in\ "% '^TT'i i^SriPif»lliiMi M#.R..:G;BpaMi€8S BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Henrg W. Sage 1 891 f\.a94-GH-^ 2^\^it DF 726.B74"'" ""'"^'^'*y library ..Days in Attica, 3 1924 028 242 109 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028242109 DAYS IN ATTICA DAYS IN ATTICA BY MRS. R. C. BOSANQUET WITH 17 ILLUSTRATIONS AliD 3 PLANS NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1914 Kniff^'^S TO T. H. PREFACE SINCE these chapters were written the Greek nation has entered upon a new phase. The Balkan War is over, and it is still too soon to estimate all the results ; but even the extension of the kingdom is of secondary importance when compared with the new provinces which recent years have added to the national character — reserve, forethought, self- denial. These qualities are not the results of the war. The successes of the Greek nation, when suddenly called upon to tjike up arms, were the fruit of a pre- liminary period of self-discipline. It was the new Greek who heralded the new Greece. Since Mr. Venizelos came into power such important changes have come about that the nation seems trans- formed. The Constitution has been revised, criminal law amended, the army and na\-}' remodelled, and the police service reformed. Above all, the civil service has been made permanent and independent of party — a change which involved sacrifices on the part of men of aU classes. In a country notorious for its frequent changes of ministry Venizelos' Government, after four years of office, is stronger than ever ; in fact, the old party divisions have been broken down by a new national consciousness. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTORY : TRAVEL IN GREECE . . . .1 CHAPTER I. CRETE ....... 13 II. THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN . . . .50 III. LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS .... 66 IV. PROMISE . . . . . . .86 V. FULFILMENT . . . . . .120 VI. ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL . . . 150 VII. THE AFTERGLOW ..... 167 VIH. THE BYZANTINE CHURCHES OF ATTICA . . .192 IX. THE AGE OF CHIVALRY . . . . 214 X. THE DARK AGES ...... 234 XI. MODERN ATHENS . . . .255 XH. HOME LIFE IN ATTICA ..... 274 XIII. THE ATTIC COUNTRY-SIDE . . . .297 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . .341 INDEX ....... 345 xi LIST OF PLATES THE PROPYLjEA FROM WITHIN .... Frontispiece From a water-colour drawing by Miss Hodgkin TO FACE PAGE 1. FIGURE OF SNAKE-CHARMER FOUND AT KNOSSOS . 22 From the reproduction in the British Museum 2. WALL-PAINTING FROM KNOSSOS : BULL AND ACROBATS . 28 From a water-colour by Gillieron in the Liverpool Museum 3. WALL-PAINTING FROM TIRYNS : BOAR-HUNT . . 54 From Rodenwaldts "Tiryns" 4. HEAD OF THE LEMNIAN ATHENA BY PHEIDIAS . . 76 From a photograph by Alinari 5. ARCHAIC SCULPTURE ..... I02 From photographs by Alinari 6. orator's PLATFORM ON THE PNYX . . . .112 7. NORTH-EAST ANGLE OF THE PARTHENON . . I32 From a photograph by Alinari 8. TWO VIEWS OF HADRIAN'S LIBRARY .... I78 a. From an engraving b. From a photograph by Alinari g. BRONZE STATUE FROM ANTICYTHERA . . .188 From a photograph by Alinari 10. MARBLE STATUE FROM ANTICYTHERA . . . I90 From a photograph by Alinari 11. TWO BYZANTINE CHURCHES . . .192 From photographs by Alinari xiii xiv DAYS IN ATTICA TO FACE PAGE 12. COLOSSAL LION FROM PIRAEUS .... 212 From a pliotograph by Alinari 13. ACROPOLIS FROM THE PNYX, SHOWING PRANKISH TOWER 222 From Dupr^s " Voyage a Attienes ct a Constantinople " 14. THE BAZAAR OF TURKISH ATHENS .... 244 From DodwelVs " Views in Greece " 15. WOMAN OF ELEUSIS A VILLAGE HOST From photographs by W. A. Mansell & Co. 282 16. LOADS OF FUEL ...... 308 From a photograph by W. A. Mansell & Co. SKETCH-MAP OF ATTICA AND ARGOLIS ... 68 PLAN OF THE ACROPOLIS ...... 122 PLANS OF TWO BYZANTINE CHURCHES . . . 200 DAYS IN ATTICA DAYS IN ATTICA INTRODUCTORY TRAVEL IN GREECE A CENTURY ago the tide of travel left Greece high and dry. Athens possessed but one tavern, and the few adventurers who came usually stayed with their consul or lodged with the French Capuchins in the monastery that then enclosed the Monument of Lysicrates. Now there are half a dozen first-class hotels, many smaller ones, and a few modest pensions. French fashions, English medicines, and German hardware are all seen in the main streets of the town. Yet Greece is still a remote land. Tourists do not come here as readily as to Italy or Egypt ; the Greek himself speaks of " going to Europe " and distinguishes between " European " and " native " goods. The Balkan highlands detach Greece from the rest of the continent, and to all intents and purposes she is an island. It is hoped that in a few years' time the railway which is already completed as far as Larisa will be con- tinued to Salonika, where it will join the European system. For the present the three main routes to Athens are by Brindisi, by Marseilles, and by Constanti- nople. The most direct line with the shortest sea voyage 2 DAYS IN ATTICA is via Brindisi. By this route the mails from London to Athens take something under five days. From Brin- disi to Patras is a two days' voyage ; from Marseilles to the Piraeus five days. The journey by Constantinople is the most costly, but it is comfortable and speedy. There is a good service of steamers between Constanti- nople and Athens, the fastest taking about two days. Climate. — In spite of its nearness to the sea, the climate of Athens is continental rather than marine in its extremes of temperature. In the three hottest months of summer the thermometer stands at about 95° in the shade, though this heat is made bearable by a cool breeze from the sea at evening. For the other nine months of the year the wind usually blows from the land, that is from the cold Balkan mountains. The plain of Athens is sheltered to some extent by its circle of hills ; it is only when these are themselves snow-covered that the cold is intense. It is strange that the average Athenian house is built without heating apparatus. Not till Parnes shows a snowy cap does the householder bestir himself to buy a stove. The ideal time for visiting Greece is April or May ; but the other months may well be enjoyed by one prepared for varieties of temperature. The variability of the Athenian climate will prevent the town from becoming a winter health resort, although the weather does not change from day to day as in England. For better or worse the sunshine or the rain persists for at least ten days at a time. Yet from season to season it is impossible to prophesy what will be in store. I have known a winter made up of a succession of balmy days ; another with black frost lasting for weeks, and a third with months of steady rain. In April especially a sample of all kinds of weather may be expected. The traveller must be content to take a supply of both winter and summer clothing. Hotel Life.— The cost of living in Athens is relatively TRAVEL IN GREECE 3 high, and the terms quoted by the large hotel-keepers seem exorbitant until we remember that for the moment Athens has outgrown its sources of supply. Vegetables, fowls, game, and other things that used to be plentiful are now rather scarce. In all probability this condition of things will not last long, since capital readily finds its way into these safe enterprises that cater for the needs of a growing town. There is increasing competition among hotel-keepers. Within recent years a number of large new hotels have been opened, which give a varied choice of quarters. The " European " hotels in the neighbourhood of Constitution Square are just such as may be found in any other capital. On the other hand a traveller who wishes to see something more typically Athenian will find many possible hotels in the lower end of the town around Concord Square. Here he may obtain a clean bedroom and choose a restaurant suited to his purse. It is not usual for Greek families to take boarders. This, which often proves a pleasant plan in other countries, is here difficult to arrange and not always successful. Travel with a dragoman is in Greece much the same as in any other land. For a fixed sum (usually 40 francs a day per person) the dragoman takes you wherever you wish to go, finds the mules or carriages, takes beds and a cook (or cooks himself), and arranges a comfortable lodging at the end of each day's journey. People who cannot stand irregular hours and uncer- tain diet will find this the right way to travel. With a dragoman they can enjoy, not only the more obvious train and steamer routes, but also the beautiful moun- tain passes of the interior. Yet some of the true delights of travel must be sacrificed. Those who journey carry- ing with them the resources of civilization can never know the elemental joys that link us to a vanished age ; 4 DAYS IN ATTICA the combat with hunger and weariness, the pleasurable dependence on the will of an unknown folk, the exhilara- tion of uncertainty in approaching the outskirts of that little town which for a whole hot afternoon has shone before us on the hills like a far white star ; the excitement of weighing the chances of our night's lodging as we sit at dusk in the village square sipping black coffee and wondering when the friendly crowd will finish its questions and bestir itself to find the man whose house shall receive us. " These people wash themselves every day. They have lead on their boots. The little one has gold in his mouth." Such are the awestruck whispers that reach our ears. You who travel "personally conducted" cannot come into real contact with the country people. The most honest dragoman inevitably slides into the role of assuming that he is your protector and that all the country people are rogues. Your intercourse with them must be through him. The more he can exalt your position, the more he shines in reflected glory. Finally, you find yourself posing in lonely isolation as the English lordos. The children are rebuked for shyly touching your hands, and you miss many naive inquiries as to your wardrobe, your status, and your family. To lose any opportunity for getting on friendly terms with the Greek peasant is a real loss, for no man is more simple and courteous than he is in his own home. Travel without a dragoman is yearly becoming easier. There is now no part of Greece where a foreigner with a few words of modern Greek may not go. A few routes are suggested in Baedeker, but every man will be wise to make his own itinerary and take with him just enough of the necessities of life to enable him to face the luck of the road. As he goes along he will devise his own resources for comfort and despise those of TRAVEL IN GREECE 5 others. The suggestions offered here are intended only for those who have as yet done no travelling in Greece. Whether you walk or ride, you will need an animal to carry your pack. Mules or small ponies may be found at almost every village. You take a fresh animal at each stage, and the muleteer -Cvho goes with you acts as your guide for the day. His fee is included in the sum arranged for the use of the mule, but it does no harm to let him know that if he gives satisfaction there will be an additional tip at the end of the journey. On the disposition of this agoyatis depends much of your day's happiness. Usually he is a pleasant person, cheery and resourceful. Occasionally you will come across one who shows his resource by charging for unexpected extras, as in the story told by the scholiast on Demo- sthenes, where the agoyatis makes one charge for the mule and another for the mule's shadow in which the traveller had made his noonday halt. Three great annual fasts are observed by the Greek Church, forty days before Christmas, forty days before Easter, and forty days before the Feast of the Assump- tion in August. When planning a journey which will coincide with one of these (it must be remembered that a Greek calendar is necessary), you should carry your own supplies, to vary the otherwise monotonous repetition of fowl, eggs, and cheese. In the Peloponnese it is well to be provided with a private store of food at all times of the year. As butter is almost unknown, a jar of marmalade is worth carry- ing. Except for those who delight in the hardships of travel, a portable bed is almost a necessity. The bed in the village inn is often nothing but a quilt spread on the floor, and the quilt will seldom bear inspection. In all cases a light rug and a pillow are essential for use by day and night. The pillow should have a removable outer cover of American leather or dark washing material. 6 DAYS IN ATTICA With the rug it forms a pad for the hard wooden saddle of the mule, and at night the clean pillow is slipped out of its case. A small set of washing apparatus must be taken also. In an otherwise comfortable lodg- ing there is often no arrangement for washing. Where possible put up at the house of the best man in the village rather than at the village inn ; in small places the khan is the dirtiest house in the town. You need have no scruple in asking for a lodging in the best house you see. The Greek peasant is at heart truly hospitable, and if you do not impress him as an exacting guest he will do his utmost to make you comfortable. He will open his best wine, send his wife into the loft to fetch the last fresh walnuts, and will load your plate with mizethra (fresh cheese) and honey. In moderately well- to-do villages you will often be given meat for the even- ing meal. In the middle of the day the peasant does not himself eat meat, and does not expect his visitor to want it. It is safe to ask for macaroni, and a rice pilaf; these are favourite dishes and are well prepared. Giaourti, a Turkish dish of curds, is refreshing in the middle of the day. The coarse country bread is delicious ; in some parts of Greece there is nothing but barley-bread, which may be some weeks old and must be soaked in water before it can be eaten. Oranges are abundant from Christmas to Easter ; eggs are always available, and there is often a variety of fresh vegetables. The resinous flavour of the country wine is detestable to most of us ; the country water is purer than that found in Athens. When in doubt, order black coffee. This and loukoumi (Turkish delight) are to be had at wayside khans where there may be nothing else ; the sticky sweet is sustaining and not unwholesome. A solid breakfast is, of course, unknown. Eggs and hot milk should be ordered overnight ; otherwise you will find a Greek breakfast of black coffee and rusks. Cows' milk is rarely TRAVEL IN GREECE 7 found ; sheep's milk is sweet and creamy, gOats' milk better than its reputation. The resources of the country are simple, but they are readily set at your disposal. Foreigners are still popular and are pre-eminently well treated. At places quite on the beaten track you may be troubled by beggars, but compared with other countries in Southern Europe Greece is free from this plague. If it is now on the increase travellers have only themselves to blame. A supply of cigarettes and small gifts come in useful as recompenses for the services offered freely in friendship. Unless thoroughly acquainted with the national idiom it is safer not to compromise your dignity by gratuitous condescension. Familiarity from a stranger is neither appreciated nor understood. In the country the manner of the well-bred is a combination of gravity and courtesy. Jocularity should follow only at a later stage of acquaintance. Unfortunately there are now scattered through Greece — especially Laconia — a class of people of whom these remarks do not hold good. These are the Greeks who have returned from America. They have finished their business cares as fruit-sellers or ice-cream men, and have returned home either wealthy or penniless to finish their days in fame and idleness at their native cafe. There is no road so lonely that we may not suddenly be greeted by a jaunty billycock and a cheeky grin : " Say, are you fellahs fr'm Chicago ? " or, " Good-day, boss ! Gimme a smoke." These encounters grate on the nerves, but are often kindly meant, and at the worst show only a vain olficiousness. The Americanized Greek is a great person in his own town, and he welcomes this oppor- tunity of spreading his plumes before his fellow-towns- men. It is hard if we curtly turn aside and do not allow him to parade his knowledge of the foreigners' language, and if we deny him the pleasure of ordering about his neighbours on our behalf. 8 DAYS IN ATTICA The carriage for country work is a landau solidly built. It travels slowly but is not uncomfortable. It is a pity that there are not more carriage roads in Greece. Pos- sible driving tours are very limited, though even as it is the Greek driver does cross-country work that would dismay an Enghsh coachman. Motor roads are few. The most independent way of traveUing is to bicycle. It is not an ideal country for cyclists, but there are some very good roads, notably the ride from Tripolitza to Sparta. Mr. Richardson (late Director of the American School in Athens) has written a paper on " The Bicycle in Greece,"! in which he emphasizes the shortness of the distance from point to point, and says, "any good bicyclist would find it no great matter to leave Thebes and pay his respects to Athens on the first day, visit Corinth and Argos on the next, and sleep comfortably at Sparta the next night." It must be remembered, however, that in bad weather even the best roads get broken and there may be places where it is necessary to carry the bicycle. In case of mishaps it is better not to attempt a bicycle tour alone. For the solitary traveller mule-riding is preferable, as this implies the company of a muleteer. Railway travelling in Greece is very easy. There are few railways ; there is no through traffic, and seldom a crowded station. The carriages are comfortable ; the trains go at a quiet pace and keep good time. They pass through some of the most beautiful scenery in Greece. Nobody should miss the journeys from Corinth to Athens, and from Athens to Chalcis, both possible expeditions for a single day. Travel by Sea. — To visit the outlying parts of Greece you must make use of every class of boat. The first-class liners usually touch only at Corfu, Patras, and Piraeus. ' R. B. Richardson, "Vacation Days in Greece." Smith, Elder & Co. TRAVEL IN GREECE 9 Coast towns on the mainland and some of the larger islands are served by second-class European boats ; places of less importance by Greek steamers and sailing boats (caiques). The steamers that I have called " second-class European boats " are the smaller or older vessels of the well-known lines. They are cargo boats, slow and reliable, not carrying many first-class passengers. They remind one sometimes of the old-fashioned English inn on a deserted coaching road, that maintains a tradition of cleanliness and respectability for the few travellers who still make use of it. I always enjoy these boats for the variety of passengers on board : prosperous islanders returning to their homes, their smart wooden boxes, ornamented with gold paper and brass-headed nails ; peasants carrying their large bundles in the striped red and white rug of native manufacture ; perhaps a Greek priest full of local information and ready to offer the hospitality of his monastery at the end of half an hour's talk ; a minor Turkish official travelling with his harem to Janina ; a Greek police-officer coming to take up his duties in Crete now that the Italian gendarmerie is with- drawn ; or a group of booted Cretans going as a gang of workmen to mines or railway. Travel on the little native steamer is altogether less desirable. However, in the Greek islands the distances from point to point are short, and it is no great hardship to put up for one night with a dingy cabin or a close saloon where the oil-lamp swings viciously with each movement of the boat. On these steamers you must be prepared to supply your own food, for "the eating is not in the ticket " (as I once heard it phrased). They run fairly regularly — that is to say, within one or two days of their advertised times — and are generally small and old. I remember making the voyage from Syra to Athens in a little so-ton boat that had started life as an English yacht, somewhere in the forties. It had been sold at a sacrifice 10 DAYS IN ATTICA " because the owner's bulldog died on board." I suspect that there were also other reasons less strictly sentimental. But in good weather even these Greek steamers can give you pleasant journeys. There are mild nights when you can sleep in your long chair on deck ; there are hours of cheerful conversation on the bridge where the captain always makes you welcome ; and a cup of black coffee does not make a bad breakfast when served to the tune of an ^gean sunrise. Travel by caique is only possible in the summer, and even then much time may be wasted by calms and storms. I do not speak from personal experience, and I fancy that to enjoy it you must have something of the fatalistic Eastern temperament as well as a good constitution. I am told that without some experience of this sort it is impossible to understand the spirit of the Odyssey. One of the great characteristics of Mediterranean travel is the use of small boats for landing. In many cases it is impossible for the steamer to come alongside the quay, but there are plenty of big ports where the custom only continues because the boatmen are sufficiently formidable to make it very uncomfortable for any company that allows its passengers to land without their aid. I wonder how long this benighted state of things will be allowed to last. In Marseilles and even Naples more modern methods are used, and where the companies cannot bring their boats to the landing-stage they will send out their own tenders for the use of the passengers. I have made no mention of the large steamers run by English and German companies which now take pleasure cruises round coasts of the Mediterranean hitherto almost inaccessible. Travellers on these boats find themselves so well looked after that they need no advice of mine. For health a few precautions are necessary, and these are hardly peculiar to Greece. Suitable clothing may TRAVEL IN GREECE 11 make a heavy pack, but it is essential to have a sufficiency of extra wraps. The difference in temperature between morning and evening is often emphasized by a difference in altitude. Perhaps you start from the plain in morning sunshine. As you climb the heat becomes unbearable ] yet the evening may find you some 4,000 feet up on Taygetus or Parnassos, and the end of the ride comes after sunset by damp rocks or through woods that have been in shade all the day. Your own vitality is lowered by the day's exertion, and, unless you wrap yourself up, the next day's ride will be cut short by chills or fever. With sufficiently warm clothing the sunset hour is not to be dreaded, except in the few marshy and malarious districts such as those in the neighbourhood of Kopais. The mosquito is, of course, the traveller's worst enemy. After April a mosquito net should be carried. The river beds are breeding grounds for malaria. A bathe among the oleanders at the end of a long day's ride is more alluring than prudent. If you follow simple precautions, do not get over-tired, and take quinine freely through the hot weather, you may rejoice in your travel without thought of fever. A few days in Athens between each journey send you back to country life with new strength and vigour. A chapter on travel in Greece would be incomplete without some mention of brigandage. Although the days of brigandage are over, there are still brigands in Greece; that is to say, there are large tracts of desolate country in which outlaws are hiding from justice. Where the Englishman drinks himself stupid, the Greek drinks him- self furious. The sudden flare-up of a vinous quarrel usually ends in knives being drawn. One man falls. His opponent flies to the hills, often without waiting to see whether he has killed his man. The police pursue him, of course, but he has had a good start. His neighbours are too sympathetic, too conscious of their own fallibility 12 DAYS IN ATTICA to reveal his whereabouts. In half the cases of this kind the murderer gets clear away. Hereafter he has a miser- able life, getting such food as he can by preying on a poor neighbourhood. In the end he either dies of starva- tion, takes ship to America, or in despair gives himself up to justice. A price is put on his head and occasionally he is shot. The fact that there is a lawless element at large in lonely places should not be ignored by the traveller, but the thought need never disturb his peace of mind. These outlaws are solitary men ; two may sometimes be found together, but as a rule there is no combination, no con- certed action, and no capital to back them. Without these things they can never become formidable. Such brigandage as there is need not affect Europeans, for the foreigner is well taken care of. Should the country be unsettled, as may happen near the frontier or round the Vale [of Tempe, he will be warned, and an escort sent with him. " It is too expensive to touch a European," says the hungry outlaw with a regretful sigh. CHAPTER I CRETE I THE NORTHERN PORTS CRETE in the sunrise 1 That is where Greek history begins in the books, where it begins also for the happy traveller who can approach Greece by way of Crete. In travelling it is not always easy to make the most logical approach to your subject. Steamers and railways have a habit of disregarding history and sentiment, and those who care enough about obtaining the right sequence of impressions will find that they must forsake the main routes of travel. At the present time the simplest way of reaching Greece via Crete is to take one of the smaller Messagerie boats that run fortnightly from Marseilles to Canea, the capital of Crete, or an Austrian-Lloyd boat starting from Trieste. The first sight of the island is unforgettable. You step from your dark cabin in the early morning and find yourself in a luminous upper world, threaded with grey lines of zephyrous cloud and distant coastland. The newly-washed deck mirrors the glory, and the ship becomes a golden argosy bearing you into your first ^gean sunrise. Around the horizon, hinted in faint grey, lies the well-known map of the Mediterranean translated into reality. On the left a rocky headland, 13 14 DAYS IN ATTICA Cape Matapan, shows the distant mainland of Greece. Nearer, looming grey and large, is Cythera, and on the distant southern horizon the smaller island, Anticythera, that cost the Roman world a shipload of masterpieces and kept them for the delight of our own generation (see p. i88). Behind Cythera the jagged line of Cape Malea, the most eastern promontory of the Peloponnese, can be seen on a clear day. Had our course been set for Athens rather than for Crete we should have headed close under this rock of evil name. Our steamer would have hooted greetings to the tiny hermitage perched where only goats should climb, and the lonely hermit who lives there would have rung his chapel bell in answer. The boat is heading south-east, and far away on the right — a glow of snowy peaks — the White Mountains stand to receive the first heartleap of recognition. So are the white cliffs of Dover to the Briton, and so was the tip of Athena's brazen spear on the Acropolis to the returning Greek mariner. Beneath the mountains lies Crete, beautiful, enticing, romantic. The island is little more than three successive mountain ranges — the White Mountains, Ida, and Lasithi, with the uplands at their feet rich in corn, wine, and oil. For the greater part of the year these mountains are capped with snow. Their outlines dominate the whole island. The high- lands leading up to them are pierced with luxuriant gorges. On the map, Crete seems shaped like a long boat ; its high, sharp prow points to the west, its curving stern to the east ; the straight keel is its inhospitable southern shore. Such harbours as it has are on the north, but, except for the one splendid natural inlet of Suda Bay, these were better for the light craft of antiquity than for our own deep-drawing steamers. In rough weather anchorage is uncertain in all Cretan harbours except Suda Bay, and few travellers would CRETE 15 choose to be put ashore at Suda, where there is no town, no inn, and no regular means of communication with the nearest town (Canea). Canea, Rettimo, and Candia are the three ports along the northern coast. Canea lies most to the west and has a distinctly African flavour, owing to its intercourse with the Cyrenaica. Its name is a corruption of the classical Cydonia, and this again is embedded in modern Greek as the word for quince. If the Greeks knew quinces in the first instance as "Apples of Cydonia," is it not possible that quinces were cultivated in prehistoric times and carried by the Minoans from Crete to Greece ? The old sea routes are little changed, and still as in Roman days there is a geographical connection between Crete and the province of Cyrenaica. As Sicily is the natural stepping- stone between Tunisia and Italy, so Crete is the step between Greece and the Cyrenaic promontory. There is no direct steamer route along the coast of North Africa. An Arab from Benghazi, in charge perhaps of a consign- ment of butter for Alexandria, must leave his Italian boat at Canea and wait there for the Pan-Hellene that will carry him to Egypt. Captain Spratt, who made the Admiralty chart for Crete, and wrote two amusing volumes describing his travels on Cretan muletracks, mentions that in the middle of last century he found a tribe of Benghazi Arabs settled in tents outside the town wall. To Canea also have drifted the African elements from other parts of Crete. The Egyptian soldiers of Mehemet Ali are said to have settled here at the close of the first Greco-Turkish war, and here are the remains of a black serf population, mentioned in Venetian archives, and connected by tradition with the Saracen invaders of the eighth and ninth centuries. Even from the sea the town has an African look. Six flower-like minarets rise from the undergrowth of domes and flat-roofed white houses. 16 DAYS IN ATTICA Two palm-trees on the quay seem set there to say, "Africa," But Venice has her mark here too. Around the town runs the encircHng Venetian wall, its arms stretching partially across the harbour mouth, and its sloping ramp stamped here and there and here again with the Lion of St. Mark. Unless you are a blas6 traveller from the East, accustomed to the glow of dark faces and bright colours, I envy you the first morning in Canea. Boat- men in baggy breeches and bare legs ; black-bearded countrymen in high boots carrying themselves mag- nificently ; dandies with tightly gartered stockings of flamingo or canary colour ; full-blooded Ethiopians in sacks ; Arabs in flowing white from the Cyrenaica ; hundreds of cheerful brown boys with very little in the way of clothes and a great deal in the way of smile, all these you will see ; but the Russian, French, and Italian soldiers who used to mix with them have vanished together with their three flags that floated over the town. The Turkish flag flies no longer on that rock in the harbour of Suda Bay, the last place in Crete where it was shown. Steamers generally wait a day in Canea to take on a cargo of oil or wine, or to unload hardware, petroleum, and other luxuries of civilization. I once remember seeing several hundred tons of gunpowder put ashore from our steamer. There is not much sight-seeing to be done, but one can be very happy sitting in the pubhc gardens, exploring the immense dark vaults of the old Venetian galley-houses, visiting the Turkish Cemetery, the local schools of weaving and embroidery, or driving out to the Governor's residence, a pleasant white villa, fronted with an avenue of giant marguerites and a meditative sentinel. Then when evening comes, if you are wise, you will not return to your boat for dinner. You will go to the little inn on the edge of the quay and CRETE 17 order your meal on the unstable wooden balcony that juts over the water. As dusk falls, the lights from the black hull of your steamer throw spirals of gold into the smooth harbour ; each fishing boat shines like a glow- worm with its single light ; strange great moths of mauve and white and brown come round your little lamp. You lean your arms on the balcony and hear the waves against the wall. " It's as good as Venice," you say to yourself, " only — so much better." There are plenty of boats, Austrian, Italian, or coasting Greek steamers, to carry you on from Canea to Candia. A short intermediate stop will be made at Retimo, a town of local importance only. It lies higher than Canea and Candia, and looks more of a fortress as it rises from the sea — steep rocks crowned with the sloping Venetian ramp. It is the port of a large agricultural district, the capital of one of the four nomarchies of Crete. Cretan geography is delightfully simple. The island is so narrow that it is divided into four quarters, the divisions running north and south from sea to sea, each comprising a block of mountain and a northern port. Fii-st comes Canea and the White Mountains. Next Retimo with Mount Ida. Third Candia and Lasithi (but Mount Ida cannot help overlooking the Candia district as well as her own territory), and fourthly Hagios Nikolaos with the Sitia mountains and the port of Sitia (both mountains and port of less importance than those in the first three nomarchies). These divisions go back certainly to Venetian times, and probably earlier. Each capital is near a Roman site. Canea as we saw, answered to Cydonia ; Retimo is the classical Rethymnos ; Candia was the port for Knossos, and Hagios Nikolaos is on the site of Lato, one of the many small states of Eastern Crete. Candia approached from the sea seems a more compact edition of Canea, without its African element. Here the 18 DAYS IN ATTICA Venetian walls hug the town more closely and enclose a smaller pool or harbour. It used to be the capital of the island, but since Canea was chosen as the seat of Govern- ment, Candia has a certain lofty provincialism that does not make it less attractive. There are fewer minarets against the sky-line j there is less bustle on the quay than at Canea, yet on the whole its situation is more impressive. The Venetian fortification goes sheer down into the water — a magnificent front for the breakers. The town lies tilted with a slope towards the sea, that goes far to justify the perspective of those mediaeval artists whose pictures show every building in the town. Indeed, this sloping view of the city with the wall enclosing it, and the sea washing its rampart, always makes the approach to Candia seem Uke stepping into the inset of a sixteenth- century map. II IN THE CANDIA MUSEUM But mediaeval Candia must wait until the prehistoric treasures have been seen — treasures that have made the island famous, revealing it as the threshold of Greek history, nay more, as a complete cycle of history in itself. The collection is housed in a great white building standing to the east of the town, a conspicuous landmark as one approaches from the sea. Here is shown practically everything of interest that has been found in the island, making a series so com- plete that no other European museum (except perhaps Copenhagen) can rival it as a collection of national antiquities. It is true that Admiral Spratt collected a good many marbles of the classical period which are now in the British Museum or at Cambridge, but the vein of prehistoric antiquities had not been struck in his CRETE 19 day, and it is the series of Bronze Age finds that is the glory of this treasure-house. For some time it had been suspected that Crele^had played a great part in the Mycenaean age^^but it was not until 1895 that Milchlofer's guess was verified. In this year Sir Arthur Evans explored Cretan villages, collected the " milk-stones " worn as charms by the peasant- women, and after studying the signs engraved upon them, came to the conclusion that there must have been a system of prehistoric writing in the island. While Crete was under Turkish rule it was hopeless to think of excavating, but he bought the hill of Kephala (Knossos) and staked out a claim against the day when it might be possible to excavate. The emancipation of Crete came earlier even than he had expected. In 1898 the island was occupied by the troops of the Allied Powers, and early in 1900 he and Mr. Hogarth began to dig in and around the Palace of Knossos. Almost at the same time Professor Halbherr lit upon a palace of the same period at Phaistos, less than thirty miles to the south-west. Other workers flocked to Crete, and from each excava- tion came new treasures for the collection. In ten years the nucleus formed in Turkish days by a patriotic group of local antiquaries had grown to a museum of world- wide fame. In those early days the moving spirit in that little society was a young doctor, Joseph Hazzidakis. To-day he is Director-General of Antiquities throughout the island and Keeper of the Candia Museum. He sits at the centre of the web, keeping touch with all that goes on in the different fields of excavation, assimilating new know- ledge and arranging new material, befriending the Euro- pean students who come to study in the museum, and directing the excavations that the museum yearly makes on its own account. He has the dignity characteristic of the older generation of Cretans. Like others who 20 DAYS IN ATTICA have lived through the stormy times vaguely referred to as " the troubles," he has gained a quiet and cheerful self-reliance. Before the enrolment of the Cretan militia, the old Turkish barracks were used as the museum. The ancient Greek inscriptions were stored away in the disused rifle racks where somehow they seemed more at home than in the lofty halls which have now been built for them by some Greek architect dreaming of classical temples. Outside the museum, door a row of Greco-Rom^n statues stand in exile. Once they were the pride of the collection : now they are turned into the cold to make room for the new wonders. Without even pausing to look at these, one mounts the staircase to the main hall where the prehistoric finds are skilfully arranged. There is something dramatic in the way in which the bronze " double-axe " set on a high pedestal dominates the hall. All the most striking objects are thus placed on isolated stands and the eye is helped in every way. Much time and thought have gone to making cotrect restorations. Instead of broken fragments lying in trays the clay vases have been put together ; the glorious stone basins, jars, and stands are restored to their original splendour. The frescoes are made intelligible by sketchy outlines filling in the missing pieces. Knowledge gained from one painting is used to help out another. A delicate ivory carving of a diving boy is placed in an upright glass case in which he is held poised in just the diver's posi- tion. The larger objects, great bronze cauldrons, painted sarcophaghi, and decorated jars are given less conspicuous places. The finer painted ware, the porcelain plaques and figurines, the seals, ornaments, gems, and all small objects needing close scrutiny, are set out in the best light in the central glass cases. The arrangement is not chronological but topographi- cal. The finds from Knossos are grouped nearest the CRETE 21 entrance and continue half-way down the hall. Objects from the neighbourhood of Phaistos are to the right, and so forth. It is useless to describe the position in detail, for the number of new finds each year necessitates constant re-arrangement. For the same reason no satis- factory catalogue can be published, and it is well to take some modern book to read on the spot. For English readers Burrows' " Discoveries in Crete " and Hawes' " Crete the Forerunner " are useful. Here I only mention a few of the most conspicuous objects. From Knossos comes the large gaming-board that catches one's eye on first entering, noticeable for its light blue and crystal inlay, combined with silver and gold and ivory. The design of the board is as elaborate as the ornament, pointing to an age like our own, when the art of amusement had become a complicated study. Yet this table belongs to a day that was old when Homer sang. Here is a set of small faience plaques showing dwelling houses two and three stories high, some with gable roofs and black timber wall-beams not unlike the "black and white " houses of Western Britain. Wood must have been plentiful when these houses were built, for timber is freely used. The round ends of the tree boles make decorative fines in the outer surface of the wall. Case after case is filled with pottery as graceful in out- line as the vases of later Greece. Most of them are decorated with rich glaze ornament in red or brown. The designer of to-day is beginning to find here a wealth of new suggestions. There are conventional patterns of scroll and spiral : sketches of growing flowers, a crocus or an iris, indicated by swift strokes of a brush handled with a deftness of touch almost Japanese ; shell and seaweed and the eight-armed polypus show possi- bilities of twirl and whorl that our own age has passed by. The colouring is for the most part bright and 22 DAYS IN ATTICA effective. Here and there, time or chance, or some deeper artistic understanding has attained a masterpiece of mellow harmonies. Look, for instance, at some of the Zakro bowls and jugs where the colours blend from orange to rose, or at this frescoed olive in the glass case beside the door. It is only a small fragment with the design of an olive branch on a square foot of plaster. Each leaf is laid on in one light, detached stroke, and the colours are a harmony of cream, pale turquoise, and bronze. If art is "crystallized delight," here is a real work of art telling of the maker's joy in this sombre spray. But it is not only their work, it is the people them- selves who are here. Draw aside the hoUand screens that cover the frescoes on the entrance wall, and there are the men and women of three or four thousand years ago, in colours almost as gay as when they were first painted, and drawn with a surprising swing and sharpness of characterization. The men are tall, nude, bronzed. They carry them- selves like kings. Their long hair curls over bare shoulders and touches a tight metal waist-belt. Their faces are beardless and aglow with vigour. The women (drawn, it must be admitted, by an inferior artist) look petite and effeminate, with large black eyes and mocking red lips. Here, as in all ancient art, the flesh of the men is red, the women white, and the convention corresponds to a difference of life and habit ; these men were hardy, open-air fellows, and the women delicate stay-at-homes. Even the "king " wears nothing in addition to his feather crown but a loin-cloth and belt, whereas all the women are over-dressed, over-decorated, over-curled, and, I am sure, over-scented. The women's quarters in the Palace at Knossos tell the same story. They are carefully planned, beautifully painted, and elaborately secluded. The pleasant eastern terrace, where the queen and her FKiURE OF SXAKK-CHARMKK FOUND AT KNOSSOS CRETE 23 ladies could walk, is screened from observation from the other parts of the palace. And yet, looking at the sprightly profiles on these frescoes, one realizes that the seclusion was not due to jealous Orientalism, but rather to a form of Minoan chivalry that sheltered a fine bloom of its civilization. These Minoan ladies are well educated. They have heard talk of men and affairs, and their delicate little noses have grown a slight upward tilt to mark their conscious superiority. The fresco with the massed tiers of women's faces shows that they were allowed to visit public amusements — bull-fights perhaps. They often laughed. And they often, Ariadne-like, took the law into their own hands and interfered successfully in affairs of state. There is something awe-inspiring in the wonderful porcelain figures, in big busby hats and furbelow petticoats, who brandish snakes and stare with fierce black eyes. Here is femininism run riot. Are they votaries of some ancient mother-goddess, or of the goddess Fashion only ? (Plate i.) The frescoes of the lily-white ladies suggest questions of life inside the palace. But what of the larger world outside ? What was the fabric of Empire on which rested all this finished social life ? This ruddy cup- bearer, he knows the answer. He stands here alert and smiling, his dark hair curling to his waist, his body slightly thrown back to balance the weight of the large golden cup that he carries : on his wrist the seal worn as a bracelet shows that he is some palace official. He tells the story of some great thalassocracy — a sea-empire. That is why the Minoan settlements lie unfortified : that is why their men are sunburned and virile, their women splendidly dressed, and their homes magnificent luxurious, secure : that is why their decoration loves the sea-creatures — the flying-fish, the octopus, the coral, the trumpet shell. 