Rambles and Studies in Greece Part 5

But it is time that we should leave the environs of Athens,(63) and wander out beyond the borders of the Athenian plain into the wilder outlying parts of the land. Attica is, after all, a large country, if one does not apply railway measures to it. We think thirty miles by rail very little, but thirty miles by road is a long distance, and implies land enough to support a large population and to maintain many flourishing towns. We can wander thirty miles from Athens through Attica in several directions-to Eleutherae, on the western Botian frontier; to Oropus, on the north; and Sunium, on the south. Thus it is only when one endeavors to know Attica minutely that one finds how much there is to be seen, and how long a time is required to see it. And fortunately enough there is an expedition, and that not the least important, where we can avoid the rough paths and rougher saddles of the country, and coast in a steamer along a district at all times obscure in history, and seldom known for anything except for being the road to Sunium. Strabo gives a list of the demes along this seaboard,(64) and seems only able to write one fact about them-a line from an old oracle in the days of the Persian war, which prophesied that "the women of Colias will roast their corn with oars,"(65) alluding to the wrecks driven on sh.o.r.e here by the northwest wind from Salamis. Even the numerous little islands along this coast were in his day, as they now are, perfectly barren. Yet with all its desolation it is exceedingly picturesque and varied in outline.

We took ship in the little steamer(66) belonging to the Sunium Mining Company, who have built a village called Ergasteria, between Thorikos and the promontory, and who were obliging enough to allow us to sail in the boat intended for their private traffic. We left the Peiraeus on one of those peculiarly Greek mornings, with a blue sky and very bright sun, but with an east wind so strong and clear, so _?ap???_, as the old Greeks would say, that the sea was driven into long white crests, and the fishing-boats were lying over under their sails. These fresh and strong winds, which are constantly blowing in Greece, save the people very much from the bad effects of a very hot southern climate. Even when the temperature is high the weather is seldom sultry; and upon the sea, which intrudes everywhere, one can always find a cool and refreshing atmosphere.

The Greeks seem not the least to fear these high winds, which are generally steady and seldom turn to squalls. The smallest boats are to be seen scudding along on great journeys from one island to another-often with a single occupant, who sits holding the helm with one hand, and the stern sheet with the other. All the ferry-boats in the Peiraeus are managed in this way, and you may see their great sails, like sea-gulls' wings, leaning over in the gale, and the spray dashing from the vessel's prow. We met a few larger vessels coming up from Syra, but on the whole the sea was well-nigh as desert as the coast; so much so, that the faithful dog, which was on board each of those boats, thought it his serious duty to stand up on the taffrail and bark at us as a strange and doubtful company.

So, after pa.s.sing many natural harbors and s.p.a.cious bays, many rocky headlands and bluff islands-but all desert and abandoned by track of man, we approached the famous cape, from which the white pillars of the lofty old temple gleamed brilliantly in the sun. They were the first and only white marble pillars which I saw in Greece. Elsewhere, dust and age, if not the hand of man, have colored that splendid material with a dull golden hue; but here the sea breeze, while eating away much of the surface, has not soiled them with its fresh brine, and so they still remain of the color which they had when they were set up. We should fain conjecture that here, at all events, the Greeks had not applied the usual blue and red to decorate this marvellous temple; that-for the delight and benefit of the sailors, who hailed it from afar, as the first sign of Attica-its brilliant white color was left to it, to render it a brighter beacon and a clearer object in twilight and in mist. I will not yet describe it, for we paid it a special visit, and must speak of it in greater detail; but even now, when we coasted round the headland, and looked up to its shining pillars standing far aloft into the sky, it struck us with the most intense interest. It was easy, indeed, to see how Byron's poetic mind was here inspired with some of his n.o.blest lines.

When we turned from it seaward, we saw stretched out in _echelon_ that chain of Cyclades, which are but a prolongation of the headland-Keos, Kyphnos, Seriphos, Siphnos, and in the far distance, Melos-Melos, the scene of Athens's violence and cruelty, when she filled up, in the mind of the old historian, the full measure of her iniquity. And as we turned northward, the long island, or islet, of Helena, which stretches along the point, like Hydra off that of Argolis, could not hide from us the mountain ranges of Euba, still touched here and there with snow. A short run against the wind brought us to the port of Ergasteria, marked very strangely in the landscape by the smoke of its chimneys-the port where the present produce of the mines of Laurium is prepared and shipped for Scotland.

