My Sixty Days in Greece: A Spartan School

I.

ONE rainy June afternoon I found myself in Sparta. The modern Sparta is called a thriving town, and as a token of its thrift the good people were grading some of the principal streets, and it was hard to pick one’s way through the mud. Every few yards the contractors had left a pillar of earth, or, as the Greek calls it, a “ witness,” to show the work that had been done, and the effect of these warts was unpleasing. A space in front of the principal café had been spared, and there the guests were seated on a miniature Ararat rising above a deluge of mire. Sparta is a very modern town, as is evinced by the width of the streets, and this width may have detracted somewhat from the liveliness of the main thoroughfare. Still I do not intend to fly in the face of the guidebook, especially in view of the fact that the day before, at Tripolitza, which is one of the most bustling places in this part of the world, I had met a Spartan gentleman, who was very proud of his home, had much to tell about the town, and in his enthusiasm produced some of the oranges for which Sparta is famous. “ Out of the strong came forth sweetness.” That was the motto of the University of Helmstedt, and a good motto it is for a university. It hardly seems so good a motto for ancient Sparta, and one can no more fancy Leonidas peeling an orange than Alcibiades smoking a cigarette.

The ancient Spartans always figure in school histories as stern ascetics. But they were huge feeders, that is certain, and much of their abstinence was sheer affectation. Your Attic was more frugal than your Spartan. “ Spartan diet" was not intended to be a satisfying portion. It was simply a national diet like oatmeal, and was often, doubtless, mere surplusage. Of course it may be said that oranges, which seem so un-Spartan, are a modern innovation, and it is well known that the introduction of a new fruit-tree may change not only the character of the landscape, but the character of the inhabitants. But if the orange is a new-comer the olive is an ancient friend, and the olives of Sparta are suspiciously fine, suspiciously famous. To oranges an American does not need an introduction, but the value of the olive is not made known to the classical student except on classical soil, and once familiar with the swart beauty of the Greek olive he understands better the climax of the soldier’s rations in Aristophanes’ “ something to drink in a flask, dry bread, two onions, and three olives.”

The olives of Sparta were a witness to the continuity of historical life. The Spartan gentleman whom I met at Tripolitza was an example of the way in which history repeats itself. The modern Spartans are not averse to emigration, and many of them come to America. Now, every reader of Greek history remembers that the Partheniæ, or maidens’ sons, as the name is usually interpreted, went out in a body to Tarentum, for reasons best known to their mothers. True, a recent investigator has undertaken to show that the maiden mothers are a myth, and that the Partheniæ took their name from Parthenion, the Virgin Mountain, but the tradition is there. Tarentum was settled from Sparta ; and as Lower Italy was the America of ancient Greece, and the Greeks spoke of Great Greece as we speak of Greater Britain, my Spartan friend might pass for the reincarnation of one of the original Tarentines. Not only had he lived in America, but he was an American citizen, and to that extent my fellow countryman. To be sure, his speech did not stir any sympathetic chords in my bosom, for lingua americana in bocca spartana is apt to be nutcrackerish. Another fellow countryman, at least in spe, I was to encounter a few days afterwards, on the long drive from Sparta to Gýtheion, a round-headed son of Laconia, whose traveling library consisted of two volumes tied up in a red cotton handkerchief : one a pamphlet which dealt with the army regulations of the kingdom of Hellas ; the other a Greek guide to English conversation, from which he would extract from time to time a choice unintelligible morsel. One phrase, however, he had by heart, and fired at me with the solemnity and intensity of a minutegun. It was somewhat embarrassing to be asked every sixty seconds, “ ’Ow arr you ? “ On that long drive I could not suppress the wish that Kyrios Triantaphyllópoulos, or whatever his name was, had already joined his brother, the substantial confectioner of Philadelphia, in whom he took such pride.

