^mw-% ^, THE I5LE5 AND 5HRiriE5 S.J.bARKOWS LIBRARY OF THE University of California. OII^T OF Class ^ \ ^ Vt A If. n r,'o(X_iNA-<- C nr // -^^f^^ <^- cJ^t THE ISLES AND SHRINES GREECE or THE UNIVERSITY _ or THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE BY SAMUEL J. BARROWS ILLUSTRATED BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1899 \ B R ^f THE dfORH\}L, Copyright, 1898, By Samuel J. Barrows. John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. TO WILHELM DORPFELD, Ph.D., LL.D. director oC tije German ^rcfjacoloflical 5fgtitute at ^ttens, WHO IN BRINGING TO LIGHT THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF THE OLD WORLD HAS WON THE GRATITUDE AND ADMIRATION OF THE NEW. PREFACE The isles and shrines of Greece ! Not all the shrines, nor all the isles, but many of them, and these the most beautiful and the most famous. This book is a partial expression of gratitude for rich opportunities enjoyed in Greece, where few per- sons, I fancy, have had a more varied experience. The great difficulty has been to compress within the limits of one volume the mass of material at my command. No place is described that I have not seen, though I saw many places which there is no room to describe. Nearly all of the illustrations are reproductions from photographs from my own camera. In fulfilling a desire to enter Greece by the por- tals of the Odyssey and to leave it through the Trojan gates of the Iliad, my trip included the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnesus, Phocis, Thessaly, Attica, the ^gean Islands and Troy. If Crete is not included, it is because it lay out of my path, not because I admit the Turkish claim to that island, which by every consideration of history, Ian- Vlll PREFACE guage, and tradition ought to be on the map of Greece. As I was the only American accompanying Dr. Dorpfeld in his fruitful excavations at Troy in 1893, it is a special satisfaction to present some of the main results of that expedition to American readers. Athens, the centre of Greek life and nationality, has received a large share of attention. But such chap- ters as *' The Christian Shrine," " The Altar of the Home," and others included in the section under Attica, are subjects of a national character. The great interest awakened among students by Dr. Dorpfeld's studies of the old Greek theatre should make welcome a popular account in English of the essential features of his theory concerning it. While I have confined myself mainly to my gen- eral theme, I have tried also to infuse something of the spirit of Greek life and nationality into these pages; but writing for the general reader rather than for the specialist, I have had to omit a vast number of facts and details upon which my state- ments are based. For the same reason I have sought to avoid the appearance of pedantry by spelling in the most familiar way those proper names which have slipped into English through the Latin. I much prefer to transliterate Greek directly into English, and in the case of modern Greek words have generally done this. I should consider it gross impiety to use a Latin name for a Greek god. PREFACE IX To the keen, vigilant eyes and ripe scholarship of Professor J. Irving Manatt of Brown University, who has read the proof-sheets, made wise amendments, and saved me from many errors, my special thanks are due. Mr. Michael Anagnos of Boston, a Greek " to the manner born," has cemented a friendship of many years by his helpful interest in these pages. Professor John Williams White of Harvard Univer- sity has read the chapter on *' The Greek Theatre " and offered valuable suggestions. I am indebted to Professor Tarbell of Chicago University for material in the study of Attic grave reliefs, and return thanks to him and to Professor J. R. Wheeler of Columbia College, his associate in the conduct of the American Archaeological School in Athens in 1892-93, for many courtesies. Professor Francis Greenleaf Allinson of Brown University gen- erously permits me to use his close and spirited trans- lation of the *' Hymn to Apollo." A few sketches which appeared originally in the Christian Register and the New York Tribune have been re-written for this volume. In the early pages of the book I have taken a lively interest in pilfering from the notebooks of my daughter, and the reader cannot be sorrier than I am that Mavilla did not accompany me in all my journeyings. It is a poor girl who cannot write better than her father. I have borrowed, too, with not less gratitude, the eyes, the memory and the literary taste of my wife. X PREFACE But where shall I stop in my acknowledgments? How many people has it taken to make this book ! Dr. Dorpfeld will know how much, and at the same time how little, I have been able to draw from his delightful expositions. I cannot refrain from ex- pressing my gratitude to Dr. Wolters, the second secretary of the German Archaeological Institute ; to Dr. Korte, now of Bonn ; to Mrs. Schliemann, Mr. Alexander Rangabe, Dr. Kalopathakes and his family, Miss Marion Muir and her pupils at Athens; to Mon- sieur and Madame Parren ; and to all the rest who kindly united in making my stay in Greece a pleasant and abiding memory. SAMUEL J. BARROWS. Washington, D. C. March i, i8g8. CONTENTS Pagb I THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE The Old Greece and the New 3 II THE IONIAN ISLES ViDo: A Greek Quarantine 13 Corfu. I 24 Corfu. II 32 Cephalonia: A Mountain Monastery .... 45 Far-seen Rocky Ithaca 56 Zante : I The Work of the Earthshaker 70 II A Bit of Exegesis 82 III THE SHRINES OF ATTICA The Acropolis of Athens: I The Parthenon 89 II The Propylasa 106 III The Acropolis Museum 116 Attic Grave Reliefs 129 The Greek Theatre 138 Modern Athens 155 The Street and the Agora 162 The Altar of the Home 181 The Christian Shrine: I From Paganism to Christianity 201 II The Modern Greek Church 214 xii CONTENTS Page Attic Days 223 I A Composite Day 224 II The Athenian Press 228 III An Athenian Schoolboy 233 IV My Frieze of Goats 238 V A Greek Bugle Call 241 VI A Theban Terra-Cotta 242 VII A Treasury of Bones 243 VIII An Athenian Tetradrachma 244 IX Some Greek Vases 247 X The Greek Calendar 248 XI Greek Philanthropy 249 Attic Wanderings 251 IV THE PELOPONNESUS From Athens to Megalopolis 267 From Megalopolis to Olympia 282 V PHOCIS 295 Delphi 297 The Delphic Hymn to Apollo 303 The Monastery of St. Luke 307 VI THESSALY 315 Tempe and Meteora 317 VII ISLANDS OF THE ^GEAN Eubcea : I An International Funeral 335 II Eretria 342 The Cyclades 344 VIII TROY I Marching on Troy 355 II The Modern Siege 357 INDEX 373 INDEX OF GREEK WORDS 390 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. The Theseion and the Acropolis .... Frontispiece Cliffs of Corfu Facing page 24 The Ship of Stone " 38 Nike binding her Sandal " 112 The Mourning Athene " 123 Grave Relief. Athens " 129 Tomb of Hegeso. Athens '* 130 The Theatre at Epidaurus " 152 The Areopagus " 201 Byzantine Church at Tegea " 206 A Homeric Roast " 284 Delphi " 298 My Little Monk " 307 Ploughing in Thessaly " 317 The Vale of Tempe ** 322 A Mid-air Monastery " 326 Monastery of St. Barlaam. Ascent by Net and Windlass " 330 Excavations at Troy " 360 Food Jars at Troy " 368 I THE OLD GREECE AND THE NEW iSf iroTaTToi \i0oi Koi noTanai oiKobofial. Mark xiii. ISfjpiTov lvo(ri(PvWou dpinpfnes ' dpcfil be vfjaoi TloXXai vaierdovai pa\a axfbov dXKTjXrjai, Aovkix^iov re Sa/ii; re Koi vXT]ar(Ta ZdKvvOoS' Odyssey ix. 21 The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece ! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose and Phcebus sprung. Byron. anjasjgy^/saftB^ THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE THE OLD GREECE AND THE NEW There is a Greece of yesterday and a Greece of to-day, and every Philhellene believes that there will be a Greece of to-morrow. A country that has emerged from so many catastrophes of history can- not be easily extinguished in life, language, literature, art, or in political aspiration. Each one of these aspects of Greece is interesting to me, and I find it difficult to separate them except for chronological or historic purposes. One cannot set foot upon Greek soil without feeling the thrill of centuries of history. He is brought into the inspiring presence of some of the most perfect triumphs of art, or sees the ruder strug- gles of a more primitive age seeking to realize that which was to come. His imagination is kindled by embers of tradition which still glow in the life and thought of the people. The climate, the scenery, the mountains, rivers, plains, and valleys of Greece have been reflected in its literature, and furnish a beautiful background for its history. It is a small theatre for human action ; but what a drama of war, art, politics, 4 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE religion, and civilization has been enacted within its limits ! Battlefields, shrines, temples, theatres, in- scriptions, statues, reliefs, vases, ornaments, and household utensils some of them preserved on the very site where they were first used or reared, or stored within the walls of the greater museums are the visible reminders to the traveller of a life and a history which are imperishably embalmed in its me- morials. And, if one leaves the surface and descends into the tombs of Mycenee, which the spade of Schlie- mann unsealed, he goes down into the deep, rich, and curious strata upon which Greek civilization was built. The traveller in Greece to-day cannot see all the tem- ples or shrines which were seen by Pausanias and Saint Paul, but he can see the memorials of a primi- tive civilization which was lost to sight and mind, even in their day, except as it was preserved in the half-mythic, half-historic pictures of Homer. Then there is a higher and later stratum of history, written on the tombs, walls, porticos, and theatres of the Roman occupation. Still later there is a stratum little worked in our schools, but of much interest, which reveals the traces of Venetian, Prankish, and Byzantine supremacy ; and, finally, there is the long, blood-stained highway of Turkish invasion and rule. The Venetians may be known by what they built up ; the Turks, like the Persians, by what they pulled down. In the great earthquake at Zante, some of the buildings which stood firm, though not unshaken, were the massive monuments of Venetian architecture, seen in the old castle and in private dwellings which have survived the shocks of seven hundred years. But, except here and there in the remains of some THE OLD GREECE AND THE NEW 5 mosque, the Turkish epoch is mainly shown by bom- bardment, neglect, and devastation. The traveller in Greece sees the marks not only of the surge of political forces, but of the march and conflict of religious ideas. First, it is the magnificent reign of the Greek gods, when the religious sen- timent was beautifully and grandly incarnated in the stone hewn from its mountain quarries. Then came the triumph of the cross, and afterward the triumph of the crescent. If the cross may accuse the cres- cent, certainly the crescent can accuse the cross of pillaging the temples and destroying the monuments of the heathenism to which it succeeded. But Greece is something more than a graveyard of a dead religion or a dead nation. It reveals a life which is interesting partly because it is the pro- longation and reproduction of the life of the past, and partly because it is a fresh, new life of our day. Greece is one of the oldest and at the same time one of the youngest of nations. It traces with pride its long lineage back to Pericles, Solon, and their pro- genitors ; but it thrills with more excitement as it recounts the story of the Greek revolution the smoke of whose battles has but just passed away. I have heard children in the Athenian schools recite, not without ancestral pride, the story of Marathon as a task to be learned ; but I remember more vividly a scene in a Greek prison school in which a boy told a story from the history of the revolution with such power that he was carried away by his own ear- nestness, and the visitors, themselves native Greeks, were kindled by his patriotism. The Greeks always have been and still are an intensely patriotic people. 6 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE Ages of misfortune and oppression have not sufficed to quench this sentiment, though there is the same difficulty to-day that there used to be in giving it united expression. It is but sixty-five years since the new kingdom of Greece was formed after the de- liverance from Turkish rule. In that time it has made rapid progress in adapting itself to the condi^ tions of European civilization in the nineteenth cen- tury. The process is still going on. If it is somewhat melancholy to see the ruins of the older Greece, it is extremely interesting to see the work of building the new nation on the ruins of the old. Our own country is an example of a nation whose development is pro- ceeding with the greatest rapidity and on the grandest scale. This is one reason, as Professor Palmer has so well shown in his address on " The Glory of the Im- perfect," why America is one of the most interesting countries in the world to live in. The process of mak- ing history is even more fascinating than the process of reviewing it after it is made. For the same reason I find it hard to be simply a student of archaeology or history in Greece. Many go there whose interest and occupation it is to study simply the monuments of the past and who have little time for or little interest in the present. They hardly care for anything that is not older than the Christian era. Antiquity is at a premium here, and it brings its price. On the other hand, the Philistine finds his way to Greece also. He has no time or taste for anything that is not still alive and capable of making a bargain. A merchant resi- dent in Greece, and born of English parents, told me that he had been in Athens several times, but he had never climbed to see the Parthenon. THE OLD GREECE AND THE NEW 7 The real Panhellenist, like our own Professor Fel- ton, is deeply and intensely interested in the old Greece, but as keenly and sympathetically interested in the new. It is nearly thirty years since I read his fascinating Lowell lectures on "Ancient and Mod- ern Greece." As I think of the interest of that work as a fresh presentation of the old and a vivid picture of the new, I find it to-day serving as a sort of mile-stone to denote the immense progress which archaeology has made in Greece since it was written. At that time Schliemann had not put his spade into the ground. The treasures of Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Olympia were still buried. Eleusis, Megalopolis, Epidaurus, Argos, Delphi, Rhamnus, and many of the islands were lying al- most undisturbed as they had been for centuries. The traveller walked over their sites scarcely know- ing that below him were the remains of temples and theatres and works of art which it only required shovels and wheelbarrows and human muscle to re- veal. The exquisite Hermes of Praxiteles and the fourteen thousand bronzes of Olympia, a large part of the rich collection of statues and grave reliefs at the Central Museum of Athens, and nearly all the collection at the Acropolis Museum, were not yet unearthed. Indeed a whole library of books and re- ports needs to be written to describe the monuments and buildings, statues and treasures, which have been found since Felton's day. Modern archaeological science has been almost created in that time. This is one reason why Greece has still such a fascination for the enterprising archaeologist. He knows that he is working in a field which is not exhausted. The 8 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE spade is even mightier than the pen. The promise allures him. He reads in his Pausanias the record of whole forests of statues and temples. Who can tell when he may make a discovery which will reveal some masterpiece of art or settle some of the vexed questions of history? Thus archaeological work has an interest here which it cannot have in Paris or Ber- lin. The student there works with material that is already furnished him ; in Greece he has an opportu- nity of unearthing it for himself. If the material is old the science itself is new. There is something to excite youthful ardor. It has the fascination and perpetual promise that fishing affords to the de- voted angler, only the fishing is done in the earth instead of the sea. It is not surprising then that many of the men working in the field in Greece have no gray hair on their heads. Even Dorpfeld the prince of modern archaeologists, at least in relation to architecture, is little over forty years old ; and to refute the presumption that an archaeologist must be a dried-up, wizened specimen of humanity he easily and modestly bears the honors of the handsomest man in Athens. But the interest of Greece is not all below ground nor in the new and active life above it. There is an atmospheric, a physical charm, in its climate and scenery which attracts and rewards the traveller though he may care little for its ruins or for the new life about him. He may breathe the fresh, soft air, rejoice in the glow of the sunlight which shines for so many days with undimmed brilliancy, and see in the face of Nature the same sweet smile which beautified it three thousand years ago. In THE OLD GREECE AND THE NEW 9 that time Nature has not been wholly asleep. For- ests have disappeared, springs have run dry, rivers have changed their courses, the sea has receded from the shore, villages and cities have decayed and been buried in earth and oblivion ; but still there is the same grandeur of the mountain, the same fresh beauty of the plain, the same peace or wrath of the sea, as when the Homeric rhapsodist sang the glories of Olympus or painted in hexameters the garden of Alcinoiis. Byron gives a faithful transcript of the scene when he says : " And yet how lovely in thine age of woe, Land of lost gods and godlike men, art th.ou ! Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow, Proclaim thee Nature's varied favorite now. Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild, Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields, Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled. And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields. There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds. The free-born wanderer of thy mountain air ; Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds. Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare : Art, glory, freedom, fail ; but Nature still is fair." The organization of modern travel, the multiplica- tion of railroad and steamship connections, the ap- pearance on the field of a new convenience and a new distress in the shape of a Cook or Gaze agent has enabled the tourist "to do" Athens and the rest of Greece in four or five days ; but Greece will not do what she might for him unless he banishes the demon of haste and basks for months in the smile of her lovely countenance. An instantaneous view is better lO THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE than nothing ; but there are fine shades of expression and soft, dreamy revelations of beauty which can only be taken by a time exposure. The old Greece and the new. Rather let me say the old Greece in the new, and the new Greece in the old. This to me is the perpetual fascination of this land. The past and the present cannot be wholly unravelled. The old and the new are continually in- termingling. Temples have fallen and monuments are broken, but the ideals of beauty they embodied still animate the modern world. The gods no lon- ger sit on Olympus, but Olympus still lies under the shadow of the Almighty. You stand on the Acro- polis and reverently view the Parthenon ; and then your eye turns to the ever old and ever new sea, or lights on the fresh verdure of the grain that is grow- ing in the valley, or watches the changing colors of the sunset spreading over Hymettus. You turn to- ward the Areopagus and think of the grand address which Paul gave to the crowd from the market; but down in the schools and streets below the children are repeating words and phrases some of which are eight centuries older than the speech of Paul, but are still included in the same tongue. Scarcely a festi- val passes that some old custom does not come to light which embodies the memory of classic days. The old Greece in the new ; the new Greece in the old. In what I write I shall not try to separate them wholly. It is the unity of the impression which makes the reality of Greece as it is. ** Why do you go to Greece? " said some one to me. It was a strange question. It nearly dumfounded me. " Why does any one stay away ? " II THE IONIAN ISLES VIDO: A GREEK QUARANTINE How many travellers in Greece spend their first night on Greek soil in a house of their own construc- tion? Built, too, with an axe and a needle! Not Mycenaean, Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian in style, but historically Greek and essentially nomadic. If I gave it its etymological name I should call it scenic archi- tecture. That Greek word aKr^vrj has come down to us through a series of theatrical transformations and embodied itself in the word scene in our own language with a great deal of its dramatic odor and character. But in modern Greek it still retains, also, its primitive meaning of tent, one example of a thousand other moss-grown words which have come down from the days of Homer. We had crossed the broad ocean, spent some weeks on the Continent, and made at Naples our final ar- rangements for the invasion of Greece. Travellers had told us that an indomitable will, a tough skin, and an artistic spirit were all that were necessary. As this outfit could not be procured in Naples, we tried to get a few other things on which we might rely. Our providence in this direction was greatly stimulated by the predictions of a friend in Rome that a Greek quarantine was something not to be endured. Of our party of seven, four ladies, two boys, and his modesty, myself, all but one had camped out on the ** Beautiful Water" of Canada, 14 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE which the Greeks might insist on calHng BaXaaaa /caXrjy but which the Indians, not knowing Greek, had roughly called ** Memphremagog." It was not easy in Naples to get all that might be needed for a camper's outfit. " A hamper of provisions," says Mavilla, *' containing plenty of figs, sweet chocolate, and niarrojis glaccSy was the most important part of our equipment. We had, moreover, a small kerosene stove, a baby tomahawk, a roll of Roman silk blan- kets and enough heavy drilling to make a large tent. Our family had not camped out seventeen summers without learning something of the art of making much of little ; so when we added to our outfit a steel knife and a spoon apiece we looked forward undis- mayed to the Greek quarantine." I was obliged to travel from Naples in a separate compartment from my family and was thereby relieved from following Paul's occupation as a tent- maker; but what happened in the ladies' compart- ment, and the subsequent experience at Brindisi, Mavilla has faithfully recorded : *' On many of our journeys it would have been hard to confine ourselves to tent-making. Crossing the St. Gotthard Pass it would have been wicked to lose a minute of that magnificent scenery. Even the pleasant monotony of Holland gives a continual en- joyment to the eye ; but the journey from Naples to Brindisi is well adapted to sewing, reading, or sleep- ing. Brown fields stretch away to the brown foot- hills. Glaring white farmhouses are scattered among the brown vineyards. Occasional cornfields, dashed with yellow pumpkins, soften the treeless landscape. There are few signs of life except here and there a THE IONIAN ISLES 1 5 farmer ploughing with his white oxen, or a peasant riding across the country on his Httle brown donkey. One misses the richness and briUiancy of the usual Italian landscape, and wonders at the dulness of life in the heel of Italy. When we reached Taranto, our 20 X 30 tent was finished. *' An obsequious Httle English agent met us at the dingy station at Brindisi and guided us through the darkness to the waiting carriages. Our amazement knew no bounds when we saw ourselves surrounded by crowds of men with lanterns, banners, and torches, shouting and singing to the accompaniment of drums and a brass band ! They at once made room for our open vehicles to lead the procession while they walked beside us and fell in behind. On all sides was the greatest enthusiasm and excitement, cries of " Viva Monticelli ! " " Viva le donne ! " Puzzled as we were, we could not help laughing, even in the pecuHar situation of being the only women in the streets. The revellers saw that we were disposed to be good-natured, so they increased their merriment, brandished their torches, and waved their flags over our heads. At last we learned that there had been an election and Brindisi was celebrating the victory of the favorite candidate. The unusual advent of stran- gers was an opportunity not to be wasted, so we were escorted to the quay in triumph." The steamer left at two in the morning, but we were safely and comfortably settled the night before. The trip from Italy to Corfu, the first of the Greek isles, is a delightful one, when favored as we were with a calm sea and a clear sky. By early morning we find the bare and rugged outlines of the Albanian 1 6 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE mountains rising on the left, at first with a dimpled sky line, then growing more rugged and varied. They are for us the first sight of a country over which Turkish rule is extended. The hills are brown, gray and barren. Off to the right are islands of hazy blue. About ten o'clock Corfu comes in sight, first a long tongue of land lapping the sea, from which rise stalwart mountains, wrapped in blue. This island, with its mountains, has been the scene of many a conflict, mythical or historic; but now it lies en- swathed in perfect calm, as if it might really be the fabled land of Alcinoiis. As we near it, the hills describe more graceful curves and reveal their fresh verdure. At first there is Httle indication of human life ; and it is hard to believe that this lovely island was known to the ancients for centuries before the existence of another continent was dreamed of, and that it has been the theatre of Homeric myths, the struggles of Greek