We may not now feel the want of what is lost. The hills once covered with forest trees are bare, the countryside is untilled and empty, and these ruins are invested with a sentimental charm in the thought of what has been lost. The traveller is in the mood of Sulpicius as he consoles Cicero for his daughter’s death. “Returning from Asia, as my voyage took me from Aegina towards Megara, I began to survey the regions round about: behind me was Aegina, before me Megara, to the right Peiraeus, to the left Corinth, all cities at one time prosperous and flourishing, but now they lay prone and ruined before my eyes. And I began thus to ponder within myself: ‘Ah! shall we frail creatures resent the death of one of ourselves, seeing that our life must needs be full short, when in one place so many dead cities lie before us?’” Indeed the Greek cities are most aptly compared to humanity. There never was anything grandiose about them, nothing monstrous like the empire of China, no desire to thrust Greek manners or religions upon the rest of the world, no attempt to monopolize trade even by honest methods. They wished to live and let live, loved and hated fiercely, but like men; and if they must die they did not whine about it—indeed, for their country’s sake they held it glorious to die. And now they are gone, and their place knows them no more, no one can feel that touch of triumph that Shelley felt over his Ozymandias. They have left behind them everywhere a poignant regret, such as one feels for a very dear friend gone for ever. Most strong is this feeling when our steps wander over some desolate spot, once a populous city, such as Pæstum or Myndos. I mention Myndos because there the contrast is most vividly brought out by the second idyll of Theocritus. There is the old harbour, there is the ring of the city walls a mile across, and the whole space between is brushwood and stones. Yet from this city sailed to Cos opposite the hot-blooded youth whom Simaitha loved, whose story is told in the poet’s words of passion. And these cities, once so full of life and happiness, are a desert now. Even the new Greece, which rose from the ashes of the old not a hundred years ago, which has sprung into new life and honour within the last few months, cannot console us for the Greece that is gone. The quick intelligence is still here, the courage, the idealism; but Greece can hardly escape the corruption of the modern world, with its grasping after wealth; and the sincerity of the ancient spirit exists chiefly amongst peasants and fishermen. A false and pedantic way of thought is spreading from the schools and the newspapers, which must spoil the people unless the efforts of a few wise and longsighted men shall prevail.
The pictures in this volume follow roughly the history of the Doric style. In Olympia lies the floor of the Heræum, most ancient of all existing Greek temples, built before 1000 B.C. Unhappily this view tells us nothing of what it looked like: earthquake and flood, and the hand of man, have done all they could to destroy. The temples in Sicily and Magna Græcia, with Corinth, belong to the earliest stage known to us. Corinth was built about 650; the temples of Athena at Syracuse, now the cathedral, and of Zeus at Selinus (which are not represented here) are as old or older. Segesta comes next, in the early sixth century; and in the same century temples at Girgenti (Agrigentum), Aegina, and Pæstum. The temple of Zeus at Olympia was built between 469 and 457, the Parthenon 454-438, Sunium and Eleusis about the same time, and two buildings at Pæstum. The theatres belong to a later date, and the Corinthian temple of Zeus Olympian at Athens, begun by Peisistratus, was not finished until the time of Hadrian.
Olympia is the epitome of the Greek race, as the forum is of the Roman dominion: the Roman ideal being law, order, and government; the Greek, all the powers of man at their best, used and enjoyed in the holy precinct of their great God. The difference is shown at once, in that the Olympian assembly was enforced by no lawgiver, but the voluntary gathering of men of one blood, who for a set time laid aside all their quarrels, and remembered that they were marked off by a great gulf from all other men. They came for no material gain: their prize was not dominion and power, nor wealth and trade, but the crown of wild olive and glory incorruptible. Elis, a state small and insignificant politically, had the honour of presiding over these games; no man might compete save those of pure Hellenic blood, and no woman might approach them. And here, every four years, from a time before the beginning of history, the men of Greece met, kings and potentates competing with private men, high and low, rich and poor, all acknowledging the one tie greater than all others. The celebrations lasted all through the glorious days of Greece, and until the glory of Greece had long departed, and they were abolished for ever in 394 A.D. by Theodosius. Art and literature formed no part of the contests, which were nearly all athletic; but painters and other artists exhibited their works there, and it was common for orators and philosophers to recite: Herodotus is said to have read his history at the festival.
The picture is taken from the small hill of Kronos: we look over the site of Hera’s temple to the great temple of Zeus. To the left, out of sight, is the entrance to the racecourse. Just beneath us, under the hill, is a row of small shrines called Treasuries, which mighty states and monarchs had built to contain their own chief offerings. In the distance is the river Alpheius. We cannot imagine how this plain looked when it was the encampment of thousands, covered with booths, and full of goodly men and horses; the crowds, the processions, the feastings, litany and sacrifice; but every man must feel the same thrill as when he stands in Westminster Hall, or St. Sophia at Constantinople: for here have passed all the great men of the Greek race.