At Gýtheion I lost sight of my intending fellow countryman, but the shadow of America followed me everywhere during my short stay in Laconia; and as I was sitting alone in the hallway of the inn, one of the young sons of the house, who the night before had vainly strewn Persian Insect Powder on my couch, endeavored to divert my supposed melancholy by a rude album of the Columbian Exposition which his American brother had sent home, with an inscription in which he expressed his desire that the rest of the family could have seen “ the marvelous buildings.” Yes, the shadow of America followed me everywhere. So in the same town I was sitting in front of a restaurant which bore the cheery name Abundance (i Aphthonía), and taking a very modest part in a triangular conversation with a brilliant German scholar and a prominent local capitalist, when a coin was submitted for our inspection by a collector of the place. German scholar and local capitalist shook their heads. They could make nothing of the image and superscription. But the battered bit of silver was no puzzle to me. It was a Mexican real, or “ ryal,” the familiar “ seven-pence ” of my South Carolina boyhood, and as I looked at the coin long stretches of my life were unrolled before me. Once more I was seated, a lad fresh from college, on the deck of the good ship Hermina, bound to Bremen, and reading Calderon’s El Principe Constante, which I have never looked into from that day to this. In that drama there is a brilliant description of the eagle and his hostility to the poison of the asp, which reminded me at the time of the device on the coins of Mexico. Once more I was a student in Germany, poring over sunshiny Aristophanes in the gray light of a Berlin winter morning, and finding eagle and asp again in the charade that opens The Wasps. And there was that other feature of the device, the prickly pear, which, like myself, is a native of America, and flourishes on Greek soil as it does on the Mexican coin.

II.

My new-found fellow countryman, on whom I have turned my metaphorical back so long, had served as an assistant in a Brooklyn florist’s shop ; but Brooklyn was too slow for a man accustomed to the bustle of Sparta, and so be had returned a couple of years before in order to open an establishment for the sale of ready-made clothing. I cherish his business card ; but the ready-made clothing business seemed a strange occupation for a descendant, or at all events a representative. of the men who were harangued by Tyrtæus. To be sure, at that very time, the ingenious Dr. Verrall was engaged in exploding the myth of Tyrtæus, but I did not know it, and as I watched my Sparto-American deftly cutting an orange into sixteen parts Tyrtæus’s anapaests were thumping in my brain, and well they might be. Was I not in Sparta, and had I not found in my own experience that the witness of Leonidas was true, and that the verses of Tyrtæus were well fitted to put an edge to youthful courage ? At all events, some of the boys who heard me declaim the stirring lines of the Marching Song had died the death of Spartans, and were sleeping the sleep of the Spartans whose ghosts were about me.

“ Hand me down,” I fancy, would have suggested to an ancient Spartan something else than a suit of ready-made clothing, — would have suggested rather such an armory as that stout fighter Alcæus describes : —

But other times, other ways, and to judge by the aspect of the modern Spartans, the ready-made clothing business must have been flourishing. In this respect Sparta presented a strong contrast to Tripolitza, the modern capital of Arcadia, from which I had just come. Tripolitza abounded in the fustanella, and as my visit fell on St. George’s Day, and the whole population was in holiday attire, the sight of all those clean white kilts was grateful to the eye. In Sparta, on the other hand, everything was rigged out in garments that might have been imported from my own dwelling-place, Baltimore, a great emporium of the business.

The main street of Sparta, thanks perhaps to the grading processes already mentioned, was almost too American for a classical pilgrim, and I soon betook myself to the side-streets, some of which had a more truly Romaic air. In one of these streets was a famous silk factory, into which I peeped, — an establishment guiltless of modern machinery, and designedly so. But the factory was deserted at that hour, and there is nothing more depressing than a silent shop. However, the next day, as I was riding in from Mistrá, I met a procession of the factory girls who were making their way home to the villages about the town. Nowhere else in my short visit to Greece did I see so many bewitching faces, such lustrous eyes, such subtle features. It was as if the handicraft had given these Spartan maidens something of the tingle and the sparkle of American girlhood. How unlike these faces to the stolid countenances of the girls I had seen in Arcadia, crouching close together on the ground, and breaking stones to ballast the railway that is to continue the line beyond Tripolitza ! These modern Spartan maidens will always be associated in my mind with the delicate blooms of the olive which lashed my face as I rode along. Not the least did they resemble the commanding and exacting figures that haunt the records of ancient Sparta : Lampito, for instance, well known from the Lysistrata of Aristophanes : —

To which Lampito responds : —

III.

