mill. Opinions have differed as to whether the ancient road ran, like

the modern highway, between the salt-pools and the sea, or skirted the foot of the hills, making a circuit round the pools. In any case it seems probable that in antiquity the water of the salt-springs was not dammed up as at present so as to form pools, but was allowed to flow directly into the sea in brooks which hence received the name of Rhiti (‘streams’).

After entering the Thriasian plain the road continues to skirt the shore. As the ground is here low and marshy, the road is raised on a causeway, which consists of ancient materials mixed with those of later ages. This causeway therefore marks the line of the Sacred Way. On the right of it, about half a mile beyond the salt-pools, where the road to Kalyvia branches off across the plain to the right, there are remains of an ancient monument, which appears to have consisted originally of a cubical mass of earth, cased with white marble and supporting a tombstone. An inscription proves that the monument marked the tomb of one Strato, his wife Polla (Paula) Munatia, and his son Isidotus. This sepulchre, one of the many sepulchres which lined the Sacred Way in antiquity, is not mentioned by Pausanias.

The Thriasian plain, through which the Sacred Way led to Eleusis, is surrounded by mountains and hills except on the south, where it is bounded by the Gulf of Salamis. It is about nine miles long from east to west, and five miles wide at the broadest part, from north to south. The northern and western parts of the plain are stony and barren. Nearer the sea there is a tract of fertile cornland, but it does not extend much to the north of Eleusis itself. The monotony of the otherwise treeless expanse is broken here and there by some scattered olive-trees and oaks. In spring and early summer the plain is gaily carpeted in places with anemones, red, purple, and blue.

XI. THE HALL OF INITIATION AT ELEUSIS.—The great Hall of Initiation, to which the paved road leads from the smaller portal, is a vast single chamber about a hundred and seventy feet square, the sides of which face north, south, east, and west. The whole of the west side, together with the western parts of the northern and southern sides, are bounded by the rock of the acropolis, which has been cut away perpendicularly to make room for the hall. The roof was supported by six rows of columns, seven columns in each row: the bases of all these columns except one are still to be seen in their places. Eight tiers of steps, partly cut in the rock, partly built, ran all round the chamber except at the entrances, of which there were six, namely, two on the north, two on the east, and two on the south. On these tiers of steps the initiated probably sat watching the performance of the mysteries which took place in the body of the hall. It is calculated that about three thousand people could find room on them. The steps, originally narrow, were widened at a later date by a casing of marble. That this marble casing of the steps is a late work appears from the use of mortar to fasten it on.

There are passages of ancient writers which seem to imply that besides the place to which the initiated had access there was an inner Holy of Holies called the _anaktoron_ or _megaron_, which none but the high-priest of the mysteries might enter, and which, being suddenly thrown open, disclosed to the view of the awestruck beholders the most sacred objects of their religious veneration lit up by a blaze of dazzling light. But no trace of any inner chamber or enclosure has been discovered in the great Hall of Initiation. It may therefore be suggested that the _anaktoron_ or _megaron_ was perhaps nothing but the body of the hall, which may have been screened by curtains from the spectators sitting in darkness on the tiers of seats that ran all round it, till suddenly the curtain rose and revealed the vast hall brilliantly illuminated, with the gorgeously attired actors in the sacred drama moving mazily in solemn procession or giddy dance out and in amongst the forest of columns that rose from the floor of the hall, while the strains of grave or voluptuous music filled the air. Then, when all was over, the curtain would as suddenly descend, leaving the spectators in darkness and silence, with nothing but the memory of the splendid pageant that had burst upon them and vanished like a dream.

XII. ELEUTHERAE.—From Eleusis the road to Eleutherae, which is at the same time the highway from Athens to Thebes, goes north-west across the plain. The olive-trees begin to appear soon after we have left Eleusis, and the road runs for three miles through thick groves of them to the large village of Mandra situated on a small height at the entrance to a valley; for here the mountains which bound the plain of Eleusis begin. The native rock crops up among the houses and streets of the village. The hills that rise on both sides of the valley are wooded with pine. Beyond the village the valley contracts, and the road ascends for a long time through the stillness and solitude of the pine-forest. A little wayside inn (the khan of Palaio-Koundoura) is passed in a lonely dale; and then, after a further ascent, the prospect opens up somewhat, and the tops of Hymettus and Pentelicus are seen away to the east, appearing above a nearer range of hills. Soon afterwards the road descends into a cultivated and fertile little plain or valley watered by the chief arm of the Eleusinian Cephisus, and bounded on the north by the principal range of Cithaeron, on the south by the lower outlying chain which we have just crossed. This no doubt is the plain in which stood the temple of Dionysus mentioned by Pausanias. At the northern end of the valley or plain there is now a police-barrack on the right of the road, and near it a public-house, the khan of Kasa. Here the pass over Cithaeron, in the strict sense, begins. It is a narrow rocky defile, up which the road winds tortuously between high pine-clad slopes on either hand. In the very mouth of the pass, immediately beyond the barrack, a steep, conical, nearly isolated hill rises up as if to bar the road. Its summit is crowned with the grey walls and towers of Eleutherae.

The ruins of Eleutherae, now called Gyphtokastro or ‘Gypsy-castle,’ form one of the finest extant specimens of Greek fortification. The circuit of the walls, which is but small, encloses the summit and part of the southern slope of the hill. The north wall, strengthened with eight square projecting towers, is nearly complete. It is about eight feet thick, and is built of blocks laid in regular courses, with a core of rubble. As the ground falls away to the north, the wall is higher on the outside than on the inside. The towers are about thirty paces apart. Most of them entered from the ramparts by two doors, one on each side of the tower. These doors are still to be seen, though the floors of the upper stories, having been of wood, have of course perished. Each tower has three small windows or loopholes, one in each of the sides which project outward beyond the curtain. Traces of the wall and towers on the other and lower sides of the hill can still be seen, but they are far less perfect than on the north side. The chief gate was on the south. The whole place is now an utter solitude. When I first visited it, on a day in May, the ground was carpeted with yellow flowers; goats were balancing themselves on the grey ruins; and the goatherd was sleeping in the shadow of one of the towers. On either hand the mountains, clothed in their sombre mantle of dark pine-forests, towered into the bright sky.

If from the ruins of Eleutherae we return to the highroad which winds along the western foot of the hill, and follow it for a few miles to the top of the pass, we obtain a commanding view over the wide plain of Boeotia stretching away to the line of far blue mountains which bounds it on all sides. Below us, but a little to the west, at the foot of the long uniform slope of Cithaeron, the red village of Kokla marks the site of Plataea. Thebes is hidden from view behind the dip of a low intervening ridge. The sharp double-peaked mountain on the west, beyond the nearer fir-clad declivities of Cithaeron, is Helicon. The grand mountain mass which, capped with snow, looms on the north-west, is Parnassus. The mountains on the north-east are in Euboea, but the strait which divides them from Boeotia is not visible.

XIII. MEGARA.—From Eleusis to Megara by road or railway is about fourteen miles. The road first passes along the northern side of the low ridge which formed the acropolis of Eleusis; then it turns down to the sea and follows the shore. The plain of Eleusis is divided from the plain of Megara by a chain of wooded hills which advances southward from Mount Cithaeron to the shore of the bay. The road skirts the foot of these hills, ascending and descending, traversing olive-groves, and winding round little bays and headlands, commanding views, ever shifting but ever beautiful, of the coast of Salamis across the blue and blue-green waters of the lake-like bay, which is here so narrow that the white monastery of Phaneromene, with its clustered domes and turrets, can be plainly seen standing among green fields on the opposite shore. Then, when the last spur of the hills is rounded, the plain of Megara, covered with olives and vines, and backed by high mountains, opens out before us. In the distance can be distinguished the picturesque oriental-looking town of Megara, with its white houses rising in terraces, one above the other, on the sides of two isolated hills in the far corner of the plain: the higher of the two hills used to be crowned by a square mediaeval tower.

The modern town is chiefly confined to the western hill, the southern slope of which it occupies to the summit. Its narrow steep streets, and white-washed, flat-roofed, windowless houses, with low doorways opening into courts shaded here and there by a fig-tree, have much the appearance of an Arab village. The dazzlingly white walls make, in the brilliant sunshine, an excellent background for the gay costumes of the women, the bright colours of which (red, green, blue, violet) add to the Eastern effect of the scene.

XIV. THE SCIRONIAN ROAD.—The famous pass along the sea-cliffs, known in antiquity as the Scironian Road, is thus described by Strabo: “The Scironian cliffs leave no passage between them and the sea. The road from the Isthmus to Megara and Attica runs along the top of them; indeed in many places it is compelled by the beetling mountain, which is high and inaccessible, to skirt the brink of the precipices.” The dread of robbers, who here lay in wait for travellers, enhanced the natural horrors of the pass in ancient as well as in modern times. In recent years these horrors have been dissipated by the construction of a highroad and a railway along the coast; but down to the middle of the present century, if we may trust the descriptions of travellers, the cliff-path well deserved its modern name of Kake Skala or ‘the Evil Staircase.’ For six miles it ran along a narrow crumbling ledge half-way up the face of an almost sheer cliff, at a height of six to seven hundred feet above the sea. On the right rose the rock like a wall; on the left yawned the dizzy abyss, where, far below, the waves broke at the foot of the precipices in a broad sheet of white curdling foam. So narrow was the path that only a single sure-footed beast could make its way with tolerable security along it. In stormy or gusty weather it was dangerous; a single slip or stumble would have been fatal. When two trains of mules met, the difficulty of passing each other was extreme. Indeed at the beginning of the present century Colonel Leake pronounced the path impassable for horses; and at a later time, when it had been somewhat mended, another distinguished traveller, himself a Swiss, declared that he knew of no such giddy track, used by horses, in all Switzerland. In many places the narrow path had been narrowed still further by its outer edge having given way and slid into the depths, so that it was only by using the utmost caution that the traveller was able to scramble along at all. At one point, where it crossed the mouth of a gully, the road had completely disappeared, having either fallen into the sea or, according to another account, been blown up in the War of Independence. Here therefore the wayfarer was obliged to pick his steps down a breakneck track which zigzagged down to the narrow strip of beach, from which he had laboriously to clamber up by a similar track on the opposite side of the gully. One traveller has graphically described how his baggage-horses slid and slipped on their hind feet down one of these tracks, while their drivers hung on to the tails of the animals to check their too precipitate descent. Last century the path had ceased to be used even by foot-passengers. Chandler took boat at Nisaea and coasted along the foot of the cliffs, looking up with amazement at the narrow path carried along the edge of perpendicular precipices above the breakers and supported so slenderly beneath “that a spectator may reasonably shudder with horror at the idea of crossing.”

Nothing was easier than to make such a path impassable. Accordingly when word reached Peloponnese that Leonidas and his men had been annihilated by the Persians at Thermopylae, the Peloponnesians hurried to the Isthmus, blocked up the Scironian road, and built a fortification wall across the Isthmus. In modern times, though the path had fallen into decay, it still showed traces of having been used and cared for in antiquity. In many places the marks of the chariot-wheels were visible in the rock; in other places there were remains of massive substructions of masonry which had once supported and widened the road; and here and there pieces of ancient pavement were to be seen. These were probably vestiges of the carriage road which, as Pausanias tells us, the emperor Hadrian constructed along this wild and beautiful coast. At the present day, as the traveller is whirled along it in the train, he is struck chiefly by the blueness of the sea and the greenness of the thick pine-woods which mantle the steep shelving sides of the mountains.

XV. THE ISTHMUS OF CORINTH.—The Isthmus of Corinth, which unites Peloponnese on the south to the mountainous district of Megara and Central Greece on the north, is a low flat neck of land about three and a half miles wide at the narrowest part and about two hundred and sixty feet high at the lowest point, stretching roughly in a direction from south-west to north-east. The central part is a flat tableland, which shelves away in steep terraces to the sea on the southern side. Its surface is rugged, barren, and waterless; where it is not quite bare and stony, it is mostly overgrown with stunted shrubs and dwarf pines, or with thistles and other prickly plants of a grey arid aspect. There is no underwood and no turf. In spring some grass and herbage sprout in patches among the thistles and afford pasture to flocks. The niggard soil, where soil exists, is cultivated in a rude imperfect way, and yields some scanty crops, mostly of wheat and barley. But in the drought of summer every green blade disappears, and the fields are little more than a bare stony wilderness swept by whirling clouds of dust. This rugged barren quality of the soil was equally characteristic of the Isthmus in antiquity. It seems to have been customary to gather the stones from the fields before sowing the seed.

In ancient times ships of small burden were regularly dragged on rollers or waggons across the narrowest part of the Isthmus in order to avoid the long voyage round Peloponnese; hence this part of the Isthmus was known as the _Diolkos_ or Portage. The Portage began on the east at Schoenus, near the modern Kalamaki; its western termination is not mentioned by ancient writers, but was probably near the west end of the modern canal. We read of fleets of warships being transported across the Isthmus; for example after the battle of Actium the victorious Augustus thus conveyed his ships across the Isthmus in pursuit of Antony and Cleopatra, and in 883 A.D. the Greek admiral Nicetas Oriphas transported a fleet across it to repel an attack of the Saracens. Some remains of the ancient Portage, which seems to have been a sort of tramway, may still be seen near a guard-house, at the point where the road from Kalamaki to Corinth crosses the northern of the two ancient fortification walls.

The lowest and narrowest part of the Isthmus, through which the Portage went in antiquity and the modern canal now runs, is bounded on the south by a line of low cliffs. Along the crest of these cliffs may be traced the remains of an ancient fortification wall stretching right across the Isthmus from sea to sea. It is built of large blocks laid in fairly regular courses, and is flanked by square towers which project from the curtain at regular intervals of about a hundred yards on the north side, showing that the wall was meant to protect the Corinthian end of the Isthmus against invasion from the north. The wall does not extend in a straight line, but follows the crest of the cliffs, wherever this natural advantage presented itself.

XVI. THE BATH OF APHRODITE.—The lower spring, which Pausanias took to be Pirene, has sometimes been identified with the copious springs now known as ‘the bath of Aphrodite.’ They issue just below the steep northern edge of the broad terrace on which the old city of Corinth stood. Here the rocks curve round in a semicircle and overhang so as to form grottoes under their beetling brows. From these rocks, overgrown with moss and rank creepers, the clear water bubbles and trickles in copious rills, which nourish a rich vegetation in the open ground through which they flow. The grotto, which is always fresh and cool, commands an uninterrupted view over the Gulf to the mountains beyond. Here in the days of the Turkish dominion the bey of Corinth had his gardens, where he led a life of Asiatic luxury. A staircase still leads from the grotto to the terrace above, on the edge of which stood his seraglio. All is now ruin and desolation. A few pieces of ancient columns of green and white streaked marble mark the site of the seraglio. The spring is frequented only by washerwomen, and its streams water only vegetable gardens and orchards. But the water is as sweet as in Pausanias’s time, and the grottoes under the overhanging ledge of rock might pass for “the chambers made like grottoes” of which he makes mention.[6]

Footnote 6:

However, the true Pirene described by Pausanias has lately been discovered elsewhere by the American archaeologists who are now excavating the site of ancient Corinth.

XVII. THE PROSPECT FROM ACRO-CORINTH.—The view from the summit of Acro-Corinth has been famous since the days of Strabo, who has accurately described it. The brilliant foreground, indeed, on which he looked down has vanished. The stately city with its temples, its terraced gardens, its colonnades, its fountains, is no more. In its place there is spread out at our feet the flat yellowish expanse of the Isthmus, stretching like a bridge across the sea to the point where the Geranian mountains, their slopes clothed with the sombre green of the pine-forests, rise abruptly like a massive barrier at its farther end, sending out on their western side a long promontory, which cuts far into the blue waters of the Corinthian Gulf. Across the Gulf tower on the north the bold sharp peaks of Cithaeron and Helicon in Boeotia. On the north-west Parnassus lifts its mighty head, glistering with snow into late spring, but grey and bare in summer. In the far west loom the Locrian and Aetolian mountains, seeming to unite with the mountains of Peloponnese on the south, and thus apparently converting the Gulf of Corinth into an inland mountain-girdled lake. To the south-west, above ranges of grey limestone hills dotted with dark pines, soar the snowy peaks of Cyllene and Aroania in Arcadia. On the south the prospect is shut in by the high tablelands and hills of Argolis, range beyond range, the lower slopes of the valleys covered in spring with corn-fields, their upper slopes with tracts of brushwood. Eastward Salamis and the sharp-peaked Aegina are conspicuous. In this direction the view is bounded by the hills of Attica—the long ridge of Hymettus and the more pointed summits of Pentelicus and Parnes, while below them in clear weather the Parthenon is distinctly visible on the Acropolis nearly fifty miles away, the pinnacle of Lycabettus rising over it crowned with its white far-gleaming chapel.

XVIII. THE CAPTURE OF CORINTH BY ARATUS.—The story of the capture of Corinth by Aratus has been told by Plutarch with a wealth of picturesque details which he doubtless took from the Memoirs written by Aratus himself. The city, and especially the lofty and precipitous acropolis of Corinth, was held for King Antigonus by a Macedonian garrison. Aratus resolved to take the place by a night surprise. For this perilous service he picked out four hundred men, and led them to one of the city-gates. It was midsummer: a full moon rode in a cloudless sky, and the assailants feared that its bright beams, reflected from so many helmets and spears, might betray their approach to the sentinels on the walls. But just as the head of the column neared the gate, a heavy bank of clouds came scudding up from the sea and veiled the moon, blotting out the line of walls and shrouding the storming-party in darkness. Favoured by the gloom eight men, in the guise of travellers, crept up to the gate and put the sentinels to the sword. Ordering the rest of his men to follow him at the best speed they could make, Aratus now advanced at the head of a forlorn hope of one hundred men, planted the ladders, scaled the wall, and descended into the city. Not a soul was stirring in the streets, and Aratus hurried along in the direction of the acropolis, congratulating himself on escaping observation, when a patrol of four men was seen coming down the street with flaring torches. The moon shone full on them, but Aratus and his men were in shadow. Aratus whispered his men to stand close in the shadow of the houses. The unsuspecting patrol came on: in a minute three of them were cut down, and the fourth escaped with a gash on his head, crying out that the enemy were within the walls. A few minutes more and the trumpets rang out and the whole city was up. The streets, lately silent and deserted, were thronged with crowds hurrying to and fro; lights glanced at the windows; and high above the city a line of twinkling points of fire marked the summit of the acropolis. At the same time a confused hum of voices broke on the ear from all sides. Undeterred by these symptoms of the gathering storm, Aratus pressed up the winding path towards the acropolis as fast as the steep and rugged nature of the ground allowed.

Meantime the three hundred men whom he had left behind, bewildered by the sudden uproar, the flashing of multitudinous lights, and all the tumult of the rudely awakened city, missed the path up the acropolis and, knowing not whither to turn, halted under an overhanging crag at the foot of the mountain. Here they remained in a state of the utmost anxiety and alarm. For by this time Aratus was hotly engaged with the garrison on the summit, and the noise of battle and of distant cheering came floating down to them, but so faint with distance, so broken and distorted by the reverberation of the cliffs, that the men below, listening intently, could not tell from which direction the sounds proceeded. While they were still crouching under the shadow of the precipice, they were startled by a loud peal of trumpets close at hand, and peering through the gloom they perceived a large body of men marching past them up the slope. It was the king’s troops hastening to the relief of the garrison on the acropolis. Instantly the three hundred charged out from their lurking-place, and taking the enemy completely by surprise, broke them and drove them in confusion towards the city. They were still flushed with victory when a messenger came hurrying down at breakneck speed from the citadel, telling them that Aratus was at it, cut and thrust, with the garrison, who stood bravely to their arms, and imploring them to hasten to his assistance. They bade him lead the way; and as they toiled upwards they shouted to let their comrades know that help was at hand. By this time the clouds had passed over and the sky was again clear; and so all up the weary ascent they could see the weapons of friend and foe glittering in the moonlight, as the fight swayed this way and that, and could hear their hoarse cries, multiplied apparently a thousandfold as they rolled down on the night air from crag to crag. At last they reached the top, and charging side by side with their friends, forced the enemy from the walls. Day was beginning to break when Aratus and his men stood victorious on the summit.

XIX. SICYON.—Few ancient cities were more advantageously or beautifully situated than Sicyon. Built on a spacious and level tableland, defended on every side by cliffs, abundantly supplied with water, at a distance both safe and convenient from the sea, which, lying beyond a strip of fertile plain, sends its cool refreshing breezes to temper the summer heat, the city possessed a site secure, wholesome, and adapted both for agriculture and commerce. Nor are the natural beauties of the site less remarkable than its more material advantages. Behind it rise wooded mountains and in front of it, across the narrow plain, is stretched the wonderful panorama of the Corinthian Gulf, with Helicon, Cithaeron, and Parnassus towering beyond it to the north, and the mighty rock of Acro-Corinth barring the prospect on the east. At sunrise and sunset especially the scene is one of indescribable loveliness. The ancients themselves were not insensible to the charms of Sicyon. “A lovely and fruitful city, adapted to every recreation,” says a scholiast on Homer, and Diodorus speaks of Sicyon as a place “for peaceful enjoyment.”

XX. PHLIASIA.—The valley of the Asopus above Sicyon is a deep and narrow glen shut in on either hand by mountains, the steep sides of which are thickly overgrown with bushes. In some places, where the road is hemmed in between the roots of the mountain and the white, turbid, rushing river, the bank is occasionally undermined and swept away by the stream, and the path disappears altogether. In its upper reaches the glen widens so as to admit of here and there a small riverside meadow, prettily situated among oaks and shrubbery, with now and then a patch of ploughed land. After we have followed the glen upwards from Sicyon for about four hours, it opens out into a broad and fertile plain, encircled by steep mountains, down which brooks flow on all sides to join the Asopus. This upland plain, some four miles long and standing about a thousand feet above the sea, is Phliasia, the district of which Phlius was the ancient capital. On the west its level expanse is bounded by the picturesque, rugged, woody mass of Mount Gavria (about five thousand feet high), above which appears the snowy top of the lofty Cyllene in Arcadia. The eastern side of the valley is bounded by the Tricaranian range, which with its three flat summits divides the Phliasian valley from the vale of Nemea. The Asopus rises among the southern hills and flows northward through the valley in a deep grassy bed. It is here a clear and tranquil stream, very different from the rapid and turbid river which it becomes in the glen below, where it takes its colour from the soil which is washed down into it by the numerous torrents from the white argillaceous mountains through which it threads its way. About the middle of the plain it is joined by a tributary, longer than the Asopus itself, flowing from the mountains which enclose the south-western corner of the plain. The soil of the Phliasian valley is excellent; the central part of it is given up almost exclusively to vineyards which furnish now, as they did in antiquity, a fine fiery wine like Burgundy. In autumn the red and golden foliage of the fading vines lends a richer glow of colour to the beautiful landscape.

Some light is thrown on the topography of Phlius by the events which followed the battle of Leuctra. The Phliasians had been friends of Sparta when Sparta was at the height of her power; and after the disastrous day of Leuctra, when Sparta was deserted by allies and subjects alike, the Phliasians stood loyally by their old friends. This drew down on them the hostility of the victorious Thebans and their allies. In 368 B.C. a body of Arcadians and Eleans, marching through the pass of Nemea to join the Thebans, were induced by some Phliasian exiles to make an attempt to surprise and capture Phlius. Six hundred men, supplied with ladders, being sent in advance, concealed themselves by night at the foot of the citadel walls. Next morning the sentinels on Mount Tricaranum, to the east of the town, signalled the approach of the enemy from the valley of Nemea. The eyes of the citizens were thus turned to the hills, over which they momentarily expected to see the enemy appearing. Taking advantage of their distraction the six hundred men under the acropolis planted their ladders and were soon masters of the almost deserted citadel. But the citizens rallied, and after a fierce struggle drove the enemy with fire and sword over the ramparts.

Next year the allies made a more determined attempt to get possession of Phlius. The Theban commander at Sicyon marched from that city against Phlius at the head of his garrison and of a body of Sicyonian and Pellenian troops. He was supported by Euphron, tyrant of Sicyon, with two thousand mercenaries. The attack was again made from the hills on the east of the town. On the neck of land which joins the citadel of Phlius with the hills a detachment of Sicyonians and Pellenians was posted, to prevent the Phliasians from ascending the hills and taking their enemies in the rear. The rest of the army then descended from the hills in the direction of a sanctuary of Hera, meaning to ravage the corn-fields and vineyards in the valley. But the Phliasian cavalry and infantry met them and prevented them from carrying out their intention. Skirmishing went on most of the day with varying fortune. At one time Euphron with his mercenaries drove the Phliasians over the broken ground. But as soon as they reached open ground, where the Phliasian cavalry could come into play, they were in turn driven back up the hills as far as the sanctuary of Hera. At last the assailants abandoned the attack and retreated up the hill, purposing to join the detachment of Sicyonians and Pellenians, which they had left on the neck of ground leading to the citadel. To reach them they had to make a long detour up the hill, for a ravine lay between them and their friends, the ravine namely along which the city walls were built. The Phliasians pursued them up hill a little way, then perceiving the enemy’s intention of forming a junction with the detachment on the neck they turned back, and taking a short cut close under the town walls hastened to attack the detachment of the enemy before the main body could come up to their assistance. In this race the cavalry outstripped the infantry and charged the Pellenians alone. The latter stood to their arms and repelled the cavalry, till the Phliasian infantry came running up. Then, attacked by horse and foot simultaneously, the Pellenians and Sicyonians gave way. The victorious Phliasians erected a trophy and sang a loud paean. The enemy watched the scene from the hills; then, drawing together his beaten and scattered forces, fell sullenly back on Sicyon.

XXI. NEMEA.—Between the valley of Cleonae on the east and the valley of Phlius or St. George on the west is interposed the valley of Nemea, running like its sister valleys from south to north. It is a narrow dale, some two or three miles long, and from half to three-quarters of a mile broad. At its northern end it contracts to a mere gully. Through the bottom of the valley, which is almost a dead flat, meanders like a thread the brook Nemea, fed by the numerous rills which descend from the neighbouring hills. When swollen by heavy rain, these tributaries, having an insufficient outlet through the gully at the north end, keep the bottom of the valley green, moist, and marshy. The dale is thus better adapted for pasturage than tillage; indeed from the rich pastures which clothe its bottom and the lower slopes of the hills it received its name of Nemea, ‘the pastoral vale.’ But if the valley itself, especially after rain, is green and smiling, the surrounding hills, scarred and seamed with the beds of torrents, are of a dark and melancholy hue, and, combined with the absolute solitude—not a human habitation being visible through the length and breadth of the dale—affect the mind with a sense of gloom and desolation.[7] The solitude is only broken by the wandering herds of cattle, and from time to time by a group of peasants, who come over from St. George to till their fields in this secluded valley. A white track winds up the western slope to the mouth of a glen which opens in the hill-side. Through this glen is the way to St. George and Phlius.

Footnote 7:

The valley has been less solitary since the village of Herakleia was founded near the ruined temple of Nemean Zeus.

