Travellers fresh from Italy perceive an Oriental picturesqueness in modern Athens, but the immediate impression of its Occidental character gained by those who come from Egypt or Constantinople is the correct one. The old narrow streets, reminiscent of the Turkish period, are few in number and lie on the northern side of the Acropolis. Back of them, further to the north and west, lies a very clean and well-planned town which boasts of being a little Paris. The substantial houses and hotels, the dignified palaces of the royal princes and the buildings of the University and Museum, the conventional shops and public squares, the boulevards and gardens, give to Athens the general appearance of any European city that is moving fast toward and beyond a population of two hundred thousand, and is not yet disfigured by the smoke-stacks of factories. A welcome individuality of taste is shown chiefly in the classical architecture of the group of University buildings and of the Museum.

Even to pilgrims and strangers the modern city reveals an eager and, in many aspects, a charming life. But a special relationship follows in the wake of familiarity with the new, added to knowledge of the old, Athens. The student of Greek literature finds that he need not always seek the ruins of antiquity or the permanent stage-setting of Nature when he desires a sense of fellowship with the past. At any street corner this sense may be quickened by some person or object which is an integral part of the city’s modern life. Ancient literature not only gleams, like “a stately palace hall, with golden pillars of song,” but also mirrors common things, trivial or serious, which subtly unite the times of Homer with those of Pericles, and both with our own.

Greek gentlemen conspicuously engaged in having their boots blacked share the habits if not the politics of Aristophanes’s dicast who was always seeking the sponge and the basin of oil-mixed pitch for his dusty shoes. Street-venders from Rhodes, who beguile foreign ladies with embroideries, are plying the craft of the Phœnician peddler at the home of Eumæus, then a happy princelet and later the swineherd of Odysseus. The peddler displayed to Eumæus’s lady mother and her maidens a golden chain set here and there with amber beads, and “they offered him their price.” Bargaining, the basis of all transactions, is not always as amiable as it is in Rome. An Athenian cab-driver in search of drachmas can be as obstinate as the corpse in Aristophanes’s “Frogs,” whom Dionysus asked to take his luggage to Hades:—

Dionysus and his servant had made their entrance with a donkey, ridden by Xanthias who was carrying the traps on a pole over his shoulder. No age has allowed the donkey to escape his manifest destiny of bearing burdens, nor has age or custom exhausted his capacity of occasional revolt. The persevering attack of the Trojans on Ajax could be likened only to the cudgelling by boys of a lazy ass which has strayed into a cornfield and will not desist from wasting the deep crop—an episode as modern as it is Homeric. But for the most part the little beasts carry patiently everything that is portable, as they did when, in the annual transportation of the properties used in the Eleusinian Mysteries, their dull share in a great business became proverbial. Their panniers of lemons and oranges and crates of water-jars are both antique and modern, and a famous lost picture of Polygnotus comes to life in a donkey loaded with fresh green boughs, moving toward the spectator.

That Dionysus, in search of a carrier, so conveniently saw a corpse in the street was due to the Athenian custom of bearing the dead to the grave on open biers. The same custom, shocking to foreign observers, prevails to-day; and at almost any hour, in any thoroughfare, may be seen one of these funeral processions, with the cover of the coffin carried in front and the uncovered face exposed to the curious and the indifferent. Thus exposed, the dead Alcestis was brought out from her palace, and the cortège, with which the modern procession seems to mingle, moves off the stage with prayers that Hermes and Persephone may kindly welcome this traveller to their realm. These deities have been forgotten, but their business is transferred to him who was once their grim agent. To the modern Greek peasant Charon is Death. Alcestis dreaded him as a messenger and ferryman:—

To-day he rides in his own might:—

Around the next corner, especially toward the end of Lent when spring lamb is due in the markets and shepherds troop to town, another song from the “Alcestis” may displace the strain of melancholy. For Apollo, Pythian lord of song, once served Admetus,—

