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

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

"Now they with hearts exultant through the livelong night sat by the space that bridged the moat of war, their watch-fires multitudinous alight. And just as in the sky the stars around the radiant moon shine clear; when windless is the air; when all the peaks stand out, the lofty forelands and the glades; when breaketh open from the sky the ether infinite and all the stars are seen and make the shepherds glad at heart--so manifold appeared the watch-fires kindled by the Trojan men in front of Ilios betwixt the streams of Xanthus and the ships. So then a thousand fires burned upon the plain and fifty warriors by the side of each were seated in the blazing fire's gleam the while the horses by the chariots stood and champed white barley and the spelt and waited for the throned Dawn."

Sappho's fragments are redolent of flowers; her woven verse, a "rich-red chlamys" in the sunshine, has a silver sheen in the moonlight. We hear the full-throated passion of "the herald of the spring, the nightingale"; the breeze moves the apple boughs, the wind shakes the oak trees. Her allusions to "the hyacinths, darkening the ground, when trampled under foot of shepherds"; the "fine, soft bloom of grass, trodden by the tender feet of Cretan women as they dance"; or the "golden pulse growing on the shore,"--all these seem inevitable to one who has seen the acres of bright flowers that carpet the islands or the nearby littoral of the Asian coast. Her comparison of a bridegroom to "a supple sapling" recalls how Nausica?, vigorous, tall, and straight as the modern athletic maiden, is likened by Odysseus to the "young shaft of a palm tree" that he had once seen "springing up in Delos by Apollo's altar." In her Lesbian orchards the sweet quince-apple is still left hanging "solitary on the topmost bough, upon its very end"; and there is heard "cool murmuring through apple boughs while slumber floateth down from quivering leaves." Nor need we attribute Sappho's love of natural beauty wholly to her passionate woman's nature. All the gentler emotions springing from an habitual observation of nature recur in poets of the sterner sex. "The Graces," she says, "turn their faces from those who wear no garlands." And at banquets wreaths were an essential also for masculine full-dress. Pindar, in describing Elysian happiness, leads up to the climax of the companionship with the great and noble dead by telling how "round the islands of the Blest the ocean breezes blow and flowers of gold are blooming: some from the land on trees of splendour and some the water feedeth; with wreaths whereof they twine their heads and hands." Against the green background passes Evadne with her silver pitcher and her girdle of rich crimson woof, and her child is seen "hidden in the rushes of the thicket unexplored, his tender flesh all steeped in golden and deep purple light from pansy flowers."

Footnote 2:

Translation by E. Myers.

To follow through the poetry of the Greeks the unfailing delight in the radiance of the moon would be to follow her diurnal course as she passes over Greek lands from east to west. The full moon looked down on all the Olympian festivals and Pindar's pages are illuminated with her glittering argentry. The Lesbian nights inspire Sappho as did all things beautiful.

"The clustering stars about the radiant moon avert their faces bright and hide, what time her orb is rounded to the full and touches earth with silver."

Wordsworth could take this thought from Sappho: "The moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare," but the Lesbian certainly did not finish the fragment by lamenting that "there has passed away a glory from the earth."

The night and the day alike claimed the attention of the poets and the interchange of dusk and dawn appealed to the sculptor also. In the east gable of the Parthenon the horses of the Sun and of the Moon were at either end. Nature's sleep is a favourite topic. Alcman's description is unusual only for its detail:--

"Sleep the peaks and mountain clefts; Forelands and the torrents' rifts; All the creeping things are sleeping, Cherished in the black earth's keeping; Mountain-ranging beast and bee; Fish in depths of the purple sea; Wide-winged birds their pinions droop-- Sleep now all the feathered troop."

Goethe, in his well-known paraphrase,--

"Ueber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,"--

cannot refrain from adding the subjective conclusion of the whole matter:--

"Die V?gelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch."

The great dramatists display an observation of the beauty of the external world not always sufficiently emphasized. In AEschylus an intense feeling is evident; none the less because it is subordinated to his theme or used to point, by way of contrast, some awe-inspiring or pathetic situation or some scene of blood. Clytemnestra describes how she murdered her husband. His spattering blood, she says,--

"Keeps striking me with dusky drops of murd'rous dew, Aye, me rejoicing none the less than God's sweet rain Makes glad the corn-land at the birth-pangs of the buds."

