Greek Lands and Letters

“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 conquered in the end, and time and tourists have completed the victory by turning the island into one of the “excursions in Attica.” No longer the “eye-sore of Piræus,” as Pericles called it, it now immeasurably enhances the Attic landscape and beckons to its own shores those who day by day have watched its mountainous beauty across the estranging gulf. Only on the western side of the island, where the town of Ægina occupies the site of the ancient capital, is the coast free from steep cliffs, and the entire surface, as it is seen from Athens, consists of mountain-ridges crowned by the high peak of Oros, once sacred to Zeus Panhellenios and now bearing a chapel to Saint Elias. Toward these Æginetan hills the eye inevitably turns whether the sullen rain-clouds are gathering, as of old, about the highest summit, or Zeus unrolls his bluest canopy above the deeper azure of their slopes, or whether, against the changing sunsets, they darken into stormy purple or delicately veil themselves in amethystine, shot with rose.

Ægina’s lodestone for modern travellers is the Doric temple on a hill above the Bay of Marina in the northeastern part of the island. Regular boats ply between Piræus and the harbour-town of Ægina, the route taken by Lucian’s group of friends who hired a tiny boat at four obols a head in order to see the islanders celebrating their famous Festival of Hecate. From the town the temple may be reached by a ride of several hours across the rough but fertile northern districts of the island. Excursion boats, however, for those who have but a day, cross directly from Piræus to the Bay of Marina, a route more nearly akin to that followed by the Athenian ships which began the mad expedition to Sicily by a race “as far as Ægina,” and then turned their prows toward the open sea. From the shore of the bay it is an easy walk to the isolated hill-top upon which the ruined temple stands. On an April day this approach is one of vivid beauty, the bright new green of fig trees glistening among resinous pines and the ground rioting in the colour of many flowers. The hill-top itself offers a scene which is unsurpassed even among the remoter islands of the Greek seas. The intense brilliance of the very white marble columns under the cloudless sky is tempered by the somewhat sombre green of neighbouring trees. Afar are seen the broken coast and the varied mountains of the mainland from Megara to Sunium. Below, in capricious loveliness, now a tranquil plain of ultramarine, now a restless surface of sparkling crystal, stretches the Saronic Gulf.

The temple was erected to Aphæa, protectress of women. Of the outer colonnade enough is intact to reveal the dignity of the original structure, but it was in the pediment sculptures that the art of Ægina was best expressed. Preserved now in the Munich Museum, they are heirs to the ancient fortune of many Æginetan products which were shipped to the north and to the south, to Egypt and to the barbarous shores of the Black Sea. These pediment groups, well known as examples of the work of the Æginetan school of sculpture in the early part of the fifth century, probably represented episodes of the Trojan War. This would seem to indicate that they were produced after the victory at Salamis which inspired so many symbolistic expressions in art and literature of the conquest of barbarians by Greeks. Ægina distinguished herself at Salamis, her sailors being awarded the first honours for valour. And her older heroes had fought conspicuously in the Trojan War, the earlier act of the long drama.

But it was the personal bravery of the Æginetans rather than their national policy which brought them glory at Salamis. The island-commonwealth was inclined to aid the Persians, and it was the interference of Athens at this crisis which brought on the open war between the two maritime powers. By the middle of the fifth century Ægina was completely conquered and made a member of the Confederacy of Delos. Twenty years later the Dorian inhabitants were expelled and the island freshly settled from Attica.

Ægina’s heyday had antedated that of Athens by two centuries. Her argosies had been known in all ports where men bought or sold. Her system of coinage and of weights and measures had set the standards for the Greek world. At home her people displayed their restless energies in both industrial and artistic pursuits. In literature alone were they barren. Their claim to poetry lies only in the inspiration which one manifestation of their energy yielded to a foreign poet.

The Æginetans were remarkable athletes as well as fighters, and Pindar boasted that he held up a mirror to their noble deeds, and wrought for them a necklace of the Muses, “with white ivory and gold inlaid and coral of the lily flower gathered ’neath the ocean dew.” The young Pytheas, indeed, who won the pancratium at Nemea, was celebrated by both Pindar and Bacchylides, and in the ode of the latter poet there lurks the memory of some spring visit to Ægina when the young flowers and reeds were made into garlands, and bare-footed girls bounded like young fawns toward the flowery hills. Pindar, in the eleven extant odes which he wrote for Æginetan youths, mingled a “fitting draught as meed for their toil upon the highway clear of god-inspired deeds.” His willingness to use his best gifts in their behalf he explained by the ancient friendship between the island and his native city, typified by the sisterhood of the nymphs Thebe and Ægina, both beloved by Zeus. And although he praised the athletic spirit of the Æginetans and their justice, their defence of strangers, and the deliverance wrought by them at Salamis “when Zeus was showering destruction far and wide and death came thick as hail upon unnumbered men,” his most frequent theme was the glory of their legendary heroes.

The nymph Ægina had borne Æacus, who was so just a king that at his death the gods made him a judge in Hades. His sons were Peleus and Telamon, their sons were Achilles and Ajax and Teucer.

Lords of wide adventure, they drifted away from Ægina’s shores. Teucer, son of Telamon, ruled in Cyprus, a new land, and Ajax held the Salamis of his father. Peleus ruled in Thessalian Pthia. In the Euxine Sea Achilles won a “shining isle,” and his son was prince in “Epirus, famed afar, where, from Dodona on, the cattle-pasturing headlands, jutting high, lie out against the Ionian Sea.” But at the invocation of Pindar they gather once more in their ancient home.

Nor was the significance of human greatness absent from Pindar’s mind:—

Thus to a youth of Ægina who was lifted on the wings of hope and valour the poet gave a warning and a larger hope.