unia 
 al
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN ! 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 MODERN GREECE.
 
 MODERN GREECE: 
 
 TWO LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED BEFOTJK 
 
 THK PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION OF EDINBURGH, 
 
 WITH PAPERS OX 'THE PROGRESS OF GREECE" AX I) 
 BYRON IN GREECE.' 
 
 BY 
 
 R. C. JEBB, LL.D. EDIN., 
 
 ritOFESSOR OF GREEK IS THE fXIVBBSITT OF GLASGOW. 
 
 oinrippuv yap Tijuilrrepos xp^ * 
 (crrai TroX/rcus roiffde. 
 
 AESCHTLtTS. 
 
 The tide of years to come shall bring more praise 
 To this thy people. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1880. 
 
 All rifjhts reserve*!.
 
 DF 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 LAST winter I had the honour of delivering at the 
 Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh two lectures on 
 Modern Greece, which are here published, with a few 
 slight alterations, chiefly verbal. 
 
 The paper on ' The Progress of Greece ' appeared in 
 Afacmillan's Magazine for March, 1879. It is reprinted 
 here, in a revised form, as illustrating those parts of the 
 second lecture which touch on the social and political con- 
 dition of Greece at the present day. The paper on 'Byron 
 in Greece ' is supplementary to the first lecture, which 
 sketches the history of the Greek nationality. In such a 
 sketch the Greek War of Independence could be treated 
 only in its most general aspect. No episode of that war 
 is more interesting to Byron's countrymen than that 
 with which his name is connected ; and it is also one 
 which places us midway between the opening and closing 
 chapters of a memorable struggle. 
 
 It is my hope that this little book may be acceptable 
 to those who desire to have the elementary facts of the 
 subject in a concise form, and that it may help in send- 
 ing readers to sources of information more important 
 than itself. Hertzberg's Geschichte Griechenlands unter 
 der Homer, his Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben 
 .des antiken Lebens bis zur Gegenwart, and Carl Hopf's
 
 vi PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 Geschichte Griechenlands, are standard works well known 
 to students. Some valuable matter, especially with 
 regard to the early Slavonic settlements, may be found 
 in C. J. Jh-ecek's Geschichte der Bulgaren. Finlay's 
 History of Greece, from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864, has lately 
 been issued from the Clarendon Press in a new edition 
 of seven volumes, enriched by the notes of the editoi 1 , 
 Mr. H. F. Tozer, of Exeter College, whose learning has 
 brought the latest light to bear on many points in which 
 the statements of the text required modification. 
 
 For the statistics of contemporary Greece, political, 
 social, and industrial, the work of M. Moraitinis, La, 
 Grece telle qu'elle est, has now an English companion in 
 the New Greece of Mr. Lewis Sergeant. 
 
 Foreign observers of Greek affairs are, broadly speak- 
 ing, of two classes : those who think that Greece has a 
 future, and those who further think that she may be 
 allowed to have a present. Where the latter opinion is 
 entertained with most conviction, there will be least 
 disposition to suppose that sincere good-will to the 
 Greek cause demands the concealment of defects, or the 
 undue depreciation of other nationalities. 
 
 May, 1880.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FIRST LECTURE ..... 1 
 
 SECOND LECTURE ... .62 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF GREECE . . . 108 
 
 BYRON IN GREECE . ... 143
 
 MODERN GREECE. 
 I. 
 
 THE privilege of addressing an audience at the Philo- 
 CORRIGENDA. 
 
 P. 15, margin, delete 442 A.L>. 
 
 P. 18, line 4, for ' not transferred,' read ' now transferred.' 
 
 P. 113, line 14, for 'Few of the purchasers,' read 'Few wealthy 
 purchasers.' 
 
 the Great to our own. In a second lecture on Friday 
 next I shall endeavour to give some of the impressions 
 derived from a recent visit to Greece. 
 
 The central fact of all Greek history, from the The Greek 
 
 Nationality. 
 
 earliest age down to the present day, is the unbroken 
 life of the Greek nationality. Here, after all, is the 
 great contrast between the destiny of Italy and of 
 Greece. The principles of Roman law have survived 
 the Roman type of character and mind. Greece, the 
 1.
 
 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE privilege of addressing an audience at the Philo- 
 sophical Institution of Edinburgh on such a subject as 
 Modern Greece imposes an obligation which must be 
 obeyed at the outset that of defining the ground 
 which it is proposed to traverse. My lecture this 
 evening will attempt to trace in outline the story 
 of the Greek nation from the time of Alexander 
 the Great to our own. In a second lecture on Friday 
 next I shall endeavour to give some of the impressions 
 derived from a recent visit to Greece. 
 
 The central fact of all Greek history, from the The Greek 
 
 Nationality. 
 
 earliest age down to the present day, is the unbroken 
 life of the Greek nationality. Here, after all, is the 
 great contrast between the destiny of Italy and of 
 Greece. The principles of Roman law have survived 
 the Roman type of character and mind. Greece, the 
 '. '
 
 2 MODEEN GREECE. 
 
 first seat of European politics, has left us no direct 
 political inheritance, but has perpetuated the intellec- 
 tual and moral stamp of Hellenic society in a national 
 character of marked distinction, 
 its two The national unity of the ancient Hellenes rested 
 
 phases. 
 
 not merely on common language and common institu- 
 tions, but also on common blood. All Hellenes 
 regarded themselves as scions of one stock. A new 
 kind of Hellenic nationality sprang from the Asiatic 
 conquests of Alexander the Great. Alexander founded 
 cities which were Greek in civilization, but of which 
 the population was partly Greek, partly Macedonian, 
 partly Asiatic. Henceforth there are two types of 
 Greek the Greek of Europe and the Greek of Asia. 
 The Greek of Europe dwelling chiefly in Greece 
 Proper and the islands still claimed pure Hellenic 
 blood, and retained in some measure the nobler 
 qualities of the ancient race. The Greek of Asia was 
 usually of mixed blood, and in him the quick Greek 
 intelligence passed over into a more decidedly Asiatic 
 type of versatility or cunning. 
 
 For 150 years after Alexander the dying embers of 
 freedom in European Greece flickered with a fitful 
 light : then the Romans, having first conquered 
 Macedon, conquered Greece also.
 
 MODERN GREECE. 3 
 
 After that, the story of Greek subjection has three 
 great chapters Roman, Byzantine, Turkish. The 
 Roman chapter begins in 146 B.C. and ends in 716 A. D. 
 The Byzantine chapter begins in 716 A.D. and ends in 
 1453 A.D. The Turkish chapter begins in 1453 and 
 extends down to 1821. 
 
 The Roman conquest of Greece was a welcome j^od'-Tw 
 event to the mass of the European Greeks. The 
 popular sentiment at the time was expressed by a 
 parody of the saying attributed to Themistocles in 
 exile, to the effect that his ruin had made his fortune. 
 The general feeling was, ' We can hardly be worse off, 
 and perhaps Rome may give us rest.' And for some 
 time the Greeks had no cause to complain. The 
 Roman way of ruling the world was too practical 
 to be mechanical. It never affected a pedantic unifor- 
 mity in the government of the provinces. In Greece 
 the Romans found a political civilization ready-made, 
 and in good order. Each city had a complete 
 machinery for the management of its own affairs, and 
 this machinery would work equally well whether the 
 city was independent or not. The Romans, therefore, 
 let it alone as much as they could. Rome said to 
 Greek cities, ' Pay your taxes, but manage your own 
 concerns in your own way.' Under Rome the Greek
 
 4 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 cities of Greece Proper had municipal self-government 
 for nearly five centuries, till Constantino's time. 
 
 Population. Yet the whole period of Roman domination in 
 Greece was a period of decline. In 300 B.C. the 
 population of Greece Proper and the islands may 
 have been about three and a half millons, and the 
 total Greek race, including the Asiatic Greeks, about 
 seven millions. At the end of the first century 
 of our era, 400 years later, the population of Greece 
 Proper and the islands was probably under two 
 millions, and the total of the Greek race perhaps did 
 
 Taxes. not exceed five millions. The Roman taxes were not 
 excessive in amount, but the system of letting and 
 sub-letting them vested a frightful tyranny in the 
 
 Public tax-farmers. Rome spent little or nothing out of the 
 
 works. r 
 
 taxes on keeping up public works in Greece roads 
 and bridges, water-courses and harbours; the disarmed 
 provincials were incessantly harried by pirates ; and 
 in Greece, as in Italy, the accumulation in a few hands 
 of vast estates, cultivated by slaves, was gradually 
 crushing out the middle-class. The early Emperors 
 were usually well-disposed to Greece it was the tone 
 of educated society to be so and the Emperor's 
 Land. jealousy of the Senate told in the same direction. But 
 the first real benefactor of Greece, in Roman days, was
 
 MODERN GREECE. 5 
 
 Hadrian. Hadrian's sympathy was not shown merely Hadrian. 
 in the temples and buildings with which he adorned 
 Athens. He brought to that city the water of 
 Cephissia, and he brought the water of Lake Styin- 
 phalus to Corinth. He did a better thing yet he 
 placed Greek life on the firm basis of Roman law, 
 by codifying the local usages of the Greek cities on 
 Roman principles, without abolishing municipal insti- 
 tutions ; and he gave the rights of Roman citizenship 
 to the Greeks nearly a century before Caracalla gave 
 them to all free subjects of the empire. 
 
 Everyone knows, from Juvenal or Johnson, the The Greek 
 
 J at Rome. 
 
 character of the Greek at Rome the versatile ad- 
 venturer who was equally ready to cast a horoscope or 
 to compound a medicine, to square the circle or to 
 drill the ballet, to pose as a professor or an acrobat : a 
 being whose rank traversed the whole scale which 
 separates an Italian organ-grinder from the last new 
 tenor, but who was always so far in the same condition, 
 that Rome refused to take him seriously. This was 
 the needy Greek of Asia or Alexandria who came to 
 push his way at Rome. But there was another type of j^fj 
 Greek which was not much seen at Rome, the Greek 
 of Europe, who stayed in Greece Proper. When the 
 Romans conquered Greece, they found that the bulk of
 
 G MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 the population were of a class hardly known in Italy. 
 In Cicero's time it was very rare for a comparatively 
 jxxjr man in Italy to have any land of his own. But 
 in Greece the mass of the free men were still farming 
 their own land, just as in the old days. We have not 
 far to seek for a specimen of the Greek farmer or 
 small landowner who lived on his own land in the old 
 Plutarch, country among the old associations. There could not 
 be a better specimen than Plutarch at the end of the 
 first century. Plutarch had paid a few visits to 
 Rome as a tourist from the provinces, but he spent the 
 latter years of his quiet life in Greece, near his native 
 place, Chseroneia the scene of the battle in which 
 Philip dealt the death-blow' to Greek liberty. In his 
 ' Table-talk ' Plutarch gives us pleasant glimpses of 
 the society of the time. Here is his picture of life 
 at a watering-place, a Greek Brighton, in Eubcea : 
 'It is a place fitted by nature for sundiy honest 
 pleasures, beautified with many fair houses and lodg- 
 ings, in such sort as it is reputed the public hostelry 
 of all Greece. This town flourishes chiefly in the 
 middle of spring ; for many resort thither at that 
 time, and meet in each others' houses at tables 
 spread with all good things, and, being at leisure, 
 hold large converse touching letters.'
 
 MODERN GREECE. 7 
 
 Greece was so thinly peopled then, Plutarch says, 
 that the whole country could not have furnished more 
 than 3,000 heavy-armed soldiers the number fur- 
 nished of old by one second-rate town in the Pelo- 
 ponnesus. Corn-fields had become lonely sheep-walks, 
 where you might walk all day long and scarcely meet 
 a soul. For educated men it was a time of quiet 
 looking-back on the great past ; and that past was 
 around them everywhere. Close to Plutarch's home 
 stood the great stone lion commemorating those who 
 died for Greek freedom at Chseroneia. One still sees 
 its fragments there by the roadside. Plutarch had 
 seen Phocion's house at Athens, and the underground 
 chamber of Demosthenes, and the offerings dedicated 
 by Nicias, and at Sparta the spear of Agesilaos : the 
 old forms and names survived ; the great games were 
 still held at the Isthmus and at Delphi, at Nemea and 
 at Olympia ; the Amphictyonic Council still met ; the 
 ancient court still sat on the hill of Mare ; the Spartan 
 Senate was still the Gerousia ; and Athens was still a 
 home of letters and art, and of much else that Roman 
 swords could not destroy, nor Roman money buy. 
 Lucian, three generations after Plutarch, can still con- 
 trast the tranquil elegance of Athenian life with the 
 extravagant luxiiry of Rome ; and if Juvenal called
 
 8 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 Greek history mendacicms for saying that Xerxes dug 
 that canal through Mount Athos which can be traced 
 at this day, Lucian is ready with the retort that a 
 Roman told the truth only once in his life, and that 
 was when he made his will. 
 Goths at Greece, then, had still a worthy home-life of its own, 
 
 Athens J 
 
 both in country and in town ; but some powerful tonic 
 was needed to lift and brace that life. Such a tonic 
 came in the middle of the third century. The Goths, 
 after defeating tho Roman legions, stormed Athens. 
 For 300 years the Greeks had had no chance of show- 
 ing that they could fight : but they showed it now : 
 they drove the Goths out of Greece, inflicting on them 
 their first grave reverse. Here was a proof that the 
 warlike spirit lived : a proof the more striking since 
 this enemy was the same before whom the Western 
 Empire afterwards went down : and this was at a 
 time when many young Romans, we are told, were cut- 
 ting off their thumbs to avoid military service. The 
 Greek success was largely due to a regenerating influ- 
 ence which had now taken full hold of the Greek 
 character. 
 
 and'the'"^ Christianity had long been working its way up- 
 wards from the lower strata of Greek society. ' We 
 will hear thee again of this matter,' the Atheni-
 
 MODERN GREECE. 9 
 
 ans had said to St. Paul ; and curiosity had ended in 
 conversion. The Greeks were a people peculiarly sen- 
 sitive to everything that was in the intellectual air of 
 the time, and there was much in it that helped Chris- 
 tianity. The aspect of speculative thought had long 
 been sterile; there was a tendency to take refuge from 
 polytheism in deism ; and in particular there was a 
 spreading belief, half-mystic, in the resurrection of 
 the body, a belief which drew many votaries to the 
 worship of the Egyptian Serapis, and was in turn streng- 
 thened by that cult. The Greek character, which had 
 long been marked by a certain quick-witted levity 
 the natural result of intellectual and political de- 
 spair took a new earnestness from a practical rule of 
 life which had the sanction of a lofty hope. The 
 Christian organization became also a political discip- Greek- 
 line. The members of every Greek congregation met 
 together, not only for worship, but also for the manage- 
 ment of the common affairs. In 300 A.D. the body 
 corporate of Eastern Christians, the Greek Church, 
 with its central administration, was already a powerful 
 commonwealth within the Roman State. 
 
 Constantino the Great saw this. The West was, Constanti- 
 nople the 
 
 on the whole, still pagan: his rival, the Senate, was 
 pagan : the Greek East was, on the whole, Christian.
 
 10 MODEEN GEEECE. 
 
 Constantino resolved that the power of the Roman 
 Emperor should form a close alliance with the strong 
 and wide-spread corporation of Greek Christendom. 
 This was one, at least, of his chief motives for that 
 step which preserved the Empire for a thousand 
 years, and saved Europe from premature devastation. 
 In 330 A.D. Constantine removed the seat of Empire 
 from the Old Rome in the West to that New Rome 
 which he had founded in the East. 
 Conse- The establishment of Constantinople as the capital 
 
 quence for 
 
 eeks. Q f {.^e R oman Empire was a turning-point in the 
 destiny of the Greek race. The centre of political 
 gravity was shifted from a place where all its sur- 
 roundings were Latin to a place where its surround- 
 ings were mainly Greek. Officially speaking, Con- 
 stantinople was at first a Latin city, and remained so 
 for nearly four centuries. But from the first it was 
 saturated with Greek influences : and it was certain 
 that the Latin nucleus could not last for ever when it 
 was steeped in a solvent so powerful and so subtle. 
 Surely, it might be thought, the Roman yoke now 
 became lighter than ever for Greece. The result 
 Constan- was the opposite. Constantine refonned the whole 
 
 tine's re- 
 System of the Empire. He made the Emperor practi- 
 cally absolute. He made the Emperor's household
 
 MODERN GREECE. 11 
 
 the centre of all government. He subordinated the 
 military power to the civil power. He organized an 
 efficient public service. He provided for a regular 
 administration of justice. But he greatly increased 
 the public burdens. Heavy taxes were required to 
 pay for a splendid court, a highly-trained staff of offi- 
 cials, and a strong army. The machinery of taxation 
 introduced by Constantino seriously altered the con- 
 dition of Greece. 
 
 Hitherto the Greek cities of Greece Proper had Municipal 
 
 institutions. 
 
 retained their old municipal institutions. They 
 had managed their land and raised their money 
 in their own way. But now Constantino imposed 
 on Greece the municipal system of Rome. This 
 meant' that the local affairs of each Greek town 
 and the district belonging to it were henceforth 
 to be managed by a small board of the licher land- 
 owners, called the curia. This board was respon- The curia, 
 sible for the land-tax payable by every holder 
 of land within the district, and when the land-tax fell 
 short, the members of the board had to make up the 
 deficit out of their own pockets. The board had also 
 to levy a capitation- tax on all merchants and artisans; 
 and, in order to keep up the amount of this tax, it 
 was enacted that the son of an artisan should follow Caste.
 
 12 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 his father's calling. Experience shows that the insti- 
 tution of caste is seldom permanent except where 
 social contact implies religious defilement. Under 
 the Roman and Byzantine Empire the attempt to 
 introduce caste left no lasting traces except trade- 
 guilds, and the local division of towns into quarters. 
 Before Constantino the cities of Greece Proper had 
 been municipal democracies. After Constantine they 
 
 Results. were municipal oligarchies. The results of the change 
 were, on the whole, bad for Greece. The free cultiva- 
 tors of the soil, richer or poorer, wei*e steadily im- 
 poverished, and in the course of the 200 yeai's between 
 Constantine and Justinian the class of richer land- 
 owners was nearly extinguished. Worse still, the 
 national life of Greece was weakened at its source. 
 No Greek institutions now remained around which 
 the people could rally. The local framework within 
 which they lived was now as foreign as the court to 
 which they sent their taxes. 
 
 Greece* ^ u * these evils took a long time to show their depth. 
 
 Though the causes of decay were working, Greece 
 enjoyed a fair amount of material prosperity in the 
 space between Constantine and Justinian. In the 
 fourth and fifth centuries Syria and the Red Sea w,ere 
 usually insecure. This turned the trade of Central
 
 MODERN GREECE. 13 
 
 Asia into the Black Sea, and brought the Mediterranean 
 trade back to Greece. The Greeks kept out the nor- 
 thern barbarians, and the capital of wealthy refugees 
 from the northern border came into Greece. Then, 
 heavy as the taxes were, Constantine's regular system 
 had at any rate increased the security of life aud pro- 
 perty by placing two established orders between the 
 court and the people namely, the clergy, and the 
 lawyers. 
 
 Greece suffered a new blow from Justinian. Jus- J . I - l ) ;l tin . i *! 1 
 tinian's reign may claim the threefold splendours of 
 war, legislation, and architecture ; but it also intro- 
 duced for Greece and for the Empire the era of mental 
 degradation. In Justinian's time Athens was a 
 university town with the prestige of a literary 
 capital. The luxury which prevailed there was cei- 
 tainly modest if tried by the standard of Constanti- 
 nople: the Athenian ladies might wear dresses of 
 Chinese silk which Greek hands had embroidered with 
 gold ; the philosophers might cheer their studies with 
 the choice vintages of Rhodes or Thasos; but, after all, 
 the pleasures which gave the tone to Athenian life 
 were still, as of old, better than these. Such as they 
 were, however, they failed to awaken sympathy in the 
 Roman Louis XIV. In 529 Justinian confiscated the
 
 14 
 
 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 Schools of 
 Athens 
 closed (529 
 A.B.) 
 
 End of the 
 old Litera- 
 ture and 
 Art. 
 
 Invasions 
 and immi- 
 grations. 
 
 endowments which Marcus Aurelius had bestowed on 
 the four philosophical sects of Athens. He closed that 
 illustrious school which now for nine-hundred years 
 had been a holy place to those who aspired to look 
 on the face of eternal truth, the Academy of Plato. 
 
 The end of the old Hellenic literature and art may 
 be placed here, so far as it can be placed at any one 
 moment. The glories of old Greece had been slowly 
 dying : in the year 393 the Olympian games had been 
 held for the last time ; the Mysteries of Eleusis had 
 been threatened by an imperial edict forbidding the 
 nocturnal celebration of pagan rites, but had actually 
 ceased only when Alai-ic and his Goths destroyed the 
 temple at Eleusis; the greatest works of Pheidias 
 the statues, in ivory and gold, of Athene and of the 
 Olympian Zeus had left Greece in the fifth century. 
 And now, in the sixth, a night of bigotry and ignor- 
 ance settles down on the empire, to last for two- 
 hundred years. 
 
 Tribe after tribe had come pouring down on the 
 Danube from the north. The Goths under Alaric 
 had been followed by the Huns under Attila ; after 
 the Huns came their kinsmen, the Bulgarians and 
 the Avars. Now and again fierce invaders swept 
 over Greece ; then, in the seventh century, comes
 
 MODERN GREECE. 15 
 
 that great wave of Slavonian immigration which 442 A.D. 
 effaced so much of the old Hellenic tradition even 
 in the names of places. The Slavonians made per- 
 manent settlements in Greece ; but still in the main 
 it was by the Greeks that the Empire was saved 
 on its northern frontier. 
 
 At last, however, at the beginning of the eighth 
 century, it looked as if the end had come indeed. 
 The Roman Empire and the Greek nationality seemed 
 alike doomed to destruction. They were hard pressed 
 by two deadly foes : in Europe, by the Bulgarians ; 
 in Asia, by the Saracens. Just then a great man LO, the 
 
 Isaurian 
 
 arose, and saved them. This was Leo III., the (716 " 741 ^ 
 Isaurian. With Leo the Byzantine Empire may be 
 said to begin. The story of Greek subjection enters 
 on its second great chapter; the Roman chapter is 
 closed, and the Byzantine chapter opens. 
 
 No hard-and-fast line can be drawn between the n. Byzan- 
 tine period 
 
 Roman Empire and the Byzantine. There was no ( 71(i - 14o;; )- 
 break at any one point. The Christian Emperors of 
 Constantinople went on calling themselves Emperors 
 of the Romans down to the Turkish conquest. The 
 Greek subjects of the Eastern empire went on calling 
 themselves Romaioi, Romans. ' Byzantine ' is a 
 conventional term, meant to express the fact that a
 
 16 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 certain change passed over the character of the 
 Roman Empire in the East. We must see how this 
 change came about, and what it meant. 
 
 the'traiil- Constantinople had been originally a Latin city. 
 Latin was the language of the court and of the 
 government. Constantino's centralizing reforms were 
 essentially Roman in spirit. And in one respect he 
 gave Constantinople a marked resemblance to Rome. 
 He kept up at Constantinople the custom of gratui- 
 tously distributing grain to the needy part of the city 
 population. This gave the populace of the capital an 
 interest in common with the imperial court. Both 
 court and populace wished to see the provincials taxed 
 to the last farthing that could be wrung from them. 
 The popular opinion of Constantinople was thus placed 
 in direct antagonism to that of the provinces. Con- 
 stantine's system had now been in force for more than 
 300 years. The grinding taxation had gone on. Pop- 
 ulation was still dwindling. The neglect of roads, 
 bridges, and harbours had gone far to destroy com- 
 munication. Each provincial town was more or less 
 isolated in its own narrow district. The futile caste- 
 system had at least served to check the intercourse of 
 classes. The grand scheme for crystallizing society 
 had failed. Human life was slowly mortifying within
 
 MODERN GREECE. 17 
 
 that iron framework by which the Roman Empire 
 had thought to fix it in one attitude for ever. There 
 was little interchange of ideas, and there were not 
 many ideas to exchange. Mental activity was almost 
 extinct under the dead weight of ignorance and super- 
 stition. 
 
 It was at this moment that the Saracens issued from 
 Arabia in the first enthusiasm of militant Unitarians, 
 believing that, as God is one and has one prophet, so 
 the faithful are one army with one caiise. In a few 
 years of the seventh century they rent away from the 
 Eastern Empire its southern provinces in Syria, Egypt, 
 and Africa. In the provinces which now remained 
 to the Empire the majority of the population was 
 Greek. Hence the Greek nation and the imperial 
 government were drawn into closer connection. Re- Reforn '* 
 forms were urgently needed, and these reforms 
 were now gradually made under the influence of a 
 public opinion which was mainly Greek. The pro- 
 vinces had been divided into departments called 
 ' themes.' This division was now made the basis 
 of the military system. A general and a corps were 
 assigned to each 'theme.' The army thus became 
 more efficient for defence, and less capable of united 
 rebellion. Finance was further centralized. Hitherto
 
 18 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 the free nmnicipalities had been allowed to adjust 
 the incidence of the land-tax at which they were 
 assessed, and to collect for their own district. This 
 power was not transferred to imperial officers, and 
 the emperor was henceforth his own chancellor of 
 the exchequer; a change which worked well, for, 
 while taxation became more productive, the condition 
 of the people showed improvement. The adminis- 
 tration of justice was facilitated by the removal of 
 a serious practical hindrance. Justinian's code had 
 been too voluminous for general use. Leo III. now 
 issued a standard abridgment of it in Greek, and 
 this ' Ecloga,' superseding all other epitomes, re- 
 stored uniformity to the practice of the law-courts. 
 Socially the transition from the Roman phase of the 
 Empire to the Byzantine is marked by the final adop- 
 tion of Greek as the official language ; by the preva- 
 lence of Greek manners ; and by the identification 
 both of Emperor and of people with the Orthodox 
 Greek Church. But the Greek nationality which thus 
 became the basis of the Empire was the Asiatic, not 
 the European. Since Justinian's reign the Greeks of 
 Asia had come to treat the Greeks of Europe as mere 
 
 'Hella- provincials. At the beginning of the eighth centurv 
 dikoi.' 
 
 the Greeks of Greece Proper were often called Helladikoi.
 
 MODERN GREECE. 19 
 
 All Greek subjects of the Empire called themselves 
 Romaioi. The name of Hellenes was reserved either 
 for the ancient Greeks or for the adherents of 
 Hellenic paganism. Hence the fitness of the term 
 Byzantine, borrowed from the name of the older 
 Greek city on site of the Latin Constantinople. 
 ' Byzantine ' means that the militaiy Roman mon- Caning of 
 archy, as reformed by Constantino, had now been tine ' 
 again reformed under the influence of Greek ideas, 
 and had assumed a more decidedly Greek aspect. 
 And this new phase is called Byzantine rather than 
 Hellenic, because the Greek ideas and usages which it 
 embodied were those of the Asiatic Greeks, not those 
 of European Hellas. 
 
 Under the Byzantine Empire Eui'opean Greece was Medieval 
 
 Greece, 716 
 
 quietly prosperous for four hundred years, from the ~~ 
 eighth century to the twelfth. It was, indeed, 
 merely an outlying province, rarely visited by the 
 Emperors, and little thought of save for the taxes 
 which it sent to Constantinople. Let us imagine a 
 traveller visiting Greece any time between 900 and 
 1100 A.D. : what would he have found 1 ? 
 
