Transcriber's notes:
Punctuation and hyphenation have been normalised. Variable, archaic or unusual spelling has been retained. A list of the few corrections made can found at the end of the book. In the text, corrections are indicated with red dotted underlining; hover the mouse over the underlined text to see a Transcriber's Note.
INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL
IN
GREECE, TURKEY, RUSSIA,
AND
POLAND.
BY THE AUTHOR OF
"INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL IN EGYPT, ARABIA PETRÆA, AND THE HOLY LAND."
WITH A MAP AND ENGRAVINGS.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
SEVENTH EDITION.
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
329 & 331 PEARL STREET,
FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1853.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1838, by
Harper & Brothers,
in the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New York.
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION.
The fourth edition of this work was published during the author's absence from the city. His publishers, in a preface in his behalf, returned his acknowledgments to the public, and he can but respond to the acknowledgments there made. He has made some alterations in the page relating to the American phil-Hellenists; and for the rest, he concludes as in the preface to his first edition.
The author has been induced by his publishers to put forth his "Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland." In point of time they precede his tour in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land. The countries which form the subject of the following pages perhaps do not, in themselves, possess the same interest with those in his first work; but the author has reason to believe that part of his route, particularly from the Black Sea to the Baltic, through the interior of Russia, and from St. Petersburgh through the interior of Poland to Warsaw and Cracow, is comparatively new to most of his countrymen. As in his first work, his object has been to present a picture of the every-day scenes which occur to the traveller in the countries referred to, rather than any detailed description of the countries themselves.
New York, November, 1838.
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME
Page
A Hurricane.—An Adventure.—Missilonghi.—Siege of Missilonghi.—Byron.—Marco Bozzaris.—Visit to the Widow, Daughters, and Brother of Bozzaris.—Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris."
13
Choice of a Servant.—A Turnout.—An Evening Chat.—Scenery of the Road.—Lepanto.—A projected Visit.—Change of Purpose.—Padras.—Vostitza.—Variety and Magnificence of Scenery.
28
Quarrel with the Landlord.—Ægina.—Sicyon.—Corinth.—A distinguished Reception.—Desolation of Corinth.—The Acropolis.—View from the Acropolis.—Lechæum and Cenchreæ.—Kaka Scala.—Arrival at Athens.
46
American Missionary School.—Visit to the School.—Mr. Hill and the Male Department.—Mrs. Hill and the Female Department.—Maid of Athens.—Letter from Mr. Hill.—Revival of Athena.—Citizens of the World.
61
Ruins of Athens.—Hill of Mars.—Temple of the Winds.—Lantern of Demosthenes.—Arch of Adrian.—Temple of Jupiter Olympus.—Temple of Theseus.—The Acropolis.—The Parthenon.—Pentelican Mountain.—Mount Hymettus.—The Piræus.—Greek Fleas.—Napoli.
73
Argos.—Parting and Farewell.—Tomb of Agamemnon.—Mycenæ.—Gate of the Lions.—A Misfortune.—Meeting in the Mountains.—A Landlord's Troubles.—A Midnight Quarrel.—One good Turn deserves another.—Gratitude of a Greek Family.—Megara.—The Soldiers' Revel.
99
A Dreary Funeral.—Marathon.—Mount Pentelicus.—A Mystery.—Woes of a Lover.—Reveries of Glory.—Scio's Rocky Isle.—A blood-stained Page of History.—A Greek Prelate.—Desolation.—The Exile's Return.
118
A Noble Grecian Lady.—Beauty of Scio.—An Original.—Foggi.—A Turkish Coffee-house.—Mussulman at Prayers.—Easter Sunday.—A Greek Priest.—A Tartar Guide.—Turkish Ladies.—Camel Scenes.—Sight of a Harem.—Disappointed Hopes.—A rare Concert.—Arrival at Smyrna.
149
First Sight of Smyrna.—Unveiled Women.—Ruins of Ephesus.—Ruin, all Ruin.—Temple of Diana.—Encounter with a Wolf.—Love at first Sight.—Gatherings on the Road.
173
Position of Smyrna.—Consular Privileges.—The Case of the Lover.—End of the Love Affair.—The Missionary's Wife.—The Casino.—Only a Greek Row.—Rambles in Smyrna.—The Armenians.—Domestic Enjoyments.
188
An American Original.—Moral Changes in Turkey.—Wonders of Steam Navigation.—The March of Mind.—Classic Localities.—Sestos and Abydos.—Seeds of Pestilence.
203
Mr. Churchill.—Commodore Porter.—Castle of the Seven Towers.—The Sultan's Naval Architect.—Launch of the Great Ship.—Sultan Mahmoud.—Jubilate.—A National Grievance.—Visit to a Mosque.—The Burial-grounds.
218
Visit to the Slave-market.—Horrors of Slavery.—Departure from Stamboul.—The stormy Euxine.—Odessa.—The Lazaretto.—Russian Civility.—Returning Good for Evil.
236
The Guardiano.—One too many.—An Excess of Kindness.—The last Day of Quarantine.—Mr. Baguet.—Rise of Odessa.—City-making.—Count Woronzow.—A Gentleman Farmer.—An American Russian.
258
INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL
IN
GREECE, TURKEY, RUSSIA, AND POLAND.
CHAPTER I.
A Hurricane.—An Adventure.—Missilonghi.—Siege of Missilonghi.—Byron.—Marco Bozzaris.—Visit to the Widow, Daughters, and Brother of Bozzaris.
On the evening of the —— February, 1835, by a bright starlight, after a short ramble among the Ionian Islands, I sailed from Zante in a beautiful cutter of about forty tons for Padras. My companions were Doctor W., an old and valued friend from New-York, who was going to Greece merely to visit the Episcopal missionary school at Athens, and a young Scotchman, who had travelled with me through Italy, and was going farther, like myself, he knew not exactly why. There was hardly a breath of air when we left the harbour, but a breath was enough to fill our little sail. The wind, though of the gentlest, was fair; and as we crawled from under the lee of the island, in a short time it became a fine sailing breeze. We sat on the deck till a late hour, and turned in with every prospect of being at Padras in the morning. Before daylight, however, the wind chopped about, and set in dead ahead, and when I went on deck in the morning it was blowing a hurricane. We had passed the point of Padras; the wind was driving down the Gulf of Corinth as if old Æolus had determined on thwarting our purpose; and our little cutter, dancing like a gull upon the angry waters, was driven into the harbour of Missilonghi.
The town was full in sight, but at such a distance, and the waves were running so high, that we could not reach it with our small boat. A long flat extends several miles into the sea, making the harbour completely inaccessible except to small Greek caiques built expressly for such navigation. We remained on board all day; and the next morning, the gale still continuing, made signals to a fishing boat to come off and take us ashore. In a short time she came alongside; we bade farewell to our captain—an Italian and a noble fellow, cradled, and, as he said, born to die on the Adriatic—and in a few minutes struck the soil of fallen but immortal Greece.
Our manner of striking it, however, was not such as to call forth any of the warm emotions struggling in the breast of the scholar, for we were literally stuck in the mud. We were yet four or five miles from the shore, and the water was so low that the fishing-boat, with the additional weight of four men and luggage, could not swim clear. Our boatmen were two long, sinewy Greeks, with the red tarbouch, embroidered jacket, sash, and large trousers, and with their long poles set us through the water with prodigious force; but, as soon as the boat struck, they jumped out, and, putting their brawny shoulders under her sides, heaved her through into better water, and then resumed their poles. In this way they propelled her two or three miles, working alternately with their poles and shoulders, until they got her into a channel, when they hoisted the sail, laid directly for the harbour, and drove upon the beach with canvass all flying.
During the late Greek revolution, Missilonghi was the great debarking-place of European adventurers; and, probably, among all the desperadoes who ever landed there, none were more destitute and in better condition to "go ahead" than I; for I had all that I was worth on my back. At one of the Ionian Islands I had lost my carpet-bag, containing my notebook and every article of wearing apparel except the suit in which I stood. Every condition, however, has its advantages; mine put me above porters and custom-house officers; and while my companions were busy with these plagues of travellers, I paced with great satisfaction the shore of Greece, though I am obliged to confess that this satisfaction was for reasons utterly disconnected with any recollections of her ancient glories. Business before pleasure: one of our first inquiries was for a breakfast. Perhaps, if we had seen a monument, or solitary column, or ruin of any kind, it would have inspired us to better things; but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could recall an image of the past. Besides, we did not expect to land at Missilonghi, and were not bound to be inspired at a place into which we were thrown by accident; and, more than all, a drizzling rain was penetrating to our very bones; we were wet and cold, and what can men do in the way of sentiment when their teeth are chattering?
The town stands upon a flat, marshy plain, which extends several miles along the shore. The whole was a mass of new-made ruins—of houses demolished and black with smoke—the tokens of savage and desolating war. In front, and running directly along the shore, was a long street of miserable one-story shantees, run up since the destruction of the old town, and so near the shore that sometimes it is washed by the sea, and at the time of our landing it was wet and muddy from the rain. It was a cheerless place, and reminded me of Communipaw in bad weather. It had no connexion with the ancient glory of Greece, no name or place on her historic page, and no hotel where we could get a breakfast; but one of the officers of the customs conducted us to a shantee filled with Bavarian soldiers drinking. There was a sort of second story, accessible only by a ladder; and one end of this was partitioned off with boards, but had neither bench, table, nor any other article of housekeeping. We had been on and almost in the water since daylight, exposed to a keen wind and drizzling rain, and now, at eleven o'clock, could probably have eaten several chickens apiece; but nothing came amiss, and, as we could not get chickens, we took eggs, which, for lack of any vessel to boil them in, were roasted. We placed a huge loaf of bread on the middle of the floor, and seated ourselves around it, spreading out so as to keep the eggs from rolling away, and each hewing off bread for himself. Fortunately, the Greeks have learned from their quondam Turkish masters the art of making coffee, and a cup of this Eastern cordial kept our dry bread from choking us.
When we came out again the aspect of matters was more cheerful; the long street was swarming with Greeks, many of them armed with pistols and yataghan, but miserably poor in appearance, and in such numbers that not half of them could find the shelter of a roof at night. We were accosted by one dressed in a hat and frockcoat, and who, in occasional visits to Corfu and Trieste, had picked up some Italian and French, and a suit of European clothes, and was rather looked up to by his untravelled countrymen. As a man of the world, who had received civilities abroad, he seemed to consider it incumbent upon him to reciprocate at home, and, with the tacit consent of all around, he undertook to do the honours of Missilonghi.
If, as a Greek, he had any national pride about him, he was imposing upon himself a severe task; for all that he could do was to conduct us among ruins, and, as he went along, tell us the story of the bloody siege which had reduced the place to its present woful state. For more than a year, under unparalleled hardships, its brave garrison resisted the combined strength of the Turkish and Egyptian armies, and, when all hope was gone, resolved to cut their way through the enemy or die in the attempt. Many of the aged and sick, the wounded and the women, refused to join in the sortie, and preferred to shut themselves up in an old mill, with the desperate purpose of resisting until they should bring around them a large crowd of Turks, when they would blow all up together. An old invalid soldier seated himself in a mine under the Bastion Bozzaris (the ruins of which we saw), the mine being charged with thirty kegs of gunpowder; the last sacrament was administered by the bishop and priests to the whole population and, at a signal, the besieged made their desperate sortie. One body dashed through the Turkish ranks, and, with many women and children, gained the mountains; but the rest were driven back. Many of the women ran to the sea and plunged in with their children; husbands stabbed their wives with their own hands to save them from the Turks, and the old soldier under the bastion set fire to the train, and the remnant of the heroic garrison buried themselves under the ruins of Missilonghi.
Among them were thirteen foreigners, of whom only one escaped. One of the most distinguished was Meyer, a young Swiss, who entered as a volunteer at the beginning of the revolution, became attached to a beautiful Missilonghiote girl, married her, and, when the final sortie was made, his wife being sick, he remained with her, and was blown up with the others. A letter written a few days before his death, and brought away by one who escaped in the sortie, records the condition of the garrison.
"A wound which I have received in my shoulder, while I am in daily expectation of one which will be my passport to eternity, has prevented me till now from bidding you a last adieu. We are reduced to feed upon the most disgusting animals. We are suffering horribly with hunger and thirst. Sickness adds much to the calamities which overwhelm us. Seventeen hundred and forty of our brothers are dead; more than a hundred thousand bombs and balls thrown by the enemy have destroyed our bastions and our homes. We have been terribly distressed by the cold, for we have suffered great want of food. Notwithstanding so many privations, it is a great and noble spectacle to behold the ardour and devotedness of the garrison. A few days more, and these brave men will be angelic spirits, who will accuse before God the indifference of Christendom. In the name of all our brave men, among whom are Notho Bozzaris, *** I announce to you the resolution sworn to before Heaven, to defend, foot by foot, the land of Missilonghi, and to bury ourselves, without listening to any capitulation, under the ruins of this city. We are drawing near our final hour. History will render us justice. I am proud to think that the blood of a Swiss, of a child of William Tell, is about to mingle with that of the heroes of Greece."
But Missilonghi is a subject of still greater interest than this, for the reader will remember it as the place where Byron died. Almost the first questions I asked were about the poet, and it added to the dreary interest which the place inspired, to listen to the manner in which the Greeks spoke of him. It might be thought that here, on the spot where he breathed his last, malignity would have held her accursed tongue; but it was not so. He had committed the fault, unpardonable in the eyes of political opponents, of attaching himself to one of the great parties that then divided Greece; and though he had given her all that man could give, in his own dying words, "his time, his means, his health, and, lastly, his life," the Greeks spoke of him with all the rancour and bitterness of party spirit. Even death had not won oblivion for his political offences; and I heard those who saw him die in her cause affirm that Byron was no friend to Greece.
His body, the reader will remember, was transported to England and interred in the family sepulchre. The church where it lay in state is a heap of ruins, and there is no stone or monument recording his death, but, wishing to see some memorial connected with his residence here, we followed our guide to the house in which he died. It was a large square building of stone, one of the walls still standing, black with smoke, the rest a confused and shapeless mass of ruins. After his death it was converted into a hospital and magazine; and, when the Turks entered the city, they set fire to the powder; the sick and dying were blown into the air, and we saw the ruins lying as they fell after the explosion. It was a melancholy spectacle, but it seemed to have a sort of moral fitness with the life and fortunes of the poet. It was as if the same wild destiny, the same wreck of hopes and fortunes that attended him through life, were hovering over his grave. Living and dead, his actions and his character have been the subject of obloquy and reproach, perhaps justly; but it would have softened the heart of his bitterest enemy to see the place in which he died.
It was in this house that, on his last birthday, he came from his bedroom and produced to his friends the last notes of his dying muse, breathing a spirit of sad foreboding and melancholy recollections; of devotion to the noble cause in which he had embarked, and a prophetic consciousness of his approaching end.
"My days are in the yellow leaf,
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone.
"If thou regret'st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here: up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!
"Seek out—less often sought than found—
A soldier's grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest."
Moving on beyond the range of ruined houses, though still within the line of crumbling walls, we came to a spot perhaps as interesting as any that Greece in her best days could show. It was the tomb of Marco Bozzaris! No monumental marble emblazoned his deeds and fame; a few round stones piled over his head, which, but for our guide, we should have passed without noticing, were all that marked his grave. I would not disturb a proper reverence for the past; time covers with its dim and twilight glories both distant scenes and the men who acted in them, but, to my mind, Miltiades was not more of a hero at Marathon or Leonidas at Thermopylæ than Marco Bozzaris at Missilonghi. When they went out against the hosts of Persia, Athens and Sparta were great and free, and they had the prospect of glory and the praise of men, to the Greeks always dearer than life. But when the Suliote chief drew his sword, his country lay bleeding at the feet of a giant, and all Europe condemned the Greek revolution as foolhardy and desperate. For two months, with but a few hundred men, protected only by a ditch and slight parapet of earth, he defended the town where his body now rests against the whole Egyptian army. In stormy weather, living upon bad and unwholesome bread, with no covering but his cloak, he passed his days and nights in constant vigil; in every assault his sword cut down the foremost assailant, and his voice, rising above the din of battle, struck terror into the hearts of the enemy. In the struggle which ended with his life, with two thousand men he proposed to attack the whole army of Mustapha Pacha, and called upon all who were willing to die for their country to stand forward. The whole band advanced to a man. Unwilling to sacrifice so many brave men in a death-struggle, he chose three hundred, the sacred number of the Spartan band, his tried and trusty Suliotes. At midnight he placed himself at their head, directing that not a shot should be fired till he sounded his bugle; and his last command was, "If you lose sight of me, seek me in the pacha's tent." In the moment of victory he ordered the pacha to be seized, and received a ball in the loins; his voice still rose above the din of battle, cheering his men until he was struck by another ball in the head, and borne dead from the field of his glory.
Not far from the grave of Bozzaris was a pyramid of sculls, of men who had fallen in the last attack upon the city, piled up near the blackened and battered wall which they had died in defending. In my after wanderings I learned to look more carelessly upon these things; and, perhaps, noticing everywhere the light estimation put upon human life in the East, learned to think more lightly of it myself; but, then, it was melancholy to see bleaching in the sun, under the eyes of their countrymen, the unburied bones of men who, but a little while ago, stood with swords in their hands, and animated by the noble resolution to free their country or die in the attempt. Our guide told us that they had all been collected in that place with a view to sepulture; and that King Otho, as soon as he became of age and took the government in his own hands, intended to erect a monument over them. In the mean time, they are at the mercy of every passing traveller; and the only remark that our guide made was a comment upon the force and unerring precision of the blow of the Turkish sabre, almost every scull being laid open on the side nearly down to the ear.
But the most interesting part of our day at Missilonghi was to come. Returning from a ramble round the walls, we noticed a large square house, which, our guide told us, was the residence of Constantine, the brother of Marco Bozzaris. We were all interested in this intelligence, and our interest was in no small degree increased when he added that the widow and two of the children of the Suliote chief were living with his brother. The house was surrounded by a high stone wall, a large gate stood most invitingly wide open, and we turned toward it in the hope of catching a glimpse of the inhabitants; but, before we reached the gate, our interest had increased to such a point that, after consulting with our guide, we requested him to say that, if it would not be considered an intrusion, three travellers, two of them Americans, would feel honoured in being permitted to pay their respects to the widow and children of Marco Bozzaris.
We were invited in, and shown into a large room on the right, where three Greeks were sitting cross-legged on a divan, smoking the long Turkish chibouk. Soon after the brother entered, a man about fifty, of middling height, spare built, and wearing a Bavarian uniform, as holding a colonel's commission in the service of King Otho. In the dress of the dashing Suliote he would have better looked the brother of Marco Bozzaris, and I might then more easily have recognised the daring warrior who, on the field of battle, in a moment of extremity, was deemed, by universal acclamation, worthy of succeeding the fallen hero. Now the straight military frockcoat, buttoned tight across the breast, the stock, tight pantaloons, boots, and straps, seemed to repress the free energies of the mountain warrior; and I could not but think how awkward it must be for one who had spent all his life in a dress which hardly touched him, at fifty to put on a stock, and straps to his boots. Our guide introduced us, with an apology for our intrusion. The colonel received us with great kindness, thanked us for the honour done his brother's widow, and, requesting us to be seated, ordered coffee and pipes.
And here, on the very first day of our arrival in Greece, and from a source which made us proud, we had the first evidence of what afterward met me at every step, the warm feeling existing in Greece toward America; for almost the first thing that the brother of Marco Bozzaris said was to express his gratitude as a Greek for the services rendered his country by our own; and, after referring to the provisions sent out for his famishing countrymen, his eyes sparkled and his cheek flushed as he told us that, when the Greek revolutionary flag first sailed into the port of Napoli di Romania, among hundreds of vessels of all nations, an American captain was the first to recognise and salute it.
In a few moments the widow of Marco Bozzaris entered. I have often been disappointed in my preconceived notions of personal appearance, but it was not so with the lady who now stood before me; she looked the widow of a hero; as one worthy of her Grecian mothers, who gave their hair for bowstrings, their girdle for a sword-belt, and, while their heartstrings were cracking, sent their young lovers from their arms to fight and perish for their country. Perhaps it was she that led Marco Bozzaris into the path of immortality; that roused him from the wild guerilla warfare in which he had passed his early life, and fired him with the high and holy ambition of freeing his country. Of one thing I am certain, no man could look in her face without finding his wavering purposes fixed, without treading more firmly in the path of high and honourable enterprise. She was under forty, tall and stately in person and habited in deep black, fit emblem of her widowed condition, with a white handkerchief laid flat over her head, giving the Madonna cast to her dark eyes and marble complexion. We all rose as she entered the room; and though living secluded, and seldom seeing the face of a stranger, she received our compliments and returned them with far less embarrassment than we both felt and exhibited.
But our embarrassment, at least I speak for myself, was induced by an unexpected circumstance. Much as I was interested in her appearance, I was not insensible to the fact that she was accompanied by two young and beautiful girls, who were introduced to us as her daughters. This somewhat bewildered me. While waiting for their appearance, and talking with Constantine Bozzaris, I had in some way conceived the idea that the daughters were mere children, and had fully made up my mind to take them both on my knee and kiss them; but the appearance of the stately mother recalled me to the grave of Bozzaris; and the daughters would probably have thought that I was taking liberties upon so short an acquaintance if I had followed up my benevolent purpose in regard to them; so that, with the long pipe in my hand, which, at that time, I did not know how to manage well, I cannot flatter myself that I exhibited any of the benefit of Continental travel.
The elder was about sixteen, and even in the opinion of my friend Doctor W., a cool judge in these matters, a beautiful girl, possessing in its fullest extent all the elements of Grecian beauty: a dark, clear complexion, dark hair, set off by a little red cap embroidered with gold thread, and a long blue tassel hanging down behind, and large black eyes, expressing a melancholy quiet, but which might be excited to shoot forth glances of fire more terrible than her father's sword. Happily, too, for us, she talked French, having learned it from a French marquis who had served in Greece and been domesticated with them; but young and modest, and unused to the company of strangers, she felt the embarrassment common to young ladies when attempting to speak a foreign language. And we could not talk to her on common themes. Our lips were sealed, of course, upon the subject which had brought us to her house. We could not sound for her the praises of her gallant father. At parting, however, I told them that the name of Marco Bozzaris was as familiar in America as that of a hero of our own revolution, and that it had been hallowed by the inspiration of an American poet; and I added that, if it would not be unacceptable, on my return to my native country I would send the tribute referred to, as an evidence of the feeling existing in America toward the memory of Marco Bozzaris. My offer was gratefully accepted; and afterward, while in the act of mounting my horse to leave Missilonghi, our guide, who had remained behind, came to me with a message from the widow and daughters reminding me of my promise.
I do not see that there is any objection to my mentioning that I wrote to a friend, requesting him to procure Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris," and send it to my banker at Paris. My friend, thinking to enhance its value, applied to Mr. Halleck for a copy in his own handwriting. Mr. Halleck, with his characteristic modesty, evaded the application; and on my return home I told him the story of my visit, and reiterated the same request. He evaded me as he had done my friend, but promised me a copy of the new edition of his poems, which he afterward gave me, and which, I hope, is now in the hands of the widow and daughters of the Grecian hero.
I make no apology for introducing in a book the widow and daughters of Marco Bozzaris. True, I was received by them in private, without any expectation, either on their part or mine, that all the particulars of the interview would be noted and laid before the eyes of all who choose to read. I hope it will not be considered invading the sanctity of private life; but, at all events, I make no apology; the widow and children of Marco Bozzaris are the property of the world.
CHAPTER II.
Choice of a Servant.—A Turnout.—An Evening Chat.—Scenery of the Road.—Lepanto.—A projected Visit.—Change of Purpose.—Padras.—Vostitza.—Variety and Magnificence of Scenery.
Barren as our prospect was on landing, our first day in Greece had already been full of interest. Supposing that we should not find anything to engage us long, before setting out on our ramble we had directed our servant to procure horses, and when we returned we found all ready for our departure.
