Perhaps the best way to study thoroughly a country, as well as to enjoy it, is to do what we do at home, namely, to wander over it at leisure, letting impressions settle in on us without making efforts to gather information. Unfortunately, we seldom have time to do this in a foreign country. I count it, therefore, as a privilege that during two successive summers a residence, once on the island of Kalauria, now called Poros, and once on the mainland opposite to it, in the territory of Troezen, furnished me an opportunity to become acquainted in this delightful way with a most interesting part of Greece. Not only did I pay frequent visits to the temple on the island, where Demosthenes committed suicide—a temple at that time being excavated by Swedish archÆologists, but I also made several excursions to Troezen, Methana, and Ægina, and once, breaking through the high mountain which opposite Poros approaches the sea, I worked my way over it across the eastern prong of plane-tree-leaf-shaped Peloponnesus to the old Dryopian town of Hermione, which, in its beautiful situation at the innermost recess of a deep bay, rivals Troezen.

For several weeks during one of these summers Mr. Kabbadias, the Greek Ephor-General of Antiquities, was our next neighbor; and subsequently, when he was excavating at Epidauros, where he worked for five years after his brilliant success on the Athenian acropolis, an invitation from him was the occasion of my making a still longer excursion. My companion was a Greek neighbor. As it was summer, we made an early start, sailing along two hours to the harbor of Troezen, where we took horses which had preceded us. At five o’clock we were in the saddle. For an hour or more we skirted the shore as far as the nature of the land (if we may call bare rocks land) would allow it, passing in the rear of Methana, that jagged sierra which from Athens forms an impressive background for Ægina, and is itself projected against the higher mountains of the mainland. Then coming to a point where these mountains fall sheer into the sea some fifteen hundred feet, we were obliged to turn inland. The path, foreseeing the jumping-off place, took the turn betimes by climbing up with many a zigzag a face of the mountain which was not quite perpendicular. After a long pull we passed on our right a village called Lower Phanari, which looked so much like an eyrie that one might think “Lower” was added in jest. But when with still more toil we reached another village called Upper Phanari, and looked down upon the other, we recognized the seriousness of the distinction. There it lay, with its fifty-one houses, so far below us that it seemed almost level with the sea.

Why anybody should ever choose to live so high up on the rocks as Upper Phanari was not at first apparent. But after a halt here for luncheon (brought with us, of course, for no traveller counts on living on such a region), and after two hours of refreshing sleep on wooden benches, we moved downward and inland, and in a quarter of an hour came upon one of those little plains which supported so many villages in ancient Greece. In this case an ancient village, the name of which we may never know, and which occupied the site of Upper Phanari, where it has left substantial traces of itself in the shape of walls, must have got a scanty support from this little plain. Both ancients and moderns, rather than live in the plain, preferred to live on the rocks above, although it entailed carrying the produce and drinking water a mile, that they might live in sight of the beloved sea. Our downward turn was soon exchanged for another upward one, our course being all the time northward and parallel to the shore. Once a great gap in the range separating us from the sea revealed not only the sea, but the whole of Methana, which, with all its height, was so low that we looked over its peaks down into the sea. About four o’clock, refusing a turn into a broad mountain valley to the left, we turned sharply to the right and broke through the mountains by a narrow gorge, and were again on the outside with the whole Saronic Gulf before us. It was such a display of beauty that one shrinks from enumerating its details. What immediately arrested our attention was that which lay at our feet. Here the mountains receded a little, giving place to a paradise of vines and trees, which made a marked contrast to the brown mountains on the one hand, and the blue sea on the other. The boundary lines of each color were very sharp. A large opening, very little of which we could see, ran back into the mountain to the left of the plain. Through this opening a stream came down, flowing even in the summer, a rare thing in Eastern Greece.

This plain contained the ancient town of Epidauros, and three hours’ distant, up through the opening in the mountains, lay the sanctuary of Æsculapius, called to-day the Hieron or Holy Place, which gave the town its importance. One travelling from Athens to Nauplia by sea is attracted by this single opening on the whole eastern shore of Argolis. But much as one would like to turn in here and explore the great opening, and go this way up to the “holy place,” the steamers take him along past it, unless he perchance gets off at Ægina, and trusts himself to a sail-boat to take him across. Travellers generally have to follow the beaten track; and I had visited the Hieron four times by the longer route from Nauplia before it befell me to approach it by this road, which was trodden by the greater part of the tens of thousands who came to seek salvation from Æsculapius.

We now wound our way down the mountain side, entering the village of Epidauros at sunset, along with the troops of vintagers, from whose crates we took grapes to our hearts’ content. As for any payment, nobody thought of that. Now I got an interesting lesson in Greek hospitality. My companion had brought a letter of introduction to a man in this village whom we met coming in from his vineyard. He said that he was very busy disposing of his grapes, and could hardly be at his house at all that night. But he called one of his workmen and told him to take us to his house and see that we had the best room in it. We did not see him again until the next morning, when we met him already among his vines at four o’clock, three miles up the valley on the road to the Hieron. The pressure of New England haymaking is nothing compared with that of the vintage season in Greece.

