And yet we can hardly call this a beginning. Some twenty-five years ago, a very extensive and splendidly successful excavation was made on an adjoining site, when a party of German archæologists laid bare the Theatre of Dionysus—the great theatre in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought [pg 123]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 with the sitting portrait statues of the Greeks—very deep, and with a curved back, which exceeds both in comfort and in grace any chairs designed by modern workmen.43 Each chair has the name of a priest inscribed on it, showing how the theatre 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 theatre. For after having been first beautified and adorned with statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes’s time), it was again restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or about his time, so that the theatre, 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, amongst which one—a shaggy old man, in a stooping posture, [pg 124]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 amusement, 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 centre of the theatre is empty, and was never in Greek days occupied by seats, but a wooden structure was set up in advance of 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 seats, which can hardly have been an arrangement of the old Greek theatre. They are generally supposed to have been added when the building came to be used for contests of gladiators, which Dion Chrysostom tells us were imported from Corinth in his day.

All these later additions and details are, I fear, calculated to detract from the reader’s interest in this theatre, which I should indeed regret—for nothing can be more certain than that this is the veritable stone theatre which was built when the wooden one broke down, at the great competition of Æschylus and Pratinas; and though front seats may have been added, and slight modifications introduced, the general structure can never have required alteration. The main body of the curved rows of seats have no backs, but are so deep as to leave plenty of room for the feet of the people next above; and I [pg 125]fancy that in the old times the προεδρία or right of sitting in the front rows was not given to priests, but to foreign embassies, along with the chief magistrates of Athens. The cost of admission was two obols to all the seats of the house not specially reserved, and such reservation was only for persons of official rank, and by no means for richer people, or for a higher entrance money—a thing which would not have been tolerated, I believe, for an instant by the Athenian democracy.44 When the state treasury grew full with the tribute of the subject cities, the citizens had this sum, and at times even more, distributed to them in order that no one might be excluded from the annual feast, and so the whole free population of Athens came together without expense to worship the gods by enjoying themselves in this great theatre.

It is indeed very large, though exaggerated statements have been made about its size. It is generally stated that the enormous number of thirty thousand people could fit into it—a statement I think incredible;45 and it is not nearly as large as other [pg 126]theatres I have seen, at Syracuse, at Megalopolis, or even at Argos. This also 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 cannot, I fancy, have been far from the original top of the house. Such a thing were impossible where thirty thousand 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, which shows that in some theatres the difficulty was felt; and in the extant plays, asides are so rare46 that it must have been difficult to give them with effect.

In one respect, however, the voice must have been more easily heard through the old house than it now is through the ruins. The back of the stage was built up with a high wooden structure to represent fixed scenes, and even a sort of upper story on which gods and flying figures sometimes appeared—an arrangement which of course threw the voice forward into the theatre. There used to be an old idea, not perhaps yet extinct, that the Greek audiences had the lovely natural scenery of their country for their stage decoration, and that they embraced in one view the characters on the stage, and the coasts [pg 127]and islands for miles behind them. Nothing can be more absurd, or more opposed to Greek feeling on such matters. In the first place, as is well known, a feeling for the beauty of landscape as such was almost foreign to the Greeks, who never speak of the picturesque in their literature without special relation to the sounds of nature, or to the intelligences which were believed to pervade and animate it: a fine view as such had little attraction for them. In the second place, they came to the theatre to enjoy poetry, and the poetry of character, of passion, of the relation of man and his destiny to the course of Divine Providence and Divine justice—in short, to assume a frame of mind perfectly inconsistent with the distractions of landscape. For that purpose they had their stage, as we now know, filled in at the back with high painted scenes, which in earlier days were made of light woodwork and canvas, to bear easy removal, or change, but which in most Græco-Roman theatres, like the very perfect one at Aspendus, or indeed that of Herodes Atticus close by at Athens, were a solid structure of at least two stories high, which absolutely excluded all prospect.

But even had the Athenians not been protected by this arrangement from outer disturbance, I found by personal investigation that there was no view for them to enjoy! Except from the highest tiers, and therefore from the worst places, the sea and islands [pg 128]are not visible, and the only view to be obtained, supposing that houses did not obstruct it, would have been the dull, somewhat bleak, undulating hills which stretch between the theatre and Phalerum.

The back scenes of the Greek theatres were painted as ours are, and at first, I suppose, very rudely indeed, for we hear particularly of a certain Agatharchus, who developed the art of scene-painting by adopting perspective.47 The other appurtenances of the Greek theatre were equally rude, or perhaps I should say equally stiff and conventional, and removed from any attempt to reproduce ordinary life—at least this was the case with their tragedy, their satyric dramas, and their older comedy, which dealt in masks, in fixed stage dresses, in tragic padding, and stuffing-out to an unnatural size, in comic distortions and indecent emblems—in all manner of conventional ugliness, we should say, handed down from the first religious origin of these performances, and maintained with that strict conservatism which marks the course of all great Greek art. The stage was long and narrow, the means of changing scenes cumbrous and not frequently employed; the number of the actors in tragedy strictly limited—four is an unusual number, exceptionally employed in the second Œdipus of Sophocles. In fact, we cannot [pg 129]say that the Greek drama ever became externally like ours till the comedies of Menander and his school. These poets, living in an age when serious interests had decayed, when tragedy had ceased to be religious, and comedy political, when neither was looked upon any longer as a great public engine of instruction or of censure, turned to pictures of social life, not unlike our genteel comedy; and in this species of drama we may assert that the Greeks, except perhaps for masks, imitated the course of ordinary life.

It is indeed said of Euripides, the real father of this new comedy, that he brought down the tragic stage from ideal heroism to the passions and meannesses of ordinary men; and Sophocles, his rival, the supposed perfection of an Attic tragedian, is reputed to have observed that he himself had represented men as they ought to be, Euripides as they were. But any honest reader of Euripides will see at once how far he too is removed from the ordinary realisms of life. He saw, indeed, that human passion is the subject, of all others, which will permanently interest human thought; he felt that the insoluble problems of Free Will and Fate, of the mercy and the cruelty of Providence, were too abstract on the one hand, and too specially Greek on the other; that, after all, human nature as such is the great universal field on which any age can reach the sympathy and the interest of its remotest successors. [pg 130]But the passions painted by Euripides were no ordinary passions—they were great and unnatural crimes, forced upon suffering mortals by the action of hostile deities; the virtues of Euripides were no ordinary virtues—they were great heroic self-sacrifices, and showed the Divine element in our nature, which no tyranny of circumstances can efface. His Phædra and Medea on the one hand, his Alcestis and Iphigenia on the other, were strictly characters as they ought to be in tragedy, and not as they commonly are in life; and in outward performance Euripides did not depart from the conventional stiffness, from the regular development, from the somewhat pompous and artificial dress in which tragedy had been handed down to him by his masters.

