Read Ebook: Rambles and Studies in Greece by Mahaffy J P John Pentland

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 470 lines and 149016 words, and 10 pages

INDEX 531

Photogravures by A. W. ELSON & CO.

GREECE.

INTRODUCTION--FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE COAST.

A voyage to Greece does not at first sight seem a great undertaking. We all go to and fro to Italy as we used to go to France. A trip to Rome, or even to Naples, is now an Easter holiday affair. And is not Greece very close to Italy on the map? What signifies the narrow sea that divides them? This is what a man might say who only considered geography, and did not regard the teaching of history. For the student of history cannot look upon these two peninsulas without being struck with the fact that they are, historically speaking, turned back to back; that while the face of Italy is turned westward, and looks towards France and Spain, and across to us, the face of Greece looks eastward, towards Asia Minor and towards Egypt. Every great city in Italy, except Venice, approaches or borders the Western Sea--Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples. All the older history of Rome, its development, its glories, lie on the west of the Apennines. When you cross them you come to what is called the back of Italy; and you feel that in that flat country, and that straight coast-line, you are separated from its true beauty and charm. Contrariwise, in Greece, the whole weight and dignity of its history gravitate towards the eastern coast. All its great cities--Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Sparta--are on that side. Their nearest neighbors were the coast cities of Asia Minor and of the Cyclades, but the western coasts were to them harborless and strange. If you pass Cape Malea, they said, then forget your home.

So it happens that the coasts of Italy and Greece, which look so near, are outlying and out-of-the way parts of the countries to which they belong; and if you want to go straight from real Italy to real Greece, the longest way is that from Brindisi to Corfu, for you must still journey across Italy to Brindisi, and from Corfu to Athens. The shortest way is to take ship at Naples, and to be carried round Italy and round Greece, from the centres of culture on the west of Italy to the centres of culture on the east of Greece. But this is no trifling passage. When the ship has left the coasts of Calabria, and steers into the open sea, you feel that you have at last left the west of Europe, and are setting sail for the Eastern Seas. You are, moreover, in an open sea--the furious Adriatic--in which I have seen storms which would be creditable to the Atlantic Ocean, and which at times forbid even steam navigation.

I may anticipate for a moment here, and say that even now the face of Athens is turned, as of old, to the East. Her trade and her communications are through the Levant. Her chief intercourse is with Constantinople, and Smyrna, and Syra, and Alexandria.

This curious parallel between ancient and modern geographical attitudes in Greece is, no doubt, greatly due to the now bygone Turkish rule. In addition to other contrasts, Mohammedan rule and Eastern jealousy--long unknown in Western Europe--first jarred upon the traveller when he touched the coasts of Greece; and this dependency was once really part of a great Asiatic Empire, where all the interests and communications gravitated eastward, and away from the Christian and better civilized West. The revolution which expelled the Turks was unable to root out the ideas which their subjects had learned; and so, in spite of Greek hatred of the Turk, his influence still lives through Greece in a thousand ways.

For many hours after the coasts of Calabria had faded into the night, and even after the snowy dome of Etna was lost to view, our ship steamed through the open sea, with no land in sight; but we were told that early in the morning, at the very break of dawn, the coasts of Greece would be visible. So, while others slept, I started up at half-past three, eager to get the earliest possible sight of the land which still occupies so large a place in our thoughts. It was a soft gray morning; the sky was covered with light, broken clouds; the deck was wet with a passing shower, of which the last drops were still flying in the air; and before us, some ten miles away, the coasts and promontories of the Peloponnesus were reaching southward into the quiet sea. These long serrated ridges did not look lofty, in spite of their snow-clad peaks, nor did they look inhospitable, in spite of their rough outline, but were all toned in harmonious color--a deep purple blue, with here and there, on the far Arcadian peaks, and on the ridge of Mount Taygetus, patches of pure snow. In contrast to the large sweeps of the Italian coast, its open seas, its long waves of mountain, all was here broken, and rugged, and varied. The sea was studded with rocky islands, and the land indented with deep, narrow bays. I can never forget the strong and peculiar impression of that first sight of Greece; nor can I cease to wonder at the strange likeness which rose in my mind, and which made me think of the bays and rocky coasts of the west and south-west of Ireland. There was the same cloudy, showery sky, which is so common there; there was the same serrated outline of hills, the same richness in promontories, and rocky islands, and land-locked bays. Nowhere have I seen a light purple color, except in the wilds of Kerry and Connemara; and though the general height of the Greek mountains, as the snow in May testified, was far greater than that of the Irish hills, yet on that morning, and in that light, they looked low and homely, not displaying their grandeur, or commanding awe and wonder, but rather attracting the sight by their wonderful grace, and by their variety and richness of outline and color.

