Chapter X

Bargaining--Departure for Athens--Voyage--The Piræus--Athens--
Vandalism--The Parthenon--Its entablatures--Mysterious fire--
Curiosities--Athenian improvements--Road to Corinth--Megara--
Thunder storm--Isthmus of Corinth--Cutting the isthmus--
Difficulties of the enterprize--Levels of the seas--Corinth--
Change of climate--Vostizza.

While I was rambling among the mountains, the expected boat came in, and announced its departure again for Athens in the evening. The patron, however, as soon as he heard of my return, came to me, and expressed a wish at first that I should engage his vessel for myself alone, in which case he would sail immediately after sunset, when a land-breeze usually springs up. This was a regular attempt at imposition upon an Englishman, which impressed me with the conviction that some of my countrymen who have travelled in Greece must have conducted themselves as consummate coxcombs. Their highnesses would not condescend, forsooth, to make a voyage from Epidaurus to the other side of the gulph in a small packet, in which their precious persons were liable to be contaminated by the touch of a native Greek, or other passengers bound for the same destination. My new acquaintance was clearly of opinion that it was beneath my national dignity to reject his offer, the more especially as he proposed to place his vessel at my service for the moderate sum of one hundred drachmas!

♦ BARGAINING ♦

Even my Greek valet could not stand this: he indignantly bade the fellow go away, but at the same time asked me how much I was inclined to give, he being himself on his route to Athens, and not all indisposed to perform it free of expense. I said, what was perfectly true, that I had not the most remote intention of engaging the vessel for my own use, the more especially as several persons, to my knowledge, were waiting at Epidaurus to procure a passage to the other side; and that, moreover, far from feeling any disinclination to sail in company with a motley group of all sorts of travellers, it was the thing of all others I preferred. So far as I was concerned, the boat being open to the atmosphere, they might fill it mast high if they liked, and I would take my chance with the rest. “How much are you to pay,” I asked my kind adviser, “for your passage?”

“Oh, sir,” he replied, “I am but a very poor man--they will perhaps make me pay them two drachmas and a half.”

“And quite enough too,” I observed, “for it is but a voyage of a few hours, and, for my own part, I shall pay no more.”

The first negotiation having failed, the patron had the impudence again to come to me, and inquired whether, at all events, I might not wish to engage the best part of his vessel for myself, which I might have for the reduced sum of thirty drachmas. I went to look at his boat in order to understand what he meant by the “best part.” It was a common coaster, without any deck; the bottom was filled with small gravel for ballast; and upon this gravel, unless I had a mattress, which I had not, I was to take my seat wherever I chose! I thanked him for his obliging offer; but gave him to understand that I had no ambition whatever to distinguish myself in any way from his other passengers, and that I would pay the ordinary fare, whatever that was, but not a Lepta more. “Then,” said he, angrily, “you shall not come in my boat.”

“Very well,” I replied, “then you shall not sail to-night--at least not without me.” Upon explaining the matter to the port-captain, who had to endorse my passport, he observed that I was quite right, and that he would not permit the vessel to leave the harbour if such an attempt at extortion, of which he was quite ashamed, were persevered in on the part of the patron, whom he immediately sent for, and reproved vehemently as a disgrace to the _kingdom_! My Greek, who was my dragoman throughout this proceeding, seemed very much astonished at this new revolution. So then, he said, or rather seemed to say, Englishmen are to be openly plundered no more!

