Chapter V: Part 5

Nay, of the very beginning of the narrative as set forth by Tacitus, how little do we actually know. The bright light dazzles us, and we think it reveals everything, but on examination we can make out but little with clearness. What are we to believe about the battle of the Grampians and Galgacus? Who reported that fine speech of his, containing so many capital hits at the condition of the court of Domitian and the policy of the Prætorian guards? Is it not odd that the Romans, who do not condescend to afford us the slightest hint of the character or structure of the language of their Celtic and Gothic contemporaries, should have got hold of an entire speech of the kind, and translated it so well? That the Romans found it the hardest of all their conflicts to establish themselves in Scotland is clear enough; but it is beyond a doubt that the number and organisation of their adversaries were exaggerated by the historian, to enhance the merit of his brother-in-law and fellow Romans. How are we to believe that thirty thousand trained warriors were gathered under the command of one leader, with such means of subsistence as Scotland can have then afforded? We know that the islands of New Zealand, having an area co-extensive with the United Kingdom, could just produce about that number of men able to bear arms, were every one, in all the remotest corners of the islands, brought to join the general muster; and it is difficult to suppose that Scotland was much more populous than a track of New Zealand similar in extent would be now. How much more interesting than the grandiloquent Roman’s account of the chariot charge, and the showers of darts, would have been some actual account of the character and appearance of the mountain warriors who braved the power of Rome; but we derive no more distinct impression of them than that their swords were very long. It would be something to know even the name of the chief called Galgacus, and an accurate sketch of his appearance would be worth a picture-gallery. Modern art has by no means supplied the defect. We have before us a representation of “Galgacus addressing the Caledonian army before the battle of the Grampians,” which, we are informed, is engraved in steel, in the finest style of the art. The chief has unexceptionable mustaches, and is arrayed in the full uniform of some one of the Highland regiments. His ostrich plume is very rich and full, and he addresses the meeting in the attitude which may be found in the frontispiece of “the Speaker’s Guide.” His chariot—but for the material, which is basket-work—might have come out of Longacre. We cannot say much for the anatomy of the horses, but their grooming is excellent, and they are admirably matched. At their head stands a figure arrayed in tartan, whose shape and attitude would seem much more natural were he accoutred in cords and tops, with a green frock and shoulder-knots. Another attempt, evidently more ambitious in the adaptation of costume and coincidents, is not much more successful. The scene is laid on the slope of Arthur Seat as a suitable piece of mountain scenery. Galgacus is more rough and hairy than in the other attempt. There is a greater portion of bare limb and a smaller amount of tartan. He wears on his head a skull-cap with a spike in it, such as dragoons wore in the seventeenth century. In his hand he carries a Lochaber-axe, such as that which made the City Guard of Edinburgh so formidable in the days of poor Ferguson. The chariot is not so well got up as in the rival plate; we question if it would go a couple of yards on a turnpike road, not to speak of its capacity to bowl along the scaurs and precipices of the Grampians. A scythe projects from either axle in a way which makes one wonder how the group around can pay so much attention to the oratory. If the machine move a few inches, the leg of a venerable gentleman very intent on the oration will be amputated. As to this personage,—his head, with its high brow, aquiline nose, and profuse white beard, is taken from some apostle in some painting by some great master. The costume is of the peculiar kind invented by Benjamin West. The old man carries in his hand an instrument like an Irish reaping-hook; only it is made of gold, and he is going to cut the misletoe with it. He is the type of those mysterious personages called Druids in the histories perused by our youth at school, and his function in modern phraseology is that of army chaplain. From neither of these representations do we derive a very satisfactory notion of Galgacus and his followers; and, indeed, it would be difficult to say which of them seems the more distant from the probable truth.