Here, at last, we found ourselves again among men; three thousand operatives, many of them with families, make quite a busy town of Ergasteria. And I could not but contrast their bold and independent looks, rough and savage as they seemed, with what must have been the appearance of the droves of slaves who worked the mines in old days. We were rowed ash.o.r.e from our steamer by two men called Aristides and Epaminondas, but I cannot say that their looks betokened either the justice of the one or the culture of the other.

We found ourselves when we landed in an awkward predicament. The last English engineer remaining in the Mining Company, at whose invitation we had ventured into this wild district, had suddenly left, that morning, for Athens. His house was shut up, and we were left friendless and alone, among three thousand of these Aristideses and Epaminondases, whose appearance was, as I have said, anything but rea.s.suring. We did what was best to meet the difficulty, and what was not only the best thing to do, but the only thing, and it turned out very well indeed. We went to the temporary director of the mines, a very polished gentleman, with a charming wife, both of whom spoke French excellently. We stated our case, and requested hospitality for the night. Nothing could be more friendly than our reception. This benevolent man and his wife took us into their own house, prepared rooms for us, and promised to let us see all the curiosities of the country. Thus our misfortune became, in fact, a very good fortune. The night, however, it must be confessed, was spent in a very unequal conflict with mosquitoes-an inconvenience which our good hostess in vain endeavored to obviate by giving us a strong-smelling powder to burn in our room, and shutting all the windows. But had the remedy been even successful, it is very doubtful whether it was not worse than the disease.

We started in the morning by a special train-for the company have a private line from the coast up to the mines-to ascend the wooded and hilly country into the region so celebrated of old as one of the main sources of Athenian wealth. As the train wound its way round the somewhat steep ascent, our prospect over the sea and its islands became larger and more varied. The wild rocks and forests of southern Euba-one of the few districts in Greece which seem to have been as savage and deserted in old days as they are now-detached themselves from the intervening island of Helena. We were told that wild boars were still to be found in Euba. In the hills about Laurium, hares, which Xenophon so loved to hunt in his Elean retreat, and turtle doves, seemed the only game attainable. All the hills were covered with stunted underwood.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Laurium]

The mines of Laurium appear very suddenly in Attic history, but from that time onward are a prominent part of the wealth of the Athenians. We know that in Solon's day there was great scarcity of money, and that he was obliged to depreciate the value of the coinage-a very violent and unprecedented measure, never repeated; for, all through later history, Attic silver was so good that it circulated at a premium in foreign parts just as English money does now. Accordingly, in Solon's time we hear no mention of this great and almost inexhaustible source of national wealth.

All through the reign of the Peisistratids there is a like silence.

Suddenly, after the liberation of Athens, we hear of Themistocles persuading the people to apply the very large revenue from these mines to the building of a fleet for the purpose of the war with aegina.(67) The so-called Xenophon _On the Attic Revenues_-a tract which is almost altogether about these mines-a.s.serts indeed that they had been worked from remote antiquity; and there can be little doubt that here, as elsewhere in Greece, the Phnicians had been the forerunners of the natives in the art of mining. Here, as in Thasos, I believe the Phnicians had their settlements; and possibly a closer survey of the great underground pa.s.sages, which are still there, may give us some proof by inscriptions or otherwise.

But what happened after the Semitic traders had been expelled from Greek waters?-for expelled they were, though, perhaps, far later from some remote and unexplored points than we usually imagine. I suppose that when this took place Athens was by no means in a condition to think about prosecuting trade at Sunium. Salamis, which was far closer and a more obvious possession, was only conquered in Solon's day, after a long and tedious struggle; and I am perfectly certain that the Athenians could have had no power to hold an outlying dependency, separated by thirty miles of the roughest mountain country, when they had not subdued an island scarcely a mile from the Thriasian plain and not ten miles from Athens. I take it, then, that the so-called _s??????s??_, or unifying of Athens, in prehistoric times, by Theseus, or whoever did it, was not a cementing of all Attica, including these remote corners, but only of the settlements about the plains of Attica, Marathon, and Eleusis; and that the southern end of the peninsula was not included in the Athens of early days. It was, in fact, only accessible by a carefully constructed artificial road, such as we hear of afterward, or by sea. The Athenians had not either of these means of access at so early a period. And it is not a little remarkable that the first mention of their ownership of the silver mines is a.s.sociated with the building of a fleet to contend with aegina. I have no doubt that Themistocles's advice has been preserved without his reasons for it. He persuaded the Athenians to surrender their surplus revenue from Laurium, to build ships against the aeginetans, simply because they found that without ships the aeginetans would be practically sole possessors of the mines. They were far closer to Laurium by sea than Athens was by land-closer, indeed, in every way-and I am led to suspect that, in the days before Solon, the mines may have been secretly worked by aegina, and not by Athens. I cannot here enter into my full reasons, but I fancy that Peisistratus and his sons-not by conquest, but by some agreement-got practical possession of the mines, and were, perhaps, the first to make all Attica really subject to the power of Athens.(68) But no sooner are they expelled than the aeginetans renew their attacks or claims on Laurium; and it is only the Athenian fleet which secures to Athens its possession.