I stood there, I know not how long--without guide or map--telling myself the name of each mountain and promontory, and so filling out the idle names and outlines of many books with the fresh reality itself. There was the west coast of Elis, as far north as the eye could reach--the least interesting part of the view, as it was of the history, of Greece; then the richer and more varied outline of Messene, with its bay, thrice famous at great intervals, and yet for long ages feeding idly on that fame; Pylos, Sphacteria, Navarino--each a foremost name in Hellenic history. Above the bay could be seen those rich slopes which the Spartans coveted of old, and which, as I saw them, were covered with golden corn. The three headlands which give to the Peloponnesus "its plane-leaf form," were as yet lying parallel before us, and their outline confused; but the great crowd of heights and intersecting chains, which told at once the Alpine character of the peninsula, called to mind the other remark of the geographer, in which he calls it the Acropolis of Greece. The words of old Herodotus, too, rise in the mind with new reality, when he talks of the poor and stony soil of the country as a "rugged nurse of liberty."

For the nearer the ship approaches, the more this feature comes out; increased, no doubt, greatly in later days by depopulation and general decay, when many arable tracts have lain desolate, but still at all times necessary, when a large proportion of the country consists of rocky peaks and precipices, where a goat may graze, but where the eagle builds secure from the hand of man. The coast, once teeming with traffic, is now lonely and deserted. A single sail in the large gulf of Koron, and a few miserable huts, discernible with a telescope, only added to the feeling of solitude. It was, indeed, "Greece, but living Greece no more." Even the pirates, who sheltered in these creeks and mountains, have abandoned this region, in which there is nothing now to plunder.

They are considered the purest in blood of all the Greeks, though it does not appear that their dialect approaches old Greek nearer than those of their neighbors; but for beauty of person, and independence of spirit, they rank first among the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, and most certainly they must have among them a good deal of the old Messenian blood. Most of the country is barren, but there are orange woods, which yield the most delicious fruit--a fruit so large and rich that it makes all other oranges appear small and tasteless. The country is now perfectly safe for visitors, and the people extremely hospitable, though the diet is not very palatable to the northern traveller.

So with talk and anecdote about the Mainotes--for every one was now upon deck and sight-seeing--we neared the classic headland of Tainaron, almost the southern point of Europe, once the site of a great temple of Poseidon--not preserved to us, like its sister monument on Sunium--and once, too, the entry to the regions of the dead. And, as if to remind us of its most beautiful legend, the dolphins, which had befriended Arion of old, and carried him here to land, rose in the calm summer sea, and came playing round the ship, showing their quaint forms above the water, and keeping with our course, as it were an escort into the homely seas and islands of truer Greece. Strangely enough, in many other journeys through Greek waters, once again only did we see these dolphins; and here as elsewhere, the old legend, I suppose, based itself upon the fact that this, of all their wide domain, was the favorite resort of these creatures, with which the poets of old felt so strong a sympathy.

But, while the dolphins have been occupying our attention, we have cleared Cape Matapan, and the deep Gulf of Asine and Gythium--in fact, the Gulf of Sparta is open to our view. We strained our eyes to discover the features of "hollow Lacedaemon," and to take in all the outline of this famous bay, through which so many Spartans had held their course in the days of their greatness. The site of Sparta is far from the sea, probably twelve or fifteen miles; but the place is marked for every spectator, throughout all the Peloponnesus and its coasts, by the jagged top of Mount Taygetus, even in June covered with snow. Through the forests upon its slopes the young Spartans would hunt all day with their famous Laconian hounds, and after a rude supper beguile the evening with stories of their dangers and their success. But, as might be expected, of the five villages which made up the famous city, few vestiges remain. The old port of Gythium is still a port; but here, too, the "wet ways," and that sea once covered with boats, which a Greek comic poet has called the "ants of the sea," have been deserted.

We were a motley company on board--Russians, Greeks, Turks, French, English; and it was not hard to find pleasant companions and diverting conversation among them all. I turned to a Turkish gentleman, who spoke French indifferently. "Is it not," said I, "a great pity to see this fair coast so desolate?" "A great pity, indeed," said he; "but what can you expect from these Greeks? They are all pirates and robbers; they are all liars and knaves. Had the Turks been allowed to hold possession of the country they would have improved it and developed its resources; but since the Greeks became independent everything has gone to ruin. Roads are broken up, communications abandoned; the people emigrate and disappear--in fact, nothing prospers."

Presently, I got beside a Greek gentleman, from whom I was anxiously picking up the first necessary phrases and politenesses of modern Greek, and, by way of amusement, put to him the same question. I got the answer I expected. "Ah!" said he, "the Turks, the Turks! When I think how these miscreants have ruined our beautiful country! How could a land thrive or prosper under such odious tyranny?" I ventured to suggest that the Turks were now gone five and forty years, and that it was high time to see the fruits of recovered liberty in the Greeks. No, it was still too soon. The Turks had cut down all the woods, and so ruined the climate; they had destroyed the cities, broken up the roads, encouraged the bandits--in fact, they had left the country in such a state that centuries would not cure it.

