PREFACE

During a residence of eleven years in Greece I have formed the habit of writing to certain periodicals descriptions of my journeys. The occasion for making a book out of these articles was the suggestion on the part of many members of the American School of Classical Studies, at Athens, who had shared these journeys with me, that I should do so, and so make the descriptions accessible to them. I yielded to this suggestion all the more readily from the consideration that my wanderings have taken me into many nooks and corners not usually visited by those whose stay in the country is short.

Having seen the sunrise from most of the mountain-tops of the country, having forded many of its rivers, and having caught the indescribable color at early dawn and at evening twilight, from the deck of coasting steamers, all along these fascinating shores, I felt it only right that I should try to convey to others, less fortunate than myself, some picture, however inadequate, of all this experience and enjoyment. All that is here set down is, however, but a part of a larger picture that is ever present in my memory.

For the most part I have avoided what has been most frequently described. Athens, Olympia, and the much-visited Argive plain, I have not touched upon, because I did not wish to swell the book by telling thrice-told tales. I tell of what I have most enjoyed, in the hope that readers may feel with me the charm of this poet’s land, which has, more than any other, “infinite riches in a little room.”

The slight alterations that I have made in the original form of the descriptions was made with the design of bringing them, in a measure, up to the present time. I have also arranged them on a geographical thread, running from the Ionian Islands, through Northern Greece to the Peloponnesus. The two larger articles, on Sicily and Dalmatia, are not simply tacked on. They belong to the subject, inasmuch as Sicily was an important part of Hellas, as the Greeks called their country, and inasmuch as Greek colonies once skirted the greater part of the coast of Dalmatia.

In regard to the spelling of proper names, I have tried to shun unusual appearances. But I have great objection to changing all the Greek endings in os into us, just because the Romans did so. I also object to changing the Greek k into c where it will surely be pronounced as an s. In the case of names that have become a part of our English speech, I have, however, admitted these changes. The result may not seem satisfactory, on account of the lack of a rigid system; but I trust that it will be pardoned.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

VACATION DAYS IN GREECE

CORFU

It is great good fortune to spend a week in Corfu on the way to Greece. Seeing it from one end to the other, wandering through its olive forests and vineyards, brings on a mild, or, in some cases, a wild, intoxication without wine. What words fit the surrounding beauty but “Islands of the Blessed,” “Elysium,” “Garden of Eden,” "Paradise"? It is not Heaven, after all, for one sees here the poor, lame, blind, begging for small alms; but, as long as earth holds such corners as Corfu, it is not all cursed.

To the traveller who has felt the intoxication of such a region, and is impelled to report something of it, the impotence of words comes home with special force. Naught but the painter’s art seems adequate to report Corfu. And, furthermore, painter as well as poet might here well feel the weakness of his art. It is a great boon to have had this realm of beauty brought upon the retina of the eye, and so communicated to the soul.

One may, perhaps, be allowed to group the impressions that Corfu makes, and report them with a plainness that aspires only to the office of a photograph, resigning the attempt at coloring.

Before the eye lies one Corfu—the Corfu of to-day; but before the mind are brought two others—the Kerkyra of Greek history and the Scheria of Homer. The two latter compete with the former, and refuse the present beautiful scene a monopoly of attention.

But, first, to be just to the present Corfu. The traveller who has never been east of Italy, which was my case at the time of my first visit in 1890, feels that he is here passing for the first time the bounds between Europe and the Orient. The streets and squares of the city, which contains a population of about 30,000—about one-third of the population of the whole island—swarm with figures clad in the most wonderful costumes, men and women vying with one another in display of colors. The Corfiotes themselves contribute largely to this display of costumes. From across the narrow strait come from Epirus many Albanians, with their big white skirts and their kingly air, some for trade and a quick return, and some for a longer stay. From the same quarter come the no less picturesque people, partly Greek and partly Wallachian—but who can give the component parts of the blood of these people of Epirus?—who, having attempted to secure the consummation of what the Congress of Berlin decreed, incorporation with Greece, were treated as Turks usually treat insurgents, and were then living as refugees in Corfu, awaiting the hour when Moslem rule shall recede from the shores of Europe. Some of these men’s costumes are ragged and dirty, but with what an air the men walk in them. It is not a swagger, but a king’s gait. A well-dressed European gentleman can as little compete with these men for attention as the Berlin palace can compete with the picturesque ruins of Heidelberg. The clergy, who seem numerous enough here to preach the Gospel to every creature, with their long black gowns and high stiff caps, make quite a feature in the throng. The military officers are also numerous and brilliantly dressed, but are too much like ordinary Europeans to attract particular notice.

The vegetation here is also Oriental—oranges, lemons, figs, forests of cactus and giant aloes abound. The four or five million olive-trees, many sixty feet high, are the characteristic features of the island. They form a beautiful background for the tall, dark-green cypresses. But the vine presses hard upon the olive. It is great good fortune to be here in the time of the grape harvest, even if one must miss the oranges and the olives. One day in September I walked to Palæokastritza, an old cloister on a rock looking out on the Ionian Sea, sixteen miles from the city. The way was through a continuous vineyard full of laborers. At this season of the year there is hardly a drop of running water in the island. There are places where springs and brooks and even rivers have been and will be again, but there are none there now. The water in the wells and cisterns looks suspicious. But one has a substitute for water that is just about as cheap. For copper coin of the value of two cents a woman gave me a pile of grape clusters, enough for four men. On my return I managed to signify with my poor Greek to a man riding on a load of grapes that I would like to change places with him. For three miles I rode stretched out on the top of crates full of grapes, resting my tired feet, eating, by the permission of the driver, from the top of the crates, while from the bottom the precious juice oozed out and trickled into the dusty road. I felt that I was playing Dionysos. Then it was that the vintagers, many women and few men, came trooping picturesquely from the fields. They looked so happy that it seemed as if the contagion of joy rested in the vine. It seemed as if a touch of music would have converted them into a Dionysiac chorus.

