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

Homer says that the Arcadians went to Troy in vessels borrowed from Agamemnon, because they had none of their own. The most potent fact in the history and development of Arcadia is its isolated position as the one inland country (save little Doris) of Greece. Only from the heights of the encircling mountains could her people catch sight of distant seas. Those whom the sea-spell lured with irresistible magic left their hills to seek foreign coasts and enlist in foreign navies. The Arcadians have rightly been called the mercenaries of Greece. Those who stayed at home lived the restricted life of a population cut off from intercourse with the larger world. The entire territory is composed of high land, its lowest elevation from the sea being more than two thousand feet. In the east are great plains of swampy ground, and lakes drained by underground channels. Towards the west the land becomes an irregular, hilly plateau intersected by rivers. In antiquity superb forests of oaks and pines, coverts for many a wild beast, contributed to that general physical wildness which prevented a people untouched by foreign ideas from uniting in a progressive political life. Even against the background of Greek individualism their history is conspicuously one of separate towns. And of these towns few attained to any eminence.

Arcadia contained the oldest and the youngest of all Greek cities. The latter, Megalopolis, is still in civic existence, and is the terminus of the modern railroad ride from Athens for those who are on their way to Bassæ. It was the last town founded in free Greece, and its establishment originated in the ardent hope of Epaminondas to unite the scattered Arcadians under one government. In the same southwestern portion of Arcadia, near the young Megalopolis and easily reached from it on horses, lie the ruins of old Lycosura, believed by the Greeks to be the most ancient of all their cities and to have served as a model for later foundations.

But the chief rôles in the political life of Arcadia were played by Mantinea and Tegea, cities lying in the wide eastern plains. Near them lay Pallantium, and within the territories of these three cities flourishes the modern Tripolis, in its origin an important Turkish stronghold and now one of the most prosperous towns of the new nation. The sanguinary history of Tripolis in the War of Independence was worthy of the ancient character of Mantinea and Tegea.

Although Homer called Mantinea “lovely,” her life was one of military activity. Mantineans fought at Thermopylæ, but it is in the pages of the historians of later periods, of Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius, that they chiefly figure, fighting on their own territory against Sparta or with Sparta against Thebes. This evil coalition resulted in the famous battle of 362 B. C., in which Epaminondas fought for the last time. The description of the battle forms the close of Xenophon’s treatise on Greek History, and the chaotic results of the long-anticipated struggle, whereby “neither party, though each claimed to have conquered, was seen to gain any more in land or cities or authority than it possessed before the battle was fought,” are set forth by him with considerable vividness. But the momentous fact that in this battle the great Theban commander lost his life he disposes of in a subordinate clause. This petty injustice is the more singular because the fatal blow was generally believed to have been struck by Xenophon’s son, Grylus, who received a public burial and monument at Mantinea. It is Pausanias who admits us to the last scene of a noble life, enacted among the alien, windswept oaks of Arcadia, on the hill now known as Mytika. “When Epaminondas received his wound, they carried him out of the line of battle. He was still in life. He suffered much, but with his hand pressed on his wound he kept looking hard at the fight, and the place from which he watched it was afterwards named ‘Scope’ (the Lookout). But when the combat ended indecisively he took his hand from the wound and breathed his last, and they buried him on the battlefield.”

The memory of Epaminondas inspired a later hero who not only fought at another battle of Mantinea but was himself a son of the Arcadian soil. In the period of the Achæan League, Philopœmen, born in Megalopolis, was eight times chosen to be the general of the united forces, and in 206 B. C. he met and conquered at Mantinea the recalcitrant Spartans who had refused to join the league. The description of this battle is given to us by Polybius, his younger fellow townsman, who at the hero’s death was the youth selected to bear his ashes to the tomb. Because all such victories in the cause of freedom were but fitful gleams of the fire whose flame had been quenched at Chæronea, it is the more necessary to give heed to a character like Philopœmen, from the day of whose death, Pausanias sadly remarks, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. He closes the long line of Greeks who led their peoples to liberty. At one of the Olympic festivals the whole audience in the theatre rose to greet Themistocles, who had saved Greece from Persia. And centuries later a similar tribute was paid to Philopœmen. Not long after his victory over the Spartans it chanced that he was present at the competition of the minstrels at the Nemean Games. “Pylades, a native of Megalopolis, and the most famous minstrel of his time, who had gained a Pythian victory, was singing an air of Timotheus, the Milesian, called ‘The Persians.’ Scarcely had he struck up the song, ‘The glorious crown of freedom who giveth to Greece,’ when all the people turned and looked at Philopœmen, and with clapping of hands signified that the song referred to him.”

