A maiden prayed to live for ever.’
And still she lives and hangs in a basket in a church, and every St. John’s Day about noon she eats a roll of bread.” Another story tells of a lady who resided at Danzig and was so rich and so blest with all that life can give that she wished to live always. So when she came to her latter end, she did not really die but only looked like dead, and very soon they found her in a hollow of a pillar in the church, half standing and half sitting, motionless. She stirred never a limb, but they saw quite plainly that she was alive, and she sits there down to this blessed day. Every New Year’s Day the sacristan comes and puts a morsel of the holy bread in her mouth, and that is all she has to live on. Long, long has she rued her fatal wish who set this transient life above the eternal joys of heaven. A third story relates how a noble damsel cherished the same foolish wish for immortality. So they put her in a basket and hung her up in a church, and there she hangs and never dies, though many, many a year has come and gone since they put her there. But every year on a certain day they give her a roll and she eats it and cries out “For ever! for ever! for ever!” And when she has so cried she falls silent again till the same time next year, and so it will go on for ever and for ever. A fourth story, taken down, near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St. Mary at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.
XCIII. Orpheus in Hell.—Why in his picture of hell the painter Polygnotus should have depicted Orpheus touching the branches of a willow-tree is not clear. Pausanias has himself rightly pointed out that willows grew in the grove of Proserpine, but that does not suffice to explain the gesture of Orpheus in the picture. Mr. J. Six ingeniously suggests that when Orpheus went to hell to fetch the soul of his lost Eurydice he may have carried in his hand a willow-branch, just as Aeneas carried the Golden Bough, to serve as a passport or ‘open Sesame’ to unlock the gates of Death to a living man, and that in memory of this former deed the painter may have depicted the bard touching the willow. Virgil tells how at sight of the Golden Bough, “not seen for long,” the surly Charon turned his crazy bark to shore and received Aeneas on board. Mr. Six surmises that here the words “not seen for long” refer to the time when Orpheus, like Aeneas, had passed the ferry with the Golden Bough in his hand. If he is right, Polygnotus took a different view of that mystic branch from Virgil, who certainly regarded it as a glorified mistletoe. Professor C. Robert accepts Mr. Six’s explanation. Formerly he held that Pausanias had misinterpreted the gesture of Orpheus. The bard, on Professor Robert’s earlier view, was depicted merely holding the lyre with one hand and playing on it with the other, and a branch of the willow under which he sat drooped down and touched the hand that swept the strings. This view, which Professor Robert has wisely abandoned, is open to several objections. It substitutes a commonplace gesture, which Pausanias could hardly have so grossly mistaken, for a remarkable one which, however it is to be explained, had clearly struck Pausanias as unusual and significant. Again, if Orpheus had been depicted playing, would not some one have been represented listening? But, so far as appears from Pausanias’s description, not a soul was paying any heed to the magic strains of the great minstrel. It seems better, therefore, to suppose that, like blind Thamyris, he sat sad and silent, dreaming of life in the bright world, of love and music.
XCIV. The Acheron.—The Acheron is the river now known as the Suliotiko or Phanariotiko which comes down from the mountains of the once famous Suli and winds, a sluggish, turbid, and weedy stream, through the wide plain of Phanari, traversing some swamps or meres before it reaches the sea. These swamps, which extend nearly to the sea, and never dry up though they shrink in summer, are the Acherusian lake. The plain, where it is not too marshy, is covered with fields of maize and rice and meadows where herds of buffaloes browse. A few plane-trees and low tamarisks fringe the margin of the winding river. Otherwise the plain is mostly treeless. On its eastern side rise, like a huge grey wall, the wild and barren mountains of Suli.
Before entering the plain, on its passage from these rugged highlands, the Acheron flows through a profound and gloomy gorge, one of the darkest and deepest of the glens of Greece. On either side precipices rise sheer from the water’s edge to a height of hundreds of feet, their ledges and crannies tufted with dwarf oaks and shrubs. Higher up, where the sides of the glen recede from the perpendicular, the mountains rise to a height of over three thousand feet, the black pine-woods which cling to their precipitous sides adding to the sombre magnificence of the scene. A precarious footpath leads along a perilous ledge high up on the mountain-side, from which the traveller gazes down into the depths of the tremendous ravine, where the deep and rapid river may be seen rushing and foaming along, often plunging in a cascade into a dark abyss, but so far below him that even the roar of the waterfall is lost in mid-air before it can reach his ear.
At the point where the river emerges from the defile into the plain, there are a few cottages with some ruins of a church and fortress on the right bank. The place is called Glyky. The church seems to have occupied the site of an ancient temple; some fragments of granite columns and pieces of a white marble cornice, adorned with a pattern of acanthus leaves, may be seen lying about. Here, perhaps, was the seat of that Oracle of the Dead where the envoys of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, summoned up the ghost of his murdered wife Melissa, and where Orpheus vainly sought to bring back his lost Eurydice from the world of shades.
