Chapter XVI Mediæval Greece
When I first went to Greece, nearly twenty years ago, the few travellers one met in the country never thought of studying its mediæval remains. We were in search of classical art, we passed by Byzantine churches or Frankish towers with contemptuous ignorance. Mr. Finlay’s great book, indeed, was already written; but those who knew German and were bold enough to attack the eight volumes which Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopædia devote to the article on Greece, had been taught by Hopf’s Essay on Mediæval Greece to fathom what depths dulness could attain. Whether the author, or the odious paper, and type in its double columns, contributed to this result, was of little consequence. The subject itself seemed dreary beyond description. All the various peoples who invaded, swayed, ravaged, colonized the country in the Dark Ages, seemed but undistinguishable hordes of barbarians, of whom we knew nothing, about whom we cared nothing, beyond a general hatred of them, as those who had broken up and destroyed the splendid temples and fair statues that are now the world’s desire. Even the very thorough and learned scholars, who produced Bædeker’s Greece, a very few years ago, never thought of putting in any information whatever, beyond their chronological table, upon the many centuries which intervened between the close of paganism and the recent regeneration of the country. The contempt for Byzantine work in the East was in our early days like the contempt of Renaissance work in the West. We were all Classical or Gothic in taste.
Now a great reaction is setting in. Instead of the dreadful Hopf, we have the fascinating Gregorovius, whose Mediæval Athens clothes even dry details with the hue of fancy; the sober Murray’s Guide includes Mt. Athos and its wonders as part of its task. Recent travellers, and the students at the Foreign Schools of Athens, tell us of curious churches and their frescoes, and now Mr. Schultz, of the British school, has undertaken to reproduce them with his pencil. Following the example of Pullen, whose pictures have secured for posterity some record of the churches of Salonica, so often threatened by fire, he will perpetuate the remnants of an architecture and an art which were rapidly perishing from neglect. When I was first at Athens men were seriously discussing the propriety of razing to the ground the most striking of all the Byzantine churches at Athens, because it stood in the thoroughfare which led from the palace to the railway station! Historians tell us the dreadful fact, that over seventy of these delicately quaint buildings were destroyed when the new cathedral, a vulgar and senseless compromise in style, was constructed. A few more years of Vandalism in Greece, a few more terrible fires at Salonica and at Athos, and the world had lost its best records of a very curious and distinctive civilization.
There are indeed no mean traces of this art in Adriatic Italy; the exarchate at Ravenna, the eastern traffic of Venice, have shown their influence on Italian art and architecture. The splendid mosaics of Ravenna, nay, even the seven domes of S. Antonio at Verona, the frescoes of the Giotto Chapel at Padua, above all, the great cathedral at Venice, are all strongly colored—those of Ravenna even produced—by Byzantine art. Yet most travellers who visit S. Mark’s at Venice have never seen a Byzantine church, and do not feel its Eastern parentage; still fewer visit the splendid basilica of Parenzo, which is a still more unmistakable example. But to those who have turned aside from Olympia and Parthenon to study the early Christian remains in Greece, all this art of Eastern Italy will acquire a new interest and a deeper meaning.
These are the reasons which have tempted me to say a few words on this side of Greek travel. I do not pretend to speak as an authority; I only desire to stimulate a nascent interest which will presently make what I say seem simple and antiquated. But as yet even high authorities are very much in the dark about these things. What would a student of Gothic architecture say to a discussion whether an extant building belonged to the fourth century or the eleventh? and yet such divergent views are still maintained concerning the origin of the Athenian churches.
Let us begin with the best and quaintest, the so-called Old Cathedral, which was fortunately allowed to stand beside its ugly and pretentious successor. The first thing which strikes us is the exceeding smallness of the dimensions, it is like one of the little chapels you find in Glendalough and elsewhere in Ireland. I do not know whether the Greeks contemplated a congregation kneeling in the open air, as was the case around these chapels in Ireland, but such edifices were certainly intended in the first instance as holy places for sacerdotal celebrations, not as houses of prayer for the people. I was told on Mt. Athos that it was not the practice of the Greek church to celebrate more than one service in any one Church daily. Hence the monks, who are making prayer continually, have twenty or thirty chapels within the precincts of each monastery. Perhaps a similar motive may have led to the construction of a great number of smaller churches at Athens, where seventy have already been destroyed, and at Salonica, where remains of them are still being frequently discovered. Perhaps, also, that desire to consecrate to the religion of Christ the hallowed places of the heathen, which turned the Parthenon and the temple of Theseus into churches, also prompted the Byzantine bishops to set up chapels upon smaller heathen sanctuaries, where no stately temple existed, and mere consecration would have left no patent symbol of Christian occupation.
But if this Cathedral is small, it has the proper beauty of minute art; it is covered with rich decoration. All its surfaces show carved fragments not only of classical, but of earlier Byzantine work—friezes, reliefs, inscriptions, capitals—all so disposed with a general correspondence or symmetry as to produce the effect of a real design. Moreover, this foreign ornament is set in a building strictly Byzantine in form, with its rich doorway, its tiny windows with their high semicircular arches supported on delicate capitals, and toned by the centuries of Attic dust to that rich gold brown which has turned the Parthenon from marble almost to ruddy gold. Never was there greater harmony and unity attained by the most deliberate patch-work. In the earlier works on Byzantine art, this church was confidently assigned to the sixth century. Buchon found upon it the arms of La Roche and of Villehardouin, so that he assigned it to the thirteenth. The character of the other buildings of these knights makes me doubt that they and their friends could have constructed such a church—the Western monks then built Latin churches in Greece—and I suppose that the arms, which I could not find, were only carved by the Franks upon the existing building. But I will not therefore subscribe to the sixth-century theory.
Of the remaining churches three only, the Kapnikarea, the Virgin of the Monastery, and S. Theodore, are worth studying, as specimens of the typical form of such buildings. The main plan is a square, surmounted by a cupola supported on four pillars, with a corridor or porch on the West side, and three polygonal apses on the East. Lesser cupolas often surround the central dome. The height and slenderness of this central dome is probably the clearest sign of comparative lateness in these buildings, which used to be attributed to the fourth and fifth centuries, but are now degraded to the eleventh. The earliest form is no doubt that of the massive S. George’s at Salonica—a huge Rotunda covered with a flat dome, not unlike the Pantheon at Rome, with nothing but richly ornamented niches, and a splendid mosaic ceiling in the dome, to give relief to a very plain design. The successive complications and refinements added to this simple structure may be studied even in the later churches of Salonica.
The traveller who has whetted his taste for this peculiar form of mediæval art, and desires to study it further, will find within reach of Athens two monasteries well worth a visit, that of the Phæneromené on Salamis, a very fair specimen of an undisturbed Greek monastery, and that of Daphne, which may be ranked with the ruins of Mistra as showing clear traces of the conflict of East and West, of Latin with Greek Christianity. This sanctuary, with its now decaying walls, succeeded as usual to a pagan shrine with hardly altered name. The Saints, still pictured in black and gold upon the walls, and worshipped upon their festivals, have become fantastic and unreal beings, well enough adapted to that mixture of superstition and nationalism which is the body of the Greek religion, and, despite a purer creed, not very far removed from the religious instincts of the old Hellenic race. Five or six wretched monks still occupy the dilapidated building, vegetating in sleepy idleness; they do nothing but repeat daily their accustomed prayers, and receive dues for allowing the people of the neighboring hamlets to kiss, once or twice a year, a dreadful-looking S. Elias, painted olive-brown on a gold background, or to light the nightly lamp at the wayside shrine of a saint black with smoke.
The structure as we now see it is chiefly the work of the Cistercians who accompanied Otho de la Roche from Champagne to his dukedom of Athens, and was established round a far older Byzantine church and monastery. Like all mediæval convents, it is fortified, and the whole settlement, courts and gardens included, is surrounded by a crenelated wall, originally about thirty feet high.
There are occasional towers in the wall, and remains of arches supporting a passage of sufficient altitude for the defenders to look over the battlements. The old church in the centre of the court has had a narthex or nave added in Gothic style by the Benedictines, and here again are battlements, from which the monks could send down stones or boiling liquid upon assailants who penetrated the outer walls. Three sides of the court are surrounded by buildings; beneath, there are massive arcades of stone for the kitchen, store-rooms, and refectory; above, wooden galleries which supplied the monks with their cells. Most of this is now in ruins, occupied in part by peasants and their sheep. But the church, both in its external simplicity and its internal grandeur, is remarkable for the splendid decoration of its walls with mosaics, which, alas! have been allowed to decay as much from the indolence of the Greeks as the intolerance of the Turks. In fact, while some care and regard for classical remains have gradually been instilled into the minds of the inhabitants—of course, money value is an easily understood test—the respect for their splendid mediæval remains has only gained Western intellects within the last two or three years, so that we may expect another generation to elapse before this new kind of interest will be disseminated among the possessors of so great a bequest from the Middle Ages.
The interior of the church at Daphne is a melancholy example. From the effects of damp the mortar has loosened, and great patches of the precious mosaic have fallen to the ground. You can pick up handfulls of glazed and gilded fragments, of which the rich surfaces were composed. Here and there a Turkish bullet has defaced a solemn Saint, while the fires lit by soldiers in days of war, and by shepherds in time of peace, have, in many places, blackened the roof beyond recognition. Within the central cupola a gigantic head of Christ on gold ground is still visible, or was so when I saw the place in 1889; but the whole roof was in danger of falling, and the Greek Government, at the instigation of Dr. Dörpfeld, had undertaken to stay the progress of decay, and so the building was filled with scaffolding. This, however, enabled us to mount close to the figures, which in the short and high building are seen with difficulty from the ground, and so we distinguished clearly round the base of the cupola the twelve Apostles, in the bay arches the prophets, in the transepts the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, and the Transfiguration of Christ—all according to the strict models laid down for such ornaments by the Greek Church. The drawings are indeed stiff and grotesque, but the gloom and mystery of the building hide all imperfections, and give to these imposing figures in black and gold a certain majesty, which must have been felt tenfold by simple worshippers not trained in habits of æsthetic criticism.
We have, unfortunately, no records of the history of these convents, as in the case of many Western abbeys, and the old chronicles of wars and pestilences seldom mention this quiet life. We should fain, says M. Henri Belle, have followed the fortunes of these monks who left some fair abbey in Burgundy to catechise schismatics in this distant land, and bring their preaching to aid the sword of the Crusaders; but these Crusaders were generally intent on changing their cross for a crown, and were therefore not at all likely to favor the rigid proselytism of the Cistercians. It is very interesting to know that Innocent III., that great pope, who from the outset disapproved of the violent overthrow of the Christian Empire of the East, was the first to recommend, both to the conquerors and their clergy, such moderation as might serve to bring back the schismatic Greeks to the Roman fold. There are still extant several of his letters to the abbeys of the Morea, and to this abbey of the duchy of Athens, showing that even his authority and zeal in this matter were unable to restrain the bigotry of the Latin monks. There were frequent quarrels, too, between these monks of Daphne and their Duke, and frequent appeals to the sovran pontiff to regulate the relations between the civil authority, which claimed the right of suzerain, and the religious orders, which claimed absolute independence and immunity from all feudal obligations. Still, in spite of all disputes, the abbey was the last resting-place of the Frankish Dukes of Athens, and in a vault beneath the narthex were found several of their rude stone coffins, without inscription or ornament. One only has carved upon it the arms of the second Guy de la Roche, third Duke of Athens—two entwined serpents surmounted with two fleurs-de-lis. Guy II., says the chronicle, behaved as a gallant lord, beloved of all, and attained great renown in every kingdom. He sleeps here, not in the darkness of oblivion, but obscured by greater monuments of the greater dead. Yet I cannot but dally over this interesting piece of mediæval history, the more so as it explains the strange title of Theseus, Duke of Athens, in Shakespeare’s immortal Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as the curious fact, at least to classical readers, that the poet should have chosen mediæval Athens as a court of gracious manners, and suitable for the background of his fairy drama.
Neglecting geography, I shall carry the reader next to the very analogous ruins of Mistra, where, however, it was rather the Greek that supplanted the Latin, than the Latin the Greek ecclesiastic.
When the Franks invaded Greece a very remarkable family, the Villehardouins, seized a part of the Morea, and presently built Mistra, above Sparta; it was adorned with fair Gothic churches and palaces, and surmounted by a fortress. Sixty years after the conquest, William Villehardouin was captured by a new Byzantine emperor Palæologus, who was recovering his dominion. The Frank was obliged to cede for his ransom the forts of Mistra and Monemvasia, which from that time were strongholds of the Byzantine power till the conquest of the Turks. Still the Villehardouins long kept hold of Kalamata and other forts; and to the pen of one of the family, Geoffrey, we owe the famous old chronicle La Conquête de Constantinople, which is unique in its importance both as a specimen of old French and a piece of mediæval history.