XXII. THE PASS OF THE TRETUS.—At the southern end of the valley of Cleonae there rises like a wall of rock the mountain of Tretus, which forms the watershed between the Corinthian and the Argolic gulfs. A straight toilsome path led from Cleonae in antiquity, and still leads past the village of Hagios Vasilios, over the mountain, descending into the Argolic plain at the ruins of Mycenae. But the more convenient way from the valley of Cleonae to the plain of Argos bends round to the west, where the mountain is not so high, and runs up a gradually ascending gully. This was the pass of the Tretus, the chief line of communication between Corinth and the south. In antiquity it was, as Pausanias tells us, a driving road, and the ruts worn by the chariot-wheels can still be seen in many places. The defile, though long and narrow, shut in by high mountains on either hand, is nowhere steep, and the rise is not considerable. The road runs by a deeply worn watercourse, at the bottom of which a clear and shallow stream finds its way amid luxuriant thickets of oleander, myrtle, and arbutus. The lower slopes of the mountains are also green with shrubs, but their upper slopes are grey and rocky.

The pass is easily defended. On both sides, towards Cleonae and towards the plain of Argos, may be seen traces of ancient works built to defend the defile. Near the highest point of the pass, where the road begins to descend towards Argos, there are low Turkish watch-towers called Derweni on both sides, and rough stone walls such as the Greeks threw up in many passes during the War of Independence. In 1822 the Turkish army under Dramali Pasha, retreating from the plain of Argos, was caught by the Greeks in the pass of the Tretus and nearly annihilated; for years afterwards the defile was strewed with skeletons and skulls of men and horses.

“Every part of the Argolic plain,” says Leake, “is considered unhealthy in summer, and the heat is excessive; that of the ravine of the Tretus, in the mid-day hours, is said to be something beyond bearing, which I can easily conceive, having passed through it in August, at an hour in the morning when the heat was comparatively moderate. Not long since a Tartar, after having drunk plentifully of wine and raki at Corinth, was found to be dead when the suriji held his stirrup to dismount at the khan of Kharvati (Mycenae), just beyond the exit of the Tretus.”

The name Tretus (‘perforated’) was supposed by the ancients to be derived from a great cave in the mountain where the Nemean lion had his lair. As to the ancient name of the pass, and the supposed wheel-marks in it, W. G. Clark says: “This is the road known by the name of Tretos, or ‘the perforated’; not, I conceive, in consequence of the caverns in the neighbouring rocks, which are not more numerous hereabouts than elsewhere, but because the glen is, as it were, _drilled_ through the rock. And drilled it has been by the stream which flows at the bottom. We saw, or fancied we saw, frequent wheel-marks in the rocks, and we know that this was the direction of a carriage road. But from my subsequent observations I learned to distrust these marks. The ordinary mode of carrying wood in Greece is to tie the heavier ends of the poles on each side to the back of the horse or donkey, and suffer the other ends to trail along the ground, thus making two parallel ruts which in course of time may attain the depth of and be mistaken for wheel-tracks. When a depression is once made, it becomes a channel for the winter rains, and so is smoothed and deepened.”

The modern name of the defile is Dervenaki. The railway from Corinth to Argos runs through it. Towards the northern end of the pass the khan of Dervenaki stands in a little glade overshadowed by tall poplars, cypresses, and mulberry-trees, beside a murmuring spring. At the southern outlet of the pass the whole plain of Argos, with the mountains on either hand and the sea in the distance, bursts suddenly on the view. On the left, nestling at the foot of the hills, are Mycenae and Tiryns, with Nauplia and its towering acropolis rising from the sea and bounding the plain on this side. On the right is Argos with its mountain citadel, and beyond it the Lernaean lake glimmers faintly in the distance. In the centre of the picture, beyond the long foreground of level plain, stretches the blue line of the Argolic Gulf.

XXIII. MYCENAE.—Passing southwards through the pass of the Tretus, we see the spacious plain of Argolis stretched out before us. Mycenae lies to our left at the roots of the mountains which bound the eastern side of the plain, not far from the point where the pass of the Tretus opens out on it. The Argolic plain may be roughly described as a great triangle, the base of which, on the south, is formed by the Argolic Gulf, while the eastern and western sides are enclosed by the ranges of mountains which converge northwards till they meet in Mount Tretus. The length of the plain from north to south is about twelve miles, the greatest breadth from east to west perhaps not much less. The mountains which shut it in are barren and rocky, the highest being those on the west which form the boundary between Argolis and Arcadia. The whole expanse appears to have been once a bay of the sea, which has been gradually filled up by the deposits brought down from the surrounding mountains. The Gulf of Argolis, a broad and beautiful sheet of water winding between mountains, must originally, before its upper waters were expelled by the alluvial deposit, have resembled still more closely, what it still recalls, a fine Scotch sea-loch or a Norwegian fiord.

This alluvial plain, situated at the head of a deep and sheltered frith or arm of the sea, which opening on the Aegean gave ready access to the islands of the Archipelago and the coasts of Asia, was naturally fitted to become one of the earliest seats of civilisation in Greece. And in point of fact legend and archaeology combine to show that in prehistoric times Greek civilisation reached a very high pitch in the plain of Argolis. It contained at least three fortified towns of great importance, of which remains exist to this day, Tiryns, Argos, and Mycenae (to mention them in the order in which they lie from south to north). Tiryns and Mycenae stand on the eastern, Argos on the western side of the plain. Of the three Tiryns is nearest to the sea, from which it is distant not much more than a mile. It, or rather its citadel, occupies a low rocky mound, not a hundred feet above the level of the sea, and rising in perfect isolation from the flat. Farther inland Argos lies at the foot of the last spur which projects into the western side of the plain from the range of Artemisius. Its citadel, the Larisa, is a fine bold peak nearly a thousand feet high.

Farther inland, nine miles from the nearest point of the sea, stands Mycenae, near the northern extremity of the plain, but on its eastern side. Its citadel, in respect of elevation and natural strength, occupies an intermediate position between the low citadel of Tiryns and the high mountainous one of Argos. It lies at the mouth of a wild and narrow glen, which here opens on the eastern side of the Argolic plain, between two lofty, steep, and rocky mountains. From the mouth of this glen two deep ravines diverge, one running due west, the other running south-west, and the triangular tableland which they enclose between them is the citadel of Mycenae. The whole scene, viewed from the citadel, is one of desolate grandeur. The ravines yawning to a great depth at our feet, the rugged utterly barren mountains towering immediately across them, the bleak highland glen winding away into the depth of these gloomy and forbidding hills, make up a stern impressive picture, the effect of which is heightened if one sees it, as the present writer chanced to do, on a rainy day. Then with a lowering sky overhead and the mist clinging to the slopes of the mountains, no sound heard but the patter of the rain and the tinkling of sheep-bells from the glen, the whole landscape seems to frown and assumes an aspect more in keeping with the mist-wrapt stronghold of some old robber chief in Skye or Lochaber, than with the conception which the traveller had formed of Agamemnon’s “golden city.”

XXIV. THE END OF THE MYCENAEAN AGE.—The catastrophe which put an end to the Mycenaean civilisation in Greece would seem to have been the Dorian invasion, which, according to the traditional Greek chronology, befell about the middle of the twelfth century B.C. That the end of Mycenae and Tiryns was sudden and violent is proved by the conclusive evidence which shows that the palaces were destroyed by fire and that, once destroyed, they were never rebuilt. The date, too, of the Dorian invasion, so far as we can determine it, harmonises well with this view; for the Egyptian evidence of the existence of Mycenae comes down to about the time of the Dorian invasion, and there significantly stops. The cessation also of the characteristic Mycenaean pottery about the same date points to the same conclusion. It is not indeed to be supposed that the Dorians swept over Greece in one unbroken wave of conquest. The tide of invasion probably ebbed and flowed; raids were met and repelled, but were followed by incursions of fresh swarms of invaders, the new-comers steadily gaining ground, encroaching on and enveloping the ancient Mycenaean kingdoms till, the last barrier giving way before them, the capitals themselves were stormed, their treasures plundered, and the palaces given to the flames. The conflict between civilisation and barbarism, the slow decline of the former and the gradual triumph of the latter, may have lasted many years. It is thus that many, if not most, permanent conquests have been effected. It was thus that the Saxons step by step ousted the Britons, and the Danes obtained a footing in England; it was thus that the Turks slowly strangled the Byzantine empire. Events like the fall of Constantinople and the expulsion of the Moors from Granada are only the last scenes in tragedies which have been acting for centuries.

To attribute, with some writers, the creation instead of the destruction of the Mycenaean civilisation to the Dorians is preposterous, since the Dorian immigration did not take place till the twelfth century B.C., while the Mycenaean civilisation is known from Egyptian evidence to have existed from the middle of the fifteenth century B.C. at least. But this attribution involves other than chronological difficulties. The typical Dorians were the Spartans, and no greater contrast can well be conceived than that between the luxurious semi-Oriental civilisation of Mycenae and the stern simplicity of Sparta. On the one side we see imposing fortifications, stately tombs, luxurious baths, magnificent palaces, their walls gay with bright frescoes or glittering with burnished bronze, their halls crowded with a profusion of precious objects of art and luxury, wrought by native craftsmen or brought by merchants from the bazaars of Egypt and Assyria; and in the midst of all a sultan, laden with golden jewellery, listening to minstrels singing the tale of Troy or the wanderings of Ulysses. On the other side we see an open unfortified city with insignificant buildings, where art and poetry never flourished, where gold and silver were banned, and where even the kings prided themselves on the meanness of their attire. The Dorians, if we may judge of them by the purest specimens of the breed, were just as incapable of creating the art of Mycenae as the Turks were of building the Parthenon and St. Sophia.

Of the Greeks who were rendered homeless by the Dorian invasion most fled to Asia. There, on the beautiful island-studded coast, under the soft Ionian sky, a new Greece arose which, in its splendid cities, its busy marts, its solemn fanes, combined Greek subtlety and refinement with much of Asiatic pomp and luxury. By this long and brilliant after-glow of the Mycenaean civilisation in Asia we may judge, as it has been well said, what its meridian splendour had been in Europe.

XXV. MOUNT ARACHNAEUS.—Mount Arachnaeus is the high naked range on the left or northern side of the road as you go to the Epidaurian sanctuary from Argos. The most remarkable peak is Mount Arna, the pointed rocky summit which rises immediately above the village of Ligourio to a height of over three thousand five hundred feet. The western summit, Mount St. Elias, is somewhat higher. From the summit of Mount Arna the mountains of Megara and Attica are visible. It might well have been on its top that the beacon was lighted which flashed to Argos the news of the fall of Troy. The name Arachnaea is said to have been still used by the peasantry in the early part of this century. The altars of Zeus and Hera upon which, according to Pausanias, the people sacrificed for rain, appear to have stood in the hollow between the two peaks, for there is here a square enclosure of Cyclopean masonry which would appear to have been an ancient place of worship.

Mount Arachnaeus and the mountains of the Argolic peninsula in general are little better than a stony waterless wilderness. The climate is very dry, and the beds of all the streams are waterless except after heavy rain. The hardy little holly-oak and a few dun-coloured shrubs are almost the only representatives of plant life. The eye of the traveller is wearied by the grey monotony of these arid mountains and desert tablelands, and his feet are cut and bruised by the sharp stones over which he has painfully to pick his steps. Nowhere else in Greece, probably, is the scenery so desolate and forbidding.

XXVI. EPIDAURUS.—The city of Epidaurus was five Roman miles distant from the sanctuary of Aesculapius. But it takes about two hours and a half to ride the distance, for the road is very rough. The scenery on the way is extremely beautiful—a great contrast to the dull road from Nauplia to the sanctuary. The path leaves the open valley by a narrow glen at its northern end, and leads down deeper and deeper through luxuriantly wooded dells into the bottom of a wild romantic ravine. Here we follow the rocky bed of the stream for some distance between lofty precipitous banks. Farther on the path ascends the right bank of the stream, and we ride along it, with the deep ravine below us on the left and a high wall of rock on the right. The whole glen, as far as the eye can reach, is densely wooded. Wild olives, pines, plane-trees, Agnus castus, laurel, and ivy mantle its steep sides with a robe of green. In half an hour from the sanctuary another valley opens on the left, down which comes the road from Ligourio. After joining it we continue to follow the glen along a path darkened by trees and the luxuriant foliage of the arbutus, while beside us the stream flows through thickets of myrtle and oleander. In about half an hour more the valley opens out, and we see the sea, with the bold rocky headland of Methana stretching out into it on the right, the islands of Salamis and Aegina in the distance, and farther off the Attic coast lying blue but clear on the northern horizon.

Emerging at last from the valley we cross a little maritime plain, covered with lemon-groves, and reach the site of the ancient Epidaurus. Its position is very lovely. From the little maritime plain, backed by high mountains with wooded sides, a rocky peninsula juts out into the sea, united to the mainland only by a narrow neck of low marshy ground. It divides two bays from each other: the northern bay is well sheltered and probably formed the ancient harbour; the southern bay is an open roadstead. The ancient city seems to have lain chiefly on the peninsula, but to have extended also to the shores of the two bays. The rocky sides of the peninsula fall steeply into the sea, and it rises in two peaks to a height of about two hundred and fifty feet; the eastern peak is somewhat the higher. On the edge of the cliffs may be seen in some places, especially on the southern side of the peninsula, remains of the strong walls which enclosed the city. They are built chiefly in the polygonal style, of large blocks well cut and jointed.

The peninsula, now mostly overgrown with brushwood and shrubs, commands fine views both seaward and landward. The coast southward in the direction of Troezen is very bold and grand, the mountains rising here abruptly to a great height from the sea. At the head of the bay, on the other hand, the hills, wooded with pines, are lower, and between them appears the mouth of the valley up which the path leads through thickly wooded glens to the sacred grove of Aesculapius.

XXVII. THE TEMPLE IN AEGINA.—The temple stands on the top of a hill towards the north-east corner of the island, commanding superb views over the sea and the coasts of Attica and Peloponnese. It is distant about two and a half hours from the town of Aegina. Travellers from Athens who wish to visit the temple commonly land in the fine rocky bay of Hagia Marina on the eastern side of the island. A steep declivity, sparsely wooded with pine-trees, leads up from the shore of the bay to the temple. I shall always remember how on a lovely day in spring we landed here and lay under the pine-trees, looking down on the intensely blue but crystalline waters of the bay. The air was full of the fragrance of the pines, the yellow broom was in flower at our feet, and visible across the sea was the coast of Attica. It was a scene such as Theocritus might have immortalised.

XXVIII. THE SANCTUARY OF POSEIDON IN CALAURIA.—The sanctuary is situated very picturesquely on a saddle between the two highest peaks of the island, both of which are covered with pine-woods. A walk of about an hour brings us to it from Poros, the modern capital of the island. The path at first skirts the southern shore of the island for a short way, then turns and ascends in a north-westerly direction through the pine-forest. From the sanctuary, which stands at a height of about six hundred feet above the sea, beautiful and wide prospects open between the wooded hills both to the north and the south. We look down on the sea with its multitudinous bays, creeks, promontories, and islands stretched out before us and framed as in a picture between the pine-clad hills on either hand. A fitter home could hardly have been found for the sea-god whose favourite tree—the pine—still mantles the greater part of the island.

XXIX. TROEZEN.—The plain of Troezen lies between the sea and a range of rough and rocky hills, wooded with dark evergreens and stunted trees, which shut it in on the west and south. The northern part of the plain is marshy in places, and the marshes breed fever among the sallow inhabitants of Damala, the wretched hamlet which nestles among trees at the foot of the hills in the inmost corner of the plain, close to the ruins of Troezen. Stretches of pasture-land, however, and of vineyards alternate with the swamps; and eastward, toward the island of Calauria, the plain is well watered, cultivated like a garden, and verdant with vines, olives, lemon-groves, and fig-trees. Seen from the water of the beautiful almost landlocked bay the green of this rich vegetation, with the tall dark cypresses towering conspicuously over all, is refreshing to eyes accustomed to the arid plains and hills of Greece. At Damala groves of oranges and lemons yield the villagers a considerable return. On higher ground, to the north-west of the village, are the ruins of Troezen. The glorious prospect over plain and mountain and sea is unchanged; but of the city itself, which, if we may trust Pausanias, its people regarded with such fond patriotic pride, nothing is left but some insignificant ruins overgrown with weeds and dispersed amid a wilderness of bushes. An isolated craggy mountain, rising steeply on the farther side of a deep ravine, was the ancient acropolis. The ascent is toilsome, especially if it be made at noon on an airless summer day with the sun blazing pitilessly from a cloudless sky, the rocks so hot that you cannot touch them without pain, the loose stones slipping at every step, the dry withered shrubs and herbage crackling under foot and blinding you with clouds of dust and down. The wonderful view from the summit, however, makes amends for the labour of the ascent, ranging as it does across the green fertile plain at our feet and away beyond a bewildering maze of islands, capes, and bays to Sunium on the north-east and the snowy peak of Parnassus on the north-west.

Another picturesque bit of scenery, of a different kind, may be seen by following up the ravine to the point where at a great height it is spanned by a single small arch of grey stone, which the peasants call the Devil’s Bridge. It carries the path and a tiny aqueduct, hewn out of one block of stone, across the narrow but profound abyss. High beetling crags rise above the little bridge; ferns and ivy mantle thickly one of the rocky sides of the lyn beneath it; and trees droop over the stream that murmurs in the depths below. This is the stream which Pausanias calls the Golden River. Luxuriant lemon-groves now line its banks where it issues from the ravine on the plain of Troezen.

XXX. FROM TROEZEN TO EPIDAURUS.—We left the ruins of Troezen at half-past twelve in the afternoon, and rode northward across the broad flat neck of land which connects the mountainous peninsula of Methana with the mainland. In fifty minutes we reached the shore of the lagoon which is formed at the head of the Bay of Methana by the Potami river, the Golden River of Pausanias. After making a detour round the lagoon we came, at half-past one, to the beach at the point where the stream flows out of the lagoon into the sea. Thence we rode for some way along the beach, then over a rocky point, after which the path kept inland a little from the sea. But all through our journey from Troezen to Kato-Phanari the mountains rose at no great distance from us on the left. By half-past two we were opposite Lesia, a hamlet at the foot of a high rocky mountain, with a glen on its eastern side, down which comes a stream. But the bed of the stream, when we crossed it, was dry. Below the hamlet in the plain are olives. A little before four o’clock we came to a ruined mediaeval or modern tower perched on an eminence to our right, between us and the sea. Near it stands a small chapel beside a fine carob-tree. The mountains now advanced to the water’s edge, and our path led along their bushy and rocky slopes, winding round bays and headlands at a considerable height above the sea. Here we enjoyed fine views across the spacious bay to the high, mountainous, and rugged peninsula of Methana, which wears a sombre aspect due perhaps to the dark colour of its volcanic rocks. Farther on the path, though never far from the sea, trended inland and we passed over a great deal of stony ground mostly planted with olives. At many places along our route in the course of the day the peasants were at work gathering the olives from the trees. Another feature in the day’s ride was the great number of carob-trees we passed, some of them very fine trees, with dark, smooth, glossy leaves. Finally the path ascended a steep rocky slope and brought us at half-past four to the village of Kato-Phanari, very picturesquely situated high on the side of a mountain, which a short way above the village rises up in rugged precipices of grey rock. Twilight was coming on, but enough of daylight remained to allow me to appreciate the beauty of the prospect from the loftily situated village across the sea to the islands, the high conspicuous peninsula of Methana, and the long line of headlands stretching away towards Epidaurus, all bathed in the warm though fast fading light of a winter evening.

Next morning we left Kato-Phanari soon after eight o’clock. The path rose steeply up the mountain-side in view of the sea. In a little less than an hour we reached Ano-Phanari, a village overlooking the sea, situated far up the side of a lofty rocky mountain which faces southward to the still higher precipitous mountain on whose seaward face, below the precipices, stands the lower village of Kato-Phanari. On this latter mountain, or rather on the summit of the range to which it belongs, called Mount Ortholithion, certain ceremonies are said to have been performed, time out of mind, by the peasants in seasons of drought and pestilence.

At Ano-Phanari I heard of remains of an ancient fortress in the neighbourhood, and set off with a guide to visit them. A walk of a few minutes in a north-easterly direction brought us to the top of the mountain, where the remains are to be seen. The situation is a remarkably fine one. Precipices descending towards the sea encircle the summit on the north and north-east, and the views across the Saronic Gulf to Aegina, Salamis, and Megara are magnificent. Some mediaeval remains, comprising walls and two or more ruined chapels, are to be seen on the summit, and on its southern side, towards the village, there is a ruined fortification wall built of large irregular blocks. Thus the ancient fortress which occupied this commanding situation appears to have been repaired and inhabited in the Middle Ages. What the name of the place was in antiquity we do not know.

The villagers called my attention to several holes in the rocks between the fortress and the village from which streams of warm air issue. The air from one of the holes was hot enough to warm me, though the morning was cold. In this particular hole, too, I could hear a rumbling sound as of water boiling or wind blowing underground.

We left Ano-Phanari about ten o’clock and descended westward, out of sight of the sea, into a small trough-like plain or valley surrounded on all sides by rocky and barren mountains. Passing some insignificant ruins in the little plain, we ascended the mountains northward by a steep rocky path that led into a narrow upland valley running north and south and enclosed by hills, the sides of which were shaggy with bushes of various sorts. This dale we traversed from end to end. Through a narrow opening or gorge in the mountains on its eastern side we obtained a striking glimpse of part of the promontory of Methana, mostly in shadow, but with gleams of sunshine resting on it here and there. At the northern end of the valley, ascending a ridge, we saw stretched out below us at some depth a wide open valley of roughly circular shape. Our path, which was again very rugged, did not descend into the valley, but skirted its eastern side, keeping up on the mountain, till it turned eastward through a gap in the hills. On passing through the gap a view of the sea with all its coasts and islands shining in the sun (for after a dull morning the day had brightened) suddenly burst upon us. Salamis was conspicuous to the north, and to the east of it appeared Mount Pentelicus with the marble quarries visible even at that distance as white patches on its side. Far below us lay Epidaurus, its little peninsula stretching out into the blue bay. We were at a great height above the sea, but now gradually descended to it in the direction of Epidaurus by a steep rugged path running obliquely down the bushy side of the mountain. Thus we came at last into a little maritime plain, traversed it from south to north, and passing some lemon-groves reached the modern village of Palaea Epidauros or Old Epidaurus about half-past two.

The village stands on the shore at the head of a deep narrow sheltered inlet formed by the peninsula of ancient Epidaurus on the south and a higher promontory, wooded with low green pines, on the north. Beside the village a little headland runs out into the water; it is crowned with a white-washed chapel of St. Nicholas, which stands in a large walled enclosure with two cypress-trees growing in front of it. The church seems to occupy the site of the sanctuary of Hera mentioned by Pausanias.

XXXI. METHANA.—Methana is still the name of the mountainous peninsula which runs far out into the sea from the coast of Troezen, forming a very conspicuous landmark in the Saronic Gulf. The isthmus which joins it to the mainland, about a thousand feet wide, was fortified in the Peloponnesian war by the Athenians, who established a fortified post on the peninsula, whence they ravaged the coasts of Troezen and Epidaurus. Remains of the wall across the isthmus may still be seen with the two castles on the opposite shores. These fortifications were renewed in the Middle Ages; and the Greeks attempted to make use of them in the War of Independence. The peninsula itself is a mountainous mass of grand and picturesque outline. In the heart of it the chief peak, the conical Mount Chelona, rises to a height of between two and three thousand feet. Most of the peninsula is of volcanic origin, the prevailing rock being a dark red or brown trachyte. The general character of the scenery is one of barren desolation, the whole region, with the exception of a few narrow strips on the coast, being occupied by the sharp mountain-ridges which radiate from Mount Chelona. Narrow gullies divide these ridges from each other. Water is scarce, and the air dry and hot. The inhabitants, however, contrive to cultivate patches of ground, supported by terraces, high up on the mountain sides. The contrast is great between this desolate and arid mountain-mass, and the rich and well-watered plain of Troezen which adjoins it on the south.

XXXII. NAUPLIA.—Nauplia, now a busy flourishing seaport, and one of the chief towns of Greece, occupies the northern side of a rocky peninsula which juts out westward into the Argolic Gulf, near the head of the gulf and on its eastern side. The northern side of the peninsula is flat, and here the narrow and not too savoury streets of Nauplia are crowded together. Thus the town looks across the harbour to the Argolic plain and has no sea-view. The southern side of the peninsula, at the back of the town, is a long and lofty rock called Itsh-Kaleh, which seems to have been the original citadel of Nauplia; for ancient walls, built in the polygonal style, may be seen in places serving as foundations for the mediaeval and modern fortifications. Other remains of antiquity exist in the shape of rock-cuttings, staircases, cisterns, and so forth. The steep southern slope of the rock is thickly overgrown with cactus. On the northern side of the peninsula, between it and the shore of the Argolic plain, stretches the harbour which gives Nauplia its commercial importance. Though spacious, it is very shallow; large steamers have to anchor far out.

An isthmus connects the peninsula with the mainland. Immediately on the landward, that is, eastern side of the isthmus, the massive and imposing rock of Palamidi, one of the strongest fortresses in Greece, towers up abruptly to a height of over seven hundred feet. The fortifications which crown its summit were built by the Venetians and Turks; they now serve as a prison. In their walls, as well as in the walls of Itsh-Kaleh, are built many Venetian inscriptions, some of them bearing the lion of St. Mark. Three sides of the mighty rock are precipitous, but on the south-eastern side it is accessible, being joined by a ridge to the hills. The ascent from Nauplia is by a long staircase at the north-western corner of the fortress; it begins close to the gate of the town. The name Palamidi is derived from Palamedes, the son of Nauplius. Palamedium was probably the ancient name of the fortress, though no classical writer mentions it. The prospect from the summit over the gulf and plain of Argos, with the background of mountains encircling the plain, is very fine. Nor is the view from the quay of Nauplia across the bay to the mountains of Argolis one to be easily forgotten, especially if seen by moonlight, when the sea is calm, the stars are shining, and the tall yard-arms of the lateen-rigged craft stand out like black wings against the sky, now blotting out and now disclosing a star as the boats heave on the gentle swell.

XXXIII. THE SPRINGS OF THE ERASINUS.—From Argos the road to Tegea goes south-west. At first it skirts the foot of the steep Larisa, and then runs through the southern part of the Argolic plain. On the right rise the mountains, of no great height, which bound the plain on the west. About three miles from Argos we quit the highway and strike westward towards the hills through a beautiful avenue of fine silver poplars, plane-trees, and oleanders. It soon brings us to the springs.

