Bacchylides and His Native Isle

As long as men shall prize the things of the mind, pilgrim feet will turn fondly to the shrines of song. From Concord to Colonus, and from Lesbos back again to Weimar and Windermere, every haunt of the Muses, however long forsaken, is always holy ground. For an old nest may break forth into singing anew ; and this miracle has even now befallen. Across the silence of uncounted centuries trills out again the liquid note of “the honey-tongued nightingale of Keos,” and that “ vine - clad isle ” springs once more into the foreground of men’s imagination.

The return of Bacchylides, not now in time-worn tatters, but in his singing-robes unsoiled, brings back with peculiar vividness a pilgrimage I made to Keos five years ago, and one I would fain live over again in the resurgent poet’s company. Possibly, some, who can never make the pilgrimage in fact, may like to go with me in fancy to look at the poet’s isle as it is to-day, to recall the great features of its past, and to meet the old singer himself in the atmosphere which first quivered with his songs. We shall find him in illustrious society, for the fame of Keos was not bound up in a single voice. After Athens, no soil was richer than hers in the harvest of Hellenic genius. For an isolated rock, barely five-and-twenty miles in circuit, Keos bore no common crop. Her tiny territory was quartered by four cities, each with its own laws and treaties, its own mint, and, we may almost say, its own religion ; and a single one of those cities gave to the great age of Greece four of its great names, — one of them among the very greatest. Before Bacchylides and beyond him in fame was his mother’s brother, Simonides, the laureate of Hellas in her victorious conflict with the East; and both were sons of Ioulis, as were Prodikos, the teacher of Socrates, and that great master of ancient medicine, Erasistratos.

Let to-day the little isle is left to its past, cut off from the world of modern men. Not absolutely ; for there is a faint hebdomadal circulation. Five days out of every seven the circuit is broken, but on Wednesdays the Piræus steamer calls there on its way to Syra, as it does again on its return, twenty - four hours later. Hence, if he would not retire from the world for eight days, or some multiple thereof, the pilgrim must do Keos between noon and noon, which is short shrift for an old Hellenic tetrapolis. Such were perforce the narrow limits of my own pilgrimage, and I should hesitate to write the meagre record of it if the actual pilgrimage were all. But for four years Keos had been pretty constantly in my mind’s eye, and I had sought out every scrap of literature, ancient or modern, that bore upon it; more than that, the island itself, with its solitary town perched like an eyrie at the summit, had become familiar to my eyes from every point of view, as I sailed among the Cyclades or gazed upon it day by day from my summer home on Andros. Thus, when I did set foot upon Keos I was already at home there, and twenty-four hours sufficed to steep with local color my accumulated Keian lore.

It was high noon of a perfect June day when we dropped anchor at Koressia, which is the port of Ioulis, and were rowed ashore ; for this spacious landlocked harbor is as innocent of a pier as it was when Nestor put in here on his return from Troy. Of the harbor town which flourished here in Bacchylides’ time, but had been absorbed by Ioulis long before Strabo came in the first century B. C. to take notes for his geography, there are but slight remains; and its modern successor is limited to half a dozen summer cottages in one bend of the bay, and as many mean warehouses and cafés in another. It is a grateful solitude in which the Past asserts itself; and one is free to try his mind on the wealth of matter which the ancient geographer has packed into half a dozen sentences. Strabo himself is primarily concerned with the lay of the land, the four towns, the quartette of great names hailing from loulis, and the unique hemlock habit, to all of which we shall attend in good time ; but on this spot and in the mood of the moment it is a fact postponed by him that most appeals to me. The unique landmark of Koressia was a temple of Apollo Smintheus, whose pestilent arrows are forever raining on us as we open the Iliad. We know not how the Mouse-god came to Keos, unless old Nestor carried him away captive from the flames of Troy. Anyway, the Gerenian knight did build here a shrine to his own Athene, — possibly that she might watch the exiled Sminthian and keep him out of mischief.

