Project Gutenberg's Vacation days in Greece, by Rufus B. Richardson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: Vacation days in Greece Author: Rufus B. Richardson Release Date: March 19, 2014 [EBook #45175] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VACATION DAYS IN GREECE *** Produced by KD Weeks, Ann Jury and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber’s Note The photographs and maps been repositioned, where necessary, to fall at a paragraph or chapter break. Larger versions of the two maps can be viewed using the link provided below the image. Please see the transcriber’s notes at the end of this text for a more complete account of any other textual issues and their resolution. BRONZE CHARIOTEER FOUND AT DELPHI VACATION DAYS IN GREECE BY RUFUS B. RICHARDSON FORMERLY DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF ARCHÆOLOGY, ATHENS ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1903 COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published, September, 1903 TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK To MY SON THE COMPANION OF MY TRAVELS PREFACE During a residence of eleven years in Greece I have formed the habit of writing to certain periodicals descriptions of my journeys. The occasion for making a book out of these articles was the suggestion on the part of many members of the American School of Classical Studies, at Athens, who had shared these journeys with me, that I should do so, and so make the descriptions accessible to them. I yielded to this suggestion all the more readily from the consideration that my wanderings have taken me into many nooks and corners not usually visited by those whose stay in the country is short. Having seen the sunrise from most of the mountain-tops of the country, having forded many of its rivers, and having caught the indescribable color at early dawn and at evening twilight, from the deck of coasting steamers, all along these fascinating shores, I felt it only right that I should try to convey to others, less fortunate than myself, some picture, however inadequate, of all this experience and enjoyment. All that is here set down is, however, but a part of a larger picture that is ever present in my memory. For the most part I have avoided what has been most frequently described. Athens, Olympia, and the much-visited Argive plain, I have not touched upon, because I did not wish to swell the book by telling thrice-told tales. I tell of what I have most enjoyed, in the hope that readers may feel with me the charm of this poet’s land, which has, more than any other, “infinite riches in a little room.” The slight alterations that I have made in the original form of the descriptions was made with the design of bringing them, in a measure, up to the present time. I have also arranged them on a geographical thread, running from the Ionian Islands, through Northern Greece to the Peloponnesus. The two larger articles, on Sicily and Dalmatia, are not simply tacked on. They belong to the subject, inasmuch as Sicily was an important part of Hellas, as the Greeks called their country, and inasmuch as Greek colonies once skirted the greater part of the coast of Dalmatia. In regard to the spelling of proper names, I have tried to shun unusual appearances. But I have great objection to changing all the Greek endings in os into us, just because the Romans did so. I also object to changing the Greek k into c where it will surely be pronounced as an s. In the case of names that have become a part of our English speech, I have, however, admitted these changes. The result may not seem satisfactory, on account of the lack of a rigid system; but I trust that it will be pardoned. vii viii ix CONTENTS PAGE Corfu 3 A Day in Ithaca 13 Delphi, The Sanctuary of Greece 24 Dodona 34 The Bicycle in Greece 47 Acarnania 54 Ætolia 65 Thermopylæ 79 Thessaly 90 An Ascent of the Highest Mountain in Greece 104 A Journey from Athens to Eretria 111 Taygetos and Kithæron 119 Styx and Stymphalus 128 An Unusual Approach to Epidauros 140 Messene and Sandy Pylos 151 A Tour in Sicily 173 Dalmatia 208 ILLUSTRATIONS Bronze Charioteer Found at Delphi Frontispiece FACING PAGE Corfu. Mouth of the Old Harbor with “Ship of Ulysses” 10 Ithaca. Polis Bay from the North 20 Temple at Stratos 56 Thermon. Temple of Apollo in the Foreground 72 Thermopylæ. From the West 86 Meteora Monasteries 100 Sparta, with Taygetos in the Background 120 The Stygian Pool 130 Theatre at Epidauros 146 Bay of Navarino, with Old Pylos to the Right and Sphakteria to the Left 158 Stone Quarry at Syracuse Called Latomia dei Cappucini 186 So-called Concordia Temple at Girgenti 194 Cattaro 214 Spalato. Palace of Diocletian. South Front 222 Clissa 234 Map of Sicily and Dalmatia 173 Map of Greece at end of volume xi xiii VACATION DAYS IN GREECE CORFU It is great good fortune to spend a week in Corfu on the way to Greece. Seeing it from one end to the other, wandering through its olive forests and vineyards, brings on a mild, or, in some cases, a wild, intoxication without wine. What words fit the surrounding beauty but “Islands of the Blessed,” “Elysium,” “Garden of Eden,” "Paradise"? It is not Heaven, after all, for one sees here the poor, lame, blind, begging for small alms; but, as long as earth holds such corners as Corfu, it is not all cursed. To the traveller who has felt the intoxication of such a region, and is impelled to report something of it, the impotence of words comes home with special force. Naught but the painter’s art seems adequate to report Corfu. And, furthermore, painter as well as poet might here well feel the weakness of his art. It is a great boon to have had this realm of beauty brought upon the retina of the eye, and so communicated to the soul. One may, perhaps, be allowed to group the impressions that Corfu makes, and report them with a plainness that aspires only to the