 In the outward aspect of the cities he would have General 
 
 aspect. 
 
 seen much of the old Hellenic character. Many of 
 the ancient temples some of them now converted to
 
 20 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 Christian use were still perfect or in fair preserva- 
 tion. Barbarous invaders had made some havoc, and 
 sheer neglect had done its work, especially in the 
 Peloponnesus ; but most of the lai-ge towns could still 
 show large remains of ancient architecture. Our 
 visitor would have looked in vain, no doubt, for the 
 great masterpieces of sculptor and painter; most of 
 them had long since gone to the New Rome or to 
 the Old. He would have heard the Greek language, 
 strangely impoverished, indeed, and a good deal cor- 
 rupted in grammar, but not as yet alloyed with many 
 foreign elements ; and, if he had talked to men of the 
 better class, he would have found that the old Greek 
 literature was still read. But his chief feeling would 
 be the sense that a great wave of social change had 
 at some time swept over Greece, not, indeed, oblitera- 
 ting all the land-marks of the past, yet greatly altering 
 the surface and the life. 
 Names of First, it would strike him how the people seemed to 
 
 places. 
 
 have forgotten the old names of places, even the most 
 famous. Sea-port towns, indeed, had generally kept 
 their own names as Corinth, Argos, Methone, Patras. 
 But he would find with wonder that Delphi was 
 known as Kastri, that Marathon had become Vrana, 
 that Salamis was Kiluri, that Platrea was Kochla, that
 
 MODERN GREECE. 21 
 
 Mycenae was Kharrata, that Olympia was Miraka ; 
 even the great mountain-ranges had often taken new 
 titles Parnassus was Liakura, Helicon was Zagora, 
 Cyllene was Ziria. Then in a great part of the 
 rich plains, and on the lower slopes of the hills, 
 he would find a population living on good terms 
 with the Greek, yet of a very distinct physical type 
 mostly tall, robust, and of a blond complexion with 
 a distinct language of their own, too, and a distinct 
 character, formed by the inherited habits of a life 
 divided between guerilla warfare and the occupation 
 of shepherds or husbandmen, and marked by an evi- 
 dent dislike to the life of towns. They had their tribes, 
 of which the chiefs formed a nobility each tribe being 
 subdivided into clans under patriarchs and dwelt 
 mostly in scattered groups of huts, built in woods or 
 on river-banks. These were the descendants of Slavo- 
 nians who had long ago settled in Greece, and who 
 were chiefly graziers. At the present day the Greek 
 mountains exhibit for the most part crags of bare 
 limestone, only varied by scanty verdure or tufts of 
 stunted underwood. But on many of those mountains 
 the medieval visitor would have seen a dark mantle of 
 forest: and, if he had climbed them, his guide would 
 have shown him many a spot in the thick wood on the
 
 22 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 hill-tops where some Greek anchorite of the seventh 
 century had sought refuge from the pagan Slavonians 
 who first settled in the plains beneath, driven from 
 their northern seats by the conquering Bulgarians or 
 Avars. 
 
 Agriculture. He would not have met with any large extent of 
 cornfields. The Slavonians in Greece were more of 
 a pastoral than an agricultural people, though they 
 were not unskilled in tillage, their favourite crops, 
 we are told, being millet and rye. And the roads 
 over the hills once excellent were now so bad 
 that any large transport of grain had become impos- 
 sible. But near every town and village he would 
 have seen small patches of corn raised by spade-hus- 
 bandry : also olive-groves, orchards, vineyards, where 
 light toil reaped a rich reward, giving Greece a mono- 
 Serfdom and poly of the choicest oils, wines, and fruits. The 
 
 slavery. r ' 
 
 groups of labourers among those vines and fruit- 
 trees would be made up of three classes, though a 
 stranger probably would not have seen much outward 
 difference between them. Free men would be there, 
 working as hired labourers for a wage. Others would 
 be mingled with them, who were neither free citizens 
 nor slaves belonging to a master, but serfs bound 
 to the soil, and jealously protected by the imperial
 
 MODERN GREECE. 23 
 
 government, who looked on the produce of their 
 labour as most important to the treasury, and took 
 good care that no grasping landlord should make 
 them work at manufactures for his own profit. 
 Lastly there would be some ordinary slaves employed 
 on the land by their owner not very many, how- 
 ever. It had become so easy for a rural slave in 
 Greece to escape into the Slavonian or Bulgarian 
 settlements that it was necessary to treat them better 
 than formerly, and this made them too expensive 
 to be largely used in agricultural work. Rural no 
 less than domestic slavery, however, survived in some 
 measure down to the Turkish conquest. 
 
 But if our medieval traveller wished to discover the Manufac- 
 tures. 
 
 true spring of Greek energy and prospeiity, he would 
 
 turn from the fields to the towns. The silk-worm had 
 
 been brought into Greece from China in Justinian's 
 
 reign. Medieval Thebes and Athens flourished by the 
 
 manufacture of silk almost as Manchester has flourished 
 
 by cotton. Their marts could show many other costly 
 
 wares besides woollen fabrics of gorgeous hues, dresses 
 
 embroidered with gold, jewellery, and ornamented arms. 
 
 If the stranger visited the southern port of Monemvasia Commerce. 
 
 whence malmsey took its name or the harbour of 
 
 the Peirseus, he would be in the midst of a scene as
 
 24 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 busy as the Rialto of Venice in later days. Under 
 the Byzantine Empire the trade of India and China 
 passed through Central Asia, north of the Caliph's 
 dominions, to the Euxine, and thence through the 
 ^Egean to the West. The Greek marine, both mer- 
 cantile and naval, was the largest in the world. The 
 Greeks had in their hands almost all the commerce 
 with the Black Sea and with the West. They carried 
 to Europe the perfumes, pearls, and jewels of India 
 and Arabia above all, their spices, then largely used 
 at table, and for incense in churches the silks of 
 China the tortoise- shell of Africa as well as the 
 oils, fruits, and wines, the textures, arms, and jewel- 
 lers' work of the Empire itself. 
 
 The wealth of the Byzantine world from the eighth 
 century to the twelfth is sufficiently shown by a 
 single fact. The Byzantine Empire supplied West- 
 ern Europe with almost the whole of the gold coin 
 which was then in circulation. The long stability 
 of the Byzantine gold currency is a remarkable 
 proof of prosperity and of prudence. Contrast it 
 with the progressive depreciation under the earlier 
 Roman Empire. In the three centuries between 
 Augustus and Gallienus the Roman gold standard was 
 gradually depressed to a degree which might be stated
 
 MODERN GREECE. 25 
 
 in English terms by saying that a gold sovereign had 
 become worth about twelve shillings ; while the silver 
 currency had been at last annihilated by the issue of a 
 base substitute, to such effect as if an English silver 
 shilling had become worth less than a copper penny. 
 The result was wide-spread misery a general paralysis 
 of labour, and wholesale destruction of capital. Dur- 
 ing the whole course of the 900 years which separate 
 Constantine I. from Constantine XI., the gold byzant 
 the unit of the Eastern gold coinage maintained 
 its value unaltered. 
 
 The Byzantine Empire reached the height of its Byzantine 
 
 decline: 1057 
 
 prosperity at the end of the tenth century, and the be- ~ 
 ginning of its decline may be dated from the middle of 
 the eleventh. Intelligent centralization had gradually 
 passed into stupid despotism. The Emperor was abso- 
 lute, and his will was no longer exercised through able 
 officials. Basil I. had taken the administration away ^ 7 ; s86 . 
 from the highly trained public service which Constan- 
 tine had instituted, and transferred it to the eunuchs 
 of the palace. The middle class, though never extin- 
 guished, was diminished, and the higher Byzantine 
 clergy discountenanced popular progress. Byzantine 
 commerce, too, had begun to suffer from Italian com- 
 petition and from piracy.
 
 20 MODEEN GREECE. 
 
 ti!^B^n- 0f But it; was lon S Before these things began to 
 dim the brilliant surface of the Byzantine world. The 
 glimpses which we catch of medieval Constantinople 
 reveal a gorgeous picture, in which the most incon- 
 gruous colours are quaintly blended. It was above all 
 things the age of formula ; in all things the letter 
 had prevailed over the spirit. The stately ritual which 
 was celebrated under the dome of St. Sophia had 
 its worldly counterpart in the elaborate etiquette 
 of the palace above the Golden Horn, and found a 
 sombre reflection in the ponderous pedantries or puerile 
 conceits which too often disguise the solid worth of 
 Byzantine literature. The mind of the age could no 
 longer rise to the higher levels of art. It was too 
 rigid ; it was also too ingenious. , It showed itself 
 more characteristically in clever mechanism. The 
 Emperor Theophilus in the ninth century had a childish 
 delight in costly toys, which were executed under the 
 supervision of the eminent mathematician Leo, after- 
 wards archbishop of Thessalonica : thus at the entrance 
 to the hall of state in the palace of Constantinople 
 there stood a golden plane-tree, with artificial birds 
 wrought in gold and precious stones, birds that could 
 flutter their wings and sing, vultures that screamed 
 and lions that roared, while organs concealed behind
 
 MODERN GREECE. 27 
 
 the panels of the walls filled the apartments with soft 
 music. Sometimes this ingenuity took a more use- 
 ful turn. The system of beacon-telegraphs was per- 
 fected, and in the Emperor's council-chamber there 
 was a dial on whose face could be read the signals 
 flashed by fire from the borders of Armenia or the 
 shores of the Adriatic. 
 
 With all this there was a strong dash of barbarism The Court, 
 in the manners of the time. We hear of scenes at the 
 Byzantine court which recall the orgies of Alexander 
 in Asia. The Emperor Manuel was once giving an 
 entertainment in the palace when two of his guests 
 quarrelled. One of them struck at the other with his 
 sword. The Emperor put out his arm to arrest the 
 blow, and was wounded. The Empress Euphrosyne, 
 the wife of Alexius III., was almost a Byzantine 
 Cleopatra. Her husband found it expedient to send 
 his lady to a convent on the Black Sea, but he after- 
 wards recalled her to coxirtj and then we are told how 
 the populace of the capital shouted, as Euphrosyne was 
 seen once more surrounded by a gay cavalcade on her 
 way to one of her great hunting-parties, dexterously 
 managing her spirited horse, calling to her hounds, and 
 with a falcon perched on her embroidered glove. 
 
 On the whole it is refreshing to turn from the Byzan- The Army.
 
 28 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 tine court to the Byzantine camp. For several centuries 
 the Byzantine army was the finest in the world, and 
 its artillery department had a special advantage 
 in the use of the combustible substance called Greek 
 fire, thrown from brazen tubes. The Byzantines had 
 formidable foes. The Saracen cavalry was mail-clad : 
 the Bulgarian warriors are described as sheathed cap- 
 a-pie in iron ; both nations had engines of war for 
 sieges and for the field. Yet neither Saracen nor 
 Bulgarian could meet the Byzantines on equal 
 terms. 
 Northern Danger threatened the Empire from both north and 
 
 Invaders. 
 
 east, but not in the same form. The northern peoples 
 who poured across the Danube came mainly in search 
 of new homes. Their tendency was to settle down 
 into kingdoms of moderate size, which the Empire could 
 hold in check, or with which it could live on tolerably 
 good terms. Thus the Slavonian settlements in Servia 
 and Croatia were placed there to check the Avars. 
 For a long period the Emperors managed to have 
 peaceable relations with the kingdom of Bulgaria : 
 and from the eleventh century they were generally at 
 Eastern peace with the Russians. But the Mohammedan 
 
 Invaders. 
 
 nations who burst into Asia Minor from the east were 
 driven by a fanatic impulse to universal conquest, with
 
 MODERN GREECE. 29 
 
 which no compromise was possible. With them the 
 Empire had to fight for bare life. It beat the Saracens 
 at last. But just then a fatal mistake was made. In 
 1045 Constantino IX. destroyed the little kingdom of 
 Armenia, an Asiatic Switzerland, with a Christian 
 population of sturdy mountaineers. Thus the gates of 
 Asia Minor were left open. 
 
 A worse foe than the Saracen found his way in. ol J, uk 
 
 J Turks. 
 
 The Saracens, a Semitic people, were fiery warriors, 
 
 but they also knew how to value civilization and 
 
 art. These new-comers were neither Semitic nor 
 
 Aryan, but Turanian, of a stock akin to the old 
 
 Bulgarians, and to the Magyars, or Hungarians. 
 
 These were the Turks, not, at first, the Ottoman 
 
 Turks, but a tribe then far stronger the Seljuks. 
 
 The Seljuks were a nomad people. They knew 
 
 nothing of city-life. When they had devoured one 
 
 district they went on to another. In the eleventh 
 
 century the Seljuk Turks spread over Asia Minor. 
 
 They founded the Empire of Roum (that is, Rome), IOSOA.D. 
 
 and fixed their head-quarters close to Constantinople 
 
 itself at Nicsea. From Nicsea they fell back before 
 
 the crusaders to Iconium. But the death-blow to the 1195-99 A.D. 
 
 Byzantine Empire did not come from the Seljuks: it 
 
 was dealt by the Fourth Crusade.
 
 30 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 Fourth i^ us "\Vesterns the very name of the Crusades is 
 
 Crusade * 
 
 still like that talisman with which Walter Scott has 
 linked it : every soldier of the Cross is a Knight of the 
 Leopard. To Eastern Christendom, however, the 
 crusaders appeared in a very different light. A 
 Godfrey or a Tancred could not always restrain half- 
 disciplined bands of free-lances from pillaging the 
 country through which they passed. A Greek 
 Christian was poorly consoled for a ruined homestead 
 or a broken head by the fact that the giver of these 
 gifts had the Latin Cross on the shoulder of his 
 doublet. Various causes, political and religious, had 
 long been making bad blood between East and West. 
 The Fourth Crusade brought matters to a head. The 
 Fourth Crusade was a marauding expedition by 20,000 
 brigands, whose deliberate purpose was to divide the 
 spoil of the Byzantine Empire according to a pre- 
 arranged plan, and who mocked the sacred ensign 
 under which they marched by making it the pretext 
 of an infamous design. History records no crime 
 which, in calculated rapacity, in sustained cruelty, 
 and in studied hypocrisy, is blacker than the Fourth 
 Crusade. 
 Latin Em- In 1204 the Byzantine Empire, strictly so called, 
 
 pire of Rou- 
 
 ll > and the first Latin Emperor now styled the
 
 MODERN GREECE. 31 
 
 Emperor of Eoumania was set up at Constanti- 
 nople. At the same time three Latin principalities 
 were established in European Greece. One of them, 
 the principality of Thessalonica, very soon passed into 
 Greek hands, but the other two were more lasting. 
 The Latin principality of the Morea lasted from 1205 
 to 1387. The Dukedom of Athens lasted from 1205 
 to 1456. 
 
 It is a picturesque episode in the long story of J"^f s o 
 Athens, this period of the Frankish Dukedom. 
 Its memories live in the poetry of those centuries, and 
 later. Dante and Chaucer, like Shakspere, call 
 Theseus the Duke of Athens. Boccaccio, in the story 
 of the princess Alathiel, gives a picture of the Athenian 
 ducal court ; and an old Catalan chronicler, a Spanish 
 Froissart, describes its splendid pageants and tourna- 
 ments. Meanwhile other bits of the Byzantine Em- 
 pire had become Greek kingdoms. At the south-east 
 corner of the Black Sea a young Greek adventurer Emp ire of 
 
 J Trebizond. 
 
 had set up the Empire of Trebizond in the beautiful 
 country between the river Halys and the snowy peaks 
 of the Caucasus, a land of corn-fields and forest-clad 
 hills, of crag and torrent. For 250 years the Empire 
 of Trebizond maintained a luxurious court, disputed 
 the commerce of the Black Sea with Genoa, and proved
 
 32 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 how the want of moral worth can neutralize the most 
 bountiful gifts of nature. 
 The raiaw- But it was in the Greek Empire of Nicsea that the 
 
 logl. 
 
 true Byzantine tradition lingered. In 1261 the 
 Emperor of Nicaea, Michael Paheologus, succeeded in 
 wresting Constantinople from the Latins. He and his 
 successors, the Palseologi, ruled Constantinople from 
 1261 till the Turkish conquest in 1453. These two 
 centuries of slow death are usually called the Greek 
 Empire, as distinguished from the Byzantine Empire, 
 The 'Greek- strictly so called, which fell in 1204. But in all its 
 
 Empire(12til J 
 
 main characteristics this Greek Empire was essentially 
 a feeble revival of the Byzantine. The Empire had 
 now shrunk to narrow limits. It consisted of Thessalo- 
 nica, of a province in the south of the Morea, and of 
 a few towns near Constantinople. Still the Palaeologi 
 called themselves Emperors of the Romans to the 
 end. 
 
 SlTu?k" The end had come verv near - About 125 A - D - a 
 Turkish chief led into Asia Minor from the far East 
 a little tribe of some 400 tents. Under this chief's 
 
 i.".2f. to 1453 sorij Othman, the petty tribe rapidly grew. Othman's 
 son, Orkhan, the real founder of the Ottoman domin- 
 ion, threw off his allegiance to the decaying Seljuk 
 Empire. The Ottomans gained their first footing in
 
 MODEEN GREECE. 33 
 
 Europe when they took Gallipoli on the Dardanelles 
 in 1356. A century more, and they were at the 
 walls of Constantinople. 
 
 When the hour had come the last Constantino 
 met his fate like a man. The Ottomans were to 
 deliver their assault on the morrow. That evening Capture of 
 
 Constanti- 
 
 Constantine XI. went round the posts of his troops ; nop e> Ui 
 he received the eucharist in St. Sophia, according to 
 that Latin rite which the founder of his house had 
 accepted ; he asked forgiveness of those whom he 
 might have wronged; and next morning, when the 
 Ottomans stormed Constantinople, he fell in the 
 breach. 
 
 The Empire of the East, Roman and Byzantine, Merits of the 
 
 ' Eastern Em- 
 had lasted 1100 years when it perished. It has two pire- 
 
 claims on the gratitude of mankind. 
 
 First, the benefits which it conferred on its sub- 
 jects were, on the whole, greater than any govern- 
 ment had yet maintained so widely and so long. 
 These benefits were chiefly three. The administration 
 of justice from the eighth century to the eleventh 
 was more generally efficient than it had ever before 
 been over an equally large area; a merit which is 
 not obliterated by such later corruptions of justice 
 as marked and hastened the Byzantine decline. A
 
 34 MODEKN GREECE. 
 
 middle class was never lost; for, even when those 
 smaller land-holders who represented the old middle 
 class of the independent Greek commonwealths had 
 been impoverished or effaced by the double incubus 
 of the great estates and of taxation, an urban middle 
 class was sustained by the extension and prosperity 
 of Byzantine commerce. And a literary tradition 
 was preserved, which, though often deformed by 
 pedantry, was still as a silver lamp to the dark 
 
 Next, this Empire kept the gates of Europe, and 
 gave the West time to grow. It seemed a great 
 deliverance when, in 1683, John Sobieski turned 
 back the Ottomans from the walls of Vienna. But, 
 had it not been for that Empire on the Bosporus, 
 hordes of warriors as fierce as the Ottomans would, 
 centuries before, have swept the face of Europe, not 
 stopping at the Danube, but spreading havoc to the 
 Rhine or the Seine, and from the Seine, it may be, 
 carrying sword and fire to the banks of the Thames or 
 the Tweed. The Eastern Empire has been too often 
 judged as if it resembled that effeminate son of Priam 
 who carried away the light and charm of Hellas to a 
 new and uncongenial home : but in truth that Empire 
 was less a Paris than a Hector, the champion who
 
 MODERN GREECE. 35 
 
 alone saved the European Troy. Thrice a strong 
 enemy came up against it, and with each of the three 
 that trusty warden of our marches waged a combat 
 of four hundred years : it beat back the Persian ; it 
 beat back the Saracen; and, after a third struggle 
 of four centuries, it was only in death that it yielded 
 to the Turk. 
 
 Here, in U53, the third and last chapter of Greek ^J u 
 subjection opens the Turkish chapter. Under Turk- 
 ish domination the Greek race was brought to the 
 lowest condition which the long record of its existence 
 can show. No other race, probably, having once 
 fallen so deep, has again risen to freedom and civi- 
 lization. Just here it is that the marvellous vitality 
 of Greek national life is most strikingly seen. Those 
 who would read this dark chapter aright must care- 
 fully distinguish between national unhappiness and 
 national degradation. The crowning proof that a for- 
 eign domination is intellectual and moral death to its 
 subjects is when those subjects have been brought to 
 feel contented with a mere animal existence, and have 
 ceased to resent even to feel the privation of every- 
 thing which imparts a higher dignity and value to 
 human life. 
 The Turk has been called unspeakable: a bold rhe-
 
 36 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 torical figure, when we consider how much he has been 
 spoken of. In one sense no epithet could well be less 
 happy. There is nothing ineffable about the Turkish 
 system as such. Its distinctive feature is its rigidly 
 matter-of-fact character. It consists in literal adherence 
 to a few general rules. Even among well-educated 
 Christians it may frequently be observed that few 
 persons are apt to be more cruel than a conscientious 
 man who has no imagination. Now the average Turk 
 has not much imagination ; his conscience is such as 
 is formed by his religion that is, by the broad views 
 and injunctions of the Koran ; and his education is 
 not calculated to correct or moderate this. The aver- 
 age Turk is absolutely indifferent to the results pro- 
 duced by applying his general rules : all that is the 
 will of Allah. What he. as a servant of the Prophet, 
 has to do, is to do what the Koran says, or the Sultan ; 
 and this he does with varying degrees of integrity, but 
 not, generally, with any diabolical malice ; often, how- 
 ever, without that decent moderation which armed 
 strength is apt to forget, unless it is restrained by 
 conscience, by cant, or by some power of seeing as 
 the victim sees. 
 Greek life Let us try and see what Greek life under Turkey 
 
 under Tur- 
 
 k *y- was like when it was about at its worst say in
 
 MODERN GREECE. 37 
 
 the year 1560. Suppose we are walking near a 
 white-washed Turkish village in Bceotia. That Greek 
 who is working in the fields is the tenant of a Turkish 
 landlord to whom he pays a head-rent. The Turkish 
 landlord holds his land as a fief directly from the 
 Sultan. The Turk's father was a cavalry soldier, who 
 received this fief as a good-service reward, on condition 
 of taking the field again, when required, with a certain 
 number of men. These fiefs were of three classes 
 there were about 2000 of them in all in Greece 
 enabling the Sultan to call out about 7000 cavalry. 
 In the sixteenth century they were made hereditary 
 in most places, passing on from father to son. The 
 Turk never troubled himself about tilling the land : 
 he left that to the natives; his one business in life 
 was to keep up his military skill ; and for a long time 
 these Turkish land-holders were the best light cavalry 
 in Europe. 
 
 If our Greek friend in the fields had only to 
 pay his rent which is not very heavy his poverty- 
 stricken air would be hard to understand. But if you 
 pursue your enquiries, the case will become clearer. 
 It is now about a month since the harvest. A great 
 heap of corn, not yet threshed, is lying in the open air 
 near the Greek's house. This means that the Turkish
 
 38 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 tax-gatherer has not been here yet. The Greek farmer 
 has to pay the Government a tax in kind on the whole 
 yield of his land, a fraction varying from a third to 
 a tithe. To prevent frauds on the exchequer, the 
 whole produce, once harvested, must be let alone till 
 the tax-collector comes in person, and sees the govern- 
 ment heap separated from the farmer's heap. For the 
 same primitive reason there must be no private 
 threshing in closed barns. This is inconvenient, par- 
 ticularly in a wet season, but still the Greek farmer 
 could get on pretty well if there was not another 
 burden on his back. Our Greek is a Christian, and 
 The so he has to pay the haratch. The haratch is a capita- 
 
 haratch. 
 
 tion-tax, paid to the Ottoman Porte by all rayahs, 
 that is, by all male infidels above the age of ten, 
 excepting priests, the maimed, the blind, and the 
 paralytic. For what says the Koran ? ' Fight against 
 those who forbid not what God and his Prophet have 
 forbidden, and who profess not the true religion of 
 those unto whom the book has been delivered, until 
 they pay tribute and be brought low.' In the middle 
 of the sixteenth century the whole revenue of Turkey 
 was not much more than six millions. This tax on 
 male infidels then yielded about three and a half 
 millions. Our Greek's neighbour on the next farm is
 
 MODERN GREECE. 39 
 
 an idle, swaggering Albanian, whose military or rather 
 predatory tastes have found him some grace in the 
 eyes of the landlord ; but, idle though he is, he is 
 better off than our plodding Greek. He has no 
 haratch to pay : and why 1 He has embraced the 
 Mohammedan religion. 
 
 The Greek is a poor man, then; but in this 
 quiet country life he may at least have a happy 
 home. Consoling himself with this reflection, the 
 traveller strolls on to the village, when his atten- 
 tion is attracted by a remarkable sight. Remember 
 that our scene is laid about the year 1560. The 
 whole place is in a stir. The open place in the 
 middle of the village is full of people. Huddled on 
 one side of it are the Greeks of the village the men 
 pale and stern, the women with tears streaming down 
 tlieir faces and wringing their hands in the bitterest 
 anguish, or else motionless, as if stupefied. On the 
 other side of the open space stand some Turkish 
 officers, the commissioners sent hither by the Pasha 
 of Eubcea, to whose government the Boeotian village 
 belongs : a small armed force surrounds them. Before 
 the Turkish officers stand the Greek elders of the 
 village, old men, silent, with their heads bowed and 
 their hands crossed on their breasts. Behind the old
 
 40 MODEEN GREECE. 
 
 men. stand all the male children of the village between 
 the ages of six and nine. The village, with its district, 
 is but a small place, and perhaps there may be some 
 thirty of these male children between six and nine. 
 After a careful scrutiny, the Turkish officers pick out 
 six of the thirty children. 
 
 What was to be done with those Christian children 
 in the year of grace 1 560 1 
 The child- They were to be sent along with hundreds of 
 
 tribute. J 
 
 others from many scores of villages to Constanti- 
 nople. At Constantinople they were to be distributed 
 through four large colleges, and there to be educated 
 in the Mohammedan religion, as household slaves of 
 the Sultan. Thenceforth they were to be separated 
 from every tie of country and of race. As they 
 grew up, some passed into the domestic service of the 
 palace or the pashas; a few of the most intelligent 
 were trained for posts in the administration ; those 
 of the strongest physique were enrolled in the corps 
 TheJanis- of Janissaries. The Mosaic law excluded the stran- 
 
 saries. 
 
 ger and the hired servant from the Passover, but ad- 
 mitted the servant bought with money. Just so the 
 Janissaries, as household slaves, stood in a closer re- 
 lation to the Sultan than any of his free troops. The 
 Janissaries were originally celibate soldiers, vowed to
 
 MODERN GREECE. 41 
 
 the service of the Prophet and the Sultan. They 
 were the peculiar instrument of Ottoman conquest. 
 For a long period the Janissaries were chiefly recruited 
 from the tribute of male children which was levied, 
 once in every four years, on the Christian Greeks. The Abolition 
 
 of child- 
 
 child-tiibute was abolished by the Porte in 1687, tribute ' 
 partly because agriculture could not spare so much 
 able-bodied labour, partly because the increase of the 
 Mussulman population had made the Porte indepen- 
 dent of this recruiting source for the army. The 
 Janissaries, too, had acquired not only the right to 
 marry, but also, from 1566, the right to enroll their 
 sons in the corps, and had become jealous of admitting 
 the Greek tribute-children. It would be easy to 
 argue that the child-tribute was really after all a 
 very fine thing for the Greeks. No doubt it opened 
 to many individuals far more prosperous careers than 
 they could have had if they had stayed in their 
 villages. Yery possibly some struggling parents may 
 have been well content to have a son taken off their 
 hands on such terms. It is not so easy to say how 
 many homes that tribute must have left desolate, 
 how many hearts it must have broken ; and most 
 certainly it was fatal to all the better hopes of the 
 nation. The manhood of a tormented people can
 
 42 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 fight against every plague of Egypt except the last; 
 but there could be no future for Greece while 
 every household in the land, where the voice of 
 children was heard, lay under the continual shadow 
 of a power more appalling than the Angel of Death, 
 a power which not only rent asunder the bonds of 
 national loyalty and of natural affection, but which 
 forced parent and child alike to believe that in this 
 world and in the world to come they were divided 
 by an impassable abyss. 
 ^fSrfftS Just at the time when the child-tribute ceased, 
 
 irecctJ, lOo-* 
 1718 
 
 another event favoured the revival of Greece. 
 Venice wrested the Morea from Turkey, and kept it 
 for over thirty years. The Venetian conquest of the 
 Morea takes lustre from association with the name of 
 a great man, Francesco Morosini. Those who were at 
 Venice in the latest years of Morosini's life saw his 
 portrait in the hall of the Great Council there, looking 
 down on them from among the faces of the illustrkms 
 dead, and were told that Morosini alone in the annals 
 of the Republic had received that honour during his 
 lifetime. After his conquest of the Peloponnesus, 
 Morosini, now surnamed ' the Peloponnesian,' was 
 made Doge of Venice. He received the ducal insignia 
 while he was still in Greece. The investiture took
 
 MODERN GREECE. 43 
 
 place at the little island of Poros in the Saronic Gulf, 
 the island in which, 2000 years before, Demosthenes 
 had expired : a curious link between the fortunes 
 of Athens and Venice, the crownless queen of the 
 ^Egean and the conquering bride of the Adriatic. 
 
