In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

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.