Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian columns of the Olympieum to obtain a satisfying view of the Acropolis, embedded like a crystal in its proper matrix of encompassing air and plain and sea and mountains. Future journeys in Greece will but reënforce the conviction of the noble loveliness of the Attic plain. The atmosphere is singularly clear and vibrant, and within it colour and form are sharply defined. The Ægean at its shores adds movement and space. And here more than anywhere else Sir Richard Jebb’s description of the Greek hills seems inevitable. Their forms “are at once so bold and so chastened, the onward sweep of their ranges is at once so elastic and so calm, each member of every group is at once so individual and so finely helpful to the ethereal expressiveness of the rest, that the harmony of their undulations and the cadences in which they fall combine the charm of sculpture with the life and variety of a sunlit sea.”

In making such a study of this city as is demanded for turning the quick appreciation of its external charm into the more permanent possession of its underlying qualities, we must submit to some analysis of the great moments in its history and its literature.

When Athenian literature begins with Solon, in the sixth century, B. C., the Greeks have emerged from a dim antiquity. In the two preceding centuries, the mother cities of Achæan and Dorian Greece had been sending out colonists east and west, not merely in a spirit of Phœnician commercialism, but also with adventuresome, intellectual curiosity. The heroes of their earliest traditional literature sailed with them. Associations half slumbering in the popular consciousness thrilled them as they steered again over the course of the Argo or as they followed once more the later track of Odysseus to the west, and in lower Italy and Sicily reëstablished Great Hellas as an integral part of Hellenic civilization.

In this earlier colonization Athens participated only vicariously, but it was into this larger Hellas that Solon the lawgiver and poet was born. Fire, brought from the mother cities, was blazing on the hearths of Greek colonies from the Crimea to Sicily. The Ionians of Asia Minor had long since joined in the movement of expansion; they were presently to colonize the site of modern Marseilles; they were already converting to their own use the distant outposts of the “Tyrian trader.” Athens meanwhile was slowly developing. Later she would herself be mistress of the sea.

The Athenians, more than most Greeks, could boast that they were autochthonous, earth-born children of their own soil. Isocrates in his “Panegyricus” makes proudly the claim: “We dwell in the land not after expelling others, nor even finding it a desert, nor even coming as a mixed breed collected from many nations, but ... sprung from the soil and able to address our city by the same names as we give to the closest relations.” The prehistoric Greek invaders of Attica had fused with rather than driven out the former occupants, the Pelasgians or whoever they may have been. Erichthonius, Erechtheus, or Poseidon, “one form for many names,” was born of Earth but mothered on Athena, and it would have been as futile as it was impious to challenge the pedigree of the Erechtheidæ. Erechtheus-Poseidon might coil forever undisturbed beneath the sheltering shield of the Virgin-goddess. Cecrops, too, the mythical king and Attic hero, owned a perpetual ground-rent on the Acropolis and the Athenians were Cecropidæ. They were also the “Sons of Hephæstus,” who was often associated with Athena, a partnership of the heavenly wisdom with the arts and crafts. An ancient festival of the whole city, held in honour of Athena, became afterwards specialized among the artisans, under the name of Chalkeia, in honour of Hephæstus; and the god may yet win back as his own “Hephæsteum” the so-called “Theseum” on the hill above the classic market-place.

The age of the heroes merges with that of the Kings. Theseus moves, a grandiose figure, through art and literature. Thus when the “Hill party” of Pisistratus became preëminent, Theseus, the aristocrat, came into prominence in vase painting. He appears in all the forms of didactic sculpture, and the “City of Theseus,” the older Athens, is recalled again in the Roman renaissance by the Arch of Hadrian. This still offers to the modern pilgrim, on the west side facing the Acropolis, the inscription: “This is the Athens of Theseus, the old city,” and on the other, facing the Olympieum of Hadrian: “This is the City of Hadrian and not the City of Theseus.” Thus meet the old and the new, with classic Athens ignored.

To understand the literature of the sixth century, we must remember that the ancient citadel town of the prehistoric kings had long since overflowed into the district at its immediate base, absorbing, as time went on, various original townships adjacent to the Acropolis. Although the name of king and some relics of royal authority survived in the person of the King Archon, yet, unlike the relation of Sparta to Laconia or Thebes to Bœotia, Athens was not a mere royal centre for the Attic demesmen. All Attica was Athens. All its free inhabitants, class by class, became included in the citizenship, albeit the republic was an aristocracy, first of birth, then of wealth. Solon’s readjustment of the laws for rich and poor determined the trend towards government by the people, and even the inevitable tyranny, postponed by Solon, only served, when it came, to retard the current and to dam up a reservoir of irresistible democratic consciousness which was to sweep away the tyrants and to render the Attica of Marathon inaccessible to the returning despot.

The picture of the old city of Theseus is vague to our imagination, but the Athens of Solon’s administration emerges somewhat more clearly as we take away, one after another, some of the prominent features of the later Athens that we know best. The Acropolis lacked the Propylæa, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheum, its barrenness being relieved by little save the “old” temple of Athena Polias. Not only the Dionysiac theatre, but even its earliest forerunner were things of the future. The drama was yet unborn. The Market-place of later centuries, adorned with statues and stoas, was represented by a simpler centre of civic life at the west end of the Acropolis, where were the public buildings of administration, the communal winepress of the Lenæum and the old Callirrhoë spring.

Yet Solon calls Athens a great city, and he was to make it still greater. Into that early Market-place he came and, if we accept the picturesque details handed down by tradition, feigning madness in order to violate with impunity the law forbidding citizens to re-open the question of conquering Salamis, he cried:—

“Forward to Salamis, forward, to fight for the isle that we yearn for,