We were awakened in the morning by an unaccustomed sound,—a subdued, rapid, rhythmic cadence coming up from the esplanade below, accompanied by the monotonous undertone of a voice saying something in time with the shuffle of marching feet, the whole punctuated now and then by a word of command and less frequently by the unmistakable clang of arms. The soldiers from the fortress were having their morning drill. The words of command sounded strangely natural, although presumably in Greek, doubtless because military men the world over fall into the habit of uttering “commands of execution” in a sort of unintelligible grunt. The counting of “fours” sounded natural, too, despite the more marked Hellenism of the numbers. So far from being a disturbance, the muffled tread of the troops was rather soporific, which is fortunate, because I have been in Nauplia on several occasions, and this early drill appears to be the regular thing under the windows of the HÔtel des Étrangers.

The fine open space along the water front makes a tempting parade-ground, and at other hours an attractive place for general assemblage, especially at evening, when the people of Nauplia are to be seen lounging along the wharves or drinking their coffee in the shade under the white line of buildings. The quay curves for a long distance around the bay, and alongside it are moored many of those curious hollow schooners that do the coastwise carrying in Greece. Nauplia appears still to be something of a port, although infinitely smaller and less busy than either the PirÆus or Patras. Her name, of course, is redolent of the sea. The beauty of her situation has often reminded visitors of Naples, but it is only a faint resemblance to the Italian city. In size she is little indeed. Scenically, however, her prospects are magnificent, with their inclusion of a panorama of distant and imposing peaks towering far away across the inner bay, so admirably sheltered from the outer seas by the massive promontory, on the inner shelf of which the city stands. The town is forced to be narrow because of the little space between the water and the great cliff rising precipitously behind. There is room for little more than three parallel streets, and in consequence Nauplia is forced to make up in length what she lacks in breadth, and strings along eastward in a dwindling line of buildings to the point where the marshy shore curves around toward Tiryns, or loses herself in the barren country that lies in the gray valleys that lead inland to Epidaurus.

From the windows of the hotel the most conspicuous object in the middle distance was a picturesque islet in the midst of the bay, almost entirely covered by a yellow fort of diminutive size and Venetian appearance—the home of an interesting functionary, though a gruesome one; to wit, the national executioner. For Nauplia at the present day is above all else the Sing-Sing of Hellas,—the site of the national prison, where are confined the principal criminals of the kingdom, and more especially those who are under sentence of death. The medieval fortifications on the summit behind the town have been converted to the base uses of a jail, and are locally known as the Palamide. We did not make the ascent to the prison, although it cannot be a hard climb, but contented ourselves with purchasing the small wares that are vended by street dealers in the lower town,—strings of “conversation beads,” odd knives, and such like things, which you are assured were made by “brigands” confined in the prison above. Somehow a string of beads made by a Greek “brigand” seems a possession to be coveted.

“M. de Nauplia,” if that is the proper way of referring to the headsman, is a criminal himself. He is generally, and probably always, one who has been convicted of murder, but who has accepted the post of executioner as the price of escaping the extreme penalty of the law. It is no small price to pay, for while it saves the neck of the victim it means virtual exile during the term of the service, and aversion of all good people forever. We were told that the executioner at the time was a man who had indulged in a perfect carnival of homicide—so much so that in almost any other country he would have been deemed violently and irreclaimably insane and would have escaped death by confinement in an asylum. But not so he. Instead he was sentenced to a richly deserved beheading by the guillotine, and the penalty was only commuted by his agreement to assume the unwelcome task of dispatching others of his kind—an office carrying with it virtual solitary imprisonment for a term variously stated as from five to eight years, and coupled with lasting odium. For all those years he must live on the executioner’s island, unattended save by the corporal’s guard of soldiers from the fort, which guard is changed every day or two, lest the men be contaminated or corrupted into conniving at the prisoner’s escape. Others told us that the term of his sanguinary employ was as long as twenty-five years, but this was far greater than the average story set as his limit. On liberation, it is said to be the ordinary practice for these unhappy men to go abroad and seek spots where their condition is unknown. On days when death sentences are to be executed the headsman is conveyed with solemn military pomp to the Palamide prison above the city, and there in the prison yard the guillotine is found set up and waiting for the hand that releases its death-dealing knife. Whether or not the executioner is paid a stated pittance in any event, or whether, as we were told by some, he was paid so much “per head,” we never found out. Meantime the executioner’s island undeniably proves one of the features of Nauplia, quaint to see, and shrouded with a sort of awesome mystery.

