Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

To Argos, nurse of steeds,

Where Cyclopēan walls rear high

Their giant stones to flaunt the sky.”

To-day, in the spring, the hill of Tiryns is covered with slender stalks of asphodel, while amidst flowers delicate and shadowy as these, along the pathways of the “asphodel meadows” below, steal the ghosts of the ancient masters of these Cyclopean walls and galleries.

Mycenæ and Tiryns, linked in tradition with the name of Perseus, both sent men to Platæa to fight against the Persians. In a little more than a decade thereafter they were both captured and destroyed by Argos, jealous of their proximity and of their place on the national roll of honour from which she had excluded herself. At the end of another decade Æschylus chose to flatter the Argives, just then the allies of Athens, by transferring from Mycenæ to their town the scene of the “Agamemnon.”

In addition to the plain of Argolis the “Akte,” or peninsula proper, has its own history and associations. Leaving Tiryns and Nauplia behind, the road to the inland Epidaurus sanctuary is overlooked from the north by the naked ridge of Mount Arachneum, from which flashed to the palace roof at Argos the last relay of flame in the chain of beacons. The Epidaurian Asclepieum claimed the honour of the birth of the god of healing, the foundling son of Apollo, who was suckled by a goat. From this parent sanatorium others were established throughout Greece. The Athenians even called “Epidauria” one of the days used for the worship of Asclepius. In a fragmentary hymn to the god, found at Athens, reference is made to the oracle quoted by Pausanias as beginning: “Great joy for mortals all thy birth, Asclepius! Thou, love-child of Koronis and my own, wast born in rugged Epidaurus!” In the precinct of this famous health-resort was found a tablet inscribed with a hymn by Isyllus, an Epidaurian poet, containing the genealogy of the god’s mother and telling how Apollo named the child and called him “Destroyer of disease, Health-giver, mighty Gift to men.” Homer’s epithet for Epidaurus is “abounding in vines,” and in later days Dionysus was not neglected. The auditorium, with the circle of the orchestra still completely marked by a sunken rim of stone, is the most beautiful and the best preserved of the theatres in Greece, and one may here better than at Athens imagine the mise-en-scène of the great dramas for which the Argolid furnished so largely the subject matter. The opening scene of the “Ion” of Plato brings before us the star rhapsodist of his day, relating how he is just back from the Asclepius festival at Epidaurus where the Epidaurians held a contest, not only in his own specialty of reciting Homer but in lyric poetry besides. In Epidaurus were celebrated the usual games, as the well-preserved Stadium testifies and as we know from more than one passage of Pindar. In the Abaton, now more fully excavated, have been found some of the tablets dedicated by grateful patients who had been cured by sleeping in the precinct. Cures of blindness, palsy, ulcers, dropsy, internal maladies and external wounds are recorded in this medical literature, which Strabo tells us was here displayed in great abundance, as in the great Sanatorium of Hippocrates on the island of Cos.

Troezen, far down the eastern side of the peninsula, both geographically and by its associations, historical and mythological, turns our thoughts away from Dorian Argos and across the Saronic Gulf to Athens. It was here that some of the Athenian women and children found a place of refuge during the Persian invasion. In a colonnade of the market-place Pausanias saw portrait statues of those refugees whose rank and wealth permitted this expression of their gratitude. Here in the harbour the Greek fleet assembled before sailing to take its position in the Straits of Salamis. The ruined remains of the acropolis are insignificant, but our vision, like that of the refugees, may range over the wonderful landscape—Parnassus beyond the Isthmus and gulf, mountains and headlands, and the Ægean set with island jewels—back to the fertile plain below, which in modern times has welcomed the beauty of the orange and the lemon to replace the vanished glory of the kings and heroes of antiquity.

Plutarch, in his “Life of Theseus,” relates the well-known story that the young prince in the dawning vigour of manhood is taken by his mother to test his strength on the great rock beneath which lie concealed the tokens left by his father to guarantee his royal birth. He lifts the rock and takes the sword and the sandals. Emulous of the fame of Heracles, he rejects the suggestion of the easy voyage across the Saronic Gulf, and by the dangerous land route, where wild beasts and giants must be met and slain, he makes his way past the ill-famed Scironian rocks to Athens, and claims the paternity of Ægeus and becomes the national hero of his father’s land.

In the “Hippolytus” of Euripides we find Theseus, self-exiled from Athens for a year, again in Troezen, the realm of Pittheus, his maternal grandfather, who has had the rearing of his son, Hippolytus. The handsome youth has been seen at Eleusis by Phædra, his young stepmother, who then and there falls in love with him. He is, however, a somewhat intractable compound of a Jehu and a Joseph, wholly absorbed in colourless devotion to Artemis and inaccessible to the blandishments of Aphrodite, who uses the unlucky Phædra as a cat’s-paw to punish the intrusion of the divine huntress into the sphere of influence rightfully belonging to the goddess of love. Phædra, despairing and mortified at her rejection by Hippolytus, very properly hangs herself, but by way of securing her posthumous justification leaves a note for her husband, accusing the innocent Hippolytus. Theseus, in his rage, banishes his son and invokes a curse by Poseidon. Faring forth in his chariot Hippolytus, though an excellent whip, is unable to cope with the great bull sent up from the sea. This so terrifies the horses that their driver is thrown upon the rocks and dies, after Artemis, a somewhat tardy dea ex machina, has appeared to the now remorseful Theseus and has exonerated his son. This favourite drama, in addition to the admirable drawing of Phædra’s character, combines the grandeur of the sea as it roars up in a tidal wave, envisaging the terrible sea-bull, and the loveliness of the Troezenian meadows where Hippolytus, a replica of the young Ion in Apollo’s temple, presented the vision of human beauty, so dear to Greek eyes, in its appropriate setting of nature’s lonely charm.[^[37]]

In addition to these more superficial attractions there was at Troezen one of the most popular entrances to the lower world. Here Heracles fetched up Cerberus, and by this route Dionysus brought back his mother Semele. It is also reasonable to suppose that Theseus, from a sense of local pride, must have passed down this way when he assisted his friend Pirithöus in carrying off Persephone.