In Byron's Shadow

InByronsShadow:
ModernGreeceinthe
English&American
Imagination
David Roessel
OXFORDUNIVERSITYPRESS
In Byrons Shadow
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In Byrons
Shadow
onra oarrcr r +nr
rorr s n s +rar c+
r +or ++r o
David Roessel
1
:oo:
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roessel, David E. (David Ernest), +j
In Byrons shadow : modern Greece in the English and American imagination /
David Roessel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-+-j+8-8
+. English literatureHistory and criticism. :. GreeceIn literature.
. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, +y88+8:KnowledgeGreece.
. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, +y88+8:Inuence.
j. American literatureHistory and criticism. . American literatureGreek inuences.
y. English literatureGreek inuences. I. Title.
PR+: .G8 R :oo+
8:o.':jdc:+ oo-o8j
+ j y 8 :
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For
r+r r+
mia bisogna voi conoscete,
e ci chad essa buono
rarr+c r
I rst went to Greece in +y after receiving an M.A. in classics, driven by a
desire to see the places I had studied. All I had at the time was enough for a
one-way ticket, and upon arriving I took a job teaching English to the grand-
children of refugees from Smyrna in order to make ends meet. My career in
classics did not end there, for I went on to teach in the Classics Department at
Howard University in the early +8os. But that experience repeatedly led me
back to the eastern Mediterranean and started me on the road to this book.
I was outside of and somewhat at odds with academia when I began this
study more than a decade ago, but three remarkably generous academics
helped to make it possible. Carrie Cowherd, with whom I shared an ofce
when I taught at Howard University, functioned as an early mentor and has
read almost everything I have written. Eileen Gregory of the University of
Dallas, whom I met at a conference on H. D. in +8, took an interest in my
work and urged me to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities. When I pointed out that I had no one in the eld to write recom-
mendations, she promptly offered to write one. I received the grant for
+o++ and did my rst research on the present subject at the New York
Public Library and the British Library. At the end of the fellowship period, I
had a great deal of data, which I had to put together in some coherent way.
I went looking for an example and for guidance and found both in one per-
son. I wrote to Arnold Rampersad, who was then at Columbia, to ask if I
might become a student of his. It never occurred to me that it was a bit odd
for a professor at Columbia to correspond faithfully with an unknown person
in Cleveland, who had appeared out of the blue. I am now aware of the num-
ber of letters and messages that come into his ofce, and his generosity and
humanity astounds me even more. In ++, I went to Princeton to work with
Arnold. The greatest praise I can give him as a teacher is that he showed me,
by setting the highest standard, how to write this book in the proper way. Pam
and I continue to value his and Marvinas friendship.
At Princeton I also met Mike Keeley, whose name I had known for years
from my reading. Mike shared my passion for Greece and for writing about
Greece, and over the years he went from dissertation adviser to close
viii r a r r + c r
colleague. Mary Keeley added her own keen insight into things literary. Will
Howarth has been an untiring source of support. I also owe a great debt to
Walt Litz, who read several early versions and offered cogent advice. John
Logan helped me with French sources at several points. Dimitri Gondicas,
Ian MacNiven, Susan Wolfson, and Nick Moschovakis read and com-
mented on early chapters.
The Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies in
Athens has become my second home. Only those who work on Greece in the
modern period know the incredible job of book collecting that was done by
the intrepid John Gennadius around the turn of the twentieth century. Haris
Kalligas, the director of the Gennadius, has been a good friend and staunch
supporter. The staff at the library are like family now, so I know that they will
not mind me using their rst names. Many thanks to Sophie, Anna, Maria,
Andreas, Dimitri, Soula, Katerina, Vasso, and Aliki; to Natalia and Maria in
the archives; to Saki, Litsa, and Voula in Loring Hall; and to the rest of the
staff at the Classical School. I am grateful to College Year in Athens for its in-
terest in this work, especially to Kimon Giocarinis and Mary Lee Coulson.
I made extensive use of the British Library, the New York Public Library, the
Library of Congress, the Cleveland Public Library, the Firestone Library of
Princeton University, the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylva-
nia, and the library at the British School at Athens.
In the early years, I was aided by Frank Toti, Mike and Del DeMauro,
Susan Roessel, Pat and Jim Foung, George and Judy Green, and Garo and
Rosie Yacoupian, on whose couches I slept during research trips. In recent
years, I have been helped in similar ways by Ruth Keshishian, William
Packard, Yannis and Joan Moschovakis, Kim Toh and Scott Pike, George
Kacandes and Nicolette Trahoulias, Nancy Serwint, Diane Bolger, Gerald
L. Vincent, Damla Demizoglu, Ian and Susan MacNiven, and Lawrence and
Carolyn Roessel. Nick Moschovakis endured Mount Athos with me more
than once; Mike DeMauro was with me during my exploration of the By-
ronic regions of Epirus; Frank Toti sat with me in Delphi and Missolonghi;
and with Jerry Vincent I followed Durrell on Corfu, trailed Rimbaud on
Cyprus, and took journeys to Lebanon, Aleppo, Luxor, and Alexandria.
Pamela has been a presence pamsa ja pamsot.
During work on this book, I received support from the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities, the Cyprus Fulbright Commission, the American
School of Classical Studies (in the form of the Gennadeion Fellowship), the
Princeton Hellenic Studies Program, the American Studies Program at
Princeton, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, the
Foundation for Hellenic Culture, and Professor Costas Vayenas and his
group at the University of Patras.
My editors at Oxford University Press have truly been a pleasure with
which to work. Elissa Morriss commitment to the book raised my own fal-
r a r r + c r ix
tering spirits at times. Stacey Hamilton was a great aid. Merryl Sloane, much
more than a copy editor, combined remarkable diligence and a graceful intel-
ligence in going through the text. They all contributed in making this a bet-
ter book. I learned a great deal from each of them. I have been a member of
the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (+j+), the British
School at Athens (spring +y), and the Cyprus American Archaeological
Research Institute (spring +8).
D. R.
+ckowrrnor+s
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following quotations:
W. H. Auden excerpt from Letter to Lord Byron from W. H. Auden Collected
Poems. Copyright +y by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random
House, Inc.
Kay Boyle excerpt from A Poem for the Students of Greece from Collected
Poems. Copyright ++ by Kay Boyle. Reprinted with permission of Copper
Canyon Press, P.O. Box :y+, Port Townsend, WA 8.
Quotations from The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund
Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press. Copyright +: by
Princeton University Press. Used by permission of Princeton University Press.
The line from by god i want above fourteenth. Copyright +:j, +j,
++ by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright +y by
George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: .,c,.,6:, by E. E. Cummings,
edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing
Corporation.
Quotations from The Collected Poems of Lawrence Durrell, edited by James
Brigham, Faber and Faber. Copyright +8j by Estate of Lawrence Durrell.
Used by permission of Faber and Faber.
Eight lines from The Waste Land from the Collected Poems .,c,.,6:, by
T. S. Eliot. Copyright + by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Used by permission of
Faber and Faber and the estate of T. S. Eliot.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti excerpt from Forty Odd Questions for the Greek
Regime and One Cry for Freedom from Open Eye, Open Heart. Copyright
+y by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Used by permission of New Directions Publish-
ing Corporation.
xii + c k o wr r n o r + s
Robert Frost excerpt from Greece in Robert Frosts Collected Poems, Prose, &
Plays (New York: Library of America), +j. Used by permission of the Library
of America.
Excerpt from America by Allen Ginsberg from The Collected Poems,
.,,,.,Sc. Copyright +j by Allen Ginsberg. Used by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.
Rachel Hadas excerpts from Last Trip to Greece from Halfway Down the
Hall. Copyright +8 by Rachel Hadas, Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted
by permission of the University Press of New England.
Kenneth O. Hanson excerpt from Take It from Me from The Distance Any-
where, University of Washington Press. Copyright +y by Kenneth O. Han-
son. Reprinted by permission of University of Washington Press.
Kenneth O. Hanson excerpts from Political Poem and After the Counter-
coup that Failed from The Uncorrected Word. Copyright +y by Kenneth O.
Hanson, Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission of the University
of New England Press.
Ernest Hemingways To the Good Guys Dead from SSPoems by Ernest Hem-
ingway, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis. Copyright +y by the Ernest Hem-
ingway Foundation and Nicholas Gerogiannis, reprinted by permission of Har-
court, Inc.
Quotation from Israel Horovitz from The Good Parts. Copyright +8 by Is-
rael Horovitz. All rights reserved. Stock and amateur production rights con-
trolled exclusively by Dramatists Play Service, o Park Avenue South, New
York, NY +oo+. Used by permission of Israel Horovitz.
Excerpt from Rudyard Kiplings translation of the Greek national anthem from
Rudyard Kiplings Verse, .SS,.,:6, Doubleday Publishing, ++. Also used by
permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of the National Trust for Places of His-
torical Interest and Natural Beauty.
John Lehmann excerpt from The Road to Rhamnous from The Collected
Poems: .,c.,6. Copyright + by John Lehmann. Used by permission of
David Higham Associates, Limited.
Excerpt from Hypocrite Auteur from Collected Poems .,.,.,S:by Archibald
MacLeish. Copyright +8j by the Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted
by permission of Houghton Mifin Co. All rights reserved.
+ c k o wr r n o r + s xiii
Quotations from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, edited by E. R. Dodds.
Copyright +y by the Estate of Louis MacNeice. Used by permission of
David Higham Associates, Limited.
James Merrill excerpts from After Greece and Kostas Tympanikis from
Selected Poems. Copyright +: by James Merrill. Reprinted with permission
of Alfred A. Knopf.
Passages from The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. Copyright ++ by
Henry Miller. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
William Plomer excerpts from Three Pinks and On the Poems of C. P.
Cavafy from The Five-Fold Screen, Hogarth Press. Copyright +:. Used by
permission of Barclays Bank Trust Company as trustee for the Estate of William
Plomer.
William Plomer excerpts from Another Country and Three Pinks from The
Collected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, +y. Used by permission of the
Random House Archive and Library, UK.
Excerpt from Cantos by Ezra Pound. Copyright +8 by Ezra Pound. Used by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Excerpts from Birthday on the Acropolis from Collected Poems .,c-.,,by
May Sarton. Copyright +, +88, +8, +8o, +y by May Sarton. Used by
permission of W. W. Norton & Company.
Quotations from The Collected Poems of George Seferis, translated by Edmund
Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Copyright +y by Princeton University Press.
Used by permission of Princeton University Press.
Bernard Spencer, Aegean Islands, +o-++ from Collected Poems, edited by
Roger Bowen. Copyright Oxford University Press, +8+. Used by permission
of Oxford University Press.
Bernard Spencer, Greek Excavations from Collected Poems, edited by Roger
Bowen. Copyright Oxford University Press, +8+. Used by permission of Ox-
ford University Press.
Bernard Spencer, Salonika (June +o) from Collected Poems, edited by Roger
Bowen. Copyright Oxford University Press, +8+. Used by permission of Ox-
ford University Press.
xiv + c k owr r n o r + s
John Waller excerpt from Spring in Athens from The Kiss of the Stars (copy-
right John Waller, +8). Used by permission of A. M. Heath, Limited.
W. B. Yeats excerpts from September ++ and The Man and the Echo
reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon and Schuster,
from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, rev. :d ed., edited by Richard J.
Finneran. Copyright +: by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed by
Berthe Georgie Yeats.
co+r+s
Abbreviations and Citations, xvii
Chronology, xix
Introduction: Almost Impossible to Think Sanely about Greece,
r. r+s+ oar++rss +n rarsr+ nru+srr+ (+yyo+8)
+. I Want to Revive Athens, +
:. Greeces of Byron and of Homer, :
. On the Ruins of Missolonghi, y:
rr. +nr +orc roacr or rrorn (+8-++)
. Dangerous Ground, +o+
j. Pet Balkan People, +:
. Politicized Pans, +j
rrr. +nr rn or +uaosr+ +n uaro+ns (+++)
y. Constantinople, Our Star, +8y
8. On the Quai at Smyrna, :+o
. A Hard Place to Write About, :+
Conclusion: A New Kind of Byronism, :j:
Notes, :8j
Bibliography,
Index, y
+uuarvr ++r os +n cr +++r os
In this work, CPW refers to Byrons The Complete Poetical Works, y vols., ed-
ited by Jerome McGann. For poetical citations to longer works, specically
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, The Giaour, The Corsair, The Bride of Abydos,
The Siege of Corinth, and Don Juan, I give the canto, stanza, and/or line num-
bers as they are relevant for each poem. For shorter works and references to
Byrons notes, I provide the volume and page number. To keep these cita-
tions distinct, where volume and page numbers are given, they are always
preceded by CPW and include p. or pp. in front of the page numbers, while
the references to canto, stanza, and line numbers never have CPW nor p. or
pp. References to the poetical works of Shelley also provide stanza and/or
line numbers, and stanza numbers are given for Felicia Hemanss long poem
Modern Greece. BLJ refers to Byrons Letters and Journals, +: vols., edited by
Leslie Marchand. References are to the volume and page number. Quota-
tions from Winckelmann in chapter + are taken from English Romantic Hel-
lenism, edited by Timothy Webb. The rst citation in the text reads Webb,
English Romantic Hellenism, but subsequent references contain just Webb
and the page number. Other works are cited by the authors name and, where
needed, the title, followed by the page number. Full reference information is
provided in the bibliography.
xvrr
cnaooroov
rvr+s r oarrk nrs+oav
+yyo: Greeks in the Peloponnesus
rebel against Ottoman rule with
Russian aid.
+yy: Execution of Greek patriot Rhi-
gas Pheraios in Belgrade.
+8o: The celebrated leap of the
Suliet women to escape capture by
Ali Pasha.
+8:+: Beginning of Greek War of
Independence
+8:: Byrons death in Missolonghi
+8:: Destruction of Missolonghi by
the Turks
rr+ra++tar, +a+vrr, +n +a+
aro+anro oarrcr
+yyo: Voltaires Ode Pindarique
propos la guerre prsente en
Grce
+yy+: P.-A. Guys Voyage littraire
de la Grce.
+y8:: M. G. A. F. Choiseul-
Gouffiers Voyage Pittoresque de
la Grce
+yy+y: Hlderlins Hyperion
+8o: Chateaubriand visits Greece.
+8o: Sydney Owensons Woman;
or, Ida of Athens
+8o+8++: Byrons first journey to
Greece
+8+:: Byrons Childe Harold s Pil-
grimage, cantos + and :
+8+: Byrons The Giaour
+8+: Byrons The Corsair
+8+: Byrons The Siege of Corinth
+8::: Shelleys Hellas
+8:y: Delacroixs painting Greece
Expiring on the Ruins of Misso-
longhi
+8:: Victor Hugos Les Orientales
xrx
xx c n a o o r o o v
+8:y: Naval battle of Navarino secures
Greek independence
+8: Founding of modern Greek
state and arrival of King Otho from
Bavaria
+8: Revolution in Greece results in a
constitutional monarchy
+8j+8jy: British and French troops
occupy Athens because of Greek
sympathy for the Russians during
the Crimean War
+8: Revolution in Greece; King
Otho abdicates and is replaced by
George I (from Denmark)
+8+8y: Revolt in Crete
+8yo: Greek brigands kidnap four for-
eigners near Marathon and later
kill them at Dilessi
+8y: Bulgarians fail in a revolt against
the Turks. Turks massacre thou-
sands of Bulgarians in response
+88+: European powers force Turkey
to cede Thessaly to Greece
+8y: GrecoTurkish War
+8+: Disraelis Contarini Fleming
+8: Mary Shelleys Euphrasia
+88: Edward Lears painting
Marathon
+8j+: Edward Lears Journal of a
Landscape Painter in Albania and
Illyria
Hiram Powerss statue The Greek
Slave exhibited in London.
+8jy: Edmond Abouts Le roi de
montagnes
+8y: Swinburnes Ode on the In-
surrection in Candia
+8: Mark Twains Innocents
Abroad
+8y: Gladstones The Bulgarian
Horrors and the Eastern Question
+88+: Swinburnes Athens: An
Ode
+8: E. F. Bensons Limitations
+8y: E. F. Bensons The Vintage: A
Romance of the Greek War of In-
dependence
+8: Stephen Cranes Active Ser-
vice
+oj: E. M. Forsters The Road
from Colonus
+o: Virginia Woolf s first visit to
Greece and her story A Dia-
logue on Mount Pentelicus
c n a o o r o o v xxi
++:++: First and Second Balkan
Wars
++:: Constantine ascends throne in
Greece in March after the assassi-
nation of his father, George I
++: World War I begins
++j: Gallipoli campaign
++y: Greece joins the war on the side
of the Allies after the abdication
and exile of King Constantine
++8: Greece is given eastern Thrace
and the area around Smyrna by the
Treaty of Versailles
+:o: Elections return Royalist party;
King Constantine returns
+:o+::: Greco-Turkish War;
Greece defeated and loses eastern
Thrace and the area around
Smyrna; Smyrna burnt; revolution
deposes King Constantine (leaves
for second exile) and Royalist gov-
ernment; six ministers executed
+:: Treaty of Lausanne mandates an
exchange of populations between
Greece and Turkey; Greece re-
ceives more than a million refugees
+j: Attempted coup by Venizelist
party; Venizelos goes into exile; re-
turn of King George II
+: Beginning of the dictatorship of
General Metaxas, which lasts until
Greeces entry into World War II
+o: Greece enters World War II
+++: Demetra Vaka Browns In the
Shadow of Islam
++: Julia Dragoumiss A Man of
Athens
++8++: Vita Sackville-West
writes Challenge
++: Demetra Vaka Browns In
Pawn to a Throne
+:: Hemingways in our time;
first publication of Asia Minor
vignettes
+:: Centennial of Byrons death
+:: Susan Glaspells Fugitive s
Return; Robert Byrons The
Byzantine Achievement
+o: Hemingways On the Quai at
Smyrna
++: William Plomer goes to
Greece
+:: Christopher Isherwood
spends the summer in Greece; he
later includes an account of the
trip in Down There on a Visit
(+:)
+j: Lawrence Durrell moves to
Corfu
+y: Audens Letter to Lord
Byron
+: Henry Miller travels to Greece
++: Millers The Colossus of
Maroussi
xxii c n a o o r o o v
+++j: Greece occupied by Axis
powers
+j+: Greek Civil War
+y: Coup by a group of colonels
preempts elections; military junta
is established
+y: Fall of the junta; democracy re-
stored to Greece
+j: Durrells Prospero s Cell
+8: George Seferiss The King of
Asine and Other Poems, a volume
of verse, is translated and pub-
lished in London
+jy: Francis Kings The Firewalkers
+j8: Patrick Leigh Fermors Mani;
Edmund Keeleys The Libation
+j: Kevin Andrewss The Flight of
Ikaros
+: Zorba the Greek (film)
+j: James Merrills The (Diblos)
Notebook
+: John Fowless The Magus
(first version)
+y+: Death of the poet George Se-
feris
+y: Kay Boyles A Poem for the
Students of Greece
+yy: Mary Lee Settles Blood Tie
wins National Book Award
+8+: Peter Levis The Hill of Kro-
nos
+8:: Don DeLillos The Names
In Byrons Shadow
r +aontc+r o
Almost Impossible to Think Sanely about Greece
On the terrace of the Hotel Cecil in the Greek city of Patras just after the
outbreak of World War II in the summer of +, Henry Miller tried to dis-
suade Lawrence Durrell from enlisting in the Greek army. He knew what I
thought about war, Miller related, and I think in his heart he agrees with
me, but being young, being serviceable, being English despite himself, he was
in a quandary. It was a bad place in which to discuss a subject of this sort. The
atmosphere was charged with memories of Byron. Sitting there, with Misso-
longhi so near, it was almost impossible to think sanely about war (Colossus
of Maroussi :j).
Millers problem was compounded by the fact that it was equally impossi-
ble to think sanely about Greece with Missolonghi so near. In Edward Whit-
temores Jerusalem Poker, a character in Athens asserts that the light here is
different. Its a palpable thing and the effect is inescapable, which is why
Greece has always been more of an idea than a place. When the modern na-
tion was founded in the last century, Alexandria and Constantinople were the
great Greek cities in the world, and Athens was a lonely plain where a few
shepherds grazed their ocks at the foot of the Acropolis. But no matter. An
idea doesnt die. It only slumbers and can always be resurrected (++). The
idea continuously resurrected from the late eighteenth century into the
twentieth century was the regeneration of Greece and the Greeks, the physi-
cal reincarnation of the idea of the ancient past. And it was Byron, the mar-
tyr of Missolonghi, who had made the dream that Greece might still be
free a part of a literary tradition. In addition to being young, serviceable,
and English, Durrell was also a poet, and that, as Miller certainly knew, was a
key element in Durrells desire to join the Greek army.
It was not the last time that Henry Miller would have trouble thinking
sanely about either Greece or war, but the shade of Byron did not trouble him
long. Durrell, in the end, did not join the Greek army; he went with Miller
to Athens, where they met poet George Seferis and George Katsimbalis, a

r u v a o

s s n + n ow
fellow out of all proportion, as Durrell called him in his poem My Theol-
ogy. With these two Greeks as guides, Miller and Durrell would create a new
concept of modern Greece in writing in English, one where young, service-
able, poetic young men no longer debated whether they should join the Greek
army. They constructed a Greece where one went to escape from precisely
such debates.
As Australian author George Johnston signaled in his novel Closer to the
Sun (+o), Millers Colossus of Maroussi was the work that replaced the verse
of Byron as the canonical text of modern Greece for English and American
readers. The protagonist, the fortyish David Meredith, asks a fellow expatri-
ate on the island of Silenus (Hydra), an elderly British woman, how she came
to be living in the Aegean. Asthma, she replied. That . . . and my own pas-
sion for Byron. I feel now, she continues, it should have been Shel-
ley. . . . But then it would have been Italy instead of here (). Some fteen
pages later, Davids brother Mark asks him the same question. He responds,
Shall I say I am learning to know something about the light and shadow on
rocks against the sky, the true taste of water, the rhythms of the season, the
values of simplicity. Mark exclaims, Oh, for Gods sake. . . . All this
pseudo-poetic Henry Miller guff (). Johnston included these two ex-
changes to indicate the generational gap between the pre- and postwar gen-
erations of expatriates on the island, signied by the two different books of
Greece they carried with them on their voyage. According to Johnston, after
Byron came Miller. There was, he suggests, nothing in between. For more
than a hundred years after Byrons death, the Greek land was haunted, holy
ground, as Byron said of Athens. But, with Missolonghi so near, the spirit
haunting it was Byron himself.
This book examines the signicance of what Victor Hugo called the
Greece of Byron, or modern Greece, in English and American writing.
Although ancient Greece, Hugos Greece of Homer, and modern Greece
occupy the same geographical space on the map, they are two distinct entities
in the Western imagination, as demonstrated by Virginia Woolf s comment:
I take pains to put old Greece on my right hand and new Greece on my left
& nothing I say of one shall apply to the other (Passionate Apprentice o).
Scholarship has tended to follow Woolf s advice, for while there is a large
shelf of books devoted to the position and meaning of old Greece on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century literature in English, hardly any attention has
been given to new Greece. The Greece of Byron is an interesting case study
for several interrelated reasons, including its close connection to a single for-
eign poet, its persistent politicization, and its survival as a Romantic area
long after the age of Romanticism ended.
Few countries have remained in the shadow of a single author for so long.
In John Fowless The Magus (+), Nicholas Urfe says, My knowledge of
modern Greece began and ended with Byrons death at Missolonghi
r + a o n t c + r o j
(o), and most of English and American writing about Greece into the
twentieth century was also stuck in the milieu of the Greek War of Indepen-
dence and Byrons Eastern Tales. For a century after the poets death, writers
tended to replicate rather than revise the Greece found in Byrons poetry.
This desire was, to be sure, not simply a homage to a single writer but also an
attempt to keep alive the social and political currents of the Romantic age, if
only in one small spot on the globe. The literary tradition has, of course,
more than one Byron. In addition to the hero of Missolonghi, there is the
dandy in London and the introspective Manfred. This book is concerned
only with the rst. Byron was not always a politicized entity, but Byron in
Greece was. With Missolonghi so near, one could say with some justice that
it was also impossible to think sanely about Byron.
The resurrection of Greece, considered the original font of Western cul-
ture, was never an end in itself but rather was connected with a new spiritual,
political, or cultural revival. Jerome McGann noted that in Childe Harolds
Pilgrimage Byron was deeply concerned with the renewal of the value of the
individual person, and the renewal of Greece as a political entity becomes
Byrons objective correlative for this idea (Beauty of Inections :o).
Greece, therefore, was a highly politicized place on the map of Europe, since
its renewal as a political entity was associated with the social and cultural
changes desired by Western authors. In Maria Edgeworths novel Helen
(+8), therefore, a young Englishman, who spoke with enthusiasm of
modern Greece, and his hopes that she might recover her ancient character,
is cautioned that Greece is a dangerous eld for the political speculator
(+yj). I argue that the lack of innovative writing about modern Greece from
+8 to +:o is directly related to the fact that the country was such a danger-
ous eld for writers, a place where one had to tread lightly because of the
powerful presence of Byron and his legendary death in Greece. During his
conversation with Durrell that day in Patras, Miller himself saw Greece as
such a dangerous eld.
In the rst decade of the last century, Saki (Hector Herbert Munro) called
modern Greece and the surrounding Balkans the last shred of happy hunt-
ing-ground for the adventurous, a playground of passions that are fast be-
coming atrophied for want of exercise. . . . If the Balkan lands are to be nally
parceled out between competing Christian kingdoms and the haphazard rule
of the Turk banished beyond the Sea of Marmara, the old order, or disorder
if you like, will have received its death blow. . . . the old atmosphere will have
changed; the glamour will be gone (j:8+). Another way of phrasing
Sakis words would be to say that modern Greece and Macedonia in particu-
lar was, in ++:, the last remaining Romantic area on earth. Through Byron,
modern Greece became, as it were, embalmed in the time of Romanticism,
and it suffered the fate of all perceived Romantic or nineteenth-century con-
ceptions and values after the Great War. If before ++, Byron in Greece was
r u v a o

s s n + n o w
a model for the poet as a man of action, then after ++8 he became an anti-
model for the young men sent to ght for the dead values of a botched civi-
lization. After the Great War, novels of the conict, like Dos Passoss Three
Soldiers and Hemingways A Farewell to Arms, suggested that the only way to
save ones self and ones sanity was to desert. A tting analogy, or objective
correlative, of that act was to desert the cause of the Greeks during the
Greco-Turkish War of +:o+:: and all of the cultural meanings associ-
ated with that cause.
With contemporary notions of dancing Zorbas and Shirley Valentines
with or without bikini tops, we might forget that before the late +os almost
no one went to Greece to nd their inner selves. This is the Greece that Miller
and Durrell began to construct after their close encounter with Missolonghi
in +. English and Americans in the nineteenth century went for that kind
of experienceto discover the self and to be changed withinto Italy. One
went to Greece, on the other hand, in imitation of Byron, to help change the
Greeks and to assist Greece in its restoration to its ancient splendor. As Edge-
worth indicated in Helen, discussions of whether Greece would recover its
ancient character involved one in dangerous political speculations, since, in
the eyes of those who pursued such speculations, the revival of the Greeks
had to have some effect on the rest of Europe and the world at large. Greek re-
generation was not simply a part of nineteenth-century nationalism, it con-
tained within it millennial hopes. Yet while I argue that modern Greece had a
particular signicance for English and American writers from +yyo to +y,
I also suggest that the depiction of Greece had a symbiotic relation to the per-
ception of Italy, Turkey, and the Mediterranean in general. When the idea of
Italy became highly politicized, because of Mussolini and Fascism, the idea
of Greece lost political force; conversely, when the idea of late nineteenth-
century Italy was not politicized, the conception of Greece was.
From a global perspective, two rather insignicant events frame this
study. In +yyo, the Greeks rose in revolt against Turkish rule. The revolt
failed, but because of an increasing idealization of the Greek past in the eigh-
teenth century and the growing revolutionary sentiment of the age, this up-
rising caught the attention of Western Europe. In +y, a group of colonels
staged a coup in Greece to prevent elections that the Socialist candidate was
poised to win. This event also could have passed unnoticed abroad, but it
came at a time of intense worldwide political activism during the late +os.
After three decades as lotus land, Greece once again became a partisan slogan
in the West, as it had been in the time of Byron. If the coup did not put a
complete end to the Greece of Miller and Durrell, it forced many writers to
reconsider their thinking about modern Greece. My point should be clear
it was not what was happening in Greece that caused England and America
to think about a small nation in the eastern Mediterranean. Rather, Greece
became an important place in the English and American mind when it t in
r + a o n t c + r o y
with other, already established ideas. A book about modern Greece, or the lit-
erature of modern Greece, would be quite different; for one thing, it would
have far more to say about the brutal civil war of the late +os. While events
of Greek history will have a prominent place in the pages that follow, my
focus will be on the meaning given to those events in works in England and
America, not what they meant to Greeks.
Modern Greece, in history and in literature, has been viewed as a transi-
tory moment squeezed between two larger and more important entities.
Viewed chronologically, modern Greece rests between the glory of the classi-
cal Greek past and the hope of a resurrected Greek future, which in many
Western minds ought to resemble the democracies of Western Europe and
America, which were founded on classical Greek models. Modern Greece as
an entity did not exist but remained in a state of becoming. In +o, nearly
eighty years after the end of the Greek War of Independence, G. F. Abbott
edited a book entitled Greece in Evolution, which argued that modern Greece
was beginning to show the promise that the world expected of it. In +yy,
John Koumoulides edited a book entitled Greece in Transition: New Essays in
the History of Modern Greece, .S:..,,,, as if the entire existence of the
Greek state was a preparation for something to come. Viewed geographically,
modern Greece sits between Europe and Asia; it is in the process of throwing
off the Orientalism it acquired during four centuries of Turkish rule and
reacquiring a European nature. This perception was reinforced by the fact
that nearly every generation of English and American philhellenes from +8
until +:: experienced at least one of a series of Greek struggles to free them-
selves from Turkish oppression. The notion that modern Greece was still in a
state of becoming, an idea supported by a continual series of armed con-
frontations with the Turks, helped to x the conception of modern Greece in
the time of the Greek Revolution, the Greece of Byron. This is why it could
appear to Saki as the last shred of happy hunting ground for the adventurous.
A broad synopsis of the argument that follows would read: the Romantic
age constructed an image of a politicized, female, modern Greece t for the
temple of Apollo. This image dominated representations of Greece into the
twentieth century and was eventually transmuted by writers afliated with
modernism into an apolitical, male Greece in a Dionysian frenzy. The transi-
tion is obvious in literary works, but the reasons are not, and it certainly can-
not be explained only as a modernist reaction to Romantic Greece. The liter-
ary geography of the Mediterranean is equally important. While the story of
Italy or Egypt in English and American writing differs greatly from that of
Greece, the perception of these three places and the adjoining areas interact
and affect one another.
The rst part of this book covers the years from +yyo through the end of
the Greek War of Independence (+8:++8). I look at the development of
philhellenism as a cultural movement that had revolutionary implications
8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
within a European context while containing imperialist rhetoric with regard
to the Turks and the East. I examine the persistent personication of Greece
as a female needing rescue from a Turk by a savior from the West and how
Byron employed that scenario in works such as The Giaour. I argue that one
of the main reasons that so little of the mass of philhellenic writings from the
Greek War of Independence has lasted is that the canonical texts of the
Greek Revolution were written by Byron before the Greek Revolution had
even started. With the scripture of the Greek uprising intact, later works
functioned more as commentary and interpretation.
The second part investigates the omnipresence of Byronic Greece in
writing in English from +8 to ++. The Greece of Byron was a radical
cause linked to other issues, including the abolition of slavery, the extension
of the vote, and the independence movements in Italy, Spain, and Poland.
For the liberals and the radicals who espoused these causes, the liberation of
the Greeks was part of a sacred heritage. Given that the rhetoric about
Greece had been established by Byron, the only real developments were an
expansion of that rhetoric by Gladstone and other liberals to include the
Balkan Christians generally and, in response to that expansion, a simultane-
ous narrowing of philhellenic rhetoric to cover only those pure Greeks of
unmixed blood who lived on remote islands and mountains. Both of these
developments had deleterious effects on the perception of the Greeks. On
the one hand, when lumped with the other Christians of the East, they were
viewed as Balkan or Levantine; on the other, a preserve of real Greeks was
created by disenfranchising the majority of Greeces inhabitants. Philhel-
lenes abroad would eventually apply the true versus false Greek di-
chotomy to disputes between political factions within Greece.
The third part of this work deals with the reaction to the Greece of Byron
in the years during and after the Great War. The idea of a Greater Greece,
including Constantinople and Asia Minor, survived the ghting of World
War I. In fact, the Versailles Treaty almost established the desired Greater
Greece by granting the Greeks eastern Thrace and the territory around
Smyrna. Philhellenic writing was surprisingly deaf to the fact that the Ro-
mantic nationalism that lay behind the drive for a Greater Greece had died in
the trenches. The Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of +:o+:: and
the subsequent exchange of populations with Turkey, in which a million and
a half Greeks were forced to leave their homes on Turkish soil and go to
Greece, brought an end to Greater Greece and the dream of a Greek regen-
eration. I argue that Hemingway and other modern writers employed the
Greek defeat of +:: as a symbol for the death of the prewar values because
of the focus upon Greek culture and the desire for a revival of the Greeks in
the nineteenth century. The fate of the modern Greeks was simply a foil to
invert the world of the old men. In the aftermath of the Greek defeat and the
end of the Greek revival as it had been envisioned from +yyo, authors had to
r + a o n t c + r o
recreate or reinvent a new modern Greece. The third part ends with a look at
the most signicant attempts in that direction during the two decades after
the Great War and why they failed to gain wide recognition.
The conclusion looks at the Greece brought into existence by Miller and
Durrell. These two authors reinvested modern Greece with meaning by
stripping it of all political signicance; ironically, in the late +os, when both
Italy and Spain were engulfed by contemporary political questions, Greece
offered the discovery of yourself, to borrow the words of Lawrence Dur-
rell. I show that this occurred when Greece itself was under a dictatorship
and under the shadow of the impending war, so that the creation of an idyllic
Greece during these years was an act of will by both Miller and Durrell.
Those writers who came to Greece in the late +os and +jos carrying the
books of Miller and Durrell also persisted in turning their eyes from the in-
ternal politics of Greece, despite a bitter civil war between the Left and the
Right from +j to +. Greece became repoliticized in Western eyes by the
military coup in +y, partly because leftist political activism in the West
viewed the coup as a cause and partly because the unappealing politics within
Greece helped to move lotus land elsewhere.
A study of this scope must, of necessity, attempt to provide a framework
rather than a comprehensive account of each period. I hope that my work
stimulates further investigations on particular periods, movements, and lit-
erary works. Despite numerous studies about the Greece of Homer in Eng-
lish and American literature, the Greece of Byron has been largely over-
looked, especially after +8. Terence Spencer, in his invaluable Fair Greece,
Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism before Byron, stops just before the Greek
Revolution begins. Raizis and Papas have done important work on the poetry
about the Greek Revolution but do not deal with ction or drama and do not
go much beyond +8jo. Larrabee and Eisner have written books on travelers
accounts of Greece, but they generally avoid creative works. Karanikass dis-
cussion of modern Greeks in American literature focuses more on twenti-
eth-century works written after the period that I discuss. Even Artemis
Leontis, in her recent and useful book Topographies of Hellenism, speaks as if
most, if not all, Western travelers ignore modern Greece in an attempt to
make contact with a sublime and serene classical past. But when Noel Brails-
ford, Allen Upward, and Stephen MacKenna went to Greece to ght against
the Turks in +8y, and when E. F. Benson, Isabella Mayo, and George Hor-
ton published philhellenic novels that same year, it was Byron who provided
the inspiration. Since this is the rst attempt to trace the portrayal of mod-
ern Greece from the Romantic period through modernism, rather than focus
on a few key works I have chosen to use a wide array of sources and to ll in
the cultural background.
The trouble with Greece, as the main character of DeLillos The
Names says, is that it is strategically located, and it needs to be examined in
+o r u v a o

s s n + n ow
conjunction with Turkey, the Balkans, and Italy. I originally intended such a
comparative study but found that Greece (and then Turkey and the Balkans)
had to be investigated rst.
1
In the course of this study and in the years of
my own involvement with Greece, I have at times felt that I have uncovered
new territory. But I have always been brought back to earth by Peter Levis
sane words: Whoever discovers Greece today can hardly rank with Colum-
bus (Hill of Kronos ). This is not a voyage into the unknown but an investi-
gation into a spot on the literary map that has been generally neglected in the
past because it was perceived to be so well known and traveled. My aim is to
challenge that perception and to show that modern Greece is more than a
transitory moment in writing in English but a place worth stopping in and
pondering over.
r
r+s + oar++rs s s
rars r+ nru+s rr+
( +yyo+8)
1
I Want to Revive Athens
In early +yyo, a small expeditionary force from Russia landed in the southern
Peloponnesus to aid local Greeks in a rebellion against Ottoman rule. Rus-
sias motives were not at all altruistic; it wanted to divert Ottoman troops
from the Russian border and, if possible, add Mediterranean territory to the
empire of Czarina Catherine. Nor were local Greeks overly eager to join in
the effort for their liberation. It took several years of negotiations and
promises by Russian agents before any prominent Greek chieftains pledged
their support. When the Russians nally arrived with far fewer than the ex-
pected army of +o,ooo, a mutual mistrust quickly developed between the
local Greeks and the Russian leader, Count Alexis Orloff. Many Greeks who
had listened to the appeals for freedom were reluctant to swear allegiance to
the Russian sovereign, an oath upon which Orloff insisted. And the Russians
found that it was hard to recruit even ,ooo Greek soldiers and harder still to
keep any kind of discipline. Further, incidents of indiscriminate massacre
and plunder by the Greek warriors against both Turkish and Greek civilians
alienated the local population and prevented the revolt from gaining popular
support. The result, as Thomas Hope remarked in in his novel Anastasius
(+8+), was that the Greeks and Russians each, alike disappointed, threw on
the other the blame of every failure (I.:8).
The most ambitious action of the campaign occurred when a force of
Greeks and Russians pushed north toward the town of Tripolitza. The ad-
vance was so slow that it provided ample time for the Turkish commander to
receive reinforcements from Albania. When the Ottoman troops attacked the
advancing Greco-Russian force, large numbers of Greeks ed the battleeld,
leaving oo Russian soldiers to their fate. The remaining Russians left on
their ships. The Ottoman governor quickly extinguished what was left of the
rebellion, and the most enduring result of the uprising was the misery of the
local population at the hands of the Albanians, called in contemporary
sources the Arnauts, who had arrived to assist the Ottoman army.
1
The revolt of +yyo appears in history, when it appears at all, as a footnote
to the Russo-Turkish Wars of +y8+yy or the more important Greek
rebellion of +8:+. While it is true that the Greeks had begun a revival of
+
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
national consciousness in the middle of the eighteenth century, the events of
+yyo were caused more from frustration with Ottoman misgovernment than
from a fervor for national liberation. The revolt took its place in a long series
of activities by disgruntled subject peoples under Turkish rule. For example,
a serious uprising by Greeks on the island of Cyprus had occurred just six
years earlier. There was no reason to think that any more notice would be
taken of the events of +yyo than the other numerous local rebellions in the
empire of the sultan.
Yet +yyo marked a watershed in how Western Europeans perceived the
modern Greeks. Across the Ionian sea, the rebellion red imaginations from
the moment Count Orloff and his soldiers set foot on Greek soil. The Gentle-
mans Magazine of London for July +yyo announced: On the rst appear-
ance of the Russian succours, the Greeks, who had long groaned under the
tyrannical yoke of the haughty Ottomans, assumed for the moment the ap-
pearance of the manly bravery of their renowned ancestors, and fell upon
their oppressors with all the violence of vindictive rage (quoted in Constan-
tine +y:).
2
In his Ode Pindarique propos la guerre prsente en Grce,
written while the revolt was in progress, Voltaire put in the mouth of Pallas
Athena his own hopes for the outcome of the struggle:
Je veux ressusciter Athnes.
QuHomre chante vos combats,
Que la voix de cent Dmosthenes
Ranime vos coeurs et vos bras.
Sortez, renaissez, Arts aimables,
De ces ruines dplorables
Qui vous cachaient sous leurs dbris;
Reprenez votre clat antique.
(Oeuvres Compltes 8.+:)
[I want to revive Athens.
Let Homer sing your combats,
Let the voice of a hundred Demosthenes
Revive your hearts and your arms.
Come forth, be born again, lovable Arts,
From these deplorable ruins
That hid you under their debris;
Take back again your antique brilliance.]
For Voltaire, as for the rest of Western Europe, a necessary corollary of
the resumption by the modern Greeks of the mantle of their famous ances-
tors would be the revival of the Arts aimables of antiquity from the de-
plorable ruins of the present. The independence of modern Greece was for
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s +j
most Western intellectuals never an end in itself but rather a prelude to the
regeneration of Greece, an artistic, spiritual, and/or political ideal. Olga
Augustinos noted that, in the case of Voltaire, Greek liberation meant not
the creation of independent Greece but the victory of reason and human
rights (+). And Jerome McGann described the importance of modern
Greece in Byrons rst narrative poem in the following terms: Childe
Harold (+8+:) is obsessed with the idea of the renewal of human culture in
the west at a moment of its deepest darkness. This means for Byron the re-
newal of the value of the individual person, and the renewal of Greece as a
political entity becomes Byrons objective correlative for this idea (Beauty
of Inections :o).
3
Greece functioned as such an objective correlative for a
whole generation of writers; this explains why the revival of the Greeks, un-
like that of the Serbs, the Bulgars, or the Arabs, was thought to have the
power to transform the lives and art of the world, especially the Western
part. For with the regeneration of Greece comes a solution to the cultural
malaise of the individual in industrial society.
Philhellenism was from its inception more than a chapter in the story of
nineteenth-century nationalism. In terms of cultural inheritance, there was a
common belief in Europe and America that, as Shelley claimed in the preface
to Hellas, We are all Greeks. So, the nal triumph of the Greek cause
should be viewed, in the words of the poet, as a portion of the cause of civil-
isation and social improvement (Shelleys Poetry and Prose o, o8). In a
dialogue published in +8:, Walter Savage Landor had the philhellene Ed-
ward Trelawny tell a leader of the Greek Revolution: But other nations do
not interest me like the Greeks, to whom I owe every exalted, every generous,
every just sentiment (Complete Works VIII.::y). In +8yy, Edward Augustus
Freeman wrote of the Greek War of Independence: The uprising of Greece
against her oppressors had in it all that could attract a like movement in Italy
or Poland, while it had further claims which the cause of Italy or Poland
could not claim. The practical wrongs of Greece were greater than those of
either Italy or Poland, while the name of Greece appealed to all nobler feel-
ings of mens hearts in a way that Poland, or even Italy, could not do (Histor-
ical Essays o8).
4
Supporters of Irish, Polish, or Italian nationalism wanted
these various peoples to be free; early philhellenic writers like Voltaire and
Hlderlin really hoped that a Greek revolution would free them.
The modern Greeks, whether they desired a new Athens or not, would
nd that the only way they could inuence opinion in the West was by ac-
cepting and exploiting the Western construction of their own identity and
goals.
5
Here again the revolt of +yyo was the crucial precedent, for one could
plausibly argue that no notice would have been taken of that rebellion if not
for the participation of the Russians and, more important, the manner in
which the Russians, even Empress Catherine in her letters to Voltaire, de-
picted Russian action in Greece.
6
Certainly one goal of Russian propaganda
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
was to use Greek freedom as a cover for Russian conquest, in the manner that
Byron complained about Catherines son, Alexander: How fain, if Greeks
would be his slaves, free Greece! (Age of Bronze +o.j). But the announced
Russian commitment to the regeneration of Greece in the late eighteenth
century also seemed an attempt to prove the Westernness of Russia. Greek
intellectuals in the decades after +yyo would embrace the Western idea of the
regeneration of their own race for the same purpose: to demonstrate to the
West that they deserved a place among the civilized peoples.
7
The revolt of +yyo was the crystallizing event in the emergence of phil-
hellenism as a signicant literary movement,
8
and +yyo continued to echo in
European writing for decades. In Friedrich Hlderlins Hyperion (published
in two parts in +yy and +y), the hero participates in the rebellion, and the
failed attack on Tripolitza forms the crux of the novel. The singer who ap-
pears in the second canto of Richard Polwheles Grecian Prospects (+y)
remarks upon the din of arms in vain in +yyo but quickly adds: Yet in
these isles, I nurse the martial res, / Fires, that ere-long, shall far illumine
Greece (y). Sydney Owensons Woman; or, Ida of Athens (+8o) is set
after the failed revolt, and one of its central themes is the hope of a new and
successful attempt to overthrow the Ottoman yoke. Byrons rst Turkish
Tale, The Giaour (+8+), takes place at the time the Seven Islands were pos-
sessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts [Albanians]
were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time
subsequent to the Russian invasion (CPW III, pp. o). And the rst his-
torical event in Thomas Hopes Anastasius (+8+) is the uprising in the
Morea, another name for the Peloponnesus (I.:y:8), and the young heros
rst success occurs during the campaign against the Albanians in +yy
(I.jj). Just as important as the specic references to the rebellion in
Greece were the language and concepts attached to the event. Hlderlins
modern Greek hero rhetorically asks: Were we born in the swamp, like a
will-o-wisp, or are we descended from the victors of Salamis? (++). Owen-
son in her introduction says that the Russians found no difculty in inspir-
iting the Greeks to defence of their national rights, and for the recovery of
their ancient liberties. The same love of freedom, the same vivacity of feel-
ing, and ardor of enthusiasms, was found among many of the oppressed
descendants of the heroes of Marathon and Plataea as distinguished their
immortal ancestors (I.xxiv). The restoration of ancient Greece gures as
the central prospect in Polwheles Grecian Prospects. In the second canto of
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage (+8+:), Byron also talked of the modern Greeks as
the descendants of the ancients:
In all save form alone, how changd! and who
That marks the re still sparkling in each eye,
Who but would deem their bosoms burnd anew
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s +y
With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty!
And many dream that the hour withal is nigh
That gives them back their fathers heritage.
(II.yj.y+++)
But Byron remained cautious, indeed almost pessimistic, about the possi-
bility of Greek liberation, which, in the event it should occur, should not be
dependent on foreign assistance (Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still
the same, II.y.y:y). In Itinraire de Paris Jrusalem (+8++) Chateaubriand
was equally cautious. Despite his claim that there is still an abundance of
genius in Greece; I even think that our masters in every line still reside
there, he concluded, at the same time, I fear the Greeks are not too well
disposed to break their chains. If even they were released from the tyranny
which oppresses them, they would not lose in a moment the marks of their
fetters. They have not only been crushed beneath the weight of despotism,
but for two thousand years they have been a superannuated and degraded
nation (+8o).
9
In his novel of +8+, Thomas Hope could poke fun at the great interest in
the revival of the Greeks. An Italian tells Anastasius that a great opportu-
nity awaits him in France, All you have to do is to present yourself in the
august assembly of the great nation as the representative of oppressed and
mourning Greece. Be the eloquent, the pathetic organ of its ardent desire to
share the benets which France confers on the world. Tell of the myriads that
to her lift their imploring hands. . . . it will be your own fault if in the conven-
tion you are not hailed as the worthy descendant of Harmodius and Aristo-
geiton (III.+o). Still, Hope himself was interested in the regeneration of
the Greeks, for he said in his preface that the author wrote the novel because
in an age when whatever relates to the regions once adorned by the Greeks,
and since defaced by the Turks, excites particular attention he thought the
narrative might add to our information on so interesting a subject (I.i).
10
The connection between modern Greeks and ancient Greeks expressed in
these works reveals a changed mental and political geography of the
Mediterranean. For if the modern Greeks were descended from the victors
of Marathon, then they were also Europeans and siblings of the West. And if
they were Europeans, indeed the ancestors of the founders of European civ-
ilization, they should not be the subjects of Eastern barbarism. For many the
proof of the birthright of the modern Greeks was the revolt of +yyo.
The reason that the events of +yyo had such an effect on the Western
imagination stemmed from factors that had little to do with modern Greece
itself. The most signicant development came in the middle of the eighteenth
century, when intellectuals began to reject the dominant aesthetics of neo-
classicism. As Frank Turner said, the search for new cultural roots and alter-
native cultural politics developed out of a need to understand and articulate
+8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
the disruptive, political, social, and intellectual experience that Europeans
confronted in the wake of the enlightenment and of revolution (:). That for
many the response to such cultural malaise resulted in a turn to Hellenism
was largely the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
11
The German art
historian asserted the aesthetic perfection of the fth-century ucr Athenians
by studying fragments of Roman copies of Greek originals. After Winckel-
mann, in the words of Walter Pater, the standard of taste, then, was xed in
Greece, at a denite historical period (Renaissance +). In the Athens of
Pericles, Phidias, and Sophocles Winckelmann found the noble simplicity
and sedate grandeur of Gesture and Expression, which constituted for him
the central elements of true beauty. He went on to explain: As the bottom of
the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate be-
neath the strife of passions in Greek gures (Webb, English Romantic Hel-
lenism +:+). In the cultural upheaval of the late eighteenth century, many
would nd in the idea of the inner repose of the ancient Greeks an answer to
their own personal and cultural turbulence.
Winckelmann claimed that to the Greek climate we owe the production
of Taste, and from thence it spread at length over all the politer world
(Webb ++). The importance of environment as an explanation for the Greek
achievement can be seen from the following comments of Chateaubriand
about his visit to Greece in +8o:
The climate operates more or less on the taste of nations. In Greece,
for instance, a suavity, a softness, a repose pervade all Nature, as well
as the works of ancients. You may almost conceive, as it were by intu-
ition, why the architecture of the Parthenon has such exquisite pro-
portions, why ancient sculpture is so un-affected, so tranquil, so sim-
ple, when you behold the pure sky, the delicious scenery of Athens, of
Corinth, of Ionia. In the native land of the Muses, Nature suggests no
wild deviations, she tends, on the contrary, to dispose the mind to love
of the uniform and of the harmonious. (j)
It became a convention throughout the nineteenth century for visitors to
read the aesthetics of repose, which Winckelmann found in classical Greek
art, into the Greek landscape and climate. For example, John Addington
Symondss description of Athens, even though rst published in +8y, is
thoroughly infused with the spirit of Winckelmanns Hellenism:
Athens by virtue of scenery and situation, was predestined to be the
mother-land of the free reason of mankind, long before the Athenians
had won by their great deeds the right to name their city the ornament
and the eye of Hellas. Nothing is more obvious to one who has seen
many lands and tried to distinguish their essential characters, than the
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s +
fact that no one country resembles another, but that, however similar
in climate and locality, each presents a peculiar and well-marked prop-
erty belonging to itself alone. The specic quality of the Athenian
landscape is lightnot richness or sublimity or romantic loveliness or
grandeur of mountain outline, but luminous beauty, serene exposure
to the airs of heaven. The harmony and balance of the scenery, so var-
ied in its details and yet so comprehensive, are sympathetic to the tem-
perance of Greek morality, the moderation of Greek art. (III. )
After his visit to Athens in February +8jy, Melville wrote in his poem The
Attic Landscape:
Tourist spare the avid glance
That greedy roves the sight to see:
Little here of Old Romance,
Or Picturesque of Tivoli.
No ushful tint the sense to warm
Pure outline pale, a linear charm.
The clear-cut hills carved temples face,
Respond, and share their sculptural grace.
Tis Art and Nature lodged together,
Sister by sister, cheek to cheek;
Such Art, such Nature, and such weather
The All-in-All seems here a Greek.
(:j)
In +o, a tourist, Sir Sidney Colvin, still marveled at the afnity of Greek
nature and Greek art (::).
12
For the present study, the signicance of the link between landscape and
artistic prowess lies in the fact that, as the quotation from Symonds suggests,
the Greek landscape has remained much the same over the course of :,ooo
years. The Greeks who lived there in +8oo should have been able to be af-
fected by it in the same way as the fth-century Athenians. Further, the em-
phasis on climate and environment served to discourage an attempt to build a
New Athens somewhere else. Winckelmann himself suggested the futility of
such an enterprise when he remarked, This Taste was not only original
among the Greeks, but seemed also quite peculiar to the country: it seldom
went abroad without loss, and it was long ere it imparted its kind inuences to
more distant climes (Webb ++). By such logic, Greece could only be re-
produced in Greece. This did not preclude, however, some attempts to see
the formation of a New Greece in other areas; Shelley himself would view the
United States as a New Athens in the New World in Hellas (see ll. y+).
:o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
But the contemporary interest in the effect of nature on character made Eu-
ropeans aware of modern Greece as a place on the map in a way that they had
not been earlier.
Owenson drew directly upon ideas about the efcacy of the Greek climate in
the preface to her novel Woman; or, Ida of Athens (+8o). Owenson stated that
her object in the book was to delineate the character of woman in the per-
fection of her natural state. She chose a modern Greek as the best vehicle
for that examination because Ida comes from a country where the genial in-
uence of climate, the classic interest in scenery, and the sublimity of objects
with which it abounds, nely harmonize with that almost innate propensity
to physical and moral beauty, that instinctive taste for the fair ideal, and that
lively and delicate susceptibility to ardent and tender impressions, which
should distinguish the character of women in its purest and highest state of
excellence (I.ixx). In short, many a charming Aspasia may still exist in
Athens unconscious of the latent powers of their own ardent minds
(I.ixx). The heroine of Owensons novel is just such a new Aspasia made
conscious or simply the old one brought back to life.
13
Although Ida of Athens is set in the late eighteenth century, in many ways
it reads like a historical romance of fth-century Athens. Ida plays the lyre:
She sung; her voice was scarcely louder than a sigh, and her accompaniment
was only an harmonic chord, swept at intervals. It is supposed something of
the ancient greek song is still to be traced in the popular airs (I.j). She
dresses in tunics. At the end of the rst volume there is the festival of sea-
sons, which Owenson terms evidently a true festival of Delos, which
takes place among the majestic ruins of the temple of Jupiter (I.+jy). The
celebration begins when two choirs of nymphs advance from the dark shade
of the grove towards the area of the temple, in the spring of youth, beautiful
as a vision of poetic fancy (I.+o). Owensons descriptions of lyre playing,
veiled drapery, and festivals at ancient temples tempt one to dismiss her en-
tire novel as a vision of poetic fancy, except that she offered numerous notes
to support her portrayal of modern Greek life.
The interest in things Greek had led to an increase of enterprising travel-
ers eager to discover as much as possible about the ancient Greeks. Some
made careful drawings of the monuments and extant sculpture, such as James
Stuart and Nicholas Revett in their Antiquities of Athens (+y:+8+). Others,
like Lord Elgin, brought as many antiquities home as they could. Still others
would occasionally turn from an examination of ruins to use the customs and
character of the modern Greeks to elucidate passages from ancient poetry or
prose. The majority of such commentaries came from those so overcome with
a mania for Hellenism that they were determined to see it in almost every-
thing around them, for, as Constantine noted, an ide xe can always be sub-
stantiated (+jj). Many travel narratives encouraged readers to make the
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s :+
connection between ancient and modern Greeks and fueled hopes of Greek
regeneration, despite the fact that the travelers were nearly unanimous in the
opinion that the present inhabitants were degenerated or debased versions of
the originals. These books provided Owenson the sources for Ida of Athens.
14
Owenson glossed the passage about Ida playing the lyre with a citation to
performances heard by the French travelers Olivier and Savary (I.:++y).
But Owensons favorite source was P.-A. Guyss Voyage littraire de la Grce
(+yy+; trans. in +yy: as Sentimental Journey through Greece). For Owensons
dance of Greek nymphs, she quoted the following lines of Guys: The pres-
ent greeks often exhibit an exact image of the ancient choir of greek nymphs,
when with their arms interlaced they dance through the woods, and recall the
memory of those descriptions the poets have left us (I.::o). The note to the
sentence Osmyn loved like a greek (II.+o) reads: The love of the modern
greeks, like that of the ancient is, according to de Guys [sic] and other trav-
ellers, a frenzy rather than a passion (II.:yo).
15
Owenson, who, like Winck-
elmann, never actually saw Greece, created in her novel a closer connection
between the ancient and modern inhabitants of Greece than some of her
sources had depicted.
16
But whether travelers observed at least some exact
images of ancient practices among the modern inhabitants of Greece, like
Guys, or whether they might say, In all save form alone, how changd, like
Byron (Childe Harold II.yj.y++), most acknowledged the modern Greeks as
the heirs of Pericles and Aspasia and helped to create both interest in and
sentiment for the regeneration of Greece.
The fact that European views of modern Greece were colored by precon-
ceptions about the classical past is also evident in the paintings of European
travelers who visited Greece in the early nineteenth century. As Fani-Maria
Tsigakou observed, the artists represented the scenery of the imagined
classical Greek world, which has more in common with the representations
of artists who never went to Greece than with the real scenery of the country,
for it was the formalized literary past, not the present, that was the attrac-
tion of Greece (:8:).
17
Many visitors to Greece, both authors and
painters, wore a set of ideological blinders that kept them from seeing any-
thing that challenged their preconceived view of Greece. The poet and
artist William Haygarth wore just such a set of ideological blinders, for he
said of his journey to Greece in +8+o+8++ that there is nothing in our visit
resembling the ceremonious introduction of a new circle of acquaintances; it
is the revived delight of the society of long absent and beloved friends
(Greece +y+). Those writers and artists who desired to depict something
other than a reunion with classical friends were confronted by the ideolog-
ical blinders of their audience.
If their contact with the Attic landscape caused the Athenians to be viewed as
the arbiters of taste for the politer world, that same contact also inspired
:: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
their noble simplicity, a phrase that made the ancient Greeks resemble late
eighteenth-century descriptions of the noble savage.
18
There are great simi-
larities between Winckelmanns depiction of the ancient Greeks and the ac-
counts from travelers of the manners and customs of South Sea islanders, as
Hateld noted (:). For example, Winckelmann said of the ancient Greeks:
In their dress they were professed followers of nature. No modern stiffen-
ing habit, no squeezing stays hindered Nature from forming easy beauty
(Webb ++). About a hundred years after Winckelmanns death, Ruskin
commented: The Greek lived in all things, a healthy, and, in a certain de-
gree, a perfect life. He had no morbid or sickly feeling of any kind. He was ac-
customed to face death without the slightest shirking, and to undergo all
kinds of bodily hardship without complaint, and to do whatever he supposed
right and honorable, in most cases, as a matter of course (Works j.:o).
Ruskin concluded his chapter Of Classical Landscape in Modern Painters
by stating that, at base, the ancient Greek was similar to a Scotch Presbyter-
ian Border farmer of a century or two back (:j), the difference being that
effect of softer climate and surrounding luxury, inducing the practice of var-
ious forms of polished art (:y).
The rst volume of Owensons novel related the encounter between a
dissolute and jaded aristocratic Englishman, a character much like Byrons
Harold and tantalizingly referred to as Lord B., and the simple, natural per-
sonality of Ida. At the end of the volume, the English lord, mistaking inno-
cence for gullibility, attempts to persuade Ida to leave Greece and become
his mistress since, considering systematic morals, he believed those of an
athenian could not be very rigid (I.+8). She must, therefore, be a kind of
pleasure-loving Ariadne (I.+y). He soon learns otherwise, for Ida dis-
misses his offer with the comment, Your arguments carry not a single con-
viction; they are untrue to nature, and must be false to reason (II.). Al-
though Owensons heroine asserts that the glory of Greece expired when
the inuence of nature was abandoned (I.+yo), Idas story begins not with
a critique of the degenerated state of Greece but with the debased state of
aristocratic England. Even before Greece becomes free, Idas rustic and
primitive world can teach England a lesson in morality and natural living.
Lord B., we nd out in volume of the novel, has been reformed by his
meeting with Ida and has left his rakish life behind him. Although without
the moral foundations found in Owenson, Byron also employed the image
of a Greek Arcadia in the second canto of Don Juan. The natural innocence
of Haide allows her to fall in love with and make love to Juan without pon-
dering the jaundiced compromises between love and marriage common
among women in Byrons England: Haide was Natures bride, and knew
not this; / Haide was Passions child, borne where the sun / Showers triple
light and scorches even the kiss / Of gazelle-eyed daughters (II.:o:.+o
+:).
19
As Marilyn Butler noted, Haide inhabits a kind of Eden, but sexu-
r w+ + + o a r v r v r + + n r s :
ality already exists there, and it is natural and good (Romantics, Rebels and
Reactionaries +y).
In the search for new cultural roots and alternative cultural politics, to
use Turners phrase, Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
looked to the inhabitants of primitive lands as well as to a glorious past. The
ancient Greeks could be offered as sterling examples of both high civiliza-
tion and noble savages, since they had reached artistic excellence without
the mechanization and urbanization of modern life. Further, the term
Greeks was used for a conation of the supposed qualities of Sparta and
Athens, which were considered the epitomes of noble simplicity and rened
elegance, respectively. The fusion of the primitive and the cultured is most
notable in Owensons Ida, but occurs in Hlderlins Hyperion as well. Per-
haps it was the welding of two deeply held but conicting desiresthe lure
of the simple life and the attraction of the big citywhich drew so many
European intellectuals to Hellenism. These expectations have also ac-
counted for the disappointment of so many travelers to Greece. One does
not go to Paris expecting rusticity nor to Wales or Maine expecting urbanity.
But on the same airplane ight from Athens one can still hear complaints
that Greece was too rustic or too urbane, depending upon whether the
speaker was looking for representations of Pericles and Aspasia or of shep-
herds of an imagined Arcadia.
In addition to nature and climate, the other element central to the ancient
Greek miracle was freedom. Winckelmann asserted: Art claims liberty: in
vain would nature produce her noblest offsprings, in a country where rigid
laws would choak [sic] her progressive growth, as in Egypt, that pretended
parent of sciences and arts; but in Greece, where, from their earliest youth,
the happy inhabitants were devoted to mirth and pleasure, where the narrow-
spirited formality never restrained the liberty of manners, the artist enjoyed
nature without a veil (Webb +++:o).
Here was the reason that the modern Greeks were only the latent descen-
dants of their ancient ancestors. Claude Adrienne Helvtius wrote in De
lsprit (+yj8): The physical position of the Greeks is still the same: why are
the present-day Greeks different from the Greeks of former times? It is be-
cause the form of the government changed; it is because, just like the water
that takes the form of the vessels in which it is poured, the character of na-
tions is susceptible to all sorts of forms; in all countries the spirit of govern-
ment makes the spirit of nations (tr. Augustinos +). Owenson remarked
more succinctly that the Greeks are only debased because they are no longer
free (I.). Once the Greeks regained their liberty, Nature would take its
course and mold the Greeks as it had done centuries earlier. When Hlder-
lins hero, Hyperion, joins the Greek camp, he announces that he is commit-
ting himself to the goal . . . where the young free state dawns and the pan-
theon of all Beauty rises from the soil of Greece (++). Hyperion considers
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
the restoration of Beauty, his ultimate goal, as a natural and necessary conse-
quence of an independent Greece.
Winckelmann never seriously concerned himself with the regeneration of
the Greeks. This may be due to the fact that he died in +y8, two years before
the revolt that stirred hopes of a Greek renewal. Yet it seems doubtful that
the German art historian would think that the Ideal, and the capital letter is
appropriate, could so easily be regained in modern times. A key element in
Winckelmanns thinking was the belatedness of his era. Just how far human-
ity had fallen from the golden age can be seen in the end of his description of
an artistic masterpiece, a torso of Hercules without head, arms, breast, or
legs (Webb +:):
Him art bemoans with me: for this work, which she might have op-
posed to the greatest discoveries of wit and meditation, and proud of
whose superior merits she might even now, as in her golden days, have
looked down on the homages of mankind; this very work, and perhaps
the last, which the united strength of her forces producedthis work
she now sees cruelly mangled, and, with many hundred others, almost
destroyed.But from these melancholy reections her Genius turns,
to teach us, from what remains, the ways that lead to perfection.
(Webb +:y)
The perfection mentioned at the end of this passage has more in common
with Platonic contemplation than participation in the events of the world. In
fact, one form of Hellenism sought a withdrawal from worldly surroundings
into the life of the mind. The goal was not the regeneration of the Greeks or
culture generally but rather the salvation of the individual through the con-
templation of ancient beauty. This did not necessarily require a voyage to
Greek shores, for one may, as Philip Marden noted in +oy, learn to ap-
preciate the beautiful in Greek thought without leaving home (:). But some
Hellenists found, or at least thought, that just as the climate of Greece aided
the contemplation of the ancients, it could also favor the individual who
went there in search of the ways that lead to perfection. In George Gis-
sings novel New Grub Street (+8+), Edwin Reardon, a struggling and im-
poverished writer, discusses with his fellow author Biffen his life after his
separation from his wife: The best moments of life are those when we con-
template beauty in the purely artistic spiritobjectively. I have had such
moments in Italy and Greece; times when I was a free spirit, utterly remote
from the temptations and harassing of sexual emotion. What we call love is
mere turmoil. Who wouldnt release himself from it for ever, if the possibil-
ity offered? ().
He then goes onto describe one of those moments, that marvelous sunset
at Athens when the Acropolis simply glowed and blazed, revealing a
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s :j
world which seems to me, when I recall it, beyond the human sphere,
bathed in diviner light, and providing a satisfaction innitely preferable to
sexual emotion (, yo). Reardon was a pure Hellenist, a direct descen-
dant of Winckelmann. Like Symonds in his description of Athens, Reardon
never interrupted his meditations to consider the present inhabitants of
Greece. Further, to become involved in the contemporary politics of Greece,
or any other country for that matter, would be submitting oneself to an extra
dose of the turmoil from which one longed to escape. Greece as the realm of
the intellectual ideal, especially as it was expressed in the works of Winckel-
mann, Schilling, Goethe, Coleridge, and Walter Pater, has a long tradition of
its own in later nineteenth-century English and American literature and
often serves as the conservative classicist counterpart to the legacy of liberal
philhellenism.
20
Authors with a more radical agenda, on the other hand, were extremely
quick to exploit the political dimensions of Winckelmanns Hellenism and to
make Athens the centerpiece of a revolutionary ideal. For philhellenes, as
Lambropoulos said, above all, Greece was the symbol of the general revival
of liberty (8, my italics). For example, in the rst canto of Shelleys Revolt
of Islam (+8+8), ancient Athens appears as the apogee of human freedom in
the battle against tyranny and evil:
Then Greece, arose, and to its bards and sages
In dream, the golden-pinioned Genii came,
Even where they slept amid the night of ages,
Steeping their hearts in divinest ame
Which thy breath kindled, Power of holiest name!
And oft in cycles since, when darkness gave
New weapons to thy foe, their sunlike fame
Upon the combat shonea light to save,
Like Paradise spread forth beyond the shadowy grave.
(I.:.o+)
Athens has a similar place in Ode to Liberty (+8:o), where Shelley said
that as One sun illumines Heaven (88), so Athens doth the world with thy
[Libertys] delight renew (o). The radical weekly the Examiner, edited by
Shelleys friend Leigh Hunt, challenged the notion that an admiration of
classical Greek art could be separated from the modern Greek struggle for
liberty: Will they be enraptured with the Elgin marbles; with the very
names of Phidias and Praxiteles . . . and not do what they can towards fur-
nishing their quota of men and money in favor of Greek genius no longer
petried, and against barbarians to whom the old Persians were demigods?
Scarcely not, or they can never again take up their Aeschylus and Sophocles
with comfort (Oct. y, +8:+, p. :y). The division between Hellenists and
: r u v a o

s s n + n ow
philhellenes throughout the nineteenth century was, in a nutshell, the differ-
ence between those who could read their Sophocles with comfort when
Greeks were ghting Turks and those who could not.
If for Hlderlin the regeneration of Greece would restore the pantheon of
all Beauty and if for Voltaire it would bring back the pantheon of all Reason,
for Shelley it meant a return of the pantheon of all Liberty. Discussing Shel-
leys response to the Greek War of Independence, Michael Scrivener wrote,
There is no question that Shelley wanted the Greeks to defeat the Turks in
that revolutionary war; this is the primary reason he wrote Hellas. But the
Greek side is to be admired only insofar as it is libertarian and democratic,
actually a rebirth of the Athenian demos (:). In a letter explaining the
setting of The Revolt of Islam, Shelley explained: The scene is supposed to
be laid in Constantinople & modern Greece, but without much attempt at
minute delineation of Mahometan manners. It is in fact a tale illustrative of
such a Revolution as might be supposed to take place in an European nation
(Letters of P. B. Shelley I.j).
21
Shelley undoubtedly chose modern Greece
as the scene for his revolutionary epic because the environment of Greece
was a natural incubator of liberty. But Greece in the poem stands for any
place in Europe or even America, and the renewal of the tradition of Greek
liberty anywhere becomes a regeneration of Shelleys imaginary Greece.
The lack of local details and color does not matter since Shelleys idealized
conception of Greece extends beyond such particulars.
While a contemplative, even mystical, form of Hellenism existed apart
from political philhellenism, political philhellenism was deeply imbued with
the spiritual dimensions of Hellenism from its beginnings until well into the
twentieth century.
22
Both Hlderlins Hyperion and Shelleys Laon must go
through a spiritual withdrawal from the world to renew their souls and nd
the truth before preparing to take part in their respective revolutions. Shelley
described the progression from individual awakening to national regenera-
tion in the preface to The Revolt of Islam:
It is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress
of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love
of mankind; its inuence in rening and making pure the most dar-
ing and uncommon impulses of the imagination, the understanding,
and the senses; its impatience at all the oppressions which are done
under the sun; its tendency to awaken public hope, and to enlighten
and improve mankind; the rapid effects of the application of that
tendency; the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery
and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom, the
bloodless dethronement of their oppressors. (Complete Poetical
Works II.+oo)
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s :y
Despite the failure of the revolution due to the treachery and barbarity
of hired soldiers and the confederacy of the Rulers of the World, Shel-
leys nal, Platonic message is about the transient nature of ignorance and
error, and the eternity of genius and virtue (+oo). Laons movement must
be nonviolent because the renewal and reformation of the individual soul
precedes mass action, and violence is anathema to those who have undergone
such spiritual transformation. Laon says of the revolution: If blood be
shed, tis but change and choice / Of bonds,from slavery to cowardice
(.:8.+jyj8). Laons public effort fails because all of humanity was not
ready for regeneration, but Laon triumphs personally by holding to his prin-
ciples and in the end is transported to the realm of the blessed. In Hlderlins
novel, Hyperions experience is similar to that of Laon. On the battleeld, he
was horried by the atrocities committed by his fellow Greeks and left the
cause in disillusionment. Yet Diotima had warned him before he had de-
parted for the Greek camp that his desire to move from private thought to
public action was premature and an act of hubris: This is vain pride . . . not
long ago you were more modest, not long ago you said I must still go away
and learn (+o8). For Hlderlin and Shelley, the liberty of Greece without
the consequent change in human understanding and behavior was not worth
consideration, let alone effort.
23
Winckelmann xed the period of Greek greatness in the fth century
ucr. In literary philhellenism, the moment of the Greek past that was to be
regenerated was even more specic, the time of the Persian Wars, precisely
o8o ucr. Hlderlins hero says that modern Greeks are descended
from the victors of Salamis. Owenson calls them descendants of the he-
roes of Marathon and Plataea (I.xxiv). Along with Thermopylae, these
three places would be the sacred sites of early philhellenism. Shelleys deci-
sion to make Hellas a sort of imitation of the Persae of Aeschylus, full of
lyric poetry was made within an already well established literary tradition
(Letters of P. B. Shelley II.). The Persian Wars were a remarkably bright
spot in ancient Greek history, when the disparate city-states were able to
work together and preserve their liberty against a more numerous foe. What
happened some hundred years later, when both Athens and Sparta alter-
nately allied themselves with the Persians to defeat their fellow Greeks, was
conveniently forgotten. An enduring feature of literary philhellenism was
the location of the struggle of the modern Greeks for freedom within a
Herodotean framework of the heroics of the Persian Wars to the exclusion of
the rest of Greek history.
Yet, once again, ancient Greek history had implications far beyond the
modern Greeks. In +88+, Denton Snider noted that Marathon stands for a
thousand battles; all other struggles for freedom, of which our Occident has
been full, are merely echoes, repetitions, imitations to a certain extent of that
:8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
great primitive action (++j). In Sniders view, ancient Greece, which has
created to a large extent what we may call the symbols of our Western world
and has provided the ideals by which we mould our work and to which we
seek, at least partially, to adjust our lives, belongs as much to us as to the
present inhabitants of Greece (++j). Thirty-seven years earlier, John Stuart
Mill wrote that the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history,
is more important than the battle of Hastings (Grotes History of Greece
:y). Marathon, in European eyes, is the preeminent symbol of Western
freedom, not simply Greek freedom.
The seamier side of Athenian democracy, especially its reputation for
demagoguery, never became a serious issue in discussions of the regenera-
tion of Greece. This neglect was not because historians or politicians were
unaware or uninterested in the weaknesses of Athenian democracy. As Jen-
nifer Tolbert Roberts has shown in Athens on Trial (+yj:oy), in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Athenian democracy was often
equated with mob rule and was anything but admired. Conservative or mod-
erate politicians and political thinkers in England and America formed a
master narrative of Greek history with Thucydides, not Herodotus, as the
dominant text. With the appearance of the volumes of William Mitfords
anti-Athenian History of Greece (+y8+8+o), Tories and liberals fought
over Athens like Greeks and Trojans over the body of Patroclus (Richard
Jenkyns +).
But the writers who constructed the parameters of the discourse of phil-
hellenism were, for the most part, liberals and radicals. St. Clair described
the leaders of the London Greek Committee during the Greek War of Inde-
pendence: They were at the extreme left of the political spectrum within
which British politics was then conducted (That Greece Might Still Be Free
+). Greek freedom was just one item on their list of activities, which in-
cluded Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, and the abolition of
slavery.
24
In fact, support for the Greeks in England in the +8:os suffered be-
cause of the character and opinions of their most vigorous supporters. With
the possible exceptions of the years of Gladstone and Lloyd George, philhel-
lenism was never ofcially embraced by the institutional power structures in
any country.
25
Indeed, Western governments had some cause to look upon the philhel-
lenic movement with a skeptical eye, since the desire of many philhellenes
was to spread revolution from Greece to Italy, Ireland, and the rest of the
world. Daniel Webster pointedly stated that in Europe the Grecian revolu-
tion has been discouraged, discountenanced, and denounced for no other
reason but because it is a revolution (, his italics). Speaking of the attitude
of the rulers of Europe toward the possibility of Greek freedom, Shelley re-
marked in the preface to Hellas: Well do these destroyers of mankind know
their enemy, when they impute the insurrection of Greece to the same spirit
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s :
before which they tremble throughout the rest of Europe, and that enemy
well knows the power and cunning of its opponents, and watches the mo-
ment of their approaching weakness and inevitable division to wrest the
bloody sceptres from their grasp (Shelleys Poetry and Prose +o). Earlier in
the preface he said that the apathy of the rulers of the civilized world to the
Greek revolution is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of
the shows of this mortal scene (o8).
26
But the apathy of those rulers was
hardly inexplicable when authors like Shelley announced that victory in
Greece would be a step toward the demise of European monarchy. The
revolutionizing of the Greek insurrection was, to a large extent, itself a
misreading, or Europeanization, of the goals and aims of the Greek insurrec-
tion by authors with their own agendas.
A fair number of the philhellenes who fought in the Greek War of Inde-
pendence, especially the French and Italian volunteers, had been involved in
revolutionary movements in their own countries and in Spain before they
landed in Greece.
27
On July +, +8:+, the Examiner noted, Turkey is now the
only theatre of events which excites any immediate interest among the other
nations of Europe (p. oy). Byron wryly summed up the experience of
these partisans of liberty in two untitled stanzas written in +8:o:
When a man hath no freedom to ght for at home,
Let him combat for that of his neighbors;
Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,
And get knockd on the head for his labors.
To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,
And is always as nobly requited;
So battle for freedom wherever you can,
And, if not shot or hangd, youll get knighted.
(CPW IV, p. :o)
The debate about liberty in general in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries was often waged by means of classical analogies. The anony-
mous French drama Les Thermopyles (+y+) and Nicholas Franois Guil-
lards opera Miltiade Marathon (+y) were more directly connected with
the French Revolution than with ancient Greek history.
28
One of the most
popular plays on the English and American stage in the late eighteenth cen-
tury was Arthur Murphys Grecian Daughter (rst produced in +yy:), which
recounts the victory of Timoleon and the supporters of liberty over Diony-
sius, the tyrant of Syracuse, who, ttingly, depended upon Punic mercenar-
ies to maintain his position. The rhetoric about freedom in the drama suits
the classical subject and the larger cultural concern with freedom and liberty,
which led within a few years to the American Revolution. Murphy never
o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
alluded to the rebellion of +yyo nor to the possibility of the regeneration of
the Greeks in this work, but his play and similar artistic productions helped
to lay the foundation for interest in a modern Greek revival through its por-
trayal of the heroism of their ancestors in the face of tyranny. The connec-
tion of classical places and gures such as Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis,
Themistocles, and Leonidas with the cause of liberty in contemporary
France and America helped to x modern Greece within a discourse of revo-
lution. Before anyone in the West had heard any reasons from the Greeks for
their War of Independence in +8:+, Western preconceptions had already
provided the answer. An uprising in modern Greece was, simply by being in
Greece, caught up in the rhetoric of European partisan politics in a unique
way. Even the Italian Risorgimento, by the fact that it was called Italian and
not Roman, was less burdened by established preconceptions.
A good analogy for philhellenism in the rst decades of the nineteenth
century is the Spanish Civil War of the +os, as Jusdanis observed (+).
That struggle also attracted writers to a cause that was larger than the battle-
elds of Spain. Embracing either the Loyalist side in Spain or liberty in
Greece was as much a protest against government at home as it was sympathy
for those ghting abroad. Finally, support for these two struggles in litera-
ture was as pronounced as the lack of practical support by Western govern-
ments, as though the outpouring of writing was an embarrassed response to
the realpolitik of politicians. In both cases, few artistic voices were raised
against the voluminous pages of the literary Left. In fact, one is even less
likely to nd a poem in English advocating Turkish rule in Greece (I have not
found a single one), than a verse encomium of Franco (see Roy Campbells
Flowering Rie). The numerous philhellenic works written in England
and France in the early nineteenth century, like those for the Spanish Loyal-
ists in the +os, can give a misleading impression. Woodhouse observed,
Philhellenes were always a minority in England (+j:), and while the move-
ment was stronger in France and America, it never had enough public sup-
port to sway those in power. Still, from the standpoint of literature, it was a
prominent and noisy minority. Philhellenic writers would never wholly for-
get their radical roots. In +8yy, Edward Augustus Freeman still claimed that
philhellenism was one of the most prominent and distinctive signs of liberal
sentiment (Historical Essays o8). In +8y, poet William Cory commented
that real old Tory spirit . . . comes out unmistakably in a man who sneers at
the Greeks. It is, for once in a way, a thoroughly good test of a Liberal to ask
whether he favors or spites that nation (quoted in Esher +8). Political phil-
hellenism, as Robert Byron observed in +:, was an offshoot of the French
Revolution, a bastard sister of Liberty (Byzantine Achievement ). To be
a conservative philhellene would always be an oxymoron, since philhellenism
was built on the fact that liberty in Greece was the objective correlative of
some kind of transformation in the rest of the Western world.
29
r w+ + + o a r v r v r + + n r s +
In his poem America, Allen Ginsberg composed a holy litany of left-
ist causes of the United States in the twentieth century:
America free Tom Mooney.
America save the Spanish Loyalists.
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die.
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
(Collected Poems +y)
In the nineteenth century, support for the Greek cause became part of a
holy litany in the struggle for the liberty of nations. When Jules Verne
wanted to indicate Captain Nemos political convictions in Twenty Thousand
Leagues under the Sea, he did so by means of the portraits hanging in the cap-
tains bedroom: Kociuzko, the hero whose dying words were Finis Poloniae;
Botzaris, the Leonidas of modern Greece; OConnell, the defender of Ire-
land; Washington, the father of the American union; Manin, the Italian pa-
triot; Lincoln, who was shot by a defender of slavery; and nally that martyr
of the emancipation of the black race, John Brown hanging from the gibbet,
just as Victor Hugo had so gruesomely drawn him (o). Verne later sig-
naled Nemos commitment to the cause of oppressed races when the cap-
tain stops at Crete to support the insurrection of the late +8os. In his novel
about the Greco-Turkish War of +8y, The Broom of the War God, Henry
Noel Brailsford provided the following portrait of a philhellene in the For-
eign Legion: He cared something for the fate of Greece, yes, he was ghting
for the national idea, for the freedom of Crete. He would ght for that cause
in Poland, in the Transvaal, wherever a down-trodden race asserted its indi-
viduality. He was here in the Legion chiey that he might learn the use of
arms, for some day he hoped to march under the green banner of the Irish re-
public (+:+::).
But if from an intra-European perspective philhellenism seemed pro-
gressive and revolutionary, from an extra-European perspective it looked
rather conservative and narrow-minded.
30
The analogy between the Persian
and Ottoman empires placed the struggle for liberty in Greece in an East-
versus-West framework in which East was evil and West was good. For if the
rulers of Europe were the foes of liberty, the terrible despots and bloody
tyrants of the East were much worse. In the preface to Hellas, Shelley said,
But for Greece, Rome the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of
our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we
might still have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have ar-
rived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China or
Japan possess (Shelleys Poetry and Prose o). He used Othman, the name
of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, as the embodiment of tyranny in The
Revolt of Islam. Winckelmann had said that art could never ourish where
: r u v a o

s s n + n ow
rigid laws would choak her progressive growth, as in Eygpt. And Chateau-
briand asserted that the Turks are no ordinary oppressors, though they have
found apologists. A proconsul might be a monster of lust, of avarice, and of
cruelty, but all proconsuls did not delight, systematically and from a spirit of
religion, in overthrowing monuments of civilisation and of the arts, in cut-
ting down trees, in destroying harvests, nay, even whole generations; and this
the Turks have done every day of their lives (+8+). During the Greek War of
Independence, a British resident in Greece wrote in an open letter to Prime
Minister George Canning:
It has been, also, endeavored to misrepresent the cause of Greece, by
confounding her struggles and exertions with the variety of distur-
bances which so lately have agitated the heart of Europe to its core; to
reduce it to the standard of attempted revolutions in the extensive
peninsulas of Italy, and Spain. . . . With reference to the countries I
have mentioned, a partial advancement of liberty (in comparison I
mean to Greece), acts, considered by the Government as precaution-
ary and salutary, by the governed as dangerous and wrong; not wrest-
ing from them entirely the privileges whereof they were formerly
possessed, but removing from that weight and estimation which they
supposed themselves entitled to enjoy, was sufcient to put the multi-
tude at issue with its ruler. . . . With the Greeks it is not so; the obliga-
tion which forces that nation to extremes, is so prominently marked
. . . as to exhibit them to the universe, a sad and solitary example of
the restlessness resulting from power without limits, and passion
without rule. (Greece to the Close of +8:j, in Bulwer, An Autumn
in Greece +++)
The author of this letter was a liberal who supported the independence
movements in Italy and Spain. Yet he still could not bring himself to see the
plight of a northern Italian population under the absolute monarchy of Aus-
tria as equivalent to the position of the Greeks under the Turks. European
governments might be bad by degrees, but the Turks were ruthlessness in-
carnate. Some thinkers could not even t the Turks into the progressive and
evolutionary conception of history prevalent in the Victorian age. For exam-
ple, Edward Augustus Freeman declared: The Turkish domination of
Athens can hardly be called a period of the history of Athens. It is a mere
break, a time during which Athens ceased to be (Historical Essays :8).
Within this view of the East lies both fear of the Eastern Other and a dis-
missal of the East as incapable of progress as it was dened in the West. In his
speech in support of the Greeks during the War of Independence, Daniel
Webster acknowledged, In various parts of India, to be sure, the govern-
ment is bad enough; but there it is a government of barbarians over barbar-
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s
ians, and the feeling of oppression, of course, is not so keen (+). It is signif-
icant to note that interest in the idea of the regeneration of Greece increases
around +yy+, the same period when Raymond Schwab dates the Oriental Re-
naissance in the West, a movement that looked to texts and beliefs from India,
China, and the rest of Asia as an inspiration for Western thinking (y). In the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Orientalism was seen as another so-
lution to Western cultural malaise. In Flauberts novel Bouvard and Pcuchet,
Bouvard sees the future of Humanity in a cheerful light. Modern man is
progressing. Europe will be regenerated by Asia. The historical law being
that civilisation goes from East to West (j). The regeneration of the West
by the East did not, of course, preclude Western colonization of the East.
Just as, according to Vergil, the Greeks had educated Rome through the
Roman conquest of Greece, so the East would teach civilization to the West
by means of Western colonization of the East.
Philhellenism, and to some degree transcendental Hellenism as well, can
be viewed as a competing ideology to Orientalism, one that sees the West re-
generated by returning to its Western roots. This may partly explain the
relentlessly Apollonian nature of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century Hellenism developed by Winckelmann. Dionysus came from Asia
bearing Asian mysteries, which challenged the rationality of the West. Intel-
lectuals who wanted a regeneration of the West from Greece may have read
The Bacchae, but their ur-text was The Persians of Aeschylus. Modern Greece
might lie on the borders of the East, could even be considered by some to be
part of the East, but Greek regeneration was part of a Western ideology.
31
In-
deed, the author of the letter to Canning echoed the moral of Aeschyluss
Persians when he said that in the fteenth century the Mahometans were
seduced to pass from Asia to Europe, and overleap the boundaries which
Nature seemed to give them (in Bulwer, Autumn in Greece :j:).
At a public meeting of the London Greek Committee on May +j, +8:,
Lord John Russell proposed a motion that the liberation of that unhappy
country [Greece] affords the cheering prospects of being able to enlarge the
limit of Christianity and civilization (quoted in St. Clair, That Greece Might
Still Be Free +). In +8::, William Wilberforce said of Western policy to-
ward Turkey: It is a disgrace to all Powers of Europe that, long ere now, they
have not made a simultaneous effort and driven back a nation of barbarians,
the inveterate enemies of Christianity and freedom into Asia (quoted in
Coupland ). In his +8o Horae Ionicae, W. R. Wright celebrated the defeat
of the Turkish attack on the island of Corfu by the Venetians in +y+, which
ended the last attempt by the Ottomans to expand their empire westward:
Let Europe, with exulting voice, recall
The nal triumph of the Christian sword;
How, still displayd, the winged lion ew
r u v a o

s s n + n ow
Victorious oer the ramparts of Corfu:
While the erce Saracen, oerwhelmd with shame,
Despairing ed, and cursd the Christian name.
(:o)
The Crusading opposition between Christian and Muslim had a long
history in European letters and, as the above quotations show, might seem a
natural extension of the Europe-versus-Asia ideology within which the mer-
its of Greek independence were discussed and argued. There were a few
clergymen in England who saw the issue of Greek liberation in overtly reli-
gious terms, the most prominent being Thomas S. Hughes. Hughes, who
called for the extermination of Turks in Europe, should be viewed as a rabid
opponent of Islam rather than as a supporter of the Greeks.
32
Hughes was
certainly not motivated by sympathy for the Christianity that he had encoun-
tered in Greece during his travels, which he dismissed as the ridiculous and
absurd mummeries of the Greek Church (Travels II.y).
The religious dimension of the struggle between East and West in early
English philhellenic literature, although always present, was rarely stressed.
33
For example, in her long poem Modern Greece (+8+y), Felicia Hemans re-
ferred to the minaret as the Landmark of slavery, towering oer the waste
and said that Within its precinct not a ower may smile, / Nor dew nor sun-
shine fertilize the ground; / Nor wild birds music oat oer zephyrs breath,
/ But all in silence round, and solitude, and death (st. :). But the next
stanza made clear that Hemans was not attacking Islam in general but con-
temporary Ottoman rule in Greece. In medieval Spain and Baghdad, He-
mans wrote, Islam was the center of learning:
For other inuence poured the Crescents light
Oer conquered realms, in ages past away;
Full and alone it beamed, intensely bright
While distant climes in midnight darkness lay.
(st. )
In Shelleys Hellas, the phantom of the conqueror of Constantinople, Ma-
homet II, returns to tell the present Ottoman ruler that Islam must fall
(888), but this is presented in terms of natural decline (A later Empire nods
in its decay, 8yo) rather than because the religion itself is more inherently
wrong or misguided than Christianity.
34
Owenson, generally more hostile
to Islam, spoke deprecatingly of the self-denial of Ramazan (Ramadan),
when the dogma of puerile superstition holds in subjection the inuence
of climate, of habit, and of inclination; when nature herself stands checked!
. . . Such is the inuence of a bigoted faith on a people, who, with the excep-
tion of the time of this annual fast, are, of all nations, the most devoted to the
r w+ + + o a r v r v r + + n r s j
pleasure of the senses! (III.++). But her heroine, while nominally Chris-
tian, never enters a church nor celebrates a Christian ritual in the course of
four volumes. Ida is a modern Athenian, and her conversation is of Epicurus,
Demosthenes, and Sophocles, not of saints and martyrs.
35
Even in its most philosophic and abstruse form, such as in The Revolt of
Islam, philhellenic literature was anti-Turkish and anti-Eastern and so by ex-
tension at times employed anti-Muslim language. Chateaubriand, for exam-
ple, wrote, In the book of Mahomet, there is no principle of civilisation, no
precept that can impart elevation to the character; that book inculcates nei-
ther a hatred of tyranny, nor a love of independence (+8o8+). But few phil-
hellenes of the sword or the pen were clergymen or, for that matter, regular
Christian believers. In his letter to Thomas Love Peacock describing a visit to
Pompeii, which he referred to as a Greek city, Shelley expressed a common
sentiment when he named Christianity as one of the factors that had con-
tributed to mankinds decline: O, but for that series of wretched wars which
terminated in the Roman conquest of the world, but for the Christian reli-
gion which put a nishing stroke to the antient system, but for the changes
which conducted Athens to its ruins, to what an eminence might not human-
ity have arrived! (Letters of P. B. Shelley II.yj). One of the great attractions
of the ancient Greeks was that they had never been touched by the deleteri-
ous strictures of Christianity, particularly in matters relating to sex. Greece
was connected to subversive social ideas like toleration of homosexuality and
the abolition of marriage, as in Wilhelm Heinses +y8j novel, Ardinghello und
die glckseligen Inseln, where a New Hellas of free love is established on the is-
land of Naxos.
36
A large number of philhellenic authors would not accept the
link between Christianity and civilization or freedom made by Russell and
Wilberforce; many hoped that the liberation of Greece would be as much a
blow to the Christian faith as it would be to Islam. Those who were inspired
by the idea of the regeneration of Greece wanted to challenge the status quo
in the social as well as the political realm.
Literary philhellenism, then, inherently contained from its inception seri-
ous tensions in language and ideas. The regeneration of Greece was con-
ceived and expressed as a subversion of the dominant culture of Europe both
politically and socially. But on another level, the regeneration of Greece was
depicted and offered as a demonstration of the superiority of Europe over
Asia. The Crusading language of religious difference was often used to un-
derscore the separation of Europe from Asia, even though many philhellenic
writers desired to change or undermine the religious foundation that had
given rise to a Crusading outlook. Further, within the larger East-versus-
West framework, which incorporates a Muslim-versus-Christian opposition,
literary philhellenism in general was, as McGann said of Shelleys Hellas,
open to a political exploitation by Europes imperialist power (Romantic
Ideology +:j). Such exploitation was not a complete misuse of literary
r u v a o

s s n + n o w
philhellenism, for however much philhellenism wanted to change conditions
in the West, it held to a belief in the superiority of the West because of its
Greek/European heritage.
37
Yet while literary philhellenism sometimes uses the language and con-
cepts of the contemporary literature of Western imperialist expansion, it
does not t easily into the model of Western imperialist encounters with the
East constructed by Edward Said. For in this case, the Greeks were subju-
gated by the Turks, a people of the East, and if Greece cannot technically be
called a colony of the Turks, the inhabitants were certainly colonized and had
a colonial mentality. Further, after +yyo, the Greeks often appealed to Eu-
rope for assistance against what they considered an occupying force. While
certain European governments might have desired to incorporate Greece
into their own empires, as they had other Ottoman possessions, the great ma-
jority of philhellenes of both the pen and the sword were adamant that the
only acceptable result was independence for Greece. The cultural ambigui-
ties of early philhellenism can be seen from the following sentence of Nigel
Leasks concerning Shelley: The faith of The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus
Unbound, and Hellas, lies in a ricorso of liberty spreading over the world from
the revolutionary liberation of the long oppressed East (+o8). One could
rewrite the end of this statement to read: the revolutionary liberation of the
source of Western culture long oppressed by the East. Both formulations
would be correct, since the rediscovered fountain of European civilization
was within the oppressed East, but it was a part, according to the Greeks
themselves, that was oppressed by other Easterners.
Despite the shared goal of Greek freedom, however, there were serious
tensions in the relationship between the philhellenes and the Greeks. For if
philhellenes did not want to colonize Greece in a political sense, they cer-
tainly intended to colonize it culturally, albeit with what they thought to be
its own cultural past. Henry Holland ended his account of his travels
through Greece in +8+:+8+ with the following thought:
I certainly am far from believing that the ancient Greeks, with all their
peculiarities of natural spirit and usage, will be revived in the people
who now inhabit the country. The race has undergone many changes
the condition of the surrounding world still more. But this belief is
by no means necessary to the question; and it still remains a matter of
interesting speculation, whether a nation may not be created in this
part of Europe, either through its own or foreign efforts, which may
be capable of bearing a part in the affairs and events of the civilized
world. (jo+)
Such a view of the Greek future was, and to some extent remains, rare in-
deed. Most Westerners, like Voltaire, thought the regeneration of ancient
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s y
Greece was indeed necessary to the question. They had no interest in al-
lowing modern Greeks to be modern Greeks.
Modern Greek culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century owed
more to Byzantium than to ancient Athens. Many Greeks desired a restora-
tion of the Greek Empire centered on Constantinople. Byron expressed this
yearning during his description of Carnival in Constantinople:
And whose more rife with merriment than thine,
Oh Stamboul! once the empress of their reign?
Though turbans now pollute Sophias shrine,
And Greece her very altars eyes in vain:
(Alas! her woes still pervade my strain!)
(Childe Harold II.y.yyj+)
And also in this couplet:
The city won for Allah from the Giaour,
The Giaour from Othmans race again may wrest.
(Childe Harold II.yy.y:o)
The Greeks might eye the altars of St. Sophia and, as the legend goes,
long for the last emperor, Constantine XI, to appear from the walls of the
church and lead the Greeks to victory, but for Westerners the centuries of
Byzantium were best forgotten. The general opinion was that during the
long decline and fall, which Gibbon documented in the last half of the eigh-
teenth century, Whatever arts and sciences, whatever virtues might have
been found in antient times among the Greek republicans, seem to have been
obscured, or totally lost, under their emperors. The present Greeks have not
a trace of them remaining (James Porter ::y). As mentioned above, rad-
ical philhellenes were not attracted to the Orthodox faith of the Greeks, and
Christians in the West considered it a debased form of Christianity in need of
instruction.
38
The fall of Constantinople in +j, which for Greeks constitutes the
dening moment of their history, was the single event of Byzantine history
that had any currency in philhellenic writing. Felicia Hemans described the
fall of the city and the death of Constantine XI in Modern Greece (+8+y) and
at greater length in The Last Constantine (+8:). But in both works she
made numerous allusions to the Persian Wars. For example, discussing the
fall of Constantinople in Modern Greece, she wrote: Who from the dead at
Marathon arose / all armd (st. +), and the sound of the approaching Ot-
toman army in The Last Constantine resembled the noise the wind bore
when, of old, / Dark Asia sent her battle-myriads oer / Th indignant wave
which would not be contolld, / But past the Persian chains, in boundless
8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
freedom rolld (st. ). Hemans placed the capture of the city in the context
of the Herodotean struggle between Europe and Asia. Like many early phil-
hellenic writers, she appropriated the fall of Constantinople and subsumed
it into the desire to revive Athens. So did Shelley in Hellas, where his vision
of the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks was set within the frame-
work of The Persians. In The Siege of Corinth, Byron repeatedly presented
the Venetian loss of Greece in the early eighteenth century against the back-
ground of the Persian Wars, as in the lines: But vain her [Freedoms] voice,
till better days / Dawn in those yet unremembered rays / Which shone upon
the Persian ying, / And saw the Spartan smile in dying (+.+).
Some writers, like Hlderlin and, for the most part, Owenson, simply ig-
nored Greeces medieval past altogether and focused only on a revival of the
ancient past.
After the Greeks failed to gain their freedom in +yyo, a few of the rst ardent
philhellenic authors, notably Voltaire, gave up their dreams of a New
Athens.
39
But for most the hopes raised by the revolt were not so easily extin-
guished. Over the next decades, the smallest sign of unrest in Greece would
nd a resonance in English literature. During the war between Russia and
Turkey from +y8y to +y:, the Russians encouraged pirates to disrupt Ot-
toman sea trafc in the eastern Mediterranean. In typically acerbic fashion,
Finlay remarked, Few accounts of the scenes of bloodshed enacted by the
pirates have been preserved; the wail of the murdered has found no echo,
while infatuated literati have deemed it patriotic to represent every priva-
teersman as a Themistocles and every Klepht as a Leonidas (j::yo).
The most renowned piratical Themistocles was Lambros Katsonis or
Canziani. Canziani, whose base was in the southern Peloponnesus, terror-
ized shipping for two years until the French assisted the Ottoman navy in
ending his career (Finlay j::y:y). In Owensons Woman; or, Ida of Athens,
however, the young hero, Osmyn, goes to Thebes, where he understood the
heroic Lambro Canziani then was (II.+++; see also I.:++, where Greek gal-
ley slaves sing of the feats of Lambro Canziani while at their oars). A note
for this sentence said that Canziani joined the Russian navy out of hatred of
the Turks and with the assistance of Greek patriots, tted out twelve small
vessels. But the Russians, obliged to suspend the war against the Turks,
found it more expedient to check the French revolution than to restore lib-
erty to the oppressed Greeks; and Lambro, after many heroic feats, and im-
portant captures, was necessitated to disperse his little eet (II.:yo). In The
Bride of Abydos, Byrons hero, Selim, plans to join a lawless brood among
whom are a few who aspire to higher thoughts:
The last of Lambros patriots there
Anticipated freedom share;
r w + + + o a r v r v r + + n r s
And oft around the cavern re
On visionary schemes debate,
To snatch the Rayahs from their fate
(II.:o.8o8)
Byron attached a note that read: Lambro Canzani [sic], a Greek, famous for
his efforts in +y8o for the independence of his country; abandoned by the
Russians he became a pirate, and the Archipelago was the scene of his enter-
prizes. He is said to be still alive in Petersburg. He and Riga are the two most
celebrated of the Greek revolutionists (CPW III, p. +). Canzianis name
also appears in Hopes Anastasius II.j; Catherine Grace Garnetts Reine
Canziani (+8:j), whose heroine, the love interest of a hero based on Byron, is
the daughter of the legendary Lambro; and Agnes Stricklands narrative
poem of +8, Demetrius (y, +y). The hopes of a Greek revival led Owenson,
Byron, and Hobhouse (Journey II.8) to immortalize the exploits of a
simple rufan. If, as seems likely, the pirate Lambro of Don Juan is modeled
on the famous corsair Canziani, Byron eventually provided a far more accu-
rate picture of this celebrated revolutionist:
A sher therefore was he,though of men,
Like Peter the Apostle,and he shd
For wandering merchant vessels, now and then
And sometimes caught as many as he wishd.
The cargoes he conscated, and gain
He sought in the slave-market too, and dishd
Full many a morsel for that Turkish trade,
By which, no doubt, a good deal may be made.
(II.+:.+oo+8)
In +yo, also in connection with the Russo-Turkish war, the Suliots, an
Albanian Christian tribe dwelling in a mountainous region of northwestern
Greece, rose in rebellion and plundered the villages in the surrounding
plains. Although they received none of the promised assistance from Russia,
in +y: they were able to make a favorable treaty with Ali Pasha of Yanina,
the ruler of the region. But in +yy, Ali set out to conquer the Suliots. The
mountain tribe managed to hold out for several years. In +8o, when Alis
victorious forces appeared, six men and twenty-two women threw them-
selves over a precipice behind the village to avoid falling into the hands of
their inhuman persecutors. Albanian soldiers, on returning to Joannina, de-
clared they saw several young women throw their children from the rock, and
then spring down themselves (Finlay :j+).
This event, which occurred among an obscure people in an obscure area,
became another piece of evidence that the spirit of freedom lived on in the
o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
modern Greeks. As W. R. Wright described his voyage among the Ionian is-
lands in Horae Ionicae (+8o):
Mark on the eastern shore where Parga lies,
And Sullis crags in distant prospect rise;
The last of the ancient Greeks, unknown to fame,
Her sons preservd the unconquerable ame
That erst on freedoms sacred altar glowd.
(:)
40
The Suliots were hardly unknown to fame. They appear, among other
places, in stanza of Felicia Hemanss Modern Greece, as the high point of a
description of a journey of Freedom through modern Greece:
But from the hills the radiance of her [Freedoms] smile
Hath vanished long, her step hath ed afar,
Oer Sulis frenzied rocks she paused awhile,
Kindling the watch-res of mountain-war,
And brightly glowd her ardent spirit there.
In the next stanza (jo), Hemans tells how a Suliot mother, a tting rival to
a Spartan mother, in dread delirium hurled to death her free-born infant,
neer to be a slave. Hemans returned to this incident in the +8:os in her
poem The Suliote Mother. Byron referred to the Suliot rebellion in Childe
Harold II.y.:+: and added the note: Five thousand Suliotes, among the
rocks and in the castle of Suli, withstood o,ooo Albanians for eighteen
years: the castle was at last taken by bribery. In this contest there were several
acts performed not unworthy of the better days of Greece (CPW II, p. +j).
The leap of the Suliot women was so well known by the middle of the nine-
teenth century that Edward Lear could evoke the event in the painting The
Rocks of Suli by having the gures look over a precipice (reproduced in Ed-
ward Lear in the Levant +).
41
In the Suliot story, Wright, Hemans, Byron,
and Lear saw signs of the survival of the ancient Greek devotion to freedom.
Whatever the real ethnic origins of the Suliots, in Western literature they
would be Greeks. Since +yyo the literati, as Finlay called them, had been
watching for any evidence of the survival and revival of the ancient Hellenes.
When the Greek War of Independence began in +8:+, the pump of poetic
inspiration had been primed for ve decades. The subsequent ood of phil-
hellenic verse was only to be expected.
Hlderlin ended his epistolary novel Hyperion with the two words nachstens
mehr, more soon. In the book, the ending symbolizes the fragmentary and
incomplete state of the heros bildungsroman. Hlderlin wants us to imag-
r w+ + + o a r v r v r + + n r s +
ine that Hyperion would write another letter to Bellarmin about his search
for personal renewal and his desire to revive Greece. He does not intend us to
read the ending metatextually, that there would be more soon on the same
subject from a different writer. Yet when reading the conclusion of one of
the most important early philhellenic works, it is hard not to see Byron on
the horizon even if, as seems likely, Byron had never read Hyperion. For in
the history of literary philhellenism, the last two words of Hyperion make
Hlderlin appear a literary John the Baptist, one who lost his mind if not his
head, for the poet-Christ who would die at Easter in Missolonghi. There
would be more soon.
2
Greeces of Byron and of Homer
On October :o, +8:y, the decisive engagement of the Greek War of Inde-
pendence was fought in the bay of Navarino in western Greece. A eet of
eighty-two Ottoman and Egyptian ships was all but annihilated by a force of
twenty-seven ships from England, France, and Russia. The combatants
were not at war. The European squadron had been sent to enforce an
armistice between the Greeks and their Muslim opponents. The armistice
had been agreed upon by the three European powers, but the Ottoman gov-
ernment had not accepted the proposed settlement. Admiral Edward Cod-
rington, the commander of the Allied force, chose to follow and impede the
movement of the Muslim eet, while Greek ships continued to maneuver
without restraint. Tension between the Allied contingent and the Muslims
was already high when Codrington decided to take his twenty-seven ships
into the two-by-three-mile bay of Navarino, where the Muslim navy was an-
chored. His provocative action had a predictable result. Shots red at the Al-
lies were returned; the conict escalated into a full-scale battle; and four
hours later only twenty-four of the eighty-two vessels of the Muslim eet
remained. Despite the superiority of his land forces, the Egyptian general,
Ibrahim, son of the Egyptian ruler, Mohammed Ali, could no longer protect
his vital routes of supply by sea. In the summer of +8:8, French soldiers
landed in the Peloponnesus to supervise the withdrawal of the Egyptian
army. By October of that year, the Greeks were free, at least from the Turks
(Finlay y:+:+, :y:8).
No Greeks fought at Navarino, an irony that did not check the celebra-
tions of armchair philhellenes in England and France. The Greeks were, in
fact, very close to defeat in the fall of +8:y until the providential event at
Navarino changed the course of the war.
1
Still, the Greeks had accomplished
a remarkable, and unexpected, feat. For more than six years, since +8:+, they
had sustained their rebellion against enormous odds and were still in the eld
to benet from Codringtons action. They had received needed money and
volunteers from abroad, but it was the effort and sacrice of ordinary Greeks
in a bitter guerrilla war that had kept the struggle going. Even the acerbic and
:
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a
critical philhellene-turned-historian George Finlay said, The Greek Revo-
lution was emphatically the work of the people. The leaders generally proved
unt for the position they occupied, but the people never wavered in the con-
test, from the day they took up arms (:+). In the fall of +8:8, the Greeks
still did not have a country, an effective government, or even a common vi-
sion of the future. Few nations have achieved their liberty with so little no-
tion of what to do with it. Even fewer have been confronted with such great
expectations of a total transformation of their politics and culture.
The battle of Navarino embarrassed the English government. The king in
a speech to Parliament all but apologized to the sultan by referring to the ac-
tion as an untoward event, and Codrington was recalled as commander of
the Mediterranean squadron for misapprehending his instructions (Fin-
lay, y::+). England was in the awkward position of having helped to free
Greece without desiring or approving of the result. France, which had also
been embarrassed after the battle, adjusted to circumstances and embraced
Greek independence. Only Russia was elated by Navarino and promptly de-
clared war on Turkey to take advantage of the weakness of the Ottoman navy
in the Black Sea.
Among the dozens of poems written to celebrate the battle was Victor
Hugos Navarin, composed in November +8:y. In the second section,
Hugo addressed the two Greeces, modern and ancient:
Grces de Byron et dHomre
Toi, notre soeur, toi, notre mre,
Chantez! si votre voix amre
Ne sest pas teinte crier.
(II.j8)
[Greeces of Byron and of Homer
You, our sister, you, our mother,
Sing! If your bitter voice
Has not been extinguished by crying.]
Hugo dened the two Greeces by their perceived relationship to the rest
of Europe and by the two poets whose works form the dominant texts of
the country in the Western imagination. Ancient Greece, our mother,
is the Grce dHomre because it was through ancient Greek poetry,
especially the epics of the blind bard, that Hugo and his contemporaries
would approach and understand the past. However much Europeans might
have misread or misunderstood these ancient sources, they began with the
original writing of the Greeks and often spent numerous hours laboriously
learning classical Greek in order to discover the real Athens and Sparta.
But when the French author calls modern Greece the Grce de Byron, he
r u v a o

