In The Levant

This sheepish remnant of the picturesque could not preserve for us any illusions; the roses blooming by the wayside we knew; the birds singing in the fields we had heard before; the commissionnaire persisted in pointing out the evidences of improvement. But we burned with a secret fever; we were impatient even of the grateful avenue of trees that hid what we at every moment expected to see. I do not envy him who without agitation approaches for the first time, and feels that he is about to look upon the Acropolis! There are three supreme sensations, not twice to be experienced, for the traveller: when he is about to behold the ancient seats of art, of discipline, of religion,—Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. But it is not possible for the reality to equal the expectation. “There!” cried the commissionnaire, “is the Acropolis!” A small oblong hill lifting itself some three hundred and fifty feet above the city, its sides upheld by walls, its top shining with marble, an isolated fortress in appearance! The bulk of the city lies to the north of the Acropolis, and grows round to the east of it along the valley of the Ilissus.

In five minutes more we had caught a glimpse of the new excavations of the Keramicus, the ancient cemetery, and of the old walls on our left, and were driving up the straight broad Hermes Street towards the palace. Midway in the centre of the street is an ancient Byzantine church, which we pass round. Hermes Street is intersected by Æolus Street; these two cut the city like a Greek cross, and all other streets flow into them. The shops along the way are European, the people in the streets are European in dress, the cafés, the tables in front of hotels and restaurants, with their groups of loungers, suggest Paris by reminding one of Brussels. Athens, built of white stone, not yet mellowed by age, is new, bright, clean, cheerful; the broad streets are in the uninteresting style of the new part of Munich, and due to the same Bavarian influence. If Ludwig I. did not succeed in making Munich look like Athens, Otho was more fortunate in giving Athens a resemblance to Munich. And we were almost ashamed to confess how pleasant it appeared, after our long experience of the tumble-down Orient.

We alighted at our hotel on the palace place, ascended steps decked with flowering plants, and entered cool apartments looking upon the square, which is surrounded with handsome buildings, planted with native and exotic trees, and laid out in walks and beds of flowers. To the right rises the plain façade of the royal residence, having behind it a magnificent garden, where the pine rustles to the palm, and a thousand statues revive the dead mythology; beyond rises the singular cone of Lycabettus. Commendable foresight is planting the principal streets with trees, the shade of which is much needed in the long, dry, and parching summer.

From the side windows we looked also over the roofs to the Acropolis, which we were impatient and yet feared to approach. For myself, I felt like deferring the decisive moment, playing with my imagination, lingering about among things I did not greatly care for, whetting impatience and desire by restraining them, and postponing yet a little the realization of the dream of so many years,—to stand at the centre of the world’s thought, at the spring of its ideal of beauty. While my companions rested from the fatigue of our sea voyage, I went into the street and walked southward towards the Ilissus. The air was bright and sparkling, the sky deep blue like that of Egypt, the hills sharp and clear in every outline, and startlingly near; the long reach of Hymettus wears ever a purple robe, which nature has given it in place of its pine forests. Travellers from Constantinople complained of the heat: but I found it inspiring; the air had no languor in it; this was the very joyous Athens I had hoped to see.

When you take up the favorite uncut periodical of the month, you like to skirmish about the advertisements and tease yourself with dipping in here and there before you plunge into the serial novel. It was absurd, but my first visit in Athens was to the building of the Quadrennial Exposition of the Industry and Art of Greece,—a long, painted wooden structure, decked with flags, and called, I need not say, the Olympium. To enter this imitation of a country fair at home, was the rudest shock one could give to the sentiment of antiquity, and perhaps a dangerous experiment, however strong in the mind might be the subtone of Acropolis. The Greek gentleman who accompanied me said that the exhibition was a great improvement over the one four years before. It was, in fact, a very hopeful sign of the prosperity of the new state; there was a good display of cereals and fruits, of silk and of jewelry, and various work in gold and silver,—the latter all from Corfu; but from the specimens of the fine arts, in painting and sculpture, I think the ancient Greeks have not much to fear or to hope from the modern; and the books, in printing and binding, were rude enough. But the specimens from the mines and quarries of Greece could not be excelled elsewhere; the hundred varieties of exquisite marbles detained us long; there were some polished blocks, lovely in color, and you might almost say in design, that you would like to frame and hang as pictures on the wall. Another sign of the decadence of the national costume, perhaps more significant than its disappearance in the streets, was its exhibition here upon lay figures. I saw a countryman who wore it sneaking round one of these figures, and regarding it with the curiosity of a savage who for the first time sees himself in a mirror. Since the revolution the Albanian has been adopted as the Grecian costume, in default of anything more characteristic, and perhaps because it would puzzle one to say of what race the person calling himself a modern Greek is. But the ridiculous fustanella is nearly discarded; it is both inconvenient and costly; to make one of the proper fulness requires forty yards of cotton cloth; this is gathered at the waist, and hangs in broad pleats to the knees, and it is starched so stiffly that it stands out like a half-open Chinese umbrella. As the garment cannot be worn when it is the least soiled, and must be done up and starched two or three times a week, the wearer finds it an expensive habit; and in the whole outfit—the jacket and sleeves may be a reminiscence of defensive armor—he has the appearance of a landsknecht above and a ballet-girl below.