The spot is very picturesque. A rugged mountain here descends in precipices of yellowish limestone to the plain, and at its foot a body of clear sparkling water comes rushing impetuously in several streams from the rocks, partly issuing from a low cavern, partly welling up from the ground. Under the rocks the water forms a pellucid but shallow pool, where water-plants of a vivid green grow thickly; then flowing through the arches of a wall, which partially dams up the pool, it is diverted into several channels shaded by tall poplars, willows, and mulberries, and so turns in a short space a dozen mills—the Mills of Argos, as they are called. After watering the rice-fields, the channels unite once more into a river, which finds its way into the sea through swampy ground, among thick tangled beds of reeds and sedge, some three miles only from its source at the foot of the hills. This river, the modern Kephalari, is the Erasinus (‘the lovely river’) of antiquity. It is the only river of the Argolic plain which flows summer and winter alike; and the opinion both of the ancient and the modern Greeks that it is an outlet of the Stymphalian lake in Arcadia appears to be well founded.

In the face of the limestone cliff, a few feet above the springs of the river, are the mouths of two caves. A staircase leads up to them. Passing through the mouth of the larger we find ourselves in a lofty dimly-lighted cavern with an arched roof, like a Gothic cathedral, which extends into the mountain for a distance of two hundred feet or more. Water drips from the roof, forming long stalactites. Some light penetrates into the cave from its narrow mouth, but even at high noon it is but a dim twilight. Bats, the natural inhabitants of the gloomy cavern, whir past our heads, as if resenting the intrusion. Several branches open off the main cave. The longest of them, opening to the left, communicates at its inmost end with the upper air by means of a windowlike aperture. In another branch, also to the left, there is a low, narrow, pitch-dark opening, which, if explored with a light, reveals at its far end a crevice descending apparently into the bowels of the mountain. The smaller of the two caves, to the north, is walled off and forms a chapel of the Panagia Kephalariotissa. The worship of Pan, which Pausanias mentions, may have been held in this or the neighbouring cavern; for Pan, the shepherd’s god, loved to haunt caves, and in these two caves shepherds with their flocks still seek shelter from rain and storm. The chapel of the Panagia, in which there are some ancient blocks, may very well have succeeded to a shrine of Pan, or perhaps of Dionysus, who was also worshipped here. A festival is still held annually on the spot on the eighteenth of April; it may be nothing but a continuation, in a changed form, of the festival of Dionysus called Tyrbe, which Pausanias mentions.

In summer the place is now a favourite resort of holiday-makers from Argos, who take their pleasure in a white-washed summer-house or covered shed at the mouth of the cave. The whole scene—the rocky precipices, the shady caverns, the crystal stream, the tranquil pool, the verdure and shade of the trees—is at once so beautiful and agreeable, that if it had been near Athens it would probably have been renowned in song and legend. But Argos had no Sophocles to sing its praises in immortal verse.

XXXIV. THE LERNEAN MARSH.—Mount Pontinus, which rises above the village of Lerna, is a hill of no great height, but of broad massive outline. On its crest are seen from below against the sky the walls and towers of a mediaeval castle crowning the summit. The slope of the hill towards Lerna is on the whole even and uniform and tufted with low plants, but toward the south-east it is broken by some high lines of rocks. The carriage road from Argos skirts the foot of the hill and traverses the village. Beside the road rise the springs both of the Pontinus brook and the Amymone; and between the road and the sea is the Lernean marsh. In approaching Lerna from Argos and entering the pass between Mount Pontinus and the sea we first come to the rush-fringed spring of the Pontinus on the left side of the road. The stream is a mere brook of clear water bordered by rushes and tall grasses and almost choked with green water-plants. A great part of the water is diverted at the spring to turn a mill which stands on the shore. The whole course of the brook from its source to the sea is only a few hundred yards.

After passing the source of the Pontinus and traversing in a few minutes the village of Lerna we come to the springs of the Amymone, which rise beside the road at the southern end of the village, a few yards to the north of a white-washed chapel of St. John. The springs are copious and issue from under rocks, forming at once a shallow pool of beautifully clear water, from which the stream flows towards the sea in a bed fringed with reeds. Great beds of reeds, marking the site of the Lernean marsh, grow also beside the pool and in the narrow stretch of flat swampy ground between it and the sea. A fig-tree has rooted itself among the rocks from which the springs flow, and a few yards farther off are a mulberry-tree and a silver poplar.

Some eighty yards or so to the north-east of the springs but completely hidden by a screen of trees is the Alcyonian Lake described by Pausanias. It is a pool of still, dark, glassy water surrounded by great reeds and grasses and tall white poplars with silvery stems. Though distant only about thirty yards from the highroad and the village, the spot is as wild and lonely as if it lay in the depths of some pathless forest of the New World. I sought it for some time in vain, and when at last I came upon it, in the waning light of a winter afternoon, everything seemed to enhance the natural horror of the scene. The sky was dark save for one gleam of sunlit cloud which was reflected in the black water of the pool. The wind sighed among the reeds and rustled the thin leaves of the poplars. Altogether I could well imagine that superstitions might gather about this lonely pool in the marsh. Of such a spot in England tales of unhappy love, of murder and suicide, would be told. To the Greeks of old it seemed one of the ways to hell. The man who drove me from Argos said, like Pausanias, that the pool had never been fathomed and was bottomless.

XXXV. THE ANIGRAEAN ROAD.—South of Lerna the road skirts the shore for some distance. Leaving the village of Kiveri the path runs along the slope of Mount Zavitza, which falls steeply to the sea on the left. This is the district called Anigraea by Pausanias. The road is still, as it was in his days, very rugged and bad. Now and then we come to a little cove with a beach at the mouth of a narrow glen which cleaves the mountain-side; elsewhere the sea is bordered throughout by sheer cliffs, above which the path scrambles up hill and down dale. The sides of the mountains are chiefly clothed with lentisks and wild olives, with a patch of corn-field here and there. In about two hours and a half from Kiveri the path arrives opposite the Anavolo, the ancient Dine. It is an abundant source of fresh water rising in the sea, about a quarter of a mile from the narrow beach under the cliffs. The body of fresh water appears to be fully fifty feet in diameter. In calm weather it may be seen rising with such force as to form a convex surface, disturbing the sea for several hundred feet around. It is clearly the exit of a subterraneous river of some magnitude, and thus corresponds with the Dine of Pausanias. After clambering along the Anigraea for nearly three hours, we find that the mountain abruptly ceases, and the maritime plain of Thyrea stretches out before us to the south. This is what Pausanias describes as “a tract of country on the left, reaching down to the sea, where trees, especially olives, thrive well.” The plain is about five miles long, but nowhere more than half that in breadth; its soil is a rich loam; corn-fields and olive-groves cover its surface.

XXXVI. THE BATTLEFIELD OF SELLASIA.—At the present day the track from Arachova to Sparta follows the bed of the Kelephina river (the ancient Oenus) for some seven or eight miles. Path there is none. You ride in the stony bed of the river, crossing its scanty water backwards and forwards again and again. The scenery is picturesque, the river winding between high banks, which are generally green with shrubs and trees. Indeed many trees grow in the very bed of the stream, and the traveller in riding has sometimes to be careful not to be knocked off by their boughs. In front of us, as the valley widens, we get glimpses of the high, blue, snowy range of Taygetus. The point at which, quitting the bed of the stream, we ascend its western bank, and the whole magnificent range of Taygetus appears in full view across the valley of the Eurotas, was the scene of the battle of Sellasia.

XXXVII. SPARTA.—Ancient Sparta stood upon a broad stretch of fairly level ground, broken by a few low eminences, on the right bank of the Eurotas, where the river makes a bend to the south-east. Thus the city was bounded on the north and east by the wide gravelly bed of the river. Approaching from the north by the highroad from Tegea you cross the river by a new iron bridge, then traversing a flat strip of ground ascend through a hollow between two of the low eminences or hills which were included within the circuit of ancient Sparta. Leaving these eminences on the right and left you emerge to the south upon a level stretch of cornland, with olive-trees thickly dotted over it. When I saw it the wheat was breast high, and its waving surface, dappled with the shadows of multitudinous olive-trees, presented a rich and park-like aspect. This plain is about half a mile across; on the south it is terminated by the low broad-backed ridge, running east and west, on which stands the town of New Sparta.

This new town, which has sprung up since the War of Independence, is charming. The streets, crossing each other at right angles, are broad and pleasant. Many of the houses are surrounded by gardens, and the soft verdure of the trees peeping over the low walls is grateful and refreshing to the eyes. The gardens abound with orange-trees, which, when laden with fruit, remind one of the gardens of the Hesperides. In spring the air, even in the streets, is heavy with rich perfumes. On the south the town is bounded by the river of Magoula, which here flows from west to east, to fall into the Eurotas a little below the town, opposite the steep heights of Therapnae. Westward the plain extends three or four miles to the foot of the magnificent range of Taygetus, which rises abruptly with steep rocky sides to the height of nearly eight thousand feet. A conspicuous landmark to the west, viewed from Sparta, is the sharp conical hill of Mistra, leaning upon, but still sharply defined against, the Taygetus range. Though really a mountain over two thousand feet high, it is completely dwarfed by the immense wall of Taygetus rising at its back.

The country between Sparta and Taygetus offers points of the most picturesque beauty, especially if, instead of following the highroad, which is rather tame, you strike straight across for Mistra from the ruined theatre of Old Sparta. It was a bright evening in spring or early summer (towards the end of April, but summer is earlier in Greece than in England) when I took this walk, and the impression it made on me was ineffaceable. The orange-groves, the gardens fresh and green on all sides, men taking their ease in the warm evening air at a picturesque tavern under a great spreading tree, children playing in the green lanes, a group of Spartan maidens filling their pitchers at a spring that gurgled from a grey time-worn wall, a river (the Magoula) spanned by a quaint old bridge and winding through groves of orange-trees spangled with golden fruit, and towering above all the stupendous snow-clad range of Taygetus in the west, with the sunset sky above it—all this made up a picture or rather a succession of pictures, of which it is impossible to convey in words the effect. It was a dream of Arcadia, the Arcadia of poets, and of painters like the Poussins.

In this union of luxuriant verdure with grand mountain scenery the valley of Sparta recalls the more famed but not more beautiful Granada with its green spreading Vega, its lilac-tinted mountains basking under the bright sky of Spain, and the snowy range of the Sierra Nevada lying like a great white cloud on the southern horizon. But Taygetus towers above the spectator at Sparta as the Sierra Nevada certainly does not over the spectator at Granada. To see it on a bright day with all its superb outline—its sharp peaks and grand sweeping curves—clearly defined in the pellucid air, its long line of snowy summits glistering in the sun, and the deep purple shadows brooding on its lower slopes, is a sight not to be forgotten. A recent explorer of Greece has observed that of all Greek cities Sparta enjoys the most beautiful situation. So far as my experience goes, the observation is just.

XXXVIII. MISTRA.—The scenery of the district at the eastern foot of Mount Taygetus, to which Pausanias here conducts us, is well described by Vischer as follows: “ While in Therapne, Amyclae, and the round buildings of Vaphio and Marmalia we met with vestiges of a very ancient civilisation which flourished in the plain of the Eurotas before the Dorian invasion; on the other hand when we reach the first line of the rocky heights of Taygetus, we find ourselves in the Middle Ages—in the days of the Franks and the Byzantines. The first stage of Taygetus rises abruptly from the plain in bold cliffs broken by many gullies, from which the mountain torrents issue. Crowning with its picturesque ruins the summit of one of these heights, an hour’s ride to the west of Sparta, is the fortress of Mistra, built by William de Villehardouin in the middle of the thirteenth century. Below the castle, on the mountain-side, is spread the extensive town, once a place of much more importance, now half in ruins, with its numerous churches and monasteries falling into decay. Yet for the traveller, in spite of its decay, Mistra must remain in virtue of its situation one of the most enchanting spots which he can find in Greece or anywhere; and the prospect from the castle height, on the one side over the whole plain, on the other side up to the snowy peaks of Taygetus, across the fruitful levels and wooded slopes of the first step in the mountain staircase, needs only a view of the sea to be second to none.

“ The whole neighbourhood, too, is one of indescribable beauty. The way from New Sparta by the village of Magoula, which lies scattered among fruit-trees of every sort, is delightful enough. It passes through a plain watered by fresh brooks, where the drooping branches of the olive-trees and fig-trees often literally bar the way, and in riding one has to take heed not to be hung by the head among the boughs. But all this is almost forgotten when we ride from Mistra by Parori and Hagiannis along the foot of the mountains to Sklavochori. On this ride all the beauties of the Eurotas valley are crowded together; for here we have wild magnificence combined with the luxuriant loveliness of a rich southern vegetation. Parori, which lies close to Mistra and was formerly a suburb of it, is at the mouth of a dark and deep gorge, from which a stream comes brawling. This gorge is pointed out to travellers as the Caeadas, the gully into which the Spartans used to throw prisoners of war and afterwards malefactors; and certainly the Caeadas, as well as the Apothetae, where weakly children were exposed, is to be sought in one of the ravines of Mount Taygetus, of which hardly any appears so stern and awful as the one at Parori. At the mouth of the gorge, just above the village, there is a very lovely spot. From a Turkish fountain there pours a copious stream of water, which trickles through creeping plants of all sorts into a large basin, and before it stand some fine plane-trees.

“Farther on, the way winds through wood and thicket, where fruit-trees alternate with tall oaks, elms, and plane-trees, to the village of Hagiannis, hidden among groves of oranges, lemons, fig-trees, and olives. Amongst the woods dark cypresses rise singly like columns; many Judas-trees stood in full blossom, forming with their rosy red a pleasant contrast to the various shades of green, while the oleanders, growing as high as trees beside every rill, had not yet unfolded their buds. Wild vines climb to the very topmost boughs, and many other creepers, such as ivy, bindweed, and clematis, often weave trees and shrubs into an impenetrable thicket. In wealth of vegetation this district is unsurpassed in Greece, and no one who has set foot on Greek soil should fail to visit it. Yet it often happens that travellers, satisfied with having visited Sparta, turn back from it immediately, and then, full of the impressions left on them by the plains of Tripolitza, of Argolis, and of the neighbourhood of Athens, complain that there are no trees in Greece.”

The present writer, though he was not farther south than Parori, can confirm the general accuracy of this description. The view of the beautiful valley of Sparta from the steep hill of Mistra, crowded with monuments of the Middle Ages, and dominated by the towering mass of Mount Taygetus, which rises like a wall behind it, combines almost every element of natural beauty and historical association. Immediately below the Frankish castle, which crowns the summit of the hill, are the ruins of a spacious Byzantine palace, once the residence of the governor of the Morea, who ranked next after the emperor. Its great hall opened on the palace garden, from the terrace of which the wonderful view is to be had over the valley. Again, the fountain, described by Vischer, at the mouth of the tremendous gorge, is a scene not to be forgotten. The water gushes from many mouths in the face of a wall built against the rock. A stone seat encircles the trunk of the great spreading plane-tree which fronts the fountain. All this, with the gloomy gorge behind, makes up a picture such as is oftener seen in dreams than in reality. Once more, the village of Trypi, situated a little to the north of Mistra, at the entrance of the famed Langada pass over Mount Taygetus, is one of idyllic beauty. It is embowered among woods and orchards on the mountain-side; and entering it from the south you pass the mouth of a narrow glen carpeted with ferns and overarched with trees.

XXXIX. ON THE ROAD FROM SPARTA TO ARCADIA.—Pausanias now returns from Mount Taygetus to Sparta and sets off northward by the road which led to Megalopolis in Arcadia. As far as the Arcadian frontier the track follows the valley of the Eurotas, keeping on the right or west bank of the river and generally running close to the stream, the banks of which are fringed with oleanders, fig-trees, and planes. For the first three miles the valley is open and possesses that combination of charms which renders the vale of Sparta the most beautiful region of Greece. The river flows on the whole at the foot of the somewhat bare hills which rise on the eastern side of the valley, dipping their rocky declivities in many places in its water. But on the other side low rolling hills, covered with excellent soil and intersected by streams, stretch away to where the long range of Taygetus stands up against the western sky, its majestic snowy peaks contrasting finely with the dark woods of its lower slopes and the luxuriant vegetation of the valley. In this open part of the valley must have lain all the places and objects mentioned by Pausanias between Sparta and the image of Modesty; but no one has yet ventured to identify them. About three miles from Sparta the valley contracts and the scenery changes. We are no longer in a great open valley covered with luxuriant vegetation and enclosed by grand mountains. It is a narrow dale through which we are passing, hemmed in by low hills, at the foot of which the river flows between banks thickly wooded with willows, poplars, oleanders, and plane-trees. Well-tilled fields lie on the gentle lower slopes of the hills and occupy the stretches of flat land where the hills retire from the river. The bare upper declivities are dotted here and there with a few olives.

XL. CAPE MALEA.—The sides of Cape Malea, the south-eastern extremity of the Greek mainland and of Europe, are formed by dizzy crags, about a thousand feet high, of dark bare rock, seamed and scarred in places by cracks and fissures. At the extreme end of the cape there is a great natural recess in the cliff; and here in the face of the bluff, about two hundred and fifty feet above the sea, there is a tiny terrace sloping to the perpendicular edge of the precipice. Two chapels are built on the terrace, and close by, partly hewn in the rock, is the cell of a half-naked and nearly savage hermit. From the terrace you may clamber down, at the risk of your neck, to a cave opening on the foam of the great rollers which break here eternally. In the inmost corner of the cave is a heap of human bones. The sense of utter solitude and isolation from the world which the spot is fitted to evoke in the mind is broken by the sight of passing vessels. In fair weather steamers of all nations pass continually; and small Greek sailing-boats, with their reddish-brown or white lateen sails, skim along close under the cliffs. But the cape has a bad name for storms and heavy surf; at times even large steamers are unable to weather it for a week together. There was an ancient proverb, “When you have rounded Malea, forget your home.”

XLI. MONEMVASIA.—The ancient Minoa[8] is now Monemvasia, an island about half a mile long, close to the shore, with which it is connected by a long old stone bridge. The island is a lofty precipitous rock, resembling Gibraltar, or the Bass Rock and Dumbarton Rock in Scotland. The summit, crowned by the ruins of a mediaeval fortress and a mass of tumble-down roofless churches and houses overgrown with weeds, is now only a sheepwalk. From the summit the rock falls away in sheer and lofty precipices, especially on the north. The modern town lies huddled up at the foot of the cliffs on the southern side. Strong walls encircle it, which are connected with the ruined fortress on the top of the rock. Within the walls everything is fast falling to decay. Fine churches, high archways, great private houses, all deserted and in ruins, testify to the former prosperity and the present decline of the town. Trade has quite deserted it; the coasting steamers call only at rare intervals. From the town a zigzag path leads up the face of the rock to the old citadel on the summit.

Footnote 8:

The reference is to Minoa on the eastern coast of Laconia, not to the better known but less picturesque Minoa near Megara.

In the Middle Ages Monemvasia was one of the chief places of the Levantine trade and one of the strongest fortresses in the Morea. It gave its name to Malmsey wine, which was grown in the Cyclades, especially Tenos, but was called after the port whence it was shipped to the west.

XLII. MAINA.—The great central peninsula of southern Greece, which Pausanias describes in detail, has been known since the Middle Ages by the name of Maina or Mani. The backbone of the peninsula is the great range of Taygetus, which runs south till it terminates in Taenarum, the modern Cape Matapan, the southern extremity of Greece. The scenery of the peninsula is wild and savage; the villages, hedged in by impenetrable thickets of cactus, cling like eagles’ eyries to the faces of apparently inaccessible cliffs, and are reached by stony and exceedingly toilsome footpaths—the only semblance of roads in these secluded highlands. Almost everywhere the surface is nothing but the naked rock. Wood there is none, but a few bushes and here and there some tufts of grass have rooted themselves in the crevices of the rocks, and furnish a scanty pasture to the sheep and goats. The miserable stony soil, wherever it exists, is carefully husbanded by means of terraces, and under the soft southern sky of Laconia yields a tolerable return. There are no springs or brooks; water is obtained only from cisterns, which are kept closed by their owners, and leave to draw from them has to be paid for.

The inhabitants, the Mainotes, Mainiotes, or Maniates, are a hardy and warlike race of mountaineers, who claim to be descended from the ancient Spartans. In the fastnesses of their rugged mountains they are said to have retained their primitive heathenism till the latter half of the ninth century; and the Turks never succeeded in subjugating them. As pirates they were greatly dreaded. They are still notorious for the relentless ferocity of their blood-feuds, which are so common that every family of importance has a tower in which to take refuge from the avengers of blood. In these towers persons implicated in a blood-feud have been known to live for many years without ever coming out. To this day many heads of families dare not quit their shelter except under a strong guard of armed retainers. A village will contain twenty to thirty of such strongholds. Each tower is surrounded by a few low huts, which serve as workshops and as the lodgings of the subordinate members of the household. Frequently tower and huts together are enclosed within a fortification wall strengthened with turrets and loopholed. Bitter feuds often rage between the towers of the same village.

XLIII. PHARAE AND THE MESSENIAN PLAIN.—The ancient Pharae, or Pherae, probably occupied the site of the modern Kalamata, an industrial town situated on the left bank of the broad stony bed of the Nedon, a mile from the sea. Telemachus, in search of his father, lodged for the night at Pharae on his way from Pylus to Sparta, and again on his return. It is a long day’s ride from Sparta to Kalamata, by the magnificent Langada pass over Mount Taygetus. Pausanias does not mention the name of the river on which Pharae stood, but from Strabo we learn that it was the Nedon. It is a torrent which issues from a rocky gorge in Mount Taygetus, about a mile to the north-east of a steep hill that rises at the back of the town. This hill is crowned with a mediaeval castle, built or occupied successively by Franks, Venetians, and Turks. The presence of ancient hewn stones in the walls, as well as the whole arrangement of the fortress, seem to show that a castle stood here in antiquity also. There are no other relics of antiquity in Kalamata.

The town, with its narrow winding streets and lively bazaar, lies in the great Messenian plain, near its south-eastern extremity. This plain, open to the south and sheltered from the north by mountains, is the warmest part of Greece, and on account of its wonderful fertility was known to the ancients as Makaria or the Happy Land. Its natural wealth and delightful climate were celebrated by Euripides in a lost play, of which some lines have been preserved by Strabo. Here at the present day groves of oranges, lemons, fig-trees, olives, and vineyards succeed each other, all fenced by gigantic hedges of prickly and fantastically-shaped cactuses and sword-like aloes, which, with the hot air, remind a traveller from northern Europe that he is in a sub-tropical climate.

XLIV. MESSENE.—From Kalamata, the probable site of the ancient Pharae, the road to Messene runs north-west across the fertile Messenian plain between hedges of huge fantastically-shaped cactuses and groves of fig-trees, olives, and vines. In front of us loom nearer and nearer the twin peaks of Ithome and Eva rising boldly and abruptly from a single base on the western side of the plain, and forming the natural citadel, as it were, of the whole country. As we near their base we quit the dusty highway and strike westward up the mountain-side by devious and rocky paths. This brings us in time to the monastery of Vourkano, where visitors to Messene generally spend the night.

The monastery is beautifully situated on the eastern slope of the mountain, about a quarter of an hour’s walk below the saddle which unites the twin peaks. The buildings, arranged in the form of a quadrangle round a little church, stand on a fine open terrace among cypresses, oaks, and wild olives, commanding an unimpeded view over the Messenian plain southward to the shining waters of the gulf and northward to where the plain ends at the foot of the hills. Ithome and its sister peak rise from the plain about midway between these northern hills and the gulf. Mount Eva, the lower of the two peaks, lies to the south or south-east of Ithome, with which it is connected by a ridge or saddle about half-way up the two mountains. The eastern wall of Messene stood and still stands in ruins on this saddle. The city itself lay on the western side, in the cup formed by the converging slopes of the two mountains. The site may be compared to an immense theatre, of which the back is formed by the saddle in question and the wings by Mount Ithome and Mount Eva. The wretched hamlet of Mavromati lies nearly in the middle of this theatre-like hollow; there are many remains of antiquity in its neighbourhood. But the site of the ancient city is now chiefly occupied by corn-fields, vineyards, and olive-groves.

The view from the top of Ithome is magnificent. The whole of the rich Messenian plain lies stretched out beneath us. To the south the full sweep of the Messenian gulf is seen, with the glorious snow-capped range of Taygetus bounding both plain and gulf on the east. High up on Taygetus is visible the gap through which the Langada pass runs. Over this pass, which forms the direct route between Sparta and Messenia, the Spartans must have often marched to attack their ancient foes; and it seems just possible that the gleam of their burnished arms in the sunshine, as the army defiled over the pass, may have been visible to the sentinels on Ithome. Farther to the north we see the mountains of Arcadia, with the Lycaean group conspicuous on the north-east. Westward the view is in general bounded by nearer and lower hills, but where they dip on the north-west and again on the south-west we catch glimpses of the Ionian or, as the ancients also called it, the Sicilian sea.

XLV. ON THE ROAD TO OLYMPIA.—The Erymanthus, descending from the lofty mountains of north-western Arcadia, flows between hills into the broad open valley of the Alpheus and joins that river on its northern bank. At its junction with the Alpheus it flows over gravel between abrupt cliffs of pudding-stone. Its water, seen at least from the southern side of the wide valley on a sunny day, is of a bright blue colour. After fording the river and climbing the farther bank, the path leads through open pastures, and then, to avoid a great bend of the river, ascends a pass or woody gorge, where fine oaks and pines, now singly now in clumps, are scattered in wild variety. When we have reached the summit and begin to descend again towards the Alpheus, a series of magnificent views of the river winding between wooded hills opens up before us. For beyond the meeting of its waters with the Erymanthus, the valley of the Alpheus assumes a softer and gayer aspect. Moderate heights rise on the right bank, their gentle slopes thickly wooded with trees and shrubs of the most varied sorts. Pine-trees, maples, planes, and tall lentisk bushes succeed each other, varied here and there by fields and green pastures. Across the Alpheus lie the beautiful wooded hills of Triphylia, where many a picturesque village is seen nestling among pine-woods, and many a height, crowned by church or ruins, stands out abruptly and precipitously above the river. The whole country, with its woods and streams, and the broad river flowing majestically through the middle of the landscape, is like a great park. The illusion, however, is broken by the path, which scrambles up hill and down dale, struggles through thickets, and splashes through streams and torrents, in a fashion which resembles anything rather than the trim well-kept walks and avenues of an English park. Such is the scenery and such the path by which Pausanias is now moving westward towards Olympia.

Dio Chrysostom has described how he lost his way in this charming country and fell in with an old dame of the Meg Merrilies type who professed to have the gift of second sight. He says: “Going on foot from Heraea to Pisa by the side of the Alpheus, I was able, up to a certain point, to make out the path. But by and by I found myself in a forest and on broken ground, with many tracks leading to sheepfolds and cattle-pens. And meeting with no one of whom I could ask the way I strayed from the path and wandered up and down. It was high noon; and seeing on a height a clump of oaks, as it might be a grove, I betook myself thither, in the hope that from thence I might spy some path or house. Here then I found stones piled carelessly together, and skins of sacrificed animals hanging up, with clubs and staves, the offerings, as I supposed, of shepherds; and a little way off, seated on the ground, was a tall and stalwart dame, somewhat advanced in years, in rustic attire, with long grey hair. Of her I asked what these things might be. She answered, very civilly, in a broad Doric accent, that the spot was sacred to Hercules, and as for herself, she had a son a shepherd and often minded the sheep herself; that by the grace of the Mother of the Gods she had the gift of second sight, and all the herdsmen and farmers of the neighbourhood came to ask her about their crops and cattle.”

