Rambles and Studies in Greece

Preface

TO THE SECOND EDITION. This Edition has been considerably enlarged and corrected, in answer to the requests of friends and the complaints of critics. The former, who were pleased to think it a useful introduction for tra vellers in the country, found it too incomplete — an objection which I have met as far as I could by undertaking a new journey, and adding new observations and reflections throughout the book. But it is still, of course, a slight sketch, and a very incomplete one too — in fact a mere stimulus to further research. The critics pointed out a good many real errors, which have been corrected, and asserted a good many of their own, by way of improvement, which have not been adopted, because I found upon honest study, that they were Verschlimmbesserungen. But I have not turned aside to refute them, save in a very* few instances,

PREFACE.

. VI and I now regret that even these should detain my readers, inasmuch as the objections were mainly intended to effect a diversion in another contro versy, which is already forgotten. In no case, however, has the tone of a criticism, however supercilious, prevented me from profiting by the matter of it, very thankfully too, whenever it saved me from any serious error. On the whole, my reviewers have been very generous, and have given the book more than fair play. It seemed unnecessary to reprint such parts of my former Preface as referred to the position and prospects of the Greek nation, because the text of the book now embodies these views, and no longer contains the passages which may have been unjust, and requiring modification. My belief in the high qualities of the Greeks, as com pared with their neighbours, has been greatly strengthened by their calm and reasonable attitude all through the present crisis — a policy which is brought into stronger relief by the dastardly meanness of the Servians.

There are signs that the sympathy for Greece and a feeling for her claims are growing in England. It is a common thing now to hear a Greek occupation of Constan- PREFA CE. VII tinople discussed, and most people seem favourable to the increase of the Hellenic kingdom. Perhaps an honest effort to pay the interest of the Greek loan would now be sufficient to create an active Hellenic party in England, and raise a de sire to give Greece a leading part to play in the settlement of the Eastern question. The main difficulty in the way is the objection which I have myself brought, that Greece has now been free for nearly fifty years, and has not made such solid advance as to justify her being intrusted with European interests in the East. The reply urged against me by a notable historian, that fifty years was of small account in the history of a nation seems, however, as bad as the objection, for it completely ignores the real state of the case.

A careful perusal of the last two volumes of Finlay's History of Greece — a book in no way par tial to the Greeks — will prove to any honest stu dent that the country was not liberated fifty years ago, and that both objection and answer are based upon an historical blunder. The battle of Navarino did, indeed, relieve Greece of Turkish despotism ; but surely, no country can be called liberated which passes at once into bloody anarchy and PREFA CE. VIII civil war, and then under the sway of selfish des pots, all of whom endeavour to centralize every department of government under their own super vision and for their o\yn advantage. These evils arose from the misfortune of the Greek leaders being unprincipled and dishonest, and, moreover, from their being of course ignorant of the real meaning of political liberty.

And anyone who knew Bavaria, even after 1848, and has felt the offi cious and petty despotism which watched over the people, will know that the princes and statesmen of such a kingdom could not administer a really free constitution for a single day. Until, there fore, the Greeks, by a sober and honourable agi tation, obtained a new constitution in 1843, and abolished the selfish domination of foreigners, no man should assert that they became a free people. But if we reflect that even this constitution was framed and administered by politicians partly hostile to it, partly so depraved by the old despotism, that they could not understand their newer and higher responsibilities, it will appear unjust to date the liberation of Greece even from this epoch, but we should rather name the year 1862, when another revolution, stained by very few crimes or

PREFACE.

. IX excesses, removed the Bavarian king, who could not rise above base intrigue, and inaugurated with the present sovereign the commencement of real liberty. The social and commercial progress of Greece within the sixteen years which have elapsed since that date are unmistakable. There is politi cal progress, too, as the events of the last year amply show ; but it will require a much longer time to efface the habits of intrigue, of venality, and of selfishness, in which the leaders of the nation were trained by their rulers for many centuries. Probably the most effectual remedy would be to enlarge their interests and their hopes, and to purify their selfishness by ennobling their am bition. I must not conclude this Preface without thank ing Mr. T. V. Keenan, of Trinity College Library, for his valuable corrections and suggestions all through the book. Dublin, Jan. 25, 1878. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I.

