Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume VIII Part 9

THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS[48]

BY J. P. MAHAFFY

Some ten or twelve years ago, a very extensive and splendidly successful excavation was made when a party of German archeologists laid bare the Theater of Dionysus--the great theater in which aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought out their immortal plays before an immortal audience. There is nothing more delightful than to descend from the Acropolis, and rest awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs with which the front row of the circuit is occupied. They are of the pattern usual in the sitting portrait statues of the Greeks--very deep, and with a curved back, which exceeds both in comfort and in grace any chairs made by modern workmen.[49] Each chair has the name of a priest inscribed on it, showing how the theater among the Greeks corresponded to our cathedral, and this front row to the stalls of canons and prebendaries.

But unfortunately all this sacerdotal prominence is probably the work of the later restorers of the theater. For after having been first beautified and adorned with statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes' time), it was again restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or about his time, so that the theater, as we now have it, can only be called the building of the second or third century after Christ. The front wall of the stage, which is raised some feet above the level of the empty pit, is adorned with a row of very elegant sculptures, among which one--a s.h.a.ggy old man, in a stooping posture, represented as coming out from within, and holding up the stone above him--is particularly striking.

Some Greek is said to have knocked off, by way of amus.e.m.e.nt, the heads of most of these figures since they were discovered, but this I do not know upon any better authority than ordinary report. The pit or center of the theater is empty, and was never in Greek days occupied by seats, but a wooden structure was set up adjoining the stage, and on this the chorus performed their dances, and sang their odes. But now there is a circuit of upright slabs of stone close to the front seat, which can hardly have been an arrangement of the old Greek theater. They are generally supposed to have been added when the building was used for contests of gladiators or of wild beasts; but the part.i.tion, being not more than three feet high, would be no protection whatever from an evil-disposed wild beast.

All these later additions and details are, I fear, calculated to detract from the reader's interest in this theater, which I should indeed regret--for nothing can be more certain than that this is the veritable stone theater which was built when the wooden one broke down, at the great compet.i.tion of aeschylus and Pratinas; and tho front seats may have been added, and slight modifications introduced, the general structure can never have required alteration.

It is indeed very large, tho I think exaggerated statements have been made about its size. I have heard it said that the enormous number of 30,000 people could fit into it--a statement I think incredible; for it did not to me seem larger than, or as large as, other theaters I have seen, at Syracuse, at Megalopolis, or even at Argos. But, no doubt, all such open-air enclosures and sittings look far smaller than covered rooms of the same size. This is certain, that any one speaking on the stage, as it now is, can be easily and distinctly heard by people sitting on the highest row of seats now visible, which can not, I fancy, have been far from the original top of the house. And we may doubt that any such thing were possible when 30,000 people, or a crowd approaching that number, were seated. We hear, however, that the old actors had recourse to various artificial means of increasing the range of their voices. Yet there is hardly a place in Athens which forces back the mind so strongly to the old days, when all the crowd came jostling in, and settled down in their seats, to hear the great novelties of the year from Sophocles or Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals and claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the supporters of the old, and the lovers of the new, devotees and sceptics, wondering foreigners and self-complacent citizens. They little thought how we should come, not only to sit in the seats they occupied, but to reverse the judgments which they p.r.o.nounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, of pa.s.sion, and of pride.

WHERE PAUL PREACHED TO THE ATHENIANS[50]

BY J. P. MAHAFFY

It was on this very Areopagus, where we are now standing, that these philosophers of fas.h.i.+on came into contact with the thorough earnestness, the profound convictions, the red-hot zeal of the Apostle Paul. The memory of that great scene still lingers about the place, and every guide will show you the exact place where the Apostle stood, and in what direction he addrest his audience. There are, I believe, even some respectable commentators who transfer their own estimate of St. Paul's importance to the Athenian public, and hold that it was before the court of the Areopagus that he was asked to expound his views. This is more than doubtful. The "blases" philosophers, who probably yawned over their own lectures, hearing of a new lay preacher, eager to teach and apparently convinced of the truth of what he said, thought the novelty too delicious to be neglected, and brought him forthwith out of the chatter and bustle of the crowd, probably past the very orchestra where Anaxagoras' books had been proselytizing before him, and where the stiff old heroes of Athenian history stood, a monument of the escape from political slavery.

It is even possible that the curious knot of idlers did not bring him higher than this platform, which might well be called part of Mars'

Hill. But if they chose to bring him to the top, there was no hindrance, for the venerable court held its sittings in the open air, on stone seats; and when not thus occupied, the top of the rock may well have been a convenient place of retirement for people who did not want to be disturbed by new acquaintances, and the constant eddies of new gossip in the market-place.

