CHAPTER XV. SAMOS AND THE

TEMPLE AT BRANCHIDÆ

The stiff north wind, which was known to be blowing outside, counseled delaying departure from Delos until after the evening meal, for our course to Samos lay through the trough of the sea. In the shelter of the narrow channel between Greater and Lesser Delos the water was calm enough to enable eating in comfort, and it was the commendable rule of the cruise to seek shelter for meals, owing to the lack of “racks” to prevent the contents of the tables from shifting when the vessel rolled. Hence it was well along in the evening before the anchor was weighed; and as the engines gave their first premonitory wheezes, word was passed from the bridge that all who did not love rough weather would better retire at once, as we were certain to “catch it” as soon as we rounded the capes of the neighboring Mykonos and squared away for Samos across a long stretch of open water. The warning served to bring home to us one of the marked peculiarities about cruising in the Ægean, namely, the succession of calm waters and tempestuous seas, which interlard themselves like the streaks of fat and lean in the bacon from the Irishman’s pig, which was fed to repletion one day and starved the next. This, of course, is due to the numerous islands, never many miles apart, which are forever affording shelter from the breezes and waves, only to open up again and subject the craft to a rolling and boisterous sea as it crosses the stretches of open channel between them. When the experiences due to these sudden transitions were not trying, they were likely to be amusing, we discovered, as was the case on one morning when the tables had been laid for breakfast rather imprudently just before rounding a windy promontory. The instant the ship felt the cross seas she began to roll heavily, and the entire array of breakfast dishes promptly left the unprotected table, only to crash heavily against the stateroom doors that lined the saloon, eliciting shrieks from those within; while the following roll of the vessel sent the débris careering across the floor to bring up with equal resonance against the doors on the other side, the stewards meantime being harassed beyond measure to recover their scudding cups and saucers.

In the morning of our arrival off Samos we found ourselves moving along on an even keel, under the lee of that extensive island and close also to the shores of Asia Minor, the famous promontory of Mykale looming large and blue ahead. We coasted along the Samian shore, close enough to distinguish even from a distance the ruins of the once famous Heræum, which was among the objects of our visit. It was marked from afar by a single gleaming column, rising apparently from the beach. For the present we passed it by, the ship heading for the little white town farther ahead and just opposite the bay made by the great bulk of Mykale. It was historic ground, for it was at Mykale that the pursuing Greeks, under Leotychides and Xantippus, made the final quietus of the Persian army and navy in the year 479 B.C., just after Salamis, by the final defeat of Tigranes. Mykale, however, we viewed only from afar. The ship rounded the mole protecting the harbor of what was once the chief city of Samos, and came to anchor for the first time in Turkish waters. While the necessary official visits and examination of passports were being made, there was abundant opportunity to inspect the port from the deck. It lay at the base of a rugged mountain, and the buildings of the city lined the diminutive harbor on two sides, curving along a low quay. In general appearance the town recalled Canea, in Crete, by the whiteness of its houses and the pale greenness of its shutters and the occasional slender tower of a mosque. Technically Samos is a Turkish island. Practically it is so only in the sense that it pays an annual tribute to the Sultan and that its Greek governor is nominated by that monarch. It was sufficiently Turkish, in any event, to require passports and the official call of a tiny skiff flying the crescent flag and bearing a resplendent local officer crowned with a red fez. The formalities were all arranged by proxy ashore, and in due time the ship’s boat returned, bearing the freedom of the city and a limited supply of Samian cigarettes, which retailed at the modest sum of a franc and a half the hundred.

Herodotus devotes a considerable space to the history of the Samians in the time of the Persian supremacy and especially to the deeds of the tyrant Polycrates, who seized the power of the island and proved a prosperous ruler. In fact the rampant successes of Polycrates alarmed his friend and ally, King Amasis of Egypt, who had the wholesome dread of the ancients for the “jealousy” of the gods; and in consequence Amasis sent a messenger up to Samos to tell Polycrates that he was too successful for his own good. Amasis was afraid, according to the messenger, that some evil would overtake the Samian ruler, and he advised Polycrates to cast away whatever thing he valued the most as a propitiation of the gods. The advice so impressed Polycrates that he recounted his possessions, selected a certain emerald seal-ring that he cherished exceedingly, took it aboard a fifty-oared galley and, when sufficiently far out at sea, hurled the treasured ring into the water. Whereat he returned content that he had appeased the presumably jealous gods. In less than a week a fisherman, who had taken an unusually beautiful fish in those waters, presented it as a great honor to Polycrates, and in dressing it for the table the servants found in its belly the ring that Polycrates had tried so hard to cast away! The event was held to be superhuman, and an account of it was promptly sent to Amasis in Egypt. He, however, judging from it that Polycrates was inevitably doomed by heaven, ended his alliance with Samos on the naïve plea that he should be sorry to have anything happen to a friend, and therefore proposed to make of Polycrates an enemy, that he need not grieve when misfortune overtook him! Misfortune did indeed overtake Polycrates, and Herodotus describes at some length how it occurred, ending his discourse with the remark that he feels justified in dealing at such length with the affairs of the Samians because they have accomplished "three works, the greatest that have been achieved by all the Greeks. The first is of a mountain, one hundred and fifty orgyiæ in height, in which is dug a tunnel beginning at the base and having an opening at either side of the mountain. The length of the tunnel is seven stadia, and the height and breadth are eight feet respectively. Through the whole length of the tunnel runs another excavation three feet wide and twenty cubits deep, through which cutting the water, conveyed by pipes, reaches the city, being drawn from a copious fount on the farther side of the mountain. The architect of this excavation was a Megarian, Eupalinus the son of Naustrophus. This, then, is one of the three great works. The second is a mound in the sea around the harbor, in depth about a hundred orgyiæ and in length about two stadia. The third work of theirs is a great temple, the largest we ever have seen, of which the architect was Rh[oe]cus, son of Phileos, a native Samian. On account of these things I have dwelt longer on the affairs of the Samians."[3]