Introduction

— FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE COAST . . I II. GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS AND ATTICA, ... 26 III. ATHENS — THE MUSEUMS — THE TOMBS, 51 IV. THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS, 83 V. ATHENS — THE THEATRE OF DIONYSUS — THE AREOPAGUS, 115 VI. EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA — COLONUS — THE HARBOURS — LAURIUM — SUNIUM, 1 44 VII. EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA — PENTELICUS— MARATHON — DAPHNE — ELEUSIS, 175 VIII. FROM ATHENS TO THEBES — THE PASSES OF MOUNT CITHÆRON, ELEUTHERÆ, PLATÆA, 203 IX. THE PLAIN OF ORCHOMENUS, LEBADEA, CHÆRONEA, . 233 X. ARACHOVA — DELPHI — THE BAY OF CIRRHA, 258 XI. ELIS — OLYMPIA AND ITS GAMES— THE VALLEY OF THE ALPHEUS 283 XII. ARCADIA — ANDRITZENA — BASSÆ — MEGALOPOLIS — TRI- POLITZA, 324 XIII. CORINTH — TIRYNS — ARGOS— NAUPLIA, 360 XIV. MYCENÆ, 402 XV. GREEK MUSIC AND PAINTING, ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE I. Tomb in the Cerameicus (Athens), . .

Frontispiece. II. The Temple of Theseus (Athens), 33 in. The Marathonian Theseus, 62 IV. The Stele of Aristion (Athens), ,64 v. Archaistic Artemis (Naples) 66 VI. Archaistic Apollo (Naples) 68 vn. Tomb in the Cerameicus (Athens), 73 Vin. The Parthenon (West Front), 85 IX. The Parthenon, a Block from the Cella Frieze, ... 99 x. The Temple of Poseidon at Corinth, 364 MAP OF GREECE to face page Stanford* Oeog Bigtab* 6.~> Ckannn Ctom London : MaenulJaii .V Co.

Chapter I. 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 r 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 his tory. 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, B [ch. RAMBLES IN GREECE. 2 its glories, lie on the west of the Apennines. When vou cross them you come to what is called the back of Italy ; and you feel in that flat country, and that straight coast line, you are separated from its true beauty and charm.1 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 neighbours were the coast cities of Asia Minor and of the Cyclades, but the western coasts were to them harbourless 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 out-lying 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 (such as they are] 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, 1 Though this statement is broadly true, it requires some modifica tion. I should be sorry to be thought insensible to the beauties, not only of Ravenna, with its mosaics and its pines, but of Ancona, of the splendid Monte Gargano, and of the rich gardens and vineyards of Apulia. o 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 intercourse is with Con stantinople, and Smyrna, and Syra, and Alexandria, to which a man may sail almost any day in the week. You can only sail to Italy — I had almost said to Europe — on Saturdays, and upon an occa sional Thursday. This curious parallel between ancient and mo dern geographical attitudes in Greece is, no doubt, greatly due to the now by-gone 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 gravi tated eastward, and away from the Christian and better civilized West.

The revolution which ex pelled 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. B [ch. 4 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 in the morning, eager to get the earliest possible sight of the land which still occupies so large a place in our thoughts. It was a soft grey morning ; the sky was covered with light broken clouds, and 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 colour — 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 won der 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 com mon 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 like purple colour, 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 colour. 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 in tervals, and then for long ages feeding idly on that fame; Pylos, Sphacteria, Navarino — each a fore most 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, [en. 6 as Strabo observed,1 were as yet lying parallel be fore 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 propor tion 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 tele scope, 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.2 1 viii. c. 2, ess-rt to'ivvv r} Yle\OTrovvi](ios eoiKvIa ipvkAtp irKaravov rb oxvfia.. 2 On a later occasion, our ship was obliged to run into this bay for shelter from a storm, when we found some cultivation along the coasts, and a village, with extensive fortifications above it, said to be Venetian. But as we crossed the mouth of the gulf, the eye fastened with delight on distant white houses along the high ground of the eastern side — in other words, along the mountain slopes which run out into the promontory of Tainaron ; and a telescope soon brought them into distinctness, and gave us the first opportunity of discussing modern Greek life.