against Greek, or of foreign rivalry and rule. Then come signs of the fertility which distinguishes the island. Olive groves spread over the hills. A white house stands like an outpost on a point overlooking a charming bay. The blue sea is like a smooth lake. The hills are green, black, brown and gray. Vessels are lying sleepily along the shore, taking siestas of oriental languor. But we may not touch those sacred shores till the days of our purification are accomplished. Of more immediate interest to us than the harbor of Corfu, which lies before us under its protecting hills, is the question, "Where is our quarantine to be passed? " Just to the east of Corfu lies the island of Vido. We slowly round its southern end, raise THE IONIAN ISLES 1 7 our flag, and come to anchor in the harbor. Rows of one-story brick buildings are seen on the shore. There is something ominous in their yellow color, but they cannot wholly tinge the cheerful complexion of the quiet, sun-bathed island. Now the health officer has mounted the ladder and taken a census of the passengers, so many first class, so many second class, so many steerage. Then we are told that only about ten more can be accom- modated on the island. The larger number must spend two days of the quarantine on the steamer till there is more room. The steamer was not bad, but the island seemed better. It was then that the tent which the ladies had made turned the scale in our favor. " May we put up a tent and camp by ourselves? " " Certainly," said the health officer. The director was sitting in a boat below. ** Is your tent all ready? " he shouted. "Not quite," I answered. I saw that there were almost no trees on the island. There were some good spars on the steamer, but they could not be purchased for tent-poles. A tent without poles or ropes would be a heap of shapeless cloth duck without bones. "What do you require? " shouted the director. " About thirty yards of rope." "How large?" " The size of your tiller ropes." "Anything else?" " A pair of long oars for our tent-poles." The director and his boat left for Corfu ; and, be- fore we had disembarked from the steamer, the rope 1 8 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE and the oars were in the boat alongside which was to take us ashore, I had heard that Greeks could be slow. I did not dream that they could be so prompt. Wing-sandalled Hermes could not have done better. In a few minutes we had landed with our bag- gage. Then came the most amusing part of our experience. There were already on the island two or three groups of passengers from other vessels. None of these were allowed to mingle with any ex- cept those of their own group. The officers and pur- veyors stood likewise aloof, and talked to passengers at a distance of six feet, over which it is assumed that a cholera germ cannot travel during a short conversation. The first process was to secure the names, ages, and nativity of the new arrivals. The agent stood at a safe distance and asked questions and noted the answers. If a passenger ventured to move towards him, he beat a hasty retreat. Even the mildest and most interesting young lady, as fair as the princess who used to live at Corfu, became an object of terror. The agent, who spoke little Eng- lish, but talked in Greek, French, and Italian, dis- trusted his ability to write the names of our party. He cautiously put his pencil and paper on the ground and retired several feet. I advanced, and took it up, and wrote the necessary information. Then I laid it on the ground, with the pencil, and retired. The officer returned boldly, picked it up and likewise retired, but not before I had levelled and snapped my kodak amid the laughter of the on- lookers. Is photography under such circumstances contagious? THE IONIAN ISLES I9 Rooms were then allotted to passengers, and a guard, acting also as a servant, was assigned to each group. We hastened in the waning afternoon to put up our tent. A large haystack stood in the middle of a field not far from the quarantine building. This would furnish a good backing and a protection from the wind. We had but two oars for tent-poles ; one of these could serve as a ridgepole. We drove the blade into the hay at the proper height, set the other oar perpendicularly on the ground and lashed it to the ridgepole. Not far away was a small fig-tree which lanni, our guard and guide, cut down and used as an additional prop for the ridgepole. Across this frame we hung our tent. We had no tent-pins, but the English government had spent five million dollars in furnishing us substi- tutes. For fifty years, Corfu and the Ionian Isles were under the protectorate of Great Britain. During this period, that government erected vast and expen- sive fortifications commanding the harbor of Corfu. When the islands were relinquished to Greece in 1863, these fortifications were dismantled and blown to pieces. We guyed our tent to some of the mass of fragments and used smaller ones in place of tent- pins to hold down our canvas. Meanwhile deft fin- gers had sewed and hung Turkey-red curtains, giving an oriental brilliancy to the interior and dividing it into compartments. A home-made Yankee tent and a manufactured English ruin for our first night in Greece ! Our Greek and Italian fellow passengers were in- clined to commiserate us for having only the shelter 20 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE of canvas ; but, when we assured them that we had had seventeen summers' experience in tent life (at least some of us), and that Canadian Augusts were often as cold as this Greek November, their fears were quieted. If the ruin was modern and made to order, it served very well as an introduction to some that were to follow. Later, we had abundant opportunities to see what the tooth of time and shattering earthquakes could do in furnishing melancholy classical ruins ; but these enormous masses of stone, in jagged angular confusion, with the mouths of cannon yawning from out the chaos, were a striking witness of what gun- powder could do in tearing to pieces a work built to resist it. There is but one point of terrible affinity between this rugged mass of ruins and the fairest gem of Greek architecture : it was gunpowder in the shape of a wicked bomb from Morosini's battery which wrecked the Parthenon. The departure of the first company of passen- gers enabled us to secure a room as precaution against storm. Our tent was made more luxurious by the addition of iron bedsteads. We cooked our own light breakfast. Luncheon and dinner we ate at the tables furnished for first-class passengers by the proprietor of the St George Hotel at Corfu. lanni, our squire, followed us about with vigilant and help- ful fidelity ; he was always at beck and call. A little donkey, with two water-casks slung over his back, brought water from a well a third of a mile away to fill water jars, which suggested Homeric times. The ruins of the English fortress challenged us to climb and scramble. The island, half a mile wide and THE IONIAN ISLES 21 three-quarters of a mile long, furnished a good prom- enade. The beautiful scenery of Corfu was spread before us. We bathed in the clear warm water, wrote letters, read, chatted, and listened to the Babel of languages at dinner ; Greek, Italian, French, German, and English were all spoken by the twenty people at our dinner-table. A Babel without the tower ! The Italian steerage passengers in another part of the island poured forth an endless stream of words. The Florentine or Roman ItaHan is musical enough, but the Venetian or Neapolitan, when uttered rapidly, sounds like a succession of firecrackers or torpedoes. The vowels explode like a Gatling gun and the con- sonants go off in smoke. The United States Consular Agent, Mr. Stretch, was kindness itself He executed commissions for us in Corfu, and twice crossed to the island to see us. We were allowed to talk to him across a ten-foot space, separated by fences. It is but just to recognize the unfailing courtesy of the Greek medical director and of all who had to administer the duties of his department. We had prepared ourselves for a quarantine which might be a purgatory; but this proved to be a haven of rest. It needs the youthful enthusiasm of Mavilla to describe it: " Life at the Vido was a happy dream. We learned then, if never before, the true meaning of dolce far 7iiente. Although the end of November it was what we should call June weather with nothing but sun- shine and starshine during our stay. ** I cannot pass quickly over this our charming im- prisonment, for, though it lasted but a few days, it 22 THE ISLES AND SHRTNES OF GREECE seems as if we were there for weeks. Without it our Greece would not be one half so dear to us as it is. There in the sunshine amid the flowers we lay- on the grass and wove wreaths of superb crimson gowans while some one read aloud. We dutifully read to the end, but the circle of listeners grew con- stantly smaller as we strolled away to the other side of the island or wandered over the ruins of the old fort. Would you not like to stray among blooming crocuses in November, gathering handfuls of cycla- men and Jack-in-the-pulpits? We plucked them fresh a dozen times a day and then marvelled that they grew no less. *' A thousand happy memories will always cling to Vido : the delightful sea-bathing at full noon ; the hot afternoons that we spent on the bluff, listening to the military music floating across the water from the fortress; the cool evenings when the wandering musicians from Corfu serenaded us with mandolin and guitar, while the Zingara flirted, the tenor sang and we danced on the bluff. " On the last day we gave an afternoon tea. We received on the veranda of our little cottage, as the tent had already been taken down. Our guests were three Greek gentlemen and the United States Consular Agent from Corfu. As a government official, the lat- ter was allowed to land on the island, but he could only come as far as the boundary railing. We stood behind another bar, ten feet away, and balanced his refreshments on the end of a long rail. The rest of us drank our tea from little blue-spotted bowls which the Consul had sent us from Corfu. A little Dutch plate of great antiquity, that we had brought from THE IONIAN ISLES 23 Marken, held our biscuit. Since we had no other dishes, box-covers served for bon-bon trays. Surely never was a more Arcadian afternoon. The devoted lanni had gathered flowers for the occasion and had made everything ready for our departure. We felt dismal enough at having to change our camp dresses for our travelling clothes, and gloves and hats seemed equally odious; but at Vido one could not be un- happy long about anything, and even at parting one must, smile. So I waited till the others had gone down to the shore; then, pulling a last bunch of cyclamen and daisies, I ran to the boats." CORFU I Twenty-five years ago I had the sharp zest of the explorer. It whets one's curiosity to a feather-edge to enter a country which, so far as modern civiHzation is concerned, is devoid of a past; where there are no works of man except the few traces of nomadic Indian occupancy and the only history revealed is that written by the great forces of Nature. Thus it was very interesting to enter the Black Hills with Custer in 1874; to penetrate a country unmapped and unnamed ; to see washed out the first thimble- ful of gold ; to plant the standard of nationality and civiHzation on a lofty height and listen to strains of patriotic music resounding for the first time through those silent hills. We were the harbingers of a new civilization. The practical question to the enthusiastic miner was, " Where shall I stake my claim?" There is another zest, more delicate but not less keen. It is the zest of the mythologist, the archaeol- ogist, the philologist and the student of letters whose interest in a country is heightened by its long past, the mellowed accretions of myth, tradition and language, its rich treasures of art and the resplendent glow of imaginative literature which invests it like a halo. That is the difference between the Black Hills '^' f-y ISLES 25 and Greece. Greece was an illuminated palimpsest, the Black Hills a blank page. There are two ways of entering Greece. You may- sail directly to the Piraeus, the port of Athens, and come at once under the spell of Propylaea and Par- thenon. That is to enter by the front door. Or you may land at Corfu, and go from one to another of the Ionian Islands. That is to go through the back lane of Homeric tradition. When I went to Greece, I determined, if possible, to enter by the portal of the Odyssey, and to leave by the portal of the Iliad. If I had lived in the Orient, I should have reversed the programme; but, living in the Occident, it was easier to read the second story first. The centre of the Odyssey is Ithaca; the centre of the Iliad is Troy. In going from one to the other, my trip included nearly all the most important isles and shrines of Greece. Hardly less important than Ithaca in the Odyssey, and more fascinating in charm of incident and beauty of description, is the land of the Phaeacians, the an- cient Scheria. The island and its inhabitants are invested with a certain mythical and superhuman character, and the poet gives full rein to his imagina- tion in describing its marvellous fertility and beauty. It is the island which tradition, rightly or wrongly, has identified with the modern Corfu. As we entered the harbor it seemed as if we were sailing into mythic waters. But the captain sails by a modern chart. Of the seven Ionian Islands, Corfu, called by the Greeks Kerkyra, is the largest and the most impor- tant. It holds, too, the palm for beauty and fertility. It has an area of 422 square miles and a population 26 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE of 25,000 souls. Its veritable history can be traced back to the settlement of a Corinthian colony there, 734 B. C. As in our own history, the colony soon quarrelled with the mother country. In 655 B. C, the Corcyraeans, as they were called, beat the Corin- thians in a naval battle. The island took the part of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Later it passed into the hands of the Romans. When the Crusaders insanely dismembered the Byzantine Empire, this island jewel dropped easily into the hands of Venice, and though the Neapolitan kings secured it for a hundred years, and the Turks besieged it twice, the Venetians ruled it until the beginning of this cen- tury. Their occupation and that of the Neapolitans covered a period of six centuries. The French secured possession for seven years, from 1807 to 1 8 14. For forty-eight years thereafter, until 1863, it formed one of the seven Ionian Islands grouped into a State under the protection of Great Britain. In 1863, when King George was called to the throne of Greece, the desire for political union v/ith that country was so strong, as expressed by a vote of their people, that England gave up her protectorate, and the Ionian Islands thenceforth became a part of the kingdon: of Greece. Here, in brief outHne, are the epochs in the history of Corfu. The charm of the island lies in its phys- ical beauty, its halo of tradition and the picturesque and archaic features of its modern life. If one wished to settle down into the simple luxu- ries of physical existence, I know not where he could find them more perfectly combined than on this island. No fickleness of nature has marked its THE IONIAN ISLES 2/ changing fortunes. The same clear sky, balmy air, refulgent sun and glorious prospects abide here as in the days of Homer. The fertility of the soil is remarkable. In the sense in which we speak of it in the latitude of Boston, there is no such thing as win- ter in Corfu. The snow falls on the Albanian moun- tains, or on the head of Monte San Salvatore, 3,CX)0 feet high, but never whitens the streets of Corfu. Flowers bloom all the year round. The fields in November are gay with English daisies and cyclamen and heather, and we pick crocuses, snowdrops and chrysanthemums. Great walls of cactus and hedges of aloes run along the roadsides. There are vast groves of olives, some of them of great age. The five hundred years claimed for them may not be theirs ; but it is easy to believe that they have out- lived centuries. It is estimated that there are four million olive-trees on the island ; and nowhere else have I seen such beautiful growths of this historic tree. There are fine groves of oranges, lemons and figs, and the vineyards of Corfu send wine to France, Italy and elsewhere. Bananas, palms, magnolias and the eucalyptus flourish in the gar- dens. Few places are more kindly favored oy nature with a generous soil, a genial and lovely prospect. To one who has been reared in the popular or academic fiction that Greek is a dead language, it is curiously exhilarating to land in Corfu and find it really alive. It refuses to be bound in the cere- ments of the academic pronunciation, to be immured in grammars or text-books ; it is as wing-worded as when it escaped the barriers of Homeric teeth. It is 28 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE not too fine for common use. It is the language of bootblacks and hack-drivers, as well as of poets and historians ; its vocabulary is conspicuously displayed in shop signs, bills of fare, public notices and the names of streets. If he has any of his old college Greek in his brain, now is the time for the traveller to get it out and burnish it up. Still more fortunate is he if he has taken time by the forelock and pre- pared for this trip by acquiring some knowledge of modern Greek, which is best described by Geldart as *' old Greek made easy." It is nonsense to treat Greek as if it were a dead language. It is living in the speech, journalism and literature of the Greeks of to-day, just as Chaucer is living in the speech, journalism and literature of the English people. The letters, the accents, are the same. The old Greek has changed its form in modern usage. It is simpler, less accurate, less rich in moods and inflec- tions ; but it is, historically, essentially the same lan- guage. One may open his Homer and pick out on every page words that are in common usage to day, after three thousand years of currency. The univer- sal daily greeting ^aipert is Homeric. The resem- blance to the New Testament Greek is remarkable. The Greek Church has done much to preserve the vitality of the language, for the New Testament is used in all the services in the old Greek, and children say the Lord's Prayer by heart just as it stands in Matthew. " Never before," said Mavilla, *' had Greek ' sight translation ' been half so interesting, or practical, as when we lingered along the narrow, crooked streets of the little town, trying to discover which was a THE IONIAN ISLES 29 baker's shop and which a barber's. The fruit and candy stalls we had no difficulty in recognizing." The streets are narrow, the esplanade broad and partly shaded with trees. The ruins, with two or three exceptions, are not Greek, but Venetian. They consist mainly of the old Venetian forts, one of which, Fortezza Vecchia, is still used as a military post by the Greeks. But for the visitor the main interest is the magnificent view of harbor, town and island. Traditions grow as luxuriantly in Corfu as olives, figs and lemons. Some of them have a very inti- mate relation to the life and religion of the people. There is an Homeric tradition and a Christian tradi- tion. The Homeric tradition is worked into the guide-books and comes down as a literary heritage. But the Christian tradition is woven into ritual, cere- mony and procession in the Greek Church, and is still used to praise God and shame the devil. We had come to find the Homeric trail, but we could not lapse into luxuriant paganism until we had paid our respects to the lifeless and desiccated remains of Saint Spiridion. All Saints Day (in the Greek, not the Roman calendar), which was observed the day after we landed, was a civil, military and religious festival, all the town, the country-side, the garrison, the two brass bands, and the countless church officials joining in one interminable procession in honor of the patron saint of the island, Saint Spiridion. One of the semi-official lives of the saint states that he was born in Cyprus about 318 A. D. From a hum- ble shepherd he became an archbishop, and many stories are told of the miracles he wrought. He died in 350 and his body was taken to Constantinople in 30 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE 700, where it remained until 1453, when it was re- moved to Corfu. Instead of being burnt or buried, it is sacredly preserved in a silver coffin decorated with gold and jewels. Three times a year the body is taken out of the church and carried about the city in a palanquin with a glass case. This fes- tival, like those of Easter and other holy days in Greece, is national and patriotic as well as religious. It brings out the whole populace of every grade and order, and the military solemnities are almost as con- spicuous as the sacerdotal. We joined the waiting crowd at the door of Saint Spiridion's Church, standing on tiptoe to hear mass. The women were in full holiday dress, their breasts covered with masses of golden icons and heavy gold chains. Their soft, white veils were spotless, and their velvet bodices and silk aprons were of the gay- est colors. As the chimes pealed for eleven o'clock, the procession started from the church. In the van were a number of small children dressed in sailor costume. The civil authorities and dignitaries were preceded by banner-bearers. Acolytes bore huge waxen columns, candles if you please, as long and as stout as a lamp-post. Then came priests and bish- ops in richest garments of gorgeous colors. The arch- bishop walked close to the body of his ancient and distinguished forerunner; then, in great state, came Saint Spiridion himself, in his sacred palanquin, borne by four men, the body upright, with head, trunk, and hands exposed to view. *' Poor old thing," said Mavilla, " fifteen hundred years a withered mummy, and still jolted about the city three times a year ! " THE IONIAN ISLES 3 1 The multitude fell in behind the troops of soldiers, and, with their candles in their hands, marched the whole morning. When the procession reached the square, the palanquin was placed on the ground and prayers were offered, thanking the saint for delivering the island from an ancient plague. The benediction was pronounced in a forcible way by a battery of artillery. To some this service was apparently little more than a national festival ; to the superstitious peasants it was full of solemn awe, the veneration with which they regard the old saint amounts to that bestowed by their ancestors on the lesser divinities, to others it furnished material for piety and gratitude. One old man who stood near me in the square was deeply moved and the tears rolled down his cheeks. I wondered in just what way the service touched his heart. But there was nothing Pharisaical in his tears, though they fell on a street corner. CORFU II But we had not come to Corfu to pay our respects to Saint Spiridion. Where were Nausicaa and the gardens of Alcinoiis, and the ship of the Pha^acians which the gods had turned to stone? Where was the ball which the princess had thrown into the river ? The Phaeacian episode is one of the most charming in the Odyssey; it is one of the most ingenious devices ever constructed for bridging a narrative. Homer and here let me say that when I speak of Homer, I mean the man, the men, or succession of men who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey ; he may have been blind, though I cannot think he was born so ; he may have been born in seven different cities or more ; he may have been a succession of rhapso- dists whose narrative deliquesced into song. I am not given to dropping into controversy by discussing the Homeric question ; I simply inform the disputants that I recognize their claims and contentions, and ** have filed them for future consideration." But I hope they will generously permit me to say " Homer" without accusing me of illiterate partisanship or blank idiocy Homer, I was about to say, had adroitly brought his hero Odysseus into a most embarrassing predicament, a state of absolute nakedness and desti- tution in a strange land. He had been for many THE IONIAN ISLES 33 years on the fabled isle of Calypso. Through the intervention of the gods, she had granted him release and furnished him with timber and tools ; he had made a raft, or boat, and launched forth on the deep for Ithaca. But the ocean god was not going to let him off so easily. In a tremendous storm the raft went to pieces, and if a submarine goddess had not given him a life-preserver he would have perished. He nears the shores of a strange isle. He is in danger of being dashed to pieces on its rocky cliffs ; the skin is torn from his hands. At last he finds the mouth of a river, swims up, lands on the bank, heaps together a pile of leaves as a protection against rheumatism, and, half dead from exhaustion, sinks into a profound slumber. Now, how is Homer to get him out of this naked pauperism and introduce him once more into organ- ized and reputable society? Of course he had the whole pantheon of gods at his disposal and could use the deus ex machina whenever he wished. Noth- ing could have been easier than to ask Athene to come down, wake up the hero and give him a new suit of clothes. She does supply him from her wardrobe on one occasion. But as a general thing Homer does not care to drag in the gods by the ears. He is more fond of using them to give impulse and direction to human action. What, then, is the ingenious device he uses to wake up and clothe his hero ? The laughing music, the playful scream of a girl's voice. Nausicaa, a beautiful Diana-like princess, upon whose charms Homer loves to dilate, is sleeping in her chamber in the palace of King Alcinoiis^ her 3 34 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE father. The goddess Athene comes to her, not even here, however, with direct address, but in the form of one of her handmaids, who chides her for sleeping when she ought to be up and having a care for her household. She reminds her of the washing that must be done for her father that he may appear respectably among his counsellors, and for the bach- elor brothers who are fond of going to the dance. She hints, too, about a day of marriage for the girl herself