University of Virginia Library

84. LETTER LXXXIV.

Egean Sea.—We got under way this morning, and
stood toward Athens, followed by the sloop-of-war,
John Adams, which had come to anchor under our
stern the evening of our arrival at Egina. The day is
like every day of the Grecian summer, heavenly. The
stillness and beauty of a new world lie about us. The
ships steal on with their clouds of canvass just filling
in the light breeze of the Egean, and withdrawing the
eye from the lofty temple crowning the mountain on
our lee, whose shining columns shift slowly as we pass;
we could believe ourselves asleep on the sea. I have
been repeating to myself the beautiful reflection of
Servius Sulpitius, which occurs in his letter of condolence
to Cicero, on the death of his daughter, written
on this very spot. [18] “On my return from Asia,” he
says, “as I was sailing from Egina toward Megara, I
began to contemplate the prospect of the countries
around me. Egina was behind, Megara before me;
Piræus on the right, Corinth on the left; all which
towns, once famous and flourishing, now lie overturned
and buried in the ruins; upon this sight, I could
not but presently think within myself, `Alas! how do
we poor mortals fret and vex ourselves if any of our
friends happen to die or be killed, whose life is yet so
short, when the carcases of so many cities lie here exposed
before me in one view.”'

The columns of the Parthenon are easily distinguishable
with the glass, and to the right of the Acropolis,
in the plain, I see a group of tall ruins, which by
the position must be near the banks of the Ilissus. I
turn the glass upon the sides of the mount Hymettus,
whose beds of thyme, “the long, long summer gilds,”
and I can scarce believe that the murmur of the bees
is not stealing over the water to my ear. Can this be
Athens? Are these the same isles and mountains Alcibiades
saw, returning with his victorious galleys from
the Hellespont; the same that faded on the long gaze
of the conqueror of Salamis, leaving his ungrateful
country for exile: the same that to have seen, for a
Roman, was to be complete as a man; the same whose
proud dames wore the golden grasshopper in their
hair, as a boasting token that they had sprung from
the soil; the same where Pericles nursed the arts, and
Socrates and Plato taught “humanity,” and Epicurus
walked with his disciples, looking for truth? What
an offset are these thrilling thoughts, with the nearing
view in my sight, to a whole calendar of common misfortune!

Dropped anchor in the Piræus, the port of Athens.
The city is five miles in the interior, and the “arms
of Athens,” as the extending walls were called, stretched
in the times of the republic from the Acropolis to
the sea. The Piræus, now nearly a deserted port,
with a few wretched houses, was then a large city. It
wants an hour to sunset, and I am about starting with
one of the officers to walk to Athens.

Five miles more sacred in history than those between
the Piræus and the Acropolis, do not exist in
the world. We walked them in about two hours,
with a golden sunset at our backs, and the excitement
inseparable from an approach to “the eye of Greece,”
giving elasticity to our steps. Near the Parthenon,

which had been glowing in a flood of saffron light before
us, the road separated, and taking the right, we
entered the city by its southern gate. A tall Greek,
who was returning from the plains with a gun on his
shoulder, led us through the narrow streets of the
modern town to a hotel, where a comfortable supper,
of which the most attractive circumstance to me was
some honey from Hymettus, brought us to bed-time.

We were standing under the colonnades of the
temples of Theseus, the oldest, and the best preserved
of the antiquities of Athens, at an early hour. We
walked around it in wonder. The sun that threw inward
the shadows of its beautiful columns, had risen
on that eastern porch for more than two thousand
years, and it is still the transcendent model of the
world. The Parthenon was a copy of it. The now
venerable and ruined temples of Rome, were built in
its proportions when it was already an antiquity. The
modern edifices of every civilized nation are considered
faulty only as they depart from it. How little dreamed
the admirable Grecian, when its proportions rose
gradually to his patient thought, that the child of his
teeming imagination would be so immortal!

The situation of the Theseion has done much to
preserve it. It stands free of the city, while the Parthenon
and the other temples of the Acropolis, being
within the citadel, have been battered by every assailant,
from the Venetian to the ikonoklast and the Turk.
It looks at a little distance like a modern structure, its
parts are so nearly perfect. It is only on coming close
to the columns that you see the stains in the marble
to be the corrosion of the long-feeding tooth of ages.
A young Englishman is buried within the nave of the
temple, and the son of Miaulis, said to have been a
young man worthy of the best days of Greece, lies in
the eastern porch, with the weeds growing rank over
his grave.

We passed a handsome portico, standing alone amid
a heap of ruins. It was the entrance to the ancient
Agora. Here assembled the people of Athens, the
constituents and supporters of Pericles, the first possessors
of these god-like temples. Here were sown,
in the ears of the Athenians, the first seeds of glory
and sedition, by patriots and demagogues, in the stirring
days of Platæa and Marathon. Here was it first
whispered that Aristides had been too long called
“the just,” and that Socrates corrupted the youth of
Athens. And, for a lighter thought, it was here that
the wronged wife of Alcibiades, compelled to come
forth publicly and sign her divorce, was snatched up
in the arms of her brilliant, but dissolute husband, and
carried forcibly home, forgiving him, woman-like, with
but half a repentance. The feeling with which I read
the story when a boy, is strangely fresh in my memory.

