In the northwestern corner of Arcadia, skirting Achæa and Elis, rises another well-known mountain, Erymanthus, the favourite hunting ground of Artemis, who as Leader, Saviour, and Fairest received countless shrines from the Arcadians. The southern and lower continuation of Mount Erymanthus was known as Mount Pholoë, to which, as we know from the “Anabasis,” Xenophon and his sons and their guests used to come from Elis for the pleasures of the chase. Its beautiful woodlands were fabled to be one of the homes of the Centaurs, whose strange dual nature linked the world of men to the world of beasts. Heracles was entertained by them when, as one of his labours, he came to hunt the wild boar in the Erymanthian thickets.
The forests which spread over the plains and darkened the hills of Arcadia were filled with wild boars and bears and deer. The bear especially gave rise to many legends. The Great Bear in the heavens was once an Arcadian maiden, Callisto, whom jealous Hera turned into a bear and whom Artemis, as a favour to her, shot down. But Zeus retransformed the maiden into shining stars, the guides of mariners before and since the night when Odysseus “kept looking ever at the Pleiades and at Boötes setting slow and at the Bear, by surname called the Wain.” Callisto’s son was Arcas, or Bear, and he first taught the forest dwellers, in the country that was to inherit his name, how to raise corn and bake bread. The great oak woods of Arcadia were responsible for the epithet “acorn-eating,” which the riddle-loving priestess of Delphi often applied to the inhabitants. In the time of Pausanias the Arcadian forests were still conspicuous in all parts of the country. Driven gradually from the plain to the mountains they are even there at last yielding to decay.
But the waters of Arcadia are as unchanged as the hills. Both the Alpheus and the Eurotas rise within its borders, the former turning westward, as of old, to its haunts at Olympia, the latter winding to the south to delight a new Sparta with its gleaming water and ripple-washed reeds. And the Ladon, the northern branch of the Alpheus, flows on with the impetuous charm and beautiful colour which gave it the reputation of being the loveliest river in Greece. From out of the range of the Erymanthian hills springs the river Erymanthus, which was especially sacred to Pan, as if its reeds above all others could be shaped into tuneful pipes. In the river Gortys the nymphs washed the new-born Zeus. And by the banks of the Aroanius, which flows down a northern valley to join the Ladon, Pausanias, in enviable leisure, awaited Arcadian music. “Amongst the fish in the Aroanius,” he tells us, “are the so-called spotted fish. They say that these spotted fish sing like a thrush. I saw them after they had been caught, but I did not hear them utter a sound, though I tarried by the river till sunset, when they were said to sing most.”
A group of renowned Arcadian waters may be reached in one northward excursion of three days from Tripolis. The first of these is the Lake of Pheneus, as famous for its strangeness as for its loveliness. It is so surrounded by hills that no stream can escape from it above ground, and the water issues only by two katavothras. The condition of these subterranean channels determines whether the great mountain basin of the Pheneus is a fertile plain or a broad lake. In ancient times and in our own the changes have succeeded each other with the fascination of mystery. Pausanias found a plain, and knew the lake only by tradition. From his day until the beginning of the nineteenth century there were no records. But with the ensuing careful descriptions of geographers and travellers come baffling alternations of a “swampy plain covered with fields of wheat or barley” and a “wide expanse of still water deep among the hills, reflecting black pine woods, gray crags, and sky now crimson with sunset.”
To the east of Pheneus and separated from it only by a mountain ridge the Lake of Stymphalus is sunk in placid beauty within towering hills. It was the scene of the fifth labour of Heracles, who killed the monstrous man-eating birds that haunted it. They typified, probably, the pestilence which would arise whenever the underground channel that served as an outlet for the lake became stopped. Heracles was the master-engineer of mythological times. Later engineers also experimented with the water which flows into the Stymphalian Lake from the surrounding mountains and especially from Cyllene. Its purity and abundance led Hadrian to have a supply of it carried by an aqueduct to Corinth. And to-day the Athenians are contemplating importing it into their arid city.