The architecture of Mistra, begun at a noble epoch by the Latins, was taken up by the Byzantine Greeks, so that we have both styles combined in curious relics of the now deserted stronghold. For, since 1850, when an earthquake shook down many houses, the population wandered to the revived Sparta, which is now a thriving town. But as the old Sparta in its greatest days was only a collection of shabby villages, showing no outward sign of its importance, so the new and vulgar Sparta has no attractions (save the lovely orange and lemon orchards round it) in comparison with the mediæval Mistra. The houses are piled one above another till you reach the summit crowned by the citadel which, itself a mountain, is severed from the higher mountains at its back by a deep gorge with a tumbling river. “The whole town is now nothing but ruined palaces, churches, and houses. You wander up rudely-paved streets rising zigzag, and pass beneath arches on which are carved the escutcheons of French knights. You enter courts overgrown with grass, but full of memories of the Crusaders. It is the very home of the Middle Ages. Passing through these streets, now the resort of lizards and serpents, you come upon Frankish tombs, among others that of Theodora Tocco, wife of the Emperor Constantine Palæologus, who died in 1430. The Panagia is the only church well preserved—a Latin basilica, with a portico in the form of an Italian loggia, and a Byzantine tower added to it. This building is highly ornamented with delicate carving, and its walls are in alternate courses of brick and stone, while the gates, columns, and floor are of marble. The interior is adorned with Byzantine frescoes of scenes from the Old Testament. Higher up is the metropolitan church, built by the Greeks as soon as William Villehardouin had surrendered the fort in 1263. This great church is not so beautiful as that already described, but has many peculiarities of no less interest. The palace of the Frank princes was probably at the wide place on a higher level, where the ruined walls show the remains of many Gothic windows. The citadel was first rehandled by the Greek Palæologi, then by the Turks, then by the Venetians, who in their turn seized this mediæval ‘Fetter of Greece.’ And now all the traces of all these conquerors are lying together confused in silence and decay. The heat of the sun in these narrow and stony streets, with their high walls, is intense. But you cannot but pause when you find in turn old Greek carving, Byzantine dedications, Roman inscriptions, Frankish devices, emblazoned on the walls. The Turkish baths alone are intact, and have resisted both weather and earthquake. But the churches occupy the chief place still, dropping now and then a stone, as it were a monumental tear for their glorious past; the Greek Cross, the Latin Cross, the Crescent, have all ruled there in their turn. Even a pair of ruined minarets remain to show the traces of that slavery to which the people were subject for four hundred years.”
The occupation of the Frankish knights had not found an adequate historian, since old Villehardouin, till Gregorovius wrote his Mediæval Athens. The traveller still sees throughout Greece frequent traces of this short domination, but all of one sort—the ruins of castles which the knights had built to overawe their subjects, and of which Mistra was perhaps the most important. The same invaders built the great towers at Kalamata, and most picturesque of all is the keep over the town of Karytena in Arcadia, the stronghold of Hugo de Bruyères. But the Frankish devices which adorned these castles have been mostly torn down by the Turks, or replaced by the Venetian lion, according as new invaders turned the fortifications of their predecessors to their own uses. Nor are any of these castles to be compared in size or splendor with those of northern Europe. The most famous of them, the palace at Thebes, was so completely destroyed by the Catalans, that all vestige of it has disappeared, and we owe our knowledge of it to the description of the Catalan annalist, Ramon Muntaner, who tells of the ravages of his fellows not without some stings of his æsthetic conscience.
But let us pass from these complex ruins, which speak the conflict of the East and West, to the peculiar quiet homes of the Greek monk, who spends his time not in works of charity, not in labors of erudition, not in the toil of education, like his western brother, but simply in performing an arduous and exacting ritual, in praying, or rather in repeating prayers, so many hours in the day, in observing fasts and vigils, above all in maintaining the strict creed which has given the title of orthodox to his Church. These resting-places (μόνη is the suggestive word) are of course settled in quiet regions, in the mountains, upon the islands, so that we cannot expect them near a stirring capital like Athens. Yet in the gorge of the defile which leads up to Phyle there is a little skete (the house of ascetics) lonely and wild in site; and by the sea on Salamis, nearly over against Megara, the traveller will find a small but very characteristic specimen of the Greek monastery, the Panagia Phæneromené.
There he will see the tiny cells, and the library, almost as small as any of them, at the top of dark stairs, and containing some twenty volumes; he will be received by the Hegoumenos with mastic and jam, and then with coffee, and strive to satisfy the simple curiosity of the old men, who seem so anxious to hear about the world, and yet have turned away their eyes from seeing it. Above all, he will find in the midst of the enclosure a little model Byzantine Church, built with the greatest neatness, of narrow bricks, in which string courses and crosses are introduced by an altered setting of the bricks. Here too he will see the curious practice, which led to marble imitations at Venice, of ornamenting the walls by building in green and blue pottery—apparently old Rhodian ware, for it is not now to be found in use. It is a simpler form of the decoration already described in the Cathedral of Athens, that of ornamenting a wall with foreign objects symmetrically disposed, and no one who sees it will say that it is inartistic. Within are the usual ornaments of the Byzantine Church, but not in mosaic; for all the walls are covered with frescoes by a monk of the early eighteenth century, a genius in his way, though following strictly the traditions of the school of Athos. The traveller who ascends the pulpit will thence see himself surrounded by very strange pictures—over the west door, as is prescribed, the Last Judgment, with the sins of men being weighed in a huge balance, and devils underneath trying to pull down the fatal scale. The condemned are escorted by demons to an enormous mouth breathing out flames—the mouth of hell. Beatitudes and tortures supply the top and bottom of the composition. Even more quaint is the miracle of the swine of the Gadarenes running down a steep place into the sea. They are drowning in the waves, and on the head or back of each is a little black devil trying to save himself from sinking. Similar creatures are escaping from the statues of heathen gods which tumble from the walls as the infant Jesus passes by on his flight to Egypt. This points to the belief that the statues of heathen gods were inhabited by an evil spirit, and so far actually bodies with souls within them!
These few details are sufficient to tempt the reader to visit this monastery, which is far better worth seeing than the beautifully situated and hospitable Vourkano described elsewhere in this work. I have no space to speak of Megaspilion, for this book must be kept within handy limits, and can never aspire to even approximate completeness. So also will I here pass by with a mere mention the eyries of Meteora in Thessaly, perched upon strange pinnacles of rock, like S. Simeon upon his pillar. The approach to, and descent from, these monasteries in a swinging net is indeed a strange adventure to undergo, and more painfully unpleasant than most such adventures, but at the top there is little of interest. The hoards of precious MSS. which Curzon describes in his delightful volume, over which the monks quarrelled when he offered gold, and would not sell them because none would allow his brother to enjoy the money—these splendid illuminated books have either been cozened away by antiquarians, or are gathered in the University Library at Athens. They are there in their right place. I understand the peaks of Meteora, when the present occupants die out, are to receive not holy men, but criminals, who are to suffer their solitary confinement not in dungeons beneath the earth, but far above the haunts of men.
But all these monastic settlements pale into insignificance when we turn to Mount Athos, the real Holy of Holies of the Greek Church, which is indeed far from the kingdom of Greece, and therefore beyond the scope of this work, and yet a chapter on the mediævalism of Eastern Europe can hardly be written without some consideration of this strange promontory, in its beauty surpassing all description, in its history unique both for early progress and for subsequent unchangeableness, in its daily life a faithful mirror of long past centuries, even as its buildings are now mediæval castles inhabited by mediæval men. I will here set down the impressions, from a visit made in 1889, not merely of the art, but of the life of this, the most distinctive as well as the largest example of Greek monasticism.
Velificatus Athos is an expression which has a meaning even now, though a very different one from that implied by Juvenal. The satirist would not believe that Xerxes turned it into an island, though the remains of the canal are plainly visible to the present day. But now the incompetence of the Turkish Government has turned Athos, for English travellers, into an island, for it may only be approached by sea. If you attempt to ride there from Salonica or Cavalla, you are at once warned that you do so at your own risk; that the tariff now fixed by a joint commission of Turks, dragomans, and bandits for the release of an English captive is £15,000; that you will have to pay that sum yourself, etc. etc. This is enough to drive any respectable and responsible person from the enterprise of the land journey, and so he must wait for the rare and irregular chances of boat or steamer traffic. It was my good fortune to find one of H. M.’s ships going that way from Salonica, and with a captain gracious enough to drop me on the headland, or rather to throw me up on it, for we landed in a heavy sea, with considerable risk and danger, and the τρικυμία, as they classically call it, lasted all day, and raged around the Holy Mountain. Yet this adventurous way of landing under the great western cliffs of the promontory, with the monasteries of S. Paul, Gregory, and Dionysius, each on their several peaks, looking down upon us from a dizzy height through the stormy mists, was doubtless far the most picturesque introduction we could have had to the long-promised land.
For this had been many years my desire, not only to see the strangest and most perfect relic now extant of mediæval superstition, but to find, if possible, in the early MSS. which throng the libraries of that famous retreat some cousin, if not some uncle or aunt of the great illuminated MSS. which are the glory of the early Irish Church. The other travellers who have reached this place have done so by arriving at some legitimate port on the tamer eastern side; the latest, Mr. Riley,186 by landing at the gentlest and most humane spot of all, the bay of Vatopédi. We, on the contrary, crept into a little boat-harbor under the strictest, the most primitive, and far the most beautiful of the western eagles’ nests, whither English pickles, tinned lobster, and caviare have not yet penetrated. We were doing a very informal and unceremonious thing, for we were invading the outlying settlements, to demand shelter and hospitality, whereas we should have first of all proceeded to the capital, Karyes, to present pompous letters of introduction from Papas, Prime Ministers, Patriarchs, and to receive equally elaborate missives from the central committee, asking the several monasteries to entertain us.
But we took the place by storm, not by regular siege. We showed our letters, when we climbed up to Dionysiu, as they call it, and prayed them to forestall the hospitality which they would doubtless show us, if we returned with official sanction. The good monks were equal to the occasion; they waived ceremony, though ceremony lords it in these conservative establishments, and every violation of it is called a προσβολή, probably the greatest sin that a monk can commit. At every step of our route this obstacle stood before us, and had we attempted to force our way past it, no doubt our dumb mules would have spoken, and reproved our madness. Yet when they had before them all the missives which were to be read at Karyes next day, to be followed up by a letter addressed to themselves, they actually antedated their hospitality and made us feel at home and happy.
Nowhere have I seen more perfect and graceful hospitality in spirit, nowhere a more genuine attempt to feed the hungry and shelter the outcast, even though the means and materials of doing so were often very inadequate to Western notions. But let me first notice the extant comforts. We always had ample room in special strangers’ apartments, which occupy the highest and most picturesque place in every monastery. We always had clean beds to sleep in, nor were we disturbed by any unbidden bedfellows, these creatures having (as we were told) made it a rule of etiquette never to appear or molest any one till after Pascha, the Feast of the Resurrection. The feast was peculiarly late this year, and the weather perfect summer; still the insects carefully avoided any such προσβολή toward us as to violate their Lenten fast. In addition to undisturbed nights—a great boon to weary travellers—we had always good black bread, and fresh every day; we had also excellent Turkish coffee, and fortunately most wholesome, for the ceremony of the place requires you to drink it whenever you enter, and whenever you leave, any domicile whatever. Seven or eight times a day did we partake of this luxury and without damage to digestion or nerves. There was also sound red wine, and plenty of it, varying according to the makers, but mostly good, and only in one case slightly resinated. There were also excellent hazel-nuts, often served hot, roast in a pan, and very palatable.
What else was there good? There was jam of many kinds, all good, though unfortunately served neat, and to be eaten in spoonfuls, without any bread, till at last we committed the prosvolé of asking to have it brought back when there was bread on the table. There were also eggs in abundance, just imported to be ready for Easter, and therefore fresh, and served au plat. Nor had we anywhere to make the complaint so pathetic in Mr. Riley’s book, that the oil or butter used in cooking was rancid. This is the advantage of going in spring, or rather one of the many advantages, that both oil and butter (the latter is of course rare) were quite unobjectionable.
When I say that butter was rare and eggs imported, I assume that the reader knows of the singularity of Athos, which consists in the absence of the greatest feature of human life—woman, and all inferior imitations of her in the animal world. Not a cow, not a goat, not a hen, not a cat, of that sex! And this for centuries! Three thousand monks, kept up by importation, three thousand laborers or servants, imported likewise, but no home production of animals—that is considered odious and impious. And when, in this remote nook of extreme conservatism, this one refuge from the snares and wiles of Eve, a Russian monk seriously proposed to us the propriety of admitting the other sex, we felt a shock as of an earthquake, and began to understand the current feeling that the Russians were pushing their influence at Athos, in order to transform the Holy Mountain into a den of political thieves.