 When the Venetians came into the Morea it was a state of the 
 
 Morea (1688 
 
 wilderness. The Turkish system had for 200 years A ' D% * 
 been making Greece a desert, and now war had 
 finished the work. Roads were impassable. Bridges 
 were broken down. The richest land was fallow. The 
 towns were in ruins. The Hanoverians who served 
 with Morosini complained that their red uniforms 
 spoilt their sport in hunting buffaloes. Greek com- 
 merce had long ago been destroyed by the pirates who 
 literally swarmed in the Greek waters, and who had 
 regular stations from which they levied black-mail on 
 the coast-towns and villages. If a Greek fishing-boat 
 ventured a few miles to sea, it was at the risk of the 
 crew presently finding themselves galley-slaves on 
 board a Maltese or Barbary corsair. The Venetians 
 restored commerce between the Levant and the West j 
 but they insisted that the trade should pass through 
 Venice, and their protective system damaged the Greek 
 markets by lowering the price of exports. 
 
 The Venetian Government in the Morea, care-
 
 44 
 
 MODERN GREECE 
 
 Fail of Vene- fully organized as it had been, was overthrown 
 
 tian rule, 
 
 by the Turks with singular ease as soon as their 
 troubles elsewhere left their hands free to set about 
 it in earnest. The chief cause of this was that 
 the Venetians had not incorporated the Greek 
 population with the ruling caste by developing local 
 institutions, and so the Venetian sway in the Morea 
 was to the end a domination which could be main- 
 
 its result. tained only by force of arms. One lasting benefit, 
 however, the Venetians conferred on Greece. They 
 familiarized the Greeks, who under Turkey had been 
 declining towards semi-barbarism, with the almost 
 forgotten influences of a higher civilization. The 
 Catholic clergy in the Morea did much for education : 
 the college at Tripolitza was especially successful. So- 
 the Venetians, when their brief rule passed away, 
 left behind them the germs of a nobler social life. 
 
 tevohitfon. The Greek Revolution, which began in 1821, was- 
 not a sudden insurrection to which the people were 
 stung by maddening wrongs. It was the necessary 
 result of a movement which had grown very 
 slowly, obedient to a law as sure as that the tree 
 which winter has stripped shall put forth its 
 
 Senerai leaves in the spring. The causes which prepared 
 Greek liberation had been working for more than a
 
 MODERN GREECE. 45 
 
 century before the first blow was struck. The English 
 Revolution of 1688, the American War of Independ- 
 ence, the volcanic revenge of suppressed nature in 
 France, these great events stirred a feeling which 
 spread in slowly widening circles to every region in 
 which the strong could still deprive the weak of those 
 things which God gave to all. As soon as the Greek 
 race so long torpid and benumbed from sheer helpless 
 wretchedness came to comprehend their position, and 
 to be capable of concerted action, it was only a ques- 
 tion of time : sooner or later it was certain that they 
 must rise. In the last century three causes went to s Pc ial 
 
 J preparatives 
 
 give the Greeks this light and this power. 
 
 First, the Sultans organized a service of highly- 
 educated Greek officials, whose position gradually gave 
 them some influence in protecting the Christian subjects 
 of the Porte, and in opening a career to Greeks of 
 ability. 
 
 Secondly, Greek commerce was greatly extended 
 during the latter part of the eighteenth century. 
 This was due partly to the commercial treaties be- 
 tween Turkey and Russia of 1779 and 1783. By 
 these treaties the Gi-eek Christians of Turkey were 
 enabled to trade under the Russian flag. Then 
 Turkey managed to keep out of the wars in which so
 
 46 MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 many European countries were involved by the French 
 Revolution, and so the Turkish flag could bring 
 Greek ships into harbours which were closed against 
 the merchant marine of most other states. 
 
 Thirdly, there was a literary revival of the 
 Greek language. The first object of this revival 
 was to establish a written dialect in which all 
 Greeks could exchange ideas. The literary lan- 
 guage had, of course, lived on among the educated 
 without a break from Byzantine times. But the 
 popular spoken language had been barbarized more 
 and more during the centuries of Turkish rule, 
 and, except in the large towns, had come to be 
 little better than a patois with a number of local 
 forms. By the efforts of a few able men, who 
 clearly saw that this was the first step towards the 
 recovery of Greek independence, the Greek language 
 was once more fitted to be the organ of a national 
 mind. As soon as this had been done, education 
 began to be the most powerful agency of national 
 revival. 
 
 Religion. All these causes helped to bring the Greeks to- 
 gether, to define their common aims, and to quicken 
 their desire for political freedom. At the same time 
 a special cause quickened their desire for religious
 
 MODERN GREECE. 47 
 
 freedom. In the tenth century Greek missionaries had 
 brought the first tidings of the Gospel to the Russians 
 at Kieff. And now, in the eighteenth century, it 
 was Russia that acquired the power of protecting the 
 Greek Church in Turkey. This protectorate, for such 
 it was in reality though not in name, dates from a 
 treaty between Russia and Turkey in 1774. The 
 Greek Revolution was in its origin quite as much 
 religious as political. There was a general tendency 
 to identify Greek orthodoxy with Greek nationality. 
 This will be easily understood if we glance at the past 
 of the Greek Church. Christianity, as we have seen, 
 had become a regenerating influence in the Greek 
 character before the end of the third century. The 
 Greek Church assumed its distinctive aspect about a 
 hundred years later. The Arian heresy arose in the 
 fourth century. The Emperors immediately after 
 Constantino favoured Arianism, but the mass of their 
 Greek subjects were strongly opposed to it. The title T 11 
 Orthodox, as applied to the Greek Church, dates from 
 the fourth century. It denotes the creed received by 
 the Greek people as opposed to the creed favoured by 
 the Roman Emperors. The popular character thus 
 imprinted on the Orthodox Church was confirmed by 
 the controversy of 150 years concerning image- worship.
 
 48 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 This was really a political struggle between the 
 Emperors, who wished to complete centralization by 
 extending the civil power over the Church, and the 
 people, allied with the secular clergy, who maintained 
 the independence of the popular Church in matters 
 of faith and worship. The people prevailed in the 
 end. 
 
 Their allies in that struggle, the secular clergy, have 
 been their allies ever since. The monastic orders of 
 regular clergy furnished the prelates of the Eastern 
 Church, and were in nearer relations with the Byzan- 
 tine court, as afterwards with the Ottoman govern- 
 ment. The secular clergy, on the other hand the 
 parish priests have for centuries been the trusted 
 friends of the people. During the Turkish centuries, 
 when the Greeks in Greece did not see much of the 
 prelates, the parish priests established claims to the 
 attachment of the nation which can never be forgotten : 
 to them it was in great part due that the heart of the 
 people did not utterly fail, that the light of know- 
 ledge was not wholly quenched. 
 
 In 1821 ' then ' ^ was natural that tne Greeks 
 should think of Greek Orthodoxy as if it meant 
 almost the same thing as Greek nationality. The 
 Porte, too, accustomed its Christian subjects to
 
 MODERN GREECE. 49 
 
 identify their religion with their political cause ; thus 
 the Turks used the phrase ' Roman nation ' to denote 
 all Eastern Christians, Greek, Albanian, Wallach, and 
 Bulgarian. Russia, however, very soon cleared up 
 the Greek views of this matter. The action of Russia 
 in 1823 showed that it is possible to belong to the 
 Greek Church and yet not to sympathize with the 
 aspirations of Greek nationality. The disenchantment, 
 if somewhat rude, was wholesome. The Greek Revolu- 
 tion was thenceforth seen to be distinctly political, an 
 affair of the Greek nation, not of the Greek Church ; 
 but none the less the Greek Church retains, and will 
 always retain, that place which centuries of trial have 
 confirmed to it in the affections of the Greek people. 
 
 When the Greeks rose in 1821 there were about Population 
 
 in 1821. 
 
 two millions of Greeks in European Greece and the 
 islands, and about the same number of Turks. In 
 Asia Minor, Russia, Cyprus, and elsewhere there were 
 ]>erhaps another million and a half of Greeks, making 
 a, total of three and a half millions. There are now 
 between one and a half and two millions of Greeks in 
 the Greek kingdom,* and about five millions elsewhere 
 
 * The results of the Greek census just published (Feb. 1880) 
 show a total population of 1,679,000, against 1,457,000 in 1870 
 an average annual increase of 1'69 per cent. From 1860 to 1870 
 the annual increase was 1 per cent. 
 D
 
 50 MODEKN GEEECE. 
 
 a total of six and a half to seven millions. Turkey 
 
 had ruled Greece for nearly 400 years. When Greece 
 
 came out of that bondage, what shall we say had been 
 
 Result of the net result of the ordeal ? The answer cannot be 
 
 Turkish 
 
 doubtful : that fiery trial had renewed the temper of 
 the Greek nationality; much of the dross had been 
 purged from it in a furnace seven times heated, and, 
 instead of a glittering alloy, there now came forth 
 metal rough but sound, out of which patient toil might 
 yet weld a worthy nation. When the Turks took 
 Constantinople the Greek race ceased to be repre- 
 Nationai sented by the hybrid Greeks of Asia. The represen- 
 
 centre of J 
 
 changed. tation reverted to the Greeks of Europe : and there it 
 had been vested for four centuries in the class on 
 whom the prosperity of a country, if it is to be firm, 
 must always rest at last those who eat the fruits of 
 the ground in the sweat of their brow. The Greek 
 Revolution produced no great general and no great 
 statesman, though it produced many instances of un- 
 
 character of surpassed heroism. Its real glory is this that as it 
 
 the Eevolu- 
 
 sprang from the truest instincts which make a man, 
 so to the end it was loyal to that origin, and showed 
 the world how, without leaders of genius, the old 
 saying still holds good when a resolute nation means 
 to be free where there is the will, there is the way.
 
 MODERN GREECE. 51 
 
 Freedom departed from Greece when Philip of 
 Macedon conquered : from Macedon the power over 
 Greece passed to Rome from Rome, to Constanti- 
 nople : now it has once more come back to Greece. 
 We look back over these two-and-twenty centuries 
 and wo ask : Do the modern Greeks indeed represent 
 those old Greeks who shaped the mind of Europe ? 
 And, if they do, what credentials can they show 1 
 "What are the Hes which link them to the far past, 
 and what is the strength of each tie ? 
 
 The ties which connect the Greeks of to-day with Links be- 
 tween An- 
 
 the ancient Greeks are chiefly three race, character, Modern^ 
 
 Greece. 
 
 and language. 
 
 First, as to race. In 1830, when Europe was Race, 
 in its first Philhellenic glow, Professor Fallmerayer 
 of Munich amazed the world by announcing his 
 discovery that the Greeks were not Greeks, but 
 Slavonians. It is needless to say that so brilliant a 
 paradox commanded wide applause. Carl Hopf 's work 
 has now reduced it to its just dimensions. In 
 the middle of the eighth century in 747 A.D. a 
 great pestilence swept over the Byzantine Empire. 
 The Greek population of Greece Proper was greatly 
 diminished : and many of the survivors were trans- 
 ported to Constantinople to fill Tip the gaps there.
 
 52 MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 The partially depopulated districts in Greece were 
 occupied by Slavonians. From 750 to 850 A.D. the 
 Slavonians formed the majority of the population in 
 Greece. This was the period at which the Slavonian 
 names of places were multiplied most rapidly. But 
 then the tide began to turn. The superior social civi- 
 lization of the Greek element tended to repair its 
 numbers. From the middle of the ninth century the 
 Greeks in Greece began to do to the Slavonians just 
 what the Slavonians, in their old home, had for the 
 same reason done to the Turanian Bulgarians. The 
 Slavonians, being superior in civilization to the Bul- 
 garians, had gradually absorbed them. Just so the 
 Greeks, being superior in civilization to the Slavo- 
 nians, gradually absorbed them. The process of Hel- 
 lenizing the Slavonians went on steadily in Greece 
 until, in about 200 years, it was practically complete. 
 For every one Slavonic name of a place in the Pelo- 
 ponnesus, there are now, according to Leake's com- 
 putation, about ten Gi-eek names, either ancient or 
 early medieval. Thus, between 850 and 1050, was 
 formed the basis of the modern Greek nation. It 
 contains, as all would allow, a large infusion of 
 Slavonic blood ; but it is a fact equally well estab- 
 lished that the strain of Hellenic blood has been
 
 MODERN GREECE. 53 
 
 perpetual, and that the Hellenic element is that which 
 has determined the type of the modern nationality. 
 
 Next, the essential continuity of the Hellenic race Character. 
 is signally shown by the evidence of national character 
 viewed in its larger aspects. It is seldom safe to take 
 as national or generic those minor traits which vary 
 almost infinitely in the individual. But nations are 
 often distinguished by broadly- marked tendencies or 
 aptitudes traceable through every period of their his- 
 tory. These may properly be called national charac- 
 teristics. Originating partly, perhaps, in race, they 
 may yet cease to be, in themselves, proofs of a 
 perpetual strain of blood, since they attach themselves 
 to a certain type of civilization ; but the persistency 
 of such broad traits vouches at least for a continuous 
 tradition of those institutions and usages, those ways 
 of thinking and feeling, which give essential unity to 
 an originally composite nationality. Have the modern 
 and the ancient Greeks any such national character- 
 istics in common ? They have at least two : first, a 
 marked aptitude for city-life, as distinguished from 
 rural life on the one hand, and on the other from the 
 life of a larger political organism. Closely connected 
 with this aptitude for city-life is the ability which they 
 have always shown in commerce. Secondly, the
 
 54 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 Greeks have at every period of their history been true 
 to the love of mental culture, not merely from a 
 pei*ception that knowledge is power, but also, and 
 more, for the sake of the intellectual and moral 
 pleasure which literature and art bestow. 
 
 Language. Lastly, old and new Greece are bound together by 
 language. Latin, in passing into the Komance lan- 
 guages, was more or less disintegrated. Greek was 
 for centuries rude and ungrammatical, but it was 
 always itself and itself alone. Many foreign words 
 thrust themselves into its vocabulary most of which 
 have now been thrust out ; but in the organic matters 
 of structure and syntax Greek has never made a com- 
 promise with any foreign language. Briefly its story has 
 been this. About 300 A.D. the spoken Greek language 
 began to diverge from the literary language. But until 
 about 750 A.D. Old Greek was generally understood 
 by the people. Then came the great breach of Hellenic 
 tradition, due chiefly to the Slavonians, and by 900 
 A.D. classical Greek had probably ceased to be generally 
 understood by the people. Presently, between 1100 
 and 1200, the people's spoken Greek began to have a 
 popular literature of its own. By the thirteenth cen- 
 tury this popular dialect had made such way that it 
 was beginning to be used in polite society and in
 
 MODEEN GREECE. 55 
 
 literature. This popular Greek of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury differed very little from the popular Greek which 
 was in use at the beginning of this century. During 
 the last 80 years, however, the Greek language has 
 been returning more and more to the old classical type. 
 The vocabulary has been largely purged of alien 
 words, Slavonian, Turkish, Italian, Albanian. The 
 grammar, too, has been cleared of many corruptions, 
 dating from the sixth and seventh centuries, when 
 the want of communication between towns narrowed 
 the circle of ideas and gradually barbarized the idiom 
 of the rural districts. This recent regeneration has 
 of course proceeded most rapidly in the literary lan- 
 guage, but it has made very great progress in the 
 spoken language too. The chief difference now re- 
 maining between Old and Modem Greek is one which 
 exists between old and modern languages generally : 
 the old is synthetic, the modern is analytic. Thus it 
 has been the unique destiny of the Greek language to 
 have had, from prehistoric times down to our own, an 
 unbroken life. Not one link is wanting in this chain 
 which binds the New Greece to the Old. 
 
 To sum up : we have seen that from Alexander's Summary, 
 time there were two types of Greek the half-oriental 
 Greek of Asia and the more genuine Greek of Europe.
 
 56 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 From the Roman Conquest in 146 B.C. down to the 
 founding of Constantinople in 330 A.D. the Greek 
 nation is most truly represented by the Greek of 
 Europe. But the change of capital from the Tiber to 
 the Bosporus brought the Empire into closer relations 
 with Asia. During the whole Byzantine period the 
 Greek nationality was mainly represented by the 
 Greeks of Asia, who, like the other subjects of the 
 Empire, called themselves Romans. The Greeks of 
 Europe came to be looked upon as mere provincials. 
 Then the Turkish conquest broke up the Byzantine 
 system, and dispersed the Byzantine aristocracy of 
 birth or learning. The representation of the Greek 
 race goes back from Asia to Europe, and for 
 four hundred years the real core of the Greek na- 
 tion was the agricultural population of Greece 
 Proper. The Greek Revolution, springing from deep 
 general causes, delivered part of the Greek race from 
 Turkey. Thus, after more than two thousand years 
 there were once more free Greeks, bound to the old 
 Greeks by ties of race, character, and language. 
 Greek"" 1 ^ e Greek nationality, like the Jewish nationality, 
 has never been crushed out. But there is a signal 
 difference. The Jew has acclimatized himself to 
 the political atmosphere of every country in which he
 
 MODERN GREECE. 57 
 
 has been admitted to equal civic rights. The Greek 
 has never done this. The Greek has never been able 
 to draw his political breath freely under any political 
 system which was not Greek. The Greek has been 
 the loyal subject or the able servant of foreigners, but 
 he has never become, in mind and heart, their fellow- 
 citizen ; for to do that would be to strip himself of 
 what he can no more put off than he can put oft 
 his skin, the innate distinction of his Hellenic char- 
 acter. This has been so, whether the foreign influence 
 was wielded by Roman or by Ottoman, by Venice or 
 by Russia, by France or by Great Britain ; and it will 
 be so to the end. 
 
 The story of this undying Greek nationality is rich 
 with all the colours of the most varied romance. Take 
 one place only take Athens and recall for a moment 
 some of the things which Athens has seen since the day 
 when the news came that Philip had conquered at 
 Chseroneia. It is a night in the beginning of March 
 in the year 86 B.C. ; the Roman legionaries, with drawn 
 swords, are rushing into Athens, amid shouts and the 
 sound of trumpets, through a gi-eat breach in the walls : 
 Sulla's face is turned to the citadel which has so long 
 defied him, and, as the glare of the torches falls on his 
 features, those about him can tell by the expression of
 
 58 MODEEN GEEECE. 
 
 his hard blue eyes that the Roman soldiers are free to 
 deluge the streets of the stubborn town with the blood 
 of its famished defenders. Three centuries roll away, 
 and now again there is a siege at Athens, but this 
 time Athenians are the besiegers ; the Athenian cita- 
 del is held by northern invaders who have stormed 
 the city, enemies already terrible to the Empire, the 
 Goths : and the brave Athenian who leads his towns- 
 men to victory is an officer in the army of Rome, 
 under whose leadership the Greeks will soon prove 
 that the spirit of Marathon is in them yet. Pass 
 from the third century to the eleventh, and mark 
 a brilliant procession which is moving throxigh 
 the portals of that same Athenian citadel : it is an 
 Emperor of the Romans who is going up to give 
 solemn thanks in the Parthenon, once a pagan temple, 
 now a Christian church, but still, as of old, the House 
 of the Virgin : the walls of its sanctuary, as yet un- 
 touched by time, are now bright with gilded paintings 
 of Byzantine Emperors and Saints ; and beneath that 
 roof, under which Pericles saw the Athene of Pheidias, 
 Basil II. will dedicate his thank- offering, because the 
 Lord of battles has given him his great victory over 
 the Bulgarians. A few generations more have gone 
 by, the glory of the Byzantines has fallen, and now
 
 MODERN GREECE. 59 
 
 the old shrine of Athene looks down on another goodly 
 sight : the Frankish Duke of Athens is holding a great 
 tournament in the plain of the Cephisus ; many a pala- 
 diri of western chivalry is there, from France and 
 Burgundy, from Sicily and Spain, and the prize of 
 valour will be given by a western Queen of Beauty 
 who would shudder and make the sign of the cross if 
 she heard but the name of that heathen Queen of 
 Beauty who beguiled the good knight Tannhaiiser. A 
 brief space more, and again a monarch is mount- 
 ing to the citadel of Athens, but the Church which 
 crowns it is not his goal: he comes to gaze from 
 its summit on the new realm which Allah has given to 
 the faithful servant of his Prophet; and as the Otto- 
 man conqueror of Constantinople looks out on that 
 wonderful scene, so full of a history which he knows 
 not on those waters of Salamis where the tide of 
 Asiatic barbarism was rolled back for two thousand 
 years on the land still rich with the unravaged 
 triumphs of Hellenic art Mohammed II. turns to the 
 vizier at his side, and says, ' Verily Islam owes much 
 to Omar the son of Turakhan.' Again two hundred 
 years glide past, and the soldiers of Venice have their 
 camp in the old grove of olives hard by the Sacred 
 Way from Eleusis to Athens : they are besieging the
 
 60 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 Ottomans who hold the Athenian citadel. It is a 
 September evening, and a cry bursts from them as 
 sudden flames are seen to shoot from the Parthenon 
 into the dark evening sky : a stray bomb from a mor- 
 tar has exploded among the Turkish stores in the 
 temple, and, at that instant, the most perfect building 
 in the world has been marred for ever. Since that 
 day the spirit of calm loveliness which still dwells 
 with the ruined temple of Athene has looked on many 
 a stirring scene of which men still living can remember 
 the new fame : it has seen Turkish garrisons hold or 
 yield that ancient rock, as their fortune waxed or 
 waned through the long agony of the Greek rebellion : 
 it has seen at last the growing life of a people born again 
 on to freedom : but it has never beheld a nobler sight than 
 on that day, only thirty-seven years ago, when the 
 great square of Athens was thronged with the firm but 
 peaceful and truly loyal concourse who came to ask 
 King Otho for that gift without which a people can 
 never be free in more than name. 
 
 The Greeks had enjoyed nominal liberty for 
 eleven years before their Bavarian master gave 
 them a constitution, and they had possessed a 
 nominal constitution for twenty years before they 
 could get it to work. Freedom from an external
 
 MODERN GREECE. 61 
 
 yoke is one thing; constitutional freedom is an- 
 other; without this last the former may mean no 
 more than a change of despots. That fraction of the 
 Greek territory and race which are comprised in the 
 Greek kingdom have been free from Turkey since 
 1832. But it is only since 1863 that they have been isos. 
 free in the fullest political sense. Greece, as a 
 country in which personal liberty and private pro- 
 perty are secured by really effective guarantees, is of 
 the same age as the present reign.
 
 II. 
 
 IN my first lecture I endeavoured to show how the 
 Greek nationality has had an unbroken life : this 
 evening I shall attempt to give some impressions of 
 a visit to the country, so far as these may serve to 
 illustrate the chief traits of its present aspect and con- 
 dition. 
 
 We left Marseilles in a French steamer on a Saturday 
 afternoon at the beginning of May, 1878, and after a 
 pleasant voyage came on Wednesday afternoon into the 
 beautiful harbour of Syra, with its white town climbing 
 up the steep face of the cliff and looking as it were built 
 of dominoes. One ought to enter Greece by this way 
 round the Morea into the ^Egean, and leave it by the 
 other route through Corfu and Briiidisi : thus one 
 sees things in the right order: the associations of 
 Western Greece are the more modern. There had 
 been some doubt on board as to whether we should
 
 MODERN GREECE. 63 
 
 reach Syra in time for the Austrian Lloyd steamer 
 which was to take us on to the Peirseus : to 
 our relief, there it was in the harbour, getting 
 up steam : but the satisfaction was short-lived : 
 in a few minutes more it had left the harbour 
 without waiting for us. This made it necessary 
 to stay three days at Syra; but the delay had its 
 reward. We resolved to visit Delos, about fifteen miles Delos - 
 off, and at five the next morning we started from Syra 
 in a boat which danced before a light breeze; the 
 wind fell as the sun rose above the turquoise-coloured 
 sea, but in about seven hours we were at Delos. The 
 sacred island of the old ^Egean is now a bare rock 
 without tree or house, a silent grave of the Hellenic 
 past. From its hill, the Cynthus which gave a name 
 to Apollo, there is a wonderful view of the Cyclades. 
 Delos is the very centre of their inner group. To the 
 east, only a few miles off, we see the bold form of 
 Myconos rising steeply from the sea ; there to the 
 south, are Naxos and Paros, pale blue as evening falls, 
 and between them a faint and far-off glimpse of los, 
 the isle where the old legend told that Homer lay 
 buried ; the long and lofty Tenos to the north, a deep 
 purple Andros scarcely seen beyond : to the west, the 
 long dark line of Syra. Perfect calm and stillness
 
 64 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 reigned over all. A distinguished member of the 
 French school of Athens, who was superintending ex- 
 cavations in Delos, most hospitably gave us shelter for 
 the night on the rocky isle of Rheneia close by. We 
 spent the evening in a boat on the glassy sea, when 
 the forms of the Cyclades became still more beautiful 
 under the light of moon and stars ; and next day we 
 returned to Syra. 
 
 Athens. Athens is the place which best shows what the 
 
 Greeks have done since the Turks left, though it is 
 not the best place at which to estimate the general 
 state of the country. Perhaps no city in the world 
 has had such a fate. Apart from its old fame, 
 Athens has a good site for commerce with the Levant, 
 and it might have been expected that, into whatever 
 hands it passed, it would at least always be a town of 
 importance. And so it was for some seventeen 
 hundred years after the loss of Greek independence. 
 But then it came under rulers who cared for 
 commerce as little as for literature or art. Under 
 the Turks Athens was simply a second-rate provincial 
 town in the pashalik of Eubcaa. 
 
