Behind Hymettus: In Two Parts. Part Two

III.

A BRAURONIAN HOLIDAY.

IT is Christmas morning when we leave Athens for our next Midland ramble, and ten o’clock finds us at Markopoulo. It is a large village in the plain, seven miles below Liopesi, with vineyards Stretching to the south, and a fine environment of hills in the near distance on all sides save one. We stop here, because it is the best starting-point for Brauron and Porto Raphti; but first inquiries for guide or beasts are fruitless. At last a village publican offers himself and his cart — two wheels and one horse — at twelve drachmæ for the day, and while he is harnessing we look about the place. Its most striking feature, as one notes in passing after the harvest, is the vast area devoted to threshing-floors ; after that the winepress, for Markopoulo sends to Athens at every vintage some twelve hundred barrels of must. The town fattens on its own corn and wine, and has altogether a comfortable air.

For antiquity it takes little thought, though the first court we enter offers one good and significant inscription on a tombstone, namely, Telesinos son of Telesinos of Agnous. That the deme of that name was in this vicinity is pretty well attested, and this is one of its credentials. The first Agnousian in history or legend was probably the herald Leos, who betrayed his Midland folk, with their king Pallas, to Theseus, up yonder at Pallene (Charvati), and so inaugurated an era of bad feeling between Pallene and Agnous, which for aught we know may continue to this day.

The rain overnight has given an exceptionally bright atmosphere even for Attica, but the roads are none the better. The currish-looking pony is off like the wind before we are fairly settled in the cart, and the mud flies about our ears ; but once in the open, we would not exchange cart or track for a royal carriage on the Athenian boulevards. “ To Brauron ! ” is the word, and that means a straight-away three miles to north, half the time over unfenced wheatfields ; for highway or furrow is all one to our carter, and he has a perfect understanding with the brute. A jovial soul is this carter, and sings all the way, when not expatiating on the local sights and stories. In no time to speak of, he lands us on the slope of a round knoll green with young wheat, and topped off with a Frankish tower. This is built partly of ancient temple blocks, and still stands at its full height (sixty feet) and little the worse for wear, except that the stairway is gone, and the two upper stories are thus out of our reach. The spot offers an enchanting prospect in contrast with the average Attic brownness, for it is a prospect of abounding verdure. Fir-clad knolls and green slopes of wheat diversify the nearer scene, while farther off the Attic ranges lift their heads, and below you catch the merest glimpse of sea where it breaks through the rugged coast-line at Livadhi. Round the base of the knoll we stand on, an old flume carries pure, sweet water from the Erasinos to a large basin where two barefooted washerwomen are at work, whence it descends to turn a mill, a quarter mile below. There we find the miller, singing as he grinds. Above, in the firs, is a tiny chapel, and across the stream a farmstead, but village there is none in sight. There may be sweeter rural solitudes in Attica or in Arcadia, but I have never found one.

Such is and should be Brauron, where once rose the famous shrine of Artemis, and Iphigeneia ministered at the altar. After the perils of Aulis and the savage Tauric land with its savage sacrificial rites, Agamemnon’s daughter could have found no serener peace than Athena promised her in this lovely vale : —

Ages before Euripides produced this most faultless of his plays, Iphigeneia among the Taurians, the cult of the archer goddess had been kept on these Brauronian terraces, the sylvan slopes that rise so picturesquely from the winding stream. And as in the play Athena speeds the little company escaping from the Tauric shore, so we may fancy Artemis welcoming them hither. Where the glint of blue sea breaks through the hills, yonder, their bark is beached, and forth comes Iphigeneia, radiant with heavenly peace. Orestes follows, bearing the ancient xoanon, pledge of atonement at last accomplished ; then Pylades, pattern of all faithful souls ; and last of all, — if Thoas has kept his word and sent them after, — the choir of captive maidens rejoicing to “ tread once more with merry feet the dancing lawns of Hellas.” So the stage is set for an Iphigeneia in Brauron, which Sophocles should have written ; a softened, serener, heavenlier Œdipus at Colonus. May the poet yet come, or painter, worthy the subject and the scene, — the Vale of Brauron and the Return of the Pelopidæ. Every element of pastoral loveliness and heroic association is ready to his hand, but he must be a great artist indeed who shall equal the theme.

