Part 8

We had a most unusual March. At one time snow lay on the ground a foot deep for three days. But we excavated the greater part of the ancient theatre and many interesting graves, besides mapping out the walls of the city. In subsequent years we took up the work again, and uncovered the old gymnasium and a temple of Dionysos near the theatre, but we stopped too soon; after us the Greeks took up the work, and achieved results that nearly overshadowed ours. But ours will ever be the service of having uncovered one of the most interesting theatres of Greece, and a real Greek gymnasium, which is a rare thing, inasmuch as most gymnasia which are preserved to us are Roman modifications of the original Greek form. More than this, we forever laid the idea, up to that time so prevalent, that the Eretria which was destroyed by the Persians was several miles to the east of this. The acropolis walls did that; but it was the service of the Greek excavator to uncover the temple of Apollo, with its archaic gable sculptures, and to find a considerable quantity of large vases of the sixth century before Christ, and thus to corroborate the testimony of the walls. There was, in fact, no other such place for a commanding acropolis on the whole stretch of shore as on the hill rising above the theatre. Any city established further east would have deserved the name of "the city of the blind."

TAYGETOS AND KITHÆRON

If the coupling of these two names seems forced, my first reason for it is the purely formal one that ten days after being on the summit of Taygetos, we were climbing Kithæron. Greece is such a small country that to traverse it from end to end in ten days, and see Sparta, Argos, and Thebes, with some mountain climbing thrown in, is nothing that justifies a boastful feeling; but when, at the end of such a journey, one reflects upon the history and mythology which is attached to these names, and calls up the scenes enacted on the plains on which he looks down from these mountains, he wonders at what he has accomplished.

The mountains of Greece have many and great charms; and they have this pre-eminent claim on our attention, that they are the unchanged witnesses of the past. Poor villages occupy the Cadmeia and the site of Sparta; waves of immigration have swept over Greece to such an extent that one may be in honest doubt whether the people who walk these dirty streets have any more claim to be the heirs and representatives of Leonidas and Epaminondas, whose names perchance they bear, than we have. The plains and rivers remain, except that the former have lost their trees and the latter their water. But Taygetos, "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," remains as it was. The great men of Greece knew the mountains, and were known of them. Alkman and Pindar had held converse with Taygetos and Kithæron, which now remain as their sole surviving companions.

Six years ago I had approached Sparta from Messenia _through_ Taygetos, and had arrived at evening when the sun sent its rays almost level through the orange-trees loaded with fruit and redolent with blossoms. I feared that any different approach might bring a sort of disappointment. But when, after a morning at Mantineia, in the upland plain of Arcadia, we gained the top of the last height of the pass, and saw the long ridge of Taygetos towering before us with the sun just sinking behind it, we stood leaning over our bicycles and gave way to silence like that of "stout Cortez and his men." What went through my mind could hardly be called reflection, unless I could so designate an acceptance of the propriety of the one epithet, περιμήκετος, which Homer chose for this mighty mass, whether he intended it in the sense of "stretched out" or "high towering." Night was beginning to fall before we could break the spell and move down into the valley of the Eurotas, and it was already dark when we crossed the bridge of the Eurotas and entered Sparta. The object of this journey was not so much to visit Sparta as to climb Taygetos; but, while waiting until the afternoon of the next day for another contingent of the American School to come after us from Tripolitza by carriage, we used the time to visit the site of Amyklæ, and to hunt up the mound from which came the celebrated Vaphio cups, the finest product of the goldsmith's art left to our wondering eyes by the Achæan civilization of Greece.

Taygetos is the highest mountain in Peloponnesus, outranking Kyllene by somewhat more than a hundred feet, and falling only a hundred feet short of eight thousand. Since Sparta is only slightly above the sea-level, the task before us was arduous, and when our forces were united, we decided to make a part of the ascent before evening. An acquaintance in Sparta gave me a letter of introduction to a leading man of Anavryti, a village three hours up the mountain. When we reached his house at dusk, in the middle of a village that resounded with flowing streams, this letter opened his doors and his heart. It opened the doors so wide that the neighbors came streaming in to see us, to such an extent that he was at last glad to avail himself of the help of a gendarme with his whip to clear out the younger portion of his self-invited guests. He then set to work, in the manner of Greek hosts, to kill us with kindness, making us eat and drink for about two hours. After this came those futile attempts to sleep which those who have travelled much in the interior of Greece know too well. At half-past two we were only too ready to stop the fight with the small enemy and address ourselves to the overcoming of Taygetos. For the first two hours we went on by the light of a lantern, guided by the son of our host, over a difficult path which gave us an occasional fall. After that came the gorgeous sunrise and the increasing reward in the ever more extended outlook, which made us almost forget that we had not slept. It was owing, however, largely to this lack of sleep that one of our number gave out a thousand feet below the summit, while another was with some difficulty coached over the last five hundred feet.