XLVI. OLYMPIA.—Olympia lies on the right or north bank of the Alpheus, where the river meanders westward through a spacious valley enclosed by low wooded hills of soft and rounded forms, beyond which appear on the eastern horizon the loftier mountains of Arcadia. The soil of the valley, being alluvial, is fertile; corn-fields and vineyards stretch away in all directions. The whole aspect of the scene, without being grand or impressive, is rich, peaceful, and pleasing. The bed of the Alpheus is wide; but in summer the water is scanty and is divided into several streams running over a broad gravelly bed. The sacred precinct or Altis of Olympia lies between the river on the south and a low but steep hill, thickly wooded with pine-trees and shrubs, which rises on the north. This wooded hill is the ancient Mount Cronius. Immediately to the west of the precinct the Cladeus flows between steep sandy banks into the Alpheus from the north.

In the close hot climate of Olympia the need of a good supply of drinking water is especially felt. For months together rain hardly falls; between May and October a shower is a rarity. The great festival was always held in summer (July or August), when the weather at Olympia is cloudless and the heat intense. Hence the multitudes who flocked to witness the games must have been much distressed by the dust and the burning sun, against which the spreading shade of the plane-trees in the sacred precinct could have afforded only an imperfect protection. Indeed Lucian, doubtless with a strong touch of exaggeration, speaks of the spectators packed together and dying in swarms of thirst and of distemper contracted from the excessive drought. The water of the Alpheus is not good to drink, for even in the height of summer it holds in solution a quantity of chalky matter. The water of the Cladeus, on the other hand, is drinkable in its normal state; but even a little rain swells it and makes it run turbid for a long time. Hence it was necessary to sink wells and to bring water from a distance. This was done even in Greek times. Nine wells, some square, some round, some lined with the usual shell-limestone, others with plaques of terra-cotta, have been found at Olympia; and water was brought in aqueducts from the upper valley of the Cladeus. But in Roman times the supply was immensely improved and extended by the munificence of the wealthy sophist Herodes Atticus. Lucian tells us how the mountebank Peregrinus denounced Herodes and his aqueduct for pandering to the luxury and effeminacy of the day. It was the duty of the spectators, he said, to endure their thirst, and if need be to die of it. This doctrine proved unacceptable to his hearers, and the preacher had to run for his life pursued by a volley of stones.

XLVII. PHIDIAS’S IMAGE OF OLYMPIAN ZEUS.—The testimony of antiquity to the extraordinary beauty and majesty of the image is very strong. The Roman general Paulus Aemilius was deeply moved by the sight of it; he felt as if in the presence of the god himself, and declared that Phidias alone had succeeded in embodying the Homeric conception of Zeus. Cicero says that Phidias fashioned the image, not after any living model, but after that ideal beauty which he saw with the inward eye alone. Quintilian asserts that the beauty of the image served to strengthen religion, the majesty of the image equalling the majesty of the god. A poet declared that either the god must have come from heaven to earth to show Phidias his image, or that Phidias must have gone to heaven to behold it. The statue was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the world, and to die without having seen it was deemed a misfortune. The rhetorician Dio Chrysostom, a man of fine taste, extolled it in one of his speeches. He calls it “the most beautiful image on earth, and the dearest to the gods.” He represents Phidias speaking of his “peaceful and gentle Zeus, the overseer, as it were, of united and harmonious Greece, whom by the help of my art and of the wise and good city of Elis I set up, mild and august in an unconstrained attitude, the giver of life and breath and all good things, the common father and saviour of mankind.” And again in a fine passage he says: “Methinks that if one who is heavy laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortune and sorrow in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that are incident to the life of man.”

XLVIII. THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES.—Hermes is represented standing with the infant Dionysus on his left arm, and the weight of his body resting on his right foot. His form is the perfection of manly grace and vigour; the features of his oval face, under the curly hair that encircles his brow, are refined, strong, and beautiful; their expression is tender and slightly pensive. The profile is of the straight Greek type, with “the bar of Michael Angelo” over the eyebrows. The left arm of the god rests upon the stump of a tree, over which his mantle hangs loosely in rich folds, that contrast well with his nude body. His right arm is raised. The child Dionysus lays his right hand confidingly on the shoulder of Hermes; his gaze is fixed on the object, whatever it was, which Hermes held in his right hand, and his missing left arm must have been stretched out (as it appears in the restoration) towards the same object. As most of Hermes’s right arm is wanting, we cannot know for certain what he had in his right hand. Probably it was a bunch of grapes. In a wall-painting at Pompeii a satyr is represented holding the infant Dionysus on his left arm, while in his raised right hand he dangles a bunch of grapes, after which the child reaches. It is highly probable that this painting is an imitation, not necessarily at first hand, of the work of Praxiteles; and if so, it affords a strong ground for supposing that the missing right hand of the Hermes held a bunch of grapes. The only objection of any weight to this view is that in the statue Hermes is not looking at the child, as we should expect him to be, but is gazing past him into the distance with what has been described as a listening or dreamy look. Hence it has been suggested that Hermes held a pair of cymbals or castanets in his hand, to the sound of which both he and the child are listening; and a passage of Calpurnius has been quoted in which Silenus is represented holding the infant Dionysus on his arm and amusing him by shaking a rattle. This certainly would well explain the attitude and look of Hermes; but on the other hand cymbals or a rattle would not serve so well as a bunch of grapes to characterise the infant Dionysus. The same may be said of the suggestion that Hermes, as god of gain, held aloft a purse and was listening to the chinking of the money in it. In his left hand Hermes probably held his characteristic attribute, a herald’s staff; the round hole for it in the hand is still visible.

On his head he seems to have worn a metal wreath; the deep groove for fastening it on may be seen in the back part of the hair. Traces of dark red paint were perceived on the hair and on the sandal of the foot when the statue was found; the colour is supposed to have been laid on as ground for gilding. The back of the statue, which would not be seen well, is not carefully finished; it still shows the strokes of the chisel. Otherwise the technical finish is exquisite. The differences of texture between the delicate white skin of the god, the leather straps of the sandals, the woollen stuff of the cloak, and the curly hair of the head, are expressed in the most masterly way.

A late distinguished critic was of opinion that the Hermes is an early work of Praxiteles, executed before he had attained a full mastery of his art. Such a view, it would seem, can only be held by one who knows the statue solely from photographs and casts. But no reproductions afford an adequate idea of the beauty of the original. Engravings of it are often no better than caricatures. Again, the dead white colour and the mealy texture of casts give no conception of the soft, glossy, flesh-like, seemingly elastic surface of the original, which appears to glow with divine life. Looking at the original, it seems impossible to conceive that Praxiteles or any man ever attained to a greater mastery over stone than is exhibited in this astonishing work.

XLIX. LASION.—Pausanias has omitted to mention an ancient town that lay in the wild upper valley of the Peneus, in the heart of the Elean highlands, not far from the Arcadian frontier. This was Lasion, a place which, from its proximity to the Arcadian boundary, was the subject of border feuds, the Arcadians claiming possession of it, though in fact it appears to have belonged properly to Elis. It changed hands several times in the fifth, fourth, and third centuries B.C. The ruins of this secluded little town were discovered by G. F. Welcker in 1842 near Koumani, a village at the head waters of the Peneus. They may be visited on the way from Olympia to Psophis, though the visit necessitates a short detour to the west.

The route first follows the valley of the Cladeus through soft woodland scenery of the richest and most charming kind, between low hills crowned with clumps of pines. Then, still following the glen of the Cladeus, we ascend through romantically beautiful forests of pines and ancient oaks, and emerge on a wide breezy tableland, backed on the north by the high mountains of northern Arcadia. In the middle of the plateau, which is open and well cultivated, lies the scattered village of Lala. Crossing the northern end of the tableland, which is here carpeted with ferns, we again ascend a steep slope, and find ourselves on a still higher tableland, covered with fine oak forests. After traversing the forest for some time we quit the path to Psophis, which continues to run northward, and take a path which strikes westward. The time from Lala to the parting of the ways is about two hours. Another half-hour’s ride through the forest, which grows denser as we advance, brings us to Koumani, a trim well-to-do village, beautifully situated among oak-woods. The time from Olympia is about six hours.

The ruins of Lasion, now called Kouti, are to the north of the village, apparently on the same level with it, but a profound ravine divides them from the village, and half an hour’s laborious descent and ascent of its steep sides are needed to bring us to the ruins. The site is an exceedingly strong one. Two tributaries of the Peneus, coming from the higher mountains to the north-east, flow in deep ravines, which meet at an acute angle. Between them stretches a long, comparatively narrow ridge or tongue of land, which on three sides falls steeply down to the glens; only on the east the ascent is gentle. The top of the ridge is quite flat, and well adapted to be the site of a city. At one point it narrows to a mere isthmus or neck which divides the level summit into two parts, an eastern and a western. The western and smaller part was doubtless the ancient citadel; a finely-built wall of ashlar masonry, extending across the narrowest point of the neck, divides it from the rest of the city. The eastern and larger part of the ridge is more or less covered with ruins, and at its eastern end, where the ascent is easiest, a very fine piece of the city wall is still standing. Square towers, about seven feet broad, project from it at intervals. Walls and towers are built of well and regularly cut blocks; the masonry resembles that of Messene. There seem to be no traces of fortification walls on any other side of the plateau; perhaps none existed, the inhabitants thinking the deep ravines a sufficient defence.

The situation of Lasion is not only strong but beautiful. Tall plane-trees overhang the streams in the deep glens far below the ruins. To the north and north-east rises at no great distance the grand and massive range of Mount Erymanthus; while westward the view extends, between the heights that hem in the narrow valley of the Peneus, away over the lowlands of Elis to the distant sea.

L. THE ERYMANTHUS.—The first sight I had of the Erymanthus, among the mountains of northern Arcadia, is one of the scenes that dwell in the memory. We had been travelling for hours through the thick oak-woods which cover the outlying slopes and spurs of Mount Erymanthus on the south, when suddenly, emerging from the forest, we looked down into a long valley, through which flowed, between hills wooded to their summits, a shining river, the Erymanthus. At the far end of the valley high blue mountains closed the view. The scene, arched by the bright Greek sky, was indeed Arcadian.

LI. THE MONASTERY OF MEGASPELEUM.—The ancient Buraicus is the stream now called the Kalavryta river because it descends from the town of that name. The valley, which is broad and open at Kalavryta, contracts to the north of the town into a narrow defile flanked by huge rocks. In this narrow valley is the great monastery of Megaspeleum, the largest and wealthiest monastery in Greece, and indeed one of the largest and richest monasteries of the Eastern Church. Formerly it had dependencies even in Russia. The building and its situation are in the highest degree picturesque. It is a huge whitewashed pile, with wooden balconies on the outside, eight stories high, perched at a great height above the right bank of the river, on the steep slope of a mountain and immediately overhung by an enormous beetling crag which runs sheer up for some hundreds of feet above the roof of the monastery. It is this overhanging cliff which gives to the monastery its name of Megaspeleum (‘great cave’). So completely does it overarch the lofty building that when in the War of Independence the Egyptian soldiers of Ibrahim Pacha attempted to destroy the monastery by letting fall masses of rock upon it from the cliff above, the rocks fell clear of the monastery, leaving it unharmed. The steep slope of the mountain below is occupied by the terraced gardens of the monks, which with their rich vegetation, and the cypresses rising here and there above them, add greatly to the charm of the scene. A single zigzag path leads up this steep terraced slope to the monastery. The bare precipices above, crowned with forests, the deep wooded valley below, and the mountains rising steeply on the farther side, make up a landscape of varied delight and grandeur, on which a painter would love to dwell.

LII. THE GULF OF CORINTH.—After describing the view from the monastery of Troupia on the hill of Bura, Leake makes the following remarks on the scenery of the Gulf of Corinth, which are worth transcribing because they convey the impression made by this wonderfully beautiful gulf on one who in general was not given to dwell on the charms of nature. He says: “I doubt whether there is anything in Greece, abounding as it is in enchanting scenery and interesting recollections, that can rival the Corinthiac Gulf. There is no lake scenery in Europe that can compete with it. Its coasts, broken into an infinite variety of outline by the ever-changing mixture of bold promontory, gentle slope, and cultivated level, are crowned on every side by lofty mountains of the most pleasing and majestic forms; the fine expanse of water inclosed in this noble frame, though not so much frequented by ships as it ought to be by its natural adaptation to commerce, is sufficiently enlivened by vessels of every size and shape to present at all times an animated scene. Each step in the Corinthiac Gulf presents to the traveller a new prospect, not less delightful to the eye than interesting to the mind, by the historical fame and illustrious names of the objects which surround him. And if, in the latter peculiarity, the celebrated panorama of the Saronic Gulf, described by Sulpicius, be preferable, that arm of the Aegaean is in almost every part inferior to the Corinthian sea in picturesque beauty; the surrounding mountains are less lofty and less varied in their heights and outlines, and, unless where the beautiful plain of Athens is sufficiently near to decorate the prospect, it is a picture of almost unmitigated sterility and rocky wildness exhibited in every possible form of mountain, promontory, and island. It must, however, be admitted that it is only by comparison that such a scene can be depreciated.” I can only confirm this estimate of the superior charms of the Gulf of Corinth. Its waters seemed to me of an even deeper blue; and the delicacy of the morning and evening tints—azure, lilac, and rose—on the mountains is such that it is hard in looking at them to believe they are of the solid earth; so unsubstantial, so fairy-like do they seem, like the gorgeous phantasmagoria of cloudland or mountains seen in dreams.

LIII. ON THE COAST OF ACHAIA.—Pausanias continues to move eastward along the coast of Achaia. Beyond the Buraicus river, where it issues from its romantic gorge, the strip of fertile plain which has skirted the coast all the way from Aegium comes to an end. The mountains now advance to the shore, and the road runs for a short distance along the summit of cliffs that border the coast. Then the mountains again retreat from the shore, leaving at their base a small maritime plain clothed with olive-groves. A stream, the river of Diakopton, crosses the plain and flows into the sea. It comes down from a wild and magnificent gorge, thickly wooded with tall firs and shut in by stupendous precipices of naked rock. Seen at nightfall under a lowering sky, with wreaths of white mist drooping low on the black mountains, the entrance to this gloomy gorge might pass for the mouth of hell; one could fancy Dante and his guide wending their way into it in the darkness.

Eastward of this little plain the mountains, covered with pine forests, again rise in precipices from the sea, hemming in the railway at their foot. A line of fine crags runs along the face of the mountains for a long way, their crests tufted with pine-woods, and the lower slopes at their feet also clothed in the same mantle of sombre green.

LIV. PELLENE.—The scanty and insignificant ruins of Pellene are situated on the summit of a mountain which rises on the western side of the river of Trikala (the ancient Sythas), near the small hamlet of Zougra. It is a ride of two hours and a half from Xylokastro, the little town at the mouth of the river, to Zougra. We cross the river by a large stone bridge not far from its mouth, and then ascend the valley on the western bank of the stream. The bottom of the valley is fruitful; vineyards and fine groves of olives occupy the greater part of it, and tall cypresses rise here and there, like dark spires, above the greener foliage. The hills which enclose the valley on the east and west are not very high, but they are gashed and tortured by great scaurs and precipices of white and whity-brown earth. On the western side of the valley in particular a long line of high white precipices runs almost unbroken along the brow of the hills. The white, probably argillaceous, earth, which is thus cleft and gouged into precipices, is the same which forms the great precipices on the eastern side of Sicyon. Indeed it prevails nearly all the way along the southern coast of the Gulf of Corinth from Sicyon to Derveni, near Aegira. This chalky earth forms a plateau of varying height, separated from the shore by a stretch of level plain which averages perhaps a mile in width. The seaward face of the plateau is steep, high, and white; its edges are sharp as if cut with a knife, and ragged like the edge of a saw. Every here and there it is rent by a stream or torrent which has scooped a deep bed for itself out of the friable soil. The valley of the Sythas, up which we go to Pellene, is nothing but one of these water-worn rifts on a gigantic scale. As we ascend it through vineyards and olive-groves, between the rugged broken hills with their long lines of white precipices, the massive Cyllene, with its high, bare, pointed summit, looms in front of us at no great distance, blocking the southern end of the valley. After riding up the valley for an hour or more along a road which, for Greece, is excellent, we begin to climb a mountain on the western side of the river. A long, toilsome, winding, dusty, or, in rainy weather, muddy ascent, impeded rather than facilitated by a Turkish paved road of the usual execrable description, brings us in time to the little hamlet of Zougra. As we rise up the steep slope, our fatigue is to some extent compensated by the fine prospect that opens up behind us to the Corinthian Gulf and the mountains beyond it.

LV. THE ROAD FROM ARGOS TO ARCADIA.—From Argos two main passes lead westward over the chain of Mount Artemisius to Mantinea. The southern and more direct of the two is for the greater part of the way nothing but a rough bridle-path; in places it crosses the deep beds of torrents, which at the time of my journey were dry. The path turns round the northern foot of the lofty acropolis of Argos, and skirting the wide Argolic plain enters the valley of the Charadrus or Xerias, as it is now called. This is a long narrow valley of somewhat monotonous aspect, enclosed by barren and rocky hills, and barred at the farther end by a steep mountain, on which, when I saw it far away on a bright April morning, purple shadows rested. The bed of the river is broad and stony, sometimes several hundred yards in width; it is generally dry, but after heavy rains the spates that come roaring down it from the mountains are much dreaded. Flocks of sheep and goats feed in the valley; the herdsmen carry the usual long staves tipped with crooks, and sometimes a gun. Trains of laden mules or asses, conducted by peasants, also met us. The head of the valley, immediately under the mountain barrier, is very picturesque. The bottom is partly covered with shrubs and trees, among which (for the place was then in its spring beauty) I noticed the broom and the hawthorn, both in flower, also wild roses, and a tree with a lovely purple bloom, which I believe to have been the Judas-tree. Beyond the small hamlet of Mazi, consisting of a few wretched stone cottages, the path begins the long ascent and winds up the face of the mountain-wall in a series of zigzags. The view backward from the summit of the pass is magnificent, embracing a wilderness of mountains with the sea and the islands of Hydra and Spetsa in the distance. From the top of the pass the path drops down very steeply, almost precipitously, into the flat sodden expanse of the Fallow Plain, across which we look to a bleak chain of grey limestone hills. The village of Tsipiana stands at the foot of the pass, its red-roofed houses, with a large church in their midst, rising in tiers on the steep mountain-side. On a ledge high above the village is a monastery among cypresses, and higher still there shoots up a huge fantastic pinnacle of rock. The traveller who has reached Tsipiana is in Arcadia, and if this is his first glimpse of that poetical land, he may find the reality to answer to his expectations, if not to his dreams.

From a low rocky hillock, which runs out like a promontory into the flat, he looks northward over the Fallow Plain, fallow no longer, but covered with a patchwork of maize-fields, and intersected by a stream meandering through it in serpentine curves. Southward the eye ranges away over the level expanse to where it terminates in low blue hills, at the foot of which, dimly perceptible in the distance, lies the town of Tripolitza. In the middle distance, on a projecting hill, appears a ruined mediaeval castle. The rural solitude of the landscape with its green spreading plain, its winding river, its lonely hills, and the silence and peace brooding over all, is not unworthy of Arcadia.

LVI. MANTINEA.—The ruins of Mantinea are situated in a flat, marshy, and treeless plain about nine miles north of the present town of Tripolitza. The plain is about seven miles long from north to south, but in the latter direction it melts into the plain of Tegea; the division between the two is marked only by the protrusion of rocky hills on either side, which here narrows the plain to about a mile in width. On the east the plain is bounded by the chain of Mount Alesius, bare and high on the north, low and bushy on the south; between the two sections of the chain thus marked off from each other is the dip through which the path goes to Nestane and so by the Prinus route to Argos. On the west of the plain rises the high rugged range of Mount Maenalus, its lower slopes bare or overgrown with bushes, its higher slopes belted with dark pine-woods. Seen from the plain to the north of Mantinea on a bright autumn day, this fine range, with its dark blue lights and purple shadows, presents the appearance of a tossing sea of billows petrified by magic. Finally, on the north the plain of Mantinea is divided from that of Orchomenus by a low chain of reddish hills.

A great part of the plain, including almost all the southern part, is covered with vineyards, the rich green foliage of which, when the vines are in leaf, contrasts with the grey arid slopes of the surrounding mountains. But the site of Mantinea itself is now mostly cornland. Not a single house stands within the wide area, and hardly one is within sight. In spring the swampy plain is traversed by sluggish streams, little better than ditches, the haunts of countless frogs, which sun themselves on the banks and squatter into the water with loud flops at the approach of the wayfarer. The whole scene is one of melancholy and desolation. As the plain stands about two thousand feet above the sea, the climate is piercingly cold in winter as well as burning hot in summer. The marshes now render the site unhealthy at all times, but in antiquity it was doubtless better drained. Of the oak-forest, through which the road ran from Mantinea to Tegea in the days of Pausanias, nothing is left. Indeed the oak has long ago retreated from the plains to the mountains of Arcadia.

LVII. THE ROAD TO STYMPHALUS.—The road to Stymphalus, after diverging from the road to Pheneus, continues to skirt the foot of the mountains in a north-easterly direction. Behind us we leave Mount Trachy, which seen from the north is an imposing mountain, its steep sides rent by parallel gullies. Gradually the hill and plain of Orchomenus disappear behind us, and the path leads into a savage glen, hemmed in by wild rocky mountains, bare and desolate, towering high on either side. Away up in the face of a precipice on the right of the path is seen the little monastery of Kandyla, hanging in what appears an almost inaccessible position. In winter a torrent flows down the middle of the glen to swell the marsh in the plain of Orchomenus. A mile or so beyond the monastery we reach the village of Kandyla, straggling in the wide gravelly bed of the torrent, shaded by plane-trees and mulberry-trees, and shut in on all sides by high rocky mountains, their sides covered with fir-woods and their summits tipped with snow for a good part of the year. From the upper end of the village a pass leads eastward over the mountains to Bougiati and the ancient Alea; the path, which is very rough and steep, ascends a wild gully overhung on the south by a huge beetling crag; the descent on the eastern side of the mountains, towards Bougiati, is so steep as to be almost impassable for horses.

But at present we are following the path to Stymphalus, which, leaving the village of Kandyla in a northerly direction, ascends the mountain by zigzags along the edge of precipices. The snow sometimes lies deep here as late as March, making the ascent difficult and dangerous. The pass runs north-east between the lofty Mount Skipieza, nearly six thousand feet high, on the left, and the sharp-peaked Mount St. Constantine, crowned with a Frankish castle, on the right. From the first summit of the pass a path branches off to the right, descending into the narrow valley of Skotini which we see stretching eastward beneath us. Half an hour more takes us to a second summit, whence we look down on the plain and lake of Stymphalus and across to the majestic mass of Mount Cyllene towering on the farther side of the valley. The way now goes down a ravine shut in on both sides by lofty fir-clad mountains and known as the Wolf’s Ravine from the wolves that are said to abound in it. Thus descending we reach the valley of Stymphalus and the western end of the lake.

LVIII. THE LAKE AND VALLEY OF STYMPHALUS.—The valley of Stymphalus lies immediately to the east of the valley and lake of Pheneus, from which it is divided only by the ridge of Mount Geronteum. The general features of both valleys are alike. Both are shut in so closely on all sides by mountains and hills that the water which accumulates in them has no outlet except by underground chasms, and forms in the bottom of each valley a lake which shrinks in summer. But the valley of Stymphalus is smaller and narrower than the valley of Pheneus, and its lake is quite different. Instead of a deep sea-like expanse of blue water, we have here a small lake of the most limpid clearness, the shallowness of which is proved to the eye by the patches of reeds and other water-plants that emerge from the surface of the water even in the middle of the lake. The palm of beauty is generally, I believe, awarded to the lake of Pheneus; but the charms of Stymphalus are of a rarer and subtler sort. Blue lakes encircled by steep pine-clad mountains may be found in many lands; but where shall we look for the harmonious blending of grand mountains and sombre pine-forests with a still, pellucid, shallow, but not marshy lake, tufted with graceful water-plants, such as meets us in Stymphalus?

The lake of Stymphalus may be a mile and a half long by half a mile wide. On the north it bathes the foot of a ridge or chain of low heights, covered with rugged grey rocks and overgrown with prickly shrubs, which reaches its highest point on the west and descends gradually in terraces to the east, where its last rocks are elevated above the plain and lake by only a few feet. On the crest of this rocky ridge, towards its eastern end, are some remains of the citadel of Stymphalus. At the back of the ridge a stretch of level ground divides it from the steep slopes of the majestic Cyllene, which rises like a wall on the northern side of the valley. The sides of this great mountain are mostly bare and of a reddish-grey hue; but the grey shoulder of its sister peak on the east, joined to it by a high ridge, is mottled with black pines. The mountains on the southern side of the lake are also steep and high; low bushes mantle their lower and dark pine-forests their upper slopes. Conspicuous among them, between immense pine-covered slopes, is the deep glen known as the Wolfs Ravine, through which the road goes to Orchomenus.

Solitude and silence, broken by the strident cries of the water-fowl that haunt the mere, reign in the valley. A few hamlets nestle in the nooks and glens at the foot of the mountains; but in the wide strath and on the banks of the lake not a human habitation is to be seen. The impression left by the scenery on some minds is that of gloom and desolation. Yet on a hot day, when all the landscape is flooded with the intense sunlight of the south, it is pleasant to sit on the rocky ridge of Stymphalus, looking down on the cool clear water of the lake and listening to the cries of the water-fowl, the drowsy hum of bees, and the tinkle of distant goat-bells. In such weather even the dark pine-forests on the mountains, gloomy as they must be under a bleak cloudy sky, suggest only ideas of coolness and shade; and we can well imagine that the ancient Stymphalus, with its colonnades and terraces rising from the lake, must have been a perfect place in which to lounge away the languid hours of a Greek summer. For the high upland character of the valley contributes with the expanse of water to temper the heat of the summer sun. The traveller who passes, as he may do, in a single day from the cool moist air of the valley to the sultry heat of the plain of Argos is struck by the contrast between the climates. In the morning he may have left the cherry-trees in blossom at Stymphalus; in the evening he may see the reapers getting in the harvest in the plain of Argos.

LIX. THE LAKE OF PHENEUS.—The lake of Pheneus (for what was a plain in the time of Pausanias is now a lake) is a broad and beautiful sheet of greenish-blue water encircled by lofty mountains which descend in rocky declivities or sheer precipices to the water’s edge, their upper slopes clothed with black pine-woods and their summits capped with snow for many months of the year. Right above the lake on the north-east towers the mighty cone of Cyllene, the loftiest mountain but one in Peloponnese; while on the north-west Dourdouvana rears its long serrated crest, culminating in a sharp bare peak of grey rock, at the foot of which, embowered in trees and gardens, nestles the village of Phonia, the representative of the ancient Pheneus. Here on the north, between the village and the lake, is the only stretch of level ground that breaks the mountain ring, and the luxuriant green of its vineyards and maize-fields contrasts pleasingly with the sombre hue of the pine-forests all around. The first sight of this blue lake embosomed among forest-clad mountains takes the traveller by surprise, so unlike is it to anything else in Greece; and he feels as if suddenly transported from the arid hills and the parched plains of Greece to a northern land—from the land of the olive, the vine, and the orange, to the land of the pine, the mountain, and the lake.

