LETTER XXII.

The Maid of Athens—Romance and Reality—American Benefactions to Greece—A Greek Wife and Scottish Husband—School of Capo d’Istrias—Grecian Disinterestedness—Ruins of the Most Ancient Temple—Beauty of the Grecian Landscape—Hope for the Land of Epaminondas and Aristides.

Island of Ægina.—The “Maid of Athens,” in the very teeth of poetry, has becomeMrs. Black of Ægina! The beautiful Teresa Makri, of whom Byron asked back his heart, of whom Moore and Hobhouse, and the poet himself, have written so much and so passionately, has forgotten the sweet burthen of the sweetest of love songs, and taken the unromantic name, and followed the unromantic fortunes, of a Scotchman!

The commodore proposed that we should call upon her on our way to the temple of Jupiter, this morning. We pulled up to the town in the barge, and landed on the handsome pier built by Dr. Howe (who expended thus, most judiciously, a part of the provisions sent from our country in his charge), and, finding a Greek in the crowd, who understood a little Italian, we were soon on our way to Mrs. Black’s. Our guide was a fine, grave-looking man of forty, with a small cockade on his red cap, which indicated that he was some way in the service of the government. He laid his hand on his heart, when I asked him if he had known any Americans in Ægina. “They built this,” said he, pointing to the pier, the handsome granite posts of which we were passing at the moment. “They gave us bread, and meat, and clothing, when we should otherwise have perished.” It was said with a look and tone that thrilled me. I felt as if the whole debt of sympathy which Greece owes our country, were repaid by this one energetic expression of gratitude.

We stopped opposite a small gate, and the Greek went in without cards. It was a small stone house of a story and a half, with a rickety flight of wooden steps at the side, and not a blade of grass or sign of a flower in court or window. If there had been but a geranium in the porch, or a rose-tree by the gate, for description’s sake.

Mr. Black wasout—Mrs. Black wasin. We walked up the creaking steps, with a Scotch terrier barking and snapping at our heels, and were met at the door by, really, a very pretty woman. She smiled as I apologised for our intrusion, and a sadder or a sweeter smile I never saw. She said her welcome in a few, simple words of Italian, and I thought there were few sweeter voices in the world. I asked her if she had not learned English yet. She coloured, and said, “No, signore!” and the deep spot in her cheek faded gradually down, in teints a painter would remember. Her husband, she said, had wished to learn her language, and would never let her speak English. I began to feel a prejudice against him. Presently, a boy of perhaps three years came into the room—an ugly, white-headed, Scotch-looking little ruffian, thin-lipped and freckled, and my aversion for Mr. Black became quite decided. “Did you not regret leaving Athens?” I asked. “Very much, signore,” she answered with half a sigh; “but my husband dislikes Athens.” Horrid Mr. Black! thought I.

I wished to ask her of Lord Byron, but I had heard that the poet’s admiration had occasioned the usual scandal attendant on every kind of pre-eminence, and her modest and timid manners, while they assured me of her purity of heart, made me afraid to venture where there was even a possibility of wounding her. She sat in a drooping attitude on the coarsely-covered divan, which occupied three sides of the little room, and it was difficult to believe that any eye but her husband’s had ever looked upon her, or that the “wells of her heart” had ever been drawn upon for anything deeper than the simple duties of a wife and mother.

She offered us some sweetmeats, the usual Greek compliment to visitors, as we rose to go, and laying her hand upon her heart, in the beautiful custom of the country, requested me to express her thanks to the commodore for the honour he had done her in calling, and to wish him and his family every happiness. A servant-girl, very shabbily dressed, stood at the side door, and we offered her some money, which she might have taken unnoticed. She drew herself up very coldly, and refused it, as if she thought we had quite mistaken her. In a country where gifts of the kind are so universal, it spoke well for the pride of the family, at least.

I turned after we had taken leave, and made an apology to speak to her again; for in the interest of the general impression she had made upon me, I had forgotten to notice her dress, and I was not sure that I could remember a single feature of her face. We had called unexpectedly of course, and her dress was very plain. A red cloth cap bound about the temples, with a coloured shawl, whose folds were mingled with large braids of dark-brown hair, and decked with a tassel of blue silk, which fell to her left shoulder, formed her head-dress. In other respects she was dressed like a European. She is a little above the middle height, slightly and well-formed, and walks weakly, like most Greek women, as if her feet were too small for her weight. Her skin is dark and clear, and she has a colour in her cheek and lips that looks to me consumptive. Her teeth are white and regular, her face oval, and her forehead and nose form the straight line of the Grecian model—one of the few instances I have ever seen of it. Her eyes are large, and of a soft, liquid hazel, and this is her chief beauty. There is that “looking out of the soul through them,” which Byron always described as constituting the loveliness that most moved him. I made up my mind, as we walked away, that she would be a lovely woman anywhere. Her horrid name, and the unprepossessing circumstances in which we found her, had uncharmed, I thought, all poetical delusion that would naturally surround her as the “Maid of Athens.” We met her as simple Mrs. Black, whose Scotch husband’s terrier had worried us at the door, and we left her, feeling that the poetry which she had called forth from the heart of Byron, was her due by every law of loveliness.