Footnote 3:

Herodotus, Book III, section 60.

It was, then, inside this mole, two stadia in length, that we were anchored. Doubtless the modern mole is still standing on the ancient foundation, but it would not be considered anything remarkable in the way of engineering to-day, whatever it may have been deemed in the childhood of the race. Something in the air of Samos must have bred a race of natural engineers, no doubt, for not only were these artificial wonders constructed there, but Pythagoras, the mathematical philosopher, was born in the island.

From the city up to the remnants of the ancient aqueduct in the mountain is not a difficult climb, and the tunnel itself affords a great many points of interest. In an age when tunneling was not a common or well-understood art, it must indeed have seemed a great wonder that the Samians were able to pierce the bowels of this considerable rocky height to get a water supply that could not be cut off. The source of the flowage was a spring located in the valley on the side of the mountain away from the town, and it would have been perfectly possible to convey the water to the city without any tunnel at all, merely by following the valley around. For some reason this was deemed inexpedient—doubtless because of the evident chance an enemy would have for cutting off the supply. The obvious question is, what was gained by making the tunnel, since the spring itself was in the open and could have been stopped as readily as an open aqueduct? And the only answer that has been suggested is that the spring alone is so concealed and so difficult to find that, even with the clue given by Herodotus, it was next to impossible to locate it. And in order to conceal the source still further, the burial of the conduit in the heart of the mountain certainly contributed not a little. Nevertheless it is a fact that the farther end of the tunnel was discovered some years ago by tracing a line from the site of this spring, so that now the aqueduct has been relocated and is found to be substantially as described by Herodotus in the passage quoted.

Most visitors, possessed of comparatively limited time like ourselves, are content with inspecting only the town end of the tunnel, which lies up in the side of the mountain. It is amply large enough to enter, but tapers are needed to give light to the feet as one walks carefully, and often sidewise, along the ledge that borders the deeper cutting below, in which once ran the actual water pipes. The depth of the latter, which Herodotus calls “twenty cubits,” is considerably greater at this end of the tunnel than at the other,—a fact which is apparently accounted for by the necessity of correcting errors of level, after the tunnel was finished, to give sufficient pitch to carry the water down. In those primitive days it is not surprising that such an error was made. There is evidence that the tunnel was dug by two parties working from opposite ends, as is the custom to-day. That they met in the centre of the mountain with such general accuracy speaks well for the engineering skill of the time, and that they allowed too little for the drop of the stream is not at all strange. The result of this is that, in the end commonly visited by travelers, there is need of caution lest the unwary slip from the narrow ledge at the side into the supplementary cut thirty feet below—a fall not to be despised, either because of its chance of injury or because of the difficulty of getting the victim out again. So much, as Herodotus would say, for the water-conduit of the Samians.

From the tunnel down to the ancient Heræum, whither our ship had sailed to await us, proved to be a walk of something over two miles along a curving beach, across which occasional streams made their shallow way from inland to the sea. It was a pleasant walk, despite occasional stony stretches; for the rugged mountain chain inland presented constantly changing views on the one hand, while on the other, across the deep blue of the Ægean, rose the commanding heights of Asia Minor, stretching away from the neighboring Mykale to the distant, and still snow-crowned, peaks of the Latmian range. Under the morning sun the prospect was indescribably lovely, particularly across the sea to the bold coasts of Asia, the remote mountains being revealed in that delicate chiaroscuro which so often attends white peaks against the blue. Ahead was always the solitary column which is all that remains standing of the once vast temple of Hera, “the largest we ever have seen,” according to the ingenuous and truthful Herodotus.