Nearly as rare in the streets as this dress are the drooping red caps with tassels of blue. The women of Athens whom we saw would not take a premium anywhere for beauty; but we noticed here and there one who wore upon her dark locks the long hanging red fez and gold tassel, who might have attracted the eye of a roving poet, and been passed down to the next age as the Maid of Athens. The Athenian men of the present are a fine race; we were constantly surprised by noble forms and intelligent faces. That they are Greek in feature or expression, as we know the Greek from coins and statuary, we could not say. Perhaps it was only the ancient Lacedemonian rivalry that prompted the remark of a gentleman in Athens, who was born in Sparta, that there is not a drop of the ancient Athenian blood in Athens. There are some patrician families in the city who claim this honorable descent, but it is probable that Athens is less Greek than any other town in the kingdom; and that if there remain any Hellenic descendants they must be sought in remote districts of the Morea. If we trusted ourselves to decide by types of face, we should say that the present inhabitants of Athens were of Northern origin, and that their relation to the Greeks was no stronger than that of Englishmen to the ancient Britons. That the people who now inhabit Attica and the Peloponnesus are descendants of the Greeks whom the Romans conquered, I suppose no one can successfully claim; that they are all from the Slavonians, who so long held and almost exclusively occupied the Greek mainland, it is equally difficult to prove. All we know is, that the Greek language has survived the Byzantine anarchy, the Slavonic conquest, the Frank occupation; and that the nimble wit, the acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness, the cunning and craft of the modern Greek, seem to be the perversion of the nobler and yet not altogether dissimilar qualities which made the ancient Greeks the leaders of the human race. And those who ascribe the character of a people to climate and geographical position may expect to see the mongrel inheritors of the ancient soil moulded, by the enduring influences of nature, into homogeneity, and reproduce in a measure a copy of that splendid civilization of whose ruins they are now unappreciative possessors.

Beyond the temporary Olympium, the eye is caught by the Arch of Hadrian, and fascinated by the towering Corinthian columns of the Olympicum or Temple of Jupiter. Against the background of Hymettus and the blue sky stood fourteen of these beautiful columns, all that remain of the original one hundred and twenty-four, but enough to give us an impression of what was one of the most stately buildings of antiquity. This temple, which was begun by Pisistratus, was not finished till Hadrian’s time, or until the worship of Jupiter had become cold and sceptical. The columns stand upon a terrace overlooking the bed of the Hissus; there coffee is served, and there we more than once sat at sundown, and saw the vast columns turn from rose to gray in the fading light.

Athens, like every other city of Europe in this age of science and Christianity, was full of soldiers; we saw squads of them drilling here and there, their uniforms sprinkled the streets and the cafés, and their regimental bands enlivened the town. The Greeks, like all the rest of us, are beating their pruning-hooks into spears and preparing for the millennium. If there was not much that is peculiar to interest us in wandering about among the shops, and the so-called, but unroofed and not real, bazaars, there was much to astonish us in the size and growth of a city of over fifty thousand inhabitants, in forty years, from the heap of ruins and ashes which the Turks left it. When the venerable American missionaries, Dr. Hill and his wife, came to the city, they were obliged to find shelter in a portion of a ruined tower, and they began their labors literally in a field of smoking desolation. The only attractive shops are those of the antiquity dealers, the collectors of coins, vases, statuettes, and figurines. Of course the extraordinary demand for these most exquisite mementos of a race of artists has created a host of imitations, and set an extravagant and fictitious price upon most of the articles, a price which the professor who lets you have a specimen as a favor, or the dealer who calmly assumes that he has gathered the last relics of antiquity, mentions with equal equanimity. I looked in the face of a handsome graybeard, who asked me two thousand francs for a silver coin, which he said was a Solon, to see if there was any guile in his eye; but there was not. I cannot but hope that this race which has learned to look honest will some time become so.

Late in the afternoon we walked around the south side of the Acropolis, past the ruins of theatres that strew its side, and ascended by the carriage-road to the only entrance, at the southwest end of the hill, towards the Piræus. We pass through a gate pierced in the side wall, and come to the front of the Propylæa, the noblest gateway ever built. At the risk of offending the travelled, I shall try in a paragraph to put the untravelled reader in possession of the main features of this glorious spot.

The Acropolis is an irregular oblong hill, the somewhat uneven summit of which is about eleven hundred feet long by four hundred and fifty feet broad at its widest. The hill is steep on all sides, and its final spring is perpendicular rock, in places a hundred and fifty feet high. It is lowest at the southwest end, where it dips down, and, by a rocky neck, joins the Areopagus, or Mars Hill. Across this end is built the Propylæa, high with reference to the surrounding country, and commanding the view, but low enough not to hide from a little distance the buildings on the summit. This building, which is of the Doric order, and of pure Pentelic marble, was the pride of the Athenians. Its entire front is about one hundred and seventy feet; this includes the central portico (pierced with five entrances, the centre one for carriages) and the forward projecting north and south wings. In the north wing was the picture-gallery; the south wing was never completed to correspond, but the balance is preserved by the little Temple of the Wingless Victory, which from its ruins has been restored to its original form and beauty. The Propylæa is approached by broad flights of marble steps, which were defended by fortifications on the slope of the hill. The distant reader may form a little conception of the original splendor of this gateway from its cost, which was nearly two and a half millions of dollars, and by remembering that it was built under the direction of Pericles at a time when the cost of a building represented its real value, and not the profits of city officials and contractors.

Passing slowly between the columns, and with many a backward glance over the historic landscape, lingering yet lest we should abruptly break the spell, we came into the area. Straight before us, up the red rock, ran the carriage-road, seamed across with chisel-marks to prevent the horses’ hoofs from slipping, and worn in deep ruts by heavy chariot-wheels. In the field before us a mass of broken marble; on the right the creamy columns of the Parthenon; on the left the irregular but beautiful Ionic Erechtheum. The reader sees that the entrance was contrived so that the beholder’s first view of the Parthenon should be at the angle which best exhibits its exquisite proportions.

We were alone. The soldier detailed to watch that we did not carry off any of the columns sat down upon a broken fragment by the entrance, and let us wander at our will. I am not sure that I would, if I could, have the temples restored. There is an indescribable pathos in these fragments of columns and architraves and walls, in these broken sculptures and marred inscriptions, which time has softened to the loveliest tints, and in these tottering buildings, which no human skill, if it could restore the pristine beauty, could reanimate with the Greek idealism.

