“Returning from Asia Minor and voyaging from Ægina toward Megara I began to look on the places round about me. Behind me was Ægina; before me Megara; on the right Piræus; on the left Corinth—cities once flourishing, now prostrate and in ruins.”

The sail in bright sunshine up the Gulf of Ægina, the ancient Saronic Gulf, will have fulfilled the traveller’s anticipations of the beauty of Greece and will have quickened the historic imagination. History and antiquity, however, will give place to the insistent claims of modern Greek life, as the steamer enters the busy port and passes through the narrow opening between the welcoming arms of the ancient moles which still protect the harbour and serve at night to hold up the green and red signal lights for mariners.

In this harbour meet the Orient and the Occident. One may see here craft of all kinds from all parts of the Mediterranean and from beyond the Straits; modern steamers, big and little; gunboats, native or foreign; sailing vessels from the Greek islands or Turkish possessions, laden with bright cargoes of yellow lemons and Cretan oranges, great grapes purple and white, or “tunnies steeped in brine”; here a steamer packed with pilgrims for a religious festival on Tenos; here, perhaps, another vessel crowded with American tourists to Jerusalem.

Upon landing, most visitors go immediately to Athens, but no one should fail to return once and again to Piræus in order to see the extant remains of the ship-houses; of the gateways and walls to the northwest of the Great Harbour; of the walls that skirt the whole peninsula; of the theatres and other scanty traces of the old life within the city. Even to a traveller innocent of the facts of Greek history, the drive at sunset along the rim of the peninsula and the indenting harbours will be one of the best remembered experiences in the neighbourhood of Athens, by reason of the sheer physical beauty of land and sea, islands and distant mountains.

The terminus of the electric railroad from Athens to Piræus is in the northwest corner of the modern town between the lines now assumed for the “Themistocles Wall” and the “Wall of Conon,” dating, respectively, from the two most significant epochs in the history of Piræus. Although the tyrant Hippias had begun to fortify the Munychia hill in the sixth century B. C., his undertaking was interrupted, and it was left for Themistocles, in the early part of the fifth century, to begin, and finally to carry well on the way to completion, the transformation into a sea-fortress of this natural vantage-ground. Later, he was for removing Athens itself to Piræus. Failing in this, he shifted the habitat for the new fleet from the open roadstead of Phalerum, which was nearer Athens, to the land-locked harbours of Piræus. But the return of the Persians, ten years after Marathon, surprised the Athenians with their preparations incomplete, and Athens was transferred, not indeed to Piræus, but to the “wooden walls” of the triremes themselves.

When, under Pericles, Athens reached the acme of her intellectual, artistic, and material power, around the harbours at Piræus had been built a well-planned city, with stately avenues and dwellings for wealthy men and wealthier gods. The port had been completely fortified either by the restoration and carrying out of the interrupted building or by the extension of the plans of Themistocles. A massive wall inclosed the three harbours within its circuit, and strong moles, lasting on into modern times, guarded their entrances. Ship-houses had also been built, and doubtless an arsenal, though a less pretentious one than the great structure afterwards erected. In short, all the paraphernalia existed for offensive and defensive naval operations. The “Long Walls,” actually built soon after the banishment of Themistocles in 472 B. C., had united Athens and its port into a dual city. No greater proof of the vital union of the two cities could be cited than the rage and grief felt by the citizens when, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, in 404 B. C., the Spartans razed the Long Walls. It was amputating the very feet of the imperial Queen of the Ægean.

Some ten years later, the Long Walls were rebuilt and the restoration of the Piræus fortifications was taken in hand. Of the remains now visible, the major part belongs to this rebuilding at the beginning of the fourth century. A little less than a century had elapsed since Marathon, and we now find Athens allied with her old enemy, Persia, against another Greek state. Conon the Athenian, victorious over the Spartans in the naval battle of Cnidus, sent back Persian gold to fortify the Piræus anew, and the circuit wall, of which such extensive remains are extant, was called by his name.

