Studies of Travel: Greece

by Edward A. Freeman

The cavalcade leaves Chorbati to make its way to Corinth by way of Nemea. Pausanias gives a choice of routes; the one chosen is that which he distinguishes as the τρητὸς, which he describes as narrow, but passable for carriages. Narrow enough it is, and well it deserves its name as a passage cleft through the rocks, but the wheel tracks are there to show that carriages did once go that way. We are between Corinth and Argos, not between Thebes and Delphi; but we can well fancy the difficulties and the likelihood of quarrel if Laios and Oidipous met in such a strait as this.

We pass on, over ground which five-and-fifty years ago beheld one of the fiercest struggles of the War of Independence. Each of the passes, each of the heights, was held and stoutly contested in the August of 1822, when the men of Peloponnêsos beat back the Turkish host of Dramali in utter defeat. On our immediate path the ground rises and falls, but we are led over no special heights till, as we descend, the plain of Nemea breaks upon us. The columns rise in all the stateliness of solitude. Beyond rise the hills in which the ancients placed the cave of the Nemeian lion. This then is one of the seats of Pan-hellenic religion and Pan-hellenic festive gathering. If its glory did not reach that of Olympia or Delphi or even of the Isthmus, it is the first of the four to which our journey leads us, and we remember that Nemeian victories called forth the song of Pindar, and that Alkibiadês did not disdain either to win triumphs there, or to have those triumphs recorded in the choicest art of the sculpture of his day. There is the temple in the plain, a plain well fitted for the purposes of the games, and, cut out of one of the hills to the right as in the Larissa of Argos, we see where the theatre of Nemea once was. Though the place hardly ranks among sites of first-rate interest, though it calls up no such primæval associations as Mykênê which we have left, no such later associations as Corinth to which we are going, there is much to muse upon in the plain of Nemea. The legend of the lion comes home to us all the more strongly after seeing the sculptured forms which the world has agreed to call lions in the Mykênêan akropolis. Science and scholarship going hand in hand have given him a new interest. The lion, whose cave we cannot see, though we see the mountain side in which it is hollowed, may be mythical in his own person, but he is no mere creature of fiction. If, with Mr. Dawkins, we trace out the retreat of the lion from Europe, we see at Nemea one very important stage in his retreat. We trace him from the day when he made his lair in the caves of Mendip to the day when Herodotus so accurately marked out his geographical limits within the European continent. In his day the lion was still found in the region which stretched from the Achelôos to the Nestos; and when we look at the evidently careful nature of the notice itself, and when we go on to put that notice in its right place among other notices, we shall not be tempted for one moment to think that the lions of Herodotus were other than real lions. Some indeed have suggested that Herodotus was so poor a naturalist as to mistake lynxes or wild cats for lions. No one will be likely to think this when he has once put the whole evidence in its right order. Just as we can believe in a Mykênaian empire without pledging ourselves to a personal Agamemnôn, so we can believe in lions in Peloponnêsos without pledging ourselves to a personal Hêraklês. The constant references to the lion in the Homeric poems must come from actual knowledge or from very recent tradition. The beast has a two-fold name; he is not only λέων but λῖς, and we are tempted, though it is slightly dangerous, to carry our thoughts on a little further with regard to his name. We ourselves seem never to have called him by anything but a name borrowed from the Latin; but are not Löwe and λῖς strictly cognate, signs of a time when the king of beasts had a name common to the whole Aryan family? Anyhow we may be sure that primitive legend would not have quartered the lion at Nemea, that primitive art would not have sculptured him at Mykênê, except at times when his presence in Peloponnêsos was, if a thing of the past at all, a thing of a very recent past.

The modern fauna of Nemea, as it strikes the passer-by, is of a lowlier and more harmless kind. The shepherdesses are there with their goats among the ruins, and a draught of their milk in the Greek May is a refreshment not to be scorned. And he who uses his eyes as he passes along may have the same luck as the infant Hermês when he met the tortoise in his path. The tortoise of that adventure willingly sacrificed himself for the good of mankind, that the baby-god might make a lyre out of his shell. The tortoise kept his place in the human nursery speech of Greece, and we may still ask the question of the Greek girls,

χελὶ χελώνη, τί ποεῖς ἐν τῷ μέσω;

There is a temptation to carry him off as a living memorial of the spot; but the way from Nemea to Britain is long.