The verdict of Europe is in favor of the Greek gentleman; but it might have been suggested, had we been so disposed, that the greatest and the most hopeless of all these sorrows--the utter depopulation of the country--is not due to either modern Greeks or Turks, nor even to the Slav hordes of the Middle Ages. It was a calamity which came upon Greece almost suddenly, immediately after the loss of her independence, and which historians and physiologists have as yet been only partially able to explain.

Of this very coast upon which we were then gazing, the geographer Strabo, about the time of Christ, says, "that of old, Lacedaemon had numbered one hundred cities; in his day there were but ten remaining." So, then, the sum of the crimes of both Greeks and Turks may be diminished by one. But I, perceiving that each of them would have been extremely indignant at this historical palliation of the other's guilt, "kept silence, even from good words."

These dialogues beguiled us till we found ourselves, almost suddenly, facing the promontory of Malea, with the island of Cythera on our right. The island is little celebrated in history. The Phoenicians seem, in very old times, to have had a settlement there for the working of their purple shell-fishery, for which the coasts of Laconia were celebrated; and they doubtless founded there the worship of the Sidonian goddess, who was transformed by the Greeks into Aphrodite . During the Peloponnesian War we hear of the Athenians using it as a station for their fleet, when they were ravaging the adjacent coasts. It was, in fact, used by their naval power as the same sort of blister on Sparta that Dekelea was when occupied by the Spartans in Attica.

Cape Malea is more famous. It was in olden days the limit of the homely Greek waters, the bar to all fair weather and regular winds--a place of storms and wrecks, and the portal to an inhospitable open sea; and we can well imagine the delight of the adventurous trader who had dared to cross the Western Seas, to gather silver and lead in the mines of Spain, when he rounded the dreaded Cape, homeward bound in his heavy-laden ship, and looked back from the quiet AEgean. The barren and rocky Cape has its new feature now. On the very extremity there is a little platform, at some elevation over the water, and only accessible with great difficulty from the land by a steep goat-path. Here a hermit built himself a tiny hut, cultivated his little plot of corn, and lived out in the lone seas, with no society but stray passing ships. When Greece was thickly peopled he might well have been compelled to seek loneliness here; but now, when in almost any mountain chain he could find solitude and desolation enough, it seems as if that poetic instinct which so often guides the ignorant and unconscious anchorite had sent him to this spot, which combines, in a strange way, solitude and publicity, and which excites the curiosity, but forbids the intrusion, of every careless passenger to the East.

So we passed into the AEgean, the real thoroughfare of the Greeks, the mainstay of their communication--a sea, and yet not a sea, but the frame of countless headlands and islands, which are ever in view to give confidence to the sailor in the smallest boat. The most striking feature in our view was the serrated outline of the mountains of Crete, far away to the S. E. Though the day was gray and cloudy, the atmosphere was perfectly clear, and allowed us to see these very distant Alps, on which the snow still lay in great fields. The chain of Ida brought back to us the old legends of Minos and his island kingdom, nor could any safer seat of empire be imagined for a power coming from the south than this great long bar of mountains, to which half the islands of the AEgean could pass a fire signal in times of war or piracy. The legends preserved to us of Minos--the human sacrifices to the Minotaur--the hostility to Theseus--the identification of Ariadne with the legends of Bacchus, so eastern and orgiastic in character--make us feel, with a sort of instinctive certainty, that the power of Minos was no Hellenic empire, but one of Phoenicians, from which, as afterwards from Carthage, they commanded distant coasts and islands, for the purposes of trade. They settled, as we know, at Corinth, at Thebes, and probably at Athens, in the days of their greatness, but they seem always to have been strangers and sojourners there, while in Crete they kept the stronghold of their power. Thucydides thinks that Minos's main object was to put down piracy, and protect commerce; and this is probably the case, though we are without evidence on the point. The historian evidently regards this old Cretan empire as the older model of the Athenian, but settled in a far more advantageous place, and not liable to the dangers which proved the ruin of Athens.

The nearer islands were small, and of no reputation, but each like a mountain top reaching out of a submerged valley, stony and bare. Melos was farther off, but quite distinct--the old scene of Athenian violence and cruelty, to Thucydides so impressive, that he dramatizes the incidents, and passes from cold narrative and set oration to a dialogue between the oppressors and the oppressed. Melian starvation was long proverbial among the Greeks, and there the fashionable and aristocratic Alcibiades applied the arguments and carried out the very policy which the tanner Cleon could not propose without being pilloried by the great historian whom he made his foe. This and other islands, which were always looked upon by the mainland Greeks with some contempt, have of late days received special attention from archaeologists. It is said that the present remains of the old Greek type are now to be found among the islanders--an observation which I found fully justified by a short sojourn at AEgina, where the very types of the Parthenon frieze can be found among the inhabitants, if the traveller will look for them diligently. The noblest and most perfect type of Greek beauty has, indeed, come to us from Melos, but not in real life. It is the celebrated Venus of Melos--the most pure and perfect image we know of that goddess, and one which puts to shame the lower ideals so much admired in the museums of Italy.

