My Sixty Days in Greece: Iii. My Traveling Companions
I.
ON the night of the 10th of April, 1896, the Birmania, of the Florio-Rubattino line, dropped anchor in the harbor of the Piræus. On the afternoon of June 8, the Euterpe, of the Austrian Lloyd, weighed anchor in the same port.
I had been on Greek soil and in Greek waters some sixty days, — scant measure for my more than threescore years, but every day of the sixty meant something. Not that I enjoyed every day ; " enjoyment” is not the word for so tense a life, a life that made sleep seem an impertinence ; but the tension revealed unsuspected capacities of enjoyment, unknown possibilities of vibration, and there was one old scholar in Greece who would not have exchanged with some younger men. At the same time, it must be confessed that 舠an old scholar in Greece ” has not so jocund a sound as 舠 a young god in France,” the formula in which the German students of my time used to sum up the conditions of an earthly paradise.
Greece demands of her lovers physical vigor. Penelope, at least according to Ovid, instituted the trial of the bow in order to put the manly strength of her suitors to the test, —
and Hellas, being a heathen goddess, takes pleasure in the legs of a man. Even Odysseus, who was remarkably well preserved, and had Athena to train him, declined to engage in a foot-race with the Phæacians; and while he excused himself on the ground of his seafaring life, and not on the ground of his maturer years, the young fellows saw through the pretext, and classed him among the elderly gentlemen, — the sad rubric to which I was assigned on the Dörpfeld excursion. “ If I were only as young as I was,” I cried in Homeric fashion, — “ if I were only as young as I was in 1860, when I tramped over Switzerland!” But Varus could not give Augustus back his legions, and Time would not give me back my legs. Thirty-six years and the shipwreck of the Civil War lay between now and then, and there was no use in repining. Even a poor devil upon two sticks would find enough in Greece to enjoy, and one stout American hickory sufficed me. Still, scrambling over ruins is not easy work, and a steady pull uphill is less fatiguing, just as a hard author is preferable to a corrupt text. Difficulties are not to be measured by feet or metres. I remember the climb to the summit of Mount Cynthus, which lifts its awful form to the height of three hundred and fifty feet, as a very creditable performance, and my ankle felt for many a day the rough descent from the Lárisa to the theatre of Argos.
For a considerable portion of those sixty days I traveled with a large company, and my pilgrimage under Professor Dörpfeld’s guidance made me acquainted with a number of human varieties which would have interested Socrates far more than the plain of Argos or the current of the Alpheus. But it is not of these companions in flesh and blood that I am thinking now, nor of Baedeker, nor of Murray, nor of the Guide-Joanne. My most constant companions in Greece were the voices of the dead Greeks. They did not squeak and gibber, as ghosts are supposed to do ; and if I could not always recall the exact notes of the pieces that were shut up in the duodecimo and octavo musical boxes of my library at home, still there was a certain pleasure in trying to hum the melody, and every strain that came back, came back with new wings. The deep bass of Æschylus pealed from the summit of the “ Arachnæan steep,” last station of the fire-signals that were sped from Troy. The banks and braes of the Cephisus echoed the notes of Sophocles. Not so clearly at Colonus. There are no green dells at Colonus itself. The voice of the nightingale is not heard for the rattling of the tram-car. Unsmitten of the sun the place may be, and unvisited by blasts of wintry storm, but the pursuivants of Dionysos keep wine-shops and cafés in Colonus, and do not dance in the train of the god. You must push on to Kolokythou, where the tramway stops, or, still better, follow the stream up to Kephisiá, and the voice of Sophocles will be more clearly discerned.
But while the spirit of Sophocles seemed to be localized, there was no woodland glade that did not recall the charm of Euripidean song. Euripides was not in earnest with his poetry, we are told. He was nothing but a rationalist, and his song was a mocking-bird song. But mocking-bird song or not, it issued from the heart of nature, to which the poet was as near as he was to the heart of man. I never passed a group of women washing clothes at fountain or in stream — and there is no more familiar sight in Greece — without thinking of Euripides, who saw the poetry of common things, and did not hesitate to introduce into the Hippolytus the figure of the washerwoman gossip from whom the leader of the chorus learned how lovelorn Phædra was pining away. Haply the poetic side of the laundress had been lost in the eyes of the superfine Attics of his day, and he felt himself called on to restore it. Yet how could it have been lost ? Nausicaa, the divine washerwoman of the Odyssey, was my earliest Greek love ; and when I grew to man’s estate and found that she was wedded to priggish Telemachus, I suffered long, and then composed in her honor a study on the washerwomen of literature and legend. Kudrun is to me a more interesting personage than Kriemhilde or Brunhilde, and few figures stand out more boldly in the memory than Arlette of Falaise, who won the heart of Robert of Normandy, and became the mother of William the Conqueror.