From the house of the maid of Athens we walked to the school of Capo d’Istrias. It is a spacious stone quadrangle, enclosing a court handsomely railed and gravelled, and furnished with gymnastic apparatus. School was out, and perhaps a hundred and fifty boys were playing in the area. An intelligent-looking man accompanied us through the museum of antiquities, where we saw nothing very much worth noticing, after the collections of Rome, and to the library, where there was a superb bust of Capo d’Istrias, done by a Roman artist. It is a noble head, resembling Washington.

We bought a large basket of grapes for a few cents in returning to the boat, and offered money to one or two common men who had been of assistance to us, butno one would receive it. I italicise the remark, because the Greeks are so often stigmatised as utterly mercenary.

We pulled along the shore, passing round the point on which stands a single fluted column, the only remains of a magnificent temple of Venus, and, getting the wind, hoisted a sail, and ran down the northern side of the island five or six miles, till we arrived opposite the mountain on which stands the temple of Jupiter Panhellenios. The view of it from the sea was like that of a temple drawn on the sky. It occupies the very peak of the mountain, and is seen many miles on either side by the mariner of the Ægæan.

A couple of wild-looking, handsome fellows, bareheaded and bare-legged, with shirts and trousers reaching to the knee, lay in a small caique under the shore; and, as we landed, the taller of the two laid his hand on his breast, and offered to conduct us to the temple. The ascent was about a mile.

We toiled over ploughed fields, with here and there a cluster of fig-trees, wild patches of rock and brier, and an occasional wall, and arrived breathless at the top, where a cool wind met us from the other side of the sea with delicious refreshment.

We sat down among the ruins of the oldest temple of Greece after that of Corinth. Twenty-three noble columns still lifted their heads over us, after braving the tempests of more than two thousand years. The ground about was piled up with magnificent fragments of marble, preserving, even in their fall, the sharp edges of the admirable sculpture of Greece. The Doric capital, the simple frieze, the well-fitted frusta, might almost be restored in the perfection with which they were left by the last touch of the chisel.

The view hence comprised a classic world. There was Athens! The broad mountain over the intensely blue gulf at our feet was Hymettus, and a bright white summit as of a mound between it and the sea, glittering brightly in the sun, was the venerable pile of temples in the Acropolis. To the left, Corinth was distinguishable over its low isthmus, and Megara and Salamis, and following down the wavy line of the mountains of Attica, the promontory of Sunium, modern Cape Colonna, dropped the horizon upon the sea. One might sit out his life amid these loftily-placed ruins, and scarce exhaust in thought the human history that has unrolled within the scope of his eye.

We passed two or three hours wandering about among the broken columns, and gazing away to the main and the distant isles, confessing the surpassing beauty of Greece. Yet have its mountains scarce a green spot, and its vales are treeless and uninhabited, and all that constitutes desolation is there, and strange as it may seem, you neither miss the verdure, nor the people, nor find it desolate. The outline of Greece, in the first place, is the finest in the world. The mountains lean down into the valleys, and the plains swell up to the mountains, and the islands rise from the sea, with a mixture of boldness and grace altogether peculiar. In the most lonely parts of the Ægæan, where you can see no trace of a human foot, it strikes you like a foreign land. Then the atmosphere is its own, and it exceeds that of Italy, far. It gives it the look of a landscape seen through a faintly-teinted glass. Soft blue mists of the most rarefied and changing shapes envelop the mountains on the clearest day, and without obscuring the most distant points perceptibly, give hill and vale a beauty that surpasses that of verdure. I never saw suchairas I see in Greece. It has the same effect on the herbless and rocky scenery about us, as a veil over the face of a woman.

The islander who had accompanied us to the temple, stood on a fragment of a column, still as a statue, looking down upon the sea towards Athens. His figure for athletic grace of mould, and his head and features, for the expression of manly beauty and character, might have been models to Phidias. The beautiful and poetical land, of which he inherited his share of unparalleled glory, lay around him. I asked myself why it should have become, as it seems to be, the despair of the philanthropist. Why should its people, who, in the opinion of Childe Harold, are “nature’s favourites still,” be branded and abandoned as irreclaimable rogues, and the source to which we owe, even to this day, our highest models of taste, be neglected and forgotten? The nine days’ enthusiasm for Greece has died away, and she has received a king from a family of despots. But there seems to me in her very beauty, and in the still superior qualities of her children, wherever they have room for competition, a promise of resuscitation. The convulsions of Europe may leave her soon to herself, and the slipper of the Turk, and the hand of the Christian, once lifted fairly from her neck, she will rise, and stand up amid these imperishable temples, once more free!