They, too, had not despised human nature—how could they? Both Æschylus and Sophocles were great painters of human character, as well in its passions as in its reasonings. But the former had made it accessory, so to speak, to the great religious lessons which he taught; the latter had at least affected to do so, or imagined that he did, while really the labyrinths of human character had enticed and held him in their endless maze. Thus, all through Greek tragedy there was on the one hand a strong element of conventional stiffness, of adherence to fixed subjects, and scenes, and masks, and dresses—of adherence to fixed metres, and regular dialogues, where question and answer were balanced line for line, and the [pg 131]cast of characters was as uniform as it is in the ordinary Italian operas of our own day. But on the other hand, these tragic poets were great masters of expression, profound students not only of the great world problems, but of the problems of human nature, exquisite masters too of their language, not only in its dramatic force, but in its lyric sweetness; they summed up in their day all that was great and beautiful in Greek poetry, and became the fullest and ripest fruit of that wonderful tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which even now makes those that taste it to be as gods.

Such, then, were the general features of the tragedy which the Athenian public, and the married women, including many strangers, assembled to witness in broad daylight under the Attic sky. They were not sparing of their time. They ate a good breakfast before they came. They ate sweetmeats in the theatre when the acting was bad. Each play was short, and there was doubtless an interval of rest. But it is certain that each poet contended as a rule with four plays against his competitors; and as there were certainly three of them, there must have been twelve plays acted; this seems to exceed the endurance of any public, even allowing two days for the performance. We are not fully informed on these points. We do not even know how Sophocles, who contended with single plays, managed to compete against Euripides, who con[pg 132]tended with sets of four. But we know that the judges were chosen by lot, and we strongly suspect, from the records of their decisions, that they often decided wrongly. We also know that the poets sought to please the audience by political and patriotic allusions, and to convey their dislike of opposed cities or parties by drawing their representatives in odious colors on the stage. Thus Euripides is never tired of traducing the Spartans in the character of Menelaus. Æschylus fights the battle of the Areopagus in his Eumenides.

But besides all this, it seems that tragic poets were regarded as the proper teachers of morality, and that the stage among the Greeks occupied somewhat the place of the modern pulpit. This is the very attitude which Racine assumes in the Preface to his Phèdre. He suggests that it ought to be considered the best of his plays, because there is none in which he has so strictly rewarded virtue and punished vice.48 He [pg 133]alters, in his Iphigénie, the Greek argument from which he copied, because as he tells us (again in the Preface) it would never do to have so virtuous a person as Iphigenia sacrificed. This, however, would not have been a stumbling-block to the Greek poet, whose capricious and spiteful gods, or whose deep conviction of the stain of an ancestral curse, would justify catastrophies which the Christian poet, with his trust in a benevolent Providence, could not admit. But, indeed, in most other points the so-called imitations of the Greek drama by Racine and his school are anything but imitations. The main characters and the general outline of the plot are no doubt borrowed. The elegance and power of the dialogue are more or less successfully copied. But the natural and familiar scenes, which would have been shocking to the court of Louis XIV.—“ces scenes entremêlées de bas comique, et ces fréquents exemples de mauvais ton et d’une [pg 134]familiarité choquante,” as Barthélémy says—such characters as the guard in the Antigone, the nurse in the Choephorœ, the Phrygian in the Orestes, were carefully expunged. Moreover, love affairs and court intrigues were everywhere introduced, and the language was never allowed to descend from its pomp and grandeur. Most of the French dramatists were indeed bad Greek scholars,49 and knew the plays from which they copied either through very poor translations, or through the rhetorical travesties surviving under the name of Seneca, which were long thought fully equal to the great and simple originals.

So the French of the seventeenth century, starting from these half-understood models, and applying rigidly the laws of tragedy which they had deduced, with questionable logic, from that very untrustworthy guide, our text of the Poetics of Aristotle, created a drama which became so unlike what it professed to imitate, that most good modern French critics have occupied themselves with showing the contrasts of old Greek tragedy to that of the modern stage. They are always praising the naiveté, the familiarity, the irregularity of the old dramatists; they are always noting touches of common life and of ordinary motive quite foreign to the dignity of Racine, and Voltaire, and Alfieri.50 They think that the real [pg 135]parallel is to be found not among them, but in Shakespeare. Thus their education makes them emphasize the very qualities which we admit, but should not cite, as the peculiarities of Greek tragedy. We are rather struck with its conventionalities, with its strict adherence to fixed form, with its somewhat stilted diction, and we wonder how it came to be so great and natural within these trammels.

Happily the tendency in our own day to reproduce antiquity faithfully, and not in modern recasting, has led to the translating, and even to the representing, of Greek tragedies in their purity, and it does not require a knowledge of Greek to obtain some real acquaintance with these great masterpieces. Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Dean Milman, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Whitelaw, and many others, have placed faithful and elegant versions within our reach. But since I have cautioned the reader not versed in Greek against adopting Racine’s or Alfieri’s plays as adequate substitutes, I venture to give the same advice concerning the more Greek and antique plays of Mr. Swinburne, which, in spite of their splendor, are still not really Greek plays, but modern plays based on Greek models. The relief produced by ordinary [pg 136]talk from ordinary characters, which has been already noticed, is greatly wanting in his very lofty, and perhaps even strained, dialogue. Nor are his choruses the voice of the vulgar public, combining high sentiments with practical meanness, but elaborate and very difficult speculations, which comment metaphysically on the general problems of the play. There is nothing better worth reading than the Atalanta in Calydon. The Greek scholar sees everywhere how thoroughly imbued the author is with Greek models. But it will not give to the mere English reader any accurate idea of a real Greek tragedy. He must go to Balaustion’s Adventure, or Aristophanes’s Apology, or some other professed translation, and follow it line for line, adding some such general reviews as the Etudes of M. Patin.

