We twelve members of the American School had spent three rather cold and rainy November days at Delphi, managing to see between the showers, perhaps better called tempests, that kept sweeping up the valley of the Pleistos, most of the important objects both in the museum and in the excavation area. After so much tantalizing promise, followed by disappointment, it began to seem very doubtful whether the six bicyclists of the party could carry out their intention of prolonging the trip into Thessaly. The morning of the fourth day looked about like the three preceding mornings, except that the storm centre, on and around Mount Korax to the west of Parnassus and Delphi, had at last broken up. Just this little encouragement led five of us to move on, and we slipped quickly down the long winding road to the foot of the high slope on the top of which Delphi stands.

After we had toiled through mud to Amphissa, we began to reap the benefits of a clearing and bracing north wind. We had an exhilarating climb of three hours up the Amblema Pass, which leads over the ridge connecting Parnassus with the still higher mountains to the west. Before we got to the top, which is the backbone between the Corinthian Gulf and the Gulf of Malis, a cold cloud, which we may as well call a winter storm, came rushing out of the gap to meet us like an army debouching from a covert. We began to fear that Doris, into which we were going to pass, was another storm centre, and our feeling of pity for the one man who had been prudent enough to take his bicycle back to Athens began to change to envy. But after dropping a thousand feet or more into Doris we got below the storm, and the roads became somewhat drier. When we were at the level of that upland plain they were quite good. Doris had been a storm centre in the morning, but at noon was almost clear. What luck!

Confronting us on the north side of the plain was another mountain barrier which shut out ThermopylÆ from our view. Rain-clouds were playing around this mountain. After luncheon at Gravia, it was a matter of from two to three hours to get across the plain and partly climb and partly circumvent this second barrier. And then came a most exhilarating experience. Here was the sight of a lifetime. The Gulf of Malis far below us, the road visible in all its extent winding like an enormous serpent down the side of the mountain to the plain from two to three thousand feet below us, and then running straight as an arrow to Lamia, Mount Othrys in the background, ThermopylÆ to the right, and, soon after, Tymphrestos to the left, with the Spercheios winding down from it. Historic associations apart—as if they ever could be apart!—this is a landscape not easily surpassed. It is one of those views which seem to gain in power with repetition. It was the fifth time that I had seen and felt it; and I firmly believe that I had a keener relish in the view than my companions who saw it for the first time.

Bicycling down the face of a mountain like that, over curves that take you half a mile or a mile in one direction, and then as far in the other direction, is about the nearest approach to flying that has yet been given to man. One seems to be floating in the ether, and dropping at will down to the earth like a bird on the wing.

In this winding down the mountain-side we crossed probably more than once the path by which the Greek traitor led Hydarnes and his Ten Thousand Immortals around in the rear of the Greeks and cut off their retreat. But it was getting too late now to see and study ThermopylÆ by the light of that day. Lamia was our goal, a city where one finds comfortable quarters and good eating. We had heard far back on the road that the bridge over the Spercheios had been carried away two years before, and had not yet been replaced. Some said that we should find a boat to ferry us over, while others said that there was neither bridge nor ferry, which seemed incredible, since we were on the great highway from the Corinthian Gulf to northern Greece. But when we reached the Spercheios at twenty minutes before five o’clock the worst that had been told us came true. No ferry-man was there. One sorrowful-looking Greek who was, figuratively speaking, in the same boat with us, suggested that we go back to a village called Moschochori, which we had passed about two miles back, the road leaving it about a quarter of a mile to the east. He thought that we should there find the ferry-man, who had abandoned his post a little too early, and had left his boat in plain sight bound to a tree with chain and padlock. This suggestion had the advantage that, in case we failed to find the boatman and to induce him to return, we might at least find shelter in the village, poor as it was, which would in the cold weather be better than passing the night in the open air.

I had on two former occasions failed to reach Lamia at nightfall and been obliged to pass the night in this region; once in 1890, very near where we were then standing, in a barn filled with corn-husks, and again, ten years later, under the hospitable roof of the chief of police at Molo, to the east of ThermopylÆ. But this time it seemed as if, with a sufficient outlay of energy, we ought to pass over Jordan into a land of milk and honey. The first step was to go back. Just where we were turning from the high-road to go into the village there met us a man on horseback, who proved to be the village doctor going to visit a sick woman. The husband of the patient was trotting along behind him. No sooner did the doctor hear our story than he turned to the man following him, and said: "Go into the village and tell the ferry-man that if he doesn’t get back to the ferry as fast as his legs can carry him I will split his head for him. Tell him there are strangers waiting to get over to Lamia." The word “stranger” has great power in Greece. If the stranger is not, as in Homer, under the special protection of Zeus, he is under the protection of all good men, which is perhaps quite as efficient.

At this point came a curious turn. The man who was to call the ferry-man said: “But the ferry-man will not believe me when I tell him that strangers are waiting.” The doctor saw the point, and said: “Yes, one of you must go with him.” I decided that I was needed, and after a hard tramp quite a distance through mud about a foot deep—I would not abate one tittle of nine inches—I saw the effect of the message. The ferry-man saddled a horse and shot off in the direction of the missing bridge as if he believed the doctor was ready to do what he had said he would do. When we reached the ferry all was in readiness for our passage, and, shortly after seven o’clock we sat down to dinner in Lamia. As the doctor and his follower went over in the same ferry-boat it is a fair inference that they had also a personal interest in stirring up the ferry-man.

The fact that this bridge had been lacking for two years on the only high-road which leads directly from Thessaly, not only to the Corinthian Gulf, but also, by a fork in Doris, to Boeotia and Attica, is a sign of the times. The people of Lamia complain against the Government, for this is a national road made and neglected by the general Government. Incomplete in 1890 when I first went over it on foot, it was completed at great expense, and it seems reckless extravagance to neglect it now. Greece might better afford to spare on its army and navy, and put the savings into internal improvements. The bridge over the Peneios, on the high-road between Trikkala and Larisa, the two principal cities of Thessaly, has been down for eight or ten years and its place has been supplied by a ferry-boat. The long-projected railroad, designed to connect Athens with Larisa, and ultimately with Europe, was nearly half finished in 1894, and until 1902 nothing was done to carry on the work, or to save from disintegration the part already finished. After a lapse of eight years a new company has taken up the work and is vigorously pushing it; but the old material has been declared to be of no value. A sense of waste in such matters makes one feel that Greece is far from being a Switzerland in thrift. It hardly affords a basis upon which a “greater Greece” can be built up.

The next day we took ThermopylÆ at our leisure, passing out from Lamia over the Spercheios on the bridge of Alamana, at which Diakos, famous in ballad, resisted with a small band a Turkish army, until he was at last captured and taken to Lamia to be impaled. Luckily this one bridge over the Spercheios remains, and Thessaly has a road open to the east through ThermopylÆ and Atalante. The day was perfect, a day to make an old man young. We were like boys at play, in spite of the overpowering associations of the place. We sat down in the sunlight and dabbled with our feet in the hot sulphur stream, which has given its name to the place, ThermopylÆ meaning “Hot Gates,” and when a serious shepherd came and looked at us in wonderment we regarded him as the “Old Man of ThermopylÆ,” in that character-sketch, “There was an old man of ThermopylÆ who never did anything properly.” We had him photographed in that character, and fancied him doomed to return for a space to the scene of his excesses and to behave himself “properly.” We then went through the pass as far east as Molo, and after taking luncheon there returned to the pass for serious study, i.e., for tracing as far as possible the position and movements of the antagonists in the great battle.

It may be taken as a well-known fact that the Spercheios has since the time of Herodotus made so large an alluvial deposit around its mouth that, if he himself should return to earth, he would hardly recognize the spot which he has described so minutely. The western horn, which in his time came down so near to the gulf as to leave space for a single carriage-road only, is now separated from it by more than a mile of plain. Each visit to ThermopylÆ has, however, deepened my conviction that Herodotus exaggerated the impregnability of this pass. The mountain spur which formed it did not rise so abruptly from the sea as to form an impassable barrier to the advance of a determined antagonist. It is of course difficult ground to operate on, but certainly not impossible. The other narrow place, nearly two miles to the east of this, is still more open, a fact that is to be emphasized, because many topographers, including Colonel Leake, hold that the battle actually took place there, as the great battle between the Romans and Antiochos certainly did. This eastern pass is, to be sure, no place where “a thousand may well be stopped by three,” and there cannot have taken place any great transformation here since classical times, inasmuch as this region is practically out of reach of the Spercheios, and the deposit from the hot sulphur streams, which has so broadened the theatre-shaped area enclosed by the two horns, can hardly have contributed to changing the shape of the eastern horn itself. Artificial fortification was always needed here; but it is very uncertain whether any of the stones that still remain can be claimed as parts of such fortification. It is a fine position for an inferior force to choose for defence against a superior one; but while it cannot be declared with absolute certainty that this is not the place where the fighting took place, yet the western pass fits better the description of Herodotus. Besides this, if the western pass had been abandoned to the Persians at the outset the fact would have been worth mentioning.

As to the heroic deed itself, the view that Leonidas threw away his own life and that of the four thousand, that it was magnificent but not strategy, not war, does not take into account the fact that Sparta had for nearly half a century been looked to as the military leader of Greece. It was audacious in the Athenians to fight the battle of Marathon without them, and they did so only because the Spartans did not come at their call. Sparta had not come to ThermopylÆ in force, it is true; but her king was there with three hundred of her best men. Only by staying and fighting could he show that Sparta held by right the place she had won. It had to be done. “So the glory of Sparta was not blotted out.” Had Sparta shown the white feather here, and a retreat would have been interpreted as showing the white feather, she would have lost prestige with the rest of the Greeks; and in that case it is as good as certain that PlatÆa would never have been fought. But besides showing the high statecraft which the occasion demanded, Leonidas was performing the simple duty of obedience to Spartan law, not to retreat before an enemy. He had been sent to hold the post; and he stayed to the end; and there is no more stirring clarion note in all that high-pitched story of the Persian war in Herodotus than the epitaph inscribed on the monument to the fallen Spartans, “Stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.” Whether Simonides felt the need of simplicity and brevity, or whether Spartan taste prescribed it, it is at any rate most fitting that boasting is omitted. The deed was so great that one little note of brag, or even some little amplifying and embellishing, would have belittled it. It is stirring to read those other equally brief and equally simple lines of Simonides inscribed on the monument erected for the total number who fought and fell: “Four thousand from Peloponnesus fought here with three millions.”

One may have read, and read often, the description of the battle in the school-room, but he reads it with different eyes on the spot, when he can look up at the hillock crowned with a ruined cavalry barrack just inside the western pass and say to himself: “Here on this hill they fought their last fight and fell to the last man. Here once stood the monuments to Leonidas, to the three hundred, and to the four thousand.”

The very monuments have crumbled to dust, but the great deed lives on. We rode back to Lamia under the spell of it. It was as if we had been in church and been held by a great preacher who knows how to touch the deepest chords of the heart. Euboea was already dark blue, while the sky above it was shaded from pink to purple. Tymphrestos in the west was bathed in the light of the sun that had gone down behind it. The whole surrounding was most stirring, and there was ever sounding in our hearts that deep bass note, “What they did here.” Even when we were afterward enjoying the great walls of the Acropolis of Pharsalos and the Vale of Tempe we kept thinking of ThermopylÆ.