On issuing from the electric railroad station, the visitor sees before him, a few yards distant, the Great Harbour’s smaller, inner fold, known in antiquity as “The Marsh” (Port d’Halæ) or, perhaps, as the “Blind” Harbour. This inner harbour, roughly a third of a mile by a sixth in size, now furnishes ample accommodation for smaller craft and a convenient landing-place, although in Conon’s day it was probably more of a marshy barrier than a navigable sheet of water. If the whole contour of the two harbours together suggested the designation of “Cantharus,” it may have been from either the meaning “Beetle,” or that of “Two-handled Cup.” Until recently, the name was identified with the southernmost portion only of the Great Harbour. The locus classicus is the “Peace” of Aristophanes. Dædalus and Icarus with their flying-machines had long since anticipated the modern aëroplane, and in this comedy Trygæus in search of Peace starts out to navigate Zeus’s ether on his “beetle.”“beetle.” Then, as now, a safe landing-place for the airship was a desideratum, and Trygæus states that he will have as a safe mooring “the Cantharus harbour in Piræus.”^[4]

Skirting now the northern margin of the inner harbour, the route will follow in part the probable line of the demolished wall of Themistocles, which extended on and reached the water outside both the peninsula of Eetioneia and the outer bay of Krommydaru, where traces of the more ancient fortifications are still extant. Close by the modern station of the Larisa railway, however, will be found the very considerable ruins of a gateway identified with the Conon walls. This alone is an ample reward for the long détour around the harbour.

If time and energy permit, it is well worth while, instead of crossing by boat to Akte, to return to the starting-point and to saunter along the whole margin of the Great Harbour. Particularly picturesque are the great sloops, laden with lemons and oranges, moored in behind the Karaiskakis square, which only the pedestrian would be likely to discover. As one lingers along the quays, however, modern warships and all the craft for commerce and travel will give place to the memories evoked from the greater past. This harbour of commerce will, in imagination, be once more crowded with triremes, brought around from the two war-harbours on the other side, to be inspected one after the other by the Council of the Five Hundred. As official inspectors of the triremes, when made ready to set out for conquest or defeat, this Council held its sittings on the Choma, probably a little promontory that juts southward from the Karaiskakis Place. One may recall, with the help of Thucydides, the setting out of the ill-starred Sicilian expedition. No such vast array had ever left the harbour for so distant and protracted a warfare. All the citizens of Athens as well as of Piræus are here to witness the departure of sons and friends. High hopes of imperial expansion feed the imagination of the multitude. Some rest their confidence on divine favour sure to accompany the pious, though reluctant, Nicias; others put faith in the warrior Lamachus; more in the brilliant Alcibiades, still idolized though accused of sharing in the mutilation of the Hermæ. The great fleet of swift triremes is ready, together with the transports for heavy-armed soldiers, equipments, and supplies. Now the men are all on board and a hush falls upon the throng at a sudden blast of the trumpet. The prayers, according to established ritual, are offered by the united squadron. At a concerted sign, the mixing-bowls are crowned throughout the whole host and the men and generals pour libations from gold and silver cups. The throngs upon the land, both citizens and foreign well-wishers, join in the service. The hymn of triumph sung, the libations poured, the ships weigh anchor and put to sea. But before the last trireme has passed through the moles, and while the ear still catches the notes of the flute and the voice of the Keleustæ, giving the time to the crews, a revulsion of grim presentiment overmasters many of the watchers on the shore. The expedition now no longer seems what they so lightly voted in the assembly. The ever-recurrent Greek feeling that “high things annoy the god” calls up the warning words of Æschylus, uttered a generation before, in the year of the unlucky Egyptian expedition sent out on a similar venture:—

Or else his immortal lament “over the unreturning brave” comes unbidden to their lips:—

The mysterious mutilation of the Hermæ is fresh in mind and the fear of angered gods reasserts its sway. But no presentiment of ill could anticipate the reality of the disaster in the harbour of Syracuse or the slow tortures of living death in its stone quarries. A chance for retaliation in kind was indeed to come. In a Piræus stone quarry Syracusan captives were in turn imprisoned a few years later, but they, more lucky than the Athenians, cut their way to freedom from their rock-bound prison.

