Wednesday, October 31st.
Anchored between the Island of Longa and the Coast of Immortal Attica. But my heart bleeds whilst I survey the sad change it has undergone. In vain do I search for the descendants of those rustic patriots, whose valour enabled Miltiades and Themistocles to overthrow the Persian host by sea and land, or for those well cultivated fields, where art concealed the frugality of nature. Alas! far as the best glass can reach, no sign of a dwelling can be seen; and the country, for want of inhabitants, lies entirely neglected.
After almost despairing of meeting a human being, I one day fell in with two men grazing a considerable number of horses, which I imagined was a nursery for the Turkish Cavalry; but on mentioning this to the Greeks who attended them, they answered no; that the only use they were of was to tread out the corn in summer; in return for which they grazed them from place to place in winter. I also found a small chapel, not bigger than an hermitage, to which the people from the interior country, on particular occasions, resort. Part of the neighbourhood is covered with wood, which any one may take who chooses to cut it. Longa, the once celebrated Island of Helen, is entirely depopulated, and produces nothing. Our pilot calls this Port Maundré. It has the same advantage I remarked at Modon, a passage at each end of the island.
If you can believe that I am within a day's journey of Athens, how will you envy my being so near the mother of the arts and sciences, and what will you say when I tell you that I did not go there. But be assured it was not through want of exertion; but from the impracticability of getting there by land in these hostile times. But whilst the people were wooding, I went in a boat to the Promontory of Sunium, to see the remains of the Temple of Minerva, which I take to be one of the most ancient remaining in Greece. If we may credit Homer, it was contemporary with Troy; for in the third book of the Odyssey, Nestor, after relating the seduction of Clytemnestra, passing to the return of the Greeks, says,
"But when to Sunium's sacred point we came,
Crown'd with the Temple of the Athenian Dame,
Atrides Pilot, Phrontes, there expired, &c."
In some ground lately opened I found a human scull, and some other burnt bones. What antiquarian will object to their being those of this ill-fated pilot?
A considerable part of the architrave of the Temple is still standing, supported by fifteen columns, nine of which are in a row, each nineteen feet high, and near eleven in circumference. The whole edifice was of Parian marble. Vast quantities of fragments and broken columns are lying all around, and the Temple is still a beautiful, and a venerable object, on whatever side you approach the Promontory.
November 5th.