 The Bishop of Lincoln (Dr. Wordsworth) was at 
 
 1832. Athens in 1832, and this is his account of it: 
 
 ' A few new wooden houses, one or two more solid
 
 MODERN GREECE. 65 
 
 structures, and the two lines of planked sheds which 
 form the bazaar, are all the inhabited dwellings that 
 Athens can boast.' It is now a handsome and pros- isso. 
 perous city. Athens has a population of 50,000 ; 
 the Peirseus has a further population of 30,000, and 
 contains some thirty steam-factories. The public 
 buildings which have arisen at Athens within the 
 life-time of a generation show a purity of taste and a 
 happy grace which all foreign visitors recognize. 
 The same may be said of many handsome private 
 houses which have been built or are now rising. This, 
 by the way, is a good sign for Greece. It is 
 becoming more usual for Greek men of wealth, 
 who hare made their fortunes abroad, to return 
 and settle at Athens. The whole aspect of Athens 
 is clean and neat. The only partial exception, 
 perhaps, is the Albanian quarter known as Plaka, 
 whence come at night the brayings of many 
 donkeys nicknamed by sleepless Athenians ' the 
 nightingales of Plaka.' .Handsome new boulevards 
 are gradually coming into existence, but it would 
 be too much to hope that the trees will be much 
 more than a pleasure to the eye. From May to 
 August the one thing which Athens craves in vain 
 is shade. The gardens of the Palace indeed are
 
 66 MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 opened with a graceful liberality to the public, and 
 afford a welcome refuge from the heat. But the 
 groves on the banks of the Ilissus have dwindled sadly 
 since the days when Socrates and Phsedrus sought 
 their shelter from the summer noon. Those bowery 
 haunts of the nightingale by the Cephisus which 
 Sophocles celebrates bloom no longer with the 
 golden-eyed crocus and the clustering bells of the 
 Destruction narcissus. The destruction of wood in Greece has 
 
 of wood. 
 
 been due to many causes, some local, some general. 
 One of these causes came vividly before us. In a 
 valley between Helicon and Parnassus we met what 
 might have been taken for a tribe of gipsies a long 
 train of men, women and children, some on foot, 
 some on horses, with all their household goods. These 
 were shepherds, who were moving up from the 
 Boeotian valley it was near the end of May to 
 their summer pastures on the topmost heights of 
 Parnassus. The shepherds in Greece form a separate 
 community, under the rule of a patriarchal ' chief, 
 and are looked upon by the common people as 
 wealthy. The flocks of goats belonging to these 
 shepherds have had a great deal to do with the 
 disappearance of the woods in Greece, by browsing 
 on the underwood of the uplands. But there has
 
 MODERN GREECE. 67 
 
 been something worse than the goats the reck- 
 lessness of the country-people themselves, who woxild 
 allow a whole hill-side to be stripped in lighting a 
 single fire. Athenians still living can remember when 
 the last patches of forest in the glens of Hyinettus 
 and Pentelicus blazed around Athens night after 
 night. People at Corfu can tell the same story 
 of the glens in Albania. Then the ravages of 
 war were disastrous to many districts. When the 
 wood had been destroyed, the next thing to 
 go was the water which the trees had screened. 
 In the month of May a person of extremely 
 small athletic powers can jump over the river 
 Asopus. The same thing has happened elsewhere, 
 as in some parts of Italy. In Dante's Inferno, Adam 
 of Brescia, the false coiner, is tormented by thirst, 
 and longs for the green hills and cool rivulets of 
 Casentino. Nowadays the once shady margins of 
 those streams of Casentino are as dry as the parched 
 lips of the siifferer. Of course this destruction of 
 wood and drying up of water has in turn injured 
 the climate of Greece by diminishing the rain-fall. 
 
 A tour through the provinces of the Greek king- Mode of 
 
 3 travelling 
 
 dom is the only satisfactory way of forming any 
 opinion as to the general state of the country. There
 
 68 MODEEN GREECE. 
 
 is probably no country in Europe of which the con- 
 dition can be so little judged from its large towns : 
 the tale which these tell is in some points too nattering 
 and in others too harsh. As there are few inns 
 except in the towns on the coast, and as the road- 
 system of Greece is still incomplete, tourists are still 
 \mder the necessity of employing a dragoman, who 
 provides riding-horses for the travellers, and usually 
 carries a complete canteen, trusting to the villages 
 only for the staple articles of food, eggs, chickens, 
 and bread, sometimes lamb and fruit. Our drago- 
 man, whose Christian name was Miltiades, deserves a 
 portrait by a better artist : he had lived some years 
 in the service of an Englishman, and had certain 
 fixed beliefs, which nothing could disturb, with regard 
 to British usages and the Biitish character.; his views 
 of the English language, though limited, had much of 
 the rigid and dogmatic character of the later Greek 
 rhetoric; and when he desired to be particularly 
 emphatic, he used to begin with the stirring exordium, 
 ' My gentlemens, I tell you the truth.' His method 
 of dealing with the natives was sometimes more 
 summary than we could quite approve, but he had 
 the practical merit of generally carrying his point. 
 Under the leadership of Miltiades we generally
 
 MODERN GREECE. 6!) 
 
 started about six in the morning sometimes earlier 
 rested about mid-day, for an hour or two, wherever 
 shade and water could be found, and usually finished 
 the day's journey by five or six in the evening, at 
 some village where a room in a cottage could be had 
 for the night. This was our life for several weeks, 
 and it was extremely pleasant. In the Greek climate 
 the heat is not oppressive for moderately strong 
 persons, even in May and June ; indeed the only 
 months of the year which appear to be distinctly 
 bad for tourists in Greece are July and August. The 
 earlier spring-months February to April are pro- 
 bably the best of all ; but the practical advantage 
 of the spring and summer over the late autumn and 
 winter is chiefly this, that, as a rule, it is easier in 
 spring and summer to obtain food in the out-of-the- 
 way villages. The nature of the broken, hilly ground 
 in many places makes it necessary to go at a foot's 
 pace a great part of the way. The little Greek horses 
 are in some points like those from that part of 
 western Ireland which used to be known as 'the 
 stone-wall country ' ; and the peculiar gift of the Greek 
 horse is much the same. As his Irish brother has the 
 knack of somehow getting over stone walls, so the 
 Greek animal has the art of picking his way without
 
 70 MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 stumbling through rocky tracks which baffle descrip- 
 tion apparently impossible labyrinths of jagged 
 points and smooth surfaces, up ladders worse than 
 any stair of penance, and down places certainly more 
 difficult than the descent to Avernus. If one had to 
 name any one path as more conspicuously bad than 
 another, it would be safe to specify part of the bridle- 
 path between Tegea and Sparta the very line of the 
 old road along which the courier Pheidippides is said 
 to have gone at such a wonderful pace, when he was 
 sent from Athens to Sparta to ask for help before the 
 battle of Marathon, and performed the distance in 
 forty-eight hours. He certainly well deserved his 
 name, the son of the sparer of horses. If all the 
 roads had been equally bad, we, mounted as we were, 
 should have occupied at least a fortnight in perform- 
 ing that journey. Everyone knows that the common 
 Theirra- Greek name for the horse is the irrational, but the 
 
 tional. 
 
 meaning of the name deserves notice. It is simply 
 this : owing to the badness of the roads for the last 
 twelve hundred years, the horse has been less used 
 in Greece for cari-iage-draught than as a beast of 
 burden; hence he has come to be looked upon as 
 the typical animal, the animal which is most useful 
 all round ; and thus he has had specially appropriated
 
 MODERN GREECE. 71 
 
 to him the generic name of 'irrational,' that is, of 
 animal as distinguished from man. 
 
 Since Greece became free much energy and Roads, 
 money have been expended on public works. The 
 one thing that still remains to be done is to com- 
 plete the road-system. At present the roads of 
 the Greek mainland, in the Peloponnesus and north 
 of it, have an aggregate length of about 550 miles : 
 but a veiy large part of these are of bad quality. 
 This is not the fault of the Greek government. 
 It is simply want of money. The cost of road- 
 making in Greece is enormous. Draw a straight 
 line, or even a curve, between almost any two places 
 of importance in Greece, and you will find that you 
 cannot avoid carrying it over a mountain-range, or 
 at least a tract of stony hills. The average cost of 
 road-making in Greece, taking the hardest and easiest 
 ground together, has been estimated at 600 a mile. 
 As far as the Peloponnesus is concerned, the currant- 
 trade and the silk-trade are the two forces which 
 are pressing Greece to go on with the roads, and 
 are also bringing in some of the money which will 
 help her to do it. No pressure of this kind will 
 come from agriculture, and no help either, until more 
 capital has been put into the land.
 
 72 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 tenure. The agrarian history of Greece, old and new, 
 
 supplies some practical illustrations of the evils 
 incident to both the opposite extremes in land- 
 tenure. Under the Roman Empire Greece, like Italy, 
 passed through a phase of vast estates, when land was 
 in a few hands; but here we must not forget the 
 limit to the analogy between these vast estates and 
 similar estates in modern times namely, that these 
 large estates in ancient Greece and Italy were cul- 
 tivated mainly by slaves, whose condition can never 
 really be compared with that of free peasants, how- 
 ever much the latter may suffer in special cases. 
 In 1832, at the end of the war, a quantity of land 
 the endowment of the Turkish military fiefs re- 
 verted to the new Greek government, and was granted 
 in small lots to peasant-holders, subject to taxes on 
 the produce. This was a necessity, since the land- 
 market did not then attract capitalists ; and even 
 at it was, much land was perforce left unproductive. 
 The system of small-holdings has ever since been an 
 obstacle to scientific methods of farming, since the 
 average farmer has not been in a condition to attempt 
 or to desire improvement. Agriculture in Greece has 
 made most creditable progress in the last few years ; 
 but it is necessary that more capital should be
 
 MODERN GREECE. 73 
 
 invested in land, and that the system of small- 
 holdings should be tempered by the creation of a 
 class of land-owners able and anxious to turn the 
 advantages of the soil to full account, before Greek 
 agriculture can become what it might and should 
 be the foundation and the mainstay of Greek 
 prosperity. 
 
 When we left Athens we took the northern 
 provinces first. Our route lay from Athens to Thebes, 
 and then through the wonderful scenery of Mount 
 Helicon and Mount Parnassus to Delphi, near the 
 shores of the Gulf of Corinth. It is a delightful 
 country to travel slowly through, in spring or early 
 summer ; it was then about the middle of May, and 
 not at all unpleasantly hot. Day after day, as we 
 came to place after place of old renown, a continual 
 procession of great memories was passing before the 
 mind, while the eye was feasted with a perpetual series 
 of magnificent views. The characteristic of Greek Greek 
 
 scenery. 
 
 scenery is clearness of contour and fusion of colour, 
 the union of distinct outlines with delicately blended 
 hues. But who shall desciibe the outlines of the 
 Greek hills? The best thing that was ever said 
 about them, to my thinking, was said by Thackeray 
 a true artist, with a true instinct for all the beautiful
 
 74 MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 things of Greece, in spite of those dismal recollections 
 of Greek grammar at school that haunted him 
 when he was at Athens, and imagined the Greek 
 Muse appearing to him in the awful form of a 
 stern and patronizing preceptress. He speaks of 
 the Attic plain as surrounded by ' a chorus of 
 hills.' It is an image full of truth. The forms of 
 these Greek hills are at once so bold and so chastened, 
 . the onward sweep of their ranges is at once so elastic 
 and so calm, each member of every group is at once 
 so individual and so finely helpful to the ethereal 
 expressiveness of the rest, that the harmony of their 
 undulations and the cadences in which they fall 
 combine the charm of sculpture with the life and 
 variety of a sun-lit sea, leading one's thoughts away 
 from the Hebrew image of the hills that stand 
 around Jerusalem, and irresistibly suggesting the 
 Hellenic image of a choral sisterhood, marshalled 
 by the great master of the scene to chant a sublime 
 antiphone of praise and thanksgiving for the good- 
 liness of that wonderful land. There are subtle 
 analogies between form and sound which can hardly 
 be expressed in words, but which are more expressive 
 than any words to those who have felt them. If 
 I should attempt to describe the peculiar impression
 
 MODERN GREECE. 75 
 
 which the scenery of Greece has left on my memory, 
 I should transfer to Greece those words which Byron 
 applies to the intellectual beauty of Ziileika, 'the 
 mind, the music breathing from her face.' 
 
 There is a glorious view from the head of the View from 
 
 Cithajron. 
 
 pass over Mount Cithaeron, as one goes northward 
 out of Attica. The pass is a noble gorge whose 
 steep sides are clad on the left hand with pine, on the 
 right with fir ; and at a turn of the road the whole 
 plain of Bceotia bursts upon the sight, stretched 
 out far below us. There to the north-west soars up 
 N^e Helicon, and beyond it, Parnassus; and, though 
 this is the middle of May, their higher cliffs are 
 still crowned with dazzling snow. Just opposite, 
 nearly due north, is Thebes, on a low eminence with a 
 range of hills behind it, and the waters of Lake Copais 
 to the north-west, gleaming in the afternoon sun. 
 That mountain whose bold crest rises in the north-east 
 is Mount Delphi in Euboea. The whole wide view has 
 a wonderful sunshiny clearness. The sharply defined 
 profile of the wavy or soaring hills is a framework 
 within which the brightest and the most delicate colours 
 are blended, from the dazzling snow seen in strong 
 relief against the deep azure of the sky, to the dark 
 patches of brown and green in the plain at our feet.
 
 76 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 As we look over that plain, how many famoiis places 
 can be seen at once ! There, on our left, near the foot 
 of snowy Helicon, is the old site of the brave little 
 town, Thespise, whose sons stood with the Athenians 
 at Marathon and fell with the Spartans at Thermopylae. 
 There, close to it, you can see a mound or hillock 
 breaking the level surface of the plain : that is the 
 sepulchral mound which marks the battlefield of Leuc- 
 tra, where Epameinondas and his Theban phalanx 
 dealt the death-blow to the power of Sparta. Here, 
 just below us, near the point where our zig-zag road 
 will presently bring us out on the plain, is the site of 
 Platsea, separated by some nine miles from its deadly 
 enemy Thebes, on the other side of the valley, and 
 nestling as for shelter under Mount Cithseron, near the 
 pathway to its best friend, Athens. There, on the- 
 right, is the spot where Tanagra stood ; and one can 
 trace at least the bed of the Asopus the stream is in 
 these summer days a thread hardly to be seen from so 
 high up winding along among fruit trees and vines, 
 fields of barley, and pastures where cows and sheep are 
 grazing. The day happened to be extraordinarily 
 clear, even for Greece; and once, just for a moment, 
 we caught a strange gleam in the northern sky, very 
 far off it could barely be seen it was something that
 
 MODERN GREECE. 77 
 
 flashed like the point of a silver spear. Our guide 
 exclaimed ' Look ! Mount Olympus ! ' 
 
 This is one of the characteristics of travel in Greece 
 this sudden seeing of distant things that you never 
 supposed from the map that you could possibly see. I A surprise, 
 well remember one evening, near the end of our ride, 
 when we were coming to a village not far from Leuctra. 
 To the south the massive wall of Cithseron stood up 
 dark against the purple sky. In front of us, to the 
 west, and very near now, that is Helicon a great 
 buttress in front and behind it, on our right hand, 
 a lower ridge, now undulating, now serrated like a 
 battlement; behind this, again, far-off Parnassus, 
 snow-crowned, blue. But cease to look straight in 
 front of yoti towards the sunset in the west : look a 
 little to your left : there is an opening there between 
 Cithseron and Helicon. What can be that very lofty 
 distant mountain that we see between them ? We 
 turned to our guide and asked him he answered, 
 ' Ziria.' Ziria is the modern name of Mount Cyllene 
 in Arcadia. Here we were in Breotia, between Cithseron 
 and Helicon, and we could see a range which is in the 
 heart of Arcadia ! Sometimes the surprise is the other 
 way. Mount Ithome, in the centre of the Messenian 
 plain, is nearly 2,500 feet high, and you have a very ex-
 
 78 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 tensive and beautiful view from the top of it : you see 
 an amphitheatre of hills sweeping round from a blue 
 point of sea to the snowy cliffs of Taygetos in the east, 
 and at the mid-point of the crescent you see Eira, the 
 hiding-place of Aristomenes, as the Greek monk called 
 it when he pointed to that lofty hill : but from the 
 top you cannot see those very heights which you do 
 see from the flat level in Bceotia you cannot see 
 Cyllene in Arcadia. 
 The Branch- Never shall I forget the day when we went from 
 
 ing Roads. 
 
 Livadia along the lower slopes of the Parnassus 
 range. We had now left Daulia behind us, Daulia, 
 the first home of the nightingale, as the old Greeks 
 fabled a bowery place, with its pomegranates and 
 orchards and almond trees and olives. Now we 
 were in the country that the primeval story made 
 the scene of a dark and horrible deed ; the story 
 which Sophocles has made immortal in CEdipus 
 the King. CEdipus was coming back from the 
 place to which we were then going Delphi ; he 
 had gone thither to solve a dark doubt whether he 
 was indeed the true son of the King and Queen 
 of Corinth ; and the oracle had given him an answer 
 darker than his own doubt, that he was yet fated 
 to slay his father. Who that father was, the god
 
 MODEEN GEEECE. 79 
 
 said not. Then, as he took his way from Delphi 
 with gloomy thoughts, (Edipus came to a place where 
 three roads met. Here he encountered a lordly man, 
 whom he knew not, borne in a chariot ; and one 
 of the proud man's servants jostled the poor wayfarer 
 (Edipus out of the path ; but there was proud blood 
 in (Edipus also, whencesoever it came ; he turned on 
 the insolent lord and slew him, not knowing then, 
 nor yet to know till worse had come, that the slain 
 man was his own father, Laius, the King of Thebes. 
 It is a thrilling moment even now, when one comes to 
 the place where those three roads meet. A bare 
 isolated hillock of grey stone stands at the point where 
 our path from Daulia meets the road to Delphi, and a 
 third road that stretches to the south. There, in front, 
 we are looking up the road down which (Edipus came ; 
 we are moving in the steps of the man whom he met 
 and slew ; the road runs up a wild and frowning pass 
 between Parnassus on the right hand and on the left 
 the spui-s of the Helicon range, which here approach 
 it. Away to the south a wild and lonely valley 
 opens, running up among the desolate places of 
 Helicon, a vista of naked cliffs or slopes clothed with 
 scanty herbage, a scene of inexpressible grandeur and 
 desolation. Strangely enough this weird spot has
 
 80 MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 had its story renewed in our own time. That grey 
 hillock of stone at the meeting of the three roads 
 mai'ks the point where travellers long ago saw the 
 legendary grave of the king and father whom (Edipus 
 siew ; and now that hillock bears a monument of 
 no mythical horror that oblong stone on its 
 summit is the tomb of a brigand chief, once the scourge 
 of the country-side, who was killed some twenty-five 
 years ago at this place where the three roads meet. 
 Brigandage. Everyone asks, does brigandage still exist in 
 Greece 1 This is like asking, does scarlatina still 
 exist? Brigandage is an acute symptom of social 
 disease. No doubt its causes are a good deal 
 more preventable than those of scarlatina; b\it, like 
 scarlatina, it may always recur when things reach a 
 certain point. So far as we saw or could learn, there 
 was not then any danger from brigands in Greece ; and 
 we were there soon after the rising in Thessaly had been 
 stopped, chiefly through the influence of the English 
 Government. At such a time, if ever, the roads from 
 the north might have been expected to be insecure. 
 The causes which generate brigandage have ceased to 
 be active in Greece, and brigandage will reappear only 
 when they revive, that is, one may reasonably hope, 
 never. The state of Greece in this respect offers a
 
 MODERN GREECE. 81 
 
 favourable contrast with the actual state of districts in 
 Italy and Sicily.* 
 
 The northern part of our route ended at Delphi. Delphi. 
 Delphi is on the side of Mount Parnassus, where the 
 deep ravine between it and Helicon opens on a rich 
 plain, with the blue waters of the Corinthian Gulf 
 beyond. In the tremendous face of Parnassus there is 
 a mighty cleft. Approach it, and on the right hand you 
 will find traces of an ancient chamber, which was once 
 fitted with stone basins for ablution. There it was 
 that the pilgrims to this oracle of old put away their 
 uncleanness with holy washing, that so they might 
 pass pure through those portals of rock into the awful 
 shrine beyond, where they should question Apollo 
 concerning the secret things of good and evil, of 
 life and death, until the voice of the holy priestess 
 gave them answer, coming forth from among the 
 dense wreaths of vapour and incense that half 
 veiled from their eyes her tossed arms and palpitating 
 form, as the power of the god came upon her, and 
 words not her own were rolled through her pale lips, 
 
 * And, we may now add, European Turkey. The chief 
 of the brigands who recently took an English officer near 
 Salonica is a Wallach, and his band was partly composed 
 of Hodouts, i.e., Albanian irregulars who had been discharged,, 
 or who had deserted. 
 
 F
 
 82 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 while the clash of a god's armour was heard from 
 an unknown place, and the garlands of laurel were 
 shaken. At Delphi one has a feeling deeper than can 
 be moved by historical association alone, or even by 
 natural beauty : this spot was once in very truth what 
 poetry called it, the mid-point of the earth the focus 
 to which all passions of the human heart were drawn 
 by the intense craving to read futurity the centre 
 from which those passions were hurled back upon the 
 life of man, strengthened, or shattered. What hopes 
 have passed through those rocky gates of the oracle at 
 Delphi, and what despair has come forth of them ; 
 what anguish has entered, and what rapture 
 returned; how many knaves and fools have tried 
 there to take Heaven into partnership with their folly 
 or fraud, how many good men have had a noble 
 enterprise cheered or blasted, how many kingdoms 
 have had their destinies changed, how many triflers 
 have been humoured, how many wise men have been 
 set for a life-time to solve riddles that had no answer, 
 within that terrible sanctuary of Delphi ! ^Eschylus 
 has struck the true note for Delphi when, in the 
 opening scene of the Furies, he puts this prayer into 
 the mouth of the priestess ere she passes to the inner 
 
 
 
 shrine :
 
 MODERN GREECE. 83 
 
 First of the powers oracular I hail 
 
 Earth's primal inspiration ; Themis next, 
 
 To whom, grey legend whispers, Earth bequeathed 
 
 This lineal throne of prescience ; after whom, 
 
 Sanctioned by Themis and by none withstood, 
 
 Once more a Titaness inherited, 
 
 Phoebe, and gave this throne a natal gift 
 
 To him who bears her modulated name. 
 
 Then Zeus put divination in his heart, 
 
 Set him, fourth seer and latest, on the throne 
 
 And speaks for ever in his oracles. 
 
 That is just what one feels at Delphi. It is not 
 merely Hellenic; it is a great natural sanctuary 
 of primeval man, a place marked for the abode 
 of that mystery and dread with which a faith 
 rooted in fear surrounds the Divine power, before 
 a gentler religion comes, and the clouds break 
 before the sunshine such sunshine as the Greek 
 fancy threw around the form of Apollo, as he rose 
 in music on a dark background of elder deities 
 now sinking to chaos and night. 
 
 In a leisurely journey through the Greek provinces Traits of 
 one cannot fail to get glimpses of the people's life " r d cl 
 which tell more about the real state of the country 
 than many blue-books. Facts and figures are but 
 dead things to these hints. Once, when we, came 
 to an Arcadian village in the evening, our host,
 
 84 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 the head of the cottage household, said to our 
 dragoman's servant, Petros, eTcrde viyt<ayxvos ; to 
 which Petros promptly answered, o^t : ' Are you 
 married ? ' ; No.' As soon as this emphatic neg- 
 ative was heard, there was a perceptible increase 
 of cordiality towards Petros. Miltiades afterwards 
 told us that the question put to Petros was 
 frequently put to men of his class when they ap- 
 peared in strange villages, and that unmarried men 
 were usually the best received. The cause which 
 makes rural Greece such a paradise of bachelors 
 is a simple one their rarity. The Greeks are 
 an essentially domestic people, and the popula- 
 tion in the provinces is thin : it was computed 
 not long ago at about 58 to the square mile. 
 A man of the agricultural class generally 
 marries as soon as he can. In Greece, as 
 elsewhere, marriage in the humbler ranks is 
 generally arranged between the parents and the 
 bridegroom the bride has not much to say in the 
 matter. The parents seek a young man of good 
 character who has laid by 3000 or 4000 francs ; 
 and, according to the prevalent tariff of matrimonial ex- 
 change, eligible husbands being at a premium, such 
 a youth may reasonably expect a dower of quite six
 
 MODERN GREECE. 85 
 
 times that amount. It is also the custom that the 
 parents of the bride should provide nearly all the 
 furniture for the young couple's house. 
 
 All competent observers agree in bearing testimony 
 to the good moral character of the agricultural popu- 
 lation in Greece. They work hard and live hardly ; 
 a labouring man will breakfast at four in the morning 
 on a little bread and garlic, washed down with a 
 glass of retinUes the thin ordinary wine of the 
 country, preserved with resin, which gives it a strong 
 flavour of sealing-wax ; and then he will work in the 
 fields till seven or eight at night, with only one 
 repetition, perhaps, of the meal just described. 
 Drunkenness is almost unknown in Greece, and 
 this is no doiibt one of the reasons why insanity 
 is so rare. At Salona Scala, on the Gulf of Corinth, 
 where we had to wait for a boat, there was a poor 
 crazy fellow in the verandah before the inn, twanging 
 a bouzukt a sort of guitar with one string and 
 singing some songs of his own making. It was 
 curious to see how the people who were loitering 
 at the door of the inn behaved to him : there 
 was no jeering or attempt to make fun of him, as 
 may too often be seen in other countries. One of 
 them said to us, by way of explaining the state of
 
 86 MODEEN GREECE. 
 
 things, not, he is mad, or he is an idiot but ' he 
 is afflicted in mind,' and this was said gravely, in 
 a low tone, as if to bespeak sympathy for the poor 
 creature. There are only two lunatic asylums in 
 Greece; the chief one is at Corfu. 
 ^ Greek family life has a decidedly patriarchal 
 tone partly a legacy from the ancient clan-system, 
 but more directly due to the very great importance 
 of family discipline and cohesion during those ages 
 when the Greeks were an oppressed and friendless 
 race./MDne sees the same thing among the Jews, 
 only that there, of course, much more is due to the 
 strong and definite traditions of the Jewish law. 
 In the case of the Greeks the patriarchal tone is 
 strengthened by what may be called the patriarchal 
 sentiment of the Greek church. Once we breakfasted 
 in a cottage on the little island of B/heneia close to 
 Delos. Our host was an old man who might have 
 carried in the Greek War that rusty gun which hangs 
 against the cottage wall. He sat cross-legged, 
 smoking his pipe : his wife brought us milk, coffee, 
 and a sort of cream-cheese. Their son-in-law was 
 there, a boatman from the neighbouring island of 
 Siphnos ; and presently his wife, the daughter of the 
 old couple, came in, and sat down, looking at us with
 
 MODERN GREECE. 87 
 
 her large dark eyes widely opened. The old man 
 and his wife talked to us, and their son-in-law 
 replied to the questions that were asked about his 
 children; the young mother smiled brightly when 
 the children were mentioned, but never spoke. 
 This silence had the air of custom rather than 
 shyness ; she was evidently the pride of the 
 island cottage, and was the only one of the family 
 who wore shoes. It seems that it is a rule 
 of etiquette in Greek households of the humbler 
 sort that, in the presence of strangers, no woman 
 shall speak except the mistress of the house. 
 On another occasion we were kindly received by 
 a very pleasant young couple in a village of one 
 of the valleys between Helicon and Parnassus. 
 They had three children, a boy of seven, named 
 Athanasius ; a little girl of five, named Elia, 
 but the third, a sturdy boy about a year old, 
 had, we found, no name as yet : the father said 
 that he was considering the question. This is a curious 
 vestige of patriarchalism which has the sanction of the 
 Greek Church. The name need not be given to 
 the child at baptism : the choice of the name is the 
 special prerogative of the father, and he is allowed 
 to keep this state-secret in petto as long as he pleases.
 
 88 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 On the day when we left Sparta to go northward 
 up the valley of the Eurotas, we met the country- 
 people coming in to the bazari, the market, at 
 Sparta. The women were walking, as a rule, while 
 the husband or father followed on horseback often 
 with children perched on the saddle in front of 
 them, or encircled by each arm. This arrangement is 
 characteristic of the southern Morea. For many 
 centuries the civilization of the Peloponnesus was 
 lower than that of Northern Greece. This has left 
 a sure mark behind : among the country people, the 
 position of women in the Peloponnesus is visibly 
 lower than it is elsewhere in Greece. In Arcadia, 
 particularly, one cannot help noticing the tendency 
 to throw too much of the hard out-of-door work upon 
 women. This tendency is the more significant in 
 regard to the history of the Morea as it is completely 
 foreign to the normal Gi-eek character. The Greek 
 feeling for the sacredness of family life, and also the 
 intellectual refinement which belongs to the national 
 character, renders the average Greek naturally cour- 
 teous and chivalrous towards women of every rank. 
 
 Greece is by constitution a democratic country. 
 The Byzantine aristocracy was broken up at the 
 Turkish conquest, and there is now no order of
 
 MODERN GREECE. 89 
 
 nobility in Greece. But it is a complete mistake to 
 represent the common people in Greece as ignoring the 
 differences of education or breeding. The Greek has 
 usually a great deal too much tact to behave in 
 such a manner. The real difference between an 
 average Greek of this class and a man of the same 
 class in most other countries is that, with the Greek, 
 social perceptions come by instinct rather than by 
 training. A Greek of the lower orders is usually 
 self-possessed in manner, but it is the self-possession 
 of a child ; he is not obtrusive ; only everything in 
 the nature of a discussion interests him keenly. 
 Naturally, then, travellers in Greece find more than 
 the usual possibilities of companionship in such a 
 -case, though the Greek be his condition what it 
 may no more thrusts his company on the stranger 
 than he repels it. In fact, it would not be too 
 much to say of him 
 
 His honour, 
 
 Clock to itself, knew the true moment when 
 Exception bade him speak. 
 
