Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

We were received most hospitably by the medical officer of the district, who had an amiable young wife, speaking Greek only, and a lively old mother-in-law, living, as usual, permanently in the house, [pg 253]to prevent the young lady from being lonely. Like all the richer Greeks in country parts, they ate nothing till twelve, when they had a sort of early dinner called breakfast, and then dined again at half-past eight in the evening. This arrangement gave us more than enough time to look about the town when our day’s ride was over; so we went, first of all, to see the site of Trophonius’s oracle.

As the gorge becomes narrower, there is, on the right side, a small cave, from which a sacred stream flows to join the larger river. Here numerous square panels cut into the rock to hold votive tablets, now gone, indicate a sacred place, to which pilgrims came to offer prayers for aid, and thanksgiving for success. The actual seat of the oracle is not certain, and is supposed to be some cave or aperture now covered by the Turkish fort on the rock immediately above; but the whole glen, with its beetling sides, its rushing river, and its cavernous vaulting, seems the very home and preserve of superstition. We followed the windings of the defile, jumping from rock to rock up the river bed, and were soon able to bathe beyond the observation of all the crowding boys, who, like the boys of any other town, could not satisfy their curiosity at strangeness of face and costume. As we went on for some miles, the country began to open, and to show us a bleak and solitary mountain region, where the chains of Helicon and Parnassus join, and shut out the sea of [pg 254]Corinth from Bœotia by a great bar some thirty miles wide. Not a sound could be heard in this wild loneliness, save the metallic pipe of a water ouzel by the river, and the scream of hawks about their nests, far up on the face of the cliffs.

As the evening was closing in we began to retrace our steps, when we saw in two or three places scarlet caps over the rocks, and swarthy faces peering down upon us with signs and shouts. Though nothing could have been more suspicious in such a country, I cannot say that we felt the least uneasiness, and we continued our way without regarding them. They kept watching us from the heights, and when at last we descended nearer to the town, they came and made signs, and spoke very new Greek, to the effect that they had been out scouring the country for us, and that they had been very uneasy about our safety. This was indeed the case; our excellent Greek companion, who felt responsible to the Greek Government for our safety, and who had stayed behind in Livádia to make arrangements, had become so uneasy that he had sent out the police to scour the country. So we were brought in with triumph by a large escort of idlers and officials, and presently sat down to dinner at the fashionable hour, though in anything but fashionable dress. The entertainment would have been as excellent as even the intentions of our host, had not our attention been foolishly distracted by bugs walking up the table-cloth. It is, [pg 255]indeed, but a small and ignoble insect, yet it produces a wonderful effect upon the mind; for it inspires the most ordinary man with the gift of prophecy: it carries him away even from the pleasures of a fair repast into the hours of night and mystery, when all his wisdom and all his might will not save him from the persistent skirmishing of his irreconcilable foe.

It may be here worth giving a word of encouragement to the sensitive student whom these hints are apt to deter from venturing into the wilds of Greece. In spite of frequent starvation, both for want of food and for want of eatable food; in spite of frequent sleeplessness and even severe exercise at night, owing to the excess of insect population;[102] such is the lightness and clearness of the air, such the exhilarating effect of great natural beauty, and of solitary wandering, free and unshackled, across the wild tracts of valley, wood, and mountain, that fatigue is an almost impossible feeling. Eight or ten hours’ riding every day, which in other country and other air would have been almost unendurable, was here but the natural exercise which any ordinary man may conveniently take. It cannot be denied that the dis[pg 256]comforts of Greek travelling are very great, but with good temper and patience they can all be borne; and when they are over they form a pleasant feature in the recollections of a glorious time. Besides, these discomforts are only the really classical mode of travelling. Dionysus, in Aristophanes’s Frogs, asks, especially about the inns, the very questions which we often put to our guide; and if his slave carried for him not only ordinary baggage, but also his bed and bedding, so nowadays there are many khans (inns) where the traveller cannot lie down—I was going to say to rest—except on his own rugs.

The next day was occupied in a tour across the plain to Orchomenus, then to Chæronea, and back to Livádia in the evening, so as to start from thence for the passes to Delphi. Our ride was, as it were, round an isosceles triangle, beginning with the right base angle, going to Orchomenus north-east as the vertex, then to Chæronea at the left base angle, and home again over the high spurs of mountain which protrude into the plain between the two base angles of our triangle. For about a mile, as we rode out of Livádia, a wretched road of little rough paving-stones tormented us—the remains of Turkish engineering, when Livádia was their capital. Patches of this work are still to be found in curious isolation over the mountains, to the great distress of both mules and riders; for the stones are very small and [pg 257]pointed, or, where they have been worn smooth, exceedingly slippery. But we soon got away into deep rich meadows upon the low level of the country adjoining the lake, where we found again the same infinitely various insect life which I have already described. A bright merry Greek boy, in full dress (for it was again a holiday), followed in attendance on each mule or pony, and nothing could be more picturesque than the cavalcade, going in Indian file through the long grass, among the gay wild flowers, especially when some creek or rivulet made our course to wind about, and so brought the long line of figures into more varied grouping. As for the weather, it was so uniformly splendid that we almost forgot to notice it. Indeed, strangers justly remark what large conversation it affords us in Ireland, for there it is a matter of constant uncertainty, and requires forethought and conjecture. During my first journey in Greece, in the months of April, May, and June, there was nothing to be said, except that we saw one heavy shower at Athens, and two hours’ rain in Arcadia, and that the temperature was not excessively hot. I have had similar experiences in March and April during three other sojourns in the country.

