1795] NAUPLIA 209 NAPOLI [NAUPLIA], April 28. Safely arrived at the Sign of the Bear. We are in a scrape here, which I know you will be wicked enough to laugh at; it is quite dans notre genre. We have contrived in Maina and our route to spend all our money in buying medals, etc., and cannot get a farthing for our drafts on Smyrna or Constantinople. We have, indeed, found nobody who had any trade there, and of consequence nobody who would take our word for a farthing, so we are obliged to borrow a few shillings of the Consul and hope to find some at Argos-about five miles off. If nobody gives us any there, we must stay here, for we are very comfortable in the Consul's house. We little expected to find money so scarce, or we could have had it at Tripolizza. At present, like good Irishmen, now that we have got out of the land of robbers, we have nothing for anybody to steal; while we were there we had money enough. Adieu. My love to all at home, and believe me Your sincerely affectionate brother, CHAPTER IX AEGEAN ISLANDS: CRETE SOME readers may be puzzled by Morritt's remarks about the paucity of remains, "nothing to see," etc., at Argos and Sparta. This was true until a very few years from the present time. Within the last two decades the labours of the various " schools" of Athens, English, American, French, and German, have uncovered much that was entirely concealed for nearly a century after Morritt's visit. Similarly in Crete he finds no evidence of its former greatness. At Gortyna he writes, "There is little here"; and of the palace of the Minoan kings there was nothing visible of the vast remains uncovered in 1900 and the subsequent years by Sir Arthur Evans and his followers, which have thrown entirely new light on the history of "Aegean" peoples and civilisation, even while the inscriptions are still unknown language, Yet Morritt (see p. 240) was much nearer the truth, through his study of ancient accounts, than most who have discussed the question until a century after his time, when he rejected the current belief that the famous labyrinth was merely the quarry at Gortyna, on the ground that the labyrinth belonged to Gnossus and not to Gortyna, and supposed it to have been "a subterranean palace" there. The recent spade-work in Crete has fairly established the truth that the labyrinth was the great palace of the Minoan kings at Gnossus, whose multiplicity of rooms and passages has been uncovered; and there is much plausibility in the view that the name itself comes from the labrys or double-headed axe, which was sculptured as a sacred emblem in the palace. This implies that Morritt was 1795] TIRYNS 211 mistaken in his opinion that the Cretan labyrinth was derived from the Egyptian. The great Egyptian temple of the twelfth dynasty at Hamara was probably rather earlier in date than the Minoan "labyrinth,' which is not at present placed earlier than 2000 B.C.; but it would seem that the name was transferred by Greek writers from the Cretan palace to the manychambered Egyptian temple. DEAR MOTHER, NAXOS, June 4-5, 1795.. We went to Argos from Napoli. In the plain are the ruins of Tiryns, which you mentioned to me in a letter, and of which, to give you an idea, I need only translate Pausanias, who seems to have found them in the very state they now are, and probably will remain for ages to come. They are the rudest specimen of architecture in Greece, and form a breastwork and parapet to a little hill which contained the houses of Tiryns. The stones are not cut; they are a collection of rough fragments of rocks heaped one on the other, the hollows filled with smaller stones to give solidity to the fabric. When the Archbishop mentioned to you that many were thirty feet long, I suspect he has found somewhere the measure given in Greek, and has reduced it to English measures from the most received opinions of the relative measures; of which reduction I have more than once doubted the accuracy, as, in many instances, it makes ancient stories scarcely possible. Pausanias is more exact. He says the smallest of these stones (not counting those in the crevices) could not be drawn by a yoke of two mules, which I believe true; the largest I saw were ten or eleven feet in length by five or six in breadth and thickness. We had seen other buildings of which the stones were almost as large, but the striking thing in these is the extreme rudeness of the masonry, which carries with it the marks of the very remote and early times of Greece, and one can't help seeing with pleasure and wonder a wall which the Greeks themselves ascribed to the Cyclopes. At Argos we found few remains: the walls of the citadel, built up with more modern ones; forms of buildings in the rocks; that of the theatre, notwithstanding what Chandler says; and fragments of architecture, with some broken statues, in the churches. Of the famous temple of Juno, common to it and Mycenae, we could hear no tidings; it seems to have entirely disappeared, and a small church near the situation is adorned with the only fragments of it that are left, probably. We got at Argos, however, some money for our draft on Constantinople, which was the most agreeable thing we found at the place. The next four days were employed in a fool's-pace journey through the Argolis. We endeavoured to persuade our guides (one of whom weighed about twenty stone) to go faster, and, indeed, horsewhipped them a little; by which means we very near lost our horses entirely, and were glad at last to go at any rate. We slept in villages as miserable as possible. The objects that made some amends for the désagréments of our journey were the remains of the temple and buildings sacred to Aesculapius, near Epidaurus. Chandler gives a detailed account of them. The theatre, in particular, remains the most perfect of any we had seen; almost all the marble seats are in their places-we counted above fifty rows; the passages between them, and the communication through the body of the theatre, are still seen. We had often been struck before with the shape of these seats-they are very broad and low, and they rise like steps one from another. It makes us think that the ancients sat then as their descendants often do now, with their legs under them à la Turque; if they did not, they must kick one another's dernières during the whole representation, which I do not find mentioned in any book of the times. Five miles from this is the city of Epidaurus, now a village of about five mud houses. 1795] VOLCANIC ACTION 213 Nothing but a little old rubbish, overgrown with weeds, remains. The situation is fine, and partly on a small promontory jutting into the sea, and forming a convenient port for the town. Aegina lies before it, and the sea-view is beautiful. We now continued along the Argolis, leaving Troezene on our left, and came in a day and a half to Hermione. The country is uneven, wild, and uncultivated, though naturally very fertile; I believe, however, that throughout it, and particularly near Troezene, the air is unwholesome in the great heats, and the water bad. You know the whole coast has been changed by earthquakes and volcanoes, and several small islands have been thrown up by them; we saw near Didymos (a little village in the inland part of Troezenia) a curious effect of them. The fire having consumed the earth below, the undermined surface has in two places fallen in, and forms two regular circular basins in the middle of the plain, the least near forty yards in depth and eighty or ninety diameter. The sides are an upright wall of brown rock, and so regular we could hardly believe them natural. In the bottom is a little chapel and some vineyards. The largest is on the side of a hill, by consequence not so regular. The people of the village find much saltpetre in it, of which they make a little commerce. Near Hermione we had the pleasure of riding along a stream between two high winding screens of rock covered with foliage, particularly pine and firs. The scenery, of course, was gloomy and picturesque, and when we had got through this defile, which is about four miles long, we crossed a fine plain, much cultivated and wooded, to Hermione (now Castri), which is in a beautiful situation, with one of the best ports in Greece. The isle of Hydra is opposite, and screens the road between them from wind and weather. At Hermione we found the broken-up seats of a small theatre on the shore. They are different from any we had seen, as they are a stucco of small stones |