Chapter IV: Part 4

From the glorious mountain air and cold water, trickling down over precipices a thousand feet high, we came at evening again to Amphissa, with its stifling air and scanty water-supply, and, worst of all, with its one hotel, which has not improved since 1890. It is a fact that there was only one wash-basin in the house, and it was very hard to get a turn at it. Our sufferings in the night were dreadful; and when in the morning the landlord tried to persuade us that they were caused by mosquitoes, the meekest man in our party got angry almost to the point of profanity, and pointed out blood-stains on the sheets that were evidently not those of mosquitoes. And yet this landlord tried to do well by us, giving us four of his six beds, while well-dressed Greeks slept on his dining-tables. But stop! Perhaps they knew better than we what they were about. If one were shut up to a choice between Itea and Amphissa for a night's lodging, it would be better to take to the woods, especially in summer. And during that long summer night of torture we regretted that we were not lying again in the open field on our blankets.

But regrets are out of place, and nothing but the pleasure remains when one thinks of the glories of Kiona.

A JOURNEY FROM ATHENS TO ERETRIA

Most hand-books of travel in Greece, beginning with the invaluable Baedeker, impress it upon their readers that there are no long distances in Greece. Even without the help of railroads, which, of course, as far as they extend, have annihilated the barriers between the old "jarring states," one finds the historic places, like Corinth, Delphi, Chæronea, Thebes, and many others lying so near one another that, after lodging in one of them, one can always count on spending the next night at another. One loses no time. On the map, according to which one might lay out a scheme of travel, Athens and Eretria lie very near together. The overland route to Oropos, with a short sail across the Eubœan Gulf, can be compassed in any summer's day. But the surest and most convenient way is supposed to be to take the steamer at Piræus in the early evening, and wake at Chalkis the next morning, and take a ride of three hours to Eretria in the morning air. But this simple and easy scheme sometimes fails in practice, as my experience has shown.

On Wednesday, February 18, 1891, three of us started out from Piræus at evening to re-enforce one student of the American School who, in very bad weather, had been carrying on excavations begun several weeks before. We had deferred sailing for three days on account of the weather. As we set out it was a grief to us that we must sail past Sunion, Marathon, and Rhamnus before daybreak. We wished to supplement previous acquaintance with those places by a view from the sea. The night wore away with considerable tossing, and in order to get a little view of the narrowing Euripos at Chalkis I arose at half-past six. Seeing that we were near land on the left, I asked a sailor what land it was, and got for an answer something that sounded like "Macaroni." Not remembering any such land in the neighborhood of Chalkis, I cleared my eyes, looked about me, and became sharply interrogative. Now I elicited the well-known name "Sunion." This was astounding. Leaning far out over the railing I saw the columns crowning the "steep." Ah! good fortune was going to allow us to see Marathon by broad daylight.

It did not take long to see that we were in a boisterous sea. My various Atlantic experiences furnished no parallel to it. Not only were the billows high, but the fierce northeast wind, mingled with sleet, seemed to take up the tops of them and carry them up into the sky. It required two hours more for us to round the point of Sunion. It was a great effort for the good ship Peneios, and when that was accomplished we seemed to come to nothing better, and we were soon aware of the determination of our level-headed captain to put into the harbor of Laurion from stress of weather.

All that day and the next day we lay in that harbor, if it can be called lying to roll about as we did. The long island, Makronisi, called in antiquity Helene, almost makes Laurion a land-locked harbor. But between this island and the mainland the northeast wind came tearing through with unabated fury for forty-eight hours. The projection of the mainland to the north of the harbor being quite low, we were as poorly protected as it was possible to be in that harbor. Several of the vessels which had taken refuge there appeared to be having a rougher time than the Peneios. Our captain looked on with some pride when an English steamer dragged her anchor nearly across the whole width of the harbor. During the second night we had some fears of an Apia disaster. No boats went to or from the land, and so we lay the greater part of two days, unable to telegraph to our friends in Athens, as much shut off from the world as if we were on an ocean voyage. Yet nobody thought of wishing to see the captain change his mind and sail on. At last, on Saturday morning, at about two o'clock, we steamed out, and were as badly shaken at the start as one often finds it his lot to be. One lesson was most thoroughly impressed upon us, that there may have been good cause in antiquity for Athenian fleets shunning the winter trip northward, and for Philip's being allowed free hand to accomplish his undertakings Thraceward at that season of the year.

Little recked we of Marathon, or Rhamnus, or Oropos in the blinding storm in which we at last reached Chalkis, and were rowed ashore in blinding snow and splashing water from the oars. Photographic apparatus was in special danger.

Once landed we seemed near Eretria, but here our vicissitudes thickened. Between us and Basiliko, the half-way halting-place on the road to Eretria, was one of the numerous Potamos of Greece, which was taking this opportunity to justify its name, to make up for being nothing but a dry bed nine months in the year. All coach-drivers but one said that the Potamo would be as far as we could go toward Eretria that day. But this one talked so confidently of being able to find horses for us at the Potamo that we entrusted ourselves to his care, and started out in the rain.

