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Title: Greece and the Ægean Islands
Author: Philip Sanford Marden
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Language: English
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GREECE
AND
THE ÆGEAN ISLANDS
I
ACROPOLIS, SHOWING PROPYLÆA
GREECE
AND THE
ÆGEAN ISLANDS
BY
PHILIP SANFORD MARDEN
London
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO., Ltd.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
1907
COPYRIGHT 1907 BY PHILIP S. MARDEN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published November 1907
PROLEGOMENA
What follows makes no pretense whatever of being a scientific work on Greece, from an archæological or other
standpoint. That it is written at all is the resultant of several forces, chief among which are the consciousness that no book
hitherto published, so far as I am aware, has covered quite the same ground, and the feeling, based on the experience of
myself and others, that some such book ought to be available.
By way of explanation and apology, I am forced to admit, even to myself, that what I have written, especially in the
opening chapters, is liable to the occasional charge that it has a guide-bookish sound, despite an honest and persistent
effort to avoid the same. In the sincere desire to show how easy it really is to visit Hellas, and in the ardent hope of making
a few of the rough places smooth for first visitors, I have doubtless been needlessly prolix and explicit at the outset, notably
in dealing with a number of sordid details and directions. Moreover, to deal in so small a compass with so vast a subject as
that of ancient and modern Athens is a task fraught with many difficulties. One certainly cannot in such a book as this
ignore Athens utterly, despite the fact that so much has been published hitherto about the city and its monuments that no
further description is at all necessary. My object is not to make Athens more familiar, but rather to describe other and
more remote sites in Greece for the information, and I hope also for the pleasure, of past and future travelers. Athens,
however, I could not ignore; and while such brief treatment as is possible here is necessarily superficial, it may help to
awaken an additional interest in that city where none existed before.
Aside from the preliminary chapters and those dealing with Athens itself, I hope to have been more successful. I have, at
any rate, been free in those other places from the depressing feeling that I was engaged on a work of supererogation, since
this part of the subject is by no means hackneyed even through treatment by technical writers. Since the publication of
most of the better known books on Greek travel, a great deal has been accomplished in the way of excavation, and much
that is interesting has been laid bare, which has not been adequately described, even in the technical works. In dealing with
these additions and in describing journeys to less familiar inland sites, as well as cruises to sundry of the classic islands of
the Ægean, I hope this book will find its real excuse for being.
In adopting a system for spelling the names of Greek cities, towns, and islands, I have been in something of a quandary,
owing to the possibilities presented by the various customs of authors in this field, each one of which has something to
recommend it and something, also, of disadvantage. If one spells Greek names in the more common Anglicized fashion,
especially in writing for the average traveler, one certainly avoids the appearance of affectation, and also avoids misleading
the reader by an unfamiliar form of an otherwise familiar word. Hence, after much debate and rather against my own
personal preferences and usage in several instances, I have adhered in the main to the forms of name most familiar to
American eyes and ears. In cases of obscure or little known sites, where it is occasionally more important to know the
names as locally pronounced, I have followed the Greek forms. This, while doubtless not entirely logical, has seemed the
best way out of a rather perplexing situation, bound to be unsatisfactory whichever way one attempts to solve the problem.
In mercy to non-Hellenic readers, I have likewise sought to exclude with a firm hand quotations from the Greek language,
and as far as reasonably possible to avoid the use of Greek words or expressions when English would answer every
purpose.
If, in such places as have seemed to demand it, I have touched upon archæological matters, I hope not to have led any
reader far from the truth, although one admittedly an amateur in such matters runs grave risk in committing himself to paper
where even the doctors themselves so often disagree. I hope especially to have escaped advancing mere personal opinions
on moot points, since dilettanti in such a case have little business to own any opinions, and none at all to exploit them to the
untutored as if they had importance or weight. Rather I have only the desire to arouse others to a consciousness that it is as
easy now to view and enjoy the visible remnants of the glory that was Greece, as it is to view those of the grandeur that
was Rome.
In the writing of these chapters an effort has been made to set forth in non-technical terms only what the writer himself has
seen and observed among these haunts of remote antiquity, with the idea of confining the scope of this book to the needs
of those who, like himself, possess a veneration for the old things, an amateur’s love for the classics, and a desire to see
and know that world which was born, lived, and died before our own was even dreamed of as existing. If by what is
written herein others are led to go and see for themselves, or are in any wise assisted in making their acquaintance with
Greece, or, better still, are enabled the more readily to recall days spent in that most fascinating of all the bygone nations,
then this book, however unworthily dealing with a great subject, will not have been written in vain.
Philip Sanford Marden.