♦ DEPARTURE FOR ATHENS ♦

I went on-board with my luggage about eight o’clock in the evening, and took my place on the _gravel_, sitting on my portmanteau. By-and-by came in a whole crowd of men, women, and children, including my acquaintances of the glen, with beds and mattresses, on which they settled themselves at once for sleep. We sailed at nine with a tolerably good breeze, which, however, died away soon after. The night was balmy and so clear that I never thought of sleep while contemplating the azure canopy of the sky, “thick inlaid with patens of bright gold,” and feeling that the Parthenon would be soon within my view. Accordingly, by the earliest gleam of morning, while we were passing Ægina, I beheld that still glorious monument to the incarnate wisdom and genius of all antiquity. “If the progress of decay,” said Mr. Hobhouse, “be as rapid as it has been for more than a century past, there will, in a few years, be not one marble standing upon another on the site of the Parthenon.” I had expected to find this prophecy realized, as it was well-known that the Turks, before they quitted the capital, had wantonly destroyed every remnant of its ancient lustre upon which they could lay their hands. Most agreeable, therefore, was my surprise to find so vast a pile of columns still remaining, to attest the miracles of which architecture is capable, the true gods of Paganism being the men who could conceive and embody, in a permanent form, the ideas that even to this hour, are breathing amid the sculptures of that mutilated temple.

♦ VOYAGE ♦

♦ THE PIRÆUS ♦

It was tantalizing to be obliged to row all the day, as not even a sigh of the atmosphere would come to our assistance. It was four o’clock in the afternoon before we entered the Piræus, where we found a considerable degree of bustle prevailing. Several Greek vessels were in the harbour; a French man-of-war was in the roads; and merchant ships, of some hundred tons burthen, were either delivering or receiving cargoes in the most systematic order. Upwards of a hundred horses and camels were waiting on the beach for employment, the road to Athens, which is at the distance of about five miles from the Piræus, being as yet chiefly traversed by animals with all sorts of burthens on their backs, although it was by no means impassable for carriages. I lost no time in procuring horses; and after riding for about an hour and a quarter through the olive grounds which interpose between Athens and the sea, where, by-the-bye, companies of the Bavarian troops were encamped in wooden huts, being engaged in widening and re-constructing the road, I alighted at Casali’s hotel, and was immediately shown to an excellent chamber.

♦ ATHENS ♦

A capital dinner and a bottle of genuine old Madeira compensated me for the privations of the morning; and after my bed of gravel, I found Casali’s unobjectionable. But when I sallied forth the next day to explore the wonders of Athens, alas! they were no longer to be seen. The once proud city of marble was literally a mass of ruins--the inglorious ruins of mud houses and wretched mosques, forming in all quarters such undistinguishable piles, that in going about I was wholly unable to fix upon any peculiarities of streets or buildings by which I might know my way from one part of the capital to another. With the exception of the remains of the Forum, the Temple of Theseus, which is still in excellent preservation, the celebrated columns of the temple of Jupiter Olympus, and the Parthenon, nothing now exists at Athens of all the splendid edifices by which it was so profusely decorated in the days of its glory.

♦ VANDALISM ♦

I therefore devoted the whole day to the Acropolis, examining with a degree of admiration which every hour rendered more and more intense, the columns and capitals, but above all the entablatures, which time had spared, or Vandalism had still left unviolated upon that sacred mountain. “Time had spared!” The phrase has no meaning here; for it is the singular attribute of these skies of Attica to embalm in their own unchangeable purity every particular form or feature, even the slightest sprig, the most delicate flower, the most minute vein and curl of the leaf, the slightest smile of beauty, which the sculptor chooses to call into existence from the quarries of Pentelicus. The very heads that grace those columns are as round and as fresh at this moment as they were in the time of Pericles. A marble, which by some good fortune had been overlooked amongst the weeds by all the despoilers, was turned up a day or two before my visit, exhibiting a cantharus surrounded by a wreath of vine-leaves. The vessel stood out from the mass to which it was attached, and the wreath seemed as if it had just left the chisel of Phidias. In such a climate it is no poetical privilege to say, that the amaranths are immortal, rivalling those with which

----“the spirits elect
Bind their resplendent locks.”