24 DAYS IN ATTICA Early in Neolithic times, whilst the rest of Europe vras still in a state of barbarism, there lived round the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean a race of men — small, swarthy, and long-headed — who already showed them- selves artists, traders, and explorers. While Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt were each in turn rulers of the world, Crete had its empire also, not like these others, an empire of vast land territory, but a thalassocracy ruling the sea and the sea coasts, suppressing piracy and carry- ing on its trade with places as far apart as Ethiopia and Central Europe, as Assyria and Sicily. An island-empire, dependent solely on its power at sea, drawing its wealth from its native industry as well as from commerce — the historic parallel that at once suggests itself is that of England under Queen Elizabeth. One might fancy that the temper of the people was also somewhat similar — active, breezy, adventurous ; fond of sport, fond of dress, fond of dancing and amusement. The capital of this Cretan empire lay on the northern coast at Knossos, three miles from Candia. Other towns fringed the shores of the island, and settlements were made on the mainland of Greece and on the islands of the JEgean. The name of Minos is as proverbial in these waters as was afterwards the name of Solomon further east. He seems in the end to become the embodiment of all this far-reaching Cretan civilization ; and it is not unlikely that Minos became a kind of general title such as Pharaoh. An adjective has been coined from it and archaeologists divide the time of Cretan rule into Early, Middle, and Late Minoan periods. Outside the capital of Knossos the island must have borne a rich population. Fisherfolk fringed the shores ; smaller trading centres grew up in the few sheltered bays ; inland a population of farmers lived in solidly- built homesteads cultivating corn and oil. In the later days of the Minoan Empire the wealthy ruling classes CRETE 25 had homes in the country and lived in beautiful villas such as those unearthed at Hagia Triada, on the south side of the island. Near it another palace has been excavated by the Italians (at Phaistos), which shows that here also was a great Minoan centre. Homer speaks of " hundred-citied Crete," and the extent of its trade tells the same story. The settlements of this age are unforti- fied. Those were the old spacious days when expansion of trade did not inevitably imply collision with the interests of other nations. From fishermen the Cretans became traders and soon monopolized the carrying-trade of the .(Egean. By its position their island was well suited for this role. The high civilization of Egypt and Assyria met in Crete the instinctive artistic excellence of the Mediterranean peoples, mingled perhaps with some northern element that gave stability to the race. At all events the result was the production of a new civilization much tinged with Egyptian influence, but showing itself both in religion and in art simpler and more human than any- thing that came from Egypt. At Knossos one generation of artists succeeded another. Their painted ware and goldsmiths' work were prized throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Their ships carried objects of art to other countries and brought home metals from the North, ivory and spices from the East. The character of their rule must at one time have been something like that of our East India Company — peaceful on the whole, fighting when necessary, not for territory but for trade. As the carriers of the Mediterranean they seem to have held the same position as that taken by the Phcsnicians. in later days. No doubt Crete was to Egypt the land of romance, the Ultima Thule of their world. It and the other ^gean lands are spoken of on the Egyptian inscriptions by vague suggestives names : " the Ends of the Lands of the 26 DAYS IN ATTICA Great Circle," the " Isles in the midst of the Very Green Sea." The long-haired, naked Cretans, with their beauti- ful wares, hailing from this distant land, struck the historian's fancy as something picturesque and unusual in Egypt, the land of flowing robes and stately head-gear. On the tomb of Rek-ma-ra, vizier to a Thothmes of the Eighteenth Dynasty, there is painted a procession of Keftians bringing gifts. They are naked, long-haired, slender ; blood-brothers to the cupbearer from Knossos. For some 2,500 years Crete was supreme in the ^gean. Naturally in so long a space of time there were inter- ruptions and disastrous incidents. Many of these have left their mark in the blackened walls and charred remains found at different successive levels in the palace of Minos ; on the whole, however, it seems that revolu- tions from within are more often responsible for these catastrophes than invasion from without. The invasions such as there were left no permanent scar since neither language nor religion were essentially altered. Ultimately a change came over the .^Egean world and the centre of gravity passed from Crete to the mainland. About the middle of the fifteenth century B.C. Knossos was destroyed and sacked, and though reinhabited, never regained her former importance. Of the empire's long death struggle we know nothing, and for the catastrophe itself there is only the evidence of the blackened stones, and the sacked palace from which all the precious metals were looted. The story of Theseus embodies the memory of this civilization. It shows that the Greeks remembered a power alien, terrible, and splendid ; that they remem- bered a time when the ruler of Crete was in a position to exact the most mortifying tribute from Greece— a blood-tax of slaves from the youth of the nation. The excavations at Knossos have made it possible to illustrate this old legend from actual remanis. We picture the CEETE 27 long, open boat beached on the little bay beside the port of Candia, the convoy of youths and maidens from Athens, with Theseus, the king's son, among them, and the five miles of dusty open country across which they were driven to the great palace of King Minos at Knossos. This palace is made real to us by the actual remains excavated by Sir Arthur Evans, which still stand in some places as much as three stories high. For the most part it is made of a white gypsum, whose tiny crystals dance and twinkle in the sun. A palace of diamonds it must have been when Theseus saw it. It is fronted by a paved open space, finished with tiers of low steps. The steps do not lead into the palace, and seem more probably to have been placed there as seats for spectators. The open space in front would therefore serve as a kind of primitive theatre or dancing ground. Inside is the huge central court, surrounded by offices of state, the grand staircase and the throne-room in which there stands the chair of state on which King Minos sat, with stone benches for his counsellors round the wall. Beyond the throne-room is an elaborate series of offices and passages which are quite complicated enough to have served for the basis of the legend that this palace was a great labyrinth in which King Minos kept his monster the Minotaur ; and behind these again is the wide corridor backed by an imposing array of storehouses filled with jars of baked clay, each large enough to hide one of Ali Baba's thieves. Underground vaults there are too, and in these the prisoners would be housed until they were brought out to make sport for the royal household by an unequal contest with the bulls of King Minos. Various frescoes and reliefs found on the palace walls, which show that bull-baiting was a favourite sport at Knossos, may still be seen in the museum at Candia. In one relief the head of a bull is splendidly executed 28 DAYS IN ATTICA in red plaster. A fresco shows a bull charging a girl athlete (Plate 2). A boy is turning a somersault on the animal's back, and another girl stands behind in an attitude indicating that her performance is safely over. These are no doubt professional toreadors who could take part in the sport with a fair chance of success if the bull were in any way trained for his part. The legend of the man-destroying Minotaur suggests a more barbarous pastime, when captives were led out to fight against a bull so fierce that their death was a certainty. It is for this that Theseus and his friends were stowed away in the innermost recesses of the palace. Then in the dear old story the heart of the Princess Ariadne is stirred with pity. Has she seen the file of fair-haired Greeks marched into the palace ? and has it been a case of love at first sight as her eyes singled out the prince among his comrades ? or has a rumour of his voluntary sacrifice touched her ? At nightfall she leaves her painted bedroom in the women's quarters under the eastern slope of the hill. She steals up the wide staircase and halts a moment before crossing the moonlit space of the great court. In her hand there gleams one of those famous Minoan swords with beautiful inlay along the blade and a design in low relief on the golden hilt. She finds her way to the prisoners' quarters, helps Theseus to kill the Minotaur, and then fearing the wrath of King Minos flies with Theseus and his companions to the sea, and together they embark for Greece. The story of Theseus's subsequent wanderings does not concern us here. It is hard to forgive the hero for leaving Ariadne desolate on Delos, still harder to forgive him for neglect- ing to hoist the white sail that was to betoken his success, and so save his father, old ^geus, from that despairing leap of suicide as he saw the black sail coming up the gulf. Naturally the legend is rounded off and polished as all PLA TE [[ O o b s \ 'J. ' CRETE 29 legends must be that have been tossed to and fro in the sea of tradition some three or four thousand years. It is only as a legend that it can be accepted. Still it is something that recent excavations have shown that what need not be true historically may still be true pictorially ; the great empire of Minos, his terrible bulls, his bewilder- ing palace, and the tribute of young Greeks, all these give an impression quite in harmony with the civilization of the Minoan Empire revealed at Knossos, The numerous colour reliefs that show the very appearance of these old inhabitants of Crete have displaced rather crudely the vague dignified figures of our imagination. Instead of a grim, shadowy Minos, the gloomy judge of the underworld, the only king of Crete that we know is the youthful stalwart king in the fresco, with an elaborate head-dress surmounted by peacock's feathers, a crown of almost barbaric magnificence. What robes of state he wore we cannot tell. The male figures in Minoan art are nude except for a loin-cloth, metal girdle, and high boots. They wear long hair hanging down their backs. And Ariadne ? How are we to picture her ? Not in flowing Grecian draperies, but in elaborate Minoan costume, a costume that can be described only in the terms of the modern modiste. A tight-fitting jacket-bodice cut low in front to show the breasts, a very small waist, an elaborately gathered " bell-skirt," covered either with embroideries or with rows of flounces, a high brimless black hat that is something between the hat of a Greek priest and a soldier's busby ; this is the figure of the Minoan lady that has become familiar on gems and rings and in the little porcelain figures found in an , underground shrine at Knossos. Or if the steeple-hat befits only the priestess or the witch, Ariadne may wear instead a disc of straw with roses under the brim, like those of the terra-cotta ladies from Palaikastro. 30 DAYS IN ATTICA III THE VENETIANS IN CANDIA There are many places to love, but few to be in love with. The little port of Candia is one of those few that can kindle this passionate affection. Small and full of colour as a jewel, it holds in little compass an intensity of life. It seems less a harbour than a haven — not a busy centre of wholesale trade, but a refuge for all small craft running before the northern gales. Its entrance is a " needle's eye " for shipping, and none but the humble can pass its seaward gate. Steamers must wait outside, and the long-striding breakers of the " Very Green Sea " tumble mercilessly the heavy shore boats in which passengers land. But once inside the sloping batter of the Venetian walls there is a blue pool of peace, girdled with the swinging curves of the fishing craft and fringed with their intricate cordage. The Venetian ramparts rise out of the still water. A disused fort punctuates the end of the wall at the narrow harbour mouth. Useless as a fortification, it is invaluable as an ornament, for its light stonework catches the colours of dawn and evening and sends them down into the trembling waters of the harbour among the rainbow tints of the craft. Large boats cannot enter this cosy anchorage, so the caiques have it all to themselves. Goods for the more important towns are carried by regular steamers. The sailing boats supply the needs of the hundred smaller islands. I have seen one caique carrying a piano, and another laden with rush-bottomed chairs. It takes many chairs to make a cargo, and after the hold of the ship was filled they piled themselves on the poop and even began to climb the rigging, where they were lashed with cords. No effort was made to protect CRETE 31 them from the water, and I wondered in what plight they would reach their journey's end. A cargo of un- glazed earthenware jars seemed to have even less chance of a happy arrival, since they also were travelling as deck passengers. There is still an Italian element in this old Venetian port. A couple of boats from Bari, larger and better manned than the Cretan caiques, have their home here, and almost monopolize the fishing, for the Candiots are by nature sailors rather than fishermen. These Bari boats may be seen any fine afternoon swinging round the harbour mouth. Even before the anchors are let down a dozen brown boys scamper up the rigging, and sit like monkeys on the lateen sails which they furl with hands and feet. Then there is the slim grey schooner which comes periodically from Sicily, bringing the precious sulphur for the vines, and gradually filling the harbour with her pale primrose dust. As soon as she is moored, planks are placed from her bulwarks to the shore, and over these a succession of half-naked brown figures run nimbly up and down. They wear sacks over their heads, and on these sacks they carry the bags of sulphur, which they pitch on to the backs of waiting donkeys. The process of unloading lasts a week or more, and by the time it is over the men are yellow, the donkeys are yellow, and the street from the harbour to the town is powdered with soft yellow dust. It is a fair sight, even at noonday, but wait till evening adds her own primrose light to the harmony and then see what magic that Sicilian sulphur ship has brought. Various captains saunter round the harbour, as beautiful as their boats and as miscellaneous as their cargoes. What cut-throats they look ! Yet most of them are really decent, hard-working fellows. This tawny giant, who wears a shirt of red flannel printed with large white lozenges, is the brother of our own housemaid. She 32 DAYS IN ATTICA speaks of him proudly as a " reformed pirate," and though I question both the reform and the piracy, I have no doubt that his innocent-looking blue and green Ariadne has seen some odd cargoes on her decks. I myself have seen a couple of hundred rifles carried on board at dusk. This is the romance of the retail traffic of the sea. Think of the adventures awaiting each man who owns a boat — the luck of the seas, the sudden squalls, the tempestuous venture, the safe return or the unknown end. Think of the little white towns hovering over their own watery reflections as they wait for these small consignments of civilization borne to them on the pointed golden wings of the caique. The spirit of the port has changed little since Venetian days. Then, as now, it was the scene of a hundred little activities. The Cretan galleys of the fifteenth century were merchantmen belonging to private owners. They exported the hot Cretan wine, honey, wax, cheese, cotton, and carved chests ; and brought Ijack glass, tapestry, brocade, spices, and perfumes from the East. These were not all for home consumption. They were often for further distribution, for Crete was an entrepot of Mediterranean traffic. In those days Crete was obliged to furnish Venice with two armed galleys for six months' service in the Adriatic. These were boats of private adventurers chartered and armed with boatmen at the expense of the Cretan Govern- ment. The Venetian archives are full of documents relating to these boats and to the commerce of Crete. They give a vivid picture of the Cretan captain waiting till the sea is clear of Genoese ships, darting up the Adriatic, offering tenders to the Venetian Senate, receiv- ing the cargo which is to be carried perhaps as far as Syria, and then leaving the lagoons with a certain fixed itinerary to which he must absolutely adhere. There was to be no turning aside to snap up a chance cargo, or some CRETE 33 Venetian ship-owner might suffer. Venice was jealous of the privileges of her own ships, and the preference given to them was often the subject of formal complaint. She taxed the Cretan merchants heavily, and crippled enterprise by her grudging legislation. No Cretan ship could leave the harbour of Venice without consent of the Senate. At one time Crete was forbidden to grow its own corn lest it should become too independent ; at another the export of cypress wood was forbidden, lest the supply for ship-building should be exhausted. This last piece of legislation was made in the true interest of the island, but it was none the less galling to the merchants who suffered by it. In 1204 at the partition of the Eastern Empire (p. 217) Crete fell to the share of the Marquis of Montserrat, who sold it to the Venetians for one thousand marks of silver. The price does not seem excessive, though he parted with a sovereignty that was purely nominal. Venice having paid for Crete in hard cash treated the island as a mere business speculation. She taxed it as much as it could bear, and in return she protected the harbours and gave the country a government strictly impartial in its harsh- ness. To the Cretans she appeared a rapacious mistress. It was not till her protection was withdrawn that they found how much they had owed to her. In appearance Venice still rules the harbour. The Lion of St. Mark frowns a battered frown on the barefooted urchins who chase each other round the string-course of the old fort. On entering the custom-house any traveller who, at that exciting moment has eyes for the past, will readily see that the modern douane is built against the end of one of the Venetian galley-houses. The dark recesses of the interior, now used for storing bales, are covered by mediaeval vaults. The galley-houses are mostly in ruins, but one other still keeps its roof whole, and is conspicuous among the snialler buildings of the 34 DAYS IN ATTICA harbour. In Venetian days there were more than a dozen such here. They stood like gigantic stables down by the waterside, much as the ship-sheds for the Athenian triremes bordered the harbour of the Piraeus. Under these high-spanned vaults the Cretan galleys were built and repaired. The size of the building gives the scale of the boats they housed; the high, upcurving hulls with their fin-like sweep of oars, the heavy, square-rigged masts, and the towers for archers in the prow. In the fifteenth century Candia had some fame as a ship-build- ing centre, and Venice ordered boats of the prized cypress wood to be built here for her own use. The Venetian town of Candia is now deeply embedded in the later Turkish houses, but here and there a corner of Venice comes to the surface. If once one begins to look out for her it is astonishing how often the West smiles out through the Eastern veil. The mosques cover churches. Turkish houses are set on Venetian founda- tions. A narrow Turkish street may hold a cloister wall, or a text from the Koran adorn an Italian fountain. One notable instance of Venetian work is the doorway, with a design of grapes and acanthus, hidden in a narrow street below the Eastern Telegraph office. Arches and plinths that must have belonged to the same Italian build- ing can be traced far down the side lanes. The luxury of telegraphing to England costs twopence-halfpenny a word, but considering this exquisite stonework at its entrance, and the panorama of sea and harbour from its windows, the telegraph office might safely double its rate without losing our custom. Across the middle of the present town there runs a solid line of masonry sometimes known as the old Genoese wall. The name is picturesque, but since the Genoese were only masters of Candia for five years it is not likely that they did more than set hand to the building. It probably represents the wall of the first CRETE 35 small Venetian settlement. It can be traced from the plateau in front of the old St, George's Gate, now known as the "Square of the Three Arches" (Tris Kamarais Square), to the open market-place in the centre of the town. Here it is interrupted for a space, then it continues again in the line of police barracks, after which it vanishes. The wall is made of a coarse yellow tufa, not beautiful, but solid and venerable. There are traces of towers set in the wall about 90 feet apart. Small houses have grown about its ruined top, gay and irregular as the yellow marigolds that have also come there uninvited. The bit of the wall that runs from the Tris Kamarais Square is broken by many small doors. Push open one of these, scramble over a heap of masonry or up a flight of garden steps and you will find yourself in the yard of a little house which is set on the top of the old wall. Like many another precious bit of old Candia the Genoese wall is fast disappearing. Between one visit and another we found a piece of it pulled down to make way for a modern house, whose owner preferred to use the old stones for a new building instead of perching airily on the top of the wall in the good old style. When the Venetian settlement outgrew the narrow space enclosed by the sea and this first line of wall, a number of houses settled outside the town and then the fortification of this larger burgh had to be con- sidered. The old wall was found "not only useless but also inconvenient and a hindrance," and in 1541 the Italian engineer, Michele Sammichele, proposed destroying it altogether "since the material would be useful for finishing the new fortifications." The dwellers within the older town resented this attack on their privileges, and a compromise was arrived at. The old wall was left standing, but one large breach was made for the main stream of traffic as well as a few smaller 36 DAYS IN ATTICA openings at stated intervals along the wall. The " great breach " which was perhaps on the site of the old gate- way was now "embellished with a fine arch" and the open space behind it became the main square of the town. In this square was placed the beautiful fountain which is still the chief feature of Candia ; it has eight bays carved with tritons, dolphins, and sea nymphs. Four lions set back to back with water running from their mouths supplied the large basin. There is little water in the fountain now and the lions' mouths are grievously dry. The relation of the old wall to the newer outer wall is an amusing little bit of history ; the line of demarcation is always so jealously guarded by those dwelling within the pale, so scoffed at by those outside. Gerola in his fascinating volumes on the Venetian architecture of Crete has gathered together many documents bearing on this period. There were endless negotiations between the Cretan Government and the Venetian Senate as to the repair of the old wall and the building of the new. In 1465 the Cretan Government reports that it i^ " absolutely impossible to continue the building of the walls and towers " with the system then in vogue. The Senate replies by advising a new method of raising money : the expenses for the new fortifications are to be apportioned as follows, "one half from the nobles, feudatories, and citizens, and the other half from the Cretan Government and the Jews." Before long comes an appeal from Candia for more money and also for iron tools which are " difficult to procure in the island," and a notification that the gate in the old wall is "so weak that it could not be weaker." To judge from the depressing tone of these documents one would imagine that the work was almost at a standstill, yet in 1491 a German pilgrim, Dietrich von Schachten, writes that the Venetians have a "beautiful big town CRETE 37 ditch" and are making strong buildings upon it. Throughout the whole of the next century the people of Candia were busy with their fortifications. In fact the work never came to an end so long as the Venetians occupied the town. Now it is the sea that has ruined a bit of the mole and now the introduction of cannon has revolutionized the science of fortification and a new series of earthworks and redoubts have become necessary. From one cause or another completion was delayed. But still these great city walls are the proudest relic of the Venetian occupation. They will last while Candia lasts. There is something Roman in their magnificent permanence ; they remain an enduring protest against everything shoddy and mean. Where Venice came she meant to stay and when she built she built for futurity. St. Mark's Lion set on gate and bastion seems to proclaim the pleasure of an artist signing a work that he knows to be good. While this work was going on outside, the interior of the town was also being enriched with good public buildings. Around the fountain square the old plans of Candia show the palace of the Duke, and the palace of the Grand Captain (the Duke being Governor of the whole island and the Grand Captain responsible only for the military welfare of the department of Candia). There was also the great Church of San Marco and other municipal buildings, including an armoury. All of these have disappeared except the church (which, as usual, has been turned into a mosque) and the armoury, which has had a varied history and which may still be seen a hundred paces further down the main street. It has been badly treated, but two beautiful arcades still remain. In order to mark the withdrawal of the Turkish troops in 1898 a large public library was planned, which should incorporate the fapade of this Venetian armoury. The work had already been begun when it was found that 38 DAYS IN ATTICA the old walls would not bear the strain of the new building. The plan was abandoned and the armoury to-day stands uncertain of its fate. Its front is covered with whitewash, its lower arcade blocked with modern masonry; but there is something fine in the sweep of its walls with their unmistakable Venetian batter and string-course, and even in ruin the arcades are good to look at. Behind them rises a lily-like minaret, showing its little red flag for the hour of prayer by day and a lamp for the evening prayer. The town is rich in Italian churches now used as mosques. The most beautiful of these is the Venetian Church of Santa Catarina, which stands near the gate of Gesu. You pass through this gate on the way out to Knossos. The church is a large basilica-like building, and one wonders if even in Venetian days a congregation could have been found to fill it, yet it was by no means their largest church. The Moslems have now boarded off one half of the interior to serve as an apotheke for mosque furniture — a queer collection of old benches and lamps and banners. The partition wall and the other woodwork of the mosque at the end of the building are painted in soft, faded tones of emerald and turquoise. The floor is carpeted with pale yellow matting and above there are rows of tiny lights set low. A raised dais leads up to the Moslem Holy of Holies, which has been placed cornerwise across the east end of the church that it may point to Mecca and not to Jerusalem. Beside it the invariable mosque clock with Turkish dial swings an enormous pendulum, and all around shine the intricacies of blue and purple tilework. It is these Persian tiles that are the glory of the present building, and have earned fame for it as the Blue Mosque of Candia, Evening service in this mosque is an unforgettable experience. All is in gloom except the east end where cool tiles mirror the few tiny lights. Here, while their leader reads from the CEETE 39 Koran, half a dozen stately old Moslems stand, or bend, or prostrate themselves. There are silent pauses while the long figures stoop and kiss the ground. No music and no word from the congregation, only the one droning voice and the intervals of silence. At the foot of the old square, outside the Blue Mosque, are fragments of a marble screen and headless Christian saints, who were probably turned out to make way for the Persian tiles. They were once adapted to the uses of a fountain, but its basin is now dry and the saints guard only the lettuces and artichokes of a little vegetable stall that has come to live beside them. The mosque on the site of that which was once the Church of San Marco is worth visiting for the sake of the odd column bases in the interior. They are shaped like inverted Corinthian capitals; On the steps of this mosque a number of old Turkish ladies sit cross-legged beside piles of home-woven goods : carpets, aprons, and gay stockings, which they offer for sale. They are very friendly and very merry, and they seem to enjoy themselves in their shady corner where they can gossip and watch the life of the square. Another old church which apparently was too much ruined by the siege to serve as a mosque is the Church of San Rocco, which stands down by the port. It seems to have been round in plan with a cloister outside. The cloister now serves for a mason's yard, and is full of Turkish tombstones. The church itself is a mere store- house. A church of San Rocco always betokens Venetian occupation. A native of Montpelier, San Rocco (Saint Roch) lived in the fourteenth century. He travelled throughout Italy and showed wonderful powers of nursing and healing the plague-stricken. After death his remains, treasured at Montpelier, continued to work miracles in cases of epidemic. Venetians, with their numerous possessions in the Levant, were particularly likely to suffer 40 DAYS IN ATTICA from the plague, and in the fifteenth century a party of pious Venetians, visiting Montpelier as pilgrims, managed to steal the saint's body. This was brought to Venice with great rejoicing. A church and hospital was founded for the saint, and Tintoretto's glowing frescoes are still to be seen on the walls of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice. Whether the stolen relics continue to work miracles in their new surroundings we are not told. At all events, here in Candia his church is set with intention close down by the harbour. Plague always comes first to a port, and before reaching the town that deadly enemy would find itself confronted with a saint who had the reputation of a specialist in such matters. In 1645 the Turks invested the town and for twenty- four years the city walls stood the test of the longest siege in history. An interesting memorial of this siege is found beside a little open square in the south-west corner of the town. Here is a pretty fountain decorated with four Corinthian capitals and bearing a Latin inscription dated 1666. This tells how the Providatore Generale Antonius Piolus obtained a new source of water for the citizens and gave them this fountain after the town had been besieged " four times five years," when the water supply seemed about to fail. IV CANDIA OF TO-DAY The Candia of to-day still looks like a Turkish town, though a few modern " European " buildings are rising. One notes with sadness that new houses imitate those of modern Athens and forsake the pleasant courtyard style so appropriate to a hot climate. A European house has its best face to the street; a Moslem's house turns its back CRETE 41 to the public, A passer-by would hardly guess at the jars of growing flowers, the fountains, fruit trees, and courts of inlaid pebbles that wait behind the closed doors in those blank, high walls. The heart of the town is still the market-place outside the Turkish gate. Sometimes one hears the square dignified by the name At Meidan, much as if one came across a Trafalgar Square in some small Indian province. To it all the traffic converges, and from it the roads branch off north, south, east, and west. It is good to turn here about eight o'clock in the morning, to find the market smelling of hot loaves, and to watch the world buying its breakfast. Rings of bread on trays, fruit, vegetables, and mizethra on the stalls, baskets of fish from the harbour, and basins of white Turkish curd ; here they are appealing to eyes and nostrils, and to ears too, for each salesman cries his wares with its own especial adjective : " Shellfish of the moment," "Beautiful oranges," " Fresh bread," are shouted up and down the street, Thegiaourti seller alone does not need to call for attention. In his yellow shirt and green stockings he walks silently by, balancing on his head a triple tray, and each tray bears a dozen basins of curds. Whatever our nationality we all rush to buy giaourti. The trays are emptied almost as soon as he appears. The world here is more magnificently staged and dressed than in a theatre. There is hardly a black coat to be seen. The Cretans are still proud of their national costume ; their hanging breeches, and waist- coats with converging lines of buttons. They carry themselves magnificently, with a slight swagger that sets the dark blue drapery swinging and displays broad shoulders and slim hips. Round the thin Cretan waist a thick red or purple sash is wound. The countrymen wear top-boots, black or yellow, according to the season ; the to\Vnsmen prefer a pair of tight stockings in some 43 DAYS IN ATTICA exquisite rainbow shade of apricot, canary, or green. It is no good hoping to possess such stockings yourself. They are no more to be bought to order than the rain- bow itself. No shop sells them, but "sometimes you find a man who brings them to the town." This was all the information we could gather, and though visiting Candia at all seasons of the year we never saw that swarthy pedlar with his gaudy wares. In a bird's-eye view of the town this market-place would look like the centre of a coloured star, brilliant, clamorous, kaleidoscopic. The rays of the star pierce the side lanes, carrying animation down the " street of the bootmakers," " the street of the tailors," " the street of the hammerers," and so forth. And between the rays are silent blocks of houses, their plaster tinted with beautiful faint old shades of mauve and cream and green ; upper stories launched out across the street on crumbling grey timber supports ; and windows filled with decaying lattice work. The high, blank walls of these Turkish houses give a prisoned feel- ing to the lanes. There is neither bright sunlight nor sharp shadow, but a reflected half-light everywhere. In spring a pervasive smell of orange blossom tells of the gardens hidden behind the walls. Occasionally, a Moslem woman in a black veil flits along, like a black bundle, from one door to another. The sombre effect of the street is heightened by her featureless humanity. It is remarkable how seldom one sees women in the main streets of Candia. The Christian women seem even more home-keeping than the Moslems who have the protection of the veil. "Walking across the market-place in Candia feels like going into the Union without your brother," so I once heard an English girl describe her impression of the Moslem atmosphere in the town. Crete is the land of feuds, the true " Isle of Unrest." In the eighth and ninth centuries it was the Saracens and Byzantines who fought here, then the Genoese and Vene- CRETE 43 tians, then the Venetian and Turk. Now it is Turkey and Greece who claim her, "and the end is not yet." The distinction between Christian and Moslem intrudes itself even before landing. Among the bumping hubbub of boats that flock round the incoming steamer there are always Christian boats for the Christians, and Moslem boats for the Moslem passengers. The Moslem wears a fez or scarlet handkerchief on his head, and twists a red belt round his waist. The Christian prefers the various shades of indigo so freely used on the island and wears a dark sash. The feud is embittered by the fact that here the division is not racial but religious. With a few exceptions the Moslems in Crete are not Turks by birth, but Cretans who embraced Islam at the time of the Turkish conquest. They seem to have belonged to the town population, whose sense of nationality had already been weakened by dependence on the Venetian foreigner. In some cases, perhaps, they had Italian blood in their veins and bore Italian names. Such are still found in the Island : Pasquale, Cornaro — even Dandolo. The countrymen with farms lying unprotected in the lowlands would also wish to gain the protection of the Turk by an outward conformity to his religion. The Moslems, there- fore, are found in and around the larger towns. The hill villages are, and always have been, Christian. One can guess how the hardy Cretan hillsman hated his time- serving brother of the plains. For two centuries these parties have lived side by side, making Crete a sort of political barometer sensitive to record the state of affairs in Europe. The Greek War of Independence was answered by risings of the Christians in 1821 and 1828. The insurrections of 1856-8 and 1869 corresponded to revolutions on the mainland of Europe, especially the long struggle for the liberation of Italy. The Greco-Turkish War opened with the Christian risings of 1896-7. 