We hurried on to the Acropolis. The ascent is
winding and difficult, and, near the gates, encumbered
with marble rubbish. Volumes have been written on
the antiquities which exist still within the walls. The
greater part of four unrivalled temples are still lifted to
the sun by this tall rock in the centre of Athens, the
majestic Parthenon, visible over half Greece, towering
above all. A Bavarian soldier received our passport
at the gate. He was resting the butt of his musket
on a superb bas-relief, a fragment from the ruins.
How must the blood of a Greek boil to see a barbarian
thus set to guard the very sanctuary of his glory.

We stood under the portico of the Parthenon, and
looked down on Greece. Right through a broad gap
in the mountains, as if they had been swept away that
Athens might be seen, stood the shining Acropolis of
Corinth. I strained my eyes to see Diogenes lying
under the walls, and Alexander standing in his sunshine.
“Sea-born Salamis” was beneath me, but the
“ships by thousands” were not there, and the king had
vanished from his “rocky throne” with his “men and
nations.” ægina lay far down the gulf, folded in its
blue mist, and I strained my sight to see Aristides
wandering in exile on its shore. “Mars Hill,” was
within the sound of my voice, but its Areopagus was
deserted of its judges, and the intrepid apostle was
gone. The rostrum of Demosthenes, and the academy
of Plato, and the banks of the Ilissus, where Socrates
and Zeno taught, were all around me, but the
wily orator, and the philosopher “on whose infant lips
the bees shed honey as he slept,” and he whose death
and doctrine have been compared to those of Christ,
and the self-denying stoic, were alike departed. Silence
and ruin brood over all!

I walked through the nave of the Parthenon, passing
a small Turkish mosque (built sacrilegiously by the
former Disdar of Athens, within its very sanctuary),
and mounted the southeastern rampart of the Acropolis.
Through the plain beneath ran the classic Ilissus,
and on its banks stood the ruins of the temple
of Jupiter Olympus, which I had distinguished with
the glass in coming up the Egean. The Ilissus was
nearly dry, but a small island covered with verdure divided
its waters a short distance above the temple, and
near it were distinguishable the foundations of the
Lyceum. Aristotle and his Peripatetics ramble there
no more. A herd of small Turkish horses were feeding
up toward Hymettus, the only trace of life in a
valley that was once alive with the brightest of the
tides of human existence.

The sun poured into the Acropolis with an intensity
I have seldom felt. The morning breeze had
died away, and the glare from the bright marble ruins
was almost intolerable to the eye. I climbed around
over the heaps of fragmented columns, and maimed and
fallen statues, to the northwestern corner of the citaadel,
and sat down in the shade of one of the embrasures
to look over toward Plato's academy. The part
of the city below this corner of the wall was the ancient
Pelasgicum. It was from the spot where I sat
that Parrhesiades, the fisherman, is represented in
Lucian to have angled for philosophers, with a hook
baited with gold and figs.

The academy (to me the most interesting spot of
Athens) is still shaded with olive groves, as in the
time of Plato. The Cephissus, whose gentle flow has
mingled its murmur with so much sweet philosophy,
was hidden from my sight by the numberless trees. I
looked toward the spot with inexpressible interest. I
had not yet been near enough to dispel the illusion.
To me, the academy was still beneath those silvery
olives in all its poetic glory. The “Altar of Love”
still stood before the entrance; the temple of Prometheus,
the sanctuary of the Muses, the statues of
Plato and of the Graces, the sacred olive, the tank in
the coal gardens, and the tower of the railing Timon
were all there. I could almost have waited till even
ing to see Epicurus and Leontium, Socrates and As
pasia, returning to Athens.

We passed the Tower of the Winds, the ancient
Klepsydra or water-clock of Athens, in returning to
the hotel. The Eight Winds sculptured on the octagonal
sides, are dressed according to their temperatures,
six of them being more or less draped, and the
remaining two nude. It is a small marble building,
more curious than beautiful.

Our way lay through the sultry streets of modern
Athens. I can give you an idea of it in a single sentence.
It is a large village, of originally mean houses,
pulled down to the very cellars, and lying choked in its
rubbish. A large square in ruins after a fire in one of
our cities, looks like it. It has been destroyed so often
by Turks and Greeks alternately, that scarce one stone
is left upon the other. The inhabitants thatch over
one corner of these wretched and dusty holes with

maize stalks and straw, and live there like beasts. The
fineness of the climate makes a roof almost unnecessary
for eight months in the year. The consuls and
authorities of the place, and the missionaries, have
tolerable houses, but the paths to them are next to
impracticable for the rubbish. Nothing but a Turkish
horse, which could be ridden up a precipice, would
ever pick his way through the streets.