ARACHOVA—DELPHI—THE BAY OF KIRRHA.
The pilgrim who went of old from Athens to the shrine of Delphi, to
consult the august oracle on some great difficulty in his own life, or
some great danger to his country, saw before him the giant Parnassus as
his goal, as soon as he reached the passes of Cithæron. For two or three
days he went across Bœotia with this great landmark before him, but it was
not till he reached Lebadea that he found himself leaving level roads, and
entering defiles, where great cliffs and narrow glens gave to his mind a
tone of superstition and of awe which ever dwelt around that wild and
dangerous country. Starting from Lebadea, or, by another road, from
Chæronea, he must go about half-way round Parnassus, from its east to its
south-west aspect; and this can only be done by threading his way along
torrents and precipices, mounting steep ascents, and descending into wild
glens. This journey among the Alps of Phocis is perhaps the most beautiful
in all Greece—certainly, with the exception of the journey from Olympia
over Mount Erymanthus, the most beautiful of all the routes known to me
through the highlands.
[Illustration: A Greek Shepherd, Olympia]
The old priests of Delphi, who were the first systematic road-builders
among the Greeks, had made a careful way from Thebes into Phocis, for the
use of the pilgrims thronging to their shrine. It appears that, by way of
saving the expense of paving it all, they laid down or macadamized in some
way a double wheel-track or fixed track, upon which chariots could run
with safety; but we hear from the oldest times of the unpleasantness of
two vehicles meeting on this road, and of the disputes that took place as
to which of them should turn aside into the deep mud.(110) We may infer
from this that the lot of pedestrians cannot have been very pleasant. Now,
all these difficulties have vanished with the road itself. There are
nothing but faintly-marked bridle-paths, often indicated only by the
solitary telegraph wires, which reach over the mountains, apparently for
no purpose whatever; and all travellers must ride or walk in single file,
if they will not force their way through covert and forest.
These wild mountains do not strike the mind with the painful feeling of
desolation which is produced by the abandoned plains. At no time can they
have supported a large population, and we may suppose that they never
contained more than scattered hamlets of shepherds, living, as they now
do, in deep brown hairy tents of hides at night, and wandering along the
glens by day, in charge of great herds of quaint-looking goats with long
beards and spiral horns. The dull tinkling of their bells, and the eagle’s
yelp, are the only sounds which give variety to the rushing of the wind
through the dark pines, and the falling of the torrent from the rocks. It
is a country in which the consciousness grows not of solitude, but of
smallness—a land of huge form and feature, meet dwelling for mysterious
god and gloomy giant, but far too huge for mortal man.
Our way lay, not directly for Delphi, but for the curious town of
Arachova, which is perched on the summit of precipices some 4000 feet or
more above the level of the sea. We rode from eight in the morning till
the evening twilight to reach this place, and all the day through scenes
which gave us each moment some new delight and some new astonishment, but
which could only be described by a painter, not by any pages of writing,
however poetical or picturesque. It is the misfortune of such descriptions
on paper, that the writer alone has the remembered image clear before him;
no reader can grasp the detail and frame for himself a faithful picture.
We felt that we were approaching Arachova when we saw the steep slopes
above and below our path planted with vineyards, and here and there a
woman in her gay dress working on the steep incline, where a stumble would
have sent her rolling many hundreds of feet into some torrent bed. At one
particular spot, where the way turned round a projecting shoulder, we were
struck by seeing at the same time, to the north, the blue sea under Eubœa,
and, at the south, the Gulf of Corinth where it nears Delphi—both mere
patches among the mountains, like the little tarns among the Irish moors,
but both great historic waters—old high roads of commerce and of culture.