office of a photograph, resigning the attempt at coloring. Before the eye lies one Corfu—the Corfu of to-day; but before the mind are brought two others—the Kerkyra of Greek history and the Scheria of Homer. The two latter compete with the former, and refuse the present beautiful scene a monopoly of attention. But, first, to be just to the present Corfu. The traveller who has never been east of Italy, which was my case at the time of my first visit in 1890, feels that he is here passing for the first time the bounds between Europe and the Orient. The streets and squares of the city, which contains a population of about 30,000—about one-third of the population of the whole island—swarm with figures clad in the most wonderful costumes, men and women vying with one another in display of colors. The Corfiotes themselves contribute largely to this display of costumes. From across the narrow strait come from Epirus many Albanians, with their big white skirts and their kingly air, some for trade and a quick return, and some for a longer stay. From the same quarter come the no less picturesque people, partly Greek and partly Wallachian —but who can give the component parts of the blood of these people of Epirus?—who, having attempted to secure the consummation of what the Congress of Berlin decreed, incorporation with Greece, were treated as Turks usually treat insurgents, and were then living as refugees in Corfu, awaiting the hour when Moslem rule shall recede from the shores of Europe. Some of these men’s costumes are ragged and dirty, but with what an air the men walk in them. It is not a swagger, but a king’s gait. A well-dressed European gentleman can as little compete with these men for attention as the Berlin palace can compete with the picturesque ruins of Heidelberg. The clergy, who seem numerous enough here to preach the Gospel to every creature, with their long black gowns and high stiff caps, make quite a feature in the throng. The military officers are also numerous and brilliantly dressed, but are too much like ordinary Europeans to attract particular notice. The vegetation here is also Oriental—oranges, lemons, figs, forests of cactus and giant aloes abound. The four or five million olive-trees, many sixty feet high, are the characteristic features of the island. They form a beautiful background for the tall, dark-green cypresses. But the vine presses hard upon the olive. It is great good fortune to be here in the time of the grape harvest, even if one must miss the oranges and the olives. One day in September I walked to Palæokastritza, an old cloister on a rock looking out on the Ionian Sea, sixteen miles from the city. The way was through a continuous vineyard full of laborers. At this season of the year there is hardly a drop of running water in the island. There are places where springs and brooks and even rivers have been and will be again, but there are none there now. The water in the wells and cisterns looks suspicious. But one has a substitute for water that is just about as cheap. For copper coin of the value of two cents a woman gave me a pile of grape clusters, enough for four men. On my return I managed to signify with my poor Greek to a man riding on a load of grapes that I would like to change places with him. For three miles I rode stretched out on the top of crates full of grapes, resting my tired feet, eating, by the permission of the driver, from the top of the crates, while from the bottom the precious juice oozed out and trickled into the dusty road. I felt that I was playing Dionysos. Then it was that the vintagers, many women and few men, came trooping picturesquely from the fields. They looked so happy that it seemed as if the contagion of joy rested in the vine. It seemed as if a touch of music would have converted them into a Dionysiac chorus. If Corfu had no classical history, it would still be historically interesting. It has been spared that curse which rested so long on the rest of Greece—Turkish occupation. The Turks dashed their forces in vain in two memorable sieges against its rock forts. The high degree of culture here, as compared with the rest of Greece, outside of Athens, is partly due to this exemption. But there have been stimulating influences from without. Rome, Byzantium, Naples, Venice, and England have held sway here. The rule of Venice, to which the Corfiotes gave themselves voluntarily, as they had formerly done to Rome, lasted nearly six hundred years, with the interruption of the Anjou episode. This rule was mild and beneficent. It was the Venetians who built the fortifications which kept off the Turks, and which still form, though to a less degree than twenty-five years ago, the characteristic feature in the aspect of the city. 3 4 5 6 7 From Waterloo to 1864 England exercised a protectorate over this and the six other Ionian Islands. Ten successive Lord High Commissioners, of whom Gladstone was one, and whose monuments profusely deck the esplanade, represented here the majesty of England. The English built the present fine system of roads—paid for, of course, in Ionian money. A kindly feeling prevails toward England because she yielded to the strong desire of the inhabitants for union with the kingdom of Greece. But the fact that the English, on their departure, blew up the principal fortification of the harbor on the island Vido, and carried away all the guns from the other forts, left a sting. The dismantled fort was paid for in Ionian money, but the exigencies of European politics demanded the dismantling. Austria had as much to say about that as England. But, sweeping away the name of Corfu, which arose in the Middle Ages, and transferring ourselves back of all this foreign occupation and centuries of semi-barbarism, let us introduce ourselves to the Greek Kerkyra of Thucydides. Passing southward, a half a mile or so from the esplanade of the present city, one