44 DAYS IN ATTICA The signs of that last outbreak are visible on first land- ing in Candia. The main street leading from the harbour to the square is still in ruins. It was sacked and burned by the Turks as an answer to the rising of 1896. Barrels of petroleum were opened, and flames poured down the sloping street. When I first came here in 1904, the broken walls were as desolate as Pompeii. It is better now, and each year new houses are being built on the old sites. At the foot of this unhappy-looking street there is an open plateau where the Venetian gate lately stood. This gate vanished in 1897, after the "affair of the custom- house," when the British troops who were taking over the Customs from the Turkish authorities were surrounded and killed. The British fleet arrived the next day, and Admiral Noel's wrath is still remembered. He shipped off the whole Turkish garrison, hanged the chief offenders on the town wall, and utterly demolished the gate that had witnessed their treachery. Since that day there has been an exodus of Moslems from the Island ; the well-to- do have settled in Constantinople and other great centres; the artisans seem to have found homes in Asia Minor, where the liquorice trade of Sokhia is in their hands, and on the site of ancient Cyrene where Turkish-speaking Cretans live to-day. Those who still remain in Candia are a friendly, peaceable folk, and perhaps the old jealousies are being forgotten. At our last landing we found a young Turk pulling bow oar in our Christian boat — a sign of better times coming. Now that Cretan deputies are sitting in the Athenian Parliament the fatalistic Moslem population is learning to submit to the inevitable. CRETE 45 PHAISTOS AND COUNTRY TRAVEL Stay in the town of Candia long enough to get by heart its brilliant harmonies ; haunt the museum and dive into its enchanted ocean of history ; visit Knossos and study there the background against wrhich that vivid Minoan civilization moved ; then say good-bye to town life, hire mule or pony, and set out with light pack and lighter heart to enjoy the unsurpassed loveliness of the island in spring. Whether you are interested in archaeology or botany, in geology or in mere human nature, you will find enough to content you in the Cretan countryside. Even if there be time for nothing else, ride across the hills to the great Messara Plain, put up at Gortyna — where you can wash in a Greek sarcophagus, and sleep in a guest-chamber approached by a staircase of ancient Doric capitals — and then ride on next day to Phaistos and Hagia Triada, where Italian scholars have unearthed the homes of the Minoan princes of Southern Crete. In the situation of Phaistos there is something that suggests the Acropolis of Athens. The Messara, like the Cephissian Plain, is oval-shaped, surrounded on three sides by hills and on the fourth by the sea. In both plains the Acropolis is set at the seaward end on a ridge of rock, its sharp front cutting into the valley like a ship's high prow. Here the resemblance ends, for whereas in Athens the white houses of the town rise surf-like around the foot of the cliff, at Phaistos the Acropolis drops to a calm green ex- panse of corn-land. The plain of the Cephissus is stony and dry though olive-studded. The Messara Plain is for months of the year knee-deep in flowers, and has 46 DATS IN ATTICA more spreading olive groves from which rise the chimes of sheep-bells and nightingales. In Athens the Acropolis is a fortress : at Phaistos it is a palace. The Athenian buildings rise conspicuous from every point. At Phaistos the ruins lie low on the lower end of the ridge, and we must turn the crest of the hill before we can look down on the great courtyards, cool terraces, and magnificent tiers of steps. These steps are wonderful, wider and shallower than any modern palace dreams of. Oh, to see one of those supple, swarthy Minoan princes come striding down that staircase ! the processions and the dancing and the ritual of waving boughs! Is there no magic of moonlight that can bring them back to life as we see them on the gold rings and seal stones and vases ? This one great palace did not content those luxurious princes of Phaistos. The Messara Plain becomes an oven during the summer months, and it seems to have been for the sake of escaping the excessive heat that they built another settlement an hour's ride from Phaistos in a cooler spot. On the southern end of the same rocky ridge, with a wide outlook towards the sea on one side and the snows of Ida on the other, the Italians are now excavating a series of villas of the same period as the palace. This group of country houses is now known as Hagia Triada, after the little Venetian Church of the Holy Trinity which was the only building on the spot when the excavations were begun. It is here that the most interesting finds were made. The site proved rich in small objects which had been scarce at Phaistos. The painted sarcophagus, the carved stone vases bearing figures in relief, the ingots of copper stamped with Minoan characters, and many other remains of astonish- ing excellence now to be seen in the Candia Museum, were originally found at Hagia Triada. The well-known fresco of the wild cat stalking a pheasant comes from a set of rooms that may well have CRETE 47 belonged to the princess of the reigning house. Her apartments are set to the north, and from the cool terrace outside there is a view of sea, and snow mountains that sets one thinking of Etna's white slopes against the blue sea and coast of Sicily. The rooms here are small and must have been as exquisite as they were tiny. The little light-well set round with three columns each of a different marble and the diminutive doors and passage suggest the toy-home of a petted little Minoan lady, dainty as Japan and gay as Paris. These palaces of the southern kingdom throw reflected glory on the rulers of Knossos. If princes who were but underlings lived in such luxury, how great their over- lord must have been ! One wonders how close was the connection between north and south. How many times a week, a month, a year, did the messengers from Knossos canter across that wild moorland region and clatter down the rocky gorges of the hill barrier ? That the Minoans had horses is known from a seal impression found at Knossos. It shows a horse — perhaps imported from Africa — being brought to the island in a large open boat. Travel in Crete needs little preparation. Although it is real travel (not a mere committing of yourself to the charge of railway and hotel officials) it brings small hard- ship and much delight. Except at the coast towns, Canea, Retimo, Candia, Sitia, there is no regular inn. In a village of any size hospitality is offered by some well-to-do peasant, who is probably pleased at the novelty of the visit and prides himself on making lavish entertainment. A day's riding in any part of the island will give plunges from one scene to another. At one time you may be on a limestone plateau covered with white boulders and grey scrub. Then you will drop through thickets of myrtle and arbutus to the oleander valley where 48 DAYS IN ATTICA a little cataract tumbles and the nightingales sing at high noon. Constantly in sight of the sea, seldom on the level, and never on a carriage road, the rocky paths of Crete probably follow the tracks used for four thousand years. The famous forests of cypresses and cedars have vanished, and the hills which they once covered are barren. The soil collected by their roots has been washed into the river valleys, leaving the upper slopes to the rocks and rock plants. The flowers belong to three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Even for one who eyes them only as illuminations beside the text of travel they are sufficiently gorgeous. The cities of Crete are made to delight a mediaeval mind. They are surrounded by magnificent walls filled with buildings of Venetian and Turkish architecture with hardly a modern house to be seen. Here there is no gentle yielding of town to country, and, except at Canea, nothing in the way of a suburb. The town has in many cases shrunk back from the city wall, but has never flowed beyond it. Through the dark tunnel of the gate you pass at once into the open country of corn and flowers. The villages have no walls, but they also end abruptly. The houses cluster together for mutual protection. Around them lie the oHve groves and cultivated lands. There are few scattered farm-houses, save in the west of the island. The country between one village and another has an awesome loneliness that reminds one of the days not so very long ago, when battle, murder, and sudden death waited for solitary travellers on the country roads. The country folk are charming. They have simplicity, dignity, humour, and, in the east of the island at any rate, an unvarying friendliness. Class distinctions are for- gotten outside the towns, but it is no drawback to be provided with introductions from Cretan notables. The hospitality offered is various. In one week we were the CRETE 49 guests of a bishop, an abbot, an officer of gendarmerie, and a cheesemonger. In each case we were treated so hospitably that it disturbed us to reflect on the expense and trouble to which our hosts had put themselves and for which we could offer no immediate recompense. - A Cretan April has something of the atmosphere of Chaucer's spring mornings — a certain indescribable, inexplicable hopefulness. The country still seems very young in spite of its four thousand years of civilization. Its new birth counts almost within the decade, and its history is still in the making. Modern events move so fast that each spring sees some fresh development in the political situation. Crete to-day has perhaps something of the charm that drew poets to Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century — the charm of a political drama acted by beautiful people on a beautiful stage. Patriotism is still a passion on this island, for which men died yesterday and are ready to die to-morrow. CHAPTER 11 THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN I NAUPLIA THE approach to the Greek mainland shows a succession of powdery white headlands, barren and shapely. Fertile plains and wooded hills are hidden away inland. Greece fronts the outer world with a classical severity. Her beauty is not the obvious, delicious loveliness of moister climates : it is joy of form rather than wealth of decoration. After the subtle modelling of a grey Greek mountain the Alps seem like nouveaux riches with their unrestrained purples, their noisy gorges, and dazzling heights. Nor would I exchange the nudity of Greece for the luxuriant draperies of Italy. Forgive me, Italy ! The comparison was thrust upon me here by the very name of the bay to which our Greek steamer is heading, Nauplia, " Napoli di Romagna," as the Venetians called it. This little Greek Naples lies at the head of a long gulf almost land-locked by the eastern headlands of Argolis. The rocky island of Spetzia lies like another Capri at the entrance to the bay. The citadel watching the bay, The bay with the town in its arms, The town shining white as the spray Of the sapphire sea-wave on the rock, Where the rock stars the girdle of sea White-ringed .... 60 THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN 51 Had Meredith seen Nauplia in a vision when he wrote those lines ? They are all here : the bay, the citadel, the town, the rock. Behind the town rises the sharp beak of the citadel hill (Palamidi). Here on the Feast of St. Andrew we saw citizens climb at daybreak to celebrate their Panegyris. The fortress on the top is a prison where criminals are kept in barred cells round an open courtyard. Six or seven are shut up together and press for front places at the bars, that they may hold out for sale the bone knives and beads that they have carved. It is a black contrast to the crowd of virtuous citizens who dance on the hill- top a hundred paces away. The castle-crowned rock in the harbour (Itsh-kaleh) is also a place of grim association, the home of the public executioner. The town itself is a pleasant place where one can stay in comfort for some days, visiting Epidaurus (one of the most famous rest-cures of the ancient world) and the homes of Homer's heroes : Tiryns, Argos, Mycenae. Tiryns lies on a long, low ridge, rising abruptly from the flats by the shore. It is not a natural fortress, but its ancient masters once turned it into an impregnable stronghold. The outer walls are made of giant blocks of masonry, huge enough to give rise to the legend that they had been piled together by the hands of Cyclops. The main approach winds half round the fortress, so that though the chief gateway lies to the east a stranger entering the palace would find that the road had led him round the south angle of the building, so that he finally entered from the west, having passed three successive gates and three courtyards. The last court brought him opposite the hall of the ancient palace, the megaron, where the square of the central hearth is still marked by the bases of four columns that supported the roof. By this hearth the master of the house would have his seat, and often the lady also. When Odysseus reached the 52 DAYS IN ATTICA country of the Phaeacians, the Princess Nausicaa directed him to her father's palace, and the brief words in which she described to him the home-scene make a picture that fits well the outline of Tiryns : — " But when thou art within the shadow of the halls and the court, pass quickly through the great chamber, till thou comest to my mother, who sits at the hearth in the light of the fire weaving yarn of sea-purple stain, a wonder to behold. Her chair is leaned against a pillar and her maidens sit behind her. And there my father's throne leans close to hers, wherein he sits and drinks his wine like an immortal." But though the lady of the house might share her husband's hearthside seat, the women's apartments lay in another part of the palace, removed from the coming and going of the chief rooms. Here at Tiryns they are found behind and a little to the left of the men's megaron. The women's megaron is a smaller building, marked by the same square hearth in the centre. There seems no direct communication between the two, although but a single wall divides them. The women's rooms are reached by a side entrance from the open forecourt, and in order to go from the men's to the women's megaron it is necessary to pass right round at the back of the men's megaron through a number of small rooms, probably the household offices. The first of these is the bathroom, where the guests in Homeric story are con- ducted on first arrival. This must be the reason why it is placed so near to the main living-room. It is a small, square chamber, the floor composed of one huge stone slab, and on this was placed the bath of baked clay, an oblong tub perhaps decorated with brown paint, such as has been found in other Mycensean houses. A stone pipe carried off the waste water from a square gutter in the floor. The walls seem to have been panelled with wood — altogether a noble bathroom and no doubt THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN 53 one of the most important places in the house. Beyond the women's apartments run dark galleries with sloping roofs ; they are built in the thickness of the wall and may have served as magazines for storing provisions and household goods. The shepherds in later days have found them a welcome fold for their sheep, and the walls have been rubbed by soft, oily fleeces till they shine. Altogether a roomy, hospitable house, with large forecourts, where dependents could come and go, or petitioners wait ; with ample accommodation for house- hold and guests ; and with these great store-chambers for the hoarded wealth of the kings. The walls of the chief living-rooms were probably gay with frescoes, their doors decorated with slabs of inlay, the floors in some instances ornamented with cobbles fixed in lime and perhaps coloured. The lower slope of the hill was no doubt devoted to the military needs of the settlement. There are so many points of obvious resemblance between this type of house and those described in the Odyssey and Iliad, that one would like to think of Tiryns as one of the very homes for which the Argive heroes sighed. At any rate, here is a type of house that lasted long and was known in many different parts of the Mycenaean world. At Mycenae, and at Gla in Bceotia, much the same ground-plan is found. Even the old house of Erechtheus on the Acropolis at Athens chows remains of the same central hearth with its four supporting pillars. The ground round Tiryns was, and is still, well suited for cultivation. It was, in fact, once chosen as the site for an agricultural college, and to that epoch belong the slender dark cypresses that become so familiar in the views of Nauplia. The palaces that Homer knew were surrounded not only with farmland, but also with what we should call a pleasure garden. I should like to fancy the goodly palace of Tiryns set round with a pleasaunce 54 DAYS IN ATTICA such as he describes around the palace of the Phaeacian king :— " Without the courtyard, hard by the door, is a great garden, of four ploughgates, and a hedge runs round on either side. And there grow tall trees blossoming — pear- trees and pomegranates, and apple-trees with bright fruit, and sweet figs and olives in their bloom. The fruit of these trees never perisheth, neither faileth winter nor summer, enduring all the year through. Evermore the west wind blowing brings some fruitfe to birth and ripens others. Pear upon pear waxes old, and apple on apple, yea, and cluster ripens upon cluster of the grape, and fig upon fig. There too hath he a fruitful vineyard planted, whereof the one part is being dried by the heat, a sunny plot of level ground, while other grapes men are gathering, and yet others they are treading in the winepress. In the foremost row are unripe grapes that cast the blossom, and others there be that are grow- ing black to vintaging. There too skirting the furthest line, are all manner of garden beds, planted trimly, that are fresh continually, and therein are two fountains of water, whereof one scatters his streams all about the garden, and the other runs over against it beneath the threshold of the courtyard and issues by the lofty house." This is a picture of Tiryns as it may have been in the day of Homer's heroes, and the site, as Schliemann left it after his excavations, gave a good impression of the typical Mycenasan palace. During the past few years the German Institute of Archaeology has carried on fresh excavations, and the results show that they were right in supposing that Schliemann had by no means exhausted the site. They have brought to light traces of a lower town surrounding the citadel, and beneath the Mycenaean palace they have found older buildings. In this earlier settlement there were frescoes allied in subject and in treatment to the frescoes found in the PL A TE Iff THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN 55 great palace at Khossos (see p. 22), and there were also two great halls with painted stucco floors. The mural paintings have been broken into innumerable fragments, and the labour of reconstruction is increased by the fact that it is very seldom that two fragments actually join. Blue and brown are the predominating colours, and there are bright touches of red. When this gigantic jig-saw puzzle has been put together with missing pieces indicated by the same clever artist who restored the frescoes at Knossos, it is hoped that the paintings from Tiryns will be another great feature for the National Museum at Athens. The reconstruction has already advanced sufficiently to show that in the earliest palace there was a life-size procession of warriors ; from the Mycenasan palace comes a spirited boar-hunt (Plate 3), with women watching the scene from a safe distance in chariots. Once more one marvels at Time's trickery, which has taken from us every painting of the great classical age in Greece, and has left us these pictures of an earlier millennium. II MYCEN^ The sweltering Argive Plain lies like a tortoise, its hind legs to the sea, its head stretching up into the mountains of Tenea. High above the eye of the tortoise Mycenae lies. Nauplia is set in the right foot. Argos in the centre. From Nauplia to Mycenae is a short run by train. The line follows the coast as far as Argos, passes under the headland of Larissa, and then turns north across a plain that seems always ten degrees hotter than the rest of the country. It lies low, shut in by hills on all sides 56 DATS IN ATTICA except towards the sea. Mycenae commands the passes through the hills behind and keeps watch over plain and sea below. Yet one looks in vain for a frowning Acropolis dominating the landscape. In spite of its 2,000 feet of height Mycenae is not a conspicuous land- mark. It is set on one of a series of foot-hills which are dwarfed by the mountain-range behind. In the dry, scattered light of noon, mountains, foot-hills, and citadel assume one monotonous tone of broken grey. The citadel is placed just as Homer described it " in midmost Argos," hidden away among her stony heights. The train stops at a little wayside station guarded by a single row of eucalyptus trees, from which a narrow ribbon of road runs up to the modest inn, that blushes a bright pink, and calls itself " The Beautiful Helen." No wheeled vehicles are likely to be found at the station, but a brown boy in the grey cotton smock of the country takes charge of travellers' bags and puts them on the inevitable mule. When we last stayed at the Beautiful Helen we were impressed with the cleanliness, unusual in small Greek inns. Our host told us that he had acted foreman to the American excavators at Corinth and had learnt there that the type of traveller who would come to Mycenae would not grumble at simplicity if he could have a clean bed and an omelette for break- fast. He proudly showed us the white enamel washing apparatus, and a panoply of bedding spread out to air on the balcony. The homestead behind the inn gave attractive glimpses of "works and days" in a modern Argive version. I have a vivid recollection of some dozen peasants clothed in loose blue linen, wielding their wooden shovels with laughter and merrymaking, while the chaff from the threshing-floor made dusty the rose of a sultry twilight. This was when we returned to our pleasant quarters at the end of a long day among the stones on the Acropolis. THE THIRSTY ARGIVB PLAIN 57 From this homestead the road runs uphill, and soon the lines of boulders mark the outer lines of the fcJrtress and the remains of a prehistoric bridge across a ravine. On the left of the road is the entrance to the magnificent beehive tomb shown to Pausanias and other travellers as the Treasury of Atreus. One can but be grateful that the old picturesque, inaccurate names are still allowed to linger. Tomb A and Tomb B would convey little to the imagination, while the present name suggests the natural mistake of the first discoverers who found a sepulchre so gorgeous that it seemed to them a king's hidden treasure-chamber. Atreus, son of Pelops and father of Agamemnon, was just the kind of personage, on the borderland of myth and history, who would benefit, so to speak, by the touch of reality, by association with visible remains, so to Atreus the treasure-house was assigned. The wanderings of the two carved shafts that flanked the doorway of this tomb illustrate well the kind of vicissitudes that have beset the stones of ancient Greece. The uppermost part of the right-hand shaft was used as the lintel of a mosque in Argos, and to adapt it to that purpose a large portion of the outer surface was hewn away. The greater part of the left and the upper part of the right shaft were removed to Ireland in 1810 by the then Lord Sligo. They were given to him by Veli Pasha, Governor of the Morea, in memory of a picnic party at Mycenae, which seems to have ended in a little informal excavation. The present Marquis of Sligo has presented these pieces of the columns to the British Museum, where they now stand in a command- ing position. A complete restoration of the doorway that once contained them has been set up at the end of the Archaic Room among the Greek marbles. It gives an idea of regal opulence, with which the interior of the tomb is in keeping — the burial-place of a great king. 58 DAYS IN ATTICA A passage of squared stones led down into the hill-side where semi-columns in dark grey stone supported a lintel crowned with slabs of red porphyry. The vaulted tomb itself is cut out of the earth ; from the outside nothing but the entrance to the passage was visible, and this was probably filled in with earth after the burial. Once inside the columned inner entrance a large room is revealed, 50 feet high, and shaped like a beehive. Think of its dusky magnificence as it lay hidden through the centuries gloriously decorated with gold rosettes and paintings ! Through this large hall is a smaller inner chamber, the tomb proper, which could be sealed up and made doubly secure. The other tombs seen by the roadside on the way up to Mycenae are repetitions, more or less imperfect, of this famous building. A turn in the road and the Lion Gate is before us. Solid stone lintels crowned by a massive slab of stone on which are carved two lions on either side of a blank column. Why is the column there ? The answer to that question might keep us waiting outside the gate all day. To divine the meaning of the column one must turn to Sir Arthur Evans' fascinating work on "Tree and Pillar Cult." It is a mistake to suppose that the most primitive ideas are the most simple. The connection of the god with the tree or pillar — one might almost say his evolution from the tree or pillar — is particularly hard to define since the thought of primitive man was in itself confused. The name " Lion Gate " is to this extent a misnomer, since it gives the lions the first importance, whereas they are but heraldic supporters to the column between them. The column may be said to stand for the deity, and links the dwellers in Mycenae with that ancient forrn of religion — the worship of stocks and stones. It is something of a mental exertion to forget the later hier- archy of Hellenic gods, and to purge our minds of all THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN 59 superfluous knowledge as we pass under this gate that is so old and so simple and so mysterious. Inside the gate and close to it is the circle of masonry enclosing the royal tombs discovered by Schliemann. Here most of the golden treasures were found, the death mask of the king, the swords, the cups, the diadems — all the wealth that has justified the Homeric epithet of "golden Mycenae." The other scattered remains on the hill-top are more suggestive taken as a whole than studied individually. There are walls of dwelling-houses, and the lines of a palace which are best interpreted by the ground-plan of Tiryns. It is the situation of the citadel that kindles the imagination more than any study of the stones. Except on the side of the Lion Gate the ground drops steeply from the summit : on the south-east it is even precipitous. Yet the natural strength of the position was not con- sidered sufficient protection. Unlike the low-lying, unwalled cities of her predecessors in Crete, Mycenae has been walled and rewalled at different dates and in different styles. Sitting among the low stones of the old palace, one looks across " thirsty, horsebearing Argos " to the shining shield of sea, seeing in vision the long, open boats that once carried the princes of the Peloponnese, their gilded bronze, their terrible plumes, their tents, and their followers to the plains of windy Troy : " They set up their mast and spread the white sail forth, and the wind filled the sail's belly and the dark wave sang loud about the stern, as the ship made way and sped across the wave accomplishing the journey." This is the place to read again Achilles' defiance of Agamemnon : it shows the spirit in which some of that host set out, and also the unsatisfactory nature of that indefinite headship which the King of Mycenae was able to claim over the other lords of the Peloponnese. "Ah me, thou clothed in shamelessness, thou of the 60 DATS IN ATTICA crafty mind, how shall any Achaian hearken to thy bidding with all his heart, be it to go a journey or to fight the foe again ? Not by reason of the Trojan spearmen came I hither to fight, for they have not wronged me ; never did they harry mine oxen nor my horses, nor even waste my harvest in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurse of men ; seeing there lieth between us long space of shadowy mountains and echoing sea : but thee, thou shameless one, we followed hither, to make thee glad by earning recom- pense at the Trojan's hands for Menelaos and for thee, thou dog-face ! " Certainly the King of Mycenae was not followed from pure devotion. Here on his hill-top palace the tragedy of Agamemnon's life was finished. Homer shows the beginning of the drama. It is to ^schylus that one turns for the end, ^schylus himself had probably never visited Mycenae since he laid the scene of his play at Argos. He had not realized how noble a watch-tower this palace made and how many hours there were for Clytemnestra to lay her plots. If it were morning when the long boats were sighted over sea, it would be evening before Agamemnon's triumphal chariot reached the Lion Gate. In the play the moments are compressed. The watchers in the tower have hardly brought the queen news of his arrival on the shore, before the shouts outside proclaim his return to the palace. The chariot is slowly drawn within the gates and in it stands wide-ruling Agamemnon in his golden armour and nodding plumes ; and beside him the captive prophetess. Clytemnestra welcomes him, spreading carpets at his feet. She leads him to the bathroom. These hard stones that now lie baking in the sun she covered with soft drapery, and hidden among the drapery the noose and net. The final pause, the cry of anguish, and then the cry of triumph as the queen shows her bloody axe to the sunshine. "Thus and thus I smote him." This is the tremendous drama that opens the long THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN 61 trilogy of the House of Atreus. One cannot visit Mycence and ignore ^schylus any more than one can visit Agincourt without Shakespeare. There is no need to ask how much is poetry, how much is literature ? This is the wine of imagination that has turned men of business into tomb-hunters and archaeologists. In the early part of last century there was a young student who did not trouble over nice distinctions between literature and history. He studied his Homer as the Bible was studied before the days of the higher criticism. He had the faith that can remove mountains, and he lived to show tangible proofs of his belief. This boy was Henry Schliemann. His story still reads like a fairy-tale. Single-handed he amassed a fortune that enabled him to realize his youthful dreams and to carry on excavations on the traditional sites of the Homeric world. At Troy he showed the walls of successive settle- ments reaching back to the Stone Age. At Tiryns and at Mycenae he laid bare these palaces and tombs of the Argive kings. In the tombs he found treasures of a civilization fully as wonderful as that described by Homer. It is in the Central Museum at Athens that the treasures of Schliemann's Mycenaean Age are stored. The so- called " Mycenaean Room " (just opposite the main entrance) has been designed to harmonize with its con- tents. The walls are decorated with reproductions of Mycenaean patterns, correct both in form and colour, and on the ftoor there are the same spiral motives in mosaic. In the large glass cases in the centre of the room are set out the contents of the royal tombs found by Schliemann at MycerKe : the death-maSk of some great king, his crown and ornaments represented in fine gold leaf. On the top of one of these cases stands an alabaster cup with three upcurving handles. These grandiloquent curves are not suggestive of stone-work. The cup must have 62 DAYS IN ATTICA been manufactured as something of a tour de force, in imitation no doubt of some metal original. It is remark- able that three out of the original four handles have sur- vived. Then there is the golden Nestor cup, so called because it recalls Homer's description of the cup that Nestor used in the camp before Troy : — " A right goodly cup that the old man brought from home, embossed with studs of gold, and four handles that were to it, and round each two golden doves were feeding, and to the cup were two feet below. Another man could scarce have lifted the cup from the table when it was full, but Nestor the Old raised it easily. In this cup the woman like unto the goddesses mixed a mess for them, with Pramnian wine, and therein grated cheese of goats' milk, with a grater of bronze, and scattered white barley thereon and bade them drink, whenas she had made ready the mess." At the far end of the room, set each on its own pedestal, are two small golden cups found in a tomb at Vaphio, near Sparta. These may very well have been imported from Crete. Here once more is the world of the Cretan bull-fight — only on these cups it is not the fight that is shown us but the preliminary scenes of capture. A bull- hunt is going forward ; with the help of a decoy cow naked men are driving the bulls into a trap. The figures of the men are attenuated and uninteresting when com- pared with the masterly treatment of the animals. The craftsman who did not shrink from rendering in beaten gold the figure of a tripped bull rolling in a net could also handle with delicious satire the innocent expression on the face of the cow who is leading her companions jo their fate. These cups look as if they were made in solid metal. In reality there is an inner cup of smooth gold over which the embossed outer cup is fitted, leaving a hollow space between. The handle is a beautiful little bit of constructive goldsmith's work. THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN 63 Beside the cups is an inlaid dagger showing a lion- hunt. The huntsmen are true Cretans with their slim, naked bodies and big shields. The Mycenaean, no less than the Briton, seems to have known that para- doxical sportsman's instinct that loved and drew and hunted and slew the wild creatures around him. Swords and golden shields are here too, and an infinite number of small discs of beaten gold (perhaps ornaments on a mummy case recalling the golden armour and raiment which the king had worn in life), an abundance also of gold rings, bracelets, and diadems. Looking into these glittering cases we understand how the stories of the "Age of Gold" lingered on into Hesiod's day, and how the poets of Homer's time loved to enlarge on the glories of the " King of Mycenae rich in gold." Read how Agamemnon arrayed himself for battle :— "Then the son of Atreus cried aloud and bade the Argives arm them, and himself amid them did on the flashing bronze. First he fastened fair greaves about his legs, fitted with ankle-clasps of silver ; next again he did his breast-plate about his breast, the breast-plate that in time past Kinyras gave him for a guest-gift. For afar in Cyprus did Kinyras hear the mighty rumour how that the Achaians were about to sail forth to Troy in their ships, wherefore did Kinyras give him the breast-plate, to do pleasure to the king. Now therein were ten courses of black cyanus, and twelve of gold, and twenty of tin, and dark blue snakes writhed up towards the neck, three on either side, like rainbows that the son of Kronos has set in the clouds, a marvel of the mortal tribes of men. And round his shoulders he cast his sword, wherein shone studs of gold, but the scabbard about it was silver fitted with golden chains. And he took his richly-dight shield of his valour that covereth all the body of a man, a fair shield, and round about it were ten circles of bronze 64 DAYS IN ATTICA and thereon were twenty white bosses of tin, and one in the midst of black cyanus. And thereon was embossed the Gorgon fell of aspect, glaring terribly, and about her were Dread and Terror. And from the shield was hung a baldric of silver, and thereon was curled a snake of cyanus; three heads interlaced had he growing out of one neck. And on his head Agamemnon set a two- crested helm with fourfold plate and plume of horse- hair, and terribly the crest nodded from above. And he grasped two strong spears, shod with bronze, and keen, and far forth from him into the heaven shone the bronze, and thereat Hera and Athena thundered, honouring the King of Mycenae rich in gold." Reading this description and then looking at the con- tents of the royal tombs found by Schliemann at Mycenae it is easy to sympathize with the first burst of surprise and admiration that made Schliemann himself and the scholars of his day ready to believe that these were the very tombs of Homer's heroes. It was a thrilling moment when the archaeologist asserted that he had found the very features of Agamemnon in his death-mask. Soon came the in- evitable reaction. The theory did not bear investigation, and the 'scientific world drew away to the extreme of caution and placed unknown centuries between the tombs at Mycenae and the Achaians of whom Homer sang. Gladstone was one of the first scholars who reconsidered the evidence and showed how the discoveries at Mycenae , could rightly be used to illustrate Homer. It was sug- gested that the poems of Homer might belong to a period of fusion between the two races : that they date from a time soon after a race of warriors from the North had established themselves in the homes of Mycenaean culture. These men with weapons of iron and habits of hardihood replaced but did not destroy the luxurious, art-loving subjects of Mycenae. In spite of the change of race there was continuity of tradition. The conquerors respected the THE THIRSTY ARGIVE PLAIN 65 refinements of the old civilization, and prided themselves on their treasures of Mycenaean workmanship, such as the elaborately ornamented shield of Achilles and Nestor's cup. A garment or a vessel " well-vsrrought," it was this that the northern spirit delighted in, and this that the southern craftsman could so well achieve. So Schliemann has proved his main point, and has shown that these Homeric epics have a basis of fact. After all, Homer was a poet dreaming of an age of gold, not an archaeologist describing the Bronze or Iron Age. Who can be sorry that he did not know the real Mycenae well enough to write of heroines in flowered bell-skirts, stiff jackets, and high hats, instead of his own gentle chiton-clad women in their " great shining robes, light of woof and gracious " ? There are some to whom the great Mycenaean Room in the museum at Athens must serve instead of a visit to Crete or Mycenae. To these I would commend the ex- cellent reproductions in the glass case labelled "Knossos." Here are the faience figurines, the gilded bull, and many other of Sir Arthur Evans' most striking finds. Those who cannot travel even to Athens will find the same reproductions and many original objects from Knossos in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Some reproduc- tions are also shown in the First Vase Room at the British Museum. CHAPTER III LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS IN Greece each district has its own cycle of legend. The most barren landscape is peopled with gracious forms and the silence filled with echoes of past music. Subtle as the fragrance of hidden flowers, elusive as a childish memory, these ghosts of bygone faith still haunt their old homes to touch us with the intimate note of hidden personality. Later, more stirring memories added sanctity to the already sacred soil. The spirit of Theseus lingered at Marathon, and at the time of the battle he was seen to lead the charge against the Persians, while in later days it was the ghosts of the victorious legions themselves that haunted the spot. It is this double background of tradition — legend breaking through upon history, and history reaching back into legend — that makes travel in Greece so much a matter of the individual imagination. That which is to one man cause for disappointment may to another bring rapturous exaltation. Of Attica this is specially true, since outwardly it is less blessed by Nature than other parts of Greece. Those who take Attica at its surface value find themselves alone with stones and bushes under a hot sky. Those who approach her as her own sons, piously remembering the footsteps of gods and heroes, may still know the joy of being young in the world's youth. Little Attica 1 What a scrap of the earth's surface it is 1 LEGENDS OF THE ACKOPOLIS 67 From the Bay of Phalerum and the harbour of Piraeus there runs inland a ten-mile stretch of country, for the most part stony and flat — the plain of the river Cephissus. This river itself is often dry in summer, its course marked only by a slender line of dark green foliage, where olive and oleander have sent their roots to the hidden moisture of its bed. In the middle of the plain a limestone ridge mounts to the sharp profile of Lycabettus, breaks steeply to that queer rock known as the " frog's mouth," and then reappears again in the abrupt cliff of the Acropolis. The ridge behind Lycabettus is called Turkovoumi, the "Turks' Mountains." One fancies a note of satire in the name. As a rule the hills were the home of the Christians. The only mountain the Turks could boast of was this absurd miniature range. The real hills, the " violet crown " of Athens, which were never occupied by the Turks, are Hymettus, Pentelicus, Parnes. They enclose the plain on its three landward sides. Behind each of these mountain masses is another piece of Attica not visible from Athens. Between Hymettus and the eastward sea lies the Mesogaia Plain. It is larger and more fertile than the plain of the Cephissus, and yet figures little in history, for no highroad passes through it. Attica's back-parlour, should one say ? Behind Pentelicus lies the plain of Aphidnae, lying saucer-like with a ring of hills around it and a piece of rising ground in its centre. The railway to Chalcis skirts the edge of this country, a pleasant, wooded region. The great plain behind Parnes does not belong to Attica but to Boeotia. Parnes is the one landward boundary of the Attic peninsula. Towards the west her soaring ridges dip to Mount ^galeus, and behind these is the sea-girt Thriasian plain around Eleusis, now reckoned as Attic territory. This, then, is Attica at its " surface value " : an Acropolis, a rocky ridge, an oval plain, a ring of hills, three other hidden plains, and a rocky coast. Superficially 68 DAYS IN ATTICA it is not much larger than a good-sized Scotch shooting, and in the best sense of the word Athens itself is still but a country town. In the heart of the city you catch glimpses of the guardian hills. From the Acropolis Hymettus seems near at hand, every cleft and gully shining distinct, so that it is hard to believe the summit is three hours away. At the further, narrower end of the plain, Pentelicus shows white scars where the marble has been quarried from her side. To the left Parnes, perhaps the most beautiful of the three sister mountains, shows the cliff of Harma, a sharp nick in her flowing outline. This is the landward view from the Acropolis. On the other side, looking down from the Acropolis towards the sea, the plain seems almost toy-like, ridged with rock and dotted with diminutive dwellings. Dark lines of factories begin to streak the landscape as it closes to the harbour of Piraeus. Then carrying the eye further, across the sea and across the crystal gulfs of air, the pointed silhouette of ^gina shows wine-dark against the blue. The Athenians could call it their eyesore in those old days when politics counted for so much more than landscape. To-day Athens might change the metaphor and know .iEgina as " the apple of her eye," this expressive point of darker colour set in the blue circle of the gulf. Behind ^gina are the airy peaks of the Peloponnese, and faintest among these the outline of the Troezen hills around the Argive Plain. These are the hills over which Theseus journeyed to Athens, coming, as all heroes should, from " over the hills and far away." This is the magic of the name Troezen. To us in Athens it stands for the land of the bluest distance " across the far horizon's rim," the land from which came the prince-adventurer to win a crown and make a city. The modern traveller who approaches Athens by the railway finds himself travelling in the footsteps of Theseus, and from the Isthmus onwards the stages of the ■ Scale of English Miles - TICA & ARGOLIS 3EBN PftiLWA-y .SHewh TE OP Theseus 5hewn — LEGENDS OP THE ACROPOLIS 69 journey are marked by