In the grateful shade of the rock we sat and listened to the description of the archæological work done on the spot by the Danes, which has not, at this writing, been officially published, and therefore seems not proper matter for inexpert discussion here. One interesting fact, however, which we were told, was that, by means of certain records deciphered from tablets found on the acropolis, it had been possible to fix definitely the date of the statue of the Laocoön as a work of the first century before Christ. This was established by the list of the names of the priests, and of the sculptors who worked for them, at periods which it proved possible to fix with a remarkable degree of exactness.
ARCHED PORTAL OF ACROPOLIS. LINDOS
We ascended to the height above, where we were permitted to wander at will among the ruins. As from below, the chief features were those of the medieval period, which had so largely swallowed up the temple of Athena. Nevertheless the excavators had restored enough of the original site from its covering of débris to reveal the vestiges of the old temple and an imposing propylæa, with traces enough in fragmentary form to enable making drawings of the structures as they probably appeared to the ancient eye. For the rest the chief interest centred in the relics of the abode of the knights. Just at the head of the grand entrance stairway was the tower which defended the acropolis on its one accessible side. The arched portal is very nearly perfect still, and one passes under it, across a sort of moat, by means of an improvised bridge of planks, where once, no doubt, a drawbridge served to admit or to bar out at the will of the Grand Master of the ancient commandery. Beyond the entrance hall lay a succession of vaulted halls and chambers leading around to the open precincts of the acropolis, the most evidently well-preserved buildings being the chapel of St. John and the house once occupied by the Grand Master himself. All were of the brownish native rock, and were unmistakably medieval in their general style of architecture. On the open terraces above the entrance, little remained to be seen save the heaps of débris and the faint traces of the classic temples. But most impressive of all was the sheer drop of the rock on all sides around the acropolis and the views off to sea and inland over Rhodes. The precipices everywhere, save at the entrance alone, fell away perpendicularly to the sea, which murmured two or three hundred feet below. Nevertheless, despite the evident hopelessness of ever scaling the height, the painstaking knights had built a wall with battlements all about, less serviceable as protecting the inhabitants against assault than for preserving them from falling over to a certain and awful death themselves. The drop on the landward side was considerably less, but quite as steep and quite as impregnable to would-be scaling parties. Even a few munitions of war, in the shape of rounded stones about the size of old-fashioned cannon balls seen in our modern military parks, were to be found about the summit.
The views from this elevated height were superb, not only off across the sea to the mountainous land of Asia Minor, but inland toward the rocky interior of Rhodes herself. The land just across the little depression in which the white town lay, rose to another though less commanding height, in the slopes of which the excavator said they had but recently unearthed some ancient rock tombs. Beyond, the country rolled in an undulating sea of green hills—a pleasant land as always, and doubtless as flowery as of old when she took her name from the rose (rhodos) and when the wild pomegranate flower gave Browning’s “Balaustion” her nickname. As a colony of the Athenian empire she stood loyal to the Attic city down to 412 B.C., in those troublous days of the Peloponnesian war, when the star of Athens waned and most of the Rhodians at last revolted. Those who still clung to Athens probably went away as Balaustion did, and returned, if at all, only after Athens had been laid waste to the sound of the flute. Under the Roman domination Rhodes enjoyed a return to high favor, and Tiberius selected the smiling isle as his place of banishment. For siding with Cæsar, Cassius punished the island by plundering it. For centuries after, it was overrun by the Arabs; and from them it was taken by the Byzantines, who turned it over to the Knights of St. John, who took the new name of the Knights of Rhodes, fortified the spot as we saw, and held it for a long time against all comers, down to 1522, when the Sultan Solyman II. reduced it. It is still Turkish territory, and of the finds made by the archæologists on the site of Lindos, the great bulk have been sent to Constantinople, including several hundred terra cotta figurines. The zealous Turks, the excavators complained, had taken away their books on landing, with the result that they had led a lonely life of it, their only diversion being their labors on the acropolis.
We had no chance to inspect the interior of the island, which other visitors have described in glowing colors as most attractive in the profusion of its almost tropic verdure and its growths of cactus, oleander, myrtle, figs, and pomegranates. Like Cos, Rhodes was an ancient seat of culture, greatly favored by students, and the site of a celebrated university. Æschines founded here a famous school of oratory, and in later years the institution was honored by the patronage of no less a personage than the Roman Cicero. Of these, of course, we saw no trace.
Neither had we any opportunity to visit the ancient capital, “Rhodes the town,” which boasts the ruins of a very similar castle of the knights. As for the famous Colossus, which nearly everybody remembers first of all in trying to recall what were the wonders of the world, it no longer exists. But in passing one may remark that the notion that this gigantic statue bestrode the harbor has been exploded, destroying one of the most cherished delusions of childhood which the picture in the back of Webster’s Unabridged contributed not least of all in producing, in the past two generations.
There were three celebrated cities in Rhodes in its golden age—Lindos, Ialysos, and Kameiros—which, with Cos, Cnidos, and Halicarnassus, formed the ancient Dorian “hexapolis,” or six cities, four of which it had been our good fortune to visit within the past two days. The city of Rhodes was formed comparatively late by inhabitants from the three original cities of the island, and became a prosperous and influential port. The inhabitants were seafaring people and developed a high degree of skill in navigation, with an interesting corollary in their code of maritime law, from which a faint survival is found in the doctrine of “general average” in our own admiralty practice, sometimes referred to as the Rhodian law, and having to do with the participation of all shippers in such losses as may be occasioned by throwing a part of the cargo overboard to save the whole from loss. To visit Kameiros and the interior would have been interesting but impossible, and we found our consolation for the inability to visit other Rhodian sites in the loveliness of Lindos, with its acropolis above and its pure white walls below, its gardens, its courtyards, and its collections of plates. And we left it with regret—a regret which was shared no doubt by the lonely Danish explorer whom we left waving adieu to us from the shore as we pulled away across the shallow waters of the harbor to the steamer, and turned our faces once more toward the west and that Athens of which Balaustion dreamed.