Nothing is more curious than to study the effects, upon a large society, of the total exclusion of the female sex. It is commonly thought that men by themselves must grow rude and savage; that it is to women we owe all the graces and refinements of social intercourse. Nothing can be further from the truth. I venture to say that in all the world there is not so perfectly polite and orderly a society as that of Athos. As regards hospitality and gracious manners, the monks and their servants put to shame the most polished Western people. Disorder, tumult, confusion, seem impossible in this land of peace. If they have differences, and squabble about rights of property, these things are referred to law courts, and determined by argument of advocates, not by disputing and high words among the claimants. While life and property is still unsafe on the mainland, and on the sister peninsulas of Cassandra and Longos, Athos has been for centuries as secure as any county in England. So far, then, all the evidence is in favor of the restriction. Many of the monks, being carried to the peninsula in early youth, have completely forgotten what a woman is like, except for the brown smoky pictures of the Panagia with her infant in all the churches, which the strict iconography of the orthodox Church has made as unlovely and non-human as it is possible for a picture to be. So far, so well.
But if the monks imagined they could simply expunge the other sex from their life without any but the obvious consequences, they were mistaken. What strikes the traveller is not the rudeness, the untidyness, the discomfort of a purely male society, it is rather its dulness and depression. Some of the older monks were indeed jolly enough; they drank their wine, and cracked their jokes freely. But the novices who attended at table, the men and boys who had come from the mainland to work as servants, muleteers, laborers, seemed all suffering under a permanent silence and sadness. The town of Karyes is the most sombre and gloomy place I ever saw. There are no laughing groups, no singing, no games among the boys. Every one looked serious, solemn, listless, vacant, as the case might be, but devoid of keenness and interest in life. At first one might suspect that the monks were hard taskmasters, ruling their servants as slaves; but this is not the real solution. It is that the main source of interest and cause of quarrel in all these animals, human and other, does not exist. For the dulness was not confined to the young monks or the laity; it had invaded even the lower animals. The tom-cats, which were there in crowds, passed one another in moody silence along the roofs. They seemed permanently dumb. And if the cocks had not lost their voice, and crowed frequently in the small hours of the morning, their note seemed to me a wail, not a challenge—the clear though unconscious expression of a great want in their lives.
How different were the notes of the nightingales, the pigeons, the jays, whose wings emancipate them from monkish restrictions; and whose music fills with life all the enchanting glens, brakes, and forests in this earthly Paradise!
For if an exquisite situation in the midst of historic splendor, a marvellous variety of outline and climate, and a vegetation rich and undisturbed beyond comparison, can make a modern Eden possible, it is here. Nature might be imagined gradually improving in her work when she framed the three peninsulas of the Chalcidice. The westernmost, the old Pallene, once the site of the historic Olynthus, is broad and flat, with no recommendation but its fertility; the second, Sithonia, makes some attempt at being picturesque, having an outline of gently serrated hills, which rise, perhaps, to one thousand feet, and are dotted with woods. Anywhere else, Sithonia may take some rank, but within sight of the mighty Olympus, and beside the giant Athos, it remains obscure and without a history. Athos runs out into the Ægean, with its outermost cone standing six thousand five hundred feet out of the sea, and as such is (I believe) far the most striking headland in Europe. You may see higher Alps, but from a height, and with intervening heights to lessen the effect; you may see higher Carpathians, but from the dull plain of land in Hungary. Here you can enjoy the full splendor of the peak from the sea, from the fringe of white breakers round the base up to the pale-gray, snow-streaked dome, which reaches beyond torrent and forest into heaven. Within two or three hours you can ascend from gardens of oranges and lemons, figs and olives, through woods of arbutus, myrtle, cytisus, heath, and carpets of forget-me-not, anemone, iris, orchid, to the climate of primroses and violets, and to the stunted birch and gnarled fir which skirt the regions of perpetual snow. Moreover, the gradually-increasing ridge which forms the backbone of the peninsula is seamed on both sides with constant glens and ravines, in each of which tumbling water gives movement to the view, and life to the vegetation which, even where it hides in its rich luxuriance the course of the stream, cannot hush the sounding voice. Here the nightingale sings all the day long, and the fair shrubs grow, unmolested by those herds of wandering goats, which are the real locusts of the wild lands of southern Europe.
Each side of the main ridge has its peculiarities of vegetation, that facing north-east being gentler in aspect, and showing brakes of Mediterranean heath ten or fifteen feet high, through which mule paths are cut as through a forest. The coast facing south-west is far sterner, wilder, and more precipitous, but enjoys a temperature almost tropical; for there the plants and fruits of southern Greece flourish without stint.
The site of the western monasteries is generally on a precipitous rock at the mouth of one of the ravines, and commands a view up the glen to the great summit of the mountain. To pass from any one of these monasteries to the next, you must either clamber down a precipice to the sea, and pass round in a boat commanded by a skipper-monk, or you must mount the mules provided, and ride round the folds and seams of the precipices, on paths incredibly dangerous of aspect, and yet incredibly free from any real disasters. When you come to a torrent you must descend by zigzag winding till you reach a practicable ford near the sea-level, and cross it at the foot of some sounding fall. But the next projecting shoulder stands straight out of the sea, and you must climb again a similar break-neck ascent, till you reach a path along the edge of the dizzy cliff, where you pass with one foot in the air, over the sea one thousand feet beneath, while the other is nudged now and then by the wall of the rock within, so that the cautious mule chooses the outer ledge of the road, since a loss of balance means strictly a loss of life. It was a constant regret to us that none of the party could sketch the beautiful scenes which were perpetually before us, or even photograph them. But the efforts of photographers hitherto have been very disappointing. There are indeed pictures of most of the monasteries, taken at the instigation of the Russians, but all so wretchedly inadequate, so carefully taken from the wrong point, that we deliberately avoided accepting them, or carrying them home. Mr. Riley too, a man of taste and feeling, had essayed the thing with leisure and experience in his art, and yet the cuts taken from the photographs, which are published in his book, are also hopelessly inadequate. When, for example, approaching from the north, we suddenly came in view of Simópetra—standing close to us, across a yawning chasm, with the sea roaring one thousand feet beneath, high in the air on its huge, lonely crag, holding on to the land by a mere viaduct, and behind it the great rocks and gorges and forests framed by the snowy dome of Athos in the far background—we felt that the world can produce no finer scene, and that the most riotous artistic imagination, such as Gustave Doré’s, would be tamed in its presence by the inability of human pencil to exceed it.187 The plan of this monastery and its smaller brothers (I was going to call them sisters!) is that of a strong, square keep, rising straight from the sheer cliffs, with but a single bridge of rock leading landward, and when the wall has been carried to a height far more than sufficient against any attack save modern artillery, they begin to throw round it stories of balconies, stayed out from the wall by very light wooden beams, each balcony sheltered by that above, till a deep-pitched roof overhangs the whole. The topmost and outermost corner of these balconies is always the guest-chamber or chambers, and from this lofty nook you not only look out upon the sea and land, but between the chinks of the floor of boards you see into air under your feet, and reflect that if a storm swept round the cliff your frail tenement might be crushed like a house of cards, and wander into the sea far beneath. To me, at least, it was impossible to walk round these balconies without an occasional shudder, and yet we could not hear that the slender supports had ever given way, or that any of the monks had ever been launched into the air. On the divans running round these aerial guest-chambers are beautiful rugs from Smyrna and Bulgaria, the ancient gifts of pilgrims and of peasants, which were thrust aside in the rich and vulgar Russian establishments for the gaudy products of modern Constantinople and Athens, while the older and simpler monasteries were content with their soft and mellow colors. The wealth of Athos in these rugs is very great. There were constantly on the mules under us saddle-cloths which would be the glory of an æsthetic drawing-room.
But it is high time for us to take a closer view of the inside of these curious castles, some of which, Vatopédi, Ivíron, Lavra, are almost towns surrounded by great fortifications, and which possess not only large properties, outlying farms, dependencies, but within them a whole population of monks and their retainers. Let us first speak of the treasures accumulated within them, relics of ancient art and industry in the way of books, pictures, and work in precious metals. The reader will doubtless appreciate that the estimate of some of these things depends largely on the taste and education of the visitor. Mr. Riley thinks it of importance, in his excellent work, to enumerate the exact number of chapels contained in, or attached to, each monastery, whereas to me the exact number, and the name of the patron saint, seems about the last detail with which I should trouble my readers. So also some sentimental travellers enumerate with care the alleged relics, and Mr. Riley lets it be seen plainly not only that he is disposed to believe in their genuineness, but that, if proven, it is of the highest religious importance. Seeing the gross ignorance of the monks on all really important matters of history on the real date and foundation of their several monasteries, the ascription of a relic to some companion of our Lord, or some worthy of the first four centuries, seems to me ridiculous.
With this preamble I turn first to the books. Every convent we visited had a library containing MSS. The larger had in addition many printed books; in one, for example, which was not rich (Esphigménu), we found a fine bound set of Migne’s “Fathers.” The library room was generally a mere closet with very little light, and there was no sign that anybody ever read there. The contents indeed consisted of ecclesiastical books, prayer-books, lesson-books, rituals noted for chanting, of which they had working copies in their churches. Still they are so careless concerning the teachings of their old service books that they have completely lost the meaning of the old musical notation, which appears in dots and commas (generally red) over their older texts, and they now follow a new tradition with a new notation. When one has seen some hundreds of these Gospels, and extracts from the Gospels, ranging over several centuries, some written in gold characters on the title-page, with conventional pictures of the Evangelists on gold ground, one begins to wonder what could have possessed the good monks to occupy themselves with doing over and over again what had been done hundreds of times, and lay before them in multitudes of adequate copies. I suppose the nature of their religious worship suggests the true answer. As they count it religion to repeat over and over again prayers and lessons all through their nights of vigil and their days of somnolence, so they must have thought it acceptable to God, and a meritorious work, to keep copying out, in a fair hand, Gospels that nobody would read and that nobody would disturb for centuries on dusty shelves.
In the twelve libraries I examined I did not find more than half a dozen secular books, and these of late date, and copies of well-known texts. There may of course be some stray treasures still concealed in nooks and corners, though a good scholar, Mr. Lambros of Athens, has spent much labor in classifying and cataloguing these MSS. But I saw chests here and there in out-of-the-way lumber rooms, with a few books lying in them, and believe that in this way something valuable may still be concealed. In general the monks were friendly and ready to show their books, or at least their perfect manners made them appear so; but in one monastery (Stavronikíta) they were clearly anxious that none of these treasures should be studied. They had not only tossed together all their MSS. which had been recently set in order by Mr. Lambros, but had torn off the labels with which he had numbered them, without any attempt, or I believe intention, of replacing them with new ones.
As I am not now addressing learned readers, I need not go into details about the particular books which interested me. My main object had been to find, if possible, at Mount Athos some analogy, some parallel, to the splendid school of ornamentation which has left us the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, St. Chad’s Gospel at Lichfield, and other such masterpieces of Irish illumination. I have always thought it likely that some early Byzantine missionary found his way to Ireland, and gave the first impulse to a local school of art. That there is a family likeness between early Irish and Byzantine work seems to me undeniable. I can hardly say whether I was disappointed or not to find that, as far as Athos went, the Irish school was perfectly independent, and there was no early book which even remotely suggested the marvellous designs of the Book of Kells. The emblems of the Evangelists seemed unknown there before the eleventh century. There was ample use of gilding, and a good knowledge of colors. In one or two we found a dozen kinds of birds adequately portrayed in colors—the peacock, pheasant, red-legged partridge, stork, etc., being at once recognizable. But all the capitals were upon the same design, all the bands of ornament were little more than blue diaper on gold ground. There were a good many books in slanting uncials, probably seventh to ninth century; an occasional page or fragment of earlier date, but nothing that we could see of value for solving the difficulties of a Scripture text. Careful and beautiful handwritings on splendid vellum of the succeeding centuries were there in countless abundance. They are valuable as specimens of handwriting and as nothing else. In many of the libraries the monk in charge was quite intelligent about the dates of the MSS., and was able to read the often perplexing colophon in which the century and indiction were recorded. But the number of dated MSS. was, alas! very small.
I now turn to the κειμήλια or treasures in precious metals and gems, which have often been described and belauded by travellers. Each visitor sees something to admire which the rest pass over in silence, or else he is shown something not noticed by the rest. So the reader must consult first, Curzon, then Mr. Tozer, then Didron, then Mr. Riley, and even after that there remain many things to be noted by fresh observers. The fact is that the majority of these reliquaries, pictures, and ornaments of the screen are tawdry and vulgar, either made or renewed lately, and in bad taste. It is only here and there that a splendid old piece of work strikes one with its strange contrast. Far the most interesting of all the illustrations given by Mr. Riley is that of the nave of one of the Churches, which are all (except the old Church of Karyes) built on exactly the same plan, with small variations as to the lighting, or the outer narthex, or the dimensions. An architect would find these variations highly interesting; to the amateur there seems in them a great sameness. But among the uniform, or nearly uniform, features is a huge candelabrum, not the central one hung from the middle of the dome, but one which encircles it, hung by brass chains from the inner edges of the dome, consisting of twelve (sometimes only ten) straight bands of open-worked brass, of excellent design, joined with hinges, which are set in double eagles (the Byzantine emblem), so that they form large decagons or duodecagons, in the upper edge of which candles are set all round. The design and work of these candelabra appeared to me old. But the monks affirmed that they were now made in Karyes. This I did not believe, and in any case my suspicions as to the antiquity of the design were confirmed by one I found in St. Paul’s (Agio Pavlo), which bears on one of the double eagles an inscription that the Hegoumenos had restored and beautified the church in 1850. But this eagle joined brass bands on which was a clear German inscription stating that they were made in Dresden in the year 1660.