Lowell, Mass., August, 1907.
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
TRAVELING IN GREECE
1
II.
CRETE
18
III.
THE ENTRANCE TO GREECE
37
IV.
ATHENS; THE MODERN CITY
50
V.
ANCIENT ATHENS: THE ACROPOLIS
76
VI.
ANCIENT ATHENS: THE OTHER MONUMENTS
96
VII.
EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA
123
VIII.
DELPHI
146
IX.
MYCENÆ AND THE PLAIN OF ARGOS
169
X.
NAUPLIA AND EPIDAURUS
193
XI.
IN ARCADIA
211
XII.
ANDHRITSÆNA AND THE BASSÆ TEMPLE
229
XIII.
OVER THE HILLS TO OLYMPIA
247
XIV.
THE ISLES OF GREECE: DELOS
272
XV.
SAMOS AND THE TEMPLE AT BRANCHIDÆ
286
XVI.
COS AND CNIDOS
304
XVII.
RHODES
318
XVIII.
THERA
334
XIX.
NIOS; PAROS; A MIDNIGHT MASS
351
XX.
CORFU
368
INDEX
381
xi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
ACROPOLIS, SHOWING PROPYLÆA
Frontispiece
MAP
1
LANDING-PLACE AT CANEA
20—
THRONE OF MINOS AT CNOSSOS
34
STORE-ROOMS IN MINOAN PALACE, CNOSSOS
36
OLD CHURCH IN TURKISH QUARTER, ATHENS
60
TEMPLE OF NIKÉ APTEROS
80
THE PARTHENON, WEST PEDIMENT
86
TEMPLE OF OLYMPIAN ZEUS
104
THE AREOPAGUS
108
THE THESEUM
112
TOMB AMPHORA, CERAMICUS
116
TOMB RELIEF, CERAMICUS
118
BRONZE EPHEBUS, NATIONAL MUSEUM, ATHENS
120
THE TEMPLE AT SUNIUM
134
THE APPROACH TO ÆGINA
138
THE TEMPLE AT ÆGINA
138
PEASANT DANCERS AT MENIDI
142
THE PLAIN BELOW DELPHI
150
THE VALE OF DELPHI
156
CHARIOTEER, DELPHI
166
AGORA, MYCENÆ
180
WOMAN SPINNING ON ROAD TO EPIDAURUS
198
EPIDAURIAN SHEPHERDS
202
THEATRE AT EPIDAURUS
206
xiii
xiv
AN OUTPOST OF ARCADY
224
THE GORGE OF THE ALPHEIOS
226
ANDHRITSÆNA
230
AN ARBOREAL CAMPANILE. ANDHRITSÆNA
234
THRESHING FLOOR AT BASSÆ
240
TEMPLE AT BASSÆ, FROM ABOVE
244
TEMPLE AT BASSÆ, FROM BELOW
244
HERÆUM. OLYMPIA
258
ENTRANCE TO THE STADIUM. OLYMPIA
262
DELOS, SHOWING GROTTO
282
GROTTO OF APOLLO, DELOS
282
COLUMN BASES. SAMOS
296
CARVED COLUMN-BASE. BRANCHIDÆ
296
TREE OF HIPPOCRATES. COS
306
CNIDOS, SHOWING THE TWO HARBORS
314
SCULPTURED TRIREME IN ROCK AT LINDOS.
(From a Sketch by the Author)
327
ARCHED PORTAL OF ACROPOLIS. LINDOS
328
SANTORIN
336
LANDING-PLACE AT THERA
338
THERA
342
A THERAN STREET
346
OLD COLUMNS IN CHURCH, PAROS
362
“SHIP OF ULYSSES.” CORFU
374
GREECE
AND
THE ÆGEAN ISLANDS
SKETCH MAP
OF
GREECE
AND THE
ÆGEAN ISLANDS
xv
CHAPTER I. TRAVELING IN
GREECE
The days in which a visit to Greece might be set down as something quite unusual and apart from the beaten track of
European travel have passed away, and happily so. The announcement of one’s intention to visit Athens and its environs
no longer affords occasion for astonishment, as it did when Greece was held to be almost the exclusive stamping-ground of
the more strenuous archæologists. To be sure, those who have never experienced the delights of Hellenic travel are still
given to wonderment at one’s expressed desire to revisit the classic land; but even this must pass away in its turn, since few
voyage thither without awakening that desire.