s s n + n o w
acknowledges that the medium through which Western Europeans knew the
Greece of the present was the verse of a contemporary English poet.
2
In the
nineteenth-century Western mind, modern Greece, although contemporary,
stood at a further remove than the Greece of antiquity. John Gennadius un-
derscored the point when, in the preface to his +88+ translation of D. Bikelass
novel Loukis Laras, he acknowledged that the translation into English of a
modern Greek tale is a literary enterprise so unusual, if not to say unprece-
dented, that it calls for some explanation, if not for apology (i).
The poets of Hugos two Greeces help to illustrate the pervasive percep-
tual dichotomy between ancient/pagan/Westernized Greece and modern/
Orthodox Christian/Oriental Greece. As the Western ideal of culture and
civilization, antiquity must be carefully studied in order that Europeans can
learn how to improve themselves. But modern Greece is known through
Western observers, chiey Byron, who, instead of learning from or even
about modern Greece, view themselves as advisers for the reclamation of the
lost Greek past. In Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, Byron counseled the Greeks
as to how they can regenerate themselves:
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? no!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers low,
But not for you will Freedoms altars ame.
Shades of the Helots! triumph oer your foe!
Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;
Thy glorious day is over, but not thine years of shame.
(II.y.y:o:8)
Byron assumed that the modern Greek view of liberation was consistent
with his own, shaped by the revolutionary tradition of late eighteenth-cen-
tury Europe and based on a Western liberal/radical concept of freedom.
Many Greeks might in fact have preferred to be part of an Orthodox empire,
such as Russia, or simply achieve greater autonomy under Ottoman rule. But
the narrator of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage does not stop to ask what a modern
Greek desires, he knows what they should want even if they might disagree:
This must he feel, the true-born son of Greece, / If Greece one true-born
patriot still can boast (II.8.y88). If a Greek did not feel about the re-
generation of his land the way Byron presumed that he should feel, he was
not a true-born Greek. Of course, Byron and Western observers of
Greece placed Greece within their cultural expectations because modern
Greece was considered part of the same family, notre soeur. Hugo would
have been more precise if he had said our little sister, since all Western
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a j
writers considered Greece to be a bit behind its other siblings and in need of
instruction from older brothers like Byron; in ++o, Jules Bois said, lAthe-
nienne est la petite soeur de la Parisienne (y). Chateaubriand distin-
guished the two Greeces a bit differently when he spoke of quitting forever
this sacred soil, my mind lled with its past greatness and present debase-
ment (+y). Western Europe approached ancient Greece with awe but mod-
ern Greece with condescension. For in the eyes of many philhellenes, Old
Greece was in fact what Christian Europe and America are now (Freeman,
Historical Essays o).
In his poem The Man and the Echo, W. B. Yeats mused about the power
of words and wondered whether his nationalist play Cathleen ni Houlihan
(+o) helped to inspire the Easter Rising in Dublin in ++:
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
(Poems j)
With respect to the inuence of Byrons poems on those who went to ght
for Greece during the Greek War of Independence, the question mark is un-
necessary. Dozens of young men from Germany, France, England, and
America went off to serve the cause of Greek freedom with copies of Byron
in their pockets. Unlike the men in the Dublin Post Ofce, they had not even
seen the country for which they were ghting except on the printed pages of
Byrons books. From +8:+ to +8:, philhellenes like the future historian
George Finlay or the young Boston doctor Samuel Gridley Howe read Byron
on the decks of ships heading east across the Ionian sea.
3
In +8y, dozens
more would dream that Greece might still be free and participate in an-
other Greco-Turkish War. Byron had created a country that could motivate
men to action and dominate the imaginations of powerful intellects like
Hugos. What did the Greece of Byron look like?
In many respects, and this is particularly true for Canto II of Childe
Harolds Pilgrimage, Byrons Greece differed little from the picture of the
country provided by his predecessors and contemporaries. Terence Spencer,
in his admirable study of literary philhellenism before Byron, said, One im-
portant source of his [Byrons] success was the fact that the feelings he de-
scribed, and aroused, were authentic. . . . The land which had gained a
stronger and stronger romantic appeal during the eighteenth century was
present in Byrons poetry amid all its sorrows and humiliations, never forget-
ting the splendours and glories of its past, and therefore making memory, in-
dignation, and sympathy more poignant (:). The Grce de Byron was al-
ready familiar ground to his readers; for forty years they had pondered, like
Chateaubriand had in +8o, Greeces glorious past, its degraded present, and
its possible future.
r u v a o

s s n + n o w
That same Western construction of Greece helped to draw Byron to Gre-
cian shores. Edward Trelawny recorded Byron saying:
Travelling in Greece, Hobhouse and I wrangled everyday. His guide
was Mitfords fabulous history. He had a greed for legendary lore,
topography, inscriptions; gabbled in lingua franca to the Ephori of
the villages, goatherds, and our dragomen. He would potter with map
and compass at the foot of Pindus, Parnes, and Parnassus, to ascer-
tain the site of some ancient temple or city. I rode my mule up them.
They had haunted my dreams since boyhood; the pines, eagles, vul-
tures, and owls were descended from those Themistocles and Alex-
ander had seen, and were not degenerated like the humans; the rocks
and torrents the same. John Cams dogged perseverance in pursuit of
his hobby is to be envied; I have no hobby and no perseverance. I
gazed at the stars and ruminated; took no notes, asked no questions.
(Records 8:8)
Trelawny is not the most accurate source,
4
yet Byron himself indicated
that, on this occasion, his friend may not have been far from the truth. The
poet wrote to Francis Hodgson from Athens on January :o, +8++: I am liv-
ing in the Capuchin Convent, Hymettus before me, the Akropolis behind
me, the temple of Jove to my right, the stadium in front, the town to the left,
eh, Sir, theres a situation, theres your picturesque! (BLJ II.y). Byrons
poetic account of a journey through Greece is strikingly different from the
antiquarian pursuits and fascination with minutiae so apparent in John Cam
Hobhouses Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey.
5
But whether or not it reected Byrons own emotional response, the de-
scription of the haunted, holy ground of Athens and Greece in Childe
Harold was decisively shaped by the tradition of literary philhellenism that
had been established in the previous four decades (II.88.8:8).
6
Byrons use of
a Greek temple, in this case the Parthenon, to lament the past greatness of
Greece was, by the time he composed it, a literary convention:
Look on its broken arch, its ruind wall
Its chambers desolate, and portals foul;
Yes, this was once Ambitions airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul,
Behold each lack-lustre, eyeless hole.
(II..jo)
His encomium of the natural beauty of Greece and the musing on Greeces
lost liberty and its possible recovery were also standard fare:
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a y
And yet how lovely in thine age of woe,
Land of lost gods and godlike men! art thou!
Thy vales of ever-green, thy hills of snow,
Proclaim thee Natures varied favorite now.
(II.8j.8o+)
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead the scatterd children forth,
And long accustomd bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilome did await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylaes sepulchral strait
Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Eurotass banks, and call thee from the tomb?
(II.y.yo+)
Byrons version of what were commonplaces became canonical because, as
Spencer noted, Byron could express these opinions and emotions with an
intensity hitherto unknown (:o).
The dominance of Byrons poetical skill can be illustrated by comparing a
couplet of Childe Harold to two similar passages by other poets.
7
The lines of
Byron read:
Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee
Nor feels as lovers oer the dust they lovd.
(II.+j.+:y:8)
William Haygarths Greece: A Poem in Three Parts (+8+) was, according to
the author in the preface, designed in the country which it attempts to de-
lineate and a part of it was written in Athens in the middle of +8++ (v).
Byron and Haygarth had met in Athens in +8++ (see BLJ :.), where they
could have discussed their poetic projects. The following couplet, despite the
obvious similarity to the lines of Byron above, might have been written be-
fore Haygarth had read Childe Harold:
Hard is the heart, O Corinth! who beholds
Thee bowd to dust, nor sheds one pitying tear.
(III.::y)
These lines, and numerous other passages of Haygarth, sound eerily like
paraphrases of Byron, but at least some of the resonances resulted from the
8 r u v a o

s s n + n ow
fact that Byron and Haygarth were operating in what had become an estab-
lished genre. Indeed, from the standpoint of literary history, Haygarths im-
portance is to demonstrate just how conventional the stirring lines of Childe
Harold really were.
Felicia Hemanss long poem Modern Greece (+8+y), on the other hand,
was inspired by and written in imitation of the second canto of Childe
Harold. It includes the following passage:
Is there one who views with cold, unaltered mien
His frozen heart with proud indifference fraught,
Each sacred haunt, each unforgotten scene
Where Freedom triumphed or where Wisdom taught?
(st. :.+)
Hemanss effort is a good example of the fate of poems about Greece in
the decade after Childe Harold and Byrons Tales. There are only so many
ways one can say that a person must be hardhearted not to be distressed at
Greeces present state. When the idea had been said simply and well, as in
Cold is the heart fair Greece! that looks on thee, then the poets who came
later often had to stretch words or syntax, as Hemans does in the lines above.
Hemans, an extremely popular author in her day, was a better poet than this
passage suggests. But by the time of Modern Greece, Byron had xed an
image of Greece and the ways to describe it in the English imagination. With
little room to maneuver, Hemans could only provide pale echoes of the senti-
ments expressed in Childe Harold.
In a letter to Lord Holland after the publication of The Bride of Abydos
(+8+), Byron wrote: My head is full of Oriental names and scenes and
added that the whole of the Bride cost me four nightsand you can very
easily suppose that I have no great esteem for lines that can be strung to-
gether as fast as minutes: . . . but it is my story and my East(& here I am
venturing with no one to contend againstfrom having seen what my con-
temporaries must copy from the drawings of others only) (BLJ .+8).
Byron claims for his Tales, and one supposes by extension Childe Harold as
well, an authenticity based on rsthand knowledge. And he had in fact trav-
eled to places where Owenson had not been. But there were others who had
seen the East, or at least Greece, with their own eyes, like W. R. Wright, John
Cam Hobhouse, William Haygarth, and Charles Kelsall. In Childe Harold,
Byron eclipsed his contemporaries not, as he suggested, because his descrip-
tions of Greece were more authentic than those in the verse of Wright, Hay-
garth, or Kelsall, but rather because, as Spencer indicated, he more readily
aroused authentic feelings about a shared ideal construction of Greece in his
English readers.
Byron was, however, one of the rst to attempt to substantiate the Greek
revival with evidence from the modern Greeks in their own words. He trans-
lated Romaic (modern Greek) songs and attached an appendix of Romaic au-
thors at the end of Childe Harold (CPW II, pp. :+++y). The most important
of the translations was the War Song of Rhigas, which appeared in the rst
edition of Childe Harold and in subsequent collections of Byrons verse. Rhi-
gas was a Greek patriot inspired by the French Revolution; he had even hoped
for French aid in setting up a republic in Greece. He established himself in
+y in Vienna, where he wrote prose and poetry to prepare his countrymen
for the future rebellion. In +yy, spurred by French victories in Italy and the
French occupation of the Ionian islands, he left Vienna to ask Napoleon for
assistance in Greece. Rhigas was arrested by the Austrians in Trieste and
turned over to the Turks. He was executed in Belgrade in June +y8.
8
In +8o, Byron and Hobhouse had heard Rhigass War Song sung by a
young Greek nobleman, Andreas Lontos, who later fought in the War of In-
dependence (Hobhouse, Journey II:j8). Both Englishmen were impressed
by the sentiments of the song and the singer, and both translated it for Eng-
lish readers. In Byrons more famous version, the third stanza begins:
Sparta, Sparta, why in slumbers,
Lethargic dost thou lie?
Awake, and join thy numbers
With Athens, old ally!
Leonidas recalling,
That chief of ancient song,
Who savd ye once from falling,
The terrible! The strong!
Who made that bold diversion
In old Thermopylae.
(CPW I, pp. +:)
Byron and Hobhouse may have believed that they were providing an au-
thentic Greek yearning for the regeneration of Greece. In fact, what they had
done was to translate back into English Rhigass own translation of West-
ern nostalgia into modern Greek. For Rhigas, who had assisted in a transla-
tion into Greek of Abb Barthlemys popular historical novel of ancient
Greece, Voyages du jeune Anacharsis (+y8), had modeled his War Song on
the French national anthem, La Marseillaise.
9
If Byrons translation of Rhi-
gass poem made an English audience think that the Greeks held the same
views about the revival of Greece as readers in London, it was because Rhi-
gas had sought to propagate those ideas in his native land. As Byron himself
must have realized, the great majority of Greeks who he met in the Levant
jo r u v a o

s s n + n o w
would not have known who Leonidas was. Byrons use of the translation of a
translated modern Greek text to support the cause of Greece would be im-
itated by others.
10
Harold Spender, father of the poet Stephen Spender and a member of the
last generation to mature while the Grce de Byron still reigned supreme, as-
serted of the second canto of Childe Harold in +:: It contains his sublimest
presentation of the case for modern Greece, as the cradle of freedom and the
treasure-house of our art. It produced on Europe something of that same
magical awakening, which came, six centuries before, from Peter the Hermits
appeals for the enslaved Holy Land (Byron and Greece +o). This is a colossal
misreading of Byrons poem, although Spenders comment about reader re-
sponse appears accurate. Unlike Owenson, Byron never unambiguously ad-
vocated the liberation of modern Greece. When the poet discussed the regen-
eration of Greece in stanza y of Childe Harold (quoted earlier), he ended in a
question mark. It is not certain that the author intended the resounding afr-
mative answer that Spender reads. The opening of The Giaour also contained
stirring lines about Greek regeneration: For Freedoms battle once begun, /
Bequeathed by bleeding Sire to Son, / Though bafed oft is ever won. / Bear
witness Greece, thy living page, / Attest it many a deathless age (+::).
But again the ending of the passage undercut Byrons stirring exhortation:
Enough!no foreign foe could quell / Thy soul, till from itself it fell, / Yes!
Self-abasement pavd the way / To villain-bonds and despot-sway (+8+).
In neither Childe Harold nor The Giaour did Byron ever clearly claim that the
Greeks would, or could, overcome their self-abasement. The desire and hope
for their regeneration is expressed but not the expectation.
Indeed, in the notes to Childe Harold, which apparently went unread by
Spender, Byron appeared skeptical about the probability of a revival of the
Greeks and suggested a future for the country as a colony of Europe:
11
The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns
as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! but they may be sub-
jects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they
are free and industrious and such may Greece be hereafter. (CPW II,
p. :o+)
To talk, as the Greeks themselves do, of their rising again to their
pristine superiority, would be ridiculous; as the rest of the world must
resume its barbarism, after re-asserting the sovereignty of Greece;
but there seems to be no very great obstacle, except in the apathy of
the Franks, to their becoming an useful dependency, or even a free
state with a proper Guarantee;under correction, however, be it spo-
ken, for many, and well-informed men doubt the practicability even of
this. (CPW II, p. :o:)
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a j+
Byron was never quite sure what to make of the Greeks, as his private let-
ters to Hobhouse demonstrate. After his return from a year and a half stay in
the Levant (+8o+8++) and not long before the publication of the rst two
cantos of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, Byron wrote his former traveling com-
panion, My mind is not very well made up as to ye. Greeks, but I have no pa-
tience with the absurd extremes into which their panegyrists & detractors
have equally run (BLJ :.+:j). Yet within months after the publication of
the rst two cantos of Childe Harold, Byron would be read as the foremost
panegyrist of the Greeks.
In an intriguing note to Greece, William Haygarth explained: I have ven-
tured to predict in poetry what I certainly should not be so hardy as to foretell
in prosethe moral regeneration of Greece (:y). The same dichotomy
entered into the writing of Byron. In his letters and notes he was never so
hardy as to talk seriously about Greek regeneration. But in his poetry,
Byron, like Haygarth, drew as much on Western feelings about Greece as on
what he actually saw on his journey. So while he did not go so far as to predict
a regeneration of the Greeks, he certainly considered the possibility fondly.
And Byrons passages about a Greek revival are easily taken out of their am-
biguous context. The most striking example is The Isles of Greece from
Don Juan, Canto III (+8:o), which became the single most important phil-
hellenic text, particularly stanzas and y:
The mountains look on Marathon
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians grave,
I could not deem myself a slave . . .
Must we weep oer days more blest?
Must we blush?Our fathers bled.
Earth! Render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae!
(CPW V, pp. +8o)
Within the context of Don Juan, this lyric is sung by a sad trimmer, a
bard who has learned to give the audience what it wants: Thus usually, when
he was askd to sing, / He gave the different nations something national; /
Twas all the same to himGod save the king / or a Ira, according to the
fashion all. / . . . In Greece, hed sing some sort of hymn like this tye
(8j.+, 8.8). In an earlier stanza, Byron said of the poet:
j: r u v a o

s s n + n ow
He deemed, being on a lone isle, among friends,
That without any danger of a riot, he
Might for long lying make himself amends;
And singing as he sung in his warm youth,
Agree to a short armistice with the truth.
(III.8.8)
This passage suggests that he is not trimming when he sings The Isles
of Greece. Yet the line just before the trimmer sings, In Greece, hed sing
some sort of hymn like this tye, equally hints that he might be singing ac-
cording to fashion.
12
Like nearly all of Byrons calls for Greek regeneration,
the text here is ambiguous; McGann said that it concludes in a typical By-
ronic gesture of resolute irresolution (Beauty of Inections :8j). There was
not, however, much ambiguity perceived by Byrons audience. The song of a
sad trimmer became the anthem of Greek renewal for Western readers.
If in Childe Harold II and The Isles of Greece Byron reproduced the
canonical expressions of philhellenic ideas about the fallen state of Greece
and the hope for its regeneration in the early nineteenth century, in The Gi-
aour and his other Tales Byron made his own original contribution to the idea
of modern Greeceit was indeed, as the poet had told Lord Holland, his
story and his East.
13
For where Childe Harold focused on the revival of an
idealized Westernized Greece, The Giaour introduced an exotic Eastern con-
ception of Greece.
14
This is strikingly apparent in the illustrations for
Byrons rst Turkish Tale, in which Byrons Giaour dresses in Arnaut
garb (+j) and is indistinguishable from the Turk he kills.
15
When some
philhellenes, enamored of Byrons Tales, arrived in Greece during the War
of Independence, they refused to support Byrons own choice as the Greek
leader, Alexander Mavrocordato, to whom Shelley had dedicated Hellas. No
other Greek had such a close connection to the foremost English authors of
literary philhellenism. But the educated Mavrocordato in his European
clothes did not t the images of a Giaour or a Conrad, which Byrons Tales
had made popular. The philhellenes preferred the heavily mustachioed
chieftains in local dress, such as Theodore Kolokotronis or Odysseus An-
droutsos, to whom Edward Trelawny attached himself.
16
These men, basi-
cally brigands, were certainly colorful, but they were hardly the proper lead-
ers for a new country that hoped to take its place among the nations of
Europe. Byrons Tales laid the foundation for an enduring paradox of phil-
hellenism: the desire for Greece to become Western and the simultaneous re-
jection of Westernization in Greece as inauthentic.
The Giaour takes the reader out of the world of morally rigorous and
philosophical noble savages inhabiting a benign natural environment into the
world of the klephts, brigands who lived in rugged mountains with a social
code based on honor and backed by primal violence. The klephts became he-
roes in Greek folk songs because they lived beyond the control of the Ot-
tomans. Finlay explained that a life of independence, even when stained
with crime, has always been found to throw a spell over the minds of op-
pressed nations. The Greeks make Robin Hoods, or demi-heroes, of their
leading klephts (::::). In a passage that Byron had written for The Siege
of Corinth but had not included in the poem, he linked the klephts to the
struggle to liberate Greece:
And some are rebels on the hills
That look upon Epiruss valleys
Where Freedom still at moments rallies,
And pays in blood Oppressions ills.
(CPW III, p. jy)
A note by Byron reads: The last tidings recently heard of Dervish (one of
the Arnaouts [sic] who followed me), state him to be in revolt in the moun-
tains, at the head of some of the bands common in that country in times of
trouble (CPW III, p. 88). The true character of these bands, according to
Finlay, was hardly patriotic: The ordinary life of the klepht was as little dis-
tinguished by mercy to the poor as it was ennobled by national patriotism.
There is very little to eulogize in the conduct of criminals (::). Hlder-
lins Hyperion wryly comments: Yes, it was indeed a remarkable undertak-
ing to establish my Elysium with the help of a robber band (+:). But after
The Giaour, many Westerners dreamed that their Elysiums could be estab-
lished with the help of robber bands.
The original klephtic act in Western literature is the killing of Hassan by
the Giaour, a death required by Hassans murder of the Circassian woman
Leila. Finlay acknowledged the canonical status of Byrons Tale when he
mentioned the death of Hassan in his discussion of klephts in his monumen-
tal History of Greece: Their [the klephts] most glorious exploits were to
murder Turkish agas in mountain passes, as Lord Byron describes the scene
in his Giaour (::).
17
The Giaour, along with a robber-clan (jo) that
he seems to lead, ambushes Hassans party while it wind[s] slowly through a
long dele (jj:) in the mountains. The landscape is quite different from
the congenial earth of the Greece portrayed in the second canto of Childe
Harold or other works of nineteenth-century philhellenism:
Above, the mountain rears a peak,
Where vultures whet their thirsty beak,
And theirs may be a feast tonight,
Shall tempt them down ere morrows light.
Beneath, a rivers wintry stream
j r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Has shrunk before the summer beam,
And left a channel bleak and bare,
Save shrubs that spring to perish there.
Each side the midway path there lay
Small broken crags of granite gray,
By time or mountain lightning riven,
From summits clad in mists of heaven;
For where is he that hath beheld
The peak of Liakura unveild?
(jj)
This is a Greece that Byron knew from personal observation, the forbidding
mountains familiar to most travelers in mainland Greece and Crete where, as
Patrick Leigh Fermor remarked, all is violent and extreme (Roumeli +o).
But in The Giaour Greece remains a romanticized world in which True foes,
once met, are joined till death! (j).
The pirates of The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair also come from a
world of lawlessness, which is justied, even ennobled, by the fact that the
established authority is despotic, both in the form of the local pasha and in
the rule of the sultan. Modern Greek society did tolerate, and even romanti-
cize, klephtic and piratical lawlessness, but that view was balanced by the
reality that the klephts were as likely to rob or kill fellow Greeks as the com-
mon enemy. Byron knew and provided a glimpse of that reality in the note to
line +oyy of The Giaour. In the text, Taheer warns Hassan of the attack mo-
ments before it occurs. As an explanation of second hearing, which Byron
says is more prevalent in the East than second sight, the poet recounts how
he was almost attacked by pirates during an excursion to Cape Colonna
(Sounion): I observed the Dervish Tahiri riding rather far out of the path,
and leaning his head upon his hand, as if in pain.I rode up and enquired.
We are in peril, he answered (CPW III, p. :+). Nothing occurred, but on
his return to Athens, Byron learned that pirates intended to attack his party
and had only refrained because they thought the group was accompanied by
a larger company of Albanian guards than was the case.
18
The ambush in The
Giaour recreates the near-ambush of Byron at Cape Colonna, as the names
Taheer/Tahiri suggest. When Byron has the narrator of The Giaour look
down from Colonnas height to the shore, which has many a grotto,
meant for rest, / That holds the pirate for a guest (y) and end with a
lament that man has turned the lovely land of Greece into a place where
lust and rapine wildly reign (o), he alludes to the personal threat he en-
countered traveling in Greece.
But despite the allusion to his own danger from Greek brigands, Byron
romanticizes the foreigner and his robber clan and positions them on the side
of Greek liberation and, by extension, the West. The Advertisement at-
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a jj
tached at the beginning of the Tale states that the story takes place soon
after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged
for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. The desertion of the
Maniotes, on being refused the plunder of Misitra [Mistra], led to the aban-
donment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea, during
which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of
the faithful (CPW III, p. o). As chapter + has shown, not only would
Byrons audience be familiar with the historical benchmark given in the ad-
vertisement (the revolt of +yyo), they would instantly place that event and
Byrons Tale in the context of Greek regeneration. Byron offers a rather
bleak view about a Greek revival, for in his account the Maniotes were moti-
vated solely by personal gain and plunged the country into complete ruin.
The discouraging picture of modern Greece offered in the advertisement is
balanced immediately by the rst six lines of the poem, which invoke
Themistocles, a hero from the golden past of the Persian Wars:
No breath of air to break the wave
That rolls below the Athenians grave,
That tomb which, gleaming oer the cliff,
First greets the homeward-veering skiff,
High oer the land he savd in vain
When shall such a hero live again?
Themistocles helped to free Greece from the threat of the Persian invasion.
He was a man who saved the land as opposed to the present inhabitants who
mar it into a wilderness (j+).
19
Not until Greece once again had such he-
roes would both the land and the Greeks ourish.
The hero of The Giaour, like the pirates, acts for personal reasons: And in
the eld it had been sweet / Had danger wooed me on to move / a slave of
glory, not of love (+o+o++). Since, as McGann noted, lines ++y have a
point of view that is, like B[yron]s, contemporary and English, it is
tempting to read into the poem a distinction between what Westerners
thought about Greece (++y) and what it was really like (CPW III, p. +j).
20
Still, the reader, already conditioned by the allusions to +yyo, properly sides
with the Giaour against Hassan because Byron employs political language to
describe the love of Leila:
To me she gave her heart, that all
Which tyranny can neer enthrall.
(+o8)
Although the Giaour acknowledges, Yet did he [Hassan] but what I had
done / Had she been false to more than one (+o:), Byron does not
j r u v a o

s s n + n o w
present the two situations as equal. Leila was a slave of Hassan and, whatever
the aga may have felt for her, was not a willing partner. Leila chose the for-
eigner; even Hassan calls him lost Leilas love (+). Our sympathies are
not with Hassan.
21
The use of the loaded word tyranny, which could be used
almost as a synonym for Ottoman rule,
22
links the personal freedom of Leila
to the political freedom of Greece implied in the historical setting of the
poem (sometime after +yyo).
The connection between personal and political liberty is made stronger by
lines 8+o:, added to the second edition of the poem, in which the narrator
expounds on the political situation of modern Greece. The narrator speaks of
an expired Greece: Tis GreeceBut living Greece no more! / So coldly
sweet, so deadly fair, / We startfor soul is wanting there (+). These
lines balance a passage in which the Giaour talks of the appearance of a vision
of his dead love: No breathing form within my grasp, / No heart that beats
reply to mine, / Yet Leila! yet the form is thine! (+:88o). In The Giaour,
especially after the rst edition, the love of the Giaour is balanced by, and
equated to, the love of the narrator for Greece as a political ideal.
23
The two
themes run parallel and employ the same words and imagery, but they never
intersect. It is as if, as McGann said of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, the politi-
cal regeneration of Greece is the objective correlative of a renewal of the per-
sonal integrity of the individual. Still, as the lines once intended for The Siege
of Corinth show, Byron viewed groups like the Giaour and his robber clan as
the keepers of the spark of Freedom, who pay in blood Oppressions ills.
24
The attitude of a number of philhellenes demonstrates that the brigands
of The Giaour and the other Tales became an integral and admired part of the
Grce de Byron. Just how integral can be seen from Charles Brinsley Sheri-
dans preface to Songs of the Modern Greeks, his translation of a collection of
Greek songs published in +8:j.
25
Sheridan was a member of the literary sub-
committee of the London Greek Committee, and the book, whose major sec-
tions were klephtic songs, historical ballads, and romantic ballads, was in-
tended to increase support for the cause of Greek independence. The klephtic
songs, according to the author, are valuable as a collection, not so much of
beautiful poems, as of historical documents, which prove the capacity of the
Greeks to defend and govern their country, and, consequently, the injustice of
the shackling of their freedom with the condition of receiving a foreign sover-
eign (xviii). Indeed these songs stand as proof, from the horses mouth as it
were, that the accounts of their [Greek] national character, as presented to us
by a long succession of travelers, have been mainly erroneous (xix). How
could so many Western observers have been so consistently mistaken?
Tourists naturally resorted to those parts of Greece which were the
most accessible, and the most worth visiting. But the fertility and the
exposure of these very spots had long ensured on the part of the
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a jy
Turks, both the will and the power to seize them. Thus, their Greek
inhabitants became debased by patient submission to a barbarous
yoke; while those, who really deserved the glorious title of Greeks,
abandond such polluted spots, and took refuge among barren and in-
accessible mountains. Hence arose a considerable portion of that gal-
lant class termd by the invaders Klephtai, or robbers, a title they af-
terwards bore with pride and exultation, much in the same way that
whig, originally a term of abuse, was afterwards complacently as-
sumed by those to whom it was hostilely applied. (xixxx)
For Sheridan, the klephts are the true descendants of the ancient Greeks,
although, with regard to culture and civilization, they are even further from
the ancient model than their debased kinsmen in the plains. While it is cer-
tainly true that there was a degree of national feeling in the klephts, they
hardly formed the Greek equivalent of the Whig party. The songs them-
selves make this clear. The majority of them speak of ghting the Turks, but
none of them talk of Greek liberation, still less of a Greek nation. The fol-
lowing song, The Summons to the Klephtai of Mount Olympus, chosen
for its brevity, will provide a avor of the genre:
This summer came the Pashas threat;
Its seal was hot, its ink was wet:
Ye Klephts, who hold each mountain height,
Descend and bow to Alis might.
But two, the boldest sons of Greece,
Will never pay that price of peace;
These grasp their guns and glittering swords,
And seek what cheer the wild affords.
(+)
Such lyrics are proof of resistance to Ottoman authority but do not pro-
vide clear evidence that the Greeks were ready to defend and govern their
own country. A poem at the end of the book offered some indication that the
Greeks had thought of their struggle in national and libertarian terms:
Kindle from our countrys ashes,
Liberty! thy sacred re
Many a Spartan sabre clashes,
Breathe on one Tyrtaean lyre! . . .
Though our fathers glorious deeds
Formd a sadly pleasing theme,
Yet a heart which really bleeds,
Is mockd by memorys dream.
(:jo)
j8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
It is no surprise that these lines echo Western sentiments about the revival
of Greek freedom, including mention of Tyrtaeus, the poet of ancient
Sparta, for they come from a section subtitled Recent Odes of Greek
Literati. The unnamed literati had translated Western notions about the re-
generation of Greece into modern Greek just as Rhigas had done in his War
Song. Sheridans retranslation was meant to convince the English public
that modern Greece was really like the modern Greece that existed in the
mind of the West.
The Greek literati were the natural allies of philhellenic supporters in the
West. But, as St. Clair noted, they were just as likely to be scorned for their
Western attitudes and dress. Edward Trelawny wrote: When the Muses
deserted Parnassus, the Klephtes, i.e. outlaws, took possession of their
haunts, and kept alive the love of freedom and the use of arms. They were the
only Greeks I found with any sense of honour. . . . The Klephtes were the
only efcient soldiers at the commencement of the insurrection; and their
leaders maintained the war for three years so successfully that the Greek gov-
ernment were enabled to borrow money (Records :8).
At that point, Trelawny asserted, the political leaders of the elite class,
and he meant men like Mavrocordato, appointed their own generals, embez-
zled the loan money, and almost lost the war. Later in the same chapter,
Trelawny said: It was particularly revolting to the mind as well as the feel-
ings of [Colonel Charles J.] Napier, to witness the war as waged in Greece
without a plan, combination, system, or leader; every man frantic with
excitement to kill and plunder on his own account (:+). According to Tre-
lawny, Napier would have agreed to become the commander of the Greek
forces only if he were given the authority to instill some discipline and struc-
ture. Yet it was the klephts who killed and plundered on their own account
and resisted any effort to form a regular army. Trelawny himself, after he
joined the band of Odysseus Androutsos, would become part of the problem.
While he was Odysseuss confederate and brother-in-law, for Trelawny mar-
ried Odysseuss teenage sister in +8:, the brigand chief switched sides and
made an agreement with the Turks. Finlay called the act the most cele-
brated instance of treachery among the Greeks during their Revolution
(:8o). Yet Trelawny, in his own eyes, had taken Byrons ctions and
turned them into facts (St. Clair, Trelawny ++). In +8:+8:j, he lived the
life of a Giaour, striving for Greek freedom with his own maid of
Athens as a wife. For the rest of his long life, he would exploit that past in
print and speech. Indeed, through his connection to Trelawny, the traitor
Odysseus became in England a hero of the Greek revolution.
26
Many philhellenes with more personal integrity than Trelawny became
fond of the klephts during the war. Samuel Gridley Howe, a doctor with a
Boston Brahmin background, wrote a sketch about the life of a klepht called
A Modern Greek, which was published in +8+. His subject began his ca-
reer as a slave in Constantinople but escaped to become rst a pirate and later
a mountain brigand. Howe concluded: A ne man, indeed, you have for an
attendant, says the reader;a murderer, robber, and brigand. . . . but be this
as it may, Francesco had his redeeming qualities, for he was brave, and gener-
ous, and warm-hearted; and he loved his country with a zeal equaled only by
his deadly hatred of the Turks (:+:).
In the West, as in Greece, the klephts became the keepers of the ame of
liberty. And it was Byron who in The Giaour and the other Tales created the
image of the klepht for Western readers. A newspaper article printed in Bal-
timore in +8+, ve years before the War of Independence, testied to the im-
portance of Byrons Tales in the myth making of Greek brigands at the same
time as it exposed the romanticism of the genre: This Romance of the East
is a thing better enjoyed at home, by your re side, than in sailing a solitary
caique, among the lonely islands of the Archipelago. The roar of the Helle-
spont is harmonious only in the verse of Homer; and in spite of the enchant-
ment of Lord Byrons poetry, a Greek pirate is a gure that must be placed at
a distance to be pleasing (quoted in Larrabee :).
The failure of the revolt of +yyo almost immediately produced a curious dis-
crepancy in the depiction of modern Greece. The revolt was supposed to
show that the modern Greeks had reclaimed the manly bravery of their
renowned ancestors, that they were the descendants of the heroes of
Marathon and Plataea. But modern Greece was more commonly portrayed,
in both art and literature, as a woman. The most famous picture of modern
Greece in the late eighteenth century was the frontispiece to Marie G. A. F.
Choiseul-Goufers Voyage pittoresque de la Grce (+y8:).
27
The text that ac-
companies the illustration reads:
Greece, depicted as a woman in chains, is surrounded by sepulchral
monuments erected in honour of the great men of Greece who have
championed her liberty, as for example Lycurgus, Miltiades, Themis-
tocles, Aristides, Epaminondas, Pelopidas, Timoleon, Demosthenes,
Phocion, and Philopoemen. She leans on the tomb of Leonidas, and
behind her stands the column on which were engraved Simonides
lines for the three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopylae.
Traveler, tell them in Lacedaeomon
We lie here in obedience to her laws . . .
Greece seems to be calling up the shades of these great men, and on
the rock nearby these words are inscribed:
Let someone arise . . .
(tr. Constantine +yj)
o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
The picture of a chained Greek woman who, it is implied, is at the mercy
of a Turkish man was one of the most effective and pervasive means of evok-
ing sympathy for the Greek cause. It played upon the fears of a European
woman, however degenerated and debased, trapped in an Oriental harem, as
if Europe were suffering the ravishment of its eponymous ancestor, Europa.
This particular form of the feminization of modern Greece, which had
begun decades before Byrons Tales, ensured that the struggle for Greek
freedom would almost always be portrayed or discussed in terms of the
threat of sexual domination by the Turks and the romantic attraction of the
Greek woman for the West. In Demetra Vaka Browns In Pawn to a Throne
(++), the American hero mused, What other girl in the world would reply
to a declaration of love with politics? (+y). For almost +jo years, the answer
was a Greek girl.
One way to show how +yyo politicized the depiction of the Greek woman
in the harem is to look at a novel written thirty years before the revolt. In
Antoine-Franois Prvosts Un Histoire dune grecque moderne, translated in
+y+ as The Story of Fair Greek of Yester-Year, the narrator, a Frenchman,
buys a Greek girl from a pashas harem and eventually takes her back to
France.
28
The bulk of the work consists of the narrators discovery that the
girl is accomplished in both painting and music, his acquisition of her, and
his attempts to ward off competitors for her sexual favors, which, as a Chris-
tian, he does not compel even as her owner. Although the heroine is Greek
and a number of the minor characters are Greeks and Turks, the author
never raises the question of Greek liberation nor uses the girls position to
evoke, along with the sexual politics of gender, the political situation of mod-
ern Greece. This is a harem story, with the narrator a Western voyeur both
fascinated and repelled by Eastern customs. Forty years later, the book could
not have been written without engaging the interest in Greek regeneration
and the place of Greece on the map of Europe, concerns that Prvost blithely
ignores. Indeed, it is hard to read the book now without injecting some of
these conceptions back onto the text. For after +yyo, any narrative entitled un
histoire dune grecque moderne operated in a charged political context.
Choiseul-Goufers frontispiece looks to the ancient heroes of the past
for help, hinting that modern Greek men are too debased to come to their
countrys aid. Many Westerners as well as Greeks thought that, even with the
valiant efforts of Greek men, freedom could only be achieved with assistance
from the West and not assistance from dead heroes. Some writers would di-
rectly call for their countries to assist Greek independence. Charles Kelsall,
in his poem A Letter from Athens (+8+:), wrote such an appeal with language
that included Choiseul-Goufers image of sexual domination:
Rise Britain, rise! (for to thy sons is givn
That high prerogative of favring heavn
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a +
To rescue nations from the tyrants lust,
To scourge the guilty, and avenge the just,)
Pour forth thy dauntless legions, and release
The fettered Hellespontah! rescue Greece!
(y)
In Greece, William Haygarth said:
Yes, wretched Greece! beneath my countrys shield
Thou mayst vanquish and be free again.
(III.yo; see also III.:y)
In the preface to Hellas, Shelley chastised the governments of Europe: The
apathy of the rulers of the civilized world to the astonishing circumstance of
the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilization, rising as it
were from the ashes of their ruin, is something perfectly inexplicable to a
mere spectator to the shows of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks (Shel-
leys Poetry and Prose o8).
In these passages, the someone who was to arise and unchain the female
Greece was not an ancient Greek male but a European man. Byron reacted to
such thinking when he told the Greeks:
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
(Childe Harold II.y.y:o:+)
Still, in the notes to that poem, Byron forthrightly said, The English
have at last compassionated their Negroes, and under a less bigoted govern-
ment may probably one day release their Catholic brethren: but the interpo-
sition of foreigners alone can emancipate the Greeks, who, otherwise, appear
to have as small a chance of redemption from the Turks, as the Jews from the
rest of mankind in general (CPW II, p. :o:). He went on to talk of Greek at-
titudes to their probable deliverers, the Russians, French, and English. He
concluded, echoing the end of Choiseul-Goufers text, But whoever shall
appear with arms in their hands will be welcome; and when that day arrives,
heaven have mercy on the Ottomans, they cannot expect it from the
Giaours. It is surely not a coincidence that a work entitled The Giaour fol-
lowed shortly thereafter.
The romance of Greek liberation can succinctly be summed up as a white
man saving a lapsed white woman from the Turk, a brown man.
29
The white
woman is a Greek or, like Byrons Leila, stands for Greece, but the white man
is often English, French, or American, depending on the nationality of the
writer. In Owensons novel, Ida does marry a Greek hero who has devoted
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
himself to Greek liberation. But at the end of the novel he joins the Russian
army so that he can be a member of the Russian force that will liberate the
Greeks. Only as a Russian can Owenson envision Osmyn freeing Greece.
Although other versions of the romance of Greek liberation appeared in
words and pictures after +yyo, it was Byron, once again, who supplied the
canonical text. In the poem, the Giaours race and faith are alike un-
known (8oy), but in a note Byron said that the story is one told of a young
Venetian many years ago (CPW III, p. :). Leila, a Circassian, is referred
to as a swan, and her whiteness is stressed elsewhere (e.g., thus rose fair
Leilas whiter neck, p. j++). The last of the principal characters is the dark
Hassan (black Hassan from the Haram ies, p. ). This triangle will be
recreated numerous times in the course of the next one hundred years; for
example, see the continual contrast between the lovely Greek Ismene and
her Ottoman pursuer dark Amurath in Agnes Stricklands Demetrius of
+8 (:, j). A visual representation of the motif occurs in Delacroixs
painting Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (+8:y), where the bare-
breasted Greece, depicted as a white female, stands amidst the ruins of a
town with her hands out. Behind her is a dark-skinned, turbaned soldier rep-
resenting the Muslim attackers, who now pose the familiar sexual threat to
the feminized Greece. Below Greece a white male arm extends from the
ruins in Western dressthe arm of Byron.
In The Giaour, it must be stressed, Byron varied and manipulated the ro-
mance of Greek liberation by separating the yearning for freedom from the
love story. In fact, in none of Byrons Tales does the romance of liberation
appear in its simple, didactic form. In The Bride of Abydos, all of the princi-
palsSelim, Zuleika, and her father, Giafrare Turks, although they dif-
fer in character. Zuleikas father takes the part of the Eastern tyrant (see
+.:y8) and the hero, Selim, is Greek in soul, if not in creed (.8y). In
The Corsair, Byron inverted the romance and presented the triangle of a
Western man between Greek and Turkish women. In The Siege of Corinth, all
the principals are Venetian. Only in this last poem is the struggle for Greek
freedom forcefully entwined within the romantic narrative. The setting is
the Ottoman recapture of Corinth and the Peloponnesus in +y+j. Byron of-
fered the struggle between the two foreign occupiers of Greece as one of
freedom and the West against tyranny and the East in such lines as Till
Christian hands to Greece restore / the freedom Venice gave of yore
(j.+oj) and the allusion to the Persian Wars, that quintessential East/West
conict (+.+). The triangle consists of the Venetian commander
Minotti, his daughter Francesca, and her lover Alp, who joined the Ottoman
army after a false accusation was made against him in Venice. Further, in
none of Byrons Turkish Tales is there a successful conclusion, either for the
lovers or for captive Greece. Byrons variations on the romance of Greek lib-
eration can be read as subversions of the generic formula.
30
At the very least
they are complex investigations of widely held notions.
It is ironic, therefore, that because of their artistry and popularity, Byrons
manipulations of the standard romance of Greek liberation as it appears in,
for example, Choiseul-Goufers frontispiece, became accepted as the new
norm of that same romance. As with the passages about a Greek revival in
Childe Harold, Byrons ambiguous and questioning formulations were read
without ambiguity and questions. So, for example, the careful separation in
The Giaour between the themes of Greek liberation and the romance of the
Giaour and Leila would collapse, and some philhellenes would view chief-
tains dressed as the Giaour as Greek patriots. Literary philhellenes would
often exhibit the same lack of discernment and generate reductive versions
of the romance of liberation based on Byron but without his probing lan-
guage or equivocal endings.
One scene from The Siege of Corinth would be especially important for
later philhellenic writing. It occurs when, on the eve of the nal assault on
Corinth, Alp walks to the site of an ancient ruin:
There a temple in ruin stands,
Fashioned by long forgotten hands;
Two or three columns, and many a stone,
Marble and granite, with grass oergrown.
(+8.joj)
On this haunted, holy ground Alp has an encounter with either Francesca
or a vision of Francesca. The setting is reminiscent of Choiseul-Goufers
frontispiece, although Francesca does not appear in chains. Byrons fusion of
the two Greecesancient Greece personied in the ruined temple and mod-
ern Greece personied in Francescais subtle and provocative. In his de-
scription of the temple, Byron laments the effects of Time on the present,
past, and future but does not mention the lost greatness of Greece in a
context where, especially after Childe Harold II, the reader would expect it.
Nor does Francesca, whose appearance might simply be Alps imagination
running wild, directly address the issue of freedom in her exhortation to Alp
to return to the Christian faith. The scene effectively builds upon literary
and artistic precedents without reductively following the established model.
The numerous imitations of this scene rarely have the same degree of under-
statement and suggestion.
In the romance of Greek liberation in literature, the perils of the harem
implied in Choiseul-Goufers illustration quickly became a permanent
xture. Owensons Ida, whose conversation and customs are drawn from an-
tiquity, undergoes the threat of sexual domination in volume . During a
r u v a o

s s n + n o w
skirmish between Greek rebels and the agas soldiers, Ida, who had gone out
to lend moral support to her compatriots, faints and is carried to the Turkish
leaders harem. The aga desires Ida but fears repercussions if he rapes her.
He exchanges the life of the captured Greek leader, Idas love, Osmyn, for
her promise of marriage. After the ceremony, at the very moment when the
aga intends to consummate the union, the news arrives that Osmyn has es-
caped. In the confusion, Ida is able to ee the agas apartments.
Shelley uses the depiction of Greek women in the sultans harem to en-
courage readers of Hellas to support the struggle for freedom in Greece. One
of the key alterations made in adapting the structure of Aeschyluss Persians
for Hellas was the identity of the chorus. In Aeschylus, the chorus is made up
of noble Persian ladies who break into mournful laments as they learn that
their sons and husbands have been destroyed by the Greeks. In Shelley, how-
ever, the chorus consists of Greek captive women who are found within
the seraglio of the sultan. Shelleys change from his professed model brings
his text in line with the romance of Greek liberation and is calculated to pro-
voke a Western European audience to assist the Greeks.
In The Revolt of Islam, in which Shelley said that he made little attempt to
delineate Mahommedan customs, one of the few genuinely Eastern mo-
tifs was the harem rape of the heroine. Cythna is carried off by soldiers and
taken to Othmans harem: One was she among many there, the thralls / Of
the cold Tyrants cruel lust (y..:8jyj8). Othman sees her wondrous
loveliness and
bade her to his secret bower
be borne, a loveless victim, and she tore
Her locks in agony, and her words of ame
And mightier looks availed not; then he bore
Again his load of slavery, and became
A king, a heartless beast, a pageant and a name.
(y.j.:8y)
The rape sends Cythna into madness, which is a power / Which dawned
through the rent soul (y.y.:888j). The fear of Cythnas mad power leads
Othman to send her to be bound in an undersea cave, a fate similar to that of
Byrons Leila in The Giaour.
31
Even though the analogy of Greece-in-chains/woman-in-bondage had
become a literary topos by +8+, the year The Giaour appeared, the immense
popularity of Byrons poem ensured that his version heavily inuenced later
writers. Byrons Tales became so pervasive in the West that, along with
Childe Harold and The Isles of Greece, they have been the lenses, as it
were, through which much of Greek history and politics have been read. The
feminization of Greece was an integral part of the depiction of the country
as a politicized space.
In +8j+, Grard de Nerval said of the women he saw on the island of
Syros, Il ny avait rien l du charme dangereux d lantique htare (II.:jy),
and the same is true of most contemporary Greek women in nineteenth-cen-
tury Western literature. Although consistently threatened by the harem, the
modern Greek female was not portrayed with the exotic sexuality attributed
to truly Oriental women but rather with the pure, austere, classical charac-
ter of Owensons Ida, who was a modern Aspasia but one innocent as beau-
tiful, and virtuous as intelligent (II.). This construction of the Greek fe-
male continued in later philhellenic literature for more than a hundred years.
In Lynchs novel Glamour: A Tale of Modern Greece (++:), the rural Greek
heroine is a pagan, a child of the Earth, deep down in whose nature lovingly
reposes the desire for Beauty, who does not wear it as a would-be fashionable
cloak. . . . She is natural (:, :). Chrysoulas paganism, like the simplic-
ity of Owensons Ida, is in no way linked to sexual licentiousness or even to
immodest behavior. Instead, it stands as a corrective to the decadent manners
of Western Europe, since conduct for her bears two speciesright and
wrong (:8). Byron presents the contrast in contemporary perceptions be-
tween the Greek and Eastern female in the characters of Medora and
Gulnare in The Corsair. The former, in life itself . . . so still and fair
(III.o), has been described as sociable, domestic, civilized, and beautiful
(Elfenbein :). Gulnare, the Turk who possesses the re that lights an East-
ern heart (III.j), can both intrigue and emasculate the male. R. S. Hichens
employed and expanded on these perceptions in his novel In the Wilderness
(++y). The hero becomes involved with two different Englishwomen, one
who represents Athens and the other Constantinople. With his wife,
Rosamund, a beautiful blonde who, like an Athene Nike, embodies simplic-
ity, endurance, and calmness, he travels to Greece. At one point he tells
Rosamund: You reminded me of the maidens of the porch on the Acropolis.
I connected you with Greeceand all my dreams of Greece (+o). But after
a tragic accident in which he kills his son, he is ensnared by dark Mrs. Clarke,
who personies the umber mystery of Stamboul, . . . with its promiscuous
degradation (:o, jo). Rosamund returns at the end to save him from his
emasculating loss of self-respect in the East. His salvation ttingly occurs at
Olympia in front of the Hermes of Praxiteles. Hichens avoids actual Greek
and Turkish politics in the book, but the sexual politics of his story obviously
build on the notion of the Greeks as the Western ideal and the Turks as the
erotic and dangerous Eastern Other.
32
The construction of the romance of Greek liberation in Byron and others
certainly implies the emasculation and consequent disappearance of the
Greek male. As Marilyn Butler said of Byrons The Giaour, In this story of
r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Athens, the native Greeks are virtually invisible (Orientalism of Byrons
Giaour 8y). In Hichenss In the Wilderness, Rosamund comments that
Greece is strangely bare of men (). The seeming invisibility of the
Greek male reects the uneasiness even of supporters of the modern Greeks
about their place among Western nations. The Examiner for April +j, +8:+,
spoke of the modern Greeks as that mixed and depraved race, the descen-
dants of the effeminate race of the Later Roman Empire, who have nally
risen up from their burdens and contumelies (:+). Freeman called the
Byzantines effete . . . given up only to luxury and sloth (Historical Essays
:y).
33
European men will rescue and indeed marry the female Greece in nu-
merous rewritings of the romance by English or American authors over the
next century and a half. Greek males will sometimes marry and have a
happy ending with Greek women, although more often one of the lovers
will die. But Greek men will almost never become involved with European or
American women until after the Second World War, when modern Greece
becomes less of a political and more of a primitive, sexual space in Western
literature.
34
There was a racial factor in the squeamish reticence to pair
Greek men and Western women, as if the West could only recognize Greek
women as European. This may have arisen from the fact that Greek men, at
least real Greek men, that is, klephts, were not thought to be effeminate
but, if not completely Eastern, they were still considered exotic primi-
tives. In other words, literature resolved the perceived dichotomy between
ancient/West and modern/East in Greece by making the rst female and the
second male. The former can be fully integrated, even married, into the
European family. Byron suggested such a division in The Corsair for, as
Elfenbein observed, Medora is entirely different from Conrad, while
Gulnare is his double (:). One explanation for this construction is that
Conrad, as a corsair with the Greek pirates, has become Eastern like
Gulnare, whereas Medora remains Western.
A number of nineteenth-century English novels have a woman of Greek
descent living in England, among them Geraldine Jewsburys Zoe (+8j),
Edward Collinss Vivien Romance (+8yo), Henry Creswells Modern Greek
Heroine (+88o), and William Blacks Briseis (+8).
35
Greek men, on the
other hand, were tacitly kept out of the European family. As late as +:, the
Greek protagonist of Anthony Gibbss Enter the Greek conceals his ethnic
background from his English friends and, of course, from the English-
woman he lovesthe rst part of the book is really a novel of a Greek man
passing as a European. Near the end of Dora Bradfords novel Greek Fire
(+j), the English heroine, Angel, has the following exchange with a young
countryman:
But, my dear child, you cant possibly marry a Greek.
Why not?
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a y
It absolutely isnt done.
Dr. Cameron is doing it anyway. Hes going to marry Haide.
Thats quite different. (jo)
It was indeed considered quite different in English and American writing, al-
though the reasons, as in this case, were left rather vague.
While this explanation of the perceived dual nature of Greece certainly
underlies both the Tales of Byron and much of the Western writing about
Greece, it remains below the surface and is rarely openly stated. For the
klephts, and with them the pirates, were the deadly foes of the Turks and
kept the ame of freedom burning in their inaccessible hideaways. But they
were not, at least in the Western imagination, men with homes and families
but rather a group of men without women, joined in a special bond, depicted
as homosocial if not homosexual, such as the robber clan in The Giaour or the
last of Lambros men in The Bride of Abydos. George Francis Savage-Arm-
strong emphasized this point in his poem The Klephts Flight (+88:),
written a full fty years after the War of Independence, in which a klephtic
leader explains to his new wife why they must leave their native land and seek
a new home elsewhere:
I amI was a robber-chief.
Ive fought for Greece and Liberty,
Ive fought for Greece, for love, for thee
A chief of Klephts, no vulgar thief.
No murderer for only gain,
But Freedoms soldier I have been. . . .
Alas, the chief of Klephtic band
Owns one allegiance, only one . . .
True to his band in rain or sun,
To them he yields his heart, his hand,
His strength, his liberty, his life;
No deadlier treason can he speak
Than in the ear of robber-Greek
To breathe the name of wife.
(Garland from Greece +y:y)
His love for the woman won out over his commitment to his fellow klephts,
and now every musket of my band / Is levelled with relentless hand / At
this poor heart that at thy feet / Has found an unimagined rest (+yyj).
The newly married couple is barely able to escape from the pursuing band
and leave for the Ionian islands. Savage-Armstrong was an admirer of the
klephts and their role in the ght against the Turks, as his poems War-Song
of the Greeks and The Brigand of Parnassus demonstrate.
8 r u v a o

s s n + n ow
The Klephts Flight shows the ambiguous place of the klephts in the
English and American imagination, for the captain, by the code of the bands,
would never be allowed to integrate himself into ordinary society.
36
In
Demetra Vaka Browns novel Grasp of the Sultan (++y), a Greek patriot tells
the young English hero:
I shall never marry. You will nd many Greeks of wealth all over the
world who will not marry so long as Constantinople is enslaved. It is
not an easy thing, because we Greeks love to be fathers, to have sons,
and to see them grow up in our traditions. But we, who belong to the
Brotherhood in ships, must have no descendants when we die. All our
money must go to the buying of dreadnoughtsto the building of the
great Greek navy which may some day reconquer Constantinople, may
free the Greek spirit, and permit priests to enter St. Sophia again. (+j)
In Greece, of course, the klephts married. It was only against the rules in
English and American literature.
In William Cullen Bryants Song of the Greek Amazon, a poem about a
female klepht, the speaker goes to the mountains after the Turks have killed
the man that she loved:
They slew himand my virgin years
Are vowed to Greece and vengeance now,
And many an Othman dame, in tears,
Shall rue the Grecian maidens vow.
(Poetical Works I.++y)
It is not at all surprising to nd that the Greek amazon of this poem, as in
many depictions of woman warriors, renounces her accustomed place in so-
ciety when she takes on a male role nor that this choice also entails a renun-
ciation of her sexuality. What must be stressed is that the position of the male
klepht acting in the male role differs little from that of Bryants Greek ama-
zonas Armstrongs poem indicates, he too was placed outside of human
society and his virgin years were vowed to Greece and vengeance. If kleph-
tic life prevented a klephts incorporation into the Greek state, and educated
Greeks were considered inauthentic, then it is no wonder that English and
American writers, like Europeans generally, thought of a regenerated Greece
as a female space.
The workings of the romance of liberation were an integral part of literary
philhellenism during the Greek Revolution and beyond, so it might be useful
to give another example at this time. In Demetra Vaka Browns In Pawn to a
Throne (++), written with her husband, Kenneth Brown, the heroine is
Artemis Byzas, the last of a Greek noble family from Constantinople. Her
great-grandfather tells her: The great sire of all your sires was Constantine
Byzas, who with a notable group of Greeks, emigrated from Megara, came
here and found the rst Greek city, which was named after him, Byzantium
(+y). The old man trains the girl to sacrice herself for her country by making
her learn Iphigeneias nal speech at Aulis (8). Artemis is chosen as the
bride of the half-German crown prince of Greece so that there will be a Greek
presence in the royal family at Athens. Unfortunately, with the coming of
World War I, Artemis and Greece face a new threat as dangerous as the Turks:
Yet a more sinister inuence now hovered over Greece, an inuence to whom
the killing of a few thousand men, to further their own schemes, was indeed
only of academic interest. As the heavy clouds in the sky blotted out the
moon, so Teutonism was blotting out Attic gentleness and cultivation (++).
On the Acropolis, Artemis meets Elihu Peabody, a member of the Ameri-
can legation. To the young diplomat, Artemis seemed the very embodiment
of eternally young Greece, whom the world loves. . . . And there in an instant,
ancient Greece receded and gave place to one person alone, a young girl. As
he thought of her, she changed: she was no longer the reincarnation of the
spirit of old Greece; she became the personication of a New Greece, a
Greece alive and forward looking, a Greece of the future (j, 8). The royal
family plans an attack on the republican Greek forces, which have broken
away from the threat of Teutonism and are ghting beside the Allies in
Salonica. Artemis, who as the princes betrothed is living in the palace, be-
comes for all intents and purposes a captive with the sexual threat of earlier
Greek heroines hovering over her. She attempts to stop the impending Ger-
man takeover of Greece by sending Elihu Peabody to intercept a German
messenger. He succeeds, and the threat of Teutonism recedes from Greece.
Of course, the last of the Byzas, that very embodiment of young Greece,
promises to become Mrs. Peabody and move to Connecticut. The romance of
liberation, then, replicates the cultural colonialism implicit in the removal of
antiquities from Greece by men like Elgin, a point made clear by Owenson in
+8o when Lord B. tells Ida: Let others ravish from your country the ruined
fragments of its former glory, but for me, oh! be it still reserved to bear away
a nobler prize, and shew the lovely inspiration from which athenian genius
drew its splendour (I.+).
37
A Greek hero does appear in the novel, Spiro Mellioti. Artemis says that
since +yj his ancestors fought side by side with mineand have died and
rotted unburied on the battleelds of Greece (+8:). Spiros whole life is de-
voted to the cause of Greece and the family Byzas, which, given the fact that
the present representative is the personication of Greece, amount to the
same thing. It is not surprising that Spiro is the only member of Artemiss
group of patriots who dies in the novel. The wife of an American lawyer
named Elihu Peabody would not have erce klephts guarding her doors.
yo r u v a o

s s n + n o w
In Pawn to a Throne, with the adjustment of the Germans for the Turks,
reprises in a reductive form the romance of Greek liberation inherited from
the nineteenth century. In ++, as in +yyo, the best way to gain support for
Greece abroad was, in the opinion of the author, not to portray a group of
heroic young men in the pass of Thermopylae but rather to depict a beautiful
young woman as the captive of brutal forces. There is, of course, a central dif-
culty with Vaka Browns novel, as with the romance of liberation in general.
After the woman who is the embodiment of Greece has been rescued and
agrees to become Mrs. Peabody and live in Connecticut after the war, what is
the future of young Greece? Vaka Brown, like most philhellenic authors, is
too busy attempting to inspire the rescue to worry about the consequences.
The romance of Greek liberation was such a convention by the late nine-
teenth century that the classical scholar Gilbert Murray provided a carica-
ture of the theme in his early novel Gobi; or, Shamo (+88). The heroine is
Clearista Botzares, whose beauty was only a tenth of her charm. Every well-
informed person in Arganthos [the ctional island on which the novel be-
gins] or Athens too, for that matter, knew of her learning and patriotism, had
heard of her journey to the North of Greece, to nurse wounded insurgents
on the Macedonian frontier; and had read that eloquent pamphlet about the
same insurrection which appeared in Athens with the signature Clearista.
For it was part of her system to discard her second name and bear only one,
like the great Greeks of olda small piece of pedantry (y). It might be sur-
prising that someone should discard so famous a surname, but it turns out
that the name was borrowed from the Suliot Nothi Botzares, whose life was
accidentally saved by Clearistas grandfather during the War of Indepen-
dence. Clearista learns that an old schoolmate has married a wealthy English
nobleman in order to use his money and position to redeem Macedonia:
Sophia was a real patriot, and this, Clearista saw, combined with moderate
beauty and Greek birth, had fascinated the romantic young philhellene
(:). She resolves to do her patriotic duty as well and sets her sights on the
more noble and more wealthy Lord Strathburne, a weak, pale, and insipid
Englishman with a lisp. In Murrays novel, rich philhellenic foreigners are
now the prey of designing young Greek women. But at the end of the novel,
Clearista, like Artemis Byzas, no longer lives in Greece.
The Grce de Byron had become the norm even before the poet left to join
the cause of Greek independence in +8:, so much so that Thomas Hughes
in his Travels in Greece and Albania (+8o) included the following diary entry
for the year +8+:
September thVain would be the attempt, if I endeavored to ex-
press my sensations at rst setting foot upon the shores of Greece; that
o a r r c r s o r u v a o + n o r n o r a y+
Clime of the unforgotten brave!
Whose land from plain to mountain-cave,
Was freedoms home, or glorys grave!
The impression is still vivid, but it dees description. (I.+8)
Hughes quotes lines from The Giaour, which were added to the fth edition
of the poem that appeared, according to McGann (CPW III, p. +), in early
September +8+. Hughes has rewritten his rst impressions of Greece be-
tween +8+ and the publication of his book to include a quotation from a
poem of Byron that he could not have read at the time of his rst visit to the
country. Even after the fact, Hughes wants the public to believe that he rst
saw Greece with the poems of Byron in his head.
Those who came after Hughes did not have to pretend that Byron was in
their heads as they disembarked at Piraeus or Patras. The young Edward
Everett, who would go on to be a professor of Greek at Harvard and a famous
orator, stopped in London to visit Byron in preparation for a visit to Greece.
The poet provided advice and some letters of introduction (Larrabee o+).
Those who did not journey to Greece also felt the impact of Byrons po-
etry. Felicia Hemanss Modern Greece can best be described as a Childe
Harolds Pilgrimage without the persona of Harold. And Mrs. Vaughans
Grecians (+8:), one of the rst plays written about the Greek War of Inde-
pendence, has the Byronic epigraph, Of the three hundred grant but three /
To make a new Thermopylae.
Near the end of Navarin, Hugo wrote:
Grce est libre, et dans sa tombe
Byron applaudit Navarin.
Hugo and the rest of Europe believed that Byron had died that Greece
might still be free. Byron did not end, however much he might have wished
it, as one of certain men the Turkish shot. He was bled to death by Euro-
pean doctors after he had accomplished very little during four months in the
real Greece. But when he stepped into the Grce de Byron as an actor, he be-
came for all eternity the hero of his own script.
3
On the Ruins of Missolonghi
The Greeks in Missolonghi, alternately spelled as Mesolonghi or Missa-
longhi in philhellenic literature, were in desperate straits by the middle of
April +8:. The town, situated in a salt marsh in western Greece just north of
the Corinthian Gulf, had been under siege since April :y, +8:j. Food was
scarce and ammunition low. Rather than surrender to the attacking Ottoman
and Egyptian armies, the defenders of Missolonghi decided to attempt to
break through the Turkish lines on the night of April ::, +8:. Out of ,ooo
men, women, and children who took part in the sortie, only about :,ooo
would eventually reach safety. On April :, the last remaining Greek soldiers
blew themselves up in the towns powder magazine (Finlay :+y). It is
most unlikely that any of those soldiers were aware that Byrons Minotti had
expired exactly the same way at the end of The Siege of Corinth and that, in
Western European eyes, they had also lived and died a Byronic ction.
The War of Independence would not have a new Marathon, but, as
George Croly pronounced in his poem On the Ruins of Mesolonghi, writ-
ten soon after the fall of the town, it did have a new Thermopylae:
Glorious spirits! ye have past;
On the ground your blood is cast,
Tower and bastion, all are won,
Round the new Thermopylae
Lies the gore, and lies the clay,
To high heaven the soul is gone.
(Poetical Works ::o)
In his powerful Les Ttes du Serail, with the haunting line Missalonghi
nest plus, Victor Hugo would go even further: Voici votre Calvaire aprs
vos Thermopyles.
The heroic end of the year-long defense of Missolonghi was, in the words
of Finlay, the most glorious military operation of the Greek Revolution. . . .
Greek patriotism seemed to have concentrated itself within the walls of
y:
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r y
Mesolonghi (:y). Unfortunately, the valiant behavior of the defenders of
the town did not inspire their fellow Greeks to put aside their differences and
strike hard at the enemy. Finlay, who was actively involved in the War of In-
dependence at the time, lamented that the garrison that surrendered the
Acropolis to the Turks in May +8:y lacked the devoted patriotism of the
men of Mesolonghi (:).
When news of the fall of Missolonghi reached Western Europe and
America, however, supporters of Greek independence redoubled their ef-
forts. As St. Clair said, the Turks found it totally incomprehensible that the
capture of a small shing village should have ideological signicance. Misso-
longhi had no classical associations (That Greece Might Still Be Free :).
Yet one of the physicians accompanying the Muslim army saw a message
scribbled on a househic e vita decessit Lord Byron. Here was a clue to a fac-
tor that no Turk could have been expected to understand. In the two years
since the death of Lord Byron, Missolonghi had become the most famous
town in modern Greece, the symbol of the War of Independence, the focus
of all philhellenic feeling (That Greece Might Still Be Free :). In Western
literature, only one location from the Greek Revolution would join Mara-
thon, Salamis, and Thermopylae in the pantheon of liberty. Modern Greeks
would venerate such locations as Kalavryta, where the ag of the revolution
was raised for the rst time. The rest of the world revered Missolonghi. And
it was Byron, not the most glorious military operation of the Greek Revolu-
tion, who was primarily responsible for placing one of the more obscure and
unappealing locations in Greece on the map of the world. The English poet
Aubrey de Vere wrote in +8jo, Byrons fate will long impart interest to a
place which would otherwise not possess much to attract notice (Picturesque
Sketches in Greece and Turkey I.o+). Without the poets death, Misso-
longhi might have been remembered only by Greeks.
Byron arrived in Missolonghi on January , +8:. From August , +8:, until
December :, the poet had stayed on the Ionian island of Cephalonia, which
was then under British control. Some philhellenes and members of the Lon-
don Greek Committee almost despaired of Byrons ever setting foot in liber-
ated Greece.
1
Even after his arrival in Missolonghi, they continued to be
frustrated by what they perceived to be the poets indecision and inactivity.
Byrons inaction, however, stemmed from the enormous confusion and seri-
ous conicts among various Greek leaders. On September :y, +8:, Byron
wrote Hobhouse from Cephalonia: The fact is that matters are in great dis-
order.No less than three partiesand one conspiracy going on at this mo-
ment among thema few steps further and a civil war may ensue.On all
sides they are (as you perceive) trying to enlist me as a partizan. . . . I have not
yet gone to the Main[a]because to say the truthit does not appear that I
could avoid being considered as a favourer of one party or anotherbut the
y r u v a o

s s n + n o w
moment I can be of any real service I am willing to go amongst them (BLJ
++.:y:8). In the end, as Byron himself must have realized, he could never be
of real service to the Greeks.
2
John Cam Hobhouse, after reading accounts of
Byrons last days from Leicester Stanhope, the Benthamite who was sent out
to establish a free press in Greece, concluded: Had he lived I am not sure
that he could not one day or the other have had cause to regret that he had not
fallen by the fevers of Mesolonghi, just as Pompey grieved he had not fallen
in Campania (Marchand III.+:).
3
Whether Byron would have ever re-
gretted escaping the fevers of Missolonghi, it was readily apparent to Hob-
house that Byron had accomplished more by dying than he ever could have
by living.
Dr. Julius Millingen, who accompanied Byron to Missolonghi and, in the
eyes of some, had a hand in killing the poet, expressed amazement at the dis-
crepancy between the optimistic opinion of the modern Greeks prevalent in
Europe and Byrons pessimistic view of the descendants of Miltiades.
Millingen recorded Byrons response: This should not surprise you, for I
know this nation by long and attentive experience, while in Europe they
judge it by inspiration. The Greeks are perhaps the most depraved and de-
graded people under the sun, uniting to their original vices both those of
their oppressors, and those inherent in slaves ().
4
In an essay entitled The
Present State of Greece, dated February :, +8:, and not published dur-
ing the poets lifetime, Byron commented on the almost complete disorgani-
zation of the Greeks:
The Greeks have been downright slaves for ve centuries and there is
no tyrant like a slave. The Delegate of a Despot is still a bondsman,
and men whose fathers fathers, farther than they can reckon, were
absolute vileins, without property, even of their own persons, still
move as if they were in fetters, or, in many instances, may seem only to
have exchanged the chains of the prisoner for the freedom of the
jailor. This is a hard truth; but we fear it is one. We are not here to at-
ter, but to aid, as far as in our power, to a better order of things, and,
whether of the Greeks or to the Greeks, let the truth be spoken. (Com-
plete Miscellaneous Prose +)
Anyone familiar with the notes to Childe Harolds Pilgrimage would not
nd such sentiments about the Greeks at all surprising; Byron had been say-
ing the same sort of thing for more than a decade. Finlay suggested that
Byron did not overlook the vices of the Greek leaders, but at the same time
he did not underrate the virtues of the people. The determined spirit with
which they asserted their independence received his sincere praise, even
while the rapacity, cruelty, and dissensions in the military weighed heavily
on his mind (::). Yet, as Finlay acknowledged, Byron was often as dis-
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r yj
gusted with the Suliot soldiers in his employ as he was with the Greek lead-
ers (:::y). Still, Byron remained committed to the establishment of a
better order of things in Greece even as he increasingly despaired of its
probability.
If Europe, as Byron reportedly told Millingen, judged Greece by inspira-
tion rather than experience, it was an inspiration founded in large measure
on the poetry that Byron had written. And Byron continued to produce verse
that seems at odds with the insightful and searching criticism of the Greeks
found in his letters and other prose. In the poem On this day I complete my
thirty sixth year, composed for his birthday on January ::, +8:, he said:
Thy Swordthe bannerand the Field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan borne upon his shield,
Was not more free!
Awake! (not Greeceshe is awake!)
Awake my spiritThink through whom
Thy Life-blood trickles its parent lake,
And then strike home! . . .
If thou regretst thy youth, why live?
The Land of honorable Death
Is hereup to the eld! and give
Away thy breath:
Seek outless often sought than found,
A Soldiers Gravefor thee the best,
Then look around and choose thy ground
And take thy Rest.
(CPW VII, pp. 8o8+)
Byron had seen little around him to connect the glory of Greece and valor of
the Spartans with the present inhabitants of Greece. Yet, when this poem
was published posthumously, it would, like the purple passages of Childe
Harold and The Isles of Greece, encourage its audience to judge Greece by
inspiration rather than by close observation of the real situation. To the end
of his life, the Greece of Byrons poetry differed greatly from the Greece of
his prose. And, as Byron surely knew by the year +8:, it was through his po-
etry and not his prose that Greece was known abroad. After all, many of the
active English and American philhellenes whom Byron met in Greece had
been inspired to join the cause by his verse.
5
Byrons poetic statements about Greece do not appear to be the pose of the
bard but rather an indication that, despite his long and attentive experience,
y r u v a o

s s n + n o w
he too was moved to judge Greece by inspiration. An unpublished poetic
fragment dated June +, +8:, a few months before he left for Greece, began:
The Dead have awakenedshall I sleep? / The Worlds at war with
tyrantsshall I crouch? (BLJ ++.:). However much he might have railed
against the Greeks, a part of Byron wanted to see the War of Independence as
a sign of regeneration of the classical dead and a blow to tyranny both abroad
and at home. In this fragment, as in On this day, the problem is not Greece
(she is awake), but the self-perceived inactivity of the poet. Finlay said of
Byron: It seemed as if two different souls occupied his body alternately
(::j). If so, then one of these souls wrote his verse, the other his prose. But
the reading public, as I have already suggested, seems to have paid attention
only to Byrons poetic soul and even then not to its complete output and
shaded nuances.
As St. Clair observed, Byrons death and the heroic defense of Missolonghi
quickly became conated. The name of Missolonghi became one of the
great rallying cries of the nineteenth century and not a few who responded to
it believed that Lord Byron had died in the destruction of the town (That
Greece Might Still Be Free :). Henry J. Bradeld wrote in his poem Lean-
dro (+8o), A warrior from the West shall come, / To aid thy cause, to share
thy doom! (Tales of the Cyclades :+). It was, after all, a natural assumption
for readers who judge by inspiration; had not the poet himself in one of his
last poems said that he wanted to Seek out . . . / A soldiers grave? What
better ground to choose for him than a place in the new Thermopylae? Years
later, Isadora Duncan would ask if there were anything more touching than
Byrons death in the brave town of Missolonghi? (My Life +:+).
In Thomas Moores Evenings in Greece (+8:), the women of the island of
Zea (Kea) gather to sing songs while they await word about their loved ones
ghting for freedom on the mainland. Some passing mariners inform them
about the news of Missolonghi:
Twas from an isle of mournful name,
From Missolonghi, last they came
Sad Missolonghi, sorrowing yet
Oer him, the noblest Star of Fame
That eer in lifes young glory set!
And now were on their mournful way,
Wafting the news through Helles isles;
News that would cloud evn Freedoms ray,
And sadden Victory mid her smile.
Their tale thus told, and heard, with pain,
Out spread the galliots wings again;
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r yy
And, as she sped her swift career,
Again that Hymn rose on the ear
Thou art not deadthou art not dead
As oft twas sung in ages own,
Of him, the Athenian, who, to shed
A tyrants blood, pourd out his own.
(Poetical Works :o)
The chorus then breaks into a lyric about Harmodius, a tyrannicide of the
sixth century ucr, whose deed is presented as a classical analogy for Byrons
illustrious end.
Moore was working on Evenings in Greece in the spring of +8:j, well be-
fore he learned of the fall of Missolonghi. But few readers in the years after
+8: could look at the phrase Sad Missolonghi, sorrowing yet or the fol-
lowing couplet from W. G. Thompsons +8: Lines on the Death of Lord
Byron: Yea, on the battleeld expired, / With thy ancestral glories red
(Chew +y) and not link Byrons heroism and the new Thermopylae.
While Byron is not specically mentioned in Crolys On the Ruins of
Mesolonghi, Hugos Les Ttes du Serail, or a number of other poems
about the fall of Missolonghi (e.g., Felicia Skenes On Missalonghi, +8),
he is unquestionably present in all of these works. One could argue that in the
most important of the pieces honoring Missolonghi, Les Ttes du Serail,
Byrons presence is felt even more strongly because, unlike Canaris, Boz-
zaris, Miaoulis, or even Fabvier, he does not need to be named.
Byrons death and the fall of Missolonghi were quickly taken up into the
romance of Greek liberation. One of the most famous and inuential exam-
ples was Ferdinand Victor Eugne Delacroixs painting Greece Expiring on
the Ruins of Missolonghi (+8:y; see chap. :), from which George Croly took
the title of the poem quoted above.
6
The poet who had been instrumental in
creating the romance of Greek liberation had become a principal in that same
romance.
Byrons entrance into the romance of Greek liberation would politicize
many readings of an earlier work written in +8+o, during his rst stay in
Athens. The poem is titled Song and begins:
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh, give me back my heart!
Or, since that has left my breast,
Keep it now, and take the rest!
Hear my vow before I go,
~
Zc aoo
~
o_ ccc
(CPW I, p. :8o)
y8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Teresa Macri, later Mrs. John Black, for whom the poem was thought to
have been written, became as much a shrine for many Western visitors to
Greece in the decades after the War of Independence as the plain of
Marathon because, through the conation of Byrons expression of love for
a Greek woman and his commitment to a feminized Greece, she too became
a part of the romance of Greek liberation.
7
As late as +8y, C. C. Felton
commented that it is a common thing for travellers to call on Mrs. Black,
with no more introduction than zoe mou, sas agapo (Greece, Ancient and
Modern j+j).
After a description of his visit to Teresa Black in +8:, the American
Walter Colton discussed Byrons relationship with the Maid in what
amounted to a free-associative gloss on Byrons text in the romantic light of
the poets death:
I have ever lamented the blind necessity which so early separated the
minstrel and her who drew forth his most passionate and tender lays.
Beings so congenial in their sympathies, impulses, desires; so alike in
their tastes, pleasures, and susceptibilities, should have met but once,
and then never parted. . . . But they were not thus to be united; it was
for him to wander on, to encounter strange and familiar faces, to be
falsely allied, to seek again the scene of his former exile, to bind the
wreath of the lyre upon his sword, and ashing it in the eye of an ex-
ulting Greece, drop into an untimely grave! He sunk alone; but like a
resplendent star, that kindles with its own effulgence the clouds that
would darken its descent. She, that was the object of his early fond-
ness, was not there to witness his departure; but she heard, through
the tops of her distant isle, the moaning winds conveying onward the
sighs of a dismayed nation, the regrets of a bereaved world! (::+::)
While all visitors were not so effusive, many were as prone to view the rela-
tions of Byron and the Maid of Athens in terms of the poets later involve-
ment in Greek politics.
Numerous instances of the politicization of Byrons Song appeared in
the nineteenth century. As early as June +8:, Byrons little love poem was
put to political use when the New Royal Theatre in Drury Lane presented
John Baldwin Buckstones Revolt of the Greeks; or, The Maid of Athens, which
was followed in June +8:8 by the melodrama Maid of Athens; or, Greece and
Liberty at the Caledonian Theatre.
8
The two most reductive political uses of
the poem are Catherine Grace Garnetts Reine Canziani (+8:j), in which a
Lord Byron persona named Lord Monthermer falls in love with the daugh-
ter of the Greek patriot Canziani and proclaims, Zoe mou sas agapo . . . will
be my motto, and a novel ttingly entitled Maid of Athens by Lafayette
McLaws (Emily Lafayette) published in +o. In the latter book, on his rst
journey to Athens, Byron falls in love with Thyrza Rhigas, the daughter of
the Greek patriot executed in +y8. McLawss novel opens on the day of
Rhigass death with the heros wife singing Byrons +8o translation of Rhi-
gass War Song. In the novel, Thyrzas mother herself constructs the ro-
mance of liberation by calling her daughter the Maid of Athens and
prophesying that she will become a beautiful woman, and another man will
lay down his life for her sake and accomplish what her father began (). The
book inventively weaves a ctitious connection between the Maid of Athens,
Byrons Thyrza poems, and his philhellenism. But it is important to make
clear that, while the novels premise stretches the truth, it would not neces-
sarily strain the credulity of its readers. McLawss audience had already been
conditioned to link the Maid of Athens and Byrons love of Greece.
9
An up-
dated Maid of Athens caught the eye of a young philhellene in a number of
novels with that phrase in the title, such as Justin McCarthys Maid of Athens
(+88), Joseph Hockings Tommy and the Maid of Athens (++y), French
Strothers Maid of Athens (+:), and Mary Richmonds Maid of Athens
(+8).
The canonization of Byron as the hero of Greece was rapid and enduring
in European literature. In his poem To the Shade of Byron (+8:y), Henry
Bradeld exclaimed with the fame of thy country, thy name shall be
wreathed. For Bradeld, as probably for many of his readers, Byrons
country was Greece as much as, if not even more than, England. Taking a
page from Byron himself, Bradeld did not hesitate to tell the Greeks how
they should feel about their hero: When the Greek thinks of thee, / Shall
the tear dim his eye, / For thy genius hath taught him, / Undaunted to die!
(Tales of the Cyclades +jy). In The Last of the Klephts: A Glimpse of the
Greek War of Independence, written during the Greco-Turkish War of
+8y, Isabella Mayo said of the progress of the Greek state: It has been his
[Byrons] hopes which have come truehis endeavors which have been jus-
tied (8). The modern Greeks have certainly honored Byrons effort, but
they might legitimately balk at accepting the notion that Byrons poems
taught them dedication to the cause of Greek freedom or that modern
Greece had to justify his hopes and endeavors.
As William Ruddick noted, from the time of his death a distinction
form[ed] in the opinion of his contemporaries between Byron, the hero of
Greece, a man of action, politically and militarily effective, and the slapdash,
self-regarding and self-dramatizing poet of earlier days (:y). Even those
who found fault with his poetry could, although sometimes grudgingly, ac-
knowledge his courage. For example, in Courage, Matthew Arnold, who
reservedly praised the earlier poets verse in his essay Byron, wrote:
And Byron! Let us dare admire
If not thy erce and turbid song,
8o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Yet that in anguish, doubt, desire,
Thy ery courage still was strong.
(+8)
The conception of Byron as a man of action was, to a large degree,
based on reports of Byrons last days by those who were there, who arrived
soon after, or who were in the area. The earliest and most important of them
were Count Peter Gambas Narrative of Lord Byrons Last Journey to Greece
(+8:j), William Parrys Last Days of Lord Byron (+8:j), Edward Blacquieres
Narrative of a Second Visit to Greece, Including Facts Connected with the Last
Days of Lord Byron (+8:j), and Leicester Stanhopes Greece in .S: and
.S:,, Being a Series of Letters and Other Documents on the Greek Revolution . . .
to Which Are Added, Reminiscences of Lord Byron (+8:j).
10
Samuel Chew in
his useful Byron in England rather naively reported: It is evident, then, that
the testimony of Byrons fellow-workers for the cause of independence was
entirely, or almost entirely, favorable to him; without doubt this group of dis-
interested witnesses did much to rehabilitate the reputation which the last
years in Italy had somewhat tarnished (:oy). Since the writers were all fel-
low workers in the cause of Greece and that cause was still very much in
doubt in +8:j, how disinterested would their accounts really be? Did
Byron in his death throes mutter, as Gamba reported, Poor Greece! . . . I
have given her my time, my means, my healthand now I give her my life!
could I do more? (:j). Both before and after Byrons death at Missolonghi,
the Western idea of modern Greece was attached to his star.
11
In the words of Finlay, Byrons arrival in Greece directed the attention
of all Europe to the affairs of Greece by joining the cause (::). Finlay
was one of those whose attention was captured, and he left for Greece soon
after he heard of Byrons departure. Byrons public fame, or infamy, depend-
ing on ones viewpoint, would have attracted notice no matter what cause the
poet embraced. But the commitment of the poet of The Isles of Greece to
the struggle for Greek freedom struck a strong emotional chord throughout
Europe and America.
12
Even before Byrons arrival in Greece in +8:, the
prominence of the Grce de Byron had linked the poet and the place in a
close association. Byrons death in Missolonghi, especially as it was reported
by those with him, solidied that connection into an unbreakable bond. In
the eyes of the West, the poet created Greece twicerst when he put the
Grce de Byron down on paper and later when he played a major role in the
liberation of the country. Or, as Casimir Delavigne put it in Messnienne sur
Lord Byron, Childe Harold sur vos bords revient pour succomber (+).
The French poet went on to call Byron Greeces Homer and Achilles com-
bined (Il chantait comme Homre, il fut mort comme Achille, +).
Yet if Byron saved Greece, then Greece in turn redeemed Byron. By
the early +8:os Byrons verse had declined in popularity, a trend helped by
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r 8+
the scandals connected with his personal life and the hostile reception to
such works as Cain and Don Juan. The poets death, in the words of Ruddick,
rescued his personal reputation (:y). The story of Missolonghi is equally
about the redemption of the personal integrity of the poet as it is about the
regeneration of Greece. Flaubert said, In Greece, he [Byron] preferred to
die rather than be bled. He went there to ght for the rebirth of a country that
had been strangled by servitude. He went there to lift the chariot of freedom
out of the mire where tyrants had plunged it. But the mire had an ennobling
effect. It immortalized Byron, the son of the century (Portrait of Lord
Byron ). In ++:, Emilie Barrington claimed, Whatever Byron was else-
where, the Byron of that Missolonghi I am staring at across the sea was
noble-hearted and tender-hearted (:).
After +8:, the fortunes of Byron and Greece were irrevocably joined,
and they would rise and fall together. In the +8jos, when Byrons reputation
hit its lowest ebb in England (Chew :), Freeman stated that dislike to-
wards Greece on the part of Englishmen naturally reached its height during
the frenzy of the Russian war. He added: In all matters relating to Greeks
and Turks we reversed the rules by which our sympathies were guided in
other parts of the world (Historical Essays +:). When interest in Byron re-
vived around +88o, so did English philhellenism. In America, where Byron
and Byronism did not experience as large a midcentury lull, philhellenic feel-
ing remained strong.
13
There were, without question, important political
considerations that help explain the different attitudes toward modern
Greece in nineteenth-century England and America, yet these same factors
also affected opinions about Byron. And Greece was not always the cart be-
hind the Byronic horse, since a revolt in Crete or Macedonia would in-
evitably call attention to Byrons heroism. But Byrons literary and cultural
importance went beyond and, for many British and Americans, could be sep-
arated from his philhellenism. Supporters of modern Greece, on the other
hand, would invoke Byron, as they would the classical past, whenever Greece
was involved in territorial disputes with the Turks.
14
In Byron in Greece in
the Temple Bar of +88+, written at a time when Greece and Turkey were on
the verge of war, the anonymous author stated at the outset that no political
virus will nd their expression here but added: At a time when Greece is
once more in everyones thoughts and on nearly everyones lips, it may be in-
teresting to revert to what were more familiar to the preceding generation of
Englishmen than they are to the present one, the experiences of Byron in
Hellas (+oo). The nal crescendo carries an unsubtle message about con-
temporary events. [Byron] died for Greece, which to this hour nds in his
name, his Muse, and his sword, one of the strongest claims to the sympathies
of mankind (+o8).
But since Byron was perceived to be Freedoms laureate, as Robert Un-
derwood Johnson proclaimed in To the Spirit of Byron, he could be
8: r u v a o

s s n + n ow
invoked during rebellions in Italy or Poland, as well as for agitation for do-
mestic reform in Britain.
15
For Europeans and Americans, Byron, the son
of the century, was larger than Greece in the political as well as the cultural
realm.
16
Modern Greece was subsumed into Byronism in a way that Byron
was never contained by philhellenism. As Carlisle phrased it in the prologue
to his play The Last of the Greeks; or, The Fall of Constantinople (+8:8): Hon-
our to Byron, when the theme is Greece (v). When the theme was Byron,
Greece might not be involved at all.
Modern Greece was associated with a political Byronism of a certain
kind.
17
Twenty years after Byrons death, Joseph Mazzini wrote:
I know of no more beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission
of art than the death of Byron in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry
with the cause of peoples; the unionstill so rareof thought and
actionwhich alone completes the human Word, and is destined to
emancipate the world; the grand solidarity of all nations in the con-
quest of rights ordained by God for all his children, and in the accom-
plishment of that mission for which such rights exist;all that is now
the religion and hope of the party of progress throughout Europe, is
so gloriously typied in this image. (Byron and Goethe )
Earlier in this essay, the Italian patriot said of the two poets: Both of
theseI am not speaking of their purely literary merits, incontestably and
universally acknowledged . . . greatly aided the cause of intellectual eman-
cipation, and awakened in mens minds the sentiment of liberty (8). The
political Left did not embrace Byron primarily for his artistic or aesthetic
value but as the leading example of both poetry and the poet serving the
cause of liberty. In nearly all of Mazzinis comments about Byron, politics
takes precedence over art. His attitude helps to explain why modern Greece
is central to the Byronism of the politically engaged and a radical/liberal
symbol throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. For readers who
wanted to privilege, or even separate, the aesthetics or dandyism of the self
regarding and self-dramatizing poet from the poets political voice, Byrons
role in Greece was overlooked or downplayed.
18
Mazzini, perhaps the high priest of nationalistic Byronism in the middle
of the nineteenth century, noted, I have, throughout my life, scattered By-
rons of mine wherever I have been sojourning (Mack Smith +8+). He re-
ferred to actual texts of the poet he had to leave behind during his years of
hiding. But Mazzini also left, or attempted to leave, other scattered Byrons in
the form of poets and writers who were encouraged to emulate Mazzinis
conception of the martyr for Greece. The best known was Swinburne, of
whom Mazzini consented to take intellectual charge in the hopes that the
young English poet might be the literary Byron of the Italian Risorgimento
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r 8
(Gosse +). The Byron of Greece, like the Greece of Byron and Shelley, be-
came connected to a radical/liberal ideology.
The fascination of other writers with Byrons fate is quite understand-
able. Authors, such as Dante, Milton, and Yeats, dreamed of being men of
action with the power to affect the course of events, yet they were seldom ef-
fective. Indeed, for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the myth of
Byron became the prime instance of the poet as a man of action against
whom other writers had to measure themselves. It was a myth, since the poet
was hardly effective politically or militarily in Greece. Further, it instilled a
belief that the success of a cause could come from the martyrdom of a single
literary gure. In +y, during the Spanish Civil War, a Communist leader in
England told Stephen Spender without jest, Go and get killed, comrade, we
need a Byron in the movement (Hugh Thomas 8).
The literary construction of modern Greece was fashioned among and
within ideological arguments about the artist in politics. Implicitly tied up in
the discussion of the role of the poet in the world of politics was the place
where an author once was a man of action. The desire of authors to strive for
the title of Byron of Italy or Byron of Ireland would add luster to polit-
ical Byronism, but such aspirations did little for the cause of Greece. Greece
already had the real Byron, a fact that may have encouraged some writers ap-
prehensive of the poets long shadow to turn their attention elsewhere. Many
authors who were unsympathetic to the liberal causes associated with Byron
allowed that to color their attitude toward Greece. It is one of the paradoxes
of nineteenth-century English intellectual history that the Tories invariably
exhibited disdain for a small monarchy dominated by a conservative clergy
because of misinformed rhetoric about revolutionary Greece.
In the wake of the poet, a whole new breed of philhellenes, the romantic By-
ronists, made their way to Greece: They were more Byronic than Byron,
trying to nd in Greece the exoticism which they loved, thinking they were
copying Byron but actually behaving in a way Byron himself never did
(St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free +y). Yet no matter how rosy their
preconceptions, the experience of Greece would in most cases have a deat-
ing effect. Indeed, some, such as David Urquhart in The Spirit of the East
(+88) or P. J. Green in Sketches of the War in Greece (+8:y), would sour on the
Greeks and publish scathing critiques of their shortcomings.
19
But the arm-
chair Romantic Byronists and philhellenes who remained at home remained
almost entirely impervious to what was actually happening in Greece. Accu-
rate information, particularly at the beginning of the war, was rarely avail-
able, though this was not the real problem. The major difculty was that au-
thors could not conceive of modern Greece without seeing it through both
ancient Greece and Byrons poetry. The result was that, as St. Clair said, it
seemed impossible to represent any event in Modern Greece as an event in its
8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
own right without overwhelming it with misleading allusions (That Greece
Might Still Be Free :).
Of the numerous memoirs of the War of Independence written by Eng-
lish volunteers, none would be as popular as the poems of Felicia Hemans
and Walter Savage Landor. The American Samuel Gridley Howe would
write several pieces on his experience in Greece, but they never approached
the circulation of the verse of William Cullen Bryant, Fitz Halleck, or James
Gates Percival. Of course, Childe Harold and the Tales continued to be read
with fervor. Literary philhellenism had dened its terms and set its parame-
ters before the War of Independence began and would not allow the modern
Greeks to disturb its view of Greece.
20
The public perception of modern Greece would continue to be shaped by
misleading allusions. For example, in An Autumn in Greece, Henry Bulwer
wrote in a letter dated August +, +8:, from the Italian port of Ancona,
where he was awaiting a ship for Greece, that the most splendid news has
been received here of a battle fought at Marathon, in which the Greeks did
not forget the spot on which they stood, and showed themselves worthy of
their ancient glory. The Turks were defeated with great loss (8). As Bulwer
would discover when he arrived in Greece, such a battle never took place. In
a note to his famous poem Marco Bozzaris, Fitz-Greene Halleck related
that the Greek leader was one of the best and bravest of the modern Greek
chieftains. He fell in a night attack upon the Turkish camp at Laspi, the site
of ancient Plataea, April :o, +8:, and expired in the moment of victory
(Poetical Writings ). Bozzaris actually died near Karpenisi in western
Greece, which is nowhere near the site of the battle against the Persians. But
Hallecks note has been repeatedly republished as it was written in +8:. If
Americans today know of Bozzaris at all, it is often from Hallecks poem and
its misleading note.
So the Grce de Byron, not surprisingly, survived the War of Indepen-
dence basically unchanged. The principal idea throughout the +8:os re-
mained the regeneration of the Greeks, as in Bulwers comment that
changed as the Greek may be from the portrait of his fathers, a family re-
semblance still remains; that image of Liberty which forsook his dwelling,
was cherished in his heart (j) and in the repeated phrase we are Greeks
once again in the song that opens canto : of Agnes Stricklands Demetrius
(). The idea formed the central inspiration for Walter Savage Landors
poem Regeneration (+8:j).
21
In that work, as in Childe Harold, the revival
of Greece is viewed both as a strike against the spreading / Of Despotism
(+o) and as a possible cure for English cultural malaise:
I, in the land of strangers, and deprest
With sad and certain presage for my own,
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r 8j
Exult at hopes fresh dayspring
(Poetical Works III.:8j, ll. y+y)
The central analogies still referred to the Persian Wars and, to a lesser ex-
tent, to the fall of Constantinople in +j. In part because of the immense
popularity of Byrons The Isles of Greece, Marathon had pride of place
as the most frequent misleading allusion. It appears in Landors Regenera-
tion (jjj) and takes center stage in Felicia Hemanss The Sleeper on
Marathon, in whose rst two stanzas, especially the debt to Byron is obvi-
ous.
22
The young Elizabeth Barrett Brownings debt to Byron is equally
clear in her Rigas Last Song, since Byron was the medium through which
both Rhigas and his anthem were widely known in England. Her own recon-
struction of The mountains look on Marathon / And Marathon looks on
the sea shows which of the two poets, Greek or English, was her prime
inspiration:
I looked on the mountains of proud Souli,
And the mountains they seemed to look on me;
I spoke my thought on Marathons plain,
And Marathon seemed to speak again.
(Poetical Works jy)
It was so commonplace to locate the modern Greek struggle for inde-
pendence within historical analogies that authors could simply refer to the
ancient event and assume the reader would make the necessary comparison
to the contemporary struggle in Greece. George Crolys The Death of
Leonidas and Hemanss Ancient Greek Song of Victory (although in this
instance the epigraph to Byron provides a connecting link) are both poems
concerning the Greek War of Independence. Indeed it is safe to conclude
that, from +8:+ to +8, any poem about or, for that matter, any mention of
places or classical gures like Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis, Leonidas,
Themistocles, Miltiades, Rhigas, or the Suliots was written in response to
the Greek War of Independence.
23
The ancient Greek heroes, however, were to be revived in the exotic dress
of Byrons Giaour, a point visually presented in Karl Krazeisens painting
Greeks Fighting among Classical Ruins.
24
Delacroixs inuential +8: paint-
ing The Giaour and the Pasha demonstrates how Byrons poem became a key
text of the struggle for freedom. The continued interest in the klephts in
England was demonstrated by Sheridans translation of klephtic songs in
+8:j; Landors dialogues between Maurocordato and Colocotroni and
among Odysseus, Tersitza, Akrive, and Trelawny, as well as the fragment
about the Suliot uprising, which all appeared in +8: (Complete Works
8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
VIII.+8j:o:, :o, :8); and Mary Shelleys short story of the same
year, The Evil Eye.
25
But this was mild compared to the klephtomania that swept America. Dr.
Samuel Gridley Howe observed, There was something exceedingly wild,
romantic, and enticing about the life and conditions of the Klepht (Greek
Revolution xxvii), and his countrymen all seemed to agree. A misleading
analogy between the guerrilla war of the Greeks and the tactics used by both
Indians and settlers on the American frontier was at least partly to blame.
26
English authors tended to civilize the klephts; Landors Odysseus and
Colocotroni have ne manners and can talk intelligently about European pol-
itics, while in Mrs. Vaughans The Grecians the klephts are portrayed as
heroic, even classical gures. The Americans, on the other hand, seemed al-
most to revel in the unorthodox warfare of the klephts. In William Cullen
Bryants Greek Partisan, the poet described the exploits of his heroes:
They go to the slaughter
To strike the sudden blow,
And pour on earth, like water,
The best blood of the foe;
To rush on them from rock and height,
And clear the narrow valley,
Or re their camp at dead of night,
And y before they rally.
Chains are round our country pressed,
And cowards have betrayed her,
And we must make her bleeding breast
The grave of the invader.
(Poetical Works I.+j)
In the most famous American poem about the Greek War of Indepen-
dence, Fitz-Greene Halleck celebrated Marco Bozzariss night attack on the
Turkish camp. The Turkish captain was sleeping when the raid began:
He woketo die midst ame, and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and sabre stroke,
And death shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain cloud.
(Marco Bozzaris, Poetical Writings +)
Such maneuvers were not the stuff of the armies of Napoleon or Wellington,
but, as Halleck knew well, Washington had used the same tactic to take Tren-
ton on Christmas Day +yy.
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r 8y
In Snow-bound John Greenleaf Whittier looked back on reading the
newspaper on a winter day in the +8:os:
Before us passed the painted Creeks,
And daft McGregor on his raids
In Costa Ricas everglades.
And up Taygetos winding slow
Rode Ypsilantis Mainote Greeks,
A Turks head on each saddle-bow!
(o)
Europe recoiled in horror at the barbarity of the Greeks during the war. It
was all well and good for a writer like Hugo to use the placement of Greek
heads on the sultans seraglio to show the barbarism of the Turks, but the
Greeks were supposed to be different. Whittiers mention of the decapita-
tion of the Turks is not meant to indicate his disapproval of the Greeks and
their cause. It would seem that Americas experience with frontier heroes like
Daniel Boone allowed it to romanticize the actions of the klephts that embar-
rassed Europe.
Despite the manly activities of the klephts in the war, the feminization of
Greece continued, as shown by the following titles of books in three different
languages: The Maid of Scio: A Tale of Modern Greece by Snowden (+8:),
the anonymous German novel Athanasia die schnen Griechin aus Samos
(+8:), Das Mdchen aus Zante by Ioannides (+8::), Orpheline dArgos:
pisode de la rvolution grecque by Heidenstam (+8o), and LAthnienne; ou,
Les Franais en Grce by Stier (+8:), whose very title signies the the gen-
der relations between Greece and the West. Tsigakous comment about
painting is equally true of literature: Romantic artists were moved more by
the tragedies of the Revolution than by its achievements. It was the failures of
the Greeks they depictedsuch as The Massacre of Scio, The Destruction of
Missolonghi, and The Sacrice of the Suliot Women (jj). Of course, in both
visual and poetic works of these events, the focus was often on the suffering
of women. The enormous concentration in both Europe and America on the
tragedies of the Greek Revolution and the fate of the victims is quite strik-
ing. The female gure in need of rescue depicted on the title page of Casimir
Delavignes Messnienne sur Lord Byron (+8:) is another example both of
the feminization of Greece and Byrons entrance into the romance of libera-
tion. The goal of philhellenic artists and poets was, to be sure, to generate in-
terest and support for the Greek cause, but one must still ask why a victim-
ized Greece was routinely viewed as the most effective vehicle for that
purpose. The West may have been attracted to the depiction of Greece as the
88 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
heroine of a Greek tragedy awaiting the deus ex machina because it left Eu-
ropeans and Americans a noble role in the Greek revival. In her novel
Anthea: A Story of the Greek War of Independence (+8:), Ccile Cassavetes
has a Greek character say: We are like sleeping beauty at present, waiting for
Russia, France, or England to send a prince who will rouse us out of Turkish
slavery (:yy). But it is also difcult to dismiss the notion that the feminiza-
tion of Greece was related to European and American ideas about modern
Greeces place in the European family.
Along with Missolonghi, the event that received the most attention from
European and American writers was the terrible slaughter of the Greeks on
the island of Chios (Scio). Raizis and Papas suggest that the massacre of
Scio excited the imagination of the American poets more than any other
event of the Greek war (American Poets ). In the spring of +8::, a small
Greek force had landed on the island in the eastern Aegean to encourage the
inhabitants to join the rebellion. They met with little success. Still, masses of
Turks from Asia Minor, having heard of the massacres of Muslims in the
Peloponnesus, crossed the small channel separating the island from the
mainland. Thousands of Greeks were killed and as many as +,ooo were
taken as slaves.
27
The depiction of the destruction of Chios in poetry and
painting, as in Delacroixs Scenes from the Massacres of Scio and Hemanss
Sisters of Scio, closely followed the feminized portrayal of captive Greece,
which had developed since the late eighteenth century.
28
The sad fate of
Byrons lovely Leila was, as it were, transposed into what Raizis and Papas
called the tragic fate of that beautiful Greek island (American Poets ).
The sexual threat to Greek women from the Turks remained a promi-
nent feature of philhellenic verse, as in the beginning of Hallecks Marco
Bozzaris:
At midnight, in his guarded tent,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power
(+)
In the poem, Bozzariss night raid becomes a rescue of a captive Greece
from the threat of the harem. The theme of the seizure of a Greek for a
Turks harem is most prominent in dramatic works; indeed it was almost a re-
quirement for plays set in the context of the modern Greek struggle for free-
dom to have a scene in which a Greek woman must be rescued from a lustful
Turk by her husband or lover.
Curiously, the enemy in these plays was invariably Ali, the pasha of Ioan-
nina, who had subdued the Suliots in +8o. Ali was actually in rebellion
against the sultan in +8:+ and was killed by Ottoman forces the following
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r 8
year. But, undoubtedly because of his well-known war with the Suliots and
the connection between their resistance and the revival of Greek liberty, Ali
was rmly on the Ottoman side in literature if not in history. Further, for
English and American audiences his presence on stage recalled the tragic sui-
cide of the Suliot women. By the +8:os, then, the Suliot struggle had become
one more misleading reference through which England and America viewed
the Greek Revolution. Ali was often transposed in space to Athens and in
time to the War of Independence. He became the stage personication of the
terrible Turk, whom the Greeks were ghting at the time the plays were per-
formed, even though his headless body was already resting in a grave.
In one of the earliest plays about the Greek Revolution for the English
stage, Mrs. Vaughans Grecians (+8:), the captured woman is Victoria, the
wife of the Greek leader, Ypsilantis. Ali announces that Victoria must bow
to my will, / And minister to my pleasure ().
29
The Greeks organize a suc-
cessful rescue of Victoria, in which a Greek prince named Antrobus, a de-
scendant of Agamemnon, dies. His daughter, Menonia, loses her mind and
becomes a symbol for the state of modern Greece. When her betrothed sees
her wandering aimlessly around the camp, he says:
View this, ye minions of despotic power!
Ye advocates of slavery! behold
The lovely ruin, beautiful in madness.
How lovd, how shelterd from each chilly blast,
Was once this lovely rose; now view the change
Which grief has made!
(jo)
He ends with a plea to restore the lovely sufferer. Menonia and her lover
both die, but the play ends with the remaining Greeks pledging to struggle
for our countrys peace when liberty again shall smile on Greece (j).
The rst American play inspired by the revolution, Mordecai Noahs Cap-
tive; or, The Fall of Athens (+8::), has a similar plot. The captive is Zelia, the
wife of a Greek patriot, with whom Ali has fallen in love; he wants to make her
his wife. The Greek leader, Ypsilanti, appears at Alis palace in Athens dis-
guised as a painter commissioned to make a portrait of Zelia for the pasha. As
he prepares for a sitting with the Acropolis in the background, he muses:
Here as artist, I am to sit, and while tracing the features of a female slave, my
eyes must wander to Athens. . . . O Greece! Greece! how lovely art thou even
in captivity! how splendid thy ruins! how soft and balsamic thy air! how rich
and fruitful thy valleys! (:). Once again the female captive and the country
are merged together. The Greeks capture Athens with the help of an Ameri-
can warship, whose commander, Burrows, appears at the end of the play as a
deus ex machina who essentially contributed to the victory (y).
30
o r u v a o

