University of Virginia Library

81. LETTER LXXXI.

Napoli di Romania.—Anchored in the harbor of
Napoli after dark. An English frigate lies a little
in, a French and Russian brig-of-war astern, and two
Greek steamboats, King Otho's yacht, and a quantity
of caiques, fill the inner port. The fort stands a hundred
feet over our heads on a bold promontory, and
the rocky Palamidi soars a hundred feet still higher,
on a crag that thrusts its head sharply into the clouds,
as if it would lift the little fortress out of eyesight.
The town lies at the base of the mountain, an irregular
looking heap of new houses; and here, at present,
resides the boy-king of Greece, Otho the first. His
predecessors were Agamemnon and Perseus, who,
some three thousand years ago (more or less, I am
not certain of my chronology), reigned at Argos and
Mycenæ, within sight of his present capitol.

Went ashore with the commodore, to call on Tricoupi
and Mavrocordato, the king's cabinet counsellors.
We found the former in a new stone house,
slenderly furnished, and badly painted, but with an
entry full of servants, in handsome Greek costumes.
He received the commodore with the greatest friendliness.
He had dined on board the Constitution six
years before, when his prospects were less promising
than now. He is a short, stout man, of dark complexion,
and very bright black eyes, and looks very
honest and very vulgar. He speaks English perfectly.
He shrugged his shoulders when the commodore alluded
to having left him fighting for a republic, and
said anything was better than anarchy. He spoke in
the highest terms of my friend, Dr. Howe (who was
at Napoli with the American provisions, when Grivas
held the Palamidi). Greece, he said, had never a better
friend. Madam Tricoupi (the sister of Prince
Mavrocordato) came in presently with two very pretty
children. She spoke French fluently, and seemed an
accomplished woman. Her family had long furnished
the Prince Hospodars of Wallachia, and though not
a beautiful woman, she has every mark of the gentle
blood of the east. Colonel Gordon, the famous Philhellene,
entered, while we were there. He was an intimate
friend of Lord Byron's, and has expended the
best part of a large fortune in the Greek cause. He
is a plain man, of perhaps fifty, with red hair and
freckled face, and features and accent very Scotch. I
liked his manners. He had lately written a book upon
Greece, which is well spoken of in some review that
has fallen in my way.

Went thence to Prince Mavrocordato's. He occupies
the third story of a very indifferent house, furnished
with the mere necessaries of life. A shabby
sofa, a table, two chairs, and a broken tumbler, holding
ink and two pens, is the inventory of his drawing-room.
He received us with elegance and courtesy,
and presented us to his wife, a pretty and lively little
Constantinopolitan, who chattered French like a magpie.
She gave the uncertainty of their residence until
the seat of government was decided on, as the apology
for their lodgings, and seemed immediately to
forget that she was not in a palace. Mavrocordato is
a strikingly handsome man, with long, curling black
hair, and most luxuriant mustaches. His mouth is
bland, and his teeth uncommonly beautiful; but without
being able to say where it lies, there is an expression
of guile in his face, that shut my heart to him.
He is getting fat, and there is a shade of red in the

clear olive of his cheek, which is very uncommon in
this country. The commodore remarked that he was
very thin when he was here six years before. The
settlement of affairs in Greece, has probably relieved
him from a great deal of care.

Presented, with the commodore, to King Otho.
Tricoupi officiated as chamberlain, dressed in a court
suit of light-blue, wrought with silver. The royal
residence is a comfortable house, built by Capo d'Istria,
in the principal street of Napoli. The king's
aid, a son of Marco Bozzaris, a very fine, resolute-looking
young man of eighteen, received us in the
antechamber, and in a few minutes the door of the
inner room was thrown open. His majesty stood at
the foot of the throne (a gorgeous red velvet arm-chair,
raised on a platform, and covered with a splendid
canopy of velvet), and with a low bow to each of us
as we entered, he addressed his conversation immediately,
and without embarrassment, to the commodore.
I had leisure to observe him closely for a few minutes.
He appears about eighteen. He was dressed in an
exceedingly well cut, swallow-tailed coat, of very
light blue, with a red standing collar, wrought with
silver. The same work upon a red ground, was set
between the buttons of the waist, and upon the edges
of the skirts. White pantaloons, and the ordinary
straight court-sword, completed his dress. He is
rather tall, and his figure is extremely light and elegant.
A very flat nose, and high cheek-bones, are the
most marked features of his face; his hair is straight,
and of a light brown, and with no claim to beauty;
the expression of his countenance is manly, open, and
prepossessing. He spoke French fluently, though
with a German accent, and went through the usual
topics of a royal presentation (very much the same all
over the world) with grace and ease. In the few remarks
which he addressed to me, he said that he
promised himself great pleasure in the search for antiquities
in Greece. He bowed us out after an audience
of about ten minutes, no doubt extremely happy
to exchange his court-coat and our company for a riding-frock
and saddle. His horse and a guard of
twelve lancers were in waiting at the door.

