... κραίνων ἐφετμὰςἩρακλέος προτέρας,ἀτρεκὴς Ἑλλανοδίκας γλεφάρωνΑἰτωλὸς ἀνὴρ ὑψόθενἀμφὶ κόμαισι βάλοι γλαυκόχροακόσμον ἐλαίας.
... κραίνων ἐφετμὰςἩρακλέος προτέρας,ἀτρεκὴς Ἑλλανοδίκας γλεφάρωνΑἰτωλὸς ἀνὴρ ὑψόθενἀμφὶ κόμαισι βάλοι γλαυκόχροακόσμον ἐλαίας.
... 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 ofB.C.364, held by genuine Pisatans under the protection of Arkadian spears, was the only lawful celebration of the festival within historic times?
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 thestadium; we pass by the foundations of the great temple of Poseidôn; we see traces ofthe 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 anxiousthan 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 fromDekeleia, 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 forthe 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 itsperibolos, 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 seethe rude foundations—the ἀργοὶ λίθοι of Pausanias—of theperibolosof 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 eyerests 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 Latinau.
We have come to Eleusis in the guise of votaries of Poseidôn; but it is to be confessed that, when we reach the sacred city, we have to take it on trust from Pausanias that the sea-god ever was worshipped there. He tells us that there was at Eleusis a templeof Poseidôn the Father; but the remains which we have to study are the remains of the temple of the powers which were emphatically the Mother and the Daughter. Eleusis, like other cities, began as a hill-fort; it still has its akropolis, part of the circuit of whose wall can be traced. It is crowned by a church and bell-tower, of no wonderful architecture certainly, but which we trust may be allowed to abide, even though there may be the ten-thousandth part of a chance that a stone with two or three letters upon it might be found in their foundations. The hill of the Eleusinian akropolis forms a long irregular ridge, rising in the greater part of its course close above the bay, but running a little inland at the point where it becomes an akropolis. It thus leaves a considerable space for the lower city between the hill and the haven. In a walk along the hill, a shattered tower of Frankishtimes, standing on a nearly detached height, is a prominent object. When reached, it presents no details for study. But in the walk thither we look out on Salamis and the bay which it guards—a lake, as it might seem, between the mainland and the curved island—while on the other side we look down on the Thriasian plain, the plain so often ravaged by Peloponnesian invaders before they crossed the ridge of Aigaleôs to deal havoc in the neighbourhood of Athens itself. And, on the ridge before we reach the tower, one of the smallest and humblest of churches will not be scorned by those who deem that no aspect of the history of the land is beneath their notice. At the foot of the hill, at the opposite end from the tower, lay, as Athens might lie were its haven close at hand, the holy city of the Great Goddesses. At the very end of the ridge, keeping away, as it would seem, from the sea,are the ruins of the temple which was once the greatest in size among the holy places of Hellas. Little now can be made out of its vast circuit. The confused and shattered ruins which are left are those of the temple of Athênê Propylaia. Its plan may be made out with no difficulty; the results may be seen in more than one book from Colonel Leake onward. But one feature, which is not the least instructive of all, seems hardly to have drawn to itself any notice. Among its ruins lie capitals of the same class as those in the baths of Antoninus, capitals in which the traditional trammels are forsaken, and in which a wider scope is given for representation of forms divine, human, or animal. These are memorials of what was in truth one of the most flourishing times in Eleusinian history; when, under thePax Romana, no Tellos could fight in warfare between Athens and Eleusis,no traitors driven from Athens could find shelter in Eleusis, but when Athens and Eleusis flourished side by side, the one as the university of the world, the other as one of its chief seats of pilgrimage. Are these remains of the temple, as rebuilt by the philosophic Marcus? In any case they are links in that long chain of the history of art which here, as we stand in Eleusis, carries off our thoughts to Lucca and to Wetzlar. The last age then of the glories of Eleusis begins with the saint of heathendom, the prince in whose days the martyrs of Lyons bore their torments and Polycarp played the man at the stake. They were avenged when Eleusis fell before the attack of a Christian and a Teutonic invader. The desolation which we see around us dates from that inroad of Alaric which marked so great an epoch in Grecian history, the great turning-point when pagan Hellas changed intothe Christian land which scorned the Hellenic name. Since that day Eleusis has never again raised her head. A time came when she had passed away as utterly as Tiryns or Mykênê. Not an inhabited house was there when Spon and Wheler rode to Eleusis. A small town which had arisen in the days of Leake had become yet smaller during the War of Independence. And now Eleusis seems to be beginning to arise again at the point of her circuit which lies furthest away from her ancient sanctuary. Vessels are in the bay; a modern factory—we forget its exact object—covers a large space between the hill and the sea. Signs of life are to be welcomed everywhere; they are especially to be welcomed when they show that Greece has life in other spots than her encroaching capital. Let the factory grow and prosper; let the vessels come in greater numbers, they will do no harm to what remains of thetemple of Dêmêtêr and Athênê; only we should be glad to be equally sure that some æsthetic doctor, Greek or German, may not some day meditate a raid on the churches, the campanile, and the ruined tower.