LETTER XXIII.

Athens—Ruins of the Parthenon—The Acropolis—Temple of Theseus—The Oldest of Athenian Antiquities—Burial-Place of the Son of Miaulis—Reflections on Standing where Plato taught, and Demosthenes harangued—Bavarian Sentinel—Turkish Mosque, erected within the Sanctuary of the Parthenon—Wretched Habitations of the Modern Athenians.

Ægæan Sea.—We got under way this morning, and stood towards Athens, followed by the sloop-of-war, “John Adams,” which had come to anchor under our stern the evening of our arrival at Ægina. The day is like every day of the Grecian summer, heavenly. The stillness and beauty of a new world lie about us. The ships steal on with their clouds of canvass just filling in the light breeze of the Ægæan, and withdrawing the eye from the lofty temple crowning the mountain on our lee, whose shining columns shift slowly as we pass; we could believe ourselves asleep on the sea. I have been repeating to myself the beautiful reflection of Servius Sulpitius, which occurs in his letter of condolence to Cicero, on the death of his daughter, written on this very spot,[8]“On my return from Asia,” he says, “as I was sailing from Ægina toward Megara, I began to contemplate the prospect of the countries around me. Ægina was behind, Megara before me; Piræus on the right, Corinth on the left; all which towns, once famous and flourishing, now lie overturned and buried in their ruins; upon this sight, I could not but presently think within myself, ‘Alas! how do we poor mortals fret and vex ourselves if any of our friends happen to die or be killed, whose life is yet so short, when the carcases of so many cities lie here exposed before me in one view.’”

The columns of the Parthenon are easily distinguishable with the glass, and to the right of the Acropolis, in the plain, I see a group of tall ruins, which by the position must be near the banks of the Ilissus. I turn the glass upon the sides of the mount Hymettus, whose beds of thyme, “the long, long summer gilds,” and I can scarce believe that the murmur of the bees is not stealing over the water to my ear. Can this be Athens? Are these the same isles and mountains Alcibiades saw, returning with his victorious galleys from the Hellespont; the same that faded on the long gaze of the conqueror of Salamis, leaving his ungrateful country for exile; the same that to have seen, for a Roman, was to be complete as a man; the same whose proud dames wore the golden grasshopper in their hair, as a boasting token that they had sprung from the soil; the same where Pericles nursed the arts, and Socrates and Plato taught “humanity,” and Epicurus walked with his disciples, looking for truth? What an offset are these thrilling thoughts, with the nearing view in my sight, to a whole calendar of common misfortune!

Dropped anchor in the Piræus, the port of Athens. The city is five miles in the interior, and the “arms of Athens,” as the extending walls were called, stretched in the times of the republic from the Acropolis to the sea. The Piræus, now nearly a deserted port, with a few wretched houses, was then a large city. It wants an hour to sunset, and I am about starting with one of the officers to walk to Athens.

Five miles more sacred in history than those between the Piræus and the Acropolis do not exist in the world. We walked them in about two hours, with a golden sunset at our backs, and the excitement inseparable from an approach to “the eye of Greece,” giving elasticity to our steps. Near the Parthenon, which had been glowing in a flood of saffron light before us, the road separated, and taking the right, we entered the city by its southern gate. A tall Greek, who was returning from the plains with a gun on his shoulder, led us through the narrow streets of the modern town to an hotel, where a comfortable supper, of which the most attractive circumstance to me was some honey from Hymettus, brought us to bed-time.

We were standing under the colonnades of the temple of Theseus, the oldest, and the best preserved of the antiquities of Athens, at an early hour. We walked around it in wonder. The sun that threw inward the shadows of its beautiful columns, had risen on that eastern porch for more than two thousand years, and it is still the transcendent model of the world. The Parthenon was a copy of it. The now venerable and ruined temples of Rome, were built in its proportions when it was already an antiquity. The modern edifices of every civilised nation are considered faulty only as they depart from it. How little dreamed the admirable Grecian, when its proportions rose gradually to his patient thought, that the child of his teeming imagination would be so immortal!

The situation of the Theseion has done much to preserve it. It stands free of the city, while the Parthenon and the other temples of the Acropolis, being within the citadel, have been battered by every assailant, from the Venetian to the iconoclast and the Turk. It looks at a little distance like a modern structure, its parts are so nearly perfect. It is only on coming close to the columns that you see the stains in the marble to be the corrosion of the long-feeding tooth of ages. A young Englishman is buried within the nave of the temple, and the son of Miaulis, said to have been a young man worthy of the best days of Greece, lies in the eastern porch, with the weeds growing rank over his grave.