So completely is the lake fenced in by mountains on all sides that no stream can issue from it above ground, and the water escapes only by two subterranean emissaries or _Katavothras_, as they are called by the Greeks, at the south-eastern and south-western ends of the lake. Through the latter emissary the water passes under the mountain, and issuing on the other side, about six miles from the lake and eight hundred feet below its level, forms the source of the Ladon. On the state of these emissaries it depends whether the great mountain-basin of Pheneus is a fertile plain or a broad lake. From antiquity down to the present century the periods in which the basin has been completely drained have alternated with periods in which it has been occupied by a lake. In the time of Theophrastus (the fourth century B.C.) the bottom of the valley seems to have been generally dry land, for he mentions that once, when the emissaries had got choked up, the water rose and flooded the plain, drowning the willows, firs, and pines, which, however, reappeared the following year when the flood subsided. In the following century part of the valley at least would seem to have been a lake, for the geographer Eratosthenes, quoted by Strabo, informs us that the river Anias formed in front of the city of Pheneus a lake which was drained by subterranean passages, and that when these passages were closed the water rose over the plain, but that when they were opened again it was discharged into the Ladon and hence into the Alpheus in such volume that the sacred precinct at Olympia was flooded, while the lake on the other hand shrank. Strabo himself mentions that the flow of the Ladon was once checked by the obstruction of the emissaries consequent upon an earthquake. According to Pliny there had been down to his time five changes in the condition of the valley from wet to dry and from dry to wet, all of them caused by earthquakes. In Plutarch’s age the flood rose so high that the whole valley was under water, which pious people attributed to Apollo’s anger at Hercules, who was said to have stolen the prophetic tripod at Delphi and carried it off to Pheneus about a thousand years before. However, later on in the same century the waters had again subsided, for Pausanias found the bottom of the valley to be dry land, and knew of the former existence of the lake only from tradition.

From the days of Pausanias down to the beginning of the nineteenth century we have no record of the condition of the valley. In 1806, when Leake and Dodwell visited it, the great valley was still a swampy plain, covered with fields of wheat or barley except at the south-western end, where round the entrance to the emissary the water formed a small lake which never dried up even in summer. But in 1821, doubtless through the obstruction of the emissaries, the water began to rise over the plain, and by 1829-1830, when the French surveyors mapped the district, the whole basin was occupied by a deep lake five miles long by five miles wide. On January 1, 1834, the emissaries suddenly opened again, the Ladon became a deep and raging torrent, the valley was drained, and fresh vegetation sprang up on the rich slimy soil. But when Welcker visited Pheneus in 1842 the valley was once more occupied by a lake, and had been so, if he was correctly informed, since 1838 at least. And a lake it would seem to have been ever since. In 1853 the Swiss scholar Vischer found a great lake, exactly as the French surveyors had represented it on their map; the hill on the north-west side of the valley, on which are the scanty remains of the ancient acropolis, projected like a peninsula into the lake, and the site of the ancient city was deep under water. W. G. Clark in 1856 describes with enthusiasm the “wide expanse of still water deep among the hills, reflecting black pine-woods and grey crags and sky now crimson with sunset”; according to him the lake was seven miles long and as many wide. In June 1888 Mr. Philippson found a broad clear lake of deep green colour; and in the autumn of 1895 I viewed with pleasure the same beautiful scene, though I would describe the colour of the water as greenish-blue rather than green. The lake has shrunk, however, a good deal since the middle of the century. A long stretch of level plain, covered with vineyards and maize-fields, now divides the ancient acropolis of Pheneus from the margin of the lake.

LX. FROM PHENEUS TO NONACRIS.—The route from Pheneus to the Styx, at least so far as the modern village of Zarouchla, is one of the most beautiful in all Greece. The grandeur of the mountains, the richness of the vegetation, the fragrance and charm of the pine-forests, the distant views of the blue lake of Pheneus, all contribute to render the impression which the day’s journey leaves on the memory one of the most agreeable that the traveller brings back with him from Greece.

From the lower village of Phonia we ascend through the luxuriant gardens and lanes of the village to the ridge which bounds the plain of Pheneus on the north-west. On reaching it, a grand view westward of the mighty Mount Chelmos (the ancient Aroanius), with its bare summit and pine-clad lower slopes, bursts upon us. The mountain is seen rising above a deep basin-like valley, the bottom and sides of which are clothed with the richest vegetation. High up on the slope of the mountain to the north-west (Mount Crathis), among trees, is the delightfully-situated monastery of St. George. Our path leads down into the valley; on the slope grow white poplars and cypresses, and the ground is partly carpeted with ferns. From the bottom of the valley, which is chiefly occupied by a charming grove of plane-trees, we ascend through fine woods, mostly of oak, to the monastery of St. George. Still ascending after we have passed the monastery, we plunge again into a maze of beautiful woods and dense tangled thickets, threaded by rills of sparkling water. Vegetation of such rank luxuriance is rarely met with in Greece. On emerging from these delightful woodlands we traverse, always ascending, a stretch of bare bushy slopes which intervenes between the verdant glades below and the sombre pine-forests higher up. When these slopes are passed, we enter the pine-forest, through which our way now goes for several hours.

Few things can be more delightful than this ride through the pine-woods. It was a bright October day when I passed through them on my way to Solos; in many places the forest was carpeted with ferns, now turned yellow, and between the tree-trunks we could see across the valley the great slopes of Mount Cyllene, of a glowing purple in the intense sunlight. From time to time, too, we had views backward over the blue waters of the lake of Pheneus embosomed in its dark pine-clad mountains. Added to all this were the delicious odour of the pines and the freshness and exhilaration of the air at a height of about six thousand feet. But the culmination of beauty, so far as distant views go, is reached on the summit of the ridge, before we begin to descend the northern slope towards Zarouchla. On the one side, toward the south-east, we look back to the lake of Pheneus and the great mountains which encircle it, Mount Cyllene above all. On the other side, toward the north-west, we gaze down into the long narrow valley of the river Crathis, hemmed in on either hand by high mountains, above which soars the bare sharp peak of Mount Chelmos on the south, while at the farther end of the valley the view is closed by the blue Acarnanian mountains across the Gulf of Corinth.

From the ridge we now descend through the forest by a steep, winding, stony path, till we reach the bed of a stream flowing among romantic rocks and woods to join or rather to form, with other streams, the Crathis. In the bottom of the valley the richness of the vegetation even increases. We rode through thickets of planes, growing as great bushes or small trees, so dense that we had constantly to stoop to the horses’ necks to prevent our faces from being brushed by the branches. Other trees and plants, of which I did not know the names, grew in profusion around us. And above all this Eden-like verdure of woods and lanes and thickets shot up the huge sharp peaks of Chelmos and its sister mountains, blue and purple in the sunlight. In this paradise lies the village of Zarouchla. Beyond it the path follows the valley of the Crathis, keeping for the most part on the right bank of the stream. The valley is very narrow, and is enclosed by immense steep mountains, the sides of which, wherever it is practicable, are terraced for vines or other cultivation. The Crathis, when I saw it, was a clear rushing stream, easily fordable at any point. At first the path runs in the bottom of the valley through tangled thickets. Here and there, where the dale is wide enough to admit of it, a patch of maize is grown. But soon, as we proceed, the valley contracts too much to allow even of this, and so the path, often rough and difficult for horses, ascends and leads along the barer mountain-side at some height above the stream.

Thus advancing we at last arrive opposite to the mouth of the deep glen down which the Styx comes to join the Crathis on its western bank. Here we cross the Crathis and strike up the glen of the Styx. The scenery of the profound and narrow glen is almost oppressively grand. The mountains are immense and exceedingly massive; above they are bare and rocky; but their lower slopes are terraced so as to resemble gigantic staircases, and on the terraces are perched several very picturesque villages, the houses scattered at different levels and embowered among trees. At the upper end of the glen soars the mighty cone of Mount Chelmos. The grandeur of the scenery, which would otherwise be almost awful, is softened by the wonderful luxuriance of the vegetation in the glen. The horse-chestnut trees especially, with their enormous gnarled and knotted trunks, are a sight to see. The nightingales are said to be very common here and to sing from February to June. A long laborious ascent by a winding path brings us to the prosperous village of Solos on the eastern side of the glen. The villages on the opposite side of the glen, dispersed over the terraced slopes, form, with Solos, almost a single settlement. One of them probably occupies the site of the ancient Nonacris.

LXI. THE FALL OF THE STYX.—The village of Solos stands, as we have seen, on the right bank of the Styx, near where that stream falls into the Crathis. But the source of the stream is at the head of the glen, some miles to the south, where the water tumbles or trickles, according to the season, over the smooth face of an immense perpendicular cliff, the top of which is not far below the conical summit of Mount Chelmos, a mountain nearly eight thousand feet high. The walk from Solos to the foot of the fall and back is exceedingly fatiguing, and very few travellers accomplish it; most of them are content to view the fall from a convenient distance through a telescope. For the first two miles or so the path is practicable for horses, and travellers who are resolved to make their way to the waterfall will do well to ride thus far and to have the horses waiting for them here on their return. It is also necessary to take a guide or guides. The path winds up the glen, keeping at first high on the right bank. The bed of the stream is here prettily wooded with poplars and other trees and is spanned by a bridge with a single high arch. For a considerable distance above the village the water of the Styx, as seen from above, appears to be of a clear light-blue colour, with a tinge of green. This colour, however, is only apparent, and is due to the slaty rocks, of a pale greenish-blue colour, among which the river flows. In reality the water is quite clear and colourless.

In about twenty minutes from leaving the village we come in sight of the cliff over which the water of the Styx descends. It is an immense cliff, absolutely perpendicular, a little to the left or east of the high conical summit of Mount Chelmos. The whole of this northern face of the mountain is in fact nothing but a sheer and in places even overhanging precipice of grey rock—by far the most awful line of precipices I have ever seen. The cliffs of Delphi, grand and imposing as they are, sink into insignificance compared with the prodigious wall of rock in which Mount Chelmos descends on the north into the glen of the Styx. The cliff down which the water comes is merely the eastern and lower end of this huge wall of rock. Seen from a distance it appears to be streaked perpendicularly with black and red. The black streak marks the line of the waterfall, to which it has given the modern name of Mavro-nero, ‘the Black Water.’ The colour is produced by a dark incrustation which spreads over the smooth face of the rock wherever it is washed by the falling water or by the spray into which the water dissolves before it reaches the ground. In the crevices of the cliffs to the right and left of the fall great patches of snow remain all the year through. I saw them and passed close to the largest of them on a warm autumn day, after the heat of summer and before the first snow of winter.

About twenty-five minutes after leaving Solos we cross the Styx by a ford, and henceforward the route lies on the left or western bank of the stream. Five minutes from the ford bring us to a mill picturesquely situated among trees, where a brook comes purling down a little glen wooded with willows and plane-trees. Just above the mill the Styx tumbles over a fine rocky lyn in a roaring cascade. Beyond this point the steep slopes of the hills on the opposite bank of the stream are covered with ferns, which when I rode up the glen were tinged with the gold of autumn. In front of us looms nearer and larger the cone of Mount Chelmos with its long line of precipices.

Ten or twelve minutes beyond the mill the horses are left and the traveller sets forward on foot. As we advance the glen grows wilder and more desolate, but for the first half-mile or so it is fairly open, the track keeps close to the bed of the stream, and there is no particular difficulty. A deep glen now joins the glen of the Styx from the south-east. Here we begin to ascend the slope and cross an artificial channel which brings down water to the mill. All pretence of a path now ceases, and henceforward till we reach the foot of the waterfall there is nothing for it but to scramble over rocks and to creep along slopes often so steep and precipitous that to find a foothold or handhold on them is not easy, and stretching away into such depths below that it is best not to look down them but to keep the eyes fixed on the ground at one’s feet. A stone set rolling down one of these slopes will be heard rumbling for a long time, and the sound is echoed and prolonged by the cliffs with such startling distinctness that at first it sounds as if a rock were coming thundering down upon the wayfarer from above. In the worst places the guides point out to the traveller where to plant his feet and hold him up if he begins to slip. Shrubs, tough grass, and here and there a stunted pine-tree give a welcome hold, but on the steepest slopes they are wanting. The last slope up to the foot of the cliff—a very long and steep declivity of loose gravel which gives way at every step—is most fatiguing. As I was struggling slowly up it with the guides, we heard the furious barking of dogs away up the mountains on the opposite side of the glen. The barking came nearer and nearer, and being echoed by the cliffs had a weird impressive sound that suited well with the scene, as if hell-hounds were baying at the strangers who dared to approach the infernal water. However, the dogs came no nearer than the foot of the slope up which we were clambering, and some shouts and volleys of stones served to keep them at bay.

At the head of this long slope of loose gravel we reach the foot of the waterfall. The water, as I have indicated, descends the smooth face of a huge cliff, said to be over six hundred feet high. It comes largely from the snow-fields on the summit of Mount Chelmos, and hence its volume varies with the season. When I visited the fall early in October, after the long drought of summer, the water merely trickled down the black streak on the face of the cliff, its presence being shown only by the glistening appearance which it communicated to the dark surface of the rock. At the foot of the cliff it formed a small stream, flowing down a very steep rocky bed into the bottom of the glen far below. The water was clear and not excessively cold. Even when, through the melting of the snows, the body of the water is considerable, it is said to be all dissolved into spray by falling through such a height and to reach the ground in the form of fine rain. Only the lower part of the cliff is visible from the foot of the waterfall, probably because the cliff overhangs somewhat. Certainly the cliffs a little to the right of the waterfall overhang considerably. With these enormous beetling crags of grey rock rising on three sides, the scene is one of sublime but wild and desolate grandeur. I have seen nothing to equal it anywhere. On the third side, looking down the glen and away over the nearer hills, we see the blue mountains of Acarnania across the Gulf of Corinth; my guide said these mountains were in Roumelia. In the face of the rock, a few yards to the right of the waterfall, are carved the names or initials of persons who have visited the spot, with the dates of their visits. Among the names is that of King Otho, with the date 1847.

LXII. THE VALLEY OF THE AROANIUS.—After traversing the upland plain of Soudena in a broad stony bed, which in autumn is dry, the river enters a defile at the south-eastern corner of the plain. Through this defile, formed on the east by the slopes of Mount Chelmos and on the west by the hills that close the plain of Soudena on the south, the Aroanius and the road to Clitor run side by side. At first the space between the hills is broad and level, dotted here and there with trees. Soon, however, the valley contracts and begins to descend, affording a beautiful prospect of range behind range of mountains in the south, shading away according to the distance from dark purple to pale blue. The path runs at first on the east bank of the river-bed, which was dry when I saw it early in October. But after being joined by a tributary, which comes down from Mount Chelmos in a deeply-excavated bed between slopes of red earth, the river attained the dimensions of a good-sized Scotch burn. Gradually as the mountains close in on either side the valley becomes a glen, through which the stream flows among plane-trees in a prettily-wooded bed. Here the path crosses to the right or west bank, which it follows henceforward. Farther on the glen contracts into a deep rocky gorge between steep mountains, but only to expand again and allow the river to flow, with a pleasing murmur, in its wooded bed through a stretch of cultivated ground. Thus gradually the valley opens out into the plain of Clitor. Vineyards and maize-fields occupy its lower reaches. It was the time of the vintage when I traversed this beautiful valley. Bunches of ripe grapes lay as offerings before the holy pictures in the little wayside shrines; we met strings of donkeys laden with swelling wine-skins or with panniers of grapes; and in the vineyards as we passed the peasants were at work pressing the purple clusters, with which they insisted on loading, for nothing, the aprons of our muleteers.

LXIII. THE SPRINGS OF THE LADON.—The Ladon of Arcadia, the greatest of the tributaries of the Alpheus, rises in the middle of a valley on the western side of Mount Saita, the ancient Oryxis. The valley is of some breadth, and its bottom is furrowed on both sides by the dry beds of two watercourses. Between the two watercourses there rises in the midst of the valley a low hill of reddish rock, which ends on the south in a precipitous face some hundred and fifty feet high. At the foot of this red precipitous rock lies a large still pool of opaque dark-blue water, fringed by sharp-pointed grasses and other water plants, while a few stunted willows, holly-oaks, and plane-trees grow among the rocks beside it. This pool is the source of the Ladon, which rushes from it in a brawling impetuous stream of dark-blue water, its margin fringed with willows. The water enters the pool, not from the rocks above, but from a deep chasm in the earth which is only visible when, as sometimes happens, the source dries up. A peasant, who was beside the pool when I visited it in 1895, told my dragoman that three years before, after a violent earthquake, the water ceased to flow for three hours, and the chasm in the bottom of the pool was exposed, and fish were seen lying on the dry ground. After three hours the spring began to flow a little, and three days later there was a loud explosion and the water burst forth in immense volume. Mr. Philippson was informed on the spot of a like event which had taken place in 1880. Similar sudden eruptions of water at the source of the Ladon have been reported earlier in the present century and in antiquity. The stoppage of the water and its abrupt reappearance are doubtless due to the alternate obstruction and clearance of the subterranean passages by which the Lake of Pheneus is drained. For the ancients were right in supposing that the water which rises at the source of the Ladon comes directly underground from the Lake of Pheneus. It has the same deep greenish-blue tinge as the water of the lake, and is flat and tepid to the taste like standing water, not cold and fresh like the water of a mountain spring. The source is distant only about five miles from the lake, from which it is divided by the high range of Mount Saita. The hills on the opposite or western side of the valley are much lower; their slopes of reddish rock are partly covered with low green bushes. Numbers of peasant women may be seen washing clothes beside the pool in the usual Greek fashion; after soaking the clothes in water they beat them with a sort of broad paddle in a wooden trough.

LXIV. THE GORGE OF THE LADON.—The path from the village of Stretzova leads across bushy and rocky slopes, and then through bare stony fields to the northern bank of the river. Indian corn is here grown in the valley of the Ladon; wooded mountains rise from its southern bank, and higher mountains of imposing contour close the view on the south-east. At the point where we strike the river two springs gush from under rocks and form a pool shaded by fine spreading plane-trees, whence a stream flows into the Ladon after a course of a few yards. From this point to the bridge of Spathari, a ride of about five hours, the scenery is unsurpassed in Greece. The river here forces its way along the bottom of a profound gorge hemmed in by high wooded mountains, which in places descend in immense precipices, feathered with trees and bushes in their crevices, to the brink of the rapid stream. The narrow path runs high up on the right or northern side of the gorge, sometimes overhung by beetling crags, and affording views, now grand now almost appalling, down into the depths of the tremendous gorge, and across it to the high wooded slopes or precipices on the farther side.

The gorge may be said to be divided in two at the village of Divritsa, where the mountains recede a little from the river, and the scenery of the two parts is somewhat different. In the first half, ending a little above the village of Divritsa, the river sweeps round the base of high steep mountains, which on the south side of the gorge are wooded to their summits and broken every now and then by a profound glen, the sides of which are also wooded from top to bottom. The mountains on the north side are in general not wooded, but bare or overgrown with bushes. This would detract from the beauty of the scenery if the path ran on the south side of the gorge, from which the barer slopes of the mountains on the north would be visible. As it is, the path runs along the steep sides of the mountains on the north side, and the eye rests continually on the mighty wall of verdure that rises on the other side of the river. I had the good fortune to traverse this wonderful gorge on a bright October day, when the beautiful woods were just touched here and there with the first tints of autumn. Far below the river was seen and heard rushing along, now as a smooth swirling stream of opaque green water with a murmurous sound, now tumbling, with a mighty roar, down great rocks and boulders in sheets of greenish-white foam.

Below Divritsa the grandeur of the gorge increases to the point of being almost overpowering. Wooded mountains rising steeply from the river have now given place to enormous perpendicular or beetling crags tufted with trees and bushes in their crevices wherever a tree or a bush can find a footing, and overhanging the ravine till there is hardly room to pass under them, and they seem as if they would shut out the sky and meet above the river. Add to this that the path is narrow and runs high above the stream along the brink of precipices where a slip or a stumble of the horse might precipitate his rider into the dreadful depths below. We seem therefore to breathe more freely when, a little above the bridge of Spathari, we at last issue from the gorge and see a great free expanse of sky above us, lower hills, and the river winding between them through woodland scenery of a pretty but commonplace type.

LXV. ALIPHERA.—From the citadel, and indeed from the whole summit of the ridge, there is a glorious prospect over the valley of the Alpheus for miles and miles. All the mountains of northern Arcadia are spread out like a panorama; and through the broad valley that intervenes between them and the height on which we stand, the Alpheus is seen winding far away and far below. The air blows fresh and sweet on the height, and the peacefulness, the stillness, the remoteness from the world of this little mountain-citadel remind one irresistibly of Keats’s lines in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

What little town by river or sea-shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

LXVI. DIMITSANA.—The ancient Teuthis perhaps occupied the site of the modern Dimitsana, a village which stands very picturesquely on a high ridge on the left or eastern bank of the Gortynius river, surrounded on all sides by steep and lofty mountains. The river sweeps in a semicircle at the bottom of a deep gully round the western part of the town, which thus stands on a high rocky promontory jutting into the ravine. The steep and narrow streets, which are little better than rocky staircases, are lined with shops and present a busy and animated scene. The air is cool and healthy. To the south the eye ranges over the vine-clad hills on both sides of the river, to the green plain of Megalopolis threaded by the silver stream of the Alpheus, and bounded far away to the south by the snowy range of Taygetus. A steep, rugged, and zigzag path leads down through terraced vineyards to the bed of the river at the southern foot of the hill. Here a bridge spans the stream, just below a point where the river descends fifty feet in a space of as many yards, tumbling over huge masses of rock between lofty precipices overhung with shrubs. The hill on the opposite or western side of the ravine is even steeper and higher than that of Dimitsana.

All round the crest of the ridge occupied by the town are the remains of an ancient wall, parts of it being intermixed with the yards, walls, and foundations of private houses. In some places there are several courses of masonry standing. The style of masonry is rectangular at the east, but polygonal at the west end of the ridge. The blocks at the latter end are enormous. Here too are the foundations of an imposing edifice, turned east and west, and built of fine squared blocks. It was doubtless a temple. Some ancient foundations may also be seen among the terraced vineyards on the southern slope of the hill.

LXVII. GORTYS.—On the right bank of the Gortynius, or river of Dimitsana, about two and a half miles from its junction with the Alpheus, are the ruins of Gortys. They occupy the fairly spacious summit of a hill which falls away on the east in lofty precipices to the river. A visit to them may be most conveniently paid from Karytaena. From this picturesque town, perched high on the right or eastern bank of the Alpheus, we descend northward by a very rugged and stony path into the deep glen of the Alpheus. Steep arid mountains enclose the glen, and behind us towers the imposing rock of Karytaena with its ruined mediaeval castle. In about half an hour we reach the junction of the Gortynius river with the Alpheus. We now quit the glen of the Alpheus and follow that of the Gortynius river in a north-easterly direction, keeping at first along the left bank of the stream. The glen, though shut in by barren stony mountains, is rather less gloomy and forbidding than the glen of the Alpheus which we have left. In less than half an hour we descend into the bed of the Gortynius, a rushing stream of clear bluish-green water, and cross it by a stone bridge which is carried on a high pointed arch and paved, in the usual fashion of such bridges in Greece, with cobbles of the most agonising shapes and sizes. Just above the bridge the glen deepens and narrows into a ravine with steep rocky sides, and the view looking up it, with the old high-arched bridge in the foreground and the rushing stream of green water below, is highly picturesque. I drank of the water here and found it by no means cold, in spite of what Pausanias says as to the exceeding coldness of the water of the Gortynius. But it was hot autumn weather when I passed this way. Pausanias may have seen the river in winter or spring, when its current was chilled by ice or melting snow. From the bridge a steep and rugged path ascends the right or western side of the glen. We follow it and continue to ride up hill and down dale along the side of the barren mountains, with the river rolling along in the bottom of the deep ravine on our right. Half-way up the precipices which rise on this side of the ravine hangs a little red-roofed monastery. In about three-quarters of an hour from crossing the bridge we reach the ruins of Gortys.

The ruins, as we have seen, occupy the summit of a hill which overhangs the right or western bank of the Gortynius river. At its eastern extremity the hill falls down in sheer precipices of great height into the glen of the river. It is in looking down these immense precipices that we appreciate the height of the hill. On the other hand, seen from the south, as you approach it from Karytaena, the hill presents the appearance merely of a gently-swelling down. The reason of this is that from the bridge over the river we have been gradually rising, and that the ground immediately to the south of Gortys is itself a hill as high as the hill of Gortys, from which it is divided only by a slight hollow now chiefly occupied with vineyards. But when we have ascended what appears to be the gentle eminence occupied by the ruins of Gortys we see that the hill descends in a long slope north-eastward to the glen of the Gortynius river, which curves round the hill in a great bend on the north-east and east. The summit of the hill extends in the form of a rather narrow ridge from south-east to north-west, gradually rising to its highest point on the north-west. Towards this end the hill is naturally defended on the side of the south by masses of rugged rocks, of which the ancient engineers took advantage, interposing pieces of walls in the intervals between the rocks. In the crannies of the rocks bushes have now rooted themselves.

The long slope of the hill down to the glen of the Gortynius on the north-east is bare and stony. Stony and barren, too, are the mountains that surround Gortys on all sides. In a grey cold light or under a cloudy sky they would be exceedingly bleak and dreary; but under the warm sunshine of Greece they are only bare and desolate. The most pleasing view is down into the glen of the Gortynius on the north-east, where the river emerges from a narrow defile between high precipices, above which the mountains rise on both sides. At the mouth of the defile there is a house or two among trees. In spite of its height above the river, Gortys lies essentially in a basin shut in on all sides by mountains. The summer heat here must consequently be very great. Even in October, when I visited the place, though a fresh breeze was blowing, it was drowsily hot among the ruins. The sweet smell of the thyme, the tinkle of sheep-bells, the barking of dogs, and the cries of shepherds in the distance seemed to enhance the feeling of summer and to invite to slumber in the shade. But it was pleasant and almost cooling to hear the roar of the river, and to see its blue-green water and greenish-white foam away down in the glen.