But we must not allow speculations to spoil our observations, nor waste the precious moments given us to take in once for all the general outline of the Greek coasts. While the long string of islands, from Melos up to the point of Attica, framed in our view to the right, to the left the great bay of Argolis opened far into the land, making a sort of vista into the Peloponnesus, so that the mountains of Arcadia could be seen far to the west standing out against the setting sun; for the day was now clearer--the clouds began to break, and let us feel touches of the sun's heat towards evening. As we passed Hydra, the night began to close about us, and we were obliged to make out the rest of our geography with the aid of a rich full moon.

It may be well to add a word here upon the other route into Greece, that by Brindisi and the Ionian Islands. It is fully as picturesque, in some respects more so, for there is no more beautiful bay than the long fiord leading up to Corinth, which passes Patras, Vostitza, and Itea, the port of Delphi. The Akrokeraunian mountains, which are the first point of the Albanian coast seen by the traveller, are also very striking, and no one can forget the charms and beauties of Corfu. I think a market-day in Corfu, with those royal-looking peasant lads, who come clothed in sheepskins from the coast, and spend their day handling knives and revolvers with peculiar interest at the stalls, is among the most picturesque sights to be seen in Europe. The lofty mountains of Ithaca and its greater sister, and then the rich belt of verdure along the east side of Zante--all these features make this journey one of surpassing beauty and interest. Yet notwithstanding all these advantages, there is not the same excitement in first approaching semi-Greek or outlying Greek settlements, and only gradually arriving at the real centres of historic interest. Such at least was the feeling which I had in approaching Greece by this more varied route. No traveller, however, is likely to miss either, as it is obviously best to enter by one route and depart by the other, in a voyage not intended to reach beyond Greece. But from what I have said, it may be seen that I prefer to enter by the direct route from Naples, and to leave by the Gulf of Corinth and the Ionian Islands. I trust that ere long arrangements may be made for permitting travellers who cross the isthmus to make an excursion to the Akrokorinthus--the great citadel of Corinth--which they are now compelled to hurry past, in order to catch the boat for Athens.

The modern Patras, still a thriving port, is now the main point of contact between Greece and the rest of Europe. For, as a railway has now been opened from Patras to Athens, all the steamers from Brindisi, Venice, and Trieste put in there, and from thence the stream of travellers proceeds by the new line to the capital. The old plan of steaming up the long fiord to Corinth is abandoned; still more the once popular route round the Morea, which, if somewhat slower, at least saved the unshipping at Lechaeum, the drive in omnibuses across the isthmus, and reshipment at Cenchreae--all done with much confusion, and with loss and damage to luggage and temper. Not that there is no longer confusion. The railway station at Patras, and that at Athens, are the most curious bear-gardens in which business ever was done. The traveller is informed that unless he is there an hour before the time he will not get his luggage weighed and despatched. And when he comes down from his comfortable hotel to find out what it all means, he meets the whole population of the town in possession of the station. Everybody who has nothing to do gets in the way of those who have; everything is full of noise and confusion.

At last the train steams out of the station, and takes its deliberate way along the coast, through woods of fir trees, bushes of arbutus and mastic, and the many flowers which stud the earth. And here already the traveller, looking out of the window, can form an idea of the delights of real Greek travel, by which he must understand mounting a mule or pony, and making his way along woody paths, or beside the quiet sea, or up the steep side of a rocky defile. Every half-hour the train crosses torrents coming from the mountains, which in flood times color the sea for some distance with the brilliant brick-red of the clay they carry with them from their banks. The peacock blue of the open sea bounds this red water with a definite line, and the contrast in the bright sun is something very startling. Shallow banks of sand also reflect their pale yellow in many places, so that the brilliancy of this gulf exceeds anything I had ever seen in sea or lake. We pass the sites of AEgion, now Vostitza, once famous as the capital or centre of the Achaean League. We pass Sicyon, the home of Aratus, the great regenerator, the mean destroyer of that League, as you can still read in Plutarch's fascinating life of the man. But these places, like so many others in Greece, once famous, have now no trace of their greatness left above ground. The day may, however, still come when another Schliemann will unearth the records and fragments of a civilization distinguished even in Greece for refinement. Sicyon was a famous school of art. Painting and sculpture flourished there, and there was a special school of Sicyon, whose features we can still recognize in extant copies of the famous statues they produced. There is a statue known as the Canon Statue, a model of human proportions, which was the work of the famous Polycleitus of Sicyon, and which we know from various imitations preserved at Rome and elsewhere. But we shall return in due time to Greek sculpture as a whole, and shall not interrupt our journey at this moment.

All that we have passed through hitherto may be classed under the title of "first impressions." The wild northern coast shows us but one inlet, of the Gulf of Salona, with a little port of Itea at its mouth. This was the old highway to ascend to the oracle of Delphi on the snowy Parnassus, which we shall approach better from the Boeotian side. But now we strain our eyes to behold the great rock of Corinth, and to invade this, the first great centre of Greek life, which closes the long bay at its westernmost end.

