Читать книгу Studies of Travel - Greece - Freeman Edward Augustus - Страница 3

It may not seem easy to say anything new on so well-worn a subject as Athens and her Akropolis, but of all subjects in the world there is none which has been more steadily looked at from a single inadequate point of view. It is moreover a subject whose history is not yet ended, and which supplies new points of view by the fact that new pages in its history are still happening. Nowhere is the unity of history more needed to be taught as a practical lesson than on the spot where we may fairly say that the political history of the world begins. There, on the spot whose history begins before the beginning of recorded history, we feel perhaps more keenly than anywhere else how blind and narrow is the way in which the history of that spot has been so commonly looked at, how large a part of the true interest, the true life, of the spot is lopped away, if we look only at some two or three centuries of its long and varied history. In the city of Athens, as a whole, we are painfully struck by the glaring contrast of extreme antiquity and extreme newness. There are buildings of yesterday; there are buildings of a thousand years back; there are buildings of two thousand years back, but the three classes stand out in marked and indeed unpleasant contrast to one another. There are no intermediate links such as there are at Rome, binding the great classes of objects together, and making them all fit into their places as members of one unbroken series. Hence, while at Rome we never forget that we are at Rome, at Athens we may sometimes forget that we are at Athens, That so it is no fault of the Athenians, old or new. It comes of the fact that the Turk once ruled in Athens, and therefore had to be driven out of Athens; while, as the Turk never ruled in Rome, he never had to be driven out of Rome. If this is true of the city in general, it is far less true of the Akropolis. There we can never forget that we are in Athens; and, if we use our eyes aright, we can never forget that the Athens in which we stand did not exist, as some seem to fancy, only for two or three centuries two thousand years back, but that its long history spans the whole range from our first glimpses of civilized Europe down to the warfare in which men still living have borne a part. It is but a narrow view of the Akropolis of Athens to look on it simply as the place where the great works of the age of Periklês may be seen as models in a museum. A truer and a wider view will begin earlier and will go on later. The Parthenôn and the Propylaia are but the records of one stage, though doubtless the most brilliant stage, in the history of a city which ought equally to number among its records the primæval wall which was venerable and mysterious in the days of Thucydides and the bulwarks which were raised by the last Odysseus in warfare with the Turkish oppressor. In the eye of the true historian those earliest and those latest records, and the records of the long ages which passed between them, all have, perhaps not all an equal value, but at least value enough to stamp them all as alike parts of the history of the city, all alike entitled to respect and veneration from every one in whose eyes the history of the city is precious. On the hill of the Akropolis and its buildings the whole history of Athens, from its earliest to its latest days, has been clearly written, and there it may still be clearly read wherever the barbarism of classical pedantry has not wiped out the record. The primæval wall, the wall of Themistoklês, the wall of Kimôn, all come within the charmed period. No one is likely to damage them. It needs, however, a wider view than that of the mere student of the writings, the mere admirer of the art, of two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, to take in the full meaning even of the works of those arbitrarily chosen centuries. Those remains of the earliest masonry, for which we have to search behind the great buildings of the days of the democracy, those stones which rival aught at Argos or at Tiryns, have a tale to tell such as Argos and Tiryns cannot tell. Why was Athens Athens? How came that one city to fill that particular place in the world’s history which no other city ever did fill? In the Homeric catalogue Athens stands alone; all Attica is already Athens, while every other part of the catalogue is crowded with the names of those smaller towns many of which passed away before recorded history begins. Marathon and Eleusis find no place in the great record. The work had already been done, be the name of the doer of it Thêseus or any other, which made Athens all that Athens was — which fused together into one commonwealth the largest extent of territory, the largest number of citizens which, according to Greek political ideas, could act together as members of a single commonwealth. Athens could become all that she did become, because, in an unrecorded age, in an age of which those rude stones at least are the only record, all Attica became Athens. To that great revolution, none the less certain because in its own nature unrecorded, it is alike owing that Athens in one age could rear the trophy of Marathôn, and that in another she was chosen to be the head of regenerate Greece. The oldest wall — we may call it the wall of Thêseus — and the latest wall of Odysseus are but the earliest and the latest pages of one story, bound together by the direct tie of cause and effect.

