Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

Further east, on the open bay of Phaleron, is New Phaleron, a bathing resort as frankly modern as the Lido at Venice. The exact site of Old Phaleron is open to dispute, but the walk between it and Athens was a favourite constitutional in Plato’s time. Many a classic conversation was held here on the way. In the “Symposium” of Plato, Glaucon asks Apollodorus: “Isn’t the road to Athens just made for conversation?” Now the banality and the bareness of the city’s outskirts intrude sadly upon the pedestrian’s philosophic equipoise, both here and on the other road between Athens and Piræus where Lucian and his friend, in the second century of our era, could still find shelter from the hot sun under some olive trees by the wayside and “sit down to rest upon an overturned stelé.”

The focus of the inner city life was the splendid Agora laid out by the famous architect Hippodamus. Here ended the road from Athens. This square was probably west of Munychia north of the Zea harbour, perhaps about where the present Athena street intersects Munychia avenue. Near it were probably grouped various sanctuaries. Xenophon tells how in the civil war the patriotic party, “the men from Phyle,” unable to exclude “the City party” from the whole of Piræus, fell back on the Munychia hill, and the men from Athens blocked up the avenue that leads to the temple of Bendis and to the sanctuary of Munychian Artemis. By this Market-place, too, houses of rich residents were probably built.

The Piræus was essentially a democratic stronghold. It was the rendezvous for the patriotic anti-Spartan party; and Plato, with all his aristocratic leanings, chose to lay at Piræus the opening scene and setting for his greatest dialogue, the “Republic.” It was the fitting propylæa for his ideal city as well as for the real Athens. “I went down yesterday,” Socrates begins, “to Piræus with Glaucon, both to make a prayer to the goddess and to take a look at the festival to see how they would carry it off, inasmuch as they are now celebrating it for the first time.” The Thracian residents, it seems, had just introduced a celebration in honour of their goddess Bendis, and the natives had united with them. The whole port was en fête with processions conducted both by the hospitable native citizens and the Thracians themselves. In the evening there was to be a torch-race followed by an all-night festival. Socrates, who was on the point of returning to Athens after witnessing the daylight processions, was easily persuaded by Polemarchus to stay over for the torch-race, dining first at the house of his father, the rich and hospitable old metic, Cephalus. At the house Socrates finds another son, Lysias, who was soon to become famous as an orator. For the Thirty were to plunder the property bequeathed by Cephalus to his sons, all the ready money, the shield factory, and the slaves; were to put summarily to death young Polemarchus; and were to force Lysias, reduced to sudden poverty, to betake himself to speech-writing for a living. His crowning effort was an arraignment of his brother’s murderers. Most skilful of narrators, he tells of the fate of Polemarchus; how his house was plundered; how his wife was robbed of the very ear-rings from her ears; and how after his execution, notwithstanding the just title of the family to large holdings of real estate, he was buried from a hired shed, one friend providing a robe, another a pillow, for the corpse. He tells, too, of his own arrest at his home by the emissaries of the Thirty: how he bargained for his life with a sum of ready money; how one of his captors followed him into the inner room, looked over his shoulder into the money-chest, and took not only the price agreed upon but all the contents of the strong box; how he was taken to another house of a Piræus acquaintance; and how, while his captors were keeping guard at the peristyle door in front, he had escaped by a back door to the house of a friend, the shipmaster, with the appropriate name of Archenaus. So, while his less fortunate brother, Polemarchus, is led off to Athens, thrown into prison, and “bidden by the Thirty their usual bidding—to drink hemlock,” Lysias, by the aid of his nautical friend, is embarked for Megara under cover of night. We should like to have fuller details of that escape of the young Lysias, yesterday a wealthy manufacturer, to-day a plundered fugitive but destined to become one of the greatest of the “ten” orators and a master architect of Attic style. Perhaps a small boat put off from some lonely spot on Akte, perhaps from the Great Harbour itself, shooting through the moles in the darkness and, wind and weather permitting, kept to starboard of the Psyttaleia reef, passed up through the strait of Salamis, on through the beautiful Bay of Eleusis, and landed the fugitive at Megara.

Plato’s account of the visit of Socrates to the Piræus homestead carries us back to the days of security before the reign of the Thirty. We see old Cephalus welcoming Socrates cordially, delivering a monologue on his own gracious old age, telling a story about Sophocles in his later years, and finally withdrawing to supervise a sacrifice to the gods.

The introduction of a foreign divinity like Bendis of the Thracians was not unusual. The celebration, described at the opening of the Republic, was at least no more exotic than a St. Patrick’s day in America. Foreigners and natives united in it as they did in the celebration of the Mother of the Gods. The customs inspection of foreign deities was lenient. The Greeks were free traders both in art and religion, though the finished product imported was likely enough to be used as new material. Into the smelting furnace of the classic period was cast the old, the new, the foreign, and the domestic, to reappear in fairer form, stamped with the Hellenic hall-mark. Among the various imported deities, Cybele is well vouched for at Piræus where a number of marble votive shrines of the Great Mother have been found. One of these archaic Cybele reliefs, brought from Piræus to the National Museum in Athens, shows the goddess with her lion in her lap, her cymbals in her hand. The “new theology,” fostered by Euripides and domiciled in daily life by the “New Comedy,” could treat these cymbals as typical of “a creed out-worn.” One of Menander’s characters exclaims:—

“No god, my wife, saves one man through another’s help,

For if a human being can by cymbals’ clash

Deflect the god to whatsoever is desired,

Then greater than the god is he that doeth this.”

Among various resident colonists who may have occupied distinct sections of the city, like a mediæval Ghetto or a modern Italian quarter, the worship of home divinities was kept alive. It is known, for example, that the Egyptian resident merchants, perhaps as early as the end of the fifth century, had received a special license to erect an Isis sanctuary and the Cyprians instituted a similar cult of Adonis and Aphrodite.