I will add a word upon the form and scope of the following work. My aim is to bring the living features of Greece home to the student, by connecting them, as far as possible, with the facts of older history, which are so familiar to most of us. I shall also have a good deal to say about the modern politics of Greece, and the character of the modern population. A long and careful survey of the extant literature of ancient Greece has convinced me that the pictures usually drawn of the old Greeks are idealized, and that the real people were of a very different--if you please, of a much lower--type. I may mention, as a very remarkable confirmation of my judgment, that intelligent people at Athens, who had read my opinions elsewhere set forth upon the subject, were so much struck with the close resemblance of my pictures of the old Greeks to the present inhabitants, that they concluded that I must have visited the country before writing these opinions, and that I was, in fact, drawing my classical people from the life of the moderns. If this is not a proof of the justice of these views, it at least strongly suggests that they may be true, and is a powerful support in arguing the matter on the perfectly independent ground of the inferences from old literature. After all, national characteristics are very permanent, and very hard to shake off, and it would seem strange, indeed, if both these and the Greek language should have remained almost intact, and yet the race have either changed, or been saturated with foreign blood. Foreign invasions and foreign conquests of Greece were common enough; but here, as elsewhere, the climate and circumstances which have formed a race seem to conspire to preserve it, and to absorb foreign types and features, rather than to permit the extinction or total change of the older race.

They are, probably, as clever a people as can be found in the world, and fit for any mental work whatever. This they have proved, not only by getting into their hands all the trade of the Eastern Mediterranean, but by holding their own perfectly among English merchants in England. As yet they have not found any encouragement in other directions; but there can be no doubt that, if settled among a great people, and weaned from the follies and jealousies of Greek politics, they would outrun many of us, both in politics and in science. However that may be--and perhaps such a development requires moral qualities in which they seem deficient--it is certain that their workmen learn trades with extraordinary quickness; while their young commercial or professional men acquire languages, and the amount of knowledge necessary for making money, with the most singular aptness. But as yet they are stimulated chiefly by the love of gain.

Besides this, they have great national pride, and, as M. About remarks, we need never despair of a people who are at the same time intelligent and proud. They are very fond of displaying their knowledge on all points--I noted especially their pride in exhibiting their acquaintance with old Greek history and legend. When I asked them whether they believed the old mythical stories which they repeated, they seemed afraid of being thought simple if they confessed that they did, and of injuring the reputation of their ancestors if they declared they did not. So they used to preserve a discreet neutrality.

The instinct of liberty appears to me as strong in the nation now as it ever was. In fact, the people have never been really enslaved. The eternal refuge for liberty afforded by the sea and the mountains has saved them from this fate; and, even beneath the heavy yoke of the Turks, a large part of the nation was not subdued, but, in the guise of bandits and pirates, enjoyed the great privilege for which their ancestors had contended so earnestly. The Mainotes, for example, of whom I have just spoken as occupying the coast of Messene, never tolerated any resident Turkish magistrate among them, but "handed to a trembling tax-collector a little purse of gold pieces, hung on the end of a naked sword." Now, the whole nation is more intensely and thoroughly democratic than any other in Europe. They acknowledge no nobility save that of descent from the chiefs who fought in the war of liberation; they will allow no distinction of classes; every common mule-boy is a gentleman , and fully your equal. He sits in the room at meals, and joins in the conversation at dinner. They only tolerate a king because they cannot endure one of themselves as their superior. This jealousy is, unfortunately, a mainspring of Greek politics, and when combined with a dislike of agriculture, as a stupid and unintellectual occupation, fills all the country with politicians, merchants, and journalists. Moreover, they want the spirit of subordination of their great ancestors, and are often accused of lack of honesty--a very grave feature, and the greatest obstacle to progress in all ages. It is better, however, to let points of character come out gradually in the course of our studies than to bring them together into an official portrait. It is impossible to wander through the country without seeing and understanding the inhabitants; for the traveller is in constant contact with them, and they have no scruple in displaying all their character.

M. About has earned the profound hatred and contempt of the nation by his picture, and I do not wonder at it, seeing that the tone in which he writes is flippant and ill-natured, and seems to betoken certain private animosities, of which the Greeks tell numerous anecdotes.

I have no such excuse for being severe or ill-natured, as I found nothing but kindness and hospitality everywhere, and sincerely hope that my free judgments may not hurt any sensitive Greek who may chance to see them. Even the great Finlay--one of their best friends--is constantly censured by them for his writings about Modern Greece.