We hear of proceedings of Hippias about coinage,(69) which are adduced by Aristotle as specimens of injustice, or sharp practice, and which may have something to do with the acquisition of the silver mines by his dynasty.

But I must cut short this serious dissertation.

Our special train brought us up slowly round wooded heights, and through rich green brakes, into a lonely country, from which glimpses of the sea could, however, still be seen, and glimpses of blue islands, between the hills. And so we came to the settlements of the modern miners. The great Company, whose guests we were, had been started some years ago, by French and Italian speculators, and Professor Anstead had been there as geologist for some years. But the jealousy of the Greeks, when they found out that profit was rewarding foreign enterprise, caused legislation against the Company; various complications followed, so that at last they gladly sold their interest to a native Company. In 1887 this Company was still thriving; and I saw in the harbor a large vessel from Glasgow, which had come to carry the lead to Scotland, when prepared in blocks-all the produce being still bought by a single English firm.

When the Greeks discuss these negotiations about the mines they put quite a different color on the affair. They say that the French and Italians desired to evade fair payment for the ground-rent of the mines, trusting to the strength of their respective governments, and the weakness of Greece. The Company's policy is described in Greece as an over-reaching, unscrupulous attempt to make great profits by sharp bargains with the natives, who did not know the value of their property. A great number of obscure details are adduced in favor of their arguments, and it seemed to me that the Greeks were really convinced of their truth. In such a matter it would be unfair to decide without stating both sides; and I am quite prepared to change my present conviction that the Greeks were most to blame, if proper reasons can be a.s.signed. But the legislative Acts pa.s.sed in their Parliament look very ugly indeed at first sight.

The princ.i.p.al Laurium Company(70) never enter the mines at all, but gather the great ma.s.s of scoriae, which the old Athenians threw out after smelting with more imperfect furnaces and less heat than ours. These scoriae, which look like stone cinders, have been so long there that some vegetation has at last grown over them, and the traveller does not suspect that all the soil around was raised and altered by the hand of man. Owing to the power of steam, and their railway, the present miners carry down the scoriae on trucks to the sea-coast, to Ergasteria, and there smelt them. The old Athenians had their furnaces in the middle of the mountains, where many of them are still to be seen. They sought chiefly for silver, whereas the modern Company are chiefly in pursuit of lead, and obtain but little silver from the scoriae.

In many places you come upon the openings of the old pits, which went far into the bowels of the mountains, through miles of underground galleries and pa.s.sages. Our engine-driver-an intelligent Frenchman-stopped the train to show us one of these entrances, which went down almost straight, with good steps still remaining, into the earth. He a.s.sured us that the other extremity which was known, all the pa.s.sage being open, was some two or three miles distant, at a spot which he showed us from a hill. Hearing that inscriptions were found in these pits, and especially that the name of Nicias had been discovered there, we were very anxious to descend and inspect them. This was promised to us, for the actual pits were in the hands of another Greek Company, who were searching for new veins of silver. But when we arrived at the spot the officers of the Company were unwilling to let us into the pits. The proper overseer was away-intentionally, of course. There were no proper candles; there were no means of obtaining admission: so we were balked in our inquiry. But we went far enough into the mouth of one of them to see that these pits were on a colossal scale, well arched up; and, I suppose, had we gone far enough, we should have found the old supports, of which the Athenian law was so careful.

The quant.i.ty of scoriae thrown out, which seems now perfectly inexhaustible, is in itself sufficient evidence of the enormous scale on which the old mining was carried on. Thus, we do not in the least wonder at hearing that Nicias had one thousand slaves working in the mines, and that the profits accruing to the State from the fines and head-rents of the mines were very large-on a moderate estimate, 8000 a year of our money, which meant in those days a great deal more.