Another question is in itself of a far more simple character, yet has caused a sufficient amount of complex dispute—Where was this battle of the Grampians fought? The Grampian mountains are well enough known in modern geography. The Mons Grampius of Tacitus is as great a geographical vagrant as the source of the Niger or the place where Hannibal passed the Alps. The etymologists find that the word Grampian is decidedly of Gaelic origin; but etymologists, and Celtic ones especially, can always find what is wanted. Our own belief is that the name of the Grampian mountains is derived from the words _Mons Grampius_ of Tacitus, and we have no doubt that he gave that name to the battle-field with true Roman caprice and contempt. Where then was it? When Tacitus speaks of the army having passed the Bodotria, and the natives being driven, as it were, into another island before the battle, we seem to have the fact pretty clearly ascertained that it occurred north of the Forth and Clyde, and of the line of forts subsequently erected. But over the extensive ground thus opened to them antiquaries have moved about the battle like a chessman over every available square, from Lochore in Fifeshire, where Scott rather encouraged them to place it on account of his son’s marriage with the heiress, to the hills of Aberdeenshire. A hard fight was made at Ardoch, with its fine fort and camps, in full view of the Grampian range, if not on them; but the champions of the other spots would not admit themselves to be defeated. In the midst of such a contest, in which such men as Sibbald, Horsley, Gordon, Stukeley, Whitaker, Chalmers, Pinkerton, Roy, and Ritson were engaged so unsuccessfully, it is pleasant to see a real giant come forth and hew the pigmies down with an unhesitating sword. Some thirty years ago there appeared an “Account of interesting Roman Antiquities discovered in Fife,” by the Rev. Andrew Small of Edenshead. In a chapter, giving “an account of the battle of Meralsford on the Lomond hill, which Tacitus has mistaken for Mount Grampius,” he affords a model to the class of antiquaries who have generally dealt with these subjects, since he carries to the highest perfection their peculiar method of reasoning. His view is, that Tacitus had made a topographical blunder, since a battle which Mr Small knows to have taken place at Meralsford, “appears obviously to have been that great battle described by Tacitus as having been fought at the foot of Mons Grampius. But it is clear to a demonstration, that he had mistaken Mons Lomundus for Mons Grampius, as it is nigh the north brae of the West Lomond Hill that the battle was fought.” Such reasoning is conclusive. His method of describing the whole affair is equally clear and convincing. We have the operations of the Romans step by step thus:—“At Burnside they were within less than a quarter of a mile of the Caledonians, having only to cross in a north-east direction the south-east angle of the farm of Bonnety when they entered upon the lands of Edenshead, and there they came first in contact with the Caledonians, where a large cairn, erected upon the march betwixt these two lands, straight east from the farm-steading of Bonnety, which stood about these twenty years back, evidently points out the extremity to where the left wing had extended.” Here it seems the Romans at the commencement of the affair were repulsed, an event which Tacitus naturally passes over; and the exulting Mr Small, who is a truly national writer, talks of “the warm reception they met with, and the sound drubbing they got from the brave Caledonians when the battle commenced;” while he further finds that the unfaithful Tacitus “carefully conceals their retreat across the river Eden, because he considers it disgraceful to the Roman arms.”

It is a pity that people will not be satisfied with such comprehensive solutions of difficulties, but it must be admitted that the battle of the Grampians is still in want of a site. A curious element of perplexity was added to the dispute, by the introduction in the midst of it, about a century ago, of the itinerary of Richard, the monk of Cirencester, who had left behind him a manuscript giving a full and minute account of the geography of Britain in the time of the Romans, taken from Roman sources. His itinerary went as far north as the Moray Firth, and wherever he set down a station, there some remains or some identity of name immediately proved the accuracy of his materials. Never was such joy in the antiquarian world. The writers on Roman British archæology, who followed the discovery, alluded to their groping predecessors as astronomers might to those who wrote in ignorance of the Copernican theory. The magnificent work of General Roy on the military antiquities of the Romans, was but a commentary on the itinerary of Richard. Whitaker treated it as an undoubted authority for the state of Britain in the middle of the second century, “a period when we have scarce any information concerning the island from the Roman historians, and the Roman Empire among us was in its greatest glory and its farthest extent.” Even Gibbon gave the work entire credit.

Yet there were some anachronisms or anatopisms, if we may coin a word, which cast suspicion on the performance; and among these, after having taken the inquirer by the ninth Iter beyond the boundaries of Aberdeenshire and the wild uplands near the source of the Don, here all at once he found himself at the “Mons Grampius.” No ingenuity could reconcile this with the account of Tacitus, and the antiquaries had to resort to the bold operation of believing that this did not profess to be the site of the battle, but was a station named in honour of it, as we now say Waterloo Bridge, and Trafalgar Square. But there was something very suspicious in the unwonted circumstance of a monk of the fourteenth century having occupied himself with Roman topography; and the suspicion is not removed by a preliminary dialogue, in which Richard argues the matter with his abbot, who tells him that man has but a short time to live in this world, and it is a sad thing to see a rational creature occupying so brief an interval in setting down a useless list of places which have ceased to exist, and were in their best days only the abode of benighted heathens.

There is, indeed, some reason to believe that the itinerary of Richard is a hoax; but if it be, it is a very complicated and elaborate one. The existence of the MS. was first notified to Stukeley the antiquary, who received an account of it as a discovery made in Copenhagen by Mr Charles Julius Bertram, who enclosed a specimen of it. This so excited the interest of the antiquary that he insisted on having a copy of the whole. Mr Charles Julius Bertram held the responsible place of English Professor in the Royal Marine Academy, and if it be the case that, having tried by the specimen and description to “take a rise,” as it is termed, out of the solemn antiquary, and finding that he must support the story or find himself in a position which it would be unpleasant for an instructor of youth to occupy, that of a perpetrator of practical jokes—it must be admitted that he bore the task he had brought on himself bravely, and relieved himself from his predicament very successfully. We see that a translation of Richard of Cirencester has been published by Mr Bohn in his six old English chronicles. We would like well to see a critical inquiry into its authenticity, conducted with the light of modern archæological science. To the subject, as well as to the wider field of the Roman vestiges in Scotland, we must in the mean time bid farewell.

ATHENS IN 1853.[7]

Wordsworth, whose elegant and scholarly work on Greece is now familiar to most drawing-room tables, in his more erudite-looking but scarcely less elegant volume on _Athens and Attica_, published in the year 1836, gives a description of the then waste and desolate condition of the city of Pericles in the following terms:—

“The town of Athens is now lying in ruins. The streets are almost
deserted; nearly all the houses are without roofs. The churches are
reduced to bare walls and heaps of stones and mortar. There is but one
church in which service is performed. A few new wooden houses, one or
two of more solid structure, and the two lines of planted sheds which
form the bazaar, are all the inhabited dwellings that Athens can now
boast. In this state of _modern_ desolation, the grandeur of the
ancient buildings which still survive here is more striking—their
preservation is more wonderful. There is now scarcely any building at
Athens in so perfect a state as the temple of Theseus. The
least-ruined objects here are some of the ruins themselves.”

