LETTER XXV.
The Prison of Socrates—Turkish Stirrups and Saddles—Plato’s Academy—The American Missionary School at Athens—The Son of Petarches and Nephew of “Mrs. Black of Ægina.”
Athens.—We dismounted at the door of Socrates’ prison. A hill between the Areopagus and the sea, is crowned with the remains of a showy monument to a Roman pro-consul. Just beneath it the hill forms a low precipice, and in the face of it you see three low entrances to caverns hewn in the solid rock. The farthest to the right was the room of the Athenian guard, and within it is a chamber with a round ceiling, which the sage occupied during the thirty days of his imprisonment. There are marks of an iron door which separated it from the guard-room, and through the bars of this he refused the assistance of his friends to escape, and held those conversations with Crito, Plato, and others which have made his name immortal. On the day upon which he was doomed to die, he was removed to the chamber nearest the Acropolis, and here the hemlock was presented to him. A shallower excavation between, held an altar to the gods; and after his death, his body was here given to his friends.
Nothing, except some of the touching narrations of Scripture ever seemed to me so affecting as the history of the death of Socrates. It has been likened (I think, not profanely), to the death of Christ. His virtuous life, his belief in the immortality of the soul and a future state of reward and punishment, his forgiveness of his enemies and his godlike death, certainly prove him, in the absence of revealed light, to have walked the “darkling path of human reason” with an almost inspired rectitude. I stood in the chamber which had received his last breath, not without emotion. The rocky walls about me had witnessed his composure as he received the cup from his weeping jailer; the roughly-hewn floor beneath my feet had sustained him, as he walked to and fro, till the poison had chilled his limbs; his last sigh, as he covered his head with his mantle and expired, passed forth by that low portal. It is not easy to be indifferent on spots like these. The spirit of the place is felt. We cannot turn back and touch the brighter links of that “fleshly chain,” in which all human beings since the creation have been bound alike without feeling, even through the rusty coil of ages, the electric sympathy. Socrates died here! The great human leap into eternity, the inevitable calamity of our race, was here taken more nobly than elsewhere. Whether the effect be to “fright us from the shore,” or, to nerve us by the example, to look more steadily before us, a serious thought, almost, of course, a salutary one, lurks in the very air.
We descended the hill and galloped our small Turkish horses at a stirring pace over the plain. The short stirrup and high-peaked saddle of the country, are (at least to men of my length and limb) uncomfortable contrivances. With the knees almost up to the chin, one is compelled, of course, to lean far over the horse’s head, and it requires all the fulness of Turkish trousers to conceal the awkwardness of the position. We drew rein at the entrance of the “olive-grove.” Our horses walked leisurely along the shaded path between the trees, and we arrived in a few minutes at the site of Plato’s Academy. The more ethereal portion of my pleasure in seeing it must be in the recollection. The Cephissus was dry, the noon-day sun was hot, and we were glad to stop, with throbbing temples, under a cluster of fig-trees, and eat the delicious fruit, forgetting all the philosophers incontinently. We sat in our saddles, and a Greek woman, of great natural beauty, though dressed in rags, bent down the boughs to our reach. The honey from the over-ripe figs, dropped upon us as the wind shook the branches. Our dark-eyed and bright-lipped Pomona served us with a grace and cheerfulness that would draw me often to the neighbourhood of the Academy if I lived in Athens. I venture to believe that Phryne herself, in so mean a dress, would scarce have been more attractive. We kissed our hand to her as our spirited horses leaped the hollow with which the trees were encircled, and passing the mound sacred to the Furies, where Œdipus was swallowed up, dashed over the sultry plain once more, and were soon in Athens.
I have passed most of my leisure hours here in a scene I certainly did not reckon in anticipation, among the pleasures of a visit to Athens—the American Missionary School. We have all been delighted with it, from the commodore to the youngest midshipman. Mr. and Mrs. Hill have been here some four or five years, and have attained their present degree of success in the face of every difficulty. Their whole number of scholars from the commencement, has been upwards of three hundred; at present they have a hundred and thirty, mostly girls.