If Corfu had no classical history, it would still be historically interesting. It has been spared that curse which rested so long on the rest of Greece—Turkish occupation. The Turks dashed their forces in vain in two memorable sieges against its rock forts. The high degree of culture here, as compared with the rest of Greece, outside of Athens, is partly due to this exemption. But there have been stimulating influences from without. Rome, Byzantium, Naples, Venice, and England have held sway here. The rule of Venice, to which the Corfiotes gave themselves voluntarily, as they had formerly done to Rome, lasted nearly six hundred years, with the interruption of the Anjou episode. This rule was mild and beneficent. It was the Venetians who built the fortifications which kept off the Turks, and which still form, though to a less degree than twenty-five years ago, the characteristic feature in the aspect of the city.

From Waterloo to 1864 England exercised a protectorate over this and the six other Ionian Islands. Ten successive Lord High Commissioners, of whom Gladstone was one, and whose monuments profusely deck the esplanade, represented here the majesty of England. The English built the present fine system of roads—paid for, of course, in Ionian money. A kindly feeling prevails toward England because she yielded to the strong desire of the inhabitants for union with the kingdom of Greece. But the fact that the English, on their departure, blew up the principal fortification of the harbor on the island Vido, and carried away all the guns from the other forts, left a sting. The dismantled fort was paid for in Ionian money, but the exigencies of European politics demanded the dismantling. Austria had as much to say about that as England. But, sweeping away the name of Corfu, which arose in the Middle Ages, and transferring ourselves back of all this foreign occupation and centuries of semi-barbarism, let us introduce ourselves to the Greek Kerkyra of Thucydides. Passing southward, a half a mile or so from the esplanade of the present city, one comes along an isthmus between two old harbors to an elevated peninsula, on which now stands the King’s villa in a beautiful garden. Here one is overpowered by historic associations. Here lay the proud Greek colony established by Corinth in 734 B.C., a colony that first set the example of filial ingratitude, and, feeling itself stronger than the mother city, joined battle with her and defeated her in the first great naval battle of Greeks against Greeks, in 665 B.C. From this rising ground the eye dimly discerns in the distance, near the mainland opposite the southern end of the island, the Sybota Islands, where the later great naval battle between mother city and colony in the presence of an Athenian fleet gave the occasion for the dreadful Peloponnesian war. From this inner harbor, now abandoned and still, nearly silted up and yearly submitting to the encroachment of vines upon its borders, the proud fleet of Alcibiades and Nicias sailed for Syracuse. It was the alliance with Kerkyra, the key to the voyage to Sicily, that lured the Athenians to that ruin.

Little of this Kerkyra remains above ground. Perhaps much may yet be found below. About twelve years ago excavations by Carapanos laid bare a great quantity of terra-cottas. Perhaps it was a terra-cotta manufactory that he discovered. The ruins of an old Doric temple lie on the surface of the ground near a spring in an olive grove on the side of the peninsula looking toward the mainland. The situation, 100 feet above the strait, among the olives and near an ancient fountain, makes one feel that he could have joined in doing honor to the dryads and naiads with the throng that used to meet here. One of the antiquarians of Corfu has lately advanced the view that these remains are those not of a temple but of a bath. Blessed bathers!

It was not bad taste for the King of Greece to put his gardens on the spot of the Gardens of Alkinoos. If I were King of Greece I would try to compound with my subjects to take the business of ruling off my hands and let me keep my Corfu home. It is no wonder that Elizabeth, the Empress of Austria, sought relief from her troubles in her villa on the other side of the inner harbor.

When a part of the Venetian works was being removed in 1843, where the isthmus between the two old harbors joins the present city, there was found a circular monument about twenty feet in diameter, ending in a flat cone, and containing an inscription running almost around the layer of stones just below the coping. It reads thus: “This is the monument of Menekrates, son of Tlasias, of Œantheia by birth. The people erected it in his memory, “for he served them well as proxenos” (consul) “and he perished in the sea.” This with more, making six hexameters, now much more obscured than when first discovered and copied, I made out by the help of a manual of epigraphy in the rays of the sun just rising over the mountains of Epirus. The archaic forms of the letters make it a remarkable inscription, which may be dated as far back as 600 B. C. As I read this inscription, a century older than the Persian war, and two centuries before Thucydides, I thought, here surely one is in contact with Greek antiquity.

The next day, in an upper room of the building used for both library and high school, in company with the director, Professor Romanos, and Professor Papageorgios, a gentleman who deserves the title philoxenos, I read the other inscriptions of Corfu which have not been lost in the labyrinths of the British Museum or elsewhere. Some of these are of about the same age as that on the Menekrates monument, but very clear as well as exceedingly interesting on account of the old forms of the letters. They are mostly tomb inscriptions, telling of the grief which all the world has felt over the loss of the brave and the good.

One need not linger too long over Kerkyra. It is a state which we cannot love. We cannot forget that before Salamis it held its fleet off the southern point of the Peloponnesus, waiting to see which way the great struggle was going to incline. When Athens concluded the alliance with her at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, many at Athens felt it to be an unholy alliance, and that the burden of hatred thus shouldered was almost a counterbalance to the winning of the second navy in Greece. Thucydides draws an awful picture of the decimating feuds, which seemed tinged with barbaric fury, between aristocracy and commons. In his pages the island vanishes from view bathed in blood.

Long before the time of Thucydides the natives of this island stoutly maintained their descent from the oar-loving Phæacians of Homer. Their land was Scheria, the home of Alkinoos. This belief, in which they took so much pride, really made them great as a naval power; and he who would to-day take away the charm of Homeric tradition from this land, which has been made by it into holy ground, would work it a greater injury than one who should despoil it of its olive-trees. Of course, our enjoyment of Homer does not depend on localizing his story:

And yet the story of the Odyssey, localized here from gray antiquity, one likes, while here, to believe; to read as if there had been nobody to bring up any objections to its geography, or to reason about its geography at all—to read it, in short, with Corfiote eyes and Corfiote fancy.

