Part 9

We should be the last to shut out either the earlier or the later associations. We do not forget that Aitôlia, poor in early history, is rich in yet earlier legend, or that it reached the height of its legendary fame when the divine Epeians gave way to the Aitôlian colony which was to grow into the Eleian guardians of Olympia, the special servants of Zeus. As we skirt the inner bay of Krissa, we may think of all the sacred wars from Solôn to Aischinês. Naupaktos has its place alike in legend and in history; in the waters of the outer gulf we remember alike Phormiôn of Athens and Don John of Austria. As we pass by Patras, we remember how well St. Andrew fought for his city against Slave and Saracen. As we look on the southern shore, we remember that there were once Frank Princes of Achaia no less than Frank Dukes of Athens. As we look to the northern shore, we remember that there was a day when the Empire of Servia stretched, without a break, from the Danube to the Corinthian gulf. And, beyond all this, as we skirt the northern shore of the outer gulf, we pass by a spot whose fame in later times outshines every other association from Meleagros to Don John. We pass by Mesolongi, the city of the two immortal sieges, of the long defence where the Fanariot Mavrokordatos, alone among his class, placed his name alongside of the men of Souli and the men of Hydra--of the night of the great sally which places the name of Mesolongi alongside of Ithomê and Eira, of Saguntum, of Numantea, and of Zaragoza. All these memories go to make up the history of the shores along which we pass; still they lie outside its main and special interest. They come either before or after the days when the two shores of the gulf formed the main centre of Hellenic history. The Achaian cities line the shore, and, with our usual protest against vain attempts to call back a past which is gone for ever, for a moment we hardly regret that Slavonic Vostizza has again become Hellenic Aigion. But before we reach the older Achaian shore, we pass by the territory of the city but for whose help those Achaian cities, whose place in earlier history is so small, could never have risen to become one of the two leading powers of Greece. There is the land of Sikyôn, city of Aratos, deliverer and betrayer of Corinth to the right--the man who taught the cities to the left the art of Themistoklês, the art which teaches how a small state may become a great one. And we see plainly written on the two shores, why, in the warfare of those times, the League of the North was commonly the aggressor, the League of the South was commonly the victim. Save here and there some more favoured spot, the shore of Aitôlia seems bare beyond the common bareness of Grecian hills; the shore of Achaia seems rich with a richness the like of which we have hardly seen on any other part of the Hellenic mainland. The narrow strait, the strait by which Phormiôn won his glory, brings into that close neighbourhood which is so characteristic of Greek geography--a neighbourhood as near as that of Euboia to Boiôtia at one point and to Northern Achaia at another--two races as unlike one another as any could be who worshipped the same ancestral gods and spoke dialects of the same ancestral tongue. The development and the rivalry of those two powers give us our second lesson in Grecian history, the lesson of the days when, if the scale of men is smaller, the scale of things is larger, when cities have grown into federations, when the range of Grecian politics is no longer shut up within the Grecian seas, but when Macedonia and Pergamos, Syria and Egypt, Carthage and Rome herself, have begun to appear as actors on the scene. The seas of Eastern Greece belong to the days of her more brilliant yet narrower fame, when Greece was her own world, when the teachings of her history are mainly teachings of example and analogy. The seas of Central and Western Greece belong to the days when Greece, less free it may be, less brilliant, less rich in great deeds and mighty men, had become part of a greater world, and when her destinies had become connected with the destinies of later days by a direct chain of cause and effect. The historical position of the Corinthian gulf is that it is, above all the waters of Hellas, the sea which washes the shores of the Federal lands.

