XIV. The Scironian Road.—

The famous pass along the sea-cliffs, known in antiquity as the Scironian Road, is thus described by Strabo: “The Scironian cliffs leave no passage between them and the sea. The road from the Isthmus to Megara and Attica runs along the top of them; indeed in many places it is compelled by the beetling mountain, which is high and inaccessible, to skirt the brink of the precipices.” The dread of robbers, who here lay in wait for travellers, enhanced the natural horrors of the pass in ancient as well as in modern times. In recent years these horrors have been dissipated by the construction of a highroad and a railway along the coast; but down to the middle of the present century, if we may trust the descriptions of travellers, the cliff-path well deserved its modern name of Kake Skala or ‘the Evil Staircase.’ For six miles it ran along a narrow crumbling ledge half-way up the face of an almost sheer cliff, at a height of six to seven hundred feet above the sea. On the right rose the rock like a wall; on the left yawned the dizzy abyss, where, far below, the waves broke at the foot of the precipices in a broad sheet of white curdling foam. So narrow was the path that only a single sure-footed beast could make its way with tolerable security along it. In stormy or gusty weather it was dangerous; a single slip or stumble would have been fatal. When two trains of mules met, the difficulty of passing each other was extreme. Indeed at the beginning of the present century Colonel Leake pronounced the path impassable for horses; and at a later time, when it had been somewhat mended, another distinguished traveller, himself a Swiss, declared that he knew of no such giddy track, used by horses, in all Switzerland. In many places the narrow path had been narrowed still further by its outer edge having given way and slid into the depths, so that it was only by using the utmost caution that the traveller was able to scramble along at all. At one point, where it crossed the mouth of a gully, the road had completely disappeared, having either fallen into the sea or, according to another account, been blown up in the War of Independence. Here therefore the wayfarer was obliged to pick his steps down a breakneck track which zigzagged down to the narrow strip of beach, from which he had laboriously to clamber up by a similar track on the opposite side of the gully. One traveller has graphically described how his baggage-horses slid and slipped on their hind feet down one of these tracks, while their drivers hung on to the tails of the animals to check their too precipitate descent. Last century the path had ceased to be used even by foot-passengers. Chandler took boat at Nisaea and coasted along the foot of the cliffs, looking up with amazement at the narrow path carried along the edge of perpendicular precipices above the breakers and supported so slenderly beneath “that a spectator may reasonably shudder with horror at the idea of crossing.”

Nothing was easier than to make such a path impassable. Accordingly when word reached Peloponnese that Leonidas and his men had been annihilated by the Persians at Thermopylae, the Peloponnesians hurried to the Isthmus, blocked up the Scironian road, and built a fortification wall across the Isthmus. In modern times, though the path had fallen into decay, it still showed traces of having been used and cared for in antiquity. In many places the marks of the chariot-wheels were visible in the rock; in other places there were remains of massive substructions of masonry which had once supported and widened the road; and here and there pieces of ancient pavement were to be seen. These were probably vestiges of the carriage road which, as Pausanias tells us, the emperor Hadrian constructed along this wild and beautiful coast. At the present day, as the traveller is whirled along it in the train, he is struck chiefly by the blueness of the sea and the greenness of the thick pine-woods which mantle the steep shelving sides of the mountains.