In the guise of a young man, the herdsman of a flock, most delicate, as are the sons of kings, Athena once appeared to Odysseus. And it was to a man who was pasturing his flocks on many-fountained Ida that Aphrodite gave her immortal heart. Perhaps thereafter in the streets of Troy Anchises made people think suddenly of early dawns on the mountain-side when the silver car of the moon hangs low over the sea and the nightingale sings and the bleating flocks answer the pipe’s ethereal cry. In Athens a transient shepherd, with his crook and his coat of fleece, may fling the townsman’s thoughts abroad to the men he has seen among the hills of Arcadia, where as of old a misty night is hateful to shepherds and goatherds, and a bright moon their heart’s delight; or in Lesbos, where still in mountain pastures the hyacinth is trampled under foot and darkens the ground. A flock of sheep following the bellwether from the country to the town is a reminder that the Greeks before Troy were ordered about like a great flock of white ewes by the thick-fleeced leader, Odysseus; and that the astute one, in the course of his later adventures, saved himself from the wrath of blind Polyphemus by clinging face upwards and with a steady heart, beneath the shaggy belly of his best and goodliest ram. Aristophanes in the “Wasps” parodies the Homeric ram. Here it is the family donkey which, led out to be sold, is smuggling under its shaggy belly the old man imprisoned by his son to cure him of the “jury habit.” The dejected donkey is addressed by the son:—

Athens is a bustling capital, but to the on-looker every Easter lamb becomes a Golden Fleece, and—

The Easter feast is of great importance in Greece because the Lenten fast is so scrupulously observed. At all times the working people are temperate enough to have pleased Aristophanes, who liked to dwell on the simple living of a generation before his own, when from the country districts men trooped in to the assembly,—

But during parts of Lent even vegetables are forbidden, and a man who has guided you up Pentelicus will accept from your lunch-basket only a few olives and an orange to supplement his own piece of coarse bread.

The markets are in the older and most picturesque part of the city, but only a modern Aristophanes could make them into scenes of rollicking farce shot through with political purpose. Provincial Megarians with pigs to sell, uncouth Bœotians bringing in vegetables and game, knavish Athenians offering garlic and salt and anchovies from Phaleron—probably the types are still here, dialects, morals and all, awaiting their sacred bard.

In the same district lies the bazaar known as Shoe Lane, where cobblers and tailors and carpenters work in the open, protected by awnings. Socrates, keen-eyed for handicraft and homely illustrations, often must have watched their forebears. Not far from the shoemakers, the coppersmiths, in the same district as of old, are suitably gathered in Hephæstus Street, whence the sound of ringing hammers echoes afar. The Homeric picture of Hephæstus in his forge on Olympus is duplicated in any little forge along the modern street, when a workman rises from his anvil and with a sponge wipes his face and hand and sturdy neck and shaggy breast. In more than one part of the city the “bankers’ tables,” at which also Socrates used to seek his crowd, are reproduced in the much frequented tables of the money changers.

The open-air bakeries of his day also exist again and tempt with their bread and plain cakes the exhausted sight-seer, whatever his philosophy. But a Platonist is deterred at the threshold of a pastry-cook’s in the fashionable shopping district by the remembrance that in the ideal life there is no place for “those celebrated delicacies, the Athenian confectionery.”

Modern Athens is too arid to afford many public fountains, but women still draw water from the meagre spring Callirrhoë, on the edge of the Ilissus, not far from the Zeus columns. This spring, in name and situation, is still identified by some experts with the town-spring of primitive Athens and the later Nine Spouts. The traveller who throws in his fortunes with the archæological opposition must at least find in the lesser Callirrhoë the Athenian counterpart of the fountains which in so many of the towns and villages of Greece perpetuate, in usefulness and charm, an antique life of homely activities transmuted into poetry. The townspeople of Odysseus drew their water just outside the city from a wayside spring deep in an alder thicket, where a basin had been fashioned to catch the cold stream falling from a cliff. In the old days of peace, when the plain was safe, the wives and daughters of the men of Troy had washed the family clothes in broad stone troughs beside the two springs that fed the Scamander. Nausicaä of Phæacia and her maidens did the palace washing so far from the town that the occasion involved a day’s excursion and a generous lunch-basket packed by the Queen. But there was a spring of drinking water nearer, for, when Odysseus was entering the city, Athena met him in the form of a young girl carrying a pitcher. At Eleusis, also, in the royal age, the king’s fawnlike daughters, their crocus-yellow hair dancing on their shoulders, drew water for the palace in vessels of bronze from the Maiden Well. In classical Athens, as to-day, only the poorer women went for their own water, and perhaps it was after meeting one who looked tired and hopeless that Euripides made Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, given in marriage to a peasant in Argos to further her mother’s schemes, cry aloud to the night:—

Only in the Panathenaic procession did the carrying of water-jars become ennobled. To-day a working girl may be seen in a pose suggesting that of the maidens of the Phidian frieze.