Few men in history are more interesting than Philopœmen. From youth to a hale old age he lived the life of his choice, combining rugged and fearless sincerity with keen military knowledge, and uniting in an unusual degree the reckless impulsiveness of a freebooter with the patient power of a skilful general. When one term of his generalship had expired, he hurried over to Crete to help in a war which in no way concerned him; but his countrymen, accustomed to depend upon his ability, summoned him back, and he arrived on the mainland just in time to find that the Romans had fitted out a fleet against Sparta, and to plunge into the fray. Being no sailor, however, he unwittingly embarked in a leaky galley, which reminded the Romans and their allies (in those days every man had read his classics at school) of the verses in the Catalogue in which Homer speaks of the Arcadians as ignorant of the sea. After eight successful generalships and many brilliant exploits, when he was more than seventy years old, Philopœmen was captured and poisoned by the Messenians. In him Arcadia lost her greatest son, in whom had lived her own wildness and her own patience, her own flaming spirit and her own honourable austerity. According to Polybius, he had harboured no illusions about the future of his country and of Hellas, but had chosen to offer his life, while it lasted, as a bulwark against the inevitable. “I know full well,” he said in answer to Aristænus’s criticism of his policy of resisting all unjust encroachments from Rome, “that there will hereafter come a time when the Greeks will have to yield obedience under compulsion to every order issued to them. But would one wish to see this time come as quickly as possible or, on the contrary, postponed as late as possible? Methinks as late as possible! In this, then, the policy of Aristænus differs from my own. He is eager to see the inevitable come as quickly as possible and he helps it on to the best of his ability, whereas I to the best of my power resist and thrust it back.” One false hope, according to Pausanias, he did treasure: “He would fain have modelled his life on the pattern set by the character and deeds of Epaminondas, but could not equal him in all things, for while the temper of Epaminondas was very gentle, that of the Arcadian was passionate.”

Although Arcadia’s part in the Persian wars was not heroic, Tegea, like Mantinea, proved her bravery at Thermopylæ, and at Platæa, according to Herodotus, her citizens struggled with the Athenians for the foremost post in the battle. Later wars, civil and foreign, kept her busy through several centuries. But the arts of peace also flourished within her walls, and Tegea must be honoured for having erected one of the most distinguished temples not only of the Peloponnesus but of all Greece. This was the Temple of Athena Alea, built by Scopas early in the fourth century. Only a few traces are left of its mingled Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns. More important are the fragments preserved in the National Museum at Athens of sculptures from the hand of Scopas himself, portraying the Calydonian boar-hunt, the heroine of which was the Arcadian maiden Atalanta. The same Museum contains marble reliefs from Mantinea, coming probably from the time, if not the workshop, of Praxiteles, and very interesting sculptures of disputed date from old Lycosura. The Arcadians, whose native gift was music, did not lag behind the rest of the Greeks in their appreciation of the plastic arts.

Pallantium was not important in Arcadian history, but was reverenced by the Romans as the home of Evander, whose enterprizing colonization of the Palatine Hill was immortalized by Virgil. In filial remembrance of the adventurer the town was rebuilt by Antoninus Pius.

To the north of the great plain of Mantinea and Tegea lay another marshy plain containing three other important cities, Orchomenus, Pheneus, and Stymphalus. But the train from Athens sweeps far toward the south, and ruined cities slip out of mind among the “winding valleys deep-withdrawn and ridgèd crests of Arcady.” The real significance of Arcadia lay in its landscape rather than in its towns. If the country contributed few large centres and few splendid deeds to Greek history, it offered its mountains and streams to be peopled by the divine progeny of Greek imagination. Pan himself was born amid the “wind-tossed mountain trees of steep Cyllene,” and from many another Arcadian hillside thereafter his pipes reached the ears of shepherds tending their flocks in upland pastures. Artemis, making her pastime the chase of boars and swift deer, fairer than the fair wild wood-nymphs attending her, took especial pleasure in the ridges of Erymanthus and became the reverently worshipped Maiden of the Arcadian country.