From the silk factory I proceeded to hunt up the various relics of antiquity in and near the town. It is a town of open conduits, not to say gutters, and the gutter that separated the street from the Leonidæum was sending along a far more ample stream than does the bed of the Ilissus in its ordinary mood ; and in lieu of a stepping-stone my attendant threw a pile of prickly-pear stems into one of the shallows, that I might cross dry-shod. The sight of the Leonidæum ought to have called up a number of apt quotations. But apt quotations never come when they are called, and my mind wandered off to the whole system of Greek proper names and the harm that this “ Lion ” name had done its owners, and finally to the Aristophanic passage in which a Greek father is congratulated on the birth of a bouncing boy : —

All this was not very respectful to the memory of Leonidas, but the guidebook guards us against undue enthusiasm about the remains of this temple in antis, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the tomb of Leonidas. It is a fine piece of masonry, but to the untrained eye it looks more like an abandoned bit of modern work than like an ancient ruin. Leonidas having been eliminated, there was nothing about “ the 12 yards by 7 1/2 of good Hellenic masonry ” to stir the imagination ; and I felt instead a perverse interest in the prickly pears, which were just then full of blooms, and pushing their purple and yellow flowers from the edge of the barbed disks with an insulting opulence like so many ficos to the universe. No one would expect such insolent, not to say indecent beauty of a plant that is all made up of greenness and prickles, — a plant that might well serve to embody the popular conception of the philological guild.

The Battle of the Amazons over the house door of the apothecary Kopsomantikos is one of the sights of the town. Another sight is the relief of the Gorgon’s head above the door of Diamantópoulos, and in the doorway two women were sitting, who eyed the strangers with something of a stony Spartan stare. Gorgo, or Wideawake, is to a Greek scholar a rather pretty name, and recalls not only the beautiful Medusa Rondanini, but also the clear-eyed little daughter of crazy King Cleomenes, who was to become the wife of that very Leonidas after whom the Leonidaeum was named.

Surely something is to be said for those bits of antiquity that are built into houses, and for my part I cannot harbor any resentment against the playful architects of such a church as the Little Metropolitan of Athens, that patchwork quilt in stone. It is, after all, a better fate to be used for no matter what purpose of life than to be stuck up and stared at in a museum. A museum is nothing more than a burial-place, and I had rather live on as a flower than be mewed up in a coffin. Of course I do not desire to lose such standing as I have among the worshipers of the antique, and I am simply speaking from the point of view of the antique object itself, with which I naturally sympathize more and more as time goes on. Professionally I am ruthless, and while a mill-race is assuredly a thing of life, a hundred mill-races might go in order to save one slab of the Laws of Gortyn. But if I personally were a fragment of a column, six or seven feet across, I should not object to having myself hollowed out and made a manner of wine-vat. This is the fate that has befallen some of the columns at Olympia, and there are worse fates. A column that supports nothing is an absurdity, and sweet are the uses of a wine-vat, though there are those who would prefer to be siphons. And so the Battle of the Amazons and the Gorgon’s head interested me all the more for the places of their abode. I remember the houses in which they were imbedded, and I feel as if they were on my visiting-list.

IV.

The next point was the museum. The Greek government, in obedience to the spirit of the people, favors the erection of local museums. If you wish to see the Hermes of Praxiteles and the Nike of Pæonius, you must take the long journey to Olympia, and the treasures unearthed at Delphi are to be seen only by those who are willing to make their way by a circuitous route to the shrine of the god. Foreigners who would like to find everything concentrated at Athens are prone to grumble at this arrangement. But it is a wise measure. It creates local centres of interest, local eddies of pride, and much is preserved that might otherwise be smuggled abroad. The monuments of the museum at Sparta — to which, by the way, American explorers have made some noteworthy contributions — have a decidedly local character. Nowhere do the Dioscuri figure so largely, that loving pair of brothers whose devotion closes with a lingering cadence that Nemean ode which tells how Kastor fell in fight, and how the divine brother renounced half of heaven that he might share the other half with his best beloved.

“Said Father Zeus to Polydeukes: ‘ Thou art my son. He who lies here was the mortal seed of a hero. A choice I give thee. If, ’scaping death and hateful eld, thou wilt alone inhabit Olympus with me and with Athena and Ares of the sombre spear, this is thy lot. But if thou championest thy brother’s cause and art minded to share with him all things alike, half of the time thou mayest draw thy breath beneath the earth, and half in heaven’s golden halls.’ So spake he. Nor did Polydeukes take unto his will a double counsel. And Zeus set free the eye, and then the voice, of brazen-mailèd Kastor.”