The author of the tract on "Athenian Revenue" says that the riches of the mines were absolutely unbounded; that only a small part of the silver district had been worked out, though the digging had gone on from time immemorial; and that after innumerable laborers had been employed the mines always appeared equally rich, so that no limit need be put on the employment of capital. Still he speaks of opening a new shaft as a most risky speculation. His general estimate appears, however, somewhat exaggerated. The writer confesses that the number of laborers was in his day diminishing, and the majority of the proprietors were then beginners; so that there must have been great interruption of work during the Peloponnesian War. In the age of Philip there were loud complaints that the speculations in mining were unsuccessful; and for obtaining silver, at all events, no reasonable prospect seems to have been left. In the first century of our era, Strabo (ix. i. 23) says that these once celebrated mines were exhausted,(71) that new mining did not pay, and thus people were smelting the poorer ore, and the scoriae from which the ancients had imperfectly separated the metal. He adds that the main product of the mining district was in his day honey, which was especially known as smokeless (_???p??st??_), on account of its good preparation. This in itself shows that the mining had decayed, for now all the flowers in the neighborhood of the smelting are killed by the black fumes.

Our last mention of the place in olden times is that of Pausanias (at the end of the second century A. D.), who speaks of Laurium, with the addition that it had once been the seat of the Athenian silver mines!

There is but one more point suggested by these mines, which it is not well to pa.s.s over when we are considering the working of them in ancient times.

Nothing is more poisonous than the smoke from lead-mines; and for this reason the people at Ergasteria have built a chimney more than a mile long to the top of a neighboring hill, where the smoke escapes. Even so, when the wind blows back the smoke, all the vegetation about the village is at once blighted, and there is no greater difficulty than to keep a garden within two or three miles of this chimney. As the Athenians did not take such precautions, we are not surprised to hear from them frequent notices of the unhealthiness of the district, for when there were many furnaces, and the smoke was not drawn away by high chimneys, we can hardly conceive life to have been tolerable. What then must have been the condition of the gangs of slaves which Nicias and other respectable and pious Athenians kept in these mines? Two or three allusions give us a hideous insight into this great social sore, which has not been laid bare, because the wild district of Laurium, and the deep mines under its surface, have concealed the facts from the ordinary observer. Nicias, we are told, let out one thousand slaves to Sosias the Thracian, at an obolus a day each-the lessee being bound to restore them to him the same _in number_.

The meaning of this frightful contract is only too plain. The yearly rent paid for each slave was about half the full price paid for him in the market. It follows that, if the slave lived for three years, Nicias made a profit of 50 per cent. on his outlay. No doubt, some part of this extraordinary bargain must be explained by the great profits which an experienced miner could make-a fact supported by the tract on the Revenues, which cannot date more than a generation later than the bargain of Nicias. The lessee, too, was under the additional risk of the slaves escaping in time of war, when a hostile army might make a special invasion into the mountain district for the purpose of inflicting a blow on this important part of Athenian revenue. In such cases, it may be presumed that desperate attempts were made by the slaves to escape, for although the Athenian slaves generally were the best treated in Greece, and had many holidays, it was very different with the gangs employed by the Thracian taskmaster. We are told that they had three hundred and sixty working days in the year. This, together with the poison of the atmosphere, tells its tale plainly enough.

And yet Nicias, the capitalist who worked this hideous trade, was the most pious and G.o.d-fearing man at Athens. So high was his reputation for integrity and religion, that the people insisted on appointing him again and again to commands for which he was wholly unfit; and when at last he ruined the great Athenian army before Syracuse, and lost his own life, by his extreme devoutness and his faith in the threats and warnings of the G.o.ds-even then the great sceptical historian, who cared for none of these things, condones all his blunders for the sake of his piety and his respectability.

Of course, however, an excursion to Laurium, interesting as it might be, were absurd without visiting the far more famous Sunium,-the promontory which had already struck us so much on our sea voyage round the point,-the temple which Byron has again hallowed with his immortal verse, and Turner with his hardly less immortal pencil. So we hired horses on our return from the mines, and set out on a very fine afternoon to ride down some seven or eight miles from Ergasteria to the famous promontory. Our route led over rolling hills, covered with arbutus and stunted firs; along valleys choked with deep, matted gra.s.s; by the side of the sea, upon the narrow ledge of broken rocks. Nowhere was there a road, or a vestige of human habitation, save where the telegraph wire dipped into the sea, pointing the way to the distant Syra. It was late in the day, and the sun was getting low, so we urged our horses to a canter wherever the ground would permit it. But neither the heat nor the pace could conquer the indefatigable esquire who attended us on foot to show us the way, and hold the horses when we stopped. His speed and endurance made me think of Phidippides and his run to Sparta; nor, indeed, do any of the feats recorded of the old Greeks, either in swimming or running, appear incredible when we witness the feats that are being performed almost every day by modern muscle and endurance. At last, after a delightful two hours'

roaming through the homely solitude, we found ourselves at the foot of the last hill, and over us the shining pillars of the ruined temple stood out against the sky.