From any of the summits such a view from sea to sea would not be the least
remarkable; but it was interesting and unusual to see it from a mule’s
back on one of the high roads of the country. A moment later, the houses
of Arachova itself attracted all our attention, lying as they did over
against us, and quite near, but with a great gulf between us and them,
which we were fortunately able to ride round. The town has a curious,
scattered appearance, with interrupted streets and uncertain plan, owing
not only to the extraordinary nature of the site, but to the fact that
huge boulders, I might say rocks, have been shaken loose by earthquakes
from above, and have come tumbling into the middle of the town. They crush
a house or two, and stand there in the street. Presently some one comes
and builds a house up against the side of this rock; others venture in
their turn, and so the town recovers itself, till another earthquake makes
another rent. Since 1870 these earthquakes have been very frequent. At
first they were very severe, and ruined almost all the town; but now they
are very slight, and so frequent that we were assured that they happened
at some hour _every day_. I believe this is practically true, though we,
who arrived in the evening and left early next day, were not so fortunate
as to feel the shock ourselves. But the whole region of Parnassus shows
great scars and wounds from this awful natural scourge.
Arachova is remarkable as being one of the very few towns of Greece of any
note which is not built upon a celebrated site. Everywhere the modern
Greek town is a mere survival of the old. I remember but three
exceptions—Arachova, Hydra, and Tripolitza,(111) and of these the latter
two arose from special and known circumstances. The prosperity of Arachova
is not so easily explicable. In spite of its wonderful and curious site,
the trade of the place is, for a Greek town, very considerable. The wines
which they make are of the highest repute, though to us the free use of
resin makes them all equally worthless. Besides, they work beautifully
patterned rugs of divers-colored wool—rugs which are sold at high prices
all over the Greek waters. They are used in boats, on saddles, on beds—in
fact for every possible rough use. The patterns are stitched on with wool,
and the widths sewn together in the same way, with effective rudeness.
We had an excellent opportunity of seeing all this sort of work, as we
found the town in some excitement at an approaching marriage; and we went
to see the bride, whom we found in a spacious room, with low wooden
rafters, in the company of a large party of her companions, and surrounded
on all sides by her dowry, which consisted, in eastern fashion, almost
altogether of “changes of raiment.” All round the room these rich woollen
rugs lay in perfect piles, and from the low ceiling hung in great numbers
her future husband’s white petticoats; for in that country, as everywhere
in Greece, the men wear the petticoats. The company were all dressed in
full costume—white sleeves, embroidered woollen aprons, gold and silver
coins about the neck, and a bright red loose belt worn low round the
figure. To complete the picture, each girl had in her left hand a distaff,
swathed about with rich, soft, white wool, from which her right hand and
spindle were deftly spinning thread, as she walked about the room admiring
the _trousseau_, and joking with us and with her companions. The beauty of
the Arachovite women is as remarkable as the strength and longevity of the
men, nor do I know any mountaineers equal to them, except those of some of
the valleys in the Tyrol. But there, as is well known, beauty is chiefly
confined to the men; at Arachova it seemed fairly distributed. We did not
see any one girl of singular beauty. The average was remarkably high; and,
as might be expected, they were not only very fair, but of that peculiarly
clear complexion, and vigorous frame, which seem almost always to be found
when a good climate and clear air are combined with a very high level
above the sea.
We saw, moreover, what they called a Pyrrhic dance, which consisted of a
string of people, hand-in-hand, standing in the form of a spiral, and
moving rhythmically, while the outside member of the train performed
curious and violent gymnastics. The music consisted in the squealing of a
horrible clarionette, accompanied by the beating of a large drum. The
clarionette-player had a leathern bandage about his mouth, like that which
we see in the ancient reliefs and pictures of double-flute-players.
According as each principal dancer was fatigued, he passed off from the
end of the spiral line, and stuck a silver coin between the cap and
forehead of the player. The whole motion was extremely slow throughout the
party—the centre of the coil, which is often occupied by little children,
hardly moving at all, and paying little attention to the dance.
In general, the Greek music which I heard—dance music, and occasional
shepherds’ songs—was nothing but a wild and monotonous chant, with two or
three shakes and ornaments on a high note, running down to a long drone
note at the end. They repeat these phrases, which are not more than three
bars long, over and over again, with some slight variations of
_appoggiatura_. I was told by competent people at Athens, that all this
was not properly Greek, but Turkish, and that the long slavery of the
Greeks had completely destroyed the traditions of their ancient music.
Though this seemed certainly true of the music which I heard, I very much
doubt that any ancient feature so general can have completely disappeared.