No! it is to the human animal alone, to his impieties against the divinity of genius, to those insane passions which urge him to war against his own tribes, to the insatiable desire of indiscriminate devastation which sometimes actuates him, as if he were obeying the mandate of some evil spirit--or to what is still more debasing, the thirst of gold--rapine for the sake of restoring the shattered fortunes of a titled pauper, or of transmuting the adventurer into a parvenu--to these, thou holy pile! holy even after all the vices of our nature have done their worst upon thy fanes and altars, do we owe these prostrate columns, these fractured capitals, these loosened mutilated entablatures, bearing witness alike to the despicable dust, as well as to the redeeming god, of which man is composed.

♦ THE PARTHENON ♦

Had the Parthenon remained perfect it would have been the Iliad in marble--in Pentelican marble; the polished, unchangeable, eloquent dialect of exalted conception--the living model of mind for all ages, which no age shall ever rival. Minerva, for whom the temple rose, was no fable. Her reputed wisdom, the terrors which her thunders cast upon the field of war, her preference for the olive and those arts of prosperous peace of which it was the symbol; the brilliant beauty of her presence when she started at once into existence, completely arrayed in panoply wrought by the immortal artist; her immediate admission into the assembly of the gods, her love for mankind, the peculiar tutelar favour with which she looked upon Attica, her inflexible virtues, the matchless purity of her life, the pains which she took to teach kings how to cultivate the land, and the Argonauts the navigation of the seas, and the shepherdess the charms of the lute; her skill in embroidery, painting, poetry, and sculpture, and the exquisite perfection of taste which shone through all her works, were no more than the picture which the Parthenon itself displayed of transcendant genius in all the departments of thought and action upon which human intelligence, in its most inspired moods, can be exerted.

♦ ITS ENTABLATURES ♦

Enough of that pile,--which under the care of an enlightened government, may now be looked upon, I hope, as imperishable,--still remains to animate the new generations of Greece with the grandeur of antiquity. The very atmosphere of these ruins is favourable to the birth of noble aspirations. It is scarcely possible for any mind, open at all to improvement, to hold ineffectual converse with the figures that still live upon the entablatures, to mark the spirit impressed on their looks, the gracefulness with which they ride, or the power with which, standing on the earth, they rein back their proud horses, or the style in which they hold the pipe, or fling upon the air the triumphant sound of the Bacchanal drum, while dancing in procession to the temple, or returning from the fields of victory.

♦ MYSTERIOUS FIRE ♦

A sentinel, who happened to be from the island of Cerigo, perceiving that I had lingered all the day among these ruins, suggested to me that I ought not to leave the Acropolis without examining what he and his comrades conceived to be the greatest curiosity of the place. He called one of the guard and desired him to shew me the “mysterious fire,” as he called it. Upon quitting the porch of the temple, I turned under this man’s guidance to the right, and descending a few steps towards the guard-house, I reached a part of the foundations of the Parthenon, which are composed of large blocks of marble fitted together without any cement. Looking in between two of these blocks, which were separated from each other little more than the eighth of an inch, I distinctly saw in the interior of the wall a pale yellow light, resembling that of a taper in the daytime.

♦ CURIOSITIES ♦

At first I looked about to see whether this could be the result of a contrivance to procure a little fee for the benefit of the guard; but I could discover no ground whatever for any such suspicion. Neither was the sun then shining on that part of the Acropolis; and the men assured me that the illumination was much stronger always during the night. I examined one or two other apertures in its immediate neighbourhood, and observed a similar light, which they had not discovered before, and which raised their wonder in a way that convinced me, that they at least were quite unconscious of any fraud. There was no smoke or heat about the spot; and the wall was of a thickness of at least from three to four feet, if not more. I concluded that the glow proceeded from some phosphoric substance or insect in the interior of the structure; and had only to lament that it was not known to the priests of the Parthenon of old, as it would have then been handed down to us as the divinity of some oracle, or as a fragment of the vestal fire which was never to be extinguished.

