Pæstum, the Greek Poseidonia, is one of those cities that have no history; at least, this city played no great part in ancient history and gave the world no great men. But Pæstum was not happy. It had its day, from the foundation in the seventh century for some two hundred years; but it fell early into the hands of the barbaric Lucanians. After this it existed, but it never became great. We know Pæstum for its roses, biferi rosaria Pæsti, which flower twice a year in May and November; and until lately, for its loneliness and desolation. Not a living soul was there in the circuit of the city walls, nothing but a bare plain with hundreds of flowering grasses, and the great temples in their grandeur. All its charm is gone now: a factory stains the sky with its smoke, and the modern world, whose god is its belly, has put its foul mark upon the quietude of Pæstum. Those who saw Pæstum when it was one of the most impressive sights in the world, will be careful not to go thither again.
Corinth, on the other hand, takes us back to the heart of the ancient world. From time immemorial Corinth was a great place. It lay on the high-road of the seas, in the time when voyagers hugged the coasts. Traders from Asia and Phœnicia would not ply to Italy and Spain along the open sea when they could go from island to island and along the sheltered waters of the two gulfs: all these must ship their goods across the Isthmus, and the Isthmus was dominated by the impregnable rock of Corinth. Thus the masters of Corinth could levy tolls on all commerce: they grew rich, as in older days Troy did, and later Constantinople, because they lay across a trade route. Here was built the first Greek navy of war-ships: here were the rich and powerful tyrants; here was worshipped Poseidon, with his famous Isthmian games, and Phoenician Aphrodite. A few years ago, the precinct of Poseidon was dug out, and there appeared a mass of votive tablets, on which we may see the daily life of Corinth in the seventh century before Christ. Pre-eminent amongst all the scenes are those of the potter’s trade: the pottery is seen being made on the wheel, baked in the furnace, and loaded into the ships for export to Italy and elsewhere. Corinth reminds us of some of the best stories of Herodotus: Cypselus and his chest, Arion and the dolphins, and that attractive scatterbrain Hippocleides, who at Sicyon hard by danced away his marriage, and did not care one jot. No great man of letters ever came out of Corinth, no poet and no orator; but Corinthian bronze was famous, and the city was full of works of art. When Mummius sacked Corinth and left it desolate, he made his famous bargain with the contractors who removed the spoil: if they damaged any of the works of art, they were to replace them with others as good. Corinth was afterwards rebuilt; all will remember St. Paul’s connection with the city, and the riot when Gallic was governor of Achaia.
The Acrocorinthus is one of the most magnificent sights in the world: it has the common quality of the Greek mountains, grandeur without excessive size; but standing as it does isolated from other hills, and visible everywhere, from Athens to Parnassus, its effect on the imagination is never to be forgotten. Its height is not far short of 2000 feet, and it is crowned with a fortress as it has been all through history. From the summit we see the whole centre of Greece; even the Parthenon itself, the centre of Greek artistic achievement. Here too is the sacred spring Peirene, struck out by the hoof of Pegasus.
The view here given towards the gulf shows Parnassus in the distance, like a ghost.
Athens is the heart of Greece, and Greece is the soul of mankind. No man who loves what is beautiful, or who admires what is noble, can fail to feel at home in Athens. Here in this little plain, girt with purple mountains, lived those men who discovered human reason, who showed how to express man’s greatest ideas, who pitted courage and intellect against brute force, who for a few short years lived the fullest life possible for mankind: we have lived on their thoughts ever since.
