Greek city

“ I cannot undertake to describe, not even to mention, the many noble buildings, either built or in construction, from the quarries of Pentelicus,—the University, the Academy, the new Olympium,—all the voluntary contributions of wealthy Greeks, most of them merchants in foreign cities, whose highest ambition seems to be to restore Athens to something of its former splendor. It is a point of honor with every Greek, in whatever foreign city he may live and die, to leave something in his last will for the adornment or education of the city of his patriotic devotion. ”

“ It shows us what an ancient Greek city, neither ruined nor forsaken nor artificially fostered, but left to the working of natural circumstances, finds itself after long ages of Roman, Venetian, Turkish, and restored Greek rule. The chief remark which the place suggests to a Western eye is how little there is to remark. In the modern town there is no remarkable building of any kind, old or new. ”

“ What happens at Athens has long concerned them more than what happens at Constantinople; and with Greece occupying the islands in the daily view of many of them, they are coming to regard themselves more and more every day as citizens of Graecia Irredenta. What is to be done with these? What, in particular, with Smyrna, the second city of the Ottoman Empire and the first of ‘Magna Graecia’? Its three and a half hundred thousand souls include the largest Greek urban population resident in any one city. Shall it be united to Greece? Greece herself might well hesitate. ”

“ During these busy years Athens became a marvel of beauty and art, the resort of strangers from all quarters, the ablest workers in marble and metal, [Pg 364] the noblest artists, poets, and philosophers, until for more than a century that city was the recognized centre of the loftiest products of the human intellect. ”

“ With the growth of the city came a stir of life, a quickening of commercial enterprise, an awakening of thought, which were also new. Merchants from Egypt, from Spain, from the Black Sea, and from all islands and lands that lie between these, artificers from Tyre, artists, poets, and philosophers from wherever Greek was spoken, all these brought their wealth, their cunning, their wisdom, to the feet of Athens. ”

“ Hardly anything is told either false or true of Greece for three hundred years after this time, and when something more like history begins we find that all Greece, small as it is, was divided into very small states, each of which had a chief city and a government of its own, and was generally shut in from its neighbours by mountains or by sea. ”

“ That city may be one of the renowned centres of the Greek motherland; it may be Athens or Sparta, Thebes or Argos; but it may also be the Iberian Zakynthos or the Campanian Kymê, Kyrênê on her terrace by the Libyan sea or far away Olbia by the banks of Dnieper. Every scattered member of the great brotherhood comes there of equal right; all are alike at home in the gathering of the united folk; all throng to the common hearth of the common gods of Hellas and her children. ”

“ Athens is much improved. The roads are better, the streets cleaner, the whole city better kept than I remembered it. The people look prosperous; there is a general air of well-being in all classes.
We hurried to the Acropolis, where we found the old immortal glories and much that was new and interesting in the small museum behind the Parthenon. The two most precious objects of Greek art which the last twenty years’ research has brought to light, you are familiar with,—the Victory untying her sandal and the Hermes of Olympia. ”

“ In spite of its antiquity the streets are new, because, as the histories tell us, the city has been thrice razed to the ground on account of the morose and overbearing character of the inhabitants. It is excellent for the breeding of horses; it is all well-watered and green, and has more gardens than any other city in Greece. For two rivers flow through it, irrigating the plain below the city ”

“ Political connection between them there was none, and slender indeed were the ties of sentiment, language, and religion which bound to one another the Hellenes of Miletus, Corinth, Syracuse, Marseilles, and the hundreds of other Greek city-states then in existence. The complexity of the map may be appreciated by observing that Crete alone had twenty-three distinct states. In Greece, as elsewhere, cities in which life was at once national and municipal proved the most favorable soil for the growth of free institutions. ”

“ The City of Corinth was the largest and most important city of Greece. The commerce of the world flowed through its two harbours. The population consisted of Greeks, Jews, Italians, and a mixed multitude; it was excitable, pleasure loving, and mercurial. In this city was held a perpetual vanity fair. The vices of the east and west met and clasped hands in the work of human degradation. The Greek goddess Aphrodite had a magnificent temple in which a thousand priestesses ministered to a base worship. ”

“ The public discipline enforced in ancient Sparta; the ordinances attributed to Lycurgus, for the training of the young and for the regulating of the lives of citizens. G. Schömann, Antiquity of Greece: The State, part 3, chapter 1. AGORA, The. The market-place of an ancient Greek city was, also, the centre of its political life. "Like the gymnasium, and even earlier than this, it grew into architectural splendour with the increasing culture of the Greeks. In maritime cities it generally lay near the sea; in inland places at the foot of the hill which carried the old feudal castle. ”

“ All communities are always governed in one of three ways: either by one man, or by a few men, or by many men, and the Greeks tried all these ways, until they found the one that answered best to their ideals of what a city-state should be. All states did not {72} develop in the same way, but one stands out from the others as having most nearly reached the Greek ideal. That state was Athens. ”

