The Near East: Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople

by Robert Hichens

Your carriage turns to the right, and in a moment you are driving along the shore of a sea without wave or even ripple. In the distance, across the purple water, is the calm mountain of the island of Ægina. Over there, along the curve of the sandy bay, are the clustering houses of old Phalerum. This is new Phalerum, with its wooden bath-houses, its one great hotel, its kiosks and cafés, its shadeless plage, deserted now except for one old gentleman who, like almost every Greek all over the country, is at this moment reading a newspaper in the sun.

Is there any special charm in new Phalerum, bare of trees, a little cockney of aspect, any exceptional beauty in this bay? When you have bathed there a few times, when you have walked along the shore in the quiet evening, breathing the exquisite air, when you have dined in a café of old Phalerum built out into the sea, and come back by boat through the silver of a moon to the little tram station whence you return to Athens, you will probably find that there is. And from what other bay can you see the temple of the Parthenon as you see it from the bay of Phalerum?

You have your first vision of it now, as you look away from the sea, lifted very high on its great rock of the Acropolis as on a throne. Though far off, nevertheless its majesty is essentially the same, casts the same tremendous influence upon you here as it does when you stand at the very feet of its mighty columns. At once you know, not because of the legend of greatness attaching to it, or because of the historical associations clinging about it, but simply because of the feeling in your own soul roused by its white silhouette in this morning hour, that the soul of Greece—eternal majesty, supreme greatness, divine calm, and that remoteness from which, perhaps, no perfect thing, either God-made or, because of God's breath in him, man-made, is wholly exempt—is lifted high before you under the cloudless heaven of dawn.

You may even realize at once and forever, as you send on your carriage and stand for a while quite alone on the sands, gazing, that to you the soul of Greece must always seem to be Doric. From afar the Doric conquers.

The ancient Hellenes, divided, at enmity, incessantly warring among themselves, were united in one sentiment: they called all the rest of the nations "barbarians." The Parthenon gives them reason. "Unintelligible folk" to this day must acknowledge it, using the word "barbarian" strictly in our modern sense.

But the sun is higher, the morning draws on; you must be gone to Athens. Down the long, straight, new road, between rows of pepper-trees, passing a little church which marks the spot where a miscreant tried to assassinate King George, and always through beautiful, bare country like the desert, you drive. And presently you see a few houses, like the houses of a quiet village; a few great Corinthian columns rising up in a lonely place beyond an arch tawny with old gold; a public garden looking new but pleasant,—not unlike a desert garden at the edge of the Suez Canal,—with a white statue (it is the statue of Byron) before it; then a long, thick tangle of trees stretching far, and separated from the road and a line of large apartment-houses only by an old and slight wooden paling; a big square with a garden sunken below the level you are on, and on your right a huge, bare white building rather like a barracks. You are in Athens, and you have seen already the Olympieion, the Arch of Hadrian, the Zappeion garden, Constitution Square, and the garden and the palace of the king.

Coming to Athens for the first time by this route, it is difficult to believe one is in the famous capital, even though one has seen the Acropolis. And I never quite lost the feeling there that I was in a delightful village, containing a cheery, bustling life, some fine modern buildings, and many wonders of the past. Yet Athens is large and is continually growing. One of the best and most complete views of it is obtained from the terrace near the Acropolis Museum, behind the Parthenon. Other fine views can be had from Lycabettus, the solitary and fierce-looking hill against whose rocks the town seems almost to surge, like a wave striving to overwhelm it, and from that other hill, immediately facing the Acropolis, on which stands the monument of Philopappos.

It is easy to ascend to the summit of the Acropolis, even in the fierce heat of a summer day. A stroll up a curving road, the mounting of some steps, and you are there, five hundred and ten feet only above the level of the sea. But on account of the solitary situation of the plateau of rock on which the temples are grouped and of its precipitous sides, it seems very much higher than it is. Whenever I stood on the summit of the Acropolis I felt as if I were on the peak of a mountain, as if from there one must be able to see all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.