As for revivals of Greek plays, it seems to me not likely that they will ever succeed. The French imitations of Racine laid hold of the public because they were not imitations. And as for us nowadays, who are more familiar with the originals, a faithless reproduction would shock us, while a literal one would weary us. This at least is the effect which the Antigone produces, even with the modern choruses of Mendelssohn to relieve the slowness of the action. But, of course, a reproduction of the old chorus would be simply impossible. The whole pit in the theatre of Dionysus seems to have been left empty. A part somewhat larger than our orchestra [pg 137]was covered with a raised platform, though still lower than the stage.51 Upon this the chorus danced and sang and looked on at the actors, as in the play within the play in Hamlet. Above all, they constantly prayed to their gods, and this religious side of the performance has of course no effect upon us.52

As to old Attic comedy, it would be even more impossible to recover it for a modern public. Its local and political allusions, its broad and coarse humor, its fantastic dresses, were features which made it not merely ancient and Greek, but Athenian, and Athenian of a certain epoch. Without the Alexandrian scholiasts, who came in time to recover and note down most of the allusions, these comedies would be to the Greek scholar of to-day hardly intelligible. The new Attic comedy, of which Terence is a copy, is indeed on a modern basis, and may be faithfully reproduced, if not admired, in our day. But here, alas! the great originals of Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus are lost to us, and we must be content with the Latin accommodations.

But I have delayed too long over these Greek [pg 138]plays, and must apologize for leading away the reader from the actual theatre in which he is sitting. Yet there is hardly a place in Athens which calls 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 skeptics, 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 pronounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, of passion, and of pride.

Plato makes Socrates say, in his Apologia (pro vita sua), that a copy of Anaxagoras could be bought on the orchestra, when very dear, for a drachme, that is to say for about 9d. of our money, which may then have represented our half-crown or three shillings in value.53 The commentators have made desperate attempts to explain this. Some say the orchestra was used as a book-stall when plays were not going on—an assumption justified by no [pg 139]other hint in Greek literature. Others have far more absurdly imagined that Plato really meant you could pay a drachme for the best seat in the theatre, and read the writings of Anaxagoras in a fashionable play of Euripides, who was his friend and follower. Verily a wonderful interpretation!

If the reader will walk with me from the theatre of Dionysus past the newly excavated site of the temple of Æsculapius, and past the Roman-Greek theatre which was erected by Hadrian or Herodes Atticus, I will show him what Plato meant. Of course, this later theatre, with its solid Roman back scenes of masonry, is equally interesting with the Theatre of Dionysus to the advocates of the unity of history! But to us who are content to study Greek Athens, it need not afford any irrelevant delays. Passing round the approach to the Acropolis, we come on to a lesser hill, separated from it by a very short saddle, so that it looks like a sort of outpost or spur sent out from the rock of the Acropolis. This is the Areopagus—Mars’ Hill—which we can ascend in a few minutes. There are marks of old staircases cut in the rock. There are underneath, on our left and right, as we go up, deep black caverns, once the home of the Eumenides. On the flat top there are still some signs of a rude smoothing of the stone for seats. Under us, to the north-west, is the site of the old agora, once surrounded with colonnades, the crowded market-place of all those [pg 140]who bought and sold and talked. But on the descent from the Areopagus, and, now at least, not much higher than the level of the market-place beneath, there is a small semicircular platform, backed by the rising rock. This, or some platform close to it, which may now be hidden by accumulated soil, was the old orchestra, possibly the site of the oldest theatre, but in historical times a sort of reserved platform, where the Athenians, who had their town bristling with statues, allowed no monument to be erected save the figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton, which were carried into Persia, replaced by others, afterwards recovered, and of which we may have a copy in the two fighting figures, of archaic character, now in the Museum of Naples. It was doubtless on this orchestra, just above the bustle and thoroughfare of the agora, that booksellers kept their stalls, and here it was that the book of Anaxagoras could be bought for a drachme.

Here then was the place where that physical philosophy was disseminated which first gained a few advanced thinkers; then, through Euripides, leavened the drama, once the exponent of ancient piety; then, through the stage, the Athenian public, till we arrive at those Stoics and Epicureans who came to teach philosophy and religion not as a faith, but as a system, and to spend their time with the rest of the public in seeking out novelties of creed and of opinion as mere fashions with which people choose [pg 141]to dress their minds. And it was on this very Areopagus, where we are now standing, that these philosophers of fashion 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 addressed his audience. There are, I believe, even some respectable commentators, who transfer their own estimate of S. 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.54 This is [pg 142]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’s 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 choose 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 [pg 143]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 touch of irony, that he finds them very religious indeed,55 so religious that he even found an altar to a God professedly unknown, or perhaps unknowable.56 Probably S. Paul meant to pass from the latter sense of the word ἄγνωστος, which was, I fancy, what the inscription meant, to the former, which gave him an excellent introduction to his argument. Even the use of the singular may have been an intentional variation from the strict text, for Pausanias twice over speaks of altars to the gods who are called the ἄγνωστοι (or mysterious), but I cannot find any citation of the inscription in the singular form. However that may be, our version does not preserve the neatness of S. Paul’s point: “I find an altar,” he says, “to an unknown God. Whom then ye unknowingly worship, [pg 144]Him I announce to you.” But then he develops a conception of the great One God, not at all from the special Jewish, but from the Stoic point of view. He was preaching to Epicureans and to Stoics—to the advocates of prudence as the means, and pleasure as the end, of a happy life, on the one hand; on the other, to the advocates of duty, and of life in harmony with the Providence which governs the world for good. There could be no doubt to which side the man of Tarsus must incline. Though the Stoics of the market-place of Athens might be mere dilettanti, mere talkers about the ἀγαθόν and the great soul of the world, we know that this system of philosophy produced at Tarsus as well as at Rome the most splendid constancy, the most heroic endurance—I had almost said the most Christian benevolence. It was this stern and earnest theory which attracted all serious minds in the decay of heathenism.

Accordingly, S. Paul makes no secret of his sympathy with its nobler features. He describes the God whom he preaches as the benevolent Author of the beauty and fruitfulness of Nature, the great Benefactor of mankind by His providence, and not without constant and obtrusive witnesses of His greatness and His goodness. But he goes much further, and treads close upon the Stoic pantheism when he not only asserts, in the words of Aratus, that we are His offspring, but that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”

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 its 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 [pg 146]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 passed by as of no import compared with its heathen splendor.57 [pg 147]There are very old and very beautiful little churches in Athens, “ces délicieuses petites églises byzantines,” [pg 148]as M. Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, and unlike what one generally sees in Europe. [pg 149]They strike the observer with their quaintness and smallness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model [pg 150]of that unique and splendid building, the cathedral of S. Mark at Venice. But yet it is surprising 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! Let us hope that the man who lashes himself into rage at the destruction of the Venetian tower may set his face in time against this real piece of barbarism, if indeed it ever ventures to assert itself in act.58

I have now concluded a review of the most important old Greek buildings to be seen about Athens. To treat them exhaustively would require a far longer discussion, or special knowledge which I do not possess; and there are, moreover, smaller buildings, like the so-called Lantern of Demosthenes, which is really the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, and the Temple of the Winds, which are well worth [pg 151]a visit, but which the traveller can find without a guide, and study without difficulty. But incompleteness must be an unavoidable defect in describing any city in which new discoveries are being made, I may say, monthly, and when the museums and excavations of to-day may be any day completely eclipsed by materials now unknown, or scattered through the country. Thus, on my second visit to Athens, I found in the National Bank the wonderful treasures exhumed by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, which are in themselves enough to induce any student of Greek antiquity to revisit the town, however well he may have examined it in former years. On my third visit, they were arranged and catalogued, but we have not yet attained to any certainty about the race that left them there, and how remote the antiquity of the tombs. These considerations tend not only to vindicate the inadequateness of this review, but perhaps even to justify it in the eyes of the exacting reader, who may have expected a more thorough survey.

