The first time Mark Twain saw the Parthenon, he was about five or six miles away, on the deck of a ship near the Greek port of Piraeus. “Every column of the noble structure was discernible through the telescope,” he wrote in 1867. Beside it lay the city of Athens. Twain and his companions were “anxious to get ashore and visit these classic localities as quickly as possible.” “No land we had yet seen had aroused such a universal interest among the passengers.”
Then came a problem: The commandant of Piraeus placed Twain’s ship under quarantine. The Quaker City had just come from Italy, where cholera was rampant. Greece wanted to prevent its own outbreak of a bacterial disease that can kill. The commandant ordered the travelers to stay aboard for eleven days before disembarking. This long isolation was too much, and the captain of the Quaker City made arrangements to take on supplies and sail for Constantinople, the next scheduled stop. “To lie a whole day in sight of the Acropolis, and yet be obliged to go away without visiting Athens!” wrote Twain. “Disappointment was hardly a strong enough word to describe the circumstances.”
These lines appeared in print two months later in the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper that had paid for Twain to join one of the first organized tours of Americans in Europe. The account appeared again almost word for word in The Innocents Abroad, the 1869 book that made Twain famous. During his life, The Innocents Abroad sold more copies than any other book he wrote, which means it outsold the better-known tales about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The traits that have made Twain abidingly popular — humor, irreverence, deep thinking about the nature and promise of the United States — shine from its pages.
It also reveals what happened when Twain broke the Greek government’s quarantine, evaded the police, and visited the Parthenon by moonlight.
When Twain arrived in Greece on August 14, 1867, he was 31 years old. He wore the familiar bushy mustache, but his hair had not yet turned white. He had grown up as Samuel Clemens in Hannibal, Mo., worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, and, during the Civil War, headed to Nevada, where he failed as a miner but started to know success as “Mark Twain,” the writer. In 1865, based in California, he came to the attention of readers in the East with a short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The novels that would make him a superstar of American literature lay in the future.