VIII. Phyle.—

An expedition to the ruins of Phyle is a favourite excursion of visitors to Athens. The distance by road is about fourteen miles. Diodorus indeed estimates the distance at a hundred Greek furlongs or eleven miles. But he is wrong. Demosthenes, more correctly, says that it was over a hundred and twenty Greek furlongs. A carriage road runs as far as Chasia, a large village on the southern slopes of Mount Parnes, about ten miles from Athens. Beyond this point the way is nothing but a steep and stony bridle-path. After ascending it for half an hour we come to the meeting of two deep and savage glens. In the glen to the right or east the little monastery of Our Lady of the Defile stands romantically at the foot of sheer precipices. The path to Phyle (which is at the same time the direct road to Thebes) winds rapidly up the narrow western glen through a thin forest of firs. In places the path is hewn in the rock, and the defile is so narrow that a handful of men might make it good against an army. Phyle is reached in about an hour and three-quarters from Chasia. The fortress with its massive walls and towers crowns a high precipitous crag on the southern side of the pass, which it completely dominates. A ridge connects the crag with the higher mountains on the east; and along this ridge is the only approach to the fortress. On the west and south the sides of the crag fall away abruptly into a deep ravine, which is broken by tremendous precipices, crested with firs and tufted with shrubs and underwood. The ruins of the fortress encircle a little plateau, scarcely three hundred feet long from east to west, on the summit of the crag. The walls and towers, built of fine quadrangular blocks without mortar, are best preserved on the north-east side, where they are still standing to a height of seventeen courses. The tower at the north-east angle is round; the other two remaining towers are square. The principal gate was on the east side, approached from the ridge. There was further a postern, also approached from the ridge, near the south-east corner. From the fortress, which stands more than two thousand feet above the sea, the view is magnificent, taking in the whole of the Athenian plain with Athens itself and Hymettus, and the sea with Salamis, Aegina, and the coast of Peloponnese.

The high peak, now named Mount Pagania, which towers immediately to the north-east of Phyle in the form of a crescent-shaped wall of naked rock is probably the ancient Harma, which the augurs at Athens watched till they saw lightning flash about its summit, whereupon they sent the sacrifice to Delphi. Strabo expressly says that Harma was near Phyle. On its eastern side the peak descends in precipices into the deep glen, already mentioned, at the entrance of which is the monastery of Our Lady of the Defile.

Farther up this glen than the monastery, at a height of some hundreds of feet above the torrent (the Potami) which traverses it, there is a cavern which is sometimes visited. The direct distance of this cavern from the monastery is only about a mile and a half. But in the glen the stream, hemmed in by precipices advancing from the mountains on both sides, has scooped out for itself between them a bed so profound and rugged that to scramble along it is impossible, even when the water is at its lowest. Hence in order to reach the cavern it is needful to make a long detour round the western flanks of Mount Pagania and to come down into the glen at a point a good deal higher up. Having done so we follow the glen downward past the place where another glen opens into it, bringing its tributary stream to swell the Potami. The cave is situated high up on the eastern side of the main glen, a little below the meeting of the waters. To clamber up the steep slope to it is far from easy. The mouth of the cave is so narrow that only one person can enter it at a time; it opens at the foot of a precipice darkened by overhanging trees and flanked by two crags which project like wings on either side. In the face of the rock to the right of the entrance into the cavern are some votive niches with worn inscriptions under them. Within the cave, which may be about a hundred paces deep, water dripping from the roof has formed large stalactites and has hollowed out basins in the floor. Broken lamps and potsherds have been found in it in considerable quantities, which, with the votive niches outside, prove that this secluded spot was an ancient sanctuary. It was most probably the Nymphaeum or sanctuary of the Nymphs, which Menander mentioned as being near Phyle. Here, too, the people of Phyle probably offered the sacrifices to Pan to which Aelian refers. For one of the inscriptions on the rock outside the cave sets forth that a certain Tychander caused workmen to put up the image of Pan beside the Celadon, and that sacrifices were offered by one Trophimianus. From this inscription we learn that the Potami, which flows in the depth of the glen below the cave, went in antiquity by the name of the Celadon or ‘Roaring Stream.’