One more excursion, this time not on the Attic soil, but on the Attic sea, must be added to the Eleusinian and the Marathônian pilgrimage, even by those who cannot undertake to follow the keen guidance of Colonel Leake into every corner of the Attic δῆμοι. The survey of the Attic land may well be ended at the point where, in geographical accuracy, it ought, by those at least who approach by way of Syra, to have begun. But to one thus drawing nigh for the first time, Sounion is at most the beacon which points to Athens; it may even be that, if he chances to draw nigh on a dim and cloudy morning, he mayfail to distinguish the marbled steep of Sounion among the other lofty points over which his eye wanders. He expects, it may well be, that the height and the temple will front him boldly as the first point of Attic ground to catch his eye. He may not thoroughly take in the fact that the promontory lies in a manner round a corner. Unless he has studied his map very carefully, he may draw near under the belief that the Attic peninsula ends in a point, in the same way in which the three southern peninsulas of Peloponnêsos, that of Tainaros above all, certainly do. Pausanias indeed begins his picture, not only of Attica, but of all Greece, with the “height of Sounion, stretching forth from the Attic land and the mainland of Hellas towards the Kyklades and the Ægæan sea.” Yet it is certain that some who have approached the mainland of Hellas from the Kyklades have not beenlucky enough to catch a sight of Athênê on the promontory as a harbinger of Athênê on the inland rock. Even he who is more favoured cannot, at that moment, stop to study the arrangement of the columns which still keep their ancient whiteness. Nor will he, as he sails by, find out that there too the rival of Athênê was not wholly ousted, that the sea-god kept at Sounion a secondary place, at least as important as that which he kept at Eleusis alongside of Dêmêtêr and her Child.
A voyage to Sounion forms then a necessary part of even a short sojourn in Athens and Attica. He who is careful about mines, old or new, might prefer a land journey which should combine Sounion with Laureion. Otherwise it may be better to put oneself under the guardianship of the lord of the dolphins, to whom men prayed on Sounion (ὦ χρυσοτρίαιν’, ὦ δελφίνων μεδέων Σουνιάρατε), and to trust to his golden trident to clear the way. That way leads by several striking points of coast, each cape having, as a rule, an island placed before it as a kind of outpost. Such above all is Zôstêr, where the narrow isthmus, as Dean Blakesley hints, tied the promontory to the shore, but where pious etymologers at a later time saw the spot where Lêtô loosed her girdle. Such an etymology is much of a piece with many popular etymologies in our own land. From the hill of Battle we look out on Telham, so called, says the local legend, because the advancing Norman theretoldhis army. Not far off flows one of the “cold becks” which have given their names to so many spots from Normandy to Scotland. Here it is said to mark the spot where the Dukecalled backhis flying men. The derivation of Zôstêr from Lêtô’s zone is a guess essentially ofthe same kind as these; yet there is a difference between them which is not uninstructive in comparing the history of the Greek and the English language. In the English derivations the real meaning is absolutely forgotten; wholly wrong words, having merely an accidental likeness in sound, are pressed into the service. In one of the two cases the word thus misapplied has itself in that meaning become obsolete. It is not unlikely that a new legend may arise, and that Telham, instead of the spot where Williamtold—that is, numbered—his army, may become the spot where hetoldthem to do this or that. But Greek had not, in the days at least when the Zôstêr legend was invented, been so utterly broken up as that men were likely to go off to an altogether wrong root. The tale kept within the prescribed range of tying or untying something or other; and Lêtô, Artemis, andApollôn