Read Ebook: Greek Lands and Letters by Allinson Anne C E Anne Crosby Emery Allinson Francis Greenleaf

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INDEX 463

MAP OF GREECE AND THE AEGEAN 1

MAP OF PIRAEUS 32

AREOPAGUS 104

STREET OF THE TOMBS 114 Monument of Hegeso

AFTER POLYGNOTUS 134

THE PANATHENAEA CONTINUED 134

MAP OF ATTICA 144

AEGINA 188 Temple of Aphaea

CORINTH 202 Temple of Apollo and Acrocorinth

DELPHI AND THE ROAD TO ARACHOVA 250

MAP OF BOEOTIA 266

A GALLERY OF THE ACROPOLIS OF TIRYNS 324

CALAURIA 356 Temple of Poseidon. Scene of the death of Demosthenes

OLYMPIA 388 Kronos Hill. The ruins of the Altis

TA?GETUS 432

NIKE OF SAMOTHRACE, reproduced on the front cover, is from a coin in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

GREEK LANDS AND LETTERS

Cicero, at one time studying Greek oratory in Rhodes, at another speaking Greek as the language best adapted to a Sicilian audience, suggests with sufficient definiteness the eastern and western boundaries of ancient Hellas. Leaving out of consideration more remote colonies, we may content ourselves with including in the Greater Greece of antiquity all the Mediterranean lands and waters from Sicily and Lower Italy, in the west, to Cyprus and the coast of Asia Minor, in the east. The Riviera, or seaboard of the eastern side of the AEgean, is sharply differentiated from the continuous highlands of the interior, which suggest, a short distance inland, a boundary line between Europe and Asia. For a maritime people like the Greeks this was a barrier more effectual than the highway of the Bosphorus. In the early historic times, when the sun rose over these mountains of Asia Minor he left behind him the Oriental and looked down at once upon the Cis-montane Greeks, and it was upon Greeks that he was still shining when his setting splendour lit up the Bay of Naples--the "New-town" of that day--or the ancient Cumae and the heights of Anacapri or the islands of the Sirens and the golden brown columns of Poseidon's temple at Paestum.

The seaboard, too, of Macedonia and Thrace belonged to Greece by reason of their water-front on the AEgean. And to the south, the encroachments of the Greeks upon the preserves of the Nile-god were so extensive for centuries before the time of Alexander that we need not wonder either at Egyptian reminiscences in Greek art or at the increasing evidences of Hellenic life in Egypt.

The Greeks, compared with the hoary antiquity of the Egyptians, are late comers. The essential difference, however, is not a matter of centuries or millennia. The Egyptians, perhaps because the details are foreshortened by the vast distance, seem to possess a chronology, but no real history. There were revolutions, rather than evolution. The Greeks were young, too, individually as well as chronologically. From Homer down through the classic period we hear "the everlasting wonder-song of youth." Plato makes an Egyptian priest say to the Athenian law-giver: "O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever children; no Hellene is ever old!" We find the Greeks of the historic period on the intellectual watershed between antiquity and the modern world. From data now well established we may push back their life far beyond recorded chronology, and, if we anticipate even by a little the nucleus of the Homeric poems, we possess a practically unbroken continuity of their history and language for three thousand years down to the present day. Greek history is often confined within perfectly arbitrary dates. In reality, the death of Alexander in 323 B. C., the closing of the schools of philosophy in 529 A. D., and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A. D. only break its course into convenient chapters.

The Greek language is itself one of the greatest creations of Greek art. Discarding some superfluities, retained or over-emphasized by others of our common Indo-European family, the Greeks developed an instrument for the expression of thought unsurpassed, if not unequalled, among any other people. "The whole language resembles the body of an artistically trained athlete, in which every muscle is called into full play, where there is no trace of flaccid tumidity, and all is power and life." The "common dialect" already dominated the eastern Mediterranean before the Romans took physical possession. Its direct legatee is the modern Greek, that had sprung up in lusty independence some three centuries before the Turks put an end to senile Byzantium and its crabbed ecclesiastical speech.