s s n + n ow
Interestingly, nineteenth-century philhellenic drama was the genre in
which the romance of Greek liberation almost always had a Greek as a
herothough sometimes, as in the case of Noahs Captive, foreign help en-
sured the ultimate success of the Greek cause. At least on stage, the noble
Greek male had a presence, perhaps because the audience wanted the visual
effect of seeing characters in the garb of Byrons Giaour.
When we survey the enormous output of philhellenic literature in Europe
and America during the Greek War of Independence, now admirably cata-
logued in the bibliography of philhellenic writing by Droulia, one is immedi-
ately struck by the fact that almost none of it has lasted. Delacroixs paint-
ings, Hugos Orientales, and Hallecks Marco Bozzaris are about all that
stand out. English authors and European writers, who composed in the
shadow of the Grce de Byron, have remained in that shadow ever since. The
New Oxford Book of Romantic Verse grants extensive space to the work of Fe-
licia Hemans, who has been rediscovered in the last few years, but not one of
her numerous poems about modern Greece is included. The editors deci-
sion was completely justiable; Hemanss Greek efforts do not constitute her
best work. What is important to note is that authors appear to have made a
conscious decision to stay within the language and concepts of their great
predecessor, as if by doing so they were paying homage to the creator of their
imaginary Greece. Literary philhellenism was still a world of pale para-
phrases of Byron, as witnessed by these lines from Scot Thomas Campbells
Song of the Greeks (+8::):
Again to the battle, Achaians!
Our hearts bid the tyrants deance;
Our land, the rst garden of Libertys tree
It has been, and shall yet be, the land of the free!
(:o)
The philhellenic literature of the +8:os offers a striking contrast to the
writing about the Spanish Civil War of the +os. The latter conict, another
cause for pens on the Left, engendered numerous works by such artists as
Orwell, Hemingway, Malraux, Picasso, Koestler, Auden, and MacNeice that
have found a permanent place in European art and literature. But there was
no equivalent of the Grce de Byron with which authors of the Spanish con-
ict had to contend. The struggle for Greek liberty already had a canonical
text before the War of Independence began.
The immense hold of Byron over English and American authors in par-
ticular both during the Greek Revolution and in the following decades is il-
lustrated by the almost universal decision to avoid prose ction in favor of
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r +
lyric or narrative poetry in the Byronic style.
31
Across the channel, the
French produced a plethora of philhellenic novels with, of course, Byronic
themes and inuences: Ducanges Thlne, Doins Cornelie, Stiers
LAthnienne; ou, Les Franais en Grce, Dominoiss Alais; ou, La Vierge de
Tndos (+8:), and Heidenstams Orpheline dArgos represent just the tip of
the iceberg. Neither England nor America would produce a sizable amount
of ction about the Greek revolution until the +8os.
The Greek struggle for freedom may have been called the cause of Europe,
but Greek fever hit only a part of the English literati. The poet laureate,
Robert Southey, wrote to Henry Taylor after he heard of Byrons fate at Mis-
solonghi: I am sorry Lord Byron is dead, because some harm will come
from his death, and there was none to be apprehended while he was liv-
ing. . . . We shall now hear his praises from every quarter. I dare say he will be
held up as a martyr to the cause of Greek liberty, as having sacriced his life
by his exertions on behalf of the Greeks. Upon this score, the liberals would
beatify him (Life and Correspondence j.+y8).
Southey and Byron had a deep antipathy for each other, which was per-
sonal, aesthetic, and political.
32
Given Southeys distaste for Byrons life and
work, in addition to Byrons ferocious attacks on the laureates own composi-
tions, it is hardly surprising that Southey would lament any luster to Byrons
reputation. But how can any harm come from his rivals death in Greece?
Some of that harm, clearly, would be political, as the liberals could turn
Byrons death to their advantage. The liberal causes in the +8:os, all of them
championed at one time by Byron, were Catholic emancipation, parliamen-
tary reform, the abolition of slavery, and the extension of liberty. It was for
the latter of these causes that Byron died in Greece, and his death generated
interest in Greek freedom in Europe and America. The poet laureate did not
view that development with enthusiasm.
As far as I am aware, this is the only place in his published correspondence
that Southey mentions the Greek War of Independence (he mentions Byron
only two other times). Southeys conservatism regarded Greek independ-
ence as a threat to the established order of Europe after Waterloo. Even more
important, a Greek victory might weaken Turkey and encourage the Rus-
sians to attempt to expand southward, endangering British rule in India.
The Great Game, as it was called, between Russia and Britain had begun
in earnest by the +8:os. Conservative poets, like conservative politicians,
were more concerned about preserving the empire than striking at the heart
of tyranny. But they did not take up their pens against the liberation of the
Greeks. As the anonymous author of Greece to the Close of +8:j wrote,
Nor shall we nd any writer hardy enough to aver that if an active interest
were taken upon the question, their principles would lead them the other
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
wayto support the Turkish Government against the victims of misrule
(in Bulwer, An Autumn in Greece :o). If there were any poets so inclined, like
Southey they chose silence.
33
Greek freedom was and would continue to be a partisan issue in En-
gland.
34
The notion that all, or even most, classically educated British gen-
tlemen had an innate sympathy for philhellenism is deeply mistaken. Along
with a Whig interpretation of history there is a liberal view about the regen-
eration of Greece, which was passed down from Byron and Shelley. Just as
the membership list of the London Greek Committee reads like a roll call of
prominent English liberals and radicals of the day, so the list of authors who
wrote in support of Greek freedom includes the foremost pens of what con-
stituted the literary LeftByron, Shelley, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt,
Jefferson Hogg, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas Campbell, Samuel Rogers,
and Jeremy Bentham. They were not a harmonious group; no literary Left
has ever been. For instance, Byron had serious differences about politics with
Leicester Stanhope and about literature with Landor, who in turn, corre-
sponded amicably with Southey.
35
But the composition of a philhellenic
work in the +8:os can be used, though not infallibly, to place an author on the
map of literary politics in England. Further, since British policy toward
Turkey and Greece was dominated by British colonial interests, the cause of
Greece continued to be a form of protest against the English government.
For example, in +8y, when Noel Brailsford and Allen Upward went off to
ght for Greece in a war their own government was trying to prevent, they
were in the same situation as the English philhellenes of +8:. Upward later
summed up the position of philhellenism in England: If Britain gives birth
to Byrons, she also gives birth to Elgins; and the Byrons are usually in exile,
while the Elgins are in ofce (East End of Europe :+).
English philhellenism was further complicated by the nancial machina-
tions of the leaders of the London Greek Committee. In the middle of the
+8:os, the committee raised money on the London Stock Exchange with ex-
tremely favorable rates for investors (a promised j percent down for +oo
percent return). The bonds were backed, on the authority of the London
Greek Committee, by the national property of Greece, a promise that
would cause problems for decades to come. As the value of the bonds rose,
some of the committee saw an opportunity to prot from their philhellenism.
The deputies of the Greek government serving in London joined in. When
the stock fell drastically, the speculators tried all sorts of maneuvers to save
themselves from ruin.
36
The disgraceful scandal was made public, and the
philhellenes of the Greek committee were ridiculed by their fellow liberals as
well as by the other side. Although Byron had certainly used satirical ele-
ments in his writing about Greece, especially in Don Juan and The Age of
Bronze, this episode marked the real beginning of satire in literary philhel-
lenism, which, it almost goes without saying, was never directed against
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r
Greece but rather toward pseudophilhellenes.
37
In Thomas Moores The
Ghost of Miltiades, the shade of the ancient hero visits one of the specula-
tors, a follower of Jeremy Bentham:
The Ghost of Miltiades came once more;
His brow, like the night, was lowering oer,
And he said, with a look that ashd dismay,
Of Libertys foes the worst are they,
Who turn to a trade her cause divine,
And gamble for gold on Freedoms shrine!
Thus saying the Ghost, as he took his ight,
Gave a Parthian kick to the Benthamite,
Which sent him, whimpering, off to Jerry
And vanishd away to the Stygian ferry!
(Poetical Works :+)
In the United States, on the other hand, Greek fever raged unabated, free
of partisan entanglements and nancial scandals. Raizis and Papas remarked
that the unreserved public enthusiasm in America for the Greek movement
was quite independent of its purely historical signicance and the actual con-
ditions of Balkan politics at that time. The concern for the Greek war de-
rived mainly from American interest in the classical tradition and in the hope
for the realization of the dream common among romantics and humanists:
the restoration of Greece to her old glory and the return of arts and sciences
to the land of the Hellenes (American Poets ). This restoration was, not sur-
prisingly, to take the form of an American-style republic. Noahs Grecian
Captive ends with a procession of banners with the names of ancient Greeks
mixed with those of Washington, Kosciusco, Bolivar, and La Fayette:
The queen of the Arts has broken the bonds of tyranny and slaveryand a
glorious day succeeds to a long night of peril and calamityNow to meet
freedom by the establishment of just lawsa free and upright govern-
menta liberal, tolerant, and benevolent spirit to all (8).
The American and Greek revolutions were regarded as kindred events;
indeed the Greek rebellion was sometimes seen as a validation and extension
of the American experiment as well as a return of the classical past.
38
This
view is particularly evident in William Cullen Bryants Conjunction of
Jupiter and Venus, which moves from the peace and promise brought by the
achievement of American liberty to the sad state of Greece after the struggle
for freedom. The poet tells Greece: In yonder mingling lights [from Amer-
ica] / There is an omen of good days for thee (Poetical Works I.+8). The
central concern of the piece is not the historical signicance of Greece nor
the actual condition of Balkan politics but rather the historical signicance of
early nineteenth-century Americaespecially its example and role on the
r u v a o

s s n + n o w
international level. The universal public enthusiasm for the Greek Revo-
lution in America stemmed in large part from the fact that the Greek Revolu-
tion was perceived as a validation of the American Revolution and the cre-
ation of the American republic. This attitude persisted throughout the
nineteenth century. In +88o, for example, Joseph Moore simply told his
American compatriots that the Greek War of Independence progressed in a
manner similar to our own Revolutionary struggle (:).
This may explain why there were no deep divisions about liberty in
Greece as there were about the domestic issue of abolition. Many Americans,
both southerners and northerners, could embrace the Greeks. Indeed, this
enthusiasm over the liberation of Greeks in bondage might well have been a
means of deecting the question of slavery at home.
39
One of the sad ironies of history is that the end of the Greek War of Inde-
pendence did not create an independent Greece. England, France, and Rus-
sia collectively chose a foreign ruler for Greece, Otho of Bavaria, who arrived
on February , +8. According to Finlay, the change in the Greek constitu-
tion in +8, by which Greece became a constitutional monarchy, put an
end to alien rulers, under which the Greeks had lived for two thousand
years (y:+y8). Other historians might choose as the date of real Greek inde-
pendence the year +8, when Otho was forced to abdicate in favor of George
of Denmark. Still others might prefer +y, when, at the end of the military
junta that had ruled the country since +y, the restored democracy under
Constantine Karamanlis abolished the monarchy.
Still, after +8, most Europeans and Americans would agree with Felicia
Skenes comment in The Isles of Greece (+8) that Time-honord Greece at
length is free! (:). Like Charles Brinsley Sheridan in the introduction to
The Songs of the Greeks and Alexander Baillie Cochrane in The Morea (+:
y), many philhellenes argued against the imposition of a foreign monarchy,
and after independence a few visitors, such as the American Nathaniel Parker
Willis, still objected that Greece had received a king from a family of
despots (II.:o).
40
Yet Byron himself had said something needed to be done
to the Greeks, and even he might not have opposed the imposition of a ruler
from abroad. Henry Bulwer, sent to Greece in +8: by the London Greek
Committee to help administer the Greek loan after Byrons death, stated, I
would wish to see [Greece] free, but free according to her means of being so
(8). Further, the Greeks had escaped from the Ottoman yoke and had re-
joined, or were in the process of rejoining, the West. A ruler from Bavaria
was, in that sense, just one of the family.
The domestic politics of Greece had almost no place in nineteenth-cen-
tury literary philhellenism.
41
Few supporters of Greece in the +8:os knew
the form of the ofcial government, just as few in the +8os paid attention
to the ofcial relations between king and assembly. Philhellenism was a
o + n r a t r s o r r s s o r o o n r j
movement founded to save Greece from the Turks, to spread liberty to other
places, and to start a new cultural renaissance in the West. Many knowledge-
able people realized that it would take the Greeks some time to become a po-
litical or cultural force; in many reckonings at least one generation would
need to pass.
42
Still, for most Europeans and Americans, the formation of the
kingdom of Greece was not the event that would give birth to the miracle
generation. Instead, philhellenic feeling after the War of Independence was
frozen as if its clock had stopped in the destruction of Missolonghi.
The reason lies in the most prescient and neglected work about Greece
and its struggle written during the War of Independence, Mary Shelleys
Last Man (+8:). The novel is a roman clef about the lives and deaths of
Shelley and Byron and is best known for its ctional characterization of the
two poets. It is set in the future, around the year :+oo, but it is not a futuristic
or science ction work. We rst meet Lord Raymond, the character based on
Lord Byron, after he has just returned from a war between the Greeks and
the Turks in which he became the darling hero of a rising people (o).
Greek independence had been achieved by the time the novel starts, but
Shelley never precisely tells us when in the period between +8:+ and :oy it
happened.
Later in the book, after Raymond decides to abandon English politics, he
asks Adrian (P. B. Shelley) to accompany him to Athens: You will behold
new scenes; see a new people; witness the mighty struggle there going for-
ward between civilization and barbarism; behold, and perhaps direct the ef-
forts of a young and vigorous population, for liberty and order (+j). When
they arrive, a truce was in existence between the Greeks and the Turks; a
truce that was like a sleep to the mortal frame, signal of renewed activity on
waking (+o+). The Turks soon attack the Greeks, who had expanded in
recent years to take Macedonia and Thrace, even to the gates of Constan-
tinople (++). Both Raymond and Adrian join the Greek army.
A year later, Adrian returns to England wounded and disillusioned. He
asserts, I shall not be suspected of being averse to the Greek cause; I know
and feel its necessity; it is beyond every other good cause. Yet he objects to
the inated rhetoric that he hears: But let us not deceive ourselves. The
Turks are men; each bre, each limb is as feeling as our own, and every
spasm, be it mental or bodily, is as truly felt in a Turks heart and being, as in
a Greeks (++). Adrian is wounded when he tries to save a Turkish girl from
death as the Greek forces slaughter every Turk in a captured town: One of
the fellows, enraged at my interference, struck me with his bayonet in the
side, and I fell senseless (+:). Adrian, while not condemning Raymonds
enthusiasm for the Greeks, points out the difference between them: All this
has a different effect on Raymond. He is able to contemplate the ideal of war,
while I am sensible only to its realities. . . . I do not sympathize in their
dreams of massacre and glory (+:). The passage certainly paints a noble
r u v a o

s s n + n ow
picture of Percy Shelley, one that builds from and points out the problems of
the philhellenism of both The Revolt of Islam and Hellas. Greeks had to be
powerless victims to gain P. B. Shelleys sympathy and neither he nor his
alter ego, Adrian, knew what to do with Greeks who must compromise ne
ideals in a real world.
Raymond, in the meantime, leads the Greeks to a great victory on the
river Hebrus in Thrace, but he is captured. The narrator helps effect the ran-
som and release of Raymond, who stays in Greece to witness the recapture of
Constantinople, the nale in the long drawn history of Greek and Turkish
warfare (+yj). But when the Greek army arrives in front of the Golden
City, they nd it eerily undefended. A plague has hit, and all the inhabitants
have perished. Only Raymond enters to plant the Grecian standard on the
height of St. Sophia (+). He catches the plague and dies. The narrator eu-
logizes him in words echoing the elegies for the real Byron: Now his death
has crowned his life, and to the end of time it will be remembered, that he de-
voted himself, a willing victim, to the glory of Greece (:o). Constantino-
ple, however, never becomes Greek. The Greek army had ed from the city
in fear of the disease, but it quickly spreads and kills them all. Eventually, the
narrator of the novel is the last man on earth.
The signicance of Constantinople in The Revolt of Islam was certainly a
key factor in the prime importance of the city in The Last Man. Still, Mary
Shelley is unique in so clearly assessing the dimensions, goals, and lengths of
the Greek struggle. By her account, philhellenism still has another hundred
years or so to go, and a future generation of Byrons and Shelleys will still be
talking about the need to defeat barbarism and looking forward to the regen-
eration of the Greeks into a vigorous and free people. Although Shelley
reprises nearly all of early philhellenisms central tenetsthe magnicence
of the Greek climate, the struggle between freedom and tyranny, and the
battle between Western civilization and the despotic Eastthe fact that
they do not change in her projected future inevitably tarnishes and decon-
structs their value. Just as The Last Man critiques Romanticism in general,
43
it also presents, in the midst of the War of Independence and just after the
death of Byron, the rst anti-Romantic view of philhellenism. Even more
strikingly, it predicts the history of Greece and its cause in the West with un-
canny accuracy. Unfortunately, The Last Man had no literary inuence. It
received bad reviews when it rst appeared and has remained relatively un-
known ever since.
The Last Man forcefully impresses upon the reader that the ght for
Greek freedom will not really end until Constantinople is taken. If the king-
dom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire were not ofcially at war after +8+,
it was, as Mary Shelley put it, simply one of the truces that are like a brief
and restful sleep. The overall situation would still be presented, by both
Greeks and their supporters, in the same framework and language used since
+yyo, except that the oppressed Greek was often specied as a Cretan, an
Epirot, or a Macedonian. So, for example, William Cullen Bryant ended his
poem Massacre at Scio by reminding readers that Scio (Chios) and other
Greek regions have not been redeemed and that the struggle for Greek free-
dom is not over: Stern rites and sad, shall Greece ordain / To keep that day,
along her shore, / Till the last link of slaverys chain / Is shivered, to be worn
no more (I.y).
rr
+nr +or c roacr or rrorn
( +8++)
4
Dangerous Ground
In Edith Whartons story Roman Fever, a character says: I was just think-
ing what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travellers. To
our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangershow
we used to be guarded!to our daughters, no more danger than the middle
of Main Street (Collected Short Stories :.8y). In this piece, Wharton is as
concerned with the changes in the Rome of literature as much as the real city,
for she engages and reappraises the portrayal of the place as it appears in
such works as Hawthornes Marble Faun and Jamess Daisy Miller. Ancient
Greece also carried a varied signicance for the different generations in the
nineteenth century, from Winckelmanns Apollonian ideal to Nietzsches
Dionysian ecstasy to the archaeological focus on the objects of daily life. As
with interpretations of Rome, these changes can be charted in notable works
of literature.
1
In comparison, it is hard to perceive if modern Greece meant different
things to each generation from +8 to ++ and harder still to use imagina-
tive writing to map the development. A student of literature in English prob-
ably cannot recall a single prominent literary work of the later nineteenth
century that engages and revises the Grce de Byron in the way that Whar-
ton interacts with Jamess Rome. Admittedly, more artists and writers visited
Rome than Athens during the Victorian era. Further, interest in Greece was
bound to decline after the surge of attention during the War of Indepen-
dence, when the events in the country were often front-page news abroad.
But these factors alone cannot explain the lack of literature about modern
Greece, since the opportunity to reinterpret the Greece of Byron would
seem as attractive a subject to an author as a reappraisal of the Rome of
James. Near the beginning of E. F. Bensons Limitations, an aspiring sculptor
drawn to Apollonian idealism explained his decision to travel to Athens: I
dont want to be inuenced by any modern art, and if you go to Rome you
must fall in with some modern school or other; there are too many artists at
Rome (:y). There also had been too many novels about artists in Rome for
+o+
+o: r u v a o

s s n + n ow
decades, but it was not until +8 that Bensons novel about the foreign artist
colony in Athens appeared.
2
The relative neglect of modern Greece by English writers in the century
after Byron was observed by Rennell Rodd, the editor of The Englishman in
Greece: Being the Collection of the Verse of Many English Poets (++o), a vol-
ume that appeared just one year after the centenary of Byrons rst visit to
Greece in +8o. In the introduction to that book, Rodd lamented that the
literary record of the Englishman in Greece offers less copious material from
which to select than that of the Englishman in Italy, to which cherished land,
throughout the century but recently closed, our most illustrious singers have
dedicated so much of their affection and genius. . . . And now that the high-
ways and waterways [of Greece] are open, that communications easy and se-
cure have unveiled the hidden charms of that storied land, it would almost
seem as though the fountains of inspiration had run dry, [even though] no
land should appeal more directly to the poet (j).
The contents of Rodds collection The Englishman in Greece indicate that
his title must be read far less literally than that of its companion volume, The
Englishman in Italy. For where the latter contains mostly English writings
that were inspired by trips in Italy, over half of the book about Greece is de-
voted to works that reect the classic spirit rather than reveal the living
character of the country (j), which explains the presence of numerous au-
thors who had never set foot in Greece nor expressed the least interest in the
modern Greeks, such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Brown-
ing, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. James Elroy Flecker wrote in
Oak and Olive:
Though I was born a Londoner
And bred in Gloucestershire,
I walked in Hellas years ago
With friends in white attire;
And I remember how my soul
Drank wine as pure as re.
(Collected Poems +y)
These lines, as the rest of the poem makes clear, look back to the days before
Flecker ever visited Athens. Like Flecker, Rodd assumed that one could walk
in Hellas while in Gloucestershire or other northern parts. In order to walk
in Italy, on the other hand, it seems one actually had to go there.
Rodd ended his brief introduction with the forthright statement From
English writers the living Greece has not yet had her due of song (8). Rodd
did not explicitly state that the deciency exists in both quantity and quality,
but that is evident from the poems selected about living Greece that were
not composed by Byron. Rodd himself offered an explanation for and an ex-
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +o
ample of the pedestrian character of nineteenth-century writing about
Greece in his poem Misolonghi, rst published in +88 and reprinted in
++. Rodd spoke of traveling through Greece with a copy of Byron to guide
him (Oft with thee since, my poet, where the steep / Of Sunium sees the
red evening dye the deep [Violet Crown +o]), and concluded: Thou art
grown one with these things, and thy fame / Links a new memory to each sa-
cred name (++). Rodds volume The Violet Crown (++) stands as a case
study for what was wrong with English and American writing about living
Greece from +8 until the Great War. The author was awed and over-
whelmed by Byron as shown by the eulogistic Misolonghi; the Byronic
lament about past glory in ruins in An Attic Night and Delos; the By-
ronic echoes of heroic struggles for freedom in poems like Thermopylae
and Zalongos: The Flight of the Suliots; and, of course, the celebration of
the quintessential Greek heroes in The Song of the Klepht. A translation
from the Romaic, a word that by +88 had a faintly archaic air, is thrown in
for good measure. There is not a new perspective in the book.
3
In The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne wryly remarked on the mid
nineteenth-century tourists to Rome who made the mandatory visit to the
Colosseum at midnight exalting themselves with raptures that were
Byrons, not their own (Novels 8+8:). The desire to experience Byrons
raptures appears even stronger in the majority of visitors to Greece in the
decades after the War of Independence. Instead of searching for new springs
of inspiration, the goal was to situate oneself, as Rodd did, within the
haunted, holy ground constructed by the martyr of Missolonghi.
Byrons poetry became a mantra for entry into the experience of
Greece with sites where, as late as +y, Dora Una Ratcliffe claimed that the
temptation to quote tries one sorely (+). In the same year, standing at
Marathon, Osbert Lancaster observed, The Mountains look on Mara-
thon, and Marathon looks on the sea: when one has said that one has said
everything (88). The response of Valentine Mott, a Philadelphia physician,
could stand as a paradigm for the usual nineteenth-century American or
English encounter with Greece. He recounted an excursion he took one af-
ternoon to Platos Grove and Marss Hill: We felt almost as though we were
inspired under the world of glorious recollections that pressed upon the
memory, as we gazed around us, upon every hallowed temple, rock, and
mountain, that spoke to us in mute and sublime eloquence of the past. And
could not help but repeat, as we rode along, those magnicent lines of the
noble poet, which vividly embodied our exalted feelings (+y:). He then
quoted not from Homer or Sophocles but from The Corsair. The Grce de
Byron had become the medium between the past and the modern traveler.
In +o, Sir Sidney Colvin remembered his rst visit to Athens in lines
that call to mind the Greeces of Homer and Byron delineated by Hugo: You
watch and watch, with snatches of Greek and snatches of English poetry
+o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
ringing in your brain (::y).
4
Byron also was used as the medium for the ex-
perience of Greek sites in a number of paintings. For example, Edward
Lears Marathon (+88), which Peter Levi called one of his most Byronic
paintings (++), has a group of gures looking from the mountains onto
Marathon, which in turn looks out on the sea, as if the work is as much a gloss
on the famous lines from The Isles of Greece as a depiction of the land-
scape of Attica.
5
Alfred Austin, later poet laureate of Britain, visited Athens in +88+ but wrote
no verse honoring the occasion. The laughter of the gods, he remarked,
would attend the man who attempted to adorn still further what Byron
touched on (Autobiography II.+). But British travelers with literary pre-
tensions did provoke the laughter of both gods and men by composing their
own Byronic meditations on Greek soil. One such effort was Aubrey de
Veres Grecian Ode, which ends with a line that recalls and revises Byrons
Age of Bronze (CPW VI, p. :y+): Yes, yestis Hellas, Hellas still. No vol-
ume of verse entitled The American in Greece appeared in ++o, but the re-
sults would have been equally meager and disheartening.
6
No one author dominated writing about Italy or France the way that
Byron dominated writing about modern Greece. How static the general per-
ception of the land remained from the War of Independence through the
rst decade of the twentieth century is indicated by Bohun Lynchs com-
ment about tourist pilgrims with their traveling editions of Homer and
Byron in his novel of ++:, Glamour: A Tale of Modern Greece (:8). Unwit-
tingly, Lynch reproduced precisely Hugos Grces de Byron et dHomre,
with exactly the same division between authors and chronological Greeces.
Not much had changed since +8:y.
The continued prominence of the Grce de Byron colored modern
Greece throughout the nineteenth century with a particular political signi-
cance. For all of the recitations of The Isles of Greece and evocations or
imitations of Byronic verse in poetry and painting recalled not just the
Greece of landscape and ruins but also the philhellenic sentiment of the pe-
riod of the Greek Revolution. About the philhellene from the War of Inde-
pendence to +o, R. M. Burrows said in ++: His state of mind was that of
Byron in his early days, when he wrote the Isles of Greece and dreamed that
Greece might still be free (Philhellenism in England and France +:). De
Veres Grecian Ode (+8jo), Felicia Skenes The Isles of Greece (+8),
and Lears Marathon (+88) were all, by their choice of a Byronic model, po-
litically charged works.
At the end of the Greco-Turkish War of +8y, Diplomaticus, the au-
thor of an article entitled The Case against Greece in the Fortnightly Re-
view, complained that British public opinion about the Greeks was based
upon a sentimental tradition rather than the contemporary facts: The man
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +oj
in the street has no time . . . and perhaps no opportunity to puzzle out the
subtle why and wherefore of the shifting phases of international politics. In
this country, and in a less degree France, Italy, and Germany, he is funda-
mentally Philhellene. The Greek Cause is one of the abiding convictions of
his political consciousness. It is founded in memories which, although little
more than half a century old, have all the magic force of legend (yy:). In the
same year, G. W. Steevens protested that the Greek is what he wasa dis-
honest, intelligent, chicken-hearted talker, whom nothing will apparently
deprive of Britains sympathy as long as he quotes Byron and lives in the land
of Alcibiades (What Happened in Thessaly +o). The idea that the
British had been and still were more fundamentally philhellenic than other
Europeans was itself part of the legend.
Whether the philhellenic spirit was embraced by the general population
or even the majority of writers in nineteenth-century England or America is
a matter open to debate. What is demonstrably true is that the novelists and
poets who composed works about modern Greece were, almost without ex-
ception, supporters of the cause of Greece. Commenting on the cartoons
that appeared during the time of the Cretan uprising in +8, Grand-
Carteret observed: If the ofcial, political and parliamentary world cur-
rents were created founded on opinions more favorable to the status quo than
to the development of Philhellenism, the pencil, disturbing itself little about
the Ottoman empire, has seen only the Greeks and their audacious attempt
(Bickford-Smith, Cretan Sketches :). H. D. Traill exclaimed in his +8y
satire Our Learned Philhellenes: Oh, the poets! . . . They are now, as they
have always been, full of a noble zeal for Hellas and the Hellenes (jo). Phil-
hellenism certainly appeared to be an abiding part of the English and Amer-
ican political consciousness, since it was present in almost every literary ef-
fort about modern Greece.
One result of this partisanship, ironically, was that the portrayal of mod-
ern Greece lacked depth and development.
7
Although, as Diplomaticus
noted, modern Greece was little more than a half century old in +8y, it was
already something of a museum piece in the imagination of the West. Ter-
ence Spencer concluded his study of literary philhellenism in England up to
the time of Byron with a thought about how the changed circumstances after
the War of Independence would inaugurate a new view of Greece and the
Greeks: The English poet and traveler since Byrons day had quite other
things upon which to meditate (:y). Yet most British and American travel-
ers turned away from those other things to reproduce the aura and spirit of
the Greek Revolution.
John Pierponts A Birthday in Scio, the product of a journey in +8,
remembered the massacre of +8:: with a tale to freeze a Western freemans
blood (). Pliny Earles Marathon, written in honor of a visit to the site
in +88, ended with the reawakening of Greece: She wakens! shout, ye sons
+o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
of men! / Joy, joy for Greece! she lives again! (+8). To ask what Earle meant
by that closing couplet in +88 would be pointless, for he clearly was thinking
in terms of +8:+. And Earle was certainly not the last poet to employ the
theme of the rebirth of Greece. After the discovery of three female statues
on the Acropolis in +88, Andrew Lang, who thought they represented the
daughters of a legendary Athenian king, composed a poem entitled The
Daughters of Cecrops. At the end of the poem, the female statues become a
symbol of what modern Greece might become:
As new arisen they [the statues] stand to-day,
Fresh from the hand of Canochus,
The re-arisen Hellas may
Defy the lapse of ages thus;
In times despite serenely fair,
A marvel in Athenian air!
The laurel of the god of old
Was proof against the thunderstroke.
On laureld Hellas Persia rolled
In thunder, and in spray she broke;
Even so this present tyranny
Must break, and leave serener sky!
(III.+j)
The phrase this present tyranny probably referred to the situation on
Crete, the site of another rebellion in +88. But, although no clear allusion to
contemporary events on Crete is made, the phrase would not puzzle the Eng-
lish or American reader. In philhellenic poetry, modern Greece was in a per-
manent state of arising or awaking throughout the nineteenth century.
Greece remained xed in the English and American imagination in the exact
same position that Byron had depicted it some seventy-ve years earlier.
The aura of legend that enveloped modern Greece helps to explain the
discrepancy between the prevalence of Italy as a site for novels about artists
and tourists and the lack of such works set in Greece. During a visit to
Athens in +8, William Makepeace Thackeray was appalled to nd that
Murrays Handbook for Travellers in Greece referred to Byron, not Shake-
speare, as our native bard. Thackeray commenced to criticize Byron but
pulled up short: That man never wrote from the heart. He got up rapture
and enthusiasm with an eye for the public; but this is dangerous ground, even
more dangerous than to look Athens full in the face, and say your eyes are not
dazzled by beauty. The Great Public admires Greece and Byron; the public
knows best (:+). Nineteenth-century English authors did not shy away
from unfavorable critiques of Byrons literary merit.
8
But, like Thackeray,
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +oy
they avoided the dangerous ground of Greece and Byron taken together. The
few who traversed it stayed, for the most part, carefully within the estab-
lished parameters. It was not the public alone who dictated the course of
writing about Greece; Thackeray simply used it as an excuse. A passage from
Byrons Marino Faliero, which like so many of his lines stands as an eerie epi-
taph for his end, sheds some light on the hesitancy of other writers to rein-
terpret Byrons Greece:
They never fail who die
In a great cause. . . .
Though years
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which oerpower all others, and conduct
The World at last to freedom.
(CPW IV, pp. jjy)
Not surprisingly, none of the poets and prose writers, however much they
might have disparaged Byrons verse, really wanted to be measured against
the magic force of legend in which art and action were so blurred.
The paucity of nineteenth-century narrative literature about modern
Greece in English is the clearest signal of the general attitude of avoidance.
Only a handful of works appeared from +8 to the Cretan revolt of
+8+8, including Mary Shelleys short story Euphrasia (+8); David
Moriers novel Photo the Suliote (+8jy); several narrative poems like C. J.
Collinss Albanian: A Tale of Modern Greece (+8), Stevenson MacGills
Nacnud: A Tale of Asia Minor (+8o, about the massacre on Scio), Lucy E.
Partridges Costanza of Mistra: A Tale of Modern Greece in Four Cantos
(+8), and W. M. Henrys Corsairs Bride, Scio, and Other Poems (+8o);
Willam H. Dixons play Azamoglan: An Incident in the Greek Revolution
(+8j); and three American dramas about the death of Marco Bozzaris:
Nathaniel Deerings Marco Bozzaris (+8j+), O. B. Bunces Bozzaris (+8jo),
and Julius Augustus Requiers Marco Bozzaris (+8o).
9
None of these works
could consider the changes in Greece after +8, since the central action of
each occurs during the Greek struggle for liberty in the decades before inde-
pendence. Nor do they reexamine the issues of that period in a new way; in-
deed, each reads as if it had been composed in the +8:os. Most of them re-
hearse the familiar theme of a young Greek woman who must be rescued
from a Turkish harem.
10
For example, in Mary Shelleys Euphrasia: The tale of horror was
soon told. Athens was still in the hands of the Turks; the sister of the rebel
had become the prey of the oppressor. . . . Her matchless beauty had been
seen and marked by the Pasha; she had for two months inhabited his harem
+o8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
(o). As in Byrons Siege of Corinth, the heroines personication as the na-
tion of Greece is signaled by her juxtaposition with an ancient temple. Eu-
phrasias brother tells the narrator that, during the rescue, his sister was shot:
I knew not she was dying; till at last entering a retired valley, where an olive
wood afforded shelter, and still better the portico of a fallen ancient temple, I
dismounted and bore her to the marble steps, on which I placed her. . . . The
lightning showed me her face; pale as the marble which pillowed it. Her dress
was dabbled in blood, which soon stained the stones on which she lay (o).
In Deerings Marco Bozzaris the heroine, Bozzariss sister Eudoraan
invention of the author (in Requiers play, the heroine is Bozzariss imagined
daughter)rst appears against a temple in ruins. Bozzaris himself By-
ronically muses on the past and present as he seeks his daughter after a suc-
cessful return from a night raid on the Turkish camp at Carpenisi:
Surely the traveller, while passing near,
Must pause and ponder: for it will remind him
Of Hellas as she was, andI must speak it!
Ah, alas, as she isdegraded and in bondage.
(:j)
11
The heroes in these works are klephts, yet analogies abound between these
erce mountain warriors and their cultured ancient forebears. For example,
in Photo the Suliote, Morier provided the following description of a band of
klephts: No Homeric heroes ever sat down with keener appetites to their
banquet than the redeemed Suliotes; and in imitation of those ancient wor-
thies, it was not until they were fully gorged that they recounted in detail to
their friends all that had befallen them (I.+y).
The brigands are these Hellenic Robin Hoods, described as those
whose
divine forms have been transmitted to us in those exquisite sculptures
monuments of imperishable glory of the Grecian artwhich still
breathe and move along the stones of the Panathenaic procession of
the Parthenon. Such were they, too, who strove for the chaplet of pars-
ley or laurelthe corruptible crown which rewarded the victory in the
gymnastic struggle of the Olympic games, in the presence of the as-
sembled nation. These, indeed, appeared in a costume less encum-
bered by drapery, yet not more picturesquely heroic than the Greek
Palikari with his short white kilt of many plaits, his embroidered velvet
vest, his silver greaves, scarlet leggings, and light sandals. (III.+:)
Moriers klephts may have the soul and form of the ancient Greeks, but they
are dressed like Byrons Giaour. These paragons are not above cutting off the
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +o
ear of a hostage to send as a message to Ali Pasha, an act that the narrator of
the tale declines to condemn.
One nineteenth-century book about Greece in English stands out both as
a success when it was published in +8j+ and as a minor classic of travel writ-
ing, Edward Lears Journal of a Landscape Painter in Albania and Illyria. It is
an odd fact that this popular and enduring travelogue of Greece does not de-
scribe any of the great classical sites or regions but restricts the narrative to
the area north of the kingdom of Greece still in Turkish hands at the time of
Lears journey.
12
Lear certainly knew and enjoyed what Richard Monckton
Milnes called Greece proper. In a letter to his sister after three weeks in the
Peloponnesus, he wrote: The beauty of this part of Greece can hardly be
imagined (Selected Letters +oy). In Journal of a Landscape Painter, he re-
marked, The further you wander north of Epirus, the less you nd that
grace and detail which is so attractive in southern Greece, and most espe-
cially in Athens and Peloponnesus (). Peter Levi, Lears most recent biog-
rapher, says that all of Lears wonderful achievements were made possible
by this journey through southern Greece (+::). But Lear never published
nor prepared for publication a travel journal of the area and, while his trip
through the south of Greece may have been crucial for his art, his reputation
as a travel writer rests on descriptions of regions with less grace and de-
tail.
13
It is tempting to see Lears decision not to include free Greece in
his travel journal as, at least in part, a desire to avoid the dangerous ground of
Greece and Byron. But whether intentional or not, the status of Lears Jour-
nal of a Landscape Painter as the preeminent work about Greece in English
in the middle of the nineteenth century illustrates the lack of any real en-
gagement with or reappraisal of the Grce de Byron in literature.
The scant production of literature about modern Greece did not mean
that there was a dearth of texts about the land in circulation at midcentury.
Byrons Tales, as well as the poems about the Greek Revolution by such
authors as Hemans, Campbell, Halleck, and Bryant, continued to be anthol-
ogized and reprinted through the +8jos and beyond.
14
A youth in +8jj, like
Swinburne, would encounter Greece with precisely the same books as a
young man in +8:. This explains why, unlike Rome, the kingdom of the
Hellenes did not acquire a new signicance for each generation.
Even the rst important conict between Greeks and Turks since the War of
Independence inspired few pens and fewer new thoughts. In May +8, the
Cretans, who had chafed for years under a cruel and inept administration,
began a rebellion whose ultimate aim was union with Greece. In November of
that year, the Turkish commander, Mustafa Kyrtli Pasha, attacked the Arkadi
monastery, which was situated near the northern coast of the island between
the towns of Heraklio and Rethymno. An army ofcer from Greece, Panos
Koroneos, had used the monastery as his headquarters, but he withdrew most
++o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
of his men and equipment before the Turkish advance. Left inside were per-
haps +jo armed insurgents, a large part of the religious community, and oo
women and children, who had sought shelter within the church. After the
Turks had breached the walls, a priest, in the words of the American consul in
Crete at the time, changed what was before but protless slaughter into a
deed of heroism by setting re to the powder magazine (Stillman, American
Consul in a Cretan War y). Dakin estimates that oo Greeks and jo Turks
died in the explosion (Unication of Greece +++). With help from Greece, the
rebellion continued until +8, when Turkey threatened to declare war on
the Greek state. Ottoman authority was restored on the island with the ap-
proval of the Western powers.
The revolt of Crete and the destruction of the Arkadi monastery gener-
ated interest in the Cretan struggle abroad. A few philhellenes, most with
no freedom to ght for at home, enlisted beside numerous Greek volun-
teers in the most recent Greek cause.
15
Another signicant American relief
effort, headed by the old philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe, was organized
for the benet of Cretan refugees.
16
Public response in America and England
replicated the Greek War of Independence. Americans were uniformly sup-
portive of Cretan aspirations; in fact, the American consul on Crete, William
Stillman, was one of the most vocal supporters of the rebellion. British pub-
lic opinion, still dominated by the Russophobia of the Crimean War, was less
enthusiastic.
17
Just two years before the revolt, Charles Dickens had cau-
tioned the Greeks on Crete that they must keep quiet now, since no help
would come from Europe (j). Philhellenism remained, as Edward Augus-
tus Freeman noted, one of the most prominent and distinctive signs of lib-
eral sentiment, and it was the liberal Left, including Freeman, who spoke
up for the Cretans. Still, in comparison to the Greek fever of the +8:os, the
interest in Crete hardly constituted a mild temperature.
The focus was still on the reclamation of the ancient heritage. For exam-
ple, in the Nation of January +y, +8y, Stillman asserted These men [the
Cretan rebels] are, in my mind, the legitimate successors of Leonidas and
Epaminondas, Agesilaus and Themistocles, what wonder would it be if we
found some of their vices as well as their virtues? (Articles and Despatches
jjj). S. G. W. Benjamin said, Crete under Turkish rule is like a prisoner
chained to a dead man and struggling for release from the fearful union.
Crete under Greek rule will spring to a new existence and develop new ener-
gies (:y).
Crete, a poem by the American Edmund Clarence Stedman, memorial-
ized the tragedy at Arkadi.
18
After two stanzas that recalled the contempo-
rary event, Stedman unskillfully connected the revolt of +8 to the Greek
War of Independence by means of a pale paraphrase of a famous couplet
from Byron (For Freedoms battle once begun /Is handed down from sire
to son):
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +++
Though the Cretan eagle fell,
And the ancient heights were won,
Freedoms light was guarded well,
Handed down from sire to son;
Through centuries of shame,
Ah! it never wholly died,
But was hid, a sacred ame,
There on topmost Idas side.
(oo)
The poem ends with a plea for the heroes of the ancient epics to appear in
Crete and plant the ag of Greece: Shades of heroes Homer sung/ . . .
Rise with shadowy swords among / Candias smoking elds and towns. The
last two stanzas present, literally and unchanged, the Grces de Byron et
dHomre of the Greek Revolution.
The destruction of Arkadi also appears in Ode on the Insurrection of
Candia by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne was the most famous
literary philhellene of his generation, producing a poem on each occasion
that the Greeks and Turks found themselves at odds in the second half of the
nineteenth century: Ode on the Insurrection of Candia in +8y, Athens:
An Ode in +88+, and For Greece and Crete in +8y. Still, it must be con-
ceded that his poetic reputation did not rest upon any of these efforts.
Where Stedmans Crete invoked the philhellenic verse of Byron, Ode
on the Insurrection of Candia resurrected the language, concepts, and even
visual structure, with its strophes and antistrophes, of Shelleys Hellas and
Ode to Liberty.
19
The struggle in Crete has symbolic signicance because,
as Greece was the birthplace of freedom, it was part of the most holy land.
Throughout the poem, Swinburne spoke of a return of freedom to Greece
(e.g., where freedom must turn again the beauty of thy brows on Greece,
(Complete works :.:). At no time did Swinburne distinguish Crete from
free Greece; he never acknowledged that the latter already existed. Rhetoric
and reality clearly collide in the lines: O kings and queens and nations mis-
erable /. . . Ye have one hour, but these [those who died in the pursuit of free-
dom] the immortal years (:.:). For Swinburne, as for Shelley, the return
of Greek freedom will sound the death knell of monarchs and tyrants. The
Cretan insurgents, on the other hand, were ghting to become subjects of the
king of Greece.
In his biography of Swinburne, the poets friend Edmund Gosse said of
Ode on the Insurrection of Candia, It is a ne performance, learnedly
constructed, but it is a little dull and in later years the poet disliked to hear it
mentioned. He was conscious, I think, of a slight insincerity in the enthusi-
asm it expressed, for though he was very deeply concerned for Mentana and
Custozza [events in the Italian Risorgimento], he did not really care whether
++: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
the Cretans insurrected or not (+j). Gosse, in my view, simplied Swin-
burnes outlook. The poet probably cared little for the Cretans qua Cretans,
indeed he almost never refers to them as Cretans. But, like Voltaire, he was
interested in the regeneration of the Greeks because he wanted desperately
to resuscitate Athens.
Gosse also said, Swinburne was never tired of reciting, like a thrush
singing Greek, and with gestures of ecstasy, the odes in praise of Athenian
liberty which break up The Persians of Aeschylus. The state of Athens in the
fourth [fth?] century appeared to him [Swinburne] to approach his ideal re-
public more nearly than any other ancient or modern institution (::).
Swinburne himself wrote in his Erectheus one of the nest specimens of Vic-
torian Hellenism:
A wonder enthroned on hills and seas,
A maiden crowned with a fourfold glory,
That none from the pride of her head may rend;
Violet and olive-leaf purple and hoary,
Song-wreath and story the fairest of fame,
Flowers that the winter can blast not or bend;
A light upon the earth as the suns own ame,
A name as his name,
Athens, a praise without end.
(Complete Works y.+)
In Athens: An Ode, ostensibly written to bolster the Greeks for a con-
frontation with the Turks in +88+, which almost led to war before the Euro-
pean powers intervened, Swinburne urged the sons of them that fought the
Marathonian eld to return to a time when Gods were yours yet strange to
Turk and Galilean, / Light and Wisdom only then as gods adored: / Pallas
was your shield, your comforter was Paean, / From your bright worlds navel
spoke the Sun your lord (Complete Works j.8+). In a letter, Swinburne said
of this poem, I am writing an anti-Christian and anti-Russian ode on
Athens. Watts says that the astute and practical Greeks will laugh at it and
mejustly, he seems to think. Let them laugh, in (their) Gods nameand
so prove that modern Hellas is an annexe [sic] of the kingdom of Bulgaria
(Swinburne Letters ::++).
Swinburne was in earnest. His support for the modern Greeks in +8y,
+88+, and +8y was based on the same hopes of Hlderlin and Shelley, the
desire for a rebirth of the idealized world of the ancients with its political lib-
erty, its perceived dedication to artistic beauty, and its pagan gods. The king-
dom of Greece might have a monarch and practice Orthodox Christianity,
but Swinburne was writing for Greece, the world he depicted so elo-
n + o r a o t s o a o t n ++
quently in his Erechtheus and Atalanta in Calydon. For him, as for Shelley,
that was the real Greece, and nothing that had occurred between the Aegean
and Ionian seas in the nineteenth century affected his view of it.
Yet poetry did not need to be written about the Cretan revolt, since it
could be borrowed just as easily and, perhaps, more effectively from the past.
One of the earliest books published in support of the Cretans, Joseph
Cartwrights Insurrection in Candia and the Public Press (+8), has an epi-
graph from Byron on the title page and another at the opening of the rst
chapter. The Greek Revolution had been misunderstood because of mislead-
ing allusions to the classical past and then had itself become a misleading al-
lusion for modern Greek history for the rest of the nineteenth century.
The perception of Greece as geographically indeterminate remained preva-
lent at the middle of the nineteenth century, although the clear dichotomy of
ancient/West and modern/East had begun to break down. Ancient Greece
was still culturally and geographically rmly xed in the West, and the Greek
landscape was still perceived as a key to the Greek miracle and the founding
of Western culture. In +oo, as in +8oo, interest in the modern Greeks
stemmed mostly from their perceived connection to the revered past. In
+88:, Theodore Cuyler wrote of Greece, No land on the Continent of Eu-
rope has a stronger claim on our hearts, or excites more thrilling hopes for the
future, than the land in which Pericles builded [sic], and Plato thought, and
Phidias carved, and Paul proclaimed the Gospel of eternal life (+yo).
After independence, however, modern Greece was viewed as something of
a gray area between East and West without being a full or credible member of
either region. Monckton Milness poem about the Ionian island of Corfu,
which appeared in +8, addressed the place as follows: Thou art a portal,
whence the Orient, / The long-desired, long-dreamt-of Orient / Opens
upon us, with its strange forms, Outlines immense and gleaming distances, /
And all circumstance of faery land (8). In +88, George Gissing noted in a
letter from Athens: The Greeks always talk about going to Europe & in-
deed this is not Europe but the East. It will be a very long time before Greece
rids itself of its orientalism (Letters .+). On the other hand, for those
seeking the true Orient, Greece was already too Western. In +8, Thack-
eray remarked on arriving at Smyrna that he was glad that the Turkish part
of Athens was extinct, so that I should not be baulked of the pleasure of
entering an Eastern town by an introduction to any garbled or incomplete
specimen of one (:j).
20
In his novel The Bertrams, Anthony Trollope
lamented, Alexandria is fast becoming a European city; but its Europeans are
from Greece and the Levant! . . . Poor Arabs! Poor Turks! giving way on all
sides to wretches so much viler than yourselves, what a destiny is before you
(). Irby and Mackenzies comment on Greek women in +8 perhaps best
++ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
sums up the contemporary attitudes: The modern Greek woman falls short
alike of the softness and re of the Oriental and the renement and loftiness
of the Western lady (+o).
In +8y, when Mark Twain wondered that the manly people that per-
formed such miracles as the valor of Marathon are only a tribe of unconsid-
ered slaves to-day (:8o), most opinions of the modern Greeks were equally
negative.
21
In fact, Twain could only have gotten his information second-
hand since he only spent a single night in Greece, when he evaded quarantine
to visit the Acropolis. Twains language, which recalls the discourse about the
modern Greeks before the War of Independence, suggests that circum-
stances were the cause for the low state of the Greeks. What tribe of slaves is
not unconsidered, and would that not change if they were no longer slaves?
More to the point, perhaps, is to ask slaves of whom? Twain was not en-
tirely clear on this point; he suggested that part of the problem had been
King Otho, who had abdicated four years earlier in +8 and been replaced
by a new monarch from Denmark, George I.
22
Yet the former king hardly
seems the sole reason the Greek kingdom was lled with conscators and
falsiers of high repute (Twain :y8). Further, poor opinions of Otho were
by no means universal; another American, Walter Colton, said that the
Greeks want a popular, vigorous, and intelligent government, equal laws
and freedom from oppression. These they are now beginning to realize
under the mild and enlightened policy of Otho (:yo). In most minds, if the
Greeks were still thought to be unconsidered slaves, both established rheto-
ric and history indicated that their oppressors continued to be the Turks.
The most famous American artistic effort with a modern Greek theme
around the middle of the nineteenth century was titled simply The Greek
Slave. Hiram Powerss statue, one of the most popular works shown at the
Great Exhibition in London in +8j+, represented a Greek girl, naked, her
wrists chained, implying that she was destined for a Turkish harem (Tsig-
akou yy). The piece is remarkable for its execution not for its innovative con-
ception. The ideology of the statue hardly differs from Choiseul-Goufers
+y8: frontispiece; even the use of nudity just expanded upon the bared
breasts of the Greek female in Delacroixs Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Mis-
solonghi. The enormous interest in The Greek Slave would in turn strengthen
the traditional perception of a feminized Greece made captive by the Turks.
Tsigakou caustically notes that Elizabeth Barrett Brownings sonnet
about Powerss statue praises the passionless perfection of the work rather
than the manifest erotic implications. Hellenic nudity was capable of puri-
fying any naked gure in the eyes of the prudish Victorians (yy). Brown-
ings response was not, however, simply an instance of Victorian prudery.
She saw the work through the established philhellenic lenses of Winckel-
manns grandeur and simplicity coupled with the aspirations of freedom
founded upon ideas about ancient Athens:
n + o r a o t s o a o t n ++j
They say ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her . . .
To confront mans crimes in different lands
With mans ideal sense. Pierce to the centre
Arts ery nger, and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From Gods pure heights of beauty against mans wrong!
(:)
For Browning, the Greek slave, precisely because she is a Greek, could still
symbolize the end of serfdom of this world. When the poet looked at The
Greek Slave, she did so with the Greek cause as, to use the words of Diplo-
maticus, an abiding conviction of her political consciousness, one that was
preserved and passed down by the liberal Left.
Throughout the nineteenth century the image of the Greek slave en-
dured, in part because of cultural preconceptions and in part because there
still were Greeks who were in need of liberation.
23
Monckton Milnes divided
his Memorials into two parts, Greece Proper and In Turkish Greece, the
latter an oxymoronic title that signied the continuing oppression of the
region. Charles Dilke, a prominent Liberal politician, asked in Parliament in
+8y8: What kind of Greece is a Greece which does not include Lemnos,
Lesbos, or Mytilene, Chio, Mount Olympus, Mount Ossa and Mount Athos?
Not only the larger part, but the most Greek part of Greece was omitted from
the Hellenic Kingdom. Crete, and the islands, and the coast of Thrace, and
the Greek colony of Constantinople, are the Greek Greece (:).
Despite the fact that the modern Greeks had shown little sign of fullling
the fervent philhellenic hopes for a regeneration of the ancients, Dilke saw
the Greeks and the Turks within the ideological framework of the early
nineteenth century. He asserted, I believe in Greecebelieve in the ulti-
mate replacement of the Turkish State by powerful and progressive
Greece, which would be an outpost of Western Europe in the East
(:). Elsewhere he said that Greece would be a force of the future
instead of a force for the past; a force of trade, rather than a force of war; Eu-
ropean instead of Asiatic, intensely independent, democratic, maritime!
(Eastern Question jo). In New Greece (+8y8), Lewis Sergeant declared, The
cause of peace and good government in Europe appears to require the estab-
lishment of Greece as a Great Power in the Aegean. The interests of Greece
and Europeand particularly Greece and Englandare involved together
in the accomplishment of this idea (iv). W. E. Baxter wrote in +8y: All of
the lost deeds of ancient time will again be rivalled by the Greeks of a future
++ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
age! (+). Dilke, Baxter, and Sergeant saw the Greeks as a potential bastion
of European progressive liberalism not because of the track record of the
kingdom of Greece, but rather because as Greeks they already occupied that
place in a grand ideological scheme.
In +8, Monckton Milnes had cautioned those who thought that Greece,
having at last attained the means of free action, would quickly develop
anew in all its pristine energy. . . . Until then this generation be extinct, and
carry along with it its wild instincts and savage virtues; the atmosphere in
which Grecian politics are to work must be turbulent and dark (+j+, +j).
The future of the country, he predicted, rested with the bright youths whom
the revolution had detacht [sic] . . . from Oriental modes and feelings and
who were now eager to attach themselves to European thoughts and habits
(+j). Where the ancient Greeks were the originators of Western culture, the
modern Greeks are only the pensioners of the culture which the rest of
Europe has learnt by labor and the fruition of the ages; they [the modern
Greeks] have to think with others thoughts, almost to feel with others feel-
ings (+jj). But the idea that the regeneration of the Greeks would rejuve-
nate the West died slowly, as the discussion of Swinburne above has demon-
strated. Aubrey de Vere, after noting that Sophocles, Homer, and Plato were
once again taught in Greek classrooms, concluded, What then may we not
expect when that race, which possesses probably the largest ability of all
European races, are, thus, brought into contact at once with the noblest of
languages, the noblest of literatures (Picturesque Sketches I.:j). De Veres
estimation of the ability of the Greeks was, of course, based on the past, not
the present.
Greeces place in the Western imagination explains why, decades after the
establishment of a Greek state, the modern Greeks were still discussed in
terms of their past and their potentiality while the present was overlooked.
The classicist R. C. Jebb wryly noted Foreign observers of Greek affairs
are, broadly speaking, of two classes: those who think that Greece has a fu-
ture, and those who think that she may be allowed to have a present (vi). The
former were far more numerous than the latter.
Although the general opinion about the modern Greeks was negative, the
sentiment of travelers, with their eyes on the glorious past and/or the excit-
ing future, was predominantly philhellenic. Several pro-Turkish books ap-
peared that used the dismal state of modern Greece to argue that the Greeks
should never have become independent, such as Sir Grenville Temples
Travels in Greece and Turkey (+8) and Adolphus Slades Records of Travel
in Turkey (+8) in England or James Ellsworth DeKays Sketches of Turkey
in .S.and .S:(+8) and James Harrisons Greek Vignettes (+8y8) in the
United States. In +8o, the German scholar Jacob Fallmerayer published a
study that claimed that the modern Greeks were mainly, if not wholly, Slavic
in blood. Fallmerayers book caused an uproar in Greece, but neither his
n + o r a o t s o a o t n ++y
work nor the evidence presented by pro-Turkish travelers had much effect
on English or American nineteenth-century literature.
24
A central tenet of
philhellenic thought from its inception had been the degeneration and de-
basement of the modern Greeks, so a catalogue of their faults only proved a
point already accepted. Many of the supporters of the Greek cause were as
committed as their opponents to the idea of the modern Greeks as an un-
considered tribe of slaves. It was, after all, precisely the slavery of Greece
that, according to Winckelmann and others, had prevented the Greek land-
scape from producing another Athens like that of the fth century ucr. Even
after independence, it would take time for Greek regeneration to occur.
S. G. W. Benjamin wrote in +8y: Patience must indeed be the motto of the
Philhellenist who longs for the restoration of Athens and Greece, his faith in
the progress of the Greeks, and in their energy and disposition to overcome
obstacles and arise above their present condition, must often be taxed to the
uttermost (:+). The heroines father in Justin McCarthys Maid of Athens
(+88) is described as a Philhellene of the most genuine type; his love for
Greece and his faith in her survived the hardest experience and the keenest
disappointments. Even the worst failures and meanesses [sic] of the worst
Greek parties politicians could not cure him of his devotion to the Greek
cause (I.+). The real question for philhellenes was whether a revival of the
Greeks were possible, and at a larger philosophical level, ideas of human
progress and the transforming qualities of liberty were the crucial issues.
Greece and the Greeks were still not of importance in their own right but for
their symbolic place in political and cultural battles.
In his Voyage en Orient (+8j), the French writer Lamartine, employing a
pagan-versus-Christian cultural dichotomy, described the Attic landscape as
a desiccated wasteland rather than an earthly paradise. Only God can reviv-
ify it. The spirit of liberty will not sufce. To the poet and painter, there is
written on these sterile mountains, on these white capes whitened with the
ruins of fallen temples, on these marshy and rocky wastes, whereon nothing
but sonorous names resoundIt is nished (y8). The temple of The-
seus had a kind of frigid, dead beauty, which contrasted with the living
grandeur of St. Peters at Rome. Chateaubriand concurred, commenting,
Christianity will prevent modern nations from falling into such deplorable
decrepitude as what he saw in Athens (Travels in Greece +o+).
Benjamin Disraelis ctional hero Contarini Fleming challenges the phil-
hellenic sentiment from a different cultural standpoint than Lamartine.
Fleming concludes a visit to the Acropolis as follows: These are a few of my
meditations amid the ruins of Athens. They will disappoint those who might
justly expect an ebullition of rapture from one who gazed upon Marathon at
midnight and sailed the free waters of Salamis. I regret the disappointment,
but I have arrived at an age when I can think only of the future (Contarini
Fleming, Works VI.). Flemings chief meditation was on the absurdity of
++8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
modern education, which was conned to the literature of two dead lan-
guages (VI.8). But Fleming does not advocate the study of spoken Euro-
pean languages since these have been in great part founded upon the classic
tongues. . . . Why not study the oriental? Surely in the Persians or the Arabs
we might discover new sources of emotion, new modes of expression, new
trains of ideas, new principles of invention, and new bursts of fancy
(VI.). The position advocated by Disraelis character was hardly a new way
of thinking in +8+, the year the novel was published. Romantic Orientalism
had been viewed as a means to revive the West for some sixty years. But few
real or ctional visitors had espoused the turn to the East while sitting near
the Parthenon, the temple of Romantic Hellenism.
The Romantic Orientalism presented in Disraelis novels Contarini Flem-
ing (+8+) and Tancred (+8y) is far more aggressive than the mystical, tran-
scendental version that forms the natural counterpart to the Romantic Hel-
lenism of Winckelmann. Disraelis Orientalism in these novels appears
instead to be an inversion of Romantic philhellenism in which the philosoph-
ical concepts have a geographical locus that must be defended from Western
intrusions. Flemings career as a reverse Byron is often signaled in the text.
On entering Ioannina he exclaims, I longed to write an Eastern Tale!
(VI.:), and he enlists in the Ottoman army to help extinguish an insurrec-
tion of Albanians. No other character in nineteenth-century English ction
of which I know ghts for Turkish rule on European soil. Tancred focuses on
the regeneration of Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land in order to bring back
the empire of the East (XVI.+:+), but Disraeli places it in a rhetorical and
conceptual framework that replicates the importance of freedom in philhel-
lenic discourse:
Asia has been overrun by Turks and Tartars. For nearly ve hundred
years the true Oriental mind has been enthralled. Arabia alone has re-
mained free and faithful to the divine tradition. From its bosom we
shall go forth and sweep away the moulding remnants of the Tartaric
system, and then, when the East has resumed its indigenous intelli-
gence, when angels and prophets again mingle with humanity, the
sacred quarter of the globe will recover its primeval and divine su-
premacy, it will act upon the modern empires and the faint-hearted
faith of Europe. (XVI.y)
In a review of the novel, Richard Monckton Milnes, a philhellene, com-
plained that in the book the hero is taught to look on Christendom as an in-
tellectual colony of Arabia (Blake :o8). But Tancred actually goes further
than that, for it also argues that the East should not be a political colony of
Europe. James Buzard said that Disraelis rejection of philhellenism at the
same time that he mimicked Byronic fashion and style stemmed from a de-
sire to be a Tory Byron (+). Contarini Fleming and Tancred, however, sug-
gest the author might also have desired to be an Oriental Byron.
The degree to which Disraelis Jewish origin affected his identication
with the East and consequent rejection of philhellenism was a matter of
some debate.
25
Certainly Disraelis political opponents xed on his racial
background in the disputes about the Bulgarian atrocities of +8y. As the
battle between Disraeli and Gladstone joined in earnest, the Liberal leader
wrote his friend the duke of Argyll, Dizzys crypto-Judaism has had to do
with his policy (Seton-Watson y8). In +8y, T. P. OConnor, another phil-
hellene, tried to show that Disraeli treated the whole Eastern Question from
the standpoint of the Jew (Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation
:oo). The letters Disraeli wrote during his trip to the East in +8o do suggest
a personal afnity for the Turks. Navarino is called the scene of Codring-
tons bloody blunder. Disraeli also announced: I am quite the Turk, wear a
turban, smoke a pipe six feet long, and squat on a divan. . . . In fact, I nd the
habits of this calm and luxurious people [the Turks] entirely agree with my
preconceived opinions of propriety and enjoyment, and I detest the Greeks
more than ever (Letters +:+y, +y).
But Disraelis relation to philhellenism was hardly so simple. In between
Contarini Fleming and Tancred, he wrote The Rise of Iskander (+8), as trite a
piece of philhellenic writing as any in the decades after Byron. The hero is
the fteenth-century Albanian chieftain Skanderberg, who appears in the
novel as an ethnic Greek. The novel opens in Athens, where a solitary being
stands upon the towering crag of the Acropolis, amid the ruins of the Tem-
ple of Minerva, and gazed upon the inspired scene. . . . Beautiful Greece, he
exclaimed, Thou art still my country. A mournful lot is mine, a strange and
mournful lot, yet not uncheered by hope. . . . Themistocles saved Greece and
died a satrap; I am bred one, let me reverse our lots and die at least a patriot
(Works IV.j). In short, The Rise of Iskander is simply the Greek War of In-
dependence transported backward in time. If Gladstone had read this novel
instead of Tancred, admittedly a more innovative and challenging book, he
might have come away with an entirely different view of Disraelis supposed
crypto-Judaism.
Contarini Fleming and Tancred, with their adaptation of a philhellenic
rhetorical style for anti-Western purposes, constitute the most serious as-
sault on the haunted, holy ground of Greece and Byron in midnineteenth-
century writing in English. Since, however, they amount to a transposition of
Romantic philhellenism to the Orient, they do not reappraise or critique the
philhellenic tradition in the light of Greek independence.
There is nothing in English around the middle of the nineteenth century
comparable to the Greek stories of Arthur de Gobineau (Souvenirs de Voyage,
+8y:) or Edmund Abouts novel Le Roi des Montagnes (+8jy).
26
Gobineaus
+:o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
two stories, slender as they are, clearly demonstrate the directions British
writers failed to take. Le mouchoir rouge concerns life on the Ionian island
of Cephalonia under British rule. Akrivie Phrangopoulou examines the
Greek romance after liberation by recounting the experience on Naxos of an
English naval ofcer, whose nationality serves to signal the storys relation-
ship to the Byronic tradition. Both subjects would have been fruitful material
for a British writer, but it was a Frenchman who pursued them.
Abouts book, translated as The King of the Mountains, was easily the most
famous novel about modern Greece in Europe and America during the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century and, not coincidentally, the only work of
note to reappraise the romantic klephts of philhellenic legend.
27
The gap be-
tween About and English writing can best be demonstrated by the fact that
Abouts book appeared in the same year as one of the rst novels in English
set in modern Greece written after +8, Moriers stereotypically philhel-
lenic Photo the Suliote.
Abouts book professes to be a faithful rendering of an account by a Ger-
man student, Hermann Schultz, of his capture by the famous Greek brigand
Hadgi-Stavros, who fought in the war of independence but never knew ex-
actly whether he was a brigand or an insurgent, whether his men were thieves
or patriots. No doubt his hatred of the Turk was great, but it did not blind
him to the advantages to be derived from pillaging a Greek village (:).
Abroad, however, they heard only of the heroic side of his exploits. . . .
Byron dedicated an ode to him (:y). Abouts text describes not only the ram-
pant pillaging of both Greek natives and foreign travelers but also the way it
was tolerated and even aided by the authorities. A police captain says, True,
we have among our superiors some madmen who pretend that brigands
ought to be treated the same way as Turks, but he assures Schultz that such
men are rare and ineffective (+). About also takes aim at philhellenes abroad
when the captain tells the young German that publicizing the story of his kid-
napping will only make him look foolish: When you return to Germany, you
can do what you like. Speak, write, publish, I shant care. Works written
against us harm no one, unless perhaps their authors. You are free to try the
experiment. If you describe faithfully what you have seen, youll be accused
of slandering an illustrious and oppressed race. Our friends, and most men of
sixty are of the number, will tax you with levity, caprice, and even ingrati-
tude. . . . But the best of the affair is, no one will believe you (+j).
The narrator of Schultzs tale informs the reader that he sent a copy to
Athens for comment and dutifully attaches a letter from one Patriotis Psep-
tis, author of a volume of dithyrambi on the Regeneration of Greece,
which reads: The history of the King of the Mountains is an invention of
some enemy of truth and ofthe police. . . . I confess that, formerly, there
were brigands in Greece. The most important of these were destroyed by
Hercules and Theseus, whom we look upon as the original founder of the
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +:+
Grecian police. Those who escaped have fallen under the blows of our invin-
cible army (o:).
Almost everything in The King of the Mountains is delivered in that same
lighthearted style; the author makes fun of a German botanist and a French
archaeologist as well as the bloodthirsty Greek brigand who banks at Bar-
clays. Romilly Jenkins correctly noted that Abouts ironic wit nullied his
message: Yet it is probable that the general effect of the novel in Europe was
harmful rather than salutary. Its success was too complete. It presented a
state of society so preposterous that, as the gendarme Pericles told Schultz,
nobody but a Greek could take it seriously, and in laughing until they cried at
the antics of Pericles and Hadgi-Stavros, men forgot the real tyranny and
blackmail, the tortures and mutilation, which were the order of the day in
that lovely countryside (+:). Still, Greeces friends abroad responded pre-
cisely as About predicted, revealing just how dangerous the ground of mod-
ern Greece was for a critical and revisionary pen.
The reality of Greek brigands was brought home to the English public in
April +8yo. An excursion of English and Italian visitors to Marathon ended
with the party in the hands of brigands. The outlaws released two women
and a child, who were sent to Athens to help arrange the ransom for the four
men in the group. The brigands leader also sought freedom of movement
and amnesty. The latter was specically denied in the new Greek constitu-
tion adopted in +8, a clause that had been approved by the governments of
Britain, France, and Russia. When Greek troops caught up to the bandits at
the village of Dilessi, all of the hostages were killed. Three of them were
English and one was Italian.
Greece reacted with as much horror as Europe, but that did not prevent an
outpouring of anti-Greek sentiment in the press. Jenkins said, in England
the public indignation knew no bounds. . . . Greece was a disgrace to civilisa-
tion, a nest of robbers and pirates, a country of half-Slav, half-Greek demi-
savages. . . . The unreasoning prejudice in favour of Greece which had been
so strong in +8:+ had, after half a century, given way to an equally unreason-
ing prejudice against her (y).
A year after the Dilessi murders, the niece of Thomas Wyse, a former
British minister to Athens, wrote in the introduction to her late uncles
Greek journals that the Dilessi tragedy had already had a salutary effect on
thinking both in Greece and abroad: a sort of romance still hung around the
klephts, and, no matter how much it might be condemned, there was always a
poetry surrounding the life, that made one excuse and palliate it. The
events at Dilessi, she added, had caused brigandage to lose its luster of ro-
mantic heroism both in Greece and abroad (+).
Her pronouncement, like Jenkinss comment about the end of unreason-
ing prejudice in favour of Greece, is directly at odds with the assertion of
+:: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Diplomaticus that the magic force of philhellenic legend was still potent in
+8y. And Diplomaticus was right. For, pace the younger Wyse, in literature
Dilessi had no perceptible effect on English writing about Greece and hardly
dented the poetry surrounding klephtic life.
In a book of poems, A Garland from Greece, published twelve years after
the tragedy at Dilessi, George Francis Savage-Armstrong included a piece
called The Brigand of Parnassus: +.n. +88+. At the opening, an old man
asks his son if war has been declared against the Turks:
War or no war? Iron-sted shall we ght the Turk and sally,
Janina be ours, and every Greek and Grecian vale be free,
Turk and turban roll in ruin from the mountains to the sea?
(:y)
The old man is delighted that the decision is for war: Praise be God!Ill
take my musket, and Ill march to Tempes vale (:y8). He then recalls his
youth in +8:+:
I was young, and I was a Captain of a little band of Braves
Roaming free upon Parnassus heights above a land of slaves.
Brigands, robbers, Klephts, they called us. Let them call us what they
might,
We were men, and we were free, and we were happy day and night.
(:8:)
The crucial event in his reminiscence is, predictably, the kidnapping of his
sister by a pasha and her rescue by the band of klephts. He then returns to the
present:
Greece is not yet free as long as any Greeks a slave
Thats our watchword now. . . .
Will not the gallant lads of Greece in freedom born and bred,
Thinking on the Greece that was, and dreaming of her glorious dead,
Dare and do to-day if Greece be left to ght the Turk alone?
(ooo+)
The poem responded to the political climate of +88+, when Greece and
Turkey nearly went to war, a conict that was avoided when the European
powers adjusted Greeces northern borders in its favor. Savage-Armstrong
wanted to inspire the spirit of +8:+ in his readers, and his composition re-
hearsed the literary conventions of the Greek Revolution. Even after Dilessi,
he had no qualms about calling his hero a brigand nor invoking the romance
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +:
surrounding the klephts. Savage-Armstrongs sub-Byronic verse may have
lost its poetic element, but his klephts had not.
Justin McCarthys novel Maid of Athens (+88) was also set during the
events of +88+. In the book, the heroine makes a spirited defense of Greek
brigands, which, given the fact that the author was a member of the British
Parliament, amounts to a direct comment about the public uproar over
Dilessi:
English people dont quite understand the hold these brigands some-
times had on the villagers here. They were robbers to the rich foreign
traveler; they were very often benefactors to their poor neighbors. A
brigand chief was often known to give marriage portions to the poor
girls of the village in which he took shelter now and then. If a poor
man lost some of his cattle, or his olives had been spoiled or anything
of the kind happened, the brigand chief was ready to make up the loss
to him. The villagers regarded him exactly as the Highlanders did
Rob Roy or the Sherwood people Robin Hood. (II.+8)
She tells of the kidnapping of a group of French travelers by klephts that
sounds much like Dilessi. The Greek government would not encourage the
giving of ransom; and the friends of the captured were wild with affright lest
the delay in payment might make the brigands furious (II.+o). She and her
mother, the widow of a respected philhellene, went to negotiate. The bandits
instantly agreed to accept half of what was offered. She ends her account:
we had a feast togetherthe prisoners, the leading brigands, and our-
selves. At her departure, the chief gave her a delightful little dagger, which
I hardly need say I cherish as a treasure (II.+:). Although she has never
seen the leader of the band again, she knows that he is able to move about the
country without interference from the police: It would be a very unwise
thing for the government to rake up old scores against a man like that. . . . He
may be their ally one day (II.+).
George Hortons Fair Brigand (+8y), an American novel whose plot mir-
rors that of Abouts book, provides a much more benevolent view of Greek
brigands than its French precursor. A villager says of the klephtic band,
They do not rob us you see; they rob strangers and give dowries to our
daughters and presents to our churches. Who would protect the honest shep-
herd that opposed the brigands? (). And one of the American captives
implicitly criticizes the Greek government for the tragedy at Dilessi: If
there is such a hulla-balloo made that the fool Government sends troops,
they will kill us, as they did those Englishmen at Marathon (y). Clearly,
About found no followers in England and America. Even the author who had
borrowed Abouts plot parted company when it came to criticizing klephts.
28
+: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
For Horton, McCarthy, and others, the discourse of modern Greece was
xed in the +8:os. Rather than wanting modern Greece to mean something
different for their generation, they insisted on its keeping the same meaning
in spite of the facts before them. Like Byron, while in Greece McCarthy and
Savage-Armstrong worried about and took precautions against the very
brigands whom they romanticized on the page. The kingdom of Greece
with its monarchy, its almost feudal regional leading families, its state reli-
gion, and its lawless brigands was hardly the paradise of freedom envisioned
by Hlderlin or Shelley. But the struggle for Greek freedom had taken on a
literary life of its own, which could not be punctured even by events as tragic
as Dilessi.
The Greco-Turkish War of +8y occurred during what was the silver age of
literary philhellenism in English, at least in terms of volume. One year ear-
lier, the Cretans had begun another rebellion against Ottoman rule. Men and
equipment were sent to the island by the Greek government, which openly
declared for annexation. In addition, several klephtic bands crossed Greeces
northern border into Turkish territory. In April +8y, Greece and Turkey
were ofcially at war for the rst time since the War of Independence. A
blockade of Crete by the navies of the European powers prevented major op-
erations on the island by either side. The main campaign in Thessaly ended
in a humiliating debacle for the Greeks. Retreat followed retreat until on May
++ the Greek government asked the Western powers to mediate a settlement.
Greece lost a small amount of territory and was required to pay an indemnity
of million Turkish pounds. The outcome was happier on Crete, where the
powers intervened to make the island an autonomous province of the Ot-
toman Empire with Prince George, the second son of King George of
Greece, as governor. As Dakin concluded, Greece, though defeated, had
gained on balance (Unication of Greece +j).
The war occurred at an opportune time. No signicant conicts were in
progress elsewhere that diverted attention from events in Greece; as the rst
European war in a decade, the Greco-Turkish War attracted many of the
leading reporters of the time, among them Richard Harding Davis and
Stephen Crane. Just one year later, the Spanish-American War would bring
the United States onto the world stage as a colonial power, irrevocably com-
plicating American attitudes toward national struggles for liberation. Over
the previous decade, Britain had abandoned an Eastern strategy centered on
the preservation of the Ottoman Empire as a buffer against Russia. The phil-
hellenism of the British heart was no longer checked by its Russophobic
head, and the cause of Greece acquired the kind of mainstream, semiofcial
status it had always held in America. Further, Byrons grandchildren, who
had no freedom for which to ght at home, rushed to Greece to take part in
these new crusades for freedom (Brailsford :).
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +:j
If active philhellenes were now truly men of the rie instead of the
sword, literary philhellenes also took up a different medium, ction. Still, a
number of poems in the traditional philhellenic strain appeared in +8y,
such as Edmond Rostands Pour la Grce, Swinburnes For Greece and
Crete, William Watsons Hellas, Hail, Andrew Langs Member from
Crete, and an early offering from Robert Frost entitled simply Greece,
which ends:
Greece could not let her glory fade!
Although peace be in sight,
The race the Persian wars arrayed
Must ght one more good ght.
Greece! in triumph long ago
It was you proved to men,
A few may countless hosts oerthrow:
Now prove it once again!
(jo:)
29
But philhellenic poems were dwarfed by the pages of prose. Modern
Greece had begun to make a sustained appearance in English and American
ction earlier in the decade with the publication of such novels as Elizabeth
Edmondss Amygdala (+8), Ccile Cassavetes Anthea (+8:), E. F. Ben-
sons Limitations (+8), and George Hortons Constantine: A Tale of Greece
under King Otho (+8), but it was in +8y that modern Greece gained a sig-
nicant presence as a ctional space in literature in English.
An air of nostalgia permeates many of the novels of the +8os. In his his-
tory of the Greek War of Independence published in +8y, W. Allison
Phillips wrote that the imagination of Europe is still red by Byrons dream
of a Hellas on whose soil, freed from the blighting rule of the barbarian, the
arts and sciences shall once more ourish in their ancient glory (:). For
Phillips, as for many other philhellenes, history appeared to be repeating
itself. He opened his volume: Once more the Greek has measured his
strength against the Turk, and once more the passionate cry of the Hellenes
for the fulllment of their national aspirations has, in spite of the unfriendly
attitude of the Governments and the warnings of experienced statesmen,
awakened sympathetic echoes throughout Europe. The Philhellenic enthusi-
asm is an instinct rather than a conviction (+). The war inspired Isabella
Mayo to publish her translation of Patriot Songs of the Greeks, in which
she said that the present struggle carries ones thoughts back to that stirring
period, between +yyo and +8o, which closed with the recognition of Greek
independence (:yj).
The cause of Greece was especially strong in those who felt that they had
missed the great struggles for freedom of earlier decades. As the philhellenic
+: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
hero of Noel Brailsfords The Broom of the War God (+88) volunteered to
ght for greater Greece, he thought of his mothers stories of friends of
hers who had fought with Garibaldi, and he recalled his boys sorrow that he
had been too late to join them. Was the dream of a great free Italy any fairer
than this inspiration of Hellenism? (). In My Life and Times (+:),
Jerome K. Jerome remembered, when the war of +8y broke out, Poetical
friends of mine went out to ght for Greece but added that they spent
most of their time looking for the Greek army, and when they found it didnt
know it, and came home again (:y). In Richard Harding Daviss comic
play, The Galloper, which rst appeared on Broadway in +oj, Blanche, a
music-hall actress recently arrived in Athens, attempts to take advantage of
such emotional reactions: Well, my story is that little Blanches father was a
volunteer in the last Greek warI come out here to act, my heart bleeds for
the Greek soldiers, and I volunteer as a Red Cross nurseI go to the front
get wounded. . . Come back by Monday nightand open to two hundred
million dollars (Farces +joj+).
Byrons grandchildren of the rie and the pen sensed that +8y might be
the last opportunity to experience the magic force of philhellenic legend with
its ideals of freedom and heroism. And the consensus was that they were al-
ready too late. Three years before, in George Bernard Shaws Arms and the
Man, the heroine, Raina, wondered: Perhaps we only had our heroic ideas
because we are so fond of reading Byron and Pushkin, and because we were
delighted with the opera that season at Bucharest. Real life is so seldom like
that! indeed never, as far as I knew it then (I.:). Philhellenic writers in
+8y, all guilty of being too fond of reading Byron, also discovered that real
life was different from Childe Harold or The Giaour and lamented the gap be-
tween their world and the golden age of seventy years earlier, when the heroic
ideals had, in their eyes, been valid.
While philhellenes of the rie came from all over Europe, the production
of philhellenic ction in the +8os was predominantly an English and Amer-
ican phenomenon; the French, who had contributed to the genre so gener-
ously in the +8:os and +8os, offered few additions. French reticence was un-
derstandable; the +8y war could not even point to noble failures, and the
Greek Revolution of the +8:os was a well-worn subject in French novels by
+8o.
30
For English and American writers, however, it was an opportunity to
create the philhellenic ction that had not been written in the +8:os. For all
intents and purposes, that is what they did.
The +8os generated as much, if not more, writing about the Greek Rev-
olution as about the contemporary situation.
31
In the preface to his +8y
translation of Stefanos Xenoss novel Andronike: A Heroine of the Greek Rev-
olution, E. A. Grosvenor stated that, although the characters were from the
period of the Greek Revolution of +8:+, They might be reckoned charac-
ters of to-day. That revolution, with its mythical heroism and shame, was it-
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +:y
self an episode in the ceaseless struggle between the Christians and the Mus-
sulmans, the Greeks and the Turks (vii). The same logic underlies novels
about the Greek Revolution such as Isabella Mayos Daughter of the Klephts
(+8y) and E. F. Bensons two volumes The Vintage (+88) and The Capsina
(+8) or ctional accounts of Byron in Greece such as McClawss Maid of
Athens (+o) and Hallie Ermine Rivess Castaway (+o). All of these writ-
ings, along with Elizabeth Edmondss Amygdala: A Tale of the Greek Revolu-
tion (+8) and Ccile Cassavetes Anthea: A Story of the Greek War of Inde-
pendence (+8:), treat the War of Independence with the same reverence that
authors of the +8:os had given to the Persian Wars. The move to ction did
not cause a reevaluation of the Grce de Byron but instead represented the
nal apotheosis of Byrons Greece into the pantheon of legend.
Where the Greeks of the revolution had appeared inferior to the warriors
of Salamis and Thermopylae, the Greeks of +8y were now portrayed as the
degenerated stock of the heroes of +8:+. In his memoir As We Were (+o),
E. F. Benson recalled his days in Athens in the +8os. He spoke of how the
modern Greeks were justly proud of those stubborn ancestors who, seventy
years before, had risen, under the leadership of Petrobey and the Mainats,
and thrown off the damnable yoke of the Turks, kindling by that most heroic
insurrection European sympathy with Hellenism, of which the immortal
mouthpiece was Byron (+). It was precisely that most heroic insurrec-
tion that Benson portrayed in The Vintage and The Capsina, two ponder-
ously hagiographic volumes. He presented the Greeks of +8y, however, as a
people prone to verbal bravado who were incapable of making any sort of
stand against the enemy (As We Were +j). Benson commented that hardly
a trace of old Hellenic blood remained in mainland Greece, and the popu-
lation was largely of that mixed blood which by way of a formula we call
Levantine (+). But he appeared less concerned to show a gap between the
ancients and the Greeks of +8:+ than to point out the one between both of
those groups and the Greeks of +8y.
In George Hortons Like Another Helen (+oo), it is the American philhel-
lene who fails to measure up to the standards of the legendary past. The
novel transposes the romance of Greek liberation to Crete in +8y. The
Turkish commander Kostakes, who desires the beautiful Panayotta for his
harem, appears as the embodiment of the unspeakable Turk of old; in fact,
Hortons novel was published in England with the title The Unspeakable
Turk. Panayotta is a true granddaughter of the Greek Revolution; she is cap-
tured by Kostakes only after her dress is caught by a branch as she attempts
to commit suicide by leaping off a cliff a la manire Suliot. The weak link in
the triangle is John Curtis, a twenty-two-year-old American who imagined
himself an ancient Greek or Lord Byron (+:) and who whispers the refrain
of Byrons Maid of Athens as he rescues Panayotta from a band of Bashi-
Bashouks (+8y). Later in the novel, Curtis begins to have second thoughts
+:8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
about Panayotta and his own place in the romance of liberation: Shes grand
here in her native mountains, but you cant lug a mountain around with a girl.
It would take four years of education to t her for Boston, or even Lynn. . . . I
wonder if Americans wouldnt look askance at a woman who had lived in a
Turkish harem. Wouldnt she bring a taint of suspicion with her, no matter
how pure she might be? (oj). Panayottas Orthodoxy might seem too
much like Catholicism for Curtiss mother, and a taint of the papacy was as
a taint of leprosy (o). When Curtis discovers that Panayotta was literally
tainted by leprosy after she hid in a lepers colony during her escape from
Kostakess house, he catches the next boat out of Crete. Curtiss failure as a
hero is both marked and balanced by the presence of the Swede Peter Lind-
bohm, a true philhellene of the old stamp, who goes in search of Panayotta as
the book closes. Like Another Helen is nostalgic not so much for the legendary
Greeks of the revolution but rather for the legendary English and American
philhellenes of the +8:os.
In Stephen Cranes Death and the Child, the antihero, the son of an
emigrant Greek, has lost his native valor. The principal character, Peza, ar-
rives in Thessaly to cover the war for an Italian newspaper. But after he sees a
stream of refugees, he resolves to join the ght: Ah, this is too cruel, too
cruel, too cruel. Is it not? I did not think it would be as bad as this. . . . And yet
I am a Greek. Or at least my father was a Greek (Works j:+::). At the front,
surrounded by hardy peasant soldiers, the educated expatriate is told to take
cartridges off a corpse. Frightened by contact with the dead man, he ees in a
manner similar to that of Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage. But
where Flemings ight was portrayed as part of an initiation into the world of
battle, Pezas is depicted as a complete failure of manhood. At the close of the
story, he encounters a lone child of a mountain shepherd, who was left be-
hind by his family. The boy asks the emigrant, Are you a man?
Peza gasped in the manner of a sh. Palsied, windless, and abject, he
confronted the primitive courage, the sovereign child, the brother of
the mountains, the sky and the sea, and he knew the denition of his
misery would be written on a wee grass-blade. (Works j:++)
Crane had an extremely positive view of Greek soldiers; it is somewhat
ironic that the great realist still saw legendary klephts all around him in +8y.
In this time of change and surprise, he wrote in a dispatch, it is good to
nd something that does not move with either tide. . . . This unchangeable
element is the spirit of the Greek people (Works :+:+). He added: There
will be a great deal to happen before these people of the mountains care to
pause (Works :+j). After the Greeks had cared to pause more than once,
Crane continued to defend their bravery. One of his dispatches, entitled
Greeks Waiting at Thermopylae, noted, Although the pass has been wid-
n + o r a o t s o a o t n +:
ened and much changed since Leonidas ght, it is still an ideal place to hold
an enemy in check (Works :jy). For Crane, the villain was Crown Prince
Constantine, who would not allow his troops to engage the Turks. He eulo-
gized General Smolenski, who, according to Crane, wept when ordered to re-
treat by the prince. For Frederick Palmer, however, Smolenski was himself
the problem. As a European trained Oriental, the general was unsuited for
either Western or Eastern modes of warfare (Going to War in Greece +:o).
Given Cranes positive view of these mountain people, the confronta-
tion at the end of Death and the Child is not simply one between child and
man, innocence and the loss of innocence. It also represents a confrontation
between a true child of the Greek mountain, one who represents the un-
changing spirit of the Greek people, and the son of an emigrant. In Death
and the Child, life abroad took the klepht out of the man.
The works of Benson and Crane point to a curious fact concerning writ-
ing about modern Greece before +:o. Benson was justly famous for come-
dies of bourgeois social manners, from Dodo in +8j to the Lucia and Mapp
novels of the +os. But his Greek novels, The Vintage and The Capsina, por-
tray precisely the dry, stereotypical heroic Greeks who would be the perfect
targets of Bensons comic wit. Crane, on the other hand, was justly famous
for his realistic depiction of Bowery life in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and of
warfare in The Red Badge of Courage. Yet his novel set in Greece during the
war of +8y, Active Service (+8), is a at, uninspired bourgeois romance of
the sort that Crane was reacting against in his earlier efforts.
32
Greece had a
curious effect; it made otherwise good authors write against themselves, and
the result was rather poor work. The satire, criticism, and deconstruction of
cherished beliefs that could be done back home somehow were not yet ready
for the dangerous ground of Greece and Byron.
Although the writing of Benson, Horton, and Crane all suggest different
ways in which the present did not live up to the ideals of philhellenic legend,
none of them challenged the worth of those ideals. At the end of his account
of the war of +8y in A Year from a Reporters Notebook, in which he dwelt at
length on the ineptitude of the Greek army and its ofcers, Richard Harding
Davis stated:
There have been many minarets within the last two years standing
above burning villages in Asia Minor and Armenia. They have looked
down upon the massacre of twenty thousand people through the last
two years, and upon the destruction of no one knows how many vil-
lages. If the ve Powers did not support these minarets, they would
crumble away and fall to pieces. Greece tried to uproot them, but she
was not brave enough, nor wise enough, nor strong enough, and so they
still stand. . . . Some people think that all of them have been standing
quite long enoughthat it is time they come down forever. (:jjy)
+o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
For Davis, as for many other writers, the central elements of the Greek
causethe struggle against tyranny, the battle between East and West, the
conict between barbarism and civilizationwere still noble and worthy, but
a sense of will in Greece, the West, or both, was wanting.
33
Only in Brailsfords Broom of the War God are the bright aims of Hel-
lenism rejected. The novel is a ctional account of a philhellene in the For-
eign Legion written by a volunteer. Brailsfords hero, Henry Graham, starts
out with a head lled with philhellenic rhetoric. When a Greek sergeant
thanks Graham for the valiant behavior of the Foreign Legion at the battle of
Pharsala, he replies, It is we who owe everything to Hellas, everything
(:y). But Graham has already begun to reject such platitudes. Near the end
of the book, he sits at a campre looking at the mountains: Liberty and Free-
dom were there. A bonre of the vanities. It held all that men loved, home,
faith, and fatherland. The war was over, an innite bitter sadness shrouded all
his memories. Patriotism and devotion, all the bright aims of Hellenism,
the words came lightly to his ears mixed with a chatter of frivolity. It seemed
better to watch the triumph of a stern and serious barbarism than to dream of
the lost ideals of a people too futile to guard them (:o).
Yet even Brailsford was not content to part company completely with the
legend of the past. For if the Greeks of +8y had not been too futile to guard
the noble ideals, those concepts would not necessarily have been lost. Brails-
fords criticism was aimed less at the bright aims of Hellenism than at the
Greek soldiers who had not been, like his hero, Varatasi, the commander of
the Foreign Legion, true descendants of the Hellenes. On his way to the
front, Graham meets an old klepht of seventy-three who had gone to Athens
at the opening of hostilities because he wanted to organize a band of irregu-
lars from Domoko to go and ght at the frontier. In y8 he had been captain of
such a band, and many a time before he had led revolts against the Turks.
They thought he was too old for the work this time (jy). At the end of the
book, the aged Alexi dies from wounds received while ghting the Turks one
last time. Although the now-disillusioned Graham cannot share Alexis de-
light in the death of the Turks who the old klepht had slain, the old warrior
stands out as a relic from a nobler, simpler age.
Few literary philhellenes were as critical of the Greeks as Brailsford, but
few had had his experience. Crane and Davis spent but a few days at the front
and were well paid for their efforts. Brailsford simply got knocked on his
head for his labors, like the philhellenes of old. In fact, Brailsford and his c-
tional alter ego Henry Graham, actually suffered the disillusionment of the
volunteers of the +8:os. From Byron down to the simplest private, they had
also wondered whether the lost ideals of a people too futile to guard them de-
served their sacrice.
The great public that admired Greece and Byron paid no more attention
to Brailsford than it had to earlier refugees from the front lines. After the war,
Henry Norman observed, Hellas is wrecked today, but let us, for our own
sake as well as hers, pray that she remembers who and what were the men
whose name she bearsin the words of old George Sandys, admirable in the
arts, and glorious in arms, famous for government, affectors of freedom,
every way noble. Thus and thus only, and that hardly, shall she fulll the
splendid prophecy of Shelley: If Greece must be /A wreck, yet shall its
fragments reassemble (:). Henry Nevinson chastised the West for not
coming to the aid of Greece, concluding: In the near East, Greece is still
what she was of old, the one point of enlightenment and freedom, the one
barrier against Oriental darkness and oppression. When greater Powers were
hesitating through fear of self interest, she alone had the courage to strike
another blow against the barbarian despotism which still holds very many of
her race in bondage (:88). Within a year of the defeat in +8y, Samuel Bar-
rows opened his book The Isles and Shrines of Greece with the sentence:
There is a Greece of yesterday, a Greece of to-day, and every philhellene be-
lieves that there will be a Greece of tomorrow (). Barrows did not explic-
itly say that the Greece of tomorrow would resemble the Greece of yester-
day, but that idea was understood by every philhellene.
The lack of impact of the defeat of +8y on the English and American
imagination is perhaps best shown by the conclusion of Richard Harding
Daviss play The Galloper, a comic romance set during the war of +8y,
which opened on Broadway in +oj. The work ends with a Greek advance
and an appearance by a triumphant Greek crown prince, who congratulates
an American reporter for capturing a Turkish outpost single-handedly. The
last stage directions read: The Crown Prince turns to the soldiers, who wave
their muskets and cheer him, as the cta++r r+rrs (oo). A Broadway hit,
Daviss play surfaced again as the musical The Yankee Tourist, in which the
crown prince and his men sing and dance in celebration at the close. The
magic force of legend could, apparently, rewrite the history of actual events.
It could not, however, change the fact that recent events had altered the geog-
raphy of southeastern Europe forever.
5
Pet Balkan People
In April +8y, an insurrection against Ottoman rule broke out in a number of
Bulgarian villages in the Rhodope mountains. The Bulgarian nationalists
were neither well organized nor well armed. The Ottoman authorities re-
sponded quickly, and resistance ended with the death of the Bulgarian
leader, Hristo Botjev, on May +. Ottoman forces, both regular troops and
the irregular militia, burned numerous villages and killed thousands of civil-
ians; the number is a matter of some dispute, but a good estimate is between
+o,ooo and +j,ooo. The Bulgarian atrocities hardly differed from actions
taken by the Ottomans against the Maronite Christians in Lebanon in +8o
+8+ or the Cretans in +8+8.
1
Yet it was the fate of the Bulgarians that
became a cause clbre in Europe, especially in Britain. Although the last rie
shot was red in Bulgaria in the spring of +8y, a veritable cannonade of arti-
cles and pamphlets continued in Britain throughout the summer. On Sep-
tember , William Ewart Gladstones slight book The Bulgarian Horrors and
the Question of the East appeared and went on to sell more than :oo,ooo copies
in the rst month.
2
Gladstone entreated the British and the other European governments to
obtain the extinction of Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks
now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying
off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their
Yuzbachis, their Kaimakans and their Pachas, one and all, bag and baggage,
shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned
(+:). And not simply from Bulgaria, for the ve cases of Servia, Bosnia,
Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Bulgaria should be considered as the con-
nected limbs of one and the same transaction (8). In short, Gladstone
wanted the Turks out of Europe, and his phrase bag and baggage was soon
appropriated for that goal.
Gladstones logic was rmly rooted in the perceived differences between
Europe and Asia, which had been prevalent in the West since the Enlighten-
ment. His use of Oriental words to enumerate the different Ottoman ofcials
underscored their unsuitability to administer a part of Europe. According to
+:
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +
Gladstone, the Turks had received several opportunities for reform and im-
provement but, as Muslims of the East, had shown themselves incapable of
progress. Gladstones colleague, Edward Augustus Freeman, forthrightly
declared in his pamphlet The Turks in Europe (+8yy) that the differences be-
tween the Turks and the European nations are of a different kind from the
differences between one European nation and another. . . . It is a mistake to
speak of the Sultan and his ministers as a government and to treat them as
such ().
3
As K. P. Sandiford noted, Gladstone believed so deeply in the
idea of a Europe founded upon the twin poles of Christianity and Hellenism
that he was almost an outright bigot on the subject of Turkish rule on the
western side of the Bosporus (+88). Sandiford went on to suggest that Glad-
stones negative response to the national aspirations of the Poles and the
Magyars stemmed in part from the fact that, in the eyes of the veteran Lib-
eral politician, there was no sultan to denounce or Graeco-Roman legacy to
defend (+8).
How was it that the Bulgarians, about whom little was known in late nine-
teenth-century Europe, became an integral part of the Greco-Roman
legacy? It happened through an extension of the concept of philhellenism to
encompass all of the European Christians under Ottoman rule. In his article
of +8yy, Medieval and Modern Greece, Freeman forthrightly asserted,
Free Greece must be extended far beyond the present absurd boundary.
Wherever Hellenes form the mass of Christian people that land must be Hel-
las (Historical Essays 8:). But he added, The Greeks must remember that
they must claim for themselves no superiority over the Servians or Bulgari-
ans on any ground of past greatness. . . . any narrow philhellenism, grounded
on mere classical sentimentalism, will be purely mischievous. . . . They must
be satised to be rst among equals (+j). Freeman, Gladstone, and most
other philhellenes of the +8yos embraced what might be called wider or,
even more problematically, Balkan philhellenism, which included but was
not limited to the aspirations of the modern Greeks. For, as Freeman also
said, the cause of each of the Eastern Christian nations was equally one of
right against wrong, of freedom against oppression, of Christendom against
Islam, and were too great and holy to be affected in any way by the sub-
tleties of ethnology (8). In large measure, the other Balkan nations en-
tered the consciousness of Europe through Greece.
The extension of the philhellenic outlook was natural not only because an
established and effective discourse about the liberation of European Chris-
tians from Muslim Turks was already at hand, but also because many of those
prominent in the Bulgarian agitation, such as Gladstone and Freeman, had
long-standing reputations as philhellenes. For example, William J. Stillman,
one of the more vocal American advocates of the liberation of the Slavs in the
late +8yos (in his Herzegovina and the Late Uprising, +8yy), had, as the Amer-
ican consul on Crete, been a strong supporter of Cretan aspirations with The
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Cretan Insurrection (+8y). At the beginning of his account of the rebellion in
Herzegovina, Stillman noted, My Cretan experience hardly left me to con-
jecture on the immediate causes of discontent (Herzegovina 8). Nor, he
could have added, did it leave him to conjecture as to how to present the
Slavic uprising to his American audience.
4
The Greeks and the other Balkan Christians, according to Gladstone,
were sharers in a common religion and also sharers in common suffering
(The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern Question :j). Through the efforts of Glad-
stone, Stillman, and others, they would also be sharers in nineteenth-century
philhellenic rhetoric. For example, in his essay Montenegro, published in
+8yy, Gladstone supported the territorial claims of that small mountain
kingdom by stating that in the Middle Ages Montenegro fought with a
valor that rivalled, if it did not surpass, that of Thermopylae and Marathon,
with numbers and resources far inferior, against a foe braver and far more
terrible (). Later he added some remarks about the resemblances be-
tween the characteristic features of Montenegro and of Homeric or Achaian
Greece (yo). In a later essay, The Peace to Come, the Liberal leader
quoted two of the most famous philhellenic lines by Byron, Of the three
hundred, grant but three / To make a new Thermopylae, and then added:
Europe did not know then . . . that Montenegro had fought many such a
battle, as Thermopylae itself does not surpass (:+). Stillman began his de-
scription of the capital city of Montenegro as follows: The residence of the
ruler of Montenegro is worthy of its Lacedaimonian prototype, without
explaining why or how Lacedaimonia functioned as a prototype for the Mon-
tenegrin city of Cettinja (+8). The author and designer William Morris, in a
letter to the Daily News in +8y about the Bulgarian atrocities, included a sin-
gle historical allusion: those babies murdered in Bulgariathere were
more, I believe, slain in Scio a while ago (8). The struggles of the Mon-
tenegrins and the Bulgarians could be compared to any number of national
liberation movements, but the connection was invariably made to the Greeks.
The modern Greeks also served a useful purpose as an example of a Euro-
pean people who had experienced a debasement similar to that of the Bulgar-
ians and their neighbors. Gladstone lamented certain uncivilized customs of
the Montenegrins, such as wife beating. Yet he reminded this audience that
this was a practice that did not excite general repugnance one generation
back among the Hellenic inhabitants of Cefalonia (Montenegro y).
The implicit message was that the Montenegrins were simply one genera-
tion behind the Greeks when measured on the scales of civilization.
In The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern Question, also written in +8y, Glad-
stone announced, There are four Christian races under the Portethe
Slavs, the Wallachs of Romania, the Armenians, and the Greeks (). He
wanted the needs of all four to be addressed equally. Gladstone admitted
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +j
that, despite their similar cultures and recent histories, the Hellenes and the
Slavs are to some extent rivals in their dreams (:j). From a practical point
of view, he perceived this as an advantage for England, since Greece would
need allies to balance the power of the more numerous Slavs to the north. But
Gladstone expressed the hope that the Eastern Christians would live and
work together in harmony. His pamphlet ended with a string of philhellenic
quotations from The Siege of Corinth, The Giaour, and The Age of Bronze of
Byron, whose recollections, he told the reader, have recently been revived
in England by a well meant effort (:y). That effort was, to a degree, closely
linked to the new assault on Turkish oppression in Turkey-in-Europe. At the
top of page :y, Gladstone wrote that Byron joined the Greek cause when
Greece lay cold and stark in the tomb. But at the bottom of the same page,
he subtly shifted the focus: Lord Byron brought to this Great Cause, the
dawn of emancipation, for the East then all in grave-clothes not only the
enthusiasm of a poet or the reckless daring of a rover but also the strongest
practical good sense. In the move from Greece in the tomb to the East all
in grave-clothes, one can see the appropriation of philhellenic rhetoric and
the Byronic mantle for all of the Balkans.
The ideological reasons for such an approach should be evident. The clas-
sical past and its regeneration at the time of the Greek Revolution had
been the means by which Western philhellenes had legitimized the place
within Europe of the Orthodox Greeks and their seemingly Near Eastern
culture. The other Balkan peoples also required such legitimizing, and the
logical way to proceed was to tie them, however tangentially, to the only
Western culture that had existed in Eastern Europe, the glorious ancient
Greeks and their regenerated descendants. The Serbs, Bulgarians, and Ro-
manians, Robert Byron observed in +:, emerged in emulation of the
Greeks (Byzantine Achievement ), or at least that is the way it appeared to
Freeman and others in the West. There was, however, an inherent problem in
the Balkan philhellenism of the +8yos that was bound to annoy the Greeks.
On the one hand, all Eastern Christians were to be treated equally, and the
Greeks could claim no superiority over the others on the basis of either the
Greece of Byron or the Greece of Homer. On the other hand, because those
two Western constructions were the best known topoi about the region, they
became the very terms used to justify the aspirations of the Bulgarians and
other Oriental Christians.
5
The Bulgarian agitation and its aftermath marked the ideological victory
of liberal philhellenism over Russophobia in Britain. In +8y, Disraeli and
the Tory government held rm to the traditional British policy of support
for Turkey. As for the brutal actions of Turkish troops, Disraeli noted in
Parliament on July +o, +8y, Wars of insurrection are always atrocious,
and he cited the severe actions taken by the British government after a recent
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
rebellion in Jamaica.
6
Gladstone and the Liberal party, on the other hand,
argued that free Europeans and Christians would provide a better and more
secure deterrent to Russia than the decrepit Ottoman Empire. R. W. Seton-
Watsons assertion that the Beaconseld Government stood or fell by its
Eastern policy in the election of +88o may overstate the case, but the vic-
tory of Gladstone did mark a turning point in British foreign policy (j8). It
was not, however, simply the victory of altruism for the oppressed over bla-
tant self-interest. One reason for the new direction was that Turkophobia
and Islamophobia nally overtook Russophobia in Britain. From a practical
point of view, the Russo-Turkish War of +8yy+8y8 had demonstrated that
the Turks were no longer an effective barrier. Disraeli himself recognized
the fact when he forced the Ottoman Empire to cede Cyprus in return for
British support in +8y8.
7
The anonymous author of the pro-Bulgarian pamphlet An Appeal for a
New Nation (+8y) cried: Are you a friend of Liberty! If you are, you should
be the friends of the struggling Christians of Turkey (+). The friends of
liberty embraced the cause. The link between the Bulgarian agitation and the
radical philhellenes of the past is perhaps best exemplied by William Mor-
ris, for whom a rally on the Eastern question provided his rst public action
in a long leftist career.
8
Morriss revolutionary vision, like Shelleys, in-
cluded the idealization of the ancient Greeks. In Morriss long poem The
Earthly Paradise, the Arcadian village that the Wanderers nally nd is, in
the words of E. P. Thompson, a friendly and fertile land where Greek tradi-
tions still linger (++). The mixture of a contemplative, Platonic Hellenism
descended from Winckelmann and the tradition of the Greek love of free-
dom, which had inspired Shelley and Hlderlin, still functioned as a catalyst
for radical ideas. Yet the most prominent public gure of the Bulgarian agita-
tion, Gladstone, was the leader of an established party, a fact that reduced, if
it did not entirely undermine, the movements potential as a vehicle for revo-
lutionary change.
9
If the London Greek Committee of +8: made up, in the
words of St. Clair, the extreme left of British politics as it was then con-
structed, the membership of the London Greek Committee of +8y reads
much like the list for a party at Gladstones house at Hawarden.
An Appeal for a New Nation also asserted that lightness and darkness are
the proper terms for Christianity and Mohammedism (). Such rhetoric
had been part of philhellenic discourse for decades. For philhellenes, free-
dom and progress had always been associated with European culture. Yet
radical and liberal philhellenes usually had an uneasy, if not hostile, relation-
ship with their fellow Christians at home. The career of William Watson, a
man much less controversial both artistically and politically than either
Swinburne or Morris, shows this continuing dichotomy. One year after he
supported the cause of the Greeks in the +8y poem Hellas, Hail, he was
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +y
severely criticized for his agnostic poems in The Hope of the World.
10
And
mainstream Christians, among them Gladstone himself, formed the back-
bone of the leadership of the Bulgarian agitation. The movement succeeded
in winning over established Liberal politicians and many inuential High
Churchmen because it stressed the need to free Christians from the Turks.
It was, on the whole, fairly satised with and condent in its own Western
culture and political structures, which caused the Balkan situation to be por-
trayed primarily in terms of a Muslim/East and Christian/West confronta-
tion. With Gladstone, Robert Byron later lamented, philhellenism degen-
erated into that negative and unprotable emotion, abstract hatred of the
Turk (Byzantine Achievement :o).
Gladstone was the most famous English-speaking philhellene in the later
nineteenth century and arguably the most famous in all of Europe. He was
also the most problematic. For one thing, his reputation for philhellenism
exceeded the facts. Contrary to popular belief, he had not advocated the ces-
sion of the Ionian islands to the kingdom of Greece during his brief period
as high commissioner in Corfu in +8j; he had in fact concluded that such
a union should not be an object of immediate or practical desire (Shan-
non, Gladstone yo).
11
In the late +8yos, he helped to make support for the
aspirations of Greece more popular in Britain than ever before and sup-
ported the Greek acquisition of Thrace in +88+. But by linking that support
with the claims of the Bulgarians, Serbians, and Montenegrins, one effect of
his effort was to diminish the special status of the Greeks as the only West-
ern nation in the East. Finally, by altering the social composition of the
movement in Britain against Turkish oppressionto put it another way, by
institutionalizing philhellenic sentiment within the British political struc-
turehe subverted its effectiveness as a rallying cry for reform both abroad
and at home. The nostalgia for the War of Independence that colored so
much English philhellenic writing of the +8os may stem in part from the
fact that Gladstone, by making philhellenism mainstream and incorpo-
rating its radical past into a dominant political discourse, had distanced phil-
hellenism from its revolutionary origins and made it more palatable to a
wider public. Bourgeois and middle-class writers, and their readers as well,
could be nostalgic for the magic force of legend because it was no longer a
threat to them.
12
The integration of philhellenism into mainstream politics occurred
around the same time that the masterpieces of literary philhellenism,
Byrons poetry and Shelleys Hellas, became accepted as part of an academic
literary tradition. Along with Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, and Keats, the
authors of The Giaour and the Ode to Liberty emerged as the canonical
poets of Romanticism.
13
The political and literary acceptance of philhel-
lenism progressed together, each supporting the other. As Byron and Shelley
+8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
became recognized as members of Englands great company, their sen-
timents toward freedom were muted in favor of their poetic style. For exam-
ple, William Watson, who had ties to the Liberal party, said in Shelleys
Centenary:
In other shapes than he forecast,
The world is moulded: his erce blast,
His wild assault upon the Past,
These things are vain;
Revolt is transient: what must last
Is that pure strain,
Which seems the wandering voices blent
Of every virgin element,
A sound from the oceans cavern sent,
An airy call
From the pavilioned rmament
Oerdoming all.
(Poems I.jj)
14
Conversely, the new attitude toward the Orient championed by Glad-
stone, which was much less critical of the West than that of early philhel-
lenism, caused works like Hellas to be read in a less threatening way. The re-
sult was that, by +oo, literary philhellenism became part of the established
tradition not only, or even primarily, a legacy of the Left. Alfred Austin, a
poet of the Tories and supporter of Disraeli who had answered Gladstones
Bulgarian Horrors with a pamphlet entitled Tory Horrors, commemorated a
boat trip through the Gulf of Corinth in +88+ with Off Missalonghi, a cel-
ebratory poem about Byrons death in the Greek struggle: I will not land
where He, alas! / Just missed Fames crown. Enough for me / To gaze and
pass (Lyrical Poems +:y). In his autobiography, Austin related, I also vis-
ited Marathon and sailed past Suniums marble steep and repeated the clos-
ing couplet of his splendid poem [The Isles of Greece]: A land of slaves
shall neer be mine: / Dash down your cup of Samian wine (II.+). Yet
a page before reciting lines from the universal anthem of Greek freedom,
Austin commented on domestic reforms in Turkey after its defeat by Russia
in +8yy: As I write these words, the transformation of Turkey from a
despotically and infamously ruled State to a self-governing and self-
conscious Nation has taken place, the territorial expansion of Greece seems
more remote than ever (II.+j). Where Southey in the +8:os had worried
that the beatication of Byron would help a liberal agenda, in the +88os
Austin felt that he could embrace Byron but not the cause for which the poet
had given his life. But the authors who supported Turkey, Austin included,
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +
refrained from composing celebratory verses about Turkeys victory over
Greece in +8y. The Turkish army won on the eld of battle, but philhel-
lenic sentiment reigned supreme in English and American verse.
During the late +8yos, the call went out for the new Byrons of the emerg-
ing Balkan peoples. Gladstone stated that Montenegro would long ere this,
have risen to world-wide and immortal fame, had there been a Scott to learn
and tell the marvels of its history, or a Byron to spend and be spent on its be-
half. For want of a vates sacer, it has remained in the mute, inglorious condi-
tion of Agamemnons predecessors. . . . I hope that an interpreter between
Montenegro and the world has at length been found in the person of my
friend Mr. Tennyson, and gladly accept the honour of having been invited to
supply a commentary to his text (Montenegro o). Gladstone referred
to Tennysons sonnet Montenegro, which preceded the politicians article
in the May +8yy issue of Nineteenth Century. Just as Mazzini encouraged
Swinburne to become a Byron of Italy, it appears that Gladstone approached
Tennyson on the subject of the Montenegrins, and the poet sent the piece to
the politician for approval before publication (Thorn j). In the poem,
Tennyson depicted an entire nation of klephts:
They rose to where the sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, armed by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes . . .
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for ve hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
(::)
If Gladstone hoped that Tennyson would become the poet of Montene-
gro to rival the poet of Greece, he was soon to be disappointed. When, in
+8yy, with the Turks pressing upon the Montenegrins and the Serbians,
Russia declared war on the Ottomans and advanced to the gates of Constan-
tinople, the proposed poet of Montenegro switched sides. According to
Thorn, despite the sentiments of his poem, Tennyson held on too strongly
to the vestiges of the old Crimean spirit not to share the Tory alarm at this
Russian victory (8).
Gladstone did not have to recruit a poet of Bulgaria; a young writer
applied for the post. Oscar Wilde sent Gladstone his Sonnet on the Mas-
sacre of the Bulgarian Christians, suggesting that the inuential politician
+o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
recommend the sonnet to the Nineteenth Century or the Spectator (Ell-
mann 8:). The poem was composed a short while before Wilde worked on
Ravenna, in which the major gures are Dante and Byron. Of the latter,
Wilde wrote with a typical philhellenic ourish:
O Hellas! Hellas! in thine hour of pride,
Thy day of might, remember him who died,
To wrest from thy limbs the trammelling chain:
O Salamis! O lone Plataean plain!
O tossing waves of wide Eubeoan sea!
O wind-swept heights of lone Thermopylae!
He loved you wellay, not alone in word,
Who freely gave to thee his lyre and sword,
Like Aeschylus at well-fought Marathon!
()
Contemporaries who understood the expanding spirit of the philhel-
lenism of the late +8yos would read these verses of Ravenna, Wildes
membership in the London Greek Committee from +8y to +88+, and the
Bulgarian sonnet as the connected limbs of one and the same transaction,
to use Gladstones phrase. But, despite his admonition to Greece to remem-
ber Byron, Wilde, like Tennyson, composed just one brief offering in sup-
port of freedom in the Balkans. The literature of Balkan freedom did not
produce a single work that has entered the English or American canon, in
large part because it originated as a derivative branch of an already ossied
philhellenic language.
William Watson made a more determined effort to become the poet of
the Armenians with his two volumes The Purple East (+8) and The Year
of Shame (+8y), works that expressed outrage at the massacre of thousands
of Armenians in the late +8os.
15
Watson employed a new twist on the theme
of regeneration; in his work it was England that had fallen from its past
greatness. He refers to this corpse of Englands Honour in A Hurried
Funeral (Year of Shame :). In The Awakening, a poem near the end of
The Year of Shame, he wrote: Behold, she is risen who lay asleep so long /
Our England, our Beloved! (j). Watson transposed to an England that
needed to recover its role as a moral agent in the world the rhetoric of an
awakening Greece, which he himself had employed in Hellas, Hail:
Fiercely sweet as stormy Springs, / Mighty hopes are blowing wide; / Pas-
sionate pregurings / Of a world re-vivied (Hope of the World y).
Watsons transposition of the philhellenic rhetoric of regeneration to
England rather than Armenia points to a central difculty of the poetry of
wider philhellenism.
16
The public and often the poets themselves had little
knowledge of and slight emotional ties to Oriental Christians other than the
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r ++
Greeks. In ++j, Noel and Charles Buxton observed, Serbia, Roumania, and
the rest are to most of us mere names (War and the Balkans ), and the situ-
ation was even worse in earlier decades. The Buxtons added, Many people
who have formed no clear conception of the other States are well acquainted
with the Kingdom which occupies the territory of ancient Hellas (+). Even
more telling, no one saw the liberation of the Bulgarians or Serbians as an ob-
jective correlative for their own condition. At the height of the Bulgarian ag-
itation, George Eliot commented that the prospects of our western civiliza-
tion seem more critically involved in the maintenance of the French Republic
than in the result of the Bulgarian strugglemomentous as that too is felt to
be by prophetic souls (Letters .o). Philhellenism, in what Freeman would
call the narrow sense, survived the attempt at expansion precisely because
many intellectuals in the West, still touched by the grandeur and simplicity of
Winckelmanns ancients, continued to see in the possible regeneration of the
Greeks passionate pregurings of a world re-vivied.
One prominent literary philhellene rejected Balkan philhellenism for the
pure spirit of pagan and revolutionary Greece. Perhaps Algernon Charles
Swinburne refused to take up the cause of the Bulgarians because he
thought they had no real connection to the all-important Hellenic heritage.
Or perhaps he simply rejected any alliance with High Churchmen. The
plain fact is that the man who wrote a series of poems in support of Greek as-
pirations also wrote, in The Ballad of Bulgarie, a scathingly satirical pic-
ture of the Bulgarian agitation and its principal leaders (although written in
+8y, the piece was not privately printed until +8). Whatever his reason,
Swinburnes opinion of the Gladstonian expansion of philhellenic senti-
ment was perceptive. Radical philhellenism did not completely lose its soul
when it was incorporated into the larger, less-focused umbrella of Gladston-
ian policy in the East; it could still point to a William Morris. But such peo-
ple were now a small part of a larger landscape. Those philhellenic voices
that called for the advance of liberty throughout the West by the same means
as were advocated in the East against the Turks and that looked to a regener-
ated Greece to alter not just aesthetics but political and social life in Europe
grew more and more faint.
The events of the late +8yosthe Bulgarian atrocities of +8y, the Serbian
and Montenegrin wars against the Ottoman Empire, the Russo-Turkish War
of +8yy, and the Treaty of Berlin in +8y8did not immediately affect writ-
ing about Greece, as the discussion about the response to the war of +8y has
shown. But they signicantly changed the map of southeastern Europe in
the mind of the West for the rst time since the Greek revolt of +yyo. The
new perspective can be summed up in a single adjective, Balkan. The word is
so omnipresent in our current geographical thinking that we often forget that
it has only been used to refer to a particular region of Europe for a little more
+: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
than a century. Before +8y, the term Balkan was rare and almost entirely
used to denote a range of mountains, like the words Alps or Rockies. For ex-
ample, Mackenzie and Irbys well-known account of their journeys in the re-
gion between Salonica and Vienna, published in +8, was entitled Travels in
the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe. By +88, however, Balkan sig-
nied an area extending from Dubrovnik to Constantinople and from the
Hungarian border to Crete.
17
By the early twentieth century, it had acquired
the further meanings of fractious and unsophisticated, which led to the
cognate word Balkanize as in Paul Scott Mowrers Balkanized Europe (+:+),
since these were perceived as the preeminent characteristics of the people
living in the region.
Edward Lears travel book, Journal of a Landscape Painter in Albania and
Illyria, provides a good example of the unclear picture of the Balkan region
prior to +8y and also illustrates why philhellenic rhetoric was so readily and
easily extended beyond the apparent Greek world. Lear stated in his intro-
duction that his book recounts two journeys: the rst, from Saloniki in a
north-western direction through ancient Macedonia, to Illyrian Albania,
and by the western coast through Epirus to the boundary of modern Greece
at the Gulf of Arta;the second in Epirus and Thessaly (+). The last sen-
tence of the book reads: And so, with the last point of Zakynthus and the
dim, distant mountains of Kefalonia, ends my journey in the lands of
Greece (:8). Are Lears Albania and Illyria in the title part of the lands of
Greece? At least one reader appeared to think so, for Alfred Tennyson enti-
tled his poem honoring the volume To E. L. on his Travels in Greece.
When Disraeli made the Albanian hero Skanderberg a Greek in his novel
The Rise of Iskander (+8+), he was not attempting to rewrite history nor
erase Albanian identity. He just did not view Greek and Albanian as mutually
exclusive terms. Further, the words Christian and Greek often seem inter-
changeable when used in opposition to Turk in nineteenth-century philhel-
lenic rhetoric. If an area was not Turkish it could, by default, be called
Greek.
18
The question of where Greece ended was further complicated by
the tendency of nineteenth-century philhellenes to advocate the replace-
ment of the Ottoman Empire with a new Greek or Greco-Slav state. Glad-
stone had endorsed a new Greek empire centered in Constantinople in the
Gentlemans Magazine for July +8j. Mazzini put forward the idea of a
Greco-Slav republic whose borders resembled those of the Byzantine Em-
pire. In a letter to Jesse White in +8jy, he envisioned a federated Europe, one
of whose members was to be Helleneia (Greece) having Epirus, Thessalia,
Albania, Macedonia, Rumelia, reaching the Balkan mountains, including
Constantinople. Constantinople to be the central town under a Greek presi-
dency of a confederation of races (European and Christian) now constituting
the Turkish empire (Mack Smith +j). The logic behind such thinking
was that, as Allen Upward stated, the Bulgarians have received their reli-
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +
gion, and such civilization as they possess, from the Greeks (East End of Eu-
rope +o++). A traveler after +8y might still, to use the words of a character
from Edward Whittemores novel Nile Shadows (+8), never be able to get
the Balkans straight in his mind (:j), but he was now aware of the presence
of Serbians, Bulgarians, and Montenegrins. And though conicting maps
might read Albania, Epirus, or Illyria, he had no doubt about where he was
in the Balkans, as the titles of innumerable books attest.
19
Where Greece had possessed a split personality of ancient/West versus
modern/Orient in the mind of the early nineteenth-century West, it now ac-
quired a new schizophrenia of ancient/Western Europe versus modern/
Eastern Europe or, more precisely, Balkan Europe.
20
As before, it was the
classical past that provided the Western half of the construction. Winston
Churchill underscored the point when in his famous iron curtain speech
in Fulton, Missouri, he said that from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the
Adriatic, only AthensGreece with her immortal glories had escaped
Soviet domination (The Iron Curtain +o). He could just as well have
said, Greece because of her immortal glories. For the West, Greece was
theirs in a way Poland, Hungary, and Romania were not, and that notion
had colored Western Europes relationship to Greece from +yyo.
21
Yet, at
the same time that Western Europe acknowledged that connection by in-
cluding Greece as the only geographically Eastern European nation in
Western Europe, it simultaneously lamented the fact that modern Greece
did not really t into Western Europe because it remained, to a large extent,
culturally Balkan.
There is nothing redeeming in a connection with the Balkans. In the early
nineteenth century, when Greece was envisioned between East and West, the
negative perception of Eastern tyranny and Islamic faith was at least partly
balanced by an exotic, Arabian Nights image of the Orient. But such exoti-
cism belonged in the Orient, not in Europe. Harry De Windt called his ac-
count of a Balkan journey Through Savage Europe (+oy) and defended his
title as follows: the term [savage] accurately describes the wild and lawless
customs between the Adriatic and the Black Seas (+j). De Windt intended
his readers to be struck, if not shocked, by his oxymoronic titleno one
would question savage Turkey, savage Africa, or even savage China.
Europe, by denition, was not savage. The penultimate chapter of James
Pettifers book The Greeks (+) is entitled A Balkan or European Future,
which suggests that Balkan and European remain conicting categories.
In literature in English before World War I, the Balkans were usually por-
trayed as farcical little states or unstable hotbeds of intrigue, as in E. F. Ben-
sons Princess Sophia (+oo) and Allen Upwards Prince of Balkistan (+8j).
22
The best-known work set in the region was, of course, Shaws Arms and the
Man (+8), which the author later called a sketch of the theatrical nature
of the rst apings of Western civilization by spirited races just emerging
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
from slavery (Complete Prefaces jo). The positive, even heroic, view of the
Bulgarian independence movement in Ivan Turgenevs On the Eve (+8j)
found no echo in ction in English nor did the English translation of the
Bulgarian author Ivan Vazovs novel Under the Yoke: A Romance of the Bul-
garian Uprising, which appeared in +8 with an introduction by Edmund
Gosse. The lack of effect of the English version of Vazovs novel, the rst
great work of Bulgarian ction, can best be measured by the fact that it was
followed a year later by the depiction of backward Bulgarians in Shaws
Arms and the Man.
In English and American writing about Greece, Balkan is almost always a
term of disparagement. In Henry Millers Colossus of Maroussi, the word
Greek has a universally positive value. He writes of how the Greek earth
opens to me like the Book of Revelation (:+; see also o). Yet Miller en-
countered certain phenomena in Greece that he cannot refer to as Greek:
I walked to the edge of the town where as always in the Balkans everything
comes to an end abruptly, as though the monarch who designed this weird
creation had suddenly become demented leaving the gate swinging on one
hinge (++). The gate swinging on one hinge, the perfect symbol of an inept
civilization, had to be Balkan. When Miller wrote the phrase as always in
the Balkans, he might just as well have written as always in Greece, since
his knowledge of the Balkans was limited to his experience in Greece. But
Miller knew even before he left Paris how to distinguish between what was
Greek and what was Balkan in modern Greece.
Bensons Princess Sophia illustrates how quickly Balkan had come to sig-
nify modern Greeces other half, the thing against which Greece had to be
dened even though it shared a common geography and culture. The novel
relates how a ctional Balkan principality called Rhodope, lled with pictur-
esque peasants and an upper class, to paraphrase Shaw, in their rst apings of
Western civilization, was turned into a casino by a ruler who became enam-
ored of Monte Carlo. Benson never visited the area where he placed Rhod-
ope, apparently either Albania or Montenegro, but described Greece at the
time of the war of +8y as an astonishing little kingdom the like of which,
outside of pure ction, will never again exist in Europe (As We Were +).
Princess Sophia is, quite simply, Bensons witty, satirical sketch of modern,
Balkan Greece. But, unlike Edmond About in The King of the Mountains,
he chose not to set his comic portrait of Greece within Greece. He may have
been checked by his youthful attraction to the Hellenic ideal and his admira-
tion of the Greek Revolution, which he so eulogistically depicted in The Vin-
tage and The Capsina. Princess Sophia, published one year after the second of
Bensons novels about the War of Independence, is a perfect example of how
philhellenic authors attempted to banish the Balkan Other within Greece be-
yond its boundaries. Rather than nding new springs of inspiration in the
juxtaposition of the old Hellenism and the new geographical conguration
of southeastern Europe, Benson kept Greece as Greece by placing
Greeces Balkan character north of the border.
Shaw exhibited something of the same impulse. He used the Serbo-Bul-
garian conict of +88j to deconstruct outdated concepts of romance and
heroism in Arms and the Man. In Major Barbara (+oj), however, the Greco-
Turkish War of +8y was invoked in the course of a vastly different lesson. At
the end of the play, the Greek professor and soon-to-be munitions manufac-
turer Cusins says that an artillery shell can destroy the higher powers just as
a tiger can destroy a man: there Man must master that power rst. I admitted
this when the Turks and Greeks were last at war. My best pupil went out to
ght for Hellas. My parting gift to him was not a copy of Platos Republic, but
a revolver and a hundred Undershaft cartridges. The blood of every Turk he
killedif he shot anyis on my head as well as that of Undershafts (Col-
lected Plays III.+8:). Cusins does not imply that his student should not have
enlisted in the Greek cause nor that he should not have given the young man
a revolver. He uses a confrontation of Greeks and Turks as an example of
men having to confront evil with evil because his audience, or most of his au-
dience, would agree with Cusinss reasoning in such a circumstance. For
Shaw, as for Benson, that signicance does not extend to the rst apings of
Western civilization beyond the northern frontier in Serbia or Bulgaria.
Gladstones vision of a harmonious Balkan federation soon proved itself
to be a utopian fantasy. With the increase in interest in the Balkans in the
+8yos, there was the consequent increase in travelers handbooks about the
region. Rebecca West explained: The problems of India and Africa never
produced anything like the jungle of savage pamphlets that sprang up in the
footsteps of the liberals who visited Turkey in Europe under the inspiration
of Gladstone (:+). She continued:
English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition
constantly went out to the Balkan peninsula to see who was in fact ill-
treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist
faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-
treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people estab-
lished in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally massacree
and never massacrer. The same sort of person, devoted to good works
and austerities, who is traditionally supposed to keep a cat and a par-
rot, often set up on their hearth the image of the Albanian or Bulgar-
ian or the Serbian or the Macedonian Greek people which had all the
force and blandness of pious fantasy. (:o)
One such visitor of humanitarian disposition was Mabel Moore, who re-
marked: Possibly the Greeks may be exasperating to their neighbors but I
do not believe they are guilty of butchery. . . . the proud, ultimate challenge of
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
the Greek is that he has never, in all the ages of history, raised his hand
against defenceless women and children (+y). Clearly, she did not know
her Thucydides well. On the Macedonian issue, she said, I wish they [the
Greeks] might have Macedonia all to themselves, for they do want it badly,
and wish for it so sincerely and so whole-heartedly (+j).
23
This has all the
blandness of the pious fantasies condemned by West.
Those who had championed the freedom of both the Serbians and the Bul-
garians in the late +8yos were faced less than a decade later with the Serbo-
Bulgarian War of +88j. Shaw undoubtedly chose this conict as the setting
for his critique of our heroic ideas in Arms and the Man because it revealed
some of the conicts and incoherence of Liberal idealism. But the central
battleground of both the Balkan nations and their Western supporters was
Macedonia in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the rst decade
of the twentieth century. Gladstone, still bearing the banner of wider phil-
hellenism as late as +8y, found the dissension between the liberated peo-
ples extremely distasteful: Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can
be more deplorable and blameworthy than the jealousies between Greek and
Slav, and plans by States already existing for appropriating other territory.
Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians, as well as Bulgaria for the Bul-
garians and Servia for the Servians. And if they are all small and weak, let
them bind themselves together for defence, so they may not be scattered by
others, either great or small, which would probably be the effect of their
quarreling among themselves (Macedonian Question ). Allen Upward,
a philhellene, asserted that the phrase Macedonia for the Macedonians
could not have been used by any man of impartiality or intelligence who
possessed rst-hand knowledge of the country (East End of Europe :y).
G. W. Steevens, a Turkophile with the Ottoman army in +8y, adducing at
least six different kinds of Macedonians, used the absurdity of the phrase to
argue that only continued Turkish rule in Macedonia and Thrace could pre-
vent total anarchy (With the Conquering Turk ).
Upward stated that a visitor to Macedonia may be a Philhellenic or a Bul-
garophile, but cannot be both (East End of Europe +o). He then quoted
from a reporter in Athens who complained that it is most disheartening to
see the Liberal press, especially the Tribune, does not only overlook all Greek
grievances or arguments in their favor, but has lately started a systematic
counter-campaign against Hellenism in general, reproducing and bringing
forward before the eyes of the public all the abuse obviously obtained from
Bulgarian sources (). Before +8y, philhellenism had been the foremost
sign of liberal sentiment. But by +o, many Liberals had deserted the
cause of the Greeks for that of the Bulgarians.
24
Indeed, the only distinctive
sign of liberal sentiment was now opposition to the Turks, whose only apolo-
gists were diehard Tories and other conservatives, like novelist Marmaduke
Pickthall, who were still wedded to the old policy of Disraeli. Hector Herbert
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +y
Munro, a conservative who wrote as Saki, satirized the chasm the Balkans
had caused among Liberals in his story The Oversight. While planning a
dinner party, Lady Prowche consults with a friend to ensure that there will be
no unpleasantness among the guests. She particularly inquires about two
men of whom she knows next to nothing. Theyre both of them moderate
Liberal, Evangelical, mildly opposed to female suffrage, and, we discover
later, both oppose vivisection of animals (j+j). Relieved, Lady Prowche puts
the two men together. But after the party, she reports that they caused a
scene. Hyenas could not have behaved with greater savagery. . . . They ac-
tually came to blows! I thought they agreed on every subject that one could
violently disagree aboutreligion, politics, vivisection, the Derby decision,
the Falconer report; what else was left to quarrel about? My dear, we were
fools not to have thought of it. One of them was Pro-Greek and the other was
Pro-Bulgar (j+y).
In the battle for hearts and minds in Europe and America, the Greeks had
an enormous advantage, which could best be summed up by the PanHellenic
Reviews assertion in +8y that Greece was the land where Homer lived, and
Epaminondas bled; where Byron breathed his last, and from which he ad-
dressed the noblest of his poems as a farewell to the world (vol. +, no. +, p. :).
Writing at the end of the second Balkan War in ++, J. Irving Manatt asked,
Shall not the civilized world now pay some fraction of its incalculable debt
to the old Greece by insisting on historic justice and fair play in settling ac-
counts of a war in which the Greeks of to-day showed themselves the peers of
the men who fought at Marathon and died at Thermopylae? (xixii). The
civilized world recognized no similar debt to the Bulgarians or Serbs. Indeed,
Demetra Vaka Brown quoted a Bulgarian boasting: When we get to Athens,
we shall tear down the Acropolis stone by stone (Heart of the Balkans :o+).
Neocles Kasasis reminded readers that the Bulgarians had followed the Hun-
nish horde of Attila and were not in the least changed since (+).
The value of the Greek past was clear to the other Balkan nations and
their apologists. Since it was impossible to diminish that hold on the Western
imagination, the best for which they could strive was to seize upon as much
of the glorious heritage as they could. Such a strategy derived naturally from
the extension of the philhellenism of the +8yos, which had attempted to le-
gitimize the aspirations of all of the Balkan nations by covering them with
the philhellenic mantle. In +o8, Allen Upward protested that the Bulgari-
ans, in order to justify their claims to the region between Epirus and Thrace,
seized upon Macedonia, a name with no more denite signication than
Wessex or Languedoc. Unfortunately for themselves [the Bulgarians], the
Greeks had been the rst to make use of this name, and to give it wide exten-
sion to the north in the interests of Hellenism (East End of Europe :). In
The Shade of the Balkans (+o), a collection of Bulgarian folk songs made by
Henry Bernard, the Bulgarian poet Pencho Slaveikoff wrote: Our songs of
+8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
mythology have in them palpable signs showing how close they used to be
united to those songs and legends of ancient Greece. It is interesting to know
that some of those legends are kept alive by the Bulgars, whereas they have
apparently been dropped from the poetic baggage of modern Greece (j).
Edith Durham, the preeminent champion of the Albanians in the English-
speaking world, declared that the independence of Greece had been largely
obtained by Albanian aid (Burden of the Balkans +). In ++, Rebecca West
described the Serbs as the last legatees of the Byzantine empire in all its law
and magnicence, quietly erasing the modern Greeks from any claim to the
succession (++).
25
It was, however, an uphill battle. First, these writers did
not challenge the legitimacy of the philhellenic legacy but rather attempted
to appropriate it. But by leaving intact the magic force of Greece, they
handed an immense advantage to the people who were still called Greeks.
Second, when Western readers thought of ancient Greece, they had an image
of the Parthenon, and when they thought of modern Greece, they recalled
Childe Harold and The Isles of Greece. When they thought of Bulgaria,
they might well remember that, according to Shaw, Bulgarians did not wash
their hands.
Still, the partisans of the other Balkan nations were, on the whole, rather
mild on the subject of the Greeks, especially when one considers that, from
+8y until ++:, a guerrilla war was waged among Greek, Bulgarian, and
Serbian bands in Macedonia.
26
Bulgarophiles abroad realized that there was
little propaganda value in an attack on the Greeks, toward whom many West-
erners still felt a sentimental attraction. The image of the terrible Turk, on
the other hand, was still powerful in the West and a far more useful card to
play. So, for example, while Arthur Howden Smith made passing remarks
about the low character of the Greeks in Fighting the Turk in the Balkans
(+o8), he never mentioned that the Bulgarian band with whom he traveled
was also ghting the Greeks in Macedonia. There would, one supposes, have
been far less romance in such an endeavor. Further, as Harold Spender suc-
cinctly put it, the bear [Turkey] is not yet slain, and the Balkan states are not
likely to divide the bears skin before the animal is dead (Never Again o).
The appearance of Harold Spenders name, along with that of men like
Sir Charles Dilke and William Pember Reeves, on the list of both the pro-
Bulgarian Balkan Committee and the Anglo-Hellenic Leagues in the rst
decade of the twentieth century indicates another reason for the moderation
in the attacks on each other by Bulgarophiles and philhellenes. The Glad-
stonian dream of a Balkan federation survived in important circles of the
Liberal party up until ++, despite the fact that the various Balkan peoples
were already engaged in a bloody struggle for Macedonia.
On the other side, philhellenes had little to gain by demonizing the Bul-
garians or Albanians.
27
So, even though the Greek bands in Macedonia often
worked in collusion with the Turkish authorities against the Bulgarians,
28
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +
philhellenism abroad continued to focus its attacks on Ottoman rule. There
is nothing in English remotely resembling the Greek author Ion
Dragoumiss Blood of Martyrs and Heroes, which gloried the guerrilla
struggles of the Greek bands against the Bulgarians. The discrepancy be-
tween the attitude toward the Macedonian struggle within Greece and that
of philhellenes abroad can be seen in the response to the death of Pavlos
Melas, a leading gure in the Macedonian struggle. All Greece mourned
Melas, indeed, Dakin wrote that on the announcement of his death: All
work stoppedjust as eighty years earlier on the occasion of Byrons death
at Missalonghi; everyone walked around mournfully in the streets and
squares; and the church bells tolled the passing of a national hero (Greek
Struggle in Macedonia ++). Melas remains a revered gure in Greece. Yet, to
my knowledge, his name appears just once in British or American philhel-
lenic literature of the period, in the decidedly second-rate composition by
Ronald Burrows: Red the bloods that owed for Hellas, / Varatassis died
and Melas (Glasgow ++).
Although the Greeks and Bulgarians would be at odds, and often at war,
during much of the rst half of the twentieth century, the Bulgarians never
became the villains of philhellenic literature. That role was reserved for the
Turks, the Germans, and the Communists. The Bulgarians may have been a
threat to Greece, but they were never a threat to Western civilization as it
was conceived in France, Britain, or America. And since the intellectuals in
those countries transposed their concerns about Western civilization onto
Greece, there was no place for the Bulgarian problem in most Western writ-
ing about Greece.
The main effect of the diffusion of philhellenic sentiment among various
Balkan peoples was that the number of true, or narrow philhellenes, never
a large number, was reduced even further. Allen Upward claimed, Philhel-
lenism has been conned to a small number of enthusiasts (East End of Eu-
rope 8o). The challenge of the Gladstonian extension of philhellenic rhetoric
did not cause a new reevaluation or reappraisal of the literary construction of
Greece. If anything, the attempted appropriation of the Byronic mantle led
authors to cling even more rmly to the Byronic tradition and so served to
further discourage any reconsideration of the magic force of philhellenic
legend. Whether that stance was a wise decision politically might be open to
debate. From an aesthetic point of view, however, it encouraged the percep-
tion that the springs of inspiration had indeed run dry in Greece.
The rst signicant change in the romance of Greek liberation occurred in
Justin McCarthys Maid of Athens (+88), published less than a decade after
the Bulgarian agitation. The heroine is an English girl, who was born in
Athens, and has always lived there with her mother. Shes pretty and clever
and above all a Greek patriot and all that, and the English there have taken it
+jo r u v a o