LXVIII. THE PLAIN OF MEGALOPOLIS.—Megalopolis stood in the great western plain of Arcadia, which, like the great eastern plain of Mantinea and Tegea, extends in a direction from north to south. In natural beauty the plain of Megalopolis is far superior to its eastern neighbour. The latter is a bare monotonous flat, unrelieved by trees or rivers, and enclosed by barren mountains, so that its general aspect is somewhat dreary and depressing; only towards its northern end do the mountains rise in grander masses and with more picturesque outlines. The plain of Megalopolis, on the other hand, is surrounded by mountains of fine and varied outlines, some of the slopes of which are clothed with wood, and the surface of the plain itself is diversified with copses and undulating downs and hillocks, refreshed by numerous streams shaded with plane-trees, and watered by the broad though shallow stream of the Alpheus winding through its midst. The scenery, in contrast to that of the eastern plain, is eminently bright, smiling, and cheerful. It is, perhaps, seen at its best after rain on a fine morning in early summer. The vegetation is then green, the air pellucid, the outlines of the environing mountains are sharp and clear, and their tints vary from deep purple to lilac.

LXIX. THE CAVE OF THE BLACK DEMETER.—The cave of the Black Demeter has been identified with a small cavern in the glen of the Neda, about an hour’s walk to the west of Phigalia. The place is known in the neighbourhood as the _stomion tes Panagias_ or Gully of the Virgin. To reach the cavern it is necessary to descend into the ravine by a steep and narrow path which affords very little foothold and overhangs depths which might turn a weak head. At the awkward places, however, it is generally possible to hold on to bushes or rocks with the hands. Thus we descend to the bed of the river, which here rushes roaring along at the bottom of the narrow wooded ravine, the precipitous sides of which tower up on either hand to an immense height. The cave is situated in the face of a prodigious cliff on the north side of the ravine, about a hundred feet or so above the bed of the river, from which it is accessible only by a narrow and difficult footpath. The ravine at this point sweeps round in a sharp curve, and the cavern is placed just at the elbow of the bend. On the opposite side of the lyn, some fifty feet or so away, a great crag, its sides green with grass and trees wherever they can find a footing, soars up to a height about as far above the cavern as the cavern is above the stream. Hills close the view both up and down the glen; those at the upper end are high, steep, and wooded.

The cavern itself, originally a mere shallow depression or hollow in the side of the cliff, has been artificially closed by a rough wall of masonry, apparently of recent date; the plaster seemed to me fresh. In the cavern thus formed a rough floor of boards has been run across at a height of about four feet above the ground. Thus the grotto is divided into two compartments, the upper of which has been converted into a tiny chapel with an altar at the end and two holy pictures of Christ and John the Baptist. On one of the walls are some faded frescoes. Light enters the little cave by a small window in the wall beside the altar. At least half of the roof is artificial, being built of the same rough masonry as the wall. Close beside this tiny cavern, to the east of it, may be seen a still tinier grotto, separated from the former by a slight protuberance in the rock. The same ledge of rock gives access to both grottoes.

What is called the Gully of the Virgin is a tunnel, some hundred yards long, formed of fallen rocks and earth, through which the Neda rushes in the ravine below the cavern. In winter the swollen stream flows over the roof of the tunnel, but in summer, when the river is low, you may walk through the tunnel and admire the stalactites which hang from its roof.

LXX. THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT BASSAE.—This temple, by far the best preserved of all ancient temples in Peloponnese, stands in a strikingly wild and secluded situation at a height of nearly four thousand feet above the sea, with a wide prospect southward to the distant mountains of Messenia and Laconia. The ground on which the temple is built is a narrow platform on the southern side of a hill, the Mount Cotilius of the ancients. The rocky slopes of this hill, rising rapidly behind the temple, shut out all distant views on the north and north-east. But to the south the slope descends gradually towards the valley of the Neda. Due south, through a dip in the hills, is seen the apparently flat-topped summit of Ithome. To the south-east, through another gap, appears the range of Taygetus, with its beautiful outlines and sharp snowy peaks. In the nearer foreground, between Ithome and Taygetus, rises Mount Ira, the last stronghold of the Messenian race in its struggle for freedom with Sparta. To the east are bare rough hills, dotted with oak-trees, the western spurs of Mount Lycaeus, while farther to the south appears the high round-topped Tetrasi, perhaps the Nomian mountains of the ancients. The sea is not visible, but it may be seen by ascending the slope at the back of the temple. The bleak desolate mountains form a striking background to the solitary temple which, built of the same cold grey limestone which composes the surrounding rocks, tends to deepen rather than relieve the melancholy of the scene, the ruined fane witnessing silently to the transitoriness of human greatness and the vanity of human faith.

LXXI. THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT AULIS.—From the head of the Bay of Aulis a small valley, sloping gently upwards, runs inland between hills for something over a mile. It is watered by a brook which falls into the bay. About a mile up the valley from the shore is a ruined Byzantine chapel of St. Nicholas, which is supposed to occupy the site of the temple of Artemis, mentioned by Pausanias, where Iphigenia was led to the altar to be sacrificed before the Greek fleet set sail for Troy. The scene, if it indeed be so, of this famous event in Greek legend was somewhat bleak and cheerless as I saw it under a leaden sky on a dull November afternoon. The ruined chapel, with its fallen dome and roofless walls, had a forlorn air, standing solitary in a bare, stony, ploughed field on the slope of the low hills that enclose the little valley on the south. Similar hills—low, stony, and treeless—with higher hills rising above them on the north and west, shut in the valley on all sides except the east, where appeared, of a pale blue-green colour under the wintry sky, a bit of the Bay of Aulis, beyond it the open channel of the Euripus, and still farther off, bathed in a gloomy purple, the coast and mountains of Euboea. Bare ploughed fields, with a small tree dotted here and there among them, occupied all the bottom of the valley, and formed the foreground of the melancholy scene. Yet bare fields, stony hills, leaden sky, cold steely sea, and purple mountains glooming in the distance, seemed a fitting framework for the ruined shrine, with its memories of departed glory.

LXXII. GLAUCUS’S LEAP.—Immediately beyond the flat-topped hillock which probably marks the site of Salganeus, the plain comes abruptly to an end and the path runs along the steep, bushy, but not precipitous slope of Mount Messapius at some height above the sea, which on a bright sunshiny day is of a beautiful green colour, clear as crystal and dappled with patches of purple. Thus proceeding along the steep mountain-side for about a mile we find ourselves opposite a pretty rocky island, wooded with pines, which lies a little way off the shore. On the island is a ruin which, so far as I could judge by the eye from the shore, seemed to be mediaeval or modern. Hereabouts, too, a row of large stones may be observed lying at the bottom of the clear water, but they appear to be boulders rather than hewn stones. Farther on a high cliff, which seen from the east reminds one of the Lorelei Rock on the Rhine, rises close to the shore. The path here descends and runs along the narrow beach at the foot of the cliff, from which a very copious spring of water rushes into the sea. This high cliff is probably what the ancients called Glaucus’s Leap. On the morning when I passed it, the clear, sunlit, greenish-blue water at its foot looked very inviting; one could fancy the sea-god taking his plunge into its cool delicious depths. Beyond the cliff the path again runs along the foot of the long slope, covered with lentisk and holly-oak bushes, which descends from the high, bold, pointed summit of Mount Messapius in an unbroken sweep to the sea.

LXXIII. EVENING ON THE EURIPUS.—The views from Anthedon across the beautiful Euripus are charming, especially at sunset when the opposite mountains of Euboea glow with delicate pink and lilac hues, and flakes of golden and rosy clouds are reflected in the mirror-like surface of the strait, which, apparently landlocked on all sides, resembles a calm lake. The effect is heightened if a fishing-boat, its russet sails aglow in the warm evening light, chances to glide along at the time, and a snatch of song comes wafted from it across the water.

LXXIV. THE COPAIC LAKE.—Like other lakes which are drained not by rivers but by natural subterranean passages in the limestone mountains which surround them, the level of the Copaic Lake varied greatly from time to time. Such variations depend upon two different sets of causes, first the varying capacity of the emissaries, and second the varying amount of water poured into the lake.

In the first place, not only are the emissaries subject to a gradual and regular process of change, their passages being slowly clogged and their mouths choked up by the alluvial deposits which in the course of ages raise the bed of the lake; but they are also exposed to sudden and incalculable changes, wrought by earthquakes, landslips, floating logs, and so on, which may in a few minutes either widen the passages or block them up altogether. In the second place, while these changes, whether gradual or sudden, affect the outflow of the water, others not less marked influence its inflow. For the rainfall, on which the inflow ultimately depends, varies not only with the year but with the season. In the sub-tropical climate of the Mediterranean rain hardly falls in summer, and as a consequence the streams in that season either flow with diminished volume or dry up entirely.

All these various causes combine to produce secular and periodic as well as irregular and unforeseen variations in the level of lakes like the Copaic mere. In no lake, perhaps, have the annual changes been more regular and marked than in the Copaic; for while in winter it was a reedy mere, the haunt of thousands of wild fowl, in summer it was a more or less marshy plain where cattle browsed and crops were sown and reaped. So well recognised were these vicissitudes of the seasons that places on the bank of the lake such as Orchomenus, Lebadea, and Copae had summer roads and winter roads by which they communicated with each other, the winter roads following the sides of the hills, while the summer roads struck across the plain. With the setting in of the heavy autumn rains in November the lake began to rise and reached its greatest depth in February or March, by which time the mouths of the emissaries were completely submerged and betrayed their existence only by swirls on the surface of the mere. Yet even then the lake presented to the eye anything but an unbroken sheet of water. Viewed from a height such as the acropolis of Orchomenus it appeared as an immense fen, of a vivid green colour, stretching away for miles and miles, overgrown with sedge, reeds, and canes, through which the river Cephisus or Melas might be seen sluggishly oozing, while here and there a gleam of sunlit water, especially towards the north-east corner of the mere, directed the eye to what looked like ponds in the vast green swamp. Bare grey mountains rising on the north and east, and the beautiful wooded slopes of Helicon on the south, bounded the fen. In spring the water began to sink. Isolated brown patches, where no reeds grew, were the first to show as islands in the mere; and as the season advanced they expanded more and more till they met. By the middle of summer great stretches, especially in the middle and at the edges, were bare. In the higher parts the fat alluvial soil left by the retiring waters was sown by the peasants and produced crops of corn, rice, and cotton; while the lower parts, overgrown by rank grass and reeds, were grazed by herds of cattle and swine. In the deepest places of all the water often stagnated the whole summer, though there were years when it retreated even from these, leaving behind it only a bog or perhaps a stretch of white clayey soil, perfectly dry, which the summer heat seamed with a network of minute cracks and fissures. By the end of August the greater part of the basin was generally dry, though the water did not reach its lowest point till October. At that time what had lately been a fen was only a great brown expanse, broken here and there by a patch of green marsh, where reeds and other water plants grew. In November the lake began to fill again fast.

Such was the ordinary annual cycle of changes in the Copaic Lake in modern times, and we have no reason to suppose that it was essentially different in antiquity. But at all times the water of the lake has been liable to be raised above or depressed below its customary level by unusually heavy or scanty rainfall in winter or by the accidental clogging or opening of the chasms. As we read in ancient authors of drowned cities on the margin of the lake, so a modern traveller tells of villagers forced to flee before the rising flood, and of vineyards and corn-fields seen under water.

The plan of draining the Copaic Lake, which has been successfully accomplished within the last few years, was conceived and apparently executed at a very remote time in antiquity. Strabo reports a tradition that the whole basin of the lake had at one time been drained and cultivated by the people of Orchomenus, and this tradition has been strikingly confirmed by the recent discovery of a complete and very ancient system of drainage works in the bed of the lake. The discovery was made by the engineers charged with the execution of the modern drainage works. As described by them, the ancient works were composed of an ingenious combination of dykes and canals, which completely encircled the lake and, receiving the waters of the streams which flowed into it on the west and south, conducted them to the chasms on the east and north-east banks. Where the canal skirted closely the precipitous rocky shore of the lake, a single dyke or embankment sufficed, the water being led between the dyke and the shore. But where the canal had to cross a bay, or where the bank of the lake was not high and steep enough to serve as one side of the canal, two parallel dykes were constructed and the water flowed between them. The remains of these ancient drainage works in the bed of the lake are of two sorts. In the first place we see them as low broad mounds, about five feet high and fifty to sixty yards wide, stretching for long distances across the plain, either in an unbroken line or with occasional gaps. Sometimes it is a single mound that we see, sometimes two parallel mounds at a short distance from each other. And between the two parallel mounds or beside the single one a long shallow depression marks the line of the ancient canal. These long, low, broad mounds are clearly the remains of the dykes which formerly enclosed the canals, and which have been gradually reduced to their present level by the ceaseless wash of the waters in the course of ages. In the second place, the line of the ancient canals may be traced by the walls built of great polygonal blocks which in many places support and case the inner side of the dykes. In some places these walls are well preserved, but in others nothing of them remains but a conspicuous line of white stones running for miles through the otherwise stoneless plain.

When the system of drainage by canals which has just been described was in full operation the basin of the Copaic Lake must have been nearly dry. But as we have no ground to suppose that in the historical period of antiquity the lake was ever drained, it would seem that we must refer these ancient drainage works to the prehistoric ages. Now Strabo, as we have seen, has preserved a tradition that the bed of the lake was at one time drained and cultivated by the people of Orchomenus. We shall therefore hardly err in ascribing to the Minyans of Orchomenus—the Dutchmen of antiquity—the extensive system of dykes and canals by which the vast plain was reclaimed from the waters and converted into waving corn-fields and smiling vineyards, which poured wealth into the coffers of the burghers. This was the golden age of Orchomenus, when its riches vied with the treasures of Delphi and the wealth of Egyptian Thebes.

LXXV. THE GREAT KATAVOTHRA.—To reach Larymna from the sanctuary of Apollo on Mount Ptous, we quit the trough or little mountain-girdled valley in which the remains of the sanctuary are to be seen and ascend the ridge that bounds it on the north-west, forming a saddle between Mount Tsoukourieli and Mount Megalo Vouno. From the summit of the ridge or saddle we take a last look backwards at the vale of Apollo with its ruined sanctuary and the beautiful Lake Likeri, with its winding shores, beyond and below it to the south; then turning northwards we descend somewhat steeply a narrow glen with high bushy sides, which leads us straight down to the north-eastern corner of the great Copaic plain. Across this corner of the plain, which until a few years ago was a marsh or even a lake for many months of the year, but is now under cultivation, we ride to the Great Katavothra, the largest of the natural chasms in the line of cliffs through which the water of the Copaic Lake found its way to the sea. It is a great cave with a high-arched roof opening in the face of a cliff of creamy white limestone. Unlike most of the other chasms or emissaries, it is still in use; the river Melas (the modern Mavropotamos or Black River), after traversing all the northern edge of the Copaic plain in a canal-like bed, pours its water in a steady stream into the cave and vanishes in the depths. A little way inward from the mouth of the cave there is an opening in the roof. When the sunshine streams down through this aperture, lighting up the back of the gloomy cavern with its hanging rocky roof and hurrying river, the effect is very picturesque; it is like a fairy grotto, and we could almost fancy that we stood

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

But alas! the women who may be seen any day washing their dirty linen at the mouth of the cave break the spell.

LXXVI. THE VALE OF THE MUSES.—The grove of the Muses lay at the northern foot of Mount Helicon in a valley which is traversed by a stream flowing from west to east. Towards its western end the valley contracts, being hemmed in between the steep, lofty, and wooded slopes of Helicon on the south and another rugged but less lofty mountain on the north. The saddle which joins the two mountains bounds the Vale of the Muses on the west. A fine view of the valley is to be had from a ruined mediaeval tower which surmounts a rocky hill of no great height on the northern side of the vale, about midway between Ascra and the village of Palaeo-Panagia. Across the valley to the south rise the steep slopes of Helicon, rocky below and wooded with pines above. In a glen at the foot of these great declivities are seen the trees that hide the secluded monastery of St. Nicholas, below which dark myrtle-bushes extend far down the slope. At the head of the valley in the west the serrated top of Helicon appears foreshortened, and a little on this side of the highest point the monastery of Zagara peeps out, delightfully situated on a woody slope that falls away into the sequestered dale where stand the two villages also called Zagara. To the left of the summit the snowy top of Parnassus just shows itself in the distance. In the nearer foreground, on the hither side of the valley, the conical hill of Ascra, crowned with its ruined tower, stands out boldly. Vineyards cover the gently-swelling hills on the northern side of the vale, and down the middle of it the brook Archontitza (probably the ancient Termesus or Permessus), fed by many springs, flows through fields of maize and corn.

LXXVII. HIPPOCRENE.—To reach the far-famed Hippocrene (‘the Horse’s Fount’) from the sanctuary of the Muses we ascend the steep eastern side of Helicon over moss-grown rocks, through a thick forest of tall firs. After a toilsome ascent of about two hours we emerge from the wood upon a tiny open glade of circular shape, covered with loose stones and overgrown with grass and ferns. All around rises the dark fir-wood. Here, in the glade, is Hippocrene, now called Kryopegadi, or ‘cold spring.’ It is a well with a triangular opening, enclosed by ancient masonry. The clear ice-cold water stands at a depth of about ten feet below the coping of the well. But it is possible to climb down to the water by means of foot-holes cut in the side, or by holding on to the sturdy ivy, which, growing from a rock in the water, mantles the sides of the well. The coldness and clearness of the water of this perennial spring are famous in the neighbourhood, especially among the herdsmen, who love to fill their skin bottles at it.

LXXVIII. LEBADEA.—The modern town of Livadia retains the ancient name of Lebadea but slightly altered. It stands very picturesquely at the mouth of a wild gorge in the mountains, facing northward across the plain. The white houses with their red roofs and wooden balconies climb the hill-sides on both banks of the Hercyna, a clear and copious stream, which issues from the gorge and rushes noisily through the streets in a rocky bed, turning some mills and spanned by several bridges. At the back of the town a steep rocky hill, crowned with the ruins of a great mediaeval castle, descends in sheer and lofty precipices into the gorge on the left bank of the stream. The houses extend down into the plain, scattered among gardens and clumps of trees which give the town, as seen from below, an agreeable aspect. The mountains at the foot of which Lebadea lies are the northern spurs of Mount Helicon; the high conical summit to the east is the ancient Mount Laphystius, now the mountain of Granitsa. The plain that lies spread out below the town on the north melts eastward into the great Copaic plain; on the north it is divided by a chain of low hills from the parallel plain of Chaeronea.

The greater part of the water of the Hercyna rises in the profound gorge immediately behind the town. Here, at the foot of the great precipice which is surmounted by the ruins of the castle, a cold spring called Kryo (‘cold’) issues from the rocks and is conducted into a small well-house. Some niches for holding votive offerings are cut in the face of the cliff above it. The largest of these cuttings is a square chamber hewn out of the rock, about six feet above the ground. Right and left, in the sides of the chamber, are benches cut in the rock. In this cool retreat the Turkish governor of Lebadea used to smoke his pipe in the heat of the day. On the opposite side of the ravine, a few paces off, near some plane-trees, several springs of clear but lukewarm water rush turbulently from the ground, and, united with the water of the Kryo, form the Hercyna. They turn a cotton-mill close to the spot where they rise. That some of these springs are the waters of Memory and Forgetfulness of which all who would consult Trophonius had to drink before descending into the oracular pit, is highly probable; but we have no means of identifying these mystic waters. An alteration in the flow of one of the springs is known to have occurred within the nineteenth century; and many such changes may have taken place since antiquity. The general features of the spot, however, have probably changed but little, and they are well fitted to impress the imagination. The many springs gurgling strongly from the ground, the verdant plane-trees, the caverned rocks, the great precipices soaring on three sides of us and overhung on the west by the ruins of the mediaeval castle, make up a scene which once seen is not easily forgotten. But the ravine of which this is after all only the mouth does not end here. Its deep, narrow, stony bed, sometimes dry, sometimes traversed by a raging torrent, winds far into the heart of the mountains, shut in on either hand like a cañon by tremendous crags. If you follow it upwards for some miles, the country begins to open up and you find yourself in bleak and desolate highlands. A profound silence reigns, broken only by the cry of a water-ouzel beside the torrent or the screaming of hawks far up the cliffs.

LXXIX. THE BOEOTIAN ORCHOMENUS.—Orchomenus, one of the oldest and most famous cities in Greece, occupied the eastern extremity of a sharply-marked chain of hills—the Mount Acontium (‘javelin’) of the ancients—which extends east and west for about six miles, bounding the broad level plain of the Cephisus on the north. Beginning nearly opposite to Chaeronea, which lies at the foot of the hills on the southern side of the plain, the ridge rises gradually to a considerable height, runs eastward at this level for some miles, and then slopes down into the Copaic plain. From beginning to end it is the stoniest, barest, barrenest, and most forbidding chain of hills that can well be conceived; looking up at it you wonder if the foot of man has ever trodden these rugged and pathless solitudes. Close to the southern base of these desolate hills the Cephisus—a fairly broad and deep stream of turbid whitish water—flows between low banks fringed with tall willows; ducks disport themselves on its surface, and pigs wallow in the mire on its banks. According as the weather has been dry or rainy, the current is sluggish or rapid. Riding beside it under the willows on a grey November day you might fancy yourself on the banks of an English Ouse or Avon, if the cotton-fields by the river-side and the towering ridge of naked rock beyond did not remind you that you are in a foreign land.

At its eastern end the ridge descends in a long and gentle slope, expanding fan-like as it descends to the Copaic plain. This long slope was the site of Orchomenus. The position is one of great natural strength. On the south and north it is protected by the steep and rugged sides of the ridge which form, as it were, a first line of defence. At the foot of these declivities the waters of the Cephisus on the south and of the Melas on the north constitute a second line of defence; while on the east, where the descent to the plain is gradual, the site was till lately rendered secure by the great Copaic swamp which advanced to within a few hundred yards of the end of the slope. The ancient walls, of which considerable remains exist, started from the broad eastern foot of the hill, and followed its northern and southern brows upwards, converging more and more as they rose till at the upper end of the slope they were within about thirty yards of each other. Here at the head of the slope the walls end at the foot of a cliff which rises like a wall to a considerable height. Its small summit, reached by a long, steep, and narrow staircase hewn out of the rock, was the ancient acropolis. Yet this cliff, which presents such an imposing appearance on the east, is separated on the west only by a shallow depression of a few feet from the long rugged ridge of the hills. This, therefore, was the weak point in the circuit; and art had to be called in to supply the want of a natural defence. Accordingly the little citadel, protected by precipices on the east and north, was fortified on the west and south by immense walls of massive masonry, the remains of which are amongst the finest specimens of ancient Greek fortification in existence. The fortress thus formed is so small that it resembles a castle rather than an acropolis of the ordinary Greek type. But the splendid style of the masonry leaves no room to doubt that it is a Greek fortress of the very best period, probably of the fourth century B.C.—the golden age of Greek military engineering.

LXXX. THE PLAIN OF CHAERONEA.—The plain of Chaeronea—one of the largest plains in Greece—stretches in an unbroken sweep from the foot of Mount Parnassus eastward to what used to be the Copaic Lake. Its length from east to west is about twelve miles, and its breadth from north to south about two. The plain is a dead flat, covered with fields of cotton and maize, and enclosed by bare, stony, barren hills both on the north and on the south. Seen on a bright summer day, with the mountains beyond the Copaic plain appearing blue in the distance and Parnassus towering grandly on the west, the scene is beautiful enough; but on a grey November morning, with the mists down on the distant mountains, it wears a cheerless aspect that well becomes a battlefield where a nation’s freedom was lost.

LXXXI. PANOPEUS.—The space enclosed by the fortification walls and by the rocky crests shows but few signs of habitation. On the highest point of the hill, among some holly-oaks, are the scanty tumble-down ruins of a mediaeval tower, built in the usual way of small stones with bricks and mortar in the chinks. A little lower down, and farther to the east, is a small chapel with remains of faded paintings on the walls. Scattered about the hill, especially round the chapel, is a good deal of broken pottery. A fine grove of beautiful holly-oaks now shades part of the summit, growing on a grassy slope amid low plants and shrubs. It is pleasant in the heat of the day to rest in the shade of these trees, to smell the wild thyme which grows abundantly on the hill, and to enjoy the distant prospects. To the north, across the broad Chaeronean plain, we look straight into the defile through which the Cephisus flows from Phocis into Boeotia; at the northern end of the defile the low hill is visible on which are the scanty ruins of Parapotamii. To the west Parnassus lifts his mighty head at no great distance from us, his middle slopes darkened by pine-forests that look like the shadows of clouds resting on the mountain-side.

LXXXII. NEAR HYAMPOLIS.—From the ledge of rocks which bounds the plateau on the south, near a ruined chapel, a spring of beautifully clear water gushes forth. Some ancient blocks lie tumbled about the spring, and a tall poplar-tree grows opposite it. The day was very hot when I passed it on my way to and from the ruins of Hyampolis; but the leaves of the poplar rustled in the breeze, and the water flowed from under the rocks with a soothing murmur. Parnassus loomed dim in the distance through a haze of heat. On my return from the ruins I found a shepherd boy at the spring who offered to share his bread with me. This picturesque spot, on which a poet of the Anthology might have written an epigram, is perhaps the site of the temple of Artemis mentioned by Pausanias.

LXXXIII. TITHOREA.—The site of Tithorea, first identified by Clarke in 1801, is occupied by the modern village of Velitsa, which stands very picturesquely among trees on the north-eastern slopes of Parnassus, overlooking the broad valley of the Cephisus. About two-thirds of the village are enclosed within the ancient ivy-mantled walls, which rank with those of Messene and Eleutherae as among the finest existing specimens of Greek fortifications. At the back of the village to the south rises a huge mountainous cliff of grey rock, its ledges tufted with pines. Between the foot of this great cliff and the village there intervenes a very steep slope, mostly overgrown with holly-oak bushes. On the east the village as well as the site of the ancient city is bounded by a very deep rocky ravine, which winds southward into the heart of the mountains. At the bottom of the ravine a torrent flows from Parnassus over a broad gravelly bed to join the Cephisus in the plain below. This torrent, now called Kakorevma or Evil Stream, is the ancient Cachales. In the time of Pausanias, the townspeople, he tells us, had to fetch their water in buckets from the depths of the lyn. Nowadays a portion of the water of the stream is diverted higher up the glen and brought in a conduit to the village, where it turns two mills and waters the gardens and orchards. As Tithorea was thus naturally defended on two sides, namely by the great cliff on the south and by the deep ravine on the east, it needed walls on two sides only, the west and the north. These walls, starting from the foot of the cliff, first descend the steep slope in a straight line above the village, then follow the gentler slope within the village, still in a direction due north, till they turn round at an obtuse angle and run eastward to the brink of the ravine. Here they stop. Along the edge of the ravine a number of ancient blocks may be observed, but whether they are the remains of an ancient fortification wall is not clear. Perhaps the deep precipitous side of the ravine may have been considered a sufficient defence by itself. The walls so far as they exist are finely and solidly built of regular ashlar masonry, and are flanked by massive square towers constructed in the same style. Walls and towers are best preserved in the lower ground among the houses and gardens of the village, but on the steep slope above the village the remains are also considerable.

The investigation of the ruined fortifications on this slope, it may be observed, is a matter of some difficulty, for the slope is not only very steep but overgrown with prickly shrubs and cumbered with huge fallen blocks. The antiquary who picks his way painfully among these obstacles is mortified by the contrast between his own slow progress and that of the village urchins who accompany him; for they climb and skip like goats on the top of the walls, now appearing suddenly on the highest pinnacles and then again leaping from stone to stone with wonderful confidence and agility.