Of creative literature the same unbroken continuity cannot be predicated. The early literature, beginning with Homer, extends through the first quarter of the fifth century B. C. It includes the great epic poetry, the elegiac and iambic, the beginnings of philosophy, and seven of the ten greatest lyric poets. No fact in Greek literature is more conspicuous than the shortness and the richness of the next period, which may be conveniently called the "Attic," although some of the greatest writers came from outside of Attica--from Boeotia, from the islands, from beyond the AEgean, or from Sicily. Within this brief period of only 183 years, if we close it with the death of Menander in 292 B. C., all the additional types of the literature either culminated or originated.

The next period of 150 years, commonly known as the Alexandrian period, has within its early limits the name of Theocritus, whose quality entitles him to rank with the writers of the Classic period, as does that of his two legatees, Bion and Moschus, and also Herodas, whose writings, recovered in the fortunate year 1891, have now made him a part of the Greek Classics. But in the Alexandrian period, and in the Graeco-Roman period from 146 B. C. to 529 A. D., the great names are, as a rule, not so great, and they are spread over a long time. Few of them, except Lucian in the second century of our era, and Plutarch immediately preceding him, successfully compete for a prominent place as writers of pure literature.

With a few exceptions, the great original work in Greek literature had been done before the death of Menander. The Greek anthology, however, must not be ignored. It ranges over more than one thousand years and leaves no century in all that time without at least some minor representative of great beauty. Like a cord twisted of dull strands and golden, it binds together the Attic age with the whole of the subsequent time down to the year 550 of our era, the golden strand reappearing sufficiently often to assure us of its continuity. The next nine centuries of Byzantine Greek, ecclesiastical and profane, are little known to most classical scholars. The contributions of the modern Greek, before and since the days of Byron, are significant, and the friends of the new kingdom await with cordial expectation the rise of new writers to give to the lore of the peasant and the struggles of the patriot a worthy literary form. Of the lacunae in the literature, in spite of the continuity of the language, Professor Hatzidakis of Athens has well said: "The Greek language is as little to be blamed for this as could be the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus, because in those times no one fashioned from them a Hermes of Praxiteles or a Venus of Melos."

A glance at the map will show how accessible was the mainland of Greece, upon the east and south, to seafaring visitors from across the AEgean, who would naturally find here their first landing-places. Except for the great gash of the Corinthian Gulf, the western coast is indented only with smaller, though good, harbours, while the whole southern and eastern seaboard from Messenia in the southwest to Thrace is a ragged fringe of promontories, large and small, welcoming into the interior the waters that suggested sea-business of war and commerce.

Thessaly and Mount Olympus to the north belong geographically to the Kingdom of Greece. On either side of Thessaly irregular mountain chains run southward and preserve a general connection through Central Greece and Attica, and, despite the submerging water, may be identified as reappearing in the islands far out in the AEgean. Olympus on the northeast--hardly interrupted by the river Peneius, which has rent its way through the precipitous ca?on known as the "Vale" of Tempe--is continued along the east coast by Mount Ossa and Mount Pelion. Then across the narrow entrance to the Pagasaean and Malian gulfs the system is continued by the sharp dorsal fins of the island of Euboea, that stretches like a sea-monster along the shores of Locris, Boeotia, and Attica, to reappear at intervals far to the southeast in the islands Andros, Tenos, Myconos, Delos, Naxos, Amorgos, and Astypalaea. On the west of Thessaly the great Pindus ridge, descending through the centre of northern Greece, details on the rugged system of peaks and ranges which fill central Greece southward to the Gulf of Corinth and which in general run from west to east. One of these ranges, called the Othrys Mountains, bounds the Thessalian countries on the south and ends at the Gulf of Pagasae. Another, Mount OEta, is continued by the high mountains that shut off Thermopylae to the north and runs on as the boundary between Locris and Boeotia. Still another range, running out of the central complex, has its culmination in Parnassus, 8070 feet high, and is continued, though more interrupted and with a more irregular course, by Mount Helicon in Boeotia and the frontier hills of Attica, from Helicon to Parnes, and bends around into the massive ridge of Mount Pentelicus, from whose summit the spectator can see the prolongation in the islands of Ceos, Cythnos, Seriphos, and others beyond.

