The road by which we ascended was lined with laburnums and acacias. We passed two exquisite rocky coves, revealing glimpses of blue sea far below us, and now began to descend towards the city itself. We marvelled to see amongst the rocks and gardens by the roadside, thickets of rosy oleander, the spiry flowers of aloes, and here and there a palm-tree flourishing in the open air. Then we passed an open public garden with a brilliant array of flowers; and just outside the Porta Pille, the land-gate of Ragusa, we discovered, in a pleasant grove of plane-trees, a small hotel, the Albergo al Boschetto, where we settle down once more into civilized life, in a room overlooking a beautiful gully of sea.
But how tenfold delightful are all these varying beauties of sea and land to pilgrims like ourselves, fresh from the terrible limestone wilderness of the interior! What balm in this tropical luxuriance of flowers and foliage to eyes dazed with the pitiless glare of naked rocks! What peace in the rhythmic murmur of the waves and ‘the unnumbered smile’ of the ocean below us! And hardly less refreshing is it to the spirits of those—who, like Childe Harold, have penetrated
From the dark barriers of that rugged clime,
Even to the centre of Illyria’s vales,
Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales,
—to find ourselves once more among associations as great as any that ennoble the haunts of man.
Here, at last, after painfully exploring some of the turbid streams and runnels of the mediæval civilisation of Bosnia, we take our seat beside the fountain-head of Illyrian culture. This is the city which claims as her proudest title that she has been ‘the Athens of Illyria.’ This is the sweet interpreter between the wisdom of the ancients and the rude Sclavonic mind, who acclimatized on Dalmatian soil the flowers of Greek and Italian genius. This is the nursing mother of those enterprising merchants who in the Middle Ages laid bare the mineral wealth of the Bosnian mountains, and infused the spirit of commerce into their inmost recesses. This is ‘the Palmyra between great empires,’ the City of Refuge which received, within walls that never betrayed a fugitive, the hunted remnants of Christian chivalry who, when Bosnia was trodden down beneath the hoofs of the Infidel, preferred exile to renegation.
For her allotted part of interpreter between Italian and Sclave, Ragusa was fitted by her very origin.[321] Her citizens can trace their lineal descent from the inhabitants of the Greco-Roman Republic of Epidaurus. When the Sclavonic barbarians, descending from the mountains of the interior, destroyed the ancient city of Epidaurus, the Roman survivors emigrated in a body to the present site of Ragusa, then a peninsular rock. Ragusa thus stands to Epidaurus in the same filial relation in which Venice stands to Aquileja and Patavium, and Spalato to Salona.
The site of the ancient Epidaurus, to exploring of which I devoted a day of my sojourn here, lies on the south-eastern horn of the bay on which Ragusa herself is situated. The site is covered by a small modern town called, by a strange transference of names, Ragusa Vecchia; for the same pride of origin which induced the citizens of mediæval Ragusa to style their city ‘Epidaura,’ led them further to speak of their ancient Epidauritan seats as ‘Old Ragusa.’
I took my place in the capacious trabaccolo which fulfils the function of ferry-boat between New and Old Ragusa, and a friendly Maestro filling our lateen sail as we glided beyond the shelter of the Isle of Lacroma and the haven of the Argosies, we had soon accomplished our eight miles’ voyage, and were entering the harbour of Ragusa Vecchia. This little town, in which most of the relics of the ancient Epidaurus are discovered, lies on a small two-humped peninsula, and is so nearly an island that at one point the two seas are separated only by a neck of land some dozen yards broad, and raised not more than a foot or two above sea level. This answers very well to the accounts of ancient Epidaurus which have come down to us; for we read that the original city was on an island till it was joined to the mainland by an earthquake; and Procopius, writing in the sixth century, tells us that Epidaurus had two harbours. Everywhere around one seems to trace the volcanic activity which, to the Greco-Roman city as well as to her offspring Ragusa, was ever the most terrible foe. The rocks that start up from the sea at the nose of the present peninsula are but so many fragments from the wreck of the old Epidauran site. Indeed, it is evident that Epidaurus covered a much larger area than the site of Ragusa Vecchia can supply; besides the remains on the peninsula, many, and amongst them the tomb of a P. Cornelius Dolabella, have come to light on the plain to the east about the modern village of Obod, which, I take it, preserves, in a Sclavonic disguise, the first two syllables of Epidaurus. In the adjoining bay of St. Ivan the walls of the Roman houses are, I was assured, distinctly visible beneath the surface of the sea, which proves that here a great subsidence of land has taken place within historic times.