When Pisistratus flourislied here, — for his native seat, Philaidai, seems to have included the Brauronian territory, — the local cult and the Homeric associations were still in full vigor. And so we do not wonder that it was the Tyrant and his sons who inaugurated at Athens the epic revival which at least stimulated the collection, and went far to assure the transmission, of the great poems. The Tyrant’s younger son, Hipparchus, doubtless owed his literary-archæological turn to the Brauronian atmosphere in which his youth was nurtured. It was he, Plato tells us, who first brought Homer’s poems to Athens, and compelled the rhapsodists to recite them in an orderly way at the Panathenaic festivals ; and that, as we know, in the Brauronian precinct on the Acropolis, where still lies the inscribed pedestal that once supported the Wooden Horse as it was wrought in bronze by Strongylion. Nor did the young Brauronian stop with Homer: he sent a penteconter all the way to Teos to bring Anacreon to Athens, and Simonides of Keos he had long time with him, holding him with large pay and gifts. While doing so much for the town, he remembered the country folk as well, and for their edification he set up Hermæ on all the roads, midway between Athens and the demes ; and on these he had chiseled wise saws of his own and others, “ that so the people might not prefer the Delphic γvῴθι &3963;αυτov and &3956;&3951;ὲv ἄγαυ to the oracles of Hipparchus, but, passing up and down, and reading and enjoying a feast of his wisdom,” they might go home and profit by it. Some of these roadside texts have come down to us in the pages of Plato and Plutarch, and in particular we are quite able to restore and set up again the middle milestone on the Steirian Way, some part of which we are traveling to-day. It read on the left and right respectively : —

Halfway from the city to Steiria.

Memorial this of Hipparchus : don’t deceive a friend.

Had the young man’s practice been up to his precept, the family might have had a longer lease of power, and Harmodius and Aristogeiton found no place in history.

One would fain linger here and follow the winding streamlet to the sea. But delay now would be to miss Porto Raphti and our Athenian train, — perhaps to find Brauronian hospitality as coy as did an old traveler some ninety years ago. Dodwell relates that on his approach, with an escort of Turks, the Brauronians shut up all their fowls, and protested that there was not a pullet in the place. Even the Hegoumenos — there was a monastery here then — solemnly assured him that not a fowl was to be found in a circuit of many miles. “ He had hardly finished his assertion when a treacherous cock within the sacred walls betrayed the holy ecclesiastic by crowing aloud, and was immediately answered by all the cocks in the village,”—whereupon, by paying double price, Dodwell got a supply of poultry. During our visit not a cockcrow has broken the Sabbath stillness, and about the only inhabited place we have seen is the old mill.

The carter urges, and we are off on a bee-line for old Prasiæ. At first there is a fair road through the fragrant pines, and then we emerge on a most desolate, stony tract, untilled, and untenanted save by a single shepherd with a lot of savage dogs and a flock in which black sheep abound. This sterile stretch was well named Steiria, and it could never have done much in corn and wine ; but barren it was not when it came to breeding men. At any rate, it bred, if not a race of tyrants, as did Brauron, a master hand at turning tyrants out. What schoolboy has not followed Thrasybulos the Steirian from Thebes to Phyle, from Phyle to Munychia, from Munychia to the Acropolis, and thrown up his hat at every well-aimed blow till the Thirty were down, and the people on top again! Recalling the fight on Munychia, and how the petroboloi, joining him on the spot, found their ammunition at their feet, one notes here on his native heath that Thrasybulos came honestly by his tactics. Steiria is still an exhaustless arsenal of stones (χϵρμáδια), go that even the shepherds’ dogs have little terror for the passer-by.

Beyond this waste lie some vinelands, sparse and thirsty, and then we reach the sea, where heads one of the finest harbors in Greece. The rocks are sprinkled with myriads of bright anemones, red, white, blue, and purple, whereas in all the verdure of Brauron we had seen not one, — only daisies and dandelions. It is the warm sun rising early over the smiling sea that wooes them out of these rocks, and gives our eyes this rare Christmas treat. We jolt around the harbor head, where the fishermen are preparing their nets for the night’s work, and pull up at the petty hamlet of Porto Raphti, which stands on a little cape, and looks northward across the harbor on the noble bulk of Mount Peratia. The cape runs far out and divides the harbor in two ; while still farther out, like a harbor bar, rises an island rock supporting a colossal figure which the rustic fancy has taken for a tailor at his bench, and so imposed the vulgar name of Tailor’s Haven (Porto Raphti) on a place which deserves better things.