And Therapne, where the Great Twin Brethren are buried, looks down on the museum.

Yes, the monuments had a decidedly local character and a corresponding interest. The marble may have been a poor thing, but it was Laconian; the statuaries may not have been consummate artists, but they were Laconian : and this local character reminded me of a visit that I had made sixteen years before to the museum at Treves. For the museum at Treves, like the museum at Sparta, is dominated by the genius of the place, and is full of stumpy figures which seemed to be of the same family as the Stammgäste of the Red House, the inn at which I put up in that ancient city. The true way to be interesting is to smack of the soil, — to be Spartan, to be Treviran, to be American. Your cosmopolitan is one of your transportable fruits, your transportable wines, your translatable poets. The dialect writers have found this out, and so has every American who has made the acquaintance of combination room or common room in the great English universities.

V.

In order to see the museum I had to look up the scholarches of the place, who deputed the phylax to open the building; and soon after the building was open, the scholarches himself made his appearance, a tall young man, of wiry figure, of enthusiastic and cordial manners, a typical Greek of his class. Kyrios G. was a graduate of the University of Athens, and, as it soon appeared, a friend of an American professor of my acquaintance, also a graduate of the same university. Our conversation, begun in French, was continued in English, of which the scholarches had learned a good deal during a sojourn of some months in the United States ; and his only serious difficulty was with the Greek proper names, which did not translate readily into English. Occasionally we went over into ancient Greek, that tongue which is supposed to be of so much service to the traveler in Greek lands. How far it is of service, and how far the modern Greek of practice corresponds to the modern Greek of theory, and what the emotions of a western Hellenist are when he finds himself amid the whir and the rush of the spoken Greek of ’Ellás, — these are not matters to be dispatched in the familiar account of a holiday jaunt. The shortest answer would be the production of a washing-list, in which the only word that has any considerable resemblance to ancient Greek is the word for “ drawers,” esóurako, “ inside rag,” or else an appeal to a modern bill of fare, with its soupa and makaronia and tomdtes and omelétta and patátes. But the answer would not be fair. True, it stirs a certain rebellion to be told, as one is told over and over again, that there is not so much difference between modern Greek and Xenophon as there is between Xenophon and Homer. But for all that, even in the rudest vernacular there are notes that wake the music of the ancient speech, and out of the level of the modern language the past rises as do the Greek islands out of the level of the Ægean. Attic Greek is still of service to the traveler, if supplemented by gesture. To be sure, gesture alone might serve, but we are not to underrate the conversational value of the Greek of the books. From the newspapers and the signboards many ancient words are becoming more and more familiar to the people, and a certain archaizing process is going forward, so that the foreigner who asks for a commodity under a classic name is more and more likely to get it. Of course, in Kyrios G. I had before me a man whose life was in ancient Greek, a scholar who was so familiar with the old tongue that it slipped perpetually into the new, so that nothing would seem more natural than an occasional resort to Attic speech. But as every one knows who has had any experience in foreign lands, the pronunciation is everything, the grammar nothing; and what with my efforts to tune my ancient pipes to the modern music, to drop my h’ s, to transform my diphthongs, to give my g’s the right gulp before the right vowel, to come down on my accents with the rap of a bludgeon, and to give quantity to the winds, I cannot say that my part of the performance was a joy to me. But despite my own trouble, I could not keep from noticing that the party of the other part was under some little constraint. He was not unfamiliar with the process, well known to modern Greek as to ancient, of “ turning the fair side outward,” and he knew too much to be satisfied with the flabbiness of Byzantine Greek. Here in the heart of Sparta Hymettus was to be reproduced, and the frequent substitution of synonyms and the picking and choosing of words reminded me somewhat of the performances of the Latin debates of the German seminaria and the hesitating utterance of German “ promotions.” Still he had no difficulty with the pronunciation, and was consequently very much more at his ease ; for although I had surrendered Erasmus immediately upon touching Greek soil, and was actually eager to bow the knee to Baal, my joints had waxed stiff and my genuflections could not have been edifying. However, with French, English, and Attic in varying proportions we came to a pleasant understanding; and when we parted, he to visit his kaphenion and I to see a famous Roman mosaic, we promised to meet again before I left Sparta.

