable specimen. From its small size
and clear position, all its points are very easily taken in. “Such,” says
Bishop Wordsworth, “is the integrity of its structure, and the
distinctness of its details, that it requires no description beyond that
which a few glances might supply. Its beauty defies all: its solid yet
graceful form is, indeed, admirable; and the loveliness of its coloring is
such that, from the rich mellow hue which the marble has now assumed, it
looks as if it had been quarried, not from the bed of a rocky mountain,
but from the golden light of an Athenian sunset.” And in like terms many
others have spoken.
I have only one reservation to make. The Doric Order being essentially
massive, it seems to me that this beautiful temple lacks one essential
feature of that order, and therefore, after the first survey, after a
single walk about it, it loses to the traveller who has seen Pæstum, and
who presently cannot fail to see the Parthenon, that peculiar effect of
massiveness—of almost Egyptian solidity—which is ever present, and ever
imposing, in these huger Doric temples. It seems as if the Athenians
themselves felt this—that the plain simplicity of its style was not
effective without size—and accordingly decorated this structure with
colors more richly than their other temples. All the reliefs and raised
ornaments seem to have been painted; other decorations were added in color
on the flat surfaces, so that the whole temple must have been a mass of
rich variegated hues, of which blue, green, and red are still
distinguishable—or were in Stuart’s time—and in which bronze and gilding
certainly played an important part.
We are thus brought naturally face to face with one of the peculiarities
of old Greek art most difficult to realize, and still more to
appreciate.(13) We can recognize in Egyptian and in Assyrian art the
richness and appropriateness of much coloring. Modern painters are
becoming so alive to this, that among the most striking pictures in our
Royal Academy in London have been seen, for some years back, scenes from
old Egyptian and Assyrian life, in which the rich coloring of the
architecture has been quite a prominent feature.
But in Greek art—in the perfect symmetry of the Greek temple, in the
perfect grace of the Greek statue—we come to think form of such paramount
importance, that we look on the beautiful Parian and Pentelic marbles as
specially suited for the expression of form apart from color. There is
even something in unity of tone that delights the modern eye. Thus, though
we feel that the old Greek temples have lost all their original
brightness, yet, as I have myself said, and as I have quoted from Bishop
Wordsworth, the rich mellow hue which tones all these ruins has to us its
peculiar charm. The same rich yellow brown, almost the color of the Roman
travertine, is one of the most striking features in the splendid remains
which have made Pæstum unique in all Italy. This color contrasts
beautifully with the blue sky of southern Europe; it lights up with
extraordinary richness in the rising or setting sun. We can easily
conceive that were it proposed to restore the Attic temples to their
pristine whiteness, we should feel a severe shock, and beg to have these
venerable buildings left in the soberness of their acquired color. Still
more does it shock us to be told that great sculptors, with Parian marble
at hand, preferred to set up images of the gods in gold and ivory, or,
still worse, with parts of gold and ivory; and that they thought it right
to fill out the eyes with precious stones, and set gilded wreaths upon
colored hair.
When we first come to realize these things, we are likely to exclaim
against such a jumble, as we should call it, of painting and
architecture—still worse, of painting and sculpture. Nor is it possible or
reasonable that we should at once submit to such a revolution in our
artistic ideas, and bow without criticism to these shocking features in
Greek art. But if blind obedience to these our great masters in the laws
of beauty is not to be commended, neither is an absolute resistance to all
argument on the question to be respected; nor do I acknowledge the good
sense or the good taste of that critic who insists that nothing can
possibly equal the color and texture of white marble, and that all
coloring of such a substance is the mere remains of barbarism. For, say
what we will, the Greeks were certainly, as a nation, the best judges of
beauty the world has yet seen. And this is not all. The beauty of which
they were evidently the most fond was beauty of form—harmony of
proportions, symmetry of design. They always hated the tawdry and the
extravagant. As to their literature, there is no poetry, no oratory, no
history, which is less decorated with the flowers of rhetoric: it is all
pure in design, chaste in detail. So with their dress; so with their
dwellings. We cannot but feel that, had the effect of painted temples and
statues been tawdry, there is no people on earth who would have felt it so
keenly, and disliked it so much. There must, then, have been strong
reasons why this bright coloring did not strike their eye as it would the
eye of sober moderns.