The course lay through the famous Lelantine Plain, which, in spite of the rain, was seen to be a paradise. Such vines and fig-trees and, farther on, such grain-fields! I had not seen its like in Greece. It is no wonder that it was a bone of contention almost before the dawn of history. It is something of a testimonial to the power and ambition of Eretria that it reached so far out from its own fertile plain to grasp at what geographically belonged to Chalkis.

Our driver soon made a halt, and informed us that we were at the end of our stipulated drive. There were no signs of any river or any horses. He said the river was a quarter of a mile farther on, and that the horses were not his lookout. On being told either to find horses or drive back to Chalkis, he became surly, and demanded, besides the liberal sum of twenty drachmas which we had agreed to pay at this point, twenty drachmas more for driving us back. We told him that we should pay nothing at all except on a hearing before the demarch of Chalkis. He at last drove slowly back, going through the form of inquiring at several houses for horses, but getting none.

Arrived at Chalkis, we all went to the demarch's office, and, shivering over a pan of coals, discussed the case. Under the demarch's pacific influence, we arranged to have the same man drive us out again the next day, paying a total of thirty drachmas, and in the meantime to telegraph to the demarch of Eretria to send us horses to meet us at the river.

The next day was no better than the preceding, and we postponed starting for several hours, in hopes of a cessation of the rain. When at last we reached the river, and looked across the arches of the bridge then lying several years unfinished, though the rest of the road was ready for use, we were unable to get any response to our shouts. At last somebody told us that a man from Eretria had got tired of shouting for us an hour before, and had returned the way he came. Here was an emergency. We must go forward. After much beating about the neighborhood, one little unpromising-looking horse was found. By making trips enough we could by means of this weak creature get over to Basiliko, and then perhaps still get on to Eretria. By the aid of a long rope, our effects were soon made fast to the many-horned Greek saddle, and we started to make the quarter-mile distance to a ford a little below the bridge. Going along the top of one of the dikes thrown up to facilitate watering of the vineyards, our horse slipped and came down the bank into a foot of Lelantine mud. Our effects scattered about under him prevented his absolute disappearance. But this was bad for the effects. Some of the cargo was at last righted, and the horse ungently pulled by application of force at both ends into a standing position, and by some carrying of bags and bundles we reached the river-bank. The stalwart boy who accompanied the horse ventured into the water to test its depth. It was clear that that weak horse could not keep his footing there.

Our stalwart boy was equal to the emergency. Taking us one by one on his back he bore us over, and then the parcels, spending nearly an hour in the operation. The sight of a bearded gentleman being carried pickapack across a rushing river by a boy whose footing could not be very secure on the uneven river-bed, and who could not quite keep the boots of his rider out of the water, is a very ridiculous one to a bystander; but as each one's turn came it became a serious event to him.

When we were all well over, we noticed that the faithful horse had followed his master, and got across also. By his help we easily made the half mile to Basiliko, where our man from Eretria was still waiting for us; and that night we spent at Eretria, ready to inaugurate what proved to be most interesting and successful excavations on the site of that city on which the storm of Persian vengeance fell before it was scattered at Marathon.

We had a most unusual March. At one time snow lay on the ground a foot deep for three days. But we excavated the greater part of the ancient theatre and many interesting graves, besides mapping out the walls of the city. In subsequent years we took up the work again, and uncovered the old gymnasium and a temple of Dionysos near the theatre, but we stopped too soon; after us the Greeks took up the work, and achieved results that nearly overshadowed ours. But ours will ever be the service of having uncovered one of the most interesting theatres of Greece, and a real Greek gymnasium, which is a rare thing, inasmuch as most gymnasia which are preserved to us are Roman modifications of the original Greek form. More than this, we forever laid the idea, up to that time so prevalent, that the Eretria which was destroyed by the Persians was several miles to the east of this. The acropolis walls did that; but it was the service of the Greek excavator to uncover the temple of Apollo, with its archaic gable sculptures, and to find a considerable quantity of large vases of the sixth century before Christ, and thus to corroborate the testimony of the walls. There was, in fact, no other such place for a commanding acropolis on the whole stretch of shore as on the hill rising above the theatre. Any city established further east would have deserved the name of "the city of the blind."

TAYGETOS AND KITHÆRON

If the coupling of these two names seems forced, my first reason for it is the purely formal one that ten days after being on the summit of Taygetos, we were climbing Kithæron. Greece is such a small country that to traverse it from end to end in ten days, and see Sparta, Argos, and Thebes, with some mountain climbing thrown in, is nothing that justifies a boastful feeling; but when, at the end of such a journey, one reflects upon the history and mythology which is attached to these names, and calls up the scenes enacted on the plains on which he looks down from these mountains, he wonders at what he has accomplished.

