Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

“The winding valleys deep-withdrawn and ridgèd crests of Arcady.”

Pindar.

Of the temples that once adorned the mainland and the islands of Greece only a brave few now rear columns from the ground. Among these the Temple of Apollo at Bassæ constrains the traveller to penetrate to the heart of Arcadia. The rewards of the difficult journey are many, and are enhanced by a general knowledge of the whole Arcadian territory, into which the detached impressions of a brief stay may be sympathetically fitted.

Homer says that the Arcadians went to Troy in vessels borrowed from Agamemnon, because they had none of their own. The most potent fact in the history and development of Arcadia is its isolated position as the one inland country (save little Doris) of Greece. Only from the heights of the encircling mountains could her people catch sight of distant seas. Those whom the sea-spell lured with irresistible magic left their hills to seek foreign coasts and enlist in foreign navies. The Arcadians have rightly been called the mercenaries of Greece. Those who stayed at home lived the restricted life of a population cut off from intercourse with the larger world. The entire territory is composed of high land, its lowest elevation from the sea being more than two thousand feet. In the east are great plains of swampy ground, and lakes drained by underground channels. Towards the west the land becomes an irregular, hilly plateau intersected by rivers. In antiquity superb forests of oaks and pines, coverts for many a wild beast, contributed to that general physical wildness which prevented a people untouched by foreign ideas from uniting in a progressive political life. Even against the background of Greek individualism their history is conspicuously one of separate towns. And of these towns few attained to any eminence.

Arcadia contained the oldest and the youngest of all Greek cities. The latter, Megalopolis, is still in civic existence, and is the terminus of the modern railroad ride from Athens for those who are on their way to Bassæ. It was the last town founded in free Greece, and its establishment originated in the ardent hope of Epaminondas to unite the scattered Arcadians under one government. In the same southwestern portion of Arcadia, near the young Megalopolis and easily reached from it on horses, lie the ruins of old Lycosura, believed by the Greeks to be the most ancient of all their cities and to have served as a model for later foundations.

But the chief rôles in the political life of Arcadia were played by Mantinea and Tegea, cities lying in the wide eastern plains. Near them lay Pallantium, and within the territories of these three cities flourishes the modern Tripolis, in its origin an important Turkish stronghold and now one of the most prosperous towns of the new nation. The sanguinary history of Tripolis in the War of Independence was worthy of the ancient character of Mantinea and Tegea.

Although Homer called Mantinea “lovely,” her life was one of military activity. Mantineans fought at Thermopylæ, but it is in the pages of the historians of later periods, of Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius, that they chiefly figure, fighting on their own territory against Sparta or with Sparta against Thebes. This evil coalition resulted in the famous battle of 362 B. C., in which Epaminondas fought for the last time. The description of the battle forms the close of Xenophon’s treatise on Greek History, and the chaotic results of the long-anticipated struggle, whereby “neither party, though each claimed to have conquered, was seen to gain any more in land or cities or authority than it possessed before the battle was fought,” are set forth by him with considerable vividness. But the momentous fact that in this battle the great Theban commander lost his life he disposes of in a subordinate clause. This petty injustice is the more singular because the fatal blow was generally believed to have been struck by Xenophon’s son, Grylus, who received a public burial and monument at Mantinea. It is Pausanias who admits us to the last scene of a noble life, enacted among the alien, windswept oaks of Arcadia, on the hill now known as Mytika. “When Epaminondas received his wound, they carried him out of the line of battle. He was still in life. He suffered much, but with his hand pressed on his wound he kept looking hard at the fight, and the place from which he watched it was afterwards named ‘Scope’ (the Lookout). But when the combat ended indecisively he took his hand from the wound and breathed his last, and they buried him on the battlefield.”