We passed a handsome portico, standing alone amid a heap of ruins. It was the entrance to the ancient Agora. Here assembled the people of Athens, the constituents and supporters of Pericles, the first possessors of these godlike temples. Here were sown, in the ears of the Athenians, the first seeds of glory and sedition, by patriots and demagogues, in the stirring days of Platæa and Marathon. Here was it first whispered that Aristides had been too long called “the just,” and that Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens. And, for a lighter thought, it was here that the wronged wife of Alcibiades, compelled to come forth publicly and sign her divorce, was snatched up in the arms of her brilliant, but dissolute husband, and carried forcibly home, forgiving him, woman-like, with but half a repentance. The feeling with which I read the story when a boy, is strangely fresh in my memory.

We hurried on to the Acropolis. The ascent is winding and difficult, and, near the gates, encumbered with marble rubbish. Volumes have been written on the antiquities which exist still within the walls. The greater part of four unrivalled temples are still lifted to the sun by this tall rock in the centre of Athens, the majestic Parthenon, visible over half Greece, towering above all. A Bavarian soldier received our passport at the gate. He was resting the butt of his musket on a superb bas-relief, a fragment from the ruins. How must the blood of a Greek boil to see a barbarian thus set to guard the very sanctuary of his glory.

We stood under the portico of the Parthenon, and looked down on Greece. Right through a broad gap in the mountains, as if they had been swept away that Athens might be seen, stood the shining Acropolis of Corinth. I strained my eyes to see Diogenes lying under the walls, and Alexander standing in his sunshine. “Sea-born Salamis” was beneath me, but the “ships by thousands” were not there, and the king had vanished from his “rocky throne” with his “men and nations.” Ægina lay far down the gulf, folded in its blue mist, and I strained my sight to see Aristides wandering in exile on its shore. “Mars Hill” was within the sound of my voice, but its Areopagus was deserted of its judges, and the intrepid apostle was gone. The rostrum of Demosthenes, and the academy of Plato, and the banks of the Ilissus, where Socrates and Zeno taught, were all around me, but the wily orator, and the philosopher, “on whose infant lips the bees shed honey as he slept,” and he whose death and doctrine have been compared to those of Christ, and the self-denying stoic, were alike departed. Silence and rain brood over all!

I walked through the nave of the Parthenon, passing a small Turkish mosque (built sacrilegiously by the former Disdar of Athens, within its very sanctuary), and mounted the south-eastern rampart of the Acropolis. Through the plain beneath ran the classic Ilissus, and on its banks stood the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Olympus, which I had distinguished with the glass in coming up the Ægæan. The Ilissus was nearly dry, but a small island covered with verdure divided its waters a short distance above the temple, and near it were distinguishable the foundations of the Lyceum. Aristotle and his Peripatetics ramble there no more. A herd of small Turkish horses were feeding up toward Hymettus, the only trace of life in a valley that was once alive with the brightest of the tides of human existence.

The sun poured into the Acropolis with an intensity I have seldom felt. The morning breeze had died away, and the glare from the bright marble ruins was almost intolerable to the eye. I climbed around over the heaps of fragmented columns, and maimed and fallen statues, to the north-western corner of the citadel, and sat down in the shade of one of the embrasures to look over toward Plato’s academy. The part of the city below this corner of the wall was the ancient Pelasgicum. It was from the spot where I sat that Parrhesiades, the fisherman, is represented in Lucian to have angled for philosophers, with a hook baited with gold and figs.

The academy (to me the most interesting spot of Athens) is still shaded with olive groves, as in the time of Plato. The Cephissus, whose gentle flow has mingled its murmur with so much sweet philosophy, was hidden from my sight by the numberless trees. I looked toward the spot with inexpressible interest. I had not yet been near enough to dispel the illusion. To me the academy was still beneath those silvery olives in all its poetic glory. The “Altar of Love” still stood before the entrance; the temple of Prometheus, the sanctuary of the Muses, the statues of Plato and of the Graces, the sacred olive, the tank in the cool gardens, and the tower of the railing Timon, were all there. I could almost have waited till evening to see Epicurus and Leontium, Socrates and Aspasia, returning to Athens.

We passed the Tower of the Winds, the ancient Klepsydra or water-clock of Athens, in returning to the hotel. The Eight Winds sculptured on the octagonal sides, are dressed according to their temperatures, six of them being more or less draped, and the remaining two nude. It is a small marble building, more curious than beautiful.

