Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

This plain contained the ancient town of Epidauros, and three hours’ distant, up through the opening in the mountains, lay the sanctuary of Æsculapius, called to-day the Hieron or Holy Place, which gave the town its importance. One travelling from Athens to Nauplia by sea is attracted by this single opening on the whole eastern shore of Argolis. But much as one would like to turn in here and explore the great opening, and go this way up to the “holy place,” the steamers take him along past it, unless he perchance gets off at Ægina, and trusts himself to a sail-boat to take him across. Travellers generally have to follow the beaten track; and I had visited the Hieron four times by the longer route from Nauplia before it befell me to approach it by this road, which was trodden by the greater part of the tens of thousands who came to seek salvation from Æsculapius.

We now wound our way down the mountain side, entering the village of Epidauros at sunset, along with the troops of vintagers, from whose crates we took grapes to our hearts’ content. As for any payment, nobody thought of that. Now I got an interesting lesson in Greek hospitality. My companion had brought a letter of introduction to a man in this village whom we met coming in from his vineyard. He said that he was very busy disposing of his grapes, and could hardly be at his house at all that night. But he called one of his workmen and told him to take us to his house and see that we had the best room in it. We did not see him again until the next morning, when we met him already among his vines at four o’clock, three miles up the valley on the road to the Hieron. The pressure of New England haymaking is nothing compared with that of the vintage season in Greece.

Nothing could exceed the cordiality of our host in these two encounters by evening and morning twilight. His hospitality was as hearty as it was a matter of course. Angels could have done no more. It was, in the Homeric phrase, δόσις ὀλίγη τε φίλη τε. His off-hand hospitality was to us a perfect godsend. We were lodged in the best house in the village, and made as free and easy as if we had been in an inn. Without him we should have come off short. The village contained only about thirty houses, and most of these very uninviting. In fact, a stranger would hardly seek shelter in any of them except under stress of weather. There is hardly a more neglected corner in Greece than this once important place, the mother city of Ægina, which lies in plain sight confronting it, two hours’ sail across the bay. Not only does no steamer put in here, but there was not even a sail-boat in the harbor while we were there. We were told that no sail-boat was owned by anybody in the village, an unheard-of thing on a Greek coast. To send a telegram or to get a physician one must send to Piada, called also New Epidauros, an hour and a half distant. A mail comes twice a week on horseback from Nauplia, all the way across the peninsula.

In this neglected but most picturesque corner remain the walls of a stately acropolis on a rocky peninsula with a harbor on each side of it, and other remains of a great city protruding from the rich soil where this peninsula joins the mainland.

But while the city has perished, the Hieron has, in a certain sense, come to life again. Here an area has been laid bare much larger than that excavated by the Germans at Olympia. The theatre, the best preserved of all Greek theatres, was never entirely covered up, and was early and easily cleared. The project of having a grand presentation of ancient dramas here has often been broached but never carried out, on account of the difficulty of transporting and feeding the spectators necessary to the success of the project, to say nothing of lodging them. The acoustic properties of this theatre are well known. One standing in front of the stage makes himself heard without effort by one sitting in the top row of seats.

The finest building in the precinct was the so-called Tholos, a round building as highly ornamented as the Erechtheum at Athens, and boasting Polycleitus as its architect. The temple of Æsculapius was almost equally brilliant, but these two buildings do not exist except to the archæologist. We have inscriptions giving most elaborate accounts of the construction of each of them; but of each building nothing remains except their foundations and broken fragments of their brilliant adornment. Were it not for giving this description of a journey the appearance of a guide-book, I might speak of the Herculean labors of Mr. Kabbadias in excavating the Stadion, and the little pleasure that the sight of it affords the layman.

THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS

The great interest of the excavation really centres in the inscriptions discovered. Mr. Kabbadias looked up from his arduous work, the hot afternoon of our arrival, upon a much-defaced inscription, and said with an enthusiasm which means much in a quiet man: “I tell you no man has a right to think that he understands Greek life if he has not read these inscriptions of Epidauros.” These inscriptions, at any rate, kept him from sleeping during the afternoon hours of summer days when nearly all Greeks sleep, even if they do not sleep nights.