 The manners of the Greek common people to each 
 other are habitually more courteous than is the case 
 in most other countries. As we wound in single and
 
 90 MODEKN GREECE. 
 
 straggling file along the narrow paths, it would often 
 happen that one of the Greeks would call out some- 
 thing which another did not hear, and then the 
 formula invariably was, opurde, ri Aeyere ; ' If you 
 please, what do you say?' It is interesting to watch a 
 bargain being made between two Greeks. The process 
 is not dramatic, as in Italy, or rhetorical, as in Ire- 
 land; it is a display of dialectical fence. I have agree- 
 Ascra. able recollections of at least one paiise which it gave 
 us in a long ride. As we were entering the valleys 
 of Helicon, we came to a place of quaint and homely 
 charm a hamlet in a green nook under slopes of 
 grey stone the place once called Ascra, where the 
 poet Hesiod put the points of good husbandry into 
 verse for the Boeotian farmers, and bade them know 
 the lucky days and the unlucky, and do justly, be- 
 cause there is a life after death. Hesiod was not 
 charmed with Ascra, but it looks a pleasant spot 
 now, the home where he sang and grumbled. We 
 halted there under a large pear-tree, while Miltiades 
 haggled with the natives for eggs; and there was 
 time to note how thriving the place looked, with its 
 clumps of mulberry trees and poplars, its patches of 
 ground preparing for cotton, and fields of barley and 
 potatoes which would have rejoiced Hesiod's soul ;
 
 MODERN GREECE. 91 
 
 while above the cup-like hollow in which the hamlet 
 nestles, the steep grey crags of Helicon rise in a double 
 line of ramparts, with dark pine-wood on the upper 
 heights. Miltiades was eventually baffled in his 
 negotiations by the townsmen of Hesiod ; but 
 in justice to his diplomatic skill it is only fair to 
 mention another occasion. We arrived at a village 
 near Tripoli tza, in the Morea, one evening, and did 
 not know where to look for a lodging. After some 
 enquiries Miltiades knocked at the door of a cottage. 
 The head of the family, a farmer, was still in the fields 
 it was about half-past seven on a summer evening 
 and the farmer's wife naturally demurred to ad- 
 mitting Miltiades and his party. The dialogue that 
 ensued is worthy of record. Miltiades, finding 
 that persuasion failed, boldly but gravely asserted 
 that one of the party was 'an official person 1 (ema-Typos 
 av0pu>7ros). The Greek word for ' official ' is of vague 
 and alarming import in the Greek provinces. The 
 hostess replied, ' What sort of official 1 ' (TTOIO? 
 eTTio-ij/tos ;) Miltiades, unabashed, made answer by 
 uttering the long and solemn word KadyyrjTijs : ' A 
 Professor.' This species of official was evidently 
 a new terror in those parts. Opposition quailed. 
 Miltiades had a keen eye for signals of distress, but,
 
 92 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 like a true Greek, he used his diplomatic advantage 
 with dignified moderation ; and the garrison would 
 have surrendered at discretion, if the master of the 
 house had not come back from the fields just then 
 and given us a hospitable welcome. 
 
 From Delphi , , 
 
 to Corinth. Ihe second part ot our journey was through the 
 Peloponnesus. At Salona Scala, the port of Delphi, 
 we ought to have caught a steamer, but there had 
 been an accident, and, after waiting a day and a 
 half, we took an open boat, and got to Corinth 
 after a very rough but enjoyable sail of eight 
 hours. I have seldom seen a finer sunset than on 
 that evening in the Gulf of Corinth; the western 
 sun, gleaming through stormy clouds, threw a purple 
 light, broken by shadow, on Delphi and on the cliffs 
 of Parnassus about it ; our boat was dashing on 
 through a deep blue sea which was rapidly whitening 
 with foam; far away to the west the shores of the 
 Corinthian gulf stretched in clear azure outlines, 
 narrowing to meet each other at the opposite pro- 
 montories which stand as portals between the inner 
 and outer waters. This was not Byron's sunset 
 it was not one unclouded blaze of living light : but 
 as one looked at the grand hills around Delphi, one 
 felt that the blendinsr of sunshine and storm was
 
 MODERN GREECE. 93 
 
 
 
 best for the last look. It was about ten at 
 night when we got to Corinth, and I remember a 
 Greek passenger who was with us saying that he 
 could tell by the sound of some Greek voices on 
 the shore, as our boat came near in the dark, that 
 the speakers were from Salona, the place we had 
 left. The mainland of the Greek Kingdom is only 
 about two-thirds of the size of Scotland, but it is 
 large enough to have very many local varieties of 
 rustic accent and idiom in the vernacular. Now, 
 as of old, the -intersecting chains of hills keep the 
 towns very much apart, fostering local differences 
 and local feelings. 
 
 One could not see the physical character of Greece The Acro- 
 
 Corinthus. 
 
 better than from the top of the Acro-Corinthus, the old 
 citadel of Corinth, about 1880 feet above the sea. The 
 view is by no means the finest in Greece, but it is cer- 
 tainly one of the most instructive. It brings together 
 all the typical features of the landscape hills, bays, 
 islands : and it shows in a small compass the distinctive 
 physical formation of the whole peninsula. This view 
 from the Aero-Corinth is like a map showing a strip of 
 Northern Greece and a strip of Southern for purposes 
 of comparison. The great feature of the whole is 
 that the breaking up of the land by hills and sea is
 
 94 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 repeated on a smaller and smaller scale, with finer 
 and finer articulation, as we pass from north to south. 
 Mycenae. At Mycense it was our good fortune to find the dis- 
 
 tinguished archaeologist, Mr. Stamatakes, whom the 
 Greek Government had appointed to continue the 
 excavations at Mycense which Dr. Schliemaim had left 
 unfinished. Mr. Stamatakes was then employing 25 
 workmen, all picked men. The graves which Dr. 
 Schliemann found at Mycenee lie in a precinct of oval 
 form on the side of the acropolis of Mycenae, and 
 within the Gate of Lions close to the road which 
 leads from that gate to the top of the low hill. On 
 the top of the hill are the foundations of an ancient 
 house. Schliemann's theory is that the graves of the 
 oval precinct were the graves of Agamemnon and his 
 dynasty, and that the house on the top of the hill was 
 the house in which these same people lived. Mr. 
 Stamatakes believes, and it is difficult to doubt, that 
 the gi'aves in the oval precinct are far older than 
 the age at which this hill of Mycena3 became the seat 
 of a Greek dynasty. Greek princes would not have 
 buried their dead so close to their dwelling-house. 
 The burial-places used by the dynasty whose house 
 can be traced on the top of the hill were more probably 
 the domed buildings outside the Gate of Lions the
 
 MODEKN GEEECE. 95 
 
 larger of which buildings is popularly called 'The 
 Treasury of Atreus.' Mr. Stamatakes was further of 
 the decided opinion that the substructions of the house 
 on the hill-top are not Hellenic in character. At 
 that time May, 1878 Dr. Schliemann's veritable 
 Agamemnon was the guest of Mr. Stamatakes. Aga- 
 memnon was kept in a wooden box on the ground 
 floor of Mr. Stamatakes' house at Mycenae, and we 
 saw him there. The head was crushed in upon the 
 breast, as if the coffin had been too short, and the 
 mouth was twisted ; but the teeth were in excellent 
 condition. He was then in a state critically near to 
 evaporation : but his name will live. The new hotel 
 at Nauplia, hard by, is the ' Agamemnon.' 
 
 If Greece is pre-eminently a country in which 
 Nature has moulded man's fate by the physical form 
 of his home, it is also the land where she delights in a 
 certain irony of contrast between the home and the 
 man. Attica, with its thin soil and cold grey lime- 
 stone, became the seat of a fertile and genial art, of a 
 luxuriant imagination, of a bright and mirth-loving 
 people. The stern and rigid genius of military Sparta p all ^Zf >f tlie 
 was cradled in a valley of the softest and richest 
 beauty, a valley where the pink flowers of the oleander 
 and the blossom of the yellow thorn mingle with the
 
 !)<! MODERN GREECE. 
 
 foliage of poplars and evergreen oaks on the banks 
 of the Eurotas, winding among fields of barley, 
 olive-groves and mulberry trees, vines and currants. 
 Strange revenge of fate : the first thing that one sees 
 as one comes into modern Sparta Sparta, that old 
 home of iron war, that foe of eveiy new-fangled 
 device is a steam-manufactory of silk. A Spartan 
 put his head out of the window as we rode by, and 
 politely asked us to come in and see the works. The 
 whole valley of the Eurotas is given up to mulberry 
 plantations for the silk-worm. All the way from the 
 bridge over the Eurotas to Sparta about five miles 
 you see a number of small round green mounds or 
 hillocks, most of them terraced with ledges, for feeding 
 the silk-worms, which are reared chiefly on a sort of 
 heather. Sparta and Kalamata are the chief seats of 
 the silk-trade. In spite of the silk-trade, however, 
 it is still three days' post from Athens to Sparta, 
 and a nine hours' ride from Sparta to the sea 
 si>art.i. at Marathonisi. Modern Sparta is a little town 
 of white and brown houses, with a church on 
 rising ground, and trees dotted about, a straggling 
 place, close under the great cliffs of Taygetos. The 
 site of old Sparta is just north of the new town, among 
 olives and barley fields ; there is nothing to be seen
 
 MODERN GREECE. 97 
 
 but the traces of the old theatre, in a large hollow 
 scooped out of the side of a hill, and the ruins of a 
 small building of much later date, absurdly called 
 ' the tomb of Leonidas.' 
 
 But Sparta needs no relics in stone : the site speaks 
 for itself. Its full grandeur is seen if you approach 
 from Arcadia. We left the south border of Arcadia 
 at half-past four in the morning of the last day of 
 May. It was starlight in the clear sky, but the 
 light of dawn was growing. The many-folded moun- 
 tains that enclose the plain of Tripolitza showed 
 varying shades of deep purple; only their western 
 heights were beginning to catch the rays of the rising 
 sun, which had not yet appeared above the eastern hills. 
 Farther north the inner plain of Mantineia was seen, 
 its hills robed in a paler blue. For hours we rode 
 southward through the dry bed of a torrent called 
 the Saranda Potamo, because it winds so much that 
 a straight line would cross it some forty times. 
 
 Just before eight o'clock we suddenly saw a 
 brilliant flash, like the sparkle of a diamond, in- 
 tensely radiant against the cloudless blue sky, above 
 the bleak, brown hill in front. It was the highest Taygetos 
 point of Taygetos the mighty mountain range 
 above Sparta. Twice again in the next two hours
 
 98 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 that apparition came the silver flash ; and then, 
 the third time, a larger vision was reveal ed a 
 mighty mass, toweling lip like a wall built by 
 giants, and from its middle line throwing out a 
 huge black buttress to the plain, while its top- 
 most ramparts shine afar off through the clear 
 air with the dazzling glory of snow. By half-past 
 two we were on the ridge which is the northern 
 border of the Spartan valley, and the whole range 
 of Taygetos was extended before us : beginning in a 
 low line to the south-west, then rising into that great 
 battlemented crest which we had seen far off, then 
 dipping again at a great cleft in, the chain, then 
 springing up once more to stretch away in bold 
 heights to the north-west, a sight never to be for- 
 gotten, a range of marvellous grandeur, stretching 
 from distant sea to distant cliff for a line of seventy 
 miles. 
 
 Any one who has ever spent a night at the Great 
 St. Bernard Alp knows how naturally and gracefully 
 hospitality connects itself with the life of a monastery. 
 It is so in the Greek Chui-ch too. Next to the 
 monasteries of Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, 
 hardly any Greek monastery has a finer situation 
 than that which is placed on the side of Mount
 
 MODERN GREECE. 99 
 
 Ithome. Ithome stands in the centre of the Messenian 
 plain a great natural citadel, about 2,470 feet high, 
 that is, more than four times as high as the Acropolis 
 of Athens, which it strongly resembles in form, and a 
 good deal higher than the Acro-Corinthus. On the top 
 of Ithome there is a little church in which the 
 Byzantine paintings are still fresh, and close to it a 
 cell in which an old monk lives alone and serves 
 the church. I noticed a block of white marble set 
 in the rough masonry over the door, with the words 
 in Greek, ' Blessed is the dweller here, if he hath 
 a good patience ; for so he follows the ensample of 
 our Good Master. May 8, 1757.' The spirit of 
 ascetic solitude which breathes in the words har- 
 monizes well with the lonely summit. As one looks 
 down on the Messenian plain an undulating expanse 
 of green, with dark patches of orchards, and dotted 
 with villages one sees to the westward a line of 
 grey wall, with the ruins of towers at intervals, 
 winding over the fields. Those are the remains of 
 the massive walls begun by Epameinondas, and meant 
 to make Messene safe for ever from her deadly foe 
 beyond those snow-crowned ramparts to the east. 
 Neither Greek nor Roman ever took those walls, but 
 at last they were stormed by Alaric and his Goths.
 
 100 MODERN GEEECE. 
 
 There are only about twenty monks in the monastery 
 of Ithome, some of them very young. Novices are 
 admitted as early as fifteen; on the other hand the 
 Superior told us that he was thirty-three when 
 he first entered the monastic life. The brethren's 
 hours are chiefly divided between out-door occupa- 
 tions and devotional exercises. The first service is 
 at dawn, the last at midnight, and there are five 
 
 Temple at others between. A noble parting-view of Ithome 
 DUMB. 
 
 is enjoyed by any one who seeks out a temple 
 of Apollo, high up among the wooded hills, on the 
 border between Messenia and Elis. The place was 
 once called Bassse, ' The Glens.' In this wild spot, 
 two and twenty centuries ago, a neighbouring town, 
 delivered from a pestilence, raised its thank offering 
 to the Healer. After threading many an upland glen 
 the traveller suddenly sees the columns of a beautiful 
 temple rise up before him in a grey nook a temple 
 to which solitude and time have been tender ; and 
 then if he looks back from this shrine of Apollo, 
 guarded as by some strange spell in the secret 
 recesses of the hills, he descries Ithome rising far 
 off below him in the centre of the Messenian plain, 
 and sees how truly it is the natural acropolis of 
 the land.
 
 MODERN GREECE. 101 
 
 We were lucky in the moment of our arrival 
 at Olympia. It was the day before the German 
 excavators were to close their third campaign of nine 
 months, and render an account to the Greek inspector 
 on the spot. We were most kindly received by 
 Dr. Treu, to whom we brought letters. He forthwith 
 put us on ponies, and took us on a little tour of the 
 excavations. The valley of Olympia lies nearly east 
 and west, and is about three miles long by one broad. 
 The Alpheus runs through it, and a smaller stream, 
 the Cladeus, flows into the Alpheus through an opening 
 in the north side of the valley. In the angle between 
 the Alpheus and the Cladeus a cluster of splendid 
 temples once stood. The Germans have laid bare the 
 foundations of these the temples of Zeus, Hera, 
 and the Mother of the Gods : also a large square 
 enclosure, a sort of sacred court the peribolos 
 and the sacred treasuries. When one looked down 
 from the village on the hill where the Germans had 
 their quarters, the excavations had the effect of a 
 clear ground-plan of the sacred precinct. Some 
 famous statues that had been found in or near the 
 temples were then lying in a little wooden shed by 
 the Cladeus. The exquisite fragment of the flying 
 Victory was there a work of Pseonius, and the
 
 102 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 splendid Hermes of Praxiteles, the only extant work 
 of that master, who represents the second period 
 of matured Attic sculpture that school of softer 
 finish which succeeded to the bolder and grander 
 inspirations of Pheidias. The valley itself is very 
 lovely. The wooded hills which enclose it, low, but 
 of exquisite outline, suggest that nature meant the 
 place to be a choice and secluded scene of holy festival. 
 One thinks of the time when temples stood there in 
 the glory of marble, and gold, and brilliant colours, 
 when those statues were perfect, when that plain 
 could show, besides, all living glories of the human form, 
 when the blue line of those far-off snow-streaked 
 heights in Arcadia met the eyes of the swift runner 
 in the foot-race, and when, as evening closed some day 
 of brilliant rivalries, in Pindar's words, 'the lovely 
 light of the fair-faced moon beamed forth, and all 
 the holy place resounded with festal joy.' 
 
 From Olympia to Patras from the silent and 
 deserted haunt of all that made old Greece strong and 
 beautiful, back to the work-a-day world of modern 
 commerce. Yet it is well that a tour in Greece 
 should end here that one should look out on Ithaca, 
 bathed in the soft blue haze of sunset on the 
 Ionian sea, a very dream of the Odyssey, and then
 
 MODERN GREECE. 103 
 
 turn one's eyes to that busy town and harbour of 
 Patras close at hand. It is in sucli busy places as 
 these that Greece is fitting itself to take its due rank 
 once more among the nations. 
 
 It is your rule to exclude politics here, and I 
 
 shall not infringe it. The Greek question has present 
 
 position of 
 
 one aspect in which it happens to touch the Greece, 
 politics of the hour, but it has also/ another, a 
 larger and higher aspect, in which it rises clear of 
 them. With regard to the general position and pro- 
 spects of Greece, there are two things which would 
 perhaps be generally admitted by persons of sober 
 judgment, who have endeavoured to look fairly and 
 dispassionately at the facts of the case. First, Greece 
 has made creditable progress during the last fifty 
 years ; during the last fifteen years it has made pro- 
 gress which may well be called remarkable, and which, 
 notwithstanding deficiencies that remain, offers a solid 
 ground of confidence in the future of Greece and the 
 Greek nation. Every one admits now that it was 
 a mistake to make the Greek kingdom so small, 
 and to give it such a frontier a frontier which 
 leaves out such a place as Janina for instance, so 
 long the very centre of Greek life, during a period 
 when Athens was a second-rate provincial town.
 
 104 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 Then the country started with a heavy debt for a 
 loan of which less than one-fifth was applied to the 
 purposes for which it was raised. Further, it is 
 only since the beginning of the present reign that 
 Greece has had a truly effective constitution. All 
 these causes have kept the country poor. Want of 
 capital has impeded agriculture and public works. 
 Greece has universal suffrage, and civil servants are 
 removable on a change of ministry. Thus there 
 has been a general dearth of secure careers for able 
 men. The liberal professions have been overstocked. 
 Greece has had too many politicians and too many 
 political journalists. In this last respect things are 
 mending. More openings for educated energy are 
 being made by the development of manufacture and 
 commerce. Greece must not be judged by particular 
 moments of trouble and depression. Other countries 
 besides Greece have such moments now and then. 
 We must judge Greece by its general position and 
 prosperity, as compared with the state of things from 
 which it started. It had to create for itself the 
 first elements of civilization. Europe set Greece to 
 make bricks without straw. Consider fairly what 
 Greece has done, and you will not condemn or despise 
 it; you will respect and esteem it, you will find it
 
 MODERN GREECE. 105 
 
 worthy of sympathy and encouragement yes, and 
 worthy of admiration. 
 
 Secondly, the Greek race offers, on the whole, the 
 best hope of settled order, of constitutional govern- 
 ment and of high civilization in those countries which 
 were once Hellenic. This may be said without any 
 undue disparagement of its competitors. Let us con- 
 cede everything that can be advanced in favour of 
 Muscovite or Ottoman rule by the admirer* of either. 
 At least it cannot be said that either Russia or 
 Turkey represents those blessings which subjects 
 of the British monarchy have learned to associate 
 with the name of constitutional freedom, and 
 which they believe to be inseparable from the high- 
 est and most beneficent form of civilization. The 
 Greeks have won constitutional freedom by patient 
 effort, and have proved that they can use it. As re- 
 gards the new principalities, the type of nationality 
 and civilization which they represent is, speaking 
 broadly, the Slavonic. Now the efficacy of Greek civ- 
 ilization, as compared with Slavonic, has once already 
 been tested on a large scale and with a definite result. 
 In the middle of the ninth century the Slavs had a 
 numerical majority in Greece, though, as Carl Hopf has 
 finally demonstrated, and as all learned students of the
 
 106 MODERN GREECE. 
 
 question are now agreed, the strain of Hellenic blood 
 was never at any time lost in Greece. What hap- 
 pened? In two hundred years the Greek minority 
 absorbed and Hellenized the Slavs among whom they 
 lived. How was that done? By the superiority 
 intellectual, political, social of Greek civilization. 
 If we are sincere in believing that constitutional 
 freedom and the diffusion of sound education are good 
 things, then we must desire to see the influence of 
 the Greek race extended and strengthened in South- 
 eastern Europe. 
 
 It was on the heights above Mycense that the 
 beacon-fire of Ida found the goal of its race from 
 conquered Troy. Close by is the fair town of 
 Nauplia, the earliest capital of New Greece, where 
 in our own time another beacon-fire finished its 
 course, the sign sent on from West to East, which 
 touched point after point with flame, until at 
 last it reached the land from which it had first 
 shone of old, and kindled comfort for a people 
 who sat in dai'kness. The light which returned as 
 freedom had gone forth as knowledge ; long ago 
 Greece had lifted her own signal to the West, the 
 star which guided the dim search for truth, the star 
 which still shines above the troubles of our life with
 
 MODERN GREECE. 107 
 
 a ray so clear and so serene. All men can unite 
 in hoping that Greece may yet again become a source 
 of illumination and of temperate strength for those 
 neighbouring countries which were once Hellenic, 
 but which have long been the abodes of barbarism, 
 ignorance, and violence that a torch lit by Greece 
 may yet flash through them with a message bringing 
 the reverence for law, the love of ordered liberty, the 
 will to work for the common good, the desire to rise 
 from the aims of individual ambition to those which 
 contemplate the advancement of mankind.
 
 THE PEOGKESS OF GREECE. 
 
 ' A STRUGGLE, equal in duration to the war which 
 Homer sung, and in individual valour not perhaps 
 inferior, has at last drawn to a glorious close ; and 
 Greece, though her future destiny be as yet obscure, 
 has emerged from the trial regenerate and free. Like 
 the star of Merope, all sad and lustreless, her dark- 
 ness has at length disappeared, and her European 
 sisters haste to greet the returning brightness of the 
 beautiful and long-lost Pleiad.' These are the closing 
 words of a book which, since the appearance of 
 Finlay's work, has probably had few English readers, 
 Emerson's History of Modern Greece. When they were 
 written in 1830 Capodistria was still President of the 
 new State, and three years were yet to pass before 
 King Otho should arrive at Nauplia. 
 
 During the half-century which has nearly elapsed 
 since then, ' the European sisters ' have not always
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 109 
 
 been so gracious to ' the long-lost Pleiad ' ; indeed 
 they have sometimes been on the verge of hinting 
 that the constellation which they adorn would have 
 been nearly as brilliant without her. But at least 
 there can no longer be any excuse for alleging that 
 Greece has been a failure without examining the 
 facts. Her record is before the world. The last few 
 years have been especially fertile in works replete 
 with information on the political, social, and economic 
 condition of the country. 
 
 Among these may be mentioned the work of M. 
 Moraitinis, La Grece telle qu'elle est ; the work of 
 M. Mansolas, La Grece a ^Exposition Universelle de 
 J'aris en 1878; the essay of M. Tombasis, La Grece 
 sous le point de vue agricole ; and an interesting 
 little book, full of information and of acute criticism, 
 by Mr. Tuckerman, formerly Minister of the United 
 States at Athens, The Greeks of To-day. It is 
 often instructive to compare Mr. Tuckerman's obser- 
 vations with those made more than twenty years ago 
 by his countryman, Mr. H. M. Baird, who, after resid- 
 ing for a year at Athens and travelling both in 
 Northern Greece and in the Morea, embodied the 
 results in his Modern Greece. Lastly, Mr. Lewis 
 Sergeant, in his New Greece, has essayed a double
 
 110 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 task to show statistically how far Greece has ad- 
 vanced, and to show historically why it has advanced 
 no further. Mr. Sergeant's book cannot fail to do 
 good service in making the broad facts concerning 
 Greece better known to the British public. 
 
 In the following pages only a few of the salient 
 points in the condition of modern Greece can be 
 noticed. The facts and views presented here are 
 derived both from study and from personal observa- 
 tion. They are offered merely in the hope that some 
 readers may be induced to seek fuller sources of know- 
 ledge regarding a people who, by general consent, are 
 destined to play a part of increasing importance in 
 the East. 
 
 Agriculture. The prosperity of Greece must always depend 
 mainly on agriculture. No question is more vital for 
 Greece at this moment than that of recognising the 
 causes which have checked progress in this direction, 
 and doing what can be done to remove them. It was 
 with agriculture as with every other form of national 
 effort in the newly established kingdom : it had to 
 begin almost at the beginning. The Turks had left 
 the land a wilderness. The Egyptian troops in the 
 Peloponnesus, after burning the olives and other 
 inflammable trees, had cut down those which,
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. Ill 
 
 like the fig-tree could less easily be destroyed by 
 fire. The Greek peasantry was too poor and too 
 wretched to aim at moi-e than a bare subsistence 
 by the rudest methods of husbandry. It should 
 never be forgotten in estimating what Greece has 
 done in this department, as in others during the 
 last forty years, that in the earlier part of this period 
 progress was necessarily very slow. The first workers 
 had to construct everything for themselves, or even to 
 undo the work of the past before they could get a clear 
 start. Hence when the rate of recent progress is 
 found to have been rapid the favourable inference is 
 strengthened. 
 
 Including both the Ionian and the ^Egean islands, Cultivated 
 
 area of 
 
 the Kingdom of Greece contains about fourteen mil- Greece - 
 lions and a half of acres. Nearly one-half of this 
 total area is occupied by forests, marshes, or rocky 
 tracts, and is not at present susceptible of cultivation. 
 According to M. Tombasis, who is of special authority 
 on Greek agriculture, one-fourth of the total area is 
 under cultivation : but of this nearly one-half is always 
 fallow. Hence not much more than one-seventh of 
 the total area is productive at any given time. One- 
 fourth, therefore, of the territory which might be cul- 
 tivated is not under cultivation at all. But it is
 
 112 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 satisfactory to learn from M. Mansolas that some 
 500,000 acres have been brought under cultivation 
 within the last fifteen years. 
 
 ^ e PP u l a ti n f the Kingdom, as given by the 
 last census (February, 1880) is 1,679,000. It is 
 computed that from one-third to one-fourth of this 
 population is engaged in. agricultural or pastoral 
 pursuits. The increase since 1830 has been large 
 in all the staple agricultural products, and in 
 some it has been remai-kable. The cultivation of 
 olives has increased about three-fold since 1830 ; of 
 figs, six-fold ; of currants, fifteen-fold ; of vines, 
 twenty-eight-fold. The progress of the currant trade 
 has been tolerably steady since 1858. M. Moraitinis 
 puts the area occupied by currant-vines at nearly 
 40,000 acres ; M. Mansolas, at even a higher figure. 
 The average yearly production of currants, before the 
 Greek War of Independence, was about ten million 
 pounds weight. It has lately risen to upwards of a 
 hundred-and-fifty million pounds weight. The pro- 
 duce from arable land is stated to have increased fifty 
 per cent, in the last fifteen yeai-s. 
 iinpcdi- Creditable progress has been made, then, by Greece 
 
 ments to ' 
 
 i^ " in all the chief branches of her agriculture ; in some 
 branches, even great progress. And yet competent
 
 PEOGRESS OF GREECE. 113 
 
 observers are generally agreed that Greek agriculture 
 is still very far from doing justice to the natural re- 
 sources of the country. The causes of this defect 
 deserve the earnest attention of all who wish to see 
 the prosperity of Greece set on a firm basis. Want 
 of capital is unquestionably the great want of all for 
 Greek agriculture. But, if abundant capital were forth- 
 coming to-morrow, it would still have to contend with 
 a special set of difficulties created by the want of 
 capital at the critical moment nearly fifty years ago. 
 After the War of Independence the Greek lands 
 which the Turks had left on receiving a large com- 
 pensation at the instance of the Powers became the 
 property of the Greek State. Few of the purchasers 
 were found. Part of the land was granted by the 
 Government in small lots to peasant holders, subject 
 to taxes on the produce. A great part was left in 
 the hands of the Government, and remained un- 
 productive. 
 