When you stand on the Acropolis and look round upon Attica, a great part of its history becomes immediately unravelled and clear. You see at once that you are placed in the principal plain of the country, surrounded with chains of mountains in such a way that it is easy to understand the old stories of wars with Eleusis, or with Marathon, or with any of the outlying valleys. Looking inland on the north side, as you stand beside the Erechtheum, you see straight before you, at a distance of some ten miles, Mount Pentelicus, from which all the splendid marble was once carried to the rock [pg 153]around you. This Pentelicus is a sort of intermediate cross-chain between two main lines which diverge from either side of it, and gradually widen so as to form the plain of Athens. The left or north-western chain is Mount Parnes; the right or eastern is Mount Hymettus. This latter, however, is only the inner margin of a large mountainous tract which spreads all over the rest of South Attica down to the Cape of Sunium. There are, of course, little valleys, and two or three villages, one of them the old deme Brauron, which they now pronounce Vravron. There is the town of Thorikos, near the mines of Laurium; there are two modern villages called Marcopoulos; but on the whole, both in ancient and modern times, this south-eastern part of Attica, south of Hymettus, was, with the exception of Laurium, of little moment. There is a gap between Pentelicus and Hymettus, nearly due north, through which the way leads out to Marathon; and you can see the spot where the bandits surprised in 1870 the unfortunate gentlemen who fell victims to the vacillation and incompetence of people in power at that time.

On the left side of Pentelicus you see the chain of Parnes, which almost closes with it at a far distance, and which stretches down all the north-west side of Attica till it runs into the sea as Mount Corydallus, opposite to the island of Salamis. In this long chain of Parnes (which can only be [pg 154]avoided by going up to the northern coast at Oropus, and passing into Bœotia close by the sea) there are three passes or lower points, one far to the north—that by Dekelea, where the present king has his country palace, but where of old Alcibiades planted the Spartan garrison which tormented and ruined the farmers of Attica. This pass leads you out to Tanagra in Bœotia. Next to the south, some miles nearer, is the even more famous pass of Phyle, from which Thrasybulus and his brave fellows recovered Athens and its liberty. This pass, when you reach its summit, looks into the northern point of the Thriasian plain, and also into the wilder regions of Cithæron, which border Bœotia. The third pass, and the lowest—but a few miles beyond the groves of Academe—is the pass of Daphne, which was the high road to Eleusis, along which the sacred processions passed in the times of the Mysteries; and in this pass you still see the numerous niches in which native tablets had been set by the worshippers at a famous temple of Aphrodite.

On this side of Attica also, with the exception of the Thriasian plain and of Eleusis, there extends outside Mount Parnes a wild mountainous district, quite alpine in character, which severs Attica from Bœotia, not by a single row of mountains, or by a single pass, but by a succession of glens and defiles which at once explain to the classical student, when he sees them, how necessary and fundamental were [pg 155]the divisions of Greece into its separate districts, and how completely different in character the inhabitants of each were sure to be. The way from Attica into Bœotia was no ordinary high road, nor even a pass over one mountain, but through a series of glens and valleys and defiles, at any of which a hostile army could be stopped, and each of which severed the country on either side by a difficult obstacle. This truly alpine nature of Greece is only felt when we see it, and yet must ever be kept before the mind in estimating the character and energy of the race. But let us return to our view from the Acropolis.

If we turn and look southward, we see a broken country, with several low hills between us and the sea—hills tolerably well cultivated, and when I saw them in May all colored with golden stubbles, for the corn had just been reaped. But all the plain in every direction seems dry and dusty; arid, too, and not rich alluvial soil, like the plains of Bœotia. Then Thucydides’s words come back to us, when he says Attica was “undisturbed on account of the lightness of its soil” (ἀστασίαστος οὖσα διὰ τὸ λεπτόγεων), as early invaders rather looked out for richer pastures. This reflection, too, of Thucydides applies equally to the mountains of Attica round Athens, which are not covered with rich grass and dense shrubs, like Helicon, like Parnassus, like the glades of Arcadia, but seem so bare that we wonder where the bees of [pg 156]Hymettus can find food for their famous honey. It is only when the traveller ascends the rocky slopes of the mountain that he finds its rugged surface carpeted with quantities of little wild flowers, too insignificant to give the slightest color to the mountain, but sufficient for the bees, which are still making their honey as of old. This honey of Hymettus, which was our daily food at Athens, is now not very remarkable either for color or flavor. It is very dark, and not by any means so good as the honey produced in other parts of Greece—not to say on the heather hills of Scotland and Ireland. I tasted honey at Thebes and at Corinth which was much better, especially that of Corinth made in the hills toward Cleonæ, where the whole country is scented with thyme, and where thousands of bees are buzzing eagerly through the summer air. But when the old Athenians are found talking so much about honey, we must not forget that sugar was unknown to them, and that all their sweetmeats depended upon honey exclusively. Hence the culture and use of it assumed an importance not easily understood among moderns, who are in possession of the sugar-cane.

But amid all the dusty and bare features of the view, the eye fastens with delight on one great broad band of dark green, which, starting from the west side of Pentelicus, close to Mount Parnes in the north, sweeps straight down the valley, passing about [pg 157]two miles to the west of Athens, and reaching to the Peiræus. This is the plain of the Kephissus, and these are the famous olive woods which contain with them the deme Colonus, so celebrated by Sophocles, and the groves of Academe, at their nearest point to the city. The dust of Athens, and the bareness of the plain, make all walks about the town disagreeable, save either the ascent of Lycabettus, or a ramble into these olive woods. The River Kephissus, which waters them, is a respectable, though narrow river, even in summer often discharging a good deal of water, but much divided into trenches and arms, which are very convenient for irrigation.59 So there is a strip of country, fully ten miles long, and perhaps two wide on the average, which affords delicious shade and greenness and the song of birds, instead of hot sunlight and dust and the shrill clamor of the tettix without.

