Volume 74 — ATHENS IN 1853.[7]

ATHENS IN 1853.^[7]

Wordsworth, whose elegant and scholarly work on Greece is now familiar to most drawing-room tables, in his more erudite-looking but scarcely less elegant volume on Athens and Attica, published in the year 1836, gives a description of the then waste and desolate condition of the city of Pericles in the following terms:—

“The town of Athens is now lying in ruins. The streets are almost deserted; nearly all the houses are without roofs. The churches are reduced to bare walls and heaps of stones and mortar. There is but one church in which service is performed. A few new wooden houses, one or two of more solid structure, and the two lines of planted sheds which form the bazaar, are all the inhabited dwellings that Athens can now boast. In this state of modern desolation, the grandeur of the ancient buildings which still survive here is more striking—their preservation is more wonderful. There is now scarcely any building at Athens in so perfect a state as the temple of Theseus. The least-ruined objects here are some of the ruins themselves.”

A sad picture!—but the saddest thing is, that this is only a picture of what the whole of Greece had been suffering during its long-protracted and painful existence in the middle ages, at a time when Italy, having wrought for itself a new character and language by admixture with Lombard blood, was performing a principal part in the great drama then opening of modern European civilisation. The Greeks have preserved their historical continuity and their language, without a gap, up to the present moment; but for this privilege—if, indeed, it shall prove to be one—they have paid dearly. Better were it, one sometimes thinks, that the whole Hellenic race had been swallowed up by those devastating swarms of Slavonic and other barbarians who now people great part of European Turkey, than to have prolonged such centuries of gilded decrepitude as we see in the later history of Byzantium, and to have been trampled under foot, shorn, and bled by contending races of foreign masters, in the manner exhibited by the medieval rulers of Peloponnesus, and other parts of Greece proper. Whoso wishes to weep for the fortunes of a people, whose character is seldom judged with much Christian charity, will look into the stern, darkly-glowing pages of Professor Fallmerayer, or the more calm, sober, and philosophic chapters of our countryman George Finlay, and he will not remain unmoved.^[8] No man who knows what the Greeks have suffered from the days of sanguinolent Sylla until now, will speak against the Greeks. One wonders how a single blade of green grass should be found growing on a soil where, for many centuries, it seemed to rain blood and stones upon a race doomed by Heaven to be exterminated. Professor Fallmerayer, as is well known, goes so far as to say that the Greek race actually is exterminated—that there are literally at this moment no Greeks in Greece:^[9] but the existence of one common Greek language in all the countries anciently inhabited by the Hellenes is a pretty strong proof, that, however much Slavonic and Albanian blood may have been imported into Greece, there must have been an equally strong Greek element remaining behind to Hellenise the importation. As for Athens, amid the general black and fiery devastation that possessed subjugated Greece, it continued to present such various phases of lovely decay, genteel decadence, and even fitful flushes of prosperity, without health, as became the metropolis of ancient taste and science. Rome, upon the whole, behaved handsomely enough to her beautiful slave. The Emperor Hadrian, who, like our Queen Victoria, was given to perambulate his empire, visited Athens also, of course, and bestowed on it many distinguished marks of his imperial favour, of which not a few remain even to the present day. He went so far, indeed, in improving a certain district of the city—the south-east quarter, towards the Ilissus—that it went by his name so long as Roman memory lived upon the spot; and the completion of the rich and lordly temple of Jupiter in that region is attributed to him. Julian also, the Apostate, who was educated there, with his fine pagan frenzy, could not be slow to patronise the city of the heathen Muses; nay, even Alaric the Goth, who sacked Lacedæmon, and annihilated Megalopolis, and who, by the base treachery of Arcadius, the puny Emperor of the East, was made Roman governor of those very Greek provinces which as a Goth he had plundered,—this Christian scourge of Hellenic heathendom, when violating the awful mystery of Eleusis and the sacred pomp of Olympia, left Athens unscathed, and feared the gigantic image of the blue-eyed goddess that looked down from the Acropolis. After the fall of the Western Empire, when the dissolute Isaurian, Zeno, purchasing peace for the East, delivered Italy to the Goths, Athens shared naturally in the decay which affected all the provincial cities of the empire, under such a system of centralised absolutism and fiscal oppression as was organised at Byzantium. Nevertheless, we find that when, in the year 1204, the Byzantine Empire was suspended for a season, and large portions of it separated for ever from the centre of authority, Athens became the capital of one of the most flourishing branches of the Frankish Empire; and under the government, first of the Burgundian family of La Roche, then of the Sicilian branch of Arragon, and, lastly, of the Acciauoli, a family of rich merchants from Florence, enjoyed a degree of material prosperity, which the general haze through which the eye is apt to view medieval history seldom allows us distinctly to discern. On this subject Mr Finlay has some remarks, which many of our readers will see with interest.