XCV. A Ride across Parnassus.—We left the new village of Delphi, which stands a little to the south-west of the ancient sanctuary, shortly after eight o’clock, and at once struck up the mountain-side at the back of the village. The path for a good way is the same as that to the Corycian cave. It climbs the bare rocky face of the mountain in a series of zigzags, from which as we rose higher and higher a wide prospect opened up behind us to the Gulf of Corinth and the distant mountains of Peloponnese. On reaching the top of this long and steep declivity we found ourselves on the edge of an expanse of comparatively level though broken ground, sparsely wooded with pines, beyond which soared the upper slopes of Parnassus, its summit lightly capped with snow. The high plateau on which we now stood is bounded on the north by an outlying spur of Parnassus, clothed with pine-forest, in the southern face of which is the Corycian cave. Instead of crossing the tableland in the direction of the cave, we skirted its south-western corner, keeping the wooded mountain on our right. The path continued to wind for hours along grey rocky slopes where pines grew more or less thickly. On either hand rose sombre mountains of the same general character—grey and rocky with patches of pine-forest on their sides. Now and then a little moss relieved with its verdure the barrenness of the rocks, and a stony glade through which we passed was speckled with pale purple crocuses. On these heights the air felt chilly, for the season was late October, and a little snow—the first of autumn—had fallen in the night, just touching with white the peaks of Parnassus and the high Locrian mountains in the west. The morning had been bright when we left Delphi, but as the day wore on the sky became overcast, its cold and lowering aspect harmonising well with the wild and desolate scenery through which we rode. The jingling of the mule-bells and the cries of the muleteers were almost the only sounds that broke the silence, though once in the forest to the right we heard the clapper-like note of a pelican, and once in an open glade we passed some woodmen hewing pine-logs. In time, the path beginning to descend, the rocks gave place to earthy slopes; a little pale thin grass and some withered ferns grew in the glades; the sun shone out between the clouds, and as we descended into the warmer lowlands it seemed as if we were pursuing the departing summer.
In about four hours from Delphi high purple mountains, sunlit and flecked with cloud-shadows, appeared in the north through and above the pine-forest. Farther down the forest grew thin and then disappeared from the stony bottom of the valley, though the upper slopes of the mountains on either side were still wrapped in their dark mantle of pines. It was near one o’clock when we reached Ano-Agoriani, a village nestling among trees in a hollow of the mountains and traversed by a murmuring brook. After a halt of about an hour we quitted the village and descended into the deep bed of the stream; then ascending steeply its western bank we pursued our way along the rocky mountain-side high above the glen. In three-quarters of an hour we came in sight of the broad valley of the Cephisus lying stretched below us and backed by mountains on the north. By steep, rocky, winding paths we now descended into the valley, and at a quarter to four reached Kato-Agoriani. The village stands just at the foot of Parnassus. About a mile to the east the grey ruined walls and towers of Lilaea climb a steep and rugged hill-side—the last fall of Parnassus to the plain. The situation of the place at the northern foot of the mountain is such that it can receive very little sun at any time of the year, which, though an advantage in the torrid heat of a Greek summer, must render the winter climate severe. As we rode downwards to Kato-Agoriani the sun set behind the mountains at our back soon after three o’clock, but it was not till nearly two hours afterwards that his light faded from the hills on the opposite or northern side of the valley. This may illustrate the remarks of Pausanias as to the climate of Lilaea.
XCVI. Pericles.—Pericles, a great Athenian statesman, and one of the most remarkable men of antiquity, was the son of Xanthippus, who commanded the Greeks at the battle of Mycale. By his mother Agariste, niece of Clisthenes, who reformed the democracy at Athens after the expulsion of the Pisistratidae, he was connected both with the old princely line of Sicyon and with the great but unfortunate house of the Alcmaeonidae. The date of his birth is unknown, but his youth must have fallen in the stirring times of the great Persian war. From his friendship with the poet Anacreon, his father would seem to have been a man of taste, and as he stood in relations of hospitality to the Spartan kings his house was no doubt a political as well as literary centre. Pericles received the best education which the age could supply. For masters he had Pythoclides and the distinguished musician Damon, who infused into his music lessons a tincture of philosophy, whereby he incurred the suspicions of the vulgar, and received the honour of ostracism. Pericles listened also to the subtle dialectics of the Eleatic Zeno. But the man who swayed him most deeply and permanently was the philosopher Anaxagoras. The influence of the speculative genius and dignified and gentle character of the philosopher who resigned his property that he might turn his thoughts more steadily to heaven, which he called his home, and who begged as his last honour that the school-children might have a holiday on the day he died, can be traced alike in the intellectual breadth and the elevated moral tone of the pupil, in his superiority to vulgar superstitions, and in the unruffled serenity which he preserved throughout the storms of political life. It was probably the grand manner of Pericles even more than his eloquence that won him the surname of Olympian Zeus.[[11]]