From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain record of a Pleasant Journey

by Julia Ward Howe

These visits at end, Mr. Evangelides took me home to dinner, where the best Greek dishes were enhanced by Samian wine. We had scarcely dined when the archbishop, followed by an attendant priest, came to return our visit. The Greeks present all kissed his hand, and gliko and coffee were speedily offered. We resumed our conversation of the morning, and the celibacy of the clerical hierarchy came next in order in our discussion. The father was in something of a strait between the Christian dignification of marriage and its ascetic depreciation. The arrival of other visitors forced us to part, with this interesting point still unsettled. We next visited the wife of the American vice-consul—Mr. Saponzaki—a handsome person, who received us with great cordiality. After a brief sojourn, we walked down to the landing, visiting the foundery, where they were making brass cannon, and the Acadi, the smart little steamer given by the Greeks of London to the Cretan cause. She ran our blockade in the late war, but is now engaged in a more honest service, for she runs the Turkish blockade, and carries the means of subsistence to the Cretans. Here we met Mr. DeKay, a youthful Philcandiote of our own country. He had already made himself familiar with the state of things in Candia, and, like the blockade-runner, was serving in his second war, with the difference that his former record showed him to have been always on the side of Christian loyalty.

Finally, amid thanks and farewells, a small boat took us alongside of the Austrian steamer, which carried us comfortably, and by magnificent moonlight, to the Piræus.

PIRÆUS—ATHENS.

We were still soundly asleep when the cameriere knocked at the door of our cabin, crying, "Signora, here we are at the Piræus." The hour was four of the morning, but we were now come to the regions in which men use the two ends of the day, and throw away the middle. We, therefore, seized the end offered to us, and as briefly as possible made our way on deck, where we found a commissionaire from the Hotel des Etrangers, at Athens. We had expected to meet here the chief of our party, who had gone before us to Athens. The commissionaire, however, brought us a note, telling of an accident whose fatigues did not allow him to wait upon us in person. We were soon in the small boat, and soon after in the carriage, intent upon reaching Athens. Pireo, as they call the classic port, is quite a bustling place, the harbor gay with shipping and flags of all nations. The drive to the Capitol occupies three quarters of an hour. The half-way point of the distance is marked by two rival khans, at one of which the driver of a public vehicle always stops to water his horses and light his cigar. Here a plate of lokumia, a sweetmeat something like fig-paste, and glasses of fresh water, were brought out and offered to us. Soon we came in sight of the Acropolis, not without an indescribable puzzle at beholding, in commonplace existence, one of those dreams whose mystical beauty we never expect to realize, and fear to dissipate. Now we drive through many streets and squares, and finally stop at a hotel in front of one of the prettiest of the latter, from whose door our chief issues to welcome us. With him is the elder neophyte, who has so far shared his wanderings, and latterly the near danger of shipwreck. Under her guidance we walk out, after breakfast, to look at the shops in Hermes Street, but the glaring sun soon drives us back to our quarters. We take the midday nap, dine, and at sunset drive to the Acropolis. On our way thither, we pass the remaining columns of the Temple of Jupiter Olympius, a Roman-Greek structure, the work of Adrian. These columns, sixteen in number, stand on a level area of some extent. One of them, overthrown by an earthquake, lies in ruins, its separate segments suggesting the image of gigantic vertebræ. The spine is indeed a column, but it has the advantage of being flexible, and the method and principle of its unity are not imitable by human architects. At the Acropolis a wooden gate opens for our admission, and a man in half-military costume follows our steps.

We visit first the Propylea, or five gates, then the Parthenon. Our guide points out the beauty of its Doric columns, the perfection of their execution—the two uniting faces of each of their pieces being polished, so as to allow of their entire union. Here stood the great statue of Minerva Medica; here, the table for sacrifice. Here are the ways on which the ponderous doors opened and shut. And Pericles caused it to be built; and this, his marble utterance, is now a lame sentence, with half its sense left out. In this corner is the high Venetian tower, a solid relic, modern beside that which it guards. And worse than any wrong dénouement of a novel is the intelligence here given you that the Parthenon stood entire not two hundred years ago, and that the explosion of a powder magazine, connected with this Venetian fortification, shattered its matchless beauty.

Here is the Temple of Victory. Within are the bas-reliefs of the Victories arriving in the hurry of their glorious errands. Something so they tumbled in upon us when Sherman conquered the Carolinas, and Sheridan the valley of the Shenandoah, when Lee surrendered, and the glad president went to Richmond. One of these Victories is untying her sandal, in token of her permanent abiding. Yet all of them have trooped away long since, scared by the hideous havoc of barbarians. And the bas-reliefs, their marble shadows, have all been battered and mutilated into the saddest mockery of their original tradition. The statue of Wingless Victory that stood in the little temple, has long been absent and unaccounted for. But the only Victory that the Parthenon now can seize or desire is this very Wingless Victory, the triumph of a power that retreats not—the power of Truth.

I give heed to all that is told me in a dreamy and desolate manner. It is true, no doubt—this was, and this, and this; but what I see is none the less emptiness—the broken eggshell of a civilization which Time has hatched and devoured. And this incapacity to reconstruct the past goes with me through most of my days in Athens. The city is so modern, and its circle so small! The trumpeters who shriek around the Theseum in the morning, the café keeper who taxes you for a chair beneath the shadow of the Olympian columns, the custode who hangs about to see that you do not break the broken marbles further, or carry off their piteous fragments, all of these are significant of modern Greece; but the ruins have nothing to do with it.

Poor as these relics are in comparison with what one would wish them to be, they are still priceless. This Greek marble is the noblest in descent; it needs no eulogy. These forms have given the model for a hundred familiar and commonplace works, which caught a little gleam of their glory, squaring to shapeliness some town-house of the west, or southern bank or church. So well do we know them in the prose of modern design, that we are startled at seeing them transfigured in the poetry of their own conception. Poor old age! poor columns!

And poor Greece, plundered by Roman, Christian, and Mussulman. Hers were the lovely statues that grace the halls of the Vatican—at least the loveliest of them. And Rome shows to this day two colossal groups, of which one bears the inscription, "Opus Praxitelæ," the other that of "Opus Phidiæ." And Naples has a Greek treasure or two, one thinks, besides her wealth of sculptural gems, of which the best are of Greek workmanship. And in England those bas-reliefs which are the treasure of art students and the wonder of the world, were pulled from the pediment of the Parthenon, like the pearly teeth from a fair mouth, the mournful gaps remaining open in the sight of the unforgiving world. "Thou art old and decrepit," said England. "I am still in strength and in vigor. All else has gone, as well thy dower as thy earnings. Thou hast but these left. I want them; so give them me."

Royal Munich also had his share. The relict of Lola Montes did to the temple at Egina what Lord Elgin did to the Parthenon, inflicting worse damage upon its architecture. At the time, the unsettled state of the country, and the desire to preserve things so costly and beautiful, may be accepted as excuses for such acts. But when Greece shall have a museum fit to preserve the marbles now huddled in the Theseum, or left exposed on the highways, then she may demand back the Elgin and Bavarian marbles. She will then deserve to receive them again. Nor could she, methinks, do better than devote to this noble purpose some of the superfluous extent of Otho's monstrous palace, whose emptiness afflicts the visitor with sad waste of room and of good material. Making all allowance for the removal of the Penates of its late occupants, it is still obvious that these two luxurious wrens occupied but a small portion of this eagle's nest. A fine gallery could as easily be spared from its endless apartments as are the public galleries from the Vatican.