Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

“Whom one sent forth to war one knows, but, in the stead of men, come back unto the homes of each but urns and ashes.”

The mysterious mutilation of the Hermæ is fresh in mind and the fear of angered gods reasserts its sway. But no presentiment of ill could anticipate the reality of the disaster in the harbour of Syracuse or the slow tortures of living death in its stone quarries. A chance for retaliation in kind was indeed to come. In a Piræus stone quarry Syracusan captives were in turn imprisoned a few years later, but they, more lucky than the Athenians, cut their way to freedom from their rock-bound prison.

Despite the imperious insolence of Athens and her unrighteous schemes for aggrandizement, our sympathy in the tragedy is ever fresh. By the harbour side we mourn to-day the predestined doom of the gallant squadron and the stricken city. Through the ebb and flow of hope and disaster, the thought sweeps on to the close of the war and the humiliation of Athens at the hands of Sparta; the destruction of the Long Walls, their rebuilding and the refortification of Piræus under Conon; the aftermath of Athenian power; the brilliant age of Plato and the orators; the struggle with Philip; the fall of Greek liberty; the sway of Macedon; the Roman conquest, with the long, stubborn siege of Piræus so graphically described by Appian. Sulla, exasperated by the long defence of the Mithridatic army, with whom the Athenians had cast in their lot, burnt the arsenal and docks and razed the fortifications so utterly that the Roman governor, Sulpicius, in writing to his friend Cicero in 45 B. C., could describe Piræus as the “corpse” of a great city. In the second century of our era it had resumed a semblance of commercial prosperity. Lucian, in his dialogue, “When My Ship Comes In,” goes down to Piræus with a friend to admire a great grain transport that has just put into harbour on its way from Egypt to Rome. For a merchantman it is large; some 180 feet long, 45 in beam, and over 40 feet in depth to the hold. The prow stretches out long, and at the stern is the gilded figure-head of a goose with its graceful curving neck. The two friends wonder at a sailor mounting nimbly by the swaying ropes and running out nonchalantly along the great yardarm, as he holds on by the yardsheets. But the generous cargo of grain, enough, as we are told, to feed Athens for a year, is destined for Rome. Athens was no longer the emporium of the eastern Mediterranean. She had become a way-station. No longer could she enforce the old law, mentioned by Aristotle, which required that two thirds of the cargo of every grain-ship that put into Piræus must be carried up to the metropolis.

After Roman times, in the long atrophy of the Byzantine age, Piræus dwindled to a group of fishermen’s huts. It revived somewhat under De la Roche in the fourteenth century, and thereafter, at least was known as Porto Leone from the seated figure of a marble lion that kept guard among the ruins like the majestic lion that still sentinels the battlefield of Chæronea. In the seventeenth century, the Venetians carried off this Piræus lion, and now, seated by another arsenal in another seaport, careless of the passing tourist, it looks grimly over the Adriatic where steamers come and go between the neighbouring Trieste and its native land.

Leaving now the Great Harbour and our meditations on the vicissitudes of history, we resume our inspection of the fan-shaped peninsula. Without a special permit the visitor is excluded from the western end and from the Royal Garden which encloses the most probable site of the Tomb of Themistocles, if indeed his bones were ever brought back from burial in exile. His official tomb was in Magnesia in Caria. A public interment in his native land could not be granted to one exiled as a traitor. Thucydides knows only of a secret burial of his bones in Attica. The remains of the monument in question stand on the point of Akte near the entrance to the outermost harbour. From this tomb the great admiral’s spirit could still watch over the Athenian sea-power. Skepticism about the site is forgotten when we read the fragment, meagre as it is, of the comic poet Plato:—

“Fair is the outlook where thy mounded tomb is placed.

For it will signal merchantmen from here and yon,

It will behold the sailors faring out and in,

Will be spectator of the triremes’ racing oars.”

This “contest of the triremes” may allude to the boat-race in which the course lay from Cantharus harbour around the whole peninsula to Munychia. These races in sacred ships were part of the systematic training of the Attic youths.