And yet, the Boeotians by nature were no less intelligent than the rest of the Greeks. Epaminondas, the strategist, and Plutarch, the biographer, were Boeotians but they had left their native haunts at an early age. Those who remained behind suffered from the poisonous vapours that arose from the swamp-ridden borders of Lake Copais. In plain, modern medical terms, they probably were victims of malaria, a disease which does not tend to make people brilliant-minded.
The French Crusaders, who set up as rulers of Athens during the entire thirteenth century, began to drain these quagmires, and conditions among the Boeotians improved. The Turks, of course, allowed the mosquitoes to breed to their hearts’ content and the Boeotians grew worse. Finally under the new kingdom, a French and afterwards an English company let the muddy waters of Lake Copais flow into the Euboic Sea and turned the bottom of this inland sea into fertile pasture-land.
THE MEDITERRANEAN
To-day the Boeotian is no more ‘Boeotian’ than an Athenian or Brooklyn bootblack and, Heaven knows, they are quick-witted enough to get an extra coin out of a Scotsman or an Armenian. The marshes are gone, the vapours are gone, the malaria mosquitoes are gone. And an entire countryside that had been derided for centuries as Exhibit A of rustic numskullery and ignoble imbecility was restored to normal behaviour by the draining of a few miasmatic swamps.
And then we come to Attica, most interesting of the Greek lands. Nowadays we take the train that goes from Larissa to Athens and that connects with the trunk-lines of Europe. But in the olden days those who wanted to get from Thessaly in the north to Attica in the south had only one route at their disposal, the route of the famous pass of Thermopylae. It was not really a pass in the modern sense of the word—a narrow gap between two high mountains. It was a narrow track, about 45 feet wide, between the rocks of Mount Oeta and the Gulf of Halae, which was part of the Euboic Sea. It was here that Leonidas and three hundred Spartans sacrificed themselves to the last man to save Europe from Asia, when they tried to halt the advancing hordes of Xerxes in the year 480 b.c.
Here two hundred years later the barbarous Gauls were prevented from invading Greece. Even as late as 1821 and 1822 the pass, played an important military part in the war between Turks and Greeks. To-day the pass is no longer visible. The sea has retreated almost three miles from the mainland, and all that remains is a fifth-rate bathing establishment where people afflicted with rheumatism and sciatica try to find relief in those hot springs (‘thermos’ is Greek for ‘hot,’ as you will know from ‘thermometer’ and ‘thermos flask’) which gave their name to a battlefield which shall be remembered as long as mankind continues to honour those who die in defending lost causes.
As for Attica, it is a small triangle—a rocky promontory bordered by the blue waters of the Aegean Sea. Between its many hills lie numerous small valleys, all having direct access to the sea and kept fresh and pure by the breezes that come in from the shore. The ancient Athenians declared that their sharpness of wit and clearness of vision were due to the delightful air they breathed. They may have been right. There were no stagnant Boeotian pools to encourage the thrifty malaria mosquito. As a result, the Athenians were healthy and kept healthy. They were the first people to recognize that man is not divided into two equal parts, body and soul, but that body and soul are one, that a healthy body is necessary to encourage a healthy soul, that a healthy soul is an indispensable part of a healthy body.
In that air it was possible to look all the way from the Acropolis to the Pentelican Mountains that dominated the plain of Marathon and provided the city with marble. But it was not only the climate that made the Athenians what they were, and for that matter are to this very day.
There was the sea that gave the people of Attica direct access to every part of the inhabited and uninhabited world. And there was that geological freak of Nature which had dumped a steep but flat-topped miniature mountain, a sort of mesa more than 500 feet high, 870 feet long, and 435 feet wide, right in the heart of the plain surrounded by Mt Hymettus (home of the best Athenian honey), by Mt Pentelicus and by that Aegaleus from the slopes of which the unhappy fugitives from Athens watched the annihilation of the Persian fleet in the straits of Salamis a few days after the troops of Xerxes had set their city on fire. This flat-topped, steeply-sloped hill had first of all attracted the immigrants from the north, for there they found what we all need—food and safety.