When there are national songs of a distinctly Greek character transmitted
all through the Slavish and Turkish periods, it seems odd that they should
be sung altogether to foreign music. Without more careful investigation I
should be slow to decide upon such a question. Unfortunately, our
specimens of old Greek music are very few, and probably very
insignificant, all the extant works on music by the ancients being devoted
to theoretical questions, which are very difficult and not very
profitable. To this subject I have devoted a special discussion in my
_Social Life in Greece_, with what illustration it is now possible to
obtain.
The inhabitants wished us to stay with them some days, which would have
given us an opportunity of witnessing the wedding ceremony, and also of
making excursions to the snowy tops of Mount Parnassus. But we had had
enough of that sort of amusement in a climb up Mount Ætna, a short time
before, and the five hours’ toiling on the snow in a thick fog was too
fresh in our memory. Beside, we were bound to catch the weekly steamer at
Itea, as the port of Delphi is now called; and eight additional days, or
rather nights, in this country might have been too much for the wildest
enthusiast. For the wooden houses of Arachova are beyond all other
structures infested with life, and not even the balconies in the frosty
night air were safe from insect invasions.
We therefore started early in the morning, and kept along the sides of
precipices on our way to the oracle of Delphi. It is not wonderful that
the Arachovites should be famous for superstitions and legends, and that
the inquirers into the remnants of old Greek beliefs in the present day
have found their richest harvest in this mountain fastness, where there
seems no reason why any belief should ever die out. More especially the
faith in the terrible god of the dead, Charos, who represents not only the
old Charon, but Pluto also, is here very deep-seated, and many Arachovite
songs and ballads speak of his awful and relentless visits. Longevity is
so usual, and old age is so hale and green in these Alps, that the death
of the young comes home with far greater force and pathos here than in
unhealthy or immoral societies, and thus the inroads of Charos are not
borne in sullen silence, but lamented with impatient complaints.
At eleven o’clock we came, in the fierce summer sun, to the ascent into
the “rocky Pytho,” where the terraced city of old had once harbored
pilgrims from every corner of the civilized world. The ordinary histories
which we read give us but little idea of the mighty influence of this
place in the age of its faith. We hear of its being consulted by Crœsus,
or by the Romans, and we appreciate its renown for sanctity; but until of
very late years there was small account taken of its political and
commercial importance. The date of its first rise is hidden in remote
antiquity. As the story goes, a shepherd, who fed his flocks here,
observed the goats, when they approached the vaporous cavern, springing
about madly, as if under some strange influence. He came up to see the
place himself, and was immediately seized with the prophetic frenzy. So
the reputation of the place spread, first around the neighboring pastoral
tribes, and then to a wider sphere.
This very possible origin, however, does not distinctly assert what may
certainly be inferred—I mean the existence of some older and ruder
worship, before the worship of Apollo was here established. Two arguments
make this clear. In the first place, old legends consistently speak of the
arrival of Apollo here; of his conflict with the powers of earth, under
the form of the dragon Python; of his having undergone purification for
its murder, and having been formally ceded possession by its older owners.
This distinct allusion to a previous cult, and one even hostile to Apollo,
but ultimately reconciled with him, is sustained by the fact that
Pausanias describes in the Temple of Apollo itself two old stones—one
apparently an aërolith—which were treated with great respect, anointed
daily with oil, and adorned with garlands of flowers. One of these was to
the Greeks the centre of the earth (_ὀμφαλός_), and beside it were two
eagles in gold, to remind one of the legend that Zeus had started two
eagles from the ends of the earth, and that they met at this exact spot
midway. These old and shapeless stories, which occur elsewhere in Greek
temples, point to the older stage of fetish worship, before the Greeks had
risen to the art of carving a statue, or of worshipping the unseen deity
without a gross material symbol.
The researches of M. A. Lebègue, at Delos, have given us another instance.
He found that the old shrine of Apollo has been made in imitation of a
cave, and that in the recess of the shrine, made with large slabs of stone
forming a gable over a natural fissure in the rock, there was an ancient,
rude, sacred stone, on which were remaining the feet of the statue, which
had afterward been added to give dignity to the improved worship. M.
