ATHENS—THE THEATRE OF DIONYSUS—THE AREOPAGUS.
There are few recent excavations about Athens which have been so
productive as those along the south slope of the Acropolis. In the
conflicts and the wear of ages a vast quantity of earth, and walls, and
fragments of buildings has either been cast, or has rolled, down this
steep descent, so that it was with a certainty of good results that the
Archæological Society of Athens undertook to clear this side of the rock
of all the accumulated rubbish. Several precious inscriptions were found,
which had been thrown down from the rock; and in April, 1884, the whole
plan of the temple of Æsculapius had been uncovered, and another step
attained in fixing the much disputed topography of this part of Athens.
And yet we can hardly call this a beginning. Some twenty-five years ago, a
very extensive and splendidly successful excavation was made on an
adjoining site, when a party of German archæologists laid bare the Theatre
of Dionysus—the great theatre in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
brought out their immortal plays before an immortal audience. There is
nothing more delightful than to descend from the Acropolis, and rest
awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs with which the front row of
the circuit is occupied. They are of the pattern usual with the sitting
portrait statues of the Greeks—very deep, and with a curved back, which
exceeds both in comfort and in grace any chairs designed by modern
workmen.(43) Each chair has the name of a priest inscribed on it, showing
how the theatre among the Greeks corresponded to our cathedral, and this
front row to the stalls of canons and prebendaries.
[Illustration: Theatre of Dionysus, Athens]
But unfortunately all this sacerdotal prominence is probably the work of
the later restorers of the theatre. For after having been first beautified
and adorned with statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes’s time), it was again
restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or about his time, so that
the theatre, as we now have it, can only be called the building of the
second or third century after Christ. The front wall of the stage, which
is raised some feet above the level of the empty pit, is adorned with a
row of very elegant sculptures, amongst which one—a shaggy old man, in a
stooping posture, represented as coming out from within, and holding up
the stone above him—is particularly striking. Some Greek is said to have
knocked off, by way of amusement, the heads of most of these figures since
they were discovered, but this I do not know upon any better authority
than ordinary report. The pit or centre of the theatre is empty, and was
never in Greek days occupied by seats, but a wooden structure was set up
in advance of the stage, and on this the chorus performed their dances and
sang their odes. But now there is a circuit of upright slabs of stone
close to the front seats, which can hardly have been an arrangement of the
old Greek theatre. They are generally supposed to have been added when the
building came to be used for contests of gladiators, which Dion Chrysostom
tells us were imported from Corinth in his day.
All these later additions and details are, I fear, calculated to detract
from the reader’s interest in this theatre, which I should indeed
regret—for nothing can be more certain than that this is the veritable
stone theatre which was built when the wooden one broke down, at the great
competition of Æschylus and Pratinas; and though front seats may have been
added, and slight modifications introduced, the general structure can
never have required alteration. The main body of the curved rows of seats
have no backs, but are so deep as to leave plenty of room for the feet of
the people next above; and I fancy that in the old times the _προεδρία_ or
right of sitting in the front rows was not given to priests, but to
foreign embassies, along with the chief magistrates of Athens. The cost of
admission was two obols to all the seats of the house not specially
reserved, and such reservation was only for persons of official rank, and
by no means for richer people, or for a higher entrance money—a thing
which would not have been tolerated, I believe, for an instant by the
Athenian democracy.(44) When the state treasury grew full with the tribute
of the subject cities, the citizens had this sum, and at times even more,
distributed to them in order that no one might be excluded from the annual
feast, and so the whole free population of Athens came together without
expense to worship the gods by enjoying themselves in this great theatre.
It is indeed very large, though exaggerated statements have been made
about its size. It is generally stated that the enormous number of thirty
thousand people could fit into it—a statement I think incredible;(45) and
it is not nearly as large as other theatres I have seen, at Syracuse, at
Megalopolis, or even at Argos. This also is certain, that any one speaking
on the stage, as it now is, can be easily and distinctly heard by people
sitting on the highest row of seats now visible, which cannot, I fancy,
have been far from the original top of the house. Such a thing were
impossible where thirty thousand people, or a crowd approaching that
number, were seated. We hear, however, that the old actors had recourse to
various artificial means of increasing the range of their voices, which
shows that in some theatres the difficulty was felt; and in the extant
plays, _asides_ are so rare(46) that it must have been difficult to give
them with effect.
