The journey from this point to Patras, which we accomplished in twelve hours, is not so interesting, and the traveller who tries it now had better telegraph for a carriage to meet him as far as possible on the way. By this time a good road is finished for many miles, and the tedium and heat of the plain, as you approach Patras, are very trying. But with this help, I think no journey in all Greece so well worth attempting, and of course it can be accomplished in either direction.
Patras is indeed an excellent place for a starting-point. Apart from the route just described, you can go by boat to Vostitza, and thence to Megaspilion. There are, moreover, splendid alpine ascents to be made for those who like such work, to the summits of Chelmos and Olonos (Erymanthus), and this is best done from Patras. Moreover, Patras is itself a most lovely place, commanding a noble view of the coast and mountains of Ætolia across the narrow fiord, as well as of the Ionian islands to the N. W. Right opposite is the ever-interesting site of Missolonghi. Last, and perhaps not least, there is at Patras a most respectable inn, indeed I should call it a hotel,[135] where the traveller who has spent ten [pg 350]days of rough outing in Peloponnesus will find a haven of rest and comfort. From here steamers will carry him to Athens round the coast, or home to Italy.
CHAPTER XII.
ARCADIA—ANDRITZENA—BASSÆ—MEGALOPOLIS—TRIPOLITZA.
There is no name in Greece which raises in the mind of the ordinary reader more pleasing and more definite ideas than the name Arcadia. It has become indissolubly connected with the charms of pastoral ease and rural simplicity. The sound of the shepherd’s pipe and the maiden’s laughter, the rustling of shady trees, the murmuring of gentle fountains, the bleating of lambs and the lowing of oxen—these are the images of peace and plenty which the poets have gathered about that ideal retreat. There are none more historically false, more unfounded in the real nature and aspect of the country, and more opposed to the sentiment of the ancients. Rugged mountains and gloomy defiles, a harsh and wintry climate, a poor and barren soil, tilled with infinite patience; a home that exiled its children to seek bread at the risk of their blood, a climate more opposed to intelligence and to culture than even Bœotian fogs, a safe retreat of bears and wolves—this is the Arcadia of old Greek history. Politically it has no weight whatever till the days [pg 352]of Epaminondas, and the foundation of Megalopolis. Intellectually, its rise is even later, and it takes no national part in the great march of literature from Homer to Menander.[136] It was only famed for the marketable valor of its hardy mountaineers, of whom the Tegeans had held their own even against the power of Sparta, and obtained an honorable place in her army. It was also noted for rude and primitive cults, of which later men praised the simplicity and homely piety—at times also, the stern gloominess, which did not turn from the offering of human blood.
I must remind the reader that rural beauty among the ancients, as well as among the Renaissance visions of an imaginary Arcadia as a rustic paradise, by no means included the wild picturesqueness which we admire in beetling cliffs and raging torrents. These were inhospitable and savage to the Greeks. It was the gentle slope, the rich pasture, the placid river framed in deep foliage—it was, in fact, landscape-scenery like the valleys of the Thames, or about the gray abbeys of Yorkshire, which satisfied their notion of perfect landscape; and in this the men of the Renaissance were perfectly agreed with them.
How, then, did the false notion of our Arcadia [pg 353]spring up in modern Europe? How is it that even our daily papers assume this sense, and know it to be intelligible to the most vulgar public? The history of the change from the historical to the poetical conception is very curious, and worth the trouble of explaining, especially as we find it assumed in many books, but accounted for in none.
It appears that from the oldest days the worship of Pan had its home in Arcadia, particularly about Mount Mænalus, and that it was already ancient when it was brought to Athens at the time of the Persian Wars. The extant Hymn to Pan, among the Homeric Hymns, which may have been composed shortly after that date, is very remarkable for its idyllic and picturesque tone, and shows that with this worship of Pan were early associated those trains of nymphs and rustic gods, with their piping and dance, which inspired Praxiteles’s inimitable Faun. These images are even transferred by Euripides to the Acropolis, where he describes the daughters of Aglauros dancing on the sward, while Pan is playing his pipe in the grotto underneath (Ion, vv. 492, sqq.). Such facts seem to show a gentle and poetical element in the stern and gloomy mountaineers, who lived, like the Swiss of our day, in a perpetual struggle with nature, and were all their lives harassed with toil and saddened with thankless fatigue. This conclusion is sustained by the evidence of a far later witness, Polybius, who [pg 354]in his fourth book mentions the strictness with which the Arcadians insisted upon an education in music, as necessary to soften the harshness and wildness of their life. He even maintains that the savagery of one town (Kynætha) was caused by a neglect of this salutary precaution. So it happens that, although Theocritus lays his pastoral scenes in the uplands of Sicily, and the later pastoral romances, such as the exquisite Daphnis and Chloe, are particularly associated with the voluptuous Lesbos, Vergil, in several of his Eclogues, makes allusion to the musical talent of Arcadian shepherds, and in his tenth brings the unhappy Gallus into direct relation to Arcadia in connection with the worship of Pan on Mænalus. But this prominent feature in Vergil—borrowed, I suppose, from some Greek poet, though I know not from whom—bore no immediate fruit. His Roman imitators, Calpurnius and Nemesianus, make no mention of Arcadia, and if they had, their works were not unearthed till the year 1534, when the poetical Arcadia had been already, as I shall show, created. There seems no hint of the idea in early Italian poetry;[137] for according to the histories of mediæval literature, the pastoral romance did not originate until the very end of the fourteenth century, with the Portuguese Ribeyro, and he lays all [pg 355]the scenes of his idylls not in a foreign country, but in Portugal, his own home. Thus we reach the year 1500 without any trace of a poetical Arcadia. But at that very time it was being created by the single work of a single man. The celebrated Jacopo Sannazaro, known by the title of Actius Sincerus in the affected society of literary Naples, exiled himself from that city in consequence of a deep and unrequited passion. He lay concealed for a long time, it is said, in the wilds of France, possibly in Egypt, but certainly not in Greece, and immortalized his grief in a pastoral medley of prose description and idyllic complaint called Arcadia,[138] and suggested, I [pg 356]believe, by the Gallus of Vergil. Though the learned and classical author despised this work in comparison with his heroic poem on the Conception of the Virgin Mary, the public of the day thought differently. Appearing in 1502, the Arcadia of Sannazaro went through sixty editions during the century, and so this single book created that imaginary home of innocence and grace which has ever since been attached to the name. Its occurrence henceforward is so frequent as to require no further illustration in this place.