Greek Lands and LettersAllinson, Anne C. E. (Anne Crosby Emery)
History
Greek Lands and Letters
Allinson, Anne C. E. (Anne Crosby Emery)
Greece -- Description and travel; Greek literature -- History and criticism
After Roman times, in the long atrophy of the Byzantine age, Piræus
dwindled to a group of fishermen’s huts. It revived somewhat under De la
Roche in the fourteenth century, and thereafter, at least was known as
Porto Leone from the seated figure of a marble lion that kept guard
among the ruins like the majestic lion that still sentinels the
battlefield of Chæronea. In the seventeenth century, the Venetians
carried off this Piræus lion, and now, seated by another arsenal in
another seaport, careless of the passing tourist, it looks grimly over
the Adriatic where steamers come and go between the neighbouring Trieste
and its native land.
Leaving now the Great Harbour and our meditations on the vicissitudes of
history, we resume our inspection of the fan-shaped peninsula. Without a
special permit the visitor is excluded from the western end and from the
Royal Garden which encloses the most probable site of the Tomb of
Themistocles, if indeed his bones were ever brought back from burial in
exile. His official tomb was in Magnesia in Caria. A public interment in
his native land could not be granted to one exiled as a traitor.
Thucydides knows only of a secret burial of his bones in Attica. The
remains of the monument in question stand on the point of Akte near the
entrance to the outermost harbour. From this tomb the great admiral’s
spirit could still watch over the Athenian sea-power. Skepticism about
the site is forgotten when we read the fragment, meagre as it is, of the
comic poet Plato:—
“Fair is the outlook where thy mounded tomb is placed.
For it will signal merchantmen from here and yon,
It will behold the sailors faring out and in,
Will be spectator of the triremes’ racing oars.”
This “contest of the triremes” may allude to the boat-race in which the
course lay from Cantharus harbour around the whole peninsula to
Munychia. These races in sacred ships were part of the systematic
training of the Attic youths.
The public road leads over the shoulder of the hill and, in descending
again to the coast, offers a beautiful view to the west and south over
the Saronic Gulf. The driveway then runs along the water’s edge around
the promontory, keeping close inside the ruined “Wall of Conon.”
Although the remains of this encircling wall rise nowhere more than
about eight feet above ground, and usually much less, yet the very
continuity of the ruins is imposing. Practically in an unbroken line the
solid masonry hems the irregular rim of the peninsula from the mouth of
the Great Harbour to a point not far distant from the war-harbour of Zea
on the opposite side and may be traced again intermittently around to
the Bay of Phalerum. Solid tower buttresses are interposed at frequent
intervals. On this southern shore of Akte, where the modern town does
not intrude, the spectator is free to divide his attention between the
beauty of the sea view and thoughts of the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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