Scene after scene swept through my fancy as I stood on the spot. I saw Demosthenes, after his first unsuccessful oration, descending with a dejected air toward the temple of Theseus, followed by old Eunomus;[[10]] abandoning himself to despair, and repressing the fiery consciousness within him as a hopeless ambition. I saw him again, with the last glowing period of a Philippic on his lips, standing on this rocky eminence, his arm stretched toward Macedon; his eye flashing with success, and his ear catching the low murmur of the crowd below, which told him he had moved his country as with the heave of an earthquake. I saw the calm Aristides rise, with his mantle folded majestically about him; and the handsome Alcibiades waiting with a smile on his lips to speak; and Socrates, gazing on his wild but winning disciple with affection and fear. How easily is this bare rock, whereon the eagle now alights unaffrighted, repeopled with the crowding shadows of the past.

[9] You will recollect what Byron says of these three girls in one of his letters to Dr. Drury: “I had almost forgot to tell you, that I am dying for love of three Greek girls, at Athens, sisters. I lived in the same house. Teresa, Marcama, and Katinka, are the names of these divinities—all under fifteen.”
[10] “However, in his first address to the people, he was laughed at and interrupted by their clamours; for the violence of his manner threw him into a confusion of periods, and a distortion of his argument. At last, upon his quitting the Assembly, Eunomus, the Thriasian, a man now extremely old, found him wandering in a dejected condition in the Piræus, and took upon him to set him right.”—Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes.

LETTER XXV.

The Prison of Socrates—Turkish Stirrups and Saddles—Plato’s Academy—The American Missionary School at Athens—The Son of Petarches and Nephew of “Mrs. Black of Ægina.”

Athens.—We dismounted at the door of Socrates’ prison. A hill between the Areopagus and the sea, is crowned with the remains of a showy monument to a Roman pro-consul. Just beneath it the hill forms a low precipice, and in the face of it you see three low entrances to caverns hewn in the solid rock. The farthest to the right was the room of the Athenian guard, and within it is a chamber with a round ceiling, which the sage occupied during the thirty days of his imprisonment. There are marks of an iron door which separated it from the guard-room, and through the bars of this he refused the assistance of his friends to escape, and held those conversations with Crito, Plato, and others which have made his name immortal. On the day upon which he was doomed to die, he was removed to the chamber nearest the Acropolis, and here the hemlock was presented to him. A shallower excavation between, held an altar to the gods; and after his death, his body was here given to his friends.

Nothing, except some of the touching narrations of Scripture ever seemed to me so affecting as the history of the death of Socrates. It has been likened (I think, not profanely), to the death of Christ. His virtuous life, his belief in the immortality of the soul and a future state of reward and punishment, his forgiveness of his enemies and his godlike death, certainly prove him, in the absence of revealed light, to have walked the “darkling path of human reason” with an almost inspired rectitude. I stood in the chamber which had received his last breath, not without emotion. The rocky walls about me had witnessed his composure as he received the cup from his weeping jailer; the roughly-hewn floor beneath my feet had sustained him, as he walked to and fro, till the poison had chilled his limbs; his last sigh, as he covered his head with his mantle and expired, passed forth by that low portal. It is not easy to be indifferent on spots like these. The spirit of the place is felt. We cannot turn back and touch the brighter links of that “fleshly chain,” in which all human beings since the creation have been bound alike without feeling, even through the rusty coil of ages, the electric sympathy. Socrates died here! The great human leap into eternity, the inevitable calamity of our race, was here taken more nobly than elsewhere. Whether the effect be to “fright us from the shore,” or, to nerve us by the example, to look more steadily before us, a serious thought, almost, of course, a salutary one, lurks in the very air.