Anne C. E. Allinson

“ Beyond the Bay of Eleusis the eye that has not yet seen Athens turns inland in strained waiting for the Acropolis. Rising out of a still distant plain and bearing upon its crest the half-realized ruins of the Parthenon, the hill of the pilgrim’s desires becomes a reality—“and from a dream, behold, it is a waking vision.”
This journey, of scarcely eight hours, serves also to reveal a surprising amount of Greek territory. Taking it in the reverse direction, the train passes through Attica, Megara, the Isthmus and Argolis, and follows the entire northern coast line of Achæa. ”

“ Perhaps thereafter in the streets of Troy Anchises made people think suddenly of early dawns on the mountain-side when the silver car of the moon hangs low over the sea and the nightingale sings and the bleating flocks answer the pipe’s ethereal cry. In Athens a transient shepherd, with his crook and his coat of fleece, may fling the townsman’s thoughts abroad to the men he has seen among the hills of Arcadia, where as of old a misty night is hateful to shepherds and goatherds, and a bright moon their heart’s delight ”

“ At Olympia itself the new green of the trees and grass, the pink of the almond blossoms on the banks of the Alpheus, and all the awakening of the early spring help to dissipate the melancholy that is wont to invade the mind in a lonely site amidst ruins which record some by-gone efflorescence of human activity. This Olympian plain, through which the Alpheus sweeps down to the sea between fields and vineyards, offered ample room for the vast throngs of visitors. There was no city accommodation. They must encamp in the open as they do to-day at many a modern festival. ”

“ Here in the harbour the Greek fleet assembled before sailing to take its position in the Straits of Salamis. The ruined remains of the acropolis are insignificant, but our vision, like that of the refugees, may range over the wonderful landscape—Parnassus beyond the Isthmus and gulf, mountains and headlands, and the Ægean set with island jewels—back to the fertile plain below, which in modern times has welcomed the beauty of the orange and the lemon to replace the vanished glory of the kings and heroes of antiquity. ”

“ If any work of man’s hands can purge the mind of the commonplace, it is the Propylæa, imposing in its grand proportions, yet enticing by its beauty. Through this the pilgrim now passes and is alone with Greek life. Although the plateau is deserted, the temple in ruins, there is no sense of death. There is rather a sudden sense of Beauty set free from the trammels of daily life. ”

“ At times the west wind from the ocean sweeps up this long narrow gulf as if through a cañon, beating the waves into fury and filling the air with cold moisture, even while the sun or the moon denies the presence of a storm. On the other side of the Isthmus the Saronic Gulf pushes far asunder the coasts of Attica and the Peloponnesus and skirts on the north the littoral of Megara. From its placid evening surface the mountains of Ægina and Salamis rise in curves and sharp peaks of cool violet and rose. ”

“ The fruitful plain, the height of Mount Voïdia in the background, the splendid waterfront facing the mountainous Ætolian coast combine to give a suitable welcome to Greece. This entrance is never fairer than in the hour when the silver gray of dawn is obliterated by the clear bloom in the sky that heralds the rising sun. The morning light reveals outlines in naked distinctness, and tinges all surfaces with a colour so fresh and buoyant that an immediate conviction arises of the joyous nobility of 195Greek scenery and of the youthfulness which a race so nurtured might maintain. ”

“ The student of Greek literature finds that he need not always seek the ruins of antiquity or the permanent stage-setting of Nature when he desires a sense of fellowship with the past. At any street corner this sense may be quickened by some person or object which is an integral part of the city’s modern life. Ancient literature not only gleams, like “a stately palace hall, with golden pillars of song,” but also mirrors common things, trivial or serious, which subtly unite the times of Homer with those of Pericles, and both with our own. ”

“ Probably the architect’s taste and the Phigalians’ desire united to choose as the material of the temple the native rock that could be quarried in the neighbourhood. Marble was imported for the capitals of the inner pillars, for the ceilings of the north and south porticoes, for the roof tiles and for the sculptured frieze which now honours the British Museum. The columns of the peristyle and the architrave, barren of adornment, are singularly noble. They look as if they had sprung from the rocks about them and belonged more to the mountains overshadowing them than to men. ”

“ It would be very unsafe to assert that the eager Greeks, if called back to our own age of ingenious mechanisms, would turn uninterested from the vicarious competition by motor-cars, or feel nothing but disgust at human forms crooked into the semblance of brutes over a flying bicycle, but it is safe to emphasize that all their contests, whether exhibiting the development of the perfect human body or the beauty of the horse, ministered to that sure sense of form and proportion which they demanded and obtained from poet, painter, and musician, sculptor, architect, and athlete. ”

“ But the rollicking infant and his half-angry, half-amused victim must be remembered to complete the idea of a religion which left a definite place for humour. While the gravely beautiful Hermes which adorned the temple of Hera at Olympia revealed, in perfect marble, a serious and noble conception of divinity, it may well be that among the many wooden or stone statues of the god which stood in orchard closes, by cool wayside springs, and in crossways near the gray seashore, more than one recalled his lovable and mischievous boyhood. ”