It is a curious feet that both Athens and Rome (like modern London or Amsterdam), the most important settlements of ancient Europe, were situated not immediately on the sea but several miles away from it. The example of Cnossus, the Cretan centre of the Mediterranean world hundreds of years before either of them had been founded, may have acted as a warning of that dreadful thing that may happen when one is for ever exposed to a surprise attack by pirates. Athens, however, was more conveniently near to the sea than Rome. A short time after be had landed in the Piraeus, then as now the harbour of Athens, the Greek sailor could be with his family. The Roman merchant needed three days for the trip. That was a little too long. He lost the habit of going back to his home city, settled down in the port at the mouth of the Tiber, and Rome gradually lost that intimate touch with the high seas which is of such tremendous benefit to all nations aspiring to world domination.
But gradually these mesa people, these inhabitants of the ‘topmost city’ (for that is what acro-polis meant), moved into the plain, built houses round the foot of their hill, surrounded them with walls, finally connected these fortifications and those of the Piraeus and settled down to a glorious life of trade and robbery which ere long made their impregnable fortress the richest metropolis of the entire Mediterranean Sea, Then their Acropolis was given up as a place of abode and became a shrine—a known harbour of the Peloponnesus, situated on the gulf of that name. The town was destroyed five centuries before the birth of Christ. But to us people of the modern world it is of more direct importance than even Athens or Rome. For it was here that long before the beginning of written history civilization for the first time touched the shores of savage Europe.
In order to understand how this came about, look at the three half-submerged ridges of the great Balkan hand that reaches from Europe to Asia. These fingers are composed of islands. Those islands nowadays belong to Greece except for a few in the eastern part of the Aegean which Italy has occupied and continues to occupy for the reason that no other nation wants to go to war on account of a few worthless rocks in a distant sea. For convenience sake we divide those islands into two groups, the Cyclades near the Grecian coast, and the Sporades near the coast of Asia Minor. Those islands, as St Paul knew, are within short sailing distance of each other. And they formed the bridge across which the civilization of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria moved westward until it reached the shores of Europe. Meanwhile that civilization, under the influence of those early immigrants of Asiatic origin who had settled down on the Aegean islands, had already been very distinctly ‘Easternized,’ and it was in that form that finally it reached Mycenae, which should have become what Athens afterwards became, the centre of the classical Greek world.
Why didn’t this happen? We do not know. No more than we know why Marseilles, the logical successor to Athens as the dominating power of the Mediterranean, should have been forced to surrender that honour to a very modern and very upstart village called Rome. The short-lived glory of Mycenae and its abrupt decline will ever remain a mystery.
But, you will object, all that is history and this is supposed to be a book on geography. But in Greece, as in many ancient lands, history and geography have become so interwoven that the two cannot be discussed separately. And from a modern point of view there are only a few geographical items really worth mentioning.
The isthmus of Corinth has been pierced by a canal about four miles long but too shallow and too narrow for large vessels. Greece, as a result of a series of wars with Turkey (alone and together with Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro), almost doubled her territory, then
lost one-half of all those new acquisitions because in her dreams of grandeur she underestimated the fighting qualities of the Turks. The Greeks to-day, as in ancient times, take readily to the sea, and the blue and white flag of the republic (the ancient Bavarian colours imported by the first king of the country after it had regained its independence in 1829) is to be seen in every part of the Mediterranean. Also occasionally in the North Sea and the Baltic, where such Grecian vessels are famous for their slovenliness and dirt. And for the rest, there are the figs and the olives and currants that are exported to all countries that care for such delicacies.
Will Greece ever return to her ancient glories as so many of her people hope and fervently expect? Perhaps.