When we were at last on the summit at half-past ten, the reward was a perfect view--the first absolutely perfect view which I had ever had out of many mountain ascents in Greece. We had, fortunately, taken the rare moment when, after four days of cloudy and rainy weather, the sky had just cleared, and for half a day a perfectly cloudless ether was diffused over everything. We saw the valley of the Eurotas winding down from the mountains to the sea, where it empties near Helos, the "marsh town," which is said to have given its name to the whole remnant of the Achæan people, who were reduced to a galling bondage under the Dorian spearmen from the north. Sparta looked so near that we were almost lured into the attempt to throw stones into it. Kythera was surprisingly near, and even Crete--troubled and troublesome Crete--seemed so near that annexation to Greece appeared to be a most obvious lot for it. The southern islands of the Ægean, Melos and its neighbors, were conspicuous to the east; while on the west it seemed as if we could almost slide down into the Messenian Gulf. But, while all these objects caught our attention time and again, it was still to the north that our gaze was mainly directed; for there lay the whole Peloponnesus, with its peaks and ridges, which compose the greater part of it, spread out before us like a raised map, closed in on the north by the big three, Kyllene, Aroania, and Erymanthos. Compared with these, the three Attic mountains to the extreme left, and somewhat distant, looked small, though distinct. It was a place and a scene that one must needs be reluctant to leave. Had we brought food with us we should have been tempted to stay and spend the night in the substantial "tabernacle for Elias," which crowns this summit, according to the usual practice in Greece. But evening brought us to Sparta, a good many stone's-throws distant, as we felt in our knees and in our appetites. Two suggestions force themselves upon one visiting this region: the first is that the Spartans showed wonderful energy in breaking through the wall of Taygetos, and conquering their Dorian neighbors in Messenia, and in crushing them again when they made a desperate attempt to throw off the yoke; the second is that the difference between these two branches of Dorians could not be due to the Messenians having, as is sometimes alleged, settled in a fatally fertile and enervating plain. If rich fields could enervate a people, the Spartans surely did not lack that invitation, for the valley of the Eurotas must have been in antiquity, as now, a garden.

But what an unlovely people was this armed camp, which goes under the name of Sparta! We will not reproach them that they failed to produce anything in art and literature. It is rather their meanness and absolute selfishness, as the strongest military power in Greece, that makes them odious. For a century, from the Persian war to Leuctra, whenever Sparta moved through the passes to the north it meant woe to some Greek city; and when there was question raised at home over the unrighteous conduct of a general abroad, the outspoken criterion was: "Has he acted for the interests of Sparta?"

The last great injustice was the seizing and holding the Cadmeia in time of peace. It is this that makes lovers of fair play rejoice at the crushing return blow delivered by Epaminondas and his Thebans at Leuctra, and take satisfaction in his passing down the Eurotas, and showing the women of Sparta, for the first time, "the smoke of an enemy's camp." And now by a historical thread we are led from Taygetos and Sparta over to Thebes and Kithæron.

By a lucky choice we approached Thebes, not by any of the usual routes, but by taking the train from Athens to Megara, walking thence across to the east end of the Corinthian Gulf, and skirting its shore until we reached Ægosthenæ, at the foot of Kithæron. No traveller ought to neglect this region. It is one of the finest shores in Greece; so rugged that we were several times driven inland by a promontory rising perpendicularly from the sea, and made to climb more than a thousand feet before we could continue our journey. We took a recompense for the extra toil by tipping off into the sea several bowlders, some of which, striking a projecting crag, would reach the water with the effect of a bursting shell. This whole northeastern arm of the Corinthian Gulf runs in between Kithæron on the north and Geraneia on the south, and so gains a peculiar seclusion.