A sad picture!—but the saddest thing is, that this is only a picture of what the whole of Greece had been suffering during its long-protracted and painful existence in the middle ages, at a time when Italy, having wrought for itself a new character and language by admixture with Lombard blood, was performing a principal part in the great drama then opening of modern European civilisation. The Greeks have preserved their historical continuity and their language, without a gap, up to the present moment; but for this privilege—if, indeed, it shall prove to be one—they have paid dearly. Better were it, one sometimes thinks, that the whole Hellenic race had been swallowed up by those devastating swarms of Slavonic and other barbarians who now people great part of European Turkey, than to have prolonged such centuries of gilded decrepitude as we see in the later history of Byzantium, and to have been trampled under foot, shorn, and bled by contending races of foreign masters, in the manner exhibited by the medieval rulers of Peloponnesus, and other parts of Greece proper. Whoso wishes to weep for the fortunes of a people, whose character is seldom judged with much Christian charity, will look into the stern, darkly-glowing pages of Professor Fallmerayer, or the more calm, sober, and philosophic chapters of our countryman George Finlay, and he will not remain unmoved.[8] No man who knows what the Greeks have suffered from the days of sanguinolent Sylla until now, will speak against the Greeks. One wonders how a single blade of green grass should be found growing on a soil where, for many centuries, it seemed to rain blood and stones upon a race doomed by Heaven to be exterminated. Professor Fallmerayer, as is well known, goes so far as to say that the Greek race actually is exterminated—that there are literally at this moment no Greeks in Greece:[9] but the existence of one common Greek language in all the countries anciently inhabited by the Hellenes is a pretty strong proof, that, however much Slavonic and Albanian blood may have been imported into Greece, there must have been an equally strong Greek element remaining behind to Hellenise the importation. As for Athens, amid the general black and fiery devastation that possessed subjugated Greece, it continued to present such various phases of lovely decay, genteel decadence, and even fitful flushes of prosperity, without health, as became the metropolis of ancient taste and science. Rome, upon the whole, behaved handsomely enough to her beautiful slave. The Emperor Hadrian, who, like our Queen Victoria, was given to perambulate his empire, visited Athens also, of course, and bestowed on it many distinguished marks of his imperial favour, of which not a few remain even to the present day. He went so far, indeed, in improving a certain district of the city—the south-east quarter, towards the Ilissus—that it went by his name so long as Roman memory lived upon the spot; and the completion of the rich and lordly temple of Jupiter in that region is attributed to him. Julian also, the Apostate, who was educated there, with his fine pagan frenzy, could not be slow to patronise the city of the heathen Muses; nay, even Alaric the Goth, who sacked Lacedæmon, and annihilated Megalopolis, and who, by the base treachery of Arcadius, the puny Emperor of the East, was made Roman governor of those very Greek provinces which as a Goth he had plundered,—this Christian scourge of Hellenic heathendom, when violating the awful mystery of Eleusis and the sacred pomp of Olympia, left Athens unscathed, and feared the gigantic image of the blue-eyed goddess that looked down from the Acropolis. After the fall of the Western Empire, when the dissolute Isaurian, Zeno, purchasing peace for the East, delivered Italy to the Goths, Athens shared naturally in the decay which affected all the provincial cities of the empire, under such a system of centralised absolutism and fiscal oppression as was organised at Byzantium. Nevertheless, we find that when, in the year 1204, the Byzantine Empire was suspended for a season, and large portions of it separated for ever from the centre of authority, Athens became the capital of one of the most flourishing branches of the Frankish Empire; and under the government, first of the Burgundian family of La Roche, then of the Sicilian branch of Arragon, and, lastly, of the Acciauoli, a family of rich merchants from Florence, enjoyed a degree of material prosperity, which the general haze through which the eye is apt to view medieval history seldom allows us distinctly to discern. On this subject Mr Finlay has some remarks, which many of our readers will see with interest.

“It is usual,” says he, “to suppose that Athens was a miserable and
decayed town during the whole period of the middle ages, and that
Attica then offered the same barren, treeless, and unimprovable aspect
which it now does as a European kingdom. Such, however, was not the
case: the social civilisation of the inhabitants, and their ample
command of the necessaries and many of the luxuries of life, was in
those days as much superior to the condition of the citizens of Paris
and London, as they are now inferior. The Spaniard Montaner, who was
well acquainted with all the rich countries round the Mediterranean,
then the most flourishing portion of the globe, and who was familiar
with the most magnificent courts of Europe, says that the dukes of
Athens were among the greatest princes who did not possess the title
of king. He has left us a description of the court of Athens, which
gives us a high idea of its magnificence; and he declares that the
nobles of the duchy then spoke as good French as the Parisians
themselves. The city was large and wealthy, the country thickly
covered with villages, of which the ruins may still be traced in spots
affording no indication of Hellenic sites. Aqueducts and cisterns then
gave fertility to land now unproductive: olive, almond, and fig trees
were intermingled with vineyards, and orchards covered ground now
reduced by the want of irrigation to yield only scanty pasturage to
the flocks of nomade shepherds. The valonia, the cotton, the silk, and
the leather of Attica then supplied native manufactories, and the
surplus commanded a high price in the European markets. The trade of
Athens was considerable, and the luxury of the Athenian ducal court
was celebrated in all the regions of the West, where chivalry
flourished.”

