Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Read online

  The district of the Ceramicus has its name from the hero Ceramus, reputed son of Dionysus and Ariadne. On the right is the Royal Portico, where sits the king when holding his yearly office. On the tiling of this portico are images of baked earthenware, of Theseus throwing Sciron into the sea and Day carrying away the beautiful Cephalus, who was ravished by Day, who was in love with him. This tale was told by Hesiod in his poem on women.…

  A portico behind carries pictures of the gods; on the wall opposite are painted Theseus, Democracy and Demos. It shows Theseus as the man who gave the Athenians political equality. Theseus is also remembered for bestowing sovereignty upon the people, and from his time they continued under a democratic government, until Peisistratus rose up and became despot.…

  Here is built also a sanctuary of the Mother of the gods; the image is by Pheidias. Hard by is the council chamber of the Five Hundred, the Athenian councillors for a year.… Near this is the Tholos (Round House) where the presidents sacrifice, and a few small statues made of silver. Farther up stand statues of eponymoi, or heroes from whom the Athenian tribes received their names.… Before the entrance of the theatre called the Odeum or Music Hall are statues of Egyptian kings.… After the Egyptians come statues of Philip and his son Alexander. The events of their lives were too important to form a mere digression in another story. Whereas the Egyptians were honoured out of genuine respect and because they were benefactors, but it was rather through sycophancy that the people gave statues to Philip and Alexander.

  395 SYNESIUS OF CYRENE

  Synesius (c. 373–c. 414) visited Alexandria and Athens as a young man, then spent three years as an ambassador in Constantinople in 399. He was appointed bishop of Ptolemais in Cyrenaica, now part of Libya, in 410.

  Letter 136 to his brother

  May the sailor who brought me here die miserably: Athens contains nothing magnificent except its place names. When a sacrificial victim is burnt, only the skin remains as an indication of what animal that once was: just so, now that philosophy has deserted Athens, all that remains is to wander and wonder at the Academy and the Lyceum; and that colourful portico from which the sect of Chrysippus took its name (not that there is much colour in it now; the proconsul has removed the panels on which Polygnotus of Thasos had expended all his art). In our day, Egypt nourished the seeds of wisdom taken from Hypatia; Athens was indeed once a city, the home of the wise; now it is inhabited by beekeepers. The Plutarchean philosophers are very conscious of this, and they attract the young to the theatres, not by the reputation of their rhetoric but by amphoras of Hymettian honey.

  1806 VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

  François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was a French aristocrat whose novels and travel writing marked him out as a leader of the French Romantic movement. Despite years in exile in London in the early years of the French Revolution, he became a diplomat under Napoleon. In 1806, he travelled to the Holy Land, via Greece.

  It is not in the first moment of a strong emotion that you derive most enjoyment from your feelings. I proceeded towards Athens with a kind of pleasure which derived me of the power of reflexion; not that I experienced anything like what I had felt at the sight of Lacedaemon. Sparta and Athens have, even in their ruins, retained their different characteristics; those of the former are gloomy, grave and solitary; those of the latter pleasing, light and social. At the sight of the land of Lycurgus, every idea becomes serious, manly and profound; the soul, fraught with new energies, seems to be elevated and expanded; before the city of Solon, you are enchanted, as it were, by the magic of genius; you are filled with the idea of the perfection of man, considered as an intelligent and immortal being. The lofty sentiments of human nature assumed at Athens a degree of elegance which they had not had at Sparta. Among the Athenians, patriotism and the love of independence were not a blind instinct but an enlightened sentiment springing from that love of the beautiful in general with which Heaven had so liberally endowed them. In a word, as I passed from the ruins of Lacedaemon to the ruins of Athens, I felt that I should have liked to die with Leonidas, and to live with Pericles.

  We advanced towards that little town whose territory extended 15 or 20 leagues, whose population was not equal to that of a suburb of Paris and which, nevertheless rivals the Roman Empire in renown.…

  I perceived, at some distance on my left, the ruins of the bridge over the Cephisus built by Xenocles of Lindus. I mounted my horse without looking for the sacred fig tree, the altar of Zephyrus or the pillar of Anthemocritus, for the modern way deviates in this part from the ancient Sacred Way. On leaving the olive-wood we came to a garden surrounded by walls which occupies nearly the site of the outer Ceramicus. We proceeded for about half an hour through wheat stubble before we reached Athens. A modern wall, recently repaired and resembling a garden wall, encompasses the city. We passed through the gate and entered little rural streets, cool and very clean; each house has its garden planted with orange and fig trees. The inhabitants appeared to me to be lively and inquisitive and had not the dejected look of the people of the Morea [the Peloponnese]. We were shown the house of the consul.

  I could not have had a better recommendation than to M. Fauvel for seeing Athens. He has resided for many years in the city of Minerva and is much better acquainted with its minutest details than a Parisian is with Paris…. Invested with the appointment of consul at Athens, which merely serves him as a protection, he has been and still is engaged as draughtsman upon the Voyage pittoresque de la Grece.