Like most of these “ isles of Greece, " Keos is simply a mountain rock springing from the sea, with now and then a bit of level border to offer foothold. About Koressia this border may be half a mile wide at the mouth of the Elixos, which has cut itself a deep channel from the top of the island. On the right of the gorge thus formed our road winds aloft, — a road “ made with hands.”Broad, paved, wall-guarded on the side of the precipice, it was built some fifty years ago by a Keian engineer, and is the pride of the Keian community. Far beneath the Elixos tumbles in its winding way, — like the Helisson and the Ilissos it seems to have got its name from its sinuous course, — and leads with it a band of greenery that charms the eye. Halfway up we come upon a marble fountain beset with spouting dolphins, and, hard by, a little marble belvedere, — an octagon with five door and window ways framing glorious views of the glen and harbor to the west, the Myrtoan main to the north, and the town above. These are public benefactions of a good burgomaster, who has gone on — " in the prime of life and fortune,” as he says in the inscription — to build himself a marble tomb on the same sightly terrace. So far as I know, the tomb is still waiting for its tenant; but the demarch must be fond of traveling this road, and reflecting how handy the water will come by and by.

As our cavalcade sets forth again, we have above us the town, looking like a flock of seagulls lit on a beetling cliff, and the long line of whirling windmills in the still higher distance ; and just without the gates we halt at another fountain, neighbored by a spreading planetree. It is rather more archaic, and the stone pavement before it. is relieved by a basis of old gold Pentelic, inscribed,

“The people [have erected this statue of] Livia wife of the Imperator Cæsar.” Thus, what time our new era was dawning on the world, the poor Keians were paying court on this spot to the imperial consort of Augustus; and the marble record of the fact now does duty as a paving-stone !

The wide road, here cut down in the sheer cliff, leads across the saddle of the two-hilled city, now and then dodging round a corner and threatening to run into people’s houses. For here, as in Naxos and Tenos, the houses often straddle the street, and the street becomes an arcade. Making our way through the labyrinth, we dismount at a café whose back balcony looks down upon a deep gorge, — the fellow of that by which we had entered, —while over against us on the southeast rises to a height of some two thousand feet the real apex of the island, now named for the Prophet Elias.

While a lamb is roasting for our luncheon, we follow the same great road a half mile or so around the head of the defile to the Lion, still couchant on the steep over against loulis on the east, as he may have been when Simonides was singing here, — some would even say, when Nestor put in here. There are lions and lions, but the Lion of loulis is the Lion of Hellas. The lions on guard above the gate of Mycenæ may be older, but they have lost their heads, and therewith their main majesty. The lion sentinel over Leonidas’ grave at Thermopylæ disappeared ages ago, though we still possess the inscription written for it by Simonides : —

The Lion of Chæroneia commemorates a great and definite event, but he has been broken to pieces. Better luck has attended the Lion of Keos. Couched here on his flank in the living rock, with reverted head, twenty-eight feet from tip to tail, every feature perfect, full of life and majesty, it is hard to think of him as a mere image made with hands. He looks rather as if in some prehistoric age — the colossus of his kind — he might have lain down here alive, and turned to stone, possibly after clearing the island of its first occupants. For there is a myth handed down to us by an old writer that Keos was originally inhabited by the nymphs, until they were scared away by a lion and fled to Karystos, leaving to the “ jumping-off place ” the name of Lion Point. At all events, the monument and the myth make a perfect fit: our lion is the very beast to strike terror into nymphs or any other unwelcome neighbors. He lies just under the great road, with the mountain rising terrace on terrace above, and sloping down to the gorge below. The terrace patches yield a scant growth of barley, and the sheaves, already gathered under the Lion’s nose, afford good sitting for the rest of us, while Dr. Quinn takes a camera-shot at the Lion, and catches a panorama of the Castle Hill and the town, with the whirling windmills on the lofty ridge beyond.