Does not the very ship which Poseidon turned into stone, because it conveyed Ulysses home, still stand at the mouth of the old inner harbor? Yesterday I passed the bridge over the Potamo, where, according to Gregorovius, Ulysses was cast ashore, and tumbled out of the stream that had received him to sink exhausted in his long sleep under the double tree. I can almost go farther here than I am asked to go. Methinks that under yonder tree, which looks as if it might count almost any number of centuries, the sturdy swimmer fell asleep and awoke so sweetly. It does not matter that another place near the entrance of the old harbor has come to honor in the mouths of the natives as the spot of the meeting between Ulysses and Nausikaa. Our mood adapts itself kindly to either locality. Somewhere hereabouts we will let the sweet story have a local habitation. Let fancy for the hour hold sway. Thus we are perchance brought nearer to the clever voyager, the beautiful maid, the garrulous old king guided by his wife in the midst of his sailor people. Ah! the fiction of Homer holds the mind in more abiding thrall than the facts of Thucydides.

A DAY IN ITHACA

Ithaca was the first of the great Homeric places of renown to “swim into my ken,” if it can be said to have swum into my ken when I saw it by the light of the full moon in sailing from Corfu to Patras. But I became acquainted with Troy and Mycenæ long before I really appropriated Ithaca. This I got by the method of gradual approach, a method which has a certain charm only granted to one who is privileged to reside a series of years near his goal.

On a journey to Dodona, the year after this moonlight view, our steamer, in passing from Patras to Prevesa, put in at Bathy, officially called Ithaca, on the east side of the island; and I had just one hour ashore which was more tantalizing than satisfactory as far as studying the topography of Ithaca was concerned; and yet one may believe that he sees in the beautiful bay and harbor the very harbor of Phorkys, where Ulysses landed after his twenty years’ absence. The cave of the Nymphs, where the jolly Phæacians laid him asleep with his treasures about him was not visible; but we were told that this is now farther up the hill.

After an interval of several years, in which I had passed Ithaca several times in the night, I set foot on it again in a more satisfactory fashion. Taking refuge from the August heat of Athens in the Ionian Islands, I was spending a few days in Argostoli, the chief town of Kephallenia, and seized this opportunity to approach Ithaca from the back side, so to speak. A drive of four hours brought us clear across from the west side of Kephallenia to Samos on the east side, over the high backbone of the island. During the last hour of the journey, the descent, as “the sun was setting, and all the ways were growing shady,” our eyes were fastened upon Ithaca lying peacefully in the bosom of Kephallenia—a beautiful sight.

As we had planned for only one day in Ithaca, we determined to make it a long one, and started from Samos in a sail-boat at half-past two in the morning; but, although the sail was filled most of the time, so gentle was the breeze that, even supplemented by the work of the oars, it did not bring us to Ithaca until half-past five. My boy of twelve years, companion of many of my wanderings in Greece, was asleep most of the way, but broke the parallel with Ulysses by waking up when the keel touched the shore.

We landed at the foot of Mount Aëtos, on the top of which Gell and Schliemann place the city of Ulysses, but deferred climbing this until we might see whether our time and strength held out, and pushed at once for our main goal, some ruins near Stauros, at the northern end of the island, nine or ten miles distant. We followed all the way, with an occasional cut-off, the fine carriage road made by the English, to whose occupation the Ionian Islands owe most of their good roads, notably the one on which we had crossed from Argostoli to Samos, which required much difficult and expensive engineering. The road crossed the backbone of Ithaca twice at points where this is somewhat low; but in the last seven miles it followed the western shore about half way up the steep slope which runs down into the sea, leaving almost no strip of level coast. In fact, Ithaca smiles in very few spots, being nearly all mountain, just the country to get attached to. Ulysses naturally enough calls it “rugged, but a good bringer-up of boys,” and adds: “I never could find anything sweeter than my native land.” In one respect it is doubtless somewhat changed. As we passed along the foot of the principal mountain of the island, a bare height of over 2,600 feet, I asked a peasant its name, and was glad to hear him answer “Neriton.” But this is now as undeserving of its constant Homeric epithet of “leaf-shaking” as is Zakynthos of its epithet of “woody.” The denudation of the Greek mountains is a sad theme, and is most strikingly illustrated in the Ionian Islands. Mount Aenos, over 5,000 feet high, on Kephallenia, had until about the beginning of the present century its slopes covered with large pines, which were known in all the world as Abies cephalonica. But at that time a destructive fire swept away nearly half of this treasure; and two years ago about one-third of the remainder went in the same way. What has occurred here goes on every summer all over Greece; but the loss is in no case so conspicuous as in this. I have seen Pentelicus burning for three days—a brilliant illumination for Athens—and, in sailing from Poros to Nauplia in midsummer, I counted twenty-six fires on the mountains of Peloponnesus; but all these could do nothing more in the way of damage than to help on a little the aridity into which Attica and the Argolid are helplessly sinking. Where it scarcely ever rains during six months of the year, the grass and weeds become like tinder, and a fire once started from some shepherd’s carelessness is difficult to stop.

Water was rather scanty on our road, and what we got came from cisterns. Springs are, indeed, rare in Ithaca. But when we came to the famous spring Melanhydro (Blackwater), near Stauros, in the hope of finding something fine, we found the water not only warm, but having three-quarters of a very ripe tomato in it, as well as pieces of a big cactus stalk, and rather full of little pollywogs besides. The proper care of springs is something which the Greeks do not seem to appreciate. I have seen the famous spring Pirene on Acro-Corinth treated even worse than this.

But if the water which we needed for our eighteen-mile walk in the August sun was bad, we found consolation in grapes. I suspect, though I cannot verify it from actual weighing, that my regular allowance of grapes in an August or September day’s walk in Greece is ten pounds. One rarely pays anything for these, inasmuch as they are much cheaper than New England huckleberries. While it is considered contra bonos mores to take them without asking, peasants seem always glad to give them. On the hottest part of the return journey, as we stopped at a house and asked for grapes, the man of the house said that his vineyard was two kilometres distant, but insisted upon going to it at once. This I could not allow, whereupon, in spite of my protests, he got upon the very top round of a rickety ladder, leaning against the wall of his house, and, at the risk of his neck, pulled down from a vine running over a high trellis two clusters which he feared were not ripe, as proved to be the case. In the meantime his wife had been with great difficulty restrained from setting before us eggs, bread, and cheese, which we refused on the ground that we had just eaten. To be strictly truthful, I ought to state that, not being enough used to the Greek language to discriminate fine shades of meaning, I am not sure but that the man meant to send his wife the two kilometres in question. Greek custom would incline me to this supposition.

