LETTER XXIV.
The “Lantern of Demosthenes”—Byron’s Residence in Athens—Temple of Jupiter Olympus, Seven Hundred Years in Building—Superstitious Fancy of the Athenians respecting its Ruins—Hermitage of a Greek Monk—Petarches, the Antiquary and Poet, and his Wife, Sister to the “Maid of Athens”—Mutilation of a Basso Rilievo by an English Officer—The Elgin Marbles—The Caryatides—Lord Byron’s Autograph—Attachment of the Greeks to Dr. Howe—The Sliding Stone—A Scene in the Rostrum of Demosthenes.
Took a walk by sunset to the Ilissus. I passed, on the way, the “Lantern of Demosthenes,” a small octagonal building of marble, adorned with splendid columns, and a beautifully sculptured frieze, in which it is said the orator used to shut himself for a month, with his head half shaved, to practice his orations. The Franciscan convent, Byron’s residence while in Athens, was built adjoining it. It is now demolished. The poet’s name is written with his own hand on a marble slab of the wall.
I left the city by the gate of Hadrian, and walked on to the temple of Jupiter Olympus. It crowns a small elevation on the northern bank of the Ilissus. It was once beyond all comparison the largest and most costly building in the world. During seven hundred years it employed the attention of the rulers of Greece, from Pisistratus to Hadrian, and was never quite completed. As a ruin it is the most beautiful object I ever saw. Thirteen columns of Pentelic marble, partly connected by a frieze, are all that remain. They are of the flowery Corinthian order, and sixty feet in height, exclusive of base or capital.
Three perfect columns stand separate from the rest, and lift from the midst of that solitary plain with an effect that, to my mind, is one of the highest sublimity. The sky might rest on them. They seem made to sustain it. As I lay on the parched grass and gazed on them in the glory of a Grecian sunset, they seemed to me proportioned for a continent. The mountains I saw between them were not designed with more amplitude, nor corresponded more nobly to the sky above.
The people of Athens have a superstitious reverence for these ruins. Dodwell says, “The single column toward the western extremity was thrown down, many years ago, by a Turkish voivode, for the sake of the materials, which were employed in constructing the great mosque of the bazaar. The Athenians relate that, after it was thrown down, the three others nearest it were heard to lament the loss of their sister! and these nocturnal lamentations did not cease till the sacrilegious voivode was destroyed by poison.
Two of the columns, connected by one immense slab, are surmounted by a small building, now in ruins, but once the hermitage of a Greek monk. Here he passed his life, seventy feet in the air, sustained by two of the most graceful columns of Greece. A basket, lowered by a line, was filled by the pious every morning, but the romantic eremite was never seen. With the lofty Acropolis crowned with temples just beyond him, the murmuring Ilissus below, the thyme-covered sides of Hymettus to the south, and the blue Ægæan stretching away to the west, his eye, at least, could never tire. There are times when I could envy him his lift above the world.
I descended to the Fountain of Callirhoe, which gushes from beneath a rock in the bed of the Ilissus, just below the temple. It is the scene of the death of the lovely nymph-mother of Ganymede. The twilight air was laden with the fragrant thyme, and the songs of the Greek labourers returning from the fields came faintly over the plains. Life seems too short, when every breath is a pleasure. I loitered about the clear and rocky lip of the fountain, till the pool below reflected the stars in its trembling bosom. The lamps began to twinkle in Athens, Hesperus rose over Mount Pentilicus like a blazing lamp, the sky over Salamis faded down to the sober tint of night, and the columns of the Parthenon mingled into a single mass of shade. And so, I thought, as I strolled back to the city, concludes a day in Athens—one, at least, in my life, for which it is worth the trouble to have lived.
I was again in the Acropolis the following morning. Mr. Hill had kindly given me a note to Petarches, the king’s antiquary, a young Athenian, who married the sister of the “Maid of Athens.”[[9]] We went together through the ruins. They have lately made new excavations, and some superb bassi-rilieivi are among the discoveries. One of them represented a procession leading victims to the sacrifice, and was quite the finest thing I ever saw. The leading figure was a superb female, from the head of which the nose had lately been barbarously broken. The face of the enthusiastic antiquary flushed while I was lamenting it. It was done, he told me, but a week before, by an officer of the English squadron then lying at the Piræus. Petarches detected it immediately, and sent word to the admiral, who discovered the heartless goth in a nephew of an English duke, a midshipman of his own ship. I should not have taken the trouble to mention so revolting a circumstance if I had not seen, in a splendid copy of the “illustrations of Byron’s Travels in Greece,” a most virulent attack on the officers of the “Constellation,” and Americans generally, for the same thing. Who but Englishmen have robbed Athens, and Ægina, and all Greece? Who but Englishmen are watched like thieves in their visits to every place of curiosity in the world? Where is the superb caryatid of the Erechtheion? stolen, with such barbarous carelessness, too, that the remaining statues and the superb portico they sustained are tumbling to the ground! The insolence of England’s laying such sins at the door of another nation is insufferable.