In one respect, however, the voice must have been more easily heard
through the old house than it now is through the ruins. The back of the
stage was built up with a high wooden structure to represent fixed scenes,
and even a sort of upper story on which gods and flying figures sometimes
appeared—an arrangement which of course threw the voice forward into the
theatre. There used to be an old idea, not perhaps yet extinct, that the
Greek audiences had the lovely natural scenery of their country for their
stage decoration, and that they embraced in one view the characters on the
stage, and the coasts and islands for miles behind them. Nothing can be
more absurd, or more opposed to Greek feeling on such matters. In the
first place, as is well known, a feeling for the beauty of landscape as
such was almost foreign to the Greeks, who never speak of the picturesque
in their literature without special relation to the sounds of nature, or
to the intelligences which were believed to pervade and animate it: a fine
view as such had little attraction for them. In the second place, they
came to the theatre to enjoy poetry, and the poetry of character, of
passion, of the relation of man and his destiny to the course of Divine
Providence and Divine justice—in short, to assume a frame of mind
perfectly inconsistent with the distractions of landscape. For that
purpose they had their stage, as we now know, filled in at the back with
high painted scenes, which in earlier days were made of light woodwork and
canvas, to bear easy removal, or change, but which in most Græco-Roman
theatres, like the very perfect one at Aspendus, or indeed that of Herodes
Atticus close by at Athens, were a solid structure of at least two stories
high, which absolutely excluded all prospect.
But even had the Athenians not been protected by this arrangement from
outer disturbance, I found by personal investigation that there was no
view for them to enjoy! Except from the highest tiers, and therefore from
the worst places, the sea and islands are not visible, and the only view
to be obtained, supposing that houses did not obstruct it, would have been
the dull, somewhat bleak, undulating hills which stretch between the
theatre and Phalerum.
The back scenes of the Greek theatres were painted as ours are, and at
first, I suppose, very rudely indeed, for we hear particularly of a
certain Agatharchus, who developed the art of scene-painting by adopting
perspective.(47) The other appurtenances of the Greek theatre were equally
rude, or perhaps I should say equally stiff and conventional, and removed
from any attempt to reproduce ordinary life—at least this was the case
with their tragedy, their satyric dramas, and their older comedy, which
dealt in masks, in fixed stage dresses, in tragic padding, and
stuffing-out to an unnatural size, in comic distortions and indecent
emblems—in all manner of conventional ugliness, we should say, handed down
from the first religious origin of these performances, and maintained with
that strict conservatism which marks the course of all great Greek art.
The stage was long and narrow, the means of changing scenes cumbrous and
not frequently employed; the number of the actors in tragedy strictly
limited—four is an unusual number, exceptionally employed in the second
_Œdipus_ of Sophocles. In fact, we cannot say that the Greek drama ever
became externally like ours till the comedies of Menander and his school.
These poets, living in an age when serious interests had decayed, when
tragedy had ceased to be religious, and comedy political, when neither was
looked upon any longer as a great public engine of instruction or of
censure, turned to pictures of social life, not unlike our genteel comedy;
and in this species of drama we may assert that the Greeks, except perhaps
for masks, imitated the course of ordinary life.
It is indeed said of Euripides, the real father of this new comedy, that
he brought down the tragic stage from ideal heroism to the passions and
meannesses of ordinary men; and Sophocles, his rival, the supposed
perfection of an Attic tragedian, is reputed to have observed that he
himself had represented men as they ought to be, Euripides as they were.
But any honest reader of Euripides will see at once how far he too is
removed from the ordinary realisms of life. He saw, indeed, that human
passion is the subject, of all others, which will permanently interest
human thought; he felt that the insoluble problems of Free Will and Fate,
of the mercy and the cruelty of Providence, were too abstract on the one
hand, and too specially Greek on the other; that, after all, human nature
as such is the great universal field on which any age can reach the
sympathy and the interest of its remotest successors. But the passions
painted by Euripides were no ordinary passions—they were great and
unnatural crimes, forced upon suffering mortals by the action of hostile
deities; the virtues of Euripides were no ordinary virtues—they were great
heroic self-sacrifices, and showed the Divine element in our nature, which
no tyranny of circumstances can efface. His Phædra and Medea on the one
hand, his Alcestis and Iphigenia on the other, were strictly characters as
they ought to be in tragedy, and not as they commonly are in life; and in
outward performance Euripides did not depart from the conventional
stiffness, from the regular development, from the somewhat pompous and
artificial dress in which tragedy had been handed down to him by his
masters.