  1812 LORD BYRON

  The poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788–1824), travelled widely in Europe after scandalizing British society, but the long narrative poem based on his travels, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, established his reputation as a genius. A British philhellene who devoted much effort, and finally his life, to the cause of Greek independence from Ottoman rule, he also despised the way in which his countrymen were despoiling Greece, removing Classical treasures such as the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon. These feelings were vividly expressed in this extract from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

  Canto the Second

  I.

  Come, blue-eyed maid of heaven!—but thou, alas,

  Didst never yet one mortal song inspire—

  Goddess of Wisdom! here thy temple was,

  And is, despite of war and wasting fire,

  And years, that bade thy worship to expire:

  But worse than steel, and flame, and ages slow,

  Is the drear sceptre and dominion dire

  Of men who never felt the sacred glow

  That thoughts of thee and thine on polished breasts bestow.

  II.

  Ancient of days! august Athena! where,

  Where are thy men of might, thy grand in soul?

  Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were:

  First in the race that led to Glory’s goal,

  They won, and passed away—is this the whole?

  A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour!

  The warrior’s weapon and the sophist’s stole

  Are sought in vain, and o’er each mouldering tower,

  Dim with the mist of years, grey flits the shade of power.

  III.

  Son of the morning, rise! approach you here!

  Come—but molest not yon defenceless urn!

  Look on this spot—a nation’s sepulchre!

  Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn.

  E’en gods must yield—religions take their turn:

  ‘Twas Jove’s—’tis Mahomet’s; and other creeds

  Will rise with other years, till man shall learn

  Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds;

  Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds.

  X.

  Here let me sit upon this mossy stone,

  The marble column’s yet unshaken base!

  Here, son of Saturn, was thy favourite throne!

  Mightie
st of many such! Hence let me trace

  The latent grandeur of thy dwelling-place.

  It may not be: nor even can Fancy’s eye

  Restore what time hath laboured to deface.

  Yet these proud pillars claim no passing sigh;

  Unmoved the Moslem sits, the light Greek carols by.

  XI.

  But who, of all the plunderers of yon fane

  On high, where Pallas lingered, loth to flee

  The latest relic of her ancient reign—

  The last, the worst, dull spoiler, who was he?

  Blush, Caledonia! such thy son could be!

  England! I joy no child he was of thine:

  Thy free-born men should spare what once was free;

  Yet they could violate each saddening shrine,

  And bear these altars o’er the long reluctant brine.

  XIII.

  What! shall it e’er be said by British tongue

  Albion was happy in Athena’s tears?

  Though in thy name the slaves her bosom wrung,

  Tell not the deed to blushing Europe’s ears;

  The ocean queen, the free Britannia, bears

  The last poor plunder from a bleeding land:

  Yes, she, whose generous aid her name endears,

  Tore down those remnants with a harpy’s hand.

  Which envious eld forbore, and tyrants left to stand.

  XV.

  Cold is the heart, fair Greece, that looks on thee,

  Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they loved;

  Dull is the eye that will not weep to see

  Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed

  By British hands, which it had best behoved

  To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.

  Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,

  And once again thy hapless bosom gored,

  And snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

  1849 JAMES LAIRD PATTERSON

  Athens left Patterson (see page 17) torn between his admiration for the city’s glorious but pagan past, and his commitment to Christian values.

  Thursday, 12 September. At five o’clock this morning we were in the harbour of Piraeus, after a rough ten hours’ passage from Syra [Syros, island in the Cyclades]. The harbour is (for its size) the most perfect, I should think, in the world. Certainly its adoption instead of, or rather in addition to, the adjacent Phalerum and Munichium, was not the least benefit for which Athens had to thank Themistocles, and did not. How wide seems the application of that law which, by denying their reward to good and useful works in this life, points to some future condition, where this shall be rectified. Great robberies, bloodshed and injustice seldom fail to challenge the regard and obtain the rewards of the world, or, more properly, of its prince.

  We stood on deck watching the grey dawn, as it revealed the outline of the coast and that of Salamis; and the charm of Greece dawned with it, indefinable and inexpressible, that most subtle and refined genius loci – that mastery of our souls, which sways them with a rod so strong, and yet so gentle, that to escape it is at once beyond our power and beside our will.