Although Ithaca is noted for its hospitality, this treatment is not mentioned as an isolated, but as a typical case of Greek hospitality. I doubt whether there is any people so hospitable as the Greek. The longer I live here and the more I travel about, the more I am impressed with this hospitality. It is not only on this rugged island where men live by “wresting little dues of wheat and wine and oil,” “an ill-used race of men,” one might be tempted to call them, that the stranger at the gate must come in and have the best that the house affords; at Platæa, six years ago one November night, a house-holder received the American School at Athens, carrying more mud on their persons than it is often the lot of four men to carry, into the only room in his house which had a fire, turning out his family, who were evidently enjoying it, to pass the night in a colder room. And they seemed to take it as a matter of course.

But I have wandered from our goal. I had expected to find in the remains near Stauros corroboration of my belief that here lay the Homeric city. For I had long supposed, with Leake of the older topographers, and Bursian, Partsch, and Lolling of the later ones, that it must be here. Here are massive walls, rock-cut steps, ancient cisterns, and the niches in the rock passing under the name of the “School of Homer.” But at the close of the day, in order not to be unjust to the dissenters, I climbed Aëtos, and saw that the walls there, resembling those of Tiryns, had about as good claim as those at Stauros to be regarded as those of a Homeric fortress. The question where the Odyssey locates the city is not at present to be decided by remains, but by certain other indications which seem to point to the region of Stauros.

The suitors of Penelope, who wished to kill Telemachus on his return from “Sandy Pylos,” lay in wait for him on an island called Asteris, “midway between Ithaca and rugged Samos.” Opposite the northern end of the island, though much nearer to Samos (Kephallenia) than to Ithaca, is the only island in the whole strait, needing to be magnified a good deal to suit the story of the Odyssey; but what poet ever denied himself the right to magnify? And looking toward this little island is the only harbor on this (western) side of Ithaca, a deep indentation running far into the land, now called “Polis Bay,” a reminiscence of the fact that a city once stood here. This name is a genuine survival from old times, and not a revamping of a classical name, as is the case with Mount Neriton. About this bay and up as far as Stauros, and even farther to the west and north, is the main smiling spot of the island. It was autopsy that I wanted more than anything else; and, as I stood on the rocks near Homer’s school, autopsy forced upon me the conviction that here, and here only, must have been the important city of the island, the city from which the faithful Paladin of Agamemnon ruled not only Ithaca but also Kephallenia. Here, amid the remains of an ancient settlement, one looks into three harbors about equally distant, Polis on the west side of the island, a broader one on the east side, now called Phrikes, in which we saw a good-sized vessel anchored, and on the north end one still more capacious, probably the Reithron of the Odyssey. The situation was well adapted to a city ruling the island and possessing easy communication with the coast, east and west.

It is not so very many years ago that general scepticism prevailed about Homeric topography. But now, just as one smiles, in listening to Dörpfeld’s masterly exposition of the thoroughly excavated walls of Troy, at the thought that “if Troy ever stood” was catalogued by an almost contemporary poet with insoluble riddles, like "if Israel’s missing tribes found refuge here," so, in passing over Ithaca with the Odyssey in hand, one smiles to think that not long ago Hercher could maintain that there was no agreement between the Ithaca of the Odyssey and the Ithaca of reality. It may be granted that Hercher knocked out the somewhat visionary Gell; but he did not touch Leake; indeed, it seems as if he had not read Leake at all. There is one passage in the Odyssey which seemed to support Hercher, in which Ithaca is spoken of as “a low island,” and as “lying apart and farther to the west than Samos and Zakynthos.” How the poet, be he the original poet of the Odyssey or an epigonos, ever happened to say this of Ithaca, the rugged island lying close up against the eastern shore of Kephallenia, no one has yet satisfactorily explained. But, apart from this Homeric crux, there is a most gratifying coincidence between “the Land and the Book.” The topography of Ithaca has gained respect in proportion as attempts have been given up to force Corfu into identity with the land of the Phæacians.

In respect to Schliemann’s and Gell’s acropolis on Mt. Aëtos at the narrowest part of the island, it must be granted that this was an important fortress of the Homeric period, controlling communication between the northern and southern halves of the island, as well as the nearest approach from Samos, which was probably always in antiquity the main city of Kephallenia. But that the main city of Ithaca was ever on this eagle’s eyrie is in accordance neither with antecedent probability nor with the poet’s story.

It is curious to see how different have been the estimates of the height of this mountain, according as one wished to make it the site of the Homeric Ithaca or not. And, indeed, the figures given in different books which might be supposed to rest on measurements vary also. Probably the figures given by Partsch, 380 metres, are correct. This would make the top about 1,200 feet above the sea level, but only about half that above the high ground over which the road from Bathy passes to the mooring place—it can hardly be called a harbor—opposite Samos. Partsch makes merry at “those whose faith can not only remove mountains, but also make them lower than they actually are, and who speak of the run up the steep sides of Aëtos as if it were only a matter of half an hour.” I was in my turn amused to find that in my eagerness to go up this height and down again as soon as possible, in order to take our boat back to Samos, I had made the ascent in considerably less than half an hour. Perhaps the fleet-footed shepherd boy who led me up may have taken me along a good deal faster than Partsch would have gone making his way alone. He ought, however, to have looked out not to spoil a good case by underrating the powers of English pedestrians.

At half-past three we reached the shore, where our boat was tied by the stern cables waiting for us, and we set sail for Samos in such a splendid breeze from the north which had just sprung up, right on our quarter, that no Homeric ship ever sped over the waters with more life than ours. In just one hour and five minutes we landed in Samos, in time for me, though tired, to wander before dark over the high hills containing the acropolis of Samos, the remaining walls of which are most impressive.

The next morning, starting with a carriage at half-past three, we were at eight o’clock in Argostoli. During the slow ascent I kept my eyes fastened upon Ithaca every moment when it was possible to do so. I wanted to see the sunlight once more illumine that long chain of four separate peaks stretched out in the sea from north to south; but before sunrise we had already got into the gorge through which the road pushes up to the top. Our first sight of the island was in the evening twilight and our last in the morning twilight. As I thought it over afterward I could not help thinking that there was an especial propriety in this; for was not Ithaca pre-eminently a land of twilight?

