Transcriber’s Note:

Footnotes have been collected at the end of each chapter, and are linked for ease of reference.

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s [note] at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

Any corrections are indicated using an underline highlight. Placing the cursor over the correction will produce the original text in a small popup.

Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the corrections table in the note at the end of the text.

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

THE PROPYLÆA
From within, looking toward Salamis. From a painting by H. R. Cross

GREEK LANDS AND

LETTERS

BY

FRANCIS GREENLEAF ALLINSON

(Professor of Classical Philology in Brown University)

AND

ANNE C. E. ALLINSON

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

MDCCCCIX

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY FRANCIS G. ALLINSON

AND ANNE C. E. ALLINSON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published December 1909

TO

A. C. E.

AND

S. C. A.

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to interpret Greek lands by literature, and Greek literature by local associations and the physical environment. Those who possess an intimate acquaintance with Greek or who have the good fortune to stay long in Greece will be able to draw upon their own resources. Many travellers, however, must curtail their visit to a few weeks or months, and it is hoped that to them this book may prove useful as a companion in travel, while to a wider range of readers it may prove suggestive in appraising what is most vital in our “Hellenic heritage.”

To keep within reasonable bounds it has seemed necessary to limit our survey to those portions of the mainland of Greece and those islands, immediately adjacent in the Gulf of Ægina, which may be easily visited during a short stay in Athens as headquarters. But the visitor cannot be too strongly urged to avail himself of opportunities to visit the remoter islands and the shores of Asia Minor, which are so beautiful a part of the Greek world and have played so brilliant a rôle in Greek history and literature.

In quoting or summarizing the literature the limitations of space are obvious. Selections have been made which to us seemed most fairly to interpret the countries and sites. It is hoped that these will not only prove representative when taken together but will recall much that has perforce been omitted.

Purely learned treatises in Greek have not been cited except by way of illustration. The historical geographer Strabo, of the time of Augustus, has offered suggestive material; and Pausanias, of the second century of our era, the pious and often charming writer of the “Guidebook to Greece,” has, as was inevitable, been the cicerone in many places.

History it has seemed proper to use chiefly to explain the literature, or, especially in the case of Herodotus and Thucydides, as itself part of the noblest prose literature. But in different chapters emphasis has been laid, to some extent, upon different elements, such as myth and legend, prehistoric tradition, the history of certain epochs in classic times, the demands of religion, the growth of the artistic impulse or the bloom of the Attic period. By this means we have hoped, without too much repetition, to suggest a fairly adequate outline of the different factors in Greek civilization. The introductory chapter is intended to provide the essential background for the others.

Forms of art other than literature are only incidentally touched upon. Archæological information or discussion, except as illustration, is precluded by the purpose of the book, which deals with the literature and the land as being permanent possessions that are not essentially modified by the successive data of archæology, necessarily shifting from month to month.

In translating Greek authors it has seemed best, as a rule, to offer new versions, rendering the thought as literally as is consistent with our idiom or, in the case of poetry, with the exigencies of English verse. The anapæstic dimeters and, in the dialogue parts of the drama, the six-stress iambic verse have been retained; less uniformly the elegiac couplet; and, occasionally only, the heroic hexameter. Elsewhere poetry has been usually turned by rhymed verse or by rhythmic prose.

Some existing translations or paraphrases have been used, for which credit has been given in the text or the footnotes. Moreover, in most of the citations from Pausanias Mr. Frazer’s admirable translation has been used without explicit mention, and for this we make acknowledgment here. In translating Pindar many turns of expression have been taken from the beautiful translation of Ernest Myers, although, when they are not expressly credited, the versions have been rewritten. While it is hoped that full credit has thus been given wherever it is due, there are doubtless expressions here and there remaining in the memory from numerous commentators on Greek authors that form a common stock in trade for the translator.

In transliterating Greek names we have followed, as a rule, familiar English usage.

Among many books of reference there are a few to which we are especially indebted. We have used constantly Mr. J. G. Frazer’s “Commentary on Pausanias,” which includes a wealth of outside references, as, for example, citations from other travellers beginning with Dicæarchus, the entertaining geographer of the fourth century b. c. We are also indebted to Curtius’s “History of Greece” and Tozer’s “Geography of Greece”; Dr. W. Judeich’s “Topographie von Athen” (especially for Piræus); Professor Ernest Gardner’s “Ancient Athens,” which should be in the hands of every visitor to Athens; and Miss J. E. Harrison’s “Primitive Athens.” Professor J. B. Bury’s “History of Greece” has been constantly suggestive. On modern Greece Schmidt’s “Das Volksleben der Neugriechen” and Sir Rennell Rodd’s “Customs and Lore of Modern Greece” have furnished definite material.

Among the numerous editions of Greek authors necessarily consulted we are under special obligations to Professor Gildersleeve’s “Pindar, the Olympian and Pythian Odes,” and to Professor Smyth’s “Melic Poets.” Certain quotations in the text, not provided for in the footnotes, are acknowledged in the Appendix, in which are also given, for the sake of comparison, exact references to the Greek.

Our personal thanks are due to Professor J. Irving Manatt, of Brown University, for valuable suggestions and criticism of several chapters, and to Professor Walter G. Everett for his discussion of the section on Greek philosophy. We are also especially indebted to Professor Herbert Richard Cross of Washington University, St. Louis, for placing at our disposal his water-color sketch of the Propylæa, from which the frontispiece is taken, and to Professors C. B. Gulick and G. H. Chase of Harvard University for assistance in obtaining the impression of the coin upon the cover of this book.

F. G. A.

A. C. E. A.

Providence, October, 1909.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Nike of Samothrace, reproduced on the front cover, is

from a coin in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY: THE WIDESPREAD LAND OF
HELLAS

“Greek literature is read by almost all nations.”

Cicero, Pro Archia.

Cicero, at one time studying Greek oratory in Rhodes, at another speaking Greek as the language best adapted to a Sicilian audience, suggests with sufficient definiteness the eastern and western boundaries of ancient Hellas. Leaving out of consideration more remote colonies, we may content ourselves with including in the Greater Greece of antiquity all the Mediterranean lands and waters from Sicily and Lower Italy, in the west, to Cyprus and the coast of Asia Minor, in the east. The Riviera, or seaboard of the eastern side of the Ægean, is sharply differentiated from the continuous highlands of the interior, which suggest, a short distance inland, a boundary line between Europe and Asia. For a maritime people like the Greeks this was a barrier more effectual than the highway of the Bosphorus. In the early historic times, when the sun rose over these mountains of Asia Minor he left behind him the Oriental and looked down at once upon the Cis-montane Greeks, and it was upon Greeks that he was still shining when his setting splendour lit up the Bay of Naples—the “New-town” of that day—or the ancient Cumæ and the heights of Anacapri or the islands of the Sirens and the golden brown columns of Poseidon’s temple at Pæstum.

The seaboard, too, of Macedonia and Thrace belonged to Greece by reason of their water-front on the Ægean. And to the south, the encroachments of the Greeks upon the preserves of the Nile-god were so extensive for centuries before the time of Alexander that we need not wonder either at Egyptian reminiscences in Greek art or at the increasing evidences of Hellenic life in Egypt.

The Greeks, compared with the hoary antiquity of the Egyptians, are late comers. The essential difference, however, is not a matter of centuries or millennia. The Egyptians, perhaps because the details are foreshortened by the vast distance, seem to possess a chronology, but no real history. There were revolutions, rather than evolution. The Greeks were young, too, individually as well as chronologically. From Homer down through the classic period we hear “the everlasting wonder-song of youth.” Plato makes an Egyptian priest say to the Athenian law-giver: “O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever children; no Hellene is ever old!” We find the Greeks of the historic period on the intellectual watershed between antiquity and the modern world. From data now well established we may push back their life far beyond recorded chronology, and, if we anticipate even by a little the nucleus of the Homeric poems, we possess a practically unbroken continuity of their history and language for three thousand years down to the present day. Greek history is often confined within perfectly arbitrary dates. In reality, the death of Alexander in 323 B. C., the closing of the schools of philosophy in 529 A. D., and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A. D. only break its course into convenient chapters.

