what the whole of Greece had been suffering during its long-protracted
and painful existence in the middle ages, at a time when Italy, having
wrought for itself a new character and language by admixture with
Lombard blood, was performing a principal part in the great drama then
opening of modern European civilisation. The Greeks have preserved their
historical continuity and their language, without a gap, up to the
present moment; but for this privilege—if, indeed, it shall prove to be
one—they have paid dearly. Better were it, one sometimes thinks, that
the whole Hellenic race had been swallowed up by those devastating
swarms of Slavonic and other barbarians who now people great part of
European Turkey, than to have prolonged such centuries of gilded
decrepitude as we see in the later history of Byzantium, and to have
been trampled under foot, shorn, and bled by contending races of foreign
masters, in the manner exhibited by the medieval rulers of Peloponnesus,
and other parts of Greece proper. Whoso wishes to weep for the fortunes
of a people, whose character is seldom judged with much Christian
charity, will look into the stern, darkly-glowing pages of Professor
Fallmerayer, or the more calm, sober, and philosophic chapters of our
countryman George Finlay, and he will not remain unmoved.[8] No man who
knows what the Greeks have suffered from the days of sanguinolent Sylla
until now, will speak against the Greeks. One wonders how a single blade
of green grass should be found growing on a soil where, for many
centuries, it seemed to rain blood and stones upon a race doomed by
Heaven to be exterminated. Professor Fallmerayer, as is well known, goes
so far as to say that the Greek race actually is exterminated—that there
are literally at this moment no Greeks in Greece:[9] but the existence
of one common Greek language in all the countries anciently inhabited by
the Hellenes is a pretty strong proof, that, however much Slavonic and
Albanian blood may have been imported into Greece, there must have been
an equally strong Greek element remaining behind to Hellenise the
importation. As for Athens, amid the general black and fiery devastation
that possessed subjugated Greece, it continued to present such various
phases of lovely decay, genteel decadence, and even fitful flushes of
prosperity, without health, as became the metropolis of ancient taste
and science. Rome, upon the whole, behaved handsomely enough to her
beautiful slave. The Emperor Hadrian, who, like our Queen Victoria, was
given to perambulate his empire, visited Athens also, of course, and
bestowed on it many distinguished marks of his imperial favour, of which
not a few remain even to the present day. He went so far, indeed, in
improving a certain district of the city—the south-east quarter, towards
the Ilissus—that it went by his name so long as Roman memory lived upon
the spot; and the completion of the rich and lordly temple of Jupiter in
that region is attributed to him. Julian also, the Apostate, who was
educated there, with his fine pagan frenzy, could not be slow to
patronise the city of the heathen Muses; nay, even Alaric the Goth, who
sacked Lacedæmon, and annihilated Megalopolis, and who, by the base
treachery of Arcadius, the puny Emperor of the East, was made Roman
governor of those very Greek provinces which as a Goth he had
plundered,—this Christian scourge of Hellenic heathendom, when violating
the awful mystery of Eleusis and the sacred pomp of Olympia, left Athens
unscathed, and feared the gigantic image of the blue-eyed goddess that
looked down from the Acropolis. After the fall of the Western Empire,
when the dissolute Isaurian, Zeno, purchasing peace for the East,
delivered Italy to the Goths, Athens shared naturally in the decay which
affected all the provincial cities of the empire, under such a system of
centralised absolutism and fiscal oppression as was organised at
Byzantium. Nevertheless, we find that when, in the year 1204, the
Byzantine Empire was suspended for a season, and large portions of it
separated for ever from the centre of authority, Athens became the
capital of one of the most flourishing branches of the Frankish Empire;
and under the government, first of the Burgundian family of La Roche,
then of the Sicilian branch of Arragon, and, lastly, of the Acciauoli, a
family of rich merchants from Florence, enjoyed a degree of material
prosperity, which the general haze through which the eye is apt to view
medieval history seldom allows us distinctly to discern. On this subject
Mr Finlay has some remarks, which many of our readers will see with
interest.