The mountains of Greece have many and great charms; and they have this pre-eminent claim on our attention, that they are the unchanged witnesses of the past. Poor villages occupy the Cadmeia and the site of Sparta; waves of immigration have swept over Greece to such an extent that one may be in honest doubt whether the people who walk these dirty streets have any more claim to be the heirs and representatives of Leonidas and Epaminondas, whose names perchance they bear, than we have. The plains and rivers remain, except that the former have lost their trees and the latter their water. But Taygetos, "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," remains as it was. The great men of Greece knew the mountains, and were known of them. Alkman and Pindar had held converse with Taygetos and Kithæron, which now remain as their sole surviving companions.

Six years ago I had approached Sparta from Messenia _through_ Taygetos, and had arrived at evening when the sun sent its rays almost level through the orange-trees loaded with fruit and redolent with blossoms. I feared that any different approach might bring a sort of disappointment. But when, after a morning at Mantineia, in the upland plain of Arcadia, we gained the top of the last height of the pass, and saw the long ridge of Taygetos towering before us with the sun just sinking behind it, we stood leaning over our bicycles and gave way to silence like that of "stout Cortez and his men." What went through my mind could hardly be called reflection, unless I could so designate an acceptance of the propriety of the one epithet, περιμήκετος, which Homer chose for this mighty mass, whether he intended it in the sense of "stretched out" or "high towering." Night was beginning to fall before we could break the spell and move down into the valley of the Eurotas, and it was already dark when we crossed the bridge of the Eurotas and entered Sparta. The object of this journey was not so much to visit Sparta as to climb Taygetos; but, while waiting until the afternoon of the next day for another contingent of the American School to come after us from Tripolitza by carriage, we used the time to visit the site of Amyklæ, and to hunt up the mound from which came the celebrated Vaphio cups, the finest product of the goldsmith's art left to our wondering eyes by the Achæan civilization of Greece.

Taygetos is the highest mountain in Peloponnesus, outranking Kyllene by somewhat more than a hundred feet, and falling only a hundred feet short of eight thousand. Since Sparta is only slightly above the sea-level, the task before us was arduous, and when our forces were united, we decided to make a part of the ascent before evening. An acquaintance in Sparta gave me a letter of introduction to a leading man of Anavryti, a village three hours up the mountain. When we reached his house at dusk, in the middle of a village that resounded with flowing streams, this letter opened his doors and his heart. It opened the doors so wide that the neighbors came streaming in to see us, to such an extent that he was at last glad to avail himself of the help of a gendarme with his whip to clear out the younger portion of his self-invited guests. He then set to work, in the manner of Greek hosts, to kill us with kindness, making us eat and drink for about two hours. After this came those futile attempts to sleep which those who have travelled much in the interior of Greece know too well. At half-past two we were only too ready to stop the fight with the small enemy and address ourselves to the overcoming of Taygetos. For the first two hours we went on by the light of a lantern, guided by the son of our host, over a difficult path which gave us an occasional fall. After that came the gorgeous sunrise and the increasing reward in the ever more extended outlook, which made us almost forget that we had not slept. It was owing, however, largely to this lack of sleep that one of our number gave out a thousand feet below the summit, while another was with some difficulty coached over the last five hundred feet.

When we were at last on the summit at half-past ten, the reward was a perfect view--the first absolutely perfect view which I had ever had out of many mountain ascents in Greece. We had, fortunately, taken the rare moment when, after four days of cloudy and rainy weather, the sky had just cleared, and for half a day a perfectly cloudless ether was diffused over everything. We saw the valley of the Eurotas winding down from the mountains to the sea, where it empties near Helos, the "marsh town," which is said to have given its name to the whole remnant of the Achæan people, who were reduced to a galling bondage under the Dorian spearmen from the north. Sparta looked so near that we were almost lured into the attempt to throw stones into it. Kythera was surprisingly near, and even Crete--troubled and troublesome Crete--seemed so near that annexation to Greece appeared to be a most obvious lot for it. The southern islands of the Ægean, Melos and its neighbors, were conspicuous to the east; while on the west it seemed as if we could almost slide down into the Messenian Gulf. But, while all these objects caught our attention time and again, it was still to the north that our gaze was mainly directed; for there lay the whole Peloponnesus, with its peaks and ridges, which compose the greater part of it, spread out before us like a raised map, closed in on the north by the big three, Kyllene, Aroania, and Erymanthos. Compared with these, the three Attic mountains to the extreme left, and somewhat distant, looked small, though distinct. It was a place and a scene that one must needs be reluctant to leave. Had we brought food with us we should have been tempted to stay and spend the night in the substantial "tabernacle for Elias," which crowns this summit, according to the usual practice in Greece. But evening brought us to Sparta, a good many stone's-throws distant, as we felt in our knees and in our appetites. Two suggestions force themselves upon one visiting this region: the first is that the Spartans showed wonderful energy in breaking through the wall of Taygetos, and conquering their Dorian neighbors in Messenia, and in crushing them again when they made a desperate attempt to throw off the yoke; the second is that the difference between these two branches of Dorians could not be due to the Messenians having, as is sometimes alleged, settled in a fatally fertile and enervating plain. If rich fields could enervate a people, the Spartans surely did not lack that invitation, for the valley of the Eurotas must have been in antiquity, as now, a garden.