Another companion voice the attentive reader of these sketches has already divined, for I have quoted Pindar in season and out of season ; and no wonder. Pindar was one of the two Greeks who accompanied me in book form on my voyage across the Atlantic. He was my oracle, he is my oracle still; and on consulting him as to the continuation of this series I received the reply in tripping Greek, Tρίа ϵπϵа διаρκέσϵι (Three numbers will be quite enough) ; and then lapsing into English he went on: “ Of your sixty days in Greece you have given really not more than three or four; and sixty days described on that scale would fill a volume. To be sure, you have been moderate in comparison with his late Majesty of unhappy memory, Maximilian of Mexico, who took no less than two hundred and eighty-two octavo pages in which to display the riches of a four days’ visit to Bahia ; but you profess to be an admirer of mine, and I bid you remember my saying : To broider a few things among many, that is a hearing for the wise.”
II.
The arrogance of Pindar is something unendurable to most people, sometimes even to me ; and being in a rebellious mood, I will explain my choice of so dictatorial a companion. Some ten years ago I made a little experiment with Aristophanes, who is a much more free and easy person than Pindar ; and as the experiment had proved interesting at least to the experimenter, it occurred to me, when I was setting out on my trip to Greece, that I might treat Pindar as I had treated Aristophanes ; and somehow my fancy was tickled by the thought of making the Theban eagle fetch my game as the Attic hawk had done. Of course I expected him to scream out some moral sentiment from time to time ; but every Greek is under all circumstances a moralist, and so long as he brought in my quarry, well and good.
Now, my experiment with Aristophanes was after this fashion. I resolutely shut out all light that came from other quarters, and declined to see anything that was not to be seen from Aristophanic casements. Aristophanes was to be my Scripture, and I was to keep myself only to him. He was my Old Testament, my only guide, and I flatly refused to consult other documents, — Records of the Past, Deluge Tablets, Nimrod Epic, or Moabite Stone. This Greek world according to Aristophanes turned out to be a droll map, and the construction of it might be excused as the amusement of a midsummer vacation ; but even thus a serious soul might regard so elaborate a pastime as a sad waste of precious hours. For the old way is the better way. In the study of so organic a thing as Greek literature correlation is indispensable. To understand Aristophanes, for instance, to understand Greek comedy, you must understand everything Greek. You must understand lyric poetry in all its sweep, the musical jet of personal passion, the stately measures of choral song, the mad whirl of the dithyramb, the merry catch of the toper, the chant of the mystic worshiper, the simple melody of the swallow song, and the wood-notes wild of the Attic nightingale. You must understand the grave sister Tragedy whom Comedy mocks and mimics at every turn, whose altar she kicks over with irreverent foot, whose sceptred pall she turns into a blanket for the tossing of sage and seer. Thalia, with arms akimbo, outfaces Clio, and Thucydides and Aristophanes are impaneled on the same jury. The snub - nosed street preacher who brought philosophy down from heaven to dwell among men sits at the same banquet with " the bald-head bard ” who carried merriment up from men to dwell among the gods, —
Kudathenaian and Pandionid,
Son of Philippos, Aristophanes.”
In a large part of the poet’s comedies an oratorical contest forms the hinge of the piece, and Aristophanes belongs to the history of rhetoric ; and the whole is rounded by the Oceanus of Homer, that great river into which and out of which flow all the streams of Greek life. Then, after you have studied all the literature, you must study all the history, and all the antiquities, and all the rest of it.
This is the old process, the orthodox process with which everybody is more or less familiar; and because it is orthodox it stirs revolt at times in the most believing soul. Ordinarily we fill our galleries of the antique with all the light procurable, and that is doubtless in the main the right way ; but there are other ways, and a number of years ago I had an opportunity of witnessing the effect of a different method. It was the jubilee of the Berlin Museum, and on the night of the great day court and university, artists and scholars, joined in a torchlight procession that made its way through the aisles of the sculpture gallery. That strange phantasmagory, with its high lights and its deep shadows, will never be forgotten by those who followed in the wake of the flickering flames; and I can recall as if it were yesterday how the equestrian statue of Colleoni, which I had never seen before, rode out of the darkness, and rode into the darkness again. A few weeks afterwards I stood before the original near San Zanipolo in Venice, and scanned the proud figure at my leisure. No detail was lost in the sunlight of an Italian summer. Yet that second in Berlin gave the unforgettable flash ; and so the wave of Aristophanes’ torch often fixes an image such as no detailed drawing can yield.