For my own part, I cannot conceive the motive for carrying away a fragment of a statue or a column. I should as soon think of drawing a tooth as a specimen of some beautiful woman I had seen in my travels. And how one dare show such a theft to any person of taste, is quite as singular. Even when a whole column or statue is carried away, its main charm is gone with the association of the place. I venture to presume, that no person of classic feeling ever saw Lord Elgin’s marbles without execrating the folly that could bring them from their bright, native sky, to the vulgar atmosphere of London. For the love of taste, let us discountenance such barbarisms in America.
The Erechtheion and the adjoining temple are gems of architecture. The small portico of the caryatides (female figures, in the place of columns, with their hands on their hips) must have been one of the most exquisite things in Greece. One of them (fallen in consequence of Lord Elgin’s removal of the sister statue), lies headless on the ground, and the remaining ones are badly mutilated, but they are very, very beautiful. I remember two in the Villa Albani, at Rome, brought from some other temple in Greece, and considered the choicest gems of the gallery.
We climbed up the sanctuary of the Erechtheion, in which stood the altars to the two elements to which the temples were dedicated. The sculpture around the cornices is still so sharp, that it might have been finished yesterday. The young antiquary alluded to Byron’s anathema against Lord Elgin, in “Childe Harold,” and showed me, on the inside of the capital of one of the columns, the place where the poet had written his name. It was, as he always wrote it, simply “Byron,” in small letters, and would not be noticed by an ordinary observer.
If the lover, as the poet sings, was jealous of the star his mistress gazed upon, the sister of the “Maid of Athens” may well be jealous of the Parthenon. Petarches looks at it and talks of it with a fever in his eyes. I could not help smiling at his enthusiasm. He is about twenty-five, of a slender person, with downcast, melancholy eyes, and looks the poet according to the most received standard. His reserved manners melted toward me on discovering that I knew our countryman, Dr. Howe, who, he tells me, was his groomsman (or the corresponding assistant at a Greek wedding), and to whom he seems, in common with all his countrymen, warmly attached. To a man of his taste, I can conceive nothing more gratifying than his appointment to the care of the Acropolis. He spends his day there with his book, attending the few travellers who come, and when the temples are deserted, he sits down in the shadow of a column, and reads amid the silence of the ruins he almost worships. There are few vocations in this envious world so separated from the jarring passions of our nature.
Passed the morning on horseback, visiting the antiquities without the city. Turning by the temple of Theseus, we crossed Mars Hill, the seat of the Areopagus, and passing a small valley, ascended the Pnyx. On the right of the path we observed the rock of the hill worn to the polish of enamel by friction. It was an almost perpendicular descent of six or seven feet, and steps were cut at the sides to mount to the top. It is the famous sliding stone, believed by the Athenians to possess the power of determining the sex of unborn children. The preference of sons, if the polish of the stone is to be trusted, is universal in Greece.
The rostrum of Demosthenes was above us on the side of the hill facing from the sea. A small platform is cut into the rock, and on either side a seat is hewn out, probably for the distinguished men of the state. The audience stood on the side-hill, and the orator and his listeners were in the open air. An older rostrum is cut into the summit of the hill, facing the sea. It is said that when the maritime commerce of Greece began to enrich the lower classes, the thirty tyrants turned the rostrum toward the land, lest their orators should point to the ships of the Piræus, and remind the people of their power.
Scene after scene swept through my fancy as I stood on the spot. I saw Demosthenes, after his first unsuccessful oration, descending with a dejected air toward the temple of Theseus, followed by old Eunomus;[[10]] abandoning himself to despair, and repressing the fiery consciousness within him as a hopeless ambition. I saw him again, with the last glowing period of a Philippic on his lips, standing on this rocky eminence, his arm stretched toward Macedon; his eye flashing with success, and his ear catching the low murmur of the crowd below, which told him he had moved his country as with the heave of an earthquake. I saw the calm Aristides rise, with his mantle folded majestically about him; and the handsome Alcibiades waiting with a smile on his lips to speak; and Socrates, gazing on his wild but winning disciple with affection and fear. How easily is this bare rock, whereon the eagle now alights unaffrighted, repeopled with the crowding shadows of the past.
| [9] | You will recollect what Byron says of these three girls in one of his letters to Dr. Drury: “I had almost forgot to tell you, that I am dying for love of three Greek girls, at Athens, sisters. I lived in the same house. Teresa, Marcama, and Katinka, are the names of these divinities—all under fifteen.” |
| [10] | “However, in his first address to the people, he was laughed at and interrupted by their clamours; for the violence of his manner threw him into a confusion of periods, and a distortion of his argument. At last, upon his quitting the Assembly, Eunomus, the Thriasian, a man now extremely old, found him wandering in a dejected condition in the Piræus, and took upon him to set him right.”—Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes. |