The beauties of the place have been often sung: they are summed up in one immortal phrase, “city of the violet crown.” The continued changes of colour, especially towards evening, in that clear air, with sea and cloud and mountain, make the scene a continual delight. In the midst of this fertile plain rises the sharp peak of Lycabettus, and beside it the buttressed Acropolis, from which the temples grow like flowers. And from every side this is a landmark: whether from Aegina opposite, or from some frontier fortress like Phyle, or even from Acrocorinth, this rock, not high in itself, stands out to the view, and makes us remember Athens. Here, more easily than anywhere, can we see how the Greek architect saw each building as part of a whole. I have already spoken of the refinements of the Parthenon, and how it is set with regard to the sunlight: but the Parthenon is only one of a group of temples. There yet remain a great part of the Erechtheum, the oldest shrine on the Acropolis, and site of the King’s house before history began: and a little shrine of Victory, built on a bastion of the rock. But there were others; and the whole precinct was entered by the Propylaea, which also remains in part, to which led a flight of steps. The idea of this gateway was a stroke of genius. The visitor entering by it saw the whole mass of buildings as it were framed by the marble pillars and architrave; and if he turned, he looked out through the same frame upon the plain and the sea, the strait of Salamis, with the island beyond it. The rock falls steep under the gate, so there is nothing to bar this view, which must have reminded the Athenian of the great past every time he looked forth from it. To the right, as one looks out of this gateway, lies the spur of the Areopagus, seat of that most ancient court and council, upon which place St. Paul told the Athenians of the Unknown God. To the left, but not visible, is the precinct of Dionysus, with the theatre. Straight ahead, the ancient Athenian would see the long walls joining his city to Peiraeus and the sea, where in fortified harbours lay his mighty fleets. Over the market-place westward he could see the Dipylon Gate with its place of tombs, and the sacred way leading to Eleusis and the Mysteries. Eastward lies Hymettus with its honey-bees; northwards Lycabettus, where the Persian host was first sighted pouring over the hillside, and beyond it Pentelicon, that looks down on Marathon plain; north-westwards are the hills of Acharnae, where the fires of the invading Spartans were first seen in that war which ended the greatness of Athens. And all round about are caves and clefts and shrines that belonged to the immemorial religion of the place, each linked with memories, many with immortal works of literature. We can no longer know the magnificence of the past; but we can name many of the things that were seen there, from the description of Pausanias which has come down to us.
Up this slope, once in every four years, after the games, came the great procession of the Panathensæ, which is portrayed for us on the frieze of the Parthenon itself. Was there ever such a picture of beauty and strength and life? There went the victors, crowned and rejoicing; the flower of the Athenian cavalry, such men and such horses as the world can show no finer (see them on the Parthenon frieze!), all the chief soldiers and statesmen, elders bearing branches of olive, the fairest of Athenian women with baskets upon their heads, and the sacred robe to be offered to the most ancient and reverend image of Pallas, borne as the sail of the Panathenaic ship. The whole scene is portrayed upon the sculptured frieze of the Parthenon. One of the plates in this book represents the modern idea of a religious festival, and the hundreds of dotted figures give a far-away notion what this great day must have looked like. But how faint! These dark-clad forms have not a hint of the gorgeous colour of the ancient world. On the Acropolis, too, was held the feast of Brauronian Artemis, when the little Athenian maidens dressed up in bearskins for some mysterious ceremony. Here was the mark of Poseidon’s trident, under the Erechtheum; here was Athena’s sacred olive-tree, and her snakes. And the whole place crowded with statues and offerings, and inscriptions carved on stone, treaties of peace, and records of honour—the history of Athens open for all to read.
