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7 pp. + stamp-less address leaf. Joseph Cushing Jr.  Autograph Letter Signed. Athens, Greece, December 6, 1851. 

To his wife in Baltimore, a long letter of some 2000 words describing his travel to Athens to tour the surviving ancient ruins and antiquities of Greece, just twenty years after that country won independence from Ottoman Turkey.

One of the most distinguished publishers of antebellum America, the 70 year-old Cushing (1781-1852) was at first dismayed by a lengthy Greek tour which sadly prevented a visit to Palestine (“the only opportunity which my life will ever present of placing my foot on the holy soil where were transacted the opening scenes of our cherished religion”), but he found his two weeks in Athens “more interesting…than I supposed possible”. He describes at length the “magnificent Parthenon, the beau ideal of architecture”; “the prison where Socrates is said to have drunk the fatal hemlock”;  the “pulpit where Demosthenes and other orators were wont to address the People”; the Temple of Jupiter Olympus (“commenced more than 500 years before Christ”, which “so long withstood the corrosion of time and at length perished from the violence of men”); the Stadium “where so warmly contended the aspirants for the wreath of Victory in the Grecian games”; and “the very garden where Plato taught his disciples”.  A 25-mile ride on horseback (“to me rather an unusual mode of locomotion”), brought him to a mountain-top which offered a stunning view of the Plain of Marathon and the Aegean sea – “The whole scenery of this country is very beautiful, its characteristics being those of softness and repose rather than grandeur though its surface is varied with many mountain ridges and summit.” He reassured his wife that “my health and muscles hold out remarkably well” in a “healthful” climate – though he died just eight months after his return to Boston.