'A Wood Near Athens'

AUTUMN in Greece, like spring, is a fleeting and impalpable thing that makes its presence felt on one day and is gone the next and then reappears again, revealing itself in some strange and unexpected manner. The reason is not far to seek. Trees, so far as they are able to thrive on the barren and stony soil of Greece, are for the most part not deciduous. The plane, the poplar, and the oak are almost the only deciduous trees that are to be seen in any numbers — and they are rare enough. The plane is essentially a tree of inhabited areas. The streets of Thebes and the shady sources of the Attic Cephissus or the straggling houses of the deme Marousi are sheltered with old and venerable planes. Poplars, as in the plain near Thermopylæ, or here and there in the Attic ‘Middle Land,’ are planted in the marshy places in neat rows to drain the earth and hold in the dikes. The few of these trees that grow to any large extent untended and wild are to be found in the remote parts of Peloponnese and Macedonia. There the all too rare groves of Turkish oak and plane give shade that in the hottest of summers contains a coolness such as one meets only near running water.

Apart from these trees, Greece has little to offer but pines and firs of endless variety and shape, green all the year, but particularly so in October and November, when new clusters of green needles give an air of freshness that beguiles one into thinking that spring is beginning. So autumn makes its presence felt only in places where there are leaves that fall, and in other ways that do not concern the mutations of trees and the rise and fall of their sap. A weakening sun and a faint flavor in the air of vegetal decay; a dry wind from the south blowing across waterless torrent beds; wild fruits of the autumn, like the blood-red arbutus and the purple berry of the myrtle; the chalky-pink oleander and the first gold on the oranges — such are the signs and hints of an autumn that is scarcely otherwise apparent. A Rip van Winkle awakened in Attica in November would be hard put to it to decide the time of year. If he knew nothing of arbutus and oleander and myrtle and did not know that the winter snow should have filled the torrent beds, he would call it spring, his decision strengthened by seeing the purple and yellow crocuses that star the ground in October and November from the stony levels of the plain to the topmost summits of Pentelicus, Parnes, and Hymettus.

As though to confound the issue for those who do not know the country, travelers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries illustrated their works with engravings which show Greece to be blessed with a more luxuriant growth of deciduous trees than ever graced a fraction of its lands. The illustrations, too, to Childe Harold and the numerous works of the ‘Romantic’ period, when Greece in revolt drew to its ranks all the poetic forces of Europe, show the hills of Greece to be adorned with a wealth of trees that would transform it in autumn to a riot of autumnal color. One can only imagine that the engravers worked in the wooded lands of Northern Europe on the inadequate sketches given them by their more experienced taskmasters. Other curious errors suggest in similar ways that the London and Paris studios of the early nineteenth century evolved a type of Greek scenery as alien to the real type as the modern Greek politician is to Pericles. One plate, for instance, in Dodwell’s elaborate book, Views in Greece (1821), gives a view of the Acropolis from near the Ilissus. The river is shown as a foaming rapid such as one sees in the high lands of the Alps. In reality it is an insignificant stream, canalized to preserve its existence in summer and, even in spate, little larger than a Cornish trout stream. An enchanted land was created in those days that accorded but ill with the realities of Greek scenery and did rank injustice to its subtler grades of color and atmospheres that are finer than those of any other land.

By a curious freak of fate, it is Shakespeare who gives a hint of the real Greek scenery over two centuries before a euphuistic age, with the experience of travelers to correct it, unconsciously distorted Greek scenery for its own romantic ends. Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was tempted to search for the ‘wood near Athens’ of Oberon and Titania, in the hope that, in finding it, I might elaborate on circumstantial evidence a wholly untenable theory that Shakespeare had visited Athens!

The plain of Athens, except in the Acharnian deme, is sown with little else but olives and pines, nearly everywhere too scattered to justify the identification of any wood or grove. At Acharnæ and Deceleia the pines are so continuous as to become a forest, and, in any case, these places are in no sense ‘near Athens.’ Then by chance I lighted on the very wood itself, barely four miles out of Athens, near the modern village of Chalandri. Here the coldest skeptic could not but admit was the scene of the deeds of Puck and his fellows — a wood of tall shady firs, complete in itself, the trees close together and shutting off the sun — in fact the very home of Oberon and

Titania, with Parnes, the home of the nymphs, showing dimly through the openings of the western end, and Pentelicus, the mother of marble palaces, rising steeply to the north. So tall are the tree trunks that there is nothing to hinder the most active of fairy dances, and so soft the carpet of pine needles that there could be no hindrance or discomfort to the sleep of the mortal persons of the play.

‘The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders at our quaint spirits’ was there at sundown, ‘flying between the cold moon and the earth,’ like ‘Cupid all armed.’ Close by, in a ravine near Franko Monastiri, was Oberon’s bank of wild thyme itself. Nowhere was there to be found in Shakespeare’s account a discordant element that would make me reject this wood as the real scene of the play. Had he only mentioned the tortoises that lumbered across between the tree trunks, the last flickering doubt that still lingered in my mind would have been extinguished. But Titania speaks of ‘purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries,’ the far-famed fruits of Athens, which grow in all the orchards around the wood, so why should there be any doubt left at all? This was in very truth the wood itself, unknown and unidentified all these centuries, while the musty collators and commentators on the text of Shakespeare had made confusion worse confounded and spent their time searching Warwickshire when all the time they were told ‘a wood near Athens.’ But textual critics seldom have more range of activity than the snail, which averages five miles in fifteen centuries. Here was amateur archæology with a vengeance, the triumph of topography over textual criticism, the apotheosis of common curiosity! Shakespeare vindicated at last after all the gloom of intervening centuries!