Lebègue’s work at Delos has been completed and superseded by M. Homolle.
Homer speaks in the Iliad of the great wealth of the Pythian shrine; and
the Hymn to the Pythian Apollo implies that its early transformations were
completed. But seeing that the god Apollo, though originally an Ionian
god, as at Delos, was here worshipped distinctively by the Dorians, we
shall not err if we consider the rise of the oracle to greatness
coincident with the rise and spreading of the Dorians over Greece—an event
to which we can assign no date, but which, in legend, comes next after the
Trojan War, and seems near the threshold of real history. The absolute
submission of the Spartans, when they rose to power, confirmed the
authority of the shrine, and so it gradually came to be the Metropolitan
See, so to speak, in the Greek religious world. It seems that the
influence of this oracle was, in old days, always used in the direction of
good morals and of enlightenment. When neighboring states were likely to
quarrel, the oracle was often a peacemaker, and even acted as arbitrator—a
course usual in earlier Greek history, and in which they anticipated the
best results of our nineteenth-century culture. So again, when excessive
population demanded an outlet, the oracle was consulted as to the proper
place, and the proper leader to be selected; and all the splendid
commercial development of the sixth century B. C., though not produced,
was at least sanctioned and promoted, by the Delphic Oracle. Again, in
determining the worship of other gods and the founding of new services to
great public benefactors, the oracle seems to have been the acknowledged
authority—thus taking the place of the Vatican in Catholic Europe, as the
source and origin of new dogmas, and of new worships and formularies.
[Illustration: The Temple of Apollo, Delphi]
At the same time the treasure-house of the shrine was the largest and
safest of banks, where both individuals and states might deposit
treasure—nay, even the states seem to have had separate chambers—and from
which they could also borrow money, at fair interest, in times of war and
public distress. The rock of Delphi was held to be the navel or centre of
the earth’s surface, and certainly in a social and religious sense this
was the case for all the Greek world. Thus the priests were informed, by
perpetual visitors from all sides, of all the last news—of the general
aspect of politics—of the new developments of trade—of the latest
discoveries in outlying and barbarous lands—and were accordingly able,
without any genius or supernatural inspiration, to form their judgments
upon wider experience and better knowledge than anybody else could
command. This advice, which was really sound and well-considered, was
given to people who took it to be divine, and acted upon it with implicit
faith and zeal. Of course, the result was in general satisfactory; and so
even individuals made use of it as a sort of high confessional, to which
they came as pilgrims at some important crisis of their life; and finding
by the response that the god seemed to know all about the affairs of every
city, went away fully satisfied with the divine authority of the oracle.
This great and deserved general reputation was not affected by occasional
rumors of bribed responses or of dishonest priestesses. Such things must
happen everywhere; but, as Lord Bacon long ago observed, human nature is
more affected by affirmatives than negatives—that is to say, a few cases
of brilliantly accurate prophecy will outweigh a great number of cases of
doubtful advices or even of acknowledged corruption. So the power of the
Popes has lasted in some respects undiminished to the present day, and
they are still regarded by many as infallible, even though historians have
published many dreadful lives of some of them, and branded them as men of
worse than average morals.
The greatness and the national importance of the Delphic Oracle lasted
from the invasion of the Dorians down to the Persian War, certainly more
than three centuries; when the part which it took in the latter struggle
gave it a blow from which it seems never to have recovered. When the
invasion of Xerxes was approaching, the Delphic priests informed
accurately of the immense power of the Persians, made up their minds that
all resistance was useless, and counselled absolute submission or flight.