But what an unlovely people was this armed camp, which goes under the name of Sparta! We will not reproach them that they failed to produce anything in art and literature. It is rather their meanness and absolute selfishness, as the strongest military power in Greece, that makes them odious. For a century, from the Persian war to Leuctra, whenever Sparta moved through the passes to the north it meant woe to some Greek city; and when there was question raised at home over the unrighteous conduct of a general abroad, the outspoken criterion was: "Has he acted for the interests of Sparta?"

The last great injustice was the seizing and holding the Cadmeia in time of peace. It is this that makes lovers of fair play rejoice at the crushing return blow delivered by Epaminondas and his Thebans at Leuctra, and take satisfaction in his passing down the Eurotas, and showing the women of Sparta, for the first time, "the smoke of an enemy's camp." And now by a historical thread we are led from Taygetos and Sparta over to Thebes and Kithæron.

By a lucky choice we approached Thebes, not by any of the usual routes, but by taking the train from Athens to Megara, walking thence across to the east end of the Corinthian Gulf, and skirting its shore until we reached Ægosthenæ, at the foot of Kithæron. No traveller ought to neglect this region. It is one of the finest shores in Greece; so rugged that we were several times driven inland by a promontory rising perpendicularly from the sea, and made to climb more than a thousand feet before we could continue our journey. We took a recompense for the extra toil by tipping off into the sea several bowlders, some of which, striking a projecting crag, would reach the water with the effect of a bursting shell. This whole northeastern arm of the Corinthian Gulf runs in between Kithæron on the north and Geraneia on the south, and so gains a peculiar seclusion.

And Ægosthenæ! the northwestern frontier town of the Megarid, what a magnificent ruin! The view that we took of its walls and towers by the full moon was something not to be forgotten. At Ægosthenæ we were on the route so often travelled by the Spartans when they went over into Bœotia to "regulate" its affairs, and it was under these walls that the remnant of their beaten and disheartened army first stopped to take breath on getting out of Bœotian territory after Leuctra. We had planned to follow this entire route, but, since even this involved some climbing, we agreed to take a little more climbing and go in a straight line for Platæa, over the top of Kithæron, in spite of the fact that the mountain wore a cap of cloud. So, having taken a very cold sea-bath and another good look at the ruins of Ægosthenæ, which were only a little less imposing by day than by moonlight, we scaled the height with a single peasant for a guide, and his mule to carry our packs. After many a look back on the increasingly beautiful scene behind us, whenever the dark fir-trees, which cover the slopes and give the name of "fir mountain" as a substitute for the old name Kithæron, allowed it, we at last entered into the cloud just before reaching the top. In the darkness of cloud and fir-trees we better felt that we were on the mountain chosen by the Erinnyes for their abode, a place of howlings, the scene of woe for Œdipus, Actæon, Pentheus, and Agave. Who would wish for sunlight on such a spot? It would have been as inappropriate as a cloud on Taygetos. While we were musing thus, suddenly there came a rift in the cloud, and we saw the whole plain of Bœotia once, twice, three times, and the spell of the Erinnyes was broken. We went five hundred feet further down on the north side, where we seemed to have left behind us the awful myths and to have come down into the realms of history; for we were looking down into Platæa, which lay at our feet. One of the brightest pages in Greek history is the unbroken record of the heroism of Platæa, and when it was finally crushed one might well have written over it, "dead on the field of honor." Its Athenian leanings were abhorrent to Thebes, which always desired a "big Bœotia." But no one could have done a better turn to Platæa than did Thebes, when it espoused the cause of Persia and led away nearly all the rest of Bœotia with it. At the close of "old Platæa's day" the Panhellenic spirit of Platæa was rewarded by the Greeks in their giving the fine old heroic city the prize of valor, and declaring its soil forever sacred and inviolate. But the gods gave it a greater prize, in that they made its name forever associated with the battle that made Greece free.

It was again dark when we entered Thebes, and again we seemed to have left the realm of bright history and to have come under the spell of the awful myths of Cadmus's line, the horrors of Œdipus and his fratricidal sons, dark horrors relieved only by the bright form of Antigone.

STYX AND STYMPHALUS

Arcadia is a name to conjure with. It "throngs the pulses with the fulness of the spring." It had been my lot to pass twice through Southern Arcadia from east to west. But the great plains of Mantineia and Megalopolis lie open to the sunlight, and have nothing weird or even poetical about them. Even Lykosoura and Bassæ do not belong to the Arcadia that furnished the stories about singing fishes and aquatic mice. We must look elsewhere for those wonderful fountains, some of which cured madness, while one not only cured drunkenness, but, passing beyond the "touch not, taste not, handle not," made even the smell of wine forever odious. It is recorded, by the way, that somebody set up an inscription by this fountain, warning the traveller against drinking of it. All these features belong to Northern Arcadia.