But vividness of impression is not the only thing to be gained from such a process. Nothing could teach more sharply the danger of partial judgment, the utter untrustworthiness of the argument from silence. We have to deal with an Attic poet steeped in Athenian life, and yet how little does he help us about the very things that we most wish to know when we visit Athens ! Think of an Attic poet who never mentions Hymettus, and who treats grand Parnassus and perky Lycabettus as if they were fellows. Of course the topographers have got something out of Aristophanes, but not so much as might have been expected, and in spite of my real affection for him I never took him with me to the Acropolis. Wherever else his mocking spirit haunted me, this was hallowed ground. On the way up I may possibly have glanced at the " grotto of Pan,” but I had no sympathy with the “ bridal chamber ” curiosity, which of late weeks has prompted an exploration of the rendezvous of Aristophanes’ young married lovers ; and only once did he interfere with my musing on the Acropolis itself.
Late one afternoon I was sitting on the platform of the temple of Wingless Victory, watching the sunset, and listening to an emotional friend of mine as he declaimed Byron’s famous lines beginning, —
Along Morea’s hills the setting sun.”
They are duly registered in Baedeker, it is true, but my friend knew them by heart, and admired them from his heart. “ This is the scene,” says Baedeker, “ Byron had in his mind in the opening lines of the third canto of The Corsair.” He might have gone further and said that Byron himself informs us that the verses were written on the spot, wherever the exact spot was, and were transferred as a purpureus pannus from another poem. It would have been better as a fragment, and I began to suspect artificiality. “ True,” said I to myself, “ the sun as a deity, as Sol, as a personification, as another Lord Byron, has a right to set where he pleases, to sink ‘ slow . . . along Morea’s hills,’ and to ‘ sink to sleep behind his Delphian cliff,’ and 'pause on the hill ere he sinks below Cithæron’s head ; ’ but to the beholder from the platform of the temple of Wingless Victory Delphi is not in the line of vision with Ægina and Idra, and he who attempts to see Salamis and Parnassus at once from this point of view will run the risk of getting his eyes crossed.” Then I remembered that this was what the sausage-seller in the Knights of Aristophanes said when requested to fix one eye on Caria and the other on Carthage, and remembered it all the better because some malapert critic had tried to mar the faultless text, and to substitute Kalchedon, the city of the blind, for Karchedon, the New Tyre of the West.
The beautiful vision was obscured, and my eyes and ears were filled with the fantastic figures and the hoarse shouts of the chorus of old men in the Lysistrata, as they advanced slowly up the slope of the Acropolis to smoke out and to burn out the revolted women from the citadel. Snatches of the song came up to me strangely Americanized with anachronistic references to the Venezuelan troubles. The women of America bad seized the Capitol, and insisted on peace. Peace was the sine qua non. Else no surrender of Capitol or garrison. The situation was strained to cracking, and the fire-eaters and the fire-bringers were astonished at the stout defense. Ho! Ho! they cried.
Here’s an unexpected go !
How they rally, how they sally !
How they swarm to face the storm !
We will nevermore allow
All this Venezuelan row,
All this jaw and all this jabber!
Take a stick and beat ’em quick
Into curds or bonnyclabber !
Never, never, hardly ever
Was there poet half so clever
To my mind
As Euripides, who swears
That the thing most void of shame
In the world is that which bears
Hateful, hateful, hateful name,
Womankind.
It was an odious intrusion at that hour of quiet musing. In Athens your best rendezvous with Aristophanes is in the market, not on the Acropolis, and the imperishable eulogy of violet-wreathed Athens with which the guidebooks credit him is, as I have noted elsewhere, taken from Pindar, with whom I am becoming reconciled. My original project, A Pindarist in Greece, comes back to me, and with it the old German song,
There is, after all, no better comrade for a trip to Greece than Pindar.
III.
The whirl of the new Olympic games had not left me much time for communing with Pindar or any other member of the choir invisible, and it was not until I reached Nauplia, the second stage of my trip to the Peloponnesus, that I had a little space for meditation. Nauplia was the headquarters of our party for several days, and I found myself more than once on the quay at nightfall, straining my eyes seaward as I had strained them landward when I crossed the Argolic gulf on my way to Athens. Pindar has something to say of Argos, if not of Nauplia ; and as we were standing on the terrace of the temple of Hera, and our leader pointed out Midea, an ancient stronghold, once a rival of Mycenæ and Tiryns, I felt a certain proprietary interest in the place on Pindar’s account. Midea was the home of the hero who won the foot-race in the first celebration of the Olympic games. He was cousin-german to the founder, Herakles, and carried off the founder’s prize, and his grandam bore the name of the fortress. Yonder in Tiryns was his father slain with a staff of hard olive wood by one of the sons of Herakles, ancestor of the line of athletes made immortal by Pindar’s Rhodian song.
