Rupert Brooke and Skyros (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Rupert Brooke and Skyros

Of these two the name of Achilles still survives in the name of Akhili, which is given to a landlocked bay on the eastern shore, far the loveliest place in the island, whence on the clearest of summer days one can just discern the distant shores of the Troad.

A memorial of Theseus is perhaps found in a small temple site near the old castle high up on the cliffs. It was a small sanctuary, dedicated in all probability to Theseus as a hero, and it was right on the edge of the sea, almost hanging over the water on an escarpment of the main ridge of rock on which the town is built. Other traces of old Hellenism linger on the island. The spring of Niphi, on the western side, preserves the name of the Nymphs, the hill-top Areion that of Ares, and Artemi that of Artemis. None of these names is a revival, as is so often the case in modern Greece. The fact thatout in the wilder parts of the island, and so removed from the archaistic zeal of the village schoolmasters and antiquaries, makes it all the more probable that the names come down to us in true and authentic descent from antiquity. Niphi is a spring that breaks abruptly from the cliff-side and falls into the sea through a luxuriant grove of fig-trees amongst which cluster a few houses, all in ruins but one. Areion is a bleak summit that rises at the southern end of the island above a valley of olive-trees. Shepherds told me that there were old ruins on it, but I was not able to get there. Artemi is just such another peak, rugged and without even the wild thyme and shrubs that one finds elsewhere. In few places on the mainland can one find so many traces of antiquity as here, for Turk, Venetian, and Slav have swept away most of the old place-names in the Peloponnese and in the central provinces.

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