the names of the places where he met and overcame the monsters in his path. It is at the Isthmus of Corinth that the road from Trcezen joins the railway from Patras. The pine-trees still grow here as in the days when Theseus met Sinis " the pine-bender " and treated him to a taste of his own ingenious devilry. Sinis waited here for travellers and had invented a method of his own for destroying them. Vase paintings show Theseus bending down the pine-tree to which he has already attached the giant. When the hand of Theseus is removed the tree will spring back and Sinis will be torn in two or flung into the air. The train stops again at Crommyon, where Theseus slew the wild sow Ph^a — " foul old landed-proprietress," as Pater styles her. Now the road narrows to a single path, winding round the side of the cliffs above the sea. Here Sciron lay in wait ; it was his pleasant custom to hurl wayfarers into the sea, till Theseus came and with fine poetic justice flung him over the cliff's edge to fatten his own turtle. There truly enough in the transparent, green waters below, one may still see from the railway a rock shaped like a sea-tortoise, its lean head protruding from its rounded back. This narrow pass above the sea has in all times suggested itself as an excellent place for highway robbery, and the task of Theseus had to be repeated every few decades until the railway did its civilizing work. Eleusis, the next point of the journey, recalls another cycle of legend, and that perhaps the most beautiful of all Greek mythology, but for the moment we must forget the weary woman sitting by the wayside at the virgin's well, "where the people of Eleusis come to draw water under the shadow of an olive-tree." In the story of Theseus Eleusis is the scene of the great wrestling match where he met and threw Kerkyon, king of this district. Hitherto his combats had been with monsters outside the pale of society. Now for the first time he is pitted against the 70 DAYS IN ATTICA forces of a rival state. Kerkyon was a king, and though in the Theseus myth he figures as an oppressor, in the Eleusinian legend he bears a different character. His chief crime seems to have been that his state blocked the landward road to Athens. Theseus wrestled with and overthrew him. At Eleusis the railway leaves the path of Theseus and bears to the east in order to enter the Cephissian Plain by the pass between Mount ^galeus and Parnes. Theseus bore right on by the Sacred Way, now the main road from Eleusis to Athens, which crosses the hill-barrier of Corydallus. This pass is marked by the monastery of Daphni, and at the little inn here the peasants still pause for their noonday halt under the shade of the wooded hill-side. Here Procrustes, first of all Greek innkeepers, waited to offer his hospitality to strangers. With that naive disregard of facts that still characterizes the profes- sion, he insisted that the traveller should adapt himself to the accommodation offered, rather than adapt the accom- modation to the traveller. To this end he stretched on a rack the limbs of those that were too short for his bed or lopped off the extremities of those that were too large. Theseus being fashioned in heroic mould exactly fitted the Procrustean bed and afterwards dealt with his host as he deserved. Then on, down the long slope of road to Athens. Here he made himself known to his father ^geus, brought the turbulent nobles into subjection, and so ends happily this cycle of his travels. In the latter part of the Theseus legend the world is no longer bounded by the Athenian horizon. Wider issues are involved. The story of Theseus in Crete, which has been told in a previous chapter, shows Athens emerging from a subordi- nate position in the great Minoan Empire. Once established in Athens, Theseus seems to change from a hero of romance into a human king with very human failings. Without going so far as Grote, who LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS 71 holds that the possession of kingly power at once con- verted the "athletic and amorous knight-errant" into a " profound and long-sighted politician," one admits that Theseus now moves in a different atmosphere. A governor grappling with quite real political problems is a less romantic figure than a hero slaying a monster, but let us take Theseus seriously and see a unity of purpose even in his knight-errantry. Is not Theseus in his aspect of road-maker, giant-killer, and traveller's friend, the cham- pion of unity no less than Theseus the king converting the inhabitants of Attica into citizens of Athens ? And even in his kingly days adventures in plenty remained to him. Plutarch tells us how the Amazons invaded Attica — " an undertaking neither trifling nor feminine." Whom or what this invasion exactly indicates the pious traveller does not inquire. There seems, however, to have been a time when the very existence of the State was in danger. The invaders must have pressed Athens hard, for the spots dedicated to the memory of Theseus' victory over the Amazons are close to the Acropolis itself. A fine picture this of the women warriors galloping down the Cephissian Plain and closing in on the rock citadel of the maiden goddess, herself also a rare lover of fight. A later development of the Theseus legend deals with his philanderings with Helen at Aphidnae and his rescue of Persephone from the underworld. Indeed, according to tradition, it was his continued absence on heroic enter- prise that lost him his kingdom, for while he was away from Athens Castor and Pollux, the brothers of Helen, brought an army into Attica and ravaged the country to avenge the rape of their sister. (This is of course another version of the Homeric story in which Helen is carried off by Paris.) The Athenians were now suffering for the sins of their king. Menestheus, a descendant of the royal line of Erechtheus, took this opportunity of stirring up rebellion, and when Theseus returned he found 72 DAYS IN ATTICA it impossible to recover the government. Theseus was exiled and never returned to Athens in his lifetime, though his bones were afterwards brought home and buried in the shrine that bore his name. However the Theseus myth is to be viewed, whether as Pater saw it, " the type of progress triumphant through injustice, set on improving things off the face of the earth," or as the type of social order developing, organizing, and unifying heterogeneous elements into a single state : whether you curse him as a Radical or bless him as a reformer, whether you look upon him as a man, a dynasty, a type, or a purely mythological invention, is all beside the mark here. What we want to know is what he meant to the Athenians who first told his story. To them Theseus stood for the making of Attica, the ingathering of the gods on the AcropoHs, and the establishment of Athena's supremacy : — " When Theseus came to the throne, he, being a power- ful as well as a wise ruler, among other improvements in the administration of the country, dissolved the councils and separate governments and united all the inhabitants of Attica in the present city, establishing one council and one town hall. They continued to live on their own lands, but he compelled them to resort to Athens as their metropolis, and henceforward they were all inscribed in the roll of her citizens. A great city thus arose, which was handed down by Theseus to his descendants, and from his day to this the Athenians have regularly cele- brated the national festival of the Synoecia, or ' union of the communes,' in honour of the goddess Athena." What a picture Thucydides here gives of the peasantry gathered into Athens to vote, to pay taxes, and to wor- ship ! Their daily life goes on as usual on their remote farms, but they have been made to feel themselves mem- bers of a greater community. Their eyes are no longer turned to their little village shrine where the sacred fire LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS 73 burned before a local goddess, but to the Prytaneum, the public hearth of Athens. Here was the outward sign of internal unity. The removal of the hearth meant the removal of the hearth-deities. It meant the extinction of local patriotism and petty jealousies. The Acropolis rock became the heart of Attica. The magnificent temples built upon it later could not add to its sanctity, however much they added to its glory. The sites were sacred before the shrines came there. Even when Theseus came the Acro- polis was so crowded with myths and memories that the divinities from the country (with one exception) had to be accommodated in precincts outside the Acropolis walls. In our school-days Theseus seemed to come at the beginning of the Athenian legend, but when we stand on the Acropolis he seems more truly at the beginning of Athenian history, and behind him crowd a score of shadowy nightmare forms, half deity, half demon. The rock is theirs, not his. It is worth while to recall these old legends in their early crudity, since it was to com- memorate them that the temples were built. Strange and uncouth as the legends were in their beginning, Pheidias and his followers redeemed them from savagery and shaped them into beauty. The Parthenon frieze shows gods and mortals moving calmly through an ordered world ; in the pediments a cosmic crisis is suggested but it never compromises the dignity of the actors. Looking at them it is hard to realize how much has been tacitly omitted. Giants and monsters have been humanized ; mysterious old goddesses are given youth and beauty ; ugly incidents are forgotten. But for all this the nightmare legends were first in possession, and any study of the Acropolis would be incomplete without them. The starting-point of Athenian mythology, that which 74 DATS IN ATTICA the Germans would call the "foundation legend," sets forth a rivalry between the goddess Athena and the god Poseidon. On the surface it records the jealousies of two gods, competing for the greatest of Greek cities. But the strife has a deeper significance in ^ the making of Attica. The worship of the new divinity (Athena) triumphs over that of the old sea -god (Poseidon). The olive, emblematic of the ordered life of the husband- man and citizen is preferred to the salt spring, emblematic of the wandering life of the seafarer. I wonder if the Athenians ever reflected how Poseidon had his revenge in the later days of their expansion when the wealth of the city was squandered over fleets that never returned to her shores ? There are many versions of the legend. ApoUodorus gives in brief the shape into which it finally crystallized : — " The gods were minded to choose for themselves cities where they should be specially worshipped. Posei- don was the first to reach Attica, where he smote with his trident and made a sea spring up in the midst of the Acropolis, where it remains to this day and is called the Sea of Erechtheus.^ Athena followed, and calling Cecrops to be witness that she took the land in possession planted the olive which still grows in the temple of Pandrosus. Then a strife arose concerning the country ; so Zeus, to reconcile the rivals, appointed judges, who were not Cecrops and Cranaus as some say, nor yet Erechtheus, but the twelve deities (the Olympian gods). Their de- cision adjudged the land to Athena upon the witness of Cecrops, and so Athens gained its name, being called after the goddess." There is another version of the same legend, not with- out its bearing on modern politics. The story is told by Augustine on the authority of the learned Varro : — " In the days of King Cecrops the women of Attica took ' It may still be seen by the north porch of the Erechtheum (p. 137). LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS 75 full part in political affairs. When Poseidon and Athena disputed the spiritual patronage of Athens, King Cecrops after consulting an oracle took a referendum vote of the adult inhabitants. The vote was given on grounds of sex, the men voting for sea-power, the women for the goddess of wisdom and needlework. Then, as now, the women had the numerical majority and carried the business in hand. But the men had superior strength and punished the suffragatrices by the loss of the vote and otherwise." This dramatic opening introduces at once almost all the principal actors who figure in the legends of the Acropolis : the divinities Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, and the heroes Erechtheus, Cecrops, Cranaus, Pandrosus. To take Athena first, since it was she who henceforth reigned on the hill-top. How shall we figure her to our- selves — this grey-eyed deity of Athens, whose worship became the inspiration of all notable achievements ? The simplest and truest thought of her is perhaps to be found in Homer's line : " The semblance of a woman fair and tall, and skilled in splendid handiwork." Later she assumed many different aspects. On the Acropolis she is figured as Athena of the City; Athena, Giver of Victory; Athena, Giver of Health ; Athena the Champion, and Athena the Maid. Yet primarily she stands as the goddess of good handiwork, rejoicing in all things well and temperately wrought. Here on the Acropolis it was the achievement of the politician that was dedicated to her. In their temple in the market-place below, she and her brother Hephaestus accepted in the same spirit the work of the craftsman. How did the Athenian visualize her ? It is difficult to say. The great statue in gold and ivory made by Pheidias for the Parthenon ^ is known only from small and incomplete reproductions, but eVen allowing for this it seems hardly intimate enough to suit ' See p. 127. 76 DAYS IN ATTICA the character in which the legends show her. Its vague impersonal majesty is more a patriot's image of his city than an artist's conception of womanhood. The so-called " Lemnian " Athena gives perhaps the most winning representation. Here she is as Odysseus knew her in her companionable aspect — active, almost boyish in figure, with a capacity for mirth in the demure lips, which recalls that delicious burst of laughter in Ithaca when she found Odysseus seeking to deceive even her — his monitress. It has been said that this statue, perhaps made for the island of Lemnos, was in antiquity the most popular representation of the goddess. Fitting this to Homer's line we shall gain an idea of what Athena may have been to the Athenian people in those earlier days before her personality was merged in the greatness of the state she typified. Poseidon, whose real element is the water, remains on the Acropolis hill as something of an interloper. It is true that his salt spring moans with a sound of the sea ; true that the holes of his trident still left on the face of the rock have been cherished by orthodox Athenians as Mohammed's footmark in Jerusalem is cherished by the faithful Mussulman. Still his place is but a secondary one. His worship is confined to a single altar in a temple dedicated to various deities. The defeated rival would have gained more dignity by withdrawing himself altogether from the hill-top. The ocean was still his. He was the maker of storms and earthquakes, and terrible enough to the Athenians both on sea and land. Zeus also has his shrine on the Acropolis. From earliest times a precinct which now lies north-east of the Parthenon seems to have been sacred to him. His altar here was on the open face of the rock and was not covered by a temple. Here once a year was per- formed that strange archaic rite in which a bull was slaughtered, and in the trial that followed the blood- HEAD OF THE LEMXIAX ATHEXA IIV PHEIIHAS i\ THf-: i;;ii,(k";na :\u skl :\i LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS 77 guiltiness was finally brought home to the axe, which was condemned and executed. Throughout Greece Zeus is of course supreme ; yet it sometimes seems as though his very supremacy deprived him of the more intimate personal worship given to the other gods. The local deities gained their popularity from the fact that they were connected with one beloved spot — the home of the worshipper. Thus Athena at Athens, Apollo at AmyclcB, Hera at Argos, were adored with a jealous passion that was more than half patriotism. Zeus was, as a matter of course, supreme everywhere, and therefore had no one special locality for his own intimate possession. At Athens he was altogether eclipsed by his daughter Athena. He had a temple in the Pirceus, where the sailor on return gave thanks for a safe voyage : a shrine on the Acropolis, and altars on some neigh- bouring mountain-tops — altogether a meagre allowance compared with the fact that on the Acropolis alone Athena seems to have had at one time no less than three temples. It is true that outside the town there stood from the time of Peisistratus onwards the unfinished columns of a temple to Olympian Zeus, and the fact is perhaps not without its significance that the temple to " the god of all the Greeks " remained imperfect through the centuries of independence, while the Greek states were in rivalry with each other, to be finished only when a foreign ruler had taught them the identity of their interests as a nation. So much for the gods who appear in the legend of ApoUodorus. The other characters mentioned belong to that dim race, half human, half divine, whom the Athenians regarded as their progenitors. Various scraps of genealogy have come down to us in which the name of Cecrops, Cranaus, Erechtheus, figure in different relationships, but these mostly bear the mark of later mythological invention. What shadowy personages or 78 DAYS IN ATTICA dynasties lie at the back of these traditions who shall say ? The Athenians boasted that they were autoch- thonous, sprung from the earth : earth was their mother ; Cecrops, born from the earth, their father. The sanctity attaching to the grave of Cecrops on the Acropolis was therefore a serious matter, and one which, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter, even the en- lightened fifth-century Athenian could not suffer any man to trifle with. As if to typify the antiquity of these early kings and their close relationship with earth, the vase paintings show them at times with curling serpents' tails. It is Erechtheus who seems the most nearly human, and he is brought down almost within the vision of history by the fact that, under the first temple on the Acropolis, remains have been traced of the old palace of Erechtheus. Here Homer tells us that Athena dwelt. One of the early legends shows her as the foster-mother of the infant Erichthonius, whom Ge, the earth-mother, had committed to her charge. Athena gave a closed basket containing the babe into the keeping of the three daughters of Cecrops, with strict injunctions that they should on no account look within. She then flew off to Pentelicus and was returning, bearing with her an immense crag with which to buttress up her new abode, when, in mid-air, she met the sacred crow who told her that the daughters of Cecrops had disobeyed her orders. They had opened the casket committed to their charge and there beheld the unbeholdable. In horror at the news Athena dropped her crag, which may still be seen lying out awkwardly in the centre of the plain. (Thus the Athenian mind accounted for the somewhat astonishing appearance of Lycabettus.) The legend ends with the faithless sisters being driven from the Acropolis ; in some versions they throw themselves over the cliff, while Pandrosos, the one sister who had not been guilty of the crime, has a precinct set apart for LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS 79 her on the Acropolis, adjoining the tomb of her father, Cecrops. These are the old tales, bizarre rather than beautiful. Their crudity seems contrary to the Hellenic spirit until the rationalizing instinct of the classical Greek mind is seen at work. Scraps of primitive legend, survivals of strange ritual, and a series of unmeaning names have to be fitted together so that the Greek may conceive of his past as an orderly whole, not as we see it— a turmoil of light and darkness, with earth-worship, devil-worship, and fertility-charms gradually giving way to higher forms of religion. Such a conception as this was impossible at that day, and since the Greek was both too logical and too sceptical to accept things just as he found them, he made a patchwork mythology, working the old pieces into the pattern and adding, where chronology seemed to demand it, goodly strings of invented names. Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, Cecrops, Erechtheus, Pandrosos, not to speak of Butes the father-priest, and Ge the earth-mother herself ; these seem to have been already established on the Acropolis before the days of Theseus. There is no record of their coming, for they were always there. They are, as it were, the earliest stratum of divinities. Where then should be found room for the newcomers (whom Theseus brought to Athens) from Eleusis and Eleutherae, from Acharnae and Brauron ? Only one of these " outsiders " was allowed to find a place on the summit of the Acropolis : the Brauronian Artemis, a goddess sufficiently mysterious and uncouth to associate on equal terms with the most autochthonous and serpentine of the " old nobility." The Artemis from Brauron has her precinct on the south side of the Acropolis between the Propylaea and Parthenon. Perhaps the site was already dedicated to some early worship of the huntress Artemis, dating from days when gods of the chase were the first to be 80 DAYS IN ATTICA propitiated. The goddess of Brauron was an old wooden image, little more than a log. The legend of the Brauronian cult was later woven by Euripides into his play " Iphigenia in Tauris." According to this version Iphigenia was not really slain by her father in expiation of his vow, but was miraculously rapt away from the altar of sacrifice by Artemis, the protectress of all young maidens. She was carried to Tauris in the Crimea, where she became a priestess and tended an old wooden image of the goddess. Here her brother Orestes found her ; at her instigation he avenged their father's murder ; afterwards they filed together to Brauron in Attica, taking with them the image, henceforward known as Brauronian Artemis. The after-fate of this statue was a favourite subject of discussion with the ancients. It is clear, how- ever, that the Athenians laid no claim to it. There were two statues in the sanctuary of Brauronian Artemis on the Acropolis, one considerably older than the other, but neither claiming to be the original image from the Crimea, though the shrine on the Acropolis was an important centre of the Brauronian cult. The protector of Iphigenia remains always a woman's goddess, a special protector of maidens and of women in childbirth. Between the ages of five and ten the Athenian maidens accompanied by their parents and led by a priestess were brought to her shrine to perform some obscure ceremony of initiation or propitiation. They must " dance as bears " before the goddess. At first it would seem that they were clad in actual bearskins, but afterwards this came to be replaced by the " saffron robe " of which the women sing in the " Lysistrata " of Aristophanes. The garments worn at this festival were hung as offerings upon the image. Other relics of girlhood were also left here ; a doll, a mirror, a shawl, and on the eve of marriage the bride must bring her girdle as an offering to Artemis. LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS 81 So, still, in Southern Europe the bride brings her orange-wreath and veil to hang before the image of the Virgin ; and so, still, in Japan the little girls bring, not their toys but their first handiwork to their goddess of mercy who combines the tenderness of Artemis for all young things with Athena's love of good work. The village of Brauron, from which the cult of Artemis came, lies near the one little port of the great Mesogaia Plain behind Hymettus. Each of the three hidden plains of Attica supplied Athens with a new divinity, and one came over the sea from Thrace. From Aphidnae, the plain behind Pentelicus, came the two brothers, the Anakes or Dioscuri. Their true Greek home was at Sparta, but the great Twin Brethren could always truly say — By many names men call us, In many lands we dwell. Their presence at Aphidnae had to be accounted for by the supposition that they were there to look after their truant sister the fair Helen (see p. 71). In Athens their worship took no root and soon disappeared. It was far otherwise with the two other great divinities who are said to have come to Athens at the time of the Union of Attica : Demeter, who came from Eleusis, and Dionysus, originally a Thracian god who came to Athens from Eleutherae, a small plain lying behind Parnes. Geographically Eleutherae would seem to belong to Boeotia rather than to Attica, but its inhabitants " liked the Athenian form of government," says Pausanias, and attached themselves to Athens, bringing with them the ancient image of their god. The worships of Demeter and Dionysus seem to have been inherently suited to the Athenian temperament. Once introduced they eclipsed the influence of the older 82 DAYS IN ATTICA gods. The stories that grew around these two mysterious cults are far removed from the strange old tales of Cecrops, Erechtheus, and the rest. Superstition rises to reverence and dogma changes to poetry. Yet in a certain sense their worship has the same basis as the religions of the most primitive type. Demeter typifies the fruitful powers of Nature. Dionysus stands for humanity's enjoyment of her gifts. These two never won a place on the summit of the Acropolis, yet in course of time their cults came to fill a more prominent place in the life of the individual citizen than those of the older deities. As Zeus and Athena became more and more the great civic gods, the intimacy of their earlier relations with their worshippers was forgotten. In Attica the teaching of the new gods made an appeal to the individual conscience and to those elements of fervour and of mysticism to which the older Greek religion had paid small heed. Though Dionysus was brought to Athens from Eleutherae, he was in reality a god from further north, wafted across the sea from Thrace. He is the god of all benign influences, of the goodly juice of the grape, of the warm south wind, kindly animal affections and the joys of dance and song. As his sacred boat was carried over the waters the sap rose and the masts burst into leaf and fruitage under the spell of his warm breath. His mother, Semele, a mortal, had perished from the vision of her divine lover in his full glory. Dionysus, prematurely born in that moment of ecstasy, was after- wards sheltered in the thigh of his father, Zeus, until the moment of his rebirth. Hence he is the god of all rap- ture and exaltation, in one aspect human and approach- able, yet in another aspect full of awful godhead. The legend as Euripides presents it in " The Bacchae " shows him in the later guise. The god comes to Thebes, the home of his mother, Semele. The king, Pentheus, his LEGENDS OP THE ACROPOLIS 83 own near relation, rejects him with scorn. Dionysus reveals and vindicates himself, and Pentheus is torn in pieces by the frenzy of the Bacchae. The horror of the tragedy is raised to a point that poetry alone dare touch by the fact that it is the king's own mother who leads the rout. The god has blinded her eyes and in her fervour against the unbeliever she slays her son without recog- nizing him. Dionysus soon came to have a number of small shrines in Athens. The exact position of " Dionysus in the marshes," " Dionysus in the market-place," and the relations of these to the celebrated " Place of the winepress," where yearly his mysteries were celebrated, are problems that still tease topographers. One of his small shrines can be seen in the maze of excavations to the west of the Acropolis. It is marked by a small winepress, and over it was found the club-house built by a Dionysiac Society of Roman times. His greatest monu- ment is the noble theatre on the south of the Acropolis, where two of his temples also stand (see p. 151). With Demeter the case was different. Her temple at Eleusis was so near that the pilgrimage thither became an event of ever greater importance. In contrast with the number of shrines with which Dionysus was honoured Demeter seems to have had only two temples in Athens. One, known as the Eleusinion, was some- where below the Acropolis rock, perhaps in the neigh- bourhood of the Areopagus. Another stood near the Sacred Gate. It was probably from here that the procession started at the time of the Eleusinian festival. On the "mystic banks of the Ilissus," outside Athens, was a precinct dedicated to her where in " the flowering month," the end of February and the beginning of March, " the lesser mysteries " were celebrated. These were a kind of preparation for the greater mysteries at Eleusis, and none but those who had been 84 DAYS IN ATTICA initiated at the spring festival were allowed to share in the solemnities of the September gathering (see p. 317). In these mysteries Dionysus shared hardly less than Demeter, and it was his image that was carried in solemn procession along the Sacred Way to Eleusis at the later festival. Like Dionysus, Demeter is ostensibly a kindly deity, the patroness of the fruitful earth and the sweet reward of the husbandman's toil ; and, like Dionysus, she has also a relentless aspect. This is shown in the legend of her mourning for Persephone. The world is held famine-stricken in the frozen hand of grief, while she walks up and down the land searching for her vanished daughter. At last she comes to Hecate, the mistress of dark lore, who had heard the cry of Persephone when Plutus and his dark horses approached her as she was gathering flowers in a spring meadow, and carried her off to the underworld. Demeter's wrath and grief are unap- peasable ; she refuses to allow the plants to bear fruit, and the whole race of men seem about to die of famine, when the Olympians intervene and Plutus is obliged to yield Persephone. The meeting between mother and daughter is one of the sweetest themes of poetry. But the face of the daughter has changed and Demeter reads the truth in her eyes. Persephone has eaten the pome- granate, mysterious fruit of the underworld, and Plutus holds her as part of his kingdom. To him, therefore, she returns once a year, while Demeter mourns for her and the trees shed their leaves. At the close of the winter months Persephone returns to the upper world, and "blossom by blossom the spring begins." These, and such as these, are the legends which the Athenians told to their children, as they were climbing the steep ascent to the Propylaea ; as they were watching the chorus on the dancing-ground of Dionysus, or as they trod the Sacred Way to Eleusis ; a world of LEGENDS OF THE ACROPOLIS 85 memories, half believed in, wholly loved, to which Athenians looked back with wistful longing through the hardships of the Peloponnesian War, through the dis- appointments of the Sicilian expedition, and the gradual loss of political supremacy and military prestige. CHAPTER IV PROMISE I Athens Before the Persian Wars ON the summit of the Acropolis, between the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, there are low rock walls much blurred by time, but still giving recognizable indication of a long, rectangular building. In modern plans of the Acropolis this is clearly marked and is sometimes described as the Hekatompedon or Hun- dred-Foot Temple. There seems little doubt that these inconspicuous remains mark the earliest temple to Athena on the Acropolis. On the same spot still earlier masonry has been found — two stone column bases and fragments of prehistoric walling. Slight enough in them- selves, these remains seem to indicate that beneath the temple there was once a living-house with a central hall resembling 'those at Tiryns and Mycenae. It is exciting enough to be told that here is the original house of Erechtheus, a palace of sufficient antiquity for the Athenians to believe that Athena herself lived here. At any rate the site was dedicated to her from earhest times so it was natural that this spot should be chosen for her first temple. PROMISE 87 I had often tried to picture to myself what the Acropolis hill-top was like in those early days before the first Persian invasion, and it was in the Acropolis Museum that I came across the bit of sculpture that gave the thought an outline — a relief much broken but still show- ing temple, sacred precinct, olive-tree, and priestess. This missing link came to bridge the gulf between our first vision of the bare Acropolis rock, covered only with rude shrines, huddled dweUings, and the remains of cyclopeaa walls, and our later knowledge of the enlarged summit in all the glory of its marble temples. The little temple in the rehef is a box-like building. It is in the first primitive stone style recalling the old wooden construction. The triglyphs still look like beams and the pediment suggests a wooden gable. The roof is covered with tiles. It helps to call up a picture of the Acropolis in the early days of the sixth century, giving life to the precise information collected by archaeologists and his- torians, such as Dorpfeld and Judeich. Their researches have put the facts before us, but some imagination is necessary to shape the facts into a picture. Let us make the attempt. First there was the long, narrow crag, and, dark against the sky, the ragged outlines of the old Cyclopean walls. At the western end, line behind line of masonry, was the famous nine-gated entrance (Enneapylon), a formidable approach to the fortress. For the Acro- polis was a fortress ; an impregnable stronghold of Church and State set in the midst of the town. The dwelling-houses, the tombs, even the palace of the early inhabitants had disappeared. The hill-top had lost its first residential character. The dwellings of the citizens were elsewhere. Such buildings as there were were for defence or for worship. On the centre of the ridge was a solid - looking temple covered with stucco very fine and white, and 88 DAYS IN ATTICA ^ ornamented with deep touches of colour — dark ^lues and greens and a reddish brown. At the east end four detached columns and two pilasters supported the/archi- trave, above which was the well-known frieze of a/ternate triglyph and metope supporting a triangular p^iment filled with sculpture. The figures in the design show monstrous forms ; one rears erect three human heads, blue-bearded, and of uncouth amiability. The narrow ends of the pediment were filled with their curling tails. The whole work is painted with gay colours over the rough stone. It is hard to believe that tnis plain and solid building is the forerunner of the greit marble Parthenon, yet this was the first temple of Athena. Here was kept her old wooden image to wllich every four years the city in procession brought; the gar- ment woven by the flower of its maidenhood, the same procession that was recorded on the frieze of the later Parthenon. The old temple measured one hundred Attic feet from east to west, and in the main ropm of the Parthenon the same length measurement was carefully preserved. The temple was double, with a chamber east and west, and the Parthenon also preserved the same character. The simplicity and honesty of this early Doric architecture was full of promise. In less than a century it blossomed into full grace ar^d dignity. The proportions were enlarged and corrected, so that what was here mere heaviness developed into easy strength. Marble took the place of limestone, and in more beautiful material the sculptured ornament became a triumph of art. Even before the discovery of the marble in Pentelicus there had been steady progress. Peisistratus made the first step towards improvement by changing the old pediment sculptures for newer ones, and he also added a limestone colonnade which lightened the squat appearance of the temple. We look indulgently at any reconstruction of old Hekatompedon, because it shows the " man's thought PROMISE 89 dark in the infant's brain " and has hints of beauty to be. Yet to those who built it this temple was in itself a thing of beauty, a triumph of architecture, a notable advance on all that had gone before. The flavour of sanctity gave it mysterious awe, since it stood on the site of that first Mycenaean house where Athena dwelt with Erechtheus. When the temple was built the position was somewhat reversed, and instead of Athena being the guest of Erechtheus, it was Erechtheus who seemed to be the guest of Athena. But the old serpent-king of the Acropolis was not forgotten. There were sacred serpents dwelling in the precinct, and the curling tails of the sculptured pediments seem more connected with his worship than with that of Athena. Outside the temple there may still be seen a stone altar of Ge, the earth-mother, who confided the child Erichthoneus to the care of Athena. To complete the picture, to the north of the temple there must be imagined a level piece of the hill fenced in around a gnarled old olive-tree whose roots twisted serpent-like into the ground ; near by was a bare rock showing three holes in an irregular row about one foot apart; a rocky pool beside it was filled with stagnant, black water. These were the three mysterious emblems that gave sanctity to the Acropolis : the olive of Athena, the trident-mark of Poseidon, and the salt spring that moans in sympathy with the storm-tossed sea (see p. 137). Beside the temple and sacred precinct there were at this date few other buildings on the Acropolis ; some smaller temples, perhaps ; a shrine to Artemis ; an altar to the earth-mother ; some archaic statues, and a few capitals bearing votive offerings. The top of the hill slopes so much that there was indeed little place for other buildings. I fancy that at this time it was not all barren rock. We hear later of a flower that grew freely here, the flower with which Athena, Giver of Health, healed the workman who fell from the Propylaea, 90 DAYS IN ATTICA and may there not have been other oHves as well as that hoary, old tree of Athena ? After all, it is but a picture of fancy that we are painting. Let us think of the old Hekatompedon standing against a background of green, with the bare rock showing in places through the carpet of grass and flowers, a rocky footpath leading from one shrine to another, and in front of each an open space where the white-robed priest offered sacrifice. A deep gully divides the Acropolis from the rocky heights to the west. This was excavated by Dr, Dorpfeld, who laid bare the crowding houses and narrow ways of the sixth-century town. The streets are crooked and the houses small. There was no town-planning here, no master-mind to direct the growth of the settlement whose inhabitants clustered round the Acropolis like bees around their hive, ready at any moment to seek refuge in their fortress. At first the early settlers seem hardly to have dared to quit the Rock. When it was no longer possible for them to live within the Acropolis walls they cut the foundations of their homes back into the very wall of the cliff and remained perched on its barren ledges. A road wound down from the Areopagus into the valley below. The ancient city is here lost beneath the modern houses, but its lines are fairly known. A paved, open space marked the market-place, widening to a circle known as the orchestra or dancing-ground. Beyond this the space was prolonged and ran irregularly northwards towards a substantial group of houses at the farther end of the city. This is the Ceramicus, or potters' quarter. It was the fine white clay of this district that lured the Athenian potters at an early date from their incon- venient homes at the foot of the Acropolis, and here (since one trade follows another) the commercial centre of the city grew up. The straggling market-place that connects the potters' quarter with the buildings at the PROMISE 91 foot of the hill gradually acquired a double character. At the potters' end it was the market of commerce. At the other end, beneath the Areopagus, political news and gossip of State affairs were the commodities exchanged. Throughout this century the potters' business became increasingly important. The vases from Attica, with their glossy black figures and ruddy ground, found a market in Sicily, in Italy, in Asia Minor, and throughout the islands of the Mediterranean. Sixth-century Athens must have been a grey little town, with narrow streets and roofs of warm tiles. It lay beneath the Acropolis and stretched away unevenly to the north. The finest buildings were those near the hill. Here was a grey circular building known as the Tholos, where the daily sacrifices were offered. Beside it was the Prytaneum, with a thin wisp of smoke curling from it in token that the sacred fire still burnt in this the great public hearth of Athens. Here the officials lived and had their public meals. We may imagine it perhaps shaped like a dwell- ing-house, the hearth in the centre and the living-rooms opening from it. The new buildings of Peisistratus rose among their more venerable neighbours, conspicuous by their fresh stucco and bright paint. The small city would be all bustle and activity, a market town just blossoming into the new dignity of a capital. Around it, and merging in it without the barrier of intervening walls, came the cultivated fields and olive groves, a strip of deeper green ever marking the course of the three little rivers, Cephissus, Ilissus, and Eridanus. Away to the west lay barren salt marshes, with the sea beyond. To the south was the curving Phalerum Bay with its fringe of sand, and the long longships and fishing-boats drawn up on the beach. Phalerum itself would be half obscured by the rounded hill of Munychia, already crowned by a fortress and scarred with quarries. On the other side of Munychia, like a blue inland lake, shone the 92 DAYS IN ATTICA harbour of the Piraeus ; only a fringe of small houses and a few craft in the haven then marked the spot where Themistocles later created his second Athens. So much for the seaward view ; and away inland was the crown of hills, not barren and stony as to-day, but covered with deep woods, the haunt of wolf, and bear, and boar, and rich in birds and small game. The forests then came well down on to the plain and merged into the olive groves and cultivated lands, as these merged into the tracts of rock, scrub and marsh that fringed the shore. Here, as in a map, the Attica of the sixth century revealed the secret of her political condition with that eternal division between the party of the plain (rich and populous), the