Bœotia in August
PIGS, treachery, stupidity, and frogs; the normal reaction among historians of ancient Greece to these terms is — Botia. But yesterday at Lebadeia I drank of the waters of the spring of Lethe which make one forget unpleasant and remember pleasant things. So to me these lovely fragrant Boeotian fields under Helicon and Parnassus suggest only Pindar and Hesiod, the Muses and the fountain Hippocrene, Philip and Alexander. Why, Boeotia is the very heart of Greece: it is one of the very cradles of the race — though metaphors, tike meteors, frequently explode on contact with reality, for geologically Boeotia is much more like a bath than a cradle! It is a great hollow of plain land ringed round by hills on east and south and by the long flowing range of Helicon and by the dominating bastion of Parnassus on the north and west. The waters of these plains, which slope gently from north to south, are hemmed in on all sides by a rocky rim. as in the great plain of Thessaly. But in Thessaly they have cut their way out through Tempe, while here they pass by underground channels.
It is a burning August blazing with the heat of molten silver. The great plain shimmers and shakes in the mirage, and a dozen tall pillars of dust, like tall thin trees of immense height, stalk uneasily up and down in the noonday stillness, then vanish into a wisp of dustiness and are gone, to be replaced by other devils like themselves.
But where were once Copais Lake and its eels is now a fertility of green iucern, lines of willows and clovery pasture, cotton and maize, so that even in August its freshness recalls the spring.
Along the edge of the old lake, whose water line is clear against the smooth cliffs, there once ran a strip of narrow land between cliff and lake, and behind it rose Helicon. Along this strip, which in places is not fifty feet across, there passed Dorians, Persians, Macedonians, Gauls, Goths, Slavs, and Turks, and all the invaders who had ever forced Tempe and Thermopyke. Here was their final test, their ultimate battle before Athens and the Peloponncse dropped like ripe fruit into their hands. So the towns of this strip recur time and time again in history. Chæroneia, Coronea, Haliartus, are the sites not of single battles only. Last of all was the battle of Petra, the real gate of the pass where, in the war of independence, Prince Ypsilanti cut down to a man the Turkish armies at a Thermopyke more pregnant with success than that of Leonidas. But with the draining of the lake the Boeotian Thermopylæ had vanished.
I think that, what chiefly distinguished and still distinguishes Boeotia from other Greek provinces is the fact that it has no real seaboard and no real touch with the outer world of the two Greek seas, Ægean and Ionian. Boeotians were never sailors, and there is no large town on any Boeotian coast. It was rather a self-contained unit, hemmed in by an edging of rock. The black Cephissus River that fed the great lake was its central artery, while round and near the plain there stood on spurs the great cities of Bœotia. Northward on the uplands that slope to Parnassus is the unheard-of beauty in spring of flowers that stretch in meadows and scent the air of the plain — narcissus and jonquil, in pale waves. But now it is August, and instead of spring flowers and the sound of waters there are everywhere the lovely chalky pink oleanders in the dry river beds, and on the parched lowlands the sound only of the hoopoe; even the frogs are silent, and the friendly chorus that made the plains in May one cheerful shout is replaced at night by an utter quiet.
As the burning sun sinks, Parnassus emerges from its heat haze blue and majestic, snowless and gaunt, to change, after sunset, to a mighty hump of sepia. To the east the sea is felt rather than seen, and Eubœa rises a pale silvery filament of limestone cliffs, windblown and verdureless. Where the plain narrows to the borders of Doris, the city of Orchomenus stands out clear-cut on its spur, and to the south the ancient island of Gla rises from its dry lake bed.
Thebes the seven-gated and its many waters lie over the divide on a lower plain, hotter and dustier than this, a plain that is the lowest of the steps by which Bœotia descends southward. But I remember the loveliness of Theban almond trees in spring.
I called Bceotia the cradle of Greece — forgive this ancient tag, but, after all, Greece mustered at Aulis under Agamemnon in those wide and lovely bays that indent the coast opposite Chalkis; and before Agamemnon brave men held at Orchomenus and Gla one half of the plain while their kinsmen at Thebes, half Cretans, half Mycenæans, princes whose names are not wholly forgotten, held the other half. The richness of the Mycemean palaces at Orchomenus and Thebes was the richness of more than a local chieftain. In fact Boeotia in Mycenæan times must have been the wealthiest province of all that prehistoric empire. Orchomenus, insignificant on its spur, is really one of the most unassailable fortresses in Greece. The river Cephissus winds along one side of the hill and then doubles back to defend the other, encircling the head on which the city stands. Across the neck of the spur runs a gigantic wall of defense. The fort ress is complete.
But to-day t he barren waste of Orchomenus gives little hint of riches. It is only when we look at the plain that the source of wealth is obvious. And in Mycenæan days, as to-day, there was no Lake Copais. The mouldering dikes and barriers that still protrude from the plain are the work of these prehistoric folk, mighty engineering feats for those early days. They hemmed in the rivers of the plain and guided them whither they wished to the natural underground exits that still partly drain the lake to the sea. Their constant care was that these exits should not be blocked in flood time by floating logs or drifting silt. These exits once blocked, the plain became lake again.
After the ruin of that Mycenæan empire, neglect brought about the flooding of the plain again, and throughout Hellenic times it remained a lake, and a hundred square miles of cultivation were lost forever. Only Alexander seems to have attempted the drainage once again, and a vast but unfinished tunnel in the rocky divide is the handiwork of his engineers. To-day all the streams and marsh waters are led to one great canal that empties its flood with a mighty roaring of waters through a tunnel half a mile long and twice the height of a railway tunnel. But the Cephissus River still emerges by its underground outlet as of old.