But, surely, any real lover of Greece must feel that plain speaking about the faults of the nation is much wanted. The worship lavished upon them by Byron and his school has done its good, and can now only do harm. On the other hand, I must confess that a longer and more intimate intercourse with the Greeks of the interior and of the mountains leads a fair observer to change his earlier estimate, and think more highly of the nation than at first acquaintance. Unfortunately, the Greeks known to most of us are sailors--mongrel villains from the ports of the Levant, having very little in common with the bold, honest, independent peasant who lives under his vine and his fig-tree in the valleys of Arcadia or of Phocis. It was, no doubt, an intimate knowledge of the sound core of the nation which inspired Byron with that enthusiasm which many now think extravagant and misplaced. But here, as elsewhere, the folly of a great genius has more truth in it than the wisdom of his feebler critics.

GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS AND ATTICA.

It was our fortune to come into Greece by night, with a splendid moon shining upon the summer sea. The varied outlines of Sunium on the one side, and AEgina on the other, were very clear, but in the deep shadows there was mystery enough to feed the burning impatience to see it all in the light of common day; and though we had passed AEgina, and had come over against the rocky Salamis, as yet there was no sign of Peiraeus. Then came the light on Psyttalea, and they told us that the harbor was right opposite. Yet we came nearer and nearer, and no harbor could be seen. The barren rocks of the coast seemed to form one unbroken line, and nowhere was there a sign of indentation or of break in the land. But, suddenly, as we turned from gazing on Psyttalea, where the flower of the Persian nobles had once stood in despair, looking upon their fate gathering about them, the vessel had turned eastward, and discovered to us the crowded lights and thronging ships of the famous harbor. Small it looked, very small, but evidently deep to the water's edge, for great ships seemed touching the shore; and so narrow is the mouth that we almost wondered how they had made their entrance in safety. But we saw it some weeks later, with nine men-of-war towering above all its merchant shipping and its steamers, and among them crowds of ferry-boats skimming about in the breeze with their wing-like sails. Then we found out that, like the rest of Greece, the Peiraeus was far larger than it looked.

It differed little, alas! from more vulgar harbors in the noise and confusion of disembarking; in the delays of its custom house; in the extortion and insolence of its boatmen. It is still, as in Plato's day, "the haunt of sailors, where good manners are unknown." But when we had escaped the turmoil, and were seated silently on the way to Athens, almost along the very road of classical days, all our classical notions, which had been scared away by vulgar bargaining and protesting, regained their sway. We had sailed in through the narrow passage where almost every great Greek that ever lived had sometime passed; now we went along the line, hardly less certain, which had seen all these great ones going to and fro between the city and the port. The present road is shaded with great silver poplars and plane trees, and the moon had set, so that our approach to Athens was even more mysterious than our approach to the Peiraeus. We were, moreover, perplexed at our carriage stopping under some large plane trees, though we had driven but two miles, and the night was far spent. Our coachman would listen to no advice or persuasion. We learned afterwards that every carriage going to and from the Peiraeus stops at this half-way house, that the horses may drink, and the coachman take "Turkish delight" and water. There is no exception made to this custom, and the traveller is bound to submit. At last we entered the unpretending ill-built streets at the west of Athens.

The stillness of the night is a phenomenon hardly known in that city. No sooner have men and horses gone to rest than all the dogs and cats of the town come out to bark and yell about the thoroughfares. Athens, like all parts of modern Greece, abounds in dogs. You cannot pass a sailing boat in the Levant without seeing a dog looking angrily over the taffrail, and barking at you as you pass. Every ship in the Peiraeus has at least one, often a great many, on board. I suppose every house in Athens is provided with one. These creatures seem to make it their business to prevent silence and rest all the night long. They were ably seconded by cats and crowing cocks, as well as by an occasional wakeful donkey; and both cats and donkeys seemed to have voices of almost tropical violence.

So the night wore away under rapidly growing adverse impressions. How is a man to admire art and revere antiquity if he is robbed of his repose? The Greeks sleep so much in the day that they seem indifferent about nightly disturbances; and, perhaps, after many years' habit, even Athenian caterwauling may fail to rouse the sleeper. But what chance has the passing traveller? Even the strongest ejaculations are but a narrow outlet for his feelings.

In this state of mind, then, I rose at the break of dawn to see whether the window would afford any prospect to serve as a requital for angry sleeplessness. And there, right opposite, stood the rock which of all rocks in the world's history has done most for literature and art--the rock which poets, and orators, and architects, and historians have ever glorified, and cannot stay their praise--which is ever new and ever old, ever fresh in its decay, ever perfect in its ruin, ever living in its death--the Acropolis of Athens.

When I saw my dream and longing of many years fulfilled, the first rays of the rising sun had just touched the heights, while the town below was still hid in gloom. Rock, and rampart, and ruined fanes--all were colored in uniform tints; the lights were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows of dark crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was no variety in color between what nature and what man had set there. No whiteness shone from the marble, no smoothness showed upon the hewn and polished blocks; but the whole mass of orange and crimson stood out together into the pale, pure Attic air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, still perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek history, of magnificence and meanness--of loftiness and lowness--as well in outer life as in inward motive. And, as it were in illustration of that art of which it was the most perfect bloom, and which lasted in perfection but a day of history, I saw it again and again, in sunlight and in shade, in daylight and at night, but never again in this perfect and singular beauty.