Despite the imperious insolence of Athens and her unrighteous schemes for aggrandizement, our sympathy in the tragedy is ever fresh. By the harbour side we mourn to-day the predestined doom of the gallant squadron and the stricken city. Through the ebb and flow of hope and disaster, the thought sweeps on to the close of the war and the humiliation of Athens at the hands of Sparta; the destruction of the Long Walls, their rebuilding and the refortification of Piræus under Conon; the aftermath of Athenian power; the brilliant age of Plato and the orators; the struggle with Philip; the fall of Greek liberty; the sway of Macedon; the Roman conquest, with the long, stubborn siege of Piræus so graphically described by Appian. Sulla, exasperated by the long defence of the Mithridatic army, with whom the Athenians had cast in their lot, burnt the arsenal and docks and razed the fortifications so utterly that the Roman governor, Sulpicius, in writing to his friend Cicero in 45 B. C., could describe Piræus as the “corpse” of a great city. In the second century of our era it had resumed a semblance of commercial prosperity. Lucian, in his dialogue, “When My Ship Comes In,” goes down to Piræus with a friend to admire a great grain transport that has just put into harbour on its way from Egypt to Rome. For a merchantman it is large; some 180 feet long, 45 in beam, and over 40 feet in depth to the hold. The prow stretches out long, and at the stern is the gilded figure-head of a goose with its graceful curving neck. The two friends wonder at a sailor mounting nimbly by the swaying ropes and running out nonchalantly along the great yardarm, as he holds on by the yardsheets. But the generous cargo of grain, enough, as we are told, to feed Athens for a year, is destined for Rome. Athens was no longer the emporium of the eastern Mediterranean. She had become a way-station. No longer could she enforce the old law, mentioned by Aristotle, which required that two thirds of the cargo of every grain-ship that put into Piræus must be carried up to the metropolis.

After Roman times, in the long atrophy of the Byzantine age, Piræus dwindled to a group of fishermen’s huts. It revived somewhat under De la Roche in the fourteenth century, and thereafter, at least was known as Porto Leone from the seated figure of a marble lion that kept guard among the ruins like the majestic lion that still sentinels the battlefield of Chæronea. In the seventeenth century, the Venetians carried off this Piræus lion, and now, seated by another arsenal in another seaport, careless of the passing tourist, it looks grimly over the Adriatic where steamers come and go between the neighbouring Trieste and its native land.

Leaving now the Great Harbour and our meditations on the vicissitudes of history, we resume our inspection of the fan-shaped peninsula. Without a special permit the visitor is excluded from the western end and from the Royal Garden which encloses the most probable site of the Tomb of Themistocles, if indeed his bones were ever brought back from burial in exile. His official tomb was in Magnesia in Caria. A public interment in his native land could not be granted to one exiled as a traitor. Thucydides knows only of a secret burial of his bones in Attica. The remains of the monument in question stand on the point of Akte near the entrance to the outermost harbour. From this tomb the great admiral’s spirit could still watch over the Athenian sea-power. Skepticism about the site is forgotten when we read the fragment, meagre as it is, of the comic poet Plato:—

This “contest of the triremes” may allude to the boat-race in which the course lay from Cantharus harbour around the whole peninsula to Munychia. These races in sacred ships were part of the systematic training of the Attic youths.

The public road leads over the shoulder of the hill and, in descending again to the coast, offers a beautiful view to the west and south over the Saronic Gulf. The driveway then runs along the water’s edge around the promontory, keeping close inside the ruined “Wall of Conon.” Although the remains of this encircling wall rise nowhere more than about eight feet above ground, and usually much less, yet the very continuity of the ruins is imposing. Practically in an unbroken line the solid masonry hems the irregular rim of the peninsula from the mouth of the Great Harbour to a point not far distant from the war-harbour of Zea on the opposite side and may be traced again intermittently around to the Bay of Phalerum. Solid tower buttresses are interposed at frequent intervals. On this southern shore of Akte, where the modern town does not intrude, the spectator is free to divide his attention between the beauty of the sea view and thoughts of the past.

