J. P. Mahaffy

“ The shattered pillars and the torn pediments will not bear so great a strain: and the traveller feels forced to admit a sense of disappointment, sore against his will. He has come a long journey into the remoter parts of Europe; he has reached at last what his soul had longed for many years in vain: and as is wont to be the case with all great human longings, the truth does not fulfil his desire. The pang of disappointment is all the greater when he sees that the tooth of time and the shock of earthquake have done but little harm. ”

“ But surely, no voyage in Greece can be called complete which does not include a visit to the famous shrine of Delphi, where the wildness and ruggedness of nature naturally suggest the powers of earth and air, that sway our lives unseen—where the quaking soil and the rent rocks speak a strength above the strength of mortal man—and where a great faith, based upon his deepest hopes and fears, gained a moral empire over all the nation, and exercised it for centuries, to the purifying and the ennobling of the Hellenic race. ”

“ Nowhere in Greece did I see more apparent remains of the purest Greek type. Our hostess, in particular, was worthy to take her place in the Parthenon frieze, and among the children playing on the quay there were faces of marvellous beauty.
With enterprise and diligence, a trading nation or city may readily become great in a small island or barren coast, and no phenomenon in history proves this more strongly than the vast empire of the Phœnicians, who seem never to have owned more than a bare tract of a few miles about Tyre and Sidon. They were, in fact, a great people without a country. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Far below, a bright mountain stream was rushing beside the pass into Attica; around us were the great walls of the old Greeks, laid together with that symmetry, that beauty, and that strength which marks all their work. The massive towers are now defending a barren rock; the enclosure which had seen so many days of war and rapine was lying open and deserted; the whole population was gone long centuries ago. There is still liberty there, and there is peace—but the liberty and the peace of solitude. ”

“ For here, in southern Greece, in a very hot climate, in a level plain, every second child is fair, with blue eyes, and looks like a transplanted northern, and not like the offspring of a southern race. After the deep brown Italian children, which strike the traveller by their southernness all the way from Venice to Reggio, nothing is more curious than these fairer children, under a sunnier and hotter sky; and it reminds the student at once how, even in Homer, yellow hair and a fair complexion is noted as belonging to the King of Sparta. ”

“ And yet Nicias, the capitalist who worked this hideous trade, was the most pious and God-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 gods—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. ”

“ A dusty ride of two hours, relieved now and then for a moment by the intense perfume from the orange blossoms of gardens fenced with mighty aloes, brought us to the noisy and stirring town of Pyrgos.115 We found this town, one of the most thriving in Greece, quite as noisy as Naples in proportion to its size, full of dogs barking, donkeys braying, and various shopkeepers screaming out their wares—especially frequent where young shrill-voiced boys were so employed. Nowhere does the ultra-democratic temper of new Greek social life show itself more manifestly than in these disturbed streets. ”

“ We passed a few miles to the south of Karytena, with its wonderful, and apparently impregnable Frankish fortress perched like an eagle’s nest on the top of a huge cliff, from which there must be a splendid outlook not only down the valley of Megalopolis, but into the northern passes from Achaia, and the mountains of Elis. I can conceive no military post more important to the Arcadian plain, and yet it seems to have attained no celebrity in ancient history. ”

“ The dull tinkling of their bells, and the eagle’s yelp, are the only sounds which give variety to the rushing of the wind through the dark pines, and the falling of the torrent from the rocks. It is a country in which the consciousness grows not of solitude, but of smallness—a land of huge form and feature, meet dwelling for mysterious god and gloomy giant, but far too huge for mortal man.
Our way lay, not directly for Delphi, but for the curious town of Arachova, which is perched on the summit of precipices some 4000 feet or more above the level of the sea. ”

“ The great temple, raised upon a natural platform, looks out toward Salamis, and the narrow line of azure which separates it from the land. Turning to the left as you stand at the temple front, the eye wanders over the rich plain of Eleusis, now dotted over with villages, and colored (in April) with the rich brown of ploughing and the splendid green of sprouting wheat. This plain had multiplied its wealth manifold since I first saw it, and led us to hope that the peasants were waking up to the great market which is near them at Athens. ”

“ There is, in fact, no building on earth which can sustain the burden of such greatness, and so the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be disappointing. When the traveller reflects how all the Old World’s culture culminated in Greece—all Greece in Athens—all Athens in its Acropolis—all the Acropolis in the Parthenon—so much crowds upon the mind confusedly that we look for some enduring monument whereupon we can fasten our thoughts, and from which we can pass as from a visible starting-point [pg 90] into all this history and all this greatness. And at first we look in vain. ”