Later literature in more than one language created a visionary Arcadia of uninterrupted pastoral charm and ease, a refuge for the weary, an earthly dream of “unlaborious life.” The fashion began in Greek itself in the artificial period of Alexandrian civilization when men were sated with city life and began to write chamber poetry about the beauties of nature. Arcadia, with its still unspoiled hills and woods and rivers, became a convenient setting for the delicate and charming fancies of litterateurs. But in the real Arcadia “nature” was a serious force to be reckoned with. The frowning mountains, wild ravines, and stretches of barren soil; the gusty storms of winter and the close heat of summer; the difficulties of communication between village and village, and the remoteness from the great highway of the sea, all combined to make Arcadian life rude and elemental. Often the inhabitants were forced to a hand to hand struggle with poverty. Sometimes they gave way, as Herodotus indicates when he says that “some men from Arcadia who were in need of a livelihood and wanted employment” deserted to the Persians. But oftener the Arcadians fought it out at home, tilling what soil they could, and patiently tending herds and flocks.

Such a people, busy with the primitive needs of life, found in Pan and Artemis saviours and graciously intimate friends rather than fanciful presences with which to adorn pastoral poetry. Arcadia was, indeed, a very religious country, teeming both in its cities and on its lonelier hillsides with sanctuaries to many of the Olympian hierarchy, and especially to a strange, elusive divinity, known as the “Mistress.” But the divinities of life in the open most appealed to them. It is indicative of an important and not always recognized element in Greek character that some of the most lovely fancies of Greek mythology should have taken root where life was hard. The austerity of work and poverty was never denied by the clear-eyed Greeks. But instead of seeking, like the Celts, to escape from it into dreams of unreal and fairer worlds, they balanced against it the palpable beauty of this world and found much room for joy and laughter.

Pan’s birth in Arcadia was third in an interesting series of events. The first was the birth of Zeus himself on Mount Lycæus, the isolated mountain peak which rises northwest of Megalopolis. It is, however, no widespread Hellenic tradition which gave to the king of the gods an Arcadian birthplace. Of all the places that claimed that honour, perhaps Crete most impressed herself upon the Greek world at large. But the legend of Arcadia at least resulted in bestowing upon the ruler of Olympus the well-known epithet “Lycæan,” and in establishing on the summit of the mountain a sanctuary involving sacrifices and festivals. Human sacrifices continued here astonishingly long, and the savagery of the early Arcadians left traces also in tales of werewolves roaming among the desert places of the mountain.

A much more engaging story, especially when it is clothed in Ionic mirth and grace, brought Zeus as a lover to another mountain peak in Arcadia and pictured the second divine birth in the country. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, whether it is read in the original or in Shelley’s inimitable translation, is alive with that witty and audacious fancy which furnished to naughty mortals delightful brothers among the gods. On Mount Cyllene, towering above the other mountains of Arcadia and bulwarking the northeastern portion of the country, dwelt Maia, a fair-tressed nymph. Zeus loved her and—

The precocity of the divine infant is the theme of the story. He is not four days old when he starts for Thessaly to steal the cattle of Apollo. But as he crosses the threshold of his mother’s cave he meets a tortoise creeping along and feeding on the rich grass, a sight which moves him to laughter and gives him a fresh idea. This is no less than the fashioning of the lyre out of the tortoise’s shell:—

When he has sung enough and is “seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat,” he hurries off to the shadowed hills of Pieria and steals fifty of the lowing kine which are feeding there on flowering, unmown meadows. Cunningly reversing their tracks, and making for himself sandals of twigs and leaves that will not betray him, he drives the cattle to the river Alpheus in Arcadia, by whose banks they munch lotus and marsh-marigold. He kills and cooks with lusty appetite, in the serene moonshine, and then at dawn, through a silence broken by no step of god or man nor bark of dog, he goes back to the crests of Cyllene and enters the cave, through the hole of the bolt,—

Meantime Apollo, the Far-darter, has been tracking him from the Thessalian meadows. To the fragrant Cyllenian hill he comes where sheep are peacefully grazing, and finds the little thief wrapped once more in swaddling bands, feet, head and hands curled into a small space, tortoise shell clasped under his baby arm.