There can be no doubt that the temple of Neptune on Mount Taenarum must have been quite as fine as to position, but the earthquakes of Laconia have made havoc of its treasures, while at Sunium, though some of the drums in the shafts of the pillars have been actually displaced several inches from their fellows above and below, so that the perfect fitting of the old Athenians has come to look like the tottering work of a giant child with marble bricks,-in spite of this, thirteen pillars remain,(72) a piece of architrave, and a huge platform of solid blocks; above all, a site not desecrated by modern habitations, where we can sit and think of the great old days, and of the men who set up this n.o.ble monument at the remotest corner of their land. The Greeks told us that this temple, that at aegina, and the Parthenon, are placed exactly at the angles of a great equilateral triangle, with each side about twenty-five or thirty miles long. Our maps do not verify this belief. The distance from Athens to Sunium appears much longer than either of the other lines, nor do we find in antiquity any hint that such a principle was attended to, or that any peculiar virtue was attached to it.

We found the platform nearly complete, built with great square blocks of poros-stone, and in some places very high, though in others scarcely raised at all, according to the requirements of the ground. Over it the temple was built, not with the huge blocks which we see at Corinth and in the Parthenon, but still of perfectly white marble, and with that beautifully close fitting, without mortar, rubble, or cement, which characterizes the best and most perfect epoch of Greek architecture.(73) The stone, too, is the finest white marble, and, being exposed to no dust on its lofty site, has alone of all temples kept its original color-if, indeed, it was originally white, and not enriched with divers colors. The earthquake, which has displaced the stones in the middle of the pillars, has tumbled over many large pieces, which can be seen from above scattered all down the slope where they have rolled. But enough still remains for us to see the plan, and imagine the effect of the whole structure. It is in the usual simple, grand, Doric style, but lighter in proportions than the older Attic temples; and, being meant for distant effect, was probably not much decorated. Its very site gives it all the ornament any building could possibly require.

It was our good fortune to see it in a splendid sunset, with the sea a sheet of molten gold, and all the headlands and islands colored with hazy purple. The mountains of Euba, with their promontory of Geraestus, closed the view upon the north-east; but far down into the aegean reached island after island, as it were striving to prolong a highway to the holy Delos.

The ancient Andros, Tenos, Myconos were there, but the eye sought in vain for the home of Apollo's shrine-the smallest and yet the greatest of the group. The parallel chain, reaching down from Sunium itself, was confused into one ma.s.s, but exposed to view the distant Melos. Then came a short s.p.a.ce of open sea, due south, which alone prevented us from imagining ourselves on some fair and quiet inland lake; and beyond to the south-west we saw the point of Hydra, the only spot in all h.e.l.las whose recent fame exceeds the report of ancient days. The mountains of Argolis lay behind aegina, and formed with their Arcadian neighbors a solid background, till the eye wandered round to the Acropolis of Corinth, hardly visible in the burning brightness of the sun's decline. And all this splendid expanse of sea and mountain, and bay and cliff, seemed as utterly deserted as the wildest western coast of Scotland or Ireland. One or two little white sails, speeding in his boat some lonely fisherman, made the solitude, if possible, more speaking and more intense. There are finer views, more extensive, and perhaps even more varied, but none more exquisitely interesting and more melancholy to the student of Ancient Greece.

CHAPTER VII.

EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA-PENTELICUS-MARATHON-DAPHNE-ELEUSIS.