The Greek language is itself one of the greatest creations of Greek art. Discarding some superfluities, retained or over-emphasized by others of our common Indo-European family, the Greeks developed an instrument for the expression of thought unsurpassed, if not unequalled, among any other people. “The whole language resembles the body of an artistically trained athlete, in which every muscle is called into full play, where there is no trace of flaccid tumidity, and all is power and life.” The “common dialect” already dominated the eastern Mediterranean before the Romans took physical possession. Its direct legatee is the modern Greek, that had sprung up in lusty independence some three centuries before the Turks put an end to senile Byzantium and its crabbed ecclesiastical speech.

Of creative literature the same unbroken continuity cannot be predicated. The early literature, beginning with Homer, extends through the first quarter of the fifth century B. C. It includes the great epic poetry, the elegiac and iambic, the beginnings of philosophy, and seven of the ten greatest lyric poets. No fact in Greek literature is more conspicuous than the shortness and the richness of the next period, which may be conveniently called the “Attic,” although some of the greatest writers came from outside of Attica—from Bœotia, from the islands, from beyond the Ægean, or from Sicily. Within this brief period of only 183 years, if we close it with the death of Menander in 292 B. C., all the additional types of the literature either culminated or originated.

The next period of 150 years, commonly known as the Alexandrian period, has within its early limits the name of Theocritus, whose quality entitles him to rank with the writers of the Classic period, as does that of his two legatees, Bion and Moschus, and also Herodas, whose writings, recovered in the fortunate year 1891, have now made him a part of the Greek Classics. But in the Alexandrian period, and in the Græco-Roman period from 146 B. C. to 529 A. D., the great names are, as a rule, not so great, and they are spread over a long time. Few of them, except Lucian in the second century of our era, and Plutarch immediately preceding him, successfully compete for a prominent place as writers of pure literature.

With a few exceptions, the great original work in Greek literature had been done before the death of Menander. The Greek anthology, however, must not be ignored. It ranges over more than one thousand years and leaves no century in all that time without at least some minor representative of great beauty. Like a cord twisted of dull strands and golden, it binds together the Attic age with the whole of the subsequent time down to the year 550 of our era, the golden strand reappearing sufficiently often to assure us of its continuity. The next nine centuries of Byzantine Greek, ecclesiastical and profane, are little known to most classical scholars. The contributions of the modern Greek, before and since the days of Byron, are significant, and the friends of the new kingdom await with cordial expectation the rise of new writers to give to the lore of the peasant and the struggles of the patriot a worthy literary form. Of the lacunæ in the literature, in spite of the continuity of the language, Professor Hatzidakis of Athens has well said: “The Greek language is as little to be blamed for this as could be the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus, because in those times no one fashioned from them a Hermes of Praxiteles or a Venus of Melos.”

A glance at the map will show how accessible was the mainland of Greece, upon the east and south, to seafaring visitors from across the Ægean, who would naturally find here their first landing-places. Except for the great gash of the Corinthian Gulf, the western coast is indented only with smaller, though good, harbours, while the whole southern and eastern seaboard from Messenia in the southwest to Thrace is a ragged fringe of promontories, large and small, welcoming into the interior the waters that suggested sea-business of war and commerce.

But this interlacing of land and water, that brought the insinuating “call of the sea,” was not the only factor that predetermined the character of the Greek cantons. The Greeks were mountaineers as well as mariners. One is, indeed, almost tempted to speak of Greece as consisting of only mountains and marina. There are of course some relatively large plains, notably the fertile granary of Thessaly, but the general impression of the land from any bird’s-eye view is a succession of lofty ridges, peaks, and spurs. Only by many shiftings of the place of outlook do these partially resolve themselves into ranges continuous in certain general directions, though with many sharp angles and curves and buttressed by uncompromising cross ridges. These mountain barriers make clear the history of the Greek peoples, both how they combined temporarily to resist foreign invasion and, above all, why they developed and cherished in tiny cantons their characteristic individualism, which has been by turns a bane and a blessing.

Thessaly and Mount Olympus to the north belong geographically to the Kingdom of Greece. On either side of Thessaly irregular mountain chains run southward and preserve a general connection through Central Greece and Attica, and, despite the submerging water, may be identified as reappearing in the islands far out in the Ægean. Olympus on the northeast—hardly interrupted by the river Peneius, which has rent its way through the precipitous cañon known as the “Vale” of Tempe—is continued along the east coast by Mount Ossa and Mount Pelion. Then across the narrow entrance to the Pagasæan and Malian gulfs the system is continued by the sharp dorsal fins of the island of Eubœa, that stretches like a sea-monster along the shores of Locris, Bœotia, and Attica, to reappear at intervals far to the southeast in the islands Andros, Tenos, Myconos, Delos, Naxos, Amorgos, and Astypalæa. On the west of Thessaly the great Pindus ridge, descending through the centre of northern Greece, details on the rugged system of peaks and ranges which fill central Greece southward to the Gulf of Corinth and which in general run from west to east. One of these ranges, called the Othrys Mountains, bounds the Thessalian countries on the south and ends at the Gulf of Pagasæ. Another, Mount Œta, is continued by the high mountains that shut off Thermopylæ to the north and runs on as the boundary between Locris and Bœotia. Still another range, running out of the central complex, has its culmination in Parnassus, 8070 feet high, and is continued, though more interrupted and with a more irregular course, by Mount Helicon in Bœotia and the frontier hills of Attica, from Helicon to Parnes, and bends around into the massive ridge of Mount Pentelicus, from whose summit the spectator can see the prolongation in the islands of Ceos, Cythnos, Seriphos, and others beyond.

The narrow neck that divides the Corinthian from the Saronic Gulf and connects Attica and Bœotia with the Peloponnesus, lifts up among its rugged hills in Megara the picturesque twin peaks of the Kerata. South of the isthmus itself, with its narrow plain and the deep cutting necessary for the canal, rises the splendid acropolis of Acrocorinth, keeping guard at the entrance to the “Island of Pelops.”

The Peloponnesus, or Morea, is a rugged complex of mountains that by turns shut out and admit the sea. Of its four irregular peninsulas, jutting out southward in the Argolis and in Laconia and Messenia, each has its mountain system; the more broken hills in the Argolid plain; the ridge of Parnon to the east of the plain of Lacedæmon; the imposing barrier of Taygetus between Sparta and Messenia. In Messenia itself are fertile plains. One is in the midland, as the name Messenia originally implied, among offshoots of the Arcadian Lycæus; while the great mountain fortress of Ithome, 2600 feet high, where crops could be reared and an army supported, towering above the hills and plains of central Messenia, looks down on another larger plain, almost tropical in its products, that stretches southward to the gulf.

The centre and west of the Peloponnesus is a mass of peaks and mountain ridges tangled up at abrupt angles but bounded on the north by a formidable chain, generally parallel with the Gulf of Corinth and dominated by Erymanthus and Cyllene to the west and east respectively. Around and against this chain great mountains are piled up like petrified billows. In this part of Greece plains few but important are interspersed, as at Megalopolis or Olympia. Along the northwest coast there is the wider sea-margin of “Hollow” Elis, while along the Corinthian Gulf Ægialus, the “coast-land,” seems often little more than a grudging marina subjacent to the foothills of Erymanthus and Cyllene.

From north to south, from east to west the Greek landscape lends itself to panoramic views. Lucian in his “Charon” makes Hermes seat himself on one of the twin peaks of Parnassus and Charon upon the other. With eyes anointed with Homeric eye-salve, the Ferryman, on his furlough from the under-world, is able to see not only the Greater Greece outspread around him,—from Asia Minor to Sicily, from the Danube to Crete,—but to look off beyond to the Orient and to Egypt. These wide outlooks are enhanced by the distinctness of the sky-line, everywhere an important factor. “The hard limestone of which the mountains are composed is apt to break away, and thus produces those sharply-cut outlines which stand out so clearly against the transparent sky of Greece.”