So Midea is enshrined in two of Pindar’s noblest odes, and her Cyclopean walls have a meaning for the Pindaric scholar they can have for no other. But Pindar’s solitary Argive ode opens with a bead-roll of all the mythic worthies who flourished on Argive soil, and the poet soon finds himself obliged to apologize, as modern scholars are often tempted to apologize, for long lists of proper names all resonant with music and lighted up with rainbow hues to them, to others mere meaningless syllables. I began to think that, Pindar might not be so satisfactory, after all, and a homely distich from a Greek folk-song came into my mind to match the German folk-song I quoted just now : —
I have one pretty maiden in my arms, but want another.
I had Pindar ; I wanted Pausanias ; and, turning to my satchel, I found that I had left my Pausanias in Athens. I knew it was madness to look for a Pausanias in a bookseller’s shop at Nauplia, and yet I could not keep from inquiring. “ Pausanias,” I received for answer, “is not in stock. Perhaps Xenophon or Homer will do as well.” Homer and Xenophon would not do so well, and I was disconsolate.
IV.
During the few hours spent at Corinth, on the way to Nauplia, I had not missed Pausanias. In fact, Pausanias would not have been of much service, for of ancient Corinth there is almost nothing left, except a few columns of a temple, — a squat, surly temple with no nonsense about it. One might call it an uncompromising temple, if it had not sheltered two cults, as is shown by the double cella. The columns are monoliths, so many petrified trees, and the graceful swell so much admired in the Doric order is lacking. A part of the entablature remains. It has a perilous perch, and the temple looks as if it would take extreme pleasure in tossing off the load on some impertinent beholder whenever Lord Poseidon shall assert his dominion and give the excuse of an earthquake.
That ruin was all, or nearly all. The old city itself lay fathoms below, and the trenches which the Americans were digging had yielded little up to that time. Ancient Corinth, the great merchant city of Greece, seemed to have closed her accounts definitely. Her ledger was not to be reopened. Acrocorinthus is mediæval, and in Greece mediæval things are not held in much esteem. The view from the summit is unrivaled, but there is nothing to comfort you on the way up. Wall after wall confronts you, and you must reach the signal-station before you can enjoy any part of the panorama. In other ascents there are often glimpses to gladden the eye ; in this, as soon as you enter the gate of the fortifications you are in jail until you emerge at the very top. Two thirds of the way up, a mule or a pony is available ; the remaining third, by far the hardest part, must be traversed afoot, — which things are an allegory to the aspiring student. Acrocorinthus, like the Rigi, makes the most of its height, and gives the eye an almost unjustifiable range. The ancients were fully aware of its advantages in this respect, for they knew all about views, though they did not parade their knowledge. A practical folk were the Greeks, and not unfrequently what we should call homely in their comparisons. That Acrocorinthus should be called a horn we can understand, — Switzerland is full of such horns ; but to say that Acrocorinthus is the horn by which the Peloponnesian cow is bound is one of those American turns of expression with which the Greeks every now and then surprise the finical souls of the Old World. This horn was sacred to Aphrodite. Poseidon, who owned the isthmus, ceded the height to Helios, and Helios to Aphrodite, perhaps by way of making friends with the goddess after his taletelling in that affair of hers with Ares.
I will not expatiate on the view from Acrocorinthus, though I have Greek warrant for any mistakes I might make in surveying the landscape, even if the mistakes were as bad as the one I ventured to point out in the sunset as seen from the temple of Wingless Victory. It will be enough to say that all the patron deities of Acrocorinthus rule the summit, Poseidon, Helios, and Aphrodite, sea and sun and immortal charm. On the way down some of us took the path that leads by the spring of Pirene. Apart from my general classicism I had a personal right to Pirene by reason of my long wrestle with Persius, which was far worse than any struggle Bellerophon had with Pegasus ; for it was once my fate to try by searching to find out something like fun in the contorted language of Ben Jonson’s “ crabbed coxcomb,” and among other things to unfold the wit and humor involved in calling the fountain that had gushed forth at the stroke of Pegasus’ hoof, let us say, Rozinante’s spring. I must confess that this memory was not calculated to endear Pirene to me; but there were other memories, and the fact that Persius had not “ laved his lips in the caballine fount ” was an inducement to lave mine. A bare-legged Greek had espied our party as Helios had espied Ares and Aphrodite, and hurried down ahead of us with a cup ; and as I drank what that affected Etruscan called the “ Pegaseian nectar,” I shook Persius off.