The Puritan conscience of the maid is aroused. She gets up and goes to her father the king, and says, " Dear papa, may the servants yoke the mules to the wagon, the good one with the high back, that I may go with the washing for you and my brothers " (no hint about the day of her marriage, but the old man understands it). He gives her his best high-top wain. The mules are har- nessed, and the queen puts up a nice luncheon. The princess takes the reins and, accompanied by her maids, drives with the clothes to the washing pools. When they get there the princess does not tie her mules to a tree all harnessed and with the check-rein up, as a city-bred girl might do; she considerately unharnesses them and lets them feed on the succulent grass. She and the maids go to the pools and wash the clothes with laughing rivalry. Then, while the clothes dry, comes the lunch, and after that a game of ball, the maids singing as they play. At last the royal pitcher makes a bad curve or a wild throw; the fielders miss it, and the ball falls into the river. What happens, what must happen? What would a bevy of girls do under similar circumstances in any and every age? There is a loud, laughing scream THE IONIAN ISLES 35 of comic despair as the ball splashes in the river ! It is this scream which wakes the sleeping hero. Odysseus behaves with great propriety. Behind the shelter of a thick branch he appeals to the princess for protection. Her maids are frightened enough ; but she maintains her stately self-possession. She neither runs from the salty bushwhacker nor does she refer him to the Charity Organization Soci- ety. She calms her frightened maids, tosses some clothes to the suppliant, and, after she has harnessed her mules to the high-wheeled wain, she leads the way to her father's home, using the whip on the mules " with discretion " (Homer was anxious to show that there was one woman who did know how to whip a mule). She only asks of the hero that when she gets to the town he will keep a good way behind the team, not to attract the attention of the idle gossips as they pass the loungers in the agora. Thus she leads him to her father's palace with its exquisite gardens, concerning whose beauty and fruit- fulness Homer waxes eloquent. Messrs. Scott, Dumas, Van Lennep, Spielhagen, and all the rest of you, could you devise anything more ingenious, more natural, or more artlessly beau- tiful, to get your hero out of difficulty, and to lead him to the palace of a king, where he shall be received with abundant hospitality, and where his sojourn shall furnish a pretext for telling the whole history of his previous adventures, of which the reader was igno- rant? In the Odyssey, Homer begins in the middle, and it is not until you are through a fourth of the volume that you get the first part of the story. How charmingly the episode is fitted together ! The reader 36 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE has no suspicion at the beginning that this little pleas- antry about the lusty bachelors going to the dance, or the reference to the king's need of clean linen, has anything to do with Odysseus, but later he perceives that had there been no men's clothes to wash, Odys- seus would have been left in a ridiculous plight. Then that game of ball is so spontaneous, with the wild throw and the bad fielding, which any college boy will condone in a club of girls, leading to that explosive scream; it is all so artless and so modern that it might have happened yesterday. If you do not think so, read it over in the charming translation of Professor Palmer in Book VI. of the Odyssey. It was this Nausicaa and her beautiful maids, so much more interesting than the wizened body of Saint Spiridion, it was this fabled garden of Alcinous that I was seeking to find. I was half confident that if I could only put a spade somewhere near the shore where Odysseus landed I might, perhaps, find buried in the sand the ball which the princess had thrown. What a magnificent trophy that would be ! I should be made an honorary member of every col- lege ball team in the country. The garden of Alcinous, teeming with luscious fruit, is not difficult to find. The garden of the present king might rival it in fruitfulness. And is there not a street named after Alcinous, and is it not the site of the famous palace on a hill overlooking the sea? We rode thither from the city, winding past King George's beautiful garden, into which we looked from our open carriage. At the roadside were groups of dark-eyed children with bunches of flowers and clusters of THE IONIAN ISLES 37 oranges which they plucked from the walls. They flung their spoils into the carriages, and we tossed a few coins into the dusty road. "Not a gleam of the bronze doors of Alcinoiis," says Mavilla, '' shone through the trees on the hill- top, but Imagination restored all in more than the original splendor. Although we fancied we could hear girlish laughter ringing through the olive grove, and I caught a glimpse of white arms in the surf on the beach below, yet we did not find Nausicaa. Nevertheless, the walk to the crest well repaid us, for there we had the whole world at our feet, a sunny, flowery little world amid seas. There were garden valleys, little villages straggling up the wooded slopes, and bold hills dropping abruptly into the sea." We drove along through the centre of the penin- sula to the one-gun battery, the lake of Kalikiopoulo on our right, the sea beyond the hills to the left. The view from the gun battery at the extreme point of the peninsula is charming. If Homer tells the truth, the ship of the Phaeacians who were kind enough to take Odysseus to Ithaca, was turned into stone by angry Poseidon when they came back. And if tradition tells the truth, the little island before us was originally the old ship. But elsewhere there is another island claimant for this honor, and I admit that I am not enough of a naval architect to decide between them. The question occurs, also, whether the mouth of this bay was the place where Odysseus landed. If so, where were the rocky cliffs against which he was in danger of being dashed ? Mr. Still- man, in his charming book *' On the Track of Odys- 33 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE seus," has discussed the question in detail, and has found elsewhere the rocky cliffs. But a work so highly mythical and imaginative as the Odyssey, though so true to life and nature, cannot be reduced to exact bounds of topography or geography. It is not Hkely that any island, starting as the basis of a tradition or story, would preserve its configuration wholly after floating in the warm imagination of the rhapsodists. Instead of making the story conform to the topog- raphy, the topography would be made to conform to the story. More accuracy is demanded of the modern historical novelist, but how easy to find slips and an- achronisms in description ! In his '' Chevalier de la Maison Rouge," Dumas has given a description of the Conciergerie at Paris. As I tried not long since to fit the story to the prison, my guide shrugged his shoul- ders and said, " When Dumas did not find what he wanted he made it." I suspect Homer did the same. The literary traveller on the trail of Homer must not harden into an archaeological hteralist. He must keep his own imagination fluent and sympathetic or he will miss that of the poet. Later on, at Tiryns, Mycenae, and at Troy, it will be well worth while to remember how much of fact and history have been brought to light from taking the truth of the Homeric narrative for granted. But for the Island of Scheria we cannot solidify the fluent, misty, auroral tradition. All that is needed is to find an island which might furnish in fertility, beauty, clime, and general topography the conditions necessary for the Phaeacian episode, and tradition was evidently satisfied that Corfu fulfilled them. I was not willing to leave Corfu without an effort to ^^^^^H^*i 1 t J 1 ^ '\^*i ;: m- THE IONIAN ISLES 39 see Nausicaa. I had no desire to see her mummified in a coffin like Saint Spiridion. I wanted her with some life in her eye and grace in her limbs. Is it unreas- onable to ask a girl to keep her youth for twenty-five or thirty centuries? If the fountain of perpetual youth is to be found anywhere, is it not in this land of fruit and flowers? We applied at the old residence, but the princess had moved. The garden was blooming, but where was the maid ? I felt confident that we must go to some of the wash pools to find her. Gastouri, a suburb of the town, is renowned for the beauty of its women, why not there ? Mavilla declares that *' the drives on the island of Corfu are beyond the power of pen or camera," which may be a gentle hint to me that / must not attempt to describe them. '* Even the warmth of the painter's brush is unsatisfactory. The sweetness of the air, the delicious heat of the November sun, and the fascination of being there are inseparable." Nevertheless, Mavilla would have been sorry enough if I had not taken my camera. Per- haps the hint, after all, is that I had better quote from her diary instead of trying to improve on it: "We saw but few people as we drove toward the Empress of Austria's summer palace. One or two little whitewashed cottages basked in sunny gardens. Under the trees by the roadside were shepherds with their flocks, idle and peaceful, as if Hfe contained neither care nor worry. In front of a group of tiny cottages sat three old women, spinning in the sun- shine. I was sure that they were the sister Fates, and so looked anxiously for the shears. Evidently 40 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE they had no thought of cutting off our pleasure, for they responded cordially to our salutations. ** Near the palace is a little hamlet, where children were playing in the road. We refused their entreaties to take us through the grounds, and asked only for a cosey spot for picnicking. As guide, we chose a dear little lame fellow with a heavenly face. We left the carriages in the shade, and scrambled up a steep hill after the crippled laddie, who hobbled over the rocks with his one bare foot and crutch faster than we could with our walking boots. ** Our luncheon tasted like nectar and ambrosia, served on the slopes of Olympus. For the time being, the American sovereigns decided to become immortal gods. " On the pinnacle of the hill above us, suggesting some of Diirer's impossible mountain shrines, was a tiny chapel. To us, who like to have our churches convenient, of easy access to the electric cars, the situation of this chapel was striking. Even on that beautiful day, the wind from the sea was so strong that it was hard to keep our footing as we toiled up the winding trail over the rocks. Once there, we lay in the lea of the Httle stone building, and picked crocuses while we got our breath. Faded wreaths hung over the church door, but the windows were nailed up, and the rough little edifice could not be entered. Even the bell-rope in the tiny campanile was decayed. For many years a priest had lived in a cell built against the end of the chapel, but he had died, our little guide told us, and this hilltop shrine is now used only on special occasions. But we had come to see the shrines, and this was one of them. THE IONIAN ISLES 4I " Whether Gastouri ran down to the valley or strug- gled up the hill, it matters not, for now it is just half way. Our angel-faced guide swung himself out of the carriage in front of a rose-wreathed cottage, and smilingly said, " * This is my home ; down there is Gastouri.* " We went down afoot, for the cobble-paved alleys were so steep that even mules are of little use in Gastouri. Each house looks down on the roof of the one below; so the doings of every household are carefully supervised. The highest building was a real country store, with the usual post-office, tobacco, candy, and loungers. A few of the houses had court- yards, where women sat combing one another's hair, and wreathing it about their heads, while the children and the cats played around. Where the houses opened directly on the alley, the women were spin- ning in the open doorway. They all had a pleasant word for us, especially if we noticed their children the dear roly-poly little things ! At Gastouri more than elsewhere in Corfu one sees the traces of Italian blood, and the mixture of the languages from the time of the Venetian supremacy. The women have the beauty and grace of both nations, and some of them are the grandest creatures I have seen. " In the valley, in the shade of a colossal plane- tree, was a covered v/ell. The earthen roof was arched, and looked centuries old. Here the girls of the village were drawing water and washing in the rough stone troughs on the bank. We begged a drink from one pretty creature who was filling her jug from a tin pail. Then, while we stood talking with the girls who were treading the clothes and 42 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE wringing them out, a queenly figure came down the alley. " * Look ! ' one whispered, ' here comes Nausicaa ! ' She was barefooted like the others, and on her head she carried a beautiful water-jar, which lay on its side. Her poise, her figure, her coloring, and her swinging gait would have driven an artist to distraction. She was dressed in a rich costume of velvet and silk, the delight of the more prosperous peasants, and over her masses of black hair, twisted and bound with ribbons, was thrown the white veil w^orn by all women. She was greeted by the girls at the v/ell, and laughed in reply herself, without bending her stately head. For us, though, she had no word. She haughtily turned away when we wished to take her picture, and filled her jar at the well. When it was filled one of our gentlemen tried to lift it, but with one hand he could not easily raise it from the ground. The girl laughed, swung the jar lightly to her head, poised it, and walked back up the lane. ''We turned reluctantly from the picturesque group at the well, for the long shadows were already dark- ening the narrow lanes of the village. One of the younger girls ran timidly after us, and thrust a bunch of cyclamens into my hand. I turned back to thank her, and saw that the others had stopped their work, and were resting their jars on the edge of the well, while they looked after the strangers who had so sud- denly broken in upon their peaceful lives. " Toward evening the market-women trudged homeward from the town. We met them walking in groups, distaff in hand, driving their sheep before, or carrying huge bundles of green stuff on their THE IONIAN ISLES 43 heads. Sometimes there came a mule-cart, with a few lazy men riding, while their wives walked beside them in the road, shielding their eyes from the level rays of the sun. There was a flock of turkeys, driven by a small girl who flourished a dry branch over the heads of her younger brother and sister, as well as over her feathered charges. There was another dear little girl leading a frisky kid by a cord. He gam- bolled and pranced, dragging his unwilling mistress hither and thither, while the child's mother walked sedately beside the family cow. *' Nearer the town we met a bridal party. The bride, dressed in the accumulated finery of several genera- tions, rode on a piUion, with her arms about her handsome husband's waist. The sunset glow was re- flected in their happy faces with true honeymoon intensity. " Corfu has many sides. We had seen several, but had still to visit ^ the other side.' There was another hillside village, more rugged and less picturesque than Gastouri, but quaint in its own way. The chil- dren and the goats showed us a path up the moun- tain, which gave us a wonderful view of the whole island, and the sea on either side. The pleasantest part of that day's expedition was the long drive through a different section of country. We walked a good deal, preferring shade and flowers afoot to indolence in a sunny carriage. I could never cease to marvel at the olive groves, such gnarled, twisted, fantastic trees, hundreds of years old, and yet ever young. In their shade we ate our luncheon, and gathered snowdrops. We chatted with the women who were gathering the olives, smiled indulgently 44 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE at the sylvan picture of shepherd and shepherdess sauntering together, exchanged greetings with a hunter who was cutting 'cross country, and stared curiously at the snug, white farmhouses barricaded with hedges of aloes. " Yes, we had found Greece, olives, figs, palms, oranges, grapes, and cyclamen, our dreams were beginning to come true. The Grecian seven by this time were thorough Hellenists, but Corfu was not all, there were other fairy isles to visit." CEPHALONIA A MOUNTAIN MONASTERY The Greek coasting steamers are somewhat uncer- tain. You can never tell just when they will arrive or depart. The wilfulness of the managers and the wilfulness of the weather are factors in this uncer- tainty. Though the sea was mercifully calm, we were twenty-four hours late in starting from Corfu for Cephalonia. We boarded the steamer at eight o'clock in the evening. A beautiful moon turned the water into silver, and a brilliant sunrise burnished it with gold. Cephalonia has an area of two hundred and sixty square miles and about sixty-eight thousand inhabi- tants. The coast is rugged and abrupt; it is indeed a mountain rising from the sea. Seen from a dis- tance, especially from the south, one might imagine it to be some vast sea-monster that had come to the surface to breathe, its arched back rising high in the air. The loftiest mountains have an elevation of five thousand feet. As early as the fifth century before Christ the Corinthians established a footing here. Like Corfu, Cephalonia, after becoming a part of the eastern empire, passed into the hands of the Venetians and the Turks, and then into those of England, but in 1863 reverted to Greece. Of the sixty-eight thousand inhabitants two only were English, and one of these was our devoted friend 46 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE and host. Mr. Stretch had said to us as we left Corfu, " You will breakfast in Argostoli with my cousin Alfred Woodley." As we sailed into the winding bay of this port we saw among the crowd of boats with their importunate boatmen a large yawl manned by half a dozen sturdy Greeks whose dark faces contrasted strongly with the handsome English face in the stern. Though of English birth, Mr. Woodley is an example of the cosmopolitan relations which one may sustain in these Greek islands. *' Though I talk English with my father," he said, " I always speak Italian with my mother, who came from Italy ; with my sis- ter, who was brought up in France, I speak French ; and to my brother in Russia I write in Greek." Two sea-water mills are among the curiosities of the island. The water runs in from the sea, passes through a deep natural channel in the rock and has sufficient fall to turn a large mill wheel. To find just where the current from the sea goes has baffled investigators. It mysteriously disappears in the rocky caverns. But this phenomenon of under- ground rivers and mysterious channels is not uncom- mon in Greece. In former times two mills were worked by the current; one is now abandoned and the other is not regularly used ; but the water con- tinues to flow as of yore and hides its course some- where in the interior of the island. Before dinner, which was to be breakfast, we took a long walk by the shore to the old tide mills. The first mill was not running, so in disgust, hunger, heat and dust, Mavilla sat down by the roadside and waited for the more energetic sightseers, who trudged another mile to the second mill. I mention this THE IONIAN ISLES 4/ because it was on this occasion that she excavated the little torso of which she is so proud. " I was idly digging," she said, '' among the rocks and sand with my red umbrella, hoping to find a stray bit of pottery, when I suddenly unearthed a little figure about three inches long, minus head, arms and legs. Still, it was not to be despised. From a dismembered torso Michael Angelo derived his inspiration. Origi- nally the little figure was probably a child's toy. How much more touching than if I had found a broken vase, or a common bit of chiselled marble ! In no museum have I ever seen a torso just like my little treasure, nor do the archaeologists who have seen mine know how to classify it. At all events, it must be recognized as one of the unexpected discoveries of the day ! " The darkened rooms of Mr. Woodley's rambling great house on the hillside were a refreshing retreat after the white heat of the sultry village. The house was full of old pictures, antique furniture and quaint odds and ends which suggested an English home; but the fig-trees and palms in the court and the out- of-door breakfast-room were Oriental. The dinner, with its fresh fish and game, was deHcious, from soup to melons. In the cooler part of the afternoon we started in two carriages for a drive up the mountain to the con- vent of Saint Gerasimo and thence across the island. Mr. Woodley accompanied us, and his man-servant took charge of the extra wagon which held our light traps. Cephalonia is an island of rolling stones. One seldom sees such miles of stone walls as cross and 48 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE crisscross the brown hillside vineyards. Not only is the land terraced and graded and crazy-quilted by these walls, but there are piles of stones in the middle of every field. Hour after hour we toiled up the winding road, for the monastery of Saint Gcra- simo Hes far above the sea. Windmills crown every hill-top, currant vines grow among the stones, and hardy olive-trees bend under the force of the harsh mountain winds. There is little else to break the monotony of the heights. We passed no villages and almost no houses, but occasionally we met a peasant on a mule going down to the sea for supplies, or were overtaken by some Argostoli pilgrim carrying a votive offering to Gerasimo's shrine. There were a few shepherds with their flocks, and from the olive- trees we heard the girls singing unmusical Greek songs in a nasal drone, while they gathered the ripe fruit. Half-way to the monastery is a picturesque and un- attractive inn. We stopped to rest our horses and let our drivers refresh themselves. The inn-keeper's wife hospitably invited us to come upstairs. We picked our way among the hens which were scratch- ing on the earthen floor of the common room and climbed to the upper story by a ladder on the out- side. There, in the only bedroom which the inn boasted, the proud housekeeper showed us the win- dow-pane where King George of Greece had scratched his name with a diamond. Leaving the others to feign awe and admiration for the royal signature, Mavilla peeped into the next room. " It was a bare attic, with bunches of herbs, uncanny dried octopods, and rude farm implements hanging from the rafters, THE IONIAN ISLES 49 and on the floor I gasped with delight, visions of pantry shelves, plum buns and fruit-cake flashing through my mind were piles of dried Zante cur- rants ! As our apples are stored at home, so these cur- rants were heaped everywhere in generous profusion. Pleased to find us so appreciative, our hostess straightway filled our hands and pockets and hats. What a feast we had ! The supply lasted us for days, weeks, months. In fact, a short time ago, when un- packing some Greek trophies, we found one of the small boy's handkerchiefs wound round a wad of Zante currants." At dusk we approached the monastery, passing through a straggling village on the edge of the pla- teau. An arched gateway opened into the convent courtyard, where a young priest with a Christ-like face was pacing to and fro between the little chapel and the big plane-tree in the centre of the enclosure. On the balcony of one of the long buildings sat two or three of the nuns, with their black shawls drawn over their heads. Below them were some monks mending a farm wagon. As we drove into the court- yard they hospitably welcomed us, and while the men unharnessed our horses, the sisters led us up into the refectory, where the long tables were already lighted by candles and antique lamps. The sisters were delighted to see Mr. Woodley, who frequently visited the convent, and they chatted together in rapid vernac- ular Greek which we could not begin to understand. The supper, which had been brought ready cooked from Argostoli, was spread and the hospitable nuns added fresh eggs and honey to the feast. Rather regretfully they withdrew while we ate, but no sooner 4 Jo THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE had we finished than they reappeared and invited us to visit their inner court. The monastery of Saint Gerasimo is really a nunnery with an abbess and a few priests and acolytes who conduct the religious services in the chapel. The country people respect and love the abbess, or Mother Superior, as do the inmates of the convent, where she has been for over thirty years. She lives in the main building, which stands between the men's court and the women's. The latter was the more interesting, with its row of little whitewashed houses, each having a bit of garden under the windows, shaded by vines and fig-trees. In each tiny house live two sisters, whose busy fingers decorate their liv- ing-rooms with embroidery, patchwork and knitted tidies. Some of the younger girls were drawing water at the well as we crossed the courtyard. Sev- eral others ran out to peep at us, holding back with shy curiosity. One sister had been to France, and she was pushed forward as interpreter. The rest kept behind her, clinging to one another's skirts; but they soon lost their fear and followed us into the chapel. The monastery is distinguished for two things, the remains of Hagios Gerasimo, and the underground cell in which he lived. Neither of them was particu- larly attractive, but the little sisters would have been disappointed if we had not begged the privilege of seeing what is left of their patron saint. To the chapel we went, then, where the priests and the little boys who drone the responses were already gathered. Anastasios the priest asked us to write our Christian names on a bit of paper. Then we took our places TPIE IONIAN ISLES 5 1 in the stalls, with the other worshippers, and service was conducted for our especial benefit. On a great shelf built into the wall lay what had once been Gerasimo, a poor brown mummy, laden with rings and votive jewels. Before his shrine the priest stood chanting a prayer. Now and again we could catch our own names " Guilielmos," '' Triantaphylle," " Mavilla " as he presented each one to the saint. Then, when the introductions were over, we were allowed to step within the sacred enclosure, and bow before his saintship. The fervor of the worshippers made the service solemn, and even we Americans were touched. The very small hole in the floor, through which we had to wriggle down into the saint's cell, shows that Gerasimo must have been an abstemious man. How could a man dig a hole for himself in the rocks under- ground, and live in that foul dampness, when he might have enjoyed God's sunshine? But men thought differently four hundred years ago, and Gerasimo was considered wise and holy and possi- bly clean. Beyond the plain where the convent stands rises Mt. Aenus. The view from its summit is the finest to be had in the Ionian islands. We planned to climb it in time to see the sunrise. " Please have the mules ready and wake us at three," we said, as we went to our rooms. At three the convent bells and the clatter of hoofs beneath our windows woke us. It was raining hard. No sunrise, no mountain ! We mournfully gathered in the refectory to decide what we should do. In the first place," said our practical escort, ** let's 52 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE have some tea." So we sat around in the dim candle- hght and held an informal '* afternoon tea" at 3 A. M. on Surrday. Glimmering through the rain we could see the lights of the chapel, where the monks and the sisters were already at mass. We splashed across the court and sHpped in behind the pillars. The ser- vice was antiphonal. On one side stood a young priest who was reading the liturgy at a rate which would have made the most rapid phonograph green with envy. What a cataract of words ! And all the time his eyes were scarcely on the book ; one of them at least was busy scanning the new-comers. It is not a common event to have such a party at early morning prayers. On the other side stood an old priest at a second reading-desk with a large illumi- nated prayer-book which now and then caught the drippings of the candle he held in his hand. Very prominent was the sharp nasal tone of the principal boy as he sang out, i^ Ky - rie e - lei - son The old priest invited Mavilla and myself to look over with him and follow the Greek text. We each held a naked candle, while the priest kept track of the place with one of his fingers. He had been a sailor in his early days and had seen a little of the world. His literal devotion to the service did not prevent him from keeping up a broken conversation with uS; which he interjected between the responses. "You come from America?" " Yes." THE IONIAN ISLES 53 " Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison What part? " " From Boston." " Ah ! Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison I was there once. It was many years ago." Then another vol- ley of Greek addressed to Heaven, and suspended at the proper pause to make sure that his communica- tions with earth were not cut off. The expression " Lord have mercy" {Kyrie eleison) when he learned that we were from Boston seemed to us strangely inappropriate. He was greatly pleased to estab- lish this relationship, and more than the ordinary amount of melted candle dripped upon the sacred page. The service was thoroughly mechanical, and I did not see why a phonograph run by water power would not have been as devotional. But it was a free and novel lesson in the modern Greek pronunciation. " I moved away," says Mavilla, " and let the priest talk with my father. The stone floor was cold, and I was sleepy. Two or three nuns were nodding in their stalls; another, crouched on the floor, was rocking back and forth, throwing up her hands and moaning. The little choir boys yawned, and pulled each other by the sleeves when it was time for their responses. The splash of the rain mingled with the monotonous drone of the priest; the incense made me dull, and the candles flickered weirdly before my sleepy eyes." "When will the service be over?" I whispered to Mr. Woodley. *' In three hours," he replied cheerfully. " It lasts every morning from two to seven." Mavilla gave one look at the picturesque two by the reading-desk " the dark, gray-bearded priest and the pale clergyman, paler than ever in the dim 54 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE candle-light " and quietly stole back to bed. It was not long before the paternal clergyman followed. For their hospitality the monks made no charge, but accepted with thanks the contribution we offered. I was told that there were some sixty women and some twenty men at this monastery, which serves as a sort of hospital for the surrounding country, people with mental as well as physical derangements being sent here for cure. By six o'clock in the morning the rain had ceased, but the clouds hung heavy over the mountain-peak, and it was too late to make the ascent. We decided, therefore, to drive across the island to Samos on the east side, where we might hire a sloop for Ithaca. We said adieu to the monks and their mountain shrine. The carriages which had brought us from Argostoli, on the west side of Cephalonia, we had retained over night, so that we were able to proceed directly to Samos without retracing our steps. The ride over the mountains, from which the clouds had lifted, afforded one of the grandest views in the Ionian Isles, the island of Zante appearing in the south, and the rocky ridge of '* far-seen " Ithaca looming up to the east. Before noon we had reached Samos. Some of the suitors of Penelope lived here. It is situated in a beautiful bay on the strait which divides Cephalonia from Ithaca. The town is small and has no such importance as it had in Homer's days, and probably could not furnish any rich princely suitors to a modern Penelope. In the small village hotel there were hanging two pictures of very indifferent artistic quality, which, to the only Americans on the island of Cephalonia, were sugges- THE IONIAN ISLES 55 tive of modern Greek affinities. One was a picture of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, the other a view of Niagara Falls. These were as much of a surprise to us as a picture of Athene or the Parthenon would be in a remote Montana ranch. With gratitude and regret we bade our generous friend Mr. Woodley good-by, and after hiring a barca set sail for Ithaca. FAR-SEEN ROCKY ITHACA ** Far-seen and rocky." These are adjectives which the poet of the Odyssey applied to this island three thousand years ago, and they belong to it still. They alone are not enough to distinguish it as the abode of Odysseus ; but without these attributes any island would claim the honor in vain. There are other natural features lending support to the tradition which identifies the island with the Ithaca of Homer. Homer is not reckless or audacious in statement. When he undertakes to describe the course of an arrow or a spear in the body of some Trojan whose eyes had been veiled in death, he does not make the cruel bronze take an impossible course. When, like- wise, he deals with geography, he does not create a map wholly out of his imagination. He uses exist- ing facts, places and scenery as the trellis upon which to spread the flower and fruit of his tropical yet simple fancy. He mentions islands and places, to be sure, which cannot be identified with any existing sites ; but, on the other hand, the catalogue of ships and places in the second book of the Iliad, even though it be a later addition, furnishes us with the oldest information we have about the geography and topography of Greece in that early time. Though Homer, individual or composite, had no intention of writing a book on geography, he had no intention of ignoring the subject. If he had done so, seven cities THE IONIAN ISLES 57 Ithaca was one of them would not have claimed to be his birthplace. The steamers from Brindisi to Greece stop at Corfu and Patras ; but they make no account of Ithaca. It does not lie in the pathway of trade. We were told that it was not easy to get there ; that it would take us a week out of our course ; especially that it was not practicable to go there with a party of seven, four of whom were ladies, and one a seven-year-old boy. But these ladies and that boy had camped in the forests of Canada, and had spent their first three nights on Greek soil under a tent of their own construction. They were prepared to do it again if necessary. Had they not also read the Odyssey crossing the Atlantic? And did they not long, like Odysseus, to see the smoke rise from his native land? But why go to Ithaca? It has no temples, no great churches, no paintings, no monuments of archi- tecture, no sculptures, no ruins, and no history of more than local interest. Nor has it any natural curiosities such as make Niagara or the Natural Bridge famous the world over. And yet, in spite of this, it had an attraction for us equalled only among these isles by Corfu, and for precisely the same rea- son. The fame of Ithaca was not made by sword, trowel, chisel, or brush ; it was made wholly by the pen. Literature, as well as art and religion, has its shrines, and every country with a literature has them. They may be shrines rural or urban, scenic or civic, historic, traditional or mythical, but literature has given them their fame, and may sometimes be wholly responsible for their creation. The whole scenery of Scotland has been tinged by the genius of Walter 58 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE Scott, as the peaks and crags and vales and meres of the Lake District have felt the touch of Words- worth, Southey and Coleridge. Paris means Victor Hugo and Dumas as well as Napoleon, Richelieu and the French kings; and with all its wonderful shrines of religion and art, Florence, for the modern traveller, means Dante and Browning as well as Raphael and Savonarola. Has Phidias or Pericles done more for Athens than Socrates, Sophocles, iEschylus and Plato? So Ithaca is a shrine, a mon- ument of literature ; and it has this peculiar interest, that its fame lies wholly and absolutely in this direc- tion. The Odyssey was built with Ithaca as one of its foundation stones ; but now it is Ithaca that rests on the Odyssey, which Lowell has said is the one long story that will bear continuous reading. It mat- ters not whether it deals with history or romance, the story of the Odyssey will continue to exert its charm and Ithaca will loom up in the narrative just as it looms up in the landscape. The picture is so well fixed in the mind that now we can seek with enthusiasm for the easel and the canvas on which it was painted. So long as the Odyssey continues to be read, some Ithaca will possess an interest as the home of its hero and his faithful Penelope, as the abode of the devoted swineherd, and as the scene of the wanton riot of the suitors and their tragic doom. With it we shall connect the dutiful Telemachus, the aged Laertes, and Argos the faithful dog. One of the constant iterations in the Odyssey, so often repeated that it becomes a kind of standing joke, is the question addressed to every new-comer in Ithaca. " But now, good stranger, tell me this : THE IONIAN ISLES 59 Who are you, and whence do you come ; from what land and city? On what ship did you come, and how did sailors bring you here? Whom do they call themselves? " And then was added, we can suppose, with a knowing wink, or a figurative poke in the rib : " For I don't imagine that you came on foot ! " Cer- tainly one would have to roll back the sea or walk on the water to get to Ithaca on foot. We did not make the attempt. The other questions are as likely to be put to a stranger in Ithaca to-day as they were then. Inquisitiveness is an hereditary Greek trait. Cephalonia is separated from Ithaca, as Homer informs us, by a strait which is from eight to ten miles wide. There is no steamer plying between the islands. We had therefore, as already said, crossed to the east side of Cephalonia, and hired a small sloop to take us over. The breeze was light, for which some of our party were grateful. But the men bent to their oars just as they did in the old days. There is nothing older in the way of naviga- tion than an ash breeze, unless it be one of pine or poplar. A warm sun beamed upon us. There was no danger of collision. Ours was the only boat vis- ible in this long strait. We had an unobstructed view of the west side of Ithaca. No just idea of the shape of the island can be had from that side ; but we got an excellent view of the three hills or moun- tains which raise their backs and, with a long, flowing outline, cut a small ;;/ in the air. There is Aetos. It is only 650 feet high, but it counts for more than that when seen from the level of the sea. There is Neritos, only 2,600 feet high, but looming up still higher as 6o THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE we view it through the lens of the imagination. This island was not made for a farm. It looks too hard and forbidding for a poem. It appears to have been made for a quarry, so stern and rocky is its visage. I had two guide-books in my pockets. One was a Baedeker, the other was an Odyssey. I took out the Odyssey, and in the two hours we were cross- ing, read all the allusions to Ithaca which it con- tains. Homer meant to tell the truth about his Ithaca, and in some respects this island bears out well the words of the Odyssey. " In Ithaca," he says, " there are no open runs, no meadows ; a land for goats. Not one of the islands is a place to drive a horse, and none has good meadows of all that rest upon the sea, Ithaca least of all." Homer, it is clear, was not in the real-estate business. He may or may not have been born on this island; but he is not advertising property for sale. He knows well what Ithaca lacks. There is no meadow land here. The goats still climb these rocky cliffs ; and that it is pos- sible to drive a horse from one end of the island to the other on a single highway is due to the good roads established under English rule. But Homer could tell, also, the good features of the island. When Odysseus has been brought from Scheria by night in a profound sleep by the magic boat of the Phasacians, he is landed in the harbor of Phorcys. When he wakes he is so dazed that he fails to recog- nize his native land. But Athene, who is perpetually turning up when wanted, appears in the guise of a shepherd, and the home-brought wanderer asks her what sort of a land it is. She says, " You are simple, stranger, or come from far away to ask about this THE IONIAN ISLES 6 1 land. It is not quite so nameless. Many men know it well, men dwelling toward the east and rising sun, and those behind us, also, toward the darksome west. It is a rugged land, not fit for driving horses, yet not so very poor, though lacking plains. Grain grows abundantly, and wine as well; the showers are fre- quent, and the dews refreshing; here is good pastur- age for goats and cattle; trees of all kinds are here, and never-failing springs." ^ And then she proceeds to show him things and places which he cannot fail to recognize. If Odysseus were to wake up here to-day he would find a wire strung on poles. He would puzzle his brain a little to know what it meant. Perhaps Athene, who, according to Roscher and others, is a personification of the lightning, would be kind enough to tell him that it is a modern pathway for her swift feet, and that on it she could flash across the land or dart under the sea. It is one form in which the goddess still lives in the nineteenth century, and she served us a good turn on our way to Ithaca. I did not forget, before leaving Cephalonia, that Ithaca had a poor reputation for horses, and asked what would be the possibility of getting two carriages. " There are just two on the island," was the response, " but we can send a despatch from Samos by cable to Ithaca to have these carriages meet you at Pissaeto." The telegram was sent, and by the time we were ready to land in the pretty little cove at Pissaeto the carriages from the town, four miles away, were wait- ing for us, and we thanked Athene for her electrical benignity and service. 1 Palmer's translation. 62 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE The carriages seemed as archaic as the island it- self, and might have passed for chariots captured by Odysseus in the Trojan War. It was not necessary to look at the horses' teeth to be impressed with their age. These steeds would not have cut much of a figure on a Parthenon frieze. ** If our horses were not speedy," says Mavilla, " there was exhilaration in the thought that thty were the only ones on the island, and that our frail carriages were all that kings could command in Ithaca." Putting the ladies in the carriages, I started on foot from the little cove, which is entirely devoid of set- tlement, the real harbor of Ithaca being on the east side. Up the steep hill one can walk faster than he can ride. In about half an hour we came to the little chapel of St. George, from which a rugged pathway leads to the top of Aetos. There was just time to reach the summit and get a good view before sunset, and I wanted to make sure of the view and to pay a visit to " Odysseus' Castle." There are some Greeks who live on the principle of not doing to-day what they can put off till to-morrow. Our charioteer was one of them. I took out my watch, and then pointed to the top of Aetos. " Aijpcov, avpiou " (to-morrow, to-morrow), said the driver, to which I replied, with even more emphasis, " 'Lrj/jLepov, crrjfjLepov " (to-day, to-day). But it was not worth while to keep the carriages and the rest of the party waiting. It was agreed, therefore, that the others should drive on to Vathy, the port of Ithaca, and that I should make the ascent to the so-called castle and the summit of Aetos, and rejoin them at Vathy, the town three miles away. THE IONIAN ISLES 63 The rest of the party looked askance at the abrupt height, and, without going up, Mavilla was sure that Odysseus had never lived there. *' Homer," she said, " would have described the rocky ascent in detail if the palace had stood on any such eminence." But the local tradition found a defender in Eumaeus him- self. He had served as guide to Schliemann, and he offered to guide me. He could speak no word of English or French, and his Greek was more modern than that of Homer. He returned, however, my Homeric greeting x^^P^'^^> ^^^ there is, indeed, no part of Greece where this Homeric salutation is not in vogue. His dress was modern in form, but ancient enough in substance. His coat and trousers were of European cut, but when I looked at his feet I was sure it was the old swineherd. Except for the wear and tear of three thousand years, the sandals he wore, cut out of leather and tied with thongs, might have been those which the swineherd was making about the time Odysseus came home. He had changed his occupation from swineherd to goatherd, and there was a sensible diminution in his affection for his master, since he confided to me that he thought Odysseus was a rascal (jravovpyof;^ and never wanted to come back. It is a stiff" climb to the summit, and I had but a short time to make it. The old king must have been stout of leg if he came up here. The signs of an ancient stronghold are beyond doubt in the old Cyclopean walls, in which the natural rock has been used to the best advantage. A cavity ten feet in diameter and eighteen feet deep has been walled about by heavy stones, perhaps for a cistern. 64 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE There are other traces of a foundation and pieces of wall here and there, indicating some larger fortifi- cation commanding this pass. Its style and character suggest great antiquity. Gell and Schliemann have both assumed that this was the site of the castle of Odysseus. Schliemann, in one of his earliest ven- tures in excavation, tried to prove his claim with the spade, but with small result. It is fortunate that his failure at Ithaca did not deter him from the later ex- cavations, so rich and fruitful, at Mycenae and Troy. It is well-nigh impossible to reconcile the topography of the town of Ithaca in the Odyssey with the situa- tion of this so-called castle. I got Eumseus to stand in the ruins while I took a photograph of him, but even his ancient face surmounted by a European cap instead of one of the traditional sugar-loaf Odys- sean cut could not invest the site with much of probabihty. The view from the summit was well worth the steep climb. No other outlook can give an ade- quate idea of the shape of Ithaca. On the east side the Gulf of Molo is so deep that it nearly cuts the island in two. As you stand on the narrow, lofty ridge, you have a fine view of Cephalonia and the bay of Samos to the west; to the north you see the Leucadian promontory, the southern end of Santa Maura, whence Sappho made her traditional leap; while to the east are the island of Atakos and the mountains of Acarnania. It was a beautiful, peace- ful scene. I succeeded in taking a photograph which gives a good idea of the topography of the northern part of the island and the narrow spine of the isthmus which holds it together. Looking down from this THE IONIAN ISLES 6$ height the eye of the camera caught the water of the Gulf of Molo on one side, and the water of the strait on the other, while the rugged mountain ridge arched its back between them. I lingered on the summit till the sun went down, and then, with the goatherd, made my way to the town of Vathy, which was not reached till after dark. A hardy fisherman and his boy joined us on our way, and were much impressed with what I told them of the physical greatness of America as compared with Ithaca. The ladies, with their youthful escort, had already found accommodation in a little Greek inn bearing the lofty name of Parnassus. It is pretty hard for any hotel to live up to the majestic pretension of this name, and if Spiridion, my worthy host, came short of it, I am bound to say that the prices were not so high as the mountain. A rickety outside stairway led to the four rooms of the inn. Below was the kitchen, where the modern Spiridion and his wife lived, and cooked potatoes and fish, fish and po- tatoes, potatoes and fish, hot for breakfast, tepid for dinner, and cold for supper. In one of the tiny bedrooms hung a bit of a mir- ror. This was the hotel register, where the six or eight visitors of the last ten years had stuck their visiting cards. We studied them with interest. There were some German professors, and an English lord or two, who had anchored their yachts in the shel- tered harbor, where fifty vessels could find protection ; but not an American name among them. Many a year it will be before seven Americans take Vathy by storm again. Our blessings are with them when they go ! Let them not expect to have the three bed- 5 66 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE rooms to themselves. Let them not delude them- selves with a vision of a picturesque inn where a dainty Greek maiden in becoming costume serves nectar and ambrosia. Yet Spiridion's wife, though neither young nor attractive, was solicitous about our meals. With great care she pretended to inquire as to the hours when we would have them served, as if it made any difference, when we knew that the food was all cooked in one batch, and doled out to us at regular intervals. The next day a pouring rain was discouraging to archaeological investigation. But Paul and my- self did not mean to have our enthusiasm damp- ened. We planned to go to the north of the island to see if the topography could any more easily be reconciled to the story. One of the tires of the chariot was nearly off to start with. To all ap- pearances it would not last fifteen minutes, and we had a round trip of from five to six hours ahead of us. But there was no telling how many journeys it had made in that condition, and the driver's confi- dence seemed to be based upon its age and general debility. If the carriage was bad, the road was fine, and now and then the clouds lifted to give us a view on the way to Stavros. The road winds around the Gulf of Molo, and then rises in a zigzag on the mountain side, and runs across the high *' divide " or saddle which separates the Gulf of Molo from the channel of Ithaca. The beautiful view of the day before was shut out by the pouring rain. We passed through the little village of Levke, and finally, after a slow, wet ride of three hours, a large part of which was up hill, we wound round the THE IONIAN ISLES 6/ Bay of Polis, and reached Stavros. Here we left our carriage, and, taking as a guide a young man whom we had found in the village, we wandered through the olive groves and fertile vineyards to see if per- chance we might find the aged Laertes among them. A woman whom we met near the little church of Hagios Anastasios showed us tlie spring of Mela- nydro, which may or may not be the Arethusa of the Odyssey. We took a taste of its dark waters. If only we could tell a classical spring by the taste or by chemical analysis ! But the Odyssey was not written in a laboratory or under the inspiration of an hydraulic survey. Then we went down the staircase in the rock to the picturesque spot called " Homer's School," which Baedeker says has borne the name for the last hundred years. The rain had ceased, and though the clouds were heavy, we got some idea of the beautiful view from this, one of the most charming spots on the island. The difficulties of identifying modern Ithaca with the Ithaca of Homer appear, in the first place, in the situation of the island as a whole and in its rela- tion to the others of the group. In the Odyssey it is described as the most westerly of the islands, whereas it lies to the east of Cephalonia. It is not easy to get round this general difficulty. The story also requires a small island near Ithaca, " a rocky isle in the sea, midway between Ithaca and rugged Samos." The only island in the channel of Ithaca is Daskalio or Mathitario, about six miles from Polis. From Stavros we had a good view of this Httle island, which does not look much larger than a sand- bar now, though the Odyssey requires one with a 68 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE " double harbor." But there is time for many changes in three thousand years. Taking this little island as a fixed and necessary point in the identification, we are obliged, then, to assume some