So large a troupe of actors played their parts in Greek history that the imagination demands a roomy stage. But the country is small. Were it not for the mountain barriers, the scale of distances would seem trivial. It is, for example, only some thirty miles in an air line from Thermopylæ to the Gulf of Corinth. Even on the leisurely and winding Piræus, Athens, and Peloponnesus Railway, it is only one day’s ride from Athens via the Isthmus down to Kalamata on the Bay of Messenia. The degrees of latitude that include the mainland of Central and Southern Greece span in the west only the Lipari Islands and Sicily; the thirty-eighth parallel that passes south of Palermo and the straits of Messina runs a little north of Athens; while the thirty-seventh parallel, running just south of Syracuse, passes still farther south of Kalamata and Sparta.

Not only is the mainland of Greece contained in narrow geographical limits, but the Ægean itself is almost an inland lake enclosed within neighbouring coasts. In clear weather the sailor, without adventuring upon open sea, might pass from mainland to mainland as he watched from his advancing prow another island lift above the horizon before losing sight of the harbour left astern. In Greek literature there is no more striking reminder of the contiguity of the Asian coast to Greece proper than the well-known passage in the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus describing the swift telegraphy of the beacon signals that brought to Argos the news of the capture of Troy. The ten years’ absence of Agamemnon’s host tends to an instinctive extension of the distance, if the imagination is not checked by the actual scale of miles. Troy seems farther from Argos than the Holy Land from the homes of the Crusaders.

Beacon telegraphy is a time-honored device. Many bright beacons doubtless blazed before Agamemnon, as well as since his time. Commentators have been at pains to justify by modern experiments with beacon fires on lofty heights the severest strain upon our optic nerves which Æschylus makes in the case of the light that leaped from Mount Athos to the high ridges of Eubœa. The distance is more than 100 miles, but, bearing in mind that the Eubœan mountain is some 4000 feet high and Athos more than 6000, we need not apply for any special license for our poet’s imagination. The devious course of the fire signals from Eubœa to Argos is one of the best illustrations of the jagged surface that Greece lifts skywards. As one stands on Mount Pentelicus and looks across to Eubœa, the intervening arm of the sea is hemmed in for the eye into narrow inland lakes. And Æschylus, sufficiently, though not officiously, realistic, makes the firelight zigzag irregularly to dodge the interfering ridges till it falls upon the palace roof at Argos,—not at Mycenæ, as is the not infrequent misrepresentation of the Æschylean story.

Clytemnestra, to the chorus asking who could have brought the news so quickly, replies:—

“Hephæstus, on from Ida sending brilliant gleam,

And hither beacon beacon sped with courier flame.

First Ida to the Hermæan crag of Lemnos sent,

Then from the island was received the mighty flame

By Athos, Zeus’s mount, as third: this over-passed—

So that it skimmed the sea’s broad back,—the torch’s might,

A joyous traveller, the pine’s gold gleam, sun-like,

To watching Mount Macistus brought its flashing news.

Macistus then, delaying not, nor foolishly

Foredone with sleep, as messenger pass’d on his share.

The beacon’s gleam unto Euripus flowing far

Then came and signal to Messapium’s pickets made.

They too gave back a flame and ever onward sent

The news by lighting up a heap of heather gray.

The Torch then, strong to run, nor dimm’d as yet, leap’d on

Like radiant moon across Asopus and his plain

And came unto Cithæron’s crags, awaking there

A new relay of courier flame: nor did the guard

Disown the far-escorted light, but escort flame

In turn made soar aloft into the ether high.

Then over Lake Gorgopis smote the gleam and came

Unto Mount Ægiplanctus urging that the flame

Ordain’d should fail not. Lighting with ungrudging strength

They send a mighty beard of fire. O’er the height

That overlooks the Saronic Gulf it onward flared,

Until, when it had reach’d the Arachnæan steep,

It lighted on the outposts neighbour to our town;

Then on this roof of the Atreidæ falls this light,

The long-descended grandchild of the Idæan flame!”

From the very smallness of Greece results the overcrowding of associations that almost oppress the spectator standing at one or another place of vantage. But if his historic horizon is as clearly defined as the physical he will come back to the sea-level with a clearer understanding of the interdependence between the scene and the action of the great dramas here enacted. The country is not only a background but a cause for the literature. Neither can be fully understood without the other.

It must not be assumed from the smallness of the land that the spurs to the imagination of the Greeks were few. On the contrary, within their narrow borders, nature was prodigal of her inspiration. In the few miles from Thessaly to the Messenian Gulf are offered a variety of climate and an alternation of products well-nigh unparalleled for such a limited area. The warm air of the sea penetrating into sheltered valleys favours an almost tropical vegetation, while the lofty mountain ridges offer almost an Alpine climate. In Attica, in early spring, snow may occasionally be seen sprinkled on Hymettus and glistening white on Mount Pentelicus, while oranges hang on the trees in Athens. Taygetus in the south maybe a snow-covered mountain even as late as May while in the Messenian plain below grows the palm and, more rarely, the edible date. In the Argolis are groves of lemons and oranges, and in Naxos, in the same latitude as Sparta, the tender lime ripens in the gardens. The gray-green olive is familiar throughout Central and Southern Greece. If we extend the survey farther north, the beeches of the Pindus range, west of Thessaly, are surrounded by the vegetation rather of northern Europe; in the interior of Thessaly the olive tree does not flourish; the northern shores of the Ægean have the climate of Central Germany, while Mount Athos, whose marble walls jut far out into the Ægean and rise 6400 feet above the sea, offers on its slopes nearly all species of European trees in succession.

The different parts of Greece offer a varying development in literature. In this particular some districts, like Acarnania, Ætolia, and Achæa, though possessed of great natural beauty, are negligible. Arcadia, though itself unproductive, inspired poetry; others, also, like Phocis, Locris, and Messenia, are inevitably drawn into the associations of literature and history. In Epirus we find at Dodona the first known sanctuary of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks. In Thessaly the earliest Greeks, or Achæans, may have first forged in the fire of their young imagination the tempered steel of the hexameter. Here was the home of Achilles, and here, perhaps, we must look for the kernel of the Iliad. Here most fitly, close to Olympus where dwelt the immortals, could the sons of men be “near-gods.”

From the north and northwest successive waves of population descended into lower Greece to conquer, merge with, or become subject to the previous comers. But prehistoric peoples, whether alien or Greek, like the Eteo-Cretans, the Pelasgi, the Minyæ, the Leleges, the Hellenes, the Achæans, and even great movements like the Dorian and Ionian migrations, are all foreshortened on a scenic background, as equidistant to the Greeks of the classic periods as is the vault of heaven to the eyes of children. One star, indeed, differed from another. The Dorian, for example, was of the first magnitude. But the relations of apparent magnitude and real distance were ignored or naïvely confused in the fanciful constellations of myth and saga, distant yet ever present, bending around them to their explored horizon. Heroic figures impalpable but real as the gods themselves intervened continually, controlling decisions, shaping policies, or determining disputed boundaries among even the most intellectual of the Greeks. Royalty, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny alike must reckon with personified tradition.

When we emerge into the light of more authentic records it is well, in the confusing maze of inter-cantonal contentions, to focus the mind, for the purpose of appreciating the literature, upon certain broader relations and more clearly defined epochs in Greek history, like the so-called “Age of the Despots” within the seventh and sixth centuries, the Persian wars, and the conflicts between Attica as a pivot and the Peloponnese, Thebes, and Macedon.

It might be expected from the variety of natural charm offered by Hellenic lands, from Ilium to Sicily, from Mount Olympus to Crete, that the Greeks would show in their literature a pervasive love of nature. This was, in fact, the case. The modern eye has not been the first to discover the beauty of form and colour in the Greek flowers and birds, mountains, sky and sea. Modern critics, ignoring all historical perspective and assuming as a procrustean standard the one-sided and sophisticated attitude that has played a leading rôle in modern literature, announced as axiomatic that ancient Greek poets had no feeling for nature and found no pleasure in looking at the beauties of a landscape. This superficial idea still keeps cropping up, although thoughtful readers of Greek literature have long since pointed out the necessity both of a chronological analysis of the literature and of a more inclusive statement of the various forms in which a sentiment for the natural world is evinced.[^[1]] It is a far cry from Homer to Theocritus, and, as might well be expected in a range of six centuries and more, new elements appear from time to time, due both to changing conditions of life and civilization and also to the personal equation.