The king usually passes his evenings with the Misses
Armanspergs, the daughters of the president of the
regency. They accompanied him from Munich, and
are the only ladies in his realm with whom he is acquainted.
They keep a carriage, which is a kind of
wonder at Napoli; ride on horseback in the English
style, very much to the amusement of the Greeks;
and give soirées once or twice a week, which are particularly
dull. One of the three is a beautiful girl,
and if policy does not interfere, is likely to be Queen
of Greece. The Count Armansperg is a small,
shrewd-looking man, with a thin German countenance,
and agreeable manners. He is, of course, the real
king of Greece.

The most agreeable man I found in Napoli, was
the king's uncle, the prince of Saxe, at present in
command of his army. He is a tall, and uncommonly
handsome soldier, of perhaps thirty-six years, and,
with all the air of a man of high birth, has the open
and frank manners of the camp. He has been twice
on board the ship, and seemed to consider his acquaintance
with the commodore's family as a respite
from exile. The Bavarian officers in his suite spoke
nothing but the native German, and looked like mere
beef-eaters. The prince returns in two years, and
when the king is of age, his Bavarian troops leave
him, and he commits himself to the country.

Hired the only two public vehicles in Napoli, and
set off with the commodore's family, on an excursion
to the ancient cities in the neighborhood. We left the
gate built by the Venetians, and still adorned with a
bas relief of a winged lion, at nine o'clock of a clear
Grecian summer's day. Auguries were against us.
Pyrrhus did the same thing with his elephants and his
army, one morning about two thousand years ago, and
was killed before noon; and our driver stopped his
horses a half mile out of the gate, and told us very
gravely that the evil eye was upon him. He had dreamed
that he had found a dollar the night before—a certain
sign by the laws of witchcraft in Greece, that he
should lose one. He concluded by adding another
dollar to the price of each carriage.

We passed the house of old Miaulis, the Greek admiral,
a pretty cottage a mile from the city, and immediately
after came the ruins of the ancient Terynthus,
the city of Hercules. The walls, built of the largest
hewn stones in the world, still stand, and will till time
ends. It would puzzle modern mechanics to carry
them away. We drove along the same road upon
which Autolycus taught the young hero to drive a
chariot, and passing ruins and fragments of columns
strewn over the whole length of the plain of Argos,
stopped under a spreading aspen tree, the only shade
within reach of the eye. A dirty khan stood a few
yards off, and our horses were to remain here while
we ascended the hills to Mycenæ.

It was a hot walk. The appearance of ladies, as we
passed through a small Greek village on our way,
drew out all the inhabitants, and we were accompanied
by about fifty men, women, and children, resembling
very much in complexion and dress, the Indians
of our country. A mile from our carriages we arrived
at a subterranean structure, built in the side of the
hill, with a door toward the east, surmounted by the
hewn stone so famous for its size among the antiquities
of Greece. It shuts the tomb of old Agamemnon.
The interior is a hollow cone, with a small chamber at
the side, and would make “very eligible lodgings for
a single gentleman,” as the papers say.

We kept on up the hill, wondering that the “king
of many islands and of all Argos,” as Homer calls
him, should have built his city so high in this hot climate.
We sat down at last, quite fagged, at the gate
of a city built only eighteen hundred years before
Christ. A descendant of Perseus brought us some
water in a wooden piggin, and somewhat refreshed, we
went on with our examination of the ruins. The
mere weight of the walls has kept them together three
thousand six hundred years. You can judge how immoveable
they must be. The antiquarians call them
the “cyclopean walls of Mycenæ;” and nothing less
than a giant, I should suppose, would dream of heaving
such enormous masses one upon the other. “The
gate of the Lions,” probably the principal entrance to
the city, is still perfect. The bas-relief from which it
takes its name, is the oldest sculptured stone in Europe.
It is of green basalt, representing two lions
rampant, very finely executed, and was brought from
Egypt. An angle of the city wall is just below, and
the ruins of a noble aqueduct are still visible, following
the curve of the opposite hill, and descending to
Mycenæ on the northern side. I might bore you now
with a long chapter on antiquities (for, however dry in
the abstract, they are exceedingly interesting on the
spot), but I let you off. Those who like them will
find Sphon and Wheeler, Dodwell, Leake, and Gell,
diffuse enough for the most classic enthusiasm.