It is, however, of far less import to know on what spot of the Areopagus Paul stood, than to understand clearly what he said, and how he sought to conciliate as well as to refute the philosophers who, no doubt, looked down upon him as an intellectual inferior. He starts naturally enough from the extraordinary crowd of votive statues and offerings, for which Athens was remarkable above all other cities of Greece. He says, with a slight touch of irony, that he finds them very religious indeed, so religious that he even found an altar to a G.o.d professedly unknown, or perhaps unknowable....

Thus ended, to all appearance ignominiously, the first heralding of the faith which was to supplant all the temples and altars and statues with which Athens had earned renown as a beautiful city, which was to overthrow the schools of the sneering philosophers, and even to remodel all the society and the policy of the world. And yet, in spite of this great and decisive triumph of Christianity, there was something curiously prophetic in the contemptuous rejection of its apostle at Athens. Was it not the first expression of the feeling which still possesses the visitor who wanders through its ruins, and which still dominates the educated world--the feeling that while other cities owe to the triumph of Christianity all their beauty and their interest, Athens has to this day resisted this influence; and that while the Christian monuments of Athens would elsewhere excite no small attention, here they are pa.s.sed by as of no import compared with its heathen splendor?

There are very old and very beautiful little churches in Athens, "delicious little Byzantine churches," as Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, and unlike what one generally sees in Europe. They strike the observer with their quaintness and smallness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model of that unique and splendid building, the cathedral of St. Mark at Venice. But yet it is surprizing how little we notice them at Athens. I was even told--I sincerely hope it was false--that public opinion at Athens was gravitating toward the total removal of one, and that the most perfect, of these churches, which stands in the middle of a main street, and so breaks the regularity of the modern boulevard!

FROM ATHENS TO DELPHI ON HORSEBACK[51]

BY BAYARD TAYLOR

We left Athens on the 13th of April, for a journey to Parna.s.sus and the northern frontier of Greece. It was a teeming, dazzling day, with light scarfs of cloud-c.r.a.pe in the sky, and a delicious breeze from the west blowing through the pa.s.s of Daphne. The Gulf of Salamis was pure ultramarine, covered with a velvety bloom, while the island and Mount Kerata swam in transparent pink and violet tints. Crossing the sacred plain of Eleusis, our road entered the mountains--lower offshoots of Cithaeron, which divide the plain from that of Boeotia....

We climbed the main ridge of the mountains; and, in less than an hour, reached the highest point--whence the great Boeotian plain suddenly opened upon our view. In the distance gleamed Lake Capas, and the hills beyond; in the west, the snowy top of Parna.s.sus, lifted clear and bright above the morning vapors; and, at last, as we turned a shoulder of the mountain in descending, the streaky top of Helicon appeared on the left, completing the cla.s.sic features of the landscape....

As we entered the plain, taking a rough path toward Plataea, the fields were dotted, far and near, with the white Easter s.h.i.+rts of the people working among the vines. Another hour, and our horses' hoofs were upon the sacred soil of Plataea. The walls of the city are still to be traced for nearly their entire extent. They are precisely similar in construction to those of OEnoe--like which, also, they were strengthened by square towers. There are the substructions of various edifices--some of which may have been temples--and on the side next the modern village lie four large sarcophagi, now used as vats for treading out the grapes in vintage-time. A more harmless blood than once curdled on the stones of Plataea now stains the empty sepulchers of the heroes.

We rode over the plain, fixt the features of the scene in our memories, and then kept on toward the field of Leuktra, where the brutal power of Sparta received its first check. The two fields are so near, that a part of the fighting may have been done upon the same ground....

I then turned my horse's head toward Thebes, which we reached in two hours. It was a pleasant scene, tho so different from that of two thousand years ago. The town is built partly on the hill of the Cadmeion, and partly on the plain below. An aqueduct, on mossy arches, supplies it with water, and keeps its gardens green. The plain to the north is itself one broad garden to the foot of the hill of the Sphinx, beyond which is the blue gleam of a lake, then a chain of barren hills, and over all the snowy cone of Mount Delphi, in Euboea. The only remains of the ancient city are stones; for the ma.s.sive square tower, now used as a prison, can not be ascribed to an earlier date than the reign of the Latin princes....

The next morning we rode down from the Cadmeion, and took the highway to Livadia, leading straight across the Boeotian plain. It is one of the finest alluvial bottoms in the world, a deep, dark, vegetable mold--which would produce almost without limit, were it properly cultivated. Before us, blue and dark under a weight of clouds, lay Parna.s.sus; and far across the immense plain the blue peaks of Mount Oeta. In three hours we reached the foot of Helicon, and looked up at the streaks of snow which melt into the Fountain of the Muses....