One word with regard to this same servant. We had taken him at Corfu, much against my inclination. We had a choice between two, one a full-blooded Greek in fustinellas, who in five minutes established himself in my good graces, so that nothing but the democratic principle of submitting to the will of the majority could make me give him up. He held at that time a very good office in the police at Corfu, but the eagerness which he showed to get out of regular business and go roving warmed me to him irresistibly. He seemed to be distracted between two opposing feelings; one the strong bent of his natural vagabond disposition to be rambling, and the other a sort of tugging at his heartstrings by wife and children, to keep him in a place where he had a regular assured living, instead of trusting to the precarious business of guiding travellers. He had a boldness and confidence that won me; and when he drew on the sand with his yataghan a map of Greece, and told us the route he would take us, zigzag across the Gulf of Corinth to Delphi and the top of Parnassus, I wondered that my companions could resist him.
Our alternative was an Italian from somewhere on the coast of the Adriatic, whom I looked upon with an unfavourable eye, because he came between me and my Greek; and on the morning of our departure I was earnestly hoping that he had overslept himself, or got into some scrape and been picked up by the guard; but, most provokingly, he came in time, and with more baggage than all of us had together. Indeed, he had so much of his own, that, in obedience to Nature's first law, he could not attend to ours, and in putting ashore some British soldiers at Cephalonia he contrived to let my carpet-bag go with their luggage. This did not increase my amiable feeling toward him, and, perhaps, assisted in making me look upon him throughout with a jaundiced eye; in fact, before we had done with him, I regarded him as a slouch, a knave, and a fool, and had the questionable satisfaction of finding that my companions, though they sustained him as long as they could, had formed very much the same opinion.
It was to him, then, that, on our return from our visit to the widow and daughters of Marco Bozzaris, we were indebted for a turnout that seemed to astonish even the people of Missilonghi. The horses were miserable little animals, hidden under enormous saddles made of great clumps of wood over an old carpet or towcloth, and covering the whole back from the shoulders to the tail; the luggage was perched on the tops of these saddles, and with desperate exertions and the help of the citizens of Missilonghi we were perched on the top of the luggage. The little animals had a knowing look as they peered from under the superincumbent mass, and, supported on either side by the by-standers till we got a little steady in our seats, we put forth from Missilonghi. The only gentleman of our party was our servant, who followed on a European saddle which he had brought for his own use, smoking his pipe with great complacency, perfectly satisfied with our appearance and with himself.
It was four o'clock when we crossed the broken walls of Missilonghi. For three hours our road lay over a plain extending to the sea. I have no doubt, if my Greek had been there, he would have given an interest to the road by referring to scenes and incidents connected with the siege of Missilonghi; but Demetrius—as he now chose to call himself—knew nothing of Greece, ancient or modern; he had no sympathy of feeling with the Greeks; had never travelled on this side of the Gulf of Corinth before; and so he lagged behind and smoked his pipe.
It was nearly dark when we reached the miserable little village of Bokara. We had barely light enough to look around for the best khan in which to pass the night. Any of the wretched tenants would have been glad to receive us for the little remuneration we might leave with them in the morning. The khans were all alike, one room, mud floor and walls, and we selected one where the chickens had already gone to roost, and prepared to measure off the dirt floor according to our dimensions. Before we were arranged a Greek of a better class, followed by half a dozen villagers, came over, and, with many regrets for the wretched state of the country, invited us to his house. Though dressed in the Greek costume, it was evident that he had acquired his manners in a school beyond the bounds of his miserable little village, in which his house now rose like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, higher than everything else, but rather rickety. In a few minutes we heard the death notes of some chickens, and at about nine o'clock sat down to a not unwelcome meal. Several Greeks dropped in during the evening, and one, a particular friend of our host's, supped with us. Both talked French, and had that perfect ease of manner and savoir faire which I always remarked with admiration in all Greeks who had travelled. They talked much of their travels; of time spent in Italy and Germany, and particularly of a long residence at Bucharest. They talked, too, of Greece; of her long and bitter servitude, her revolution, and her independence; and from their enthusiasm I could not but think that they had fought and bled in her cause. I certainly was not lying in wait to entrap them, but I afterward gathered from their conversation that they had taken occasion to be on their travels at the time when the bravest of their countrymen were pouring out their blood like water to emancipate their native land. A few years before I might have felt indignation and contempt for men who had left their country in her hour of utmost need, and returned to enjoy the privileges purchased with other men's blood; but I had already learned to take the world as I found it, and listened quietly while our host told us that, confiding in the permanency of the government secured by the three great powers, England, France, and Russia, he had returned to Greece, and taken a lease of a large tract of land for fifty years, paying a thousand drachms, a drachm being one sixth of a dollar, and one tenth of the annual fruits, at the end of which time one half of the land under cultivation was to belong to his heirs in fee.
As our host could not conveniently accommodate us all, M. and Demetrius returned to the khan at which we had first stopped and where, to judge from the early hour at which they came over to us the next morning, they had not spent the night as well as we did. At daylight we took our coffee, and again perched our luggage on the backs of the horses, and ourselves on top of the luggage. Our host wished us to remain with him, and promised the next day to accompany us to Padras; but this was not a sufficient inducement; and taking leave of him, probably for ever, we started for Lepanto.
We rode about an hour on the plain; the mountains towered on our left, and the rich soil was broken into rough sandy gullies running down to the sea. Our guides had some apprehensions that we should not be able to cross the torrents that were running down from the mountain; and when we came to the first, and had to walk up along the bank, looking out for a place to ford, we fully participated in their apprehensions. Bridges were a species of architecture entirely unknown in that part of modern Greece; indeed, no bridges could have stood against the mountain torrents. There would have been some excitement in encountering these rapid streams if we had been well mounted; but, from the manner in which we were hitched on our horses, we did not feel any great confidence in our seats. Still nothing could be wilder or more picturesque than our process in crossing them, except that it might have added somewhat to the effect to see one of us floating down stream, clinging to the tail of his horse. But we got over or through them all. A range of mountains then formed on our right, cutting us off from the sea, and we entered a valley lying between the two parallel ranges. At first the road, which was exceedingly difficult for a man or a sure-footed horse, lay along a beautiful stream, and the whole of the valley extending to the Gulf of Lepanto is one of the loveliest regions of country I ever saw. The ground was rich and verdant, and, even at that early season of the year, blooming with wild flowers of every hue, but wholly uncultivated, the olive-trees having all been cut down by the Turks, and without a single habitation on the whole route. My Scotch companion, who had a good eye for the picturesque and beautiful in natural scenery, was in raptures with this valley. I have since travelled in Switzerland, not, however, in all the districts frequented by tourists; but in what I saw, beautiful as it is, I do not know a place where the wildness of mountain scenery is so delightfully contrasted with the softness of a rich valley.
At the end of the valley, directly opposite Padras, and on the borders of the gulf, is a wild road called Scala Cativa, running along the sides of a rocky, mountainous precipice overlooking the sea. It is a wild and almost fearful road; in some places I thought it like the perpendicular sides of the Palisades; and when the wind blows in a particular direction it is impossible to make headway against it. Our host told us that we should find difficulty that day; and there was just rudeness enough to make us look well to our movements. Directly at our feet was the Gulf of Corinth; opposite a range of mountains; and in the distance the island of Zante. On the other side of the valley is an extraordinary mountain, very high, and wanting a large piece in the middle, as if cut out with a chisel, leaving two straight parallel sides, and called by the unpoetical name of the armchair. In the wildest pan of the Scala, where a very slight struggle would have precipitated us several hundred feet into the sea, an enormous shepherd's dog came bounding and barking toward us; and we were much relieved when his master, who was hanging with his flock of goats on an almost inaccessible height, called him away. At the foot of the mountain we entered a rich plain, where the shepherds were pasturing their flocks down to the shore of the sea, and in about two hours arrived at Lepanto.
After diligent search by Demetrius (the name by which we had taken him, whose true name, however, we found to be Jerolamon), and by all the idlers whom the arrival of strangers attracted, we procured a room near the farthest wall; it was reached by ascending a flight of steps outside, and boasted a floor, walls, and an apology for a roof. We piled up our baggage in one corner, or, rather, my companions did theirs, and went prowling about in search of something to eat. Our servant had not fully apprized us of the extreme poverty of the country, the entire absence of all accommodations for travellers, and the absolute necessity of carrying with us everything requisite for comfort. He was a man of few words, and probably thought that, as between servant and master, example was better than precept, and that the abundant provision he had made for himself might serve as a lesson for us; but, in our case, the objection to this mode of teaching was, that it came too late to be profitable. At the foot of the hill fronting the sea was an open place, in one side of which was a little cafteria, where all the good-for-nothing loungers of Lepanto were assembled. We bought a loaf of bread and some eggs, and, with a cup of Turkish coffee, made our evening meal.
We had an hour before dark, and strolled along the shore. Though in a ruinous condition, Lepanto is in itself interesting, as giving an exact idea of an ancient Greek city, being situated in a commanding position on the side of a mountain running down to the sea, with its citadel on the top, and enclosed by walls and turrets. The port is shut within the walls, which run into the sea, and are erected on the foundations of the ancient Naupactus. At a distance was the promontory of Actium, where Cleopatra, with her fifty ships, abandoned Antony, and left to Augustus the empire of the world; and directly before us, its surface dotted with a few straggling Greek caiques, was the scene of a battle which has rung throughout the world, the great battle of the Cross against the Crescent, where the allied forces of Spain, Venice, and the pope, amounting to nearly three hundred sail, under the command of Don John of Austria, humbled for ever the naval pride of the Turks. One hundred and thirty Turkish galleys were taken and fifty-five sunk; thirty thousand Turks were killed, ten thousand taken prisoners, fifteen thousand Christian slaves delivered; and Pope Pius VI., with holy fervour, exclaimed, "There was a man sent from God, and his name was John." Cervantes lost his left hand in this battle; and it is to wounds he received here that he makes a touching allusion when reproached by a rival: "What I cannot help feeling deeply is, that I am stigmatized with being old and maimed, as though it belonged to me to stay the course of time; or as though my wounds had been received in some tavern broil, instead of the most lofty occasion which past ages have yet seen, or which shall ever be seen by those to come. The scars which the soldier wears on his person, instead of badges of infamy, are stars to guide the daring in the path of glory. As for mine, though they may not shine in the eyes of the envious, they are at least esteemed by those who know where they were received; and, even was it not yet too late to choose, I would rather remain as I am, maimed and mutilated, than be now whole of my wounds, without having taken part in so glorious an achievement."
I shall, perhaps, be reproached for mingling with the immortal names of Don John of Austria and Cervantes those of George Wilson, of Providence, Rhode Island, and James Williams, a black of Baltimore, cook on board Lord Cochrane's flagship in the great battle between the Greek and Turkish fleets. George Wilson was a gunner on board one of the Greek ships, and conducted himself with so much gallantry, that Lord Cochrane, at a dinner in commemoration of the event, publicly drank his health. In the same battle James Williams, who had lost a finger in the United States service under Decatur at Algiers, and had conducted himself with great coolness and intrepidity in several engagements, when no Greek could be found to take the helm, volunteered his services, and was struck down by a splinter, which broke his legs and arms. The historian will probably never mention these gallant fellows in his quarto volumes; but I hope the American traveller, as he stands at sunset by the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto, and recalls to mind the great achievements of Don John and Cervantes, will not forget George Wilson and James Williams.
At evening we returned to our room, built a fire in the middle, and, with as much dignity as we could muster, sitting on the floor, received a number of Greek visiters. When they left us we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and lay down to sleep. Sleep, however, is not always won when wooed. Sometimes it takes the perverse humour of the wild Irish boy: "The more you call me, the more I won't come." Our room had no chimney; and though, as I lay all night looking up at the roof, there appeared to be apertures enough to let out the smoke, it seemed to have a loving feeling toward us in our lowly position, and clung to us so closely that we were obliged to let the fire go out, and lie shivering till morning.
Every schoolboy knows how hard it is to write poetry, but few know the physical difficulties of climbing the poetical mountain itself. We had made arrangements to sleep the next night at Castri, by the side of the sacred oracle of Delphi, a mile up Parnassus. Our servant wanted to cross over and go up on the other side of the gulf, and entertained us with several stories of robberies committed on this road, to which we paid no attention. The Greeks who visited us in the evening related, with much detail, a story of a celebrated captain of brigands having lately returned to his haunt on Parnassus, and attacked nine Greek merchants, of whom he killed three; the recital of which interesting incident we ascribed to Demetrius, and disregarded.
Early in the morning we mounted our horses and started for Parnassus. At the gate of the town we were informed that it was necessary, before leaving, to have a passport from the eparchos, and I returned to procure it. The eparchos was a man about forty-five, tall and stout, with a clear olive complexion and a sharp black eye, dressed in a rich Greek costume, and, fortunately, able to speak French. He was sitting cross-legged on a divan, smoking a pipe, and looking out upon the sea; and when I told him my business, he laid down his pipe, repeated the story of the robbery and murder that we had heard the night before, and added that we must abandon the idea of travelling that road. He said, farther, that the country was in a distracted state; that poverty was driving men to desperation; and that, though they had driven out the Turks, the Greeks were not masters of their own country. Hearing that I was an American, and as if in want of a bosom in which to unburden himself, and as one assured of sympathy, he told me the whole story of their long and bloody struggle for independence, and the causes that now made the friends of Greece tremble for her future destiny. I knew that the seat of the muses bore a rather suspicious character, and, in fact, that the rocks and caves about Parnassus were celebrated as the abodes of robbers, but I was unwilling to be driven from our purpose of ascending it. I went to the military commandant, a Bavarian officer, and told him what I had just heard from the eparchos. He said frankly that he did not know much of the state of the country, as he had but lately arrived in it; but, with the true Bavarian spirit, advised me, as a general rule, not to believe anything a Greek should tell me. I returned to the gate, and made my double report to my companions. Dr. W. returned with me to the eparchos, where the latter repeated, with great earnestness, all he had told me; and when I persisted in combating his objections, shrugged his shoulders in a manner that seemed to say, "your blood be on your own heads;" that he had done his duty, and washed his hands of the consequences. As we were going out he called me back, and, recurring to our previous conversation, said that he had spoken to me as an American more freely than he would have done to a stranger, and begged that, as I was going to Athens, I would not repeat his words where they could do him injury. I would not mention the circumstance now, but that the political clouds which then hung over the horizon of Greece have passed away; King Otho has taken his seat on the throne, and my friend has probably long since been driven or retired from public life. I was at that time a stranger to the internal politics of Greece, but I afterward found that the eparchos was one of a then powerful body of Greeks opposed to the Bavarian influence, and interested in representing the state of the country as more unsettled than it really was. I took leave of him, however, as one who had intended me a kindness, and, returning to the gate, found our companion sitting on his horse, waiting the result of our farther inquiries. Both he and my fellow envoy were comparatively indifferent upon the subject, while I was rather bent on drinking from the Castalian fount, and sleeping on the top of Parnassus. Besides, I was in a beautiful condition to be robbed. I had nothing but what I had on my back, and I felt sure that a Greek mountain robber would scorn my stiff coat and pantaloons and black hat. My companions, however were not so well situated, particularly M., who had drawn money at Corfu, and had no idea of trusting it to the tender mercies of a Greek bandit. In the teeth of the advice we had received, it would, perhaps, have been foolhardy to proceed; and, to my great subsequent regret, for the first and the last time in my ramblings, I was turned aside from my path by fear of perils on the road. Perhaps, after all, I had a lucky escape; for, if the Greek tradition be true, whoever sleeps on the mountain becomes an inspired poet or a madman, either of which, for a professional man, is a catastrophe to be avoided.
Our change of plan suited Demetrius exactly; he had never travelled on this side of the Gulf of Corinth; and, besides that, he considered it a great triumph that his stories of robbers were confirmed by others, showing his superior knowledge of the state of the country; he was glad to get on a road which he had travelled before, and on which he had a chance of meeting some of his old travelling acquaintance. In half an hour he had us on board a caique. We put out from the harbour of Lepanto with a strong and favourable wind; our little boat danced lightly over the waters of the Gulf of Corinth; and in three hours, passing between the frowning castles of Romelia and Morea, under the shadow of the walls of which were buried the bodies of the Christians who fell in the great naval battle, we arrived at Padras.
The first thing we recognised was the beautiful little cutter which we had left at Missilonghi, riding gracefully at anchor in the harbour, and the first man we spoke to on landing was our old friend the captain. We exchanged a cordial greeting, and he conducted us to Mr. Robertson, the British vice-consul, who, at the moment of our entering, was in the act of directing a letter to me at Athens. The subject was my interesting carpet-bag. There being no American consul at Padras, I had taken the liberty of writing to Mr. Robertson, requesting him, if my estate should find its way into his hands, to forward it to me at Athens, and the letter was to assure me of his attention to my wishes. It may be considered treason against classical taste, but it consoled me somewhat for the loss of Parnassus to find a stranger taking so warm an interest in my fugitive habiliments.
There was something, too, in the appearance of Padras, that addressed itself to other feelings than those connected with the indulgence of a classical humour. Our bones were still aching with the last night's rest, or, rather, the want of it, at Lepanto; and when we found ourselves in a neat little locanda, and a complaisant Greek asked us what we would have for dinner, and showed us our beds for the night, we almost agreed that climbing Parnassus and such things were fit only for boys just out of college.
Padras is beautifully situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, and the windows of our locanda commanded a fine view of the bold mountains on the opposite side of the gulf, and the parallel range forming the valley which leads to Missilonghi. It stands on the site of the ancient Patræ, enumerated by Herodotus among the twelve cities of Achaia. During the intervals of peace in the Peloponnesian war, Alcibiades, about four hundred and fifty years before Christ, persuaded its inhabitants to build long walls down to the sea. Philip of Macedon frequently landed there in his expeditions to Peloponnesus. Augustus Cæsar, after the battle of Actium, made it a Roman colony, and sent thither a large body of his veteran soldiers; and, in the time of Cicero, Roman merchants were settled there just as French and Italians are now. The modern town has grown up since the revolution, or rather since the accession of Otho, and bears no marks of the desolation at Missilonghi and Lepanto. It contains a long street of shops well supplied with European goods; the English steamers from Corfu to Malta touch here; and, besides the little Greek caiques trading in the Gulf of Corinth, vessels from all parts of the Adriatic are constantly in the harbour.
Among others, there was an Austrian man-of-war from Trieste, on her way to Alexandria. By a singular fortune, the commandant had been in one of the Austrian vessels that carried to New-York the unfortunate Poles; the only Austrian man-of-war which had ever been to the United States. A day or two after their arrival at New-York I had taken a boat at the Battery and gone on board this vessel, and had met the officers at some parties given to them at which he had been present; and though we had no actual acquaintance with each other, these circumstances were enough to form an immediate link between us, particularly as he was enthusiastic in his praises of the hospitality of our citizens and the beauty of our women. Lest, however, any of the latter should be vainglorious at hearing that their praises were sounded so far from home, I consider it my duty to say that the commandant was almost blind, very slovenly, always smoking a pipe, and generally a little tipsy.
Early in the morning we started for Athens. Our turnout was rather better than at Missilonghi, but not much. The day, however, was fine; the cold wind which, for several days, had been blowing down the Gulf of Corinth, had ceased, and the air was warm, and balmy, and invigorating. We had already found that Greece had something to attract the stranger besides the recollections of her ancient glories, and often forgot that the ground we were travelling was consecrated by historians and poets, in admiration of its own wild and picturesque beauty. Our road for about three hours lay across a plain, and then close along the gulf, sometimes winding by the foot of a wild precipitous mountain, and then again over a plain, with the mountains rising at some distance on our right. Sometimes we rose and crossed their rugged summits, and again descended to the seashore. On our left we had constantly the gulf, bordered on the opposite side by a range of mountains sometimes receding and then rising almost out of the water, while high above the rest rose the towering summits of Parnassus covered with snow.
It was after dark when we arrived at Vostitza, beautifully situated on the banks of the Gulf of Corinth. This is the representative of the ancient Ægium, one of the most celebrated cities in Greece, mentioned by Homer as having supplied vessels for the Trojan war, and in the second century containing sixteen sacred edifices, a theatre, a portico, and an agora. For many ages it was the seat of the Achaian Congress. Probably the worthy delegates who met here to deliberate upon the affairs of Greece had better accommodations than we obtained, or they would be likely, I should imagine, to hold but short sessions.
We stopped at a vile locanda, the only one in the place, where we found a crowd of men in a small room, gathered around a dirty table, eating, one of whom sprang up and claimed me as an old acquaintance. He had on a Greek capote and a large foraging cap slouched over his eyes, so that I had some difficulty in recognising him as an Italian who, at Padras, had tried to persuade me to go by water up to the head of the gulf. He had started that morning, about the same time we did, with a crowd of passengers, half of whom were already by the ears. Fortunately, they were obliged to return to their boats, and left all the house to us; which, however, contained little besides a strapping Greek, who called himself its proprietor.
Before daylight we were again in the saddle. During the whole day's ride the scenery was magnificent. Sometimes we were hemmed in as if for ever enclosed in an amphitheatre of wild and gigantic rocks; then from some lofty summit we looked out upon lesser mountains, broken, and torn, and thrown into every wild and picturesque form, as if by an earthquake; and after riding among deep dells and craggy steeps, yawning ravines and cloud-capped precipices, we descended to a quiet valley and the seashore.
At about four o'clock we came down, for the last time, to the shore, and before us, at some distance, espied a single khan, standing almost on the edge of the water. It was a beautiful resting-place for a traveller; the afternoon was mild, and we walked on the shore till the sun set. The khan was sixty or seventy feet long, and contained an upper room running the whole length of the building. This room was our bedchamber. We built a fire at one end, made tea, and roasted some eggs, the smoke ascending and curling around the rafters, and finally passing out of the openings in the roof; we stretched ourselves in our cloaks and, with the murmur of the waves in our ears, looked through the apertures in the roof upon the stars, and fell asleep.
About the middle of the night the door opened with a rude noise, and a tall Greek, almost filling the doorway, stood on the threshold. After pausing a moment he walked in, followed by half a dozen gigantic companions, their tall figures, full dresses, and the shining of their pistols and yataghans wearing a very ugly look to a man just roused from slumber. But they were merely Greek pedlers or travelling merchants, and, without any more noise, kindled the fire anew, drew their capotes around them, stretched themselves upon the floor, and were soon asleep.
CHAPTER III.
Quarrel with the Landlord.—Ægina.—Sicyon.—Corinth.—A distinguished Reception.—Desolation of Corinth.—The Acropolis.—View from the Acropolis.—Lechæum and Cenchreæ.—Kaka Scala.—Arrival at Athens.
In the morning Demetrius had a roaring quarrel with the keeper of the locanda, in which he tried to keep back part of the money we gave him to pay for us. He did this, however, on principle, for we had given twice as much as our lodging was worth, and no man ought to have more. His character was at stake in preventing any one from cheating us too much; and, in order to do this, he stopped our funds in transitu.
We started early, and for some time our road lay along the shore. It was not necessary, surrounded by such magnificent scenery, to draw upon historical recollections for the sake of giving interest to the road; still it did not diminish that interest to know that, many centuries ago, great cities stood here, whose sites are now desolate or occupied as the miserable gathering-places of a starving population. Directly opposite Parnassus, and at the foot of a hill crowned with the ruins of an acropolis, in perfect desolation now, stood the ancient Ægira; once numbering a population of ten thousand inhabitants, and in the second century containing three hiera, a temple, and another sacred edifice. Farther on, and toward the head of the Gulf of Corinth, the miserable village of Basilico stands on the site of the ancient Sicyon, boasting as high an antiquity as any city in Greece, and long celebrated as the first of her schools of painting. In five hours we came in sight of the Acropolis of Corinth, and, shortly after, of Corinth itself.