The picturesque land-locked harbours of Zea and Munychia next claim our interest. The pear-shaped Zea basin, now known by the Turco-Greek name of Pashalimani, makes into the neck of the peninsula between the promontory hill of Akte and the Acropolis of Munychia. Behind it and close to it was erected in the fourth century the great Arsenal, and at various points beneath its transparent water may still be seen distinct remains of 38 of the ship-ways that ran down from the ancient ship-houses where the triremes were drawn up. Inscriptions tell us that there were originally 372 in all, of which 82 were in Munychia, 94 in the Great Harbour, and the remainder in Zea. No other relic of antiquity brings us into closer touch with the naval power of Athens and her empire on the Ægean. The covered sheds themselves can only be reconstructed in imagination. Some broken columns of the ship-houses and portions of the launching piers remain in situ. To accommodate the 196 triremes, 130-165 feet long, assigned to the Zea Harbour, some of the houses must have been constructed so as to dock the boats in at least two tiers. At Syracuse, the formidable Piræus of the west, remains of ship-sheds have been found, and at Carthage, the bitter foe of Syracuse, they remained for Appian to describe. Dry-docks may have existed near the harbour entrance. This narrow neck of the pear-shaped harbour was still further guarded at the inner opening by projecting moles, which here also are still extant. The entrance was actually closed, in case of need, by chains extended across at the surface of the water. Of the proud warships themselves, those chargers of the sea stabled in Zea, there remains one realistic reminder. Their timbers have long since rotted away, the gulfs have washed down all such small objects of durable material as bronze nails and clamps, but some heavy plates of Parian marble have been found in the harbour. These were set into the bows of the warships, and upon them were painted the vessel’s eyes that used to keep fierce outlook for the enemy or peer through the gloom of night and storm for the first sight of the shoreward lights of Piræus. Danaus at Argos, in the “Suppliants” of Æschylus, as he sees the approaching ship, exclaims:—

On the marble plates actually recovered the iris is painted bright red or blue, and a vacant hole in the middle suggests the head of a burnished bronze nail that served at once as the pupil of the eye and to rivet on the plate. These eyes are common in representations of ancient vessels, and only in recent years are they disappearing from use among Sicilian and Italian boatmen.

The most casual survey of this protected haven will justify the sagacity of Themistocles in concentrating his energy upon Piræus. His proposition to transfer Athens altogether to the seaport was strategically wise. The extent of the Long Walls, uniting the two into a double city, was a source of weakness, as it drained the defenders away from both towns. But it was a true instinct of the Athenians, which posterity endorses, to cling to the sentiments evoked by their ancient city and in it to develop to the full their intellectual empire.

It is probable that the extant traces of the ship-sheds in the two war-harbours date back only as far as the fourth century B. C., but the number and size fairly represent the older Periclean constructions. The Thirty Tyrants destroyed the former ship-sheds, as Isocrates tells us, and sold for three talents (about $3100) the material of these buildings upon which the city had spent more than one thousand talents.

The ruins of the “Wall of Conon” can still be traced for some distance to the east after leaving the harbour of Zea, and at the southeastern promontory the ruins of ancient fortifications are again to be seen. The harbour of Munychia (modern Phanari) is smaller than that of Zea. Its contour is so perfect an oval as to seem artificial. It had space to accommodate only eighty-two triremes in ship-houses, scanty remains of which are here visible under the water.

At the east side the ruined wall may again be traced to the Bay of Phalērum or (Greek) Phàleron, and beyond, curving around the Munychia acropolis to complete the circuit to the north of the town.

Further east, on the open bay of Phaleron, is New Phaleron, a bathing resort as frankly modern as the Lido at Venice. The exact site of Old Phaleron is open to dispute, but the walk between it and Athens was a favourite constitutional in Plato’s time. Many a classic conversation was held here on the way. In the “Symposium” of Plato, Glaucon asks Apollodorus: “Isn’t the road to Athens just made for conversation?” Now the banality and the bareness of the city’s outskirts intrude sadly upon the pedestrian’s philosophic equipoise, both here and on the other road between Athens and Piræus where Lucian and his friend, in the second century of our era, could still find shelter from the hot sun under some olive trees by the wayside and “sit down to rest upon an overturned stelé.”