Our way lay through the sultry streets of modern Athens. I can give you an idea of it in a single sentence. It is a large village, of originally mean houses, pulled down to the very cellars, and lying choked in its rubbish. A large square in ruins after a fire in one of our cities, looks like it. It has been destroyed so often by Turks and Greeks alternately, that scarce one stone is left upon the other. The inhabitants thatch over one corner of these wretched and dusty holes with maize stalks and straw, and live there like beasts. The fineness of the climate makes a roof almost unnecessary for eight months in the year. The consuls and authorities of the place, and the missionaries, have tolerable houses, but the paths to them are next to impracticable for the rubbish. Nothing but a Turkish horse, which could be ridden up a precipice, would ever pick his way through the streets.

[8]

“Ex Asia rediens,” &c.—I have given the Translation from Middleton’s Cicero.

LETTER XXIV.

The “Lantern of Demosthenes”—Byron’s Residence in Athens—Temple of Jupiter Olympus, Seven Hundred Years in Building—Superstitious Fancy of the Athenians respecting its Ruins—Hermitage of a Greek Monk—Petarches, the Antiquary and Poet, and his Wife, Sister to the “Maid of Athens”—Mutilation of a Basso Rilievo by an English Officer—The Elgin Marbles—The Caryatides—Lord Byron’s Autograph—Attachment of the Greeks to Dr. Howe—The Sliding Stone—A Scene in the Rostrum of Demosthenes.

Took a walk by sunset to the Ilissus. I passed, on the way, the “Lantern of Demosthenes,” a small octagonal building of marble, adorned with splendid columns, and a beautifully sculptured frieze, in which it is said the orator used to shut himself for a month, with his head half shaved, to practice his orations. The Franciscan convent, Byron’s residence while in Athens, was built adjoining it. It is now demolished. The poet’s name is written with his own hand on a marble slab of the wall.

I left the city by the gate of Hadrian, and walked on to the temple of Jupiter Olympus. It crowns a small elevation on the northern bank of the Ilissus. It was once beyond all comparison the largest and most costly building in the world. During seven hundred years it employed the attention of the rulers of Greece, from Pisistratus to Hadrian, and was never quite completed. As a ruin it is the most beautiful object I ever saw. Thirteen columns of Pentelic marble, partly connected by a frieze, are all that remain. They are of the flowery Corinthian order, and sixty feet in height, exclusive of base or capital.

Three perfect columns stand separate from the rest, and lift from the midst of that solitary plain with an effect that, to my mind, is one of the highest sublimity. The sky might rest on them. They seem made to sustain it. As I lay on the parched grass and gazed on them in the glory of a Grecian sunset, they seemed to me proportioned for a continent. The mountains I saw between them were not designed with more amplitude, nor corresponded more nobly to the sky above.

The people of Athens have a superstitious reverence for these ruins. Dodwell says, “The single column toward the western extremity was thrown down, many years ago, by a Turkish voivode, for the sake of the materials, which were employed in constructing the great mosque of the bazaar. The Athenians relate that, after it was thrown down, the three others nearest it were heard to lament the loss of their sister! and these nocturnal lamentations did not cease till the sacrilegious voivode was destroyed by poison.

Two of the columns, connected by one immense slab, are surmounted by a small building, now in ruins, but once the hermitage of a Greek monk. Here he passed his life, seventy feet in the air, sustained by two of the most graceful columns of Greece. A basket, lowered by a line, was filled by the pious every morning, but the romantic eremite was never seen. With the lofty Acropolis crowned with temples just beyond him, the murmuring Ilissus below, the thyme-covered sides of Hymettus to the south, and the blue Ægæan stretching away to the west, his eye, at least, could never tire. There are times when I could envy him his lift above the world.

I descended to the Fountain of Callirhoe, which gushes from beneath a rock in the bed of the Ilissus, just below the temple. It is the scene of the death of the lovely nymph-mother of Ganymede. The twilight air was laden with the fragrant thyme, and the songs of the Greek labourers returning from the fields came faintly over the plains. Life seems too short, when every breath is a pleasure. I loitered about the clear and rocky lip of the fountain, till the pool below reflected the stars in its trembling bosom. The lamps began to twinkle in Athens, Hesperus rose over Mount Pentilicus like a blazing lamp, the sky over Salamis faded down to the sober tint of night, and the columns of the Parthenon mingled into a single mass of shade. And so, I thought, as I strolled back to the city, concludes a day in Athens—one, at least, in my life, for which it is worth the trouble to have lived.

