Studies of Travel - Greece

Edward Freeman

Edward A. Freeman

Studies of Travel - Greece

Preface

The papers that have been brought together in these small volumes are the results of three several journeys made by my father in Greece and Italy. He visited Greece for the first time in 1877, but of the papers written in that year, which appeared in the Saturday Review, only those on Corfu have been reprinted. They form part of the volume of Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice, in the preface to which work the hope was held out that some out of many papers on the more distant Greek lands might one day be put together. It has been thought that these papers will not prove the less welcome that they must now lack the re-casting that my father would undoubtedly have given to them. Since his Greek journey was made, fresh light has been thrown on many points by the German excavations at Olympia as well as by those conducted by the Greeks themselves on the Athenian Akropolis, at Eleusis and elsewhere.

The papers on the two Italian journies of 1881 and 1883 also stand as they were written with the exception of a few verbal alterations which have seemed needful in such a reproduction of what was originally intended for the columns of a newspaper.

I have to thank the editors of the Saturday Review, the Guardian, and the Pall Mall Gazette for their courtesy in allowing the reprint of these articles which have appeared in their pages.

В В В В Florence Freeman,

Alicante:

January 17, 1893.

Round PeloponnГЄsos

The traveller who enters the older Hellenic world by way of Corfu, and who leaves that island by an evening steamer, will awake the next morning within a region which even modern geography and politics allow to be wholly Hellenic. As long as light serves him, he still keeps along the channel which divides free Corfu from enslaved Epeiros; night cuts him off from the sight of the mouth of the Ambrakian Gulf, and of the point where modern diplomacy has decreed that Greek nationality shall, as far as diplomacy can affect such matters, come to an end. The next morning’s dawn finds him off the mouth of the outer Corinthian Gulf. To the east he is shown the position, on one side, of Patras, the old Achaian city which St. Andrew a thousand years back so manfully defended against Slave and Saracen, on the other side, of Mesolongi, whose fame belongs wholly to our own day. We call up the two sieges — the one where the civilian Mavrokordatos, the one hero whom the Fanariot aristocracy gave to the cause of Greece, beat back the Ottoman from its mud walls; the other made more famous still by that fearful sally of the besieged, when, like the men of Ithômê or Eira, they cut their way through the thickest bayonets of the Egyptian invader. There may be some to whom the record of those great deeds may be an unknown tale, but who may yet remember how Mesolongi saw the last and worthiest days of the life of Byron. Of Patras, of Mesolongi, however, we have hardly so much as a distant glimpse; we are told where they are, and that is all. For a while, too, the Peloponnesian coast itself is more distant and less attractive than the islands to the west of it, now parts, no less than Peloponnêsos itself, of the Hellenic realm. Yet we may remember that, as we pass by the Eleian shore — Βουπράσιόν τε καὶ Ἤλιδα δῖαν, while we are shown where lies the path to Olympia, we are now passing by the true Morea, the land which once distinctively bore that name before it gradually spread over the whole peninsula. The mainland as yet hardly attracts us. The dawn has hardly given way to full sunlight as we see Ithakê fade away in the distance, while Kephallênia lifts her bold height full before us. Half the Odyssey rushes on our memory, and the memory of some may be English enough to remember the happy description of our own Ælfred, how Aulixes — his form of Odysseus— was king of two kingdoms, Ithakê and something else, which he held under the casere Agamemnôn. A happy power of seeing the analo