To any one who has seen the country, and thought about the question there,
many such reasons present themselves. In the first place, all through
southern Europe, and more especially in Greece, there is an amount of
bright color in nature, which prevents almost any artificial coloring from
producing a startling effect. Where all the landscape, the sea, and the
air are exceedingly bright, we find the inhabitants increasing the
brightness of their dress and houses, as it were to correspond with
nature. Thus, in Italy, they paint their houses green, and pink, and
yellow, and so give to their towns and villas that rich and warm effect
which we miss so keenly among the gray and sooty streets of northern
Europe. So also in their dress, these people wear scarlet, and white, and
rich blue, not so much in patterns as in large patches, and a festival in
Sicily or Greece fills the streets with intense color. We know that the
coloring of the old Greek dress was quite of the same character as that of
the modern, though in design it has completely changed. We must,
therefore, imagine the old Greek crowd before their temples, or in their
market-places, a very white crowd, with patches of scarlet and various
blue; perhaps altogether white in processions, if we except scarlet
shoe-straps and other such slight relief. One cannot but feel that a
richly colored temple—that pillars of blue and red—that friezes of
gilding, and other ornament, upon a white marble ground, and in white
marble framing, must have been a splendid and appropriate background, a
genial feature, in such a sky and with such costume. We must get
accustomed to such combinations—we must dwell upon them in imagination, or
ask our good painters to restore them for us, and let us look upon them
constantly and calmly.
But I will not seek to persuade; let us merely state the case fairly, and
put the reader in a position to judge for himself. So much for the painted
architecture. I will but add, the most remarkable specimen of a richly
painted front to which we can now appeal is also really one of the most
beautiful in Europe—the front of S. Mark’s at Venice. The rich frescoes
and profuse gilding on this splendid front, of which photographs give a
very false idea, should be studied by all who desire to judge fairly of
this side of Greek taste.
But I must say a word, before passing on, concerning the statues. No
doubt, the painting of statues, and the use of gold and ivory upon them,
were derived from a rude age, when no images existed but rude wooden
work—at first a mere block, then roughly altered and reduced to shape,
probably requiring some coloring to produce any effect whatever. To a
public accustomed from childhood to such painted, and often richly dressed
images, a pure white marble statue must appear utterly cold and lifeless.
So it does to us, when we have become accustomed to the mellow tints of
old and even weather-stained Greek statues; and it should be here noticed
that this mellow skin-surface on antique statues is not the mere result of
age, but of an artificial process, whereby they burnt into the surface a
composition of wax and oil, which gave a yellowish tone to the marble, as
well as also that peculiar surface which so accurately represents the
texture of the human skin. But if we imagine all the marble surfaces and
reliefs in the temple colored for architectural richness’ sake, we can
feel even more strongly how cold and out-of-place would be a perfectly
colorless statue in the centre of all this pattern.
I will go further, and say we can point out cases where coloring greatly
heightens the effect and beauty of sculpture. The first is from the
bronzes found at Herculaneum, now in the museum at Naples. Though they are
not marble, they are suitable for our purpose, being naturally of a single
dark brown hue, which is indeed even more unfavorable (we should think)
for such treatment. In some of the finest of these bronzes—especially in
the two young men starting for a race—the eyeballs are inserted in white,
with iris and pupil colored. Nothing can be conceived more striking and
lifelike than the effect produced. There is in the Varvakion at Athens a
marble mask, found in the Temple of Æsculapius under the south side of the
Acropolis, probably an _ex voto_ offered for a recovery from some disease
of the eyes. This marble face also has its eyes colored in the most
striking and lifelike way, and is one of the most curious objects found in
the late excavations.
I will add one remarkable modern example—the monument at Florence to a
young Indian prince, who visited England and this country some years ago,
and died of fever during his homeward voyage. They have set up to him a
richly colored and gilded baldachin, in the open air, and in a quiet,
wooded park. Under this covering is a life-sized bust of the prince, in
his richest state dress. The whole bust—the turban, the face, the
drapery—all is colored to the life, and the dress, of course, of the most
gorgeous variety. The turban is chiefly white, striped with gold, in
strong contrast to the mahogany complexion and raven hair of the actual
head; the robe is gold and green, and covered with ornament. The general
effect is, from the very first moment, striking and beautiful. The longer
it is studied, the better it appears; and there is hardly a reasonable
spectator who will not confess that, were we to replace the present bust
with a copy of it in white marble, the beauty and harmony of the monument
would be utterly marred. To those who have the opportunity of visiting
Greece or Italy, I strongly commend these specimens of colored buildings
and sculpture. When they have seen them, they will hesitate to condemn
what we still hear called the curiously bad taste of the old Greeks in
their use of color in the plastic arts.