The reader need not fear my plunging him deeply into antiquities. Greece has been explored, and examined, and written upon, till the subject is almost threadbare; and I do not flatter myself that I discovered in it anything new. Still no man from such a distant country as mine can find himself crossing the plain of Corinth, and ascending to the ancient city, without a strange and indescribable feeling. We have no old monuments, no classical associations; and our history hardly goes beyond the memory of that venerable personage, "the oldest inhabitant." Corinth is so old that its early records are blended with the history of the heathen gods. The Corinthians say that it was called after the son of Jupiter, and its early sovereigns were heroes of the Grecian mythology. It was the friend of Sparta and the rival of Athens; the first city to build war-galleys and send forth colonies, which became great empires. It was the assembling-place of their delegates, who elected Philip, and afterward Alexander the Great, to conduct the war against the Persians. In painting, sculpture, and architecture surpassing all the achievements of Greece, or which the genius of man has ever since accomplished. Conquered by the then barbarous Romans, her walls were razed to the ground, her men put to the sword, her women and children sold into captivity, and the historian who records her fall writes that he saw the finest pictures thrown wantonly on the ground, and Roman soldiers playing on them at draughts and dice. For many years deserted, Corinth was again peopled; rose rapidly from its ruins; and, when St. Paul abode there "a year and six months"—to the Christian the most interesting period in her history—she was again a populous city, and the Corinthians a luxurious people.
Its situation in the early ages of the world could not fail to make it a great commercial emporium. In the inexperienced navigation of early times it was considered difficult and dangerous to go around the point of the Peloponnesus, and there was a proverb, "Before the mariner doubles Cape Malea, he should forget all he holds dearest in the world." Standing on the isthmus commanding the Adriatic and Ægean Seas; receiving in one hand the riches of Asia and in the other those of Europe; distributing them to every quarter of the then known world, wealth followed commerce, and then came luxury and extravagance to such an extent that it became a proverb, "It is not for every man to go to Corinth."
As travellers having regard to supper and lodging, we should have been glad to see some vestige of its ancient luxury; but times are changed; the ruined city stands where stood Corinth of old, but it has fallen once more; the sailor no longer hugs the well-known coasts, but launches fearlessly into the trackless ocean, and Corinth can never again be what she has been.
Our servant had talked so much of the hotel at Corinth, that perhaps the idea of bed and lodging was rather too prominent in our reveries as we approached the fallen city. He rode on before to announce our coming, and, working our way up the hill through narrow streets, stared at by all the men, followed by a large representation from the juvenile portion of the modern Corinthians, and barked at by the dogs, we turned into a large enclosure, something like a barnyard, on which opened a ruined balcony forming the entrance to the hotel. Demetrius was standing before it with our host, as unpromising a looking scoundrel as ever took a traveller in. He had been a notorious captain of brigands, and when his lawless band was broken up and half of its number hanged, he could not overcome his disposition to prey upon travellers, but got a couple of mattresses and bedsteads, and set up a hotel at Corinth. Demetrius had made a bargain for us at a price that made him hang his head when he told it, and we were so indignant at the extortion that we at first refused to dismount. Our host stood aloof, being used to such scenes, and perfectly sure that, after storming a little, we should be glad to take the only beds between Padras and Athens. In the end, however, we got the better both of him and Demetrius; for, as he had fixed separate prices for dinner, beds, and breakfast, we went to a little Greek coffee-house, and raised half Corinth to get us something to eat, and paid him only for our lodging.
We had a fine afternoon before us, and our first movement was to the ruins of a temple, the only monument of antiquity in Corinth. The city has been so often sacked and plundered, that not a column of the Corinthian order exists in the place from which it derives its name. Seven columns of the old temple are still standing, fluted and of the Doric order, though wanting in height the usual proportion to the diameter; built probably before that order had attained its perfection, and long before the Corinthian order was invented; though when it was built, by whom, or to what god it was consecrated, antiquaries cannot agree in deciding. Contrasted with these solitary columns of an unknown antiquity are ruins of yesterday. Houses fallen, burned, and black with smoke, as if the wretched inmates had fled before the blaze of their dwellings; and high above the ruined city, now as in the days when the Persian and Roman invaded it, still towers the Acropolis, a sharp and naked rock, rising abruptly a thousand feet from the earth, inaccessible and impregnable under the science of ancient war; and in all times of invasion and public distress, from her earliest history down to the bloody days of the late revolution, the refuge of the inhabitants.
Corinth.
It was late in the afternoon when we set out for the Acropolis. About a mile from the city we came to the foot of the hill, and ascended by a steep and difficult path, with many turnings and windings, to the first gate. Having been in the saddle since early in the morning, we stopped several times to rest, and each time lingered and looked out with admiration upon the wild and beautiful scenery around us; and we thought of the frequently recurring times when hostile armies had drawn up before the city at our feet, and the inhabitants, in terror and confusion, had hurried up this path and taken refuge within the gate before us.
Inside the gate were the ruins of a city, and here, too, we saw the tokens of ruthless war; the fire-brand was hardly yet extinguished, and the houses were in ruins. Within a few years it has been the stronghold and refuge of infidels and Christians, taken and retaken, destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again, and the ruins of Turkish mosques and Christian churches are mingled together in undistinguishable confusion. This enclosure is abundantly supplied with water, issuing from the rock, and is capable of containing several thousand people. The fountain of Pyrene, which supplies the Acropolis, called the most salubrious in Greece, is celebrated as that at which Pegasus was drinking when taken by Bellerophon. Ascending among ruined and deserted habitations, we came to a second gate flanked by towers. A wall about two miles in circumference encloses the whole summit of the rock, including two principal points which still rise above the rest. One is crowned with a tower and the other with a mosque, now in ruins; probably erected where once stood a heathen temple. Some have mistaken it for a Christian church, but all agree that it is a place built and consecrated to divine use, and that, for unknown ages men have gone up to this cloud-capped point to worship their Creator. It was a sublime idea to erect on this lofty pinnacle an altar to the Almighty. Above us were only the unclouded heavens; the sun was setting with that brilliancy which attends his departing glory nowhere but in the East; and the sky was glowing with a lurid red, as of some great conflagration. The scene around and below was wondrously beautiful. Mountains and rivers, seas and islands, rocks, forests, and plains, thrown together in perfect wantonness, and yet in the most perfect harmony, and every feature in the expanded landscape consecrated by the richest associations. On one side the Saronic Gulf, with its little islands, and Ægina and Salamis, stretching off to "Sunium's marble height," with the ruins of its temple looking out mournfully upon the sea; on the other, the Gulf of Corinth or Lepanto, bounded by the dark and dreary mountains of Cytheron, where Acteon, gazing at the goddess, was changed into a stag, and hunted to death by his own hounds; and where Bacchus, with his train of satyrs and frantic bacchantes, celebrated his orgies. Beyond were Helicon, sacred to Apollo and the Muses, and Parnassus, covered with snow. Behind us towered a range of mountains stretching away to Argos and the ancient Sparta, and in front was the dim outline of the temple of the Acropolis at Athens. The shades of evening gathered thick around us while we remained on the top of the Acropolis, and it was dark long before we reached our locanda.
The next morning we breakfasted at the coffee-house, and left Corinth wonderfully pleased at having outwitted Demetrius and our brigand host, who gazed after us with a surly scowl as we rode away, and probably longed for the good old days when, at the head of his hanged companions, he could have stopped us at the first mountain-pass and levied contributions at his own rate. I probably condemn myself when I say that we left this ancient city with such a trifle uppermost in our thoughts, but so it was; we bought a loaf of bread as we passed through the market-place, and descended to the plain of Corinth. We had still the same horses which we rode from Padras; they were miserable animals, and I did not mount mine the whole day. Indeed, this is the true way to travel in Greece; the country is mountainous, and the road or narrow horse-path so rough and precipitous that the traveller is often obliged to dismount and walk. The exercise of clambering up the mountains and the purity of the air brace every nerve in the body, and not a single feature of the scenery escapes the eye.
But, as yet, there are other things beside scenery; on each side of the road and within site of each other are the ruins of the ancient cities of Lechæum and Cenchreæ, the ports of Corinth on the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs; the former once connected with it by two long walls, and the road to the latter once lined with temples and sepulchres, the ruins of which may still be seen. The isthmus connecting the Peloponnesus with the continent is about six miles wide, and Corinth owed her commercial greatness to the profits of her merchants in transporting merchandise across it. Entire vessels were sometimes carried from one sea and launched into the other. The project of a canal across suggested itself both to the Greeks and Romans, and there yet exist traces of a ditch commenced for that purpose.
On the death of Leonidas, and in apprehension of a Persian invasion, the Peloponnesians built a wall across the isthmus from Lechæum to Cenchreæ. This wall was at one time fortified with a hundred and fifty towers; it was often destroyed and as often rebuilt; and in one place, about three miles from Corinth, vestiges of it may still be seen. Here were celebrated those Isthmian games so familiar to every tyro in Grecian literature and history; toward Mount Oneus stands on an eminence an ancient mound, supposed to be the tomb of Melicertes, their founder, and near it is at this day a grove of the sacred pine, with garlands of the leaves of which the victors were crowned.
In about three hours from Corinth we crossed the isthmus, and came to the village of Kalamaki on the shore of the Saronic Gulf, containing a few miserable buildings, fit only for the miserable people who occupied them. Directly on the shore was a large coffee-house enclosed by mud walls, and having branches of trees for a roof; and in front was a little flotilla of Greek caiques.
Next to the Greek's love for his native mountains is his passion for the waters that roll at their feet; and many of the proprietors of the rakish little boats in the harbour talked to us of the superior advantage of the sea over a mountainous road, and tried to make us abandon our horses and go by water to Athens; but we clung to the land, and have reason to congratulate ourselves upon having done so, for our road was one of the most beautiful it was ever my fortune to travel over. For some distance I walked along the shore, on the edge of a plain running from the foot of Mount Geranion. The plain was intersected by mountain torrents, the channel-beds of which were at that time dry. We passed the little village of Caridi, supposed to be the Sidus of antiquity, while a ruined church and a few old blocks of marble mark the site of ancient Crommyon, celebrated as the haunt of a wild boar destroyed by Theseus.
At the other end of the plain we came to the foot of Mount Geranion, stretching out boldly to the edge of the gulf, and followed the road along its southern side close to and sometimes overhanging the sea. From time immemorial this has been called the Kaka Scala, or bad way. It is narrow, steep, and rugged, and wild to sublimity. Sometimes we were completely hemmed in by impending mountains, and then rose upon a lofty eminence commanding an almost boundless view. On the summit of the range the road runs directly along the mountain's brink, overhanging the sea, and so narrow that two horsemen can scarcely pass abreast; where a stumble would plunge the traveller several hundred yards into the waters beneath. Indeed, the horse of one of my companions stumbled and fell, and put him in such peril that both dismounted and accompanied me on foot. In the olden time this wild and rugged road was famous as the haunt of the robber Sciron, who plundered the luckless travellers, and then threw them from this precipice. The fabulous account is, that Theseus, three thousand years before, on his first visit to Athens, encountered the famous robber, and tossed him from the same precipice whence he had thrown so many better men. According to Ovid, the earth and the sea refused to receive the bones of Sciron, which continued for some time suspended in the open air, until they were changed into large rocks, whose points still appear at the foot of the precipice; and to this day, say the sailors, knock the bottoms out of the Greek vessels. In later days this road was so infested by corsairs and pirates, that even the Turks feared to travel on it; at one place, that looks as though it might be intended as a jumping-off point into another world, Ino, with her son Melicertes in her arms (so say the Greek poets), threw herself into the sea to escape the fury of her husband; and we know that in later days St. Paul travelled on this road to preach the gospel to the Corinthians.
But, independently of all associations, and in spite of its difficulties and dangers, if a man were by accident placed on the lofty height without knowing where he was, he would be struck with the view which it commands, as one of the most beautiful that mortal eyes ever beheld. It was my fortune to pass over it a second time on foot, and I often seated myself on some wild point, and waited the coming up of my muleteers, looking out upon the sea, calm and glistening as if plated with silver, and studded with islands in continuous clusters stretching away into the Ægean.
During the greater part of the passage of the Kaka Scala my companions walked with me; and, as we always kept in advance, when we seated ourselves on some rude rock overhanging the sea to wait for our beasts and attendants, few things could be more picturesque than their approach.
On the summit of the pass we fell into the ancient paved way that leads from Attica into the Peloponnesus, and walked over the same pavement which the Greeks travelled, perhaps, three thousand years ago. A ruined wall and gate mark the ancient boundary; and near this an early traveller observed a large block of white marble projecting over the precipice, and almost ready to fall into the sea, which bore an inscription, now illegible. Here it is supposed stood the Stèle erected by Theseus, bearing on one side the inscription, "Here is Peloponnesus, not Ionia;" and on the other the equally pithy notification, "Here is not Peloponnesus, but Ionia." It would be a pretty place of residence for a man in misfortune; for, besides the extraordinary beauty of the scenery, by a single step he might avoid the service of civil process, and set the sheriff of Attica or the Peloponnesus at defiance. Descending, we saw before us a beautiful plain, extending from the foot of the mountain to the sea, and afar off, on an eminence commanding the plain, was the little town of Megara.
It is unfortunate for the reader that every ruined village on the road stands on the site of an ancient city. The ruined town before us was the birthplace of Euclid, and the representative of that Megara which is distinguished in history more than two thousand years ago; which sent forth its armies in the Persian and Peloponnesian wars; alternately the ally and enemy of Corinth and Athens; containing numerous temples, and the largest public houses in Greece; and though exposed, with her other cities, to the violence of a fierce democracy, as is recorded by the historian, "the Megareans retained their independence and lived in peace." As a high compliment, the people offered to Alexander the Great the freedom of their city. When we approached it its appearance was a speaking comment upon human pride.
It had been demolished and burned by Greeks and Turks, and now presented little more than a mass of blackened ruins. A few apartments had been cleared out and patched up, and occasionally I saw a solitary figure stalking amid the desolation.
I had not mounted my horse all day; had kicked out a pair of Greek shoes on my walk, and was almost barefoot when I entered the city. A little below the town was a large building enclosed by a high wall, with a Bavarian soldier lounging at the gate. We entered, and found a good coffee-room below, and a comfortable bed chamber above, where we found good quilts and mattresses, and slept like princes.
Early in the morning we set out for Athens, our road for some time lying along the sea. About half way to the Piræus, a ruined village, with a starving population, stands on the site of the ancient Eleusis, famed throughout all Greece for the celebration of the mysterious rites of Ceres. The magnificent temple of the goddess has disappeared, and the colossal statue made by the immortal Phidias now adorns the vestibule of the University at Cambridge. We lingered a little while in the village, and soon after entered the Via Sacra, by which, centuries ago, the priests and people moved in solemn religious processions from Athens to the great temple of Ceres. At first we passed underneath the cliff along the shore, then rose by a steep ascent among the mountains, barren and stony, and wearing an aspect of desolation equal to that of the Roman Campagna; then we passed through a long defile, upon the side of which, deeply cut in the rock, are seen the marks of chariot-wheels; perhaps of those used in the sacred processions. We passed the ruined monastery of Daphne, in a beautifully picturesque situation, and in a few minutes saw the rich plain of Attica; and our muleteers and Demetrius, with a burst of enthusiasm, perhaps because the journey was ended, clapped their hands and cried out, "Atinæ! Atinæ!"
The reader, perhaps, trembles at the name of Athens, but let him take courage. I promise to let him off easily. A single remark, however, before reaching it. The plain of Attica lies between two parallel ranges of mountains, and extends from the sea many miles back into the interior. On the border of the sea stands the Piræus, now, as in former times, the harbour of the city, and toward the east, on a little eminence, Athens itself, like the other cities in Greece, presenting a miserable appearance, the effects of protracted and relentless wars. But high above the ruins of the modern city towers the Acropolis, holding up to the skies the ruined temples of other days, and proclaiming what Athens was. We wound around the temple of Theseus, the most beautiful and perfect specimen of architecture that time has spared; and in striking contrast with this monument of the magnificence of past days, here, in the entrance to the city, our horses were struggling and sinking up to their saddle-girths in the mud.
We did in Athens what we should have done in Boston or Philadelphia; rode up to the best hotel, and, not being able to obtain accommodations there, rode to another; where, being again refused admittance, we were obliged to distribute ourselves into three parcels. Dr. Willet went to Mr. Hill's (of whom more anon). M. found entrance at a new hotel in the suburbs, and I betook myself to the Hotel de France. The garçon was rather bothered when I threw him a pair of old boots which I had hanging at my saddle-bow, and told him to take care of my baggage; he asked me when the rest would come up; and hardly knew what to make of me when I told him that was all I travelled with.
I was still standing in the court of the hotel, almost barefoot, and thinking of the prosperous condition of the owner of a dozen shirts, and other things conforming, when Mr. Hill came over and introduced himself; and telling me that his house was the house of every American, asked me to waive ceremony and bring my luggage over at once. This was again hitting my sore point; everybody seemed to take a special interest in my luggage, and I was obliged to tell my story more than once. I declined Mr. Hill's kind invitation, but called upon him early the next day, dined with him, and, during the whole of my stay in Athens, was in the habit, to a great extent, of making his house my home; and this, I believe, is the case with all the Americans who go there; besides which, some borrow his money, and others his clothes.
CHAPTER IV.
American Missionary School.—Visit to the School.—Mr. Hill and the Male Department.—Mrs. Hill and the Female Department.—Maid of Athens.—Letter from Mr. Hill.—Revival of Athens.—Citizens of the World.
The first thing we did in Athens was to visit the American missionary school. Among the extraordinary changes of an ever-changing world, it is not the least that the young America is at this moment paying back the debt which the world owes to the mother of science, and the citizen of a country which the wisest of the Greeks never dreamed of, is teaching the descendants of Plato and Aristotle the elements of their own tongue. I did not expect among the ruins of Athens to find anything that would particularly touch my national feelings, but it was a subject of deep and interesting reflection that, in the city which surpassed all the world in learning, where Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle taught, and Cicero went to study, the only door of instruction was that opened by the hands of American citizens, and an American missionary was the only schoolmaster; and I am ashamed to say that I was not aware of the existence of such an institution until advised of it by my friend Dr. W.
In eighteen hundred and thirty the Rev. Messrs. Hill and Robinson, with their families, sailed from this city (New-York) as the agents of the Episcopal missionary society, to found schools in Greece. They first established themselves in the Island of Tenos; but, finding that it was not the right field for their labours, employed themselves in acquiring a knowledge of the language, and of the character and habits of the modern Greeks. Their attention was directed to Athens, and in the spring of eighteen hundred and thirty-one they made a visit to that city, and were so confirmed in their impressions, that they purchased a lot of ground on which to erect edifices for a permanent establishment, and, in the mean time, rented a house for the immediate commencement of a school. They returned to Tenos for their families and effects, and again arrived at Athens about the end of June following. From the deep interest taken in their struggle for liberty, and the timely help furnished them in their hour of need, the Greeks were warmly prepossessed in favour of our countrymen; and the conduct of the missionaries themselves was so judicious, that they were received with the greatest respect and the warmest welcome by the public authorities and the whole population of Athens. Their furniture, printing-presses, and other effects were admitted free of duties; and it is but justice to them to say that, since that time, they have moved with such discretion among an excitable and suspicious people, that, while they have advanced in the great objects of their mission, they have grown in the esteem and good-will of the best and most influential inhabitants of Greece; and so great was Mr. Hill's confidence in their affections, that, though there was at that time a great political agitation, and it was apprehended that Athens might again become the scene of violence and bloodshed, he told me he had no fears, and felt perfectly sure that, in any outbreaking of popular fury, himself and family, and the property of the mission, would be respected.[1]
In the middle of the summer of their arrival at Athens, Mrs. Hill opened a school for girls in the magazine or cellar of the house in which they resided; the first day she had twenty pupils, and in two months one hundred and sixty-seven. Of the first ninety-six, not more than six could read at all, and that very imperfectly; and not more than ten or twelve knew a letter. At the time of our visit the school numbered nearly five hundred; and when we entered the large room, and the scholars all rose in a body to greet us as Americans, I felt a deep sense of regret that, personally, I had no hand in such a work, and almost envied the feelings of my companion, one of its patrons and founders. Besides teaching them gratitude to those from whose country they derived the privileges they enjoyed, Mr. Hill had wisely endeavoured to impress upon their minds a respect for the constituted authorities, particularly important in that agitated and unsettled community; and on one end of the wall, directly fronting the seats of the scholars, was printed, in large Greek characters, the text of Scripture, "Fear God, honour the king."
It was all important for the missionaries not to offend the strong prejudices of the Greeks by any attempt to withdraw the children from the religion of their fathers; and the school purports to be, and is intended for, the diffusion of elementary education only; but it is opened in the morning with prayer, concluding with the Lord's Prayer as read in our churches, which is repeated by the whole school aloud; and on Sundays, besides the prayers, the creed, and sometimes the Ten Commandments, are recited, and a chapter from the Gospels is read aloud by one of the scholars, the missionaries deeming this more expedient than to conduct the exercises themselves. The lesson for the day is always the portion appointed for the gospel of the day in their own church; and they close by singing a hymn. The room is thrown open to the public, and is frequently resorted to by the parents of the children and strangers; some coming, perhaps, says Mr. Hill, to "hear what these babblers will say," and "other some" from a suspicion that "we are setters forth of strange gods."
The boys' school is divided into three departments, the lowest under charge of a Greek qualified on the Lancasterian system. They were of all ages, from three to eighteen; and, as Mr. Hill told me, most of them had been half-clad, dirty, ragged little urchins, who, before they were put to their A, B, C, or, rather, their Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, had to be thoroughly washed, rubbed, scrubbed, doctored, and dressed, and, but for the school, would now, perhaps, be prowling vagabonds in the streets of Athens, or training for robbery in the mountains. They were a body of fine-looking boys, possessing, as Mr. Hill told me, in an extraordinary degree, all that liveliness of imagination, that curiosity and eagerness after knowledge, which distinguished the Greeks of old, retaining, under centuries of dreadful oppression, the recollection of the greatness of their fathers, and, what was particularly interesting, many of them bearing the great names so familiar in Grecian history; I shook hands with a little Miltiades, Leonidas, Aristides, &c., in features and apparent intelligence worthy descendants of the immortal men whose names they bear. And there was one who startled me, he was the son of the Maid of Athens! To me the Maid of Athens was almost an imaginary being, something fanciful, a creation of the brain, and not a corporeal substance, to have a little urchin of a boy. But so it was. The Maid of Athens is married. She had a right to marry, no doubt; and it is said that there is poetry in married life, and, doubtless, she is a much more interesting person now than the Maid of Athens at thirty-six could be; but the Maid of Athens is married to a Scotchman! the Maid of Athens is now Mrs. Black! wife of George Black. Comment is unnecessary.
But the principal and most interesting part of this missionary school was the female department, under the direction of Mrs. Hill, the first, and, except at Syra, the only school for females in all Greece, and particularly interesting to me from the fact that it owed its existence to the active benevolence of my own country-women. At the close of the Greek revolution, female education was a thing entirely unknown in Greece, and the women of all classes were in a most deplorable state of ignorance. When the strong feeling that ran through our country in favour of this struggling people had subsided, and Greece was freed from the yoke of the Mussulman, an association of ladies in the little town of Troy, perhaps instigated somewhat by an inherent love of power and extended rule, and knowing the influence of their sex in a cultivated state of society, formed the project of establishing at Athens a school exclusively for the education of females; and, humble and unpretending as was its commencement, it is becoming a more powerful instrument in the civilization and moral and religious improvement of Greece, than all that European diplomacy has ever done for her. The girls were distributed in different classes, according to their age and advancement; they had clean faces and hands, a rare thing with Greek children, and were neatly dressed, many of them wearing frocks made by ladies at home (probably at some of our sewing societies); and some of them had attained such an age, and had such fine, dark, rolling eyes as to make even a northern temperament feel the powerful influence they would soon exercise over the rising, excitable generation of Greeks and almost make him bless the hands that were directing that influence aright.
Mr. and Mrs. Hill accompanied us through the whole establishment, and, being Americans, we were everywhere looked upon and received by the girls as patrons and fathers of the school, both which characters I waived in favour of my friend; the one because he was really entitled to it, and the other because some of the girls were so well grown that I did not care to be regarded as standing in that venerable relationship. The didaskalissas, or teachers, were of this description, and they spoke English. Occasionally Mr. Hill called a little girl up to us, and told us her history, generally a melancholy one, as, being reduced to the extremity of want by the revolution; or an orphan, whose parents had been murdered by the Turks; and I had a conversation with a little Penelope, who, however, did not look as if she would play the faithful wife of Ulysses, and, if I am a judge of physiognomy, would never endure widowhood twenty years for any man.