party of the coast (struggling and ambitious), and the party of the hills (poor and discon- tented). This is the landscape of Attica tinted to a sixth-century atmosphere. And now to make the picture complete, let us look at that procession of peasants moving slowly down from the mountain-side and approaching the city from the east. In the front is a chariot drawn by white horses, and on it stands a strapping peasant-girl, clad in long scarlet robes, with a brazen helmet on her head, a long spear in her hand, and the golden aegis of Athena on her breast. Beside her sits a lean and bearded man in full armour. The chariot jolts roughly as the horses pace along the broken road. The girl steadies herself on her spear and keeps her head erect. But her eyes are wide with fright, her lips parted. From time to time the man at her side mutters an encouraging word. There are peasants marching beside the car and waving boughs of olive which they have snapped in passing through the groves. They have come far and are breathless, hoarse with shouting and singing, and parched with the dusty highway. As they near the town they push the garlands back from their brows, swing their sticks, and PROMISE 93 break out once more into a joyful chant. The towns- folk come running out to meet them ; their astonishment turns to delight or disdain as they hurry back to tell the news. Before the city is reached a joyful crowd pushes along the road to meet the peasant waggon. They are all in holiday attire, shouting and singing, and taking up the refrain of the peasants. " Athena ! Athena ! " they shout. " Athena comes to visit her city !" And then another cry is raised, " Hail to the ruler beloved of the goddess ! " In this manner Peisistratus returned from his first exile. A hoax ? a miracle play ? a drama ? What does it all mean ? After-generations have often discussed that strange outburst of enthusiasm. Where did credulity end and docility begin ? Out of all that shouting crowd, was there one who scanned the peasant girl Phye with really religious awe ; or was it all a matter for throwing caps in the air and taking a show good- humouredly ? I have chosen it as a typical picture of this old pre- Persian Athens. In the first place we have the impetuous life of the young, growing nation ; childlike still and with a simplicity that was the germ of greatness ; receptive rather than critical, emotional, pleasure-loving, and sensi- tive to any new impression ; ready to run with the crowd and shout for the tyrant to-day, as to-morrow they will be ready to run and shout for the tyrannicides ; but above all things full of that surging life and energy that makes them throw their hearts into every enterprise. This is the material which, tempered by adversity and taught by experience, will make the fine steel of the iifth-century Athenian. And on the other hand there is the figure of Peisis- tratus, the strong man who gave an interval of peace to the faction-haunted city. He was the benevolent tyrant who patronized the arts ; who made his court a resort of the sculptors and poets of other lands ; who 94 DAYS IN ATTICA encouraged commercial intercourse, and turned the minds of the Athenians from their own petty parochial concerns to the wider culture of Asia Minor and the ^gean. This was the age of tyranny ; state after state in the Greek world had been forced to learn that the one cure for their internal quarrels lay in the temporary surrender of their liberty. Athens was not peculiar in her political conditions, but she was peculiar in the good fortune that gave her Peisistratus as tyrant. Indeed, accepting Aristotle's definition of tyrant as one who rules for his own good rather than for the good of the state, it is difficult to bring the rule of Peisistratus under the head of tyranny. Plutarch gives a pleasant picture of the relations between Peisistratus and Solon, the great law- giver who saw his reforms suddenly endangered by a coup d'etat. He alone had been clear-eyed enough to see the trend of politics, and when the crisis came he was the only one with sufficient courage to defy the tyrant. But for all that the friendship between them was unimpaired, and Solon stands to Peisistratus somewhat as Samuel stood to Saul in those days a few centuries earlier, when the Jewish nation had also given itself over to a tyranny. The progress made in every art during this period is amazing. Tradition asserts that it was at the court of Peisistratus that the cycle of Homeric poetry was for the first time collected and written down. Whether this is actually the case or not, the legend is in itself a tribute to his reputation as an art patron, and befits the picture of his court as a centre for artists of widely differing spheres. Nor was this kind of art patronage mere self- glorification. It needed an outlook in advance of his day to encourage his court poets to work at a subject such as the Siege of Troy, in which Athens and men of Attica played an inconspicuous part. As Professor Bury truly says, an Eastern monarch would have set PROMISE 95 them to immortalize his own exploits ; and in this matter, as much as in anything else, Peisistratus showed the wideness of his view. In the plastic arts the heavy limestone carving was gradually discarded. The sculptor began to use marble, and, however far from beauty the result, he had at any rate the satisfaction of finding that it need no longer be covered with paint to hide the blemishes and irregu- larities of its surface. Before very long this art of marble- cutting was carried further, and the veined, translucent stone was made to acknowledge a subtle relationship with veined and glowing flesh. The parallel between Florence under the Medici and Athens under the Peisistratidae often suggests itself. In the Archaic Rooms of the Athenian museums the sculp- tors are seen struggling with the same problems that beset the resurrection of art in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of our era. In both cases there was a double difficulty to contend with : the limitations imposed by the material and those imposed by custom and by re- ligious associations. There is, however, one great differ- ence. The Italian sculptors had specimens of the best Greek work before them, while the Attic sculptors were drawing their inspiration from Ionian models only slightly in advance of their own achievements. Where the Greek had advantage over the Italian was in the life he saw around him. No doubt it was long before nude models were posed, but there were nude slaves in his own workshop. He could go to the gymnasium or to the palaestra, and could watch the vigorous play of muscles as the naked wrestlers gripped each other ; could study the slow grace of the disc-thrower, the poise of the arm with the lance, the relaxed pause of the weary athlete. Here he had around him all day living statues with the sun playing on the modelling of the flesh, and revealing subtleties of anatomy that sent him back to his work 96 DAYS IN ATTICA with a cry to Athena to endue his chisel with new skill. This was the age when the athletic contests became famous. In the great games of Olympia, of Corinth, and of Athens, all freeborn Greeks were allowed to com- pete. A legitimate outlet was thus given to the competi- tive instincts of the race, and local patriotism no longer led of necessity to broken heads. Perhaps Peisistratus was wise enough to perceive the drift of the age, and it was as a statesman no less than as a sportsman that he showed honour to the victors of the games. His own horses competed in the chariot races ; Herodotus even thinks it credible that Peisistratus permitted the owner of the winning team at Olympia to have his sentence of banishment reversed on the condition that he on his part should allow Peisistratus to claim the victory. With a ruler who threw himself so enthusiastically into their pastimes it is little wonder that the pleasure-loving side of the Athenians was developed. The Athenians learned to enjoy painting, sculpture and music. They also learned to consider dancing as an art as well as a religious exercise. And here we come to one of the most interesting features of the period — the religious revival connected with the worship of Dionysus and its effect upon dramatic art. Before the days of Peisistratus the god from Thrace was acknowledged and worshipped in Athens, He had three festivals in the year : in December the Rural Dionysia, in January the "feast of the wine-press," in February the "feast of blossoming." But it is not until the latter part of the sixth century that he takes a prominent place among the Athenian divinities, and the development of his worship must be attributed to Peisistratus. There was one orchestra or dancing- ground in the market-place, and another in front of the little limestone temple where afterwards stood the great Dionysiac theatre. There has also been discovered PROMISE 97 another precinct of Dionysus on the western slope of the hill, and it seems evident that about this period he became one of the most popular divinities in Athens. One may perhaps suggest that Peisistratus himself was too good an actor not to enjoy the dramatic interest of the Dionysiac choruses. His simulated wound shown in the Agora, his entrance into the town led by the goddess Athena, the ruse that led to the taking of Nisaea, all these must have needed careful stage management, and reveal him (like many another politician) as an actor manque. It was he who instituted a fourth great annual festival in honour of Dionysus — the Dionysia of the city. It celebrated the resurrection of the god of the vine after his long winter sleep, and took place in the end of March and beginning of April, when little is needed to set any southerner dancing in tune to the triumph of Nature. A feast at this time of the year seems not only natural but inevitable ; the Athenians had per- haps from time immemorial been wont to celebrate the coming of spring in a sacred dance. It was in these days that the story element was introduced and the dance turned to drama. Any one who has lived in Attica knows how the first mild days and soft rains can throw a veil of green over the brown hill-sides, while a million plants are drawn out of the earth and the almond-trees become sheeted with blossom ; any one who has seen these things knows the advent of spring concentrated into a three days' miracle and ceases to wonder that the ancient Athenians gave themselves over to a religious ecstasy that was indeed the intoxication of delight. The worship of Dionysus is associated with rapture, with feelings that pass the bounds of speech and express themselves in motion. This is why it is associated with the dancing-ground, why the dance is in essence religious, and why the whole story of the development of the drama is bound up with 98 DAYS IN ATTICA that little limestone temple of Dionysus under the Acropolis hill. It will be interesting to consider these questions more in detail when we come to stand in the magnificent marble-seated theatre of the fourth century. For the moment it is enough to note that the dramatic art, no less than the arts of poetry and sculpture, must trace the time of its flowering to the genial atmosphere of the tyrants. Within view of the dancing-ground, though at some distance away from it, Peisistratus began to build a temple to Olympian Zeus. This he never finished, but the site was well chosen. The broad platform overlooking the Ilissus was probably in those days a well-wooded solitude. Hadrian could not better the choice of Peisis- tratus when he came to select a spot for his magnificent temple. Away across the river the Lyceum, a famed gymnasium, was half hidden by its groves of trees. To complete the list of all that Athens owes to her tyrants two more works must be added, practical benefits which perhaps outweighed in value all the rest : a good water supply and good roads. An aqueduct now brought water from the upper Ilissus, and the town, formerly dependent on brackish wells and uncertain rivers, had a fine public fountain with water gushing from nine generous lion-mouths. Instead of the stony tracks leading from the moun- tains, hard to find and rough to follow, Peisistratus or his sons gave Attica well-laid roads, marked with mile- stones and leading to the altar of the Twelve Gods in the Agora, which became thus as it were the Hyde Park Corner of Athens. In short, that which was at the coming of Peisistratus a mere country town, is found at the end of his family's reign a small capital, with temples, theatre, gymnasium, fountains, roads, and everything essential to the well- being of city life. PEOMISE 99 The Athenians changed even more than their city. Instead of the factious crowd of countrymen, rude in speech and limited in idea, a gay polyglot throng filled the market-place. The simple Attic dress with its woollen or leather tunic was exchanged for the longer, more effeminate and more elaborate Ionic dress of linen : golden clasps and cunningly woven borders were popular at festivals. For active life men still kept to the short tunic that left their limbs free, and the athletes at their exercises wore nothing but a girdle — but for city life a more luxurious style was becoming common, and even Solon's sumptuary laws could not stem the tide of fashion. " The Athenians," says Thucydides, " were the first who laid aside arms and adopted an easier and more luxurious way of life. Quite recently the old-fashioned refinement of dress still lingered among the elder men of the richer class, who wore undergarments of linen, and bound back their hair in a knot with golden clasps in the form of grasshoppers." What a beguiling fashion that must have been ! No wonder the old men clung to it in spite of changing modes, even as they clung to their becoming wigs in the early days of the nineteenth century. II IN THE NATIONAL MUSEUM In modern Athens there are still four places where it is possible to breathe the atmosphere of those far-away days before the city was destroyed by the Persians. The first is in the Archaic Rooms of the National Museum, another is in the museum on the Acropolis, the third is on the Pnyx hill, and the fourth on the Areopagus. The National Museum in Athens stands at the town 100 DAYS IN ATTICA end of that long road leading out to the Patissia suburl This Patissia Road is one of the new boulevards th: have gained for Athens the name of " le petit Paris. High white houses with brightly coloured jalousie blind stand on either side of a broad street where young tree are planted. Down the middle of the road there rattle with much horn-blowing a little electric tram. On th pavements are the nursery parties of the suburb : nurse in high Russian head-dresses and silver chains ; nurse with gigantic gay caps of frilled ribbon ; nurses in larg white aprons, stout nurses, thin nurses, lean nurses brawny nurses (but mostly stout) ; and beside them th children, little dark-eyed monkeys in tartan dresses witl ribbon sashes ; a few perambulators, and many babie carried on the arm, their embroidered robes reaching t( the hem of the nurses' skirts. On a sunny day thesi parties all saunter along the pavement, sooner or later t( drift into the pleasant shade of the museum garden, thi only playground at this end of the town. There th( children romp among the shrubs of oleander and arbutu and lean over the circular stone basins of the two pond where the goldfish lurk. At the further end of the garden there rises a whiti colonnade, shadowing a terrace of Venetian red, in fron of a large white building. A decorative row of orange trees stands before the terrace like a guard of honour This is the National Museum, a pleasant refuge on a ho day. Here are shaded rooms, marble floors, and silent sleepy guardians in long blue cassocks, with the freshnesi of that large garden between the museum and the dust; street. The coolest thing that I know on a hot day is t( turn into the rooms of archaic sculpture, and to spenc a morning among these stone Apollos, gazing onesel back into the earliest twilight of Greek art. After the precocious brilliance of Ci'ete and Mycena night seems to settle over the Mediterranean world. Thi PROMISE 101 old culture is wiped out, the old traditions forgotten. The builder has lost the secret of architecture ; the painter decorates his vase with angular scratches. The few records that remain of this dark period are stored in the Prehistoric Room — a small gallery leading out of the big hall which is devoted to the Mycenaean treasures. A brief visit to the Prehistoric Room is enough to indicate how completely the Mycenaean civihzation had vanished. Here remains of the Pre- Mycenaean periods herd together as if that glorious inter- lude had never been- The gulf between these prehistoric scraps and the period of full-blown Greek art is bridged by the objects shown in what are known as the Archaic Rooms. Return to the entrance-hall, turn into the room on your right and you have before you a scheme of sculpture illus- trating the growth of that art from the first rude stone images up to the mature beauty of the bronze Hermes. There is something repellent and yet mesmeric in this phalanx of stone figures with staring eyes, wide-smiling lips, and rigid limbs. They are a strange company gathered from different parts of the Greek world and dating from the eighth to the sixth century B.C. Arranged in a roughly chronological order the earliest works are for the most part nearest the entrance. In the centre of the large Archaic Room stands an im- pressive figure lately found at Sunium. It is a stone colossus, IS feet high, the figure of a man with a right leg slightly advanced. The limbs are heavy and lumpish ; the eyes monstrous and protruding; the corners of the closed lips turned up in a deprecating smile. The ears are treated as a mere spiral ornament. The hair is arranged in neat curls. There may have been something impressive in his aspect to the sailors who rounded the bay and caught sight of him standing in the open air on that fine rocky headland at Sunium. But as 102 DATS IN ATTICA he is now, imprisoned in a grey museum and surrounded by others of the same type, he becomes a very nightmare of amiable uncouthness. His main significance Hes in his strong Egyptian savour. He shows clearly enough one quarter to which the callow ^gean sculptor naturally turned for inspiration. In the same room are other figures of much the same aspect. They are all known as " Apollos," and it is likely enough that some of them stood for an aspect of the deity, though others were but representations of human athletes. At first they seem to be nothing more than stone reproductions of the old sacred images of wood. There is something flat and angular in the treat- ment of the stone ; the figure recalls the flat board or trunk of the tree out of which such statues were first made. It is only by slow degrees that changes are intro- duced in attitude or anatomy. First the distinction of sex is indicated, then a knee or ear is studied, an arm is raised, or the bony framework of the torso is suggested. In the same room another stage of progress is indicated in the statuette of the Flying Victory found at Delos and long known as the Victory of Archermus. Here the artist grapples with a new set of problems. No longer content with the search after an easier and more lifelike attitude, he now goes further and tries to represent movement. The figure of the Flying Victory is reproduced on Plate 5a. At first it seems simply ludicrous. The lower half of the body turns to the right : in trying to suggest the movement of the limbs in flight, the artist has only conveyed the idea that the goddess is dropping on one knee. This attitude was also adopted to represent running figures. Compare this Victory with the helmeted Runner reproduced on the same plate, Fig. 6. There are remains of large wings behind the Victory's PLATE V ARCHAIC SCULPTURE a. FL'S'lNi; \llLTOI«Y /'. HELMK'I'ED KUNNliK C, TOMHSTONE oK AI';lSTI(]N d, ACK'fll'OLIS .MAIDEN PROMISE 103 shoulders, small wings in front of them, and wings on her ankles. If he could not quite make her fly, her creator supplied her handsomely with wings. The upper half of the body and the head are not like the legs in profile, but are turned to the front. This gives the statue a queer twist. The broad, smiling mouth and wide eyes seemed turned to the spectator as though demanding sympathy for some huge joke. Does she really expect to be taken seriously ? It is hard at first to realize that this is one of the great statues of antiquity : that for generations it was worshipped as divine, and that in modern days it has been studied and discussed as much as any work of art. The ques- tion of authorship alone has filled many articles in archaeological journals. It is now questioned whether the statue has any connection with the pedestal bearing the names of Archermus and Mikkiades of Chios, on which it once rested, yet it is still accepted as a work of that Chian school which in the seventh century was known as foremost among marble-workers. To contemporaries this statue seemed a miracle of art. There is certainly some suggestion of motion. The cloak is blown back from the goddess's shoulders and the drapery from her limbs, so that the form of the thigh is suggested under the clinging folds. This effect of clinging drapery, and the traces of wings on the shoulders, give this figure the right to be considered as a distant ancestress of that most beautiful statue of the fourth century, the Victory of Samothrace. Perhaps without this crude attempt that other Victory would not have been achieved. Certainly the conception of this little archaic figure shows thought and poetry far in advance of its execution. The Apollo from Sunium and the Nike of Archermus are typical of this early art where beauty is only relative, precious only by contrast with what has been, or as a 104 DAYS IN ATTICA foretaste of what is to be. In the next rooms the sculp- ture already explains itself. Here there is the same com- bination of gracious simphcity and formal reserve that give their charm to the pictures of the early Italian Renaissance. The bas-relief that shows Triptolemus receiving the ears of corn has a dignity of gesture, a sentiment indicated by pose rather than expressed by feature, which recall the historical frescoes of Giotto. Beside Triptolemus on either side stand Demeter and Persephone. The funeral monument of Aristion is an arresting bit of characterization (Plate 5c). The sharp features, bare muscular limbs, and alert expression, stamp them- selves on the memory, so that when one tries to picture Athens of the sixth century the town of our imagination seems peopled with a race of hardy, intelligent soldiers such as this. Less ambitious than the Flying Victory, it is infinitely more pleasing, and the style is marked by a reserve that already tells of power. Of later date than the Victory, and of Attic workmanship, it brings the history of sculpture a full step nearer to Pheidias. It has besides a kind of historical interest, for this Aristion may well be the very man of that name who is mentioned in Plutarch as the friend of Peisistratus. The story runs thus : — " Solon, privately conferring with the heads of the fac- tions, endeavoured to compose the differences. Peisis- tratus appeared the most tractable, for he was extremely smooth and engaging in his language, a great friend to the poor, and moderate in his resentments, and what Nature had not given him he had the skill to imitate ; so that he was trusted more than the others, being accounted a prudent and orderly man, one that loved equality and would be an enemy to any that moved against the present settlement. Thus he deceived the majority of the people, but Solon quickly discovered his character, and found PROMISE 105 out his design before any one else ; yet did not hate him upon this, but endeavoured to humble him and bring him off from his ambition, and often told him and others that if any one could banish the design of pre-eminence from his mind and cure him of his desire of absolute power, none would make a more virtuous man or more excellent citizen. Now when Peisistratus, having wounded himself, was brought into the market-place in a chariot and stirred up the people as if he had been thus treated by his opponents because of his pohtical conduct, and a great many were enraged and cried out, Solon, coming close to him, said, 'This, O son of Hippocrates, is a bad copy of Homer's Ulysses ; you do to trick your country- men what he did to deceive his enemies.' After this the people were eager to protect Peisistratus, and met in an assembly, where one Aristion making a motion that they should allow Peisistratus fifty clubmen for a guard to his person, Solon opposed it. . . . " And the people, having passed the law, were not nice with Peisistratus about the number of his clubmen, but took no notice of it, though he enlisted and kept as many as he would until he seized the Acropolis. When that was done and the city in an uproar, Megacles with all his family at once fled ; but Solon, though he was very old and had none to back him, yet came into the market-place and made a speech to the citizens, partly blaming their inadvertency and meanness of spirit, and in part urging and exhorting them not thus tamely to lose their liberty ; and likewise then spoke that memor- able saying that before it was easier to stop the rising tyranny, but now the greater and more glorious action to destroy it when it was begun already and had gathered strength. But all being afraid to side with him, he returned home, and taking his arms, he brought them out and laid them in the porch before his door, with these words, ' I have done my part to maintain my 106 DATS IN ATTICA country and my laws,' and then he busied himself no more." Ill IN THE ACROPOLIS MUSEUM A museum on the Acropolis sounds almost like dese- cration, yet I have never heard any one wish the present modest building away. It is sunk beneath the level of the ground and its roof is hardly visible. Here are gathered together all the treasures discovered by the Greek Archaeological Society when excavating on the Acropolis (1884-90). The collection is homogeneous. It has a unity of time as well as of place. The objects all date from before the great destruction of the Acro- polis by the Persians in 480 B.C. They were mostly found under the level of the present Parthenon, the broken fragments having been roughly shovelled together to make a broad terrace on which the new temple should be built. Herodotus tells the story of the national catastrophe that preceded the great rebuilding : — " The Persians encamped upon the hill over against the citadel, which is called Mars Hill by the Athenians, and began the siege of the place, attacking the Greeks with arrows whereto pieces of lighted tow were attached, which they shot at the barricade. And now those who were within the citadel found themselves in a most woeful case, for their wooden rampart betrayed them ; still, however, they continued to resist. It was in vain that the Peisistradae came to them and offered terms of surrender — they stoutly refused all parley, and among other modes of defence rolled down huge masses of stone upon the barbarians as they were mounting up to the gates, so that Xerxes was for a long time very PROMISE 107 greatly perplexed, and could not contrive any way to take them. "At last, however, in the midst of these many diffi- culties, the barbarians made discovery of an access. For verily the oracle had spoken truth, and it was fated that the whole mainland of Attica should fall beneath the sway of the Persians. Right in front of the citadel, but behind the gates and the common ascent, where no watch was kept and no one would have thought it possible that any foot of man could climb, a few soldiers mounted from the sanctuary of Aglaurus, Cecrops' daughter, notwithstanding the steepness of the precipice. As soon as the Athenians saw them upon the summit, some threw themselves headlong from the wall and so perished, while others fled for refuge to the inner part of the temple. The Persians rushed to the gates and opened them, after which they massacred the suppliants. When all were slain they plundered the temple and every part of the citadel." When the war was over and the victorious Athenians returned to the ruined Acropolis they found that the work of destruction was complete. With full confidence in themselves they gave up the idea of mere restoration and set to work to create other and more beautiful statues and temples to replace those that they had lost. The debris of the old buildings and statues was used as worthy foundations to level up the narrow gable of the hill-top, till it widened to a broad platform on which the new buildings could be planted. It is almost as though the Athenians were glad to be rid of the old works of art, which already jarred on their taste and were yet too sacred to have been intentionally set aside. Once displaced, they might be discarded. In any case they had proved their inability to protect the national shrines and the supphants in the temple. In many of our modern towns the Persians might 108 DAYS IN ATTICA also prove a wholesome scourge. " Make a cleaa sweep and begin again," is an inspiring programme to a nation serene in its self-confidence, and this was evi- dently the motto on which the fifth-century Athenians acted. They wanted no museum for their discarded divinities. They simply buried them where they lay. Thus it came to pass that when, in our own day, the top of the Acropolis hill was thoroughly excavated there was found a rich deposit, dating from before the Persian War, and mostly from the century immediately preceding it. Many of these fragments are in such excellent pre- servation that it is hard to believe they are unearthed from a rubbish-heap more than two thousand years old. Here are found the painted limestone sculptures that filled the pediments of the old Hekatompedon, and of some unknown neighbouring buildings. There is a brawny Hercules wrestling with a monster, and there is the three-headed Typhon whose curling tail diminishes as it recedes into the acute angle of the pediment. Another limestone group shows a struggle between a bull and two lions. The grim persistence with which the lion holds on to his prey, the strength in the down- pressed neck of the bull are almost Minoan in spirit. Here also is a portion of the marble pediment of Peisistratus that replaced the limestone reptiles. It is much broken, but enough remains to show that it repre- sented Athena slaying a giant — a vigorous piece of work ; the attitude of the goddess belies her smile. As this group was in the place of honour over the central temple at the time of the Persian invasion, it no doubt met with the roughest treatment. It seems little less than a miracle that the gentle face of the goddess survived the fall of the temple she adorned. The row of maidens or priestesses that were standing around the Hekatompedon had less far to fall and suffered less than the Athena. They are marble statues PROMISE 109 showing the soft lines and rich decoration beloved by the Ionian sculptor, and therefore dating no doubt from the artistic revival under Peisistratus. The dress is most elaborate. How were these neat folds kept in place ? The undergarment is drawn tightly round the figure. Over it an embroidered cloak is arranged in small per- pendicular folds that usually seem to hang from a hidden band passed crosswise over the breast. Probably this style of statue drapery became something of an artistic convention and was never quite a faithful copy of Nature. Experiments have shown that it is impossible to repro- duce these costumes line for line without cutting and sewing the material, whereas in the Attic and Doric styles of dress there is no line of drapery in stone that cannot be reproduced by pinned folds. The elaborate Ionic dress worn by these Acropolis maidens was in vogue in Athens throughout the latter half of the sixth century and corresponds with the fashion of more luxu- rious dress for men mentioned in a previous section (see p. 99). Herodotus has an amusing tale that it was introduced to punish the Athenian ladies for having stabbed an offender to death with their brooches, since this style of dress does not require the heavy shoulder- brooch of the Doric dress. This may or may not have been the case, but it is probable that it was also part of the general cult of Eastern fashion for which Peisistratus was in great measure responsible. The style was too artificial to become permanently popular, and in the next century both men and women in Athens adopted the simpler and more dignified Doric draperies. These Acropolis maidens have some points of resem- blance with the Flying Victory from Delos ; being less ambitious, they are much more pleasing and certainly — there is no other word — more lady-like. I know no one who has haunted the Acropolis Museum without coming to feel the charm of these gentle " aunts " : well-dressed 110 DAYS IN ATTICA and well-bred, something more than mortal and yet not quite divine. We can picture them on that day when the rough Persian soldiery poured up the hill. They stood in line outside the temple awaiting their fate with serene dignity, much as the statue-like senators of Rome awaited the Goths who stormed their Capitol. After twenty-two centuries of burial the dresses of these priestesses still keep their gay borders and their faces that demure, downcast smile (Plate ^d). The last time I visited the Acropolis Museum I found so many new acquaintances among the old friends there that it almost seemed as if there might have been new excava- tions. But the Acropolis holds no more for the ex- cavator. The additions are due to scholars who have been building up new statues out of old fragments. The illustrated catalogue also helps one to new discoveries. The archaic animal groups are the most impressive of the restorations. In addition to the old fragmentary pediment of lion and bull there is now a companion group showing a lioness tearing a calf. In the first group, though the lion was obviously master, one felt that the bull had made a good fight. This new pediment is more cruel. The calf is completely crumpled up under the huge lioness, a creature made more terrifying by the touches of bright paint. Notice her red eye with blue eyeball and long, tearing claws. The calf has never had a chance. This marble greyhound with gentle head and intent eye has gained by the recovery of his nose. And here are two archaic riders, their noble horses pacing forward with arched necks and well-raised feet. One horse has a blue mane, one a red. The body of one rider and the hands of both are missing. Were their wrists too weak to hold their steeds without that torturing bit indi- cated, though the metal bridles are missing, by the raised head and open mouth of the horse ? It is classical models PROMISE 111 such as these that have given Art the conception of the horse as an animal that holds his head high and froths at the mouth. A study of the bits used in antiquity explains the device by which this effect was obtained, and the bridles of the modern Greek are often hardly less cruel. Most beautiful among the animal studies is this delicately outlined flight of birds : great winged eagles and storks in alternate panels, which were ranged under the eaves of the old temple of Athena. IV DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATS Of the actual remains of pre-Persian Athens little is now to be seen except that which has found a place in the museums. The foundations of the old Hekatompedon on the Acropolis need to be interpreted by an expert. The columns of the new colonnade which Peisistratus set around it are now mere fragments built into the north wall of the Acropolis. The Prytaneum, the Tholos, the Bouleuterium, the Orchestra in the Agora, the Lyceum, have vanished, leaving no trace. The Areopagus shows no more than a flight of rock-cut steps, a level floor, and two stone benches. The Pnyx is the most satisfactory building that remains of this age. Here the retaining wall ^ rises to a conspicuous height, and here are the stone platform from which the orators addressed the people and the altar (also of stone) on which sacrifices were offered. From here also there is a memorable view of the Acropolis, which gathers itself together, a massive pillar of light and shade against the flat, grey background • But recent excavations have now shown this wall to be no earlier than the fourth century. 