LETTER XXVI.
The Piræus—The Sacra Via—Ruins of Eleusis—Gigantic Medallion—Costume of the Athenian Women—The Tomb of Themistocles—The Temple of Minerva—Autographs.
Piræus.—With a basket of ham and claret in the stern-sheets, a cool awning over our heads, and twelve men at the oars, such as the coxswain of Themistocles’ galley might have sighed for, we pulled away from the ship at an early hour, for Eleusis. The conqueror of Salamis delayed the battle for the ten o’clock breeze, and as nature (which should be called he instead of she, for her constancy) still ruffles the Ægæan at the same hour, we had a calm sea through the strait, where once lay the “ships by thousands.”
We soon rounded the point, and shot along under the
“Rocky brow
Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis.”
It is a bare, bold precipice, a little back from the sea, and commands an entire view of the strait. Here sat Xerxes, “on his throne of gold,[[11]] with many secretaries about him to write down the particulars of the action.” The Athenians owed their victory to the wisdom of Themistocles, who managed to draw the Persians into the strait (scarce a cannon shot across just here), where only a small part of their immense fleet could act at one time. The wind, as the wily Greek had foreseen, rose at the same time, and rendered the lofty-built Persian ships unmanageable; while the Athenian galleys, cut low to the water, were easily brought into action in the most advantageous position. It is impossible to look upon this beautiful and lovely spot and imagine the stirring picture it presented. The wild sea-bird knows no lonelier place. Yet on that rock once sat the son of Darius, with his royal purple floating to the wind, and, below him, within these rocky limits, lay “one thousand two hundred ships-of-war, and two thousand transports,” while behind him on the shores of the Piræus, were encamped “seven hundred thousand foot, and four hundred thousand horse,”—“amounting,” says Potter, in his notes, “with the retinue of women and servants that attended the Asiatic princes in their military expeditions, to more than five millions.” How like a king must the royal Persian have felt, when
“He counted them at break of day!”
With an hour or two of fast pulling, we opened into the broad bay of Eleusis. The first Sabbath after the creation could not have been more absolutely silent. Megara was away on the left, Eleusis before us at the distance of four or five miles, and the broad plains where agriculture was first taught by Triptolemus, the poetical home of Ceres, lay an utter desert in the sunshine. Behind us, between the mountains, descended the Sacra Via, by which the procession came to Athens to celebrate the “Eleusinian mysteries”—a road of five or six miles, lined, in the time of Pericles; with temples and tombs. I could half fancy the scene, as it was presented to the eyes of the invading Macedonians—when the procession of priests and virgins, accompanied by the whole population of Athens, wound down into the plain, guarded by the shining spears of the army of Alcibiades. It is still doubtful, I believe, whether these imposing ceremonies were the pure observances of a lofty and sincere superstition, or the orgies of licentious saturnalia.
We landed at Eleusis, and were immediately surrounded by a crowd of people, as simple and curious in their manners, and resembling somewhat in their dress and complexion, the Indians of our country. The ruins of a great city lay about us, and their huts were built promiscuously among them. Magnificent fragments of columns and blocks of marble interrupted the path through the village, and between two of the houses lay, half buried, a gigantic medallion of Pentelic marble, representing, in alto-rilievo, the body and head of a warrior in full armour. A hundred men would move it with difficulty. Commodore Patterson attempted it six years ago, in the “Constitution,” but his launch was found unequal to its weight.
The people here gathered more closely round the ladies of our party, examining their dress with childish curiosity. They were doubtless the first females ever seen at Eleusis in European costume. One of the ladies happening to pull off her glove, there was a general cry of astonishment. The brown kid had clearly been taken as the colour of the hand. Some curiosity was then shown to see their faces, which were covered with thick green veils, as a protection against the sun. The sight of their complexion (in any country remarkable for a dazzling whiteness) completed the astonishment of these children of Ceres.
We, on our part, were scarcely less amused by their costumes in turn. Over the petticoat was worn a loose jacket of white cloth reaching to the knee, and open in front—its edges and sleeves wrought very tastefully with red cord. The head-dress was composed entirely of money. A fillet of gold sequins was first put, à la feronière, around the forehead, and a close cap, with a throat-piece like the gorget of a helmet, fitted the skull exactly, stitched with coins of all values, folded over each other according to their sizes, like scales. The hair was then braided and fell down the back, loaded also with money. Of the fifty or sixty women we saw, I should think one half had money on her head to the amount of from one to two hundred dollars. They suffered us to examine them with perfect good-humour. The greater proportion of pieces were paras, a small and thin Turkish coin of very small value. Among the larger pieces were dollars of all nations, five-franc pieces, Sicilian piastres, Tuscan colonati, Venetian swansicas, &c. &c. I doubted much whether they were not the collection of some piratical caique. There is no possibility of either spending or getting money within many miles of Eleusis, and it seemed to be looked upon as an ornament which they had come too lightly by to know its use.