As we get clear of the gulf, by the mouth of Achelôos, the White River of later nomenclature, we are again among the Western islands, though we now see them from wholly different points, and in wholly different relations to one another from those in which we saw them as we first made our way from Corfu round Peloponnêsos. Our course is somewhat erratic; but it enables us to see a coast which has a character of its own and a history of its own. We skirt the shore of Akarnania. Here is a land which has no place in the Homeric Catalogue--a land therefore which has no place in the Hellas of those days, so far as we have any right in these days to make use of the name of Hellas at all. It was then the _Epeiros_, the nameless mainland, the non-Hellenic shore, as opposed to the Hellenic islands, the realms of Megês and of Odysseus. In the Federal age we find it a Federal commonwealth, weak besides its robber neighbours of Aitôlia, but holding the first place in Greece for what Livy calls the “fides insita genti,” the people who never broke their faith to either friend or enemy. Yet they had enough of worldly wisdom to plead their absence from the Catalogue as a merit in Roman eyes. Aitôlians, Achaians, all the rest, had a share in the overthrow of the mother city of Rome; Akarnania was guiltless. Here is a special history, and the coast has a special character. It is, like other Grecian coasts, a coast of bays and islands and peninsulas; but nowhere else have we seen such a crowd of small islands, mere spots of rock some of them, among which we thread our way, reminding us less of anything that we have seen in Greece than of the northern and more desolate part of the Dalmatian archipelago. There are the Echinades, the Oxeiai, the sharp islands, the urchin islands of later times; but can these dots be Doulichion and the holy Echinai, islands which sent forty ships to the war of Ilios? We pass in and out among them, steering northward between Leukas and the mainland, with the Epeirot mountains in the distant view; but we ourselves do not even reach the channel--after so many changes it is a channel--which divides Leukas or Santa Maura from the mainland. We turn; above the smaller islands rises Ithakê; above Ithakê rises Kephallênia. We enter the haven, as we would believe, of the realm of Odysseus, but not without feeling a difficulty how an island which clearly lies to the north-east can be said to lie πρὸς ζόφον. We pass in and in, hardly dreaming beforehand of the windings of the deep bay which so truly bears the name of Bathy. Scepticism vanishes for a time, and we cannot keep ourselves from greeting the men of Ithakê as countrymen of the elder Odysseus.

But there is still one spot of the mainland to be seen. Before we leave the Hellenic islands, we have still to make another, a more momentary, incursion on the Peloponnêsian mainland. We have seen the sites of Isthmian and Nemeian games; we have still to take a glimpse of the scene of the great festival of Zeus himself. We have passed by the Aitôlian shore; we must visit the great Aitôlian colony. Our last record of Hellenic travel must draw its inspiration from the spot where--

... κραίνων ἐφετμὰς Ἡρακλέος προτέρας, ἀτρεκὴς Ἑλλανοδίκας γλεφάρων Αἰτωλὸς ἀνὴρ ὑψόθεν ἀμφὶ κόμαισι βάλοι γλαυκόχροα κόσμον ἐλαίας.

It is hard to conceive the rude Aitôlian discharging such a duty. We may be inclined to fall back on the doctrine of oppressed nationalities, to say,

ἦτοι Πίσα μὲν Διός,

but to deny all place as his ministers to strangers from the northern shore of the gulf. What if we make our way to Olympia, under the belief that the Olympiad of B.C. 364, held by genuine Pisatans under the protection of Arkadian spears, was the only lawful celebration of the festival within historic times?

Corinth to Eleusis.