 The system of small holdings, the petite culture, has Small 
 
 J holding*. 
 
 lasted to this day, the partition of land being especi- 
 ally minute in the mountainous districts and in the 
 ^Egean islands. This system has been a constant bar 
 to the introduction of scientific farming. The average 
 
 agriculturist has been too poor and too ignorant to 
 H
 
 114 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 attempt it. The mode of taxation a. modification of 
 the old Turkish system is such that, as Mr. Tuckerman 
 says, ' the husbandman suffers delay in bringing his 
 crop to market, loses by depreciation while awaiting 
 the tax-gatherer's arrival, and finally in the tax to 
 which it is subjected.' The importance of encourag- 
 ing better methods of farming has been recognised 
 from the earliest days of Greece. Capodistria, when 
 President of the Republic, founded in 1831 an Agri- 
 cultural School at Tiryns. This was, on the whole, a 
 failure, and was closed in 1865. It has been replaced 
 by a more technical school, of which M. Mansolas 
 gives a more encouraging report. But the case of 
 Greece is widely different from that of a country in 
 which the land is occupied chiefly by an educated class 
 of large or considerable land-holders. In Greece each 
 several holder of one or two acres has to be converted 
 to scientific farming before agricultural reform can 
 make way. And the natural conservatism of an agri- 
 cultural population is intensified by the fact that in 
 these matters every man has hitherto been his own 
 master, with no obligation beyond the payment of his 
 taxes to the State. It is not even the ambition of the 
 peasant farmer to get as much out of the land as he 
 can. The difficulties of communication limit his mar-
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 115 
 
 ket, and he is usually content if he can satisfy the 
 wants of his household, with perhaps a margin of profit. 
 Tradition and the influence of climate combine to make 
 these wants few and simple, and so to restrict the 
 amount of energy employed. In Greece, as elsewhere, 
 it is in one sense a misfortune that the peasantry are 
 contented with so little. 
 
 Again, the population of Greece is thin excluding 
 the Ionian Islands, it has been computed at fifty-eight 
 to the square mile and the system of small holdings 
 increases the dearth of agricultural labour. The des- 
 truction of the forests in Greece has been due mainly 
 to the long unrestrained recklessness of the peasants 
 and to the depredations of the wandering shepherds 
 with their flocks of goats. The destruction of the 
 forests has in turn injured the climate and helped to 
 dry up the rivers. The Greek government has not 
 been insensible to these evils, but it has had to contend 
 against deeply-rooted prejudices and traditions those, 
 namely, which were engendered by Turkish rule. 
 Good results may be anticipated from a law lately 
 passed, which permits the tax-paying tenant of public 
 land to buy it from the State, and to pay the purchase 
 money by instalments spread over eighteen years. 
 This should tend to bring in a better class of agricul-
 
 116 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 turists, and also by degrees to enlarge the cxiltivated 
 area. 
 
 The want of roads in Greece has been an obstacle 
 to agricultural industry, as to enterprise of every kind. 
 Seaboard towns sometimes import their wheat, when 
 there is an ample supply at a distance perhaps of a 
 day's journey inland, simply because the transport by 
 mules or horses would be too expensive. Mr. Tucker- 
 man computes that there are about two hundred miles 
 of ' good highway ' in Greece Proper : and if by 
 'good' is meant 'thoroughly practicable for carriages,' 
 this is perhaps not far from the mark. The roads 
 of the mainland, according to an official return in 
 1878, have an aggregate length of 889 kilometres, 
 933 metres; i.e., about 550 miles. The fact is 
 that there has been no great demand for roads on the 
 part of the unambitious agricultural class, and the 
 country, with its already heavy burdens, has felt no 
 sufficiently strong incentive to proceed vigorously with 
 a work of such heavy cost. Roadmaking is enor- 
 mously expensive in a country so full of rocky tracts 
 and intersected by frequent chains of hills. But 
 already the exigencies of trade are beginning to open 
 up the Morea. Last summer, in going from Laconia 
 into Messenia, I came on the still unfinished road
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 117 
 
 which is being made from Kalamata to Tripolitza, and 
 followed it for some way. A few more such first-rate 
 highways would be the greatest of boons to the country. 
 There is still no continuous road between Kalamata 
 and Patras ; there is nothing worthy to be called a 
 road between Tripolitza and Sparta. The poet tells 
 us that, when Apollo passed from Delos to Delphi, 
 
 The children of Hephaestus were his guides, 
 Clearing the tangled path before the god, 
 Making a wild land smooth ; 
 
 and every modern tourist will echo the wish that the 
 rising Polytechnic School of Athens may produce 
 some more ' road-making sons of Hephaestus.' But Public 
 
 works. 
 
 it would be a mistake to infer, from the deficiency of 
 roads which is still felt, that Greece has been inactive 
 in public works. Some dozen harbours have been con- 
 structed or restored, lighthouses have been erected at 
 all the dangerous points in the Greek seas, drainage 
 works have been executed in several places, eleven 
 new cities have arisen on ancient sites, more than forty 
 towns and more than six hundred villages have been 
 rebuilt since the war. 
 
 The manufacturing industries of Greece have made Manufac- 
 tures. 
 
 rapid progress within the last few years. According
 
 118 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 to M. Moraitinis, the Peineus 1 did not contain a single 
 steam manufactory in 1868. It has now more than 
 thirty such establishments ; and the kingdom contains 
 in all no less than 112 steam factories. Most of these 
 have been established within the last ten years. There 
 are, besides, about 700 factories which do not use 
 steam. The number of artisans employed is about 
 25,000, and the anmial products represent a value of 
 about six millions sterling. 
 
 At the Great Exhibition of 1851 G-reece was repre- 
 sented by thirty- six exhibitors. At Paris in 1878 
 it was represented, according to the list of M. Manso- 
 las, by 533. He notes the progress of cotton-spinning, 
 which since 1870 has diminished the importation of 
 that article by nearly two- thirds. The export of 
 Greek wines has also increased very largely. The 
 large mulberry plantations in the valley of the 
 Eurotas attest the growing importance of the silk 
 manufacture. Though Government patronage has 
 never been wanting, the rapid progress of recent 
 
 1 Sixty years ago the Peiraeus Porto Leone, under the 
 Turks had well-nigh ceased to be even a port. The traces 
 of its ancient dignity were few and modest. There was a 
 piece of deal boarding, projecting a few feet into the sea, to 
 serve as a landing-stage for small boats ; and there was a 
 wooden hut for a guard.
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 119 
 
 years has been due, M. Mansolas thinks, chiefly to 
 private enterprise and to the power of association. 
 This power is gradually overcoming the obstacles 
 long presented by a thin population, by the want 
 of capital, by the absence of machinery, and by the 
 slender demand for luxuries. It is a good sign 
 that, whereas in 1845 Greece was importing twice 
 the value of her exports, the ratio of imports to exports 
 has lately been less than three to two. Forty-seven 
 years ago Lord Palmerston predicted a bright future 
 for Greek commerce, and already the prediction has 
 been in some measure fulfilled. Next to agiculture, 
 the mainstay of Greece is her merchant marine, trading 
 with Turkey and the ports of the Levant. In 1821 
 Greece had only about 450 vessels ; the number in 
 1874 was 5,202 representing an aggregate burden of 
 250,077 tons; and the merchant marine of Greece 
 ranks, in the scale of importance, as the seventh of the 
 world. 
 
 The question of national education has from the Education, 
 first days of recovered freedom engaged the most 
 earnest attention of the Greek people. Education is 
 for the Greeks not merely what it is for every 
 civilized nation, the necessary basis of all worthy 
 hope ; it is, further, the surest pledge of their unity as
 
 120 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 a people both within and without the boundaries of 
 the present kingdom ; it is the practical vindication of 
 their oldest birthright ; it is the symbol of the agencies 
 which wrought their partial deliverance ; it is the liv- 
 ing witness of those qualities and those traditions on 
 which they found their legitimate aspirations for the 
 future. 
 
 During three centuries and a half of Turkish rule, 
 among the influences by which the Greek nationality 
 was preserved from effaceinent were the studies 
 which fostered its language and its religion ; and, 
 when the earliest hopes of freedom began to be 
 felt, the first sure promise of its approach was the 
 fact that those studies had been enlarged and Lad 
 received a new impulse. Koraes struck the true 
 note in the preface to his translation of Beccaria 
 On Crimes and Punishments, which he dedicated 
 in 1802 to the young Ionian Republic. 'You 
 are now,' he said, addressing the studious youth of 
 Greece, ' the instructors and teachers of your country, 
 but the time is fast approaching when you will be 
 called upon to become her lawgivers. Unite, then, 
 your wealth and your exertions in her behalf, since in 
 her destitution she can boast no public treasury for the 
 instruction of her children ; and forget not that in her
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 121 
 
 brighter days their education was a public duty en- 
 trusted to her rulers.' 
 
 If ever there was a case iu which the deliverance 
 of a nation was directly traceable to the awakening of 
 the national intelligence, that case was the Greek War 
 of Independence. No people could have a more 
 cogent practical reason than the Greeks have for 
 believing that knowledge is power ; but they do not 
 value it only or chiefly because it is power. The love 
 of knowledge is an esential part of the Greek char- 
 acter an instinct which their historical traditions 
 strengthen, indeed, but have not created. After the 
 war, when the troubled period of Capodistria's Presi- 
 dency hud given place to settled institutions, one of 
 the first great tasks taken in hand was that of 
 thoroughly organising public instruction. 
 
 M. Burnoufs remark, quoted by Mr. Sergeant, Thesitua- 
 
 tion in 1833. 
 
 that public instruction was ' almost non-existent ' in 
 Greece in 1833, is true in a sense, but needs qualifica- 
 tion. It is true that there was no complete or uniform 
 system of public instruction. In the political situ- 
 ation of the Greeks before the war such a thing had 
 not been possible. On the other hand, many elements 
 of such a system had been supplied by the strenuous 
 efforts made at many particular centres of Greek life
 
 122 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 during a long series of years. In fact the tradition of 
 Greek culture had, under the heaviest discourage- 
 ments, been preserved unbroken from the conquest of 
 Constantinople, though it was only in the latter part 
 of the seventeenth century that a few of the schools 
 
 Revolution, began to be prosperous or famous. Among these 
 were the lyceums of Bucharest in Wallachia and 
 Jassi in Moldavia, which had been protected by a 
 series of Phanariot Hospodars ; the schools of Janina 
 in Epirus, which had owed much to the beneficence of 
 the brothers Zosima, ' the Medicis of Modern 
 Greece ; ' the gymnasium of Smyrna, the college of 
 Scio, the Greek college at Odessa, and many more of 
 nearly equal repute. By 1815 almost every Greek 
 community had its school. Ten years of war and 
 confusion interrupted the work. But, in 1833, there 
 were still the materials, however scattered or imper- 
 fect, with which to begin ; and there was a spontane- 
 ous public sympathy with the object a sympathy 
 which the successful struggle for freedom had helped 
 not a little to quicken. 
 
 System of Under the system of public instruction adopted in 
 
 Public In- 
 
 1011 ' modern Greece, 1 three successive grades of schools lead 
 
 1 The chief organizer of this system was George Gennadius, 
 the father of the present Minister of Greece in England, and
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 123 
 
 up to the university : (1) the Demotic or Primary 
 National Schools ; (2) the Hellenic Schools, secondary 
 grammar schools ; (3) the Gymnasia, higher schools 
 of scholarship and science, in which the range and the 
 level of teaching are much the same as in the German 
 gymnasium, or in the upper parts of our public 
 schools. From the Gymnasium the next step is to 
 the University of Athens. In all three grades of 
 schools, and also at the University, instruction is 
 gratuitous. Primary education is in theory compul- 
 sory as well as gratuitous, but in practice the principle 
 of compulsion has seldom been applied. Possibly it has 
 seldom been found necessary, for there can be no doubt 
 that primary education in Greece has made extra- 
 ordinary progress since 1833 such progress as could 
 have been made only where the love of knowledge 
 was an instinct of the people and that at the present 
 time Greece can compare favourably in this respect 
 
 a descendant of Gennadius Scholarius, the first Patriarch 
 of Constantinople after the Turkish Conquest. George 
 Gennadius was studying in Germany when the Greek Revolu- 
 tion broke out. He served in the war ; he was a prominent 
 speaker in the assemblies ; and on the settlement of the State 
 he devoted his life to public education. Many of the Bishops 
 and scholars of Greece have been his pupils ; and the memory 
 of his unselfish energy is still held in deserved honour.
 
 124 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 with any country in the world. In 1835 there were 
 about 70 primary schools, with less than 7,000 scholars; 
 in 1845, about 450 schools, with 35,000 scholars; in 
 1874, about 1,130 schools, with 70,000 scholars. 
 Higher The growth of the higher schools and of the Uni- 
 
 education. 
 
 versity has not been less remarkable. Within five- 
 and-twenty years the number of the ' Hellenic ' 
 schools has been nearly doubled : that of the Gymnasia 
 has been nearly trebled ; and the total numbers of 
 pupils have grown in corresponding ratio. In 1841 
 the University of Athens, then recently founded, had 
 292 students ; in 1872 it had 1244. A few years ago 
 it was estimated that about 81,000 persons that is 
 about one-eighteenth of the entire population was 
 under instruction in Greece, either at public or at 
 private establishments. The sum spent by Greece on 
 public instruction is rather more than 5 per cent, 
 of its total expenditure a larger proportion than is 
 devoted to the same purpose by France, Italy, Austria, 
 or Germany. When Mr. Tuckerman claims for 
 Greece that ' she stands first in the i-ank of nations 
 not excepting the United States as a self-educated 
 people,' the claim, righly understood, is just. It 
 means, first, that nowhere else does the State spend so 
 large a fraction of its disposable revenue on public
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 125 
 
 education ; secondly, that nowhere else is there such a 
 spontaneous public desire to profit by the educational 
 advantages which the State affords. 
 
 Closely connected with the progress of the higher The over 
 
 J stocked 
 
 education in Greece is a phenomenon which every callll) s s - 
 visitor observes, and which has hitherto remained an 
 unsolved problem of modern Greek society. This is 
 the disproportionately large number of men who, hav- 
 ing received a university education, become lawyers, 
 physicians, journalists, or politicians. M. Mansolas, 
 after observing that the ' dominant calling ' in Greece 
 is that of the agriculturist, assigns the second place 
 to ' the class of men who exercise the liberal pro- 
 fessions, of whom the number is excessive relatively 
 to the rest of the population.' Mr. Sergeant quotes 
 on this subject part of a Report drawn up in 1872 
 by Mr. Watson, one of our Secretaries of Legation 
 at Athens. ' While there is felt in Greece,' Mr. 
 Watson says, ' a painful dearth of men whose 
 education has fitted them to supply some of the 
 multifarious material wants of the country such, 
 for instance, as surveying, farming, road-making, 
 and bridge-building there is, on the other hand, 
 a plethora of lawyers, writer, and clerks, who, in 
 the absence of regular occupation, become agitators
 
 126 PEOGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 and coffee-house politicians.' As lately as June, 
 1878, the correspondent of the Times at Athens 
 wrote as follows: 'Public life is here the mono- 
 poly of the class exercising the so-called liberal pro- 
 fessions of advocates and university men, whose 
 name is legion, an upper sort of proletariate, divided 
 into two everlastingly antagonistic factions of place- 
 men and place-hunters.' 
 Causes of j^ j^ easv fa, aggicm one set of causes for this 
 
 the over- * 
 
 state of things. Where a school and university 
 education is offered free of charge to a people of 
 keen intellectual appetite, it is natural that an un- 
 usually large proportion of persons should go through 
 i. Condition the university course. And where, as in Greece, 
 
 of Greece * 
 
 agriculture is under a system which gives little scope 
 to the higher sort of intelligence, while there is neither 
 public nor private capital enough to provide employ- 
 ment for many architects or civil engineers, it is 
 natural that an unduly large proportion of university 
 graduates should turn to one of the liberal profes- 
 sions, or to some calling in which their literary 
 training can be made available. 
 
 Mr. Tuckerman has described vividly the process, 
 by which ' the coffee-house politician ' is developed. 
 A young man, of somewhat better birth than the
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 127 
 
 agricultural labourer or the common sailor, finds 
 himself at eighteen a burden on a household which 
 is hardly maintained by the industry of his father. 
 If he followed in his father's steps, his lot would 
 be to till the soil for what, when rent and taxes 
 have been paid, is little more than a bare livelihood, 
 or perhaps to subsist on the salary of a small public 
 office. But the boy has been at a school of the higher 
 grade, and, with a natural taste for learning, has 
 conceived the ambition to make something better of 
 his life than this. What, then, is he to do? He 
 would be glad to get a clerkship in one of the com- 
 mercial hoxises of Athens, Patras, or Syra ; but there 
 are hundreds of applicants whose chances are better 
 than his. Even if he could afford to try his fortune 
 in a foreign country, the risk would be, in his case, 
 too great. Athens, the busy centre of so many 
 activities, is his one hope. Surely there he will 
 find something to do. He makes his way to Athens, 
 attends the University, and becomes interested in 
 his studies. His years of university life are made 
 tolerably happy by the companionship of fellow- 
 students whose situation resembles his own. Litei-ary 
 and political discussion, enjoyed over the evening 
 coffee and cigarette, comes to be his chief delight.
 
 128 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 At last he takes his degree. He must choose a 
 profession. The Bar is already overcrowded. A 
 perpetual series of epidemics would be required to 
 provide moderate occupation for one half of the physi- 
 cians. He has not patience to undertake the duties 
 of a schoolmaster among the Greeks of Turkey. It 
 remains that he should be a politician. He writes 
 for the newspapers, and awaits the moment when 
 his party shall hold its next distribution of loaves 
 and fishes. He receives, perhaps, a small post, or 
 some other reward. Thenceforth he is devoted to 
 his new career. Through years of plenty and years 
 of leanness, he is content to wait on the revolutions 
 of the political wheel. If it is suggested to him 
 that this is an unsatisfactory life, his answer is 
 simple : Can you show me a better ? 
 
 of Greeks Such cases may be common, and may help to 
 key. explain why, in addition to the overstocked liberal 
 
 professions, there should be a large number of party 
 writers and place-seekers. But the continued over- 
 supply in all these careers would still remain inex- 
 plicable if we confined our view to the kingdom of 
 Greece. The clue is to be found in the relations 
 existing between free Greece and that which is still 
 emphatically ' enslaved ' Greece f)
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 129 
 
 The kingdom of Greece offers a university educa- 
 tion free of charge nob only to its own subjects but 
 also to the Greek subjects of the Porte. As to 
 the measure in which the ranks of university men 
 at Athens have been swelled by Greek subjects of 
 Turkey, an interesting piece of evidence will be 
 found in Mr. H. M. Baird's Modern Greece. Mr. 
 Baird attended classes at the University of Athens, 
 and became intimately acquainted with its life and 
 working. 'It is a circumstance well worth the 
 noticing,' he writes, ' that rather more tJutn one-half 
 of the matriculated students are from districts under 
 the rule of the Sultan.' Thus Athens is a focus 
 of intellectual life not only for the kingdom of 
 Greece but for the Greeks of Turkey : and the already 
 redundant supply of lettered men is further increased 
 by an influx from abroad. 
 
 Hence the social equilibrium of Greece is deranged Balance of 
 
 occupations 
 
 in a manner to which no other country presents a destr y e(1 - 
 parallel. In other countries the law of supply and 
 demand roughly suffices to maintain a natural balance 
 between the number of those who engage in pro- 
 ductive industries and the number of those who 
 embrace the liberal professions or seek office from 
 
 the State. In Greece this is not so. The population 
 
 I
 
 130 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 of Greece is a million and a half. The number of 
 Greeks in Turkey is about five millions. Among 
 these five millions there are, of course, many who 
 desire a political or official life. They cannot have 
 this under conditions which they can accept in 
 Turkey. They are therefore driven to seek it in 
 Greece. Educated men, or men desirous of educa- 
 tion, throng into the kingdom of Greece from Epirus, 
 Thessaly, Macedonia, Thrace, Crete. But unfortu- 
 nately there is no reciprocity. The industrial popu- 
 lations of those pi'ovinces are not at the disposition 
 of Greece. Thus the balance of occupations is de- 
 stroyed. ' Five competitors at least,' says M. 
 Moraitinis, 'dispute each public office.' He antici- 
 pates an objection. ' This invasion from without 
 this plethora of applicants, so troublesome in its 
 effects could not free Greece stop it 1 ' ' No,' he 
 answers, ' the evil is unavoidable. Greece has the 
 duty of receiving all her children who come to her 
 from without. To repel them would be a treason 
 against kinship; it would be to deny the past and 
 to blight the future : it would be, also, to forego 
 the precious aid of devoted patriotism and of valu- 
 able ability.' 
 
 Mr. "Watson, in the Report already noticed, points
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 131 
 
 out, indeed, that the plethora of academically-trained 
 men is not an unmixed evil. 'Undoubtedly,' ne o e c ^? of 
 says, ' it confers considerable advantages on the 
 Levant in general. . . . Many provinces of the 
 Ottoman Empire are indebted to the seats of learn- 
 ing in Athens for a supply of intelligent doctors, 
 divines, lawyers, chemists, clerks.' ' The rdle of 
 Greece in the contemporary East,' M. Lenormant 
 writes, ' closely resembles its rdle in antiquity. . . 
 The Hellenic race represents the motive power in 
 the Ottoman Empire, as, twenty-two centuries ago, 
 it represented it in Persian Asia.' It may be fairly 
 urged, as Mr. Sergeant well urges, that the very 
 existence of this so-called ' over-education ' is a proof 
 of the fitness of Greece to pei-form the part of a 
 civilizing power in the East. 
 
 It may also be said that the general influence of Spirit of 
 
 order in 
 
 high education widely diffused has done much to Greece - 
 leaven Greek life with the spirit of order, industry, 
 and sustained effort. Mr. Sergeant's remarks on this 
 ]K)int are illustrated by the testimony of foreign 
 observers to the decorous behaviour of the Athenian 
 population on occasions which in most other capitals 
 would scarcely fail to evoke some popular turbulence, 
 or even to let loose the passions of a mob. In
 
 132 PEOGEESS OF GEEECE. 
 
 1843. the crisis of the revolution under the former reign, 
 
 which resulted in King Otho signing the consti- 
 tutional decree, the whole population of Athens was 
 in the streets. 'For an entire day the open space 
 in front of the palace was filled with an excited 
 and determined people and a revolted soldiery. All 
 police surveillance was suspended ; men of the lowest 
 class paraded the streets with loaded arms, and the 
 largest opportunity for license and lawlessness was 
 afforded : yet not a gun was fired, nor a stone raised, 
 nor was even a flower plucked from the public- 
 gardens.' The Greek capital, in this instance, only 
 reflected the normal character of the Greek people : 
 there is plenty of popular enthusiasm ; but there 
 is no rowdyism. 
 
 Probably the large development of manufacturing 
 industry and commerce in Greece during the last 
 few years will tend gradually to diminish the pressure 
 of candidates for the learned or literary callings, 
 by showing men where they may find a sphere of 
 honourable exertion without permanently leaving the 
 Growth of country. In fact the intelligent enterprise and power 
 
 commercial 
 
 enterprise. o f combination which have lately been exhibited in 
 this field go far to prove that it has already become 
 attractive to men of education. Thus new banks
 
 PROGBESS OF GREECE. 133 
 
 have been established ; a new steam navigation com- 
 pany for the Mediterranean and the Black Sea has 
 been formed, under the Greek flag, by Greek capital- 
 ists; and the rights of the Franco-Italian company, 
 which since 1865 had woi-ked the mines of Laurium, 
 have been purchased by a new company composed 
 chiefly of Greeks. Projects have been entertained 
 for lines of railway from Athens to Patras, and from 
 Patros to Pyrgos on the north-west coast of the 
 Morea. A correspondent quoted by Mr. Tuckerman 
 confirms the view indicated above. 'These private 
 undertakings, ' he writes, ' including mining and 
 railway operations, having already begun to produce 
 most satisfactory results, not merely as regai-ds the 
 social, but also as regards the political condition of 
 the country. It is thus that we have lately witnessed its result 
 quite an unprecedented phenomenon. A large num- 
 ber of clerks and other employes of the Civil Service 
 are sending in their resignations, and are accepting 
 posts in these new establishments at rates of re- 
 muneration even lower than the Government salaries, 
 preferring the stability and hope of advancement 
 offered them by private enterprise to the torturing 
 and ruinous uncertainty with which they held offices 
 dependent on the arbitrary will of each successive
 
 134 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 minister. In this new movement I see the solution 
 of one of the great difficulties this country has been 
 labouring under the fight for public offices.' 
 The civil It is an opinion which is often heard in Greece, 
 
 Service and 
 
 from natives and from foreign residents, that 
 permanence in the Civil Service appointments would 
 do much to steady the politics of the country ; others, 
 again, say that this is made virtually impossible by 
 universal suffrage, since the majority will always 
 prefer the chances afforded by a frequent redistri- 
 bution of many small prizes. In England there are 
 about fifty-two electors to every thousand inhabitants ; 
 in France, with universal suffrage, there are 267 ; in 
 Greece no fewer than 311. It is noteworthy that 
 M. Moraitinis an xinquestionably intelligent friend 
 of progress in Greece appears to regard universal 
 suffrage as being, for Greece, an institution of doubt- 
 ful expediency, and even goes so far as to suggest 
 that the constitution ' might and should be modified ' 
 in the direction of withdrawing the suffrage from 
 those ' who having nothing to preserve, are ready 
 to sell their conscience' (p. 569). 
 Greek But we are concerned with Greece and its con- 
 
 political 
 
 stitution as they now are. On the main point there 
 is little difference of opinion. The great n'eed of
 
 PEOGRESS OF GREECE. 135 
 
 all for Greece, if Greece is to go on prospering, 
 is that politics should cease to be a game played 
 between the holders and seekers of office, and that 
 all local or personal interests whatsoever should be 
 uniformly and steadily subordinated to the public in- 
 terests of the country. Before this can be thoroughly 
 secured two things must come to pass. First, ade- 
 quate outlets must be found for the energies of the 
 educated class who have hitherto been driven into 
 making politics a livelihood: this, as we have seen, 
 has in a certain measure been accomplished already, 
 and there seems reason to hope that the growing 
 material prosperity of Greece will by degrees provide 
 u complete solution. Secondly, the Greek people 
 must bring a sound and vigorous public opinion to 
 bear on public affairs not by fits and starts, but 
 steadily. It has been said, with too much truth, 
 that Greece has been a nation of opinions without 
 a public opinion. The free growth and effective 
 expression of public opinion has been checked by 
 too much centralization, by the tendency of many 
 administrations to regard a close bureaucracy as the 
 only shelter for authority. There can be no vitality 
 of public opinion without diffusion of power; but 
 for a long time the average Greek voter in the pro-.
 