The identification of the presenttown of Keos — bearing, as usual in the Cyclades, the island name — with the ancient loulis is placed beyond a doubt by Strabo’s precise topography. “ The city,” he says, “ is pitched upon a mountain some fiveand-twenty stadia from the sea, and its seaport is the place where Koressia once stood, though that town has ceased to be even a village settlement. . . . And near Koressia is the river Elixos.” Mountain site, stream, distance, seaport, all answer to a dot; and yet, as we shall see, old Tournefort (circa 1700) had removed loulis to Karthaia, and Karthaia to loulis. As Strabo found the four towns merged in two, we find today substantially the entire island population packed in one ; yet the greater loulis counts less than five thousand souls. They have the repute of manly mountaineers, inclined to soldiering and seafaring, and zealous of good works as a community: witness their fine roads and bridges and frequent fountains.

Nor is public spirit any new thing under the Keian sun. In the Holy Struggle for liberty (1821-28) the men of Keos bore a leading and constant part, thus emulating the example of a greater age. For in the Persian wars, when most of her island neighbors gave earth and water to the Mede, Keos stood stoutly for the good cause from first to last; and her name may still be read on the glorious muster roll of Salamis and Platæa that was set up at Delphi four-and-twenty centuries ago, and which now, by the irony of fate, adorns the Sultan’s public square. Time has spared one jewel, three words long, of Simonides, which finds its proper setting in all we know of Keian history: πóλιξ ăνδρα διδáσκϵι (the state moulds the man). Keos was a school of that larger patriotism which found an organ voice in Simonides, while Pindar was dumb for very shame of his faithless “ Mother Thebes.” It was the good fortune of Simonides to be bred in this mountain air of the sea, aloof from the provincial feuds that kept the mainland in ferment, and in a society famed for that perfect poise which the old Greeks styled sophrosyne.

Physically, it was a rare climate. The fig-trees bore thrice a year, Theophrastus says, and the honey rivaled that of Hymettus and Hyblæa. The silkworm flourished, and it was a Keian dame (Pamphile, Latoös’ daughter) who first turned its labor to account by weaving those diaphanous webs which later found their way to Rome, and gave Lucretius a handle against his degenerate countrywomen. Morally, the air was pure. Young men and maidens refrained from wine, and of courtesan and flute-girl the island was innocent. This physical and moral wholesomeness, strange to say, had its drawback: it induced excessive longevity and consequent over-population. With the economic question thus raised Keos dealt in an original way, for which, I think, Malthus never gave her credit. Where other Greek states relieved their congestion by the colonial route, Keos chose what we may call the hemlock route.

The Keian hemlock was a very drastic article, and the draught it brewed (as Theophrastus tells us) was one “of swift and easy release.” In the exercise of their distinctive virtue, the aged Keians numbered their own days, and, before infirmity and dotage overtook them, sought this euthanasy ; and Menander, whose plays the sands of Egypt are now giving up piecemeal along with the lyrics of Bacchylides, applauded the practice : “ Noble the Keian fashion, Phanias ;

Who cannot nobly live spurns life ignoble.”

They bade their friends as to a festival, and, with garlands on their brows, pledged them in the deadly cup. If Theramenes was (as Plutarch avers) a Keian, his dying pleasantry in pledging “ dear Kritias ” in the hemlock draught was as homely as it was grim.

The facts are certified by writers as early as the fourth century, who speak of the hemlock habit as already in the established order of things ; and one historical instance of this blessed " taking off ” is recorded by a Roman eye-witness, Valerius Maximus, who visited Keos in the suite of Pompey on bis way to Asia. Plere at Ioulis, a noble dame of ninety winters, but of sound mind and body, was setting forth on this free-will journey, and nothing loath to have her departure dignified by Pompey’s presence. Unlike a Roman he would have detained her, but she would not stay ; and, having deliberately set her house in order, she drained the mortal draught and expired with circumstance, as Socrates before her, while the Romans looked on awestruck and bathed in tears.

