Rambles and Studies in Greece Part 4

And yet we can hardly call this a beginning. Some twenty-five years ago, a very extensive and splendidly successful excavation was made on an adjoining site, when a party of German archaeologists laid bare the Theatre of Dionysus-the great theatre in which aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought out their immortal plays before an immortal audience. There is nothing more delightful than to descend from the Acropolis, and rest awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs with which the front row of the circuit is occupied. They are of the pattern usual with the sitting portrait statues of the Greeks-very deep, and with a curved back, which exceeds both in comfort and in grace any chairs designed by modern workmen.(43) Each chair has the name of a priest inscribed on it, showing how the theatre among the Greeks corresponded to our cathedral, and this front row to the stalls of canons and prebendaries.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Theatre of Dionysus, Athens]

But unfortunately all this sacerdotal prominence is probably the work of the later restorers of the theatre. For after having been first beautified and adorned with statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes's time), it was again restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or about his time, so that the theatre, as we now have it, can only be called the building of the second or third century after Christ. The front wall of the stage, which is raised some feet above the level of the empty pit, is adorned with a row of very elegant sculptures, amongst which one-a s.h.a.ggy old man, in a stooping posture, represented as coming out from within, and holding up the stone above him-is particularly striking. Some Greek is said to have knocked off, by way of amus.e.m.e.nt, the heads of most of these figures since they were discovered, but this I do not know upon any better authority than ordinary report. The pit or centre of the theatre is empty, and was never in Greek days occupied by seats, but a wooden structure was set up in advance of the stage, and on this the chorus performed their dances and sang their odes. But now there is a circuit of upright slabs of stone close to the front seats, which can hardly have been an arrangement of the old Greek theatre. They are generally supposed to have been added when the building came to be used for contests of gladiators, which Dion Chrysostom tells us were imported from Corinth in his day.

All these later additions and details are, I fear, calculated to detract from the reader's interest in this theatre, which I should indeed regret-for nothing can be more certain than that this is the veritable stone theatre which was built when the wooden one broke down, at the great compet.i.tion of aeschylus and Pratinas; and though front seats may have been added, and slight modifications introduced, the general structure can never have required alteration. The main body of the curved rows of seats have no backs, but are so deep as to leave plenty of room for the feet of the people next above; and I fancy that in the old times the _p??ed??a_ or right of sitting in the front rows was not given to priests, but to foreign emba.s.sies, along with the chief magistrates of Athens. The cost of admission was two obols to all the seats of the house not specially reserved, and such reservation was only for persons of official rank, and by no means for richer people, or for a higher entrance money-a thing which would not have been tolerated, I believe, for an instant by the Athenian democracy.(44) When the state treasury grew full with the tribute of the subject cities, the citizens had this sum, and at times even more, distributed to them in order that no one might be excluded from the annual feast, and so the whole free population of Athens came together without expense to worship the G.o.ds by enjoying themselves in this great theatre.

It is indeed very large, though exaggerated statements have been made about its size. It is generally stated that the enormous number of thirty thousand people could fit into it-a statement I think incredible;(45) and it is not nearly as large as other theatres I have seen, at Syracuse, at Megalopolis, or even at Argos. This also is certain, that any one speaking on the stage, as it now is, can be easily and distinctly heard by people sitting on the highest row of seats now visible, which cannot, I fancy, have been far from the original top of the house. Such a thing were impossible where thirty thousand people, or a crowd approaching that number, were seated. We hear, however, that the old actors had recourse to various artificial means of increasing the range of their voices, which shows that in some theatres the difficulty was felt; and in the extant plays, _asides_ are so rare(46) that it must have been difficult to give them with effect.

In one respect, however, the voice must have been more easily heard through the old house than it now is through the ruins. The back of the stage was built up with a high wooden structure to represent fixed scenes, and even a sort of upper story on which G.o.ds and flying figures sometimes appeared-an arrangement which of course threw the voice forward into the theatre. There used to be an old idea, not perhaps yet extinct, that the Greek audiences had the lovely natural scenery of their country for their stage decoration, and that they embraced in one view the characters on the stage, and the coasts and islands for miles behind them. Nothing can be more absurd, or more opposed to Greek feeling on such matters. In the first place, as is well known, a feeling for the beauty of landscape as such was almost foreign to the Greeks, who never speak of the picturesque in their literature without special relation to the sounds of nature, or to the intelligences which were believed to pervade and animate it: a fine view as such had little attraction for them. In the second place, they came to the theatre to enjoy poetry, and the poetry of character, of pa.s.sion, of the relation of man and his destiny to the course of Divine Providence and Divine justice-in short, to a.s.sume a frame of mind perfectly inconsistent with the distractions of landscape. For that purpose they had their stage, as we now know, filled in at the back with high painted scenes, which in earlier days were made of light woodwork and canvas, to bear easy removal, or change, but which in most Graeco-Roman theatres, like the very perfect one at Aspendus, or indeed that of Herodes Atticus close by at Athens, were a solid structure of at least two stories high, which absolutely excluded all prospect.