We descended by a rocky ravine, in the bosom of
which lay a well with six large fig-trees growing at its
brink. A woman, burnt black with the sun, was drawing
water in a goat-skin, and we were too happy to get
into the shade, and, in the name of Pan, sink delicacy
and ask for a drink of water. I have seen the time
when nectar in a cup of gold would have been less refreshing.

We arrived at the aspen about two o'clock, and
made preparations for our dinner. The sea-breeze
had sprung up, and came freshly over the plain of

Argos. We put our claret in a goat-skin of water
hung at one of the wheels, the basket was produced,
the ladies sat in the interior of the carriage, and the
commodore and his son and myself, made tables of the
footboards; and thus we achieved a meal which, if
meals are measured by content, old King Danaus and
his fifty daughters might have risen from their graves
to envy us.

A very handsome Greek woman had brought us
water and stood near while we were eating, and making
over to her the remnants of the ham and its
condiments and the empty bottles, with which she
seemed made happy for a day, we went on our way to
Argos.

“Rivers die,” it is said, “as well as men and cities.”
We drove through the bed of “Father Inachus,”
which was a respectable river in the time of Homer,
but which, in our day, would be puzzled to drown a
much less thing than a king. Men achieve immortality
in a variety of ways. King Inachus might have
been forgotten as the first Argive; but by drowning
himself in the river which afterward took his name,
every knowledge-hunter that travels is compelled to
look up his history. So St. Nepomuc became the
guardian of bridges by breaking his neck over one.

The modern Argos occupies the site of the ancient.
It is tolerably populous, but it is a town of most wretched
hovels. We drove through several long streets of
mud houses with thatched roofs, completely open in
front, and the whole family huddled together on the
clay floor, with no furniture but a flock bed in the
corner. The first settlement by Deucalion and Pyrrha,
on the sediment of the deluge, must have looked
like it. Mud, stones, and beggars, were all we saw.
Old Pyrrhus was killed here, after all his battles, by a
tile from a house-top; but modern Argos has scarce a
roof high enough to overtop his helmet.

We left our carriages in the street, and walked to
the ruins of the amphitheatre. The brazen thalamos
in which Danœ was confined when Jupiter visited her
in a shower of gold, was near this spot, the supposed
site of most of the thirty temples once famous in
Argos.

Some solid brick walls, the seats of the amphitheatre
cut into the solid rock of the hill, the rocky acropolis
above, and twenty or thirty horses tied together,
and treading out grain on a thrashing-floor in the open
field, were all we found of ancient or picturesque in
the capitol of the Argives. A hot, sultry afternoon,
was no time to weave romance from such materials.

We returned to our carriages, and while the Greek
was getting his horses into their harness, we entered
a most unpromising café for shade and water. A billiard-table
stood in the centre; and the high, broad
bench on which the Turks seat themselves, with their
legs crooked under them, stretched around the wall.
The proprietor was a Venetian woman, who sighed, as
she might well, for a gondola. The kingdom of Agamemnon
was not to her taste.

After waiting awhile here for the sun to get behind
the hills of Sparta, we received a message from our
coachman, announcing that he was arrested. The
“evil eye” had not glanced upon him in vain. There
was no returning without him, and I walked over with
the commodore to see what could be done. A fine-looking
man sat cross-legged on a bench, in the upper
room of a building, adjoining a prison, and a man with
a pen in his hand, was reading the indictment. The
driver had struck a child who was climbing on his
wheel. I pleaded his case in “choice Italian,” and
after half an hour's delay, they dismissed him, exacting
a dollar as a security for reappearance. It was a
curious verification of his morning's omen.

We drove on over the plain, met the king, five
camels, and the Misses Armanpergs, and were on
board soon after sunset.