Kyrios G. was an enthusiast in his profession, and thinking that there could be no greater treat in the world for a professor of Greek than to listen to a lecture on Greek grammar, he invited me to come the next day to his schoolroom and he present when he was conducting a class in the ancient tongue. At first I fancied that he had made some special scientific discoveries ; but when I reflected that while we were in the museum he had carefully explained to me the myth of Orpheus (Orféfss) I began to dread lest the instruction might after all be of an elementary character, and for a man of my calling I am not an enthusiast as to certain details, unless I myself am the hierophant. But my new friend evidently thought that he was offering me what I should in after - years look back to as the crowning glory of my visit to Greece, and I promised to be at the schoolhouse the next morning at ten. Nor was I suffered to forget my promise, for the next morning, at an early hour, a card was sent to my hotel, — a new one, which had not yet settled into a regular line of cimices lectularii, and had not yet assumed a startlingly classic name.

VI.

Of the genuine Greek inn, the typical xenodochíon, the polite visitor to Athens, who has found quarters in one of the admirable establishments on the Square of the Constitution, has no just conception, and I cherish grateful memories of my days at the Grande Bretagne. New Corinth has of late years felt the influence of foreign travel, and the old capital, Nauplia, has been touched with the grace of comfort, the Anglo-American grace. But the interior of the Pelópbnnesos has not been pervaded by these new ideas, and the inns are like the third-class inns of southern Europe. There are none of the modern conveniences which the Swiss, stimulated by English and Americans, have made well-nigh universal; but to a man who, in his time, has endured hardness there is nothing surprising in the character of the Greek inn, and if I introduce the subject here, it is because no account of foreign travel that omits all mention of hotels can give the right perspective. Indeed, in my experience, the merits and demerits of this pension and that hotel are apt to crowd out marvels of art and wonders of nature in the conversation of travelers. Nor would I underrate the importance of the subject from an historical and anthropological point of view. A comparative study of beds, for instance, might lead to important conclusions. The whole history of the German “ Michel ” is tucked away in the feather-bed below and the feather-bed above, and the great forerunner of sociological study, Polybius, can find no better illustration of the difference between the poverty of Greece and the wealth of Italy than the fact that in Greece the hotels of his time were kept on the European plan, and in Italy on the American.

In Greece the hotels of the interior follow one general type, — the Italian. There is no common sitting-room. Why should there be ? There is no office, but that does not seem to interfere with the presentation of bills. The ground-floor is given up to a café or restaurant, if the innkeeper goes into that line of business. Frequently, however, the master of the Apollo has only rooms to let. The sleeping apartments on the floor above are often approached by an outside stairway, and, as is to be expected in a southern climate, they are scantily furnished. Over - furnishing is a vice anywhere ; under a southern sky it is a crime, of which the Greeks are not guilty. There is usually a mirror, though that tribute to human vanity is sometimes lacking, and, like the Turk, the solitary Turkish towel bears no brother near his throne. The bedstead is invariably of iron, and does not offer the same vantage-ground to the assailants of sleep as a wooden framework would do ; but the cushions are there and the walls are there, so that small comfort is to be derived from that slight reduction of possibilities. As in primitive United States within my memory, single rooms are rare. Two, three, four, five beds are put in one room, or strung along the corridors. A fastidious person who desires to occupy a room alone has to pay for all the beds therein. In some places special charges are made for sleeping in the daytime, and there is a fixed rate for sleeping on the floor. That a man should wish to be private when he is asleep seems absurd to a race that sleeps at any time and in any place, regardless of onlookers. But in this whole domain, we Americans, who submit to the abomination of the Pullman sleepers, have no right to find fault with any other nationality, — we have no right to be fastidious about undressing in the eyes of the world; and a large charity ought to cover the divergencies of different regions and different periods in this respect. In the good old times people used to go to bed utterly devoid of raiment, and the bedclothes, as we call them still, were the only clothes.