The narrow neck that divides the Corinthian from the Saronic Gulf and connects Attica and Boeotia with the Peloponnesus, lifts up among its rugged hills in Megara the picturesque twin peaks of the Kerata. South of the isthmus itself, with its narrow plain and the deep cutting necessary for the canal, rises the splendid acropolis of Acrocorinth, keeping guard at the entrance to the "Island of Pelops."

The Peloponnesus, or Morea, is a rugged complex of mountains that by turns shut out and admit the sea. Of its four irregular peninsulas, jutting out southward in the Argolis and in Laconia and Messenia, each has its mountain system; the more broken hills in the Argolid plain; the ridge of Parnon to the east of the plain of Lacedaemon; the imposing barrier of Taygetus between Sparta and Messenia. In Messenia itself are fertile plains. One is in the midland, as the name Messenia originally implied, among offshoots of the Arcadian Lycaeus; while the great mountain fortress of Ithome, 2600 feet high, where crops could be reared and an army supported, towering above the hills and plains of central Messenia, looks down on another larger plain, almost tropical in its products, that stretches southward to the gulf.

From north to south, from east to west the Greek landscape lends itself to panoramic views. Lucian in his "Charon" makes Hermes seat himself on one of the twin peaks of Parnassus and Charon upon the other. With eyes anointed with Homeric eye-salve, the Ferryman, on his furlough from the under-world, is able to see not only the Greater Greece outspread around him,--from Asia Minor to Sicily, from the Danube to Crete,--but to look off beyond to the Orient and to Egypt. These wide outlooks are enhanced by the distinctness of the sky-line, everywhere an important factor. "The hard limestone of which the mountains are composed is apt to break away, and thus produces those sharply-cut outlines which stand out so clearly against the transparent sky of Greece."

So large a troupe of actors played their parts in Greek history that the imagination demands a roomy stage. But the country is small. Were it not for the mountain barriers, the scale of distances would seem trivial. It is, for example, only some thirty miles in an air line from Thermopylae to the Gulf of Corinth. Even on the leisurely and winding Piraeus, Athens, and Peloponnesus Railway, it is only one day's ride from Athens via the Isthmus down to Kalamata on the Bay of Messenia. The degrees of latitude that include the mainland of Central and Southern Greece span in the west only the Lipari Islands and Sicily; the thirty-eighth parallel that passes south of Palermo and the straits of Messina runs a little north of Athens; while the thirty-seventh parallel, running just south of Syracuse, passes still farther south of Kalamata and Sparta.

Not only is the mainland of Greece contained in narrow geographical limits, but the AEgean itself is almost an inland lake enclosed within neighbouring coasts. In clear weather the sailor, without adventuring upon open sea, might pass from mainland to mainland as he watched from his advancing prow another island lift above the horizon before losing sight of the harbour left astern. In Greek literature there is no more striking reminder of the contiguity of the Asian coast to Greece proper than the well-known passage in the "Agamemnon" of AEschylus describing the swift telegraphy of the beacon signals that brought to Argos the news of the capture of Troy. The ten years' absence of Agamemnon's host tends to an instinctive extension of the distance, if the imagination is not checked by the actual scale of miles. Troy seems farther from Argos than the Holy Land from the homes of the Crusaders.

Clytemnestra, to the chorus asking who could have brought the news so quickly, replies:--

From the very smallness of Greece results the overcrowding of associations that almost oppress the spectator standing at one or another place of vantage. But if his historic horizon is as clearly defined as the physical he will come back to the sea-level with a clearer understanding of the interdependence between the scene and the action of the great dramas here enacted. The country is not only a background but a cause for the literature. Neither can be fully understood without the other.