But even had the Athenians not been protected by this arrangement from outer disturbance, I found by personal investigation that there was no view for them to enjoy! Except from the highest tiers, and therefore from the worst places, the sea and islands are not visible, and the only view to be obtained, supposing that houses did not obstruct it, would have been the dull, somewhat bleak, undulating hills which stretch between the theatre and Phalerum.

The back scenes of the Greek theatres were painted as ours are, and at first, I suppose, very rudely indeed, for we hear particularly of a certain Agatharchus, who developed the art of scene-painting by adopting perspective.(47) The other appurtenances of the Greek theatre were equally rude, or perhaps I should say equally stiff and conventional, and removed from any attempt to reproduce ordinary life-at least this was the case with their tragedy, their satyric dramas, and their older comedy, which dealt in masks, in fixed stage dresses, in tragic padding, and stuffing-out to an unnatural size, in comic distortions and indecent emblems-in all manner of conventional ugliness, we should say, handed down from the first religious origin of these performances, and maintained with that strict conservatism which marks the course of all great Greek art.

The stage was long and narrow, the means of changing scenes c.u.mbrous and not frequently employed; the number of the actors in tragedy strictly limited-four is an unusual number, exceptionally employed in the second _dipus_ of Sophocles. In fact, we cannot say that the Greek drama ever became externally like ours till the comedies of Menander and his school.

These poets, living in an age when serious interests had decayed, when tragedy had ceased to be religious, and comedy political, when neither was looked upon any longer as a great public engine of instruction or of censure, turned to pictures of social life, not unlike our genteel comedy; and in this species of drama we may a.s.sert that the Greeks, except perhaps for masks, imitated the course of ordinary life.

It is indeed said of Euripides, the real father of this new comedy, that he brought down the tragic stage from ideal heroism to the pa.s.sions and meannesses of ordinary men; and Sophocles, his rival, the supposed perfection of an Attic tragedian, is reputed to have observed that he himself had represented men as they ought to be, Euripides as they were.

But any honest reader of Euripides will see at once how far he too is removed from the ordinary realisms of life. He saw, indeed, that human pa.s.sion is the subject, of all others, which will permanently interest human thought; he felt that the insoluble problems of Free Will and Fate, of the mercy and the cruelty of Providence, were too abstract on the one hand, and too specially Greek on the other; that, after all, human nature as such is the great universal field on which any age can reach the sympathy and the interest of its remotest successors. But the pa.s.sions painted by Euripides were no ordinary pa.s.sions-they were great and unnatural crimes, forced upon suffering mortals by the action of hostile deities; the virtues of Euripides were no ordinary virtues-they were great heroic self-sacrifices, and showed the Divine element in our nature, which no tyranny of circ.u.mstances can efface. His Phaedra and Medea on the one hand, his Alcestis and Iphigenia on the other, were strictly characters as they ought to be in tragedy, and not as they commonly are in life; and in outward performance Euripides did not depart from the conventional stiffness, from the regular development, from the somewhat pompous and artificial dress in which tragedy had been handed down to him by his masters.

They, too, had not despised human nature-how could they? Both aeschylus and Sophocles were great painters of human character, as well in its pa.s.sions as in its reasonings. But the former had made it accessory, so to speak, to the great religious lessons which he taught; the latter had at least affected to do so, or imagined that he did, while really the labyrinths of human character had enticed and held him in their endless maze. Thus, all through Greek tragedy there was on the one hand a strong element of conventional stiffness, of adherence to fixed subjects, and scenes, and masks, and dresses-of adherence to fixed metres, and regular dialogues, where question and answer were balanced line for line, and the cast of characters was as uniform as it is in the ordinary Italian operas of our own day. But on the other hand, these tragic poets were great masters of expression, profound students not only of the great world problems, but of the problems of human nature, exquisite masters too of their language, not only in its dramatic force, but in its lyric sweetness; they summed up in their day all that was great and beautiful in Greek poetry, and became the fullest and ripest fruit of that wonderful tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which even now makes those that taste it to be as G.o.ds.