This extract is uncommonly interesting, as it shows us not only what was done in the past of Athens, but what may be done in the future. But whatever prosperity Athens might have enjoyed under the Frankish dukes was merely temporary; for these dynasties, having no firm root in the country, fell by degrees, one after another, into the condition of ill-governed European dependencies, or of conquered countries governed by foreign rulers for selfish purposes. The wisdom of popular conciliation exercised by most of the early Frankish princes in Greece, as a matter of necessity, on their first entrance into possession, became forgotten when their power seemed firmly established. Part of their kingdoms—in Peloponnesus, for instance—were at an early period resumed by the decadent Byzantine government, which, whatever faults it had, certainly possessed in no ordinary degree the virtue of an obstinate vitality; and all of them were so cruelly oppressed by their unprincipled governors, that when the Turks appeared in Europe, many Greeks looked upon their now greatest enemies as their best friends. In the year 1456, three years after the capture of Constantinople, Athens was Turkish, and remained so till the late war, notwithstanding more than one attempt of the Venetians to make themselves masters of the place. In one of these attempts their admiral threw a bomb into the Acropolis, which reduced the then almost entire Parthenon to its present state of beautiful dilapidation. This happened in the year 1686. What Athens was under the Turks, before the ravages of the Liberation War, during the course of which it was always a most important, and, at the same time, a very exposed point, is thus described by a German traveller in the year 1810:—

“Athens is a town of considerable extent and population,[10] and
surrounded with a wall. The houses are bad, and stand without order in
the narrow streets. The Turks have several mosques and public baths
here; the Greeks a good many churches, cloisters, and chapels.
Fragments of pillars and statues are found everywhere. The Turks have
very recently made lime of some of the finest works of Greek art. The
Acropolis is now a fortress. The garrison consists of a few Turks, who
live there with their families, and are called Castriasni, or soldiers
of the fort. The fortifications are bad. The Parthenon is a ruin. The
Temple of Theseus is entire, and used as a Greek church dedicated to
St George. The Tower of the Winds is used as an oratory for the
dervishes. The country round Attica is dry and bare. The city itself
is under the protection of the Kislar Aga, and is treated mildly by
the Turks. Of the three harbours which Athens once had, the Piræus,
under the name of Porto Leone, or Porto Draco, is the only one now
used. In the place of the magnificent temples and porticoes once found
there, there are seen only a few miserable huts, a tottering booth of
customs, a cloister dedicated to St Spiridin, and a few ruins of a
theatre.”[11]

In the above remarks we have taken a large sweep of time hastily under our view; but the subject is a curious one; and next to the capital of Bavaria there is, at the present moment, no European city on which the last twenty years have made such a change as on Athens. Unreasonable and ill-informed tourists will, of course, visit that city with unreasonable expectations, and be disappointed; but they who start from Mr Wordsworth’s position in 1836, and with some such historical review as we have just given, will be astonished. Athens is now a flourishing, elegant, and, in some important respects, altogether unique capital, containing a population of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants. This, indeed, is not a rise, since Ukert’s times, equal to the marvellous increase in the population of Manchester and Glasgow within the present century; but it is something very notable, and something that looks out into the immediate future with a significance scarcely less attractive than the strange and various past out of which it has sprung. There are two races that have marched out of the past into the present, carrying with them a yet unsolved problem in their existence—the Jews and the Greeks. Providence may yet have in store some worthy work for both. At all events, so long as they exist curiosity cannot sleep.

