| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: On the track of Ulysses - Together with an excursion in quest of the so-called Venus - of Melos: two studies in archaeology, made during a cruise - among the Greek islands
Author: Stillman, William James
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "On the track of Ulysses - Together with an excursion in quest of the so-called Venus - of Melos: two studies in archaeology, made during a cruise - among the Greek islands" ***
(This file was produced from images generously made
[Illustration: (uncaptioned)]
ON THE TRACK OF
ULYSSES
TOGETHER WITH
AN EXCURSION IN QUEST OF THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS
_TWO STUDIES IN ARCHÆOLOGY, MADE DURING A CRUISE AMONG THE GREEK ISLANDS_
BY
W. J. STILLMAN
[Illustration: (uncaptioned)]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_
1888
Copyright, 1887,
By W. J. STILLMAN.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
To
WENDELL PHILLIPS GARRISON.
_In times when the feverish ambition of our people so generally climbs
to distinction by ways offensive to the true intellectual and moral
life, and when we find the old standards of human dignity so often
forgotten; it renews one’s faith in the future of humanity to meet a man
whom neither the “Olympian dust” nor that of California has been able to
deflect from that line of perfect rectitude of life which, if existence
is to be anything but an indecent scramble, we must recognize as
entitling the man who holds it, to the highest respect of his
fellow-men. When besides this claim to our respect he has been able to
maintain undimmed the lustre of a name such as you bear, the distinction
is still brighter. If therefore my insignificant tribute were only as
the dust which, catching the sunshine, males it visible, let me offer
this dedication in recognition of the true standard of nobility as I
know it in your father’s son._
W. J. STILLMAN.
PREFACE.
The series of papers herewith committed to the more or less permanent
condition of book form were originally (less some development of their
arguments) printed in the _Century_ magazine, being the results of an
exploring visit to Greek lands taken as a commission for that
periodical. I have sought in them to solve, in a popular form, certain
problems in archæology which seemed to me to have that romantic interest
which is necessary to general human interest; and while necessarily, in
such a study, dealing much with conjecture, I have not ventured to
assume anything which I am not satisfied is true. The problem of the
so-called Venus of Melos is one of those which archæology has fretted
over for two generations, and I cannot pretend to have offered a
solution which will command assent from the severely scientific
archæologist; but I have an interior conviction, stronger than any
authority of ancient tradition to my own mind, that that solution is the
true one. I do not wish it to be judged as a demonstration, but as an
induction in which a kind of artistic instinct, not communicable or
equally valuable to all people, has had the greatest part; and, for the
rest, I am satisfied to let it be taken by the rule of “highest
probability,” by which we solve to our satisfaction, more or less
complete, problems of the gravest importance—a rule, indeed, which is
for many such the only standard of truth. In archæology, as in some
other inexact sciences, opinion has with most people greater weight than
it always merits, but it should have weight in proportion to the
knowledge its originator may have of his subject. As to this I have done
all that any man can to penetrate to the material which exists for
forming an opinion, and I rest in the sincere conviction, sustained
through a study of many years, that the so-called Venus of Melos is
really the Niké Apteros of the restored temple dedicated to that
goddess.
I must acknowledge the courtesy of the proprietors of the _Century_
magazine in according me the use of the admirable illustrations
accompanying my text, which were put on the blocks by Harry Fenn from my
own sketches or photographs.
W. J. STILLMAN.
New York, _September, 1887_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES 1
THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY 50
THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS 75
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
The Route of Ulysses 1
Ithaca and adjoining Islands 3
West Coast of Scheria 8
Greek Boats and Rostrum of Roman Galley 13
Corfu, from the King’s Garden 14
Port of Phorcys and Neriton, from the Mouth of Ulysses’ Cave 28
Raven’s Cliff and the Fountain of Arethusa 34
The Site of Ithaca—Port Polis 36
Inscription found at Polis 39
The School of Homer 43
View of Samé from the West,—with parts of Pelasgic and Hellenic Walls
58
Crané from the Sea Shore 60
Distant View of Palé from the Citadel of Crané 63
Zante 64
Citadel of Cerigo 67
Landing-Place of the Cyprian Aphrodite or Astarte 73
The so-called Venus of Melos 82
Street in Castro 84
The Site of Old Melos, from the Port 85
Medicean Venus 88
Venus Urania 88
Capitoline Venus 88
Venus of the Vatican 89
Venus Anadyomene 89
Venus Victrix of the Louvre 89
Venus of Capua 90
Restoration of the Statue as proposed by Mr. Tarral 90
Fragments found at Melos attributed to the Statue 91
Victory of Brescia (Front) 92
Victory of Brescia (Side) 92
Victory raising an Offering (Temple of Niké Apteros, the Acropolis,
Athens) 93
Victory untying her Sandal (Temple of Niké Apteros, the Acropolis,
Athens) 96
Victories leading a Bull to Sacrifice (Temple of Niké Apteros, the
Acropolis, Athens) 97
The so-called Venus of Melos (Front) 99
The “Venus” Restored (Front. Traced from a Photograph of a living
Model) 99
The “Venus” Restored (Side. Traced from a Photograph of a living
Model) 100
The so-called Venus of Melos (Side) 100
Victory of Consani 104
Temple of Niké Apteros 105
Greek Coin 106
ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.
CHAPTER I.
[Illustration: THE ROUTE OF ULYSSES.]
What remains for exploration to find on the surface of our little earth?
The north and south poles, some outlying bits of Central Africa, some
still smaller remnants of Central Asia,—all defended so completely by
the elements, barbarism, disease, starvation, by nature and inhumanity,
that the traveler of modest means and moderate constitution is as
effectually debarred from their discovery as if they were the moon.
What then? I said to myself, searching for adventure. Let us begin the
tread-mill round again and rediscover. I took up the earliest book of
travel which remains to us, and set to burnish up again the golden
thread of the journey of the most illustrious of travelers, as told in
the Odyssey, the book of the wanderings of Odysseus, whom we
unaccountably call Ulysses, which we may consider not only the first
history of travel, but the first geography, as it is doubtless a
compendium of the knowledge of the earth’s surface at the day when it
was composed, as the Iliad was the census of the known mankind of that
epoch. Spread on this small loom, the fabric of the story, of the most
subtle design,—art of the oldest and noblest,—is made up with warp of
the will of the great gods, crossed by the woof of the futile struggles
of the lesser, the demi-gods, the heroes, and tells the miserable labors
of the most illustrious of wanderers, the type for all time of craft,
duplicity, and daring, as well as of faith and patient endurance.
[Illustration: ITHACA AND ADJOINING ISLANDS.]
But as Homer’s humanity mixes by fine degrees with his divinity, so his
_terra cognita_ melts away into fairy-land, and we must look for a trace
written on water before landing on identifiable shores. The story opens
finding Ulysses the prisoner of Love and Calypso, in Ogygia, a fairy
island of which the Greek of Homeric days had heard, perhaps, from some
storm-driven mariner, or which may be a bit of brain-land. The details
of the story make it very difficult even to conjecture where Ogygia was,
if it was.[1] How Ulysses leaves the island alone on a raft is told by
the poet in the fifth canto; how he got there the hero recounts in the
narration to Alcinoüs in Phæacia. Leaving Troy, he stops at Ismarus, a
town on the coast of Thrace, which he surprises and sacks; but, repulsed
by the inhabitants of the lands near by, rallying to the defense, and
visited by the wrath of the gods for his impiety, he is punished by a
three days’ gale, and reaches Cape Malea, where, unable to stem the
north wind which still persecutes him, he runs past Cerigo down to the
African coast, which he reaches in nine days. Here we enter into
semi-fable.[2] The Lotophagi seduce his men with their magic fruit which
brings oblivion, and he is obliged to fly again. This time he goes
north, and comes to an island which lies before the port of the Cyclops,
a terrible race: giants with one eye, and cannibals, over whose land the
smoke hangs like whirlwinds—evidently Sicily. This little island, where
the Greeks debark, is not to be identified, but is probably one of those
to the west of Sicily, called later the Ægades. Thence, after the famous
adventure of the Cyclops’ cave, one of the poet’s most marvelous
inventions (since every detail shows that there was no positive
knowledge of the land or its people—only a fantastic tradition), they
fly and arrive at the floating island of Æolus, still a creation of
mythology, and thence to the shores of the Læstrygonians, another
fabulous, man-eating race, in whose land the days are separated only by
a brief pretense of night; escaping thence with his single ship and
crew, Ulysses arrives at Æa, the island of Circe, from earliest
classical times identified with Cape Circeo, between Naples and Cività
Vecchia. Circe sends the hero to the land of the Cimmerians,[3] where
time touches eternity, and the shades of the dead come to visit the
unterrified living; and here Tiresias, the dead soothsayer, tells the
future wanderings of the Ithacan chief. Again, returning to Æa, he is
redirected toward home through the strait where Scylla and Charybdis
menace his existence. This we recognize by later tradition as the
Straits of Messina, but the fabulous so dominates the slight element of
geography in it, that it is clear that Homer never passed that way, and
gained his knowledge only from far remote report; while his second
passage—after the sacrilege committed in the Island of the Sun—through
the straits, is puzzling, and the recital makes it clear that till
Phæacia was reached the poet was not in _terra cognita_.
The indications are hardly reconcilable with the map. Leaving Circe to
go home, he passes the straits, and stopping at the Island of the Sun,
his comrades commit a sacrilege which leads to their destruction and his
being driven back to Ogygia through the straits, a solitary survivor.
But on his departure for Phæacia direct, he does not pass again through
the straits, evidently returning to the south of Sicily.
Released by Calypso, he goes on a raft with the sailing direction to
keep the Great Bear, “which is also called the Wain,” on his left,—that
is, he sails eastward, and for seventeen days splits the waves, and sees
on the eighteenth the wooded mountain of the island of the Phæacians,
the Scheria of the ancients. The continuity of tradition and the
consistency of the narrative leave me no doubt that this was our Corfu,
the uttermost of the lands positively known to the geography of that
day. The actuality of Scheria has been disputed by certain German
critics, who will have it that all the local allusions of the Odyssey
are imaginary. But in the Æneid, when Æneas is going to Butrintum, which
is now Butrinto, opposite Corfu on the Albanian coast, he says that no
land was in sight except Scheria. This makes it certain that in Virgil’s
time there was no question on the point.
Already in sight of Scheria, Ulysses is overtaken again by the wrath of
Poseidon, who unchains on him all his tempests; and, his raft wrecked in
open sea, himself swept away from it into the mountainous waves, he
regrets not having found a glorious death before Troy, seeing an
inevitable and unhonored end before him, with no funeral rites to give
his soul peace. Leucothea, the white goddess, throws into the black warp
a silver thread, and brings the story into new light and color. She
gives him an amulet which, by its magic, carries him through the last of
his grave perils, and preserves him when, with a great and wrathful
burst of wind, Poseidon disperses the timbers of his raft and leaves him
floating in the yeasty sea. He seizes on one of the timbers and
hopefully strikes out for the land. Athene comes once more to his aid.
She chains all the winds except Boreas, which, wafting him for two days
and nights to the southeast, gives place to a perfect calm. Ulysses,
raised on the summit of a huge wave, looks out and sees the land. But it
is a terrible, rock-bound coast. “He hears the roar of the waves that
break on the rocks, because the shock of the great waves against the
bare cliffs sounds fearfully, and the sea, far and wide, is covered with
foam. But there is no peaceable roadstead, no port, safe refuge of
ships; everywhere high, mountainous rocks and cliffs.” He appeals to the
gods for pity, and just then, “while he turns these thoughts in his
spirit and heart, an immense wave throws him on the bare shore. Then his
flesh would have been torn and his bones broken if Athene had not
inspired him. With both hands he clutches the rock and embraces it with
groans until the wave had withdrawn. He in this way escapes death, but
the return of the wave falls on him, strikes him, and withdraws him into
the open sea. He, emerging from the depths, more prudently coasts along,
swimming until he can find an opening in the rocks where he may enter,
and finally perceives the mouth of a river. He offers a prayer to the
river god, and is heard and peacefully received by the peaceable wave,
which lands him on the sandy shore.” The whole of the finale of the
fifth book is grand and imaginative, especially in the description of
the stormy sea and the condition of Ulysses as he sinks on the
hospitable sands exhausted, half dead from his long struggle and his two
days’ and nights’ swim, sustained only by one of the logs of his
raft;[4] but what to my present purpose is of most significance is the
striking description of the west coast of Corfu and the unmistakable
evidence of the mythologist giving way to the traveler. Here we strike
the veritable track of Ulysses, and here begin our researches. To reach
this point all the commerce of the Levant aids us—steamers from Trieste,
Brindisi, Naples, Patras, Malta, etc.
Here I found fit to my purpose a little yacht of twelve tons,
cutter-rigged and Malta-built, the _Kestrel_, with whose master and
owner I made my bargain, namely: he was to obey all my reasonable orders
for any voyage within the two archipelagos, find his ship and crew of
two sailors in all they needed for service and safety, do my cooking,
and insure himself, for the sum of fifteen pounds sterling a month for
three months; and while he was putting in stores, fitting new cables to
his anchors, and burnishing up a bit, we began to inspect Scheria.
[Illustration: WEST COAST OF SCHERIA.]
The popular tradition of to-day fixes the landing of Ulysses near the
actual city of Corfu, and an island is pointed out as the ship turned to
a rock; while the spot where he landed, and the scene of that most
charming of all the episodes of his wanderings, the meeting with
Nausicáa, is put at the “one-gun battery,” just south of the harbor of
Corfu. Nothing could comport less with the description of the Odyssey.
The Channel of Corfu, dividing the island from Epirus, is a land-locked
basin in which no such storm could arise as Ulysses encountered, and
along which no such rocks exist as are described in the poem. The
seventeen days’ drift from the westward before the tempest, and the next
two days after it, wafted by Boreas, show that he was in the open
Adriatic, and coasting along the rock-bound western coast of Scheria to
find an inlet where he might enter. The illustration shows the character
of this coast in entire concordance with the Odyssey; and there is near
the spot from which my view of the west coast of Scheria is taken, a
convent (which is visited by all the tourists who, having some days in
Corfu, care for the most picturesque part of the island), and which by
its name, Palæcastrizza, shows that it stands near the site of some
ancient city or fortress, as the term “Palæcastron” is never applied by
local tradition to any construction not belonging to the classical or
archaic epochs. Even Byzantine ruins never receive the epithet “palæos.”
No trace is now to be found of any prior structure near the convent,
which, while it probably has some relation to an antique site, certainly
is not on that of the city of Alcinoüs, which must have been farther
south where the shore breaks down to a plain. There used to be in the
island an old antiquity-hunter who brought from time to time to sell
clandestinely in the city, objects of gold and terra-cotta, vases, etc.,
dug up at a site which only he seems to have known, and of which he
would never disclose the location. On inquiring for him on this my last
visit to Corfu for these researches, he was not to be heard of. All that
we had learned from him was that the ruins of which he knew and where he
excavated in secret were somewhere on the western coast, which
corresponds to my hypothesis that the capital of Alcinoüs was there.
There is something so unpractical in the Greek laws on the subject of
excavation and exportation of antique objects, that it is to be hoped
that the shrewd common sense of the people will ere long see their
impolicy. Excavation without permission from the Government, even on
one’s own land, is forbidden, which is not unreasonable considering all
things; but even when permission is accorded or when objects are found
by chance, the Government practically confiscates the find when the
finders are feeble, and levies a tax of half the value when they are
not. Everything, therefore, is done in secret, and exportation by
contraband is the only possible manner of profiting by one’s good
fortune. The peasant who finds an antique site carefully conceals it;
and the objects he finds, instead of enabling the archæologist to
classify the antiquities by reference to their provenance, are sold to
some one who removes them from the country, and so all clue is lost to
their true archæological position. As I shall have to show in the course
of these articles, grave loss to the science of archæology sometimes
occurs in this way. In this particular instance the loss to me is the
being unable to identify, with any probability, the place where or near
to which Ulysses landed, and where the classic meeting with Nausicáa
took place. When we get to Ithaca we shall find that the author of the
Odyssey knew well every foot of land he describes; and the scene of
Ulysses’ disaster, already translated, accords so well with the actual
topography that it is difficult to suppose that a mere inspiration
dictated it, and that the author was not well acquainted with the island
of Scheria, whose capital was Phæacia.
The claim of the city of Corfu to be the site of the ancient Phæacia
rests on nothing but the fact that it is the only city in the island;
but the ever-tranquil bay on which it lies, and the fact that Ulysses,
instead of searching for a place where he could land, would rather have
had to search for a place where he could not, shows conclusively that no
part of the eastern coast is entitled to the honor. The “one-gun
battery,” where local tradition places his landing, is perhaps the least
likely point, as no running stream is to be found near there. The lake,
which is now suggested as the tranquil water in which Ulysses came to
land, must then have been much larger than at present, and now in nowise
resembles a river: it is the half-filled arm of the sea into which a
wide basin of marshy land has been for centuries draining, but into
which no watercourse leads, and the view seen from above the “one-gun”
needs scarcely a commentary to show its entire incompatibility with the
Odyssey.
The capital of Alcinoüs was, we are told by Homer, founded by his father
Nausithoüs. His people were formerly inhabitants of Hyperia, “near the
Cyclops,” and were by these latter so ravaged and overborne that they
emigrated to Phæacia. The generally accepted location of the Cyclops in
Sicily suggests that Hyperia was probably there or in Italy; and that
the Phæacians may have been related to the Siculi; since the Pelasgi,
who invaded Italy from the north, and, uniting with the Umbri, spread
over the whole of southern Italy, expelling the aborigines, are
continually confounded by the earliest traditions with the Cyclops. As,
from all we know, the Tyrrhene Pelasgi were the earliest metal-workers
in that part of Europe,[5] and as the Cyclops, the children of
Hephaistos, the great metal-worker, are a mythological idealization of a
race of smiths who had a habit of covering the eyes, for protection from
sparks, with a screen in which a single hole was cut to see through,
which was transmogrified into a single eye in the middle of the
forehead, there is nothing unlikely in the inference that the Pelasgi
and Cyclops were identical, and that the Phæacians were refugees from
the conquest of southern Italy by that formidable people. That they were
not Greeks we know by their absence from the catalogue of the “Iliad,”
where all the Hellenic tribes were recorded in their places in the
league.