comes along an isthmus between two old harbors to an elevated peninsula, on which now stands the King’s villa in a beautiful garden. Here one is overpowered by historic associations. Here lay the proud Greek colony established by Corinth in 734 B.C., a colony that first set the example of filial ingratitude, and, feeling itself stronger than the mother city, joined battle with her and defeated her in the first great naval battle of Greeks against Greeks, in 665 B.C. From this rising ground the eye dimly discerns in the distance, near the mainland opposite the southern end of the island, the Sybota Islands, where the later great naval battle between mother city and colony in the presence of an Athenian fleet gave the occasion for the dreadful Peloponnesian war. From this inner harbor, now abandoned and still, nearly silted up and yearly submitting to the encroachment of vines upon its borders, the proud fleet of Alcibiades and Nicias sailed for Syracuse. It was the alliance with Kerkyra, the key to the voyage to Sicily, that lured the Athenians to that ruin. Little of this Kerkyra remains above ground. Perhaps much may yet be found below. About twelve years ago excavations by Carapanos laid bare a great quantity of terra-cottas. Perhaps it was a terra-cotta manufactory that he discovered. The ruins of an old Doric temple lie on the surface of the ground near a spring in an olive grove on the side of the peninsula looking toward the mainland. The situation, 100 feet above the strait, among the olives and near an ancient fountain, makes one feel that he could have joined in doing honor to the dryads and naiads with the throng that used to meet here. One of the antiquarians of Corfu has lately advanced the view that these remains are those not of a temple but of a bath. Blessed bathers! It was not bad taste for the King of Greece to put his gardens on the spot of the Gardens of Alkinoos. If I were King of Greece I would try to compound with my subjects to take the business of ruling off my hands and let me keep my Corfu home. It is no wonder that Elizabeth, the Empress of Austria, sought relief from her troubles in her villa on the other side of the inner harbor. When a part of the Venetian works was being removed in 1843, where the isthmus between the two old harbors joins the present city, there was found a circular monument about twenty feet in diameter, ending in a flat cone, and containing an inscription running almost around the layer of stones just below the coping. It reads thus: “This is the monument of Menekrates, son of Tlasias, of Œantheia by birth. The people erected it in his memory, “for he served them well as proxenos” (consul) “and he perished in the sea.” This with more, making six hexameters, now much more obscured than when first discovered and copied, I made out by the help of a manual of epigraphy in the rays of the sun just rising over the mountains of Epirus. The archaic forms of the letters make it a remarkable inscription, which may be dated as far back as 600 B. C. As I read this inscription, a century older than the Persian war, and two centuries before Thucydides, I thought, here surely one is in contact with Greek antiquity. The next day, in an upper room of the building used for both library and high school, in company with the director, Professor Romanos, and Professor Papageorgios, a gentleman who deserves the title philoxenos, I read the other inscriptions of Corfu which have not been lost in the labyrinths of the British Museum or elsewhere. Some of these are of about the same age as that on the Menekrates monument, but very clear as well as exceedingly interesting on account of the old forms of the letters. They are mostly tomb inscriptions, telling of the grief which all the world has felt over the loss of the brave and the good. 8 9 10 CORFU. MOUTH OF THE OLD HARBOR WITH "SHIP OF ULYSSES" One need not linger too long over Kerkyra. It is a state which we cannot love. We cannot forget that before Salamis it held its fleet off the southern point of the Peloponnesus, waiting to see which way the great struggle was going to incline. When Athens concluded the alliance with her at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, many at Athens felt it to be an unholy alliance, and that the burden of hatred thus shouldered was almost a counterbalance to the winning of the second navy in Greece. Thucydides draws an awful picture of the decimating feuds, which seemed tinged with barbaric fury, between aristocracy and commons. In his pages the island vanishes from view bathed in blood. Long before the time of Thucydides the natives of this island stoutly maintained their descent from the oar-loving Phæacians of Homer. Their land was Scheria, the home of Alkinoos. This belief, in which they took so much pride, really made them great as a naval power; and he who would to-day take away the charm of Homeric tradition from this land, which has been made by it into holy ground, would work it a greater injury than one who should despoil it of its olive-trees. Of course, our enjoyment of Homer does not depend on localizing his story: “Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben Das allein veraltet nie.” And yet the story of the Odyssey, localized here from gray antiquity, one likes, while here, to believe; to read as if there had been nobody to bring up any objections to its geography, or to reason about its geography at all—to read it, in short, with Corfiote eyes and Corfiote fancy. Does not the very ship which Poseidon turned into stone, because it conveyed Ulysses home, still stand at the mouth of the old inner harbor? Yesterday I passed the bridge over the Potamo, where, according to Gregorovius, Ulysses was cast ashore, and tumbled out of the stream that had received him to sink exhausted in his long sleep under the double tree. I can almost go farther here than I am asked to go. Methinks that under yonder tree, which looks as if it might count almost any number of centuries, the sturdy swimmer fell asleep and awoke so sweetly. It does not matter that another place near the entrance of the old harbor has come to honor in the mouths of the natives as the spot of the meeting between Ulysses and Nausikaa. Our mood adapts itself kindly to either locality. Somewhere hereabouts we will let the sweet story have a local habitation. Let fancy for the hour hold sway. Thus we are perchance brought nearer to the clever voyager, the beautiful maid, the garrulous old king guided by his wife in the midst of his sailor people. Ah! the fiction of Homer holds the mind in more abiding thrall than the facts of Thucydides. 