A few hours later his Grace returned the visit, seeking in his turn, it would appear, the refreshment of a new point of view.
"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."
Arrived in Athens, the travellers found the "veteran" (as the Doctor is called throughout her book) in full tide of work. The apartment in the pleasant hotel swarmed with dark-eyed patriots, with Cretan refugees, with old men who had known "Xaos" in the brave days of old, with young men eager to see and greet the old Philhellene. Among the latter came Michael Anagnostopoulos, who was to become his secretary, and later his son-in-law and his successor at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. The ladies of Athens came too, full of hospitable feeling. There were visits, deputations, committee meetings, all day long, and in the evening parties and receptions.
Spite of all this, her first impression of Athens was melancholy. She was oppressed and depressed at sight of the havoc wrought by Time and war upon monuments that should have been sacred. Speaking of the Parthenon, she exclaims:—
"And Pericles caused it to be built; and this, his marble utterance, is now a lame sentence, with half its sense left out....
"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 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 dreary 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 models 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 old columns!"
There was a colony of Cretan refugees at Nauplia, another at Argos, both in dire need of food and clothing. The Doctor asked the Government for a steamer, and received the Parados, in which he promptly embarked with wife, daughters, and supplies, and sailed for Nauplia.
The travelling library of this expedition was reduced to "a copy of Machiavelli's 'Principe,' a volume of Muir's 'Greece,' and a Greek phrase-book on Ollendorff's principle." Our mother also took some worsted work, but she suffered such lively torment from the bites of mosquitoes and sand-fleas on her hands and wrists that she could make little use of this. To one recalling the anguish of this visitation, it seems amazing that she could even write in her Journal; indeed, the entries, though tolerably regular, are brief and condensed.