Before we went away the whole school rose at once, and gave us a glorious finale with a Greek hymn. In a short time these girls will grow up into women and return to their several families; others will succeed them, and again go out, and every year hundreds will distribute themselves in the cities and among the fastnesses of the mountains, to exercise over their fathers, and brothers, and lovers, the influence of the education acquired here; instructed in all the arts of woman in civilized domestic life, firmly grounded in the principles of morality, and of religion purified from the follies, absurdities, and abominations of the Greek faith. I have seen much of the missionary labours in the East, but I do not know an institution which promises so surely the happiest results. If the women are educated, the men cannot remain ignorant; if the women are enlightened in religion, the men cannot remain debased and degraded Christians.
The ex-secretary Rigos was greatly affected at the appearance of this female school; and, after surveying it attentively for some moments, pointed to the Parthenon on the summit of the Acropolis, and said to Mrs. Hill, with deep emotion, "Lady, you are erecting in Athens a monument more enduring and more noble than yonder temple;" and the king was so deeply impressed with its value, that, a short time before my arrival, he proposed to Mr. Hill to take into his house girls from different districts and educate them as teachers, with the view of sending them back to their districts, there to organize new schools, and carry out the great work of female education. Mr. Hill acceded to the proposal, and the American missionary school now stands as the nucleus of a large and growing system of education in Greece; and, very opportunely for my purpose, within a few days I have received a letter from Mr. Hill, in which, in relation to the school, he says, "Our missionary establishment is much increased since you saw it; our labours are greatly increased, and I think I may say we have now reached the summit of what we had proposed to ourselves. We do not think it possible that it can be extended farther without much larger means and more personal aid. We do not wish or intend to ask for either. We have now nearly forty persons residing with us, of whom thirty-five are Greeks, all of whom are brought within the influence of the gospel; the greater part of them are young girls from different parts of Greece, and even from Egypt and Turkey (Greeks, however), whom we are preparing to become instructresses of youth hereafter in their various districts. We have five hundred, besides, under daily instruction in the different schools under our care, and we employ under us in the schools twelve native teachers, who have themselves been instructed by us. We have provided for three of our dear pupils (all of whom were living with us when you were here), who are honourably and usefully settled in life. One is married to a person every way suited to her, and both husband and wife are in our missionary service. One has charge of the government female school at the Piræus, and supports her father and mother and a large family by her salary; and the third has gone with our missionaries to Crete, to take charge of the female schools there. We have removed into our new house" (of which the foundation was just laid at the time of my visit), "and, large as it is, it is not half large enough. We are trying to raise ways and means to enlarge it considerably, that we may take more boarders under our own roof, which we look up to as the most important means of making sure of our labour; for every one who comes to reside with us is taken away from the corrupt example exhibited at home, and brought within a wholesome influence. Lady Byron has just sent us one hundred pounds toward enlarging our house with this view, and we have commenced the erection of three additional dormitories with the money."
Athens is again the capital of a kingdom. Enthusiasts see in her present condition the promise of a restoration to her ancient greatness; but reason and observation assure us that the world is too much changed for her ever to be what she has been. In one respect, her condition resembles that of her best days; for, as her fame then attracted strangers from every quarter of the world to study in her schools, so now the capital of King Otho has become a great gathering-place of wandering spirits from many near and distant regions. For ages difficult and dangerous of access, the ancient capital of the arts lay shrouded in darkness, and almost cut off from the civilized world. At long intervals, a few solitary travellers only found their way to it; but, since the revolution, it has again become a place of frequent resort and intercourse. It is true that the ancient halls of learning are still solitary and deserted, but strangers from every nation now turn hither; the scholar to roam over her classic soil, the artist to study her ancient monuments, and the adventurer to carve his way to fortune.
The first day I dined at the hotel I had an opportunity of seeing the variety of material congregated in the reviving city. We had a long table, capable of accommodating about twenty persons. The manner of living was à la carte, each guest dining when he pleased; but, by tacit consent, at about six o'clock all assembled at the table. We presented a curious medley. No two were from the same country. Our discourse was in English, French, Italian, German, Greek, Russian, Polish, and I know not what else, as if we were the very people stricken with confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. Dinner over, all fell into French, and the conversation became general. Every man present was, in the fullest sense of the term, a citizen of the world. It had been the fortune of each, whether good or bad, to break the little circle in which so many are born, revolve, and die; and the habitual mingling with people of various nations had broken down all narrow prejudices, and given to every one freedom of mind and force of character. All had seen much, had much to communicate, and felt that they had much yet to learn. By some accident, moreover, all seemed to have become particularly interested in the East. They travelled over the whole range of Eastern politics, and, to a certain extent, considered themselves identified with Eastern interests. Most of the company were or had been soldiers, and several wore uniforms and stars, or decorations of some description. They spoke of the different campaigns in Greece in which some of them had served; of the science of war; of Marlborough, Eugene, and more modern captains; and I remember that they startled my feelings of classical reverence by talking of Leonidas at Thermopylæ and Miltiades at Marathon in the same tone as of Napoleon at Leipsic and Wellington at Waterloo. One of them constructed on the table, with the knives and forks and spoons, a map of Marathon, and with a sheathed yataghan pointed out the position of the Greeks and Persians, and showed where Miltiades, as a general, was wrong. They were not blinded by the dust of antiquity. They had been knocked about till all enthusiasm and all reverence for the past were shaken out of them, and they had learned to give things their right names. A French engineer showed us the skeleton of a map of Greece, which was then preparing under the direction of the French Geographical Society, exhibiting an excess of mountains and deficiency of plain which surprised even those who had travelled over every part of the kingdom. One had just come from Constantinople, where he had seen the sultan going to mosque; another had escaped from an attack of the plague in Egypt; a third gave the dimensions of the Temple of the Sun at Baalbeck; and a fourth had been at Babylon, and seen the ruins of the Tower of Babel. In short, every man had seen something which the others had not seen, and all their knowledge was thrown into a common stock. I found myself at once among a new class of men; and I turned from him who sneered at Miltiades to him who had seen the sultan, or to him who had been at Bagdad, and listened with interest, somewhat qualified by consciousness of my own inferiority. I was lying in wait, however, and took advantage of an opportunity to throw in something about America; and, at the sound, all turned to me with an eagerness of curiosity that I had not anticipated.
In Europe, and even in England, I had often found extreme ignorance of my own country; but here I was astonished to find, among men so familiar with all parts of the Old World, such total lack of information about the New. A gentleman opposite me, wearing the uniform of the King of Bavaria, asked me if I had ever been in America. I told him that I was born, and, as they say in Kentucky, raised there. He begged my pardon, but doubtfully suggested, "You are not black?" and I was obliged to explain to him that in our section of America the Indian had almost entirely disappeared, and that his place was occupied by the descendants of the Gaul and the Briton. I was forthwith received into the fraternity, for my home was farther away than any of them had ever been; my friend opposite considered me a bijou, asked me innumerable questions, and seemed to be constantly watching for the breaking out of the cannibal spirit, as if expecting to see me bite my neighbour. At first I had felt myself rather a small affair but, before separating, l'Americain, or le sauvage, or finally, le cannibal found himself something of a lion.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Since my return home I have seen in a newspaper an account of a popular commotion at Syra, in which the printing-presses and books at the missionaries were destroyed, and Mr. Robinson was threatened with personal violence.
CHAPTER V.
Ruins of Athens.—Hill of Mars.—Temple of the Winds.—Lantern of Demosthenes.—Arch of Adrian.—Temple of Jupiter Olympus.—Temple of Theseus.—The Acropolis.—The Parthenon.—Pentelican Mountain.—Mount Hymettus.—The Piræus.—Greek Fleas.—Napoli.
The next morning I began my survey of the ruins of Athens. It was my intention to avoid any description of these localities and monuments, because so many have preceded me, stored with all necessary knowledge, ripe in taste and sound in judgment, who have devoted to them all the time and research they so richly merit; but as, in our community, through the hurry and multiplicity of business occupations, few are able to bestow upon these things much time or attention, and, farthermore, as the books which treat of them are not accessible to all, I should be doing injustice to my readers if I were to omit them altogether. Besides, I should be doing violence to my own feelings, and cannot get fairly started in Athens, without recurring to scenes which I regarded at the time with extraordinary interest. I have since visited most of the principal cities in Europe, existing as well as ruined and I hardly know any to which I recur with more satisfaction than Athens. If the reader tire in the brief reference I shall make, he must not impute it to any want of interest in the subject; and as I am not in the habit of going into heroics, he will believe me when I say that, if he have any reverence for the men or things consecrated by the respect and admiration of ages, he will find it called out at Athens. In the hope that I may be the means of inducing some of my countrymen to visit that famous city, I will add another inducement by saying that he may have, as I had, Mr. Hill for a cicerone. This gentleman is familiar with every locality and monument around or in the city, and, which I afterward found to be an unusual thing with those living in places consecrated in the minds of strangers, he retains for them all that freshness of feeling which we possess who only know them from books and pictures.
By an arrangement made the evening before, early in the morning of my second day in Athens Mr. Hill was at the door of my hotel to attend us. As we descended the steps a Greek stopped him, and, bowing with his hand on his heart, addressed him in a tone of earnestness which we could not understand; but we were struck with the sonorous tones of his voice and the musical cadence of his sentences; and when he had finished, Mr. Hill told us that he had spoken in a strain which, in the original, was poetry itself, beginning, "Americanos, I am a Stagyrite. I come from the land of Aristotle, the disciple of Plato," &c., &c.; telling him the whole story of his journey from the ancient Stagyra and his arrival in Athens; and that, having understood that Mr. Hill was distributing books among his countrymen, he begged for one to take home with him. Mr. Hill said that this was an instance of every-day occurrence, showing the spirit of inquiry and thirst for knowledge among the modern Greeks. This little scene with a countryman of Aristotle was a fit prelude to our morning ramble.
The house occupied by the American missionary as a school stands on the site of the ancient Agora or market-place, where St. Paul "disputed daily with the Athenians." A few columns still remain; and near them is an inscription mentioning the price of oil. The schoolhouse is built partly from the ruins of the Agora; and to us it was an interesting circumstance, that a missionary from a newly-discovered world was teaching to the modern Greeks the same saving religion which, eighteen hundred years ago, St. Paul, on the same spot, preached to their ancestors.
Winding around the foot of the Acropolis, within the ancient and outside the modern wall, we came to the Areopagus or Hill of Mars, where, in the early days of Athens, her judges sat in the open air; and, for many ages, decided with such wisdom and impartiality, that to this day the decisions of the court of Areopagites are regarded as models of judicial purity. We ascended this celebrated hill, and stood on the precise spot where St. Paul, pointing to the temples which rose from every section of the city and towered proudly on the Acropolis, made his celebrated address: "Ye men of Athens, I see that in all things ye are too superstitious." The ruins of the very temples to which he pointed were before our eyes.
Descending, and rising toward the summit of another hill, we came to the Pnyx, where Demosthenes, in the most stirring words that ever fell from human lips, roused his countrymen against the Macedonian invader. Above, on the very summit of the hill, is the old Pnyx, commanding a view of the sea of Salamis, and of the hill where Xerxes sat to behold the great naval battle. During the reign of the thirty tyrants the Pnyx was removed beneath the brow of the hill, excluding the view of the sea, that the orator might not inflame the passions of the people by directing their eyes to Salamis, the scene of their naval glory. But, without this, the orator had material enough; for, when he stood on the platform facing the audience, he had before him the city which the Athenians loved and the temples in which they worshipped, and I could well imagine the irresistible force of an appeal to these objects of their enthusiastic devotion, their firesides and altars. The place is admirably adapted for public speaking. The side of the hill has been worked into a gently inclined plane, semicircular in form, and supported in some places by a wall of immense stones. This plain is bounded above by the brow of the hill, cut down perpendicularly. In the centre the rock projects into a platform about eight or ten feet square, which forms the Pnyx or pulpit for the orator. The ascent is by three steps cut out of the rock, and in front is a place for the scribe or clerk. We stood on this Pnyx, beyond doubt on the same spot where Demosthenes thundered his philippics in the ears of the Athenians. On the road leading to the Museum hill we entered a chamber excavated in the rock, which tradition hallows as the prison of Socrates; and though the authority for this is doubtful, it is not uninteresting to enter the damp and gloomy cavern wherein, according to the belief of the modern Athenians, the wisest of the Greeks drew his last breath. Farther to the south is the hill of Philopappus, so called after a Roman governor of that name. On the very summit, near the extreme angle of the old wall, and one of the most conspicuous objects around Athens, is a monument erected by the Roman governor in honour of the Emperor Trajan. The marble is covered with the names of travellers, most of whom, like Philopappus himself, would never have been heard of but for that monument.
Descending toward the Acropolis, and entering the city among streets encumbered with ruined houses, we came to the Temple of the Winds, a marble octagonal tower, built by Andronicus. On each side is a sculptured figure, clothed in drapery adapted to the wind he represents; and on the top was formerly a Triton with a rod in his hand, pointing to the figure marking the wind. The Triton is gone, and great part of the temple buried under ruins. Part of the interior, however, has been excavated, and probably, before long, the whole will be restored.
East of the foot of the Acropolis, and on the way to Adrian's Gate, we came to the Lantern of Demosthenes (I eschew its new name of the Choragic Monument of Lysichus), where, according to an absurd tradition, the orator shut himself up to study the rhetorical art. It is considered one of the most beautiful monuments of antiquity, and the capitals are most elegant specimens of the Corinthian order refined by Attic taste. It is now in a mutilated condition, and its many repairs make its dilapidation more perceptible. Whether Demosthenes ever lived here or not, it derives an interest from the fact that Lord Byron made it his residence during his visit to Athens. Farther on, and forming part of the modern wall, is the Arch of Adrian, bearing on one side an inscription in Greek, "This is the city of Theseus;" and on the other, "But this is the city of Adrian." On the arrival of Otho a placard was erected, on which was inscribed, "These were the cities of Theseus and Adrian, but now of Otho." Many of the most ancient buildings in Athens have totally disappeared. The Turks destroyed many of them to construct the wall around the city, and even the modern Greeks have not scrupled to build their miserable houses with the plunder of the temples in which their ancestors worshipped.
Passing under the Arch of Adrian, outside the gate, on the plain toward the Ilissus, we came to the ruined Temple of Jupiter Olympus, perhaps once the most magnificent in the world. It was built of the purest white marble, having a front of nearly two hundred feet, and more than three hundred and fifty in length, and contained one hundred and twenty columns, sixteen of which are all that now remain; and these, fluted and having rich Corinthian capitals, tower more than sixty feet above the plain, perfect as when they were reared. I visited these ruins often, particularly in the afternoon; they are at all times mournfully beautiful, but I have seldom known anything more touching than, when the sun was setting, to walk over the marble floor, and look up at the lonely columns of this ruined temple. I cannot imagine anything more imposing than it must have been when, with its lofty roof supported by all its columns, it stood at the gate of the city, its doors wide open, inviting the Greeks to worship. That such an edifice should be erected for the worship of a heathen god! On the architrave connecting three of the columns a hermit built his lonely cell, and passed his life in that elevated solitude, accessible only to the crane and the eagle. The hermit is long since dead, but his little habitation still resists the whistling of the wind, and awakens the curiosity of the wondering traveller.
The Temple of Theseus is the last of the principal monuments, but the first which the traveller sees on entering Athens. It was built after the battle of Marathon, and in commemoration of the victory which drove the Persians from the shores of Greece. It is a small but beautiful specimen of the pure Doric, built of Pentelican marble, centuries of exposure to the open air giving it a yellowish tint, which softens the brilliancy of the white. Three Englishmen have been buried within this temple. The first time I visited it a company of Greek recruits, with some negroes among them, was drawn up in front, going through the manual under the direction of a German corporal; and, at the same time, workmen were engaged in fitting it up for the coronation of King Otho!
Temple of Jupiter Olympus and Acropolis at Athena.
These are the principal monuments around the city, and, except the temples at Pæstum, they are more worthy of admiration than all the ruins in Italy; but towering above them in position, and far exceeding them in interest, are the ruins of the Acropolis. I have since wandered among the ruined monuments of Egypt and the desolate city of Petra, but I look back with unabated reverence to the Athenian Acropolis. Every day I had gazed at it from the balcony of my hotel, and from every part of the city and suburbs. Early on my arrival I had obtained the necessary permit, paid a hurried visit, and resolved not to go again until I had examined all the other interesting objects. On the fourth day, with my friend M., I went again. We ascended by a broad road paved with stone. The summit is enclosed by a wall, of which some of the foundation stones, very large, and bearing an appearance of great antiquity, are pointed out as part of the wall built by Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, four hundred and eighty years before Christ. The rest is Venetian and Turkish, falling to decay, and marring the picturesque effect of the ruins from below. The guard examined our permit, and we passed under the gate. A magnificent propylon of the finest white marble, the blocks of the largest size ever laid by human hands, and having a wing of the same material on each side, stands at the entrance. Though broken and ruined, the world contains nothing like it even now. If my first impressions do not deceive me, the proudest portals of Egyptian temples suffer in comparison. Passing this magnificent propylon, and ascending several steps, we reached the Parthenon or ruined Temple of Minerva; an immense white marble skeleton, the noblest monument of architectural genius which the world ever saw. Standing on the steps of this temple, we had around us all that is interesting in association and all that is beautiful in art. We might well forget the capital of King Otho, and go back in imagination to the golden age of Athens. Pericles, with the illustrious throng of Grecian heroes, orators, and sages, had ascended there to worship, and Cicero and the noblest of the Romans had gone there to admire; and probably, if the fashion of modern tourists had existed in their days, we should see their names inscribed with their own hands on its walls. The great temple stands on the very summit of the Acropolis, elevated far above the Propylæa and the surrounding edifices. Its length is two hundred and eight feet, and breadth one hundred and two. At each end were two rows of eight Doric columns, thirty-four feet high and six feet in diameter, and on each side were thirteen more. The whole temple within and without was adorned with the most splendid works of art, by the first sculptors in Greece, and Phidias himself wrought the statue of the goddess, of ivory and gold, twenty-six cubits high, having on the top of her helmet a sphinx, with griffins on each of the sides; on the breast a head of Medusa wrought in ivory, and a figure of Victory about four cubits high, holding a spear in her hand and a shield lying at her feet. Until the latter part of the seventeenth century, this magnificent temple, with all its ornaments, existed entire. During the siege of Athens by the Venetians, the central part was used by the Turks as a magazine; and a bomb, aimed with fatal precision or by a not less fatal chance, reached the magazine, and, with a tremendous explosion, destroyed a great part of the buildings. Subsequently the Turks used it as a quarry, and antiquaries and travellers, foremost among whom is Lord Elgin, have contributed to destroy "what Goth, and Turk, and Time had spared."
Around the Parthenon, and covering the whole summit of the Acropolis, are strewed columns and blocks of polished white marble, the ruins of ancient temples. The remains of the Temples of Erectheus and Minerva Polias are pre-eminent in beauty; the pillars of the latter are the most perfect specimens of the Ionic in existence, and its light and graceful proportions are in elegant contrast with the severe and simple majesty of the Parthenon. The capitals of the columns are wrought and ornamented with a delicacy surpassing anything of which I could have believed marble susceptible. Once I was tempted to knock off a corner and bring it home, as a specimen of the exquisite skill of the Grecian artist, which it would have illustrated better than a volume of description; but I could not do it; it seemed nothing less than sacrilege.
Afar off, and almost lost in the distance, rises the Pentelican Mountain, from the body of which were hewed the rough rude blocks which, wrought and perfected by the sculptor's art, now stand the lofty and stately columns of the ruined temple. What labour was expended upon each single column! how many were employed in hewing it from its rocky bed, in bearing it to the foot of the mountain, transporting it across the plain of Attica, and raising it to the summit of the Acropolis! and then what time, and skill, and labour, in reducing it from a rough block to a polished shaft, in adjusting its proportions, in carving its rich capitals, and rearing it where it now stands, a model of majestic grace and beauty! Once, under the direction of Mr. Hill, I clambered up to the very apex of the pediment, and, lying down at full length, leaned over and saw under the frieze the acanthus leaf delicately and beautifully painted on the marble, and, being protected from exposure, still retaining its freshness of colouring. It was entirely out of sight from below, and had been discovered, almost at the peril of his life, by the enthusiasm of an English artist. The wind was whistling around me as I leaned over to examine it, and, until that moment, I never appreciated fully the immense labour employed and the exquisite finish displayed in every portion of the temple.
The sentimental traveller must already mourn that Athens has been selected as the capital of Greece. Already have speculators and the whole tribe of "improvers" invaded the glorious city; and while I was lingering on the steps of the Parthenon, a German, who was quietly smoking among the ruins, a sort of superintendent whom I had met before, came up, and offering me a segar, and leaning against one of the lofty columns of the temple, opened upon me with "his plans of city improvements;" with new streets, and projected railroads, and the rise of lots. At first I almost thought it personal, and that he was making a fling at me in allusion to one of the greatest hobbies of my native city; but I soon found that he was as deeply bitten as if he had been in Chicago or Dunkirk; and the way in which he talked of moneyed facilities, the wants of the community, and a great French bank then contemplated at the Piræus, would have been no discredit to some of my friends at home. The removal of the court has created a new era in Athens; but, in my mind, it is deeply to be regretted that it has been snatched from the ruin to which it was tending. Even I, deeply imbued with the utilitarian spirit of my country, and myself a quondam speculator in "up-town lots," would fain save Athens from the ruthless hand of renovation; from the building mania of modern speculators. I would have her go on till there was not a habitation among her ruins; till she stood, like Pompeii, alone in the wilderness, a sacred desert, where the traveller might sit down and meditate alone and undisturbed among the relics of the past. But already Athens has become a heterogeneous anomaly; the Greeks in their wild costume are jostled in the streets by Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians, Dutchmen, Spaniards, and Bavarians, Russians, Danes, and sometimes Americans. European shops invite purchasers by the side of Eastern bazars, coffee-houses, and billiard-rooms, and French and German restaurants are opened all over the city. Sir Pultney Malcolm has erected a house to hire near the site of Plato's Academy. Lady Franklin has bought land near the foot of Mount Hymettus for a country-seat. Several English gentlemen have done the same. Mr. Richmond, an American clergyman, has purchased a farm in the neighbourhood; and in a few years, if the "march of improvement" continues, the Temple of Theseus will be enclosed in the garden of the palace of King Otho; the Temple of the Winds will be concealed by a German opera-house, and the Lantern of Demosthenes by a row of "three-story houses."
I was not a sentimental traveller, but I visited all the localities around Athens, and, therefore, briefly mention that several times I jumped over the poetic and perennial Ilissus, trotted my horse over the ground where Aristotle walked with his peripatetics, and got muddied up to my knees in the garden of Plato.
One morning my Scotch friend and I set out early to ascend Mount Hymettus. The mountain is neither high nor picturesque, but a long flat ridge of bare rock, the sides cut up into ravines, fissures, and gullies. There is an easy path to the summit, but we had no guide, and about midday, after a wild scramble, were worn out, and descended without reaching the top, which is exceedingly fortunate for the reader, as otherwise he would be obliged to go through a description of the view therefrom.
Returning, we met the king taking his daily walk, attended by two aids, one of whom was young Marco Bozzaris. Otho is tall and thin, and, when I saw him, was dressed in a German military frockcoat and cap, and altogether, for a king, seemed to be an amiable young man enough. All the world speaks well of him, and so do I. We touched our hats to him, and he returned the civility; and what could he do more without inviting us to dinner? In old times there was a divinity about a king; but now, if a king is a gentleman, it is as much as we can expect. He has spent his money like a gentleman, that is, he cannot tell what has become of it. Two of the three-millions loan are gone, and there is no colonization, no agricultural prosperity, no opening of roads, no security in the mountains; not a town in Greece but is in ruins, and no money to improve them. Athens, however, is to be embellished. With ten thousand pounds in the treasury, he is building a palace of white Pentelican marble, to cost three hundred thousand pounds.