Such, then, were the general features of the tragedy which the Athenian public, and the married women, including many strangers, a.s.sembled to witness in broad daylight under the Attic sky. They were not sparing of their time. They ate a good breakfast before they came. They ate sweetmeats in the theatre when the acting was bad. Each play was short, and there was doubtless an interval of rest. But it is certain that each poet contended as a rule with four plays against his compet.i.tors; and as there were certainly three of them, there must have been twelve plays acted; this seems to exceed the endurance of any public, even allowing two days for the performance. We are not fully informed on these points. We do not even know how Sophocles, who contended with single plays, managed to compete against Euripides, who contended with sets of four. But we know that the judges were chosen by lot, and we strongly suspect, from the records of their decisions, that they often decided wrongly. We also know that the poets sought to please the audience by political and patriotic allusions, and to convey their dislike of opposed cities or parties by drawing their representatives in odious colors on the stage. Thus Euripides is never tired of traducing the Spartans in the character of Menelaus. aeschylus fights the battle of the Areopagus in his _Eumenides_.

But besides all this, it seems that tragic poets were regarded as the proper teachers of morality, and that the stage among the Greeks occupied somewhat the place of the modern pulpit. This is the very att.i.tude which Racine a.s.sumes in the Preface to his _Phedre_. He suggests that it ought to be considered the best of his plays, because there is none in which he has so strictly rewarded virtue and punished vice.(48) He alters, in his _Iphigenie_, the Greek argument from which he copied, because as he tells us (again in the Preface) it would never do to have so virtuous a person as Iphigenia sacrificed. This, however, would not have been a stumbling-block to the Greek poet, whose capricious and spiteful G.o.ds, or whose deep conviction of the stain of an ancestral curse, would justify catastrophies which the Christian poet, with his trust in a benevolent Providence, could not admit. But, indeed, in most other points the so-called imitations of the Greek drama by Racine and his school are anything but imitations. The main characters and the general outline of the plot are no doubt borrowed. The elegance and power of the dialogue are more or less successfully copied. But the natural and familiar scenes, which would have been shocking to the court of Louis XIV.-"ces scenes entremelees de bas comique, et ces frequents exemples de mauvais ton et d'une familiarite choquante," as Barthelemy says-such characters as the guard in the _Antigone_, the nurse in the _Choephor_, the Phrygian in the _Orestes_, were carefully expunged. Moreover, love affairs and court intrigues were everywhere introduced, and the language was never allowed to descend from its pomp and grandeur. Most of the French dramatists were indeed bad Greek scholars,(49) and knew the plays from which they copied either through very poor translations, or through the rhetorical travesties surviving under the name of Seneca, which were long thought fully equal to the great and simple originals.

So the French of the seventeenth century, starting from these half-understood models, and applying rigidly the laws of tragedy which they had deduced, with questionable logic, from that very untrustworthy guide, our text of the _Poetics_ of Aristotle, created a drama which became so unlike what it professed to imitate, that most good modern French critics have occupied themselves with showing the contrasts of old Greek tragedy to that of the modern stage. They are always praising the _naivete_, the familiarity, the irregularity of the old dramatists; they are always noting touches of common life and of ordinary motive quite foreign to the dignity of Racine, and Voltaire, and Alfieri.(50) They think that the real parallel is to be found not among them, but in Shakespeare. Thus their education makes them emphasize the very qualities which we admit, but should not cite, as the peculiarities of Greek tragedy. _We_ are rather struck with its conventionalities, with its strict adherence to fixed form, with its somewhat stilted diction, and we wonder how it came to be so great and natural within these trammels.

Happily the tendency in our own day to reproduce antiquity faithfully, and not in modern recasting, has led to the translating, and even to the representing, of Greek tragedies in their purity, and it does not require a knowledge of Greek to obtain some real acquaintance with these great masterpieces. Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Dean Milman, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr.

Whitelaw, and many others, have placed faithful and elegant versions within our reach. But since I have cautioned the reader not versed in Greek against adopting Racine's or Alfieri's plays as adequate subst.i.tutes, I venture to give the same advice concerning the more Greek and antique plays of Mr. Swinburne, which, in spite of their splendor, are still not really Greek plays, but modern plays based on Greek models. The relief produced by ordinary talk from ordinary characters, which has been already noticed, is greatly wanting in his very lofty, and perhaps even strained, dialogue. Nor are his choruses the voice of the vulgar public, combining high sentiments with practical meanness, but elaborate and very difficult speculations, which comment metaphysically on the general problems of the play. There is nothing better worth reading than the _Atalanta in Calydon_. The Greek scholar sees everywhere how thoroughly imbued the author is with Greek models. But it will not give to the mere English reader any accurate idea of a real Greek tragedy. He must go to _Balaustion's Adventure_, or _Aristophanes's Apology_, or some other professed translation, and follow it line for line, adding some such general reviews as the _Etudes_ of M. Patin.