Thus the Ionian stock of Keos had a Doric strain,—a sort of iron in the blood, — which we feel in the monumental lines of Simonides, “ calm, simple, terse, strong as the deeds they celebrate, enduring as the brass or stone which they adorned.” Still, in the grain it was Ionian, in cult Apolline. It was Apollo, not in his malign Sminthian manifestation, but in the person of his benign son Aristæus, who was the fountain-head of Keian culture; and where Apollo moves the Muses follow.

It was this unique blend that made Keos at once a theatre of strenuous action, a school of high thinking, and a nest of song. And it was in song that Keos won enduring fame. When Æschylus was born at Eleusis, and Pindar at Thebes, this isle was already ringing with the chorals of Simonides. Up to thirty the man and his Muse were home-bred ; but even then his fame had gone abroad in Greece. Athens, ever quick to hear a great voice, wooed him ; and to their brilliant court the Pisistratids welcomed him with open arms. There he met Anacreon, and loved him well, as he mourned him melodiously at last. There he must have witnessed the early plays of Thespis; and, above all, he watched from its very cradle the growth of the generation that was to make its mark at Marathon and Salamis. He saw the overthrow of the tyrants whose praises he had sung, and the rise of the Athenian democracy whose laureate he became. Withal the Keian was broadening into the Hellene, as in the society of Thessalian princes and in the courtly circles of Syracuse — where his last days were passed with such comrades as Æschylus and Pindar — he was to attain his full stature as an all-round man of the world. Courtier and diplomat; in the largest sense a patriot, but no puritan ; illustrious at thirty, and still winning Athenian choral crowns at eighty ; at ninety going down to the grave with princely pomp, and leaving behind a fame that “ filled antiquity as rich wine fills a golden urn,” few singers have been happier in their day and lot. A modern parallel has been sought in Voltaire ; but for a truer heredity of genius, partial though it be, we need only look to our own Lowell. Wide as was Simonides’ range, we have but scant salvage of a precious freight, and that chiefly in one kind. All things considered, it is the kind we would have chosen, for in these forty odd epigrams all the glory of Greece in its most glorious age finds fit utterance. From the day that Athens chose his elegy on the heroic dead of Marathon in preference to that of their own comrade Æschylus, Simonides was the “God-gifted organ voice ” of Hellas: and this is perhaps his loftiest organ note: —

That goes beyond word-painting, — his own definition of poetry; and this is antique sculpture, majestic as the Lion of his native isle : —

Bacchylides was born too late to partake the glow of battle and the wine of victory ; and, compared with his great kinsman, he must seem an idle singer of an empty day. Yet, in his minor key, what poet ever sang a sweeter note ? One’s lyric standard need not make him prefer Bacchylides to Pindar, but even in the eagle’s presence the nightingale is not to be scorned. It is the shadow of greater names — the odious comparison— that has obscured the real worth of the younger Keian. Taking its cue from the author of the De Sublimitate (doubtless but half understood), modern criticism has made him out a mere echo of his uncle, — learned and painstaking, flawless and ornate, but languid and without any breath of divine inspiration. Yet if Pindar himself, in his eagle flights, deigned time and again to swoop down and peck at Bacchylides, his must have been a genius to be reckoned with by the highest; and even our fragments, footing up one hundred and seven lines all told, and the longest of them not a sonnet’s length, go far to justify the appeal which Mahaffy had already taken from the traditional judgment

If Simonides was the master voice of his own strenuous day, the serener day that followed found a voice as true in Bacchylides. Witness the familiar Pæan. of Peace, and that other genial fragment, where fancy, warmed by the wine-cup, builds castle above castle in the air, —of love and glory, of regal state and opulence and

Conning these lines on his native isle, how little we dreamed that another ship from Egypt was about to fetch us a richer freight than the wheat-laden argosies he sang,—even his own songs ! More than once he had spoken well of Egypt, as in the flotsam line,

and Egypt has repaid him well in safeguarding for two thousand years a volume of his verse tenfold greater than all we had before, and in giving it up at a moment when the world is ripe as it never was before to test and treasure it.