And Ægosthenæ! the northwestern frontier town of the Megarid, what a magnificent ruin! The view that we took of its walls and towers by the full moon was something not to be forgotten. At Ægosthenæ we were on the route so often travelled by the Spartans when they went over into Bœotia to "regulate" its affairs, and it was under these walls that the remnant of their beaten and disheartened army first stopped to take breath on getting out of Bœotian territory after Leuctra. We had planned to follow this entire route, but, since even this involved some climbing, we agreed to take a little more climbing and go in a straight line for Platæa, over the top of Kithæron, in spite of the fact that the mountain wore a cap of cloud. So, having taken a very cold sea-bath and another good look at the ruins of Ægosthenæ, which were only a little less imposing by day than by moonlight, we scaled the height with a single peasant for a guide, and his mule to carry our packs. After many a look back on the increasingly beautiful scene behind us, whenever the dark fir-trees, which cover the slopes and give the name of "fir mountain" as a substitute for the old name Kithæron, allowed it, we at last entered into the cloud just before reaching the top. In the darkness of cloud and fir-trees we better felt that we were on the mountain chosen by the Erinnyes for their abode, a place of howlings, the scene of woe for Œdipus, Actæon, Pentheus, and Agave. Who would wish for sunlight on such a spot? It would have been as inappropriate as a cloud on Taygetos. While we were musing thus, suddenly there came a rift in the cloud, and we saw the whole plain of Bœotia once, twice, three times, and the spell of the Erinnyes was broken. We went five hundred feet further down on the north side, where we seemed to have left behind us the awful myths and to have come down into the realms of history; for we were looking down into Platæa, which lay at our feet. One of the brightest pages in Greek history is the unbroken record of the heroism of Platæa, and when it was finally crushed one might well have written over it, "dead on the field of honor." Its Athenian leanings were abhorrent to Thebes, which always desired a "big Bœotia." But no one could have done a better turn to Platæa than did Thebes, when it espoused the cause of Persia and led away nearly all the rest of Bœotia with it. At the close of "old Platæa's day" the Panhellenic spirit of Platæa was rewarded by the Greeks in their giving the fine old heroic city the prize of valor, and declaring its soil forever sacred and inviolate. But the gods gave it a greater prize, in that they made its name forever associated with the battle that made Greece free.

It was again dark when we entered Thebes, and again we seemed to have left the realm of bright history and to have come under the spell of the awful myths of Cadmus's line, the horrors of Œdipus and his fratricidal sons, dark horrors relieved only by the bright form of Antigone.

STYX AND STYMPHALUS

Arcadia is a name to conjure with. It "throngs the pulses with the fulness of the spring." It had been my lot to pass twice through Southern Arcadia from east to west. But the great plains of Mantineia and Megalopolis lie open to the sunlight, and have nothing weird or even poetical about them. Even Lykosoura and Bassæ do not belong to the Arcadia that furnished the stories about singing fishes and aquatic mice. We must look elsewhere for those wonderful fountains, some of which cured madness, while one not only cured drunkenness, but, passing beyond the "touch not, taste not, handle not," made even the smell of wine forever odious. It is recorded, by the way, that somebody set up an inscription by this fountain, warning the traveller against drinking of it. All these features belong to Northern Arcadia.

Mantineia is historically the most interesting city of Arcadia; and yet I had twice looked from its walls through those deep gorges to the north, knowing that just through the first one, almost in sight, lay old Orchomenos, and longed to pass through that gateway, but had been prevented by other claims upon my time. But in the summer of 1895 I was allowed the delight of seven days in the saddle with two pleasant companions in these uplands where reality is more inspiring than the Louis Quatorze fictions that have been thrown around the name of Arcadia.

To one accustomed to arid Attica and Argolis, the abundance of water and trees in this region is most striking. The three great northern mountains look bare enough at their tops; but they reach up and draw down from the sky that store of moisture which Pentelicus and Arachnæon are impotent to procure. Everywhere about them are rippling streams lined with plane-trees, with here and there a magnificent chestnut grove, and mountains covered with forests of pine and fir. Fields of maize (with here and there a patch of hemp), watered by thousands of little streams, diverted from the brooks, remind us of home. Around Nonakris, which was almost the farthest point north reached in our journey, is a wild tangle of vegetation which makes it difficult to keep the paths, which follow along the streams, from becoming overgrown and impassable. From this tangle we snatched many luscious blackberries as we rode past, catching some briers with the berries.

Nonakris was in ruins when Pausanias visited it, but past it flowed the river Styx, the name of which is probably better known than any other Arcadian name. It was a painful and somewhat dangerous toil of about three hours from the nearest of the half-dozen villages which represent the ancient Nonakris to the foot of the famous waterfall from which the river comes down. I use the word "toil" rather than ascent, for, it being impossible to force our way up the bed of the stream, we had to climb down about half as much as up; in fact, it was, taken in the heat of noonday, a more toilsome climb than the ascent of Aroania, which we had made on the same day before daybreak.