If then, fully to take in the historic greatness of the Athenian Akropolis, we must look to facts and their records alike far earlier and far later than the days of Periklês, the works of the days of Periklês lose half their value if we look at them simply as the works of the age of Periklês, and do not bear in mind the long ages, the stirring events, of their later history. The house of Athênê is emphatically the Parthenôn. When Dêmêtrios the Besieger was lodged in its opisthodomos, the satirical remark was made that he and his following were by no means fitting guests for its virgin owner. It should, however, be remembered that that ancient temple has remained the house of the Virgin under three distinct forms of worship. The classical purist might disdain to notice — or, if he noticed, he might be eager to wipe out such a memory — that on the walls of the cella may still be seen the paintings, the εἰκόνες of another creed, another form of art, from those of Pheidias and Iktinos. Yet those painted forms tell us of one of the great moments in the history of South-Eastern Europe — one might rather say one of the great moments in the history of the world. It speaks of the day when the New Rome was again queen of all the nations, from Crete to the Danube, from the Euphrates to the Bay of Naples, when the Slayer of the Bulgarians, in the moment of his triumph, chose, out of all the holy places of his Empire, the church of the Panagia on the rock of Athens as the scene of his thanksgiving for the great salvation which his arms had wrought. We stand on the rock, and run over in our minds the long ages between Periklês returning from the recovery of Samos, and Basil returning from the recovery of Ochrida. We look down upon the lands which endured the ravages of the last Philip in the cause of Rome, on the city which endured the storm of Sulla in the cause of Mithridatês. We look down on the works of Hadrian and the works of Hêrôdês, and the eye wanders to a spot where the monument of a Syrian prince is the most prominent object on an Athenian hill. We think how long Athens remained the school of Rome, how the Goth turned away from her walls, how Justinian at once strengthened her as a fortress and took away from her her crown as the seat of heathen philosophy and heathen worship. Yet we mark the slight lingering of ancient memories which, in re-dedicating her ancient temples to the new faith, still kept a certain analogy between their older and their newer functions. We mark how the Parthenôn still remained the Parthenôn; how the temple of the heathen warrior Thêseus became the church of the Christian warrior George. We think — Athens is not expressly mentioned in the tale, but she can hardly be deemed to have lagged behind her fellows — how the Greeks, the Ἑλλαδικοί, as the Byzantine writer scornfully calls them, set forth on their strange and bootless errand of delivering Constantinople from Isaurian and Iconoclastic rule. Below us lie the churches of Eirênê, monuments of days when Athens and Constantinople were united in a common orthodoxy, when Athens had given an Empress to the Eastern world, and when men again dreamed of a union of East and West by the marriage of an Athenian and a Frank. All these memories lead up naturally to the great scene of Basil’s day of triumph, when a prince who might be deemed at once Roman, Greek, and Slave, chose Athens and her still abiding Parthenôn for the greatest ceremony of his long reign of warfare and of victory. We pass on to another age. The spirit which will hardly endure the memory of a Greek-speaking Cæsar on the holy hill of Athênê will find times even less to its taste when an Italian prince, in his will drawn up in the Italian tongue, bequeaths the city of Athens to the Church of St. Mary. Things had indeed changed, alike from the days of Periklês and from the days of Basil, yet Athens under the French and Italian Dukes had in some sort come back nearer to her ancient place than when she beheld the thanksgiving of the Macedonian Emperor. Athens, by that name, was again one of the powers of the world, no longer a mere province of Rome, either in her older or her newer seat. It was indeed a time of foreign rule. A Latin Duke had made his palace in the Propylaia of Periklês; a Latin Bishop had displaced the Orthodox rite of Basil’s day in the church which was still the Parthenôn. Yet those were days when Athens was the seat of a brilliant court, when the fame of her princes was spread through Europe. The formula of our own Shakespeare, so strange in the ears of many, when he speaks of Thêseus Duke of Athens, is a mark of days when her Kings and Archons had been forgotten, but the memory of her Dukes still lived in the minds of men. But the wanton barbarism of classical exclusiveness will not endure the memory or the record or the monuments of days like these. Only yesterday the tower of the Dukes of Athens was standing. Its stern and heavy mass well broke the horizontal lines of the Greek architecture, and gave to the whole group somewhat of that outline which the hill of Laon has, and which the hill of Athens has not. But the tower was late; it was barbarous; it did not belong to the two or three favoured ages; it was a reminder of times which the exclusive votaries of those two or three favoured ages would fain wipe out from the records of mankind. Mr. Mahaffy, indeed, who cannot distinguish between the taking of Constantinople in 1204 and the taking of Athens in 1687, believed that Morosini had found time to build this massive tower during the few weeks of his occupation. Mr. Mahaffy, who looks on the Akropolis as so sacred that it was a sin to bombard it, even to drive the Turks out of it — who seems to think freedom and national being something of less moment than the preservation of this or that statue or column — calls for its destruction in his text and crows over its completed destruction in a note. Of this piece of wanton barbarism Dr. Schliemann must bear the blame. Who, if any, were his Greek accomplices, we have forborne to ask. But the tower is gone; a most striking memorial of one age in the history of Athens has been swept away, under the paltry pretext that inscriptions might be found among its materials. By a righteous Nemesis, when the destroyers had finished their work of havoc, they found nothing to reward them.

We can conceive nothing more paltry, nothing more narrow, nothing more opposed to the true spirit of scholarship, than these attempts to wipe out the history of any age. So far from destroying the ducal tower, we would have kept the Turkish minaret. For the Parthenôn, already the temple of heathendom and of two forms of Christianity, became in the end the temple of Islam. A mosque had of course its minaret. Its lower part is still there in the form of a staircase, but the characteristic upper part has vanished. We know not how it vanished, whether through wanton destruction or in one of the sieges in the seventeenth or the nineteenth century. In any case, we should have been well pleased to see both minaret and tower breaking the outline, and speaking of days which have been, but which have passed away. Greece is free; the rule both of the Frank and of the Turk is gone; but that is no reason why the memorials of either Frank or Turk should be swept away. A higher national feeling would keep them carefully as trophies of victory. At all events, let not men, calling themselves scholars, lend themselves to such deeds of wanton destruction. The name of Morosini is unfairly held up to execration because an accident of warfare, which he could not control, made him the destroyer of the Parthenôn. A far heavier blame rests on those who were the deliberate destroyers of the ducal tower. On them indeed may well fall the words of withering scorn in which Byron so well couples the destroying names of Eratostratos and Elgin.