“ What is truly remarkable about the city is just this, that while the modern town is an insignificant mushroom of the present century, the monuments of Greek art in the best period—the masterpieces of Ictinus and Mnesicles, and the theatre on which the plays of the tragedians were produced—survive in comparative perfection, and are so far unencumbered with subsequent edifices that the actual Athens of Pericles absorbs our attention. ”

“ The substantial houses and hotels, the dignified palaces of the royal princes and the buildings of the University and Museum, the conventional shops and public squares, the boulevards and gardens, give to Athens the general appearance of any European city that is moving fast toward and beyond a population of two hundred thousand, and is not yet disfigured by the smoke-stacks of factories. ”

“ To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key. ”

“ Greece is a country cut up into a multitude of valleys by mountain masses and arms of the sea that render intercommunication difficult; so difficult that few cities were able to hold many of the others in subjection for any length of time. Moreover, many Greek cities were on islands and scattered along remote coasts. To the end the largest city states of Greece remained smaller than many English counties; and some had an area of only a few square miles. Athens, the largest of the Greek cities, at the climax of its power had a population of perhaps a third of a million. ”

“ At the same time, the [p. 53] life of each peculiar city continues distinct, and even gathers to itself a greater abundance of facts and internal interests. So that during the two centuries now under review there was in the mind of every Greek an increase both of the city-feeling and of the Pan-Hellenic feeling, but on the other hand a decline of the old sentiment of separate race,—Doric, Ionic, Æolic. ”

“ The Physicians of Athens. 63. The Beginnings of Greek Medical Science.—As we move about the city we cannot but be impressed by the high average of fine physiques and handsome faces. Your typical Greek is fair in color and has very regular features. The youths do not mature rapidly, but thanks to the gymnasia and the regular lives, they develop not merely admirable, but healthy, bodies. The proportion of hale and hearty old men is great ”

“ The Hellas of which it speaks is a cluster of autonomous cities in the Peloponnesus, the Islands, and Northern Greece, together with their colonies scattered over the coasts of Italy, Sicily, Thrace, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and Africa. These cities care only to be independent, or at most to lord it over one another. Their political institutions, their religious ceremonies, their customs, are civic and local. Language, commerce, a common Pantheon, and a common art and poetry are the ties that bind them together. In its second phase, Greek history begins with the expedition of Alexander. ”

“ Cast your eye above them and you see the square white houses of a Greek town. Look higher up, and there is the Grecian sky, the same sky that looked down upon the birth of Jove and the giving of Cretan law, upon the flitting sail that brought the yearly tribute of youths and maidens from Athens, upon the knightly vengeance of Theseus, striding down the labyrinth, all clad in ringing mail. Centuries of oppression may drag their slow length along, the children of the desert may come and go as they will, but that chaste sweet sky is patiently waiting above. And beneath it is Greece. ”

“ Greece as we know it in the infant stages of its development, with a totally different state of society, a totally different organization and culture; and in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath the hands of their divine builders. ”

“ And one ought not to omit the recently excavated Thermon, the ancient capital of Ætolia, even if it does cost an extra day. The long-known and impressive ruins of Œniadæ, the chief city in Acarnania, also invite one to linger a whole day instead of spending a few hours in passing.
The first five cities of ancient Greece in renown and interest were Athens, Sparta, Argos, Thebes, and Corinth. One can ride from Athens to Thebes or Corinth and back in a single day; he can also reach Argos from Athens in a day, leaving a rather long day’s work for reaching Sparta. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The tourist who visits Greece to-day finds much to admire in the modern city which ancient Athens wears now like a jewel on her withered breast. It is a bright, attractive place. When I revisited it a few years ago, it seemed to me by contrast with the Orient a miniature Paris. ”

“ In Greece the atmosphere is very clear and bright and the{279} sun shines ardently on the bleached ruins, the gleaming sea, and the roofs of the modern city.
The rivers Ilissus and Cephissus lave the city. Away in the level country is the wood where Plato had his academy. The whole territory is classic soil. We stand in front of the site of the Erechtheum, burned by the Persians, and rebuilt by Pericles. It was an edifice of superb architecture, dedicated to the virgin goddess, the adored Athene. ”

“ Athens, once the seat of learning and philosophy, the home of poets, painters and sculptors, the city that once led the world in civilization and art, became the capital of the modern kingdom of Greece.
{195} The influence continued to spread until it effected all the states of western Europe. It turned men's minds everywhere to political thought and discussion. It quickened the hardy mountaineers of Switzerland to reorganize their republican institutions, on the basis of equal rights. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing so impresses the visitor to Greece—not the waters of the Ægean sea, with their myriad hues; not the Acropolis, eloquent with ruins; not even the lovely site of Athens itself—as the part which little Greece has played in the instruction of the world. With an area of less than twenty-five thousand square miles, not half of which is productive, and with a population of less than two and a half millions, this diminutive nation has a history without a parallel. ”