And since this must be but an earnest of richer gifts to come, we may dwell for a moment on the manner of its coming. Antiquity had its own strange ways of handing down its wealth, — ways so strange that we recover our legacies only by robbing its tombs. The sepulchres of Mycenæ, furnished forth as dwellings for the dead, have at last told us the actual life-story of Homer’s idealized Achaians ; while the tombs of Egypt are found to be the archives, sacred and secular, of uncounted generations. True, their illuminated texts do not much appeal to us ; but it is to their funereal etiquette that we owe the recovery of our poet, and of many another precious scroll, notably the Athenian Constitution of Aristotle. The old Egyptian thought to while away eternity with his favorite authors, and so took with him to the long home not only his Book of the Dead, but a stock of light reading, — tales, love stories, and the like. When Egypt became a province of Alexander’s Greater Greece, and Alexandria the literary capital of the world, Greek books must have speedily asserted their supreme charm, and crowded the stiff old picture-writings to the wall. The Muses, indeed, in their captivity on the Nile, could not sing the old songs of Helicon and Castaly, — it is but for a moment we catch the pipe-notes of Theocritus above the stifling sands, — but all the harvest of Hellenic genius was garnered there. Not alone in the vast library that flames were to devour, but in countless homes of affluence and culture, Hellenic and Hellenized, Greek letters found loving study. And, no doubt, following the time-honored fashion of the country, Hellene and Hellenist alike would indulge the “ ruling passion, strong in death.” Thus Flinders Petrie could have thought it nothing strange when he found the mummy of a young girl with a papyrus roll of the Iliad to pillow her head; and he may yet light upon some bookworm’s tomb with all its treasures intact.

Such a “ bursting forth of genius from the dust ” was looked for when the buried cities of Campagna came to light; and Wordsworth, musing by Rydal Mount, uttered this prophetic note : —

If “ haughty Time ” has failed as yet to grant the letter of the poet’s wish, the essence of it is taking shape in accomplished fact. Instead of a single scroll of the elder Keian, the younger is now restored to us in a full score of his sweetest songs. Some eighteen centuries ago there died at Luxor a man who loved Bacchylides so well that the poet must needs bear him company beyond the bourne.² That the dead man thumbed the precious volume in the tomb we cannot say ; but it was in safekeeping. Meantime, every copy aboveground would seem to have perished within the four centuries following. At least, for any trace we can get of Bacchylides beyond the hundred-odd lines that had lodged here and there, as other ancients quoted them to point a moral or adorn a tale, the poet had been lost to the world for fourteen hundred years, until the tomb at Luxor gave up its treasure a year or so ago.

We may turn, then, from the tatters of the anthology to an editio princeps, on which the learning of Britain assisted by Germany has labored for a year, and which has but now reached these shores. Rash as it would be to pass judgment at sight, the first reading of these twenty poems, aggregating ten hundred and seventy lines, bears out our best prepossessions. If Bacchylides still misses the splendor of the poet militant, he sings with a clear, true note — at times in lofty strain — the mimic wars beside wide - whirling Alpheos and the springs of Castaly. Fitly enough, these new odes of victory begin at home. It is a Keian compatriot, Melas, returning crowned from the Isthmus, and again from Nomea, to whom the first two odes are dedicated ; and the sixth and seventh celebrate another Keian, Lachon, who has won the stadion at Olympia. The first ode is of peculiar interest because it gives the setting and correction of a familiar fragment: ” I declare, and will declare, that highest glory waits on worth, while wealth even with craven men doth dwell.” For the elegant trifler the poet has been reputed, the ode is a noble tribute to virtue, — that strenuous virtue, which once won “ leaves behind an imperishable crown of glory.” The sixth ode, of sixteen short lines, has a delicious flavor. Lachon, crowned with the Olympian olive, has returned to “vine-clad, Keos,” and this is his welcome home, — an offhand serenade ending thus :

“ And now song-queen Urania’s hymn by grace of Victory doth honor thee, O wind-fleet son of Aristomenos, with songs before thy doors, for that thou hast won the course and brought good fame to Keos.”