A naïve feeling for nature is uppermost in the descriptive comparisons and similes of Homer and, generally speaking, in the myth-making of the Greeks. The concrete embodiment of natural phenomena and objects in some Nature-divinity often obviated the necessity for elaborate description and summarized their conceptions as if by an algebraic formula. The mystical element was not lacking, but by this myth-making process it became objective and real. The sympathetic feeling for nature becomes more and more apparent in lyric poetry and the drama until in Euripides there emerges, almost suddenly, the “modern” romanticism. In the Hellenistic and imperial times, finally, the sentimental element is natural to men who turn to the country for relief from the stress of life in a city. One generalization for the classic periods may be safely made. Although the Greeks from Homer to Euripides thought of the world as the environment of man, yet they stopped short of a sentimental self-analysis. Charles Eliot Norton, more than thirty years ago, pointed out that the expression of a sentiment like Wordsworth’s—

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—

is foreign to the clear-eyed Hellene, reared amongst the distinct outlines of his mountains and from the cradle to the grave at home upon the blue and windswept Ægean. Certainly this is true until the speculative questionings of the Ionic philosophers had time to react upon literature. As the Greeks accepted their pedigrees from the gods and heroes, so they accepted their environment of beauty. They were not unlike the child, content to betray by a stray word or caress his unanalyzed admiration for his mother’s face.

Emphasis has often been laid, and rightly, upon the keen sensitiveness of the Greeks to beauty of form in sculpture, architecture, and literature. It is urged that they made this sense of form and proportion so paramount that they were blind to the beauty of colouring and indifferent to the prodigal variety of Nature’s compositions. It may be readily admitted that this is a vital distinction between the ancient and modern attitudes. Both the craving for perfection of form and the preference given to man before nature come out in the preëminent development of sculpture by the Greeks. Their admiration of the beauty of the human form, unlike the sensitive shrinking of moderns, was extended even to the lifeless body. Æschylus speaks of the warriors who have found graves before Troy as still “fair of form.”

But a prevailing tendency does not necessarily exclude other elements. However meagre the vocabulary of the Greeks in sharp distinction of shades of colour, their love for a bright colour-scheme is shown not only by the brilliancy of their clothing and their use of colouring in statuary and architecture,—for even in these mere form was not enough,—but in unnumbered expressions like Alcman’s “sea-purple bird of the springtime.”

A few of the more obvious passages, illustrating the Greek attitude toward nature, are here given in general historic sequence. Others will be found in the subsequent chapters in connection with particular landscapes. Very often such references are casual and subordinate to some controlling idea, but they none the less reflect habitual observation. Even when we speak of Homeric “tags,” like the “saffron-robed” or “rosy-fingered,” or of Sappho’s “golden-sandalled” Dawn, as “standing epithets,” we are implying that these epithets made a general appeal. The naïve insertions in Homer of comparisons drawn from birds and beasts, from night and storm and other familiar elements of nature, would seem like an intrusive delay of the story did they not carry with them the conviction that both poet and hearers alike were well content to linger by the way and observe the objects of daily life indoors and out. Thus in the Odyssey:—

“The lion mountain-bred, with eyes agleam, fares onward in the rain and wind to fall upon the oxen or the sheep or wilding deer.”

Or, again:—

“Hermes sped along the waves like sea-mew hunting fish in awesome hollows of the sea unharvested and wetting his thick plumage in the brine.”

One of the longer and best known comparisons is the description in the Iliad of the Trojan encampment by night:—

“Now they with hearts exultant through the livelong night sat by the space that bridged the moat of war, their watch-fires multitudinous alight. And just as in the sky the stars around the radiant moon shine clear; when windless is the air; when all the peaks stand out, the lofty forelands and the glades; when breaketh open from the sky the ether infinite and all the stars are seen and make the shepherds glad at heart—so manifold appeared the watch-fires kindled by the Trojan men in front of Ilios betwixt the streams of Xanthus and the ships. So then a thousand fires burned upon the plain and fifty warriors by the side of each were seated in the blazing fire’s gleam the while the horses by the chariots stood and champed white barley and the spelt and waited for the throned Dawn.”

Sappho’s fragments are redolent of flowers; her woven verse, a “rich-red chlamys” in the sunshine, has a silver sheen in the moonlight. We hear the full-throated passion of “the herald of the spring, the nightingale”; the breeze moves the apple boughs, the wind shakes the oak trees. Her allusions to “the hyacinths, darkening the ground, when trampled under foot of shepherds”; the “fine, soft bloom of grass, trodden by the tender feet of Cretan women as they dance”; or the “golden pulse growing on the shore,”—all these seem inevitable to one who has seen the acres of bright flowers that carpet the islands or the nearby littoral of the Asian coast. Her comparison of a bridegroom to “a supple sapling” recalls how Nausicaä, vigorous, tall, and straight as the modern athletic maiden, is likened by Odysseus to the “young shaft of a palm tree” that he had once seen “springing up in Delos by Apollo’s altar.” In her Lesbian orchards the sweet quince-apple is still left hanging “solitary on the topmost bough, upon its very end”; and there is heard “cool murmuring through apple boughs while slumber floateth down from quivering leaves.” Nor need we attribute Sappho’s love of natural beauty wholly to her passionate woman’s nature. All the gentler emotions springing from an habitual observation of nature recur in poets of the sterner sex. “The Graces,” she says, “turn their faces from those who wear no garlands.” And at banquets wreaths were an essential also for masculine full-dress. Pindar, in describing Elysian happiness, leads up to the climax of the companionship with the great and noble dead by telling how “round the islands of the Blest the ocean breezes blow and flowers of gold are blooming: some from the land on trees of splendour and some the water feedeth; with wreaths whereof they twine their heads and hands.”[^[2]] Against the green background passes Evadne with her silver pitcher and her girdle of rich crimson woof, and her child is seen “hidden in the rushes of the thicket unexplored, his tender flesh all steeped in golden and deep purple light from pansy flowers.”

To follow through the poetry of the Greeks the unfailing delight in the radiance of the moon would be to follow her diurnal course as she passes over Greek lands from east to west. The full moon looked down on all the Olympian festivals and Pindar’s pages are illuminated with her glittering argentry. The Lesbian nights inspire Sappho as did all things beautiful.

“The clustering stars about the radiant moon avert their faces bright and hide, what time her orb is rounded to the full and touches earth with silver.”

Wordsworth could take this thought from Sappho: “The moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare,” but the Lesbian certainly did not finish the fragment by lamenting that “there has passed away a glory from the earth.”

The night and the day alike claimed the attention of the poets and the interchange of dusk and dawn appealed to the sculptor also. In the east gable of the Parthenon the horses of the Sun and of the Moon were at either end. Nature’s sleep is a favourite topic. Alcman’s description is unusual only for its detail:—

“Sleep the peaks and mountain clefts;

Forelands and the torrents’ rifts;

All the creeping things are sleeping,

Cherished in the black earth’s keeping;

Mountain-ranging beast and bee;

Fish in depths of the purple sea;

Wide-winged birds their pinions droop—

Sleep now all the feathered troop.”

Goethe, in his well-known paraphrase,—

“Ueber allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,”—

cannot refrain from adding the subjective conclusion of the whole matter:—

“Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.”

The great dramatists display an observation of the beauty of the external world not always sufficiently emphasized. In Æschylus an intense feeling is evident; none the less because it is subordinated to his theme or used to point, by way of contrast, some awe-inspiring or pathetic situation or some scene of blood. Clytemnestra describes how she murdered her husband. His spattering blood, she says,—

“Keeps striking me with dusky drops of murd’rous dew,

Aye, me rejoicing none the less than God’s sweet rain

Makes glad the corn-land at the birth-pangs of the buds.”

Comparisons, similes, and epithets drawn from the sea reappear continually in the warp and woof of Greek, and especially of Athenian, literature. Æschylus, like the rest, knew the sea in all its moods, terrible in storm, deceitful in calm, beautiful at all times and the pathway for commerce and for war. The returning herald in the “Agamemnon” rehearses the soldiers’ hard bivouac in summer and in winter:—

“And should one tell of winter, dealing death to birds,

What storms unbearable swept down from Ida’s snow,

Or summer’s heat when, ruffled by no rippling breeze,

Ocean slept waveless, on his midday couch laid prone.”

