Studies of Travel - Greece

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Freeman Edward Augustus. Studies of Travel - Greece

Preface

Round Peloponnêsos

The Athenian Akropolis

Athens Below the Akropolis

Marathôn

The Saronic Gulf

Tiryns

Argos

The Akropolis of Mykênê

The Treasuries and Treasures of Mykênê

Mykênê to Corinth

Corinth

The Corinthian Gulf

Corinth to Eleusis

Sounion

Olympia and its Church

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The traveller who enters the older Hellenic world by way of Corfu, and who leaves that island by an evening steamer, will awake the next morning within a region which even modern geography and politics allow to be wholly Hellenic. As long as light serves him, he still keeps along the channel which divides free Corfu from enslaved Epeiros; night cuts him off from the sight of the mouth of the Ambrakian Gulf, and of the point where modern diplomacy has decreed that Greek nationality shall, as far as diplomacy can affect such matters, come to an end. The next morning’s dawn finds him off the mouth of the outer Corinthian Gulf. To the east he is shown the position, on one side, of Patras, the old Achaian city which St. Andrew a thousand years back so manfully defended against Slave and Saracen, on the other side, of Mesolongi, whose fame belongs wholly to our own day. We call up the two sieges — the one where the civilian Mavrokordatos, the one hero whom the Fanariot aristocracy gave to the cause of Greece, beat back the Ottoman from its mud walls; the other made more famous still by that fearful sally of the besieged, when, like the men of Ithômê or Eira, they cut their way through the thickest bayonets of the Egyptian invader. There may be some to whom the record of those great deeds may be an unknown tale, but who may yet remember how Mesolongi saw the last and worthiest days of the life of Byron. Of Patras, of Mesolongi, however, we have hardly so much as a distant glimpse; we are told where they are, and that is all. For a while, too, the Peloponnesian coast itself is more distant and less attractive than the islands to the west of it, now parts, no less than Peloponnêsos itself, of the Hellenic realm. Yet we may remember that, as we pass by the Eleian shore — Βουπράσιόν τε καὶ Ἤλιδα δῖαν, while we are shown where lies the path to Olympia, we are now passing by the true Morea, the land which once distinctively bore that name before it gradually spread over the whole peninsula. The mainland as yet hardly attracts us. The dawn has hardly given way to full sunlight as we see Ithakê fade away in the distance, while Kephallênia lifts her bold height full before us. Half the Odyssey rushes on our memory, and the memory of some may be English enough to remember the happy description of our own Ælfred, how Aulixes — his form of Odysseus— was king of two kingdoms, Ithakê and something else, which he held under the casere Agamemnôn. A happy power of seeing the analogies between the institutions of his own day and those of remote ages enabled the West-Saxon King who had seen Rome in his childhood, the prince under whom English, Welsh, and Danish rulers held their kingdoms, to understand the imperial position of the lord of many islands and of all Argos better perhaps than it was understood again till the light of comparative research broke on our own age. We pass by, hoping for some future chance of prying into the geographical difficulties of the Homeric Ithakê, but feeling at all events that it is a stirring moment when we look on islands which legend at least pictures to us as the realm of Odysseus, and in seeing which we may take in a lesson of comparative politics from the noblest ruler of our own people.