They, too, had not despised human nature—how could they? Both Æschylus and
Sophocles were great painters of human character, as well in its passions
as in its reasonings. But the former had made it accessory, so to speak,
to the great religious lessons which he taught; the latter had at least
affected to do so, or imagined that he did, while really the labyrinths of
human character had enticed and held him in their endless maze. Thus, all
through Greek tragedy there was on the one hand a strong element of
conventional stiffness, of adherence to fixed subjects, and scenes, and
masks, and dresses—of adherence to fixed metres, and regular dialogues,
where question and answer were balanced line for line, and the cast of
characters was as uniform as it is in the ordinary Italian operas of our
own day. But on the other hand, these tragic poets were great masters of
expression, profound students not only of the great world problems, but of
the problems of human nature, exquisite masters too of their language, not
only in its dramatic force, but in its lyric sweetness; they summed up in
their day all that was great and beautiful in Greek poetry, and became the
fullest and ripest fruit of that wonderful tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, which even now makes those that taste it to be as gods.
Such, then, were the general features of the tragedy which the Athenian
public, and the married women, including many strangers, assembled to
witness in broad daylight under the Attic sky. They were not sparing of
their time. They ate a good breakfast before they came. They ate
sweetmeats in the theatre when the acting was bad. Each play was short,
and there was doubtless an interval of rest. But it is certain that each
poet contended as a rule with four plays against his competitors; and as
there were certainly three of them, there must have been twelve plays
acted; this seems to exceed the endurance of any public, even allowing two
days for the performance. We are not fully informed on these points. We do
not even know how Sophocles, who contended with single plays, managed to
compete against Euripides, who contended with sets of four. But we know
that the judges were chosen by lot, and we strongly suspect, from the
records of their decisions, that they often decided wrongly. We also know
that the poets sought to please the audience by political and patriotic
allusions, and to convey their dislike of opposed cities or parties by
drawing their representatives in odious colors on the stage. Thus
Euripides is never tired of traducing the Spartans in the character of
Menelaus. Æschylus fights the battle of the Areopagus in his _Eumenides_.
But besides all this, it seems that tragic poets were regarded as the
proper teachers of morality, and that the stage among the Greeks occupied
somewhat the place of the modern pulpit. This is the very attitude which
Racine assumes in the Preface to his _Phèdre_. He suggests that it ought
to be considered the best of his plays, because there is none in which he
has so strictly rewarded virtue and punished vice.(48) He alters, in his
_Iphigénie_, the Greek argument from which he copied, because as he tells
us (again in the Preface) it would never do to have so virtuous a person
as Iphigenia sacrificed. This, however, would not have been a
stumbling-block to the Greek poet, whose capricious and spiteful gods, or
whose deep conviction of the stain of an ancestral curse, would justify
catastrophies which the Christian poet, with his trust in a benevolent
Providence, could not admit. But, indeed, in most other points the
so-called imitations of the Greek drama by Racine and his school are
anything but imitations. The main characters and the general outline of
the plot are no doubt borrowed. The elegance and power of the dialogue are
more or less successfully copied. But the natural and familiar scenes,
which would have been shocking to the court of Louis XIV.—“ces scenes
entremêlées de bas comique, et ces fréquents exemples de mauvais ton et
d’une familiarité choquante,” as Barthélémy says—such characters as the
guard in the _Antigone_, the nurse in the _Choephorœ_, the Phrygian in the
_Orestes_, were carefully expunged. Moreover, love affairs and court
intrigues were everywhere introduced, and the language was never allowed
to descend from its pomp and grandeur. Most of the French dramatists were
indeed bad Greek scholars,(49) and knew the plays from which they copied
either through very poor translations, or through the rhetorical
travesties surviving under the name of Seneca, which were long thought
fully equal to the great and simple originals.
So the French of the seventeenth century, starting from these
half-understood models, and applying rigidly the laws of tragedy which
they had deduced, with questionable logic, from that very untrustworthy
guide, our text of the _Poetics_ of Aristotle, created a drama which
became so unlike what it professed to imitate, that most good modern
French critics have occupied themselves with showing the contrasts of old
Greek tragedy to that of the modern stage. They are always praising the
_naiveté_, the familiarity, the irregularity of the old dramatists; they
are always noting touches of common life and of ordinary motive quite
foreign to the dignity of Racine, and Voltaire, and Alfieri.(50) They
think that the real parallel is to be found not among them, but in
Shakespeare. Thus their education makes them emphasize the very qualities
which we admit, but should not cite, as the peculiarities of Greek
tragedy. _We_ are rather struck with its conventionalities, with its
strict adherence to fixed form, with its somewhat stilted diction, and we
wonder how it came to be so great and natural within these trammels.
