VII. AEGINA AND EPIDAURUS
Across the bay from Megara and Corinth earthquake had raised, or left, one of their earliest rivals in industry and trade—the island of Aegina. There, in Mycenaean times, a prosperous city developed, whose graves gave up much gold.111 The conquering Dorians found the land too barren for tillage, but admirably placed for commerce. When the Persians came the island knew only an aristocracy of tradesmen, eager to sell the excellent vases and bronzes produced in their shops for the slaves whom they imported in great number to work in their factories, or for sale to the cities of Greece. Aristotle, about 350, calculated that Aegina had a population of half a million, of whom 470,000 were slaves.112 Here the first Greek coins were made, and the Aeginetan weights and measures remained standard in Greece till its conquest by Rome.
That such a commercial community could graduate from wealth to art was revealed when, in 1811, a traveler discovered in a heap of rubbish the vigorous and finely carved figures that once adorned the pediment of the temple of Aphaea. Of the temple itself twenty-two Doric columns stand, still bearing their architrave. Probably the Aeginetans built it shortly before the Persian War; for though its architecture is classic, its statuary shows many traces of the archaic, semi-Oriental style. Possibly, however, it was raised after Salamis; for the statuary, which represents Aeginetans overcoming Trojans, may symbolize the perennial conflict between Greece and the Orient, and the recent victory won by the Greek fleet under the very brows of Aegina at Salamis. To that fleet the little island contributed thirty ships; and one of these, after the victory, was awarded by the Greeks the first prize for bravery.
A pleasant boat ride takes the traveler from Aegina to Epidaurus, now a village of five hundred souls, but once among the most famous cities of Greece. For here—or rather ten miles out in a narrow gorge among the loftiest mountains of the Argolic peninsula—was the chief home of Asclepius, the hero-god of healing. “O Asclepius!” Apollo himself had said through his oracle at Delphi, “thou who art born a great joy to all mortals, whom lovely Coronis bare to me, the child of love, at rocky Epidaurus.”113 Asclepius cured so many people—even raising a man from the dead—that Pluto, god of Hades, complained to Zeus that hardly anyone was dying any more; and Zeus, who would hardly know what to do with the human race if it were not for death, destroyed Asclepius with a thunderbolt.114 But the people, first in Thessaly, then in Greece, worshiped him as a savior god. At Epidaurus they raised to him the greatest of his temples, and there the physician-priests who from him were called Asclepiads established a sanitarium known throughout Hellas for its success in treating disease. Epidaurus became a Greek Lourdes; pilgrims flocked to it from every part of the Mediterranean world, seeking what to the Greeks seemed the greatest boon of all—health. They slept in the temple, submitted hopefully to the regimen prescribed, and recorded their cures, which they believed to be miraculous, on stone tablets that still lie here and there among the ruins of the sacred grove. It was out of the fees and gifts of these patients that Epidaurus built its theater, and the stadium whose seats and goals still lie in the lap of the neighboring hills, and the lovely tholos—a circular, colonnaded building whose surviving fragments, preserved in the little museum, are among the most exquisitely carved marbles in Greece. Today such patients go to Tenos in the Cyclades, where the priests of the Greek Church heal them115 as those of Asclepius healed their forerunners two thousand five hundred years ago. And the gloomy peak where once the people of Epidaurus sacrificed to Zeus and Hera is now the sacred mount of St. Elias. The gods are mortal, but piety is everlasting.
What the student looks for most eagerly at Epidaurus is not the leveled ruins of the Asclepium. The land is well wooded here, and he does not see the perfect theater that he is seeking until a turn in the road spreads it out against the mountainside in a gigantic fan of stone. Polycleitus the Younger built it in the fourth century before our era, but even to this day it is almost completely preserved. As the traveler stands in the center of the orchestra, or dancing place—a spacious circle paved with stone—and sees before him fourteen thousand seats in rising tiers, so admirably designed that every seat directly faces him; as his glance follows the radiating aisles that rise in swift straight lines from the stage to the trees of the mountain slope above; as he speaks quietly to his friends on the farthest, highest seats, two hundred feet away, and perceives that his every word is understood: then he visions Epidaurus in the days of its prosperity, sees in his mind’s eye the crowds coming out in gay freedom from shrine and city to hear Euripides, and feels, more than he can ever express, the vibrant, plein-air life of ancient Greece.