gained a fresh seat of worship through the etymological guess. But Zôstêr has its place in history as well as in legend. The Persians, after Salamis, took, so says Herodotus, the three small peaks which form the peninsula for Athenian ships, and fled all the more till they found out their mistake. One sceptical historian suggests that it must have been a moonlit night. But, after all, may not this story be less legendary than that of Lêtô, only so far as that real actors are brought in? That the Persians took the rocks of Zôstêr for ships and fled all the more is the kind of mocking saying which was likely to be said at the time, whether true or false. And, even if it was a mere mocking saying, it might well have passed into serious belief before Herodotus, a four-years-old child at the time, had grown into an inquiring historian. After all, the story belongs toa class. There are the thistles which the armies took for spears after the fight of Montl’hery. There are the Welshwomen in the red cloaks, whom the French at Fishguard took for regular soldiers coming to the help of the valiant militia of Pembrokeshire. Did all these things happen, or are they all mere sayings which have found their way into history? Let comparative mythologists argue the point.
But we are followed by etymologies along the whole coast. Every one who has ever looked at the map knows the long island, immediately east of the southern point of Attica, whose name fluctuates between the mere description Makris and the more attractive name of Helenê. How came Helen hither? We may be sure, with all deference to Strabo, that this is not the Kranaê of the third book of the Iliad; that was far away by the Lakonianshore, and the Homeric reference was commemorated by a temple of Aphroditê with an unseemly surname. So Pausanias tells us, though he does not explain what brought Helen to the long island off Sounion. We will not hint that according to one Homeric story (see Odyssey iii. 278) she must have been, if not on the island, at least near it, in better company and at a later and better part of her story, than that in which Strabo would bring her into these parts. But on Attic soil or on Attic waters we must learn to feel an Attic patriotism, and, so minded, we can give her a chance from another quarter. We must not forget that Helen has her independent place in Attic as well as in Peloponnesian legend. She was carried off by Thêseus as well as by Paris. She was known at Aphidna, at Dekeleia, and at Rhamnous; and it would be only a fair freak of etymological invention to give heran island off the Attic as well as off the Lakonian coast.
But with Helen in this way to guard the eastern side of the southern extremity of the Attic land, it is a little disappointing when we find the real origin of the name of the much smaller island which guards its western side. There lies the isle of Patroklos. Helen and Patroklos seem well matched; and a charm seems to be broken when we find that the island takes its name, not from the Homeric antitype of Jonathan, but from the Admiral of Ptolemy Philadelphos, who there dug a trench and threw up a wall when he came to help Athens against Antigonos Gonatas. Such a fall from poetry to prose, from legend to history, is really sad. Yet we may draw some small comfort. Everything is a gain which reminds us that the history of Athens did not end with the war of Chairôneia or with the warof Lamia, but that Ptolemy and Antigonos, and men later by ages on ages than Ptolemy and Antigonos, had something to do with fixing her destinies.
The island of Patroklos is the last of the series of capes and islands between Peiraieus and Sounion. All have lost their names, unless any one takesPhauraandPhleuato be forms of the same name. All the rest have descriptive names ending in νησί—the diminutive form, which, according to rule in modern Greek, has supplanted the older νῆσος—just as along our own shores they might end inholmorey. We turn round the last point, and now—
Σούνιον ἱρὸν ἀφικόμεθ’, ἄκρον Ἀθηνῶν.