And yet, as we sat upon the western steps of the temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, I could imagine what this area was, say in the August days of the great Panathenaic festival, when the gorgeous procession, which I saw filing along the Via Sacra, returning from Eleusis, swept up these broad steps, garlanded with flowers and singing the hymn to the protecting goddess. This platform was not then a desolate stone heap, but peopled with almost living statues in bronze and marble, the creations of the genius of Phidias, of Praxiteles, of Lycius, of Clecetas, of Myron; there, between the two great temples, but overtopping them both, stood the bronze figure of Minerva Promachus, cast by Phidias out of the spoils of Marathon, whose glittering helmet and spear-point gladdened the returning mariner when far at sea, and defied the distant watcher on the Acropolis of Corinth. First in the procession come the sacrificial oxen, and then follow in order a band of virgins, the quadriga, each drawn by four noble steeds, the élite of the Athenian youth on horseback, magistrates, daughters of noble citizens bearing vases and pateræ, men carrying trays of offerings, flute-players and the chorus, singers. They pass around to the entrance of the Parthenon, which is toward the east, and those who are permitted enter the naos and come into the presence of the gold-ivory statue of Minerva. The undraped portions of this statue show the ivory; the drapery was of solid gold, made so that it could be removed in time of danger from a public enemy. The golden plates weighed ten thousand pounds. This work of Phidias, since it was celebrated as the perfection of art by the best judges of art, must have been as exquisite in its details as it was harmonious in its proportions; but no artist of our day would dare to attempt to construct a statue in that manner. In its right, outstretched hand it held a statue of Victory, four cubits high; and although it was erected nearly five hundred years before the Christian era, we are curious to notice the already decided influence of Egyptian ideas in the figure of the sphinx surmounting the helmet of the goddess.

The sun was setting behind the island of Salamis. There was a rosy glow on the bay of Phalerum, on the sea to the south, on the side of Hymettus, on the yellow columns of the Parthenon, on the Temple of the Wingless Victory, and on the faces of the ever-youthful Caryatides in the portico of the Erechtheum, who stand reverently facing the Parthenon, worshipping now only the vacant pedestal of Athene the Protector. What overpowering associations throng the mind as one looks off upon the crooked strait of Salamis, down upon the bare rock of the Areopagus; upon the Pnyx and the bema, where we know Demosthenes, Solon, Themistocles, Pericles, Aristides, were wont to address the populace who crowded up from this valley, the Agora, the tumultuous market-place, to listen; upon the Museum Hill, crowned by the monument of Philopappus, pierced by grottos, one of which tradition calls the prison of Socrates,—the whole history of Athens is in a nutshell! Yet if one were predetermined to despise this mite of a republic in the compass of a quart measure, he could not do it here. A little of Cæsar’s dust outweighs the world. We are not imposed upon by names. It was, it could only have been, in comparison with modern naval engagements, a petty fight in the narrow limits of that strait, and yet neither the Persian soldiers who watched it from the Acropolis and in terror saw the ships of Xerxes flying down the bay, nor the Athenians, who had abandoned their citadel and trusted their all to the “wooden walls” of their ships, could have imagined that the result was laden with such consequences. It gives us pause to think what course all subsequent history would have taken, what would be the present complexion of the Christian system itself, if on that day Asiatic barbarism had rendered impossible the subsequent development of Grecian art and philosophy.

We waited on the Acropolis for the night and the starlight and the thousand lights in the city spread below, but we did not stay for the slow coming of the midnight moon over Hymettus.

On Sunday morning we worshipped with the Greeks in the beautiful Russian church; the interior is small but rich, and is like a private parlor; there are no seats, and the worshippers stand or kneel, while gilded and painted figures of saints and angels encompass them. The ceremony is simple, but impressive. The priests are in gorgeous robes of blue and silver; choir-boys sing soprano, and the bass, as it always is in Russian churches, is magnificent. A lady, tall, elegant, superb, in black faced and trimmed with a stuff of gold, sweeps up to the desks, kisses the books and the crucifix, and then stands one side crossing herself. We are most of us mortal, and all, however rich in apparel, poor sinners one day in the week. No one of the worshippers carries a prayer-book. There is reading behind the screen, and presently the priests bring out the elements of communion and exhibit them, the one carrying the bread in a silver vessel on his head, and the other the wine. The central doors are then closed on the mysterious consecration. At the end of the service the holy elements are brought out, the communicants press up, kiss the cross, take a piece of bread, and then turn and salute their friends, and break up in a cheerful clatter of talk. In contrast to this, we attended afterwards the little meeting, in an upper chamber, of the Greek converts of the American Mission, and listened to a sermon in Greek which inculcated the religion of New England,—a gospel which, with the aid of schools, makes slow but hopeful progress in the city of the unknown God.

The longer one remains in Athens the more he will be impressed with two things: the one is the perfection of the old art and civilization, and what must have been the vivacious, joyous life of the ancient Athenians, in a climate so vital, when this plain was a garden, and these beautiful hills were clad with forests, and the whispers of the pine answered the murmurs of the sea; the other is the revival of letters and architecture and culture, visible from day to day, in a progress as astonishing as can be seen in any Occidental city. I cannot undertake to describe, not even to mention, the many noble buildings, either built or in construction, from the quarries of Pentelicus,—the University, the Academy, the new Olympium,—all the voluntary contributions of wealthy Greeks, most of them merchants in foreign cities, whose highest ambition seems to be to restore Athens to something of its former splendor. It is a point of honor with every Greek, in whatever foreign city he may live and die, to leave something in his last will for the adornment or education of the city of his patriotic devotion. In this, if in nothing else, they resemble the ancient patriots who thought no sacrifice too costly for the republic. Among the ruins we find no palaces, no sign that the richest citizen used his wealth in ostentatious private mansions. Although some of the Greek merchants now build for themselves elegant villas, the next generation will see the evidences of their wealth rather in the public buildings they have erected. In this little city the University has eighty professors and over twelve hundred students, gathered from all parts of Greece; there are in the city forty lady teachers with eight hundred female pupils; and besides these there are two gymnasiums and several graded schools. Professors and teachers are well paid, and the schools are free, even to the use of books. The means flow from the same liberality, that of the Greek merchants, who are continually leaving money for new educational foundations. There is but one shadow upon this hopeful picture, and that is the bigotry of the Greek church, to which the government yields. I do not now speak of the former persecutions suffered by the Protestant missionaries, but recently the schools for girls opened by Protestants, and which have been of the highest service in the education of women, have been obliged to close or else “conform” to the Greek religion and admit priestly teachers. At the time of our visit, one of the best of them, that of Miss Kyle of New York, was only tolerated from week to week under perpetual warnings, and liable at any moment to be suppressed by the police. This narrow policy is a disgrace to the government, and if it is continued must incline the world to hope that the Greeks will never displace the Moslems in Constantinople.

