Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

To moderns the most familiar of all the shrines of Bœotia is that of the Muses on Mount Helicon. So familiar, indeed, has it become through tradition and poetry that its geographical position is as unimportant as that of Raphael’s Parnassus. It almost perplexes us to localize Helicon as the eastern peak, now called Zagora, of the southern portion of the group of mountains that lie between the Copaic plain and the Gulf of Corinth; and to know that at the northern foot of this peak still nestles the valley, green and shady and traversed by a mountain stream, where once foregathered the iris-haired, golden-snooded Muses. Hippocrene even, struck out by the hoof of Pegasus as he flew toward heaven, is identified with the modern Kryopegadi, a very cold and clear perennial spring high up on the eastern side of the mountain within a little green glade encircled by fir trees. Helicon is still the home of fir-woods, oak groves and strawberry shrubs. Pausanias said that nowhere else could the goats find sweeter berries, and nowhere else could be found so many healing herbs. Hellebore, the ancient cure for madness, grew here in abundance.

In spite of the almost incalculable importance of the worship of the Muses and their pervasive presence in poetry, Greek literature scarcely concerns itself with their localized abode. Sophocles breaks the strain of the “Œdipus Tyrannus” by a fleeting vision of the nymphs sporting with Dionysus on the far-off heights of Helicon. And Hesiod was inspired to write his “Theogony” by a vision of the Muses that came to him as he slept on the mountain “majestical, sacred:”—

“High on the summit of Helicon chorals they sing to their dancing,

Lovely, desire-enchaining, yet strong and with supple feet glancing.

Thence in tumultuous riot, with veils of the darkness enringing,

Onward they fare in the night, and lovely the voice of their singing.”

For the most part it is only in Alexandrian poetry, from which Roman poetry derived a large part of the material which it passed on to modern poetry, that we find Helicon and Hippocrene figuratively used as sources of inspiration.

Certain Bœotian towns illustrate other traditions of culture. Thespiæ, in the territory of Platæa, was used by Cicero to illustrate what was so little understood and so greatly scorned by the Romans—the Greek love of art. Nothing could so embitter the conquered people of Greece as to take from them or pretend to buy from them their works of art. “Believe me,” Cicero urges, “no community in the whole of Greece or Asia ever sold of its own accord to anybody any statue or picture or civic ornament. For the Greeks take marvellous delight in things which we despise. What would the Thespians take for their Eros, the only thing that attracts visitors to their town?” This was the Praxitelean statue which the sculptor himself ranked with his Faun as his best work and which Phryne obtained from him and presented to her native city. Eros was the tutelar divinity of the place, originally worshipped in the form of an unwrought stone. The statue, called forth by the æsthetic taste of a later age and passionately appreciated by the people, was taken to Rome by Caligula, returned by Claudius, stolen again by Nero. Pausanias saw only a copy when he was at Thespiæ. Now no copy like the familiar Capitoline copy of the Faun supplies us with half knowledge. But a visible symbol of Thespiæ’s other claim to remembrance has been left to us, to enrich the fragmentary wall and the few foundations that alone at present mark the ancient site. Not only did the city share in the victory of Platæa, but more daringly in earlier years, when the struggle with Persia was on the “razor’s edge” of uncertainty, she had sent her strongest men to die with Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The fragments of a stone lion similar to the lion of Chæronea are thought to mark the grave of these sons of Thespiæ who were inspired by—

“An ardour not of Eros’ lips.”

In the eastern valley of the Asopus, or Vourieni, lie the not inconsiderable remains of ancient Tanagra, a city more popularly known to-day for its artistic taste than any other Greek city, except Athens. As early as 1874 excavations of its necropolis began to yield in extraordinary abundance the small terra-cotta figures which now adorn many museums, and in copies, more or less successful, have become a staple article of modern trade. These figurines, rough in finish but scrupulously lovely in shape, were objects of familiar use to the Tanagrians, being thrown into graves at burials. Other things in the city implied more civic pride. Pausanias mentions approvingly the unusually good taste of the inhabitants in separating their religious buildings from the business and residence portions of the city. And Dicæarchus is enthusiastic over their fine houses, adorned with porticoes and encaustic paintings. Literature also had its place, for here lived Corinna, a woman of no mean poetic talent. Pausanias saw her tomb in an honoured place in the city and a picture of her in the Gymnasium binding on her head a fillet to celebrate a victory over Pindar at Thebes. With unexpected acumen he remarks that she probably owed her victory partly to the fact that she wrote in a dialect intelligible to the Bœotians, and partly to her beauty. Moderns know her through the story that she advised Pindar to use mythological allusions, and after his first experiment told him that she had meant him to sow with the hand, not with a sack; and through her own haunting fragment of song: “Among the white-armed women of Tanagra, a city made famous by sweet soprano voices.” Such evidences of culture are the more surprising when we learn from Dicæarchus that Tanagra was a town of farmers. Their bluff straightforwardness, their kindliness and their simple living greatly impressed him in comparison with the insolence and dissipation of the Thebans.