other place for the town of Ithaca than the present site of Vathy. The fact that Polis means *' city " in Greek, and that this name has been applied to the harbor on the north- west coast for centuries, creates a presumption that the ancient city may have been there. There are other questions which meet the Homeric student: Where was the cave of the Nymphs, and where did Odysseus land when he returned to Ithaca? About a mile and a half to the south of Vathy is a cave with stalactites, called Palaeokropi, which might have served as the grotto of the Nymphs, though if the Nymphs do not belong to the world of reality, their grotto might be easily and pardonably myth- ical. The description of the harbor of Phorcys is quite definite. Some find its correspondent in the Bay of Dexia, and others in the Bay of Vathy. The result of examination the ascent of Aetos, the wet trip to Stavr6s, and a study of Vathy and the Gulf of Molo convinced me that many of the topographical allusions in the Odyssey cannot be easily identified in detail. A theory which fits one locality and one allusion is sure to involve contradic- tion and misfit with another allusion. On the other hand, if we may dismiss as the mistake of some rhapsodist who had never been to Ithaca, the state- ment as to the westerly position of the island, we cannot fail to find a striking general resemblance to the rugged, far-seen, rocky isle described in the Odyssey. It seems to me that the original rhapso- THE IONIAN ISLES 69 dists may have used it so far as it served their pur- pose, and that the author or editor who unified the story attempted no geographical identification. The remarkable discoveries at Troy, which were made through loyally accepting the verity of a hoary tra- dition as to the site of the ancient city, remind us of the great claim that tradition has to respect. Though Gell carried too far his attempt to identify places in the Odyssey, he has done well to present evidence from coins and elsewhere to show how many cen- turies the name Ithaca has been applied to the island. The spade has not come to the corroboration of the poet in Ithaca, as it has at Troy and Mycenae. Ex- cavations have proved of little avail. But it is not necessary to go below ground to substantiate Homer here. The island may have lost many of its trees, though the olive and the almond and the lemon are found in the northern part, and there are beautiful vineyards such as Laertes may have tended ; but the substantial features of mountain and bay, " the footpaths stretching far away, the sheltered coves and steep rocks " of which the poet spoke, still re- main enveloped in the glow of his imagination. If the doubter lands at Ithaca, Athene, in the shape of the shepherd, may say, as she did to the sceptical Odysseus, *' Come, then, and let me point you out the parts of Ithaca, that so you may believe." And important features in the argument will be, as they were then, the Harbor of Phorcys and the Cave of the Nymphs. ZANTE I THE WORK OF THE EARTHSHAKER Poor Zante ! When first I saw her, from the heights of Cephalonia, she was lying peacefully, like a brooch, on the quiet bosom of the sea. And then, as if seized by a fearful nightmare, she was rudely shaken from her sleep, and her scarred face plainly shows the suffering she endured. Zante, or Zakynthos, as it was anciently called, and as it has been renamed by the modern Greeks, is one of the most beautiful of the Ionian islands. It lies to the south of Cephalonia and to the west of the Peloponnesus, and, like the other Ionian islands, floats the Greek flag. It is old enough to be mentioned in the Odyssey, but, unlike Corfu or Ithaca, has not been the scene of epic description or adventure. With the exception of a constitutional tendency to earthquakes, Zante is a little island paradise, '^ the flower of the East." Its climate is exceptionally fine. In spring the multitude of flowers is something phe- nomenal, and even in winter roses and cyclamen bloom in abundance. It is a great garden for cur- rants, oranges and lemons, and its olive groves are hale and venerable, Zante is seldom visited by Americans ; but there are few who are not famihar with its products in the THE IONIAN ISLES 7 1 shape of currants and olive oil, which, until recently, have formed a large part of its trade, now sadly debilitated by causes as revolutionary as earthquakes. The island has a population of about forty-four thou- sand and an area of one hundred and sixty-nine square miles. Ordinarily, Zante is not a place for sightseers. The town by that name, with a population of about sixteen thousand souls, is quiet, well behaved, and not at all sensational. It has a fine old Greek church, a Roman Catholic church, and a ruined Venetian castle commanding the city from the high hill above. The archaeologist generally goes else- where in search of ruins; but in February, 1893, he could find them there in sad abundance. He could watch them, too, in process of making, with the added interest which came from knowing that he was in great danger thereby of becoming a ruin himself. At Vido I had seen them made by gunpowder ; I was interested to see how they were made by earthquakes. My curiosity was abundantly satisfied. A dead earth- quake is bad enough, especially when it leaves pov- erty and distress in its path, but a live one, when you are in the second story of a hotel, is the most surprising of earthly sensations. It does not seem strange, when you think of the globe as rushing through space faster than a cannon- ball, that occasionally a section of its crust, warped by volcanic fires or wrinkled by some great subsi- dence, should crack and shiver. But, though we are perfectly used to the motion of the earth as a whole, there are few things more startling than the motion of a large piece of its surface. It is doubly startling *r2 THE ISLES AND SltRINfiS OF GREEiCE when you are on an island which everywhere bears marks of the mighty force which has convulsed it, and left ruined homes and churches, and pain and poverty in its track. You have seen what such a tremendous force can do ; you feel absolutely help- less in its hands. One may become so thoroughly accustomed to the motion of water as to have a sense of mental and physical exhilaration in riding on its waves ; but when the very earth shakes beneath you like a sieve, you feel as helpless dust within it. It was four days after the great shock which left town and village sadly shattered that I had my first experience with an active earthquake. It was a sort of shuddering reminiscence of what had gone before, a premonition, too, of what was to follow, not the kind of dessert you want for your dinner. It was not what it did that frightened one, so much as what it seemed capable of doing. Emotionally at least you had considered this " terrestrial ball " as solid and inert. You are suddenly amazed to find it alive. It is arching its gigantic back; it is trem- bling with anger or pain. More fearful than the thought that its motion is voluntary is the terribly swift suspicion that it may be involuntary ; that the great creature cannot help it ; that it is the victim of internal distress. If you were not so frightened, you might even be sympathetic ; you are immensely re- lieved when the shaking stops ; but you have no surety that it will not come again. In this pale incertitude none of us left the table. We might have done so had it not been for the stolid indifiference of the hotel keeper. He was the only person or thing in the vicinity that in the midst of tHE IONIAN ISLES 73 the general agitation seemed to be absolutely un- moved. He felt perfectly sure, he said, that his hotel would stand. Did he hold a mortgage on the land? The next morning at six o'clock occurred the most powerful shock after the first ruinous one. We were sleeping, my companion and myself, in two iron bed- steads, each of which had a frame above, terminating in a gilded crown for the support of a mosquito net- ting. The affirmation of Shakspere, " Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," seemed to have in it an ele- ment of prediction. The King of Greece, however, had taken off his crown, or the jaunty little yachting- cap that serves the same purpose, and gone to a safe place on his yacht. Our gilded crowns were a part of the bedstead. I do not know how the king felt, but as for myself, the sensation I had at six o'clock that morning was unlike anything I had ever experienced. For a moment it seemed as if the bottom had dropped out of everything. We waited expectantly for the tremendous crash with which the building would col- lapse and bury us in its ruins. What a mighty ague ! It was not a wave, not an undulation, but a wrench- ing, shivering, shattering. Titanic power. It is only three or four seconds in duration, but each second is a brief eternity. What can you do? If you are able to rush into the street, you may be killed by your neighbor's walls ; if you stay in your house, you may be buried under your own. On the whole, the safest thing is to do nothing. Your fate will be decided for you. One needs to experience an earthquake to know what terror might reside in the old time in the desig- nation of Poseidon as the earthshaker. Had the sea ;74 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE god waked up to wreak his vengeance on Christian shrines? The time for you to make your preparation, when you Hve \u h.n earthquake country, is when you build your house. And if you build as in the sight of the gods, you can put up a house that will endure on this tremulous island the repeated shocks of seven hun- dred years. So the Venetians built here, and so the English who followed them. This is one rea- son why there is little appearance of earthquake ruin as you sail into the harbor of Zante to-day. The great buildings, the lofty towers, were made to last. Not so the houses built by the Greeks living in the outskirts of the town and in the villages on the island. They have been built with stones and earth, without the grip of lime, and when the day of reckoning comes they go down. Just how the earthshaker troubled Zante in ancient times, I do not know; but in the present century several visitations have been recorded. Severe shocks were felt in 1873 and 1886, but the last great con- vulsion before that of 1893 was in 1840, on Saint Luke's Day. It did a great deal of damage, but there was only one shock. The earthquake of 1893, however, was signalled by slight premonitions, and by several succeeding shocks of great power. The strongest, which did immense damage and endan- gered the lives of thousands of people, occurred at half-past five on the morning of January 31. It was followed by one at two o'clock the next day, and by a third at six o'clock the day following, February 2. Between these were a great number of minor shocks, which served to continue and heighten the alarm and THE IONIAN ISLES 75 to heap up another instalment of ruins in the outskirts of the city. Excitement and terror were widespread. The nomarch, or governor of the island, lost his head completely, and was found on the shore hunting for a boat in which to escape with his family from the island. Five hundred people immediately sailed for Patras, and as many more left the next day. Those who owned anything in the shape of a wagon or car- riage, pulled it out in the square or on the quay and slept in it. Others hired carriages for the same pur- pose. No one went to bed. The country people stayed out of doors. On the third day the terror was increased by a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning, and a general panic ensued. The condition of a large number of people was certainly unfortunate. They were suddenly rendered homeless. Some had nothing but the clothes on their backs. The climate of Zante is usually mild, even in winter; but that week the cold was more severe than for many years. The rain poured into the roofless cellars in which many families had taken refuge. From the Greek naval station, about three hours by water, one hundred tents were sent to the island, where several thousand were needed. Half of these tents were taken possession of by the soldiers, who had left their barracks. The Athenian papers loudly rebuked this form of military cowardice, and the nomarch and the commandant were dismissed. The poorest part of the town is on the south side, in what is known as Neachori. The havoc of the earthquake here was great, so far as property is con- cerned. Few houses were totally demolished. In j6 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE nearly every case one or two walls were left stand- ing, and in almost all cases the front. This fact is significant. The system of house building in Zante in the last thirty years has been disgracefully careless. No lime is used in the construction of the walls except on the facades, which are the only parts that stand. A wall of earth and stones may bear the slight exposure of such a mild climate as that of Zante, but it is no protection against a wrenching, jostling earthquake. That more people were not maimed or killed is due to the fact that the inhabi- tants well know where the weak part of the house is, and so have their sleeping-rooms in the front, and the kitchen and dining-room in the back. The most destructive shock was at half-past five in the morn- ing, before they had risen. There were thus few people on the streets to be hit by falling stones. Earthquakes undoubtedly have their freaks ; but they do have some respect for good architecture. In the larger buildings, for the most part, the dam- age was confined to faUing ceilings, tiles and copings. Yet some of the churches fared badly, the Roman Catholic having an immense hole in the side wall through which the morning sun shone on the dam- aged picture of the Virgin. This little idyllic island, sunning itself in the Ionian Sea, is held to the larger world by no less than nine submarine cables, radiating to all points of the com- pass, south and southeast to Crete and Alexandria, east to Katakolon and the Peloponnesus, north to Patras and Athens, northwest to Corfu and Italy, west to Malta. An island thus guyed by electric cables could not float away from the sympathies of THE IONIAN ISLES ^JJ the world or be left in isolated affliction. No sooner had the shock of January 31 shaken Zante than the lightning flashing in these nine cables carried the news of the devastation to all parts of the civ- ilized world. Then came the echoes from sympa- thetic hearts and generous purses. I have never seen Greece stirred as she was by this event. Politi- cal feeling runs so high that unity of thought and feeling and action are sometimes well-nigh impos- sible. But the whole nation was welded into a sympathetic whole in the fires of affliction. The Athenian newspapers at once sent correspondents to the scene of the disaster, and every day served up a broadside of telegrams filling several columns. Earnest, patriotic and humane were their calls for aid to their unfortunate countrymen. Subscription lists were opened, and money came pouring in. It was not a time of financial prosperity in Greece ; but as soon as the nature of the disaster was fully known, subscriptions were prompt and abundant. Athens has many newspapers, and it is evident that the people read them. Sad as it was to go round and see the evidences of disaster on this beautiful island, nothing during my stay in Greece made me gladder than this proof that the Greek people are inspired by the spirit of Christian philanthropy. While some of the subscriptions were imposingly large, the smaller ones represented even greater sacri- fice. Clubs, societies, theatres, workingmen's guilds, school children, corporations and tradesmen all united their tithes and their endeavors. The responses from England, France, Germany and America were equally prompt and generous. 78 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE More immediately urgent than money gifts was the need of tents and supplies for the homeless and hungry. In the race to furnish relief England came in ahead. News of the disaster had been tele- graphed to London, and thence to Admiral Tryon of the Mediterranean fleet. It took only a single elec- tric spark to kindle the humane energy of our Eng- lish cousins. The English ironclad " Camperdown " was just going into Malta. Within three hours after she arrived she was loaded with five hundred large and one thousand small tents, two marquees, seventy tons of boards, a large quantity of biscuit, rice, flour, cocoa, and two thousand blankets. She sailed imme- diately, under the command of Captain Johnstone, and arrived at Zante on the third of February. The same energy displayed in getting the supplies was shown in distributing them for the relief of the suf- ferers. The English Jack-tars worked with a hearty good will in putting up tents. Captain Johnstone was ubiquitous on horseback, bringing cool judg- ment as well as warm sympathy to the aid of the panic-stricken people. A committee of rehef was at once formed for the proper distribution of tents and food. It consisted of the English residents and members of both of the prominent Greek political parties, with sub-commit- tees in the villages. Later three Greek men-of-war arrived with further supplies, and an Italian man-of- war came on a similar errand of mercy. King George of Greece and Queen Olga, with the Crown Prince and Prince Nicolas, arrived in the royal yacht, ac- companied by the Minister of the Interior. I joined the king and queen and the rest of the THE IONIAN ISLES 79 royal party in their tour of inspection. Large throngs met them at the wharf, and followed them silently through the streets. At any other time there would have been great cheering and speechmaking; but the royal visit seemed a sorrowful pilgrimage to min- ister to stricken subjects, and there were more tears than cheers. The king and queen went into churches and monasteries, but especially into the wrecked homes, and gave to many poor people that sympathy which helps to bear trials. The king with his little yachting cap looked like a naval officer, and the queen, dressed in deep black, like the Sister of Charity that she really is. Every one was impressed with her simplicity and tender kindness. Students of seismology found interesting material for study in the earthquakes of 1893. The nine sub- marine cables converging in Zante pass over known seismic centres. In all the serious shocks which the island has sustained since they were laid, the cables in the path of the earthquake have been broken. In the great convulsion of the 27th of August, 1886, which preceded that of Charleston, six miles of the cable were buried by a landslide on the- bottom of the sea, which increased the depth from seven hundred to nine hundred fathoms. The cable was never re- covered, and another one was laid. A shock having precisely the same characteristics, without the same strength, occurred in 1873, and parted the cable six miles away from Zante. In the catastrophe I have described the cable was not affected. Zante is composed of rock surrounded on the southeast and northwest by a bank of yellow mud, gradually shelving into forty or fifty fathoms two 8o THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE miles away from the shore, when suddenly the lead drops from three hundred to five hundred fathoms. That this latter depth is the centre of the earthquakes, seems probable from the fact that Cephalonia, to the north, felt no shock; Patras, but a sHght one; Gastouni, fifteen miles due east from Zante, was shaken severely ; and Katakolon and Pyrgos, twenty-five miles east and southeast of the town of Zante, felt the disturbance strongly, but suffered no damage. The lesser shocks were not felt elsewhere. The cables tested showed no increase of sea temperature, which would have oc- curred if there had been an active volcano. Mr. Foster, the Zante seismologist, claims that while earthquakes in Japan and in the vicinity of ^tna and Hecla are due to volcanic causes, those in this region are due to mechanical causes. There are evi- dences of a strong current even at the bottom of the ocean. Some of the cables have been eaten away by chemical action. Disintegration is constantly going on and vast displacements of submarine mountains occur, burying the cables and causing the tidal waves which generally accompany an earthquake. Zante has gradually lost the position it once held as a commercial town. This is largely owing to the opening of the railway on the mainland between Pyrgos and Patras. During the currant season the city of Zante used to be not only the port for loading steamers with her own produce, but all the currant- growing centres on the Arcadian coast sent their fruit up in caiques to be sold and shipped there, adding fifty thousand tons to her trade. The people have been unusually thrifty in days that are past. From the English they acquired the habit of put- THE IONIAN ISLES 8 1 ting by something for a rainy day. But owing to the reduced commercial importance of the island and an exceptionally bad season, their little savings had been entirely exhausted and the next year's crop mortgaged. The misfortune of the earthquake was thus accentuated by commercial depression. That explains why many of these hitherto thrifty people were not able to buy bread. Ten years ago there began a mania for the pro- duction of currants, owing to the increased demand in France for dried fruit to replace the damage done by the phylloxera. All the good, bad and indifferent fruit remaining in the country was bought up at fab- ulous prices by French merchants. The Greeks up- rooted many of their olive-trees and ruthlessly burnt some millions of oak and pine trees in order to plant currants. But France found that the wine produced was not drinkable, and obtained her supplies else- where. The result was that two hundred thousand tons of currants were produced, when there was a demand for only half the amount. Owing to the destruction of olives, the quantity of oil produced was reduced fifty per cent. There is still a demand for olives; but it will take many years to replace the trees. Thus the present outlook for Zante is not a cheerful one. But the soil is fertile, and were many of these currant vines uprooted and grains grown instead, the island, it is claimed by competent authorities, could well compete for the European market. II A BIT OF EXEGESIS There are some words whose meaning cannot be learned from the dictionary of a foreign tongue. They must be learned from life, manners, customs, scenery, climate. This is especially true of Greece, whose literature reflects so much of its life. To travel there is to give one a new conception of even the commonest w^ords. '' Sun," " sky," " light," " moon," " night," mean infinitely more to one after he has seen the rosy-fingered light of a Greek morn, the blaze of noon, the glory of a sunset, the wonder- ful beauty of the star-gemmed heavens at night. No one who lives habitually under a leaden sky can im- agine the transparency of the Greek atmosphere. The scenery of Greece is beautifully reflected in its language. Mountains, hills, plains, groves and seas interpret the words which describe them. Greece is a small country; but if not vast, it is intense. It is a cameo, beautifully cut. Some words shrink in size when we have known it, but they do not shrink in significance. The word '' river " is an exception. A boy brought up on the banks of the Hudson or the Mississippi might jump over some of these Greek rivers without knowing that he had crossed them. I learned while standing on the shaky soil of Zante the meaning of one word in Homer. It was worth coming hundreds of miles to see it unfolded in a THE IONIAN ISLES 83 beautiful illustration, one of the finest I have seen in Greece. Homer speaks of Ithaca as *' far-seen," " rugged," " rocky." And so it is. Its mountain shapes are clearly cut in the sky line; and, when you cross to it from Cephalonia, you see what a rugged, rocky land it is, without marsh or pasture except for its browsing goats. You understand per- fectly what Homer meant when he used these ad- jectives, and you see how well they fit into the picture. But there is another phrase not so easily explained, and I sailed away from Ithaca at night without knowing what it meant. I refer to Homer's characterization of it as " low-lying," an adjective which seems quite inconsistent with the others I have quoted. But, on climbing the lofty hill of Zante, crowned with its sturdy Venetian fortress, I discov- ered, as I looked toward the north, the meaning of Homer's epithet. The grand, impressive object was the island of Cephalonia. Its lofty mountain, Aenus, is the highest in the Ionian islands. So grand is the swell of its curve, as it rises majestically above the water, that it looks not like a peak set on a pedestal, but as if the whole island were a mountain standing up to its knees in the sea. To the east, on the right as you look from the south, nestles Ithaca under the shadow of the greater isle. It is by comparison alone that it is '' low-lying." Traverse its hills and moun- tains and you will see how generally accurate is the description in the Odyssey. View it from Zante, and the epithet " low-lying " is perfectly explicable. It does not describe a flat island, but one which is low only when compared with the snow-crowned peaks of Cephalonia. This is but another proof 84 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE that the poet was describing a region more or less familiar. Homer and the New Testament are a good way apart, but they are both included in the marvellous unity of the Greek language. If I learned the mean- ing of one word of Homer, standing on the hill of Zante, I felt anew the force of a verse in the New Testament. It was the doxology to the Lord's Prayer, " And Thine be the kingdom and the power and the glory." It was the poiver that first impressed me. What an immeasurable force had shaken this island to its foundation ! The prostrate villages, the shat- tered houses in the city below,, were the melancholy proof. There is something terrible in the conception and experience of an energy which in a few sec- onds can turn a village into a heap of ruins. Yet, awful as are the destructive forces of Nature, they are not so grand as those which are constructive. What mighty Power reared those lofty mountains set in the bosom of the sea ! Majestic masonry whose architect was the Eternal ! In a thunder-storm or an earthquake