We do not know who it was that first called Edinburgh the “Modern Athens,” but the designation, topographically at least, is not without a great truth. The situation of our fair metropolis is, in several most important respects, very similar to that of the real Athens; and the prominent points of the one may serve as an admirable analogical basis for the comprehension of the prominent points of the other. There is a sea in both adjacent, and a mountain view beyond; there is an abrupt rock forming a natural fortress in the middle; there is a range of fine mountains in the background, and prominent and picturesque hills in the immediate vicinity. For the Firth of Forth, the capital of Greece has the Saronic Gulf; for the coast of Fife, the mountain-coast of Argolis; for Inchkeith, Ægina; for the Castle, the Acropolis; for the Pentland Hills, Hymettus; for Arthur’s Seat, Lycabettus; and all this so nicely correspondent that an expert teacher of geography might well use it as a sort of _memoria technica_ for his scholars. Points of difference, of course, there are also, and very marked ones too, some of which, when a nice comparison is made, turn the balance in favour of the Athenian, and others as strongly in favour of the Scottish capital. In favour of the Greek landscape, the complete and well-defined background, formed by Mount Pentelicus on the north-east, and the chain of Parnes, and other connecting ridges to the north and north-west, deserves to be first mentioned; for in the room of these Edinburgh has nothing to present but the bare and dreary stretch of the Lammermoors. One must also confess honestly, though a patriotic Scottish heart is loth to make such admissions, that Inchkeith with its lighthouse is a very poor substitute for Ægina with its Doric temple; while against Salamis in no view can we dare to present the isle of Cramond. Largo Law, also, though it be very beautiful, and becomes more beautiful the nearer you approach it, even as backed by the Lomonds, and flanked by the Cleish Hills and Ben Cleugh in the far west, is, when set against the grand ridge of lofty Argolic mountains, apt to appear small. On the other hand, Edinburgh has a decided advantage over Athens, and all other fair towns, that it is built on a series of parallel ridges, with valleys between, which present one part of the city in picturesque contrast to the other, and at the same time open up a prospect various and wide in all directions, from the midst of a city’s bustle into the green and blue quietude of the country. There is no such ridge of elevated ground in Athens as that on which Queen Street, George Street, and Princes Street stand; and even the elevations which the Attic landscape presents have not been wisely used in the construction of the modern city. All the heights over against the Acropolis, the Hill of Philopappos, the Hill of Mars, the Museum, and the Hill of the Nymphs, occupying as they do a situation something corresponding to our Calton Hill in Edinburgh, and presenting the finest architectural positions, form no part of the present city, the principal part of which is crammed into the low ground which lies between the Acropolis and the Academy—that is to say, following out our analogy, occupies a situation corresponding to that part of the city of Edinburgh which lies between the Castle and Arthur’s Seat, supposing the ridge of the High Street altogether removed, and the level of the Princes Street Gardens continued with a very gentle elevation towards that hill and the adjacent heights, which occupy the position of the fine conical hill hanging over Athens on the north-west, and now acknowledged to be Lycabettus. As the modern city has been constructed, there are only three points from which a free view into the open country is obtainable,—the Acropolis, of course, being the first; the esplanade to the north, where the two principal hotels are, being the second; and the street before the palace of King Otho, between Lycabettus and the Ilissus, being the third. This street, which at its south end assumes the name of the Street Amalia, looks down upon the Temple of Jupiter in the vale of the Ilissus, and beyond the Acropolis to the sea. On the whole, therefore, though Attica presents a much finer landscape than Mid-Lothian, Athens does not, and, even in its best days, never did occupy an architectural position so magnificent as Edinburgh; not to mention what we learn from the best authorities, that the ancient classical city was grand only in its temples and public buildings, whereas Edinburgh, as a princely mouth once uttered, is altogether a city of palaces.

The present appearance of the city may be well gathered from the description of a recent German traveller, from whose book we shall now proceed to make a few characteristic extracts.

“Modern Athens lies altogether on the ground occupied by the ancient
city. No doubt this idea of making the capital of the modern city
identical with the ancient, went out from the brain of King Ludwig of
Bavaria. But this romantic sentimentality was a decided political
mistake. The original inhabitants of Athens planted themselves at a
certain distance from the sea,[12] on an island fortress, that they
might be safe from the attacks of the pirates, with whom the seas
were, in those early times, everywhere infested. At the present day no
such motive exists. The sea is the natural element of Greek life and
of Greek prosperity. The natural position for the capital of a kingdom
that depends for its advancement so much on trade and commerce, was
the Piræus, which Themistocles advised the ancient Athenians to look
upon as their real capital. Or, possibly, even any port of Attica may
be regarded as too much in a corner to present a position fit for the
capital of a compact Greek kingdom; and it is no doubt to be regarded
as a proof of the great wisdom of Capo d’Istria and the Venetians,
that they chose Nauplia, with its fine situation and beautiful
harbour, as the seat of their government. It is well known, also, that
the idea was at one time entertained of placing the capital of the new
kingdom on the rising ground which forms the isthmus of Corinth—a
situation which would have commanded both seas.

“Nevertheless the new city has risen up with an astonishing rapidity.
It contains some twenty thousand inhabitants,[13] and occupies a large
space of ground. Two principal streets, crossing one another at right
angles, run through the whole length and breadth of the city. Off from
these runs, in every possible relation of irregularity, a confused web
of streets, made for any purpose rather than beauty or convenience.
The one of these main streets, the street of Hermes, goes from west to
east, being the direct continuation of the road from Piræus to the
city, and ends in a beautiful square area, laid out in public gardens,
immediately in front of the palace. The street would be a perfect
straight line, open from the high ground on which the palace lies down
to the plain of the Piræus, were it not for the interposition of a
small old Byzantine church, which projects, about the middle of its
course, in such a manner as to cause a slight bend in the direction of
the street. The other main street leads from north to south. It has
received the name of the street of Aeolus, from the small tower of the
winds below the north base of the Acropolis, which is its southern
starting-point. The street is uneven in its level, but straight in its
direction; so that from every point of its length the Acropolis is
visible, closing the prospect to the south.

“In these two streets the real life of modern Athens is concentrated.
They are composed for the most part of elegant houses, generally of
two storeys high. Here there are glass windows—seldom found in the
minor streets—double-hinged doors, and balconies. In the street of
Aeolus are the principal coffeehouses and shops. And when the lounger
looks into the open barbers’ shops, which are found here in great
numbers, and are places of great resort, and beholds all the busy
processes of hat-making, shoe-making, and tailoring, which are here
exposed to public view on the ground-floor, without any notion of
concealment, he enjoys that same rich fulness of street life which
gives such a charm to Naples and other Italian cities; only here in
Athens everything is more motley and more glittering.