Apollo is not deceived, but is forced to laughter. Finally they agree to put the case before Zeus on Olympus. There, after Apollo’s attack, Hermes makes a lying and witty defence, at which his immoral and omnipotent father laughs aloud. Both sons are sent off to find the kine, and on the way the Cyllenian shows the Far-darter his tortoise-lyre and entrances him with its music:—

Hermes suggests an exchange, promising the tortoise shell to Apollo, if he may have in return the glittering lash and drive the herd. Thus the lyre, invented in Arcadia, passed to the rightful lord of music and to an universal sovereignty.

The two brothers became fast friends and sealed their affection on snowy Olympus by mutual promises. The older brother reserves for himself the awful gift of prophecy, but in return for the lyre gives to the younger lordship over the twisted-horned cattle and horses and toiling mules, over the burning eyes of lions, and white-tusked boars and dogs and sheep, and, most important of all, makes him herald to lead the dead to Hades.

Almost imperceptibly, toward the close of the hymn, the two gods take on something of the stateliness which clothes them in more serious poetry. But the rollicking infant and his half-angry, half-amused victim must be remembered to complete the idea of a religion which left a definite place for humour. While the gravely beautiful Hermes which adorned the temple of Hera at Olympia revealed, in perfect marble, a serious and noble conception of divinity, it may well be that among the many wooden or stone statues of the god which stood in orchard closes, by cool wayside springs, and in crossways near the gray seashore, more than one recalled his lovable and mischievous boyhood. Certainly it is tempting to imagine the infant trickster in the Hermes of the Anthology who guarded pleasant playgrounds and to whom boys offered marjoram and hyacinth and fresh garlands of violets.

Hermes would seem to have frequently returned to his early Arcadian home, and during one of these visits he fell in love with the daughter of Dryops, and for her sweet sake became thrall of a mortal man and shepherded the fleecy sheep. The fruit of his union with the shepherd’s daughter was Pan, and another Homeric hymn describes his birth:—

Such was the pleasant début of the god who was to make glad the hearts of men also, bringing laughter into a world of tears, and inspiring amid the difficulties and the ennui of civilization a wholesome passion for life in the open air. Lord was he of every snowy crest and mountain peak and rocky path. Soft meadows where crocuses and fragrant hyacinths nestled in the grass knew his presence. By still pools within the green woods he would sit contentedly, or lofty crags would tempt his lively feet to adventurous climbing. Over the high white hills he would range in the pursuit of wild beasts. And in the evening he would sit on some jutting rock or by the dusky water of a wayside spring and play on his reeds such melodies of honeyed sweetness as even the nightingale’s spring song could not surpass. With him the mountain nymphs, the shrill singers, went wandering with light feet, and Echo moaned along the mountain crest. Many a lonely shepherd among the hills or tired husbandman in the meadows must have desired to keep the god within his hearing. A broken fragment in the Greek Anthology, embedded among frigid Byzantine conceits, but springing one knows not out of what fresher age, seems instinct with such prayers as theirs:—

Although Pan dwelt all over Hellas, his Arcadian birth was not disputed, and more than one Arcadian mountain was especially distinguished by his presence. Among the Nomian hills, to the south of Lycæus, he invented the music of his pipes. Mount Mænalus, near Tripolis, he often visited, and on Mount Parthenius he requested recognition at Athens. Over this mountain, named for virginal Artemis, ran one of the regular passes from the Argolis into Arcadia, a route followed to-day by the train from Athens to Tripolis. The swift Athenian courier was passing this way when he was delayed by the god.