Nothing could exceed the cordiality of our host in these two encounters by evening and morning twilight. His hospitality was as hearty as it was a matter of course. Angels could have done no more. It was, in the Homeric phrase, d?s?? ????? te f??? te. His off-hand hospitality was to us a perfect godsend. We were lodged in the best house in the village, and made as free and easy as if we had been in an inn. Without him we should have come off short. The village contained only about thirty houses, and most of these very uninviting. In fact, a stranger would hardly seek shelter in any of them except under stress of weather. There is hardly a more neglected corner in Greece than this once important place, the mother city of Ægina, which lies in plain sight confronting it, two hours’ sail across the bay. Not only does no steamer put in here, but there was not even a sail-boat in the harbor while we were there. We were told that no sail-boat was owned by anybody in the village, an unheard-of thing on a Greek coast. To send a telegram or to get a physician one must send to Piada, called also New Epidauros, an hour and a half distant. A mail comes twice a week on horseback from Nauplia, all the way across the peninsula.

In this neglected but most picturesque corner remain the walls of a stately acropolis on a rocky peninsula with a harbor on each side of it, and other remains of a great city protruding from the rich soil where this peninsula joins the mainland.

But while the city has perished, the Hieron has, in a certain sense, come to life again. Here an area has been laid bare much larger than that excavated by the Germans at Olympia. The theatre, the best preserved of all Greek theatres, was never entirely covered up, and was early and easily cleared. The project of having a grand presentation of ancient dramas here has often been broached but never carried out, on account of the difficulty of transporting and feeding the spectators necessary to the success of the project, to say nothing of lodging them. The acoustic properties of this theatre are well known. One standing in front of the stage makes himself heard without effort by one sitting in the top row of seats.

The finest building in the precinct was the so-called Tholos, a round building as highly ornamented as the Erechtheum at Athens, and boasting Polycleitus as its architect. The temple of Æsculapius was almost equally brilliant, but these two buildings do not exist except to the archÆologist. We have inscriptions giving most elaborate accounts of the construction of each of them; but of each building nothing remains except their foundations and broken fragments of their brilliant adornment. Were it not for giving this description of a journey the appearance of a guide-book, I might speak of the Herculean labors of Mr. Kabbadias in excavating the Stadion, and the little pleasure that the sight of it affords the layman.

The great interest of the excavation really centres in the inscriptions discovered. Mr. Kabbadias looked up from his arduous work, the hot afternoon of our arrival, upon a much-defaced inscription, and said with an enthusiasm which means much in a quiet man: “I tell you no man has a right to think that he understands Greek life if he has not read these inscriptions of Epidauros.” These inscriptions, at any rate, kept him from sleeping during the afternoon hours of summer days when nearly all Greeks sleep, even if they do not sleep nights.

Among this material there is, perhaps, nothing more interesting than two long inscriptions, each containing records of twenty or more cases of miraculous cures wrought on sick people who came here and went to sleep in a long porch, remains of which survive. The cures are mostly wrought in dreams. Here is a sample (I quote from the stone):

The following case ascribes to the god the power to work cures upon an absent person:

As if to put the seal of verification upon these cases, two inscriptions tell of doubters who were convinced of the god’s power to heal, against their will. One records the case of a man with all the fingers of one hand paralyzed except one, who, seeing these tablets in the sacred precinct recording the miraculous cures, laughed and doubted:

This was the only vengeance inflicted by the mild god upon this “doubting Thomas”; for “when day dawned he went away healed.”

Some think that this great healing establishment had two strings to its bow, and that alongside of the miraculous cures which drew the crowd there was a treatment which approached in some degree the regular practice of medicine. At any rate it is clear that water played a great rÔle here, not only from the inscriptions, but also from the fact that the precinct is honeycombed with water-pipes. Sunlight and good air were also doubtless operative. The Hieron lies in a bowl, high up, it is true, but finely protected from the winds, especially the north wind and east wind. It possesses the qualities of a good winter resort. In summer it is now somewhat hot, but the air is certainly not so sultry as in the lower lying parts of Argolis. As the precinct is spoken of in ancient times as a “grove,” there must then have been abundant shade all about. Numerous porches also, with various exposures, gave an option between sun and shade. We should not go far astray in speaking of the Hieron as an ancient Carlsbad as well as an ancient Lourdes. But in its material equipment it was greatly superior to both; for from very early times down through the days of the Antonines one noble building after another was reared here under the supervision of the best architects.

When the cool of the day had come on we strolled over the sacred precinct, and then with Mr. Kabbadias and his family took dinner at a table set in the open air just behind the stage building. Close by us was the fine cavea of the theatre, resplendent with the light of a summer full-moon. It is easily understood that such a visit is more impressive than the usual one from Nauplia, in which most of the day is taken up in coming and going and one has but about three hours to see the place and take a hurried luncheon.

Rising the next morning at two o’clock from our mattresses on the floor beside the statues in the museum, we struck into a more Alpine road even than that by which we had come, into the roughest part of Argolis. At eight o’clock we passed the water-shed between the Argolic and the Saronic gulfs, from which both are plainly visible, and here, high up between Ortholithi and the Didyma, we took our well-earned breakfast beside a spring. At noon we were at the ruins of Troezen, and so almost home.