Mantineia is historically the most interesting city of Arcadia; and yet I had twice looked from its walls through those deep gorges to the north, knowing that just through the first one, almost in sight, lay old Orchomenos, and longed to pass through that gateway, but had been prevented by other claims upon my time. But in the summer of 1895 I was allowed the delight of seven days in the saddle with two pleasant companions in these uplands where reality is more inspiring than the Louis Quatorze fictions that have been thrown around the name of Arcadia.

To one accustomed to arid Attica and Argolis, the abundance of water and trees in this region is most striking. The three great northern mountains look bare enough at their tops; but they reach up and draw down from the sky that store of moisture which Pentelicus and Arachnæon are impotent to procure. Everywhere about them are rippling streams lined with plane-trees, with here and there a magnificent chestnut grove, and mountains covered with forests of pine and fir. Fields of maize (with here and there a patch of hemp), watered by thousands of little streams, diverted from the brooks, remind us of home. Around Nonakris, which was almost the farthest point north reached in our journey, is a wild tangle of vegetation which makes it difficult to keep the paths, which follow along the streams, from becoming overgrown and impassable. From this tangle we snatched many luscious blackberries as we rode past, catching some briers with the berries.

Nonakris was in ruins when Pausanias visited it, but past it flowed the river Styx, the name of which is probably better known than any other Arcadian name. It was a painful and somewhat dangerous toil of about three hours from the nearest of the half-dozen villages which represent the ancient Nonakris to the foot of the famous waterfall from which the river comes down. I use the word "toil" rather than ascent, for, it being impossible to force our way up the bed of the stream, we had to climb down about half as much as up; in fact, it was, taken in the heat of noonday, a more toilsome climb than the ascent of Aroania, which we had made on the same day before daybreak.

When, after all, we stood face to face with the fall our feeling was one of disappointment. It was nearly the middle of September, and though Aroania, holding snow in its gorges all the year round, may be called with more propriety than Ætna "the nurse of snow," there was little water falling, and we saw none of the rainbow effects mentioned by some travellers. Still, as Herodotus speaks of a _little_ water, and both he and Homer speak of this as _trickling_, we ought to be content. After climbing down to the black pool at the foot of the last rock over which the water poured, we took time to let the whole setting of the Styx make its impression, which it could not fail to do. It is the setting rather than the fall which has always made the impression. Where Aroania is broken off on the east end so abruptly that one can only think of it as cut off by some gigantic cleaver, down over this front comes the Styx, not with a shoot, but hugging the rock and deflected several times along its face. Pausanias says that the precipice is the highest that he ever remembers to have seen, and its height is recorded as upward of six thousand feet. As the mountain throws out arms to the right and left of the fall, we have a place fitted to throw a potent spell over the mind on a moonlight night or at morning or evening twilight. It was here that the exiled Cleomenes, the gifted but mad King of Sparta, made the chiefs of the Arcadians swear to support him in his attempt to secure a return to Sparta by force of arms. He doubtless took advantage of the knowledge that the Arcadians had from remote times regarded this awful place as imparting an especial sanctity to oaths, and that here particularly the warrior's oath (_sacramentum_) was taken.

It is no wonder that the lively imagination of the Greek transferred the earthly Styx to Hades, and represented the most awful and binding oath of the gods, by which they pledged their immortality, as that one which they swore by this hated and deadly water.

There is now, as there was in ancient times, a tradition that it is dangerous to drink of this water; but so great was our heat and thirst that, regardless of consequences, we drank deep at the Stygian pool. On returning home, after an interval of several days, I was caught by a lurking fever and general derangement of the system, which it required several days to throw off. I am not going to decide whether this is an example of the slowness and sureness of the gods in punishing impiety, whether I carried off a little malaria from an intervening visit at Stymphalus, or whether it was simply the result of drinking too much cold water not merely from the Styx, but from many others of the countless springs about Aroania.

Aroania, from which the Styx falls, although 7,725 feet high, is less generally known than its great neighbors east and west. When I first went to Greece I had forgotten that there was such a mountain. But it is much higher than Erymanthos, and affords a better view than Kyllene, which is about seventy feet higher. Pausanias, who was no mountain climber, ascended Aroania. Perhaps he was possessed by the idea of doing justice to everything connected with so holy a place. Following in his footsteps, we walked up to a shepherd's enclosure, at an altitude of 5,000 feet, accompanied by the owner of the flocks, who was also later our guide to the Styx. Here we spent the night in the open air, near a fire, wrapped in rugs. At half-past two we set out by the light of an old moon and reached the summit at half-past four. For two hours clouds swept past us with fierce velocity, and it was bitter cold as well as wet. It began to appear as if the same misfortune was upon us as befell us a month before, when we had climbed Parnassus to be lost in a cloud whose lifting gave us only here and there a glimpse of the world below. But now at last we did get the whole broad view from Thessaly to Taygetos. The grandest feature of all was Parnassus and the still higher mountains of Ætolia; but the most interesting and instructive feature was Peloponnesus, stretched out before us like a raised map. We could study its chains and ganglia of mountains.