But I have an appointment with my scholarches, and must not dwell on that other important element on which travelers are wont to dilate, the food, nor yet on the drink, a tempting theme. Indifference to the quality of that which goes to make up the temple in which our souls are lodged cannot be classed among the virtues ; and the brave endurance of hardship is not incompatible with the maintenance of gastronomic ideals. A man may munch parched corn in the service of his country and eat raw middling,” may devour tough “ flapjacks ” and drink new “ applejack ” out of a tin cup, and yet be true to the memory of better things. Now, traveling in the interior of Greece is still a manner of campaigning, but there is nothing that I encountered in the way of food or drink or lodging that might not have been inscribed withpejora passus. A well-known scholar, in a little book on Greece, dwells on the fact that his wife drank tea out of a thick china cup, while he was feasting his eyes on this or that, and the illustrious historian Freeman utters a prolonged grunt as he recalls the horrors of the samári, or native saddle ; but the thickness of the china ought not to raise a wall between the beholder and the loveliness of Greece, and the samári is not so bad if one learns to ride sidewise, as the Greeks do. Wherever one can find bread and cheese and eggs and olives, there is no danger of perishing; and if one must have meat, why, a lamb can be slaughtered in a trice. The lamb of rural Greece represents the chicken of rural America, and what traveler in our Southern country has not been called on to witness the mad chase of the bird that was to furnish forth the midday or the evening meal ? Still, it is fair to say that one grows weary of Easter lamb, and I remember a three-course dinner of arnaki at Megalopolis which seemed at the time somewhat monotonous. But I remember, too, that the first course was a most excellent broth ; and that memory brings me back with a jerk to Sparta.

This choice fragment of Antiphanes, which I should otherwise have forgotten, figured in a lecture on Sparta which I delivered in my apprenticeship, many years ago, and is eminently appropriate in a paper which has for its heading A Spartan School.

VII.

I have tarried a long time in the xenodochíon, but, like La Fontaine, who always took the longest way round to the Academy, I am in no hurry to go to school, and I was in no hurry then. Besides, it was a beautiful morning, and I had a couple of hours before me ; for one rises early in Greece. So I wandered about the town first and studied the unfashionable quarters again, —a deserted marketplace, and an ironmonger’s shop full of strange bars and bolts and gratings that might have come from a disused Inferno, standing out most distinctly in my memory. Thence to the edge of the town, from which I could gaze at the rifted side of Taygetus. It seemed near enough to thrust the hand into the scars. I can recollect nothing just like it. The sternness of the rock, its implacability, recalls Delphi; but for rifts Taygetus is solitary, as was the Spartan state, and into these rifts the spirits of the Spartans seem to have fled, leaving the valley of the Eurotas, with its wealth of vegetation and its overflow of water, to the descendants of the Helots, to the hucksters and the traders, to the dealers in ready-made clothing and the dealers in Yankee notions. And yet the ancient Spartans were of all the Greeks the most wolfish in their love of money. Was it not prophesied of old,

In the eyes of a classical traveler this transformation of Sparta into a brisk trading town would seem to be nothing but a fulfillment of the old oracle. Isocrates says of the Spartans that they learned letters only in order to keep accounts, and I could not help thinking of that a day or two afterwards, as I was passing an open door in Gýtheion and heard an old man ask his granddaughter in a sharp tone, “ How many drachmas are there in a napoleon ? ” As this is one of the guidebook phrases, I should not have believed my ears if it had not been for the harsh iteration. So after all we have only to substitute “ daric ” for “napoleon,” and the historic continuity of which Mr. Freeman makes so much is restored.

VIII.