we are startled by the revelation of amaz- ing power ; but what a revelation of the silent energy of Nature is made to us all the time ! It was mani- fest in the litde flower, in the tender grain growing at my feet, in the swell of the tide, the breath of the wind and the glare of the sun. Silently the shadows moved; but what an unspeakable Energy moved them ! the Power that turns the world on its axis and sends it silently whirling on its pathway among the stars. Compared with this silent energy of light and shadow, the Zante earthquake seemed insignificant. THE IONIAN ISLES 85 The royal yacht of the King of Greece was lying in the harbor, and a few cables off was the English war-vessel, the " Camperdown/' which had come so quickly on its errand of mercy. Not far away lay an Italian ironclad and two Greek men-of-war, all on the same gospel mission. Three political kingdoms were represented by the flags in the harbor. The royal family of Greece added personality to vague and abstract conceptions of government. In honor of the king and queen, the Itahan vessel was gayly decked with flags. A white puff of smoke from a port-hole ; and, four seconds afterward, the boom of the gun reached my ear on the hill-top. Another fol- lowed, and another, till the full compliment of thunder had been paid to the sovereign. But to my thought a kingdom was proclaimed in this suggestive scene not symbolized by any of the flags. More silently than the blazing guns, the willing lightning carried under the ocean the message of sorrow and devas- tation and the appeal to human brotherhood. Every one of these great war-vessels, native and foreign, had come in answer to that appeal. Each one had brought aid and comfort. What a majestic fulfil- ment of the prediction that the spear should be turned into the pruning-hook ! To what nobler ser- vice can a war-vessel be put than to go on a mission of philanthropy, bearing bread for the hungry and shelter for the homeless? The music of that artillery was the angel song of peace on earth, good will to men. Each vessel bore the flag of its own kingdom, but also the invisible banner of the larger kingdom of love and brotherhood. And \S\^ glory was not wanting. A wonderful illunii- 86 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE nation of sunlight flooded the landscape. " God said, Let there be light, and there was light." The snow on the distant mountains glistened, the sea glimmered, the rose and the cyclamen displayed their color. In this surpassing scene of natural beauty the glory of the Lord was enshrined. But more beautiful than the outward scene was the conception of the glory revealed in that Love and Goodness which, joined to Truth and Beauty, are welling up in the heart of man for the redemption of the world. Ill THE SHRINES OF ATTICA THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS I THE PARTHENON Athens is the centre of Greece, the Acropolis is the centre of Athens, and the Parthenon is the centre of the AcropoHs, I do not mean measured by the surveyor's chain, but by the highest standards of human interest. Unless a man is an irreclaimable Philistine, the Acropolis is the first thing he hastens to see in Athens, and the last thing he sees when he takes his leave. And of the temples which crown it, the Parthenon in all its shattered glory is supreme. No visitor who has not been side-tracked in pro- vincialism or ignorance comes to the Parthenon with- out prepossessions. He has seen it pictured in books and photographs or modelled in wood and stone. He has heard it proclaimed as an adorable sanctuary of religion and art. He knows just what he ought to see and just how he ought to feel when he sees it. If he is an American, he recalls not without amuse- ment the remarkable zeal with which wooden temples of the Doric order were propagated in his own land, and applied to every sort of structure, whether town- hall, church, schoolhouse, or private dwelling, with- out the slightest regard to utility or fitness. Perhaps he has an unjust grudge against the Parthenon as the mother of all these insignificant and solemn cari- 90 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE catures ; but could he think any less of them than would Pericles himself? I have never forgotten Wagner's look of disgust when I told him, just be- fore the first grand representation of his trilogy at Bayreuth, that some one was going about Germany circumventing his copyright by playing the music on a piano. Athens could not copyright the Parthe- non; and so the rustic imitations we have made of it have been much like Wagner's wonderful orches- tration reduced to a piano, or an oratorio played on a flute. Yet one must not forget that this multiplica- tion of Grecian temples on American soil was born of the enthusiasm which the revival of knowledge of the Parthenon spread in Europe, and which crossed the ocean and caused the Doric column to impinge on the primeval forest. It is hard to see how the conceptions of one who comes with such impressions as these or with any impressions derived from pic- tures or models of the Parthenon can help being heightened when he sees the original, unless he comes with a too luxurious imagination ; and in that case I am bold enough to think his imagination is more likely to be at fault than that embodied in a temple which Pericles and Phidias and Ictinus and Callicrates thought worthy of the gods. Many visitors to Niagara have confessed their disappointment at the first sight of the great cata- ract; and Mr. Mahaffy has admitted that even the Parthenon could not stand the weight of expectation he had formed in regard to it, though his disappoint- ment subsequently gave way to sober and enduring admiration. Too much importance, however, may be ascribed to first impressions. Few brains can THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 9 1 take an instantaneous view perfect in all its details. The mind has not had time to get into focus. The emotions have not had time to rise. The subject cannot be grasped in its full proportions. The first impressions of an engraving may be the clearest and best; but brains are not always so sensitive as paper, and the process by which great images or ideas are transferred to them is often like that of the slow, laborious work by which the engraver cuts a plate. The only man who can afford to be satisfied with his first impression of the Parthenon is he who is so un- fortunate as not to be able to take a second. I have seen tourists come up in their carriages, remain half an hour or less, and then go off. They have '* done the Parthenon," but the Parthenon has not done much for them. They can say that they have seen it, and thus secure a little respect in good society, though even this claim is not true. No one can see the Parthenon who does not know it, and he cannot know it without studying it. It is one of those grand and enduring works whose emotional effect is in- creased by a knowledge of the intellectual and aesthetic principles upon which it is constructed, just as a thorough student of harmony can perceive relations and enjoy effects not perceptible to an un- educated ear. As for myself, I mounted the Acropolis with a joy which it would be but affectation to conceal. I should as soon think of measuring the great temple by my first impression of it as of measuring an oak with an acorn. Even so far as the mere intellectual use of vision is concerned, it is impossible for any one pair of eyes to see at once all of the Parthenon, its struc- 92 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE ture, method, and intent. It was more than a cen- tury and a half after the temple had become known to the Western world through Spon and Wheler, in 1678, that the curvature was discovered by Penne- thorne in 1837. There are elements in it which the eye can discover only when aided by the rule. The Parthenon is a symphony in stone. It is not to be grasped in any melodic phrase of construction, but only in the full, rich harmony of its perfection. From a study of the whole one is led inevitably to a study of the parts ; and from a study of the parts he comes back to a fuller, more perfect conception of the whole. Alas that gunpowder and vandalism should have made such inroads upon its beauty! Though shaken by earthquakes, the tooth of time has spared it. There is scarcely a wrinkle on its counte- nance which can be ascribed to age or decay. It was the divine energy of man that reared it, and the diabolical energy of man that broke its columns and architraves and stripped its frieze and pediments of their treasures. This is the melancholy thought which forces itself on the visitor. Let the bombard- ment of the Parthenon be another count in the in- dictment against the costs and hardships of war. Though literally '' broken and cast down," the tem- ple is " not in despair." The drums of many of its columns are scattered about, and great gaps are left in the stately row which supported the roof; but there is a grandness, a solidit}^ a strength, in the ruins which brook no suggestion of decay. The Parthenon was young when it was dismembered, and it is young still. The fallen drums are white and sound to the core. THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 93 One of the elements in the glory of the Parthenon is the imposing Acropolis on which it stands. Here is a steep hill of solid rock, rising abruptly from the plain to a height of two hundred feet. It is a natural fortification, inaccessible on all sides but one. It is only about three hundred yards the long- est way, and about one hundred and twenty-five the shortest. Yet what spot in Greece contains more shrines of art or religion or more history to the square inch carved into or built upon its surface? There is first the hard, crystalline limestone of which the hill itself is built, hoary with age and out- dating and outlasting everything that has been built upon it. Its summit must have been rough and jagged when the work was begun of planing it off to furnish the foundations for the dwelling-place of men and gods. Athens did not begin on the plain, and extend to the hill : it began on the hill, and spread to the plain. This lofty rock was far enough from the sea to furnish a safe retreat from the depreda- tions of pirates, and it was easy to fortify it against attack. Those early dwellers, Pelasgic or other, did not put up a hedge or a board fence. They erected walls whose rough, solid masonry still winds its rugged courses around and over the Acropolis, as it did centuries before the Parthenon was built. Some of these walls were buried for ages until the spade of the excavator revealed them. Others rise stubbornly in the daylight, as if to dispute with the marble Propylsea the trophy of permanence. Whatever myths may float around the heads of these early dwellers, the walls they built are solid facts, and will outlast the trivial masonry of our day. 94 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE Then there are the traces of the devout spirit of early Greek occupation. He would be rash who would let inisty conjectures of how long Athene or Artemis had been worshipped on this hill harden into any rigid chronology. It is known that Pisistratus lived on the Acropolis five centuries and a half be- fore the Christian era; but other kings and tyrants had dwelt there before him, and this hill was the centre of civil and judicial life. That there was an early temple here to Athene is known, and in 1885 Dorpfeld pointed out its foundations near the Erech- theum. The temple was destroyed in the Persian wars, and perhaps rebuilt. Then the conception of a magnificent temple farther to the right, and cover- ing vastly more space than the original one, took shape ; and the foundations were broadly and strongly laid. They are still there ; and many of the broken columns of this unfinished temple, which must have been attempted after the Persian War, are built with other fragments into the north wall of the Acropolis. All this before the Parthenon. When Pericles began it, he built the new temple as far as possible upon the foundation of the old one. It was enriched and glorified by the chisel of Phidias and by the brush of the painter. It was consecrated to the virgin goddess, and her statue within it was one of the grandest achievements of ancient art. The Parthenon was completed 438 B. c. For six centuries it stood there as a holy temple of the reli- gion to which it was dedicated. Then a new religion, reared on a Hebrew foundation, and with a new virgin goddess, arose, and in time the Parthenon, under THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 95 Prankish rule, became a Christian church. The march of religions went on, and Mohammedanism crossed swords with Christianity. The Turks were victorious, and the Parthenon was turned into a mosque and topped with a minaret. Two hundred years ago the Venetians sought to recover their hold in Greece. The Turks who held the Acropolis stored their treasures and their gunpowder in the Parthenon, just as the Puritans, a little earlier on American soil, sometimes used their wooden churches for similar purposes. To the credit of Morosini, the Venetian commander-in-chief, be it said that he was reluctant to bombard Athens, but a council of his officers urged its capture. The Acropolis was the key to the situa- tion, and a bomb fired by one of his officers fell into the Parthenon and exploded the magazine, leaving the building a wreck. The Venetians practically gained nothing. They left Athens the following year, and once more a Turkish mosque was built in the Parthenon. The next sacrilege was Lord Elgin's rape of Athene's girdle the beautiful frieze, the pediments and metopes of her temple, which now enrich the British Museum but have left the Parthenon dis- robed. The judgment of the world concerning this act has been various ; but the English protest has nowhere been so strongly uttered as by Byron in flaming poetic curses. When I saw these marbles in the British Museum, I said, "They are at least safe here from earthquakes, bombardments, and changes of weather, and thousands may see them who never go to Greece." Still, when I came to the Parthenon, the sense of loss was too great to be satisfied by 96 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE that argument. For the bald fact remains that those who see the dislocated marbles in the British Mu- seum do not see them as they were meant to be seen. It is another illustration of Emerson's " Each and All," of taking home a shell from the seaside. Those colossal figures cannot be properly seen close at hand ; still more, they cannot be appreciated apart from the grand temple for which they were made, any more than the Parthenon apart from the Acropolis on which it stands or from the scenery which sur- rounds it. They are jewels plucked from a coronet; and, when you see the crown, you mourn that they have been torn away. The temple did not escape bombardment from Greek guns too, in the hot days of the revolution ; but which of the cruel wounds that still remain were made by friends or foes I do not know: the saddest thing is that they are there. When one mounts the Acropolis to view the Par- thenon, the great rock on which it is built seems to be inseparable from the structure itself. It gives it an elevation and dignity which it would not have if put in a hollow or set on a plain. At first the visitor may want to lay aside every suggestion or interpolation of later times that comes between him and the temple of Pericles ; but the tides of history have left their water-marks, and cannot remain un- read. He finds himself on this ancient rock brought into association with centuries older than Pericles, and with the twenty-four centuries that have followed him. He ascends the rugged steps which so many feet have trod, and over which has passed the grandeur of many a Panathenaic procession. He enters the mag- THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 97 nificent gateway of marble, the Propylaea, the noblest and most elaborate portal ever erected by the wor- shippers of a Greek deity. He turns to the old Pelasgic wall, and thinks of the ruder days before this later splendor. He treads with veneration the stones which mark the ancient temple of Athene, and stands where her lofty statue doubtless rose. The Erechtheum that exquisite romance in marble and the charming temple of Athene Nike are still here. The Parthenon rises grandly over all. But on its cella walls is the faded image of the Virgin Mary which marks the advent of Christianity, and here and there the architect may trace the vestiges of the Byzantine church or the Turkish mosque. Neither Christianity nor Mohammedanism could add anything to its material glory; and the Parthenon in strength and dignity rises calmly superior to the parasites which assailed its beauty. Elsewhere Chris- tianity built its own temples with a magnificence sur- passing that of the Parthenon ; but here on this grand old rock Athene still is victor, and the glory of her temple reveals to us the inspiration toward the beau- tiful and the sublime which lay in the heart of the Greek religion. One of the first impressions which the Parthenon makes, and which it was intended to make, is that of simplicity, a simplicity combined with strength and elegance. Here is none of the complexity of Gothic architecture, no such multiplication of points, angles, and mere ornament as gives over-elaboration and richness to the cathedral at Milan. Putting aside considerations of size and weight, it seems to the 7 98 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE spectator as if it had been an extremely simple matter to lay these stones one upon another, and to rear the columns drum upon drum. Here is no springing arch or swelling dome: mechanically it seems to be but a glorified, marble log-cabin, retaining in various details a strong reminiscence of its humble wooden origin. But when one studies the temple carefully, he sees what a remarkable combination of mathematical and mechanical effects was necessary to produce the grand and simple structure before him. The architects never forgot the observer's eye. They wished to produce a certain effect; but, in order to achieve this in the mind of the spectator, it was necessary to construct a different building from that which he thought he saw. Thus the observer thinks he is looking at a building whose beautiful columns are perfectly straight from top to bottom. He pre- sumes that he is looking at a stylobate and steps built on horizontal lines. He sees no signs of lean- ing in those strong pillars. Yet, when the temple has been measured foot by foot, as Penrose mea- sured it, he finds that he has been looking at a build- ing whose lines and angles have been softened into curves so delicate and beautiful that they melt imper- ceptibly in the observer's eye. The fact that the end of the building Hes deeper than the middle was observed before the reason was discovered. Karl Botticher maintained that this cur- vature had occurred because the corners of the foundation had settled. An examination of the foun- dation showed that the building was set on the solid rock and that it was impossible for it to sink so many centimetres. It was maintained by another that it THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 99 was due to earthquakes; for hardly any of the columns hav,e escaped disturbance of this sort. But earthquakes do not do their work with mathematical regularity. It would have been a miraculous con- vulsion which could have jostled this temple into curves of beauty. The measuring rod showed that no part of the building was more perfect in design than that which had been ascribed to convulsion or decay. Every column, instead of being a straight line from base to neck, tapers towards the top and has a gentle swell or entasis. So slight is this curve that, as Penrose truly says, until a comparatively recent period, the columns were assumed to be perfectly straight. And what is the object of this curve? It is '* to correct the optical illusion, which gives an at- tenuated appearance to columns perfectly straight." The curvature of the steps is more easily detected. It will be conveyed to the mind of the reader by the figure of a bow which is already strung. Set it down with the string parallel to the floor. The string forms a horizontal line, while the bow arches above it. Let the string represent the ground on which the Par- thenon rests: the curvature of the bow will corre- spond to the curve of the stylobate and the steps, which rise gently to the middle, and then slope down as gently to the other end. Place a hat on the steps at one end ; go to the other end and get down until your eye is on a level with the edge of the step, and then look along it. You will not be able to see the hat at the other end. The convex rise in the middle conceals it from view. Yet comparatively few per- sons when they mount these stairs, suppose that lOO THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE they are stepping on a curve instead of on a straight line. Of course, if the columns were set on this con- vex stylobate without correction, they would not be perpendicular supports to the roof; they would lean in opposite directions. To secure perpendicularity the lower drums of the columns are made higher on one side than on the other, thus offsetting the curva- ture of the base. The difference in the height of the sides is something like eight centimetres. As the architrave is curved as well as the stylobate, the same correction in the drums must be made at the top as well as at the bottom. In addition to their own entasis, the whole line of columns is made to in- cline slightly toward the building, so as better to bear the strain of the roof. Think of the immense amount of work required to calculate and secure these effects ! It has been conjectured that wooden columns may have been set up and used as patterns for the marble ones. By building the columns in sections or drums the work was easier. The stylobate is made of great blocks. The steps on the sides are so high that one has to climb them. They were made for the eye, not for the feet. In earlier times when small buildings prevailed, the steps to the temples were made in a certain proportion to the columns. When the Parthenon was built this pro- portion was retained and the blocks were too high for steps. The same is true of the Zeus Temple at Olympia, and of others. Small steps were therefore laid at the entrance between the larger ones. So when the west end of the Parthenon was made the entrance for the Byzantine church, small steps had to be interpolated there also. THE SHRINES OF ATTICA lOI In Greek temples orientation was of great im- portance. The axis of the temple pointed to the rising sun. The main door was to the east, so that when it was opened on the high festal day of the goddess, the sun would shine into the temple. Pen- rose and Lockyer have supported this view by astronomical calculations. Greek architecture must be seen in the joyous light of a Greek sky. The problem, still inviting discussion, as to how the Doric temple was lighted is not so difficult of solution when the temple is set, like the Parthenon upon the Acropolis, upon lofty heights or open plains. Set it in the forest or surround it with heavy shade-trees, as some of the stately old man- sions in our own country, which, unhappily, imitated the Greek style, and the effect is solemn and gloomy enough. But in Greece the flood of sunlight through a clear atmosphere is so intense that, when it falls upon a building of Pentelic marble like the Parthe- non, the glare is too strong for weak eyes. The whole building is suffused with a glory which must have brilliantly illuminated its colored triglyphs and sculptured pediments. What of the inside? Shall we maintain with Fergusson that it was lighted from the top, or with Dorpfeld that it was lighted only through the great door which was opened on festal days? In support of the latter view the point has been made, with great truth, that the penetrating power of light in Greece is so great that through a large door enough light would enter to reveal in mystic grandeur the colossal statue of Athene in the Parthenon or the 102 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE equally great statue of Zeus in the temple at Olym- pia. It is argued also that the Greeks did not want in their house of God anything but a " dim religious light ; " and an American architect has sought to show that lamps were used in these solemn temples. The great size of the door in the pronaos, some fifteen feet broad and thirty feet high, supports the theory that it was used for lighting the interior. There was a smaller door by which the priests might enter. Karl Botticher has advanced the theory that the Parthenon \vas not really a sanctuary, but a treasure house. The slight architectural reasons presented for this bold conjecture have been examined in de- tail and refuted by Dorpfeld. Their force can only be fully appreciated by those who are fortunate enough to see the building under Dr. Dorpfeld's guid- ance, and trace with him its history revealed in clamps, tool marks, the circles on vv^hich missing col- umns once stood and the grooves described by hinged doors. The changes made in the Parthenon by its adaptation to Byzantine worship render complex and difficult the task of distinguishing in the interior be- tween the original and the adapted structure. It is in just such a task that Dr. Dorpfeld's architectural knowledge and rare powers of observation find their opportunity. An Hellenic clamp, a tool mark or a tell-tale circle may show the age of a stone and the use that was made of it as clearly as if the workman had written it in words. But I cannot linger on the artistic and mechanical details of this wonderful temple of worship. For the last hundred years our knowledge of it has been con- THE SHRINES OF ATTICA IO3 tinually increasing, and wc cannot be sure that we know all its secrets or even all it was intended to reveal. There is one spot in it of peculiar interest. It is the space nearly in the centre of the building where the remains of a strong foundation of poros stone and a square slot in the middle reveal, un- doubtedly, the spot where stood the famous statue of Athene wrought by Phidias, on a frame of wood, and covered with ivory and gold. How wonderful was the influence on the Greek mind of this con- ception of the virgin goddess, and how