11 12 A DAY IN ITHACA Ithaca was the first of the great Homeric places of renown to “swim into my ken,” if it can be said to have swum into my ken when I saw it by the light of the full moon in sailing from Corfu to Patras. But I became acquainted with Troy and Mycenæ long before I really appropriated Ithaca. This I got by the method of gradual approach, a method which has a certain charm only granted to one who is privileged to reside a series of years near his goal. On a journey to Dodona, the year after this moonlight view, our steamer, in passing from Patras to Prevesa, put in at Bathy, officially called Ithaca, on the east side of the island; and I had just one hour ashore which was more tantalizing than satisfactory as far as studying the topography of Ithaca was concerned; and yet one may believe that he sees in the beautiful bay and harbor the very harbor of Phorkys, where Ulysses landed after his twenty years’ absence. The cave of the Nymphs, where the jolly Phæacians laid him asleep with his treasures about him was not visible; but we were told that this is now farther up the hill. After an interval of several years, in which I had passed Ithaca several times in the night, I set foot on it again in a more satisfactory fashion. Taking refuge from the August heat of Athens in the Ionian Islands, I was spending a few days in Argostoli, the chief town of Kephallenia, and seized this opportunity to approach Ithaca from the back side, so to speak. A drive of four hours brought us clear across from the west side of Kephallenia to Samos on the east side, over the high backbone of the island. During the last hour of the journey, the descent, as “the sun was setting, and all the ways were growing shady,” our eyes were fastened upon Ithaca lying peacefully in the bosom of Kephallenia—a beautiful sight. As we had planned for only one day in Ithaca, we determined to make it a long one, and started from Samos in a sail- boat at half-past two in the morning; but, although the sail was filled most of the time, so gentle was the breeze that, even supplemented by the work of the oars, it did not bring us to Ithaca until half-past five. My boy of twelve years, companion of many of my wanderings in Greece, was asleep most of the way, but broke the parallel with Ulysses by waking up when the keel touched the shore. We landed at the foot of Mount Aëtos, on the top of which Gell and Schliemann place the city of Ulysses, but deferred climbing this until we might see whether our time and strength held out, and pushed at once for our main goal, some ruins near Stauros, at the northern end of the island, nine or ten miles distant. We followed all the way, with an occasional cut-off, the fine carriage road made by the English, to whose occupation the Ionian Islands owe most of their good roads, notably the one on which we had crossed from Argostoli to Samos, which required much difficult and expensive engineering. The road crossed the backbone of Ithaca twice at points where this is somewhat low; but in the last seven miles it followed the western shore about half way up the steep slope which runs down into the sea, leaving almost no strip of level coast. In fact, Ithaca smiles in very few spots, being nearly all mountain, just the country to get attached to. Ulysses naturally enough calls it “rugged, but a good bringer-up of boys,” and adds: “I never could find anything sweeter than my native land.” In one respect it is doubtless somewhat changed. As we passed along the foot of the principal mountain of the island, a bare height of over 2,600 feet, I asked a peasant its name, and was glad to hear him answer “Neriton.” But this is now as undeserving of its constant Homeric epithet of “leaf-shaking” as is Zakynthos of its epithet of “woody.” The denudation of the Greek mountains is a sad theme, and is most strikingly illustrated in the Ionian Islands. Mount Aenos, over 5,000 feet high, on Kephallenia, had until about the beginning of the present century its slopes covered with large pines, which were known in all the world as Abies cephalonica. But at that time a destructive fire swept away nearly half of this treasure; and two years ago about one-third of the remainder went in the same way. What has occurred here goes on every summer all over Greece; but the loss is in no case so conspicuous as in this. I have seen Pentelicus burning for three days—a brilliant illumination for Athens—and, in sailing from Poros to Nauplia in midsummer, I counted twenty-six fires on the mountains of Peloponnesus; but all these could do nothing more in the way of damage than to help on a little the aridity into which Attica and the Argolid are helplessly sinking. Where it scarcely ever rains during six months of the year, the grass and weeds become like tinder, and a fire once started from some shepherd’s carelessness is difficult to stop. Water was rather scanty on our road, and what we got came from cisterns. Springs are, indeed, rare in Ithaca. But when we came to the famous spring Melanhydro (Blackwater), near Stauros, in the hope of finding something fine, we found the water not only warm, but having three-quarters of a very