I made my way to my appointment, revolving the while a little sketch of a country school which I had recently read in Bikélas’ Discussions and Reminiscences. In this sketch, the famous author of Loukes Laras, a novel which has been translated into a variety of languages, protests against the traditional teaching of grammar and history in the elementary schools of Greece. Why, he asks, should so much time and toil be spent on teaching little country boys all these pluperfects and all these duals, things that do not occur in the language they use or in any language they are likely to learn ? Why stuff their heads with all the speculative matter that masquerades as history ? What was the name of the king who sacrificed himself for his country? Codrus. Well and good, says Bikélas. That is a lesson of patriotism. But what is the sense of talking about the Heraclidae and their mysterious return ? What are the royal houses of Argos and Mycenae to the time that now is ? And yet, with all respect for M. Bikélas’ judgment, these things are to the Greek all alike indefeasible. To the critical historian Codrus is quite as mythical as Cecrops, and the reason given for favoring Codrus tells the whole story. The passionate patriotism of the Greeks will not allow any severance from the past. They have entered into the inheritance of Hellenism, and the question of actual descent has nothing to do with it. The Greeks do not intend to allow any solution of continuity in that respect, as the names of the streets in any Greek town show. It is true that in Sparta a German baron had the laying out of the streets, but hardly the naming of them. Agesilaus and Leonidas figure side by side with Otho and Amalia, and if the Dioscuri were to come back together, they might ride down their own avenue. King Arthur is perfectly mythical to us, and yet what man is there born to the English tongue who does not feel an especial proprietorship in that noble figure among the noble figures that stand guard around the tomb of Maximilian in Innsbruck? And if we are to have the Great Twin Brethren, why not the dual, which had practically died the death with Demosthenes ? To the dispassionate inquirer, what the ancient Hellenes would have thought of their modern representatives is a matter of no moment. As well ask what our colonial and revolutionary ancestors would have thought of the newcomers whose Americanism is of yesterday, and who undertake to represent America abroad. The Hellenes of to-day have been called by some ill-natured partisans of Fallmerayer the hermit-crabs of history, but no one can come into contact with them and not feel a certain sympathy with their determined hold on the past. They will not give up an alphabet which makes orthography a burden and hampers intercourse with the Western world. Open a Greek newspaper, and you have to guess at many of the names that will not accommodate themselves to the Greek alphabet. Rózberis we know and Salisbourts we know, and Channoto can be identified from the context, but who is Phransís Sarm ? Yet inasmuch as the ancient alphabet holds the rudest dialect to the old moorings there is no prospect of change.

However, these reflections were hardly in place, as I was about to visit, not a country school, but the highest school of the region, and the class whose performances I was to witness ranked highest in this highest school. Arriving with due scholastic punctuality, I was received with effusion and presented to the scholars. The room was a facsimile of the one in which I myself had sat some forty-five years before in Göttingen. The long desks and the long benches had doubtless been copied from German models, — the same German models that have been followed in the University of Athens. There were some thirty boys, as nearly as I can remember, all bullet-headed, closecropped, sunburnt fellows, — unjoyous, as it seemed to me. The ages ranged from fourteen to seventeen, as well as I could make out. On the desk lay a number of slips of paper rolled up like spills. These contained the names of the boys, who were called up by lot, so that no youth could lull himself into security by the reflection that he had recited the day before. It was a review lesson, and after the bustle occasioned by my entrance had subsided, the exercise went on. There was a platform, there was a desk, but the teacher stood on the same level with the pupils. No pent-up desk or platform confined his powers as he walked backwards and forwards, emphasizing his rapid questions by lively gestures and by flashing eyes. The boys had been well drilled, and showed besides the alertness of their race. There was seldom need of correction, and “ Polí kalá ” (Very good) was the chief comment. In the course of the morning, a potentate in civilian’s dress and a potentate in military uniform dropped in and witnessed the proceedings. The soldier interjected a few remarks, the civilian kept a discreet silence. The textbooks were a grammar and a reader. The grammar was constructed on the basis of Curtius, Meyer, and other German authorities; for the Greeks pride themselves on being abreast of the times, and such a journal as the Nea Iméra of Trieste often brings out excellent summaries of philological works before they reach America. But there was not the least native flavor about the grammar. It was nothing but German done into conventional modern Greek, and I could not summon up much interest in the behavior of that varium et matetbile, that “ thing of choppings and changings,” the third declension. Not so the scholarches as he reviewed with rapture those nouns in which the form of the vocative is as sensitive to the accent as a maiden to her lover’s call, and those in which the genitive stands with parted lips, sighing, as it were, for the lost digamma. Somehow, my thoughts were not with accent and hiatus. They were with the rifts in the side of Taygetus.

In the silent watches of the night the fear sometimes comes over me lest, when I have preached grammar so long to others, I myself should be a grammatical castaway. It is a fate that has overtaken many grammarians, and, conscience-smitten, I gathered myself up and listened to the lesson.