A sceptical thought will flash across the mind. Ought we not to read Ἀθήνης for Ἀθηνῶν? But if we stiflethe thought, we have again another witness to the way in which all Attica had even in Homeric times already become Athens. There is the little bay fenced in by the height, crowned by the white columns, which gives the cape its modern, its Italian, name. The name is well applied; Sounion is before all things the Cape of the Columns. The pure white which their marble still keeps is striking to the eye which has been for some time accustomed to the yellowish brownish hue of the standing columns of Athens. We say the standing columns, because those columns of the Parthenôn which have been thrown down are as white as those on Sounion. But for this last fact, it would be easy to account for the difference in the hue of the columns by the difference between the pure sea-air of Sounion and the air of an akropolis rising above a great city. Only here comes in thedifficulty which is suggested by the whiteness of the fallen columns at Athens. Either the discolouring of the columns which are still standing has happened since Morosini’s siege, or else the columns that are overthrown have regained their whiteness since their fall. We do not pretend to explain the difficulty; we only state it. All that we are concerned with is the striking effect of the white marble of the columns on Sounion as contrasted either with the discoloured columns of the Parthenôn, or with the primitive columns of rougher stone which were covered with some kind of plaster from the beginning. The actual material of the columns of Sounion is something intermediate between the two. It is marble, but marble from the neighbouring hills, much less fine than the Pentelic marble of the Parthenôn. Another point at once strikes the eye. Thirteen architectural objectsstand up, but it is soon seen that only twelve are of the usual shape of columns. What is the thirteenth? It looks like a square pier, such as we should expect to find inside a basilica at Lucca, but not outside a temple at Sounion. The appearance is puzzling until we actually reach the site of the temple and there carefully spell out the ground plan. But before we do this two other remains have to be studied. Sounion, besides being a holy place, was also a fortress. When the news of the overthrow at Syracuse came to Athens, when every means was used to prop up the tottering commonwealth, one means of defence that was taken was the fortification of Sounion. This was done with the special object of supplying a defence to the corn ships which brought in the foreign food that Athens needed more than ever when the Peloponnesians were at Dekeleia. Alarge part of the wall which cut off the promontory is still to be traced, a wall of the best Hellenic masonry, strengthened by square towers at intervals. Within this military circuit again we come to the remains of the Propylaia, the entrance, as at Eleusis and at Athens itself, to the immediate sacred precinct. But the summit of all, crowning the promontory and immediately overlooking the sea, is the temple itself. And when we come carefully to study its plan, we see the meaning of the anomalous square object which seemed so puzzling from below. The temple was onein antis, and the square object is the end of one of the walls of thecella. The fellow to it may be traced, though it does not rise high enough to make a feature in the general view. One of the columns ranging with theantæ, two on the northern side towards the land and nine on the southern orseaside, are still standing with their architraves; but the eastern and western fronts, with their columns and pediments, have perished.
It is indeed a spot to stand and gaze, though now with quite other and happier feelings than those which Byron put into the mouth of his imaginary Greek poet. The impulse is to gaze on the sea and the islands, the realm of Athens, the realm which her fortress on Sounion was to guard. But it is well to look landward also, and a short walk from the temple will show that Athênê was not the only power that was worshipped on Sounion. That the sea-god, lord of the Sounion dolphins, was worshipped there is plain from Aristophanes. The jokes in the Birds, where the god is addressed,
Ὦ Σουνιέρακε χαῖρ’ ἄναξ Πελαργικέ,
give us another title of the sea-god. Poseidôn at Sounion, like Zeus atDodônê, was prayed to as Pelasgian. The comic poet, when he had once got into Nephelokokkygia, does not scruple to change the epithets of the deity into “hawky” and “storky.” We might be sure from this that Colonel Leake was misled in fancying that Poseidôn had nothing more than a mere altar on Sounion. We come down from the temple of Athênê, we pass the Propylaia; we pass the ruins of the wall; we reach the little isthmus—for the site of the temple is peninsular—and on a lower height we find remains, not enough to enable us to make out the plan of any building, but enough to show that a building of some importance must have stood there. Surely here we have the site of the temple of the god who was prayed to on Sounion. Poseidôn is here, as well as at Corinth, at home on his isthmus.
The men of Sounion are the subjectof an allusion of the poet Anaxandridês, quoted by Athênaios, which at first sight is not very clear:—
πολλοὶ δὲ νῦν μέν εἰσιν οὐκ ἐλεύθεροι, εἰς αὔριον δὲ Σουνιεῖς, εἶτ’ εἰς τρίτην ἀγορᾷ κέκρηνται.
