University of Virginia Library

85. LETTER LXXXV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was again in the Acropolis the following morning.
Mr. Hill had kindly given me a note to Petarches
the king's antiquary, a young Athenian, who married
the sister of the Maid of Athens.[19] We went together
through the ruins. They have lately made new excavations,
and some superb bassi-relievi are among the
discoveries. One of them represented a procession
leading victims to sacrifice, and was quite the finest
thing I ever saw. The leading figure was a superb
female, from the head of which the nose had lately
been barbarously broken. The face of the enthusiastic
antiquary flushed while I was lamenting it. It
was done, he told me, but a week before, by an officer
of the English squadron then lying at the Piræus.
Petarches detected it immediately, and sent word to
the admiral, who discovered the heartless Goth in a
nephew of an English duke, a midshipman of his own
ship. I should not have taken the trouble to mention
so revolting a circumstance if I had not seen, in a
splendid copy of the “Illustrations of Byron's Travels
in Greece,” a most virulent attack on the officers of
the Constellation, and Americans generally, for the
same thing. Who but Englishmen have robbed
Athens, and Egina, and all Greece? Who but Englishmen
are watched like thieves in their visits to every
place of curiosity in the world? Where is the superb
caryatid of the Erechtheion? stolen, with such barbarous
carelessness, too, that the remaining statues
and the superb portico they sustained are tumbling to
the ground! The insolence of England's laying such
sins at the door of another nation is insufferable.

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

The Erechtheion and the adjoining temple are gems
of architecture. The small portico of the caryatides
(female figures, in the place of columns, with their
hands on their hips) must have been one of the most
exquisite things in Greece. One of them (fallen in
consequence of Lord Elgin's removal of the sister

statue), lies headless on the ground, and the remaining
ones are badly mutilated, but they are very, very beautiful.
I remember two in the Villa Albani, at Rome,
brought from some other temple in Greece, and considered
the choicest gems of the gallery.

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

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

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

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

Scene after scene swept through my fancy as I stood
on the spot. I saw Demosthenes, after his first unsuccessful
oration, descending with a dejected air toward
the temple of Theseus, followed by old Eunomas;[20]
abandoning himself to despair, and repressing the fiery
consciousness within him as a hopeless ambition. I
saw him again, with the last glowing period of a Phil
lipic on his lips, standing on this rocky eminence, his
arm stretched toward Macedon; his eye flashing with
success, and his ear catching the low murmur of the
crowd below, which told him he had moved his country
as with the heave of an earthquake. I saw the
calm Aristides rise, with his mantle folded majestically
about him; and the handsome Alcibiades waiting with
a smile on his lips to speak; and Socrates, gazing on
his wild but winning disciple with affection and fear.
How easily is this bare rock, whereon the eagle now
alights unaffrighted, repeopled with the crowding
shadows of the past.