For this was old Prasiæ, a deme that boasted a temple of Apollo and the tomb of Erisychthon. He was the son of Cecrops, and, so says Pausanias, died on the return voyage after conducting a sacred mission to Delos, and was here entombed. So the colossus on the harbor bar might well be his monument.¹ Apollo’s temple here at Prasiæ was the last station on the long way by which the Hyperboreans forwarded their firstfruits to the god’s great Delian festival. Here the Athenians received them, and carried them across to the Holy Isle ; and so out of this fine harbor, in early times, their own splendid theôries set forth, “ singing as they sailed to Delos.”

The sacred legations sail no more, but there is yet commerce between Prasiæ and Athens. The fisherman’s cart standing by the café. where wTe lunch and talk with the fisher folk, — this well-built covered cart, with two lamps, — loads every midnight with the day’s catch, and before daybreak is delivering fresh fish in Athens. It is a six hours’ drive over the Steirian Way, whereon Hipparchus’ finger-post ought to be set up again to break the journey and inculcate honest dealing ; for the fluctuations of the Athenian fish market are past finding out under any economic laws.

A Christinas bath in the divine sea, and we are off again straight across country through the old deme of Myrrhinous, which has given the overhanging mountain the name of Merenta. On our way we rest at a little hilltop convent, untenanted to-day. but with a wellkept flower garden attesting the taste and fidelity of its solitary keeper. May the blessedness of Iphigeneia abide upon her! Strawberry - blooms on an exposed hilltop at Christmas, — that is the story of Attica.

At Markopoulo the telephone is talking to Athens, and a Greek drummer is showing off American sewing-machines to a lot of Albanian women. Two hours more, and we are dining by electric light under the Acropolis.

IV.

A SABBATH STROLL IN SPHETTOS.

On the 19th of February— a perfect Attic winter day — we again seek the Midland. Leaving our train at Koropi, midway between Liopesi and Markopoulo, we follow a party of villagers, in bright apparel, to the town, which lies under a rocky spur of Hymettus, a short half-mile southward from the station. It is a very considerable place, substantially built, decently kept, and boasts a population of three thousand souls.

The first old tombstone that turns up here, in the litter of a stable-yard, is that of Nikias son of Mnesiphilos of Lamptra.

A company of decent Albanians listen with great interest as we expound the writing, and then respond with resinato, which the early hour compels us to decline. They tell us of other old stones and letters at the schoolhouse, and show the way to the demarch’s, where the key’ is kept. That dignitary’s residence is a pretty New England sort of cottage, with the inevitable high - walled court, garnished with ovens and outbuildings. The demarch was not at home, but his wife met us with a hearty welcome. Beside the door stood some fine old gravestones, in particular an urn of beautiful Pentelic, with the usual parting scene in good relief : Glaukias, seated, clasps the hand of Archagora (husband and wife, no doubt), while Nikomache and Diotimos stand in sympathetic attention. Every figure is perfect, and the names are written above them. I have seen few better examples of the monumental urn, one of the most pleasing developments of the art which made the old Greek street of tombs so different from our doleful buryinggrounds. Several other stelœ, with and without reliefs, were ranged about, the demarch’s door, all of them as early as the fourth century.

After spelling out the inscriptions we follow the demarch’s wife into her tidy little parlor ; not bare, as usual, but prettily furnished, and relieved by some excellent photographs of Queen Olga and other persons of quality. There is also a striking portrait of our hostess herself in all the splendor of Albanian attire. The demarch is a native of the place, and a physician, like so many of the provincial mayors, but his wife is proud of being a xene from Leonideion. With all her politeness, she offers no refreshments, — an omission that could hardly be paralleled in the poorest cottage of Andros, our hospitable island retreat.

On our way to the schoolhouse we meet the demarch, surrounded by a crowd of his constituents. He looks the rustic in “ store clothes ; ” without the wife’s civility, yet good natured enough, and with none of the insolence of office. In his company is the scholarch, a superior young man, who opens the little museum under his schoolroom with an air, and displays to us (so far as display is possible, in the dim light and under accumulated dust) the archaic treasures of Koropi: a number of funeral reliefs, one excellent in grouping and expression ; divers inscriptions, including what seems to be a demotic register, probably of the ephebi, or “ first voters,” as we should call them, though the heading of the stone, which should give the deme name, is quite rubbed out. Still, some good names remain legible, — Aristophanes, Antiphilus, and Lysimachus, for example. We note also several epitaphs of the early Christian centuries.