“It is usual,” says he, “to suppose that Athens was a miserable and
decayed town during the whole period of the middle ages, and that
Attica then offered the same barren, treeless, and unimprovable aspect
which it now does as a European kingdom. Such, however, was not the
case: the social civilisation of the inhabitants, and their ample
command of the necessaries and many of the luxuries of life, was in
those days as much superior to the condition of the citizens of Paris
and London, as they are now inferior. The Spaniard Montaner, who was
well acquainted with all the rich countries round the Mediterranean,
then the most flourishing portion of the globe, and who was familiar
with the most magnificent courts of Europe, says that the dukes of
Athens were among the greatest princes who did not possess the title
of king. He has left us a description of the court of Athens, which
gives us a high idea of its magnificence; and he declares that the
nobles of the duchy then spoke as good French as the Parisians
themselves. The city was large and wealthy, the country thickly
covered with villages, of which the ruins may still be traced in spots
affording no indication of Hellenic sites. Aqueducts and cisterns then
gave fertility to land now unproductive: olive, almond, and fig trees
were intermingled with vineyards, and orchards covered ground now
reduced by the want of irrigation to yield only scanty pasturage to
the flocks of nomade shepherds. The valonia, the cotton, the silk, and
the leather of Attica then supplied native manufactories, and the
surplus commanded a high price in the European markets. The trade of
Athens was considerable, and the luxury of the Athenian ducal court
was celebrated in all the regions of the West, where chivalry
flourished.”
This extract is uncommonly interesting, as it shows us not only what was
done in the past of Athens, but what may be done in the future. But
whatever prosperity Athens might have enjoyed under the Frankish dukes
was merely temporary; for these dynasties, having no firm root in the
country, fell by degrees, one after another, into the condition of
ill-governed European dependencies, or of conquered countries governed
by foreign rulers for selfish purposes. The wisdom of popular
conciliation exercised by most of the early Frankish princes in Greece,
as a matter of necessity, on their first entrance into possession,
became forgotten when their power seemed firmly established. Part of
their kingdoms—in Peloponnesus, for instance—were at an early period
resumed by the decadent Byzantine government, which, whatever faults it
had, certainly possessed in no ordinary degree the virtue of an
obstinate vitality; and all of them were so cruelly oppressed by their
unprincipled governors, that when the Turks appeared in Europe, many
Greeks looked upon their now greatest enemies as their best friends. In
the year 1456, three years after the capture of Constantinople, Athens
was Turkish, and remained so till the late war, notwithstanding more
than one attempt of the Venetians to make themselves masters of the
place. In one of these attempts their admiral threw a bomb into the
Acropolis, which reduced the then almost entire Parthenon to its present
state of beautiful dilapidation. This happened in the year 1686. What
Athens was under the Turks, before the ravages of the Liberation War,
during the course of which it was always a most important, and, at the
same time, a very exposed point, is thus described by a German traveller
in the year 1810:—
“Athens is a town of considerable extent and population,[10] and
surrounded with a wall. The houses are bad, and stand without order in
the narrow streets. The Turks have several mosques and public baths
here; the Greeks a good many churches, cloisters, and chapels.
Fragments of pillars and statues are found everywhere. The Turks have
very recently made lime of some of the finest works of Greek art. The
Acropolis is now a fortress. The garrison consists of a few Turks, who
live there with their families, and are called Castriasni, or soldiers
of the fort. The fortifications are bad. The Parthenon is a ruin. The
Temple of Theseus is entire, and used as a Greek church dedicated to
St George. The Tower of the Winds is used as an oratory for the
dervishes. The country round Attica is dry and bare. The city itself
is under the protection of the Kislar Aga, and is treated mildly by
the Turks. Of the three harbours which Athens once had, the Piræus,
under the name of Porto Leone, or Porto Draco, is the only one now
used. In the place of the magnificent temples and porticoes once found
there, there are seen only a few miserable huts, a tottering booth of
customs, a cloister dedicated to St Spiridin, and a few ruins of a
theatre.”[11]
In the above remarks we have taken a large sweep of time hastily under
our view; but the subject is a curious one; and next to the capital of
Bavaria there is, at the present moment, no European city on which the
last twenty years have made such a change as on Athens. Unreasonable and
ill-informed tourists will, of course, visit that city with unreasonable
expectations, and be disappointed; but they who start from Mr
Wordsworth’s position in 1836, and with some such historical review as
we have just given, will be astonished. Athens is now a flourishing,
elegant, and, in some important respects, altogether unique capital,
containing a population of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants. This,
indeed, is not a rise, since Ukert’s times, equal to the marvellous
increase in the population of Manchester and Glasgow within the present
century; but it is something very notable, and something that looks out
into the immediate future with a significance scarcely less attractive
than the strange and various past out of which it has sprung. There are
two races that have marched out of the past into the present, carrying
with them a yet unsolved problem in their existence—the Jews and the
Greeks. Providence may yet have in store some worthy work for both. At
all events, so long as they exist curiosity cannot sleep.