remarkable its influence on the western mind when it passed into Christianity ! Athene, as pictured by Homer, is a grand and beautiful conception. In the earliest forms in which men undertook to paint or mould with the hand that which floated as a vision in the brain, we are struck by the great chasm between that which they aimed at and that which they achieved. The literary conception was high, the artistic product low. But gradually this ideal of the divinity of the intellect, embodied in the form of a woman, and radiating, too, into gracious charms of sentiment and beneficence, took possession of the eye and hand of the artist as well as of the song of the minstrel ; and by and by, yet as early as the fifth century before Christ, art rose to the level of literature, and bloomed in the perfect flower of the Parthenon and the won- drous art of Phidias which adorned it. The influence of this Greek idea did not stop here. In the fifth century A. D. the Parthenon became the temple of Saint Sophia, and a few centuries later it was transformed into the church of the Virgin Mary. Like Paganism, Christianity could not be 104 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE contented with a purely masculine deity. Athene, excluded from her temple, revenged herself by re-ap- pearing in a new guise and with new functions. If the later Christian homage to a virgin met a need of the human heart, who shall say that that rendered to the Greek virgin was not as sincere and inspiring? The best time to see the Parthenon is at sunset or under the silver light of the full moon. The tones of the building, weather-stained by centuries, seem richer and deeper in the sunset glow; and the temple fits beautifully into the illumined landscape. Take your stand at the southwest corner of the temple of Nike. Below you lies the theatre of Herodes Atticus, a little to the right the hill of Philopappus, still farther Observatory Hill, the Areopagus, the Pnyx, and the stately Theseion. In the plains the fresh green barley alternates with olive groves and brown furrowed fields. To the left stretches the Bay of Phaleron, opening to the larger sea. Piraeus lies beyond. Here is the island of Salamis, there ^gina. The coast of Attica fades into the dis- tance. Walking to the other end of the Acropolis, we see below the new Athens, the royal palace and garden, and steep Lycabettus rising abruptly from the plain. The whole view is framed in by sea and mountain, Pentelicus, from whose bosom came the milk-white curdled marble with which these temples were reared, Parnes, ^galeos, the pass of Daphne, and, most familiar of all, the long ridge of Hymettus. How the sinking sun seems to fondle it, and how softly the mutable colors play over it, gold and violet and red, melting its hard, rocky surface into or THE UNIYERS, THE SHRINES OF ATTICA I05 geniality and beauty ! In this sunset glow the Parthe- non, the magnificent Propylaea, the Erechtheum, and the bewitching temple of Nike are gilded with super- natural light, as if the sun loved to heighten their beauty. And, when the moon rises and in the deep silence silvers the old rock and the temples upon it, you forget the things of to-day ; and in the witch- ery of the moonlight- Athene seems to come once more to claim her holy place, and you are a willing worshipper at her shrine. THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS II THE PROPYL^A Whether it be a great book, a great symphony, a great opera, or a great temple, it is possible to heighten the effect and the expectation by a great introduction. So Gibbon wrote the introduction to his history nine times; so Beethoven wrote and re- wrote his overture to *' Leonore ; " so Wagner scored his marvellous overture to *' Tannhauser " and his dreamy Vorspiel to " Parsival." Thus the evangelists wrote the mystic proem to John and the poetic pre- lude to St. Luke. So, too, Pericles inspired the marble proem to the Parthenon. The Propylaea, as its simple name implies (ivpo'irv- \aia, the part before the gates), is a prelude, a Vor- spiel, an overture in stone. It was built on the rocky slope of the Acropolis and constituted one of the grandest approaches to a temple ever reared. In this matter some of the greatest cathedrals of England and the Continent are sadly lacking. The approach to St. Peter's diminishes rather than height- ens the effect. St. Paul's, London, is set within the busy mart; Lincoln and Ely are hedged in by other buildings; Cologne needs twice as much room. Salisbury is one of the few English cathe- drals which, set within the beautiful close of Sarum, preserves with leisurely greensward and a fine colon- THE SHRINES OF ATTICA IO7 nade of trees a fitting prelude. Our own Capitol at Washington, crowning a genial acropolis, has also a worthy approach. The Acropolis of Athens, though its summit was levelled and its surface extended, was too small for a great esplanade. The Propylaea placed on the top would have concealed or diminished the Parthe- non ; but it could be built on the stern slope of the rock in spite of the great difficulties encountered. This was not the first time that such an undertaking had been successfully attempted. The student who has leisure to study the Propylaea finds it suggestive of both history and prophecy. The whole Acropolis, indeed, is a pahmpsest of stone full of riddles and revelations. If you question this magnificent portico, it will tell you four things at least, first, that there was an older Propylaea here before the Persian de- scent upon Athens ; secondly, that after its destruction by the Persians it was restored ; thirdly, that under Pericles a new and grander structure was raised ; and fourthly, that the architect did not complete the work according to his original intention, but was obliged to finish it provisionally in such a way as not to sacrifice his more perfect plan. Only one of these things is immediately obvious to the traveller, the building he sees before him ; the others must be painstakingly sought out. To understand what is above the surface, you must go below it. As the Parthenon does not wholly efface the piety and labor which were wrought into the temples which preceded it, so the Propylaea does not wholly conceal the foundations of the building which was reared and sacrificed before it was con- I08 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE ceived. Fresh, vital, and imposing as is the later structure, it is also full of reminiscence. We know, to begin with, that here on the top of the slope of the Athenian Acropolis in early times was a tower or building ; not a military defence, but a gate- way such as Pericles erected. We can see how the marble was worked in this pre-Persian time, how large were the squares of stone. It was built in a grand way. We can see the external side of the old building; we can sec the course of the protect- ing wall and how the old Cyclopean walls were hidden with marble. Then we see how in the post- Persian times Themistocles or some one else had re- stored the ancient structure and covered it so as not to show what it had suffered. As the old Propylsea was made a fitting introduc- tion to the old temple on the Acropolis, so Pericles determined that the new building should be a suitable approach to the new temple. The Parthenon had been finished a year (438 B. C.) before the Propylaea was begun. It is hard to believe that so much as we see was built in five years. The lines of the new Propylaea deflect somewhat from the old. One can see the inner side of the wall of the earlier building and trace its direction, which was adapted to the old way up the Acropolis. One understands, too, why the Propylaea of Pericles was turned so as to harmonize with the position of the Parthenon. The Propylaea is built of Pentelic marble. It con- sists of a great central wall in which are five doors or openings, approached through Doric and Ionic colon- nades, while two great wings flanking the entrance formed large halls designed for paintings. The archi- THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 109 tectural difficulties of building such a structure at dif- ferent elevations on the upper side of this rock were great indeed, and the mechanical difficulties of hand- ling the vast blocks of marble in beam and architrave would not seem light to a modern builder if his supply of steam or electricity were cut offi The Greeks must have known how to make cranes before they built temples. That they knew, too, how to put stones to- gether, the wall on the south side of the Propylaea well attests. Although earthquakes and explosions have shattered the building and thrown down many of its columns, the joining of the blocks in this wall is so perfect that the seams can scarcely be felt as you run your hand up and down the smooth white marble. An interesting feature of the Propylaea, as of the Par- thenon, is its persistent reminiscence of the wooden structure, especially in the doors and doorways. There are cuttings in the wall which seem to indi- cate the fastening of a wooden door. Panels are also cut into the marble in a way that would be meaning- less in a stone building except as they show how a plank could be set in and held against springing. Wooden doors and door-jambs could thus have been used. But in some cases it is merely servile imita- tion, as when the architect in some of his pilasters imitates literally the upright wooden plank at the end of a wall, whereas, if less hampered by traditional forms, he might have made something more beautiful. Dr. Dorpfeld, who has shown in detail this repetition and imitation of the wooden structure, finds in it a proof of the essential conservatism of architecture. The large hall on the northwest wing we can easily no THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE believe was adorned with paintings. There are signs of nail-holes where the corners of the stones come together, but we cannot be sure that they were not made in later times. The walls themselves may have been frescoed. It is a question whether the exterior of the building was painted. There are indications that not the whole but parts of it were thus treated. Some of the triglyphs are of poros stone. We can- not suppose that this cheaper stone would be used in a prominent and exposed position in a marble building. That is contrary to Greek usage and ex- ample. It might have been used, however, if it were covered with stucco and painted. So long as wood prevailed in marble buildings for beams and other purposes it was painted ; and, when afterward the marble structure imitated the wooden form in which it had its origin, it was still natural to decorate the same parts. Thus the triglyphs representing the ends of the beams were colored, and also the drops. In later times, therefore, portions of the building which were to be painted could be made out of poros instead of more costly marble. Why should not the gods, who see everywhere, approve such pious econ- omy? At Olympia, for instance, there was no Pen- telic marble, nothing but a quarry of coarse shell conglomerate. When the great temples which gave renown to that place were built, this conglomerate was covered with white stucco, which gave it the appearance of marble. Such a veneer the gods could not disdain. Grand as was the Propylaea, there is evidence that the plan of the architect was still grander. The THE SHRINES OF ATTICA m southwest wing was evidently intended, when the plans were drawn, to be as large as the northwest wing. Mnesicles had laid it out without perhaps consider- ing how far it would interfere with monuments and offerings already in existence and thus encounter conservative or priestly opposition. When this op- position was aroused he was therefore obliged to finish it off in a provisional way. He assumed, how- ever, that its final completion was only a matter of time and so finished it in a manner that would not interfere with his plan when work was resumed. This is hinted in the character of the pilaster at the end of the southwest wing. It was evidently set up so that later it might bear an architrave, like the pilaster on the opposite wing. This was the architect's expectation. One of the columns was left unfinished at the bot- tom, to be '' worked off," as the artisan's habit was, after the upper part was completed. Pericles and his architect at this south side of the building probably ran against two rather hard ob- stacles : one the old Cyclopean wall which crossed the hill at this point, the other the indurated preju- dice of the priests. Both were made of traditional material, and of the two the religious prejudice was no doubt the more stubborn. The architect temporarily accommodated himself to both. The wall of the wing was cut off sharp where it met the Cyclopean wall. We can easily imagine the arguments the priests advanced against extending this building so as to interfere with estab- lished monuments and sacred precincts. We meet the same arguments to-day against the introduction of new and more beautiful and equally devout ideas, 112 THE TSLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE whether framed in words or in marble. But the same reverent conservatism, more intelHgent and clear- eyed, has also protected us against inroads of vandal- ism and hideous innovations in art and religion. Dr. Ddrpfeld has developed, with fascinating proba- bility, the thought of the architect not only in regard to this southwest wing, but concerning a larger plan for the whole structure. As you go around to the external wall of the north wing, where it stands ex- posed towards the east, you see a cornice or frieze on the outside that was obviously intended for the interior of a room. In the middle there is a square hole in the upper wall, for a beam or stringer. There is a corresponding hole on the south side. These and other prophetic details indicate that a hall as large as that of the northwest wing was to flank the gateway and fill out the corner on the northeast. Symmetry would require another room to fill out the southeast corner, and thus the great central gateway would have been flanked by two large halls on each side, filled with votive paintings. That would have meant a partial encroachment on the sacred precincts of Artemis Brauronia, and undoubtedly the removal of some of the statues which Pausanias mentions. Though noble in intention and execution, the Pro- pylsea is distinguished, too, by a fitting humility; the roof rises no higher than the stylobate of the Parthenon. It was built in subordination to the building for which it was the prelude. It was made not to dwarf or darken the supreme temple, but to lead up to it. The Propylaea is the beautiful frontlet on the stern brow of the Acropolis, the Parthenon is still the crown of Athene's holy hill. NIKE BINDING HER SANDAL. THE SHRINES OF ATTICA II3 Close to the south wing of the Propylaea, and involved with it in questions of structure and chrono- logical precedence, is the beautiful little Temple of Athene Nike, or the '' Wingless Victory," as it is com- monly and less accurately called. This temple is so small that it might be put into a corner of the Parthenon. It is only eighteen feet wide and twenty- seven feet long ; and its Ionic columns are but thir- teen and one-quarter feet high. It was removed from the corner of the Acropolis to make place for a Turkish battery ; but afterwards the scattered blocks of the temple were found and laid up again by loving hands, so that we have substantially the original building, though we cannot fully reconstruct with the imagination the beautiful friezes which once adorned it. Some of the exquisite reliefs from the balustrade are in the Acropolis Museum, and among them the cow led by two Victories, and the graceful, airy Victory assumed to be binding her sandal, though ladies of our party insisted that a sandal could not be fastened with one hand, and that she was probably untying or adjusting it. If the Parthenon is grand, the Erechtheum is poetic. The Parthenon reveals the nobility of the Doric order; the Erechtheum, the beauty and grace of the Ionic. Who has not seen pictures or repro- ductions of the stately Caryatides? Lord Elgin kid- napped one of them, but it has been restored in terra-cotta. Another mutilated member of the sex- tette has been pieced out, so that the original im- pression of these six Grecian maidens supporting the roof of the temple-porch is substantially renewed for the spectator. When I see them, I recall the 8 114 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE strong, beautiful peasant girls of Gastouri in Corfu, who walked with their jars of water on their heads, as if they were entirely unconscious of the burden. So these *' Maidens of the Porch " hold up the entablature with perfect grace and ease, as if they hardly knew it was there. The Erechtheum is a gem of refinement and deli- cacy. It was set on the most sacred site of the Acropolis, the spot where tradition places the famous contest between Athene and Poseidon for supremacy at Athens. We know more about this old legend than about many features of the exquisite building whose architectural details repay a careful study. It is inter- esting to have a Doric and an Ionic temple confront- ing each other. They were consecrated to the same deity, but as they represented different orders of ar- chitecture, so likewise there may have been a trace of ** denominational" difference in their worship, or they may have fulfilled different functions. Was it on theological grounds that Cleomenes, the king of Sparta, Dorian we may suppose to the backbone, was refused admission to the Ionic shrine? Or had local and poHtical differences more to do with it? Just what was the relation of the Erechtheum to the Parthenon is a subject still under discussion.^ Like the Parthenon, the Erechtheum was used later as a Christian church. By the irony of fate the beauti- 1 In a lecture given at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens, March i, 1894, Professor John Williams White, of Harvard University, reviewed in detail the evidence from Greek authors and inscriptions concerning the meaning of "The Opisthodomos at the Acropolis at Athens," and reached the conclusion that 6 6Tri(T(>6SoiJ.os, without further designation, refers not to a part of the Parthenon but to a separate building. THE SHRINES OF ATTICA II5 ful *' Maidens of the Porch " were doomed also to sup- port the Turkish harem into which a portion of the temple was converted. But centuries of service, cen- turies of enforced publicity, have not bent their forms, reduced their vigor, nor divested them of maidenly grace and charm. And down there in the lower city I can show you Greek maids and matrons who are to-day heroically, gracefully and strongly upholding the architrave of public duty; who are bearing with patriotic courage burdens which disaster and war have brought upon the home and the state, yet who have lost no womanly grace or serenity in fulfilling the tasks they have so cheerfully assumed. The strong maidens of the Upper City have come down to the plain. THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS in " Master, behold what manner of stones and what manner of buildings ! " were the words of one of the disciples to Jesus as they came out of the temple ; and Josephus has told us how great some of the stones of the Jewish temple were. It is interesting right in the midst of the Gospel record to find this note of astonishment and admiration evoked by the grand and beautiful in art. The more I climbed the Acropolis the more I repeated the exclamation of the wondering disciple at Jerusalem, " Behold what manner of stones and what manner of buildings ! '* Where too can one find more eloquent fragments ? Is there any place where stones have more secrets to tell to one who takes pains to study their language ? As we came from the Parthenon one afternoon. Dr. Dorpfeld called our attention to the large drum of a column which lay near by. It had been rejected by the architect because it was not true. We know that in the building of one of the temples it was ex- pressly stipulated that all stones should be inspected by the chief architect and those that were not perfect should be thrown out. Under this alert inspection no careless or slovenly contractor could have his bill audited for imperfect work ; the rejected stone could not become the head of the corner, nor find a place anywhere else in the building. For centuries this THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 11/ drum has lain there as a rebuke to imperfection and a mute witness to the vigilance and fidelity of the architect. Few stones here seem to have forgotten their history. Most of them can tell us what they did or were meant to do. It is curious how the master architect can reconstruct an ancient building from a mass of stones and fragments as the master zoologist can reframe an extinct animal from a heap of bones. Some of these fragments still preserve organized rela- tions. They lie together imbedded in the rock just where they were placed. From such a ground plan, broken though it is in continuity and design, Dorp- feld has derived the site, form and dimensions of a temple, older than the Parthenon and the Erechtheum and lying between them. It was possibly for a long time the only temple on the Acropolis. Pausanias mentions the temple of Athene Polias as standing at the time of his visit, perhaps about 175 A.D., and as containing a statue of Hermes, almost hidden by myrtle leaves, a folding chair, the work of Daedalus, and spoils taken from the Persians. This old temple had been partially destroyed by the Persians at the same time with the old Erechtheum ; the walls had undoubtedly been left standing and it was in all probability promptly rebuilt by the Athenians. The Parthenon was not finished till some years later, and we cannot suppose that Athene was without a temple on the Acropolis in the mean time. There are still many questions under dispute concerning the age, name and functions of this temple, and among them whether Athene Ergane Athene as patroness of art and invention was worshipped under that aspect in Il8 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE this assumed temple of Athene PoHas, or whether, as some maintain, a separate building dedicated to her in this character was erected in another precinct. No trace of such temple, at all events, has been found. Of the many statues on the Acropolis mentioned by Pausanias, the pedestals of some have been identi- fied and the position of others may be conjectured Not far to the left of the way from the Propylsea to the Parthenon was the pedestal of the great statue of Athene Promachos, made by Phidias from Persian spoil. The goddess in war vesture stood with her spear in poise. The statue was no doubt colossal, for Pausanias tells us that one could descry the spear- head and helmet crest as he sailed from Sunium to Athens. This type of Athene is a familiar one, often reproduced in small bronze figures, which are not necessarily replicas of the statue of Phidias, but older representations of a generic conception of the goddess as defender and protector. The Acropolis, consecrated to religion and the State, reveals few traces of the earlier days when it served as the abode of man. Not far from the Erechtheum, however, an old house wall has been brought to light. In the vicinity are a large number of roof tiles of pre-Persian date, which seem to be as fresh as if made to-day. The building, whatever it was, for which they were used, was probably erected only a short time before the Persian War, and when it was destroyed these bricks or tiles were buried, and so preserved. In this heap of tiles we have material for a whole chapter on ancient roofs. It is easy to distinguish between the flat ones and those evidently intended for roofing. In ancient times house-tops THE SHRINES OF ATTICA II9 were covered with earth. This is well established from a study of the older temples. The construc- tion of the roof of the Doric temple was a hard problem at first for those who maintained the deri- vation of the Doric style from the wooden structure. It could not be explained by any device or applica- tion of stone. Then it was seen that originally the roof was partly wood and partly clay. The heavy mass of earth required beams of great strength. When they were imitated in stone they were at first made ponderous, afterwards much lighter. With earthen roofs it was desirable of course to have a sufficient fall to shed the rain. If the pitch was too great the earth was washed off. This led to the in- troduction of terra-cotta tiles, which would allow a steeper incline ; they were for the most part bent or curved, the better to carry off the water. The intro- duction of marble roofing dates from a much later time. The Acropolis, as I have before intimated, was not a plateau to begin with ; the summit had more or less pitch. An old Pelasgic or Cyclopean wall of large unwrought stones formed a defensive barrier. When afterwards, in the fifth century before Christ, it was determined to level the rock, the space between the external wall and the summit had to be filled in. For this purpose many scattered fragments were used ; bases of statues, broken columns, pieces of sculpture and everything else obtainable, were thrown in. Thus the forward-looking Athenians builded better than they knew; for things which had ceased to be inter- esting to them have proved to be very interesting to us when upturned by the archaeologist's spade. 