The fact that this bridge had been lacking for two years on the only high-road which leads directly from Thessaly, not only to the Corinthian Gulf, but also, by a fork in Doris, to Bœotia and Attica, is a sign of the times. The people of Lamia complain against the Government, for this is a national road made and neglected by the general Government. Incomplete in 1890 when I first went over it on foot, it was completed at great expense, and it seems reckless extravagance to neglect it now. Greece might better afford to spare on its army and navy, and put the savings into internal improvements. The bridge over the Peneios, on the high-road between Trikkala and Larisa, the two principal cities of Thessaly, has been down for eight or ten years and its place has been supplied by a ferry-boat. The long-projected railroad, designed to connect Athens with Larisa, and ultimately with Europe, was nearly half finished in 1894, and until 1902 nothing was done to carry on the work, or to save from disintegration the part already finished. After a lapse of eight years a new company has taken up the work and is vigorously pushing it; but the old material has been declared to be of no value. A sense of waste in such matters makes one feel that Greece is far from being a Switzerland in thrift. It hardly affords a basis upon which a “greater Greece” can be built up.
The next day we took Thermopylæ at our leisure, passing out from Lamia over the Spercheios on the bridge of Alamana, at which Diakos, famous in ballad, resisted with a small band a Turkish army, until he was at last captured and taken to Lamia to be impaled. Luckily this one bridge over the Spercheios remains, and Thessaly has a road open to the east through Thermopylæ and Atalante. The day was perfect, a day to make an old man young. We were like boys at play, in spite of the overpowering associations of the place. We sat down in the sunlight and dabbled with our feet in the hot sulphur stream, which has given its name to the place, Thermopylæ meaning “Hot Gates,” and when a serious shepherd came and looked at us in wonderment we regarded him as the “Old Man of Thermopylæ,” in that character-sketch, “There was an old man of Thermopylæ who never did anything properly.” We had him photographed in that character, and fancied him doomed to return for a space to the scene of his excesses and to behave himself “properly.” We then went through the pass as far east as Molo, and after taking luncheon there returned to the pass for serious study, i.e., for tracing as far as possible the position and movements of the antagonists in the great battle.
It may be taken as a well-known fact that the Spercheios has since the time of Herodotus made so large an alluvial deposit around its mouth that, if he himself should return to earth, he would hardly recognize the spot which he has described so minutely. The western horn, which in his time came down so near to the gulf as to leave space for a single carriage-road only, is now separated from it by more than a mile of plain. Each visit to Thermopylæ has, however, deepened my conviction that Herodotus exaggerated the impregnability of this pass. The mountain spur which formed it did not rise so abruptly from the sea as to form an impassable barrier to the advance of a determined antagonist. It is of course difficult ground to operate on, but certainly not impossible. The other narrow place, nearly two miles to the east of this, is still more open, a fact that is to be emphasized, because many topographers, including Colonel Leake, hold that the battle actually took place there, as the great battle between the Romans and Antiochos certainly did. This eastern pass is, to be sure, no place where “a thousand may well be stopped by three,” and there cannot have taken place any great transformation here since classical times, inasmuch as this region is practically out of reach of the Spercheios, and the deposit from the hot sulphur streams, which has so broadened the theatre-shaped area enclosed by the two horns, can hardly have contributed to changing the shape of the eastern horn itself. Artificial fortification was always needed here; but it is very uncertain whether any of the stones that still remain can be claimed as parts of such fortification. It is a fine position for an inferior force to choose for defence against a superior one; but while it cannot be declared with absolute certainty that this is not the place where the fighting took place, yet the western pass fits better the description of Herodotus. Besides this, if the western pass had been abandoned to the Persians at the outset the fact would have been worth mentioning.
THERMOPYLÆ. FROM THE WEST
As to the heroic deed itself, the view that Leonidas threw away his own life and that of the four thousand, that it was magnificent but not strategy, not war, does not take into account the fact that Sparta had for nearly half a century been looked to as the military leader of Greece. It was audacious in the Athenians to fight the battle of Marathon without them, and they did so only because the Spartans did not come at their call. Sparta had not come to Thermopylæ in force, it is true; but her king was there with three hundred of her best men. Only by staying and fighting could he show that Sparta held by right the place she had won. It had to be done. “So the glory of Sparta was not blotted out.” Had Sparta shown the white feather here, and a retreat would have been interpreted as showing the white feather, she would have lost prestige with the rest of the Greeks; and in that case it is as good as certain that Platæa would never have been fought. But besides showing the high statecraft which the occasion demanded, Leonidas was performing the simple duty of obedience to Spartan law, not to retreat before an enemy. He had been sent to hold the post; and he stayed to the end; and there is no more stirring clarion note in all that high-pitched story of the Persian war in Herodotus than the epitaph inscribed on the monument to the fallen Spartans, “Stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.” Whether Simonides felt the need of simplicity and brevity, or whether Spartan taste prescribed it, it is at any rate most fitting that boasting is omitted. The deed was so great that one little note of brag, or even some little amplifying and embellishing, would have belittled it. It is stirring to read those other equally brief and equally simple lines of Simonides inscribed on the monument erected for the total number who fought and fell: “Four thousand from Peloponnesus fought here with three millions.”
One may have read, and read often, the description of the battle in the school-room, but he reads it with different eyes on the spot, when he can look up at the hillock crowned with a ruined cavalry barrack just inside the western pass and say to himself: “Here on this hill they fought their last fight and fell to the last man. Here once stood the monuments to Leonidas, to the three hundred, and to the four thousand.”
The very monuments have crumbled to dust, but the great deed lives on. We rode back to Lamia under the spell of it. It was as if we had been in church and been held by a great preacher who knows how to touch the deepest chords of the heart. Eubœa was already dark blue, while the sky above it was shaded from pink to purple. Tymphrestos in the west was bathed in the light of the sun that had gone down behind it. The whole surrounding was most stirring, and there was ever sounding in our hearts that deep bass note, “What they did here.” Even when we were afterward enjoying the great walls of the Acropolis of Pharsalos and the Vale of Tempe we kept thinking of Thermopylæ.