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

by James George Frazer

XLIX. Lasion.—Pausanias has omitted to mention an ancient town that lay in the wild upper valley of the Peneus, in the heart of the Elean highlands, not far from the Arcadian frontier. This was Lasion, a place which, from its proximity to the Arcadian boundary, was the subject of border feuds, the Arcadians claiming possession of it, though in fact it appears to have belonged properly to Elis. It changed hands several times in the fifth, fourth, and third centuries B.C. The ruins of this secluded little town were discovered by G. F. Welcker in 1842 near Koumani, a village at the head waters of the Peneus. They may be visited on the way from Olympia to Psophis, though the visit necessitates a short detour to the west.

The route first follows the valley of the Cladeus through soft woodland scenery of the richest and most charming kind, between low hills crowned with clumps of pines. Then, still following the glen of the Cladeus, we ascend through romantically beautiful forests of pines and ancient oaks, and emerge on a wide breezy tableland, backed on the north by the high mountains of northern Arcadia. In the middle of the plateau, which is open and well cultivated, lies the scattered village of Lala. Crossing the northern end of the tableland, which is here carpeted with ferns, we again ascend a steep slope, and find ourselves on a still higher tableland, covered with fine oak forests. After traversing the forest for some time we quit the path to Psophis, which continues to run northward, and take a path which strikes westward. The time from Lala to the parting of the ways is about two hours. Another half-hour’s ride through the forest, which grows denser as we advance, brings us to Koumani, a trim well-to-do village, beautifully situated among oak-woods. The time from Olympia is about six hours.

The ruins of Lasion, now called Kouti, are to the north of the village, apparently on the same level with it, but a profound ravine divides them from the village, and half an hour’s laborious descent and ascent of its steep sides are needed to bring us to the ruins. The site is an exceedingly strong one. Two tributaries of the Peneus, coming from the higher mountains to the north-east, flow in deep ravines, which meet at an acute angle. Between them stretches a long, comparatively narrow ridge or tongue of land, which on three sides falls steeply down to the glens; only on the east the ascent is gentle. The top of the ridge is quite flat, and well adapted to be the site of a city. At one point it narrows to a mere isthmus or neck which divides the level summit into two parts, an eastern and a western. The western and smaller part was doubtless the ancient citadel; a finely-built wall of ashlar masonry, extending across the narrowest point of the neck, divides it from the rest of the city. The eastern and larger part of the ridge is more or less covered with ruins, and at its eastern end, where the ascent is easiest, a very fine piece of the city wall is still standing. Square towers, about seven feet broad, project from it at intervals. Walls and towers are built of well and regularly cut blocks; the masonry resembles that of Messene. There seem to be no traces of fortification walls on any other side of the plateau; perhaps none existed, the inhabitants thinking the deep ravines a sufficient defence.

The situation of Lasion is not only strong but beautiful. Tall plane-trees overhang the streams in the deep glens far below the ruins. To the north and north-east rises at no great distance the grand and massive range of Mount Erymanthus; while westward the view extends, between the heights that hem in the narrow valley of the Peneus, away over the lowlands of Elis to the distant sea.

L. The Erymanthus.—The first sight I had of the Erymanthus, among the mountains of northern Arcadia, is one of the scenes that dwell in the memory. We had been travelling for hours through the thick oak-woods which cover the outlying slopes and spurs of Mount Erymanthus on the south, when suddenly, emerging from the forest, we looked down into a long valley, through which flowed, between hills wooded to their summits, a shining river, the Erymanthus. At the far end of the valley high blue mountains closed the view. The scene, arched by the bright Greek sky, was indeed Arcadian.

LI. The Monastery of Megaspeleum.—The ancient Buraicus is the stream now called the Kalavryta river because it descends from the town of that name. The valley, which is broad and open at Kalavryta, contracts to the north of the town into a narrow defile flanked by huge rocks. In this narrow valley is the great monastery of Megaspeleum, the largest and wealthiest monastery in Greece, and indeed one of the largest and richest monasteries of the Eastern Church. Formerly it had dependencies even in Russia. The building and its situation are in the highest degree picturesque. It is a huge whitewashed pile, with wooden balconies on the outside, eight stories high, perched at a great height above the right bank of the river, on the steep slope of a mountain and immediately overhung by an enormous beetling crag which runs sheer up for some hundreds of feet above the roof of the monastery. It is this overhanging cliff which gives to the monastery its name of Megaspeleum (‘great cave’). So completely does it overarch the lofty building that when in the War of Independence the Egyptian soldiers of Ibrahim Pacha attempted to destroy the monastery by letting fall masses of rock upon it from the cliff above, the rocks fell clear of the monastery, leaving it unharmed. The steep slope of the mountain below is occupied by the terraced gardens of the monks, which with their rich vegetation, and the cypresses rising here and there above them, add greatly to the charm of the scene. A single zigzag path leads up this steep terraced slope to the monastery. The bare precipices above, crowned with forests, the deep wooded valley below, and the mountains rising steeply on the farther side, make up a landscape of varied delight and grandeur, on which a painter would love to dwell.

