Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

In many places you come upon the openings of the old pits, which went far into the bowels of the mountains, through miles of underground galleries and passages. Our engine-driver—an intelligent Frenchman—stopped the train to show us one of these entrances, which went down almost straight, with good steps still remaining, into the earth. He assured us that the other extremity which was known, [pg 175]all the passage being open, was some two or three miles distant, at a spot which he showed us from a hill. Hearing that inscriptions were found in these pits, and especially that the name of Nicias had been discovered there, we were very anxious to descend and inspect them. This was promised to us, for the actual pits were in the hands of another Greek Company, who were searching for new veins of silver. But when we arrived at the spot the officers of the Company were unwilling to let us into the pits. The proper overseer was away—intentionally, of course. There were no proper candles; there were no means of obtaining admission: so we were balked in our inquiry. But we went far enough into the mouth of one of them to see that these pits were on a colossal scale, well arched up; and, I suppose, had we gone far enough, we should have found the old supports, of which the Athenian law was so careful.

The quantity of scoriæ thrown out, which seems now perfectly inexhaustible, is in itself sufficient evidence of the enormous scale on which the old mining was carried on. Thus, we do not in the least wonder at hearing that Nicias had one thousand slaves working in the mines, and that the profits accruing to the State from the fines and head-rents of the mines were very large—on a moderate estimate, £8000 a year of our money, which meant in those days a great deal more.

The author of the tract on “Athenian Revenue” says that the riches of the mines were absolutely unbounded; that only a small part of the silver district had been worked out, though the digging had gone on from time immemorial; and that after innumerable laborers had been employed the mines always appeared equally rich, so that no limit need be put on the employment of capital. Still he speaks of opening a new shaft as a most risky speculation. His general estimate appears, however, somewhat exaggerated. The writer confesses that the number of laborers was in his day diminishing, and the majority of the proprietors were then beginners; so that there must have been great interruption of work during the Peloponnesian War. In the age of Philip there were loud complaints that the speculations in mining were unsuccessful; and for obtaining silver, at all events, no reasonable prospect seems to have been left. In the first century of our era, Strabo (ix. i. 23) says that these once celebrated mines were exhausted,[71] that new mining did not pay, and thus people were smelting the poorer ore, and the scoriæ from which the ancients had imperfectly separated the metal. He adds that the main product of the mining district was in his day honey, which was especially known as smokeless (ἀκάπνιστον), on ac[pg 177]count of its good preparation. This in itself shows that the mining had decayed, for now all the flowers in the neighborhood of the smelting are killed by the black fumes.

Our last mention of the place in olden times is that of Pausanias (at the end of the second century A. D.), who speaks of Laurium, with the addition that it had once been the seat of the Athenian silver mines!

There is but one more point suggested by these mines, which it is not well to pass over when we are considering the working of them in ancient times. Nothing is more poisonous than the smoke from lead-mines; and for this reason the people at Ergasteria have built a chimney more than a mile long to the top of a neighboring hill, where the smoke escapes. Even so, when the wind blows back the smoke, all the vegetation about the village is at once blighted, and there is no greater difficulty than to keep a garden within two or three miles of this chimney. As the Athenians did not take such precautions, we are not surprised to hear from them frequent notices of the unhealthiness of the district, for when there were many furnaces, and the smoke was not drawn away by high chimneys, we can hardly conceive life to have been tolerable. What then must have been the condition of the gangs of slaves which Nicias and other respectable and pious Athenians kept in these mines? Two or three allusions give us a hideous [pg 178]insight into this great social sore, which has not been laid bare, because the wild district of Laurium, and the deep mines under its surface, have concealed the facts from the ordinary observer. Nicias, we are told, let out one thousand slaves to Sosias the Thracian, at an obolus a day each—the lessee being bound to restore them to him the same in number.