The Corfiotes of to-day boast of descent from the Phœnicians, and
certainly they are not to be measured by the same standard as the Greek
race in general. Their reputation for dishonesty has given rise to a
Greek proverb, which relegates a person of more than usual craftiness
and bad faith to the “Corfiotes.” “He behaves like a Corfiote” is the
greatest reproach the continental Greek can bring against a man who is
too clever in business matters. In character as well as history the
Corfiote has little in common with Greece. As he had no place inside the
line drawn around the Hellenic world at the great critical, even if
mythical, epoch assigned to the siege of Troy, so in his latest history
he has always maintained a position more or less apart. Diodorus Siculus
makes the Homeric name of the city, Phæacia, to have been derived from
Phæacus, son of Poseidon, and places his reign contemporary with the
Argonauts, as Phæacus protected Jason against the king of Iolcus when,
returning from Colchis with Medea, he took refuge at Scheria. Mythology
begins with it in the combat of Zeus and Poseidon in their struggle for
supremacy in the government of the universe, and finishes with Ulysses’
visit. History commences with the arrival of a colony of Corinthians
under Chersicrates, who built a city which he called Chrysopolis. This
was probably Corfu, for, as the immigration of Nausithoüs, coming from
Italian shores, first established itself on the coast looking toward
their old home, so the Corinthians, coming by the islands and the
Epirote shores, would find their first landing in the spacious and
tranquil bay formed by the crescent-shaped island, which, at its
extremes, approaches the mainland. The Hellene of Corinth brought all
the seeds of the virtues and vices of his national temperament to the
fertile soil of Corcyra, as it is henceforward called by the Hellenic
chronicles, colonization and war with their neighbors filling all their
early history. They founded, according to their tradition, Apollonia and
other cities on the mainland; but, as among the ruins of those cities
there are Pelasgic remains, it is not to be supposed that they were the
first colonists, but that they merely colonized, as the Romans did in
the later times, with a dominant population, cities in decline or too
weak to maintain their independence. This is, in ancient Greek history,
oftener the meaning of the word _colonize_ than the founding of a new
city. To get a clear idea of the condition of this part of the world at
the beginning of historical, or even heroic record, we must take into
consideration that an epoch of civilization, perhaps of empire, had long
preceded the awakening of the Hellenic national life; an epoch which
ought, perhaps, to be measured by centuries, if we could measure it at
all, and whose record is preserved in the stupendous ruins we call
Pelasgic, a name applied by the Greeks to a people who preceded them,
derived possibly from the Greek name of the stork, indicating a
migrating or wandering people,—wandering, probably, because their empire
had been broken up by some newer and stronger race, but which the
various remaining traditions accord in asserting to have once held great
rule in Italy, where they were known also as Tyrrhenians, in the
Peloponnesus, and in Crete. We shall see presently some indications of
the correctness of the assumption that they preceded by an infinite
period the great assemblage of Greeks, which the expedition to Troy
perhaps marks, perhaps symbolizes; but at present I have only to do with
the history and mythology of Corfu, which is in no way that we can
discover connected with the Pelasgi.
[Illustration: GREEK BOATS AND ROSTRUM OF ROMAN GALLEY.]
The first wars of Corcyra were, as was to be expected of an enterprising
people, with the mother country; but as in those days piracy was the
chief business of every maritime people, _war_ was perhaps only a normal
condition. The Persian invasion brought Corcyra into the Hellenic
league, but, with the duplicity of which the race furnished so many
instances in ancient times, the Corcyriote fleet only sailed, and took
good care not to be in time for the battle, fearing the vengeance of the
Persians. Their prudence brought on them, after the defeat of Xerxes at
Salamis, a combined attack of the Peloponnesian States. As the union of
these was always a challenge to Athens, she sided with the Corcyriotes,
and the resulting war plunged Corcyra into intestine and social strife,
in which the most horrible cruelties were perpetrated by the islanders;
and the animosities and renewals of revolt and war, which the divisions
of the classes of the population gave opportunity for, reduced the
island to anarchy and helplessness. Their subsequent history is one of
repeated subjugation and revolt. After losing even the relative
independence of alliance with Athens, they were conquered by Agathocles
of Syracuse, Pyrrhus, and finally by Rome.
[Illustration: CORFU, FROM THE KING’S GARDEN.]
From this time Corcyra was the base of the Roman military movements
against the Levantine enemies of the republic. The commanding position
of the island has, from that day to this, made it an object of the
covetousness of all the maritime powers of the Mediterranean by turns.
In the civil wars of Rome, the island espoused the part of Pompey, later
of Brutus and Cassius, and then, always unfortunate, of Antony. After
the battle of Actium, fought almost within sight of its shores, Corcyra
was besieged, taken, and rigorously punished by Augustus, and then
relegated to an obscurity out of which only the great Ottoman invasion
of Europe brought it. It was involved more or less in the Saracenic,
Bulgarian, Norman, and Neapolitan wars and invasions, and finally threw
itself into the arms of Venice to save itself from conquest by Genoa.
From this time (1386) the history of Corcyra, become Corfu, until the
overthrow of the republic by Napoleon, is identified with that of
Venice, and all the remains or structures in the island date from the
Venetian occupation.
In 1537 the troops of the Sultan, under the orders of the renegade
Barbarossa, made a descent on the island and laid siege to the city,
which, taken by surprise, was ill-provisioned and with a small garrison.
The Turkish fleet blockaded the port, and the troops beleaguered the
city by land. The garrison was under the terrible alternative of being
starved into surrender speedily or dismissing all the useless mouths.
The latter was, on the whole, safer, for the surrender would have been
disastrous even to the non-combatants, who were to Turkish barbarity no
less obnoxious than the soldiers. The old men, women, and children were
sent out of the city, perhaps the most horrible necessity which ever
befell brave men. A successful defense of the city justified, in a
military point of view, the terrible sacrifice; and, after a long and
obstinate siege, Barbarossa, his army nearly destroyed by battle and
pestilence, withdrew, defeated. The island was almost depopulated,
ravaged, and so utterly impoverished that Venice was obliged to send the
people seed-corn and beasts to till their fields. Nearly the whole of
the nobility of the island had been killed in the defense.
To be in readiness for a similar emergency, the Senate augmented the
already strong fortifications. The New Fort, as it is still called, was
constructed, and, with a paternal regard for the well-being of the
islanders, which Venice did not always show for her Greek insular
possessions, institutions were founded and regulations made which
contributed greatly to the prosperity of the island.
In 1716 a new and determined attack was made by the Turks, under the
leadership of Achmet III. Their fleet drove off that of Venice, and an
army of thirty thousand men was debarked and laid siege to the city,
whose defense was directed by Count Schulembourg. The outlying heights
were taken quickly, and the garrison, shut in the inner line of
fortifications, received the desperate assault of the Turks on the main
works with more desperate resistance. After twenty days of incessant
attack, the Turks carried the outworks, penetrated to the Place d’Armes,
which is under the walls of the New Fort, and attempted to scale the
walls themselves.
“The assault lasted more than six hours with an incredible fury. The
women brought assistance to the defenders, and the priests, crucifix in
hand, ran along the ramparts or threw themselves into the fight. Finally
a vigorous sortie terminated this bloody day. Attacked on every side,
the assaulting force beat a retreat and lost all the outposts it had
taken. A tempest, which had burst on them in the night, completed the
work of defeat, and, seized by panic, they embarked precipitately,
leaving baggage and artillery behind them. In forty-two days they had
lost fifteen thousand men.” (_Isles de la Grèce._)
The victory was commemorated by a statue to Schulembourg, which no
subsequent conquest has disturbed, and which stands on the parade-ground
among monuments of greater or less good taste (generally the latter), to
mark the history of the island in modern days.
From that day to this, with the exception of an occasional _émeute_,
nothing has come to disturb the peace of Corfu, and the once so splendid
courage of the inhabitants has gone out like a fire without a draught.
There is probably no province of the Hellenic kingdom so devoid of
martial spirit or the virtues that grow out of it. It is now a most
delightful winter resort, a Fortunate Isle left out of the current of
political events and given over to invalids and sportsmen, who find on
the opposite Albanian coast the best shooting on the Mediterranean. The
old citadel, with its double peak, serves as a light-house to the lines
of steamers which furrow the Adriatic, cross, and make Corfu their
_entrepôt_ between Trieste, Venice, Brindisi, Alexandria,
Constantinople, and Smyrna.
The English occupation endowed the island with good roads, most of which
are maintained in fair condition still; and a winter’s sojourn here
lacks nothing which could be expected in the compass of ten by thirty
miles, with two posts per week from Europe. The fruits are those of the
northern Mediterranean in great perfection, the oranges being only
second to those of Crete; the waters are still well supplied with fish,
though the people do all they can to exterminate them by the use of
dynamite in fishing; and the Bella Venezia is a hotel which, though
still strange to the resources of our American caravansaries, is more
appropriate to the ways of the East and of idle people than are ours.
The kindly, honest old host, appropriately known as Dionysos, lacks but
little of giving to the stranger the hospitality of Alcinoüs. And life
is so cheap that one who has worn out the world and realized an income
of a thousand dollars a year may find a Macarian peace in an upper room
of the Bella Venezia, with windows looking out on the beautiful
mountains of Epirus, snow-clad all winter, and the bright blue of the
intervening sea, with the coming, going, and merely passing ships of all
nations; and, when the sun is low, have a comfortable carriage to thread
the labyrinths of the immense olive groves which form almost the only
shade in the island. Here one meets men of all races—Turkish reliefs on
their way from Stamboul to Durazzo, or Scutari of Albania; white-skirted
palikars from Epirus; Eastern Jews, with their characteristic long
robes; Persians, Montenegrins, Peloponnesians, etc., who, changing
steamers here, or glad to breathe a land air during the stay in port of
their steamers, stroll up and down the parade, with the easy-going
townsmen and tourists of all nations, seeing the island in comfort or
rushing over it in the custody of Cook or Gaze, to carry away a confused
remembrance of Corfu and Syra, hardly recalling which was which.
Ulysses was dismissed from Scheria loaded with presents. The modern
voyager is not so fortunate. The souvenirs of Corfu which he will carry
with him, whether antique or modern, will rarely recompense him for the
outlay. The bric-à-brac shops abound in false antiques, arms from
Epirus, Greek laces, and Eastern embroideries, which no wise buyer
meddles with, dear beyond measure as they are. Be content with the
moderate _pension_ of the Bella Venezia, and tempt not Mercury in his
favored island; he was the god of thieves as well as merchants, and was
never better worshiped in his capacity of joint protector than in the
bric-à-brac shops of Corfu.
Ulysses went to Ithaca in one night, in what must have been, for the
time, the quickest passage on record, and a great credit to the rowers
of King Alcinoüs. Nothing like it is to be expected to-day, though it is
not impossible still, and the steamer which does the service makes a
long, roundabout voyage. Our yacht, though small, was too big for
rowing, and we had no special motive, as Ulysses had, to get quickly to
Ithaca. As our route lay by Santa Maura, which has to do with the story
of the Odyssey, if not with the wanderings from Troy, we turned aside
from his course to visit it. Nericus, as it was called in Homeric
nomenclature, probably formed part of the realm of the Ithacan kings,
Laertes mentioning his conquest of it; but it is not mentioned in the
catalogue, and we may conclude was not Greek. It is barely separated
from the mainland by a narrow channel, cut by the Corinthians through a
flat, which more anciently, however, must have been a shallow arm of the
sea. The action of the elements is filling it up again, so that time may
unite it to the Acarnanian shore, as in the Homeric days; for Laertes,
in recalling to Ulysses some of his old exploits (Odyssey, book 24),
says: “Ah, that it had pleased Zeus, Apollo, Athene, to have borne me to
your palace, such as I was when, at the head of the Cephalonians, I
took, _on the continent_, the proud city of Nericus!” In the catalogue
of the Iliad we find that “Ulysses commands the magnanimous
Cephalonians; the warriors of Ithaca; those of shady Neriton, of
Crocyles, of the barren Ægilipos; those of Samos [Samé of Cephalonia,
not the island Samos], of Zacynthus [Zante], and of the adjoining
continent. Twelve ships whose sides were painted red followed him.” But
Nericus occurs nowhere.
Nothing illustrates so strikingly the change in the condition of
civilization as the relations between the ancient and modern chief
cities of the Greek islands. The substitute for the stately Nericus is a
low, flat, uninteresting town, built on the plain which lies north of
Nericus, and next the roadstead. To the east lie the rugged mountains of
Acarnania and the Gulf of Arta; north, in full view, is the modern
fortress of Prevesa; further, and to the east, Arta, the ancient
Ambracia; and the long strip of low coast which stretches away from
Prevesa northward is dotted with masses of ruin—those of the imperial
Nicopolis, monument of the victory of Actium, won in those blue waters.
The idle shepherds of those days, watching their sheep on these hills,
saw the crash of prows, the flight of Egypt, and the shame of Antony.
Perhaps, through this very channel, where the light-draft caïque now
glides, to gain the shelter of the islands going southward, ran the
fugitive ships of Cleopatra; for this was evidently the channel by which
the craft of those days avoided the stormy capes of Cephalonia and the
southern point of Nericus. Standing on the eastern brow of the hill on
which the old city stood, and on which its ruins still mark a noble
past, is the citadel. Along the plain, among the olives, the fragments
of tombs lie spread like flocks of sleeping sheep. The port was on the
bay now connected with the northern roadstead by the Corinthian Channel;
and two or three underground passages, in part cut in solid rock, one
being high enough for a man to walk in upright, and cut as cleanly and
evenly as the walls of a chamber, connect it with the citadel which
dominates the northern part of the island, where the fertile plains lie.
The ruins are of various ages, embracing Pelasgic, but mainly later, and
coming down to Roman times; and the great extent of the Pelasgic
_enceinte_, which almost everywhere underlies the Hellenic and Roman
work, shows the great early importance of the city. The citadel is bold
and commanding, and looks out on the northern and western seas on one
side, and the Corinthian Channel and the inland sea on the other, and
down to Ithaca, which, indeed, is visible from some points.
The post-Homeric name of Nericus was Leucadia. Æneas is represented as
having debarked there, and Apollo had a temple on the heights which
terminate the island to the south. From the cliffs which overlook the
Adriatic on that side, Sappho is said to have leaped into the sea,
overcome by the sorrows of her unhappy love. “Sappho’s Leap” is the name
of the cliff to this day, and my Corfiote captain, as we glided by, told
me how the place was celebrated because the Duchess of the island had
jumped off into the sea from it, and that the people had put up a great
inscription in memory of it. He had never seen it, and didn’t know
exactly where the leap was made; but I think he was very excusable for
his ignorance, as the action of the sea, driven as it is sometimes by
the furious southwest wind into a very “hell of waters,” which consume
the rock in their fury, must long ago have brought down all that
classical times had seen of the rock, and changed the face of the cliff
entirely. As it now is, I could find hardly a point where a new Sappho
would have found a welcome so gentle as the embrace of the Adriatic;
masses of fallen rock and stony beach would have given a harsher but
more speedy end.
Mythology says that when Adonis was killed, Aphrodite, seeking him
through all the earth, finally found him lying dead in the temple of the
Erythræan Apollo. The Sun-god, to cure her grief, counseled her to throw
herself from the cliffs of Leucadia into the sea, where she would find
oblivion. Here Zeus, who seems to have found obstacles in the way of his
legitimate marriage, and to have wooed Hera at first with less success
than attended his mortal loves, found by the same process a salutary
indifference to the charms of his divine sister and afterwards spouse,
to which temporary coolness on his part might, perhaps, be ascribed his
ultimate success with the fickle fair.
And here, in practical historical times, criminals condemned to death
were thrown into the sea. The people (who even now preserve a certain
sympathy with the criminal class) used to tie numbers of birds to the
limbs of the condemned and cover them with feathers to break the force
of their fall, and then send boats to pick them up. If they survived,
they were pardoned.
In modern times nothing has occurred to signalize Santa Maura, or
“Levkadi,” as it is indifferently called. It was taken and retaken by
Turks and Venetians, and finally passed with the rest of the Ionian
Islands to the heirs of Venice. Its people are a mild, hospitable race,
to whom the stranger is a guest almost in the antique sense.
We loitered along with a feeble west wind, under the western shore, bold
and desolate, of Levkadi, its high peaks above us breaking into ravines,
and the ravines ending in cliffs, doubled “Sappho’s Leap,” and before us
lay Ithaca, the ten-years-sought-for island. To the north was still
visible a dim film which we knew to be Corfu; nearer, one less dim,
which we recognized by its outline to be Paxos, an island without
history and without interest, but which tradition asserts to have been
once united to Corfu and separated by an earthquake. The breeze
quickened at night-fall as we went round the point of the Leukadian
cliffs, and before us lay the inland sea, which, separating Santa Maura,
Ithaca, Cephalonia, and Zante from the mainland, is a sort of
smooth-water channel for ships coming out of the Gulf of Patras, or of
Corinth, as it is indifferently called, or running in there from Corfu
and the upper Adriatic. The bolder portions of Ithaca are almost utterly
denuded rock. One hollow, like a great theatre, opens northward between
two bold rocky peninsulas, and this is the vale from which the Odyssean
city drew its prosperity. Olive-trees and vineyards still cover its
slopes, and suggestions of white villages flashed out from the silvery
green sea of olive orchards as we flitted by, running under the eastern
shore to catch the breeze that blew down from the mountain as the sun
sank. We had all the wind our cutter could carry, and bowled along
through the smooth water in the lee of the island like a steamer. Far
ahead we saw, in the gathering night, a faint glimmer of light, which
seemed too faint for a light-house, and too steady for a house-light,
and which perplexed us exceedingly, as no light was indicated on the
chart; but, creeping along shore, we found that it was a tiny chapel
standing on a long and menacing peninsula of bare rock, in the window of
which burned a lamp,—in all probability the fulfillment of a vow made by
some devout Greek sailor who had escaped the teeth of this Scylla; or
the perpetuation of an antique custom, when the little chapel of St.
Nicholas, protector of sailors, was a temple of Neptune, whom the saint
replaces in function and respect of the seafarer. Nothing is more
interesting in this part of the world than the evidences of the unbroken
continuity of religious tradition, and the gradual change of paganism
into Christianity,—if, indeed, the change has taken place, which in
certain districts I am scarcely disposed to admit. The little chapels
which one finds planted by the seaside or solitary roadside in all the
Greek islands, and even on the mainland, will generally be found to have
some antique material in them, some evidence of the earlier shrine which
honored one of the Greek gods. The Olympians have their homologues if
not their homonyms. Zeus goes back to his awful antique dignity of the
All-father, the original sole deity of the Pelasgian, worshiped in a
temple not made by hands, under the speaking oak of Dodona, the one God,
maker of heaven and earth, the Dyaus or Sky-father of our Aryan
ancestors, and Zeus (Deus, Divus) of the western branch of the family;
but his creatures and children fall into the lower rank of saints:
Apollo becomes St. Elias (Helios); Athena, the Virgin Mary; Ares, St.
George; Poseidon, St. Nicholas, etc., etc.
We left St. Nicholas and his night-light behind us, and, rounding a cape
into the Bay of Vathy, saw in the dim distance the light of the outer
light-house, and met the wind coming out of the bay. It was late, and
beating up the bay would be a long job; so we turned in and left the
navigation to the sailors. The next morning we woke, as Ulysses did,
under the shadow of Neriton, where the Phæacians had left him sleeping.
“In one part of Ithaca is the port of Phorcys, the old man of the sea;
the bold promontories forming the circuit protect it from the great
waves and the sounding winds. The ships which have once entered it may
lie without cables. At its extremity is a bushy olive-tree whose shadow
hides a delicious grotto and shady retreat, sacred to the Nereids. In
this asylum, refreshed by an inexhaustible fountain, are placed the
vases and the jars of stone.... It has two entrances: one, looking
toward the north, is for the use of men; the other, to the east, is more
divine. Never man enters there: it is the path of the immortals.
