The markets are in the older and most picturesque part of the city, but only a modern Aristophanes could make them into scenes of rollicking farce shot through with political purpose. Provincial Megarians with pigs to sell, uncouth Bœotians bringing in vegetables and game, knavish Athenians offering garlic and salt and anchovies from Phaleron—probably the types are still here, dialects, morals and all, awaiting their sacred bard.
In the same district lies the bazaar known as Shoe Lane, where cobblers and tailors and carpenters work in the open, protected by awnings. Socrates, keen-eyed for handicraft and homely illustrations, often must have watched their forebears. Not far from the shoemakers, the coppersmiths, in the same district as of old, are suitably gathered in Hephæstus Street, whence the sound of ringing hammers echoes afar. The Homeric picture of Hephæstus in his forge on Olympus is duplicated in any little forge along the modern street, when a workman rises from his anvil and with a sponge wipes his face and hand and sturdy neck and shaggy breast. In more than one part of the city the “bankers’ tables,” at which also Socrates used to seek his crowd, are reproduced in the much frequented tables of the money changers.
The open-air bakeries of his day also exist again and tempt with their bread and plain cakes the exhausted sight-seer, whatever his philosophy. But a Platonist is deterred at the threshold of a pastry-cook’s in the fashionable shopping district by the remembrance that in the ideal life there is no place for “those celebrated delicacies, the Athenian confectionery.”
Modern Athens is too arid to afford many public fountains, but women still draw water from the meagre spring Callirrhoë, on the edge of the Ilissus, not far from the Zeus columns. This spring, in name and situation, is still identified by some experts with the town-spring of primitive Athens and the later Nine Spouts. The traveller who throws in his fortunes with the archæological opposition must at least find in the lesser Callirrhoë the Athenian counterpart of the fountains which in so many of the towns and villages of Greece perpetuate, in usefulness and charm, an antique life of homely activities transmuted into poetry. The townspeople of Odysseus drew their water just outside the city from a wayside spring deep in an alder thicket, where a basin had been fashioned to catch the cold stream falling from a cliff. In the old days of peace, when the plain was safe, the wives and daughters of the men of Troy had washed the family clothes in broad stone troughs beside the two springs that fed the Scamander. Nausicaä of Phæacia and her maidens did the palace washing so far from the town that the occasion involved a day’s excursion and a generous lunch-basket packed by the Queen. But there was a spring of drinking water nearer, for, when Odysseus was entering the city, Athena met him in the form of a young girl carrying a pitcher. At Eleusis, also, in the royal age, the king’s fawnlike daughters, their crocus-yellow hair dancing on their shoulders, drew water for the palace in vessels of bronze from the Maiden Well. In classical Athens, as to-day, only the poorer women went for their own water, and perhaps it was after meeting one who looked tired and hopeless that Euripides made Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, given in marriage to a peasant in Argos to further her mother’s schemes, cry aloud to the night:—
“O Night, dark foster-mother of the golden stars,
Thy shelter folds me while this jar bows low my head
As to and from the river-springs I come and go.”
Only in the Panathenaic procession did the carrying of water-jars become ennobled. To-day a working girl may be seen in a pose suggesting that of the maidens of the Phidian frieze.
AFTER POLYGNOTUS