“The houses of the foreign ambassadors and the various government
offices, the bank, the university, are situated at some distance from
the busy hum of the street of Aeolus, on the gently-rising ground
towards Lycabettus, between the royal palace and the old Academy. This
is the fashionable quarter of Athens, being not the west end, as in
London, but the north-east quarter of the city.

“After having mastered these keys, so to speak, of the position, the
stranger may venture into the strange maze of short, crooked, and
narrow streets, of which the rest of the city is composed. But let a
man not venture rashly. Here there is no more neatness, no more
two-storeyed houses, with windows and balconies; everywhere are to be
seen miserable huts and cabins, meagrely composed of four walls
whitewashed, and covered with a light roof of tiles; a few openings
with wooden shutters serve at once as door, window, and chimney.
Causeway there is none; so if there happens to have been rain, or if
the sky takes a gusty fit, and the dust is driving—not at all uncommon
in this quarter—these troglodytes have a miserable lodgment. In the
midst of all this wretchedness, the high-sounding names, which are
stuck up on every street corner, have a burlesque effect. In the midst
of the strangest huddle of ill-built houses, and motley patchwork of
incoherent stones, you look up and find yourself surrounded by the
‘SENATE-HOUSE,’ the ‘PAINTED STOA,’ the ‘EPONYMIC HEROES,’ the tragic
‘TRIPODS,’ and the Council of the ‘AREOPAGUS,’—all in the most
classical Greek; and when these local associations fail, you find the
dirtiest lanes and vennels dignified with the names of Pericles and
Phidias, Praxiteles and Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This is
another manifestation of the same sort of beggarly pride, which
delights to stamp the children of modern Greek Christians with the
names of some old heathen heroic Epaminondas or Achilles.”

This witness is in the main true; though there are a few things in the extract to which one might object, as proceeding from that unsympathising critical spirit too common in these times, which delights to pass itself off for cleverness. What harm, for instance, can there be in the son of a modern Greek being called Achilles, any more than in a modern dealer in old clothes being called Moses? Is it any burlesque upon the good old president of the British round table, when there happens to be an oldest son called Arthur in any reputable English family now paying taxes to her Majesty? And is the sainted ghost of Jeremiah the prophet insulted because there is a Dissenter of that name who keeps a grocer’s shop in Beverley, or because Tom and Jerry once walked the boards of the British stage profanely? As little offence is there in the names of the streets, however humble some of them may now be; for we have reason to hope, that as boys and trees grow bigger, so these streets will grow more magnificent with years. Even Wellington’s noble name does not always decorate a noble street in British towns; and Princes Street in Aberdeen does not look so royal by any means as Princes Street in Edinburgh. The real stumblingblock in these Athenian streets is not in the names of Æschylus and Sophocles, Colocotroni, Miaulis, and Lord Byron,[14] which are all well worthy of the sort of immortality hereby conferred on them; but in those other names of ancient places, chosen out of Pausanias, and put down where the ill-informed archæologist now thinks that they ought to be, and where the better-informed archæologist, some fifty years hence, will know that they ought not. This archæological objection, by the way, and not any of those political and commercial ones mentioned by Herr Hettner, is the real strength of the objection to the present site of the capital of Greece, which has been made by so many; for the present city being built, not on the whole area certainly, but on the greater portion of the ancient one, it follows that, till the new houses, which have been raised so quickly on the foundations of old temples and porticoes, shall have crumbled down by age, or be shaken down by an earthquake, the snouts of zealous antiquaries are doomed to sniff about these famous purlieus in vain;—a great loss, certainly, to the archæological societies of the present age in Berlin, London, Munich, and elsewhere, now so vigorous; but the Greeks will thereby keep their subterranean treasures to themselves for another century at least, free from touch of foreign mattock, by which time they may have somewhere to put them; for at present the government has neither a museum to put ancient remains in when found, nor money to pay for them—a state of matters which leads even now sometimes to lamentable results, over which Professors Gerhard and Panofka in Berlin must weep. But, after all, Canaris did not drive his conquering fire-ships across the Archipelago, nor did Lord Byron think it worth while to die poetically at Messolonghi, for the sake of the archæologists. In choosing Athens as the site of the capital of the new kingdom of Greece, the patriotic reminiscences of the Greek people were no doubt as much consulted as the sentimental romance of Bavarian Louis. If cats have a right to attach themselves to places, why not men?