But we must not forget man and his works when we are in one of the chief seats of Hellenic worship. Here is the temple of Nemeian Zeus, standing desolate in the plain, almost as some of our Cistercian abbeys stand in their valleys. The history of the holy place is characteristic of Greek religion and of Greek politics. As Elis wrested the possession of Olympia from Pisa, so Argos wrested the possession of Nemea from Kleônai. In each case the possession of the temple and all that belonged to it was a source of dignity and political power. It was therefore eagerly sought for, and unscrupulously seized, by the greater city at the expense of the smaller. In the Olympian case indeed, one ground of refusing the ancient claim of the men of Pisa was that they had no city at all, but were mere villagers, unable and unworthy to preside over one of the great religious solemnities of the Greek nation. With our Northern notions, we are inclined to ask why Olympia and Nemea did not themselves grow into cities. Why did not a town grow up around the sanctuary? Not a few English towns, some of them of considerable size, grew up round some venerated monastery or other great church. A few devotees of the saint, a few dependents of his ministers, began the settlement. Traffic, shelter, all the motives which draw men together, increased the colony. In course of time it either wrested municipal rights from its ecclesiastical lords or received them as a free gift. In either case a new borough was formed, a borough which had not been made but had grown. But in Greek ideas a city was something which did not grow but was made. It might grow indefinitely after it was once made; but its first making did not take the form of growing. A new city was called into being by special and solemn acts, and no such foundation would have been endured at Olympia by Elis or at Nemea by either Argos or Kleônai. Some accommodation there must have been for the ministers of the God and his worshippers, even in ordinary times. At the great festival seasons, so we gather from the story of the assault on the tents of the envoys of Dionysios at Olympia, the crowds which assembled were encamped in the open plain like an army. But such a camp did not, like so many of the camps of Rome, grow into a permanent city. One might have fancied that it might become an object of Pan-hellenic policy to remove these national sanctuaries from the power of particular cities, and to place them under some kind of management in which all who had a right to share in the festival might be represented. But such an idea was foreign to the Greek political mind. The presidency of the temple and the games was essentially a privilege of this or that city. Pisa or Kleônai, Elis or Argos, were hosts, and the rest of Greece were their guests. There were, indeed, Amphiktionies, where a temple belonged to several cities in common; but the action of the most famous of their number in Greek affairs did not do much to impress the general Greek mind in favour of that system of management. Throughout Grecian history the Delphic Amphiktiony either does nothing or becomes the tool of some powerful commonwealth or prince.

But, besides the memories of Nemea and the thoughts which it suggests, there is the temple itself. There is enough left to trace out the whole ground plan, and three columns soar above the plain, catching the eye as a prominent object in the descent. We say “soar,” for these are perhaps the only Doric columns which do soar. They are taller and slenderer than any others to be seen in Greece, and they have thereby lost much of the true Doric character. That they are of much later date than the Attic Parthenôn none can doubt. Greek antiquaries are even inclined to fix them as late as Macedonian times. One almost wonders that an architect who departed so far from the primitive Doric idea in the proportion of his columns did not venture to adopt either of the later forms of capitals, one of which at least must have come into use before his time. We have seen the Ionic capital in use on the Athenian akropolis, and it certainly would have looked more in place as a finish to the columns of Nemea than the form which seems the natural finish at Poseidônia and even at Athens. But they are grand objects all the same. Nothing can wholly take away the inherent majesty of the Doric architecture, and beside them is a relic of even greater interest than themselves. Within the precinct, built out of the remains of the heathen sanctuary, are the ruins of a small church, clearly of early date, one of the many instances in which the professors of the new faith turned the holy places of the old faith to their own purposes. A train of thoughts are suggested by the neighbourhood of the two temples, now alike equally fallen. But on this head we shall do well to check ourselves; a greater opportunity for musings of this kind will be found on the western side of Peloponnêsos.

We leave the temple; we pass by the remains of the theatre; we climb to a fountain where the women gathering around may afford a study in the varied ornaments of their dress. We pass on; we come down again, marking a number of quarries which supplied stone for the neighbouring building and which have almost the look of buildings themselves. It is to our shame that we pass by the remains of Kleônai, its akropolis covering a low hill, without stopping for a nearer examination? Such questions are not always decided by the traveller for himself; they are for the most part settled for him. And he who has lingered at Mykênê in the morning and must needs reach Corinth in the evening may be forgiven if he fail to give Kleônai her due. A halt and a meal are taken at a more convenient point, within sight of the hill of Kleônai, where a few trees give shade, and where a few ruined and forsaken houses remain as memories of the last earthquake. Of that earthquake we shall hear and see more at Corinth. We press on to the city of the two seas and the mountain crowned by its citadel. Before we reach them, we learn again at once how thoroughly Greece is a land of mountains, and how near one part of Greece is to another. Here in Peloponnêsos we see over the gulf to the mountains of Northern Greece. The hoary head of Parnassos rises before us,