Philip Sanford Marden

“ Where the plain stops and the mountain wall approaches once again close to the sea, this road grows decidedly picturesque, recalling in a mild way the celebrated Amalfi drive as it rises and falls on the face of the cliff. Nor should one pass from the subject of Eleusis without mentioning the numerous little kids that frisk over the ruins, attended by anxious mother-goats, all far from unfriendly. Kids are common enough sights in Greece, and to lovers of pets they are always irresistible; but nowhere are they more so than at Eleusis, where they add their mite of attractiveness to the scene. ”

“ The sea, varying from a light green to a deep Mediterranean blue, laps gently along the side of the highway toward the open ocean, while ahead, up the straight boulevard, appears the Acropolis of Athens, now seen for the first time in its proper light as one of the most magnificent ruins of the earth. The road thither is good but uncomfortably new. When its long lines of pepper trees, now in their infancy, shall have attained their growth, it will be a highway lined with shade and affording a prospect of much beauty. ”

“ The railway station, as usual, lay far outside the village, and in the station yard the one carriage of the town was awaiting us. Into it we were thrust; Spyros mounted beside the driver, a swarthy native; and with a rattle that recalled the famous Deadwood coach we whirled out of the inclosure and off to the town. The village itself proved to be but a sorry hole, to put it in the mildest form. It was made up of a fringe of buildings around a vacant common, level as a floor and sparsely carpeted with grass and weeds. ”

“ Human habitation there is none. Kastri was now out of sight behind. On the roadside and in the more gradual slopes of the ravine below one might find olive trees, and here and there a plane. Beyond, through the mysterious windings of the defile runs the road to Arakhova. It was on this spot that Apollo had his most famous shrine, the abode of his accredited priestesses gifted with prophecy; and no fitter habitation for the oracle could have been found by the worshipers of old time than this gloomy mountain glen where nature conspires with herself to overawe mankind by her grandeur. ”

“ Under a cloudy sky—and there are occasionally such skies even in sunny Greece—it is not at all easy to pick out the Acropolis, lying low in the foreground and flanked by such superior heights as Lycabettus and Pentelicus. Hence it is that the voyager, returning home from a stay in Athens, enjoys the seaward view of the receding site far more than the approaching newcomer; and it must be added that, however one may reverence the Acropolis from his reading, it can never mean so much to him as it will after a few days of personal acquaintance, when he has learned to know its every stone. ”

“ Marathon has no ruins to show. Aside from the interest attaching to that famous battleground as a site, there is nothing to call one thither, if we except the tumulus, or mound, which marks the exact spot of the conflict which was so important to the history of western Europe. Neither Marathon nor Thermopylæ can offer much to-day but memories. But Sunium, Ægina, and Eleusis possess ruins decidedly worth a visit in addition to much scenic loveliness, and the last-named is a spot so interwoven with the highest and best in Greek tradition that it offers a peculiar charm. ”

“ Nauplia herself made a pleasant picture to the approaching eye, lying on her well-protected harbor at the base of an imposing cliff, on the top of which the frowning battlements of an old Venetian fortress proclaimed the presence of the modern state prison of Greece. The evening sun brought out the whiteness of the city against the forbidding rock behind, while far away westward across the land-locked bay the evening light touched with a rosy glow the snowy summit of Cyllene, and brought out the rugged skyline of the less lofty Peloponnesian mountains. ”

“ It has remained for the present day, when the earth has been all but completely overrun and when men have found a dearth of new worlds to conquer, that we have had the time and the interest to turn back to Greece, sweep away the rubbish of ages, and give back to the light of day the palaces of Agamemnon, the strongholds of Tiryns, and the hoary old labyrinth of Minos. On the fringes of Magna Græcia, where the empire was in touch with the unceasing tides of western civilization, as in Sicily and at Corfu, the remnants of the older days fared but ill. ”

“ Even though the British occupation came to an end as long ago as 1865, the roadways of the island bear the marks of the British thoroughness, and make riding in Corfu a pleasure. The houses along the way are largely of the summer-residence variety, the property of wealthy foreigners rather than of native Corfiotes; and their gardens, especially in the springtime, are a riot of roses, tumbling over the high walls, or clambering all over the houses themselves, and making the air heavy with their fragrance. The trees are no less beautiful, and the roads are well shaded by them. ”

“ Munich has the interesting pedimental figures from the temple at Ægina; Naples and Paris have collections not to be despised; but nowhere may one find under a single roof so wide a range of Greek sculpture, from the earliest strivings after form and expression to the highest ultimate success, as in the Athenian National Museum, with its priceless treasures in marble and in bronze. The wealth of statues, large and small, quaintly primitive or commandingly lovely, in all degrees of relief and in the round, is stupendous. ”

“ It has seen the worship of Athena Parthenos give way to the reverence of another Virgin—a holier ideal of Wisdom set up in its own precincts, and worshiped there on the very spot where once the youth of Athens did honor to the pagan goddess. Gods and religions have risen and departed, despots have come and gone; but the Parthenon has stood unchanging, the unrivaled embodiment of architectural beauty to-day, as it was when Ictinus, Mnesicles, Pheidias, and those who were with them created it out of their combined and colossal genius, under the wise ordainment of Pericles. ”

“ Athens is a clean city. Its streets, while unpaved, are still fairly hard. Its buildings are in the main of stone, covered with a stucco finish and given a white color, or a tint of buff or light blue. The prevailing tone is white, and in the glare of the brilliant sun it is often rather trying to the eyes. To relieve the whiteness there is always the feathery green of the pepper trees, and the contrast of the clambering vines and flowers that in their season go far to make the city so attractive. ”

