Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

Remains of the old gateway in the northern circuitwall, just where the north Long Wall joined on, are still extant. Within a century, the traces of the Long Walls themselves have been disappearing. Enough is left, however, to mark their course at various points, and the remains are particularly plain of the “South” Long Wall, where it nears the Munychia acropolis. Ascending Munychia, we may imagine the Long Walls still reaching up to Athens. We may picture them either in time of war, with defenders within and foes without, or in time of peace, with the stream of pedestrians bent upon pleasure or business. Outside the North Wall was one of the places of execution. Plato illustrates the contest between the brute in man and his higher reason by the story of a certain Leontius who one day was walking up from Piræus and saw some dead bodies fallen prostrate by the side of the executioner. He loathes the sight but is fain to look. Vulgar curiosity gains the mastery; he runs up to the dead bodies and, holding his eyelids wide open, exclaims: “There wretches! Take your fill of the fine spectacle!”

Turning from the course of the Long Walls, the eye surveys the whole panorama of the harbours and the city. Just within the old wall, on the west slope of the Munychia hill, is the old Theatre in a ruined condition. But we can think of the harbour folk in days of peace enjoying on these same rising seats the plays of a Menander or Euripides or see convened there in the times of grim civil strife a hurried assembly of the patriotic party.

Somewhere close by the north side of Zea was the famous arsenal which, though not built till near the end of the fourth century, has entirely disappeared. Luckily, however, in 1882 there was discovered near the Zea harbour a slab of Hymettus marble containing the directions given to the contractors for its construction. It was built to contain the rigging, tackle, sails, cables for undergirding the ships, etc., while the masts, spars, oars, rudders, and other wooden gear seem to have been kept in the ship-sheds themselves alongside of the ships. This arsenal of Philo replaced an older and less elaborate one. It was a large building, four hundred by five hundred feet within, and provided for a roomy arcade where the populace, screened from the burning heat without, could promenade and gaze at the suggestive evidences of their sea power.

Of the many private and public buildings, temples and colonnades mentioned by classic authors, but few can be positively located. In the Colonnade of the Exchange—the Deigma—Theophrastus, Menander’s friend and the successor of Aristotle, represents his “Boastful Man,” a shipping-merchant, as bragging about his great ventures and cargoes at sea. Meanwhile his balance at the banker’s actually amounts to about twenty cents. That this Deigma, where gossip was coined and bargains struck around the money-changers’ tables, must have been close to the edge of the Great Harbour is evident from Xenophon, who says that one day twelve Lacedæmonian ships swept into the harbour suddenly, landed a party and carried off from the Exchange a group of sea-captains and merchants.

The site of the Asklepieion, partly church, partly sanatorium, has been identified in the remains west of Zea. Aphrodite, born of the foam, is a popular goddess with sailor-folk. To her were dedicated, it would seem, no less than three sanctuaries at Piræus.

Lastly, there was the famous Hieron or Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena. Even its site cannot now be identified, but it must have been one of the most frequented centres of Piræus life in the fifth century. An inscription records that into the treasury of this sanctuary went the tax of a drachma on every vessel that put into the port. Incidentally many a further contribution was levied on the newly landed sailor, who was as much a fish out of water among the land-sharks as is the modern Jack Tar on ship’s leave. The comic poet Diphilus tells how one of these harbour caterers used to select his victims: “For example there’s the skipper who grudgingly pays off a vow made under stress of weather when the mast went by the board or when he had snapped the rudder-sweeps of the ship or else was forced by water rising in the hold to hurl his cargo overboard. A wide berth I give to a fellow like him. Such a man will not be free-handed; my best chance is with the captain who has made a quick, safe voyage from Byzantium, who, all excitement over his gain of ten or twelve per cent for three days’ risk, is loud in his chatter about freights and usuries.” He’s the man for the purposes of this shark, and no sooner is he landed than our keeper of the Sailors’ Snug Retreat goes up to him, takes his hand, and reminds him that a sacrifice at the temple of Zeus Preserver would be in order. He thoughtfully relieves the skipper of any care, making the purchases, superintending the offering, and sharing the commission with the priests of the Hieron. And human nature was much the same five hundred years later, when we again meet a skipper whose performance, once he is safe at Piræus, falls far short of the vows made in storm and peril. Lucian, in his “Zeus the Tragedian,” gives details. The Olympian Father, alarmed at the signs of increasing irreligiousness and the consequent stringency in the sacrificial market, calls an assembly of the gods. After some difficult points of precedence as to order of seating have been temporarily waived and half-naturalized divinities like Mithras and our Thracian Bendis have been admitted, Zeus makes a speech. He begins fluently enough with a mosaic of oratorical phrases which he has memorized from Demosthenes. Presently, however, he exclaims: “But my Demosthenes is giving out. I must tell you in plain Greek what has troubled me.” He reminds them of the dinner in which some of them—“as many as had been invited”—had participated the day before, when “Mnesitheus, the ship-owner, had given them a Thanksgiving banquet at Piræus on account of the preservation of his vessel that had come within an ace of being wrecked off Eubœa.” “That evening,” he continues, “while taking a constitutional, I kept thinking over the stinginess of Mnesitheus who undertook to entertain sixteen gods by sacrificing a single cock—and that, too, a wheezy old rooster!—with four little lumps of frankincense so mouldy that they went out forthwith on the coals, without giving even the tip of my nose a whiff of the smoke. That’s what he did, though he was for promising whole hecatombs when his boat was driving on the cliff and was already encircled by reefs.”

Sometimes the fisher-folk preferred to go up to Athens and dedicate votive offerings in the Parthenon. Lucian, in “The Fisher,” when angling over the edge of the Acropolis for the scaly philosophers of the second century, borrows of the Priestess of the Parthenon a rod, hook, and line that “the fisherman from Piræus had dedicated” as a thank-offering.

Of the many epigrams in the Greek Anthology on shipwrecked mariners, the most appropriate to our harbour town is perhaps the one written by Antipater of Sidon for the tomb of a certain Aristagoras who was drowned after reaching harbour at Scarphe. We are reminded of the Piræus temple to Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage by the bitterness with which the poet uses the epithet:—

“Ever the sea is the sea. It is idle to blame

Cyclades’ waves or the Needles or Narrows of Helle;