The Near East / Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople

mong them the Theater of Dionysus and the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian who spent much of his money in the beautification of Athens, and who taught rhetoric t

ommon thing to see weary travelers, who have just come down from the Acrop

bove it being wide enough to do away with all fear of crowding and inconvenience. The marble arm-chairs were assigned to priests, whose names are carved upon them. In the theater I saw one high arm-chair, like a throne, with lion's feet. This is Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The fronts of the seats are pierced

of Plato. It is not one of the gloriously placed theaters of the Greeks, but from the upper tiers of seats there is a view acro

emory of his wife. This is not certain, and there are some authorities who think that, like the beautiful arch near the Olympi

the interior, or, rather, what was once the interior, of this formerly roofed-in building, is very str

hen you pass beyond this towering fa?ade, which might well be a section of the Colosseum transferred from gladiatorial Rome to intellectual Athens, you find yourself in a theater which looks oddly, indeed, almost meanly, small and pale and graceful. With a sort of fragile timidity it seems to be cowering behind the flamboyant walls. When all its blanched marble seats were crowded with spe

on, like those who dwell in less-favored lands. When I was in Athens the weather was usually magnificent and often very hot. Yet Phalerum, perhaps half an hour by train from Constitution Square, was deserted. In the vast hotel there I found only two or three children, in the baths half a dozen swim

gue the matter, and suggested that anxiety about the war had something to do with it. But I was informed t

F ATHENE, IS

ou can go to picnic at Marathon or at Salamis, or you can carry a tea-basket to the pine-woods which slope down to the Convent of Daphni, and come back to it after paying a visit to Eleusis. Or, if you are not afraid of a "long day," you can motor out and lunch in the lonely home of the sea-god under th

mething to eat. Its door was unlocked, and I entered a large, deserted room, with many tables, a piano, and a terrace. No one came. I called, knocked, stamped, and at length evoked a thin elderly lady in a gray shawl, who seemed alarmed at the sight of me, and in a frail voice begged to know what I wanted. When I told her, she said there was nothing to eat except what they were going to have themselves. The sea

R OF DIONY

ry, but it passes through country which is typical of Greece, and through which it would be foolish to go in haste. Go quietly to Marathon, spend two hours there, or more, and when you return in the evening to Athens you will have tasted a new joy. You will have lived for a little while in an exquisite pastoral-a pastoral through which, it is true, no pipes of Pan have fluted to you,-I he

e of Greece is the pine. I do not forget the wild olive, from which in past days the crowns were made, nor the fact that the guide-books say that in a Greek landscape the masses of color a

men of mine were taken by brigands and carried away to be done to death. And there were mighty fig-trees, and mulberry-trees, and acres and acres of vines, wi

in native dress, with the white fustanella, a sort of short skirt not reaching to the knees, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels, were busily talking politics. Carts, not covered with absurd but lively pictures, as they are in Sicily, lumbered by in the dust. Peasants, sitting sidewise with dangling feet, met us on trotting donkeys. Now and then a white dog dashed out, or a flock of thin turkeys gobbled and stretched their necks nervously as they gave us passage. Women, with rather dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads, were working in the vineyards or washing clothes here and there be

cely anything is spectacular. But, oh, the bright simplicity of the life and the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an early world. One looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like the Turkish Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are small, exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as if it had been deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over the slopes w

habitation was perched. It was raised high above the ground upon a sort of tripod of poles. It had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor of brushwood and maize. A ladder gave access to it, and

IN OF M

her figures could I see between me and the bright-blue waters that once bore up the fleet of Persia. Behind me were stony and not very high hills, ending in the slopes down which Miltiades made his soldiers advance "at a running pace." One hundred and ninety-two brave men gone to dust beneath me; instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch-house of brushwood and wheat and maize; silence the only epitaph. The mound, of hard, sun-baked earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a few rusty-looking thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But about it grew aloes, and the wild oleander, with its bright-

s countrymen, smiling, with a cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls out "Addio!" Then he mounts his la

Greece, for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large town, when the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of friends making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or me

tay out of doors at night, often driving into the country, and eating under the trees or by the sea. But even in the heat of a rainles

ve-tree in Greece, a small and corrugated veteran said to have been planted in the

some lean, long-tailed horses were standing with bowed heads, as if drowsing. An ancient and very deep well was close by. In the marble well-head the friction of many drawn cords has cut grooves, some of them nearly an inch in depth. The court of the convent is roughly paved and is inclosed within rough walls. In it are a few trees, an acacia or two, a wild pepper-tree, and one gigantic cypress. From a branch near the entrance a big bell hung by a chain. But the only sound of bells came to me from without the walls, where som

