The Turk and his lost provinces

by William Eleroy Curtis

West from Tanagra is Thebes, a famous old town founded by Cadmus, the home of Pindar, the poet, and Epaminondas, the soldier and statesman. It was the rival of Athens until Alexander the Great sacked it in 336 B.C., when six thousand of the citizens were slain and thirty thousand carried away as slaves. It is now a sleepy little town of about twenty-five hundred inhabitants who grow fruit and do other kinds of farming. The ruins of the ancient town are covered with rubbish and the topography has been considerably changed by earthquakes. There is no hotel, and very little to interest the traveler.

From Thebes one can go west to Delphi, the seat of the famous oracle and the headquarters of the cult of Apollo, but it is a difficult and uncomfortable journey, requiring several days on horseback. The easier route is from Corinth by boat, twice a week, to a little town called Itea. From there to Delphi is only a ride of two and a half hours. The grandeur of the scenery and the magnificent view of Parnassus are full compensation for the time and fatigue, and even in these modern times the gorges in the mountains are filled with a mysterious atmosphere which must have affected the imagination of the ancients. The oracle was consulted, you remember, upon all affairs of importance, both by the people and the state, and its influence was not diminished by the ambiguity of its utterances. The voice of the oracle came from a chasm in the rocks which can not be identified these days, probably because of earthquakes. Above the chasm the prophetic virgin sat upon a golden tripod and uttered responses which none but the priests could understand. Altogether the oracle was a good scheme and its influence was wholesome among the people. Solon, the great law-giver; Plato, the philosopher; Aeschylus, Pindar, and Sophocles all spoke of it with great respect.

Modern Delphi is called Castri, and stands on part of the ancient site, at an altitude of twenty-one hundred and thirty feet above the gulf of Corinth and among the cliffs of Parnassus. There has been an enormous amount of excavating done there by the French School of Archeology which has been rewarded by many interesting and important discoveries.

The classic mountain Parnassus, which rises eight thousand and seventy feet, may be comfortably climbed from Delphi, the ascent being made most of the way on horseback. Every foot of the journey is crowded with historic and mythical associations.

The pass of Thermopylae, known to every schoolboy as the place where Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans held the whole Persian army at bay, is thirty miles in a straight line directly north from Delphi, on the other side of Parnassus, but nearly three times that distance by the circuitous route which must be traveled. There are no roads and it takes several days to make the journey on horseback. The pass is a narrow ravine or defile between two wooded hills and its strategic advantages are perfectly apparent, although the guide-books say that a rocky eminence which formerly overhung the defile has been thrown down by earthquakes and the gorge has been considerably filled up by alluvial deposits brought down by mountain torrents, so that the present appearance of the pass gives very little idea of what it must have been. It resembles hundreds of similar gorges in Colorado and other parts of the Rocky Mountains. Here Leonidas detained the Persian army under Xerxes until the Greeks were able to make a safe retreat. The exact spot was afterwards marked by a monument with this inscription:

STRANGER, TELL THE SPARTANS THAT WE ARE LYING HERE IN OBEDIENCE TO THEIR COMMANDS.

Due north from Thermopylae is the famous Mount Olympus, 9,754 feet high, the home of the gods, which, unfortunately, is now on Turkish soil, much to the sorrow and mortification of the Greeks. If they had their territorial rights they would still include that noble peak within their jurisdiction.

Mount Ossa, 6,398 feet high, lies immediately south of Olympus; Mount Pelion is farther to the south, rising 5,308 feet above the sea.

Going westward from Athens, crossing the peninsula by railroad to Corinth, and then turning southward for fifteen or sixteen miles, we come to Mycenae, which was the scene of so much activity in mythological times, but its importance dwindled long before the dawn of history. It was founded by Perseus, who raised the massive walls of the city with the aid of the Cyclops. Agamemnon, the great soldier, had his seat there, and was not only the ruler of that district but the chieftain of all the Greeks, of the islands as well as the mainland. He led them against Troy and after his return was murdered by Aegisthos, the lover of his wife, Clytemnestra. Although Orestes, his only son, avenged his father’s death and his mother’s shame, when he grew up, the legends do not tell us that he regained the throne.

The tomb of the great Grecian chieftain is well preserved and is one of the most striking examples of ancient masonry. It is a sort of underground temple in the shape of a bee-hive, fifty feet high, and near it is another vaulted sepulcher, supposed to have been the tomb of Clytemnestra. Extensive excavations have been made at Mycenae by Grecian archeologists under the direction of Dr. Schliemann, who disclosed to the world the ruins of Troy. It is one of the most interesting places in Greece.