The focus of the inner city life was the splendid Agora laid out by the famous architect Hippodamus. Here ended the road from Athens. This square was probably west of Munychia north of the Zea harbour, perhaps about where the present Athena street intersects Munychia avenue. Near it were probably grouped various sanctuaries. Xenophon tells how in the civil war the patriotic party, “the men from Phyle,” unable to exclude “the City party” from the whole of Piræus, fell back on the Munychia hill, and the men from Athens blocked up the avenue that leads to the temple of Bendis and to the sanctuary of Munychian Artemis. By this Market-place, too, houses of rich residents were probably built.

The Piræus was essentially a democratic stronghold. It was the rendezvous for the patriotic anti-Spartan party; and Plato, with all his aristocratic leanings, chose to lay at Piræus the opening scene and setting for his greatest dialogue, the “Republic.” It was the fitting propylæa for his ideal city as well as for the real Athens. “I went down yesterday,” Socrates begins, “to Piræus with Glaucon, both to make a prayer to the goddess and to take a look at the festival to see how they would carry it off, inasmuch as they are now celebrating it for the first time.” The Thracian residents, it seems, had just introduced a celebration in honour of their goddess Bendis, and the natives had united with them. The whole port was en fête with processions conducted both by the hospitable native citizens and the Thracians themselves. In the evening there was to be a torch-race followed by an all-night festival. Socrates, who was on the point of returning to Athens after witnessing the daylight processions, was easily persuaded by Polemarchus to stay over for the torch-race, dining first at the house of his father, the rich and hospitable old metic, Cephalus. At the house Socrates finds another son, Lysias, who was soon to become famous as an orator. For the Thirty were to plunder the property bequeathed by Cephalus to his sons, all the ready money, the shield factory, and the slaves; were to put summarily to death young Polemarchus; and were to force Lysias, reduced to sudden poverty, to betake himself to speech-writing for a living. His crowning effort was an arraignment of his brother’s murderers. Most skilful of narrators, he tells of the fate of Polemarchus; how his house was plundered; how his wife was robbed of the very ear-rings from her ears; and how after his execution, notwithstanding the just title of the family to large holdings of real estate, he was buried from a hired shed, one friend providing a robe, another a pillow, for the corpse. He tells, too, of his own arrest at his home by the emissaries of the Thirty: how he bargained for his life with a sum of ready money; how one of his captors followed him into the inner room, looked over his shoulder into the money-chest, and took not only the price agreed upon but all the contents of the strong box; how he was taken to another house of a Piræus acquaintance; and how, while his captors were keeping guard at the peristyle door in front, he had escaped by a back door to the house of a friend, the shipmaster, with the appropriate name of Archenaus. So, while his less fortunate brother, Polemarchus, is led off to Athens, thrown into prison, and “bidden by the Thirty their usual bidding—to drink hemlock,” Lysias, by the aid of his nautical friend, is embarked for Megara under cover of night. We should like to have fuller details of that escape of the young Lysias, yesterday a wealthy manufacturer, to-day a plundered fugitive but destined to become one of the greatest of the “ten” orators and a master architect of Attic style. Perhaps a small boat put off from some lonely spot on Akte, perhaps from the Great Harbour itself, shooting through the moles in the darkness and, wind and weather permitting, kept to starboard of the Psyttaleia reef, passed up through the strait of Salamis, on through the beautiful Bay of Eleusis, and landed the fugitive at Megara.

Plato’s account of the visit of Socrates to the Piræus homestead carries us back to the days of security before the reign of the Thirty. We see old Cephalus welcoming Socrates cordially, delivering a monologue on his own gracious old age, telling a story about Sophocles in his later years, and finally withdrawing to supervise a sacrifice to the gods.

The introduction of a foreign divinity like Bendis of the Thracians was not unusual. The celebration, described at the opening of the Republic, was at least no more exotic than a St. Patrick’s day in America. Foreigners and natives united in it as they did in the celebration of the Mother of the Gods. The customs inspection of foreign deities was lenient. The Greeks were free traders both in art and religion, though the finished product imported was likely enough to be used as new material. Into the smelting furnace of the classic period was cast the old, the new, the foreign, and the domestic, to reappear in fairer form, stamped with the Hellenic hall-mark. Among the various imported deities, Cybele is well vouched for at Piræus where a number of marble votive shrines of the Great Mother have been found. One of these archaic Cybele reliefs, brought from Piræus to the National Museum in Athens, shows the goddess with her lion in her lap, her cymbals in her hand. The “new theology,” fostered by Euripides and domiciled in daily life by the “New Comedy,” could treat these cymbals as typical of “a creed out-worn.” One of Menander’s characters exclaims:—

Among various resident colonists who may have occupied distinct sections of the city, like a mediæval Ghetto or a modern Italian quarter, the worship of home divinities was kept alive. It is known, for example, that the Egyptian resident merchants, perhaps as early as the end of the fifth century, had received a special license to erect an Isis sanctuary and the Cyprians instituted a similar cult of Adonis and Aphrodite.