s s n + n ow
into their heads to call her the Maid of Athens, I am told (I.8). Her name,
appropriately enough, is Athena, and the reader rst encounters her on the
Acropolis in front of the Parthenon. The hero is Kelvin Cleveland, a philhel-
lenic Englishman who had rst arrived in Greece with a fever mood of Hel-
lenic enthusiasm that he described as a rapture blended of an impossible
past and an unattainable present. I, too, felt myself a Greek; I, too, knew
that I must have been a Greek; I must have worshipped my mother Athens
under Pericles, and visited Socrates in prison. But I was also full of heroic
thoughts . . . of the great unnished struggle for Greek independence; and I
longed for a renewal of that struggle, with my own chivalric form, to be sure,
as a volunteer in the midst of it (I.+). The romantic triangle is completed
by Constantine Margarites, an aspiring but deceitful young Greek politician.
Athena becomes engaged to marry the Greek Constantine in order to fur-
ther her philhellenic dreams of a Greater Greece. The announcement
prompts the following outburst from Sir Thomas Vale, an Englishman visit-
ing Athens: Marry a Greek! Oh no, no; surely not; that would never do
quite impossible, I should say. A charming young English lady marry a
Greek! Will no young Englishman intervene? (III.+j). Vale is presented as
something of a Turkophile, so his feelings should not be instantly taken as
the sentiment of the author. But in the end, of course, the English heroine,
does indeed marry her Western suitor.
In McCarthys version of the Greek romance, the Greek female has been
dropped from the story in favor of an English female, although one born in
Greece. Yet the only difference between Athena and earlier Greek heroines is
her nationality; in all other respects she retains the position as the personi-
cation of modern Greece (see I., where Athena is described as some sort
of Macaria sacricing herself for Athens, and I.yy, where Athena says that
she thought of herself as Myrrha, the Greek slave in Byrons Sardanapalus).
Despite Sir Thomas Vales objection about the joining of an Englishwoman
with a Greek man, that is not the motivating factor behind the authors deci-
sion to alter his heroines ethnicity. Western girls had rarely married Greeks
in the Greek romances. Rather, the change from Greek to English female
ensures that the Western hero will marry a Western woman. In short,
McCarthys new formulation of the romance raises, for the rst time, nag-
ging questions about the place of the Greek female in the European family.
It is hard not to link McCarthys reservations about Greek ethnicity, which
are so clearly implied in his shift of the heroines nationality, and the emer-
gence of the conception of the Balkans, which had occurred just a decade
or so earlier. When the choice was simply between the West or Turkey,
Greeks were invariably associated with the West. But after +8y, Greece was
conceptually incorporated into a predominantly Slavic region, and the issue
of its place in the West became, even for some philhellenes, less self-evident.
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +j+
The confusion caused by the new geographical conguration is apparent in
McCarthys book. The title, Maid of Athens, points directly back to Byron
and the philhellenic tradition. But the manner in which McCarthy con-
structs his version of the Greek romance could well be called Fallmerayers
revenge. The German scholar had argued that the modern Greeks were
really Slavs, and he certainly would have reveled in the fact that a prominent
philhellene like McCarthy now had enough questions about the racial back-
ground of contemporary Greeks to employ an English heroine.
McCarthy was not the only writer who had doubts about the Greek fe-
males place in the established romance of liberation. In Like Another Helen
(+oo), George Hortons American philhellene expresses reservations about
how the beautiful Cretan Panayotta would t into Boston society (see chap.
). In his A Fair Brigand (+8y), Kyriakoula, the sister of a mountain klepht
who is called a cross between a wild rose and a tigress (y+), stabs her former
lover in the middle of a fashionable party at the end of the book. Her similar-
ity to her lawless brother implies that she, like the heroine of Like Another
Helen, is innately too wild for civilized society. Kyriakoula would seem to be a
Greek who has the passion and re of the Eastern female, yet she is never
unequivocally Greek. One description of her ends, these Albanian women
are perfect devils when they get started (y, my italics; she is also called an
Albanian on :). The American heroes, or rather antiheroes, in both of
these novels are also deeply awed. The philhellene in Like Another Helen is a
young cad, and the self-absorbed archaeologist in A Fair Brigand only mar-
ries the Greek girl who saved his life because he cannot nd another means of
escape. But there are no such extenuating circumstances in Hortons The
Monks Treasure (+oj), in which Hortons image of a modern Nausicaa
(:), whose pose seemed as though it had been carved out of Pentelic mar-
ble by some pupil of Phidias () and who is descended from refugees of the
massacre on Scio, turns out to be an Italian in origin, a fact that helps to jus-
tify her natural superiority to the other islanders, her rejection of her Greek
anc, and her suitability for life in America.
29
A scholar in The Monks Trea-
sure declares, I am not of those who hold with Professor Fallmerayer that
the Greeks are all Slavonians (+:, my italics). The dilemma for Horton,
McCarthy, and other philhellenes was to recognize who were the Greeks and
who were the Slavonians or, in the case of Kyriakoula in A Fair Brigand, the
Albanians. At times, it seemed this was so difcult that it was easier and safer
to import a heroine from the West.
30
It is important to stress that McCarthy, like Horton, had an impeccable
reputation as a philhellene.
31
McCarthys name appears in the list of the
London Greek Committee members from +8y to +88+. He visited Greece
more than once and wrote some poems on classical Greek themes in Serapion
and Other Poems. His novel openly espoused Greeces claim to Thessaly,
+j: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Epirus, Crete, and other areas and presented active measures to ensure those
claims as noble and heroic. The oddity is that it expressed a philhellenism
without either a Greek hero or a Greek heroine. Mr. Vlachoss explanation as
to why so many foreigners in Athens enlist in the cause of Greece points out
the disjunction that occurs when the heroine in the romance is herself no
longer Greek: Did not all your great men busy themselves about Greek in-
dependence? . . . Besides, in this case it is not Greece alone: there is the beau-
tiful English girl (I.+y8).
There was no consensus about the cultural identity of the Greek female
among English and American authors at the end of the nineteenth century.
While McCarthy and Horton seemed uncertain about her European status,
in Anthony Hopes Phroso, Edmondss Amygdala, and Bohun Lynchs
Glamour, Greek women are married into the European family just as they
had been in previous decades. About the Otherness or Easternness of the
Greek male there was general unanimity. When a Greek male left the homo-
social world of the klephtic band, it seems that he immediately became as
much a sexual threat to both Greek and Western women as a Turk.
The main Greek character in McCarthys Maid of Athens has taken the
place of the Turk in the romantic triangle. McCarthy, again apparently
building on the arguments of Fallmerayer, justied his negative portrayal of
Constantine by stressing his mixed Levantine background (There is a
difference, after all, between Greek and Levantine, I.:). An English charac-
ter says of Constantine: His morality clearly was not our morality; his code
of honour was not our code of honour (III.j). The real Greeks in Mc-
Carthys book are men from the islands (I.8o) or the klephts of the mountains
(II.+8j), who are still pure in blood and ethnic spirit.
32
In Glamour: A
Tale of Modern Greece (++:), Bohun Lynch distinguished between the
Greeks of Athens, who are a mongrel, mongering race (jj) and the Ypsila-
diotes, a mountain people all nobly made and beautiful who are living in
what is, after all, Europe, but so remote from any modern inuence that they
believeactually, positively, openly believethat satyrs sweep down upon
them in night time (+yo).
After +88, three basic versions of the Greek romance would exist side
by side. One would replicate the Byronic original in which a Turk, or later a
German, would appear as the embodiment of tyranny. Greece would be
personied by a beautiful Greek female with Praxitelean features, and the
hero would be a Western philhellene with Byronic dreams. This construc-
tion appears in such works as Edmondss Amygdala: A Tale of the Greek
Revolution (+8), Lafayette McClawss Maid of Athens (+o), Hortons
Like Another Helen (+oo), Demetra Vaka Browns Grasp of the Sultan
(++y) and In Pawn to a Throne (++), and Hockings Tommy and the Maid
of Athens (++y).
In the second version of the romance, the Greek female remains the ro-
mantic heroine, but a Greek male replaces the Turk as the sexual threat. In
Lynchs Glamour, the villain, as in McCarthy, is one of the mixed and cor-
rupted Greek politicians from the city of Athens, who tries to force the beau-
tiful village girl Chrysoula into marriage.
33
The equation between the Greek
male and the Turk is particularly evident in Anthony Hopes Phroso (+8),
which is set on a Greek island still under Ottoman control. The hero, Lord
Wheatley, whose friends attribute his journey to the island of Neopalia to the
fact that he has been reading old Byron again (:), must rst save Eu-
phrosyne from her treacherous cousin Constantine and then from the
clutches of the Turkish governor, Mouraki Pasha. In neither book is libera-
tion from Turkish rule a major part of the plot, although it remains in the
background of both. Lynch made several references to the ghting in Mace-
donia and the heros desire to participate in it (jy, :oy8), while Hope re-
ferred to Mouraki Pashas tyranny of the islanders (::8, :).
The third group followed McCarthys lead and imported a Western fe-
male into Greece, such as the Italian heroine of Hortons The Monks Trea-
sure. Richard Harding Daviss comic play The Galloper, set during the war of
+8y, expressed philhellenic sentiments but included two American women
serving as Red Cross nurses. Jane Aiken Hodges Greek Wedding (+yo), set
during the Greek War of Independence, had an American girl with strong
philhellenic sentiments, who must rst be rescued from a harem in Constan-
tinople and then from the fortress of a Greek pirate by a countryman of Lord
Byron. As there neither is a Greek in the wedding ceremony nor is the event
held in Greece proper, Hodges title might bafe a reader who did not realize
that philhellenic writing no longer needed Greeks. The Byronic backdrop of
political philhellenism gave romance in Greece a spell or glamour, even
if there were no integral connection between romance and politics. In
Stephen Cranes Active Service (+8), set during the war of +8y, the hero
muses, War and lovewar and Margerywere in conjunctionboth in
Greeceand he could tilt with one lance at both gods (Works .+jy). But
philhellenism and the ght against the Turks are totally extraneous to the
plot; neither the American heroine, Margery; her father, the archaeologist;
nor the hero, Rufus Coleman, are involved with the political fortunes of
Greece nor even possess strong philhellenic sentiments. Yet, as Crane was
aware, one needed only to say, War and love . . . were in conjunctionboth
in Greece, and the reader would supply a whole set of Byronic dreams to the
words on his page.
In only a few novels and stories do Greek heroines marry Greeks, such
as Edmondss Daughter of Crete (+8+) and Mayos Daughter of the
Klephts (+8y). In both cases, as the titles clearly reveal, the focus is on the
Greek females while their male counterparts remain in the background.
34
+j r u v a o

s s n + n o w
It is signicant, and perhaps not surprising, that the rst updated version
of the romance of liberation in which a Greek man appears as the central
hero, A Man of Athens (++), whose very title inverts the gender of the
phrase Maid of Athens, was written by a writer of Greek descent, Julia
Dragoumis.
Although Western women began to be leading characters in some novels set
in Greece after +88, such as McCarthys Maid of Athens, Cranes Active
Service, Richard Harding Daviss Princess Aline, and Bensons Limitations,
one does not nd anything like the examination of the experience of the
American or English girl in Italy that was so prevalent in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century. Near the end of Henry Jamess Portrait of a Lady, Is-
abel Archers relations to the ruins of Rome are described: She had long be-
fore this taken old Rome into her condence, for in a world of ruins the ruin
of her own happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. . . . She had be-
come deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated
her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiey as a place where people
suffered (jj+). We are told that, on a trip to the Levant during an interval
that we are not closely concerned with her (j), Isabel had a thousand
uses for her sense of the romantic, which was more active than it had been.
I do not allude to the impulse it received as she gazed at the Pyramids in the
course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among the broken
columns of the Acropolis and xed her eyes upon the point designated to her
as the strait of Salamis, deep and memorable as those emotions had re-
mained (j+). Athens was always deep and memorable; it was also almost
always off stage.
In George Gissings Emancipated, the heroine, Miriam, like Isabel Archer,
makes a trip to Greece during an interval when we are not closely concerned
with her. She might very well have a reverie about beauty at a classical tem-
ple, for Gissings other character who makes an off-stage visit to Athens,
Reardon in New Grub Street, recounts such an experience (yo). But for
Miriam, as for Isabel, the name of Italy signied perilous enticement, and
she was beginning to feel it (:o). In George Eliots Middlemarch, Mr.
Brooke has an album with pictures of memorable moments of his visit to
Greece in his youth (::). But, once again, it is Italy and Rome that widen
Dorothea Brookes horizons. We sometimes hear of people traveling to
Greece in novels by major writers, but we never see them there, and it is some-
what remarkable how little the place matters in their books. Some authors
who traveled to Greece never published creative work based on that experi-
ence. In +888, Edith Wharton took a cruise in the Aegean for four months,
which, she says in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, was the greatest
step forward in my making and left her with inexhaustible memories (8).
Yet unlike her travels in Italy, she never used her memories of this journey
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +jj
through the Greek islands in her ction.
35
Greece was not, as Lambropoulos
put it, hospitable to the bourgeois interiority necessary for novels (jy).
Where Rome conjured thoughts of decline and the passage of time,
Athens was often associated with Winckelmanns serenity and grandeur.
Richard Jenkyns noted, There are very few [nineteenth-century] novels ac-
tually set in ancient Greece, and those insignicant. Lytton left Pausanias the
Spartan unnished, while Landors Pericles and Aspasia, a collection of imag-
inary letters, merely illustrates why the novelists kept clear of Hellas. It is less
a novel than a succession of moral reections; Landor sees the Greeks not as
real people but as heroic gures on a bas-relief (y). This perception car-
ried over to the classical places. As Leontis observed, for some authors the
incarnation of an eternal and universal beauty on the site of the Acropolis
brings the viewer to the revelation of the divine (j+).
36
Tom Carlingford,
the hero of Bensons Limitations, says of his trip to Olympia: For the rst
time in my life I feel fully sane. . . . I have seen perfection and I know what it
means (8o). This has a predictable result: So he gave himself up heart and
soul to his religion. . . . he sat in the Dionysiac theatre and read Aristophanes;
he spelt out shorter inscriptions with reverence; he walked to Eleusis by the
Sacred Way; he sat an hour on the barrow of Marathon that holds the bones
of the Greeks who conquered the Persians and died in victory. If this is to be
mad, it is a pleasant thing to be mad, but it is a form of madness which is the
outcome of youth and enthusiasm, and possibly genius. (8).
But where Isabel Archer could take Rome into her condence, on the
Acropolis Tom Carlingford says that he can only look and wonder (y8).
The hero of Richard Harding Daviss Princess Aline (+8j) tells a rst-time
visitor to Athens: You are coming now, Miss Morris . . . into a land where
one restores his lost illusions. Anyone who wants to get back his belief in
beautiful things should do it here (++). This consists, of course, in being
overwhelmed by the beauty and serenity of the Acropolis. Where the ruins of
Rome acted as a door to ones inner feelings, Greek ruins were thought to
lead one away from the individual to abstract concepts, which was hardly
amenable to bourgeois interiority. Bensons Limitations, like Gissings New
Grub Street, explores the psychological dilemma of an artist who has to bal-
ance an attraction to the purity of classical Greek art with the need to work
and live in the modern world. Still, in Benson as in Gissing, Greece is where
one comes face to face with perfection (Limitations 8), while England is
where one struggles with the consequences of that vision.
Yet classical sites, with their fallen columns and marble pieces, also con-
jured up notions other than perfection, grandeur, and serenity.
37
In +y8j, f-
teen years after the revolt of +yyo, Henry Home, Lord Kames, stated that
Greek ruins had a political signicance that made them inappropriate to imi-
tate in English gardens. According to Home, Gothic ruins, operating in a
manner similar to the Colosseum at Rome, exhibited the triumph of time
+j r u v a o

s s n + n o w
over strength; a melancholy, but not unpleasant thought: a Grecian ruin sug-
gests rather the triumph of barbarity over taste; a gloomy and discouraging
thought (II.jo). Home does not indicate whose barbarity was responsible
for the gloomy and discouraging thoughts inspired by Greek ruinsRoman,
Byzantine, or Turkishbut the latter would certainly have been present in a
number of minds after the failure of the recent uprising.
Classical sites continued to convey a contemporary political meaning
throughout the nineteenth century. Chateaubriand remarked of his visit to
Greece: Travellers who are content to visit civilized Europe are extremely
fortunate: they penetrate not into those regions where the heart is wounded
at every step; where living ruins every moment divert attention from the
ruins of stone and marble. In vain would you give full scope in Greece to the
illusion of the imagination: the mournful truth necessarily pursues you
(+yj). William Cullen Bryant made the following observation after a visit to
the Acropolis around the middle of the nineteenth century: In looking at
these remains, one can hardly help asking oneself whether the Greeks of that
early period, which produced works of art weaving such a stamp of calm
greatness and employing such a ne harmony of the intellectual faculties,
were not of a different character than the Greeks of the present day (Letters
from the East :+). Musings at the Colosseum rarely became occasions for in-
quiries into the ethnological origin of the Italians.
Greek ruins had, of course, been a central element in philhellenic art from
the beginning; one need only recall the ancient column behind the bound
Greek woman in the frontispiece to Choiseul-Goufers book. Throughout
the nineteenth century Greek ruins continued to be linked to ideas about
modern Greek freedom, as in Karl Krazeisens painting of the War of Inde-
pendence, Greeks Fighting among Classical Ruins, and Delacroixs Greece Ex-
piring on the Ruins of Missolonghi; the opening set of a temple in ruins and
some columns prostrate and broken in Deerings Marco Bozzaris (+8j+);
and Cale Young Rices poem of ++:, In a Greek Temple (during the First
Balkan War).
As the leading classical site, the Acropolis was also the preeminent place to
dream of modern Greek freedom. The front of the Parthenon is the back-
drop for the opening soliloquy about Greek freedom in Mordecai Noahs
Greek Captive (+8:) and Disraelis Rise of Iskander (+8+). Robert Under-
wood Johnsons +88 poem Apostrophe to Greece: Inscribed to the Greek
People on the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of Their Independence is subti-
tled From the Parthenon, and it includes a note saying that it was on the
steps of Athenas temple that the author began composing the lines ().
Given the identication between Greece and the heroine of the romance
of liberation, the sight of the Parthenon and the Acropolis often leads a phil-
hellenic hero to think about the living Greek virgin, who now personies
the country. For example, when the hero of Lynchs Glamour makes a mid-
r r + u + r k + r r o r r r +jy
night visit to the Acropolis, he thinks, Of all the emotions at the call of
beauty, that derived from such a moment must stand out alone. Something,
varying in explicitness according to personality, something far above yearn-
ing for power of expression oods the heart at such a time. Yet John Strellie
does not remain in a state of reverie or sublime wonder, for he notes that
through it all as a setting to my mood, emphasising all the loveliness before
me, was the recollection of the girl at Kephissia (+:). In Demetra Vaka
Browns Grasp of the Sultan, a daughter of ever-rising, ever-struggling
Crete (:yj) is rescued from the sultans harem in Constantinople by an
Englishman and brought to Athens: And here, within sight of the
Parthenon, she is freed from Musulman shacklesshe is a living emblem of
Greater Greece, and she is ttingly paired with the eternal emblem of clas-
sical Greece visible above the city (:yj). In the romance of liberation, the
Acropolis is, like Greece itself, both politicized and, by its identication with
the heroine, feminized.
If one judges simply by the number of pages written, the modern Greek
struggle for freedom was somewhat less inhospitable to ction than the
Greece of Winckelmann, especially in the last decades of the century. Yet the
Grce de Byron was hardly more amenable to the bourgeois interiority nec-
essary for Bildungsromans or stories of inner growth than the classical bas-
relief. For the politicization of Greek ruins and their surroundings, like the
escape into the divine sphere, moved the focus away from the individual and
his or her own psychology toward partisan external concerns. With the ex-
ception of Brailsfords Broom of the War God, which chronicles the disillu-
sionment of a philhellenic volunteer, the aim of most philhellenic novels was
to celebrate the Byronic past and keep its spirit alive. Further, the magic
force of Byronic legend tended to make both real and ctional philhellenes
less interested in and less aware of how modern Greece might alter them and
more interested in how they might assist in altering the fate of the modern
Greeks. McCarthys hero, who claimed, I, too, felt myself a Greek, longs
for a renewal of the great unnished struggle for Greek independence . . .
with my own chivalric form, to be sure, in the midst of it (I.+). When the
philhellene T. S. Hutchinson arrived in Greece at the start of the First
Balkan War, he remarked, I am expecting to be a Greek as soon as I get a uni-
form (j). No one in the ction of Henry James, as far as I can recall, ends
up thinking not of what Italy did for them, but of what they did or could do
for Italy. Byron, viewed in England and America as both the poet of Greece
and the hero of Greece, set a different precedent for the land across the Io-
nian sea. Athens, said Z. D. Ferriman, is the only foreign city which has
reared statues to Englishmen (Greece and the Greeks +). One was to
Byron, the other to Gladstone.
The rst ctional character in English who, like Isabel Archer in Rome,
would become deeply and tenderly acquainted with Greece, who would take
+j8 r u v a o

s s n + n ow
Greek ruins into her condence, who would let them interfuse and mod-
erate her passion did not appear until Susan Glaspells Fugitives Return
was published in +:. By then, the Asia Minor Disaster of +:: had oc-
curred, and the broken columns and marble fragments had begun to acquire
a different, tragic signicance, one that was more hospitable to bourgeois in-
teriority. In the years before that great catastrophe, for those actual or arm-
chair visitors who were not lost in clouds of divine glory, Greek ruins sug-
gested the triumph of barbarity over taste. And it was not only Greek ruins
that carried such political meaning but also the villages and villagers that one
passed on the way to the classical sites.
6
Politicized Pans
After the rebirth of Greece in +8, the Western world began to look for
signs of the promised revitalization that had been so condently assumed in
earlier philhellenic literature. In +8y, Lewis Sergeant curtly summed up the
European view: The Greeks of today stand in this special relation to the rest
of Europe, that their condition is regarded as a state of probation (New
Greece +). From +8 until +oo, philhellenes and Turkophiles fought over
the degree of progress in Greece just as an earlier generation had traded
words over the nature of the Athenian democracy.
1
Murrays Handbook for
Travellers in Greece for +8y: stated that one of the main reasons for a trip to
Greece was to judge the countrys progress: A journey in Greece is full of
interest for a traveler of every character, except indeed for a mere idler or
man of pleasure. There the politician may contemplate for himself the con-
dition and progress of a people of illustrious origin, and richly endowed by
Nature, which, after a servitude of centuries, has again taken its place among
nations; there can he best form an accurate opinion on that most important
question, the present state and future destinies of the Levant (+). Shelley
had said, We are all Greeks, and if Greece were to be a mirror into which
the West could look and see its own sense of Greekness, then it had to be-
come more like Europe and America.
2
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, intellectuals in
Britain and America began to turn away from the Victorian view of science
and advancement as a sign of progress (Hynes, Edwardian Turn of Mind +).
In opposition to the perceived ugliness and emptiness of modern urban life,
a pastoral ideal once again found favor. The new life of post-Christian man,
according to Edward Carpenter in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (+88),
would be essentially a return to pre-Christian customs:
The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high
tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the
glory of the human form and the great procession of the stars, or
greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred
+j
+o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations. . .
once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight
of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of
Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the
emblem of everlasting splendour which shines within. (y)
As at the end of the eighteenth century, a hundred years later the ancient
Greeks again occupied a special place in the pastoral vogue. For many
thinkers of European descent the ancient Greek world still represented their
collective, lost, bucolic past. The importance of Greek antiquity in this
desire to return to nature is supported by Samuel Hyness observation that
Pan is a particularly prominent gure in the late Victorian and Edwardian
periods (Edwardian Turn of Mind +).
3
Oscar Wilde put the idea succinctly
in his poem Pan: Double Villanelle:
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
And what remains to us of thee? . . .
Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
The modern world has need of Thee!
(Complete Poetry +:+::)
But Hynes noted that modern appearances of Pan were not always in
forms that would be recognizable to the Greeks; Barrie, someone had said,
had robbed Pan to pay Peter, and other Edwardian Pans were similarly do-
mesticated (+).
4
Nor was it necessary to meet the Greek god on his native
ground of Arcadia. One could meet him in the English countryside, as in
Sakis The Music on the Hill and Merediths poem The Woods of West-
ermain, or in America, as in Kiplings Pan in Vermont. Those who
looked in the Mediterranean usually went to Italy, as in E. M. Forsters
Story of a Panic. As Kenneth Churchill observed, in the years after +8yo
if what was needed to rejuvenate industrial society was a return to the
essence of paganism, then Italy was the place to establish contact (+j). A
character in H. D.s novel Asphodel states the connection between Greek
gods and Italian soil at the turn of the century quite simply: We had
Greece, having Italy (+++). Many other travelers, both real and imaginary,
had the same feeling.
The case of Norman Douglas is instructive. In his book about the Sorren-
tine peninsula, Siren Land (+++), Douglas wrote:
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s ++
many of us would do well to mediterraneanize ourselves for a season, to
quicken those ethnic roots from which has sprung so much of what is
best in our natures. To dream in Siren land, pursuing the moods and
memories as they shift in labyrinthine mazes, like shadows on a wood-
land path in June; to stroll among the hills and ll the mind with new
images upon which to browse at leisure, casting off outworn weeds of
thought with the painless ease of a serpent and unperplexing, inciden-
tally, some of those questions of the day of which the daily papers
nevertheless know nothingthis is an antidote for many ills. (:8)
Douglas presented the benets of southern Italy as a place of such repose
in Siren Land, Old Calabria (++j), and the novel South Wind (++y). In all of
these books, a key reason the region provided an antidote to what Douglas
termed the spiritual blunting or anaesthesia of northern European life
(Siren Land +j+) was that it still manifested traces of its classical Greek her-
itage. In a passage that echoed his Romantic predecessors, Douglas discussed
the relation between ancient Greek civilization and its natural surroundings:
And the Greeks? The idea that we entered into the world tainted from birth,
that feeling of duty unfullled which is rooted in the doctrine of sin and has
hindered millions from enjoying life in a rational and plenary mannerall
this was alien to their mode of thought. A healthy man is naturally blithe, and
the so-called joy of life of the ancient Greeks is simply the appropriate reac-
tion of the body to its surroundings (Siren Land +j+).
Such eloquent thoughts and musings eluded Douglas in the Greek heart-
land. In +:o, he traveled to Athens on a commission from the Greek gov-
ernment, which had paid him oo English pounds to compose a book about
Greece. After an uncongenial visit prompted an early return, he complained,
I have tried to write an article about Greece. Two pages in the better part of
a week. They read like a Board-School exercise (Holloway :8).
5
A second
visit with his friend and would-be collaborator Edward Hutton in +: was
no more successful. Douglas told Hutton, I cannot write a book about
Greece; if I could I should have written it long ago (Holloway y). Even
with Hutton sending him a rdaction of each chapter to ll out, Douglas
eventually withdrew from the project, and Hutton published A Glimpse of
Greece (+:8) on his own. In +:, almost ten years after he had received pay-
ment, Douglas nally published a very slender Greek book of around fty
pages, One Day.
Why was it so difcult to Mediterraneanize in Greece? A large part of the
reason was that through the middle of the +:os, modern Greece was a
highly politicized space in the minds of English and Americans, where one
pondered the present state and future destiny of Greece and the Levant. At
around the same time that Wilde composed Pan, Robert Underwood
+: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Johnson claimed that the modern world had need of Greece for a very differ-
ent reason:
Then Hellas! scorn the sneer
Of kings who will not hear
Their peoples moaning voice
More deaf than shore to sea!
The world hath need of Thee. . .
Troy was, but Athens is
The Worlds and Libertys
Nor ever less shall be!
(Apostrophe to Greece +o+:)
Even Pans seen on Greek soil were politicized.
6
One of the few appearances
of Pan in Greece written by a major writer dealt specically with the tough
old riddle of the modern Greek and his position in the world today.
Virginia Woolf s early story A Dialogue on Mount Pentelicus, unpub-
lished until +8y, begins when a party of six English visitors have just n-
ished a trip up Mount Pentelicus near Athens and started their descent.
Woolf had made such a journey during her stay in Athens in +o (Passionate
Apprentice ::y). Tourists, we are informed, is not how the group would
refer to themselves. Germans are tourists and Frenchmen are tourists but
Englishmen are Greeks. Such was the sense of their discourse, and we must
take their word for it that it was very good sense indeed (Complete Shorter
Fiction ).
7
While at the top of the mountain, they feel themselves charged
on each side by tremendous presences, but they are a bit put off by their at-
tempt to speak to their guides in the classical language: the fact that Greek
words spoken on Greek soil were misunderstood by Greeks destroys at a
blow the whole population of Greece (). During a rest near a stream they
commence the dialogue of the title. It ranges over many subjectsover
birds and foxes, and whether turpentine is good in wine . . . and over so sink-
ing and surging like the ight of an eagle through mid-air dropped at last
upon the tough old riddle of the modern Greek and his position in the world
today. Some, of optimistic nature[,] claimed for him a present, some less
credulous but still sanguine expected a future, and others with generous
imagination recalled a past (j, brackets in original).
An exchange occurs between one speaker, who maintains that ancient
Greece had died as the day dies here in Greece, completely (j), and an-
other, who claims that the English idea of the ancient Greeks is simply an il-
lusion. But after these initial speeches, the dialogue is interrupted by an
Orthodox monk carrying a load of wood. He was large and nely made, and
had the nose and brow of a Greek statue. It was true that he wore a beard and
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s +
his hair was long, and there was every reason to think him both dirty and illit-
erate. But as he stood there, suspended, with open eyes, a fantastic
pathetichope shot through the minds of some who saw him that his was
one of those original gures (y). But, unfortunately, it is no longer in the
power of the English mind . . . to see fur grow upon smooth ears and cloven
hoofs where there are ten separate toes. It is their power to see something dif-
ferent from that, and perhaps, who knows?, something ner (y). What the
English tourists did see was the light in the monks eye (perhaps an echo of
Byrons comment about the re still sparkling in each eye in a modern
Greek?), which pierced through much, and went like an arrow drawing a
golden chain through ages and races till the shapes of men and women and
the sky and the trees rose up on either side of its passage and stretched in a
solid and continuous avenue from one end of time to the other (8). Even
the man who had argued against the continuity of the Greeks now answers
the monks greeting as a Greek to a Greek and if Cambridge disavowed the
relationship the slopes of Pentelicus and the olive groves of Mendeli con-
rmed it (8).
Woolf s afrmation of a link, however fragile, between the ancient and
modern Greeks in this story is a bit surprising. In her journal of her visit in
+o she had written, I take some pains to put old Greece on my right hand
& new Greece on my left & nothing I say of one shall apply to the other. The
justice of that division has been proved etymologically, & ethnologically,
indeed & I daresay I could go on proving it through all the arts & sciences, but
these shall be sufcient (Passionate Apprentice o). She also remarked,
Modern Greece is so imsy & fragile, that it goes to pieces entirely when
confronted with the roughest fragment of the old. But there is very little of
it, & if you choose you may see exactly what the Greeks of the jth century
saw (:), and the people of Athens are, of course, no more Athenians
than I am (:8). How Woolf would have reconciled these statements with
the solid and unbroken avenue of the Greek race in her story need not detain
us here.
8
We can be content with the fact that her story of an encounter with
a Pan gure in Greece did not provide an antidote to the many ills of the
modern world but offered instead a new insight into the position of the mod-
ern Greek in that world.
For if one made contact with the essence of paganism in Greece, that
was routinely offered as proof that the Greeks were still the Greeks and en-
listed to support Greeces national aspirations. In the introduction to his
translation of the stories of Argyris Eftaliotis, Tales from the Isles of Greece
(+8y), W. H. D. Rouse, invoking the cultural icon of the period, claimed,
Out on the [Greek] hills Pan is not yet dead (xi). He returned to this idea at
the end of the introduction where he said, With all around so untouched by
what is ugly in modern life, one could half expect to hear Pan piping down
there in the glen (xv). But, while there is something Homeric still lingering
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
about rural Greece, there is something Byronic as well. For it is not so long
since blind Homers trudged the country-side, and in return for a welcome,
sang the heroic ballads of olden days; only now no Troy was their theme, but
the struggle of Greece for freedom against the Turk (ix).
This is not at all surprising, as interest in Greek liberation had always
centered on the link between the ancient and modern Greeks. In one of the
rst book-length studies of modern Greek folklore in English, Customs and
Lore of the Modern Greeks (+8:), the poet Rennell Rodd justied the topic
by declaring that the present Greeks can help Mediterraneanize the West:
There lives a people who seem to have preserved, in manner and look, that
old-world freshness of our dreams, who still live the natural life with little
heed or knowledge of the world beyond the village (xxi, my italics). But,
as with Rouse, that statement has political implications: A people which has
retained through inevitable transformations so much that it is directly trace-
able to the Hellenic fountain head, must therefore be looked upon as the gen-
uine representatives of those whose languages they still speak and whose
name they still assume (Customs and Lore :o). However, Rodds book, like
Edward Grosvenors The Permanence of the Greek Type (+8y), should not
be read simply as propaganda for the Greek cause. Just as, according to
Michael Herzfeld, Greek scholars used folklore to construct a cultural con-
tinuity in defense of their national identity (), foreign philhellenes con-
structed a cultural continuity in Greece to defend their individual identity in
the face of the dehumanization in the modern world. The way for Rodd to
save his own dreams was to assist the cause of the Greeks.
Although the interest in the customs of rural Greece and the relation of
those practices to the classical past had a broad cultural impetus, most of
those who introduced modern Greek folklore and village life to an English
audience in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were literary philhel-
lenes, like the novelists Elizabeth Edmonds (Quaint Customs of Rural
Greece and Superstitions in Greece, +8:), Isabella Fyvie Mayo (Pa-
triot Songs of the Greeks, +8y), and George Horton (In Argolis, +o:).
They all, in their various ways, would agree with what was stated forthrightly
in the introduction to Lucy Garnetts Greek Folk Songs from the Turkish
Provinces of Greece (+88j): We hope that such study will have not only spec-
ulative and scientic, but practical and political results in exciting sympathy,
and gaining aid, for that reconstitution of Hellas which is still unachieved,
and the fulllment yet of Shelleys prophetic vision in the rst year of the
War of Independence (+8:+)Another Athens shall arise ().
9
An en-
counter with Pan in Italy was an antidote for a civilization that makes a man
unhappy and unhealthy (Douglas, South Wind ). An encounter with Pan
in Greece, on the other hand, could lead to a quotation from Hellas or The
Isles of Greece. As Thackeray said, it was dangerous ground. Woolf was
not simply recounting a meeting with one modern Greek in her story A Di-
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s +j
alogue on Mount Pentelicus but engaging with a touristic convention that
had become rmly established in the previous decades. In +8, for example,
Walter Colton published an account of a conversation in Athens that was
quite intellectual, as usually happens on such occasions; it ran on the pres-
ent condition and future prospects of Greece and embraced many glowing
predictions (::).
While the study of modern Greek folklore and customs was offered as an
excavation of the beliefs of antiquity, there was no place for the Dionysian
ecstasy found in Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy nor the violent origins as-
cribed to some Greek rites by J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge anthropolo-
gists in most accounts of late nineteenth-century village life. The Greeks
were, on the whole, portrayed as less primitive than the Italians, and cer-
tainly than the Etruscans, because, as the descendants however far removed
of the founders of civilization, they had to be rened primitives.
10
In the
caves of southern Italy, Douglas could step outside and beyond the decent
Hellenic civilization to prehistoric beliefs (Siren Land +y8). The inhabi-
tants of Greek villages, on the other hand, were generally offered as the liv-
ing representatives of fth-century Hellenic civilization, reincarnations of
Owensons Ida who sang, in the place of Pindaric odes, folk songs of antique
derivation.
Of a Greek in a Parisian drawing room, Proust remarked: What we seek
in vain to embrace in the shy young Greek is the gure admired long ago on
the side of a vase (.:jj). On Greek soil, however, authors often had more
success nding those admired gures in the Greeks whom they met. In +8j,
C. C. Felton stopped for a night at Delphi at a home where a girl was prepar-
ing for her wedding: Statho, the future bride, is a dark-eyed, comely damsel,
looking, in her Parnassian costume, like a bas-relief on the Parthenon,so
statuesque is she in her attitude and the ow of her drapery (Familiar Let-
ters :8j). In her story The Only Son of His Mother, Julia Dragoumis
wrote, In the islands, it is still possible to meet in the esh the prototypes of
Praxiteles, Myron, and Polycletus (Tales of a Greek Island :).
11
In Hock-
ings novel Tommy and the Maid of Athens (++y), the almost classical fea-
tures and the nely chiseled nostrils of the heroine lead the English hero
to ponder not of the sublimity of the caryatids, but her features rather made
him think of Byrons poem Maid of Athens (jo). If the Greeks were sim-
ply generic primitives, one might not be able to distinguish them from Alba-
nians, Bulgarians, or, even worse, Turks. The classical features found by
philhellenes in the faces of the modern Greeks situated the Greeks in the
world of Byron as much as in that of Homer. In fact, the interest in rural
Greece among philhellenic writers appeared simultaneously with and as a
response to the Bulgarian agitation and the new geographical construction of
southeastern Europe. It was one strategy used to preserve the special status
of the Greeks.
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Paradoxically, in order to substantiate the link between the ancient and
modern Greeks, philhellenes like Rodd disinherited the vast majority of the
Greek population. Rodd claimed, It is in the folk of the mountains and the
upper air, living their changeless life apart, with their tanned faun-like fea-
tures, and the laughing look in their clear brown eyes under the matted hair,
that the link with the old world is closest (Customs and Lore 8+; notice how
his rural Greeks even look like Pans).
12
While Rodds book, like many other
studies of Greek customs, proved that the folk in the mountains were
closely connected to the ancient worthies, it also supported the position,
found in several novels of the late nineteenth century, that the Greeks of
Athens and the larger towns who had abandoned those customs were a mon-
grel race, which might best be called Levantine and considered no better
than Turks. In +8j, Bayard Taylor claimed, Not one fth of the present
population can with justice be called Greeks (::). In an article of +o,
Bohun Lynch said, We [Westerners] must withhold our respect from the
mass [of the Greek people], and reserve it for only two or three component
groups (Some Sidelights on Modern Greece 8j). Three years later, in
his novel Glamour, he revised the romance of liberation to depict a foreign
philhellene saving an Ypsaliote woman of a purer stock than most of the
Greeks (+y) from a mongrel Athenian. He goes on to say that these imag-
ined Ypsaliotes are absolutely untouched by modern inuences and con-
tinue to celebrate ancient festivals in honour of Pan (+y:, :).
13
In the twentieth century, much would be written in English about the
struggles between Greek and Greek, such as the controversies between Roy-
alists and Venizelists during World War I, the civil war between the Right and
the Left after World War II, and the years of the military junta from +y to
+y. But it is important to remember that the tendency to split the country
into true Greeks and false Greeks arose not from an examination of in-
ternal Greek politics but from an external distinction imposed from abroad.
The growing population of Athens in the late nineteenth century came from
rural villages with which they kept strong family ties. Even today, a family in
Athens often identies itself by its village of origin, and Athenians have
never been considered less Greek by their Greek rural relatives.
14
The di-
vision between true rural and false urban and the urge to save village
Greeks from city non-Greeks grew from a Western desire to nd as di-
rect a link as possible with antiquity. But that framework, when it was applied
to real dissension in Greece, distorted the picture of Greek politics abroad
for almost a century.
Largely missing from late Victorian and Edwardian descriptions of
Greece is the claustrophobic, realistic depiction of village life that can be
found in the stories and novels of the late nineteenth-century Greek author
Alexandros Papadiamantis, to mention only the most prominent example.
Papadiamantiss novel The Murderess (+o), for example, tells the story of a
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s +y
grandmother on the island of Skiathos who goes on a mission to kill little
girls in order to remove the pain and torment they and their families will have
to face as they grow up in a place where many of the young men leave to nd
their fortune elsewhere. The fact that Papadiamantis, who is now regarded as
one of the most important prose writers of his generation, was completely
passed over by Elizabeth Edmonds and W. H. D. Rouse in favor of Drosinis
and Eftaliotis, whose view of village life was more benign, speaks volumes
about the politics and ideology of nineteenth-century translations from
modern Greek. Edmonds did translate Gregory Xenopouloss The Step-
mother: A Tale of Modern Athens (+8y), and she wrote in the introduction
that the author had written several longer novels in the realistic style, and
upon my making strictures upon one which he kindly sent me, he most elo-
quently and warmly defended himself in a long letter, which declared his ad-
miration of Zola as his master. His most recent stories, however, are not open
to any such criticism (y). Edmonds clearly did not want realism in Greece
and probably in England as well, and she was not going to translate nor com-
pose it (see her Amygdala). Neil Wynn William offered a corrective and real-
istic look in Greek Peasant Stories (+8) and his novel The Bayonet that Came
Home: A Vanity of Modern Greece (+8). His tale The Story of a Grecian
Boy tells how a childs pet lamb is taken rst by klephts and then by soldiers,
who despite the fact that they have orders to restore it to its youthful owner,
slaughter it in front of the boy. But William was a lonely voice, hampered by
a rather wooden prose style, and had no inuence on other authors.
15
Rouse summed up the prevalent attitude about rural Greece and its peo-
ple: The charm of these sunny lands, and their people so merry and light-
hearted, attracts the thoughts to them again and again (introduction to
Eftaliotis, xv). Certainly tragedies strike the villagers in tales written in Eng-
lish, as in Hortons Aphroessa and Dragoumiss Vasilis, and in the stories
of Eftaliotis and Xenopoulos translated from the Greek. At times there are
strange, unexplained phenomena, like Nereids or vampires, subjects in
keeping with the contemporary rejection of science and interest in the mys-
terious and paranormal, which, among other things, led Yeats to the seances
of Madame Blavatsky.
16
In most of these works, however, Greece possesses
the therapeutic qualities for foreigners often found in Italy. It too is a place
where those from a cold and straitlaced world can nd a refuge from mate-
rialism (Wright :) or a return to the essence of paganism (Kenneth
Churchill +j). Julia Dragoumiss aptly named story North and South,
which recounts how a stay on the island of Poros leads an American woman
toward happiness, hardly differs in kind from such Italian tales as E. M.
Forsters A Room with a View or Elizabeth von Arnims The Enchanted
April.
17
And Horton opens Aphroessa (+8y), a narrative poem about the en-
counter of a village shepherd and a Nereid, with his Western narrator ad-
dressing the people on Poros:
+8 r u v a o

s s n + n ow
Here on this innocent Aegean isle,
Whose mountains look on blooming Argolis,
Will I take refuge from the world awhile
There is no other spot so sweet as this.
(:)
At the end of Lynchs Glamour, the English hero, John Strellie, dwelling on
a Greek island with the Greek girl whom he had saved from an evil Athenian
Levantine and then married, has found that escape from civilization so
often sought in writing of the period: Here at Philotion, among the vineyards
or out on the desolate headland, modern existence, I think, with its hopelessly
entangled principles, its ludicrous ideas of right and wrong falls into perspec-
tive. For in the wilds a man may live; and is not eaten up by vain regrets (+).
Still, underlying the majority of these depictions of rural Greece as an
idyllic retreat was a desire to comment, at times directly and other times indi-
rectly, on what Woolf had called the tough old riddle of the place of the
modern Greek in the world today. In the late nineteenth century, as at the
beginning of the same century, politics played a central role in the manner in
which the local inhabitants were perceived. Upon his arrival in Greece, John
Strellie had expressed a desire to go and ght with a Greek band in Macedo-
nia. Even as he begins his description of his island idyll, Strellie says of the
Greek klepht who had helped him rescue the beautiful Chrysoula, for him
there is always Macedonia as a playgroundalways war again (+). In ad-
dition to their idyllic depictions of rural Greek life, both Dragoumis (A Man
of Athens) and Horton (Like Another Helen) wrote philhellenic novels about
Greeks ghting for liberation. For English or Americans who really wanted
to take refuge from the world for a while, Italy was a better destination since
there one could nd traces of the pagan vitality without the politicized bag-
gage of the Greece of Byron, in which there was always war again. In the in-
troduction to a volume entitled A Sheaf of Greek Folk Songs, Countess Ce-
saresco reected the politicized perception of Greek rural life when she
wrote: Folk poetry is the work of the peasant and the peasant is rarely polit-
ical. In Greece he is political: when he took to the mountain fastnesses to ght
the battle of his race he became political to an intense degree, but politics is
still his passion when he is simply hoeing and sowing (xxiv).
Because of the persistence of modern Greece as a politicized space, the
Western perception of the land and its people was less open to change than
that of the ancient Greeks, and a different kind of Hellenism arose at the end
of the nineteenth century. In +8y, Gilbert Murray wrote, The serene and
classical Greek of Winckelmann and Goethe did good service in his day,
though we now feel him to be a phantom. He has been survived, especially in
the painters and poets, by an aesthetic and eshly Greek in ne raiment, an
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s +
abstract Pagan who lives to be contrasted with an equally abstract early
Christian and Puritan, and to be gloried or mishandled according to the
sentiments of his critic. . . . He would pass, perhaps, as a Graeculus of the
Decadence (History of Greek Literature iv). Although the move to more
eshly Greeks had begun with the French writers Baudelaire and Gautier,
the great apostle of aesthetic Hellenism in the English speaking world was
Walter Pater. For him, not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is
the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us. . . . To burn always
with this hard, gem-like ame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life
(Renaissance :+). This concern with individual perceptions and pleasures
complete with strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours (:+)
led to a new interest in the Hellenistic and late Roman periods, epochs when,
as Pater suggested in Marius the Epicurean (+88j), life was more personal,
luxurious, and open to Eastern inuence.
18
As Richard Jenkyns said, The
Hellenism of the decadents languishes in an atmosphere swimming with ori-
ental odours (:y). The turn to a languid sensuality might also be called the
Ottomanization of antiquity. This aspect of decadence exhibited itself more
openly in France than in England, for after +8o French writers produced a
number of works about ancient Greek courtesans and prostitutes, the most
important being Pierre Louss Chansons de Bilitis (+8) and Aphrodite
(+8), as well as Fernand Nief s Phryne La Courtesan (+oj) and Prosper
Castaniers Les Amants des Lesbos (+oo). Louss work resembles and draws
on such Oriental writing as Flauberts Salammbo (+8:) and Pierre Lotis
Aziyade (+8y). Lous, who never visited Greece, found inspirations for his
ancient Greek novels during trips to Algeria.
19
There could not, of course, be a similar Ottomanization of modern
Greece, so there was no modern Graeculus of the decadence. The philhel-
lenic desire to redeem more Greeks from Turkish rule required that the
Greeks be dened in opposition to the Turks and, by extension, Oriental sen-
suality. From the revolt of +yyo, modern Greece was portrayed as a victim of
Turkish lust and vice. Throughout the nineteenth century and the rst
decades of the twentieth, modern Greek women continued to be portrayed
in the tradition of the chaste and austere, if also natural and pagan, Ida.
20
In
her novel In the Shadow of Islam (+++), Demetra Vaka Brown portrays the
Greek Elpis as immune to the erotic allure of the Orient, which briey en-
thralls the visiting American, Millicent Grey. The primitive woman is in
you, Elpis tells Millicent, and Orkhan Effendi is just the man to awake that
primitive woman in you,and who would defend you against him? (++).
The answer, of course, is Elpis, who, being Greek, has complete control of
the primitive woman within her. Modern Greek men, if they were not actu-
ally deceitful Levantines, were generally poor, brave, and quite willing to let
the foreigner have the Greek heroine.
21
+yo r u v a o

s s n + n o w
While the conception of ancient Greece could be broadened and ener-
gized by new ideas and directions, the conception of modern Greece, be-
cause of the way in which it was politicized, could not take part in any of
these developments. Nothing demonstrates this as clearly as the fact that in
the +8os, the years during which the French were writing novels about
ancient Greek sexuality, English and American authors composed phil-
hellenic novels, short stories, and poems about the Greek War of Indepen-
dence, in which there is hardly a trace of a eshly Greek or a hetaira to
be found.
Perhaps for the same reason, one nds a surprising dearth of references to
homosexuality, among foreigners or Greeks, in nineteenth-century writing
about modern Greece.
22
Certainly some travelers went to Greece after +8
because of the homosexual associations of the classical past. Two of the most
famous were Natalie Clifford Barney and Rene Vivien, who in +o jour-
neyed to Lesbos, an island still held by the Turks, in the hopes of starting a
new Sapphic circle.
23
But if any, like James Merrill some fty years later,
went to Athens to follow the faun incarnate in this or that young man in a
culture where, according to Merrill, a soldier, like nine out of ten from his
class and culture, would count himself lucky to catch a permissive male
lover, they did not write about it (A Different Person ++, +:). Although
homosexuality could be referred to as Greek love, at the end of the nine-
teenth century it was more readily found, like almost everything else
Greek, in Italy. Kenneth Churchill noted that an atmosphere of homo-
sexuality . . . pervades the literary treatment of Italians, at least until [D. H.]
Lawrence (+:+).
24
The avoidance of homosexuality might, as with Oriental
sensuality generally, stem from the fact that, although it was an ancient
Greek trait in the Western mind, it could also be associated with contempo-
rary Oriental or Ottoman life. In +8+:, when Greece was still the East, Byron
found male lovers in Greece, but, at the end of the century, Andr Gide and
Oscar Wilde sought partners in Algiers, not Athens.
25
The rst novel in English to use Greeces homosexual associations in a
contemporary Greek setting was Ronald Firbanks Inclinations (++), in the
rst part of which Geraldine OBrookomore, whose inclinations give the
book its title, travels to Greece with young Mabel Collins, a pair who might
have been loosely modeled on Barney and Vivien.
26
Other foreign women of
similar inclinations show up in Greece. For example, on the ship they meet
Miss Arne, who is on her way to Greece to study Lysistrata (:8). Since
there are no signicant Greek characters in the novel, we have no indication
if the inclinations of the foreigners are shared by the natives. OBrook-
omores hopes of creating a Sapphic garden in Greece with Mabel are foiled
when the girl elopes with Count Pastorelli, a persistent satyr, who follows
them around from place to place. Still, Inclinations broke ground in writing
about Sapphic love in the country of Sappho at a time when one could do so
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s +y+
only guardedly. Firbank did not break ground in writing about the sexuality
of modern Greek men, however. He imported his satyr from Italy.
E. M. Forsters short story about contact with the essence of paganism in the
Peloponnesus, The Road from Colonus (+oj), was rather unusual for its
time in that it made no mention of the tough old puzzle of the modern
Greek and his position in the world today. Mr. Lucas, the leading character
in the tale, had caught the fever of Hellenism forty years earlier, and all
his life he had felt that if he could but visit that land, he would not have lived
in vain. But Athens had been dusty, Delphi wet, Thermopylae at, and he
had listened with amazement and cynicism to the rapturous exclamations of
his companions. Greece was like England: it was a man who was growing
old. . . . Yet Greece had done something for him, though he did not know it.
It had made him discontented, and there are stirrings of life in discontent-
ment (+:y). Riding ahead of his party, he nds a spring in a hollow tree with
a powerful presiding spirit, and his one desire now is, like Oedipus, to remain
near the hallowed ground. To Mr. Lucas, who in a brief span of time, dis-
covered not only Greece, but England and all the world and life, there
seemed nothing ludicrous in the desire to hang within the tree another votive
offeringa little model of an entire man (+o). His daughter and the other
English travelers physically force him to leave the spot. Mr. Lucas feels that
he has missed the supreme event . . . which would transgure the face of the
world (+y). Later, we nd such an event did occur when the sacred tree de-
molished the local inn during a storm on the very night Mr. Lucas had
wanted to stay there. Back in England, he becomes just an irritable old man.
The Road from Colonus has afnities to Forsters early Italian stories,
The Story of a Panic and Albergo Empedocle, with one great excep-
tion.
27
As Furbank observed, The Road from Colonus was the story of
the chance of salvation lost, as The Story of a Panic was the chance of sal-
vation taken (I.+o). This is not a coincidence. Forster visited Greece on a
group tour for archaeologists and classical language students in +o. Fur-
bank, Forsters biographer, wrote of that journey that the writer came over-
prepared to many of the famous sights, and they made no impression.
Marathon was no more than a view, and Aegina by moonlight did not come
off (I.+o:). The whole visit does not appear to have come off, for years
later Forster wrote in a letter to Christopher Isherwood: Do I know Greece
well? I should hope so. I was there in +o and have not been there since. I got
tuned up by a modern Greek who stole another archaeologists coat before
we landed, and said I had given it to him (Selected Letters II.++8).
28
Some-
thing of Forsters own impressions almost certainly show up in his novel
Maurice (written in ++ but published posthumously in +y+), in which
Clive Durham, like Forster a Cambridge man, catches the fever of Hel-
lenism and visits Athens. Sitting in the theater of Dionysus, he thinks:
+y: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Here dwelt his gods. . . . But he saw only a dying light and dead land. He
uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew the past was devoid of
meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards (++).
29
Like Norman
Douglas, Forster found it easier to Mediterraneanize in Italy, which he
called the beautiful country where they say yes and the place where
things happen (Furbank I.).
In Forsters case, the avoidance of the political question of the modern
Greek was itself a political decision. From his rst contact with Greece in
+o, Forster, to use the words of Woolf, kept old Greece on his right hand
and new Greece on his left. He argued that the spirit of the classical age had
departed from the modern country. In Cnidus (+o), he described a visit
to an important Greek city on the coast of southern Asia Minor:
30
But I did see the home of the Goddess who has made Cnidus famous
to us . . . that Demeter of Cnidus, whom we hold in the British mu-
seum now. She was there at that moment, warm and comfortable in
the little access room of hers between the Ephesian room and the
Archaic room. . . .
I am not going to turn sentimental, and pity the exiled Demeter
and declare her sorrowful eyes are straining for the scarped rock, and
the twin harbours, and Triopia, and the sea. She is doing nothing of
the sort. . . . And if, as I believe, she is alive, she must know that she
has come among people who love her, for all they are so weak-chested
and anaemic and feeble-kneed, and who pay such prosaic homage as
they can. (Abinger Harvest +yjy)
The return of antiquities taken from Greece had been the subject of debate
since Byron excoriated Lord Elgin in The Curse of Minerva. Forsters com-
ment about the Demeter of Cnidus must be read in the context of that de-
bate, for the statue is a symbol of Hellenism, which, according to Forster,
now belonged in England.
Another article Forster wrote after his trip to Greece, Gemistus Pletho
(+oj), briey told the life of the famous Greek philosopher who lived at
Mistra in the early fteenth century and desired to return to the worship of
the old pagan gods.
31
Forster recounted how Gemistus came to Italy in +
for the Council of Florence and caused a revival of the study of Plato in the
Italian city. Gemistus went back to Mistra and died only three years before
the city was taken by the Turks. Forster notes that Gemistus did not see that
the revival had really taken place in Italy; that Greece is just a spirit which can
appear, not only at any time, but also in any land (Abinger Harvest +88y).
Gemistus became both a symbol and an artifact in the transition of Greek
culture from Greece to Italy, for in +j his body was taken from Mistra by
Sigismundo Malatesta and buried in the Tempio at Rimini. Forster con-
cluded, The Renaissance can point to many a career which is greater, but to
none which is so strangely symbolical (++).
The view that the spirit of Greece had been transferred to England ap-
peared in the writings of others who, like Forster, combined the fever of
Hellenism with opposition to Greeces national aspirations. Near the end of
his poem At Delphi, the Turkophile Alfred Austin had the Castalian foun-
tain say:
Though the Muses may have left
Tempes glen and Delphis cleft,
Wanderer! they have only gone
Hence to murmuring Albion. . . .
There the Muses prompt the strain,
There they renovate my reign;
There you wilt not call in vain,
Apollo! Apollo! Apollo!
(Lyrical Poems :+)
Austin does not appear to have cared about Turkey qua Turkey; he held to
the old Tory policy that a strong Ottoman Empire was needed to preserve
British imperial interests. But Forster, like Marmaduke Pickthall, was more
of a Romantic Orientalist, for in the later essay Salute to the Orient, he of-
fered a prayer that the East may be delivered from Europe the known and
Russia the unknown, and may remain the East (Abinger Harvest :).
32
Forsters defense of the Orient stemmed in part from what he saw as a
fundamental difference in outlook between East and West in the area of per-
sonal relations. In his diary for December :, +o, Forster noted that his In-
dian friend Syed Ross Masood gives up his duties for his friendwhich is
civilisation. Though as he remarks, Hence the confusion of Oriental states.
To them personal relations come rst (Furbank I.+j). Forster para-
phrased Masoods comment in Salute to the Orient when he said that a
personal relationship is most important for the Oriental (Abinger Harvest
:y). In this respect Forster, who declared that he would rather betray his
country than a friend, saw himself as more Oriental than Western, as did
Masood, who once told Forster in you I see an oriental with an oriental view
in most things (Furbank I.+). Forster, like Disraeli, identied with the Ori-
ent, and the two authors both created characters who wanted to ght for the
preservation of the Ottoman Empire. In Forsters posthumously published
Arctic Summer, when the main character, Cyril, hears about the Italian in-
vasion of Libya in +++, he wants to go to Tripoli and help the Turks, stating
simply, Those Italians have got to be smashed (+).
If the Italians had to be smashed, then so did philhellenism, for it pro-
vided the ideological structure used to challenge the continued existence of
+y r u v a o

s s n + n o w
the Ottoman Empire. Cnidus and Gemistus Pletho both offer an im-
plicit if indirect challenge to that abiding part of the political consciousness
by denying a connection between the ancient and modern Greeks.
33
It was an
understated and subtle approach, much less direct than the French Romantic
Orientalist Pierre Loti produced in Turquie Agonisante (++), but one that
Forster perhaps thought would be more effective with a public still attracted
to the magic force of Byronic legend.
Before the Great War, in the politicized environment of modern Greece,
those who wrote reveries set on Greek ground, as Forster did in The Road
from Colonus, were not always simply ignoring the puzzle of the modern
Greek but often intentionally avoiding it. They tried to read Sophocles with-
out noticing the contemporary world around them, as did certain Hellenists
during the Greek War of Independence.
34
One wonders whether the de-
struction of the sacred site at the end of The Road from Colonus, like the
transfer of the statue of Demeter from Cnidus, suggested that the Greek
spirit can no longer be found in the land where it originated.
In the autumn of ++:, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Greece joined
forces and nearly drove the Turks from Europe. Just three weeks after hostil-
ities commenced, Greek troops entered Thessaloniki. By the time the Turks
signed an armistice with the Balkan allies, the Greek ag ew over Ioannina in
Epirus, and the Greek navy had taken possession of almost all of the Turkish-
held islands in the Aegean. Greece had nearly doubled in size and population.
It was a startling triumph for all of the Balkan nations, but for the Greeks,
who had suffered a humiliating defeat in +8y, it was especially sweet.
With the Turkish bear badly wounded if not slain, the Balkan allies almost
immediately fell to ghting over the bears skin. The Second Balkan War
began on June :, ++, when the Bulgarians, who felt that their territorial
acquisitions were not commensurate with their burden on the battleeld, at-
tacked the Serbs and Greeks in Macedonia. The offensive went badly, and
both the Turks and the Romanians took advantage of the concentration of
Bulgarian forces on its western border to advance on other fronts. The result
was a disaster for Bulgaria. It gained no ground in Macedonia, lost more ter-
ritory on the Aegean coast, ceded fertile land in the Danube basin to Roma-
nia, and, perhaps most galling of all, gave the city of Adrianople and other
areas won in the First Balkan War back to Turkey.
For the Greeks, the Second Balkan War was another triumph. They ex-
tended their reach another hundred miles eastward from Thessaloniki. Con-
stantinople was now only two hundred miles away from troops serving under
the Greek ag.
35
But if it were a new day for the Greek armed forces, it was
also another opportunity for old rhetoric.
A comparison of +8y with ++:++ reveals an odd inverse proportion
between the number of Greeks freed from Turkish rule and the amount of
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s +yj
philhellenic poetry and ction written in English. In the +8os, philhellenic
literature had reached a level not seen since the War of Independence, but the
only practical result of the conict was that the Cretans achieved a semiau-
tonomous status under the sultan. In the Balkan Wars, the Greeks had enor-
mous success in expanding the Greek state, but the output of philhellenic
writing barely surpassed the attention given to the Cretan revolt in the +8os.
Timing was certainly a factor, since by the middle of ++ the eyes of the
world were drawn to the possibility of a general European war. Looking back
later, some writers would view the Balkan Wars not as the liberation of the
Balkans but rather as a prelude to the Great War.
36
Still, the lack of literature
about modern Greece in ++: and ++ strikes one as a bit odd, because the
years from +o until +:o were a busy time for philhellenic organizations
and publications. The announced aim of the Hellenic Herald, published in
London from November +o until May ++:, was to give an exhaustive ac-
count of the various movements and affairspolitical, racial, and socialin
the Near East; and to set forth with clearness the Greek claims in the Balkan
peninsula. In addition . . . a portion of each number will be given over to lit-
erary mattersmore particularly to modern Greek literature (Dec. +o,
p. +). A literary section was included in an avowedly partisan political journal
to show that the modern Greeks were the cultural descendents of ancient
Greece and to set them apart from the other Balkan nationalities. The Anglo-
Hellenic League was formed in ++ to support the cause of Greater Greece
in England. Its counterpart in America, the American Hellenic Society,
started in ++. In the forefront of this new wave of philhellenism on both
sides of the Atlantic were professors of classics. The only author of note in
the reformed Anglo-Hellenic League of ++:, which included the promi-
nent scholars Ronald Burrows and Gilbert Murray, was Maurice Hewlett; no
author of similar stature appears on the rolls of the American Hellenic Soci-
ety. Writers, especially the avant-garde, which had been the soul of the phil-
hellenic movement in the +8:os, were replaced in the ++os by academics.
In ++:, some foreign philhellenes again packed their Byrons and went to
ght so that more Greeks might be free. T. S. Hutchinson, a veteran of the
U.S. Civil War who made the journey from New York, gave an account of the
make-up and experience of the philhellenic foreign legion in the siege of
Ioannina in An American Volunteer under the Greek Flag (++). Hutchinson
rehearsed all of the nostrums of nineteenth-century philhellenism. The Turk
was of no value to civilization. Humanity and modern progress demand his
retirement to Asia (:). To Greece, on the other hand, we owe . . . every-
thing that our modern civilization represents (y), and the same spirit of
these old heroes had descended to the Greeks of today (8o). He provided a
glowing account of the klephts in their fantastic and beautiful costumes
(++:). They are not desperate, independent outlaws as some people have pic-
tured them but freedom ghters like the klephts of old (++).
+y r u v a o

s s n + n o w
The ships that carried Hutchinson and the other philhellenes to Greece
were far from empty. They were packed with emigrant Greeks returning
home to ght for their motherland. Some, as Dragoumis says in A Man of
Athens, had not even been taught their own language, but they are Greeks all
the same (; see also Vaka Browns In Pawn to a Throne +:o:+). The ght
to free Greeks became more ethnic around ++: because fewer foreigners
chose to involve themselves, although philhellenic rhetoric still proclaimed
the Greek cause as a means to regenerate all of the Western world.
The most noteworthy philhellenic voice of the Balkan Wars was James
Elroy Flecker, who had gone to the Levant to serve in the British mission in
Smyrna in +o, then met and married his own maid of Athens in ++o.
37
In Ode to the Glory of Greece: A Fragment, Flecker is visited by the
shades of Byron and Shelley in a dream after the rst Greek victories. Shel-
ley, referring to Flecker as the inheritor, instructs his successor:
Go thou to Athens, go to Salonica,
Go thou to Yannina beside the lake . . .
Cry, The Olympians wake!
And cry, O Towers of Hellas built anew by rhyme,
Star-woven to my Amphionic lyre,
Stand you in steel for ever,
And from your lofty lanterns sweeping the dim hills
and the nocturnal sea
Pour out the re of Hellas, the everlasting re!
(Collected Poems :)
Byron and Shelley were the Amphions whose verse had begun the rebuilding
of Hellas, and another English poet, Flecker, would make new towers arise.
Despite, or maybe because of, the fact that Flecker had been to Greece and
had married a Greek, he still saw the country through the medium of Ro-
mantic philhellenism.
At the end of the poem Flecker wrote, if no Pheidias with marble towers
/ Grace our new Athens and if modern Greek poets are gentler in tone than
Aeschylus:
Yet still victorious Hellas, thou hast heard
Those ancient voices thundering to arms
(:)
The victory in the Balkan Wars was not the fulllment of the philhellenic
legacy, as Flecker made clear in another poem, A Sacred Dialogue (Christ-
mas ++:). At the opening, Christ says:
r o r r + r c r z r n r + s +yy
Peace and good will the world may sing
But we shall talk of war!
How fare my armies of the north!
(Collected Poems :+:)
The bishop of Jerusalem answers, They wait victorious peace, / All the
high forts of Macedonia / Fly the proud ag of Greece. Christ then asks
about Constantinople and the Church of St. Sophia. The bishop sighs: Ah,
it still wants redeeming! Christ laments, Still waitsve hundred years,
and still / My soldiers waitso long? (:+). The note following the poem
says that it was originally written for Christmas, ++:, and referring to the
rst Balkan war, this poem contains in the last speech of Christ words that
read like a prophecy of events that may occur very soon (December, ++)
(:+j). The mantle of philhellenism could pass relatively intact from Byron
and Shelley through Swinburne to Flecker because the dream that Greece
might still be free was still potent.
38
But, just as Greek emigrants returning to aid their native country were re-
placing foreign philhellenes on the battleeld, writers of Greek descent also
began to emerge as the literary champions of Greece, including John Mavro-
gordato (Letters from Greece), D. J. Cassavetti (Hellas and the Balkan Wars),
and Demetra Vaka Brown (A Child of the Orient). The most interesting effort
from this group was Julia Dragoumiss novel A Man of Athens, published in
Boston in ++. Dragoumis was not the rst person of Greek descent to
write a version of the romance of Greek liberation in English; Demetra Vaka
Browns In the Shadow of Islam had appeared in +++. But Dragoumis was
the rst to rmly place a Greek male in the role usually assigned to a foreign
philhellenic hero, one Metro Philippides, a young professor of archaeology
at the University of Athens. He was born in a humble family on the island of
Poros and orphaned young; at their rst meeting the heroine notices that his
wrists were large, betraying peasant origin (++). At the opening of the book,
however, he has just returned from Paris, where he earned his doctorate.
Dragoumis lessens Metros Westernization in France by making archaeology
his eld of study; he is a real Greek in search of the real Greeks.
Like so many philhellenic stories, the novel opens on the Acropolis. Metro
sees Theodora Douka, who, although she comes from an aristocratic Con-
stantinople family, seems like some statues of Artemis of the fourth cen-
tury; not at all a Byzantine type (j). Theodora, the last descendant of an
imperial family, is the personication of Greece, and the rst part of the
novel depicts a struggle for her by representatives of old Greeks and new
Greeks. On one side is her father, an old-style, upper-class Phanariot of the
Byzantine type, who insists that she marry someone of her own class. On the
+y8 r u v a o

