Cities of the Dawn. James Ewing Ritchie
– I saw two steam away one morning. Naples seems a very sleepy place compared to the Piræus. Little white boats, with leg-of-mutton sails, skim the blue waters of the harbour all day long, and the men are lean and dark, and wonderfully active, a great contrast to our English sailors. Once upon a time, coming from New York, we called off Portland Bill for a pilot. It was midnight, and dark as Erebus, but we all sat up waiting for the pilot, to hear the English news. Suddenly there climbed up the ship’s side, and stood on the deck in the full glare of light, two awful living mountains of flesh, as fat as beer and bacon could make them – a couple of English pilots. We had some skinny American ladies on board, and when they saw these men they uttered quite an appalling shriek. They had never seen such specimens of humanity before. I own I felt really ashamed of my fellow-countrymen, and asked myself why on earth men should make themselves such guys. Happily, in Australia I lost a couple of stone, and I have been mercifully preserved from laying on flesh ever since. Flesh is the great source of human depravity. With Falstaff, I hold the more of it the more frailty.
And now let me return to Athens, the Acropolis of which I see in all its glory, and on which by night lights gleam that you can see in the harbour, crowning the belt of bright lamps which by night glorify the whole front of the town. They show you Mars’ Hill, where Paul preached the unknown God; the porch of the Erechtheum, sacred to the olive-tree, brought to Greece by Athene; and the Parthenon, which still attests the genius of Phidias. Of Athens it may be said:
‘Her shores are those whence many a mighty bard
Caught inspiration glorious in their beams;
Her hills the same that heroes died to guard,
Her vales that fostered Art’s divinest dreams.’
Modern Athens is bright and cheerful, the shops gay and lofty, with well-known Greek names. The latter remark also applies to the streets. The hotels are magnificent. The Hôtel d’Angleterre is well spoken of, and the dragoman Apostoles will be found an intelligent servant, who will arrange for the traveller who is disposed to make an excursion in the Morea for food, lodging, mules or horses at a reasonable rate. The Hôtel Grand Bretagne, just opposite the palace – and a far finer building to look at – is about as good a hotel as I was ever in. The rooms seem awfully dark as you enter from the glare of the ever-shining sun, but the rooms are lofty, well ventilated, and everywhere you have marble floors and marble columns, and the feeding is good, considering what a parched-up land Greece is, and how dried-up its beef and skinny its poultry. I have seen cheaper hotels in Athens, such as the Hôtel des Iles Ionienic, the proprietor of which, a Greek from Corfu, strongly recommended it to me; but on the whole, in such a place as Athens, I should think it preferable to pay a little more for the comfort of a first-class hotel, even though it may make one indifferent to the ‘Laurels’ or the ‘Cedars’ of his own native land.
How to live rationally is an art the majority of Englishmen have not yet acquired. I leave Athens with regret; its people are all industrious. At any rate, there are no beggars in its streets; and if this be the result of its democratic Government, so much the better for the coming democracy, which, whether we like it or not, is sure to rule at home. Here the Government is popular, and the people are content. Manufactures are almost unknown. They have a woollen factory at Athens, and a cotton-mill in the Piræus, and there must be a busy agricultural population, as a good deal of the land between the Piræus and the capital is laid out in market-gardens. I am troubled as I think of our great cities, with their vices and slums. I hold, with the poet, God made the country and man the town.
It is a chequered history, that of Athens. Once it was occupied by the Goths. The Romans fortified it; but the ancient walls, which had been strengthened by Sylla, were unequal to its defence, and the barbarians became masters of the noble seats of the Muses and the Arts. Zosimus tells us that the walls of Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva, with her formidable ægis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles, and that the conqueror was dismayed by the presence of the hostile gods of Greece. Yet, nevertheless, Alaric a second time mastered the city by means of his barbarian troops. It is wonderful that any remains of the Athens of its prime exist. As it is, it requires a good deal of enthusiasm to ‘do’ its ruins, with which photography has long made the world familiar. The glory of the Parthenon, however, remains. Gibbon tells us in the sack of Athens the Goths had collected all the libraries, and were about to set fire to them, when one of the chiefs, of more refined policy than his brethren, dissuaded them from the design by the profound observation that as long as the Greeks were exercised in the study of books they would never apply themselves to the exercise of arms. But, as Gibbon writes, the Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose masters resolved every question into an article of faith, and condemned the infidel to eternal flames. For centuries Athens had flourished by means of her schools. After the settlement of the Roman Empire, it was filled with scholars from every part of the known world, even including students from Britain. In the suburbs of the city tradition still lingered of the Academy of the Platonists, the Lycæum of the Peripatetics, the Portico of the Stoics, and the Garden of Epicurus. The Attic schools of rhetoric and philosophy maintained their reputation from the Peloponnesian war to the reign of Justinian. It was he who suppressed the school which had given so many sages to mankind, and whose influences have quickened and invigorated the human intellect ever since. The art of oratory may soon be held to be almost a doubtful boon – at any rate, so far as senates and parliaments are concerned. It was not so when the eloquence of Demosthenes
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