112 DAYS IN ATTICA of Hymettus. On the very top of the Pnyx hill there are another altar and platform, the purpose of which is not very clear. Plutarch made much of the fancy that the double view from the Pnyx ridge represented the choice before the Athenian democracy. Should it face the sea and follow an imperial policy, devoting its attention to colonies and conquests oversea, or should it content itself with an interior, self -regarding " little Athens " policy ? In point of fact the sea- view is not visible from either platform on the Pnyx. What matter ? A dramatic gesture in the direction of the Piraeus would enable an orator like Themistocles to make his point with proper effect whether the sea were visible or not. In the first days of the Athenian Assembly the Pnyx hill-side had perhaps a natural slope from the altar and rock platform down to the valley in which lay the old town of Athens. Then, as the audience grew, it became impossible for those at the foot of the hill either to see or hear what occurred on the summit. In order to remedy this a massive circular retaining wall was built, and inside it the ground was banked up, giving the hill-top the character of an irregular theatre. As in a theatre, the audience were now circled above instead of below the orator, their backs to the town, their faces towards the sea. This retaining wall is still an impressive sight as one turns from the carriage-road in the Acropolis valley. The rocky path that leads to the summit passes under these blocks, some of which measure as much as 13 feet by 6 feet. It seems to follow the original path used by the citizens of ancient Athens, for the rocks are worn smooth with use. The democracy continued to grow as democracies will, and by the middle of the fourth century B.C. the Pnyx hill was deserted and the Assembly met in the great new theatre on the south side of the Acropolis. PLATK rr y. < O T. c ,; PROMISE 113 Standing on the breezy Pnyx and looking at the rock- cut platform, one tries to picture the actual working of a democracy that governed by mass meeting. No electing of delegates and representatives here. It is the whole body of citizens that decide the action of the State. See how they must be bullied and bribed into attendance. Look at that cord round the market-place to prevent trivial comings and goings on the day of the Assembly. Only the road to the Pnyx remains open, and along that road go the citizens, driven more ignominiously than schoolboys to a house-match or sheep to a fair. The payment of a few obols makes up to the poor man for the loss of his day's wage. The rich man to whom the small bonus is of no value has perhaps his own policy to further or is ambitious to shine as an orator. Go they all must, willing or unwilling, or lose their privileges as Athenian citizens. The picture of Athenian democracy seems like a caricature of all democratic government. How could a mob thus collected decide questions of State policy ? Home affairs must have been difficult enough to deal with in an Assembly where conflicting interests were personally represented ; but what when it came to foreign policy ? No room for fine diplomacy here. The Government of Athens bawled its intentions on the hill-top, and then wondered that its schemes were sometimes forestalled by its neighbours. Think, too, of the officials chosen by lot without question of their char- acter and experience, so that a man might find himself harbour-master one year and another year, say, auditor of accounts ; only the most important offices, such as the Ministry of War, being filled by officials rationally selected. That the system met with 'even tolerable success is a glorious tribute to the intellect of the average Athenian citizen. It is true that there was power to discard any man flagrantly unsuited for office and also a system of 114 DAYS IN ATTICA scrutiny and an account to be rendered at the expiration of office. Without these modifying circumstances the Athenian democracy could hardly have survived a gene- ration. Even as it was it failed. It was here on the Pnyx that the pitiful blunders were made, resulting in the Sicilian expedition and the Peloponnesian War. But the deliberations on this hill-top also belong to the best age of Greek democracy, an age that was already pass- ing when Pericles proudly claimed, "Athens is the school of Hellas, and the individual Athenian in his own person , seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace." The picture of democracy on the Pnyx is not complete without its complement, the picture of aristocracy on the Areopagus, that hill-side opposite. A cynic has re- marked that all the pilgrims who come to Athens may be divided into two classes — those who follow the footsteps of Paul and those who follow the footsteps of Pausanias. The latter spend many days visiting odd scraps of masonry, discussing the exact site of the nine-mouthed fountain, and finding their joy in the most obscure remains ; the former drive straight to the Areopagus, and, having looked at Athens from this point of view, proceed to discuss the probable site of the altar to the Unknown God. Perhaps those days of undivided alle- giance are over, but there is much to be said for the concentrated vision of the pilgrim. Indeed, it is a mag- nificent picture that this chapter in the Acts recalls — the picture of a little Jew standing on the little Areopagus and waving aside with one gesture of his hand the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and all the accumulated tradition of splendour on that overshadowing hill. " Know ye not that God dwelleth not in temples made with hands ? " " Temples made with hands " — that is all he has to say of them. Truly a memorable moment in the PROMISE 115 history of mankind ! And the pilgrims are right who come to Athens determined to make real for themselves at least this one great impression and not to concern them- selves with doubts whether really Paul stood upon this crag called " Areopagus " or in the council-house of the same name below. Perhaps the impression would not be lessened but deepened, if they gathered up the full harvest of associa- tions suggested by this piece of rock, and then thought of all that the Areopagus suggested to the Athenians as well as of the little that it conveyed to Paul. The Areopagus is connected in Greek legend with mysteries of defiance and retribution. It is the only rising ground within bowshot of the Acropolis. There- fore in early days it was the natural camp of any enemy attacking the citadel. Here the Amazons are supposed to have encamped in their war with Theseus. Here, later, the Persians stationed themselves, slinging fiery bolts against the wooden wall of the Acropolis (see p. io6). But in the days of Athenian greatness the thought of the Areopagus as a post for the foe vanished from view, and instead came vaguer and even more gloomy associations. It was the Hill of Judgment and the Home of Retribution. Here Ares came to be judged after he had murdered his daughter's lover, and here in later days sat the old conservative aristocratic Court of the Areopagus, charged with the duty of clearing the State from blood-guiltiness. Its members were to judge between accused and accuser, as each solemnly stated his case standing by the stone allotted to him, and their task was also detective. They were to discover wrong- doers and for this end they were given power over the private life of the citizen, almost matching those of the Spanish Inquisitors or the Roman Censor. Yet Athens was grateful to them ; they stood between society and the dark powers of the underworld. As the duty of 116 DAYS IN ATTICA the Inquisitors was to punish heresy and save men from the devil, so the Areopagus must see to the punish- ment of crime lest unavenged blood should call down the wrath of the Furies, or lest men should in secret depart from those sacred customs by which the State had grown strong. Early society is not liberal or pro- gressive. It is intensely conservative, afraid to deviate from the familiar paths lest unknown terrors should befall. Beneath the Areopagus rock is a chasm which became in time the home or prison of the Furies. In the early days of society they had not been thus confined to one spot but were found everywhere. Hard to appease, insatiable, vindictive, they sent madness and misfortune to the house of the murderer and would allow no crime to remain unavenged. Primitive man suffered throughout from consciousness of guilt. It seemed to him that the whole community must be punished if the criminal were not made a scape- goat. Thus the Furies were represented as lynx-eyed. And since vengeance implies a series of infinite retalia- tion and the long tale of a blood-feud, the Furies were also shown to be thirsty and unappeasable. When in the natural course of social development the State assumed responsibility for punishment, the Court of the Areopagus gradually replaced the Furies, and its harsh justice was merciful after their black terror. It is easy therefore to see why the Furies had their dwelling in the chasm beneath the Areopagus. For centuries the city eyed their home uneasily. The legend that tells how they were changed from Erinyes, " Furies," to Eumenides, or " Kindly Ones," is a pleasant illustration of the genial rationalism with which the later Greek spirit mellowed the bitterness of its Dark Ages. The story is worked out by ^schylus in his play "The Eumenides." It shows Orestes tormented by the Furies PROMISE 117 for the murder of his mother. It is true that he had killed her in order to avenge his father's death and that blood was already crying out for vengeance when, by Apollo's express command, he carried out the death sentence, The Furies take no heed to the justice of the cause ; vengeance is their only cry. Orestes has slain his mother and blood must answer for blood. In despair Orestes appeals to Apollo. Apollo directs him to Athens. He must go to the hill of Ares and there lay his cause before Athena. Then comes the magnificent scene in which Apollo pleads for Orestes, the chorus of Furies reiterate their cry that a mother's murder cannot and must not remain unavenged. In the end Athena institutes the Court of the Areo- pagus, the men of Athens are made judges of all cases of homicide. The Furies are given a home beside the rock and their name is changed. Athena sums up the matter thus : — Hear now my statute, men of Athens, ye Who try this case, the first of homicide, And ever henceforth for the host of ^Egeus This ParHament of judges shall abide. I dedicate yon hill (the seat and camp Of Amazons when with ill-will to Theseus They came in war and fenced that high-fenced town, A new town 'gainst the old, and sacrificed To Ares whence the rock and hill are named The Areopagus) on which the people's Awe And his brother Fear shall chase alike By day and night wrongdoing ; if the people Themselves admit no changes in my laws. I charge the people cherish and revere Neither a lawless nor despotic form. And not to cast all fear outside the State. For who of mortals fearing naught is just ? If you do duly dread this awful Court, Then you shall have a bulwark of the land And city safeguard such as no man hath. 118 DAYS IN ATTICA This speech plainly emphasizes the change from the era of private vengeance to the conception that the State is guardian of the laws. It is a change that must come sooner or later in every progressive society. The Greeks are peculiar in that they seem to have been so far advanced and so far self-conscious that they demanded some rational explanation of the change, and that the explanation came not from the priests but from the poets. It is peculiar also to the Greek genius that some special spot should have been connected with the story. Legend and landscape seem wedded in the Greek mind. And in all the near neighbourhood of Athens there is perhaps no other place so suggestive of communication with the lower world as this upstanding rock with its abrupt edge and chasm. As time went on the feelings of awe lessened. Cynicism and disillusion marked the generation that saw the end of the Peloponnesian War. The Court of the Areopagus was removed to a building in the neighbourhood of the Agora, and justice no longer needed the backing of tamed Furies. No doubt it was essential for the health of young Athens that the Court of the Areopagus should lose its vague terrors, and yet from a sentimental point of view I am attached to this group of gloomy old aristocrats and their dark alliance with the spirits of the underworld. The Areopagus seems indeed to have been the chosen home of mystery. Somewhere in this same region the tomb of CEdipus, King of Thebes, was thought to be hidden. In the great trilogy of Sophocles CEdipus comes blind and exiled to Colonus. Theseus, King of Athens, comes to meet him and show him hospitality. In reply CEdipus says : "Son of .(Egeus, I will unfold that which shall be a treasure for this thy city, such as age never can mar. Anon, unaided and with no hand to guide me. PROMISE 119 I will show the way to the place where I must die. But that place reveal thou never unto mortal man ; tell not where it is hidden, nor in what region it lies, that so it may ever make for thee a defence, better than many shields, better than the succouring spear of neighbours. But for mysteries which speech may not profane thou shalt mark them for thyself, when thou comest to that place alone : since neither to any of this people can I utter them nor to mine own children, dear though they are. No, guard them thou alone ; and when thou art coming to the end of life disclose them to thy heir alone ; let him teach his heir : and so thenceforth." ^ ' I quote from a translation by the late Sir Richard Jebb. The translation of jEschylus on p. 117 is by A. Swan wick. CHAPTER V FULFILMENT: BUILDINGS ON THE ACROPOLIS f: THE ENTRANCES 1^ |0R the works of Pericles . . . were perfectly made in so short a time and have continued so long a season. For every one of those which were finished at that time seemed to them to be very ancient touching the beauty thereof, and yet for the grace and continuance of the same it looketh at this day as if it were but newly done and finished ; there is such a certain kind of flourishing freshness in it, which telleth that the injury of time cannot impair the sight thereof. As if every one of those foresaid works had some living spirit in it to make it seem fresh and young and a soul that lived for ever which kept them in their good continuing state."' So Plutarch writes of the impression left upon him by the beauties of the Acropolis, and the good old English of Sir Thomas North's translation fits his style well. Even when newly made this Propylaea and these temples seemed "very ancient touching the beauty thereof." Plutarch saw here a beauty which is never new or old but eternal. And even in old age, even worn ' Plutarch, Pericles, xiii. FULFILMENT 121 and broken as they are to-day, the stones still keep that "certain kind of flourishing freshness" which seems like a living spirit in the pure marble. After reading eulogies like this passage from Plutarch, it is possible that when the moment comes for approach- ing them the eyes are shy of disappointment. But here before the portals of the Acropolis there is no need to hesitate. Go ahead boldly. Pray only for a clear sky and the reality will surpass all dreams. The fifth-century approach to the Acropolis was not the winding carriage-road, low gate, and steep steps that we know to-day. To set our feet on the way trodden by the worshippers of old we must leave the modern road where it passes the Theatre of Dionysus and must follow the footpath that winds up behind the Stoa of Eumenes and above the Odeum of Herodes. Here later buildings have obliterated the original path, but if we strike off above the Odeum and make a straight line for the gate in the iron railings under the outer bastion, our feet will be on rocks worn smooth by climbing multitudes. Passing through the gate — if by a happy chance we find it open — we must cross the marble stairs and step on to the natural rock beyond. This again is polished by use and cut into irregular slanting grooves. From this point the approach to the Propylsea seems to have been by a road that mounted in zig-zags, partly paved and partly cut in the rock. As the surface was worn dangerously smooth, grooves were cut to give foothold, not only to the people on foot, but also to the horsemen of the Panathenaic procession and to the oxen and goats driven up here for sacrifice. Inside the gates the same smooth rock and artificial grooving can be followed to the top of the plateau. I like to be precise about this old rocky roadway to the Acropolis ; otherwise with the modern staircase approach in our minds it is difficult to give proper dignity to the 122 DATS IN ATTICA picture of that great state procession winding up to the Parthenon. There is another picture that always occurs to me as I cUmb this rocky way — the picture of a little Athenian maid of ten, dressed in a saffron robe, holding tight by her mother's hand as they mount the path together. She is to play her part in that strange cere- mony, the "bear-dance," which takes place in the sanctuary of Brauronian Artemis, just behind the Propylaea (see p. 79). Awed by the mysterious rites before her, comforted perhaps by the vision of a new yellow robe, I seem to see her with a face of wonder and worship such as Titian has shown in his figure of the Virgin, the solitary child climbing the steep steps of the temple at Jerusalem. In Roman times the approach to the Propylaea was given a more pretentious aspect. A large statue of Agrippa, having a chariot and horses, was placed to face some turn in the winding path. Its pedestal is con- spicuous enough to-day. Early in the first century the rocky way was replaced by marble steps, and the monu- ment of Agrippa was left somewhat stranded, seeing that its position had been chosen with reference to the old path. The Roman love of pomp is here contrasted with the Greek sense of fitness. Pericles had been content that his Acropolis should be approached by the venerable foot-worn way until at one supreme moment the snowy portal of " the entrances " ushered the worshipper into the fairyland of marble within. By adding their steps and vile patchwork gateway the Romans gave prose for poetry. The Propylaea of Pericles consisted of a series of build- ings thrown right across the west front of the hill. In the centre was the high gateway pierced by five entrances and enriched with a deep columned porch both within and without. On either side of this wonderful entrance two marble halls were thrown forward like wings towards FULFILMENT 123 the ascent. These halls had also porticoes so that a per- spective of columns led the eye through the great open- ings unbarred by gates. The hall on the north side was considerably larger than that on the south ; and it was used as a picture-gallery. Opposite to it the little temple of Victory stood out on the end of the southern bastion, sending a welcome blot of shade across the steep, rocky road. On either side of the gateway the marble statue of a soldier on horseback faced the entrance.. The plan was therefore irregular enough. Had it not been for the southern bastion with its little temple, the great northern hall would have spoiled the symmetry of the whole by outreaching the southern building, and even as it is the eye is arrested by a sense of something unaccountable. Greek architecture is too logical to lend itself to caprice, and there is something more than capricious, almost whimsical, in this abrupt shortening of the southern wing. In point of fact, this irregularity is due to no architect's whim, but rather to the steady, relentless prejudice of the Athenian populace. Pericles and his architect, Mnesicles, who planned these entrance buildings, seem at first to have con- templated a perfectly symmetrical arrangement in which the picture-gallery on the north would have been balanced by an exactly similar hall to the south ; and again these two outer buildings would have had their counterpart in two halls within the gates. The Propylaea would therefore have been in every way double : a double porch and double wings both within and without. This original plan was not relinquished until after the building had actually been begun, for technical details of the northern angle within the gate are treated as though they were to form part of an inner hall, and not as they eventually became, part of an outer wall. Why the original plan was abandoned on this north side 124 DAYS IN ATTICA it is impossible to say. On the opposite side, however, it is plain enough that the inner hall was sacrificed because it would have encroached on the sanctuary of the Brauronian Artemis, while the outer hall had to be curtailed for fear of encroaching on the equally sacred ground of Athena, Giver of Victory. The architect found himself in the embarrassing position of having to create a spacious building especially intended to strike the eye by its dignity and breadth and to place it on a confined piece of ground where he was jostled by sacred sites that could not be disturbed. The work seems to have proceeded slowly, and there are signs that the Propylasa never received the last finishing touches. On the stones in the walls on the southern side of the ascent there are knobs that were left to enable the builders to lift these large blocks into their places and which, in the natural course of events, would have been chiselled away after they were in position. The marble of the walls and pavements is left without the final surface-smoothing, and the fluting on some of the columns is also incomplete. But even though the entrance was not all that its creators had dreamed, it remained a great achievement even in that great age. There was nothing like it in any of the other cities of Greece. Approached from without, the snowy columns, ranged one behind the other, towered up into the clear sky ; seen from within these same columns guarded the mauve and green of the landscape that swims below : " a portal opening into the unknown." The Athenians were inordinately proud of this group of buildings. Their comedians laughed at them for " always belauding four things : their myrtle-berries, their honey, their Propylaea, and their figs." Epamin- ondas told the Thebans that the only way of humbling the Athenian spirit would be to " uproot the Propylaea and plant them before your own citadel." FULFILMENT 125 II THE PARTHENON Through the Propylaea the well-worn rock slopes upwards to the west front of the Parthenon. This west end is but little damaged, and gives some idea of the vision that opened to the Athenian, who from the portico of the Propylaea saluted this new miracle of art. It is perhaps impossible for us to understand all that the sight conveyed to him : only those who have travelled through the midnight of national disaster and issued into the dawn of the world's most glorious morning can tell the rapture with which the Athenians hailed the rebuild- ing of their great temple. The old Hekatompedon had been destroyed by the Persians, but even before this the building of a large new temple had been contemplated ; its limestone foundations may still be seen at the south- east corner of the present Parthenon. The new temple was to be of marble and was to stand on a wide platform. The debris of the old buildings was used to raise the southern slope of the Acropolis and a new wall was built to buttress up this artificial terrace. Here the work paused. When Ictinus, the architect of the new Par- thenon, began his work a generation later, he found the site already prepared at great cost, and a quantity of masonry, columns, and drums that had been made ready for the first temple. These latter being out of date he discarded. The foundations he accepted, only modify- ing their proportions to suit the newer canons of art. The width was increased and its length diminished, so that length and width were now in the exact ratio of nine to four. The generation that built the Parthenon was the generation that remembered the discipline of 126 DAYS IN ATTICA the last Persian invasion, but had grown to manhood under the genial influences of prosperity. Athens had been expanding year by year. She was now the mistress of an important confederacy of smaller states. She had constituted herself the banker of this alliance, and the treasure which before had been lodged at Delos was now transferred to Athens. She was rich in memory, rich in hope, and rich in this world's goods. She was rich also in spiritual energy and in an art freed from archaic formalism. In Pericles she had a statesman who was also an artist, and in Pheidias an artist who was also enough of a statesman to bring the work of an army of craftsmen into one harmonious whole. The walls of Troy were built by song ; the temple of Athena soared out of an exaltation of spirit scarcely less magical. " As the buildings rose, stately in size and unsurpassed in form and grace, the workmen vied with each other that the quality of their work might be enhanced by its artistic beauty." ^ Begun in 447 B.C., the Parthenon was so far completed nine years later that it was ready to receive the great statue of Athena. With the entrance of the goddess the miracle was com- plete. All that the mind and hand of man could do to visualize a great national ideal had been done. Even the average Athenian citizen must have been aware that just as his life as a citizen was given a fullness more complete than anything his individual life could hold, therefore this central statue and seat of civic worship surpassed all other temples and statues of the goddess. The Erech- theum had greater loveliness, and the wooden image that it held claimed immemorial antiquity ; the hearts of returning sailors leapt at the sight of the sun glinting on the spear and helmet of the Promachos, that grea,t statue of Athena the Champion placed within the Propylaea; the boyish face and curling hair of the Lemnian Athena ' Plutarch, Pericles, xiii. FULFILMENT 127 showed the goddess as a friend, but the supremacy of the enshrined " Parthenos " was unquestioned. While the temple was being built Pheidias was prepar- ing his statue of the goddess who was to inhabit it. It is difficult now to understand the beauty of this work of Pheidias, which in the judgment of contemporaries rivalled even his famous masterpiece, the Zeus of Olympia, The materials were gold and ivory, a com- bination suited to these dim windowless temples of antiquity. How Athena would shine when the straight shaft of light from the doorway fell upon her I The statue was adjusted by an elaborate system of balance and pressure, a fact that was illustrated by the popular belief that if the figure of a warrior were removed from Athena's shield the whole work would fall to the ground. By the malice of his enemies Pheidias was accused of having made this warrior a portrait of himself. Our conception of the statue is based upon descrip- tions by old writers such as Pausanias and upon the few small representations that have survived. Judging from these it would seem that Pheidias gained his effect by the size and glory of his goddess and the heavy wealth of her golden apparel, rather than by the suggestion of personal charm. Athena stood with a spear in her left hand, a Victory poised on the outstretched palm of her right. On her head was a high helmet with a sphinx in the centre and griffins on either side. At her left was a shield with the battle of the Amazons on its outer face, the battle of Gods and Giants within, while on her sandals was carved another battle subject, the struggle between Lapiths and Centaurs — three subjects that were again repeated on the outer decoration of the temple. On the base of the statue a new design was introduced, the birth of Pandora. There is so little symbolism in Greek art, that it may be wrong to suggest it here, yet in any Gothic cathedral how many a Christian parallel might 128 DAYS IN ATTICA be found to this figure of the woman through whose disobedience all evils were loosed upon the world, thus introduced at the base of the statue of the goddess triumphant over evil 1 This prodigality of ornament might suggest that what. Pheidias added to the richness of his goddess he sub- tracted from her dignity, were it not that the size of the statue made simplicity of treatment impossible. A space of material' 30 feet high must be broken up lay incident and subsidiary design. How bald, for example, the height of the sandals would have appeared had they been left as blank spaces 2 feet high by 5 feet long and just near the level of the spectator's eye. Moreover the whole spirit of the work required that the statue should be thus richly decorated. Athena here was guardian of the wealth no less than of the liberties of Athens. A square of darker stones in the centre of the Parthenon pavement marks the place where the base of the statue stood, and behind this are traces of the wall that divided the temple in two parts. The wor- shipper who first sighted the Parthenon from the Propylsea must skirt one side of the building and enter at the east end. Passing through the outer portico he would push open the high door, and then in the main hall of the building known as the New Hekatom- pedon he would find himself facing the great statue. Like its predecessor the archaic temple, this hall was also 100 Attic feet in length. No light entered the Parthenon except through the high doorways. Travellers who visited it before its destruction in the days when it was used as a Turkish mosque mention its gloom, but mosque doors are heavily curtained, while those of an ancient temple probably stood wide. There is an absurd legend that the marble was translucent. A French traveller, De la Guilletiere, who claimed to have visited FULFILMENT 129 Athens in 1676, speaks of the wonderful light coming through two polished and shining stones placed near each other at the far end of the mosque. De la Guilletiere was a fraud, a mere compiler who made his travels in his study-chair. Nevertheless a small and picturesque fact of this sort is not one that he would have invented, and it may well have been gathered from some more genuine traveller of the period. Wheler, who visited the Par- thenon three years after De la Guilletiere, says : " My companion and I were not so much surprised with the obscurity of it as Monsieur Guiliter [sic], because the observations we had made on other heathen temples did make it no new thing unto us." Commenting on the transparent stones that excited the wonder of De la Guilletiere, he remarks dryly : " They are only of a transparent marble, an obscure light passing through it ; and several holes being made deep in it makes the light look of a reddish or yellowish colour. But as for its shining in the night, that's a wonder never heard of until now, and as to his comparing it to the brightness of a carbuncle, that may pass for one of his hyperboles ; our eyes being much too dim to see it." Spon, who accom- panied Wheler, says : " I was not, like others, surprised at the darkness since I had noticed that all the light it received came from the openings which the Christians had cut in making the choir ; and that thus in pagan times the only daylight that could enter came through the doors." The temple itself was a simple oblong building with a door at either end and a partition-wall across the central hall. As far as can be seen there was no opening in this wall, and in order to pass from the eastern portion or cella in which the statue stood into the western portion, it may have been necessary to walk round outside the building and to enter it again through the western portico. When the Parthenon was turned into 130 DAYS IN ATTICA a Christian church this wall was pierced with two doors. The hall behind was known as the Parthenon proper. It was divided into three by a double row of columns, and here the treasures of the State were stored. Miss Harrison has compiled a delightful catalogue of these treasures. " Within this Parthenon, in the narrow special sense, were kept, as is known from inscriptions, vessels used for the sacred processions, furniture, clothes, jewels, dresses, and fragments of every description — single leaves from crowns, feet of beds, and the like ; in fact, such things as were best kept in a chamber easily closed and accessible, as a rule, only to State officers, for the public exhibition of which there was no adequate reason. We have the official list of these objects year by year from 417 to 406 B.C. In it are comprised such things as a gold crown, gold cups, uncoined gold, a golden drinking cup with a sacred silver stand, two silver-gilt nails, a silver-gilt mask, silver cups and a silver horn, gilt blades, gilt corn ears, a gold image on a pillar, and the like. In no case is money registered, so the idea must be given up that the Parthenon was a state bank." Around the outside of this solid windowless building ran the frieze, 522 feet long, and outside this again the great colonnade with its carved metopes and its two gables at the outer ends carrying the pediment sculptures. It will be seen that the frieze being within the colonnade occupied the place where ornament was least visible, and yet in many eyes it is the crowning glory of the whole work. It was of this frieze, brought by Lord Elgin to London, that Haydon wrote those burning words, which introduced a new era in the study of art. Henceforward effeminate Apollos and self-conscious Venuses were no longer accounted the highest products of Greek art. "To these divine things" (he writes of the Elgin Marbles) " I owe every principle of art I may possess. I never enter among them without bowing to the FULFILMENT 131 great spirit of art that reigns within them. I thank God daily that I was in existence on their arrival and will continue to do so until the end of my life. . . . Pilgrims from the remotest corners of the earth will visit their shrine and be pacified by their beauty." It is only over the west front that any portion of this frieze can be seen in situ, and for this an evening light is best. But even in the best light it cannot be properly seen. The ground falls steeply away. The spectator is obliged to stand immediately under the figures, and a backward step may mean a fall of six feet. It is in the Acropolis Museum and in the British Museum that the design can best be studied. For many years it was looked upon as a purely decorative subject. Youths, maidens, water-carriers, and elders were placed here, it was said, as representations of the city life. Now it has been estab- lished beyond doubt that this is no mere procession of typical figures. It is indeed a representation of the city life, but it shows that life at a moment chosen because of its supreme importance. At the great Panathenaic festival which took place every four years there was carried in state through the town an embroidered robe which had been made for the goddess by those Athenian maidens, who had been living meantime in the sacred seclusion of the Pandroseum. The procession wound from the lower city to the Acropolis, and the robe was presented to the old wooden image of Athena in the Erechtheum. On the west front of the frieze the procession is seen starting. Young soldiers are mounting or preparing to mount their horses. One is fastening his shoe, another donning his cloak. Here, as on the slabs of the Nike Balustrade, it is the grace of the daily action that is immortalized. On the north side the same knights are seen cantering on barebacked horses. This is the chivalry of ancient Athens, the flower of the nation. It was for the production of these soldier-citizens tempered like fine 132 DAYS IN ATTICA steel that the State had laboured, and they in turn, as their oath showed, found in the State the aim of their existence. " I will not disgrace my sacred weapons nor desert the comrade who is placed by my side. I will fight for things holy and things profane whether I am alone or with others. I will hand on my fatherland greater and better than I found it. I will hearken to the magistrates and obey existing laws and those hereafter established by the people. I will not consent unto any that destroys or disobeys the constitution, but will pre- vent him whether I am alone or with others, I will honour the temple and religion which my forefathers established. So help me Aglaurus, Eugalios, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone." In front of the knights come men in chariots, players on harps and pipes, then boys bringing water-vessels and leading the animals for the coming sacrifice. On the south side the same subjects are repeated with infinite divergence of detail. As Mr. Murray has pointed out, it is as though the procession had divided into two portions along the north and south sides of the building to meet again at the east end, where the scenes culminate over the main entrance in the presentation of the peplos. The maidens who made the robe are seen entering the pre- sence of the divinities accompanied by the city magistrates. In the centre gods and goddesses are seated reclining as at a feast. They are clad in the lightest draperies, without any insignia of office, gods by virtue of their godhead only, distinguished from each other by most subtle touches of characterization. Outside the frieze ran the colonnade of forty-six mighty marble columns. Although so terribly destroyed in the centre by the cannons of the Venetians in 1687, enough remains to give an impression of the whole work. Indeed, in a sense the beauty and importance of the colonnade has been enhanced by the destruction PLATE rrr NORTH-EAST ANCLE OF THE PARTHENON UTI'H 'i'HF. HILL UK L^■CA ItE"! IL'S FULFILMENT 133 of the inner building. Against the background of clear sky the form and colour of each individual column is given its full value. To the casual visitor who accepts what he sees without further question this colonnade is to-day "the Parthenon," and may even stand in some minds for the type of all Greek temples. It was in the proportions of this colonnade that Mr. Penrose dis- covered the subtleties of Greek architecture. He showed how the long, straight lines of stylobate and architrave are made to rise slightly in the centre, so as to counteract the illusion of a downward dip which, owing to the formation of the human eye, would otherwise appear. The columns are also made to lean slightly inwards and to taper almost imperceptibly towards the top, thus giving the impression that the solid lines of roof and metopes are easily borne. The columns in Mycenaean architecture are wider at the top than at the bottom, and the effect always suggests discomfort. They seem flattened by the weight above. Apropos of the proportions of the Parthenon, visitors are often puzzled by the height of the steps surrounding the colonnade. Except in places where blocks of marble are placed as subsidiary stairs, these steps are suitable only for a race of giants, and the sight of a procession of ordinary mortals mounting them would have been ungainly and almost ridiculous. The fact is that according to the laws of Greek architecture a colossal temple demanded colossal steps. The joints of the stones are so precisely laid that they appear almost to have grown together. Stuart reports that he tried to break them and found them as firmly united as if they had never been separate. Very finely ground surfaces seem to have some molecular attraction. In the carvings on the metopes and on the pediment at each end the genius of the Greek sculptor found inspiration in limitation. On frieze, metopes, and pedi- ments three different problems presented themselves. 134 DAYS IN ATTICA The long and comparatively narrow frieze had to be filled with some continuous design, unrolling itself in epic cadences without any break until the great culmina- tion was reached, and for this the theme was found in the Panathenaic procession. The metopes, on the contrary, must form a series of complete pictures having sufficient relation to each other to give unity to the design without losing the decorative feeling of varied movement. Each subject had to fill a square panel, a difficult space to deal with when applied to the human figure. This difficulty was met by the choice of scenes of contest as the subject for most of the metopes. The lines of prostrate or attacking figures gave diagonal and horizontal curves that contrasted well with the repeated perpendiculars of the triglyphs. On the north and south sides was the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs (the figure of the Centaur lending itself most happily to the square space), on the west the battle of Greeks and Amazons, and on the east the battle of Gods and Giants. In Mr. Murray's view the subjects of the metopes were chosen to represent the disorderly forces in the universe which the worship of Athena would subdue. They con- trasted with the stately procession round the frieze much as the gargoyles on the outside of a Gothic church are meant to contrast with the cherub and angel faces of the interior. Round the body of the temple moved the spirit of Athens. In the interior was the ideal of order and worship, on the exterior the realities of struggle and occasional defeat. The sculptures that filled the two pediment gables east and west were narrative or didactic rather than symbolic. They repeated the two primary articles of faith in the cult of Athena. On the east end the birth of Athena from the head of her father Zeus, on the west the contest between Athena and Poseidon. At the east end there are two sculptures that remain in place. Firstly, the FULFILMENT 135 horses' heads, which in the extreme left angle drew the chariot of the sun as he rose from the sea ; and secondly, the head of one of the horses driven by Selene, the moon- goddess, as she dropped beneath the horizon on the right. The moment chosen for representation is the moment of dawn. In the centre of the gable where it was highest stood Zeus and Athena, in what attitudes we do not know. They had vanished before Carrey made his drawing of the pediment in 1674, from which most of our information is drawn. Somewhere near them was Athena's brother Hephaistos, who assisted the miraculous birth by breaking the head of Zeus from which Athena sprang. On either side of these three stood other deities. Next came sitting and reclining figures filling the long angles. These groups are seen in the British Museum. Various names have been attributed to them, but as they are there merely as spectators, their identification is necessarily uncertain. The horses of the sun and moon closed in the two angles. The spirit of the whole composition is best summed up in the Homeric hymn to Athena : " Olympos, the abode of the gods, trembled at the sight of her, the earth moaned heavily, the sea was agitated, raising its purple waves and tossing its brine. Helios, the sun-god, stayed his horses, what time Athena was doffing her immortal armour to the joy of her father Zeus." For the west pediment Carrey's drawing supplies the main figures of the central group. The moment chosen is that after the rival emblems have been created. Poseidon and Athena are shown drawing away from each other. The olive-trees perhaps filled the space between, while the salt spring gushed out behind Poseidon. On either side stood the chariots in which Athena and Poseidon had arrived on the scene, each chariot having a driver, and an attendant at the horses' heads. The horses are made to rear as though in alarm 136 DAYS IN ATTICA at the sudden display of divine energy. Behind each chariot was a series of figures cut off from the central action. Of these Mr. Murray says : " By their presence they indicate the permanent effects of the momentary dispute of the deities on the district in question — that is, Attica. The produce of the land, especially olive-growing was to be supreme over seafaring. It was what would now be called a ' Little Athens' policy." This, then, was the aspect of the Parthenon as it stood for centuries, every detail of its ornament tending in some way to the glorification of the goddess. To make the picture complete one must add vivid touches of colour on the background of the sculpture, on the borders of the garments, and possibly also on the bodies of horses and riders ; and to the figures on the frieze add metal wreaths and bridles made of gilded bronze. Yet even with the help of descriptions and drawings left by those who saw the Parthenon before its destruction the original vision cannot be recaptured. It is wiser perhaps to accept the temple as it is to-day with a new beauty even in ruin. Thackeray said some unkind things about modern Athens, but the ruins on the Acropolis brought him to his knees. " To say truth, when one walks among the nests of eagles, and sees the prodigious eggs they laid, a certain feeling of discomfiture must come over us smaller birds. You and I could not invent — it even stretches our minds painfully to try and comprehend part of the beauty of the Parthenon — ever so little of it — the beauty of a single column, a fragment of a broken shaft lying under the astonishing blue sky there, in the midst of that unrivalled landscape." FULFILMENT 137 III THE ERECHTHEUM The Parthenon was built to replace the old " hundred- foot " temple to Athena. But it' was not forgotten that this old temple had guarded other divinities and also the emblems of Poseidon's trident-mark and the sacred pool or " sea " as it was called. These could not be removed from the precinct. The Parthenon there- fore, beautiful though it was, did not satisfy the religious conscience of the Athenians. There must be another temple to replace the old house of Erechtheus where Athena had first dwelt. Thus it came about that on the Acropolis there were two great temples of the goddess, each fulfilling a different function. The Parthenon is the centre of State worship. The Erechtheum is, so to speak, her home. Athena shared this temple with Erechtheus and with other ancient divinities ; with Poseidon her ancient rival, with Butes the father of the royal house, and with Hephaistos the brother of Athena in her domestic capacity as Athena Ergane, the goddess of good workmanship. Gods and heroes were thus sheltered together under the roof of the new building. It was the home of conservatism, the refuge of good old cults which were no longer fashionable but which it would be dangerous to neglect. Here were the sacred emblems, witnesses to the bygone strife between Athena and Poseidon. The deep triple mark where the god struck the rock with his trident, the salt spring " sound- ing like the sea," and growing in the temple enclosure the sacred olive tree that shot again the night after the Persians had destroyed it by fire. In the Parthenon the goddess was represented by the most magnificent work of art man's hand could pro- 138 DATS IN ATTICA duce. In the Erechtheum it was her old wooden statue, the sacred image dropped from heaven, that was cherished. The Parthenon celebrated the glories of the new epoch, the Erechtheum retained the spirit and the memories of long-venerated things. Yet though the Erechtheum was carefully planned to accommodate the old cults, the architects escaped all tendency to archaism in their work. It is as beautiful as the Parthenon, though executed in a different spirit. In it there is a more intimate charm and a greater multi- plicity of detail. It seems a work of love rather than of worship. The carving of the stone is so delicate that modern hands, even with modern tools, have never been able to reproduce the fineness of the original. It is impossible now to tell what subject was chosen for the sculptured frieze, but as a whole the ornament of the temple is not chosen to teach but to give delight. Whereas the sculptures on the Parthenon suggest the first articles of faith in the creed of an Athenian, there is no religious significance of the six figures of women who bear the south porch of the Erechtheum. They are known as caryatides, in remembrance perhaps of the inhabitants of Caryae who were brought captive in the fifth century B.C. Noble captives they are too with their finely poised, vigorous bodies, the heads that rise instead of bending to the weight of the marble porch. One of these figures is now in the British Museum — an exile as well as a captive. Her place was filled by a cast which weathered to a darker colour and stood shamefaced among her step-sisters. Last year a new cast was sent from England. In 1903 the scaffolding, which had surrounded the Parthenon during its restoration, was moved to the Erechtheum, and this afforded a good opportunity to subject the whole