As we left Arachova, proceeding toward Delphi, the deep gorge opened, disclosing a blue glimpse of the Gulf of Corinth and the Achaian mountains. Tremendous cliffs of blue-gray limestone towered upon our right, high over the slope of Delphi, which ere long appeared before us.

Our approach to the sacred spot was marked by tombs cut in the rock. A sharp angle of the mountain was pa.s.sed; and then, all at once, the enormous walls, b.u.t.tressing the upper region of Parna.s.sus, stood sublimely against the sky, cleft right through the middle by a terrible split, dividing the twin peaks which gave a name to the place. At the bottom of this chasm issue forth the waters of Castaly, and fill a stone trough by the road-side. On a long, sloping mountain-terrace, facing the east, stood once the town and temples of Delphi, and now the modern village of Kastri.

As you may imagine, our first walk was to the shrine of the Delphic oracle, at the bottom of the cleft between the two peaks. The hewn face of the rock, with a niche, supposed to be that where the Pythia sat upon her tripod, and a secret pa.s.sage under the floor of the sanctuary, are all that remain. The Castalian fountain still gushes out at the bottom, into a large square enclosure, called the Pythia's Bath, and now choked up with mud, weeds, and stones. Among those weeds, I discerned one of familiar aspect, plucked and tasted it. Watercress, of remarkable size and flavor! We thought no more of Apollo and his shrine, but delving wrist-deep into Castalian mud, gathered huge handfuls of the profane herb, which we washed in the sacred front, and sent to Francois for a salad....

As the sun sank, I sat on the marble blocks and sketched the immortal landscape. High above me, on the left, soared the enormous twin peaks of pale-blue rock, lying half in the shadow of the mountain slope upheaved beneath, half bathed in the deep yellow l.u.s.ter of sunset. Before me rolled wave after wave of the Parna.s.sian chain, divided by deep lateral valleys, while Helicon, in the distance, gloomed like a thunder-storm under the weight of gathered clouds. Across this wild, vast view, the breaking clouds threw broad belts of cold blue shadow, alternating with zones of angry orange light, in which the mountains seemed to be heated to a transparent glow. The furious wind hissed and howled over the piles of ruin, and a few returning shepherds were the only persons to be seen.

And this spot, for a thousand years, was the shrine where spake the awful oracle of Greece.

CORINTH[52]

BY J. P. MAHAFFY

The gulf of Corinth is a very beautiful and narrow fiord, with chains of mountains on either side, through the gaps of which you can see far into the Morea on one side, and into Northern Greece on the other. But the bays or harbors on either coast are few, and so there was no city able to wrest the commerce of these waters from old Corinth, which held the keys by land of the whole Peloponnesus, and commanded the pa.s.sage from sea to sea. It is, indeed, wonderful how Corinth did not acquire and maintain the first position in Greece.

But as soon as the greater powers of Greece decayed and fell away, we find Corinth immediately taking the highest position in wealth, and even in importance. The capture of Corinth, in 146 B.C., marks the Roman conquest of all Greece, and the art-treasures carried to Rome seem to have been as great and various as those which even Athens could have produced. No sooner had Julius Caesar restored and rebuilt the ruined city, than it sprang at once again into importance, and among the societies addrest in the Epistles of St. Paul, none seems to have lived in greater wealth or luxury. It was, in fact, well-nigh impossible that Corinth should die. Nature had marked out her site as one of the great thoroughfares of the old world; and it was not till after centuries of blighting misrule by the wretched Turks that she sank into the hopeless decay from which not even another Julius Caesar could rescue her.

The traveler who expects to find any sufficient traces of the city of Periander and of Timoleon, and, I may say, of St. Paul, will be grievously disappointed. In the middle of the wretched straggling modern village there stand up seven enormous rough stone pillars of the Doric Order, evidently of the oldest and heaviest type; and these are the only visible relic of the ancient city, looking altogether out of place, and almost as if they had come there by mistake. These pillars, tho insufficient to admit of our reconstructing the temple, are in themselves profoundly interesting. Their shaft up to the capital is of one block, about twenty-one feet high and six feet in diameter. It is to be observed, that over these gigantic monoliths the architrave, in which other Greek temples show the largest blocks, is not in one piece, but two, and made of beams laid together longitudinally. The length of the shafts (up to the neck of the capital) measures about four times their diameter, on the photograph which I possess; I do not suppose that any other Doric pillar known to us is so stout and short.

