From this height, on the side of the Museum Hill, we see the grotto that has been dignified with the title of the “prison of Socrates,” but upon slight grounds. When the philosopher was condemned, the annual sacred ship which was sent with thank-offerings to Delos was still absent, and until its return no execution was permitted in Athens. Every day the soldiers who guarded Socrates ascended this hill, and went round the point to see if the expected vessel was in sight; and it is for their convenience that some antiquarian designated this grotto as the prison. The delay of the ship gave us his last immortal discourse.
We went one evening by the Temple of Jupiter, along the Ilissus, to the old Stadium. This classic stream, the Ilissus, is a gully, with steep banks and a stony bottom, and apparently never wet except immediately after a rain. You would think by the flattery it received from the ancient Athenians that it was larger than the Mississippi. The Panathenaic Stadium, as it is called, because its chief use was in the celebration of the games of the great quadrennial festival, was by nature and art exceedingly well adapted to chariot races and other contests. Open at the end, where a bridge crossed the Ilissus, it extended a hundred feet broad six hundred and fifty feet into the hill, upon the three sloping sides of which, in seats of marble, could be accommodated fifty thousand spectators. Here the Greek youth contended for the prizes in the chariot race, and the more barbarous Roman emperors amused a degenerate people with the sight of a thousand wild beasts hunted and slain in a single celebration.
The Stadium has been lately re-excavated, and at the time of our visit the citizens were erecting some cheap benches at one end, and preparing, in a feeble way, for what it pleases them to call the Olympic Games, which were to be inaugurated the following Sunday. The place must inevitably dwarf the performance, and comparison render it ridiculous. The committee-men may seem to themselves Olympic heroes, and they had the earnest air of trying to make themselves believe that they were really reviving the ancient glory of Greece, or that they could bring it back by calling a horse-race and the wrestling of some awkward peasants an “Olympiad.” The revival could be, as we afterwards learned it was, only a sickly and laughable affair. The life of a nation is only preserved in progress, not in attempts to make dead forms live again. It is difficult to have chariot races or dramatic contests without chariots or poets, and I suppose the modern imitation would scarcely be saved from ludicrousness, even if the herald should proclaim that now a Patroclus and now an Aristophanes was about to enter the arena. The modern occupants of Athens seem to be deceiving themselves a little with names and shadows. In the genuine effort to revive in its purity the Greek language, and to inspire a love of art and literature, the Western traveller will wholly sympathize. In the growth of a liberal commercial spirit he will see still more hope of a new and enduring Greek state. But a puerile imitation of a society and a religion which cannot possibly have a resurrection excites only a sad smile. There is no more pitiful sight than a man who has lost his ideals, unless it be a nation which has lost its ideals. So long as the body of the American people hold fast to the simple and primitive conception of a republican society,—to the ideals of a century ago,—the nation can survive, as England did, a period of political corruption. There never was, not under Themistocles nor under Scanderbeg, a more glorious struggle for independence than that which the battle of Navarino virtually terminated. The world had a right to expect from the victors a new and vigorous national life, not a pale and sentimental copy of a splendid original, which is now as impossible of revival as the Roman Empire. To do the practical and money-getting Greeks justice, I could not learn that they took a deep interest in the “Olympiad”; nor that the inhabitants of ancient Sparta were jealous of the re-institution of the national games in Athens, since, they say, there are no longer any Athenians to be jealous of.
The ancient Athenians were an early people; they liked the dewy freshness of the morning; they gave the first hours of the day to the market and to public affairs, and the rising sun often greeted the orators on the bema, and an audience on the terrace below. We had seen the Acropolis in almost every aspect, but I thought that one might perhaps catch more of its ancient spirit at sunrise than at any other hour.
It is four o'clock when my companion and I descend into the silent street and take our way to the ancient citadel by the shortest and steepest path. Dawn is just breaking in pink, and the half-moon is in the sky. The sleepy guard unbolts the gate and admits us, but does not care to follow; and we pass the Propylæa and have the whole field to ourselves. There is a great hush as we come into the silent presence of the gray Parthenon; the shades of night are still in its columns. We take our station on a broken pillar, so that we can enjoy a three-quarters view of the east front. As the light strengthens we have a pink sky for background to the temple, and the smooth bay of Phalerum is like a piece of the sky dropped down. Very gradually the light breaks on the Parthenon, and in its glowing awakening it is like a sentient thing, throwing shadows from its columns and kindling more and more; the lion gargoyles on the corners of the pediment have a life which we had not noticed before. There is now a pink tint on the fragments of columns lying at the side; there is a reddish hue on the plain about Piræus; the strait of Salamis is green, but growing blue; Phalerum is taking an iridescent sheen; I can see, beyond the Gulf of Ægina, the distant height of Acro-Corinth. .
The city is still in heavy shadow, even the Temple of Theseus does not relax from its sombreness. But the light mounts; it catches the top of the white columns of the Propylæa, it shines on the cornice of the Erechtheum, and creeps down in blushes upon the faces of the Caryatides, which seem to bow yet in worship of the long-since-departed Pallas Athene. The bugles of the soldiers called to drill on the Thesean esplanade float up to us; they are really bugle-notes summoning the statues and the old Panathenaic cavalcades on the friezes to life and morning action. The day advances, the red sun commanding the hill and flooding it with light, and the buildings glowing more and more in it, but yet casting shadows. A hawk sweeps around from the north and hangs poised on motionless wings over the building just as the sun touches it. We climb to the top of the western pediment for the wide sweep of view. The world has already got wind of day, and is putting off its nightcaps and opening its doors. As we descend we peer about for a bit of marble as a memento of our visit; but Lord Elgin has left little for the kleptomaniac to carry away.
At this hour the Athenians ought to be assembling on the Pnyx to hear Demosthenes, who should be already on the bema; but the bema has no orator, and the terrace is empty. We might perhaps see an early representation at the theatre of Dionysus, into which we can cast a stone from this wall. We pass the gate, scramble along the ragged hillside,—the dumping-ground of the excavators on the Acropolis,—and stand above the highest seats of the Amphitheatre. No one has come. The white marble chairs in the front row—carved with the names of the priests of Bacchus and reserved for them—wait, and even the seats not reserved are empty. There is no white-clad chorus manoeuvring on the paved orchestra about the altar; the stage is broken in, and the crouching figures that supported it are the only sign of life. One would like to have sat upon these benches, that look on the sea, and listened to a chorus from the Antigone this morning. One would like to have witnessed that scene when Aristophanes, on this stage, mimicked and ridiculed Socrates, and the philosopher, rising from his undistinguished seat high up among the people, replied.