But we shall not trifle on these points. Among the public buildings of Athens, in what our author calls the fashionable quarter, the most prominent, certainly, are the palace and the university. The ground, as we have already mentioned, rises with a very gentle slope from the level of the plain in which the Ilissus and Cephissus are lost, to the base of Lycabettus, which overhangs the city in a most effective conical mass to the north-east. Along the highest part of this slope runs, from north to south generally, though with a considerable bend in the middle, a long street, principally occupied with public buildings and other houses, in size and elegance much surpassing the best houses in the two principal streets described by Mr Hettner. This is the same street which is above described as sweeping down to the Ilissus, and, under the name of Amalia Street, opening up a view of the sea. Now it is on this upper part of the city, just beneath the base of Lycabettus, that the palace and the university are situated. The former especially is, next to the Acropolis, both from its situation and its size, the most prominent object in the city. No eye can miss its glaring extent of white wall, and the glimmering of its long uniform ranges of windows, tier upon tier, like the arches in the Coliseum;—but, like the Coliseum, certainly, in nothing else—like a huge Manchester cotton-factory rather, new and whitewashed, as the English say—or like a large Austrian barracks, as the Germans say—or one of those immense cloister-like baronial halls, which sometimes stare upon the flitting eye of the tourist from amid the vine-clad heights of Germany. Altogether, not architecturally only—for even Bavarian architects are not infallible—but economically much more, we are disposed to think the palace was a blunder. Nothing, indeed, can exceed the beauty and chaste magnificence of its internal decoration—that part of the work is in every respect worthy of the classical fame of Munich. But what has all this magnificence to do, the practical mind will ask, with a petty and beggarly kingdom, that has neither roads, nor people, nor water, nor money to pay its lawful debts? We are afraid the artistic sentimentality of Bavarian Louis had something to do with this; he was too much of a poet, and too little of a practical man, to know what the infant kingdom of Greece required in the first place. What it required, our readers may see in a small but very sensible book noted below.[15] Certainly among the last of necessary things was a royal residence, which, had it been intended for the Queen of Great Britain and India, or the Czar of all the Russias, could not have been raised larger in scale, or more magnificent in embellishment.

Our German traveller had the good fortune to inspect the show-rooms of King Otho’s palace, not in their pure naturals, as they are commonly shown to strangers, but when furnished with fair ladies and gay knights, on occasion of a court-ball. Let us see how they looked when lighted.

A GREEK COURT-BALL.

“I have just returned from a grand court-ball. The ball-room is
finished in the same style of luxuriant but chaste magnificence in
which the whole palace is built. It is of truly colossal dimensions.
In height it occupies two entire floors of the building. It is divided
into three parts, separated from each other by tall marble pillars,
whose Ionic capitals are adorned with painting and gilding. More than
a thousand persons can move about with ease in every part of this
magnificently lighted hall, and yet it does not appear
crowded—scarcely even filled. In the most remote parts, where no
dancing is going on, parties can saunter up and down with ease and
freedom.

“We arrived about nine in the evening. Along the walls several groups
were already seated on the crimson-velvet cushioned divans. How
remarkable the scene that now presented itself! On the right, the men
reclining at ease, in their gay and glittering Greek attire, the
scarlet cap on their heads; on the left, the women, some in Greek,
others in Frankish costumes. A few of the men were parading in the
centre of the saloon, engaged in animated conversation. There could
not be a more attractive sight than the contemplation of such a
variety of costume and outward bearing. The simple black dress-coat
prevailed least of all; then the diplomatic and military uniforms of
the different embassies, and of the French, English, and Austrian
fleets now stationed in the Piræus; but chiefly the Greek national
costume, in all its striking varieties, from the gold-embroidered
fustanella of the royal court marshals, to the simple loose Turkish
trousers of the islanders. How wild and proud are the fine expressive
countenances of these men! It almost seemed as if the smooth inlaid
floor burnt beneath their feet—for their true home is on the rocky
mountains, where they are their own masters, only issuing forth from
time to time, in true middle-age fashion, on some jovial plundering
expedition. There sits, for example, between two captains of Palikari,
a fierce-looking old man, with white hair and a long flowing white
beard, his curved sabre hanging at his side. His features are
expressive of daring, but nobly chiselled: they remind one of the fine
manly forms in which the old Byzantine mosaics represent the apostle
Paul. This man is a warrior every inch. He is the famous Papa
Kostas—called Papa because he was formerly a monk. Latterly he
returned to the world, and became an honoured hero in the Greek
Liberation war. Two years ago he wished to be elected deputy for his
native town of Lamia; but government, to whom he was obnoxious, found
means to frustrate his election. What did he then do? He incited the
whole of his province to rebellion, and for six entire months the king
had to carry on an open war with him. At length the royal troops
succeeded in conquering him, and he then took flight into Turkey.
After some time an amnesty was granted him; and now he is at a
court-ball, but so proud and unsubdued, that, instead of a pardoned
rebel, he looks like one who is waiting for the first favourable
occasion to avenge the humiliation he has endured.

“There is in like manner some history about all these men. They are
barbarians, but there is poetry in them; and it is quite intelligible
that these wild mountaineers should have been victorious over the
superior force of the enervated Turks.

“The saloon gets more and more crowded. Suddenly the general murmur
ceases. The king appears with his blooming consort on his arm. Early
in the morning a new French man-of-war had arrived in the Piræus, and
the officers are now presented by the French ambassador. Immediately
the Polonaise begins, the queen opening the ball with the Austrian
ambassador. She is dressed in blue, embroidered with silver, her hair
magnificently arranged in the European style. The king, on the
contrary, is as usual in the glittering gold and silver gala-dress of
the national Greek costume; he and the sister of the English resident
minister make the second pair. The queen dances the second movement of
the Polonaise with the president of the Chamber. He is a Hydriot, and
wears the dress of the Greek islanders—dark blue, tight-fitting short
jacket, wide bunchy Turkish trousers of the same colour, and between
jacket and hose a simple red girdle. The king leads out the venerable
matron, the wife of the president of the Chamber, who is also dressed
in the costume worn by the women of the Greek islands—a blue silk
dress with yellow stripes, a jacket of the same material, very much
cut open in, front, the bosom covered with a silk handkerchief, also a
little parted in front. In Berlin or Paris it would excite some
wonderment to see such attire recognised as admissible at court.