As for revivals of Greek plays, it seems to me not likely that they will ever succeed. The French imitations of Racine laid hold of the public because they were not imitations. And as for us nowadays, who are more familiar with the originals, a faithless reproduction would shock us, while a literal one would weary us. This at least is the effect which the _Antigone_ produces, even with the modern choruses of Mendelssohn to relieve the slowness of the action. But, of course, a reproduction of the old chorus would be simply impossible. The whole pit in the theatre of Dionysus seems to have been left empty. A part somewhat larger than our orchestra was covered with a raised platform, though still lower than the stage.(51) Upon this the chorus danced and sang and looked on at the actors, as in the play within the play in _Hamlet_. Above all, they constantly prayed to their G.o.ds, and this religious side of the performance has of course no effect upon us.(52)

As to old Attic comedy, it would be even more impossible to recover it for a modern public. Its local and political allusions, its broad and coa.r.s.e humor, its fantastic dresses, were features which made it not merely ancient and Greek, but Athenian, and Athenian of a certain epoch. Without the Alexandrian scholiasts, who came in time to recover and note down most of the allusions, these comedies would be to the Greek scholar of to-day hardly intelligible. The new Attic comedy, of which Terence is a copy, is indeed on a modern basis, and may be faithfully reproduced, if not admired, in our day. But here, alas! the great originals of Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus are lost to us, and we must be content with the Latin accommodations.

But I have delayed too long over these Greek plays, and must apologize for leading away the reader from the actual theatre in which he is sitting.

Yet there is hardly a place in Athens which calls back the mind so strongly to the old days, when all the crowd came jostling in, and settled down in their seats, to hear the great novelties of the year from Sophocles or Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals and claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the supporters of the old, and the lovers of the new, devotees and skeptics, wondering foreigners and self-complacent citizens. They little thought how we should come, not only to sit in the seats they occupied, but to reverse the judgments which they p.r.o.nounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, of pa.s.sion, and of pride.

Plato makes Socrates say, in his _Apologia_ (_pro vita sua_), that a copy of Anaxagoras could be bought on the orchestra, when very dear, for a drachme, that is to say for about 9d. of our money, which may then have represented our half-crown or three shillings in value.(53) The commentators have made desperate attempts to explain this. Some say the orchestra was used as a book-stall when plays were not going on-an a.s.sumption justified by no other hint in Greek literature. Others have far more absurdly imagined that Plato really meant you could pay a drachme for the best seat in the theatre, and read the writings of Anaxagoras in a fashionable play of Euripides, who was his friend and follower. Verily a wonderful interpretation!

If the reader will walk with me from the theatre of Dionysus past the newly excavated site of the temple of aesculapius, and past the Roman-Greek theatre which was erected by Hadrian or Herodes Atticus, I will show him what Plato meant. Of course, this later theatre, with its solid Roman back scenes of masonry, is equally interesting with the Theatre of Dionysus to the advocates of the unity of history! But to us who are content to study Greek Athens, it need not afford any irrelevant delays. Pa.s.sing round the approach to the Acropolis, we come on to a lesser hill, separated from it by a very short saddle, so that it looks like a sort of outpost or spur sent out from the rock of the Acropolis. This is the Areopagus-Mars'

Hill-which we can ascend in a few minutes. There are marks of old staircases cut in the rock. There are underneath, on our left and right, as we go up, deep black caverns, once the home of the Eumenides. On the flat top there are still some signs of a rude smoothing of the stone for seats. Under us, to the north-west, is the site of the old _agora_, once surrounded with colonnades, the crowded market-place of all those who bought and sold and talked. But on the descent from the Areopagus, and, now at least, not much higher than the level of the market-place beneath, there is a small semicircular platform, backed by the rising rock. This, or some platform close to it, which may now be hidden by acc.u.mulated soil, was the old _orchestra_, possibly the site of the oldest theatre, but in historical times a sort of reserved platform, where the Athenians, who had their town bristling with statues, allowed no monument to be erected save the figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton, which were carried into Persia, replaced by others, afterwards recovered, and of which we may have a copy in the two fighting figures, of archaic character, now in the Museum of Naples. It was doubtless on this orchestra, just above the bustle and thoroughfare of the _agora_, that booksellers kept their stalls, and here it was that the book of Anaxagoras could be bought for a drachme.