By far the finest embroideries in silk were at the rich convent of Iviron, and indeed the main church there has many features worthy of note. The floor is of elaborate old mosaic, with an inscription of George the Founder, which the monks refer to the tenth century. There are quaint Rhodian plaques, both set in the outer wall, and also laid like carpets, with a border of fine design on the walls of the transept domes. Beside them are remarkable old Byzantine capitals designed of rams’ heads. But the great piece of embroidery is a πόδια (or apron of the Panagia). The ground is gold and green silk, on which portraits of the three imperial founders are worked, their crowns of pearls, their dresses of white silk, their beards of brown silk, and their faces painted most delicately in colors upon silk. Never in my life have I seen any embroidery so perfect and so precious. There were also occasional old crosses of great excellence, but to describe them here would be tedious and useless, unless it be to stimulate the reader to go out and see them for himself; nor can I recommend this, if he be not a well-introduced traveller, ready to rough it and to meet with good temper many obstacles. Travelling in Turkey, where time has no value, and where restrictions upon liberty are both arbitrary and unjustly applied, is a matter of great patience.
What shall we say of the services which go on most of the day and night in these monastic churches, and which seemed to Messrs. Riley and Owen so interesting and so in harmony with the Church of England, that they were never tired of regretting the separation of Anglican from Greek Christianity, and hoping for a union or reunion between them? Mr. Owen went so far as to celebrate the Eucharist after the Anglican ritual in one or two of these churches before a crowd of monks, who could not understand his words, far less the spirit with which our Church approaches the Holy Table.
Yet here are large companies of men, who have given up the world to live on hard fare and strict rule, spending days and nights in the service of God, and resigning the ordinary pleasures and distractions of the world. Surely here there must be some strong impulse, some living faith which sways so many lives. And yet after long and anxious searching for some spiritual life, after hours spent in watching the prayers and austerities of the monks, we could not but come to the conclusion that here was no real religion; that it was a mountain, if not a valley, “full of dry bones, and, behold, they were very dry.”
It is of course very hazardous for a stranger to assert a negative; there may be, even in this cold and barren ritual, some real breath of spiritual life, and some examples of men who serve God in spirit and in truth. But the general impression, as compared with that of any Western religion—Roman Catholic, Protestant, Unitarian—is not favorable. Very possibly no Western man will ever be in real sympathy with Orientals in spiritual matters, and Orientals these monks are in the strictest sense. They put a stress upon orthodoxy as such, which to most of us is incomprehensible. They regard idleness as not inconsistent with the highest and holiest life. They consider the particular kind of food which they eat of far more religious importance than to avoid excess in eating and drinking. How can we judge such people by our standards? To them it seems to be religion to sit in a stall all night, perhaps keeping their eyes open, but in a vague trance, thinking of nothing, and not following one word that is said, while they ignore teaching, preaching, active charity, education of the young, as not worthy of the anchorite and the recluse. To us the ἀγρυπνία which we attended seemed the most absolute misconception of the service of God; to the monks this was the very acme of piety.
I have spoken unreservedly of these things, as I learned that these gentle and hospitable souls were impossible to please in one respect—they think all criticism of their life most rude and unjust. They complained to me bitterly of Mr. Riley’s book, which they had learned to know from extracts published in Greek papers, and yet could there be a more generous and sympathetic account than his? If, then, I must in any case (though I deeply regret it) incur their resentment, it is better to do so for a candid judgment, than to endeavor to escape it by writing a mere panegyric, which would mislead the reader without satisfying the monks. Indeed, in one point I could not even satisfy myself. No panegyric could adequately describe their courteous and unstinted hospitality.
Footnotes
1 Though this statement is broadly true, it requires some modification. I should be sorry to be thought insensible to the beauties, not only of Ravenna, with its mosaics and its pines, but of Ancona, of the splendid Monte Gargano, of Trani and Bari, and of the rich gardens and vineyards of Apulia.
2 Cf. Strabo, viii. c. 2, ἐστι τοίνυν ἡ Πελοπόννησος ἐοικυῖα φύλλῳ πλατάνου τὸ σχῆμα.
3 These words were written in 1873. On a later occasion, our ship was obliged to run into this bay for shelter from a storm, when we found some cultivation along the coasts, and a village (Koron), with extensive fortifications above it, said to be Venetian. The aspect was by no means so desolate as appeared from a passing view outside the headlands. Coasting steamers now call here (at Kalamata) every second day.
4 Which the reader will find best portrayed in Prosper Mérimée’s Colomba.
5 See the remarks of Polybius, who was himself witness of this great change, quoted in the last chapter of my Greek Life and Thought, from Alexander to the Roman Conquest.
6 We hailed him with a steam whistle in 1886, in vain; so it may be that he has passed to some newer and more social kind of life.
7 A closer view of Crete disclosed to me the interesting fact that the island is turned to the north, as regards its history. It is barred on the south by great walls of rock, with hardly any landing-places, so that all traffic and culture must have started from the slopes and bays on the north side, where the Cyclades are its neighbors.
8 I should except the splendid Venus victrix, as she is called, found at Capua, and now in the Museum of Naples.
9 In my Social Life in Greece, from Homer to Menander.
10 The words are M. About’s.
11 I beg to point out to a learned and kindly critic in the Athenæum, who corrected several faults of spelling in the first edition, that this is the form of the name warranted by inscriptions, and now to be received by scholars: cf. Wachsmuth’s Stadt Athen, i. p. 49.
12 This beautiful monument has been so defaced and mutilated that the photographs of to-day give no idea of its decoration. The careful drawings and restorations of Stuart and Revett were made in the last century, when it was still comparatively intact, and it is through their book alone that we can now estimate the merits of many of the ancient buildings of Athens. It should be added that there was a solitary Corinthian capital found in the temple of Bassæ, which I will describe in another chapter. But this still affords an unsolved problem. The Philippeion at Olympia (built by the famous Philip of Macedon) also contained an inner circle of Corinthian pillars, while the outer circle was Ionic.
13 The following remarks on the polychromy of Greek art are not intended for Professors of Fine Art, to whom, indeed, few things in this book, if true, can be new, but for the ordinary reader, who may not have seen it discussed elsewhere.
14 By the way, the appellation “Temple of Theseus” is more than doubtful. The building fronts towards the east. This is proved by the greater size and more elaborate decoration of the eastern portal. It is almost certain, according to an old scholion on Pindar, that the temples of heroes like Theseus faced west, while those only of the Olympian gods faced the rising sun. The temple, therefore, was the temple, not of a hero, but of a god. Probably the Temple of Heracles, worshipped as a god at Athens, which is mentioned in the scholia of Aristophanes as situated in this part of Athens, is to be identified with the building in question. But I suppose for years to come we must be content to abide by the old name of Theseon, which is now too long in general use to be easily disturbed.
15 I was since informed at Athens that this complaint had not been without results, and that steps are being taken to prevent quarrying at random on classical sites.
16 Even the marble statue set up to the patriot Botzari over the grave of the heroes of Missolonghi was so mutilated by the inhabitants that the authorities have removed it from mere shame.
17 It is fair to add that an exception has been made for the discoveries at Mycenæ, which have been almost all brought to Athens; and that a handsome museum has now been built at Olympia, and a good road from Pyrgos, which has a railway to the sea.
18 Since this was written there have been published (in German) two careful catalogues of the sculptures of Athens by V. Sybel and by Milchhöfer (1881), and there is besides the excellent Handbook for Greece by Dr. Lolling (Bædeker). The new edition of Murray’s Handbook is very dear and not very satisfactory. There is a small Greek Catalogue published by Stanford, translated by Miss Agnes Smith. The Mycenæan antiquities are described in a separate book by Schliemann, and by Schuchhardt.
19 There is no more pathetic instance than that described by Mr. Squier (in his admirable work on Peru) of the tomb of a young girl which he himself discovered, and where he comments on the various objects laid to rest with the dead: cf. Squier’s Peru, p. 80. There has since been found at Myrina, on the Asiatic coast, a great store of these clay figures, also in tombs. Some sets of them were made to represent the sculptures of a pediment, such as that of the Parthenon, or rather of the east front of the temple of Olympia.
20 If I mistake not, Mr. A. S. Murray seems disposed to date them about the first century either B. C. or A. D., thus bringing them down to about the time of Strabo.
21 There is already quite a large collection of them in the British Museum, e. g. Vase Room I., case 35, where there are many of these figures from Tanagra. In Room II. there is a whole case of them, chiefly from Cyrene, and from Cnidus.
22 No. 53, Mus. Pio Clem., in a small room beside the Apollo Belvedere and Laocoon.
23 There is now an excellent publication of the archaic statues found in the Acropolis, by Cavvadias (Wilberg, Athens).
24 I endeavored to examine these drums by looking down through a hole in the wall over them. They seemed to me not fluted, and rather of the shape of barrels, very thick in the middle, than of the drums of pillars in temples.
25 It is asserted somewhere by a Greek author that the temples burned by the Persians were left in ruins to remind the people of the wrongs of the hated barbarians. But we have distinct evidence, in some cases, that this assertion is not true, and besides, using the materials for other purposes is not the same thing. We now know that a quantity of mutilated statues were shot as rubbish into the space between the old Parthenon and the wall, to make a terrace for the newer and greater building. Here they were found in the recent excavations.
26 Aristion is also mentioned among the artists of the period.
27 “Vultum ab antiquo rigore variare.”—Plin. xxxv. 35.
28 They have been published in the first part of an excellent work on the treasures of Athens, reproduced in phototype by Rhomaïdès Brothers, with an explanatory text by various Athenian scholars.
29 I cannot do better than quote the admirable description of M. Ch. Diehl: “C’étaient surtout de nouvelles statues de jeunes femmes, au mystérieux sourire, à la parure étincelante, de ces idoles fardées et peintes, bien faites, par leur saveur étrange, pour tenter le pinceau d’un Gustave Moreau ou la plume d’un Pierre Loti. Comme leurs sœurs, ces nouvelles venues ont la même attitude et le même costume, les mêmes coquetteries de parure, le même soin de leur chevelure, la même expression aussi; pourtant à la série déjà connue elles out ajouté quelques œuvres exquises, et trois d’entre elles en particulier méritent d’être signalées. L’une est une merveille de coloris; sa tunique à large bande rouge, sa chemisette d’un vert foncé, bordée de pourpre, son manteau orné de méandres du dessin le plus fin, ses vêtements parsemés de croix rouges ou vertes, qui se retrouvent sur le diadème de ses cheveux, sont d’un incomparable éclat. Sous les tons chauds de ces riches couleurs disposées avec un goût exquis, il semble que le marbre s’anime et fasse la chair vivante; et un charme étrange émane de cette figure. Celle-ci (cf. Plate) d’une date plus récente, probablement l’une des plus jeunes de la série, montre l’effort d’un artiste habile pour créer une œuvre originale. Dans ces formes élancées, dans cette tête petite et fine, dans ces bras jetés en avant du corps, on sent la volonté du maître qui cherche à faire autrement que ses devanciers; le sourire traditionnel est devenu presque imperceptible, les yeux, qui souriaient jadis à l’unison des levres, out cessé de se relever vers les tempes; les joues creuses se remplissent et s’arrondissent; avec des œuvres de cette sorte, l’archaisme est prêt à finir.... La troisième enfin est une des œuvres les plus remarquables de l’art attique. Plus ancienne que la précédente, elle est d’une valeur artistique bien supérieure. Le modelé en est exquis, et son irréprochable finesse fait un contraste singulier avec les procédés qui sentent encore les conventions de l’école. Suivant les traditions de l’art antique, les yeux sont obliques et bridés, le sourire fait toujours grimacer les levres; mais dans les yeux le regard n’est plus indifférent et fixe; il brille d’une lueur de vie et de pensée; le sourire de ces levres n’est plus sec et dur, il semble avoir une douceur attendrie. Certes il n’y a dans cette sculpture nul effort pour chercher des chemins nouveaux; mais parmi les œuvres de l’art archaïque, parmi celles où le maître a docilement suivi la route frayée et battue, cette sculpture à l’expression candide et presque attristée est l’une des plus admirables.”—Excursions archéologiques en Grèce, p. 104.