I was in Pindar’s “ city of Pirene ” and in the Thirteenth Olympian. This, then, was the ancestral home of Glaucus, the Lycian hero, that gallant and flighty Homeric figure, whose forefathers must have carried the worship of the sun from this horn of light to Lycia, the land of light. This was the spot where Athena appeared to Bellerophon, weary with vain endeavors to yoke the son of Medusa; and as he slept she brought him bit and bridle. The head-stall had a golden frontlet, but the poet does not dwell on that adornment. The bit is the wonder, the bit is the charm, the bit is the gold that tames the spirit, the bit is the mild medicine ; and Bellerophon was straightway wide-awake and leaped to his feet. The poet must have visions, but he must have vision as well, clear eye and steady hand, and above all, the bit. There is a whole theory of poetic art in Pindar’s version of the myth; and his very insistence on the element of control is part of the self-irony in which genius is apt to indulge. For the Thirteenth Olympian is a praise of Corinth as rich and varied as was Corinth herself, and I have ventured elsewhere to call it a semiOriental bazaar, by reason of the admired disorder of its wares. The Greek symmetry is not felt at first, as the poet tells of Corinth’s wealth and of her miracles of art, as he extols the city where the Muse breathes sweetly and the flower of Ares is in bloom. The poem that lauds the invention of the dithyramb is itself a manner of dithyramb, and its joyous, lilting tone rings out in strange contrast to the dead silence that broods over Old Corinth at the foot of the steep. And what a comment on the verse that tells of the twin eagles which Corinth taught to perch on the gables of the Greek temple are those columns which had all their fellows in Pindar’s time, and that entablature which was crowned by the king of birds in Pindar’s time ! For a resurrected city Pausanias is doubtless the more instructive companion. For a dead and buried city the poet is a more sympathetic comrade than the periegete.
V.
Pausanias the periegete, Pausanias the personal conductor through continental Greece, is a conspicuous character among guides. Whatever classic Thrasybulus (Thrassývoulos) or Christian Thomas you may select as your dragoman, whatever faithful Angelís as your agogiátes, your muleteer, if you are a Hellenist you cannot dispense with Pausanias. That is an article of faith. Of course I had read Pausanias long before I ever saw Greece, and worked at him even in my German ’prenticeship, when Curtius’ Peloponnesos was a recent book. Pausanias occupied the middle of my desk, and was flanked by Kiepert’s Atlas and by Curtius’ volumes, — an arrangement that suggests the Napoleonic order, “ asses and savants in the centre,” though Pausanias would have been very much surprised if he had been told that he was not a savant, but only the other thing.
To be a savant, in his day, was to be a skillful writer, and Pausanias evidently prided himself on his style. It is, according to the best judges, a hopelessly bad style. It is an affected style, a bookish style. The decree of divorce from bed and board, in the cross-suit of Pen vs. Tongue and Tongue vs. Pen, was an old scandal in the time of the Antonines, and there is no hearty human life in the literature of the Greek Renascence, as there is precious little in some forms of our own. The literature of that period is reminiscential, is allusive, as is ours, and Pausanias is no exception. If you take him up at random, you may stumble on passages that remind you of Herodotus, at whom many of the stylists of that day were in the habit of dressing. You will find Herodotean phrases here and there. He has Herodotus’ way, not confined to Herodotus, of bringing in his own personality. He has Herodotus’ way of affecting discreet reticence on religious matters. But he tries — I hate to say it of an ass or even of a savant — he tries to improve on Herodotus, who is distinctly not to be improved on, and the leisurely stroll of the great Halicarnassian is turned into a mincing gait. He tries to add the piquancy of a queer order of words to the supposed naïveté of Herodotus, and the result is an Herodotus with a string-halt, an Herodotus with a locomotor ataxy. Herodotus deals largely in episodes, which he manages with consummate art; but whereas Herodotus leaves the track in order to give a better view of it, Pausanias goes off at a tangent, fetches a book from a shelf and copies for dear life. Not the text, bless you, for he endues everything with his own precious style, but the facts, the historical details.
His Attica is especially exasperating. True, he makes a proper approach to Athens. He introduces us to Sunium first. Not knowing Byron, he spares us Byron’s “ marbled steep,” and in the same matter-of-fact way in which he mentions the Hermes of Praxiteles as one of the figures set up in the temple of Hera at Olympia, in that same matter-of-fact way he tells us that there is a temple of Athena Sunias perched on the tip-top of the cape. That is all. He does not tell us that the marble is very poor and flakes off prodigiously, and owes its dazzling color to this disintegration, — a lesson to the decadents of our own time. He begins well, and for a few chapters he is tolerable, and we do not quarrel with his talk about the foolish Galatians and their works ; but no sooner does he touch Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, than he goes off on a long rambling discourse which would have had some interest three hundred years before his day, and was probably taken from some ancient manual.
