Studies of Travel - Greece. Freeman Edward Augustus

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СКАЧАТЬ clave to the Hellenic Gods. Late in the ninth century, till the apostolic zeal of the first Basil brought them within the Christian fold, the men of Maina still sacrificed to Poseidon and the other gods of their fathers. Thus they were Hellênes, Hellênes in the sense which the name bears in the New Testament, Hellênes in the sense in which Jovianus of Korkyra despoiled the temples and altars of the Hellênes to raise the church of the Panagia. No piece of nomenclature is more instructive than this. The name of Hellên would have been an insult to the Orthodox Roman of the purest Hellenic blood. It clave to the men of Tainaros only because they clave to Hellenic idols. Yet, whether as Eleutherolakônes, as Hellênes, or as Mainotes, the men of Tainaros have for many ages continued to have a name of their own.

      The most historic spot, however, in the whole voyage is reached some while before we come to Tainaros. Pentedaktylos, the specially Slavonic mountain of Constantine’s day, suggests its Hellenic neighbours, and Pentedaktylos comes in sight before we have doubled the first of the three great Peloponnesian promontories. Among the islands which lie along the coast is one which at first sight is hardly known to be an island. Sphagia keeps close watch over the haven of Navarino — watch so close that the whole length of Sphagia has to be passed before we see the narrow mouth which leads into the landlocked harbour which saw the last great sea-fight fought in Hellenic waters. Sphagia is there; Navarino is there; but some have ventured to doubt whether Sphagia is Sphaktêria, and whether Navarino is Pylos. Some have held that, in the changes of the coast, what was Sphaktêria has now become part of the mainland, and that the island which we now see is not that where Sparta endured her first great humiliation, where Kleôn and Dêmosthenês, in the teeth of all expectation, of every seeming impossibility, brought back “the men,” the Spartan captives, in triumph to the harbour of Peiraieus. Such questions as this cannot be settled by one who sees the sites only as the power of steam hurries him alongside of them. In this general view the question is of no great moment. There is the coast, whatever may be the exact spot, where the legend makes Nestor entertain Têlemachos, and whence Têlemachos and Peisistratos drove a carriage and pair in two days from Pylos to Sparta. Now whether Têlemachos and Peisistratos be real men or mere creations of fancy, the road at least is no creation of fancy. The poet would not have ventured to make his heroes perform such a drive, as something perfectly easy and usual unless Peloponnêsos had been better supplied with roads in his day than it is in our own. Here then we get a kind of history out of the legend. There again is the coast, whatever may be the exact spot, where happened the most remarkable episode of the Peloponnesian war, the occupation of Pylos-the Lacedæmonian Koryphasion-and all that came of it. With yet more certain knowledge of the exact spot, we can point to the harbour where the fetters of Greece were broken, and where the might of Turk and Egyptian fell before the combined powers of Orthodox Russia, Catholic France, and Protestant England.

      We pass on from promontory to promontory, the gulfs taking different shapes and bringing different objects into sight at every moment. At last

      Slow sinks, more lovely ere his work is done,

      Behind Morea’s hills the setting sun.

      Pentedaktylos and Tainaros are lighted up, as the sun, in Greek phrase, reigns (βασιλεύει) over the heavens from which he is about to sink into his golden cup. Cerigo and Malea are seen only by the help of the lesser lights, but we can still see the long harbourless coast of Lakonia stretching away to the Argolic lands, and we have found out too the site of the Lakonian Epidauros, more famous in later days as Monembasia. As we woke one morning about the islands of the West, so we wake the next along the islands of the Ægæan. Tênos, Andros, Mykonos, Mêlos, Naxos, Dêlos itself, come into view at different points, till we stand before the haven which has in modern times made itself the centre of the commerce and navigation of these seas. The isle of Syros stands before us, bleak and barren. There is the steep conical hill, covered, every inch of it, with houses rising up to the church of St. George, the cathedral church of Latin Syra, the mediæval city, the city of refuge in days when men were driven to fall back on the hill-fortresses of the earliest day. On the shore, on the site of ancient Syros, but spreading over the adjoining hills, is the modern Hermoupolis, the busy mart of all the islands. Another night, a fair starry night, on the deep, and we reach the goal of the whole pilgrimage. Day has hardly dawned enough to see clearly Sounion and its marble columns, but there, however dimly seen, is the shore of Attica, and the thought comes that came into the heart of the sailors of Salaminian Aias, that before long

      προσείποιμ’ αν Ἀθάνας.

      The Athenian Akropolis

      It may not seem easy to say anything new on so well-worn a subject as Athens and her Akropolis, but of all subjects in the world there is none which has been more steadily looked at from a single inadequate point of view. It is moreover a subject whose history is not yet ended, and which supplies new points of view by the fact that new pages in its history are still happening. Nowhere is the unity of history more needed to be taught as a practical lesson than on the spot where we may fairly say that the political history of the world begins. There, on the spot whose history begins before the beginning of recorded history, we feel perhaps more keenly than anywhere else how blind and narrow is the way in which the history of that spot has been so commonly looked at, how large a part of the true interest, the true life, of the spot is lopped away, if we look only at some two or three centuries of its long and varied history. In the city of Athens, as a whole, we are painfully struck by the glaring contrast of extreme antiquity and extreme newness. There are buildings of yesterday; there are buildings of a thousand years back; there are buildings of two thousand years back, but the three classes stand out in marked and indeed unpleasant contrast to one another. There are no intermediate links such as there are at Rome, binding the great classes of objects together, and making them all fit into their places as members of one unbroken series. Hence, while at Rome we never forget that we are at Rome, at Athens we may sometimes forget that we are at Athens, That so it is no fault of the Athenians, old or new. It comes of the fact that the Turk once ruled in Athens, and therefore had to be driven out of Athens; while, as the Turk never ruled in Rome, he never had to be driven out of Rome. If this is true of the city in general, it is far less true of the Akropolis. There we can never forget that we are in Athens; and, if we use our eyes aright, we can never forget that the Athens in which we stand did not exist, as some seem to fancy, only for two or three centuries two thousand years back, but that its long history spans the whole range from our first glimpses of civilized Europe down to the warfare in which men still living have borne a part. It is but a narrow view of the Akropolis of Athens to look on it simply as the place where the great works of the age of Periklês may be seen as models in a museum. A truer and a wider view will begin earlier and will go on later. The Parthenôn and the Propylaia are but the records of one stage, though doubtless the most brilliant stage, in the history of a city which ought equally to number among its records the primæval wall which was venerable and mysterious in the days of Thucydides and the bulwarks which were raised by the last Odysseus in warfare with the Turkish oppressor. In the eye of the true historian those earliest and those latest records, and the records of the long ages which passed between them, all have, perhaps not all an equal value, but at least value enough to stamp them all as alike parts of the history of the city, all alike entitled to respect and veneration from every one in whose eyes the history of the city is precious. On the hill of the Akropolis and its buildings the whole history of Athens, from its earliest to its latest days, has been clearly written, and there it may still be clearly read wherever the barbarism of classical pedantry has not wiped out the record. The primæval wall, the wall of Themistoklês, the wall of Kimôn, all come within the charmed period. No one is likely to damage them. It needs, however, a wider view than that of the mere student of the writings, the mere admirer of the art, of two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, to take in the full meaning even of the works of those arbitrarily chosen centuries. Those remains of the earliest masonry, for which we have to search behind the great buildings of the days of the democracy, those stones which rival aught at Argos or at Tiryns, have a tale to tell such as Argos and Tiryns cannot tell. Why СКАЧАТЬ