It was our good fortune to see it in a splendid sunset, with the sea a sheet of molten gold, and all the headlands and islands colored with hazy purple. The mountains of Eubœa, with their promontory of Geræstus, closed the view upon the north-east; but far down into the Ægean reached island after island, as it were striving to prolong a highway to the holy Delos. The ancient Andros, Tenos, Myconos were there, but the eye sought in vain for the home of Apollo’s shrine—the smallest and yet the greatest of the group. The parallel chain, reaching down from Sunium itself, was confused into one mass, but ex[pg 183]posed to view the distant Melos. Then came a short space of open sea, due south, which alone prevented us from imagining ourselves on some fair and quiet inland lake; and beyond to the south-west we saw the point of Hydra, the only spot in all Hellas whose recent fame exceeds the report of ancient days. The mountains of Argolis lay behind Ægina, and formed with their Arcadian neighbors a solid background, till the eye wandered round to the Acropolis of Corinth, hardly visible in the burning brightness of the sun’s decline. And all this splendid expanse of sea and mountain, and bay and cliff, seemed as utterly deserted as the wildest western coast of Scotland or Ireland. One or two little white sails, speeding in his boat some lonely fisherman, made the solitude, if possible, more speaking and more intense. There are finer views, more extensive, and perhaps even more varied, but none more exquisitely interesting and more melancholy to the student of Ancient Greece.
CHAPTER VII.
EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA—PENTELICUS—MARATHON—DAPHNE—ELEUSIS.
This great loneliness is a feature that strikes the traveller almost everywhere through the country. Many centuries of insecurity, and indeed of violence, have made country life almost impossible; and now that better times have come, the love and knowledge of it are gone. The city Athenian no longer grumbles, as he did in Aristophanes’s day, that an invasion has driven him in from the rude plenty and simple luxuries of his farming life, where with his figs and his olives, his raisins and his heady wine, he made holiday before his gods, and roasted his thrush and his chestnuts with his neighbor over the fire. All this is gone. There remains, indeed, the old political lounger, the loafer of the market-place, ever seeking to obtain some shabby maintenance by sycophancy or by bullying. This type is not hard to find in modern Athens, but the old sturdy Acharnian, as well as the rich horse-breeding Alcmæonid, are things of the past. Even the large profits to be made by market-gardening will not tempt them to adopt this industry, and the great city of Athens is [pg 185]one of the worst supplied and dearest of capitals, most of its daily requirements in vegetables, fowls, eggs, etc., coming in by steamers from islands on the coast of Thessaly. No part of the country of Attica can be considered even moderately cultivated, except the Thriasian plain, and the valley of Kephissus, reaching from near Dekelea to the sea. This latter plain, with its fine olive-woods reaching down across Academus to the region of the old long walls, is fairly covered with corn and grazing cattle, with plane trees and poplars. But even here many of the homesteads are deserted; and the country seats of the Athenians were often left empty for years, whenever a band of brigands appeared in the neighboring mountains, and threatened the outlying houses with blackmail, if not with bloodier violence. Of late there is a steady improvement.
Nothing can be truer than the admirable description of Northern Attica given in M. Perrot’s book on the Attic orators. He is describing Rhamnus, the home of Antiphon, but his picture is of broader application.[74]
All these remarks are even more strongly exemplified by the beautiful country which lies between [pg 187]Pentelicus and Hymettus, and which is now covered with forest and brushwood. We passed through this [pg 188]vale one sunny morning on our way to visit Marathon. There is, indeed, a road for some miles—the road to the quarries of Pentelicus—but a very different one from what the Athenians must have had. It is now a mere broad track, cut by wheels and [pg 189]hoofs in the sward; and wherever the ruts become too deep the driver turns aside, and makes a parallel track for his own convenience. In summer days, the dust produced by this sort of road is something beyond description; and the soil being very red earth, we have an atmosphere which accounts to some extent for the remarkable color of the old buildings of Athens. The way, after turning round the steep Lycabettus, which, like Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh, commands the town close by, passes up the right side of the undulating plain of Attica, with the stony but variegated slopes of Hymettus upon the right, and Pentelicus almost straight ahead. As soon as the suburbs are passed we meet but one or two country seats, surrounded with dark cypress and pepper trees; but outside the sombre green is a tall, dazzling, white wall, which gives a peculiarly Oriental character to the landscape. There is cultivation visible when you look to the westward, where the village of Kephissia lies, among the groves which accompany the Kephissus on its course; but up toward Pentelicus, along the track which must once have been crowded with carts, and heavy teams, and shouting drivers, when all the blocks of the Parthenon were being hurried from their quarry to adorn the Acropolis—along this famous track there is hardly a sign of culture. Occasionally, a rough stubble field showed that a little corn had been cut—an occasional station, with a couple of soldiers, [pg 190]shows why more had not been sown. The fear of brigands had paralyzed industry, and even driven out the scanty rural population.
Mount Lycabettus, Athens