DELPHI, THE SANCTUARY OF GREECE

After a glorious day spent at Acro-Corinth, the American School, four persons, set out on November 5, 1890, for a ten days’ trip through Central Greece. The first point of interest was Delphi.

As, in entrance into some fraternities, a rough and ridiculous initiation increases the pleasure of membership, so in the present case, perhaps, the rough and ridiculous approach to Delphi only served to increase the appreciation of the glory there.

The little Greek steamer which coasts the Corinthian Gulf lay at anchor at Corinth, ready to start at 5 P.M. But though it was so near that one could throw a stone into it from the shore, we paid a drachma and a half apiece for being rowed on board. The boatman got well paid for the few strokes which it took him to cover that short distance.

We paid more than we ought. We had committed the fatal error of asking the price instead of coolly jumping into the boat and paying half a drachma apiece when we reached the steamer. All that we lacked was a little knowledge of the country, the language, the people, and, more than all, the prices. We were paying for our tuition. Six months later, when I was much better informed, I was passing Chalkis, and thought I would like to go ashore for an hour or so. I then asked the boatman, by way of testing him, what he would charge to take me ashore and bring me back again. He replied, “Six drachmas.” I laughed, and said, “Half a drachma.” “All right,” said he, “jump in.” When one “knows the ropes” the boatmen are very tractable; but the stranger is at their mercy, because nowhere in Greece, not even at Piræus or Patras, is there a pier for a steamer to tie up to. All this seems managed in the interest of the boatmen.

After ascertaining that we should have to disembark at a very early hour the next morning at Itea, the ancient Chaleion, the port of Delphi (the ticket agent said five o’clock, and the steward of the boat said three o’clock), we all selected state-rooms with care, undressed and went to bed at the early hour of seven, with instructions to the steward to wake us half an hour before the time of disembarkation. Sound slumber, which comes to men wearied with tramping, often makes hours seem short; but, when we were waked, it seemed incredible that we could have had the night’s sleep that we had so carefully planned. Our watches soon gave the dreadful corroboration to our suspicions. It was only nine o’clock in the evening.

The boat had skipped Antikyra, shortening the journey by several hours, and was going to stop only half an hour before passing over to Galaxidhi, the ancient Oeantheia. In all my experience in Greece there was only one other case of a steamer being ahead of time. But oh! the hours both day and night that I have spent waiting for belated steamers; and no inconsiderable part of these hours has been spent at Itea. Three times, after patience had failed, I have taken a sail-boat across to the Peloponnesian shore, to strike the more regular communication by rail.

When we were fairly landed, the ridiculous part of our initiation was completed, and the rough part began. I would fain pass over that night in the hotel at Itea. It was no worse, however, than almost any night that the traveller passes in places called by courtesy hotels in the country towns of Greece.

Itea, after being for years the despair of travellers, received, as a result of the increased travel brought about by the excavation of Delphi, two very good lodging-houses, and, instead of being known as cheap and nasty, it became a place where one could be fleeced in good style.

The next morning we proceeded a mile or more along the shore to the east, until we identified the ruins of the ancient port of Delphi, Kirrha, which, we are told, the Amphictyons twice destroyed in a rage, though it seems quite un-Greek to do so unreasonable a thing as to destroy the harbor through which one must continue to land. Leaving Kirrha, and putting ourselves about on the track of the old visitors of the holy place of Delphi, who came from Peloponnesus, we passed through miles of the finest olive orchard in Greece to the site of the ancient Krissa at the head of the plain, the old Homeric town which appears to have yielded reluctantly to rising Delphi the control of this region. After the joy of the plain came the joy of climbing the rugged rocks for hours until it seemed as if Delphi must be in the clouds. This double reward for the double initiation suddenly ended when, turning a sharp spur of rock, we found ourselves in the grand natural theatre which was Delphi. Even to one who had never read of it, and did not know what it was to the Greeks, the mere sight of the place must still be one of the finest views in the world. But to one who has come to look on the sanctuary of ancient Greece it is this and more also. The Phædriadæ, which rise sheer behind the wretched village of Kastri, shutting out the higher snow-clad Parnassus from view, seem like no earthly rocks. The Pleistos seems like no earthly river, as it murmurs far below, as if about to tell the sea that it had passed Delphi. Mount Kirphis, fronting the Phædriadæ, and closing the great theatre, seems privileged to have been allowed to stand silently gazing on all that went on in that holy place, and to have been its appointed warder, shutting it in from the eyes of all who would not struggle up here through the mountain passes.

But from reverie to fact the little village of Kastri rudely recalls us. Villagers inform us of a “megale catastrophe.” Two nights before, at midnight, a mountain torrent had come down over the Phædriadæ, tearing through the village, sweeping away two of the miserable houses, and rendering several of the adjacent ones unsafe. One child was killed, and everybody thoroughly frightened.

All inquired anxiously whether there was not a chance of the village being soon purchased for purposes of excavation. Visitors from the neighboring town of Arachova, who seemed happy that they were not living in Kastri, said that probably many Kastriots would soon leave their homes anyway, and move to Arachova.

The most important thing in Delphi was, of course, the temple of Apollo, in which was the oracular chasm, influences from which controlled Greece so long. Fragments of the temple lay all around, near and in the houses built above its ancient floor. This floor was so near the surface of the soil that one saw quite a portion of it. By digging away a few feet of earth in one place, an opening was laid bare, by which one could pass down into a series of vaults beneath this floor. Pomtow, who visited Delphi in 1884, counted himself as the third man who had ever crawled in through these vaults. But the exploit subsequently became so common that a fixed price of twelve drachmas was allowed workmen for removing the earth. Perhaps a hundred persons have undergone this crawling process, from which one came out covered with dirt from head to foot, but satisfied that he has seen all that was to be seen of the world-renowned temple.