There was both lack of light and excess of people, — for all the town seemed to have followed us in, — so bidding adieu to the scholarch and the crowd, with a Koropian guide we set out countryward. To the east, we know, stands a chapel, with an inscription worth seeing, though no one can tell us just where. Our guide, zealous to show us a “ great stone with letters,” leads us to the brandnew cemetery, with a brand-new chapel of modern polygonal masonry, very beautiful, though unfinished. Behind this, sure enough, stands the ancient slab, with the genuine Parthenon tint of a myriad sunsets; but lo! it is inscribed with the name of a youth dead only three years. However, a closer scrutiny reveals at the very top the lower half of the ancient letters spelling the word θυγá&3964;ηρ (daughter),— all above broken off. Well, the Romans used to chisel out the old Hellenic names, heroic or divine, and chisel in their own, thus turning Hellenic gods and heroes into monuments of Roman vanity : why then may not an Albanian shepherd purloin an old Greek tombstone for his son ?

A charming spot, this new cemetery, with its environment of mountain and plain, and its setting of olive woods, blossoming almonds, and scattered oaks. Right in its midst, behind the chapel, stands a tree of noble girth and spreading top, and at its root a tomb with an epitaph worthy of the Anthology, though dated 1888 : Here lies Georgios, — after living seventy-five years, — buried under his own wondrous oak.

Farther on and up, a series of mediæval chapels, four of them in the view at once. The nearest, quite deserted, stands on ancient foundations. The second, about a stone’s throw beyond, is the Church of the Transfiguration, better kept. About it lies a litter of old marbles ; the floor is composed in part of ancient tombstones, and the roof is supported by ancient Ionic columns. The bright new painting of the Transfiguration relieves the gloom within, and without the rocks have burst into a very bloom of anemones, — a riot of color in contrast with the quiet beauty of the daisies, pansies, betonies, and speedwells which have carpeted our pathway hither. A stiff climb above this, and then a hilltop chapel overlooking all the Midland. Again the same riot of brilliant anemones, as if seeking these holy solitudes to waste their sweetness on. Still no inscription. We descend again, and the fourth chapel rewards our search. Over the rude doorway is a marble lintel, itself but a sliver of some great marble slab, and, as usual, upside down. But the precious letters that remain are as clear as when chiseled on it five hundred years or move before our era. For thou wast faithful.²

That is all. Names have perished. Who slept beneath that stone, whether humble or great, we know not. But the three words have outlasted all the centuries with all their catastrophes, — typifying the permanence of character against the evanescence of fame. Above all forces, fidelity ! Paganism could write no nobler epitaph, and Christianity could hardly choose fitter words to set above its humble portal. Choice there was none, however ; the marble splinter lay near, and answered for a lintel all the better when turned upside down. The Midland rustics of the early Christian centuries, to say nothing of their successors of the Middle Ages, could, hardly read the archaic Greek of Solon’s time, if they could read at all.

On this east side of Koropi all the chapels date far back ; on the west, toward Hymettus, is another chain of them, and in these Ross found numerous Christian inscriptions dating from the third to the fifth century, some of which we have recognized to-day at the schoolhouse; and he concludes that this region was one of the earliest seats of Christianity in Attica. In these rural solitudes behind the mountain walls the followers of the new faith would find security long before it was safe to show their colors openly in the strongholds of the old gods at Athens.

This impression deepens as we look down from the rocky height above Koropi upon the shut-in valleys stretching southward to the sea, and westward to the mountain. There is hardly a sign or sound of living thing; a true Sabbath stillness, broken only by the tinkle of sheepbells, our only neighbor on the rocks the barefooted shepherdess tending her flock. One can almost imagine those early confessors back again, and the ruined shrines reopened. But we know less of the Christian centuries here than of the pagan ; and it is much easier to gather up the classical associations of the place.

The first monument to meet our eyes in Koropi was that of a Lamptrian. And on this rocky perch we must be near the meeting-point of three demes : one of little note, Kikynna ; two of great importance, Lamptra and Sphettos. Sphettos has the elder and greater fame, for it was one of the free towns of Atticia before Athens had a name, — one of the twelve cantons welded by Theseus into the larger Attic commonwealth. But it had to be conquered first, for Pallas did not propose to surrender bis fourth of the kingdom — “ rugged breeder of giants ” that it was — to the young man from Tr&339;zen without a struggle. So he marched up the Sphettian Way you see winding northward under the mountain, but through the treachery of his Agnousian herald — townsman of our Christmas carter — suffered a fatal defeat at Pallene.