In the northwestern corner of Arcadia, skirting Achæa and Elis, rises another well-known mountain, Erymanthus, the favourite hunting ground of Artemis, who as Leader, Saviour, and Fairest received countless shrines from the Arcadians. The southern and lower continuation of Mount Erymanthus was known as Mount Pholoë, to which, as we know from the “Anabasis,” Xenophon and his sons and their guests used to come from Elis for the pleasures of the chase. Its beautiful woodlands were fabled to be one of the homes of the Centaurs, whose strange dual nature linked the world of men to the world of beasts. Heracles was entertained by them when, as one of his labours, he came to hunt the wild boar in the Erymanthian thickets.

The forests which spread over the plains and darkened the hills of Arcadia were filled with wild boars and bears and deer. The bear especially gave rise to many legends. The Great Bear in the heavens was once an Arcadian maiden, Callisto, whom jealous Hera turned into a bear and whom Artemis, as a favour to her, shot down. But Zeus retransformed the maiden into shining stars, the guides of mariners before and since the night when Odysseus “kept looking ever at the Pleiades and at Boötes setting slow and at the Bear, by surname called the Wain.” Callisto’s son was Arcas, or Bear, and he first taught the forest dwellers, in the country that was to inherit his name, how to raise corn and bake bread. The great oak woods of Arcadia were responsible for the epithet “acorn-eating,” which the riddle-loving priestess of Delphi often applied to the inhabitants. In the time of Pausanias the Arcadian forests were still conspicuous in all parts of the country. Driven gradually from the plain to the mountains they are even there at last yielding to decay.

But the waters of Arcadia are as unchanged as the hills. Both the Alpheus and the Eurotas rise within its borders, the former turning westward, as of old, to its haunts at Olympia, the latter winding to the south to delight a new Sparta with its gleaming water and ripple-washed reeds. And the Ladon, the northern branch of the Alpheus, flows on with the impetuous charm and beautiful colour which gave it the reputation of being the loveliest river in Greece. From out of the range of the Erymanthian hills springs the river Erymanthus, which was especially sacred to Pan, as if its reeds above all others could be shaped into tuneful pipes. In the river Gortys the nymphs washed the new-born Zeus. And by the banks of the Aroanius, which flows down a northern valley to join the Ladon, Pausanias, in enviable leisure, awaited Arcadian music. “Amongst the fish in the Aroanius,” he tells us, “are the so-called spotted fish. They say that these spotted fish sing like a thrush. I saw them after they had been caught, but I did not hear them utter a sound, though I tarried by the river till sunset, when they were said to sing most.”

A group of renowned Arcadian waters may be reached in one northward excursion of three days from Tripolis. The first of these is the Lake of Pheneus, as famous for its strangeness as for its loveliness. It is so surrounded by hills that no stream can escape from it above ground, and the water issues only by two katavothras. The condition of these subterranean channels determines whether the great mountain basin of the Pheneus is a fertile plain or a broad lake. In ancient times and in our own the changes have succeeded each other with the fascination of mystery. Pausanias found a plain, and knew the lake only by tradition. From his day until the beginning of the nineteenth century there were no records. But with the ensuing careful descriptions of geographers and travellers come baffling alternations of a “swampy plain covered with fields of wheat or barley” and a “wide expanse of still water deep among the hills, reflecting black pine woods, gray crags, and sky now crimson with sunset.”

To the east of Pheneus and separated from it only by a mountain ridge the Lake of Stymphalus is sunk in placid beauty within towering hills. It was the scene of the fifth labour of Heracles, who killed the monstrous man-eating birds that haunted it. They typified, probably, the pestilence which would arise whenever the underground channel that served as an outlet for the lake became stopped. Heracles was the master-engineer of mythological times. Later engineers also experimented with the water which flows into the Stymphalian Lake from the surrounding mountains and especially from Cyllene. Its purity and abundance led Hadrian to have a supply of it carried by an aqueduct to Corinth. And to-day the Athenians are contemplating importing it into their arid city.