ripe tomato in it, as well as pieces of a big cactus stalk, and rather full of little pollywogs besides. The proper care of springs is something which the Greeks do not seem to appreciate. I have seen the famous spring Pirene on Acro-Corinth treated even worse than this. But if the water which we needed for our eighteen-mile walk in the August sun was bad, we found consolation in grapes. I suspect, though I cannot verify it from actual weighing, that my regular allowance of grapes in an August or September day’s walk in Greece is ten pounds. One rarely pays anything for these, inasmuch as they are much cheaper than New England huckleberries. While it is considered contra bonos mores to take them without asking, peasants seem always glad to give them. On the hottest part of the return journey, as we stopped at a house and asked for grapes, the man of the house said that his vineyard was two kilometres distant, but insisted upon going to it at once. This I could not allow, whereupon, in spite of my protests, he got upon the very top round of a rickety ladder, leaning against the wall of his house, and, at the risk of his neck, pulled down from a vine running over a high trellis two clusters which 13 14 15 16 17 he feared were not ripe, as proved to be the case. In the meantime his wife had been with great difficulty restrained from setting before us eggs, bread, and cheese, which we refused on the ground that we had just eaten. To be strictly truthful, I ought to state that, not being enough used to the Greek language to discriminate fine shades of meaning, I am not sure but that the man meant to send his wife the two kilometres in question. Greek custom would incline me to this supposition. Although Ithaca is noted for its hospitality, this treatment is not mentioned as an isolated, but as a typical case of Greek hospitality. I doubt whether there is any people so hospitable as the Greek. The longer I live here and the more I travel about, the more I am impressed with this hospitality. It is not only on this rugged island where men live by “wresting little dues of wheat and wine and oil,” “an ill-used race of men,” one might be tempted to call them, that the stranger at the gate must come in and have the best that the house affords; at Platæa, six years ago one November night, a house- holder received the American School at Athens, carrying more mud on their persons than it is often the lot of four men to carry, into the only room in his house which had a fire, turning out his family, who were evidently enjoying it, to pass the night in a colder room. And they seemed to take it as a matter of course. But I have wandered from our goal. I had expected to find in the remains near Stauros corroboration of my belief that here lay the Homeric city. For I had long supposed, with Leake of the older topographers, and Bursian, Partsch, and Lolling of the later ones, that it must be here. Here are massive walls, rock-cut steps, ancient cisterns, and the niches in the rock passing under the name of the “School of Homer.” But at the close of the day, in order not to be unjust to the dissenters, I climbed Aëtos, and saw that the walls there, resembling those of Tiryns, had about as good claim as those at Stauros to be regarded as those of a Homeric fortress. The question where the Odyssey locates the city is not at present to be decided by remains, but by certain other indications which seem to point to the region of Stauros. The suitors of Penelope, who wished to kill Telemachus on his return from “Sandy Pylos,” lay in wait for him on an island called Asteris, “midway between Ithaca and rugged Samos.” Opposite the northern end of the island, though much nearer to Samos (Kephallenia) than to Ithaca, is the only island in the whole strait, needing to be magnified a good deal to suit the story of the Odyssey; but what poet ever denied himself the right to magnify? And looking toward this little island is the only harbor on this (western) side of Ithaca, a deep indentation running far into the land, now called “Polis Bay,” a reminiscence of the fact that a city once stood here. This name is a genuine survival from old times, and not a revamping of a classical name, as is the case with Mount Neriton. About this bay and up as far as Stauros, and even farther to the west and north, is the main smiling spot of the island. It was autopsy that I wanted more than anything else; and, as I stood on the rocks near Homer’s school, autopsy forced upon me the conviction that here, and here only, must have been the important city of the island, the city from which the faithful Paladin of Agamemnon ruled not only Ithaca but also Kephallenia. Here, amid the remains of an ancient settlement, one looks into three harbors about equally distant, Polis on the west side of the island, a broader one on the east side, now called Phrikes, in which we saw a good-sized vessel anchored, and on the north end one still more capacious, probably the Reithron of the Odyssey. The situation was well adapted to a city ruling the island and possessing easy communication with the coast, east and west. ITHACA. POLIS BAY FROM THE NORTH It is not so very many years ago that general scepticism prevailed about Homeric topography. But now, just as one smiles, in listening to Dörpfeld’s masterly exposition of the thoroughly excavated walls of Troy, at the thought that “if Troy ever stood” was catalogued by an almost contemporary poet with insoluble riddles, like "if Israel’s missing tribes found refuge here," so, in passing over Ithaca with the Odyssey in hand, one smiles to think that not long ago Hercher could maintain that there was no agreement between the Ithaca of the Odyssey and the Ithaca of reality. It may be 18 19 20 granted that Hercher knocked out the somewhat visionary Gell; but he did not touch Leake; indeed, it seems as if he had not read Leake at all. There is one