Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

They are now stations on the way to Athens for those who enter Greece at Patras. The railroad journey between these cities, along the coasts of the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs, ought to be taken in one direction or the other by every visitor to Greece, for scarcely any other displays to better advantage the combination of mountain, plain, and sea, which are the triad of Greek landscape. The waters of the Corinthian Gulf, in swift response to sun, wind, and cloud, vary from pellucid blue to vivid, foam-flecked emerald, marked by strange bands of deep wine red. Along its northern coast the mountains pile up in restrained and harmonious masses of blue or purple, crowned in winter or in spring with snowy white. At times the west wind from the ocean sweeps up this long narrow gulf as if through a cañon, beating the waves into fury and filling the air with cold moisture, even while the sun or the moon denies the presence of a storm. On the other side of the Isthmus the Saronic Gulf pushes far asunder the coasts of Attica and the Peloponnesus and skirts on the north the littoral of Megara. From its placid evening surface the mountains of Ægina and Salamis rise in curves and sharp peaks of cool violet and rose. Beyond the Bay of Eleusis the eye that has not yet seen Athens turns inland in strained waiting for the Acropolis. Rising out of a still distant plain and bearing upon its crest the half-realized ruins of the Parthenon, the hill of the pilgrim’s desires becomes a reality—“and from a dream, behold, it is a waking vision.”

This journey, of scarcely eight hours, serves also to reveal a surprising amount of Greek territory. Taking it in the reverse direction, the train passes through Attica, Megara, the Isthmus and Argolis, and follows the entire northern coast line of Achæa. The mountains across the Corinthian Gulf include not only Helicon and Cithæron of Bœotia, and Parnassus of Phocis, but also unfamiliar peaks, barren of the Muses, belonging to Locris, Ætolia, and Acarnania. From Patras can be seen the low coast of the Ætolian bay on which lies Mesolonghi, the burial-place of Byron’s heart. Near it, although unseen from Patras, is Calydon, the scene of Meleager’s boar hunt, celebrated by Homer and Bacchylides, Euripides and Swinburne.

Patras, the western seaport of Greece and surpassed in commercial importance only by Athens and Piræus, is in Achæa. The name of this province evokes Homeric memories only because it was settled by Achæans from Thessaly. Its chief contribution to Greek life lay in the “Achæan League” against Rome which, as Pausanias says, rose on the ruins of Greece “like a fresh shoot on a blasted and withered trunk.” Patras itself was unimportant until the time of Augustus, and its most valuable associations are with the early history of Christianity. In physical beauty, however, it is thoroughly Greek—“beautiful Patras,” Lucian called it, by way of contrast to the knavishness of one of its inhabitants. The epithet doubtless included not only the adornments added by the Roman emperors but also the natural charms of its situation. The fruitful plain, the height of Mount Voïdia in the background, the splendid waterfront facing the mountainous Ætolian coast combine to give a suitable welcome to Greece. This entrance is never fairer than in the hour when the silver gray of dawn is obliterated by the clear bloom in the sky that heralds the rising sun. The morning light reveals outlines in naked distinctness, and tinges all surfaces with a colour so fresh and buoyant that an immediate conviction arises of the joyous nobility of Greek scenery and of the youthfulness which a race so nurtured might maintain.

The plain of Megara is separated from Attica by the Kerata and from the Isthmus by Mount Geraneia, a massive range extending across the Megarian territory from the Corinthian to the Saronic Gulf and interposing a rough and lofty bulwark between Central Greece and the Peloponnesus.