LII. The Gulf of Corinth.—After describing the view from the monastery of Troupia on the hill of Bura, Leake makes the following remarks on the scenery of the Gulf of Corinth, which are worth transcribing because they convey the impression made by this wonderfully beautiful gulf on one who in general was not given to dwell on the charms of nature. He says: “I doubt whether there is anything in Greece, abounding as it is in enchanting scenery and interesting recollections, that can rival the Corinthiac Gulf. There is no lake scenery in Europe that can compete with it. Its coasts, broken into an infinite variety of outline by the ever-changing mixture of bold promontory, gentle slope, and cultivated level, are crowned on every side by lofty mountains of the most pleasing and majestic forms; the fine expanse of water inclosed in this noble frame, though not so much frequented by ships as it ought to be by its natural adaptation to commerce, is sufficiently enlivened by vessels of every size and shape to present at all times an animated scene. Each step in the Corinthiac Gulf presents to the traveller a new prospect, not less delightful to the eye than interesting to the mind, by the historical fame and illustrious names of the objects which surround him. And if, in the latter peculiarity, the celebrated panorama of the Saronic Gulf, described by Sulpicius, be preferable, that arm of the Aegaean is in almost every part inferior to the Corinthian sea in picturesque beauty; the surrounding mountains are less lofty and less varied in their heights and outlines, and, unless where the beautiful plain of Athens is sufficiently near to decorate the prospect, it is a picture of almost unmitigated sterility and rocky wildness exhibited in every possible form of mountain, promontory, and island. It must, however, be admitted that it is only by comparison that such a scene can be depreciated.” I can only confirm this estimate of the superior charms of the Gulf of Corinth. Its waters seemed to me of an even deeper blue; and the delicacy of the morning and evening tints—azure, lilac, and rose—on the mountains is such that it is hard in looking at them to believe they are of the solid earth; so unsubstantial, so fairy-like do they seem, like the gorgeous phantasmagoria of cloudland or mountains seen in dreams.

LIII. On the Coast of Achaia.—Pausanias continues to move eastward along the coast of Achaia. Beyond the Buraicus river, where it issues from its romantic gorge, the strip of fertile plain which has skirted the coast all the way from Aegium comes to an end. The mountains now advance to the shore, and the road runs for a short distance along the summit of cliffs that border the coast. Then the mountains again retreat from the shore, leaving at their base a small maritime plain clothed with olive-groves. A stream, the river of Diakopton, crosses the plain and flows into the sea. It comes down from a wild and magnificent gorge, thickly wooded with tall firs and shut in by stupendous precipices of naked rock. Seen at nightfall under a lowering sky, with wreaths of white mist drooping low on the black mountains, the entrance to this gloomy gorge might pass for the mouth of hell; one could fancy Dante and his guide wending their way into it in the darkness.

Eastward of this little plain the mountains, covered with pine forests, again rise in precipices from the sea, hemming in the railway at their foot. A line of fine crags runs along the face of the mountains for a long way, their crests tufted with pine-woods, and the lower slopes at their feet also clothed in the same mantle of sombre green.

LIV. Pellene.—The scanty and insignificant ruins of Pellene are situated on the summit of a mountain which rises on the western side of the river of Trikala (the ancient Sythas), near the small hamlet of Zougra. It is a ride of two hours and a half from Xylokastro, the little town at the mouth of the river, to Zougra. We cross the river by a large stone bridge not far from its mouth, and then ascend the valley on the western bank of the stream. The bottom of the valley is fruitful; vineyards and fine groves of olives occupy the greater part of it, and tall cypresses rise here and there, like dark spires, above the greener foliage. The hills which enclose the valley on the east and west are not very high, but they are gashed and tortured by great scaurs and precipices of white and whity-brown earth. On the western side of the valley in particular a long line of high white precipices runs almost unbroken along the brow of the hills. The white, probably argillaceous, earth, which is thus cleft and gouged into precipices, is the same which forms the great precipices on the eastern side of Sicyon. Indeed it prevails nearly all the way along the southern coast of the Gulf of Corinth from Sicyon to Derveni, near Aegira. This chalky earth forms a plateau of varying height, separated from the shore by a stretch of level plain which averages perhaps a mile in width. The seaward face of the plateau is steep, high, and white; its edges are sharp as if cut with a knife, and ragged like the edge of a saw. Every here and there it is rent by a stream or torrent which has scooped a deep bed for itself out of the friable soil. The valley of the Sythas, up which we go to Pellene, is nothing but one of these water-worn rifts on a gigantic scale. As we ascend it through vineyards and olive-groves, between the rugged broken hills with their long lines of white precipices, the massive Cyllene, with its high, bare, pointed summit, looms in front of us at no great distance, blocking the southern end of the valley. After riding up the valley for an hour or more along a road which, for Greece, is excellent, we begin to climb a mountain on the western side of the river. A long, toilsome, winding, dusty, or, in rainy weather, muddy ascent, impeded rather than facilitated by a Turkish paved road of the usual execrable description, brings us in time to the little hamlet of Zougra. As we rise up the steep slope, our fatigue is to some extent compensated by the fine prospect that opens up behind us to the Corinthian Gulf and the mountains beyond it.