You can stop your pony or mule, you can turn aside from the track which is called your road, you are not compelled to catch a train or a steamer at a fixed moment. When roads and rails have been brought into Greece, hundreds of people will go to see its beauty and its monuments, and will congratulate themselves that the country is at last accessible. But the real charm will be gone. There will be no more riding at dawn through orchards of oranges and lemons, with the rich fruit lying on the ground, and the nightingales, that will not end their exuberant melody, still outsinging from the deep-green gloom the sounds of opening day. There will be no more watching the glowing east cross the silver-gray glitter of dewy meadows; no more wandering along grassy slopes, where the scarlet anemones, all [pg xii]drenched with the dews of night, are striving to raise their drooping heads and open their splendid eyes to meet the rising sun. There will be no more watching the serpent and the tortoise, the eagle and the vulture, and all the living things whose ways and habits animate the sunny solitudes of the south. The Greek people now talk of going to Europe, and coming from Europe, justly too, for Greece is still, as it always was, part of the East. But the day is coming when enlightened politicians, like Mr. Tricoupi, will insist on introducing through all the remotest glens the civilization of Europe, with all its benefits forsooth, but with all its shocking ugliness, its stupid hurry, and its slavish uniformity.

I will conclude with a warning to the archæologist, and one which applies to all amateurs who go to visit excavations, and cannot see what has been reported by the actual excavators. As no one is able to see what the evidences of digging are, except the trained man, who knows not only archæology, but architecture, and who has studied the accumulation of soil in various places and forms, so the observer who comes to the spot after some years, and expects to find all the evidences unchanged, commits a blunder of the gravest kind. As Dr. Dörpfeld, now one of the highest living authorities on such matters, observed to me, if you went to Hissarlik expecting to find there clearly marked the various strata of successive occupations, you would show that you were [pg xiii]ignorant of the first elements of practical knowledge. For in any climate, but especially in these southern lands, Nature covers up promptly what has been exposed by man; all sorts of plants spring up along and across the lines which in the cutting when freshly made were clear and precise. In a few years the whole place turns back again into a brake, or a grassy slope, and the report of the actual diggers remains the only evidence till the soil is cut open again in the same way. I saw myself, at Olympia, important lines disappearing in this way. Dr. Purgold showed me where the line marking the embankment of the stadium—it was never surrounded with any stone seats—was rapidly becoming effaced, and where the plan of the foundations was being covered with shrubs and grass. The day for visiting and verifying the Trojan excavations is almost gone by. That of all the excavations will pass away, if they are not carefully kept clear by some permanent superintendence; and to expect this of the Greek nation, who know they have endless more treasures to find in new places, is more than could reasonably be expected. The proper safeguard is to do what Dr. Schliemann does, to have with him not only the Greek ephoros or superintendent—generally a very competent scholar, and sometimes not a very friendly witness of foreign triumphs—but also a first-rate architect, whose joint observation will correct any hastiness or misprision, [pg xiv]and so in the mouth of two or more witnesses every word will be confirmed.

In passing on I cannot but remark how strange it is that among the many rich men in the world who profess an interest in archæology, not one can be found to take up the work as Dr. Schliemann did, to enrich science with splendid fields of new evidence, and illustrate art, not only with the naïve efforts of its infancy, but with forgotten models of perfect and peerless form.

This New Edition is framed with a view of still satisfying the demand for the book as a traveller’s handbook, somewhat less didactic than the official guide-books, somewhat also, I hope, more picturesque. For that purpose I have added a new chapter on mediæval Greece, as well as many paragraphs with new information, especially the ride over Mount Erymanthus, [pp. 343], sqq. I have corrected many statements which are now antiquated by recent discoveries, and I have obliterated the traces of controversy borne by the Second Edition. For the criticisms on the book are dead, while the book survives. To me it is very pleasant to know that many visitors to Greece have found it an agreeable companion.

Trinity College, Dublin,
February, 1892.

[pg xv]

CONTENTS.

CHAP.PAGE
I.Introduction—First Impressions of the Coast[1]
II.General Impressions of Athens and Attica[30]
III.Athens—The Museums—The Tombs[55]
IV.The Acropolis of Athens[89]
V.Athens—The Theatre of Dionysus—The Areopagus[122]
VI.Excursions in Attica—Colonus—The Harbors—Laurium—Sunium[152]
VII.Excursions in Attica—Pentelicus—Marathon—Daphne—Eleusis[184]
VIII.From Athens To Thebes—The Passes of Parnes and of Cithæron, Eleutheræ, Platæa[215]
IX.The Plain of Orchomenus, Livadia, Chæronea[248]
X.Arachova—Delphi—The Bay of Kirrha[274]
XI.Elis—Olympia and Its Games—The Valley of the Alpheus—Mount Erymanthus—Patras[299]
XII.Arcadia—Andritzena—Bassæ—Megalopolis—Tripolitza[351]
XIII.Corinth—Tiryns—Argos—Nauplia—Hydra—Ægina—Epidaurus[388]
XIV.Kynuria—Sparta—Messene[435]
XV.Mycenæ and Tiryns[456]
XVI.Mediæval Greece[492]
INDEX[531]