With the first lines of “Prometheus Bound” we are carried far from the haunts of men:—

“Unto this far horizon of earth’s plain we’ve come,

This Scythian tract, this desert by man’s foot untrod.”

Hephæstus reluctant, compelled by Zeus’s order, rivets his kin-god, the Fire-bringer, to the desolate North Sea crag and withdraws leaving Prometheus in fetters to “wrestle down the myriad years of time.” The night shuts off the warmth and light, drawing over him her “star-embroidered robe,” and the fierce sun-god returns with blazing rays to “deflower his fair skin” bared of the white counterpane of “frost of early dawn.” Not until the emissaries of Zeus have departed does Prometheus deign to speak. Then he “communes with Nature.” He has no hope of help from God, none from the “helpless creatures of a day” whom he has helped. Alone with the forces of nature he utters that outcry unsurpassed in sublimity and in pathos:—

“O upper air divine and winds on swift wings borne;

Ye river-springs; innumerous laughter of the waves

Of Ocean; thou, Earth, the mother of us all;

And thou, all-seeing orb of the Sun—to you I cry:

Behold me what I’m suffering, a god from gods!”

Sophocles, too, lets Philoctetes, in his misery and loneliness on the rocky island of Lemnos, call out to the wild beasts and the landscape:—

“Harbours and headlands; and ye mountain-ranging beasts,

Companions mine; ye gnawed and hanging cliffs! Of this

To you I cry aloud, for I have none save you—

You ever present here—to whom to make my cry.”

In his famous ode on the Attic Colonus he describes the natural beauty of his home with particularizing exactness. He has also a wealth of glittering epithet used for local colouring, for symbolism and personification. The contrast of day and night offers to him a welcome mise-en-scène. The sun’s rays are Apollo’s golden shafts and the moon’s light seems to filter through the trees as Artemis roams the uplands:—

“O God of the light, from the woven gold

Of the strings of thy bow, I am fain to behold

Thy arrows invincible, showered around,

As champions smiting our foes to the ground.

And Artemis, too, with her torches flaring,

Gleams onward through Lycian uplands faring.”

Bacchus, also, the “god of the golden snood,” “lifts his pine-knot’s sparkle” and, roaming with his Mænads, seems to visualize for men the soul of Nature.

Aristophanes with his common-sense objectivity was averse to the sentimental and romantic in Euripides, which seemed to him effeminate. His love for nature was clear-eyed and Hellenic. His lyrics shine like a bird’s white wing in the sunlight. The self-invocation of the Clouds is alive with the radiance of the Attic atmosphere. A translation can only serve to illustrate the elements used in the description:—

CHORUS OF CLOUDS

“Come ever floating, O Clouds, anew,

Let us rise with the radiant dew

Of our nature undefiled

From father Ocean’s billows wild.

The tree-fringed peak

Of hill upon lofty hill let us seek

That we may look on the cliffs far-seen,

And the sacred land’s water that lends its green

To the fruits, and the whispering rush of the rivers divine

And the clamorous roar of the dashing brine.

For Ether’s eye is flashing his light

Untired by glare as of marble bright.”

The “meteor eyes” of the sun gaze “sanguine” and unblinking upon the cloud-palisades, glaring bright as the marble of Mount Pentelicus. Readers of the Greek will recognize here and there how an Aristophanic epithet or thought has been precipitated and recombined by Shelley into new and radiant shapes that drift through his own cloud-land,—“I change but I cannot die!”

Aristophanes’s observation of nature is varied and exact. He had nothing but ridicule for the pale student within doors, and only a man who kept up an intimacy with “the open road” could have made the naturalistic painting in the “Peace” of the serenity of country life:—

“We miss the life of days gone by, the pressed fruit-cakes, the figs, the myrtles and the sweet new wine, the olive trees, the violet bed beside the well.”

Euripides in his attitude toward nature has all the qualities of the other tragedians except sublimity, to which he more rarely attains. Many qualities are much more conspicuous. His range of colour is wider. His allusions to rivers and to the plant and animal world are more detailed. Picturesque scenes and setting delight him. Beyond all this the reflection in nature of human emotion, occasional in his predecessors, plays in his verse almost a leading part. Modern romanticism, in short, is no longer exceptional.

Hippolytus, the acolyte of Artemis, and his attendants address the virgin goddess who ranges the woods and mountains and who, as Æschylus says, is “kindly unto all the young things suckled at the breast of wild-wood roaming beasts.” The “modern” element in the original loses nothing in this paraphrase by Mallock:—

“Hail, O most pure, most perfect, loveliest one!

Lo, in my hand I bear,

Woven for the circling of thy long gold hair,

Culled leaves and flowers, from places which the sun

The Spring long shines upon,

Where never shepherd hath driven flock to graze,

Nor any grass is mown;

But there sound throughout the sunny, sweet warm days,

’Mid the green holy place

The wild bee’s wings alone.”

In one of the despairing chorals of the “Trojan Women” the personification of nature blends with the spirit of mythology. The name of Tithonus, easily supplied by a Greek hearer, is inserted for English readers in Gilbert Murray’s beautiful paraphrase:—

“For Zeus—O leave it unspoken:

But alas for the love of the Morn;

Morn of the milk-white wing

The gentle, the earth-loving,

That shineth on battlements broken

In Troy, and a people forlorn!

And, lo, in her bowers Tithonus,

Our brother, yet sleeps as of old:

O, she too hath loved us and known us,

And the Steeds of her star, flashing gold,

Stooped hither and bore him above us;

Then blessed we the Gods in our joy.

But all that made them to love us

Hath perished from Troy.”

When Dionysus addresses his Bacchantes, Euripides, in lines reminiscent of Alcman, imposes upon outward nature the solemn expectancy of the inward mind:—

“Hushed was the ether; in hushed silence whispered not

Leaves in the coppice nor the blades of meadow grass;

No cry at all of any wild things had you heard.”

The formal banns of the open wedlock of man and nature were declared in Euripides. Thereafter the treatment became more and more a matter of personal equation. In Plato’s dialogues, for example, the ethical element inevitably appears. In the famous scene beside the Ilissus, Socrates and young Phædrus talk through the heated hours beneath the shade of the wide-spreading plane tree, where the agnus castus is in full bloom, where water cool to the unsandalled feet flows by, and in the branches the cicadæ, “prophets of the Muses,” contribute of their wisdom.

The Anthology, stretched through the centuries of Greek literature, links the old and the newer, the antique reserve and the fainness of modern romanticism. One of the epigrams attributed to Plato will serve to indicate the emergence of the latter:—

“On the stars thou art gazing, my Star;

Would that the sky I might be,

For then from afar

With my manifold eyes I would gaze upon thee.”

Another seems like an artist’s preliminary sketch for the picture by the Ilissus, the deeper motive not yet painted in:—

“Sit thee down by this pine tree whose twigs without number

Whisper aloft in the west wind aquiver.

Lo! here by my stream as it chattereth ever

The Panpipe enchanteth thy eyelids to slumber.”

From this we pass without break to the piping shepherds and the country charms with which Theocritus filled his Idyls for city-jaded men:—

... “There we lay

Half buried in a couch of fragrant reed

And fresh-cut vine leaves, who so glad as we?

A wealth of elm and poplar shook o’erhead;

Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on

From the Nymphs’ grot, and in the sombre boughs

The sweet cicada chirped laboriously.

Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away

The treefrog’s note was heard; the crested lark

Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan,

And o’er the fountain hung the gilded bee.”[^[3]]

Notwithstanding the variety in landscape and the lack of unified nationality in the long centuries of Greek history, there is a unity in the impression of ancient life left upon the mind by a visit to Greece. This is in part due to the comparative meagreness of remains from periods subsequent to classic times. The long obliteration of mediæval and modern constructive civilization leaves more clear the outlines of antiquity.