When, after all, we stood face to face with the fall our feeling was one of disappointment. It was nearly the middle of September, and though Aroania, holding snow in its gorges all the year round, may be called with more propriety than Ætna "the nurse of snow," there was little water falling, and we saw none of the rainbow effects mentioned by some travellers. Still, as Herodotus speaks of a _little_ water, and both he and Homer speak of this as _trickling_, we ought to be content. After climbing down to the black pool at the foot of the last rock over which the water poured, we took time to let the whole setting of the Styx make its impression, which it could not fail to do. It is the setting rather than the fall which has always made the impression. Where Aroania is broken off on the east end so abruptly that one can only think of it as cut off by some gigantic cleaver, down over this front comes the Styx, not with a shoot, but hugging the rock and deflected several times along its face. Pausanias says that the precipice is the highest that he ever remembers to have seen, and its height is recorded as upward of six thousand feet. As the mountain throws out arms to the right and left of the fall, we have a place fitted to throw a potent spell over the mind on a moonlight night or at morning or evening twilight. It was here that the exiled Cleomenes, the gifted but mad King of Sparta, made the chiefs of the Arcadians swear to support him in his attempt to secure a return to Sparta by force of arms. He doubtless took advantage of the knowledge that the Arcadians had from remote times regarded this awful place as imparting an especial sanctity to oaths, and that here particularly the warrior's oath (_sacramentum_) was taken.

It is no wonder that the lively imagination of the Greek transferred the earthly Styx to Hades, and represented the most awful and binding oath of the gods, by which they pledged their immortality, as that one which they swore by this hated and deadly water.

There is now, as there was in ancient times, a tradition that it is dangerous to drink of this water; but so great was our heat and thirst that, regardless of consequences, we drank deep at the Stygian pool. On returning home, after an interval of several days, I was caught by a lurking fever and general derangement of the system, which it required several days to throw off. I am not going to decide whether this is an example of the slowness and sureness of the gods in punishing impiety, whether I carried off a little malaria from an intervening visit at Stymphalus, or whether it was simply the result of drinking too much cold water not merely from the Styx, but from many others of the countless springs about Aroania.

Aroania, from which the Styx falls, although 7,725 feet high, is less generally known than its great neighbors east and west. When I first went to Greece I had forgotten that there was such a mountain. But it is much higher than Erymanthos, and affords a better view than Kyllene, which is about seventy feet higher. Pausanias, who was no mountain climber, ascended Aroania. Perhaps he was possessed by the idea of doing justice to everything connected with so holy a place. Following in his footsteps, we walked up to a shepherd's enclosure, at an altitude of 5,000 feet, accompanied by the owner of the flocks, who was also later our guide to the Styx. Here we spent the night in the open air, near a fire, wrapped in rugs. At half-past two we set out by the light of an old moon and reached the summit at half-past four. For two hours clouds swept past us with fierce velocity, and it was bitter cold as well as wet. It began to appear as if the same misfortune was upon us as befell us a month before, when we had climbed Parnassus to be lost in a cloud whose lifting gave us only here and there a glimpse of the world below. But now at last we did get the whole broad view from Thessaly to Taygetos. The grandest feature of all was Parnassus and the still higher mountains of Ætolia; but the most interesting and instructive feature was Peloponnesus, stretched out before us like a raised map. We could study its chains and ganglia of mountains.

Two days later we were at Lake Stymphalus. We hastened to bathe in it. Had we plunged in we should probably have achieved distinction as the first bathers in that lake; but the sight of a half a dozen blood-suckers at our feet held us back, and, bathing _from_ the lake rather than in it, we came away not much cleaner for the operation. But we secured a practical insight into the nature of this lake, which is like several larger and smaller lakes in Northeastern Arcadia. Strictly speaking, it is no lake at all, but a mud-pond. Probably in no place is the water more than four or five feet deep, and had we dived from any part of the shore our heads would still be sticking in the mud.

In a normal condition of things there should be here neither lake nor mud-pond, but only a plain with a river running through it, and disappearing in a hole at the foot of the mountain at the southern end. Mountains are so thickly strewn in Arcadia that streams cannot get around them, and so have to go through them. In this case the water was supposed to find its way out under the mountains to a point somewhat south of Argos, where it rushes out of the mountain side as a pure and full river, under the name of Erasinos. But such a hole, called a _katabothra_, was always likely to get clogged, and, as a stoppage might occur at a distance from the mouth, it might be very difficult to clear it out. In spite of great care this katabothra was, doubtless, sometimes stopped in ancient times. The horrible Stymphalian birds which Heracles killed typify, it is supposed, the pestilence which arose from such a stoppage. Such gigantic labors as forcing open the katabothra are quite in keeping with the character of Heracles's other labors, which included the purging of the stables of Augeas and the draining of the marsh of Lerna, typified by the killing of the Lernæan hydra. That birds should here be chosen to represent the evil seems an apt touch of local coloring; for several times in our stay around this lake the air was shaken by a rustling of wings, and flocks of birds that looked like wild ducks settled down into the water or flew up from it.