Here then was the place where that physical philosophy was disseminated which first gained a few advanced thinkers; then, through Euripides, leavened the drama, once the exponent of ancient piety; then, through the stage, the Athenian public, till we arrive at those Stoics and Epicureans who came to teach philosophy and religion not as a faith, but as a system, and to spend their time with the rest of the public in seeking out novelties of creed and of opinion as mere fashions with which people choose to dress their minds. And it was on this very Areopagus, where we are now standing, that these philosophers of fashion came into contact with the thorough earnestness, the profound convictions, the red-hot zeal of the Apostle Paul. The memory of that great scene still lingers about the place, and every guide will show you the exact place where the Apostle stood, and in what direction he addressed his audience. There are, I believe, even some respectable commentators, who transfer their own estimate of S. Paul's importance to the Athenian public, and hold that it was before the _court_ of the Areopagus that he was asked to expound his views.(54) This is more than doubtful. The _blases_ philosophers, who probably yawned over their own lectures, hearing of a new lay preacher, eager to teach and apparently convinced of the truth of what he said, thought the novelty too delicious to be neglected, and brought him forthwith out of the chatter and bustle of the crowd, probably past the very orchestra where Anaxagoras's books had been proselytizing before him, and where the stiff old heroes of Athenian history stood, a monument of the escape from political slavery. It is even possible that the curious knot of idlers did not bring him higher than this platform, which might well be called part of Mars' Hill. But if they choose to bring him to the top, there was no hindrance, for the venerable court held its sittings in the open air, on stone seats; and when not thus occupied the top of the rock may well have been a convenient place of retirement for people who did not want to be disturbed by new acquaintances and the constant eddies of new gossip in the market-place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mars' Hill, Athens]

It is, however, of far less import to know on what spot of the Areopagus Paul stood, than to understand clearly what he said, and how he sought to conciliate as well as to refute the philosophers who, no doubt, looked down upon him as an intellectual inferior. He starts naturally enough from the extraordinary crowd of votive statues and offerings, for which Athens was remarkable above all other cities of Greece. He says, with a touch of irony, that he finds them very religious indeed,(55) so religious that he even found an altar to a G.o.d professedly _unknown_, or perhaps unknowable.(56) Probably S. Paul meant to pa.s.s from the latter sense of the word _????st??_, which was, I fancy, what the inscription meant, to the former, which gave him an excellent introduction to his argument. Even the use of the singular may have been an intentional variation from the strict text, for Pausanias twice over speaks of altars to the G.o.ds who are called the _????st??_ (or mysterious), but I cannot find any citation of the inscription in the singular form. However that may be, our version does not preserve the neatness of S. Paul's point: "I find an altar," he says, "to an unknown G.o.d. Whom then ye unknowingly worship, Him I announce to you." But then he develops a conception of the great One G.o.d, not at all from the special Jewish, but from the Stoic point of view. He was preaching to Epicureans and to Stoics-to the advocates of prudence as the means, and pleasure as the end, of a happy life, on the one hand; on the other, to the advocates of duty, and of life in harmony with the Providence which governs the world for good. There could be no doubt to which side the man of Tarsus must incline. Though the Stoics of the market-place of Athens might be mere dilettanti, mere talkers about the _??a???_ and the great soul of the world, we know that this system of philosophy produced at Tarsus as well as at Rome the most splendid constancy, the most heroic endurance-I had almost said the most Christian benevolence. It was this stern and earnest theory which attracted all serious minds in the decay of heathenism.

Accordingly, S. Paul makes no secret of his sympathy with its n.o.bler features. He describes the G.o.d whom he preaches as the benevolent Author of the beauty and fruitfulness of Nature, the great Benefactor of mankind by His providence, and not without constant and obtrusive witnesses of His greatness and His goodness. But he goes much further, and treads close upon the Stoic pantheism when he not only a.s.serts, in the words of Aratus, that we are His offspring, but that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being."

His first conclusion, that the G.o.dhead should not be worshipped or even imaged in stone or in bronze, was no doubt quite in accordance with more enlightened Athenian philosophy. But it was when he proceeded to preach the Resurrection of the Dead, that even those who were attracted by him, and sympathized with him, turned away in contempt. The Epicureans thought death the end of all things. The Stoics thought that the human soul, the offspring-nay, rather an offshoot-of the Divine world-soul, would be absorbed into its parent essence. Neither could believe the a.s.sertion of S. Paul. When they first heard him talk of _Jesus_ and _Anastasis_ they thought them some new pair of Oriental deities. But when they learned that Jesus was a man ordained by G.o.d to judge the world, and that Anastasis was merely the Anastasis of the dead, they were greatly disappointed; so some mocked, and some excused themselves from further listening.

Thus ended, to all appearance ignominiously, the first heralding of the faith which was to supplant all the temples and altars and statues with which Athens had earned its renown as a beautiful city, which was to overthrow the schools of the sneering philosophers, and even to remodel all the society and the policy of the world. And yet, in spite of this great and decisive triumph of Christianity there was something curiously prophetic in the contemptuous rejection of its apostle at Athens. Was it not the first expression of the feeling which still possesses the visitor who wanders through its ruins, and which still dominates the educated world?-the feeling that while other cities owe to the triumph of Christianity all their beauty and their interest, Athens has to this day resisted this influence; and that while the Christian monuments of Athens would elsewhere excite no small attention, here they are pa.s.sed by as of no import compared with its heathen splendor.(57) There are very old and very beautiful little churches in Athens, "ces delicieuses pet.i.tes eglises byzantines," as M. Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, and unlike what one generally sees in Europe. They strike the observer with their quaintness and smallness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model of that unique and splendid building, the cathedral of S. Mark at Venice. But yet it is surprising how little we notice them at Athens. I was even told-I sincerely hope it was false-that public opinion at Athens was gravitating toward the total removal of one, and that the most perfect, of these churches, which stands in the middle of a main street, and so breaks the regularity of the modern boulevard! Let us hope that the man who lashes himself into rage at the destruction of the Venetian tower may set his face in time against this real piece of barbarism, if indeed it ever ventures to a.s.sert itself in act.(58)