Two days later we were at Lake Stymphalus. We hastened to bathe in it. Had we plunged in we should probably have achieved distinction as the first bathers in that lake; but the sight of a half a dozen blood-suckers at our feet held us back, and, bathing _from_ the lake rather than in it, we came away not much cleaner for the operation. But we secured a practical insight into the nature of this lake, which is like several larger and smaller lakes in Northeastern Arcadia. Strictly speaking, it is no lake at all, but a mud-pond. Probably in no place is the water more than four or five feet deep, and had we dived from any part of the shore our heads would still be sticking in the mud.

In a normal condition of things there should be here neither lake nor mud-pond, but only a plain with a river running through it, and disappearing in a hole at the foot of the mountain at the southern end. Mountains are so thickly strewn in Arcadia that streams cannot get around them, and so have to go through them. In this case the water was supposed to find its way out under the mountains to a point somewhat south of Argos, where it rushes out of the mountain side as a pure and full river, under the name of Erasinos. But such a hole, called a _katabothra_, was always likely to get clogged, and, as a stoppage might occur at a distance from the mouth, it might be very difficult to clear it out. In spite of great care this katabothra was, doubtless, sometimes stopped in ancient times. The horrible Stymphalian birds which Heracles killed typify, it is supposed, the pestilence which arose from such a stoppage. Such gigantic labors as forcing open the katabothra are quite in keeping with the character of Heracles's other labors, which included the purging of the stables of Augeas and the draining of the marsh of Lerna, typified by the killing of the Lernæan hydra. That birds should here be chosen to represent the evil seems an apt touch of local coloring; for several times in our stay around this lake the air was shaken by a rustling of wings, and flocks of birds that looked like wild ducks settled down into the water or flew up from it.

As a proof that the water of the lake in antiquity was not up to its present level, we saw near the water's edge deep wheel ruts in the rock, which would now be deeply covered by the water in the spring (for besides the irregular variation, dependent on the more or less perfect working of the katabothra, there must always have been the regular variations, dependent on winter rains and summer drouth). Furthermore, standing on the imposing walls of the acropolis of Stymphalus, on a hill which projects from a mountain out into the marsh on its western side, one sees foundations of temples and other buildings of the lower town, hardly clear from water at the driest season of the year. Archæological excavations here would probably be particularly rewarding; but are absolutely impossible until the modern arrangements for draining the lake, begun some years ago, are carried to a higher stage of perfection than they have reached at present.

Of course there is no better drinking-water in Greece than that which flows into Lake Stymphalus. It flows from the mountains round about. Kyllene contributes a large share. It is only when it lies in the basin and stagnates there that it becomes polluted. In Hadrian's reign an aqueduct carried from this source a copious supply of water to populous Corinth, furnishing both drinking-water about as good as that of Pirene and the great amount required in the numerous baths.

Now that Athens is rapidly growing, its authorities are at their wits' ends to find a proper supply of water for the pressing needs of so large a city. All sorts of temporary expedients have been resorted to to increase the regular supply from Pentelicus. But none of them are adequate; and the minds of the far-seeing ones contemplate the necessity of bringing water from Stymphalus. Certainly if Athens is to grow at its present rate, and become a city with a population of two hundred thousand or more, something as radical as this must be adopted.

The operations of Lake Pheneus are really more interesting and important than those of Lake Stymphalus, owing to its greater size. It has been, as is seen by the marks on the surrounding rocks, at one time some one hundred feet higher than in 1895, when it was a modest lake of about three miles in diameter. In antiquity Heracles was called in even here to make a long canal, traces of which have been noted by modern travellers, straight through the plain to the katabothra at the southern end. This canal was out of repair even in Pausanias's time, and the river had reverted to its original tortuous bed. Here also the stoppage of the katabothra has been fruitful of mischief. In ancient times the strong city of Pheneos was forced to surrender by a general who stopped the katabothra, imitating the tactics by which Agesipolis took Mantineia. Once also in modern times a natural stoppage caused a general desertion of the plain, and the water gradually rose until it began to seem as if it would ultimately flow over the mountain-pass to the south, and discharge itself into the plain of Orchomenos, which already has its hands full with its own katabothra. But at the very time of the arrival in Greece of the young King Otto, the accumulated water forced the katabothra, and laid bare a tract of most richly fertilized land, an event which was regarded as a blessing bestowed upon the advent of the king. At the same time a great swelling of the Ladon and the Alpheios, resulting in an overflow of Olympia, proved conclusively, what the ancients appear to have known, that the water of Pheneos flowed into the Ladon. Since the Alpheios proper, the southern fork of the river to which the Ladon is the still greater tributary, disappears twice before it achieves an uninterrupted course, it is little wonder that the fancy of the Greek could picture it as reappearing, even after a course under the sea, at the fountain of Arethusa in Syracuse.