Otho was very popular, because, not being of age, all the errors of his administration were visited upon Count Armansbergh and the regency, who, from all accounts, richly deserved it; and it was hoped that, on receiving the crown, he would shake off the Bavarians who were preying upon the vitals of Greece, and gather around him his native-born subjects. In private life he bore a most exemplary character. He had no circle of young companions, and passed much of his time in study, being engaged, among other things, in acquiring the Greek and English languages. His position is interesting, though not enviable; and if, as the first king of emancipated Greece, he entertains recollections of her ancient greatness, and the ambition of restoring her to her position among the nations of the earth, he is doomed to disappointment. Otho is since crowned and married. The pride of the Greeks was considerably humbled by a report that their king's proposals to several daughters of German princes had been rejected; but the king had great reason to congratulate himself upon the spirit which induced the daughter of the Duke of Oldenburgh to accept his hand. From her childhood she had taken an enthusiastic interest in Greek history, and it had been her constant wish to visit Greece; and when she heard that Otho had been called to the throne, she naively expressed an ardent wish to share it with him. Several years afterward, by the merest accident, she met Otho at a German watering-place, travelling with his mother, the Queen of Bavaria, as the Count de Missilonghi; and in February last she accompanied him to Athens, to share the throne which had been the object of her youthful wish.
M. dined at my hotel, and, returning to his own, he was picked up and carried to the guardhouse. He started for his hotel without a lantern, the requisition to carry one being imperative in all the Greek and Turkish cities; the guard could not understand a word he said until he showed them some money, which made his English perfectly intelligible; and they then carried him to a Bavarian corporal, who, after two hours' detention, escorted him to his hotel. After that we were rather careful about staying out late at night.
"Thursday. I don't know the day of the month." I find this in my notes, the caption of a day of business, and at this distance of time will not undertake to correct the entry. Indeed, I am inclined to think that my notes in those days are rather uncertain and imperfect; certainly not taken with the precision of one who expected to publish them. Nevertheless, the residence of the court, the diplomatic corps, and strangers form an agreeable society at Athens. I had letters to some of the foreign ministers, but did not present them, as I was hardly presentable myself without my carpet-bag. On "Thursday," however, in company with Dr. W., I called upon Mr. Dawkins, the British minister. Mr. Dawkins went to Greece on a special mission, which he supposed would detain him six months from home, and had remained there ten years. He is a high tory, but retained under a whig administration, because his services could not well be dispensed with. He gave us much interesting information in regard to the present condition and future prospects of Greece; and, in answer to my suggestion that the United States were not represented at all in Greece, not even by a consul, he said, with emphasis, "You are better represented than any power in Europe. Mr. Hill has more influence here than any minister plenipotentiary among us." A few days after, when confined to my room by indisposition, Mr. Dawkins returned my visit, and again spoke in the same terms of high commendation of Mr. Hill. It was pleasing to me, and I have no doubt it will be so to Mr. Hill's numerous friends in this country, to know that a private American citizen, in a position that keeps him aloof from politics, was spoken of in such terms by the representative of one of the great powers of Europe. I had heard it intimated that there was a prospect of Mr. Dawkins being transferred to this country, and parted with him in the hope at some future day of seeing him the representative of his government here.
I might have been presented to the king, but my carpet-bag—Dr. W. borrowed a hat, and was presented; the doctor had an old white hat, which he had worn all the way from New-York. The tide is rolling backward; Athens is borrowing her customs from the barbarous nations of the north; and it is part of the etiquette to enter a drawing-room with a hat (a black one) under the arm. The doctor, in his republican simplicity, thought that a hat, good enough to put on his own head, was good enough to go into the king's presence; but he was advised to the contrary, and took one of Mr. Hill's, not very much too large for him. He was presented by Dr. ——, a German, the king's physician, with whom he had discoursed much of the different medical systems in Germany and America. Dr. W. was much pleased with the king. Did ever a man talk with a king who was not pleased with him? But the doctor was particularly pleased with King Otho, as the latter entered largely into discourse on the doctor's favourite theme, Mr. Hill's school, and the cause of education in Greece. Indeed, it speaks volumes in favour of the young king, that education is one of the things in which he takes the deepest interest. The day the doctor was to be presented we dined at Mr. Hill's, having made arrangements for leaving Athens that night; the doctor and M. to return to Europe. In the afternoon, while the doctor remained to be presented, M. and I walked down to the Piræus, now, as in the days of her glory, the harbour of Athens. The ancient harbour is about five miles from Athens, and was formerly joined to it by long walls built of stone of enormous size, sixty feet high, and broad enough on the top for two wagons to pass abreast. These have long since disappeared, and the road is now over a plain shaded a great part of the way by groves of olives. As usual at this time of day, we met many parties on horseback, sometimes with ladies; and I remember particularly the beautiful and accomplished daughters of Count Armansbergh, both of whom are since married and dead.[2] It is a beautiful ride, in the afternoon particularly, as then the dark outline of the mountains beyond, and the reflections of light and shade, give a peculiarly interesting effect to the ruins of the Acropolis. Toward the other end we paced between the ruins of the old walls, and entered upon a scene which reminded me of home. Eight months before there was only one house at the Piræus; but, as soon as the court removed to Athens, the old harbour revived; and already we saw long ranges of stores and warehouses, and all the hurry and bustle of one of our rising western towns. A railroad was in contemplation, and many other improvements, which have since failed; but an omnibus! that most modern and commonplace of inventions, is now running regularly between the Piræus and Athens. A friend who visited Greece six months after me brought home with him an advertisement printed in Greek, English, French, and German, the English being in the words and figures following, to wit:
"ADVERTISEMENT.
"The public are hereby informed, that on the nineteenth instant an omnibus will commence running between Athena and the Piræus, and will continue to do so every day at the undermentioned hours until farther notice.
Hours of Departure.
| From Athens. | From Piræus. | |
| Half past seven o'clock A.M. | Half past eight o'clock A.M. | |
| Ten o'clock A.M. | Eleven o'clock A.M. | |
| Two o'clock P.M. | Three o'clock P.M. | |
| Half past four P.M. | Half past five P.M. |
"The price of a seat in the omnibus is one drachme.
"Baggage, if not too bulky and heavy, can be taken on the roof.
"Smoking cannot be allowed in the omnibus, nor can dogs be admitted.
"Small parcels and packages may be sent by this conveyance at a moderate charge, and given to the care of the conducteur.
"The omnibus starts from the corner of the Hermes and Æolus streets at Athens and from the bazar at the Piræus, and will wait five minutes at each place, during which period the conducteur will sound his horn.
"Athens, 17th, 29th September, 1836."
Old things are passing away, and all things are becoming new. For a little while yet we may cling to the illusions connected with the past, but the mystery is fast dissolving, the darkness is breaking away, and Greece, and Rome, and even Egypt herself, henceforward claim our attention with objects and events of the present hour. Already they have lost much of the deep and absorbing interest with which men turned to them a generation ago. All the hallowed associations of these ancient regions are fading away. We may regret it, we may mourn over it, but we cannot help it. The world is marching onward; I have met parties of my own townsmen while walking in the silent galleries of the Coliseum; I have seen Americans drinking Champagne in an excavated dwelling of the ancient Pompeii, and I have dined with Englishmen among the ruins of Thebes, but, blessed be my fortune, I never rode in an omnibus from the Piræus to Athens.
We put our baggage on board the caique, and lounged among the little shops till dark, when we betook ourselves to a dirty little coffee-house filled with Greeks dozing and smoking pipes. We met there a boat's crew of a French man-of-war, waiting for some of the officers, who were dining with the French ambassador at Athens. One of them had been born to a better condition than that of a common sailor. One juvenile indiscretion after another had brought him down, and, without a single vice, he was fairly on the road to ruin. Once he brushed a tear from his eyes as he told us of prospects blighted by his own follies; but, rousing himself, hurried away, and his reckless laugh soon rose above the noise and clamour of his wild companions.
About ten o'clock the doctor came in, drenched with rain and up to his knees in mud. We wanted to embark immediately, but the appearance of the weather was so unfavourable that the captain preferred waiting till after midnight. The Greeks went away from the coffee-house, the proprietor fell asleep in his seat, and we extended ourselves on the tables and chairs; and now the fleas, which had been distributed about among all the loungers, made a combined onset upon us. Life has its cares and troubles, but few know that of being given up to the tender mercies of Greek fleas. We bore the infliction till human nature could endure no longer; and, at about three in the morning, in the midst of violent wind and rain, broke out of the coffee-house and went in search of our boat. It was very dark, but we found her and got on board. She was a caique, having an open deck with a small covering over the stern. Under this we crept, and with our cloaks and a sailcloth spread over us, our heated blood cooled, and we fell asleep. When we woke we were on the way to Epidaurus. The weather was raw and cold. We passed within a stone's throw of Salamis and Ægina, and at about three o'clock, turning a point which completely hid it from view, entered a beautiful little bay, on which stands the town of Epidaurus. The old city, the birthplace of Esculapius, stands upon a hill projecting into the bay, and almost forming an island. In the middle of the village is a wooden building containing a large chamber, where the Greek delegates, a band of mountain warriors, with arms in their hands, "in the name of the Greek nation, proclaimed before gods and men its independence."
At the locanda there was by chance one bed, which not being large enough for three, I slept on the floor. At seven o'clock, after a quarrel with our host and paying him about half his demand, we set out for Napoli di Romania. For about an hour we moved in the valley running off from the beautiful shore of Epidaurus; soon the valley deepened into a glen, and in an hour we turned off on a path that led into the mountains, and, riding through wild and rugged ravines, fell into the dry bed of a torrent; following which, we came to the Hieron Elios, or Sacred Grove of Esculapius. This was the great watering-place for the invalids of ancient Greece, the prototype of the Cheltenham and Saratoga of modern days. It is situated in a valley surrounded by high mountains, and was formerly enclosed by walls, within which, that the credit of the God might not be impeached, no man was allowed to die, and no woman to be delivered. Within this enclosure were temples, porticoes and fountains, now lying in ruins hardly distinguishable. The theatre is the most beautiful and best preserved. It is scooped out of the side of the mountain, rather more than semicircular in form, and containing fifty-four seats. These seats are of pink marble, about fifteen inches high and nearly three feet wide. In the middle of each seat is a groove, in which, probably, woodwork was constructed, to prevent the feet of those above from incommoding them who sat below, and also to support the backs of an invalid audience. The theatre faces the north, and is so arranged that, with the mountain towering behind it, the audience was shaded nearly all the day. It speaks volumes in favour of the intellectual character of the Greeks, that it was their favourite recreation to listen to the recitation of their poets and players. And their superiority in refinement over the Romans is in no way manifested more clearly than by the fact, that in the ruined cities of the former are found the remains of theatres, and in the latter of amphitheatres, showing the barbarous taste of the Romans for combats of gladiators and wild beasts. It was in beautiful keeping with this intellectual taste of the Greeks, that their places of assembling were in the open air, amid scenery calculated to elevate the mind; and, as I sat on the marble steps of the theatre, I could well imagine the high satisfaction with which the Greek, under the shade of the impending mountain, himself all enthusiasm and passion, rapt in the interest of some deep tragedy, would hang upon the strains of Euripides or Sophocles. What deep-drawn exclamations, what shouts of applause had rung through that solitude, what bursts of joy and grief had echoed from those silent benches! And then, too, what flirting and coqueting, the state of society at the springs in the Grove of Esculapius being probably much the same as at Saratoga in our own days. The whole grove is now a scene of desolation. The lentisculus is growing between the crevices of the broken marble; birds sing undisturbed among the bushes; the timid hare steals among the ruined fragments; and sometimes the snake is seen gliding over the marble steps.
We had expected to increase the interest of our visit by taking our noonday refection on the steps of the theatre, but it was too cold for a picnic al fresco; and, mounting our horses, about two o'clock we came in sight of Argos, on the opposite side of the great plain; and in half an hour more, turning the mountain, saw Napoli di Romania beautifully situated on a gentle elevation on the shore of the gulf. The scenery in every direction around Napoli is exceedingly beautiful; and, when we approached it, bore no marks of the sanguinary scenes of the late revolution. The plain was better cultivated than any part of the adjacent country; and the city contained long ranges of houses and streets, with German names, such as Heidecker, Maurer-street, &c., and was seemingly better regulated than any other city in Greece. We drove up to the Hotel des Quatre Nations, the best we had found in Greece, dined at a restaurant with a crowd of Bavarian officers and adventurers, and passed the evening in the streets and coffee-houses.
The appearance of Otho-street, which is the principal, is very respectable; it runs from what was the palace to the grand square or esplanade, on one side of which are the barracks of the Bavarian soldiers, with a park of artillery posted so as to sweep the square and principal streets; a speaking comment upon the liberty of the Greeks, and the confidence reposed in them by the government.
Everything in Napoli recalls the memory of the brief and unfortunate career of Capo d'Istria. Its recovery from the horrors of barbarian war, and the thriving appearance of the country around, are ascribed to the impulse given by his administration. A Greek by birth, while his country lay groaning under the Ottoman yoke he entered the Russian service, distinguished himself in all the diplomatic correspondence during the French invasion, was invested with various high offices and honours, and subscribed the treaty of Paris in 1815 as imperial Russian plenipotentiary. He withdrew from her service because Russia disapproved the efforts of his countrymen to free themselves from the Turkish yoke; and, after passing five years in Germany and Switzerland, chiefly at Geneva, in 1827 he was called to the presidency of Greece. On his arrival at Napoli amid the miseries of war and anarchy, he was received by the whole people as the only man capable of saving their country. Civil war ceased on the very day of his arrival, and the traitor Grievas placed in his hands the key of the Palimethe. I shall not enter into any speculations upon the character of his administration. The rank he had attained in a foreign service is conclusive evidence of his talents, and his withdrawal from that service for the reason stated is as conclusive of his patriotism; but from the moment he took into his hands the reins of government, he was assailed by every so-called liberal press in Europe with the party cry of Russian influence. The Greeks were induced to believe that he intended to sell them to a stranger; and Capo d'Istria, strong in his own integrity, and confidently relying on the fidelity and gratitude of his countrymen, was assassinated in the streets on his way to mass. Young Mauromichalis, the son of the old Bey of Maina, struck the fatal blow, and fled for refuge to the house of the French ambassador. A gentleman attached to the French legation told me that he himself opened the door when the murderer rushed in with the bloody dagger in his hand, exclaiming, "I have killed the tyrant." He was not more than twenty-one, tall and noble in his appearance, and animated by the enthusiastic belief that he had delivered his country. My informant told me that he barred all the doors and windows, and went up stairs to inform the minister, who had not yet risen. The latter was embarrassed and in doubt what he should do. A large crowd gathered round the house; but, as yet, they were all Mauromichalis's friends. The young enthusiast spoke of what he had done with a high feeling of patriotism and pride; and while the clamour out of doors was becoming outrageous, he ate his breakfast and smoked his pipe with the utmost composure. He remained at the embassy more than two hours, and until the regular troops drew up before the house. The French ambassador, though he at first refused, was obliged to deliver him up; and my informant saw him shot under a tree outside the gate of Napoli, dying gallantly in the firm conviction that he had played the Brutus and freed his country from a Cæsar.
The fate of Capo d'Istria again darkened the prospects of Greece, and the throne went begging for an occupant until it was accepted by the King of Bavaria for his second son Otho. The young monarch arrived at Napoli in February, eighteen hundred and thirty-three. The whole population came out to meet him, and the Grecian youth ran breast deep in the water to touch his barge as it approached the shore. In February, eighteen hundred and thirty-four, it was decided to establish Athens as the capital. The propriety of this removal has been seriously questioned, for Napoli possessed advantages in her location, harbour, fortress and a town already built; but the King of Bavaria, a scholar and an antiquary, was influenced more, perhaps, by classical feeling than by regard for the best interests of Greece. Napoli has received a severe blow from the removal of the seat of government; still it was by far the most European in its appearance of any city I had seen in Greece. It had several restaurants and coffee-houses, which were thronged all the evening with Bavarian officers and broken-down European adventurers, discussing the internal affairs of that unfortunate country, which men of every nation seemed to think they had a right to assist in governing. Napoli had always been the great gathering-place of the phil-Hellenists, and many appropriating to themselves that sacred name were hanging round it still. All over Europe thousands of men are trained up to be shot at for so much per day; the soldier's is as regular a business as that of the lawyer or merchant, and there is always a large class of turbulent spirits constantly on the look-out for opportunities, and ever ready with their swords to carve their way to fortune. I believe that there were men who embarked in the cause of Greece with as high and noble purposes as ever animated the warrior; but of many, there is no lack of charity in saying that, however good they might be as fighters, they were not much as men; and I am sorry to add that, from the accounts I heard in Greece, some of the American phil-Hellenists were rather shabby fellows. Mr. M., then resident in Napoli, was accosted one day in the streets by a young man, who asked him where he could find General Jarvis. "What do you want with him?" said Mr. M. "I hope to obtain a commission in his army." "Do you see that dirty fellow yonder?" said Mr. M., pointing to a ragged patriot passing at the moment; "well, twenty such fellows compose Jarvis's army, and Jarvis himself is no better off." "Well, then," said the young American, "I believe I'll join the Turks!" Allen, another American patriot, was hung at Constantinople. One bore the sacred name of Washington; a brave but unprincipled man. Mr. M. had heard him say, that if the devil himself should raise a regiment and would give him a good commission, he would willingly march under him. He was struck by a shot from the fortress of Napoli while directing a battery against it; was taken on board his Britannic majesty's ship Asia, and breathed his last uttering curses on his country.
There were others, however, who redeemed the American character. The agents sent out by the Greek committee (among them our townsmen, Messrs. Post and Stuyvesant), under circumstances of extraordinary difficulty fulfilled the charitable purposes of their mission with such zeal and discretion as to relieve the wants of a famishing people, and secure the undying gratitude of the Greeks. Dr. Russ, another of the agents, established an American hospital at Poros, and, under the most severe privations, devoted himself gratuitously to attendance upon the sick and wounded. Dr. Howe, one of the earliest American phil-Hellenists, in the darkest hour of the revolution, and at a time when the Greeks were entirely destitute of all medical aid, with an honourable enthusiasm, and without any hope of pecuniary reward, entered the service as surgeon, was the fellow-labourer of Dr. Russ in establishing the American hospital, and, at the peril of his life, remained with them during almost the whole of their dreadful struggle. Colonel Miller, the principal agent, now resident in Vermont, besides faithfully performing the duties of his trust, entered the army, and conducted himself with such distinguished gallantry that he was called by the Greek braves the American Delhi, or Daredevil.[3]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] They married two brothers, the young princes Cantacuzenes. Some scruples being raised against this double alliance on the score of consanguinity, the difficulty was removed by each couple going to separate churches with separate priests to pronounce the mystic words at precisely the same moment; so that neither could be said to espouse his sister-in-law.
[3] In the previous editions of his work, the author's remarks were so general as to reflect upon the character of individuals who stand in our community above reproach. The author regrets that the carelessness of his expressions should have wounded where he never intended, and hopes the gentlemen affected will do him the justice to believe that he would not wantonly injure any man's character or feelings.
CHAPTER VI.
Argos.—Tomb of Agamemnon.—Mycenæ.— Gate of the Lions.—A Misfortune.—A Midnight Quarrel.—Gratitude of a Greek Family.—Megara.
In the morning, finding a difficulty in procuring horses, some of the loungers about the hotel told us there was a carriage in Napoli, and we ordered it to be brought out, and soon after saw moving majestically down the principal street a bella carozza, imported by its enterprising proprietor from the Strada Toledo at Naples. It was painted a bright flaring yellow, and had a big breeched Albanian for coachman. While preparing to embark, a Greek came up with two horses, and we discharged the bella carozza. My companion hired the horses for Padras, and I threw my cloak on one of them and followed on foot.
The plain of Argos is one of the most beautiful I ever saw. On every side except toward the sea it is bounded by mountains, and the contrast between these mountains, the plain, and the sea is strikingly beautiful. The sun was beating upon it with intense heat; the labourers were almost naked, or in several places lying asleep on the ground, while the tops of the mountains were covered with snow. I walked across the whole plain, being only six miles, to Argos. This ancient city is long since in ruins; her thirty temples, her costly sepulchres, her gymnasium, and her numerous and magnificent monuments and statues have disappeared, and the only traces of her former greatness are some remains of her Cyclopean walls, and a ruined theatre cut in the rock and of magnificent proportions. Modern Argos is nothing more than a straggling village. Mr. Riggs, an American missionary, was stationed there, but was at that time at Athens with an invalid wife. I was still on foot, and wandered up and down the principal street looking for a horse. Every Greek in Argos soon knew my business, and all kinds of four-legged animals were brought to me at exorbitant prices. When I was poring over the Iliad I little thought that I should ever visit Argos; still less that I should create a sensation in the ancient city of the Danai; but man little knows for what he is reserved.
Argos has been so often visited that Homer is out of date. Every middy from a Mediterranean cruiser has danced on the steps of her desolate theatre, and, instead of busying myself with her ancient glories, I roused half the population in hiring a horse. In fact, in this ancient city I soon became the centre of a regular horsemarket. Every rascally jockey swore that his horse was the best, and, according to the descendants of the respectable sons of Atreus, blindness, lameness, spavin, and staggers were a recommendation. A Bavarian officer, whom I had met in the bazars, came to my assistance, and stood by me while I made my bargain. I had more regard to the guide than the horse; and picking out one who had been particularly noisy, hired him to conduct me to Corinth and Athens. He was a lad of about twenty, with a bright sparkling eye, who, laughing roguishly at his unsuccessful competitors, wanted to pitch me at once on the horse and be off. I joined my companions, and in a few minutes we left Argos.
The plain of Argos has been immortalized by poetic genius as the great gathering-place of the kings and armies that assembled for the siege of Troy. To the scholar and poet few plains in the world are more interesting. It carries him back to the heroic ages, to the history of times bordering on the fabulous, when fact and fiction are so beautifully blended that we would not separate them if we could. I had but a little while longer to remain with my friends, for we were approaching the point where our roads separated, and about eleven o'clock we halted and exchanged our farewell greetings. We parted in the middle of the plain, they to return to Padras and Europe, and I for the tomb of Agamemnon, and back to Athens, and I hardly know where besides. Dr. W. I did not meet again until my return home. About a year afterward I arrived in Antwerp in the evening from Rotterdam. The city was filled with strangers, and I was denied admission at a third hotel, when a young man brushed by me in the doorway, and I recognised Maxwell. I hailed him, but in cap and cloak, and with a large red shawl around my neck, he did not know me. I unrolled and discovered myself, and it is needless to say that I did not leave the hotel that night. It was his very last day of two years' travel on the Continent; he had taken his passage in the steamer for London, and one day later I should have missed him altogether. I can give but a faint idea of the pleasure of this meeting. He gave me the first information of the whereabout of Dr. W.; we talked nearly all night, and about noon the next day I again bade him farewell on board the steamer.
I have for some time neglected our servant. When we separated, the question was who should not keep him. We were all heartily tired of him, and I would not have had him with me on any account. Still, at the moment of parting in that wild and distant region, never expecting to see him again, I felt some slight leaning toward him. Touching the matter of shirts, it will not be surprising to a man of the world that, at the moment of parting, I had one of M.'s on my back; and, in justice to him, I must say it was a very good one, and lasted a long time. A friend once wrote to me on a like occasion not to wear his out of its turn, but M. laid no such restriction upon me. But this trifling gain did not indemnify me for the loss of my friends. I had broken the only link that connected me with home, and was setting out alone for I knew not where. I felt at once the great loss I had sustained, for my young muleteer could speak only his own language, and, as Queen Elizabeth said to Sir Walter Raleigh of her Hebrew, we had "forgotten our" Greek.