s s n + n ow
other is the orphan from Poros who, through talent and hard work, has made
his way in the world.
Theodora marries the young professor, but their union is difcult at rst.
Her father refuses to acknowledge the couple, and she remains somewhat
emotionally aloof from her new husband. In the last section, the First Balkan
War starts, and Metro and all of his friends leave for the front. This is a war
of liberation, says one. This is to set free all our brothers who are enslaved
(j:). Earlier, one of the young men had said, The heroes of +8:+ are all
dead and buried (oo), but the war reveals that the heroic spirit is very much
alive. Dragoumis separates the rescue and marriage of Theodora from the
war of liberation but uses Metros participation in the ghting to solidify his
place as the new Greek man. The novel ends with the return of Metro, who
was presumed dead, after the fall of Ioannina. Theodora and Metro come to
a new, fuller understanding, which is presented as symbolic of a new, ex-
panded Greece.
A Man of Athens can be read as the rst real Greek appropriation of the
Greek romance in English. With the exception of one elderly French profes-
sor, all of the characters are Greek, and, for almost the rst time in a novel
written in English, one listens to realistic Greek characters discussing Greek
problems. While Dragoumiss most striking innovation is to make the hero a
Greek, her most radical might be placing the focus on the kind of future
Greece will have. Since she separates the marriage of Theodora from the
war, Metros initial function is not to rescue Theodora from the Turks or
some other enemy, something he never has to do, but to rescue her from
her old Greek past and prod her to have a new vision of the country. Ear-
lier versions of the romance of liberation often ended with the departure of
the heroine from Greece and the question of the future of the country in
limbo. Of course, what Dragoumis offers her American readers sounds a
great deal like the Americanization of Greece. Metro might be a familiar g-
ure in the land where Horatio Alger wrote, but the orphan of a poor Greek
sherman at the turn of the century lived in a different world. Whether
Dragoumis, a Greek emigrant to America, desired the Americanization of
Greece or was simply playing to her intended American readership is an
open question. The book was written, after all, not to make Greeks rethink
the direction of their country but to garner support for Greece in America
by arguing that Greece was not simply changing but doing so in a way recog-
nizable to Americans.
Dragoumis may have hoped that by modifying the well-known formula of
the romance, she could rehabilitate the perception of Greek men abroad. She
seems to have failed. No one would try to replicate her strategy of appropri-
ating the romance of liberation for a Greek hero in the coming decades. And
her book was less well known than those of her fellow Greek author Demetra
Vaka Brown, who was more successful in promoting the cause of Greece by
consistently employing Greek heroines in the traditional philhellenic man-
ner in her novels In the Shadow of Islam, The Grasp of the Sultan, and In Pawn
to a Throne.
Dragoumiss novel closes at the end of the First Balkan War. The title of
Cale Young Rices poem is In a Greek Temple (during the First Balkan
War). Fleckers poems were also written during the First Balkan War; he
wrote nothing about the subsequent ght with the Bulgarians. Philhellenic
writing had always focused on the confrontations with the Turks, and the
Balkan Wars were no exception. After the Turks were beaten at Ioannina, lit-
erary philhellenes waited for the nal battle for Constantinople. Conicts
with the Bulgarians simply did not matter.
The victory of ++: had no more effect on writing about Greece than the
defeat of +8y. A clear sign of the discouraging state of philhellenic litera-
ture, whether of the narrowly Greek or the wider Balkan variety, was that, for
literary history, the most famous and, sadly, perhaps the most innovative
work relating to the Balkan Wars was probably the Futurist Filippo Tom-
maso Marinettis poem The Siege of Adrianople. Wyndham Lewis was
present when Marinetti gave a public reading of the work. Marinetti, said
Lewis, had been at Adrianople, when there was a siege. He wanted to imi-
tate the noise of bombardment. It was a poetic declamation which was
packed to the muzzle with what he called le rage Balkanique. . . . it was a
matter of astonishment what Marinetti could do with his unaided voice. He
certainly made an extraordinary amount of noise. A day attack upon the
Western front, with all the heavies hammering together, was nothing to it
(Blasting and Bombadiering ). A text of the Bombardement dAndrino-
ple published in Listas Marinetti et le Futurisme bears out Lewiss remarks,
well over half the words of the poem are the onomatopoetic zang, toumb, and
taratata (). Marinetti may have reduced the Balkan Wars to an extraordi-
nary amount of noise, but he provided no clue as to how to infuse that noise
with some new meaning.
In +8y, writers had, on the whole, kept faith with what Brailsford had
termed the bright aims of Hellenism even as they found fault with philhel-
lenes or Greeks for failing to uphold those ideals. But at the beginning of the
twentieth century, some writers started a serious assault on the Romantic tra-
dition underlying the philhellenic tradition and, by extension, philhellenism
itself. One warning shot was red in the preface to Arms and the Man (+88),
where Shaw remarked how a critic complained that his depiction of the Bul-
garians would set back the cause of freedom in the Balkans. But, Shaw said,
the real issue between the critic and myself was whether the political and
religious idealism which had inspired Gladstone to call for the rescue of
those Balkan principalities from the despotism of the Turk, and converted
miserably enslaved provinces into hopeful and gallant little States, will
+8o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
survive the general onslaught on idealism which is implicit, and indeed, ex-
plicit, in Arms and the Man and the naturalist plays of the modern school. For
my part, I hope not; for idealism, which is only a attering name for romance
in politics and morals, is as obnoxious to me as romance in ethics and reli-
gion (Complete Prefaces I.jo). Shaw recognized that the quarrel was not
about the politics of the Balkan states but with certain invalid preconcep-
tions, which had caused his audience to view the Balkans in a certain way. He
thought that that ideological construct could not withstand a searching cri-
tique from modern drama.
Still, as Shaw surely knew, behind Gladstones Balkans stood Byrons
Greece. Arms and the Man is, in fact, more an attack on Romantic Byronism
than on Gladstonian principles, for Raina asserts that our heroic ideas
come from reading Byron and Pushkin, not the Bulgarian pamphlets of the
Liberal leader. One wonders whether Shaw, consciously or unconsciously,
chose to avoid Byron by speaking of Gladstone in the preface, just as he
avoided Greece by setting the action in Bulgaria.
Another warning was sounded in Ford Madox Fords essay Little States
and Great Nations in May +o. Greece, Ford said, because she was once
the fair eld of heroes, poets, and wise men, has been articially turned into a
kind of Yellowstone Park, into a reserve where strange races quarrel futilely
in a territory that appears not to be worth commercial exploitation. Greece,
indeed, we may say, is the ironic tribute that Europe pays to the Arts of
peace (jy). Ford echoed, perhaps unintentionally, an idea that had rst ap-
peared in Mary Shelleys The Last Man eighty years earlier and that would
often be heard in the next decade: Greece had become a place of endless
and futilestruggles to be free.
39
Unlike Shaw, Ford lamented the passing of the heroic ideals and the fact
that England had lost its place as the home of Humanitarian ideals, a place
that sent Byron to Greece and gave hospitality to Mazzini, to Cavour, to
Garibaldi (j8). He provided a reason for this development in another piece
published later in the same year, The Passing of the Great Figure, where
he said, For the time being and until others arise the great Victorian gures
were the last of the priests (+o). Ford here acknowledged the end of an era,
for it was not simply that the Victorian age had great gures but also, as Beck-
son noted, the Victorians were notable for their hero-worship (:8; he
points particularly to Carlyles On Heroes and Hero-worship). Ford argued
that, in the modern age, the conditions of everyday life and thought have
changed so entirely that we very much doubt whether a Ruskin or a Glad-
stone would to-day nd any kind of widespread dominion (+o). The pres-
ent, Ford said, was a time of innumerable shades of opinion, each shade
nding its expression and contributing to the obscuring of the issues. He
continued:
r o r r + r c r z r n r+ s +8+
And this produces in the public mind a weariness, a confusion that
leads in the end to something amounting almost to indifference. Thus,
supposing that Mr. Gladstone should nowadays call attention to the
misrule in Macedonia, he might very well nd a tendency upon the
part of the public to say that the Macedonians are one of the weak
races of the world, and that the sooner and the more efciently they
are stamped out the better it will be for a world which was already
growing over-populated. Orthis is still more likelyhe might nd
that the public mind was utterly unable to make the effort to interest
itself at all in the matter of Macedonia. (+oj)
Like Shaw, Ford employed Gladstones wider philhellenism as a prime ex-
ample of a way of thinking that no longer existed. But, while the road to un-
derstanding Macedonia, an important part of Fords reserve where strange
races quarrel futilely, lay through Greece and Byron, Ford, like Shaw, con-
ned himself in the passage above to Macedonia and Gladstone. It is as
though the two writers were sparring with the magic force of legend, trying
to gauge how strong it still was.
A more direct challenge was sounded in T. E. Hulmes Romanticism and
Classicism, a lecture given in +++. Hulme declared, After a hundred years
of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival (j). That may at rst sound
like good news to philhellenes, but he means a neoclassical revival. In an omi-
nous note for the fate of Byronic philhellenism, Hulme said that contempo-
rary conservative critics in France held that romanticism made their revolu-
tion, so they hate romanticism, as romanticism in both England and France
is associated with political views (o). The central premise of Romanticism,
according to Hulme, is that man is by nature good . . . an innite reservoir of
possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppres-
sive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get
Progress. Classicism, on the other hand, holds that man is an extraordinary
xed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tra-
dition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him (+).
Hulmes aesthetic idea of ancient Greeks, not surprisingly, was the exact
opposite of the eshly Greeks presented by Pater. As Cassandra Laity, in a
discussion of Hulmes masculinization of the Greek past, observed, The
Romanticism of Swinburne, Shelley, and Byron was dened as feminine,
damp, and vague; Classicism, which formed the model for Imagism, dry,
hard, virile, and exact. (:). In Hulmes aesthetics, the Greece of
Homer appeared to be in opposition to the Greece of Byron, and a logical
corollary, one that Hulme does not state directly, would be that, to para-
phrase Woolf, one should keep old Greece on the right hand with Imagism
and new Greece on the left with Romanticism.
+8: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Echoing the sentiment of Hulme, in his essay The Function of Criti-
cism (++), T. S. Eliot stated simply that the difference between classicism
and Romanticism seems . . . rather the difference between the complete and
the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and the chaotic
(Selected Essays yo). As M. H. Abrams observed, Many of the chief gures
of the Modernist movementincluding, in England and America, Hulme,
Pound, and Eliotidentied themselves as explicitly counter-Romantic
(:y).
40
The Western construction of modern Greece, obviously, was closely
tied to Romanticism, indeed one might say that it had been built upon it. If in
his poem September ++, Yeats could write, Romantic Irelands dead
and gone, / Its with OLeary in the grave, what would a modern poet say
about the Romantic Greece of Byron, a historical and literary precursor for
Yeatss Romantic Ireland? Not surprisingly, the end of the Grce de Byron,
therefore, could be employed as a symbol of the death of Romanticism.
It soon wasin a short piece of ction in the Harvard Monthly by the
young John Dos Passos entitled The Honor of the Klepht, which ap-
peared, ttingly, just ve months before the start of the Great War. The story
begins with a familiar ring: a youthful leader of a band of klephts arrives at
his village to nd that the Turks have carried away his beloved Louka. He or-
ganizes a night attack on the Turkish camp to rescue her. All goes well until
he nds Louka in a Turkish tent, dressed in silks, and seated on a divan be-
side the pasha. The young Greek ees the scene, cutting his way through
Turkish soldiers, only to ing himself from a cliff, yelling Louka is dead.
The romance of liberation, as well as the idea of a feminized Greece, which
needed to be rescued, had nally been subverted, and so was a way of writing
that had lasted at least since the publication of The Giaour more than a cen-
tury earlier. This was not the last time that klepht would appear in a title,
and versions of the romance of liberation would continue to appear through-
out the twentieth century. But the hollowness of the literary convention had
been exposed.
Dos Passos had visited Greece in the winter of ++:,
41
but his story is
more an engagement with literary history than with anything that he saw on
his journey. The theme of many of Dos Passoss undergraduate stories is Ro-
mantic disillusionment in general; in The Almeh, his rst story in the
Harvard Monthly, he deconstructed Romantic Orientalism in a similar fash-
ion. The Honor of the Klepht is remarkable not because it is terribly in-
sightful nor clever, but rather because it took so long for someone to write
such a revision. Nor did Dos Passoss story have wide inuence on other
writers; few knew of its existence. While The Honor of the Klepht
demonstrated that Byrons Greece was moribund, it did not indicate what
kind of Greek would replace the young klepht in Western literature.
Clearly, the onslaught of modern literature that Shaw had predicted in
+88 had hardly touched English and American attitudes toward modern
r o r r + r c r z r n r+ s +8
Greece by the rst months of ++. If people wrote about modern Greece, it
was generally within the Byronic tradition. Through the end of the Balkan
Wars, it remained as if in a sealed compartment, seemingly immune to the in-
novations in thought and art around it. It would take more than an onslaught
of naturalistic plays or the declaration of a new classicist era to end the
Greece of Byron. It would take a catastrophe on a grand scale.
rrr
+nr rn or
+uaos r + s uar o+ns
( +++)
7
Constantinople, Our Star
On April :j, ++j, Denis Browne wrote a long letter to Edward Marsh con-
cerning the passing and burial of Rupert Brooke, who had died of a fever on
a British hospital ship in the Aegean. Brooke and Browne were among the
British troops sent to the Aegean to take part in the assault on Gallipoli,
which the British and French hoped would force open the Hellespont and
Dardanelles, cause Turkey to sue for peace, and bring a speedy conclusion to
the First World War. Browne described Brookes gravesite on the island
of Skyros:
We buried him the same evening in the olive grove I mentioned be-
foreone of the loveliest places on this earth, with grey-green olives
round him, one weeping above his head; the ground covered with
owering sage, bluish grey & smelling more delicious than any owers
I know. . . . Think of it all under a clouded moon, with the three
mountains around & behind us, and all those divine scents every-
where. We lined his grave with all the owers we could nd, & Quilter
set a wreath of olives on the cofn. . . .
Freyberg, Oc, and I, Charles and Cleg stayed behind and covered
the grave with great pieces of marble which were lying about every-
where. Of the cross at the head you know [it was white wood with
Brookes name in black letters]. . . . On the back of it our Greek inter-
preter, a man picked up by Oc at Lemnos, wrote in pencil:
e mhade je
~
isai
~ ~ ~
o
dotkoy sot
q
eot
am
q
tpokovaco
~
` y sot
~ ~
A
cckijot matsijot
apo
q
amx
~
` m t
pe`q sgy
~
apeket
q
qxrexy sgy
xm-ptkexy apo`
~ ~
sxm otqjxm.
+8y
+88 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
It was quite spontaneous, and, dont you think, apt. (Letters of Rupert
Brooke 8j8)
Geoffrey Keynes, Brookes friend and editor, translated the passage in a note
as here lies the servant of God, sublieutenant of the British navy, who died
for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks (8).
If Brookes funeral had been a simple and hurried affair carried out by
men who had to embark for the beaches of Gallipoli at :oo +.. the next
morning, Brownes description of the event was a carefully crafted attempt
at myth making. The detailed account of the natural abundance around the
gravesite intentionally calls to mind Brookes involvement with the neopa-
gans.
1
Neopaganism was at least partly based on a desire to return to a pas-
toral Greek way of life, an impression Browne strengthens by those great
pieces of marble, scattered remnants of antiquity, which add a touch of
Winckelmann to a grove of Theocritus. Those slabs also contain a bit of
irony, as during his life Brooke had found his version of pastoral Greece in
Polynesia, not on the shores of the Mediterranean.
After the poets English friends had established a classical Brooke, the
Greek interpreter, we are informed, took a pencil and created another
Brooke, a philhellene who died ghting to free Constantinople. In Brownes
text, it reads as a touching, spontaneous act by the only Greek present. Curi-
ously, although the Greek wrote in his native language on a wooden cross
with a pencil in the middle of the night, Browne could give a precise tran-
scription of the Greek text in his letter. Was there some discussion, either at
the graveside or earlier, about what should be written in Greek on the cross?
If so, was the Greek interpreter serving mainly as a translator rather than as
an author? To whom were these words really directed?
Not to the local Greeks, one assumes. The message in pencil on painted
white wood would be hard to read immediately after it was written and was
probably illegible within days. Both the marble fragments and the inter-
preters message on the cross were intended, to use the words of Henry
James, to link Brooke, like Byron, for consecration in the nal romance,
with the islands of Greece (Rupert Brooke y). The language and the
author of the lines on the cross provided the bona des that the Greeks
thought of Brooke as a philhellenic hero, a somewhat dubious proposition.
In his Roumeli (+:), Patrick Leigh Fermor reported that the inhabitants
of Skyros were not sure of who Brooke was although they were proud of
his presence on the island (+y).
2
The Greeks, who would not join the war
on the side of the Allies until ++y, had serious misgivings about the libera-
tion of Constantinople by an expeditionary force whose stated goal was to
leave the Golden City in the hands of the Russians.
3
The Byronization of
Brooke was an exclusively English enterprise, a kind of philhellenism with-
out Greeks.
4
c o s ++ + r o r r r , o t a s ++ a +8
Given the aura of Byron that had pervaded writing about modern Greece,
it was perhaps too much to ask a group of aspiring young authors not to asso-
ciate a fellow poet who had died of a fever on the eve of an assault against the
Turks with the hero of Missolonghi. Yet, as Robert Liddell soberly observed,
the link between the poet of England and a Greek isle seems more than a
bit anomalous: For any other poet it [Skyros] would be a most fortunate
place of burialnot perhaps for Rupert Brooke, as it makes his most famous
poem a little silly. Can we think of this corner of Skyros as forever Rugby?
(Aegean Greece :). It is, of course, ironic that Byron and Brooke died in the
service of opposing causes. Byron went to Greece to struggle against the po-
litical order and cultural values of which Britain was a part, while Brooke
died in the service and was posthumously offered to the British public as the
prime representative of, to use the phrase of Kipling, all we have and are. If
Brooke had perished on the Western front, or any place other than the
Aegean, it is fairly safe to assume that no one would have attempted to make
him the new Byron. But on Skyros, with Missolonghi just beyond the hori-
zon, it was almost impossible to think sanely. In D. M. Thomass novel Lady
with a Laptop (+y), the hero notes, Later the Greeks made a marble tomb
[for Brooke on Skyros], and on it theres his famous sonnet which starts If I
should die, think only this of me. That theres some corner of a foreign eld
that is forever England (:+:). Skyros could become forever Rugby.
In the same month that Brooke died, Wyndham Lewis published a piece in
the avant-garde journal Blast entitled Constantinople Our Star, which
began: That Russia will get Constantinople should be the prayer of every
good artist in Europe. And more, immediately, if the Turks succeeded in
beating off the Allies attack, it would be a personal calamity to those inter-
ested in the Arts (++). Some of the benets of a Russian Constantinople
would be probably the best Shakespeare Theatre in the world at this gate of
the East along with such amenities as week-end bungalows in Babylon, a
long white independents exhibition on the shores of the Bosphorus, and
endless varieties of Cafes, Gaming-houses, Casinos, and Cinemas (++).
The rest of this satirical sketch focused on the lack of an organized intellec-
tual life in England and the wretched English sense of humor. In this piece,
Lewis ridiculed the inated rhetoric surrounding the contemporary Gal-
lipoli campaign, a campaign that in turn exploited the millennarian dreams
about Constantinople and the long-held philhellenic belief about a revival of
the classical Greeks.
Lewis may not have been serious when he concluded: Let us keep our
eyes xed on Constantinople (++). But others were, and that included, not
counting Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbs, nearly every Greek and foreign
philhellene.
5
These latter two groups certainly were not praying that Russia
should gain control of the Golden City. The liberation of Constantinople
+o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
from the Turks had always been the ultimate goal of the great unnished
struggle for Greek independence (McCarthy I.+). In +8o, two years be-
fore the treaty establishing the Greek state was signed, Charles MacFarlane
depicted a Greek in Constantinople yearning for freedom in The Armenians:
A Tale of Constantinople. In +88, Elizabeth Edmonds wrote in her poem
Fair Athenae that Greeces love-longing eyes forever turn toward Con-
stantinople. Throughout nineteenth-century writing in English about
Greece, Constantinople was indeed our star.
6
In Mary Shelleys Last Man, the sign of Greek victory was to be the plant-
ing of the Grecian standard on the height of St. Sophia (+), and the
restoration of the famous church became a symbol not only of the liberation
of the city but also of the regeneration of the Greek race and, by extension,
Western civilization. In a curious case of historical amnesia, the fate of the
center of the Orthodox faith, which had closed Platos academy in j: cr, be-
came a sacred cause for those who had caught the fever of Hellenism by read-
ing that same Plato. In The Present Position of the Greek Nation (+8y),
Edward Augustus Freeman said, The hearth and home of the Greek nation
is the Church of Saint Sophia. Till the worship of the Eastern Church again
goes up within its walls in the tongue of Chrysostom and Photios, the Greek
nation must still be looked on as strangers and pilgrims in its own land ().
Prior to the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of +:o+::, no mod-
ern Greek ever dreamed of reconstituting Athens as the permanent capital of
the Greek world. . . . Not to the Parthenon of Athens, but to Santa Sophia in
Constantinople did his mingled emotions of religious and political greatness
yearn with a burning zeal (Morgenthau, I Was Sent to Athens ++).
Such statements presented something of an ideological dilemma for phil-
hellenes, as the Acropolis also had a claim to be the hearth and home of the
real Greek race, and its liberation was to have ended the period in which
Greeks were strangers in their own land. In ++:, Joseph Conrad wrote: I
cannot imagine that most democratic of kingdoms desiring a capital other
than Athensthe very cradle of democracy, matchless in the wonders of its
life and vicissitudes of its history (Future of Constantinople +). In her
novel The Grasp of the Sultan, Demetra Vaka Brown attempted to address
this problem. Athens, says a Greek patriot in Constantinople, is without
soul. It is Greece in body, in form; but the soul is here. When that is free, the
Acropolis will come to lifenot before (+8). In Compton Mackenzies
South Wind of Love (+y), set during World War I, the main character, a c-
tional representation of the author, suggests that Constantinople and parts of
Asia Minor were crucial to the long-awaited Greek resurrection: If the
Turks are driven out of Europe and pushed back into the interior of Asia
where they belong, and whence they should never have been allowed to
emerge, why then Greece can be her complete self again (8oj). Greeces
true self, for Mackenzie and other foreign philhellenes, was the pagan past,
c o s + + + r o r r r , o t a s + + a ++
and they sought a revival of classical rather than Byzantine civilization. How
a Greek Constantinople would revive the Hellenism of Athens was never
clearly addressed. Most philhellenes simply accepted the logic, or illogic,
that the way to bring life back to the Parthenon lay through Constantinople
and St. Sophia.
7
In the rst two decades of the twentieth century, Vaka Brown, a native of
Constantinople, transferred the romance of Greek liberation to the Golden
Horn with her novels The First Secretary (+oy), In the Shadow of Islam
(+++), and The Grasp of the Sultan (++y), all of which are set in Constan-
tinople before the beginning of the Balkan Wars.
8
The last of the three is the
more traditional philhellenic romance, in which an English hero, in this case
a tutor to the sons of the sultan, rescues a Greek from the Turkish rulers
harem. The woman is a Cretan who as a baby had somehow survived a fall
from cliffs when her mother had committed suicide to escape Turkish sol-
diers. Once again, the Greek female personies the nation; a Greek who
has dedicated himself to the national struggle describes the heroine: She
is Greecethe noblest partthe daughter of ever-rising, ever-struggling
Crete (:yj). Her liberation is taken by the same patriot as symbolic of the
fate of the Golden City: And here, within sight of the Parthenon, she is
freed from Musulman shacklesshe is a living emblem of Greater Greece
a forerunner of the destiny which is Constantinoples some day (:8). At
the end of the book, however, the living emblem of Greater Greece is on her
way to France and has agreed to marry her British rescuer, which makes her
fate resemble that of the Elgin marbles. But as with other versions of the
romance, Vaka Brown is more interested in exciting sentiment for the cause
than working out the details.
9
In the Shadow of Islam is a more interesting version of the Greek romance,
in part because it speaks directly about a historical development within
Turkey that threatened the Hellenic dreams of a Greek Constantinople. In
his novel Paul Patoff (+888), F. Marion Crawford has a resident of the Ot-
toman capital tell his American visitors: To you Franks we are a nation of
robbers, murderers and thieves, we are the Turkey of Byron, always thirsting
for blood, spilling it senselessly, and crying out for more (:+). In +o8,
however, a movement called the Young Turks took power, forced Sultan
Abdul Hamid to abdicate the following year, and promised that it would
enact constitutional reforms, which would bring the Ottoman lands into the
modern world. In reaction to this news, as George Burgin put it in a c-
tional expos of the Young Turks, The Man Behind (+:), Sanguine but in-
experienced Englishmen immediately announced that Turkey was about to
cast off the fatalism of the ages and reform itself (:j). In reality, according
to Burgin, the Young Turks were the worst of the Ottomans and rufans of
the deepest dye (++).
10
In Barry Unsworths more recent novels, Pascalis
Island (+8o) and The Rage of the Vulture (+8:), the events of +o8 were
+: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
depicted as the end of the Ottoman era, but this was rarely the case in ction
written in the rst two decades of the twentieth century.
Vaka Browns novel appeared at a time of debate in the West over the real
intentions and designs of the Young Turks, and her purpose, like Burgins,
was to show that the Turks were incapable of reform. The major Turkish
character, the Oxford-educated Orkhan, is introduced as a dreamer and
an idealist. He had believed that all those in the cause of Young Turkey had,
like him, one aim, the making of Turkey into a country just to all her sub-
jects (). But when faced with the reality of such principles, Orkhan
reveals himself to be a despotic Oriental who cannot conceive of equality for
non-Turks or freedom for women. Orkhan asserts, Turks and Turks alone
must rule (::), and the mere fact that he wanted a woman was sufcient
reason that she should become his (+j). The controlling motif for Turkish
oppression remains sexual domination, and Vaka Browns use of an Ameri-
can heroine, Millicent Grey, and her abduction into a harem is no doubt in-
tended to bring the truth about the Young Turks forcefully home to her
American audience.
Although not a Greek, Millicent has the requisite Praxitelean features of a
heroine of the romance of liberation (+). She falls for the combination of
Orkhans Western idealism and Eastern allure during a visit to an aunt in
Constantinople. She is able to come to her senses and refuse Orkhans pro-
posal of marriage with the help of her Greek friend Elpis, just as American
readers of the novel are helped to see through the Young Turks with the aid
of the Greek author, Vaka Brown.
Vaka Browns view of Greek men in this book is strikingly negative. Elpis
tells Millicent that she will never marry because the available Greeks are
burned-out lamps, and those that are not burned-out are smoking. Every
beautiful emotion which God has given them to cultivate through life, is
forced and wasted in ten years. . . . That is why we are the race we are today.
We inherit the hellenic dreams which have kept our race alive for so many
centuries, in spite of conquests, but we do not receive our fathers strength to
turn dreams into action (++8; see also :oo:o+). Her own brother is a luke-
warm Greek through much of the book, although near the end he dies in an
attempt to rescue the abducted Millicent from the palace harem.
If English-speaking audiences were presented with a Greek woman offer-
ing a positive view of Greek men by Julia Dragoumis, then with Demetra
Vaka Brown that same audience heard an insider present a rather severe cata-
logue of their faults. The difference between the two writers might have
something to do with their personal experiences. Vaka Brown not only wrote
a version of the romance of liberation, she lived one. In her autobiography,
she says that her move to America, where she met and married Kenneth
Brown, was made to avoid an arranged marriage, referred to as the usual
c o s + + + r o r r r , o t a s + + a +
fate of a Greek girl . . . and the worst thing that could befall one (Child of the
Orient +j).
11
Vaka Brown, a Greek patriot who championed the cause of
Greater Greece in all of her works, had serious disagreements with the social
structure of her own people. Like her heroine Elpis, she rejected marriage
into what she saw as a dissipated patriarchal society. Yet in presenting her cri-
tique of Greek society to an American audience, she, unlike Dragoumis,
could be accused of perpetuating a negative stereotype of the Greek male.
With the Greek victories in the Balkan Wars, the recovery of Constan-
tinople changed from a vague dream to an actual possibility. Conrad mused
whether I have lived long enough to see the end of the Eastern question
which has dogged my footsteps from my very cradle? (Collected Letters
j.+:). The anticipation was heightened by an old legend. The assassination
of the Greek king, George I, in Thessaloniki in March ++: brought his son
Constantine to the throne. When John Dos Passos visited Constantinople in
+:+, a Greek told him: You know the legend [about the city], a Constantine
built it, a Constantine lost it, and a Constantine will regain it (Orient Express
::). In ++j, while traveling through a still-neutral Greece, John Reed re-
ported that a Greek soldier said: Sure we want to go to war! We conquer
Constantinople. Our kinghe is named Constantine, and once Constan-
tinople was Greek! You remember? We will go back to Constantinople with
Constantine (+).
But before the Greeks could follow their king into Constantinople, the Allies
landed at Gallipoli in their own attempt to triumphantly recover the city
from Islam. As the troops arrived on the peninsula, Prime Minister Herbert
Henry Asquith declared that the success of the campaign would signify the
death knell of Ottoman domination, not only in Europe, but in Asia. The
mastery of the Dardanelles will pass into other hands. The cross will replace
the crescent on the minaret of St. Sophia (The Dardanelles +o). In Ernest
Raymonds novel Tell England (+::), the young heroes are initially disap-
pointed to learn they will be sent to Gallipoli rather than to France. Their
colonel, invoking the Trojan War, Marathon, and Byrons swim across the
Hellespont (+j), concludes his justication of the expedition: I say the
Gallipoli campaign is a new Crusade. . . . Its the Cross against the Crescent
again, my lads. By Jove, its splendid, perfectly splendid! And an English
cross, too! (+y).
12
Philhellenic language had already been extended to
cover the other Christian peoples of the Balkans. In ++j, by reason of the
same geographical contiguity that had led to the Byronization of Brooke,
that rhetoric also covered patriotic young Englishmen in the service of their
homeland.
Gallipoli eventually found a place not in the literary tradition of philhel-
lenism but rather within what Samuel Hynes has called the myth of the
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Great Warthat a generation of innocent young men, their heads full of
high abstractions like Honour, Glory, and England, went off to war to make a
world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned
by stupid generals. They were shocked, disillusioned, and embittered by
their own war experience, and saw that the real enemies were not Germans,
but the old men who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society
that had sent them to the war, and in doing so separated themselves from the
past and from their cultural inheritance. (War Imagined xii). One of the rst
novels in English to express this viewpoint was A. P. Herberts The Secret
Battle (++), in which the hero serves with distinction at Gallipoli before
being shot for desertion in France.
Near the beginning of The Secret Battle, the troops are threading a
placid way between the deceitful Aegean islands. Harry loved them because
they wore so green and inviting an aspect, and again I did not undeceive him
and tell him how parched and austere, how barren of comfortable grass and
shade he would nd them on closer acquaintance (+:). The isles of Greece
themselves are presented as complicit in a romantic, imaginative outlook,
which will not survive careful scrutiny nor the experience of battle (+j). The
link between the adjectives romantic and Romantic can at times be ten-
uous, but the deceitful Greek islands certainly put both meanings into play,
since romance and Romanticism were part of the cultural heritage from
which the myth of the war desired to separate itself. That most of the
philhellenes of the Greek War of Independence had experienced a similar
disenchantment after their experience of war was ignored. At the end of the
nineteenth century, the ght for Greek freedom had become one of the in-
herited myths connected with the high abstractions told by the old
men. In Raymonds Tell England, Doe, who would die at Helles, remarks,
The romantic genius of Britain is beginning to see the contour of Gallipoli
invested with a mist of sadness, and presenting an appearance like a mirage
of lost illusions (:yo). Within that mirage of illusions were names and
words such as Marathon, Byron, classical ideals, glory, and progress. The
last of these had been closely associated with the concept of the regeneration
of the ancient Greeks after +yyo in particular and through Romanticism in
general. But, as Paul Fussell remarked, the Great War reversed the idea of
progress (Great War and Modern Memory :+). A passage from Jack Ben-
netts novel Gallipoli (+8+) illustrates the contrast of the old and the
modern perspective of the campaign on classic ground: Over there is
Lemnos! Lemnos, Gray, and on those very mountains youre looking at now,
why, more than two thousand years ago, the Trojan War was fought. Think
of the mighty warriors who have fought in this areaAchilles, Nestor,
Ulysses, Hector! And were still ghting here in ++j, murmured Lieu-
tenant Gray. We havent learned much, have we, sir? (:oo). What was
learned in the Great War would have an enormous impact on how Lieu-
c o s ++ + r o r r r , o t a s ++ a +j
tenant Gray and his generation would respond to the Greece of Byron in the
years after the war.
If the contour of Gallipoli was soon viewed within a mirage of lost illusions,
that mirage did not immediately extend to the contours of wartime Greece.
Perhaps the last thing forgotten about the war will be that the King of
Greece was called Tino, Compton Mackenzie wrote in First Athenian
Memories (). The Greek kings nickname was indeed well known, even by
Marcels butler in Prousts In Search of Lost Time: Our butler, for instance,
if the King of Greece was mentioned, was able, thanks to the newspapers, to
say like the Kaiser Wilhelm: Tino? (8). But that knowledge hardly
ranked among the things that most people remembered about the years of
conict; neither Paul Fussell nor Samuel Hynes ever mention Constantine
in their magisterial books about the cultural legacy of the Great War.
13
With
respect to writing in English about Greece during the war, however,
Mackenzie was largely correct. The focus was not on armies and battles but
rather on the confrontation between the pro-Allied Prime Minister Elef-
therios Venizelos and King Constantine, who favored maintaining Greeces
neutrality.
14
When the Great War began, Venizelos urged the Greeks to ally them-
selves with the British and French. King Constantine and Army Chief of
Staff Ioannis Metaxas were a bit more cautious. Unlike Venizelos, they
thought that the Germans had a good chance for victory and, if Greece chose
the wrong side, it could expect to lose territory to both Turkey and Bulgaria.
Another major disagreement was that Venizelos appeared ready to cede some
of eastern Macedonia for promised territory in Asia Minor. The king found
such a deal decidedly less appealing. And, almost from the beginning of the
conict, Britain and France, on the rather specious grounds that they were
two of Greeces guarantors, violated Greek sovereignty with impunity, even-
tually occupying the second city of the country, Thessaloniki, and sending
troops into Athens itself. Yet, Venizelos tacitly supported the Allies and en-
couraged them to land in Thessaloniki even as he informed them that, in the
event, he would have to lodge a formal protest.
In addition, the king had shown himself to be a rather inept constitutional
monarch at a time when the country had a dynamic elected leader. In ++j,
Constantine forced Venizelos to resign, but in the following election the
prime minister was returned to ofce with a substantial majority. Yet just
months later, the king asked for Venizeloss resignation again. The king may
have truly believed that the prime ministers pro-Allied policy placed Greece
in jeopardy, but such open disregard for the will of the people was bound to
cause trouble. Venizelos and his party boycotted the next election as a
protest, which led to a government with a secure base in Parliament but not
in the country.
+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
In September ++, the Greek commander in eastern Macedonia surren-
dered the town of Kavala to the Germans. It is unclear precisely why this
event occurred, but the Germans could certainly point to the fact that there
were British and French troops all over Greece. For Greeks, the matter was
viewed differently, for with the Germans came the hated Bulgarians. The
king and the army ofcers who had opposed Venizelos in order to keep, they
had said, the Bulgarians out of Macedonia, had just handed it over without a
ght. Venizelos, who may have been waiting for such an excuse, left Athens
for Crete to declare a rival provisional government.
Venizelos was not instantly recognized by the Allies as the legitimate ruler
of Greece, although he received various kinds of assistance. As relations be-
tween King Constantine and the Allies worsened, it would have been logical
for the Greek king to seek support in the other camp. Whether he did or not, in
June ++y the British and French moved troops into Athens, forced the king to
abdicate and leave for exile, and restored Venizelos to power in the Greek cap-
ital. Greece, which already had some Venizelist regiments ghting with the
Allies on the Salonica front, now ofcially joined the war on the Allied side.
Greeks were genuinely divided between Constantine and Venizelos. In his
novel Argo (+, tr. +j+), the Greek author George Theotokas said of the
political division in Greece: There were National Venizelists and National-
ist anti-Venizelists, Marxist Venizelists and anti-Venizelist Marxists. And it
was a thousand times easier for a Venizelist Nationalist to reach an under-
standing with a Venizelist Marxist than with an anti-Venizelist Nationalist.
There were men who believed deeply in a republic and yet became fanatical
monarchists to revenge themselves on Venizelos; and vice versa (:8y).
No such split existed among English, French, and American writers, who
were nearly unanimously enthusiastic Venizelists. So popular was Venizelos
in England after ++ that the scholar P. N. Ure warned his audience, we can
not be pro-Venizelos and anti-Greek (). The enthusiasm for Venizelos in
countries opposed to Germany was entirely predictable, since Constantine,
whose queen was a member of the German royal family, was perceived to
favor the Central Powers in the war. But philhellenic Venizelism ran deeper
than the simple adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The strong
liberal tradition of philhellenism had always been rather uncomfortable with
a king in regenerated Greece. Athens was sacred as the fount of world liberty
and representative government. The Greek king, because he was a king, had
almost as much chance as the Turks to gain favor with English and American
philhellenes. In Greek Salad (+j), Kenneth Matthews said that his friend
Gresham was a Venizelist. But he was not a Venizelist for the same reason
that a Greek or even an interested Englishman was a Venizelist. Gresham
hated monarchy; he had, as it were, an a priori hatred of it (+jy).
15
The phil-
hellenic societies in Britain, France, and America operated as propaganda
machines for Venizelos, since, in their eyes, they were defending the real
c o s + + + r o r r r , o t a s + + a +y
Greeks from the non-Greeks.
16
The division between pure Greeks and
mixed Greeks, so prevalent in late nineteenth-century literature, now en-
tered Greek domestic politics and was used almost exclusively for the benet
of Venizelos.
Indeed, Venizelos had been hailed, to use the phrase in Robert Byrons
The Byzantine Achievement, as the one living undegenerate descendant of
Pericles even before the war (:). The rst publication of the Anglo-Hellenic
League, founded in December ++ to remind the English world of the
continuity of the Hellenic race and language; of the merit of modern Greek
literature; of the undying elements in national character; and the extraordi-
nary public spirit displayed by the Hellenes during the vicissitudes of the last
hundred years, claimed that the organization would be nonpartisan in
Greek and English politics (:). Yet shortly thereafter, one of its leading mem-
bers, R. M. Burrows, stated, Venizelos is curiously like the bust of Pericles
by Cresilos in the British Museum (New Greece y8).
17
It is not surprising then, that Burrows viewed Constantines abdication
and Venizeloss return to Athens as a dramatic moment,a glorious mo-
mentfor us Philhellenes, who have had so much hard ghting to do (An-
nual Meeting of the Anglo-Hellenic League +). Not to be outdone by their
British counterparts, the American Hellenic Society published two poems
by Edith M. Thomas, one entitled Who Shall Save Hellas? (the answer
was Venizelos) and another about the departure of King Constantine called
The Freedom of Greece Has Come Once More (in Ferriman, Greece
and Tomorrow j+j:).
Philhellenic writers wrapped Venizelos in the magic force of Byronic leg-
end. On the title page of his book Venizelos (+:o), Richard Boardman
quoted from The Isles of Greece. Venizelos was often depicted as a Cre-
tan klepht for his role in the Cretan uprising of +8y.
18
In the face of nu-
merous Venizelist books, including those by novelists Vincent Seligman (The
Victory of Venizelos, +:o) and Demetra Vaka Brown (Constantine: King and
Traitor and In the Heart of German Intrigue), the king found only one notable
English or American philhellene to speak up for him, Paxton Hibben, an
American with ties to Greenwich Village radicals who served on the editorial
board of the New Masses in the +:os.
19
In Constantine I and the Greek People
(+:o), Hibben attempted to employ traditional philhellenic arguments by
asserting that the Greek king was more democratic, perhaps, than any
monarch of his day () and that Venizeloss faction was supported by ele-
ments to a certain extent not even Greek (8). But a monarch could hardly
seem more democratic than the new Pericles and a half-Danish king with a
German wife more Greek than a Cretan klepht. Hibben himself accurately
predicted what would come from the pens of his fellow writers: They will
blackguard Constantine like a pickpocket and advertise Venizelos as an angel
from heaven (viii).
+8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
If during the War of Independence philhellenes viewed the cause of
Greece as the cause of Europe, then during World War I British intelli-
gence agents in the country, nearly all of whom had caught Hellenic fever,
could view the cause of Greece as the cause of the Entente and foster
dreams of careers as little Byrons. J. C. Lawson wrote of his work in intelli-
gence during the war that it fell into my lot to play a conscious part in the
fashioning of Modern Greek history (:). Lawson reported how he dreamed
of creating a greater Aegean Republic cut loose from mainland Greece,
comprising a region wherein alone survives a pure strain of old Greek
blood; a little world belonging to neither West nor to East, enjoying freedom,
yet not coveting progress as the Western world interprets it (+j+).
20
Greece
was still an area where some Westerners thought that they could actively seek
their imagined perfect state, even in the midst of the universal carnage.
The ction in English written about the Great War in Greece usually de-
pict the adventures of little Byrons who, with maids of Athens by their
sides, save Greece from the new barbarian, the Teutonic Constantine, and as-
sist the patriot, Venizelos. In Joseph Hockings Tommy and the Maid of
Athens (++y), a British captain helps a patriotic Greek girl prevent the be-
trayal of the country to the Germans or, to use the words of the Greek hero-
ine, to prevent Greece being made a slave state to a nation of savages ().
The captain found something romantic about the tales of a modern Maid
of Athens, something that tted with his ideas of the old Greek capital
(). Eventually, the magic force of Byronic legend takes over the heros
mind: John Penrose ceased to be a soldier who had come to Athens to dis-
cover the enemies plan; the spirit of mystery, of romance which pervaded
everything had caused him to forget (j). That same spirit appears to have
pervaded the mind of the author, for Hocking depicts an Athens that tted
with his notions of Byron. Vaka Browns In Pawn to a Throne (++), dedi-
cated to Eleftherios Venizelos, has a similar plot with an American hero who
helps a Greek girl foil Constantines attempt to become an absolute monarch
in the land that gave the world freedom (+j; see pp. 8yo). Julia Drag-
oumiss novel about the Balkan Wars, A Man of Athens (++), was also pro-
Venizelist (see pp. +yyy).
The most famous, and most prolic, of both little Byrons and literary
philhellenes of the day without question was Compton Mackenzie. With
Sinister Street and Guy and Pauline, Mackenzie was already a bestselling au-
thor before he was sent to the Aegean in ++j in the intelligence service. In
the late +:os and +os, he wrote his memoirs of the war, which appeared as
Gallipoli Memories, Greek Memories, First Athenian Memories, and Aegean
Memories.
Mackenzie, like Lawson, was still rmly in the grasp of Byronic legend.
Little did I guess at this date, he wrote, how much of the Greek history I
had learned in school would with myself as one of the protagonists be re-
c o s + + + r o r r r , o t a s + + a +
peated nearly two thousand years later (First Athenian Memories 8). Like
other English philhellenes, he stood rmly with Venizelos, to whom a Greek
in First Athenian Memories refers as the greatest man Greece has known
since the days of Marathon and Salamis (j:). On his rst visit to Athens,
Mackenzie met a young Greek woman who pleaded the cause of Venizelos
and Greater Greece. He imagined that he was listening to Pallas Athene
herself pleading before Zeus the cause of her beloved Greeks. While she
stood there, that glorious young woman, delivering a tirade against the op-
pressors of her country, I was thinking what a heroine of romance she would
make (First Athenian Memories jo). Mackenzies picture of a female Greece
pleading her case before an English Zeus gives pause and suggests that the
tendency to feminize and victimize Greece had not diminished at all from
the time of the War of Independence.
Mackenzie briey presents the Venizelist position in his ++ novel
Sylvia and Michael, in which a Greek-American volunteer kills a Royalist
Greek ofcer who had betrayed western Thrace to the Bulgarians (yyyj).
It also surfaces at times in his secret service novels Extremes Meet (+:8) and
Three Couriers (+:), both of which, like Hockings Maid of Athens, center
on intercepting communications between the German kaiser and the Greek
king. But his most extended ctional depiction of wartime Greece occurs in
South Wind of Love (+y), part of the semiautobiographical series called
The Four Winds of Love. The hero, John Ogilvie, holds the same sentiments
about Greece and Venizelos as his creator. For Ogilvie, the sight of the
Acropolis has the quality of the most intimate experience with a woman
whom he had loved for a long while but whom time and place had never
agreed to surrender to his arms (j). His love of Greece leads him to be-
come an active supporter of Venizelos, who in the book embodies the phil-
hellenic dream of a Greater Greece. He also becomes the anc of a maid of
Athens, suitably named Zoe, who inspires him to recite Byrons poem.
Ogilvie loses his maid of Athens when the Germans torpedo the ship on
which she was traveling to Athens to buy her wedding dress. This romanti-
cized ending solves the complication that the eighteen-year-old Zoe seems in
reality a poor match for an accomplished English playwright approaching
middle age. Ogilvies love of Zoe, admiration for Greece, and zeal for
Venizelos suffer no disillusionment in the course of the novel; his ercest
criticism is reserved for the ineptitude and narrow-mindedness of the
British military bureaucracy. As he prepares to depart from Greece, Ogilvie
asks another Greek maiden, whose brother had been killed on the Macedon-
ian front: May not patriotism be a false god when we worship it with human
sacrices like a Moloch? (8o). She replies:
You only wonder that now because you are weak after your illness, and
heavy at heart from your loss. Surely when we sacrice to patriotism
:oo r u v a o

s s n + n o w
we sacrice to the best part of ourselves. What is patriotism except an
ideal conception of a country which expresses all that is best of the in-
dividuals who together make it a nation? . . . When I think of Leo
lying dead at Doiran I do not think of my brother as the boy with
whom I played and laughed through childhood, I think of him as a
fragment of Hellas won back from the barbarians who have been del-
ing her for centuries. Without war she would now be dead. (8o)
No expression of the myth of the Great War nor deconstruction of the
big words can be found in this passage. Given that South Wind of Love was
written after Robert Gravess Good-Bye to All That, Siegfried Sassoons
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Robert Aldingtons Death of a Hero, and
Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms, one can read Mackenzies book as
an attempt at a revision of earlier accounts of the war. And Mackenzie specif-
ically uses Greece and a Greek maiden in his response. At one point in
Mackenzies novel, someone asks the hero: What would Byron sing of
Greece today? (). The answer that Mackenzies book provides, one must
think intentionally, is just a slightly different version of the Maid of Athens
legend along with the scarcely modied sentiments of Childe Harold and The
Giaour. It was as if the Great War had changed nothing at all.
Proust found a more subtle and probing literary use for the confrontation
between Venizelos and Constantine, one that, again, reveals the direction
that English and American authors did not take. Although the two Greek
leaders appear only briey in the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Time
Regained, they represent another version of the central conict between aris-
tocracy and bourgeoisie so important to the novel.
21
King Constantine, of
course, is aligned with the aristocratic Guermantes, especially baron de
Charlus, who tells Marcel that, like most other royal gures, the Greek king
shares both his pro-Germanism and his homosexual tastes: I knew Con-
stantine of Greece very well indeed when he was diadoch, he is a splendid
man. I always thought that the Emperor Nicholas had a great affection for
him. Of course I mean to imply nothing dishonourable. Princess Christian
used to talk openly about it, but she is a terrible scandalmonger. As for the
Tsar of the Bulgars, he is an out-and-out nancy and a monstrous liar, but
very intelligent, a remarkable man. He likes me very much (+:o:+). The
baron is in the tradition of Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna (8y),
and it was that very tradition that had provided Constantines father with the
Greek throne. But as Charluss nephew says, The age of the Congress of
Vienna is dead and gone (:88), and the social upstarts, like the Verdurins
and Brichot, are waiting for the hour of Venizelos to strike (:+:o; see also
Madame Verdurins comments on :y). Proust created something more il-
luminating than a collision between a Greek patriot and a tyrannical barbar-
c o s + + + r o r r r , o t a s + + a :o+
ian; he employed the confrontation between leaders in Greece as a metaphor
for the changes in politics and society at home in France.
One of the last and most innovative of the Byronic romances in English
from the period of the war is Vita Sackville-Wests Challenge; the novel was
written from May ++8 to November ++ but not printed until +:. The
book is a roman clef about the authors tempestuous affair with Violet Tre-
fusis grafted onto a tale of a rebellion of a Greek island, Aphros, from Herak-
leion, a ctitious Greek state that has won its independence from mainland
Greece.
22
Sackville-West had never been to Greece before she wrote Chal-
lenge, so the Greek setting of the story was chosen, at least in part, to suggest
the veiled lesbian love behind the affair of the cousins Julian and Eve, mem-
bers of a prominent English merchant family in the Levant. Eve eventually
betrays Julian and his attachment to the cause of liberty for the island of
Aphros because she does not want to share her lover with anyone or anything.
In his introduction to the +y edition, Nigel Nicolson dismissed the po-
litical plot with the comment that a young Byronic Englishman is not likely
to have seduced the loyalty of a bunch of Greek islanders from their parent
state (+o). This was, however, exactly what a number of young Byronic
Englishmen, such as Mackenzie and Lawson, were attempting to do during
the war. The rebellion in Challenge can be read as a reection of the division
between Constantines preeminence on the mainland and Venizeloss control
of Crete and the islands in ++++y. In fact, the territories of Greece and
Herakleion in the novel reect the actual geographic division between the
areas of the Royalists and Venizelists.
The history of the ctitious Herakleion is, however, suspiciously like the
history of modern Greece; independence was declared in +8: and the rst
premier after the secession from Greece died in +8+, just like the rst
president of Greece (o+). On an ideological level, then, the freedom of
Herakleion from Greece might be read as the liberation of the modern Greek
state from the burden of its Greek past. Whether Sackville-West intended
such a reading is not made clear in the text. But the central theme of the novel
is the desire to be rid of all oppression and constrictions, whether political,
social, or sexual.
Challenge is, as far as I know, the rst romance of liberation that decon-
structs the idea of Greek irredentism. A Tory Englishman in the novel scoffs:
free peoples. Too many, too many. He adds that Herakleion, already broken
away from Greece, is now not even a chip. Only a chip of a chip. To which
his companion says that the island of Aphros wants to be a chip of a chip of
a chip (j). Ironically, the book was nished at a time when the authors hus-
band, Harold Nicolson, was advising the British government to create a
Greater Greece after the war.
23
Ironically again, where J. C. Lawson advo-
cated an Aegean republic because only there alone survives a pure strain of
:o: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
old Greek blood, Aphros and its neighboring islands are ancestrally more
Italian than Greek, for the archipelago of Hagios Zacharie had, centuries be-
fore, been swamped by the settlements of colonizing Genoese (y+) and speak
their own Italianate Greek patois. It is tting that one of the last romances of
Greek liberation written before the Asia Minor Disaster of +:: depicts an
attempt to fracture rather than unify the Greek world. But the struggle for
freedom in the novel is still not depicted ironically; rather, it is noble even in
failure. Challenge is still a romance of liberation and its hero, as Nicolson ob-
served, a young Byronic Englishman.
The battleeld might have been absent from most books about wartime
Greece, but the country had its share of troops and ghting. The second
largest Allied army was centered at the Greek city of Salonica, or Thessa-
loniki. Curiously, however, the word Greece is rarely found in titles, nor does
it gure prominently in the texts of books written by veterans of the army of
the Orient. By their own accounts, they served in Salonica or Macedo-
nia; see Seligmans The Salonica Side-Show and Macedonian Musings, H.
Collinson Owens Salonica and After, Lakes In Salonica with Our Army,
Days Macedonian Memories, and Macleods Macedonian Measures. The in-
habitants of the region are often referred to as Macedonians, who are de-
tached from the conict and did not seem to mind what happened, one way
or another (Isabel Hutton ). That Macedonia was not considered an inte-
gral part of Greece is made clear by Harold Lakes comment: I do not want
to ask whether Macedonia should be returned to Greece or left in the hands
of some other power. I have no suggestions to make about boundary lines or
treaties after the war (:y). During the Great War, the region around Thes-
saloniki appeared, at least to Hugh MacDiarmid, as a Greece that is not yet
Helas [sic] (Letters +).
Unlike Gallipoli, the Macedonian campaign did not nd a signicant
place in literature in English about the war; writers, even those who served
there, seemed to accept that the enterprise was something of a sideshow to
France. Vincent Seligman said of his service in the quartermaster corps of
the army of the Orient that in every way [his] adventures were unsatisfac-
tory and unromantic (Salonica Side-Show ++j).
24
The only signicant Eng-
lish artistic works inspired by the Salonica front were the paintings of camp
life in the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere by Stanley Spencer.
Hynes noted that the spirit of the paintings is comradeship, kindness, car-
ing, and love, and in the landscapes there is a kind of pastoral innocence, as
though news of the death of landscape on the Western front had not yet
reached the outskirts of Macedonia (War Imagined +).
Few Greeks would see the Macedonian campaign in that light, especially
after +:. Stratis Myriviliss Life in the Tomb, whose rst edition appeared
in that year, is, according to its translator, the single most successful and
c o s ++ + r o r r r , o t a s ++ a :o
most widely read novel in Greece since the Great War (Bien xiii). In outlook
and subject matter, it resembles A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western
Front, and Parades End, books of the late +:os that dened, if they did not
create, our current memory of the Great War. Since Myrivilis was not trans-
lated into English until +yy, he had little impact on how the war in Greece
was perceived by those abroad.
The most interesting piece of ction in English from the Salonica front is
probably Richard Harding Daviss last short story, The Deserter (++y), in
which three American reporters covering the Macedonian front dissuade an
American serving in the British ambulance corps from deserting and going
home.
25
Their main argument is that the deserter, an aspiring author, would
not be able to write about his experiences in the war because of public shame
at his desertion. The deserter, hungry and half-frozen, suggests that warm,
well-fed men cannot understand his situation. In the end, he reluctantly re-
turns to the front, telling the reporters they can all go to hell (y). Davis
raised questions about the role of honor and service while still upholding
them. Now, when such famous American novels about the war as Dos Pas-
soss Three Soldiers, e. e. cummingss The Enormous Room, and Hemingways
A Farewell to Arms all have deserters as heroes, Daviss story reads like one of
the last, failed attempts by one of the old men to salvage some of the prewar
values. Whether Davis himself thought that it would be easier to salvage
them in a classic land far from the Western front, in hindsight it seems ap-
propriate that he set his story where the death of landscape and civilization
had not yet, in foreign eyes, found its way.
On October +y, ++8, the Daily Telegraph published on its front page a trans-
lation by Rudyard Kipling of the Greek national anthem, originally written
during the Greek War of Independence by Dionysios Solomos. The begin-
ning and ending are given below:
We knew thee of old,
Oh divinely restored,
By the light of thine eyes
And the light of the Sword.
From the graves of our slain
Shall thy valour prevail
As we greet thee again
Hail Liberty! Hail! . . .
Yet, behold now thy sons
With impetuous breath
Go forth to the ght
Seeking Freedom or Death.
:o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
From the graves of our slain
Shall thy valour prevail
As we greet thee again
Hail, Liberty, Hail!
(Verse )
It is surely one of the oddest pieces in the Kipling corpus. And the timing, at
rst glance, seems rather strange. Why was Kipling translating Solomos in
the last months of the Great War?
The poem was part of an effort by philhellenes to attract attention to
Greece and its territorial ambitions before and after the Versailles confer-
ence.
26
From ++j to +:: the number of philhellenic pamphlets and articles
produced was surpassed in quantity only during the Greek War of Indepen-
dence. The Anglo-Hellenic League alone printed fty-two pamphlets, while
the American Hellenic Society added another eighteen. Nearly all of them
echoed the language of the previous century. In an essay of +:+ entitled
The Resurrection of Greece, +8:++:+, Harold Spender asserted that
the present war in Asia Minor was only one act in the great drama of Greek
emancipation which began precisely one hundred years ago (+j:). The rst
publication of the American Hellenic Society announced, The day is at
hand when Hellas will take the part that by right belongs to it in that struggle
for grand ideals pursued by noble nations of the world (in Gauvin xi). Edith
Thomas encouraged Greek Americans to do their part by reminding them in
verse that there still resides in you / A Klephtic spark that can be blown
again (Ferriman, Greeceand Tomorrow j:). Beaumont reported to the
Daily Telegraph from the frontlines in Asia Minor in +:+: The Greeks are
always Greeks. These of today are the same as the Greeks of old. In ghting
their hereditary ancestors they seem to have caught the spirit of their ances-
tors (Greek Campaign in Asia Minor +). And T. P. OConnor, a member of
Parliament for Ireland, stated: One thing is by this time settled in the mind
of all Europe, that, so far as Europe is concerned, there is no policy for the
Turks but the old Gladstone policy of driving them out of Europe, bag and
baggage (introduction to Greece before the Conference xxii).
Looking back on the postwar years in +, T. S. Eliot noted that the
period immediately following the war is often spoken of as a time of disillu-
sionment: in some ways and for some people it was rather a period of illu-
sions (Criterion, vol. +8, p. :y+). For philhellenes, it was clearly a time of
illusions from the prewar era. The possible resurrection of Greece once
again lled a psychic need for some in Western Europe during a period of
stress, and the activity of philhellenes for Greater Greece was in part a desire
to nd hope and promise in a world that seemed lost. As Bourdon put it, If,
on the morrow of the fall of Turkey, the Greeks of Constantinople had again
possession of St. Sophia, which belongs to them, a great sign would sud-
c o s ++ + r o r r r , o t a s ++ a :oj
denly illumine the black sky with light and the oriental problem would have
been simplied (:).
27
Kiplings translation of the Greek national anthem was, then, a transla-
tion of several kinds. It was, at the basic level, a translation into English of a
text from the time of the Greek War of Independence. It was also an attempt
to translate the philhellenic spirit of that time to the twentieth century, as
well as to suggest that the regeneration of Greece, and by extension civiliza-
tion itself, were nally at hand. And it was an assertion that the prewar, nine-
teenth-century world still existed; the very language of the translation tries
to make such a case with its consistent archaisms (light of thine eye, be-
hold now thy sons). Kiplings own involvement in the enterprise was itself
part of the Romantic association of Greek freedom and English poetry.
Kipling had never been previously connected with the cause of Greece, but
as one of Englands most popular writers, his translation would honor the
spirit of Byron and generate attention. That the conservative Kipling, who
had close ties to the Tories, made the translation shows how far the Greek
cause had drifted from its liberal/radical origins.
Kipling may have been attered to be asked by Demetrius Caclamanos,
the Greek minister in London, to be a new Byron for a day.
28
Yet certain
phrases of the poem suggest that Kipling might have felt a kinship to the
philhellenic enterprise, like behold thy sons and the graves of our slain.
Kiplings only son had been killed at the battle of Loos in ++j, and two years
later he was appointed to the Imperial War Graves Commission, where he
remained a member for eighteen years, and was responsible for every in-
scription used by it (Birkenhead :y:). Kipling was one of those to whom
Hynes has referred as monument-makers (A War Imagined :y); he, like
the middlebrow writers discussed by Bracco, sought a meaning and continu-
ity after the war that resisted the ironic interpretation of the modernists
(). Philhellenic writers, as the passages above demonstrate, also resisted an
ironic interpretation of the conict just past. However it came about, the
connection between Kipling and the Greek national anthem was in many
ways a perfect tone of the old men speaking up for one of the old causes.
The old men made the peace. Venizelos succeeded beyond expectations in
achieving Greater Greece. By the Treaty of Svres in +:o, Greece obtained
territory in western Thrace and Asia Minor, while Greek troops entered
Smyrna, Adrianople, and even Constantinople itself as part of the Allied
Military Occupation. Charles Woods wrote in the Fortnightly Review in +:o
that the Hellenic kingdom now stands to secure, in proportion to its size,
practically as great if not greater, territorial advantages than any other coun-
try engaged in the war (jy). Clearly, part of Greeces success at the confer-
ences was due to the fact that it had, however belatedly, entered the conict
on the winning side. Yet the Greeks were also rewarded for being Greeks, be-
cause, as Vincent Seligman said in ++, the debt we owe to the priceless
:o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
civilization of Ancient Greece is immense (Salonica Side-Show ). In pay-
ing that debt and in aiding the Greeks in the nal chapter of their regenera-
tion, the West would also fulll, to use the words of Valentine Chirol in ++,
one of the great opportunities for the betterment of the world (:). Or, as
Anthony Gibbs sardonically put it, The statesmen of the world, feeling
some slight changes were necessary, if for no other reason than to avoid the
uncomfortable conclusion that a few million dead had been unintelligently
disposed of, presented the city [Smyrna] with some surrounding acres to our
friends the Greeks (+).
In +888, the novelist F. Marion Crawford had proleptically written of the
Turks: It was not possible . . . that such men could ever be really conquered.
They might be driven from the capital of the East by overwhelming force,
but they would soon rally in greater numbers on the Asiatic shore (Paul
Patoff j). In ++, the Turks were driven from the capital of the East by
the Allies and, in the next year, from much of the coast of Asia Minor by the
Greeks. As many scholars and diplomats realized at the time, the allocation of
Smyrna to Greece was economically impractical and potentially dangerous.
The American Commission on the Peace reported: To give her [Greece] a
foothold upon the mainland would invite immediate trouble. Greece would
press her claim for more territory; Turkey would feel that her new bound-
aries were run so as to give her a great handicap at the very start. The harbor
at Smyrna has been for centuries an outlet for products of the central Anato-
lian valleys and upland (Gelfand :j). The trouble started immediately, for
on the very day that Greek troops landed in Smyrna on May +j, ++, riots
broke out in the city, which left about oo Turks and +oo Greeks dead.
29
As
the American commission predicted, the Greek forces, harassed by bands of
Turkish irregulars, pressed for a larger and more defensible boundary.
Within a year, Greece was at war with the nationalist Turks under the leader-
ship of Mustafa Kemal, one of the rst wars to begin after the conclusion of
the war to end all wars.
Now I do not doubt that M. Venizelos is a statesman of great capabilities,
but who says that the Greeks are so particularly eager to have him? Baron de
Charlus asks Marcel (In Search of Lost Time :+:o). The answer, as Proust
knew when he wrote the passage, was that the Greeks were not particularly
eager to have the new Pericles at the helm. In the elections of November
+:o, a Royalist majority was returned to the Greek Parliament. Venizelos
left the country, and King Constantine was recalled to the throne by a popu-
lar plebiscite. Winston Churchill, a minister in the British government at the
time, later said in his history of the First World War that the return of Con-
stantine . . . dissolved all Allied loyalties to Greece and cancelled all but legal
obligations. In England, the feeling was not resentment, but a total extinction
of sympathy or even interest. Churchill, who had misgivings about the
c o s + + + r o r r r , o t a s + + a :oy
Greek presence in Smyrna, further commented: For the sake of Venizelos
much had to be endured, for the sake of Constantine, nothing (World Crisis
:88).
30
Britain, France, and Italy suspended all nancial assistance to
Greece after the return of Constantine, which hampered the ability of the
Greeks to pursue the war against the Turks. In West to North, Compton
Mackenzie has his ctional alter ego, John Ogilvie, say: I was one of those
who helped to create the notion that after the war we should be grateful to the
Greeks for what they did. But because they brought back their king we are
treating them like naughty children. I think theyre mad to reject Venizelos,
but that doesnt justify refusing them support against the Turkish National-
ists in Asia Minor (+y). The recall of King Constantine to power posed a
problem for philhellenes, since so many of them, like Mackenzie, had demo-
nized him as an enemy of Greece and Western civilization. Still, most sup-
porters of a Greater Greece, including Mackenzie, did not turn against the
idea of Greater Greece when Venizelos left ofce.
31
Mackenzies suggestion that public opinion went against the Greeks re-
veals how far his philhellenism was out of touch with the spirit of the time. In
West to North, Ogilvie laments, It is a bitter thought for a man to discover
that the whole of his energy during the war was a waste of his own time and
of his countrys money. And thats what my years in Greece will be seeming
to me if we allow the Greeks to be thrown out of Asia Minor and Eastern
Thrace (+). Mackenzie, amazingly, somehow failed to realize that nearly
everyone who had returned from France had already discovered that they
had wasted their energy during the war. They were quite willing for Greece
to lose Asia Minor and eastern Thrace as long as it did not involve them. In
the autumn of +::, when Turkish forces confronted British troops at the
Hellespont, it seemed as if Britain would be drawn into the Aegean conict.
The prevailing opinion at home was expressed by the Daily Mail in a banner
headline on September +8, s+or +nrs rw w+a and in A. A. Milnes letter
to the Daily News on October , +::, where he wrote: They have almost
brought it off, the War to End Peace, for which they have been striving for
three years . . . our chosen statesmen, sitting round a table; the same old
statesmen; each with his war memories thick upon him (quoted in Furbank
:.++:).
32
The fact that Lloyd Georges government had brought Britain to
the brink of war contributed heavily to its defeat in the elections held the fol-
lowing month.
In +:y, T. S. Eliot remarked, We have been for nine years reminded, by
the facts and fancies of the press, of the growth of the spirit of nationalism,
of the greater number of nationalities, and the multiplicity of the reasons
which all these nations have for failing to get on with each other. Instead of
few oppressed minorities, the oppressed minorities seem to be almost in a
majority, instead of a few potential Sarajevos, we seem to have dozens. . . .
Not how Europe can be freed, but how Europe can be organized, is the
:o8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
question of the day (Criterion, vol. , p. y). In his novel A People Betrayed,
Alfred Dblin agreed that there were now dozens of potential Sarajevos.
Meanwhile the many small nations and states oundered about, especially
those who had just been called to life by the fourteen points. With what sav-
agery these homunculi carried on. . . . The Czechs did battle with the Poles
over the mining areas of Cziezyn, the Yugoslavs and the Rumanians [sic] de-
manded the same region of Banat. Wonderful old Venizelos was enchanted
by Constantinople and Asia Minor and wanted to have them, plus Cyprus,
Thrace, and Northern Epirus, they all seemed so Greek to him, and after all
he was the only Greek at the Conference and he ought to know (:). In this
passage we hear what Paul Fussell has termed the dominant tone of the
world, and literature, after the Great Warirony. James Joyce, master iro-
nist, punctured the political aspirations of the small nations, Byronic phil-
hellenism, and Romantic nationalism in general, with just six words in
Finnegans Wake: Meed of anthems, here we pant (+). His words depend
upon, and underscore, how Byrons Maid of Athens had become a
metaphor for liberal nineteenth-century nationalism.
A. A. Milne did not oppose Greek irredentism in Asia Minor because he
was at heart pro-Turkish; he was rather, like most of his generation, antiwar.
The Greco-Turkish War of +:o+:: was the rst conict of Greeks
against Turks since the War of Independence began in +8:+ in which, it
seems, no battalion of foreign philhellenes fought beside the Greek army.
The entire notion of volunteering to ght for the liberation of Greeks in Asia
Minor had changed by the end of the Great War. For the same reason, no
writer of note under the age of thirty composed a poem in the manner of
Fleckers Ode to the Glory of Greece, written less than a decade earlier. If
someone had, it would not have escaped the prevailing sense of irony.
The Greeks initially had success against the Turks; by August +:+ they had
advanced to within forty miles of the Turkish capital of Ankara. There they
reached the limit of their energy and resources. The Greek army made a
short retreat to winter lines, and the two combatants uneasily faced one an-
other for a year while various attempts were made to end the conict by diplo-
matic means. On August :, +::, Kemal and the Turks launched an offen-
sive against the southern ank of the Greeks. After a day of stiff resistance,
the Greek forces simply dissolved and ran for the Aegean coast. The Turkish
army covered the :oo miles to the Mediterranean shore in about two weeks.
33
On September , the Turks entered the city of Smyrna. For a few days
there was relative calm. On September +, the Armenian quarter was set
ablaze. When the smoke cleared, the Armenian, Greek, and European sec-
tions of the city had been destroyed. Dakin estimates around :j,ooo Greeks
and Armenians were killed (Unication of Greece :). Another :oo,ooo were
crammed by the shore without food or water, hoping that they might some-
c o s ++ + r o r r r , o t a s ++ a :o
how nd a means of escape. The majority of these were eventually trans-
ported to Greece, never to see their homes again.
34
Hellenic Smyrna was
dead. Christian Smyrna, too, one of the great ancient Christian foundations
of Asia Minor, was dead. The phoenix that was to rise from these ashes was a
Turkish Izmir purged of two thousand and more years of history (Michael
Llewellyn Smith, ++). With Smyrna, the dream of a regenerated Greece
with a liberated Constantinople was also purged. Greece lost more than the
territory it had gained by the Treaty of Svres. It also lost what had been an
integral part of its national identity at home and abroad.
Eileen Gregory suggested that modernists such as Eliot and Pound saw
the Great War within a paradigm of the Trojan War and with Aeschyluss
Oresteia, especially Agamemnon, as the central text. It was, she said, the story
of the aftermath of a devastating war, in which military violence and sacrice
of innocence are brought home with the hero (:). If the years between
++8 and +::, during which the Greeks seemed about to realize their
dreams of a Greater Greece centered in Constantinople, appeared to sepa-
rate modern Greece from the wasteland of modernity in France and Eng-
land, then the retreat of the Greek army and the million and a half Greek
refugees streaming across Asia Minor and eastern Thrace to escape the vic-
torious Turkish army in the summer and autumn of +:: brought Greece
squarely into that barren landscape. As one journalist covering the evacua-
tion of the Greeks from eastern Thrace put it: All day I have been passing
them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind-bitten soldiers hiking along the trails
across the brown, rolling, barren Thracian countryside. No bands, no relief
organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitoes
at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of
their second siege of Troy (Dateline: Toronto :j). Ernest Hemingway, in
this dispatch to the Toronto Star, inserted the Greek retreat into the contem-
porary Aeschylean paradigm of the war. The disaster in Asia Minor was not
only the end of the second siege of Troy, it became, quite literally as we shall
see, the last event of the world In Our Time.
8
On the Quai at Smyrna
In +, just four years before his death, John Dos Passos published The Best
Times, an informal memoir. In the book, he gave a vivid account of an inci-
dent that he says occurred when he was in Constantinople during the sum-
mer of +:+ to report on the war between the Greeks and the Turks. His de-
scription of the event takes up half of the space that he devotes to his stay in
the city:
A grubby little war was going on in Asia Minor. Our Admiral Bris-
tol was trying to make what sense he could of a senseless business. I
remember relinquishing my prejudice against brass hats enough to
think highly of Admiral Bristol. He felt if the news could only be
published in the American newspapers somebody might try to do
something to stop it. I managed to get aboard a destroyer he sent off
with a batch of correspondents to interview the refugees.
One port on the Sea of Marmara was crowded to the waterline
with desperate Greeks, men, women, and children, whose villages had
been burned by the Turks. Another was stuffed with Turks in the
same plight, only it was the Greeks who had done the raping and
maiming and murdering. They all begged to be taken aboard. At any
moment they expected the enemy to march in and nish the massacre.
The irony was that the Greeks and Turks and their pathetic women
and crying children all looked so much alike it would have taken a lin-
guistic expert to tell them apart.
The skipper didnt have the orders and there wasnt room anyway
on a World War I destroyer, so we had to leave them to their fate. We
sat with pale faces in the wardroom while the narrow ship lurched
through the cross seas at twenty-ve knots on the way back to Con-
stant. It was not only the pitching and tossing that had turned our
stomachs. (+:)
:+o
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + :++
Dos Passos never took such a trip. The meticulous diary of the American
high commissioner in Constantinople from ++ to +y, Admiral Mark
Lambert Bristol, contained the following paragraph in the entry for July :o,
+:+:
1
Mr. John R. Dos Passos, an American press representative, called
by appointment. He is here writing stories for the New York Tribune
and for the Metropolitan Magazine. He said he would like to go to
Anatolia, to Angora, and I told him I would assist him in any way pos-
sible. However, I suggested he stay here for a while and become ori-
ented. He quite agreed to this idea and then stated that he was think-
ing of going to Rodosto where the refugees from Ismidt are now
located. I told him that I thought it would be better for him to go to Is-
midt where these refugees came from and get a proper background for
a visit to Rodosto. Also to Yalova and Guemlik where the Greeks had
murdered and burned the Turkish villages; and then visit these
refugees where they are now located in and around Constantinople. I
suggested that he might then write one story bringing out the sav-
agery of both the Greeks and the Turks against each other. Mr. Dos
Passos liked this idea.
Dos Passos could not have seen the refugees huddled on the shore awaiting
rescue, since, as Bristols comments clearly indicate, the refugees had already
been removed from their villages. The admiral suggested that Dos Passos
visit the ruined villages before interviewing the refugees, which would have
made a much less dramatic tale than the one that Dos Passos eventually wrote.
There is no evidence that Dos Passos ever made the visits that Bristol rec-
ommended. They certainly do not occur in the reports that he led in +:+
nor in the travelogue of his trip based on those dispatches from the Near East,
Orient Express, published in +:y. It appears that Dos Passos constructed the
account of the boat trip in his memoirs of + from his conversation with
Admiral Bristol in +:+.
2
Why did Dos Passos invent such an incident?
The answer, in a single word, is Hemingway, who had gone to Constan-
tinople about a year after Dos Passos to cover the end of the Greco-Turkish
War. Indeed, a reader asked to identify the author of the passage in The Best
Times would probably, and justiably, respond, Hemingway. As Herbert
Schneidau said, Hemingway made ironic laconism a salient feature of his
art (+8y), and the same technique is central to the account of the boat trip in
The Best Times. In Dos Passoss Orient Express, the language of a passage in
which a Greek archbishop announces to a group of foreign correspondents
that the Greek population has been given just three days to leave the city of
Samsoun contains just a touch of irony without laconism:
:+: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
The archbishops full lips are at the rim of his tiny coffee-cup. He
drinks quickly and meticulously. In ones mind beyond the red plush
a vision of dark crowds crawling inland over sunshriveled hills. The
women were crying and wailing in the streets of Samsoun, says the
ofcer. The news must be sent out, continues the archbishop; the
world must know the barbarity of the Turks; America must know. A
telegram to the President of the United States must be sent off. Again
in ones mind beyond the red plush, and the polished phrases of of-
cial telegrams, the roads at night under the terrible bloodorange moon
of Asia, and the wind of the deles blowing dust among the huddled
women, stinging the dark attentive eyes of children, and far off on the
heat-baked hills a sound of horsemen. (++)
Notice the ornate and vague adjectives throughout the passage, such as
sunshriveled hills, bloodorange moon, dark crowds, and huddled
women. These are absent from the account of the boat trip in The Best
Times, as they are from the following paragraph from Hemingways story
On the Quai at Smyrna from the volume In Our Time (+o):
The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all
their baggage animals they couldnt take off with them so they just
broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those
mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It
was all a pleasant business. My word yes a pleasant business. (+:)
Dos Passos signals the dominant status of Hemingways text for writing
in English about events in postwar Asia Minor by implying that he had expe-
rienced Hemingways version of the Greco-Turkish War a year before Hem-
ingway ever set foot in Constantinople.
In his book about the Asia Minor Disaster in Greek ction, Thomas
Doulis wrote that the Greco-Turkish War of +:o+:: was important
only for Turkey and Greece. Though it may have changed somewhat the
power structures of the Balkans, the Near East, and the Eastern Mediter-
ranean, this effect had little more than local signicance. For the two nations
in question, however, the war was of decisive importance (:). The last sen-
tence is undoubtedly true. The rst needs qualication, if not rejection.
Doulis himself went on to say, The events of +:: have entered the English
language as the Asia Minor Disaster, a phrase used interchangeably with
the Smyrna Disaster (). The Smyrna Disaster is the rst event in mod-
ern Greek history after the Greek War of Independence to have a secure
place in English literature and language; the text that canonized it was Hem-
ingways On the Quai at Smyrna. And, as the passage from Dos Passos
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + :+
above suggests, in English the phrase the Smyrna Disaster referred not sim-
ply to a historical event but also to a style of writing and a particular postwar
perspective.
If the literary world still, to borrow the words of Philip Gibbs, knows the
tragedy of Smyrna, the burning of that fair city and the cry of agony that
went out to sea above the re (Little Novels of Nowadays ), it is because In
Our Time holds an important place in the study of modern ction. Just as the
Greece of Byron resonated in subsequent writing, so has the Smyrna of
Hemingway. In his novel Blood Dance (+) James William Brown had the
heroine describe the scene at the harbor of Smyrna:
And there was screaming. As if the people wailed and keened for
Smyrna which was dying. It tore from thousands of throats as the
people stretched their hands to the departing ships.
And screamed. (y)
The passage clearly evokes the opening of On the Quai at Smyrna:
The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed at midnight. I do not
know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all
on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the
searchlight on to quiet them. That always did the trick (++). Even the dis-
patches that Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star in +:: have become part
of the canon of writing about the war. In A Byzantine Journey (+j), for ex-
ample, John Ash ended a brief account of the Greco-Turkish War of
+:o+:: with a single quotation designed to encapsulate the experience of
the refugees, explaining that we can gain some idea of the situation in
Bithynia from rsthand accounts in nearby Thrace, written for the Toronto
Star by a young reporter named Ernest Hemingway (+).
The Colossus of Maroussi, a key book in the construction of post-Byronic
Greece, also acknowledged the central position of Hemingways brief story.
Henry Miller asserted:
The Smyrna affair, which far outweighs the horrors of the First
World War or even the present one, has been somehow soft-pedaled
and almost expunged from the memory of present day man. The pe-
culiar horror which clings to this catastrophe is due not alone to the
savagery and barbarism of the Turks but to the supine acquiescence of
the big powers. It was one of the few shocks the modern world has
suffered. . . . And so long as human beings can sit and watch with
hands folded while their fellow-men are tortured and butchered so
long will civilization be a hollow mockery, a wordy phantom sus-
pended like a mirage above a sea of murdered carcasses. (+y:y)
:+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
The wordy phantom suspended over Millers passage, as it was sus-
pended over both Dos Passoss boat trip in The Best Times and the quotation
from Browns novel above, is Hemingways story, right down to the sea of
oating carcasses: You remember the harbor. There were plenty of nice
things oating around in it. That was the only time in my life I got so I
dreamed about things (On the Quai at Smyrna +:).
3
Miller, however,
added an admonitory message not found in Hemingways text. The point of
On the Quai at Smyrna, as well as In Our Time as a whole, is that civiliza-
tion really has become a hollow mockery. Or, as Edward Whittemore later put
it in his novel Nile Shadows (+8), Meaning, sir? Meaning? Pardon me, sir,
but in a world at war youre actually looking for meaning? (). Who could
be better used to make the point than the descendants of the creators of civi-
lization, the Greeks, coming home from their second Trojan War?
On the Quai at Smyrna, rst added to the text of In Our Time in +o as
An Introduction by the Author, was not given its current title until +8.
4
But the Greek defeat in Asia Minor had a crucial role in the text of In Our
Time through its various mutations from the appearance of the vignettes or
interchapters without the short stories in the +: in our time to the edition
of +o with the description of the harbor at Smyrna. E. R. Hagemann, ob-
serving that the events in the vignettes can be dated between ++ and +:,
said that Hemingway has reconstruct[ed] a decade . . . the Great War and its
aftermath, which Hagemann called the experience of his [Hemingways]
generation (j:). Robert Slabey concurred, stating that there were two
major sequences in the vignettes, World War I and the Greco-Turkish War
(yy). In his rst volume, therefore, Hemingway stressed the two events that
opened and closed the critical decade of his generation. The message to be
gleaned from the book was, as Hagemann observed, that there is no peace
In Our Time (y), a sentiment Hemingway also expressed in his poem
They All Made PeaceWhat Is Peace? about the Lausanne conference
that followed the Greek defeat in Asia Minor.
T. S. Eliot once wrote: Only from about the year +: did the features of
the post-war world clearly begin to emergeand not only in the sphere of
politics (Criterion, vol. +8, p. :y+). Hemingway suggested that the features
of the postwar world came into view a few years earlier, with the retreat of the
Greeks from Asia Minor. Edward Whittemore, undoubtedly inuenced by
Hemingways formulation, also thought that the Asia Minor catastrophe,
and particularly the destruction of Smyrna, opened a new era. In the rst
volume of Jerusalem Quintet, Sinai Tapestry (+yy), he wrote: Right at the
beginning of the new century, thats when it was. Right after the world of the
Strongbows and Wallensteins had died in the First World War. It couldnt
survive the anonymous machine guns, their world, and the faceless tanks and
the poison gas that killed brave men and cowards equally, the strong and the
weak all the same, the good and the bad all together so that it no longer mat-
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + :+j
tered who you were, what you were. Yes their world died and we had to have a
new one and we got it, we got our new century in ++8 and Smyrna was its
very rst act, the prelude to everything (:y8o). This passage is the best
argument that I know for the reason that a piece eventually called On the
Quai at Smyrna could, in +o, serve as a tting introduction, a prelude to
everything, for a volume of stories entitled In Our Time.
Why did Hemingway, who spent less than two weeks in Constantinople in
the autumn of +:: and who did not see the destruction of Smyrna, grant
such a prominent position to the Greco-Turkish War almost from the out-
set?
5
What Hemingway saw and heard on his trip to the Near East validated
his own experience of the war in Italy. Samuel Hynes noted that at the end of
the Great War, the soldier was seen as a victim, and if entire armies could
be imagined composed of such victimsif indeed every army was an army
of martyrsthen Victory too must fade from the story, and become only a
long catastrophe, with neither signicant action nor direction, a violence that
was neither fought nor won, but only endured (War Imagined :+j). In Hem-
ingways writing about the Greco-Turkish War, nearly everyone is a victim,
from the Turkish cart driver senselessly murdered by Greek troops in
Thrace, to the Greeks slaughtered by the Turks on the quay at Smyrna, to
the animals mutilated and thrown into the bay by the Greeks. In his accounts,
we are not given signicant action nor direction, simply endured violence.
One of the prime characteristics of the Asia Minor Disaster in English
writing was the elision of national identities. In a dispatch from the front,
Hemingway reported that the landlady in a eabag hotel in Adrianople saw
no difference in the various ethnicities in the region:
I wont care when the Turks come, Madame Marie said, sitting
her great bulk down at a table and scratching her chin.
Why not?
Theyre all the same. The Greeks and the Turks and the Bulgars.
Theyre all the same. She accepted a glass of wine. Ive seen them
all. Theyve all had Karagatch.
Who are the best? I asked.
Nobody. Theyre all the same.
(Dateline: Toronto :j+)
Dos Passos, in the passage that opened this chapter, said the various
refugees looked so much alike it would take a linguistic expert to tell them
apart. The Greeks, Turks, and Bulgars, of course, could tell one another
apart, and to them the differences were quite meaningful. But for Heming-
way and Dos Passos, the key to understanding the postwar Near East ran
through the Western front. When every soldier and every civilian could be
seen as a victim, national identities seemed insignicant. Anthony Gibbs
:+ r u v a o

s s n + n o w
described the arrival of Greek troops in Smyrna as a mirror image of the de-
struction of the city by the Turks in +::: The Greeks seized the opportu-
nity to get rid of their age-old oppressors by the simple process of bayonet-
ting as many of them as could be induced to submit to the operation and
pushing them off the quayside into the sea (+).
The people with the most to lose by the elision of nationality were the
Greeks, who for more than a century had had a special place in the eyes of the
West. Clare Sheridan, another journalist in Constantinople in the autumn of
+::, reported that the Turkish leader, Hamid Bey, told her: The Acropolis
cost the Turks a great deal. Public opinion always went to the Greeks on ac-
count of the Acropolis (West and East +:). The Great War leveled such dis-
tinctions; after ++8, as Madame Marie said, the victims were all the same.
Hemingway appears to have viewed the Greek defeat as a quintessential
Great War scenario, such as he had portrayed in his +:: poem To Good
Guys Dead:
They sucked us in;
King and country,
Christ Almighty
And the rest.
Patriotism,
Democracy,
Honor
Words and phrases.
They either bitched us or killed us.
(Complete Poems y)
According to Hemingway, the Greek soldiers were thoroughly fed up and
becoming conscious that they were going into battle to die doing a cats paw
job (Dateline: Toronto :). In a dispatch entitled The Greek Revolt, a
Captain Wittal tells Hemingway that the Greek soldiers were rst-class
ghting men. . . . I believe they would have captured Angora and ended the
war if they had not been betrayed by their ofcers and government (Date-
line: Toronto :). The dying narrator of The Snows of Kilimanjaro
echoes that sentiment when he recalls that the Greeks made the attack with
the newly arrived Constantine ofcers, that did not know a goddamned thing,
and the artillery had red into the troops and the British observer had cried
like a child (+).
6
Hemingway said near the end of The Greek Revolt:
That is the story of the Greek armys betrayal by King Constantine. And
that is the reason the revolution in Athens was not just a fake as many people
have claimed. It was the rising of an army that had been betrayed against the
man who had betrayed it (Dateline: Toronto :j). The crucial decade recon-
structed in In Our Time ends chronologically with the execution of the cabi-
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + :+y
net ministers responsible for the defeat of the Greek army, the ultimate re-
venge of all the armies of young who had been betrayed by the old men
at home.
7
Hemingway was not the only one whose attention was caught by
the treatment of the Greek political leaders; Kenneth Matthews noted, The
executions shocked Europe; it was considered a dangerous precedent that
soldiers should come back from a war and shoot the people who had crimi-
nally caused it (Greek Salad +:- ). But in In Our Time even the revenge of
the soldiers became hollow, since it entailed shooting an old man with typhus:
They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of
water. The other ve stood quietly against the wall. Finally the ofcer told the
soldiers it was not good trying to make him stand up. When they red the rst
volley he was sitting in water with his head on his knees (j+). This subtly
connected the minister with the description of the corpses oating in the
water at Smyrna that, after +o, opened the volume.
What Hemingway failed to stress was that the revolution in Greece in No-
vember +::, which led to the second abdication and exile of King Constan-
tine in addition to the execution of six ministers of the Royalist government,
was led by a group of Venizelist ofcers. It was not really a Great War sce-
nario, a rising of an army against the man who had betrayed it, but, as
Clogg noted, a raising of the stakes in the venomous feud between the
Venizelists and the Royalists (Concise History of Greece +o+).
8
The Greek
king in the Envoi of In Our Time, who the revolutionary committee . . .
would not allow to go outside the palace grounds and who thought that the
great thing in this sort of affair is not to be shot oneself (+jy), is Constan-
tines eldest son, George II. George took his fathers place in November +::
only to be forced to abdicate and leave the country himself in December +:
after the failure of a Royalist coup against the revolutionary committee of
Venizelist ofcers. Venizelos, who returned to Greece and became prime
minister again in +:8, exchanged roles with King George II in +j. After
the Royalist party won the election of +:, the Venizelists attempted coups
of their own in + and +j. Venizelos was forced to leave Greece again
after the last of these, which led to the restoration of King George II after
twelve years abroad. Viewed from within Greek history, the execution of
ministers in +:: was not a generational struggle of an army of the young
versus the old men at home. It was not even the end of the story but rather
one more move in a bitter partisan dispute that continued throughout the
period between the wars.
For Hemingway, though, Smyrna was not a Greek event but a symbol
of the world in our time. As part of this strategy, as Jeffrey Meyers said,
Hemingway deliberately excluded all the political background of the
Greco-Turkish War and objectively reported only the immediate event in
order to achieve a concentration and intensity of focusa spotlight rather
than a stage (:). One could, and Greek writers certainly did, position
:+8 r u v a o

s s n + n ow
Smyrna and the Asia Minor Disaster within a specically Greek political and
historical framework. In the preface to the translation of Ilias Veneziss Aeo-
lia, one of the rst Greek books about life in Ionia to be translated into Eng-
lish (+), Lawrence Durrell said that the waters of Smyrna were choked
with dead bodies. . . . But it is more than the injustice, the cruelty, the mad-
ness of the episode that sticks in the mind of the modern Greek. It is also a
sense of the lost richness, a lost peace of mind. If he is an exile, Durrell
remarked, he returns again and again to Anatolia in his dreams (v).
Veneziss novel carefully recalled the life in Anatolia that was lost and then
covered the evacuation in very few pages. The narrator in Stratis Myriviliss
The Mermaid Madonna says of the refugees: The odd thing was, however,
that for all the readiness with which they described the blessings they had left
behind, it was difcult to get anything out of them about the atrocities they
had survived. When they undertook to relate such things, their eyes became
veiled and their tongues twisted in knots (+). Many Greek writers also
found their tongues twisted in knots when confronting the horrors of the
disaster and like Myriviliss refugees skimmed rapidly over details of this
kind (+y). Foreign eyes were drawn to the very things from which Greeks
had to turn their faces.
The Smyrna of Hemingway is precisely about the injustice, cruelty, and
madness on the quay, because it stands for, to use the words of Clare Sheri-
dan, all the suppurating sores of Europe. The phrase the Smyrna Disaster
entered the English language, as Doulis said, but mainly as a representative
sign for our postwar condition, not as an event in the history of Greece.
Hemingways use of Smyrna as a symbol of postwar chaos resembles that
of Eliots in The Waste Land.
9
In the notes to the poem, Eliot said that a major
theme of part j, and so by extension the work as a whole, is the present
decay of Eastern Europe. One of the Eastern Europeans of the poem ap-
pears in the third section, The Fire Sermon:
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
(+)
Eugenides means well-born in Greek, a description that clashes with the
appearance of the man as unshaven, with a pocket full of currants. But the
irony of the name runs deeper. For an argument was made that the Greeks of
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + :+
Asia Minor should be part of the Greek nation because they were the last di-
rect descendants of ancient Greeks. In his novel Enter the Greek (+:),
which ends with the destruction of Smyrna in +::, Anthony Gibbs echoed
these claims: The Smyrna Greeks are very nearly a pure strain. The Athen-
ian is a mixed breed. . . . But the Greeks of Smyrna, cut off by foreign domi-
nation from intermarriage with any but the Armenian and Israelite, both of
which races they detest and are a little afraid of, have contrived to keep them-
selves Greek. In Smyrna every lady is an Aphrodite and every man an
Apollo (:). And the heros father in the novel is a Smyrniot by the name
of Euxenophilos, which has the Homeric meaning of good friend to
strangers. Despite this name and lineage, however, his son feels he is just a
dago in England.
Eugenides profession might also cast doubt on his connection to the clas-
sical past. In a contribution on Greece for The Balkans (++j), Arnold Toyn-
bee said that the name of Greece has two entirely different associations in
our minds. Sometimes it calls up a wonderful literature enshrined in a dead
language; and exquisite works of vanished art recovered by the spade, at
other times it is connected with the currant-trade returns quoted in the -
nancial pages of our newspapers (+). And the currant trade, whether con-
ducted by Greeks, Turks, or emigrant Italians, was thought to be a profession
for Levantines and mixed breeds rather than a career for Apollos and
Aphrodites. Eugenides business might be a way of signaling to which of the
two entirely different associations of Greece he belongs.
The full political signicance of Eugenides in the poem stems from the
fact that the Greek comes from Smyrna, one of what Eliot termed dozens of
potential Sarajevos created by the Versailles conference. Eliot completed
The Fire Sermon before the catastrophe at Smyrna, so he could use ironic
humor to puncture Romantic reasons to assist the Greeks. After the event,
Hemingway could dismiss such philhellenic rhetoric out of hand.
For Hemingways generation, the Smyrna Disaster was a potent symbol
of the fate of a botched civilization, to use Pounds phrase, so potent that
the single word Smyrna or a brief reference to the disaster conjured up both
banal violence and deep irony. Dos Passos included the following headline in
newsreel 8 of .,.,: oanrarn +o +rrow +rr oarrks +o nrr (USA yo+).
The last line of e. e. cummingss XLI Poems (+:j) reads, but Hassan
chuckles seeing the Greeks breathe) (Complete Poems ++).
10
Given the
common connection between the Trojan War and the Asia Minor Disaster, it
is hard not to see an intended allusion to the disaster at Smyrna in the follow-
ing lines at the end of Pounds Canto XXIII.
And that was when Troy was down, all right,
superbo Ilion . . .
And they were sailing along
::o r u v a o