But these are minor strains, and may well mark the poet’s homelier days. He is but preening his wings for flights yet to be tried with the Theban eagle. Of the fourteen triumphal odes three celebrate events sung also by Pindar ; and one of these— the fifth in Kenyon’s arrangement — is a poem of two hundred lines, substantially intact, which may be fairly regarded as giving the best measure of the poet’s powers. It is addressed to his royal patron, Hiero of Syracuse, on the same occasion that called out Pindar’s First Olympian; and it opens with a challenge that may well have made the Theban wince. Bacchylides is an eagle, too, and he asserts the claim in a lyric flight that goes far to justify it: —

“ With tawny pinions cleaving swift the azure deep on high, the eagle, wideruling and loud-crashing Zeus’ herald, relying on his mighty strength, is bold, while shrill-toned birds crouch in affright. Him nor wide earth’s mountain crests nor rugged billows of the unwearied deep restrain, but in the unmeasured Void with Zephyr’s blasts apace he plies his delicate plumes, — a shining mark for men to see. Even so have I a boundless range all ways to hymn your worth, proud scions of Deinomenes,³ by grace of Nike azuretressed and Ares of the brazen front.”

I had already ventured with some misgiving to speak of our poet as a nightingale ; and it was not a little gratifying to find he had owned up to the soft impeachment in advance by speaking of himself as “ the honey-tongued nightingale of Keos ” (Ode iii. end). But this eagle claim, supported by an eagle flight, goes farther, and must give the critics much concern.

It could not be expected, and certainly it cannot be said, that this lyric elevation is sustained throughout this or any other ode. Indeed, we can only be glad that it is so rarely essayed. For the charm of Bacchylides is that of sweetness and light. From Pindar we turn to him, as we turn from Browning to Tennyson. Ætna in eruption is sublime, but an Attic dawn delights us more. If Bacchylides rarely soars, he is never lurid, he never gives the sense of strain. He is as lucid as the noonday, his verse as crystal clear as the prose of Lysias. This quality it may well have been that won the heart of his Luxor votary, assuming that the latter was a barbarian whose Greek had come hard ; and it is bound to make Bacchylides a reigning favorite, in school and out. Then he is never dull, never languid ; and more than once we catch a fresh breeze that literature had missed, — notably in the precious seventeenth ode. There, young Theseus, challenged by that bloody old Turk of his day, Minos, leaps from the darkprowed ship as it bears the tribute-youth to the Minotaur, and dolphins conduct him down to the deep-sea halls of Amphitrite, who robes and crowns him as the sea-god’s true-born son ; so that, returning in triumph to the ship, the hero confounds old Minos, and puts new heart into his hapless company. Of this charming pæan Louis Dyer has well said that “ there is not in all literature a lyric more saturated with the magic of the sea; and indeed, the smell of the sea is on all the poet’s works. How could it be otherwise with one who had forever ringing in his ears those two voices of the mountain and the sea, blending here of all places in that perfect unison as dear to song as it ever was to liberty!