I have now concluded a review of the most important old Greek buildings to be seen about Athens. To treat them exhaustively would require a far longer discussion, or special knowledge which I do not possess; and there are, moreover, smaller buildings, like the so-called Lantern of Demosthenes, which is really the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, and the Temple of the Winds, which are well worth a visit, but which the traveller can find without a guide, and study without difficulty. But incompleteness must be an unavoidable defect in describing any city in which new discoveries are being made, I may say, monthly, and when the museums and excavations of to-day may be any day completely eclipsed by materials now unknown, or scattered through the country. Thus, on my second visit to Athens, I found in the National Bank the wonderful treasures exhumed by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae, which are in themselves enough to induce any student of Greek antiquity to revisit the town, however well he may have examined it in former years. On my third visit, they were arranged and catalogued, but we have not yet attained to any certainty about the race that left them there, and how remote the antiquity of the tombs. These considerations tend not only to vindicate the inadequateness of this review, but perhaps even to justify it in the eyes of the exacting reader, who may have expected a more thorough survey.

CHAPTER VI.

EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA-COLONUS-THE HARBORS-LAURIUM-SUNIUM.

There are two modern towns which, in natural features, resemble Athens.

The irregular ridge of greater Acropolis and lesser Areopagus remind one of the castle and the Monchsberg of Salzburg, one of the few towns in Europe more beautifully situated than Athens. The relation of the Acropolis to the more lofty Lycabettus suggests the castle of Edinburgh and Arthur's Seat. But here the advantage is greatly on the side of Athens.

When you stand on the Acropolis and look round upon Attica, a great part of its history becomes immediately unravelled and clear. You see at once that you are placed in the princ.i.p.al plain of the country, surrounded with chains of mountains in such a way that it is easy to understand the old stories of wars with Eleusis, or with Marathon, or with any of the outlying valleys. Looking inland on the north side, as you stand beside the Erechtheum, you see straight before you, at a distance of some ten miles, Mount Pentelicus, from which all the splendid marble was once carried to the rock around you. This Pentelicus is a sort of intermediate cross-chain between two main lines which diverge from either side of it, and gradually widen so as to form the plain of Athens. The left or north-western chain is Mount Parnes; the right or eastern is Mount Hymettus. This latter, however, is only the inner margin of a large mountainous tract which spreads all over the rest of South Attica down to the Cape of Sunium. There are, of course, little valleys, and two or three villages, one of them the old deme Brauron, which they now p.r.o.nounce Vravron. There is the town of Thorikos, near the mines of Laurium; there are two modern villages called Marcopoulos; but on the whole, both in ancient and modern times, this south-eastern part of Attica, south of Hymettus, was, with the exception of Laurium, of little moment. There is a gap between Pentelicus and Hymettus, nearly due north, through which the way leads out to Marathon; and you can see the spot where the bandits surprised in 1870 the unfortunate gentlemen who fell victims to the vacillation and incompetence of people in power at that time.

On the left side of Pentelicus you see the chain of Parnes, which almost closes with it at a far distance, and which stretches down all the north-west side of Attica till it runs into the sea as Mount Corydallus, opposite to the island of Salamis. In this long chain of Parnes (which can only be avoided by going up to the northern coast at Oropus, and pa.s.sing into Botia close by the sea) there are three pa.s.ses or lower points, one far to the north-that by Dekelea, where the present king has his country palace, but where of old Alcibiades planted the Spartan garrison which tormented and ruined the farmers of Attica. This pa.s.s leads you out to Tanagra in Botia. Next to the south, some miles nearer, is the even more famous pa.s.s of Phyle, from which Thrasybulus and his brave fellows recovered Athens and its liberty. This pa.s.s, when you reach its summit, looks into the northern point of the Thriasian plain, and also into the wilder regions of Cithaeron, which border Botia. The third pa.s.s, and the lowest-but a few miles beyond the groves of Academe-is the pa.s.s of Daphne, which was the high road to Eleusis, along which the sacred processions pa.s.sed in the times of the Mysteries; and in this pa.s.s you still see the numerous niches in which native tablets had been set by the worshippers at a famous temple of Aphrodite.