“It is usual,” says he, “to suppose that Athens was a miserable and decayed town during the whole period of the middle ages, and that Attica then offered the same barren, treeless, and unimprovable aspect which it now does as a European kingdom. Such, however, was not the case: the social civilisation of the inhabitants, and their ample command of the necessaries and many of the luxuries of life, was in those days as much superior to the condition of the citizens of Paris and London, as they are now inferior. The Spaniard Montaner, who was well acquainted with all the rich countries round the Mediterranean, then the most flourishing portion of the globe, and who was familiar with the most magnificent courts of Europe, says that the dukes of Athens were among the greatest princes who did not possess the title of king. He has left us a description of the court of Athens, which gives us a high idea of its magnificence; and he declares that the nobles of the duchy then spoke as good French as the Parisians themselves. The city was large and wealthy, the country thickly covered with villages, of which the ruins may still be traced in spots affording no indication of Hellenic sites. Aqueducts and cisterns then gave fertility to land now unproductive: olive, almond, and fig trees were intermingled with vineyards, and orchards covered ground now reduced by the want of irrigation to yield only scanty pasturage to the flocks of nomade shepherds. The valonia, the cotton, the silk, and the leather of Attica then supplied native manufactories, and the surplus commanded a high price in the European markets. The trade of Athens was considerable, and the luxury of the Athenian ducal court was celebrated in all the regions of the West, where chivalry flourished.”

This extract is uncommonly interesting, as it shows us not only what was done in the past of Athens, but what may be done in the future. But whatever prosperity Athens might have enjoyed under the Frankish dukes was merely temporary; for these dynasties, having no firm root in the country, fell by degrees, one after another, into the condition of ill-governed European dependencies, or of conquered countries governed by foreign rulers for selfish purposes. The wisdom of popular conciliation exercised by most of the early Frankish princes in Greece, as a matter of necessity, on their first entrance into possession, became forgotten when their power seemed firmly established. Part of their kingdoms—in Peloponnesus, for instance—were at an early period resumed by the decadent Byzantine government, which, whatever faults it had, certainly possessed in no ordinary degree the virtue of an obstinate vitality; and all of them were so cruelly oppressed by their unprincipled governors, that when the Turks appeared in Europe, many Greeks looked upon their now greatest enemies as their best friends. In the year 1456, three years after the capture of Constantinople, Athens was Turkish, and remained so till the late war, notwithstanding more than one attempt of the Venetians to make themselves masters of the place. In one of these attempts their admiral threw a bomb into the Acropolis, which reduced the then almost entire Parthenon to its present state of beautiful dilapidation. This happened in the year 1686. What Athens was under the Turks, before the ravages of the Liberation War, during the course of which it was always a most important, and, at the same time, a very exposed point, is thus described by a German traveller in the year 1810:—