  In a letter of L’s, which I got in Egypt, he talks of the Nilosity of the Nile: it is a good expression. Athens has also its Atticity. Its sway increased upon me as we drove up from Piraeus, while W pointed out the headland where Themistocles lay buried; the strong substructures of the long walls; the sweet groves of the Academy; the long range of Fames, with the dip through which winds the sacred way to Eleusis, on the left – Cithaeron, gold-fringed to the rising sun; the round thyme-clad Hymettus, and the lofty marble peaks of Pentelicon, on the right. As we near the city, and open the Museum hill, the Pnyx and Areopagus appear; while the temple of Theseus (the most perfect specimen of its style in the world), and the Propylea and Parthenon, on the Acropolis above, claim alternately our regard. The sun meanwhile kept seconding my desires, and revealing more and more of these glorious scenes, till it emerged to view, and darted its bright slanting rays over the whole plain. These rays disclosed at a glance all that scene of the struggles and development of the human mind, in the beauty and majesty of its blighted perfection, to which the civilized world looked for ages, as to the source of all wisdom and knowledge, the model of martial prowess, and the type of every form of poetry. Here Plato walked; here Socrates lived and suffered; here sang Aeschylus and Sophocles; hence went forth Miltiades and Themistocles, to fight and conquer by sea and land. Here lived a race who conquered their conquerors, and captive at last in body, brought under captivity the proud spirits of their victors, and through them of all mankind. This is the sacred place of humanity, the temple of man’s intelligence and the centre of its history. Rome, once the mistress of the world, lives again by the force of that divine system to which her fall was as a temporary scaffold; but Athens, ruined, trodden down, oppressed by the yoke of a foreign invader, and now made ludicrous by the feigned friendship of foreign allies, by the force of her past history, and the might of her ancient intelligence, yet rules in the minds of men, and sways the destiny of nations who despise her present weakness. How I wish I could wish her greatness restored; but this is as impossible, as it is to a Christian undesirable. Whatever attempts have been made in that direction, have been so plainly ‘philosophic’ – that is, in the French sense of anti-Christian – that it seems manifest that we must look back on the times of pagan Greek intellectual sway as passed (and happily so) forever.

  We drove nearly through the town, which is wonderfully formed, considering that twenty years ago it was a mere Turkish village, to the Hotel d’Orient, which is opposite the English Embassy, and is a very good one.

  BAGHDAD

  Baghdad, ‘the city of the Arabian nights’, unlike so many other cities of Mesopotamia does not date back to earliest antiquity, but was founded in AD 764 by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur. It was in its economic, cultural and intellectual prime about 800, during the reign of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. The world’s largest city through the early Middle Ages, it was destroyed by the Mongol emperor Hulagu in 1258, and did not properly recover until the 20th century, when it became the capital of the Kingdom of Iraq, both under the British Mandate from 1920 and as an independent state from 1932. The Kingdom was ended by a Ba’athist coup in 1958. Baghdad suffered from heavy bombing during the wars of 1990–91 and 2003, and in the subsequent civil unrest.

  1160 BENJAMIN OF TUDELA

  Benjamin of Tudela (1130–1173) was a Jew from Navarre in northern Spain who travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and whose writings were influential in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He was never explicit about the purpose of his travels, but frequently described the Jewish communities he encountered in his book The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. He visited Baghdad towards the end of the long caliphate of al-Muqtafi, at a time when the authority of the Abbasids was under challenge from the Seljuk Turks.

  It is two days to Baghdad, the great city and the royal residence of the caliph emir…of the family of Muhammad. He is at the head of the Muslim religion, and all the kings of Islam obey him; he occupies a similar position to that held by the Pope over the Christians. He has a palace three miles in extent, with a great park with all varieties of trees, fruit-bearing and otherwise, and all manner of animals. The whole is surrounded by a wall, and in the park is a lake whose waters are fed by the river Tigris.… He is kind unto Israel, and many belonging to the people of Israel are his attendants; he knows all language and is well versed in the Law of Israel.… He is truthful and trusty, speaking peace to all men.

  The men of Islam see him but once in the year…at the feast which the Muslims call El-eid-bed Ramadan…. He rides on a mule, and dressed in royal robes of gold and silver and fine linen; on his head is a turban adorned with precious stones and over the turban is a black shawl as a sign of his modesty, implying that all this glory will be covered by darkness on the day of death. He is accompanied by all the
nobles of Islam dressed in fine garments and riding on horses, the princes of Arabia, the princes of Torgarma and Daylam and the princes of Persia, Media and Ghuzz [in northern Iran], and the princes of the land of Tibet which is three months’ journey distant, and westward of which lies the land of Samarkand. He proceeds from his palace to the great mosque by the Basra Gate. Along the road the walls are adorned with silk and purple, and the inhabitants receive him with all kinds of song and exultation, and they dance before him.… Then he proceeds to the court of the mosque, mounts a wooden pulpit and expounds to them their Law…. He does not return the way he came; and the road which he takes along the riverside is watched all year through so that no man shall tread in his footsteps. He does not leave the palace again for a whole year. He is a benevolent man….

  In Baghdad there are 40,000 Jews, and they dwell in security, prosperity and honour under the great caliph, and among them are great sages.… At the head of them all is Daniel the son of Hisdai, who is styled ‘Our Lord the Head of the Captivity of all Israel’.…

  There are 28 synagogues, either in the city itself or in Karkh on the other side of the Tigris; for the river divides this metropolis into two parts. The great Synagogue of the Captivity has columns of marble of various colours overlaid with silver and gold, and on these columns are sentences of the psalms in golden letters. And in front of the ark are about ten steps of marble, and on the topmost are the seats of the Head of the Captivity and of the princes of the House of David. The city is 20 miles in circumference, situated in a land of palms, gardens and plantations, the like of which is not to be found in the whole land of Shinar [Mesopotamia]. People come thither with merchandise from all lands. Wise men live there, philosophers who know all manner of wisdom, and magicians expert in all manner of witchcraft.