According to all human probabilities they were right, for nothing but a
series of blunders could possibly have checked the Persians. But surely
the god ought to have inspired them to utter patriotic responses, and thus
to save themselves in case of such a miracle as actually happened. I
cannot but suspect that they hoped to gain the favor of Xerxes, and remain
under him what they had hitherto been, a wealthy and protected
corporation.(112) Perhaps they even saw too far, and perceived that the
success of the Greeks would bring the Ionic states into prominence; but we
must not credit them with too much. The result, however, told greatly
against them. The Greeks won, and the Athenians got the lead,—the
Athenians, who very soon developed a secular and worldly spirit, and who
were by no means awed by responses which had threatened them and weakened
their hands, when their own courage and skill had brought them
deliverance. And we can imagine even Themistocles, not to speak of
Pericles and Antiphon, looking upon the oracles as little more than a
convenient way of persuading the mob to follow a policy which it was not
able to understand. The miraculous defeat of the Persians by the god, who
repeated his wonders when the Gauls attacked his shrine, should be read in
Herodotus and in Pausanias.
It is with some sadness that we turn from the splendid past of Delphi to
its miserable present. The sacred cleft in the earth, from which rose the
cold vapor that intoxicated the priestess, is blocked up and lost. As it
lay within the shrine of the temple, it may have been filled by the
falling ruins, or still more completely destroyed by an earthquake. But,
apart from these natural possibilities, we are told that the Christians,
after the oracle was closed by Theodosius, filled up and effaced the
traces of what they thought a special entrance to hell, where
communications had been held with the Evil One.
The three great fountains or springs of the town are still in existence.
The first and most striking of these bursts out from between the
Phædriades—two shining peaks, which stand up one thousand feet over
Delphi, and so close together as to leave only a dark and mysterious gorge
or fissure, not twenty feet wide, intervening. The aspect of these twin
peaks, so celebrated by the Greek poets, with their splendid stream, the
Castalian fount, bursting from between them, is indeed grand and
startling. A great square bath is cut in the rock, just at the mouth of
the gorge; but the earthquake of 1870, which made such havoc of Arachova,
has been busy here also, and has tumbled a huge block into this bath, thus
covering the old work, as well as several votive niches cut into the rocky
wall. This was the place where arriving pilgrims purified themselves with
hallowed water.
In the great old days the oracle gave responses on the seventh of each
month, and even then only when the sacrifices were favorable. If the
victims were not perfectly without blemish, they could not be offered; if
they did not tremble all over when brought to the altar, the day was
thought unpropitious. The inquirers entered the great temple in festal
dress, with olive garlands and _stemmata_, or fillets of wool, led by the
_ὅσιοι_, or sacred guardians of the temple, who were five of the noblest
citizens of Delphi. The priestesses, on the contrary—there were three at
the same time, who officiated in turn—though Delphians also, were not
frequently of noble family. When the priestess was placed on the sacred
tripod by the chief interpreter, or _προφήτης_, over the exhalations, she
was seized with frenzy—often so violent that the _ὅσιοι_ were known to
have fled in terror, and she herself to have become insensible, and to
have died. Her ravings in this state were carefully noted down, and then
reduced to sense, and of old always to verses, by the attendant priests,
who of course interpreted disconnected words with a special reference to
the politics or other circumstances of the inquirers.
This was done in early days with perfect good faith. During the decline of
religion there were of course many cases of corruption and of partiality,
and, indeed, the whole style and dignity of the oracle gradually decayed
with the decay of Greece itself. Presently, when crowds came, and states
were extremely jealous of the right of precedence in inquiring of the god,
it was found expedient to give responses every day, and this was done to
private individuals, and even for trivial reasons. So also the priests no
longer took the trouble to shape the responses into verse; and when the
Phocians in the sacred war (355–46 B. C.) seized the treasures, and
applied to military purposes some ten thousand talents, the shrine
suffered a blow from which it never recovered. Still, the quantity of
splendid votive offerings which were not convertible into ready money made
it the most interesting place in Greece, next to Athens and Olympia, for
lovers of the arts: and the statues, tripods, and other curiosities
described there by Pausanias, give a wonderful picture of the mighty
oracle even in its decay.(113) The greatest sculptors, painters, and
architects had lavished their labor upon the buildings. Though Nero had
carried off five hundred bronze statues, the traveller estimated the
remaining works of art at three thousand, and yet these seem to have been
almost all statues, and not to have included tripods, pictures, and other
gifts. The Emperor Constantine brought away (330 A. D.) a great number to
adorn his capital—more especially the bronze tripod, formed of three
intertwined serpents, with their heads supporting a golden vessel, which
Pausanias, the Spartan King, had dedicated as the leader of Greece to
commemorate the great victory over Xerxes. This tripod (which was found
standing in its place at Constantinople by our soldiers in 1852) contains
the list of states according to the account of Herodotus, who describes
its dedication, and who saw it at Delphi.
