Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

But, while the dolphins have been occupying our attention, we have cleared Cape Matapan, and the deep Gulf of Asine and Gythium—in fact, the Gulf of Sparta is open to our view. We strained our eyes to discover the features of “hollow Lacedæmon,” and to take in all the outline of this famous bay, through which so many Spartans had held their course in the days of their greatness. The site of Sparta is far from the sea, probably twelve or fifteen [pg 10]miles; but the place is marked for every spectator, throughout all the Peloponnesus and its coasts, by the jagged top of Mount Taygetus, even in June covered with snow. Through the forests upon its slopes the young Spartans would hunt all day with their famous Laconian hounds, and after a rude supper beguile the evening with stories of their dangers and their success. But, as might be expected, of the five villages which made up the famous city, few vestiges remain. The old port of Gythium is still a port; but here, too, the “wet ways,” and that sea once covered with boats, which a Greek comic poet has called the “ants of the sea,” have been deserted.

We were a motley company on board—Russians, Greeks, Turks, French, English; and it was not hard to find pleasant companions and diverting conversation among them all. I turned to a Turkish gentleman, who spoke French indifferently. “Is it not,” said I, “a great pity to see this fair coast so desolate?” “A great pity, indeed,” said he; “but what can you expect from these Greeks? They are all pirates and robbers; they are all liars and knaves. Had the Turks been allowed to hold possession of the country they would have improved it and developed its resources; but since the Greeks became independent everything has gone to ruin. Roads are broken up, communications abandoned; [pg 11]the people emigrate and disappear—in fact, nothing prospers.”

Presently, I got beside a Greek gentleman, from whom I was anxiously picking up the first necessary phrases and politenesses of modern Greek, and, by way of amusement, put to him the same question. I got the answer I expected. “Ah!” said he, “the Turks, the Turks! When I think how these miscreants have ruined our beautiful country! How could a land thrive or prosper under such odious tyranny?” I ventured to suggest that the Turks were now gone five and forty years, and that it was high time to see the fruits of recovered liberty in the Greeks. No, it was still too soon. The Turks had cut down all the woods, and so ruined the climate; they had destroyed the cities, broken up the roads, encouraged the bandits—in fact, they had left the country in such a state that centuries would not cure it.

The verdict of Europe is in favor of the Greek gentleman; but it might have been suggested, had we been so disposed, that the greatest and the most hopeless of all these sorrows—the utter depopulation of the country—is not due to either modern Greeks or Turks, nor even to the Slav hordes of the Middle Ages. It was a calamity which came upon Greece almost suddenly, immediately after the loss of her independence, and which historians and phys[pg 12]iologists have as yet been only partially able to explain.[5]

Of this very coast upon which we were then gazing, the geographer Strabo, about the time of Christ, says, “that of old, Lacedæmon had numbered one hundred cities; in his day there were but ten remaining.” So, then, the sum of the crimes of both Greeks and Turks may be diminished by one. But I, perceiving that each of them would have been extremely indignant at this historical palliation of the other’s guilt, “kept silence, even from good words.”

These dialogues beguiled us till we found ourselves, almost suddenly, facing the promontory of Malea, with the island of Cythera (Cerigo) on our right. The island is little celebrated in history. The Phœnicians seem, in very old times, to have had a settlement there for the working of their purple shell-fishery, for which the coasts of Laconia were celebrated; and they doubtless founded there the worship of the Sidonian goddess, who was transformed by the Greeks into Aphrodite (Venus). During the Peloponnesian War we hear of the Athenians using it as a station for their fleet, when they were ravaging the adjacent coasts. It was, in fact, used by their naval power as the same sort of [pg 13]blister (ἐπιτείχισις) on Sparta that Dekelea was when occupied by the Spartans in Attica.

Cape Malea is more famous. It was in olden days the limit of the homely Greek waters, the bar to all fair weather and regular winds—a place of storms and wrecks, and the portal to an inhospitable open sea; and we can well imagine the delight of the adventurous trader who had dared to cross the Western Seas, to gather silver and lead in the mines of Spain, when he rounded the dreaded Cape, homeward bound in his heavy-laden ship, and looked back from the quiet Ægean. The barren and rocky Cape has its new feature now. On the very extremity there is a little platform, at some elevation over the water, and only accessible with great difficulty from the land by a steep goat-path. Here a hermit built himself a tiny hut, cultivated his little plot of corn, and lived out in the lone seas, with no society but stray passing ships.[6] When Greece was thickly peopled he might well have been compelled to seek loneliness here; but now, when in almost any mountain chain he could find solitude and desolation enough, it seems as if that poetic instinct which so often guides the ignorant and unconscious anchorite had sent him to this spot, which combines, in a strange way, solitude and publicity, and which ex[pg 14]cites the curiosity, but forbids the intrusion, of every careless passenger to the East.