I have wandered many hours in these delightful woods listening to the nightingales, which sing all day in the deep shade and solitude, as it were in a prolonged twilight, and hearing the plane-tree whispering to the elm,60 as Aristophanes has it, and [pg 158]seeing the white poplar show its silvery leaves in the breeze, and wondering whether the huge old olive stems, so like the old pollarded stumps in Windsor Forest, could be the actual sacred trees, the μορίαι, under which the youth of Athens ran their races. The banks of the Kephissus, too, are lined with great reeds, and sedgy marsh plants, which stoop over into its sandy shallows and wave idly in the current of its stream. The ouzel and the kingfisher start from under one’s feet, and bright fish move out lazily from their sunny bay into the deeper pool. Now and then through a vista the Acropolis shows itself in a framework of green foliage, nor do I know any more enchanting view of that great ruin.

All the ground under the dense olive-trees was covered with standing corn, for here, as in Southern Italy, the shade of trees seems no hindrance to the ripening of the ear. But there was here thicker wood than in Italian corn-fields; on the other hand, there was not that rich festooning of vines which spread from tree to tree, and which give a Neapolitan summer landscape so peculiar a charm. A few homesteads there were along the roads, and even at one of the bridges a children’s school, full of those beautiful fair children whose heads remind one so strongly of the old Greek statues. But all the houses were walled in, and many of them seemed solitary and deserted. The memories of rapine and violence were still there. I was told, indeed, that [pg 159]no country in Europe was so secure, and I confess I found it so myself in my wanderings; but when we see how every disturbance or war on the frontier revives again the rumor of brigandage, I could not help feeling that the desert state of the land, and the general sense of insecurity, however irrational in the intervals of peace, was not surprising.

There is no other excursion in the immediate vicinity of Athens of any like beauty or interest. The older buildings in the Peiræus are completely gone. No trace of the docks or the deigma remains; and the splendid walls, built as Thucydides tells us with cut stone, without mortar or mud, and fastened with clamps of iron fixed with lead—this splendid structure has been almost completely destroyed. We can find, indeed, elsewhere in Attica—at Phyle—still better at Eleutheræ—specimens of this sort of building, but at the Peiræus there are only foundations remaining. Yet it is not really true that the great wall surrounding the Peiræus has totally disappeared. Even at the mouth of the harbor single stones may be seen lying along the rocky edge of the water, of which the size and the square cutting prove the use for which they were originally intended. But if the visitor to the Peiræus will take the trouble to cross the hill, and walk round the harbor of Munychia, he will find on the eastern point of the headland a neat little café, with com[pg 160]fortable seats, and with a beautiful view. The sea coast all round this headland shows the bed of the surrounding sea wall, hewn in the live rock. The actual structure is preserved in patches on the western point of this harbor, where the coast is very steep; but in the place to which I refer, we can trace the whole course of the wall a few feet above the water, cut out in the solid rock. I know no scanty specimen of Athenian work which gives a greater idea of the enormous wealth and energy of the city. The port of Munychia had its own theatre and temples, and it was here that Pausanias saw the altar to the gods called the unknown. The traces of the sea wall cease as soon as it reaches the actual narrow mouth of the little harbor. I do not know how far toward Phalerum it can be traced, but when visiting the harbor called Zea61 on another occasion, I did not observe it. The reader will find in any ancient atlas, or in any history of Greece, a map of the harbors of Athens, so that I think it unnecessary to append one here.

The striking feature in the present Peiræus, which from the entrance of the harbor is very picturesque, is undoubtedly the rapid growth and extension of [pg 161]factories, with English machinery and overseers. When last there I found fourteen of these establishments, and their chimneys were becoming quite a normal feature in Greek landscape. Those which I visited were working up the cotton and the wool of the country into calico and other stuffs, which are unfortunately coming into fashion among the lower classes, and ousting the old costume. I was informed that boys were actually forbidden to attend school in Greek dress, a regulation which astonishes any one who knows the beauty and dignity of the national costume.

A drive to the open roadstead of Phalerum is more repaying. Here it is interesting to observe how the Athenians passed by the nearest sea, and even an open and clear roadstead, in order to join their city to the better harbor and more defensible headland of Peiræus. Phalĕrum, as they now call it, though they spell it with an η, is the favorite bathing-place of modern Athens, with an open-air theatre, and is about a mile and a half nearer the city than Peiræus. The water is shallow, and the beach is of fine sand, so that for ancient ships, which I suppose drew little water, it was a convenient landing-place, especially for the disembarking of troops, who could choose their place anywhere around a large crescent, and actually land fighting, if necessary. But the walls of Athens, the long walls to Peiræus, and its lofty fortifications, made this roadstead of no use to the [pg 162]enemy so long as Athens held the command of the sea, and could send out ships from the secure little harbors of Zea and Munychia, which are on the east side and in the centre of the headland of Peiræus. There was originally a third wall, too, to the east side of the Phaleric bay, but this seems to have been early abandoned when the second long wall, or middle wall, as it was originally called, was completed.

At the opening of the Peloponnesian war it appears that the Athenians defended against the Lacedæmonians, not the two long walls which ran close together and parallel to Peiræus, but the northern of these, and the far distant Phaleric wall. It cannot but strike any observer as extraordinary how the Athenians should undertake such an enormous task. Had the enemy attacked anywhere suddenly and with vigor, it seems hard to understand how they could have kept him out. According to Thucydides’s accurate detail,62 the wall to Phalerum was nearly four miles, that to Peiræus four and a half. There were in addition five miles of city wall, and nearly three of Peiræus wall. That is to say, there were about seventeen miles of wall to be pro[pg 163]tected. This is not all. The circuit was not closed, but separated by about a mile of beach between Peiræus and Phalerum, so that the defenders of the two extremities could in no way promptly assist each other. Thucydides tells us that a garrison of 16,000 inferior soldiers, old men, boys, and metics, sufficed to do this work. We are forced to conclude that not only were the means of attacking walls curiously incomplete, but even the dash and enterprise of modern warfare cannot have been understood by the Greeks. For we never hear of even a bold attempt on this absurdly straggling fortification, far less of any successful attempt to force it.