Straight over the site of the town is the great rock known as the Acro-Corinthus. A winding path leads up on the southwest side to the Turkish drawbridge and gate, which are now deserted and open; nor is there a single guard or soldier to watch a spot once the coveted prize of contending empires. In the days of the Achaean League it was called one of the fetters of Greece, and indeed it requires no military experience to see the extraordinary importance of the place.

Next to the view from the heights of Parna.s.sus, I suppose the view from this citadel is held the finest in Greece. I speak here of the large and diverse views to be obtained from mountain heights. To me, personally, such a view as that from the promontory of Sunium, or, above all, from the harbor of Nauplia, exceeds in beauty and interest any bird's-eye prospect. Any one who looks at the map of Greece will see how the Acro-Corinthus commands coasts, islands, and bays. The day was too hazy when we stood there to let us measure the real limits of the view, and I can not say how near to Mount Olympus the eye may reach in a suitable atmosphere. But a host of islands, the southern coasts of Attica and Boeotia, the Acropolis of Athens, Salamis and aegina, Helicon and Parna.s.sus, and endless aetolian peaks were visible in one direction; while, as we turned round, all the waving reaches of Arcadia and Argolis, down to the approaches toward Mantinea and Karytena, lay stretched out before us. The plain of Argos, and the sea at that side, are hidden by the mountains. But without going into detail, this much may be said, that if a man wants to realize the features of these coasts, which he has long studied on maps, half an hour's walk about the top of this rock will give him a geographical insight which no years of study could attain.

OLYMPIA[53]

BY PHILIP S. MARDEN

Olympia, like Delphi, is a place of memories chiefly. The visible remains are numerous, but so flat that some little technical knowledge is needed to restore them in mind. There is no village at the modern Olympia at all--nothing but five or six little inns and a railway station--so that Delphi really has the advantage of Olympia in this regard. As a site connected with ancient Greek history and Greek religion, the two places are as similar in nature as they are in general ruin. The field in which the ancient structures stand lies just across the tiny tributary river Cladeus, spanned by a footbridge.

Even from the opposite bank, the ruins present a most interesting picture, with its attractiveness greatly enhanced by the neighboring pines, which scatter themselves through the precinct itself and cover densely the little conical hill of Kronos close by, while the gra.s.ses of the plain grow luxuriantly among the fallen stones of the former temples and apartments of the athletes. The ruins are so numerous and so prostrate that the non-technical visitor is seriously embarra.s.sed to describe them, as is the case with every site of the kind.

All the ruins, practically, have been identified and explained, and naturally they all have to do with the housing or with the contests of the visiting athletes of ancient times, or with the wors.h.i.+p of tutelary divinities. Almost the first extensive ruin that we found on pa.s.sing the encircling precinct wall was the Prytaneum--a sort of ancient training table at which victorious contestants were maintained gratis--while beyond lay other equally extensive remnants of exercising places, such as the Palaestra for the wrestlers. But all these were dominated, evidently, by the two great temples, an ancient one of comparatively small size sacred to Hera, and a mammoth edifice dedicated to Zeus, which still gives evidence of its enormous extent, while the fallen column-drums reveal some idea of the other proportions. It was in its day the chief glory of the enclosure, and the statue of the G.o.d was even reckoned among the seven wonders of the world. Unfortunately this statue, like that of Athena at Athens, has been irretrievably lost. But there is enough of the great shrine standing in the midst of the ruins to inspire one with an idea of its greatness; and, in the museum above, the heroic figures from its two pediments have been restored and set up in such wise as to reproduce the external adornment of the temple with remarkable success.

Gathered around this central building, the remainder of the ancient structures having to do with the peculiar uses of the spot present a bewildering array of broken stones and marbles. An obtrusive remnant of a Byzantine church is the one discordant feature. Aside from this the precinct recalls only the distant time when the regular games called all Greece to Olympia, while the "peace of G.o.d" prevailed throughout the kingdom. Just at the foot of Kronos a long terrace and flight of steps mark the position of a row of old treasuries, as at Delphi, while along the eastern side of the precinct are to be seen the remains of a portico once famous for its echoes, where sat the judges who distributed the prizes. There is also a most graceful arch remaining to mark the entrance to the ancient stadium, of which nothing else now remains.

Of the later structures on the site, the "house of Nero" is the most interesting and extensive. The Olympic games were still celebrated, even after the Roman domination, and Nero himself entered the lists in his own reign. He caused a palace to be erected for him on that occasion--and of course he won a victory, for any other outcome would have been most impolite, not to say dangerous. Nero was more fortunately lodged than were the other ancient contestants, it appears, for there were no hostelries in old Olympia in which the visiting mult.i.tudes could be housed, and the athletes and spectators who came from all over the land were accustomed to bring their own tents and pitch them roundabout, many of them on the farther side of the Alpheios.