We could never understand why Lord Palmerston called the horse-races at Epsom “our Isthmian Games” rather than Olympic, Pythian, or Nemeian. But, as it was Lord Palmerston who said it, the saying was accepted as having some special point; as doubtless many people believed on the same authority that Gothic architecture was a style specially appropriate to Jesuit colleges. The only point of special connexion between Epsom and the games of the Isthmus would seem to be that these last were dedicated to Poseidôn, Ποσειδὼν ἵππιος, and might therefore perhaps seem to be in some way more specially “horsey” than the others. Anyhow the connexion with Poseidôn was a connexion with Thêseus and with Athens, and Athens always claimed a special right in the Isthmian festival, alongside of Corinth its proper president. It was somewhat strange then that, during the century when Corinth was not, the presidency of the games was bestowed on Sikyôn, rather than on Athens, the cherished ally of Rome. But in any case the games supply a link between Corinth and Athens. It is well then that the road--we were going to say between the two cities, but we must now rather say between the village and the capital--lies by the site of the games. We tread the path across the Isthmus which looks so flat from the mountain top, but which we now find to have its ups and downs. We pass by the traces of the _stadium_; we pass by the foundations of the great temple of Poseidôn; we see traces of the wall which in so many ages has proved so vain a barrier; we see signs of the canal which has been so often no less vainly tried as a means to make the Isle of Pelops truly an island. Now that Athens and Corinth are no longer enemies, the work is more needful than ever. No small amount of commerce which now goes elsewhere would, we are told, pass at once through an Isthmian canal to the haven of Peiraieus. We leave the site of Kenchreia to the right, and take ship again at the modern Kalamaki; we thus better see that northern part of the Saronic Gulf which we saw only in the distance as we passed from Peiraieus to Nauplia. We skirt the shore of Megaris; we better take in the outline of Salamis and its satellite Psyttaleia, the scene of the bloody exploit of Aristeidês. We land once more; we pass along the now familiar road, this time perhaps less anxious than before to catch the first glimpse of the holy rock of Athênê. We may perhaps rather feel that, as we near the olive groves of Kolônos, we are still within the domain of Poseidôn. We may perhaps rather fix our eyes on the lowlier and more perfect Thêseion than on the mightier and more shattered Parthenôn. Fresh from the site of the Isthmia, we are inclined to dwell on the legend which tells us how near Athens once was to being Poseidônia. The sea-god thus follows us on our way back from Corinth to Athens. He will follow us through some of the journeys which we must make in Attica itself, before we steer our course back again to the western shores of Peloponnêsos and to the islands more western still. He who cannot see the whole of the Attic land, he who must be satisfied with picturing to himself from the Athenian akropolis how Agis sent forth his plundering bands from Dekeleia, and how the spirit of freedom set with Thrasyboulos on the brow of Phylê, must at least make his way by the Sacred Way to the holy place of Christendom at Daphnê, and to the holy place of heathendom at Eleusis. He must muse on the mound of Marathôn, not to dream that Greece may yet be free, but to wonder and to hope how soon the freedom which stops at Othrys may reach at the very least to Olympos. He must stand too on the marbled steep of Sounion, no longer to shrink from the land on which he stands as a land of slaves. And on two at least of these three journeys he will still find himself in the company of the same deity who reigned on the Isthmus and on Kolônos. If Dêmêtêr and her child held the first place at Eleusis, yet by the bay which is guarded by Salamis, the sea-god was not forgotten, and on the height of Sounion the two powers who strove for the rule of Athens divided the sacred spot between them. The Isthmus with its games, Eleusis on its bay, Sounion on its height, may all be fittingly taken, as nearly as may be at a glance, as being all of them spots where the sea-god received at least a partial local worship.

The traveller who goes from Corinth to Athens by land will take Eleusis on his way; and those who, like the wearied Ten Thousand at Kerasos, have had enough of their land passage, and who prefer to pass toillessly--it may be asleep like Odysseus--over the waves, may well make Eleusis the object of an early journey after they again find themselves at Athens. We have come back to civilized life. From Athens to Eleusis the journey may be made along the Sacred Way by the same means by which the still abiding wheel-tracks tell us that it was made of old. The journey is one of the highest interest; it is a journey of double interest for those at least who count Daphnê and its abiding church no less worthy of interest than Eleusis and its fallen temple. The Sacred Way of Athens has its Roman parallel; but it is not to be found in the Sacred Way of Rome, but in the road which bears the name of the great Censor. The Sacred Way, like the Appian Way, like all ways more or less, though these two seem to have been conspicuous above others, was a street of monuments, a few of which may still be traced. Parting from the monumental quarter of Athens, from the tombs lately brought to light in Kerameikos, the Sacred Way started from the Dipylon--itself brought to light with the tombs--and passed through the olive groves, leaving Poseidôn’s hill of Kolônos to the right. The starting-point of the modern road is not exactly the same, but the two join at no great distance from the ancient walls. The tombs, which are there no longer, may be studied in the itinerary of Pausanias. But one connects itself with a monument of which some traces are to be found further on. The most splendid of all the monuments by the Sacred Way is that which commemorated the most worthless ashes in its whole course. We feel that Athens had indeed fallen when the most splendid of all the tombs was raised by the son-in-law of Phôkiôn, at the bidding and the cost of Harpalos, to commemorate Pythionikê. Further on our journey we come to the spot where the ancient temple of Aphroditê was turned to the worship of Philê, Philê-Aphroditê, the wife of Dêmêtrios the Besieger. Philê was indeed one of the noblest of women, as Pythionikê was one of the vilest; but tomb and temple alike mark the spirit of a time when strangers were turning the men, and even the gods, of Hellas out of their native homes and altars. But, before we reach the temple of Philê, we reach one of those sites where long ages of Greek history are gathered together in a single spot. There, in the pass, was the temple of Apollo; there, girded by its _peribolos_, standing on its site with the foundations built out of its stones, is the monastic church of Daphnê. It is well to gaze and study while we can. Daphnê has once been sacked already; here, as at Athens,

