Studies of Travel - Greece - Freeman Edward Augustus

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doer of it Thêseus or any other, which made Athens all that Athens was — which fused together into one commonwealth the largest extent of territory, the largest number of citizens which, according to Greek political ideas, could act together as members of a single commonwealth. Athens could become all that she did become, because, in an unrecorded age, in an age of which those rude stones at least are the only record, all Attica became Athens. To that great revolution, none the less certain because in its own nature unrecorded, it is alike owing that Athens in one age could rear the trophy of Marathôn, and that in another she was chosen to be the head of regenerate Greece. The oldest wall — we may call it the wall of Thêseus — and the latest wall of Odysseus are but the earliest and the latest pages of one story, bound together by the direct tie of cause and effect.

      If then, fully to take in the historic greatness of the Athenian Akropolis, we must look to facts and their records alike far earlier and far later than the days of Periklês, the works of the days of Periklês lose half their value if we look at them simply as the works of the age of Periklês, and do not bear in mind the long ages, the stirring events, of their later history. The house of Athênê is emphatically the Parthenôn. When Dêmêtrios the Besieger was lodged in its opisthodomos, the satirical remark was made that he and his following were by no means fitting guests for its virgin owner. It should, however, be remembered that that ancient temple has remained the house of the Virgin under three distinct forms of worship. The classical purist might disdain to notice — or, if he noticed, he might be eager to wipe out such a memory — that on the walls of the cella may still be seen the paintings, the εἰκόνες of another creed, another form of art, from those of Pheidias and Iktinos. Yet those painted forms tell us of one of the great moments in the history of South-Eastern Europe — one might rather say one of the great moments in the history of the world. It speaks of the day when the New Rome was again queen of all the nations, from Crete to the Danube, from the Euphrates to the Bay of Naples, when the Slayer of the Bulgarians, in the moment of his triumph, chose, out of all the holy places of his Empire, the church of the Panagia on the rock of Athens as the scene of his thanksgiving for the great salvation which his arms had wrought. We stand on the rock, and run over in our minds the long ages between Periklês returning from the recovery of Samos, and Basil returning from the recovery of Ochrida. We look down upon the lands which endured the ravages of the last Philip in the cause of Rome, on the city which endured the storm of Sulla in the cause of Mithridatês. We look down on the works of Hadrian and the works of Hêrôdês, and the eye wanders to a spot where the monument of a Syrian prince is the most prominent object on an Athenian hill. We think how long Athens remained the school of Rome, how the Goth turned away from her walls, how Justinian at once strengthened her as a fortress and took away from her her crown as the seat of heathen philosophy and heathen worship. Yet we mark the slight lingering of ancient memories which, in re-dedicating her ancient temples to the new faith, still kept a certain analogy between their older and their newer functions. We mark how the Parthenôn still remained the Parthenôn; how the temple of the heathen warrior Thêseus became the church of the Christian warrior George. We think — Athens is not expressly mentioned in the tale, but she can hardly be deemed to have lagged behind her fellows — how the Greeks, the Ἑλλαδικοί, as the Byzantine writer scornfully calls them, set forth on their strange and bootless errand of delivering Constantinople from Isaurian and Iconoclastic rule. Below us lie the churches of Eirênê, monuments of days when Athens and Constantinople were united in a common orthodoxy, when Athens had given an Empress to the Eastern world, and when men again dreamed of a union of East and West by the marriage of an Athenian and a Frank. All these memories lead up naturally to the great scene of Basil’s day of triumph, when a prince who might be deemed at once Roman, Greek, and Slave, chose Athens and her still abiding Parthenôn for the greatest ceremony of his long reign of warfare and of victory. We pass on to another age. The spirit which will hardly endure the memory of a Greek-speaking Cæsar on the holy hill of Athênê will find times even less to its taste when an Italian prince, in his will drawn up in the Italian tongue, bequeaths the city of Athens to the Church of St. Mary. Things had indeed changed, alike from the days of Periklês and from the days of Basil, yet Athens under the French and Italian Dukes had in some sort come back nearer to her ancient place than when she beheld the thanksgiving of the Macedonian Emperor. Athens, by that name, was again one of the powers of the world, no longer a mere province of Rome, either in her older or her newer seat. It was indeed a time of foreign rule. A Latin Duke had made his palace in the Propylaia of Periklês; a Latin Bishop had displaced the Orthodox rite of Basil’s day in the church which was still the Parthenôn. Yet those were days when Athens was the seat of a brilliant court, when the fame of her princes was spread through Europe. The formula of our own Shakespeare, so strange in the ears of many, when he speaks of Thêseus Duke of Athens, is a mark of days when her Kings and Archons had been forgotten, but the memory of her Dukes still lived in the minds of men. But the wanton barbarism of classical exclusiveness will not endure the memory or the record or the monuments of days like these. Only yesterday the tower of the Dukes of Athens was standing. Its stern and heavy mass well broke the horizontal lines of the Greek architecture, and gave to the whole group somewhat of that outline which the hill of Laon has, and which the hill of Athens has not. But the tower was late; it was barbarous; it did not belong to the two or three favoured ages; it was a reminder of times which the exclusive votaries of those two or three favoured ages would fain wipe out from the records of mankind. Mr. Mahaffy, indeed, who cannot distinguish between the taking of Constantinople in 1204 and the taking of Athens in 1687, believed that Morosini had found time to build this massive tower during the few weeks of his occupation. Mr. Mahaffy, who looks on the Akropolis as so sacred that it was a sin to bombard it, even to drive the Turks out of it — who seems to think freedom and national being something of less moment than the preservation of this or that statue or column — calls for its destruction in his text and crows over its completed destruction in a note. Of this piece of wanton barbarism Dr. Schliemann must bear the blame. Who, if any, were his Greek accomplices, we have forborne to ask. But the tower is gone; a most striking memorial of one age in the history of Athens has been swept away, under the paltry pretext that inscriptions might be found among its materials. By a righteous Nemesis, when the destroyers had finished their work of havoc, they found nothing to reward them.