We stood off the coast of Maina — the home of those Mainotes whom Byron has made so famous as pirates, as heroes, as lovers, as murderers ; and even now, when the stirring days of war and of piracy have passed away, the whole district retains the aspect of a country in a state of siege or of perpetual danger. Instead of villages surrounded by peaceful homesteads, each Mainote house, though standing alone, was walled in, and in the centre was a high square tower, in which, according to trustworthy travellers, the Mainote men used to spend their day watching their enemies, while only the women and children ventured out to till the fields. For these fierce mountaineers were not only perpetually defying the Turkish power, which was never able to subdue them thoroughly, but they were all engaged at home with internecine feuds, of which the origin was often forgotten, but of which the consequences remained in the form of vengeance due for the life of a kinsman.

When this was exacted on one side, the obligation changed The aspect was by no means so desolate as appeared from a passing view outside the headlands. A coasting steamer calls here (at Ka lamata) every fortnight. to the other ; and so for generation after generation they spent their lives in either seeking or avoiding vengeance. This more than Corsican vendetta was, by a sort of mediæval chivalry, prohibited to the women and children, who were thus in perfect safety, while their husbands and fathers were in •daily and deadly danger. 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 neighbours ; 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 their diet is not very palatable to the northern traveller. So with talk and anecdote about the Mainotes — for everyone was now up on deck and sight-see ing — 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 favourite 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 Lace dæmon,' 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 Tayge tus, 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 their 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 onboard— Russians, Greeks, Turks, French, English ; and it was not hard to find pleasant companions and diverting conversation among them all. I turned to a Turk ish gentleman, who spoke French indifferently. 1 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 r 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 im proved 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 favour 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 Slave hordes of the Middle Ages. It was a calamity which came upon Greece almost suddenly, im mediately 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, Lacedæmon had numbered 100 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 our- [ch. RAMBLES IN GREECE. 12 selves, almost suddenly, facing the promontory of Malea, with the island of Cythera (Cerigo) on our right. The island is little celebrated in his tory. The Phœnicians 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 (Venus). 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 {irtiTti\iai^) 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 inhospi table open sea ; and we can well imagine the de light 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 Ægean. 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 has built himself a tiny hut, cultivates his little plot of corn, and lives 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 Ægean, the real thoroughfare of the Greeks, the mainstay of their communi cation — 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 grey 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 Ægean 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 identifi cation 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 a Phœnician outpost, 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' 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 Athe nian, 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 reputa tion, 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 dramatises the incidents, and passes from cold narrative and set oration to a dialogue between the oppressors and the oppressed.

Melian starvation was long after 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 archæologists. 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 Ægina, 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 lowTer ideals so much admired in the museums of Italy.1 Another remark should be made in justice to the islands, that the groups of Therasia and Santorin, which lie round the crater of a great extinct vol cano, have supplied us not only with the oldest forms of the Greek alphabet in their inscriptions, but with far the oldest vestiges of inhabitants in any part of Greece. In these, beneath the lava slopes formed in the last great eruption — an erup- 1 1 should except the splendid Venus vktrix, as she is called, found at Capua, and now in the Museum of Naples. tion earlier than any history, except, perhaps, Egyptian — have been found the dwellings, the implements, and the bones of men, who cannot have lived there much later than 2000 B. c. The arts, as well as the implements, of these old dwellers in their Stone Age, have shown us how very ancient Greek forms, and even Greek decorations, are in the world's history : and we may yet from them and from farther researches, such as Schliemann's, be able to reconstruct the state of things in Greece before the Greeks came from their Eastern homes.