Still the insular side is more prominent than the peninsular. Zakynthos, Zante, the isle of flowers, the flower of the Levant, plays no great part in Hellenic history, but as the height of Kephallênia passes away, the beautiful island, with its hills, its valleys, its city spread along the shore and climbing up the mountain-side, is the chief object to draw the eye to itself as long as it remains in sight. It is not till we have passed the curve of the Kyparissian gulf, not till we have passed the great islands, that the coast itself becomes the main object of study. For a study it is, whether in geography, in history, or in simple contemplation of the grand coast-line with the inland mountains soaring above all, and changing their seeming geographical position with the various shiftings of the vessel’s course. The snow-capped height of Pentedaktylos, once Ta getos, rises over all, seen from this point and from that, but always suggesting the same thought, and commonly bringing with its mention the same answer — There lies Sparta. The shape of southern Peloponnêsos lends itself well to a coasting survey of this kind. The three long fingers in which the peninsula ends, and the two deep gulfs between them, allow the whole country to be seen as in a map, and allow most objects to be seen from several points, and therefore to assume several shapes. From Zante to Cerigo — a name which can hardly be a corruption, but which must have by some process supplanted the earlier Kythêra — the coast-line is everything. Islands there are not a few, but they are small islands near to the coast, entering into the general scenery of the coast, and, near as they are, some of them were, like Cerigo itself, part of the dominion of Venice and of the powers which stepped into the place of Venice. Any map earlier than the cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece will show a boundary passing between the coast and several islands which seem to lie within a stone’s throw of it. Along the whole line, the possessors of the mainland, first Ottoman, then Greek, were hemmed in, and as it were blockaded, by a series of floating outposts planted off their shores by the successive possessors of the Seven Islands. One is apt, in using a map of the days of “the Protection,” to mistake the odd-looking frontier drawn in the sea for the probable course of the steamer. Now the frontier is gone; the great islands and the tributary islets all form part of the same kingdom as the mainland. All are now Hellenic in every sense, yet the most striking object in the journey brings forcibly to the mind how recent and artificial is the modern use of the Hellenic name. Tainaros runs far into the sea, as it did when the temple of Poseidôn crowned its height, and when the Helot refugee sought shelter under his protection from his Spartan master. Behind it rises Pentedaktylos, or rather Tainaros carries on Pentedaktylos into the sea. All the folk of those heights called themselves Hellênes in the old days, and all call themselves Hellênes now. But in those intermediate days which are painted for us by the Imperial geographer, the name of Hellênes was confined to a very narrow range indeed. The only Hellênes whom Constantine knew, the only people who were so called by their neighbours — for they do not seem to have borne that name on their own tongues — were the men of Tainaros, the wild and, down almost to our own day, unconquerable land which had in his time already got the name of Maina. These, he tells us pointedly, were no Slaves, distinguishing them from their Slavonic neighbours on Pentedaktylos itself. They were called Hellênes, but it was not in distinction from the Slaves that they were so called. They were, he says, descendants of the old Romans. Let no one dream of colonists from the Palatine or even from the Aventine. The “old Romans” of Constantine are what we should call Greeks, Hellênes, in this particular case the Eleutherolakônes, the people of the Lakonian towns set free under Roman patronage from their subjection to Sparta. The Roman, the subject of the Empire, is distinguished from the Slave, but these particular Romans bore the Hellenic name because they, or at least their immediate forefathers, clave to the Hellenic Gods. Late in the ninth century, till the apostolic zeal of the first Basil brought them within the Christian fold, the men of Maina still sacrificed to Poseidon and the other gods of their fathers. Thus they were Hellênes, Hellênes in the sense which the name bears in the New Testament, Hellênes in the sense in which Jovianus of Korkyra despoiled the temples and altars of the Hellênes to raise the church of the Panagia. No piece of nomenclature is more instructive than this. The name of Hellên would have been an insult to the Orthodox Roman of the purest Hellenic blood. It clave to the men of Tainaros only because they clave to Hellenic idols. Yet, whether as Eleutherolakônes, as Hellênes, or as Mainotes, the men of Tainaros have for many ages continued to have a name of their own.

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We pass on from promontory to promontory, the gulfs taking different shapes and bringing different objects into sight at every moment. At last

Pentedaktylos and Tainaros are lighted up, as the sun, in Greek phrase, reigns (βασιλεύει) over the heavens from which he is about to sink into his golden cup. Cerigo and Malea are seen only by the help of the lesser lights, but we can still see the long harbourless coast of Lakonia stretching away to the Argolic lands, and we have found out too the site of the Lakonian Epidauros, more famous in later days as Monembasia. As we woke one morning about the islands of the West, so we wake the next along the islands of the Ægæan. Tênos, Andros, Mykonos, Mêlos, Naxos, Dêlos itself, come into view at different points, till we stand before the haven which has in modern times made itself the centre of the commerce and navigation of these seas. The isle of Syros stands before us, bleak and barren. There is the steep conical hill, covered, every inch of it, with houses rising up to the church of St. George, the cathedral church of Latin Syra, the mediæval city, the city of refuge in days when men were driven to fall back on the hill-fortresses of the earliest day. On the shore, on the site of ancient Syros, but spreading over the adjoining hills, is the modern Hermoupolis, the busy mart of all the islands. Another night, a fair starry night, on the deep, and we reach the goal of the whole pilgrimage. Day has hardly dawned enough to see clearly Sounion and its marble columns, but there, however dimly seen, is the shore of Attica, and the thought comes that came into the heart of the sailors of Salaminian Aias, that before long

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