The memory of Epaminondas inspired a later hero who not only fought at another battle of Mantinea but was himself a son of the Arcadian soil. In the period of the Achæan League, Philopœmen, born in Megalopolis, was eight times chosen to be the general of the united forces, and in 206 B. C. he met and conquered at Mantinea the recalcitrant Spartans who had refused to join the league. The description of this battle is given to us by Polybius, his younger fellow townsman, who at the hero’s death was the youth selected to bear his ashes to the tomb. Because all such victories in the cause of freedom were but fitful gleams of the fire whose flame had been quenched at Chæronea, it is the more necessary to give heed to a character like Philopœmen, from the day of whose death, Pausanias sadly remarks, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. He closes the long line of Greeks who led their peoples to liberty. At one of the Olympic festivals the whole audience in the theatre rose to greet Themistocles, who had saved Greece from Persia. And centuries later a similar tribute was paid to Philopœmen. Not long after his victory over the Spartans it chanced that he was present at the competition of the minstrels at the Nemean Games. “Pylades, a native of Megalopolis, and the most famous minstrel of his time, who had gained a Pythian victory, was singing an air of Timotheus, the Milesian, called ‘The Persians.’ Scarcely had he struck up the song, ‘The glorious crown of freedom who giveth to Greece,’ when all the people turned and looked at Philopœmen, and with clapping of hands signified that the song referred to him.”

Few men in history are more interesting than Philopœmen. From youth to a hale old age he lived the life of his choice, combining rugged and fearless sincerity with keen military knowledge, and uniting in an unusual degree the reckless impulsiveness of a freebooter with the patient power of a skilful general. When one term of his generalship had expired, he hurried over to Crete to help in a war which in no way concerned him; but his countrymen, accustomed to depend upon his ability, summoned him back, and he arrived on the mainland just in time to find that the Romans had fitted out a fleet against Sparta, and to plunge into the fray. Being no sailor, however, he unwittingly embarked in a leaky galley, which reminded the Romans and their allies (in those days every man had read his classics at school) of the verses in the Catalogue in which Homer speaks of the Arcadians as ignorant of the sea. After eight successful generalships and many brilliant exploits, when he was more than seventy years old, Philopœmen was captured and poisoned by the Messenians. In him Arcadia lost her greatest son, in whom had lived her own wildness and her own patience, her own flaming spirit and her own honourable austerity. According to Polybius, he had harboured no illusions about the future of his country and of Hellas, but had chosen to offer his life, while it lasted, as a bulwark against the inevitable. “I know full well,” he said in answer to Aristænus’s criticism of his policy of resisting all unjust encroachments from Rome, “that there will hereafter come a time when the Greeks will have to yield obedience under compulsion to every order issued to them. But would one wish to see this time come as quickly as possible or, on the contrary, postponed as late as possible? Methinks as late as possible! In this, then, the policy of Aristænus differs from my own. He is eager to see the inevitable come as quickly as possible and he helps it on to the best of his ability, whereas I to the best of my power resist and thrust it back.” One false hope, according to Pausanias, he did treasure: “He would fain have modelled his life on the pattern set by the character and deeds of Epaminondas, but could not equal him in all things, for while the temper of Epaminondas was very gentle, that of the Arcadian was passionate.”

Although Arcadia’s part in the Persian wars was not heroic, Tegea, like Mantinea, proved her bravery at Thermopylæ, and at Platæa, according to Herodotus, her citizens struggled with the Athenians for the foremost post in the battle. Later wars, civil and foreign, kept her busy through several centuries. But the arts of peace also flourished within her walls, and Tegea must be honoured for having erected one of the most distinguished temples not only of the Peloponnesus but of all Greece. This was the Temple of Athena Alea, built by Scopas early in the fourth century. Only a few traces are left of its mingled Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns. More important are the fragments preserved in the National Museum at Athens of sculptures from the hand of Scopas himself, portraying the Calydonian boar-hunt, the heroine of which was the Arcadian maiden Atalanta. The same Museum contains marble reliefs from Mantinea, coming probably from the time, if not the workshop, of Praxiteles, and very interesting sculptures of disputed date from old Lycosura. The Arcadians, whose native gift was music, did not lag behind the rest of the Greeks in their appreciation of the plastic arts.