The village school was a striking sight. Attracted by a loud buzzing sound near the house of the keeper of antiquities, with whom we lodged, we ventured in at the open door whence the sound proceeded, and found about forty boys apparently repeating something after the teacher, who, clad somewhat like the shepherd in the play of “Œdipus,” as given at Harvard University, looked like anything but a learned man. He proved to be a gentleman, however, in spite of his rough mantle. After school we ventured with him into his house, from which his family had fled, because a river of mud had flowed through the cellar, and left the walls in a tottering condition. He seemed to possess but little, and yet he took down from the rafters a cluster or two of half-dried grapes, and gave them to us, exhibiting the time-honored Greek hospitality.

But to return a moment to the school. No sooner had we arrived than a dead silence fell upon the crowd. The boys took seats on the long benches resting on the bare earth, and reading of Herodotus in modern Greek began. The first boy, with a voice pitched as high as a steam whistle of small dimensions and high pressure, started off to see how much he could read in a given time. If he saw a period coming, he would catch for breath, and dash over it like a locomotive putting on extra steam to take an up grade. To our utter amazement, the next boy beat the first both in pitch and rapidity. The teacher, without a word, watched the process with apparently rising satisfaction. Meanwhile a boy passed to and fro in the front benches, keeping things wonderfully quiet by striking the ears of the smaller boys with a little twig.

No sooner had we returned to our quarters on our first evening in Delphi, and begun to read the register of people who had visited the house in the past, than, just as we were noticing the name of Bayard Taylor, a peal of thunder reverberated through the great gorge, followed by peal on peal, with rain and lightning, lasting nearly all night. It was so impressive that we wished to expose ourselves to the rain in order the better to see and hear. A sheltering roof, however, was the best place from which to enjoy the storm as much as was possible while disturbed by thoughts of the poor villagers, exposed to further sufferings and fears. He who has not seen Delphi in a thunder-storm has not seen it in all its majesty. It seems made for such spectacles.

The excavations inaugurated by the French School at Athens, soon after our visit, have changed the aspect of Delphi in many respects. As the work has proceeded, I have made annual pilgrimages thither. While one finds the results of intense interest, and sees each year some additional important building brought to light, temple upon temple, the theatre, the stadion, the numerous treasuries of the different cities of Greece with their sculptured adornment, it is still the place itself that impresses one most of all. If one walks through the ruins just at night-fall, one need not ask why the Greeks considered this spot sacred. It is in itself “an awful place.” Olympia lies in a charming sunny valley. It was as appropriate to the brilliant games that were held there as was Delphi to the deep religious transactions and the awful oracle that spoke the doom of men and states. There were games at Delphi, as there was religion at Olympia; but at Olympia the games became at least as prominent as the worship of Father Zeus, while at Delphi it was always religion that was paramount.

It would be contrary to the plan of this book to describe in full the excavations of Delphi. It may be said that the results were in some ways disappointing to some people. From certain passages in ancient authors sprung a belief that statues in Delphi might be as “thick as hops.” The five hundred bronze statues that Nero is said to have carried away must have made only a small hole in the total number of seventy-three thousand reported by Pliny to have been still remaining in his time. Even if one suspects an error in the text, we know that Demetrios of Phaleron, who passed for a fairly modest man, had three hundred and sixty statues erected to him at Athens during the short time in which he directed the affairs of Athens. And taking this as a sample of the way statues multiplied, we can the more readily swallow Pliny’s numerals. At any rate, Delphi is classed by him with Olympia and Athens as the third of the places where statues most abounded. But, for many years after Pliny’s time, Delphi doubtless lay open to plunder. The bronzes were melted up and the marbles made into lime.

The yield of statues from the excavations has, it is true, been smaller than many expected it to be. But it would be most absurd to say that the work has been disappointing. The bronze charioteer alone, probably a subsidiary figure in the group dedicated by a member of the Syracusan family, Gelon, Hieron, Polyzalos, would have set the stamp of success upon the enterprise. And, apart from this, there is a whole museum full of statuary of the utmost importance in the history of sculpture. Tombs of the Mycenæan period with rich contents have also added to the interest of the excavations, more important in some aspects than those of Olympia. It will be years before the enormous quantity of inscriptions can be published.

The French excavators are to be congratulated upon the ease with which they got rid of their earth. Their dumping-cars were easily brought to the edge of the gorge of the Pleistos, and the contents shot down thousands of feet, never to trouble them more. How I have envied them when working at Corinth, where one of the chief difficulties has been to find a proper dumping-place for the enormous deposit of from twenty to thirty feet of earth. At Olympia, also, the brook Kladeos was very serviceable in carrying off the dump. It is a pity that one cannot always find an excavation site close by a serviceable river.

DODONA

My friend, Mr. Arthur Hill, the British Vice Consul at Piræus, being about to make a business trip through Epiros in the spring of 1891, invited me to join him. Without this invitation I should have travelled Greece very unsymmetrically, leaving out all the country west of the great Pindos range. It is fair to call this Greece, although, in defiance of the arrangements of the treaty of Berlin, most of it remains politically Turkish.

At Patras we took a little Greek coasting steamer late at night, and, with only one incident worth mentioning, arrived a little after noon the next day at Prevesa on Turkish territory. The one incident was a stop of an hour in the wonderfully retired harbor on the east coast of Ithaca. If Homer had this in mind in describing the harbor of Phorkys he might well say that the ships needed no cable there. Even half an hour on shore for a short Homeric reverie was something to be thankful for. On our boat was a man who looked for all the world like the weather-beaten Ulysses returning from his twenty-years’ absence. To my disgust he did not get off at Ithaca to hunt up Penelope, but went on to Leukas.

Arrived in Prevesa, I was made aware that we were off the beaten track by being informed that a letter which I had hastily written to send back to Athens would not even start for six days. This impression was deepened by the information that the British Consul at Prevesa had, during the seventeen years of his sojourn there, never thought of going to Joannina, two days into the interior. This was our goal. The excitement of visiting a country absolutely devoid of tourists is so rare that one may be pardoned for giving way to it.

Of course one cannot travel here without an escort. Two mounted men accompanied us everywhere in Turkey, and when we again came over the Greek frontier we were met by a sergeant and six privates.