In the front of the University stands a very good statue of the scholar-patriot Korais, and in the library we saw the busts of other distinguished natives and foreigners. The library, which is every day enriched by private gifts, boasts already over one hundred and thirty thousand volumes. As we walked through the rooms, the director said that the University had no bust of an American, though it had often been promised one. I suggested one of Lincoln. No, he wanted Washington; he said he cared to have no other. I did not tell him that Washington was one of the heroes of our mythic period, that we had filled up a tolerably large pantheon since then, and that a century in America was as good as a thousand years in Byzantium. But I fell into something of a historic revery over the apparent fact that America is as yet to Greece nothing but the land of Washington, and I rather liked the old-fashioned notion, and felt sure that there must be somewhere in the United States an antiquated and rich patriot who remembered Washington and would like to send a marble portrait of our one great man to the University of Athens.

XXIX.—ELEUSIS, PLATO’S ACADEME, ETC

THERE was a nightingale who sang and sobbed all night in the garden before the hotel, and only ceased her plaintive reminiscence of Athenian song and sorrow with the red dawn. But this is a sad world of contrasts. Called upon the balcony at midnight by her wild notes, I saw,—how can I ever say it?—upon the balcony below, a white figure advance, and with a tragic movement of haste, if not of rage, draw his garment of the night over his head and shake it out over the public square; and I knew—for the kingdom of knowledge comes by experience as well as by observation—that the lively flea was as wakeful in Greece as the nightingale.

In the morning the north-wind arose,—it seems to blow constantly from Boeotia at this time of the year,—but the day was bright and sparkling, and we took carriage for Eleusis. It might have been such a morning—for the ancient Athenians always anticipated the dawn in their festivals—that the Panathenaic processions moved along this very Via Sacra to celebrate the Mysteries of Ceres at Eleusis. All the hills stood in clear outline,—long Pentelicus and the wavy lines of Parnes and Corydallus; we drove over the lovely and fertile plain, amid the olive-orchards of the Kephissus, and up the stony slope to the narrowing Pass of Daphne, a defile in Mt. Ægaleos; but we sought in vain the laurel grove, or a single specimen of that tree whose twisted trunk and outstretched arms express the struggle of vanishing humanity. Passing on our right the Chapel of St. Elias, on a commanding eminence, and traversing the level plateau of the rocky gorge, we alighted at the Monastery of Daphne, whose half-ruined cloister and chapel occupy the site of a temple of Apollo. We sat for half an hour in its quiet, walled churchyard, carpeted with poppies and tender flowers of spring, amid the remains of old columns and fragments of white marble, sparkling amid the green grass and blue violets, and looked upon the blue bay of Eleusis and Salamis, and the heights of Megara beyond. Surely nature has a tenderness for such a spot; and I fancied that even the old dame who unlocked for us the chapel and its cheap treasures showed us with some interest, in a carving here and a capital there, the relics of a former religion, and perhaps mingled with her adoration of the Virgin and the bambino a lurking regard for Venus and Apollo. A mile beyond, at the foot of a rocky precipice, are pointed out the foundations of a temple of Venus, where the handbook assured us doves had been found carved in white marble; none were left, however, for us, and we contented ourselves with reading on the rock Phile Aphrodite, and making a vain effort to recall life to this sterile region.

Enchanting was the view as we drove down the opening pass to the bay, which spreads out a broad sheet, completely landlocked by the irregular bulk of Salamis Island. When we emerged through the defile we turned away from the narrow strait where the battle was fought, and from the “rocky brow” on which Xerxes sat, a crowned spectator of his ruin, and swept around the circular shore, past the Rheiti, or salt-springs,—clear, greenish pools,—and over the level Thriasian Plain. The bay of Eleusis, guarded by the lofty amphitheatre of mountains, the curving sweep of Ægaleos and Kithæron, and by Salamis, is like a lovely lake, and if anywhere on earth there could be peace, you would say it would be on its sunny and secluded shores. Salamis appears only a bare and rocky island, but the vine still flourishes in the scant soil, and from its wild-flowers the descendants of the Attic bees make honey as famous as that of two thousand years ago.

Across the bay, upon a jutting rocky point, above which rises the crown of its Acropolis, lies the straggling, miserable village of Eleusis. Our first note of approach to it was an ancient pavement, and a few indistinguishable fragments of walls and columns. In a shallow stream which ran over the stones the women of the town were washing clothes; and throngs of girls were filling their pails of brass at an old well, as of old at the same place did the daughters of Keleos. Shriller tones and laughter mingled with their incessant chatter as we approached, and we thought,—perhaps it was imagination,—a little wild defiance and dislike. I had noticed already in Athens, and again here, the extraordinary rapidity with which the Greeks in conversation exchange words; I think they are the fastest talkers in the world. And the Greek has a hard, sharp, ringing, metallic sound; it is staccato. You can see how easily Aristophanes imitated the brittle-brattle of frogs. I have heard two women whose rapid, incessant cackle sounded exactly like the conversation of hens. The sculptor need not go further than these nut-brown maids for classic forms; the rounded limbs, the generous bust, the symmetrical waist, which fashion has not made an hour-glass to mark the flight of time and health. The mothers of heroes were of this mould; although I will not say that some of them were not a trifle stout for grace, and that their well-formed faces would not have been improved by the interior light of a little culture. Their simple dress was a white, short chemise, that left the legs bare, a heavy and worked tunic, like that worn by men, and a colored kerchief tied about the head. Many of the men of the village wore the fustanella and the full Albanian costume.