Remains of the old gateway in the northern circuitwall, just where the north Long Wall joined on, are still extant. Within a century, the traces of the Long Walls themselves have been disappearing. Enough is left, however, to mark their course at various points, and the remains are particularly plain of the “South” Long Wall, where it nears the Munychia acropolis. Ascending Munychia, we may imagine the Long Walls still reaching up to Athens. We may picture them either in time of war, with defenders within and foes without, or in time of peace, with the stream of pedestrians bent upon pleasure or business. Outside the North Wall was one of the places of execution. Plato illustrates the contest between the brute in man and his higher reason by the story of a certain Leontius who one day was walking up from Piræus and saw some dead bodies fallen prostrate by the side of the executioner. He loathes the sight but is fain to look. Vulgar curiosity gains the mastery; he runs up to the dead bodies and, holding his eyelids wide open, exclaims: “There wretches! Take your fill of the fine spectacle!”

Turning from the course of the Long Walls, the eye surveys the whole panorama of the harbours and the city. Just within the old wall, on the west slope of the Munychia hill, is the old Theatre in a ruined condition. But we can think of the harbour folk in days of peace enjoying on these same rising seats the plays of a Menander or Euripides or see convened there in the times of grim civil strife a hurried assembly of the patriotic party.

Somewhere close by the north side of Zea was the famous arsenal which, though not built till near the end of the fourth century, has entirely disappeared. Luckily, however, in 1882 there was discovered near the Zea harbour a slab of Hymettus marble containing the directions given to the contractors for its construction. It was built to contain the rigging, tackle, sails, cables for undergirding the ships, etc., while the masts, spars, oars, rudders, and other wooden gear seem to have been kept in the ship-sheds themselves alongside of the ships. This arsenal of Philo replaced an older and less elaborate one. It was a large building, four hundred by five hundred feet within, and provided for a roomy arcade where the populace, screened from the burning heat without, could promenade and gaze at the suggestive evidences of their sea power.

Of the many private and public buildings, temples and colonnades mentioned by classic authors, but few can be positively located. In the Colonnade of the Exchange—the Deigma—Theophrastus, Menander’s friend and the successor of Aristotle, represents his “Boastful Man,” a shipping-merchant, as bragging about his great ventures and cargoes at sea. Meanwhile his balance at the banker’s actually amounts to about twenty cents. That this Deigma, where gossip was coined and bargains struck around the money-changers’ tables, must have been close to the edge of the Great Harbour is evident from Xenophon, who says that one day twelve Lacedæmonian ships swept into the harbour suddenly, landed a party and carried off from the Exchange a group of sea-captains and merchants.

The site of the Asklepieion, partly church, partly sanatorium, has been identified in the remains west of Zea. Aphrodite, born of the foam, is a popular goddess with sailor-folk. To her were dedicated, it would seem, no less than three sanctuaries at Piræus.