At the time of our visit Lake Pheneos was most impressive. Five hundred feet higher than Lake Stymphalus, it was surrounded by grander mountains, the steep slopes of which were thickly wooded on their lower parts. It had as fine a setting as a lake could have. When I was approaching it five years later from the south, I kept saying to my companions, "Now I will show you one of the finest sights in Greece." But as we advanced and more and more of the plain came into view, I began to wonder what had become of the lake. It soon transpired that it had repeated its old trick and slipped away again, leaving some fertile territory, but a larger area of sand; and, what seemed sadder than all else, converting a beautiful bit of scenery into a dry valley, not altogether unlovely it must be confessed. I was, however, much chagrined to be cheated out of my function as showman. Thus it will ever be with these lakes. When the water rises so high as to have weight enough to force out the obstruction which first produced the lake, the lake seeks the sea; and the process of stopping and opening will be repeated to the end of time.

In that part of Arcadia traversed by us there are no hotels and no carriage-roads. Most of the nights we slept on rugs spread on the floor of very plain houses. One night only did we have beds, in a so-called inn at Kalavryta, our farthest point to the north. These beds--bad success to them!--reminded us of the ancient conundrum, "When is a bed not a bed?" They kept the promise to the ear and broke it to the heart. We were more contented with the frank statement of the demarch (mayor, if one may call him so) of a little village, in whose house we spent our first night out: "You are very welcome to my house, but you will have bugs." The prophecy was amply fulfilled before morning. In no night of the whole journey were we spared this affliction. But the exaltation of spirit in such a country is great enough to make one speedily forget the annoyance to the flesh. Of course, a good deal of this annoyance might have been avoided by taking along our own beds, which would have involved only the paying for an extra horse. This plan I have subsequently followed.

There was a sameness in our meals. So soon as we arrived at our night's lodging we ordered four chickens, two for dinner and two to carry along the next day in our saddle-bags for luncheon. This with bread and unlimited grapes, without money and without price, provided us with two meals a day, and in Greece one never thinks of taking anything more in the early morning than a little coffee with bread. The grape season is the favorable time to travel in Greece. Grapes are even more than bread the staff of life; they assuage thirst as well as serve for food.

Our route was a long circuit which brought us back to Argos again through Mantineia, Orchomenos, Kleitor, Kalavryta, Megaspeleon, Styx, Pheneos, Stymphalus, Phlius, Nemea. It may be interesting to add that the whole outlay was less than ten dollars apiece, of which more than half went to the payment for horses. It is difficult to procure anywhere so much pleasure at so little expense. How different is this from the experience of the man who complained that he had spent years in wandering about Europe paying a dollar for every fifty cents' worth of pleasure!

AN UNUSUAL APPROACH TO EPIDAUROS

Perhaps the best way to study thoroughly a country, as well as to enjoy it, is to do what we do at home, namely, to wander over it at leisure, letting impressions settle in on us without making efforts to gather information. Unfortunately, we seldom have time to do this in a foreign country. I count it, therefore, as a privilege that during two successive summers a residence, once on the island of Kalauria, now called Poros, and once on the mainland opposite to it, in the territory of Troezen, furnished me an opportunity to become acquainted in this delightful way with a most interesting part of Greece. Not only did I pay frequent visits to the temple on the island, where Demosthenes committed suicide--a temple at that time being excavated by Swedish archæologists, but I also made several excursions to Troezen, Methana, and Ægina, and once, breaking through the high mountain which opposite Poros approaches the sea, I worked my way over it across the eastern prong of plane-tree-leaf-shaped Peloponnesus to the old Dryopian town of Hermione, which, in its beautiful situation at the innermost recess of a deep bay, rivals Troezen.

For several weeks during one of these summers Mr. Kabbadias, the Greek Ephor-General of Antiquities, was our next neighbor; and subsequently, when he was excavating at Epidauros, where he worked for five years after his brilliant success on the Athenian acropolis, an invitation from him was the occasion of my making a still longer excursion. My companion was a Greek neighbor. As it was summer, we made an early start, sailing along two hours to the harbor of Troezen, where we took horses which had preceded us. At five o'clock we were in the saddle. For an hour or more we skirted the shore as far as the nature of the land (if we may call bare rocks land) would allow it, passing in the rear of Methana, that jagged _sierra_ which from Athens forms an impressive background for Ægina, and is itself projected against the higher mountains of the mainland. Then coming to a point where these mountains fall sheer into the sea some fifteen hundred feet, we were obliged to turn inland. The path, foreseeing the jumping-off place, took the turn betimes by climbing up with many a zigzag a face of the mountain which was not quite perpendicular. After a long pull we passed on our right a village called Lower Phanari, which looked so much like an eyrie that one might think "Lower" was added in jest. But when with still more toil we reached another village called Upper Phanari, and looked down upon the other, we recognized the seriousness of the distinction. There it lay, with its fifty-one houses, so far below us that it seemed almost level with the sea.