That is the great trouble with Pausanias. Not only is his style vilipended by the historians of literature, but his honesty is assailed by critics of high and low degree. Even if they do not go so far as to say that there was no such person as Pausanias, still it is a favorite contention that the Periegesis of Hellas is a mere piece of book-making, that Pausanias could not have seen what he describes, and that the material is taken in large measure from one Polemon, who flourished in the second century before Christ, as Pausanias is supposed to have flourished in the second century after Christ. This is a hard saying, but it must be remembered that the old world moved more slowly than does ours, and we must not parallel this performance by liberties taken with modern centuries. Fifty years will answer quite as well for our times. I myself have a small collection of guidebooks that did me good service in their day and my day. Imagine a Berlin without the monument of Frederick the Great, which corresponds, let us say, to the statue of Agrippa on the Acropolis, not mentioned by Pausanias. Imagine a London without the Thames Embankment, a Vienna without the Ringstrasse, a Milan without the Galleria Vittorio - Emmanuele. Imagine a Paris — But, unfortunately, the preposition would have to be changed, and a Paris imagined with what she has lost, with so much that she had when I first saw her in 1853. To be sure, there are notes of time in Pausanias, and he refers to some of the monuments of his age, but many he ignores, though they must have stared him in the face.
An artist may be excused for artistic omissions. The great etcher Méryon saw in Paris only what he chose to see, but Pausanias is no artist, though he evidently thinks himself one. He is a cicerone, and while we may forgive his sham religious reticences, while we may forgive him when, so to speak, he stops to cross himself and tell his beads, yet we resent his silence about things that he ought to have known. But the thesis that Pausanias was not a traveler, except as a bookworm is a traveler, seems to me utterly untenable. The argument from silence is a dangerous argument, and as to his borrowings, he was not the first nor the last traveler to refresh his memory by reading the standard guidebooks after he got home. In a recent lecture, I tried to make the Altis of Olympia more vivid by comparing its dimensions with those of the inside grounds of the University of Virginia. If any one supposes for a moment that I stepped off the Altis of Olympia and found it to be 750 by 570 feet, he is very much mistaken, and though I lived twenty years at the University of Virginia. I did not trust my memory for details. In looking up monuments of Italian art, it is perfectly conceivable that a man should go back to an old Burckhardt or an old Murray even if he had a recent Baedeker. The famous Bononian riddle of Ælia Lælia Crispis, to which Burton alludes in his Anatomy of Melancholy, you will look for in vain in Baedeker under Bologna, but you will find it set forth in any old Murray.
At one time I thought of exemplifying my conception of Pausanias by preparing a guide to Baltimore on his principles, but I abandoned the plan on account of the necessary limitations. However, London, New York, Boston, would yield very good results; and in fact I remember a practical illustration of the Pausanias method applied to New York. In the early seventies a panorama of New York was making the round of the rural communities of the South, and thinking to do a young friend a service and prepare her for a visit to the great city, I took her to the show. To my amusement, the New York of the panorama was the New York of the year after the Mexican War, a Pausanias New York, the fixed quantity being the noble façade of the Jersey City ferry.
After one gets accustomed to Pausanias, one begins to have a more kindly feeling for him as a man ; for he was after all a man, and not a book. Indeed, there is a certain bonhomie about all the authors of the period, except that child of Satan, Lucian, and one warms to them after a while. Pausanias is at his best in Olympia, and the explorer of Delphi cannot dispense with Pausanias, but there are moments when his company becomes tedious in both places. It was my fortune, a fortune I cannot prize too highly, to have passed immediately from Olympia to Delphi, and to have had the historical contrast restamped upon my mind in terms of nature : and such a contrast! Olympia was the abode of the worship of Zeus, the God of the Power of the Sky ; Delphi was the oracular see of Apollo, the interpreter of Zeus, the Word of God. Olympia was a great fair, Delphi was a great shrine. Olympia was a great exposition, Delphi a great university, — the one a recurrent, the other a perpetual influence; for the laborious efforts of scholars to make Olympia of equal power with Delphi have failed, and the potency of the Word of God is revealed in the inscriptions. Elis, at least the part of Elis in which Olympia lay, was a smiling plain girt by a circuit of summer hills, a land open to the eye of day, a green chalice for the wine of life. Phocis, to which Delphi belonged, was a region of stern mountains and roaring gorges, and the fertile plain that stretched below Delphi to the Gulf of Crissa was doomed to barrenness by the curse of the god, as if there should be nothing to relieve the awe of the approach.
These two places, so different in their aspect, shared between them, though in different measure, the control of Greek life. In Olympia was centred the festal expression of Hellenism ; the unity it brought about was the unity of a common joy. In Delphi was centred the oracular power of Hellenism. At an early date there was a political confederation that had its home at Delphi, and the unity had a sharper and more aggressive stamp. Olympia had oracles as well as Delphi ; Delphi had games as well as Olympia. But it was the games, and all the games involved,that gave Olympia its eminence, and the establishment or the reëstablishment of them marks the union of the Doric island of Pelops. The importance of the Olympian festival was national.
As there was but one sun in the heavens, so there was but one Olympia, and no games could be truly Olympian save those on the banks of the Alpheus. The Pythian contests were an afterthought; and whereas Olympia opened her fair bosom to chariot-race as to foot-race, the Delphians could manage only to level the rock for a stadium; the chariot-races were performed perforce in the plain below.
