Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

When, after all, we stood face to face with the fall our feeling was one of disappointment. It was nearly the middle of September, and though Aroania, holding snow in its gorges all the year round, may be called with more propriety than Ætna “the nurse of snow,” there was little water falling, and we saw none of the rainbow effects mentioned by some travellers. Still, as Herodotus speaks of a little water, and both he and Homer speak of this as trickling, we ought to be content. After climbing down to the black pool at the foot of the last rock over which the water poured, we took time to let the whole setting of the Styx make its impression, which it could not fail to do. It is the setting rather than the fall which has always made the impression. Where Aroania is broken off on the east end so abruptly that one can only think of it as cut off by some gigantic cleaver, down over this front comes the Styx, not with a shoot, but hugging the rock and deflected several times along its face. Pausanias says that the precipice is the highest that he ever remembers to have seen, and its height is recorded as upward of six thousand feet. As the mountain throws out arms to the right and left of the fall, we have a place fitted to throw a potent spell over the mind on a moonlight night or at morning or evening twilight. It was here that the exiled Cleomenes, the gifted but mad King of Sparta, made the chiefs of the Arcadians swear to support him in his attempt to secure a return to Sparta by force of arms. He doubtless took advantage of the knowledge that the Arcadians had from remote times regarded this awful place as imparting an especial sanctity to oaths, and that here particularly the warrior’s oath (sacramentum) was taken.

It is no wonder that the lively imagination of the Greek transferred the earthly Styx to Hades, and represented the most awful and binding oath of the gods, by which they pledged their immortality, as that one which they swore by this hated and deadly water.

There is now, as there was in ancient times, a tradition that it is dangerous to drink of this water; but so great was our heat and thirst that, regardless of consequences, we drank deep at the Stygian pool. On returning home, after an interval of several days, I was caught by a lurking fever and general derangement of the system, which it required several days to throw off. I am not going to decide whether this is an example of the slowness and sureness of the gods in punishing impiety, whether I carried off a little malaria from an intervening visit at Stymphalus, or whether it was simply the result of drinking too much cold water not merely from the Styx, but from many others of the countless springs about Aroania.

Aroania, from which the Styx falls, although 7,725 feet high, is less generally known than its great neighbors east and west. When I first went to Greece I had forgotten that there was such a mountain. But it is much higher than Erymanthos, and affords a better view than Kyllene, which is about seventy feet higher. Pausanias, who was no mountain climber, ascended Aroania. Perhaps he was possessed by the idea of doing justice to everything connected with so holy a place. Following in his footsteps, we walked up to a shepherd’s enclosure, at an altitude of 5,000 feet, accompanied by the owner of the flocks, who was also later our guide to the Styx. Here we spent the night in the open air, near a fire, wrapped in rugs. At half-past two we set out by the light of an old moon and reached the summit at half-past four. For two hours clouds swept past us with fierce velocity, and it was bitter cold as well as wet. It began to appear as if the same misfortune was upon us as befell us a month before, when we had climbed Parnassus to be lost in a cloud whose lifting gave us only here and there a glimpse of the world below. But now at last we did get the whole broad view from Thessaly to Taygetos. The grandest feature of all was Parnassus and the still higher mountains of Ætolia; but the most interesting and instructive feature was Peloponnesus, stretched out before us like a raised map. We could study its chains and ganglia of mountains.

Two days later we were at Lake Stymphalus. We hastened to bathe in it. Had we plunged in we should probably have achieved distinction as the first bathers in that lake; but the sight of a half a dozen blood-suckers at our feet held us back, and, bathing from the lake rather than in it, we came away not much cleaner for the operation. But we secured a practical insight into the nature of this lake, which is like several larger and smaller lakes in Northeastern Arcadia. Strictly speaking, it is no lake at all, but a mud-pond. Probably in no place is the water more than four or five feet deep, and had we dived from any part of the shore our heads would still be sticking in the mud.