But these archæological discussions are truly _ἐκβολαὶ λόγου_,
digressions—in themselves necessary, yet only tolerable if they are not
too long. I revert to the general state of the antiquities at Athens,
always reserving the Acropolis for a special chapter. As I said, the
isolated pillars of Hadrian’s Temple of Zeus, and the so-called Temple of
Theseus, are the only very striking objects.(14) There are, of course,
many other buildings, or remains of buildings. There is the monument of
Lysicrates—a small and very graceful round chamber, adorned with
Corinthian engaged pillars, and with friezes of the school of Scopas, and
intended to carry on its summit the tripod Lysicrates had gained in a
musical and dramatic contest (334 B. C.) at Athens. There is the later
Temple of the Winds, as it is called—a sort of public clock, with sundials
and fine reliefs of the Wind-gods on its outward surfaces, and
arrangements for a water-clock within. There are two portals, or
gateways—one leading into the old agora, or market-place, the other
leading from old Athens into the Athens of Hadrian.
But all these buildings are either miserably defaced, or of such late date
and decayed taste as to make them unworthy specimens of pure Greek art. A
single century ago there was much to be seen and admired which has since
disappeared; and even to-day the majority of the population are careless
as to the treatment of ancient monuments, and sometimes even mischievous
in wantonly defacing them. Thus, I saw the marble tombs of Ottfried Müller
and Charles Lenormant—tombs which, though modern, were yet erected at the
cost of the nation to men who were eminent lovers and students of Greek
art—I saw these tombs used as common targets by the neighborhood, and all
peppered with marks of shot and of bullets. I saw them, too, all but blown
up by workmen blasting for building-stones close beside them.(15) I saw,
also, from the Acropolis, a young gentleman practising with a pistol at a
piece of old carved marble work in the Theatre of Dionysus. His object
seemed to be to chip off a piece from the edge at every shot. Happily, on
this occasion, our vantage ground enabled us to take the law into our own
hands; and after in vain appealing to a custodian to interfere, we adopted
the tactics of Apollo at Delphi, and by detaching stones from the top of
our precipice, we put to flight the wretched barbarian who had come to
ravage the treasures of that most sacred place.
These unhappy examples of the defacing of architectural monuments,(16)
which can hardly be removed, naturally suggest to the traveller in Greece
the kindred question how all the smaller and movable antiquities that are
found should be distributed so as best to promote the love and knowledge
of art.
On this point it seems to me that we have gone to one extreme, and the
Greeks to the other, and that neither of us have done our best to make
known what we acknowledge ought to be known as widely as possible. The
tendency in England, at least of later years, has been to swallow up all
lesser and all private collections in the great national Museum in London,
which has accordingly become so enormous and so bewildering that no one
can profit by it except the trained specialist, who goes in with his eyes
shut, and will not open them till he has arrived at the special class of
objects he intends to examine. But to the ordinary public, and even the
generally enlightened public (if such an expression be not a contradiction
in terms), there is nothing so utterly bewildering, and therefore so
unprofitable, as a visit to the myriad treasures of that great world of
curiosities.
In the last century many private persons—many noblemen of wealth and
culture—possessed remarkable collections of antiquities. These have mostly
been swallowed up by what is called “the nation,” and new private
collections are very rare indeed.
In Greece the very opposite course is being now pursued. By a special law
it is forbidden to sell out of the country, or even to remove from a
district, any antiquities whatever; and in consequence little museums have
been established in every village in Greece—nay, sometimes even in places
where there is no village, in order that every district may possess its
own riches, and become worth a visit from the traveller and the antiquary.
I have seen such museums at Eleusis, some fifteen miles from Athens, at
Thebes, now an unimportant town, at Livadia, at Chæronea, at Argos, at
Olympia, and even in the wild plains of Orchomenus, in a little chapel,
with no town within miles.(17) If I add to this that most of these museums
were mere dark outhouses, only lighted through the door, the reader will
have some notion what a task it would be to visit and criticise, with any
attempt at completeness, the ever-increasing remnants of classical Greece.
