We walked over the foundations of several large temples with the remains of their splendour lying unvalued about them, and at a mile from the village came to the “well of Proserpine,” whence, say the poets, the ravished daughter of Ceres emerged from the infernal regions on her visit to her mother. The modern Eleusinians know it only as a well of the purest water.
On our return, we stopped at the southern point of the Piræus, to see the tomb of Themistocles. We were directed to it by thirteen or fourteen frusta of enormous columns, which once formed the monument to his memory. They buried him close to the edge of the sea, opposite Salamis. The continual beat of the waves for so many hundred years has worn away the promontory, and his sarcophagus, which was laid in a grave cut in the solid rock, is now filled by every swell from the Ægæan. The old hero was brought back from his exile to be gloriously buried. He could not lie better for the repose of his spirit (if it returned with his bones from Argos). The sea on which he beat the haughty Persians with his handful of galleys, sends every wave to his feet. The hollows in the rock around his grave are full of snowy salt left by the evaporation. You might scrape up a bushel within six feet of him. It seems a natural tribute to his memory.[[12]]
On a high and lonely rock, stretching out into the midst of the sea, stands a solitary temple. As far as the eye can reach, along the coast of Attica and to the distant isles, there is no sign of human habitation. There it stands, lifted into the blue sky of Greece, like the unreal “fabric of a vision.”
Cape Colonna and its “temple of Minerva,” were familiar to my memory, but my imagination had pictured nothing half so beautiful. As we approached it from the sea, it seemed so strangely out of place, even for a ruin, so far removed from what had ever been the haunt of man, that I scarce credited my eyes. We could soon count them—thirteen columns of sparkling marble, glittering in the sun. The sea-air keeps them spotlessly white, and, till you approach them nearly, they have the appearance of a structure, from its freshness, still in the sculptor’s hands.
The boat was lowered, and the ship lay off-and-on while we landed near the rocks where Falconer was shipwrecked, and mounted to the Temple. The summit of the promontory is strewn with the remains of the fallen columns, and their smooth surfaces are thickly inscribed with the names of travellers. Among others, I noticed Byron’s and Hobhouse’s, and that of the agreeable author of “A Year in Spain.” Byron, by the way, mentions having narrowly escaped robbery here, by a band of Mainote pirates. He was surprised swimming off the point, by an English vessel containing some ladies of his acquaintance. He concludes the “Isles of Greece” beautifully with an allusion to it by its ancient name:—
“Place me on Sunium’s marble steep,” &c.
The view from the summit is one of the finest in all Greece. The isle where Plato was sold as a slave, and where Aristides and Demosthenes passed their days in exile, stretches along the west; the wide Ægæan, sprinkled with here and there a solitary rock, herbless, but beautiful in its veil of mist, spreads away from its feet to the southern line of the horizon, and crossing each other almost imperceptibly on the light winds of this summer sea, the red-sailed caique of Greece, the merchantmen from the Dardanelles, and the heavy men-of-war of England and France, cruising wherever the wind blows fairest, are seen like broad-winged and solitary birds, lying low with spread pinions upon the waters. The place touched me. I shall remember it with an affection.
There is a small island close to Sunium, which was fortified by one of the heroes of the Iliad on his return from Troy—why, heaven only knows. It was here, too, that Phrontes, the pilot of Menelaus, died and was buried.
We returned on board after an absence of two hours from the ship, and are steering now straight for the Dardanelles. The plains of Marathon are but a few hours north of our course, and I pass them unwillingly; but what is there one would not see? Greece lies behind, and I have realised one of my dearest dreams in rambling over its ruins. Travel is an appetite that “grows by what it feeds on.”