There is a reason for holding the spot in an especial manner sacred to Hera, for it is said by legend that she was born on the banks of one of the little streams whose waters we splashed through in crossing the beach to her shrine. The temple itself we found to lie far back from the water’s edge, its foundations so buried in the deposited earth that considerable excavation has been necessary to reveal them. The one remaining column is not complete, but is still fairly lofty. It bears no capital, and its drums are slightly jostled out of place, so that it has a rather unfinished look, to which its lack of fluting contributes; for, as even the amateur knows, the fluting of Greek columns was never put on until the whole pillar was set up, and every joint of it ground so fine as to be invisible. We walked up to the ruin through the inevitable cutting, in which lay the inevitable narrow-gauge track for the excavator’s cars, but there was no activity to be seen. The excavation had progressed so far as to leave little more to be done, or there was no more money, or something had intervened to put an end to the operations for the time. Not far away, however, along the beach, lay a few houses, which constituted the habitation of the diggers and of a few fishermen, whose seine boats were being warped up as we passed.

The exploration of the great temple of Hera has revealed the not unusual fact that there had been two temples on the same spot at successive periods. They were not identical in location, but the later overlapped the earlier, traces of the latter being confined to its lowest foundation stones. Of the ruins of the later temple there was but slightly more visible, save for the one standing column and a multitude of drums, capitals, and bases lying about. The latter were of a type we had not previously seen. They were huge lozenges of marble ornamented with horizontal grooves and resembling nothing so much as great cable drums partially wound—the effect of a multitude of narrow grooves in a slightly concave trough around the column. They were of a noticeable whiteness, for the marble of which this temple was composed was not so rich in mineral substances as the Pentelic, and gave none of that golden brown effect so familiar in the Athenian temples.

It was in this great Heræum, which in size rivaled the great temples at Ephesus and at Branchidæ, that the Samians deposited the brazen bowl filched from the Spartans, of which the ancients made so much. It appears that because of Cr[oe]sus having sought an alliance with Lacedæmonia, the inhabitants of that land desired to return the compliment by sending him a present. They caused a huge brass bowl to be made, adorned with many figures and capable of holding three hundred amphoræ. This they dispatched to Sardis. But as the ship bearing it was passing Samos on her way, the Samians came out in force, seized the ship, and carried the great bowl off to the temple, where it was consecrated to the uses of the goddess. That the Samians stole it thus was of course indignantly denied,—the islanders retorting that the bowl was sold them by the Spartans when they discovered that Cr[oe]sus had fallen before Cyrus and was no longer an ally to be desired. No trace of any such relic of course is to be seen there now. In fact there is very little to recall the former greatness of the place but the silent and lonely column and a very diminutive museum standing near the beach, which contains disappointingly little. It is, as a matter of fact, no more than a dark shed, similar in appearance to the rest of the houses of the hamlet.

The steamer was waiting near by in the sheltered waters of the sound, and as we were desirous of visiting the temple at Branchidæ that same afternoon, we left Samos and continued our voyage. Under that wonderfully clear sky the beauty of both shores was indescribable. The Asian coast, toward which we now bore our way, was, however, the grander of the two, with its foreground of plains and meadows and its magnificent background of imposing mountains stretching far into the interior and losing themselves in the unimagined distances beyond. The sun-kissed ripples of the sea were of that incredible blue that one never ceases to marvel at in the Mediterranean, and it was the sudden change from this color to a well-defined area of muddy yellow in the waters through which we glided that called attention to the mouth of the Mæander on the shore. That proverbially crooked and winding stream discharges so large a bulk of soil in projecting itself into the sea that the surface is discolored for a considerable distance off shore; and through this our steamer took her way, always nearing the low-lying beach, until we descried a projecting headland, and rounded it into waters as calm as those of a pond. Here we dropped anchor and once again proceeded to the land, setting our feet for the first time on the shores of Asia.

Samos was, of course, still to be seen to the northwest, like a dark blue cloud rising from a tossing sea. Before us, glowing in the afternoon sun, stretched a long expanse of open seashore meadow, undulating here and there, almost devoid of trees, but thickly covered with tracts of shrubs and bushes, through which we pushed our way until we came upon an isolated farmhouse and a path leading off over the moor. It was a mere cart-track through the green of the fields, leading toward a distant hillock, on which we could from afar make out the slowly waving arms of windmills and indications of a small town. None of the many rambles we took in the Greek islands surpassed this two-mile walk for pure pleasure. The air was balmy yet cool. The fields were spangled with flowers,—wild orchids, iris, gladioli, and many others. There were no gray hills, save so far in the distance that they had become purple and had lost their bareness. All around was a deserted yet pleasant and pastoral country—deserving, none the less, the general name of moor.

What few people we met on the way were farmers and shepherds, leading pastoral lives in the little brush wigwams so common in Greek uplands in the summer months. They gave us the usual cheerful good-day, and looked after our invading host with wondering eyes as we streamed off over the rolling country in the general direction of Branchidæ.

