Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

It was a hot walk. The appearance of ladies, as we passed through a small Greek village on our way, drew out all the inhabitants, and we were accompanied by about fifty men, women, and children, resembling very much in complexion and dress, the Indians of our country. A mile from our carriages we arrived at a subterranean structure, built in the side of the hill, with a door toward the east, surmounted by the hewn stone so famous for its size among the antiquities of Greece. It shuts the tomb of old Agamemnon. The interior is a hollow cone, with a small chamber at the side, and would make “very eligible lodgings for a single gentleman,” as the papers say.

We kept on up the hill, wondering that the “king of many islands and of all Argos,” as Homer calls him, should have built his city so high in this hot climate. We sat down at last, quite fagged, at the gate of a city built only eighteen hundred years before Christ. A descendant of Perseus brought us some water in a wooden piggin, and somewhat refreshed, we went on with our examination of the ruins. The mere weight of the walls has kept them together three thousand six hundred years. You can judge how immoveable they must be. The antiquarians call them the “cyclopean walls of Mycenæ;” and nothing less than a giant, I should suppose, would dream of heaving such enormous masses one upon the other. “The gate of the Lions,” probably the principal entrance to the city, is still perfect. The bas-relief from which it takes its name, is the oldest sculptured stone in Europe. It is of green basalt, representing two lions rampant, very finely executed, and was brought from Egypt. An angle of the city wall is just below, and the ruins of a noble aqueduct are still visible, following the curve of the opposite hill, and descending to Mycenæ on the northern side. I might bore you now with a long chapter on antiquities (for, however dry in the abstract, they are exceedingly interesting on the spot), but I let you off. Those who like them will find Spohn and Wheeler, Dodwell, Leake, and Gell, diffuse enough for the most classic enthusiasm.

We descended by a rocky ravine, in the bosom of which lay a well with six large fig-trees growing at its brink. A woman, burnt black with the sun, was drawing water in a goat-skin, and we were too happy to get into the shade, and in the name of Pan, sink delicately, and ask for a drink of water. I have seen the time when nectar in a cup of gold would have been less refreshing.

We arrived at the aspen about two o’clock, and made preparations for our dinner. The sea-breeze had sprung up, and came freshly over the plain of Argos. We put our claret in a goat-skin of water hung at one of the wheels, the basket was produced, the ladies sat in the interior of the carriage, and the commodore, and his son, and myself made tables of the foot-boards; and thus we achieved a meal which, if meals are measured by content, old King Danaus and his fifty daughters might have risen from their graves to envy us.

A very handsome Greek woman had brought us water, and stood near while we were eating, and making over to her the remnants of the ham, and its condiments, and the empty bottles, with which she seemed made happy for a day, we went on our way to Argos.

“Rivers die,” it is said, “as well as men and cities.” We drove through the bed of “Father Inachus,” which was a respectable river in the time of Homer, but which, in our day, would be puzzled to drown a much less thing than a king. Men achieve immortality in a variety of ways. King Inachus might have been forgotten as the first Argive; but by drowning himself in the river which afterwards took his name, every knowledge-hunter that travels is compelled to look up his history. So St. Nepomuc became the guardian of bridges by breaking his neck over one.

The modern Argos occupies the site of the ancient. It is tolerably populous, but it is a town of most wretched hovels. We drove through several long streets of mud houses with thatched roofs, completely open in front, and the whole family huddled together on the clay floor, with no furniture but a flock bed in the corner. The first settlement by Deucalion and Pyrrha, on the sediment of the deluge, must have looked like it. Mud, stones, and beggars, were all we saw. Old Pyrrhus was killed here, after all his battles, by a tile from a house-top; but modern Argos has scarce a roof high enough to overtop his helmet.

We left our carriages in the street, and walked to the ruins of the amphitheatre. The brazen Thalamos in which Danae was confined when Jupiter visited her in a shower of gold, was near this spot, the supposed site of most of the thirty temples once famous in Argos.

Some solid brick walls, the seats of the amphitheatre cut into the solid rock of the hill, the rocky Acropolis above, and twenty or thirty horses tied together, and treading out grain on a thrashing-floor in the open field, were all we found of ancient or picturesque in the capital of the Argives. A hot, sultry afternoon, was no time to weave romance from such materials.

We returned to our carriages, and while the Greek was getting his horses into their harness, we entered a most unpromising café for shade and water. A billiard-table stood in the centre; and the high, broad bench on which the Turks seat themselves, with their legs crooked under them, stretched around the wall. The proprietor was a Venetian woman, who sighed, as she might well, for a gondola. The kingdom of Agamemnon was not to her taste.