We do not know who it was that first called Edinburgh the “Modern
Athens,” but the designation, topographically at least, is not without a
great truth. The situation of our fair metropolis is, in several most
important respects, very similar to that of the real Athens; and the
prominent points of the one may serve as an admirable analogical basis
for the comprehension of the prominent points of the other. There is a
sea in both adjacent, and a mountain view beyond; there is an abrupt
rock forming a natural fortress in the middle; there is a range of fine
mountains in the background, and prominent and picturesque hills in the
immediate vicinity. For the Firth of Forth, the capital of Greece has
the Saronic Gulf; for the coast of Fife, the mountain-coast of Argolis;
for Inchkeith, Ægina; for the Castle, the Acropolis; for the Pentland
Hills, Hymettus; for Arthur’s Seat, Lycabettus; and all this so nicely
correspondent that an expert teacher of geography might well use it as a
sort of _memoria technica_ for his scholars. Points of difference, of
course, there are also, and very marked ones too, some of which, when a
nice comparison is made, turn the balance in favour of the Athenian, and
others as strongly in favour of the Scottish capital. In favour of the
Greek landscape, the complete and well-defined background, formed by
Mount Pentelicus on the north-east, and the chain of Parnes, and other
connecting ridges to the north and north-west, deserves to be first
mentioned; for in the room of these Edinburgh has nothing to present but
the bare and dreary stretch of the Lammermoors. One must also confess
honestly, though a patriotic Scottish heart is loth to make such
admissions, that Inchkeith with its lighthouse is a very poor substitute
for Ægina with its Doric temple; while against Salamis in no view can we
dare to present the isle of Cramond. Largo Law, also, though it be very
beautiful, and becomes more beautiful the nearer you approach it, even
as backed by the Lomonds, and flanked by the Cleish Hills and Ben Cleugh
in the far west, is, when set against the grand ridge of lofty Argolic
mountains, apt to appear small. On the other hand, Edinburgh has a
decided advantage over Athens, and all other fair towns, that it is
built on a series of parallel ridges, with valleys between, which
present one part of the city in picturesque contrast to the other, and
at the same time open up a prospect various and wide in all directions,
from the midst of a city’s bustle into the green and blue quietude of
the country. There is no such ridge of elevated ground in Athens as that
on which Queen Street, George Street, and Princes Street stand; and even
the elevations which the Attic landscape presents have not been wisely
used in the construction of the modern city. All the heights over
against the Acropolis, the Hill of Philopappos, the Hill of Mars, the
Museum, and the Hill of the Nymphs, occupying as they do a situation
something corresponding to our Calton Hill in Edinburgh, and presenting
the finest architectural positions, form no part of the present city,
the principal part of which is crammed into the low ground which lies
between the Acropolis and the Academy—that is to say, following out our
analogy, occupies a situation corresponding to that part of the city of
Edinburgh which lies between the Castle and Arthur’s Seat, supposing the
ridge of the High Street altogether removed, and the level of the
Princes Street Gardens continued with a very gentle elevation towards
that hill and the adjacent heights, which occupy the position of the
fine conical hill hanging over Athens on the north-west, and now
acknowledged to be Lycabettus. As the modern city has been constructed,
there are only three points from which a free view into the open country
is obtainable,—the Acropolis, of course, being the first; the esplanade
to the north, where the two principal hotels are, being the second; and
the street before the palace of King Otho, between Lycabettus and the
Ilissus, being the third. This street, which at its south end assumes
the name of the Street Amalia, looks down upon the Temple of Jupiter in
the vale of the Ilissus, and beyond the Acropolis to the sea. On the
whole, therefore, though Attica presents a much finer landscape than
Mid-Lothian, Athens does not, and, even in its best days, never did
occupy an architectural position so magnificent as Edinburgh; not to
mention what we learn from the best authorities, that the ancient
classical city was grand only in its temples and public buildings,
whereas Edinburgh, as a princely mouth once uttered, is altogether a
city of palaces.