The Temple of Ceres lies at the foot of the hill; only a little portion of its vast extent has been relieved of the superincumbent, accumulated soil, and in fact its excavation is difficult, because the village is built over the greater part of it. What we saw was only a confused heap of marble, some pieces finely carved, arches, capitals, and shattered columns. The Greek government, which is earnestly caring for the remains of antiquity and diligently collecting everything for the National Museum, down to broken toes and fingers, has stationed a keeper over the ruins; and he showed us, in a wooden shanty, the interesting fragments of statues which had been found in the excavation. I coveted a little hand, plump, with tapering fingers, which the conservator permitted us to hold,—a slight but a most suggestive memento of the breeding and beauty of the lady who was the sculptor’s model; and it did not so much seem a dead hand stretched out to us from the past, as a living thing which returned our furtive pressure.

We climbed up the hill where the fortress of the Acropolis stood, and where there is now a little chapel. Every Grecian city seems to have had its Acropolis, the first nucleus of the rude tribe which it fortified against incursion, and the subsequent site of temples to the gods. The traveller will find these steep hills, rising out of plains, everywhere from Ephesus to Argos, and will almost conclude that Nature had consciously adapted herself to the wants of the aboriginal occupants. It is well worth ascending this summit to get the fine view of plain and bay, of Mt. Kerata and its double peaks, and the road that pierces the pass of Kithæron, and leads to the field of Platæa and the remains of Thebes.

In a little wine-shop, near the ruins, protected from the wind and the importunate swarms of children, we ate our lunch, and tried to impress ourselves with the knowledge that Æschylus was born in Eleusis; and to imagine the nature of the Eleusinian mysteries, the concealed representations by which the ancients attempted to symbolize, in the myths of Ceres and Proserpine, the primal forces of nature, perhaps the dim suggestions of immortality,—a secret not to be shared by the vulgar,—borrowed from the deep wisdom of the Egyptians.

The children of Eleusis deserve more space than I can afford them, since they devoted their entire time to our annoyance. They are handsome rascals, and there were enough of them, if they had been sufficiently clothed, to form a large Sunday school. When we sat down in the ruins and tried to meditate on Ceres, they swarmed about us, capering and yelling incessantly, and when I made a charge upon them they scattered over the rocks and saluted us with stones. But I find that at this distance I have nothing against them; I recall only their beauty and vivacity, and if they were the worst children that ever tormented travellers, I reflect, yes, but they were Greeks, and the gods loved their grandmothers. One slender, liquid-eyed, slim-shanked girl offered me a silver coin. I saw that it was a beautiful Athenian piece of the time of Pericles, and after some bargaining I bought it of her for a reasonable price. But as we moved away to our carriage, I was followed by the men and women of the settlement, who demanded it back. They looked murder and talked Greek. I inquired how much they wanted. Fifty francs! But that is twice as much as it is worth in Athens; and the coin was surrendered. All through the country, the peasants have a most exaggerated notion of the value of anything antique.

We returned through the pass of Daphne and by the site of the academic grove of Plato, though olive-groves and gardens of pomegranates in scarlet bloom, quinces, roses, and jasmines, the air sweet and delightful. Perhaps nowhere else can the traveller so enter into the pure spirit of Attic thought and feeling as among these scattered remains that scholars have agreed to call the ruins of Plato’s Academe. We turned through a lane into the garden of a farm-house, watered by a branch rivulet of the Kephissus. What we saw was not much,—some marble columns under a lovely cypress-grove, some fragments of antique carving built into a wall; but we saw it as it were privately and with a feeling of the presence of the mighty shade. And then, under a row of young plane-trees, by the meagre stream, we reclined on ripe wheat-straw, in full sight of the Acropolis,—perhaps the most poetic view of that magnetic hill. So Plato saw it as he strolled along this bank and listened to the wisdom of his master, Socrates, or, pacing the colonnade of the Academe, meditated the republic. Here indeed Aristotle, who was born the year that Plato died, may have lain and woven that subtle web of metaphysics which no subsequent system of thought or religion has been able to disregard. The centuries-old wind blew strong and fresh through the trees, and the scent of flowers and odorous shrubs, the murmur of the leaves, the unchanged blue vault of heaven, the near hill of the sacred Colonus, celebrated by Sophocles as the scene of the death of Odipus, all conspired to flood us with the poetic past. What intimations of immortality do we need, since the spell of genius is so deathless?

After dinner we laboriously, by a zigzag path, climbed the sharp cone of Lycabettus, whose six hundred and fifty feet of height commands the whole region. The rock summit has just room enough for a tiny chapel, called of St. George, and a narrow platform in front, where we sat in the shelter of the building and feasted upon the prospect. At sunset it is a marvellous view,—all Athens and its plain, the bays, Salamis and the strait of the battle, Acro-Corinth; Megara, Hymettus, Pentelicus, Kithæron.

When, in descending, we had nearly reached the foot on the west side, we heard the violent ringing of a bell high above us, and, turning about, saw what seemed to be a chapel under the northwest edge of the rock upon which we had lately stood. Bandits in laced leggings and embroidered jackets, chattering girls in short skirts and gay kerchiefs, were descending the wandering path, and the clamor of the bell piqued our curiosity to turn and ascend. When we reached our goal, the affair seemed to be pretty much all bell, and nobody but a boy in the lusty exuberance of youth could have made so much noise by the swinging of a single clapper. In a niche or rather cleft in the rock was a pent-roofed bell-tower, and a boy, whose piety seemed inspired by the Devil, was hauling the rope and sending the sonorous metal over and over on its axis. In front of the bell is a narrow terrace, sufficient, however, to support three fig-trees, under which were tables and benches, and upon the low terrace-wall were planted half a dozen large and differently colored national banners. A hole in the rock was utilized as a fireplace, and from a pot over the coals came the fumes of coffee. Upon this perch of a terrace people sat sipping coffee and looking down upon the city, whose evening lights were just beginning to twinkle here and there. Behind the belfry is a chapel, perhaps ten feet by twelve, partly a natural grotto and partly built of rough stones; it was brilliantly lighted with tapers, and hung with quaint pictures. At the entrance, which is a door cut in the rock, stood a Greek priest and an official in uniform selling wax-tapers, and raking in the leptas of the devout. We threw down some coppers, declined the tapers, and walked in. The adytum of the priest was wholly in the solid rock. There seemed to be no service; but the women and children stood and crossed themselves, and passionately kissed the poor pictures on the walls. Yet there was nothing exclusive or pharisaic in the worshippers, for priest and people showed us friendly faces, and cordially returned our greetings. The whole rock quivered with the clang of the bell, for the boy at the rope leaped at his task, and with ever-increasing fury summoned the sinful world below to prayer. Young ladies with their gallants came and went; and whenever there was any slacking of stragglers up the hillside the bell clamored more importunately.