30 When I revisited Athens in the spring of 1889, the National Museum, which is a fine and spacious building, was quite an orderly museum, and it was easy to see and enjoy the works of art preserved in it. The archaic things were, moreover (as in the Acropolis), placed by themselves; so were the tombs, and so were most of the portrait busts. All that was still wanting was a good and complete catalogue.
31 These panegyrics—λόγοι ἐπιτάφιοι they were called—were a favorite exercise of Greek literary men. There are five classical ones still extant—that mentioned, that in the Menexenus of Plato, that of Hypereides, and those ascribed (justly) to Lysias and (falsely) to Demosthenes. That of Hypereides, very mutilated as it is, seems to me the finest next to that of Thucydides. But they are all built upon the same lines, showing even here that strict conservatism in every branch of Greek art which never varied, for variety’s sake, from a type once recognized as really good.
32 Roubillac’s monuments in Westminster Abbey, which excited the admiration of his contemporaries, are the best example I know of degradation in public taste on this question.
33 I did, indeed, see one relief at Athens, in which the relatives are represented as rushing forward in agony, as it were to delay the departure of the fainting figure. It is right that this exception should be noted, as it shows that they understood what violent grief was, and yet avoided representing it as a rule.
34 I fancy, from the unity of type shown in many of them, that they may even have been designed by the artist without regard to the special case, and purchased by the family of the deceased ready made. The figures upon them do not seem to me personal likenesses.
35 In the Adonais, Shelley affords a curious contrast to the somewhat morbid prominence of the poet in the case before us. The self-effacement of Shelley has centred all our interest on his lost friend.
36 He also supposed that the tower was Frankish, and built long before the Venetian conquest. But here he was wrong. The stones inside the tower, when taken down, showed clear traces of gun-powder, as was clearly shown in a learned refutation of his views, printed at Athens.
37 Other specimens are preserved in the little Turkish house on the Acropolis, and should be noted by the visitor, who may easily pass them by.
38 I speak, of course, of the copies of these famous statues which are to be seen in the Vatican Museum.
39 The illustrated work of Michaelis is probably the most complete and critical account both of the plan and the details, which have often been discussed, and especially with great accuracy by Mr. Penrose, whose monumental work, the Principles of Athenian Architecture, has recently been republished. Among the many newer works, I would call special attention to the first volume of Viollet-le-duc’s Entretiens sur l’Architecture, already translated into English, which is full of most instructing and suggestive observations on Greek architecture; also to M. E. Bournouf’s Acropole d’Athènes.
40 They will be most readily consulted in the plates of Michaelis’s Parthenon.
41 The discovery of the figures from the western pediment of the temple at Olympia, carved by Alcamenes, a contemporary of Phidias, will hardly lead us to modify this judgment. For though they show a great talent in the composition, the defects in execution are so grave as to lead many critics to suspect that we have in them the work of mere local artists, certainly not the masterful hands that adorned the Parthenon.
42 It is very uncertain, perhaps unlikely, that any of the architectural sculpture we possess was actually finished by Phidias’s own hand. But there can be no doubt that he directed it, and must have designed much of it in detail, since the general composition was certainly his creation.
43 This very pattern, in mahogany, with cane seats, and adapted, like all Greek chairs, for loose cushions, was often used in eighteenth century work, and may still be found in old Irish mansions furnished at that epoch.
44 I state this because many critics have drawn an opposite inference from a mistranslation of a passage in Plato (Apol. 26, E).
45 The exact number, according to Papadakis (cf. A. Müller, Bühnenalt., p. 47), is stated at 27,500. But I am convinced this is a great exaggeration. I should rather give 15,000 as a liberal estimate; and this agrees with the measurements made for me by Dr. Dörpfeld in 1889. This mistake is also due to misunderstanding a passage in Plato’s Symposium, which says that “Agathon, whom 30,000 citizens hear——”. It is not said that they heard him at the same time.
46 Cf. on this point my History of Greek Literature, i. p. 345.
47 Cf. on the details of Greek painting the last chapter of my Social Life in Greece.
48 The actual passage is well worth quoting—“Au reste, je n’ose encore ajouter que cette pièce soit en effet la meilleure de mes tragédies. Je laisse et aux lecteurs et au temps à décider de son véritable prix. Ce que je puis assurer, c’est que je n’en ai point fait où la vertu soit plus mise en jour que dans celle-ci; les moindres fautes y sont sévèrement punies; la seule pensée du crime y est regardée avec autant d’horreur que le crime même; les faiblesses de l’amour y passent pour des vraies faiblesses; les passions n’y sont présentées aux yeux que pour montrer tous les désordres dont elles sont causes, et le vice y est peint partout avec des couleurs qui en out fait connaître et haïr la difformité. C’est là proprement le but que tout homme qui travaille pour le public se doit proposer; et c’est que les premiers poètes tragiques avaient en vue sur toute chose. Leur théâtre était une école où la vertu n’était pas moins bien enseignée que dans les écoles des philosophes.... Il serait à souhaiter que nos ouvrages fussent aussi solides et aussi pleins d’utiles instructions que ceux de ces poètes. Ce serait peut-être un moyen de réconcilier la tragédie avec quantité de personnes célèbres par leur piété et par leur doctrine, qui l’ont condamnée dans ces derniers temps, et qui en jugeraient sans doute plus favorablement, si les auteurs songeaient autant à instruire les spectateurs qu’à les divertir, et s’ils suivaient en cela la véritable intention de la tragédie.”
49 Racine is here the exception.
50 Alfieri, though starting with a violent feeling of reaction against some of the faults of the French drama, was wholly trained upon it, and only knew the Greek plays through French versions until very late in life, when most of his works were already published. I therefore class him unhesitatingly as an offshoot of that school.
51 There is now (1891) a controversy raging concerning the height of the Greek stage and its arrangements, owing to the researches of Dr. Dörpfeld. I cannot enter upon it here.
52 This was written before the very interesting revivals of Greek plays which do such honor to Cambridge. Those who had the privilege of seeing them can judge not only how far a reproduction was possible, but how far it can succeed, for never will it be more ably undertaken and carried out.
53 The reader who cares to consult the various prices cited in my Old Greek Life will see the grounds for assuming some such change in the value of money between the fourth century B. C. in Greece and the nineteenth A. D. in England.
54 I perceive that M. Renan, who alone of skeptical critics is persuaded, possibly by the striking picturesqueness of the scene, to accept it as historical, considers it not impossible that S. Paul may have been actually brought before the court. He notices that in later days it assumed a general direction not only of literature, but of morals, and that any new teacher might fairly have been summoned before it to expound his views. This does not seem to me to agree with the ironical and trivial character of the whole audience, as intimated by the historian. The author of the work called Supernatural Religion, when analyzing, in his third volume, the Acts of the Apostles, is actually silent on this speech, though he discusses at great length the speeches of S. Paul which he thinks composed as parallels to those of S. Peter. Most German critics look on the passage as introduced by the author, like the speeches in Thucydides or Tacitus, as a literary ornament, as well as an exposition of the Apostolic preaching of the early Church. They also note its many contrasts to the teaching of such documents as the Epistle to the Romans. I have assumed, as even M. Renan seems to do, that the Apostle told Timothy, or Luke, or some other follower, the main purport of this memorable visit, and also the headings of the speech, which is too unlike his received writings to be a probable forgery.
55 The fact that the title of Menander’s famous play was Δεισιδαίμων has escaped the commentators. S. Paul must have meant “rather superstitious,” as the A. V. has it.
56 Though ἄγνωστος may surely have this meaning, I do not find it suggested in any of the commentaries on the passage. They all suppose some superstitious precaution, or else some case of the real inscription being effaced by time, and supplied in this way. The expression in Pausanias—the gods called unknown, τοῖς ὀνομαζομένοις ἀγνώστοις—seems to suggest it as a regular title, and we know that there were deities whose name was secret, and might not be pronounced. But in the face of so many better critics I will not insist upon this interpretation.
57 This depends on no mere accident, but on the essential features of the spiritual side of Greek character, on which I will quote an admirable passage from Renan’s S. Paul:
“Ce qui caractérisait la religion du Grec autrefois, ce qui la caractérise encore de nos jours, c’est le manque d’infini, de vague, d’attendrissement, de mollesse féminine; la profondeur du sentiment religieux allemand et celtique manque à la race des vrais Hellènes. La piété du Grec orthodoxe consiste en pratiques et en signes extérieurs. Les églises orthodoxes, parfois très-élégantes, n’ont rien des terreurs qu’on ressent dans une église gothique. En ce christianisme oriental, point de larmes, de prières, de componction intérieure. Les enterrements y sont presque gais; ils ont lieu le soir, au soleil couchant, quand les ombres sont déjà longues, avec des chants à mi-voix et un déploiement de couleurs voyantes. La gravité fanatique des Latins déplaît à ces races vives, sereines, légères. L’infirme n’y est pas abattu: il voit doucement venir la mort; tout sourit autour de lui. Là est le secret de cette gaieté divine des poëmes homériques et de Platon: le récit de la mort de Socrate dans le Phédon montre à peine une teinte de tristesse. La vie, c’est donner sa fleur, puis son fruit; quoi de plus? Si, comme on peut le soutenir, la préoccupation de la mort est le trait le plus important du christianisme et du sentiment religieux moderne, la race grecque est la moins religieuse des races. C’est une race superficielle, prenant la vie comme une chose sans surnaturel ni arrière-plan. Une telle simplicité de conception tient en grande partie au climat, à la pureté de l’air, à l’étonnante joie qu’on respire, mais bien plus encore aux instincts de la race hellénique, adorablement idéaliste. Un rien, un arbre, une fleur, un lézard, une tortue, provoquant le souvenir de mille métamorphoses chantées par les poëtes; un filet d’eau, un petit creux dans le rocher, qu’on qualifie d’antre des nymphes; un puits avec une tasse sur la margelle, un pertuis de mer si étroit que les papillons le traversent et pourtant navigable aux plus grands vaisseaux, comme à Poros; des orangers, des cyprès dont l’ombre s’étend sur la mer, un petit bois de pins au milieu des rochers, suffisent en Grèce pour produire le contentement qu’éveille la beauté. Se promener dans les jardins pendant la nuit, écouter les cigales, s’asseoir au clair de lune en jouant de la flûte; aller boire de l’eau dans la montagne, apporter avec soi un petit pain, un poisson et un lécythe de vin qu’on boit en chantant; aux fêtes de famille, suspendre une couronne de feuillage au-dessus de sa porte, aller avec des chapeaux de fleurs; les jours de fêtes publiques, porter des thyrses garnis de feuillages; passer des journées à danser, à jouer avec des chèvres apprivoisées—voilà les plaisirs grecs, plaisirs d’une race pauvre, économe, éternellement jeune, habitant un pays charmant, trouvant son bien en elle-même et dans les dons que les dieux lui ont faits. La pastorale à la façon de Théocrite fut dans les pays helléniques une vérité; la Grèce se plut toujours à ce petit genre de poésie fin et aimable, l’un des plus caractéristiques de sa littérature, miroir de sa propre vie, presque partout ailleurs niais et factice. La belle humeur, la joie de vivre sont les choses grecques par excellence. Cette race a toujours vingt ans: pour elle, indulgere genio n’est pas la pesante ivresse de l’Anglais, le grossier ébattement du Français; c’est tout simplement penser que la nature est bonne, qu’on peut et qu’on doit y céder. Pour le Grec, en effet, la nature est une conseillère d’élégance, une maîtresse de droiture et de vertu; la ‘concupiscence,’ cette idée que la nature nous induit à mal faire, est un non-sens pour lui. Le goût de la parure qui distingue le palicare, et qui se montre avec tant d’innocence dans la jeune Grecque, n’est pas la pompeuse vanité du barbare, la sotte prétention de la bourgeoise, bouffie de son ridicule orgueil de parvenue; c’est le sentiment pur et fin de naïfs jouvenceaux, se sentant fils légitimes des vrais inventeurs de la beauté.
