XIII. Megara.—From Eleusis to Megara by road or railway is about fourteen miles. The road first passes along the northern side of the low ridge which formed the acropolis of Eleusis; then it turns down to the sea and follows the shore. The plain of Eleusis is divided from the plain of Megara by a chain of wooded hills which advances southward from Mount Cithaeron to the shore of the bay. The road skirts the foot of these hills, ascending and descending, traversing olive-groves, and winding round little bays and headlands, commanding views, ever shifting but ever beautiful, of the coast of Salamis across the blue and blue-green waters of the lake-like bay, which is here so narrow that the white monastery of Phaneromene, with its clustered domes and turrets, can be plainly seen standing among green fields on the opposite shore. Then, when the last spur of the hills is rounded, the plain of Megara, covered with olives and vines, and backed by high mountains, opens out before us. In the distance can be distinguished the picturesque oriental-looking town of Megara, with its white houses rising in terraces, one above the other, on the sides of two isolated hills in the far corner of the plain: the higher of the two hills used to be crowned by a square mediaeval tower.
The modern town is chiefly confined to the western hill, the southern slope of which it occupies to the summit. Its narrow steep streets, and white-washed, flat-roofed, windowless houses, with low doorways opening into courts shaded here and there by a fig-tree, have much the appearance of an Arab village. The dazzlingly white walls make, in the brilliant sunshine, an excellent background for the gay costumes of the women, the bright colours of which (red, green, blue, violet) add to the Eastern effect of the scene.
XIV. The Scironian Road.—The famous pass along the sea-cliffs, known in antiquity as the Scironian Road, is thus described by Strabo: “The Scironian cliffs leave no passage between them and the sea. The road from the Isthmus to Megara and Attica runs along the top of them; indeed in many places it is compelled by the beetling mountain, which is high and inaccessible, to skirt the brink of the precipices.” The dread of robbers, who here lay in wait for travellers, enhanced the natural horrors of the pass in ancient as well as in modern times. In recent years these horrors have been dissipated by the construction of a highroad and a railway along the coast; but down to the middle of the present century, if we may trust the descriptions of travellers, the cliff-path well deserved its modern name of Kake Skala or ‘the Evil Staircase.’ For six miles it ran along a narrow crumbling ledge half-way up the face of an almost sheer cliff, at a height of six to seven hundred feet above the sea. On the right rose the rock like a wall; on the left yawned the dizzy abyss, where, far below, the waves broke at the foot of the precipices in a broad sheet of white curdling foam. So narrow was the path that only a single sure-footed beast could make its way with tolerable security along it. In stormy or gusty weather it was dangerous; a single slip or stumble would have been fatal. When two trains of mules met, the difficulty of passing each other was extreme. Indeed at the beginning of the present century Colonel Leake pronounced the path impassable for horses; and at a later time, when it had been somewhat mended, another distinguished traveller, himself a Swiss, declared that he knew of no such giddy track, used by horses, in all Switzerland. In many places the narrow path had been narrowed still further by its outer edge having given way and slid into the depths, so that it was only by using the utmost caution that the traveller was able to scramble along at all. At one point, where it crossed the mouth of a gully, the road had completely disappeared, having either fallen into the sea or, according to another account, been blown up in the War of Independence. Here therefore the wayfarer was obliged to pick his steps down a breakneck track which zigzagged down to the narrow strip of beach, from which he had laboriously to clamber up by a similar track on the opposite side of the gully. One traveller has graphically described how his baggage-horses slid and slipped on their hind feet down one of these tracks, while their drivers hung on to the tails of the animals to check their too precipitate descent. Last century the path had ceased to be used even by foot-passengers. Chandler took boat at Nisaea and coasted along the foot of the cliffs, looking up with amazement at the narrow path carried along the edge of perpendicular precipices above the breakers and supported so slenderly beneath “that a spectator may reasonably shudder with horror at the idea of crossing.”