But a nation overrun in turn by Macedonians, by Romans, by Goths and Vandals and Slavs, conquered and turned into a colony by Normans, Byzantines, Venetians, and the unspeakable riffraff of the Crusades, then almost completely depopulated and repopulated by Albanians, forced to live under Turkish domination for almost four entire centuries, and used as a base of supply and a battlefield by the forces of the Allies in the Great War—such a nation has suffered certain hardships from which it will find it extremely difficult to recuperate. As long as there is life there is hope. But for Greece it is a slender one.
Chapter IX
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ITALY, WHICH BECAUSE OF HER GEOGRAPHICAL SITUATION COULD PLAY THE PART OF A SEA-POWER OR A LAND-POWER, AS OCCASION DEMANDED
Geologically speaking, Italy is a ruin—all that is left of a vast mountain complex which formed a square like modern Spain but which withered away (as even the hardest rock will do in the course of a few million years) and finally disappeared beneath the waters of the Mediterranean. Only the easternmost part of that ancient mountain-range is visible to-day, the Apennines, which reach from the valley of the Po to Calabria in the toe of the boot.
Corsica, Elba, and Sardinia are visible remnants of that high prehistoric plateau. Sicily was of course another part of it. Here and there in the Tyrrhenian Sea small islands betray the presence of ancient pinnacles. It must have been a terrific tragedy when all that land was captured by the sea. But as it happened some 20,000,000 years ago, when the earth suffered from the last of its great volcanic epidemics, there was no one present to tell the tale. And in the end it proved to be of enormous benefit to those who afterwards were to occupy the Apennine peninsula, for it gave them a country enjoying such sublime natural advantages of climate, soil, and geographical position that it seemed predestined to become the dominating power of antiquity and one of the most important factors in the development and dissemination of art and knowledge.
Greece was the hand that reached out to Asia, caught hold of the ancient civilization of the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates, and re-exported this commodity to the rest of Europe.. But all that time the Greeks themselves remained something apart from the continent upon which they bestowed their manifold blessings. Their, country might just as well have been an island. The fact that it was a peninsula did not do it any good, for rows and rows of mountains, indeed the whole of the Balkan range, cut it off from the rest of European humanity.
ITALY
Italy, on the other hand, enjoyed the advantages of being both a sort of island, surrounded on three sides by the sea, and at the same time very distinctly a part of the land-mass of northern Europe. We often overlook that fact and talk of Spain and Greece and Italy as if they more or less resembled each other. Spain and Greece had much in common. The Pyrenees and the Balkan mountain ranges were impassable barriers between north and south. But the great plain of the Po was a salient that reached well up into the heart of Europe. The northernmost cities of Italy enjoy a higher latitude than Geneva or Lyons. Even Milan and Venice are of a higher latitude than Bordeaux and Grenoble, while Florence, which we unconsciously associate with the very heart of Italy, is almost on a line with Marseilles.
And furthermore, the Alps, although much higher than the Pyrenees and the mountains of the Balkans, had been formed in such a way as to offer comparatively easy access from south to north. The Rhine and the Rhône cleave through the Alps, and the valleys of the little brooks and streams running into the Rhine and Rhône, making an angle of ninety degrees with the mother river, offered convenient short-cuts into the plain of the Po—as Hannibal, with his elephants, was the first to prove, to the great dismay of the unsuspecting Romans.
Italy therefore was able to play a dual rôle, that of a maritime nation, dominating the Mediterranean, and that of a continental power, conquering and exploiting the rest of Europe.
When the Mediterranean ceased to be a world sea, and the discovery of America had made the Atlantic Ocean all-important for commerce and civilization, Italy lost her former advantages. Without coal and iron she could not hope to compete with the industrial countries of the West. But for almost twelve hundred years, from the founding of Rome in 753 b.c. till the fourth century of our era, Italy dominated and administered every part of Europe south of the Elbe and the Danube.