The folk-lore and customs of modern Greece, as heirs of the past, have been carefully scrutinized. Any knowledge that can be culled from special treatises will everywhere increase the traveller’s sense of historic continuity and will enrich his pleasure in meeting the country folk. But by means of only a modicum of Greek poetry he may discover for himself in Athens certain ancient beliefs and practices. On the first of March, associated like the May Day of colder climates with the blossoming of spring, bands of boys go about the streets carrying the wooden image of a bird, singing a carol which announces the arrival of the swallow, and begging gifts. One of these songs from Thessaly begins:—

That the same custom, no newer than the recurrence of Nature’s happiest gifts, enchanted the boys of ancient Athens we may infer from our knowledge of it in “seagirt” Rhodes. There the carol began:—

When the spring was late, Aristophanes’s peevish old man was probably not the only one to say: “Zeus! is the swallow never going to come?” Nor under a punctual March sun was his sneak thief the only one to talk about the weather:—

In graver poetry the dusky swallow of Simonides shared with the lovely-voiced nightingale of Sappho the honour of announcing the fragrant spring.

Other seasons in Athens had their crop of mendicant carols, and the boyish custom of celebrating Apollo at one of his summer festivals by going about from house to house and singing songs of good wishes is suggested in the modern celebration of New Year’s or St. Basil’s day. It is even possible that the rough little model of a ship carried by the boys, as if to illustrate the sea-journey of the saint “come from Cæsarea,” is a late descendant of the ship that was carried in the Panathenaic procession, the origin of which lay in Theseus’s journey to Crete, and the sail of which was Athena’s own peplos.

With Easter come the most elaborate of the peasant dances that accompany all kinds of local religious festivals. Close at hand are the famous dances of Megara, but in defiance of tradition the Athenian sojourner may elect to visit those at Menidi, a large village about three miles to the north, whose panegyris or fair is not overrun by non-participants. There are several varieties of peasant dances, and a technical knowledge of the accompanying music will be of great service in interpreting them; but whatever their particular measure may be, and whether they are performed by men and women together or by women alone, they all possess a dignity and gravity which mark them off as something quite different from the gratification of a lively humour. The religious impulse is not wholly forgotten in the delights of a carnal holiday, and the dances are the expression, in unison, of a public feeling which in origin, at least, was reverential. Save for the leader, no individual assumes liberty of movement. In long lines or semi-circles the dancers link hands and sway in monotonous harmony.

Readers of ancient Greek literature will remember how important dances were in the religious festivals of all epochs. Their variety and their ancestral relation to the modern dances are subjects for technical study, but the spectator at Menidi is at liberty to let his imagination travel the Sacred Way to Eleusis, or cross the Ægean to Delos, or seek out Argos and distant Sparta. The modern inheritance is a limited one, for it recalls only the grave choral movements that originated in Sparta, and discards the license of the Dionysiac worship. And altogether preventive of any real reconstruction of the past is the fact that now only peasants at a country fair exhibit an art which once was an important element in city as well as in village religion, and which tested the grace of the gentlest born. It is a far call from a country field and the daughters of Menidi, bedight though they are with embroideries and necklaces and often fair of form and face, to the chief temple in Sparta and the choicest maidens of the Spartan state. But one certain bond there is between the girls of to-day and the princesses of yesterday. The Easter fair serves the purpose of a market for brides, and many a wedding follows it. Dancing is a part of this happy festival as it was in antiquity in all ranks of society. And were the maidens of Menidi exiled to America, they would long for the village green and the bridal feasts, even as Iphigeneia and her comrades, exiled among the northern Taurians, longed for Agamemnon’s palace and their Argive playfellows:—