Nothing was easier than to make such a path impassable. Accordingly when word reached Peloponnese that Leonidas and his men had been annihilated by the Persians at Thermopylae, the Peloponnesians hurried to the Isthmus, blocked up the Scironian road, and built a fortification wall across the Isthmus. In modern times, though the path had fallen into decay, it still showed traces of having been used and cared for in antiquity. In many places the marks of the chariot-wheels were visible in the rock; in other places there were remains of massive substructions of masonry which had once supported and widened the road; and here and there pieces of ancient pavement were to be seen. These were probably vestiges of the carriage road which, as Pausanias tells us, the emperor Hadrian constructed along this wild and beautiful coast. At the present day, as the traveller is whirled along it in the train, he is struck chiefly by the blueness of the sea and the greenness of the thick pine-woods which mantle the steep shelving sides of the mountains.
XV. The Isthmus of Corinth.—The Isthmus of Corinth, which unites Peloponnese on the south to the mountainous district of Megara and Central Greece on the north, is a low flat neck of land about three and a half miles wide at the narrowest part and about two hundred and sixty feet high at the lowest point, stretching roughly in a direction from south-west to north-east. The central part is a flat tableland, which shelves away in steep terraces to the sea on the southern side. Its surface is rugged, barren, and waterless; where it is not quite bare and stony, it is mostly overgrown with stunted shrubs and dwarf pines, or with thistles and other prickly plants of a grey arid aspect. There is no underwood and no turf. In spring some grass and herbage sprout in patches among the thistles and afford pasture to flocks. The niggard soil, where soil exists, is cultivated in a rude imperfect way, and yields some scanty crops, mostly of wheat and barley. But in the drought of summer every green blade disappears, and the fields are little more than a bare stony wilderness swept by whirling clouds of dust. This rugged barren quality of the soil was equally characteristic of the Isthmus in antiquity. It seems to have been customary to gather the stones from the fields before sowing the seed.
In ancient times ships of small burden were regularly dragged on rollers or waggons across the narrowest part of the Isthmus in order to avoid the long voyage round Peloponnese; hence this part of the Isthmus was known as the Diolkos or Portage. The Portage began on the east at Schoenus, near the modern Kalamaki; its western termination is not mentioned by ancient writers, but was probably near the west end of the modern canal. We read of fleets of warships being transported across the Isthmus; for example after the battle of Actium the victorious Augustus thus conveyed his ships across the Isthmus in pursuit of Antony and Cleopatra, and in 883 A.D. the Greek admiral Nicetas Oriphas transported a fleet across it to repel an attack of the Saracens. Some remains of the ancient Portage, which seems to have been a sort of tramway, may still be seen near a guard-house, at the point where the road from Kalamaki to Corinth crosses the northern of the two ancient fortification walls.
The lowest and narrowest part of the Isthmus, through which the Portage went in antiquity and the modern canal now runs, is bounded on the south by a line of low cliffs. Along the crest of these cliffs may be traced the remains of an ancient fortification wall stretching right across the Isthmus from sea to sea. It is built of large blocks laid in fairly regular courses, and is flanked by square towers which project from the curtain at regular intervals of about a hundred yards on the north side, showing that the wall was meant to protect the Corinthian end of the Isthmus against invasion from the north. The wall does not extend in a straight line, but follows the crest of the cliffs, wherever this natural advantage presented itself.
XVI. The Bath of Aphrodite.—The lower spring, which Pausanias took to be Pirene, has sometimes been identified with the copious springs now known as ‘the bath of Aphrodite.’ They issue just below the steep northern edge of the broad terrace on which the old city of Corinth stood. Here the rocks curve round in a semicircle and overhang so as to form grottoes under their beetling brows. From these rocks, overgrown with moss and rank creepers, the clear water bubbles and trickles in copious rills, which nourish a rich vegetation in the open ground through which they flow. The grotto, which is always fresh and cool, commands an uninterrupted view over the Gulf to the mountains beyond. Here in the days of the Turkish dominion the bey of Corinth had his gardens, where he led a life of Asiatic luxury. A staircase still leads from the grotto to the terrace above, on the edge of which stood his seraglio. All is now ruin and desolation. A few pieces of ancient columns of green and white streaked marble mark the site of the seraglio. The spring is frequented only by washerwomen, and its streams water only vegetable gardens and orchards. But the water is as sweet as in Pausanias’s time, and the grottoes under the overhanging ledge of rock might pass for “the chambers made like grottoes” of which he makes mention.[[6]]
[6]. However, the true Pirene described by Pausanias has lately been discovered elsewhere by the American archaeologists who are now excavating the site of ancient Corinth.