passage in the Odyssey which seemed to support Hercher, in which Ithaca is spoken of as “a low island,” and as “lying apart and farther to the west than Samos and Zakynthos.” How the poet, be he the original poet of the Odyssey or an epigonos, ever happened to say this of Ithaca, the rugged island lying close up against the eastern shore of Kephallenia, no one has yet satisfactorily explained. But, apart from this Homeric crux, there is a most gratifying coincidence between “the Land and the Book.” The topography of Ithaca has gained respect in proportion as attempts have been given up to force Corfu into identity with the land of the Phæacians. In respect to Schliemann’s and Gell’s acropolis on Mt. Aëtos at the narrowest part of the island, it must be granted that this was an important fortress of the Homeric period, controlling communication between the northern and southern halves of the island, as well as the nearest approach from Samos, which was probably always in antiquity the main city of Kephallenia. But that the main city of Ithaca was ever on this eagle’s eyrie is in accordance neither with antecedent probability nor with the poet’s story. It is curious to see how different have been the estimates of the height of this mountain, according as one wished to make it the site of the Homeric Ithaca or not. And, indeed, the figures given in different books which might be supposed to rest on measurements vary also. Probably the figures given by Partsch, 380 metres, are correct. This would make the top about 1,200 feet above the sea level, but only about half that above the high ground over which the road from Bathy passes to the mooring place—it can hardly be called a harbor—opposite Samos. Partsch makes merry at “those whose faith can not only remove mountains, but also make them lower than they actually are, and who speak of the run up the steep sides of Aëtos as if it were only a matter of half an hour.” I was in my turn amused to find that in my eagerness to go up this height and down again as soon as possible, in order to take our boat back to Samos, I had made the ascent in considerably less than half an hour. Perhaps the fleet-footed shepherd boy who led me up may have taken me along a good deal faster than Partsch would have gone making his way alone. He ought, however, to have looked out not to spoil a good case by underrating the powers of English pedestrians. At half-past three we reached the shore, where our boat was tied by the stern cables waiting for us, and we set sail for Samos in such a splendid breeze from the north which had just sprung up, right on our quarter, that no Homeric ship ever sped over the waters with more life than ours. In just one hour and five minutes we landed in Samos, in time for me, though tired, to wander before dark over the high hills containing the acropolis of Samos, the remaining walls of which are most impressive. The next morning, starting with a carriage at half-past three, we were at eight o’clock in Argostoli. During the slow ascent I kept my eyes fastened upon Ithaca every moment when it was possible to do so. I wanted to see the sunlight once more illumine that long chain of four separate peaks stretched out in the sea from north to south; but before sunrise we had already got into the gorge through which the road pushes up to the top. Our first sight of the island was in the evening twilight and our last in the morning twilight. As I thought it over afterward I could not help thinking that there was an especial propriety in this; for was not Ithaca pre-eminently a land of twilight? Note.—Since excavating near Stauros in 1901 without finding any Mycenæan remains, Professor Dörpfeld has come to the conclusion that the true Homeric Ithaca was the Island of Leukas, that there was a grand confusing of names prior to Strabo, so that what was really the Homeric Same is now called Ithaca, and what was really Dulichion is now called Kephallenia. Something like this had been previously suggested in order to find a place for the Homeric Dulichion, and also to place Ithaca where it would lie “farthest out to the darkness” and “apart from the other islands.” In these two points Homer’s geography has never been quite satisfactory, but it is doubtful whether we shall get any revision of it which will be entirely satisfactory. It is possible that the results of Professor Dörpfeld’s excavations on Leukas may bring to light such Mycenæan remains as to make the scale tip in his favor. One point in his contention seems certain, viz., that Leukas is geologically an island, and as such should have found a place in the Homeric naming. But the whole question is adhuc sub judice. 21 22 23 DELPHI, THE SANCTUARY OF GREECE After a glorious day spent at Acro-Corinth, the American School, four persons, set out on November 5, 1890, for a ten days’ trip through Central Greece. The first point of interest was Delphi. As, in entrance into some fraternities, a rough and ridiculous initiation increases the pleasure of membership, so in the present case, perhaps, the rough and ridiculous approach to Delphi only served to increase the appreciation of the glory there. The little Greek steamer which coasts the Corinthian Gulf lay at anchor at Corinth, ready to start at 5 P.M. But though it was so near that one could throw a stone into it from the shore, we paid a drachma and a half apiece for being rowed on board. The boatman got well paid for the few strokes which it took him to cover that short distance. We paid more than we ought. We had committed the fatal error of asking the price instead of coolly jumping into the boat and paying half a drachma apiece when we reached the steamer. All that we lacked was a little knowledge of the country, the language, the people, and, more than all, the prices. We were paying for our tuition. Six months later, when I was much better informed, I was passing