I was again in the Acropolis the following morning. Mr. Hill had kindly given me a note to Petarches, the king’s antiquary, a young Athenian, who married the sister of the “Maid of Athens.”[9]We went together through the ruins. They have lately made new excavations, and some superb bassi-rilieivi are among the discoveries. One of them represented a procession leading victims to the sacrifice, and was quite the finest thing I ever saw. The leading figure was a superb female, from the head of which the nose had lately been barbarously broken. The face of the enthusiastic antiquary flushed while I was lamenting it. It was done, he told me, but a week before, by an officer of the English squadron then lying at the Piræus. Petarches detected it immediately, and sent word to the admiral, who discovered the heartless goth in a nephew of an English duke, a midshipman of his own ship. I should not have taken the trouble to mention so revolting a circumstance if I had not seen, in a splendid copy of the “illustrations of Byron’s Travels in Greece,” a most virulent attack on the officers of the “Constellation,” and Americans generally, for the same thing. Who but Englishmen have robbed Athens, and Ægina, and all Greece? Who but Englishmen are watched like thieves in their visits to every place of curiosity in the world? Where is the superb caryatid of the Erechtheion? stolen, with such barbarous carelessness, too, that the remaining statues and the superb portico they sustained are tumbling to the ground! The insolence of England’s laying such sins at the door of another nation is insufferable.

For my own part, I cannot conceive the motive for carrying away a fragment of a statue or a column. I should as soon think of drawing a tooth as a specimen of some beautiful woman I had seen in my travels. And how one dare show such a theft to any person of taste, is quite as singular. Even when a whole column or statue is carried away, its main charm is gone with the association of the place. I venture to presume, that no person of classic feeling ever saw Lord Elgin’s marbles without execrating the folly that could bring them from their bright, native sky, to the vulgar atmosphere of London. For the love of taste, let us discountenance such barbarisms in America.

The Erechtheion and the adjoining temple are gems of architecture. The small portico of the caryatides (female figures, in the place of columns, with their hands on their hips) must have been one of the most exquisite things in Greece. One of them (fallen in consequence of Lord Elgin’s removal of the sister statue), lies headless on the ground, and the remaining ones are badly mutilated, but they are very, very beautiful. I remember two in the Villa Albani, at Rome, brought from some other temple in Greece, and considered the choicest gems of the gallery.

We climbed up the sanctuary of the Erechtheion, in which stood the altars to the two elements to which the temples were dedicated. The sculpture around the cornices is still so sharp, that it might have been finished yesterday. The young antiquary alluded to Byron’s anathema against Lord Elgin, in “Childe Harold,” and showed me, on the inside of the capital of one of the columns, the place where the poet had written his name. It was, as he always wrote it, simply “Byron,” in small letters, and would not be noticed by an ordinary observer.

If the lover, as the poet sings, was jealous of the star his mistress gazed upon, the sister of the “Maid of Athens” may well be jealous of the Parthenon. Petarches looks at it and talks of it with a fever in his eyes. I could not help smiling at his enthusiasm. He is about twenty-five, of a slender person, with downcast, melancholy eyes, and looks the poet according to the most received standard. His reserved manners melted toward me on discovering that I knew our countryman, Dr. Howe, who, he tells me, was his groomsman (or the corresponding assistant at a Greek wedding), and to whom he seems, in common with all his countrymen, warmly attached. To a man of his taste, I can conceive nothing more gratifying than his appointment to the care of the Acropolis. He spends his day there with his book, attending the few travellers who come, and when the temples are deserted, he sits down in the shadow of a column, and reads amid the silence of the ruins he almost worships. There are few vocations in this envious world so separated from the jarring passions of our nature.

Passed the morning on horseback, visiting the antiquities without the city. Turning by the temple of Theseus, we crossed Mars Hill, the seat of the Areopagus, and passing a small valley, ascended the Pnyx. On the right of the path we observed the rock of the hill worn to the polish of enamel by friction. It was an almost perpendicular descent of six or seven feet, and steps were cut at the sides to mount to the top. It is the famous sliding stone, believed by the Athenians to possess the power of determining the sex of unborn children. The preference of sons, if the polish of the stone is to be trusted, is universal in Greece.

The rostrum of Demosthenes was above us on the side of the hill facing from the sea. A small platform is cut into the rock, and on either side a seat is hewn out, probably for the distinguished men of the state. The audience stood on the side-hill, and the orator and his listeners were in the open air. An older rostrum is cut into the summit of the hill, facing the sea. It is said that when the maritime commerce of Greece began to enrich the lower classes, the thirty tyrants turned the rostrum toward the land, lest their orators should point to the ships of the Piræus, and remind the people of their power.

Scene after scene swept through my fancy as I stood on the spot. I saw Demosthenes, after his first unsuccessful oration, descending with a dejected air toward the temple of Theseus, followed by old Eunomus;[10]abandoning himself to despair, and repressing the fiery consciousness within him as a hopeless ambition. I saw him again, with the last glowing period of a Philippic on his lips, standing on this rocky eminence, his arm stretched toward Macedon; his eye flashing with success, and his ear catching the low murmur of the crowd below, which told him he had moved his country as with the heave of an earthquake. I saw the calm Aristides rise, with his mantle folded majestically about him; and the handsome Alcibiades waiting with a smile on his lips to speak; and Socrates, gazing on his wild but winning disciple with affection and fear. How easily is this bare rock, whereon the eagle now alights unaffrighted, repeopled with the crowding shadows of the past.