This great loneliness is a feature that strikes the traveller almost everywhere through the country. Many centuries of insecurity, and indeed of violence, have made country life almost impossible; and now that better times have come, the love and knowledge of it are gone. The city Athenian no longer grumbles, as he did in Aristophanes's day, that an invasion has driven him in from the rude plenty and simple luxuries of his farming life, where with his figs and his olives, his raisins and his heady wine, he made holiday before his G.o.ds, and roasted his thrush and his chestnuts with his neighbor over the fire. All this is gone. There remains, indeed, the old political lounger, the loafer of the market-place, ever seeking to obtain some shabby maintenance by sycophancy or by bullying. This type is not hard to find in modern Athens, but the old st.u.r.dy Acharnian, as well as the rich horse-breeding Alcmaeonid, are things of the past. Even the large profits to be made by market-gardening will not tempt them to adopt this industry, and the great city of Athens is one of the worst supplied and dearest of capitals, most of its daily requirements in vegetables, fowls, eggs, etc., coming in by steamers from islands on the coast of Thessaly. No part of the country of Attica can be considered even moderately cultivated, except the Thriasian plain, and the valley of Kephissus, reaching from near Dekelea to the sea. This latter plain, with its fine olive-woods reaching down across Academus to the region of the old long walls, is fairly covered with corn and grazing cattle, with plane trees and poplars. But even here many of the homesteads are deserted; and the country seats of the Athenians were often left empty for years, whenever a band of brigands appeared in the neighboring mountains, and threatened the outlying houses with blackmail, if not with bloodier violence. Of late there is a steady improvement.

Nothing can be truer than the admirable description of Northern Attica given in M. Perrot's book on the Attic orators. He is describing Rhamnus, the home of Antiphon, but his picture is of broader application.(74)

All these remarks are even more strongly exemplified by the beautiful country which lies between Pentelicus and Hymettus, and which is now covered with forest and brushwood. We pa.s.sed through this vale one sunny morning on our way to visit Marathon. There is, indeed, a road for some miles-the road to the quarries of Pentelicus-but a very different one from what the Athenians must have had. It is now a mere broad track, cut by wheels and hoofs in the sward; and wherever the ruts become too deep the driver turns aside, and makes a parallel track for his own convenience. In summer days, the dust produced by this sort of road is something beyond description; and the soil being very red earth, we have an atmosphere which accounts to some extent for the remarkable color of the old buildings of Athens. The way, after turning round the steep Lycabettus, which, like Arthur's Seat at Edinburgh, commands the town close by, pa.s.ses up the right side of the undulating plain of Attica, with the stony but variegated slopes of Hymettus upon the right, and Pentelicus almost straight ahead. As soon as the suburbs are pa.s.sed we meet but one or two country seats, surrounded with dark cypress and pepper trees; but outside the sombre green is a tall, dazzling, white wall, which gives a peculiarly Oriental character to the landscape. There is cultivation visible when you look to the westward, where the village of Kephissia lies, among the groves which accompany the Kephissus on its course; but up toward Pentelicus, along the track which must once have been crowded with carts, and heavy teams, and shouting drivers, when all the blocks of the Parthenon were being hurried from their quarry to adorn the Acropolis-along this famous track there is hardly a sign of culture.

Occasionally, a rough stubble field showed that a little corn had been cut-an occasional station, with a couple of soldiers, shows why more had not been sown. The fear of brigands had paralyzed industry, and even driven out the scanty rural population.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mount Lycabettus, Athens]

It strikes me, when speaking of this road, that the Greek roads cannot have been at all so well constructed as the Roman, many of which are still to be seen in England. Though I went upon the track of many of them, I but once noticed the vestige of an old Greek road. There are here and there wretched remains of Turkish roads-rough angular stones laid down across the hills, in a close irregular pavement; but of the great builders of the Parthenon and of Phyle, of Eleutherae and of Eleusis, hardly a patch of road-work has, so far as I know, remained.

There is, indeed, one exception in this very neighborhood, to which we may now naturally turn. The traveller who has wondered at the huge blocks of the Propylaea and the Parthenon, and who has noticed the exquisite quality of the stone, and the perfect smoothness which it has preserved to the present day, will naturally desire to visit the quarry on Pentelicus from which it was brought. The marble of Paros is probably the only stone found superior to it for the purposes of sculpture. It is, however, harder and of larger grain, so that it must have been more difficult to work. Experts can tell the difference between the two marbles, but I confess that, though M. Rousopoulos endeavored to teach it to me from specimens in the Acropolis Museum, I was unable to attain a clear knowledge of the distinction. The large blocks of Pentelican marble, however beautiful and fine in grain, seem not unfrequently to have contained flaws, and possibly the ascertaining of this defect may of old have been one of the most difficult duties of the architect. It is supposed to have been done by sounding the block with a hammer, a process which the Greeks would call _??d????e??_. There are at present, close to the east front of the Parthenon, several of these rejected blocks, and the lapse of ages has brought out the flaw visibly, because damp has had time to penetrate the stone, and stain its pure whiteness with a dark seam. But when it came fresh from its native bed, and was all pure white, I presume the difficulty must have been considerable. Possibly these blocks on the Parthenon were injured in their transit, and left the quarries in sound condition. For in going up the steep road to these quarries, in more than one place a similar great block will be found tumbled aside, and left lying at the very spot where we may suppose some accident to have happened to crack it. This road, which in its highest parts has never been altered, is a steep descent, rudely paved with transverse courses of stone, like steps in pattern, and may have had wooden slides laid over it, to bring down the product of the quarries to the valley. It is well worth while going up for a night to the fine monastery not far off, where there is ample shade of waving trees and plenty of falling water, in the midst of steep slopes wooded with the fir-a cool and quiet retreat in the fierce heat of summer.(75) From this place to the quarries is less than an hour's walk. The moderns still draw stone from them, but far below the spots chosen by the ancients; and, of course, the remains of the old industry are on an infinitely grander scale.