Our first day was nearly all spent in skirting the gulf and plain of Ambrakia. One need not be impatient to get away from that beautiful region. The first object which drew our attention was the ruins of Nikopolis, about an hour out from Prevesa. The city was founded by Augustus as a magnificent trophy of his victory at Actium, at the foot of the hill on which he had pitched his tent before the battle. On sailing into Prevesa the day before, we had passed over the very waters once enlivened by that combat, and over which Antony, forgetting for once to be a soldier, followed the wanton queen in flight and left the world to Augustus.

The ruins of Nikopolis, spread out over several square miles, look imposing in the distance; but, like most Roman ruins near at hand, vulgar in comparison with Greek. The theatre is massive, and the aqueduct inspires respect for the practical sense of the conquerors of the world. The thought that St. Paul spent a winter here gives a peculiar interest to the ruins.

By pressing your way up through a part of the square miles of breast-high thistles about the theatre, you may reach the top of the hill from which Augustus looked down and saw his enemy apparently strong. The whole world for which he was about to grapple affords few scenes of greater beauty than that which lay before his eye.

The road over which our carriage proceeded was a testimonial that the Turks have been misrepresented by the traveller who said:

“It is a favorite idea with all barbarous princes that the badness of the roads adds considerably to the natural strength of their dominions. The Turks and Persians are undoubtedly of this opinion; the public highways are, therefore, neglected, and particularly so toward the frontiers.”

The road was being made into a good one, but as long stretches of it were covered with piles of dirt, and on a level three or four feet above the older parts, getting on was attended with difficulty. But the Turks could not be considered devoid of energy when they put so much work upon the road which everybody was then prophesying would in a few years pass into the hands of the Greeks. It may be that the “sick man” thought he might yet use that road for military operations which would trouble his southern neighbors. At any rate he did so.

Along the foot of the mountains which bound the plain of Ambrakia to the north, out from under the well-built road, copious fountains of clear, cold water gush, contributing to the river Luro, the ancient Charadros, which here overflows its banks far and wide; and a most luxuriant tangle of trees and vines, standing often in several inches of water, impenetrable as an Indian jungle, astonishes one accustomed to judge the vegetation of Greece by its eastern parts.

Our second day’s journey was up the gorge of the Luro to its sources, and then over a ridge into the plain of Joannina. For six hours we had one continuous vale of Tempe. One does not hear enough of this region. Who, for instance, ever hears of Rogus, a ruin which we passed toward evening on the first day? Yet here is an acropolis which one sees from a great distance—such an imposing affair that I supposed for a long time that it must be Ambrakia. There are remains of fine old Hellenic walls, on which stood Byzantine walls now badly crumbled. Leake supposes Rogus to be the ancient Charadra.

Along with us went a large family of Jews, seeking among the Turks a safer residence than the Ionian Islands, where just then the Jew was made very uncomfortable. As we halted at noon of the first day by a large oak-tree, on the shore of a brook, it was interesting to see groups, Christian, Jew, and Turk, taking their meals at quite an interval from one another, but all under the shade of the same tree. As we came into Joannina, the Jews were subjected to a searching examination, but we were not examined at all. We heard afterward that the father of this family was suspected of bringing a lot of letters, thus defrauding the Turkish Government of its postage fee.

But I have delayed so long over preliminaries that I can hardly be just to Joannina itself. In fact, to be just to Joannina one should write a book, and not an article. As one approaches the great plain and lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains, one feels that here, as now, must always have been the principal settlement of the whole region. The name Joannina (pronounced Yanina) appears in Byzantine annals as early as the ninth century, when mention is made of a bishop of Joannina about three hundred and fifty years after the last mention of a bishop of Dodona. Though not standing on the same site, it is the successor of Dodona. But its history is essentially Turkish. Perhaps its greatest distinction is that it was the capital of Ali Pasha, who, in the first twenty years of the present century, had established, by an energetic unscrupulousness which reminds one of Demosthenes’s picture of Philip of Macedon, a sovereignty practically independent of the Sultan, almost as large as the Sultan’s other European possessions. Ali had a sort of thirst for blood, which appears not to have belonged to Philip. The Greeks, however, seem to have forgiven him the slaughter of their fathers and mothers in deference to his genius, and to take a local pride in the monster. Most of the stories told about him are records of some murder or other. Most of the compliments which his satellites used to pay him turned on the idea that he was a good butcher. A place in the lake is still pointed out as the scene of the drowning of a dozen or so Greek women whose morals, forsooth, were not up to the high standard which Ali said he was going to set up. Some of them belonged to the best families in Joannina, and could not believe that Ali meant more than blackmail until the waters were closing over them, when they shrieked and grasped at the boat so wildly that the executioners had to become inhuman in order to carry out the commands of their lord.

But this Albanian Mussulman reckoned ill when he threw down the gauntlet to the Sultan. Retiring to an island in the lake, when he could no longer defend his capital, he was first stabbed treacherously in a parley in which he thought he was going to make terms with his master, and finally killed by shots fired through the floor from the room under that in which he had taken refuge. His head and those of his sons, who had not well supported their father in the struggle, were fastened up over the door of the Seraglio in Constantinople.

One afternoon, after conversing awhile with the successor of Ali, the present Vali or Governor-General of Epirus, if it can be called conversing to take a cup of coffee with a man, and see him smoke a cigarette, giving you meanwhile a few of his thoughts through an interpreter, we went over to the island, and saw the room in a monastery where Ali was slain. The floor was well perforated with bullet-holes.

Ali had unwittingly paved the way for Greek independence. He had shown that the power of the Sultan might be resisted for a while at least. Some of the leaders of the Greeks, who made his camp their school of war, felt that the evoking of a grand national sentiment would make them able to resist to the end. When Ali fell in 1822, Greece was already in arms.

Joannina, in the days of Ali, had, if we may believe reports, a population of 50,000. It has now not more than half that number. The Greeks are about three-quarters of the whole population, the other quarter being divided between Turks and Jews, with considerable preponderance in favor of the former, who still hold all the offices, and show by their bearing that they are the ruling class. One evening we visited the castle, which occupies a peninsula jutting out into the lake, made an island by a moat across the neck. It was positively scandalous the way those soldiers went in rags. Even the noncommissioned officers, with their torn chevrons, seemed in harmony with the walls and barracks, now tumbling to decay. But these awkward, ragged fellows seemed to have signs of strength about them, and might give a good report of themselves in battle. We lingered long over one big gun, which bore marks of service at Shipka Pass. We were reminded then that it would not do to leave out the Turk entirely in the settlement of the Eastern question.