“ We have to pass through the poorest portion of modern Athens, through wretched bazaars and dirty markets, which abut upon the main street. Amid all this squalor and poverty, all this complete denial of art and leisure, there are [pg 76] still features which faintly echo old Greek life. There is the bright color of the dresses—the predominance of white, and red, and blue, of which the old Athenians were so fond; and there is among the lowest classes a great deal of that striking beauty which recalls to us the old statues. ”

“ It is, of course, the celebrated Mysteries—the Greater Eleusinia, as they were called—which give to the now wretched village of Eleusis, with its hopeless ruins, so deep an interest. This wonderful feast, handed down from the remotest antiquity, maintained its august splendor all through the greater ages of Greek history, down to the times of decay and trifling—when everything else in the country had become mean and contemptible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But I am bound to add that every patient observer who sets to work in spite of his disappointment, and examines with honest care these “disjecta membra” of Attic art—any one who will replace in imagination the tips of noses—any one who will stoop over lying statues, and guess at the context of broken limbs—such an observer will find his vexation gradually changing into wonder, and will at last come to see that all the smoothly-restored Greek work in Italian museums is not worth a tithe of the shattered fragments in the real home and citadel of pure art. ”

“ 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 ”

“ After some hours the mountains began to approach on either side, and we reached a country wonderful in its contrast. Great green slopes reached up from us far away into the hills, studded with great single forest trees, and among them huge shrubs of arbutus and mastich, trimmed and rounded as if for ornament. It was like a splendid park, kept by an English magnate. The regularity of shape in the shrubs arises, no doubt, from the constant cropping of the young shoots all round by herds of goats, which we met here and there in this beautiful solitude. ”

“ Rare flocks of goats, with their peculiar, dull, tinkling bells—bells which have the same make and tone all through Calabria, through Sicily, and through Greece—were the only sign of human occupation or of population. But when you look for houses, there is nothing in the shape of wall or roof, save an occasional station, where, but a few years since, soldiers were living, to keep the road safe from bandits. ”

“ A Tomb from the Via Sacra, Athens I know not that any other remnants of Greek art bring home to us more plainly one of its eternal and divine features—or shall I rather say, one of its eternal and human features?—the greatest, if not the main feature, which has made it the ever new and ever lasting lawgiver to men in their efforts to represent the ideal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If he desires to study national character, and peculiar manners and customs, he will find in the hardy mountaineers of Greece one of the most unreformed societies, hardly yet affected by the great tide of sameness which is invading all Europe in dress, fabrics, and usages. And yet, in spite of the folly still talked in England about brigands, he will find that without troops, or police, or patrols, or any of those melancholy safeguards which are now so obtrusive in England and Ireland, life and property are as secure as they ever were in our most civilized homes. ”

“ Here, again, we feel the want of some stronger government—some despotic assertion of a law of gravitation to a common centre—to counteract the strong centrifugal forces acting all through Greek society. The old autonomy of the Greeks—that old assertion of local independence which was at once their greatness and their ruin—this strong instinct has lasted undiminished to the present day. They seem even now to hate pulling together, as we say. They seem always ready to assert their individual rights and claims against those of the community or the public. ”

“ So, again, the soil of Attica is light and dusty, whereas the Golden Vale of Tipperary is among the richest and greenest in the world. Still, both places were the noblest homes, each in their own country, of religions which civilized, humanized, and exalted the human race; and if the Irish Acropolis is left in dim obscurity by the historical splendor of the Parthenon, on the other hand, the gods of the Athenian stronghold have faded out before the moral greatness of the faith preached from the Rock of Cashel. ”

“ It is plain, from this evidence, that the Greeks must have looked upon the death of those they loved with unmixed sorrow. It was the final parting, when all the good and pleasant things are remembered; when men seek, as it were, to increase the pang, by clothing the dead in all his sweetest and dearest presence. But this was not done by pompous inscriptions, or by a vain enumeration of all the deceased had performed—inscriptions which, among us, tell more of the vanity than of the grief of the survivors. ”

“ 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 Pæstum unique in all Italy. ”

“ But any honest reader of Euripides will see at once how far he too is removed from the ordinary realisms of life. He saw, indeed, that human passion is the subject, of all others, which will permanently interest human thought; he felt that the insoluble problems of Free Will and Fate, of the mercy and the cruelty of Providence, were too abstract on the one hand, and too specially Greek on the other; that, after all, human nature as such is the great universal field on which any age can reach the sympathy and the interest of its remotest successors. ”