[9]

You will recollect what Byron says of these three girls in one of his letters to Dr. Drury: “I had almost forgot to tell you, that I am dying for love of three Greek girls, at Athens, sisters. I lived in the same house. Teresa, Marcama, and Katinka, are the names of these divinities—all under fifteen.”

[10]

“However, in his first address to the people, he was laughed at and interrupted by their clamours; for the violence of his manner threw him into a confusion of periods, and a distortion of his argument. At last, upon his quitting the Assembly, Eunomus, the Thriasian, a man now extremely old, found him wandering in a dejected condition in the Piræus, and took upon him to set him right.”—Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes.

LETTER XXV.

The Prison of Socrates—Turkish Stirrups and Saddles—Plato’s Academy—The American Missionary School at Athens—The Son of Petarches and Nephew of “Mrs. Black of Ægina.”

Athens.—We dismounted at the door of Socrates’ prison. A hill between the Areopagus and the sea, is crowned with the remains of a showy monument to a Roman pro-consul. Just beneath it the hill forms a low precipice, and in the face of it you see three low entrances to caverns hewn in the solid rock. The farthest to the right was the room of the Athenian guard, and within it is a chamber with a round ceiling, which the sage occupied during the thirty days of his imprisonment. There are marks of an iron door which separated it from the guard-room, and through the bars of this he refused the assistance of his friends to escape, and held those conversations with Crito, Plato, and others which have made his name immortal. On the day upon which he was doomed to die, he was removed to the chamber nearest the Acropolis, and here the hemlock was presented to him. A shallower excavation between, held an altar to the gods; and after his death, his body was here given to his friends.

Nothing, except some of the touching narrations of Scripture ever seemed to me so affecting as the history of the death of Socrates. It has been likened (I think, not profanely), to the death of Christ. His virtuous life, his belief in the immortality of the soul and a future state of reward and punishment, his forgiveness of his enemies and his godlike death, certainly prove him, in the absence of revealed light, to have walked the “darkling path of human reason” with an almost inspired rectitude. I stood in the chamber which had received his last breath, not without emotion. The rocky walls about me had witnessed his composure as he received the cup from his weeping jailer; the roughly-hewn floor beneath my feet had sustained him, as he walked to and fro, till the poison had chilled his limbs; his last sigh, as he covered his head with his mantle and expired, passed forth by that low portal. It is not easy to be indifferent on spots like these. The spirit of the place is felt. We cannot turn back and touch the brighter links of that “fleshly chain,” in which all human beings since the creation have been bound alike without feeling, even through the rusty coil of ages, the electric sympathy. Socrates died here! The great human leap into eternity, the inevitable calamity of our race, was here taken more nobly than elsewhere. Whether the effect be to “fright us from the shore,” or, to nerve us by the example, to look more steadily before us, a serious thought, almost, of course, a salutary one, lurks in the very air.

We descended the hill and galloped our small Turkish horses at a stirring pace over the plain. The short stirrup and high-peaked saddle of the country, are (at least to men of my length and limb) uncomfortable contrivances. With the knees almost up to the chin, one is compelled, of course, to lean far over the horse’s head, and it requires all the fulness of Turkish trousers to conceal the awkwardness of the position. We drew rein at the entrance of the “olive-grove.” Our horses walked leisurely along the shaded path between the trees, and we arrived in a few minutes at the site of Plato’s Academy. The more ethereal portion of my pleasure in seeing it must be in the recollection. The Cephissus was dry, the noon-day sun was hot, and we were glad to stop, with throbbing temples, under a cluster of fig-trees, and eat the delicious fruit, forgetting all the philosophers incontinently. We sat in our saddles, and a Greek woman, of great natural beauty, though dressed in rags, bent down the boughs to our reach. The honey from the over-ripe figs, dropped upon us as the wind shook the branches. Our dark-eyed and bright-lipped Pomona served us with a grace and cheerfulness that would draw me often to the neighbourhood of the Academy if I lived in Athens. I venture to believe that Phryne herself, in so mean a dress, would scarce have been more attractive. We kissed our hand to her as our spirited horses leaped the hollow with which the trees were encircled, and passing the mound sacred to the Furies, where Œdipus was swallowed up, dashed over the sultry plain once more, and were soon in Athens.