The story of the Athenian Acropolis is unique amongst its fellows, while at the same time it sums up the history of the Greek states. It is unique, because here alone, it seems, a state existed from the beginning to the end without violent interference. Many Greek sites were occupied in the Pelasgian age, when Crete was mistress of the Aegean, and later when its place was taken by Mycenæ and the cities of the mainland: but the country was swept later by the Achaeans, and after them by the Dorians, who naturally chose the more fertile and wealthy places to stay in. So the Acropolis was the site of a royal palace and a Pelasgian settlement; but the ancient population was here never displaced, it was only added to and changed gradually. Attica did not tempt the invader as other plains did; nor did her rulers grow too rich and destroy each other for greed; but her land was the refuge of strangers. Her ancient civilisation and art remained untouched by the ravages of war, and her people always prided themselves on being αὑτὁχθονες—born of the very soil. Perhaps this unbroken tradition explains the prominence of Athens in the arts. Here too, the worship of Athena joined the older worship of Poseidon, without rooting it up, and both flourished side by side. Then came the great dynasty of the tyrants, Peisistratus and his family, who made the city magnificent with buildings and engineering works, and attracted to their court the finest intellects of their day. The huge underground aqueduct which has lately been dug out belongs to this time, the sixth century before Christ. Peisistratus is followed by Solon and the reign of law: and when the barbarian came, it was Athens who barred his path and drove him back at Marathon and at Salamis. Xerxes burnt the city, but he did not destroy Athens, for the people had left it for the time; and when they returned, they built up their fortifications with the ruins of their temples and monuments, as they may still be seen piled slab on drum by the visitor of to-day. Xerxes burnt all he found, but he only cleared the ground for a finer art, which at once filled the empty spaces with buildings and monuments of a nobler kind, the remains of which we now see. Great names now stand out in plenty, Miltiades, Themistocles and Aristeides, Pericles and Pheidias and Ictinus; Plato over yonder in the olive groves of Academeia, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes in the theatre or the winepress; Socrates walking the streets, or conversing in agora or gymnasium; Demosthenes moving men’s minds in the Pnyx. When Athens fell, her conqueror spared her with a generosity not usual in those days; so it came about that her buildings remained for many hundreds of years, and the Parthenon even lasted through the devastating ruin of the Turks, until a Venetian shell dropped upon it and blew it up (1687). There is no use in trying to record what the Acropolis of Athens calls to mind: it is the best of what educated men know.
Fair and goodly in life, the Athenians were also fair in death. Without the gate, on the sacred road to Eleusis, lies the place of tombs. Not bare slabs are these, nor broken columns; here are no wreaths of artificial flowers, no ugliness and gloom, for the tombs are monuments of grace. Many, indeed, are quite simple, in shape of vases or the like; but others show delicate reliefs, with the dead in their habit as they lived—the woman at her toilet, the warrior on his horse, or one seated in a chair and clasping hands with his friends as they say, Fare you well! The inscriptions are as simple as they can be: no sentiment and no preaching, but a manly acceptance of fate, an honest regret for life, or the bare name. The reader who wishes to learn how the Greek looked on death, would do well to read the epitaphs in the Greek anthology. Here in the place of tombs we cannot fail to remember that scene which Thucydides describes: how in each year of the war the bodies of those slain were buried with public honour, and Pericles or some notable man pronounced their eulogy; and in that speech of Pericles we may read in brief the ideal of the Athenian.
From this place led forth the Sacred Way, over the hills to Eleusis, where perhaps more than anywhere else in the Greek world those higher emotions were aroused which we associate with religion. In the ritual these were lacking; and philosophy was sceptical rather than religious, except with a rare soul now and then, a Socrates or a Plato, with whom feeling and intellect seem to be fused into one force. But the Eleusinian mysteries gave what both philosophy and ritual lacked. They were mysteries in so far that no one might reveal them unlawfully; but not in the sense of a riddle or a concealment, for all Greeks might qualify for admission. The ancient mysteries recall more the Freemasons than anything else we know. Their origin is lost in darkness, and they lasted long after all else in Greece was dead, when Alaric the Goth in 396 did what Goths do in all ages—destroyed, but built not up. There were rites of purification, and two stages of initiation; first, usually as a child, and later into the higher grades as a man or woman. There were two Mysteries: the Lesser, celebrated by the Ilissos bank and close under the Acropolis, being usually a preliminary to the Greater at Eleusis. What the mysteries were, we know not: the secret has been kept, although Clement of Alexandria was initiated before he became a Christian, and he tells us whatever he thinks will discredit them. Undoubtedly, they included dramatic representations, which struck awe and admiration into the observers; but the inner meaning of these was known only to the Hierophant, who revealed it to those whom he thought fit to receive it. And now the gorgeous ceremony is over, priests and worshippers have for ever gone, and nothing remains but the pavement of the temple, with a tiny church of the Virgin perched on a bluff above it.