That ancient site appeared at last on a hillock overlooking the ocean. A small and mean hamlet had largely swallowed up the immediate environs of the famous temple that once stood there, contrasting strangely with the remaining columns that soon came into view over the roofs, as we drew near, attended by an increasing army of the youth. The name of the little modern village on the spot we never knew. Anciently this was the site of the temple of Apollo Didymeus, erected by the Branchidæ,—a clan of the neighborhood of ancient Miletus who claimed descent from Branchus. The temple of Apollo which had formerly stood upon the site was destroyed in some way in the sixth century before Christ, and the Branchidæ set out to erect a shrine that they boasted should rival the temple of Diana at Ephesus in size and in ornamentation. Nor was this an inappropriate desire, since Apollo and Diana—or Artemis, as we ought to call her—were twins, whence indeed the name “Didymeus” was applied to the temple on the spot. Unfortunately the great temple which the Branchidæ designed was never completed, simply because of the vastness of the plan. Before the work was done, Apollo had ceased to be so general an object of veneration, and what had been planned to be his most notable shrine fell into gradual ruin and decay.

It has not been sufficient, however, to destroy the beauty of much that the Branchidæ accomplished during the centuries that the work was progressing, for it is stated that several hundred years were spent in adorning the site. The fact that one of the few columns still standing and still bearing its crowning capital is unfluted bears silent testimony to the fact that the temple never was completed. Of the finished columns it is impossible to overstate their grace and lightness or the elegance of the carving on their bases, which apparently were designed to be different one from another. The pillars that remain are of great height and remarkable slenderness. Nineteen drums were employed in building them. The bases, of which many are to be seen lying about, and some _in situ_, display the most delicate tracery and carving imaginable, some being adorned with round bands of relief, and others divided into facets, making the base dodecagonal instead of round, each panel bearing a different and highly ornate design. Close by we found the remains of a huge stone face, or mask, apparently designed as a portion of the adornment of the cornice and presumably one of the metopes of the temple.

The mass of débris of the great structure has been heaped up for so long that a sort of conical hill rises in the midst of it; and on this has been built a tower from which one may look down on the ground plan so far as it remains. The major part of the ruin, however, is at its eastern end, the front, presumably, where the only standing columns are to be seen, rising gracefully from a terrace which has been carefully uncovered by the explorers. Enough remains to give an idea of the immense size projected for the building, and better still enough to give an idea of the elegance with which the ancients proposed to adorn it, that the Ephesians need not eclipse the Milesians in honoring the twin gods. Of the rows of statues that once lined the road from the sea to the shrine, one is to be seen in the British Museum—a curious sitting colossus of quaintly archaic workmanship, and somewhat suggestive, to my own mind, of an Egyptian influence in the squat modeling of the figure.

As one might expect of a shrine sacred to Apollo, there seems to have been an oracle of some repute here; for Cr[oe]sus, who was credulous in the extreme where oracles were concerned, sent hither for advice on various occasions, and dedicated a treasure here that was similar to the great wealth he bestowed upon the shrine at Delphi. Furthermore one Neco, who had been engaged in digging a canal to connect the Nile with the Red Sea,—a prototype of the Suez,—dedicated the clothes he wore during that period to the god at the temple of the Branchidæ. Thus while the site never attained the fame among Grecians that was accorded the Delphian, it nevertheless seems to have inspired a great deal of reverence among the inhabitants of Asia Minor and even of Egypt, which may easily account for the elaborate care the Branchidæ proposed to bestow and did bestow upon it.

Our inspection of the temple and the surrounding town was the source of immense interest upon the part of the infantile population, of which the number is enormous. The entire pit around the excavations was lined three deep with boys and girls, the oldest not over fifteen, who surveyed our party with open-mouthed amazement. They escorted us to the city gates, and a small detachment accompanied us on the way back over the moor to the landing, hauling a protesting bear-cub, whose mother had been shot the week before somewhere in the mountains of Latmos by some modern Nimrod, and whose wails indicated the presence of a capable pair of lungs in his small and furry body. He was taken aboard and became the ship’s pet forthwith, seemingly content with his lot and decidedly partial to sweetmeats.

The walk back over that vast and silent meadow in the twilight was one never to be forgotten. There was something mystical in the deserted plain, in the clumps of bushes taking on strange shapes in the growing dusk, in the great orb of the moon rising over the serrated tops of the distant mountains of the interior—and last, but not least, in the roaring fire which the boatmen had kindled on the rocks to indicate the landing place as the dark drew on. We pushed off, three boatloads of tired but happy voyagers, leaving the fire leaping and crackling on the shore, illuminating with a red glare the rugged rocks, and casting gigantic and awful shadows on the sea.