I have passed most of my leisure hours here in a scene I certainly did not reckon in anticipation, among the pleasures of a visit to Athens—the American Missionary School. We have all been delighted with it, from the commodore to the youngest midshipman. Mr. and Mrs. Hill have been here some four or five years, and have attained their present degree of success in the face of every difficulty. Their whole number of scholars from the commencement, has been upwards of three hundred; at present they have a hundred and thirty, mostly girls.

We found the school in a new and spacious stone building on the site of the ancient “market,” where Paul, on his visit to Athens, “disputed daily with those that met with him.” A large court-yard, shaded partly with a pomegranate tree, separates it from the marble portico of the Agora, which is one of the finest remains of antiquity. Mrs. Hill was in the midst of the little Athenians. Two or three serious-looking Greek girls were assisting her in regulating their movements, and the new and admirable system of combined instruction and amusement was going on swimmingly. There were, perhaps, a hundred children in the benches, mostly from three to six or eight years of age: dark-eyed, cheerful little creatures, who looked as if their “birthright of the golden grasshopper” had made them nature’s favourites as certainly as in the days when their ancestor-mothers settled questions of philosophy. They marched and recited, and clapped their sun-burnt hands, and sung hymns, and I thought I never had seen a more gratifying spectacle. I looked around in vain for one who seemed discontented or weary. Mrs. Hill’s manner to them was most affectionate. She governs, literally with a smile.

I selected several little favourites. One was a fine fellow of two to three years, whose name I inquired immediately. He was Plato Petarches, the nephew of the “Maid of Athens,” and the son of the second of the three girls so admired by Lord Byron. Another was a girl of six or seven, with a face, surpassing, for expressive beauty, that of any child I ever saw. She was a Hydriote by birth, and dressed in the costume of the islands. Her little feet were in Greek slippers; her figure was prettily set off with an open jacket, laced with buttons from the shoulder to the waist, and her head was enveloped in a figured handkerchief, folded gracefully in the style of a turban, and brought under her chin, so as to show suspended a rich metallic fringe. Her face was full, but marked with childish dimples, and her mouth and eyes, as beautiful as ever those expressive features were made, had a retiring seriousness in them, indescribably sweet. She looked as if she had been born in some scene of Turkish devastation, and had brought her mother’s heart-ache into the world.

At noon, at the sound of a bell, they marched out, clapping their hands in time to the instructor’s voice, and seated themselves in order upon the portico, in front of the school. Here their baskets were given them, and each one produced her dinner and eat it with the utmost propriety. It was really a beautiful scene.

It is to be remembered that here are educated a class of human beings who were else deprived of instruction by the universal custom of their country. The females of Greece are suffered to grow up in ignorance. One who can read and write is rarely found. The school has commenced fortunately at the most favourable moment. The government was in process of change, and an innovation was unnoticed in the confusion that at a later period might have been opposed by the prejudices of custom. The King and the President of the Regency, Count Armansperg, visited the school frequently during their stay in Athens, and expressed their thanks to Mrs. Hill warmly. The Countess Armansperg called repeatedly to have the pleasure of sitting in the school-room for an hour. His Majesty, indeed, could hardly find a more useful subject in his realm. Mrs. Hill, with her own personal efforts, has taughtmore than one hundred children to read the Bible! How few of us can write against our names an equal offset to the claims of human duty?

Circumstances made me acquainted with one or two wealthy persons residing in Athens, and I received from them a strong impression of Mr. Hill’s usefulness and high standing. His house is the hospitable resort of every stranger of intelligence and respectability.

Mr. King and Mr. Robinson, missionaries of the Foreign Board, are absent at Psera. Their families are here.

I passed my last evening among the magnificent ruins on the banks of the Ilissus. The next day was occupied in returning visits to the families who had been polite to us, and, with a farewell of unusual regret to our estimable missionary friends, we started on horseback to return by a gloomy sunset to the Piræus. I am looking more for the amusing than the useful in my rambles about the world, and I confess I should not have gone far out of my way to visit a missionary station anywhere. But chance has thrown this of Athens across my path, and I record it as a moral spectacle to which no thinking person could be indifferent. I freely say I never have met with an equal number of my fellow-creatures, who seemed to me so indisputably and purely useful. The most cavilling mind must applaud their devoted sense of duty, bearing up against exile from country and friends, privations, trial of patience, and the many, many ills inevitable to such an errand in a foreign land, while even the coldest politician would find in their efforts the best promise for an enlightened renovation of Greece.

Long after the twilight thickened immediately about us, the lofty Acropolis stood up, bathed in a glow of light from the lingering sunset. I turned back to gaze upon it with an enthusiasm I had thought laid on the shelf with my half-forgotten classics. The intrinsic beauty of the ruins of Greece, the loneliness of their situation, and the divine climate in which, to use Byron’s expression, they are “buried,” invest them with an interest which surrounds no other antiquities in the world, I rode on, repeating to myself Milton’s beautiful description:—

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