      We can conceive nothing more paltry, nothing more narrow, nothing more opposed to the true spirit of scholarship, than these attempts to wipe out the history of any age. So far from destroying the ducal tower, we would have kept the Turkish minaret. For the Parthenôn, already the temple of heathendom and of two forms of Christianity, became in the end the temple of Islam. A mosque had of course its minaret. Its lower part is still there in the form of a staircase, but the characteristic upper part has vanished. We know not how it vanished, whether through wanton destruction or in one of the sieges in the seventeenth or the nineteenth century. In any case, we should have been well pleased to see both minaret and tower breaking the outline, and speaking of days which have been, but which have passed away. Greece is free; the rule both of the Frank and of the Turk is gone; but that is no reason why the memorials of either Frank or Turk should be swept away. A higher national feeling would keep them carefully as trophies of victory. At all events, let not men, calling themselves scholars, lend themselves to such deeds of wanton destruction. The name of Morosini is unfairly held up to execration because an accident of warfare, which he could not control, made him the destroyer of the Parthenôn. A far heavier blame rests on those who were the deliberate destroyers of the ducal tower. On them indeed may well fall the words of withering scorn in which Byron so well couples the destroying names of Eratostratos and Elgin.

      Athens Below the Akropolis

      The main characteristic of modern Athens, and one of its chief points of contrast with Rome, is that whatever is not very old is so very new. But the visitor is apt at once to press this characteristic further than strict truth warrants, and to draw a more strongly marked geographical limit between old and new than strict truth warrants either. At first sight we are apt to fancy that everything that is old stands above, and that everything that is new lies below. The fact that the greatest work of all, the temple of Olympian Zeus, happens to lie below, hardly makes a practical exception. By the loss of so many of its columns it has ceased to be in appearance the greatest work of all, and, what is more to the point, it has practically

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