Chalkis, and thought I would like to go ashore for an hour or so. I then asked the boatman, by way of testing him, what he would charge to take me ashore and bring me back again. He replied, “Six drachmas.” I laughed, and said, “Half a drachma.” “All right,” said he, “jump in.” When one “knows the ropes” the boatmen are very tractable; but the stranger is at their mercy, because nowhere in Greece, not even at Piræus or Patras, is there a pier for a steamer to tie up to. All this seems managed in the interest of the boatmen. After ascertaining that we should have to disembark at a very early hour the next morning at Itea, the ancient Chaleion, the port of Delphi (the ticket agent said five o’clock, and the steward of the boat said three o’clock), we all selected state-rooms with care, undressed and went to bed at the early hour of seven, with instructions to the steward to wake us half an hour before the time of disembarkation. Sound slumber, which comes to men wearied with tramping, often makes hours seem short; but, when we were waked, it seemed incredible that we could have had the night’s sleep that we had so carefully planned. Our watches soon gave the dreadful corroboration to our suspicions. It was only nine o’clock in the evening. The boat had skipped Antikyra, shortening the journey by several hours, and was going to stop only half an hour before passing over to Galaxidhi, the ancient Oeantheia. In all my experience in Greece there was only one other case of a steamer being ahead of time. But oh! the hours both day and night that I have spent waiting for belated steamers; and no inconsiderable part of these hours has been spent at Itea. Three times, after patience had failed, I have taken a sail- boat across to the Peloponnesian shore, to strike the more regular communication by rail. When we were fairly landed, the ridiculous part of our initiation was completed, and the rough part began. I would fain pass over that night in the hotel at Itea. It was no worse, however, than almost any night that the traveller passes in places called by courtesy hotels in the country towns of Greece. Itea, after being for years the despair of travellers, received, as a result of the increased travel brought about by the excavation of Delphi, two very good lodging-houses, and, instead of being known as cheap and nasty, it became a place where one could be fleeced in good style. The next morning we proceeded a mile or more along the shore to the east, until we identified the ruins of the ancient port of Delphi, Kirrha, which, we are told, the Amphictyons twice destroyed in a rage, though it seems quite un-Greek to do so unreasonable a thing as to destroy the harbor through which one must continue to land. Leaving Kirrha, and putting ourselves about on the track of the old visitors of the holy place of Delphi, who came from Peloponnesus, we passed through miles of the finest olive orchard in Greece to the site of the ancient Krissa at the head of the plain, the old Homeric town which appears to have yielded reluctantly to rising Delphi the control of this region. After the joy of the plain came the joy of climbing the rugged rocks for hours until it seemed as if Delphi must be in the clouds. This double reward for the double initiation suddenly ended when, turning a sharp spur of rock, we found ourselves in the grand natural theatre which was Delphi. Even to one who had never read of it, and did not know what it was to the Greeks, the mere sight of the place must still be one of the finest views in the world. But to one who has come to look on the sanctuary of ancient Greece it is this and more also. The Phædriadæ, which rise sheer behind the wretched village of Kastri, shutting out the higher snow-clad Parnassus from view, seem like no earthly rocks. The Pleistos seems like no earthly river, as it murmurs far below, as if about to tell the sea that it had passed Delphi. Mount Kirphis, fronting the Phædriadæ, and closing the great theatre, seems privileged to have been allowed to stand silently gazing on all that went on in that holy place, and to have been its appointed warder, shutting it in from the eyes of all who would not struggle up here through the mountain passes. But from reverie to fact the little village of Kastri rudely recalls us. Villagers inform us of a “megale catastrophe.” Two nights before, at midnight, a mountain torrent had come down over the Phædriadæ, tearing through the village, sweeping away two of the miserable houses, and rendering several of the adjacent ones unsafe. One child was killed, and everybody thoroughly frightened. 24 25 26 27 28 All inquired anxiously whether there was not a chance of the village being soon purchased for purposes of excavation. Visitors from the neighboring town of Arachova, who seemed happy that they were not living in Kastri, said that probably many Kastriots would soon leave their homes anyway, and move to Arachova. The most important thing in Delphi was, of course, the temple of Apollo, in which was the oracular chasm, influences from which controlled Greece so long. Fragments of the temple lay all around, near and in the houses built above its ancient floor. This floor was so near the surface of the soil that one saw quite a portion of it. By digging away a few feet of earth in one place, an opening was laid bare, by which one could pass down into a series of vaults beneath this floor. Pomtow, who visited Delphi in 1884, counted himself as the third man who had ever crawled in through these vaults. But the exploit subsequently became so common that a fixed price of twelve drachmas was allowed workmen for removing the earth. Perhaps a hundred persons have undergone this crawling process, from which one came out covered with dirt from head to foot, but satisfied that he has seen all that was to be seen of the world-renowned temple. The village school was a striking sight. Attracted