CHAPTER II.

MODERN HISTORY OF ATHENS.

IN 1456 Athens was taken from the Franks, by Omer, and three years afterwards was visited by his master, Mohamet II., who, it is said, was greatly struck by "the beauty of the situation and the magnificence of the edifices with which it was crowded."' The city had been plundered of its treasures long before its capture by the Turks, and its temples, at this time, were as depopulated of their gods as the schools and porticoes of their masters and philosophers, but the edifices of the city, and the temples of the Acropolis in particular, had suffered but little before the retaking of Athens by the Venetians under Morosini, in 1587. It was during this siege, which preceded the capture of the Acropolis, that the powder which the Turks had deposited for safety in the Parthenon took fire by the explosion of a shell, and the temple-the masterwork of antiquity, and the wonder of succeeding ages-was blown asunder. But for this unforeseen catastrophe, and the subsequent pillagings of Elgin, the Parthenon, which had already survived so many

misfortunes, might have come to us in as perfect a state as the temple of Theseus.

The authority of the Turks was re-established six months subsequent to the bombardment of the Acropolis by the Venetians, and after this short interruption, "the humiliation of Athens was complete. Obliged at length to bend her neck to the yoke of the Eastern barbarians, who for more than sixteen centuries had been kept at a distance by the effect of Grecian superiority in all that makes a nation powerful, Athens considered herself fortunate in receiving the orders and protection of the Oriental despot, through the mediation of a black eunuch slave, the guardian of the tyrant's women."

It has been well and feelingly said, by Col. Leak, that after the conquest of this celebrated city by the Turks, her humiliation was complete, but at the same time it ought to have been noticed, in a more bold and prominent form, that the chief glory of Athens consisted in her triumph over her humiliating misfortunes; in her power to instruct and delight those who were either instrumental or indifferent to her suffering and her degradation. It was during the worst, and it is to be hoped, the last of her calamities at the time when she was governed by the slaves of a "black eunuch," that Athens emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, and began to confer upon the, then civilized, world new and important favours. Her altars began to burn anew,

and the labours of such distinguished scholars and artists as Sponn, Wheeler, Stuart, Revett, Pars, and Chandler, supplied us with new light and new models for the study of the literature and the fine arts of Greece.

But how truly humiliating it is to be told that in return for the many obligations which Athens conferred upon the age, she was exposed to the insults of vulgar minds-to the rapacity of men who robbed her of her worth and her beauty for the vilest purposes of prostitution. When we hear of the spoliations committed upon the monuments and the arts of antiquity by such men as Caligula and Sylla; by Roman Greek emperors; by Vandals, Franks, and Venetians, we find some excuse in the characters of the actors-in the ignorance and barbarities of the times; but what excuse or palliation* can be given in favour of those modern Vandals, who, forgetting what was due to the dignity and the honour of the age, could outrage the feelings and the en

* Colonel Leak thinks that the injury which the edifices in the Acropolis received by the siege of 1587, was "the cause of all the delapidations which they suffered, and which rendered the transportation of the fallen fragments of sculpture out of Turkey their best protection from total destruction." But the principle of taking what a rightful owner cannot protect is of doubtful authority, and we are inclined to think that the English people would not be willing to extend this right to others—to allow, for example, an Italian or a Frenchman to remove the decorations of St. Paul's in order to save them from the corroding effect of the English climate.

lightened sense of mankind by such wholesale spoliations as those which, in the beginning of the 19th century, stripped and ruined the matchless temple of Minerva in the Acropolis, and the equally matchless shrine of Apollo in the mountains of Arcadia.

It was the antiquarian and not the conqueror who ruined the temples of antiquity, and despoiled the city of Athens of its treasures. "We can all feel," says the indignant Byron, "or imagine the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires are beheld; the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to watch, and valour to defend his country, appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. This theatre of contentions between mighty factions, of the struggles of orators, the exaltation and deposition of tyrants, and triumphs and punishment of generals, is now become a scene of petty intrigues and perpetual disturbance between the bickering agents of certain British nobility and gentry: 'the wild foxes, the owls and serpents in the ruins of Babylon,' were scarcely less degrading than such inhabitants. The Turks have the plea of conquest for their tyranny, and the Greeks have only suffered the fortunes of war incident to the bravest; but how are the mighty fallen, when two painters con

test the privilege of plundering the Parthenon, and triumph in turn according to the tenor of each succeeding firman! Syllå could but punish, Philip subdue, and Xerxes burn Athens, but it remained for the petty antiquarian and his despicable agents to render her as contemptible as himself and his pursuits."

But while the conqueror and the antiquarian leagued themselves against the monuments of antiquity, neither the one nor the other, nor time, the destroyer of all things, have succeeded to efface the wonders of art; the principal monuments of the city and the Acropolis, with many of their ornaments, were spared, and Athens, even when under the government of a worthless slave, continued to be "the favorite of all those who had an eye for art or for nature.”

Among the many who at this time came to visit the "fallen great," there is no one who was so touched and penetrated by the beauty and the misfortunes of this city as the gifted author of "Childe Harold," and the literary world owes him no small obligations for those brief yet living pictures, which are scattered in his works, and which, though without system or order, are more valuable and more interesting than the professed works of travels. They are like the cartoons of the great masters—a few lines here and a few touches there shadow out a picture as true to life as life itself. They are