Why anybody should ever choose to live so high up on the rocks as Upper Phanari was not at first apparent. But after a halt here for luncheon (brought with us, of course, for no traveller counts on living on such a region), and after two hours of refreshing sleep on wooden benches, we moved downward and inland, and in a quarter of an hour came upon one of those little plains which supported so many villages in ancient Greece. In this case an ancient village, the name of which we may never know, and which occupied the site of Upper Phanari, where it has left substantial traces of itself in the shape of walls, must have got a scanty support from this little plain. Both ancients and moderns, rather than live in the plain, preferred to live on the rocks above, although it entailed carrying the produce and drinking water a mile, that they might live in sight of the beloved sea. Our downward turn was soon exchanged for another upward one, our course being all the time northward and parallel to the shore. Once a great gap in the range separating us from the sea revealed not only the sea, but the whole of Methana, which, with all its height, was so low that we looked over its peaks down into the sea. About four o'clock, refusing a turn into a broad mountain valley to the left, we turned sharply to the right and broke through the mountains by a narrow gorge, and were again on the outside with the whole Saronic Gulf before us. It was such a display of beauty that one shrinks from enumerating its details. What immediately arrested our attention was that which lay at our feet. Here the mountains receded a little, giving place to a paradise of vines and trees, which made a marked contrast to the brown mountains on the one hand, and the blue sea on the other. The boundary lines of each color were very sharp. A large opening, very little of which we could see, ran back into the mountain to the left of the plain. Through this opening a stream came down, flowing even in the summer, a rare thing in Eastern Greece.

This plain contained the ancient town of Epidauros, and three hours' distant, up through the opening in the mountains, lay the sanctuary of Æsculapius, called to-day the Hieron or Holy Place, which gave the town its importance. One travelling from Athens to Nauplia by sea is attracted by this single opening on the whole eastern shore of Argolis. But much as one would like to turn in here and explore the great opening, and go this way up to the "holy place," the steamers take him along past it, unless he perchance gets off at Ægina, and trusts himself to a sail-boat to take him across. Travellers generally have to follow the beaten track; and I had visited the Hieron four times by the longer route from Nauplia before it befell me to approach it by this road, which was trodden by the greater part of the tens of thousands who came to seek salvation from Æsculapius.

We now wound our way down the mountain side, entering the village of Epidauros at sunset, along with the troops of vintagers, from whose crates we took grapes to our hearts' content. As for any payment, nobody thought of that. Now I got an interesting lesson in Greek hospitality. My companion had brought a letter of introduction to a man in this village whom we met coming in from his vineyard. He said that he was very busy disposing of his grapes, and could hardly be at his house at all that night. But he called one of his workmen and told him to take us to his house and see that we had the best room in it. We did not see him again until the next morning, when we met him already among his vines at four o'clock, three miles up the valley on the road to the Hieron. The pressure of New England haymaking is nothing compared with that of the vintage season in Greece.

Nothing could exceed the cordiality of our host in these two encounters by evening and morning twilight. His hospitality was as hearty as it was a matter of course. Angels could have done no more. It was, in the Homeric phrase, δόσις ὀλίγη τε φίλη τε. His off-hand hospitality was to us a perfect godsend. We were lodged in the best house in the village, and made as free and easy as if we had been in an inn. Without him we should have come off short. The village contained only about thirty houses, and most of these very uninviting. In fact, a stranger would hardly seek shelter in any of them except under stress of weather. There is hardly a more neglected corner in Greece than this once important place, the mother city of Ægina, which lies in plain sight confronting it, two hours' sail across the bay. Not only does no steamer put in here, but there was not even a sail-boat in the harbor while we were there. We were told that no sail-boat was owned by anybody in the village, an unheard-of thing on a Greek coast. To send a telegram or to get a physician one must send to Piada, called also New Epidauros, an hour and a half distant. A mail comes twice a week on horseback from Nauplia, all the way across the peninsula.

In this neglected but most picturesque corner remain the walls of a stately acropolis on a rocky peninsula with a harbor on each side of it, and other remains of a great city protruding from the rich soil where this peninsula joins the mainland.

But while the city has perished, the Hieron has, in a certain sense, come to life again. Here an area has been laid bare much larger than that excavated by the Germans at Olympia. The theatre, the best preserved of all Greek theatres, was never entirely covered up, and was early and easily cleared. The project of having a grand presentation of ancient dramas here has often been broached but never carried out, on account of the difficulty of transporting and feeding the spectators necessary to the success of the project, to say nothing of lodging them. The acoustic properties of this theatre are well known. One standing in front of the stage makes himself heard without effort by one sitting in the top row of seats.

The finest building in the precinct was the so-called Tholos, a round building as highly ornamented as the Erechtheum at Athens, and boasting Polycleitus as its architect. The temple of Æsculapius was almost equally brilliant, but these two buildings do not exist except to the archæologist. We have inscriptions giving most elaborate accounts of the construction of each of them; but of each building nothing remains except their foundations and broken fragments of their brilliant adornment. Were it not for giving this description of a journey the appearance of a guide-book, I might speak of the Herculean labors of Mr. Kabbadias in excavating the Stadion, and the little pleasure that the sight of it affords the layman.