Yet Delphi was no mean rival of Olympia in the splendor of its buildings, in the wealth of its treasure-houses. Pausanias, who has so much to tell about the statue of Olympian Zeus and the chest of Cypselus with its wonderful figures, which were among the great show-things of Olympia, has chapter after chapter on the Lesché; of the Cnidians at Delphi, with its wonderful paintings by Polygnotus. On the narrow ledge of the frowning rocks space was made for temples and colonnades. Still, the heart of Delphi was not in its temples and its colonnades. It was in the mysterious recess between the Phædriades, and its lifeblood was the water of Castalia. Olympia was centripetal. The Greeks streamed to Olympia as to the trysting-place of the race, and felt their unity in their rivalry. Delphi was centripetal, too, but it was centrifugal as well. The Greeks streamed out of Delphi, the colonial office of the time, and the Pythoness sent them forth, speeding like the eagles which, as the story has it, flew from the great white stone at Delphi, compassed the earth, and returned again ; and so the colonists often returned to consult the oracle which had bidden them go.
But what are all the balanced antitheses of the books to the antithesis of actual vision when one drops the pen and says, not “ Elis was ” and “ Phocis was,” but “ Elis is ” and “ Phocis is ” ? Never have my eyes rested on a more reposeful landscape than Olympia. Never have I beheld a more tormented region than that which holds Delphi. Not even a Swiss rain could make Olympia gloomy. Not even a Greek sunshine could make Delphi gay. The history of Olympia is written on a carpet of flowers; the history of Delphi is graven on the rocks of the Phædriades, — the rocks of the “shining cliffs.” The sun strikes them first, but they strike back with blackness, and they are gloomy beyond compare until one has seen Taygetus, which symbolizes the mysterious state of the Spartans just as the Phædriades hide the mysterious workings of the Delphic oracle.
After all, there is no traveling companion like Nature herself.
To the modern other parts of Greece may seem more fair than Olympia, but the Greek orator who knew Sicily and knew Magna Græcia called it the most beautiful spot in Greece, and he who sympathizes most fully with the Greek understands Olympia best, True, the landscape of Olympia is not unlike what is to be seen elsewhere than in Greece, but it is specifically Greek, because it appeals to universal humanity; for this is the ultimate charm of Hellenism. Human nature cannot become old-fashioned; and he who lives in the Greece of the past lives the full life of the America of to-day. Every one has read the old story how Plato wrote and rewrote the first lines of his Republic, and lo! the finished sentence runs very much as it would in English. So the part, of Greece that was most beautiful to the Greek eye has to the American eye all the restfulness of a home landscape.
Of my three days in Olympia, I had one morning to myself. No Pindar, no Pausanias, no lecture. The faithful Baedeker was thrust into a side-pocket. It was a lovely April day. The sky had the azure hue to which I was born, and the earth was tapestried with wild flowers, blue and yellow and purple. Their faces were all familiar, though I could not call them by name, like the human flowers I was afterwards to meet as I rode in from Mistrá to Sparta. Olympia must have been a gaunt place just after the ruins were laid bare, but in that climate Nature quickly heals the wounds dealt by the spade, and I have been told that flowers unknown before to the region often put forth in wild profusion after the excavators have done their work, — a happy omen for the lover of classical antiquity. I was seated at the foot of Kronion, this side of the thorns which beset the hill as they beset the text of Pindar. Kronion was bathed in sunlight, and I was glad that I had interpreted Pindar’s words to mean “ sunny Kronion ; ” but it was not jubilant gladness such as comes to the classical woodpecker when he finds a hollow spot in the oak of antique life. The bliss of such a solitude is calm. Conspicuous all over the circuit was a lonely tree hard by the spot where I was sitting. It held fast by its roots above the treasure - houses. It was companion enough, that fellow guardian of the wealth of the past. Nothing more ancient, nothing more modern, nothing more human, than a lonely tree. Analyze the landscape, describe it, I cannot. I would not if I could. The broken jewels of Greek architecture gleamed resplendent in their setting, and the tide of festal life mantled the cup that was rimmed by the hills of Elis. I looked at the bridal of the earth and sky. The music of the past came down from the opening of Pindar’s Rhodian song in which the father of the bride gives to the bridegroom from bounteous hand the goblet bubbling with the dew of the grape. The music of the present came down from Drouva, throbbing in the drum-beat and echoing in the musket-fire that proclaimed the course of a bridal procession along the hills and dales of Pisatis. The life of earth and sky, the life of ancient Greece, and the life of modern Greece, — one sees life whole who sees it at Olympia.