AT THE FOO

ngers of Time. Made more than eight hundred years ago, the remains of the Byzantine mosaics are very curious and interesting. In the cupola, on a gold ground, is a very large head of a Christ ("Christos Pantokrator"), which looks as if it were just finished. The face is sinister and repellent, but expressive. There ar

the dim and massive little church, glimmering with gold where the sunlight fell upon the mosaics, the eyes of the Christos seemed to rebuke me from the lofty cupola. The good-natured woman locked the door behind

h of water, which looks like a lake, but which is the bay of Eleusis, you can see houses and, alas! several tall chimneys pouring forth smoke. The group of houses is Eleusis, now an Albanian settlement, and the chimneys belong to a factory where olive-oil soap

one glances at the chimneys of the soap factory, and at two or three black and dingy steamers lying just off the works to take in cargo, that here Demeter was worshiped with mysterious rites at the great festival of the Eleusinia. Yet, according to the legend,

up to the Temple of Demeter, the chief glory and shrine of Eleusis, are the deep ruts made by the chariot-wheels. The remnants of the hall of the initiated bears witness to the long desire of poor human beings in all ages to find that peace which passeth our understanding. Of beauty there is little or none. Nevertheless, even now, it is not possible in the midst of this tragic débacle to remain wholly unmoved. Indeed, the very completeness of the disaster that time and humanity have wrought here creates emotion, when one remembers that here great men came, such men as Cicero, Sophocles, and

ddess-like head. The features are pure and grand; but the two things that most struck me, as I looked at this great work of art, were the expression of the face, and the deep bosom, as of the earth-mother and all her fruitfulness. In few Greek statues have I seen such majesty and power, combined with such intensity, a

T TEMPLE OF THE M

a lake, lonely and brilliant, with the two-horned peak called "the throne of Xerxes" standing out characteristically behind the low-lying bit of coast where the Greeks have set up an arsenal. Whether Xerxes did really w

land curves, forming a series of little shallow bays and inlets, each one of which seems more delicious than the last as you coast along in a fisherman's boat. But, unfortunately, the war-ships of Greece often lie snug in harbor in the shadow of Salamis not far from the arsenal, and, as I have hinted already, their commander-in-chief has little sympathy with the inquiring

g wild places where the sea is, where its breath gives a vivid sense of life to the wilder

tains between Athens and Corinth. But Sunium has its ruined temple, standing on a great height. And in some of us a poet has wakened a wondering consciousness of its romance, perhaps when w

ts. In Athens I had heard that they were a fierce and ill-mannered population. I found them, on the contrary, as I found almost all those whom I met in Greece, cheerful, smiling, and polite. Happy, if rather dirty, children gathered round us, delighted to have something to look at and wonder about. Men, going to or coming from the works, paused to see what was the matter and to inquire where I came from. From the windows of the low, solid-looking houses women leaned eagerly out with delighted faces. Several of the latter talked to me. I could not understand what they sa

herd watching his goats as they browsed on the low scrub which covered the hills. All the people in this region are Albanians, I was told. They appeared to be very few. As we drew near to the ancient

heaven. They are raised not merely on this natural height, but also on a great platform of the famous Poros-stone. In the time of Byron there were sixteen columns standing. There are now eleven, with a good deal of architrave. These columns are Doric, and are about twenty feet in height. They have not the majesty of the Parthenon columns, but

heart of an undesecrated wilderness. Still the columns stand quite alone. All the sea-winds can come to you there, and all the winds of the hills-winds from the ?gean and Mediterranean, from crested Eub?a, from Melos, from Hydra, from ?gina, with its beautiful Doric temple, from Argolis and from the mountains of Arcadia. And it seems as if all the sunshine of heaven were there to bathe you in golden fire, as if there could be none left over for the rest of the world. The coasts of Greece stretch aw

arming itself in the sun. White, gold, and blue, and far off the notes of white were echoed not only by the mariner's sails, bu

HERODES ATT

similar spell. Wildness and calm seem woven together, a warm and almost caressing wildness with a calm that is full of roma

marble ruin, a one-armed man came up to me, and in En

" I asked him, looking

he marble columns for neighbors, with no voice but the sea's to speak to them, dwell these four persons. The man lived and worked for many years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he lost his arm in some whirring machinery. Now he has come home and entered the

white, cool, brightened with flowers, face to face with the purple sea, and the isles and the mountains of Greece.

ering but insistent hand, and left him to his

AND O

OF ANCI