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strenuous defence on the part of the cohorts, and especially of the Thracian auxiliaries who had been left to guard it, was at last taken in it were found bowers twined with ivy, and furnished with tables loaded with plate and all the apparatus of a splendid banquet. Such was the assurance with which the adherents of Pompey looked forward to the result of the battle of Pharsalia! He himself having entered the camp by the Prætorian Gate, or that nearest the enemy, escaped from it by the Decuman, on the opposite side, and did not check his horse till he arrived at the gates of Larissa.

It is a singular circumstance that the Conqueror on the plain of Pharsalia, in the brief and modest narrative of a battle by which he became the master of the civilised world, has omitted to mention the name of the place on which that exploit was achieved. In the Commentaries of JULIUS CESAR We search in vain for the word PHARSALIA. One would be almost tempted to believe that his relation of that great victory was designed by him to be rather a private memorial to himself, than the means, as it has proved, of extending the fame of his military courage and skill to all countries and through all the ages of the world. How different from this is the treatment of the same subject by the Poet, who has made the campaign of Pharsalia the theme of an Epic Decad, and has put an eloquent speech, framed to deter Pompey from the engagement, into the mouth of the greatest Philosopher, Statesman, and Orator of that time, but who was at the period of which Lucan speaks at a distance of more than two hundred miles from the Pharsalian field!

After crossing on our way eastward toward PHERE the bridge of the Enipeus, we arrive at the small hamlet of Magoula. The remains of ancient Thessalian cities are said to exist at Dirilé, Kaslar, Zanglé, and Inilé, all of which in the above order are on the right side of the road from Pharsalia to Pheræ. Hills low and broken now begin to rise on both sides of us, and the road to wind among the fibres of the roots of Mount Othrys; amid those on the left the armies of Philip and Flamininus were entangled, till at length the former found his adversary and conqueror at CYNOSCEPHALE.

The natural beauty of Pheræ, the modern Belestina, was probably one of the reasons why that city was chosen as the scene of the history in which a wife is represented as consenting to die for her husband. The sacrifice of herself made by Alcestis, singular and marvellous to one who considers the notions generally entertained in Greece of the female character and the conjugal relations, derives fresh interest from the features of the place with

ALCESTIS AND PHERE.

221

which it is connected. The Thessalian Queen resigned all the pleasures and bade adieu to all the charms with which human life is adorned in a beautiful country; and even, now when that country is as it were itself extinct, and there is no Alcides at hand to restore it as he did her,

"Rescued from death by force, tho' pale and faint,-"

to its former life and grace, yet Phere is still remarkable for its fairness among the cities of Greece. The old walls of the city skirt the lower town on the south; on the outside of them in the southern valley is a cemetery glittering with white tombstones; within the walls are houses scattered without method or connexion, and intermingled with groups of trees,―elms, planes, poplars, and cypresses,—almost concealing the city from itself, so that the place presents the appearance rather of houses in a woody glen than of trees in a spacious town. Proceeding a little further to the north, we cross a limpid stream expanding itself into a wide basin of clear water overhung by the boughs of Oriental planes. The white kiosks which stand upon its brink prove the pleasantness of a place to which we may be allowed to imagine that Alcestis addressed the words of her tenderest and most affectionate farewell. This lake was to her what the flowers of Paradise were to Eve:

"Farewell, Pheræan land! and thou, my own

Fount HYPEREA, most beloved by Gods!"

The site of the ancient Acropolis is still further to the north, on a ridge of hills in shape like large tumuli running from east to west. Here the lake of BOEBE is distinctly seen lying a few miles to the north, on the right of the road to Larissa. To the west of the Acropolis are the foundations of a temple on which a church now stands, and with which walls of polygonal masonry,perhaps those of the sacred inclosure,-are connected.