To the west of Joannina the population is largely Albanian. This class of Albanians makes you feel that there may be some truth in the words of an English traveller, who, in classifying the Albanians, speaks of one class as “Albanians who never change their clothes.” The chronology of some of these garments of more than a hundred heterogeneous pieces would be an interesting study. Rags are generally picturesque, and these Albanians contribute somewhat to the picturesqueness of Joannina’s streets. They wear for the most part a white fez, darkened by age and dirt, which distinguishes them from the people of the city, who wear, almost to a man, the red fez. On one or two occasions when Mr. Hill started to take a photograph in the streets, before he could set up his camera, a perfect sea of red heads was formed in front of it, and the very zeal to be photographed frustrated the attempt. It was almost like evoking a mob.

But in Joannina, of all places in the world, one must not forget the past, the great Hellenic past. This region was once called Hellopia and the inhabitants Selloi, a variation for Helloi, and from here the name appears to have been transmitted to the whole of Hellas. It is quite a testimonial to the persistency of the old Hellenic spirit that travellers all notice how pure is the Greek spoken in Joannina.

Three hours’ ride across a range of hills to the south lies Dodona, at the foot of Mount Tomarus, which at the time of our visit (in May) was heavily capped with snow. This oldest oracle and sanctuary of Greece, famous before Delphi was born, has a situation only a little less imposing than Delphi. Until about twenty-five years ago one was still in doubt in just what part of this region to look for the old famous sanctuary. But at that time Carapanos, a wealthy Greek, settled that question with the spade.

Procuring from the library, by the kindness of the professor of French in the Lyceum, the two beautiful volumes in which Carapanos has given the results of his work, I took them with me to the spot where he found Dodona, and followed in his footsteps. This library, by the way, contains a good many valuable books, new and old, but they are huddled together in very close quarters, as the librarian sadly admitted, employing the English phrase “pell-mell.” But worse than the disorder was the dampness. Carapanos’s book of plates was mildewed and fallen apart. Rich Greeks probably think their benefactions more safely bestowed in Athens. Otherwise somebody would have given a new library building to Joannina.

The walls that Carapanos discovered all have a singularly late appearance, and there is a striking lack of pottery in the ground; but the inscriptions and dedicatory offerings leave no doubt that this is Dodona. The temples and the finely built theatre, one of the largest in Greece, doubtless supplied the place of older and ruder buildings of the time when all Hellas came to hear the voice of Father Zeus in the rustling oak-leaves.

At the southeastern end of the lake of Joannina is a hill called Kastritza, crowned by fortifications indicating the existence of just such a city as one would look for to match this great plain and lake. Here are walls about three miles in circuit, and, in a considerable part of their extent, twenty feet high and twelve feet thick, of the finest polygonal work. And yet, so little is known of the history of Epirus, that even the name of this city cannot be ascertained with certainty. Leake thought it was Dodona itself, placing the sanctuary, however, at a little distance, on the spot now occupied by Joannina. Kastritza might still be regarded as a possible candidate for Dodona, inasmuch as sanctuaries in Greece were often at quite a remove from the nearest town, as in the case of Epidauros and Oropos. But the fact that very little is known of any city called Dodona, as well as the fact on the other side that the sanctuary excavated by Carapanos has a small acropolis connected with it, makes it extremely improbable that this great city, Kastritza, was Dodona.

The picturesqueness of the city of Joannina is matched by its grand setting. Its lake is over a thousand feet above the sea, and streams from the amphitheatre of the snow-covered mountains keep flowing into it without finding any visible outlet. The color upon the mountains and the lake at sunrise and sunset is often wonderful. Mount Mitzikeli, which rises abruptly from the lake on its side opposite the city, is a breeder of thunder-storms. (It must be remembered that this was the abode of Jupiter Tonans in antiquity.) Sometimes at mid-day, when the sun is shining to the east and west of Joannina, a storm-cloud will come down over this mountain from the higher ones of the Pindus range back of it and make straight for the city. What a place for a painter! Leake tells of the difficulty he had in persuading the Italian painter, Lusieri, to stay beyond a day or two here because he thought he detected symptoms of malaria; but, adds Leake:

“The picturesque beauties of the place had such a powerful attraction for him that he was induced to hazard a longer visit, until his fears having been calmed by my own experience, and that of the Joanninites in general, he prolonged his stay for six weeks. The longer he remained the more he was impressed with the feeling that in the great sources of his art, the sublime and beautiful, and in their exquisite mixture and contrast, Joannina exceeds every place he had seen in Italy or Greece.”

It is a pity that the pictures which Lusieri painted here were lost at sea.

The exit from this place, where tourists are never seen and where newspapers are strictly prohibited, into the Greek world of talk and bustle was as interesting as the approach to it. Our road lay over the great pass of the Pindos into Thessaly, the pass over which Julius Cæsar led his army, when he was about to grapple with Pompey. For the first day’s ride the Arachthos was our road. We crossed it more than twenty times, when it was a credit to our horses not to be carried down the stream. Of course, keeping one’s feet entirely out of the water was impossible. At last we came to the end of that day’s journey, where the stream had dwindled to a harmless looking brook at the Wallachian town of Metzovo. These Wallachians, especially the women, look entirely different from the people round about. They talk a sort of Latin and are supposed to be a remnant of the old Roman colony of Dacia. The quaint old town, where this curious old people is wedged in among other peoples, is within two hours of the backbone of Pindos, over which we passed the next morning. Within an area of a few square miles here nearly all the rivers of Greece that flow all the year round have their head waters.

It was with something of a feeling of exaltation that we left our Turkish guards behind at the ridge of Pindos and soon found ourselves tracing the ever-widening streamlet, which was soon to become the broad Peneios, down into the land of the Greeks, not only of Greek gods and heroes of the past, but of the Greek men of to-day, who have at last here inherited what their fathers possessed.