But though lofty and bleak, the uplands of Laconia are not incapable of cultivation, and in many places were anciently covered with forests of plane trees. Their eastern slopes were likewise clothed with vines, irrigated, as in Switzerland and Burgundy, by small rills, conducted through artificial channels from springs high up in the mountains.[[186]] The summits of Taygetos are waste and wild; rent and shattered by frequent earthquakes, lashed by rain-storms, and here and there bored and undermined by gnawing streams, working their way to the valley, it presents the aspect of a fragment of nature in its decrepitude. South, however, of Mount Evoras the country opens into a plain of considerable fertility, extending eastward towards Mount Zarax and the sea. On the Messenian frontier, also, are many valleys highly productive. This portion of Lacedæmon obtained in the time of Augustus the name, given perhaps in mockery, of the land of the Eleuthero Lacones, or “Free Laconians.”[[187]]
Protected on the land side by mountains difficult to be traversed, and presenting towards the sea an inhospitable harbourless coast, Laconia seems marked out by nature to be the abode of an unsocial people. Like that of many Swiss cantons, its climate is generally harsh and rude, vexed by cold winds alternating with burning heats, and appears to communicate analogous qualities to the minds of its inhabitants, who have been in all ages remarkable for valour untempered by humanity. In such a country the nobler arts can never be completely naturalised. The virus imbibed from nature will find its way into the character, and defy the influence of culture and of government.
Messenia presents, in every respect, a contrast to Laconia. Along the sea-coast, indeed, particularly from Pylos to Cape Aeritas, its barrenness is complete; neither woods nor thickets, nor any vestige of verdure being visible upon the red cinder-like precipices beetling over the sea, or sloping off into grey mountains above. But having passed this Alpine barrier, we find the land sinking down into rich plains, which on the banks of the broad Pamisos were anciently, for their luxuriant fertility,[[188]] denominated “the Happy.” North, and about the sources of the Balyra, the Amphitos, and the Neda the scenery grows highly romantic and picturesque, the eye commanding from almost every elevated point innumerable narrow meandering glens, each with its bubbling streamlet circling round green eminences, clothed to their summits with hanging woods. Messenia, which, as soon inhabited, must have been wealthy, appears to have been a favourite resort of poets in remote antiquity. Here the Thracian Thamyris, in a contest, as was fabled, with the Muses, lost his sight, together with the gift of song; and in a small rocky island on its coast,—the haunt, when I saw it, of sea-mews and cormorants,—Sparta received from an Athenian general of mean abilities one of the most galling defeats recorded in her annals.
Returning out of the Peloponnesos by way of the Isthmos, and quitting at the Laconian rocks the territories of Corinth, we enter the Megaris,[[189]] originally, as I have before observed, a part of the Athenian territories. Attica is a triangular promontory, of small extent, projecting into the Myrtöan sea, between Argolis and Eubœa. A mountain chain, of no great elevation, forms, under several names, the boundary between this country and Bœotia; and Mount Kerata, in later times, divided it from Megaris. On every other side Attica is washed by the sea, which, together with nearly all the circumjacent islands, was, in antiquity, regarded as a part of its empire.[[190]] This minute division of Greece, fertile in nothing but great men, is seldom viewed with any eye to the picturesque. Satisfied that Athens stood there, we commonly ask no more. Genius has breathed over it a perfume sweeter than the thyme of its own hills,—has painted it with a beauty surpassing that of earth,—rendered its atmosphere redolent for ever of human greatness and human glory,—and cast so dazzling an illusion over its very dust and ruins, that they appear more beautiful than the richest scenes and most perfect structures of other lands.
Independently, however, of its historical importance, Attica is invested with numerous charms. Consisting of an endless succession of hill and dale,[[191]] with many small plains interspersed; and swelling towards its northern frontier into considerable mountains, it presents a miniature of the whole Hellenic land.[[192]] In antiquity its uplands and ravines and secluded hollows were clothed with wood,—oaks, white poplars, wild olive-trees, or melancholy pines. The arbutus, the agnus castus, wild pear, heath, lentisk, and other flowering shrubs decked its hill-sides and glens; on the brow of every eminence wild thyme, sweet marjoram, with many different kinds of odoriferous plants exhaled their fragrance beneath the foot;[[193]] while rills of the clearest and sweetest water in the world, leaped down the rocks, or conducted their sparkling currents through its romantic and richly cultivated valleys. Southward, among the mountains of scoriæ of the mining district, springs of silver[[194]] may be said to have usurped the place of fountains. The face of the country is nearly everywhere arid and barren,—the plains are parched,—the gullies encumbered with loose shingle,—the eminences unpicturesque and dreary; yet wherever vegetation takes place, the virtue of the Attic soil displays itself in the production of fragrant flowers, whence the bee extracts the most delicious honey in the world, superior in quality to that of Hybla or Hymettos.
Comparative barrenness may, however, upon the whole, be considered as characteristic of Attica. Indeed, Plato,[[195]] in a very curious passage, likens to a body emaciated by sickness the hungry district round the capital, where the soil has collapsed about the rocks. But from this innumerable advantages have arisen. The earth being light and porous permits whatever rain falls immediately to sink and disappear, as in Provence,[[196]] which, more than any other part of Europe, resembles Attica. Hence, except in some few inconsiderable spots,[[197]] no bogs, no marshes exist to poison the air with cold effluvia: a ridge of mountains protects it against the northern blasts: mild breezes from the ocean prevail in almost all seasons: snow seldom lies above a few hours on the ground. The atmosphere, accordingly, kept constantly free from terrene exhalations, is buoyant and sparkling as on the Libyan desert, when, at noon, every elevated rock appears to be encircled by a luminous halo.[[198]] In air so pure the act of breathing is a luxury which produces a smile of satisfaction on the countenance; the mind performs its operations with ease and rapidity; and life, everywhere sweet, appears to have a finer relish than in countries exposed to watery and unwholesome fogs. It was perfectly philosophical, therefore, in Plato,[[199]] to regard Attica as a place designed by nature to bring the human intellect to the greatest ripeness and perfection, a quality extended by Aristotle to Greece at large. The same atmospheric properties were favourable to health and long life, warding off many disorders common in other parts of the country.