As dusk crept on, torches were set along the wall of the terrace, and as we went down the hill they shone on the red and blue flags and the white belfry, and illuminated the black mass of overhanging rock with a red glow. There is time for religion in out-of-the-way places here, and it is rendered picturesque, and even easy and enjoyable, by the aid of coffee and charming scenery. When we reached the level of the town, the lights still glowed high up in the recess of the rocks, girls were laughing and chattering as they stumbled down the steep, and the wild bell still rang. How easy it is to be good in Greece!

One day we stole a march on Marathon, and shared the glory of those who say they have seen it, without incurring the fatigue of a journey there. We ascended Mt. Pentelicus. Hymettus and Pentelicus are about the same height,—thirty-five hundred feet,—but the latter, ten miles to the northeast of Athens, commands every foot of the Attic territory; if one should sit on its summit and read a history of the little state, he would need no map. We were away at half past five in the morning, in order to anticipate if possible the rising of the daily wind. As we ascended, we had on our left, at the foot of the mountain, the village of Kephisia, now, as in the days of Herodes Atticus, the summer resort of wealthy Athenians, who find in its fountains, the sources of the Kephissus, and in its groves relief from the heat and glare of the scorched Athenian plain. Half-way we halted at a monastery, left our carriage, and the ladies mounted horses. There is a handsome church here, and the situation is picturesque and commands a wide view of the plain and the rugged north slope of Hymettus, but I could not learn that the monastery was in an active state; it is only a hive of drones which consumes the honey produced by the working-bees from the wild thyme of the neighboring mountain. The place, however, is a great resort of parties of pleasure, who picnic under the grove of magnificent forest-trees, and once a year the king and queen come hither to see the youths and maidens dance on the greensward.

Up to the highest quarries the road is steep, and strewn with broken marble, and after that there is an hour’s scramble through bushes and over a rocky path. We rested in a large grotto near the principal of the ancient quarries; it was the sleeping-place of the workmen, subsequently a Christian church, and then, and not long ago, a haunt and home of brigands. Here we found a party of four fellows, half clad in sheep-skins, playing cards, who seemed to be waiting our arrival; but they were entirely civil, and I presume were only shepherds, whatever they may have been formerly. From these quarries was hewn the marble for the Temple of Theseus, the Parthenon, the Propylæa, the theatres, and other public buildings, to which age has now given a soft and creamy tone; the Pentelic marble must have been too brilliant for the eye, and its dazzling lustre was no doubt softened by the judicious use of color. Fragments which we broke off had the sparkle and crystalline grain of loaf-sugar, and if they were placed upon the table one would unhesitatingly take them to sweeten his tea. The whole mountain-side is overgrown with laurel, and we found wild-flowers all the way to the summit. Amid the rocks of the higher slopes, little shepherd-boys, carrying the traditional crooks, were guarding flocks of black and white goats, and, invariably as we passed, these animals scampered off and perched themselves upon sharp rocks in a photographic pose.

Early as we were, the wind had risen before us, and when we reached the bare back of the summit it blew so strongly that we could with difficulty keep our feet, and gladly took refuge in a sort of stone corral, which had been a camp and lookout of brigands. From this commanding point they spied both their victims and pursuers. Our guide went into the details of the capture of the party of Englishmen who spent a night here, and pointed out to us the several hiding-places in the surrounding country to which they were successively dragged. But my attention was not upon this exploit. We looked almost directly down upon Marathon. There is the bay and the curving sandy shore where the Persian galleys landed; here upon a spur, jutting out from the hill, the Athenians formed before, they encountered the host in the plain, and there—alas! it was hidden by a hill—is the mound where the one hundred and ninety-two Athenian dead are buried. It is only a small field, perhaps six miles along the shore and a mile and a half deep, and there is a considerable marsh on the north and a small one at the south end. The victory at so little cost, of ten thousand over a hundred thousand, is partially explained by the nature of the ground; the Persians had not room enough to manouvre, and must have been thrown into confusion on the skirts of the northern swamp, and if over six thousand of them were slain, they must have been killed on the shore in the panic of their embarkation. But still the shore is broad, level, and firm, and the Greeks must have been convinced that the gods themselves terrified the hearts of the barbarians, and enabled them to discomfit a host which had chosen this plain as the most feasible in all Attica for the action of cavalry.

A sea-haze lay upon the strait of Euripus and upon Euboea, and nearly hid from our sight the forms of the Cyclades; but away in the northwest were snow peaks, which the guide said were the heights of Parnassus above Delphi. In the world there can be few prospects so magnificent as this, and none more inspiring to the imagination. No one can properly appreciate the Greek literature or art who has not looked upon the Greek nature which seems to have inspired both.

Nothing now remains of the monuments and temples which the pride and piety of the Athenians erected upon the field of Marathon. The visitor at the Arsenal of Venice remembers the clumsy lion which is said to have stood on this plain, and in the Temple of Theseus, at Athens, he may see a slab which was found in this meadow; on it is cut in very low relief the figure of a soldier, but if the work is Greek the style of treatment is Assyrian.