♦ ATHENIAN IMPROVEMENTS ♦

The site of the Areopagus; of the levelled rock, where the orators usually harangued the people of Athens; the place where the tribune stood; the indentures in the precipice where the laws and acts of authority were inserted and promulgated; the cave said to have been the prison of Socrates; the remarkable stone, still as slippery, and almost as brilliant as ice, down which childless women are said to have made a practice of sliding, in former days, as a remedy for barrenness; and some few other “lions” of a minor character, served to while away another morning. I flattered myself, moreover, that a long narrow street, filled with shops of all sorts, which had escaped the destroying hand of the Turks, preserved an air of antiquity, and that the variety of objects which it displayed--such as fruits, grocery, wine, spirits, haberdashery, tailors, shoemakers, smiths, winders and weavers of silk, manufacturers of tassels and gold lace--might often have served to divert the intense thoughts of Demosthenes from the agitations of the forum; of Euripides from the theatre; of Aristides from the calumny by which that just man was assailed on account of his virtues. But I should never have done day-dreaming, if I had remained longer at Athens; and so having gone with Mr. Griffith over the handsome mansion, then nearly finished, for the British legation, visited the new buildings which were going on in its neighbourhood, intended to be the “West End” of the capital; observed the lines of new streets marked out amongst the ruins of Old Athens, and the very neat houses already completed in different parts of the new town, where the saw and the mallet were busy in every direction, I engaged a brace of horses, and behold me on the road to Corinth.

♦ ROAD TO CORINTH ♦

The said road, by-the-bye, was no road at all; nothing more than a bridle path among the hills, all-fragrant with that peculiar thyme which enables the bees of the neighbouring ranges of Hymettus to produce the most delicious honey in the world, upon which said honey I feasted like a heathen god every morning. I slung a jar of it to my saddle-bow for a little stranger, who, I expected, would greet me on my arrival at home. The very rocks of Greece are redolent with some sort or another of vegetation, which can have no nutriment except from the atmosphere. Quitting the hills, we descended to the sea-shore by Salamis and those gloried waters where the Persian hosts were overwhelmed by a handful of freemen; passed through the ruins of Eleusis; and stopped for the night at Lyssa in a sort of inn, where horses, mules, donkies, and men all slept, I may say, together under the same roof. The habitable part of this stable was floored with clean planks, on which a hair-cloth was spread for me. The owner of the mansion gathered himself up in a corner; several Greeks were strewed about in various directions; and I, wrapped in my cloak, found even the plank and hair-cloth preferable to a couch of gravel.

♦ MEGARA ♦

About two o’clock in the morning (13th November) my guide summoned me to the field, when I gladly pursued with him our way to Megara. Sagittarius and his congregation of worlds shed a brilliant lustre over the sky, which scarcely began to grow pale until we heard the cocks of the said Megara sounding their jocund horns. We soon after entered on the isthmus of Corinth, keeping still by the side of the sea; Salamis on our left; the sun rising over Ægina; Negropont, a cloud in the distance; the Epidaurian mountains standing out like giants of air; the sea beneath us a lake of crystal; the rocks over which we were wending, tossed into all sorts of jagged forms; here impeded by straggling roots of trees; there by trees overthrown in some storm; now menaced with destruction by masses depending over our heads; now in danger, if our animals made a false step, of making no gentle transition from the precipices above that beauteous mirror to the floors which shone beneath it, mosaiqued though they were all over by the hands of all the Nereids.

♦ THUNDER STORM ♦

But for these perils, against which we occasionally guarded by allowing the horses to seek their own fortunes, I was sometimes compensated by following our course through patches of forest, still rich in foliage, through which vistas of the Ægean opened, such as no pencil can ever imitate. Trees and islands, skies and water, may be represented; and airy perspectives, shewn through a break in an old wood, may be wrought by a master into a semblance of enchantment; but here lived the enchantment itself, the ever-changing mystic lights and shades, which cannot be brought down from heaven; the memories of bright ages, of heroic deeds, of matchless poetry and eloquence, and of undying names, consecrated and preserved in one vast temple of glory, where silence always points her sceptre to the past.