Of all this, to be sure, the Lion gave no sign, — no more than the Sphinx,— as he crouched in his native rock and gazed over his shoulder on the eagle’s nest of men above him. No voice broke the stillness of the ancient hillside stadium, where (as we now know) island athletes had trained for victories at Olympia and the Isthmus ; nor did the deserted streets of the town even suggest an Olympian serenade. Still, as we ate our lamb and washed it down with good Keian wine, we had enough to think of ; and more yet as we rode for three hours over the mountain whereon Aristæus had built his altar to Ikmaian Zeus, and which is now clothed to the crest with oak plantations, at once the beauty and the wealth of Keos. The acorn crop, prized of all good tanners, yields more than half the total island revenue, and the abundant rich green foliage against the mountain background makes a charming blend of English and Alpine scenery. For the most part it is a solitary way, but as we approach Karthaia the solitude is broken. From a little glen far below our feet come up the bleat of lambs and notes of articulate - speaking men; it is a harvest group of men, women, and children reaping barley, and keeping time to the sickle with the song. What more pleasing scene or sounds could have signalized our sunset entry into the place where Simonides kept his chorus school fourand-twenty centuries ago ?

Ioulis was a good place to be born in, as Plutarch avers ; and perched aloft in the teeth of the north wind it doubtless offered good breeding for a laureate of storm and stress. But Karthaia is a poet’s dream. Full on the southern sea opens a little vale, mountain-walled on the other three sides, and bisected nearly all its length by a ridge whose seaward extremity bears the ancient acropolis. Into this we enter by a gateway carved out of the living rock, to find ourselves in a litter of marble ruins eloquent of a great past. At its extreme point the acropolis spur rises twenty feet higher in a symmetrical oval block some two hundred feet In diameter, and still bearing traces of a vast building. Bröndsted believed it to be the choregeion of Simonides, and the poet could have found no more fitting spot. At its foot by the sea are the ruins of Apollo’s temple, and a little to the west, under the acropolis wall, the theatre, with the lower rows still left to define the semicircle. There we have the essential features of the poet’s place of business, if we may use the phrase ; and that the business was a good one we have His own word in an epigram scoring six - and - fifty choral victories. There are famous old tales told of choristry and temple, but we cannot stay to tell them over.

At sunset, in a stillness broken only by the gentle plashing of the sea and the tinkle of sheep-bells, Karthaia is indeed a poet’s dream. Here, and at such an hour, Simonides may well have conceived that exquisite threnody whose pure pathos has hardly been approached in all the ages since. It is Danae’s lullaby to the babe Perseus, adrift with her in a tiny ark upon this very sea; and in Symonds’ rendering we have its beauty and its pathos unimpaired : —

Indeed, it is a poem of place; for the choristry looks out over the very waters that bore the carven chest, and toward Seriphos, where the sea gave up its precious charge.

We are nowhere expressly told that the nephew succeeded the uncle as choirmaster at Karthaia, though it is a fair inference from an epigram of his own as emended by Bergk, and would have been in the due order of things. In any case, we cannot doubt that he was himself trained here, and that he sang in many a chorus, and so bore a part in earning not a few of the six-and-fifty victories which the elder poet gloried in. Hence we might well believe that it was in this serene air, on the morrow of some sweet festival, — after the stout struggle with the Mede was over, and Hellas was launched upon her great career, — that Bacchylides tuned his lyre to that exquisite Pæan of Peace or that deep-sea idyl of Theseus and Amphitrite.

But we linger too long about this ghost of a city ; for in all its domain there is to-day but one visible tenant who pays a rent of fifty drachmæ a year, and keeps a donkey, five head of cattle, and as many black sheep, — all penned in a bit of pasture which covers the ancient theatre. There is, indeed, a tiny fieldchapel with three or four huts up the vale to the west, which is watered by a little brook. That way we would have taken to visit the last of the Keian towns, Poiëessa, on our return ; but our Keian escort would not budge an inch out of the beaten track, and we had to countermarch on Keos. It was near midnight when we sat down to dinner there, — in an upper room with an earthen floor; the ground-floor, as usual, being reserved for other livestock. We had not chosen our inn, — in fact, there is no such thing on the island, — but lodgings had been chosen for us in a household innocent of the hemlock habit. The grandmother with all her tribe — for the house was hers — had waited up for us, and a smoking dinner was at once served. It was not bad, and went far to put us in good humor again before we sought our bed. The bedroom floor was only beaten earth, and windows there were none; but we found a pair of slippers provided for each of us, and the bed was a luxury. On our midnight dinner we slept deliciously for four hours, and were off again at five for a second try at Poiëessa.