On this side of Attica also, with the exception of the Thriasian plain and of Eleusis, there extends outside Mount Parnes a wild mountainous district, quite alpine in character, which severs Attica from Botia, not by a single row of mountains, or by a single pa.s.s, but by a succession of glens and defiles which at once explain to the cla.s.sical student, when he sees them, how necessary and fundamental were the divisions of Greece into its separate districts, and how completely different in character the inhabitants of each were sure to be. The way from Attica into Botia was no ordinary high road, nor even a pa.s.s over one mountain, but through a series of glens and valleys and defiles, at any of which a hostile army could be stopped, and each of which severed the country on either side by a difficult obstacle. This truly alpine nature of Greece is only felt when we see it, and yet must ever be kept before the mind in estimating the character and energy of the race. But let us return to our view from the Acropolis.

If we turn and look southward, we see a broken country, with several low hills between us and the sea-hills tolerably well cultivated, and when I saw them in May all colored with golden stubbles, for the corn had just been reaped. But all the plain in every direction seems dry and dusty; arid, too, and not rich alluvial soil, like the plains of Botia. Then Thucydides's words come back to us, when he says Attica was "undisturbed on account of the lightness of its soil" (_?stas?ast?? ??sa d?? t?

?ept??e??_), as early invaders rather looked out for richer pastures. This reflection, too, of Thucydides applies equally to the mountains of Attica round Athens, which are not covered with rich gra.s.s and dense shrubs, like Helicon, like Parna.s.sus, like the glades of Arcadia, but seem so bare that we wonder where the bees of Hymettus can find food for their famous honey.

It is only when the traveller ascends the rocky slopes of the mountain that he finds its rugged surface carpeted with quant.i.ties of little wild flowers, too insignificant to give the slightest color to the mountain, but sufficient for the bees, which are still making their honey as of old.

This honey of Hymettus, which was our daily food at Athens, is now not very remarkable either for color or flavor. It is very dark, and not by any means so good as the honey produced in other parts of Greece-not to say on the heather hills of Scotland and Ireland. I tasted honey at Thebes and at Corinth which was much better, especially that of Corinth made in the hills toward Cleonae, where the whole country is scented with thyme, and where thousands of bees are buzzing eagerly through the summer air.

But when the old Athenians are found talking so much about honey, we must not forget that sugar was unknown to them, and that all their sweetmeats depended upon honey exclusively. Hence the culture and use of it a.s.sumed an importance not easily understood among moderns, who are in possession of the sugar-cane.

But amid all the dusty and bare features of the view, the eye fastens with delight on one great broad band of dark green, which, starting from the west side of Pentelicus, close to Mount Parnes in the north, sweeps straight down the valley, pa.s.sing about two miles to the west of Athens, and reaching to the Peiraeus. This is the plain of the Kephissus, and these are the famous olive woods which contain with them the deme Colonus, so celebrated by Sophocles, and the groves of Academe, at their nearest point to the city. The dust of Athens, and the bareness of the plain, make all walks about the town disagreeable, save either the ascent of Lycabettus, or a ramble into these olive woods. The River Kephissus, which waters them, is a respectable, though narrow river, even in summer often discharging a good deal of water, but much divided into trenches and arms, which are very convenient for irrigation.(59) So there is a strip of country, fully ten miles long, and perhaps two wide on the average, which affords delicious shade and greenness and the song of birds, instead of hot sunlight and dust and the shrill clamor of the tettix without.

I have wandered many hours in these delightful woods listening to the nightingales, which sing all day in the deep shade and solitude, as it were in a prolonged twilight, and hearing the plane-tree whispering to the elm,(60) as Aristophanes has it, and seeing the white poplar show its silvery leaves in the breeze, and wondering whether the huge old olive stems, so like the old pollarded stumps in Windsor Forest, could be the actual sacred trees, the _???a?_, under which the youth of Athens ran their races. The banks of the Kephissus, too, are lined with great reeds, and sedgy marsh plants, which stoop over into its sandy shallows and wave idly in the current of its stream. The ouzel and the kingfisher start from under one's feet, and bright fish move out lazily from their sunny bay into the deeper pool. Now and then through a vista the Acropolis shows itself in a framework of green foliage, nor do I know any more enchanting view of that great ruin.

All the ground under the dense olive-trees was covered with standing corn, for here, as in Southern Italy, the shade of trees seems no hindrance to the ripening of the ear. But there was here thicker wood than in Italian corn-fields; on the other hand, there was not that rich festooning of vines which spread from tree to tree, and which give a Neapolitan summer landscape so peculiar a charm. A few homesteads there were along the roads, and even at one of the bridges a children's school, full of those beautiful fair children whose heads remind one so strongly of the old Greek statues. But all the houses were walled in, and many of them seemed solitary and deserted. The memories of rapine and violence were still there. I was told, indeed, that no country in Europe was so secure, and I confess I found it so myself in my wanderings; but when we see how every disturbance or war on the frontier revives again the rumor of brigandage, I could not help feeling that the desert state of the land, and the general sense of insecurity, however irrational in the intervals of peace, was not surprising.