The present appearance of the city may be well gathered from the
description of a recent German traveller, from whose book we shall now
proceed to make a few characteristic extracts.
“Modern Athens lies altogether on the ground occupied by the ancient
city. No doubt this idea of making the capital of the modern city
identical with the ancient, went out from the brain of King Ludwig of
Bavaria. But this romantic sentimentality was a decided political
mistake. The original inhabitants of Athens planted themselves at a
certain distance from the sea,[12] on an island fortress, that they
might be safe from the attacks of the pirates, with whom the seas
were, in those early times, everywhere infested. At the present day no
such motive exists. The sea is the natural element of Greek life and
of Greek prosperity. The natural position for the capital of a kingdom
that depends for its advancement so much on trade and commerce, was
the Piræus, which Themistocles advised the ancient Athenians to look
upon as their real capital. Or, possibly, even any port of Attica may
be regarded as too much in a corner to present a position fit for the
capital of a compact Greek kingdom; and it is no doubt to be regarded
as a proof of the great wisdom of Capo d’Istria and the Venetians,
that they chose Nauplia, with its fine situation and beautiful
harbour, as the seat of their government. It is well known, also, that
the idea was at one time entertained of placing the capital of the new
kingdom on the rising ground which forms the isthmus of Corinth—a
situation which would have commanded both seas.
“Nevertheless the new city has risen up with an astonishing rapidity.
It contains some twenty thousand inhabitants,[13] and occupies a large
space of ground. Two principal streets, crossing one another at right
angles, run through the whole length and breadth of the city. Off from
these runs, in every possible relation of irregularity, a confused web
of streets, made for any purpose rather than beauty or convenience.
The one of these main streets, the street of Hermes, goes from west to
east, being the direct continuation of the road from Piræus to the
city, and ends in a beautiful square area, laid out in public gardens,
immediately in front of the palace. The street would be a perfect
straight line, open from the high ground on which the palace lies down
to the plain of the Piræus, were it not for the interposition of a
small old Byzantine church, which projects, about the middle of its
course, in such a manner as to cause a slight bend in the direction of
the street. The other main street leads from north to south. It has
received the name of the street of Aeolus, from the small tower of the
winds below the north base of the Acropolis, which is its southern
starting-point. The street is uneven in its level, but straight in its
direction; so that from every point of its length the Acropolis is
visible, closing the prospect to the south.
“In these two streets the real life of modern Athens is concentrated.
They are composed for the most part of elegant houses, generally of
two storeys high. Here there are glass windows—seldom found in the
minor streets—double-hinged doors, and balconies. In the street of
Aeolus are the principal coffeehouses and shops. And when the lounger
looks into the open barbers’ shops, which are found here in great
numbers, and are places of great resort, and beholds all the busy
processes of hat-making, shoe-making, and tailoring, which are here
exposed to public view on the ground-floor, without any notion of
concealment, he enjoys that same rich fulness of street life which
gives such a charm to Naples and other Italian cities; only here in
Athens everything is more motley and more glittering.
“The houses of the foreign ambassadors and the various government
offices, the bank, the university, are situated at some distance from
the busy hum of the street of Aeolus, on the gently-rising ground
towards Lycabettus, between the royal palace and the old Academy. This
is the fashionable quarter of Athens, being not the west end, as in
London, but the north-east quarter of the city.