The Temple of Theseus, which occupies an elevation above the city and west of the Areopagus, is the best-preserved monument of Grecian antiquity, and if it were the only one, Athens would still be worthy of a pilgrimage from the ends of the earth. Behind it is a level esplanade, used as a drill-ground, upon one side of which have been gathered some relics of ancient buildings and sculptures; seated there in an ancient marble chair, we never wearied of studying the beautiful proportions of this temple, which scarcely suffers by comparison with the Parthenon or that at Pæstum. In its construction the same subtle secret of curved lines and inclined verticals was known, a secret which increases its apparent size and satisfies the eye with harmony.

While we were in Athens the antiquarians were excited by the daily discoveries in the excavations at the Keramicus (the field where the Athenian potters worked). Through the portion of this district outside the gate Dipylum ran two streets, which were lined with tombs; one ran to the Academe, the other was the sacred way to Eleusis. The excavations have disclosed many tombs and lovely groups of funereal sculpture, some of which are in situ, but many have been removed to the new Museum. The favorite device is the seated figure of the one about to die, who in this position of dignity takes leave of those most loved; perhaps it is a wife, a husband, a lovely daughter, a handsome boy, who calmly awaits the inevitable moment, while the relatives fondly look or half avert their sorrowful faces. In all sculpture I know nothing so touching as these family farewells. I obtained from them a new impression of the Greek dignity and tenderness, of the simplicity and nobility of their domestic life.

The Museum, which was unarranged, is chiefly one of fragments, but what I saw there and elsewhere scattered about the town gave me a finer conception of the spirit of the ancient art than all the more perfect remains in Europe put together; and it seems to me that nowhere except in Athens is it possible to attain a comprehension of its depth and loveliness. Something, I know, is due to the genius loci, but you come to the knowledge that the entire life, even the commonest, was pervaded by something that has gone from modern art. In the Museum we saw a lovely statue of Isis, a noble one of Patroclus, fine ones of athletes, and also, showing the intercourse with Egypt, several figures holding the sacred sistrum, and one of Rameses II. But it is the humbler and funereal art that gives one a new conception of the Greek grace, tenderness, and sensibility. I have spoken of the sweet dignity, the high-born grace, that accepted death with lofty resignation, and yet not with stoical indifference, of some of the sepulchral groups. There was even more poetry in some that are simpler. Upon one slab was carved a figure, pensive, alone, wrapping his drapery about him and stepping into the silent land, on that awful journey that admits of no companion. On another, which was also without inscription, a solitary figure sat in one corner; he had removed helmet and shield, and placed them on the ground behind him; a line upon the stone indicated the boundary of the invisible world, and, with a sad contemplation, the eyes of the soldier were fixed upon that unknown region into which he was about to descend.

Scarcely a day passed that we did not ascend the Acropolis; and again and again we traversed the Areopagus, the Pnyx, the Museum hills. From the valley of the Agora stone steps lead up the Areopagus to a bench cut in the rock. Upon this open summit the Areopagite Council held, in the open air, its solemn sessions; here it sat, it is said, at night and in the dark, that no face of witness or criminal, or gesture of advocate, should influence the justice of its decisions. Dedicated to divine justice, it was the most sacred and awful place in Athens; in a cavern underneath it was the sanctuary of the dread Erinnyes, the avenging Euries, whom a later superstition represented with snakes twisted in their hair; whatever the gay frivolity of the city, this spot was silent, and respected as the dread seat of judicature of the highest causes of religion or of politics. To us Mars Hill is chiefly associated with the name of St. Paul; and I do not suppose it matters much whether he spoke to the men of Athens in this sacred place or, as is more probable, from a point farther down the hill, now occupied by a little chapel, where he would be nearer to the multitude of the market-place. It does not matter; it was on the Areopagus, and in the centre of temples and a thousand statues that bespoke the highest civilization of the pagan world, that Paul proclaimed the truth, which man’s egotism continually forgets, that in temples made with hands the Deity does not dwell.

From this height, on the side of the Museum Hill, we see the grotto that has been dignified with the title of the “prison of Socrates,” but upon slight grounds. When the philosopher was condemned, the annual sacred ship which was sent with thank-offerings to Delos was still absent, and until its return no execution was permitted in Athens. Every day the soldiers who guarded Socrates ascended this hill, and went round the point to see if the expected vessel was in sight; and it is for their convenience that some antiquarian designated this grotto as the prison. The delay of the ship gave us his last immortal discourse.

We went one evening by the Temple of Jupiter, along the Ilissus, to the old Stadium. This classic stream, the Ilissus, is a gully, with steep banks and a stony bottom, and apparently never wet except immediately after a rain. You would think by the flattery it received from the ancient Athenians that it was larger than the Mississippi. The Panathenaic Stadium, as it is called, because its chief use was in the celebration of the games of the great quadrennial festival, was by nature and art exceedingly well adapted to chariot races and other contests. Open at the end, where a bridge crossed the Ilissus, it extended a hundred feet broad six hundred and fifty feet into the hill, upon the three sloping sides of which, in seats of marble, could be accommodated fifty thousand spectators. Here the Greek youth contended for the prizes in the chariot race, and the more barbarous Roman emperors amused a degenerate people with the sight of a thousand wild beasts hunted and slain in a single celebration.

