Studies of Travel: GreeceFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Greece
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Greece -- Description and travel
One more excursion, this time not on the Attic soil, but on the Attic
sea, must be added to the Eleusinian and the Marathônian pilgrimage,
even by those who cannot undertake to follow the keen guidance of
Colonel Leake into every corner of the Attic δῆμοι. The survey of the
Attic land may well be ended at the point where, in geographical
accuracy, it ought, by those at least who approach by way of Syra, to
have begun. But to one thus drawing nigh for the first time, Sounion
is at most the beacon which points to Athens; it may even be that, if
he chances to draw nigh on a dim and cloudy morning, he may fail to
distinguish the marbled steep of Sounion among the other lofty points
over which his eye wanders. He expects, it may well be, that the height
and the temple will front him boldly as the first point of Attic ground
to catch his eye. He may not thoroughly take in the fact that the
promontory lies in a manner round a corner. Unless he has studied his
map very carefully, he may draw near under the belief that the Attic
peninsula ends in a point, in the same way in which the three southern
peninsulas of Peloponnêsos, that of Tainaros above all, certainly do.
Pausanias indeed begins his picture, not only of Attica, but of all
Greece, with the “height of Sounion, stretching forth from the Attic
land and the mainland of Hellas towards the Kyklades and the Ægæan
sea.” Yet it is certain that some who have approached the mainland of
Hellas from the Kyklades have not been lucky enough to catch a sight
of Athênê on the promontory as a harbinger of Athênê on the inland
rock. Even he who is more favoured cannot, at that moment, stop to
study the arrangement of the columns which still keep their ancient
whiteness. Nor will he, as he sails by, find out that there too the
rival of Athênê was not wholly ousted, that the sea-god kept at Sounion
a secondary place, at least as important as that which he kept at
Eleusis alongside of Dêmêtêr and her Child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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