s s n + n ow
Sitting in the stern-sheets,
Under the lee of an island
And the wind drifting off from the island.
Tet, tet . . .
what is it? said Anchises.
Tethnk, said the helmsman, I think they
Are howling because Adonis died virgin.
Huh! Tet . . . said Anchises,
well, theyve made a bloody mess of that city.
(Cantos +o)
The shared elements in Canto XXIII, On the Quai at Smyrna, and
Hemingways other writing about the Asia Minor Disaster are striking, such
as the references to the Trojan War, the screaming onshore, even the lan-
guage: I had the wind up when we came in that morning. . . . We were going
to come in, run along the pier, let go the front and rear anchors and then
shell the Turkish quarter of the town. They would have blown us out of the
water, but we would have blown the town simply to hell. . . . It would have
been a hell of a mess (On the Quai at Smyrna +:).
11
Pound had written
the lines above before Hemingway composed On the Quai at Smyrna,
but the two authors had taken a walking tour together in early +: after
Hemingway had returned from his trip to Constantinople. One cannot be
sure who has inuenced whom, but what Pounds lines along with the pas-
sages from cummings and Eliot reveal is that Smyrna was already being
used as an allusion for the state of the world in our time by modernists be-
fore Hemingway took it over for himself. He may have been drawn to use it
for that very reason.
In his poem Hypocrite Auteur, Archibald MacLeish stated:
A world ends when its metaphor is dead.
An age becomes an age, all else beside,
When sensuous poets in their pride invent
Emblems for the souls content
That speak the meanings men will never know
But man-imagined images can show:
It perishes when those images, though seen,
No longer mean.
(+j)
If one of the metaphors for the nineteenth-century Romantic world,
which believed in the possibility of human progress, was the revival of the
Greeks and all of the high-minded concepts they represented in the En-
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + ::+
glish and American imagination, then the death of the Greeks could be
used to signal the expiration of that world. MacLeish himself began Invo-
cation to the Social Muse (+:) with the line: Seora, it is true, the
Greeks are dead. The death of the Greeks functioned in modernism to
mark the end of one and the beginning of another era,
12
and the demise of
the philhellenic legacy was employed to this end also, as by Joyce in the
phrase meed of anthems, here we pant. A number of modernists, like
Hemingway and Dos Passos, used the fate of the modern Greeks in Asia
Minor as a metonym for the state of the world after the war. By inserting
references to the Greek defeat of +::, however briey, into modernist
works, these writers ensured not just that the fate of Smyrna and the col-
lapse of Greeces territorial aspirations would not be forgotten but also that
the meaning of its fate was caught up in what might be called the postwar
end of meaning.
Just as Byron was not the only one to write about a Greek revival, Heming-
way was not the only one to write about the horror of Smyrna. Hemingways
perspective did not differ greatly in outlook from most of the others, just as
Byrons verses about a Greek revival in the rst decades of the nineteenth
century were hardly unique in sentiment. A number of descriptions came
from journalists who, unlike Hemingway, witnessed part of the evacuation
from Smyrna. One such account came from Clare Sheridan, who Heming-
way once described as a reporter who smiled her way into many interviews
(Dateline: Toronto :j). Sheridan, Hemingway surely knew, had seen the
lthy water that was stagnant and stinking with rotten corpses of men and
beasts (West and East +jo).
13
In West and East (+:), Sheridan tried to give a wide picture of after-war
conditions throughout Europe, an overview of the world in our time from
Ireland to Turkey. She summed up her opinion: Everything I have ever be-
lieved in is shattered, and has been replaced by nothing very tangible (vii,
xi). Like Eliot, she considered Smyrna an example of the problems to come:
I saw in these refugees not the victims of the Turks, but of the Allied politi-
cal situation. I had visions of Lloyd George leaning over a map on a big table
in a comfortable conference chamber, and pencil in hand deciding that
Smyrna should be handed over to the Greeks. The Smyrna debacle is not the
only one in store. Europe is full of suppurating sores ready to burst, each one
caused by needless post-war politics (+jjy). She also provided a gen-
dered assessment of the disaster and war. Looking upon the refugees at
Smyrna, she remarked: To men there is a certain satisfaction in ghting,
and death is sometimes easier than life. But the fate of women and children is
tragic beyond the conception of statesmen (+jy).
14
She seems not to have
recognized that few of the male writers who had taken part in the Great War
had come away with any sense of satisfaction from the ghting.
15
::: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
For Sheridan, one problem was the complete randomness of human be-
havior. Turks did murderous things one moment, they would be tender the
next. A Turk would stone a man to death in the water, and then throw himself
upon a fallen child and protect it with his body from being trampled at the
gate. The Turks were no worse than any other and not so bad as they might
have been (+jj). Or, in her mind, as bad as the Greeks.
Sheridan saw the Greek civilians as victims of their own people, of the
Greek army that had devastated the interior, who had burned and destroyed
everything (+y). She had a more positive view of the Turks, in part because
she was attracted to their Orientalism; in describing Mustafa Kemal, in the
course of four pages she noted the Oriental in him, his Oriental gracious-
ness, and his perfect Oriental manners (+:).
16
If we can believe
Harold Nicolson, she was attracted to Kemal himself. Nicolson wrote his
wife, Vita Sackville-West, that Sheridan was having an affair with Kemal
Ataturk (Lees-Milne +.+:).
Philip Gibbs, a prolic English popular novelist, had observed the
horror of the quayside at Smyrna and heard the cry of agony which
chilled the soul of the world, which he wrote about in a chapter of Little
Novels of Nowadays (, :+).
17
As his title suggests, Gibbs, like Hemingway,
wanted to provide a picture of the postwar world in our time. Unlike Hem-
ingway, Gibbs provided a programmatic introduction for the reader:
The stories in this book are connected by a thread of plot which I have
followed from London to Moscow and beyond through other cities.
It is a thread woven by the three ugly sisters of fate in the wake of war,
and fastened round the necks of men and women so that they can
hardly escape from the wreckage of hopes in the life of Europe. . . .
Civilization itself is threatened, or, at least in the minds of many men
and women there is a sense of impending downfall. . . . A new world is
coming, with desperate problems and many dangers. My idea in writ-
ing them was to put them in the form of little novels . . . the thoughts
and moods and hopes of Europe as I have seen it lately. (v, viii)
This passage equally serves as a comment on In Our Time and The Waste Land.
Gibbs attempted to paint a broad picture of the European situation by set-
ting his stories in a wide variety of Western and Eastern locales. Miss Smith
of Smyrna is the second story. The heroine is a wealthy, aging British
woman who has spent a lifetime spreading civilized values through hospitals
and schools as a kind of Queen Victoria of the East. She realizes that the
Greek army will evacuate Asia Minor and goes to Athens to appeal to King
Constantine to remove all of the Greek women and children in the area in
order to prevent a massacre. She fails and dies with her schoolchildren when
the Turks set re to the building. But the real culprits, according to Miss
o + n r q t+ r + + s v a + ::
Smith, are the architects of the preposterous treaty, which will cause a
great tragedy hereabouts (8). In exasperation, she asks a British journalist,
Are the British forces coming to defend this unhappy population when the
Greek army is routed, or before? He answers, Our people are for peace, and
sick of war (jy). Miss Smith also learns that there is no peace in our time.
18
West and East, Little Novels of Nowadays, and In Our Time share a large
perspective, but the methods and styles of the rst two and Hemingways
book are quite different. Sheridan and Gibbs tried to put as much as they
could in their volumes, and their presentation, while stressing the horror of
what they saw, lacked biting irony. At one point Gibbs asked, Are modern
novelists and story writers to go on recording the little love tales of highly
strung ladies and introspective men and leave the terrible condition of the
world on one side because it frightens them? Or they nd them too big for
their imagination? (viii). But Gibbs, on the evidence of his own book, had
only the language and structure of those same little love tales to employ in
telling of the collapse of the world, so his stories do not offer a new approach
to writing about the postwar era. Hemingways language is as stripped down
as his selection of material, and it is laced with the ironic temperament of the
times. It is Hemingways style that stands out, and that style made Smyrna
and the Asia Minor Disaster part of literature.
Some years after the disaster, a few attempts were made to place Smyrna
within the Byronic literary inheritance. Philhellenic writing had survived de-
feats in the past, and there were some writers who had not yet realized that
the Great War had changed the perception of Greek wars of liberation. One
such author, as we have already seen, was Compton Mackenzie. At the end of
West to North (+o), the fth and nal volume of his Four Winds of Love
series, Mackenzie sent his hero back to Mileto, a city on the Asia Minor
coast, to help in the evacuation of Greek refugees. It is one of the least inter-
esting passages in the series, due largely, one suspects, to the fact that
Mackenzie had no personal experience of the event upon which to draw. It
simply provided John Ogilvie with another chance to voice pro-Greek senti-
ments and rant at the failure of the British to back their allies with force: Im
in a state of depression about the small nations. The Greek debacle has dealt
me a tragic blow (o8). Mackenzie attempted to reclaim Smyrna for the
philhellenic tradition by placing it within a nineteenth-century, rather than a
postwar, paradigm. For example, he consistently relied on Disraelis policy
of supporting the Turks to explain the debacle, and he charged the Labour
party with Tory notions of the Levant: But one might have known, his
hero laments, that the pro-Turkish party in England would be too strong for
Lloyd George (::).
19
Anthony Gibbss Enter the Greek (+:) is a more curious Smyrna novel.
For most of the novel, Tony Sutherland, the son of an English mother and a
:: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Greek Smyrniote father, tries to hide his Greek heritage as he pursues a career
as a successful playwright in London. Only at the end, during a stay on the
French Riviera, does his race memory return, as well as literary tastes from
his youth, linking Romantic writing and the ght for Greek freedom: There
came to mock him a vision of himself as the worlds perfect lover, as something
a little nineteenth centuryas Percy Bysshe, as Charles Algernon, as Byron
Byron . . . Byron. . . . The Turks were coming down on Smyrna (:y+).
Sutherland has a yacht take him to Smyrna, now in ames and with a
massacre on the quays (:8y). The captain refuses to approach shore, so
Sutherland takes off his clothes and swims to join his compatriots in death.
We are, it seems, meant to approve Tonys Byronic end, but, aside from the
awakening in Tony of race memory, it has no practical purpose. For liter-
ary history, however, it is tting that a hero who is a little nineteenth century,
who admires Shelley, Swinburne, and Byronphilhellenic writers alldies
at Smyrna, where the idea of Greek regeneration went up in ames.
It was possible to view Smyrna and the entire Asia Minor war as something
other than a disaster; the Turks always have. For them, the day of the critical
Greek defeat in Asia Minor was called byk gn, the great day, and the war is
called the War of Independence. As far as I am aware, it was not until +j:,
when Ann Bridge (Mary OMalley) published her novel The Dark Moment,
that the Turkish victory entered English literature as a great day.
20
If, as
Doulis noted, Smyrna entered the English language as a disaster, it was not
simply because the English and American writers saw events in the Aegean
area only through the eyes of the Greeks. It was also, and perhaps mainly, due
to the fact that the death and defeat of the Greeks validated their postwar
ideas about war and nationalism. Smyrna could only be the rst act of the
new age if it were looked at from the side of the losers.
The Turkish romance of liberation in ction differs curiously from its
Greek counterpart. In both Bridges The Dark Moment and Catherine
Gavins The House of War (+yo), American women fall in love with the
heroic Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the Turkish army and effective head of
the Turkish state. Kemal is depicted as a tting mate for a Western woman;
he is certainly not the sensuous Oriental nor lustful Turk of earlier novels. In
both novels, Kemal is not simply winning a war but embarking on a project to
turn a primitive oriental country into a twentieth century one (Dark Mo-
ment y). Although Bridge conceded, Smyrna was an ugly business (:),
The Dark Moment celebrated the fortitude of the Turks in overcoming both
the Greek threat to their national sovereignty and their Ottoman past. Nei-
ther Western heroine can marry Kemal at the end; the fragile Turkish state
demands that its leader not have a foreign wife.
Gavins House of War places the conventions of the Greek romance of lib-
eration side by side with her heroines involvement with Mustafa Kemal.
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + ::j
Evelyn Anderson, left by her estranged journalist husband, Jeff, in Ankara,
becomes the lover of Kemal. Jeff, on assignment in Constantinople, renews a
relationship with a Greek from Smyrna with the Byronic name of Leila
she is a cabaret singer and Jeff has taught her to sing Maid of Athens,
which is quoted several times in the text (+y, :o). Leila is killed as Jeff
attempts to take her from Smyrna during the disaster. She is stabbed not by a
Turk but by an uncle who wants to use her transit pass. Both Gavins and
Bridges novels were published after the Second World War, when relations
between Mediterranean men and Western women were far more common
than in the decades before the conict. It is worth noting that in neither book
is there even a suggestion of a relationship between a Turkish woman and a
foreign man. Gavin depicts King Constantine as a fool and his generals as
inept. The one Greek whom Kemal loathes and slightly fears is, of course,
Venizelos (). But unlike the Turks, who let their leader take them into the
twentieth century, the Greeks sent their great man into exile. Still, there are
no novels in which an English or American woman falls in love with the great
Cretan. Modern Greece was still female, but modern Turkey, when it nally
came to be considered, took a male form.
In a key moment between Evelyn and Kemal, the American woman
speaks of the support for the Greeks abroad: Youre up against a whole cen-
tury of prejudice. Ever since the British got excited about the Greek War of
Independence, theyve thought of the Greeks as heroes, like Hector and
Achilles. Kemal responds: While we were what their Lord Bryce called
usthe unspeakable Turk.
I wouldnt know about Lord Bryce, said Evelyn, but I know you
cant buck Lord Byron. Hes the one who put it into immortal poetry.
The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece,
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung.
Thats it you see. Thats what all the Philhellenes are crazy for.
(8)
Lord Byron is that with which both Kemal and Gavin, with her pro-Turkish
perspective, perceive they have to contend. As late as +yo, it still seemed
necessary to buck Lord Byron.
For writing about modern Greece after +::, Smyrna was indeed, as Edward
Whittemore said, the rst act, the prelude to everything. In the story On
the Balcony, Patrick White commented that an aging woman uncon-
sciously . . . divided her life into Before and After the Catastrophe. Her
:: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
world, the real tangible world, had ceased with Smyrna, and the best she
could do was chase back a melancholy reection of reality on to the face of
life (+:). It was precisely the opposite for writing about Greece in English;
authors were nally confronted with the real tangible world now that the
pretense was gone that somehow, when one ventured into the world of mod-
ern Greece, one entered the era of +8:+. The disaster became a benchmark in
later literature to situate readers in a post-Romantic Greece.
In Louis MacNeices poem The Island, the time-worn baker / Burnt
out of Smyrna, smokes his hubble-bubble (Collected Poems o). MacNeice
may be giving us details of a real baker; there were a million and a half
refugees in Greece after +:j, and in certain areas they made up more than
half of the population. But he is also placing his baker, and the Greek island
of Ikaria that he visits, in a historical chronology, which we as readers are
supposed to understand. Signicantly, the baker is the only Greek on the is-
land identied in such historical terms. The slim and silent girl who
gathers salt from the sea crags and the tall woman who strides out of
Homer over the pine-needles, mule droppings, / Holding a distaff may ap-
pear close to the baker in the text, but they are outside the contemporary
geography and history that includes the time-worn baker (o). All Mac-
Neice needed were the words burnt out of Smyrna to bring the real tan-
gible world of postdisaster Greece into his poem.
Smyrna is the rst event, chronologically, in novels such as Vaka Browns
Blood Dance and Edmund Keeleys The Libation. Hero Pavloussis in Patrick
Whites The Vivisector commences the story of her life by saying simply:
After the Catastropheat Smyrnawe escaped to Chios (:). Hero,
like the characters in the other books mentioned, does not attempt to de-
scribe the prelapsarian world in Anatolia. Smyrna functions as year +
of a new age.
21
It is hard to imagine a more anticlimactic event than the centenary of Byrons
death at Missolonghi in +:. The following passage from a speech upon the
occasion by Demetrius Caclamanos in London underscores the oddity of the
ceremonies: I think that this audience will be pleased to hear that in addition
to the Commemoration Celebrations, it is proposed that one of the small
towns around Athens, in the progress of construction for establishing
Greeks from Asia Minor, should be named after Byron. It will be called By-
ronea. Its streets will be named after Byrons friendsThomas Moore, John
Murray, Hobhouse, Shelley, Trelawny, and it is only too natural to think that
there will also be a Maid of Athens street (8). The man who had dreamed
that Greece might be free now would be honored by giving his name to a
town full of those forced from their homes by the Turks. Irony, as Fussell
said, was the dominant mode of expression after the Great War.
o + n r q t+ r + + s v a + ::y
The Greece of Byron, as it had been understood for a century, had effec-
tively come to an end two years earlier. As if in recognition of the end of an
era, the Anglo-Hellenic League managed to publish but a single pamphlet in
+: and, after another slender issue the following year, ceased publication
altogether. Greece, which was still coping with the aftermath of a domestic
revolution and the assimilation of a million and a half refugees, was under-
standably distracted and exhausted. Harold Spender reported to the Anglo-
Hellenic League after his visit to Greece for the ofcial ceremony in Misso-
longhi, The Byron centenary was the cause of political demonstrations in
the Balkans, but many weary British would not have greeted those remarks
with enthusiasm.
That weariness was clearly revealed in the number of English and Ameri-
can authors who passed over the Byron centenary in silence. Spender (Byron
and Greece) and Harold Nicolson (Byron: The Last Journey), two prewar
philhellenes, published volumes honoring the event. Nicolson began with a
revisionary note: I have discarded the legend that Byron went to Greece in-
spired solely by philhellenic enthusiasms, or that his sojourn in Missalonghi
was anything but a succession of humiliating failures. After that note of
caution, Nicolson went on to assert that, if Byron accomplished nothing at
Missalonghi but his own suicide . . . by that single act of heroism he secured
the liberation of Greece (ix). And the dedication of the book to Eletherios
Venizelos demonstrates clearly that Nicolsons attitudes were formed before
the disaster.
22
If Greece needed time to assimilate the defeat of the army and the arrival
of the refugees, then literature also needed time to assimilate the end of
Greek regeneration and to rethink the place of Byron in the canon. Anthony
Hecht perceptively noted that when in +8 Paul Muldoon came to make
his selection of Byrons poetry for the volume The Essential Byron, he in-
cluded none of the poetry that had been admired by Byrons contempo-
raries, and focused instead on what we might call the modern Byron. He
went on, correctly, to say that W. H. Auden dened this modern Byron for
us (+y:).
Surveying Byrons oeuvre, Auden commented that, after Beppo, The Vi-
sion of Judgment, and Don Juan, and what is left of lasting value? A few lyrics,
though none as good as Moores, two adequate satires, though inferior to
Pope and Dryden, Darkness, a ne piece of blank verse marred by some
false sentiment, a few charming occasional pieces, half a dozen lines from
Childe Harold, half a dozen lines from Cain, and that is all (Don Juan
). As Hecht observed, this excludes nearly all of the works that made the
poet famous in the nineteenth century, particularly Childe Harold, the Orien-
tal Tales (+y:), and, of course, most of the passages that had made Byron the
poet of Greece.
::8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Audens Byron was closer in spirit to Pope and Dryden than to Romantics
like Keats and Shelley. In +8, Auden asserted that Byrons distinctive
contribution to English poetry was to be, not the deant thunder of the rebel
angel, but the speaking voice of the tolerant man-about-town (George
Gordon Byron 8). This is the Byron whom Auden addresses in Letter to
Lord Byron in Letters from Iceland (+y). Auden said, I want a form thats
large enough to swim in / And talk on any subject that I choose, but Byrons
connection to Greece is not a topic in the poem, although political views
come in at the end of part :, where, four stanzas apart, Auden wrote that
suggestions have been made that Hitler would have appealed to the Ro-
mantic poet as being the true heir to the Byronic but also that Byron
might indeed / Have walked in the United Front with Gide (Collected
Poems j). As Richard Davenport-Hines noted, Auden did not start writ-
ing to Byron until the European world faced a series of crises: in March the
Germans retook the Rhineland; in May the Italians annexed Ethiopia; and in
July the Spanish War began (+o). Auden may have felt the need to talk to the
poet who tamed the Dragon by his intervention as he himself wrestled
with how he should react to news from Spain and elsewhere, for he points out
that he and Byron lived in different ages: In modern warfare, though its
just as gory, / There isnt any individual glory (). Auden may have wanted
to recreate Byron as a man about town to justify his own behavior in that
year of crisis.
The modern Byron did not transport easily to Greece. One need only look
at a poem of Audens friend and collaborator on Letters from Iceland, Louis
MacNeice, written after a visit to Missolonghi. Cock o the North begins
as a satirical ballad, which promises to rewrite the Byron myth:
Bad Lord Byron went to the ring, helmet and dogs and all,
He rode and he swam and swam and he rode but now he rode for a fall;
Twang the lyre and rattle the lexicon, Marathon, Harrow and all,
Lame George Gordon broke the cordon, nobody broke his fall.
(Collected Poems :+)
MacNeice depicted Byrons stay in Greece in +8: as a series of humiliating
and inept episodes in a tone that at times sounded a bit like Byrons own let-
ters, and he proceeded to blast at the sugary lies that the golden age is
coming back. But one is not quite sure whether, at the end of the section,
the line Spring and Greece and gloryand Easter tooare coming (:+)
and the refrain Christos aneste are part of the sugary lies or an indication
that Byrons sacrice somehow changed these satirical notes to heroic.
The second section offered perhaps the most accurate description of
Missolonghi in English poetry. It opened: The attest place, it seems, in
Hellas. A bad dream (::). MacNeice claimed that you would never guess
o + n r q t + r + + s v a + ::
/ From Greece who Veeron was, but he did not effectively explore this
theme, and some of the verse seems uninspired (And miles behind, away, /
Byron while shooting a duck felt groping in his liver /The ames of Six Mile
Bottom, :: ). The last two sections, which dealt with the poets death,
strengthened the analogies to the fates of Meleager and Christ. This devel-
opment tended to reverse the deconstruction of the Byron myth in the rst
two sections. It is never quite clear what the connection between Meleager
and Byron is supposed to signify, beyond geographical contiguity in western
Greece. The Scottish dialect in the last section hardly helps matters, as in
these lines:
I ew like a bumblin moth to the lure
O the gutterin lamp o Hellas.
(:)
D. B. Moore said of this part that, though some of it is clever, it lacks
conviction, and as poetry it remains pedestrian (+j). The same could be
said for the poem as a whole.
One reason for that might be that MacNeice himself, like his poem, was
caught between the two versions of Byron. On the one hand, he had collabo-
rated with Auden on a new poetic movement within England, one that con-
tributed to the creation of the new Byron. On the other hand, he had been
appointed director of the British Institute in Athens in +jo because, accord-
ing to his biographer Jon Stallworthy, who could be more appropriate
given Byrons place in modern Greek mythologythan a well-known
British poet with a classical education? (y). It might have been hard to de-
construct the Byronic myth with Missolonghi so near.
Byron did not disappear from English and American writing about Greece in
the years after the war. Visitors were still quoting his poems in travel books,
23
And novels with a foreign philhellene in the happy hunting ground of adven-
ture saving a Greek girl from a barbarian still appeared with some regularity.
But after the Great War and the catastrophe in Asia Minor, it had no place in
the changed circumstances of the eastern Mediterranean nor in the modern
mentality of Western writers. It could exist only as an anachronism. In Dora
Bradfords Greek Fire (+j), an English heroine is kidnapped by brigands
driving a car from Marathon to Athens, as if the fateful Dilessi tragedy in
+8yo could be reenacted in the +os. Denis Meadowss The Greek Virgin
(+y) had to resort to a ctional island where Greeks could still rebel against
the oppression of a Turkish pasha who, the author carefully noted, is not a
friend of Kemal and Turkey. A space for the romance of liberation would
reappear in the years of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War
(++), when foreign philhellenes with their maids of Athens could
:o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
confront Nazis or Communists, such as in Mary Richmonds Maid of Athens
(+8) or Winston Grahams Greek Fire (+jy).
By then, however, literature had embraced a different idea of Greece. The
Greek defeat in +:: created, for the rst time, a clear divide between the at-
titude of modern authors, here used broadly to include not only Hemingway
and Dos Passos but also Susan Glaspell, Christopher Isherwood, William
Plomer, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Louis MacNeice, Patrick White,
James Merrill, and John Fowles, and popular or middlebrow writers. The
Greece of Byron, although it continued to appear in such works as Jan
Robertss The Judas Sheep (+yj), in which an American philhellene with an
updated maid of Athens opposes the military dictatorship in Greece in +y+,
was now consigned to the latter category. Those writers determined, as
Pound said, to make it new turned away from the Byronic legacy, in part,
perhaps, to separate themselves from the legacy of Romanticism and also
from the popular books with their conventional, middle-class values.
Still, a new perception of Greece was slow to emerge in English and
American literature. One problem for Greece was that modernism was a cul-
tural movement based in and on the concept of cities, particularly London,
Paris, New York, and Berlin.
24
Modern Greece, with a reputation as a rural
Arcadia and with strong Romantic associations, never became an important
site of modernism. In the +:os it passed from being dangerous ground to a
forgotten land. Only at the end of that decade would authors begin to explore
it again.
9
A Hard Place to Write About
The golden ages of ambrosia and brigandage are past. In +j, Kenneth
Matthews, with some exaggeration, announced the end of both the Greece
of Homer and the Greece of Byron (Greek Salad 8). The last klepht be-
came a common theme in the years after the war. For example, on a road in
Arcadia in +, Dorothy Ratcliffe met a grandly dressed Greek. Are you
the last of the Klephts? she asked. No, Kyria, he answered, it is you mo-
torists who are the Klephts today, but unlike the Klephts of yore who robbed
the rich so that they might give to the poor, your passing by does not benet
the poor ().
1
Ratcliffe learned, to her disappointment, that the last klepht
had died about twenty years earlier, just as the Great War ended.
A new conception of Greece, one not based on classical or Romantic
texts, required some contact with the country and its people. Between the
wars, at the time that Paul Fussell in Abroad declared that the Mediter-
ranean was in vogue, Greece, to use E. M. Forsters comment about Cavafy,
was at a slight angle to the universe. For Americans, Greece was the lost
country for both the Lost Generation and the generation after that. Eliot,
cummings, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Moore, and Robert Lowell never saw
the Acropolis. Faulkner spent two weeks in Greece in +jy; Pound and
Langston Hughes visited briey in +j; and Elizabeth Bishop took a cruise
in Greek waters in +y. Edith Wharton sailed the eastern Mediterranean in
+:, yet the only work inspired by that trip was the story set in Crusader
Cyprus, Dieu dAmour (+:8).
Greece had only slightly more literary travelers from Britain in the +:os
and +os. Of Corfu, now one of Greeces most popular destinations,
William Plomer wrote in +: Visitors to the island are not numerous, al-
though it lies on the direct route between Brindisi and Athens, and this is
perhaps because nothing is done to attract them (Child of Queen Victoria
+j+). In Illyrian Spring (+j) by Ann Bridge (Mary OMalley), the heroine
plans to go to Greece but leaves the boat on the Dalmatian coast. Greece for
me is like the end of the rainbow, she says, Its become a sort of bogey, a
mirage ().
:+
:: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Greece became a bit of a bogey for those who went as well. Upon his re-
turn to England in +j+, Louis MacNeice averred: Having lived in Athens
for a year and a half, I nd it a hard place to write about (Coulton ++j). So
did H.D., the only noteworthy American poet to stand on Greek soil between
the wars and the author of numerous poems with classical Greek settings and
themes. Barbara Guest, in her biography of H.D., suggested that there is a
feeling of estrangement in the poets letters and notes about a trip to
Greece in +:o: There is no spontaneous reaction to the setting of her po-
etic inspiration (+:). The visits of Arnold Bennett and Norman Douglas
led to two rather forgettable works (Mediterranean Scenes [+:8] and One
Day [+:]), while neither Osbert Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell, nor Evelyn
Waugh offered any fresh perspectives.
2
With the Auden generation
Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, John Leh-
mann, and William Plomerthe situation improved, but only Plomer pub-
lished works about modern Greece before the Second World War.
One reason that the cult of heliotropy, to use Fussells phrase, missed
modern Greece in the +:os may have been that the country seemed perme-
ated by a sense of loss and tragedy, the knowledge that, as a popular song later
announced, the Golden City was Istanbul not Constantinople.
3
The hero-
ine of French Strothers novel Maid of Athens (+:) tells how refugees from
the Pontus were relocated in Macedonia, an area where walnuts did not grow
wild: These poor people looked and looked, and not a nut could they nd.
They could not understand it. Who ever heard of woods that had no walnuts
in them? There were always walnuts in Pontus! How could one get on in a
country that had no walnuts? They were almost in despair. Gathering wal-
nuts in the fall was something they had always done, and they felt lost when
they could not nd them (+88). In the decade after Smyrna, English and
American writers in search of the Mediterranean experience, like the Pontic
refugees, could not nd what they were looking for in Greece. They turned
to the French Riviera, Italy, Spain, and even Dalmatia.
Several authors tried to recuperate the events of +::+: as a boon for
Greece and to extend the nineteenth-century narrative of modern Greek re-
generation. Francis Yeats-Brown declared, Greece had received a revivify-
ing blood transfusion [from the refugees] after her defeat in Asia Minor, and
today Athens is a city of 8oo,ooo people, with a great future (oj). Henry
Morgenthau asserted, The ight of the Greeks from Asia Minor was the
birth pangs of the Greek republic. Out of their bitter tribulations has arisen a
new nation, welded by suffering into a closer bond of union, and destined, I
believe, to revive in great measure the ancient glories of that rocky land
where Western civilization was born (I Was Sent to Athens [+:] j).
Not everyone agreed with Morgenthau that the Asia Minor Disaster
would lead to the regeneration of Hellas. But most concurred that, in their
+ n + a n r r + c r + o wa r + r + u o t + :
modern tragedy, the Greeks had approached the pathei mathos, learning by
suffering, prominent in Attic tragic drama. For the Greek, Morgenthau
went on to observe, Tragedy has been another familiar fact of life down
through all the ages of his history. He has been acutely conscious of it but has
never yielded to despair (oo). Up until +::, the unfortunate events of
modern Greek history, such as the suicide of the Suliot women, the mas-
sacre at Scio in +8::, and the explosion of the Arkadi monastery on Crete in
+8, had been placed in a narrative of national rebirth, as Thermopylaes on
the way to a nal victory. With the end of the idea of progress and the hope
to expand Greek territory, the defeat of +:: was perceived through the
prism of ancient tragic drama, as a modern version of, for example, Eurip-
ides The Trojan Women with an entire nation as the cast. Modern Greece
had always been what Lawrence Durrell said of Epidaurus in his poem At
Epidaurus: a theatre where redemption was enacted. But the nature of
that redemption changed drastically after +::; it became personal rather
than public or political.
The idea of modern Greece as the orchestra of a tragic theater would
recur often in discussions of modern Greece, especially concerning the
Greek Civil War in the late +os and the military junta from +y to +y.
4
Rex Warners novel Men of Stones (+jo) used a performance of King Lear by
leftists in a detention camp in the time of the civil war as a metaphor for the
state of the country, and Edmund Keeleys The Libation (+j8) updated
Aeschyluss Oresteia with the recent history of modern Greece as a back-
ground. This motif could, of course, also be employed when other nations
were forced to turn inward and examine moments of national failure. Vaclav
Havel recently said of the state of the Czech republic: However unpleasant
and stressful and even dangerous what we are going through may be, it can
also be a force for good, because it can call for a catharsis, the intended out-
come of a Greek tragedy (). Yet the notion that tragedy was a familiar
fact of [Greek] life through all the ages of history has been especially preva-
lent in twentieth-century constructions of Greece. And tragedy became a fa-
miliar element in writing about Greece only after Smyrna.
Greek stories of loss and exile after the Asia Minor Disaster could provide
an example, and at times a catharsis, to an audience of foreign observers.
5
Glaspell remembered the refugees: To see the Greek peasants come ashore
that night in Salonica was to respect the fortitude of human nature. These
were people who had for ten days been massed on the waterfront at Smyrna.
They had seen their homes burn, and their husbands taken by the Turks.
Children had seen their mother[s] killed, and mothers had lost their chil-
dren (Dwellers on Parnassus +). She left with a respect for the forti-
tude of human nature, despite the fact that this exodus was their destruc-
tion. French Strother wrote in his novel Maid of Athens: Theyve all
experienced tragedy, individually and as a nation. . . . But you never see a
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Greek who despairs. Look at old Theodora, here, that keeps house for me.
Saw her husband and ve children murdered before her eyes in Smyrna six
years ago, and God knows what they did to her. She is as relentless as the fu-
ries in her hate, but she isnt broken, and she isnt afraid of life (++). In
+8+, the Australian novelist Patrick White, in a description of a toilet that
refused to be ushed, employed the tragic paradigm for all close encounters
with modern Greece by foreigners: Any true Grecophile will understand
when I say that the unsinkable condom and the smell of shit which precede
the moment of illumination make it more rewarding when it happens
(Flaws in the Glass +jy).
White also said, Most Greek eyes wear an expression of fatality, as
though brooding over disaster, personal, historic, and those still in store for
them (Flaws in the Glass +o+). But, he added, Greek fatality is also my
own, and why I was drawn to Greece from a distance, and one Greek in par-
ticular (++8). Greece was no longer, as it had been for a century, the last
shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous (Munro j:8). In the
endurance of and catharsis after defeat, it became a land where a foreigner
could go to overcome personal loss or to confront ones own fatalism. To
quote Durrells At Epidaurus again: Here we can carry our own small
death / With the resignation of place and identity (y). In +8, celebrating
a Birthday in Scio in verse, John Pierpont had remembered the struggles
of the War of Independence. But in +, May Sartons Birthday on the
Acropolis engendered different thoughts and a different Greece. The fth
and last section reads:
On my ftieth birthday I met the archaic smile
It was the right year
To confront
The smile beyond suffering,
As intimate and suffused
As a waves curve
Just before it breaks.
Evanescence held still;
Change stated in external terms
Aloof, Absolute:
The criterion before us.
On my ftieth birthday
I suffered from the archaic smile.
(Collected Poems :j)
Survival also gured prominently in James Merrills After Greece (+:),
which concluded:
+ n + a n r r + c r + o wa r + r + u o t + :j
The rst glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.
(Selected Poems )
As Conchis put it in Fowless Magus, Greece is like a mirror. It makes you
suffer. Then you learn (). Such was the scenario in the most signicant
American novel with a Greek setting written in the +:os, Susan Glaspells
Fugitives Return (+:). Where an encounter with the ruins of Greece in
E. F. Bensons Limitations (+8) had sent the hero home unhappy and impa-
tient with the limitations of the modern world, in Glaspells novel the antique
surroundings allow one to come to know oneself and ones place in society.
The heroine is an American woman who, after the death of her child and a di-
vorce from her husband, suffers from complete aphasia and memory loss.
Speechless, she manages to travel alone to Delphi under an assumed name,
that of her sisters friend Myra Freeman (a surname with obvious symbol-
ism). When the season at Delphi ends and the hotel closes, Myra stays on
in the only house located within the sacred sanctuary, a setting for the ulti-
mate drama (:8). Communing with the spirit of the place and the local
population, particularly a Greek woman, Stamula, who she assists in weaving,
she recovers both her speech and her old identity as Irma Lee Schraeder.
Glaspells heroine, like Glaspell herself, found a seamless web between
the ancient and modern Greeks. Irma muses that those years in Delphi had
been as if taken into something else (o). Glaspell described her rst en-
counter with the slopes of Parnassus: It was as if we had come upon another
worldtheir world, a hidden place where has been maintained a way of life
through centuries of change. And Greece herself is not unlike that
(Dwellers on Parnassus +). Glaspell worried that the incursion of West-
ern materialism would ruin the world of the Greek village: What our lives
have become is now destroying this way of life that was in Greece before
Homer was in Greece (+). In Fugitives Return, however, the American
heroine, who has recovered her sense of self at Delphi, steps in to ensure that
the ancient ways of the Greeks, which demand the death of a young Greek
rape victim, are subverted.
Andreas, an attractive young man, had some years earlier raped Constan-
tina, a dwarike shepherd girl. Rather than marry Constantina as custom
demanded, Andreas served time in prison, which only increased the shame
of Constantina in the village. When Andreas asks a pretty refugee from Con-
stantinople, Theodora, to marry him, Constantina kills the young man by
dropping a rock from the ancient stadium on his head. The village turns on
Constantina, except for Irma and her friend Stamula. The two devise a plan
in which Irma will take the young Greek girl to America. Irma becomes in
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Delphi not simply a new woman, but a New Woman of the kind that had
been familiar in ction from the +8os.
6
She may well be the rst ctional
foreign New Woman to experience Greece, and her deance of the villages
tradition ensures that she can never return. Greece, to quote Durrell once
again, offered the discovery of yourself (Prosperos Cell ++), but the real-
ization of that discovery often entailed a departure from the Hellenic world.
Irma is one of the rst characters in literature to undergo this cycle.
Glaspell had gone to Greece in +:: at the urging of her companion and
collaborator in the Provincetown Players, George Cram Cook. Cook had
from boyhood a dream of an Apollonian Greece similar to that offered by
Winckelmann, according to Glaspell in her book about him, The Road to the
Temple (+:y). The two lived mainly at Delphi and the Parnassian village of
Agoryianni until Cooks death in +:, an experience that made Glaspell the
rst major writer since Byron and Lear to have an extensive, rsthand expe-
rience of Greek village life. Glaspell buried Cook in the Greek cemetery at
Delphi in +: and then returned to the United States. Veronica Makowsky
suggested, plausibly, that Glaspell had reservations about her life in Greece,
reservations that Cook did not care to hear (+oo). Further, even in her ad-
miring memoir of her life with Cook in Greece in The Road to the Temple,
Glaspell presented examples of Cooks increasingly erratic behavior. The
most prominent manifestation was, of course, the desire to live on the slopes
of Parnassus, hardly the touristic site in +:: that it has become today. In-
deed, if Cook had had access to a hospital, he might not have died.
In Fugitives Return, Cooks view of the continuing spiritual power of
Delphi and the virtues of village life, sentiments that Glaspell repeatedly
puts in the mouth of Cook in The Road to the Temple, are combined with
Glaspells own awareness of gender inequities in Greek society, and as
Makowsky noted, in her relationship with Cook. Irma nds in the spirit of
the place something as pure and strong as the Castalian [spring] itself
(Fugitives Return :j:) and a correlation between the ruined temple of
Apollo and the temple that was her own heart (+). Yet within that temple
of her own heart, Glaspell and her heroine both learn that women need to be
able to know themselves and not simply be constructed by societal roles. It
is this tension that makes Fugitives Return one of the most interesting novels
set in Greece before World War II.
In Glaspells story The Faithless Shepherd (+:), the hero begins and
ends the action by attempting to trace out the letters of the name Dionysus.
7
It is a presence absent from Fugitives Return, although the name Dionysus
appears several times in the text. Irmas awakening is decidedly Apollonian
in nature; even her love for the archaeologist John Knight has an ethereal
character to it. Irma certainly did not leave colder climes to nd a sexual
awakening in the sun nor to escape the strictures of civilized society in the
manner of the heroine of D. H. Lawrences story Sun (+:j). Rather, like
+ n + a n r r + c r + o wa r + r + u o t + :y
the trip that the heroine of May Sartons Joanna and Ulysses (+) makes to
the Greek island of Santorini, Irmas journey prepares her to reenter civi-
lized society after a personal crisis. In the +:os, Italy was still the site to
search for Pan. And Irma, unlike Lawrences heroine, has no romantic nor
erotic connection to a Mediterranean man. When Irma needs a love interest,
one appears from over the sea.
French Strothers Maid of Athens (+:) in subject matter if not in style
presents the reverse journey from Fugitives Return. A Greek woman leaves
Greece to marry an American and have a career on the world stage, learns
more about her true self, and then returns to her homeland. Strothers title
signals that he is rewriting the romance of liberation in the post-Smyrna age,
and his book holds some interest as the rst treatment of the fate of the
Greek woman after she marries the Western hero and departs for life abroad.
Thea Milo, Strothers heroine, is a refugee from Smyrna and an actress
who has gained renown playing the lead in ancient tragedies; she escaped the
destruction of her city by portraying Cassandra. Her dreams of a career on
the stage are threatened when her family arranges a match with a rich, but
physically unappealing, merchant named Akopoulos. In this version of the
Maid of Athens, the liberation becomes personal rather than national. Hear-
ing of her familys plans, Thea declares: I must be free! I must live! I must be
happy! (). All heroines of the romance had made such pronouncements,
but Theas fate is no longer tied to that of her nation.
Thea escapes on her wedding night with the help of a young American
diplomat, Tim Johnson. The two later marry and live in Paris, where Thea
continues to act. She scores a success in a production of Antigone, but it soon
becomes clear that the Smyrna refugee can only successfully perform in
Greek tragedies, as if there is some intrinsic connection between her own life
and the plots of Attic drama. The couple move to America, where Thea dis-
covers that Greece alone had been understanding; Greece alone she had un-
derstood; and now Greece, her spiritual home, was locked against her (:).
Eventually she returns to Greece to see her dying father and to be killed by
her brother, who had vowed to take her life for not staying with the man her
family had chosen for her.
Strothers ideological perspective also reverses that of Glaspell. Where
Fugitives Return depicts a woman coming into consciousness and becoming
a New Woman, Maid of Athens is a diatribe against sexual equality and ca-
reers for women. An American woman, asked whether her sex should have
careers, responds, Of course I do, when a career is all they can get. But ca-
reers for their own sake, no! They dont bring what women really want
(+y). Strothers book, at the basic level, is an attack on the New Woman, and
it is intriguing that he uses a Greek heroine to make his point.
In Maid of Athens, liberation turns out to be a false illusion, a viewpoint
never voiced before the defeat of +::, the end of the dream of Greater
:8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Greece, and the recovery of Constantinople. But the world had changed after
Smyrna, and a Greek girl who had exclaimed, I must be free! could now
nd that she did not really want freedom at all. The failure of Theas mar-
riage, as well as Strothers often-repeated axiom that like must marry like,
raises the question whether Strother wants to reposition, or even remove, the
Greeks from the European family.
Since the Second World War, the writer who has most consistently linked
modern Greece with the tragic experience of Smyrna is Patrick White, win-
ner of the Nobel Prize in +y. For example, his stories A Glass of Tea and
An Evening at Sissy Kamaras are both variations of the Meleager story in
which the existence of household objects carried from Smyrna are intercon-
nected with the emotional and physical well-being of the characters.
8
White
married into a refugee family, since his companion of forty years, Manoli
Lascaris, was from a family from Asia Minor (see Flaws in the Glass +oo+o:),
and this may explain why White returned to it so often in his work.
Although the Greek characters in Whites ction are survivors, they
rarely if ever gain the kind of illumination or peace of Glaspells Irma Lee
Schraeder. In Whites novel The Aunts Story (+8), a Greek tells a new ac-
quaintance, Greeks are happiest dying. . . . Their memorials do not reect
this fatality. All Greek monuments suggest a continuity of life. The theatre at
Epidaurus, you have seen it, and Sounion? Pure life. But the Greeks are born
to die (+o:). In The Vivisector (+yo), Hero Pavlousis, a Smyrna refugee who
married her husband for money, tells an Australian artist: I was not com-
pletely healed, not completely, until Cosmas took me to Perialos. That is an
island off the coast of Asia Minor. It is an island of saints and miracles
(:y). But in a typical White twist, when Hero takes the artist, now her lover,
to this sacred island, her healing is called into question: Do we come all this
way fornothing? Yes of course we do; it is not so extraordinary. Cosmas
would have warned you this hermitwho is dead, or gonewas a lthy old
man (jj). She concludes: It was I who was foolish enough to believe in the
idea of regeneration, and the artist himself leaves the holy island with an
unregenerate soul (j). In the early nineteenth century, the regeneration
of the Greeks was interconnected with a new age of freedom and happiness.
In White, the failure of the Greek rebirth serves as a tting metaphor for the
fate of the individual in the modern world.
Osbert Lancaster, in his comic characterization of lovers of Greece, re-
marked that, in addition to a large group of enthusiastic admirers of the clas-
sical past, there are also a few angry and aggressive little gures, quarreling
violently among themselves and on the worst possible terms with the classi-
cal party below, following the dynamic form of Robert Byron bearing a ban-
ner with a strange device on which is inscribed the single word Byzantium
(y). In the late +:os, Robert Byron began an ambitious project to build an
entirely new conception of modern Greece, which eschewed the Greeces of
both Homer and the earlier Byron; in the words of Robert Byron, the one of
hexameters and lifeless stones and the other of abstract freedom, or the
hatred of indel misgovernment, which he termed, respectively, cultural
and political philhellenism. What then is real Philhellenism? he asked. A
higher form than the Philhellenism of reconstruction; a Philhellenism not
of the mind, but of the soul (Byzantine Achievement :+::) or, simply put, a
Greece of Byzantium. Of the Byzantine Empire he asserted: Spiritually, it
is doubtful whether there has ever existed, over so long a period of time, so
large a proportion of men and women, under one government, deeply and
sincerely anxious to maintain communion with God at all moments of their
lives (y). Echoing earlier nineteenth-century rhetoric, he suggested that
the example of Byzantium might open up potentialities in which may lie the
future of Europe, and the future of the earth (:::).
Byrons starting point in The Byzantine Achievement (+:) is, once
again, Smyrna: The intention of this book was originally to present a his-
tory of the Eastern Mediterranean between ++ and +:. But it became
immediately apparent, upon a second and protracted exploration of the
Greek seaboard in +:, that to portray events of those years without pre-
vious investigation of their historical foundations, was equivalent to offer-
ing the public the last act of a play without the rst. The fault now commit-
ted, the offer of the rst without the last, is, I hope, the lesser (ix). Notice
again the dramatic reference; if the last act ended at +:, the play was un-
doubtedly a tragedy.
Byzantium, according to Byron, has a special importance for understand-
ing the postwar world in search of order and structure: In the whole of Eu-
ropean history, no moment offers more relevant comparison to our own than
that in which Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. A
new civilisation was then born, the nature and achievement of which have re-
mained unintelligible in the centuries of Triumphant Reason that have fol-
lowed its extinction (). Byrons move here is not unlike that of other mod-
ernist writers, who attempted to go back before the rise of secular liberalism
and triumphant reason to nd an older, more secure, ideological anchor.
Around the same time that Byron confessed an attachment to the Greek
Orthodox empire of the East, T. S. Eliot was proclaiming that he was a Roy-
alist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in faith. Where Robert Byron differed
was that he alone among English and American writers turned to the me-
dieval Greek world as the road to salvation. Eliot could point to the company
of such Catholic converts as Evelyn Waugh. In fact, Byron created his own
schism between the churches of East and West. Paul Fussell noted, Byrons
quarrel with Waugh dates from Autumn, +o, when Waugh chose to be
received into the Roman Catholic Church, an act of hostility, as Byron con-
ceived it, to his own Byzantinism (Abroad 8:).
:o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Although after +:: political philhellenism was nally discredited,
Lord Byron maintained his position as rst philhellene. The spiritual
essence of Greece, according to Robert Byron, is contained in the word
Romiosyne, a word often translated as Greekness but which has a Byzan-
tine (literally Roman) rather than a classical derivation. He says that the
meaning of this word eludes the comprehension of man but then goes on
to add, [Lord] Byron knew it (Byzantine Achievement :+).
9
Near the end of
The Byzantine Achievement, Robert Byron declared that the Byzantine tradi-
tion was still alive in Greece because it had been kindled, among other places,
in the craggy fastnesses of honorable brigands (++), those same honor-
able brigands who, others claimed, had kept the ancient Greek tradition of
freedom alive. Despite his rejection of political philhellenism as an idea, he
seems to have been too drawn to the magic force of legend to place it in the
same trash heap where he put Edward Gibbon and the degenerate view of
Byzantium, and he attempted to appropriate Lord Byron for his Greece of
Byzantium.
If partisans of the Greece of Homer had the Acropolis and those of the
Greece of Byron had Missolonghi, Robert Byrons sacred ground was the
peninsula of Mount Athos, which contained twenty monasteries and various
lesser religious establishments of the Orthodox church. Byron claims the
holy mountain as one fragment, one living, articulate community of my
chosen past (Station ) and a station of a faith where all the years have
stopped (:j). Byron wrote about this holy spot in his book The Station:
Athos, Treasures and Men (++), the rst noteworthy travel book about
Greece since Edward Lears Journal of a Landscape Painter (+8j+). Like Lear,
Byron dealt with a region on the margins of Greece proper; Mount Athos is
an autonomous area that is not part of the Greek state. Neither the haunted,
holy ground of Athens, the sunny Cycladic isles, nor the Peloponnesus had
called forth a travel book in English of real literary merit since Childe Harold
left Aegean shores.
As Paul Fussell remarked, part of the great charm of The Station lies in
the disparity between the monks proclaimed spirituality and their readi-
ness to cheat their visitors (Abroad 8j).
10
In spite of Byrons assertion that
he had been translated to another dimension wholly different from other
places on earth, back into that mysterious, immaterial regnum from which
the mind cast loose with the Renaissance (Station j), he seemed to be sur-
rounded by gures quite familiar to readersthose nasty Greek degenerates
called Levantines. The venality of the monks is balanced, however, by
Byrons own boorishness and his apparent lack of interest in the spiritual life
of the monasteries. When an elderly monk refused to let Byron and his friend
use a telephone, we gradually forced the gesticulating old man up a ight of
stairs till we stood upon a landing. Now, we said like a trio of Chicago gang-
sters, where is it? (:o). Later, Byron and one of his companions were in-
+ n + a n r r + c r + o wa r + r + u o t + :+
vited to a feast at the monastery of Xeropotamou. After the food, coffee, ac-
companied by a light sweet wine in lieu of port, was handed in the other
room, till it was time for the momentous service, which was to last all night,
to begin. Did we wish to come to the church, or to sleep? Sleep, we thought
(:). Byron attempted to sleep until two in the morning, but sleep would
not come. So he got up and went to the church and was transxed by the
rhythm of chant and paces. . . . Once and again, a hundred and a thousand
times, the Kyrie eleison, in limitless plurality, beginning deep and hushed,
mounted the scale with presage of impending triumphto die off and begin
again (:8). Why did this rabid Byzantinist not plan to go to the momentous
service from the start? Why, in the text, is the only description of a service on
the Holy Mountain dependent on the fact that Byron could not sleep? It is
the collision of Byrons vision of Byzantium with both the reality of life on
Mount Athos and his own crass behavior that makes The Station so refresh-
ingly unique. Sacheverell Sitwell clearly had his friend Byron and his book in
mind when he referred to the enthusiastic partisans of Byzantium, most of
whom, it can be said, had they been alive in it would have grumbled and com-
plained incessantly at the conditions prevailing in their ideal world (Rou-
manian Journey +).
Byron sparked a Byzantine renaissance in England; Sitwell noted that in
the +os all serious minded undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge
wanted to repair to Mount Athos with that enthusiasm which carried their
grandfathers to go to Rome and Florence. To that extent have the canons of
taste changed the directions in which they face (Roumanian Journey ).
But for some reason it hardly touched writing about modern Greece. His in-
uence is most keenly felt in writing about the Byzantine heritage outside of
Greece. In recent years, the poet John Ash has published A Byzantine Jour-
ney (+j), an account of his travels in Anatolia, and William Dalrymple has
offered From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium
(+y), in which, after a brief beginning at Mount Athos, he goes down the
eastern shore of the Mediterranean from Constantinople to Egypt. Neither
Byzantine journey, signicantly, takes the author to the modern Greek state.
Rebecca Wests massive book about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
(++), which Robert Kaplan called the centurys greatest travel book (),
owes a direct debt to Byrons revision of the Byzantine era. West acknowl-
edged this in the following note in the bibliography about The Byzantine
Achievement: The author, whose death by enemy action all his friends and
readers must deplore, wrote this when he was under twenty-ve, and it is a
remarkable effort. It forms a wholesome corrective to the nonsense that used
to be talked about the decadence of Byzantium (++jj).
Yet West attempted to undercut Byrons central premise that the modern
Greeks are a living link to the medieval past. Rather, she asserted that her
own pet Balkan people, the Serbs, who had been among the last to achieve
:: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
order and gentleness are the last legatees of the Byzantine Empire in its law
and magnicence (++). To add insult to injury, she employed the concept
of Byzantine decadence, Byrons own bte noir, to justify her disinheriting
the Greeks from the Byzantine legacy. Of emperor John Cantacuzenos, who
in Wests eyes forfeited the mantle of Byzantium, she wrote: That de-
testable man was one of those men who are the price a civilisation pays in its
decay for the achievements of its prime (88+). During his reign, the
Byzantine Empire was a masterless land, where weeds that grew spread to all
neighboring elds and smothered all protable crops (88+). The hope for
civilization at that moment passed from the decadent Cantacuzenos and his
Byzantines to the younger, more vibrant Serbs under the energetic Stephen
Dushan. This was a twist that Byron could not have foreseen.
Byrons Byzantinism inuenced other works, such as Sitwells Roumanian
Journey (+8) and Rose Macaulays novel The Towers of Trebizond (+j).
There is no reference to Byron or The Byzantine Achievement in Macaulays
published letters, but her use of Byzantine Trebizond as a sacred spot and a
positive symbol surely owe something to Byrons revisonist history. Near the
end of the book, she wrote: Still, the towers of Trebizond, the fabled city,
shimmer on a far horizon, gated and walled and held in a luminous enchant-
ment (:88).
11
Both Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and The Towers of Trebi-
zond are major books by major writers. There is no work of similar stature in
ction or nonction that employs Byrons revised Byzantium in a Greek set-
ting. In Labels (+o), Evelyn Waugh declined to describe the Byzantine mo-
saics at Dafni because he would be treading on Robert Byrons ground
(+jo). Perhaps that explains it. But one cannot help thinking that the idea of
Greece in the minds of the West was not Byzantine. It was easier to carry
Robert Byrons banner in other lands.
In +y, the poet James Merrill told a story of how he had once met a young
Belgian on the Brindisi-Patras ferry who requested a ride to Athens. On the
way, he asked if I knew the Greek poet Cavafy. When I said yes, he lit up:
Well, its with him that I shall be staying the next few days in Athens
(Marvelous Poet +y). Merrill had to tell his companion that Constantine
Cavafy had been dead for decades and besides had never lived in Athens. Yet
Merrill certainly realized that, the counterfeit Cavafy aside, there was a deep
truth in what the Belgian had said. Through a misinterpretation that because
Cavafy wrote in Greek, then Athens must be Alexandria, many have car-
ried copies of the Alexandrian poet in their pockets to nd the Greece of
Cavafy. Merrill himself was one of those who had spent more than a few
days staying with Cavafy in Athens. For example, Merrills poem Days of
+, which is about passion in an Athenian setting, directly evokes a series
of poems by Cavafy, including Days of +8, Days of +o:, and Days
of +o.
12
W. H. Auden, who rst encountered Cavafy in the late +:os through
E. M. Forster and his Oxford professor, R. M. Dawkins, declared that the
Greek poets themes were love, art, and politics in the original Greek sense
(ix).
13
For those who stayed with Cavafy in Athens, the chief attraction
was verse on the rst theme. Auden went on to say, Cavafy was a homosex-
ual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal that fact, and the
erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs.
Love, there, is rarely more than physical passion, and when tenderer emo-
tions do exist, they are almost always one-sided. At the same time, he refuses
to pretend that his memories of sensual pleasure are unhappy or spoiled by
feelings of guilt (ix). Cavafys Days of +o8 is an example of such a poem:
He was out of work that year,
so he lived off card games,
backgammon, and borrowed money.
He was offered a job at three pounds a month
in a small stationery store,
but he turned it down without the slightest hesitation.
It wasnt suitable. It wasnt the right pay for him,
a reasonably educated young man, twenty-ve years old. . . .
His clothes were a terrible mess.
He always wore the same suit,
a very faded cinnamon-brown suit.
O summer days of nineteen hundred and eight,
from your perspective
the cinnamon-brown suit was tastefully excluded.
Your perspective has preserved him
as he was when he took off, threw off,
those unworthy clothes, that mended underwear,
and stood stark naked, impeccably handsome, a miracle
his hair uncombed, swept back,
his limbs a little tanned
from his morning nakedness at the baths and at the beach.
(tr. Keeley and Sherrard +yyy8)
In his autobiography, Merrill remarked that his yearly trips to Greece
were driven by a desire for such casual pickups and short-lived assignations
with social inferiors such as those about which Cavafy had written:
The soldier on the dance oor, like nine out of ten of his class and
culture, would count himself lucky to catch a permissive male lover,
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
one who wouldnt appear in the yitoni [neighborhood] making a scene.
No reection on the dancers masculinity. Girls werent easy to come by
in +j, outside of marriage or the brothel; and who on a military wage
of thirty shoeshines a month could afford either one? . . . That the
dancing soldier hoped one day to marry and raise a family struck me as
the best news yet. More than the barriers of language and background,
it seemed to ensure our never going overboard in Greece. David and I
could follow with no harm to him the faun incarnate in this or that
young man, and without losing ourselves. (Different Person ++:)
Cavafy offered not simply a series of casual erotic affairs but also a deca-
dent city in which to pursue them. In The Tomb of Iasis, he ended an epi-
graph for a young hedonist in Hellenistic times as follows:
14
But from being considered so often a Narcissus and Hermes,
excess wore me out, killed me. Traveler,
if youre an Alexandrian, you wont blame me.
You know the pace of our lifeits fever, its unsurpassable sensuality.
(tr. Keeley and Sherrard y)
Athens, as a literary, urban Greek setting began as an Alexandrian
world. In John Fowless The Magus, Nicholas recounts an encounter with his
old girlfriend in a hotel room in Piraeus:
I felt no attraction and no tenderness for her; no real interest in the
breakup of her long relationship with the boor of an Australian pilot;
simply the complex, ambiguous sadness of the darkening room. The
light had drained out of the sky, it became rapid dusk. All the treach-
eries of modern love seemed beautiful, and I had my great secret, safe,
locked away. It was Greece again, the Alexandrian Greece of Cavafy;
there were only degrees of aesthetic pleasure; of beauty in decadence.
Morality was a North European lie. (:)
In a rundown bar in Thessaloniki, the narrator of Francis Kings story
The Vultures experienced little sense of vice or squalor. Perhaps it is only
guilt in search of pleasure that produces that sense; and guilt, though so ter-
rible a reality to the ancient Greeks, is fortunately almost unknown to their
descendants (So Hurt and Humiliated +j8).
15
Under the banner of Cavafy,
the eshly Greeks of Pater and the aesthetics of the +8os rst appeared in
literary constructions of modern Athens. The modern movement, as far as
writers were concerned, came to Greece from the East not the West. And the
Levantines of Athens became, if not real Greeks, true Alexandrians.
+ n + a n r r + c r + o wa r + r + u o t + :j
The rst person to follow the faun incarnate in Athens with Cavafy in his
pocket also wrote the rst poem in English dedicated to the Greek poet.
William Plomer, like Auden, had learned about Cavafy from Forster. In To
the Greek Poet C. P. Cavafy on His Poiglasa (+o8++) from his vol-
ume The Five-fold Screen (+:), Plomer situated the poems of Cavafy in a
Greek rather than an Egyptian setting:
Your temple is built, without the least pretense,
On that antique foundation-stone, good sense,
A curious music lls its colonnades,
And Attic sunbeams stripe the lofty shades
(jy)
Since in Plomers poem Attic sunbeams stripe the shades of Cavafys temple,
it makes sense that Plomer headed to Athens to worship in it.
Plomers biographer, Peter Alexander, noted, Greece had long had an
attraction for English homosexuals before Plomer arrived in ++ (y),
but that attraction had not surfaced in any signicant way in published de-
scriptions of modern Greece. Evelyn Waugh wrote in a letter to a friend in
+:y from Athens, where he was staying with Alastair Graham, a prototype
for Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, that the at is usually full of Dago
youths called by such heroic names as Miltiades or Agamemnon with blue
chins and greasy clothes who sleep with the English colony for :j drachmas
a night (Hastings +y8). But, despite the comic potential of such
youths, Waugh did not mention them in his rst novel, Decline and Fall
(+:8), in which the only reminiscence of his trip to Greece is the descrip-
tion of a villa on Corfu. Nor did he mention them in Labels (+o), his
account of a Mediterranean tour in +:, during which he spent two days in
Athens with his gay friends Graham and Mark Ogilvie-Grant. In that book,
he said only that Graham had a house lled with mechanical singing birds
and eikons, as if it were a setting for Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium (+).
Only much later, in Brideshead Revisited (+j), does Waugh suggest that
Athens was a haven for European homosexuals in the interwar period
(+yyj, jo). Gay modern Greece rst appeared on the page in the
early +os with the poems and stories of Plomer and a Kenneth Matthews
novel, Aleko (+).
16
Plomers debt to Cavafy can be seen in two poems and most of the stories
he wrote about Greece. In the poems, a rst person narrator records a pass-
ing moment of sensual and tender pleasure, which, according to Auden, was
a trademark of the Alexandrian. Three Pinks depicts two lovers who
awaken after a night of passion to greet the dawn that will separate them.
The rst published version of the poem reads:
: r u v a o

s s n + n ow
Well observe through the dry and timeless air of Attica
In which there is no nostalgia
The pepper-tree garden where last night by the full moon
An old woman disturbed our intimacy
To sell us three pinks with long stems.
(Five-fold Screen j+)
17
Another Country begins with a direct evocation of Cavafys poem The
City: Let us go to another country, / Not yours or mine, / And start
again. But the speaker then asserts:
This is that other country
We two populate,
Land of a brief and brilliant
Aurora, noon and night,
The stratosphere of love
From which we must descend,
And leaving this rare country
Must each to his own
Return alone.
(Collected Poems y)
In both of these poems, since English does not have gender terminations
as does Greek, the gender of the lover is left uncertain. This is not the case in
the stories Local Colour, The Island, and Nausicaa (Child of Queen
Victoria and Other Stories +), where two males are clearly paired together.
Curiously, however, in all of these stories the pairs consist of two Greeks;
even in Nausicaa, in which a young Corote boatman is seduced by a visi-
tor from abroad, the foreigner is a Greek from Alexandria (perhaps an-
other nod to Cavafy). Alexander plausibly suggested that in this story Plomer
critiqued his own behavior toward the Greeks with whom he became in-
volved (+y), which makes the change in nationality of the predatory tourist
even more unsettling. Did Plomer think that homosexuality would be more
palatable to an English audience if the participants were exclusively Greek?
Or did he simply want a cover to write about his own experiences? If Plomer
took advantage of Greeks during his stay in Athens, he also took advantage of
them in his ction, by removing the Western tourists who created the market
for Greek youths.
Plomers Greece is lled with decadent men, as if the eshly ancient
Greeks of Pater had to wait until the disaster to appear in modern Athens. In
a letter to Stephen Spender, Plomer asserted: England is a land of male
women, Greece is a land of female men (Alexander +8).
18
That is certainly
+ n + a n r r + c r + o wa r + r + u o t + :y
the way he presented them in ction. In Local Colour, Madame Stroutho-
kmelos discovers that her husband was a little too Greek in his nature for
her taste, but she publicly asserts that members of the younger generation
are manly and patriotic. I think there is great hope for the future (Child of
Queen Victoria :::, ::j). When she takes the two young English visitors to a
local restaurant so that they can see a bit of the real Greece (::), the coun-
try boys act a bit too effeminate for her liking. After one of the boys, referred
to as Lilac Shirt because of his attire, has danced a little too intimately with
his partner, then embraced him and kissed him on the mouth, his fellows
respond with a rousing cheer (:). Madame Strouthokmelos becomes ap-
palled. They have forgotten themselves, she said in a tone of disgust,
(:), although, as with her husband, the boys could simply be remembering
their Greek nature. I think while you are in Greece you ought to do as the
Greeks do (::), their matronly hostess had advised her guests when they
left for lunch, and we as readers are certain that the two Englishmen, partic-
ularly the one who has a copy of Prousts Sodome et Gomorrhe in his pocket,
intend to do just that. Plomers Greek companions, like Cavafys erotic part-
ners, were social inferiors who were often bought, and this certainly had
some effect on his view of Greek men. Still, it is signicant that in Plomers
gay construction of Greece, it was still a decidedly effeminate space.
19
Cavafy wrote little about the great classical past, and those in search of the
Greece of Cavafy followed suit. There are other things in Athens besides
the Parthenon, Plomer wrote in his Autobiography (:yj), and with that
comment he summarily dispensed with the classical past. In Christopher
Isherwoods Down There on a Visit (+:), Ambrose expresses the same atti-
tude toward the classical past when he asks Christopher: Youve never been
in Athens before, have you? Then I suppose you ought to see the Acropolis. I
always think its a good thing to get that over, as soon as possible (y:). Polit-
ical philhellenism also held no interest for Plomer: Greece was for the time
being a republic. I forget why if I knew (Autobiography :8o). Greece, it
seems, was simply a decadent, sensual Disneyland where, to use the words of
James Merrill, one could follow the faun incarnate as one pleased.
Still, Plomer, like Robert Byron, was caught by the magic force of Byronic
Greece. He wrote a poem about the Greek War of Independence entitled The
Young Klepht at a time when the age of brigands had passed. In his autobiog-
raphy, he related how on Corfu he read a great deal about the War of Inde-
pendence and saw a painting of the Suliot women about to throw them-
selves over a precipice rather than fall into the clutches of Ali Pacha, which
inspired him to write a biography of Ali Pasha called Ali the Lion. Yet this en-
deavor itself suggests that, for Plomer, Byronic Greece had become history
rather than a living legacy in which a young phihellene could still take part.
The Athens of Cavafy has had an enduring literary importance, as its ap-
pearance in Merrill and Fowles attests.
20
But it has not had the wide inuence
:8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
or circulation of the Greece of Byron. Part of the reason was undoubtedly
that the heterosexual world was not going to embrace a conception of Greece,
the birthplace of Western civilization, as the site of transient assignations,
often homosexual. But the problem probably went a bit deeper. Athens was
simply not Alexandria. Plomers construction of Athens was no worse than
any other Western construction that had appeared in the previous hundred or
so years, but it depended, as did his ability to go to bed with boors, on bad
lighting (see Alexander +8). In good lighting, and Athens has remarkable
natural light, the landscape was simply wrong for a Cavaan setting. One can
just as easily create a Cavaan London, New York, or Berlin, and many writ-
ers have.
21
There was nothing recognizably Greek in Plomers Athens of
Cavafy except that the available boys spoke Greek. Of all modern Greek
poets, Cavafy has, I believe, the largest following among readers of poetry out-
side of Greece. But for English and American poets who write about modern
Greece, the shadow of George Seferis looms larger. Rex Warner spoke for the
generation that encountered Greece from + to +jj when he said that
George Seferis, more than any other writer, has been able to express . . . the
detail and clarity of the Greek scene (Where Shall John Go? oo).
A different spirit invests the homoerotic utopia that Ambrose attempts to
build on the island of St. Gregory in the Ambrose section of Christopher
Isherwoods Down There on a Visit (+:), a ctionalized version of the au-
thors actual stay on the island of St. Nicholas in the summer of +.
22
At
one point, Ambrose remembers how, right before his abrupt departure from
Cambridge, he had discovered Ronald Firbank, and I couldnt put it down
(+++). This suggests an alternative comic, or perhaps more precisely camp,
gay tradition. Ambroses island seems to intentionally suggest a male version
of Miss OBrookomores lesbian garden of delights in Firbanks Inclinations.
Both of these prospective Edens never ower, and they begin to fail when
they are invaded by the other sex. In Isherwood, Maria plays the role of the
Italian count in Firbank, seducing Ambroses young charges from his noble
vision. The books of Firbank and Isherwood are also linked by the fact that,
before +yo, they are two of only a handful of books that conceive of Greece
as a predominantly comic space.
Ambroses island is hardly an Arcadian paradise. It is full of strange,
prickly grass, brackish water that sours the stomach, hordes of ies, and
enormous rats. Isherwood is undoubtedly suggesting that the only place
where one might conceivably build a gay utopia must be a space so uninhab-
itable and unappealing that heterosexuals would not want to live there. The
foreign contingent drinks to excess. This might explain why, in a world cre-
ated for homosexuals, the two sexual acts clearly related are the hetero-
sexual union of Maria and Waldemar and Theos rape of a chicken later
served for lunch.
The Greek boys are Dionysiac fauns taken to extreme. They are swin-
ishly dirty, inhumanly destructive and altogether on the side of the forces
of disorder (Down There on a Visit +o). When they are late with the boat,
Geoffrey acidly comments, They were screwing. They were screwing some-
body or something. Each other, most likely (o). The older Greek workmen
on the island are scarcely better. They routinely dynamite the house that they
are building for Ambrose. Ambrose tells this with pridepossessive pride.
He feels that he owns these peopletheir charm, their unreliability, their
madness; everything about them. And, in a sense, he does, since it is he who is
interpreting them to us. In a sense, this place is merely the projection of his
will (:). The forces of disorder are, then, not entirely natural to the is-
land but part of the creation of a rich Englishman who, for whatever reason,
wanted the Greeks on his island to act like the satyrs in the depiction of a
Bacchic revel on a Greek vase.
William Plomer began his story Local Colour by remarking: Upon
certain kinds of Nordics the effect of living in Mediterranean countries is the
reverse of bracing. The freedom, warmth, and glamour of their surround-
ings begin to sap their intellectual and artistic activity and ambition. While
constantly talking about what they are going to accomplish, they do or make
nothing, and at last discover that in gaining liberty and sunshine they have
lost purpose and vigor (Child of Queen Victoria :+). Fowles called this con-
dition the Aegean Blues (foreword to The Magus 8). In gaining complete
liberty and sunshine, Christopher loses his ability to structure his life, as the
group as a whole loses its ability to decide anything. Anarchy and the forces
of disorder eventually take over the pen and paper. While in Berlin, Isher-
wood noted, I wrote a novel about England. Here, I want to get on with my
novel about Berlin; but already I know that I shant. All I can possibly write
nowadays is this diary, because, here, one can only write about this place
(Down There on a Visit y). But later, looking back at the diary, Isherwood
found that the handwriting of all these last short entries is big and straggly
and, at the end of the lines, it tends to collapse, like playing cards fallen on top
of each other. Obviously, it was done when I was very drunk (+:). He
found in the end that the island was a hard place about which to write, espe-
cially while he was on it.
In Isherwoods geography, St. Gregory and Greece were not the Berlin he
left and the London to which he will return; they offered a non-urban and,
from a literary perspective, nonmodernist interlude between the political op-
pression of Hitler and the social oppression of London. I couldnt care less,
here, about classical Greece; I feel far more remote from it than I ever do in
Northern Europe. But Northern Europe is becoming remote, too; quite
shockingly so. . . . There may easily be war with Hitler this year, or next. I say
this and believe it, but somehow I no longer quite care (y). Still, many
of the social tensions in the larger world emerged on this small island away
:jo r u v a o

s s n + n o w
from everything. For example, after one altercation, Christopher asked
Waldemar, Since when did you join the Brownshirts? (+:8).
Down There on a Visit was not published until +:. Although Isherwood
used the journal he kept during his stay in Greece in +, he wrote much of
the Greek section of the book later. If it had appeared in the +os, the Am-
brose section of Down There on a Visit would have been one of the most in-
novative constructions of Greece between the wars. One suspects that the
strong Dionysiac strain in Isherwoods Greece owes something to the inu-
ence of Henry Miller and Nikos Kazantzakis. In fact, Isherwood might be
playing with the image of Kazantzakiss Zorba and creating a kind of camp
Zorba with Aleko, who wore a gaudy striped shirt, mechanics overalls, and
long, elegantly pointed shoes. A ower was stuck in behind his left ear. The
ngernail on the little nger of his left hand had been allowed to grow nearly
a half an inch long. Thats the fashion in Athens just now, Ambrose told
me (yj). He held a fascination for the new arrivals to Greece: He must have
been aware of this, for he behaved with a self-conscious swagger, though he
pretended to take little notice of us (yj). Whether such inuence affected
the composition of Isherwoods book might be debated, but that it affected
the reception of the book is beyond doubt. By +:, his satyrs were familiar
gures on Greek soil, and Isherwood appeared to be riding a wave.
As the +os came to an end, a new modern Greece had still not emerged in
English writing. From +: to +, authors had experimented with tragic
Greece, the Byzantine legacy, and Cavaan Athens, and these ideas have all to
some degree been subsumed into what we now think of as Greece. But
none of them gained a wide following, especially in the years that followed.
The drought in writing about Greece from +j to + was just as bad as the
one that had lasted from +: to +:.
23
In August +o, Lawrence Durrell wrote Henry Miller a letter that in-
cluded the story of the Cocks of Attica. One summer night on the Acrop-
olis, George Katsimbalis
threw back his head, clapped the crook of his stock into his wounded
arm, and sent out the most blood-curdling clarion I have ever heard.
Cock-a-doodle-doo. It echoed all over the city. . . . We were so
shocked that we were struck dumb. And while we were still looking at
each other in the darkness, lo, from the distance silvery clear in the
darkness a cock drowsily answeredthen another, then another.
This drove K. wild. Squaring himself, like a bird ready to y into
space, and apping his coat tails, he set up a terric screamand the
echoes multiplied. . . . The whole night was alive with cockcrows
all Athens, all Attica, all Greece, it seemed, until I almost imagined
you being woken at your desk late in New York to hear these terric
+ n + a n r r + c r + o wa r + r + u o t + :j+
silvery peals: Katsimbaline cockcrow in Athens. (Colossus of Maroussi
:)
Miller added Durrells letter as an epigraph to his book on Greece, published
in ++. From then on, the Katsimbaline cockcrow continued to resound,
rst in America and then on the other side of the Atlantic. It was muted a bit
by the Second World War, but after +j nearly everyone had heard it before
he or she went to Greece. Those cocks, the world would discover, announced
the reappearance of Dionysus in Greece.
cocrts r o
A New Kind of Byronism
But Athens for me was Katsimbalis, Seferis, Antoniou,
New friends for merry places.
John Waller, Kiss of Stars
So wrote Waller in his poem Spring in Athens dated April +j. A new
note strikes one immediately. Athens had been many things over the years
haunted, holy ground for Byron, an irritation to Thackeray, a haven of deca-
dence for Plomerbut the violet-crowned city had never, in a poem in Eng-
lish, been summed up by three Greek males treated as peers. In his Views of
Attica (+jo), Rex Warners rst chapter took the reader to the wine bar
Psaras, where the author was found drinking with these same three men (:8).
For both Waller and Warner, the geographical center of Greece had shifted
from the Acropolis, Marathon, or Missolonghi to the tavernas and cafes of
Athens. Greece was no longer predominantly a visual experience, the sights
of the sites, but an aural one; both authors made a point of telling us that lis-
tening to Greeks, or at least these three Greeks, had a signicant place in their
construction of Greece. Something, clearly, had changed since +j.
Waller pointed to the main reason for this shift when he spoke of Katsim-
balis calling to the cocks from the Acropolis, / Roaring through nightfall
(:y), which did not take place when Waller was in Athens in the spring
of +j but in +o, and the event was memorialized in The Colossus of
Maroussi. This event became an emblem of new writing about Greece;
Patrick Leigh Fermor, for example, referred to it directly in Mani (+j8,
+::). By including an incident with links to Miller and Durrell, Waller,
like Leigh Fermor and Warner, was signaling that he wanted to be considered
within a particular line of writing about Greece, a movement, for lack of a
better term, that was still too new in +j to be called a tradition. And he
:j:
c o c r t s r o :j
counts on the fact that these names, Katsimbalis, Seferis, and Antoniou, are
not wholly unfamiliar. His readers already met them in Henry Millers Greek
book, The Colossus of Maroussi (++).
The narrator of Edmund Keeleys novel The Gold-Hatted Lover (++)
has also read The Colossus of Maroussi; he makes a reference to Millers visit to
Phaestos and the presence of his name in the guest book at the Minoan site
(+oj; see Colossus of Maroussi +). What this reference really does, however,
is to inscribe The Gold-Hatted Lover beside the works of Waller, Warner, and
Leigh Fermor in the guest book, as it were, of The Colossus of Maroussi. The
desire was widespread.
1
John Fowles mentioned only one contemporary
book about Greece in the preface to the revised edition of The Magus. When
Fowles was teaching on Spetses in +j+, he ran down to the harbor to pay his
respects to Henry Millers Colossus of Maroussi Katsimbalis (8).
Louis MacNeice also recognized the prominence of The Colossus of
Maroussi, although he was hardly happy about it. In +j, he began his re-
view of Kevin Andrewss The Flight of Ikaros: Many Europeans and Amer-
icans visiting Greece fall so in love with the country that they gush into print
and give a one-sided picture. The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller,
though some of its gush is good, suggests that Greece is a never-never land
where Miller can become Peter Pan. . . . Now comes Kevin Andrews to re-
dress the balance (Selected Prose :+y). Andrews wrote a good book, but The
Flight of Ikaros hardly redressed the balance, as the numerous references to
Miller by other writers demonstrate.
Millers Colossus of Maroussi and Lawrence Durrells Prosperos Cell
(+j), along with the Greek poems in Durrells volume A Private Country
(+), invented a new modern Greece, as Edmund Keeley has shown.
2
Their books had an almost immediate impact. Durrell wrote to his editor and
fellow poet, Anne Ridler, in +, Im afraid weve had a bad inuence
Henry and Is [sic] books about Greece. It is becoming a cult. In the last few
weeks the number of poets who are compiling anthologies called s+rt+r +o
oarrcr has risen (Spirit of Place 8). The change reected more than just
volume. In +j, Stephen Spender spoke of this new philhellenism which
has grown up during and since the war as a rediscovery of a classical by
way of modern Greece, precisely the reverse of Romanticisms attempt to
rediscover within the modern Greeks their ancient heritage (Brilliant
Athens and Us yy). His list of new philhellenes includes Leigh Fermor,
Durrell, Bernard Spencer, Francis King, Rex Warner, Osbert Lancaster, and
the painter John Craxton. In common with the American writer Henry
Miller, Spender added, they think of Katsimbalis . . . as their Virgilian
guide to modern Athens. He seems to stand in the central square of Athens
like one of the gigantic stone lions over the entrance to the ancient ruins of
Mycenae (y8).
3
In common with . . . Henry Miller is a bit misleading,
since Millers book essentially created Katsimbalis as the guide to modern
:j r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Greece. Even Durrells most important contribution to the Katsimbalis
myth, the story of the cocks, was published in The Colossus of Maroussi. It is
the main reason that writers wanted their works inscribed in the guest book
of that volume rather than in Durrells Prosperos Cell or Reections on a
Marine Venus.
4
The Colossus of Maroussi is itself like one of those Katsimbaline mono-
logues it memorializesit too attacks from all sides at once, tosses things in
the air only to catch them many pages later, and contradicts itself often in a
wandering, boustrophedontic logic in which Miller delights. Still, it is possi-
ble to pick out of what MacNeice called Millers gush several key ideas
central to the formation of a new view of Greece.
First and foremost, Greece is a Dionysian place.
5
Greeks were now
viewed, as Rex Warner put it in +jo, as a race knowing excess, knowing in-
toxication of all kinds (Views of Attica +). On the Sacred Way to Eleusis,
Miller related, I was on the point of madness several times. I actually did
start running up the hillside only to stop midway, terror-stricken, wondering
what had taken possession of me ().
6
For Miller, this was one of the mar-
velous things that happen to one in Greecemarvelous good things that
can happen no where else on earth (+j). At one point, when discussing the
terrain on the island of Corfu, Miller asserted, All Greece is diademed with
such antinomian spots; it is perhaps the explanation for the fact that Greece
has emancipated itself as a country, a nation, a people, in order to continue as
a luminous carrefour of a changing humanity (:+::). One aspect of a
Dionysian madness in which everyone acts on impulse is that there can be no
organization of either society or life. In Reections on a Marine Venus, Durrell
recorded the following conversation with Manoli the sherman:
You are English. They never see things before they happen. The
English are very slow.
And what about the Greeks?
The Greeks are fast . . . piff . . . paff . . . They decide.
But each one decides differently.
That is individualism.
But it leads to chaos.
We like chaos. ()
The madness and chaos of Greece put Miller in touch with the elemental
world as opposed to the abstract, dehumanized world built out of the
ashes of illusory materialism of America and France (:y).
7
In Prosperos
Cell, Durrell said: You will think it strange to have come from England to
this ne Grecian promontory where our only company can be rock, air, sky
and all the elementals (+). About a half century earlier, the antidote to a sick
Western civilization had been Greek villages, which exuded a combination of
c o c r t s r o :jj
pastoral values and the Apollonian sublime, juxtaposing modern civilization
with real civilization, as it were. As Robert Kaplan observed, Durrell and
Miller offered a new Greece linked to an enjoyment of the physical senses
that bordered on annihilation (:jo). It is this Greece to which a character in
Israel Horovitzs play The Good Parts (+8) refers when she says, Youre in
Greece, remember. Theres no need to be embarrassed about anything in
Greece. Anything. Ever (+). As Charmian Clift pointedly observed in Peel
Me a Lotus (+j), this foreign idea of Greece had deleterious consequences
for the Greeks. Every year, the country was awash with visitors who ab-
solve[d] themselves from all responsibility, all control, all moral laws, all sense
of duty (+:8). Their justication was that they were simply being Greek.
8
This should have a slightly familiar ring. Contact with the classic soil of
Italy had played somewhat the same role in the ction of writers such as
E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence. For Victorian and Edwardian writers,
Italy had been the place where the marvelous good things happen. It is not
a coincidence that early in Durrells Prosperos Cell, N. defends Lawrences
grasp of place or that near the end Count D. says, Its thirsty work talking
like a Norman Douglas character (+j, +:j). The two passages serve as book-
ends for a literature of place, Italian place, upon which Durrell drew for
his Corfu book.
9
One might say that, despite the gush of the prose, all Miller
and Durrell really did was see Pan in Greece. What is surprising is how liber-
ating this Italianizing of Greece became for foreign authors. It was, to a
signicant degree, old wine drunk from a new bottle. But it really was a
new Greece, one that had not been written about before, and it set a lot of
pens in motion.
As if to underline the point that one could see Pan in Greece, Durrells
rst book with a Greek setting was a novel entitled Panic Spring (+y),
which Durrells biographer, Ian MacNiven, said, owes almost nothing to
Henry Miller but a good deal to Norman Douglas and Aldous Huxley. The
evocation of the island scenes are reminiscent of South Wind (+:). In
Prosperos Cell, Count D. points out that, although Corfu has received the
report of Pans death, in our modern pantheon we have a creature whose
resemblance to Pan is not, I think, fortuitous. He is, as you know, the kalli-
kanzaros. He is the house sprite, a little cloven-hoofed satyr with pointed
ears, who is responsible for turning milk sour, for leaving doors unlocked,
and for causing mischief of every kind (+oj). In Reections on a Marine
Venus, Durrell wrote, Rhodes, like the rest of Greece, has clung to its belief
in Pan (+o+).
10
On Nicholas Urfes rst visit to the Villa Bourani in
Fowless The Magus, he is confronted by a bronze statue with an enormous
phallus. You know what it is? . . . Pan? A Priapus (8). In ++, Isabel
Anderson lamented that her greatest disappointment upon leaving Greece
was that I did not see Pan or hear his distant ute (+y). She was just a
decade too early.
:j r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Miller did not catch sight of a Pan; he met a contemporary Dionysus in
the esh, a high priest of madness and chaos. That is why George Katsim-
balis is a colossus and the Vergilian guide to modern Greece. Miller said that
Katsimbalis didnt believe in moderation nor good sense nor anything that
was inhibitory. He believed in going the whole hog and then taking your pun-
ishment. While he was physically restricted as a result of war wounds, he
could still galvanize the dead with his talk (o). Katsimbalis told Miller he
refused to write because he is an extemporaneous fellow, and the best sto-
ries are those you dont want to preserve. If you have any arrire pense the
story is ruined (). Extemporaneity, for Miller, provided a key to human
happiness. When the happiest man alive, as Miller called himself in The
Tropic of Cancer, meets an even happier man alive, he must be colossal.
Katsimbalis was the ur-model for a new masculine personication of
Greece, as the Katsimbaline gure Manoli was called in George Johnston
and Charmian Clifts novel The Sponge Divers (+jj, +8). The Greek sea-
man is pure Greek, the essence of it, because he is a fanatic about life.
About living. He takes life in both hands and eats it as if it were a piece of
meat (+8, j:). The American poet Kenneth Hanson described his en-
counter with this new Greek male in his poem Take It from Me: Greeks
never ll up the tank, he said / so I pushed the car uphill / around a mountain
curve at midnight. Hanson concluded:
But look at it my way.
Here was a new geography
a mind where anything that grows
grows by a kind of tour de force
requiring only unconditional surrender.
Here was the pure perfection of an art.
Nothing like it in the British Museum.
(Distance Anywhere ++y)
James Merrill had one of these new Greeks phrase it as follows in his
poem Kostas Tympakiankis:
Take me with you when you sail next week,
Youll see a different cosmos through the eyes of a Greek.
(Selected Poems +)
The new geography, the different cosmos, of a masculine Greece, ex-
temporaneous with no arrire pense, was rst charted by Miller after he met
Katsimbalis. To put it another way, Katsimbalis was already Zorba before
Kazantzakis wrote his novel in Greek. Greek women, on the other hand,
played a small part in both Millers Colossus of Maroussi and the works of the
c o c r t s r o :jy
new philhellenism generally.
11
In her recent poem Last Visit to Greece,
Rachel Hadas wrote that the Greek language had three genders, it was true,
/ but only one mattered. What was new / was how I saw this world as one of
men (j). The Greece of the new philhellenes basically had only one gender
that mattered as well; the writers were mainly men, as were all of the names
on Spenders list of new philhellenes, and their prime subject was the Greek
male. Women were not central to this new geography of Greece.
The absence of sex and, for the most part, the female of the species, from
the Dionysian world of The Colossus of Maroussi is puzzling, particularly
since Miller constructed it. From the text, as Eisner noted, one might think
that Miller was celibate for his six months in Greece (+j). Peter Levi, how-
ever, reported, that when, in a cafe in Athens, Miller found that the poets
Odysseus Elytis and Nikos Gatsos knew of his books, he became so excited
he wanted a brothel. Elytis and I do not know much about those things.
We will introduce you to Mr. Katsimbalis. He will know (Hill of Kronos
+o). But if there was no sex in The Colossus of Maroussi, there was a kind of
romance, for Miller was mesmerized by Katsimbaliss stories, and some
of the language of romantic thralldom creeps into Millers admiration of
the garrulous Greek. No other Western male author, including gay authors,
has so submitted in print to the dominance of a Greek man.
12
To be sure,
Miller viewed Katsimbalis as an alter ego. As Miller noted, Katsimbalis
talked about himself because he was the most interesting person he knew.
I admire that quality very muchI have a little bit of it myself (:8). Still,
Miller left no doubt in his text that he was, as it were, a Dr. Watson to
Katsimbaliss Sherlock Holmes. The Colossus of Maroussi remains unique in
English and American literature for its celebration of Katsimbalis and other
Greek intellectuals. Greek males were generally depicted with an animal
physicality while intellectual and emotional sophistication remained with
the foreign observer. In the rst and only issue of Greek Horizons, Derek
Patmore said, The modern Greek character has much of the lovable child
(j), and the childlike Greek became a common theme. In The Sponge
Divers, the Australian narrator explained to a woman who has had sex with
Manoli that she can expect no sentimental attention from the masculine
personication of Greece since he lacks any interior life. Thats his real
world, and he lives in it like a child. . . . It isnt complicated in the way that
we are complicated, it doesnt have the threads connecting it to any interior
mechanisms (+8). A touch of condescension can even be found in state-
ments of Durrell like the Greek is a terrible fellow. Mercuric, noisy, volu-
ble and proudwas there ever such a conjunction of qualities locked in a
human breast? Only the Irishman could match him for intractability, for
rowdy feckless generosity (Reections on a Marine Venus +). Millers book
is one of the few exceptions where the Greek characters possess superior
abilities in both mind and body.
:j8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
If Katsimbalis provided Miller with a new Greece, then Miller in turn
created a version of Katsimbalis that the real man felt compelled to emulate.
Whereas in the +8jos a visit to Teresa Macri, the Maid of Athens, was part
of any tour of Athens, in the +jos literary travelers penciled in a trip to hear
Katsimbalis, the liveliest talker and most fantastic raconteur in Greece, ac-
cording to John Lehmann (Ample Proposition 8). Millers effect on Katsim-
balis can be seen as early as +o. Durrell wrote his old companion from the
Villa Seurat:
For a week after getting news of you or a letter from you he [Kat-
simbalis] is quite unquenchably not himself. You seem to stand in
some relation of a half-analyst because he develops this mock-colossus,
like a mock-turtle out of nowhere. Then he begins to stagger and lurch
and boast and swear; and every story he says: I forgot to tell Miller
that one. Or, Miller would have enjoyed that one, eh? Some of his
stories are so manifestly neither funny, elevating, or even commonly
humane, that one winces for him and wonders why. But he goes on
roaring and washing the air with his long at dead-looking hands, try-
ing to carve a mythical personality for himself from the rubbish of lan-
guage. (Durrell-Miller Letters +)
Still, Durrell ended by saying that he is the truest Greek I know, and Kat-
simbalis remained the living embodiment of the true Greek throughout the
+jos. John Lehmanns description of Katsimbalis on a boat from Athens to
Poros, like an archaic statue dressed up in modern clothing for a lark and
roaring to the wind and the waves and the uncomprehending, rather scared
young sailors appears to imitate a scene on a boat on page of Millers
book, but we cannot be sure if it is Lehmann, Katsimbalis, or both who are
trying to recreate the earlier incident (Ample Proposition 8).
13
Greece in
English and American literature was never the same after Durrell and
Miller met Katsimbalis in Athens in the autumn of +, but neither was
Katsimbalis.
Millers trip to Greece in + was a symptom as much as a cause of a re-
thinking of the geography of the Mediterranean. In George Johnstons novel
Clean Straw for Nothing (+), a character remarks: Italy, alas, is
spoiling. . . . Even in the south. . . . Now one must go farther aeld, I am
afraid. Greece is the place, I think. Greece is still possible (+). Miller com-
mented, Greece is still a sacred precinct (+j, my italics). Landscape was a
crucial element in the explanation as to why Greece was still a sacred
precinct, for it produced the condition that made Pans possibleWe are the
children of our landscape, Durrell said in Justine, it dictates behavior and
thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it (+). He began his
c o c r t s r o :j
chapter on the history of Corfu with the comment, Under the formal pag-
eant of events which we have dignied by our interest, the land changes very
little, and the structure of the basic self of man hardly at all (j). In his dis-
cussion of the new philhellenism, Stephen Spender said that it opens on to
the eternal Greece not through politics, but through the landscape and the
people, and through modern Greek poetry (Brilliant Athens and Us y8).
The point is supported by numerous titles and subtitles of works by the new
philhellenes, such as Durrells Prosperos Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and
Manners of the Island of Corfu and Reections on a Marine Venus: A Guide to
the Landscape of Rhodes; Osbert Lancasters Classical Landscape with Figures;
Rex Warners Views of Attica and Its Surroundings; and John Lehmanns
poem Greek Landscape with Figures.
As Eisner noted, ideas about the effect of the Greek climate in these works
hardly differ from the Rationalist/Romantic melody of landscape as mean-
ing, which had appeared at the end of the eighteenth century (+j). Land-
scape had, of course, always been an important consideration in the con-
struction of Greece. Arnold Bennett in +:8 repeated the old nostrum about
the role of the environment in the creation of the Greek miracle: The Greek
landscape was classical before Greek literature and architecture and sculp-
ture. It is the origin of the Greek spirit (o). One can compare such senti-
ment to Fowless musing, Perhaps ancient Greece was only the effect of a
landscape and a light on a sensitive people (Behind The Magus :).
But the terrain of the new philhellenism was decidedly different from, al-
most the opposite of, the Greek landscape of Romantic Hellenism. In +8o,
Chateaubriand found that in Greece a suavity, a softness, a repose pervade
all nature. . . . In the native land of the Muses, Nature suggests no wild devi-
ations, she tends, on the contrary, to dispose the mind to the love of the uni-
form and the harmonious (y). His Greek environment was a reection of
the presiding deity of the day, Apollo.
Over a hundred years later, however, the landscape of Greece was per-
ceived to be full of wild deviations, as if the trees themselves responded to the
reappearance of Dionysus on Greek soil. At the beginning of Prosperos Cell,
Durrell said: All the way across Italy you nd yourself moving through a
landscape severely domesticatedeach valley laid out after an architects
pattern, brilliantly lighted, human (++). Greece, Durrell went on, by con-
trast you approach as one might enter a dark crystal; the form of things be-
comes irregular, refracted (++). The olive tree is never pruned: Prolix in its
freedom therefore the olive takes strange shapes ().
14
According to Leigh
Fermor, the scenery of the island of Hydra is violent and dionysiac (Back-
ground of Nikos Ghika :). John Fowles told how he fell instantly in love
with what I have come to call agria Ellada, or wild Greece (Greece y+).
In +yo, Storm Jameson remarked that what is unique about Greece is not
only the light, nakedly clear, but the hardness. Greece has the hardness
:o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
not of stone, which can softenbut of marble ( Journey from the North
::). The wildness and hardness of the Greek landscape functioned as
both an objective correlative for the psychological freedom of the individual
and as a facilitator for shedding restraints placed upon him by society. It was
this wildness that made Greece special and unique. Other countries may
offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape, Durrell said at the
opening of Prosperos Cell. Greece offers you something harderthe dis-
covery of yourself (++). In Greece, Fermor suggested, Nature becomes
supernatural; the frontier between the physical and the metaphysical is con-
founded (Mani :88).
A key feature in the search for the primitive in Italy from +8yo through the
writings of D. H. Lawrence in the +:os had been the romanticizing of the
Etruscans as a pre-Roman, peace-loving, natural people, a view made possi-
ble because little was known about the Etruscans. Miller and Durrell also
celebrated the primitive in Greece; in their different ways they were as little
interested in the Periclean glory that was Greece as Lawrence had been in the
Augustan grandeur that was Rome. Back before Pericles, however, were the
Mycenaeans, perceived, after Schliemanns excavations at Mycenae, as a
rather bloodthirsty and matter-of-fact crew. Miller said that the Mycenaean
fortress of Tiryns smells of cruelty, barbarism, suspicion, isolation, and he
added that the quiet at Mycenae today resembles the exhaustion of a cruel
and intelligent monster which has been bled to death (8j). These were
hardly a people on which one could build an idyllic vision of life. But, with
the excavations of Arthur Evans at Knossos, one could now go back before
the Mycenaeans to the Minoans, about whom even less was known than the
Etruscans. In what Lawrence referred to in a poem as the Minoan distance,
the Minoans became a pre-Greek, peace-loving, natural peopleor, to put it
another way, Etruscans on Greek soil.
15
Osbert Lancaster called the Minoans
a race of happy little extroverts unshadowed by the inhibiting preoccupa-
tion with the future life which so troubled the contemporary Egyptians and
were quite unconcerned with the intellectual problems which engaged the
fascinated attention of the Classical Greeks (:oj). The hero of Keeleys
The Gold-Hatted Lover sees Knossos as an unembarrassed monument to
the pleasures of the esh (y). At the Minoan site of Knossos, Henry Miller
went into more detail:
Knossos in all its manifestations suggests the splendor and sanity and
opulence of a powerful and peaceful people. It is gaygay, healthful,
sanitary, salubrious. . . . The religious note seems to be graciously di-
minished; women played an important, equal role in the affairs of this
people; a spirit of play is markedly noticeable. In short, the prevailing
note is one of joy. One feels that man lived to live, that he was not
plagued by thoughts of a life beyond . . . that he was religious in the
c o c r t s r o :+
only way becoming to man, by making the most of everything that
comes to hand, by extracting the utmost from every passing minute.
Knossos was worldly in the best sense of the word. (+:+::)
Katsimbalis, it appears, was not only a modern Dionysus but also a modern
Minoan.
It would be wrong to underestimate the impact of the Minoans on the
new pastoral perception of a primitive Greece, even for Durrell on Corfu. In
a letter to George Wilkinson in +, Durrell informed his friend, Nancy is
rabid to examine the traces of early Byzantine paintings down the coast of
Greece, while I am mad to get to Knossos and examine the traces of a Minoan
civilization, of which by this time Im quite sure, my ancestors were a
part. . . . They were sturdy and lustful, and had a vital art of their own, which
owes practically nothing to the huge contemporary civilizations around it
(Spirit of Place :). Soon after the Second World War, Durrell was at work on
a Minoan novel, Cefal.
16
In his poem Greek Excavations (+:)
Bernard Spencer claimed:
Peering for coin or condent bust
Or vase in bloom with swiftness of horses,
My mind was never turned the way
Of the classic of the just and unjust,
I was looking for things which have a date
(:o)
But the new philhellenes were not looking for things that had a date, they
were in search of a place that had no dates, that was outside of time. They were
trying, as Spencer said in Aegean Islands, +o+, to nd elements in a
happiness / More distant now than any date like o, / +.n. or u.c., ever can ex-
press (+). Those elements of happiness, when they had to be placed in a
chronology, were placed before history began. Durrells In Arcadia (+o)
suggested that Greece existed even before the Greeks arrived. The poem
opens with the arrival of the Dorians in Greece, bringing re and a brute art:
Rain fell, tasting of the sky,
Trees grew, composing a grammar,
The river, the river you see was brought down
By force of prayer on this fertile oor.
Now small skills; the ngers laid upon
The nostrils of utes, the speech of women
Whose tutors were the birds; who singing
Now civilized their children with the kiss.
(Collected Poems 88)
:: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
The effect of the rain, trees, and birds could still be felt in the +os when
this was written, since the poem concludes that there might be Something
dead out by the river: / but it seems less than a nightingale ago (8). Even
with the substitution of Dionysus for Apollo, such sentiments were, to use
Eisners phrase again, little more than the Rationalist/Romantic melody of
landscape as meaning recycled.
The writing of the new philhellenism, however, was much more than that,
because, as Spender said, it drew not only upon the landscape and people
but also on modern Greek poetry. Spender might simply have named
George Seferis as the Greek poet of the new philhellenism. His only Greek
rivals in inuence were Katsimbalis and the painter Ghika.
17
Three of the
names on Spenders list of new philhellenes were involved in early transla-
tions of Seferis. Bernard Spencer and Lawrence Durrell teamed with Nanos
Valaoritis on The King of Asine and Other Poems (+8), and Rex Warner
brought out another collection in +o. In the +os, Durrell penned the
poem Letter to Seferis the Greek; in the +jos Spender dedicated The
Messenger to Seferis; and in the +os C. Day-Lewis wrote The Room in
homage to the same Greek writer. Peter Levi said, It is amazing how much I
understood, how early from George Seferis (Hill of Kronos ). He added
that there is a sense in which he virtually invented modern Greek, both as
prose and verse (). More to the point, for Levi, as for Miller, Durrell, Fer-
mor, and Spencer, there is a sense in which Seferis created modern Greece.
Miller admitted that he knew his [Seferiss] work only from translation,
but even if I had never read his poetry I would say this is the man who is des-
tined to transmit the ame ().
18
The statement is not quite as prescient as
it might rst seem. For, just as it was Miller who caused literary travelers to
look for Katsimbalis in Athens, it was Miller again who ensured that those
same literary travelers were reading Seferis.
Miller, like Winckelmann, linked the spirit of eternality which is every-
where in Greece to the fact that the landscape does not change. Miller did
not adduce, as Arnold Bennett had, the classical sublime created by the Ger-
man thinker but claimed instead that this idea was embedded in the poems
of George Seferiades, whose pen name is Seferis. Miller then recalled
going with Seferiades one afternoon to look at a piece of land on
which he thought he might build himself a bungalow. There was
nothing extraordinary about the placeit was even a bit shabby and
forlorn, I might say. Or rather it was, at rst sight. I never had a
chance to consolidate my rst eeting impression; it changed under
my eyes as he led me about like an electried jelly-sh from spot to
spot, rhapsodizing on herbs, owers, shrubs, rocks, clay, slopes,
declivities, coves, inlets, and so on. . . . His native exibility was re-
sponding to the cosmic laws of curvature and nitude. He had ceased
c o c r t s r o :
going out in all directions; his lines were making the encircling move-
ment of embrace. He had begun to ripen into the universal poetby
passionately rooting himself in the soil of his people. Wherever there
is life today in Greek art it is based on this Antaean gesture, this pas-
sion which transmits itself from heart to feet, creating strong roots
which transform the body into a tree of potent beauty. (Colossus of
Maroussi y)
Miller also depicted Katsimbalis as rooted in the Greek landscape; in fact,
Miller concluded his book with the colossus in an Antaean gesture of picking
a ower in an Attic eld (:o+).
19
But with the appearance of a selection of
Seferiss poetry in The King of Asine, translated by Durrell, Spencer, and
Valaoritis, the example of Seferis was available for imitation. This volume, as
Avi Sharon has shown, was part of a concerted effort on the part of Spencer,
Durrell, Lehmann, and others to create a reputation for Seferis outside of
Greece.
20
Katsimbalis might sit astride the entrance to the new geography
of Greece like one of the lions of Mycenae, but the poems of Seferis were
there to be pondered, translated, and transported to England. Durrell,
Spencer, Warner, Sherrard, Keeley, and Levi are only a few of the writers
who included translating Seferis as part of their Greek experience. While the
extemporaneous fellow now speaks only in the pages of Miller for most En-
glish and American readers, Seferis stands rmly at the center of a canon of
modern Greek verse, which any real lover of modern Greece must learn to
confront in the original, like the poems of Homer for classical enthusiasts.
In his Nobel Prize speech, Seferis asserted that the present Greeks have a
kinship with the ancient Greeks because they have been formed by the same
geological features, because they are in effect children of the same landscape.
Seferis explored the use of landscape as a connecting link in the Greek expe-
rience in his poems, such as the twelfth section of Mythistorima (+j):
Bottle in the Sea
three rocks, a few burnt pines, a solitary chapel
and farther above
the same landscape repeated starts again:
three rocks in the shape of a gate-way, rusted,
a few burnt pines, black and yellow,
and a square hut buried in whitewash;
and still farther above, many times over,
the same landscape recurs level after level
to the horizon, to the twilight sky.
Here we moored the ship to splice the broken oars,
To drink water and to sleep.
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
The sea that embittered us is deep and unexplored
and unfolds a boundless calm.
Here among the pebbles we found a coin
and threw dice for it.
The youngest won it and disappeared.
We set out again with out broken oars.
(tr. Keeley and Sherrard +)
Edmund Keeley suggested that in Mythistorima, as Seferis attempts to
carry the reader to the level of myth, the level of timeless universalities, he
wins sympathy and belief by convincingly representing the present reality
sustaining the mytha contemporary Greek reality always (Modern Greek
Poetry j). Keeley went on to observe that this strategy resembles to a degree
the mythical method that Eliot coined in his review of Joyces Ulysses, in
which myth is used to give a shape and a signicance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history by using
the mythology of Homer to manipulate a continuous parallel between con-
temporaneity and antiquity (y). Leigh Fermor said something similar to
this when he remarked that Ghika extracted a logic from the disorder com-
posed of the convulsions of planes, angles, circles, cylinders, polygons,
polyhydra on the island of Hydra (Background of Nikos Ghika o). Eliot
asserted that the mythical method was a serious step toward making the
modern world possible for art (Selected Essays +yy). It was certainly a major
step toward making modern Greece possible for foreign artists. Durrell sug-
gested that the mythical method was almost a natural phenomenon in Corfu:
In this landscape observed objects still retain a kind of mythological form
so that though we are separated from Ulysses by hundreds of years in time,
yet we dwell in his shadow (Prosperos Cell j). In Reections on a Marine
Venus, he used the term historical present for the sense of observed objects re-
taining in the present their mythical force. In her autobiography, Storm
Jameson concurred: I suppose that one reason for the stubborn persistence
in us of Greece . . . is that, in this light scarred country, one is able, no, forced
to impose a myth on reality (::).
21
As Keeley cautioned, Seferis can only be said to use the example of Joyce
and Eliot in a general way, as a kindred spirit (Modern Greek Poetry yy).
22
But that was enough. To Durrell, as to Warner, Spender, and Lehmann,
Seferis wrote verse that could be viewed within a framework that was famil-
iar to themit was giving back to them a modernism they had learned from
Eliot. This may well have had a role in Durrells warning to Seferis in +,
We are having trouble translating you so that you dont sound like Eliot.
23
Seferis, Katsimbalis, and Ghika provided a way into modern Greece because
they were perceived to be both Greek and modernist, different and yet
c o c r t s r o :j
familiar. But even if to some degree this was a vicarious celebration by West-
erners of their own practices by praising those traits in Greeks, even if it
could be viewed as a form of intellectual colonialism, it caused a break-
through in writing about Greece. In the late +os and +jos, some writers
may have been attracted to the concept of a Greece connected to the mythical
method of modernism and a Greek Eliot, because it appeared to offer
them one of the last modernist spots in a literary world slipping into the in-
determinacy of postmodernism after the Second World War.
A crucial ingredient in Seferiss poetry was what Keeley called his insis-
tence on the contemporary Greek reality always, a characteristic he shared
with the painter Ghika, the poet Odysseus Elytis, and other Greek artists.
Miller presented a blueprint for the new encounter with Greece, although he
might not have accomplished it to the same degree as Durrell did in Pros-
peros Cell. In Greece, he asserted: Everything is delineated, sculptured,
etched. Even the waste lands have an eternal cast about them. You see every-
thing in its uniquenessa man sitting on a road under a tree: a donkey
climbing a path near a mountain: a ship in a harbor in a sea of turquoise: a
table in a terrace beneath a cloud. And so on. Whatever you look at you see as
if for the rst time (+). In Reections on a Marine Venus, Durrell said,
We have learned to see Greece with inner eyesnot as a collection of bat-
tered vestiges left over from cultures long since abandoned, but as some-
thing ever-present and ever-renewed: the symbol married to the primeso
that a cypress tree, a mask, an orange, a plough were extended beyond them-
selves into an eternality they enjoyed only with the furniture of all good
poetry (+y). In Don DeLillos The Names, Owen states: Correctness of
detail. This is what the light provides. Look to small things for your joy, your
truth. This is the Greek specic (:). The goal of the writer is now to some-
how get that uniqueness, that correctness of detail, on the page, to know the
natural history of a sacred place, as Durrell put it in To Argos, and to
offer a text analogous to what anthropologists would term thick descrip-
tion. That phrase accurately ts the writing of Durrell in Prosperos Cell
and Reections of a Marine Venus and even more precisely the work of Leigh
Fermor, who told the reader that his goal was to attack the country at cer-
tain points and penetrate, as far as my abilities went, in depth (Mani x). In
Prosperos Cell, for example, Durrell carefully recorded the seasonal changes
in his island home: You wake one morning in the late autumn and notice
that the tone of everything has changed; the sky shines more deeply pearl,
and the sun rises like a ball of bloodfor the peaks of the Albanian hills are
touched with snow. The sea has become leaden and sluggish and the olive a
deep platinum grey. Fires smoke in the villages, and the breath of Maria as
she passes with her sheep to the headland, is faintly white upon the air
(j). Bernard Spencer strove for precision of description in the poem
Aegean Islands, +o+:
: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
To sun ones bones beside the
Explosive crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea
(The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam,
Familiar of famous and deserted harbors,
Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars).
(+)
Miller did not say that one could now look at Greece as if he were seeing
it for the rst time because the classical and Byronic preconceptions had
been laid aside. But the fact that those constructions of Greece were no
longer potent was a major factor in permitting English and American visi-
tors to see Greece anew. It is worth noting that Miller and Durrell en-
countered Greece with less literary baggage about the country than most of
their contemporaries. Seferis once praised Miller as the rst man I admired
for not having any classical preparation on going to Greece. . . . There is such
a freshness about him (in Keeley, Modern Greek Poetry :oo). Robert Liddell
lamented to George Seferis that his university training in the classics inter-
fered with his understanding of modern Greece, while Durrell, who never
nished university, starts with an innocent eye and has no means of
knowing that Homer is more considerable than Erotokritos [a medieval
poem from Crete].
24
Even the best of the poems that Durrell wrote on Corfu lack the spirit of
eternality and historical depth one nds later in the verse he wrote after Se-
feris had greatly inuenced him, as Kenneth Young recognized as early as
+jo (j8). In Durrells early Greek poems the discovery of ones self tends to
overpower the natural history of the place. But the powerful poems that
began to appear in late +, like At Epidaurus, In Arcadia, To Argos,
and At Corinth, concern an individual contemplating myth with the help
of a charged Greek setting. In To Argos, despite the fact that the roads
have been identied now by scholars:
Only the shepherd in his cowl
Who walks upon them really knows
The natural history of a sacred place;
Takes like a text of stone
A familiar cloud-shape or fortress,
Pointing at what is mutually seen,
His dark eyes wearing the crowsfoot.
(Collected Poems +oj)
All of Durrells and Bernard Spencers longer Greek poems from the
early war period employ a kind of Antaean gesture to evoke the eternality
that is everywhere in Greece.
25
But a fundamental difference separates the
c o c r t s r o :y
work of Seferis from the writings of foreign philhellenes. At the end of Dur-
rells poems there is often a clear recuperative moment with a pastoral aura,
involving some sort of discovery of yourself, as in At Epidaurus:
Then smile, my dear, above the holy wands,
Make the indenite gesture of the hands,
Unlocking this world which is not our world.
The somnambulists walk again in the north
With the long black ries, to bring us answers.
Useless a morality for slaves, useless
The shouting at echoes to silence them.
Most useless inhabitants of the kind blue air,
Four ragged travellers in Homer.
All causes end in the great Because.
(Collected Poems 8)
The Greek world of Seferis is bleaker and less secure. Here is the nal section
of Mythistorima:
Here end the works of the sea, the works of love.
Those who will some day live here where we end
should the blood happen to darken in their memory and overow
let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels,
let them turn the heads of the victims towards Erebus:
We who had nothing will teach them peace.
(tr. Keeley and Sherrard j)
The rst person plural in Seferiss poem opens out to include the entire
Greek nation. That same rst person plural appears in Durrells poem
above, but it refers to expatriates in Greece, removed from the larger world.
26
The difference between the two writers is highlighted in Letter to Seferis
the Greek, where Durrell wrote:
O my friend, history with all her compromises
Cannot disturb the circuit made by this,
Alone in the house, a single candle burning
Upon a table in the whole of Greece.
(Collected Poems +o:)
27
Any perceptive reading of Seferis instantly reveals that history with all
her compromises did disturb the private circuit Durrell attempted to carve
out in Greece; indeed, the perspective offered by Durrell is one to which, in
:8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
my view, Seferis would never assent. In the opening of the second section of
Seferiss Mythistorima, the poet literally grappled with the Greek past:
I woke with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my elbows and I dont know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream
so our life became one and it will be very difcult for it to disunite again.
(tr. Keeley and Sherrard y)
In Journey to the Morea, Kazantzakis wrote, For a foreigner the pilgrim-
age to Greece is simple, it happens without any great convulsion; his mind,
liberated from sentimental entanglements, leaps on to discuss the essence of
Greece. But for a Greek, this pilgrimage is fraught with hopes and fears, with
distress and painful comparison (8). One can take issue with how easily a
foreigner can discuss the essence of Greece, but the visitor is prone to depict
the pilgrimage to nd Greece in literature as a relatively straightforward en-
deavor. Greeks like Seferis render that same journey as exceedingly difcult.
The Greek newspaper Kathimerini for May +, +8, carried an article en-
titled Zorba, the Quintessential Greek, Is Still Controversial. The article
called Zorba an icon of the modern Greek since Michalis Cacoyannis lmed
Zorba the Greek in + and reported that the face of Anthony Quinn, who
played Zorba in the movie, became identied with the modern Greeks al-
most as much as the Parthenon was the symbol of the glory that was Ancient
Greece. Robert Kaplan said, The Greek myth was born out of movement
in twentieth-century literature that was eventually crystallized in one of his-
torys most memorable lms (:). No one can dispute that the picture of
Anthony Quinn, dancing the zembekiko, popularized the perception of a
Dionysian Greece.
28
Surprisingly, the evidence suggests that Kazantzakiss
novel Zorba had little to do with creating the new Greece nor much inuence
on any of the writers involved in the enterprise. In +, Patrick Anderson
thought that it was strange that Henry Miller did not mention Kazantzakis in
The Colossus of Maroussi (+o++). Miller, who did not know Greek, could not
have read either Kazantzakiss novel nor his epic The Odyssey in English until
more than a decade after the publication of the book about his trip to Greece.
Still, Anderson has a point. Zorba appeared in an English translation in +j:
and was known well enough that Holiday Magazine asked Kazantzakis, called
in the periodical Greeces foremost novelist, to write an article about the
Greek islands in +j. Why did Spender not mention Kazantzakis in his arti-
cle delineating the new philhellenism, Brilliant Athens and Us? Why did
no one mention Zorba?
Peter Levi told the following tale of a visit to Athens in +: Late at
night, as caf after caf closed down, everyone in Athens who was still awake
homed in on the same few tables, and conversations mingled. A lm pro-
c o c r t s r o :
ducer I had never met was wandering around looking for someone, anyone, to
write an English script for a lm called Zorba the Greek. We all refused, no
one liked Kazantzakis (Hill of Kronos :). Neither Levi nor anyone else, so
far as I am aware, has revealed why no one liked Kazantzakis, but the state-
ment appears to be sound. In the +jos and early +os, when nearly every-
one was carrying The Colossus of Maroussi and invoking the name of Seferis,
no English or American writer of note went to stay with Zorba in Greece.
From one point of view, Zorba was simply Katsimbalis dressed up as a peas-
ant, and one might have expected those who were enamored of the colossus
of Maroussi to nd his rural alter ego somewhat appealing. It might have
been that when a real Dionysus was available as a guide to Greece, one did not
need to turn to a ctional one. Zorba did not replace Katsimbalis as the mas-
culine personication of a new Greece until the middle of the +os.
Greece was available as an alternative to Italy in the late +os because the
Smyrna Disaster had depoliticized its soil and its Pans. Spender noted in
+j that a revealing aspect of this rediscovered love of Greece is that it has
nothing to do with current Greek politics. . . . Their [the new philhellenes]
passion for the country is unpolitical. It implies a recognition of the fact that
the politics of foreign countries are more complex than they appeared in the
thirties. This mood of refusal to judge Greek politics, or even to take them
into account, is probably as characteristic of the +jos as taboos about Spain
are a hang-over from the +os (Brilliant Athens and Us y8). The refusal
to take account of Greek politics began earlier than +jo. The rst and only
issue of Greek Horizons (+), a magazine featuring the work of British ex-
patriates in Greece and published in Athens, announced in the midst of a civil
war: This quarterly will not be political. It aims rather at describing the nat-
ural beauties, customs, and the varied progress the modern Greeks have
made in the arts (:).
29
The struggle of West against East to free the Greeks
was over, and after the Great War those who wanted to revolutionize the
world sought Moscow not Athens. Without the quotations from Byron, with-
out maids of Athens who needed rescue, without the dream of regeneration,
Greece could be a sunny Mediterranean place where one could rid oneself of
Western inhibitions. On the boat to Greece Miller met people of several
Mediterranean nationalities: The Turk aroused my antipathies at once. He
had a mania for logic which infuriated me. It was a bad logic too. And like the
others, all of whom I violently disagreed with, I found in him an expression of
the American spirit at its worst. Progress was their obsession (). Here the
concept of progress, so closely tied to the construction of modern Greece for
decades, has been transferred to the Turk, whose race throughout the nine-
teenth century was thought to be impervious to progress.
Further, in the late +os another Italy was also needed because Italy,
under Mussolini, had itself become a politicized place for visitors. Thomas
:yo r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Mann signaled that in his story Mario and the Magician (+:), in which
a vacationing German family is confronted by Fascists on the beach. And
Spain had erupted in civil war by the middle of the decade. Ironically, when
the impending war politicized nearly all places in Europe and many else-
where, Greece, because the disaster had depoliticized it, was available as a
pastoral retreata private country, as Durrell called the book that con-
tained many of his early Greek poems. It was certainly no longer the politi-
cal country it once had been. Left to his own resources, Miller wrote,
man always begins again the Greek waya few goats or sheep, a rude hut,
a patch of crops, a clump of olives, a running stream, a ute (+yo). Durrell
has Father Nicholas phrase it a bit differently: What more does a man want
than an olive tree, a native island, and [a] woman from his own place? (Pros-
peros Cell +). Greece was now envisioned as an escape from the quotidian
world; Miller described the boat from Athens to Corfu as gliding in more
than a Greek atmosphereit was poetic and of no time or place actually
known to man (:).
30
Olivia Mannings Friends and Heroes (+j), set in Athens in +o++,
contained a revealing discussion between Alan Frewell and Guy Pringle:
Alan talked for some time about the Greeks and the countryside: an
idyllic, unspoilt countryside. Guy, interested in the more practical
aspects of Greek life, here broke in to ask if by unspoilt Alan did
not mean undeveloped, and by idyllic, simply that conditions had
not changed since the days of the Ottoman empire. How was it possi-
ble to enjoy the beauty of a country when the inhabitants lived in pri-
vation and misery?
Ive seen a great deal of the country, Alan responded. I have not noticed
that the people are unhappy (j8). When Alan is asked whether Greece is
happy under a dictatorship, he laughs. You could call it a dictatorship,
but a very benevolent one. . . . Before Metaxas took over thered been an at-
tempt to impose a modern political system on what was virtually a primitive
society. The result was chaos. Guy responds: You prefer the peasants to
remain in picturesque poverty, I suppose? To which Alan answers: I pre-
fer that they remain as they are: courteous, generous, honourable, and coura-
geous (j8j). Like Mannings Alan Frewell, most of the new phil-
hellenes did not draw attention to whether the Greeks were unhappy under
the dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas, which lasted from August ,
+, until Greeces entry into the Second World War, or whether there were
political prisoners in Greece. Im sure I dont know, Alan says in Man-
nings novel. There may be, but if people are intent on making a nuisance
of themselves, then prison is the best place for them (jo). Neither of
the protagonists gets the better of the other in this exchange, since the leftist,
c o c r t s r o :y+
Guy Pringle, has his own set of ideological preconceptions, which impede
his vision of the country around him.
The Colossus of Maroussi, Prosperos Cell, and Reections on a Marine Venus
are not deeply concerned with Greek politics either. Miller and Durrell
surely knew that Greece was under a dictatorship in +, but they did not
allow that to affect their view of it as a sacred precinct. Miller briey met a
political exile during a trip to Spetses, but he never tells us what the man had
done to deserve his sentence (j). Durrell made only the briefest mention
of the political problems that brought Metaxas to power in + in his rst
novel, Panic Spring (+o).
31
Bernard Spencer, in his poem Salonika (June
+o), began: My end of Europe is at war. He concluded that he would
shut . . . if I could, out of harms way the whole of bright life he witnessed
in the Greek city. The dancing, the bathing, the order of the market, and as
day / Cools into the night, boys playing in the square; / Island boats and
lemon-peel tang and the timeless caf crowd, / And the outcry of dice on
wood (:+). Who could tell from this description that Greeks lacked political
freedom when Spencer wrote the poem? Of those who wrote about Greece in
the late +os, only Bert Birtles clearly connected the Metaxas regime with
authoritarian governments elsewhere in Europe, and he dedicated his book
Exiles in the Aegean (+8) to the brave Greek victims of Fascist terror in
prison and in exile.
32
Ironically, Greece could be the sacred precinct for the
new philhellenes in part because the political liberty of the Greeks was no
longer a central concern. The real Greece, as Miller and Durrell conceived
it at the start of the Second World War, was one of personal discovery, not of
political action.
This helps to explain the rather bizarre fact that the great majority of the
texts written by the new philhellenes in the +jos did not depict the terrible
years of the Nazi occupation and the Greek Civil War, a struggle between
bands of Communist guerrillas and the right-wing government supported
by Britain and America, with the same dening sense of tragedy that imbued
the Asia Minor Disaster. In Views of Attica (+jo), Rex Warner offered this
disclaimer for his book. It is by no means to attempt any kind of description
of the civil war in Greece. I shall be chiey concerned with sights and
sounds. Violence, savagery, poverty, irreconcilable hatreds are not part of my
theme, yet it is only too true they exist. It was not that he was ignorant of the
conict, he added, but his book aspired to recount other aspects of the scene
which are real and will be, I hope, more permanent (y). The sights and
sounds of Greece could, in fact, be the civil war, as Kevin Andrewss The
Flight of Ikaros: Travels in Greece during a Civil War (+j) demonstrated.
Andrewss book stands out for the fact that, almost alone of the books of the
+jos, it did not attempt to separate the sights and sounds of Greece from its
politics and did not present the view that the strife in Greece was any less
crucial than the landscape. But where Durrell presented a journey to Greece
:y: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
that ended with the discovery of yourself in Prosperos Cell, Andrews
recorded a journey to nd the self that ended in the discovery of Greece. Not
many of his generation made that trip.
Most of the other writers, even those who served in the eastern Mediter-
ranean during the Second World War, had a reaction about the war in Greece
and its aftermath similar to that of John Fowles:
All my generation had been dazzled by the exploits of a celebrated
band of odd men who had fought beside the brave Greek resistance
from + to +j. The aura of these contemporary Xans and Paddys
somehow gilded our dream of those other handsome, dashing, and
divine andarte and their women friends who once lived on Mount
Olympus. We knew we couldnt rival them; my generation just missed
ghting in the Nazi war and the bout of world belligerence in Korea,
Malaysia, and so on that followed. We read all those glamorous ex-
ploits in Crete rather as the suburbs today read of the amboyant
goings-on in Hollywood. All that was somehow not quite credible,
belonging less to real lifeor certainly our own real livesthan to
ction. It allowed us to nibble and oat in lotus land, but not to live
where we really were. (Behind The Magus )
The Greek resistance to the Nazi occupation was viewed as a kind of
heroic age, a return to the Greece of Byron. C. M. Woodhouse, one of the
British ofcers who worked with the Greek resistance, later wrote: Every
experience of the +8:os was repeated, including torture, betrayal, and at-
tempted murder, but also including loyalty, generosity and heroic self-sacri-
ce. The very names were the same, even if they were only pseudonymous:
Odysseus, Kolokotronis, Botsaris, Karaiskakis, even Byronall were there
again in the +os (Philhellenes +8). Patrick Leigh Fermor, who para-
chuted into occupied Crete during the war, recalled, The people we lived
among were mountaineers, shepherds, and villagers living high above the
plains and cities in circumstances which exactly tallied with the life and back-
ground of the klephts in revolt at any point in the past few hundred years
(Roumeli +:). But after the war, that Byronic world was considered, as
Fowles said, not quite credible, belonging less to real life, and it was
quickly relegated to the past. A klephtic past was hardly credible to Wood-
house, author of the best ction written about Greece during the war, the
sadly neglected collection One Omen. These stories are a grimly realistic pic-
ture of working with the resistance in Greece, in which the brigand clothes
of some of the guerrillas are referred to as romantic relics of an unreal past
that had perhaps never lived (+8). The quick disappearance of the Byronic
tradition after a brief resuscitation during World War II may have occurred
because, as Woodhouse suggested:
c o c r t s r o :y
Nothing comparable to the progressive causes of the +8:osCatholic
emancipation, parliamentary reform, republicanism, utilitarianism,
evangelicanism, abolition of slavery, freedom of trade unions, educa-
tion for the working class, and so onexisted in the +os to be
merged with the philhellenism in a protest movement. . . . The de-
sire to liberate the Greeks from the Nazis was not, as the desire to liber-
ate them from the Ottoman empire had been, part of a complex of rad-
ical ideas. It was in fact singularly free of ideology. (Philhellenes +)
The desire to keep Greece out of the Communist bloc was also fairly free
of ideological discussion in Western writing and certainly not part of a com-
plex of radical ideas. None of the new philhellenes, however liberal, champi-
oned a leftist victory in the Greek Civil War. Once again, foreigners found
unanimity on an issue that was deeply divisive among the Greeks themselves.
Just as all of the versions of the romance of Greek liberation were Venizelist
in the First World War, so all of the versions of the romance of liberation set
during the civil war, such as Mary Richmonds Maid of Athens (+8), Win-
ston Grahams Greek Fire (+jy), and Helen MacInness Decision at Delphi
(+:), are anti-Communist in sentiment.
What was new was the desire of so many of the new philhellenes to leave
politics out of their experience of Greece, a reaction that partly stemmed
from the fact that, by the +os, politics was part of a Byronic Greece associ-
ated with both Romanticism and popular writing. The new philhel-
lenism, as Fowles suggested, portrayed Greece as the new lotus land. The
wheel had come full circle from the early nineteenth century. In +8y:, Mur-
rays Handbook for Travellers in Greece suggested that travelers to the country
could form an accurate opinion of the important question, the present state
and future destiny of the Levant. By the +jos, the lotus eaters went to
Greece to avoid such worldly concerns.
As a result, the books about the wars in Greece during the +os did not
make a large impact on the postwar idea of Greece in the English and Amer-
ican mind. Andrewss The Flight of Ikaros has had admirers, to be sure, but
nowhere near the number of readers or the importance as the books of
Miller and Durrell.
33
John Waller, for example, visited Athens in the spring
of +j while on active duty, but his poem Spring in Athens celebrated
evenings with Katsimbalis, Seferis, and Antoniou, as if his Athens were
hardly different from the city Miller left in December +. Many writers
turned their heads away from the civil war as Warner had, at least in print. In
Reections on a Marine Venus, Durrell alluded briey to the problems in
Greece during his stay on Rhodes from +j to +y, when Manoli the sh-
erman says of the Communists: They come to deliver us from poverty. God
knows we need that. But they will end in enslaving us with other evils. God
knows we dont want that; but he did so mainly to indicate that no such
:y r u v a o