So we passed into the Ægean, the real thoroughfare of the Greeks, the mainstay of their communication—a sea, and yet not a sea, but the frame of countless headlands and islands, which are ever in view to give confidence to the sailor in the smallest boat. The most striking feature in our view was the serrated outline of the mountains of Crete, far away to the S. E. Though the day was gray and cloudy, the atmosphere was perfectly clear, and allowed us to see these very distant Alps, on which the snow still lay in great fields. The chain of Ida brought back to us the old legends of Minos and his island kingdom, nor could any safer seat of empire be imagined for a power coming from the south than this great long bar of mountains, to which half the islands of the Ægean could pass a fire signal in times of war or piracy.[7] The legends preserved to us of Minos—the human sacrifices to the Minotaur—the hostility to Theseus—the identification of Ariadne with the legends of Bacchus, so eastern and orgiastic in character—make us feel, with a sort of instinctive certainty, that the power of Minos was [pg 15]no Hellenic empire, but one of Phœnicians, from which, as afterwards from Carthage, they commanded distant coasts and islands, for the purposes of trade. They settled, as we know, at Corinth, at Thebes, and probably at Athens, in the days of their greatness, but they seem always to have been strangers and sojourners there, while in Crete they kept the stronghold of their power. Thucydides thinks that Minos’s main object was to put down piracy, and protect commerce; and this is probably the case, though we are without evidence on the point. The historian evidently regards this old Cretan empire as the older model of the Athenian, but settled in a far more advantageous place, and not liable to the dangers which proved the ruin of Athens.

The nearer islands were small, and of no reputation, but each like a mountain top reaching out of a submerged valley, stony and bare. Melos was farther off, but quite distinct—the old scene of Athenian violence and cruelty, to Thucydides so impressive, that he dramatizes the incidents, and passes from cold narrative and set oration to a dialogue between the oppressors and the oppressed. Melian starvation was long proverbial among the Greeks, and there the fashionable and aristocratic Alcibiades applied the arguments and carried out the very policy which the tanner Cleon could not propose without being pilloried by the great histo[pg 16]rian whom he made his foe. This and other islands, which were always looked upon by the mainland Greeks with some contempt, have of late days received special attention from archæologists. It is said that the present remains of the old Greek type are now to be found among the islanders—an observation which I found fully justified by a short sojourn at Ægina, where the very types of the Parthenon frieze can be found among the inhabitants, if the traveller will look for them diligently. The noblest and most perfect type of Greek beauty has, indeed, come to us from Melos, but not in real life. It is the celebrated Venus of Melos—the most pure and perfect image we know of that goddess, and one which puts to shame the lower ideals so much admired in the museums of Italy.[8]

Another remark should be made in justice to the islands, that the groups of Therasia and Santorin, which lie round the crater of a great active volcano, have supplied us not only with the oldest forms of the Greek alphabet in their inscriptions, but with far the oldest vestiges of inhabitants in any part of Greece. In these, beneath the lava slopes formed by a great eruption—an eruption earlier than any history, except, perhaps, Egyptian—have been found the dwellings, the implements, and the bones of men who cannot have lived there much later than 2000 [pg 17]B. C. The arts, as well as the implements, of these old dwellers in their Stone Age, have shown us how very ancient Greek forms, and even Greek decorations, are in the world’s history: and we may yet from them and from further researches, such as Schliemann’s, be able to reconstruct the state of things in Greece before the Greeks came from their Eastern homes. The special reason why these inquiries seem to me likely to lead to good result is this, that what is called neo-barbarism is less likely to mislead us here than elsewhere. Neo-barbarism means the occurrence in later times of the manners and customs which generally mark very old and primitive times. Some few things of this kind survive everywhere; thus, in the Irish Island of Arran, a group of famous savants mistook a stone donkey-shed of two years’ standing for the building of an extinct race in gray antiquity: as a matter of fact, the construction had not changed from the oldest type. But the spread of culture, and the fulness of population in the good days of Greece, make it certain that every spot about the thoroughfares was improved and civilized; and so, as I have said, there is less chance here than anywhere of our being deceived into mistaking rudeness for oldness, and raising a modern savage to the dignity of a primæval man.