But the pillars of the Temple of Zeus, though very stately and massive, and with their summits bridged together by huge blocks of architrave, are still not Athenian, not Attic, not genuine Greek work; for the Corinthian capitals, which are here seen perhaps in their greatest perfection, cannot be called pure Greek taste. As is well known, they were hardly ever used, and never used prominently, till the Graeco-Roman stage of art. The older Greeks seem to have had a fixed objection to intricate ornamentation in their larger temples. All the greater temples of Greece and Greek Italy are of the Doric Order, with its perfectly plain capital. Groups of figures were admitted upon the pediments and metopes, because these groups formed clear and massive designs visible from a distance. But such intricacies as those of the Corinthian capital were not approved, except in small monuments, which were merely intended for close inspection, and where delicate ornament gave grace to a building which could not lay claim to grandeur. Such is clearly the case with the only purely Greek monument of the Corinthian Order, which is still standing--the Choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens. It was also the case with that beautiful little temple, or group of temples, known as the Erechtheum, which, standing beside the great massive Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, presents the very contrasts upon which I am insisting. It is small and essentially graceful, being built in the Ionic style, with rich ornamentation; while the Parthenon is massive, and, in spite of much ornamentation, very severe in its plainer Doric style.

But to return to the pillars of Hadrian's Temple. They are about fifty-five feet high, by six and a half feet in diameter, and no Corinthian pillar of this colossal size would ever have been set up by the Greeks in their better days. So, then, in spite of the grandeur of these isolated remains--a grandeur not destroyed, perhaps even not diminished, by coffee tables, and inquiring waiters, and military bands, and a vulgar crowd about their base--to the student of really Greek art they are not of the highest interest; nay, they even suggest to him what the Periclean Greeks would have done had they, with such resources, completed the great temple due to the munificence of the Roman Emperor.

Let us turn, in preference, to the Temple of Theseus, at the opposite extremity of the town, it too standing upon a clear platform, and striking the traveller with its symmetry and its completeness, as he approaches from the Peiraeus. It is in every way a contrast to the temple of which we have just spoken. It is very small--in fact so small in comparison with the Parthenon, or the great temple at Paestum, that we are disappointed with it; and yet it is built, not in the richly-decorated Ionic style of the Erechtheum, but in severe Doric; and though small and plain, it is very perfect--as perfect as any such relic that we have. It is many centuries older than Hadrian's great temple. It could have been destroyed with one-tenth of the trouble, and yet it still stands almost in its perfection. The reason is simply this. Few of the great classical temples suffered much from wanton destruction till the Middle Ages. Now, in the Middle Ages this temple, as well as the Parthenon, was usurped by the Greek Church, and turned into a place of Christian worship. So, then, the little Temple of Theseus has escaped the ravages which the last few centuries--worse than all that went before--have made in the remains of a noble antiquity. To those who desire to study the effect of the Doric Order this temple appears to me an admirable specimen. From its small size and clear position, all its points are very easily taken in. "Such," says Bishop Wordsworth, "is the integrity of its structure, and the distinctness of its details, that it requires no description beyond that which a few glances might supply. Its beauty defies all: its solid yet graceful form is, indeed, admirable; and the loveliness of its coloring is such that, from the rich mellow hue which the marble has now assumed, it looks as if it had been quarried, not from the bed of a rocky mountain, but from the golden light of an Athenian sunset." And in like terms many others have spoken.

I have only one reservation to make. The Doric Order being essentially massive, it seems to me that this beautiful temple lacks one essential feature of that order, and therefore, after the first survey, after a single walk about it, it loses to the traveller who has seen Paestum, and who presently cannot fail to see the Parthenon, that peculiar effect of massiveness--of almost Egyptian solidity--which is ever present, and ever imposing, in these huger Doric temples. It seems as if the Athenians themselves felt this--that the plain simplicity of its style was not effective without size--and accordingly decorated this structure with colors more richly than their other temples. All the reliefs and raised ornaments seem to have been painted; other decorations were added in color on the flat surfaces, so that the whole temple must have been a mass of rich variegated hues, of which blue, green, and red are still distinguishable--or were in Stuart's time--and in which bronze and gilding certainly played an important part.

We are thus brought naturally face to face with one of the peculiarities of old Greek art most difficult to realize, and still more to appreciate. We can recognize in Egyptian and in Assyrian art the richness and appropriateness of much coloring. Modern painters are becoming so alive to this, that among the most striking pictures in our Royal Academy in London have been seen, for some years back, scenes from old Egyptian and Assyrian life, in which the rich coloring of the architecture has been quite a prominent feature.