But it is time that we should leave the environs of Athens,63 and wander out beyond the borders of the Athenian plain into the wilder outlying parts of the land. Attica is, after all, a large country, if one does not apply railway measures to it. We think thirty miles by rail very little, but thirty miles by road is a long distance, and implies land enough to support a large population and to maintain many flourishing towns. We can wander thirty miles from Athens through Attica in several directions—to Eleutheræ, on the western Bœotian frontier; to Oropus, on the north; and Sunium, on [pg 164]the south. Thus it is only when one endeavors to know Attica minutely that one finds how much there is to be seen, and how long a time is required to see it. And fortunately enough there is an expedition, and that not the least important, where we can avoid the rough paths and rougher saddles of the country, and coast in a steamer along a district at all times obscure in history, and seldom known for anything except for being the road to Sunium. Strabo gives a list of the demes along this seaboard,64 and seems only able to write one fact about them—a line from an old oracle in the days of the Persian war, which prophesied that “the women of Colias will roast their corn with oars,”65 alluding to the wrecks driven on shore here by the northwest wind from Salamis. Even the numerous little islands along this coast were in his day, as they now are, perfectly barren. Yet with all its desolation it is exceedingly picturesque and varied in outline.

We took ship in the little steamer66 belonging to the Sunium Mining Company, who have built a village called Ergasteria, between Thorikos and the promontory, and who were obliging enough to allow us to sail in the boat intended for their private traffic. We left the Peiræus on one of those peculiarly Greek mornings, with a blue sky and very [pg 165]bright sun, but with an east wind so strong and clear, so λαμπρός, as the old Greeks would say, that the sea was driven into long white crests, and the fishing-boats were lying over under their sails. These fresh and strong winds, which are constantly blowing in Greece, save the people very much from the bad effects of a very hot southern climate. Even when the temperature is high the weather is seldom sultry; and upon the sea, which intrudes everywhere, one can always find a cool and refreshing atmosphere. The Greeks seem not the least to fear these high winds, which are generally steady and seldom turn to squalls. The smallest boats are to be seen scudding along on great journeys from one island to another—often with a single occupant, who sits holding the helm with one hand, and the stern sheet with the other. All the ferry-boats in the Peiræus are managed in this way, and you may see their great sails, like sea-gulls’ wings, leaning over in the gale, and the spray dashing from the vessel’s prow. We met a few larger vessels coming up from Syra, but on the whole the sea was well-nigh as desert as the coast; so much so, that the faithful dog, which was on board each of those boats, thought it his serious duty to stand up on the taffrail and bark at us as a strange and doubtful company.

So, after passing many natural harbors and spacious bays, many rocky headlands and bluff islands—but all desert and abandoned by track of man, we [pg 166]approached the famous cape, from which the white pillars of the lofty old temple gleamed brilliantly in the sun. They were the first and only white marble pillars which I saw in Greece. Elsewhere, dust and age, if not the hand of man, have colored that splendid material with a dull golden hue; but here the sea breeze, while eating away much of the surface, has not soiled them with its fresh brine, and so they still remain of the color which they had when they were set up. We should fain conjecture that here, at all events, the Greeks had not applied the usual blue and red to decorate this marvellous temple; that—for the delight and benefit of the sailors, who hailed it from afar, as the first sign of Attica—its brilliant white color was left to it, to render it a brighter beacon and a clearer object in twilight and in mist. I will not yet describe it, for we paid it a special visit, and must speak of it in greater detail; but even now, when we coasted round the headland, and looked up to its shining pillars standing far aloft into the sky, it struck us with the most intense interest. It was easy, indeed, to see how Byron’s poetic mind was here inspired with some of his noblest lines.

When we turned from it seaward, we saw stretched out in échelon that chain of Cyclades, which are but a prolongation of the headland—Keos, Kyphnos, Seriphos, Siphnos, and in the far distance, Melos—Melos, the scene of Athens’s violence and [pg 167]cruelty, when she filled up, in the mind of the old historian, the full measure of her iniquity. And as we turned northward, the long island, or islet, of Helena, which stretches along the point, like Hydra off that of Argolis, could not hide from us the mountain ranges of Eubœa, still touched here and there with snow. A short run against the wind brought us to the port of Ergasteria, marked very strangely in the landscape by the smoke of its chimneys—the port where the present produce of the mines of Laurium is prepared and shipped for Scotland.

We found ourselves when we landed in an awkward predicament. The last English engineer remaining in the Mining Company, at whose invitation we had ventured into this wild district, had suddenly left, that morning, for Athens. His house was shut up, and we were left friendless and alone, among [pg 168]three thousand of these Aristideses and Epaminondases, whose appearance was, as I have said, anything but reassuring. We did what was best to meet the difficulty, and what was not only the best thing to do, but the only thing, and it turned out very well indeed. We went to the temporary director of the mines, a very polished gentleman, with a charming wife, both of whom spoke French excellently. We stated our case, and requested hospitality for the night. Nothing could be more friendly than our reception. This benevolent man and his wife took us into their own house, prepared rooms for us, and promised to let us see all the curiosities of the country. Thus our misfortune became, in fact, a very good fortune. The night, however, it must be confessed, was spent in a very unequal conflict with mosquitoes—an inconvenience which our good hostess in vain endeavored to obviate by giving us a strong-smelling powder to burn in our room, and shutting all the windows. But had the remedy been even successful, it is very doubtful whether it was not worse than the disease.

We started in the morning by a special train—for the company have a private line from the coast up to the mines—to ascend the wooded and hilly country into the region so celebrated of old as one of the main sources of Athenian wealth. As the train wound its way round the somewhat steep ascent, our prospect over the sea and its islands [pg 169]became larger and more varied. The wild rocks and forests of southern Eubœa—one of the few districts in Greece which seem to have been as savage and deserted in old days as they are now—detached themselves from the intervening island of Helena. We were told that wild boars were still to be found in Eubœa. In the hills about Laurium, hares, which Xenophon so loved to hunt in his Elean retreat, and turtle doves, seemed the only game attainable. All the hills were covered with stunted underwood.

The mines of Laurium appear very suddenly in Attic history, but from that time onward are a prominent part of the wealth of the Athenians. We know that in Solon’s day there was great scarcity of money, and that he was obliged to depreciate the value of the coinage—a very violent and unprecedented measure, never repeated; for, all through later history, Attic silver was so good that it circulated at a premium in foreign parts just as English money does now. Accordingly, in Solon’s time we hear no mention of this great and almost inexhaustible source of national wealth. All through the reign of the Peisistratids there is a like silence. Suddenly, after the liberation of Athens, we hear of Themistocles persuading the people to apply the very large revenue from these mines to the building of a fleet for the purpose of the war with Ægina.67 [pg 170]The so-called Xenophon On the Attic Revenues—a tract which is almost altogether about these mines—asserts indeed that they had been worked from remote antiquity; and there can be little doubt that here, as elsewhere in Greece, the Phœnicians had been the forerunners of the natives in the art of mining. Here, as in Thasos, I believe the Phœnicians had their settlements; and possibly a closer survey of the great underground passages, which are still there, may give us some proof by inscriptions or otherwise.