building to a closer examination than had hitherto been possible. As a result of this, many FULFILMENT 139 small discoveries were made and two which are of capital importance. The first concerns the famous trident-mark in the north porch. To the left on entering there is an open- ing in the pavement, protected no doubt in antiquity by a parapet. Looking down through this we see three irregular holes in the rock, which in all probability were shown to the ancients, as they have been to modern pilgrims, as the imprint of Poseidon's trident. The new discovery confirms this, the accepted identification. Mr. Balanos, the Greek architect in charge of the repairs, found evidence showing that immediately over this opening in the pavement there was a corresponding opening (3 feet square) in the ceiling above formed by the omission of one of the marble coffers. This open- ing was carried upwards to the sloping roof as a square shaft enclosed by four slabs. Thus the trident-mark, although enclosed within the porch, was left open to the sky. The second matter concerns the original plan of the Erechtheum. Unlike almost every other ancient temple, its plan is strikingly unsymmetrical ; and it has one feature — ^the projection of the north porch beyond the west end of the building is absolutely without parallel. Again, the elevation of the west front is inharmonious and undignified. There also are three ground-levels, and three kinds of piers are used. It has been suggested that the temple as we have it is a compromise. The accompanying plan shows in red what may have been the completion of the original scheme. Was it not originally intended that the Erechtheum should have another wing on the west side answering to that on the east ? In this way a line drawn through the centre of the building would pass through the middle of the north and south porches, while a colonnade at the west end would answer to that on the east. The temple would then have 140 DATS IN ATTICA been truly double, with two cellas, two opisthodomoi, and a narrow central hall over the salt spring. In order to light this long array of rooms it is possible that those marked in the plan 2 and 4 would have been left unroofed (one may have been an open court for the olive), number 3 would have been lighted by entrances into the south and north porches, while numbers i and 5 would have opened into the eastern and western porticoes. There is much to be said for this hypothesis. Whatever the architect originally planned, we cannot believe that any Athenian would have been capable of suggesting the plan of the Erechtheum as it exists to-day. If Dr. Dorpfeld's theory is right, it remains to ask why the original project was abandoned. This question is best answered on the ground where the western portico of the Erechtheum would have stood had it been completed. This plot of ground was sacred to a nymph called Pandrosos," All-dew," and was known as the Pandroseum. Later Greek legend accounted for the presence and importance of this goddess by making her the one faiths ful daughter of Cecrops (p. 78), to whom the care of the infant Erichthoneus was committed. On the other hand her name (" All-dew ") and the extreme veneration with which her precinct was regarded, together with certain mysterious rites imposed on her votaries, indicate a cult of even greater antiquity than the legend of Cecrops. The Hellenes perhaps found Pandrosos already established on the Acropolis when they came thither and fitted her into their mythology as they best might. At all events her territory on the Acropolis bordered the holiest ground where the sacred emblems . were sheltered by the new Erechtheum, and she, the faithful daughter of Cecrops, became, in a sense, the guardian deity of all discreet maidenhood. Her precinct was the home of certain dedicated maidens chosen from the best Athenian families and entrusted with the task of FULFILMENT 141 weaving the sacred peplos which was carried through the city at the time of the great Panathenaic festival. But though dedicated thus to the service of Athena, these " Anephoroi " were not like the Vestal Virgins in Rome vowed to lifelong seclusion and virginity. The worship of Athena was less exacting in its demands than that of Vesta ; the maidens of the Pandroseum, though guarded in an atmosphere of jealous sanctity not unlike that which surrounded the Vestal Virgins, returned to a normal home life when their time of service was ended. They were but children when they were secluded on the Acropolis, and they returned to their own homes at the age of eleven. The white garments and gold ornaments which they had worn during their time of service were dedicated to the goddess. Their nominal task was the supervision of the weaving of the peplos, but how much of the actual work was done by these little ladies of tender years, and how much was left to the priestess and her attendants is a matter on which we are never enlightened. In the eyes of Athens the maidens were " responsible " for the task, and thus the glamour of youth and beauty were not want- ing from Athena's garment. What other duties engrossed their time ? There seems to have been a mysterious element in their seclusion. Even their name "Ane- phoroi " has never been satisfactorily explained. Once a year those whose term of office was about to end took part in a sacred rite without being enlightened as to its meaning. Descending from the Pandroseum by the steep flight of steps, remains of which may still be seen near this point, they made their way to the precinct of "Aphrodite in the Gardens," bearing on their heads baskets, of which the contents were unknown. Greek mythology, which regarded Pandrosos as the type of faithful obedience, naturally saw here an allusion to the basket that might not be opened. The rite seems older than the story, and probably behind it there lies some old 142 DAYS IN ATTICA charm to secure fertility. For the rest, we gather that these maidens enjoyed life as young creatures should. A bronze statue of Isocrates, represented as a boy riding, was put up in " the place where the Anephoroi played ball," I and the words conjure up a picture of the white draperies, the tip-toe flights, and the laughter that might float about the sacred hill-top on its golden evenings. Before leaving the precinct of Pandrosos there is one other shrine to notice. A gap in the west wall of the Erechtheum is bridged over by a huge block of marble. Presumably the ground beneath was considered too sacred to have a stone laid on it, and may have been the legendary site of the tomb of Cecrops. This tomb and the precinct of Pandrosos appear to have been the two insurmountable obstacles that prevented the original plan of the Erechtheum from being completed on its westward side. It would seem that the authorities in Athens accepted the plan and that it was not until the work was actually begun that popular prejudice pre- vented the execution of the original scheme. But here, as in the case of the Propylaea, the architect was tenacious and shaped his building so that at any time it could be extended and completed according to the original scheme. There is therefore a threefold vision of the Acropolis — as it is, as it was, and lastly as it might have been. As it is, with the outlines defaced and the colours gone, but with the still subtler beauty that only time can give : the ruddy tint in the fissures of the marble, the mellow golden light over its surface, the play of the blue air around the broken columns, poppy and camomile pressing up through the stones, daylight penetrating the mysteries and revealing hidden beauties ; moonlight setting its magic on the desolation ; thunder-clouds bank- ing the pallid ruins when the wet pavement shines white ' Plutarch, " Lives of the Orators." FULFILMENT 143 with reflection ; the whole building laid open to the play of rain and sun. As it was, with strong colour on the gleaming build- ings, with the colonnade of the Chalkotheke, or Store- house for bronzes, on the south side of the hiH, the gigantic bronze image of Athena the Champion, the crowd of smaller marble and bronze statues covering the hill-top, and the people thronging among them ; the worshippers ascending the steep way ; the drivers with hoarse cries goading the oxen up the slippery paths ; the country-folk staring enthralled, and the citizens too familiar with the spectacle to interrupt their gossip as they chmb. Inside the temple, the immense presence of the jewel-eyed goddess in all her divinity. Lastly, there is this other vision of the Acropolis as it might have been, or rather as it once existed in the great minds of that day — Pericles, Pheidias, Mnesicles, Ictinus, and others whose names even are lost. In this vision the Propykea spreads two broad wings to guard the whole west front of the hill; the old haphazard buildings covering the north side are swept away, and in their place stands a temple, double, like the Propylaea, with two wings and two porches. There would then have been two temples on the Acropolis of equal dignity — the Parthenon, strong in simple lines and bold relief, and the Erechtheum, exquisite in its elaboration of ornament : one temple set up for the worship of Athena, the guardian of the health and wealth of the State, the giver of all good counsels, the daughter of Zeus, and the victorious rival of Poseidon ; the other glorifying Athena, the home-goddess, the sister of Hephaistos, at once the cra,ftsman's conscience and his inspiration, and the friend of Erechtheus. The serenity of Greek architecture must not blind us to the pregnant fact that the laws of art were still sub- servient to the common law of citizenship ; the artist, no lU DAYS IN ATTICA less than the soldier, put his service at the disposal of the State and accepted at her hands even the mutilation of his ideals. The artists and statesmen of the greatest age gave mag- nanimously of their best, even though their dreams had to remain unrealized. It is only in the third millennium that their silence has been interpreted, and perhaps even this vindication of after-ages was as far from their wishes as from their thoughts. It is as though the makers of these temples had stamped upon them the device, " I abide by what I have done." IV THE TEMPLE OF VICTORY The original date of the little temple to Nike Apteros (the Wingless Victory) is not precisely known. It is obvious, however, that it must date from about the same time as the other Propylaea buildings. One might sup- pose that the architects of the Propylaea, when they found their plans crippled by the neighbourhood of this sacred site, set themselves to make a virtue of necessity ; since their entrance buildings were curtailed, they may have consoled themselves by balancing the group with this little gem of Ionic architecture. To find a temple outside the sanctuary gates is unusual, and the fact that its position never strikes one as strange is just another tribute to the skill with which the proportions of the building are fitted to the site. The spot must have been sacred to Athena from quite early times and was associ- ated with her in her victorious aspect as " Athena Nike." Then, as the process of differentiation continued, the precinct was said to be sacred to Victory, and Athena's name was dropped. But the old wooden image kept on FULFILMENT 145 the spot was really an image of Athena and not of a Winged Victory. So the pretty tale was invented that the ground and afterwards the temple were dedicated to a Wingless Victory who would never fly away. The temple is set on a terrace from which the rock drops precipitously. From here one looks right out to sea ; not, as the legend of old ^geus might lead one to suppose, that the sea beats up to the base of the cliff, but rather that the intervening ground lies far below, and the eye naturally finds its level on the blue waters of the Saronic Gulf beyond. Heated with the steep climb up to the Acropolis, it is good to step out on the wide terrace, to be greeted by this birdlike sense of space and height and by the freshness of a good sea-breeze. Standing here one sees afresh how impossible it is to separate, even in thought, the temple from its situation. To the Greek architect the two formed one whole. The lines of the slender Ionic columns follow out and carry on the soaring impression of the cliff, and while the rock ennobles the temple, the temple rests like a benediction on the rock. At Sunium also the temple and its rocky pedestal seem to have grown together to a like unity of sentiment. From earliest times the Greek genius was responsive to that indefinable charm which to-day is called the " Spirit of Place " and which to the Greek betokened the spot dear to a god. In the words of Pliny : " Trees were temples of divinities. . . . Nor have we more worship for images glittering with gold and ivory than for groves and the very silence that is in them." Thus it came about that the site on which an architect was called to plant his temple was not de- liberately selected, but had been marked out by the fine instinct of generations. His work was to create a build- ing to express the brooding spirit of the place. The Temple of Victory crowns the rock as the laurel wreath might crown the rugged head of some old warrior. 146 DAYS IN ATTICA The thought of victory was further carried out in the decoration of the parapet that originally ran breast- high round the precipitous sides of the temple terrace. This parapet bore on its outer face a glorious sculptured frieze which the worshipper would see above him on his right as he ascended the steps of the Propytea. Such of the slabs as remain are now to be seen in the AcropoHs Museum. The frieze seems to have represented the cele- bration of a festival commemorating some great victory. There is the draped and wingless figure of Athena Nike, and there is also a succession of beautiful winged creatures — Victories, Graces or Loves — which in a cer- tain gracious artlessness of pose are unsurpassed. Their light draperies show the play of their limbs. Two Nikes, with shoulders thrown back and down-pressed feet, are restraining bulls led to the sacrifice. These two panels are evidently intended to balance each other, since the brave diagonal swing from shoulder to ankle occurs once from right to left and on the other from left to right. Another Victory is fixing up a trophy ; another gaily balances herself on the bull's back. The artist does not insist on the ceremonial side of his subject. He seems rather to have allowed his chisel freely to follow the play of his fancy. The Nike fastening — or unfastening — her shoe might seem to come oddly among the procession. Yet here the attitude needs no other justification than its own perfection of grace. A Frenchman has made the pretty suggestion that the shoe is loosened to indicate that this Victory will make herself at home. Looking at the temple as it stands to-day, it is difficult to believe that from the years 1688 to 1835 its stones were dispersed and built into a bastion made by the Turks at the approach of Morosini (see p. 235). Ross, Schaubert, and Hansen are the names of the three architects to whom the present clever restoration is due. The general effect is probably much the same as that produced by the FULFILMENT 147 original temple, though naturally its vicissitudes have left their mark. The original roof and gables are missing and four panels on the north and west sides of the frieze have been replaced by casts. The originals are in the British Museum. This same buttress of rock on which the temple stands has other associations than those of victory. It was here that the old King ^Egeus climbed day by day to watch for his son's boat returning from Crete ; and this was the pinnacle of rock from which he threw himself in despair at sight of the black sail. This spot is the natural watch- tower of the Acropolis towards the sea as the Belvedere Bastion is on its landward side. Here luckless Phaedra also came each day to gaze across the sea to the purple hills above Trcezen where Hippolytus lived, and some- where in this rock she placed a shrine to " home-keeping love " to quiet her truant heart. Long since on Pallas hill, Deep in the rock, that Love no more might roam, She built a shrine and named it " Love at Home." And the rock held it, but its face alway Seeks Trcezen o'er the seas. Her watch also ended in tragedy. In the great theatre not far below, the Athenian audience saw her story un- rolled by Euripides, and it has been made to live again for us not only in the musical translation by Gilbert Murray, but also in Walter Pater's curious magical prose. It is pleasant enough to linger upon these fresh heights dreaming of "old, unhappy far-off things." Let Pater tell the story : — " Hippolytus, you remember, is the illegitimate son of Theseus. Phaedra, the wronged wife, a fiery soul with wild, strange blood in her veins, forgetting her fears of this illegitimate rival of her children, seems now to have seen him for the first time, loved at last the very touch of his fleecy cloak, and would have had him of her own 148 DAYS IN ATTICA religion— the worship of Aphrodite. But Hippolytus has given himself to the worship of the chaste huntress Artemis. He will have nothing to do with Phaedra or her divinity. In an anguish of rage, Phaedra denounces him falsely to Theseus, and Theseus flung away readily upon him one of three precious curses with which Poseidon had indulged him. Hippolytus is driven from the palace, those still unsatisfied curses in truth going on either side of him like living creatures unseen. Legend tells briefly how, a competitor for pity with Adonis and Icarus and Hyacinth, and other doomed creatures of immature radiance in all story to come, he set forth joyously for the chariot-races, not of Athens but of Troe- zen, her rival. Once more he wins the prize ; he says good-bye to admiring friends anxious to entertain him, and by night starts off homeward, as of old, like a child, returning quickly through the solitude in which he had never lacked company and was now to die. Through all the perils of darkness he had guided the chariot safely along the curved shore ; the dawn was come and a little breeze astir as the grey, level spaces parted delicately into white and blue, when in a moment an earthquake, or Poseidon the earth-shaker himself, or an angry Aphrodite awake from the deep betimes, rent the tranquil surface ; a great wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of the Attic shore, and was surging here to the very necks of the plunging horses, a moment since enjoying with him the caress of the morning air, but now, wholly forgetful of their old affectionate habit of obedience, dragging their leader headlong over the rough pavements. Evening and dawn might seem to have met on that hapless day through which they drew him home entangled in the trappings of the chariot that had been his ruin, till he lay at length, grey and haggard, at the rest he had longed for dimly amid the buffeting of those murderous stones." ^ Then ' W. Pater, "Greek Studies." FULFILMENT 149 Theseus, who had unwittingly murdered his father, finds that he has now murdered his son through that same rash carelessness. This seaward corner of the Acropolis is indeed the home of tragic memories. The Athenians in Pericles' day felt the associations of the spot too strong to be resisted and raised their protest in a Philistine revolt against one of the noblest projects of architecture. Well, one may forgive them. They lost the ideal Propylasa, but they gained the Nike temple. CHAPTER VI ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL I THE DIONYSIAC THEATRE THE Dionysiac Theatre is the sunniest spot in Athens. The tourists know it and bring their tea- baskets. The lizards know it and steal out to bask on marble chairs dedicated to priests and magistrates. The Athenian audiences of classical times must also have known it as they sat there the whole of a spring day with the sun in their eyes and the rock behind them glowing like a furnace. For the winter months it was, and still is, an ideal spot. The long lines of marble seats sloping away in a perspective of curves now mellowed to tones of lemon and pale gold, in shadow a pearl-grey. In front the marble pavement of the orchestra is broken with rough seams and stains. The chair of state belonging to the Dionysiac priest is the most perfect bit of symmetry of its kind in existence, and fortunately no Lord Elgin has been at pains to remove it. Beyond the broken stones and the hilly middle distance there are white and poppy-coloured sails dotting the gulf, with .iEgina's purple peaks behind. Overhead the sky of clear wintry blueness, so different from summer's leaden heat-shroud Under the south slope of the Acropolis at its eastern 150 ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL 151 end the ground has a steady downward gradient and shows a tendency to break into natural terraces. It is not as at Epidaurus, a theatre made by Nature, yet Nature lent herself kindly to the work, and man had need only to scarp out the hill-side with tiers of seats, to support the curving sides with masonry, and to level the central ring. That the natural formation of the ground has been taken into consideration is plain from the irregular design of the theatre ; the two sides are not symmetrical and at the top it has no definite boundary. The seats merge into the rock. As a London crowd will swarm lamp-posts and climb railings to watch a passing show, so the Athenian spectators covered every obtainable point of vantage. Behind the stone seats the rock itself gave sitting or standing accommodation, and every space would seem to have been filled, though the performance could have been only imperfectly seen and at this distance hardly heard. In the sixth century there was no theatre here, but remains of a little temple have been found, with a stone circle marking the dancing-place before it. Here, in the time of Peisistratus, Dionysus was worshipped. Even in those early days the religious dance was well on its course of dramatic development. Already to the slow revolving chorus-dance with its alternating strophe and antistrophe had been added the quick musical measure of the Dithyramb. After the union of these two the evolu- tion of the true drama followed fast, and the turning- point was reached in the days of Peisistratus, when the popularity of Homer led to the introduction of plots taken from the Homeric cycle. Once it had been shown possible to improve on the old stereotyped forms, other developments came naturally as the artistic spirit was spurred to further experiment. With the leader as interlocutor and the chorus as reciters the unfolding of the old, well-known stories at once became dramatic. 152 DAYS IN ATTICA When to question and answer was added further dialogue, single members of the chorus assumed the parts of the chief characters in the play. As these roles became prominent the importance of the chorus diminished, until in the fully developed drama they appear as mere commentators. Their remarks in- terrupt the progress of the story. Sometimes the in- terruption has the highest dramatic value, as in the plays of Euripides, when a pure lyric relieves for a moment the situation too highly charged with emotional intensity. Sometimes the interruptions seem to introduce an element of commonplace — as for instance in the CEdipus of Sophocles when the king appears with blood streaming from the empty eye-sockets, and the chorus can strike no deeper note than the cry — Alas, unhappy man ! I would have held Some converse with thee, but thy looks affright me ; I cannot bear to speak with thee. This prominence of the chorus is, however, too deeply inwrought into the substance and essence of the drama for any escape from it to have been possible. Neither authors nor audience would have desired it. In essence the chorus is the play. A tragedy without its chorus would have been unthinkable. The enfranchisement of comedy was marked when it also was " given a chorus," and here its presence is invaluable. If there is any fundamental essence of humour peculiar to all ages, it is surely found in the serious comments of the spectator who cannot see a joke. Yet it was not without reason that the Athenian Government showed reluctance to admit comedy to the full rights of the drama. For whereas tragedy was essentially religious, comedy could at most be only moral. It was Aristophanes who won for comedy its permanent place in the Attic theatre. "Starting with what is always, prima facie, the prose ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL 153 of everyday life, its acrid controversies, its vulgar and tedious types, and even its particular individuals — for Aristophanes does not hesitate to introduce his con- temporaries in person on the stage — he fits to this gross and heavy stuff the wings of imagination, scatters from it the clinging mists of banality and spite, and speeds it forth through the lucid heaven of art amid peals of musical laughter and snatches of lyric song." i To say that Greek genius showed at its best when it was working within formal limits is to insist on a commonplace, yet until the strictly conventional nature of the Greek play is grasped, how shall we understand the moving excitement of the throng who flock eagerly twice a year to their theatre to endure the fatigue and discomfort of sitting the whole day through among a heated crowd, for the sake of seeing the last new play ? The enthusiasm that brings them here is not the same that inspires the queue of weary Londoners waiting for a seat in the pit. The Athenian is not to have his pulses stirred by sensational presentations of emotion, by broken cadences of voice, by ravishing postures. His actors will walk on high shoes, the play of their features will be hidden by masks. All sweet cadences will be lost in that vast, open space that surely requires some artificial aid for the voice. Neither will his eyes be delighted by elaborate scenery. The costume is stereo- typed and varies little from one time to another, and the scenery is that same colonnaded hall which he saw in last year's play, if indeed it can be called scenery at all. For all this he cares nothing. Eyes and ears are straining towards the ring where the chorus circle. He must not miss a line of this magical music of Euri- pides nor one of Aeschylus' sonorous chants. This was the spirit that brought the Athenians in such crowds to their great theatre. Apart from the fact ' G. Lowes Dickinson, "Greek View of Life." 154 DAYS IN ATTICA that the play was given once only, and had there- fore all the excitement of a first night added to that of the " positively last performance," there was also this keen, critical instinct to be satisfied. Every Athenian was an art critic. His verdict was a serious matter to himself and to others. What the Athenians approved or condemned would be in the same measure approved or condemned throughout Greece. That they deserved their fame is seen in the fact that posterity has in very few cases reversed the judgment of contemporaries. The career of the poet must have been an exciting one under this regime. Within a few hours of the production of his play its reputation throughout the Greek world was fixed. Another characteristic of Greek poetry, dependent on the convention of the drama, is that it had to be judged by ear alone. This seems to have given to the Athenian audience an especial sensitiveness to the beauty of the spoken word. Invaluable in art, this quick receptiveness became a dangerous asset in politics, and the name wtoq, meaning literally a long-eared owl, was the nickname invented for those too easily carried away by eloquence. The Dionysiac Theatre at Athens is neither the largest nor the most beautiful that the world has seen, but standing here we reahze that this is the theatre par excellence. The original dancing-ground of the chorus, once perhaps a mere threshing-floor, has been traced partially outside the present orchestra. It formed a complete circle and therefore was better suited for dances than for the production of performances that must be viewed from one side only. Very early its south side must have been blocked by the skene or shed in which the actors dressed. In time this came to bear the scenery, and became the " scene " ; the stage in front of it was known as the proskenion. The earliest stage of which anything now exists is that which was finished ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL 155 under the administration of Lycurgus in the fourth century B.C. It consisted of a hall with a tower at either end and a portico behind. The long lines of masonry that run right across the enclosure and cut the walls of the earliest temple, belong to this stoa. With a plan all these lines can be made out on the spot. It must be confessed that the first impression of these ruins behind the stage is one of mere confusion. A good plan is given in Prof. E. Gardner's " Ancient Athens." The first scenery was probably merely leaned against the wall between the towers. Some time after Lycurgus a row of columns was set up some feet in advance of the old wall and behind the foundations of the front walls of the towers. The result of this change would be to make a longer and more even front in place of the deep recess with towers. Traces of these columns may still be seen on the right- hand side of the stage as we face the auditorium. Whether or no these columns supported a raised stage is a matter on which archaeologists are still divided. Enough to note that the stage grew while the orchestra shrank, as the importance of the acting came to over- shadow that of the chorus. In the reign of Nero another stage was built and by this time it is certain that the actors used a raised platform. The front line of the stage comes again considerably nearer the orchestra; the back wall is, however, the only line that it is easy to make out on the spot. Lastly comes the stage of Phaedrus running from wing to wing of the auditorium. A flight of stone steps leads up to the middle of this stage and on the top step is the inscription recording its erection by Phaedrus, " a governor of life-giving Attica." The inscription seems to date from the third century A.D. Whoever this Phsdrus may have been, he did not scruple to avail himself of the good work of his predecessors. The front of his stage is a patchwork of older reliefs which do not fit their place and have been 156 DAYS IN ATTICA much mutilated. The first rehef on the left shows Zeus seated, while Hermes stands by with the child Dionysus in his arms. The second shows Icarius sacrificing the goat to Dionysus. Further along to the right is the figure of Silenus. To the generations of cramped spectators he must have seemed the typification of discomfort as he crouched in the niche that is obviously too small for him. Remains of a similar figure have been found. This probably filled a corresponding niche on the other side of the stage. In Roman times the theatre seems to have been used for gladiatorial shows, and it was on this account that the upright slabs of marble were placed along the front of the seats to protect the spectators. To this period also belongs the covering of the gutter which runs around the orchestra and which originally carried off the rain- water for the whole building. The first row of carved marble chairs emphasizes the essentially religious character of these dramatic per- formances. Here in the central seat of honour sat the Priest of Dionysus. The proportions of its curving back, the arms finished with griffins' claws, and the delicate carving of its low reliefs, still give a thrill of pleasure. Below the seat are griffins fighting with Arimaspians, on its back crouch the Dionysiac satyrs, while on each side kneels a dainty Eros setting a cock to fight. The strange, free imagination of the Greeks saw no incongruity in choosing a cock-fight as a subject for the decoration of their priest's chair. One author mentions an annual cock-fight in the theatre which somehow commemorated the Persian invasion. On each side of the Dionysiac Priest sat the priests of the various temples in Athens, some forty in number, while here places were also reserved for the chief magistrates and heralds. The second rank of seats are without backs. Here the populace came, the whole ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL 157 theatre holding, it is estimated, at least twenty thousand people. Plato indeed makes an estimate of thirty thousand. When our modern theatres are built with a box for the bishop, a row of stalls for vicars and magistrates, and seats without backs for the mere play- goer, then we may also hope for a pure classical drama. The seats are carefully planned with a view to seating as many people as possible. Thirteen inches is all the space allowed to each spectator, but the base of the seat above is slightly hollowed out to allow him to sit well back in his seat. Each row thus acted as footstool to those above. The lines defining the rightful province of each spectator are carefully marked, but in spite of this there must have been plenty of shoving and grumbling. Even in the performances at the Roman circuses to which ladies were admitted Ovid shows that manners were far from perfect. "You who sit to our right be considerate of this lady, you hurt her by leaning up against her, and you who sit behind us draw back your legs, and be civil enough not to press our backs with your hard knees." Dr. Dorpfeld, to whose study of the theatre most of our knowledge is due, has discovered some holes at the ends of some of the lower seats which may have held supports for some kind of awning ; but it is difficult to see how this could have been arranged without interrupt- ing the view of those above. I believe that the true Athenian never shrank from the sun but came here to bask, lizard-like, as he watched the play. We shall get but a partial idea of the place that the theatre occupied in the life of the city if we think of it only in its connection with the drama, gladiatorial shows, and cock-fighting. Once the populace had acquired the habit of assembhng here it was soon found a much more convenient meeting place than the old building on the Pnyx. Even as early as the time of 158 DAYS IN ATTICA Thucydides some of the national assemblies had taken place here. By the time of Lycurgus the theatre had become the regular place of assembly, and he seems to have acknowledged the change when he covered the rocky hill-side with the marble benches that we see to-day. He also set up statues of the three great tragic poets, ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. To the east of the theatre there lay a great Odeum or concert hall built by Pericles. Its exact site is no longer known, but Vitruvius says that the Odeum stood near as you went out of the theatre on the left. One picture history has handed down to us of this Odeum with its sloping tentlike roof and of the great open theatre lying silent and deserted in the moonlight on that night of May in the year 415 B.C. whose doings thrilled the whole conscience of Athens with horror. Suddenly this moonlit space was filled with dark figures who moved about and talked together without noticing the one solitary witness lurking unknown among the shadows of the stage buildings. As dramatic as any of the plays produced here is the account thus briefly given by that one witness, whose word alone condemned so many of his fellow-citizens and lost for Athens her best commander in the Sicihan expedition. " Dioclides said that he had a slave at Laurium, and that he had occasion to go to him for a payment due to him. He rose early, mistaking the time, and set forth ; it was a full moon. When he had come to the Gateway of Dionysus he saw several persons descending from the Odeum into the orchestra ; afraid of them he drew into the shade and crouched down between the pillar and the column with the bronze statue of the general. He saw persons about three hundred in number standing round in groups of fifteen or some of twenty men, and seeing their faces in the moonlight he recognized most of them. After seeing this he went to Laurium and on the follow- ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL 159 ing day heard of the mutilation of the Hermae ; and so he knew immediately that these men were the culprits." II THE DRAMATIC MONUMENTS The dramas performed in the theatre at the feast of Dionysus were competitive. Each piece was produced at the expense of some public-spirited citizen who paid for the hire of the chorus and the staging of the play. This citizen was known as the choragus, and naturally he did his utmost to win the popular favour. If his play were voted the best at that festival a prize was awarded in token of his victory, and he was allowed to set up a monument in the neighbourhood of the theatre bearing a bronze tripod in a conspicuous position. Much ingenuity was spent in devising different types of pedestal to hold the tripod. One contained a small statue by Praxiteles. The few remaining in place to-day show widely different types. In time the region round the theatre came to be filled with these so-called choragic monuments, and a street made through it was known as the " Street of Tripods." After the end of the fourth century B.C. it was no longer possible to find private patrons to finance the production of the plays and the State had to provide the funds. By this time the contests must have lost much of that eager and wholesome rivalry that called forth the best powers of playwright, chorus, and actors. These tripod monuments date therefore from the period when the drama was at its best. At the end of a street opposite the Arch of Hadrian there is still a small graceful structure, looking like a tiny round tower. In Turkish times this was known as 160 DAYS IN ATTICA the "Lantern of Demosthenes," owing to its supposed resemblance to a Turkish lantern. The origin of the supposed connection with Demosthenes is lost. An in- scription on the architrave of the south-east side shows that in reality it was a monument erected by one Lysicrates in commemoration of his victory as choragus in one of the Dionysiac festivals which took place 334-3 B.C. The size of the tripod has evidently deter- mined the proportions of the whole building, which is made to carry the crowning feature as high as possible without allowing it to appear insignificant. The fluted Corinthian columns bearing the circular architrave and frieze seem naturally to suggest to the eye the slender horizontal lines of tripod with its shallow basin. One has only to imagine the tripod on the summit of the acanthus ornament that arises from the marble " thatch of laurel leaves " and at once there is a new satisfaction in the whole design. The acanthus ornament falls into place and the eye leaves off searching for an opening in the curved marble sides as the building changes from a dwarf temple into a fitting pedestal for the trophy. We know from Pausanias that this building stood among many others, some of them containing master- pieces. It was therefore designed to hold its own by appropriateness and harmony rather than by any wealth of ornament. The tripods in low relief between the capitals and the frieze above are both strictly to the point. Dionysus is seated on a cliff, accompanied by his panther and attendant satyrs. He has encountered Tyrrhenian pirates who do not believe in his divinity and is changing them into dolphins. One of them may be seen leaping into the sea, already half a dolphin. Casts of this frieze are shown in the British Museum. The building is of especial interest as the oldest example of Corinthian architecture extant. Standing in full view of the giant columns of the Olympieum ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL 161 the contrast reveals the range of the Corinthian order to which both belong. About 1660 the " Lantern " was built into the walls of a Capuchin convent and reserved by the monks as a circular study attached to their guest-chamber. Here Byron, Dodwell, Gait, and other travellers stayed when they came to Athens. There was no proper inn in the town and the hospitality of the monks was freely offered (see p. 241). In the rock of the Acropolis overlooking the Dionysiac Theatre there are two natural caves. The one imme- diately above the theatre was adapted as a choragic monument by a certain Thrasyllus (320 B.C.) who must have been a man of original ideas. He walled up the mouth of the cave and set three Doric pilasters on the face of the wall. These supported an architrave which probably carried the emblematic tripod. An inscription recording the victory of Thrasyllus may be seen lying in front of the cave, though it is now broken. His son Thrasykles added two more inscriptions recording two more victories when he was president of the games fifty years later, and these also may be found lying near the spot. Either father or son crowned the edifice with the seated statue of Dionysus now in the British Museum. This monument of Thrasyllus was destroyed by the Turks when they besieged the Acropolis in 1826-7, but the spot is still conspicuous by reason of the two Corinthian columns which stand on the rock above the cave. These were also put up to support tripods and are examples of the more commonplace type of choragic monument. They remain a standing perplexity to the casual sight- seer. They suggest the remains of a temple, but the narrow ledge of rock on which they perch makes this out of the question. It is strange how many visitors fail to track them in the guide-books and come home saying, " But what are those two odd columns above 162 DAYS IN ATTICA the theatre ? " The second cave is part of the great hospital-temple of Asklepios. Ill THE PRECINCT OF ASKLEPIOS Perhaps you have lingered on the Acropolis till the blue-coated guardian warns you that the gates are closing. Darkness overtakes you as you descend the hill by the footpath on its south side, and glancing up for one last backward glimpse of the Acropolis your eye is caught by a golden star twinkling high up in the rock. This is the light in the shrine behind the monument of Thrasykles. A tiny light lower down burns before the picture of the Virgin in the cave where the healing spring of Asklepios rises. This is another example of the con- tinuity of sacred sites. Where Asklepios used to work his miracles the Virgin now heals the sick and sends her blessings of prosperity and fruitfulness to the young couples who hang their wedding wreaths before her shrine. Visited by daylight the little cave is plain enough. A spring of water wells up through the stone and flows round the cave in a rock-cut channel. Outside are the remains of the sanctuary of Asklepios, somewhat con- fused by the superposition of a Byzantine church, but worth careful study for the light they throw on this amazing cult, with its combination of faith-healing, open- air cure, and the attractions of a fashionable watering- place. It is not nearly so large nor so elaborate as the more famous Asklepieum at Epidaurus or that at Cos, but the main features are easily traced ; a small temple, an altar, and the long portico with a double row of columns. In this portico the patients lay in long rows along the marble pavement, and when night fell they watched for ON THE SOUTH SIDE OP THE HILL 163 the god and his attendant snakes to come and work miraculous cures. Possibly the cure was not always instantaneous, but the open-air life, the excitement of a possible apparition, the social intercourse, and the neigh- bourhood of the theatre would all combine to make an invalid inclined to continue his cure for a second season. Like Homburg and Aix-les-Bains, this sanctuary of Asklepios made a little spring the foundation for a great commerce in the pleasure-loving and pain-fearing instincts of mankind. There is a well-known passage in the " Plutus " of Aristophanes which delightfully satirizes the humbug that no doubt often accompanied the miracu- lous cures. The patient is none other than Plutus the god of wealth who arrives in Athens as a blind stranger. A servant who has gone with the sick man to the temple describes their adventures with much humour to his master's wife. ■ We hasted to the temple of the god Leading the creature then the wretchedest, But now the happiest beyond compare, And the most fortunate in all the world ; And, first we took him down to the seashore. And washed him there. This done we brought him to the holy place ; And, after wafers and like offerings Had on the altar solemnly been laid, And cake burnt in the flame Hephaestus loves, We put our Plutus properly to bed. And each of us arranged his own straw couch. But I could get no sleep ; I was excited by a porridge pot Which stood a little distance from the head Of an old lady, and I felt a strange Unearthly longing to that pot to crawl. As I looked up I caught sight of the priest Snatching the cakes and the dried figs from off I quote from the translation of Lord Justice Kennedy. 