“Athens is a town of considerable extent and population,^[10] and surrounded with a wall. The houses are bad, and stand without order in the narrow streets. The Turks have several mosques and public baths here; the Greeks a good many churches, cloisters, and chapels. Fragments of pillars and statues are found everywhere. The Turks have very recently made lime of some of the finest works of Greek art. The Acropolis is now a fortress. The garrison consists of a few Turks, who live there with their families, and are called Castriasni, or soldiers of the fort. The fortifications are bad. The Parthenon is a ruin. The Temple of Theseus is entire, and used as a Greek church dedicated to St George. The Tower of the Winds is used as an oratory for the dervishes. The country round Attica is dry and bare. The city itself is under the protection of the Kislar Aga, and is treated mildly by the Turks. Of the three harbours which Athens once had, the Piræus, under the name of Porto Leone, or Porto Draco, is the only one now used. In the place of the magnificent temples and porticoes once found there, there are seen only a few miserable huts, a tottering booth of customs, a cloister dedicated to St Spiridin, and a few ruins of a theatre.”^[11]

In the above remarks we have taken a large sweep of time hastily under our view; but the subject is a curious one; and next to the capital of Bavaria there is, at the present moment, no European city on which the last twenty years have made such a change as on Athens. Unreasonable and ill-informed tourists will, of course, visit that city with unreasonable expectations, and be disappointed; but they who start from Mr Wordsworth’s position in 1836, and with some such historical review as we have just given, will be astonished. Athens is now a flourishing, elegant, and, in some important respects, altogether unique capital, containing a population of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants. This, indeed, is not a rise, since Ukert’s times, equal to the marvellous increase in the population of Manchester and Glasgow within the present century; but it is something very notable, and something that looks out into the immediate future with a significance scarcely less attractive than the strange and various past out of which it has sprung. There are two races that have marched out of the past into the present, carrying with them a yet unsolved problem in their existence—the Jews and the Greeks. Providence may yet have in store some worthy work for both. At all events, so long as they exist curiosity cannot sleep.

We do not know who it was that first called Edinburgh the “Modern Athens,” but the designation, topographically at least, is not without a great truth. The situation of our fair metropolis is, in several most important respects, very similar to that of the real Athens; and the prominent points of the one may serve as an admirable analogical basis for the comprehension of the prominent points of the other. There is a sea in both adjacent, and a mountain view beyond; there is an abrupt rock forming a natural fortress in the middle; there is a range of fine mountains in the background, and prominent and picturesque hills in the immediate vicinity. For the Firth of Forth, the capital of Greece has the Saronic Gulf; for the coast of Fife, the mountain-coast of Argolis; for Inchkeith, Ægina; for the Castle, the Acropolis; for the Pentland Hills, Hymettus; for Arthur’s Seat, Lycabettus; and all this so nicely correspondent that an expert teacher of geography might well use it as a sort of memoria technica for his scholars. Points of difference, of course, there are also, and very marked ones too, some of which, when a nice comparison is made, turn the balance in favour of the Athenian, and others as strongly in favour of the Scottish capital. In favour of the Greek landscape, the complete and well-defined background, formed by Mount Pentelicus on the north-east, and the chain of Parnes, and other connecting ridges to the north and north-west, deserves to be first mentioned; for in the room of these Edinburgh has nothing to present but the bare and dreary stretch of the Lammermoors. One must also confess honestly, though a patriotic Scottish heart is loth to make such admissions, that Inchkeith with its lighthouse is a very poor substitute for Ægina with its Doric temple; while against Salamis in no view can we dare to present the isle of Cramond. Largo Law, also, though it be very beautiful, and becomes more beautiful the nearer you approach it, even as backed by the Lomonds, and flanked by the Cleish Hills and Ben Cleugh in the far west, is, when set against the grand ridge of lofty Argolic mountains, apt to appear small. On the other hand, Edinburgh has a decided advantage over Athens, and all other fair towns, that it is built on a series of parallel ridges, with valleys between, which present one part of the city in picturesque contrast to the other, and at the same time open up a prospect various and wide in all directions, from the midst of a city’s bustle into the green and blue quietude of the country. There is no such ridge of elevated ground in Athens as that on which Queen Street, George Street, and Princes Street stand; and even the elevations which the Attic landscape presents have not been wisely used in the construction of the modern city. All the heights over against the Acropolis, the Hill of Philopappos, the Hill of Mars, the Museum, and the Hill of the Nymphs, occupying as they do a situation something corresponding to our Calton Hill in Edinburgh, and presenting the finest architectural positions, form no part of the present city, the principal part of which is crammed into the low ground which lies between the Acropolis and the Academy—that is to say, following out our analogy, occupies a situation corresponding to that part of the city of Edinburgh which lies between the Castle and Arthur’s Seat, supposing the ridge of the High Street altogether removed, and the level of the Princes Street Gardens continued with a very gentle elevation towards that hill and the adjacent heights, which occupy the position of the fine conical hill hanging over Athens on the north-west, and now acknowledged to be Lycabettus. As the modern city has been constructed, there are only three points from which a free view into the open country is obtainable,—the Acropolis, of course, being the first; the esplanade to the north, where the two principal hotels are, being the second; and the street before the palace of King Otho, between Lycabettus and the Ilissus, being the third. This street, which at its south end assumes the name of the Street Amalia, looks down upon the Temple of Jupiter in the vale of the Ilissus, and beyond the Acropolis to the sea. On the whole, therefore, though Attica presents a much finer landscape than Mid-Lothian, Athens does not, and, even in its best days, never did occupy an architectural position so magnificent as Edinburgh; not to mention what we learn from the best authorities, that the ancient classical city was grand only in its temples and public buildings, whereas Edinburgh, as a princely mouth once uttered, is altogether a city of palaces.