When the Emperor Julian, the last great champion of paganism, desired to
consult the oracle on his way to Persia, in 362 A. D., it replied: “Tell
the king the fair-wrought dwelling has sunk into the dust: Phœbus has no
longer a shelter or a prophetic laurel, neither has he a speaking
fountain; the fair water is dried up.” Thus did the shrine confess, even
to the ardent and hopeful Julian, that its power had passed away, and, as
it were by a supreme effort, declared to him the great truth which he
refused to see—that paganism was gone for ever, and a new faith had arisen
for the nations of the Roman Empire.
About the year 390, Theodosius took the god at his word, and closed the
oracle finally. The temple—with its cella of 100 feet—with its Doric and
Ionic pillars—with its splendid sculptures upon the pediments—sank into
decay and ruin. The walls and porticos tumbled down the precipitous
cliffs; the prophetic chasm was filled up by the Christians with fear and
horror; and, as if to foil any attempt to recover from ruins the site and
plan, the modern Greeks built their miserable hamlet of Castri upon the
spot; so that it is only among the walls and foundations laid bare by
earthquakes that we can now seek for marble capitals and votive
inscriptions.
One or two features are still unchanged. The three fine springs, to which
Delphi doubtless owed its first selection for human habitation, are still
there—Castalia, of which we have spoken; Cassotis, which was led
artificially into the very shrine of the god; and Delphussa, which was, I
suppose, the water used for secular purposes by the inhabitants. The
stadium, too, a tiny racecourse high above the town, in the only place
where they could find a level 150 yards, is still visible; and we see at
once what the importance of games must have been at a sacred Greek town,
when such a thing as a stadium should be attempted here.(114) The earliest
competitions had been in music—that is, in playing the lyre, in
recitation, and probably in the composition of original poems; but
presently the physical contests of Olympia began to outdo the splendor of
Delphi. Moreover, the Spartans would not compete in minstrelsy, which they
liked and criticised, but left to professional artists. Accordingly, the
priests of Delphi were too practical a corporation not to widen the
programme of their games, and Pindar has celebrated the Pythian victors as
hardly second to those at the grand festival of Elis.
There is yet one more element in the varied greatness of Delphi. It was
here that the religious federation of Greece—the Amphictyony of which we
hear so often—held its meetings alternately with the meetings at the
springs of Thermopylæ. When I stood high up on the stadium at Delphi, the
great scene described by the orator Æschines came fresh upon me, when he
looked upon the sacred plain of Krissa, and called all the worshippers of
the god to clear it of the sacrilegious Amphissians, who had covered it
with cattle and growing crops. The plain, he says, is easily surveyed from
the place of meeting—a statement which shows that the latter cannot have
been in the town of Delphi: for a great shoulder of the mountain
effectually hides the whole plain from every part of the town.
The Pylæa, or place of assembly, was, however, outside, and precisely at
the other side of this huge shoulder, so that what Æschines says is true;
but it is not true, as any ordinary student imagines, that he was standing
in Delphi itself. He was, in fact, completely out of sight of the town,
though not a mile from it. There is no more common error than this among
our mere book scholars—and I daresay there are not many who realize the
existence of this suburban Pylæa, and its situation close to, but
invisible from, Delphi. It certainly never came home to me till I began to
look for the spot from which Æschines might have delivered his famous
extempore address.
When we rode round to the real place we found his words amply verified.
