FROM THE PAINTING MADE FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN
What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it that gives to you a sensation of being gently released from the cares of life and the boredom of modern civilization, with its often unmeaning complications, its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self-satisfactions? This is not the tremendous, the spectacular release of the desert, an almost savage tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw is savage; scarcely anything is spectacular. But, oh, the bright simplicity of the life and the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an early world. One looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like the Turkish Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are small, exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as though it had been deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over the slopes with a lightness almost of foam cresting a wave. Their color is quite lovely. The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well, the little pine-trees of Greece are the color of happiness. You smile involuntarily when you see them. And when, descending among them, you are greeted by the shining of the brilliant-blue sea, which stretches along the edge of the plain of Marathon, you know radiance purged of fierceness.
The road winds down among the pines till, at right angles to it, appears another road, or rough track just wide enough for a carriage. This leads to a large mound which bars the way. Upon this mound a habitation was perched. It was raised high above the ground upon a sort of tripod of poles. It had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor of brushwood and maize. A ladder gave access to it, and from it there was a wide outlook over the whole crescent-shaped plain of Marathon. This dwelling belonged to a guardian of the vineyards, and the mound is the tomb of those who died in the great battle.
I sat for a long time on this strange tomb, in the shadow of the rustic watch-house, and looked out over the plain. It is quite flat, and is now cultivated, though there are some bare tracts of unfruitful ground. In all directions I saw straggling vines. Not far away was one low, red-tiled house belonging to a peasant, whose three small, dirty, and unhealthy-looking children presently approached, and gazed at me from below. In the distance a man on a white horse rode slowly toward the pine-woods, and to my left I saw a group of women bending mysteriously to accomplish some task unknown to me. No other figures could I see between me and the bright-blue waters that once bore up the fleet of Persia. Behind me were stony and not very high hills, ending in the slopes down which Miltiades made his soldiers advance “at a running pace.” One hundred and ninety-two brave men gone to dust beneath me; instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch-house of brushwood and wheat and maize, silence the only epitaph. The mound, of hard, sun-baked earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a few rusty-looking thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But about it grew aloes, and the wild oleander, with its bright-pink flowers, and near by were many great fig-trees. A river intersects the plain, and its course is marked by sedges and tall reeds. Where the land is bare, it takes a tawny-yellow hue. Some clustering low houses far off under the hills form the Albanian village of Marathon. Just twenty-two miles from Athens, this place of an ancient glory, this tomb of men who, I suppose, will not be forgotten so long as the Hellenic kingdom lasts, seems very far away, hidden from the world between woods and waters, solitary, but not sad. Beyond the plain and the sea are ranges of mountains and the island of Eubœa.
A figure slowly approaches. It is the guardian of the vineyards, coming back to his watch-house above the grave of his countrymen, smiling, with a cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls out “Addio!” Then he mounts his ladder carefully and withdraws to his easy work. How strange to be a watcher of vineyards upon the tumulus of Marathon!
If you care at all for life in the open, if you have the love of camping in your blood, Greece will call to you at every moment to throw off the dullness of houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be happy. Yet I suppose the season for all such joys was over when I was in Greece, for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large town, when the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of friends making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or men dreaming idly in nooks that might have made old Omar’s delight, shaded, and sung to by a stream. In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in the country, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, goatherds, Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking generally, “sons of the soil.”
THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ÆGINA
PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN