with the modern Greek religion, showing as it does a well-marked line of descent from the ancient beliefs without violent disruption or transition. It has become a well-recognized fact that certain modern churches often directly replace the ancient temples of the spot in a sort of orderly system, even if it be hard occasionally to explain. The successors of the fanes of Athena are ordinarily churches of the Virgin Mary, as was the case when the Parthenon was used for Christian worship. In other sites the worship of Poseidon gave way to churches sacred to St. Nicholas. The old temples of Ares occasionally flowered again, and not inappropriately, as churches of the martial St. George. Dionysus lives once more in churches named “St. Dionysius,” though no longer possessing any suspicion of a Bacchic flavor. Most striking of all is the almost appalling number of hills and mountains in Greece named “St. Elias,” and often bearing monasteries or churches of that designation. There is hardly a site in all Greece from which it is not possible to see at least one “St. Elias,” and I have been told that this is nothing more nor less than the perpetuation of the ancient shrines of Helios (the sun) under a Christian name, which, in the modern Greek pronunciation, is of a sound almost exactly similar to the ancient one. The substitution, therefore, when Christianity came to its own, was not an unnatural, nor indeed an entirely inappropriate, one.
It all conspires to show that, while the modern Greek is sincerely and devoutly a Christian, his transition into his new faith from the religion of his remotest ancestors has been accompanied by a very considerable retention of old usages and old nomenclature, and by the persistence of ineradicable traces of the idealistic residuum that remained after the more gross portions of the ancient mythology had refined away and had left to the worshiper abstract godlike attributes, rather than the gods and goddesses his forefathers had created in man’s unworthy image. So, while nobody can call in question the Christianity of the modern Greek, his churches nevertheless often do mingle a quaint perfume of the ancient and classic days with the modern incense and odor of sanctity. To my own mind, this obvious direct descent of many a churchly custom or churchly name from the days of the mythical Olympian theocracy is one of the most impressively interesting things about modern Hellas and her people.
In a far less striking, but no less real way, we ourselves are of course the direct inheritors of the classic Greeks, legatees of their store of thought, literature, and culture, and followers on the path the Greeks first pioneered. They and not we have been the creators in civilization, with all its varied fields of activity from politics to art. Of our own mental race the Greeks were the progenitors, and it is enough to recognize this fact of intellectual descent and kinship in order to view the Athenian Acropolis and the Hill of Mars with much the same thrill that one to-day feels, let us say, in coming from Kansas or California to look upon Plymouth Rock, the old state house at Philadelphia, or the fields of Lexington and Concord.
All this by way of introduction to the thought that to visit Hellas is by no means a step aside, but rather one further step back along the highway traversed from east to west by the slow course of empire, and therefore a step natural and proper to be taken by every one who is interested in the history of civilized man, the better to understand the present by viewing it in the light of the past. The “philhellene,” as the Greeks call their friend of to-day, needs no apologist, and it is notable that the number of such philhellenes is growing annually.
Time was, of course, when the visit to Greece meant so much labor, hardship, and expense that it was made by few. To-day it is no longer so. One may now visit the more interesting sites of the Greek peninsula and even certain of the islands with perfect ease, at no greater cost in money or effort than is entailed by any other Mediterranean journey, and with the added satisfaction that one sees not only inspiring scenery, but hills and vales peopled with a thousand ghostly memories running far back of the dawn of history and losing themselves in pagan legend, in the misty past when the fabled gods of high Olympus strove, intrigued, loved, and ruled.
The natural result of a growing appreciation of the attractions of Greece is an increase in travel thither, which in its turn has begotten increasing excellence of accommodation at those points where visitors most do congregate. Railroads have been extended, hotels have multiplied and improved, steamers are more frequent and more comfortable. One need no longer be deterred by any fear of hardship involved in such a journey. Athens to-day offers hostelries of every grade, as does Rome. The more famous towns likely to be visited can show very creditable inns for the wayfarer, which are comfortable enough, especially to one inured to the hill towns of Italy or Sicily. Railway coaches, while still much below the standard of the corridor cars of the more western nations, are comfortable enough for journeys of moderate length, and must inevitably improve from year to year as the hotels have done already. As for safety of person and property, that ceased to be a problem long ago. Brigandage has been unknown in the Peloponnesus for many a long year. Drunkenness is exceedingly rare, and begging is infinitely more uncommon than in most Italian provinces and cities. Time is certain to remove the objection of the comparative isolation of Greece still more than it has done at this writing, no doubt. It is still true that Greece is, to all intents and purposes, an island, despite its physical connection with the mainland of Europe. The northern mountains, with the wild and semi-barbaric inhabitants thereamong, serve to insulate the kingdom effectually on the mainland side, just as the ocean insulates it on every other hand, so that one is really more out of the world at Athens than in Palermo. All arrival and departure is by sea; and even when Athens shall be finally connected by rail with Constantinople and the north, the bulk of communication between Greece and the western world will still be chiefly maritime, and still subject, as now, to the delays and inconveniences that must always beset an island kingdom. Daily steamers, an ideal not yet attained, will be the one effective way to shorten the distance between Hellas and Europe proper—not to mention America.
It may be added that one need not be deterred from a tour in Greece by a lack of knowledge of the tongue, any more than one need allow an unfamiliarity with Italian to debar him from the pleasures of Italy. The essential and striking difference in the case is the distinctive form of the Greek letters, which naturally tends to confuse the unaccustomed visitor rather more than do Italian words, written in our own familiar alphabet. Still, even one quite unfamiliar with the Hellenic text may visit the country with comparatively little inconvenience from his ignorance, if content to follow the frequented routes, since in these days perfect English is spoken at all large hotels, and French at large and small alike. Indeed, the prevalence of French among all classes is likely to surprise one at first. The Greeks are excellent linguists, and many a man or woman of humble station will be found to possess a fair working knowledge of the Gallic tongue. It is entirely probable that in a few more years the effect of the present strong tendency toward emigration to America will reflect even more than it does now a general knowledge of English among the poorer people. I have frequently met with men in obscure inland towns who spoke English well, and once or twice discovered that they learned it in my own city, which has drawn heavily on the population of the Peloponnesus within recent years.
If the traveler is fortunate enough to have studied ancient Greek in his school and college days, and—what is more rare—retains enough of it to enable him to recognize a few of the once familiar words, he will naturally find a considerable advantage therein. It is often stated that Greek has changed less since Agamemnon’s time than English has altered since the days of Chaucer; and while this generalization may not be strictly true, it is very near the fact, so that it is still possible for any student well versed in the ancient Greek to read a modern Athenian newspaper with considerable ease. The pronunciation, however, is vastly different from the systems taught in England and in America, so that even a good classical student requires long practice to deliver his Greek trippingly on the tongue in such wise that the modern Athenian can understand it. Grammatically speaking, Greek is to-day vastly simpler than it was in the days of Plato. It has been shorn of many of those fine distinctions that were, and are, such terrors to the American schoolboy. But the appearance of the letters and words, with their breathings and accents, is quite unchanged, and many of the ancient words are perfectly good in modern Greek with their old meanings unimpaired. When one has mastered the modern pronunciation, even to a very moderate degree, one is sure to find that the once despised “dead language” is not a dead language at