In a normal condition of things there should be here neither lake nor mud-pond, but only a plain with a river running through it, and disappearing in a hole at the foot of the mountain at the southern end. Mountains are so thickly strewn in Arcadia that streams cannot get around them, and so have to go through them. In this case the water was supposed to find its way out under the mountains to a point somewhat south of Argos, where it rushes out of the mountain side as a pure and full river, under the name of Erasinos. But such a hole, called a katabothra, was always likely to get clogged, and, as a stoppage might occur at a distance from the mouth, it might be very difficult to clear it out. In spite of great care this katabothra was, doubtless, sometimes stopped in ancient times. The horrible Stymphalian birds which Heracles killed typify, it is supposed, the pestilence which arose from such a stoppage. Such gigantic labors as forcing open the katabothra are quite in keeping with the character of Heracles’s other labors, which included the purging of the stables of Augeas and the draining of the marsh of Lerna, typified by the killing of the Lernæan hydra. That birds should here be chosen to represent the evil seems an apt touch of local coloring; for several times in our stay around this lake the air was shaken by a rustling of wings, and flocks of birds that looked like wild ducks settled down into the water or flew up from it.

As a proof that the water of the lake in antiquity was not up to its present level, we saw near the water’s edge deep wheel ruts in the rock, which would now be deeply covered by the water in the spring (for besides the irregular variation, dependent on the more or less perfect working of the katabothra, there must always have been the regular variations, dependent on winter rains and summer drouth). Furthermore, standing on the imposing walls of the acropolis of Stymphalus, on a hill which projects from a mountain out into the marsh on its western side, one sees foundations of temples and other buildings of the lower town, hardly clear from water at the driest season of the year. Archæological excavations here would probably be particularly rewarding; but are absolutely impossible until the modern arrangements for draining the lake, begun some years ago, are carried to a higher stage of perfection than they have reached at present.

Of course there is no better drinking-water in Greece than that which flows into Lake Stymphalus. It flows from the mountains round about. Kyllene contributes a large share. It is only when it lies in the basin and stagnates there that it becomes polluted. In Hadrian’s reign an aqueduct carried from this source a copious supply of water to populous Corinth, furnishing both drinking-water about as good as that of Pirene and the great amount required in the numerous baths.

Now that Athens is rapidly growing, its authorities are at their wits’ ends to find a proper supply of water for the pressing needs of so large a city. All sorts of temporary expedients have been resorted to to increase the regular supply from Pentelicus. But none of them are adequate; and the minds of the far-seeing ones contemplate the necessity of bringing water from Stymphalus. Certainly if Athens is to grow at its present rate, and become a city with a population of two hundred thousand or more, something as radical as this must be adopted.

The operations of Lake Pheneus are really more interesting and important than those of Lake Stymphalus, owing to its greater size. It has been, as is seen by the marks on the surrounding rocks, at one time some one hundred feet higher than in 1895, when it was a modest lake of about three miles in diameter. In antiquity Heracles was called in even here to make a long canal, traces of which have been noted by modern travellers, straight through the plain to the katabothra at the southern end. This canal was out of repair even in Pausanias’s time, and the river had reverted to its original tortuous bed. Here also the stoppage of the katabothra has been fruitful of mischief. In ancient times the strong city of Pheneos was forced to surrender by a general who stopped the katabothra, imitating the tactics by which Agesipolis took Mantineia. Once also in modern times a natural stoppage caused a general desertion of the plain, and the water gradually rose until it began to seem as if it would ultimately flow over the mountain-pass to the south, and discharge itself into the plain of Orchomenos, which already has its hands full with its own katabothra. But at the very time of the arrival in Greece of the young King Otto, the accumulated water forced the katabothra, and laid bare a tract of most richly fertilized land, an event which was regarded as a blessing bestowed upon the advent of the king. At the same time a great swelling of the Ladon and the Alpheios, resulting in an overflow of Olympia, proved conclusively, what the ancients appear to have known, that the water of Pheneos flowed into the Ladon. Since the Alpheios proper, the southern fork of the river to which the Ladon is the still greater tributary, disappears twice before it achieves an uninterrupted course, it is little wonder that the fancy of the Greek could picture it as reappearing, even after a course under the sea, at the fountain of Arethusa in Syracuse.