At noon the Acropolis of Corinth burst upon the scene, and in a few hours afterwards we were in the town, where I spent the night--and such a night!--Heaven preserve us! I never before heard such a storm of thunder, never beheld such lightning as raged for four or five hours without interruption round the rocks of that lofty citadel. Had it not served as a natural conductor of the electric fluid, I hardly know how the houses still remaining at its feet could have escaped destruction. The rain came down in deluges.

♦ ISTHMUS OF CORINTH ♦

When I ascended the mountain the next morning, I questioned the Bavarian sentinels as to their feelings during the night, and they confessed that they had never known what a war of the elements was before, and that they had the strongest apprehensions about their powder magazine. But happily no accident occurred. The earth and the lower hills all round were smoking with the vapours raised by the sun from the waters, with which they were saturated. Nevertheless, I beheld, even before I was half-way to the top, the Ægean and the Gulf of Lepanto almost touching each other, and inviting the hand of commercial enterprize to complete the channel, which has been already partly excavated, for uniting the two seas.

♦ CUTTING THE ISTHMUS ♦

I know of no measure which could be devised for the benefit of Greece, so well calculated to develop its natural riches, to excite a general spirit of industry amongst its people, and to ensure to that industry the most ample returns, as this project, no modern invention, for annihilating the Isthmus. A line of direct communication would thus be established, by which all those parts of Greece, separated from each other by the prolongation of the Morea, and by the difficulties attendant on the navigation round its capes, might be immediately united. Missolonghi and Lepanto, Patras and even Gastuni, would thus be brought by steam-boats within a few hours of the Piræus. The Gulf of Lepanto, where now scarcely a sail is seen, would become another Bosphorus, the highway for merchant vessels and steamers from the Ionian isles to Athens and the Cyclades. The whole coast of Albania would take an interest in the change, whose influence would extend to Naples, Ancona, and Venice, and above all to Trieste, now becoming a most important commercial station.

Athens, which in a few months will be brought down to the shore by its rail-road, would then become an emporium of exchange of the produce of the east for the produce and manufacture of the west. Corinth would be raised to a degree of splendour which it had never known before. The stagnant waters of Lepanto would be roused from their lethargy: the shores on either side, so dangerous to health in the summer and autumn, from the quantity of rank vegetation with which they teem, would be ploughed up and cultivated--the Greek tertians and agues would disappear--population would rapidly increase, and the cotton and currants, wheat and oil, which may be grown in any part of the Morea, or of western Greece, where the rocks are not literally as bare of earth as rock can be, would ensure to the agriculturist, and the merchant, and the ship-owner, constant employment of the most advantageous description.

♦ DIFFICULTIES OF THE ENTERPRIZE ♦

I apprehend that the real width of that portion of the Isthmus which still remains to be excavated, does not much exceed four English miles. Two of these miles traverse a mere plain on the western side of the Isthmus, where a canal has been already cut by the ancients about eighty feet deep and three hundred feet wide. The mouth of this canal is at present closed up with sands from the Gulf of Lepanto; these sands might be easily removed, and the remainder of the excavation, which is still visible to the extent of about six hundred feet, might be rendered available as far as it goes. The only great difficulties of the enterprise would be found in the rocky ridges which extend from Megara to the Acrocorinthus, the summits of which are about two hundred feet above the level of the sea. Half the number of men now employed on the banks of the Danube, would, within the space of two or three years form a tunnel through these rocks, by the process of blasting, sufficiently deep for vessels of any size to be towed through the canal by steamers. The ancients, without our auxiliaries of steam or powder, actually penetrated these precipices under the superintendence of Nero; although after his departure the works were abandoned. Beyond the rocks there is a remarkable ravine which might be easily enlarged, and which extends as far as the Saronic gulf.

