Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

We were standing under the colonnades of the temple of Theseus, the oldest, and the best preserved of the antiquities of Athens, at an early hour. We walked around it in wonder. The sun that threw inward the shadows of its beautiful columns, had risen on that eastern porch for more than two thousand years, and it is still the transcendent model of the world. The Parthenon was a copy of it. The now venerable and ruined temples of Rome, were built in its proportions when it was already an antiquity. The modern edifices of every civilised nation are considered faulty only as they depart from it. How little dreamed the admirable Grecian, when its proportions rose gradually to his patient thought, that the child of his teeming imagination would be so immortal!

The situation of the Theseion has done much to preserve it. It stands free of the city, while the Parthenon and the other temples of the Acropolis, being within the citadel, have been battered by every assailant, from the Venetian to the iconoclast and the Turk. It looks at a little distance like a modern structure, its parts are so nearly perfect. It is only on coming close to the columns that you see the stains in the marble to be the corrosion of the long-feeding tooth of ages. A young Englishman is buried within the nave of the temple, and the son of Miaulis, said to have been a young man worthy of the best days of Greece, lies in the eastern porch, with the weeds growing rank over his grave.

We passed a handsome portico, standing alone amid a heap of ruins. It was the entrance to the ancient Agora. Here assembled the people of Athens, the constituents and supporters of Pericles, the first possessors of these godlike temples. Here were sown, in the ears of the Athenians, the first seeds of glory and sedition, by patriots and demagogues, in the stirring days of Platæa and Marathon. Here was it first whispered that Aristides had been too long called “the just,” and that Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens. And, for a lighter thought, it was here that the wronged wife of Alcibiades, compelled to come forth publicly and sign her divorce, was snatched up in the arms of her brilliant, but dissolute husband, and carried forcibly home, forgiving him, woman-like, with but half a repentance. The feeling with which I read the story when a boy, is strangely fresh in my memory.

We hurried on to the Acropolis. The ascent is winding and difficult, and, near the gates, encumbered with marble rubbish. Volumes have been written on the antiquities which exist still within the walls. The greater part of four unrivalled temples are still lifted to the sun by this tall rock in the centre of Athens, the majestic Parthenon, visible over half Greece, towering above all. A Bavarian soldier received our passport at the gate. He was resting the butt of his musket on a superb bas-relief, a fragment from the ruins. How must the blood of a Greek boil to see a barbarian thus set to guard the very sanctuary of his glory.

We stood under the portico of the Parthenon, and looked down on Greece. Right through a broad gap in the mountains, as if they had been swept away that Athens might be seen, stood the shining Acropolis of Corinth. I strained my eyes to see Diogenes lying under the walls, and Alexander standing in his sunshine. “Sea-born Salamis” was beneath me, but the “ships by thousands” were not there, and the king had vanished from his “rocky throne” with his “men and nations.” Ægina lay far down the gulf, folded in its blue mist, and I strained my sight to see Aristides wandering in exile on its shore. “Mars Hill” was within the sound of my voice, but its Areopagus was deserted of its judges, and the intrepid apostle was gone. The rostrum of Demosthenes, and the academy of Plato, and the banks of the Ilissus, where Socrates and Zeno taught, were all around me, but the wily orator, and the philosopher, “on whose infant lips the bees shed honey as he slept,” and he whose death and doctrine have been compared to those of Christ, and the self-denying stoic, were alike departed. Silence and rain brood over all!

I walked through the nave of the Parthenon, passing a small Turkish mosque (built sacrilegiously by the former Disdar of Athens, within its very sanctuary), and mounted the south-eastern rampart of the Acropolis. Through the plain beneath ran the classic Ilissus, and on its banks stood the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Olympus, which I had distinguished with the glass in coming up the Ægæan. The Ilissus was nearly dry, but a small island covered with verdure divided its waters a short distance above the temple, and near it were distinguishable the foundations of the Lyceum. Aristotle and his Peripatetics ramble there no more. A herd of small Turkish horses were feeding up toward Hymettus, the only trace of life in a valley that was once alive with the brightest of the tides of human existence.

The sun poured into the Acropolis with an intensity I have seldom felt. The morning breeze had died away, and the glare from the bright marble ruins was almost intolerable to the eye. I climbed around over the heaps of fragmented columns, and maimed and fallen statues, to the north-western corner of the citadel, and sat down in the shade of one of the embrasures to look over toward Plato’s academy. The part of the city below this corner of the wall was the ancient Pelasgicum. It was from the spot where I sat that Parrhesiades, the fisherman, is represented in Lucian to have angled for philosophers, with a hook baited with gold and figs.

The academy (to me the most interesting spot of Athens) is still shaded with olive groves, as in the time of Plato. The Cephissus, whose gentle flow has mingled its murmur with so much sweet philosophy, was hidden from my sight by the numberless trees. I looked toward the spot with inexpressible interest. I had not yet been near enough to dispel the illusion. To me the academy was still beneath those silvery olives in all its poetic glory. The “Altar of Love” still stood before the entrance; the temple of Prometheus, the sanctuary of the Muses, the statues of Plato and of the Graces, the sacred olive, the tank in the cool gardens, and the tower of the railing Timon, were all there. I could almost have waited till evening to see Epicurus and Leontium, Socrates and Aspasia, returning to Athens.

We passed the Tower of the Winds, the ancient Klepsydra or water-clock of Athens, in returning to the hotel. The Eight Winds sculptured on the octagonal sides, are dressed according to their temperatures, six of them being more or less draped, and the remaining two nude. It is a small marble building, more curious than beautiful.

Our way lay through the sultry streets of modern Athens. I can give you an idea of it in a single sentence. It is a large village, of originally mean houses, pulled down to the very cellars, and lying choked in its rubbish. A large square in ruins after a fire in one of our cities, looks like it. It has been destroyed so often by Turks and Greeks alternately, that scarce one stone is left upon the other. The inhabitants thatch over one corner of these wretched and dusty holes with maize stalks and straw, and live there like beasts. The fineness of the climate makes a roof almost unnecessary for eight months in the year. The consuls and authorities of the place, and the missionaries, have tolerable houses, but the paths to them are next to impracticable for the rubbish. Nothing but a Turkish horse, which could be ridden up a precipice, would ever pick his way through the streets.