The meaning of this frightful contract is only too plain. The yearly rent paid for each slave was about half the full price paid for him in the market. It follows that, if the slave lived for three years, Nicias made a profit of 50 per cent. on his outlay. No doubt, some part of this extraordinary bargain must be explained by the great profits which an experienced miner could make—a fact supported by the tract on the Revenues, which cannot date more than a generation later than the bargain of Nicias. The lessee, too, was under the additional risk of the slaves escaping in time of war, when a hostile army might make a special invasion into the mountain district for the purpose of inflicting a blow on this important part of Athenian revenue. In such cases, it may be presumed that desperate attempts were made by the slaves to escape, for although the Athenian slaves generally were the best treated in Greece, and had many holidays, it was very different with the gangs employed by the Thracian taskmaster. We are told that they had [pg 179]three hundred and sixty working days in the year. This, together with the poison of the atmosphere, tells its tale plainly enough.

And yet Nicias, the capitalist who worked this hideous trade, was the most pious and God-fearing man at Athens. So high was his reputation for integrity and religion, that the people insisted on appointing him again and again to commands for which he was wholly unfit; and when at last he ruined the great Athenian army before Syracuse, and lost his own life, by his extreme devoutness and his faith in the threats and warnings of the gods—even then the great sceptical historian, who cared for none of these things, condones all his blunders for the sake of his piety and his respectability.

Of course, however, an excursion to Laurium, interesting as it might be, were absurd without visiting the far more famous Sunium,—the promontory which had already struck us so much on our sea voyage round the point,—the temple which Byron has again hallowed with his immortal verse, and Turner with his hardly less immortal pencil. So we hired horses on our return from the mines, and set out on a very fine afternoon to ride down some seven or eight miles from Ergasteria to the famous promontory. Our route led over rolling hills, covered with arbutus and stunted firs; along valleys choked with deep, matted grass; by the [pg 180]side of the sea, upon the narrow ledge of broken rocks. Nowhere was there a road, or a vestige of human habitation, save where the telegraph wire dipped into the sea, pointing the way to the distant Syra. It was late in the day, and the sun was getting low, so we urged our horses to a canter wherever the ground would permit it. But neither the heat nor the pace could conquer the indefatigable esquire who attended us on foot to show us the way, and hold the horses when we stopped. His speed and endurance made me think of Phidippides and his run to Sparta; nor, indeed, do any of the feats recorded of the old Greeks, either in swimming or running, appear incredible when we witness the feats that are being performed almost every day by modern muscle and endurance. At last, after a delightful two hours’ roaming through the homely solitude, we found ourselves at the foot of the last hill, and over us the shining pillars of the ruined temple stood out against the sky.

There can be no doubt that the temple of Neptune on Mount Tænarum must have been quite as fine as to position, but the earthquakes of Laconia have made havoc of its treasures, while at Sunium, though some of the drums in the shafts of the pillars have been actually displaced several inches from their fellows above and below, so that the perfect fitting of the old Athenians has come to look like the tottering work of a giant child with marble [pg 181]bricks,—in spite of this, thirteen pillars remain,[72] a piece of architrave, and a huge platform of solid blocks; above all, a site not desecrated by modern habitations, where we can sit and think of the great old days, and of the men who set up this noble monument at the remotest corner of their land. The Greeks told us that this temple, that at Ægina, and the Parthenon, are placed exactly at the angles of a great equilateral triangle, with each side about twenty-five or thirty miles long. Our maps do not verify this belief. The distance from Athens to Sunium appears much longer than either of the other lines, nor do we find in antiquity any hint that such a principle was attended to, or that any peculiar virtue was attached to it.

We found the platform nearly complete, built with great square blocks of poros-stone, and in some places very high, though in others scarcely raised at all, according to the requirements of the ground. Over it the temple was built, not with the huge blocks which we see at Corinth and in the Parthenon, but still of perfectly white marble, and with that beautifully close fitting, without mortar, rubble, or cement, which characterizes the best and most perfect epoch of Greek architecture.[73] The stone, too, is the finest [pg 182]white marble, and, being exposed to no dust on its lofty site, has alone of all temples kept its original color—if, indeed, it was originally white, and not enriched with divers colors. The earthquake, which has displaced the stones in the middle of the pillars, has tumbled over many large pieces, which can be seen from above scattered all down the slope where they have rolled. But enough still remains for us to see the plan, and imagine the effect of the whole structure. It is in the usual simple, grand, Doric style, but lighter in proportions than the older Attic temples; and, being meant for distant effect, was probably not much decorated. Its very site gives it all the ornament any building could possibly require.