“The olive-tree and the grotto are known to the Phæacians. There they
go. The ship runs half-way up the beach, so strong is the stroke of the
rowers. Then these land, carrying Ulysses, still plunged in profound
sleep, and lay him on the sand, wrapped in brilliant blankets and woven
linen.”
Waking, he is bewildered by the artifice of Athena, and does not
recognize his native island; but finally, when he appeals to the Goddess
to tell him the truth, if he be in Ithaca, she replies to him:—
“Now I will show you the localities of Ithaca, that you may doubt no
more. There is the port of Phorcys, old man of the sea; there, at the
extremity of the port, the bushy olive-tree, and under its shade a
delicious grotto, dark resting-place, and sacred to the nymphs. This is
the vaulted grotto where often you sacrificed entire hecatombs to the
nymphs. There is Mount Neriton, shadowed by forests.”
The identification of this little bay or “port” is the one contested
point of the topography, and, on account of its greater commodiousness,
Port Vathy (at the left as we enter the roadstead) is maintained by some
authorities to be the “port of Phorcys.” The geology of the two bays is
conclusive evidence in favor of that which the Greeks now call Port
Dexia (the right-hand port), as Port Vathy has not, and by its
geological formation never could have had, a beach such as Homer
describes, and which was indispensable to the ancient sailor, while that
of Dexia is superb—a soft, unbroken stretch of sand. Other objections we
shall meet further on.
[Note.—The puzzling question of the forms of classical names in these
articles has been carefully considered, and the difficulty of adapting
consistent classical orthography to popular archæology seems too great
to be overcome in this place.]
CHAPTER II.
The changes of the conditions of existence in what we call civilization
resemble, a good deal more than we generally imagine, the progress of a
horse in a tread-mill. Comparing the evidences of a higher prosperity
which history affords with what we now find in Ithaca, we have ample
ground to suppose that, while our part of the world has made certain
advances, this has rather retrograded. A scanty population, the greater
part of the island indeed uninhabited; ruins of great cities where now
there is not a shepherd’s hut; a wretched, sordid life in which not even
poetry, the offspring of sorrow, can find a foothold; utter
insignificance in the world of men,—this is what the island of Ulysses,
which fills so large a part of the Old World’s poetry, shows us to-day.
We woke like Ulysses under the shadow of Neriton, but not like him under
the olive’s shade. Our yacht was anchored in a tranquil and land-locked
bay, Port Vathy (the deep), round the shores of which stretch and gleam,
white in the sun, the houses of the modern capital of Ithaca, a dull,
utterly uninteresting town, neither whose past nor present is worth a
note.
Devastated by Turks and corsairs by turns, conquered by Christian and
Infidel, the tribute of death and pillage had at one time nearly left
the island a desert, and Venetian chronicles report the repeopling of it
by a Slavonic colony; but there is good evidence, as we shall see
presently, that there was never quite an end of the original stock.
Though one does see occasionally strongly Slavonic faces, the population
is now in language and manners purely Greek, with some of the worst
traits of the race strongly developed. By good chance I found an old
acquaintance in Mr. Caravia, a deputy for Ithaca to the Greek Assembly,
then in vacation, and I had a letter to Aristides Dendrinos, the
principal personage of the island; and through their united attentions
we were made as much at home in Ithaca as possible. But the Ithacans are
shrewd folk, sharp dealers who look at foreigners as the Hebrews did on
the Egyptians, as made to be spoiled; and we were unlucky enough to have
arrived in the Greek Lent, which, as they observe it, is equal to
starvation to outsiders. The excellent wine of Ithaca, one of the best
of Greek wines, is quite worthy its ancient reputation; but flesh was
unattainable, and fish so rare, owing to the people’s habit of killing
them with dynamite, that we could not get enough for a breakfast. The
fowls in Greek lands, living an outcast life, never fed, but expected to
grow, as the partridges do, on the bounties of nature, hardly offer a
compensation for the trouble of picking their bones. They combine all
the misfortunes of the wild and domesticated conditions, with none of
the advantages of either, and offer a scant resource to the caterer. We
made haste to see what was to be seen in Ithaca, and study our great
predecessor’s footprints, but we found the learning harder than the
living. The island Greek is quick-witted, and, like the Irishman, never
confesses himself at fault in anything you want to know, especially in
things connected with ancient history or archæology. He solves the
hardest and most obscure problem by a bold dash, and is even surer than
Schliemann in his breezy inductions. It is amusing and cheering to see a
man so cock-sure of what archæology has puzzled over so many years. On
inquiring for a guide to shorten my researches (for, though Homer is
guide-book enough for Ithaca, one may be a long time in tracing out the
Odyssean movements by the poem), every one was ready to show me
everything. Before leaving I found an intelligent guide, as such go, in
one Angelo Persego, whose name I record for the benefit of such of my
readers as may be tempted (out of the Greek Lent) to visit Ithaca. But
here let me drop a word of advice for all voyagers in Greek lands. Take
a guide for lodgings and living, but never place any confidence in his
identifications or local traditions. He may be right, but the chances
are nine to one he is not. He may even have been over the ground before,
but his assurance to that effect is no evidence. I found the men I
selected utterly ignorant, as usual, of almost all I wanted to learn;
but I found a little book by G. F. Bowen, one time Fellow of Brasenose
and President of the Ionian University, which, though dated in 1850,
gives a sufficient clue to the topography to enable one to dispense with
a guide, except to find the best roads.
Vathy does not occur in the Odyssey under any name, nor is there any
trace of antique structures about it. In the illustration the narrow
entrance at the right is Vathy; the cove in the centre, with the island
off it, is the port of Phorcys, where Ulysses was landed, and which, for
the uses of ancient mariners, who beached their ships instead of
anchoring them, was a better port than Vathy. It corresponds in the
minutest detail to Homer’s account of it,—a smooth, sandy beach,
complete shelter from all winds, and only varying in any particulars in
its surroundings by a greater distance from the grotto where the
Phæacians hide the presents Ulysses brings with him; but of this more is
to be said.
The Odyssey gives no intimation of any city near the landing-place. The
port of Ulysses’ own capital was much nearer Phæacia, and the ship might
have landed him at his own door. The reason of this excessive caution
was that during so long a time he had had no news from home, and his
Phæacian friends knew that he might find his city in the hands of an
enemy.
[Illustration: PORT OF PHORCYS AND NERITON, FROM THE MOUTH OF ULYSSES’
CAVE.]
Awaking, then, from the sleep in which he had been so gently landed by
the crew of the Phæacian ship, he finds himself in a strange land, as he
supposed, and in complete solitude, and arms himself with his habitual
cunning, distrusting everything. When Athena comes to him in the form of
a shepherd, he asks where he is; and being told that he is at last in
the long-sought Ithaca, he is transported with joy, but conceals his
emotion and addresses the goddess with these hasty words, disguising the
truth and telling his story falsely, always turning in his mind many
artifices: “I, too, have heard, in the far-off, immense island of Crete,
of the island of Ithaca. It is, then, in that country that I have
arrived with my treasures. I have left an equal part to my children
because I fly from my native land, where I killed the dear son of
Idomeneus,” etc., etc., going on with a long history to account for his
presence in Ithaca, a place unknown to him, which fable he only drops
when Athena throws off her disguise; but he still is unconvinced that he
is in Ithaca. She calls his attention to Neriton in front of him, and
having convinced him, helps him hide his treasures in the grotto, when
they sit down under the olive-tree over its entrance, and she tells him
how matters stand at home, and contrives plans for getting rid of the
pretendants, who would, no doubt, put an end to him if he fell into
their hands. This seems to be his conviction, for he exclaims: “Great
gods! if you had not enlightened me I should have perished in my palace,
like Agamemnon. Come, let us plan a means by which I may revenge myself
on them all.” This hint of the fate of Agamemnon, whose end he had
learned, is the clue to his cautious deportment. They plan as follows:
He will be disguised by Athena, so that not even his wife shall know
him, and will then go to Eunæus, who keeps his swine by the Raven’s
Cliff, near Arethusa’s fountain, and wait with him studying up the
position, while she goes off to Lacedæmon to bring back Telemachus, whom
she had sent there nominally to get news of his father, but really, as
she informs Ulysses, to give him an opportunity, hitherto wanting, to
see the world and acquire renown. Here they separate, and Ulysses takes
the secret path.
The position of the grotto makes the only difficulty in tracing all his
movements; for it is not, as one would expect from the text, at the head
of the port, strictly speaking, but at the head of the little ravine
which ends in the port, a good quarter of an hour’s walk from the shore,
even making allowance for all the recession of the water-line, which has
evidently been considerable. The grotto itself corresponds exactly with
the description, and can be entered by mortals only in the usual way, by
the small opening which looks toward the port. “It has two entrances:
one, turned toward the breath of Boreas, is for human use; the other,
toward that of Notos, is more divine. Never man enters by that; it is
the way of the immortals.” The human entrance is a low, almost invisible
opening, or at least, easily passed without notice, at a short distance.
Even now, when all vegetation has disappeared from around it, and the
olive-trees come only half-way up the hill, it would easily be hidden by
a large stone, as Minerva hides it. The entrance, low and precipitous,
widens rapidly within, and we descend by what might once have been
artificially prepared steps to a vault-like cave, sixteen to twenty feet
in diameter, with a curious recess at the farther end, and at the top of
the vault another opening, like the top window of the Pantheon of Rome,
or any of the circular temples whose form was derived from the vaulted
tomb or treasury of Pelasgic architecture. At first sight I thought this
opening might have been artificial, but on close examination I saw that
the formation of the rock led to it naturally, and that, hardly large
enough to admit a human body readily, it could only, if enlarged, be
entered by a person’s being let down with a cord. This is the
“immortals’ entrance.” Under this opening lies a huge heap of stones,
the accumulation of centuries, for the lower portions are cemented
together by the stalagmitic deposit from the rock above; and the walls
of the grotto, despite the breaking off of every attackable stalactite,
are also formed of carbonate of lime so deposited. The difference
between the actual distance from the water’s edge to the grotto and that
which is indicated by the narrative of the Odyssey is not more than a
fair poetic license would permit; or the memory of the narrator, having
known the localities, might well in a few years of absence leave out
this short distance.
The Odyssean topography is greatly confused to the modern traveler by
the fact that the Homeric city undoubtedly stood at the northern end of
the island, and far remote from the modern city as well as from the
landing-place of Ulysses and the pig-pens of Eumæus. The view from the
grotto gives us, at the left, a bay of which Vathy and Phorcys are
tributaries. This cuts the island nearly in two, a narrow ridge of rock
only connecting its two great masses. On the north is the site of the
Homeric city, as I shall presently show; but on the south are the
Raven’s Cliff and the fountain of Arethusa, together with an ancient
ruin known by the people as the “Castle of Ulysses.” These ruins are of
the earliest form of Pelasgic, commonly named Cyclopean, though there is
no justification for any distinction between the “Pelasgic” and the
“Cyclopean,” or any proper distinction of styles, as they run into each
other, from the form shown at “Ulysses’ Castle” to the most elaborate
and carefully fitted polygonal which we shall find at Samé on the
opposite shore of Cephalonia. The walls of Ulysses’ Castle are of great
extent, and portions still remaining near the summit are well preserved,
some fragments being nearly twenty feet high. It must have been the work
of a powerful tribe and a great stronghold. Seen from the sea, it shows
on a sharp conical rock precipitously trending down to the shore. The
Odyssey in no manner makes allusion to this, either as city or as ruin.
Ulysses passes very near it going south, leaving it on the right,
apparently ignoring its existence. This makes it tolerably clear that it
had been so long in ruin that it was in no way to be connected with the
Odyssean dynasty or colonization even, or that it was constructed after
the Homeric epoch. The latter hypothesis is untenable, because we find
in many parts, especially in the Argolid, ruins clearly contemporary
with this, which are in the Hellenic traditions regarded as the work of
a vanished and semi-divine race of giants, the Cyclopes or the “divine
Pelasgi;” while, of the Homeric epoch, as distinguished from the
Pelasgic, which preceded it, and the Hellenic, which followed it, we
have no recognizable remains, and the cities known to have existed, such
as the Ithaca of Ulysses, have left no ruin durable enough to show in
our time. This indicates a state of civilization in which the great
necessity of strong walls as a defense had passed, or that, by the use
of cement, walls were made so light in structure that they were
efficient for the day, but perished utterly in the intervening time,
which again is an untenable hypothesis, because we find cement used
nowhere in Greece in work known to be earlier than the third century B.
C. I leave the question of the identity of the Odyssean epoch with that
of the composition of the poem at present untouched. I am dealing only
with the poem which philologists suppose to have been composed about 850
B. C. That the author knew Ithaca perfectly, I think we shall see, and
that consequently the ruins of the Pelasgic epoch, when not continuously
inhabited (as were Nericus and Samé, the former of which Laertes
conquered, and the latter of which sent the largest deputation of
“kings” as suitors for Penelope, the foundations of both being
Pelasgic), were already so lost in the twilight of prehistory as to be
without any meaning to the author of the Odyssey. The city whose ruins
are now called the Castle of Ulysses was as unknown to the epoch of
Homer as to ours. No one in the whole action of the Odyssey goes in or
out of its gates, or turns aside from his path to speak of or visit it.
“Kings” were as common as rascals in those days, but that two important
cities should exist contemporaneously in the small island of Ithaca, and
that the people of Ulysses should live in one, pasture their hogs on the
territory of the other, and ignore its existence, is impossible. This
does not prevent Schliemann from identifying the house walls, which
remain to a small height, with the pig-pens of Eumæus, or a huge stump
near the citadel, with the tree from which Ulysses had made his bed
(_Ithaca, Peloponnesus and Troy_).
That this part of the island was nearly or quite unpopulated is made
more than probable by the facts that no mention is made of any city or
people here; that the only features mentioned are the wildness, and
forests abandoned to feeding of pigs; and that Ulysses selects this part
for his concealment. The path Ulysses probably followed from the port of
Phorcys to the Raven’s Cliff is by far too hard for dilettante
following; it is not only impassable to beasts of burden, but, I should
say, difficult for a pedestrian. There is a road carriageable for a few
miles from Vathy along the ridge southward, and then a fair bridle-path
to the cliff, which, had we known it, would have led us somewhere near
the location of Eumæus’s sties; but the guide my friends had recommended
me, on his personal assurance, did not know the road, and we went
wandering across fields and over hills, abandoning our quadrupeds at the
moment when they would have been our best guides; and, finally, the
fellow had to go to a ploughman scratching the earth with a crooked
stick behind a yoke of year-old heifers, and inquire his way. I
exhausted my modern Greek in exasperated vituperation of his pretentious
ignorance, and took the lead, as I generally have had to do on similar
occasions.
There was a pretty little valley on our way, the only arable or fruitful
land in this part of the island; all else was bare and bleak. A few
tough-lived shrubs, broom and gorse, arbutus, and some others I did not
know, wring a scanty subsistence from the clefts between the rocks, and
in a mass of almost unmitigated limestone was cloven a ravine. The
roughness of Ithaca was proverbial even in Homeric days, since Athena,
while disguised as a shepherd, replies to Ulysses, “If it [Ithaca] is
rocky, if it breeds not horses in its moderate space, it is not quite
barren,” etc. One might well select this scene as one of tranquil
beauty, with the faint glimpses of the dreamy inner sea above its valley
distance, and the golden grain-fields as I saw them, interspersed with
vineyards and olive-orchards.
[Illustration: RAVEN’S CLIFF AND THE FOUNTAIN OF ARETHUSA.]
The glen of the Raven’s Cliff becomes a wild gorge below the fountain of
Arethusa, and descends abruptly to the sea. Above, a stripe of bare,
pale-gray rock down the cliff shows that in winter it is the location of
a cataract, though, when I visited the locality, dry as summer dust. The
fountain of Arethusa is situated about half-way from the cliff to the
sea, and bears the evidences of an immense antiquity. Remains of an
architectural surrounding are still to be seen, which, with some
foundations of walls of the Roman period, evidently of a temple to the
nymph or local goddess, and “Ulysses’ Castle,” are the only traces of
ruin discoverable in this lobe of the island. The recess of the fountain
has once been much larger, but the slow process of depositing the
calcareous incrustation which forms its walls has gone on so long that
only a small deep basin remains, from which the people draw the water
with a cord and bucket. Its niche is cushioned with moss and maidenhair
ferns, and the soft porous rock is always moist with the filtering
through of the water. A wooden trough is placed for the watering of the
sheep and goats which take the place of the hogs of Eumæus, for this is
the only perennial source of water in the region.
An old woman, wrinkled and bowed, looking like one of the Fates, sat
near the fountain, combing the wool she had washed at it; and on the
opposite side the nymph of the fountain, in the shape of a young matron
of some neighboring hamlet, was washing her clothes. The wash was
boiling when we came up, over a fire of brambles and weeds; but the
utensil which took the place of the bronze caldron of the antique
house-mother was an American petroleum-can, with a wire bale fitted in
rudely, and the stamp of the New York Refining Company was still visible
on the tin. We talk of the omnipresence of gold, of the omnipotence of
cotton; but in my wanderings on the earth I have found places where the
people did not know the value of a piece of gold, and wore nothing but
the homespun and woven wool of their flocks and flax of their fields,
while I have never found one that did not know petroleum; and I have
learned that the petroleum-can is a more universal concomitant of
civilization than English cutlery or American drillings.
The pens of Ulysses’ pig-herd were at the top of the cliff, where a
plain of small extent and soil of scanty depth still maintains an
olive-grove, sole representative of the forest of oaks whose acorns
fattened the swine for the revels of the suitors of Penelope.
Here Ulysses finds Eumæus, and here, in his anxiety to convince him of
the truth of his prediction of the return of the wanderer, he says: “If
he return not as I declare, let your servants seize me and throw me over
the high rock, that vagabonds may learn in future to abstain from
useless falsehoods.”
[Illustration: FROM AN OLD GREEK VASE.
THE SITE OF ITHACA—PORT POLIS.]
To return to the city of Ithaca, Ulysses must retrace his steps past the
port of Phorcys, and follow the ridge of rock which connects the
divisions of the island past the mass of Neriton. His landing-place was
on the east side of the island, the port of the ancient city Ithaca on
the west; and there are now on the road between, several villages, the
representatives, perhaps, of the ancient towns from which Ulysses drew
his quota of men for the Trojan campaign, “Crocyles and the rocky
Ægilipos.” It was in one of these villages that Schliemann, visiting the
island for the first time, in his Homeric enthusiasm, as the villagers,
in their habitual curiosity to see the stranger, came out to gaze and
question, taking the assemblage as a demonstration in his honor, and
determined to show them how well he estimated the dignity of an heir of
the Odyssean glory, mounted on a table and translated from Homer the
passages which record Laertes’ emotions on the return of his long-lost
son. “They wept with emotion,” says the naïf Doctor; and he rewarded
them by some hundred lines more. Remembering this incident, I inquired
about the matter, and found that it had excited much merriment in the
cultivated circles of Vathy, and, as I expected, the other side in the
rencontre preserved a very different recollection of the Doctor’s
achievement, and that the tears were of merriment rather than of pathos.
