LXXVIII. Lebadea.—

The modern town of Livadia retains the ancient name of Lebadea but slightly altered. It stands very picturesquely at the mouth of a wild gorge in the mountains, facing northward across the plain. The white houses with their red roofs and wooden balconies climb the hill-sides on both banks of the Hercyna, a clear and copious stream, which issues from the gorge and rushes noisily through the streets in a rocky bed, turning some mills and spanned by several bridges. At the back of the town a steep rocky hill, crowned with the ruins of a great mediaeval castle, descends in sheer and lofty precipices into the gorge on the left bank of the stream. The houses extend down into the plain, scattered among gardens and clumps of trees which give the town, as seen from below, an agreeable aspect. The mountains at the foot of which Lebadea lies are the northern spurs of Mount Helicon; the high conical summit to the east is the ancient Mount Laphystius, now the mountain of Granitsa. The plain that lies spread out below the town on the north melts eastward into the great Copaic plain; on the north it is divided by a chain of low hills from the parallel plain of Chaeronea.

The greater part of the water of the Hercyna rises in the profound gorge immediately behind the town. Here, at the foot of the great precipice which is surmounted by the ruins of the castle, a cold spring called Kryo (‘cold’) issues from the rocks and is conducted into a small well-house. Some niches for holding votive offerings are cut in the face of the cliff above it. The largest of these cuttings is a square chamber hewn out of the rock, about six feet above the ground. Right and left, in the sides of the chamber, are benches cut in the rock. In this cool retreat the Turkish governor of Lebadea used to smoke his pipe in the heat of the day. On the opposite side of the ravine, a few paces off, near some plane-trees, several springs of clear but lukewarm water rush turbulently from the ground, and, united with the water of the Kryo, form the Hercyna. They turn a cotton-mill close to the spot where they rise. That some of these springs are the waters of Memory and Forgetfulness of which all who would consult Trophonius had to drink before descending into the oracular pit, is highly probable; but we have no means of identifying these mystic waters. An alteration in the flow of one of the springs is known to have occurred within the nineteenth century; and many such changes may have taken place since antiquity. The general features of the spot, however, have probably changed but little, and they are well fitted to impress the imagination. The many springs gurgling strongly from the ground, the verdant plane-trees, the caverned rocks, the great precipices soaring on three sides of us and overhung on the west by the ruins of the mediaeval castle, make up a scene which once seen is not easily forgotten. But the ravine of which this is after all only the mouth does not end here. Its deep, narrow, stony bed, sometimes dry, sometimes traversed by a raging torrent, winds far into the heart of the mountains, shut in on either hand like a cañon by tremendous crags. If you follow it upwards for some miles, the country begins to open up and you find yourself in bleak and desolate highlands. A profound silence reigns, broken only by the cry of a water-ouzel beside the torrent or the screaming of hawks far up the cliffs.