It is a laborious climb, up a road covered with small fragments of stone.

But at last, beneath a great face of marble all chipped with the work of ancient hands, there is a large cool cavern, with water dripping from the roof into ice-cold pools below, and besides it a quaint grotto chapel, with its light still burning, and stone seats around, where the traveller may rest. This place seems to have been the main source of the old Athenian buildings. The high face of the rock above it is chipped, as I have said, with small and delicate cutting, and hangs over, as if they had removed it beneath, in order to bring down the higher pieces more easily.

Of course, they could not, and probably if they could, would not, have blasted the stone; and, so far as I know, we are not informed by what process they managed to loosen and bring down the great blocks from their sites. The surface of the rock testifies to the use of some small and delicate chisel. But whatever the process, they must have had machinery of which we have lost all record, for no amount of manual work could possibly have accomplished what they did in a few years, and accomplished it with a delicacy which shows complete control of their materials. The beautifully fitted walls of the chamber inside the left wing of the Propylaea preserve an interesting piece of detail on the face of each square block, which is perfectly fitted to its fellows; there still remains a rough k.n.o.b jutting out from the centre, evidently the handle used for lifting the stone, and usually removed when all the building was completely finished. The expenses of war and the dolors of a long siege caused the Propylaea to remain unfinished, and so this piece of construction has survived.

The view from the top of Pentelicus is, of course, very striking, and those who have no time or inclination to spend a day at Marathon itself are usually content with a very fine view of the bay and the opposite mountains of Euba, which can thence be had. But it is indeed a pity, now that the country is generally quite safe, that after so long a journey as that from England to Athens, people should turn back without completing the additional fifteen miles which brings them to the site of the great battle itself.

As we leave the track which leads up to the monastery above mentioned, the country becomes gradually covered with shrubs, and then with stunted trees-generally old fir-trees, all hacked and carved and wounded for the sake of their resin, which is so painfully obtrusive in Greek wine. But in one place there is, by way of change, a picturesque bridge over a rapid rocky-bedded river, which is completely hidden with rich flowering oleanders, and in which we found sundry Attic women, of the poorer cla.s.s, washing their clothes. The woods in this place were wonderfully rich and scented, and the sound of the turtle doves was heard in the land.

Presently we came upon the thickly wooded corner, which was pointed out to us as the spot where our unfortunate countrymen were captured in 1870, and carried up the slopes of Pentelicus, to be sacrificed to the blundering of the English Minister or the Greek Ministry,-I could not decide which,-and more certainly to their own chivalry; for while all the captured Greeks escaped during the pursuit, our English gentlemen would not break their parole. These men are now held by the better Greeks to be martyrs for the good of Greece; for this outrage first forced the Government to take really vigorous measures for the safety of the country. The whole band were gradually captured and executed, till at last Takos, their chief, was caught in Peloponnesus, three or four years ago, and hanged at Athens. So it came that I found the country (on all my visits, '75, '77, '84, '89) apparently as safe as Ireland is to a traveller, and we required neither escort, nor arms, nor any precautions whatever.

We had, indeed, a missive from the Greek Prime Minister, which we presented to the Chief Police Officer of each town-a gentleman in the usual scarlet cap and white petticoats, but carrying a great dog-whip as the sign of his office. This custom, strange to say, dates from the days of Aristophanes. But the Prime Minister warned us that, though things were now safe, there was no permanent security. Any revolution in the neighborhood (such, for example, as that in Herzegovina, which at that time had not yet broken out) might, he said, send over the Turkish frontier a number of outlaws or other fugitives, who would support themselves by levying blackmail on the peasantry, and then on travellers.