 136 PEOGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 vinces was controlled by no real sense of personal 
 responsibility to the country. Public meetings for 
 the discussion of proposed measures have been rare 
 out of Athens. Along with excessive centralization 
 another cause has been at work the tendency of 
 the Greek character to set the interests of a district 
 or a town above the general interests of the nation. 
 This 'particularism' scarcely less marked to-day 
 than in the Greek commonwealths of old may be 
 traced, now as formerly, in some measure to the 
 physical configuration of the country, and to the 
 want, still seriously felt, of easy communication. 
 The old Greeks had common national characteristics, 
 but never formed a nation ; the Greeks of to-day 
 are a nation, with a strong national sentiment, but 
 sometimes with too little unity of national purpose. 
 Nothing but such unity of purpose can enforce 
 those reforms which the country most needs 
 reforms of principle, not of detail, the choice of 
 public men on the public grounds of character and 
 fitness, the management of the finances with un- 
 deviating regard to the thorough re-establishment of 
 the national credit. There have, indeed, been critical 
 moments when the public opinion of Greece has 
 asserted itself in such questions with decisive result.
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 137 
 
 The successful protest of 1875 against ministerial 
 infringement of the constitution has been the most 
 recent example; and M. Moraitinis may justly argue 
 that a maturity of political education is proved by 
 the disciplined loyalty with which, at that crisis, 
 all classes united to uphold the constitution by con- 
 stitutional means. The same general characteristic 
 appeared also in the crisis of 1843 and 1862; and 
 it was better marked in 1862 than in 1843, and 
 in 1875 than in 1862. But then, as M. Moraitinis 
 adds, when the danger is past public opinion goes 
 to sleep again, ' and individual interests resume their 
 ascendency.' What is wanted is that public opinion 
 should be always vigilant. 
 
 No impartial observer can refuse to admit that Difficulties 
 
 of Greece. 
 
 Greece has already done much, and is now in a fair 
 way to do more. Few, probably, would deny that from 
 the outset she has had to contend with grave diffi- 
 culties not of her own making. In the first place it 
 is only since the beginning of the present reign, that 
 is, since 1863, that Greece has been in the full prac- 
 tical enjoyment of constitutional liberty. Secondly, 
 Greece began life not only as a poor country, in which 
 the first elements of prosperity had to be created anew, 
 but as a country loaded with debt for loans of which
 
 138 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 only a fraction had ever been applied to her benefit. 
 Those who wish to read the whole story of the Greek- 
 loans in the light of contemporary documents may be 
 referred to a recent pamphlet on the subject, consisting 
 of extracts from the English newspapers and periodi- 
 cals of the day, put together without comment. 1 
 Among other facts which deserve to be more generally 
 known, it will be found that of the second loan of 
 jl, 200,000, all that ever reached Greece was the 
 amount of 209,000. 
 The. Lastly, there has been that most serious and per- 
 
 frontier. 
 
 manent obstacle of all, the original defect of a bad 
 frontier. It has been already shown how this has 
 affected the balance of social and political life in Greece. 
 The dilemma raised by that ill-judged limitation of 
 the new kingdom could not be expressed more clearly 
 or- concisely than in the words of the late Edgar 
 Quinet. 2 'I am afraid,' he wrote in 1857, ' that the 
 artificial boundaries of the new State, and the con- 
 ditions imposed upon it, may have the effect of 
 hindering its development. Hence, a false position 
 
 1 The Greek Loans of 1824 and 1825. London : H. S. 
 King. 1878. 
 
 2 Preface to La Grece, moderne et ses rapports avec FAnti- 
 quite.
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 13!) 
 
 for the Greeks, and a perpetual temptation to get out 
 of it. If they stretch out their hands to their brethren 
 who are still under the yoke, they rouse the anger 
 of their protectors; if they resign themselves to 
 remaining where they are, they are reduced to a hope- 
 less plight, with no outlets, no commerce, no 
 relations ; and their brethren accuse them of be- 
 trayal.' 
 
 An interesting document in illustration of this letter from 
 
 Leopold of 
 
 view has lately been given to the world. In February, '^^"ns'j 
 1830, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg accepted the 
 Crown of Greece, offered to him in a joint note from 
 Lord Aberdeen and the French and Russian Am- 
 bassadors in London ; but after some negotiations, 
 he finally declined it in May of the same year. 
 An Athenian newspaper 1 has printed the letter, 
 hitherto unpublished, which Leopold addressed to 
 Charles X. of France on May 23rd, 1830 two days 
 after his final decision. In this he states the reasons 
 for his resolve. Prominent among them is this con- 
 
 ir rhe"flpa of Dec. 22, 1878 ( = Jan. 3, 1879). This was 
 written in Jan., 1879. In the Spectator of March 27, 1880, 
 ' an Epirote ' has published an English version of the entire 
 letter, with some just comments.
 
 140 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 
 
 sideration that a new ruler of Greece would begin 
 his work at a hopeless disadvantage if he were re- 
 garded by the Greek nation as a party to the disastrous 
 truncation of the territory. By the Treaty of 
 Adrianople (September, 1829), the boundary line of 
 Greece had been drawn from near the entrance of the 
 Gulf of Yolo on the east to the Gulf of Arta on the 
 west. But by a new decision of the Powers (February 
 3rd, 1830) a large slice was cut off. Leopold does 
 justice to the natural feeling which would make it 
 a bitter sacrifice for the Greeks to leave their brethren 
 in Continental Hellas as well as in Crete, Samos, and 
 elsewhere under that yoke which all alike had 
 striven to shake off ; and he hopes that Charles, 
 ' with the magnanimity which distinguishes him, r 
 will appreciate this. He held that in the narrow 
 limits now imposed on the country the territory 
 adjacent to the Gulfs of Volo and Arta being cut off 
 it could not be thoroughly prosperous. The truth 
 of Leopold's forecast was recognised at the Berlin 
 Congress last year by M. "Waddington. 
 
 The people of Greece are industrious, singularly 
 temperate, with a strong regard for the ties of the 
 family, and with the virtues which that implies ; they
 
 PROGRESS OF GREECE. 141 
 
 have proved at more than one trying conjuncture that 
 they have learned the lessons of constitutional free- 
 dom ; and they possess a versatile intelligence which 
 justly entitles them to be regarded as the gifted race of 
 South-Eastern Europe. Men of all parties and 
 opinions are interested in forming a true judgment 
 of what the Greeks can or cannot achieve. So long as 
 their character and capacity are imperfectly or incor- 
 rectly estimated in this country, a necessary element 
 of every ' Eastern Question ' will be taken at an 
 erroneous value, and the margin of possible miscal- 
 culation will be so far increased. The commercial 
 importance of Greece is already considerable. Its 
 political antecedents and prospects must not be too 
 hastily judged. Narrow prejudices must be laid 
 aside. We must recognize fully and fairly how 
 much the Greeks have done and are still doina 
 how much they have had to suffer, what difficul- 
 ties they have overcome, with what disadvantages 
 they are still contending : we must distinguish be- 
 tween ambitions which deserve to be reproved and 
 those aspirations for a free development of national 
 life which no people can renounce without losing 
 national self-respect. The Hellenic influence is still
 
 142 PROGEESS OF GREECE. 
 
 the best hope of a higher civilization for those lands 
 with which it is historically associated. It is the 
 interest of Europe and certainly not least of Eng- 
 land that this influence should have, at least, a fair 
 chance of showing what it can do.
 
 BYKON IN GKEECE. 
 
 THE name of Lord Byron is inseparably associated 
 with the Greek War of Independence. But the part 
 which he performed is commonly regarded as the 
 romantic adventure of a poet, not as the serious 
 enterprise of one who brought practical ability and 
 sober judgment to a cause which he viewed without 
 illusions. More than this there have lately been 
 symptoms of a tendency to treat Byron's philhellenism 
 as a sham. Nothing in the last episode of his life 
 so we have been given to understand was genuine 
 or sincere, except the aversion which he entertained 
 for the Greeks. 
 
 If Byron's mind can in auy degree be judged from 
 his recorded words and deeds, there is no imputation 
 which he would more decisively have repelled, 
 no reproach from which he would have been more 
 earnestly anxious that his memory should be vindi-
 
 144 BYEON IN GREECE. 
 
 cated. At a time like the present, when it is 
 contemplated to raise a national monument to Byron, 
 and when the philhellenic sympathies of England 
 have been rekindled by a crisis in the destinies of 
 Greece, it appears not inopportune to attempt such 
 a vindication in the only manner which is relevant 
 that is, by a connected statement of the facts from 
 which the reader must draw his own conclusions. 
 
 There are two essential conditions for a just 
 estimate of Byron's undertaking : (1) his journey 
 to Greece in 1823 must be viewed in the light of 
 the impressions which he had derived from his earlier 
 journey in 1809 : (2) his part in the affairs of 1823-4 
 must be considered in relation to the general history 
 of the Greek War. I am not acquainted with any 
 narrative which meets these two conditions : the 
 brief sketch which follows is offered as an imperfect 
 attempt to fulfil them. 
 
 Byron sailed from Falrnouth with his friend 
 
 Io09. 
 
 Hobhouse on June 26, 1809. He was then twenty- 
 one; and, though not yet known to fame, had just 
 had his first piece of literary success. He had published 
 the 'Hours of Idleness' in the spring of 1807, while 
 he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and the 
 critique in the Edinburgh Review had come a year later,
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 145 
 
 in the spring of 1808. Byron's 'English Bards and 
 Scotch Reviewers ' had appeared just before he set 
 out on his travels, and had been well received. But 
 he stai'ted on his wanderings in a sad and even 
 bitter mood ; all the world was out of joint. He and 
 his friend went through Portugal and Spain, and, after 
 some stay at Malta, reached the shores of Western 
 Greece about the end of September. The English 
 brig of war which brought them remained at anchor 
 for a few days off Patras; thence they sailed along 
 the Acarnanian coast past Ithaca and Leucadia 
 
 The barren spot 
 
 Where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave, 
 And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot, 
 The lover's refuge and the Lesbian's grave. 
 
 On September 26th they landed on the Albanian 
 coast at Prevesa. From Prevesa a journey of three 
 days took them to Janina in Epirus, a place which Janina. 
 at this time was the true centre of Greek life in 
 Europe, being greatly superior to Athens, as Byron 
 himself notes, ' in the wealth, refinement, learning, 
 and dialect of its inhabitants.' Janina was the capital 
 of one of the six Turkish pashaliks into which European 
 Greece was divided, and its pasha at this time was 
 the celebrated Mohammed Ali. This remarkable inan > 
 
 K
 
 146 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 though he sometimes called himself a Turk, really 
 sprang from an Albanian family who had embraced 
 the Moslem faith, and his ambition, which he after- 
 wards reached for a while, was to make himself 
 independent of the Sultan with the aid of the military 
 Albanian race. At that time, however, he was helping 
 the new Sultan, Mahmud II., to carry out a system 
 of centralized despotism in the provinces, and just 
 then was besieging a refractoiy pasha at Berat in 
 Northern Albania, not far from his own country 
 Tei>cieii. palace at Tepelen. He invited Byron to visit him 
 at Tepelen, and the friends reached that place from 
 Janina after a ride of nine days through a magnificent 
 hill country. Byron has described the gorgeous 
 scene at Ali's court : 
 
 Amid no common pomp the despot sate, 
 AVhile busy preparation shook the court ; 
 Slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests, and santons wait ; 
 Within, a palace, and without, a fort ; 
 Here men of every clime appear to make resort. 
 
 The wild Albanian, kirtled to his knee, 
 With shawl-girt head and ornamented gun, 
 And gold-embroidered garments, fair to see ; 
 And crimson-scarfed men of Macedon ; 
 The Delhi, with his cap of terror on, 1 
 
 1 Compare Byron's letter to his mother (Nov. 12, 1809)
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 147 
 
 And crooked glaive ; the lively supple Greek ; 
 And swarthy Nubia's mutilated son ; 
 The bearded Turk that rarely deigns to speak, 
 Master of all around too potent to be meek. 
 
 AH received Byron with distinction. There is a 
 curious touch in one of Byron's Eastern tales which 
 shows that afterwards, if not then, he had learned 
 the real character of this man. Giaffir, in the Bride 
 of Abydos, poisons his brother Abclallah with a cup 
 of coffee at the bath : 
 
 ' He drank one draught nor needed more ! ' 
 
 Ali of Janina had actually poisoned another pasha in 
 this way, and married the murdered man's daughter, 
 while Byron was in Greece. 
 
 From Tepelen Byron and Hobhouse returned to 
 Prevesa. Thence they intended to go by sea to 
 Patras. They were nearly lost, however, in a Turkish 
 vessel, which was driven on the coast of Suli, and the 
 kind offices of the Suliots at this pinch laid the foun- 
 dation of the interest which Byron felt in them when 
 he came back to Greece fourteen years later. The 
 
 describing this visit : ' The Albanians, in their dresses (the 
 most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, 
 gold-worked cloak, crimson velvet gold-laced jacket and waist- 
 coat, silver-mounted pistols and daggers), the Tartars with their 
 high caps,' &c.
 
 148 BYEON IN GEEECE. 
 
 friends now went over land to MesoloWghi, with a 
 A bivouac, guard of Albanians. Byron has described the night 
 scene at their bivouac on the Gulf of Arta, as they 
 were beginning this journey : 
 
 Where lone Utraikey 1 forms its winding cove, 
 And weary waves retire to gleam at rest, 
 How brown the foliage of the green hill's grove, 
 Nodding at midnight o'er the calm bay's breast : 
 
 On the smooth shore the night-fires brightly blazed, 
 The feast was done, the red wine circling fast, 
 And he that unawares had there ygazed 
 With gaping wonderment had stared aghast, 
 For ere night's midmost, stillest hour was past, 
 The native revels of the troop began ; 
 Each Palikar his sabre from him cast, 
 And bounding hand in hand, man linked to man, 
 Yelling their uncouth dirge, long danced the kirtled clan. 
 
 At Mesolonghi they dismissed the Albanian guards, 
 Byron keeping with him two Albanian servants, who 
 proved useful and faithful. They then crossed over 
 the narrow strait to Patras, spent a fortnight there, 
 and moved on to Vostizza, where they had their first 
 glimpse of Parnassus. Crossing the Gulf of Corinth 
 to Delphi, they rode through the Parnassus and 
 Helicon country to Thebes, and then crossed Cithaeron 
 into Attica. 
 
 They came in sight of Phyle on the evening of 
 
 1 Lutraki.
 
 BYKON IN GREECE. 149 
 
 Christmas Day, 1809. The view of the Athenian Attica, mo. 
 plain impressed Byron strongly; he ended by pre- 
 ferring it even to what he had hitherto thought 
 unapproachable Cintra: and, though Constantinople 
 shook his allegiance when he was on the spot, he 
 came back to that preference. Byron did not care 
 for classical topography; yet the charm of Attica 
 detained him for two months. The friends had lodgings 
 in the house of a Greek lady, the widow of the English 
 Vice-Consul ; and the eldest of her three daughters, 
 Theresa Macri, then no more than fifteen, was the 
 ' Maid of Athens ' to whom Byron addressed the lines 
 of farewell. When the 5th of March came, and Byron 
 and Hobhouse were to sail for Smyrna, they galloped 
 down to the Peirseus, and tore themselves away in the 
 haste of desperation. 
 
 At Smyrna, on March 28, 1810, Byron finished the Asia Minor, 
 second canto of Childe Harold, which he had begun at 
 Janina on October 31, 1809. From Smyrna they 
 made an excursion of a few days to the ruins of 
 Ephesus. The lines in the Siege of Corinth 
 
 The jackals' troop, in gather'd cry, 
 Bay'd from afar complainingly 
 
 were suggested by a reminiscence of this visit. 
 The travellers left Smyrna in the frigate Salsette
 
 150 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 on April 11, and spent a fortnight at anchor oft" 
 the Troad, which Byron concisely describes as a 
 good field for conjecture and snipe-shooting. Then 
 they were kept some time waiting for a fair wind 
 in the Dardanelles, and here on May 3, 1810, 
 Byron swam from Sestos to Abydos only about 
 a mile, with a dangei-ous current, however. This 
 is a feat of which he was exceedingly proud ; it 
 is repeatedly mentioned in his letters ; and in a note 
 on the passage in the Bride of Abydos 'The winds 
 are high on Helle's wave' he brings it in, when al- 
 luding to the controversy as to the meaning of the 
 ' boundless Hellespont.' ' Not foreseeing a speedy 
 conclusion, I amused myself with swimming across 
 it in the meantime.' 
 
 Constants- On May 14th they reached Constantinople. There 
 is an interesting notice of his appearance there by 
 a traveller who chanced to meet him. 'We were 
 interrupted in our debate by the entrance of a stranger, 
 whom, on the first glance, I guessed to be an English- 
 man, but lately arrived at Constantinople. He wore 
 a scarlet coat, richly embroidered with gold, in the 
 style of an English aide-de-camp's dress uniform, 1 
 
 1 It does not appear what this uniform of Byron's was : it may 
 have been a mere caprice.
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 151 
 
 with two heavy epaulets. His countenance announced 
 him to be about the age of two and twenty. His 
 features were remarkably delicate, and would have 
 given him a feminine appearance, but for the manly 
 expression of his fine blue eyes. On entering the 
 inner shop he took off his feathered cocked-hat, and 
 showed a head of curly aubum hair, which improved 
 in no small degree the uncommon beauty of his face.' 
 Much as Byron was delighted with the view of the 
 Golden Horn preferring it at the time to anything 
 he had seen it is curious that the two special 
 recollections of Constantinople which appear in his 
 Eastern tales are both ghastly. In a note to the 
 Giaour he mentions the heads of pashas which he 
 had seen exhibited in the niche of the Seraglio 
 gate : and the detail in the Siege of Corinth 
 
 The lean dogs beneath the wall 
 Hold o'er the dead their carnival 
 
 is taken from what Byron and Hobhouse actually 
 saw at Constantinople under the wall of the Seraglio, 
 in the cavities worn by the waters of the Bosporus. 
 
 Mr. Adair, the English ambassador, was just leaving 
 Constantinople for England, and, by a firman which 
 was granted to him as a parting favour, Byron had 
 the rare privilege of seeing the mosques. He also
 
 152 BYEON IN GREECE. 
 
 accompanied Mr. Adair to his farewell audience of the 
 Sultan, and showed a degree of touchiness about his 
 precedence on that occasion which was odd even in so 
 young a man ; it required the assurances of a veteran 
 diplomatist, the Austrian internuncio, to restore his 
 equanimity on the subject. On July 14, 1810, 
 Adair, Byron, and Hobhouse left Constantinople on 
 board the Salsette. Byron parted from his two 
 friends, who were bound for England, at Zea (Ceos), 
 a small island near the Attic coast. Here he was 
 landed with his two Albanians, a Tartar, and his 
 English servant Fletcher (the same who, fourteen 
 years later, stood by his death-bed in Greece), and 
 went on by boat to Athens. 
 
 TheMorea. From Athens he presently went to Patras, and 
 thence he writes, on July 30, that he is in good 
 health, though much bronzed. His next move was 
 to Tripolitza, to visit the Turkish governor of 
 the Morea, Yeli, a son of his old friend AH 
 of Janina. He then made a tour in the Moi-ea, 
 and in October was back again at Patras, where 
 we find him just 1'ecovering from a fever. As soon 
 as he was well, he returned to Athens, and took 
 lodgings in the Franciscan Convent there. His illness 
 at Patras had emaciated him, and, being convinced
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 153 
 
 that this was becoming, he observed a strict regimen 
 for keeping himself thin hot baths, with a diet of rice 
 and vinegar and water. The winter was enlivened by 
 a visit of that eccentric personage of whom there is 
 so good a portrait in JEothen Lady Hester Stanhope. 
 She took Byron to task for depreciating the intellect 
 of woman, and Byron appears to have pleased by 
 the somewhat equivocal compliment of deference. 
 At the same time he was preparing his notes 
 for the Second Canto of Childe Harold, and writ- 
 ing his ' Hints from Horace,' which are dated 
 from the Convent at Athens. He also worked at 
 modern Greek, and no doubt acquired much colloquial 
 facility, though it may be doubted whether he knew 
 that language very thoroughly. On June 3, 1811, 
 he finally left Athens for Malta, on his way home. 
 The prosaic fact seems to be that he was in need of 
 remittances, but he was also beginning to be weary. 
 Towards the end of July, 1811, he arrived in England, isn. 
 bringing back two Greek servants, four Athenian 
 skulls which he afterwards gave, in a silver urn, to 
 Sir Walter Scott and a phial of hemlock, which he 
 presented to his publisher. 
 
 Let us now consider what the general impressions His feeling 
 
 for the lai.rt. 
 
 were which Byron seems to have brought home from
 
 154 BYEON IN GREECE. 
 
 Greece. He had felt that two-fold spell which 
 Greece makes one of the mountains and the sea ; 
 his feeling for the large historical memories of the 
 land was ardent and sincere ; but it rested on such 
 slender knowledge that the shapes in which it 
 clothed itself were necessarily vague, and might 
 easily seem conventional, though for him they were 
 not so : 
 
 Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground, 
 No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould, 
 But one vast realm of wonder spreads around, 
 And all the Muse's tales seem truly told, 
 Till the sense aches with gazing to behold 
 The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon : 
 Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold 
 Defies the power which crush'd thy temples gone : 
 Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon. 
 
 He cared nothing for the details of classical literature 
 and art. ' I am not a collector, nor an admirer of 
 collections ; ' there is some affectation in those words, 
 but they fairly express his tone. Even in Ithaca he 
 was much tried by a Greek host who was too familiar 
 with the Odyssey. The Hellenic past never really 
 lived before him. Given a Byron, the eloquent lines 
 on the battle of Marathon might have been written 
 with no more knowledge than that Marathon is on a
 
 BYEON IN GREECE. 155 
 
 bay and that the Persians had bows. But his broad 
 and brilliant strokes have their full effect when he 
 describes what he sees. Take, for instance, this scene 
 in Albania, north of Janina near the spot from 
 which the Berlin Treaty proposed to draw the 
 new boundary of Greece : 
 
 Dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight, 
 Nature's volcanic amphitheatre, 
 Chimsera's alps extend from left to right : 
 Beneath, a living valley seems to stir ; 
 Flocks play, trees wave, streams flow, the mountain-fir 
 Nodded above ; behold black Acheron ! 
 Once consecrated to the sepulchre. 
 Pluto ! if this be hell I look upon, 
 Close shamed Elysium's gates, my shade shall seek for none, 
 
 No city's towers pollute the lovely view ; 
 Unseen is Yanina, though not remote, 
 Veil'd by the screen of hills : here men are few, 
 Scanty the hamlet, rare the lonely cot : 
 But peering down each precipice, the goat 
 Browseth ; and, pensive o'er his scattered flock, 
 The little shepherd in his white capote 
 Doth lean his boyish form along the rock, 
 Or in his cave awaits the tempest's short-lived shock. 
 
 Yet can it be said that Childe Harold, with all its 
 splendour, helps us much towards feeling the more 
 subtle and peculiar characteristics of Greek scenery 1
 
 156 BYKON IN GREECE. 
 
 I scarcely think so, if we except the last two of these 
 lines 
 
 And yet how lovely in thine age of woe, 
 Land of lost gods, and godlike men, art thou ! 
 Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow, 
 Proclaim thee Nature's varied favourite now. . . . 
 
 There a distinctive trait is seized the range of 
 visible contrast in Greece, where so small a space 
 divides the climate of the beech and of the palm. But 
 the finer touches are to be found in the Eastern 
 tales written during the three or four years after 
 his return to England most of all, perhaps, in the 
 Corsair ; there, indeed, is heard the voice of one who 
 had been 'spell-bound within the clustering Cyclades.' 
 How well these lines describe the sudden fall of 
 evening after the short twilight of a summer day in 
 Attica : 
 
 But lo ! from high Hymettus to the plain 
 
 The queen of night asserts her silent reign. 
 
 No murky vaponr, herald of the storm, 
 
 Hides her fair face, nor girds her glowing form ; 
 
 With cornice glimmering as the moon-beams play, 
 
 There the white column greets her grateful ray, 
 
 And, bright around with quivering beams beset, 
 
 Her emblem sparkles o'er the minaret ; 
 
 The groves of olives, scattered dark and wide, 
 
 Where meek Cephisus pours his scanty tide,
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 157 
 
 The cypress saddening by the sacred mosque, 
 The gleaming turret of the gay Kiosk, 
 And dun and sombre 'mid the holy calm, 
 Near Theseus' fane yon solitary palm, 
 All tinged with varied hues arrest the eye 
 And dull were his that passed them heedless by, 
 Again the /Egean, heard no more afar, 
 Lulls his chafed breast from elemental war ; 
 Again his waves in milder tints unfold 
 Their long array of sapphire and of gold, 
 Mixt with the shades of many a distant isle, 
 That frown where gentler ocean seems to smile. 
 
 But how was Byron impressed by the character, by His estimate 
 the condition and the prospects of the Greek people 1 P e P Ie - 
 The impression was unfavourable, and the forecast 
 was altogether gloomy. He liked the Albanians on 
 the whole : 
 
 Fierce are Albania's children, yet they lack 
 Not virtues, were those virtues more mature. 
 Where is the foe that ever saw their back ? 
 Who can so well the toil of war endure ? 
 Their native fastnesses not more secure 
 Than they in doubtful time of troublous need : 
 Their wrath, how deadly ! but their friendship sure, 
 When Gratitude or Valour bids them bleed, 
 Uushaking, rushing on, where'er their chief may lead. 
 
 Praise quite deserved, perhaps, by some Albanians, 
 though too flattering if applied to all the tribes
 
 158 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 without distinction. Then, as to the Turks, he 
 <lecidedly liked the Tm-kish gentlemen whom he had 
 met. ' There does not exist a more honourable, 
 friendly, and high-spirited character than the true 
 Turkish provincial Aga, or Moslem country gentle- 
 man.' It is to them that he pays a compliment. 
 A propos of Kara Osman Oglou, in the Bride of 
 A bydos : 
 
 The line of Carasman 
 Unchanged, unchangeable hath stood, 
 First of the bold timariot 1 bands 
 That won, and well can keep, their lands. 
 
 The Turks, Byron says, are not treacherous, not 
 cowardly, they do not burn heretics. He denies 
 that they are exceptionally ignorant. ' Is a Turk 
 worse clothed, or lodged, or fed, and taught, than 
 a Spaniard 1 Are their Pashas worse educated than 
 a grandee? or an Eifendi than a Knight of St. 
 Jago 1 I think not.' As to the Greeks, his opinion 
 at this time is fairly summed up in the well-known 
 lines of Childe Harold : 
 
 Hereditary bondsmen ! know ye not 
 
 Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow ? 
 
 1 The ' timariots ' were the holders of the timars, or fiefs, bestowed 
 by the Sultan as rewards for military service.
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 159 
 
 By their right arms the conquest must be wrought ? 
 Will Gaul or Muscovite redress you ? No ! 
 True, they may lay your proud despoilers low, 
 But not for you will Freedom's altars flame. . . . 
 
 The Turks may be turned out, he adds, by the 
 unbelievers, or by those Moslem fanatics in Arabia 
 who then had just seized Mecca and Medina, 
 
 But ne'er will freedom seek this fated soil, 
 
 But slave succeed to slave through years of endless toil. 
 
 That was Byron's view in 1810. He tones it down 
 :i little in the notes, which were written after he had 
 seen more of the country. Thus in January, 1811, 
 he wrote : ' To talk as the Greeks themselves do, 
 of their rising again to their pristine superiority, 
 is ridiculous ; . . . but there seems to be no very 
 great obstacle, except the apathy of the Franks \i.e. of 
 Europe] to their becoming a useful dependency, or 
 even a free state, with a proper guarantee, under 
 correction however, be it spoken, for many and well- 
 informed men doubt the practicability even of this.' 
 In the Giaour he calls the Athenians 
 
 ' Slaves nay the bondsmen of a slave,' 
 
 alluding to the fact that, under the Turks, Athens 
 belonged to the Kislar aga, or chief of the black
 
 160 BYEON IN GREECE. 
 
 slaves of the Seraglio, who appointed the fiscal 
 agent, a very good thing for Athens, by the way, 
 though Byron did not see it in this light, since 
 it screened Athens for centuries from the Pashas 
 of Eubrea, to whose government it belonged. In the 
 same poem he says of the Greek merchants, 
 
 Still to the neighbouring ports they waft 
 Proverbial wiles and ancient craft ; 
 In this the subtle Greek is found, 
 For this and this alone renown'd. 
 