From the prosperous village of Solos vigorous and patient pedestrians may reach the most famous of all the waters of Arcadia, and the most characteristic also of a country in which gentle charms, however real, are always subsidiary to a primitive wildness. These waters are the Falls of the Styx, as familiar in English as in Greek literature. They descend over a perpendicular cliff amid scenery which some consider grander and more imposing than that at Delphi. The surroundings so impressed themselves on the sensitive Greek imagination that from the time of Homer the Styx was one of the dread rivers of death and the lower world, fit companion-piece to nether darkness and the monstrous hound of hell, fit invocation even for gods when on their oath. “Let earth be witness unto this and heaven broad and yon down-flowing water of the Styx, which is the oath the greatest and most terrible among the blessed gods,” the immortals, from Zeus to Calypso, are ever exclaiming. Hesiod contributed the fancy that Iris, in a vessel of gold, brought water from the Styx to Olympus, so that the gods might swear by its material presence. The spray of the falls is said to take on at midday the lovely colors of the rainbow, which had its divine personification in the fair messenger of the gods. And it has also been pointed out that Hesiod, in addition to describing accurately the Styx as trickling down from a high and steep rock, by a fine figure suggests a view in winter when huge icicles form over the cliff and the clouds settle down so closely upon its summit that the water looks as if it were descending straight from the sky. The Styx, he says, dwelt in “glorious chambers, vaulted with long rocks, and round about a colonnade of silver pillars reared against the sky.” To him also as to Homer the dweller in this icicled palace was “terrible, hated by all the immortals.”
The traveller who must sacrifice the lakes and rivers of Arcadia to seeing the temple of Apollo comes directly by train from Athens to Megalopolis in the great south-western plain. Here he is detained only by a fourth century theatre and other more fragmentary remains of the ancient city before turning northward by carriage or horse.
If he is obliged to ride for several hours and meet a carriage at Karytæna, the grim guardian of the mountainous road to Andritsena, where he is to spend the night, he will have cause to be thankful for an experience that has put him on more familiar terms with rude Arcadia, and has made him more sensitive to the change from monotonous lowland to vast, solitary mountains and deep ravines. The town of Karytæna lies on the slopes of one of the low hills that form the northern boundary of the plain of Megalopolis. Above it, on the hill’s summit, loom the ruins of an old Frankish castle, once the seat of a barony which contributed many a romantic story to the history of the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages. Rarely in Greece is the harmony of historical impression interrupted. But here, like highwaymen to challenge intellectual security, feudalism and the mediæval world stalk out upon the unwary. The spectacle is unique. Karytæna stands at the point where the flat plain startlingly breaks into almost terrifying mountains. Mount Lycæus towers on the left, and all around serrated heights rise grandly above the castle, without detracting from its own defiant dignity. Past the foot of the hill flows, on its way to Elis, the Alpheus, here spanned by a striking bridge of six arches, bearing a Frankish inscription. The ruins of the old barony of Geoffrey de Villehardouin equal any feudal remains in Europe in their reminiscent suggestiveness of the romantic and violent life of the Middle Ages. But even while the traveller fears that he will become confused among memories of the Frankish dukes and princes of the Peloponnesus, of donjons and keeps, of chivalry and knighthood, of all the insignia and the emotions and the ideals which make the thirteenth century A. D. seem more remote from us than the fifth century B. C., he finds himself restrained and pacified. Whatever Greece lays her hands upon seems to lose its ephemeral or unrelated character and to take its place, individual, to be sure, but tributary in an harmonious whole. The ruined mediæval castle fits into the surrounding landscape as no disturbing factor, but rather as an integral part of what had helped also to shape the ancient life of Arcadia into its distinguishing forms. The age when the autochthonous Arcadians were resisting the inroads of Sparta and the age when the Slavic inhabitants were yielding to the attacks of the irresistible Franks seem to have had a common parentage in physical conditions. And the brawling stream of the Alpheus below seems to make the jousts and the romances of Geoffrey de Karytena’s court as much their own as were the festivals of Zeus and the love affairs of Pan and the nymphs.
The mountains into which the carriage turns from the six-arched bridge are threaded by a long road which, despite its smoothness and safety, runs near enough to the tops of precipices and to the sight of noisy torrents in the gloomy ravines below to engender a mood of Arcadian wildness. If this mountain region is reached in time, travellers will become spectators of the charming scenes which are enacted each evening over the hills of Greece when the bleating flocks of sheep and goats come home to their folds. Sappho saw them in hilly Lesbos:—
“Hesperus, all things thou bringest that brightness of morning had scattered,