From the prosperous village of Solos vigorous and patient pedestrians may reach the most famous of all the waters of Arcadia, and the most characteristic also of a country in which gentle charms, however real, are always subsidiary to a primitive wildness. These waters are the Falls of the Styx, as familiar in English as in Greek literature. They descend over a perpendicular cliff amid scenery which some consider grander and more imposing than that at Delphi. The surroundings so impressed themselves on the sensitive Greek imagination that from the time of Homer the Styx was one of the dread rivers of death and the lower world, fit companion-piece to nether darkness and the monstrous hound of hell, fit invocation even for gods when on their oath. “Let earth be witness unto this and heaven broad and yon down-flowing water of the Styx, which is the oath the greatest and most terrible among the blessed gods,” the immortals, from Zeus to Calypso, are ever exclaiming. Hesiod contributed the fancy that Iris, in a vessel of gold, brought water from the Styx to Olympus, so that the gods might swear by its material presence. The spray of the falls is said to take on at midday the lovely colors of the rainbow, which had its divine personification in the fair messenger of the gods. And it has also been pointed out that Hesiod, in addition to describing accurately the Styx as trickling down from a high and steep rock, by a fine figure suggests a view in winter when huge icicles form over the cliff and the clouds settle down so closely upon its summit that the water looks as if it were descending straight from the sky. The Styx, he says, dwelt in “glorious chambers, vaulted with long rocks, and round about a colonnade of silver pillars reared against the sky.” To him also as to Homer the dweller in this icicled palace was “terrible, hated by all the immortals.”

The traveller who must sacrifice the lakes and rivers of Arcadia to seeing the temple of Apollo comes directly by train from Athens to Megalopolis in the great south-western plain. Here he is detained only by a fourth century theatre and other more fragmentary remains of the ancient city before turning northward by carriage or horse.

If he is obliged to ride for several hours and meet a carriage at Karytæna, the grim guardian of the mountainous road to Andritsena, where he is to spend the night, he will have cause to be thankful for an experience that has put him on more familiar terms with rude Arcadia, and has made him more sensitive to the change from monotonous lowland to vast, solitary mountains and deep ravines. The town of Karytæna lies on the slopes of one of the low hills that form the northern boundary of the plain of Megalopolis. Above it, on the hill’s summit, loom the ruins of an old Frankish castle, once the seat of a barony which contributed many a romantic story to the history of the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages. Rarely in Greece is the harmony of historical impression interrupted. But here, like highwaymen to challenge intellectual security, feudalism and the mediæval world stalk out upon the unwary. The spectacle is unique. Karytæna stands at the point where the flat plain startlingly breaks into almost terrifying mountains. Mount Lycæus towers on the left, and all around serrated heights rise grandly above the castle, without detracting from its own defiant dignity. Past the foot of the hill flows, on its way to Elis, the Alpheus, here spanned by a striking bridge of six arches, bearing a Frankish inscription. The ruins of the old barony of Geoffrey de Villehardouin equal any feudal remains in Europe in their reminiscent suggestiveness of the romantic and violent life of the Middle Ages. But even while the traveller fears that he will become confused among memories of the Frankish dukes and princes of the Peloponnesus, of donjons and keeps, of chivalry and knighthood, of all the insignia and the emotions and the ideals which make the thirteenth century A. D. seem more remote from us than the fifth century B. C., he finds himself restrained and pacified. Whatever Greece lays her hands upon seems to lose its ephemeral or unrelated character and to take its place, individual, to be sure, but tributary in an harmonious whole. The ruined mediæval castle fits into the surrounding landscape as no disturbing factor, but rather as an integral part of what had helped also to shape the ancient life of Arcadia into its distinguishing forms. The age when the autochthonous Arcadians were resisting the inroads of Sparta and the age when the Slavic inhabitants were yielding to the attacks of the irresistible Franks seem to have had a common parentage in physical conditions. And the brawling stream of the Alpheus below seems to make the jousts and the romances of Geoffrey de Karytena’s court as much their own as were the festivals of Zeus and the love affairs of Pan and the nymphs.