The present appearance of the city may be well gathered from the description of a recent German traveller, from whose book we shall now proceed to make a few characteristic extracts.

“Modern Athens lies altogether on the ground occupied by the ancient city. No doubt this idea of making the capital of the modern city identical with the ancient, went out from the brain of King Ludwig of Bavaria. But this romantic sentimentality was a decided political mistake. The original inhabitants of Athens planted themselves at a certain distance from the sea,^[12] on an island fortress, that they might be safe from the attacks of the pirates, with whom the seas were, in those early times, everywhere infested. At the present day no such motive exists. The sea is the natural element of Greek life and of Greek prosperity. The natural position for the capital of a kingdom that depends for its advancement so much on trade and commerce, was the Piræus, which Themistocles advised the ancient Athenians to look upon as their real capital. Or, possibly, even any port of Attica may be regarded as too much in a corner to present a position fit for the capital of a compact Greek kingdom; and it is no doubt to be regarded as a proof of the great wisdom of Capo d’Istria and the Venetians, that they chose Nauplia, with its fine situation and beautiful harbour, as the seat of their government. It is well known, also, that the idea was at one time entertained of placing the capital of the new kingdom on the rising ground which forms the isthmus of Corinth—a situation which would have commanded both seas.

“Nevertheless the new city has risen up with an astonishing rapidity. It contains some twenty thousand inhabitants,^[13] and occupies a large space of ground. Two principal streets, crossing one another at right angles, run through the whole length and breadth of the city. Off from these runs, in every possible relation of irregularity, a confused web of streets, made for any purpose rather than beauty or convenience. The one of these main streets, the street of Hermes, goes from west to east, being the direct continuation of the road from Piræus to the city, and ends in a beautiful square area, laid out in public gardens, immediately in front of the palace. The street would be a perfect straight line, open from the high ground on which the palace lies down to the plain of the Piræus, were it not for the interposition of a small old Byzantine church, which projects, about the middle of its course, in such a manner as to cause a slight bend in the direction of the street. The other main street leads from north to south. It has received the name of the street of Aeolus, from the small tower of the winds below the north base of the Acropolis, which is its southern starting-point. The street is uneven in its level, but straight in its direction; so that from every point of its length the Acropolis is visible, closing the prospect to the south.

“In these two streets the real life of modern Athens is concentrated. They are composed for the most part of elegant houses, generally of two storeys high. Here there are glass windows—seldom found in the minor streets—double-hinged doors, and balconies. In the street of Aeolus are the principal coffeehouses and shops. And when the lounger looks into the open barbers’ shops, which are found here in great numbers, and are places of great resort, and beholds all the busy processes of hat-making, shoe-making, and tailoring, which are here exposed to public view on the ground-floor, without any notion of concealment, he enjoys that same rich fulness of street life which gives such a charm to Naples and other Italian cities; only here in Athens everything is more motley and more glittering.

