Rufus B. Richardson

“ A mountainous country with a coast-line of rugged headlands, and here and there a river breaking through to the sea, opening up vistas into the interior and forming a fertile plain at its mouth; above all, snow-capped and smoking Ætna, with its nearly eleven thousand feet towering so high as to be seen from every part of the island except the valleys, form a combination attractive even to one who has left history and art out of his travelling outfit. The student of history, however, gets a keener enjoyment in this land where so much history—ancient, mediæval, and modern—has been enacted. ”

“ When we visited Segesta the next day and saw its temple, also unfinished, as it was when the city was stricken down by the Greek Agathocles, we felt little pity for this city which had stirred up so much mischief for its foe, Selinus, and for its friend, Athens. But perhaps, after all, this Elymian city’s greatest crime was saying, “I must live.” If Selinus refused to accept this proposition, Segesta called in Athens or Carthage, regardless of the woes that might in consequence come upon those who disputed her right to live. ”

“ I have seen Pentelicus burning for three days—a brilliant illumination for Athens—and, in sailing from Poros to Nauplia in midsummer, I counted twenty-six fires on the mountains of Peloponnesus; but all these could do nothing more in the way of damage than to help on a little the aridity into which Attica and the Argolid are helplessly sinking. Where it scarcely ever rains during six months of the year, the grass and weeds become like tinder, and a fire once started from some shepherd’s carelessness is difficult to stop. ”

“ A JOURNEY FROM ATHENS TO ERETRIA
Most hand-books of travel in Greece, beginning with the invaluable Baedeker, impress it upon their readers that there are no long distances in Greece. Even without the help of railroads, which, of course, as far as they extend, have annihilated the barriers between the old “jarring states,” one finds the historic places, like Corinth, Delphi, Chæronea, Thebes, and many others lying so near one another that, after lodging in one of them, one can always count on spending the next night at another. One loses no time. ”

“ To judge from the exhaustion which even the strongest felt, as well as from the appearance of the mountain, for Vlocho is really a mountain, we have here the highest acropolis in Greece. It looks down upon Trichonis to the south and back into the rugged peaks of Ætolia to the north, overtopping all the foot-hills of those mountains. Its walls also match the commanding position. It is no wonder that Leake took it for the great central citadel of the Ætolians, none other than Thermon. ”

“ The finest feature of Arta is its view. From the hill, at the foot of which lies the city, one sees the mountains near Dodona, and farther south and quite close at hand, is Tsoumerka, in the spring a mass of snow, falling just short of eight thousand feet. Behind this, over beyond the Acheloos, the snowy peaks of the Pindos range crowd one upon another in such thick array that one despairs of identifying them all with the names given on the map. ”

“ But it is not my purpose to rewrite any portion of the history of Greece, but only to set forth clearly the physical and moral position of Ambrakia, that one may realize more clearly the satisfaction of the sturdy Demosthenes, the man of deeds, not the man of words, when, at Olpæ and under the walls of Amphilochian Argos, a few miles to the south, he crippled Ambrakia as thoroughly as Cleomenes had crippled Argos at Tiryns a few years before the Persian war, and made Corinth feel in the woes of her favorite daughter that she had not kindled the flames of the Peloponnesian war with impunity. ”

“ Where Aroania is broken off on the east end so abruptly that one can only think of it as cut off by some gigantic cleaver, down over this front comes the Styx, not with a shoot, but hugging the rock and deflected several times along its face. Pausanias says that the precipice is the highest that he ever remembers to have seen, and its height is recorded as upward of six thousand feet. As the mountain throws out arms to the right and left of the fall, we have a place fitted to throw a potent spell over the mind on a moonlight night or at morning or evening twilight. ”

“ At that farther end, too, was the fertile plain of Agrinion, where grows the best tobacco in Greece. Beyond that and across the Acheloos rose the snowy mountains of Acarnania and Leukas, just touched by the rising sun. On our right, rising up from the north shore of the lake and stretching far to the north, were the gigantic mountains which make the larger and wilder part of Ætolia. On our left were the lower peaks of Mount Arakynthos bordering the lake on the south. This is the heart of Ætolia. It has a wonderfully drawing power to one who has once seen it. ”

“ Having seen the sunrise from most of the mountain-tops of the country, having forded many of its rivers, and having caught the indescribable color at early dawn and at evening twilight, from the deck of coasting steamers, all along these fascinating shores, I felt it only right that I should try to convey to others, less fortunate than myself, some picture, however inadequate, of all this experience and enjoyment. ”

“ It is no wonder that the lively imagination of the Greek transferred the earthly Styx to Hades, and represented the most awful and binding oath of the gods, by which they pledged their immortality, as that one which they swore by this hated and deadly water. ”

“ If rich fields could enervate a people, the Spartans surely did not lack that invitation, for the valley of the Eurotas must have been in antiquity, as now, a garden.
But what an unlovely people was this armed camp, which goes under the name of Sparta! We will not reproach them that they failed to produce anything in art and literature. It is rather their meanness and absolute selfishness, as the strongest military power in Greece, that makes them odious. For a century, from the Persian war to Leuctra, whenever Sparta moved through the passes to the north it meant woe to some Greek city ”

“ Poor villages occupy the Cadmeia and the site of Sparta; waves of immigration have swept over Greece to such an extent that one may be in honest doubt whether the people who walk these dirty streets have any more claim to be the heirs and representatives of Leonidas and Epaminondas, whose names perchance they bear, than we have. The plains and rivers remain, except that the former have lost their trees and the latter their water. But Taygetos, “rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,” remains as it was. The great men of Greece knew the mountains, and were known of them. ”