This is true even though the sum total of the remains of Byzantine and mediæval life, on islands and on mainland, is large and claims the attention from time to time. In Athens the traveller will come upon the small Metropolis church with its ancient Greek calendar of festivals, let in as a frieze above the entrance and metamorphosed into Byzantine sanctity by the inscribing of Christian crosses. As he journeys to and fro in Greece he may see the venerable “hundred-gated” church on the island of Paros, recalling in certain details the proscenium of an ancient theatre; Monemvasia with its vast ruins, the home of Byzantine ecclesiasticism and a splendour of court life that vied with the pomp and magnificence of western Europe; or the ivy-clad ruins of Mistra, an epitome of Græco-Byzantine art from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century; the frowning hill and castle of Karytæna that guards the approach to the mountain fastnesses of Arcadia; or the ancient acropolis of Lindus on the island of Rhodes with the impregnable fortress of the Knights of St. John.

Nor will the visitor ignore the reminders of the War of Independence and the renascence of life in modern Greece. Mesolonghi, Nauplia, and Arachova have contributed fresh chapters to human history. Aligned with ancient names are those of modern heroes in the nomenclature of the streets and of public squares, like the Karaiskakis Place that welcomes the traveller as he disembarks at Piræus.

But all of these, whether mediæval or modern, fail to blur the understanding of antiquity. They do not obtrude themselves. Often they even illustrate ancient life. The same wisdom that transferred allegiance from the Saturnalia to the Christmas festival has here also been careful to use for Byzantine churches the site of ancient shrines or temples: St. Elias is a familiar name on high mountains where once stood altars of the Olympians; the cult of Dionysus has been skilfully transformed, in vine-rearing Naxos, into that of St. Dionysius; SS. Cosmo and Damiano, patrons of medicine, and known as the “feeless” saints, have established their free dispensary in place of an Asklepieion; the twelve Apostles have replaced the “Twelve Gods”; and churches dedicated to St. Demetrius have been substituted for shrines of Demeter.

The thoughtful student of the literature of the Greeks, no matter how enthusiastic he may be, will not fail to draw warnings as well as inspiration from their history. But no defects of the Greeks nor achievements of posterity can dispossess Hellas of her peculiar lustre.

“No other nation,” as Mr. Ernest Myers has said with particular reference to the age of Pindar, “has ever before or since known what it was to stand alone immeasurably advanced at the head of the civilization of the world.”

CHAPTER II
PIRÆUS, THE HARBOUR TOWN

“Returning from Asia Minor and voyaging from Ægina toward Megara I began to look on the places round about me. Behind me was Ægina; before me Megara; on the right Piræus; on the left Corinth—cities once flourishing, now prostrate and in ruins.”

Servius Sulpicius to Cicero.

The sail in bright sunshine up the Gulf of Ægina, the ancient Saronic Gulf, will have fulfilled the traveller’s anticipations of the beauty of Greece and will have quickened the historic imagination. History and antiquity, however, will give place to the insistent claims of modern Greek life, as the steamer enters the busy port and passes through the narrow opening between the welcoming arms of the ancient moles which still protect the harbour and serve at night to hold up the green and red signal lights for mariners.

PIRÆUS

In this harbour meet the Orient and the Occident. One may see here craft of all kinds from all parts of the Mediterranean and from beyond the Straits; modern steamers, big and little; gunboats, native or foreign; sailing vessels from the Greek islands or Turkish possessions, laden with bright cargoes of yellow lemons and Cretan oranges, great grapes purple and white, or “tunnies steeped in brine”; here a steamer packed with pilgrims for a religious festival on Tenos; here, perhaps, another vessel crowded with American tourists to Jerusalem.

Upon landing, most visitors go immediately to Athens, but no one should fail to return once and again to Piræus in order to see the extant remains of the ship-houses; of the gateways and walls to the northwest of the Great Harbour; of the walls that skirt the whole peninsula; of the theatres and other scanty traces of the old life within the city. Even to a traveller innocent of the facts of Greek history, the drive at sunset along the rim of the peninsula and the indenting harbours will be one of the best remembered experiences in the neighbourhood of Athens, by reason of the sheer physical beauty of land and sea, islands and distant mountains.

The terminus of the electric railroad from Athens to Piræus is in the northwest corner of the modern town between the lines now assumed for the “Themistocles Wall” and the “Wall of Conon,” dating, respectively, from the two most significant epochs in the history of Piræus. Although the tyrant Hippias had begun to fortify the Munychia hill in the sixth century B. C., his undertaking was interrupted, and it was left for Themistocles, in the early part of the fifth century, to begin, and finally to carry well on the way to completion, the transformation into a sea-fortress of this natural vantage-ground. Later, he was for removing Athens itself to Piræus. Failing in this, he shifted the habitat for the new fleet from the open roadstead of Phalerum, which was nearer Athens, to the land-locked harbours of Piræus. But the return of the Persians, ten years after Marathon, surprised the Athenians with their preparations incomplete, and Athens was transferred, not indeed to Piræus, but to the “wooden walls” of the triremes themselves.

When, under Pericles, Athens reached the acme of her intellectual, artistic, and material power, around the harbours at Piræus had been built a well-planned city, with stately avenues and dwellings for wealthy men and wealthier gods. The port had been completely fortified either by the restoration and carrying out of the interrupted building or by the extension of the plans of Themistocles. A massive wall inclosed the three harbours within its circuit, and strong moles, lasting on into modern times, guarded their entrances. Ship-houses had also been built, and doubtless an arsenal, though a less pretentious one than the great structure afterwards erected. In short, all the paraphernalia existed for offensive and defensive naval operations. The “Long Walls,” actually built soon after the banishment of Themistocles in 472 B. C., had united Athens and its port into a dual city. No greater proof of the vital union of the two cities could be cited than the rage and grief felt by the citizens when, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, in 404 B. C., the Spartans razed the Long Walls. It was amputating the very feet of the imperial Queen of the Ægean.

Some ten years later, the Long Walls were rebuilt and the restoration of the Piræus fortifications was taken in hand. Of the remains now visible, the major part belongs to this rebuilding at the beginning of the fourth century. A little less than a century had elapsed since Marathon, and we now find Athens allied with her old enemy, Persia, against another Greek state. Conon the Athenian, victorious over the Spartans in the naval battle of Cnidus, sent back Persian gold to fortify the Piræus anew, and the circuit wall, of which such extensive remains are extant, was called by his name.

On issuing from the electric railroad station, the visitor sees before him, a few yards distant, the Great Harbour’s smaller, inner fold, known in antiquity as “The Marsh” (Port d’Halæ) or, perhaps, as the “Blind” Harbour. This inner harbour, roughly a third of a mile by a sixth in size, now furnishes ample accommodation for smaller craft and a convenient landing-place, although in Conon’s day it was probably more of a marshy barrier than a navigable sheet of water. If the whole contour of the two harbours together suggested the designation of “Cantharus,” it may have been from either the meaning “Beetle,” or that of “Two-handled Cup.” Until recently, the name was identified with the southernmost portion only of the Great Harbour. The locus classicus is the “Peace” of Aristophanes. Dædalus and Icarus with their flying-machines had long since anticipated the modern aëroplane, and in this comedy Trygæus in search of Peace starts out to navigate Zeus’s ether on his “beetle.”[“beetle.”] Then, as now, a safe landing-place for the airship was a desideratum, and Trygæus states that he will have as a safe mooring “the Cantharus harbour in Piræus.”[^[4]]

Skirting now the northern margin of the inner harbour, the route will follow in part the probable line of the demolished wall of Themistocles, which extended on and reached the water outside both the peninsula of Eetioneia and the outer bay of Krommydaru, where traces of the more ancient fortifications are still extant. Close by the modern station of the Larisa railway, however, will be found the very considerable ruins of a gateway identified with the Conon walls. This alone is an ample reward for the long détour around the harbour.