♦ LEVELS OF THE SEAS ♦

Some persons have imagined that even if these difficulties were conquered, there would be still the insuperable inconvenience arising from what is really no more than a supposition, that the sea on the eastern side is higher than the sea in the Gulf of Lepanto. If the fact were so, the waters, if all obstruction were removed, would soon find their own level. Or, if an elevation did exist on the eastern side, and from any circumstance it were likely to be permanent, it might, if excessive, be corrected by a series of locks; if not excessive, it would have the effect only of producing a strong current down the Gulf of Lepanto, and consequently of keeping the canal clear of the sands which have been hitherto accumulating at the head of that gulf. I have been informed that the whole expense of such an enterprize as this would not much exceed half a million sterling; and it would seem reasonable to calculate the returns on the capital, after the completion of the works, at not less than from ten to fifteen per cent.

♦ CORINTH ♦

The celebrated ancient columns, each formed of one block of stone, which every traveller has noticed, are in Corinth, with the exception of the Acrocorinthus, the only objects worth attention in the way of “lionising.” The town is nearly as shapeless a mass of ruins as Athens itself. But even here the “restoration” of Greece was beginning to exhibit itself in the construction of several new houses, which are built in a plain substantial style.

♦ CHANGE OF CLIMATE ♦

The road from Corinth to Patras lies principally along the southern coast of the gulf, and in spring or early summer must be delightful, as it passes over declivities thickly wooded with flowering shrubs. Even the shingle has its clustres of bulbous roots, which when the stems are out and hung with their hyacinths, tulips, jonquils, and lilies, must give the country an appearance of gaiety unknown to our climate. We had rain and dense clouds constantly almost the whole way to Vostizza, which appeared the more remarkable, as the mountains on the opposite shore appeared at the same time to revel in the enjoyment of sunshine all day, and of a serene sky at night. I forget who it was of my predecessors that made the same remark: but I can bear witness to its truth. The traveller proceeding from Attica is at once sensible of a very striking difference between the temperature of the air in the Morea, and that which he had just left beyond the Isthmus.

♦ VOSTIZZA ♦

Vostizza has been for some years, even before the termination of the revolution, a highly improving town. It is built on the site of the ancient Ægium, where the states of Achaia were accustomed to hold their general council. Being the principal, as well as the most central emporium for the collection of the currants which are cultivated in the Morea, and which, indeed, have derived their name from Corinth, where the trade was originally established, it exhibits a degree of activity and an appearance of wealth not yet known in any other part of Greece, with the exception of Napoli and Patras. It stands considerably elevated above the sea, to which there is a descent from the town through what appears to be a _natural_ tunnel, although art must have had something to do with the excavation itself, as well as with the steps which are formed in the rock.

A beautiful merchant brig, belonging to the London house of Loury and Clarke was in the bay, waiting for a cargo of currants; I looked upon the vessel with no small pride, observing the superior appearance of structure, equipment, and of order, which it displayed, in comparison with the crazy, lubberly sloops and cutters by which it was surrounded. The superintendent, an intelligent Frenchman, civilly showed me over the store-house, where the currants were packed in casks. The trade seemed to afford employment to several coopers. As the produce is brought in from the country it is paid for in hard dollars; but English goods are at the same time taken out, which are purchased by the shopkeepers of the town, and paid for in the same kind of money; and although I believe the balance of export and import is as yet in favour of Vostizza, there is no reason to doubt that regenerated Greece has only to grow a little richer in order to be enabled to cultivate her soil more extensively, and thus become a very considerable consumer of our manufactures.

There are many handsome private houses at Vostizza, with gardens behind them, full of the most beautiful of all trees,--those that yield the lemon and the orange. The fruit being never absent from the foliage in this mild climate--for the town seems to have a “pocket-climate” of its own as compared with other parts of the Morea; the deep yellow of the mature lemon or orange forming so agreeable a contrast with the green leaf, and the fruit not yet ripe exhibiting the progressive shades from the olive to the gold, these trees realize the vision of the poets, who tell us of regions where the spring never fails to bloom.