“ Rich Greeks probably think their benefactions more safely bestowed in Athens. Otherwise somebody would have given a new library building to Joannina.
The walls that Carapanos discovered all have a singularly late appearance, and there is a striking lack of pottery in the ground; but the inscriptions and dedicatory offerings leave no doubt that this is Dodona. The temples and the finely built theatre, one of the largest in Greece, doubtless supplied the place of older and ruder buildings of the time when all Hellas came to hear the voice of Father Zeus in the rustling oak-leaves. ”

“ At any rate, Ithome was the fortress in which Aristodemos made the last stand against Sparta in the first war. In the small Greek world the sensation caused by the reappearance of the Messenian state may be compared to that which would be felt in Europe to-day if Poland should again take her place among the nations.
So great had been the vicissitudes of the Messenian people that Pausanias for once drops his rôle of periegete to become the historian of a gallant race that succumbed to force and fate. ”

“ It is a state which we cannot love. We cannot forget that before Salamis it held its fleet off the southern point of the Peloponnesus, waiting to see which way the great struggle was going to incline. When Athens concluded the alliance with her at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, many at Athens felt it to be an unholy alliance, and that the burden of hatred thus shouldered was almost a counterbalance to the winning of the second navy in Greece. Thucydides draws an awful picture of the decimating feuds, which seemed tinged with barbaric fury, between aristocracy and commons. ”

“ The whole vast enclosure is covered with a grove of great oaks, which, in some cases, have pushed down the walls. In one case, the growing oak has pulled out one stone from its place and carried it up in its embrace several feet above the rest of the wall. So luxuriant is the vegetation all over the hill that one who will see the whole wall outside and inside—and no less will satisfy one—must give up a whole day to the task, and force his way through thorns and briers that scratch and tear, paying with his person. ”

“ In many respects the most interesting journey which I have made in Greece was my last one through Acarnania and Ætolia. To be sure, my last journey in Greece is always my best one; yet there was a special attraction in this journey from the fact that it was the fulfilment of a long-cherished desire. There was a gap in my knowledge of western Greece which I keenly felt. I had tramped over the Ionian Islands, visited Joannina and Dodona, and passed over the Pindos range into Thessaly. ”

“ There is a break in the coast line; as you go in you find yourself in a broad bay; but that is not all; you pass through another opening, into another bay, and so on, the mountains growing higher all the time until, by passing five channels, one so narrow that it used to be stopped by a chain, and so is called to-day Catena, you reach the fifth bay, on the east shore of which, nestled up against the base of a high dark mountain, one of those from which the region Montenegro got its name, lies Cattaro, a town of five or six thousand inhabitants, the outpost of Austria to the south. ”

“ The great historians have found elsewhere more attractive themes than the wars of the men who inhabited these mighty fortresses. The modern traveller likes to follow the footsteps of the poets and historians; and so Attica, Argos, Bœotia, and Thessaly are visited and enjoyed, while the stream passes by Ætolia and Acarnania “on the other side.” But there are some who will be drawn by that beautiful Lake Trichonis, by the bountiful Acheloos, by the Gulf of Ambrakia, and by the Gorge of Klissoura, which runs through Mount Arakynthos, and only lacks a stream to make it surpass Tempe. ”

“ What a plain town it is! The palace of the present sovereign, called the New Palace, is one of the few two-story buildings in the place, but even this has hardly any ornament except four pairs of attached Corinthian columns on each of the stories at the front side, and two pairs on each of the other sides. The so-called “Old Palace” is plainer than most modern jails. The one building of interest is the monastery, in which lies buried the ancestor of the ruling family, on whose sarcophagus the Montenegrins lay their hands and swear when they go out to battle to be good and true soldiers. ”

“ But the fact that very little is known of any city called Dodona, as well as the fact on the other side that the sanctuary excavated by Carapanos has a small acropolis connected with it, makes it extremely improbable that this great city, Kastritza, was Dodona.
The picturesqueness of the city of Joannina is matched by its grand setting. Its lake is over a thousand feet above the sea, and streams from the amphitheatre of the snow-covered mountains keep flowing into it without finding any visible outlet. The color upon the mountains and the lake at sunrise and sunset is often wonderful. ”

“ It is quite a testimonial to the persistency of the old Hellenic spirit that travellers all notice how pure is the Greek spoken in Joannina.
Three hours’ ride across a range of hills to the south lies Dodona, at the foot of Mount Tomarus, which at the time of our visit (in May) was heavily capped with snow. This oldest oracle and sanctuary of Greece, famous before Delphi was born, has a situation only a little less imposing than Delphi. Until about twenty-five years ago one was still in doubt in just what part of this region to look for the old famous sanctuary. ”

“ For a pure pleasure ride, the road between Tripolitza and Sparta would be hard to match anywhere in the world. It is in capital condition, and, on account of its gentle grade, involves very little walking. Six hours suffice for the journey in either direction, and the view either way is superb. The ride through Ætolia and Acarnania, regions considered half civilized in the classical period of Greek history, but always fine in natural beauty, with big lakes, and rivers that “move in majesty” (a rare thing in Greece) , and hedged in by high mountains, is perhaps the best in Greece. ”

“ But Olympus, with all its Greek associations, is, alas! a mountain in Turkey; and as for Parnassus, it is overtopped by nearly two hundred feet by a mountain to the west of it. This mountain, called Kiona, a part of the group known in antiquity under the name of Korax, “Crow Mountain,” has the honor of being the highest mountain in the Kingdom of Greece. Parnassus, to be sure, by the greatness of its fame more than overcomes the lacking two hundred feet, just as Erymanthus, on account largely of its famous boar, is of more importance than its higher neighbor to the east, Aroania. ”