164 DAYS IN ATTICA The holy table. Then he went the round Of all the altars questing on the chance That wafers had been left there. All he found He — consecrated — in a bag ; and I, Inferring for such act great piety, Rose up that pot of porridge to invade. Wife. Most rash of men, did you not fear the god ? Servant. Indeed I did, I feared that crown and all He'd come and reach the pot before myself. You see I'd learnt a lesson from the priest. Well, the old lady noticing some noise I made in moving to remove the pot, Upraised her hand ; I gave a hissing sound As a snake does and gripped it with my teeth. She without loss of time withdrew her hand, Rolled all her blankets round her and lay still. Much of the porridge I at once devoured And, when I'd had my fill, leapt back to bed . . . Then the god Came in a manner quite professional. Examining each patient in his turn. He went and sat by the bedside Of little Plutus. First of all, he laid His hand upon the patient's head ; and next, With a clean towel wiped the eyelids' edge : Then Panacea with a purple veil Covered the head and face ; this done, the god Gave a low whistle, and there darted forth Out of the shrine two serpents of huge size. The pair crept quietly Under the veil, and as it seemed to me. Licked Plutus round the eyelids ; then, before You, madam, could toss off ten cups of wine, Plutus rose up from bed with sight restored. I clapped my hands together with delight, And went to rouse my master. Instantly Both god and serpents vanished in the shrine. You can't imagine how the patients there Kept on embracing Plutus. They sat up The livelong night until the day had dawned; Whilst loud I sang the praises of the god Who had so swiftly made our Plutus see And Neoclides blinder than before. ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE HILL 165 Moving westward on slightly higher ground there is another portico and a row of chambers behind which are paved with small round pebbles. These are probably the priests' chambers. To the south of these again there is a polygonal wall, one stone of which bears the inscription HOPOS KPENES— the boundary of the fountain. It marks the Hmits of the ancient precinct and also indi- cates that the cult of the spring may really be older than the cult of the god. Asklepios is in Athens one of the new-comers whose worship seems to have been introduced towards the end of the fifth century. The scientific men of the day looked coldly on him and scoffed at the solemn cant of pet snakes and nocturnal apparitions. In time, however, they came to realize that his methods suited the needs of certain leisured classes of society, and the two schools of medicine worked together in the same kind of har- mony as sometimes exists to-day between the family doctor and the professor of mental therapeutics. An interesting suggestion has recently been made,^ which may account for this change of attitude on the part of the followers of Hippocrates to their fellow- practitioners, the followers of Asklepios. It seems prob- able that the decline of Athens during the fourth and succeeding centuries was, among other causes, due to the invasion of malaria. At all events it is clear from the " Wasps " that fever was already prevalent in the time of Aristophanes, though it is hardly mentioned before. In malaria the orthodox practitioners found a foe against which they were powerless. Quinine was unknown to them and without quinine science was of httle use. On the other hand the faith-healing methods of Asklepios gave the patient that mental stimulus which is un- doubtedly beneficial, and it seems possible that some of the cures were of intermittent fever in its early stages. ' W. H. S. Jones, " Malaria and Greek History." 166 DAYS IN ATTICA In the National Museum at Athens there are numerous stone tablets which had been set up by grateful patients in this precinct of Asklepios. The god, figured as a bearded man, appears on many of them, and he is usually accompanied by his daughter Hygiea and his snake. Sometimes the snake is shown without the god. The patient is often seated or reclining, and is represented as smaller than the healer. Sometimes a whole family is giving thanks and Asklepios also may be accompanied by a group of other divinities or priestly healers. One relief, found in the cellar of a house at a little distance but probably belonging to this sanctuary, often attracts the attention of visitors to the museum. It is a long narrow stele with the figure of a snake curling upwards. At the head of the stele where the stone slightly widens is the sole of a sandal with the figure of a man engraved upon it. The sandal is quite realistic in representation, and the holes through which the straps would have passed are marked by deep cuttings. The figure is evidently the worshipping portrait of the donor, Silon. It remains open to conjecture whether he chose the sandal to show that he had come as a pilgrim from afar or to indicate that he had been cured of some disease in the feet. Another theory is that the donor had been saved by the sole of his sandal from the bite of a poisonous snake. These and many other such stelae may be studied in the Hall of Votive Reliefs in the National Museum. The site of the Asklepieum was afterwards built over. The Byzantine church which stood here has been removed, but this part of the hill is still rich in Byzantine remains. There are fragments of some really beautiful lintels and slabs. It is delightful to spend an afternoon among them with camera or pencil. CHAPTER VII THE AFTERGLOW: ATHENS UNDER THE ROMANS PAUSANIAS IN THE PIR^US IN fellowship with Theseus we first traversed the land approach to Athens. The sea route suggests another companion, dear garrulous Pausanias. As a travel- ling companion Pausanias is unrivalled. His knowledge of the antiquities and mythology of Greece gives him a fund of anecdote, while he is never too hurried to pause to read an inscription or to pick up crumbs of folk-lore from a passing native. When Pausanias visited Athens about i6o a.d. she was at the height of her out- ward splendour, though her political greatness was past. The buildings of the great Periclean age were still standing : to them had been added the colonnades and monuments given by members of the friendly Pergamene dynasty. Hadrian and Herodes Atticus were building on a larger and more elaborate scale than anything that had gone before. The great public works of these Romans had not all been completed, and since the interest of Pausanias was chiefly archaeological, he passed lightly over all that which was to him mere modern architecture. He does not pretend to describe what were in his day 167 168 DAYS IN ATTICA the " modern " buildings, but he occasionally mentions one or other while walking through the ancient town. With Pausanias therefore we stand at the ship's prow moving swiftly towards Athens. We pass under the white columns of Poseidon's temple perched on the cliff at Sunium. Only a few years previously these heights had been seized by Attic slaves employed in the silver mines at Laurium. Pausanias points out the Laurium mines, but he does not allude to the strike — or rebellion as he would have termed it. This was still too recent history to be of much interest to him. And now rounding the promontory of Cape Colonna, at last the features of the Athenian landscape detach themselves from the background of surrounding hills. At first the Cephissian Plain is barred by Hymettus. Then as we round the shoulder of Hymettus the plain comes into view with Parnes on the left, while scarred Pentelicus closes the view behind. And now the town itself glimmers in the distance, a mere indistinct whiteness among the broken lights and shadows of the plain. Then the craggy peak of Lyca- bettus becomes visible and from this point of view almost dwarfs the Acropolis, which rises immediately beneath it, no frowning sentinel hill, but a mere touch of brightness dominated by the higher crag. This is only the first impression. In Athens itself the AcropoliS' holds its own, and Lycabettus is banished to the background. In front of the town lies the open bay of Phalerum, and Pausanias reminds us how from this sloping beach Menestheus launched his ships for Troy. Now our boat rounds the rocky promontory of Munychia, revealing the natural advantages afforded by the double peninsula, with its fortified heights, the two almost land-locked harbours of Munychia and Zea, and the great sheltered inner harbour. This inner harbour was itself double, con- taining the military harbour of Cantharus and the THE AFTERGLOW 169 commercial harbour, the Piraeus proper. Pausanias applauds the strategic insight of Themistocles, who saw that these advantages must at all costs be secured to the city. Finding it useless to try to persuade the Athenians to forsake their old dwellings and emigrate from Athens to the sea, he contented himself with fortifying the harbour and having the new town laid out on broad lines with open spaces and colonnades to attract those whom he could not coerce. Later the Athenians themselves built the long walls, thus, as it were, tying Athens and Piraeus together, and making of the two a curious dumb-bell shaped city, a device which proved as unsatisfactory as compromises usually are. The fortifications of Themistocles encircled the new town of Pirzeus and ran across the peninsula of Munychia, and at need could even shut the sea door. In the days of Pausanias the three harbour mouths were still guarded by strong moles finished with towers, and in time of war these towers could be connected by strong chains, thus entirely closing the harbour mouth. Later another fortification wall was built, following the line of the rocky coast. In the harbours of Munychia and Zea we catch a glimpse of the great ship-sheds lining the shore. Here the triremes were housed.. Each shed was fifty or sixty feet in length, with a wooden roof resting on plain stone pillars. The high polygonal wall which formed the back of the building made, as it were, a secondary line of shore fortifications. Remains of these sheds are still plainly visible in the harbours of Zea and Munychia. Excavations made in 1885 by the Greek Archaeological Society show that in each shed a central pier of rock or masonry sloped down from the back wall to some distance under the sea, and was grooved in order to allow the vessel's keel to run along it. On either side the natural rock was cut away 170 DAYS IN ATTICA in sloping lines down to the water, thus making a kind of natural support for the sides of the ship. Passing the promontory of Acte, Pausanias points out the tomb of Themistocles, on a headland of rock, between the city he created and the sea he loved. Here Pau- sanias' galley would furl its sails and slowly row between the moles of the great harbour. By this time the lines of buildings in Pirseus would be clearly visible ; the fine rectangular plan of the city as it was laid out by Hippodamus, with three main routes running parallel to each other and connected by four cross streets, the midmost street of the three prolonged and merging in the road that leads to Athens between the long walls. In the town were two large squares, and from the sea Pausanias would get a view of the stretch of white public buildings, throwing the reflections of their marble columns among the golden tints of the sailing craft which lay at anchor round the shore. First there were the long lines of the colonnades belonging to the granary and market-place, filled with a motley throng of merchants and sailors, a throng such as Euripides had in mind when he wrote for the chorus in Hippolytus : — Hath there landed amid the loud Hum of Pirasus sailor-crowd Some Cretan venturer weary-browed Who beareth the queen some tiding ? Behind the colonnades rose the magnificent arsenal built about the same time as the ship-sheds (347-29 B.C.) and conceived in the same spirit. It was a long, narrow building, 400 feet long by 50 feet wide ; the roof supported by two rows of columns which divide the building into three compartments. The central aisle was left clear for the passage of men and the handling of goods. The side aisles were divided into two stories ; canvas, oars, and heavy fittings were stored below, the lighter ropes and tackle above. THE AFTERGLOW 171 No remains of this building can be seen to-day, but an inscription found in 1882 at the port of Munychia gives most precise details as to its construction. Standing out among the lines of the low dwelling- houses, there rose the great temple to the " Saviour Zeus and Saviour Athena," where the pious sailor offered thanks for his safe return. On the right, on the heights of Munychia, was another temple sacred to " Munychian Artemis " ; a smaller sanctuary to Aphrodite stood at the head of the little harbour of Cantharus (now marked by the custom-house), and somewhere on the northern side of the great harbour was another temple to the same sea- born goddess. With its five colonnades surrounding the water's edge, with the arsenal, the ship-sheds, the stately temples, and two theatres, this great harbour-city of the Piraeus bade fair to outshine her Mediterranean rivals even in the days of Pausanias. On disembarking, Pausanias did not follow the main street which led direct to Athens between the lines of the long walls, for this road would be uncomfortably crowded. There was no view, the roads were rutted and dirty, and the foot passenger was often in danger of finding himself squeezed against the wall in order to avoid the laden wagons passing up and down from the port. Pausanias therefore chose the more open road, and struck away to the left, entering Athens through the tombs outside the Dipylum Gate. II THE ROMAN TOWN Roman Athens compared ill with the broad, geometrical streets of the Piraeus. "The streets are nothing but miserable old lanes, the houses mean, with a few better 172 DAYS IN ATTICA ones among them," so wrote a traveller who visited Athens in the first century B.C., and even in the time of Pausanias the same description held good, though the Romans had done their best to remedy the town's most obvious defects. The aqueduct, begun by Hadrian and finished by his successor, brought fresh water from Pentelicus to Athens. It follows the same line as the modern one, starting near Cephissia and ending on the south-west slope of Lycabettus. In the course of ages the ancient aqueduct was freely tapped by those whose gardens lay along the line of its route, and the morality of the twentieth century is not always proof against the same temptation. The ancient cistern, which was no doubt open, occupied the same site above the city as the modern one, which is fortunately covered. It stands on a shady platform high above the town, with a view of the Acropolis, .^gina, and the mountains of the Peloponnese, Here the townspeople still crowd on the Feast of the Epiphany to see the Archbishop in full canonicals bless the water and throw upon it the holy cross. The Romans also gave Athens a new market-place, more spacious and less straggling than its predecessor. It lies further east of the Acropolis than did the old market. In fact the whole current of city life seems in Roman times to have set eastward, and the new suburb of Hadrian lay over towards the Ilissus. This change of fashion leading the business and pleasure of the town from one district to another is the feature that dis- tinguishes our Western towns from those of the un- changing Orient. In Western towns when the old quarters become cramped or out of fashion, new dealers set up their shops in conspicuous spots on the out- skirts of the old centres, and the stream of trade is slowly diverted from its course. In Eastern towns the process is reversed, and it is the neighbourhood of the oldest THE AFTERGLOW 173 rather than of the newest dealer that is most sought after. In Roman times Athens belonged to the Western world. That touch of the East which hangs about her to-day does not date further back than her Turkish conquerors. It is strange to hear an Athenian now talk of "going to Europe," tacitly assuming that he is in some sense an Asiatic. But this is a digression and has taken us from that prince of digressors, Pausanias himself. The new Roman market-place was entered on the west by a large gateway, of which four Doric columns with architrave and pediment are still in place. An in- scription on the architrave shows that the gate was dedicated to Athena Archegetis (Athena the Foundress), while a second inscription, which has now vanished, showed that the building dated from the middle of the first century B.C. At a distance of about six feet inside these columns, there was a wall containing the gates to which this large structure was a portico. There would probably be a large gate for wheeled vehicles opposite the wide space between the columns with smaller postern gates on either side. Remains of one of these posterns may still be seen at the south corner, where a complete anta still supports the architrave, and opposite to it is the upright jamb of a door. Here there is a long inscription bearing the name of the Emperor Hadrian. It gives the regulations for the sale of oil in the market-place. At the eastern end of the market-place another gate has been found. This is not placed in an exact line with the gate of the Foundress Athena, but lies somewhat to the south. From this it has been assumed that the market- place had more than one gate at either end. We may picture a large open court, paved with flags and sur- rounded by an Ionic colonnade ; warehouses and shops behind. Remains of these shops and stores can still be seen on the wall that bounds the market-place to the east. Even the names of the merchants have survived 174 DAYS IN ATTICA cut on the columns or on the pavement before their doors. Four holes of different sizes sunk in the floor of this pavement are clearly the measures of capacity used by the merchants. Two columns on either side of these holes have the linear measure carefully graved upon them. Here we have the Greek irvx^?, which was originally measured from the elbow to the first joints of the fingers, and which is still the standard measure in use through- out Greece. Explorers of some future age excavating the remains of Piccadilly Circus may similarly find the names of great merchants over their doors and the yard measure marked on the counter. It is true that the Roman shops were mere sheds compared with London's palatial stores, yet in its own day the Roman market had a repu- tation for architectural distinction. Its spaciousness and regularity of outline was a great improvement on the old haphazard Athenian agora. Overlooking the market and immediately outside of it stands the Clock Tower of Andronicus, famous as the " Tower of the Winds." The octagonal marble tower, with its roof of the same material gently sloping up to the centre, pleasantly closes the perspective of the long modern street that now leads up to it, but on a closer view the detail is disappointing. Heavy limbs and life- less draperies fill the panels of the frieze in a clumsy attempt to make the human figure conform to the lines of a festoon. Had the frieze been filled with simple perpendicular lines of fluting, had it even been left bare, the building would have gained a dignity that is now lacking. Nor can the beauty of the building have been enhanced by the ingenious figure of a bronze Triton, who acted as weathercock on the tower and pointed with his stick to the figure facing the quarter from which the wind was blowing. But though their absence might improve the appearance of the tower, I doubt if there is THE AFTERGLOW 175 any lover of Athens who could wish away these quaint personifications of the winds in the frieze. They seem for so many centuries to have linked the dwellers in the wind-swept city into one bond of brotherhood. The winds that haunt the poems and legends of ancient Greece are still vivid realities to the modern Athenian, and the attributes on the tower represent correctly enough their latter-day reputations. First come the three winter winds, Skiron, Boreas, and Kaikias. Skiron bears a brazier for cold days. He is the North West Wind, Boreas, who faces ^olus Street, is clad in thick garments and blows a horn. He is the strong North Wind who sweeps noisily down through the pass of Deeeleia and comes to Athens from the snowy hill-tops of Eubcea. He brings the cold, clear days char- acteristic of the Athenian winter, and the deceitful blue of his skies has tempted out many a victim since the days of Oreithyia. Simonides sings : " The North Wind rushing from Thrace covered the flanks of Olympus with snow and nipped the spirits of thinly-clad men." But Boreas has his kindly as well as his dangerous aspect. In the time of the Persian War, " It is said that the Athenians had called upon Boreas to aid the Greeks, on account of a fresh oracle which they had received, order- ing them to ask help from their son-in-law. For Boreas, according to Greek tradition, had married a woman of Attica — i.e. Oreithya, daughter of Erechtheus," and there- fore might be counted a son-in-law of Athens. Poets and painters show him sweeping his bride away as she gathers the spring flowers. Modern Athenians may have forgotten to claim kin- ship with Boreas, but they have not forgotten to look to him as their deHverer. He is the health wind, the germ-destroyer, the invigorator. During an epidemic of smallpox we saw the picture of St. Barbara carried in full procession round the outskirts of the city on 176 DAYS IN ATTICA St. Barbara's day, and when on the morrow a strong north wind sprang up, we heard a devout Greek exclaim, " Praise the Lord, St. Barbara has sent Boreas to help us." The North East Wind, Kaikias, is the evil genius of the Athenian climate. He is the " pneumonia wind," and his voice tells of the frozen tracts of Siberia over which he passed long before he rushed through the gap in the hills between Hymettus and Pentelicus. He holds a dish of pellets which have variously been called olives or hailstones. The first interpretation is the older one, but the last seems the more probable. Apeliotes, the East Wind, comes next. He is the wind of spring, bringing fruit and flowers. Euros, the South East Wind, carries the storm up from Hymettus, wrapping it in clouds as his own arm is wrapped in drapery. There is an Italian proverb prophesying rain " when the Madman puts on his cap. Monte Matto is the Italian corruption of Hymettus, and this becomes in familiar speech "II Matto" (The Madman). The cap is the sullen bar of cloud hiding the peak. The South Wind, Notos, seems in Roman times to have had a rainy reputation. To-day he is less of a rain wind than Euros his companion, and the two might well exchange the emblems of cloak and water-jar. Notos to-day often brings clouded skies and an atmosphere heavy with desert dust. Next comes Lips, the sailors' wind, with the prow of a ship as his emblem, and after him the bountiful Zephyros with flowers. The two winds are both beloved of poets. Leonidas of Tarentum mingles their attributes in one short song : " Now is the season of sailing ; for already the chattering swallow is come, and the gracious West Wind ; the meadows flower, and the sea tossed up with waves and rough blasts has sunk to silence. Weigh thine anchors and unloose thine hawsers, oh mariner ! and sail with all thy canvas set : this I, Priapus of the harbour, bid thee, THE AFTERGLOW 177 oh man ! that thou mayest sail forth to all thy trafficking." On each face of the tower, as well as the figure of the wind, there was also a sundial. Inside was the cele- brated water clock of Andronicus. Its mechanism has never been fully explained. The water that worked it was brought from the spring Clepsydra by means of an aqueduct, the remains of which may still be seen. Its value in that busy market-place is self-evident. Before it was placed there, there must have been many cloudy days when the citizens measured the flight of time chiefly by their appetites. We saw in the last chapter how Dioclides, having no clock, mistook moonlight for dawn, and found himself roaming at night in the neigh- bourhood of the Dionysiac Theatre. A few paces from the Clock Tower is the famous Library of Hadrian. Its north portico or stoa, now facing on to the little Bazaar behind Hermes Street, has long been a conspicuous object, yet it is only within quite recent years that archaeologists have ventured to exchange the well-known non-committal name, " Stoa of Hadrian," for the more definite term now employed. In 1886 the site was excavated by the Greek Archaeological Society, revealing a ground-plan much complicated by later Byzantine buildings. Around the open court remains were found of a portico of a hundred columns. This was, however, an incomplete clue to its identifica- tion, since Pausanias mentions that Hadrian gave both his Gymnasium and his Library one hundred columns. Very few gymnasia of this period are known, and until 1905 there was no library with which Hadrian's building could be compared. In that year, however, the Austrian excavations at Ephesus laid bare the remains of a Roman library to which this building bears so strong a general resemblance that there is no longer room for doubt that this is indeed Hadrian's Library, thus vindicating the 178 DAYS IN ATTICA conclusion at which Mr. Frazer and other archaeologists had already arrived on independent grounds. The whole ground-plan of Hadrian's Library has [not yet been uncovered, but thanks to the description of Pausanius, it is possible to identify the large central hall in which under a gilded roof the books were stored and around it an open courtyard enclosed by the famous colonnade. The interior of the building is reached from the upper end of ^olus Street. It is fenced in by iron railings, and, contrary to the usual custom of the Greek Archaeological Society, the gate into the enclosure is locked. There are, however, twenty small boys always ready to run for the key, and on passing in one finds a high wall of dark poros stone. This seems to be the out- side wall of a row of five chambers outside the colonnade, but following the same lines. On the right there is some plain masonry which seems to have formed the back wall of the stoa, and in front is a mapble wall of good Roman work which formed the north-eastern corner of the original hall and was retained as the short wall of a northern transept when the Christians built their church there. To see the front of the building one must pass to the old bazaar at the foot of Athena Street, where the Corinthian columns rise oddly from the scene of oriental confusion below. These columns, which still bear the name " Stoa of Hadrian," are all that is left in the west front of the Library. The two standing more in advance of the others are the two from the north side of the porch. The seven in a row beyond form the northern half of the western wall. These are plain, while those of the porch are fluted. All carry Corinthian capitals. Founda- tions still remain of the bases of the three columns which completed the front of the portico and also of the seven bases of the columns on the south side of the porch answering to those still standing on the north. The original building had therefore a fa9ade with a row of ri.ATE nil Srcr^~^-^ HADRIAN'S LIHRAKY IN TURKISH TIMES HADRIANS LIBRARY AS IT IS TO-DAY THE AFTERGLOW 179 fourteen columns and a porch with a front of seven columns. The love of these large open porticoes is as charac- teristic of Athenian life in the koman as in the Hellenistic age. For the ruler who wished to gain popularity there was no surer way to the hearts of the citizens than the gift of a new public colonnade. At the time that Pausanias visited Athens the number of these colonnades was out of all proportion to the size of the town. The Hellenic porticoes were still standing. The Hellenistic or later Greek period had added those built by Eumenes and Attains, and the Roman period gave the so-called Portico of the Giants, the portico of Hadrian's Library, and probably another outside his Gymnasium. There was therefore no quarter of the town without its sunny promenade sheltered from the weather and dry underfoot. Of these porticoes or stoce there were always two distinct types ; the first, such as the large one built by Attains, was a centre for business with shops at the back of the open colonnade and dwellings for the store- keepers above ; the second, such as that built by Eumenes, was an open promenade with no shops or dwellings attached. The one was the resort of buyers and sellers, the second the haunt of philosophers and beggars. In this matter our civilization still seems to lag behind the Greek and the Roman world. Our climate is far worse than theirs, yet Chester is almost the only town in the kingdom that protects its sidewalks from the sun and rain. Considering the colonnades in their chronological order, the Stoa of Eumenes comes first. It now runs from the Theatre of Dionysus to the Music Hall of Herodes ; in the days when it was built, however, there was no great Music Hall. The latter, though it added to the significance and usefulness of the broad double colonnade, must also have encroached on its western end. This colonnade was placed in a most popular spot. After the 180 DAYS IN ATTICA building of the Music Hall it formed a covered way from that building to the Theatre. It faced south, it was sheltered from the east and west, and from its south end it overlooked the Gulf of ^gina. Here the sun-loving Athenians came to take their morning or evening stroll, and here also the audience in the Dionysiac Theatre could hasten for shelter when a tragedy or cock-fight was interrupted by a sudden storm. To-day all that remains is a portion of pavement and sidewalk, foundations of columns and the arches of the back wall built against the hill. These arches that now seem the distinguishing feature of the Stoa of Euraenes, have only become visible since its destruction. Originally they were covered by a wall of which the lower half was marble and the upper half of limestone. Eumenes II, the giver of this portico, was King of Pergamon in the first half of the second century B.C. His father Attalus I had already shown his friendship to Athens by presenting the town with a series of recumbent statues which lay on the South wall of the Acropolis above the Dionysiac Theatre. After the death of Eumenes his son Attalus II (159-38 B.C.) continued the family tradition and won the gratitude of the Athenians by giving them another portico. This was the well-known Stoa of Attalus, which stood in the heart of the city to the East of the Hellenic Agora. Its marble pavement, its two sidewalks, and the foundations of its colonnade may still be seen. It is also possible to make out something of the shops at the back of the colonnade. The lower and upper stories were connected by means of an open staircase in the South wall. The upper story also had a double line of columns answering to the colonnade below, with the addition of a balustrade of marble for the sake of safety. Westward of the Stoa of Attalus was another portico known as the Stoa of the Giants, which was built or rebuilt in Roman times. Four bases standing in a row THE AFTERGLOW 181 are surmounted by fragments of colossal figures from which the name has been given to it. Compared with the other porticoes, this is small and of little interest, worthy of notice only as adding one more type to the list of Athenian stoae. Pausanias as he strolled through Athens may have enjoyed the new colonnades. No doubt he often paused in their shade while noting his observations on pocket-tablets at the end of a morning's sightseeing. On the Acropolis itself there are remains of only one Roman building, the little temple to Rome and Augustus, which stands just outside the east side of the Parthenon. An inscriptipn, which may still be seen on the broken fragments of the epistyle, tells us that this temple was set up by the people of Athens to the goddess Rome and to the god Caesar. It must have been a graceful little building with its round cella and the nine Ionic columns encircling it, but its blatantly servile inscription suggests too poignant a contrast between its own builders and those of the Parthenon on whose threshold it stands. These Roman buildings are all sufficiently Greek in style not to seem out of place in Athens. The Roman era has, however, left one trophy of aggressive ugliness. The Philopappus monument stands on the Mouseium Hill opposite the Acropolis. It has a splendid position and a special interest, for it was set up to the last recorded male descendant of the Seleucid dynasty. These kings of Asia Minor had been for many generations the representatives and champions of Hellenism in the Oriental world. The monument commemorates Philo- pappus in his triple character of Asiatic king, Roman consul, and Athenian citizen. The curved fagade has two stories, and was probably placed at the end of an oblong hall. In the upper story were set three statues divided by Corinthian pilasters. Inscriptions show that the central statue represented Gains Julius 182 DAYS IN ATTICA Philopappus with a royal Seleucid ancestor on either hand. The building is thus dated approximately to the year A.D. 115. In the lower story was a relief showing Philopappus as consul driving a car with four horses. When new it must have been even more unsightly than it is to-day — the "Albert Memorial" of Athens. Ill HADRIAN'S NEW SUBURB At the foot of the fashionable modern boulevard called after the Queen Amalia there stands a somewhat purpose- less and not very beautiful yellow gateway known as the Arch of Hadrian. There is nothing remarkable in its architecture, history, or position. A shallow arch sup- ports a colonnade of four columns in late Corinthian style. It does not seem to have been a triumphal arch, though there is some reminiscence of the arches in the Roman Forum. The orientation shows that it could not have served as an entrance to the enclosure of the great temple behind. Probably it was erected merely to mark the site of an earlier gate when the town wall which once stood here was destroyed. Although it bears the name of Hadrian, it seems to date from a slightly later period. Driving along any Greek road to-day the traveller may see by the roadside many structures as pretentious and less forgivable than this — magnificent gateways holding no gate and unsupported by walls. For even if it has no beauty this so-called Arch of Hadrian has a real signifi- cance. It was put there to mark the boundary between the old town and the new. On the architrave words are carved. On the side towards the Acropolis, " This is Athens the former city of Theseus," and on the other side, " This is the city of Hadrian and not the city of Theseus." This arch therefore marked not only the passage from THE AFTERGLOW 183 Hellenic to Roman Athens. It also in a certain sense recorded the entrance to a new period — the late afternoon of Athenian glory when the city was content to shine in reflected light and to flourish as the petted favourite of a great empire ; when the foreign ruler Hadrian was not afraid to challenge comparison with Theseus himself. In the eyes of its own generation, the city of Hadrian probably outshone its forerunner. The Roman buildings were planned on a more colossal scale, and the rapid succession of public works raised by Hadrian and H erodes Atticus dominated the imagination of the Athenians who by now were proud to call themselves Roman citizens. The glory of Rome would be increased by the remem- brance that these buildings were not, like those of the Acropolis, national achievements of a nation, but the mere caprice of an individual whose humour was so to adorn Athens, one of the many provincial capitals of his empire. Hadrian gave the city every kind of build- ing : temples, a library, a gymnasium, baths, and an aqueduct. He was rewarded by the adulation of all society : priests, philosophers, athletes, and idlers. Pau- sanias found the city overdone with statues of the great emperor. The space outside the Olympieum was, he says, completely filled with his image, " for every city presented a portrait-statue of the Emperor Hadrian, while the Athenians have overtopped all the rest by setting up the remarkable colossus behind the temple." He mentions also a statue near the entrance to the Parthenon and tells us that in the Agora there was another dedicated to him as " Hadrian the Liberator." This same title appears in the inscription on the chair reserved for his priest in the theatre, and it was well- deserved. Like other provinces of the Empire, Attica had been grossly overtaxed. Hadrian remitted her arrears of taxation and gave provincials equal legal rights with Roman citizens. 184 DAYS IN ATTICA Greatest of all the works of Hadrian was the temple itself, the vast building to Olympian Zeus, in this new quarter. It stood well out of the town, in full view of the Acropolis and the sea, and with the well-watered groves of the Ilissus around it, and occupied a site which from earliest times had been marked out for a sanctuary. The emperor was in fact merely accom- plishing a work which had been conceived and partly executed at two, if not three, earlier periods. Tradition says that this was the spot chosen by Deucalion for a sanctuary dedicated to Zeus after the waters of the great flood had subsided. " Here there is an opening in the ground about a cubit wide, where they say that after the flood in the times of Deucalion the water ran away ; and every year there is thrown into it a cake of meal mixed with honey." Mr. Penrose, who excavated this site in 1885, thought he discovered traces of this temple in a rough wall of hard limestone below the foundations of the standing columns. Later authorities have, however, questioned this. The second temple on this spot dates from the time of Peisistratus, and though his dynasty was unable to complete the immense work that he had planned, some of the Doric columns remained standing through after centuries. A few drums of poros stone are all that to-day remain of this sixth-century temple of Peisistratus. They are easily distinguishable from the larger marble drums of Hadrian's time. Between this building and that of Hadrian a third attempt was made to finish the temple. In the second century B.C. the Syrian Antiochus Epiphanes began to build here. His architect was a Roman named Cossutius, and the temple was to have been in the Corinthian style. Sulla carried off some of its columns to adorn the Capitoline temple at Rome. Mr. Penrose has guessed that these must have been the THE AFTERGLOW 185 marble monoliths of the inner temple, as it would have been impossible to remove the outer columns without damaging their delicate flutings. About a.d. 130 Hadrian brought the long-interrupted work to completion. When finished it was one of the largest Greek temples in the world, measuring 354 feet in length and 135 feet in breadth along the upper step. On the narrow ends (east and west) it had a triple row of eight Corinthian columns, while the sides facing north and south had a double row of twenty. The group now to be seen are those belonging to the south-east angle of the temple, while the isolated couple belong to the inner row of the south side. It is not easy for a building of such colossal pro- portions to gain its true effect. It must be balanced by a spacious sweep of ground below, and spectators must be able to stand at a distance to take in the whole at a glance. Hadrian therefore enlarged the natural platform on which the temple stood, carrying it as far as the borders of the Ilissus, where it was supported by a retaining wall, parts of which are still visible. This district round the Ilissus which had once seemed so lonely that the Athenian women feared to draw water from the spring, now became the popular quarter of the city. To-day, in the gardens of the Royal Palace, or among the oleanders of the newly-planted Zappeion garden, we come unawares upon mosaic pavements and low walls, the remains of the many baths and villas which sprang up in this district during the Roman occupation. Then, as now, the happy Athenians came here to spend the afternoons of early summer. Then, as now, the purple of .