It must not be assumed from the smallness of the land that the spurs to the imagination of the Greeks were few. On the contrary, within their narrow borders, nature was prodigal of her inspiration. In the few miles from Thessaly to the Messenian Gulf are offered a variety of climate and an alternation of products well-nigh unparalleled for such a limited area. The warm air of the sea penetrating into sheltered valleys favours an almost tropical vegetation, while the lofty mountain ridges offer almost an Alpine climate. In Attica, in early spring, snow may occasionally be seen sprinkled on Hymettus and glistening white on Mount Pentelicus, while oranges hang on the trees in Athens. Taygetus in the south maybe a snow-covered mountain even as late as May while in the Messenian plain below grows the palm and, more rarely, the edible date. In the Argolis are groves of lemons and oranges, and in Naxos, in the same latitude as Sparta, the tender lime ripens in the gardens. The gray-green olive is familiar throughout Central and Southern Greece. If we extend the survey farther north, the beeches of the Pindus range, west of Thessaly, are surrounded by the vegetation rather of northern Europe; in the interior of Thessaly the olive tree does not flourish; the northern shores of the AEgean have the climate of Central Germany, while Mount Athos, whose marble walls jut far out into the AEgean and rise 6400 feet above the sea, offers on its slopes nearly all species of European trees in succession.

The different parts of Greece offer a varying development in literature. In this particular some districts, like Acarnania, AEtolia, and Achaea, though possessed of great natural beauty, are negligible. Arcadia, though itself unproductive, inspired poetry; others, also, like Phocis, Locris, and Messenia, are inevitably drawn into the associations of literature and history. In Epirus we find at Dodona the first known sanctuary of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks. In Thessaly the earliest Greeks, or Achaeans, may have first forged in the fire of their young imagination the tempered steel of the hexameter. Here was the home of Achilles, and here, perhaps, we must look for the kernel of the Iliad. Here most fitly, close to Olympus where dwelt the immortals, could the sons of men be "near-gods."

From the north and northwest successive waves of population descended into lower Greece to conquer, merge with, or become subject to the previous comers. But prehistoric peoples, whether alien or Greek, like the Eteo-Cretans, the Pelasgi, the Minyae, the Leleges, the Hellenes, the Achaeans, and even great movements like the Dorian and Ionian migrations, are all foreshortened on a scenic background, as equidistant to the Greeks of the classic periods as is the vault of heaven to the eyes of children. One star, indeed, differed from another. The Dorian, for example, was of the first magnitude. But the relations of apparent magnitude and real distance were ignored or na?vely confused in the fanciful constellations of myth and saga, distant yet ever present, bending around them to their explored horizon. Heroic figures impalpable but real as the gods themselves intervened continually, controlling decisions, shaping policies, or determining disputed boundaries among even the most intellectual of the Greeks. Royalty, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny alike must reckon with personified tradition.

When we emerge into the light of more authentic records it is well, in the confusing maze of inter-cantonal contentions, to focus the mind, for the purpose of appreciating the literature, upon certain broader relations and more clearly defined epochs in Greek history, like the so-called "Age of the Despots" within the seventh and sixth centuries, the Persian wars, and the conflicts between Attica as a pivot and the Peloponnese, Thebes, and Macedon.

It might be expected from the variety of natural charm offered by Hellenic lands, from Ilium to Sicily, from Mount Olympus to Crete, that the Greeks would show in their literature a pervasive love of nature. This was, in fact, the case. The modern eye has not been the first to discover the beauty of form and colour in the Greek flowers and birds, mountains, sky and sea. Modern critics, ignoring all historical perspective and assuming as a procrustean standard the one-sided and sophisticated attitude that has played a leading r?le in modern literature, announced as axiomatic that ancient Greek poets had no feeling for nature and found no pleasure in looking at the beauties of a landscape. This superficial idea still keeps cropping up, although thoughtful readers of Greek literature have long since pointed out the necessity both of a chronological analysis of the literature and of a more inclusive statement of the various forms in which a sentiment for the natural world is evinced. It is a far cry from Homer to Theocritus, and, as might well be expected in a range of six centuries and more, new elements appear from time to time, due both to changing conditions of life and civilization and also to the personal equation.