No one in the assemblage could understand a word of the Greek in the
Doctor’s pronunciation of it.
In the nomenclature of the two principal higher villages of the northern
section, I found a curious survival of archaic language, which, so far
as I could learn, is as incomprehensible as Homer, in the original, to
the inhabitants. The villages are Anoï and Exoï, which are clearly from
the archaic and (except in the Cretan mountains) obsolete words _ano_
and _exo_, used as _haw_ and _gee_ are by us in driving oxen, and of
course meaning originally right and left, and these indicate site
survivals of early towns or villages. But of Ithaca the _city_, the home
of Ulysses, not a trace remains except the name _Polis_ (city, _the_
city par excellence), which is applied to a locality where not even an
ancient wall shows a claim to the appellation. The fragments of
substructure shown on the hill above and near the village of Stavros are
undoubtedly mediæval, and belong to the piratical city which was
established here, and which was destroyed in the latter part of the
sixteenth century. I searched in vain for anything to indicate the date
of the ancient city, but here, doubtless, was the home of Ulysses. Its
little port is of the nature demanded by ancient mariners,—a smooth
beach in a cove, with the island of Cephalonia opposite and near enough
to shut off any great violence of sea or wind. Homer relates that the
suitors, when Telemachus had gone to Pylos to get news of his father,
sent out a ship with some of their number to intercept and kill him on
his return, and that this ship lay in watch at an island off the port
where the return of Telemachus’s ship could be seen from afar and
prevented. Opposite Port Polis is a rock, probably the remnant of that
island; for, as the material of it is a conglomerate easily subdued by
the elements and decomposing rapidly, it must have been once a
considerable island, and it is now the only remnant of rock or island
which occupies any such relative position.
In searching around the neighborhood for traces of antiquity I was
accosted by a peasant, who told me that there had been found a stone
with some letters on it, and I made haste to hunt it out. They (for
there were two fragments) were at the bottom of a heap of stone which
had been exhumed from under a land-fall, and which were evidently part
of a very ancient building. I hired the men who gathered round to remove
the heap, and photographed the stones, which had been originally one.
The inscription is in the early style of Greek epigraphy, boustrophedon,
_i. e._, going alternately from left to right and right to left, as oxen
go when ploughing. It is the oldest known inscription in the Ithacan
alphabet.
I placed a copy of the photograph in the hands of Professor Comparetti
of Florence, amongst others, and received from him the following, read
at a meeting of the Academy of the Lincei:—
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION FOUND AT POLIS.]
“Since I have hitherto spoken of inscriptions very old or archaic, as we
say, it will be permitted me to close this communication by presenting
to the Academy a curious inscription of this kind recently discovered in
Ithaca and communicated to me by a diligent and cultivated visitor to
the Greek lands, the American, Mr. Stillman, who made in Ithaca a
photograph of the inscription, and, having unsuccessfully asked an
interpretation of several scholars, applied to me. He has permitted me
to make communication to this Academy, putting at my disposition also
the negative of his photograph, from which are printed the copies I
present. The inscription is tolerably roughly cut in a friable stone,
broken in two, worn by time and water. The photograph, which is never
the best means of representing monuments of this kind even in
experienced hands, presents some confusion and obscurity in parts; but
this is the only difficulty in the epigraph.... I saw at once that this
was an inscription of which there was already some notice in a book
published by the Phœnix of discoverers of antiquities, Schliemann, in
1868, ‘Ithaca, Peloponnesos, and Troy.’ Rich as he is in fancy,
Schliemann is ready to believe any story, and at once convinced himself
that he had discovered the inscription of a very old sarcophagus, and
found an honest workman who helped him to complete the idea, showing him
the bones found in it by him. And in his book, together with this and
other news, he communicated the inscription such as he read it. Of the
two fragments, however, he only saw that at the right, and this he read
very badly, seeing letters where none are, and imagining incredible
forms of letters. Kirchhoff in his ‘Studien zur Geschichte des
Griechischen Alphabets’ sought to apply this monument to his purposes,
but could make nothing of it, and it would have been impossible to get
anything from it. Now, thanks to the intelligent care of Mr. Stillman,
we have before us the monument as it is; he knew nothing of Schliemann;
when he saw the inscription, he saw that it was incomplete, and seeking
amongst the stones, found the other piece, and, divining justly its
relation, united them and took the photograph which now permits us to
utilize what we may call his discovery.
“The epigraph is certainly very old, besides being boustrophedon. This
is shown particularly by the forms of the _sigma_ and _iota_. It was cut
roughly and by hands little used to such work, without any care for
symmetry in the disposition of the letters or of the lines, nor for the
uniformity of the letters. Some letters are lost in the fracture, others
by the wearing of the stone, and the entire inscription is mutilated in
the lower part.
“The reading, with the filling up, is as follows:—
τᾶς [Ἀ]θάνας
τᾶς (Ρ)[έ](ας)
χα[ὶ τ](ᾶ)ς Ἡρ
ας τα (ἔ) [ν]τεα
τῶ[ἱ]ερῶ οἱ
ἱε[ρ]εε[ς] (Κες-
π
“Translation: ‘Of Athena—of Rhea—and of Hera—the sacred utensils of the
temple—the priests, Kes—placed.’
“Probably the names of the three priests followed, the first commencing
with the letters Kes,—perhaps Kesiphron,—and there ought to follow τάδ’
ἒνεθεν or τάδε χάτεθεν, or similar expression. The inscription, then,
has nothing to do with a sarcophagus, or with the dead. It treats, on
the contrary, of a hidden treasure, that is to say, of the sacred
utensils of a temple in which were worshiped the three divinities,
Athena, Rhea, and Hera, each one having her peculiar priest. It is well
known that there is nothing new in this case of three divinities
worshiped in the same temple. We know that Athena was especially
reverenced in Ithaca, and are not surprised to find her first in the
list. Then to explain this inscription, it may be supposed that in some
perilous time of war, revolution, or other danger, these priests decided
to put in security the treasures of the temple and hid them in a safe
and secret place, leaving there this inscription, so that in any case
the nature and origin of the objects might be known. Probably they cut
the inscription themselves that no one else might be in the secret, and
this would explain the signs of haste and inexperience in the cutting,
while on the other hand the language, like the orthography, is correct.”
The attribution to a sarcophagus by Schliemann is difficult to explain
as a mistake. If it had been, as he says, on a sarcophagus that he found
the right half of the inscription, he must have found the whole; but the
fact is that there was in the whole pile of stones no fragment of
anything like a sarcophagus, an object unknown in Greece till centuries
later. The inscription had evidently been a mural tablet and was about
eighteen inches deep and of a shape and size which made it impossible to
take it for a fragment of a sarcophagus; and underneath the mass of
debris from which it was extracted the workmen found a pit, which was
excavated, they told me, without finding anything; nor, they said, was
any object of antiquity found with the stones, while Schliemann engraves
a lance head and a coin of about 300 B. C. which he says were found in
the sarcophagus. This proves nothing, for when anything is found the
absurd rigor of the Greek laws makes the concealment of it the first
object of the finder. If this pit, when discovered, had still contained
the sacred objects, what a find if archæology could have profited by it!
But as the Greek law in case of concealment would have punished the
excavator by confiscation, or in the best case by taking the half of the
objects found, the first precaution taken by the finder would have been
to remove, if possible, to a foreign shore, and if not, to melt down, if
of precious metal, the objects found. Until Greek legislation on
archæological research is more intelligent, it will be gravely
handicapped. The greater part of the value of an object is often to know
where it came from, and this we never know of objects found in Greece by
chance or private excavation. There was some years ago a report, which
had certainly considerable confirmation, of the discovery of a great
treasure in this very part of Ithaca; possibly it may have been this. If
we could have found the vessels of the temple, they would have given us
the art of the descendants of the Dorians in Ithaca at least six hundred
years B. C.; for this inscription is Doric, and dates from about that
time.
In any case, we may be confident that our inscription marks the site as
having been in the vicinity of a city of, or little later than, the
Homeric epoch, as, supposing the Odyssey to have been composed in 850 B.
C., only about two hundred and fifty years could have intervened between
its composition and the placing of this inscription; and we know of no
ethnic revolution which would have destroyed the Homeric city between
the Dorian invasion and the wars of Corinth.
[Illustration: THE SCHOOL OF HOMER.]
But if there are no traces of the Homeric city, and none of earlier
construction in the immediate neighborhood of the site, there is in the
interior of the island, and in the northern lobe, which we see was
probably the special domain of the Ithaca of Ulysses, a most interesting
antiquity which is now known as the “school of Homer.” It is in all
probability a sacred place of the Pelasgic epoch, as on the rock above
it is a chapel whose substructions are clearly Pelasgic and most
probably the remains of a Pelasgic temple, which alone would account for
its preservation, and is probably also the reason of its conversion into
a Christian church. It is on a scale in keeping with all the remains we
have of the heroic epoch, about twelve by twenty feet, and though much
repaired in the modern adaptation, still shows its ancient dimensions
and style of building in the lower courses, too solid to have been
rearranged, though some of the upper stones have evidently been replaced
in later times. It stands on the brow of a low bluff, below the village
of Exoï and not far from the “field of Laertes,” which tradition points
out at a little hamlet below. Traces of other walls extend to the brink
of the precipice that overhangs the “school,” and round by the side is
an antique flight of steps, mostly preserved and cut in the solid rock,
that served as passage between the temple and the “school,” which may
have been the place of sacrifice or possibly an area for the holding of
the council. It is mainly cut in the rock at the foot of the precipice
on which the temple was built, with a double flight of steps, also cut
in the rock, descending to the ground below. It is not above fifteen
feet across at its widest, and the decomposition of the solid rock by
time and weather leaves only the general shape and character, with some
of the steps above and below it, still tolerably perfect. It was a
lovely place, and if the shade now thrown by the olive-trees which
surround it was anciently given by plane-trees, it would have been still
more striking. You look off on the sea and the distant island of Levkadi
with the mountains of Acarnania, and through the interstices of the
olive-trees you catch glimpses of the cultivated valley beneath, where,
if anywhere in this end of the island, old Laertes must have had his
field, as here only is tillage possible. North is the sea, south the
huge wall of Neriton, east the rugged mountain that looks out on the
inner sea, and west that on which Exoï is raised to the clouds and from
which one looks down on the Cephalonian channel at its foot. Like the
plain or valley between the Raven’s Cliff and Vathy for the southern
lobe, this is the only valley for the northern. The “school” is poised
thus midway between the valley and the mountain peak; and whether, as
the islanders pretend, it was the place where Homer read his poems, the
council place of the ancient heroes and kings, or the hieron of Pelasgic
priests whence the smoke of sacrifice went up to the great Zeus, the
choice of locality was one which suited alike its uses. The young wheat
was springing into head in all the interspaces of the close-standing
olive-trees, and the rocks above were overhung and draped with wild sage
and gemmed with wild flowers. The boy who guided us assured us that
there was a secret passage to the top of the rock, filled up now; and a
peasant passing by stopped to see what we might be saying or doing, and
finding that our interest was fixed on _palaia pragmata_, offered to
guide us to an ancient rock-cut well in the valley below. We found the
door which opens to the passage, which led down a stone-cut staircase to
the well, far in the ground; but as the well belonged to the priest, who
had the key in his pocket, and was, no one knew where, we had to be
content with the door, which was modern enough, though fitting an
opening cut in the rock very evidently ancient.
In this vicinity must, by the force of nature, have been the residence
of all the agricultural part of the population of the ancient Ithaca.
Says the poem:—
“Ulysses and his companions withdrew from the city and soon arrived at
the magnificent garden of Laertes, which the hero had formerly purchased
with his wealth after the many ills he had suffered. There stands his
dwelling, surrounded on all sides by a portico where the slaves who
cultivate his estate sleep and eat. In the porter’s lodge is an old
Sicilian,[6] who in this solitary place, far from the city, takes care
of the noble old man.... At these words he gives his arms to the
herdsmen who enter into the house of their master, while Ulysses, to
find Laertes, enters into the garden. The hero goes down into the great
vineyard and finds neither Dolias nor his sons, nor the other slaves.
Dolias has led them far away to gather thorns to make hedges round the
inclosure. Ulysses finds his father digging round the root of a tree in
the garden. Laertes is dressed in a dirty patched tunic; around his legs
he has bound, to preserve them, greaves of sewn leather; gloves protect
his hands, and his head is covered by a cap of goat-skin, which
completes his mournful appearance....
“‘Ah,’ replied Laertes, ‘if you are Ulysses, if you are my son returned
to this island, describe to me a sure sign that I cannot mistake.’
“‘See first,’ replies Ulysses, ‘this wound, which long ago on Parnassus
a wild boar gave me with his tusk, when I went to Autolycus to bring the
presents which he here had promised me. Then listen, I will describe to
you the trees of your beautiful garden which you gave me, and I asked of
you in my childhood as I ran behind you. We passed through your
inclosure; you told me the name of every tree, and you gave me thirteen
pear-trees, ten apple-trees, forty fig-trees, and then you promised to
give me fifty rows of vines in full bearing.’”
The legends of the modern population of Ithaca must not be confounded
with real local tradition, transmitted from ancient times. They are
unquestionably the reflection of literary statement, the reiterated
conclusions of students more or less well informed as to the true
archæological bases of opinion. The attribution of the particular spot
we visited as the garden of Laertes is doubtless due to reading of the
Odyssey, and, like the location of the “Castle of Ulysses” on Aëtos,
arose from a popular rendering of the story as handed down by literature
and converted into legend, which is located wherever the crude
antiquarianism of the people judges best. An instance of the real
tradition which has a distinct value in archæological research is that
of the preservation of the name Polis for the abandoned site where
unquestionably the Homeric city stood; and this simple indication is
sufficient to prove that Ithaca was never entirely depopulated and
repeopled by Slavs, because in this case the continuity of tradition
would have been lost, and there is no ruin to restore it in modern
times, even if it were capable of surviving the interruption. If it had
simply been handed down by a Slavonic colony, it would have been “Arad”
instead of “Polis,” while, if the depopulation had once been complete,
names which are not now understood by the present inhabitants could not
have originated with them. If the name had sprung from the presence of
ruins, the site on Aëtos would have received it instead of its present
legendary appellation, so that in no way can we explain the survival of
the name Polis for the site, or the names Anoï and Exoï, except by
supposing them to have clung to the places from Homeric times through a
continuous population of Hellenic stock, however thinned. Another
curious incident illustrates the tenacity of this kind of survival. As
we were passing through one of the villages, I heard one child calling
to others to run to see the barbarians, οἱ βάρβαροι (_várvari_), just as
the Greek children of ancient times would have called us,—_i. e._,
foreigners, people who spoke a strange language, a babble,
unintelligible sounds like those of children. I heard it twice and could
not be mistaken, though a Greek friend to whom I related it would have
it that they said βαυάροι (Bavarians), since in continental Greece,
Bavarian (German) has been a term of contempt from the days of King
Otho. But I am certain of the word; and besides, the children of Ithaca
never had anything to do with the Bavarians, as they were under the
Ionian Government till after the fall of Otho and the departure of the
Bavarians.
On the whole, I think that there is the strongest ground of probability
for these conclusions: that, whatever may be the relation of the real
Ulysses to Ithaca, the hero as conceived and represented in the Odyssey,
the Ulysses of the Homeric poems, _if he was an actuality_, lived at the
site known as Polis; and that this site, and all the others mentioned in
the poem, were known by the author of it from personal inspection. The
inscription found at Polis is in Doric Greek, which gives us a right to
conclude that the city continued to be inhabited by the mixed
population, result of the Dorian immigration; while the entire oversight
of the Pelasgic site on Aëtos indicates the total interruption of race
connection and the immense interval which must have come between its
construction and the transfer of the seat of power to Polis, as, if
still habitable when the new race took possession, it would, like
Nericus, Samé, and Crané, which we shall examine in Cephalonia, have
been made the basis of the newer city. That it was then utterly
abandoned, we conclude, not only from the neglect of it by Ulysses in
the passages we have noticed, but from the fact that while Samé, on the
other island, sends suitors, and Ithaca itself (the city) adds its
quota, no allusion is made to any from any other place in the island. In
short, the total silence through the whole poem in regard to any place
which can be by possibility connected with Aëtos, justifies my
concluding that it was as much an abandoned ruin in the time of Homer as
now.
The episode of the voyage of Telemachus to Pylos and Sparta, which
brings into the Odyssey the western shore of the Peloponnesus, is, with
the exception of some unimportant allusions, the only interjection of
continental Greece into the poem.
We went over to look for some trace of the sage Nestor, but as usual
found that while the people had enough of the after-growth of legend out
of the Odyssey, they knew absolutely nothing of the antique site. I had
no guide then to lead me to the Pylos where the ship of Telemachus found
“the Pyleans scattered along the shore offering a sacrifice to Neptune,
black bulls without a spot.”
The bay of Navarino is a vast marine lake, known to us mainly by its
being the locality of the decisive combat between the fleets of the
great European powers and the Turkish and Egyptian, which decided the
destiny of modern Greece. We ran in from the open Adriatic, whose waters
were uncomfortably agitated by the south-west wind, glad of the safe and
convenient anchorage. But a sleepier place than the modern substitute
for the “sandy Pylos” I have never found in Greece. Nobody could give me
a word of direction, and all our searching round the extended sheet of
water for the antique site, only perhaps to be recognized by some
half-hidden remnant of Pelasgian walls, was fruitless; we neither saw
nor heard of any ruin. We paid a visit to the splendidly picturesque old
Venetian fortress commanding the entrance of the bay, which perhaps has
used up the stones of Nestor’s Pylos, and which has looked down on one
of the most murderous combats of modern naval history. It is garrisoned
by a little guard of Greek soldiers, and its keep is the prison of the
district. The gate is a good sample of the fortifications by which the
Venetian Republic held her Eastern possessions.
THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.
The mythical world which had for its centre Ithaca, and for its chief
people Penelope and Ulysses, was out of all proportion larger than the
Europe of to-day; for it comprised the whole known world, from the
shadows of Cimmeria to the clouds that gave birth to the Nile. Its
geography, however, has a value to archæology and prehistory which has
not been fully recognized. The date and place of origin of the Odyssey
will never be determined with any high degree of certainty, but in
dealing with epochs that comprise unmeasured centuries we need not fear
a variation of two or three. And the collation of traditions from the
same mythical world will help us to this approximation to the probable
date of Homer’s life, if not that of Ulysses.
Gladstone, in the “Juventus Mundi,” has made use of an argument which,
even if not sound as to the Trojan war, I believe to be good for the
Odyssey. The earliest authentic records in Greek history reveal Greece
as under the control of two races, the Ionians and the Dorians, elements
whose antagonisms have been the chief cause of the disasters and ruin of
Greece.