If time and energy permit, it is well worth while, instead of crossing by boat to Akte, to return to the starting-point and to saunter along the whole margin of the Great Harbour. Particularly picturesque are the great sloops, laden with lemons and oranges, moored in behind the Karaiskakis square, which only the pedestrian would be likely to discover. As one lingers along the quays, however, modern warships and all the craft for commerce and travel will give place to the memories evoked from the greater past. This harbour of commerce will, in imagination, be once more crowded with triremes, brought around from the two war-harbours on the other side, to be inspected one after the other by the Council of the Five Hundred. As official inspectors of the triremes, when made ready to set out for conquest or defeat, this Council held its sittings on the Choma, probably a little promontory that juts southward from the Karaiskakis Place. One may recall, with the help of Thucydides, the setting out of the ill-starred Sicilian expedition. No such vast array had ever left the harbour for so distant and protracted a warfare. All the citizens of Athens as well as of Piræus are here to witness the departure of sons and friends. High hopes of imperial expansion feed the imagination of the multitude. Some rest their confidence on divine favour sure to accompany the pious, though reluctant, Nicias; others put faith in the warrior Lamachus; more in the brilliant Alcibiades, still idolized though accused of sharing in the mutilation of the Hermæ. The great fleet of swift triremes is ready, together with the transports for heavy-armed soldiers, equipments, and supplies. Now the men are all on board and a hush falls upon the throng at a sudden blast of the trumpet. The prayers, according to established ritual, are offered by the united squadron. At a concerted sign, the mixing-bowls are crowned throughout the whole host and the men and generals pour libations from gold and silver cups. The throngs upon the land, both citizens and foreign well-wishers, join in the service. The hymn of triumph sung, the libations poured, the ships weigh anchor and put to sea. But before the last trireme has passed through the moles, and while the ear still catches the notes of the flute and the voice of the Keleustæ, giving the time to the crews, a revulsion of grim presentiment overmasters many of the watchers on the shore. The expedition now no longer seems what they so lightly voted in the assembly. The ever-recurrent Greek feeling that “high things annoy the god” calls up the warning words of Æschylus, uttered a generation before, in the year of the unlucky Egyptian expedition sent out on a similar venture:—

“Grown Insolence is wont to breed

Young Insolence midst mortals’ sorrow,

Then, then, when to th’ implanted seed

There comes the birth-light’s destined morrow.”

Or else his immortal lament “over the unreturning brave” comes unbidden to their lips:—

“Whom one sent forth to war one knows, but, in the stead of men, come back unto the homes of each but urns and ashes.”

The mysterious mutilation of the Hermæ is fresh in mind and the fear of angered gods reasserts its sway. But no presentiment of ill could anticipate the reality of the disaster in the harbour of Syracuse or the slow tortures of living death in its stone quarries. A chance for retaliation in kind was indeed to come. In a Piræus stone quarry Syracusan captives were in turn imprisoned a few years later, but they, more lucky than the Athenians, cut their way to freedom from their rock-bound prison.

Despite the imperious insolence of Athens and her unrighteous schemes for aggrandizement, our sympathy in the tragedy is ever fresh. By the harbour side we mourn to-day the predestined doom of the gallant squadron and the stricken city. Through the ebb and flow of hope and disaster, the thought sweeps on to the close of the war and the humiliation of Athens at the hands of Sparta; the destruction of the Long Walls, their rebuilding and the refortification of Piræus under Conon; the aftermath of Athenian power; the brilliant age of Plato and the orators; the struggle with Philip; the fall of Greek liberty; the sway of Macedon; the Roman conquest, with the long, stubborn siege of Piræus so graphically described by Appian. Sulla, exasperated by the long defence of the Mithridatic army, with whom the Athenians had cast in their lot, burnt the arsenal and docks and razed the fortifications so utterly that the Roman governor, Sulpicius, in writing to his friend Cicero in 45 B. C., could describe Piræus as the “corpse” of a great city. In the second century of our era it had resumed a semblance of commercial prosperity. Lucian, in his dialogue, “When My Ship Comes In,” goes down to Piræus with a friend to admire a great grain transport that has just put into harbour on its way from Egypt to Rome. For a merchantman it is large; some 180 feet long, 45 in beam, and over 40 feet in depth to the hold. The prow stretches out long, and at the stern is the gilded figure-head of a goose with its graceful curving neck. The two friends wonder at a sailor mounting nimbly by the swaying ropes and running out nonchalantly along the great yardarm, as he holds on by the yardsheets. But the generous cargo of grain, enough, as we are told, to feed Athens for a year, is destined for Rome. Athens was no longer the emporium of the eastern Mediterranean. She had become a way-station. No longer could she enforce the old law, mentioned by Aristotle, which required that two thirds of the cargo of every grain-ship that put into Piræus must be carried up to the metropolis.

After Roman times, in the long atrophy of the Byzantine age, Piræus dwindled to a group of fishermen’s huts. It revived somewhat under De la Roche in the fourteenth century, and thereafter, at least was known as Porto Leone from the seated figure of a marble lion that kept guard among the ruins like the majestic lion that still sentinels the battlefield of Chæronea. In the seventeenth century, the Venetians carried off this Piræus lion, and now, seated by another arsenal in another seaport, careless of the passing tourist, it looks grimly over the Adriatic where steamers come and go between the neighbouring Trieste and its native land.

Leaving now the Great Harbour and our meditations on the vicissitudes of history, we resume our inspection of the fan-shaped peninsula. Without a special permit the visitor is excluded from the western end and from the Royal Garden which encloses the most probable site of the Tomb of Themistocles, if indeed his bones were ever brought back from burial in exile. His official tomb was in Magnesia in Caria. A public interment in his native land could not be granted to one exiled as a traitor. Thucydides knows only of a secret burial of his bones in Attica. The remains of the monument in question stand on the point of Akte near the entrance to the outermost harbour. From this tomb the great admiral’s spirit could still watch over the Athenian sea-power. Skepticism about the site is forgotten when we read the fragment, meagre as it is, of the comic poet Plato:—

“Fair is the outlook where thy mounded tomb is placed.

For it will signal merchantmen from here and yon,

It will behold the sailors faring out and in,

Will be spectator of the triremes’ racing oars.”

This “contest of the triremes” may allude to the boat-race in which the course lay from Cantharus harbour around the whole peninsula to Munychia. These races in sacred ships were part of the systematic training of the Attic youths.

The public road leads over the shoulder of the hill and, in descending again to the coast, offers a beautiful view to the west and south over the Saronic Gulf. The driveway then runs along the water’s edge around the promontory, keeping close inside the ruined “Wall of Conon.” Although the remains of this encircling wall rise nowhere more than about eight feet above ground, and usually much less, yet the very continuity of the ruins is imposing. Practically in an unbroken line the solid masonry hems the irregular rim of the peninsula from the mouth of the Great Harbour to a point not far distant from the war-harbour of Zea on the opposite side and may be traced again intermittently around to the Bay of Phalerum. Solid tower buttresses are interposed at frequent intervals. On this southern shore of Akte, where the modern town does not intrude, the spectator is free to divide his attention between the beauty of the sea view and thoughts of the past.

The picturesque land-locked harbours of Zea and Munychia next claim our interest. The pear-shaped Zea basin, now known by the Turco-Greek name of Pashalimani, makes into the neck of the peninsula between the promontory hill of Akte and the Acropolis of Munychia. Behind it and close to it was erected in the fourth century the great Arsenal, and at various points beneath its transparent water may still be seen distinct remains of 38 of the ship-ways that ran down from the ancient ship-houses where the triremes were drawn up. Inscriptions tell us that there were originally 372 in all, of which 82 were in Munychia, 94 in the Great Harbour, and the remainder in Zea. No other relic of antiquity brings us into closer touch with the naval power of Athens and her empire on the Ægean. The covered sheds themselves can only be reconstructed in imagination. Some broken columns of the ship-houses and portions of the launching piers remain in situ. To accommodate the 196 triremes, 130-165 feet long, assigned to the Zea Harbour, some of the houses must have been constructed so as to dock the boats in at least two tiers. At Syracuse, the formidable Piræus of the west, remains of ship-sheds have been found, and at Carthage, the bitter foe of Syracuse, they remained for Appian to describe. Dry-docks may have existed near the harbour entrance. This narrow neck of the pear-shaped harbour was still further guarded at the inner opening by projecting moles, which here also are still extant. The entrance was actually closed, in case of need, by chains extended across at the surface of the water. Of the proud warships themselves, those chargers of the sea stabled in Zea, there remains one realistic reminder. Their timbers have long since rotted away, the gulfs have washed down all such small objects of durable material as bronze nails and clamps, but some heavy plates of Parian marble have been found in the harbour. These were set into the bows of the warships, and upon them were painted the vessel’s eyes that used to keep fierce outlook for the enemy or peer through the gloom of night and storm for the first sight of the shoreward lights of Piræus. Danaus at Argos, in the “Suppliants” of Æschylus, as he sees the approaching ship, exclaims:—

“The bellying sails I see; the ox-hide bulwarks stretched

Along the vessel’s sides; the prow that with its eyes

Peers forward o’er the course.”