“And now the ball begins in good earnest; no more national dances, but
all in true European style. The king danced a great deal, and was most
courteous and affable in his demeanour. But the queen shone above
every one, and was the first in all the dances. She is a true knightly
dame, the boldest equestrian in the land, and graceful above all in
the dance. The young Greek ladies have shown great facility in
acquiring the new dances. It would be difficult to discover a single
national trait in them, were it not for the dark glancing eyes, the
brown complexion, and their love of bright showy colours, which betray
their half-southern, half-Oriental character. They almost all appeared
in white ball-dress, but wearing over it an extremely beautiful little
jacket of red velvet, richly embroidered with gold; and on the head,
trimmed around with plaits of deep black hair, is placed coquettishly,
inclined to one side, a little cap, also of red velvet embroidered
with gold, exactly corresponding to the jacket.

“The Greek men do not mix in the dance. Some collect in quiet corners
in groups; others contemplate languidly the strange foreign movements.
How would these stately forms and costumes correspond with such
unpoetic waltzing and whirling? The keenest dancers were the gentlemen
of the diplomatic corps.”

Then follow some sentimental remarks about Themistocles, Pericles, and Plato, and how they would have looked dancing the polka; and how it is almost a profanation for young diplomatists to think of enjoying a dance at all, on ground where grave Aristotle walked, and stern Demosthenes thundered; and how a fine German “belletrist,” in the midst of such a gay scene, “cannot but feel every moment as if some sturdy old Marathonians would rush in, blow the lights out, and tear all the pretty Parisian frippery to rags.” Shade of Goethe, what nebulous nonsense even sensible Germans will speak and print! With us a young lady, passing stupidly out of her teens, and thinking of moonshine and marriage, would be ashamed formally to enunciate such trash.

Let us now look to

THE UNIVERSITY.

“All the more highly educated Greeks exhibit a lively interest in the
newly-erected university at Athens, which is formed entirely on the
German model. The professors are chiefly Greeks, who have studied at
the French and German universities. Since the revolution of 1843,
Landerer the chemist, and Fraas[16] the botanist, are the only
foreigners in the university, but they, like the others, lecture in
Greek. The teachers, with the exception of the private tutors, are
paid by the state; they have, on an average, seven hundred dollars,
but no honorarium for the lectures. The influx of students is very
great, amounting to more than four hundred, which would be
inconceivable in so thinly-populated a country, were it not that
numbers come from Epirus, Thessaly, and Asia Minor; also from Turkish
Greece, and even, (so great is the feeling of nationality,) from the
Ionian Islands, although there is a Greek university in Corfu. The
Athenian professors point with pride to this fact, alleging that their
university forms thus the centre of all the Grecian countries, many of
them now under foreign rule, and as such is perhaps the nursery of a
future political union.

“No university in the whole world is placed on a site so rich in
associations. When the student comes out of the lecture-room, and
saunters in the open piazzas which form the entrance, he has before
him the empurpled range of Hymettus, whose bees are proverbially
associated with the glory of Attic wisdom and art; and the venerable
Acropolis, with the towering pillars of the Parthenon, remind him of
the ancient glory of his country. Where is the youth who would not
feel his heart elevated by such noble recollections?

“And yet these wings are only the wings of Icarus; they cannot perform
impossibilities. True culture and a national literature and art can
only exist where there is material prosperity, and an education
extending to all ranks of the people. There is, however, no sense of
the importance of instruction; for in most places the lowest
elementary schools are not to be found, scarcely even a few miserable
attempts at such. Government has committed the fault of working from
above downwards, instead of from beneath upwards, and has proceeded
forcibly to engraft the most extreme points—even the excrescences of
European customs and refinement—on the prevailing barbarism. They have
erected four gymnasia at Athens, Syra, Patras, and Nauplia; but the
people’s schools are still in the condition in which Capo d’Istria
left them; indeed, general evil report says rather worse than better.
How can we reap unless we sow? How can the building stand firm, when
the foundation is awanting?

“It is, therefore, a quite fruitless and premature, though well-meant,
endeavour that has been made by some of the more noble-minded Greeks,
since the happy issue of the Liberation War, to found a modern Greek
literature. The attempt, however, has had the merit of purifying the
language, and assimilating it to the ancient Greek. But so long as
Greek culture has no firm root in itself, all such endeavours must
prove imperfect imitations of foreign models. I fear much that a
hideous mildew is already nipping the blossom in the bud. Among the
many discouraging impressions caused by the present state of Greece,
the most so to me was, that the booksellers’ shops are almost
exclusively filled with the worst sort of new French romances. It is
here much as with the poor inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, who
have gained nothing by their intercourse with enlightened Europe but
the poison of whisky.”