The remains of the walls in the village, on the other hand, can be examined without discomfort, and they better repay study. Here on the north and north-west the wall, flanked by square towers, is standing in an unbroken line for a considerable distance. As a whole, the masonry of the walls and towers is splendid, massive, and almost quite regular, without being absolutely so. The beauty of these venerable walls is much enhanced by the thick green veil of ivy and other creepers which clothes their sides and droops in graceful festoons from their summits. Such a mantle of clinging verdure is very rare in Greece, where the ancient temples and fortresses, unlike the ivy-clad abbeys and castles of England, remain for the most part to this day as bare as when they were built, without even a patch of moss to soften their hard outlines and to tell of the lapse of ages.

Distant views complete the charm of Tithorea. From its ivied walls, rising among the gardens and houses of the village, we look up at the huge grey crag that hides the higher slopes of Parnassus, or down the long gradual declivity to the wide valley of the Cephisus and across it to the hills, somewhat low and tame, at whose foot lie the scanty ruins of Elatea.

LXXXIV. FROM AMPHISSA TO GRAVIA.—The smiling verdure of Amphissa and its neighbourhood forms a striking contrast to the stern, arid, and rocky scenery of Delphi, which is only ten miles off. At Amphissa, indeed, we are on the borders of almost Swiss scenery. For the fir-clad and torrent-rent mountains of Locris and Doris, which rise to the north-west, are the loftiest in the present kingdom of Greece. Two of the peaks exceed eight thousand feet in height. A fine specimen of this Alpine scenery may be obtained by following the mule-path which leads north from Amphissa over the mountains to the village of Gravia in the ancient canton of Doris. With the exception of the village of Topolia, which we leave on the right, and here and there a small farm far up on the mountain-side, not a human dwelling is to be seen. At first the path ascends the western declivities of Parnassus. Looking down to the left we see below us a narrow dale, where in early summer the course of the stream, now nearly dried up, is marked by the red oleander blossoms. Beyond the dale Mount Kiano rears its snowy head, the loftiest mountain in Greece; and behind it the long and almost equally lofty ridge of Vardousia is seen stretching north and south. The finest point on the route is at a clear spring which bubbles up at the top of the pass, just where the road surmounts the ridge that joins Parnassus to the mountains of Locris. Hitherto we have been ascending from the south; from this point the road begins to descend to the north. The valley now contracts. The snowy peaks in the west disappear, but their lower spurs form, with the western declivities of Parnassus, a narrow pass, down which a brook babbles over rocks and stones, its banks overhung with plane-trees. Pines and oaks of various kinds contrast pleasantly with the steep cliffs and bushy slopes; and now and then we come to a little grassy glade or a patch of corn. “It is,” says the Swiss traveller Vischer, whose description of the road I have borrowed, “almost a Swiss region, and I might have fancied myself transported to my native land, if the holly-oaks and oriental plane-trees had not reminded me that I was in the south.” Thus descending by a steep and rugged path we reach the village of Gravia at the northern end of the pass, in five or six hours from Amphissa.

LXXXV. DAULIS.—The situation of ancient Daulis is exceedingly beautiful. It occupied the broad but somewhat uneven summit of a fine massive hill, which rises abruptly from the glens at the eastern foot of Parnassus. Everywhere the sides of the hill—which in the grandeur of its outlines deserves almost to rank as a mountain—are high and steep, except at a single point on the west where a narrow ridge connects it with the main mass of Parnassus. On the south the hill falls away in sheer and lofty precipices of grey rock into a deep romantic glen, the sides of which, where they are not precipitous, are mantled with dark green shrubbery. Beyond the ridge to the west soar the immense grey precipitous slopes of Parnassus, mottled here and there with dark pines. High up on its side is seen a white monastery at the mouth of a dark gorge, through which a path ascends to the summit. In the hollow between the hill of Daulis and these great slopes, a mill nestles picturesquely among trees; the water is led to it in a mill-race. Northward the ruined walls of Daulis, here thickly overgrown with ivy and holly-oak, look across a deep dell to the pretty village of Davlia, embowered among trees and gardens on the opposite hill-side. The descent to the valley on this side is steep and bushy, but not precipitous, except where a line of rocks runs obliquely up it on the north-west. Here and there in the valley the last slopes of the hill are terraced and planted with vines. At the eastern foot of the hill begins the great plain—the scene of so many famous battles—which stretches away for miles past the ruins of Panopeus and Chaeronea until at Orchomenus it melts into the still vaster expanse of the Copaic plain. To the south-east, beyond an intervening range of low hills, appears the sharp outline of Helicon. In this direction, at the southern end of the narrow valley which divides these low hills from the mighty steeps of Parnassus, is the famous Cleft Way, where Oedipus is said to have done the dark deed that was the beginning of all his woes.

Altogether few places in Greece surpass Daulis in romantic beauty of situation and the wealth of historical and legendary memories which the landscape, both near and far, is fitted to evoke. Standing on the brow of its precipices we feel that this mountain fastness, frowning on the rich champaign country below, was well fitted to be the hold of a wild wicked lord like Tereus, of whose bad deeds the peasants might tell tales of horror to their children’s children. But now all is very peaceful and solitary in Daulis, for the tide of life has long rolled away from it. Parnassus still looks down on it as of old; but ivy mantles the ruins, the wild thyme smells sweet on the hill, and the tinkle of goat-bells comes up musically from the glen. Only the shadow of ancient crime and sorrow rests on the fair landscape.

LXXXVI. THE CLEFT WAY.—About five miles to the south-west of Daulis the road, after skirting the eastern foot of the mighty mass of Mount Parnassus, turns sharply to the west and begins to ascend through the long, narrow, and profound valley which leads to Delphi. Just at the point where the road turns westward and before it begins the long ascent it is joined from the south-east by the direct road from Lebadea and Thebes. The meeting of the three roads—the road from Daulis, the road from Delphi, and the road from Thebes—is the Cleft Way or Triple Road, the scene of the legendary murder of Laius by Oedipus. It is now known as the Cross Road of Megas, after the gallant Johannes Megas, who met his death here in July 1856, while exterminating a band of brigands with a small troop of soldiers. His monument, on a rock at the meeting of the roads, bears a few verses in modern Greek. Apart from any legendary associations the scene is one of the wildest and grandest in Greece, recalling in its general features, though on a vastly greater scale, the mouth of Glencoe. On both sides of the valley the mountains tower abruptly in huge precipices; the cliffs of Parnassus on the northern side of the valley are truly sublime. Not a trace of human habitation is to be seen. All is desolation and silence. A more fitting spot could hardly be found for the scene of a memorable tragedy.

LXXXVII. DELPHI.—The site of Delphi, till lately occupied by the modern village of Kastri, is in the highest degree striking and impressive. The city lay at the southern foot of the tremendous cliffs of Parnassus, which form a sheer wall of rock, about eight hundred feet high. Over these frightful precipices Philomelus drove some of the defeated Locrians. Just at the angle where this vast wall of rock bends round towards the south it is rent from top to bottom by a deep and gloomy gorge, some twenty feet wide, where there is a fine echo. Facing each other across this narrow chasm rise two stupendous cliffs, whose peaked summits tower considerably above the rest of the line of cliffs. They are nearly perpendicular in front, and perfectly so where they fall sheer down into the gorge. The eastern of the two cliffs was called Hyampia in antiquity; from its top Aesop is said to have been hurled by the Delphians. It has been suggested, though perhaps without sufficient reason, that when the later writers of antiquity, especially the Roman poets, speak of the two summits of Parnassus, they are really referring to these two cliffs. In point of fact the cliffs are far indeed from being near the summit of Parnassus; but seen from Delphi they completely hide the higher slopes of the mountain. In winter or wet weather a torrent comes foaming down the gorge in a cascade about two hundred feet high, bringing down the water from the higher slopes of the mountain. At the mouth of the gorge, under the eastern cliff, is the rock-cut basin of the perennial Castalian spring, a few paces above the highway. The water from the spring joins the stream from the gorge, which, after passing over the road, plunges into a deep rocky lyn or glen, which it has scooped out for itself in the steep side of the mountain. Down this glen the stream descends to join the Plistus, which flows along the bottom of the Delphic valley from east to west, at a great depth below the town.

From the cliffs at the back of Delphi the ground slopes away so steeply to the bed of the Plistus that it is only by means of a succession of artificial terraces, rising in tiers above each other, that the soil can be cultivated and made fit for habitation. There are about thirty of these terraces, supported by stone walls, mostly of polygonal masonry. The sanctuary of Apollo occupies only the five or six highest terraces at the foot of the cliffs, on the western side of the Castalian gorge. So high does it stand above the bottom of the valley that twenty minutes are needed to descend the steep terraced slope to the bed of the Plistus. Corn is grown on the terraces below the sanctuary; and the slopes on the eastern side of the Castalian gorge are wooded with fine olive and mulberry trees. Across the valley, on the southern side of the Plistus, rise the bare precipitous cliffs of Mount Cirphis, capped with fir-woods. From the western end of the precipices which rise at the back of Delphi a high rocky ridge projects southward toward the bed of the Plistus. This ridge closes the valley of Delphi on the west, shutting out all view of the Crisaean plain and the gulf of Corinth, though a glimpse of the waters of the gulf is obtained from the stadium, the highest part of Delphi.

Thus, enclosed by a rocky ridge on the west, by tremendous precipices on the north and east, and faced on the south, across the valley of the Plistus, by the lower but still precipitous sides of Mount Cirphis, Delphi lay in a secluded mountain valley; and rising on terraces in a semicircular shape, it resembled an immense theatre, to which it has justly been compared by ancient and modern writers. The whole scene is one of stern and awful majesty, well fitted to be the seat of a great religious capital. In respect of natural scenery no contrast could well be more striking than that between the two great religious capitals of ancient Greece, Delphi and Olympia—Delphi clinging to the rugged side of barren mountains, with frowning precipices above and a profound glen below; Olympia stretched out on the level margin of a river that winds in stately curves among the corn-fields and vineyards of a smiling valley set between soft wooded hills.

LXXXVIII. AESCHINES AT DELPHI.—That the place of assembly of the Amphictyonic Council at Delphi must have been situated near the chapel of St. Elias is shown by a passage of Aeschines, in which he says that the Cirrhaean plain lay spread beneath and in full view of the meeting-place of the Amphictyonic Council. The orator himself, he tells us, was one of the Athenian representatives at a meeting of the Council. Addressing it he pointed to the smiling and peaceful plain stretched at their feet, with its olive-groves and corn-fields, its cottages and potteries, and in the distance the shining waters of the gulf, with the port-town visible beside it. “You see,” he cried, “yonder plain tilled by the men of Amphissa and the potteries and cottages they have built. You see with your eyes the fortifications of the cursed and execrated port. You know for yourselves that these men levy tolls and take money from the sacred harbour.” He then reminded his hearers of the oath sworn by their ancestors that this fair plain should lie a wilderness for ever. His words were received with a tumult of applause, and next day at dawn the men of Delphi, armed with shovels and mattocks, marched down into the plain, razed the fortifications of the port to the ground, and gave the houses to the flames. It is refreshing to know that on their way back they were hotly pursued by the Amphissaeans in arms and had to run for their lives. This was the beginning of the chain of events which in a few months more brought Philip at the head of a Macedonian army into Greece and ended in the overthrow of Greek freedom at Chaeronea.

The view described by the orator, whose ill-omened eloquence brought all these miseries and disasters in its train, is to be obtained, not from the platform on which the chapel of St. Elias stands, but from a point a little way to the south-west of it, where the traveller coming from Delphi reaches the end of the high ridge that shuts in the valley of Delphi on the west. Here as he turns the corner the whole Crisaean plain, now covered with luxuriant olive-woods, comes suddenly into sight. The scene is again as rich and peaceful as it was before Aeschines raised his voice, like the scream of some foul bird snuffing the carrion afar off, and turned it into a desert. We may suppose either that in his time the Amphictyonic Council met at this point, or, what is far likelier, that the orator’s description of that day’s doings is more graphic than correct.

LXXXIX. THE PYTHIAN TUNE.—Sacadas was said to be the first who played the Pythian air on the flute at Delphi. The tune has been described for us by Pollux and Strabo. The melody, intended to represent musically Apollo’s combat with the dragon, was played by a single flute, but now and then the trumpets and fifes struck in. First Apollo was heard preparing for the fight and choosing his ground. Then followed the challenge to the dragon, then the battle, indicated by an iambic measure. Here probably the music imitated the twanging of the silver bow and the swish of the arrows as they sped to their mark. It is expressly said that the gnashing of the monster’s teeth was heard, as he ground them together in his agony. Here the trumpets came in, not in long-drawn winding bouts, but in short single blasts, one perhaps for each arrow-shot, every flourish marking a hit. The shrill wailing notes of the fifes mimicked the dragon’s dying screams. Then the flute broke into a light lilting air, beating time to the triumphal measure trodden by the victorious god.

XC. THE LACEDAEMONIAN TROPHY AT DELPHI.—The many statues of gods, admirals, and generals which formed the proud trophy of the Lacedaemonians at Delphi appear to have stood like soldiers in stiff formal rows at different heights on the steps of the pedestal, scowling at the Athenian trophy which probably faced them on the opposite side of the road.

This Lacedaemonian trophy, commemorative of the great naval victory of Aegospotami, is repeatedly referred to by Plutarch. He says that from the spoils of the battle Lysander set up bronze statues of himself and of all the admirals, together with golden stars of the Dioscuri; and elsewhere he tells us that in his time these old bronze statues of the admirals were covered with a beautiful blue patina, the growth of ages, so that people spoke of them as being true blue salts. Cicero specially mentions the statue of Lysander at Delphi. The reason for dedicating golden stars of the Dioscuri would seem to have been that Castor and Pollux were said to have appeared on the side of the Lacedaemonians at the battle of Aegospotami, just as they appeared on the Roman side at the battle of Lake Regillus. It is related that after the battle of Leuctra, which gave the death-blow to Spartan prestige and power, the golden stars disappeared from Delphi and were never seen again, as if in token that the star of Sparta’s fortunes had set. The dedication of the stars in memory of the appearance of the Dioscuri is an interesting confirmation of the view that the twins Castor and Pollux were the Morning and Evening Star, the equivalents of the Sanscrit Aśvins. It is notable that in Roman history the appearances of the Dioscuri as messengers of victory seem always to have taken place in the same season of the year, namely at the summer solstice or the first full moon after it. By a curious coincidence the old chronicler Holinshed reports that on the eve of the battle of Bannockburn, which was also Midsummer Eve, two men appeared at Glastonbury saying they were going to help the Scots in a battle next day; and a single knight in bright armour rode into Aberdeen on the afternoon of the battle and was seen to pass over into the Orkneys in the evening.[9]

Footnote 9:

For this modern instance I have to thank my friend Mr. R. A. Neil, of Pembroke College.

XCI. THE GODS IN BATTLE.—Apollo,

Artemis, and Athena are said to have appeared in person fighting for the Greeks against the Gauls. The heroes Theseus and Echetlus were seen combating on the Greek side at Marathon. In the great sea-fight of Salamis phantoms of armed men were perceived stretching out their hands from Aegina to protect the Greek ships; they were believed to be the Aeacids, who had been prayed to for help before the battle. The spirit of Aristomenes was said to have fought for the Thebans against his old foes the Spartans at Leuctra. The Mantineans fancied they saw Poseidon warring on their side against the Lacedaemonians. In a battle between the people of Crotona and the people of Locri, two unknown youths, of wondrous stature, in strange armour, clad in scarlet and riding white horses, were seen fighting on the wings of the Locrian army; after the battle they disappeared. These two youths were probably regarded as Castor and Pollux, whose reported appearance at the battle of the Lake Regillus, charging with lances in rest at the head of the Roman cavalry, is well known. It is said that when Alaric approached Athens he beheld Athena in full armour patrolling the walls, and Achilles guarding them with the same fiery valour with which he had avenged the death of Patroclus; terrified by the vision, the fierce barbarian gave up all thought of attacking the city. Similarly in the battles between the Spaniards and the Indians of Mexico it is affirmed by grave historians that St. James, the patron Saint of Spain, was seen tilting on his milk-white steed at the head of the Christian chivalry. In one of these battles a lady robed in white, supposed to be the Virgin, was visible by the side of St. James, throwing dust in the eyes of the infidels. The stout old chronicler Bernal Diaz, who fought in these wars, confesses that for his sins he was not found worthy to behold the glorious Apostle.[10]

Footnote 10:

For these Spanish parallels I am indebted to my lamented friend the late W. Robertson Smith. Niebuhr had previously made exactly the same comparison.

XCII. THE SIBYL’S WISH.—The author of the _Exhortation to the Greeks_ was shown at Cumae a bronze bottle in which the remains of the Sibyl were said to be preserved. Trimalchio in Petronius says: “At Cumae I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the children said to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you wish?’ she used to answer, 'I wish to die.'” Ampelius tells us that the Sibyl was said to be shut up in an iron cage which hung from a pillar in an ancient temple of Hercules at Argyrus. It has been pointed out by Dr. M. R. James that parallels to the story of the Sibyl’s wish are to be found in German folk-tales. One of these tales runs as follows: “Once upon a time there was a girl in London who wished to live for ever, so they say:

‘London, London is a fine town. A maiden prayed to live for ever.’

And still she lives and hangs in a basket in a church, and every St. John’s Day about noon she eats a roll of bread.” Another story tells of a lady who resided at Danzig and was so rich and so blest with all that life can give that she wished to live always. So when she came to her latter end, she did not really die but only looked like dead, and very soon they found her in a hollow of a pillar in the church, half standing and half sitting, motionless. She stirred never a limb, but they saw quite plainly that she was alive, and she sits there down to this blessed day. Every New Year’s Day the sacristan comes and puts a morsel of the holy bread in her mouth, and that is all she has to live on. Long, long has she rued her fatal wish who set this transient life above the eternal joys of heaven. A third story relates how a noble damsel cherished the same foolish wish for immortality. So they put her in a basket and hung her up in a church, and there she hangs and never dies, though many, many a year has come and gone since they put her there. But every year on a certain day they give her a roll and she eats it and cries out “For ever! for ever! for ever!” And when she has so cried she falls silent again till the same time next year, and so it will go on for ever and for ever. A fourth story, taken down, near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St. Mary at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.

XCIII. ORPHEUS IN HELL.—Why in his picture of hell the painter Polygnotus should have depicted Orpheus touching the branches of a willow-tree is not clear. Pausanias has himself rightly pointed out that willows grew in the grove of Proserpine, but that does not suffice to explain the gesture of Orpheus in the picture. Mr. J. Six ingeniously suggests that when Orpheus went to hell to fetch the soul of his lost Eurydice he may have carried in his hand a willow-branch, just as Aeneas carried the Golden Bough, to serve as a passport or ‘open Sesame’ to unlock the gates of Death to a living man, and that in memory of this former deed the painter may have depicted the bard touching the willow. Virgil tells how at sight of the Golden Bough, “not seen for long,” the surly Charon turned his crazy bark to shore and received Aeneas on board. Mr. Six surmises that here the words “not seen for long” refer to the time when Orpheus, like Aeneas, had passed the ferry with the Golden Bough in his hand. If he is right, Polygnotus took a different view of that mystic branch from Virgil, who certainly regarded it as a glorified mistletoe. Professor C. Robert accepts Mr. Six’s explanation. Formerly he held that Pausanias had misinterpreted the gesture of Orpheus. The bard, on Professor Robert’s earlier view, was depicted merely holding the lyre with one hand and playing on it with the other, and a branch of the willow under which he sat drooped down and touched the hand that swept the strings. This view, which Professor Robert has wisely abandoned, is open to several objections. It substitutes a commonplace gesture, which Pausanias could hardly have so grossly mistaken, for a remarkable one which, however it is to be explained, had clearly struck Pausanias as unusual and significant. Again, if Orpheus had been depicted playing, would not some one have been represented listening? But, so far as appears from Pausanias’s description, not a soul was paying any heed to the magic strains of the great minstrel. It seems better, therefore, to suppose that, like blind Thamyris, he sat sad and silent, dreaming of life in the bright world, of love and music.

XCIV. THE ACHERON.—The Acheron is the river now known as the Suliotiko or Phanariotiko which comes down from the mountains of the once famous Suli and winds, a sluggish, turbid, and weedy stream, through the wide plain of Phanari, traversing some swamps or meres before it reaches the sea. These swamps, which extend nearly to the sea, and never dry up though they shrink in summer, are the Acherusian lake. The plain, where it is not too marshy, is covered with fields of maize and rice and meadows where herds of buffaloes browse. A few plane-trees and low tamarisks fringe the margin of the winding river. Otherwise the plain is mostly treeless. On its eastern side rise, like a huge grey wall, the wild and barren mountains of Suli.

Before entering the plain, on its passage from these rugged highlands, the Acheron flows through a profound and gloomy gorge, one of the darkest and deepest of the glens of Greece. On either side precipices rise sheer from the water’s edge to a height of hundreds of feet, their ledges and crannies tufted with dwarf oaks and shrubs. Higher up, where the sides of the glen recede from the perpendicular, the mountains rise to a height of over three thousand feet, the black pine-woods which cling to their precipitous sides adding to the sombre magnificence of the scene. A precarious footpath leads along a perilous ledge high up on the mountain-side, from which the traveller gazes down into the depths of the tremendous ravine, where the deep and rapid river may be seen rushing and foaming along, often plunging in a cascade into a dark abyss, but so far below him that even the roar of the waterfall is lost in mid-air before it can reach his ear.

At the point where the river emerges from the defile into the plain, there are a few cottages with some ruins of a church and fortress on the right bank. The place is called Glyky. The church seems to have occupied the site of an ancient temple; some fragments of granite columns and pieces of a white marble cornice, adorned with a pattern of acanthus leaves, may be seen lying about. Here, perhaps, was the seat of that Oracle of the Dead where the envoys of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, summoned up the ghost of his murdered wife Melissa, and where Orpheus vainly sought to bring back his lost Eurydice from the world of shades.

XCV. A RIDE ACROSS PARNASSUS.—We left the new village of Delphi, which stands a little to the south-west of the ancient sanctuary, shortly after eight o’clock, and at once struck up the mountain-side at the back of the village. The path for a good way is the same as that to the Corycian cave. It climbs the bare rocky face of the mountain in a series of zigzags, from which as we rose higher and higher a wide prospect opened up behind us to the Gulf of Corinth and the distant mountains of Peloponnese. On reaching the top of this long and steep declivity we found ourselves on the edge of an expanse of comparatively level though broken ground, sparsely wooded with pines, beyond which soared the upper slopes of Parnassus, its summit lightly capped with snow. The high plateau on which we now stood is bounded on the north by an outlying spur of Parnassus, clothed with pine-forest, in the southern face of which is the Corycian cave. Instead of crossing the tableland in the direction of the cave, we skirted its south-western corner, keeping the wooded mountain on our right. The path continued to wind for hours along grey rocky slopes where pines grew more or less thickly. On either hand rose sombre mountains of the same general character—grey and rocky with patches of pine-forest on their sides. Now and then a little moss relieved with its verdure the barrenness of the rocks, and a stony glade through which we passed was speckled with pale purple crocuses. On these heights the air felt chilly, for the season was late October, and a little snow—the first of autumn—had fallen in the night, just touching with white the peaks of Parnassus and the high Locrian mountains in the west. The morning had been bright when we left Delphi, but as the day wore on the sky became overcast, its cold and lowering aspect harmonising well with the wild and desolate scenery through which we rode. The jingling of the mule-bells and the cries of the muleteers were almost the only sounds that broke the silence, though once in the forest to the right we heard the clapper-like note of a pelican, and once in an open glade we passed some woodmen hewing pine-logs. In time, the path beginning to descend, the rocks gave place to earthy slopes; a little pale thin grass and some withered ferns grew in the glades; the sun shone out between the clouds, and as we descended into the warmer lowlands it seemed as if we were pursuing the departing summer.

In about four hours from Delphi high purple mountains, sunlit and flecked with cloud-shadows, appeared in the north through and above the pine-forest. Farther down the forest grew thin and then disappeared from the stony bottom of the valley, though the upper slopes of the mountains on either side were still wrapped in their dark mantle of pines. It was near one o’clock when we reached Ano-Agoriani, a village nestling among trees in a hollow of the mountains and traversed by a murmuring brook. After a halt of about an hour we quitted the village and descended into the deep bed of the stream; then ascending steeply its western bank we pursued our way along the rocky mountain-side high above the glen. In three-quarters of an hour we came in sight of the broad valley of the Cephisus lying stretched below us and backed by mountains on the north. By steep, rocky, winding paths we now descended into the valley, and at a quarter to four reached Kato-Agoriani. The village stands just at the foot of Parnassus. About a mile to the east the grey ruined walls and towers of Lilaea climb a steep and rugged hill-side—the last fall of Parnassus to the plain. The situation of the place at the northern foot of the mountain is such that it can receive very little sun at any time of the year, which, though an advantage in the torrid heat of a Greek summer, must render the winter climate severe. As we rode downwards to Kato-Agoriani the sun set behind the mountains at our back soon after three o’clock, but it was not till nearly two hours afterwards that his light faded from the hills on the opposite or northern side of the valley. This may illustrate the remarks of Pausanias as to the climate of Lilaea.

XCVI. PERICLES.—Pericles, a great Athenian statesman, and one of the most remarkable men of antiquity, was the son of Xanthippus, who commanded the Greeks at the battle of Mycale. By his mother Agariste, niece of Clisthenes, who reformed the democracy at Athens after the expulsion of the Pisistratidae, he was connected both with the old princely line of Sicyon and with the great but unfortunate house of the Alcmaeonidae. The date of his birth is unknown, but his youth must have fallen in the stirring times of the great Persian war. From his friendship with the poet Anacreon, his father would seem to have been a man of taste, and as he stood in relations of hospitality to the Spartan kings his house was no doubt a political as well as literary centre. Pericles received the best education which the age could supply. For masters he had Pythoclides and the distinguished musician Damon, who infused into his music lessons a tincture of philosophy, whereby he incurred the suspicions of the vulgar, and received the honour of ostracism. Pericles listened also to the subtle dialectics of the Eleatic Zeno. But the man who swayed him most deeply and permanently was the philosopher Anaxagoras. The influence of the speculative genius and dignified and gentle character of the philosopher who resigned his property that he might turn his thoughts more steadily to heaven, which he called his home, and who begged as his last honour that the school-children might have a holiday on the day he died, can be traced alike in the intellectual breadth and the elevated moral tone of the pupil, in his superiority to vulgar superstitions, and in the unruffled serenity which he preserved throughout the storms of political life. It was probably the grand manner of Pericles even more than his eloquence that won him the surname of Olympian Zeus.[11]

Footnote 11:

It is said that once, when Pericles was transacting business in public, a low fellow railed at him all day long, and at nightfall dogged him to his house, reviling him in the foulest language. Pericles took no notice of him till he reached his own door, when he bade one of the servants take a torch and light the man home.