“After having mastered these keys, so to speak, of the position, the
stranger may venture into the strange maze of short, crooked, and
narrow streets, of which the rest of the city is composed. But let a
man not venture rashly. Here there is no more neatness, no more
two-storeyed houses, with windows and balconies; everywhere are to be
seen miserable huts and cabins, meagrely composed of four walls
whitewashed, and covered with a light roof of tiles; a few openings
with wooden shutters serve at once as door, window, and chimney.
Causeway there is none; so if there happens to have been rain, or if
the sky takes a gusty fit, and the dust is driving—not at all uncommon
in this quarter—these troglodytes have a miserable lodgment. In the
midst of all this wretchedness, the high-sounding names, which are
stuck up on every street corner, have a burlesque effect. In the midst
of the strangest huddle of ill-built houses, and motley patchwork of
incoherent stones, you look up and find yourself surrounded by the
‘SENATE-HOUSE,’ the ‘PAINTED STOA,’ the ‘EPONYMIC HEROES,’ the tragic
‘TRIPODS,’ and the Council of the ‘AREOPAGUS,’—all in the most
classical Greek; and when these local associations fail, you find the
dirtiest lanes and vennels dignified with the names of Pericles and
Phidias, Praxiteles and Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This is
another manifestation of the same sort of beggarly pride, which
delights to stamp the children of modern Greek Christians with the
names of some old heathen heroic Epaminondas or Achilles.”
This witness is in the main true; though there are a few things in the
extract to which one might object, as proceeding from that
unsympathising critical spirit too common in these times, which delights
to pass itself off for cleverness. What harm, for instance, can there be
in the son of a modern Greek being called Achilles, any more than in a
modern dealer in old clothes being called Moses? Is it any burlesque
upon the good old president of the British round table, when there
happens to be an oldest son called Arthur in any reputable English
family now paying taxes to her Majesty? And is the sainted ghost of
Jeremiah the prophet insulted because there is a Dissenter of that name
who keeps a grocer’s shop in Beverley, or because Tom and Jerry once
walked the boards of the British stage profanely? As little offence is
there in the names of the streets, however humble some of them may now
be; for we have reason to hope, that as boys and trees grow bigger, so
these streets will grow more magnificent with years. Even Wellington’s
noble name does not always decorate a noble street in British towns; and
Princes Street in Aberdeen does not look so royal by any means as
Princes Street in Edinburgh. The real stumblingblock in these Athenian
streets is not in the names of Æschylus and Sophocles, Colocotroni,
Miaulis, and Lord Byron,[14] which are all well worthy of the sort of
immortality hereby conferred on them; but in those other names of
ancient places, chosen out of Pausanias, and put down where the
ill-informed archæologist now thinks that they ought to be, and where
the better-informed archæologist, some fifty years hence, will know that
they ought not. This archæological objection, by the way, and not any of
those political and commercial ones mentioned by Herr Hettner, is the
real strength of the objection to the present site of the capital of
Greece, which has been made by so many; for the present city being
built, not on the whole area certainly, but on the greater portion of
the ancient one, it follows that, till the new houses, which have been
raised so quickly on the foundations of old temples and porticoes, shall
have crumbled down by age, or be shaken down by an earthquake, the
snouts of zealous antiquaries are doomed to sniff about these famous
purlieus in vain;—a great loss, certainly, to the archæological
societies of the present age in Berlin, London, Munich, and elsewhere,
now so vigorous; but the Greeks will thereby keep their subterranean
treasures to themselves for another century at least, free from touch of
foreign mattock, by which time they may have somewhere to put them; for
at present the government has neither a museum to put ancient remains in
when found, nor money to pay for them—a state of matters which leads
even now sometimes to lamentable results, over which Professors Gerhard
and Panofka in Berlin must weep. But, after all, Canaris did not drive
his conquering fire-ships across the Archipelago, nor did Lord Byron
think it worth while to die poetically at Messolonghi, for the sake of
the archæologists. In choosing Athens as the site of the capital of the
new kingdom of Greece, the patriotic reminiscences of the Greek people
were no doubt as much consulted as the sentimental romance of Bavarian
Louis. If cats have a right to attach themselves to places, why not men?