Athens is again the capital of a kingdom. Enthusiasts see in her present condition the promise of a restoration to her ancient greatness; but reason and observation assure us that the world is too much changed for her ever to be what she has been. In one respect, her condition resembles that of her best days; for, as her fame then attracted strangers from every quarter of the world to study in her schools, so now the capital of King Otho has become a great gathering-place of wandering spirits from many near and distant regions. For ages difficult and dangerous of access, the ancient capital of the arts lay shrouded in darkness, and almost cut off from the civilized world. At long intervals, a few solitary travellers only found their way to it; but, since the revolution, it has again become a place of frequent resort and intercourse. It is true that the ancient halls of learning are still solitary and deserted, but strangers from every nation now turn hither; the scholar to roam over her classic soil, the artist to study her ancient monuments, and the adventurer to carve his way to fortune.
The first day I dined at the hotel I had an opportunity of seeing the variety of material congregated in the reviving city. We had a long table, capable of accommodating about twenty persons. The manner of living was à la carte, each guest dining when he pleased; but, by tacit consent, at about six o'clock all assembled at the table. We presented a curious medley. No two were from the same country. Our discourse was in English, French, Italian, German, Greek, Russian, Polish, and I know not what else, as if we were the very people stricken with confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. Dinner over, all fell into French, and the conversation became general. Every man present was, in the fullest sense of the term, a citizen of the world. It had been the fortune of each, whether good or bad, to break the little circle in which so many are born, revolve, and die; and the habitual mingling with people of various nations had broken down all narrow prejudices, and given to every one freedom of mind and force of character. All had seen much, had much to communicate, and felt that they had much yet to learn. By some accident, moreover, all seemed to have become particularly interested in the East. They travelled over the whole range of Eastern politics, and, to a certain extent, considered themselves identified with Eastern interests. Most of the company were or had been soldiers, and several wore uniforms and stars, or decorations of some description. They spoke of the different campaigns in Greece in which some of them had served; of the science of war; of Marlborough, Eugene, and more modern captains; and I remember that they startled my feelings of classical reverence by talking of Leonidas at Thermopylæ and Miltiades at Marathon in the same tone as of Napoleon at Leipsic and Wellington at Waterloo. One of them constructed on the table, with the knives and forks and spoons, a map of Marathon, and with a sheathed yataghan pointed out the position of the Greeks and Persians, and showed where Miltiades, as a general, was wrong. They were not blinded by the dust of antiquity. They had been knocked about till all enthusiasm and all reverence for the past were shaken out of them, and they had learned to give things their right names. A French engineer showed us the skeleton of a map of Greece, which was then preparing under the direction of the French Geographical Society, exhibiting an excess of mountains and deficiency of plain which surprised even those who had travelled over every part of the kingdom. One had just come from Constantinople, where he had seen the sultan going to mosque; another had escaped from an attack of the plague in Egypt; a third gave the dimensions of the Temple of the Sun at Baalbeck; and a fourth had been at Babylon, and seen the ruins of the Tower of Babel. In short, every man had seen something which the others had not seen, and all their knowledge was thrown into a common stock. I found myself at once among a new class of men; and I turned from him who sneered at Miltiades to him who had seen the sultan, or to him who had been at Bagdad, and listened with interest, somewhat qualified by consciousness of my own inferiority. I was lying in wait, however, and took advantage of an opportunity to throw in something about America; and, at the sound, all turned to me with an eagerness of curiosity that I had not anticipated.
In Europe, and even in England, I had often found extreme ignorance of my own country; but here I was astonished to find, among men so familiar with all parts of the Old World, such total lack of information about the New. A gentleman opposite me, wearing the uniform of the King of Bavaria, asked me if I had ever been in America. I told him that I was born, and, as they say in Kentucky, raised there. He begged my pardon, but doubtfully suggested, "You are not black?" and I was obliged to explain to him that in our section of America the Indian had almost entirely disappeared, and that his place was occupied by the descendants of the Gaul and the Briton. I was forthwith received into the fraternity, for my home was farther away than any of them had ever been; my friend opposite considered me a bijou, asked me innumerable questions, and seemed to be constantly watching for the breaking out of the cannibal spirit, as if expecting to see me bite my neighbour. At first I had felt myself rather a small affair but, before separating, l'Americain, or le sauvage, or finally, le cannibal found himself something of a lion.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Since my return home I have seen in a newspaper an account of a popular commotion at Syra, in which the printing-presses and books at the missionaries were destroyed, and Mr. Robinson was threatened with personal violence.
CHAPTER V.
Ruins of Athens.—Hill of Mars.—Temple of the Winds.—Lantern of Demosthenes.—Arch of Adrian.—Temple of Jupiter Olympus.—Temple of Theseus.—The Acropolis.—The Parthenon.—Pentelican Mountain.—Mount Hymettus.—The Piræus.—Greek Fleas.—Napoli.
The next morning I began my survey of the ruins of Athens. It was my intention to avoid any description of these localities and monuments, because so many have preceded me, stored with all necessary knowledge, ripe in taste and sound in judgment, who have devoted to them all the time and research they so richly merit; but as, in our community, through the hurry and multiplicity of business occupations, few are able to bestow upon these things much time or attention, and, farthermore, as the books which treat of them are not accessible to all, I should be doing injustice to my readers if I were to omit them altogether. Besides, I should be doing violence to my own feelings, and cannot get fairly started in Athens, without recurring to scenes which I regarded at the time with extraordinary interest. I have since visited most of the principal cities in Europe, existing as well as ruined and I hardly know any to which I recur with more satisfaction than Athens. If the reader tire in the brief reference I shall make, he must not impute it to any want of interest in the subject; and as I am not in the habit of going into heroics, he will believe me when I say that, if he have any reverence for the men or things consecrated by the respect and admiration of ages, he will find it called out at Athens. In the hope that I may be the means of inducing some of my countrymen to visit that famous city, I will add another inducement by saying that he may have, as I had, Mr. Hill for a cicerone. This gentleman is familiar with every locality and monument around or in the city, and, which I afterward found to be an unusual thing with those living in places consecrated in the minds of strangers, he retains for them all that freshness of feeling which we possess who only know them from books and pictures.
By an arrangement made the evening before, early in the morning of my second day in Athens Mr. Hill was at the door of my hotel to attend us. As we descended the steps a Greek stopped him, and, bowing with his hand on his heart, addressed him in a tone of earnestness which we could not understand; but we were struck with the sonorous tones of his voice and the musical cadence of his sentences; and when he had finished, Mr. Hill told us that he had spoken in a strain which, in the original, was poetry itself, beginning, "Americanos, I am a Stagyrite. I come from the land of Aristotle, the disciple of Plato," &c., &c.; telling him the whole story of his journey from the ancient Stagyra and his arrival in Athens; and that, having understood that Mr. Hill was distributing books among his countrymen, he begged for one to take home with him. Mr. Hill said that this was an instance of every-day occurrence, showing the spirit of inquiry and thirst for knowledge among the modern Greeks. This little scene with a countryman of Aristotle was a fit prelude to our morning ramble.