Happily the tendency in our own day to reproduce antiquity faithfully, and
not in modern recasting, has led to the translating, and even to the
representing, of Greek tragedies in their purity, and it does not require
a knowledge of Greek to obtain some real acquaintance with these great
masterpieces. Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Dean Milman, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr.
Whitelaw, and many others, have placed faithful and elegant versions
within our reach. But since I have cautioned the reader not versed in
Greek against adopting Racine’s or Alfieri’s plays as adequate
substitutes, I venture to give the same advice concerning the more Greek
and antique plays of Mr. Swinburne, which, in spite of their splendor, are
still not really Greek plays, but modern plays based on Greek models. The
relief produced by ordinary talk from ordinary characters, which has been
already noticed, is greatly wanting in his very lofty, and perhaps even
strained, dialogue. Nor are his choruses the voice of the vulgar public,
combining high sentiments with practical meanness, but elaborate and very
difficult speculations, which comment metaphysically on the general
problems of the play. There is nothing better worth reading than the
_Atalanta in Calydon_. The Greek scholar sees everywhere how thoroughly
imbued the author is with Greek models. But it will not give to the mere
English reader any accurate idea of a real Greek tragedy. He must go to
_Balaustion’s Adventure_, or _Aristophanes’s Apology_, or some other
professed translation, and follow it line for line, adding some such
general reviews as the _Etudes_ of M. Patin.
As for revivals of Greek plays, it seems to me not likely that they will
ever succeed. The French imitations of Racine laid hold of the public
because they were not imitations. And as for us nowadays, who are more
familiar with the originals, a faithless reproduction would shock us,
while a literal one would weary us. This at least is the effect which the
_Antigone_ produces, even with the modern choruses of Mendelssohn to
relieve the slowness of the action. But, of course, a reproduction of the
old chorus would be simply impossible. The whole pit in the theatre of
Dionysus seems to have been left empty. A part somewhat larger than our
orchestra was covered with a raised platform, though still lower than the
stage.(51) Upon this the chorus danced and sang and looked on at the
actors, as in the play within the play in _Hamlet_. Above all, they
constantly prayed to their gods, and this religious side of the
performance has of course no effect upon us.(52)
As to old Attic comedy, it would be even more impossible to recover it for
a modern public. Its local and political allusions, its broad and coarse
humor, its fantastic dresses, were features which made it not merely
ancient and Greek, but Athenian, and Athenian of a certain epoch. Without
the Alexandrian scholiasts, who came in time to recover and note down most
of the allusions, these comedies would be to the Greek scholar of to-day
hardly intelligible. The new Attic comedy, of which Terence is a copy, is
indeed on a modern basis, and may be faithfully reproduced, if not
admired, in our day. But here, alas! the great originals of Menander,
Philemon, and Diphilus are lost to us, and we must be content with the
Latin accommodations.
But I have delayed too long over these Greek plays, and must apologize for
leading away the reader from the actual theatre in which he is sitting.
Yet there is hardly a place in Athens which calls back the mind so
strongly to the old days, when all the crowd came jostling in, and settled
down in their seats, to hear the great novelties of the year from
Sophocles or Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals and
claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the supporters of the old, and
the lovers of the new, devotees and skeptics, wondering foreigners and
self-complacent citizens. They little thought how we should come, not only
to sit in the seats they occupied, but to reverse the judgments which they
pronounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, of
passion, and of pride.
Plato makes Socrates say, in his _Apologia_ (_pro vita sua_), that a copy
of Anaxagoras could be bought on the orchestra, when very dear, for a
drachme, that is to say for about 9d. of our money, which may then have
represented our half-crown or three shillings in value.(53) The
commentators have made desperate attempts to explain this. Some say the
orchestra was used as a book-stall when plays were not going on—an
assumption justified by no other hint in Greek literature. Others have far
more absurdly imagined that Plato really meant you could pay a drachme for
the best seat in the theatre, and read the writings of Anaxagoras in a
fashionable play of Euripides, who was his friend and follower. Verily a
wonderful interpretation!