s s n + n o w
political strife interrupted his enjoyment of Rhodes (jo). Leigh Fermor
knew as much about the civil war as anyone, but in Mani he made only a pass-
ing reference to the ghting in the +os (+8+). From his private inva-
sions of Greece, he stated in the preface, he would leave out anything
which had not lled me with interest, curiosity, pleasure, or excitement (xi,
x). Politics, apparently, was one of those things.
34
A curious irony, then, lay at the heart of the work of Spenders new phil-
hellenes. Whatever you look at you see for the rst time, Miller pro-
claimed, and there was an effort to put that advice into practice in descrip-
tions of the landscape and people. On the other hand, Greek politics were not
quite credible or real to these foreign observers, to paraphrase Fowles, and
since their goal was to portray their Greek reality, politics were largely left
out. Louis MacNeice appeared to take aim at the prevalent attitude of his lit-
erary colleagues in the third section of The Island in which a visitor,
gorged on a Greek meal, settles down to take an August siesta:
Here, he feels, is peace,
The world is not after all a shambles
And, granted there is no God, there are gods at least, at least in Greece,
And begins to drowse; but his dreams are troubled
By the sawmill noises of cicadas, on and onWill they never cease?
Were he to count a thousand, a hundred
Thousand sheep, they would all be scraggy and stare at him with the stare
Of refugees, outraged and sullen, . . .
And there are prisoners really, here in the hills, who do not agree
To sign for their freedom, whether in doubt of
Such freedom or having forgotten or never having known what it
meant to be free.
(Collected Poems oy)
Yet even in this poem there seems to be a recuperation and reafrmation for,
in the fourth section, after asking, But where is their island of wind and oil?
/ Where the slow concord of an island? MacNeice concluded that one can
nd it in the light of the Greek sun, which can soothe one even in sleep, and
he suggested there might be something to what Durrell called islomania
after all:
The round of dark has a lip of light,
The dams of sleep are large with daybreak,
Sleeping cocks are primed to crow
While blood may hear, in ears despite,
c o c r t s r o :yj
The suns wheels turning in the night
Which drowns and feeds, reproves and heartens.
(o8)
When politics mattered in the English and American construction of
Greece, the country was routinely personied as female. Greece gained a
masculine personication abroad when political concerns were not taken
into account. This suggests that there was still a problem in coming to terms
with the enduring dichotomy of Greece.
The best books in English about Greece, as a personal discovery, are by
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Kevin Andrews,
Dilys Powell. They have something in common, which I take to be Greek re-
ality, not just a similar temperament, though most of them have been a close
friend of at least one of the others, and a quality of the same generation
marks them all (Levi, Hill of Kronos ). As a canon, this list is open to some
revision; Robert Eisner suggested that Charmian Clifts Mermaid Singing
(+j) and Peel Me a Lotus (+j) deserve consideration (::). One thing
that all of these books have in common, which gives them the sense of Greek
reality, is that they all are or purport to be nonction. In what V. S. Pritchett
called the candor of Greek light (++), the discovery of the self seemed un-
suited to the shadows of ctions ambiguity. In Greece, Miller said, The
light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the
heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated in a metaphysical bliss which
makes everything clear without being known. No analysis can go on in this
light (Colossus of Maroussi j).
35
Such a view made the country as inhos-
pitable to the bourgeois interiority of the novel as had the idea of the classical
sublime. The story of Italy as a personal discovery was often, if not predom-
inantly, told in novels. But then Italy, especially places like Rome, Florence,
and Venice, was granted a murkier atmosphere and a Renaissance past. The
rst novel of Greece as a personal discovery of which most readers would
think would probably be James Merrills The (Diblos) Notebook (+j), a
ctional account of his visit to the island of Poros with Kimon Friar, or
Fowless The Magus (+), both of which appeared just before the idea of
Greece as lotus land was challenged by the military coup of +y.
With Miller, of course, the distinction between ction and nonction
might not be appropriate; nearly all of his work is about the life of Henry
Miller. But it is worth noting that while the story of Miller in Paris, narrated
in Tropic of Cancer, has generally been recognized as a novel, the account of
Miller in Greece in The Colossus of Maroussi has consistently been placed in
the category of nonction. Readers and critics have determined that what-
ever Paris might be, Greece should be real. Durrell might seem a better exam-
ple of the need for the real in writing about Greece. One might reasonably
:y r u v a o

s s n + n o w
argue that Durrell could not write ction set in Greece, adducing Panic
Spring, Cefal, and the Athenian sections of Tunc and Numquam as proof.
Durrells most engaging ctional places were the urban, decadent cities of
London (The Black Book), Alexandria, and Avignon. Things are actually not
quite so clear, however. Durrells Greek island books might not be autobio-
graphical ction, but they are certainly ctional autobiography, for Durrell
was actually in Paris for many of the dates in Prosperos Cell and invented at
least one main character, Gideon, for Reections on a Marine Venus.
36
George
Johnstons autobiographical novel about his life on Hydra in the +jos, Clean
Straw for Nothing (+), is truer in the correctness of detail than either of
Durrells books.
The canon offered by Levi erased the novels about Greece as a personal
discovery written in the early +os, including George Johnstons Closer to
the Sun (+o); Charmian Clifts Honours Mimic (+), in my view her best
book about the Greek experience; and Edmund Keeleys The Gold-Hatted
Lover (++). Closer to the Sun and The Gold-Hatted Lover both invoke
Henry Miller as a precursor and attempt to critique the new Greece under
the microscope of ctions probing lenses. The specic merits of these works
can be argued elsewhere, but they have at least partly been ignored because of
the kind of ctional project in which they were engaged. Fiction qua ction
did not have to deconstruct Greece as a personal discoveryJohnstons and
Clifts The Sponge Divers did not nor, on stage or screen, did Willy Russells
Shirley Valentine (+88).
37
As Fowles said in The Magus: Greece is like a
mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn (). His novel in fact ts this
pattern, for while we may not agree on what Nicholas Urfe has learned or
discovered about himself during the novel, we think that the problem is not
with the mirror but with the reection.
38
Interestingly, while both The
Magus, with its illusory psychological permutations of the god game, and
Merrills The (Diblos) Notebook, with its device of replicating the jottings
and crossed-out lines of a provisional text, have narrative styles that are in-
uenced by the new trends of postmodern ction, the Greek setting in both
books is still enveloped in something like the mythical method of mod-
ernism.
39
Six years before the publication of The Magus, however, the char-
acters of Johnstons Closer to the Sun discuss the problem of the awing of
the mirror (:); personal discovery in Greece might itself be a ction.
In Closer to the Sun, an Australian family moves to the Greek island of
Silenos to learn something about the light and shadow on the rocks against
the sky, the true taste of water, the rhythm of the seasons, the value of sim-
plicity (8). In the course of the novel, that project is threatened by an inva-
sion of crass outsiders, the lure of money, and indelity. The heroine says
near the end, Everybody thinks were escaping from something by living
here, and really this is where you nd that there isnt any escape at all, not
from anything, not yourself (+y). That has the typical Durrellian ring to it,
c o c r t s r o :yy
except that such sentiments are balanced by statements that, by living on
Silenos, the main characters have simply lost [their] way and have to nd
it again (:yj); in the end they have learned no more in lotus land than
Odysseuss sailors did among the lotus eaters.
40
The sexual awakening that
Kate has with a handsome, faunlike Frenchman does not lead to a happy re-
turn home to her husband in the manner of Shirley Valentine, but rather it
threatens everything that she really cares about in her life. As the hero of
Johnstons other novel about life on Hydra, Clean Straw for Nothing, is told,
You simply cannot cut yourselves off on a little island, as you have done, for
all these years. Not without reckoning cost. Life becomes altogether too
claustrophobic. Even incestuous. In the long run fatally destructive (++).
When one turns to Charmian Clifts Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus,
rather cheerful memoirs of Clifts life with Johnston on Kalymnos and
Hydra, one realizes that in the new Greece nonction is really Sophoclean,
the world as the authors think it should be, while ction is Euripidean, men
and women as they really are.
In Clifts Honours Mimic, Kate, an Australian woman married to an Eng-
lishman, is sent to stay with her sister-in-law on a Greek island after a suicide
attempt. When she arrives, her brother-in-law tells her that her sister has
found it difcult . . . to adjust her romantic expectations to the reality of this
poor and primitive place (+). Kates romantic expectations are different,
but they also cannot survive the reality of life on a remote Greek island. She
has an affair with a sponge diver but in the end realizes that they both must
return to the worlds in which they lived before they met. This again sounds,
minus the suicide attempt, much like the plot of Shirley Valentine. But in this
case the sponge diver is a crude, sleazy, rather lazy fellow, more Levantine
than Greek, and Kates jealous brother-in-law rapes her when he nds out.
Early in the novel, Kate is said to have a predilection for slumming, and the
reader is left to wonder if Kates love affair with Fotis is a growth experi-
encethe event that reconciles her to lifeor simply an attraction to Greek
lowlife. The Greek setting is not emphasized in this work; in fact the island
and its inhabitants are depicted as rather dull, savage, and claustrophobic.
The novel ends when, as her Greek lover departs on a sponge boat, a woman
in the market spits on Kate and the boys throw stones at her, hardly a tting
end to an island idyll.
The narrator of Keeleys The Gold-Hatted Lover, an American diplomat
stationed in Greece, takes an old college friend and his wife on a holiday to
Crete with a beautiful Greek woman as a guide. She offers many of the stan-
dard lines about American visitors: they are cold and ashamed of show-
ing their emotions (8y). The married American has an affair with the guide,
while his wife takes up with the narrator. As the reunited married couple
leave for America together at the end, the narrator imagines they will be
pleased to be back in their own little world after such a trying and dangerous
:y8 r u v a o

s s n + n o w
excursion into unknown territory, and who could argue that it wasnt for the
best? (:j). On the last page of the novel, the narrator has retreated at night
to the temple at Sounion where none of the proper responses were aroused:
no sense of imminent death, no nal illuminations, no hint of tragic joy that
one might feel in swan-diving over that cliff towards the black sea. . . . the
only tangible emotion I felt was a sort of comic despair over having felt noth-
ing at all, over having failed so miserably when the moment for the grand
gestureor at least for a grand thrillnally came (:). He concludes
that he had not loved hard enough. But Greece, or the idea of Greece as a
place where one manages to have the grand thrill, has also failed the hero.
None of the novels that subverted the idea of Greece as a personal discovery
has received much notice. Nonction seemed better suited to the candor of
Greek light.
What were you doing in Greece?
Being happy. He turned his handsome face to her and smiled.
Just being happy. But unfortunatelyhe sighedhappiness does
not last. (King, Kind, in So Hurt and Humiliated )
If Greece was a paradise, then the inevitable fall from the garden had to
occur. In Prosperos Cell and The Colossus of Maroussi, the loss of paradise was
caused by World War II. The Germans were snakes on a biblical scale, so the
end of paradise became especially poignant; in ++ Durrell felt the loss of
Greece like an amputation (Prosperos Cell ++). In Reections on a Marine
Venus, paradise ended with the termination of Durrells position with the
British Military Administration of the Dodecanese islands in +y. In the
decade after the war, ironically, the snakes became the very people who car-
ried the books of Durrell and Miller under their arms. Leigh Fermor noted,
An old Athenian aware of the havoc that tourism has spread in Spain and
France and Italy, laments that this gregarious passion, which destroys the ob-
ject of its love, should have chosen Greece as its most recent, most beautiful,
perhaps most fragile victim. . . . Greece is suffering its most dangerous inva-
sion since the time of Xerxes (Roumeli ++y+8).
Throughout the +jos and +os, the real Greece kept getting pushed
by tourists into remoter mountains and islands. Leigh Fermor said in the
preface of Mani that his project was to situate and describe the present day
Greeks of the mountains in relation to their habitat and history; to seek them
out in those regions where bad communications and remoteness have left this
ancient relationship, comparatively speaking, undisturbed (x). This argu-
ment has both logic and illogic, for by writing about regions like the Mani,
Leigh Fermor ensured that the tourist hordes would disturb life there. In
Matapan (+) Durrell began:
c o c r t s r o :y
Unrevisited perhaps forever
Southward from the capes of smoke
Where past and present to the waters are one
And the peninsulas end points out
Three ngers down the night
(Collected Poems ++)
Durrell never returned to Cape Matapan, the southernmost point of main-
land Greece, but Leigh Fermor traveled there in Mani, as did Robert Liddell
in The Morea (+:y). It became harder and harder to nd the unvisited and un-
written place in Greece; William Travis went as far as the small island of
Symi just off the Turkish coast (Bus Stop Symi, +yo). Even the region in
Greece called ta agrafa, literally, the unwritten places, has been written
about, most recently in Tim Salmons The Unwritten Places (+j) and Patri-
cia Storaces chapter The Unwritten in Dinner with Persephone (+).
The unwritten places in Greece in English and American literature actu-
ally have been the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki. The comparison with
Egypt is instructive. More than three-quarters of the books in English about
Egypt focus on the urban centers of Cairo or Alexandria. Foreign authors
can nd something Egyptian about Cairo but not, apparently, anything
Greek about Athens. Few books center on expatriate life in Athens and use
the city as a character with various moods represented by its geographical re-
gions. One that does, however, is Olivia Mannings Friends and Heroes (+j),
which describes life in the city during +o++, just before the German in-
vasion. Another is Francis Kings The Firewalkers (+j; published under
the pseudonym Frank Cauleld), which is about the good life among expatri-
ates in Athens in the early +jos.
41
King was a gay author greatly inuenced
by the idea of a Cavaan Athens, and he employed the decadent hedonism
found earlier in the work of William Plomer in both The Firewalkers and The
Man on the Rock (+jy), a ctional autobiography of one of the handsome,
young, kept men. Thessaloniki has gained a presence in writing in English
with Keeleys The Libation (+j8) and School for Pagan Lovers (+).
42
Writing in +8+, Peter Levi suggested that the Greece of Durrell and Miller,
that is, Greece as a personal discovery, was hardly born in +o, and in the
last ten years has been transformed (). The military coup of +y in
Greece certainly marked a breaking point in the narrative of Levis Hill of
Kronosthe snakes in paradise in this case being homegrown. The coup
clearly altered the landscape of Greece; the junta that ruled for the next
seven years ended, or at the least interrupted, the new philhellenism and
caused a repoliticization of Greece as a place on the map. Once again, Greece
became part of a complex of radical ideas when foreign opposition to the
:8o r u v a o

s s n + n o w
Greek dictatorship became associated with, among other things, student re-
bellions in Europe and America, the movement against the Vietnam War, and
reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the San Francisco Beat poets, embodied
the renewed links between desire for freedom in Greece and opposition to
political and social oppression elsewhere. His poem Forty Odd Questions
for the Greek Regime and One Cry for Freedom (rst read at a benet for
the Greek Resistance on April :o, +y:) suggested that the coup destroyed
the new Greece of Durrell and Miller when it asked the questions: Where
is Katsimbalis Where Zorba Who stole Euripides? and Why cant we sail
the Isles of Greece and forget everything? (Open Eye, Open Heart +o).
Spenders new philhellenes of the +jos themselves contributed to the re-
examination of the place of Greece by putting aside their refusal to com-
ment about Greek politics. Osbert Lancaster, for example, penned a poem
entitled On not going to Greece, Easter, +8 and steadfastly declined to
set foot in the country until after the collapse of the junta in +y.
43
In a
work entitled simply Political Poem (+yo), Kenneth Hanson reached
back to a potent name not heard in writing about Greece for several decades:
Now in spite of the censorship / Greeks by the sea / or sitting on stones.
Are exing their muscles / and dreaming a new Marathon (Uncorrected
Word +). In After the Countercoup That Failed (+yo), Hanson used an
allusion to Yeatss The Fish to inject politics into what would have been
an idyllic seaside scene:
What will the shermen in Kalamki
do but spread their nets
as yellow as the sun
beside the sea, blue as the sky
and name the colonels one by one
until the colonels names
are bitter on the tongue?
(Uncorrected Word +:)
Seferis became an overtly political gure within Greece during the last
years of his life. His famous statement against the junta in March + and
his superb poem of protest, The Cats of St. Nicholas, ensured that after
his death in +y+, which was itself a political event within Greece, foreign-
ers could never again engage with Seferis without taking account of Greek
politics.
44
The Greek coup not only politicized Greece and Seferis abroad but also
Henry Miller and his Greek book. Ferlinghetti invoked the totemic moment
of the new philhellenism when he asked: Can you still hear the cocks
of Athens from the Acropolis? (+++). Kay Boyles A Poem for the Stu-
c o c r t s r o :8+
dents of Greece, commemorating the uprising against the junta at the
Polytechnic University in Athens in the autumn of +y, included the fol-
lowing passage:
I am thinking of that age to come, Henry Miller
Wrote for those who have closed their windows, their doors,
When men will ght and kill for God . . . when food
Will be forgotten. . . . I am thinking of a world
Of men and women with dynamos between their legs,
A world of natural fury, passion, action, drama, madness, dreams.
(+jj)
In place of Seferis, the poet of Spenders new philhellenism, Boyle invoked
Yannis Ritsos as the poet of Greece, poet of prison, poet of house arrest
(+j). It was because he was placed in detention in +y by the junta and then
kept under house arrest from +8 to +y that Ritsos became the poet of
Greece for Boyle in +y. Ritsos had been the leading poet of the Greek Left
for decades, but his name was not often heard in English writing about
Greece before the coup of +y.
45
There is a specic moment, within the period of the dictatorship, that I
think symbolizes the end of the Greece of the new philhellenes. In +y:, the
American author Mary Lee Settle went to Kos because it was cheap and she
was trying to nish a book on seventeenth-century England; as she noted,
it was always good to get some distance from the subject. Wild packs of
adolescent boys roamed the area near her house, but they smiled at her,
because, as she later discovered, her friend Vangeli had threatened them if
they did not behave (Turkish Reections j). As soon as Vangeli left the island
for a holiday in Athens, however, the situation changed: The rst large
stone hit me in the back. I ran to my house, with stones being thrown at me
from behind, got into the door, locked it behind me (). She decided to take
the ferry across to the Turkish city of Bodrun as soon as she could. The
Greeks were terrible to me, she said as she got off the boat, I have come
for the protection of the Turks. . . . When what I said got around, as I knew
it would, they welcomed me as if I were their long-lost sister (y, 8). Settle
stayed in Bodrun for three years and in +yy published her novel about the
Turkish city, Blood Tie, which won the National Book Award. By +y:,
Greece was politically unappealing and spoiling, but TurkeyTurkey was
still possible.
The politicization of Greece in foreign eyes did not end when the junta lost
power in +y. In Don DeLillos The Names, the main character sounds a
note not stressed in the years before the junta: You realize the trouble with
Greece, Greece is strategically located. To which his Greek companion
:8: r u v a o

s s n + n o w
replies simply, We have noticed (:). From the political point of view,
Greece had been strategically located throughout the +jos and the early
+os. But from the literary perspective, Greece, as the place where one went
to escape into antinomian spots, could not be situated strategically in the
international world. In a telling moment that places The Names in the post-
Arcadian, post-Millerian, and postmodern Greece created by the junta, the
main character says: I think Id feel at home with the Minoans. . . . They
werent subject to overwhelming awe. They didnt take things that seri-
ously. His estranged wife replies:
Dont go too far. . . . Theres the Minotaur, the labyrinth. Darker
things. Beneath the lilies and antelopes and blue monkeys.
I dont see it at all.
Where have you looked?
Only at the frescoes in Athens. Reproductions in books. Nature
was a delight to them, not an angry god-like force.
A dig in north-central Crete has turned up signs of human sacri-
ce. No one is saying much. . . .
A Minoan site?
All the usual signs. . . . Human sacrice isnt new to Greece.
But not Minoans.
Not Minoans. Theyll be arguing for years.
(8)
Rachel Hadas also signaled that she had entered a post-Arcadian and post-
modern Greece in the opening of Last Visit to Greece (+88):
I had the labels ready with their essence:
Add water, serve. Light, language, beauty, sea,
body, etcetera, etcetera. Time.
In honesty I had to change the tune:
Queasiness, boredom, and misogyny.
(j)
In addition, beginning in the +os, the image of Greece in writing in
English began to be extended and complicated by the work of authors of
Greek ancestry of the diaspora; in America alone, modern Greece and its past
have been explored in Harry Mark Petrakiss novel of the Greek War of Inde-
pendence, The Hour of the Bell (+y), Theodore Vrettoss revisionist look at
the removal of the Elgin marbles in Lord Elgins Lady (+8:), the poems of
Greek-born Olga Broumas starting with the volume Beginning with O (+yy),
and Catherine Temma Davidsons The Priest Fainted (+8), to name just a
c o c r t s r o :8
few works. They bring a different perspective to the encounter with Greece;
one could say they offer the reader an entirely new country.
Many years after Seferis rst met Durrell in Athens in +, he was asked to
contribute an essay on Durrells Greek poems. In a draft of that essay, writ-
ten in French and now in the Gennadius Archive in Athens, Seferis, like
Spender, noted that Durrell, Miller, and Spencer had exhibited a new kind of
enthusiasm for the modern Greeks and a new interest in the Greek landscape
not present in the work of earlier writers. The name he gave to their enter-
prise was une nouvelle sort de Byronisme. This new kind of Byronism was
meant, of course, to be the death of the old Byronism and, consequently, the
end of Byron as a guide to modern Greece. Seferis apparently had no other
term by which to denote this new direction in writing about modern Greece,
so the very movement that nally superseded the Greece of Byron, by the
use of the term new Byronism, still had the shadow of Byron attached to it.
There were, not surprisingly, several attempts to appropriate the famous
rst philhellene for the new kind of Byronism. In At Corinth (+o) Dur-
rell invoked the spirit of Byron in his personal discovery in Greece:
My skill is in words only:
To tell you, writing this home,
That we, whose blood was sweetened once
By Byron or his elders in the magic,
Entered the circle safely.
(Collected Poems 8y)
Durrells magic circle here was hardly Byronic in the traditional sense in
which the philhellenic journeys to Greece are supposed to help reform both
Greece and the world. It was this latter kind of Byronism that had led
Durrell, then young, serviceable, and English, to consider enlisting in the
Greek army in the autumn of +.
46
In At Corinth, Durrell coopts Byron
for the magic of Greece as a private circle, as opposed to the politicized
magic force of legend so prominent in English writing in the century after
Byrons death. Patrick Anderson entitled a chapter in his book Dolphin Days
(+) Missalonghi: The Pleasures of Youth, and he portrayed Byron in
Greece as the forerunner of contemporary lotus eaters. More recently,
Stephen Minta, in On a Voiceless Shore: Byron in Greece (+y), spoke of
Byrons fascination with life beyond the boundary; the imagined Greece
of Byrons youth was almost all extraordinary, a wild place, always on the
edge (+j+, j+). What was original about Byron, Minta also said, was that
he found in Greece not a paradise of monuments, as many did, but a land
of sensation, of sun, sea, and sky; a place of mountains, a rough physicality
:8 r u v a o

