Vacation Days in Greece

H., D. G.

doi:10.1038/069483a0

Books Received
Published: 24 March 1904

Vacation Days in Greece

D. G. H.

Nature volume 69, pages 483–484 (1904)Cite this article

22 Accesses
Metrics details

Abstract

THE genial personality of the late director of the American School at Athens is known to everyone who has made any long stay in the capital of Greece during the past five years and more. No foreign resident, except, perhaps, Dr. Dörpfeld, had wider personal knowledge of the Hellenic peninsula than Mr. Richardson. Certainly none had pushed a bicycle over so many stony passes, or scaled half as many storied peaks. He made mountain-climbing a speciality of the American School, so much so that climbing of all kinds became a passion of the students; and while, one risked life and limb on the Acropolis precipice to rediscover inscriptions once read by Wordsworth in the face of the Kimonian walls, another swung himself over the eastern pediment of the Parthenon to decipher by the print of the nails the dedication whereby a Roman emperor had aspired to appropriate the credit of the temple. In the pleasant volume before us Mr. Richardson describes two ascents, those of the highest peaks of Taygetus and Kióna, the less known twin of Parnassus, which overtops by about two hundred feet all other summits on Greek soil. But he alludes to many others, e.g. those of Parnassus itself and Aroania, and probably, with the exception of Tsumerka and the Pindus peaks, which are as much in Turkey as Greece, he has stood on every one of the mountain giants of free Hellas.

Vacation Days in Greece.

By Rufus B. Richardson, formerly Director of the American School of Archæology, Athens. Pp. xiii + 240; illustrated. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1903.) Price 7s. 6d.