“Une telle race, on le comprend, eût accueilli Jésus par un sourire. Il était une chose que ces enfants exquis ne pouvaient nous apprendre: le sérieux profond, l’honnêteté simple, le dévouement sans gloire, la bonté sans emphase. Socrate est un moraliste de premier ordre: mais il n’a rien à faire dans l’histoire religieuse. Le Grec nous paraît toujours un peu sec et sans cœur: il a de l’esprit, du mouvement, de la subtilité; il n’a rien de rêveur, de mélancolique. Nous autres, Celtes et Germains, la source de notre génie, c’est notre cœur. Au fond de nous est comme une fontaine de fées, une fontaine claire, verte et profonde, où se reflète l’infini. Chez le Grec, l’amour propre, la vanité se mêlent à tout; le sentiment vague lui est inconnu; la réflexion sur sa propre destinée lui paraît fade. Poussée à la caricature, une façon si incomplète d’entendre la vie donne a l’époque romaine le græculus esuriens, grammairien, artiste, charlatan, acrobate, médecin, amuseur du monde entier, fort analogue à l’Italien des XVIe et XVIIe siècles: à l’époque byzantine, le théologien sophiste faisant dégénérer la religion en subtiles disputes; de nos jours, le Grec moderne, quelquefois vaniteux et ingrat, le papas orthodoxe, avec sa religion égoïste et matérielle. Malheur à qui s’arrête à cette décadence! Honte à celui qui, devant le Parthénon, songe à remarquer un ridicule! Il faut le reconnaître pourtant: la Grèce ne fut jamais sérieusement chrétienne; elle ne l’est pas encore. Aucune race ne fut moins romantique, plus dénuée du sentiment chevaleresque de notre moyen âge. Platon bâtit toute sa théorie de la beauté en se passant de la femme. Penser à une femme pour s’exciter à faire de grandes choses! un Grec eût été bien surpris d’un pareil langage; il pensait, lui, aux hommes réunis sur l’agora, il pensait à la patrie. Sous ce rapport, les Latins étaient plus près de nous. La poésie grecque, incomparable dans les grands genres tels que l’épopée, la tragédie, la poésie lyrique désintéressée, n’avait pas, ce semble, la douce note élégiaque de Tibulle, de Virgile, de Lucrèce, note si bien en harmonie avec nos sentiments, si voisine de ce que nous aimons.
“La même différence se retrouve entre la piété de saint Bernard, de saint François d’Assise et celle des saints de l’Église grecque. Ces belles écoles de Cappadoce, de Syrie, d’Égypte, des Pères du désert, sont presque des écoles philosophiques. L’hagiographie populaire des Grecs est plus mythologique que celle des Latins. La plupart des saints qui figurent dans l’iconostase d’une maison grecque et devant lesquels brûle une lampe ne sont pas de grands fondateurs, de grands hommes, comme les saints de l’Occident; ce sont souvent des êtres fantastiques, d’anciens dieux transfigurés, ou du moins des combinaisons de personnages historiques et de mythologie, comme saint Georges. Et cette admirable église de Sainte-Sophie! c’est un temple arien; le genre humain tout entier pourrait y faire sa prière. N’ayant pas eu de pape, d’inquisition, de scolastique, de moyen age barbare, ayant toujours gardé un levain d’arianisme, la Grèce lâchera plus facilement qu’aucun autre pays le christianisme surnaturel, à peu près comme ces Athéniens d’autrefois étaient en même temps, grâce à une sorte de légèreté, mille fois plus profonde que le sérieux de nos lourdes races, le plus superstitieux des peuples et le plus voisin du rationalisme. Les chants populaires grecs sont encore aujourd’hui pleins d’images et d’idées païennes. À la grande différence de l’Occident, l’Orient garda durant tout le moyen âge et jusqu’aux temps modernes de vrais ‘hellénistes,’ au fond plus païens que chrétiens, vivants du culte de la vieille patrie grecque et des vieux auteurs. Ces hellénistes sont, au XVe siècle, les agents de la renaissance de l’Occident, auquel ils apportent les textes grecs, base de toute civilization. Le même esprit a présidé et présidera aux destinées de la Grèce nouvelle. Quand on a bien étudié ce qui fait de nos jours le fond d’un Hellène cultivé, on voit qu’il y a chez lui très-peu de christianisme: il est chrétien de forme, comme un Persan est musulman; mais au fond il est ‘helléniste.’ Sa religion, c’est l’adoration de l’ancien génie grec. Il pardonne toute hérésie au philhellène, a celui qui admire son passé; il est bien moins disciple de Jésus et de saint Paul que de Plutarque et de Julien.”
58 The reader will find in my last chapter some further information concerning the remains of mediæval Greece.
59 I have seen it very full in June; I have also seen it almost dry in April, so that it depends upon the season whether the traveller will enjoy the coolness of the river, or turn with disappointment from its stony bed.
60 On a fine summer’s day, in the meadows about Eton, I was struck with the truth of this phrase. A light breeze was making all the poplars shiver beside the great elms, which stood in silence.
61 This was the military harbor, at least in the fourth century, B. C., when the architect Philo built a famous arsenal (σκευοθήκη) at its north-east corner, of which the plan and even details have been reconstructed by Dr. Dörpfeld from an important inscription recovered in 1881.
62 Thucydides, followed by modern historians, has nevertheless been inaccurate in his use of the expression Long Walls. He sometimes means the north and Phaleric wall, sometimes the north and south parallel walls, to the exclusion of the Phaleric wall. The long walls rebuilt by Conon were the latter pair, and thus not the same long walls as were finished in 456 B. C.
63 The reader who desires to see the best poetical picture of modern Athens should consult the tenth chapter in Mr. Symonds’s Sketches in Italy and Greece—one of the most beautiful productions of that charming poet in prose.
64 IX. § I. p. 244 (Tauchn.).
65 He reads, however, φρίξουσι, instead of Herodotus’s φρύξουσι.
66 There is now a railway from Athens to the mines (1887).
67 ἀργύρου πηγή τις αὐτοῖς ἐστι, θησαυρὸς χθονός.
The earliest allusion to them is a line in Æschylus’s Persæ, where they come in so peculiarly, and without any natural suggestion, that they must have been in his day a new and surprising source of wealth. Atossa is inquiring of the chorus about Athens, and whether it possesses any considerable wealth. The chorus replies (v. 238): This inference of mine, made years ago, is now strongly confirmed by the recovered Polity of the Athenians, which says (chap. xxii.): “In the archonship of Nicodemus [484–3 B. C.], when the mines at Maroneia [as he calls them] were discovered (ἐφάνη), and there was a profit of 100 talents from the work, Themistocles,” etc.
68 It is possible that in the days of Eretria’s greatness, when she ruled over a number of the Cyclades, Eretrians may have worked the mines. These occupants probably preceded the Æginetans. But the strange thing is, that the mines and their large profits appear suddenly, and as a novelty, at a particular point of Greek history.
69 Arist. Œcon., II. 4.
70 Since I visited the place there are actually five companies—two Greek and three French—established to work the district.
71 There is also a quotation in Strabo (iii. 3, § 9), from Demetrius Phal., implying their activity in the third century B. C. Plutarch (de defectu or. 43) speaks of them as having lately failed.
72 Byron, who loved this spot above all others, I think, in Greece, speaks of sixteen as still standing in his day.
73 Dr. Dörpfeld has since shown that the marble temple at Sunium was built on the site of an older temple, with a very slight but distinct enlargement of the plan. The older temple was of the ordinary poros-stone found on the site.
74 “Aujourd’hui tout ce district est presque désert; seuls, quelques archéologues et quelques artistes affrontent ces gorges pierreuses et ces scabreux sentiers; on prend alors ce chemin pour aller de Marathon à Chalcis et revenir à Athènes par Décélie, entre le Pentélique et Parnès. Ces monuments de Rhamnunte offrent des traits curieux qui les rendent intéressants pour le voyageur érudit; mais de plus les ruines mêmes et le site ont assez de beauté pour dédommager de leur peine ceux qui recherchent surtout le pittoresque. Je n’oublierai jamais les quelques heures que j’ai passées là, il y a déjà longtemps, par une radieuse matinée d’avril. Pendant que nous examinions ce qui restait des anciens sanctuaires et de leurs défenses, notre guide songeait au déjeuner; il avait acheté un agneau à l’un de ces pâtres appelés Vlaques qui, avec leurs brebis et leurs chèvres éparses dans les buissons de myrtes et de lentisques, sont à peu près les seuls habitants de ce canton. Quand nous revînmes, l’agneau, soutenu sur deux fourches fichées en terre par un jeune pin sylvestre qui servait de broche, cuisait tout entier devant un feu clair, et la graisse coulait à grosses gouttes sur les charbons ardents. Devant notre tapis étendu à l’ombre avait été préparée une jonchée de verts branchages sur lesquels le succulent rôti, rapidement découpé par le coutelas d’un berger, laissa bientôt tomber côtelettes et gigots.
“Ce qui nous fit prolonger là notre halte après que notre appetit fut satisfait, ce fut la vue magnifique dont on jouissait de la plate-forme où nous étions établis, dans un coin de l’acropole. A nos pieds, c’était la mer, veloutée de chatoyante reflets par le soleil, par la brise, par les nuages qui passaient au ciel. En face de nous se dressaient les hautes et sévères côtes de l’Eubée, dominés par la pyramide du Dirphys. Ce fier sommet était encore tout blanc des neiges de l’hiver; au contraire, si nous nous retournons vers les gorges qui se creusaient autour de nous dans la montagne, entre des parois de marbre rougies et comme hâlées par le soleil, c’était le printemps de la Grèce dans tout son épanouissement et son éclat. Dans le fond des ravins, là où un peu d’eau filtrait sous les cailloux, arbres de Judée et cytises mêlaient leurs brillantes couleurs au tendre feuillage des platanes, et sur les pentes les plus âpres des milliers de genêts en fleur étincelaient parmi la verdure des genévriers, des chênes et des oliviers francs.
“Dans l’antiquité, toute cette portion du territoire athénien, qui faisait partie de ce que l’on appelait la Diakria ou le ‘haut pays,’ sans avoir de gros villages ni une population aussi dense que celle des plaines d’Athènes ou d’Eleusis, devait pourtant présenter un aspect assez diffèrent de celui qu’elle offre aujourd’hui; je me la représente assez semblable à ce que sont maintenant certains districts montueux de la Grèce moderne où le désir d’éviter le contact des Turcs avait rejeté et cantonné les Hellènes: il en était ainsi du Magne, de la Tzaconie, des environs de Karytena en Arcadie. Partout là, une industrieuse persévérance a mis à profit tout ce que pouvaient offrir de ressources le sol et le climat. Sur des pentes abruptes et presque verticales, de petits murs en pierres sèches s’efforcent de retenir une mince couche de terre végétale; malgré ces précautions, les grandes pluies de l’hiver et les vents de l’été en emportent une partie jusqu’au fond de la vallée, sans jamais se lasser, hommes, femmes, enfants, travaillent sans relâche à réparer ces dégâts. Que de fois, admirant la patience de ces sobres et tenaces montagnards, je les ai suivis des yeux pendant qu’ils allaient ainsi lentement, le dos courbé sous leurs hottes pleines, gravissant des sentiers sablonneux ou d’étroits escaliers taillés à même la roche qui leur renvoyait touts les ardeurs du soleil! Au bout de quelques années, il n’est pas peut-être une parcelle du terrain dans chacun de ces petits champs qui n’ait fait plusieurs fois le voyage, qui n’ait glissé jusqu’au bord du torrent pour être ensuite ramenée pelletée par pelletée, sur une des terrasses supérieures. Ces sacrifices sont récompensés. Le long du ruisseau, là où les côtes s’écartent et laissent entre elles un peu d’espace, l’eau, soigneusement ménagée, mesurée par heures et par minutes à chaque propriétaire, court bruyante et claire dans les rigoles; elle arrose des vergers où croissent, suivant les lieux, soit l’oranger, le citronnier et le grenadier, soit les arbres de nos climats tempérés, le pêcher, le pommier et le poirier; à leur ombre grossissent la fève et l’enorme courge. Plus haut, sur les versants les moins roides et les moins pierreux, là où la légère charrue inventée par Triptolème a trouvé assez de place pour tracer le sillon, l’orge et le seigle verdissent au printemps, et, dans les bonnes années, profitent pour mûrir des tardifs soleils d’automne. Ce qui d’ailleurs réussit le mieux dans ces montagnes, ce qui paye vraiment les habitants de leurs peines, c’est l’olivier, dont les puissantes racines étreignent le roc et semblent faire corps avec lui; c’est la vigne, qui, d’étage en étage, grimpe presque jusqu’aux sommets. A l’un et à l’autre, pour donner une huile et un vin qui seraient les plus savoureux du monde, s’ils étaient mieux préparés, il suffit de beaucoup de soleil, d’un peu de terre et de quelques coups de hoyau qui viennent à propos ameublir le sol et le dégager des plantes parasites.
“C’est ainsi que dans l’Attique, au temps de sa prospérité, même les cantons aujourd’hui les plus déserts et les plus stériles devaient être habités et cultivés. Sur beaucoup de ces croupes où le roc affleure presque partout, où verdit à peine, aux premiers jours du printemps, une herbe courte, diaprée d’anémones et de cistes, qui jaunira dès le mois de mai, il y avait jadis une couche plus épaisse de terre végétale. Dans les ravins, là où j’ai perdu plus d’une fois mon chemin en poursuivant la perdrix rouge ou la bécasse à travers des maquis touffus, on a, pendant bien des siècles, fait la vendange et la cueillette des olives; c’est ce dont témoignent, sur les pentes les mieux exposées aux rayons du midi ou du couchant, des restes de murs et de terrassements que l’on distingue encore dans l’épaisseur du fourré. Dans les endroits où la culture était à peu près impossible, des bois de pins, aujourd’hui presque entièrement détruits, empêchaient la montagne de se dénuder; dans les clairières et entre les rocs mêmes poussaient la sauge, la campanule et le thym, toutes ces plantes aromatiques, tous ces vigoureux arbustes que se plaît à tondre la dent des moutons et des chèvres.”