Comparisons, similes, and epithets drawn from the sea reappear continually in the warp and woof of Greek, and especially of Athenian, literature. AEschylus, like the rest, knew the sea in all its moods, terrible in storm, deceitful in calm, beautiful at all times and the pathway for commerce and for war. The returning herald in the "Agamemnon" rehearses the soldiers' hard bivouac in summer and in winter:--

"And should one tell of winter, dealing death to birds, What storms unbearable swept down from Ida's snow, Or summer's heat when, ruffled by no rippling breeze, Ocean slept waveless, on his midday couch laid prone."

With the first lines of "Prometheus Bound" we are carried far from the haunts of men:--

"Unto this far horizon of earth's plain we've come, This Scythian tract, this desert by man's foot untrod."

Hephaestus reluctant, compelled by Zeus's order, rivets his kin-god, the Fire-bringer, to the desolate North Sea crag and withdraws leaving Prometheus in fetters to "wrestle down the myriad years of time." The night shuts off the warmth and light, drawing over him her "star-embroidered robe," and the fierce sun-god returns with blazing rays to "deflower his fair skin" bared of the white counterpane of "frost of early dawn." Not until the emissaries of Zeus have departed does Prometheus deign to speak. Then he "communes with Nature." He has no hope of help from God, none from the "helpless creatures of a day" whom he has helped. Alone with the forces of nature he utters that outcry unsurpassed in sublimity and in pathos:--

"O upper air divine and winds on swift wings borne; Ye river-springs; innumerous laughter of the waves Of Ocean; thou, Earth, the mother of us all; And thou, all-seeing orb of the Sun--to you I cry: Behold me what I'm suffering, a god from gods!"

Sophocles, too, lets Philoctetes, in his misery and loneliness on the rocky island of Lemnos, call out to the wild beasts and the landscape:--

"Harbours and headlands; and ye mountain-ranging beasts, Companions mine; ye gnawed and hanging cliffs! Of this To you I cry aloud, for I have none save you-- You ever present here--to whom to make my cry."

"O God of the light, from the woven gold Of the strings of thy bow, I am fain to behold Thy arrows invincible, showered around, As champions smiting our foes to the ground. And Artemis, too, with her torches flaring, Gleams onward through Lycian uplands faring."

Bacchus, also, the "god of the golden snood," "lifts his pine-knot's sparkle" and, roaming with his Maenads, seems to visualize for men the soul of Nature.

Aristophanes with his common-sense objectivity was averse to the sentimental and romantic in Euripides, which seemed to him effeminate. His love for nature was clear-eyed and Hellenic. His lyrics shine like a bird's white wing in the sunlight. The self-invocation of the Clouds is alive with the radiance of the Attic atmosphere. A translation can only serve to illustrate the elements used in the description:--

CHORUS OF CLOUDS

"Come ever floating, O Clouds, anew, Let us rise with the radiant dew Of our nature undefiled From father Ocean's billows wild. The tree-fringed peak Of hill upon lofty hill let us seek That we may look on the cliffs far-seen, And the sacred land's water that lends its green To the fruits, and the whispering rush of the rivers divine And the clamorous roar of the dashing brine. For Ether's eye is flashing his light Untired by glare as of marble bright."

The "meteor eyes" of the sun gaze "sanguine" and unblinking upon the cloud-palisades, glaring bright as the marble of Mount Pentelicus. Readers of the Greek will recognize here and there how an Aristophanic epithet or thought has been precipitated and recombined by Shelley into new and radiant shapes that drift through his own cloud-land,--"I change but I cannot die!"

Aristophanes's observation of nature is varied and exact. He had nothing but ridicule for the pale student within doors, and only a man who kept up an intimacy with "the open road" could have made the naturalistic painting in the "Peace" of the serenity of country life:--

"We miss the life of days gone by, the pressed fruit-cakes, the figs, the myrtles and the sweet new wine, the olive trees, the violet bed beside the well."

Euripides in his attitude toward nature has all the qualities of the other tragedians except sublimity, to which he more rarely attains. Many qualities are much more conspicuous. His range of colour is wider. His allusions to rivers and to the plant and animal world are more detailed. Picturesque scenes and setting delight him. Beyond all this the reflection in nature of human emotion, occasional in his predecessors, plays in his verse almost a leading part. Modern romanticism, in short, is no longer exceptional.

Hippolytus, the acolyte of Artemis, and his attendants address the virgin goddess who ranges the woods and mountains and who, as AEschylus says, is "kindly unto all the young things suckled at the breast of wild-wood roaming beasts." The "modern" element in the original loses nothing in this paraphrase by Mallock:--

"Hail, O most pure, most perfect, loveliest one! Lo, in my hand I bear, Woven for the circling of thy long gold hair, Culled leaves and flowers, from places which the sun The Spring long shines upon, Where never shepherd hath driven flock to graze, Nor any grass is mown; But there sound throughout the sunny, sweet warm days, 'Mid the green holy place The wild bee's wings alone."

