DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.5074#0402
384
PENTELICUS.
Our last expedition was a long ride up to the summit
of Pentelicus, an expedition that no traveller should
omit: it is not a fatiguing ride with good horses. We
passed on the side of the mountain a very pretty little
turn, embowered in trees, and then followed a wild and
steep path up through flowery woods, and past the
quarry whence the marble used for the Parthenon was
taken, and the great grotto, which contains some very
white stalactites, and then winding round some narrow
dizzy bits among the low woods emerged at the foot of
the bare cone. Here we dismounted and walked up to
the summit; the view is very extensive and very beauti-
ful, including the islands, lovely Eubcea with all its bays
and mountains, all the Cyclades, and on a clear day
Mitylene, and Khios, with the Negropontine strait up to
Volo—the^whole of Attica and part of Bceotia: while
directly under the foot of the mountain lies the ever
famous plain of Marathon. Nothing struck me more in
this magnificent panorama than the extreme petiteness of
the country which composed it: one began to compre-
hend the reality of all the different peoples of the
Greeks belonging to cities, not states: and that impos-
sibility of real union among such a number of very
small independencies, each contained within its own walls,
and each jealous of its own exclusive honour, which
eventually caused the fall of Greece ; but one marvelled
all the more at the seemingly inexhaustible number of
these very citizens, when one remembered the armies
engaged at Platsea and Miletus on the same day, and a
hundred other similar instances : truly the Athenians
deserved the name of the " Immortals," better than the
ten thousand Persians continually recruited from the
five millions of Xerxes' followers,—when one thought of
PENTELICUS.
Our last expedition was a long ride up to the summit
of Pentelicus, an expedition that no traveller should
omit: it is not a fatiguing ride with good horses. We
passed on the side of the mountain a very pretty little
turn, embowered in trees, and then followed a wild and
steep path up through flowery woods, and past the
quarry whence the marble used for the Parthenon was
taken, and the great grotto, which contains some very
white stalactites, and then winding round some narrow
dizzy bits among the low woods emerged at the foot of
the bare cone. Here we dismounted and walked up to
the summit; the view is very extensive and very beauti-
ful, including the islands, lovely Eubcea with all its bays
and mountains, all the Cyclades, and on a clear day
Mitylene, and Khios, with the Negropontine strait up to
Volo—the^whole of Attica and part of Bceotia: while
directly under the foot of the mountain lies the ever
famous plain of Marathon. Nothing struck me more in
this magnificent panorama than the extreme petiteness of
the country which composed it: one began to compre-
hend the reality of all the different peoples of the
Greeks belonging to cities, not states: and that impos-
sibility of real union among such a number of very
small independencies, each contained within its own walls,
and each jealous of its own exclusive honour, which
eventually caused the fall of Greece ; but one marvelled
all the more at the seemingly inexhaustible number of
these very citizens, when one remembered the armies
engaged at Platsea and Miletus on the same day, and a
hundred other similar instances : truly the Athenians
deserved the name of the " Immortals," better than the
ten thousand Persians continually recruited from the
five millions of Xerxes' followers,—when one thought of