The Stadium has been lately re-excavated, and at the time of our visit the citizens were erecting some cheap benches at one end, and preparing, in a feeble way, for what it pleases them to call the Olympic Games, which were to be inaugurated the following Sunday. The place must inevitably dwarf the performance, and comparison render it ridiculous. The committee-men may seem to themselves Olympic heroes, and they had the earnest air of trying to make themselves believe that they were really reviving the ancient glory of Greece, or that they could bring it back by calling a horse-race and the wrestling of some awkward peasants an “Olympiad.” The revival could be, as we afterwards learned it was, only a sickly and laughable affair. The life of a nation is only preserved in progress, not in attempts to make dead forms live again. It is difficult to have chariot races or dramatic contests without chariots or poets, and I suppose the modern imitation would scarcely be saved from ludicrousness, even if the herald should proclaim that now a Patroclus and now an Aristophanes was about to enter the arena. The modern occupants of Athens seem to be deceiving themselves a little with names and shadows. In the genuine effort to revive in its purity the Greek language, and to inspire a love of art and literature, the Western traveller will wholly sympathize. In the growth of a liberal commercial spirit he will see still more hope of a new and enduring Greek state. But a puerile imitation of a society and a religion which cannot possibly have a resurrection excites only a sad smile. There is no more pitiful sight than a man who has lost his ideals, unless it be a nation which has lost its ideals. So long as the body of the American people hold fast to the simple and primitive conception of a republican society,—to the ideals of a century ago,—the nation can survive, as England did, a period of political corruption. There never was, not under Themistocles nor under Scanderbeg, a more glorious struggle for independence than that which the battle of Navarino virtually terminated. The world had a right to expect from the victors a new and vigorous national life, not a pale and sentimental copy of a splendid original, which is now as impossible of revival as the Roman Empire. To do the practical and money-getting Greeks justice, I could not learn that they took a deep interest in the “Olympiad”; nor that the inhabitants of ancient Sparta were jealous of the re-institution of the national games in Athens, since, they say, there are no longer any Athenians to be jealous of.

The ancient Athenians were an early people; they liked the dewy freshness of the morning; they gave the first hours of the day to the market and to public affairs, and the rising sun often greeted the orators on the bema, and an audience on the terrace below. We had seen the Acropolis in almost every aspect, but I thought that one might perhaps catch more of its ancient spirit at sunrise than at any other hour.

It is four o’clock when my companion and I descend into the silent street and take our way to the ancient citadel by the shortest and steepest path. Dawn is just breaking in pink, and the half-moon is in the sky. The sleepy guard unbolts the gate and admits us, but does not care to follow; and we pass the Propylæa and have the whole field to ourselves. There is a great hush as we come into the silent presence of the gray Parthenon; the shades of night are still in its columns. We take our station on a broken pillar, so that we can enjoy a three-quarters view of the east front. As the light strengthens we have a pink sky for background to the temple, and the smooth bay of Phalerum is like a piece of the sky dropped down. Very gradually the light breaks on the Parthenon, and in its glowing awakening it is like a sentient thing, throwing shadows from its columns and kindling more and more; the lion gargoyles on the corners of the pediment have a life which we had not noticed before. There is now a pink tint on the fragments of columns lying at the side; there is a reddish hue on the plain about Piræus; the strait of Salamis is green, but growing blue; Phalerum is taking an iridescent sheen; I can see, beyond the Gulf of Ægina, the distant height of Acro-Corinth. .

The city is still in heavy shadow, even the Temple of Theseus does not relax from its sombreness. But the light mounts; it catches the top of the white columns of the Propylæa, it shines on the cornice of the Erechtheum, and creeps down in blushes upon the faces of the Caryatides, which seem to bow yet in worship of the long-since-departed Pallas Athene. The bugles of the soldiers called to drill on the Thesean esplanade float up to us; they are really bugle-notes summoning the statues and the old Panathenaic cavalcades on the friezes to life and morning action. The day advances, the red sun commanding the hill and flooding it with light, and the buildings glowing more and more in it, but yet casting shadows. A hawk sweeps around from the north and hangs poised on motionless wings over the building just as the sun touches it. We climb to the top of the western pediment for the wide sweep of view. The world has already got wind of day, and is putting off its nightcaps and opening its doors. As we descend we peer about for a bit of marble as a memento of our visit; but Lord Elgin has left little for the kleptomaniac to carry away.

At this hour the Athenians ought to be assembling on the Pnyx to hear Demosthenes, who should be already on the bema; but the bema has no orator, and the terrace is empty. We might perhaps see an early representation at the theatre of Dionysus, into which we can cast a stone from this wall. We pass the gate, scramble along the ragged hillside,—the dumping-ground of the excavators on the Acropolis,—and stand above the highest seats of the Amphitheatre. No one has come. The white marble chairs in the front row—carved with the names of the priests of Bacchus and reserved for them—wait, and even the seats not reserved are empty. There is no white-clad chorus manoeuvring on the paved orchestra about the altar; the stage is broken in, and the crouching figures that supported it are the only sign of life. One would like to have sat upon these benches, that look on the sea, and listened to a chorus from the Antigone this morning. One would like to have witnessed that scene when Aristophanes, on this stage, mimicked and ridiculed Socrates, and the philosopher, rising from his undistinguished seat high up among the people, replied.

XXX.—THROUGH THE GULF OF CORINTH

WITH deep reluctance we tore ourselves from the fascinations of Athens very early one morning. After these things, says the Christian’s guide, Paul departed from Athens and came to Corinth. Our departure was in the same direction. We had no choice of time, for the only steamer leaves on Sunday morning, and, besides, our going then removed us from the temptation of the Olympic games. At half past five we were on board the little Greek steamer at the Piraeus.

We sailed along Salamis. It was a morning of clouds; but Ægina (once mistress of these seas, and the hated rival of Athens) and the Peloponnesus were robed in graceful garments that, like the veils of the Circassian girls, did not conceal their forms. In four hours we landed at Kalamaki, which is merely a station for the transfer of passengers across the Isthmus. Six miles south on the coast we had a glimpse of Cenchreæ, which is famous as the place where Paul, still under the bonds of Jewish superstition, having accomplished his vow, shaved his head. The neck of limestone rock, which connects the Peloponnesus with the mainland, is ten miles long, and not more than four miles broad from Kalamaki to Lutraki on the Gulf of Corinth, and as it is not, at its highest elevation, over a hundred feet above the sea, the project of piercing it with a canal, which was often entertained and actually begun by Nero, does not seem preposterous. The traveller over it to-day will see some remains of the line of fortification, the Isthmian Wall, which served in turn Greeks, Macedonians, Saracens, Latin Crusaders, and Slavonic settlers; and fragments of the ancient buildings of the Isthmian Sanctuary, where the Panhellenic festivals were celebrated.