After the Mycenæans came the Dorians, pressing south from Macedonia. Thebes and Orchomenus fell, and Hellenism, as we know it, began here on the ruins of a fertile and highly organized province. Boeotia has never known eclipse; even if she let the Persians pass and gave them Thebes, she was a favored land in all ages. French knights at Elatea on the northern marches founded a duchy here in the Middle Ages until they were exterminated in a strange battle at Orchomenus by Catalan Spanish mercenaries, who seized their wealth and their duchy. The battle was the final proof of the futility of mediaeval chivalry and its mode of war. The French knights charged across a swampy field, and halfway across stuck solidly in the mud and marsh. The weight of their armor on man and horse held them fast until the enterprising Catalans killed them like rats in steel traps. Hardly a family of note in France was untouched by this curious battle, and the Catalans held the land for eighty years.
Rival always to the neighboring Phocis, Boeotia had its oracle as well as Delphi. The strange deity called Trophonius had his dark and secret rites at Lebadeia, that charming hill town at the mouth of a wild gorge that leads to Helicon and the valley of the Muses. Trophonius was as old as Tune and no upstart Hellene, but he was later called a son of Apollo (by what uncouth mistress?) and by some held even to be a form of Zeus. His oracle was in the cliff side facing those waters of Lethe that are now so prosaically given to you in a glass to wash down your Turkish coffee at the inn beneath the plane trees. As you drink you see in the cliff face a neat, squarely cut grotto, and within it deep shafts, barely large enough for a man, run into the rock. Those who consulted the oracle had a fearsome time. This was no suave Pythian Apolline shrine, with marble waiting halls and the hard work all done for you by an intoxicated priestess and the oracle written down on tablets by obliging priests. Here you had to come utterly free from defilements, and get the oracle yourself from the grisly deity who awaited you at the bottom of those pits and shafts. What actually happened no man knows for certain. Pausanias, who had taken the oracle himself, tells us something, but not much, for one does not give Trophonius away with impunity! All he says is that the answers you seek may be given you either by sight or by hearing, but that, in any event, you are ‘overwhelmed by fear,’ and that many men who have passed through the ordeal ‘never laugh again afterward,’ although as a rule ‘the powder of laughter comes back again later.’ But what happened we know only in the sketchiest way. Somehow you were projected headfirst down these slanting shafts, and at the bottom you found your oracle in some inner chamber that was crawling with serpents and horror. Then up you came again, feet foremost. Once, we are told, a scoffer took the oracle for fun, just to see what it was like. He emerged later right enough, but by some other shaft (presumably that reserved for scoffers), and he emerged dead.
On the cliff face near by are the cuttings, small squares inset in the rock, where the devout fixed the marble tablets they had dedicated in memory of the ordeal.
In Greek legend and religion the beautiful and the grim are seldom far apart. Œdipus and Narcissus are both Boeotians; why, CEdipus slew his father at the crossroads not half a day’s journey from the pool at Thespiæ where Narcissus clutched his image and died; and the Narcissus is the true Boeotian flower still.
Against Trophonius and his underground horrors we must set the lovely vale of the Muses and Helicon, with the fountain Hippocrene on its rocky summit. No poisonous herbs, B’otians said, grew on Helicon’s slopes — even the venom of serpents was decreased through lack of evil sustenance in so lovely a valley. Somewhere in the valley was a shrine of the Muses with statues by half the famous sculptors of Greece, all now vanished to dust even if the loveliness of the valley remains. The Muses came hither from distant Thrace, in the days when they were three and not nine in number. A growing culture called for more Muses, as it called for more of everything, and the old three, who were (says Pausanias) Experience, Memory, and Song, had to endure the presence of newfashioned colleagues who came to birth as man invented writing and numbers and other strange exercises of his new-fledged ingenuity. So to-day perhaps in their quiet valley the nine will have to endure a Muse of Wireless and a Muse of Machinery and other gaunt thin-lipped ladies of the kind.
There is a strange story of ancient archaeologists at Haliartus on the edge of Lake Copais. For generations the townsfolk had shown a mound and said that it was the tomb of Alcmene, mother of Heracles. Local antiquaries, about the time of Alexander, disguised as pious relic hunters, excavated the grave and found bronze bracelets and queer tablets inscribed in an unknown tongue. The Society of Antiquaries of Haliartus of the time, thinking, like our Anglo-Israelites, that the Pyramids were the explanation of all things not clear to their fuzzy brains, sent the tablets off to Egypt for an expert opinion. ‘Yes,’ they were told, ‘these are Egyptian right enough, but very, very ancient and in a script no longer known in Egypt.’ I have my doubts. Egyptians were always good propagandists and defended well their claims to be the origin of all things. But here, in the great province of Mycenæan Thebes and Orchomenus, Greeks always said that the invention of letters was first made by the ingenious Cadmus the Theban. And at Thebes not so long ago Mycenæan inscriptions were found painted on a vase. Surely these antiquaries of Haliartus had found Cretan or Mycenaean tablets in some prehistoric grave. Would that we could find more!
As the sun sinks behind Parnassus the heat rises from the plain and the mirage fades. Somewhere in mid-air the heat belt balances and shimmers, and the fields below are cool and fragrant; only the cliffs and rocks remain hot and scalding to the touch, and wise folk keep off the rocky slopes at night, so great is the heat they give off until dawn comes to cool their parched expanses.