Far below us stretched the plain from Amphissa to Kirrha, at right angles
with the gorge above which Delphi is situated. The river-courses of the
Delphic springs form, in fact, a regular zigzag. When they tumble from
their great elevation on the rocks into the valley, they join the
Pleistus, running at right angles toward the west; when this torrent has
reached the plain, it turns again due south, and flows into the sea at the
Gulf of Kirrha. Thus, looking from Pylæa, you see the upper part of the
plain, and the gorge to the north-west of it, where Amphissa occupies its
place in a position similar to the mouth of the gorge of Delphi. The
southern rocks of the gorge over against Delphi shut out the sea and the
actual bay; but a large rich tract, covered with olive-woods, and medlars,
and oleanders, stretches out beneath the eye—verily a plain worth fighting
for, and a possession still more precious, when it commanded the approach
of pilgrims from the sea; for the harbor duties and tolls of Kirrha were
once a large revenue, and their loss threatened the oracle with poverty.
This levying of tolls on the pilgrims to Delphi became quite a national
question in the days of Solon; it resulted in a great war, led by the
Amphictyonic Council. Kirrha was ruined, and its land dedicated to the
god, in order to protect the approach from future difficulties. So this
great tract was, I suppose, devoted to pasture, and the priests probably
levied a rent from the people who choose to graze their cattle on the
sacred plain. The Amphissians, who lived, not at the seaside, but at the
mountain side of the plain, were never accused of robbing or taxing the
pilgrims; but having acquired for many generations the right of pasture,
they advanced to the idea of tilling their pastures, and were undisturbed
in this privilege till the mischievous orator, Æschines, for his own
purposes, fired the Delphians with rage, kindled a war, and so brought
Philip into Greece. These are the historical circumstances which should be
called to mind by the traveller, who rides down the steep descent from
Delphi to the plain, and then turns through the olive-woods to the high
road to Itea, as the port of Delphi is now called.
A few hours brought us to the neighborhood of the sea. The most curious
feature of this valley, as we saw it, was a long string of camels tied
together, and led by a small and shabby donkey. Our mules and horses
turned with astonishment to examine these animals, which have survived
here only, though introduced by the Turks into many parts of Greece.
The port of Itea is one of the stations at which the Greek coasting
steamers now call, and, accordingly, the place is growing in importance.
If a day’s delay were allowed, to let tourists ride up to the old seat of
the oracle, and if the service were better regulated so as to compete in
convenience with the train journey from Patras to Athens, I suppose no
traveller going to Greece would choose any other route. For he would see
all the beautiful coasts of Acarnania and Ætolia on the one side, and of
Achaia on the other; he could then take Delphi on his way, and would land
again at Corinth. Here again, a day, or part of a day, should be allowed
to see the splendid Acro-Corinthus, of which more in another chapter. The
traveller might thus reach Athens with an important part of Greece already
visited, and have more leisure to turn his attention to the monuments and
curiosities of that city and of Attica. It is worth while to suggest these
things, because most men who go to Greece find, as I did, that, with some
better previous information, they could have economized both time and
money. I can also advise that the coasting steamer should be abandoned at
Itea, from which the traveller can easily get horses to Delphi and
Arachova, and from thence to Chæronea, Lebadea, and through Thebes to
Athens. So he would arrive there by a land tour, which would make him
acquainted with all Bœotia. He might next go by train from Athens to
Corinth (stopping on the way at Megara), and then into the Peloponnese;
going first to Mycenæ and Argos, and then taking another steamer round to
Sparta, and riding up through Laconia, Arcadia, and Elis, so as to come
out at Patras, or by boat to Zante, where the steamer homeward would pick
him up. Of course, special excursions through Attica, and to the islands,
are not included in this sketch, as they can easily be made from Athens.
But surely, no voyage in Greece can be called complete which does not
include a visit to the famous shrine of Delphi, where the wildness and
ruggedness of nature naturally suggest the powers of earth and air, that
sway our lives unseen—where the quaking soil and the rent rocks speak a
strength above the strength of mortal man—and where a great faith, based
upon his deepest hopes and fears, gained a moral empire over all the
nation, and exercised it for centuries, to the purifying and the ennobling
of the Hellenic race. The oracle is long silent, the priestess forgotten,
the temple not only ruined, but destroyed; and yet the grand responses of
that noble shrine are not forgotten, nor are they dead. For they have
contributed their part and added their element to the general advancement
of the world, and to the emancipation of man from immorality and
superstition into the true liberty of a good and enlightened conscience.