The mountains into which the carriage turns from the six-arched bridge are threaded by a long road which, despite its smoothness and safety, runs near enough to the tops of precipices and to the sight of noisy torrents in the gloomy ravines below to engender a mood of Arcadian wildness. If this mountain region is reached in time, travellers will become spectators of the charming scenes which are enacted each evening over the hills of Greece when the bleating flocks of sheep and goats come home to their folds. Sappho saw them in hilly Lesbos:—

Arcadia is still “rich in flocks” and the “mother of sheep,” and to meet and greet her shepherds as they turn home from the mountain pastures restores the world of Greek poetry. But if Karytæna is scarcely rounded before “the sun sets and all the ways are darkened,” then pastoral idylls make way for Arcadia’s magnificent solitariness. The mediæval castle bravely lifts its head above the lonely country, while red clouds stretch like tongues of flame over the mountains and the setting sun turns into molten gold. Suddenly, perhaps, amid the awful silence of purple crags and burning sky, one sign of life asserts itself. A little kid is stumbling, lost and dreary, in a patch of green wheat which had enticed it from its mother. Doubtless before the night is over one tired shepherd who has safely enfolded his ninety and nine will climb the steeps again to find the prodigal. But travellers must pass on in the effort to reach Andritsena before midnight. The sky pales and cools into night, and stars of singular brilliance emerge, using the absence of the fair moon to “show their bright faces to men.” As one drives hour after hour through the starlit solitude, while “from heaven breaketh open the ether infinite,” all geographical and temporal limitations seem done away with, and modernity and antiquity meet within the heart of nature. But finally, as the road from time to time curves outward, the lights of human habitations begin to twinkle. Andritsena lifts her little evening beacons on a mountain-side to offer shelter and food to pilgrims of the night. The village rivals Arachova in the charm of its situation, with its outlook over the verdant hills of the Alpheus valley to the distant pale blue heights of Erymanthus in the north. Vineyards and mountain streams and trees add their quota. Those who have stayed several days in the town in bright weather, or who have been snowed in, as travellers may easily be as late as April, report many attractions out of doors, and many hospitable entertainments within the peasant houses. Even those whose impressions are gained from one night’s lodging may forget physical hardships in the discovery of a Greek inheritance. A girl, reproved for stroking the embroidered collar of a guest, says explanatorily, “but it is so pretty,” even as the old men on the wall at Troy said of Helen.

Beds of unyielding boards are exchanged before dawn for hard wooden saddles. The temple of Bassæ lies two hours away, and those who wish to see it without undue haste and yet return to Megalopolis before night-fall must begin their ride while the stars are still alight.

Bassæ, or The Glens, should be thought of in connection with Phigalia, although probably only those who take the long horseback ride to or from Olympia will see the remains of this ancient city, which, measuring by the time involved, lies as far beyond Bassæ as Bassæ is beyond Andritsena. The surrounding country fell within its territory, but the city itself stood on “high and mostly precipitous ground,” bounded on the south by the deep gorge of the winding Neda, and partially encircled on the other sides by high mountains. Here where the air was invigorating and all healthful conditions prevailed it was natural that Apollo should be worshipped as the Succourer (Epikourios). In the fifth century the Phigalians were so impressed by reports of the new Parthenon in Athens that they determined to erect by popular subscriptions a new temple to their chief divinity and to ask Ictinus, the Parthenon’s architect, to build it for them. Bassæ, where already a more primitive shrine existed, was the place chosen, and thither from Andritsena in the cool dawn modern pilgrims are taken by their peasant guides. In spite of the promise of the stars, perhaps the day breaks slowly, dark masses of clouds impeding the progress of the sun. For an hour and a half the horses make their way along moderate heights, scrambling up small hills and clattering noisily down very rocky defiles. The waysides, in March, are bright with irises, violets, hyacinths, and white and purple crocuses. Then the wildness of the country begins to increase, and culminates in the stony slope of a forbidding hill. In half an hour this is scaled by the horses, and becomes a mount of vision. In unusual panoramic grandeur, mountains lift their nearer or more distant peaks. On the east are the barren hills that form the western spurs of Mount Lycæus. Farther to the south, beyond the valley of the Neda, are the more thickly wooded slopes of the Nomian hills, and beyond them are seen the snowy summits of the range of Taygetus. To the north Erymanthus and Cyllene show their crests. And directly in front, far to the south, Mount Ithome, rising out of the Messenian plain, proudly breaks the horizon line. Nor is the sea wholly wanting, for along the southwestern horizon, as if flowing into the sky itself, stretches a shining length of the Ionian waters.