If the reader will walk with me from the theatre of Dionysus past the
newly excavated site of the temple of Æsculapius, and past the Roman-Greek
theatre which was erected by Hadrian or Herodes Atticus, I will show him
what Plato meant. Of course, this later theatre, with its solid Roman back
scenes of masonry, is equally interesting with the Theatre of Dionysus to
the advocates of the unity of history! But to us who are content to study
Greek Athens, it need not afford any irrelevant delays. Passing round the
approach to the Acropolis, we come on to a lesser hill, separated from it
by a very short saddle, so that it looks like a sort of outpost or spur
sent out from the rock of the Acropolis. This is the Areopagus—Mars’
Hill—which we can ascend in a few minutes. There are marks of old
staircases cut in the rock. There are underneath, on our left and right,
as we go up, deep black caverns, once the home of the Eumenides. On the
flat top there are still some signs of a rude smoothing of the stone for
seats. Under us, to the north-west, is the site of the old _agora_, once
surrounded with colonnades, the crowded market-place of all those who
bought and sold and talked. But on the descent from the Areopagus, and,
now at least, not much higher than the level of the market-place beneath,
there is a small semicircular platform, backed by the rising rock. This,
or some platform close to it, which may now be hidden by accumulated soil,
was the old _orchestra_, possibly the site of the oldest theatre, but in
historical times a sort of reserved platform, where the Athenians, who had
their town bristling with statues, allowed no monument to be erected save
the figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton, which were carried into Persia,
replaced by others, afterwards recovered, and of which we may have a copy
in the two fighting figures, of archaic character, now in the Museum of
Naples. It was doubtless on this orchestra, just above the bustle and
thoroughfare of the _agora_, that booksellers kept their stalls, and here
it was that the book of Anaxagoras could be bought for a drachme.
Here then was the place where that physical philosophy was disseminated
which first gained a few advanced thinkers; then, through Euripides,
leavened the drama, once the exponent of ancient piety; then, through the
stage, the Athenian public, till we arrive at those Stoics and Epicureans
who came to teach philosophy and religion not as a faith, but as a system,
and to spend their time with the rest of the public in seeking out
novelties of creed and of opinion as mere fashions with which people
choose to dress their minds. And it was on this very Areopagus, where we
are now standing, that these philosophers of fashion came into contact
with the thorough earnestness, the profound convictions, the red-hot zeal
of the Apostle Paul. The memory of that great scene still lingers about
the place, and every guide will show you the exact place where the Apostle
stood, and in what direction he addressed his audience. There are, I
believe, even some respectable commentators, who transfer their own
estimate of S. Paul’s importance to the Athenian public, and hold that it
was before the _court_ of the Areopagus that he was asked to expound his
views.(54) This is more than doubtful. The _blases_ philosophers, who
probably yawned over their own lectures, hearing of a new lay preacher,
eager to teach and apparently convinced of the truth of what he said,
thought the novelty too delicious to be neglected, and brought him
forthwith out of the chatter and bustle of the crowd, probably past the
very orchestra where Anaxagoras’s books had been proselytizing before him,
and where the stiff old heroes of Athenian history stood, a monument of
the escape from political slavery. It is even possible that the curious
knot of idlers did not bring him higher than this platform, which might
well be called part of Mars’ Hill. But if they choose to bring him to the
top, there was no hindrance, for the venerable court held its sittings in
the open air, on stone seats; and when not thus occupied the top of the
rock may well have been a convenient place of retirement for people who
did not want to be disturbed by new acquaintances and the constant eddies
of new gossip in the market-place.
[Illustration: Mars’ Hill, Athens]
It is, however, of far less import to know on what spot of the Areopagus
Paul stood, than to understand clearly what he said, and how he sought to
conciliate as well as to refute the philosophers who, no doubt, looked
down upon him as an intellectual inferior. He starts naturally enough from
the extraordinary crowd of votive statues and offerings, for which Athens
was remarkable above all other cities of Greece. He says, with a touch of
irony, that he finds them very religious indeed,(55) so religious that he
even found an altar to a God professedly _unknown_, or perhaps
unknowable.(56) Probably S. Paul meant to pass from the latter sense of
the word _ἄγνωστος_, which was, I fancy, what the inscription meant, to
the former, which gave him an excellent introduction to his argument. Even
the use of the singular may have been an intentional variation from the
strict text, for Pausanias twice over speaks of altars to the gods who are
called the _ἄγνωστοι_ (or mysterious), but I cannot find any citation of
the inscription in the singular form. However that may be, our version
does not preserve the neatness of S. Paul’s point: “I find an altar,” he
says, “to an unknown God. Whom then ye unknowingly worship, Him I announce
to you.” But then he develops a conception of the great One God, not at
all from the special Jewish, but from the Stoic point of view. He was
preaching to Epicureans and to Stoics—to the advocates of prudence as the
means, and pleasure as the end, of a happy life, on the one hand; on the
other, to the advocates of duty, and of life in harmony with the
Providence which governs the world for good. There could be no doubt to
which side the man of Tarsus must incline. Though the Stoics of the
market-place of Athens might be mere dilettanti, mere talkers about the
_ἀγαθόν_ and the great soul of the world, we know that this system of
philosophy produced at Tarsus as well as at Rome the most splendid
constancy, the most heroic endurance—I had almost said the most Christian
benevolence. It was this stern and earnest theory which attracted all
serious minds in the decay of heathenism.