We walked over the foundations of several large temples with the remains of their splendour lying unvalued about them, and at a mile from the village came to the “well of Proserpine,” whence, say the poets, the ravished daughter of Ceres emerged from the infernal regions on her visit to her mother. The modern Eleusinians know it only as a well of the purest water.
On our return, we stopped at the southern point of the Piræus, to see the tomb of Themistocles. We were directed to it by thirteen or fourteen frusta of enormous columns, which once formed the monument to his memory. They buried him close to the edge of the sea, opposite Salamis. The continual beat of the waves for so many hundred years has worn away the promontory, and his sarcophagus, which was laid in a grave cut in the solid rock, is now filled by every swell from the Ægæan. The old hero was brought back from his exile to be gloriously buried. He could not lie better for the repose of his spirit (if it returned with his bones from Argos). The sea on which he beat the haughty Persians with his handful of galleys, sends every wave to his feet. The hollows in the rock around his grave are full of snowy salt left by the evaporation. You might scrape up a bushel within six feet of him. It seems a natural tribute to his memory.[[12]]
On a high and lonely rock, stretching out into the midst of the sea, stands a solitary temple. As far as the eye can reach, along the coast of Attica and to the distant isles, there is no sign of human habitation. There it stands, lifted into the blue sky of Greece, like the unreal “fabric of a vision.”
Cape Colonna and its “temple of Minerva,” were familiar to my memory, but my imagination had pictured nothing half so beautiful. As we approached it from the sea, it seemed so strangely out of place, even for a ruin, so far removed from what had ever been the haunt of man, that I scarce credited my eyes. We could soon count them—thirteen columns of sparkling marble, glittering in the sun. The sea-air keeps them spotlessly white, and, till you approach them nearly, they have the appearance of a structure, from its freshness, still in the sculptor’s hands.
The boat was lowered, and the ship lay off-and-on while we landed near the rocks where Falconer was shipwrecked, and mounted to the Temple. The summit of the promontory is strewn with the remains of the fallen columns, and their smooth surfaces are thickly inscribed with the names of travellers. Among others, I noticed Byron’s and Hobhouse’s, and that of the agreeable author of “A Year in Spain.” Byron, by the way, mentions having narrowly escaped robbery here, by a band of Mainote pirates. He was surprised swimming off the point, by an English vessel containing some ladies of his acquaintance. He concludes the “Isles of Greece” beautifully with an allusion to it by its ancient name:—
“Place me on Sunium’s marble steep,” &c.
The view from the summit is one of the finest in all Greece. The isle where Plato was sold as a slave, and where Aristides and Demosthenes passed their days in exile, stretches along the west; the wide Ægæan, sprinkled with here and there a solitary rock, herbless, but beautiful in its veil of mist, spreads away from its feet to the southern line of the horizon, and crossing each other almost imperceptibly on the light winds of this summer sea, the red-sailed caique of Greece, the merchantmen from the Dardanelles, and the heavy men-of-war of England and France, cruising wherever the wind blows fairest, are seen like broad-winged and solitary birds, lying low with spread pinions upon the waters. The place touched me. I shall remember it with an affection.
There is a small island close to Sunium, which was fortified by one of the heroes of the Iliad on his return from Troy—why, heaven only knows. It was here, too, that Phrontes, the pilot of Menelaus, died and was buried.
We returned on board after an absence of two hours from the ship, and are steering now straight for the Dardanelles. The plains of Marathon are but a few hours north of our course, and I pass them unwillingly; but what is there one would not see? Greece lies behind, and I have realised one of my dearest dreams in rambling over its ruins. Travel is an appetite that “grows by what it feeds on.”
| [11] | So says Phanodemus, quoted by Plutarch. The commentators upon the tragedy of Æschylus on this subject, say it was a “silver chair,” and that it “was afterwards placed in the Temple of Minerva, at Athens, with the golden-hilted cimeter of Mardonius.” |
| [12] | Langhorne says in his note on Plutarch, “There is the genuine attic salt in most of the retorts and observations of themselves. His wit seems to have been equal to his military and political capacity.” |