Quod non fecerunt Gothi fecerunt Scoti;

here, as on the Athenian akropolis, we may curse the name of Elgin, and bewail the columns carried off from their own place to lose beauty, value, and interest in an English museum. And so in our own time the modern spoilers of Athens, in their zeal to wipe out the history of the land, may some day doom the apses, the cupola, the campanile, of Daphnê to be swept away, in the hope of finding inscriptions among their ruins. On a foundation of the temple-stones rises the church with its mingled stone and brickwork, its elaborate windows, its spreading cupola on a far greater scale than those at Corfu or at Athens. And there, perhaps more interesting than all, is the Frankish work at the west end, the defences of the fortified church, raised by the Latin princes, with the contemporary cloister, all alike the work of Western architects on Eastern soil. The barbarians who stole the columns seem to have left something behind them besides mere fragments. An Ionic column embedded in the wall helps to support an arch, once evidently part of a greater number, which carries off our thoughts to the basilicas, not of Ravenna, but of Rome.

Not much further on we can mark wheel-tracks on the rock, and we see the rude foundations--the ἀργοὶ λίθοι of Pausanias--of the _peribolos_ of the temple of the two-fold Aphroditê. We are brought nearer to the days of heathendom, heathendom in so strange a form, when we see the niches carved in the rock to receive the votive offerings--exactly the same fashion which has lingered on in our own times in many churches in Southern lands--and when we see from the inscription Φίλῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ that the Macedonian Queen really had Attic worshippers. By this time we begin better to understand the geography of the country, and to see, what no view from Athens itself would teach us, how strong was the geographical barrier between Athens and Eleusis. This has been well pointed out by Mr. Mahaffy; it is the kind of thing which Mr. Mahaffy, so unlucky on some points, is as well able to take in as any man. In the view from the Athenian akropolis the eye rests on the mountains which part the Attic land from the Bœotian; it passes over the lower range which parts the more specially Athenian land from the Eleusinian. From that range itself, even from the pass that crosses it, we see how completely the two districts were shut out from one another, how--no small point in Grecian political geography--they lie out of sight of one another. We now better understand the tales in the Hymn to Dêmêtêr and in Solôn’s story of Tellos, which set before us Eleusis as a state distinct from Athens, and as having its wars with Athens. We understand how it alone among the Attic δῆμοι kept, in honour doubtless of its sacred character, the name of πόλις, and how once in later times, after Athens was cleared from the Thirty, it did for a moment again become a separate state. We pass along the shore of the bay, by the Rheitoi, the reservoir once sacred to the Eleusinian goddesses, in whose waters only their priests might fish. Then comes the tomb of Stratôn, where we meet with our first sign that Eleusis was a great and flourishing town even in later Roman times. Stratôn had a wife both whose names are Roman; and in the name of her birthplace we get one of those happy misspellings which help us to trace the history of Greek pronunciation. Her description, Πώλλα Μουνατία Ἡράκληα, teaches us that, when the monument was set up, at some time after the days of Pausanias, η and ει had already the same sound, but that Greek αυ no longer represented Latin _au_.