In one of the despairing chorals of the "Trojan Women" the personification of nature blends with the spirit of mythology. The name of Tithonus, easily supplied by a Greek hearer, is inserted for English readers in Gilbert Murray's beautiful paraphrase:--

"For Zeus--O leave it unspoken: But alas for the love of the Morn; Morn of the milk-white wing The gentle, the earth-loving, That shineth on battlements broken In Troy, and a people forlorn! And, lo, in her bowers Tithonus, Our brother, yet sleeps as of old: O, she too hath loved us and known us, And the Steeds of her star, flashing gold, Stooped hither and bore him above us; Then blessed we the Gods in our joy. But all that made them to love us Hath perished from Troy."

When Dionysus addresses his Bacchantes, Euripides, in lines reminiscent of Alcman, imposes upon outward nature the solemn expectancy of the inward mind:--

"Hushed was the ether; in hushed silence whispered not Leaves in the coppice nor the blades of meadow grass; No cry at all of any wild things had you heard."

The formal banns of the open wedlock of man and nature were declared in Euripides. Thereafter the treatment became more and more a matter of personal equation. In Plato's dialogues, for example, the ethical element inevitably appears. In the famous scene beside the Ilissus, Socrates and young Phaedrus talk through the heated hours beneath the shade of the wide-spreading plane tree, where the agnus castus is in full bloom, where water cool to the unsandalled feet flows by, and in the branches the cicadae, "prophets of the Muses," contribute of their wisdom.

The Anthology, stretched through the centuries of Greek literature, links the old and the newer, the antique reserve and the fainness of modern romanticism. One of the epigrams attributed to Plato will serve to indicate the emergence of the latter:--

"On the stars thou art gazing, my Star; Would that the sky I might be, For then from afar With my manifold eyes I would gaze upon thee."

Another seems like an artist's preliminary sketch for the picture by the Ilissus, the deeper motive not yet painted in:--

"Sit thee down by this pine tree whose twigs without number Whisper aloft in the west wind aquiver. Lo! here by my stream as it chattereth ever The Panpipe enchanteth thy eyelids to slumber."

From this we pass without break to the piping shepherds and the country charms with which Theocritus filled his Idyls for city-jaded men:--

... "There we lay Half buried in a couch of fragrant reed And fresh-cut vine leaves, who so glad as we? A wealth of elm and poplar shook o'erhead; Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on From the Nymphs' grot, and in the sombre boughs The sweet cicada chirped laboriously. Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away The treefrog's note was heard; the crested lark Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan, And o'er the fountain hung the gilded bee."

Footnote 3:

Translated by C. S. Calverly.

Notwithstanding the variety in landscape and the lack of unified nationality in the long centuries of Greek history, there is a unity in the impression of ancient life left upon the mind by a visit to Greece. This is in part due to the comparative meagreness of remains from periods subsequent to classic times. The long obliteration of mediaeval and modern constructive civilization leaves more clear the outlines of antiquity.

This is true even though the sum total of the remains of Byzantine and mediaeval life, on islands and on mainland, is large and claims the attention from time to time. In Athens the traveller will come upon the small Metropolis church with its ancient Greek calendar of festivals, let in as a frieze above the entrance and metamorphosed into Byzantine sanctity by the inscribing of Christian crosses. As he journeys to and fro in Greece he may see the venerable "hundred-gated" church on the island of Paros, recalling in certain details the proscenium of an ancient theatre; Monemvasia with its vast ruins, the home of Byzantine ecclesiasticism and a splendour of court life that vied with the pomp and magnificence of western Europe; or the ivy-clad ruins of Mistra, an epitome of Graeco-Byzantine art from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century; the frowning hill and castle of Karytaena that guards the approach to the mountain fastnesses of Arcadia; or the ancient acropolis of Lindus on the island of Rhodes with the impregnable fortress of the Knights of St. John.

Nor will the visitor ignore the reminders of the War of Independence and the renascence of life in modern Greece. Mesolonghi, Nauplia, and Arachova have contributed fresh chapters to human history. Aligned with ancient names are those of modern heroes in the nomenclature of the streets and of public squares, like the Karaiskakis Place that welcomes the traveller as he disembarks at Piraeus.

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