Footnote 1:

A na?ve feeling for nature is uppermost in the descriptive comparisons and similes of Homer and, generally speaking, in the myth-making of the Greeks. The concrete embodiment of natural phenomena and objects in some Nature-divinity often obviated the necessity for elaborate description and summarized their conceptions as if by an algebraic formula. The mystical element was not lacking, but by this myth-making process it became objective and real. The sympathetic feeling for nature becomes more and more apparent in lyric poetry and the drama until in Euripides there emerges, almost suddenly, the "modern" romanticism. In the Hellenistic and imperial times, finally, the sentimental element is natural to men who turn to the country for relief from the stress of life in a city. One generalization for the classic periods may be safely made. Although the Greeks from Homer to Euripides thought of the world as the environment of man, yet they stopped short of a sentimental self-analysis. Charles Eliot Norton, more than thirty years ago, pointed out that the expression of a sentiment like Wordsworth's--

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"--

is foreign to the clear-eyed Hellene, reared amongst the distinct outlines of his mountains and from the cradle to the grave at home upon the blue and windswept AEgean. Certainly this is true until the speculative questionings of the Ionic philosophers had time to react upon literature. As the Greeks accepted their pedigrees from the gods and heroes, so they accepted their environment of beauty. They were not unlike the child, content to betray by a stray word or caress his unanalyzed admiration for his mother's face.

Emphasis has often been laid, and rightly, upon the keen sensitiveness of the Greeks to beauty of form in sculpture, architecture, and literature. It is urged that they made this sense of form and proportion so paramount that they were blind to the beauty of colouring and indifferent to the prodigal variety of Nature's compositions. It may be readily admitted that this is a vital distinction between the ancient and modern attitudes. Both the craving for perfection of form and the preference given to man before nature come out in the pre?minent development of sculpture by the Greeks. Their admiration of the beauty of the human form, unlike the sensitive shrinking of moderns, was extended even to the lifeless body. AEschylus speaks of the warriors who have found graves before Troy as still "fair of form."

But a prevailing tendency does not necessarily exclude other elements. However meagre the vocabulary of the Greeks in sharp distinction of shades of colour, their love for a bright colour-scheme is shown not only by the brilliancy of their clothing and their use of colouring in statuary and architecture,--for even in these mere form was not enough,--but in unnumbered expressions like Alcman's "sea-purple bird of the springtime."

A few of the more obvious passages, illustrating the Greek attitude toward nature, are here given in general historic sequence. Others will be found in the subsequent chapters in connection with particular landscapes. Very often such references are casual and subordinate to some controlling idea, but they none the less reflect habitual observation. Even when we speak of Homeric "tags," like the "saffron-robed" or "rosy-fingered," or of Sappho's "golden-sandalled" Dawn, as "standing epithets," we are implying that these epithets made a general appeal. The na?ve insertions in Homer of comparisons drawn from birds and beasts, from night and storm and other familiar elements of nature, would seem like an intrusive delay of the story did they not carry with them the conviction that both poet and hearers alike were well content to linger by the way and observe the objects of daily life indoors and out. Thus in the Odyssey:--

"The lion mountain-bred, with eyes agleam, fares onward in the rain and wind to fall upon the oxen or the sheep or wilding deer."

Or, again:--

"Hermes sped along the waves like sea-mew hunting fish in awesome hollows of the sea unharvested and wetting his thick plumage in the brine."

One of the longer and best known comparisons is the description in the Iliad of the Trojan encampment by night:--

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