“The houses of the foreign ambassadors and the various government offices, the bank, the university, are situated at some distance from the busy hum of the street of Aeolus, on the gently-rising ground towards Lycabettus, between the royal palace and the old Academy. This is the fashionable quarter of Athens, being not the west end, as in London, but the north-east quarter of the city.

“After having mastered these keys, so to speak, of the position, the stranger may venture into the strange maze of short, crooked, and narrow streets, of which the rest of the city is composed. But let a man not venture rashly. Here there is no more neatness, no more two-storeyed houses, with windows and balconies; everywhere are to be seen miserable huts and cabins, meagrely composed of four walls whitewashed, and covered with a light roof of tiles; a few openings with wooden shutters serve at once as door, window, and chimney. Causeway there is none; so if there happens to have been rain, or if the sky takes a gusty fit, and the dust is driving—not at all uncommon in this quarter—these troglodytes have a miserable lodgment. In the midst of all this wretchedness, the high-sounding names, which are stuck up on every street corner, have a burlesque effect. In the midst of the strangest huddle of ill-built houses, and motley patchwork of incoherent stones, you look up and find yourself surrounded by the ‘Senate-house,’ the ‘Painted Stoa,’ the ‘Eponymic Heroes,’ the tragic ‘Tripods,’ and the Council of the ‘Areopagus,’—all in the most classical Greek; and when these local associations fail, you find the dirtiest lanes and vennels dignified with the names of Pericles and Phidias, Praxiteles and Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This is another manifestation of the same sort of beggarly pride, which delights to stamp the children of modern Greek Christians with the names of some old heathen heroic Epaminondas or Achilles.”

This witness is in the main true; though there are a few things in the extract to which one might object, as proceeding from that unsympathising critical spirit too common in these times, which delights to pass itself off for cleverness. What harm, for instance, can there be in the son of a modern Greek being called Achilles, any more than in a modern dealer in old clothes being called Moses? Is it any burlesque upon the good old president of the British round table, when there happens to be an oldest son called Arthur in any reputable English family now paying taxes to her Majesty? And is the sainted ghost of Jeremiah the prophet insulted because there is a Dissenter of that name who keeps a grocer’s shop in Beverley, or because Tom and Jerry once walked the boards of the British stage profanely? As little offence is there in the names of the streets, however humble some of them may now be; for we have reason to hope, that as boys and trees grow bigger, so these streets will grow more magnificent with years. Even Wellington’s noble name does not always decorate a noble street in British towns; and Princes Street in Aberdeen does not look so royal by any means as Princes Street in Edinburgh. The real stumblingblock in these Athenian streets is not in the names of Æschylus and Sophocles, Colocotroni, Miaulis, and Lord Byron,^[14] which are all well worthy of the sort of immortality hereby conferred on them; but in those other names of ancient places, chosen out of Pausanias, and put down where the ill-informed archæologist now thinks that they ought to be, and where the better-informed archæologist, some fifty years hence, will know that they ought not. This archæological objection, by the way, and not any of those political and commercial ones mentioned by Herr Hettner, is the real strength of the objection to the present site of the capital of Greece, which has been made by so many; for the present city being built, not on the whole area certainly, but on the greater portion of the ancient one, it follows that, till the new houses, which have been raised so quickly on the foundations of old temples and porticoes, shall have crumbled down by age, or be shaken down by an earthquake, the snouts of zealous antiquaries are doomed to sniff about these famous purlieus in vain;—a great loss, certainly, to the archæological societies of the present age in Berlin, London, Munich, and elsewhere, now so vigorous; but the Greeks will thereby keep their subterranean treasures to themselves for another century at least, free from touch of foreign mattock, by which time they may have somewhere to put them; for at present the government has neither a museum to put ancient remains in when found, nor money to pay for them—a state of matters which leads even now sometimes to lamentable results, over which Professors Gerhard and Panofka in Berlin must weep. But, after all, Canaris did not drive his conquering fire-ships across the Archipelago, nor did Lord Byron think it worth while to die poetically at Messolonghi, for the sake of the archæologists. In choosing Athens as the site of the capital of the new kingdom of Greece, the patriotic reminiscences of the Greek people were no doubt as much consulted as the sentimental romance of Bavarian Louis. If cats have a right to attach themselves to places, why not men?