by a loud buzzing sound near the house of the keeper of antiquities, with whom we lodged, we ventured in at the open door whence the sound proceeded, and found about forty boys apparently repeating something after the teacher, who, clad somewhat like the shepherd in the play of “Œdipus,” as given at Harvard University, looked like anything but a learned man. He proved to be a gentleman, however, in spite of his rough mantle. After school we ventured with him into his house, from which his family had fled, because a river of mud had flowed through the cellar, and left the walls in a tottering condition. He seemed to possess but little, and yet he took down from the rafters a cluster or two of half-dried grapes, and gave them to us, exhibiting the time-honored Greek hospitality. But to return a moment to the school. No sooner had we arrived than a dead silence fell upon the crowd. The boys took seats on the long benches resting on the bare earth, and reading of Herodotus in modern Greek began. The first boy, with a voice pitched as high as a steam whistle of small dimensions and high pressure, started off to see how much he could read in a given time. If he saw a period coming, he would catch for breath, and dash over it like a locomotive putting on extra steam to take an up grade. To our utter amazement, the next boy beat the first both in pitch and rapidity. The teacher, without a word, watched the process with apparently rising satisfaction. Meanwhile a boy passed to and fro in the front benches, keeping things wonderfully quiet by striking the ears of the smaller boys with a little twig. No sooner had we returned to our quarters on our first evening in Delphi, and begun to read the register of people who had visited the house in the past, than, just as we were noticing the name of Bayard Taylor, a peal of thunder reverberated through the great gorge, followed by peal on peal, with rain and lightning, lasting nearly all night. It was so impressive that we wished to expose ourselves to the rain in order the better to see and hear. A sheltering roof, however, was the best place from which to enjoy the storm as much as was possible while disturbed by thoughts of the poor villagers, exposed to further sufferings and fears. He who has not seen Delphi in a thunder-storm has not seen it in all its majesty. It seems made for such spectacles. The excavations inaugurated by the French School at Athens, soon after our visit, have changed the aspect of Delphi in many respects. As the work has proceeded, I have made annual pilgrimages thither. While one finds the results of intense interest, and sees each year some additional important building brought to light, temple upon temple, the theatre, the stadion, the numerous treasuries of the different cities of Greece with their sculptured adornment, it is still the place itself that impresses one most of all. If one walks through the ruins just at night-fall, one need not ask why the Greeks considered this spot sacred. It is in itself “an awful place.” Olympia lies in a charming sunny valley. It was as appropriate to the brilliant games that were held there as was Delphi to the deep religious transactions and the awful oracle that spoke the doom of men and states. There were games at Delphi, as there was religion at Olympia; but at Olympia the games became at least as prominent as the worship of Father Zeus, while at Delphi it was always religion that was paramount. It would be contrary to the plan of this book to describe in full the excavations of Delphi. It may be said that the results were in some ways disappointing to some people. From certain passages in ancient authors sprung a belief that statues in Delphi might be as “thick as hops.” The five hundred bronze statues that Nero is said to have carried away must have made only a small hole in the total number of seventy-three thousand reported by Pliny to have been still remaining in his time. Even if one suspects an error in the text, we know that Demetrios of Phaleron, who passed for a fairly modest man, had three hundred and sixty statues erected to him at Athens during the short time in which he directed the affairs of Athens. And taking this as a sample of the way statues multiplied, we can the more readily swallow Pliny’s numerals. At any rate, Delphi is classed by him with Olympia and Athens as the third of the places where statues most abounded. But, for many years after Pliny’s time, Delphi doubtless lay open to plunder. The bronzes were melted up and the marbles made into lime. The yield of statues from the excavations has, it is true, been smaller than many expected it to be. But it would be most absurd to say that the work has been disappointing. The bronze charioteer alone, probably a subsidiary figure in the group dedicated by a member of the Syracusan family, Gelon, Hieron, Polyzalos, would have set the stamp of success upon the enterprise. And, apart from this, there is a whole museum full of statuary of the utmost importance in the history of sculpture. Tombs of the Mycenæan period with rich contents have also added to the interest of the excavations, more important in some aspects than those of Olympia. It will be years before the enormous quantity of inscriptions can be published. 29 30 31 32 33 The French excavators are to be congratulated upon the ease with which they got rid of their earth. Their dumping-cars were easily brought to the edge of the gorge of the Pleistos, and the contents shot down thousands of feet, never to trouble them more. How I have envied them when working at Corinth, where one of the chief difficulties has been to find a proper dumping-place for the enormous deposit of from twenty to thirty feet of earth. At Olympia, also, the brook Kladeos was very serviceable in carrying off the dump. It is a pity that one cannot always find an excavation site close by a serviceable river. 33