Unto the wild Germanic tribes from Asia that had invaded Italy in the fifth century and were now quarrelling violently for the possession of this desirable ‘far west,’ Italy gave their first conception of law and order and the superior advantages of a semi-civilized life over the uncertainties and filth of a merely nomadic existence. Of course she enriched herself incredibly at the expense of every one else. But while taking a heavy toll of taxes, she delivered certain ‘goods’ that were to shape the destinies of all those different regions for all times to come. And even to-day, the more than casual observer, visiting Paris or Bucharest, Madrid or Treves, will at once be struck by a certain similarity of look and outlook on the part of the inhabitants. He will be surprised that he can read the signs on the shops, no matter whether they are in French or Spanish or Rumanian or Portuguese. And then he will realize: “I am in an old Roman colony here. All this land once upon a time belonged to Italy. The first houses were built by Italian architects, the first streets were laid out by Italian generals, the first traffic and commercial regulations were written in the tongue of central Italy,” and he will begin to appreciate what tremendous natural advantages were enjoyed by this country that was all but an island, yet part of the mainland.
At the same time, the fortunate geological accident which had enabled Italy to conquer the whole of the known, world carried with it certain very decided drawbacks. A country born out of volcanic upheavals was for ever threatened with death, by the very mother that had given it birth. For Italy is not only the classical land of moonlit ruins, orange trees, mandolin concerts, and picturesque peasants. It is also the classical land of volcanic eruptions.
Every Italian who reaches threescore and ten (it should be easy in a country where laughter and gracious manners seem to come as natural as grouchy grins and boorishness do in other less favoured parts of the world, but, alas! statistics tell a different story) is sure to have been an active participant in at least one major earthquake and a couple of minor ones before he is reverently carried to the family grave in the Campo Santo. The seismograph (most reliable of instruments—I wish all instruments were as painstakingly true) reported 300 quakes for the period of 1905-1907 alone. The next year, 1908, Messina was completely destroyed. If you want a few vital statistics (and mere figures are often infinitely more eloquent than pages of print) here is the record for the island of Ischia, situated just opposite Capri.
That island alone suffered from earthquakes in 1228, 1302,1762, 1796, 1805, 1812, 1827, 1828, 1834, 1841, 1851, 1852, 1863, 1864, 1867,1874,1875,1880, 1881,1883, etc., etc.
As a result of these millions of years of volcanic eruptions, enormous tracts of Italian land got gradually covered with thick layers of tufa or tuff, a soft sort of rock composed of volcanic ash, thrown up by craters when in a state of violent eruption. These layers of tufa are very porous and they have a very decided influence upon the landscape of the entire peninsula. Some of those tufa fields cover areas of not less t
han 4000 square miles, and the classical seven hills of Rome were really nothing but heaps of hardened volcanic ash.
But there are other geological developments, also the result of prehistoric upheavals, which make the soil of Italy so treacherous. The Apennines, which run the entire length of the peninsula, dividing it nearly into halves, are for a great part composed of limestone, a softish substance which lies on top of the older and harder rock formations. This limestone is apt to slide. The ancient Italians were so thoroughly familiar with this fact that even in the absence of volcanic upheavals they used to inspect the boundary lines of every large country estate once in twenty years to see whether the stone marks, indicating where one man’s property ended and another man’s began, were still in their correct position. And the modern Italians are made to realize this ‘sliding process’ of their soil (and in a very costly and painful way) every time a railway is pushed out of shape or a road is squashed to pieces or another village is rolled down the embankment of a lovely green mountain.
When you visit Italy you will be surprised at the large number of towns perched on the tops of high hills. The usual explanation is that the original inhabitants fled to those eagles’ nests for safety’s sake, that, however, was only a secondary consideration. When they moved to those uncomfortable pinnacles, so far removed from the main routes of communication, they did so primarily to avoid the dangers of sliding to death. Near the top of the mountains the base rocks of the ancient geological structure usually came to the surface and offered future residents a permanent place of abode. The sides of the hills, covered with soapy limestone, were as dependable as quicksand. Hence those picturesque villages that look so marvellous from a distance and are so incredibly uncomfortable once one is inside.
The Home of Mankind Page 8