The narrow streets of Nauplia furnished diversion for a short time. They proved to be fairly clean, and the morning hours revealed a picturesque array of barbaric colored blankets and rugs hung out of the upper balconies to air. In one street a dense throng about an open door drew attention to the morning session of the municipal court. The men roaming the streets were mainly in European dress, although here and there a peasant from the suburbs displayed his quaint capote and pomponed shoes. It was one of these native-garbed gentry who approached us with a grin and stated in excellent English, that sorted strangely with his Hellenic clothes, that he was once employed in an electric light plant in Cincinnati. Did he like it? Oh, yes! In fact, he was quite ready to go back there, where pay was better than in Nauplia. And with an expressive shrug and comprehensive gesture that took in the whole broad sweep of the ancient kingdom of the Atreidai, he added, “Argos is broke; no good!” One other such deserves mention, perhaps; one who broke in on a reverential reverie one day, as we were contemplating a Greek dance in a classic neighborhood, with some English that savored of the Bowery brand, informing us that he had been in America and had traveled all over that land of plenty in the peregrinations of Barnum’s circus, adding as a most convincing passport to our friendship, "I was wit' old man Barnum w'en he died." Greeks who speak English are plentiful in the Peloponnesus, and even those who make no other pretensions to knowledge of the tongue are proud of being able to say “all right” in response to labored efforts at pidgin Greek.

It did not take long to exhaust the interest of the city of Nauplia itself, including a survey of the massive walls that survive from the Middle Ages. And it was fortunate, too, because we had planned to spend the day at Epidaurus, which lies eighteen miles or so away, and was to be reached only by a long and arduous ride in a carriage—the same highly respectable old landau in which we had ridden the length of Agamemnon’s kingdom the day before. Owing to the grade and the considerable solidity of our party a third horse was in some miraculous way attached by ropes to the carriage, the lunch was loaded in the hood forward, and we rattled away through the narrow streets toward the open country east of the town—a country that we soon discovered to be made up of narrow valleys winding among gray and treeless hills, whose height increased steadily as the highway wound along. It was a good highway—the distances being marked in “stadia,” as the Greek classically terms his kilometres, and the stadium posts constantly reminding us that this was an “Odos EthnikÉ,” or national road. But we missed sadly the large trees that are to be seen in the close neighborhood of the city as we jogged out on the dusty road in the heat of the increasing April day.

The grade, while not steep, was mainly upward through the long valleys, making the journey a matter of more than three hours under the most favorable of conditions; and the general sameness of the scenery made it a rather monotonous drive. Of human habitation there was almost none, for although here and there one might find a vineyard, the greater part of the adjacent land is little more than rocky pasture. It soon developed, however, that the modern Greek shepherd is not afraid to play his pipes at noonday through any fear of exciting the wrath or jealousy of Pan, as was once the case; for from the mountain-sides and from under the scanty shade of isolated olive trees we kept hearing the plaintive wailing of the pipes, faint and far away, where some tender of the flocks was beguiling the time in music. This distant piping is indescribable. The tone is hardly to be called shrill, for it is so only in the sense that its pitch is high like the ordinary human whistling; in quality it is a soft note, apparently following no particular tune but wavering up and down, and generally ending in a minor wail that soon grows pleasant to hear. Besides, it recalls the idyls of Theocritus, and the pastorals and bucolics take on a new meaning to anybody who has heard the music of the shepherd lads of Greece. Nothing would do but we must buy pipes and learn to play upon them; so a zealous inquiry was instituted among the wayfaring men we met, with a view to securing the same. It was not on this day, however, but on the next that we finally succeeded in buying what certainly looked like pipes, but which turned out to be delusions and snares so far as music was concerned. They were straight wooden tubes, in which holes had been burned out at regular intervals to form “stops” for varying the tone. No reed was inserted in them, and if they were to be played upon at all it must be by reason of a most accomplished “lip.” We derived considerable amusement from them, however, by attempting to reproduce on them the mellifluous whistling of the natives; but the nearest approach to awakening any sound at all which any of our party achieved was so lugubriously melancholy that he was solemnly enjoined and commanded never to try it again, on pain of being turned over to “M. de Nauplia” as the only fitting punishment. Later we found that the flute-like notes that we heard floating down over the vales from invisible shepherds came from a very different sort of wind instrument—a reed pipe of bamboo not unlike the American boy’s willow whistle, with six or seven stops bored out of the tube.

The wayfarers were decidedly the most interesting sights on the Epidaurus road. Several stadia out of Nauplia a stalwart man came striding down a hill from his flocks and took the road to town. He was dressed in the peasant garb, and across his shoulders he bore a yoke, from either end of which depended large yellow sacks containing freshly made cheese, the moisture draining through the meshes of the cloth as he walked along to market. These cheeses we had met with in the little markets at Athens and found not unpleasant, once one grows accustomed to the goat’s milk flavor and the “freshness;” although it is probable that a taste for Greek cheese, like that for the resinated wine, is an acquired one.