But neither Dorians nor Ionians were the dominant race when the Odyssey
was written, as neither Ionians nor Dorians appear in the record. The
Greeks of the Trojan war are always called Achaioi, and the Dorians were
evidently, as a dominant race, unknown to the author of the Homeric
poems. Now, as they came into Greece about 1000 B. C., and as our
researches show the island of Ithaca, with which Homer was well
acquainted, to have become Dorian with the rest of Greece, the substance
of the Odyssey must have been earlier than we have supposed, and could
hardly have been as late as 850 B. C., unless the Dorian so-called
invasion was an immigration spreading very slowly from the main line of
its movement, and its stock still a recognizably new people. Nor does
any possible modification of the Homeric poems in the recitals,
continued over centuries, affect this argument in the least, as, being
common property of all the bards and all the tribes, they were liable to
be modified in the various versions according to the localities and
local knowledge of the singers; and, one “rhapsody” being preserved by
one tribe and another by another, of this hardly homogeneous people, the
traces of the modifications received in their migrations could not be by
the philology of the date of their collation so effaced as to leave no
marks of their incomplete restoration.
It is impossible that any idea of archæological consistency had led to
the exclusion of the Dorians from the Odyssey. If the Dorians had been
ruling in Greece when it was composed, it seems to the last degree
improbable that they could have been so completely ignored, if it were
but for the deference to be paid the rulers of half the Greek world; and
whether we look at the invariable practice of all early poets to adapt
their work to their own times and surroundings, or to the entire
consistency of the work in this respect,—too complete to be due to the
study of utterly unscientific or illiterate later times,—I think it is
to be admitted as probable that the Odyssey was composed before the
great ethnical revolution in Greece was complete.
The purely local evidence supports this hypothesis to a certain extent,
and in this topography and geography I propose to wander as far as it is
possible to do so with advantage to our knowledge of the Odyssean world.
Corfu was inhabited by a race alien to the Greek, and which recognized
its descent from the Siculi displaced by the Pelasgi from Sicily.
Opposite Ithaca lies the more important island of Cephalonia, to which
Ithaca is now completely subordinate, but which then was less important
apparently than Ithaca, in all probability only because it was only
partly Hellenic. Now, the earliest classical name of this Island,
_Kephallenia_, was derived from Cephalus, a mythical hero who appears to
have been contemporary with Minos. But this name is never applied to it
in the Odyssey. Of the island nothing is said, but of the chief city,
Samos (a colony from which gave its name to the Asiatic island now known
under that appellation), Homer has much to say. It lies clearly in sight
from Ithaca, from which it is separated only by a narrow strait, and is
one of the prominent objects in the view from Ithaca. It was originally
one of that line of prehistoric cities whose only record is in the
stones of their walls, and from these we learn that it was a very
ancient coast settlement, which, unlike the city on Aëtos, survived
through successive civilizations until history got hold of it. In
Ulysses’ day it must have been a rich place, for it furnished
twenty-four pretendants to the hand of Penelope. “There are first
fifty-two young men, the chosen of Dulichios—six servants accompany
them; twenty-four have come from Samos; twenty from Zakynthos [Zante];
and from Ithaca were twelve, the bravest.” But the author of the Odyssey
seems to have had no personal knowledge of the topography of Cephalonia,
and mentions no other locality in the island. Tradition tells us that
the island was peopled by Telebœans, a people driven from the continent
by Achilles,—before the siege of Troy, therefore, but subsequent to
Cephalus; but this is one of the confusions of mythology, as Cephalus
found the Telebœans in the island. The usual condensation of history
into myth leaves very little clear in these early traditions. Races
become personified in individuals, and the work of centuries is
attributed to a life-time and an individual. Whether Cephalus was in
reality a race or a man it is impossible to do more than conjecture, but
though the poems mention the _Kephallenes_, the entire ignoring of its
topography and traditions, even of the visit of the Argonauts to it,
makes it difficult to believe that it was chiefly inhabited by a race
kindred to that of Ithaca when Homer knew it, because Homer was too much
disposed to make use of the antique traditions when apposite, to have
left unnoticed that of Jason at Palé.
Cephalus having, according to the legend, killed his wife Procris,
mistaking her for a wild animal as she, excited to jealousy by his
devotion to the chase, which she attributed to another love, hid herself
in the thickets to watch him, was banished from Athens, and, wandering
in exile, came to Thebes, just then under excitement owing to the
Telebœans of Cephalonia having killed the brothers of Alcmena, wife of
the Theban Amphytrion, and he was requested to take charge of the
expedition to avenge the murder. He succeeded in conquering the island
and gave it his name. His descendants reigned there two generations,
after which, the latest rulers of his blood being recalled to Attica by
the oracle, a federative republic succeeded, formed by the four
principal cities, or perhaps by the four which had survived the changes
of race, for there are more than four antique sites. Those which history
has preserved as having submitted to the Romans in the year of Rome 563
were Samé, Nesia, Crané, and Palé.
The city of Samé alone presents, in the annals of historical times, any
interest, and this is sad and glorious. Livy says that at the end of the
Ætolian war the Romans sent to Cephalonia to know whether they would
submit or try the fortune of war, as they seem to have joined in the war
with the Ætolians, though he gives no record of the part they took. He
gives the account, brief and tragic, of the fate of the city, which I
will neither dilute nor abbreviate:—
“An unhoped-for peace had now shone on Cephalonia when one state, the
Saméans, suddenly revolted, from some motive not yet ascertained. They
said that as their city was commodiously situated they were afraid the
Romans would compel them to remove from it. But whether they conceived
this in their own minds and under the impulse of a groundless fear
disturbed the general quiet, or whether such a project had been
mentioned in conversation among the Romans and reported to them, nothing
is ascertained except that, having given hostages, they suddenly shut
their gates, and would not relinquish their design even for the prayers
of their friends whom the consul sent to the walls to try how far they
might be influenced by compassion for their parents and countrymen. When
no pacific answer was given, the city began to be besieged.
“The consul had all the apparatus, engines, and machines which had been
brought from Ambracia, and the soldiers executed with great diligence
the works necessary to be made. The rams were therefore brought forward
in two places, and began to batter the walls.
“The townsmen omitted nothing by which the works or the motions of the
besiegers could be obstructed. But they resisted in two ways in
particular, one of which was to raise constantly opposite the part of
the wall attacked a new wall of equal strength on the inside; and the
other was to make sudden sallies at one time against the enemy’s works,
at another against his advanced guard, and in those attacks they
generally got the better. The only plan that was invented to confine
them within the walls, though ineffectual, deserves to be recorded. One
hundred slingers were brought from Ægium, Patræ, and Dymæ
[Peloponnesus]. These men, according to the customary practice of that
nation, were exercised from their childhood in throwing with a sling,
into the open sea, the round pebbles with which, mixed with sand, the
shores were generally strewn; therefore they cast weapons of that sort
to a greater distance, with surer aim and more powerful effect, than
even the Balearian slingers. Besides, their sling does not consist
merely of a single strap like the Balearic and that of other nations,
but the thong of the sling is threefold and made firm by several seams,
that the missile may not, by the yielding of the strap in the act of
throwing, be let fly at random; but, after sticking fast while whirled
about, it may be discharged as if sent from the string of a bow. Being
accustomed to drive their missiles through circular marks of small
circumference placed at a great distance, they not only hit the enemy’s
heads, but any part of their faces that they aimed at. These slings
checked the Saméans from sallying either so frequently or so boldly;
insomuch that they would sometimes from the walls beseech the Achæans to
retire for a while and be quiet spectators of their fight with the Roman
guards. Samé supported a siege of four months. When some of their small
number were daily killed or wounded, and the survivors were, through
continual fatigues, greatly reduced both in strength and spirits, the
Romans, one night, scaling the wall of the citadel which they call
Cyatides (for the city, sloping toward the sea, verges toward the west),
made their way into the forum. The Saméans, on discovering that a part
of the city was taken, fled with their wives and children into the
greater citadel; but, submitting next day, they were all sold as slaves,
their city being plundered.” (Bohn’s translation.)
It is only by conjecture we can distinguish between the two hills, both
being covered with ruins; and the walls are so broken in their circuit,
and so complex as well as various in their epoch of construction, that
no plan of the siege could be made, but the above indicates the
westernmost as first captured.
The city must have been very wealthy, if we may judge from that
generally excellent indication, the tombs, which line the roads and the
sea-shore beyond the city (looking from the point where the general view
is taken), and by the enumeration of the booty taken by the Romans,
which is given as follows: Two hundred golden crowns of ten Roman pounds
each, eighty-three thousand pounds of silver, two hundred and
forty-three pounds of gold, one hundred and eighteen pieces of Athenian
money, two thousand four hundred and twenty-two of Macedonian, two
hundred and eighty-three statues of bronze, two hundred and thirty of
marble, besides the money distributed to the army.
I know of no place where the ruins of all epochs are so well indicated
as at Samé. The large fragment of wall of the best Hellenic time which
runs down the slope of the eastern hill is one of the finest, if not
_the_ finest, I have ever seen. Its stones are perfectly hewn, and some
of them are twelve to fourteen feet long, and the highest portion still
standing is not less than twenty feet high. At other points are various
examples of the Pelasgic, similar to that of “Ulysses’ Castle,” but of
better work. There are magnificent subterranean passages, one of which
leads to the citadel on the easternmost hill, the more remote in the
distant view, but the higher and probably the site of the greater
citadel, being marked by the most imposing ruins and remains of works,
and without doubt the locality of the original settlement. On the lower
hill stand some interesting remains—a tower and remains of city wall of
mixed Hellenic and Pelasgic, the tower being of the very latest
Hellenic, showing the beginning of “rustication.” It was built upon in
the middle ages, and the whole mass of buildings transformed into a
fortress and afterward into a convent. Samé must very early have been a
large and important city, as the whole of the space, including the two
hills and the land between them, shows traces of Pelasgic construction,
and one fragment on the brow of the hill near the tower is one of the
most perfect examples of the best Pelasgic work one can find away from
Mykenæ and Argos. The stones in the illustration range about five feet
in length, and are faced with exquisite exactness. A wild fig-tree has
taken root in the interstices of the stones, and the roots have pushed
the masses of rock apart, but in several places it is difficult to see
the junction when the light is flat against them. Of Roman work there is
little; but some thermæ walls on the plains by the sea and some tombs
show a considerable Roman occupation. Livy says that Marcus Tullius, the
conqueror of Samé, went over to the Peloponnesus “after having placed a
garrison in Samé.” This negatives the notion that the walls were razed
to the foundations, as is asserted by La Croix; and it is also rendered
improbable by the existing ruins, though it is not impossible that so
much of the wall was destroyed as made the defense of it temporarily
impracticable. There are, however, some slight traces of rubble-wall on
the old ruins, which show a Roman (or possibly middle-age, though I
incline to the former) construction, which negative any supposition that
the _enceinte_ was rendered useless for defense; for no one would repair
a wall which was not tolerably complete in its circuit. The remains of
the Roman time, however, are insignificant compared with those of the
Pelasgic, either as to preservation or quality.
[Illustration: VIEW OF SAMÉ FROM THE WEST,—WITH PARTS OF PELASGIC AND
HELLENIC WALLS.]
At present Samé is an insignificant village, consisting of twenty or
thirty small houses stretched along the beach, with a tiny port formed
by a breakwater constructed from the stones of the city wall, the
fairest and best cut that could be found. The people are a thievish
clan, who set on any chance comer, like mosquitoes on a solitary and
bewildered fisherman in a swampy land. They have coins and antiquities
to sell, for which, as everywhere else in Greece, they demand the most
absurd prices; and they beset one with offers of service as guides,
etc., etc., etc., till they weary all human patience. This may be said
of the Ionians in general, but less of the people of Cerigo, perhaps,
than the others. We found, however, a grateful exception. We had
wandered along the beach to the furthermost houses of the line, and on
passing a very respectable-looking house, the owner, sitting in the
coolness of the twilight at his gates, seeing two strangers, rose to
salute us and invited us to enter; an invitation so amiable and earnest
that we accepted, and were ushered into the guest-chamber, clean and
furnished with divans in eastern fashion, where we were entertained with
the usual sweetmeats and coffee, while the daughter of the house went
into the garden and collected for each of us a bouquet of roses, the
most fragrant I ever remember to have seen. Our host narrated many
incidents of the English rule in Cephalonia, and when we rose to go
urged us to take up our quarters in his house; and finally, as we stood
before the gates, as a last favor, offered me two beautiful Greek stelæ,
memorials of the ancient dead, possibly of the period of the heroic
defense of Samé. He had found them in digging his house cellar, and they
were the ornaments of his court-yard; but learning that we were in
search of antiquities, he offered them freely as his contribution. I
shall not soon forget him or his fragrant roses and the dark-eyed Saméan
girl who offered them to us.
Of Crané scarcely a trace remains, even of the Pelasgic walls. It stood
originally on the Lake of Argostoli (to which place we drove from Samé
across the island), but at a point now far from the water’s edge. The
lake is a singular geological phenomenon, formed by a number of springs
bursting out from under the hills on which Crané lay, with a force
sufficing to drive mills and form a strong current over the whole extent
of the lake, which is a mile or more in diameter, though the surface of
land to be drained by these subterranean outpours is, one would say,
utterly inadequate to the quantity of water delivered.
I took a guide at Argostoli, a man of the usual type of Greek guide, who
assured me that he knew the ancient city, and had often guided strangers
there. On arriving at the head of the lake I found him taking useless
détours to bring me to the mills, which were driven by the springs; and
on asking him what he went there for, he replied that he supposed I
wanted to see the mills—since that was what other people had come for. I
gave him an energetic sample of modern Greek, and ordered him to show me
the way to the ancient city—Palaiokastron. “Palaiokastron!” he
ejaculated with surprise and bewilderment in his eyes, and turned to ask
some shepherd boys or other vagabonds, who were sauntering near by and
watching us, where the Palaiokastron was. They declined to give any
information, probably regarding him as a poacher on their preserves. I
had, therefore, to depend on my antiquarian instincts, and, taking the
lead, climbed over the heights above until, guided by the nature of the
ground, I found the traces of the old wall.
[Illustration: CRANÉ FROM THE SEA SHORE.]
The position of the city was entirely characteristic of the sites of the
Pelasgic epoch: a bold, double peak, almost inaccessible on the
sea-side, and on the two flanks still very precipitous, but connected
with higher land on the side opposite the water. On the side from which
the view is taken none of the ancient walls remain. The movement of
earthquakes, the gradual fall of the rock at the precipitous edge, or
the leveling labor of man has carried away all the blocks that made this
side of the _enceinte_; but many of the stones may be recognized at the
foot of the slope, some worked into modern walls, and some in the débris
of the hill. On the opposite side the traces are more distinct, and the
wall may be traced a long way, and the site of the citadel determined,
with a gate and the angles of some of the towers. From near the citadel
a view is obtained which shows a long line of the débris with a distant
view of the town of Argostoli and the lake, and far beyond the lines
that form the western shore of the superb harbor of Argostoli, almost
without a rival in the Adriatic. The mass of wall is hardly to be
distinguished from mere decomposed rock; so much have time and frost,
the great demolishers, split and crumbled the flinty, massive limestone,
the preferred material of the Pelasgi. On the further shore shown in the
view may be seen, when the air is clear, the houses which form a modern
village on the site of the ancient Palé. Here were Jason and his fellow
adventurers entertained on their search after the golden fleece,—an
expedition which perhaps we may translate from myth into probability, as
an expedition to obtain an improved breed of sheep, a finer-wooled
stock, from one of the northern and inland countries.
At Argostoli I inquired about the ruins of Palé, but was told that they
are mainly built over, and what is visible is only of the Roman period.
I attempted, however, on our return to Samé, to run around in the
_Kestrel_, as the voyage across the bay from Argostoli is neither
pleasant nor sure in the small boats that make the service. We got up
anchor as the land breeze began to blow at midnight, and I went to bed,
having given orders to anchor in a little bay about half-way to the
southern extremity of the island near which some ruins are indicated on
the map. Awaking in the morning and finding a most suspicious
tranquillity prevailing, I took a look at the outside surroundings, and
found the yacht quietly moored on the same spot she had occupied the day
before. A furious sirocco had sprung up and met us half-way to our
destined anchorage, and after beating for an hour in vain, our little
boat nearly buried in the seas, we were compelled to retreat and run
back to our former place of refuge. There is no getting ahead in such
small craft against the sharp, violent seas of the Mediterranean.
Three days the sirocco blew, and we tried in vain to pass the time
fishing. The Ionians have adopted dynamite so universally to catch their
fish that they are as scarce as honest people on shore. One does find
them sometimes, and we caught a shark about four feet long and a half
dozen red mullet where, before dynamite was discovered, we could have
caught in the same time a hundred-weight.
The third night we got under way again, and, with a heavy swell still
on, ran down to our harbor, reaching it as a flaming, splendid
thunder-storm was coming up, the finale of our southern blow. We moored
with cables out in three directions, and when the storm had all gone by
I went ashore to hunt my ruins. A vagabond Cephalonian offered his
services to carry my camera and guide me; but his crafty and evasive
face, coupled with the assurance with which he clung to me, so irritated
me that to rid myself of him I plunged into the pathless thicket.
Traveling by compass, and searching long and closely, I found at last
the remains of an early Pelasgic wall on a magnificent site, with a
breezy outlook to sea north and west and overlooking a fertile valley
inland, not especially pictorial, for it was too regular and too
thoroughly cultivated, but through it ran a bright crystal brook
overhung by huge pollard sycamores and fringed with oleanders just
bursting into blossom and making the valley look like a rose-garden.
Beyond the hill on which the city stood is a wild ravine through which
runs the brook, which in Greek would naturally be dignified by the name
of a river. Only a narrow neck, as usual, gave access to the site. It is
impossible to ascertain with any kind of assurance what the name of the
city was. It could not have been Nesia, the only one of the four
principal ones we have not visited, for no ruins are visible approaching
so late an epoch as the Roman, and it was probably Heraclea. Its
position was magnificent for defense and on account of the fertility of
the country behind it, but the site was probably abandoned very early
for one further inland, where I was assured there were ruins of an
ancient city. But my time had been so invaded by the loss of three days
through the storm, and I was already so behind my programme, that I was
not able to give the time necessary to the search and examination, or,
indeed, to follow my plan of visiting Palé.
[Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF PALÉ FROM THE CITADEL OF CRANÉ.]
We climbed down to the brook, and I enjoyed the pastime of wading in the
gurgling water as if I were a boy—it was so long since I had had that
pleasure! We followed it into a close and gloomy gorge, where the crag
of the ancient site overhung us like a huge, rough wall, almost a sheer
precipice, and down at the foot ran the brook, which we followed to the
sea. The sun was setting as we reached the yacht, and before we waked
from sleep next morning we were bounding toward Zante.
In Zante (Zakynthos) there is, so far as I could find, no ancient ruin
whatever. The character of the rock explains this; for, except at the
extreme southern end of the island, there is no stone which would resist
even the weather-wear since the Roman epoch. The island seems to be a
bed of sand raised from the sea and slightly hardened, so that, though
the citadel hill is imposing enough as a mass, the material of it is
being continually dissolved, and looks at a distance more like a bank of
clay than like rock.