Some say that this refers to their prosperity as living near the mines of Laureion. The words in themselves would seem rather to point to a class intermediate between the slave and the full citizen. But how could there be such in any part of Attica after the union of the Attic towns? Of their modern successors, a few might be seen near the mouth of a cave by the sea, some contemplating the strangers, others following the useful occupation of Nausikaa. The whole scene—the little bay, with its beach beside the blue waters; the hills behind, with their white columns against the sky; the cave, suggesting endless Homericremembrances of nymphs and sea-gods—even the homely work going on by the shore—all seems in harmony; all seems to carry us back to the days when the powers which had striven for Athens seem to have agreed to hold Sounion as a joint possession.
Olympia, when the German diggers have fled before the heat of a Greek summer, when they have left all the statues and other beautiful things that they have found sealed up against all men, Greek and barbarian, may seem to be, even literally, Olympia with the spring taken out of its year. But Olympia can, for all general historical purposes, be Olympia without them; some minds may not greatly regret their absence. To some minds galleries, museums, collections of all kinds, are simply wearisome. The weariness is one which may be well endured for the sake of theknowledge which may be gained through it; still the contemplation of objects in rows and cases, catalogued and numbered, is weariness compared with the pure pleasure of contemplating the same objects, each in its right place, each forming part of the whole of which it was meant to form part. Better one statue without a nose, in the place where the sculptor first put it than ten statues with noses set up apart from their context in any collection in Athens, Rome, or London. No blame of course attaches to the diggers at Olympia. The objects which they found were not in their places, and could not be kept in their places. They can only be kept in a museum; and to our minds that museum should not only not be at Berlin or London—an evil of which Greek law forbids all danger—but it should be at Olympia and not at Athens. The little collection atEleusis is in its right place; it is at Eleusis; so it should be with the greater collection at Olympia. But the feeling that a museum, with all that it teaches, is in itself a bore, that its lessons are painful lessons, somewhat tempers the traveller’s disappointment at finding that the relics are all shut up, and that the key is somewhere in Germany. For the buildings themselves are not carried away; they can be studied without let or hindrance, and perhaps with even a deeper feeling of thankfulness to those whose untiring zeal and energy have uncovered them. And the plain of Altis, the stream of Alpheios, the hill of Kronos, the mightier Arkadian mountains, are there in any case. And they, with the immortal remembrances of the spot, are the true Olympia.
From the port of Katakolon to the town of Pyrgos there is a road, andthat road goes on further to Olympia itself. The venerable spot can therefore be reached in a carriage. The question might, however, be raised whether a carriage journey over such a road as that between Pyrgos and Olympia—a journey moreover modified by occasional spaces where it is better to go on foot—is not at least as tiring as the ride from Mykênê to Corinth. But, as the traveller goes along from Pyrgos to Olympia, especially as he nears the immediate object of his pilgrimage, he can hardly fail to draw the comparison between the nakedness of Attica and the land through which he passes, rich with trees and with cultivation, the bleak mountains replaced by lower hills which are often green with verdure, with villages scattered thick among them, the scenery in many places coming nearer to that of the hillier parts of England than might have seemed possible in Greece. It is only here and there, when the eye catches some of the more distant points of the landscape, especially when the vast heights of Arkadia come in view, that it is brought strongly home to his mind that it is through Hellas that he is journeying. At last, however, he reaches the spot which was the religious centre of Hellas, and there the Arkadian heights, soaring over the lower hills which surround the Olympian plain itself, fully remind him where he is. Here is the spot where, more than in any other, every Greek was reminded that, however war and policy might divide them, he was still a sharer with every other Greek in a heritage of language, religion, and general culture in which the barbarian had no share, where the Greek from the Spanish Zakynthos and the Greek from the Tauric Chersonêsos could feel themselves, ifnot countrymen, at least brethren, before the temple of the common Father of Gods and men. Here were the victories won which were recorded in the odes of Pindar; here, we would fain believe, Herodotus recited his history to assembled Greece; here the Macedonian King had to prove his descent from an Argeian stock before he could be admitted as a worthy competitor of Hellenic freemen; here Alkibiadês made that display of lavish splendour which at least proved that the resources of Athens were not worn out. And as we read inscription after inscription recording the name of Elis and her citizens, our thoughts go back to the never-forgotten claims of the true people of the land. We remember how Pisa—the name may almost seem strange in this, its more ancient seat—deemed herself to be the lawful President of the Olympian feast by an older right than could belong tothe intruders from Aitolia. And we think too of that one day in later times when the arms of Thebes won back for them their ancient right for one passing moment. All this might press on the mind as we look on the plain by Alpheios, and people it in imagination with competitors, spectators, worshippers, the very realm and trysting-place of the scattered Hellenic nation. All this we might call up, even if no actual monument of those days were there to remind us of them. Yet it is something to think of all this beside the uncovered foundations of the great Pan-hellenic temple; and it is something more still to trace out all that Olympia suggests in the presence of remains which tell us of the times when the Pan-hellenic temple and its festival had passed away.
