Greek Lands And Letters - free ebook by Anne C. E. (Anne Crosby Emery) Allinson

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

THE PROPYLÆA From within, looking toward Salamis. From a painting by H. R. Cross...

36 minute read

Read Chapter

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to interpret Greek lands by literature, and Greek literature by local associations and the physical environment. Those who possess an intimate acquaintance with Greek or who have the good fortune to stay long in Greece will be able to draw upon their own resources. Many travellers, however, must curtail their visit to a few weeks or months, and it is hoped that to them this book may prove useful as a companion in travel, while to a wider range of readers it may prove

4 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY: THE WIDESPREAD LAND OF HELLAS

Cicero, at one time studying Greek oratory in Rhodes, at another speaking Greek as the language best adapted to a Sicilian audience, suggests with sufficient definiteness the eastern and western boundaries of ancient Hellas. Leaving out of consideration more remote colonies, we may content ourselves with including in the Greater Greece of antiquity all the Mediterranean lands and waters from Sicily and Lower Italy, in the west, to Cyprus and the coast of Asia Minor, in the east. The Riviera, or

32 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER II PIRÆUS, THE HARBOUR TOWN

“Returning from Asia Minor and voyaging from Ægina toward Megara I began to look on the places round about me. Behind me was Ægina; before me Megara; on the right Piræus; on the left Corinth—cities once flourishing, now prostrate and in ruins.” The sail in bright sunshine up the Gulf of Ægina, the ancient Saronic Gulf, will have fulfilled the traveller’s anticipations of the beauty of Greece and will have quickened the historic imagination. History and antiquity, however, will give place to the

28 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER III ATHENS: FROM SOLON TO THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS

“Here, stranger, seek no tyrant. This our state is ruled Not of one man. ’Tis free. The people year by year As kings succeed each other, never yield they most To Wealth, but even he that’s poor has equal share.” Many a visitor, led to Athens by interest in its associations and its art, has been surprised by its great physical beauty. The drive from Piræus, through the banal outskirts of the growing city, is, indeed, a disenchanting approach, but one has only to walk to the Corinthian columns of

18 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER IV THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS

“All this pursuit of the arts has this function, even a recall of the noblest in the soul to a vision of the most excellent in the ideal.” To speak of the Acropolis of Athens with due Hellenic restraint is difficult for any one who has lived long under its habitual sway. At the first visit three sets of impressions break down the most obdurate impassiveness. The associations acquired by a study of history engender a vicarious but active sympathy with the Greeks themselves. There is an immediate

18 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER V ATHENS: FROM THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS TO MENANDER

“Know that our city has the greatest name amongst all men because she never yields to her misfortunes. And even should we ever be compelled to yield a little—for it is nature’s way that all things bloom to suffer loss—there will abide a memory that we made our dwelling-place to be a city dowered with all things, and the mightiest of all.” After the battles of Salamis and Platæa the Athenians brought back their families to Attica. Athens was a scene of desolation: the walls destroyed, the dwellin

36 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER VI OLD GREECE IN NEW ATHENS

Travellers fresh from Italy perceive an Oriental picturesqueness in modern Athens, but the immediate impression of its Occidental character gained by those who come from Egypt or Constantinople is the correct one. The old narrow streets, reminiscent of the Turkish period, are few in number and lie on the northern side of the Acropolis. Back of them, further to the north and west, lies a very clean and well-planned town which boasts of being a little Paris. The substantial houses and hotels, the

20 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER VII ATTICA

Modern Athens climbs up around the lower slopes of Mount Lycabettus, which rises on the east like an index finger above the Attic plain. Although this peak is less than one thousand feet high, its isolated position opens out an unrivalled panorama of the Cephisian plain from Parnes and Pentelicus down to Piræus and the bay, with Salamis, the mountains of the Megarid, the Isthmus, Argolis and Ægina beyond. In the “Frogs” of Aristophanes Æschylus’s many-jointed compounds are likened to “great Lyca

30 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER VIII ELEUSIS

“That torch-lit strand whereon the Goddesses reverèd foster mystic rites and dread for mortal men whose lips the ministrant Eumolpidæ have locked in golden silence.” Eleusis, like Delphi, was a centre of Greek religious life, but its Panhellenism was of a later date and a direct consequence of the power of Athens within whose territory it lay. Although the worship of nature’s productivity, under the form of Demeter losing her daughter Persephone within the earth and recovering her again, was ind

16 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER IX ÆGINA

“Not far off from the Graces’ favour falls this island’s lot. She keepeth civic faith and hath attained to glory in the valour of the sons of Æacus. Flawless is her fame from the beginning; for she is sung as nurse of heroes, foremost in prize-winning contests numerous, foremost in swift war.” Pindar’s praise of Ægina must have been as wormwood to the Athenians, for her Dorian blood and commercial supremacy made her their natural rival, and her proximity fanned rivalry into hatred. Athens conque

6 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER X MEGARA AND CORINTH—THE GULF OF CORINTH

“Cities which were great aforetime now as a rule are mean, and those formerly were small which in my day have become great. Therefore, since I know that human prosperity never remains stationary, of both alike I shall make mention.” On the neck of land that unites Attica to the Peloponnesus two Dorian cities attained to prominence in the centuries intervening between Homeric civilization and the rivalries of Sparta and Athens, those great representatives of the Dorian and Ionian races who reduce