If the games show the physical side of the Greeks, the theatre above all shows the intellectual. While they invented, and perfected, nearly all kinds of literary art, it is the theatre that touched their life most closely, and most fully gave scope for their genius. This also grew out of religion, and was always a part of their religion. But the Greek gods were no puritans. They exacted awe and worship, and they punished the impious; but they were genial good fellows, who might be thought, without blasphemy, to share in the happiness of their people—indeed, took it in good part when they were the subject of rollicking jests. In the theatre, Aeschylus found room for his profound religious feeling, Euripides for his scepticism, Sophocles for a mirror of the mind of man, Aristophanes for his political and social satire and his merry fun. Every town and even hamlet must have its theatre. A suitable place could be found almost anywhere in the hill country—that is, in almost all parts of Greece proper—before any buildings needed to be put up. Then the hillsides were cut into seats, as at Argos and Segesta, or seats ranged around in a semicircle, and carried on when it was necessary by means of retaining walls. Below them was a round space for dancing, and beyond this the stage. There is a controversy whether the Greeks ever used a raised stage before the Roman conquest; probably they did, but at any rate all existing theatres had them. Vitruvius (who wrote about 20 A.D.) says that the Greek stage was higher and narrower than the Roman; and the stage at Taormina has been built, or rebuilt, in the Roman way.
It is proper to say this, but the onlooker will think little now of the stage, or indeed of the actors and the play, in view of one of those scenes which can never be forgotten. The sight of Etna over the stage, with his rolling steam, absorbs the whole force of imagination. Etna is tremendous. Beneath Etna Hephaistos had one of his forges, as at Lipara, Imbros, and Lemnos; and that smoke you see shows that his workmen are forging the thunder-bolts of Zeus. The very name of Volcano is Hephaistos himself. Or is it the giant Typhoeus, defeated by Zeus in the battle of gods and giants, and buried beneath the mountain, who by his struggles causes the earth thus to heave, and these fiery streams to pour forth? What wonder that the pious made offerings of incense at the top! Was it really true that Empedocles, that great philospher and healer, whose intellectual pride seems almost to claim divine honours, cast himself into the crater, that he might seem to have been swept away by the gods? Probably it was not true: but the story shows how the mountain worked on men’s imaginations.
If the theatre of Segesta has no Etna behind it, the surroundings to the eye are in other ways grand. It is seated upon the acropolis hill, whence a view can be taken at once of that corner of Sicily which was held by the mysterious Elymians, with their citadel and sanctuary of Eryx. Segesta was founded by a people who wanted protection, and feared the sea. But, like the rest of Sicily, it came under Greek influence; and its buildings, the two temples and the theatre, are Greek. This small town has played a part in history: it was the bone of contention which led Athens to interfere with Syracuse, and so on to her ruin. The columns of the temple are unfinished, the fluting has never been done. There is something that moves the sympathy in these unfinished places. No doubt the city was overwhelmed in some catastrophe, which perhaps left it quite desolate in the old cruel way. So the blocks of the Pinacotheca on the Athenian acropolis still keep the knobs which were used in mounting them; they were never cut off, for Athens fell. So, most striking of all, there lies in the quarry near Baalbek an enormous block of stone, seventy-seven feet long by fifteen and fourteen, squared and ready, one end tilted for moving; but it was never moved: there it has lain perhaps for three thousand years, and there it will lie till the world ends.
Girgenti, Agrigentum, Akragas, called by Pindar καλλἱστα βροτεἁν πολἱων, fairest of mortal cities; lofty Akragas, in Virgil’s words, spreading her walls so wide, mother of high-spirited horses—
“Arduus inde Acragas ostentat maxima longe
Moenia, magnanimum quondam generator equorum”—
although late founded in Greek history (B.C. 582), is set on a hilltop like some primaeval acropolis. Two rocky hills, with a space of level land between, were enclosed within a wall six miles round; below this the land slopes gently to the sea; the whole lies between two rivers. The existing remains, and the modern town, lie on one of the two hills. Akragas calls up only one name from the memory. Phalaris the Tyrant and his brazen bull. But Empedocles was born here. The great temple of Zeus Polieus, which Phalaris was said to have built, has perished, and those that remain cannot be certainly identified. One is called after Concord, but the Latin name cannot have properly belonged to it. The pictures here show some of the wonderful effects, which vary from hour to hour in this land of colour and sunlight. But the glory of Girgenti is the grouping of its remains: wall, temples, and rocks. If we could see the city as it was, it may well have been καλλἱστα βροτεἁν πολἱων. But in 406, the Carthaginians descended upon it, and starved out the people. All who could go migrated to Gela; the rest were massacred, and the city sacked. From this blow it never recovered, although it was afterwards inhabited.