[Illustration: ZANTE.]
Zante is rhymingly called the “fior di Levante” (flower of the Levant),
but it is difficult to see wherein it surpasses Corfu in any flowery
attribute. I guess that, as in many other cases, the rhyme went for more
than the fact, poetical or otherwise. It is fertile, and the land
extends in an immense unpicturesque plain covered with olive-orchards
and vineyards for miles from the port. Its history is unimportant and
its mythology not interesting. It was said to have been colonized by
Zakynthos, son of Dardanus of Troy, about 1500 years before Christ; but,
as I have before said, all Greek dates and traditions of migration
earlier than 1000 B. C. are purely conjectural. Zante suffered with the
other islands from the endless and furious feuds of the Greek states;
ravaged by turns by Athenian and Lacedæmonian, it came down to the
Romans an unruly subject province, conquered and reconquered, and
finally lay still in the tranquillity of slavery until Geneseric, king
of the Vandals, began an epoch of devastation, which only concluded with
the purchase, by the Venetians from the Sultan, of its soil depopulated
by the sword and slavery.
He who goes about in the Mediterranean has great chance of seeing bad
weather, for it is the reverse of a pacific sea, and in a scrap of a
boat like the _Kestrel_ the phenomena are sometimes interesting. Our
course from Zante to Cerigo (ancient Cythera) leads by Cape Mátapan,
opposite Cape Maleá, the two southern points of Greece, which enjoy a
reputation of the kind that the American proverb gives to Hatteras and
Lookout. The _Kestrel_ was again baffled, and, after beating for hours
to get past the point, we had to put up the helm and run back to
Navarino, the nearest shelter, before a gathering southerly blow. We lay
in our old anchorage another day, and as the wind fell at night we beat
out again and ran through the little archipelago of barren and desolate
islands which lie off this part of the Morea. The weather still looked
ugly, and thunder-clouds were gathering on the hills of Lacedæmon, and
we could see the storm creeping down toward the sea, but the wind was
fair, and we hoped to make Kapsali, in Cerigo, before the squall came
down. Already the heights of Cerigo loomed before us, and we had begun
to look for the landmarks, when the wind struck us. All hands made what
haste was possible to get in sail and get up a small storm jib to lie to
under, and not too quickly, for no common canvas would have stood that
blast when it struck us. The sun was setting, and soon we were out of
sight of all land in the driving spray and rain. The lightning was such
as only they who sail in semi-tropical seas can have known, blinding and
incessant; it seemed to have gathered around the mountains of Cerigo as
a centre, for it went and came and still hung there as the rain swept
down the coast and up again. As the wind fell off with the down-pouring
of the torrents we got off again and pointed our bowsprit for Kapsali;
and as the waters above and those below seemed to have formed an
alliance against us, we went below and shut the hatch. Fortunately the
wind was off shore and we had little sea, and managed to creep along
nearly as much as we had drifted to the leeward; so that when the storm
broke and the rain held up we were able to see the rocks off the coast,
and finally to grope our way into the little port of Kapsali, which is
secure against everything but a southerly blow. The wind, always
contrary, fell off as we drew near the light-house, and we had to get in
with our sweeps in the small hours of the morning, wet, cold, hungry,
and jaded from the excitement of the night; for, though it is simple and
safe in the telling, a large Greek brig foundered only two miles from us
in the squall, and we had experienced the worst weather we had yet felt,
and since the storm began no one had been able to eat or even get a cup
of coffee.
At Kapsali one begins to see the antique sailor ways and the evidence of
the intense conservatism of the eastern world. The ships are drawn up on
the beach at night as of old, and this necessitates a construction of
the hull which cannot be far removed from that of the antique. Indeed, I
have seen fishing-boats which might have served for the models of the
galley on the Roman coins. The rigging, again, is of the simplest, and
fitted for these seas, where the sudden squalls and the “meltem,” or
gusts which come down from the mountains with no warning but a little
cloud appearing on the summit, sometimes leave brief space for the
taking in of sail. On the whole, wherever we look we see ample evidence
that in the whole Levant, where the original population exists in a
considerable proportion, the ways of life and thought are the same as
those of Homer’s day. Nature has changed more than man. Where the
Venetians came they brought new habits of military life and
construction, and demolished all the old ruins to make fortresses; but
on the domestic life and on the character of the Greek they had little
or no influence.
Whether Kapsali, a mere village, the port of Cerigo, had any ancient
existence, we do not know. Cerigo lies on the high rock above it, and is
a Venetian fortress; and, as is generally the case with Venetian
fortresses, has used up all ancient masonry, if any existed, in its
construction.
[Illustration: CITADEL OF CERIGO.]
The road from Kapsali to the town of Cerigo is of Venetian construction,
kept in repair by those fitting successors of Venice, the English, who
certainly left the Ionian Islands in a state of prosperity higher than
that of to-day. Good roads were almost everywhere provided, and good
ways of other kinds, now lost entirely, if I might believe the
complaints of the people. The position of Cerigo is very strong for the
days of Venetian rule, and it overhangs the port and country round on
every side, except one, like a Pelasgic site, but I could find no stone
of that date. It is not likely that there was any very ancient city
there, as no tombs or evidences of a necropolis have been found. The
formidable character of the position in the times of the Venetians is
shown by the view from the road above the ravine which severs the
mountain from the lesser hill over the port—a ravine whose existence is
quite unsuspected from the port.
The city itself is without interest except as the first really Eastern
city one will see coming from the West, and as an example of Venetian
fortress-building. The view from the citadel is fine and breezy, the
islands of Ovo, Cerigotto, and Crete being visible, and a great expanse
of that sea which, on sunny days, is in itself so beautiful from its
color. You look down on the houses, white as continual whitewashing will
make them, whose flat, terraced roofs serve in the hot and rainless
summer as sleeping-places for the whole family. How many nights I have
dragged my mattress from the bedroom out on this delightful substitute
and let the night breeze fan me to sleep!
Of history the island has next to none. Mythology puts the landing of
Aphrodite here, as she came, foam-born and sea-borne, to found her
religion in the Greek worlds.[7] The first who are traditionally
reported to have colonized the island are the Phœnicians; but it is
impossible to ignore the previous coming of the Pelasgi, who have left a
well-marked ruin of the earliest type. To see the traces of the antique
settlements, one had better go to Port San Nicolo if provided as we
were; but secure an intelligent guide previously from Cerigo, as the
country people, as in other islands, while pretending to know all about
the antiquities, really know absolutely nothing. They know the tombs
because they serve as sheep-folds, and they have sometimes a curious
knowledge of the relative antiquity of the ruins; but they have heard
modern myths, and apply them with the least possible regard to
archæological facts, and invariably assure you that they know
everything.
So it happened that I was again, for want of choice, out on a search
with an ignorant guide. There had been some excavations commenced on the
site of what is now known as Palaiopolis (the old city), which evidently
was Phœnician, and was occupied down to Roman times. There were some
columns of Roman or Byzantine work unearthed, and from mere curiosity to
know _his_ notions, I asked a shepherd boy watching his sheep near by
what they were. “This,” he said, “was the palace of the king.” “Of what
king?” I asked. “Don’t you know?” he said, opening his eyes at me as if
this were the very _a b c_ of history. “Why, the palace of Menelaus.”
There is an old tradition that it was the place of residence of Menelaus
and Helen, and all the objects to be seen are attributed to them. The
Phœnician city is close to the sea; the Pelasgic site is several miles
back, and looms up on the highest mountains in the vicinity. In a
previous visit I had seen but had not explored it; but now I determined
to see the whole extent of it. My guide, who brought a donkey for my
occasional changes of mode of locomotion, pretended to lead me to the
ancient citadel; but when we reached the hill on which I knew it to be
better than he, he began to inquire about it of the women at work in the
fields; thereupon I, as usual, took the lead. Guided by the nature of
the ground, I found all that remained of the ancient citadel wall—a
fragment kept up by the chance of its being the limit of a field, and so
kept in repair, but in such a state of dilapidation that but for the
evidences of the continuity I would not have been sure that it was a
wall. I followed the main wall a mile or more along the edge of the
precipitous slope, and saw that it bore testimony to the importance of
the ancient city, for it was wide in its compass and massive, with
towers, gates, and flanking towers of the true Pelasgic style, but in
most places only two or three stones high. I got an imposing view of the
hill from below the lowest trace of wall, showing its position with
reference to the valley below, through which ran once a river of some
volume, if we may judge by the alluvial plains at its mouth, but which
at the time of my visit in midsummer, was dry as desert dust. A strip of
white pebbles shows where it still runs in winter-time. On the hills
close to the sea-side, and on both sides of the mouth of this ancient
river, used to lie the old Phœnician, Greek, and Roman city, whatever it
was originally called,—probably Cythera, like the island. As I have
said, it is now called Palaiopolis. The temple of Aphrodite, the people
pretend, was on the hill near the citadel where now is an insignificant
chapel, but with no evidence of antiquity except that there are in the
construction of the chapel some large stones which are evidently of
Hellenic cutting; but as the Greeks had the habit in all ages of keeping
up the temples of their gods, there is nothing to show that it was a
temple of Aphrodite rather than a Pelasgic god, which Aphrodite-Astarte
was not, and her temple must have been near the sea.
The site of Palaiopolis is marked by a quantity of tombs, most, if not
all, of Hellenic date. There are now no temple remains there; but Spon,
who visited the spot two hundred years ago, says that he saw the statue
of Aphrodite, which was very ugly and of coarse brown stone, which
reminds us of the statues of Cyprus. The rock is a soft conglomerate
which the sea cuts away very rapidly, and apparently there has been a
subsidence of the soil, since they say that when the sea is tranquil
there may be seen beneath the water, some distance out from the actual
shore, the ruins of a city. This may have been the port of
Cythera—scarcely a fortified city, as the site must have been too low.
Right and left of the rivulet which now represents the ancient river are
bluffs of conglomerate, that on the left honeycombed by tombs, some of
which have fallen with the rock, but of which others are still visible,
opened to the elements but showing within the rock-cut graves. Many
valuable articles of gold work have been found in past times, but the
treasure seems to have been exhausted. These two bluffs are the lineal
representatives and successors by right of position of what Aphrodite
must have seen as she came ashore on the foam, otherwise they have no
interest.
The two low hills which were included in the city of Cythera are covered
with fragments of building and traces of tombs, but, so far as I could
find, no wall. This is all that is left of Aphrodite, Helen, and
Menelaus in their land of fabled existence. The coming ashore of
Aphrodite undoubtedly indicates, like that of Europa at Gortyna in
Crete, the landing of a colony from Phœnicia, bearing the worship of
Astarte, who became later assimilated to Aphrodite. Of the presence here
of Helen and Menelaus there is no evidence in any trustworthy tradition.
The subjection of Cythera to Sparta is of historic date. My conclusion
as to the island is that in Homeric times it was Phœnician in its
relations as Melos was at one time, as well as Santorin and other
eastern islands, and that, like Corfu, it did not come into the Greek
system.
Opposite Cerigo, and with its snowy peaks glistening under the noonday
sun, lies Crete. The strangest omission of the Odyssey would have been
that of the island of Minos from its reminiscences, if the author had
known of it; but, as we have seen in his interviews with Athene, Ulysses
did not fail to include it in his geography though he had apparently
never visited it, and like Egypt and Lotophagitis it was known by
report. Of Egypt we had heard mention through the visit of Helen and
Menelaus. Of the country where subsequently was established the Great
Greek-African colony, Cyrene, we have no hint, yet the inhabitants of
the Peloponnesus knew of Libya earlier than the Dorian invasion—as
early, in fact, as 1500 B. C., as we know by the Karnac inscriptions.
The story of Eumæus shows knowledge of the ways of that race of
merchants and pirates, the Phœnicians, but nothing of their country.
The questions of the personality and date of Homer and of the reality of
the Trojan war are utterly diverse, and not, in fact, interdependent. As
to the latter we have thus far no direct evidence whatever, beyond
poetic traditions in which the supernatural is so strongly and
inextricably involved with the pretense or actuality of history that no
inferences can be drawn from any part of the narrative, though from its
_ensemble_ we are assured that in its ancient form it was accepted as
history by the entire Greek world as early as we know anything of that
world with historical certainty. But that is no criterion. Even at this
day myths grow and crystallize in the Oriental mind with a rapidity
which leaves the ancients without any advantage. The universal belief
from the first to the eighth century B. C. that the Iliad was history
need not weigh with us. Scientific investigators differ so widely that
we have no general inference to draw from their arguments. The most
recent excavations leave a grave doubt whether any of the ruins
excavated in the Troad can by any reasoning be admitted to be as old as
the Iliad, and the remains on Hissarlik hill which Schliemann _more suo_
has identified with Homer’s Troy are clearly the remains of the city of
Crœsus, being of brick, which does not appear in the classic traditions
or structures until his time, and we know by authentic history that he
did build a city on this hill. Professor Jebb, one of the most acute of
the literary investigators of the question, is convinced that the
topography of the Iliad is eclectic, some of its indications suiting
only Hissarlik and others only Bunarbashi; Max Müller maintains that the
whole story is a solar myth; while Nicolaïdes, a patient and thorough
Greek student of the Iliad, believes that he can follow the whole
strategy of the poem on the plain of Troy. But the main questions
involved in the Odyssey are of a different character and determined by
different criteria. I offer my suggestions as to some of them with the
deference due my masters in archæology.
[Illustration: LANDING-PLACE OF THE CYPRIAN APHRODITE OR ASTARTE.]
The general knowledge shown in the Odyssey divides itself into kinds:
that which was part of the general geography of the day, and this
included the coasts shown on our route map; and that of which the poet
had personal cognizance, which is limited to Corfu, Ithaca, Nericus, and
possibly Pylos; and this exclusiveness suggests to us that Homer, a
stranger in the West, had come, as I did, simply to follow and study the
traces of Ulysses’ wanderings, and that he did so in obedience to a
clearly preserved tradition as to his great exemplar, which was almost
impossible without the still remembered personal presence. What he
describes is admirably told, even to the “sandy shore” of Pylos, in a
world whose sandy shores are rare; but Homer does not seem to have any
mental vision of the lands and islands of which Ulysses only speaks in
his story—the lands of the Cimmerians, of the Læstrygonians, the
Cyclops, the Lotophagi, the homes of Circe and Calypso, are only heard
of. Cythera, close by, is not named, and Crete and Egypt are only named.
This kind of fulfillment, as well as this kind of omission, gives a tone
of personality to the poem, as the composition of one person, and that
one familiar with the scene of its major events, and it strengthens my
belief in the hypothesis of the presence of Homer in Ithaca, and of the
early date of the Odyssey, and by a certain implication argues for a
logical relation between the hero and the Trojan war, implying the
actuality of both.
THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.
In the year 1820, before the struggle between the Hellenic population of
the Turkish empire and the Porte had begun, and when all that attracted
the notice of the civilized world to modern Greece was the little
preserved to us of her art,—occasionally and fragmentarily found in the
ruins of her great communities,—a peasant of Melos whose name was
Theodore Kondros Botoni, working in his field to enlarge it by clearing
away the _débris_ of the walls and structures of ancient Melos (which
had been built on a steep hill-side, on a series of terraces, more or
less natural or artificial, so that the ruins of one terrace fell down
upon and encumbered that below it), saw, to his great bewilderment, the
heap of rubbish which he was digging away at the bottom suddenly crumble
down and display the upper part of an antique statue. The peasant
hastened to the French consul to inform him of the discovery, and the
latter negotiated the purchase of it for five hundred piastres and a
complete dress of the fashion of the country. This was the statue known
as the Venus of Melos.
So far, there are no variations of the history, but one account says
that the first or upper part was found several days before the lower,
and the other, that they were found together; but the inexactitude of
the documentary contemporary evidence is clear from the examination of
the ground to-day, and from the contradictions contained in it. Dumont
d’Urville, the commander of the _Chevrette_, a French man-of-war which
visited Melos after the statue was found, alluding to the discovery of
the theatre, says: “All the ground is covered with drums of columns and
fragments of statues. One finds here and there great pieces of wall of a
very solid construction, and many important tombs have been opened
through the curiosity of strangers, and the cupidity of the
inhabitants.” But neither the wall nor the tombs, nor any drum of column
or fragment of statue (if any was found), could have had anything to do
with the theatre. The theatre is very late work, and was never nearly
finished, so could have possessed neither columns nor statues. This
shows that the idea the commandant carried away was confused and
untrustworthy as to details. He goes on to say: “Three weeks before our
arrival at Melos, a Greek peasant, digging in his field inclosed in this
circuit, struck some pieces of cut stone. As these stones, employed by
the inhabitants, have a certain value, this induced him to dig farther,
and he thus happened to uncover a species of niche, in which he found a
marble statue, _two Hermes_, and some other marble fragments. The statue
_was in two pieces, joined by two strong iron clamps_. The Greek,
fearing to lose the fruit of his labor, had carried the upper part to a
stable. The other was still in the niche.... It represented a naked
woman, _whose left hand raised an apple and the right held a
drapery_,[8] well composed and falling negligently from the hips to the
feet. For the rest, _they are both mutilated, and actually detached from
the body_.”
I note by italics the points which are to be contrasted with other
evidence.
M. Dauriac, captain of the frigate _La Bonté_, writes from Melos, date
11th of April, 1820: “There has been found, three days ago, by a peasant
who was digging in his field, a marble statue of _Venus receiving the
apple from Paris_. It is larger than life; _they have at this moment
only the bust as far as the waist_. _I have been to see it._” Mr. Brest
again writes, 12th of April: “A peasant has found in a field which
belonged to him three marble statues, representing, one Venus holding
the apple of discord in one hand, the other represents _the god Hermes,
and the third a young child_.” The correspondence shows that Mr. Brest
was entirely ignorant of everything connected with archæology or art. He
probably heard one of the officers say that one of the objects was a
Hermes, and he changes it into a statue of the god Hermes, but we see
that there was only one Hermes. November 26th, Brest again writes: “His
Excellency has left me orders to make researches in order to find the
arms and other _débris_ of the statue, but to do that it is necessary to
obtain a _bouyourouldon_ which will permit us to make excavations at our
own expense, _because in the same niche where it was found there is
reason to hope that we might find other objects_.”
The contradictions are so palpable that it is clear that these documents
are only of value as secondary archæological evidence. No one seems to
have made an observation with exactitude.
We have the whole statue found, in one, bound together by iron clamps;
in another, only half had yet been found; in one, the statue is found
holding the apple of discord in one hand; in another, receiving it from
Paris; and in another still, we are told that search has been ordered
for the arms, etc.
In 1865 I visited Melos, and having made the acquaintance of Mr. Brest,
son and successor of the French consul who secured the statue for the
Louvre, he politely offered to guide me through the ruins of the ancient
city. Among other things, we visited the locality where the statue was
found, and he showed me the niche still standing as when the discovery
was made.