75 πολλαὶ δ’ ἁμὶν ὕπερθε κατὰ κρατὸς δονέοντο αἴγειροι πτελέαι τε· τὸ δ’ ἐγγύθεν ἱερὸν ὕδωρ Νυμφᾶν ἐξ ἄντροιο κατειβόμενον κελάρυζε —Theocr. VII. 135.
76 Since M. Trikoupi’s long and effective administration, brigandage was so effectually put down that, although there were plenty of brigands in Mount Olympus close to the frontier, it was perfectly safe to wander about in Northern Greece up to the vale of Tempe. Such was the state of things in 1889. Whether his recent successor will keep as good order remains to be seen.
77 Social Life in Greece, p. 23.
78 Xen. Hell., iv., 3, § 1. To cite a parallel in modern history: a writer in the Pall Mall Gazette (July 12, 1876) says: “I witnessed a battle during the War of Greek Independence. It lasted three days; the quantity of ammunition expended was enormous, and the result was one man wounded!”
79 So Strabo describes it, IX. 1, § 12. For further details consult the Guide Joanne for Athens (1888), p. 201.
80 De Legg., II. 14, § 36.
81 in Cer. v. 480.
82 Thren. (frag.)
83 Œd. Col. 1042.
84 Ran. 455.
85 Phæd. cc. 29, 30.
86 Paneg. § 6.
87 Etym. Mag., s. v. τελετή.
88 There seems no doubt that some of these symbols, derived from old nature-worship, were very gross, and quite inconsistent with modern notions of religion. But even these were features hallowed and ennobled by the spirit of the celebrants, whose reverence blinded their eyes, while lifting up their hearts.
89 In the fragments of Plutarch’s De anima there are some very striking passages on this subject. “After this,” he says, evidently describing some part of the ceremony, “there came a great light, there were shown pure places and meadows, with dances, and all that was splendid and holy to see and hear, in which he who is now perfected by initiation, and has obtained freedom and remission, joins in the devotions, with his head crowned, in the company of pure and holy men, and beholds from thence the unclean uninitiated crowd of mortals in deep mire and mist, trodden down and crowded by each other, but in fear of death, adhering to their ills through want of faith in the goods beyond. Since from these you may clearly see that the connection of the soul with the body is a coercion against nature.”
90 The Greeks always regard these nomads as foreigners in race, and incapable of any settled or civilized life. They do great mischief to young trees and fences, which they never respect. Yet when arrested for doing mischief they are protected by the sympathies of the Greeks, who hate all coercion, however reasonable.
91 Colonel Leake already felt these difficulties, and moves Eleutheræ a few miles to the south-west. But Œnoe and Eleutheræ must have been close together, from the allusion in the Antiope of Euripides. Cf. Eurip., frag. 179 (ed. Nauck), and the passages quoted there.
92 This the Peloponnesians did at Œnoe, according to Thucydides; perhaps therefore at this very place.
93 There was no photograph of this very fine building existing when I was in Greece. The only drawing of it I have seen is in the plates of Dodwell’s Archæological Tour in Greece—a splendid book. The fort of Phyle, though smaller, possesses all the features described in this fort, and shows that they represent a general type.
94 This pass (seized by the Persian cavalry before the battle of Platæa, in order to stop the Greek provision trains) was called τρεῖς κεφαλαί by the Thebans, but δρυὸς κεφ. by the Athenians (Herod. IX. 39)—evidently the same old name diversely interpreted by diverse Volks-etymologien. τρεῖς and δρυός are pronounced almost alike in modern Greek, probably therefore in old Greek likewise. But I will not touch the thorny question of old Greek pronunciation.
95 Cf. what I have said in relation to Polybius’s account of it in my Greek Life and Thought, pp. 534 sq.
96 Cf., for example, the figures in the recent (1891) Guide Joanne, ii. xxxvi.
97 There was, indeed, a splendid pleasaunce built at Thebes by the Frankish knights, which was completely destroyed by the grand Catalan company. It is described by their annalist Ramon Muntaner. The remains of one Frankish tower mark the place.
98 See his life in Gregorovius’s Athen, vol. i. pp. 144 sq.
99 The legend of the name is now fully explained in the fragments of the Antiope published by me in the Petrie papyri (Williams & Norgate, 1891).
100 I trust none will imagine that I intend the least disrespect to M. Boulgaris, who was, according to far better authority than that quoted in the text, an honorable and estimable man. But some of his Ministers have been since convicted of malpractices concerning certain archbishoprics, which were bought for money. The trial is now a matter of history, to which an allusion is sufficient.
101 Since that time, the chief power has for the most part been in the hands of M. Trikoupi, an honest patriot. Yet it was the misfortune of the country to be reduced by M. Delyanni to the verge of bankruptcy through his absurd war policy against Turkey. It is probable enough that he did not lead, but was carried along by this policy, with which all the Athenian “Jingoes” were possessed.
102 This plague seems unavoidable in a southern climate, wherever the houses, however good, are built of wood, and does not imply any ungrateful reflection upon my refined and generous hosts. In the Morea, where houses are built of masonry, even badly-kept houses are comparatively safe.
103 Cf. Polygnotus’s picture of Agamemnon (Paus. x. 30, 3), σκήπτρῳ τε ὑπὸ τὴν ἀριστερὰν μασχάλην ἐρειδόμενος.
104 Since these words were written, M. Holleaux’s researches at Akræphiæ have not only discovered the inscription containing the Emperor Nero’s speech to the Greeks, but also many curious remains from the temple of Apollo Ptoos.
105 ὅστις δὲ τὰ σὺν τέχνῃ πεποιημένα ἐπίπροσθε τίθεται τῶν ἀρχαιόητα ἡκώτων, καὶ τάδε ἐστιν οἱ θεάσασθαι. I. 24. 3.
106 Cf. Plut. Agesilaus, chap. xvii.
107 An account of the discovery, by the only surviving member of the party, Mr. G. L. Taylor, has been published by Mr. W. S. Vaux in the Trans. of the Roy. Soc. of Lit., 2nd series, vol. viii. pp. 1, sqq. The latter gentleman called attention to his paper when the subject was being discussed in the Academy in 1877. A very different story was told to Colonel Mure, and has passed from his Travels into Murray’s Guide. The current belief among the Greeks seems still to be that a Greek patriot called Odysseus, perceiving the stone protruding from the clay, and, on striking it, hearing its hollow ring, dug it out and broke it in pieces, imagining it to be a record of Philip’s victory over Hellenic liberty. Some ill-natured people added that he hoped to find treasure within it.
108 Mr. Taylor and his friends thought it must have stood in the attitude of the now abolished lion on Northumberland House. This did not appear so to us; but it is difficult to decide. The restoration by Siegel in the Mon. of the Soc. Arch. of Rome, for 1856, of which Mr. A. S. Murray most kindly sent me a drawing, makes the posture a sitting one, like that of the sitting lion in front of the Arsenal at Venice. There is a small sitting lion from Calymnæ, of the same posture, in the Brit. Museum. The Greeks, when my account was first published in their papers, became fully alive to the value of this monument, and anxious for its restoration. There had been a custodian appointed to watch over it, even when I was there, but he chanced to be absent when we paid our visit.
109 Since these words were written, the labors of the Greek archæologists have discovered the great polyandrion or common tomb of the dead, which the lion commemorated. They lay in rows, many of them with broken bones, showing how they had received their death-wound, and with them were fragments of broken weapons. Never have we come closer to an ancient battle, or discovered more affecting records of a great struggle.
110 This seems to be implied in the account of the murder of Laïus by Œdipus, on this very road, as it is described in Sophocles’s Œdipus Tyrannus.
111 Indeed Tripolitza lies between the ancient sites of Mantinea and Tegea, and quite close to the latter.
112 This was done by the monks at Athos, when Mahomet II. was threatening Constantinople. They foresaw his victory, and by early submission made their own terms, and saved both their liberties and their property.
113 Cf. also Plutarch’s tract de Pyth. orac. for details of ciceroni and visitors in his day.
114 The hippodrome for the chariot races was, however, in the plain beneath, as Pausanias tells us (x. 37, 4).
115 This journey I since made by rail, in this place a harmless innovation.
116 Cf. the passage quoted from M. Georges Perrot above, p. 185.
117 A commodious stone museum has since been built, and the treasures are doubtless by this time transferred to it. But the great earthquake of 1885, so near Olympia, makes us tremble for the safety of any sculpture in a stone building under a solid roof. How terrible if the house were to fall on the Hermes!
118 This judgment of mine has since been confirmed by the authority of Overbeck. It is indeed very hard to estimate rightly a new discovery of this kind. I rated the work of Alkamenes, perhaps, too highly.
119 The student who desires to prosecute this difficult subject should study Overbeck’s History of Greek Sculpture, or the works of Mr. A. S. Murray, or Mr. Copeland Perry, on the same subject.
120 The fact that some of these public meetings are associated with the fall of tyrants does not, I think, disprove what is here advanced.
121 I have not room here to give in full my reasons for rejecting the earlier part of the Olympic register, as being the manufacture of Hippias of Elis, later than 400 B. C. But the reader who is curious on the subject may either consult my article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1881, or the appendix to my Problems in Greek History (1892). He will then see that there is no direct evidence whatever for any early list, and that the antiquarian Pausanias, in his hunt after ancient monuments at Olympia, could find nothing earlier than the so-called 33d Olympiad. Plutarch, moreover, in the opening of his Life of Numa, tells us plainly that the list was the manufacture of Hippias, and based on no trustworthy evidence. To accept the list, therefore, in the face of these objections, is to exhibit culpable credulity.
122 So also under the early Roman Empire the exiles on the barren islands of the Ægean seem to have been allowed this indulgence. Cf. the curious passage from Plutarch I have quoted and explained in my Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 261.
123 The very stringent laws quoted by Æschines in Timarchum may possibly be spurious, since we know from other allusions that they were not enforced. But more probably they existed as a dead letter, which could be revived if occasion required.
124 The modern Greeks make their cheese for keeping, even now, in wicker baskets, and distinguish it from χλωρὸς τύρος, which now means cream cheese, and which they carry to market in woollen bags. There was a special market for it in Athens in Aristophanes’s day, but not in woollen bags; for, as Mr. Pickering (of Shrewsbury School) pointed out to me, the cream cheese of Aristophanes’s day was kept in wicker work. I gladly here acknowledge this correction of the note in my former edition.
125 I should, however, call attention to an exceptional vase in the little Turkish house on the Acropolis, probably of late date, in which a runner is represented with his elbows back and hands closed, and near his sides, in very good form.
126 Pausanias is responsible for the date, which he probably copied from Hippias of Elis. It is noted as a special wonder that the same man should win the sprint and long races at Olympia, which shows that the latter must have been mainly a test of staying power. The Spartan Ladas died at the winning-post, and this endurance was thought rather a wonderful feat, but of course his death may have resulted from bad training, or from heart disease.
127 “Know ye not,” says St. Paul, “that all run, and one receiveth the crown?”—a quite different condition of things from that of the Iliad, where every competitor, like the boys at a private school, comes off with a prize.
128 Possibly this special sort of wrestling has been confused with the pankration, from which it can have differed but little, if it indeed subsisted permanently as a distinct form of wrestling.
129 The single competitions in running and wrestling were distinct from those in the pentathlon, and rewarded by separate crowns.
130 This is the moment chosen by Canova in his celebrated representation of these boxers in the Vatican, a fact of which I was ignorant till it was pointed out to me, in correcting an error I had made about them, by Mr. M’D. Campbell, of Glasgow.
131 The first case of cheating was said to have taken place in the 98th Ol. (388 B. C.), when the Thessalian Eupolos was convicted of bribing the three boxers opposed to him, one of whom had won at the previous meeting. Such crimes were commemorated by bronze figures of Zeus (called Ζᾶνες at Elis), which were of the value of the fines inflicted, and had inscriptions warning all athletes of the dangers and the disgrace of cheating.
132 The reader will find some illustrations of it in my Social Greece, 6th edition, p. 96.
133 It has been since inserted from my notes in the English translation of Bædeker’s Greece.
134 Polybius, iv. 70.
135 By this time (1891) there are probably three or four rivals, which the traveller will see noted in his guide-book, provided he does not depend on the Guide Joanne, which neglects to give such information. The house to which I allude in the text is the Hotel S. George.
136 This is not contradicted by the fact of there being isolated Arcadian poets, such as Echembrotus and Aristarchus, distinguished in foreign schools of art.
137 The Eclogues of Petrarch are modelled upon those of Vergil to the exclusion of the most characteristic features borrowed by the latter from Theocritus.