“ The city proper now opens out before, and as the carriage enters the great principal square of Athens, the “Syntagma,” or Place de la Constitution, handsome streets may be seen radiating from it in all directions, giving a general impression of cleanly whiteness, while the square itself, spreading a wide open space before the huge and rather barnlike royal palace, is filled with humanity passing to and fro, or seated at small tables in the open air, partaking of the coffee so dear to the heart of the Greek ”

“ The gates of the Acropolis are closed at sunset by the guards, and lingering visitors are insistently herded into groups and driven downward to the gate like sheep by the little band of blue-coated custodians. Still, they are not hard-hearted, and if a belated visitor finds the outer gates locked a trifle before sunset, as often happens with the idea of preventing needless ascent, a plea for “pende lepta” (five minutes) is likely to be honored even without a petty bribe. But at last every one must go, and the holy hill of Athena is left untenanted for one more of its endless round of nights. ”

“ After a long journey one is not loath to rest beside this ancient fount after washing and drinking deep of its unfailing supply, for the water is good and the chance to drink fresh water in Greece is rare enough to be embraced wherever met. The cleft from which the spring emerges is truly wonderful. It is narrow and dark enough for a colossal chimney, running far back into the bowels of the mountain heights behind. An old stone trough hewn out of the side of the cliff was once filled by this spring, but the flow has now been diverted and it runs off in a babbling stream over the pebbles. ”

“ The Acropolis is naturally the great focus of interest, not only for what remains in situ on its top, but because of many remnants of buildings that cluster about its base. The rock itself, if it were stripped of every building and devoid of every memory, would still be commanding and imposing, alone by sheer force of its height and steepness. As it is, with its beetling sides made the more precipitous by the artifices of Cimon and ancient engineers, whose walls reveal the use of marble column drums built into the fortifications themselves, it is doubly impressive for mere inaccessibility. ”

“ Not alone is it beautiful in and of itself, but it commands from its platform a grand view of the Attic plain below, of the bay of Salamis gleaming in the sun beyond, of the long cape running down to Sunium, and of the distant mountains of the Argolid, rolling like billows in the southwest far across the gulf and beyond Ægina. To pause for a moment on gaining this threshold of the Acropolis and gaze upon this imposing panorama of plain, mountain, and sea, is an admirable introduction to Greece. ”

“ The several strongholds of Agamemnon’s kingdom were all in sight,—Mycenæ, Nauplia, Argos, and Tiryns,—at the corners of the great plain, which one might ride all around in a day; so that from his chief stronghold on the height at Mycenæ Agamemnon might well claim to be monarch of all he surveyed. Behind the valley, the twin peaks at whose base the stronghold lay rose abruptly, bearing no trace of the forests of oak that once covered them; and on a rocky foothill stood the acropolis of the city, admirably fitted by nature for defense. ”

“ On the contrary, the great gods of high Olympus, Hermes, Athena, Æolus, and others, give their names to the finest, broadest, most magnificent streets of this city that likes to call herself a little Paris. The result of it all is a curious mental state, for by the time one gets out of Athens and into the highlands of Delphi or of the Peloponnesus, where every peak and vale is the scene of some godlike encounter or amour, one is more than half ready to accept those ancient deities as actually having lived and done the things that legend ascribes to them. ”

“ Under the northern side of the towering rock and around to the east of it runs the thriving city of to-day, thence spreading off for perhaps two miles to the northward along the plain, first closely congested, then widening into more open modernized streets, and finally dwindling into scattered suburbs out in the countryside.
The growth of Athens has left its marks of progress in well-defined strata. The narrow, squalid, slummy streets of the quarter nearest the Acropolis belong to the older or Turkish period of the city’s renascent life. ”

“ To-day it is little more than the bare rock that it was when Poseidon split it from the bed of the sea. Apollo gave it an immortality, however, which does not wane although Apollo himself is dead. Athens and Corinth gave it a worldly celebrity, which proved but temporary so far as it depended on activity in the world of affairs. Delos, washed by the Ægean, has little to look forward to but to drowse the long tides idle, well content with her crowded hour of glorious life, and satisfied that her neighbors should have the age without a name. ”

“ Hermes alone fully justifies the journey to Olympia, and once seen he will never be forgotten. The satin smoothness of the marble admirably simulates human (or god-like) flesh, doubtless because of the processes which the Greeks knew of rubbing it down with a preparation of wax. No trace of other external treatment survives, save a faint indication of gilding on the sandals. If the hair and eyes were ever painted, the paint has entirely disappeared in the centuries that the statue lay buried in the sands that the restless Alpheios and Cladeus washed into the sacred inclosure. ”

“ Although to enter Greece by way of the Piræus is actually to enter the front door of the kingdom, nevertheless, as has been hinted heretofore, one may vote on the whole that it is better to make this the point of departure instead of that of initiation. Leaving Greece as most of us do with a poignant sense of regret, it is not unfitting that we depart with the benediction of the old Acropolis of Athens, crowned with its famous ruins, which are to be seen even when far at sea, glowing in the afternoon sun, and furnishing an ideal last view of this land of golden memories. ”

“ One may now visit the more interesting sites of the Greek peninsula and even certain of the islands with perfect ease, at no greater cost in money or effort than is entailed by any other Mediterranean journey, and with the added satisfaction that one sees not only inspiring scenery, but hills and vales peopled with a thousand ghostly memories running far back of the dawn of history and losing themselves in pagan legend, in the misty past when the fabled gods of high Olympus strove, intrigued, loved, and ruled. ”