But we shall not trifle on these points. Among the public buildings of Athens, in what our author calls the fashionable quarter, the most prominent, certainly, are the palace and the university. The ground, as we have already mentioned, rises with a very gentle slope from the level of the plain in which the Ilissus and Cephissus are lost, to the base of Lycabettus, which overhangs the city in a most effective conical mass to the north-east. Along the highest part of this slope runs, from north to south generally, though with a considerable bend in the middle, a long street, principally occupied with public buildings and other houses, in size and elegance much surpassing the best houses in the two principal streets described by Mr Hettner. This is the same street which is above described as sweeping down to the Ilissus, and, under the name of Amalia Street, opening up a view of the sea. Now it is on this upper part of the city, just beneath the base of Lycabettus, that the palace and the university are situated. The former especially is, next to the Acropolis, both from its situation and its size, the most prominent object in the city. No eye can miss its glaring extent of white wall, and the glimmering of its long uniform ranges of windows, tier upon tier, like the arches in the Coliseum;—but, like the Coliseum, certainly, in nothing else—like a huge Manchester cotton-factory rather, new and whitewashed, as the English say—or like a large Austrian barracks, as the Germans say—or one of those immense cloister-like baronial halls, which sometimes stare upon the flitting eye of the tourist from amid the vine-clad heights of Germany. Altogether, not architecturally only—for even Bavarian architects are not infallible—but economically much more, we are disposed to think the palace was a blunder. Nothing, indeed, can exceed the beauty and chaste magnificence of its internal decoration—that part of the work is in every respect worthy of the classical fame of Munich. But what has all this magnificence to do, the practical mind will ask, with a petty and beggarly kingdom, that has neither roads, nor people, nor water, nor money to pay its lawful debts? We are afraid the artistic sentimentality of Bavarian Louis had something to do with this; he was too much of a poet, and too little of a practical man, to know what the infant kingdom of Greece required in the first place. What it required, our readers may see in a small but very sensible book noted below.^[15] Certainly among the last of necessary things was a royal residence, which, had it been intended for the Queen of Great Britain and India, or the Czar of all the Russias, could not have been raised larger in scale, or more magnificent in embellishment.

Our German traveller had the good fortune to inspect the show-rooms of King Otho’s palace, not in their pure naturals, as they are commonly shown to strangers, but when furnished with fair ladies and gay knights, on occasion of a court-ball. Let us see how they looked when lighted.

A GREEK COURT-BALL.

“I have just returned from a grand court-ball. The ball-room is finished in the same style of luxuriant but chaste magnificence in which the whole palace is built. It is of truly colossal dimensions. In height it occupies two entire floors of the building. It is divided into three parts, separated from each other by tall marble pillars, whose Ionic capitals are adorned with painting and gilding. More than a thousand persons can move about with ease in every part of this magnificently lighted hall, and yet it does not appear crowded—scarcely even filled. In the most remote parts, where no dancing is going on, parties can saunter up and down with ease and freedom.