s s n + n ow
of sunburn and dust (yo). Such elements can in fact be found in Byron, and
Minta cannot be faulted for reminding us about them. But this is a Byron
who resembles Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, and before Miller and
Durrell, hardly anyone paid any attention to this aspect of Byrons Greek
experience.
John Lehmann was close to the mark in his poem The Road to Rham-
nous when he said, The way we came, we seemed to have left the map /
Somewhere beyond Marathon (Collected Poems +:). The map to Mara-
thon had been written by Byron. The writers who provided directions for
those going beyond were Miller and Durrell. Yet the name that Seferis gave
to the place that they discovered was the new Byronism. With Missolonghi
so near, it was still almost impossible to think sanely about Greece.
o +rs
Introduction
+. Vesna Goldsworthys useful investigation of British attitudes about the Bal-
kans, Inventing Ruritania, was published after this manuscript had been completed.
Chapter 1
+. See Finlay, History of Greece j::jojy.
:. The author quickly went on to say, Their rst attacks discovered the wom-
anly spirit by which they were inspired, indicating that the Greeks fell short of
expectations in the West from the very beginning; see the comments of Constan-
tine +y:. On the reaction in the West to Orloff s arrival, see Constantine +8y:,
Augustinos + and Terence Spencer +88.
. Even in the midst of the Greek War of Independence, the most famous
American philhellene, Samuel Gridley Howe, saw Greek freedom as a cause larger
than Greece itself: The Independence of Greece is not to release her children
alone from the thralldom of the Turks, but it will open the door for the advance of
liberty, of civilization, and of Christianity in the East (Historical Sketch of the
Greek Revolution xxx). As late as +8j:, Edward Masson, an old philhellene, wrote:
The regeneration of Greece and the establishment of the Hellenic Kingdom are
destined to exert a powerful inuence, social and religious, as well as literary, on
the rest of the world (+:+).
. As Jusdanis noted, the only other people who could relate their own na-
tional imaginings to the core of European identity were the Zionists (+). On the
enduring yet different cultural signications of Hebraism and Hellenism in mod-
ern Europe generally, see Lambropoulos.
j. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free +:o. On the growth of a
Western identity among the Greek intelligentsia in the late eighteenth century, see
Jusdanis +yo.
. Augustinos noted that Catherine wanted to use him [Voltaire] as a propa-
gandist to promote her image in Europe (++).
y. See Jusdanis ::y.
:8j
:8 o + r s + o r + o r s + : +
8. Terence Spencer analyzed traces of philhellenic sentiment in English liter-
ature from the time of Shakespeare but agreed that interest in the modern Greeks
and their regeneration increased in importance after +yyo (+8). On philhellenism
in Italian literature, see Persico; in German literature, see Quack-Eustathiades;
and in French literature and art, see Canat, Tabaki-Iona, Athanassoglou-Kalmyer,
and Augustinos.
. On Chateaubriands philhellenism and its inuence, see Canat, LHel-
lnisme des Romantiques +:y, Malakis y, and Augustinos +yj::y.
+o. Anastasius recounts the life and travels of a young Greek in the Levant
from the +yyos to the +yos. Early in the novel, the hero is compelled to adopt the
Muslim faith in order to save his life, an act that alienates him from his Greek fam-
ily and community. The work is more of a ctional story of Oriental life and travel
than a philhellenic manifesto like Woman; or, Ida of Athens or Hyperion. Still, cer-
tain passages reect the philhellenic thought of the time, such as the statement
that the complexion of the modern Greek may receive a different cast from dif-
ferent surrounding objects: The core is still the same as in the days of Pericles
(I.8j) and the heros comment that the very noblest of the Greeks . . . is daily ex-
posed to the insults of the meanest Turk. Were it not for my principles, I would
rather be a Turkish porter than a Greek prince (I.8). Anastasius was widely read
and often cited by philhellenic authors, including Mary Shelley, Collected Tales
and Stories y and Bulwer y.
++. Sydney Owenson directly attested to Winckelmanns role in shaping
ideas about Greece when she said in a note, According to Winkleman [sic], the
native Grecian countenance is distinguished by the calm and serenity of its fea-
tures, and by its expression of benevolence and genius (II.:y). Winckelmanns
most important scholarly work was the Geschichte der Kunst der ltertums (+y),
but his most inuential was the early pamphlet of +yjj, Gedanken ber die
Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst, rst
translated by Henry Fuseli in Reections on the Painting and Sculpture of the
Greeks (+yj). On Winckelmanns life and thought, see the rst chapter of Eliza
Butlers Tyranny of Greece over Germany and Wolfgang Leppmans biography.
On Winckelmanns inuence, see Stern y8++y, John Buxton +:, Constantine
+o:y, and Ferris +j+.
+:. Thomas Seymour commented in +888, Living in the midst of the same
surroundings, with the same climate, the same needs, and the same occupations,
the Greeks have retained many of the peculiarities of their ancestors (). On the
special qualities of the Greek landscape, see also the remarks of Flaubert in Notes
de Voyages (II.+y8).
+. Malcolm Kelsall and Wallace (+j) have also discussed the implications
of philhellenism and Orientalism in Owensons novel.
+. The early travel accounts of modern Greece have been the subject of sev-
eral excellent books in recent years, among them Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Au-
gustinos, and Constantine. Along the way, travelers used modern Greek customs
to interpret classical texts; see esp. Constantine +jjj. On the generally negative
view of the modern Greeks, see Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 888.
o + r s + o r + o r s : + : : :8y
+j. In Horae Ionicae (+8o), his narrative poem about a journey through the
Ionian islands, W. R. Wright used Guys in a similar fashion. Referring to lines
about a musical shepherd (He sings the warlike deeds of other times; / Or
wildly modulates to simple lays / His reedthe Doric reed of ancient days,
j), he added the following note: The modern Greeks still retain a variety of
traditional stories, which they derive from classical antiquity; their national
dance they pretend had its origins in the days of Theseus and consider it as em-
blematical of that heros adventures in the labyrinth; and the strain which ac-
companies it, is said to be the lamentation of Ariadne, deserted by him on
Naxos. See the interesting work of M. Guys (j). On Guys and his work, see
Augustinos +yjy and Constantine +yy. English readers could also turn to
Frederick Douglass Essay on Certain Points of Resemblance between the Ancient
and Modern Greek (+8+).
+. At the beginning of his notes about Athens in Childe Harold II, Byron
chided Owenson for her lack of real knowledge of Greece: Before I say anything
about a city, of which every body, traveller or not, has thought it necessary to say
something, I will request Miss Owenson, when next she borrows an Athenian for
her four volumes, to have the goodness to marry her to somebody more of a gen-
tleman than a Disdar Aga (CPW II, p. +). Byrons criticism is both playful
and skillful, for Ida actually marries into one of the two noblest Greek families
(the other is Idas own), while her brief forced and unconsummated connection to
the aga was never a real union.
+y. Tsigakou noted The majority of artists, inuenced by the conventions of
the day, depicted Greek scenery in a Claudian diffused half-light that tended to
blur forms until they seemed part of the very irridescence of the atmosphere. But
in Greece there are no mists, no half-tones (:8). Of depictions of the Acropolis,
she added, Again and again, . . . what one sees are fairy-land views bathed in a
haze of golden lighta visual cliche of the golden age (:).
+8. See Eisner yyy8.
+. The rustic world of Greece among the ruins also provided a positive alter-
native to England in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage. Harold through sins labyrinth
had run (I.j.y) and leaves his own land sore sick at heart (I..). He nds
solace for his personal disquiet among the ancient ruins:
He that is lonely hither let him roam,
And gaze complacent on congenial earth.
Greece is no lightsome land of social mirth;
But he whom Sadness sootheth may abide,
And scarce regret the region of his birth,
When wandering slow by Delphis sacred side,
Or gazing oer the plains where the Greek and Persian died.
(II.:.8y:)
But unlike Owenson, Byron did not suggest that contact with the modern Greeks
aids in a moral rejuvenation.
:88 o + r s + o r + o r s : j : 8
:o. See the books on Victorian Hellenism by DeLaura, Richard Jenkyns, and
Turner. Hellenism, like philhellenism, was complex and had numerous manifesta-
tions; on the differences between Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater see, e.g., De-
Laura +y+8+. A number of prominent English intellectuals of the nineteenth
century, notably Arnold, stressed the common position within the [Viconian]
cycle of nations of Periclean Athens and contemporary Britain and viewed an-
cient Greek civilization as an immediately relevant point of departure for com-
prehending contemporary Victorian intellectual and spiritual perplexities
(Turner :8). Since in this conceptual framework, Britain was the reincarnation of
ancient Athens, modern Greece and its situation held no particular importance.
With the notable exceptions of Swinburne and Gladstone, few of the prominent
Victorian Hellenists treated in the books of DeLaura, Turner, or Jenkyns con-
cerned themselves with modern Greece and its politics, and so they fall outside of
the scope of this study.
:+. On the relation between The Revolt of Islam and the French Revolution,
see Duff, esp. +j+.
::. At Cambridge, E. F. Benson threw himself with joy into the arms of the
pagan Greeks, with their tolerance, their admiration of the beautiful, their psy-
chological maturity (Masters j). It was at least partly a desire to recover that
past that led Benson to write novels about the Greek War of Independence in the
late +8os, as it led fellow author Allen Upward to go to Crete as a volunteer in
+8y (see his autobiography, Some Personalities +). A belief in the classical
ideal also played a central role in the creation of Compton Mackenzies philhel-
lenism (see Greece in My Life ++).
:. Shelleys transcendental Hellenism also gured prominently in Hellas, the
play he wrote in +8:+ to encourage support for the Greek War of Independence.
On the tension between Shelleys idealist Hellenism and contemporary politics in
that work, see Kipperman, Wallace +:oj, and Ferris +o8. On Chateau-
briands subjective response to Greece, which was based on an attraction to the
classical ideal and also led to expressions of philhellenism, see Augustinos ::. On
Chateaubriands reaction to the Greek Revolution, see Koukou j:.
:. On the political interests of those drawn to philhellenism, see Woodhouse,
The Philhellenes +j. On how the cause of Greece was considered suspect by many
because of the radicalism of the English philhellenes, see St. Clair, That Greece
Might Still Be Free +jy. The Literary Association of the Friends of Poland,
formed in the early +8os to support the movement for Polish independence, in-
cluded numerous people who had been prominent in the London Greek Commit-
tee a few years earlier, such as Thomas Campbell, John Bowring, and John Cam
Hobhouse (see Gleason +++:o).
:j. During the Greek War of Independence, the English government toler-
ated and occasionally assisted the activities of certain philhellenes and philhellenic
groups as a counterweight to Russian or French inuence in Greece in the event of
a Greek victory. But such support stemmed more from a desire to control their ac-
tivities than to see Greece achieve liberty (see St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be
Free +:y, and Penn jyo).
o + r s + o r + o r s : :8
:. In the introduction to An Autumn in Greece, Henry Bulwer speculated on
Greeces fate under various protectors and concluded: The old aristocratic pow-
ers of Europe would never allow the modern ag of America to be hoisted in their
face, and wave from the shores of the Peloponnesus. So connecting a link between
the independence of the New and the Old World would cause every crowned head
to shake; and there is not a tyrant but would see, in the annihilation of Turkish
despotism, the approaching insecurity of his own (+o). Yet Bulwer, like the
anonymous author of the letter to George Canning printed at the end of An Au-
tumn in Greece, argued that, since the positive existence of the Greeks was
threatened by the unlimited tyranny of the Turks, The cause of Greece should
be separated from that of all nations, or parts of nations, who have contended for
any particular form of government (). Bulwers two statements indicate how
liberal philhellenism was viewed as a threat to European governments at the same
time that it privileged Western culture and government over those considered
Eastern. For the long-established association of the Turks with tyranny, see Nor-
man Daniel, Islam and the West ++.
:y. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free ::.
:8. See also Athanassoglou-Kalmyer on the iconography of Leonidas in late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France (8j).
:. See Marilyn Butlers discussion of the development of a left-wing cult of
the classical by Shelley, Peacock, Keats, and Leigh Hunt in England as a balance
to the conservative classicism of the Germans, which was admired and champi-
oned by Coleridge (Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries +:+). Butler suggested that
Byron and Shelley located their revolutionary poems in the East to remove
them from the partisanship of European politics: Merely by adding a second
theatre of war Byron implies that liberty is a universal ideal. The enemy is not
Napoleon, who is Englands enemy; it is tyranny (++8). The choice of Greece as
a setting increased the universal idealism of the message. I cannot agree with
Richard Jenkyns, who said, Christians and pagans, radicals and conservatives
could all feel eager for the independence of Greece (+j). In England, as in
France, philhellenism was closely associated with the radicals and liberals (on the
French situation, see Athanassoglou-Kalmyer +o).
o. Dennis Porter observed that, in contrast to Flaubert, whatever their
quarrels with their fatherlands, both Byron and Stendhal remain rm in their
commitment to Western civilization as embodied in the tradition of Greece,
Rome, and Renaissance Italy (+8+).
+. On the differing views of the East in The Persians and The Bacchae, see
Said jjy. The early nineteenth-century cultural battle between Hellenism and
Orientalism can also be seen in Keatss Hyperion. Alan Bewell noted that in the
poem Keats, by depicting the Titans with Egyptian features, radically trans-
formed the meaning of the war between the Titans and the Classical Gods: the
war was restructured along an east-west axis, less as a theogony within a single
culture than as an international event, a confrontation of the gods of Europe and
those of the Orient (::). Both Hellenists and Orientalists saw a confrontation
on an East-West axis but differed on which side was to win. On the emergence of
:o o + r s + o r + o r s j
the concept of Europe during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the use
of the East as an alter ego in that development, see Chabod 8:+:+ and Hay
++y:y.
The tension between the intra- and extra-European goals of early nineteenth-
century liberals and radicals explains how so many authors of philhellenic works
also composed Oriental writings, e.g., Thomas Moore, Walter Savage Landor,
P. B. Shelley, and Byron himself (The Island). On the place of Romantic Oriental-
ism in the cultural politics of the time, see Sharufn, although I nd his analysis
of the Turkish Tales problematic. The celebrated leap of the Suliot women to es-
cape from the hands of the Turks in +8o at least suggests that the end of The
Siege of Corinth, when Minotti sets re to the powder magazine, is not simply an
example of the futility of action.
:. On a Crusading view toward the East by the West, see Said jy:. On
Thomas Hughess anti-Muslim sentiment, see also St. Clair, That Greece Might
Still Be Free j, and Charles Brinsley Sheridans response to Hughess Address to
the People of England in the Cause of the Greeks in Thoughts on the Greek Revolution.
Sheridan objected to the notion that the present struggle is an attempt to drive
the Turk out of Europe (+). As a liberal European, Sheridan could not counte-
nance such out-and-out bigotry. On the other hand, Sheridan went on to express
the hope that Christianity would spread throughout the East.
. Philhellnisme religieux, as Canat called it (Renaissance ++), was much
stronger in France, where the countrys traditional role as the defender of the
Levantine Catholics kept the Crusading sentiment alive (see Frances involvement
in the dispute between Catholics and Orthodox about the holy places in Jerusalem
in the +8jos, an issue that hardly attracted attention in England and America). So,
for example, in Stendhals Armance a young royalist nobleman goes to Greece to
ght as a philhellene (chap. +), an unlikely event in England. Yet religious phil-
hellenism never gained a rm hold in Catholic countries because the clergy
viewed the Greek Orthodox as schismatics (see Athanassoglou-Kalmyer ::j
and Malakis +:+).
A few poets writing in English were inspired solely or primarily by religion
rather than the classics or the idea of liberty, yet the slender section of only ve
poems entitled Poems on the Spiritual Emancipation of Greece in the anthol-
ogy The Greek Revolution and the American Muse (ed. Raizis and Papas) shows how
uncommon that attitude really was.
. On Shelleys portrayal of Mahmud and Islam in Hellas, see Wallace
(:o:) and Ferris (+o).
j. See also Agnes Strickland, whose hero conates a Crusading outlook with
the classical past when he vows that the stain / Of Pagan [i.e., in this context,
Muslim] worship shall no more profane / A Grecian temple (:::).
. Marilyn Butler said of Byrons The Giaour that the story proves Turk-
ish rule ethically unacceptable to civilized westerners, without showing the Chris-
tian church in a more favorable light (Orientalism of Byrons Giaour +). Such
an attitude aligns the poem with one of the major premises of literary philhel-
lenism. On the connection between the ancient Greeks and both political and sex-
o + r s + o r + o r s y :+
ual freedom, see Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries +:8y. For the con-
nection between the Greeks and homosexuality, see Eliza Butler on Winckelmann
(+, :) and Crompton on Byron (esp. 8). Toward the end of Heinses
novel, Ardinghello becomes involved in plotting an insurrection against Turkish
rule, linking the notion of rebellion and free love.
y. Nigel Leask deals more fully with the imperialist implications of a Greek
revival in the works of Byron and Shelley in British Romantic Writers and the East,
esp. +y and +o.
8. On this, see St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free +y.
. On Voltaires reaction to the defeat of +yyo, see Terence Spencer +8y88
and Augustinos +j.
o. Parga, a town on the western coast of mainland Greece, came under
British control at the same time as the Ionian islands at the end of the Napoleonic
Wars. In +8+, the British Government decided that it was not tenable to hold
Parga and sold it to the Ottoman empire. This decision was criticized in several
philhellenic writings, notably the anonymous narrative poem Parga. On this see
the articles of Nielsen and Cochrane. Wrights poem was written before the
British held Parga, but when the inhabitants of the town, like the Suliotes, had a
reputation for their opposition to Turkish rule.
+. Lear also mentioned the story of the Suliot women in Journal of a Land-
scape Painter in Albania and Illyria (y).
Chapter 2
+. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free o+.
:. In +8, R. A. H. Bickford-Smith suggested that, in England, the Grce
de Byron actually had a wider following than its classical counterpart: The
dilletanti introduced her [Greece] to the upper ten [percent of the population],
but it was Byron who was responsible for making the country known and loved
by the great poetry reading middle class (Greece under King George +). On
Byrons reputation among French philhellenes, see Tabaki-Iona :j.
. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free +y, y.
. On the career of Edward Trelawny, see the biography by St. Clair, whose
rst sentence reads: Some of his admirers still cling to the belief that Trelawny
merely exaggerated his stories at the margin for the sake of effect; but this is too
charitable a judgement [sic] (+). Trelawny was not the model for the hero of The
Corsair, as he was fond of telling people, since he did not even meet Byron until
+8::.
j. See Eisner ++o++.
. See Terence Spencer :j and W. C. Brown, Byron and English Inter-
est in the Near East.
y. About ten years before Byron went to Greece for the rst time, Richard Pol-
whele also expressed the same sentiment in the lines: Majestic Athens! Who thy
ruins pild / In aweful heaps surveys, nor drops a tear? (+:). One should also
:: o + r s + o r + o r s j :
compare Byrons Tis Greece, but living Greece no more with Charles Kelsalls
Athens, yet no more Athens! ().
8. See Dakin, Unication of Greece :o:; Walter Savage Landor gave an ac-
count of Rhigass life and work in the dialogue between Maurocordato and Colo-
cotroni in Imaginary Conversations (Complete Works 8:+88y).
. Barthlemys novel of +y8, in which the hero travels through ancient
Greece from to y ucr, was one of the most popular and inuential works of
late eighteenth-century Hellenism. See the remarks of Stern ++j.
+o. For example, in Philhellenika, Masson translated poems by Alexander
Soutzos, who was trained in Europe and brought Western poetical and aesthetic
ideas back to Greece. On Soutzos, see Beaton y8. The propaganda purpose of
Massons translation work was made clear at the outset: The object of this small
volume . . . is to promote, among classical scholars, a more intimate acquaintance
with the existing language and literature, as well as the social condition, of regen-
erated Greece (+).
++. As Leask noted, in these passages Byron seemed to subtly advocate British
rule in Greece (:). Yet in other places of Childe Harold (e.g., CPW II, pp. :o+,
:o:), Byron appeared to take a different position as he attacked the cynicism of
the European powers, which made liberty in Greece a pawn in the foreign affairs
of the Holy Alliance (see the comments of McGann, Beauty of Inections :o:).
As chapter + has argued, Byrons ambiguity about Greeces future was not unique.
Like many European liberals, Byron wanted Greek independence to undermine
Western monarchies at the same time that he thought those Western monarchies
preferable to the perceived despotism of the East.
+:. McGanns discussion of the context of The Isles of Greece in Beauty of
Inections (:y+8) is especially useful, although I am not in full agreement with
his conclusion that the poet has succeeded in composing a song on behalf of
freedom which escapes incorporation by the Age of Cant (:8).
+. Raizis used the term Byronic philhellenism to refer to an interest in Greece
that went beyond broken columns and the restoration of antiquity to include
the customs and lives of living Greeks (Aspects of Byronic Philhellenism
+:o).
+. The Giaour is deeply indebted to the literary tradition of the Oriental Tale
(on the nature and popularity of the genre in eighteenth-century England, see
Conant). As Wiener has shown, Byron drew heavily upon William Beckfords
Vathek. Yet by setting his tale in Greece in the +yyos, Byron politicized many of
his borrowings from Beckford and others in a strikingly new way. To give one ex-
ample, Byron took the phrase accursed giaour directly from Beckford (see
Wiener j+o). But in Beckfords work, the caliph Vathek uses it to refer to a
pesky Hindu magician with a dark skin. The phrase added an authentic touch to
Beckfords novel, and the confrontation between the caliph and the magician cer-
tainly contains an important racial dimension, but it carries no overt historical or
religious signicance in the cultural confrontation between East and West. In The
Giaour, however, when Hassan says: Tis he, well met in any hour / Lost Leilas
loveAccursed Giaour! (+8+), the location of Byrons tale in what was for a
o + r s + o r + o r s j : j j :
Western audience a recognizable classical past and recognizable recent politics
charges the words with all of the ideological baggage of the hope of the revival of
Greece and liberty as well as the Crusades. Byron and, to a degree, Owenson,
were, as far as I am aware, the rst English writers to fuse the genre of the Oriental
Tale with the desire to reclaim ancient Greece. This makes his work different in
character from other English Oriental Tales, like Southeys Thalaba, Landors
Gebir, Moores Lalla Rookh, or Beckfords Vathek. Byrons construction of the
Oriental Tale was a model for others, notably Thomas Hope in Anastasius. Mari-
lyn Butler pointed out that Greece was a more suitable political setting for Byron,
since the Spanish resistance to the French was rightist, Catholic, and ideologi-
cally uncongenial (Orientalism of Byrons Giaour y). The Greek Revolution
was, to a large degree, ideologically uncongenial as well, but because it was situ-
ated on the borders of Europe and was seen through classical lenses, the discrep-
ancies between the Greeks and Western liberalism were overlooked.
+j. On the fad of Greek dress in France in the +8:os, see Athanassoglou-
Kalmyer ++. For England, with a focus on Trelawny, see the article by Collcutt.
+. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free +y+, :o.
+y. Marilyn Butler reiterated Byrons role in creating the image of the klephts
in the West when she said of Byrons Eastern Tales, Their political contribution
was to familiarize a British (and, rapidly, a European) readership with the idea that
the ght within Greece would not be led by respectable leaders . . . but by the
bandits (Orientalism of Byrons Giaour +).
+8. In a letter to Hobhouse about the incident, Byron said that the pirates
asked their prisoners about the foreigners at Colonna, and one of the Greeks
knew me, and they were preparing to attack us, when seeing my Albanians and
conjecturing there were others in the vicinity, they were seized with a panic and
marched off (BLJ :.+).
+. Levinson, drawing upon the accounts of Themistocles in Herodotus and
Plutarch, called him a famously ambiguous hero and suggested that the ancient
Athenian represents both the epitome of Greeces greatness and perhaps an ex-
pression of her fatal weakness (+:o). The historical facts of Themistocless ca-
reer are double-edged, but I cannot agree with Levinson that early nineteenth-
century liberals concerned themselves with such historical accuracy. The
evidence suggests that Themistocles was perceived as a hero of liberty and was
used in the opening of The Giaour and elsewhere as a signal of the gap between
past and present rather than to deconstruct admired antiquity. The suggestion
that Themistocles might not be considered one of the unforgotten brave seems
doubtful in the context of the time when the poem was written. In Choiseul-
Goufers famous frontispiece (see chap. ), a chained Greece is surrounded by
the sepulchral monuments in honour of the great men who had championed her
liberty (my italics), and the second name on the list is Themistocles. Further,
Chateaubriand ended his account of a visit to the site of the battle of Salamis:
The waves, raised by the evening breeze, broke against the beach and expired at
my feet; I walked for some time along the shore of that sea which bathed the tomb
of Themistocles: and in all probability I was at this moment the only person in
: o + r s + o r + o r s j j j
Greece that called to mind this great man (Travels in Greece +:). In his discus-
sion of the battle of Salamis and the supposed discovery of Themistocles tomb at
Munychia by the French consul Fauvel (who was also undoubtedly Byrons
source about Themistocles resting place), Chateaubriand never alluded to the
Athenian politicians checkered career after the Persian Wars (+:, +jjj). Nor
could Themistocles in these passages stand as an example for the rise and fall of
Napoleon, since Chateaubriand wrote in +8o. After the demise of Napoleon, the
Greek hero of Charles MacFarlanes novel The Armenians: A Tale of Constantino-
ple (+8o) still unambiguously invokes Themistocles and Leonidas in the follow-
ing passage: May Hellas again be freemay the arms of a Themistocles or a
Leonidas again prepare the way for the arts and the dynamism of a Pericles
(I.:). Further, one must keep in mind that Themistocles was a partisan gure in
the debate about Athenian liberty in the early nineteenth century, and criticism of
him would place a writer on the conservative side of that debate, where Byron
would probably not situate himself.
:o. McGann suggested just such a critical reading in The Beauty of Inections,
when he said that the radical split in the poems two viewpoints reects, and in-
terprets, the European understanding of the Levant between +yyo+8+. The in-
terpretation which Byron produces is a critical one. The European understanding
is self-deluded and helpless, and Byrons own exposure to this failed understand-
ing is represented as the vision of a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind
(:). However attractive this may be for understanding Byrons real intent, it
does not accurately represent how philhellenic readers responded to The Giaour.
:+. McGann said that at the level of political allegory, Leila represents the
land over which the Turks and Venetians have been ghting for centuries and to
which neither can have any complete claim (Fiery Dust +j; see also Sharufn
:j). Byron was certainly skeptical of the Wests interest in Greek freedom
and perhaps also of the Giaours interest in Leila. But to suggest that in the early
nineteenth century the Wests interest in Greece, as symbolized by the Venetians,
could be equated with Hassan and Turkish tyranny, a familiar theme at the time,
cuts, I think, too much against the historical context in which Byron wrote. While
neither the Turks nor the Venetians might have a complete claim to Greece, a
major point of philhellenic literature was that the Greeks themselves had a claim
on the West. They were not viewed as having a similar claim upon the Turks.
::. See Norman Daniel ++. The point is made quite clearly in The Corsair by
Zuleika, another female slave in a harem, when she says, I feltI feellove dwells
withthe free (II.jo:). The idea is important for all of Byrons Oriental Tales.
:. On the parallels between love and politics in the poem, see Gleckner
+oj. I do not agree with Leasks argument that Leila, as the symbolic embodi-
ment of the Hellenic values underlying European civilization, can nd represen-
tational space only as a beautiful corpse or as a phantom which returns near the
end of the poem to exacerbate the Giaours remorse (). The symbolic embod-
iment of Hellenic values could, and often was, portrayed as a living being in
Byrons day, as in Woman; or, Ida of Athens, a book the poet had read. Byrons por-
trayal of Greece as a female corpse might have been designed to generate interest
o + r s + o r + o r s j + :j
in and action on behalf of a Greek revival rather than simply to suggest the impos-
sibility of regeneration.
:. Andrew Rutherford, among others, has argued that the poem celebrates
the outlaw, the rebel, the renegade, the Ishmaelite, the bold bad man (). But
this necessitates placing the hero outside of the historic and geographic context of
the tale, as outlaws in general and not the Greek bands that Byrons former fol-
lower, Dervish, joined. The Giaour of the poem occupies an anomalous region of
Greece and, by extension, an anomalous position in Western thinking about
Greece. Further, the fact that Byrons Tales, particularly The Corsair, were ad-
mired by those engaged in the struggle for the collective rights of workers in nine-
teenth-century England indicates that they were not read as encomia of bold bad
men but as stories of people concerned about liberty and social justice. See Man-
ning :oy and David Erdmans Byron and Revolt in England and Byron and
the Genteel Reformers.
:j. Sheridans volume was a translation of a collection of texts rst published
by M. C. Fauriel in Chantes Populaires de la Grce Moderne (on this book, see
Canat, LHellnisme des Romantiques I.:8j).
:. See for example the characterization of Odysseus in Mrs. Vaughans
drama The Grecians (+8:) and the conversation among Odysseus, Tersitza,
Akrive, and Trelawny in Landors Imaginary Conversations (+8:).
:y. A similar illustration, perhaps inuenced by the one in Choiseul-
Goufers book, appeared as the frontispiece to A. Corai [Korais]s Appel aux
Grecs, rst published in Greek in +8o+ and reprinted in French in +8:+. See
Athanassoglou-Kalmyer :.
:8. Theopha; or, Memoirs of a Greek Slave as Related by Her Lover, Envoy from
the Court of France to the Sublime Porte, a book printed in London in +y8, reads
much like a retelling of Prvosts story.
:. On the sexual triangle of a white man saving a brown woman from a brown
man as a paradigm for the European view of colonization, see Spivak :y. For an-
other use of this model with regard to Byrons Giaour, see Meyer yoyy. Meyer
reads The Giaour as a colonial enterprise and makes consistent analogies between
Egypt and Greece, which, in my view, do not hold up well. The inhabitants of
Egypt never looked to France for succor, and the French invasion was clearly a
colonial aggression. The Greeks did in fact want to be rescued from the Turks and
some made it known that they would rather be subjects of the czar than of the sul-
tan. Meyer overlooked Greek desires, which caused both the revolt of +yyo and the
Greek War of Independence in +8:+, desires that provide a historical context for
the poem, to preserve his reading of the work. Leask approached the same error
when he said, The world of The Giaour is a world suppressed under the (modern)
sign of imperialism (o). Byron, who translated Rhigass famous song, knew very
well who was suppressing whom in the Greece of +8o+8++, and it was not the
modern sign of imperialism, unless Leask meant by that the Ottomans. I prefer
Marilyn Butlers formulation that the story of the Giaour proves Turkish rule
ethically unacceptable to civilized westerners, without showing the Christian char-
acter in a more favorable light (Orientalism of Byrons Giaour +).
: o + r s + o r + o r s
o. On the ambiguity of the sexual politics of the Tales, see Leask :j, 8j
and the article of Christensen. Like Leask (+j), I nd Daniel Watkinss reading of
the Tales as critiques of English social structure too far removed from the actual
Eastern settings of the poems to be convincing. Byron himself offered another vari-
ant of the romance in Sardanapalus, in which the patriotic Greek slave girl Myrrha
is devoted to her royal master. The drama, however, is set in the ancient past, and
neither Byron nor any other author offers a similar scenario involving a modern
Greek girl who is devoted to her Turkish lord. The title of Madame Ds novel,
Les Amours dun Turc et dune Grecque: pisode de la Guerre de .S:., is more sensa-
tional than accurate, since the Turk turns out to be a young man of Greek birth
who, through his love for the heroine, returns to his true heritage.
+. On Shelleys use of Byrons Tales, particularly The Corsair, in The Revolt
of Islam, see Robinson j8. On the differences between the Greeces of Byron
and Shelley, see Wallace j.
:. Like Owensons Ida, the heroine in Mary Shelleys story Euphrasia is a
scholar who improvised patriotic songs (Collected Tales and Stories o:). In
Amygdala: A Tale of the Greek Revolution (+8) by Elizabeth Edmonds, a young
English philhellene on a reconnaissance mission in Attica meets two sisters, Irene
and Neroula, who represent the Greek and the Eastern female. Irene, a fair
blonde, is devoted to the Greek cause and strikes the young man as a model for
Athena sadgrieving over the ruin and misery of her beloved city (j). Ner-
oula, with dark hair and a dark complexion, possesses a sensual nature and has
more in common with the Oriental female. After Irenes death in the Greek War of
Independence, Gerard keeps his promise to marry Neroula, but he continues to
paint portraits of Athena with the face of Irene. Briseis, the Greek heroine in
William Blacks novel of that name, is called too august somehow, too serene and
remote (:y) as if she embodies the ideal of a classical statue.
It is worth noting that, at the end of The Lustful Turk, an anonymous +8:8
pornographic novel set in Algeria in which two Englishwomen become enamored
with the sensuality of their Oriental captor, it is a Grecian girl who castrates the
novels Algerian hero and then kills herself (+o). This is in keeping with the
prevalent thinking about Greek women at the time of the war of independence.
Against my interpretation, Wallace said, Greece and the east were associated
with uninhibited erotic beauty (+:). It is true, as she said, that Byrons Tales
depict a world of primitive values of love, violence and revenge, a world in which
eastern passion is more important than western decorum (+:). But, with the ex-
ception of the Turkish Gulnare in The Corsair, it is men who represent those
Eastern passions, and certainly not Greek women.
. In the preface to his novel Hypatia, Charles Kingsley provided a racial
theory for the effeminacy of the Christians in the Levant: Western Christianity
had some infusion of healthier blood into a world drained and tainted by Rome
(xii). The Christians of Egypt and Syria, on the other hand, were effeminate,
over civilized, exhausted by centuries during which no fresh blood came to renew
the stock (xv). Kingsley did not include the Greeks in his indictment (in his view
they had received an infusion from the Goths in late antiquity), but he certainly
o + r s + o r + o r s y y :y
presented a negative picture of Orthodoxy and its monks, one that could easily be
extended to the Greeks.
. The most notable exception is John Baldwin Buckstones Maid of Athens
(+8:), in which the Greek Demetrius and the English Madeline, with the help of
philhellenic Lord Byron, are able to marry against the wishes of her father, who
prefers a Swede. Although a Greek does end up marrying an Englishwoman in
this play, he does so only through the good ofces of Byron, who stands as a cham-
pion of freedom of choice in both politics and love.
j. This refers not only to ctional Greek women; see Celine Donalds Adven-
tures of a Greek Lady, the Adopted Daughter of the Late Queen Caroline, Written by
Herself (+8). In the novels of Black, Collins, and Jewsbury, the Greek descent of
the heroines is one of the factors employed to signal their difference from their
English neighbors. The motif also appears in Mayos Daughter of the Klephts, in
which the heroine, taken to England and orphaned as a child, functions perfectly
well in her new environment but remains slightly different from her peers. There,
however, is no such discussion about the place of Greek men in England. They
simply do not belong.
. See also Pashley, who says that when Cretans took up arms, they shrunk
from the caresses of their wives, as from a pollution, which would most probably
be punished by their falling in the next engagement (II.+yj, n. :). And in the
anonymous narrative poem Parga (+8+), the father of the heroine, Haidee, for-
bids her to marry the hero, Marcarius, until Parga is liberated from the Turks.
The pair of lovers are able to marry after the fathers death.
y. One of Landors Imaginary Conversations opens with Tersitza asking her
brother, What have I done that the stranger [Trelawny] should liken me to the
idols of antiquity? (Complete Works VIII.:o); she adds later that she is desirous
not to be thought an idol (Complete Works VIII.:o).
Chapter 3
+. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free +.
:. On this, see Marchand III.+:o.
. On Stanhope and his activities in Greece, see St. Clair, That Greece Might
Still Be Free +8; Koumarianou ++j::; and, more favorably, Rosen +.
. Millingen became a target for philhellenes when, after he was captured by
the Turks, he agreed to serve as a physician for them (see St. Clair, That Greece
Might Still Be Free :y and Woodhouse, Philhellenes +). He went on to be-
come a devoted Turkophile; he lived for many years in Constantinople and repu-
diated both his own and Byrons philhellenism. In ++8, Lord Eversley, in Some
Reminiscences: Lord Byron and Dr. Millingen, still argued that Millingen was
an outright liar.
j. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free +::8.
. On the iconography of Delacroixs painting, see Athanassoglou-Kalmyer
8y+oo.
:8 o + r s + o r + o r s y 8 8 +
y. On the life of Teresa Macri, see the two articles by C. G. Brouzas. The
mentions of Mrs. Black in travel narratives are too numerous to be listed here, but
see Willis :o:, Stephens j, Prime :+y, Baird yo, Eames +, and even
the posthumous mention by Joseph Moore :8.
8. On the second of the two plays, see Droulia ::o.
. See also William Blacks Briseis (+8), in which the heroine says that she
had also been a maid of Athens (:) and translates the phrase zoe mou, sas agapo
(y). Near the end of the book, she returns to Athens, where the hero comes in
search of her. In the nal paragraph, Athens has arrayed herself in her bridal
robes of silver and white, but Briseis will also leave Greece for England after her
nuptials (+y). John Colquhars Zoe: An Athenian Tale (+8:), a romance set in an-
tiquity, appears to be an attempt to translate Byrons Romantic-era Maid of
Athens into the past. The heroine, brought up in a small village, wins the noble
Alcibiades by her beauty and her artlessness, her pure feelings, her taste so unlike
her situation. . . . She possessed a simple naivete ().
+o. Trelawnys account of Byron in Greece in Recollections of the Last Days of
Byron and Shelley, which was less attering, did not appear until +8j8. Yet
Trelawnys criticism of Byron did not extend to the cause of the Greeks. Rather,
he tried to represent that he was the real hero of the philhellenes. The fact that
these early eyewitness accounts lauded Byron did not mean that the authors were
equally complimentary of one another. See especially Rosens analysis of how
Parry used Byron to attack Stanhope (+8j:+8).
++. St. Clair suggested that Edward Blacquiere cajoled and conned Byron into
going to Greece, and the London Greek Committee were not really interested in
him [Byron] at all but only in the publicity value of his name (That Greece Might
Still Be Free +y).
+:. Philhellenism did not have a major impact in France until +8:j, and
much of the stimulus for the upsurge . . . can be attributed to the story of Lord
Byrons pilgrimage and his death at Missalonghi (St. Clair, That Greece Might
Still Be Free :y). Byrons involvement in the Greek struggle had the same effect
in America and England.
+. Nineteenth-century English philhellenes faced a peculiar dilemma during
the Crimean War, during which the Greeks sympathized with the Russians. This
caused the British and French to send troops into Athens to keep the country out
of the conict. For most British, however, the Crimean War was not seen through
the lenses of the Greek War of Independence. Rather, as Palmerston told Lord
Clarendon, the goal was not so much to keep the Sultan and Musulmans in
Turkey as to keep the Russians out of Turkey (quoted in Palmer, Banner of Battle
:y). John Bright, in a letter of +8j opposing the war, said that England was not
only at war with Russia, but with all the Christian population of the Turkish em-
pire, and he questioned a policy founded on the perpetual maintenance of the
most immoral and lthy of all despotism over one of the fairest portions of the
earth. He added: Our love for civilization, when we subject Greeks and Chris-
tians to the Turks, is a sham (+j; see also Gladstones pseudonymous +j arti-
cle, War and Peace). For his sentiments, Bright lost his parliamentary seat in
o + r s + o r + o r s 8 + 8 :
the election of +8jy and was burned in efgy. On Byronism in America, see
Leonard, esp. p. :.
+. See, for example, Robert Harding Lawrences Graecia Nova! A Plea for
Sympathy with Modern Greece (+8yj), which concludes with the poem Missa-
longhi! (The Death of Lord Byron) (he also includes a Shelleyan effort entitled,
not surprisingly, Ode to Liberty); the anonymous Byron in Greece in the
Temple Bar during the border crisis in +88+; Lord Byron in the Greek Revolu-
tion by Frank Sanborn in Scribners Magazine in September +8y; Lord Byron
in the Greek Revolution in Chambers Journal by George Pignatorre in ++; and
the pamphlet Some English Philhellenes: Lord Byron by Z. D. Ferriman, which was
published in +:o by the philhellenic Anglo-Hellenic League.
+j. On Byrons reputation among reformers in England, see the articles by
Erdman and the book by Philip Collins.
+. One could even desire to be the Byron of the Arabs. Wilfred Scaven Blunt
wrote in The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (+8j): My wife,
Lady Anne Blunt, who accompanied me on all these [Oriental] travels, was the
granddaughter of our great national poet, Lord Byron, and so was the inheritor, in
some sort, of sympathy in the cause of freedom in the East. . . . it seemed to us, in
the presence of the events of +88+8: that to champion the cause of Arabian lib-
erty could be as worthy an endeavor as had been that for which Byron had died
(:). This stretched somewhat the Europe-versus-Asia rhetoric found in Byrons
own work. On Blunts Byron complex see Tetrault, Heirs to Virtue: Byron,
Gobineau, Blunt.
+y. For example, in Rambles and Studies in Greece, J. P. Mahaffy lamented the
neglect of Byron, saying that it was a bad sign about contemporary European
culture that the love of modern poets has weaned them [readers] from the study
of one not less great in most respects, but far greater in one at least . . . in that
burning enthusiasm for a national cause, in that red hot passion for liberty which,
even when misapplied, or wasted upon unworthy objects, is ever of the noblest
and most stirring instinct of man (+o+).
+8. In Byronism and the Victorians, Elfenbein noted that the inuence of
Byrons work and life went beyond literature and politics to fashion, social man-
ners, erotic experience, and gender roles (8). One of the merits of Elfenbeins
study is that it shows how much of a draw Byronism still was in Victorian times
and how British upper- and middle-class readers devised a Byron very different
from that of radicals like Mazzinia point demonstrated by the infrequent men-
tion of Greece in the work.
+. St. Clair said to Leicester Stanhope perhaps belongs the doubtful credit
of being the only man who went to Greece during the war whose political ideas
were not modied by the experience (That Greece Might Still Be Free +8j).
:o. Raizis, who did important work on American philhellenic writing during
the +8:os and +8os as coeditor of The Greek Revolution and the American Muse
and in his study, with Alexander Papas, American Poets and the Greek Revolution,
used the term Byronic philhellenism to characterize the period (Aspects of Liter-
ary Philhellenism +o). He added: The literary expression of that [philhellenic]
oo o + r s + o r + o r s 8 8 8
sentiment owes much more to cultural, and especially Byronic philhellenism, than
what has hitherto been acknowledged by scholars. See also Raizis and Papas,
American Poets +:+y, on the immense impact of Byron on American philhellenic
writing of the +8:os.
:+. Landors philhellenism has never received the attention it deserves nor has
the relationship of the philhellenic poems Regeneration and To Corinth with
the more famous Hellenics been explored.
::. I lay upon the solemn plain
And by the funeral mound,
Where those who died not there in vain,
Their place of sleep had found.
Twas silent where the free blood gushed,
When Persia came arrayed
So many a voice had there been hushed,
So many a footstep stayed.
I slumbered on the lonely spot,
So sanctied by Death
I slumberedbut my rest was not
As theirs who lay beneath.
For on my dreams, that shadowy hour,
they rosethe chainless dead
All armed they spring, in joy, in power
Up from their grassy bed.
(Poetical Works :y)
:. See the comments of Raizis and Papas on classical sentimentalism in
American philhellenic poetry (American Poets, esp. j, but also yj+ generally).
:. On Krazeisens painting, see Tsigakou j:j. Garber (++o+) discusses
the Orientalism of Delacroixs Combat du giaour et du pacha without mentioning
that the picture was painted during the War of Independence and was rst shown
with La Grce sur les ruines de Missolonghi during an exhibition to raise money for
the Greeks in July +8:; see Athanassoglou-Kalmyer (+).
:j. Shelleys The Evil Eye, a story of Epirot klephts and Maniote corsairs,
is set in Greece before the War of Independence but includes a pirate raid on Scio
(Chios), which evokes the great tragedy of the revolution.
:. For example, in Landors dialogue between Maurocordato and Colo-
cotroni, a discussion is held as to whether the Greek troops should be equipped
with bows and arrows in order to ensure a renewable supply of ammunition, a sug-
gestion rst made, according to Landor, by Benjamin Franklin to the American
revolutionary army (Complete Works VIII.+8:).
:y. See St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free 8o8+.
:8. See also L. E. L.s [Letitia Elizabeth Landon] The Ionian Captive,
Lydia Huntley Sigourneys The Martyr of Scio, William Cullen Bryants The
Massacre at Scio, Bradelds The Maid of Scio, Snowdens The Maid of Scio:
A Tale of Modern Greece, and Stricklands Demetrius.
o + r s + o r + o r s 8 : o+
:. Mordecai Noah explained his use of Ali in a play about the Greek War of
Independence in the preface as follows: I have taken the liberty of transferring
Ali Pacha from Joannina to Athens being a more extended eld of operation and
quite convenient, and have also made him an enemy of the Greeks, which he truly
was, as his rebellion and hostility to the Sublime Porte were the only motives
which induced him to favor the Greek cause (iii).
o. The American playwright John Howard Payne wrote two dramas con-
cerned with the Greek struggle for freedom, Ali Pacha; or, The Signet Ring (+8:j)
and Oswaldi of Athens (+8+), both of which feature Ali as the terrible Turk,
who lusts after a Greek captive. Ali Pasha also appears as the villain in Henry Gal-
ley Knights narrative poem Phrosyne in Eastern Sketches in Verse (+8o). In
France, Ali was the villain in the dramas Les Martyrs de Souli by Nepomucene
Louis Lamercier (+8:j) and Youli; ou, Les Suliotes by Franconi and Henri (+8o)
and the narrative poem Ali Pacha et Vasiliki by Prosper Poitevin (+8j).
+. Garnetts Reine Canziani is the only novel about the Greek War of Inde-
pendence written in the +8:os of which I am aware. The great majority of prose
written in English offered itself as nonction, even if, as with the anonymous
Scenes in the Morea; or, A Sketch of the Life of Demetrius Argyri, it may well have
been ction. One slight short story was written on the same theme as The Giaour,
An Athenian Adventure in The Stanley Tales by Ambrose Marten. Marten, like
Charles MacFarlane in The Armenians: A Tale of Constantinople (+8o) places
philhellenic sentiment in the mouths of some characters but sets the story before
the beginning of the revolution.
Cedric Hentschel has said that in Vier Erzhlungen der Geschichte des jetzigne
Griechenlands (+8:), the German poet Friedrich Wilhelm Waiblinger blended
the traditions of Byron and Hlderlin (Byron and Germany ). One reason
that French and German writers may have felt Byrons shadow a bit less than writ-
ers in English is that they also had other signicant inuences in their own lan-
guages, like Hlderlin, Chateaubriand, and later Hugo. The only work in English
about modern Greece other than Byron that had signicant impact in the +8:os
was Hopes Anastasius, and R. R. Madden wrote a three-volume novel called The
Mussulman (+8o), which blends Byron and Hope. But The Mussulman takes place
outside of Greece and the War of Independence.
:. Southey was a liberal in the +yos but became progressively more conser-
vative in the nineteenth century, like Coleridge and Wordsworth: see Woodring
y; Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries +j; and, at greater
length, Currys biography of Southey ++:. Curry discusses the disagreements
between Southey and Byron on 8yo.
. In France, according to Malakis, during the early years of the Greek Revo-
lution, the salons were divided into two camps; the question of the day was tes
vous Grecs, tes vous Turcs? (+:). But by +8:, everyone was Greek, and the
Turks, if there were any, were forced to be silent (+). This should not be taken as
a sign that in France philhellenism had transcended party politics, for, as Athanas-
soglou-Kalmyer said, by +8:j, The Greek cause had become almost entirely an
appanage of the liberal opposition (+o++). The Turks were keeping silent.
o: o + r s + o r + o r s :
. See Penn y+ and Rosen, who noted that the success of the appeal of
the London Greek Committee was to a degree determined by a division in soci-
ety that can only be described as ideological in character (:). On the British at-
titude toward Russia for most of the nineteenth century, see Gleason.
j. There were serious disagreements among the philhellenes on the nature of
a projected government for Greece, which were often lost within the larger ideo-
logical division of Tories/conservatives and liberals/radicals. On the different
conceptions of the Greek government offered by Blacquiere and Stanhope, see
Rosen +:j8.
. On the failure of the loan and its contribution to the decline of the philhel-
lenic spirit in England, see Penn jjy and Rosen :j88. It was in the context
of a discussion of this loan and the material that it should have purchased that
Finlay remarked: It was by those who called themselves Philhellenes in England
and America that Greece was most injured (:; see also j). The money
raised and sent to Greece was also misused. Henry Bulwer, sent to Greece as one
of the commissioners of the second installment of the loan, told his readers what
the great sum had accomplished: Nothing!except support of a faction, which
has lavished the public treasure in procuring itself partisans, and in converting an
enthusiastic peasantry into mercenary soldiers (+:+).
y. Henry Bradelds The Atheniad, a long poem on the failed campaign to at-
tack Athens in +8:y, came closest to satirizing the efforts of the Greeks in the war.
In a second philhellenic book published later in the same year, Bradeld explained
that In the Atheniad, it was my object to describe the existing errors of the
Greeks, more in the indulgence of playful humor than in anger; . . . the incidents
related in the present volume will tend to remove an impression which seems to
have been excited by my former poem. I am too much devoted to the interests of
Greece to originate this supposition, save in those who are strangers to me, and
should be sorry if I were, directly or indirectly, the means of adding to the misfor-
tunes of an oppressed people. (Tales of the Cyclades iiiiv). So much for a declara-
tion of artistic freedom.
8. See also Raizis and Papas, American Poets :+:.
. Congress backed away from recognizing the Greek government and send-
ing ofcial representatives to Greece because such intervention would have jeop-
ardized the recently announced Monroe Doctrine about European interference in
the Americas (see Larrabee y:). America did, however, produce the philhellenic
movements greatest success. The American relief efforts of +8:y and +8:8, in
which food and clothing were sent to noncombatants, were according to St. Clair,
the rst and last time the vast reserves of enthusiasm, sacrice, and good will
which the name of Greece aroused throughout Western Christendom were mobi-
lized in a manner which was wholly and intrinsically good, and the measures car-
ried through with intelligence and efciency. At last the slogans of philhellenism
were put into practice and it was found that the slogans were not needed (That
Greece Might Still Be Free j). The slogans may not have been needed, but as
the anthology of American verse about the Greek War of Independence by Raizis
and Papas reveals on every page, the poets continued to use them with frequency.
o + r s + o r + o r s + o o
o. Willis went on to say, The convulsions of Europe may soon leave her to
herself; and the slipper of the Turk and the hand of the Christian, once lifted
from her neck, she will rise, and stand there among the imperishable temples, once
more free! (II.:o).
+. Richard Monckton Milnes wrote a poem for young Mavromikali, one of
the assassins of the rst president of Greece, Capodistrias, in +8:, in which
Milnes calls the young murderer the new Harmodius (+j8; the poem appears on
+jo); Alexander Cochrane lauded the same event in his narrative poem The
Morea (+:y); and Edward Masson translated Alexander Suzzos [Soutsos]
Soliloquy of George Mavromichali and Capodistris in Philhellenika. But
these are rather rare examples of interest in Greek domestic politics. And Masson,
Suzzos translator, repudiated the poets negative view of Capodistrias in his in-
troduction (++8).
:. See the comments of Monckton Milnes +j+j. Lewis Sergeant wrote,
The true character of Hellenism reveals itself wherever Greeks have enjoyed a
few generations of free social life (New Greece j). He based his remark on the
observation of Greeks in London, Paris, and other Western cities, since, in his
view, the Greeks in Greece had still not been blessed with a few generations of
free social life.
. In the introduction to the + edition of The Last Man, Paley said that
one of the novels main themes is the failure of the imagination (xi).
Chapter 4
+. For antiquity see Richard Jenkyns and Vickery; on Schliemanns excava-
tions, see Kenner :. For Italy, see Pemble, Kenneth Churchill, Van Wyck
Brooks, Dream of Arcadia, and Nathalia Wright.
:. George Gissings novella Sleeping Fires (+8j) opens in Athens, where the
hero has just spent the winter. But at the end he calls Greece a mere fairy land; to
us of the north an escape for rest amid scenes we hardly believe real. . . . Who cares
to know the modern names of the mountains? Who thinks of the people who dwell
among them? . . . I, whose life is now to begin, must shake off this sorcery of
Athens, and remember it only as a delightful dream (:+o).
. The same is true of the following books, or sections of books, of poems
about travel to Greece in the later nineteenth century: George Savage-Arm-
strongs Garland from Greece, Elizabeth Edmondss Hesperas, and Lloyd Mifins
Castalian Days.
. When Nathaniel Parker Willis rst approached Greece by ship, Childe
Harolds Pilgrimage laid open on my knee at the Second Canto, describing our
position, even to the hour (:j). On a visit to Marathon, Jane Eames was all but
overcome with emotion: How many times I ejaculated, Oh, the glorious land of
Greece! And even while I ate my lunch, I broke out a dozen times with: The
mountains look on Marathon / And Marathon looks on the sea (+:j). Travelers
who might not be aware of the appropriate Byronic quotation were assisted by
o o + r s + o r + o r s + o + o
guidebooks like Murrays Handbook for Travellers in Greece, which told the visitor
to Acrocorinth, On this spot the traveler will recall Byrons Siege of Corinth
with renewed interest and provided a lengthy excerpt (+:). Fitz-Greene Hal-
lecks poem Marco Bozzaris was often quoted by American travelers (e.g.,
Eames +: and Ward ::y+). But since Hallecks verses were themselves an ex-
ample of Romantic Byronism, they served to increase rather than decrease the
hold of the Grce de Byron on the American mind.
j. Tsigakou said that the main attraction of the plates of Edward Lears Jour-
nal of a Landscape Painter in Albania and Illyria, published in +8j+, is the artists
genuine sensitivity in conveying the historical association of each particular site
connected with the recent events in Greece, a comment that could be extended to
some of Lears paintings of classical sites (yo). Tsigakou also noted that much of
Lears work was tinged with the Romantic philhellenism of earlier decades.
. Two major American poets traveled to Greece. William Cullen Bryant, the
author of about a half dozen philhellenic poems during the War of Independence
(e.g., The Greek Partizan, The Greek Amazon, The Massacre at Scio, and
The Greek Boy), went to the Levant as a correspondent for the New York
Evening Post in +8j:+8j. Greece was described in one brief chapter of the book
based upon these columns, Letters from the East (+8), in which Bryant observed,
The remains of ancient art, which are to be seen in Athens, have the character of
the surrounding sceneryrepose and harmony (:+8; see also Larrabee :y).
In short, the poet found those very qualities of Romantic Hellenism that had made
him so interested in the Greek Revolution decades earlier. Herman Melville jour-
neyed through the East in +8j and +8jy (Larrabee :y8:), and his The Attic
Landscape, The Parthenon, and The Archipelago show the inuence of the
Romantic Hellenism of Winckelmann, while his poem Syra describes the Greek
islanders as free from the ills of American materialism. The last work is slightly at
odds with the following passage from his journal: Contrast between the Greek
isles & those of the Polynesian archipelago. The former have lost their virginity.
The latter are fresh as their rst creation. The former look worn, and are meagre,
like life after enthusiasm is gone ( Journals y:). One might say that this is more a
comment on the young Melville, who traveled in the Pacic, and the older, disillu-
sioned Melville, who came to the Levant. Still, if Melville had developed this con-
trast in published poetry or prose, it might have provided a new perspective for
viewing Greece in English writing, one that was more readily available on the Eu-
ropean Continent. For example, Gautier in Constantinople suggested that modern
Greece is wasted by its production of masterpieces and genius and heroism (),
and Grard de Nerval approached Greece as un ls dun sicle douteur (II.:jj).
y. In contrast, see the depth, development, and debate in nineteenth-century
literature about Renaissance Italy in Bullen and in Fraser.
8. See Chew :jjy:. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Byrons
verse was unfavorably compared to Wordsworth and the emerging reputations of
Shelley and Keats. In +8, the critic George Saintsbury said, Counter-jumpers
like Thackerays own Pogson worshipped the noble poet [Byron]; beings of a no-
o + r s + o r + o r s + o y + o oj
bler stripe like Tennyson thought they worshipped him, but if they were going to
become men of affairs forgot all about him; if they were to be poets they took to
Shelley and Keats as models, not to him (Grierson o). Americans were more ad-
miring of Byron; see Leonard, esp. the rst chapter.
. Even Walter Savage Landors A Modern Greek Idyll (+8j), a poem
about the domestic relations of a Greek mother and her three sons, was rooted in
the period of the Greek War of Independence. In a note, Landor said he found the
story in M. C. Fauriels Chantes Populaires de la Grce, a two-volume work pub-
lished in +8:+8:j to show the preservation of Hellenic culture among the mod-
ern Greeks. In +8j, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell also called attention to Fau-
riels book in an article for the magazine Household Words. Writers continued to
focus on the period between +yyo and +8o in the decades after +8yo; see, for ex-
ample, Gilbert Murrays Mesolonghi Capta (+8yy) and Elizabeth Edmondss poem
Rhigas (Hesperas, +88).
+o. The exception is Collinss The Albanian, which recounts how an Italian
philhellene joined the cause, fell in love with his Helen, and died in the siege of
Missolonghi.
++. Requier also made the obligatory connection between a ruined temple and
a captive female. When his heroine nds herself a captive in the Turkish leaders
tent, it happens to be situated on the ruins of a temple to Diana. She gets posses-
sion of a knife and threatens to commit suicide on the altar:
Upon this altar I rear my form
This fragmentary relic of a grace,
Which as a deity my sires adored.
A voluntary victim, here I stand.
(+8)
+:. Edward Lears most recent biographer, Peter Levi, says of Journal of a
Landscape Painter in Albania and Illyria: There was nothing Greek about it ex-
cept for the idea, the name, the excitement of modern Greece, which was still an
image of revolutionary liberty and pure mountains (++y).
+. At one point, Lear thought of a huge work (if I can do all Greece) of
the Morea and all together (quoted in Levi ++). But he could not do it, and all
that appeared were Journal of a Landscape Painter in Albania and Illyria, Views of
the Seven Ionian Islands, and The Cretan Journal (published posthumously in
+8, but which Lear had begun to revise for publication before his death; see
Rowena Fowler in the introduction to The Cretan Journal +j+y). These books
give the impression of Lear circling around the land of grace and detail without
ever attempting a book on Attica and the Peloponnesus.
+. See Raizis, Aspects of Byronic Philhellenism (+8), who observed
that in the decades after the Greek Revolution the combined and collective circu-
lation of the verse of the +8:os was enormous. In +8j:, for example, Edward
Masson reprinted his poem of +8:, The Rising of Hellas, without any changes
o o + r s + o r + o r s + + o + + j
to indicate the success of the revolution (e.g., Each fair Muse, by Freedom led, /
Resumes her haunts of yore, nor glow to see, / Through ages still reborn, thy glo-
ries yet to be, Philhellenika j).
+j. See Dakin, Unication of Greece ++++:.
+. See Howes Appeal and Cretan Refugees. Julia Ward Howe provided an ac-
count of Howes visit to Athens in From the Oak to the Olive. See Juin, Victor Hugo
II.jy8y, for the public response of that famous philhellene of Les Orientales to
the Cretan revolt.
+y. See Marcoglou 8. On the American William Stillman in Crete, see
Marcoglou 8::.
+8. Frank Lentricchia discussed Stedmans role in the genteel tradition of
American poetry in Modernist Quartet jo and y8o.
+. On Shelleys importance for Swinburne, see the articles by David Riede
and Terry Meyers.
:o. Thackeray advised readers who loved the Arabian Nights in their
youth, [to] book themselves on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental ves-
sels, and try one dip into Constantinople or Smyrna (::y).
:+. Alexander Kinglake also noted an almost universal and unbroken testi-
mony against the character of the people whose ancestors invented Virtue ().
He added that many Greeks preferred groaning under the Turkish yoke in
Smyrna to the honour of being the only true source of legitimate power in their
own land. But, like many of the time, he concluded his criticism by stating: For
myself I love the race: in spite of their vices, and even in spite of their meanesses
[sic], I remember the blood that is in them, and still love the Greeks ().
::. Thomas Wyse, the British minister in Athens in the +8os, was harsher in
his opinion of Otho: A more honorable, high-minded ruler . . . might have made
them [the Greeks] the light and the hope of the East (+j). On the other hand,
George Horton, the American ambassador to Greece in the +8os, presented a
positive view of Otho in his novel Constantine (+y:).
:. See also Skenes poem The Greek Slave (+8) and the play of the
same name by Edward Fitzball (+8j+). Brownings poem was put to music in
+8y by J. W. Hobbs, as was a poem by Miss Pardoe with the same title by Henry
Allen in the +8os. See also Pardoes The Romance of the Harem (+8), whose
heroine is a Greek slave from Chios who escaped the massacre, and the chapter
entitled The Greek Slave in Frederick Marryats novel The Pasha of Many
Tales (+8). The idea of the Greek slave was also kept alive by the appearance of
slave narratives, such as Kelchs Turkish Barbarity: An Affecting Narrative of
the Unparalleled Sufferings of Mrs. Sophia Mazro, a Greek Lady of Missalonghi
(+8:8), The Personal Sufferings of J. Stefanini (+8:), and The Greek Exile: A
Narrative of the Captivity and Escape of Christophoros Plato Castanis during the
Massacre on Scio by the Turks. Written by Himself (+8j), as well as by such books
as Franz Hoffmans, The Greek Slave (+8yo) and Frederick Millingens Slavery in
Turkey: The Sultans Harem (+8yo).
The feminization of Greece was employed in political pamphlets. A manifesto
against British policy during the Crimean War appeared with the title A Grecian
o + r s + o r + o r s + + y + : o oy
Ladys Complaint on the Protection Offered for Turkey (+8j) by G. L., and a publi-
cation of the London Greek Committee in +88o was called Greece Abandoned; or,
Three Years of Diplomacy on the Eastern Question.
:. On Fallmerayer and the reaction to his thesis, see Herzfeld yj. Mac-
Farlanes The Armenians (+8o) spoke against the political troglodytes who
ransack their brains for proofs that the Hellenes of the present day are not
descendants of the ancients (I.). In George Hortons The Monks Treasure
(+oj), the hero declared, I am not of those who hold with Professor Fallmerayer
that all Greeks are Slavonians (+:) and William Miller said that by +oj Fall-
merayers theory was as dead as its author (Greek Life in Town and Country :).
See also the comments of Lewis Sergeant in New Greece, where he concluded that
Fallmerayer seems to have been the victim of a reaction against the Philhellenic
movement of his time (::j), and C. C. Feltons criticism of Fallmerayer in
Greece, Ancient and Modern +:+j. On the basically negative view of the modern
Greeks in the early nineteenth century, see Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 888.
:j. This was the view presented by Demetra Vaka Brown in her philhellenic
novel Bribed to be Born, posthumously published in +j+. A patriotic Greek
woman from Constantinople says of Disraelis power: Had he used it for the
good of the world, even we here might not be living under the Turkish yoke. The
Jew, Disraeli, the prime minister. No one will ever know what was behind that
masklike face. Even when he laughed, there was in the depths of his dark, burning
eyes the reection of all the suffering of the Jewish race. . . . And I dared say to
him: If only England had thought of the good of the world after the Crimean
War, and not the narrow British viewpoint, Constantinople would not be what it
is, and we, the subject races of Turkey, might have some benet of civilization.
He made no answer, yet his glowing eyes seemed to say: You talk of the misery of
subject races of the Turk. What of my people, forever persecuted, everywhere in
fear of their lives? (j).
:. The only English poem of which I am aware that deals with life on the
Ionian islands is Skenes lesser effort Revenge of the Zantiote Maiden. Frances
Maclellans Sketches of Corfu (+8j) offered a rather bucolic picture of the life and
lore of the ordinary people. Letitia Elizabeth Landon visited the area in the +8os
and wrote several short efforts about the landscape, e.g., Corfu. Two chapters of
Bulwer Lyttons novel Zanoni are set on one of the Ionian islands, but they con-
tain no authentic local color. See James Tetreault, This Violent Passion: Gob-
ineau and Greece, for a discussion of the French authors encounter with
Greece. In Germany, Hermann von Pckler-Muskau published Sdostlicher
BildersalGriechischen Leiden (+8o), of which Hentschel said: In presenting an
unvarnished image of contemporary Greece, Puckler-Muskau began to free the
German spirit from that tyranny of Greece which had originated with Winckel-
mann (yo).
:y. Abouts novel appeared in a translation in England in +8:, in a version
done by C. F. L. Wraxall, which was reissued in +88+. It was rst released in
America in +8+ in a translation by Mary Booth, and the preface to that edition
states that six different translations of the book had been offered to American
o8 o + r s + o r + o r s + : + :
publishers since the announcement of Booths version. New translations ap-
peared in both England and America in +8y.
:8. In the introduction to an English translation of The King of the Mountains
(+o:), Andrew Lang said of Greek brigands and the tragedy at Dilessi: On the
whole subject, Great Britain has very little right to throw the rst stone at Hellas,
and he argued that conditions in Greece a few decades earlier were no different
from those in the Scotland of Rob Roy. Greece was not abnormal, she was just
belatedthat was all (viii-ix). In English, therefore, even the introduction to
Abouts novel takes exception to the books point of view. Other writers had posi-
tive views of Greek brigands. In +8, C. C. Felton was delighted to be invited to a
klephtic feast by a man who had been for eleven years a klepht, or robber, on
Mount Olympus and called the occasion the most classical and Homeric thing
that has come from past ages (Greece, Ancient and Modern II.:8). Interest in the
klephts in the West is further demonstrated by Dreyfuss +88 comedy Le Klephte,
in which a group of French characters discuss whether klepht is a pleasing word to
the ear. In +8j8, Charles Asselineaus Mon Cousin Don Quixote: Physiognomie dun
philhellne, did to the philhellenic volunteers what About had done to the klephts.
:. In these poems, as well as in prose writings, the sacred names of
Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae were often invoked. For example, on
March +, +8y, Gladstone said that Greece was a Power representing the race
that fought the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis and hurled the hordes of Asia
back from European shores (Eastern Crisis +:). In his satirical poem Our
Learned Philhellenes, H. D. Traill made fun of the way poets invoked the classi-
cal past in support of modern Greece in +8y:
For if Sparta that resolute nation,
Stood fast in Thermopylaes gorge,
Whats that but a clear demonstration
That Crete should belong to King George.
(jo)
See also Richard Vaseys Psiloriti: A Dramatic Poem Illustrative of Life under the
Turk in Crete (+8).
o. One of the French offerings from this time was de Vogs Vangheli: La
Vie Orientale (+o+).
+. The number of books and articles about the Greek Revolution published
during the war of +8y is staggering; a sampling includes Mayos novel and her
two articles; Frank Sanborns Lord Byron and the Greek Revolution; Bensons
two novels on the theme; and Allisons history of the War of Independence. In his
translation of stories by Argyris Eftaliotis, entitled Tales from the Isles of Greece,
W. H. D. Rouse said that until recently there were still village Homers in
Greece only now no Troy is their theme, but the struggle of Greece for freedom
against the Turk (ix). He also said, One or two of the sketches in the original
work have been omitted, and their place has been taken by three others given at
the end, dealing with the days of the War of Independence (v).
o + r s + o r+ o r s + : + j o
:. Bettina Knapp has argued that Cranes Active Service was meant to be a
parody of Richard Harding Davis-like romances, which partly explains why its
tone is so different from Cranes previous works (+o:o). But, as Michael
Robertson noted, the claim rings hollow (+). Robertsons suggestion that the
book is a confrontation between the new world emerging in the +8os and an
older, more genteel society has some merit but still does not account for the rea-
sons that Crane makes such a bad job of it. D. A. Boxleys article argued for the
connection between the dark, enticing Nora and the East and examines how the
Eastern female can be emasculating for a Western male, a common theme also
found in, for example, Hichenss In the Wilderness. Boxley argued that, in Active
Service, Crane both replicated and deconstructed the prevalent idea of the Orient,
but I do not agree that the text can bear that interpretation. My point is simply
that Crane was not alone in somehow losing his skills when writing about Greece.
. The coverage of the war by writers at home (e.g., Diplomaticus) and
reporters in the eld (e.g., Steevens) was occasionally critical, if not hostile, to the
Greeks. Clive Bigham prefaced his account by saying, It is, of course, extremely
difcult to avoid sympathizing with the troops one accompanies, and most of
the reporters who viewed the war from the Turkish side, like Bigham (With the
Turkish Army in Thessaly), Steevens (With the Conquering Turk), and Ellis Ashland
Barret (Battleelds of Thessaly), were more sympathetic to the Turks than to the
Greeks. But the poets, ction writers, and volunteers who were drawn to the war
were, at least initially, overwhelmingly philhellenic in outlook (in addition to
Brailsfords novel, see Experiences and Reminiscences of Jock Herbert). Even
Traill, who satirized English philhellenes, did not take a stand against the Greeks
themselves.
Chapter 5
+. See Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation ::.
:. On the Bulgarian agitation in Britain, see Seton-Watson; Harris; Shannon,
Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation; Milman; and Saab. On the same period
from the Greek side, see Kofos.
. See also Gladstones distinction between slavery in archaic Greece and Ot-
toman despotism: The song of Homer witnesses that the mild slavery of the
heroic age took away half the manhood of a man. But the slavery (for that is what
it really was) imposed by the Ottoman Turk, not only substituting will for law, but
mutilating the sacred structure of the family, and clothing the excesses of tyranni-
cal power with the awful sanction of religion, was such as to take away even half
the remaining virtue of a slave (Hellenic Factor y).
. Stillman, perceiving a causal link between the rebellions on Crete and in
Herzegovina, went on to say, The Cretan insurrection made the Herzegovinian
revolt practicable and possible (Herzegovina and the Late Uprising ).
j. How dependent the perception of the Balkan struggle for freedom after
+8y was on the conception of wider philhellenism can be illustrated by two books
+o o + r s + o r + o r +
published in the early years of the twentieth century. Arthur Howden Smiths
Fighting the Turk in the Balkans: An Americans Adventures with the Macedonian
Revolutionaries (+o8) opened by asserting that romance has in large measure
passed from everyday life in America and Europe (+). This American descendant
of Childe Harold went on to say: To those who have not visited them, the
Balkans are a shadow-land of mystery; to those who know them they become even
more mysterious, for as one begins to fancy he has peered under the veil, he nds
himself caught in its meshes, and the spell of the land has him in thrall. You be-
come, in a sense, part of the spell, and of the mystery and glamour of the whole
(:). Smith did not say precisely what the spell entailed, but it clearly was related
to the magic force of Byronic legend, which had enveloped Greece and was now
extending its geographical range. In fact, the rst part of Smiths title, Fighting the
Turk in the Balkans, which emphasized against whom he was ghting even before
one knew for whom he was ghting, intentionally evoked the philhellenic legacy.
Smith was a wider Romantic Byronist, who attempted to fulll his yearnings for
romance by carrying a rie in a band of Bulgarians from Macedonia. Another one
was the young Joyce Cary, who served in a Red Cross unit with the Montenegrin
army in ++: during the First Balkan War. Cary once said, I had a certain roman-
tic enthusiasm for the cause of Montenegro, in short I was young and eager for
any sort of adventure (8). During the First Balkan War of ++:++, the French
poet Fernand Hauser published Les Balkaniques (++), whose title looked back to
the philhellenic sentiment of Victor Hugos Les Orientales while at the same time
updating the geographical terminology to reect the new conditions of southeast-
ern Europe. Hauser was so tied to the philhellenic language of the past that he was
unable to convey or analyze the changes that had occurred in the Balkans since the
late +8yos. Les Balkaniques was hopelessly out of date within the year it appeared,
for the Second Balkan War of ++:++, in which the Balkan Christians squared
off against one another, rendered the construction of wider philhellenism not
just obsolete, but absurd. In reality, Hausers vision was outdated from the start;
it was drawn more from Hugo and literary philhellenism than from the twentieth-
century context. The majority of wider philhellenic verse suffered from the same
aw; Les Balkaniques is simply, in terms of quantity, the most egregious example.
. For a fuller discussion of Disraelis speech on this occasion, see Saab .
y. Ironically, after all the difculties with the Greek loan in the +8:os, one
of the reasons for the British publics turn against the Turks was the Ottoman
default on a loan (see Milman :y).
8. On Morriss involvement with the Bulgarian agitation, see Thompson
:o::j.
. As Saab said, the Bulgarian agitation offered a means for cooperation
among disparate groups: Given the fact that the Nonconformists, the High
Churchmen, the secular working-class radicals, and the agricultural laborers rep-
resented distinct and even opposing communities, it would have been extremely
difcult for them to coalesce around an issue internal to England. What was
needed was a symbolic grievance; a cause that would allow them to protest reli-
gious intolerance, the persecution of Christianity, and the corruption and unre-
o + r s + o r + o r + y ++
sponsiveness of government, without ever having to deal with cases familiar
enough to bring out their deep and well-founded disagreements (; for further
discussion see ). But Gladstone and the established Liberals were, to a fair
extent, able to direct the movement once they decided to join the fray.
+o. See Nelson +j.
++. Shannon said that Gladstone had a sense of embarrassment when his
name was mentioned as a possible sovereign for Greece after the abdication of
Otho in +8: He was in the false position of enjoying a spurious reputation for
political philhellenism stemming from misconceptions about his Homerology and
for the fortunate non-publication of his report as High Commissioner in +8j.
Gladstone played no part in the initiative [to return the Ionian islands to Greece]
in +8: (Gladstone yj). The reputation for philhellenism was not completely
spurious, though; Gladstone had spoken out in favor of Greece during the Don
Pacico debate in +8j+ (see Shannon, Gladstone ::::) and in +8j had written
an article, War and Peace, to which he had attached only his initials, which ad-
vocated a Greek empire in the Near East. But there would be far fewer Gladstone
streets in Greek towns if the Greeks had known what Gladstone had written
concerning the Ionian islands. Saab had some interesting comments on the trips
to the eastern Mediterranean of Disraeli and Gladstone and how their varied re-
actions to the land provided insight into their Eastern policies (+o).
+:. Some even used the differences between East and West found in early
nineteenth-century philhellenic rhetoric to argue openly for British imperialism.
So, for example, the novelist and poet Maurice Baring, noting how the questions
India for the Indians and Egypt for the Egyptians were cognates of Turkey
for the Turks, asked in his volume Letters from the Near East (++): Is it possi-
ble to graft on to Oriental habits the modes of thought, the system and the forms
of government of the West? (+j). Baring did not offer a nal and complete nega-
tive, but he thought that it would take centuries, not decades, and concluded that
benign Western rule was the best for which the East could hope (+8), since how
can progress ever be a reality in Moslem countries unless the Mohammedan reli-
gion is changed out of all recognition? (:o). In the true Gladstonian tradition,
however, he was far more receptive to Bulgaria for the Bulgars, Serbia for the
Serbs, and Greece for the Greeks. For Baring, Oriental habits apparently
began on the other side of the Bosporus.
+. On the emergence of the terms Romantic and Romanticism in the second
half of the nineteenth century to refer to a period of English literary history, see
Welleck (esp. +j+), Whalley (esp. :j), and Rieder (esp. :8o). The incor-
poration of Byron into the mainstream provoked a reaction from Swinburne, who
in +8j published an essay that had helped to renew interest in the poet (see Chew
:jyj8). His criticism of Byron in the later essay Wordsworth and Byron was at
least partly a response to Matthew Arnolds praise of the work of those two poets
over the verse of Shelley. But it was also, I think, a challenge to Arnolds reading of
Byron as more reformist than revolutionary. In Wordsworth and Byron, Swin-
burne said, On the day when it shall become accepted as a canon of criticism that
the political work and the political opinions of a poet are to weigh nothing in the
+: o + r s + o r + o r s + 8 +
balance that suspends his reputationon that day the fame of Byron will y up
and vanish in the air, and he added, We nd little really living or really perma-
nent in the works of Byron which has not in it some direct or indirect touch of po-
litical emotion (Complete Works +.+). Swinburne wrote this at a time when
Arnold and others were in fact tting Byron and Shelley into the canon by lessen-
ing the poets political emotions.
+. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, in I Was Once an English Poet: A Biography of
William Watson, said that when Watson referred to Shelleys foes, he meant
those who admired him for his revolutionary thought more than his lyricism. Wat-
son believed that Shelleys greatness had been misinterpreted and it lay with his
lyrical not his political achievements (+oj).
+j. On the Armenian massacres of the +8os, see W. T. Steads The Haunting
Horrors of Armenia (+8y), which uses a quotation from The Purple East as an
epigraph.
+. The same problem occurs in the majority of verse written during the Bul-
garian agitation. They are mostly satires, often doggerel in quality, about the inac-
tion of British leadership, such as The Devils Visit to Bulgaria and Other Lands.
Even Swinburnes Ballad of Bulgarie, which satirizes Gladstone and the Liberals,
falls into this category. The focus in nearly all works of this kind is English domes-
tic politics instead of the Bulgarians and their aspirations, demonstrating the lack
of a signicant emotional connection between the Bulgarians and their British
supporters.
+y. See Todorovas essay The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention and
Goldsworthys recent Inventing Ruritania. Jelavichs British Travelers in the
Balkans surveys early British travel writing about the area.
+8. See Abbott, Tale of a Tour of Macedonia, who says that to a Turkish ofcial
Christian and Greek are convertible terms (o).
+. See, for example, Emile Lavalayes Balkan Peninsula (+88y), William
Millers Balkans (+o), W. V. Herberts By-Paths in the Balkans (+o), John
Frasers Pictures from the Balkans (++:), Edith Durhams Burden of the Balkans
(+oj), and Winifred Gordons Woman in the Balkans (++). See also Sakis story
The Lost Sanjak, in which a man is put to death because he does not know
where the Sanjak of Novibazar is. The story is discussed by Goldsworthy
++y+:j.
:o. On the idea of Eastern Europe as a half-civilized/half-savage space, see
Wolff. On the change from the Renaissance conception of the North/South divi-
sion of Europe to an East/West division during the Enlightenment, see esp. 8.
:+. See Wolff +:.
::. Surveying American literature at the turn of the century, Van Wyck
Brooks commented that in scores of other crude romances . . . dealing with
court-intrigue in imaginary countries in the Balkans,Graustark, Asturnia,
Scarvania, Waleria, and others, big bold Americans humbled effete Europeans, as
America had humbled Spain in +88 (Condent Years +:). Goldsworthy has
done an excellent job mapping the imaginary Balkans in British writing, and I re-
gret that I was not able to read her book until after my own manuscript had been
o + r s + o r + o r s + + j + +
submitted. On p. o of his novel, Upward referred to the Balkiad Atrocities,
which furnished a theme for the scathing eloquence of the greatest of living ora-
tors. Despite that eloquence and the public outcry, this was one of the few refer-
ences to the Bulgarian agitation in English. For more on Upward, who assisted the
Greeks in Crete in +8y and in Macedonia in +o8, his spiritual and mystical
books The New Word (+oy) and The Divine Mystery (++j), and their inuence on
Ezra Pound, see the articles by Knox and by Moody. In France, on the other hand,
Pierre Dspignot published Avant le Massacre: Roman Macdonien in +o:,
which, like Turgenevs early novel On the Eve (+8j), presented the Bulgarians in
a positive light.
:. On pp. :, Moore wrote a rather poor poem for a Greek girl whose fa-
ther died ghting in Macedonia (And the dear one of my race / who gavest thy
life that Greece might grow / Strong, and regain her lost domain). A book by
George Demetrius in a series for children, I Was Once a Boy in Greece (++), re-
vealed how the picture of Greece as a politicized space was offered to the youngest
American readers: And when I say Greece, I mean more particularly Macedonia,
for that was where I was born, in a village inside the Turkish frontier [so the au-
thor was not really a Greek national at all]. But we are all Greeks in Southern
Macedonia, Greek in thought, language, customs, Greek in our hope for, love of,
and belief in the Greece that never dies (+).
:. See Dakin, Greek Struggle in Macedonia j+.
:j. The Turkophile Marmaduke Pickthall went so far as to appropriate the
classical past for the Turks. He said, Classical illusions ourish in the atmos-
phere of Turkey rather than that of modern Greece. . . . The Turks preserve the
old Greeks love of beauty for its own sake;his delight in seaside vistas, colon-
nades, white temples, solemn cypress groves; his clear poetic gaze at love and
death; whereas the modern Greeks romance is simply money (quoted in Free-
mantle ::o).
:. On the ghting in Macedonia in the early years of the twentieth century,
see Dakin, Greek Struggle in Macedonia.
:y. There were some attempts to use the traditional British Russophobia to
combat Pan-Slavism. Lewis Sergeant commented in New Greece: If there is a
single Englishman who is not convinced of the real importance of Greece to Eu-
ropewhich of necessity implies the duty of Europe to take every opportunity of
strengthening the Greek kingdom. . . he would do well to sit down before a map of
Europe, to blot out the name of Greece, and to substitute for it Turkey, or Slavo-
nia, or one of the letters of the Russian empire. . . . For Panslavonianism has been
set up in rivalry to Philhellenism (:, ). But since Russophobia was no longer as
potent as it had been at midcentury, this was not effective.
:8. See Dakin, Greek Struggle in Macedonia ++8+.
:. Karanikas observed that as the novel nears its melodramatic end, the
Greeks turn more villainous and the Ango-Saxons more noble. Reference also
turns more ethnic, with Walter cited as the American and Spiro, for example, as
the jealous Greek or just the Greek (j:). He also said that the heroines true
identity . . . allows her to depart from her status as a Greek peasant girl (j). This
+ o + r s + o r + o r s + j + + j j
is an understatement, since her newfound identity actually allows her to depart
from her status as a Greek altogether.
o. In George Hentys novel In Greek Waters, a ship of philhellenic English
volunteers becomes so disenchanted with the Greeks after their arrival in the
Aegean that they decide on a mission of rescuing refugees from both sides. Some
of the young Englishmen are puzzled when a group of Greek women who have
been saved from the massacre on Scio dont seem as delighted as one would ex-
pect at getting out of the hands of the Turks (:+). A man with experience in the
Levant explains, As to their being sold as slaves, I do not suppose they view it at
all in the same way we do. . . . To us it is an abominable thing that a Greek woman
or child should be a slave to the heathen Turk. I am only pointing out to you that
from their point of view there is nothing so terrible in their lot (::, :). To the
Greeks of Chios, Hentys character continues, slavery in a Turkish house would
be preferable to trying to make ones way in the world as a shopgirl or laundress.
But two Englishwomen who are also rescued from the slave market are relieved
that they are saved from the most awful of fates (oy). Henty, more critical of
the modern Greeks than McCarthy or Horton, strikes at the very heart of the ro-
mance of Greek liberation by suggesting that the Greek female, or rather the
mostly Albanian and Suliot female, is really so different from a Western woman
that she would prefer not to be rescued from Turkish slavery. At the end of the
book, predictably, the young English hero marries one of the two Englishwomen
who he saved from an Eastern harem.
+. Horton was strongly pro-Greek (Karanikas 8). His philhellenism was
recognized by the American Greek community, for Athene, an important Greek-
American journal published in Chicago, said in an issue commemorating Horton,
The time will come when the people of Greece will honor their Horton, their
kyr Giorgos, . . . by erecting a monument to him in some secluded spot near his
beloved Acropolis (Karanikas 8). It has not happened yet.
:. The Western-educated Greek villain in Anthony Hopes Phroso has been
freed by scepticism learned in the West to practice crimes the East had taught
him (:o). Constantine is also the only resident of Neopalia who does not believe
in the traditional power of the islands patron, St. Tryphon, and tells lies with his
hand on the saints icon. In Blacks Briseis, the villain who tries to blackmail the
heroine is a Greek of the degenerate Hellenic type (+y).
. See also the installment in Filbert Pattons [Burt Standish] Dick Merriwell
series for children, Dick Merriwell in Greece; or, The Maid of Athens, in which two
American boys, after quoting Byron on the Acropolis, rescue a maid of Athens
from her Greek uncle and cousin so that she can marry her English sweetheart.
. In Bensons The Capsina, the heroine of the title is an Amazon who dies
unmarried. The Greek man who she loves, the hero of The Vintage, is married to a
woman rescued from a Turkish harem, but she does not have a signicant pres-
ence in either book.
j. In the False Dawn section of Whartons Old New York, the hero took
a ship to Piraeus and plunged into pure romance, and the tourist became a
Giaour. With good results, for it was the East which had made him a new Lewis
o + r s + o r + o r s + j j + o +j
Raycie (+). In the story, though, we only observe this new Lewis Raycie in Italy
and New York; we are not given a picture of him being made in the East. After a
second cruise in the Aegean in +:, Wharton wrote a story set in Cyprus during
the Crusader period entitled Dieu dAmour (see R. W. B. Lewis 8yo) but
nothing that dealt with contemporary Greece. Whartons diary from her rst
journey has recently been discovered and published by Claudine Lesage as The
Cruise of the Vanadis.
. This effect occurs, for example, in Richard Watson Gilders poem The
Parthenon by Moonlight and Reardons contact with a world beyond the
human sphere, bathed in divine light in Gissings New Grub Street (yo).
y. Leontiss comment that the Acropolis becomes for the viewer a place
where the highest aesthetic values of Western culture escape the ravages of time
and limitation of local and nationalist color that obstruct modern incarnations
is only half right (j+). She overlooked the fact that for a fair number of foreigners
the Acropolis was a symbol of modern Greeces national aspirations and strug-
gles, and this perspective appears frequently in English and American writing. It
poses a central dilemma for her theoretical construction of the relation between
Western travelers and Greece in the nineteenth century.
Chapter 6
+. In +8y, D. W. Dilke said, The progress that Greece has made during the
last fty years has been more than satisfactory, it has been astonishingalmost
miraculous (Papers of the Greek Committee, no. :, p. ++). Lewis Sergeant titled
one of his books Greece in the Nineteenth Century: A Record of Hellenic Emancipa-
tion and Progress, .S:..S,,. A more cautious S. G. W. Benjamin wrote, Al-
though Greece has failed to make that degree of progress that was expected of
her, still she has advanced considerably, for which she should have full credit
(::). Arguing for the other side, Diplomaticus asserted: For seventy years
Greece has been a spoiled child. She has played ducks and drakes with her re-
sources. She has not even civilised the land given her in +8o and enlarged in
+88 (y8o). Still, despite the fact that what Mazzini termed the sacred word of
progress was the measuring stick of the success of the Greek state, the idea of
the Greeks as noble savages living the natural life still appeared in some works,
such as Melvilles Syra, in which the island is described as Primitive, such an
island resort / As hearthless Homer might have known (Complete Poems :jo).
:. See Leontiss discussion of how the Acropolis becomes a place of home-
coming set apart, quite literally, from home (y; also jj:).
. See also Merivales comment that from +8o to +: there [was] an aston-
ishing resurgence in the Pan motif (vii).
. Some of the modern devotees of the Pan cult were also rather tame. D. H.
Lawrence described the neopagan Rupert Brooke, leader of a fervid back-to-
nature sect, as a Greek God under a Japanese Sunshade, reading poetry in his
pajamas, at Grantchester, at Grantchester, where the river goes (Delany xvi). A
+ o + r s + o r + o r s + + +
sinister Pan did, as Merivale has shown, play a role in several late Victorian and
Edwardian horror stories (+j8o), but Hyness remarks about the yearning for
the rural and Pans place in that desire generally ring true.
j. Douglas complained bitterly about the condition of lodgings and food in
Greece, as well as the habits of the people; see Holloway :y8o. But conditions
were no better in Calabria. According to Holloway, Douglas faced the rigors and
difculties of a stay in Calabria at age sixty-four because of his affection for the
area, for only love, or something nearly as powerful, could have made the sacrice
worth it (o). Douglas did not have that kind of feeling for Greece.
. In Margaret Sherwoods story Pan and the Crusader, set in the Middle
Ages, a Greek island has the kind of pastoral, nonpolitical signicance that it usu-
ally lacks when the setting is contemporary. It was easier, apparently, to envision a
meeting with Pan in Greece in the remote past than it was in the present day.
y. See Leontiss discussion of the story on +oy+:, especially her comments
on the irony and detachment of the narrators voice. But I must take issue with her
comment that the claim that the modern Greek offers the traveler access to Hel-
lenism was new and revisionary when Woolf wrote. Further, Leontis overlooked
the fact that for a considerable number of Westerners, the statement I, too, am a
Greek led them to identify with the modern Greeks as well as the ancients (see
McCarthy I.+).
8. In Woolf s novel Jacobs Room, the main character, in a letter to England
during a stay in Greece, echoes the sentiment that the Mediterranean provides an
antidote to the world of industrialism: I intend to come to Greece every year so
long as I live. It is the only chance that I can see of protecting oneself from civi-
lization (+). Yet in Athens, Jacob begins to nd contact with ancient ruins on
the Acropolis wearing (the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side
and the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink
feathered, the plain all colours, the marble tawny in ones eyes, is thus oppressive,
+). One must keep in mind that, although Jacobs visit to Greece occurs before
the beginning of World War I, Jacobs Room is a postwar book with a postwar out-
look. In fact, the rst quote can stand for Greece in the imagination of the prewar
traveler, while the second is the postwar reaction to that prewar image.
. In the introduction to a volume of translations by Elizabeth Edmonds,
Greek Lays, Idylls, Legends (+88j), Matthew Jenkyns stated that the book would
inform a generation of readers who have not had their sympathies awakened by
the daring deeds of the Hellenes in the revolutionary period and arouse within
that generation philhellenic sympathy by presenting a few sketches calculated to
show that the modern Greeks are not the degenerate race some Turkophiles have
represented them to be (+). Some earlier writers had placed Greek folklore
within a framework of the progress of the Greeks. During the years of British rule
in the Ionian islands, the Greeks were often viewed within an imperial discourse
that validated their colonized status. Tertius Kendrick, who wrote two rather fan-
ciful books on Greek folk practices in the +8:os (The Kako-damon; or, The Cavern
of Anti-Paros, +8:j, and The Travellers: A Tale Illustrative of the Manners, Cus-
toms, and Superstitions of Modern Greece +8:j), commented in +8:: on the almost
o + r s + o r + o r s + j + +y
hottentot customs of the peasantry on Corfu and its sister islands, which were a
striking proof of their masters character; and furnish an unequivocal demonstra-
tion of their neglect in exercizing all humane and generous principles toward an
emancipation from ignorance and wretchedness (Ionian Islands vii). Walter
Goodisson, his contemporary, made similar observations in A Historical and Topo-
graphical Essay upon the Islands of Cephalonia, Corfu, Leucadia, Ithaca, and Zante
(:o). For both authors, the advent of the British would bring progress to the
Greek villagers and an end to hottentot customs. In The Ionian Islands in Rela-
tion to Greece (+8j), written at a time of debate as to whether the islands should
be given to Greece, John Dunn Gardner said that the renown of the ancient
inhabitants has blinded Europe to the demerits of the modern race (:y), that
the Ionian islands have nothing to do with Homer (+:), and that Greeks were
more like Orientals and should not be dealt with as Englishmen (+o). He also
lamented that Byron did a great mischief by encouraging philhellenism, which
has become a thorough vice and a nuisance (, ).
+o. On Ouidas use of the Etruscan past to evoke the graceful and joyous re-
sponse to life in In Maremma (+88:), see Kenneth Churchill +. One reason for
the utopian portrayal of Etruscan life was that little was known about these people
beyond the banquet scenes in Etruscan tombs. So the Etruscan period was viewed
as a pre-Roman idyll and the people as the perfect primitives before the milita-
rized invasion of the descendants of Romulus and Remus.
++. See also Woolf s comment about the Greek monk who had the nose and
brow of a Greek statue (Complete Shorter Fiction y) and Hortons hero, Spiri-
don, in Aphroessa, who has the features of Narcissus because he could claim blood
that has trickled down the years (Poems of an Exile +). Emilie Barrington was
amazed to nd a Greek urchin in Olympia who had the face of the Hermes of
Praxiteles (+:).
+:. J. Theodore Bent felt that real Greeks could now only be found in the
Aegean islands (vi-vii): These islands, especially the smaller ones, offer unusual
facilities for the study of the manners and the customs of the Greeks as they are,
with a view to comparing them to the Greeks as they were. The mainland of
Greece has been overrun with barbarian tribes (vii).
+. Lynchs ambivalence about the modern Greeks can be seen in his conict-
ing statements about the Ypsaliotes. On the one hand, they are of a purer stock
than most of the Greeks (+y) and theyre original (+y:); on the other, their
genealogy is a hopeless problem. Of course, they are not Greeks in the Athenian
sense, nor Arnauts, nor Turks, nor Bulgars. For all we can tell they come from the
Caucaususfor theyre nobly made and beautifulor they may be a remnant of
an old timewho can say? (+y:). The Ypsaliotes are either a remnant of the clas-
sical Greeks or a remnant of the original Indo-Europeans, and the confusion at
least in part reects Lynchs doubts about the modern Greeks.
+. For example, in Drosiniss Amaryllis, translated by Elizabeth Edmonds in
+8+, the rural Greek girl with whom the sophisticated Athenian youth falls in
love on a visit to his ancestral village turns out to be his equal in status and wealth;
in fact, the two families are old friends, and the perceived gap between the maid
+8 o + r s + o r + o r s + y +
and her citied lover was an error on the part of the youth. But this kind of eli-
sion of the boundaries between urban and rural Greeks is usually absent from
works written by English or American authors, who tend to magnify rather than
elide the differences between Athens and the villages.
+j. In a series of letters reprinted at the end of his volume Tales and Sketches
of Modern Greece, William discussed domestic problems in modern Greece and
their cause. Given the absence of good government and the lack of a decent press,
he wrote, What wonder then, that with an illiterate, half-starved public spirit, the
Greeks should sometimes place party before country? (yy). He also criticized the
treatment of women, citing it as a sign that it is not so very long ago the Turks
were master (y). Of the Greek peasant he said: He is said to be the degenerate
descendant of a great race. Of his body he proves it a lie. . . . With close-cropped
hair, or dark shady looks, he resembles no one so much as himself, and but rarely
approaches the classical type of virile beauty met with in a sculpture by Phidias
(+). Despite such remarks, William wanted the English to support reforms in
Greece, and his knowledge and interest in the land suggested a deep attraction for
the place and its people. William appears to be a philhellene who is wholly con-
cerned with the present Greek state, which makes him rather unique in the +8os.
+. See Hynes, Edwardian Turn of Mind +:.
+y. Hortons novel Constantine: A Tale of Greece under King Otho (+8),
which told the history of a local madman, also began with the description of an
idyllic island by a Western narrator: The effect upon the sensibilities of a few
days residence in Poros is peculiar. One is so shut off for the time being from the
vastness of the world . . . that the passage outward through the little strait seems
like the emergence from time into eternity (y). Horton also offered a happy pic-
ture of Greek village life in The Tempting of Father Anthony, in which a teenager
attempts to become a saint against the wishes of his parents. The same elegiac pic-
ture of rural Greece can be found in Rennell Rodds In Arcadia and The
Keynote (which concludes, A Shepherds crook, a coat of eece, / A grazing
ock,the sense of peace, / The long sweet silence,this is Greece! Violet
Crown ); in Ernest Myerss Arcadia (But now amid the oak of Arcady / Pan
passed me); and in Elizabeth Edmondss The History of a Church Mouse (+8:)
and several poems in her volume of verse Hesperas. The nal story of Julia
Dragoumiss Tales of a Greek Island, which described a characters departure from
the island of Poros, is ttingly entitled The End of the Fairy Tale, for despite
some tragedies, the island is portrayed as a pastoral retreat.
+8. On Pater and Hellenism, see DeLaura +yy; Richard Jenkyns j:j,
:j:+, :y; and Turner 8y.
+. The model for the courtesan in Louss Chansons de Bilitis was apparently
a sixteen-year-old Algerian prostitute named Meriem ben Atala (see Clive +oj).
:o. See, for example, the description of Chrysoula in the chapter entitled
The Little Golden One in Lynchs Glamour. The Turkophile Marmaduke
Pickthall, who announced his conversion to Islam in ++y, attempted to subvert
this image of Greek women in his short story A Matter of Taste, in which a
o + r s + o r + o r s + + y : +
Levantine girl of Greek descent and English nationality is portrayed abounding
in soft gestures and alluring glances (As Others See Us +). Her marriage to an
Englishman, Stanley Jackson, does not, as happens in philhellenic literature, raise
her up to Western European status but rather reduces him to the level of a gross
Levantine. At the end of the story, a former friend says of Jackson: Hes just a
dago! . . . Whoever would have thought that a decent Englishman could change
skin like that? (+j). On one level, the story attacks English females (There is
one thing English girls are bad atthat is love. They think too much of them-
selves, +j), who through their ineptness at love render Englishmen susceptible
to the alluring but coarse charms of Levantine women. Pickthalls sympathies can
be clearly seen by comparing A Matter of Taste to his novel Veiled Women.
Where Jackson becomes a dago by marrying a Levantine Greek, the English
heroine of Veiled Women learns lessons about the nature of womanhood by marry-
ing a Turk and joining his harem.
:+. In Dora Bradfords novel Greek Fire (+j), a rather eligible suitor of the
English heroine, Angel, is tortured by the brigands who capture the two of them,
leaving him with no thumbs. As Bradford is not writing Jane Eyre, a mutilated
man is clearly no match for her heroinecertainly not a mutilated Greek. The
mutilation, I would argue, is itself symbolic of the Western conception of the
place of the Greek male who is not a brigand.
::. On the association between Hellenism and homosexuality in late Victorian
England, see Richard Jenkyns :8o and Dowling.
:. See Jay y:y.
:. See also Richard Jenkyns, who wrote that, for the Victorians, ancient
Greece had produced the literary treatments of homosexuality and Italy was
where it was practiced in the present day. In either case the imagination dwelt
upon the Mediterranean world (:+).
:j. For Byron, see Crompton +oyjy. For Gide and Wilde, see Delay 888
and Ellmann :o.
:. See Brophy .
:y. On Forsters Italian writings, see Kenneth Churchill +yy, Merivale
+8+8, and Papazoglou yy8o, y, +o:+.
:8. In the same letter to Isherwood, Forster said that the Greek poet C. P.
Cavafy once told him, Never forget about the Greeks that we are bankrupt. That
is the difference between us and the ancient Greeks, and my dear Forster, between
us and yourselves (Selected Letters II.++8). Whether Cavafy ever said this or not, it
accurately reects Forsters opinion of the gap between the ancient and modern
Greeks and his belief that the ancient Greek spirit could now be found in England.
:. On this trip, Clive experiences a conversion from homosexuality and
platonic love to heterosexuality. He writes to Maurice, Against my will I have
become normal. I cannot help it (++). On the irony of this turn of events in the
land of Greek love, see, with a discussion of previous views, Papazoglou +y8:.
Papazoglous reading of Clives sexual conversionthat the articiality of Clives
Hellenism . . . could not survive the confrontation with what Forster thought to be
:o o + r s + o r + o r s + y : + y
the true spirit of Hellenism represented . . . by the physical surroundings and the
reality of the country itself seems a bit odd, given that contemporary Greece
never appeared to represent the true spirit of Hellenism for Forster. Since earlier,
in The Road from Colonus, Greece was the land where the chance of salvation
was lost, it seems perfectly appropriate for Clive to experience what, in the novel,
seems another lost chance at salvation. Put simply, for Forster, Greece was not
amenable to the saving eternal moments, which occur in Italy.
o. At one point in Cnidus, Papazoglou and others have seen an epiphany,
a manifestation of [a gods] presence in the world (). I am less certain about
this, for I think the passage sounds slightly ironic; see Roessel, Live Orientals
and Dead Greeks jjjy. In either interpretation, the eternal moment is
quickly broken.
+. Forster wrote an earlier, ctional account of Malatestas journey for
Plethos body entitled The Tomb of Pletone, which was reprinted in Arctic
Summer and Other Stories. In this version, Malatesta openly proclaims, We will
bring Italy to Greece (8; see also his comment that Greece will rise from the
dead and ower in Italy, ++). Greece, on the other hand, is called a dead coun-
try (+o; see also the description of Aphrodites island of Cerigo as a dead is-
land with not even a column remaining from the goddesss temple). I cannot
agree with Papazoglou, who sees in the line Greece may slumber but she never
dies, which is repeated by several characters, a possibility of a revival in Greece
itself (y). At no point is it asserted that Greeces regeneration will take place on
Greek soil, while the entire plot of the story concerns an attempt to make
Greece awake in Italy.
:. On Pickthalls far more aggressive and direct defense of the Turkish na-
tional and territorial aspirations from +++ to +::, see Freemantle. Still, when
Pickthall eventually wrote a novel about the politics of the period from +o8
through the Balkan Wars from a Turkish point of view (Early Hours), he avoided
vituperative attacks on the modern Greeks. Pickthall once used the depiction of
Greece as a woman in an attempt to undermine sympathy for Greece in England.
He wrote about the accounts of massacres in the English press: The rumors cur-
rent in the West are due to the reports of Armenians, Greeks and other Levan-
tinesmostly women (Freemantle :oo).
. See Roessel, Live Orientals and Dead Greeks j:j and n. :y.
. Another visitor who confessed a lack of interest in the contemporary
Greek world and its politics was Isadora Duncan. Of her familys stay in the
Greek capital in +o, she wrote, We were completely self-sufcient in our Clan.
We did not mingle with the inhabitants of Athens. Even when we heard one day
from the peasants that the King of Greece had ridden out to see our temple, we re-
mained unimpressed. For we were living under the reign of other kings, Agamem-
non, Menelaus, and Priam, and she remembered their effort to reach over two
thousand years to beauty not perhaps understood by us (+:8, +). For Duncan,
Greece and modern seem to have been opposing terms, and she and her fam-
ily steadfastly wore classical tunics to show it.
o + r s + o r + o r s + y + 8 : :+
j. See Dakin, Unication of Greece o+oo.
. The Balkan Wars appear in this way in Virginia Woolf s Jacobs Room
(+o, +yj) and The Years (:o+, ::o); see Roessel, The Signicance of Constan-
tinople in Orlando. Some responses to the Balkan Wars focused more on opposi-
tion to Turkey than on support for Greece or any single Balkan nation; see, for
example, the ++: section of Maurice Barings Letters from the Near East. An-
other supporter, surprisingly, was Ezra Pound, not generally thought of as some-
one in the camp of Gladstone. Pound asserted, The disgrace to Europe is not
that Turkey is about to be driven from Europe, but that she has not long since
been driven out (The Black Crusade +o8). But Gladstone would have been
shocked at Pounds reasoning: If Oriental despotism is not lock, stock and bar-
rel, of one matter with the industrial tyrannies of Europe to what is it allied. . . .
If we cannot break the ring in our own countries, the next best thing is to see it
broken elsewhere.Consequently, he concluded: Uncivilized Montenegrins,
Servians, decadent Greeks, pestilent Bulgarians, I wish you well, and I pray you
conserve your ideal of freedom better than men have done in my own free coun-
try or in constitutional England (+o8). This was an attempt to inject into
wider philhellenism, which had been comfortably Christian and middle class,
a new kind of revolutionary meaning. It was, as much of Pounds thinking, idio-
syncratic, and while Pound probably meant the adjectives uncivilized, deca-
dent, and pestilent as complimentary, the Balkan peoples were probably not
pleased. They were not, at this stage, interested in dening themselves against
England or America.
y. See Hodgson +j.
8. The American Cale Young Rice also evoked many of the traditional ele-
ments of Byronic philhellenism in his poem In a Greek Temple (during the First
Balkan War). Like Hutchinson, he expressed hope that the victory would bring
about a regeneration within the present Greek population of the character and
traits of old Hellas: While cries that Mitylene / Is taken come again, / I gaze
upon this shrine you reared / And think how you were men! (Collected Plays and
Poems y). He returns to this thought at the end of the piece, which echoes the
nal couplet of Byrons The Isles of Greece: O Life, ll up again your cup /
For such a race to drain!
. On this development, see Roessel, Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Mer-
chant and Post-War Politics in The Waste Land and The Repeat in History:
Canto : and Greeces Asia Minor Disaster.
o. Abrams went on to add, From any comprehensive view of their basic
premises and literary practice, it seems to me that in this judgment they were
manifestly right (:y; see also Quinones +8yo). This view has been challenged
by some critics, notably Harold Bloom (Ringers in the Tower) and George Born-
stein (Transformation of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot and Stevens), who for the most
part view the modernists as post-Romantics. While I personally am more inclined
to the position of Abrams and Quinones, for my purpose it is sufcient that, what-
ever their actual literary practice, the modernists, as Abrams put it, identied
:: o + r s + o r + o r s + 8 : + +
themselves as, explicitly, counter-Romantic. The perception of modern Greece
was colored by that stance.
+. See Carr j.
Chapter 7
+. On Brooke and the neopagans, see Delany, esp. y:.
:. Leigh Fermor reported the account of a visitor to Brookes tomb, who met a
local shepherd. The shepherd said that o Broukis used to wander about the woods
[of the island] in silence, the very picture of an old-fashioned English gentleman.
What did he look like?
Magnicent, Sir, the shepherd answered. Tall, dignied, owing
hair, burning eyes, and a long white beard. (Roumeli +yj)
. On the offer of Constantinople to the Russians, see Clogg, Concise History
of Greece 8y and Fromkin +:y.
. On the Byronization of Brooke, see also Delany :++. At the dedication of
the statue of Brooke on Skyros, nearly every speaker mentioned Byron. See, for
example, Hommage Rupert Brooke :+, 8.
j. Mansell said, Never did the city inspire so much rivalry as in its last years
as an imperial capital (y); see also Coolidge. The nagging question of what
should be done with the city appeared in the title of numerous books, among them
the anonymous Constantinople: Its Past, Present and Future (+8j); Dwights Con-
stantinople and Its Problems (+o+); Leonard Woolf s Future of Constantinople
(++y); and Shotwells Short History of the Question of Constantinople and the
Straits (+::).
. Several works written at the end of the nineteenth century about the fall
of Constantinople encouraged the idea that the city should be redeemed, for ex-
ample, Neales novel Theodora Phrantza (+8jy); C. R. Eaglestones Siege of Con-
stantinople: A Historical Romance (+8y8); and C. L. Johnstones Conquest of Con-
stantinople (+88), which has a section entitled Greece in +8: by Alphonse
Lamartine.
y. This mirrors a fundamental dichotomy between the words Romios and Hel-
lene within the Greek tradition itself (see Leigh Fermor, Roumeli +:), but one
that has little effect on the history of philhellenism. The Byzantine heritage,
which Leigh Fermor associated with Romios, was largely seen as Levantine until
Robert Byron championed it in the late +:os and +os (see chap. ).
8. The First Secretary, Vaka Browns rst effort, has a young ofcial at the Amer-
ican legation helping a Circassian woman escape from a Turkish harem but without
the explicit connection to the Greek aspirations for Constantinople that appear in
the other novels. On her career, see Kenneth Browns article and Karanikas jo.
. Vaka Browns most interesting twist on the romance of liberation is that the
heroine of The Grasp of the Sultan has, with the Turkish ruler, had a child, who es-
o + r s + o r + o r s + + + y :
capes with his mother. The idea that the loss of virginity did not taint the honor of
the heroine is unique to the genre, although Vaka Brown stresses that the Greek
woman did not have sex with the sultan after the birth of her son.
+o. In Letters from the East, the novelist Maurice Baring says that in reality
there is no such thing as Young Turks: there are only Turks and foreigners (+)
and that the attitude was that if there is to be any order in this country the Turk
must be top dog. Whether he be young or old is a question of detail (y). E. F.
Benson depicted the Young Turks as simply more depraved and murderous ver-
sions of the Old Turks in Crescent and Iron Cross. On the other side, Marmaduke
Pickthall, in his novel The Early Hours, depicts the Young Turks as a continuation
of the Muslim legacy from the Ottomans.
++. In her book In the Heart of German Intrigue, Vaka Brown begins by saying,
then I married an American, and began to have a careerone I owed absolutely to
my American husband, to American encouragement, and the American public (:).
+:. Allusions to the Trojan War were common in the writings of those who
served in Gallipoli and Macedonia; for example, see Brookes fragment with the
lines And Priam and his fty sons / Wake all amazed and hear the guns / And
shake for Troy again (Poetical Works :oj). Mention of Byron was also fairly
ubiquitous, such as A. Grifn Tapps refusal to describe the scenes of his voyage
to Salonika because are they not written in two books of the chronicle of Childe
Harold? (+) and Isabel Huttons musing, as she passed near Missolonghi, on
what Byron would think of submarine warfare (+o).
+. Fussell mentions Venizelos in passing in connection to a passage in David
Joness In Parenthesis, where Signaler Oliver tells John Ball about the Greek
Venizelos (+j).
+. On Greek politics during World War I see Clogg, Concise History of Greece
8; Michael Llewellyn Smith j+; and Dakin, Unication of Greece :o+:o.
+j. Max Beerbohm, a committed Royalist, let his ideas about monarchy color
his reaction to the possibility that King Constantine might be deposed again in
+::: One refuses to believe this mornings Tribune that the throne of Constan-
tine is [in] danger because the Greeks havent lost their inveterate habit of running
at the rst sight of a fez on their classic horizon. Dash down yon cup of Samian
wine, by all means, but the throne of Constantine shall never be tampered with
(Letters +). But the party of Gresham far outnumbered the party of Beerbohm.
In their rst publication in ++8, the American Hellenic Society announced,
Upon the departure of King Constantine and his courtiers, all apostles of Pan-
German ideas, the Greek people are once again in an atmosphere purely Greek
(introduction to Gauvin ix). Demetra Vaka Brown dismissed the king as a man
who was not a Greek by blood, and lacks the cultivation to be a Philhellene (In
Pawn to a Throne +:o). In Mackenzies South Wind of Love, Venizelos represented
the true Greek spirit, while Constantine and the Royalists were quite content
with a tinpot Balkan court (8:).
+. See also Clogg, Politics and the Academy :.
+y. During the Balkan Wars, Burrows published his poem Song of the Hel-
lenes to Veniselos the Cretan, which began:
: o + r s + o r + o r s + y : o j
Veniselos! Veniselos!
Do not fail us! Do not fail us!
Now is come to thee the hour
To show forth thy master power.
Lord of all Hellenic men,
Make our country great again.
(quoted in Clogg, Politics and the Academy +)
+8. See Gibbons : and Chester j. Venizelos himself contributed to this
notion. At the Versailles conference, he told Stephen Bonsal: While you were
studying at Heidelberg and Bonn, I was hiding from the Turkish zaptiehs in the
mountain caves of my native Crete. For months I never saw a book (+yj).
+. Other Venizelist books include those by Gibbons, Price, Ure, and Trow-
bridge. Katapodes published a set of anti-Venizelist essays in England in ++y, but
he and Hibben were lonely voices. On attempts to manipulate foreign opinion
about domestic Greek politics, see Kitsikis +::.
:o. Basil Thomson in The Allied Secret Service in Greece complained that
agents inspired by the example of Byron and the philhellenes in Greece had
distorted and even falsied intelligence reports to assist Venizelos (+j).
:+. On this, see Sprinker, esp. j.
::. On the autobiographical aspects of the novel, see Nigel Nicolson +j8+
and Glendinning :++. Nicolson suggested that Aphros stood for Sackville-
Wests husband, Harold Nicolson, and he viewed Julians conict as one between
love and duty.
:. On Nicolsons philhellenic sympathies, see Lees-Milne I.++++:.
:. A signicant poet who did serve in the army of the Orient, Hugh Mac-
Diarmid, considered arranging a volume to ll a gap in the Soldier Poets series
published by Erskine MacDonald, which so far has mainly concentrated on the
Western front and at all events has not included anything from Salonika. I suggest
calling it A Voice from Macedonia (Letters :). The book never materialized. Ac-
cording to his biographer, MacDiarmid wondered whether the paucity of poetry
[on the Salonica front] was due to the monotonously grim routine of death by dis-
easeas opposed to the horric drama of death in the trenchesbut rejected this
explanation (Bold +).
:j. Other literary works set in Salonica are Mackenzies novel Extremes Meet,
A. Grifn Tapps Stories of Salonica and the New Crusade, and Macleods volume
of verse, Macedonian Measures.
:. See also Goldstein, Great Britain and Greater Greece. Philhellenes also
produced poems to support the cause. In ++, F. Noel Byron published Athenian
Days, which contained in the traditional philhellenic vein such poems as Spirit of
Greece and Marathon by Night. In +:+, William Palmer weighed in with his
long poem The Philhellenes.
:y. On the St. Sophia restoration movement and its problems, see Goldstein,
Holy Wisdom and British Foreign Policy.
o + r s + o r + o r s : o j : + + :j
:8. Thomas Pinney, commenting on a letter that Kipling wrote to Caclam-
anos, the Greek minister in England, said that the translation of the Greek na-
tional anthem was made apparently at the request of Caclamanos: an entry in
CKs [Mrs. Kiplings] diary, October ++8, says Rud writing his Greek Nat. An-
them for Greek Minister. Pinney reported that Kipling later received a gold
coin from the era of Alexander the Great from the Greek government for his ef-
fort (Letters of Rudyard Kipling :j+).
:. See Michael Llewellyn Smith o+. Arnold Toynbee, who visited Greek-
occupied Asia Minor in +:+, said, The Greeks and the Turks appeared in unfa-
miliar roles. The Greeks have shown the same inability as the Turks for governing
a mixed population (Western Question vii). Yet not everyone saw the Greeks and
Turks in unfamiliar roles, as Toynbee found out when he was forced to resign from
the Korais Chair of Modern Greek Studies at Kings College for his negative ac-
counts of Greek actions in Asia Minor in ++ and +:o. For the story of Toynbee
and the Korais chair, see Clogg, Politics and the Academy, esp. j+o:.
o. On British policy toward Greece at this time, see Churchill, World Crisis
88o. On the philhellenic sentiment of Lloyd George, which complicated
British policy, see Churchills comments on + and the article by Montgomery.
On the short, unhappy reign of Constantines second son, Alexander, which
lasted from ++y until his death in +:: from the bite of a pet monkey, see Michael
Llewellyn Smith j8, +8, +jj8.
+. The Venizelist philhellenes, while they still supported Greece during the
Greco-Turkish War, would later blame Constantine for the defeat in Asia Minor.
For example, in his novel The Labyrinth, Cecil Roberts has a Cretan say of Venize-
los: He got us Smyrna, but that fool, Constantine, lost it for us by trampling too
much on Turkish toes (y8).
:. On what is called the Chanak crisis, when British and Turkish troops
faced each other at the Hellespont in the autumn of +:: and how close Britain
came to war, see Winston Churchill, World Crisis :oy. For E. M. Forsters re-
sponse to the prospect of a war between Britain and Turkey in +::, see Roessel,
Live Orientals and Dead Greeks.
. On the Greek defeat in Asia Minor, see Michael Llewellyn Smith
:++; Dakin, Unication of Greece :+y; and Fromkin jojy.
. Clogg puts the gure killed in Smyrna at o,ooo; see Concise History of
Greece y. On the destruction of Smyrna, see Housepian.
Chapter 8
+. Papers of Mark Lambert Bristol, box , in the Manuscript Collection of the
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
:. Dos Passos has the character Anne Comfort in Chosen Country (+j+) take a
similar boat trip, but in this case even being right there she couldnt feel their
plight the way she had felt the plight of the French and the Belgians and the East
: o + r s + o r + o r s : + : + y
Side Jews; she couldnt feel it really: it was too awful and she didnt know the lan-
guage (:o). For more on Dos Passos and the Asia Minor Disaster, see Roessel,
Rewriting Reminiscences.
. Hemingways description of Smyrna also oats like a wordy phantom over
the account of the disaster in Edward Whittemores Sinai Tapestry (+yy).
Whittemore included passages such as:
People were pushed off the quay to drown. Others jumped in to commit
suicide. Still others swam out to the ships.
The English poured scalding water on the swimmers.
(:)
In a sentence that sums up the meaning of Smyrna in English and American lit-
erature from +:o to +o, he approvingly quoted an American schoolteacher:
Some people here were guilty of unauthorized acts of humanity (o:).
. On the stages of composition of In Our Time, see Hagemann, A Collation,
with Commentary, of the Five Texts of the Chapters in Hemingways In Our
Time j8. On the date of composition of On the Quai at Smyrna, see the
article by Paul Smith. On the way that Hemingway honed his style of laconic
irony in the interchapters of In Our Time, see Fenton ::. The vignettes that
concern the war in Asia Minor comprise chap. :, chap. j, and Envoi.
j. For Hemingways stay in Constantinople, during much of which he was
sick with malaria, see Reynolds y+y8. In the story On the Quai at Smyrna,
readers are led to conceive that a nameless narrator is telling the story through the
author. In Death in the Afternoon (+:), however, Hemingway implies that he saw
the mules that were pushed into the harbor at Smyrna when he says that the action
of the Greeks in Smyrna initially made him think he would not like bullghts be-
cause of the suffering of the animals (++).
. In another passage from The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway pre-
sents the evacuation of the Greek refugees from Thrace as part of a Great War
scenario in which the old men send others to die: Nansens secretary asking the
old man if it were snow and the old man looking at it and saying, No, thats not
snow. Its too early for snow. . . . But it was snow all right and he sent them on into
it when he evolved the exchange of population. And it was snow they tramped
along in until they died that winter (y).
y. In a letter to Ezra Pound, Hemingway tersely explained the connection be-
tween the Greek vignettes: The refugees leave Thrace, due to the Greek minis-
ters, who are shot (Selected Letters :). On the confrontation between young and
old in the years after the war, see Hynes, War Imagined 8, and as a motif in the
work of Pound and Eliot, see Bush :yy.
8. In The Greek Revolt (Dateline: Toronto :j) Hemingway briey ex-
plained that the Royalist ofcers who replaced the Venizelist ofcers in +:o were
responsible for the defeat, but that explanation is absent from The Snows of Kil-
imanjaro, where the ofcers are simply called Constantine ofcers without any
indication of what that might mean. Even after the revolution, according to Hem-
o + r s + o r + o r s : + 8 : : + :y
ingway, the soldiers wanted to ght but were sold out by the government in
Athens; see Dateline: Toronto :j. On the revolution in Greece led by Venizelist
ofcers after the defeat and return of the army from Asia Minor, which led to the
second abdication of King Constantine and the execution of six ministers of the
Royalist government, see Michael Llewellyn Smith +::. On the continued ri-
valry between the Venizelists and Royalists in the years between the wars, see,
among others, Clogg, Concise History of Greece +oy+.
. On this passage of The Waste Land and the Asia Minor Disaster, see Roessel
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant and Post-War Politics in The Waste Land.
+o. Hemingway ended the poem They All Want PeaceWhat Is Peace?
with the lines: And the Greek Patriarch / What about the Greek Patriarch?
(Complete Poems ). Mackenzie provided a gloss to the lines when he explained
that when the Turks entered Smyrna they nailed the Greek archbishop to the
doors of the Cathedral, and pulled out his beard (My Life and Times j.:o).
Hemingway felt that his readers would get the message that he wanted without the
gloss. If readers did not know what exactly had happened to the Greek arch-
bishop, they would know about the recent deaths of the Greeks. At the beginning
of act of William Saroyans play Loves Old Sweet Song, a refugee from Smyrna
says that he wants to return to the city, to which his son observes that his father is
still ghting the Turks (++j, my italics).
++. For more on this passage and other possible references to Asia Minor in
Pound, see Roessel, The Repeat in History.
+:. For example, John Dos Passos originally intended Three Soldiers to have
the title The Sack of Corinth, and by employing the sack of the Greek city by the
Romans in + ucr as a palimpsest for the Great War, he suggested that the world
from ++ to ++8 was a mirror image of the defeat of the Greek world by the Ro-
mans in the second century ucr. Independently of Dos Passos, and with greater
depth, H. D. also used the sack of Corinth as a palimpsest for the Great War in her
novel Palimpsest (+:). On this, see Gregory j.
+. Their journalistic competition, especially at the Lausanne conference,
where Sheridan snagged the only personal interview with Mussolini, might have
been the reason that Hemingway later would imply in Death in the Afternoon that
he, too, had been at Smyrna.
+. Clare Sheridan noted the cases of childbirth on the quay, amid the crip-
pled and blind and very aged who were trying to get away (West and East +j:), a
detail that also appears in On the Quai at Smyrna. But she does not mention the
screaming that opens Hemingways account.
+j. George Horton, a prewar philhellene and author of such novels as Like
Another Helen and The Monks Treasure, was the American consul in Smyrna
in +::. His account of the destruction of the citys Christian population and
heritage, The Blight on Asia, appeared in +:. Horton lamented a hardening
of hearts that seems to have developed in the days since Gladstonea less ex-
alted and more shifty state of mind. This is partly due to the fact that mens sen-
sibilities have been blunted by the Great War, and also in large measure a result
of that materialism which is engulng our civilization (+). But in the rest of
:8 o + r s + o r + o r s : : : : o
the book, Horton reverted to the philhellenic and anti-Turkish rhetoric of an
earlier age.
+. Some years later, she called Turkey a beacon-light of the Oriental Re-
naissance (Turkish Kaleidoscope ::). Greece was described as dead, as all na-
tions must die that have reached the height of self-expression (West and East +;
see also her comments in The Naked Truth oj).
+y. On Gibbss career in the war and postwar years, see Hynes, War Imagined
+888. Hynes noted, Gibbs was not a [Wilfred] Owen or a Hemingway, but he
had come to something like their sense of what was real in the world of war
(:8j). Gibbss view of the catastrophe in Asia Minor did not differ greatly from
Hemingways; he just did not write about it as well.
+8. Gibbs also included an account of the destruction of Smyrna in his
novel Cities of Refuge (+), which closely resembles On the Quai at Smyrna
(++j+y). It opens with two men on a British ship watching and listening to the
horror. It then continues, On the quayside were crowds of Greeks and Arme-
nians. They seemed to be running about. Their gures were dark against the
glare of the re. Screams of terror came from them, bloodcurdling across the
water. The hero wants to do something, but his companion replies, The
World War was quite enough for one mans lifetime. I cant say Im lusting for
another (++).
+. In the nal volume of The Four Winds of Love, North Wind of Love, Ogilvie
reiterated his Venizelist sympathies during the rebellion of Cretes Republicans
against Kondylis and the Royalists (:o+). The book ends with Ogilvie marrying a
maid of Athens from the ctional island of Lipsia, who had fallen in love with
him twenty years earlier.
:o. In Anne Dufelds Stamboul Love (+), an Englishwoman marries one
of Kemals lieutenants, only to nd him quickly conforming to type. At the end
of the book Beatrice ees from her Turkish husband with the help of her English
lover, replicating the romance of liberation in a novel about the Young Turks by
Vaka Brown. Dennis Wheatleys Eunuch of Stamboul (+j) has a similar plot with
a more overt political message: a group of unreformed Ottomans plans to over-
throw Kemal and recapture Thessaloniki. Marmaduke Pickthalls The Early
Hours presented the Young Turks as the inheritors of the Ottoman legacy.
:+. For +: as the beginning of a new era, see also Robert Byrons introduc-
tion to The Byzantine Achievement and Ash xiv. Female refugees from Smyrna ap-
pear as the heroines in French Strothers Maid of Athens (+:), Mary Rich-
monds Maid of Athens (+8), and Winston Grahams Greek Fire (+jy). The
rst sixty-seven pages of Dora Bradfords novel Greek Fire provide a graphic de-
scription of the destruction of Smyrna, which is rather extraneous to the main
brigand plot that follows.
::. Spender held to the view that Greece, both as a place and as a subject,
transformed and ennobled Byron: Wherever he touched on Greece, his mood
was transformed. Greece turned the satyr into an angel ().
:. For example, see Ratcliffe , Hunter +, and Lancaster 88.
:. See Bradbury, esp. .
o + r s + o r + o r s : + : 8 :
Chapter 9
+. In John Cousinss novel The Secret Valleys (+jo), three friends who return
to Crete to nd a Greek guerrilla discover that he is now the last klepht in the
mountains, and with his death we are to understand the end of an era. His daugh-
ter escapes from the police and a vengeful uncle with the help of one of the young
Englishmen and, when last seen, is on her way to England with her admirer.
:. Greece makes a brief appearance in Osbert Sitwells story That Flesh Was
Heir to . . . , in which an English tourist spreads the plague wherever she goes.
Sacheverell Sitwell wrote a poem about a visit to Mycenae called Agamemnons
Tomb (Collected Poems jyj). But neither produced a book about Greece
nearly as good as Sacheverell Sitwells Roumanian Journey, a minor classic of its
kind. In Labels, Waugh described brief visits to Athens and Crete (+8j,
+j8). Eisner found a fresh perspective in Waughs brief account of his stay in
Greece, which runs ten pages (Labels +8j8). It is true that Waugh did not sim-
ply go to the Mediterranean to gush at the sights, but neither had Twain more
than fty years earlier, and on the whole Twains account is more interesting.
. Eisners explanation is that by +: the country was bankrupt. It took a
pretty serious tourist to go there (+y8y). But France was bankrupt after the
First World War, and everyone went there because it was cheap. Something
deeper, I believe, was at work.
. See, among others, Winston Churchills The Greek Tragedy in vol. of
The World Crisis; Cosmetatos, The Tragedy of Greece (+:8); Byford-Jones, Greek
Trilogy (+); and Tsoucalis, Greek Tragedy, .S:..,6,(+). The title of this
last book suggests that all of modern Greek history has been tragic. There is cer-
tainly a connection between the tragic view of Greece and efforts in the +:os
to revive, with performances of tragedy, the festivals of the ancient Greeks, such
as the poet Angelos Sikelianoss Delphic Festivals in +:y and +o. Both, I would
suggest, found some degree of impetus in the Smyrna Disaster.
j. In +:, George Cram Cook told the villagers of Delphi, We will take the
plays that are in your lives and put them on up there. Too long that old theatre has
wanted for the people of Delphi to return! (Glaspell, Road to the Temple +:).
. On the New Woman, see Hynes, Edwardian Turn of Mind +y::++, and
Jane Eldredge Millers Rebel Women. On Glaspell and feminism in general, see
Makowsky.
y. Although the name of Dionysus appears in The Faithless Shepherd, his
spirit is largely missing from that work. The story, about a shepherd who joins a
band of brigands preying upon the ocks, equates Dionysus with moments when
delight was too sharp and with ecstasy he did not quite know how to bear
(8). But these moments are, according to the story, reveries in nature that seem to
have more to do with the Apollonian setting of the tale at Delphi than with
Dionysian revelry.
8. See also his stories On the Balcony and Being Kind to Titina, in which
the disaster also features prominently. In addition to appearing in The Vivisector, a
o o + r s + o r + o r s : o :
refugee from Asia Minor also gures in The Twyborn Affair. A few of Whites
Greek stories deal with suffering but do not use Smyrna, like The Full Belly,
which is about famine during the German occupation, and The Woman Who
Was Not Allowed to Keep Cats. On the tragic perspective in Whites work gener-
ally, see McCulloch.
. See The Byzantine Achievement :+::. Romiosyne remains a word over
which to argue, but the best discussion of it in English, to my mind, remains
Leigh Fermors chapter The Helleno-Romaic Dilemma and a Side-Track to
Crete in Roumeli +y.
+o. On Robert Byron as a travel writer, see Fussell, Abroad y++:.
++. Macaulay acknowledged that there is no denying that Trapezuntines,
like most Byzantines, did behave corruptly and cruelly and coldly very often, and
like most empires they deserved to go under, but not so deeply under as Trebi-
zond has gone, becoming Trabzon, with a dark squalid beach, and full of those
who do not know the past, or that there ever was Trebizond or a Greek empire,
and women all mufed up and hiding their faces, and the Byzantine churches
mostly turned into mosques, or broken up, or used for army stores and things
(8+). Here she replicates to some degree the early philhellenic rhetoricthat the
period of Turkish domination was a complete break with the past and the end of
the previous civilization.
+:. On Merrill and Cavafy, see Yenser +++y.
+. On Forster and Cavafys initial reception in England, see Pinchin, Alexan-
dria Still 8+++, and Bien, Cavafys Homosexuality and His Reputation outside
Greece +8:o.
+. On Cavafys sensual city, see Keeley, Cavafys Alexandria y.
+j. A decadent Greece was a central element in the novels and stories of King
(e.g., The Dark Glasses and The Firewalkers). King explored the territory of Levan-
tine Greece most thoroughly in his novel The Man on the Rock (+jy), the ctional
autobiography of an attractive young Greek man who is picked up by a foreigner.
+. Aleko (+) tells the story of an English teacher at a school on Spetses
whose infatuation with a Greek pupil leads to the termination of his contract and
the end of his marriage. The teacher realizes that Alekos physical beauty does not
reect inner sublimity or emotional depth. His awakening to his homosexuality is,
however, tied to the Greek setting of the story: I have no illusions about Aleko.
The glory of young limbs is for the rock and island, for the wild nature of which it
is a part (). The book caused a scandal and has become rather hard to nd.
+y. Plomer later revised this poem, and in his Collected Poems this stanza reads:
See, in the exsiccate light of Attica
The pepper-tree garden where last night by full moon
An old woman disturbed our intimacy
To sell us three pinks with long stems.
()
I nd the rst version more Cavaan in spirit and have cited that in the text.
o + r s + o r + o r s : : j +
+8. The one manly Greek in Plomer appears in the poem The Philhellene.
In this piece, a rich American woman takes up with a Greek man whose favorite
tense, is the Present Erotic. After the Greek gets a hold of all her money and
leaves her, she wanders around Athens in a dazed state. Plomer may be alluding to
his own relationship with the sailor Niko, who Plomer described as a tender little
lamb until Niko robbed him and left him with a case of gonorrhea.
+. The Greek from Alexandria in Nausicaa is a dandy, while the people of
Corfu are so decadent that one is not prepared for the degree of degeneration
as that in which they live and move (Child of Queen Victoria +jo).
:o. Christopher Brennans novel Massacre of Innocents (+y) makes an
explicit connection between Alexandria and Greece. The book opens with the
narrator on a boat between Alexandria and Athens pondering a passage of
Cavafy.
:+. Christopher Isherwood went to Berlin, he tells us, because he couldnt
relax sexually with a member of his own class and nation. He needed working
class foreigners (Christopher and His Kind +o; see also the comments of Fussell,
Abroad ++j+). See also Mark Dotys collection of poems, My Alexandria, which
brings the atmosphere of the Greek poet to New York. Isherwood never men-
tioned Cavafy in Down There on a Visit, but it seems likely that he knew of the
Greek poet. Plomer and Isherwood became friends in +: and met in London in
+:after Plomers trip to Athens but before Isherwoods stay on the Greek is-
land of St. Gregory in +. The tone of Isherwoods account, however, owes lit-
tle to Cavafy and more, as I have suggested, to Firbank.
::. A briefer, more autobiographical, version of Isherwoods sojourn in
Greece with Francis Turvill-Petre, the original for the ctional Ambrose, appears
in Christopher and His Kind +oy+:. Stephen Spender visited Turvill-Petre on St.
Gregory in + and described what he saw there in a letter to Isherwood; see Let-
ters to Christopher +++y.
:. As Roger Hinks asked when he arrived in Greece to work at the British
Council in the early +jos, As the Hellas of the PhilhellenesByronic Greece
is bankrupt, and the Byzantine Greece has always been publicly suspecteven to
English Levant-fanciers like Robert Byron, what can we put in their place? How
can we give Greece a new look? Hinks suggested a Mannerist Greece of the
empty centre, the distilled perspective, and the lurid lighting (+). Greece was
acquiring its new look even as Hinks posed his question.
Conclusion
+. See also Lancaster . In The Children of Thetis, Christopher Kininmouth
(:++) does not cite The Colossus of Maroussi, but, as Avi Sharon informed me,
took Durrells concept of the heraldic universe almost wholesale from its pages;
see Colossus of Maroussi jy. See also the mention of Katsimbalis as the best-
known gure in Athens in Kings Firewalkers (). See also Durrells reference to
Katsimbalis in his poem Mythology:
: o + r s + o r + o r s : j : j
All of my favorite characters have been
Out of all proportion
Some living in villas by railways
Some like Katsimbalis heard but seldom seem.
(Collected Poems ++j)
:. See Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey .,,,,(+). The point was
made as early as +jo by Kenneth Young, who said, In the last twenty years,
artists and writers have skipped the enchantments of France and Italy, and have
gone purposefully to Greece. They have discovered Greeceor, more accu-
rately, rediscovered it (j). The rst writers whom he adduces to show the emer-
gence of a new Greece free from inhibitions are Durrell and Miller.
In Inventing Paradise, Keeley described in detail the friendship and interrela-
tions among Miller, Durrell, Seferis, and Katsimbalis in Greece during +, and
those who want to follow that story further should look at that volume. Keeley also
made extensive use of Millers notebook of his trip to Greece, which was pub-
lished in +y as First Impressions of Greece. Since that work appeared beyond the
boundaries of this study, and Keeley has discussed at length the differences be-
tween the notebook and The Colossus of Maroussi, I have refrained from going over
that ground again here.
. Philip Sherrard, one of those involved in the creation of a new Greece,
has also called attention to the central role of Katsimbalis in the discovery of a
living Greece; see 8.
. Lancaster, for example, used a quotation from Durrells poem To
Argos as an epigraph for his chapter on the Argolid (+++) and later referred to
Prosperos Cell; also see the mention of Durrell in Martin Shermans play A
Madhouse in Goa (). But specic references to Durrell are far fewer than those
to Miller. Durrells Greece, one should note, is much tamer than that of Miller.
One reason for this might be Durrells decision to promote silence as one of the
dominant, if not the dominant, aspects of Greek island life. The opening epi-
graph of Prosperos Cell from The Tempest reads, No tongue: all eyes: be
silent, and silence is an important presence throughout the book. At such mo-
ments we never speak, Durrell wrote of himself and his wife. Durrells choice
of silence as the hallmark of his Corfu was, I believe, largely literary in origin.
His friend Miller had depicted Greece as a world of noise and conversation, and
he wanted to offer something different. It was Durrell, after all, who wrote
Miller the letter about Katsimbalis calling the cocks, but those sorts of loud,
extemporaneous episodes are largely absent from Prospero s Cell and Reections
on a Marine Venus.
j. The word Dionysiac began to show up more often in writing about Greece
after +o. For example, in +, Derek Patmore said that the men dancing in a
taverna on Aegina seemed entirely unself-conscious and rapt in what was almost
a dionysiac pleasure (Notes in a Greek Journal :8j). See also Leigh Fermors
comment that the landscape of Hydra is violent and Dionysiac (Background of
Nikos Ghika :).
o + r s + o r + o r s : j : o
. On the madness Miller found in Greece, see also the comments of Katsim-
balis in Millers book about Yannopoulos, a poet greater than your Walt Whitman
and all the American poets combined. He was a madman, yes, like all great Greek
fellows. Yannopoulos, Katsimbalis went on to say, became so intoxicated with
the Greek language, the Greek philosophy, the Greek sky, the Greek mountains,
the Greek sea, the Greek vegetables, even, that he killed himself. Katsimbalis
then concluded: He wasnt crazyhe was mad. Theres a difference. . . . He was
out of proportion (y8).
y. Charmian Clift also contrasted life on Hydra with the rat-race of modern
commercialism in Peel Me a Lotus +.
8. Osbert Lancaster remarked that after the Second World War, a new con-
tingent . . . arrived, easily to be distinguished from the other [classical or Byzan-
tine enthusiasts] by the erratic and seemingly purposeless nature of their course
and by the fact that they are entirely unencumbered by guide-books or intellectual
impedimenta of any sort (y8).
. See also Fowless remarks on the inuence of Lawrence on The Magus in
Behind The Magus y:.
+o. In Children of Thetis, Christopher Kininmouth asserted that on islands
one expects to see Pan (+). In +, Fiona Pitt-Keithley went in search of Pan in
the Mediterranean in The Pan Principle but reported that the Greeks were the
least priapic men she found.
++. In Inventing Paradise +j:, Keeley has a short but interesting discus-
sion of Greek women in The Colossus of Maroussi. Melina Mercouri played a fe-
male Zorba character as a prostitute in the lm Never on Sunday (+o), but fe-
male Zorbas were rather rare in literature (one appears in Keeleys novel The
Gold-Hatted Lover). Usually, both Greeks and foreigners would have sex with
foreign women in Greece, as in Merrills The (Diblos) Notebook, where the for-
eign narrator and his Greek acquaintances share a Scandinavian woman during a
drunken orgy.
+:. In Christopher Brennans novel The Massacre of the Innocents, for example,
the gay narrator says that with Greek youths he could be physically dominated,
but not, in any way, mentally so (+o).
+. Louis MacNeice, according to Stallworthy, was put off by the amboyance
of Katsimbalis and his mock-Katsimbalis act (+).
+. Miller made somewhat the same point about domestication versus wild-
ness when he said that, unlike the Greek, the Frenchman puts walls around his
talk, as he does around his garden: he puts limits about everything in order to feel
at home, but a Greek has not walls around him: he gives and takes without
stint (:, ). See also the comparison between Italian and Greek olive trees in
Warner, Views of Attica +o; and see Lancaster +o on landscape generally.
+j. The pastoral picture of the Minoans was already in place by the late +:os,
for Waugh was certainly playing with it when he mentioned the barbarities of
Minoan culture and presented the Minoans as if they were variants of the bloody
Mycenaeans (Labels +y). On the attitude toward the Minoans in English writ-
ing in the +os, see also Cecil Day-Lewiss poem Statuette: Late Minoan.
o + r s + o r + o r s : + :
+. In Durrells Cefal, also published as The Dark Labyrinth, a group of
tourists nds itself lost in a cave labyrinth in the east of Greece; each meets the
Minotaur in his or her own way. After the initial Cretan setting, the story becomes
highly allegorical, but at least two of the characters nd their way back to a land
before time began.
+y. For example, in his poem A Kind of a Philhellene, written in the early
+jos, John Fowles remarked on English-speaking expatriates who found the
essence of Greece in the poetry of Seferis, the paintings of Ghika, and what-
ever Katsimbalis said last week (Poems +). It was Millers book that had guided
these foreigners to Seferis, Ghika, and Katsimbalis. On Ghika, see The Colossus of
Maroussi j: and the essays on the painter by Spender and Fermor in Ghika:
Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures. John Lehmann said that he learned about the
Greek poets Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Angelos Sikelianos owing to a chance
meeting with Demetrios Capetanakis at Cambridge during +o+ and that
Capetanakis provided translations of these poets for Lehmanns journal New
Writing (Ample Proposition j8; see also Youngs mention of Capetanakis, jjy).
But neither Durrell, Miller, nor Spender mention Capetanakis, and his inuence
does not appear to be extensive nor lasting. Further, when Lehmann traveled to
Greece in +, he met Katsimbalis, with whom he visited Seferis on Poros; he
then went to see Ghika at Hydra. He also had a chance meeting with Sikelianos in
a taverna, but he never mentioned meeting Elytis, although he said that when he
arrived in Athens in +, he quoted from Elytiss The Age of Blue Memory
(Ample Proposition j). He took, in essence, the Miller tour of Greek intellectuals.
In the rst stanza of the poem A Spring Wind from +j, Bernard Spencer said:
Upon this table
Elytiss poems lie
Uttering the tangle of the sea, the breathing caves
And the ing of the Aegean waves.
(8)
One is struck by the passage in part because it is rather rare to nd the poet
Odysseus Elytis, who won the Nobel Prize in +y, invoked by an English or
American writer before +o. In the fourth stanza, haunted Seferis, smiling,
playing with beads makes an appearance. That is not surprising at all. If a Greek
writer received mention, it was usually Seferis.
+8. For a discussion of what the Greek-less Miller might have known about
Seferiss poetry, see Keeley, Inventing Paradise oyo.
+. For more on this, see Keeley, Inventing Paradise jjj.
:o. I am grateful to Sharon for letting me see this paper before publication and
for pointing me to Stephen Spenders essay Brilliant Athens and Us.
:+. The painter John Craxton asserted that some painters can make their real-
ity out of myth. By going to Greece I was trying to make a myth out of reality (y).
::. See Keeleys discussion about how Seferis has been particularly vulnera-
ble to the prejudices of his English-speaking interpreters in Modern Greek Poetry
o + r s + o r + o r s : : j
88, as well as his perspective on a related prejudice, for some of the same rea-
sons, for viewing Elytis as the poet of the Aegean (++8).
:. This letter, dated March :, +, is now in the George Seferis Archive in
the Gennadius Library, Athens. Speaking of Seferis, Peter Levi said, As a poet he
belongs undoubtedly to the modern movement; he knew and loved the work of
Laforgue before he ever met Eliot; but there is a directness in his poems unique in
Europe, I think. Yeats is hysterical and Eliot is obscure by comparison (Hill of
Kronos ).
:. The letter is dated November :, ++, and is now in the George Seferis
Archive, Gennadius Library, Athens.
:j. This is also true of John Lehmanns poems The Road to Rhamnous and
Greek Landscape with Figures and Craxtons comments that he was drawn to
paint certain features of landscape, and a human identity in it, an inhabited land-
scape if you like, which were like tokens for Greece (). See also Francis Kings
comment that tourists should not go to Greece primarily for the ancient sites but
for its unparalleled landscape and its unparalleled people (Introducing Greece +).
:. The last lines of Durrells To ArgosThe hyssop and the vinegar have
lost their meaning, / And this is what breaks the heartseem to suggest a more
problematic ending for we the endowed who pass here/ With the assurance of
visitors in rugs who Can raise from the menhir no ghost/ By the cold sound
English idioms (+o). But as Keeley points out in Inventing Paradise (+:o:+), the
despair is only for those who look for their meaning in the landscape and not in the
living beings around them. For the fate of the English well endowed in Greece
depends on whether they understand that Our true parenthood rests with the
eagle / We recognize him turning over his vaults and in the shepherd with dark
eyes wearing the crowsfoot. As one of the English who had learned this lesson, it
seems to me, Durrell suggested that he had, again, entered a sacred circle.
:y. Elsewhere in his poem Letter to Seferis the Greek, Durrell reprised the
idea that life in Greece focuses on the personal and private: can one say that /
Any response is enough for those / Who have a woman, an island and a tree?
(Collected Poems +o+).
:8. On the difference between the lm and the book, see Bien, Nikos Kazant-
zakis: Novelist +++:. In his article Greece Today, Kazantzakis presented Zorba
as a talker like Katsimbalis: He used to talk and talk, and when words could no
longer encompass what he wanted to say, he would jump up and begin to dance
(yo). The lm, by making the dancing visual, diminished the fact that the Greece
of Katsimbalis and of Zorba was like a siren songa charm of words.
:. Durrell opened Bitter Lemons, a book about Cyprus during the EOKA up-
rising, with a similar statement: This is not a political book, but simply an im-
pressionistic study of the moods and atmospheres of Cyprus during the troubled
years +j. Durrell went on to say that he had concentrated on individuals,
not policies, because he wanted to keep the book free from the smaller con-
tempts, in the hope that it would remain readable long after the current misunder-
standings have been resolved as they must sooner or later (++). No one would
have tried to write a book about the moods and impressions of Spain from +j
o + r s + o r + o r s : y o : y
to + or about Nazi Germany without acknowledging that politics was a crucial
factor in the equation. One could, it seems, look at the Greek world with a long
view that was beyond political concerns.
o. Gore Vidal said of the rst group of American artists and writers to visit
Rome after World War II: Rome was strange to all of us. For one thing, Italy had
been sealed off not only by war but by fascism. Since the early thirties, few Eng-
lish or American artists knew Italy well (+jo). Greek islands function as places
outside of the real world and even the world of the narrative in Storm Jame-
sons One Ulysses Too Many (+j8; see, e.g., +) and Durrells Justine (+jy).
+. Keeley commented that as far as one can gather from his travel writing
and his letters, Durrells view of Greek politics was never very broad or deep, and
though he celebrated the courage and vigor of the Greeks resistance to the Italian
invasion in ++, he subsequently appears to have shared something of the super-
cial cynicism of those Western observers who could not fathom or were uninter-
ested in penetrating the complexities of a political landscape that often seemed
alien to them in the conicting passions it occasioned, especially in times of crisis
(Inventing Paradise ::o). In First Impressions of Greece, Miller identied the
political exile he met on Spetses as Seferiss brother-in-law Constantine Tsatsos;
see Keeley, Inventing Paradise o+.
:. Birtles, a committed leftist, had a different view of Seferis. Noting Sef-
eriss studied air of intellectual evasion and his unwillingness to see the Fascist
implications of Eliots poetry, he predicted the poet would support some form
of retrograde authoritarianism (88). One hopes that Birtles lived long enough to
read Seferiss denunciation of the Greek junta in +.
. For nonctional works from the periods of the Second World War and the
Greek Civil War, see Eisner +:+j; for ction see Karanikas ::y:. What was
written generally recalled the Byronic tradition of liberation from the previous
century. Glenway Westcotts Apartment in Athens depicted the sufferings of the
Athenians under the brutal Nazi occupation, but see Karanikas on its total lack
of ethnicity (:). Cherakiss Hand of Alexander, Sedgewicks Tell Sparta, and
Mary Richmonds Maid of Athens are all variations on the romance of liberation.
George Wellers Crack in the Column is the most politically sophisticated in this
vein, but it too invoked the Greek War of Independence with an epigraph from
the famous American philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe. Winston Grahams
Greek Fire offered a Greek romance of liberation in which the role of the Turks is
taken by the Communists.
. In An Affair of the Heart, Dilys Powell divided her narrative into sections
entitled First Sight, Estrangement, Reconciliation, and Ever After.
First Sight provided a brief account of a prewar idyll in Greece with her archae-
ologist husband with some similarities to Prosperos Cell; it ended with his death in
+. At rst one might think that Estrangement was an attempt to come to
terms with this loss, but it turns out to be a disenchantment with Greece in +j
because politics and the civil war have come between her and the Greece of her
memory. She departed thinking it might be time for me to get Greece out of my
blood (jj). Her next visit went better. There were still hardships, but in her
o + r s + o r + o r s : y j : 8 o y
touchstone village of Perachora the war is over. Nobody speaks of it any more. . . .
now they go back to their old ways, now they concern themselves with today and
tomorrow. They grow old, they die, but they are the same (+)as if that were
what they were not doing in +j. Because the old ways have returned, Powell can
once again nd the Greece she loved. What estranged her from Greece, it seems,
was a period in which she could not avoid Greek politics and could not pretend
that it did not affect her relationships with the people of the country.
j. The idea appears in ction as well. Everything seems to be stripped away
by this light, stripped away to bare bones, says Kate in Johnstons novel Closer to
the Sun. You see people all the way through, as if theyre transparent almost. And
you see yourself the same way (+y).
. See MacNiven +:+ for Durrells whereabouts in +y and +8; and
on the character of Gideon, see o and y:: n. :.
y. Johnstons The Cyprian Woman (+jj), which uses Aphrodite instead of
Dionysus as the presiding deity in a Greece of the libido, also does not decon-
struct the efcacy of personal discovery in Greece.
8. Thomas Fisher plausibly suggests that at the end of The Magus readers are
asked to decide whether Nicholas has grown adequately from his experiences on
Phraxos, or if he is even capable of growth (+). What the novel does not ask us
to decide is whether the experiences on Phraxos do in fact promote personal
growth; that seems to be assumed.
. See, for example, Nicholas Urfes description in The Magus of his rst
encounter with the stripping-to-essentials sunlight and with the Circe-like
quality of Greece; the quality that makes it unique. In England we live in a very
muted, calm, domesticated relationship with what remains of our natural land-
scape and its soft northern light; in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful,
so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love-hatred,
one of passion (). In Merrills novel, Orson offers the following toast: I give
you the light of Greece. . . . Once you have had your vision no lesser world is toler-
able (The [Diblos] Notebook ++), and that sentiment about the hold of the place
on the characters runs throughout the book.
o. In Clean Straw for Nothing, the narrator muses on his personal and profes-
sional failure: Is it the island that has done this to us? Or only ourselves? I dont
think we can nd redemption here. It must be elsewhere (+j). Perhaps Johnston
is the only one who could ask this question because he spent a decade on a Greek
island with only a six-month hiatus in England.
+. Barry Unsworths rst novel, The Greeks Have a Word for It (+y), pro-
vided a look at the several kinds of English and Americans who came to Athens in
the early +os. The book is something of an apprentice work and has never been
reprinted.
:. Thessaloniki was the setting for Daniel Nashs novel, My Son Is in the
Mountains (+jj), which is based loosely on the killing of the journalist George
Polk (on which see Keeley, The Salonika Bay Murder).
. Charmian Clift also spoke out strongly against the junta in her article
The Voices of Greece (Being Alone with Oneself ). Clift, who lived in
8 o + r s + o r + o r s : 8 o : 8
Greece for ten years, never indicated such an interest in Greek politics in Mermaid
Singing, Peel Me a Lotus, or Honours Mimic, but something like the coup of +y
had not occurred during Clifts stay in Greece.
. On Seferiss declaration against the junta in March +, see Levi, Hill of
Kronos +j+j, who provides the full text of the statement in English. The aging
Katsimbaliss star may have faded a bit at this time because of his sympathy with,
if not his support for, the military government; see Levi +o.
j. In the introduction to of a collection of poems by Ritsos published in Eng-
land, Selected Poems translated by Nikos Strangos (+y), Peter Bien remarked
how extraordinary it was that Yannis Ritsos, who for decades was acknowl-
edged inside Greece as one of the undeniably major gures of her literary revival
. . . should be so new to the English-speaking world (++; in +y+ Strangos had
translated a smaller selection of Ritsoss work from +8 to +yo). Bien does not
consider that the English-speaking world might be more ready to accept Ritsos
because of the new interest in the Greek political situation. The early +yos saw
the real emergence of translations of Ritsos in English; in addition to the transla-
tions by Strangos, Amy Mims brought out a translation called Eighteen Short
Songs of the Bitter Motherland. A collection of poems published in the United
States in +, Romiossini and Other Poems, translated by Georgakas and
Paidoussi, explicitly made the connection between Ritsoss detention and the ap-
pearance of the book; the introduction includes a request that the reader write to
the U.S. State Department demanding Ritsoss release, for a poets life might be
saved. I would not want to push the point, however, since the rst volumes in
English of the work of Odysseus Elytis also began to appear in the early +yos,
and Elytis could not be described as the poet of prison and house arrest. Still, the
coup does seem to have had an effect on the dominance of Seferis as the poet of
Greece. A description of Ritsoss career up to +y, including his detention in a
camp from +8 to +j: and his subsequent imprisonment by the junta in +y,
which was changed a year later to house arrest, can be found, among other places,
in Biens introduction to Ritsoss Selected Poems.
. See Durrells poem Byron, written in + during the Second World
War; Ian MacNiven correctly noted that a deliberate ambiguity in the rst per-
son pronoun serves to conate the present and past poets (:y). But writing from
the headquarters of a war like the one to which he referred in the poem, Durrell
communed with a Byronic spirit far different from the one invoked in At
Corinth within the magic circle. He was, rather, looking back to the Byron of
Missolonghi for solidarity in a time of war and disenchantment.
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r nrx
About, Edmond, ++:+, +
Abrams, M. H., +8:, :+
Acropolis, ::j, +jjy, +o, :+, :y,
:j:
Alexander, Peter, :j, :8
Alexandria, :
Ali Pasha, , 88o
American Hellenic Society, +yj, +y,
:o
Andrews, Kevin, :j, :y+y:, :y, :yj
Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Helen, :8
Anglo-Hellenic League, +yj, +y, :o
Apollo, y, +o+, :, :jj, :j, ::
Arnold, Matthew, y8o, +o:
Ash, John, :+, :+
Athanassogou-Kalmyer, :8, :, :y,
oo
Auden, W. H., ::y:8, ::, :
Augustinos, Olga, +j, :8j, :8
Austin, Alfred, +o, +8
Balkans, concept of, ++j
Baring, Maurice, ++, :
Barrows, Samuel, ++
Beerbohm, Max, :
Benjamin, S. G. W., ++o, ++y, +j
Bennett, Jack, +j
Benson, E. F., +:y, +:, +, +j, :j8
Limitations, +o+:
The Princess Sophia, +j
Black, Teresa Macri, y8
Boyle, Kay, :8o8+
Bozzaris, Marco, 8, 88
Brailsford, Noel, +, +, +:, +o, +jy
Bridge, Ann. See OMalley, Mary
Brooke, Rupert, +8y8, ::
Brooks, Van Wyck, +:+
Brown, Demetra Vaka, o, +y, +jy,
+y8, oy, :::
In Pawn to a Throne, 8yo
In the Shadow of Islam, +, +o
Brown, James William, :+
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 8j, +++j
Bryant, William Cullen, 8, 8, , y,
+j, o
Bulgaria, +8y insurrection in, +:,
+j, o
Bulwer, Henry, :, , 8, , :8
Burgin, G. B., ++
Burrows, R. M., +o, +yj
Butler, Marilyn, ::, j, +y, :o+,
:, :
Byron, Lord
as character in Mary Shelleys The
Last Man, j
as Freedoms Laureate, 8+8
as a guide to Greece, +o+
as hero of Greece, yy, y8+
inuence on literary works during the
Greek War of Independence,
88j, o+
and the klephts, j:j
and the Maid of Athens, yyy8
at Missolonghi, yy
and the Romance of Greek liberation,
+, j,
and the tradition of liberal philhel-
lenism, y
y
8o
Byron, Lord (continued)
translation of War Song of Rhigas,
jo
views of modern Greeks, joj+,
yyj
visit to Greece in +8o+8++, y
works of
The Age of Bronze, +, :, +o, +j
The Bride of Abydoes, 8, j, +
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, ++y,
:+, y, , y, joj+, j:, +,
:8:
The Corsair, j, j
Don Juan, ::, , j+j:
The Giaour, +, , jo, j:j,
+:, , y+
Marino Faliero, +oy
On this Day, yj
The Siege of Corinth, 8, +, ,
y:
Song (Maid of Athens), yyy
Tales, Turkish, 8, j:, j, +:,
j, y
When a man has no freedom, :
Byron, Robert, o, +j, +y, +y, :8:
Byzantium, y8, :8:
Canziani, Lambros, 8
Carpenter, Edward, +jo
Cavafy, Constantine, ::, :y8
Chateaubriand, Franois-Ren, +y, +8,
:, j, ++y, +j, :j
Chew, Samuel, 8o, o
Choiseul-Goufer, Marie G. A. F.,
jo, ++
Christensen, Jerome, :
Churchill, Kenneth, +yo
Churchill, Winston, +, :oy
Clift, Charmian, :j, :j, :yj, :yy
Clogg, Richard, :+y
Colton, Walter, y8, ++
Conrad, Joseph, +o, +, :+y
Constantine, David, :o, j, :8j, :8
Constantine, King, +, +jy,
:oy
Constantinople, y, 8j, , +8,
:+o++
r n r x
Cook, George Cram, :, :
Cory, William, o
Crane Stephen, +:, +:8:, +j, o
Crawford, F. Marion, ++, :o
Craxton, John,
Crimean War, 8+, :8
Croly, George, y:
cummings, e. e., :+
Dakin, Douglas, ++o, +:, +, :o8
Dalrymple, William, :+
Davenport-Hines, Richard, ::8
Davis, Richard Harding, +:, +:o,
+j, :o
The Galloper, +:, ++, +j
Deering, Nathaniel, +o8
Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugne, :,
yy, 8j, 88, o, ++
Delavigne, Casimir, 8o, 8y
DeLillo, Don, +o, :8+8:
De Vere, Aubrey, +o, ++
Dickens, Charles, ++o
Dilessi, +:+:
Dilke, Charles, ++j, +8
Dionysus, y, , +o+, +y+, :, :jj
Disraeli, Benjamin, ++y+8, +j, +:,
oy
Dblin, Alfred, :o8
Dos Passos, John, :+o+:, :+j, :+,
:j:, :y
The Best Times, :+o
The Honor of a Klepht, +8:
Orient Express, +, :+:
Douglas, Norman, +o+, +, +j,
:jj, +
Doulis, Thomas, :+:
Dragoumis, Ion, +
Dragoumis, Julia, +j, +y, +:
A Man of Athens, +j, +yyy, +8
Drosinis, George, +y+8
Duncan, Isadora, :o
Durham, Edith, +8
Durrell, Lawrence, , :jo, :j:, :+,
:, :j8, :
Justine, :88
Prosperos Cell, :jj, :jo, :j, :yo,
:y8
r n r x
Reections on a Marine Venus, :j,
:jj, :j8, :j, :yy, :y8
works of, poetry, :, :yo, :y8y,
:8, j, 8
At Epidaurus, :, :, :y
In Arcadia, ::
Letter to Seferis the Greek,
y8
To Argos, :y
Edgeworth, Maria,
Edmonds, Elizabeth, +j:, +j, +, +y
Eftaliotis, Argyris, +
Eisner, Robert, , :j, ::, :yj, :8y,
:+, :
Elfenbein, Andrew, :, , :
Eliot, George, ++, +j
Eliot, T. S., +8:, :o, :oy8, :+,
:+8+, :
Elytis, Odysseus, :j, j
Etruscans, +y
Fallmerayer, Johann, +++y, +j+, oy
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, :8o
Fermor, Patrick Leigh, +88, :j:, :j,
:j, :y, :y8
Ferris, David, :88, :o
Finlay, George, 8, j, j, j8, y:y,
yyj, 8o,
Firbank, Ronald, +yo, :8
Flecker, James Elroy, +o:, +yyy, +y
Ford, Madox Ford (Hueffer), +8o8+
Forster, E. M., +y+y, :jj, +:o
Fowles, John, :j, :, :j, y
The Magus, , :j, :, :jj, :y
Fraser, J. G., +j
Freeman, Edward Augustus, +j, o, :,
j, , 8+, ++o, +, +o
Frost, Robert, +j
Fussell, Paul, +, :o8, :+, :, :o
Gallipoli, +j
Gavin, Catherine, :::j
Gennadius, John,
Ghika [Nikos Hajikyriako-Ghika], ::,
:,
Gibbs, Anthony, , :+, ::
8+
Gibbs, Philip, :+, ::::, :8
Ginsberg, Allen, +
Gissing, George, ::j, ++, +j, o
Gladstone, William Ewart, :8, ++,
+:y, +, +j
Glaspell, Susan, +j8, :, :jy
Gobineau, Arthur de, ++:o
Goldsworthy, Vesna, :8j
Gosse, Edmund, +++, ++:
Greece, history of, and its depiction in
English and American literature
Balkan Wars of ++:++, +yy
Coup of +y, , :y8+
Cretan Revolt of +8+8, +o+
Greco-Turkish War of +8y, +:+
Greco-Turkish War of +:o+::,
:o, :+j+8
Greek Civil War (++), :y+y+,
:yy
Kingdom of Greece, internal politics
of, j
Metaxas dictatorship (++o),
:yoy+
Revolt of +yyo, j, ++y
War of Independence, :, y:y:,
8
World War I and the Salonica Front,
+j:o
World War II, :y+, :y:y, :y
Gregory, Eileen, :o
Guest, Barbara, ::
Guys, Pierre-Augustin, :+, :8y
H. D., +o, ::, :y
Hadas, Rachel, :jy, :8:
Hagemann, E. R., :+
Halleck, Fitx-Grene, 8, +88, +o
Hanson, Kenneth, :j, :8o
Hateld, Henry, 8:
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, +o+, +o
Haygarth, William, :+, y, j+, +
Hecht, Anthony, ::y
Hellenism, ::, :j8
Hemans, Felicia, , y, o, 8, 8, 88,
o
Hemingway, Ernest, :o, :+++8,
::y
8: r n r x
Hentschel, Cedric, o+
Herbert, A. P., +
Hibben, Paxton, +y
Hichens, R. S., j
Hinks, Roger, +
Hobhouse, George Cam, , jo, y
Hocking, Joseph, +j, +8
Hlderlin, Friedrich, +, :, :y, o+,
j
Holland, Henry,
Homosexuality, j, +yoy+, ::jo
Hope, Anthony, +j:, +
Hope, Thomas, +, +, +y, :8
Horovitz, Israel, :j
Horton, George, +:, +:y:8, +j+, +,
+y
Howe, Samuel Gridley, j, j8j, 8,
++o, :8j
Hughes, Thomas, , yoy+
Hugo, Victor, , y+, o
Hulme, T. E., +8+8:
Hynes, Samuel, +jo, +, :o:,
:oj, :+j
Isherwood, Christopher, +y+, +8jo,
:y, +
Italy, , +o, +jj, +o+, :j8,
:yo
James, Henry, +o+, +j, +jy, +88
Jameson, Storm, :jo
Jebb, R. C., ++
Jenkins, Romilly, +:+
Jenkyns, Richard, :8, +jj, +, :8,
+
Johnson, Robert Underwood, 8+, +j,
++:
Johnston, George, , :j, :j8,
:yyy
Joyce, James, :o8
Jusdanis, Gregory, o, :8j
Kaplan, Robert, :j, :8
Karanikas, Alexander, ++
Katsimbalis, George, , :jj8, ::,
:
Kazantzakis, Nikos, :jo, :8
Keeley, Edmund, :o, :, :, :y,
o, :, ,
The Gold-Hatted Lover, :j, :o, :y,
:yyy8
The Libation, ::, :
Kelsall, Charles, o+
Kelsall, Malcolm, :8
Kemal, Mustafa (Ataturk), :o, :::, ::
King, Francis, :, :y8, :y
Kinglake, Alexander, o
Kingsley, Charles, :y
Kipling, Rudyard, :o, :oj
Klephts, j:jj, jj, 8j88, +o8,
+:o:, :+, :y:
Lamartine, Alphonse, ++y
Lambropoulos Vassilis, :j
Lancaster, Osbert, +o, :8, :o, :8o,

Landor, Walter Savage, +j, 88j, 8
Landscape, +8+, :+, :j8o
Lang, Andrew, +o, o8
Larrabbee, Steven, j
Lawrence, D. H., :, :jj, :o
Lear, Edward, o, +o, :o
Journal of a Landscape Painter, +o,
+:, :o, :+, oj
Leask, Nigel, , :+, ::, :j, :
Lehmann, John, :j8, :8,
Leontis, Artemis, , +jj, +j, +
Levi, Peter, +o, :, oj
The Hill of Kronos, +o, :j8, :8,
:yj, :y
Levinson, Marjorie, :
Lewis, Wyndham, +y, +8o
Liddell, Robert, +8
Lloyd Geroge, David, :8, :oy, ::+
Llwellyn Smith, Michael, :o, :j
London Greek Committee, :8, j, y,
:, +
Lynch, Bohun, j, +o, +j, +jjy,
+, +8, +y
Macaulay, Rose, ::, o
MacDiarmid, Hugh, :o:, :
Mackenzie, Compton, +o+, +j,
+8:oo, :oy, ::
r n r x
MacLeish, Archibald, ::o:+
MacNeice, Louis, ::, ::8:, ::, :j,
:yyj
MacNiven, Ian, :jj, y
Malakis, Emile, o+
Manning, Olivia, :yoy+, :y
Mansell, Peter, ::
Marathon, +y, :y:8, y:, 8j, +y, :j:
Marchand, Leslie, :y
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, +y
Matthews, Kenneth, +, :+y, :+, :j
Mavrocordato, Alexander, j:, j8
Mayo, Isabella, y, +:j, +:y, +j, +
Mazzini, Joseph, 8:8, +:
McCarthy, Justin, ++y, +:, +j+, +j:,
+jy
McGann, Jerome, j, +j, j, j:, jj, j,
y+, ::, :
Melville, Herman, +, o, +j
Merrill, James, +yo, :j, ::,
:, :j
Mill, John Stuart, :8
Miller, Henry, , +, :+, :
The Colossus of Maroussi, , :joj+,
:jj8, :o, :j
Millingen, Julius, y, yj, :y
Milnes, Richard Monckton, ++, ++j,
++, ++8
Minoans, :o+, :8:,
Minta, Stephen, :88
Missolonghi, , y:y, yyy, ::,
::8, :j:
Modernism, , 8, +y88, :o,
:j
Morgenthau, Henry, +o, ::
Moore, D. B., :o
Moore, Thomas, yyy,
Morier, David, +o8
Morris, William, +, +
Mott, Valentine, +o
Munro, Hector Herbert (Saki), j,
+y
Murphy, Arthur, :o
Murray, Gilbert, yo, +8, +yj
Mycenaeans, :o
Myrivilis, Stratis, :o
Mythical method, :j
8
Navarino, :
Neoclassicism, +y, +8+
Nerval, Gerard de, j
Nicolson, Harold, :o+, :::, ::y
Nietzsche, +j
Noah, Mordecai, 8,
OMalley, Mary (Ann Bridge), :+, :
Orientalism and the East, +, j,
j, +++, ++y+, +8, +y
Pan, +o, :jj, +j+
Papadiamantis, Alexandros, +y
Papazoglou, Dimitra, +, :o
Pater, Walter, +8, +, :, +8
Persian Wars, :y, y8, 8j
Philhellenism
and the Balkans, +:y
and the East, j
and Greek folklore, +
and its early relationship to Christian-
ity, j, ++:
and its origins in radicalism, +j, :j,
:8+, +, +oj
during and after World War I, +8,
:oj
Pickthall, Marmaduke, +, +y, +,
+8+, :o
Plomer, William, :+, :jy, :,
o+
Polwhele, Richard, +
Pound, Ezra, :+:o, +, :+
Powell, Dilys, :yj, y
Powers, Hiram, ++
Prvost, Antoine-Franois, o
Proust, Marcel, +j, +yj, :oo:o+, :o
Raizis, Marios Byron, ::, :oo, oj
and Alexander Papas, 88, , :o, ::,
o:
Raymond, Ernest, +, +
Reed, John, +
Revival of the Greeks, , j, ++y, y,
+oj, +o+
Byron on, joj:, yy
Swinburne on, ++:+
Rhigas,
8
Ritsos, Yannis, :8+
Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert, :8
Rodd, Rennell, +o:, +, +
Romance of Greek liberation, +yo,
yyy8, 8y88, +j, +yyy,
++:, :o+:
Romanticism, j, +y8, +y8,
::o:+, :j, :j
Rome, +o+, +jj
Rosen, F., :y8, o:
Rouse, W. H. D., +, +y, o8
Ruddick, William, y
Ruskin, John, :+
Russia, +, +j, +, +, +j
Rutherford, Andrew, :j
Saab, +o++
Sackville-West, Vita, :o+:
Said, Edward, , :8, :o
Saki. See Munro, Hector Herbert
Salmon, Tim, :y
Sandiford, K. P., +
Saroyan, William, :y
Sarton, May, :
Savage-Armstrong, George Francis,
y8, +:::
Schwab, Raymond,
Scrivener, Michael, :
Seferis, George, :8, :8, :8, 8
Sergeant, Lewis, +j, +
Settle, Mary Lee, :8+
Shannon, R. T., ++
Shaw, George Bernard, +:, +, +j,
+8, +y8o
Shelley, Mary, j, +oy8, +o
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
on Christianity, j
on Greek liberty, +j, :j:, +8
inuence on Swinburne, ++:+
works
Hellas, +j, +8, ::y, :8:, o, ,
+,
Ode to Liberty, :j
The Revolt of Islam, :j, ::y, j,
,
Sheridan, Clare, :+, :+8, ::+::
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, jj8, :o
r n r x
Sitwell, Sacherverel, :+
Slabey, Robert, :+
Smith, Michael Llewellyn. See Llwellyn
Smith, Michael
Smyrna, :oj, :o8, :++, :+8+
Southey, Robert, +:, +8, o+
Spanish Civil War, o, o
Spencer, Bernard, :+, :j, :y+,

Spencer, Terence, , j, y, +oj, :8
Spender, Harold, jo, +8, :o, ::y,
:8
Spender, Stephen, 8, :j, :j, :,
:
Stallworthy, Jon, ::
St. Clair, William
That Greece Might Still Be Free, :8,
, y, y, 88, :8j, :8, o:
Trelawny, j8
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ++o++
Stevens, G. W., +oj, +
Stillman, William, ++o, +
Storace, Patricia, :y
Strother, French, ::, :, :y8
Suliots, rebellion of, o, +
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 8:8,
++++, ++, +++:
Symonds, John Addington, +8+
Tennyson, Alfred, +, +:
Thackeray, William Makepeace, +oy,
++
Theotokas, George, +
Thermopylae, y:, +y
Thompson, E. P., +
Traill, H. D., +o
Travel in Greece, narratives of, :o:+,
+o, +++8, :yj
Travis, William, ::
Trelawny, Edward, j, j8
Trollope, Anthony, ++
Tsigakou, Fani-Maria, :+, 8y, +++j,
:8y, oo, o
Turks, depiction of, o, +:, j, +:,
+j:j, :::
Turner, Frank, +y, :
Twain, Mark, ++
r n r x 8j
Unsworth, Barry, ++:, y
Upward, Allen, +, :, +, +, +y,
+, :8y, +
Valaoritis, Nanos, ::
Venezis, Ilias, :+8
Venizelos, Eleftherios, +jy, :oj,
:+:, :
Verne, Jules, +
Versailles, Treaty of, :oj
Vidal, Gore,
Voltaire, +, +j, 8
Wallace, Jennifer, :8, :88, :o, :
Waller, John, :j:, :y
Warner, Rex, :, :8, :j:, :j, :y+
Watson, William, +y, +8, +o+
Waugh, Evelyn, :, ::, :j
Webster, Daniel, :8, :
West, Rebecca, +j, +8, :+:
Wharton, Edith, +o+, +j, ++j
White, Patrick, ::j:, :, :8,
:o
Whittemore, Edward, , +, :++j
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 8y
Wilberforce, William,
Wilde, Oscar, +o, +o
William, Neil Wynn, +y, +8
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, +8+,
:+:j, :
Wolf, Larry, +:
Woman; or, Ida of Athens (Sydney
Owenson), +, :o:, :y, j,
+:,
Woodhouse, C. M., o, :y:y, :88
Woolf, Virginia, , +:, +j, +
Wright, W. R., , o, :8y
Yeats, W. B., j, +8:, :8o
Young, Kenneth, :, ::

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