There is no other excursion in the immediate vicinity of Athens of any like beauty or interest. The older buildings in the Peiraeus are completely gone. No trace of the docks or the _deigma_ remains; and the splendid walls, built as Thucydides tells us with cut stone, without mortar or mud, and fastened with clamps of iron fixed with lead-this splendid structure has been almost completely destroyed. We can find, indeed, elsewhere in Attica-at Phyle-still better at Eleutherae-specimens of this sort of building, but at the Peiraeus there are only foundations remaining. Yet it is not really true that the great wall surrounding the Peiraeus has totally disappeared. Even at the mouth of the harbor single stones may be seen lying along the rocky edge of the water, of which the size and the square cutting prove the use for which they were originally intended. But if the visitor to the Peiraeus will take the trouble to cross the hill, and walk round the harbor of Munychia, he will find on the eastern point of the headland a neat little cafe, with comfortable seats, and with a beautiful view. The sea coast all round this headland shows the bed of the surrounding sea wall, hewn in the live rock. The actual structure is preserved in patches on the western point of this harbor, where the coast is very steep; but in the place to which I refer, we can trace the whole course of the wall a few feet above the water, cut out in the solid rock.

I know no scanty specimen of Athenian work which gives a greater idea of the enormous wealth and energy of the city. The port of Munychia had its own theatre and temples, and it was here that Pausanias saw the altar to _the G.o.ds called the unknown_. The traces of the sea wall cease as soon as it reaches the actual narrow mouth of the little harbor. I do not know how far toward Phalerum it can be traced, but when visiting the harbor called Zea(61) on another occasion, I did not observe it. The reader will find in any ancient atlas, or in any history of Greece, a map of the harbors of Athens, so that I think it unnecessary to append one here.

The striking feature in the present Peiraeus, which from the entrance of the harbor is very picturesque, is undoubtedly the rapid growth and extension of factories, with English machinery and overseers. When last there I found fourteen of these establishments, and their chimneys were becoming quite a normal feature in Greek landscape. Those which I visited were working up the cotton and the wool of the country into calico and other stuffs, which are unfortunately coming into fashion among the lower cla.s.ses, and ousting the old costume. I was informed that boys were actually forbidden to attend school in Greek dress, a regulation which astonishes any one who knows the beauty and dignity of the national costume.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Peiraeus]

A drive to the open roadstead of Phalerum is more repaying. Here it is interesting to observe how the Athenians pa.s.sed by the nearest sea, and even an open and clear roadstead, in order to join their city to the better harbor and more defensible headland of Peiraeus. Phalerum, as they now call it, though they spell it with an _?_, is the favorite bathing-place of modern Athens, with an open-air theatre, and is about a mile and a half nearer the city than Peiraeus. The water is shallow, and the beach is of fine sand, so that for ancient ships, which I suppose drew little water, it was a convenient landing-place, especially for the disembarking of troops, who could choose their place anywhere around a large crescent, and actually land fighting, if necessary. But the walls of Athens, the long walls to Peiraeus, and its lofty fortifications, made this roadstead of no use to the enemy so long as Athens held the command of the sea, and could send out ships from the secure little harbors of Zea and Munychia, which are on the east side and in the centre of the headland of Peiraeus. There was originally a third wall, too, to the east side of the Phaleric bay, but this seems to have been early abandoned when the second long wall, or middle wall, as it was originally called, was completed.

At the opening of the Peloponnesian war it appears that the Athenians defended against the Lacedaemonians, not the two long walls which ran close together and parallel to Peiraeus, but the northern of these, and the far distant Phaleric wall. It cannot but strike any observer as extraordinary how the Athenians should undertake such an enormous task. Had the enemy attacked anywhere suddenly and with vigor, it seems hard to understand how they could have kept him out. According to Thucydides's accurate detail,(62) the wall to Phalerum was nearly four miles, that to Peiraeus four and a half. There were in addition five miles of city wall, and nearly three of Peiraeus wall. That is to say, there were about seventeen miles of wall to be protected. This is not all. The circuit was not closed, but separated by about a mile of beach between Peiraeus and Phalerum, so that the defenders of the two extremities could in no way promptly a.s.sist each other. Thucydides tells us that a garrison of 16,000 inferior soldiers, old men, boys, and _metics_, sufficed to do this work.

We are forced to conclude that not only were the means of attacking walls curiously incomplete, but even the dash and enterprise of modern warfare cannot have been understood by the Greeks. For we never hear of even a bold attempt on this absurdly straggling fortification, far less of any successful attempt to force it.