Groups of shepherds were encountered now and then, especially at the few points along the way where buildings and shade were to be found. They were all picturesque in their country dress, but more especially the women, who spin flax as they walk and who probably ply a trade as old as Hellenic civilization itself in about the same general way that their most remote ancestors plied it. These little knots of peasants readily enough posed for the camera, and were contented with a penny apiece for drink-money. Not the least curious feature of these peasant herdsmen was the type of crook carried—not the large, curved crook that the ordinary preconceived ideal pictures, but straight sticks with a queer little narrow quirk in the end, with which the shepherd catches the agile and elusive goat or lamb by the hind leg and thus holds it until he is able to seize the animal in some more suitable part. These herdsmen proved hospitable folk, ready enough with offers of milk fresh from the herd, which is esteemed a delicacy by them, whatever it might have seemed to our uneducated palates.

Perhaps halfway out to Epidaurus one passes another remnant of the most remote time—a lofty fortification on a deserted hill. It is of polygonal masonry—that is, of angular stones fitted together without mortar, instead of being squared after the manner of the Cyclopes. Hard by, spanning a ravine which has been worn by centuries of winter torrents, there was a Cyclopean bridge, made of huge rocks so arranged as to form an enduring arch, and on this once ran no doubt the great highway from Epidaurus to the plain of Argos.

It was long after the noontide hour when the gray theatre of Epidaurus, a mere splash of stone in the distant side of a green hill, came in sight, lying a mile or so away across a level field, in which lay scattered the remnants of what was once the most celebrated hospital in the world. For Epidaurus boasted herself to be the birthplace of Æsculapius,—or, as we are on Greek soil, Asklepios,—and held his memory in deep reverence forever after by erecting on the site a vast establishment such as to-day we might call a “sanitarium.” After the heat and dust of the ride it was pleasant to stretch out in the shade of the scanty local trees, on the fragrant grass of the rising ground near the theatre, and look back down the long valley, with its distant blue mountains framed in a vista of massive gray hills. The nearer ones were impressive in their height, but absolutely denuded of vegetation, like the hills around Attica; and it was these mountains that formed the sole scenery for the background of plays produced in the great theatre close by. The theatre, of course, is the great and central attraction at Epidaurus to-day, for it is in splendid preservation while all else is a confusing mass of flat ruins. No ancient theatre is better preserved, or can surpass this one for general grace of lines or perfection of acoustic properties. Many were doubtless larger, but among all the old Greek theatres Epidaurus best preserves to the modern eye the playhouse of the ancients, circular orchestra and all. The acoustics anybody may test easily enough. We disposed ourselves over the theatre in various positions, high and low, along the half-a-hundred tiers of seats, and listened to an oration dealing with the points of interest in the theatre’s construction delivered in a very ordinary tone, from the centre of the orchestra, but audible in the remotest tier.

The circle of the orchestra is not paved, as had been the case with the theatres seen at Athens, but is a green lawn, in the centre of which a stone dot reveals the site of the ancient altar. It was stated that the circle is not actually as perfect as it looks, being shorter in one set of radii by something like two feet. But to all appearance it is absolutely round, and is easily the most beautiful type of the circular orchestra in existence to-day, if indeed it is not the only perfect one. The immense amphitheatre surrounding it was evidently largely a natural one, which a little artificial stonework easily made complete; and it is so perfect to-day that a very little labor would make it entirely possible to give a play there now before a vast audience. Some such plan was actually talked of a few years ago, but abandoned,—no doubt, because of the apparent difficulty of getting any very considerable company of auditors to the spot, or of housing them while there. It would be necessary, also, to rebuild the proskenion, the foundations of which are still to be seen behind the orchestra, and one may tremble to think of what might happen in the process should the advocates of the stage theory and their opponents fail to agree better than they have hitherto done.

From the inspection of the theatre and the enjoyment of the view across the plain to the rugged hills our dragoman called us to lunch, which was spread in a little rustic pergola below. He had thoughtfully provided fresh mullets, caught that morning off the Nauplia quay, and had cooked them in the little house occupied by the local custode. Hunger, however, was far less a matter of concern than thirst. We had been warned not to drink of the waters of the sacred well of Asklepios in the field below, and as there was no spring vouched for with that certitude that had attended the waters of Castalia, we were thrown back, as usual, on the bottled product of the island of Andros—a water which is not only intrinsically pure and excellent, but well worth the price of admission from the quaint English on its label. In rendering their panegyric on the springs of Andros into the English tongue, the translators have declared that it “is the equal of its superior mineral waters of Europe.”