It was a slightly built work, of the height, _as nearly as I can
remember_, of ten or at most twelve feet, and about five wide. It formed
a part of an old boundary-wall of the field on which it opened, and
above it the ground was level with the crown of the arch of the niche.
It had no suite or connection with any other structure, except the
boundary-wall in which it was, and there were no evidences of ruin or of
foundation of antique buildings about it. The opening had been closed
with rubbish, not with masonry, as was evident from the face of the side
walls, which were of smooth, if not carefully laid, masonry. If as I
believe not built for the concealment of the statue, it had been made
for some unimportant purpose; perhaps the protection from the weather of
the poor Hermes which is said to have been found with it. C. Doupault,
architect, has published a _brochure_ with what he supposed important
evidence on the question, in which, from data given him by old Brest
twenty-seven years after the discovery, he reconstructs the apse of a
seventh-century church, in which he places the statue. The whole study
has no value whatever, as the sketch does not correspond with the ruins
which I saw, and looking back to the correspondence quoted, it is clear
that Brest, knowing nothing of archæology or art, caught at certain
suggestions of the officers who saw the statue, and affirmed what they
surmised. As to the fragments found, to which constant reference is
made, there is not the slightest evidence that they were found in any
connection with the statue, as none of the early evidence indicates that
they were known when the statue was first taken under notice—on the
contrary, it is said explicitly by Brest that he had orders to make
researches to find the arms and other portions of the statue; indicating
clearly that the arms alluded to had not been found with the statue, and
that the connection between them and it was an after-thought, either of
the peasant, who wished to increase the value of the statue by
connecting with it fragments which he had found in other parts, or of
the archæologists, who, seeking to restore the statue to what they
judged to be its true action, connected the arm found, no one knows
where, except at Melos, with the statue. It is undeniable that when the
letters before quoted were written, there had been only conjecture as to
the arms. Dauriac, writing on the 11th of April, says that they have
only found the bust. Brest, November 26th, says that there is reason to
hope that they might find other objects _in the same niche_—proof that
it had not even then been cleared out. In fact, all we have of
documentary evidence goes for nothing beyond showing that the statue was
found at a certain place on a certain date; and if the two halves of the
statue did not fit exactly we could not be certain that they were found
at the same time and place. The hypothesis of the apple of discord is
based on a conjecture of some of the officers, and has no further
confirmation than that an arm and hand, with what may be an apple or a
cup, seem to have been found somewhere in the island about the same
time; but they evidently are not of the statue, nor even of the same
epoch.
Over or somewhere near the niche an inscription was said to have been
found which records the dedication of an exedra by a gymnasiarch to
Hercules and Hermes. The date of this inscription, according to
conjecture based on the inscription itself, is about a century before
Christ, _i. e._, long after any possibility of such a work being
produced had gone by.
These are all the positive data we have to work on. They suffice,
however, for about twenty monographs in French, German, and English; and
a late German work, by Dr. Goeler von Ravensburg, exhausts all the
possible and impossible conjectures to establish its character in
accordance with the original attribution of a Venus receiving the apple.
In the year 1880, I made another visit to Melos, on commission from “The
Century” magazine, to photograph whatever might remain which had any
connection with the statue; but found the niche gone, and no trace of
foundations of any kind, or walls, city or other, very near the spot
which was again pointed out to me as that where the Venus was found.
It would seem that in the energetic excavation that followed the last
great archæological revival, everything that was suspected to conceal
works of art had been dug away.
I found an old man, a pilot well known in our navy, Kypriotis, who had
seen the statue when it was brought out, being a boy of about fourteen.
At that time Mr. Brest was a child, and retained only slight personal
recollection of the event; but it was evident that he, like his father
in 1847, had mingled in his impressions conjecture of others and his
own, with facts perverted, and details conceived without sufficient
basis. Nothing new was to be got.
The old Melos is utterly deserted, and the modern town is built on a
pinnacle above it, which does not seem ever to have been included in the
range of the city. The port is changed from the ancient site, where now
a breakwater would be needed, as the land seems to have sunk greatly,
and the old basin of the port is silted up to a point at the bottom of
the bay, where a comparatively modern village has grown up, called
Castro.
The magnificent harbor used to make of the island an important station
before telegraphs were established, and might again, if the telegraph
were laid to it; but now a man-of-war rarely calls, except to take a
pilot for the Archipelago, and a Greek steamer stops once in a
fortnight. But in heavy weather, any ship caught near runs for Melos.
This keeps the place alive, but it has dwindled to a mere island
village, where the vast labyrinths of tombs which perforate the hills
show more human industry than the dwellings of the living. Earthquakes
and malaria have desolated and almost depopulated it.
We had left Cerigo for Crete, and intended to take Melos on our return
to Peiræus, but when within an hour of land we were caught by a terrific
south-wester, the most to be dreaded of all the winds of the Ægean, and
in spite of all we could do we were obliged to give up and run before
the gale where it would send us. It was late in the evening when its
fury came down on us, and taking in all sail except a small storm-sail
at the foot of the mast to keep from coming up into the wind, we ran
before it into the black night. I knew that there were no rocks ahead
before Melos, and if we only made the island by daylight, we could
easily fetch the port; but if not, and the yacht ran at night into the
little archipelago of which Melos is part, it would be next to
impossible to choose where our bones should be laid, for there are no
lights, and many islands and rocks. The sea was, for our little
twelve-ton craft, something fearful, and we thumped and hammered till
the little thing quivered, when a wave struck her, almost as if we had
come to the rocks. Sleep was out of the question—to sit or stand,
equally so, and we kept to our berths, as the only way to avoid being
pitched about like blocks. How long that night was! and in the middle of
it I attempted to get up, and when I put my foot on the cabin-floor,
found myself stepping into the water. We had sprung a leak with the
straining.
But day came and cheerfulness. We ran in between the huge cliffs which
form the portal of Melos harbor, with the wild surges beating against
them till the spray flew high enough to have buried a larger craft than
ours. Tired, aching, and hungry, for nothing could we get to eat till we
arrived in port, we cast anchor in the welcome harbor late in the
afternoon. Even then, the sea ran so high that we could not land until
the next day.
Castro is a pile of white houses, rising in terraces from the shore; the
streets mostly stairways, and the houses all whitewashed till they blind
one in that rarely broken sunlight.
[Illustration: THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS. (DRAWN BY BIRCH FROM A
PHOTOGRAPH.)]
I landed, and, as usual, went to the little café, where the magnates of
the village were discussing the arrival and the storm—the worst, they
said, for many years. I called, of course, on Brest, who, to my
surprise, remembered me after eighteen years; and we made an appointment
to revisit together the sites I knew, and to see those I had not known
before,—important excavations having been made since my former visit.
We went first to the new port, where some admirable statues, since taken
to Athens, had been recently found. The owner of the little field by the
water, which occupies the site of the inner port, having occasion to
sink a well, struck the ruins of a temple of Neptune, and three statues
were found, one of Neptune, a female goddess draped, but lacking the
head, and a mounted warrior, apparently Perseus.
The Greek Government, according to their laws, forbade the exportation
of them by any foreign government, and finally purchased them for thirty
thousand francs—certainly a very small price. I succeeded in seeing them
later, still in their boxes at Athens, and though not equal to the
Venus, or of the same epoch, they are very fine works.
But there the excavations stop; the owner had no means to pump out the
water that flooded his diggings, the Government had no more, and as no
one is allowed to dig unless for the Greek museum, whatever remains
under ground and water is likely to remain there another generation.
We then climbed up the zigzag road to the theatre. It is, as I have
said, of late times, probably Roman, and was never complete. Fragments
of unfinished ornament lie still where the stage should have been, but
it had clearly never been carried up above the seven ranges of seats now
existing. It was just outside the wall of the inner city, on the brow of
the hill, and overlooked the spacious harbor and looked out to sea.
There is no record of any sculpture having been found there. It was
purchased and excavated by the King of Bavaria.
Less than half a mile beyond, going with the sea at our backs, was the
field where the statue was found. The Greeks have entertained a great
deal of indignation at the rape, which they affect to call robbery; but
the civilized world may thank the French captain who, coming to get it,
and finding it already half-embarked on board a Turkish vessel, destined
for Constantinople, made the most legitimate use that was ever made of
_force majeure_, and took it away from the Turk to transfer it to the
hold of his own ship. Otherwise, no one knows what vile uses it might
have gone to, or what oblivion and destruction. All the world knows it
now, but Greek genius would have forever lacked one of its greatest
triumphs in modern times if it had disappeared in the slums of Stamboul.
[Illustration: STREET IN CASTRO.]
As I have said, there is now no trace of any construction of any kind to
be seen at the locality. The wall in which was the niche was gone, and
the field of the present owner has encroached considerably on the space
beyond, the _débris_ being piled up in huge masses like walls, and two
or three terraces above runs the citadel wall, a mass of Hellenic
masonry built of blocks of lava. The Pelasgic walls, of which some
authors speak, do not exist anywhere in the island. Brest took up a
stone, and as we stood on the wall of _débris_ above, cast it into the
field, and said, “There stood the Venus!” In the illustration I have put
a white cross on the spot.
There cannot remain the slightest doubt that the statue had been
concealed, and to my mind, the circumstances indicated for its
concealment are these: The niche, judging from its character, had been
built in Roman times; as the rubbly nature of the masonry indicated,
probably covered with stucco, as it would have been if intended for
ornament, and was designed as a shelter for an altar, or for the statue
of some divinity—Terminus, Hermes, Pan or Faunus, the more Roman
companion of him. Here the inscription and the Hermes found furnish a
plausible clew, and agree with the indication of the masonry in pointing
out the epoch of this conjunction of circumstances as subsequent to the
second century before Christ; how long after we cannot in any wise
indicate.
[Illustration: THE SITE OF OLD MELOS, FROM THE PORT. (WHITE CROSS SHOWS
WHERE THE “VENUS” WAS FOUND.)]
Now as to the epoch of the statue there can be no doubt that it was of
the immediately post-Phidian epoch; and all the most authoritative
opinions attribute it to the Attic school, and probably of the time and
school of Scopas—and some of the weightiest authorities have accepted
Scopas himself as the author.
Anything more definite than this it is impossible to establish by any
now known evidence. The concealment of the statue, then, was several
centuries later than the execution of it.
The Greeks of the classical epoch, even down to the first century after
Christ, retained, amidst all the degradation of their contemporary art,
a distinct recognition of the excellence of the elder work, as the
enormous artistic as well as pecuniary value of some of the masters’
_chefs d’œuvre_ prove. That this was one of them, and of one of the
chief masters, all civilization agrees, and, although we have lost the
name of the author, the people who hid it must have known it well. The
availing themselves of the niche, ready-made to their hands, indicates
that the possessors of the statue worked in haste, piling up stones in
front of the niche, instead of walling it up.
This indicates the haste of impending attack, or work done in secret. In
either case, if the statue had a temple in that locality, it would be
concealed near it, or near the place where it was accustomed to stand;
but no such temple is known. We may remember the contrast with the
colossal and magnificent Hercules found in a drain at Rome, carefully
covered over with good masonry. Concealment was the object in both
cases, and the greater haste and furtiveness with the Melian statue
indicate rather that it was brought from a distance than that it could
be a divinity of the island.
Conjecture as to the origin of the statue, if my hypothesis is true,
points to Athens, not only because the work is Attic, but because we
know by the coins of Melos, which in all the latest coinages still bear
the owl of Athens, that Melos belonged to that city as late as she had
any Greek allegiance, which must have been some time into the Empire, as
the Romans long made it a policy to preserve a certain kind of autonomy
in the Greek states, even when their subjection was complete. That it is
Attic, no one can doubt in face of the evidence I shall show. That
Athens was the only city likely to send to Melos a treasure of this
kind, concealment of which was impossible in Athens, is almost certain.
I conclude that it was a highly valued statue of Athens, sent to Melos
in time of great danger, to be concealed and preserved. What period this
might have been is only to be guessed at; it is therefore hardly worth
while to say more about it, except to indicate that four periods in late
Athenian history might furnish the motive requisite: when the army of
Mithridates, under Archelaus, took Athens; the wars between the factions
of Marius and Sylla; the Lacedemonian war, and the invasions of the
Iconoclasts. The Romans do not appear, in spite of all their plundering
and the enormous quantity of statues carried away from Greece, to have
desecrated the temples of the Greek gods, as we see that Pausanias, in
the century after Christ, found the most valuable of them _in situ_, as,
for instance, the Diana Brauronia of Praxiteles, the Perseus of Myron,
with others of great fame. The above conclusion, considering all the
known and reasonably conjecturable details of the discovery and
concealment, seems to me justifiable,—as well as that it was concealed
at some time between the century or two centuries before Christ and the
end of the first century after.
Now, what was the statue? We have so long been in the habit of accepting
all female statues, not distinguished by well-known symbols of their
divinity, as Venuses, that we make no distinction even in cases where
the type demands it. And yet the dominant characteristic of Greek
sculpture is this close adherence to established types. We are never at
a loss to distinguish Diana, Minerva, Juno, or even Ceres and the lesser
deities. Venus, it is true, came into vogue as subject for the sculptors
of sacred statues later than some of the others; but all that we know of
the Venus of the artists indicates that it was _par excellence_ the
womanly type. The treatment of the head in Greek sculpture was a point
apparently of doctrine, as it was in Byzantine and in the later
ecclesiastical art of Greece. It is always in a conventional type,
utterly separated from the individual.
[Illustration: MEDICEAN VENUS.]
[Illustration: VENUS URANIA.]
[Illustration: CAPITOLINE VENUS.]
[Illustration: VENUS OF THE VATICAN.]
[Illustration: VENUS ANADYOMENE.]
[Illustration: VENUS VICTRIX OF THE LOUVRE.]
This unquestionable fact should have taught us to reject from the Venus
category many statues which are now included in it, as for instance, the
Callipyge, and all in which a trace of portraiture is to be found,
besides diminishing that category by all the statues of the heroic type,
as in none of the legends of beliefs of the Greek faith was Venus ever
endowed with a heroic quality. The preconceived notion that the Melian
statue was a Venus has been a continual cause of confusion. This was, as
I have shown, the first hypothesis of the French officers, none of whom
appear to have been possessed of any archæological knowledge, and who
had the commonly prevailing notion that any nude statue must be a Venus.
I have taken the pains to collect a number of representations of the
various so-called Venuses, and most of which the type, or symbols,
justify us in so classifying; and a comparison of their character will
show what is the Venus type,—making this proviso, however, that we have
no other than internal evidence for denominating most of them Venuses.
The chief of these, in what we seek for most, _i. e._, the impersonal
type, which was inseparable from the Greek deities down through the
decline of art, which began in the time of Alexander, are: the Medici, a
distinctly marked Attic work, later, however, than the Melian statue;
the Capitoline, apparently a still later reminiscence of the Medici and
one of many similar reminiscences; and the “Venus coming out of the
bath,” at Naples, a better work than the last, but still already widely
separated from the purely conventional type of the Medicean, which we
may authoritatively accept as the Venus type of the best period of the
Venus sculpture. The close comparison of the heads and details of the
flesh will give those who do not know the originals an invaluable lesson
in the treatment of the figure in Greek art. The so-called “Venus
Urania,” at Florence, marks, to my mind, a distinct departure from the
Venus type,—so marked, indeed, as to make me decline to accept it as a
Venus, while the still typical character of the face is one which must
place it in a good period of art, before ideality of treatment had
entirely given way to individuality. The art is of too good an epoch to
have departed so far from the type of Venus, if intended for her, and
indicates rather a nymph, or some inferior deity. The Venus of the
Vatican is too late and too low down in the scale of art to be an
authoritative witness in the matter; while the Venus Anadyomene, while
still reserving the ideal character, resembles the Urania rather, in a
separation of the type from the Venus. Later still, and perhaps at the
end of that period which may be called the ideal period of antique
sculpture, most probably of Græco-Roman art, is the Venus Victrix of the
Louvre; unquestionably a Venus, for she bears in her hand the
apple—symbol of fruitfulness. But how far from the type of our Melian
treasure! In that is the most distinct approach to the Athena type—a
purely heroic ideal. I cannot believe that its sculptor intended it for
a Venus.
[Illustration: VENUS OF CAPUA.]
[Illustration: RESTORATION OF THE STATUE AS PROPOSED BY MR. TARRAL.]
The patient German admirer of our statue, which Von Ravensburg is, has
gone through all the literature and all the conjectures which it has
given rise to, as to the chief problem which gives interest to any
investigation, _i. e._, the restoration of the statue. No attempt will
satisfy all the investigators; but that which Von Ravensburg accepts
with approval—viz., the restoration of Mr. Tarral (an Englishman
residing in Paris for many years, who has given his chief attention to
this problem)—shows so entire a want of appreciation of the character of
antique design, which is, after all, our only clew, that I shall not
hesitate to put aside, not only the solution proposed, but the judgment
that could accept as satisfactory such a solution of one of the most
interesting of artistic problems. I give the figure which Von Ravensburg
publishes as Tarral’s restoration of the statue, that one may see how
absolutely its inanity is at variance with the spirit of Greek design.
The mere completion of the statue, in this sense, destroys the dignity
and unity of the work so completely that to look at it is enough for a
cultivated judgment to decide that, whatever it may have been, this it
was _not_. The author gives, also, photographs of the fragments
found—fragments so imperfect and corroded that we can only say that they
appear to be from a very low period of art, and are utterly worthless as
data for measure or opinion, from their extremely fragmentary state.
[Illustration: FRAGMENTS FOUND AT MELOS ATTRIBUTED TO THE STATUE.]
Besides, I have shown, from the records of discovery, that there is no
further reason to connect them with the statue than that they were also
found at Melos.
In following the whole course of the demonstration which Von Ravensburg
attempts of this solution of the problem, I arrive at the conclusion
that, with all his patience and research, his judgment is utterly
untrustworthy on a problem which requires not only freedom from
preconception, but long cultivation of artistic perception and general
critical ability. Mr. Tarral’s attempt proves, to my mind, only that
this was not the solution.
[Illustration: VICTORY OF BRESCIA—FRONT.]
[Illustration: VICTORY OF BRESCIA—SIDE.]
The various suggestions, more or less authoritative, made as to the
restoration, and thence as to the determination of the attributes of the
statue, are to be summed up briefly. The Count de Clarac, the then
curator of the antiques of the Louvre, adopted the Venus with the apple
hypothesis, but afterward abandoned it in favor of one put forward by
Millingen, that it was a Victory. This is one of the theories of the
restoration which has found the greatest number of adherents. Several
restorations have been proposed, which make the statue part of a group,
all which, though defended or proposed by many _dilettanti_, I reject,
for what to me seem sufficient reasons, viz.: _Firstly_, we have in the
statue no evidence whatever that it formed part of a group, and without
some such the hypothesis is gratuitous; _Secondly_, we have—with one
exception, which I shall presently note, and which gives no countenance
to such a theory—no statue or parts of statues which agree with it in
artistic quality, or even none which lend themselves to a group, if such
were made up by various sculptors; _Thirdly_, that, at the epoch in
which the statue was produced, any group which has been suggested would
have been out of accordance with the aims of art, as practiced by the
Greeks. The only evidence in favor of such a theory is that in some
antique fragments or coins are indications of such a figure as the
Melian in combination. But, as this statue must have been in its own
time nearly as celebrated, relatively, as in ours, it must have given
rise to many imitations and adaptations. It may have given rise to some
which support the group theory, but to more which support an opposing
theory.