Megara is now an unpretentious village with very white houses which gleam from a distance among the encircling mountains. Its site is that of the ancient city, on the double summit of a hill above the plain filled with vineyards, olive orchards, and bright green fields of wheat, rye and barley. A good road leads to the coast, little more than a mile away, where once the harbour of Nisæa focused the large sea business of Megara. The name of the harbour kept alive the memory of Nisus, son of Athenian Pandion, the first king of Megara (the Ionians perhaps preceded the Dorians in its occupation), as the “island of Minoa,”[^[23]] now the promontory of St. George, recalled the invasion by Minos of Crete. The king’s daughter, out of love for his enemy, betrayed her father. The chorus in the “Choëphoroi” of Æschylus uses the story as a warning to Clytemnestra:—

“Another murd’rous maid is sung in story and calls forth our hate. Led on by foeman lover, won by gifts of Minos, gold-wrought Cretan necklaces, she slew a man beloved and sheared the lock immortal from the head of Nisus while he breathed in unsuspecting sleep. But Hermes overtook her!”

The history of Megara was influenced now by Athens and now by Corinth. At times neighbourhood quarrels with Corinth turned her toward Athens, but in crises the bonds of race proved stronger. Her great epoch, however, was in the eighth and seventh centuries, before the balance of power had been shifted by the Athenian conquest of Salamis. During these centuries Megara rivalled Corinth in colonial expansion, and from Nisæa adventurers set sail to found Megara Hyblæa in Sicily, Heraclea on the Euxine, and above all Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which long before its christening as Constantinople had forgotten its mother city.

In arts and letters Megara’s achievements were slight, although tradition assigned to her the creation of comedy. Only one of her poets, Theognis, belongs to our canon of Greek literature. A contemporary of Solon, he exhibited the same tendency to use poetry as a medium of political discussion, but he was totally opposed to the democratic influences which in his city, as elsewhere, were making headway against the aristocracy. Oligarchy and tyranny had been succeeded by this larger struggle. Although Theognis was in the thick of the fight, his wide influence in later centuries was due rather to his sententious utterances on ethics, which classed him with the “gnomic poets.” Xenophon called the poetry of Theognis “a comprehensive treatment concerning men,” and as such it was used with the works of Homer and Hesiod in the educational system of fourth-century Athens. Moderns will find in the extant fragments little of the power which saves a poet’s politics and ethics from becoming in a later age either outworn or commonplace. But in the public square of the village, the old hillside market-place, we acquire a sympathy for his personal life and his love of home. Here he stood and looked down upon the fields of his confiscated estates, wasted in the riotous living of new masters. The shrill cry of a bird, announcing the autumnal harvests, reminded him that no longer for him were mules drawing the curved plough through the furrows. The sea, lying at the door of Megara, bore him into exile, and with Alcæus and Plato (and their Roman and modern imitators) he likened the State to a ship in danger, sailed by an evil crew, threatened by leaping waves.

In the Persian wars Megara made a brave show, sinking all animosity toward Athens in the great need of Hellas. But fifty years later a bitter quarrel with Athens became one of the precipitating causes of the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians had passed a decree excluding the Megarians from their markets and from all the harbours in their dominions. The Spartans demanded its revocation, and the Athenians, influenced by Pericles, refused. Opinions differed as to his disinterestedness. In the judgment of Thucydides he was moved solely by reasons of state. The more popular opinion that he was involved by Aspasia in a scandalous affair affecting both cities appears in Aristophanes, who also does not fail to see the comic side of a situation which forced the impoverished Megarians to work their way secretly into the Athenian markets bringing cucumbers and sucking pigs and garlic under their cloaks. The later comic poets made a butt of the Megarians, and the Megarian’s sneer about the Athenian figs and Propylæa was doubtless only one of many retorts.

After the Peloponnesian War we have a happier picture of Megara as the home of philosophy. Plato in his first grief over the death of his master went there to visit Eucleides, who had been wont to creep into Athens by night, in defiance of the decree, to talk with Socrates. And from the vivid opening scene of the “Theætetus,” a severely metaphysical dialogue written a few years later, we know that Eucleides and his philosophical friends used to meet each other in the market-place (where now the peasant women dance at Easter) or go to the harbour to greet a friend en route from Corinth to Athens, or gather at home for readings and conversations. Isocrates praised in Megara a domestic prosperity finer than the lust for empire which had ruined Athens and Sparta.