Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History: Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'Frazer, James George
History
Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History: Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'
Frazer, James George
Greece -- Antiquities; Greece -- Description and travel
The same antiquarian and religious tincture which appears in Pausanias’s
account of the Greek people colours his description of the country. The
mountains which he climbs, the plains which he traverses, the rivers
which he fords, the lakes and seas that he beholds shining in the
distance, the very flowers that spring beside his path hardly exist for
him but as they are sacred to some god or tenanted by some spirit of the
elements, or because they call up some memory of the past, some old
romantic story of unhappy love or death. Of one flower, white and tinged
with red, he tells us that it first grew in Salamis when Ajax died; of
another, that chaplets of it are worn in their hair by white-robed boys
when they walk in procession in honour of Demeter. He notes the mournful
letters on the hyacinth and tells the tale of the fair youth slain
unwittingly by Apollo. He points out the old plane-tree which Menelaus
planted before he went away to the wars; the great cedar with an image
of Artemis hanging among its boughs; the sacred cypresses called the
Maidens, tall and dark and stately, in the bleak upland valley of
Psophis; the myrtle-tree whose pierced leaves still bore the print of
hapless Phaedra’s bodkin on that fair islanded coast of Troezen, where
now the orange and the lemon bloom in winter; the pomegranate with its
blood-red fruit growing on the grave of the patriot Menoeceus who shed
his blood for his country. If he looks up at the mountains, it is not to
mark the snowy peaks glistering in the sunlight against the blue, or the
sombre pine-forests that fringe their crests and are mirrored in the
dark lake below; it is to tell you that Zeus or Apollo or the Sun-god is
worshipped on their tops, that the Thyiad women rave on them above the
clouds, or that Pan has been heard piping in their lonely coombs. The
gloomy caverns, where the sunbeams hardly penetrate, with their
fantastic stalactites and dripping roofs, are to him the haunts of Pan
and the nymphs. The awful precipices of the Aroanian mountains, in the
sunless crevices of which the snow-drifts never melt, would have been
passed by him in silence were it not that the water that trickles down
their dark glistening face is the water of Styx. If he describes the
smooth glassy pool which, bordered by reeds and tall grasses, still
sleeps under the shadow of the shivering poplars in the Lernean swamp,
it is because the way to hell goes down through its black unfathomed
water. If he stops by murmuring stream or brimming river, it is to
relate how from the banks of the Ilissus, where she was at play, the
North Wind carried off Orithyia to be his bride; how the Selemnus had
been of old a shepherd who loved a sea-nymph and died forlorn; how the
amorous Alpheus still flows across the wide and stormy Adriatic to join
his love at Syracuse. If in summer he crosses a parched river-bed, where
not a driblet of water is oozing, where the stones burn under foot and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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