Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History / Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'

by James George Frazer

From Stamata the path skirts the north-western shoulder of Mount Pentelicus and enters Kephisia, from which there is a good highroad through the plain to Athens. The distance by this route from the mound at Marathon to Athens is roughly about twenty-two miles.

A third route, intermediate between the two preceding routes and shorter than either of them, goes from Vrana up the wild romantic ravine of Rapentosa and crosses the southern shoulder of Mount Pentelicus, the highest summit of which is left about a mile to the westward. It is a rugged and precipitous path, hardly practicable even for heavy infantry. Within a distance of little more than nine miles the route ascends and descends a ridge which rises more than two thousand five hundred feet above the plain below.

Clearly the first of these routes is the only road by which a large army with cavalry and baggage-train could march. Therefore when the Persians landed at Marathon, under the guidance of the banished Athenian tyrant Hippias, who was of course familiar with the country, they must have intended to advance on Athens by the southern road, and consequently the Athenians must have marched to meet them by the same road; for had they taken the northern route the enemy might have given them the slip, and his cavalry might have been entering the streets of Athens at the time when the Athenians were emerging from the defiles of Pentelicus on the plain of Marathon. Thus the traveller who drives to Marathon by the carriage road may feel sure that he is following very closely the route by which the Athenian army advanced to the battle.

V. Prasiae.—The township of Prasiae was situated on the spacious and beautiful bay now called Porto Raphti, on the east coast of Attica, about sixteen miles north-east of Sunium. From the fertile valley of Cephale (now Keratea) a path leads north-eastward through a very deep and narrow glen to the shore of the bay. In the depths of this romantic glen there winds the bed of a stream which is sometimes nearly or wholly dry. The sides of the glen, seamed with the beds of torrents and rifted rocks, are so thickly wooded and overhung with pine-trees and bushes that in many places it is hard to force a passage along it. Flocks of sheep and goats browsing, and in spring the warbling of numerous nightingales in the thickets, alone relieve the solitude. At the end of the glen, which is about three miles long, the view of the wide bay, enclosed by barren mountains, suddenly bursts on us. On the north Mount Peratia, with its jagged ridge and bold beautiful outline, descends in precipices almost sheer into the water, its sides bare except for here and there a thin patch of pinewood. On the south rises, dark and massive, the loftier Mavronori (‘the black mountain’). From its base the rocky headland of Koroni runs far out into the sea, sheltering the bay on the east and narrowing its entrance to about a mile and a quarter. Right in the middle of the entrance, breaking the force of the waves when the wind blows from the east, a rocky islet in the shape of a sugar-loaf or pyramid rises abruptly from the sea to the height of about three hundred feet. Its sides, clothed with lentisk bushes and dwarf pines, are so steep that it can be scaled only on one side, the north. On its summit, looking seaward, sits a colossal but headless and armless statue of white marble on a high pedestal, the blocks of which were falling to ruin at the time of Dodwell’s visit but are now held together by iron clamps. This statue, which, to judge from its style, dates from the time of the Roman empire, is popularly supposed to resemble a tailor (raphti) seated at his work; hence it has given its present name of Porto Raphti to the bay. It has been plausibly conjectured that this is the monument described by Pausanias as the tomb of Erysichthon who died at sea on his way home from Delos. The striking monument, looking out from its high lonely isle across the blue sea, may have been erected on the traditionary site of the hero’s grave by some wealthy patron of art in Roman days, perhaps by Herodes Atticus himself.

The inner part of the bay is divided into two by a rocky spit jutting out from the shore, to which it is attached by a low isthmus. The promontory takes its name from a chapel of St. Nicholas which stands on the isthmus; a small island off the promontory still bears the name of Prasonisi or ‘Isle of Prasiae.’ The anchorage for fishing boats is on the north side of the isthmus, and here are the few wretched hovels which make up the hamlet of Porto Raphti. The hamlet is not permanently inhabited. For the bay, though one of the finest harbours in Greece, is desolate and hardly frequented except in summer. By day peasants may be met at work in the fields or carting fish to the neighbouring villages. But all through the colder seasons of the year and even on summer evenings a profound stillness, broken only by the lapping of the waves on the beach, reigns on the shores of this beautiful bay, one of the fairest scenes in Attica.

On the northern shore of the bay there are a few scanty remains of antiquity which seem to have belonged to the township of Stiria. Prasiae lay on the southern shore, which still bears the ancient name. Here, between the sandy and in part marshy beach and the hills, there stretches a strip of level cornland interspersed with olives and stately cork-oaks. Some vestiges of ancient wall may be traced at a garden not far from the shore, where there is also an ancient well. But the sand is gaining so fast here that a few years ago the ruins of a chapel with some Christian graves were discovered buried in the downs. The citadel of Prasiae occupied the rocky headland of Koroni (probably the ancient Coronea), which, as we have seen, shelters the bay on the east. This bold headland, joined to the mainland by a low sandy isthmus, has obviously been at one time an island; indeed the whole of the southern part of the bay is being gradually sanded up. The fortification walls, six feet thick and built without mortar, may be followed all round the summit of the headland, which is besides so well protected by its steep cliffs that an attack from the side of the sea must have been nearly impracticable. Another wall, eight to ten feet thick, which seems to have been strengthened with towers or bastions, runs down in a south-westerly direction from the ring-wall of the citadel. It probably served as an outwork and may have reached as far as the shore, though now it disappears some distance above the water. Within the ring-wall of the citadel are the remains of a number of cross-walls extending at right angles to it; but they are now so overgrown by dense underwood that it is almost impossible to trace them. From the summit of the headland there is a fine prospect, on the one side over the noble bay with its rocky islets, on the other side across the sea to Euboea, Andros, and Ceos. The white houses which are seen gleaming in Ceos are those of the modern town which occupies the site of the ancient Julis.