 Again and again he says that the Greeks have no 
 chance of becoming free unless a foreign power steps 
 in to deliver them. He compares them to the Catholics 
 of Ireland, to the Jews throughout the world, (this 
 was in 1811, remember) and such other 'cudgelled 
 and heterodox people.' Note this prophecy, because 
 it was so completely falsified by the results, and 
 because the success of the Greeks without foreign 
 help was precisely what must have drawn Byron's 
 sympathy most strongly to them afterwards perhaps 
 with a twinge of compunction for the wrong he had 
 done them. In 1811, however, he had made up 
 his mind : the Turks, or the Spaniards he was not 
 sure which were the best people he had seen in his 
 travels ; the Portuguese were the least estimable ;
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 161 
 
 the Greeks came above these last, but not much. 
 
 It is interesting to observe Byron's unconsciousness, His uncon- 
 sciousness of 
 
 in 1811, that there was anything stirring below the chTngf 
 stagnant surface of Greek servitude. Selim, in the 
 Bride of Abydos, speaking of his band of miscel- 
 laneous desperadoes, says 
 
 The last of Lambro's patriots there 
 Anticipated freedom share, 
 
 alluding to Lambro Canzani, who formed a scheme for 
 freeing Greece in 1789, but was left in the lurch by 
 the Russians, and turned pirate. That was Byron's 
 notion of the last thing that had been attempted in 
 this way. But silent forces were even then preparing 
 the revolution which was to break out, and prevail, 
 ten years later. When he reviled the bondsmen who 
 could ' wield the sickle, not the sword,' he little 
 dreamed what a harvest was soon to be reaped in 
 those fields. There is nothing strange in this : the 
 wonder would have been rather if Byron had seen 
 deeper. The springs of the Greek movement were 
 not then in Greece unless we except Janina but 
 in Paris, in Russia, and in a few commercial cities 
 of other countries. Byron was a young man of 
 twenty-two, not particularly philhellenic, and with a 
 
 young man's conviction that he saw through every- 
 L
 
 162 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 thing. It is more strange that, in 1811, he should 
 have been unaware that the modern Greek language, 
 which he was studying, had then for some ten years 
 at least been going through a process of regeneration. 
 He devotes a note on Childe Harold to criticizing an 
 article in the Edinburgh Review, and there says (in 
 March, 1811) : ' The reviewer mentions a plan . 
 for the purification of the Romaic ; and I have en- 
 deavoured in vain to procure any tidings or traces of 
 its existence.' 
 
 Here, then, we are at the end of the first chapter in 
 Byron's relations with Greece. He was now twenty- 
 three. Twelve years pass. At the age of thirty-five 
 he returns to Greece, to uphold the Greek cause, and 
 to end his life on Greek soil. 
 
 Only a few words can be given here to his life 
 during that interval of twelve years. It was in 1812 
 that he awoke and found himself famous on the pub- 
 lication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold. 
 Between 1813 and 1816 he wrote the Giaour, the 
 Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, Lara, the Siege of 
 Corinth, and Parisina. His marriage to Miss Mil- 
 banke took place in January, 1815, and his separation 
 from her in February, 1816. In April, 1816, he left 
 England for ever. During the next seven years his
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 163 
 
 home was in Italy. He met the Countess Guiccioli 
 at Venice in April, 1819. From January, 1820, till 
 Byron left Italy for Greece, this lady and her father, 
 Count Gamba, lived under the same roof with Byron 
 at Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa. These three years, 
 1820-1822, were years of incessant literary work. 
 The twelfth and thirteenth cantos of Don Juan were 
 finished only two months before he left Genoa for 
 Gi-eece. In 1821 the year before Shelley's death 
 Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt had planned a 
 journal to be published in England, and to be called 
 the Liberal. In the summer of 1822, the first number 
 api>eared, containing Byron's Vision of Judgment. 
 But the Liberal was a dead failure ; only three more 
 numbers appeared. It was as a red rag flaunted in 
 the face of John Bull, and made Byron more un- 
 popxilar than ever. 
 
 Just then, however, in the spring of 1823, the gallant I8 ' 2i - 
 struggle of the Greeks was beginning to awaken some 
 genuine sympathy in England. Byron's old friend Hob- 
 house wrote to him that a Greek Committee was being 
 formed in London. There was not much chance then 
 of any European power interposing to help Greece. 
 The politicians of Europe were not thinking much of 
 (Jreece in 1823; their attention was fixed on Spain.
 
 164 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 That was another attraction for Byron ; a generous 
 cause was always the more fascinating to him if it 
 was unfriended. The failure of the Liberal, too, 
 seems to have made him fancy that his popularity 
 as a poet was waning, and to have stirred in him 
 a restless desire to show what he could do in other 
 fields. Once he went so far as to say that he did not 
 believe poetry to be his true vocation. At Genoa, 
 
 April 1823. in April, 1823, he finally made up his mind to assist 
 the Greek cause, in his own words, ' not only with his 
 means, but personally,' if the Greeks would accept his 
 services. 
 
 To understand what Byron did in the Greek Revo- 
 lution, we must glance at the general tenor of its 
 course. 
 
 Greek Revo- The Greek Revolution began in April, 1821. The 
 
 lution, 
 
 number of Greeks and of Turks in Europe was then 
 nearly equal each race numbered not much, more 
 than two millions. For the first two years the Greek 
 success was rapid. By June, 1821, that is in two 
 months, they were masters of all Greece, from the 
 Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Zeituni. On January 1, 
 (our January 13) 1822, a Greek National Assembly 
 at Epidaurus put forth a constitution ; there was to 
 be a legislative assembly of deputies elected by the
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 1G5 
 
 nation, and an executive body of five persons, with 
 Alexander Mavrocordatos as President. Mavrocor- Mavrooor- 
 
 datos. 
 
 datos was, on the whole, the best Greek statesman of 
 his time, and a thoroughly honest man, though not 
 remarkably able, nor sufficiently firm. The epigram 
 of Tacitus has been applied to him : ' while he was 
 only a private man, he seemed something more ; and 
 everyone would have given him credit for the ability 
 to govern, if only he had not governed.' At the end 
 of 1822, after many ups and downs, the net result 
 was this : Greece had established a position as 
 an independent state. People could not say any 
 longer that it was only a parcel of rayahs rebelling 
 against the Porte. It was now a war between the 
 military despotism of the Ottoman Pone and an 
 unaided but united Christian nation, firmly resolved 
 to win religious and political liberty for Greece, or to 
 perish in the attempt. 
 
 The years 1823-1824, in which Byron's part falls, 1823-24. 
 were just the years in which the tide of Greek success 
 turned and began to ebb. The causes of this relapse 
 were chiefly the want of a strong government and 
 the want of money. Greece was divided into factions, 
 springing from the conflict of private interests, and 
 Greek action was paralysed. The English loans were
 
 166 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 corruptly appropriated or vainly squandered, and only 
 
 ix-s. did harm. Then, in 1825, the Egyptian troops of the 
 
 Porte, \inder Ibrahim Pasha, ravaged the Morea. 
 
 1*27. By the middle of 1827 Greece was exhausted. Then 
 
 England, France, and Kussia united in endeavouring 
 to arrange a settlement between Greece and Turkey. 
 The allied fleet almost annihilated the Turkish fleet in 
 
 Navarino. October, 1827, at Navarino that 'untoward event' 
 as it was called soon afterwards by an English prime 
 minister. In 1828 the French cleared the Morea of 
 
 i3o. the Ottoman troops. In February, 1830, it was 
 
 finally arranged that Greece was to be an independent 
 state. The first king of restored Greece, Otho, second 
 son of the king of Bavaria, landed at Nauplia in 
 February, 1833. 
 
 The nadir Thus in the whole storv of the war there was 
 
 ( f the Greek 
 
 no moment which presented the character of the 
 Greek struggle in such unfavourable colours as the 
 moment at which Byron came to it. It was the 
 hour of discord, of intrigue, of rampant selfishness, of 
 fatal blindness or indifference to the urgent needs of 
 the common weal. The years 1821 and 1822 had the 
 lustre of success. The years from 1825 to 1827 had 
 the lustre of heroic constancy under terrible suffering. 
 But the space between, in which Byron's part was
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 167 
 
 played, had neither one nor the other. The events 
 which they comprise are the only blots on the 
 record of a glorious and ultimately triumphant 
 enterprise. 
 
 About the middle of July, 1823, Byron sailed from 1823, July. 
 
 Byron starts 
 
 Genoa in the brig Hercules. His party consisted of for Greec - 
 Count Gamba, Mr. Trelawney, an Italian doctor, a 
 Greek from Russia, and eight servants. They had 
 five horses on board, and two one-pounder guns. 
 Byron took with him 10,000 Spanish dollars in coin, 
 and bills for 40,000 more. ; also a large supply of medi- 
 cines. Early in August they anchored in Argostoli, 
 the port of Cephalonia. At Cephalonia Byron stayed 
 from the beginning of August to the end of December. 
 Nothing could have been more prudent. Greece was 
 divided by factions. Byron saw that, if he entered 
 Greece Proper, he would become a bone of contention 
 between them. He resolved to hold himself aloof for a 
 while sufficiently near to study the state of affairs, 
 without being seized upon and dragged into party 
 squabbles. His object was, as Count Gamba puts it, 
 to know and to become known. He had a great 
 horror of being taken for a hunter of adventures. 
 He was determined to show that he was a practical 
 man with a serious object. He was much annoyed
 
 168 BYEON IN GEEECE. 
 
 by a report, which reached England, that he was 
 living in a luxurious villa, and continuing Don Juan. 
 As a matter of fact, he was living on cheese, vege- 
 tables, and hopes of Greek regeneration, writing 
 nothing but letters, and sometimes a journal. 
 ' Poetry,' he said to Gamba, ' should only occupy 
 the idle.' He had made up his mind to go through 
 with his task to the end. ' If Greece should 
 fall,' he wrote, ' I will bury myself in the ruins. If 
 she establish her independence, I will take up my 
 residence in some part or other perhaps in Attica, 
 where I once passed seven months.' 
 Byron's Bvron had two leading ideas about Greece at this 
 
 views. 
 
 time. First, he saw the manifest truth that nothing 
 
 could be done till the Greeks were at one among them- 
 
 1823, NO- selves. In November he wrote from Cephalonia a 
 
 vember. 
 
 public letter to the Greek Government, in which he 
 said : ' Unless union and order are established, all 
 hopes of a loan will be vain. . . . The great powers 
 of Europe will be persuaded that the Greeks are unable 
 to govern themselves.' At the same time he wrote 
 a private letter to Mavrocordatos. According to 
 Gamba, Byron had at this time a high opinion of 
 Mavrocordatos as a sincere patriot and an able states- 
 man ; and, though there may have been occasional
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 169 
 
 jars afterwards at Mesolonghi, there are indications 
 that Byron retained that general opinion to the end. 
 This letter is excellent. Byron points out to Mavro- 
 cordatos that civil war must have one of two results 
 to make Greece a Turkish province again, or to 
 make it a dependency of Europe. 'If she is de- 
 sirous of the fate of Wallachia and the Crimea,' he 
 writes, ' she may obtain it to-morrow ; if of that of 
 Italy, the day after.' [Byron had sympathized with 
 the unsuccessful Carbonari just before he left Italy.] 
 ' But if she wishes to become truly Greece, free and 
 independent, she must resolve to-day, or she will never 
 again have the opportunity.' Byron's second leading 
 idea was that, order and union once obtained, the 
 next thing to aim at was a loan, which should 
 enable the country to develop its natural resources. 
 ' Every one says,' he writes, ' and I believe, that 
 a loan will be the salvation of Greece.' Accord- 
 ingly he advised the early departure of the Greek 
 deputies, who had already been commissioned to go to 
 London to negotiate the loan. Meanwhile he lent 
 4000 towards the cost of the Greek fleet. It was 
 no easy matter to realize that sum in the Ionian 
 islands; but at last the bills were discounted 
 on fair terms by an English house in Zante. At
 
 170 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 last the Greek deputies started for London in 
 November. 
 
 Now that we have come so near to the point at 
 
 which Byron removed from Cephalonia to Mesolonghi, 
 
 let us look a little more closely at the state of things 
 
 in Greece at this time in December, 1823. 
 
 tii"wlr f When that year 1823 opened, both the Turkish and 
 
 December the Greek resources were for the time exhausted. 
 
 1823. 
 
 But both sides were resolved to fight to the bitter 
 end. Sultan Mahmud was a man of strong will and 
 of great capacity. Everyone saw that this was a war 
 without truce, a duel between tyranny and freedom, 
 between force and law, between .Christianity and 
 Mohammedanism ; and it was this that began to 
 draw towards Greece the sympathy of Christian 
 Europe. 
 
 At the beginning of 1823 the Sultan suffered a 
 sudden blow : a great fire at Constantinople destroyed 
 an arsenal and cannon foundry, with a large quantity 
 of brass guns, ammunition, and military stores, which 
 had been prepared for the spring campaign. It had 
 been intended to crush the Greeks by an overwhelming 
 onslaught. That idea had now to be given up. The 
 Porte had no money, and the old resource was used 
 a new issue of base coin. But the Sultan was not a
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 171 
 
 man to be daunted. As he could not crush the Greeks 
 this year, he resolved to harass them. A Turkish 
 army was sent to establish its headquarters at Patras, 
 and to invade the Morea. The Pashas of Scodra 
 (Scutari) and Janina in Albania were ordered to march 
 Albanian troops through western Greece, and join 
 their forces at Lepanto or at Patras. A small 
 Turkish fleet was to meet the land-forces at Patras. 
 Another Turkish force was to move through Thessaly 
 in eastern Greece. At the end of 1823 the situation December, 
 
 1823. 
 
 was this : the Greeks held the whole of the Morea, 
 except Patras (the Turkish head-quarters), and 
 two castles on the Messenian coast. The Greeks 
 held also Boeotia, Attica, the Isthmus of Corinth, 
 and the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf, 
 except Lepanto and the two forts at the en- 
 trance. The Turks had been driven from the siege 
 of Anatolico, and the Greek fleet had come to protect 
 Mesolonghi. 
 
 Greece was therefore in a good military position ; Parties in 
 but it was penniless, and worse, it was torn by party- 
 strife. The Legislative Assembly best represented the 
 national party, those who were really devoted to the 
 common interests of the country. The small Executive 
 body was the focus of intrigue and faction. Broadly
 
 172 BYEON IN GEEECE. 
 
 speaking, there were three interests which were- 
 struggling for the management of affairs. First, there 
 were the Albanian ship-owners of Hydra and Spetzas 
 representing the naval interest. Secondly, there 
 were the leaders of the Armatoli in northern Greece 
 and Roumelia, representing the military interest. 
 Thirdly, there were the Greek primates or magistracy 
 of the Morea, whose real aim was to set up a 
 territorial aristocracy. The president, Mavrocordatos, 
 was an honest man, but he had made two grave 
 mistakes ; he had assumed command of an army, and 
 had incurred a bad defeat ; and he had kept the Greek 
 public far too much in the dark. As he was not 
 factioiis, the factions united against him ; he was 
 deposed from power in the middle of 1823, and 
 retired to Hydra. Thence, in December, he went 
 to Mesolonghi, having been authorized to organize 
 the government of western Greece. 
 Byron's first During the whole time that Byron was in Greece 
 
 aim. 
 
 the country had no strong or capable executive. 
 Byron's object was to strengthen, as far as he could,, 
 the national party that is, the patriotic majority in 
 the Legislative Assembly. That was the only way 
 to get an independent and able executive body. If 
 the first instalment of the loan had come while Byron
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 173 
 
 lived, he might possibly have succeeded. As it was, 
 he could do very little. He could only urge good 
 counsels. It was not till eight months after Byron's 
 death that something like a strong executive was 
 formed under George Conduriottes ; and that was 
 done only after the party of the Morea had been put 
 down by main force. This was the second case of 
 civil strife in the years 1823-4 ; the first was actually 
 going on while Byron was in the country from Nov., 
 1823, till after his death. A faction in the Morea, 
 under Kolokotrones, who was simply a brigand chief, 
 was openly opposing the centi-al government. 
 
 Byron's arrival at Mesolonghi was hailed with an January 
 
 1824, 
 
 outburst of enthusiasm. He sailed from Cephalonia 
 on December 28, 1823, and, after having been driven 
 out of his course by a Turkish cruiser, landed at 
 Mesolonghi on January 5, 1824. He was saluted 
 with salvos of artillery, firing of musketry, and wild 
 music. Crowds of citizens men, women, and children 
 gathered on the beach to welcome him. ' He came 
 ashore in a Spetziot boat,' Gamba says, ' dressed in 
 a red uniform. He was in excellent health, and 
 appeared moved by the scene. I met him as he 
 disembarked, and in a few minutes we entered the 
 house prepared for him the same in which Colonel
 
 174 BYEON IN GREECE. 
 
 Stanhope resided. The Colonel and Prince Mavrocor- 
 dato, with a long suite of European and Greek officers, 
 received him at the door.' 
 
 Colonel Leicester Stanhope, afterwards Lord Har- 
 rington, was acting as agent of the Greek Committee 
 in London. He and Byron were not congenial 
 spirits. The Colonel, as Byron said, was for writ- 
 ing the Turks down, while he, the literary man, 
 was for fighting them down. They had many dif- 
 ferences, but Byron did justice to his colleague's 
 good intentions and honourable character. During 
 the four months at Mesolonghi the last of his life 
 Byron and Stanhope lived in the same house. 
 Byron occupied two rooms above those of the 
 Colonel. One of these was his bed-room, in the 
 other he received visitors ; at night this second 
 room was turned into a bed-room for his companions. 
 He continued his ascetic regimen. Resolved to show 
 that he could be as frugal as any soldier, he arranged 
 the expenses of his table on such a scale that it should 
 cost rather less than sixpence a day. 1 
 
 1 This was the bill of fare, as given by Gamba : 
 
 A pound and a half of bread, - - 15 paras. 
 Wine, 7 ,, 
 
 Fish, 15 
 
 Olives, - - 3 ,, 
 
 40 paras.
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 175 
 
 Nothing was accomplished during his stay at 
 Mesolonghi. He had planned a military expedition 
 against Lepanto, but had to give it up, as a band of 
 Suliots whom he had taken into his pay, and who 
 gave him endless trouble, had finally to be cashiered, 
 after a serious affray in the town. These months, 
 from January till his death in April, were passed 
 in active preparation. The morning was passed in 
 business, or in drilling the military corps which they 
 were endeavouring to form a corps of motley nation- 
 ality English, Scottish, Irish, American, German, 
 Swiss, Belgian, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, 
 Italian. Byron and Gamba generally rode in the 
 afternoon. The streets of Mesolonghi were in such 
 ;i filthy state that to avoid them they usually went 
 about half a mile by sea in a canoe, and had their 
 horses to meet them outside the town gates. The 
 rheumatic fever of which Byron died was probably 
 due, at least in part, to his obstinacy in insisting 
 on coming back in the canoe, after a heating 
 gallop under heavy rain. After dinner Byron and 
 
 His breakfast was a cup of tea without milk or sugar. Such a 
 system, persevered in for months, must have helped to determine 
 the course of his illness ; he had no strength to throw off the 
 fever. Six weeks before his death he had complained of vertigo 
 and nervous derangement. Earlier still, in February, he had had 
 n convulsive fit.
 
 176 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 his friends usually amused themselves with single-stick 
 or sword exercise, or pistol-practice at a mark. He 
 retained a taste for mild practical jokes : thus he 
 frightened a visitor who was afraid of earthquakes by 
 rolling about some barrels of cannon-balls in the 
 room over-head. 
 
 In the state of Greece just then nothing could 
 be done till the loan came from England. Byron's 
 death took place on April 19, 1824 just before the 
 moment at which his influence might have been 
 of use in directing the application of the funds, 
 and seizing the opportunity to enforce counsels of 
 united action. 
 
 But these last days of his life at Mesolonghi have one 
 interest of which nothing can deprive them. There, 
 on the spot, among the Greeks, Byron was forming 
 a definite opinion as to the prospects of Greece. 
 This opinion is revealed in some vivid glimpses. 
 In January, about three weeks after his arrival at 
 His own Mesolonghi, he said to Gamba ' I am not come here 
 
 account of .... 
 
 his aims. in search of adventures, but to assist in the regenera- 
 tion of a nation whose very debasement makes it more 
 honourable to become their friend. . . Only let the 
 loan be raised, and in the meantime let us try to form 
 a strong national government, ready to apply the
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 177 
 
 pecuniary resources, when they arrive, to the best 
 objects to the organization of troops, the establish- 
 ment of internal civilization, and the preparations 
 for acting defensively now, and on the offensive next 
 winter.' Byron was anxious to keep the cause ofjj isviewor 
 
 the cause. 
 
 Greek liberty perfectly distinct from the cause of 
 republicanism in Europe. He regarded the Greek 
 war as ' a contest between barbarism and civilization, 
 between Christianity and Islamism a struggle in 
 behalf of the descendants of those to whom we are 
 indebted for the first principles of science and the 
 most perfect models of literature and of art.' For 
 such a cause he hoped ' that all political parties, in 
 every European state, would unite their efforts. ' 
 
 There are some words which he spoke to tion (March. 
 Gamba in March, 1824, which come to us now, over 
 these six-and-fifty years, with a strange suggestion 
 of that prescient power which has been said to 
 touch the lips of dying men; they well deserve to 
 be remembered as Byron's prophecy for Greece. The 
 friends had been taking a long ride, and talking over 
 a motto for their Greek newspaper ; they chose a 
 good one at last, the verses of the Odyssey, 'Zeus 
 of the far-borne voice robs man of half his worth, 
 when the day of slavery comes on him.' 
 
 M
 
 178 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 Then Byron said : ' I hope the moment for 
 uniting the Greeks is arrived. The chance of 
 succour and the approach of danger are both in its 
 favour. ... I cannot calculate/ he went on, 
 'to what a height Greece may rise. Hitherto it 
 has been a subject for the hymns and elegies of 
 fanatics and enthusiasts; but now it will draw the 
 attention of the politician. 
 
 ' The different views and jealousies of the European 
 powers ai-e well calculated to favour the efforts of the 
 Greeks, for they apparently will secure their neu- 
 trality. This campaign, it seems, will lay the founda- 
 tions of Greek independence, and then a glorious field 
 for improvement will naturally be opened before us. 
 At present there is but little difference in many 
 respects between Greeks and Turks ; nor could there 
 be ; but the latter must, in the common course of 
 events, decline in power ; and the former must as 
 inevitably become better in every sense of the word. 
 The soil is excellent ; with skilful tillage and good 
 seeds, we should soon see how rapidly, and in what 
 perfection, the fruits of civilization would rise around 
 us. In the present state of European politics, there 
 seems to be in the East a soi-t of vacuum, which it is 
 .advisable to supply, in order tq counterbalance the
 
 BYKON IN GEEECE. 17!> 
 
 preponderance of the North. The English Govern- 
 ment deceived itself at first in thinking it possible to 
 maintain the Turkish Empire in its integrity, but it 
 cannot be done ; that unwieldy mass is already putre- 
 fied, and must dissolve. If anything like an equi- 
 librium is to be upheld, Greece must be supported. 
 -Mr. Canning, I think, understands this, and intends, 
 to behave towards Greece as he does with respect 
 to the South American colonies. This is all that 
 is wanted, for in that case Greece may look towards 
 England with the confidence of friendship, especially 
 as she now appears to be no longer infected with 
 the mania of adding to her colonies, and sees that her 
 true interests are inseparably connected with the 
 independence of those nations who have shown them- 
 selves worthy of emancipation, and such is the case 
 with Greece.' 
 
 Such was the substance of Byron's view a few weeks 
 l>efore his death. He ought to be judged as more 
 than once during his stay in Greece he begged that 
 he might be judged by his deeds. His motives for 
 joining the Greek cause were of course mixed. He was 
 conscious of practical ability, and had become seriously 
 ambitious of proving it in the face of the world. His 
 voluntary exile had cut him off from that contact with
 
 180 BYRON IN GREECE. 
 
 public affairs which would have been afforded by his 
 position in England ; and the official status which 
 the Greek Government offered him was thus a definite 
 inducement for one whose hopes of a political career 
 now depended on some such recognition by foreigners. 
 Then his interest in the Greek struggle was real 
 and strong. Here, he felt, was an arena in which 
 the cause of liberty was detached from the coil of 
 western politics and the cant of western doctrin- 
 aires. Greece drew him by the spell of memories 
 which had become part of himself. The unassisted 
 heroism of the Greeks appealed to his generous 
 instincts all the more powerfully because his expecta- 
 tions had been brilliantly disappointed. With all 
 this there was mixed up, at first, a good deal of 
 mere vanity ; but when he had once fairly engaged 
 in the work there was no more nonsense. He threw 
 himself into it with his whole heart and soul. He 
 now exhibited those qualities through which the 
 English character has usually obtained administra- 
 tive and political success in dealing with races of a 
 weaker moral fibre, though perhaps of a more subtle 
 intelligence. No people can pass through centuries 
 of severe oppression without having its moral stamina 
 weakened not necessarily as a permanent result,
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 181 
 
 but at least for a time. The typical English qualities 
 were just those which were most urgently needed 
 in Greece when Byron came to it. No sympathy 
 could have been more genuine, more resolute, or 
 more practical, than that which Byron finally con- 
 secrated to the deliverance of Greece. Few of the 
 foreigners who espoused that cause were successful ; 
 even among Englishmen, General Gordon and Captain 
 Hastings are exceptions, helping to balance the ill- 
 success due to very different causes in each case 
 of Lord Cochrane with the Greek fleet and Sir 
 Richard Church with the Greek army. Byron did 
 direct good by the prudent and able exercise of his 
 influence. Over and above these direct results, how- 
 ever, he rendered to Greece a service greater than 
 could have been performed by a brilliant soldier or 
 statesman. He brought to Greece the most beneficial 
 of allies in the enthusiasm kindled by his own 
 presence. As has been said by a writer whose 
 words rarely glow, ' wherever the English language 
 was known, an electric shock was felt, when it was 
 heard that 
 
 The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame 
 
 Over his living head, like heaven, was bent, 
 
 An early but enduring monument,
 
 182 BYRON IN GEEECE. 
 
 had died ' where his young mind first caught ethereal 
 fire.' ' 
 
 Byron came to the Greek War at the darkest 
 and most discouraging hour of its course; he saw 
 the Greek character in its least attractive phase ; 
 the thick cloud of trouble and discord was hardly 
 beginning to lift when he passed away. These pages 
 have shown without reserve the worst that Byron 
 had seen and thought of the Greeks, the best that 
 he had seen and thought of their adversaries in the 
 war. Yet, at the end, when he had now been for 
 months in close communication with the Greeks, 
 seeing them under circumstances the most unfavour- 
 able that could have been devised, he pronounces 
 as we have heard. He expresses a sober confidence 
 in the future of the country. He records a deliberate 
 opinion that the Greek nation is fitted to supply in 
 the Levant that counterpoise to other influences which 
 is desirable for the security of European peace as well 
 as in the particular interests of the British Empire. 
 The estimate formed by Byron is the same which 
 actuated on this question the foreign policy of 
 Canning. Two men, who in their different ways 
 were pre-eminently the two Englishmen of genius 
 contemporary with the crisis of the Greek struggle
 
 BYRON IN GREECE. 183 
 
 agreed in giving a well-considered support to the 
 cause of Greek independence. Both had formed the 
 judgment, based on practical knowledge, that this 
 country and others would consult the general good 
 by upholding the Greek nation; a nation then only 
 just emerging from the shadow of a despotism under 
 which, for three centuries, all the higher energies of 
 national life had been dormant, and yet evincing, 
 almost before the day of freedom was fully risen, 
 the unmistakable promise of fitness to share and 
 capacity to strengthen the liberties of Europe. 
 Byron's name is still cherished by the Greeks. The 
 work which he did for them will be variously 
 appreciated. But we shall render no more than 
 justice to his memory, and to the cause which 
 evoked the last efforts of his life, if we recognize 
 that he was thoroughly in earnest. The epitaph in 
 the church near Newstead bears the simple fact : 
 when Byron died in Greece, he was indeed ' engaged 
 in the glorious attempt to restore that country to 
 her ancient freedom and renown.' 
 
 ROBERT MACLEHOSE, PRINTER, GLASGOW.
 
 University of California 
 
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