Studies of Travel: GreeceFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Greece
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Greece -- Description and travel
Every age, from the earliest to the latest, has left its living and
speaking memorials on that memorable hill, and no classical barbarian
has yet taken in hand the cruel work of wiping out that long and
wondrous history. Here, in the very gateway, is a primæval wall,
reared, it may well be, before Corinth was Dorian, a wall of stones
such as Corinth’s own Sisyphos might have been set to roll up the
mountainside. Hard by is an arch of the thirteenth century of our era,
an arch, not of Venetian, but of genuine French work, work of the days
when there were Latin Princes of Achaia and Latin Emperors of the New
Rome. We pass on among the fortifications, the dwellings, the temples,
of all the creeds and races which Corinth has seen as citizens or as
masters. Here is work of Hellenic days, of days when Corinth sent forth
her colonies on her one sea and met the Persian in arms on the other.
Here are traces of the temples of the Roman colony, traces of the
Corinth where Paul taught and which Alaric entered as the first armed
disciple of Paul’s teaching. Here is the Byzantine church, witness of
the long years when Corinth stood as an outpost of Christendom, in one
age against the heathen Slave, in another against the Mahometan Turk.
Here is the Turkish mosque, the Turkish dwelling, telling of the long
struggle when the Turk wrested the fortress from the Greek, when the
Venetian wrested it back from the Turk, when the Turk wrested it once
more from the Venetian, till the happier day when the fetter of Hellas,
the horn of Peloponnêsos, again passed into the hands of her sons. All
are in ruins, all are fittingly in ruins, seeing that all are memorials
of powers which have passed away. But as ruins let them be guarded and
revered, as ruins which tell their tale, the tale of Corinthian and
Hellenic history. The blind fury of the destroyer has decreed that the
history of Athens shall no longer be read on the akropolis of Athens.
Let Corinth harbour no such enemies. Let not a wall be touched, let not
a stone be swept away, which still lives to tell how many times and by
how many hands
Was Corinth lost and won.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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