“ Artemis, making her pastime the chase of boars and swift deer, fairer than the fair wild wood-nymphs attending her, took especial pleasure in the ridges of Erymanthus and became the reverently worshipped Maiden of the Arcadian country.
Later literature in more than one language created a visionary Arcadia of uninterrupted pastoral charm and ease, a refuge for the weary, an earthly dream of “unlaborious life.” The fashion began in Greek itself in the artificial period of Alexandrian civilization when men were sated with city life and began to write chamber poetry about the beauties of nature. ”

“ So then a thousand fires burned upon the plain and fifty warriors by the side of each were seated in the blazing fire’s gleam the while the horses by the chariots stood and champed white barley and the spelt and waited for the throned Dawn.”
Sappho’s fragments are redolent of flowers; her woven verse, a “rich-red chlamys” in the sunshine, has a silver sheen in the moonlight. We hear the full-throated passion of “the herald of the spring, the nightingale”; the breeze moves the apple boughs, the wind shakes the oak trees. ”

“ The great mass broken off from the east end of the Areopagus rock has partially blocked the cleft into which the chorus conducts home the Dread Goddesses. As the procession, chanting its hymn, sweeps around the shoulder of the hill, the faded picture of ancient Athens regains its outlines as if under some powerful reagent. Wine-press and fountain, precincts and temples, rise again from their ruins; the throbbing life of the eager citizens reappears. But the gaily-dressed people have hushed jest and carping under the sense of awe evoked by Æschylus. ”

“ Only with very great difficulty can we discover the threads of belief which made out of the newcomer a gracious lord of the vintage, a dispeller of care and teacher of mirth, a prophet, a guide in all the arts of civilization and, more mysteriously still, a suffering god, both redeemer and redeemed, a companion at Eleusis of Demeter and Persephone. Because, however, of the persistent clarity of the Greek imagination, the god now and again emerges from amid the chaos of functions and attributes in a concrete form of beauty. ”

“ Arcadia, though itself unproductive, inspired poetry; others, also, like Phocis, Locris, and Messenia, are inevitably drawn into the associations of literature and history. In Epirus we find at Dodona the first known sanctuary of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks. In Thessaly the earliest Greeks, or Achæans, may have first forged in the fire of their young imagination the tempered steel of the hexameter. Here was the home of Achilles, and here, perhaps, we must look for the kernel of the Iliad. Here most fitly, close to Olympus where dwelt the immortals, could the sons of men be “near-gods.” ”

“ Lying toward Megalopolis, also a beneficiary of Epaminondas, it seemed to reunite in a new hope the old Arcadia and the old Messenia whose friendship had been so futile. To-day, still a strangely impressive monument, it may serve as a symbol of Messenia’s share in the spirit of Greece. Impotent in literature and art and unsuccessful even in war, the men of this country conserved through many generations and vicissitudes that intense national feeling which existed at the core of every Greek state, shaping Greek history and penetrating Greek literature. ”

“ The mountains into which the carriage turns from the six-arched bridge are threaded by a long road which, despite its smoothness and safety, runs near enough to the tops of precipices and to the sight of noisy torrents in the gloomy ravines below to engender a mood of Arcadian wildness. If this mountain region is reached in time, travellers will become spectators of the charming scenes which are enacted each evening over the hills of Greece when the bleating flocks of sheep and goats come home to their folds. ”

“ Above it, on the hill’s summit, loom the ruins of an old Frankish castle, once the seat of a barony which contributed many a romantic story to the history of the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages. Rarely in Greece is the harmony of historical impression interrupted. But here, like highwaymen to challenge intellectual security, feudalism and the mediæval world stalk out upon the unwary. The spectacle is unique. Karytæna stands at the point where the flat plain startlingly breaks into almost terrifying mountains. ”

“ But mortal women were not the only companions of Dionysus. The exuberant play of nature, the change from death to life as winter made way for spring, not only goaded human hearts with a divine torture, but peopled the hills with lithe nymphs of untouched soul, rollicking with Pan and even with the greater god whose joy, to spirits touched to finer issues, was more terrible than sweet. Pan and the nymphs had their special dwelling-place in the Corycian Cave, which Pausanias mentions as one of the four most famous caverns of the whole world, “among a total number past finding out.” ”

“ Although, for example, the courtrooms and the Lyceum have disappeared, we may, as we wander about Athens to-day, come much nearer the Greeks of the classic age than if, while the buildings had remained intact, the words of the orators and of the great Peripatetic could no longer reach our ears. The so-called “Theseum,” largely perfect as it is and invaluable for architectural and artistic suggestion, leaves us cold in the lack of literary association as compared with the Propylæa where many an old-time Athenian rubs elbows with us as we pass in and out between its stately columns. ”