The sacred well of the god, however, proved later in the day that it had not lost all its virtues even under the assaults of the modern germ theory; for while we were wandering through the maze of ruins in the strong heat of the early afternoon one of our company was decidedly inconvenienced by an ordinary "nose-bleed"—which prompt applications of the water, drawn up in an incongruous tin pail, instantly stopped. And thus did we add what is probably the latest cure, and the only one for some centuries, worked by the once celebrated institution patronized by the native divinity. It is related that the god was born on the hillside just east of the meadow, but this story is sadly in conflict with other traditions. It seems that Asklepios was not originally a divinity, but a mere human, as he seems to be in the Homeric poems. His deification came later, as not infrequently happened in ancient times, and with it came a network of legends ascribing a godlike paternity to him and assigning no less a sire than Apollo. Indeed, it is stated by some authorities that the worship of Asklepios did not originate in Epidaurus at all, but in Thessaly; and that the cult was a transplanted one in its chief site in the Peloponnesus, brought there by Thessalian adventurers.

All over the meadow below the great theatre are scattered the remains of the ancient establishment. The ceremony of healing at Epidaurus seems to have been in large part a faith-cure arrangement, although not entirely so; for there is reason to believe that, as at Delphi, there was more or less natural common sense employed in the miracle-working, and that the priests of the healing art actually acquired not a little primitive skill in medicine. It was a skill, however, which was attended by more or less mummery and circumstance, useful for impressing the mind of the patient; but this is not even to-day entirely absent from the practice of medicine with its “placebos” and “therapeutic suggestion” elements. The custom of sending the patient to rest in a loggia with others, where he might expect a nocturnal visitation of the god himself, has been referred to in these pages before, and survives even to-day in the island of Tenos at the eve of the Annunciation. The tales of marvelous cures at Epidaurus were doubtless as common and as well authenticated as the similar modern stories at Lourdes and Ste. Anne de BeauprÉ.

In addition to the actual apartments devoted to the sleeping patients, which were but a small part of the sanitarium’s equipment, there was the inevitable great temple of the god himself,—a large gymnasium suggestive of the faith the doctors placed in bodily exercise as a remedy, and a large building said to be the first example of a hospital ward, beside numerous incidental buildings devoted to lodgment. Satirical commentators have called attention to the presence of shrines to the honor of Aphrodite and Dionysus as bearing enduring witness to the part that devotion to those divinities seems to have been thought to bear in afflicting the human race. The presence of the magnificent theatre and the existence of a commodious stadium testify that life at Epidaurus was not without its diversions to relieve the tedium of the medical treatment. And in its day it must have been a large and beautiful agglomeration of buildings. To-day it is as much of a maze as the ruins at Delphi or at Olympia. The non-archÆological visitor will probably find his greatest interest in the theatre and in the curious circular "tholos"—a remarkable building, the purpose of which is not clear, made of a number of concentric rings of stone which once bore colonnades. It stands in the midst of the great precinct, and in its ruined state it resembles nothing so much as the once celebrated “pigs-in-clover” puzzle. In the little museum on the knoll above, a very successful attempt has been made to give an idea of this beautiful temple by a partial restoration. Being indoors, it can give no idea either of the diameter or height of the original; but the inclusion of fragments of architrave and columns serve to convey an impression of the general beauty of the structure, as we had seen to be the case with similar fractional restorations at Delphi. The extensive ruins in the precinct itself do not lend themselves to non-technical description. They are almost entirely flat, and the ground plans serve to identify most of the buildings, without giving any very good idea of their appearance when complete. Pavements still remain intact in some of the rooms, and altar bases and exedral seats lie all about in apparent confusion. Nevertheless the discoveries have been plotted and identified with practical completeness, and it is easy enough with the aid of the plans to pass through the precinct and get a very good idea of the manifold buildings which once went to make up what must have been a populous and attractive resort for the sick. Whatever may be thought of the religious aspects of the worship of Asklepios, it is evident that the regimen prescribed by the cult at Epidaurus, with its regard for pure mountain air and healthful bodily exercise, not to mention welcome diversion and amusement for the mind, was furthered by ample facilities in the way of equipment of this world-famous hospital.

When we were there the Greek School of ArchÆology was engaged in digging near the great temple of the god, the foundations of which have now been completely explored to a considerable depth, and it was interesting to see the primitive way in which the excavation was being carried on. Men with curiously shaped picks and shovels were loosening the earth and tossing it into baskets of wicker stuff, which in turn were borne on the heads of women to a distance and there dumped. It was slow work, and apparently nothing very exciting was discovered. Certainly nothing was unearthed while we were watching this laborious toil.