At present the city has something less than fifty thousand inhabitants, and possesses very little of the grandeur for which it was once famous.
The most attractive features about it are its ruins, and every visitor is much more interested in the Acropolis and other remains of ancient Greece than in the modern city. But I must admit that Athens has considerable beauty and is well worth a visit, apart from the historic associations that cluster around it.
There is a pretty little palace where the royal family resides, and it is surrounded by gardens arranged with considerable taste, and forming very agreeable promenades. In the square in front of the palace a band plays twice a week on pleasant afternoons and on these occasions most of the fashionables, and many of the unfashionables, of Athens come out for an airing, and to see and be seen. The balconies of our rooms overlooked this square, so that we could see the people and hear the music without the necessity of walking.
The principal street in Athens is named Hermes, and you are reminded that you are in Greece when you attempt to spell out the names of the highways and by-ways. The characters are so nearly identical with the Ancient Greek that I found my school-day studies quite convenient. When in my adolescence I spent considerable time over Anthon’s Greek Grammar, and over the Iliad and Odyssey of a party by the name of Homer, I used to ask, and sometimes with a good deal of petulance:
“What is the use of wasting time over this stuff when I might be skating or playing leap-frog?”
And my good-natured old teacher would explain that it was the most useful employment for a young man that could be advised, and I would one day see the advantage of it, and rejoice that I had made my head ache over Alpha and Omega.
I wanted to study French and German but he always told me that the modern languages were abominations, the works of a party of brimstony memory, and I should bring ruin and disgrace upon myself if I had anything to do with them. So I shunned those paths of wickedness until I reached the years of—misunderstandings, and devoted my young and happy days to Greek and Latin. For a long time I have had little to do with those dead languages, and I couldn’t conjugate a Greek or Latin verb to-day, if my life depended on the result. But I see it all now, and my three or four years of Greek were of immense advantage to me when I was in Athens.