Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

precaution on the verdant meadow; their horses plunged into the bog, and he was cut off with the greatest part of the French cavalry. His family and nation were expelled; and his son, Walter de Brienne, the titular duke of Athens, the tyrant of Florence, and the constable of France, lost his life in the field of Poitiers. Attica and Boeotia were the rewards of the victorious Catalans; they married the widows and daughters of the slain; and during fourteen years the Great Company was the terror of the Grecian states. Their factions drove them to acknowledge the sovereignty of the house of Arragon; and during the remainder of the fourteenth century, Athens, as a government or an appanage, was successively bestowed by the kings of Sicily. After the French and Catalans, the third dynasty was that of the Accaioli, a family plebeian at Florence, potent at Naples, and sovereign in Greece. Athens, which they embellished with new buildings, became the capital of a state that extended over Thebes, Argos, Corinth, Delphi, and a part of Thessaly; and their reign was finally determined by Mahomet the Second, who strangled the last duke, and educated his sons in the discipline and religion of the seraglio'."

From the polluting hand of the foul misbeliever Athens is once more free; and between regrets and anticipations, enough of Christian thoughts encounter us upon the rock of Areopagus to prevent our play

Chap. lxii. sub fin.

ing the mere scholar in the ruins, and streets, and haunted localities of a city whose air is still freighted with the voice and words of the great Apostle of the Gentiles.

Shall we dare this vehement sun, and face the glaring marbles, and clamber among bleached masses of old ruin, to have a morning walk in Athens, when we can have all things to ourselves? We turn down towards Piræus, for our first object is the temple of Theseus. It is small, and of the Doric order, with a length of thirteen columns and a breadth of six. It was erected by Conon, about thirty years before the Parthenon; and the marble is covered almost everywhere with a deep yellow rust. The finest views of it are from the north-west foot of the Areopagus, and again immediately on commencing the descent from the Acropolis. But if we are Oxford men, let us pause; this is very sacred ground to us. The fashionable promenade, to use very modern words, of classical Athens was close to this temple; and it was here that Aristotle walked, and taught as he walked. Let us leave a blessing behind for Alma Mater on this ground; for do we not owe her a deep debt of gratitude for the thorough and accurate study of Aristotle to which she compelled us? Surely it has been to us not only of immense moral value in the way of direct precept, but has acted all along as a wholesome and chastening restraint upon our intellects. And does a year go round without our discipline in that fair-towered English Athens disclosing

some new blessing, moral or mental, of which it sowed the seed? And did we but know those nameless men who years ago shaped and moulded our academical system, should we not regard them with the same sort of wondering reverence with which we look on the many inventors of Gothic architecture, or the unfamous authors of the old ballads, and make a hero-worship for ourselves within the elmy precincts and clasping streams of Oxford?

From the temple of Theseus, too, we can see the olives of Academus, where Plato's spirit haunts. Yet the heat is too great, Academi quærere sylvas. We will worship him at a distance, as we did at Oxford; where we were made to tread with painful care on the very footprints of Aristotle, while voluntary industry cheerfully gathered in occasional harvests of Platonic wisdom. Alas! the plane-tree of the Phædrus, and the cold water, and the velvet lawn of richest grass, where are they? And the sportive alluring of old Socrates, to try to make him love green things; and the thymy bosom of Hymettus, which was distasteful to him; and his longing to be in the streets, and to see men, preferring with Socratic Johnson the full tide of human existence flowing at Charing-cross, even to the pattering of rain in a thick wood, the most pleasant of natural things to the English doctor:-these things were

once.

From the temple of Theseus let us climb the Areopagus, and make ourselves tolerable masters of

[ocr errors]

its natural features; for except the sixteen stone steps, nothing but its natural features remain. Let us stand once more on ground trodden by the blessed Paul, probably for the last time before we die. From the Areopagus let us cross the hollow of the Agora, and ascend the Pnyx. Let us wade through the crisp and bearded barley to the Bema, whence Demosthenes was wont to thunder, one of the five or six true public-hearted patriots whom the world has seen and known, whose life was one continuous act of hallowed self-sacrifice for his country's sake. The truest patriots dwell mostly in the domestic recesses of a nation,-salubrious fountains, fertilizing each his proper neighborhood. From the Bema let us gaze on modern Athens and the ancient Propylæa. The view of the Parthenon, unluckily, is marred by the high and ungainly tower behind the temple of Unwinged Victory; otherwise its Doric front would be seen well, clear, grand, and separate, from the hill of the Pnyx. Let us look, too, on Salamis and Egina, and the bright blue sea around them, so calm and windless, that boats with all sails set are hanging idly, scarcely seeming to rest on the glossy surface, between Egina and Piræus. And the area at our feet, it was once a sea, a sea of heads; and it is now but an undulating multitude of barley-tops.

No sooner have we finished the descent of the south side of the Pnyx, than we begin climbing the Museion to the monument of Philopappus. This is a merry freak of fame. The ways in which men's

names are delivered to posterity are strange and divers, and not unfrequently amusing; this monument of Philopappus is an instance of it. There is nothing of extraordinary or beautiful art in what remains; but because it crowns a little eminence which must always be a striking land-mark in the topography of Athens, posterity will have in their mouths and ears for ever the name of this obscure Syrian gentleman. At the top of the Museion we get the Parthenon clear of the unsightly tower; but the view is still deprived of much of its rightful magnificence by the squalid Turkish mosque which stands aslant in the very middle of the divine temple. Now that we have descended from the Museion, we must visit the chambers in the rock at the foot of the hill, one of which has the traditionary honor of being the prison of Socrates, where he drank the fatal hemlock. There are two tolerably square chambers, and innermost of all is a well-like cavity, with a hole in the top to let down provisions to the prisoner, and perhaps to give him a scanty allowance of light and air; yet you see the place has no interest except from its being linked by tradition with the name of Socrates.

Let us cross now to the south side of the Acropolis, to look at the remains of the theatre of Bacchus. We were schoolboys once, and drilled in all the several parts, arrangements, and machinery of the Greek theatres, till the knowledge drew both lustre and interest from various parts of the chorusses.

« VorigeDoorgaan »