138 The following extract from the first prose piece of the book will show how absolutely imaginary is his Arcadia, with its impossible combination of trees, and its absence of winter:—
“Giace nella sommità di Partenio, non umile monte della pastorale Arcadia, un dilettevole piano, di ampiezza non molto spazioso, peroche il sito del luogo non consente, ma di minuta e verdissima erbetta sì ripieno, che, se le lascive pecorelle con gli avidi morsi non vi pasceresso, vi si potrebbe d’ogni tempo ritrovare verdura. Ove, se io non m’inganno, son forse dodici o quindici alberi di tanto strana ed eccessiva bellezza, che chiunque le vedesse, giudicherebbe che la maestra natura vi si fosse con sommo diletto studiata in formarli. Li quali alquanto distanti, ed in ordine non artificioso disposti, con la loro rarità la naturale bellezza del luogo oltra misura annobiliscono. Quivi senza nodo veruno si vede il dritissimo abete, nato a sostenere i pericoli del mare; e con più aperti rami la robusta quercia, e l’alto frassino, e lo amenissimo platano vi si distendano, con le loro ombre non picciola parte del bello e copioso prato occupando; ed evvi con più breve fronda l’albero, di che Ercole coronare si solea, nel cui pedale le misere figliuole di Climene furono trasformate: ed in un de’ lati si scerne il noderoso castagno, il fronzuto bosco, e con puntate foglie lo eccelso pino carico di durissimi frutti; nell’ altro l’ombroso faggio, la incorruttibile tiglia, il fragile tamarisco, insieme con la orientale palma, dolci ed onorato premio dei vincitori. Ma fra tutti nel mezzo, presso un chiaro fonte, sorge verso il cielo un dritto cipresso,” etc., etc. The work is, moreover, full of direct imitations of Vergil, not, I fancy, of Theocritus also, as the Italian commentators suppose, for that poet was not adequately printed till 1495, which must have been very near the date of the actual composition of the Arcadia.
139 It is worth noting that the Arcadian vision in the Shepherd of Hermas, describing a scene of twelve mountains of varied and contrasted aspect, though intended for an allegorical purpose, is really faithful to nature, and suggests that the author knew something of the country he describes.
140 Pausanias places the source of the Alpheus higher up, and close to Tegea in the eastern plain.
141 This is what Pausanias says, though modern scholars seem very doubtful about it.
142 Several details, such as the unusual length in proportion to the breadth, the engaged pillars inside the cella, and the forms of the capitals, have now been explained as deliberate archaicisms on the part of Ictinus, who here copied far older forms. The curious Ionic, and even the Corinthian, capitals, may point back to old Asianic, or Assyrian, models, and the proportions of the cella with its engaged pillars have their prototype or parallel in the curious old Heræon (cf. p. 304) found at Olympia. This seems to me a very happy solution of the difficulties, and shows us Ictinus in a new light. Another specimen of his art, with unexpected features, may be the newly unearthed Hall of the Mysteries at Eleusis, already described, if indeed this be his work, and not a late copy of it.
143 The same must have been the case with Messene, which was laid out likewise by Epaminondas on an absurdly large scale, as the remains of the great walls still show. They seem intended to enclose a whole parish, and not a city. But of these I shall speak again, p. 452.
144 The results hitherto attained are still uncertain, owing to an active controversy between Dr. Dörpfeld and the English explorers, which has not yet (1892) been settled. I forbear entering upon it here.
145 It is usually forgotten in recent accounts that this sacking of the town was no more than a retribution for the hideous massacre of the whole Turkish population, including women and children, in cold blood, by the insurgent Greeks. The details may be had in General Gordon’s Memoirs or in Finlay’s History.
146 Strabo mentions that the new settlers, coming upon old tombs in the digging for new foundations, found there quantities of graceful pottery, which was sold to Romans, and became the fashion there. Hence it was diligently sought and sold under the title νεκροκορίνθια. We may be sure that every ancient tomb was rifled in this way.
147 On the foundation of the new Greek kingdom, it was seriously debated whether Corinth should not be the capital; but the constant prevalence of fever in the district, together with sentimental reasons, determined the selection of Athens in preference.
148 Even the new railway has not altered this. The journey up and down the bay in a coasting steamer is still well worth undertaking.
149 M. Viollet-le-duc, in his Entretiens sur l’Architecture, vol. i. p. 45, explains the reason of this. Apart from the greater facility of raising smaller blocks, most limestones are subject to flaws, which are disclosed only by strain. Hence it was much safer to support the entablature on two separate beams, one of which might sustain, at least temporarily, the building, in case the other should crack.
150 Cf. pp. 370 and 433.
151 Strabo, who had apparently travelled but little through Greece, speaks with admiration of this view, which he had evidently seen. The fortress of Karytena is some twenty or thirty feet higher in situation and far more picturesque from below, but is too much surrounded by other high mountains to admit of a prospect like that from the Acro-Corinthus.
152 See also Guide Joanne, ii. p. 197.
153 This is just what Strabo says (viii. 6, § 21): ἔκρυσιν μὲν οὐκ ἔχουσαν μεστὴν δ’ ἀεὶ διαυγοῦς καὶ ποτίμου ὕδατος, and Corinth was one of the few Greek places he visited.
154 So also learned men speak about the amphitheatre. Herzberg (ii. 253) says: “Seine Ruine steht noch heute.” Cf. also Friedländer, ii. 383, but I could not find it.
155 Part ii. p. 198, sq. (1891).
156 The reader who performs this journey by train may consider whether what here follows is not an older and better way.
157 πολλὸς δὲ καὶ ὡς ῥόδα κίσθος ἐπανθεῖ.—Theocr. v. 131.
158 There is a tract of sea-coast on the east side of Italy, about halfway between Ancona and Monte Gargano, which has this Theocritean character to perfection. Even the railway passenger can appreciate the curious contrast it affords to the splendid orchards and gardens about Bari, which are still farther south.
159 οὐ θέμις, ὦ ποιμήν, τὸ μεσημβρινόν, οὐ θέμις ἆμμιν συρίσδεν. τὸν Πᾶνα δεδοίκαμες· ἦ γὰρ ἀπ’ ἄγρας τανίκα κεκμηὼς ἀμπαύεται, ἐστι γὰρ πικρός, καὶ οἱ ἀεὶ ὁριμεῖα χολὰ ποτὶ ῥινὶ κάθηται.—Theocr. i. 15.
160 τοὺς μὴν ὄγε λάεσσιν ἀπὸ χθονὸς ὅσσον ἀείρων γευγέμην ἄψ ὀπίσω δειδίσσετο, τρηχὺ δὲ φωνῇ ἠπείλει μάλα πᾶσιν, ἐρητύσασκε δ’ ὑλαγμοῦ, χαίρων ἐν φρησὶν ᾖσιν, ὁθούνεκεν αὔλιν ἔρυντο. Theocr. xxv. 73, and cf. Odyss. xiv. 29 sq.
161 Pausanias speaks of Mycenæ and Tiryns as of like structure, which is not true. He often refers with wonder to these walls, and reflects upon the care with which Greek historians had described foreign curiosities like the Pyramids, while equally wonderful things in Greece were left unnoticed. Thus, he says that no pair of mules could stir from its place the smallest of the blocks in the walls of Tiryns. Cf. ii. 25, 8; and ix. 36, 5.
162 The same effect is observable in Staigue Fort, in the county of Kerry, and has led some people to imagine that its stones were rudely fashioned. Cf. the splendid photographs of this Irish Tiryns in Lord Dunraven’s Notes on Irish Architecture.
163 πολυδίψιον. A fragment of Hesiod (quoted by Eustathius in Il., p. 350) notes this epithet, in order to account for its being no longer true, Ἄργος ἄνυδρον ἔον Δαναὸς ποίησεν ἔνυδρον. Strabo (viii. p. 256) explains it by confining the epithet to the town of Argos, which Homer certainly did not, and by admitting that the country was well watered. Pausanias (ii. 15, 5) says that all the rivers ran dry, except in rainy weather, which is seldom true now.
164 ἀλλ’ ἀνθηρῶν λειμώνων, φύλλων τ’ ἐν κόλποις ναίω, ἡνίκ’ ἄν ὁ θεσπέσιος ὀξὺ μέλος ἀχέτας θάλπεσι μεσημβρινοῖς ἡλιομανὴς βοᾷ. (Aves, 1092–8.)
The little-known lines in the Shield of Hercules are also worth quoting (393, sqq.):—
ἦμος δὲ χλοερῷ κυανόπτερος, ἠχέτα τέττιξ,
ὄζῳ ἐφεζόενος, θέρας ἀνθρώποισιν ἀείδειν
ἄρχεται, ᾧ τε πόσις καὶ βρῶσις θῆλυς ἐέρση,
καί τε πανημέριός τε καὶ ἐῷος χέει αὐδὴν
ἴδει ἐν αἰνοτάτῳ, ὁπότε χρόα Σείριος ἄζει.
165 These Cyclopes, cunning builders, and even workers in metal, are to be carefully distinguished from the rude and savage Cyclopes represented in Homer’s Odyssey as infesting Thrinacria, in the western seas.
166 In the days of the composition of the Iliad we see the power and greatness of Mycenæ distinctly expressed by the power of Agamemnon, who appears to rule over all the district and many islands. Yet the great hero, Diomedes, is made the sovereign of Argos and Tiryns in his immediate neighborhood. This difficulty has made some critics suppose that all the acts of Diomedes were foisted in by some of the Argive reciters of the Iliad. Without adopting this theory, which seems to me extravagant, I would suggest that, in the poet’s day, Argos was rapidly growing into first-rate importance, while all the older legends attested the greatness of Mycenæ. Thus the poet, who was obliged to put together the materials given him by divers older and shorter poems, was under the difficulty of harmonizing the fresher legends about Argos with the older about Mycenæ.
167 I prefer this view even to that from the theatre of Taormina in Sicily, which is so justly celebrated, and which many people think the finest in Europe.
168 Cf. his exhaustive article on the Mediæval History of Greece, in Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopædia, vol. lxxxv., and more especially his refutation of Fallmerayer’s theory, pp. 100–19.
169 A great authority, whose opinion I deeply respect—Prof. Sayce—goes so far as to say that language is by itself no proof of race, but only of social contact. I will not venture to deny that there are instances where this is so, and where invading strangers have adopted the language of the vanquished, though quite foreign to them. But surely this is the exception, and not the rule, and there is a primâ facie probability in favor of a well-preserved language indicating a well-preserved race.
170 This fact strengthens my conviction that at an early period Ægina worked the silver-mines of Laurium.
171 Cf. Pindar’s frag. for the Corinthian ἑταίραι.
172 The bronze cow of Myron seems also to have been a wonderfully admired work, to judge from the crowd of epigrams written upon it, which still survive.
173 Cf. the account of his habits in his work, Tiryns, cap. I.
174 I have made special inquiries for these, but without any result. They seem to be lost.
175 Cf. p. 389, and the outrages of the Galatian mercenaries under Philip V. of Macedon.
176 Mycenæ, p. 49.
177 According to Pausanias, the treasury of Minyas was differently built; for the top stone of its flat dome was the keystone (ἁρμονία) of the whole. This is not true. The stone roofs in Ireland seem to me far more curious in construction, for two reasons: first, because the stones used are so very small; and secondly, because there can be, of course, no pressure on a roof like the pressure brought to bear on a subterranean chamber from above.
178 Cf. Macpherson’s Antiquities of Kertch.
179 There has been strange diversity of opinion about the nature of this stone. Dodwell and Leake call it basalt. Moreover, Dodwell thought it greenish. Some one else thinks it yellowish. The French expedition and Curtius call it limestone. Dr. Schliemann says it is the same breccia as the rest of the gate. It is in the face of these opinions that I persist in the statement that it is bluish, and limestone.
It is owing to this note that it was again critically examined by Mr. Tuckett, who published his result in the Architect of 19th January, 1879, and who had fragments of the stone analyzed, which justified my observation. He also notes that several observers erred as to the shape of the central pillar, which does not diminish in bulk downward.
180 This, I perceive, is Dr. Schliemann’s opinion also. He was the first to show that along the entrance-wall the fine building with square blocks was only a facing laid on irregular building with small stones. This points clearly to two successive stages in the work.
181 These analogies are brought out by Mr. A. S. Murray, in the Academy, No. 29. Cf. also Dörpfeld in Schuchhardt, p. 161.
182 This is not true of Irish designs, which I compared carefully with the Mycenæan, and failed to find any identity, though many close resemblances.
183 It agrees with that of Schuchhardt (in Schliemann’s Excavations, 1891), and of Busolt in the new edition of his Greek history, 1892.
184 This theory of mine, stated in my first edition, is strongly supported by Dr. Adler in his preface to Schliemann’s Tiryns (1885).
185 This has all been done, and alas! many of the gold cups have been polished by the barbarous zeal of the curators, so destroying the exquisite red bloom which made them so remarkable.
186 Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks. By Athelstan Riley. Longmans, 1887. This is the newest and best book on the subject.
187 The very few travellers who have seen this, the most picturesque of all European buildings, must have heard with a painful shock that it was burned down in the spring of 1891.