We found the school in a new and spacious stone building on the site of the ancient “market,” where Paul, on his visit to Athens, “disputed daily with those that met with him.” A large court-yard, shaded partly with a pomegranate tree, separates it from the marble portico of the Agora, which is one of the finest remains of antiquity. Mrs. Hill was in the midst of the little Athenians. Two or three serious-looking Greek girls were assisting her in regulating their movements, and the new and admirable system of combined instruction and amusement was going on swimmingly. There were, perhaps, a hundred children in the benches, mostly from three to six or eight years of age: dark-eyed, cheerful little creatures, who looked as if their “birthright of the golden grasshopper” had made them nature’s favourites as certainly as in the days when their ancestor-mothers settled questions of philosophy. They marched and recited, and clapped their sun-burnt hands, and sung hymns, and I thought I never had seen a more gratifying spectacle. I looked around in vain for one who seemed discontented or weary. Mrs. Hill’s manner to them was most affectionate. She governs, literally with a smile.
I selected several little favourites. One was a fine fellow of two to three years, whose name I inquired immediately. He was Plato Petarches, the nephew of the “Maid of Athens,” and the son of the second of the three girls so admired by Lord Byron. Another was a girl of six or seven, with a face, surpassing, for expressive beauty, that of any child I ever saw. She was a Hydriote by birth, and dressed in the costume of the islands. Her little feet were in Greek slippers; her figure was prettily set off with an open jacket, laced with buttons from the shoulder to the waist, and her head was enveloped in a figured handkerchief, folded gracefully in the style of a turban, and brought under her chin, so as to show suspended a rich metallic fringe. Her face was full, but marked with childish dimples, and her mouth and eyes, as beautiful as ever those expressive features were made, had a retiring seriousness in them, indescribably sweet. She looked as if she had been born in some scene of Turkish devastation, and had brought her mother’s heart-ache into the world.
At noon, at the sound of a bell, they marched out, clapping their hands in time to the instructor’s voice, and seated themselves in order upon the portico, in front of the school. Here their baskets were given them, and each one produced her dinner and eat it with the utmost propriety. It was really a beautiful scene.
It is to be remembered that here are educated a class of human beings who were else deprived of instruction by the universal custom of their country. The females of Greece are suffered to grow up in ignorance. One who can read and write is rarely found. The school has commenced fortunately at the most favourable moment. The government was in process of change, and an innovation was unnoticed in the confusion that at a later period might have been opposed by the prejudices of custom. The King and the President of the Regency, Count Armansperg, visited the school frequently during their stay in Athens, and expressed their thanks to Mrs. Hill warmly. The Countess Armansperg called repeatedly to have the pleasure of sitting in the school-room for an hour. His Majesty, indeed, could hardly find a more useful subject in his realm. Mrs. Hill, with her own personal efforts, has taught more than one hundred children to read the Bible! How few of us can write against our names an equal offset to the claims of human duty?
Circumstances made me acquainted with one or two wealthy persons residing in Athens, and I received from them a strong impression of Mr. Hill’s usefulness and high standing. His house is the hospitable resort of every stranger of intelligence and respectability.
Mr. King and Mr. Robinson, missionaries of the Foreign Board, are absent at Psera. Their families are here.
I passed my last evening among the magnificent ruins on the banks of the Ilissus. The next day was occupied in returning visits to the families who had been polite to us, and, with a farewell of unusual regret to our estimable missionary friends, we started on horseback to return by a gloomy sunset to the Piræus. I am looking more for the amusing than the useful in my rambles about the world, and I confess I should not have gone far out of my way to visit a missionary station anywhere. But chance has thrown this of Athens across my path, and I record it as a moral spectacle to which no thinking person could be indifferent. I freely say I never have met with an equal number of my fellow-creatures, who seemed to me so indisputably and purely useful. The most cavilling mind must applaud their devoted sense of duty, bearing up against exile from country and friends, privations, trial of patience, and the many, many ills inevitable to such an errand in a foreign land, while even the coldest politician would find in their efforts the best promise for an enlightened renovation of Greece.
Long after the twilight thickened immediately about us, the lofty Acropolis stood up, bathed in a glow of light from the lingering sunset. I turned back to gaze upon it with an enthusiasm I had thought laid on the shelf with my half-forgotten classics. The intrinsic beauty of the ruins of Greece, the loneliness of their situation, and the divine climate in which, to use Byron’s expression, they are “buried,” invest them with an interest which surrounds no other antiquities in the world, I rode on, repeating to myself Milton’s beautiful description:—
“Look! on the Ægæan a city stands
Built nobly; pure the air and light the soil:
Athens—the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence; native to famous wits,
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess
City or suburban, studious walks or shades.
See, there the olive groves of Academe,
Plato’s retirement, where the attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound
Of bees’ industrious murmurs, oft invites
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls
His whispering stream; within the walls there view
The schools of ancient sages, his who bred
Great Alexander to subdue the world!”