On the marble plates actually recovered the iris is painted bright red or blue, and a vacant hole in the middle suggests the head of a burnished bronze nail that served at once as the pupil of the eye and to rivet on the plate. These eyes are common in representations of ancient vessels, and only in recent years are they disappearing from use among Sicilian and Italian boatmen.

The most casual survey of this protected haven will justify the sagacity of Themistocles in concentrating his energy upon Piræus. His proposition to transfer Athens altogether to the seaport was strategically wise. The extent of the Long Walls, uniting the two into a double city, was a source of weakness, as it drained the defenders away from both towns. But it was a true instinct of the Athenians, which posterity endorses, to cling to the sentiments evoked by their ancient city and in it to develop to the full their intellectual empire.

It is probable that the extant traces of the ship-sheds in the two war-harbours date back only as far as the fourth century B. C., but the number and size fairly represent the older Periclean constructions. The Thirty Tyrants destroyed the former ship-sheds, as Isocrates tells us, and sold for three talents (about $3100) the material of these buildings upon which the city had spent more than one thousand talents.

The ruins of the “Wall of Conon” can still be traced for some distance to the east after leaving the harbour of Zea, and at the southeastern promontory the ruins of ancient fortifications are again to be seen. The harbour of Munychia (modern Phanari) is smaller than that of Zea. Its contour is so perfect an oval as to seem artificial. It had space to accommodate only eighty-two triremes in ship-houses, scanty remains of which are here visible under the water.

At the east side the ruined wall may again be traced to the Bay of Phalērum or (Greek) Phàleron, and beyond, curving around the Munychia acropolis to complete the circuit to the north of the town.

Further east, on the open bay of Phaleron, is New Phaleron, a bathing resort as frankly modern as the Lido at Venice. The exact site of Old Phaleron is open to dispute, but the walk between it and Athens was a favourite constitutional in Plato’s time. Many a classic conversation was held here on the way. In the “Symposium” of Plato, Glaucon asks Apollodorus: “Isn’t the road to Athens just made for conversation?” Now the banality and the bareness of the city’s outskirts intrude sadly upon the pedestrian’s philosophic equipoise, both here and on the other road between Athens and Piræus where Lucian and his friend, in the second century of our era, could still find shelter from the hot sun under some olive trees by the wayside and “sit down to rest upon an overturned stelé.”

The focus of the inner city life was the splendid Agora laid out by the famous architect Hippodamus. Here ended the road from Athens. This square was probably west of Munychia north of the Zea harbour, perhaps about where the present Athena street intersects Munychia avenue. Near it were probably grouped various sanctuaries. Xenophon tells how in the civil war the patriotic party, “the men from Phyle,” unable to exclude “the City party” from the whole of Piræus, fell back on the Munychia hill, and the men from Athens blocked up the avenue that leads to the temple of Bendis and to the sanctuary of Munychian Artemis. By this Market-place, too, houses of rich residents were probably built.

The Piræus was essentially a democratic stronghold. It was the rendezvous for the patriotic anti-Spartan party; and Plato, with all his aristocratic leanings, chose to lay at Piræus the opening scene and setting for his greatest dialogue, the “Republic.” It was the fitting propylæa for his ideal city as well as for the real Athens. “I went down yesterday,” Socrates begins, “to Piræus with Glaucon, both to make a prayer to the goddess and to take a look at the festival to see how they would carry it off, inasmuch as they are now celebrating it for the first time.” The Thracian residents, it seems, had just introduced a celebration in honour of their goddess Bendis, and the natives had united with them. The whole port was en fête with processions conducted both by the hospitable native citizens and the Thracians themselves. In the evening there was to be a torch-race followed by an all-night festival. Socrates, who was on the point of returning to Athens after witnessing the daylight processions, was easily persuaded by Polemarchus to stay over for the torch-race, dining first at the house of his father, the rich and hospitable old metic, Cephalus. At the house Socrates finds another son, Lysias, who was soon to become famous as an orator. For the Thirty were to plunder the property bequeathed by Cephalus to his sons, all the ready money, the shield factory, and the slaves; were to put summarily to death young Polemarchus; and were to force Lysias, reduced to sudden poverty, to betake himself to speech-writing for a living. His crowning effort was an arraignment of his brother’s murderers. Most skilful of narrators, he tells of the fate of Polemarchus; how his house was plundered; how his wife was robbed of the very ear-rings from her ears; and how after his execution, notwithstanding the just title of the family to large holdings of real estate, he was buried from a hired shed, one friend providing a robe, another a pillow, for the corpse. He tells, too, of his own arrest at his home by the emissaries of the Thirty: how he bargained for his life with a sum of ready money; how one of his captors followed him into the inner room, looked over his shoulder into the money-chest, and took not only the price agreed upon but all the contents of the strong box; how he was taken to another house of a Piræus acquaintance; and how, while his captors were keeping guard at the peristyle door in front, he had escaped by a back door to the house of a friend, the shipmaster, with the appropriate name of Archenaus. So, while his less fortunate brother, Polemarchus, is led off to Athens, thrown into prison, and “bidden by the Thirty their usual bidding—to drink hemlock,” Lysias, by the aid of his nautical friend, is embarked for Megara under cover of night. We should like to have fuller details of that escape of the young Lysias, yesterday a wealthy manufacturer, to-day a plundered fugitive but destined to become one of the greatest of the “ten” orators and a master architect of Attic style. Perhaps a small boat put off from some lonely spot on Akte, perhaps from the Great Harbour itself, shooting through the moles in the darkness and, wind and weather permitting, kept to starboard of the Psyttaleia reef, passed up through the strait of Salamis, on through the beautiful Bay of Eleusis, and landed the fugitive at Megara.

Plato’s account of the visit of Socrates to the Piræus homestead carries us back to the days of security before the reign of the Thirty. We see old Cephalus welcoming Socrates cordially, delivering a monologue on his own gracious old age, telling a story about Sophocles in his later years, and finally withdrawing to supervise a sacrifice to the gods.

The introduction of a foreign divinity like Bendis of the Thracians was not unusual. The celebration, described at the opening of the Republic, was at least no more exotic than a St. Patrick’s day in America. Foreigners and natives united in it as they did in the celebration of the Mother of the Gods. The customs inspection of foreign deities was lenient. The Greeks were free traders both in art and religion, though the finished product imported was likely enough to be used as new material. Into the smelting furnace of the classic period was cast the old, the new, the foreign, and the domestic, to reappear in fairer form, stamped with the Hellenic hall-mark. Among the various imported deities, Cybele is well vouched for at Piræus where a number of marble votive shrines of the Great Mother have been found. One of these archaic Cybele reliefs, brought from Piræus to the National Museum in Athens, shows the goddess with her lion in her lap, her cymbals in her hand. The “new theology,” fostered by Euripides and domiciled in daily life by the “New Comedy,” could treat these cymbals as typical of “a creed out-worn.” One of Menander’s characters exclaims:—

“No god, my wife, saves one man through another’s help,

For if a human being can by cymbals’ clash

Deflect the god to whatsoever is desired,

Then greater than the god is he that doeth this.”

Among various resident colonists who may have occupied distinct sections of the city, like a mediæval Ghetto or a modern Italian quarter, the worship of home divinities was kept alive. It is known, for example, that the Egyptian resident merchants, perhaps as early as the end of the fifth century, had received a special license to erect an Isis sanctuary and the Cyprians instituted a similar cult of Adonis and Aphrodite.