[Illustration: VICTORY RAISING AN OFFERING (TEMPLE OF NIKÉ APTEROS, THE
ACROPOLIS, ATHENS).]
Von Ravensburg goes over, in detail, all the group theories, and easily
finds fatal objections to all. What most surprises me is that any one
ever tried to put it into a group, so completely by itself does it stand
in every sense of the word.
Millingen, in 1826, started his theory that it was a Victory holding a
shield in both hands. I am quite convinced that many who have started
other theories would have adopted this if they had not been anticipated
in proposing it. The vanity of archæological research, and eagerness to
propose something new is so dominant in most archæologists that they
exercise more ingenuity to advance some new theory than would be
requisite to show the validity of an old one. And the statue of Melos
has been preëminent in fruitfulness of theories of all qualities and
grades of improbability. Millingen, however, supported his theory by a
similar statue known as the Capuan Venus, a reproduction, I believe, in
Roman times, of the Melian statue, probably through some other
intermediate copy or reproduction, as the sculptors of the Capuan statue
could not have seen the Melian. The arms are a modern and abominable
restoration. Here, again, I must, in passing, protest against the
attribution to the Venus type of all nude or semi-nude statues. There is
nothing in the Capuan which indicates that it was intended as a Venus.
Millingen quotes Apollonius of Rhodes as describing a statue of Venus
looking at herself in the shield of Mars, which she herself is holding,
but this is no evidence of the type correspondence, and the gravamen of
the matter lies precisely in the diversity of the type from the
recognizable Venuses. But the Capuan is too far in type and treatment
from the Melian to serve as definite argument. Such as it is, an item in
the discussion, I will not exaggerate its importance, though I believe
it to be a far-away recollection of the Melian statue.
“The Victory of Brescia” is another of the recollections, rather than
reproductions, of the type of which I believe the Melian statue to be
the original. It is in bronze, is later, and has the wings, but the type
is unmistakable, and the action of the torso and head is sufficiently
different from our statue to show that it was only an emulation, and not
a plagiarism, that was intended.
The drapery differs in the arrangement, being of bronze and agreeing
with some undisputed Victories at Athens, but the action of the left leg
holding the shield is the same, and that of the arms corresponds very
nearly, as far as the arms remain in the Melian work. As a whole, it
reminds one more of the latter than does any other of the statues of its
class.
The case is one in which archæological knowledge is of very little
value, unless it be aided by thorough artistic study and a knowledge of
the requirements of art proper. The archæologist, like other scientists,
must have positive evidence to work on; and the testimony of pure taste,
the intuitions of an artistic education, are of no use to him except as
confirmatory. The intuition of the artist, whose taste has been educated
by long study of the works he has to deal with, arrives at opinions by a
kind of inspiration to which science often lacks all means of access. In
the case of this statue, archæology has no evidence to weigh, and the
ponderous erudition which Overbeck, Müller, Jahn, Welcker, and others
have piled on the question has no foundation. We can determine with
comparative certainty that the statue belongs to the epoch between
Phidias and Praxiteles, because we have the work of the school of
Phidias and sufficient comparative data for that of Praxiteles [and now,
since the discovery of the Hermes at Olympia, positive data] to judge
from; and we have a right to say that the Melian statue came between
these, but beyond this nothing—no clew except what lies in the design
and the unities attendant on it, of which _per se_ the professed
archæologist is no judge.
In working about the Acropolis of Athens some years ago, I photographed,
amongst other sculptures, the mutilated Victories in the Temple of Niké
Apteros, the “Wingless Victory,” the little Ionic temple in which stood
that statue of Victory of which it is said that “_the Athenians made her
without wings that she might never leave Athens_”; and looking at the
photographs afterward, when the impression of the comparatively
diminutive size had passed, I was struck with the close resemblance of
the type to that of the “Venus” of Melos. There are the same large,
heroic proportions, the same ampleness in the development of the nude
parts, the same art in the management of the draperies, and Richard
Greenough, the American sculptor, has called my particular attention to
the curious similarity in the treatment of the folds of the drapery, in
the introduction of a plane between the folds, a resemblance not found
in any other similar works as far as I know.
[Illustration: VICTORY UNTYING HER SANDAL (TEMPLE OF NIKÉ APTEROS, THE
ACROPOLIS, ATHENS).]
[Illustration: VICTORIES LEADING A BULL TO SACRIFICE (TEMPLE OF NIKÉ
APTEROS, THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS).]
They are little high reliefs, part of a balustrade which surrounded the
cortile of the Temple of Niké Apteros, hardly three feet high in their
perfect state, and now without heads or hands or feet. There are four of
them: one apparently untying her sandal; another,—that which best shows
the type of the figure—raising an offering or crown, and two others
leading a bull to sacrifice. I give the series. Note the exquisite
composition of the drapery below the knee of the Victory raising the
offering, and the superb flow of the entire draperies in the
sandal-tying figure, but, above all, the Victory type in the whole
assemblage. How absolutely it agrees with that of the Melian statue, and
how utterly alone in all antique art that is but for these!
Since I have begun this study, it has twice happened that artist friends
trained in the French school (_i. e._, in the only school which
cultivates the perception of style in design, and the only one that
emulates the Greek in its characteristics), both trained draughtsmen,
came into my room, and without any remark I showed them the photographs
of the Victories at Athens. They were new to both, but in one case as in
the other the first expression was: “How like the Venus of Melos!” And
the similarity runs through the treatment of every part—the management
of drapery to express the action of the limbs, the firm, heroic mould of
the figure, and the modeling of the round contours. Compare (in the
casts, if possible, as the small scale of my illustrations will not show
the point so clearly) the right shoulder of the Venus with that in the
stooping Victory. The slight differences which exist are just what might
be expected between a figure which stands as principal, isolated, and to
be seen from all sides, and one which was secondary, subordinate, of
partial decorative use, and to be seen only in one view. My
illustrations will hardly convey the strikingness of the similarity, but
I defy any one to compare side by side the series of Victories and the
Melian statue in casts and not admit that the type, the treatment, the
ideal, are the same, as sisters may be the same, or at least as mother
and daughter.
The little Temple of Niké Apteros had once, we know, a statue of Victory
without wings, and we know the _bon mot_, which I have given above,
which it suggested. The decorations of the temple are attributed to
Scopas and his school, and this Victory was unique, so far as we know,
in being wingless. We may well conceive, with the symbolical
meaning—talismanic, rather—implied in what we know of it by this
witticism, that the Athenians would have a special anxiety to keep it
from becoming a trophy in the hands of an enemy, even one who might not
be disposed to desecrate the temples of the greater gods. Niké was
rather an attribute or variation of Athena than a distinct goddess, and
was as such both of great value to the Athenians, being the _alter ego_
of their patroness; and of less reverence to the enemy, as not Minerva
herself. At all events, when Pausanias visited Athens the Niké Apteros
had gone. Her temple still stood there, and near it on the Acropolis
hill stood some of the greatest art-treasures of the antique world
untouched.
[Illustration: THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS—FRONT.]
[Illustration: THE “VENUS” RESTORED—FRONT.
(TRACED FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF A LIVING MODEL.)]
[Illustration: THE “VENUS” RESTORED—SIDE.
(TRACED FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF A LIVING MODEL.)]
[Illustration: THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS—SIDE.]
My theory, open to the grave objection that it is one in which
hypothesis bears an undue proportion to proven fact (yet not so great as
any of the group theories, and hardly more than any other theory, for
all are constructed out of the same aerial substance), is that the
Melian statue is the original Niké Apteros from the little temple on the
Acropolis of Athens. If so, one can understand the whole of my theory of
concealment, attribution, and type, because this statue above all others
would come under the rancor of a victor and its flight would become an
humiliation to Athens. It was like the standard of a defeated army, to
be kept at all hazards from the enemy. Hurried away to Melos, it was
safe from the invader, but no nearer point was secure. The restoration
in my hypothesis becomes that of the Victory in some attitude connected
with regarding, or recording, on the shield or a tablet the names of the
Attic heroes, or battles, and my opinion is that she has just finished
writing, but I am disposed to uncertainty on the exact phase of the
action, only insisting on that of the Recorder. The minutiæ of
description of many antique works of art which we owe to Pausanias and
Pliny was plainly impossible with this. Neither ever saw it, but its
memory existed in artistic tradition and has been repeated in the
statues we have seen, probably only a few of those which once existed.
Von Ravensburg sums up the objections to the shield-bearing Victory and
to the theory of Millingen as follows: The theory would indicate that
she leaned back to balance the weight of the shield, but the objections
urged are that if the shield were larger it would hide too much (yet in
an earlier part of the book the statement is made that a part of the
figure, and just that part covered by the shield, is comparatively
unfinished, which has given rise to the theory of a group in which one
side of the statue was hidden); if it were small, the weight would not
be enough to account for the attitude. And, in the next breath, he urges
that the grand heroic character _is an objection to her struggling with
a burden_. But if a goddess, and of this robust type, the burden ought
not to oppress her, however great, humanly speaking. But in point of
fact there is no noteworthy degree of backward inclination. To test the
question, I photographed a model in the attitude required to hold a
shield on her left knee and write on it.
The result was very slightly different from that of the statue. A part
of the backward action of the model was due to the necessity of a
support to enable her to remain in the pose necessary to be
photographed, but the action of writing is better expressed by the
statue.
The action of the statue is that of a figure which stands nearly
balanced and in repose, with the first movement in a forward action,
like one who reaches out to give, take, or write, or any similar action
or the moment after the action is complete. The particular moment we
cannot determine without the possession of the fore-arms. Von Ravensburg
goes on to say that he does not mean to affirm that the holding of a
shield does not suit the action of the upper part of the body, but
maintains that it does not explain it _particularly well_. But after the
inane restoration given forth with his high approval, we may be
permitted to doubt that his artistic taste has been as carefully
developed as his archæological acumen. He quotes Overbeck as objecting
to the shield resting on the left knee, that there are no traces on the
left thigh which the shield must have left; but Wittig and Von Lützow
have recognized these very marks, and they are distinctly visible even
in the east, as far as would be expected if a bronze shield merely
rested on the drapery, and the shield, if there was one, was in all
probability of bronze, held well out from the body, and resting on the
knee raised for that purpose, the foot being supported by a helmet lying
on the ground. But, further, he says these considerations are quite
superfluous, for the position of the left leg of the Melian statue
contradicts the shield-supporting, and he quotes in support Valentin,
that the left thigh would incline outward to secure a balance, and that
the supporting of a heavy object on the thigh thrown in would violate
the laws of equilibrium. That this is not true is shown by the “Victory
of Brescia,” in which the action is precisely this, and the pose of the
thigh is the same as that of the Melian statue. Moreover, I tried a
model again in this view, and the result is given in the illustration.
The knee took quite readily the action indicated, and, indeed, would be
compelled to by the pressure of the shield if the weight rested partly
on the left hand, as it must to have left the right free for any action
whatever. Both nature and the antique assert precisely the contrary to
that which Valentin assumes. The length to which the argument against
this restoration is carried by him may be judged from the assertion that
the action of the “Victory of Brescia” is that of an outward push of the
left thigh, to make it agree with that of the theory Von Ravensburg lays
down. But the assertion is purely gratuitous. If the Brescian bronze is
an argument, as far as it goes it obviates every difficulty in the
interpretation of the Melian statue by taking, so far as the action of
the limbs is concerned, the very action of the latter.
There is but one objection to the restoration theory I propose which
deserves serious consideration—that of the goddess looking off or above
the point at which she would be writing _if she were writing_. Half the
ingenuity displayed in many of the proposed restorations, or half the
sophistry employed by Von Ravensburg to combat this, would carry us over
much greater difficulties. In later Greek work, when art was sought for
its own sake, and consistency continually sacrificed to the grace of a
pose and harmony of the lines, we should not be surprised at the goddess
looking at one point and writing at another; but at this period the
dramatic unities were sacred alike in poetry as in art. But I suppose
that, unlike the Brescian statue, she is not at the moment engaged in
writing, but pausing as having just finished, and, looking out from her
pedestal in the little temple, gazes out toward Marathon, in which
direction the temple opens, and this is no difficulty in the
restoration. A little of that kind of imagination so much abused in
modern art-criticism, which consists in attributing to the artist all
the fancies which arise in our minds in the contemplation of his work,
all the far-fetched and poetic visions our own eyes have conjured up,
would supply all deficiencies in our theory.
But while I maintain that my theory has more accordances with the known
facts and actual qualities of the statue than any other, and presents
fewer gaps in the demonstration, I am unwilling to lay down any theory
not sustainable by what we know of Greek art, and I admit the difficulty
as frankly as I state those of other theories. Doing so, however, I
still maintain that not only is there the means of reconciliation of my
hypothesis of an actual shield-inscribing Victory with the statue as it
is, but even in case I am compelled to abandon this particular point,
and advocate the modification of Millingen that she holds the shield
with both hands and looks at it, my main hypothesis—that the statue is a
Victory and no Venus, and the particular wingless Victory of Athens—is
untouched. We do not know what the Niké Apteros was doing. What we can
see is that this statue was more probably holding a shield, either
contemplatively, or pausing, just having written on it, than taking any
other action.
[Illustration: VICTORY OF CONSANI.]
If we may accept the analogy of the Apollo Belvidere, which also looks
off in the same inexplicable way, it would illustrate my hypothesis
still further, but the Apollo is later and less dramatic. If we hold to
the strict dramatic quality of the best Greek art, we must suppose that
the goddess has just finished writing, and looks up and out toward the
field where her heroes died. Or even if the shield was a high one, such
as the Spartan wounded used to be brought home on, she might still be
looking at the shield, if not at the words she has just written. In
fact, several suggestions offer themselves, and none open to accusation
of such flagrant inconsistencies as those involved in Tarral’s
restoration, which shocks the dramatic sense beyond endurance.
The objection that the shield would hide so large a part of the figure
goes for absolutely nothing. We continually find Greek work completely,
or nearly, finished in positions where by necessity much of it must have
been hidden. As the pediments of the Parthenon were originally placed,
they would never have been half seen, and how the Panathenaic frieze
could have been adequately seen, once the building scaffolds were taken
down, we can much less easily conjecture than how the Victory could have
been seen behind her shield. The Brescian, a later and more realistic
work, is seen behind hers. Consani has made a very happy emulation of
the motive in his Victory. It is amongst the best of the modern Italian
works of its class, and illustrates the manner of avoiding the
difficulties we have seen adduced. The principal arguments in favor of
my theory are these: The statue is not of the Venus type but on the
contrary agrees distinctly with known statues of Victory, some of which
I have indicated, of which another is in the coin of Agathocles, and in
the Museum of Naples is a terra cotta Victory in almost the identical
action and drapery; it is of the epoch of the Victories of the temple of
Niké Apteros, and of the same style of treatment and type of figure; it
was found where we might expect the Athenians to hide a treasure; and,
while unquestionably a Victory, it is the only wingless Victory of the
great Attic school we know of. I do not consider this archæological, but
artistic demonstration.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF NIKÉ APTEROS.]
The little Temple of Niké Apteros has had a destiny unique amongst its
kind. Like the Parthenon, it was standing little more than two hundred
years ago, but during the Turkish occupation it was razed, and its
stones all built into the great bastion which covered the front of the
Acropolis and blocked up the staircase to the Propylæa. It was dug out
and restored, nearly every stone in its place, by two German architects
during the reign of Otho, and it stands again as Pausanias describes it,
on the spot where old Ægeus watched for the return of Theseus from
Crete, and seeing the black sails of his son’s ship returning, token of
failure (for Theseus had forgotten to raise the white sail, the signal
of success), threw himself from the precipice, and was dashed into black
death on the rocks below. In the distance are Salamis and Ægina, and the
straits through which the ships came from Melos and Crete, and to the
south is Hymettus, beyond which are Marathon and the road by which the
Persians came, and the Turks after them. There certainly was the spot,
and this the occasion, if ever, that an Attic sculptor should feel that
spiritual enthusiasm below which Greek art stopped and lost the clew
which, in later centuries, the Florentine found again and followed to
new, if not higher, heights.
[Illustration: GREEK COIN]
FOOTNOTES
[1]It has been conjectured that the Ogygia of Calypso was a small barren
island just south of Sardinia. There is no evidence in favor of the
theory, but it is possible. I adopt it in the route map _faute de
mieux_.
[2]The Lotophagitis has been recently plausibly identified with Jerba,
on the coast of Tunis, the word _rotos_ being still used there,
evidently a survival of some primitive language, for the date; and
the transliteration of _rotos_ to _lotos_ being according to Grimm’s
law, see Reinach’s letter to the _Nation_ (Mar. 13, 1884) on Jerba.
It is easy to understand that the Greek, coming from a country where
the conditions of life were hard and the fare of Homeric simplicity,
should find the conditions of North African existence tempting
beyond resistance, and the delicious date, (constituting the
principal and often exclusive food of the people, quite sufficient,
in fact, for all needs,) a temptation to abandon the toils and
dangers of a return home. The inevitable poetical exaggeration adds
the magic power.
[3]Cimmerians have been conjecturally identified with the Cymri, the
Cimmerian darkness with the fogs of England and the North Sea
countries, and there is nothing but conjecture in the case.
[4]The text leaves a doubt if he even retained his hold on this, as it
describes his striking out with the veil of Leucothea under his
breast.
[5]I saw, at a recent meeting of the German archæological Institute at
Rome, exquisite bronze castings found in a lake city of northern
Italy, of which the latest possibly assignable date is 1500 B. C.
Various data, which it is not the place here to discuss, have led me
to the conclusion that bronze working was independently discovered
in Italy at a period long anterior to any intercourse with Greece,
and that it probably went from Italy to Corinth, where it is said to
have been discovered.
[6]I suspect the word which I have translated Sicilian to be a mistake
in transcribing, for Homer evidently knew nothing of Sicily or he
would have given it its name when dealing with the hero’s adventures
there. It is however possible that he knew the island by name but
had not identified it with Ulysses’ Cyclops-land.
[7]The confusion which is so common between Aphrodite, the Greek
goddess, and Astarte, the Phœnician, had its beginning at Cythera.
It is only in later Greek mythology that they are confounded. The
true Aphrodite was the first-born of Zeus, the creating
Intelligence, and Dione the prolific Earth—Spirit and Matter—and
Aphrodite was Divine Love;—Astarte, lust.
[8]The worthlessness of the testimony of d’Urville is shown by this
statement—no hand has ever held or touched this drapery, as the
least examination shows.
Transcriber’s Notes
--Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
is public-domain in the country of publication.
--Silently corrected a few palpable typos.
--In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
_underscores_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "On the track of Ulysses - Together with an excursion in quest of the so-called Venus - of Melos: two studies in archaeology, made during a cruise - among the Greek islands" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.