It was a new kind of day for Keos, as we rode straight up the steep street to the southwest, and past the line of windmills whose vanes were fairly flying in the stiff west wind. To the old Keian Zephyr was the “ fattening ” wind, because it filled the corn in the ear, — a process which went on even after the reaping, as Theocritus well knew ; and no doubt the merry reapers among the oaks by our roadside were alive to this philosophy. But at the moment the whirling windmills recalled Zephyr’s function as winnower of the grain, — an office the ancient husbandman would requite with votive shrines. Indeed, the last word we hear of Bacchylides in the old anthology is on this text: —

All Greece still employs the open threshing-floor, with no “power” save the trampling hoof and the winnowing wind ; but Keian husbandry offers a more quaint survival. Instead of storing the grain in bins aboveground the Keians bury it in spherical pits. On the island of Karpathos, it is said, these pits are dug in the form of narrow-necked jars and cemented, exactly as we find their prehistoric prototypes about the Pnyx at Athens. When the Western farmer “ buries ” his potatoes, he is in grand old company.

A two hours’ ride brought us to the site of the fourth town of the old tetrapolis, only to find peasants reaping and cattle grazing where the ancient citystate had coined its money, and made its laws, and reared its temples. Poiëessa. like Karthaia, has reverted to nature, and of its old-time glory naught is left but the outlook on the Saronic Gulf and Sunium.

In twenty-four hours we had made the round of Keos and were on board again. As we watched the receding shore and the lonely harbor, once a city-state, I found my mind dwelling on a document I had recently spelled out in a dusky crypt of the Museum at Athens. It was a battered marble slab, and it bore the text of a decree of the Senate and Demos of the Koressians granting to Athens the exclusive right to export the red ochre or vermilion of their mines. The decree, which some closefisted Athenian might have written for them, not only grants this monopoly, but it fixes the duty and the freight-rates, and forbids the carriage in any but duly licensed vessels. This under stringent penalties, — the informer to take half the confiscated cargo ; if he be a slave and the chattel of the illicit exporter, to get his freedom to boot. And the decree ends, as usual, by inviting the Athenian envoys to dinner at the Prytaneion on the morrow ! Recorded with it is a decree of the same tenor by the Senate and Demos of Ioulis, and a fragment of a third by the Karthaians.

The interest of the document is manifold. It attests the autonomy of the several Keian towns in making treaties as well as in coining money. It lights up Athens’ way with the weak. In the sixth century Keos was a commercial power, as her abundant silver coinage on the Æginetan standard attests; under Athenian hegemony, the Attic standard, of course, comes in, and the Keian mints coin nothing but copper. In her vermilion — the best in the known world, as Theophrastus tells us — the island had one unique resource, indispensable to every architect and artist. Athens could afford the potter’s clay, but not his colors ; the pure Pentelic, but not the skyey tints to light it up. If she were to enjoy a monopoly in art, she must mount guard over the ochre veins of Keos. The treaties still extant, date only from the middle of the fourth century, but they are simply renewals of earlier ones; the monopoly may have been in force when Pheidias’ painters were laying their brilliant colors on the marbles of the Parthenon, if not when Polygnotos was frescoing the Stoa Poikile.

The vermilion mines are worked out; and, commercially, Keos now concerns the tanner, not the artist. But, with her poet son rising in his singing-robes again, we may ask with the old Athenian player ϵυ Kϵωτíζ ημϵρα; (What day on Keos ?)

Whatever Krates meant by the rub, it is a good day for Keos and a good day for the world that sees this old song-centre recovering its voice.

J. Irving Manatt.