The boys gave the orthodox explanations— let us rather say, the orthodox explanations of yesterday — with the utmost readiness, rattling off the technical rules for accent and inflection, and illustrating them on the blackboard in a way that either showed understanding or simulated it very closely. Only now and then was there a slip, and almost always on the treacherous ground of orthography. For the fox that gnawed the vitals of the Spartan youth of old the modern Spartan has to contend with the seven devils of the vowel signs.

The reader, to which we passed next, had a more native flavor than the grammar. It was largely made up of extracts from Xenophon, who is the great stylistic model of the Greeks of to-day, and from Plutarch, whose Lives yield the most interesting matter for that continuous history in which they believe with all their souls. Xenophon and Plutarch still hold their own in the west, but your dainty Dutch Hellenist finds much fault with Xenophon’s Greek, and your superfine English Hellenist would rather read Plutarch in North’s version, very much as Swinburne prefers Byron in a French prose translation.

The section chosen for the exercises of the morning was the Life of Themistocles ; and it was evident that Themistocles was as near to the boys as were any of the heroes of the Greek War of Independence, assuredly nearer to them than the English gentleman Hastings ("Aστιγζ), whose effigy I had seen a few days before in the Polytechnic Institute of Athens. Themistocles had many of the characteristics of the modern Greek, and Xerxes might pass for a typical Grand Turk. The chapter attacked was the one in which Themistocles makes overtures to Xerxes, and it was assailed with the utmost vigor, as if Plutarch were a Turkish garrison and the boys were Cretans. It was first read aloud in a high key and at railroad speed, — though the Greek railroad does not suggest great speed, — and then translated into modern Greek which seemed to my unfamiliar ear somewhat archaic. Next, specimens of both ancient Greek and modern version were written on the board, perhaps for my benefit, for it is very probable that the exhibitors were not imposed on by the preternatural gravity and fixedness of attention, such as mark the countenances of school trustees and school examiners the world over.

The few simple questions that I propounded through the teacher were answered satisfactorily, and the lesson went on to its next stage. The passage was taken up word by word and forced to yield a large crop of inflections. Every irregular verb had to give an account of the deeds done in the body, and the principles of “ verb formation ” were discussed in minutest detail. No chance was lost to improve the occasion except that syntax was not much insisted on. It was the grammar lesson over again, demonstrated on the dissected chapter. Then the boys passed through a running fire of questions as to the contents: “ Who ? What ? When ? Where ? Why ? ” and finally the biography of the biographer himself was taken up. The answers came, as a rule, fast enough. When there was a halt or an error, the peccant member was brought up to the blackboard and made to work out the right answer. It was lively teaching, most assuredly, and effective teaching, I doubt not; and as nothing else in the way of Greek is taught in the schools, and the ancient tongue is held up as the ideal, no matter how much the pupils depart from the standard in after-years, the impression must abide.

In the perpetual struggle between the waking tongue of the people and the dormant language of the books, the school is on the side of the sleeping beauty, — one dare not call it the dead language; and while the passionate insistence that it is not dead, but sleepeth, will not recall the past to life, still it is impossible for the classical scholar not to feel touched when the patriotic archaizer apostrophizes the ancient tongue in the language of the disciple : “ To whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” The modern tongue is too restricted, too carnal, in its range. To expatiate on moral or æsthetic themes in the language of the Klephts does not seem feasible; and in the to and fro of this struggle the school is a great power. Theoretically we may ask, Why not let the old language die the death ? Why not abolish the old alphabet, introduce phonetic spelling throughout, and let things take their course ? The processes are very much such processes as the Romance languages have passed through. There would doubtless emerge from the caldron, in which the disjointed language simmers, a new and beautiful creation. But it is impossible to reason thus with the archaizer. So long as the language of the people receives the grafts that are made on it from the old stock, so long as the dead tree revives at the scent of the waters of Castaly and Pirene, so long the archaizer will not lose courage. And such an archaizer was my friend the scholarches of the Spartan school.

The lesson over, I went out to look at Taygetus again with its riven side, and paced under the olive-trees and considered their graceful and delicate blossoms. For, as I have said, the olive-trees were in bloom when I was in Sparta.

Basil L. Gildersleeve.