The approach from Phere to VOLO from the north is remarkable for its beauty. The road slopes gradually down a gentle declivity between two ranges of undulating hills; in front is the wide plain, and beyond it the Gulf of Volo. The town stands at the centre of the bay. On the left is Mount PELION rising aloft, and stretching down the length of the MAGNESIAN peninsula; its crest even in the summer is capped with snow, and its shelving sides are starred with a rich profusion of white villages, which are blended together, and grow into each other with no mark of separation, hanging, one above the other, on the sides of the grassy mountain. Within

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them are luxuriant gardens, in which the vines weave themselves into trelliswork, or cluster round the branches of trees. Beneath the plane-trees which abound there, glistens the bright leaf of the pomegranate bursting with its red fruit. By the garden hedges numerous springs gush from the earth, and run downwards into the vale of Volo.

The traveller who walks from Volo to the south will arrive in an hour's time at the summit of an isolated hill, which is as it were one of the last struggles of Mount Pelion before it loses itself in the PAGASEAN Gulf. It is

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called GORITZA. On it are considerable remains of an ancient city: it juts into the sea so as almost to form a peninsula, a circumstance which added much to the strength of the place. The masonry is for the most part of the style called emplecton, being composed of loose stones thrown into the interval between the two external faces of the wall, and is not therefore of a very early age. The city whose area we are now treading was one of much importance. If we regard its general position, it is on the brink of the Gulf of Pagasæ; if the peculiarity of its site, it stands on a strong peninsula. In extent it occupies a wide space; in form it is elevated on a rugged hill, and, in its external relations, it is far superior to any other site in its neighbourhood.

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These circumstances afford strong evidence that this city was one of the three Fetters of Greece,-that these walls are, in a word, the remains of the ancient DEMETRIAS.

This conviction is strengthened by a visit to a conical hill about a mile to the north-west of the present. We pass through vineyards and across a brook in our way thither. On its summit is a venerable Church of the medieval style, called Panaghia Episcopi in it are many marbles, fragments of a more early structure; and in its walls is inserted a slab inscribed with the name of Demetrias, which is the title now given by the villagers in the neighbourhood to the whole district, and which it undoubtedly derived from the city whose ruins we have just visited, which was the capital of the circumjacent province.

Having determined the position of Demetrias, we are furnished with a clew for the discovery of some of its lost dependencies. We know from Livy and Strabo that the city of JASON was about a mile to the north of Demetrias: is, therefore, this conical hill, with its venerable church, the site of the citadel of Iolcus? The mountain stream of the Anaurus flowed between Iolcus and Demetrias is the clear rivulet which we crossed in our way hither, and are the vineyards through which we passed, the same as those of which Simonides sang when he recited the praises of the hero who conquered all the youth of Thessaly, by hurling his spear from the vineyards of lolcus over the eddying stream of the Anaurus?

On the summit of Mount Pelion was the cave of Cheiron. With him, the justest of Centaurs, was associated the idea entertained by the Greeks of early Hellenic education. This grotto was the School from which their national heroes went forth into the world. The hero of Pharsalia, for instance, was brought from the plains of Thessaly to the summit of Mount Pelion. Here, as in a natural observatory, he was taught to contemplate, by night, the motions of the stars; by day he was led over the mountain sides, and instructed in the nature and properties of the plants with which they abound; or he learnt, within the cave, to touch the lyre.

The form of Cheiron, the ideal instructor of the heroic age, presents an evidence that the animal and intellectual were blended together in the instruction of that period; the intellectual element, however, bearing the same ratio to the animal, that the human head of the instructor did to his equine body.

His name seems to be derived from his manual accomplishments, and furnishes proof of the value attached, in the earliest times, a fact well

224

HEROIC SCHOOL OF GREECE.

known from the special testimony of Homer, to skill in the medical and surgical arts. Indeed, it is not improbable that the botanical fertility by which Mount Pelion is distinguished among the mountains of Greece, may have recommended it for the site of the Greek heroic School, in whose course of instruction a knowledge of Pharmacy, to which those sciences were then chiefly restricted, held so prominent a part, and which was peculiarly necessary to the warriors of that age. It is sufficient to refer to the name of JASON, who was educated here, and who sailed from Aphetæ, on which now stands the castle of TRIKERI, at the south-western foot of this hill, as a confirmation of this. It is a singular fact, that at the present day the country of Cheiron has produced nearly all the medical practitioners of Greece.

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