Lastly, there was the famous Hieron or Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena. Even its site cannot now be identified, but it must have been one of the most frequented centres of Piræus life in the fifth century. An inscription records that into the treasury of this sanctuary went the tax of a drachma on every vessel that put into the port. Incidentally many a further contribution was levied on the newly landed sailor, who was as much a fish out of water among the land-sharks as is the modern Jack Tar on ship’s leave. The comic poet Diphilus tells how one of these harbour caterers used to select his victims: “For example there’s the skipper who grudgingly pays off a vow made under stress of weather when the mast went by the board or when he had snapped the rudder-sweeps of the ship or else was forced by water rising in the hold to hurl his cargo overboard. A wide berth I give to a fellow like him. Such a man will not be free-handed; my best chance is with the captain who has made a quick, safe voyage from Byzantium, who, all excitement over his gain of ten or twelve per cent for three days’ risk, is loud in his chatter about freights and usuries.” He’s the man for the purposes of this shark, and no sooner is he landed than our keeper of the Sailors’ Snug Retreat goes up to him, takes his hand, and reminds him that a sacrifice at the temple of Zeus Preserver would be in order. He thoughtfully relieves the skipper of any care, making the purchases, superintending the offering, and sharing the commission with the priests of the Hieron. And human nature was much the same five hundred years later, when we again meet a skipper whose performance, once he is safe at Piræus, falls far short of the vows made in storm and peril. Lucian, in his “Zeus the Tragedian,” gives details. The Olympian Father, alarmed at the signs of increasing irreligiousness and the consequent stringency in the sacrificial market, calls an assembly of the gods. After some difficult points of precedence as to order of seating have been temporarily waived and half-naturalized divinities like Mithras and our Thracian Bendis have been admitted, Zeus makes a speech. He begins fluently enough with a mosaic of oratorical phrases which he has memorized from Demosthenes. Presently, however, he exclaims: “But my Demosthenes is giving out. I must tell you in plain Greek what has troubled me.” He reminds them of the dinner in which some of them—“as many as had been invited”—had participated the day before, when “Mnesitheus, the ship-owner, had given them a Thanksgiving banquet at Piræus on account of the preservation of his vessel that had come within an ace of being wrecked off Eubœa.” “That evening,” he continues, “while taking a constitutional, I kept thinking over the stinginess of Mnesitheus who undertook to entertain sixteen gods by sacrificing a single cock—and that, too, a wheezy old rooster!—with four little lumps of frankincense so mouldy that they went out forthwith on the coals, without giving even the tip of my nose a whiff of the smoke. That’s what he did, though he was for promising whole hecatombs when his boat was driving on the cliff and was already encircled by reefs.”

Sometimes the fisher-folk preferred to go up to Athens and dedicate votive offerings in the Parthenon. Lucian, in “The Fisher,” when angling over the edge of the Acropolis for the scaly philosophers of the second century, borrows of the Priestess of the Parthenon a rod, hook, and line that “the fisherman from Piræus had dedicated” as a thank-offering.

Of the many epigrams in the Greek Anthology on shipwrecked mariners, the most appropriate to our harbour town is perhaps the one written by Antipater of Sidon for the tomb of a certain Aristagoras who was drowned after reaching harbour at Scarphe. We are reminded of the Piræus temple to Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage by the bitterness with which the poet uses the epithet:—

It requires no great stretch of the imagination to reproduce the thrill of pride and delight with which the Attic demesman, whether sailor or soldier, fisherman or merchant, returning from abroad sighted the heights of Akte and the Munychia acropolis and sailed up to the beautiful, dignified city built around its strong, fortified harbours. Even after independent Athens had been incorporated in the Macedonian empire, Menander could record this patriotic delight. In a fragment from his “Fishers” a sailor, returning perhaps to Piræus, falls down and kisses the earth, exclaiming:—

We think of Menander himself as a frequent visitor to the harbour town. Tradition says that he was drowned while bathing at the harbour and his countrymen gave him a tomb and an epitaph on the road from Piræus to Athens by the Long Walls. There, too, was the cenotaph of Euripides, who had sailed away to the court of the Macedonian king, never again to enter through the harbour’s arms that welcomed so many returning voyagers.

And the Athenian of the third century, returning as we do now, from a visit to Piræus, would see these tombs as he left the harbour walls and perhaps find compensation for the loss of external liberty in realizing that the great sea-fortress and the maritime empire of Themistocles, of Pericles, and of Conon had buttressed well a Greater Athens; that neither Spartan jealousy and civil discord, nor even the foreign rule of Macedon itself could destroy the real power of this Mother city and obliterate her sway over the human mind. But it required the perspective of longer time and the idealism of a Shelley boldly to interpret disaster in terms of victory and to proclaim Athens as mistress of a sea wider than the Ægean:—

The launching-ways of the ancient triremes, still seen beneath the clear water, symbolize that continued hegemony.