Athens, like most southern cities, impresses an Anglo-Saxon as having many holidays which “interrupt business”; but only during the New Year and Easter festivals can he begin to imagine a resemblance to the civic life of ancient Athens, which was almost a continuous pageant. “The gods,” said Plato, “in pity for the life of toil, man’s natural inheritance, appointed holy festivals whereby men alternate their labour with rest.” But at certain seasons, especially in the spring and autumn, the festivals were so congested that the days of labour must have been far from burdensome. Almost all the festivals had a religious origin, celebrating deities and heroes of political importance, like Athena or Theseus, or forces of nature embodied in Dionysus or Demeter. But, like Christmas, they gave abundant opportunity both for public enjoyment and for the cultivation of communal and family sentiment. Sophocles had in mind all their human charm when he made the blind Œdipus lament the future of his little daughters:—

The festivals were often connected with the activities of country folk, with planting and reaping, the vintage and the winepress, and yet at the same time played an important part in a highly cultivated city life. Some of them were confined to women, like the Thesmophoria, celebrated by matrons in honour of Demeter, the patroness of fruitful marriages, and used by Aristophanes as occasion and stage-setting for an attack on the misogyny of Euripides; or like the Tauropolia, in honour of Artemis, which suggested to Menander a lover’s opportunity. Others, such as the Hermæa, at which Socrates first met the young Lysis and discoursed on friendship, were celebrated by young men at the palæstras, or by school-boys. The “Mean Man” of Theophrastus was “apt not to send his children to school when there was a festival of the Muses, but to say that they were sick, in order that they might not contribute.” Still others, like the Panathenæa, which occurred in July, the first month of the calendar year, united all classes and ages in a magnificent display of civic loyalty. Public taste at its highest made the presentation of plays the chief element in the Greater Dionysia in March, but the drama had originated in the December festival of the country Dionysia, which continued to be celebrated with a jollity and abandon that probably lost nothing in the descriptions of Aristophanes. The same poet also found plenty of material to his liking in the Anthesteria, another Dionysiac celebration, in which Pots and Pitchers figured in drinking competitions and in offerings to the dead. The statue of Dionysus in the Marshes was escorted to the outer Cerameicus, and by the time it was brought back again, a day later, the crowd was doubtless in the state described by the chorus of Frogs in the underworld:—

The license of some of the Dionysiac holidays was in reality a break in the even tenor of Athenian temperance. At other times there seems to have been little more drunkenness among them than among the Spartans, whose uninterrupted self-restraint aroused the admiration of Plato.

From the crapulous and often naked verses of Aristophanes to the austerely beautiful marbles of Phidias is a gamut that includes all the characteristics of ancient festivals, in their appeal to both the natural and the spiritual man. Religious sincerity, civic pride, and buffoonery, jostled one another. Music, literature, and athletics added discipline and beauty.

These things as a coherent whole are long since dead. The Easter festival of to-day, like the Panathenæa, absorbs the entire city and has its hours of gaiety as well as its hours of solemnity, but it lacks the attendant contests in music, poetry, and gymnastics. If, however, it includes less of a citizen’s life than Athena’s festival, it is more Panhellenic than even the Eleusinian Mysteries, its prototype in religious significance. The Mysteries appealed to all Greeks, but invited them to gather at one spot. Those who have seen Easter ushered in at midnight by King and Metropolitan in front of the Cathedral of Athens, and who have also shared with peasant and parish priest in the announcement within some village church on a lone island of the Ægean, realize that in every part of modern Greece as never in old Greece all classes and conditions of men are at the same hour engaged in a common observance.

But the excited crowds that fill the city streets and make the Cathedral Square look like a deep cornfield stirred by a strong west wind, and the gathering of villagers in the open place in front of their tiny church alike betray one quality that is no more Christian and new than it is Pagan and old. An unquestioning and swift hospitality to strangers is as much in evidence as is the lighted taper borne by each man, woman, and child. In Athens this is but a proof on a crucial occasion of a temper which reveals itself in response to every need. By this Ionic grace, inherited from the noble civilization of Homer and eagerly exemplified by the open-minded Athenians at the height of their prosperity, the foreigner is transported back to the old city more surely than by the street names and signs in the alphabet of Xenophon, or even than by the vision, wherever his eye turns, of the ageless rock of the Acropolis.