I had an hour all to myself in Delphi, and thought over my day. The drive from Itéa, the port of Delphi, is beautiful. The road is perfect. It is a French road. It passes through olive groves, the like of which for vigorous life I have never seen, or, seeing, have never marked, and then begins the ascent along the zigzags which furrow the face of the mountain. It recalled to my mind the road from Giardini to Taormina, the road from Palermo to Monreale. A very modern dog-cart, driven by a very modern French archæologist with a very modern French girl at his side, came bowling down the road at a reckless pace. The awe of Delphi was not yet upon us. Then we reached a large village, Chryso by name, which is, being interpreted, Goldsborough, — a corruption, it is suggested, of the ancient, name Crissa; not an unnatural corruption, if one remembers the popular slanders against Delphi. Chryso seemed larger, even, than it was. Clambering far uphill, it waylays the traveler three times, and as we traversed it three times the children of the village threw wild flowers into our carriages. When we went down, I must add, the withholding of a copper tribute roused the wrath of the youthful neighbors of Delphi, and other missiles than wild flowers were hurled into the carriage that I occupied, the last of the procession. This was the only incivility I ever encountered in Greece, and it was interesting because it seemed to express the traditional hostility of those who dwelt near the ancient shrine ; and then the incivility was not without rebuke. The village elders were evidently indignant at the inhospitable conduct of the youngsters, and I noticed a set look on the faces of the village matrons which boded vengeance. The sandal which Aphrodite used on Eros has never gone out of fashion, and the women of Chryso were not all barefoot.
The new Kastri, built to make amends for the old Kastri which formerly occupied the site of ancient Delphi, received the pilgrims, and it was at Kastri, on a balcony which overhung the ravine of Pleistos, that I was sitting when I thought over the long day. The French archæologists, who carried off the concession from the Americans, appear to have absorbed something of the spirit of a priestly caste, and strictly forbid notebook or camera in the sacred precincts. Here I was free to write what I would. But I have never taken full notes of travel, and in this case it seemed as if the image could never fade, as if there could be no danger of forgetting the narrow ledge, the grim rocks, the fountain of Castaly, the recess of the twin Phædriades. These, after all, were the things to remember, and not the prosaic details which abounded as nowhere else. Digging is poetical, but there was no poetry in the lines of tramway, and in the tilted trucks that shot the refuse earth into the ravine of the Pleistos. Welling water is poetical, but there was no poetry in the bits of tin that served to guide the waters of Castaly, nor in the coils of wet rags that lay about the fountain. Some day the tracks will disappear. Some day the denizens will learn to show reverence to Castaly. Some day the traveler will be permitted to study at his leisure the lines of the structures that have been and shall be revealed. The busy workmen, the rushing cars, the roaring rubbish, the scramble from point to point, made the hurried visit to Delphi a strange antithesis to the peaceful sojourn at Olympia.
There a happy calm, here a strange oppression which it might sound affected to call awe. At all events, we found ourselves talking under our breath. While we were in the excavations word was passed from one to another that a wonderful statue had been found, and we hurried to the spot, and, perching on such points of vantage as we could gain, watched in silence the fluted raiment that simulated a column emerging from the earth.
Hieron of Syracuse was born again,舒 feet foremost. There was no noise, no shouting, over the great discovery which made that 28th of April memorable in the annals of the French school.
The victory which the statue commemorates is the victory celebrated in Pindar’s First Pythian, and I was back in Taormina, looking at Ætna again and listening to Pindar’s resonant verse again, “ O Golden Harp ! ” There is no possibility of vulgarizing Delphi with such a companion as Pindar. No matter which of the pilgrims is reeking with native wine, red or white, resinate or unresinate, another and a better spirit dominates the scene and overrules the prose of the present. This is Apollo’s ground, and Pindar was the guest of the god himself, of Phœbus who loved the Castalian fount of Parnassus. It was from this oracle by Castaly that the command went forth to lay the troubled ghost of Phrixus, and bring the Golden Fleece to Greece ; and nowhere is the story of the Argonauts more nobly told than in the Fourth Pythian by the god-gifted organ voice of Hellas. Pindar’s Jason is the noblest figure of that far-off Hellenic world, and teaches us to forget the half-hearted sophistic lover who plays so miserable a part in the Medea of Euripides. Castaly is safe with Pindar to guard it, and as I saw and heard the rush and the roar of the rubbish that was tilted into the ravine of the Pleistos, prosaic tramway and prosaic truck vanished from my mind, and I thought of Pindar’s “ treasure of hymns securely walled within the golden gorge of Apollo, — a treasure which neither the wintry rain that cometh from abroad, merciless armament of thunderous cloud, nor storm with its rout of rubble shall bear to the recesses of the deep.” The melodious tumult of Pindar’s verse drowned the rattle of the cars and the rumble of the rubbish. No better companion, after all, for a trip to Greece than Pindar.
Basil L. Gildersleeve.