A learned and ingenious but fanciful writer[[200]] considers Peloponnesos to have been the heart of Greece. Following up this idea, we must unquestionably pronounce Athens to have been the head, the seat of thought, the place where its arts and its wisdom ripened. But ere we touch upon the capital, which cannot be slided over with a cursory remark, it will be necessary to enter into some little detail respecting the demi or country towns of Attica,[[201]] of which in the flourishing times of the republic there existed upwards of one hundred and seventy-four. Of these small municipal communities, of which too little is known, several were places of considerable importance, possessing their temples, their Agoræ, their theatres, filled with walks and surrounded by impregnable fortifications. The Athenians regarded Athens, indeed, as the Hebrews did Jerusalem, in the light of their great and holy city, the sanctuary of their religion and of their freedom. But this did not prevent their preferring the calm simplicity of a country life to the noisier pleasures of the town. Many distinguished families, accordingly, had houses in these demi, or villas in their vicinity. Here, also, several of the greatest men of Athens were born: Thucydides was a native of Halimos,[[202]] Sophocles of Colonos, Epicurus of Gargettos, Plato of Ægina, Xenophon of Erchia, Tyrtæos, Harmodios, and Aristogeiton of Aphidnæ, Antiphon of Rhamnos, and Æschylus of Eleusis.
In other points of view, also, the towns and villages of Attica possessed great interest. They long continued to be the seats of the primitive worship of the country, where the tutelar deities of particular districts, of earth-born race, were adored with that affectionate faith and that fervency of devotion which peculiarly belong to small religious communities. The gods they worshipped appeared almost to be their fellow citizens, and to exist only for their protection. In fact, they were the patron saints of the villages. Fabulous legends and historical traditions combined with religion to shed celebrity over the Attic demi. There was hardly in the whole land a single inhabited spot which did not figure in their poetry or in their annals as the scene of some memorable exploit. Aphidnæ[[203]] was renowned, for example, as the place whence the Dioscuri bore away their sister Helen, after her rape by Theseus, in revenge for which the youthful heroes devastated the whole district. “Grey Marathon,”[[204]] as Byron aptly terms it, was embalmed for ever in Persian blood, and rendered holy by the vast barrows raised there by the state over the ashes of its fallen warriors. Rhamnos on the Attic Dardanelles became famous for its statue of Nemesis, originally of Aphrodite, the work of Diodotos or Agoracritos of Paros, not unworthy to be compared for size and beauty with the productions of Pheidias. The irruption of the Peloponnesians conferred a melancholy celebrity on Deceleia,[[205]] and Phylæ obtained a place in history as the stronghold where Thrasybulos gathered together the small but gallant band which avenged the cause of freedom upon the thirty. Of Eleusis,[[206]] it is enough to say that there the ceremonies of initiation into the mysteries were performed.
The capital of Megara, like Athens, stood a short distance from the sea; but was joined by long walls to its harbour Nisæa, protected from the weather by the Minoan promontory. In sailing thence to the Peiræeus we pass several islands, none of which, however, are of any magnitude, save Salamis, in remote antiquity a separate state governed by its own laws. The old capital, already deserted in the time of Strabo, stood on the southern coast over against Ægina; but the principal town of later times was situated on a bay at the root of a tongue of land projecting toward that part of Attica[[207]] where Xerxes sat to behold his imperial armada annihilated by the republicans of Hellas. Salamis was known of old under various names,—Skiras, Cychræa and Pituoussa, from the Pitus, or pine tree, by which its rocks and glens were in many places shaded. Immediately before the engagement in which his navy was destroyed, the Persian monarch sought to unite Salamis to the continent by a dam two stadia in length; his project, had it succeeded, would have ruined the ferrymen of Amphialè, a class of individuals whose operations Solon judged of sufficient importance to be regulated by a particular article in his code. Of the smaller islets that form the outworks of the Attic coast, little need be said, since they were nearly all barren, and inhabited only by a few legendary traditions. The tomb of Circe was shown on the larger of the Pharmacoussæ; and the island of Helena, east of the Samian promontory obtained the reputation of having been the spot where the faithless queen of Menelaus consummated her guilt.[[208]]
Ægina belonged to Attica only by conquest; but as when subdued its subjection was complete and lasting, it must not be altogether omitted in this glance over the home territories of the Great Demos. Like Attica itself, the island lying in the Saronic Gulf is of a triangular shape. By proximity it belongs to the Peloponnesos, being within thirty stadia of the Methanæan Chersonesos, while to Salamis is a voyage of ninety stadia, and to the Peiræeus one hundred and twenty. But the sea itself having been considered a part of Attica, whose flag, like that of England, streamed for ages triumphantly over its billows, the islands also which it surrounded fell one by one into the hands of the people, and this small Doric isle among the rest. A number of diminutive islets, or rather rocks, cluster round the shores of Ægina, some barren and treeless, others indued with a certain degree of fertility and verdant with pine woods.