But in Greek art--in the perfect symmetry of the Greek temple, in the perfect grace of the Greek statue--we come to think form of such paramount importance, that we look on the beautiful Parian and Pentelic marbles as specially suited for the expression of form apart from color. There is even something in unity of tone that delights the modern eye. Thus, though we feel that the old Greek temples have lost all their original brightness, yet, as I have myself said, and as I have quoted from Bishop Wordsworth, the rich mellow hue which tones all these ruins has to us its peculiar charm. The same rich yellow brown, almost the color of the Roman travertine, is one of the most striking features in the splendid remains which have made Paestum unique in all Italy. This color contrasts beautifully with the blue sky of southern Europe; it lights up with extraordinary richness in the rising or setting sun. We can easily conceive that were it proposed to restore the Attic temples to their pristine whiteness, we should feel a severe shock, and beg to have these venerable buildings left in the soberness of their acquired color. Still more does it shock us to be told that great sculptors, with Parian marble at hand, preferred to set up images of the gods in gold and ivory, or, still worse, with parts of gold and ivory; and that they thought it right to fill out the eyes with precious stones, and set gilded wreaths upon colored hair.

When we first come to realize these things, we are likely to exclaim against such a jumble, as we should call it, of painting and architecture--still worse, of painting and sculpture. Nor is it possible or reasonable that we should at once submit to such a revolution in our artistic ideas, and bow without criticism to these shocking features in Greek art. But if blind obedience to these our great masters in the laws of beauty is not to be commended, neither is an absolute resistance to all argument on the question to be respected; nor do I acknowledge the good sense or the good taste of that critic who insists that nothing can possibly equal the color and texture of white marble, and that all coloring of such a substance is the mere remains of barbarism. For, say what we will, the Greeks were certainly, as a nation, the best judges of beauty the world has yet seen. And this is not all. The beauty of which they were evidently the most fond was beauty of form--harmony of proportions, symmetry of design. They always hated the tawdry and the extravagant. As to their literature, there is no poetry, no oratory, no history, which is less decorated with the flowers of rhetoric: it is all pure in design, chaste in detail. So with their dress; so with their dwellings. We cannot but feel that, had the effect of painted temples and statues been tawdry, there is no people on earth who would have felt it so keenly, and disliked it so much. There must, then, have been strong reasons why this bright coloring did not strike their eye as it would the eye of sober moderns.

To any one who has seen the country, and thought about the question there, many such reasons present themselves. In the first place, all through southern Europe, and more especially in Greece, there is an amount of bright color in nature, which prevents almost any artificial coloring from producing a startling effect. Where all the landscape, the sea, and the air are exceedingly bright, we find the inhabitants increasing the brightness of their dress and houses, as it were to correspond with nature. Thus, in Italy, they paint their houses green, and pink, and yellow, and so give to their towns and villas that rich and warm effect which we miss so keenly among the gray and sooty streets of northern Europe. So also in their dress, these people wear scarlet, and white, and rich blue, not so much in patterns as in large patches, and a festival in Sicily or Greece fills the streets with intense color. We know that the coloring of the old Greek dress was quite of the same character as that of the modern, though in design it has completely changed. We must, therefore, imagine the old Greek crowd before their temples, or in their market-places, a very white crowd, with patches of scarlet and various blue; perhaps altogether white in processions, if we except scarlet shoe-straps and other such slight relief. One cannot but feel that a richly colored temple--that pillars of blue and red--that friezes of gilding, and other ornament, upon a white marble ground, and in white marble framing, must have been a splendid and appropriate background, a genial feature, in such a sky and with such costume. We must get accustomed to such combinations--we must dwell upon them in imagination, or ask our good painters to restore them for us, and let us look upon them constantly and calmly.

But I will not seek to persuade; let us merely state the case fairly, and put the reader in a position to judge for himself. So much for the painted architecture. I will but add, the most remarkable specimen of a richly painted front to which we can now appeal is also really one of the most beautiful in Europe--the front of S. Mark's at Venice. The rich frescoes and profuse gilding on this splendid front, of which photographs give a very false idea, should be studied by all who desire to judge fairly of this side of Greek taste.

But I must say a word, before passing on, concerning the statues. No doubt, the painting of statues, and the use of gold and ivory upon them, were derived from a rude age, when no images existed but rude wooden work--at first a mere block, then roughly altered and reduced to shape, probably requiring some coloring to produce any effect whatever. To a public accustomed from childhood to such painted, and often richly dressed images, a pure white marble statue must appear utterly cold and lifeless. So it does to us, when we have become accustomed to the mellow tints of old and even weather-stained Greek statues; and it should be here noticed that this mellow skin-surface on antique statues is not the mere result of age, but of an artificial process, whereby they burnt into the surface a composition of wax and oil, which gave a yellowish tone to the marble, as well as also that peculiar surface which so accurately represents the texture of the human skin. But if we imagine all the marble surfaces and reliefs in the temple colored for architectural richness' sake, we can feel even more strongly how cold and out-of-place would be a perfectly colorless statue in the centre of all this pattern.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet