Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/56

34 geographer Dicæarchus in his account of Greece describes the Amphiaraïon as situated at a distance of a day's journey for an active walker from Athens. The fatigue of the journey, he says, was agreeably relieved by the number of inns and halting-places by the wayside.11

In the second half of the 19th century the traveller on his way from Athens to Mavrodhilissi passes over a desolate and half-cultivated country, not always free from robbers, and at the end of his journey he finds in the sinister and unwlling hospitality of the Albanian peasant of Kalamo a sorry substitute for the inns of Dictearchus.

We had just time, before leaving Athens, to pay a hurried visit to Mycenæ, where I had the satisfaction of gazing on those famous lions which still guard the gateway of the city of the Atridæ, and which Pausanias saw over this gateway seventeen centuries ago. All that he tells us about them is the tradition, current in his time, that they, together with the walls of Mycenæ, were the work of the same Cyclopes who made the walls of Tiryns for Prœtus. Such a legend has, of course, no historical value, except as evidence that the ancients believed this gateway to be a work of the heroic ages, and one of the most ancient monuments in Greece, a belief in accordance not only with all that we know of the history of Mycenæ, but also with the character of the lions themselves as works of art. The heads of these animals, which in the time of Pausanias were probably still entire, are now wanting, so that it is difficult to form an accurate