It is no longer an undertaking fraught with any difficulty—much less with any danger—to visit the main points of interest in
the Hellenic kingdom; and, what is more to the purpose in the estimation of many, it is no longer an enterprise beset with
discomfort, to any greater degree than is involved in a journey through Italy. The result of the growing consciousness of this
fact has been a steadily increasing volume of travel to this richest of classic lands—richest not alone in its intangible
memories, but richest also in its visible monuments of a remote past, presenting undying evidence of the genius of the
Greeks for expressing the beautiful in terms of marble and stone. One may, of course, learn to appreciate the beautiful in
Greek thought without leaving home, embodied as it is in the imposing literary remains to be met with in traversing the
ordinary college course. But in order fully to know the beauty of the sculptures and architecture, such as culminated in the
age of Pericles, one must visit Greece and see with his own eyes what the hand of Time has spared, often indeed in
fragmentary form, but still occasionally touched with even a new loveliness through the mellowing processes of the ages.
To any thinking, reading man or woman of the present day, the memories, legends, and history of ancient Greece must
present sufficient attraction. Few of us stop to realize how much of our modern thought and feeling was first given adequate
expression by the inhabitants of ancient Athens, or how much of our own daily speech is directly traceable to their tongue.
Modern politics may still learn much tact of Pericles, and oratorical excellence of Æschines, as modern philosophy has
developed from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Is it not even true that a large part of modern religious thought, the hope of
glory at least, if not the means of grace, finds its strongest foreshadowing in the groping of the more enlightened Athenians
for a hope of immortality and life beyond the grave? The transition of the crowning architectural glory of the Acropolis at
Athens from a temple of the virgin (parthenos) Athena to a church of the Virgin Mary was, after all, not so violent, when it
is remembered that the later paganism had softened from its old system of corrupt personal deities to an abstract
embodiment of their chief attributes or qualities, such as wisdom, healing, love, and war. Down to this day the traces of the
pagan, or let us say the classic period, are easy to discern, mingled with the modern Greek Christianity, often
unconsciously, and of course entirely devoid of any content of paganism, but still unmistakably there. To this day festivals
once sacred to Asklepios still survive, in effect, though observed on Christian holy days and under Christian nomenclature,
with no thought of reverence for the Epidaurian god, but nevertheless preserving intact the ancient central idea, which
impelled the worshiper to sleep in the sanctuary awaiting the healing visit of a vision. In every church in Greece to-day one
may see scores of little metal arms, legs, eyes, and other bodily organs hung up as votive offerings on the iconastasis, or
altar screen, just as small anatomical models were once laid by grateful patients on the shrine of Asklepios at Cos. It is
most striking and impressive, this interweaving of relics of the old-time paganism with the modern Greek religion, showing
as it does a well-marked line of descent from the ancient beliefs without violent disruption or transition. It has become a
well-recognized fact that certain modern churches often directly replace the ancient temples of the spot in a sort of orderly
system, even if it be hard occasionally to explain. The successors of the fanes of Athena are ordinarily churches of the
Virgin Mary, as was the case when the Parthenon was used for Christian worship. In other sites the worship of Poseidon
gave way to churches sacred to St. Nicholas. The old temples of Ares occasionally flowered again, and not
inappropriately, as churches of the martial St. George. Dionysus lives once more in churches named “St. Dionysius,”
though no longer possessing any suspicion of a Bacchic flavor. Most striking of all is the almost appalling number of hills
and mountains in Greece named “St. Elias,” and often bearing monasteries or churches of that designation. There is hardly
a site in all Greece from which it is not possible to see at least one “St. Elias,” and I have been told that this is nothing more
nor less than the perpetuation of the ancient shrines of Helios (the sun) under a Christian name, which, in the modern Greek
pronunciation, is of a sound almost exactly similar to the ancient one. The substitution, therefore, when Christianity came to
its own, was not an unnatural, nor indeed an entirely inappropriate, one.
It all conspires to show that, while the modern Greek is sincerely and devoutly a Christian, his transition into his new faith
from the religion of his remotest ancestors has been accompanied by a very considerable retention of old usages and old
nomenclature, and by the persistence of ineradicable traces of the idealistic residuum that remained after the more gross
portions of the ancient mythology had refined away and had left to the worshiper abstract godlike attributes, rather than the
gods and goddesses his forefathers had created in man’s unworthy image. So, while nobody can call in question the
Christianity of the modern Greek, his churches nevertheless often do mingle a quaint perfume of the ancient and classic
days with the modern incense and odor of sanctity. To my own mind, this obvious direct descent of many a churchly
custom or churchly name from the days of the mythical Olympian theocracy is one of the most impressively interesting
things about modern Hellas and her people.
In a far less striking, but no less real way, we ourselves are of course the direct inheritors of the classic Greeks, legatees of
their store of thought, literature, and culture, and followers on the path the Greeks first pioneered. They and not we have
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