120 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE On the north side, not far from the Erechtheum, were unearthed votive statues which had been burned or thrown down by the Persians. These bronzes, statues, toys, terra-cotta figures and other things brought to Ught by the excavations on the Acrop- oHs, are now housed in the Museum there. They furnish interesting material for a comparison of pre-Persian with later Greek art. Here are rude representations of Athene and other gods in which the stone serves rather to imprison the divine con- ception than to give it freedom. This may be due less to poverty of conception than to imperfect execution; it was the sculptor feeling after God if haply he might find him. Here are sitting figures which may be either goddesses or women; this ambiguity is not uncommon or unnatural in an an- thropomorphic system. The Greeks did not pro- fess to know always a god from a man. Some label was necessary, not always the name label, but the indication of some attribute. The aegis of Athene hung on her breast was enough to say, " Be rever- ent: I am a goddess." These may have been toys, they may have been symbols of worship put into the graves. As such some of them certainly would have furnished new material for the sarcasm of Isaiah. They are indications perhaps of religious feeling six hundred years before Christ. As Athene was the principal goddess worshipped on the Acropolis, these little archaic terra-cottas may have been votive offer- ings at her shrine. Undoubtedly the manufacturers made them by the wholesale and sold them at a profit. They were made with suflRcient indefiniteness to suit a number of gods. The reverent purchaser when he THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 121 bought one to his liking may have considered it Athene or some other divinity. The only deity besides Athene known to have been worshipped on the Acropolis was Artemis. A sitting; figure with a deer on her arm is without doubt a symbol of this goddess. Attention has been drawn to the relation of these images to some found at Corfu with bow in hand, which likewise take us back to pre-Persian times, to the fifth or sixth cen- tury before Christ. The modern drill sergeant who exhorts his recruits to step off with the left foot at the word " march " may find abundant precedent in the standing figures in the Acropolis Museum in which, as in Egyptian statues, the left foot is ad- vanced. In one sculpture Athene is mounting a chariot with the owl in one corner ; in another, the goddess is vain enough to wear earrings. Of unusual interest are the fourteen archaic busts and torsos found near the north wall of the Acropolis, which still preserve for us the complacent, imperturb- able smile they have worn since the days before the Persian invasion. Are they women or goddesses? If they were intended for Athene herself, she was shorn of all her attributes. Here is neither helmet, spear, owl, gorgoneion, nor any divine sign or label by which to establish her godhead. In the period when these were made, the attributes and insignia of the goddess were familiar and well developed. The probability therefore is that they stand for mortal women and were votive offerings. That is clear from dedicatory inscriptions which have been found, though detached from the statues. These inscriptions show that the givers were in most cases men. The marbles 122 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE cannot then represent the persons who dedicate them. One inscription is described as " tantalizing in its just faiHng to explain what we want to know." It seems to have belonged to a statue of this kind, although the pedestal does not make that certain. The in- scription indicates that a lucky fisherman has made a big haul and set aside some of the profits of his catch for a votive offering. But the statue is simply called a Kovprj, a maiden. That is all we know about it. Whether it was a likeness of his mother, his sister, his cousin or his aunt, he does not tell us. This goes to show that these smirking statues were not individual portraits, but rather a conventional type of maidenhood dedicated to Athene. How it was that a maiden statue was offered to Athene some experts are not ready to say. I do not venture an explanation against their prudent agnosticism ; but as Athene was herself a grey-eyed maid, the patroness of the arts of peace, in whose honor the Athenian maids embroidered the peplos for the Panathehaic procession, the dedication of a maiden statue does not seem inappropriate at the shrine of the virgin goddess. These pleasant women of the Acropolis have an importance worthy of their sex in the light they throw upon early Greek costumes. A boy's head in marble, in this collection, shows fresh emancipation of artistic skill and but a quaint reminiscence of the old formalism. *' It is the prom- ise and potency of things to be," said a friend, " which appeal to us, together with the refined beauty of form and the pensive expression." The beautiful mural tablet of the so called "Mourn- ing Athene " which was found built into a wall inside THE MOURNING ATHENE. THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 123 the ancient Parthenon, presents the goddess in a less famihar attitude. It is not known exactly when the wall was built, so we cannot infer the date of the relief from that. It is of Pentelic marble and shows Athene standing in front of a stele, or grave monu- ment. She leans forward, apparently resting on her spear, her weight on her right foot, and the left just touching the ground. As the marble has been chipped we cannot tell whether her spear is re- versed or not. She wears a long Doric chiton and a Corinthian helmet; the head is represented in profile. Three theories have been presented as to the sig^ nificance of this tablet. One is that Athene is here the guardian of the Acropolis, a view which has little support. The second supposes that the goddess is mourning over a stele on which are en- graved the names of those fallen in battle. The third conceives her as guardian of a stele on which a law is engraved, depicting her thus as the pro- tector of the law. I cannot myself escape from the mournful expression of the face. To be sure the gods have reason enough in these days to be mourn- ful over bad laws, but knowing Athene as I do, I am convinced that anger, not grief, would have been the result of asking her to guard a bad law, and we should have had a broken tablet, recalling the one which Moses in his wrath let fall on the mount. The advocates of the third theory explain the sad face of the goddess by saying that it is a type charac- terizing the reaction against the smile which, though a relief from early formalism, had been overdone. As to the pose, they maintain that other statues 124 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE which do not suggest grief have similar attitudes, and that no conclusion can be drawn from it. If I speak last of the twenty-two slabs of the Par- thenon frieze it is because they should be the climax in any scale of life and beauty of the art treasures on the Acropolis ; and if I speak of them less, it is because they are probably most familiar to my read- ers. Even more than the grouping of the gods on the frieze do I enjoy the apotheosis of the cavalry procession. When before or since have horses been summoned out of stone into more Hfe, freedom, strength and variety pf motion, or riders invested with more grace and beauty? When the bicycle, the horseless carriage, the electric car and the locomo- tive shall have wrought their last mechanical ravage and made the horse as extinct as the dodo, the Parthenon frieze, if it has not crumbled into dust, will be his most perfect epitaph. Old as are the temples made by hands and dedi- cated to Athene on the Acropolis, there are still older shrines. The grottoes of Apollo and of Pan on the north side of the hill recall the time when nature worship, from which much of the later my- thology was derived, found its sanctuary in rocks and caves, springs and groves. The consecrated mag- nificence of later temples did not extinguish this tra- ditional feeling. Votive offerings were made at these nature shrines. On the same side of the rock, and not far from the grottoes of Pan and Apollo, was the ancient well, Clepsydra. The spring which feeds it is still flowing; though lost for a time, in the revolution of 1822 the Greeks rediscovered it and drank of its water as their remote ancestors had done. Was it in THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 1 25 rivalry of pagan devotion, or because something of the old pagan mystery or nature love was preserved in Greek Christianity that a Byzantine chapel with its painted saints was set in this hollow of the rock, as on the south-side grotto of the Acropolis a votive lamp is kept burning for an obscure Christian saint? Like the water from this celebrated spring, the old is perpetually bubbling up into the new ; Christianity still feeds its baptismal fonts from pagan springs. It Is time to go down from the consecrated rock. Greece is more than Athens and Athens is more than the Acropolis. But how much of Greece, the old and the new, is here ! Where can one find so large a panorama of history painted on so small a canvas? The mountains, the isles and the sea have their story to tell, and the sun will set for you to-day with as much beauty as it set for Pericles, but it will light up for you a picture that Pericles could not see. You can look down the long vista of Greek life. You can see the birth and growth of a religion. It takes refuge in the rocks and groves and streams; its ex- panding life struggles to utter itself in forms of beauty and grandeur. How rude and pitiful its first efforts ! It shapes the clay into conventional moulds. But its genius finds new liberation, and with grace, beauty and rising apostrophes of form and color wrought in snowy marble, incarnates its vision of Eternal Beauty. If you look at these melodies of curve with the eye only, you will miss half their significance. To us they are studies in artistic form and feeling ; to those who wrought them they were a part of their religion. Again, you may see the drama of history and life 126 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE which for centuries was acted on the slope and on the plain and then rewoven into the civilization and destiny of Europe. This Cyclopean wall rebuilds for you the ruder life of a primitive age with its piracy and pillage, the foundation of the citadel of Athens, mythical and half-mythical figures floating before you in mists of tradition, Cecrops, Erechtheus, Pan- dion, Theseus. Out of social chaos and tribal con- flict come organized society law and law-makers, Draco and Solon. The long strife for liberty, for democratic self-government, for federal unity, begins with the Greek struggle foi; nationality still continued to our day. We turn toward Marathon and Salamis and see brave little Athens staying the tide of Persian invasion and winning for Europe and for all time the victory it had won for Greece. The Cyclopean wall builders have gone, but the intellectual power of Themistocles is perpetuated in the Long Walls which stretch to the Piraeus and bind Athens to the sea. The Acropolis, once a fortress, is turned into a sanctuary. Pericles and Phidias in the efflorescence of genius reveal the golden age. Beauty blossoms not alone in marble, but in literature, in tragedy, comedy, philosophy, poetry and song. Down there to the left vast and delighted audiences listen to the tragedies of Sopho- cles and Euripides or laugh at the telling comedies of Aristophanes. Off to the north, looking down from the hill, is Colonus, the home of Sophocles, and near to it the leafy grove of Academos, whose name by the fortune of history has become forever linked with science and education. Here Plato un- folds the lofty scheme of his ethics and philosophy. THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 12/ This Athenian Mount of Olives has also its cross and its Golgotha. Below in the market-place Socrates teaches lessons of life and happiness, point- ing sometimes to this precipitous rock with its two roads, one of which could be chmbed with difficulty, while the other, a broader, winding way, could be trod with ease. His prison may not have been in the rocky chamber to which tradition assigns it, but the name and the place perpetuate the memory of his witness to the truth, and sadly remind us that paganism like Christianity had its martyrs, and that Athens like Jerusalem was a slayer of prophets. The voice of Demosthenes from the old bema pro- claims a new danger to Greek liberty. The Arch of Hadrian, the Odeion, the Tower of the Winds, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and far away the monu- ment of Philopappos, show how Rome the conqueror sat at the feet of Athens. Over against the rocky Acropolis stands the rocky Areopagus, where Paul gives his famous address to the crowd which gathers round him. Paganism and Christianity on these two rocks face each other. ** I perceive that in all things you are very mindful of the gods," says the preacher, looking at the forest of statues and the beautiful temples and recalling the altar to the Unknown God. Who among the crowd at his feet dreams that the Gospel of " this vain bab- bler " shall find its swift and triumphant vehicle in the Greek tongue and the spear of Athene Promachos be beaten into a Christian sword? *'We will hear thee concerning this yet again," say some of the listeners. Four centuries later the Neo-Platonists still build their bridge between Plato and Paul. 128 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE A misty veil drops over the scene. The hght of Athens pales. Goths and barbarians sweep down upon it. The scimitar of the Turk flashes in the sky and the long niglit comes, Greek nationality is not dead, but sleeping. It rises, struggles, bursts its bands, gathers its scanty, blood-stained robes about it and takes again, by sufferance, its humble place among the kingdoms of the earth. There is a new Athens, an Athens of to-day, and as we walk to the Belvedere on the eastern verge of the Acropolis we may hear a locomotive whistle and see the electric lights gleaming in the streets below. GRAVE RELIEF. ATHENS. ATTIC GRAVE RELIEFS The average modern graveyard is neither cheerfu\ nor interesting. Artistically, most cemeteries are a failure, which is only atoned for when the beauties of nature offer compensation for poverty of art. Our gravestones serve to mark, for the most part, the rest- ing-places of the dead. They are monotonous enough. Occasionally, wealth may command artistic talent and produce something more beautiful, though it is very apt to take a conventional or traditional form, and represent a broken shaft or some impossible winged angel pointing to an open Bible. The Greeks, on the other hand, had a more inter- esting and cheerful way of commemorating the dead. I have found little in the way of sculpture at Athens which more appealed to me than the grave reliefs still standing in the old cemetery and the large and fine collection oistelce^ or tombstones, in the National Museum. One could not avoid the cemeteries in the old time ; for the Greeks, as also the Romans, had the custom of burying the dead outside the city gates, along the great highroads. That was a road over which, in life or death, every one must pass. The chief street of this kind left in Greece is the " Street of Tombs " outside the Dipylon, or double gateway, of Athens. Most of the monuments unearthed have been re- 9 I30 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE moved to the Museunl ; but enough are left in place to revive the impression which they must have made twenty odd centuries ago. The Greeks did not mean that this highway of tombs should be a vale of tears, or that the passer-by should have to whistle to keep his courage up. They did not, therefore, except in a very few instances, represent death : they pictured life. Whether it was the life here or the life hereafter is a debatable ques- tion; but, at all events, it was life^ such scenes and groups and companionships as are familiar now and here, and such as we should like to have repeated in the life to come. The departed person is seldom represented alone, but nearly always appears as one of a pair or group. In some of these reliefs the avoidance of the slightest allusion to death in feature, act or situation is striking. Thus, one of the most beautiful monuments in the cemetery is that to Hegeso. A woman is sitting in a chair, while her female slave stands before her holding an open toilet- box. Both faces are fixed upon the casket and its contents, as if this were the one thing of interest. Apparently, the toilet is completed, and only the jewel or ribbon which the mistress is selecting is needed to finish her preparation. But her preparation for what? Is she getting ready for death or for life? If for death, where, according to modern ideas and exi- gencies, are the doctor and the priest? The subject is treated too seriously for us to assume that the artist or the person who dedicated the tomb was having a fling at women in picturing love of dress as '^ the ruling passion strong in death." This is not meant to be a death scene. It is not exceptional in type TOMB OF HEGESO. AlHENS. THE SHRINES OF ATTICA I31 or character, but one of a class in which the toilet- case or the mirror is frequently introduced. The difficulty of regarding this as a scene in the next life is evident. Or did the Greek faith insist on slavery and toilet-making in heaven? And which slavery is it worse to perpetuate, that of the servant to her mistress, or the slavery of the mistress to the Goddess of Fashion? But these scenes were less complex than with such casuistry we are capable of making them. They were as simple and natural and human as the daily life they describe. On one of the tombs is a monument of a valorous young Athenian named Dexileos, who won his laurels during the Corinthian War, 394 B. C. Mounted on a spirited horse, he is striking down a foeman, who falls, half recumbent, beneath his horse's feet. An inscrip- tion identifies the hero and the deed. In this case it is clear that the tomb is a monument to a military hero. It signalizes the deed which made him famous, and by which his memory is to be perpetuated. This desire to single out some one act of a man's life, or some professional success to adorn and distinguish his tombstone, is a common one in both late and early times. On the poles of the scaffold upon which the Sioux Indians elevate their dead on the open plain, they mark in red paint a record of some deed of valor, perhaps the number of scalps he has taken or of the horses he has stolen. To see the grave reliefs In greatest number and variety, and to study their significance, we must go to the National Museum. Many as there are, there would have been more Attic gravestones, if a law had not been passed to restrict their erection. Demetrius 132 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE of Phaleron seems to have been a funeral reformer, who forbade the use of elaborate grave monuments, and who thought three inexpensive varieties would be enough. It was probably owing to earlier interfer- ence with the stone-cutter's craft, and not to any pro- longed period of public health, that the production of Attic gravestones fell off in the fifth century, and again, after a period of reaction, under Demetrius at the end of the fourth. These tombstones were not made for or by dis- tinguished people; they were made for every-day people by every-day workmen. We must treat them as gravestones, not as achievements of art. They were not made for competitive exhibition in this Museum. Nevertheless it is remarkable to what an extent technical ability had been developed, and that so many sculptors could be found in Greece capable of doing such excellent work. Some of them pass beyond the ordinary level, and exemplify the highest artistic skill. The simplest form in which these monuments ap- pear is that of a slab. In the sixth century before Christ it was made tall and narrow, with variations as to size in different parts of Greece and in succeed- ing years. There are also great inequalities of depth : sometimes the relief is very deep, sometimes only an outline. Different kinds of technique seem to have been in use at the same time. The lower part was left rough, to be set in the ground, and sometimes the stone was surmounted by a sculptured gable in low relief. Though there are many inaccuracies in detail, the total impression is often strikingly effective, and originally was no doubt heightened by color. A THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 133 more ambitious and costly form of monument was constructed of a number of slabs of marble framed together like a temple front, and in this the com- memorative slab was set. These funeral slabs received various symbolical decorations. A figure half woman and half bird, with human head and arms, and bird's wings and claws, a sort of siren playing upon a musical in- strument or in an attitude of lamentation is frequently found. A lion is a common symbol. Just what its relation to death was, it is not easy to see ; perhaps the figure was simply decorative. On one tombstone in the National Museum the animal serves as a pic- torial pun ; the man's name was Leon, as the inscrip- tion shows, and the corroborative figure left no doubt about it. Marble vases formed another kind of grave-orna- ment, and were also of varying types. Many of these amphorae have a long, slender neck and flat mouth- piece. Then there is the XovTpo(j)6po<;, or copy of a type of vase with two handles. From a passage in one of the orations of Demosthenes, in which it is said that a certain man died unmarried, as is proved from the \ovTpo(f)6po<; on his grave, it is inferred that this form of two-handled vase is found only on the graves of unmarried persons. To a modern reader, a one-handled vase might seem to be a more appro- priate symbol of celibacy. When a grave-monument has but a single figure, it is natural to assume that it designates the one who has died. But where two or more persons are fig- ured, it is difficult to tell which was intended for the dead. The Greeks did not write long eulogies or 134 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE epitaphs on their tombstones. The inscriptions were mostly confined to the name. Many stones have no inscription whatever ; the names originally may have been painted. On the other hand, certain slabs are crowded with several names when there are only two figures. The explanation of this redundancy may be found in the fact that a tombstone made to commemorate one person was afterwards appropri- ated for another. Whether there was any legitimate trading in second-hand tombstones I do not know; but it looks as if in some cases the original name had been chiselled out and the monument used by a later generation. The student of sculpture will find interesting material for technical study and comparison in these reliefs, some of which show close resemblance to Par- thenon work, while in the later Roman period the melancholy degeneracy of art is evident. But of far more interest to me are the questions of life, death, and the life after death which these grave reliefs sug- gest. One of the most common motives is that of two persons clasping hands. What is the meaning of the clasped hands? Is it a gesture of farewell from the departed? is- it the joyous greeting he re- ceives in the next Hfe ? or is it merely an expression of friendship and affection in this life, as when on other stones a woman is playing with a pet bird? These are questions not easily answered. The reasons advanced for rejecting the first sug- gestion are that the clasping of hands was not with the Greeks exclusively or chiefly a sign of farewell. Nothing was more common, however, than for them to clasp hands when they met. We find it on the THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 1 35 Opening pages of the Odyssey, Telemachus grasped the right hand of the disguised Athene on the thresh- old of his father's court. Again, it is clear in some cases that the monument commemorates the seated person and not the one who is standing. In such cases it is not natural to think that the sitting figure represents the one who is saying farewell. There are many things pointing strongly to the conclusion that these are simply scenes of earthly life. Whatever the meaning of the clasped hands as to time and place, there is no doubt that these per- sons are presented to us in relations of trust, friend- ship or affection. Among the large number of Greek grave monu- ments at Athens, there are only three or four in which there is an evident suggestion of sickness and death; and there are, I believe, but two cases known in which Hermes is shown in the act of leading persons to the lower world. Curious and interesting are the banquet scenes which form a common type in these grave reliefs. One figure is usually reclining on a couch ; food is set on a table near by; slaves or companions are present, and sometimes a dog is munching a morsel beneath. Other pet animals, such as birds or rabbits, are frequently introduced. The numerous votive tablets are hard to distinguish from sepulchral monuments. We know little about them. It is possible that they may have been kept in the houses of the survivors in commemoration of the dead. There is one stone in the National Museum on which I can never look with dry eyes. It represents a youth 136 THE ISLES AND SHRINES OF GREECE who has passed away. His father, apparently, is standing opposite him. In the corner sits a boy in abject grief, which is shared by a dog mourn- fully holding his head to the ground. This stone, softly yielding to the pressure of the deepest emo- tions, shows that the Greeks could not always avoid the sadness of death by euphemism in art. Even marble sometimes melted at the touch of grief. The dog is no intrusion. The scene would lose greatly in interest and pathos if he were removed, because the range of sympathy would be limited. Human emo- tion seems to have its source deeper in the life of nature when we find a kindred emotion welling up from the heart of a dog. Simple and natural as they are, there is no frosty hardness in the reserve of these grave stones. The warmth of life is felt even in death ; they are too ten- der to be cold. To feel, however, the deep pathos beneath all the tenderness of the conception of death we must turn to Greek literature. From Odysseus in the shadowy land of the dead with unrestrained grief crying, '* My mother, why not stay for me who long to clasp thee ! " down through the long vista of the Greek anthology, the whole gamut of sorrow is touched ; sometimes in soft flute-like strains in varied keys, or, as in the inscription to the dead at Ther- mopylae, with the grandeur of the Eroica. If the minor mode is the natural language of grief there are epitaphs which remind us that Handel was not the only one who could write a funeral march in the major; and some at least, as this of Plato's, fur- nished their own consolation, singing in clear hopeful tones like the clarinet in the allegretto of the Seventh THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 1 37 Symphony of Beethoven, over the solemn fateful rhythm of death: vvp Be Oavoov Xajjiirei^ ''^aTrepo^ iv (j)6L/jLevoL