But on that classical soil I ought not to have been lonely. I should have conjured up the ghosts of the departed Atridæ, and held converse on their own ground with Homer's heroes. Nevertheless, I was not in the mood; and, entirely forgetting the glories of the past, I started my horse into a gallop. My companion followed on a full run, close at my heels, belabouring my horse with a stick, which when he broke, he pelted him with stones; indeed, this mode of scampering over the ground seemed to hit his humour, for he shouted, hurraed, and whipped, and sometimes laying hold of the tail of the beast, was dragged along several paces with little effort of his own. I soon tired of this, and made signs to him to stop; but it was his turn now, and I was obliged to lean back till I reached him with my cane before I could make him let go his hold, and then he commenced shouting and pelting again with stones.
In this way we approached the village of Krabata, about a mile below the ruins of Mycenæ, and the most miserable place I had seen in Greece. With the fertile plain of Argos uncultivated before them, the inhabitants exhibited a melancholy picture of the most abject poverty. As I rode through, crowds beset me with outstretched arms imploring charity; and a miserable old woman, darting out of a wretched hovel, laid her gaunt and bony hand upon my leg, and attempted to stop me. I shrunk from her grasp, and, under the effect of a sudden impulse, threw myself off on the other side, and left my horse in her hands.
Hurrying through the village, a group of boys ran before me, crying out "Agamemnon," "Agamemnon." I followed, and they conducted me to the tomb of "the king of kings," a gigantic structure, still in good preservation, of a conical form, covered with turf; the stone over the door is twenty-seven feet long and seventeen wide, larger than any hewn stone in the world except Pompey's Pillar. I entered, my young guides going before with torches, and walked within and around this ancient sepulchre. A worthy Dutchman, Herman Van Creutzer, has broached a theory that the Trojan war is a mere allegory, and that no such person as Agamemnon ever existed. Shame upon the cold-blooded heretic. I have my own sins to answer for in that way, for I have laid my destroying hand upon many cherished illusions; but I would not, if I could, destroy the mystery that overhangs the heroic ages. The royal sepulchre was forsaken and empty; the shepherd drives within it his flock for shelter; the traveller sits under its shade to his noonday meal; and, at the moment, a goat was dozing quietly in one corner. He started as I entered, and seemed to regard me as an intruder; and when I flared before him the light of my torch, he rose up to butt me. I turned away and left him in quiet possession. The boys were waiting outside, and crying "Mycenæ," "Mycenæ," led me away. All was solitude, and I saw no marks of a city until I reached the relics of her Cyclopean walls. I never felt a greater degree of reverence than when I approached the lonely ruins of Mycenæ. At Argos I spent most of my time in the horsemarket, and I had galloped over the great plain as carelessly as if it had been the road to Harlem; but all the associations connected with this most interesting ground here pressed upon me at once. Its extraordinary antiquity, its gigantic remains, and its utter and long-continued desolation, came home to my heart. I moved on to the Gate of the Lions, and stood before it a long time without entering. A broad street led to it between two immense parallel walls; and this street may, perhaps, have been a market-place. Over the gate are two lions rampant, like the supporters of a modern coat-of-arms, rudely carved, and supposed to be the oldest sculptured stone in Greece. Under this very gate Agamemnon led out his forces for the siege of Troy; three thousand years ago he saw them filing before him, glittering in brass, in all the pomp and panoply of war; and I held in my hand a book which told me that this city was so old that, more than seventeen hundred years ago, travellers came as I did to visit its ruins; and that Pausanias had found the Gate of the Lions in the same state in which I beheld it now. A great part is buried by the rubbish of the fallen city. I crawled under, and found myself within the walls, and then mounted to the height on which the city stood. It was covered with a thick soil and a rich carpet of grass. My boys left me, and I was alone. I walked all over it, following the line of the walls. I paused at the great blocks of stone, the remnants of Cyclopic masonry, the work of wandering giants. The heavens were unclouded, and the sun was beaming upon it with genial warmth. Nothing could exceed the quiet beauty of the scene. I became entangled in the long grass, and picked up wild flowers growing over long-buried dwellings. Under it are immense caverns, their uses now unknown; and the earth sounded hollow under my feet, as if I were treading on the sepulchre of a buried city. I looked across the plain to Argos; all was as beautiful as when Homer sang its praises; the plain, and the mountains, and the sea were the same, but the once magnificent city, her numerous statues and gigantic temples, were gone for ever; and but a few remains were left to tell the passing traveller the story of her fallen greatness. I could have remained there for hours; I could have gone again and again, for I had not found a more interesting spot in Greece; but my reveries were disturbed by the appearance of my muleteer and my juvenile escort. They pointed to the sun as an intimation that the day was passing; and crying "Cavallo," "Cavallo," hurried me away. To them the ruined city was a playground; they followed capering behind; and, in descending, three or four of them rolled down upon me; they hurried me through the Gate of the Lions, and I came out with my pantaloons, my only pantaloons, rent across the knee almost irreparably. In an instant I was another man; I railed at the ruins for their strain upon wearing apparel, and bemoaned my unhappy lot in not having with me a needle and thread. I looked up to the old gate with a sneer. This was the city that Homer had made such a noise about; a man could stand on the citadel and almost throw a stone beyond the boundary-line of Agamemnon's kingdom. In full sight, and just at the other side of the plain, was the kingdom of Argos. The little state of Rhode Island would make a bigger kingdom than both of them together.
But I had no time for deep meditation, having a long journey to Corinth before me. Fortunately, my young Greek had no tire in him; he started me off on a gallop, whipping and pelting my horse with stones, and would have hurried me on, over rough and smooth, till either he, or I, or the horse broke down, if I had not jumped off and walked. As soon as I dismounted he mounted, and then he moved so leisurely that I had to hurry him on in turn. In this way we approached the range of mountains separating the plain of Argos from the Isthmus of Corinth. Entering the pass, we rode along a mountain torrent, of which the channel-bed was then dry, and ascended to the summit of the first range. Looking back, the scene was magnificent. On my right and left were the ruined heights of Argos and Mycenæ; before me, the towering Acropolis of Napoli di Romania; at my feet, the rich plain of Argos, extending to the shore of the sea; and beyond, the island-studded Ægean. I turned away with a feeling of regret that, in all probability, I should never see it more.
I moved on, and in a narrow pass, not wide enough to turn my horse if I had been disposed to take to my heels, three men rose up from behind a rock, armed to the teeth with long guns, pistols, yataghans, and sheepskin cloaks—the dress of the klept or mountain robber—and altogether presenting a most diabolically cutthroat appearance. If they had asked me for my purse I should have considered it all regular, and given up the remnant of my stock of borrowed money without a murmur; but I was relieved from immediate apprehension by the cry of passe porta. King Otho has begun the benefits of civilized government in Greece by introducing passports, and mountain warriors were stationed in the different passes to examine strangers. They acted, however, as if they were more used to demanding purses than passports, for they sprang into the road and rattled the butts of their guns on the rock with a violence that was somewhat startling. Unluckily, my passport had been made out with those of my companions, and was in their possession, and when we parted neither thought of it; and this demand to me, who had nothing to lose, was worse than that of my purse. A few words of explanation might have relieved me from all difficulty, but my friends could not understand a word I said. I was vexed at the idea of being sent back, and thought I would try the effect of a little impudence; so, crying out "Americanos," I attempted to pass on; but they answered me "Nix," and turned my horse's head toward Argos. The scene, which a few moments before had seemed so beautiful, was now perfectly detestable. Finding that bravado had not the desired effect, I lowered my tone and tried a bribe; this was touching the right chord; half a dollar removed all suspicions from the minds of these trusty guardians of the pass; and, released from their attentions, I hurried on.
The whole road across the mountain is one of the wildest in Greece. It is cut up by numerous ravines, sufficiently deep and dangerous, which at every step threaten destruction to the incautious traveller. During the late revolution the soil of Greece had been drenched with blood; and my whole journey had been through cities and over battle-fields memorable for scenes of slaughter unparalleled in the annals of modern war. In the narrowest pass of the mountains my guide made gestures indicating that it had been the scene of a desperate battle. When the Turks, having penetrated to the plain of Argos, were compelled to fall back again upon Corinth, a small band of Greeks, under Niketas and Demetrius Ypsilanti, waylaid them in this pass. Concealing themselves behind the rocks, and waiting till the pass was filled, all at once they opened a tremendous fire upon the solid column below, and the pass was instantly filled with slain. Six thousand were cut down in a few hours. The terrified survivers recoiled for a moment; but, as if impelled by an invisible power, rushed on to meet their fate. "The Mussulman rode into the passes with his sabre in his sheath and his hands before his eyes, the victim of destiny." The Greeks again poured upon them a shower of lead, and several thousand more were cut down before the Moslem army accomplished the passage of this terrible defile.
It was nearly dark when we rose to the summit of the last range of mountains, and saw, under the rich lustre of the setting sun, the Acropolis of Corinth, with its walls and turrets, towering to the sky, the plain forming the Isthmus of Corinth; the dark, quiet waters of the Gulf of Lepanto; and the gloomy mountains of Cithæron, and Helicon, and Parnassus covered with snow. It was after dark when we passed the region of the Nemean Grove, celebrated as the haunt of the lion and the scene of the first of the twelve labours of Hercules. We were yet three hours from Corinth; and, if the old lion had still been prowling in the grove, we could not have made more haste to escape its gloomy solitude. Reaching the plain, we heard behind us the clattering of horses' hoofs, at first sounding in the stillness of evening as if a regiment of cavalry or a troop of banditti was at our heels, but it proved to be only a single traveller, belated like ourselves, and hurrying on to Corinth. I could see through the darkness the shining butts of his pistols and hilt of his yataghan, and took his dimensions with more anxiety, perhaps, than exactitude. He recognised my Frank dress; and accosted me in bad Italian, which he had picked up at Padras (being just the Italian in which I could meet him on equal ground), and told me that he had met a party of Franks on the road to Padras, whom, from his description, I recognised as my friends.
It was nearly midnight when we rattled up to the gate of the old locanda. The yard was thronged with horses and baggage, and Greek and Bavarian soldiers. On the balcony stood my old brigand host, completely crestfallen, and literally turned out of doors in his own house; a detachment of Bavarian soldiers had arrived that afternoon from Padras, and taken entire possession, giving him and his wife the freedom of the outside. He did not recognise me, and, taking me for an Englishman, began, "Sono Inglesi Signor" (he had lived at Corfu under the British dominion); and, telling me the whole particulars of his unceremonious ouster, claimed, through me, the arm of the British government to resent the injury to a British subject; his wife was walking about in no very gentle mood, but, in truth, very much the contrary. I did not speak to her, and she did not trust herself to speak to me; but, addressing myself to the husband, introduced the subject of my own immediate wants, a supper and night's lodging. The landlord told me, however, that the Bavarians had eaten everything in the house, and he had not a room, bed, blanket, or coverlet to give me; that I might lie down in the hall or the piazza, but there was no other place.
I was outrageous at the hard treatment he had received from the Bavarians. It was too bad to turn an honest innkeeper out of his house, and deny him the pleasure of accommodating a traveller who had toiled hard all day, with the perfect assurance of finding a bed at night. I saw, however, that there was no help for it; and noticing an opening at one end of the hall, went into a sort of storeroom filled with all kinds of rubbish, particularly old barrels. An unhinged door was leaning against the wall, and this I laid across two of the barrels, pulled off my coat and waistcoat, and on this extemporaneous couch went to sleep.
I was roused from my first nap by a terrible fall against my door. I sprang up; the moon was shining through the broken casement, and, seizing a billet of wood, I waited another attack. In the mean time I heard the noise of a violent scuffling on the floor of the hall, and, high above all, the voices of husband and wife, his evidently coming from the floor in a deprecating tone, and hers in a high towering passion, and enforced with severe blows of a stick. As soon as I was fairly awake I saw through the thing at once. It was only a little matrimonial tête-à-tête. The unamiable humour in which I had left them against the Bavarians had ripened into a private quarrel between themselves, and she had got him down, and was pummelling him with a broomstick or something of that kind. It seemed natural and right enough, and was, moreover, no business of mine; and remembering that whoever interferes between man and wife is sure to have both against him, I kept quiet. Others, however, were not so considerate, and the occupants of the different rooms tumbled into the hall in every variety of fancy night-gear, among whom was one whose only clothing was a military coat and cap, with a sword in his hand. When the hubbub was at its highest I looked out, and found, as I expected, the husband and wife standing side by side, she still brandishing the stick, and both apparently outrageous at everything and everybody around them. I congratulated myself upon my superior knowledge of human nature, and went back to my bed on the door.
In the morning I was greatly surprised to find that, instead of whipping her husband, she had been taking his part. Two German soldiers, already half intoxicated, had come into the hall, and insisted upon having more wine; the host refused, and when they moved toward my sleeping place, where the wine was kept, he interposed, and all came down together with the noise which had woke me. His wife came to his aid, and the blows which, in my simplicity, I had supposed to be falling upon him, were bestowed on the two Bavarians. She told me the story herself; and when she complained to the officers, they had capped the climax of her passion by telling her that her husband deserved more than he got. She was still in a perfect fury; and as she looked at them in the yard arranging for their departure, she added, in broken English, with deep and, as I thought, ominous passion, "'Twas better to be under the Turks."
I learned all this while I was making my toilet on the piazza, that is, while she was pouring water on my hands for me to wash; and, just as I had finished, my eye fell upon my muleteer assisting the soldiers in loading their horses. At first I did not notice the subdued expression of his usually bright face, nor that he was loading my horse with some of their camp equipage; but all at once it struck me that they were pressing him into their service. I was already roused by what the woman had told me, and, resolving that they should not serve me as they did the Greeks, I sprang off the piazza, cleared my way through the crowd, and going up to my horse, already staggering under a burden poised on his back, but not yet fastened, put my hand under one side and tumbled it over with a crash on the other. The soldiers cried out furiously; and, while they were sputtering German at me, I sprang into the saddle. I was in admirable pugilistic condition, with nothing on but pantaloons, boots, and shirt, and just in a humour to get a whipping, if nothing worse; but I detested the manner in which the Bavarians lorded it in Greece; and riding up to a group of officers who were staring at me, told them that I had just tumbled their luggage off my horse, and they must bear in mind that they could not deal with strangers quite so arbitrarily as they did with the Greeks. The commandant was disposed to be indignant and very magnificent; but some of the others making suggestions to him, he said he understood I had only hired my horse as far as Corinth; but, if I had taken him for Athens, he would not interfere; and, apologizing on the ground of the necessities of government, ordered him to be released. I apologized back again, returned the horse to my guide, whose eyes sparkled with pleasure, and went in for my hat and coat.
I dressed myself, and, telling him to be ready when I had finished my breakfast, went out expecting to start forthwith; but, to my surprise, my host told me that the lad refused to go any farther without an increase of pay; and, sure enough, there he stood, making no preparation for moving. The cavalcade of soldiers had gone, and taken with them every horse in Corinth, and the young rascal intended to take advantage of my necessity. I told him that I had hired him to Athens for such a price, and that I had saved him from impressment, and consequent loss of wages, by the soldiers, which he admitted. I added that he was a young rascal, which he neither admitted nor denied, but answered with a roguish laugh. The extra price was no object compared with the vexation of a day's detention; but a traveller is apt to think that all the world is conspiring to impose upon him, and, at times, to be very resolute in resisting. I was peculiarly so then, and, after a few words, set off to complain to the head of the police. Without any ado he trotted along with me, and we proceeded together, followed by a troup of idlers, I in something of a passion, he perfectly cool, good-natured, and considerate, merely keeping out of the way of my stick. Hurrying along near the columns of the old temple, I stumbled, and he sprang forward to assist me, his face expressing great interest, and a fear that I had hurt myself; and when I walked toward a house which I had mistaken for the bureau of the police department, he ran after me to direct me right. All this mollified me considerably; and, before we reached the door, the affair began to strike me as rather ludicrous.
I stated my case, however, to the eparchos, a Greek in Frank dress, who spoke French with great facility, and treated me with the greatest consideration. He was so full of professions that I felt quite sure of a decision in my favour; but, assuming my story to be true, and without asking the lad for his excuse, he shrugged his shoulders, and said it would take time to examine the matter, and, if I was in a hurry, I had better submit. To be sure, he said, the fellow was a great rogue, and he gave his countrymen in general a character that would not tell well in print; but added, in their justification, that they were imposed upon and oppressed by everybody, and therefore considered that they had a right to take their advantage whenever an opportunity offered. The young man sat down on the floor, and looked at me with the most frank, honest, and open expression, as if perfectly unconscious that he was doing anything wrong. I could not but acknowledge that some excuse for him was to be drawn from the nature of the school in which he had been brought up, and, after a little parley, agreed to pay him the additional price, if, at the end of the journey, I was satisfied with his conduct. This was enough; his face brightened, he sprang up and took my hand, and we left the house the best friends in the world. He seemed to be hurt as well as surprised at my finding fault with him, for to him all seemed perfectly natural; and, to seal the reconciliation, he hurried on ahead, and had the horse ready when I reached the locanda. I took leave of my host with a better feeling than before, and set out a second time on the road to Athens.
At Kalamaki, while walking along the shore, a Greek who spoke the lingua Franca came from on board one of the little caiques, and, when he learned that I was an American, described to me the scene that had taken place on that beach upon the arrival of provisions from America; when thousands of miserable beings who had fled from the blaze of their dwellings, and lived for months upon plants and roots; grayheaded men, mothers with infants at their breasts, emaciated with hunger and almost frantic with despair, came down from their mountain retreats to receive the welcome relief. He might well remember the scene, for he had been one of that starving people; and he took me to his house, and showed me his wife and four children, now nearly all grown, telling me that they had all been rescued from death by the generosity of my countrymen. I do not know why, but in those countries it did not seem unmanly for a bearded and whiskered man to weep; I felt anything but contempt for him when, with his heart overflowing and his eyes filled with tears, he told me, when I returned home, to say to my countrymen that I had seen and talked with a recipient of their bounty; and though the Greeks might never repay us, they could never forget what we had done for them. I remembered the excitement in our country in their behalf, in colleges and schools, from the graybearded senator to the prattling schoolboy, and reflected that, perhaps, my mite, cast carelessly upon the waters, had saved from the extremity of misery this grateful family. I wish that the cold-blooded prudence which would have checked our honest enthusiasm in favour of a people, under calamities and horrors worse than ever fell to the lot of man struggling to be free, could have listened to the gratitude of this Greek family. With deep interest I bade them farewell, and, telling my guide to follow with my horse, walked over to the foot of the mountain.
Ascending, I saw in one of the openings of the road a packhorse and a soldier in the Bavarian uniform, and, hoping to find some one to talk with, I hailed him. He was on the top of the mountain, so far off that he did not hear me; and when, with the help of my Greek, I had succeeded in gaining his attention, he looked for some time without being able to see me. When he did, however, he waited; but, to my no small disappointment, he answered my first question with the odious "Nix." We tried each other in two or three dialects; but, finding it of no use, I sat down to rest, and he, for courtesy, joined me; my young Greek, in the spirit of good-fellowship, doing the same. He was a tall, noble-looking fellow, and, like myself, a stranger in Greece; and, though we could not say so, it was understood that we were glad to meet and travel together as comrades. The tongue causes more evils than the sword; and, as we were debarred the use of this mischievous member, and walked all day side by side, seldom three paces apart, before night we were sworn friends.
About five o'clock in the afternoon we arrived at Megara. A group of Bavarian soldiers was lounging round the door of the khan, who welcomed their expected comrade and me as his companion. My friend left me, and soon returned with the compliments of the commandant, and an invitation to visit him in the evening. I had, however, accepted a prior invitation from the soldiers for a rendezvous in the locanda. I wandered till dark among the ruined houses of the town, thought of Euclid and Alexander the Great, and returning, went up to the same room in which I had slept with my friends, pored over an old map of Greece hanging on the wall, made a few notes, and throwing myself back on a sort of divan, while thinking what I should do fell asleep.
About ten o'clock I was roused by the loud roar of a chorus, not like a sudden burst, but a thing that seemed to have swelled up to that point by degrees; and rubbing my eyes, and stumbling down stairs, I entered the banqueting hall; a long, rough wooden table extended the whole length of the room, supplied with only two articles, wine-flagons and tobacco-pouches; forty or fifty soldiers were sitting round it, smoking pipes and singing with all their souls, and, at the moment I entered, waving their pipes to the dying cadence of a hunting chorus. Then followed a long thump on the table, and they all rose; my long travelling friend, with a young soldier who spoke a little French, came up, and, escorting me to the head of the table, gave me a seat by the side of the chairman. One of them attempted to administer a cup of wine, and the other thrust at me the end of a pipe, and I should have been obliged to kick and abscond but for the relief afforded me by the entrance of another new-comer. This was no other than the corporal's wife; and if I had been received warmly, she was greeted with enthusiasm. Half the table sprang forward to escort her, two of them collared the president and hauled him off his seat, and the whole company, by acclamation, installed her in his place. She accepted it without any hesitation, while two of them, with clumsy courtesy, took off her bonnet, which I, sitting at her right hand, took charge of. All then resumed their places, and the revel went on more gayly than ever. The lady president was about thirty, plainly but neatly dressed, and, though not handsome, had a frank, amiable, and good-tempered expression, indicating that greatest of woman's attributes, a good heart. In fact, she looked what the young man at my side told me she was, the peacemaker of the regiment; and he added, that they always tried to have her at their convivial meetings, for when she was among them the brawling spirits were kept down, and every man would be ashamed to quarrel in her presence. There was no chivalry, no heroic devotion about them, but their manner toward her was as speaking a tribute as was ever paid to the influence of woman; and I question whether beauty in her bower, surrounded by belted knights and barons bold, ever exercised in her more exalted sphere a more happy influence. I talked with her, and with the utmost simplicity she told me that the soldiers all loved her; that they were all kind to her, and she looked upon them all as brothers. We broke up at about twelve o'clock with a song, requiring each person to take the hand of his neighbour; one of her hands fell to me, and I took it with a respect seldom surpassed in touching the hand of woman; for I felt that she was cheering the rough path of a soldier's life, and, among scenes calculated to harden the heart, reminding them of mothers, and sisters, and sweethearts at home.
CHAPTER VII.
A Dreary Funeral.—Marathon.—Mount Pentelicus.—A Mystery.—Woes of a Lover.—Reveries of Glory.—Scio's Rocky Isle.—A blood-stained Page of History.—A Greek Prelate.—Desolation.—The Exile's Return.
Early in the morning I again started. In a little khan at Eleusis I saw three or four Bavarian soldiers drinking, and ridiculing the Greek proprietor, calling him patrioti and capitani. The Greek bore their gibes and sneers without a word; but there was a deadly expression in his look, which seemed to say, "I bide my time;" and I remember then thinking that the Bavarians were running up an account which would one day be settled with blood. In fact, the soldiers went too far; and, as I thought, to show off before me, one of them slapped the Greek on the back, and made him spill a measure of wine which he was carrying to a customer, when the latter turned upon him like lightning, threw him down, and would have strangled him if he had not been pulled off by the by-standers. Indeed, the Greeks had already learned both their intellectual and physical superiority over the Bavarians; and, a short time before, a party of soldiers sent to subdue a band of Maniote insurgents had been captured, and, after a farce of selling them at auction at a dollar a head, were kicked, and whipped, and sent off.
About four o'clock I arrived once more at Athens, dined at my old hotel, and passed the evening at Mr. Hill's.