VI. Mount Hymettus.—The outline of Hymettus, viewed from Athens, is even and regular; but its sides are furrowed by winter torrents and its base is broken into many small isolated hills of a conical form. Except towards its base the range is almost destitute of soil. Wild olives, myrtles, laurels, and oleanders are found only in some of the gullies at the foot of the mountain. Its steep rocky slopes are composed of grey marble seamed and cracked in all directions. Some stunted shrubs, however, including the lentisk, terebinth, and juniper, and sweet-smelling herbs, such as thyme, lavender, savory, and sage, grow in the clefts of the rocks, and, with flowers such as hyacinths and purple crocuses, furnish the bees with the food from which they still extract the famous Hymettian honey. Hymettus seems to have been as bare and treeless in classical antiquity as it is now; for Plato remarks that some of the Attic mountains, which now only provided food for bees, had at no very remote epoch furnished the timber with which some very large buildings were still roofed at the time when he wrote. The honey of Hymettus was renowned. It was said that when Plato was a babe the bees on Hymettus filled his mouth with honey. The story went that bees were first produced on the mountain. Poets spoke of the flowery and fragrant Hymettus. The thyme and the creeping thyme (serpyllum) of Hymettus are specially mentioned; the creeping thyme was transplanted to Athens and grown there. When ancient writers speak of Attic honey in general, they may have had Hymettian honey in view. Vitruvius compares Attic honey to resin in colour, which aptly describes the colour of the modern Hymettian honey. When Synesius visited Athens in the fifth century A.D. he found that the glory of its philosophers had departed, but that the glory of its bee-masters still remained. Opinions differ as to the quality of the modern Hymettian honey. Leake pronounced it superior to that of the rest of Attica and of the surrounding provinces of Greece. Others think it inferior to the honey of other parts of Greece, such as the Cyclades, Corinth, and Thebes, as well as to the heather honey of Scotland and Ireland. Most of the honey sold as Hymettian comes from Tourko Vouni, north of Athens, and from other parts of Attica.

Hymettus was also famous in antiquity for its marble, which seems to have been especially prized by the Romans. This marble, which is still quarried in large quantities on Hymettus, is a bluish-grey streaky marble, of finer and closer grain than the white Pentelic marble, but far inferior to it in beauty. The Greeks seem not to have used it commonly till the third century B.C. From that time onward we find it employed for tombstones, inscriptions, and the casing of buildings. The principal quarries are on the western side of the mountain, on the slopes which enclose the valley of St. George on the south and south-east and which on the other side descend nearly sheer into ‘the Devil’s Glen’ or ‘the Evil Glen,’ the deepest and wildest gorge in Hymettus. Vestiges of the ancient road or slide by which the blocks were brought down from the quarries may be seen about a hundred yards above the chapel of St. George; the road seems to have been led in serpentine curves down the slope, not in a straight line like the road from the quarries on Pentelicus. A great part of the upper ridge of Hymettus is composed of a white marble resembling the white marble of Pentelicus, but inferior to it in crystalline structure and of a duller white. The ancients apparently made little use of this white Hymettian marble.

Clouds on Hymettus were believed to prognosticate rain; if during a storm a long bank of clouds was seen lowering on the mountain, it meant that the storm would increase in fury. Hymettus is still as of old remarkable for the wonderful purple glow which comes over it as seen from Athens by evening light. When the sun is setting, a rosy flush spreads over the whole mountain, which, as the daylight fades and the shadows creep up the slope, passes by insensible transitions through all intermediate shades of colour into the deepest violet. This purple tinge is peculiar to Hymettus; none of the other mountains which encircle the plain of Athens assumes it at any hour of the day. It was when the sunset glow was on Hymettus that Socrates drained the poisoned cup.

VII. Mount Pentelicus.—Pentelicus is the pyramid-like mountain, between three and four thousand feet high, which closes the Athenian plain on the north-east, at a distance of about ten miles from Athens. Its upper slopes, as seen from the Acropolis at Athens, have been aptly compared to the pediment or gable of a Greek temple. Through the clear air of Attica the unaided eye, looking from the Acropolis, can distinguish the white line of the ancient quarries descending, somewhat to the right of the highest peak, straight down into the valley where the monastery of Mendeli lies hidden by the intervening heights; to the left of the summit, half-way up the slope, may be discerned the large white patches which mark the site of the modern quarries.