But what happened after the Semitic traders had been expelled from Greek waters?—for expelled they were, though, perhaps, far later from some remote and unexplored points than we usually imagine. I suppose that when this took place Athens was by no means in a condition to think about prosecuting trade at Sunium. Salamis, which was far closer and a more obvious possession, was only conquered in Solon’s day, after a long and [pg 171]tedious struggle; and I am perfectly certain that the Athenians could have had no power to hold an outlying dependency, separated by thirty miles of the roughest mountain country, when they had not subdued an island scarcely a mile from the Thriasian plain and not ten miles from Athens. I take it, then, that the so-called συνοικισμός, or unifying of Athens, in prehistoric times, by Theseus, or whoever did it, was not a cementing of all Attica, including these remote corners, but only of the settlements about the plains of Attica, Marathon, and Eleusis; and that the southern end of the peninsula was not included in the Athens of early days. It was, in fact, only accessible by a carefully constructed artificial road, such as we hear of afterward, or by sea. The Athenians had not either of these means of access at so early a period. And it is not a little remarkable that the first mention of their ownership of the silver mines is associated with the building of a fleet to contend with Ægina. I have no doubt that Themistocles’s advice has been preserved without his reasons for it. He persuaded the Athenians to surrender their surplus revenue from Laurium, to build ships against the Æginetans, simply because they found that without ships the Æginetans would be practically sole possessors of the mines. They were far closer to Laurium by sea than Athens was by land—closer, indeed, in every way—and I am led to suspect that, in the days before Solon, the [pg 172]mines may have been secretly worked by Ægina, and not by Athens. I cannot here enter into my full reasons, but I fancy that Peisistratus and his sons—not by conquest, but by some agreement—got practical possession of the mines, and were, perhaps, the first to make all Attica really subject to the power of Athens.68 But no sooner are they expelled than the Æginetans renew their attacks or claims on Laurium; and it is only the Athenian fleet which secures to Athens its possession. We hear of proceedings of Hippias about coinage,69 which are adduced by Aristotle as specimens of injustice, or sharp practice, and which may have something to do with the acquisition of the silver mines by his dynasty. But I must cut short this serious dissertation.

Our special train brought us up slowly round wooded heights, and through rich green brakes, into a lonely country, from which glimpses of the sea could, however, still be seen, and glimpses of blue islands, between the hills. And so we came to the settlements of the modern miners. The great Company, whose guests we were, had been started some [pg 173]years ago, by French and Italian speculators, and Professor Anstead had been there as geologist for some years. But the jealousy of the Greeks, when they found out that profit was rewarding foreign enterprise, caused legislation against the Company; various complications followed, so that at last they gladly sold their interest to a native Company. In 1887 this Company was still thriving; and I saw in the harbor a large vessel from Glasgow, which had come to carry the lead to Scotland, when prepared in blocks—all the produce being still bought by a single English firm.

When the Greeks discuss these negotiations about the mines they put quite a different color on the affair. They say that the French and Italians desired to evade fair payment for the ground-rent of the mines, trusting to the strength of their respective governments, and the weakness of Greece. The Company’s policy is described in Greece as an over-reaching, unscrupulous attempt to make great profits by sharp bargains with the natives, who did not know the value of their property. A great number of obscure details are adduced in favor of their arguments, and it seemed to me that the Greeks were really convinced of their truth. In such a matter it would be unfair to decide without stating both sides; and I am quite prepared to change my present conviction that the Greeks were most to blame, if proper reasons can be assigned. But the legis[pg 174]lative Acts passed in their Parliament look very ugly indeed at first sight.

The principal Laurium Company70 never enter the mines at all, but gather the great mass of scoriæ, which the old Athenians threw out after smelting with more imperfect furnaces and less heat than ours. These scoriæ, which look like stone cinders, have been so long there that some vegetation has at last grown over them, and the traveller does not suspect that all the soil around was raised and altered by the hand of man. Owing to the power of steam, and their railway, the present miners carry down the scoriæ on trucks to the sea-coast, to Ergasteria, and there smelt them. The old Athenians had their furnaces in the middle of the mountains, where many of them are still to be seen. They sought chiefly for silver, whereas the modern Company are chiefly in pursuit of lead, and obtain but little silver from the scoriæ.

In many places you come upon the openings of the old pits, which went far into the bowels of the mountains, through miles of underground galleries and passages. Our engine-driver—an intelligent Frenchman—stopped the train to show us one of these entrances, which went down almost straight, with good steps still remaining, into the earth. He assured us that the other extremity which was known, [pg 175]all the passage being open, was some two or three miles distant, at a spot which he showed us from a hill. Hearing that inscriptions were found in these pits, and especially that the name of Nicias had been discovered there, we were very anxious to descend and inspect them. This was promised to us, for the actual pits were in the hands of another Greek Company, who were searching for new veins of silver. But when we arrived at the spot the officers of the Company were unwilling to let us into the pits. The proper overseer was away—intentionally, of course. There were no proper candles; there were no means of obtaining admission: so we were balked in our inquiry. But we went far enough into the mouth of one of them to see that these pits were on a colossal scale, well arched up; and, I suppose, had we gone far enough, we should have found the old supports, of which the Athenian law was so careful.

The author of the tract on “Athenian Revenue” says that the riches of the mines were absolutely unbounded; that only a small part of the silver district had been worked out, though the digging had gone on from time immemorial; and that after innumerable laborers had been employed the mines always appeared equally rich, so that no limit need be put on the employment of capital. Still he speaks of opening a new shaft as a most risky speculation. His general estimate appears, however, somewhat exaggerated. The writer confesses that the number of laborers was in his day diminishing, and the majority of the proprietors were then beginners; so that there must have been great interruption of work during the Peloponnesian War. In the age of Philip there were loud complaints that the speculations in mining were unsuccessful; and for obtaining silver, at all events, no reasonable prospect seems to have been left. In the first century of our era, Strabo (ix. i. 23) says that these once celebrated mines were exhausted,71 that new mining did not pay, and thus people were smelting the poorer ore, and the scoriæ from which the ancients had imperfectly separated the metal. He adds that the main product of the mining district was in his day honey, which was especially known as smokeless (ἀκάπνιστον), on ac[pg 177]count of its good preparation. This in itself shows that the mining had decayed, for now all the flowers in the neighborhood of the smelting are killed by the black fumes.