In two or three hours we arrived at the site of old Orchomenus, of late called Scripou, but now reverting, like all Greek towns, to its original name. There is a mere hamlet, some dozen houses, at the [pg 258]place, which is close to the stone bridge built over the Kephissus—the Bœotian Kephissus—at this place. This river appears to be the main feeder of the Copaic lake, coming down, as we saw it, muddy and cold with snow-water from the heights of Parnassus. It runs very rapidly, like the Iser at Munich, and is at Orchomenus about double the size of that river. Of the so-called treasure-house of the Minyæ, nothing remains but the stone doorposts and the huge block lying across them; and even these are almost imbedded in earth. It was the most disappointing ruin I had seen in Greece, for it is always quoted with the treasure-house of Atreus at Mycenæ as one of the great specimens of prehistoric building. It is not so interesting in any sense as the corresponding raths in Ireland. Indeed, but for Pausanias’s description, it would, I think, have excited but little attention.

The subsequent excavation of it by Dr. Schliemann yielded but poor results. The building had fallen in but a few years ago. A handsome ceiling pattern, to which a curious parallel was afterward found at Tiryns, and some pottery, was all that rewarded the explorer.

On the hill above are the well-preserved remains of the small Acropolis, of which the stones are so carefully cut that it looks at first sight modern, then too good for modern work, but in no case polygonal, as are the walls of the hill city which it protected. [pg 259]There is a remarkable tower built on the highest point of the hill, with a very perfect staircase up to it. The whole of the work is very like the work of Eleutheræ, and seems to be of the best period of Greek wall-building. Nothing surprises the traveller in Greece more than the number of these splendid hill-forts, or town-fortresses, which are never noticed by the historians as anything remarkable—in fact, the art and the habit of fortifying must have been so universal that it excited no comment. This strikes us all the more when so reticent a writer as Thucydides, who seldom gives us anything but war or politics, goes out of his way to describe the wall-building of the Peiræus. He evidently contrasts it with the hurried and irregular construction of the city walls, into which even tombstones were built; but if we did not study the remains still common in Greece, we might imagine that the use of square hewn stones, the absence of mortar and rubble, and the clamping with lead and iron were exceptional, whereas that sort of building is the most usual sort in Greece. The walls of the Peiræus cannot even have been the earliest specimen, for the great portal at Mycenæ, though somewhat rougher and more huge in execution, is on the same principle. The only peculiarity of these walls may have been their height and width, and upon that point it is not easy to get any monumental evidence now. The walls of the Peiræus have disap[pg 260]peared completely, though the foundations are still traceable; others have stood, but perhaps on account of their lesser height.

In a large and hospitable monastery we found the well which Pausanias describes as close beside the shrine of the Graces, and here we partook of breakfast, attended by our muleteers, who always accompany their employer into the reception-room of his host, and look on at meat, ready to attend, and always joining if possible in the conversation at table. Some excellent specimens of old Greek pottery were shown us in the monastery, apparently, though not ostensibly, for sale, there being a law prohibiting the sale of antiquities to foreigners, or for exportation. In their chapel the monks pointed out to us some fragments of marble pillars, and one or two inscriptions—in which I was since informed that I might have found a real live digamma, if I had carefully examined them. The digamma is now common enough at Olympia and elsewhere. I saw it best, along with the koph, which is, I suppose, much rarer, in the splendid bronze plates containing Locrian inscriptions, which are in the possession of Mr. Taylor’s heirs at Corfu. These plates have been ably commented on, with facsimile drawings of the inscriptions, by a Greek writer, G. N. Ecnomides (Corfu, 1850, and Athens, 1869).

It was on our way up the valley to Chæronea, along the rapid stream of the Kephissus, that we [pg 261]came, in a little deserted church, upon one of the most remarkable extant specimens of a peculiar epoch in Greek art. As usual, it was set up in the dark, and we were repeatedly obliged to entreat the natives to clear the door, through which alone we could obtain any light to see the work. It is a funeral stele, not unlike the celebrated stele and its relief at Athens, which is inscribed as the stele of Aristion, and dates from the time of the Persian wars. The work before us was inscribed as the work of Anxenor the Naxian—an artist otherwise unknown to us; but the style and finish are very remarkable, and more perfect than the stele of Aristion. It is a relief carved on an upright slab of gray Bœotian marble—I should say about four feet in height—and representing a bearded man wrapped in a cloak, resting on a long stick propped under his arm,[103] with his legs awkwardly crossed, and offering a large grasshopper to a dog sitting before him. The hair and beard are conventionally curled, the whole effect being very like an Assyrian relief; but this is the case with all the older Greek sculpture, which may have started in Ionia by an impulse from the far east. The occurrence of the dog, a feature which strikes us frequently in the later Attic tombs, supports what I had long since inferred from stray hints in Greek literature, that dogs among the old Greeks, [pg 262]as well as the modern, were held in the highest esteem as the friends and companions of man. This curious monument of early Greek art was lying hidden in an obscure and out-of-the-way corner of Greece; isolated, too, and with little of antiquarian interest in its immediate neighborhood.[104] On my second visit (1884), I found a cast of it in the Ministry of Public Instruction at Athens. On my third I found the original removed to a prominent place in the National Museum at Athens, where the traveller may now study it at his ease.