Perhaps from this hill Ictinus looked down upon the place assigned to him by the Phigalians. Even then the situation must have seemed impressively secluded. Now, certainly, on descending the easy slope, a modern is almost overwhelmed, as if by the appearance of a god laying claim to nature’s secrets, by the sudden sight of a majestic Doric peristyle. The temple is built on a narrow plateau on the southern side of a hill called Cotilius by the ancients. Ictinus’s first approach must have been from Phigalia (where he would have talked with the municipal authorities) up the valley of the Neda, over picturesque and well-wooded hills and dales. But he must have studied the situation from all possible points of vantage. Perhaps for him, too, some special revelation came when out of dark and threatening clouds the sun, at last divinely swift, cleft the darkness, and he saw how effectively massive columns of gray limestone would be illumined by Apollo’s radiant shafts. Probably the architect’s taste and the Phigalians’ desire united to choose as the material of the temple the native rock that could be quarried in the neighbourhood. Marble was imported for the capitals of the inner pillars, for the ceilings of the north and south porticoes, for the roof tiles and for the sculptured frieze which now honours the British Museum. The columns of the peristyle and the architrave, barren of adornment, are singularly noble. They look as if they had sprung from the rocks about them and belonged more to the mountains overshadowing them than to men. Indeed, for many centuries, men forgot the existence of the temple. Pausanias, in his day, six hundred years after its building, could still describe it as surpassing all the temples in the Peloponnesus, save the one at Tegea built a hundred years later, for the beauty of its stone and the symmetry of its proportions. But in time earthquakes and iconoclasm wrought their deadly work, and through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the remaining ruins were known only to shepherds. The temple was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, but not until the present time were any efforts made to reërect some of the interior portions from the fragments lying on the ground. In the wake of the archæologist follows the tourist, and now any one who will may intrude upon Apollo’s long solitude.

Unlike other temples erected to the gods, whom Æschylus describes as “facing the dawn” and flashing back to the worshippers from their “gleaming eyes” the sun’s early rays, the temple at Bassæ lay from north to south instead of from east to west. But this was due only to the character of the situation and the exigencies of the soil. Long before Ictinus’s day a primitive shrine had existed facing the east in the usual manner. And the new temple seems to have had a special door built in its cella in order that the main statue of Apollo, facing the rising sun, might still be approached from the side of dawn. The old statue, like the old shrine, was supplanted by a finer one. Later the great bronze Apollo was sent to adorn Megalopolis. But when Ictinus lived it may well have formed the centre of his noble architectural design, an incarnation of the ideal of physical and of spiritual wholeness realized through beauty.

One further fact about the Temple in the Glens has been emphasized by the great topographer Leake: “That which forms, on reflection, the most striking circumstance of all is the nature of the surrounding country, capable of producing little else than pasture for cattle and offering no conveniences for the display of commercial industry either by sea or land. If it excites our astonishment that the inhabitants of such a district should have had the refinement to delight in works of this kind, it is still more wonderful that they should have had the means to execute them. This can only be accounted for by what Horace says of the early Romans:—

This is the true secret of national power, which cannot be equally effective in an age of selfish luxury.”

But it must also be pointed out that although the Phigalians had taste and patriotism, no architect or artist rose among them to shape their stone. Ictinus and his fellow artists must come from Athens worthily to incarnate their desires. So a generation earlier they had been obliged to persuade Onatas, the master of the Æginetan school of sculpture, to carve for them a statue of Demeter. Nor were the Phigalians less skilled than other Arcadians. Scopas had to come from Paros to build the temple to Athena at Tegea. And it was foreign poets who turned the legends of Cyllenian Hermes and Pan into literature, and later enshrined in pastoral verse the tossing mountain forests and the cool rivers of Arcady.

This was Arcadia’s destiny, to offer the raw material of her domain to the shaping hand of more gifted races. Her greatest son was a soldier. Her own deeds were deeds of blood and strife, her own life was one of work and poverty. But because poets and artists of other blood wrought for her, her name and her inherent beauty have become forever domiciled in our own literature, even in our daily speech and commoner affections.