As a deme Sphettos produced its crop of great names, — still to be found sprinkled through the pages of the orators and historians, — but only one appeals to us on the spot. That is Chærephon, the familiar of Socrates, and the butt of Aristophanic wit. “ You know Chærephon,” says Socrates to his judges. “ He was my comrade from youth up, and he was your comrade in democracy, and shared your exile [under the Thirty, two or three years before], and returned with you. And you know what manner of man he was, what an enthusiast in everything he put his hand to. And so once on a time he even ventured to go to Delphi, and asked this question of the oracle, — now don’t you be making a racket when I say this, gentlemen,—he asked if any one was wiser than I. And so the Pythia said there was no one wiser.”

That was the beginning of the wise man’s trouble, for it turned him into a universal quiz, and Chærephon of Sphettos was at the bottom of it all. The master loved him, patronizingly ; and Plato gives him a good rôle in the Gorgias and Charmides, while in the Halcyon Socrates and he have the talk all to themselves. In the Clouds, he is a sort of usher in his master’s thinking-shop: it is he who has to wrestle with the problem of measuring a flea’s leap in terms of the flea’s feet, and who in turn propounds the famous dilemma concerning the musical end of the mosquito. Both questions must have been familiar to the Sphettian mind.

It is not a little curious that the clown of the Clouds also hails from this vicinage, — “ Pheidon’s son Strepsiades of Kikynna.” The old rogue affects ignorance of the names of the excellent merimnophrontistai, but young Pheidippides knows them well,”the chalk-faced, barefoot vagabonds, with that evil genius Socrates and Chærephon at their head.” Strepsiades was doubtless as real a character in all but the name as Chærephon, and they may have been next-door neighbors here in the country, until war drove the one, and philosophy drew the other, into town. If we had the original Clouds, in which Chærephon clearly had a leading rôle, we should no doubt get more light on this local motive.³

Chærephon was a true democrat, and stood with Thrasybulos against the Thirty. He was an enthusiast in his master’s cause, but we miss him in the court and prison. He was already dead, but he had a brother, Chærecrates, present at the trial, and Socrates calls on him to testify to the facts about the Delphi mission. Two other Sphettians appear with Socrates in court, — Lysanias and his son Æschines, who, like Xenophon, afterwards wrote down notes of conversations. But it is Chærephon, impulsive, eccentric, devoted to the master, who stands for old Sphettos in our imagination today ; and were it not a century too old, one would fain refer to him the legend on the lintel, For thou wast faithful.

We had intended to walk under the mountain to Liopesi, but as we went down into the plain the sound of festal music drew us to the village square. On this carnival Sunday afternoon, it is the old Greek orchestra over again and in full swing. Some five hundred villagers are assembled, and there are nearly a hundred women in the inner dancing-ring, all in a splendor of costume reminding one of Easter at Megara. But the dance is very different, and more classical, — not the chain, but the circle, and the largest circle I have seen. Only two European costumes in the ring, — that of the demarch’s wife, who of course leads, and that of her gossip, whom we had met with her in the morning; all the rest full Albanian, with breastplates and headdresses of silver coin, —women dancing in their dowries. The brilliant colors and the bright metal lose nothing in the rays of the sinking sun, and we could watch the scene for hours; but between four and five the bell of the great church adjoining begins to ring, the circle breaks up, and the people flock from one service to the other, — just as in the old days, when the orchestra lay before the temple and had an altar for its centre. Only yesterday we had listened to Dr. Dörpfeld at the Dionysiac Theatre in Athens, and here to-day we realize that there is nothing new under this Attic sun. We follow the crowd, and soon the great church is measurably full of worshipers, as absorbed now in their devotions as a moment ago in their dancing. They prostrate themselves, with foreheads touching the cold stone floor, as a priest passes with swinging censer, and other priests intone the litany, while the youngsters clatter up and down the gallery stairs.

But day declines, and in a dash of rain we seek the station, stopping on the way to drink our scholarch’s health in a drop of resinato, which deserves a better fame than the Sphettian oxos of old enjoyed. The station master lights a fire to warm us, prepares delicious coffee for our comfort, presses flowers upon us at parting, and utterly refuses a “ tip ” even for his baby boy. All aboard for Athens, and off we go ; and at 7.30 we sit down to our regular Sunday evening dîner-con-cert at the Grande Bretagne hotel, in the midst of a brilliant company ; reminding one more of Paris than of Koropi, with its orchestra circle, its sky-roofed parterre of rustic Albanian beauties.

J. Irving Manatt.