In his youth he distinguished himself in the field, but eschewed politics, fearing, it is said, the suspicions which might be excited in the populace not only by his wealth, high birth, and powerful friends, but by the striking resemblance to the tyrant Pisistratus which old men traced in his personal appearance, musical voice, and flowing speech. But when the banishment of Themistocles and the death of Aristides had somewhat cleared the political stage, Pericles came forward as the champion of the democratic or progressive party, in opposition to Cimon, the leader of the aristocratic or conservative party. The two leaders differed hardly less than their policies. Both indeed were men of aristocratic birth and temper, honourable, brave, and generous, faithful and laborious in the service of Athens. But Cimon was a true sailor, blunt, jovial, free-handed, who sang a capital song, and was always equally ready to drink or fight, to whose artless mind (he was innocent of even a smattering of letters[12]) the barrack-room life of the barbarous Spartans seemed the type of human perfectibility, and whose simple programme was summed up in the maxim “fight the Persians.” Naturally the new ideas of political progress and intellectual development had no place in his honest head; naturally he was a sturdy supporter of the good old times of which, to the popular mind, he was the best embodiment. Pericles, grave, studious, reserved, was himself penetrated by those ideas of progress and culture which he undertook to convert into political and social realities; philosophy was his recreation; during the whole course of his political career he never accepted but once an invitation to dinner, and he was never to be seen walking except between his house and the popular assembly and senate-house. He husbanded his patrimony and regulated his domestic affairs with rigid economy that he might escape both the temptation and the suspicion of enriching himself at the public expense.

Footnote 12:

It is amusing to read in Plutarch of this stout old salt sitting in judgment on the respective merits of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The steps by which he rose to the commanding position which he occupied in later life cannot be traced with certainty. According to Plutarch, Pericles, whose fortune did not allow him to imitate the profuse hospitality by which Cimon endeared himself to the people, sought to outbid him by a lavish distribution of the public moneys among the poorer classes; this device was suggested to him by Damonides, says Plutarch on the authority of Aristotle. We may doubt the motive alleged by Plutarch, but we cannot doubt the fact that Pericles did extend, if not originate, the practice of distributing large sums among the citizens either as gratuities or as payment for services rendered—a practice which afterwards attained most mischievous proportions. According to Plato, it was a common saying that Pericles, by the system of payments which he introduced, had corrupted the Athenians, rendering them idle, cowardly, talkative, and avaricious. It was Pericles who introduced the payment of jurymen, and, as there were six thousand of them told off annually for duty, of whom a great part sat daily, the disbursement from the treasury was great, while the poor and idle were encouraged to live at the public expense. But the payment for attendance on the public assembly or parliament (of which all citizens of mature age were members), though probably suggested by the payment of the jurymen, was not introduced by Pericles, and indeed does not seem to have existed during his lifetime. It was he who instituted the payment of the citizens for military service—a measure but for which the Athenians would probably not have prolonged the Peloponnesian War as they did, and in particular would not have been so ready to embark on the fatal Sicilian expedition.

There was more justification, perhaps, for the practice, originated by Pericles, of supplying the poorer citizens from the public treasury with the price of admission to the theatre. For in an age when the study of the poets formed a chief element of education, and when the great dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were being put on the stage in all their freshness, such a measure might almost be regarded as a state provision for the education of the citizens. It was part of the policy of Pericles at once to educate and delight the people by numerous and splendid festivals, processions, and shows. But the good was mixed with seeds of evil, which took root and spread, till, in the days of Demosthenes, the money which should have been spent in fighting the enemies of Athens was squandered in spectacles and pageants. The Spectacular Fund or _Theorikon_ has been called the cancer of Athens. Vast sums were further spent by Pericles in adorning the city with those buildings, which even in their ruins are the wonder of the world. Amongst these were the Parthenon, or Temple of the Virgin, and the Erechtheum, both on the acropolis, the former completed in 438 B.C., the latter left unfinished at Pericles’s death; the magnificent Propylaea or vestibule to the acropolis, built between 437 and 432; and the Odeum or music-hall, on the south-eastern slope of the acropolis, completed before 444. The musical contests instituted by Pericles, and for which he himself laid down the rules and acted as judge, took place in the Odeum. Many artists and architects were entrusted with the execution of these great works, but under the direction of the mastermind of Phidias, sculptor, architect, painter—the Michelangelo of antiquity.

But Pericles fortified as well as beautified Athens. It had been the policy of Themistocles to make her primarily a naval and commercial power, and to do so he strengthened the marine, and gave to the city as far as possible the advantages of an insular situation by means of fortifications, which rendered both it and its port impregnable on the land side. By thus basing the Athenian state on commerce instead of, like Solon, on agriculture, he at the same time transferred the political predominance to the democratic or progressive party, which is as naturally recruited from a commercial as a conservative or aristocratic party is from an agricultural population. This policy was fully accepted and carried out by Pericles. It was in his time and probably by his advice that the Long Walls were built, which, connecting Athens with Piraeus, converted the capital and its seaport into one vast fortress. Further, in order to train the Athenians in seamanship, he kept a fleet of sixty ships at sea eight months out of every year.

The expenses entailed by these great schemes were chiefly defrayed by the annual tribute, which the confederates of Athens originally furnished for the purpose of waging war against Persia, but which Athens, as head of the league, subsequently applied to her own purposes. If, as seems likely, the transference of the treasury of the league from Delos to Athens, which sealed the conversion of the Athenian headship into an empire, took place between 460 and 454, the step was probably suggested or supported by Pericles, and at all events he managed the fund after its transference. But, though the diversion of the fund from its original purpose probably did not begin with Pericles, yet, once established, he maintained it unwaveringly. The Athenians, he held, fulfilled the trust committed to them by defending their allies against all comers, and the tribute was their wages, which it was their right and privilege to expend in works which by employing labour and stimulating commerce were a present benefit, and by their beauty would be “a joy for ever.” That Athens ruled by force, that her empire was in fact a tyranny, he fully admitted, but he justified that tyranny by the high and glorious ends which it subserved.

The rise of Pericles to power, though it cannot be followed step by step, has an obvious and sufficient explanation in his combined wisdom and eloquence. Plato traces his eloquence largely to the influence of Anaxagoras; intercourse with that philosopher, he says, filled the mind of Pericles with lofty speculations and a true conception of the nature of intelligence, and hence his oratory possessed the intellectual grandeur and artistic finish characteristic of the highest eloquence. The range and compass of his rhetoric were wonderful, extending from the most winning persuasion to the most overwhelming denunciation. The comic poets of the day, in general very unfriendly to him, speak with admiration of his oratory: “greatest of Grecian tongues,” says Cratinus; “persuasion sat on his lips, such was his charm,” and “he alone of the orators left his sting in his hearers,” says Eupolis; “he lightened, he thundered,” says Aristophanes. His speeches were prepared with conscientious care; before rising to speak he used to pray that no inappropriate word might fall from his lips. He left no written speeches, but the few sayings of his which have come down to us reveal a passionate imagination such as breathes in the fragments of Sappho. Thus, in speaking of those who had died in war, he said that the youth had perished from the city like the spring from the year. He called the hostile island of Aegina “the eyesore of the Piraeus,” and declared that he saw war “lowering from Peloponnese.” Three of his speeches have been reported by Thucydides, who may have heard them, but, though their substance may be correctly recorded, in passing through the medium of the historian’s dispassionate mind they have been shorn of the orator’s imaginative glow, and in their cold iron logic are hardly to be distinguished from the other speeches in Thucydides. An exception to this is the speech which Thucydides reports as having been delivered by Pericles over the slain in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. This speech stands quite apart from the others; and as well in particular touches (for example, in the saying that “the grave of great men is the world”) as in its whole tenor we catch the ring of a great orator, such as Thucydides with all his genius was not. It is probably a fairly close report of the speech actually delivered by Pericles.

The first public appearance of Pericles of which we have record probably fell about 463. When Cimon, on his return from the expedition to Thasos, was tried on the utterly improbable charge of having been bribed by the Macedonian king to betray the interests of Athens, Pericles was appointed by the people to assist in conducting the prosecution; but, more perhaps from a conviction of the innocence of the accused than, as was said, in compliance with the entreaties of Cimon’s sister Elpinice, he did not press the charge, and Cimon was acquitted. Not long afterwards Pericles struck a blow at the conservative party by attacking the Areopagus, a council composed of life-members who had worthily discharged the duties of archon. The nature of the functions of the Areopagus at this period is but little known; it seems to have had a general supervision over the magistrates, the popular assembly, and the citizens, and to have exercised this supervision in an eminently conservative spirit. It sat also as a court for the trial of certain crimes, especially murder. Pericles appears to have deprived it of nearly all its functions, except its jurisdiction in cases of murder. The poet Aeschylus composed his _Eumenides_ in vindication of the ancient privileges of the Areopagus. Though Pericles was the real author of the attack on the Areopagus, the measure was nominally carried by Ephialtes. It was, indeed, part of Pericles’s policy to keep in the background, and to act as far as possible through agents, reserving himself for great occasions. Ephialtes, a friend of Pericles, and a patriot of inflexible integrity, paid dearly for the distinction; he fell by the hand of an assassin employed by the oligarchical party—an event the more striking from the rarity of political assassinations in Greek history. The popular party seems to have immediately followed up its victory over the Areopagus by procuring the ostracism of Cimon, which strengthened the hands of Pericles by removing his most influential opponent. Pericles took part in the battle of Tanagra and bore himself with desperate bravery. After the battle Cimon was recalled from banishment, and it was Pericles who proposed and carried the decree for his recall.

In 454 Pericles led an Athenian squadron from the port of Pegae on the Corinthian Gulf, landed at Sicyon, and defeated the inhabitants who ventured to oppose him; then, taking with him a body of Achaeans, he crossed to Acarnania, and besieged the town of Oeniadae, but had to return home without capturing it. Not long afterwards he conducted a successful expedition to the Thracian Chersonese, where he not only strengthened the Greek cities by the addition of a thousand Athenian colonists, but also protected them against the incursions of the barbarians by fortifying the isthmus from sea to sea. This was only one of Pericles’s many measures for extending and strengthening the naval empire of Athens. Colonies were established by him at various times in Naxos, Andros, Oreus in Euboea, Brea in Macedonia, and Aegina. They served the double purpose of establishing the Athenian power in distant parts and of relieving the pressure of population at home by providing the poorer citizens with lands. Somewhat different were the famous colonies established under Pericles’s influence at Thurii in Italy, on the site of the ancient Sybaris, and at Amphipolis on the Strymon, for, though planted under the conduct of Athens, they were not exclusively Athenian colonies, other Greeks being allowed, and even invited, to take part in them. This was especially true of Thurii, which was in a manner a national Greek colony, and never stood in a relation of subjection to Athens. On one occasion Pericles sailed at the head of a splendid armament to the Black Sea, where he helped and encouraged the Greek cities and overawed the barbarians. At Sinope he left a force of ships and men, under the gallant Lamachus, to co-operate with the inhabitants against the tyrant Timesileus, and on the expulsion of the tyrant and his party he carried a decree for the despatch of six hundred Athenian colonists to Sinope, to occupy the lands vacated by the exiles. But, with the sober wisdom which characterised him, Pericles never allowed his plans to exceed the bounds of the possible; he was no political dreamer like Alcibiades, to be dazzled with the vision of a universal Athenian empire in Greece, Italy, and Africa, such as floated before the minds of many in that and the following generations. The disastrous expedition which the Athenians sent to Egypt, to support the rebel Inarus against Persia, received no countenance from Pericles.

When Cimon died in 449 the aristocratical party sought to counterbalance the power of Pericles by putting forward Thucydides, son of Melesias, as the new head of the party. He seems to have been an honest patriot, but, as the event proved, he was no match for Pericles. The Sacred War in 448 showed once more that Pericles knew how to defend the interests of Athens. The Phocians, under the protection of Athens, had wrested the control of the Delphic oracle from their enemies the Delphians. The latter were friendly to Sparta, and accordingly the Spartans marched into Phocis and restored the oracle to the Delphians. When they had departed, Pericles, at the head of an Athenian force, placed the oracle once more in the hands of the Phocians. As the seat of the great oracle, Delphi was to ancient Greece much what Rome was to mediaeval Europe, and the friendship of the god, or of his priests, was no small political advantage.

When the Athenians despatched a small force under Tolmides to crush a rising in Boeotia, they did so in spite of the warnings of Pericles. These warnings were soon justified by the unfortunate battle of Coronea, which deprived Athens at a blow of the continental dominion she had acquired a few years before by the battle of Oenophyta. The island of Euboea now revolted from Athens, and hardly had Pericles crossed over with an army to reduce it when word came that the Megarians had massacred the Athenian garrison, and, in league with Corinth, Sicyon, and Epidaurus, were up in arms, while a Peloponnesian army under King Plistoanax was on the point of invading Attica. Pericles recrossed in haste to Attica. The Peloponnesians returned home, having advanced no farther than Eleusis and Thria. It was said that Pericles had bribed Cleandridas; certain it is that both Cleandridas and Plistoanax were charged at Sparta with having misconducted the expedition and were found guilty. Having saved Attica, Pericles returned to Euboea, reduced it to subjection, expelled the Histiaeans, and settled the Athenian colony of Oreus on their lands.

The thirty years’ peace, concluded soon afterwards with Sparta, was probably in large measure the work of Pericles. The Athenians had evacuated Boeotia immediately after the battle of Coronea, and by the terms of the peace they now renounced their other continental possessions—Achaia, Troezen, Nisaea, and Pegae. The peace left Pericles at liberty to develop his schemes for promoting the internal welfare of Athens, and for making it the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of Greece. But first he had to settle accounts with his political rival Thucydides; the struggle was soon decided by the ostracism of the latter in 444. Thenceforward to the end of his life Pericles guided the destinies of Athens alone; in the words of the historian Thucydides, the government was in name a democracy, but in fact it was the rule of the first citizen. The unparalleled ascendency which he wielded so long over the fickle people is one of the best proofs of his extraordinary genius. He owed it entirely to his personal character, and he used it for the wisest and purest purposes. He was neither a vulgar demagogue to truckle to the passions and caprices of the mob, nor a vulgar despot to cow it by a hireling soldiery; he was a citizen among citizens, who obeyed him because they trusted him, because they knew that in his hands the honour and interests of Athens were safe. The period during which he ruled Athens was the happiest and greatest in her history, as it was one of the greatest ages of the world. Other ages have had their bright particular stars; the age of Pericles is the Milky Way of great men. In his lifetime there lived and worked at Athens the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Cratinus, Crates, the philosophers Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, the astronomer Meton, the painter Polygnotus, and the sculptors Myron and Phidias. Contemporary with these, though not resident at Athens, were Herodotus, the father of history; Hippocrates, the father of medicine; Pindar, “the Theban eagle”; the sculptor Polyclitus; and the philosophers Empedocles and Democritus, the latter joint author with Leucippus of the atomic theory. When Pericles died, other stars were rising or soon to rise above the horizon—the historians Thucydides and Xenophon, the poets Eupolis and Aristophanes, the orators Lysias and Isocrates, and the gifted but unscrupulous Alcibiades. Plato was born shortly before or after the death of Pericles. Of this brilliant circle Pericles was the centre. His generous and richly-endowed nature responded to all that was beautiful and noble not only in literature and art but in life, and it is with justice that the age of Pericles has received its name from the man in whom, more than in any other, all the various lines of Greek culture met and were harmonised. In this perfect harmony and completeness of nature, and in the classic calm which was the fruit of it, Pericles is the type of the ideal spirit, not of his own age only, but of antiquity.

It seems to have been shortly after the ostracism of Thucydides that Pericles conceived the plan of summoning a general congress of all the Greek states to be held at Athens. Its objects were the restoration of the temples which the Persians had destroyed, the fulfilment of the vows made during the war, and the establishment of a general peace and the security of the sea. Invitations were sent to the Greeks of Asia, the islands from Lesbos to Rhodes, the Hellespont, Thrace, Byzantium, Boeotia, Phocis, Peloponnese, Locris, Acarnania, Ambrada, and Thessaly. The aim of Pericles seems to have been to draw the bonds of union closer between the Greeks and to form a national federation. The beneficent project was defeated by the short-sighted opposition of the Spartans. But if in this scheme Pericles rose above the petty jealousies of Greek politics, another of his measures proves that he shared the Greek prejudices as to birth. At an early period of his career he enacted, or perhaps only revived, a law confining the rights of Athenian citizenship to persons both of whose parents were Athenian citizens. In the year 444, on the occasion of a scrutiny of the list of citizens, nearly five thousand persons claiming to be citizens were proved to be aliens under this law, and were ruthlessly sold into slavery.

The period of the thirty years’ peace was not one of uninterrupted tranquillity for Athens. In 440 a war broke out between the island of Samos (a leading member of the Athenian confederacy) and Miletus. Athens sided with Miletus; Pericles sailed to Samos with an Athenian squadron, and established a democracy in place of the previous oligarchy. After his departure, however, some of the exiled oligarchs, in league with Pissuthnes, satrap of Sardes, collected troops and, crossing over to Samos, overpowered the popular party and revolted from Athens. In this revolt they were joined by Byzantium. The situation was critical; the example set by Samos and Byzantium might be followed by the other confederates. Pericles discerned the danger and met it promptly. He led a squadron of sixty ships against Samos; and, after detaching some vessels to summon reinforcements from Chios and Lesbos, and others to look out for the Phoenician fleet which the Persians were expected to send to the help of Samos, he gave battle with forty-four ships to the Samian fleet of seventy sail and defeated it. Having received reinforcements of sixty-five ships, he landed in Samos and laid siege to the capital. But when he sailed with sixty ships to meet the Phoenician vessels which were reported to be near, the Samians sallied out with their vessels, defeated the besiegers, and remained masters of the sea for fourteen days. On his return, however, they were again blockaded and were compelled to surrender, nine months after the outbreak of the war.

Though Pericles enjoyed the confidence of the people as a whole, his policy and opinions could not fail to rouse the dislike and suspicions of many, and in the last years of his life his enemies combined to assail him. Two points in particular were singled out for attack, his administration of the public moneys and his religious opinions. With regard to the former, there must always be a certain number of persons who will not believe that others can resist and despise a temptation which to themselves would be irresistible; with regard to the latter, the suspicion that Pericles held heretical views on the national religion was doubtless well grounded. At first, however, his enemies did not venture to impeach himself, but struck at him in the persons of his friends. In 432 Phidias was accused of having appropriated some of the gold destined for the adornment of the statue of Athena in the Parthenon. But by the prudent advice of Pericles the golden ornaments had been so attached that they could be taken off and weighed, and when Pericles challenged the accusers to have recourse to this test the accusation fell to the ground. More dangerous, for more true, was the charge against Phidias of having introduced portraits of himself and Pericles into the battle of the Amazons, depicted on the shield of the goddess: the sculptor appeared as a bald old man lifting a stone, while Pericles was represented as fighting an Amazon, his face partly concealed by his raised spear. To the pious Athenians this seemed a desecration of the temple, and accordingly Phidias was clapped into gaol. Whether he died there or at Elis is uncertain.

Even more deeply was Pericles wounded by the accusation levelled at the woman he loved. This was the famous Aspasia, a native of Miletus, whose talents won for her general admiration at Athens. Pericles divorced his wife, a lady of good birth who had borne him two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, but with whom he was unhappy, and attached himself to Aspasia. With her he lived on terms of devoted affection to the end of his life, though, as she was a foreigner, their union was not a legal marriage. She enjoyed a high reputation as a teacher of rhetoric, and seems to have been the centre of a brilliant intellectual society, which included Socrates and his friends. The comic poet, Hermippus, brought her to trial on the double charge of impiety and of corrupting Athenian women for the gratification of Pericles. A decree was further carried by a religious fanatic named Diopithes, whereby all who denied the existence of the gods or discussed the nature of the heavenly bodies were to be tried as criminals. This blow was aimed directly at the aged philosopher Anaxagoras, but indirectly at his pupil Pericles as well as at Aspasia. When this decree was passed, and apparently while the trial of Aspasia was still pending, Pericles himself was called upon by a decree of the people to render an account of the money which had passed through his hands. The result is not mentioned, but we cannot doubt that the matter either was dropped or ended in an acquittal. The perfect integrity of Pericles is proved by the unimpeachable evidence of his contemporary, the historian Thucydides. Aspasia was acquitted, but not before Pericles had exerted all his eloquence in her behalf. Anaxagoras, tried on the charge of impiety, was obliged to quit the city.

It was in the same year (432) that the great contest between Athens and Sparta, known as the Peloponnesian War, broke out. We may dismiss as a vulgar calumny the statement, often repeated in antiquity, but quite unsupported by Thucydides, that the war was brought about by Pericles for the purpose of avoiding a prosecution. The war was in truth inevitable; its real cause was Sparta’s jealousy of the growing power of Athens; its immediate occasion was the help lent by Athens to Corcyra in its war with Corinth. At first, with a hypocritical regard for religion, the Spartans demanded as a condition of peace that the Athenians should expel the race of the Alcmaeonidae (including, of course, Pericles), whose ancestors had been guilty of sacrilege about two centuries before. The Athenians retorted in kind, and, after a little more diplomatic fencing, the Spartans were constrained to show their hand by demanding bluntly that Athens should give back to the Greeks their independence—in other words, renounce her empire and abandon herself to the tender mercies of Sparta. Pericles encouraged the Athenians to reject the demand. He pointed out that Athens possessed advantages over the Peloponnesians in superior wealth and greater unity of counsels. He advised the Athenians, in case of war, not to take the field against the numerically superior forces of the Peloponnesians, but to allow the enemy to ravage Attica at will, while they confined themselves to the defence of the city. Through their fleet they would maintain communication with their island empire, procure supplies, and harass the enemy by sudden descents on his coasts. By pursuing this defensive policy without attempting to extend their empire, he predicted that they would be victorious. The people hearkened to him and replied to the Spartan ultimatum by counter-demands, which they knew would not be accepted. Pericles had not neglected in time of peace to prepare for war, and Athens was now well equipped with men, money, and ships.

In June of the following summer a Peloponnesian army invaded Attica. By the advice of Pericles the rural population, with their movables, had taken refuge in the city, while the cattle had been sent for safety to the neighbouring islands. The sight of their country ravaged under their eyes excited in the Athenians a longing to march out and meet the enemy, but in the teeth of popular clamour and obloquy Pericles steadily adhered to his defensive policy, content to protect the suburbs of Athens with cavalry. Meanwhile Athenian fleets retaliated upon the enemy’s coasts. About the same time, as a punishment for the share that they were supposed to have had in bringing on the war, the whole population of Aegina was expelled from their island to make room for Athenian colonists. This measure, directed by Pericles, relieved to some extent the pressure in the overcrowded capital, and secured a strong outpost on the side of Peloponnese. In the autumn, after the Peloponnesian army had been obliged by want of provisions to quit Attica and disband, Pericles conducted the whole available army of Athens into the territory of Megara, and laid it waste.

It was a custom with the Athenians that at the end of a campaign the bones of those who had fallen in battle should be buried with public honours in the beautiful suburb of Ceramicus, the Westminster of Athens, and the vast crowd of mourners and spectators gathered about the grave was addressed by a citizen chosen for his character and abilities to pay the last tribute of a grateful country to its departed brave. On the present occasion the choice fell on Pericles. Once before, at the close of the Samian War, it had been his lot to discharge a similar duty. The speech which he now delivered, as reported to us by Thucydides, is one of the noblest monuments of antiquity. It is indeed the creed of Athens and of Greece. In its aristocratic republicanism—recognising at once the equal legal rights and the unequal intrinsic merits of individuals—it differs alike from the monarchical spirit of mediaeval and modern Europe, with its artificial class distinctions, and from that reactionary communism which preaches the natural as well as the legal equality of men. In its frank admiration of art and letters and all the social festivals which humanise and cheer life, it is as far from the sullen asceticism and the wild debauchery of the East as the grave and manly simplicity of its style is removed from the fanciful luxuriance of Oriental rhetoric. Finally, in the words of comfort and exhortation addressed to the bereaved, the speech—to adopt Thirlwall’s description of another great effort of Athenian oratory—“ breathes the spirit of that high philosophy which, whether learnt in the schools or from life, has consoled the noblest of our kind in prisons, and on scaffolds, and under every persecution of adverse fortune.”

The fortitude of the Athenians was put to a still severer test in the following summer, when to the horrors of war (the Peloponnesians had again invaded Attica) were added the horrors of the plague, which spread havoc in the crowded city. Pericles himself escaped the scourge, but many of his relations and best friends, amongst them his sister and his two sons Xanthippus and Paralus, were struck down. With the elder of his sons, Xanthippus, a worthless young man, the father had been on bad terms, but the death of his surviving son, at an interval of a few days, affected him deeply, and when he came to lay the wreath upon the corpse, though he struggled hard to maintain his habitual calm, he broke down, and for the first time in his public life burst into a passion of weeping. But neither private grief nor public calamity shook for a moment the lofty courage and resolution with which he continued to the last to oppose a firm front alike to enemies without and to cravens within. While refusing as before to risk a battle in Attica, which he allowed the Peloponnesians to devastate at pleasure, he led in person a powerful fleet against Peloponnese, ravaged the coast, and destroyed the town of Prasiae in Laconia. But the Athenians were greatly disheartened; they sued for peace, and when their suit was rejected by Sparta they vented their ill-humour on Pericles, as the author of the war, by subjecting him to a fine. However, they soon repented of this burst of petulance, and atoned for it by re-electing him general and placing the government once more in his hands. Further, they allowed him to legitimate his son by Aspasia, that his house might not be without an heir. He survived this reconciliation about a year, but his name is not again mentioned in connexion with public affairs. In the autumn of 429 he died. We may well believe that the philosophy which had been the recreation of his happier days supported and consoled him in the clouded evening of his life. To his clement nature it was a peculiar consolation to reflect that he had never carried political differences to the shedding of blood. Indeed, his extraordinary, almost fatherly, tenderness for the life of every Athenian citizen is attested by various of his sayings. On his deathbed, when the friends about him were telling his long roll of glory, rousing himself from a lethargy into which he had fallen, he reminded them of his fairest title to honour: “No Athenian,” he said, “ever put on black through me.”

He was buried amongst the illustrious dead in the Ceramicus, and in after years Phormio, Thrasybulus, and Chabrias slept beside him. In person he was graceful and well made, save for an unusual height of head, which the comic poets were never weary of ridiculing. In the busts of him which we possess, his regular features, with the straight Greek nose and full lips, still preserve an expression of Olympian repose.

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

Transcriber’s Note

The hyphens used in compound words that span line or page breaks in the original text are retained or removed based on the preponderance of examples elsewhere. Several words (‘white-wash’, ‘river-side’, ‘sea-weed’, and ‘water-course’) appear midline both with and without hyphenation, and are given here as printed.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original. The following issues should be noted, along with the resolutions.

49.13 darkest tragedies in Greek history[.] Added.

64.15 bear their country’s misfortunes with a noble Added. [f]ortitude.

286.30 occupied by corn-fields, vineyards, and Added. olive-groves[.]