So reckon thou this time I’m speaking of as though
Some market-fair or trip to town, where one may see
The crowd, the market, dice and loungers’ haunts;
Then, if thou’rt first unto thy lodgings, with more gold
Thou’lt go upon thy travels and shalt pick no brawl;
While he that tarries longer, worn, his money gone,
Grows old and wretched, and forever knows some lack,
A wandering vagrant finding enemies and plots,
And gains no death that’s easy, staying out his time.”
A broad avenue, flanked with porticoes, ran from the Market-place northwest to the Dipylon gate. This double gateway, impressive even from the remains of its foundations, quickens the memory to recall the generations of citizens and foreigners that have passed this way. Along the roads from Colonus and the Academy and the Sacred Way from Eleusis, converging outside the gates, will come a motley throng of Athenian ghosts, gay or scurrilous, militant or philosophic, to blot out the consciousness of the modern city. Outside the Dipylon, in the “Outer Cerameicus,” is “the Street of the Tombs.” Some of the beautiful monuments are still in situ to stimulate a detailed study of the rich material in the National Museum. It was here that the Athenians usually buried their dead. The roll-call of great names stirs the imagination here as in Westminster Abbey. This is no exclusive privilege of one place or people. But there is often an appropriate genius loci. As one lingers along the Appian Way, for example, deciphering inscriptions and pausing before the weather-beaten faces on the monuments, there is a lurking pessimism and an insidious melancholy that flow in from the beauty of the Roman Campagna. Here, however, in this proastion of Athens, this Suburb of the Dead, the memorials still in place, with their unpretentious sincerity, give rather a sensation of beauty and hope in perpetuating scenes from actual life. Even a scene of parting has less of hopeless finality. The warrior on his horse, the woman with her jewel-box, suggests life and love, not death and lamentation. Along yonder road from Eleusis came many an initiate fresh from the Mysteries, and some may well have been ready to listen with hope to Pindar’s “trumpet-blast for immortality”:—