We were a.s.sured that the Morea, which does not afford an easy escape into Turkey, has been for years perfectly secure, and I found it so in several subsequent journeys. So, then, any traveller desirous of seeing the Peloponnesus-Sparta, Olympia, Mantinea, Argos, or even Central Greece-may count on doing so with safety. Not so the visitor to Tempe and Mount Pindus.(76) The Professors of the University with whom I talked were, indeed, of a more sanguine opinion. They did not antic.i.p.ate any recurrence of the danger: they considered Greece one of the safest and quietest of countries. Moreover, in one point they all seemed agreed. It was perfectly certain that the presence of bandits would be at once known at Athens. Why this was so, I was not informed, nor whether travellers would be at once informed also. In any case, either M. Trikoupi or the British Minister can be perfectly relied upon for advice in this matter.

So much for the safety of travelling in Greece, which is suggested by the melancholy fate of Mr. Vyner and his friends, though that event is now so long past. But one point more. It is both idle and foolish to imagine that revolvers and daggers are the best protection against Greek bandits, should they reappear. They never attack where they are visible. The first notice given to the traveller is the sight of twenty or thirty muzzles pointed at him from the covert, with a summons to surrender. Except, therefore, the party be too numerous to be so surrounded and _vise_, so that some could fight, even were others shot-except in such a case, arms are only an additional prize, and a tempting one, for the clephts. It is, indeed, very seldom that the carrying of arms is to be recommended to any traveller in any land.

As we ascended the long saddle of country which lies between Pentelicus and Hymettus, we came upon a fine olive-wood, with the same enormous stems which had already excited our wonder in the groves of Academe. Indeed, some of the stems in this wood were the largest we had seen, and made us think that they may have been there since the days when the olive oil of Attica was one of its most famous products, and its export was even forbidden. Even then there were ancient stumps-_???a?_, as they were called-which were sacred, and which no man who rented or bought the land might remove; a restriction which seems hard to us, but was not so in Greece, where corn grows freely in the shade of trees, and is even habitually planted in orchards. But at all events, these old, gnarled, hollowed stumps, with their tufts of branches starting from the pollarded trunk, are a really cla.s.sical feature in the country, and deserve, therefore, a pa.s.sing notice.

When we had got well between the mountains a new scene unfolded itself. We began to see the famous old Euripus, with the mountains of Euba over against us; and down to the south, behind Hymettus, till we reach the extremity of Sunium, stretched a long tract of mountainous and barren country which never played a prominent part in history, but where a conical hill was pointed out to us as the site of the old deme Brauron. It is, indeed, surprising how little of Attica was ever celebrated. Close by the most famous city of the world are reaches of country which are as obscure to us as the wilds of Arcadia; and we may suspect that the shepherds who inhabited the _fe???a_, or rocky pastures in the Attic hills, were not much superior to those whom we now meet herding their goats in the same region.

The plain of Marathon, as everybody knows, is a long crescent-shaped strip of land by the sh.o.r.e, surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills, which may be crossed conveniently in three places, but most easily toward the south-west, along the road which we travelled, and which leads directly to Athens. When the Athenians marched through this broad and easy pa.s.sage they found that the Persians had landed at the northern extremity of the plain-I suppose, because the water was there sufficiently deep to let them land conveniently. Most of the sh.o.r.e, as you proceed southward, is lined on the seaboard by swamps. The Greek army must have marched northward along the spurs of Pentelicus, and taken up their position near the north of the plain. There was evidently much danger that the Persians would force a pa.s.sage through the village of Marathon, farther toward the north-west. Had they done this, they might have rounded Pentelicus, and descended the main plain of Attica, from the valley below Dekelea.

Perhaps, however, this pa.s.s was then guarded by an outlying fort, or by some defences at Marathon itself. The site of the battle is absolutely fixed by the great mound, upon which was placed a lion, which has been carried off, no one knows when or whither. The mound is exactly an English mile from the steep slope of one of the hills, and about half a mile from the sea at present; nor was there, when I saw it, any difficulty in walking right to the sh.o.r.e, though a river flows out there, which shows, by its sedgy banks and lofty reeds, a tendency to create a marshy tract in rainy weather. But the mound is so placed that, if it marks the centre of the battle, the Athenians must have faced nearly north; and if they faced the sea eastward, as is commonly stated, this mound must mark the scene of the conflict on their left wing. The mound is very large-I suppose thirty feet high-altogether of earth, so far as we could see, and bears traces of having been frequently ransacked in search of antiquities. Dr. Schliemann, its latest investigator, could find nothing there but prehistoric flint weapons.