29 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XI DELPHI

If leisure is the nurse of sympathetic understanding, “three radiant courses of the sun” are none too many to give to Delphi. The inner meaning of this centre of Greece needs not only to be quarried out of history and literature, but also to be garnered from the abundant beauty of a landscape which created as well as framed a unique religious life. At the chief oracular seat of the God of Prophecy antiquarian curiosity about its early legends and primitive cults makes way for the realization of

36 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XII FROM DELPHI TO THEBES

Œdipus on his way from Delphi and Laius on his way from Thebes met at the Forked Roads—the “Cleft Way”—in a lonely valley. The traveller who wishes to see the scene of the ensuing tragedy will have the opportunity to pass through a country of extraordinary beauty and variety and also to know the leisured charm of travel by horse or mule. With the multiplication of railroads these opportunities are growing rarer year by year, except for those whom adventure or professional interests lead into the

19 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XIII THEBES AND BŒOTIA

“O Thebè blest, wherein delighteth most thy heart? in which of all the noble deeds wrought in thy land in days gone by? Gone by, I say, for now the Grace of olden time is fallen upon sleep.” Of Bœotia more than of any other province of Greece is our involuntary judgment likely to be at fault, for the ancient distinction between the quick-witted Athenians and the stupid Bœotians has passed into our own proverbial language. But our inherited contempt for the Bœotian “clowns” is rather a tribute to

34 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XIV BŒOTIA, CONTINUED

Epaminondas told the Bœotians that their country was the stage of Ares, and several battles fought on their soil were of national significance. At Leuctra Epaminondas defeated Sparta. At Tanagra Athenians and Spartans first tried their strength against each other. At Delium the Athenians were defeated by the Bœotians in a struggle in which Alcibiades and Socrates took part. Alcibiades, who saved his master’s life, afterwards told their friends that in the retreat Socrates behaved exactly as he d

23 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XV THERMOPYLÆ

Thermopylæ lies due north from Delphi, less than twenty-five miles distant in an air line, but between them lie “many o’ershadowing mountains,” as Achilles might say, or, to be more exact, the great Parnassus cluster and the continuation of the Œta range, the watershed between the Bœotian Cephisus and the Malian Spercheius. Just where Doris and Phocis on the south meet Trachian Malis and Epicnemidian Locris on the north Mount Kallidromos is set like a boundary stone. The ridge that unites it wit

7 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XVI ARGOLIS

In the Argolid it seems reasonable to turn aside from history, in its narrower definition, to recall the tales of heroes and the “grandeur of the dooms imagined for the mighty dead.” The turbulent and uneven course of events in which Argolis of historic times appears now as an ally, now as an enemy of other powerful states, is of less moment than the legends handed down and crystallized in great literature. Even if the sagas which may have formed the nucleus of the Iliad sprang from the older Th

33 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XVII ARCADIA

Of the temples that once adorned the mainland and the islands of Greece only a brave few now rear columns from the ground. Among these the Temple of Apollo at Bassæ constrains the traveller to penetrate to the heart of Arcadia. The rewards of the difficult journey are many, and are enhanced by a general knowledge of the whole Arcadian territory, into which the detached impressions of a brief stay may be sympathetically fitted. Homer says that the Arcadians went to Troy in vessels borrowed from A

35 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XVIII OLYMPIA

“What time the mid-month moon in golden car flamed back her light and lit the eye of Evening full, pure judgment of Great Games did Heracles ordain and fifth year’s festival beside Alphēus and his holy banks.” Whatever may be the final decision of archæologists, it was natural for Pausanias to identify the reclining figures in the east gable of the Zeus temple at Olympia as the Alpheus and Cladeus. The right angle made by the junction of these rivers is in a fertile plain where the Altis, the sa

35 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XIX MESSENIA

Telemachus, in search of his father, sailed down the western coast of the Peloponnesus, landed at “sandy Pylos,” the home of Nestor, and by this old friend was sent across country to Menelaus at Lacedæmon. The long drive was broken by a night at Pheræ. According to a tradition that still has its supporters the modern site of Pylos is Navarino, in the centre of the western coast of Messenia, while Pheræ is represented by Kalamata, on the northeastern shore of the Messenian Gulf. A growing tendenc

6 minute read

Read Chapter

CHAPTER XX SPARTA

In the Spartans’ theory of life adventures abroad or the welcome of strangers into their own territory had no place. Perhaps nothing more sharply differentiated them from the Athenians, whose love of roving was equalled only by their delight in seeing the rest of the world drawn to their city. The instinctive and reasoned reserve of the Spartans was reënforced by the physical conditions of their country. Laconia is bulwarked on three sides by mountains, through which, in antiquity, all entrances

23 minute read

Read Chapter

APPENDIX

Chapter I. Page 2 (third paragraph) Cf. Curtius, Greek History , I , p. 23 and passim . Plato, Timæus , 22 B. 3 Quotation from Curtius, Greek History , I , p. 32. 5 Hatzidakis, Neugriechische Grammatik , p. 4. 9 Quotation from Tozer, Geography of Greece , p. 44. Cf. passim . 10-12 Æschylus, Agamemnon , 281. 17-18 Æschylus, Agamemnon , 454. 19 Homer, Odyssey , VI , 130; V , 51; Iliad , VIII , 553. 20 Homer, Odyssey , VI , 162. Pindar, Olymp. , II , 70. 21 Pindar, Olymp. , VI , 54. 22 Æschylus, Ag

18 minute read

Read Chapter