The next day I lounged about the city. I had been more than a month without my carpet-bag, and the way in which I managed during that time is a thing between my travelling companions and myself. A prudent Scotchman used to boast of a careful nephew, who, in travelling, instead of leaving some of his clothes at every hotel on the road, always brought home more than he took away with him. I was a model of this kind of carefulness while my opportunities lasted; but my companions had left me, and this morning I went to the bazars and bought a couple of shirts. Dressed up in one of them, I strolled outside the walls; and, while sitting in the shadow of a column of the Temple of Jupiter, I saw coming from the city, through Hadrian's Gate, four men, carrying a burden by the corners of a coverlet, followed by another having in his hands a bottle and spade. As they approached I saw they were bearing the dead body of a woman, whom, on joining them, I found to be the wife of the man who followed. He was an Englishman or an American (for he called himself either, as occasion required) whom I had seen at my hotel and at Mr. Hill's; had been a sailor, and probably deserted from his ship, and many years a resident of Athens, where he married a Greek woman. He was a thriftless fellow, and, as he told me, had lived principally by the labour of his wife, who washed for European travellers. He had been so long in Greece, and his connexions and associations were so thoroughly Greek, that he had lost that sacredness of feeling so powerful both in Englishmen and Americans of every class in regard to the decent burial of the dead, though he did say that he had expected to procure a coffin, but the police of the city had sent officers to take her away and bury her. There was something so forlorn in the appearance of this rude funeral, that my first impulse was to turn away; but I checked myself and followed. Several times the Greeks laid the corpse on the ground and stopped to rest, chattering indifferently on various subjects. We crossed the Ilissus, and at some distance came to a little Greek chapel excavated in the rock. The door was so low that we were obliged to stoop on entering, and when within we could hardly stand upright. The Greeks laid down the body in front of the altar; the husband went for the priest, the Greeks to select a place for a grave, and I remained alone with the dead. I sat in the doorway, looking inside upon the corpse, and out upon the Greeks digging the grave. In a short time the husband returned with a priest, one of the most miserable of that class of "blind teachers" who swarm in Greece. He immediately commenced the funeral service, which continued nearly an hour, by which time the Greeks returned and, taking up the body, carried it to the graveside and laid it within. I knew the hollow sound of the first clod of earth which falls upon the lid of a coffin, and shrunk from its leaden fall upon the uncovered body. I turned away, and, when at some distance, looked back and saw them packing the earth over the grave. I never saw so dreary a burial-scene.
Returning, I passed by the ancient stadium of Herodes Atticus, once capable of containing twenty-five thousand spectators; the whole structure was covered with the purest white marble. All remains of its magnificence are now gone; but I could still trace on the excavated side of the hill its ancient form of a horseshoe, and walked through the subterraneous passage by which the vanquished in the games retreated from the presence of the spectators.
Returning to the city, I learned that an affray had just taken place between some Greeks and Bavarians, and, hurrying to the place near the bazars, found a crowd gathered round a soldier who had been stabbed by a Greek. According to the Greeks, the affair had been caused by the habitual insults and provocation given by the Bavarians, the soldier having wantonly knocked a drinking-cup out of the Greek's hand while he was drinking. In the crowd I met a lounging Italian (the same who wanted me to come up from Padras by water), a good-natured and good-for-nothing fellow, and skilled in tongues; and going with him into a coffee-house thronged with Bavarians and Europeans of various nations in the service of government, heard another story, by which it appeared that the Greeks, as usual, were in the wrong, and that the poor Bavarian had been stabbed without the slightest provocation, purely from the Greeks' love of stabbing. Tired of this, I left the scene of contention, and a few streets off met an Athenian, a friend of two or three days' standing, and, stopping under a window illuminated by a pair of bright eyes from above, happened to express my admiration of the lady who owned them, when he tested the strength of my feelings on the subject by asking me if I would like to marry her. I was not prepared at the moment to give precisely that proof, and he followed up his blow by telling me that, if I wished it, he would engage to secure her for me before the next morning. The Greeks are almost universally poor. With them every traveller is rich, and they are so thoroughly civilized as to think that a rich man is, of course, a good match.
Toward evening I paid my last visit to the Acropolis. Solitude, silence, and sunset are the nursery of sentiment. I sat down on a broken capital of the Parthenon; the owl was already flitting among the ruins. I looked up at the majestic temple and down at the ruined and newly-regenerated city, and said to myself, "Lots must rise in Athens!" I traced the line of the ancient walls, ran a railroad to the Piræus, and calculated the increase on "up-town lots" from building the king's palace near the Garden of Plato. Shall I or shall I not "make an operation" in Athens? The court has removed here, the country is beautiful, climate fine, government fixed, steamboats are running, all the world is coming, and lots must rise. I bought (in imagination) a tract of good tillable land, laid it out in streets, had my Plato, and Homer, and Washington Places, and Jackson Avenue, built a row of houses to improve the neighbourhood where nobody lived, got maps lithographed, and sold off at auction. I was in the right condition to "go in," for I had nothing to lose; but, unfortunately, the Greeks were very far behind the spirit of the age, knew nothing of the beauties of the credit system, and could not be brought to dispose of their consecrated soil "on the usual terms," ten per cent. down, balance on bond and mortgage, so, giving up the idea, at dark I bade farewell to the ruins of the Acropolis, and went to my hotel to dinner.
Early the next morning I started for the field of Marathon. I engaged a servant at the hotel to accompany me, but he disappointed me, and I set out alone with my muleteer. Our road lay along the base of Mount Hymettus, on the borders of the plain of Attica, shaded by thick groves of olives. At noon I was on the summit of a lofty mountain, at the base of which, still and quiet as if it had never resounded with the shock of war, the great battle-ground of the Greeks and Persians extended to the sea. The descent was one of the finest things I met with in Greece; wild, rugged, and, in fact, the most magnificent kind of mountain scenery. At the foot of the mountain we came to a ruined convent, occupied by an old white-bearded monk. I stopped there and lunched, the old man laying before me his simple store of bread and olives, and looking on with pleasure at my voracious appetite.
Mound of Marathon.
This over, I hurried to the battle-field. Toward the centre is a large mound of earth, erected over the Athenians who fell in the battle. I made directly for this mound, ascended it, and threw the reins loose over my horse's neck; and, sitting on the top, read the account of the battle in Herodotus.
After all, is not our reverence misplaced, or, rather does not our respect for deeds hallowed by time render us comparatively unjust? The Greek revolution teems with instances of as desperate courage, as great love of country, as patriotic devotion, as animated the men of Marathon, and yet the actors in these scenes are not known beyond the boundaries of their native land. Thousands whose names were never heard of, and whose bones, perhaps, never received burial, were as worthy of an eternal monument as they upon whose grave I sat. Still that mound is a hallowed sepulchre; and the shepherd who looks at it from his mountain home, the husbandman who drives his plough to its base, and the sailor who hails it as a landmark from the deck of his caique, are all reminded of the glory of their ancestors. But away with the mouldering relics of the past. Give me the green grave of Marco Bozzaris. I put Herodotus in my pocket, gathered a few blades of grass as a memorial, descended the mound, betook myself to my saddle, and swept the plain on a gallop, from the mountain to the sea.
It is about two miles in width, and bounded by rocky heights enclosing it at either extremity. Toward the shore the ground is marshy, and at the place where the Persians escaped to their ships are some unknown ruins; in several places the field is cultivated, and toward evening, on my way to the village of Marathon, I saw a Greek ploughing; and when I told him that I was an American, he greeted me as the friend of Greece. It is the last time I shall recur to this feeling; but it was music to my heart to hear a ploughman on immortal Marathon sound in my ears the praises of my country.
I intended to pass the night at the village of Marathon; but every khan was so cluttered up with goats, chickens, and children, that I rode back to the monastery at the foot of the mountain. It was nearly dark when I reached it. The old monk was on a little eminence at the door of his chapel, clapping two boards together to call his flock to vespers. With his long white beard, his black cap and long black gown, his picturesque position and primitive occupation, he seemed a guardian spirit hovering on the borders of Marathon in memory of its ancient glory. He came down to the monastery to receive me, and, giving me a paternal welcome, and spreading a mat on the floor, returned to his chapel. I followed, and saw his little flock assemble. The ploughman came up from the plain and the shepherd came down from the mountain; the old monk led the way to the altar, and all kneeled down and prostrated themselves on the rocky floor. I looked at them with deep interest. I had seen much of Greek devotion in cities and villages, but it was a spectacle of extraordinary interest to see these wild and lawless men assembled on this lonely mountain to worship in all sincerity, according to the best light they had, the god of their fathers. I could not follow them in their long and repeated kneelings and prostrations; but my young Greek, as if to make amends for me, and, at the same time, to show how they did things in Athens, led the van. The service over, several of them descended with us to the monastery; the old monk spread his mat, and again brought out his frugal store of bread and olives. I contributed what I had brought from Athens, and we made our evening meal. If I had judged from appearances, I should have felt rather uneasy at sleeping among such companions; but the simple fact of having seen them at their devotions gave me confidence. Though I had read and heard that the Italian bandit went to the altar to pray forgiveness for the crimes he intended to commit, and, before washing the stains from his hands, hung up the bloody poniard upon a pillar of the church, and asked pardon for murder, I always felt a certain degree of confidence in him who practised the duties of his religion, whatever that religion might be. I leaned on my elbow, and, by the blaze of the fire, read Herodotus, while my muleteer, as I judged from the frequent repetition of the word Americanos, entertained them with long stories about me. By degrees the blaze of the fire died away, the Greeks stretched themselves out for sleep, the old monk handed me a bench about four inches high for a pillow, and, wrapping myself in my cloak, in a few moments I was wandering in the land of dreams.
Before daylight my companions were in motion. I intended to return by the marble quarries on the Pentelican Mountain; and crying "Cavallo" in the ear of my still sleeping muleteer, in a few minutes I bade farewell for ever to the good old monk of Marathon. Almost from the door of the monastery we commenced ascending the mountain. It was just peep of day, the weather raw and cold, the top of the mountain covered with clouds, and in an hour I found myself in the midst of them. The road was so steep and dangerous that I could not ride; a false step of my horse might have thrown me over a precipice several hundred feet deep; and the air was so keen and penetrating, that, notwithstanding the violent exercise of walking, I was perfectly chilled. The mist was so dense, too, that, when my guide was a few paces in advance, I could not see him, and I was literally groping my way through the clouds. I had no idea where I was nor of the scene around me, but I felt that I was in a measure lifted above the earth. The cold blasts drove furiously along the sides of the mountain, whistled against the precipices, and bellowed in the hollows of the rocks, sometimes driving so furiously that my horse staggered and fell back. I was almost bewildered in struggling blindly against them; but, just before reaching the top of the mountain, the thick clouds were lifted as if by an invisible hand, and I saw once more the glorious sun pouring his morning beams upon a rich valley extending a great distance to the foot of the Pentelican Mountain. About half way down we came to a beautiful stream, on the banks of which we took out our bread and olives. Our appetites were stimulated by the mountain air, and we divided till our last morsel was gone.
At the foot of the mountain, lying between it and Mount Pentelicus, was a large monastery, occupied by a fraternity of monks. We entered and walked through it, but found no one to receive us. In a field near by we saw one of the monks, from whom we obtained a direction to the quarries. Moving on to the foot of the mountain, which rises with a peaked summit into the clouds, we commenced ascending, and soon came upon the strata of beautiful white marble for which Mount Pentelicus has been celebrated thousands of years. Excavations appear to have been made along the whole route, and on the roadside were blocks, and marks caused by the friction of the heavy masses transported to Athens. The great quarries are toward the summit. The surface has been cut perpendicularly smooth, perhaps eighty or a hundred feet high, and one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet in width, and excavations have been made within to an unknown extent. Whole cities might have been built with the materials taken away, and yet by comparison with what is left, there is nothing gone. In front are entrances to a large chamber, in one corner of which, on the right, is a chapel with the painted figure of the Virgin to receive the Greeks' prayers. Within are vast humid caverns, over which the wide roof awfully extends, adorned with hollow tubes like icicles, while a small transparent petrifying stream trickles down the rock. On one side are small chambers communicating with subterraneous avenues, used, no doubt, as places of refuge during the revolution, or as the haunts of robbers. Bones of animals and stones blackened with smoke showed that but lately some part had been occupied as a habitation. The great excavations around, blocks of marble lying as they fell, perhaps, two thousand years ago, and the appearances of having been once a scene of immense industry and labour, stand in striking contrast with the desolation and solitude now existing. Probably the hammer and chisel will never be heard there more, great temples will no more be raised, and modern genius will never, like the Greeks of old, make the rude blocks of marble speak.
Quarries of Pentelicus.
At dark I was dining at the Hotel de France, when Mr. Hill came over with the welcome intelligence that my carpet-bag had arrived. On it was pinned a large paper, with the words "Huzzah!" "Huzzah!" "Huzzah!" by my friend Maxwell, who had met it on horse back on the shores of the Gulf of Lepanto, travelling under the charge of a Greek in search of me. I opened it with apprehension, and, to my great satisfaction, found undisturbed the object of my greatest anxiety, the precious notebook from which I now write, saved from the peril of an anonymous publication or of being used up for gun-waddings.
The next morning, before I was up, I heard a gentle rap at my door, which was followed by the entrance of a German, a missionary, whom I had met several times at Mr. Hill's, and who had dined with me once at my hotel. I apologized for being caught in bed, and told him that he must possess a troubled spirit to send him so early from his pillow. He answered that I was right; that he did indeed possess a troubled spirit; and closing the door carefully, came to my bedside, and said he had conceived a great regard for me, and intended confiding in me an important trust. I had several times held long conversations with him at Mr. Hill's, and very little to my edification, as his English was hardly intelligible; but I felt pleased at having, without particularly striving for it, gained the favourable opinion of one who bore the character of a very learned and a very good man. I requested him to step into the dining-room while I rose and dressed myself; but he put his hand upon my breast to keep me down, and drawing a chair, began, "You are going to Smyrna." He then paused, but, after some moments of hesitation, proceeded to say that the first name I would hear on my arrival there would be his own; that, unfortunately, it was in everybody's mouth. My friend was a short and very ugly middle-aged man, with a very large mouth, speaking English with the most disagreeable German sputter, lame from a fall, and, altogether, of a most uninteresting and unsentimental aspect; and he surprised me much by laying before me a veritable affaire du cœur. It was so foreign to my expectations, that I should as soon have expected to be made a confidant in a love affair by the Archbishop of York. After a few preliminaries he went into particulars; lavished upon the lady the usual quota of charms "in such case made and provided," but was uncertain, rambling, and discursive in regard to the position he held in her regard. At first I understood that it was merely the old story, a flirtation and a victim; then that they were very near being married, which I afterward understood to be only so near as this, that he was willing and she not; and, finally, it settled down into the every-day occurrence, the lady smiled, while the parents and a stout two-fisted brother frowned. I could but think, if such a homely expression may be introduced in describing these tender passages, that he had the boot on the wrong leg, and that the parents were much more likely than the daughter to favour such a suitor. However, on this point I held my peace. The precise business he wished to impose on me was, immediately on my arrival in Smyrna to form the acquaintance of the lady and her family, and use all my exertions in his favour. I told him I was an entire stranger in Smyrna, and could not possibly have any influence with the parties; but, being urged, promised him that, if I could interfere without intruding myself improperly, he should have the benefit of my mediation. At first he intended giving me a letter to the lady, but afterward determined to give me one to the Rev. Mr. Brewer, an American missionary, who, he said, was a particular friend of his, and intimate with the beloved and her family, and acquainted with the whole affair. Placing himself at my table, on which were pens, ink, and paper, he proceeded to write his letter, while I lay quietly till he turned over the first side, when, tired of waiting, I rose, dressed myself, packed up, and, before he had finished, stood by the table with my carpet-bag, waiting until he should have done to throw in my writing materials. He bade me good-by after I had mounted my horse to leave, and, when I turned back to look at him, I could not but feel for the crippled, limping victim of the tender passion, though, in honesty, and with the best wishes for his success, I did not think it would help his suit for the lady to see him.
An account of my journey from Athens to Smyrna, given in a letter to friends at home, was published during my absence and without my knowledge, in successive numbers of the American Monthly Magazine, and perhaps the favourable notice taken of it had some influence in inducing me to write a book. I give the papers as they were then published.
Smyrna, April, 1835.
My dear ****,
I have just arrived at this place, and I live to tell it. I have been three weeks performing a voyage usually made in three days. It has been tedious beyond all things; but, as honest Dogberry would say, if it had been ten times as tedious, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all upon you. To begin at the beginning: on the morning of the second instant, I and my long-lost carpet-bag left the eternal city of Athens, without knowing exactly whither we were going, and sincerely regretted by Miltiades Panajotti, the garçon of the hotel. We wound round the foot of the Acropolis, and, giving a last look to its ruined temples, fell into the road to the Piræus, and in an hour found ourselves at that ancient harbour, almost as celebrated in the history of Greece as Athens itself. Here we took counsel as to farther movements, and concluded to take passage in a caique to sail that evening for Syra, being advised that that island was a great place of rendezvous for vessels, and that from it we could procure a passage to any place we chose. Having disposed of my better half (I may truly call it so, for what is man without pantaloons, vests, and shirts), I took a little sailboat to float around the ancient harbour and muse upon its departed glories.
The day that I lingered there before bidding farewell, perhaps for ever, to the shores of Greece, is deeply impressed upon my mind. I had hardly begun to feel the magic influence of the land of poets, patriots, and heroes, until the very moment of my departure. I had travelled in the most interesting sections of the country, and found all enthusiasm dead within me when I had expected to be carried away by the remembrance of the past; but here, I know not how it was, without any effort, and in the mere act of whiling away my time, all that was great, and noble, and beautiful in her history rushed upon me at once; the sun and the breeze, the land and the sea, contributed to throw a witchery around me; and in a rich and delightful frame of mind, I found myself among the monuments of her better days, gliding by the remains of the immense wall erected to enclose the harbour during the Peloponnesian war, and was soon floating upon the classic waters of Salamis.
If I had got there by accident it would not have occurred to me to dream of battles and all the fierce panoply of war upon that calm and silvery surface. But I knew where I was, and my blood was up. I was among the enduring witnesses of the Athenian glory. Behind me was the ancient city, the Acropolis, with its ruined temples, the telltale monuments of by-gone days, towering above the plain; here was the harbour from which the galleys carried to the extreme parts of the then known world the glories of the Athenian name; before me was unconquered Salamis; here the invading fleet of Xerxes; there the little navy, the last hope of the Athenians; here the island of Ægina, from which Aristides, forgetting his quarrel with Themistocles, embarked in a rude boat, during the hottest of the battle, for the ship of the latter; and there the throne of Xerxes, where the proud invader stationed himself as spectator of the battle that was to lay the rich plain of Attica at his feet. There could be no mistake about localities; the details have been handed down from generation to generation, and are as well known to the Greeks of the present day as they were to their fathers. So I went to work systematically, and fought the whole battle through. I gave the Persians ten to one, but I made the Greeks fight like tigers; I pointed them to their city; to their wives and children; I brought on long strings of little innocents, urging them as in the farce, "sing out, young uns;" I carried old Themistocles among the Persians like a modern Greek fireship among the Turks; I sunk ship after ship, and went on demolishing them at a most furious rate, until I saw old Xerxes scudding from his throne, and the remnant of the Persian fleet scampering away to the tune of "devil take the hindmost." By this time I had got into the spirit of the thing; and moving rapidly over that water, once red with blood of thousands from the fields of Asia, I steered for the shore and mounted the vacant throne of Xerxes. This throne is on a hill near the shore, not very high, and as pretty a place as a man could have selected to see his friends whipped and keep out of harm's way himself; for you will recollect that in those days there was no gunpowder nor cannon balls, and, consequently, no danger from long chance shots. I selected a particular stone, which I thought it probable Xerxes, as a reasonable man, and with an eye to perspective, might have chosen as his seat on the eventful day of the battle; and on that same stone sat down to meditate upon the vanity of all earthly greatness. But, most provokingly, whenever I think of Xerxes, the first thing that presents itself to my mind is the couplet in the Primer,
"Xerxes the Great did die,
And so must you and I."
This is a very sensible stanza, no doubt, and worthy of always being borne in mind; but it was not exactly what I wanted. I tried to drive it away; but the more I tried, the more it stuck to me. It was all in vain. I railed at early education, and resolved that acquired knowledge hurts a man's natural faculties; for if I had not received the first rudiments of education, I should not have been bothered with the vile couplet, and should have been able to do something on my own account. As it was, I lost one of the best opportunities ever a man had for moralizing; and you, my dear ——, have lost at least three pages. I give you, however, all the materials; put yourself on the throne of Xerxes, and do what you can, and may your early studies be no stumbling-block in your way. As for me, vexed and disgusted with myself, I descended the hill as fast as the great king did of yore, and jumping into my boat, steered for the farthest point of the Piræus; from the throne of Xerxes to the tomb of Themistocles.
I was prepared to do something here. This was not merely a place where he had been; I was to tread upon the earth that covered his bones; here were his ashes; here was all that remained of the best and bravest of the Greeks, save his immortal name. As I approached I saw the large square stones that enclosed his grave, and mused upon his history; the deliverer of his country, banished, dying an exile, his bones begged by his repenting countrymen, and buried with peculiar propriety near the shore of the sea commanding a full view of the scene of his naval glory. For more than two thousand years the waves have almost washed over his grave, the sun has shone and the winds have howled over him; while, perhaps, his spirit has mingled with the sighing of the winds and the murmur of the waters, in moaning over the long captivity of his countrymen; perhaps, too, his spirit has been with them in their late struggle for liberty; has hovered over them in the battle and the breeze, and is now standing sentinel over his beloved and liberated country. I approached as to the grave of one who will never die. His great name, his great deeds, hallowed by the lapse of so many ages; the scene—I looked over the wall with a feeling amounting to reverence, when, directly before me, the first thing I saw, the only thing I could see, so glaring and conspicuous that nothing else could fix my eye, was a tall, stiff, wooden headboard, painted white, with black letters, to the memory of an Englishman with as unclassical a name as that of John Johnson. My eyes were blasted with the sight; I was ferocious; I railed at him as if he had buried himself there with his own hands. What had he to do there? I railed at his friends. Did they expect to give him a name by mingling him with the ashes of the immortal dead? Did they expect to steal immortality like fire from the flint? I dashed back to my boat, steered directly for the harbour, gave sentiment to the dogs, and in half an hour was eating a most voracious and spiteful dinner.
In the evening I embarked on board my little caique. She was one of the most rakish of that rakish description of vessels. I drew my cloak around me and stretched myself on the deck as we glided quietly out of the harbour; saw the throne of Xerxes, the island of Salamis, and the shores of Greece gradually fade from view; looked at the dusky forms of the Greeks in their capotes lying asleep around me; at the helmsman sitting cross-legged at his post, apparently without life or motion; gave one thought to home, and fell asleep.
In the morning I began to examine my companions. They were, in all, a captain and six sailors, probably all part owners, and two passengers from one of the islands, not one of whom could speak any other language than Greek. My knowledge of that language was confined to a few rolling hexameters, which had stuck by me in some unaccountable way as a sort of memento of college days. These, however, were of no particular use, and, consequently, I was pretty much tongue-tied during the whole voyage. I amused myself by making my observations quietly upon my companions, as they did more openly upon me, for I frequently heard the word "Americanos" pass among them. I had before had occasion to see something of Greek sailors, and to admire their skill and general good conduct, and I was fortified in my previous opinion by what I saw of my present companions. Their temperance in eating and drinking is very remarkable, and all my comparisons between them and European sailors were very much in their favour. Indeed, I could not help thinking, as they sat collectively, Turkish fashion, around their frugal meal of bread, caviari, and black olives, that I had never seen finer men. Their features were regular, in that style which we to this day recognise as Grecian; their figures good, and their faces wore an air of marked character and intelligence; and these advantages of person were set off by the island costume, the fez or red cloth cap, with a long black tassel at the top, a tight vest and jacket, embroidered and without collars, large Turkish trousers coming down a little below the knee, legs bare, sharp-pointed slippers, and a sash around the waist, tied under the left side, with long ends hanging down, and a knife sticking out about six inches. There was something bold and daring in their appearance; indeed, I may say, rakish and piratical; and I could easily imagine that, if the Mediterranean should again become infested with pirates, my friends would cut no contemptible figure among them. But I must not detain you as long on the voyage as I was myself. The sea was calm; we had hardly any wind; our men were at the oars nearly all the time, and, passing slowly by Ægina, Cape Sunium, with its magnificent ruins mournfully overlooking the sea, better known in modern times as Colonna's Height and the scene of Falconer's shipwreck, passing also the island of Zea, the ancient Chios, Thermia, and other islands of lesser note, in the afternoon of the third day we arrived at Syra.