There is but one more point suggested by these mines, which it is not well to pass over when we are considering the working of them in ancient times. Nothing is more poisonous than the smoke from lead-mines; and for this reason the people at Ergasteria have built a chimney more than a mile long to the top of a neighboring hill, where the smoke escapes. Even so, when the wind blows back the smoke, all the vegetation about the village is at once blighted, and there is no greater difficulty than to keep a garden within two or three miles of this chimney. As the Athenians did not take such precautions, we are not surprised to hear from them frequent notices of the unhealthiness of the district, for when there were many furnaces, and the smoke was not drawn away by high chimneys, we can hardly conceive life to have been tolerable. What then must have been the condition of the gangs of slaves which Nicias and other respectable and pious Athenians kept in these mines? Two or three allusions give us a hideous [pg 178]insight into this great social sore, which has not been laid bare, because the wild district of Laurium, and the deep mines under its surface, have concealed the facts from the ordinary observer. Nicias, we are told, let out one thousand slaves to Sosias the Thracian, at an obolus a day each—the lessee being bound to restore them to him the same in number.

The meaning of this frightful contract is only too plain. The yearly rent paid for each slave was about half the full price paid for him in the market. It follows that, if the slave lived for three years, Nicias made a profit of 50 per cent. on his outlay. No doubt, some part of this extraordinary bargain must be explained by the great profits which an experienced miner could make—a fact supported by the tract on the Revenues, which cannot date more than a generation later than the bargain of Nicias. The lessee, too, was under the additional risk of the slaves escaping in time of war, when a hostile army might make a special invasion into the mountain district for the purpose of inflicting a blow on this important part of Athenian revenue. In such cases, it may be presumed that desperate attempts were made by the slaves to escape, for although the Athenian slaves generally were the best treated in Greece, and had many holidays, it was very different with the gangs employed by the Thracian taskmaster. We are told that they had [pg 179]three hundred and sixty working days in the year. This, together with the poison of the atmosphere, tells its tale plainly enough.

Of course, however, an excursion to Laurium, interesting as it might be, were absurd without visiting the far more famous Sunium,—the promontory which had already struck us so much on our sea voyage round the point,—the temple which Byron has again hallowed with his immortal verse, and Turner with his hardly less immortal pencil. So we hired horses on our return from the mines, and set out on a very fine afternoon to ride down some seven or eight miles from Ergasteria to the famous promontory. Our route led over rolling hills, covered with arbutus and stunted firs; along valleys choked with deep, matted grass; by the [pg 180]side of the sea, upon the narrow ledge of broken rocks. Nowhere was there a road, or a vestige of human habitation, save where the telegraph wire dipped into the sea, pointing the way to the distant Syra. It was late in the day, and the sun was getting low, so we urged our horses to a canter wherever the ground would permit it. But neither the heat nor the pace could conquer the indefatigable esquire who attended us on foot to show us the way, and hold the horses when we stopped. His speed and endurance made me think of Phidippides and his run to Sparta; nor, indeed, do any of the feats recorded of the old Greeks, either in swimming or running, appear incredible when we witness the feats that are being performed almost every day by modern muscle and endurance. At last, after a delightful two hours’ roaming through the homely solitude, we found ourselves at the foot of the last hill, and over us the shining pillars of the ruined temple stood out against the sky.

There can be no doubt that the temple of Neptune on Mount Tænarum must have been quite as fine as to position, but the earthquakes of Laconia have made havoc of its treasures, while at Sunium, though some of the drums in the shafts of the pillars have been actually displaced several inches from their fellows above and below, so that the perfect fitting of the old Athenians has come to look like the tottering work of a giant child with marble [pg 181]bricks,—in spite of this, thirteen pillars remain,72 a piece of architrave, and a huge platform of solid blocks; above all, a site not desecrated by modern habitations, where we can sit and think of the great old days, and of the men who set up this noble monument at the remotest corner of their land. The Greeks told us that this temple, that at Ægina, and the Parthenon, are placed exactly at the angles of a great equilateral triangle, with each side about twenty-five or thirty miles long. Our maps do not verify this belief. The distance from Athens to Sunium appears much longer than either of the other lines, nor do we find in antiquity any hint that such a principle was attended to, or that any peculiar virtue was attached to it.

We found the platform nearly complete, built with great square blocks of poros-stone, and in some places very high, though in others scarcely raised at all, according to the requirements of the ground. Over it the temple was built, not with the huge blocks which we see at Corinth and in the Parthenon, but still of perfectly white marble, and with that beautifully close fitting, without mortar, rubble, or cement, which characterizes the best and most perfect epoch of Greek architecture.73 The stone, too, is the finest [pg 182]white marble, and, being exposed to no dust on its lofty site, has alone of all temples kept its original color—if, indeed, it was originally white, and not enriched with divers colors. The earthquake, which has displaced the stones in the middle of the pillars, has tumbled over many large pieces, which can be seen from above scattered all down the slope where they have rolled. But enough still remains for us to see the plan, and imagine the effect of the whole structure. It is in the usual simple, grand, Doric style, but lighter in proportions than the older Attic temples; and, being meant for distant effect, was probably not much decorated. Its very site gives it all the ornament any building could possibly require.

It was our good fortune to see it in a splendid sunset, with the sea a sheet of molten gold, and all the headlands and islands colored with hazy purple. The mountains of Eubœa, with their promontory of Geræstus, closed the view upon the north-east; but far down into the Ægean reached island after island, as it were striving to prolong a highway to the holy Delos. The ancient Andros, Tenos, Myconos were there, but the eye sought in vain for the home of Apollo’s shrine—the smallest and yet the greatest of the group. The parallel chain, reaching down from Sunium itself, was confused into one mass, but ex[pg 183]posed to view the distant Melos. Then came a short space of open sea, due south, which alone prevented us from imagining ourselves on some fair and quiet inland lake; and beyond to the south-west we saw the point of Hydra, the only spot in all Hellas whose recent fame exceeds the report of ancient days. The mountains of Argolis lay behind Ægina, and formed with their Arcadian neighbors a solid background, till the eye wandered round to the Acropolis of Corinth, hardly visible in the burning brightness of the sun’s decline. And all this splendid expanse of sea and mountain, and bay and cliff, seemed as utterly deserted as the wildest western coast of Scotland or Ireland. One or two little white sails, speeding in his boat some lonely fisherman, made the solitude, if possible, more speaking and more intense. There are finer views, more extensive, and perhaps even more varied, but none more exquisitely interesting and more melancholy to the student of Ancient Greece.