The foundations of four principal buildings have been brought to light by the German diggings. Two ofthem belong to the days alike of pagan worship and of Hellenic freedom. There is the lesser, the older temple, the temple of Hêrê, in the spreading capitals of its massive Doric columns—capitals, be it remembered, now lying shivered around their feet—carrying us back to the solemn and solid style of Poseidônia and of Corinth. Side by side with this venerable fragment we find inscriptions of Roman date, bearing witness to the unity of history, and showing how Olympia still remained holy after captive Greece had led captive her conquerors. Hard by stands the great central monument of all, the temple of Zeus itself, not a column of its vast ranges standing perfect, but with, frequently enough, capitals of less antique form than those of the lesser temple, to show the date and style and character of the building which held the greatest work ofPheidias. But it is not only the days of Pheidias, the days of free Greece, the days of Athenian, Spartan, and Theban rivalry, which are represented in their remains with that memorable precinct. Two periods of the history of Greece and the world have still to be represented. There is that vast semicircle of Roman brickwork, looking like the apse of a vast basilica, but which is in truth the exedra of Hêrôdês Atticus; for the bountiful man of Marathôn extended his bounty to the shrine of the common gods of Hellas as well as to the temples, the theatres, and all the public works of his own city. But the cycle is not yet complete; there is one age more to be represented, one phase more of the history of man to furnish its contribution to the architectural remains of Olympia. And that age, that phase, has, from one point of view at least, the highest claims on us of all. Wetake our chance of being set down as irreclaimable barbarians when we say that, after all, the building of highest interest of which the remains are now to be seen at Olympia is the admirable basilican church which occupies the site of the temple of Hippodameia. Enough remains to enable us to make out nearly the whole of its arrangements. It marks a very narrow view of things, a strange imprisonment of thought within a few arbitrarily chosen centuries when we see not a few who reverence every stone of the great and the little temple, even, it may be, every brick of theexedraof Hêrôdês, but who seem to turn up their noses at a monument at least as historical as any of them. No doubt the special interest of this particular building is largely due to the place where it is found. It is because it is found in the Altis of Olympia, because it is built on the site of one of the ancient temples ofOlympia, because its materials have been supplied by that and by others of those temples, that the church which now stands as a ruin alongside of them has much of its special charm. To take the lowest view, it is a memorial of the greatest revolution of the whole course of history, the revolution which installed the worship of Christ and the Panagia on the site of the shrines of Zeus and Hêrê and Hippodameia. The classical purist cannot get rid either of the general history of mankind or of the more enlarged view of the history of art merely by shutting his eyes to both of them. The basilica is there; it is a fact; it is also a fact that those who placed it there had a special motive in placing it there—that of specially marking the triumph of the new faith by setting up its altars on the site of the fallen altars of heathendom. And it is a fact also that, however mereclassical pedantry may despise the style in which that basilica was reared, it is simply pedantry that will despise it. The style, constructively perfect in itself, contained in itself the germ of all that was to come after. We cannot reach Köln and Westminster, except by the necessary stages of Spalato and Olympia.