The traveller is at first disposed to complain that even the portable
antiquities found in various parts of Greece are not brought to Athens,
and gathered into one vast national museum. Further reflection shows such
a proceeding to be not only impossible, but highly inexpedient. I will not
speak of the great waste of objects of interest when they are brought
together in such vast masses that the visitor is rather oppressed than
enlightened. Any one who has gone to the British Museum will know what I
mean. Nor will I give the smallest weight to the selfish local argument,
that compelling visitors to wander from place to place brings traffic and
money into the country. Until proper roads and clean inns are established,
such an argument is both unfair and unlikely to produce results worth
considering. But fortunately most of the famous things in Greece are
sites, ruined buildings, forts which cannot be removed from their place,
if at all, without destruction, and of which the very details cannot be
understood without seeing the place for which they were intended. Even the
Parthenon sculptures in London would have lost most of their interest, if
the building itself at Athens did not show us their application, and
glorify them with its splendor. He who sees the gold of Mycenæ at Athens,
knows little of its meaning, if he has not visited the giant forts where
its owners once dwelt and exercised their sway; and if, as has been done
at Olympia, some patriotic Greek had built a safe museum at Mycenæ to
contain them, they would be more deeply interesting and instructive than
they now are.
In such a town as Athens, on the contrary, it seems to me that the true
solution of the problem has been attained, though it will probably be
shortly abandoned for a central museum. There are (or were) at Athens at
least six separate museums of antiquities—one at the University, one
called the Varvakion, one in the Theseum, one, or rather two, on the
Acropolis, one in the Ministry of Public Instruction, and lastly, the new
National Museum, as it is called, in Patissia Street—devoted to its
special treasures. If these several storehouses were thoroughly kept,—if
the objects were carefully numbered and catalogued,—I can conceive no
better arrangement for studying separately and in detail the various
monuments, which must always bewilder and fatigue when crowded together in
one vast exhibition. If the British Museum were in this way severed into
many branches, and the different classes of objects it contains were
placed in separate buildings, and in different parts of London, I believe
most of us would acquire a far greater knowledge of what it contains, and
hence it would attain a greater usefulness in educating the nation. To
visit any one of the Athenian museums is a comparatively short and easy
task, where a man can see the end of his labor before him, and hence will
not hesitate to delay long over such things as are worth a careful study.
It may be said that all this digression about the mere placing of
monuments is delaying the reader too long from what he desires to
know—something about the monuments themselves. But this little book, to
copy an expression of Herodotus, particularly affects digressions. I
desire to wander through the subject exactly in the way which naturally
suggests itself to me. After all, the reflections on a journey ought to be
more valuable than its mere description.
Before passing into Attica and leaving Athens, something more must, of
course, be said of the museums, then of the newer diggings, and especially
of the splendid tombs found in the Kerameikus. We will then mount the
Acropolis, and wander leisurely about its marvellous ruins. From it we can
look out upon the general shape and disposition of Attica, and plan our
shorter excursions.
As some of the suggestions in my first edition have found favor at Athens,
I venture to point out here the great benefit which the Greek
archæologists would confer on all Europe if they would publish an official
guide to Athens, with some moderately complete account of the immense
riches of its museums. Such a book, which might appear under the sanction
of M. Rousopoulos, or Professor Koumanoudis, might be promoted either by
the Greek Parliament or the University of Athens. Were it even published
in modern Greek, its sale must be large and certain; and, by appendices,
or new editions, it could be kept up to the level of the new discoveries.
The catalogues of Kekulé and of Heydemann are already wholly inadequate,
and unless one has the privilege of knowing personally one of the
gentlemen above named, it is very difficult indeed to obtain any proper
notion of the history, or of the original sites, of the various objects
which excite curiosity or admiration at every step. Such a book as I
suggest would be hailed by every Hellenist in Europe as an inestimable
boon. But in a land where the able men are perpetually engaged in making
or observing new discoveries, they will naturally despise the task of
cataloguing what they know. Hence, I suggest that some promising young
scholar might undertake the book, and have his work revised by his masters
in the sober and practical school of Athens.(18)