With regard to Syra I shall say but little; I am as loath to linger about it now as I was to stay there then. The fact is, I cannot think of the place with any degree of satisfaction. The evening of my arrival I heard, through a Greek merchant to whom I had a letter from a friend in Athens, of a brig to sail the next day for Smyrna; and I lay down on a miserable bed in a miserable locanda, in the confident expectation of resuming my journey in the morning. Before morning, however, I was roused by "blustering Boreas" rushing through the broken casement of my window; and for more than a week all the winds ever celebrated in the poetical history of Greece were let loose upon the island. We were completely cut off from all communication with the rest of the world. Not a vessel could leave the port, while vessel after vessel put in there for shelter. I do not mean to go into any details; indeed, for my own credit's sake I dare not; for if I were to draw a true picture of things as I found them; if I were to write home the truth, I should be considered as utterly destitute of taste and sentiment; I should be looked upon as a most unpoetical dog, who ought to have been at home poring over the revised statutes instead of breathing the pure air of poetry and song. And now, if I were writing what might by chance come under the eyes of a sentimental young lady or a young gentleman in his teens, the truth would be the last thing I would think of telling. No, though my teeth chatter, though a cold sweat comes over me when I think of it, I would go through the usual rhapsody, and huzzah for "the land of the East and the clime of the sun." Indeed, I have a scrap in my portfolio, written with my cloak and greatcoat on, and my feet over a brazier, beginning in that way. But to you, my dear ——, who know my touching sensibilities, and who, moreover, have a tender regard for my character and will not publish me, I would as soon tell the truth as not. And I therefore do not hesitate to say, but do not whisper it elsewhere, that in one of the beautiful islands of the Ægean; in the heart of the Cyclades, in the sight of Delos, and Paros, and Antiparos, any one of which is enough to throw one who has never seen them into raptures with their fancied beauties, here, in this paradise of a young man's dreams, in the middle of April, I would have hailed "chill November's surly blast" as a zephyr; I would have exchanged all the beauties of this balmy clime for the sunny side of Kamschatka; I would have given my room and the whole Island of Syra for a third-rate lodging in Communipaw. It was utterly impossible to walk out, and equally impossible to stay in my room; the house, to suit that delightful climate, being built without windows or window-shutters. If I could forget the island, I could remember with pleasure the society I met there. I passed my mornings in the library of Mr. R., one of our worthy American missionaries; and my evenings at the house of Mr. W., the British consul. This gentleman married a Greek lady of Smyrna, and had three beautiful daughters, more than half Greeks in their habits and feelings; one of them is married to an English baronet, another to a Greek merchant of Syra, and the third—.
On the ninth day the wind fell, the sun once more shone brightly, and in the evening I embarked on board a rickety brig for Smyrna. At about six o'clock P.M. thirty or forty vessels were quietly crawling out of the harbour like rats after a storm. It was almost a calm when we started: in about two hours we had a favourable breeze; we turned in, going at the rate of eight miles an hour, and rose with a strong wind dead ahead. We beat about all that day; the wind increased to a gale, and toward evening we took shelter in the harbour of Scio.
The history of this beautiful little island forms one of the bloodiest pages in the history of the world, and one glance told that dreadful history. Once the most beautiful island of the Archipelago, it is now a mass of ruins. Its fields, which once "budded and blossomed as the rose," have become waste places; its villages are deserted, its towns are in ruins, its inhabitants murdered, in captivity, and in exile. Before the Greek revolution the Greeks of Scio were engaged in extensive commerce, and ranked among the largest merchants in the Levant. Though living under hard taskmasters, subject to the exactions of a rapacious pacha, their industry and enterprise, and the extraordinary fertility of their island, enabled them to pay a heavy tribute to the Turks and to become rich themselves. For many years they had enjoyed the advantages of a college, with professors of high literary and scientific attainments, and their library was celebrated throughout all that country; it was, perhaps, the only spot in Greece where taste and learning still held a seat. But the island was far more famed for its extraordinary natural beauty and fertility. Its bold mountains and its soft valleys, the mildness of its climate and the richness of its productions, bound the Greeks to its soil by a tie even stronger than the chain of their Turkish masters. In the early part of the revolution the Sciotes took no part with their countrymen in their glorious struggle for liberty. Forty of their principal citizens were given up as hostages, and they were suffered to remain in peace. Wrapped in the rich beauties of their island, they forgot the freedom of their fathers and their own chains; and, under the precarious tenure of a tyrant's will, gave themselves up to the full enjoyment of all that wealth and taste could purchase. We must not be too hard upon human nature; the cause seemed desperate; they had a little paradise at stake; and if there is a spot on earth, the risk of losing which could excuse men in forgetting that they were slaves in a land where their fathers were free, it is the Island of Scio. But the sword hung suspended over them by a single hair. In an unexpected hour, without the least note of preparation, they were startled by the thunder of the Turkish cannon; fifty thousand Turks were let loose like bloodhounds upon the devoted island. The affrighted Greeks lay unarmed and helpless at their feet, but they lay at the feet of men who did not know mercy even by name; at the feet of men who hungered and thirsted after blood; of men, in comparison with whom wild beasts are as lambs. The wildest beast of the forest may become gorged with blood; not so with the Turks at Scio. Their appetite "grew with what it fed on," and still longed for blood when there was not a victim left to bleed. Women were ripped open, children dashed against the walls, the heads of whole families stuck on pikes out of the windows of their houses, while their murderers gave themselves up to riot and plunder within. The forty hostages were hung in a row from the walls of the castle; an indiscriminate and universal burning and massacre took place; in a few days the ground was cumbered with the dead, and one of the loveliest spots on earth was a pile of smoking ruins. Out of a population of one hundred and ten thousand, sixty thousand are supposed to have been murdered, twenty thousand to have escaped, and thirty thousand to have been sold into slavery. Boys and young girls were sold publicly in the streets of Smyrna and Constantinople at a dollar a head. And all this did not arise from any irritated state of feeling toward them. It originated in the cold-blooded, calculating policy of the sultan, conceived in the same spirit which drenched the streets of Constantinople with the blood of the Janisaries; it was intended to strike terror into the hearts of the Greeks, but the murderer failed in his aim. The groans of the hapless Sciotes reached the ears of their countrymen, and gave a headlong and irresistible impulse to the spirit then struggling to be free. And this bloody tragedy was performed in our own days, and in the face of the civilized world. Surely if ever Heaven visits in judgment a nation for a nation's crimes, the burning and massacre at Scio will be deeply visited upon the accursed Turks.
It was late in the afternoon when I landed, and my landing was under peculiarly interesting circumstances. One of my fellow-passengers was a native of the island, who had escaped during the massacre, and now revisited it for the first time. He asked me to accompany him ashore, promising to find some friends at whose house we might sleep; but he soon found himself a stranger in his native island: where he had once known everybody, he now knew nobody. The town was a complete mass of ruins; the walls of many fine buildings were still standing, crumbling to pieces, and still black with the fire of the incendiary Turks. The town that had grown up upon the ruins consisted of a row of miserable shantees, occupied as shops for the sale of the mere necessaries of life, where the shopman slept on his window-shutter in front. All my companion's efforts to find an acquaintance who would give us a night's lodging were fruitless. We were determined not to go on board the vessel, if possible to avoid it; her last cargo had been oil, the odour of which still remained about her. The weather would not permit us to sleep on deck, and the cabin was intolerably disagreeable. To add to our unpleasant position, and, at the same time, to heighten the cheerlessness of the scene around us, the rain began to fall violently. Under the guidance of a Greek we searched among the ruins for an apartment where we might build a fire and shelter ourselves for the night, but we searched in vain; the work of destruction was too complete.
Cold, and thoroughly drenched with rain, we were retracing our way to our boat, when our guide told my companion that a Greek archbishop had lately taken up his abode among the ruins. We immediately went there, and found him occupying apartments, partially repaired, in what had once been one of the finest houses in Scio. The entrance through a large stone gateway was imposing; the house was cracked from top to bottom by fire, nearly one half had fallen down, and the stones lay scattered as they fell; but enough remained to show that in its better days it had been almost a palace. We ascended a flight of stone steps to a terrace, from which we entered into a large hall perhaps thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. On one side of this hall the wall had fallen down the whole length, and we looked out upon the mass of ruins beneath. On the other side, in a small room in one corner, we found the archbishop. He was sick, and in bed with all his clothes on, according to the universal custom here, but received us kindly. The furniture consisted of an iron bedstead with a mattress, on which he lay with a quilt spread over him, a wooden sofa, three wooden chairs, about twenty books, and two large leather cases containing clothes, napkins, and, probably, all his worldly goods. The rain came through the ceiling in several places; the bed of the poor archbishop had evidently been moved from time to time to avoid it, and I was obliged to change my position twice. An air of cheerless poverty reigned through the apartment. I could not help comparing his lot with that of more favoured and, perhaps, not more worthy servants of the church. It was a style so different from that of the priests at Rome, the pope and his cardinals, with their gaudy equipages and multitudes of footmen rattling to the Vatican; or from the pomp and state of the haughty English prelates, or even from the comforts of our own missionaries in different parts of this country, that I could not help feeling deeply for the poor priest before me. But he seemed contented and cheerful, and even thankful that, for the moment, there were others worse off than himself, and that he had it in his power to befriend them.
Sweetmeats, coffee, and pipes were served; and in about an hour we were conducted to supper in a large room, also opening from the hall. Our supper would not have tempted an epicure, but suited very well an appetite whetted by exercise and travel. It consisted of a huge lump of bread and a large glass of water for each of us, caviari, black olives, and two kinds of Turkish sweetmeats. We were waited upon by two priests: one of them, a handsome young man, not more than twenty, with long black hair hanging over his shoulders like a girl's, stood by with a napkin on his arm and a pewter vessel, with which he poured water on our hands, receiving it again in a basin. This was done both before and after eating; then came coffee and pipes. During the evening the young priest brought out an edition of Homer, and I surprised him, and astounded myself, by being able to translate a passage in the Iliad. I translated it in French, and my companion explained it in modern Greek to the young priest. Our beds were cushions laid on a raised platform or divan extending around the walls, with a quilt for each of us. In the morning, after sweetmeats, coffee, and pipes, we paid our respects to the good old archbishop, and took our leave. When we got out of doors, finding that the wind was the same, and that there was no possibility of sailing, my friend proposed a ride into the country. We procured a couple of mules, took a small basket of provisions for a collation, and started.
Our road lay directly along the shore; on one side the sea, and on the other the ruins of houses and gardens, almost washed by the waves. At about three miles' distance we crossed a little stream, by the side of which we saw a sarcophagus, lately disinterred, containing the usual vases of a Grecian tomb, including the piece of money to pay Charon his ferriage over the river Styx, and six pounds of dust; being all that remained of a man—perhaps one who had filled a large space in the world; perhaps a hero—buried probably more than two thousand years ago. After a ride of about five miles we came to the ruins of a large village, the style of which would anywhere have fixed the attention, as having been once a favoured abode of wealth and taste. The houses were of brown stone, built together, strictly in the Venetian style, after the models left during the occupation of the island by the Venetians, large and elegant, with gardens of three or four acres, enclosed by high walls of the same kind of stone, and altogether in a style far superior to anything I had seen in Greece. These were the country-houses and gardens of the rich merchants of Scio. The manner of living among the proprietors here was somewhat peculiar, and the ties that bound them to this little village were peculiarly strong. This was the family home; the community was essentially mercantile, and most of their business transactions were carried on elsewhere. When there were three or four brothers in a family, one would be in Constantinople a couple of years, another at Trieste, and so on, while another remained at home; so that those who were away, while toiling amid the perplexities of business, were always looking to the occasional family reunion; and all trusted to spend the evening of their days among the beautiful gardens of Scio. What a scene for the heart to turn to now! The houses and gardens were still there, some standing almost entire, others black with smoke and crumbling to ruins. But where were they who once occupied them? Where were they who should now be coming out to rejoice in the return of a friend and to welcome a stranger? An awful solitude, a stillness that struck a cold upon the heart, reigned around us. We saw nobody; and our own voices, and the tramping of our horses upon the deserted pavements, sounded hollow and sepulchral in our ears. It was like walking among the ruins of Pompeii; it was another city of the dead; but there was a freshness about the desolation that seemed of to-day; it seemed as though the inhabitants should be sleeping and not dead. Indeed, the high walls of the gardens, and the outside of the houses too, were generally so fresh and in so perfect a state, that it seemed like riding through a handsome village at an early hour before the inhabitants had risen; and I sometimes could not help thinking that in an hour or two the streets would be thronged with a busy population. My friend continued to conduct me through the solitary streets; telling me, as we went along, that this was the house of such a family, this of such a family, with some of whose members I had become acquainted in Greece, until, stopping before a large stone gateway, he dismounted at the gate of his father's house. In that house he was born; there he had spent his youth; he had escaped from it during the dreadful massacre, and this was the first time of his revisiting it. What a tide of recollections must have rushed upon him!
We entered through the large stone gateway into a courtyard beautifully paved in mosaic in the form of a star, with small black and white round stones. On our left was a large stone reservoir, perhaps twenty-five feet square, still so perfect as to hold water, with an arbour over it supported by marble columns; a venerable grapevine completely covered the arbour. The garden covered an extent of about four acres, filled with orange, lemon, almond, and fig trees; overrun with weeds, roses, and flowers, growing together in wild confusion. On the right was the house, and a melancholy spectacle it was; the wall had fallen down on one side, and the whole was black with smoke. We ascended a flight of stone steps, with marble balustrades, to the terrace, a platform about twenty feet square, overlooking the garden. From the terrace we entered the saloon, a large room with high ceilings and fresco paintings on the walls; the marks of the fire kindled on the stone floor still visible, all the woodwork burned to a cinder, and the whole black with smoke. It was a perfect picture of wanton destruction. The day, too, was in conformity with the scene; the sun was obscured, the wind blew through the ruined building, it rained, was cold and cheerless. What were the feelings of my friend I cannot imagine; the houses of three of his uncles were immediately adjoining; one of these uncles was one of the forty hostages, and was hanged; the other two were murdered; his father, a venerable-looking old man, who came down to the vessel when we started to see him off, had escaped to the mountains, from thence in a caique to Ipsara, and from thence into Italy. I repeat it, I cannot imagine what were his feelings; he spoke but little; they must have been too deep for utterance. I looked at everything with intense interest; I wanted to ask question after question, but could not, in mercy, probe his bleeding wounds. We left the house and walked out into the garden. It showed that there was no master's eye to watch over it; I plucked an orange which had lost its flavour; the tree was withering from want of care; our feet became entangled among weeds, and roses, and rare hothouse plants growing wildly together. I said that he did not talk much; but the little he did say amounted to volumes. Passing a large vase in which a beautiful plant was running wildly over the sides, he murmured indistinctly "the same vase" (le même vase), and once he stopped opposite a tree, and, turning to me, said, "This is the only tree I do not remember." These and other little incidental remarks showed how deeply all the particulars were engraved upon his mind, and told me, plainer than words, that the wreck and ruin he saw around him harrowed his very soul. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? This was his father's house, the home of his youth, the scene of his earliest, dearest, and fondest recollections. Busy memory, that source of all our greatest pains as well as greatest pleasures, must have pressed sorely upon him, must have painted the ruined and desolate scene around him in colours even brighter, far brighter, than they ever existed in; it must have called up the faces of well-known and well-loved friends; indeed, he must have asked himself, in bitterness and in anguish of spirit, "The friends of my youth where are they?" while the fatal answer fell upon his heart, "Gone murdered, in captivity and in exile."
CHAPTER VIII.
A Noble Grecian Lady.—Beauty of Scio.—An Original.—Foggi.—A Turkish Coffee-house.—Mussulman at Prayers.—Easter Sunday.—A Greek Priest.—A Tartar Guide.—Turkish Ladies.—Camel Scenes.—Sight of a Harem.—Disappointed Hopes.—A rare Concert.—Arrival at Smyrna.
(Continuation of the Letter.)
We returned to the house, and seeking out a room less ruined than the rest, partook of a slight collation, and set out on a visit to a relative of my Sciote friend.
On our way my companion pointed out a convent on the side of a hill, where six thousand Greeks, who had been prevailed upon to come down from the mountains to ransom themselves, were treacherously murdered to a man; their unburied bones still whiten the ground within the walls of the convent. Arriving at the house of his relative, we entered through a large gateway into a handsome courtyard, with reservoir, garden, &c., ruinous, though in better condition than those we had seen before. This relative was a widow, of the noble house of Mavrocordato, one of the first families in Greece, and perhaps the most distinguished name in the Greek revolution. She had availed herself of the sultan's amnesty to return; had repaired two or three rooms, and sat down to end her days among the scenes of her childhood, among the ruins of her father's house. She was now not more than thirty; her countenance was remarkably pensive, and she had seen enough to drive a smile for ever from her face. The meeting between her and my friend was exceedingly affecting, particularly on her part. She wept bitterly, though, with the elasticity peculiar to the Greek character, the smile soon chased away the tear. She invited us to spend the night there, pointing to the divan, and promising us cushions and coverlets. We accepted her invitation, and again set forth to ramble among the ruins.
I had heard that an American missionary had lately come into the island, and was living somewhere in the neighbourhood. I found out his abode, and went to see him. He was a young man from Virginia, by the name of ****; had married a lady from Connecticut, who was unfortunately sick in bed. He was living in one room in the corner of a ruined building, but was then engaged in repairing a house into which he expected to remove soon. As an American, the first whom they had seen in that distant island, they invited me into the sickroom. In a strange land, and among a people whose language they did not understand, they seemed to be all in all to each other; and I left them, probably for ever, in the earnest hope that the wife might soon be restored to health, that hand in hand they might sustain each other in the rough path before them.
Toward evening we returned to the house of my friend's relative. We found there a nephew, a young man about twenty-two, and a cousin, a man about thirty-five, both accidentally on a visit to the island. As I looked at the little party before me, sitting around a brazier of charcoal, and talking earnestly in Greek, I could hardly persuade myself that what I had seen and heard that day was real. All that I had ever read in history of the ferocity of the Turkish character; all the wild stories of corsairs, of murdering, capturing, and carrying into captivity, that I had ever read in romances, crowded upon me, and I saw living witnesses that the bloodiest records of history and the wildest creations of romance were not overcharged. They could all testify in their own persons that these things were true. They had all been stripped of their property, and had their houses burned over their heads; had all narrowly escaped being murdered; and had all suffered in their nearest and dearest connexions. The nephew, then a boy nine years old, had been saved by a maidservant, his father had been murdered; a brother, a sister, and many of his cousins, were at that moment, and had been for years, in slavery among the Turks; my friend, with his sister, had found refuge in the house of the Austrian consul, and from thence had escaped into Italy; the cousin was the son of one of the forty hostages who were hung, and was the only member of his father's family that escaped death; while our pensive and amiable hostess, a bride of seventeen, had seen her young husband murdered before her eyes; had herself been sold into slavery, and, after two years' servitude, redeemed by her friends.
In the morning I rose early and walked out upon the terrace. Nature had put on a different garb. The wind had fallen, and the sun was shining warmly upon a scene of softness and luxuriance surpassing all that I had ever heard or dreamed of the beauty of the islands of Greece. Away with all that I said about Syra; skip the page. The terrace overlooked the garden filled with orange, lemon, almond, and fig trees; with plants, roses, and flowers of every description, growing in luxuriant wildness. But the view was not confined to the garden. Looking back to the harbour of Scio, was a bold range of rugged mountains bounding the view on that side; on the right was the sea, then calm as a lake; on both the other sides were ranges of mountains, irregular and picturesque in their appearance, verdant and blooming to their very summits; and within these limits, for an extent of perhaps five miles, were continued gardens like that at my feet, filled with the choicest fruit-trees, with roses and the greatest variety of rare plants and flowers that ever unfolded their beauties before the eyes of man; above all, the orange-trees, the peculiar favourite of the island, then almost in full bloom, covered with blossoms, from my elevated position on the terrace made the whole valley appear an immense bed of flowers. All, too, felt the freshening influence of the rain; and a gentle breeze brought to me from this wilderness of sweets the most delicious perfume that ever greeted the senses. Do not think me extravagant when I say that, in your wildest dreams, you could never fancy so rich and beautiful a scene. Even among ruins, that almost made the heart break, I could hardly tear my eyes from it. It is one of the loveliest spots on earth. It is emphatically a Paradise lost, for the hand of the Turks is upon it; a hand that withers all that it touches. In vain does the sultan invite the survivers, and the children made orphans by his bloody massacre, to return; in vain do the fruits and the flowers, the sun and the soil, invite them to return; their wounds are still bleeding; they cannot forget that the wild beast's paw might again be upon them, and that their own blood might one day moisten the flowers which grow over the graves of their fathers. But I must leave this place. I could hardly tear myself away then, and I love to linger about it now. While I was enjoying the luxury of the terrace a messenger came from the captain to call us on board. With a feeling of the deepest interest I bade farewell, probably for ever, to my sorrowing hostess and to the beautiful gardens of Scio.
We mounted our mules, and in an hour were at the port. My feelings were so wrought upon that I felt my blood boil at the first Turk I met in the streets. I felt that I should like to sacrifice him to the shades of the murdered Greeks. I wondered that the Greeks did not kill every one on the island. I wondered that they could endure the sight of the turban. We found that the captain had hurried us away unnecessarily. We could not get out of the harbour, and were obliged to lounge about the town all day. We again made a circuit among the ruins; examined particularly those of the library, where we found an old woman who had once been an attendant there, living in a little room in the cellar, completely buried under the stones of the fallen building; and returning, sat down with a chibouk before the door of an old Turkish coffee-house fronting the harbour. Here I met an original in the person of the Dutch consul. He was an old Italian, and had been in America during the revolutionary war as dragoman, as he called it, to the Count de Grasse, though, from his afterward incidentally speaking of the count as "my master," I am inclined to think that the word dragoman, which here means a person of great character and trust, may be interpreted as "valet de chambre." The old consul was in Scio during the whole of the massacre, and gave me many interesting particulars respecting it. He hates the Greeks, and spoke with great indignation about the manner in which their dead bodies lay strewed about the streets for months after the massacre. "D—n them," he said, "he could not go anywhere without stumbling over them." As I began to have some apprehensions about being obliged to stay here another night, I thought I could not employ my time better than in trying to work out of the consul an invitation to spend it with him. But the old fellow was too much for me. When I began to talk about the unpleasantness of being obliged to spend the night on board, and the impossibility of spending it on shore, having no acquaintance there, he began to talk poverty in the most up and down terms. I was a little discouraged, but I looked at his military coat, his cocked hat and cane, and considering his talk merely a sort of apology for the inferior style of housekeeping I would find, was ingeniously working things to a point, when he sent me to the right about by enumerating the little instances of kindness he had received from strangers who happened to visit the island; among others, from one—he had his name in his pocketbook; he should never forget him; perhaps I had heard of him—who, at parting, shook him affectionately by the hand, and gave him a doubloon and a Spanish dollar. I hauled off from the representative of the majesty of Holland, and perhaps, before this, have been served up to some new visitor as the "mean, stingy American."
In the evening we again got under weigh; before morning the wind was again blowing dead ahead; and about midday we put into the harbour of Foggi, a port in Asia Minor, and came to anchor under the walls of the castle, under the blood-red Mussulman flag. We immediately got into the boat to go ashore. This was my first port in Turkey. A huge ugly African, marked with the smallpox, with two pistols and a yataghan in his belt, stood on a little dock, waited till we were in the act of landing, and then rushed forward, ferocious as a tiger from his native sands, throwing up both his hands, and roaring out "Quarantino." This was a new thing in Turkey. Heretofore the Turks, with their fatalist notions, had never taken any precautions against the plague; but they had become frightened by the terrible ravages the disease was then making in Egypt, and imposed a quarantine upon vessels coming from thence. We were, however, suffered to land, and our first movement was to the coffee-house directly in front of the dock. The coffee-house was a low wooden building, covering considerable ground, with a large piazza, or, rather, projecting roof all around it. Inside and out there was a raised platform against the wall. This platform was one step from the floor, and on this step every one left his shoes before taking his seat on the matting. There were, perhaps, fifty Turks inside and out; sitting cross-legged, smoking the chibouk, and drinking coffee out of cups not larger than the shell of a Madeira-nut.