Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

Bringest the lamb and the kid, and the child bringest home to his mother.”

Arcadia is still “rich in flocks” and the “mother of sheep,” and to meet and greet her shepherds as they turn home from the mountain pastures restores the world of Greek poetry. But if Karytæna is scarcely rounded before “the sun sets and all the ways are darkened,” then pastoral idylls make way for Arcadia’s magnificent solitariness. The mediæval castle bravely lifts its head above the lonely country, while red clouds stretch like tongues of flame over the mountains and the setting sun turns into molten gold. Suddenly, perhaps, amid the awful silence of purple crags and burning sky, one sign of life asserts itself. A little kid is stumbling, lost and dreary, in a patch of green wheat which had enticed it from its mother. Doubtless before the night is over one tired shepherd who has safely enfolded his ninety and nine will climb the steeps again to find the prodigal. But travellers must pass on in the effort to reach Andritsena before midnight. The sky pales and cools into night, and stars of singular brilliance emerge, using the absence of the fair moon to “show their bright faces to men.” As one drives hour after hour through the starlit solitude, while “from heaven breaketh open the ether infinite,” all geographical and temporal limitations seem done away with, and modernity and antiquity meet within the heart of nature. But finally, as the road from time to time curves outward, the lights of human habitations begin to twinkle. Andritsena lifts her little evening beacons on a mountain-side to offer shelter and food to pilgrims of the night. The village rivals Arachova in the charm of its situation, with its outlook over the verdant hills of the Alpheus valley to the distant pale blue heights of Erymanthus in the north. Vineyards and mountain streams and trees add their quota. Those who have stayed several days in the town in bright weather, or who have been snowed in, as travellers may easily be as late as April, report many attractions out of doors, and many hospitable entertainments within the peasant houses. Even those whose impressions are gained from one night’s lodging may forget physical hardships in the discovery of a Greek inheritance. A girl, reproved for stroking the embroidered collar of a guest, says explanatorily, “but it is so pretty,” even as the old men on the wall at Troy said of Helen.

Beds of unyielding boards are exchanged before dawn for hard wooden saddles. The temple of Bassæ lies two hours away, and those who wish to see it without undue haste and yet return to Megalopolis before night-fall must begin their ride while the stars are still alight.

Bassæ, or The Glens, should be thought of in connection with Phigalia, although probably only those who take the long horseback ride to or from Olympia will see the remains of this ancient city, which, measuring by the time involved, lies as far beyond Bassæ as Bassæ is beyond Andritsena. The surrounding country fell within its territory, but the city itself stood on “high and mostly precipitous ground,” bounded on the south by the deep gorge of the winding Neda, and partially encircled on the other sides by high mountains. Here where the air was invigorating and all healthful conditions prevailed it was natural that Apollo should be worshipped as the Succourer (Epikourios). In the fifth century the Phigalians were so impressed by reports of the new Parthenon in Athens that they determined to erect by popular subscriptions a new temple to their chief divinity and to ask Ictinus, the Parthenon’s architect, to build it for them. Bassæ, where already a more primitive shrine existed, was the place chosen, and thither from Andritsena in the cool dawn modern pilgrims are taken by their peasant guides. In spite of the promise of the stars, perhaps the day breaks slowly, dark masses of clouds impeding the progress of the sun. For an hour and a half the horses make their way along moderate heights, scrambling up small hills and clattering noisily down very rocky defiles. The waysides, in March, are bright with irises, violets, hyacinths, and white and purple crocuses. Then the wildness of the country begins to increase, and culminates in the stony slope of a forbidding hill. In half an hour this is scaled by the horses, and becomes a mount of vision. In unusual panoramic grandeur, mountains lift their nearer or more distant peaks. On the east are the barren hills that form the western spurs of Mount Lycæus. Farther to the south, beyond the valley of the Neda, are the more thickly wooded slopes of the Nomian hills, and beyond them are seen the snowy summits of the range of Taygetus. To the north Erymanthus and Cyllene show their crests. And directly in front, far to the south, Mount Ithome, rising out of the Messenian plain, proudly breaks the horizon line. Nor is the sea wholly wanting, for along the southwestern horizon, as if flowing into the sky itself, stretches a shining length of the Ionian waters.

Perhaps from this hill Ictinus looked down upon the place assigned to him by the Phigalians. Even then the situation must have seemed impressively secluded. Now, certainly, on descending the easy slope, a modern is almost overwhelmed, as if by the appearance of a god laying claim to nature’s secrets, by the sudden sight of a majestic Doric peristyle. The temple is built on a narrow plateau on the southern side of a hill called Cotilius by the ancients. Ictinus’s first approach must have been from Phigalia (where he would have talked with the municipal authorities) up the valley of the Neda, over picturesque and well-wooded hills and dales. But he must have studied the situation from all possible points of vantage. Perhaps for him, too, some special revelation came when out of dark and threatening clouds the sun, at last divinely swift, cleft the darkness, and he saw how effectively massive columns of gray limestone would be illumined by Apollo’s radiant shafts. Probably the architect’s taste and the Phigalians’ desire united to choose as the material of the temple the native rock that could be quarried in the neighbourhood. Marble was imported for the capitals of the inner pillars, for the ceilings of the north and south porticoes, for the roof tiles and for the sculptured frieze which now honours the British Museum. The columns of the peristyle and the architrave, barren of adornment, are singularly noble. They look as if they had sprung from the rocks about them and belonged more to the mountains overshadowing them than to men. Indeed, for many centuries, men forgot the existence of the temple. Pausanias, in his day, six hundred years after its building, could still describe it as surpassing all the temples in the Peloponnesus, save the one at Tegea built a hundred years later, for the beauty of its stone and the symmetry of its proportions. But in time earthquakes and iconoclasm wrought their deadly work, and through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the remaining ruins were known only to shepherds. The temple was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, but not until the present time were any efforts made to reërect some of the interior portions from the fragments lying on the ground. In the wake of the archæologist follows the tourist, and now any one who will may intrude upon Apollo’s long solitude.

Unlike other temples erected to the gods, whom Æschylus describes as “facing the dawn” and flashing back to the worshippers from their “gleaming eyes” the sun’s early rays, the temple at Bassæ lay from north to south instead of from east to west. But this was due only to the character of the situation and the exigencies of the soil. Long before Ictinus’s day a primitive shrine had existed facing the east in the usual manner. And the new temple seems to have had a special door built in its cella in order that the main statue of Apollo, facing the rising sun, might still be approached from the side of dawn. The old statue, like the old shrine, was supplanted by a finer one. Later the great bronze Apollo was sent to adorn Megalopolis. But when Ictinus lived it may well have formed the centre of his noble architectural design, an incarnation of the ideal of physical and of spiritual wholeness realized through beauty.

One further fact about the Temple in the Glens has been emphasized by the great topographer Leake: “That which forms, on reflection, the most striking circumstance of all is the nature of the surrounding country, capable of producing little else than pasture for cattle and offering no conveniences for the display of commercial industry either by sea or land. If it excites our astonishment that the inhabitants of such a district should have had the refinement to delight in works of this kind, it is still more wonderful that they should have had the means to execute them. This can only be accounted for by what Horace says of the early Romans:—

‘Privatus illis census erat brevis,

Commune magnum.’

This is the true secret of national power, which cannot be equally effective in an age of selfish luxury.”