Accordingly, S. Paul makes no secret of his sympathy with its nobler
features. He describes the God whom he preaches as the benevolent Author
of the beauty and fruitfulness of Nature, the great Benefactor of mankind
by His providence, and not without constant and obtrusive witnesses of His
greatness and His goodness. But he goes much further, and treads close
upon the Stoic pantheism when he not only asserts, in the words of Aratus,
that we are His offspring, but that “in Him we live, and move, and have
our being.”
His first conclusion, that the Godhead should not be worshipped or even
imaged in stone or in bronze, was no doubt quite in accordance with more
enlightened Athenian philosophy. But it was when he proceeded to preach
the Resurrection of the Dead, that even those who were attracted by him,
and sympathized with him, turned away in contempt. The Epicureans thought
death the end of all things. The Stoics thought that the human soul, the
offspring—nay, rather an offshoot—of the Divine world-soul, would be
absorbed into its parent essence. Neither could believe the assertion of
S. Paul. When they first heard him talk of _Jesus_ and _Anastasis_ they
thought them some new pair of Oriental deities. But when they learned that
Jesus was a man ordained by God to judge the world, and that Anastasis was
merely the Anastasis of the dead, they were greatly disappointed; so some
mocked, and some excused themselves from further listening.
Thus ended, to all appearance ignominiously, the first heralding of the
faith which was to supplant all the temples and altars and statues with
which Athens had earned its renown as a beautiful city, which was to
overthrow the schools of the sneering philosophers, and even to remodel
all the society and the policy of the world. And yet, in spite of this
great and decisive triumph of Christianity there was something curiously
prophetic in the contemptuous rejection of its apostle at Athens. Was it
not the first expression of the feeling which still possesses the visitor
who wanders through its ruins, and which still dominates the educated
world?—the feeling that while other cities owe to the triumph of
Christianity all their beauty and their interest, Athens has to this day
resisted this influence; and that while the Christian monuments of Athens
would elsewhere excite no small attention, here they are passed by as of
no import compared with its heathen splendor.(57) There are very old and
very beautiful little churches in Athens, “ces délicieuses petites églises
byzantines,” as M. Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, and unlike
what one generally sees in Europe. They strike the observer with their
quaintness and smallness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model of
that unique and splendid building, the cathedral of S. Mark at Venice. But
yet it is surprising how little we notice them at Athens. I was even
told—I sincerely hope it was false—that public opinion at Athens was
gravitating toward the total removal of one, and that the most perfect, of
these churches, which stands in the middle of a main street, and so breaks
the regularity of the modern boulevard! Let us hope that the man who
lashes himself into rage at the destruction of the Venetian tower may set
his face in time against this real piece of barbarism, if indeed it ever
ventures to assert itself in act.(58)
I have now concluded a review of the most important old Greek buildings to
be seen about Athens. To treat them exhaustively would require a far
longer discussion, or special knowledge which I do not possess; and there
are, moreover, smaller buildings, like the so-called Lantern of
Demosthenes, which is really the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, and the
Temple of the Winds, which are well worth a visit, but which the traveller
can find without a guide, and study without difficulty. But incompleteness
must be an unavoidable defect in describing any city in which new
discoveries are being made, I may say, monthly, and when the museums and
excavations of to-day may be any day completely eclipsed by materials now
unknown, or scattered through the country. Thus, on my second visit to
Athens, I found in the National Bank the wonderful treasures exhumed by
Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, which are in themselves enough to induce any
student of Greek antiquity to revisit the town, however well he may have
examined it in former years. On my third visit, they were arranged and
catalogued, but we have not yet attained to any certainty about the race
that left them there, and how remote the antiquity of the tombs. These
considerations tend not only to vindicate the inadequateness of this
review, but perhaps even to justify it in the eyes of the exacting reader,
who may have expected a more thorough survey.