We may for a moment sympathize with the pedants as we read the inscription of Jovianus at Corfu. Jovianus destroyed, and he put very little in the place of that which he destroyed. We treasure his work and his boast as pieces of history; but we must allow that art, as such, has no reason to thank him. But the case is quite different with the basilica of Olympia. Its architect may take his place alongside of those who did the bidding of Diocletian and Theodoric. He destroyed indeed, but he destroyed only to put to new uses. The shrineof the new faith was reared out of the very stones of the shrine of the old. The columns which, in a past state of things, had known only how to bear the dead weight of the entablature, were now taught to lift up the arch, as a living thing rising from their own substance. Enough is left of the basilica of Olympia to show that it might have held its own even among the basilicas of Ravenna. But at Olympia the name of Ravenna seems to awake no echo, to carry with it no meaning. In all accounts that we have seen the building is said to be Byzantine. That perhaps simply means that it is Christian and not heathen. Byzantine, in any architectural sense, the church assuredly is not. It is essentially basilican, without any Byzantine features. Nor can the date be late enough to be called Byzantine in any political sense. We may talk about Byzantine after thefinal separation of the Empires in 800; before that time the word leads to confusion. One cannot conceive this church to be later than Justinian’s time; it may well be earlier. When could such a building have been so utterly overthrown and swallowed up? We can think of no time so likely as the Slavonic and Avar inroads of Justinian’s own day and of the days of his immediate successors.
The church itself is a not very large basilica of the purest and simplest type. There is no dome, no approach to Byzantine arrangement, not even thechalkidikêor transept. Two arcades supported by the smaller columns of the former building, showing Ionic capitals of two types, led to an apse of which the arch of triumph has unluckily together vanished. But of the well-wroughtcancelli, carrying the mind across the sea to St. Clement’s, a large part still remains.The apse has its windows divided by what at first sight seem to be coupled columns—the type which ranges from St. Constantia to the Moissac cloister—but which really form a single block within and without. The walls are of brick; several of the windows are preserved, and in their jambs we see long stones set upright, just as in the primitive work both of England and Ireland. Everywhere we find these witnesses to the universality of the earliest form of Christian architecture. The pavement contains many inscribed stones of various dates. Some are Pagan, recording votes of the city of Elis in the days of the early Emperors; some are Christian, as that which records the zeal of a certain pious reader ἀναγνωστής towards the making of the pavement itself. To the west of the nave is a range of Ionic columns forming the portico, but their arches or entablature has perished. But to the south-west is an attached building where alone the arches are preserved. They are set on the Ionic columns with an intervening stilt set crosswise in a most ingenious fashion. The column becomes a mid-wall shaft.
Such a building, on such a site, found in such a case, suggests thoughts which bring all the ages of the world together. The old glory of Olympia passed away; free Elis—whatever we say of free Pisa—no longer gathered the competitors of free Hellas from Massalia to Trapezous to strive in a national solemnity before the national gods of Hellas. But Olympia lived on as long as the Roman masters of Hellas clave to the gods of Rome, and saw the gods of Rome in the gods of Hellas. A day came when the lord of Rome cast away his faith alike in Zeus of Olympia and in Jupiter of the Capitol; a day followed when a laterprince forbade either worship, when the games of Olympia ceased as a rite of the forbidden worship, when her temples were forsaken or destroyed or made into materials for new temples of the new creed. Presently barbaric invasions swept away the new temple and the old alike. Zeus was still worshipped on Tainaros; St. Andrew still helped his votaries at Patras; but the temples, pagan and Christian, of the Olympian Altis lay hidden and forgotten, and the hill of Kronos looked down on solitude instead of on the great religious centre of the Hellenic race. Ages after, the zeal of strangers working on Hellenic ground brings to light the ruins of the pagan temples, and with them the ruins of the Christian Church. We rejoice in both discoveries; only let it be remembered that each alike is part of the history of Hellas and of the history of man. We will at least believe thatthere is no fear that the recovered church of Olympia may share the same fate which the narrowness of classical barbarism decreed for the ducal tower of Athens.
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