Studies of Travel: GreeceFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Greece
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Greece -- Description and travel
subject lands of the city by the Tiber, a ruin which bespeaks its
kindred with the baths of Antoninus, and shows us in all its boldness
the great constructive invention after which men strove at Tiryns, but
which Greece, in all other things the mother of arts, had to learn
from her Roman masters. We look at the broken brick vault of the Roman
building, but if our eye turns a little to the right, we soon see how
it was the lands east of the Hadriatic which first learned how to give
the great constructive invention of Italy its noblest form and to
apply it to its highest use. At no great distance from the Roman ruin
stands a church of Byzantine days, which fitly finishes the series.
The forms to which men were feeling their way in the sally-port of
Tiryns and in the treasure-house of Mykênê reached their perfection
when the architects of the East taught the cupola, soaring or spreading
as it might be, to rise on its supporting columns over the centre of
the churches of Eastern Christendom. Primæval Greece strove after the
arch; historic Greece, if she knew its constructive use, confined it
to a few purposes of constructive usefulness. Primæval Italy strove,
and strove with more success, in the same path, and made the form
which Greece used so timidly the life of her national architecture.
On Roman ground the arch grew into the cupola, but it was on the
ground that was Greek and Roman alike, on the ground of the Eastern
peninsula, that the cupola took its noblest form. On the Larissa of
Argos a few traces have been found of galleries like those of Tiryns.
Pausanias bears witness that Argos once had her subterranean chamber
like those of Mykênê, and doubtless following the same construction.
At Tiryns and Mykênê the series goes no further; the destroying hand
of Argos decreed that it should go no further. The long life of Argos
allowed every form to stand there side by side, from the gallery and
the treasury to the Roman bath and the Byzantine church. Yet it is not
in Argos itself that the series can be really studied. In the life of
cities nothing preserves like early overthrow, nothing destroys like
continuous life. Of the members of the Argive series the latest alone
is perfect. The vault of the Roman bath is broken down; the gallery
can scarcely be traced; for the existence of the treasury we have only
the witness of a traveller seventeen hundred years back. It is among
the victims of Argos that early overthrow has preserved to us the works
of the earliest times. In forsaken Tiryns and Mykênê we learn more of
the earliest days of Greece than we can learn in the city which has
survived them by three-and-twenty centuries. We have mused over the
walls, the guarded gate, the sally-port of Tiryns; we must go on to
muse on the walls, the mightier gate, the treasuries, the rifled tombs,
of Mykênê, Imperial city of Hellas in her earliest day.
The Akropolis of Mykênê.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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