“We arrived about nine in the evening. Along the walls several groups were already seated on the crimson-velvet cushioned divans. How remarkable the scene that now presented itself! On the right, the men reclining at ease, in their gay and glittering Greek attire, the scarlet cap on their heads; on the left, the women, some in Greek, others in Frankish costumes. A few of the men were parading in the centre of the saloon, engaged in animated conversation. There could not be a more attractive sight than the contemplation of such a variety of costume and outward bearing. The simple black dress-coat prevailed least of all; then the diplomatic and military uniforms of the different embassies, and of the French, English, and Austrian fleets now stationed in the Piræus; but chiefly the Greek national costume, in all its striking varieties, from the gold-embroidered fustanella of the royal court marshals, to the simple loose Turkish trousers of the islanders. How wild and proud are the fine expressive countenances of these men! It almost seemed as if the smooth inlaid floor burnt beneath their feet—for their true home is on the rocky mountains, where they are their own masters, only issuing forth from time to time, in true middle-age fashion, on some jovial plundering expedition. There sits, for example, between two captains of Palikari, a fierce-looking old man, with white hair and a long flowing white beard, his curved sabre hanging at his side. His features are expressive of daring, but nobly chiselled: they remind one of the fine manly forms in which the old Byzantine mosaics represent the apostle Paul. This man is a warrior every inch. He is the famous Papa Kostas—called Papa because he was formerly a monk. Latterly he returned to the world, and became an honoured hero in the Greek Liberation war. Two years ago he wished to be elected deputy for his native town of Lamia; but government, to whom he was obnoxious, found means to frustrate his election. What did he then do? He incited the whole of his province to rebellion, and for six entire months the king had to carry on an open war with him. At length the royal troops succeeded in conquering him, and he then took flight into Turkey. After some time an amnesty was granted him; and now he is at a court-ball, but so proud and unsubdued, that, instead of a pardoned rebel, he looks like one who is waiting for the first favourable occasion to avenge the humiliation he has endured.

“There is in like manner some history about all these men. They are barbarians, but there is poetry in them; and it is quite intelligible that these wild mountaineers should have been victorious over the superior force of the enervated Turks.

“The saloon gets more and more crowded. Suddenly the general murmur ceases. The king appears with his blooming consort on his arm. Early in the morning a new French man-of-war had arrived in the Piræus, and the officers are now presented by the French ambassador. Immediately the Polonaise begins, the queen opening the ball with the Austrian ambassador. She is dressed in blue, embroidered with silver, her hair magnificently arranged in the European style. The king, on the contrary, is as usual in the glittering gold and silver gala-dress of the national Greek costume; he and the sister of the English resident minister make the second pair. The queen dances the second movement of the Polonaise with the president of the Chamber. He is a Hydriot, and wears the dress of the Greek islanders—dark blue, tight-fitting short jacket, wide bunchy Turkish trousers of the same colour, and between jacket and hose a simple red girdle. The king leads out the venerable matron, the wife of the president of the Chamber, who is also dressed in the costume worn by the women of the Greek islands—a blue silk dress with yellow stripes, a jacket of the same material, very much cut open in, front, the bosom covered with a silk handkerchief, also a little parted in front. In Berlin or Paris it would excite some wonderment to see such attire recognised as admissible at court.

“And now the ball begins in good earnest; no more national dances, but all in true European style. The king danced a great deal, and was most courteous and affable in his demeanour. But the queen shone above every one, and was the first in all the dances. She is a true knightly dame, the boldest equestrian in the land, and graceful above all in the dance. The young Greek ladies have shown great facility in acquiring the new dances. It would be difficult to discover a single national trait in them, were it not for the dark glancing eyes, the brown complexion, and their love of bright showy colours, which betray their half-southern, half-Oriental character. They almost all appeared in white ball-dress, but wearing over it an extremely beautiful little jacket of red velvet, richly embroidered with gold; and on the head, trimmed around with plaits of deep black hair, is placed coquettishly, inclined to one side, a little cap, also of red velvet embroidered with gold, exactly corresponding to the jacket.

“The Greek men do not mix in the dance. Some collect in quiet corners in groups; others contemplate languidly the strange foreign movements. How would these stately forms and costumes correspond with such unpoetic waltzing and whirling? The keenest dancers were the gentlemen of the diplomatic corps.”

Then follow some sentimental remarks about Themistocles, Pericles, and Plato, and how they would have looked dancing the polka; and how it is almost a profanation for young diplomatists to think of enjoying a dance at all, on ground where grave Aristotle walked, and stern Demosthenes thundered; and how a fine German “belletrist,” in the midst of such a gay scene, “cannot but feel every moment as if some sturdy old Marathonians would rush in, blow the lights out, and tear all the pretty Parisian frippery to rags.” Shade of Goethe, what nebulous nonsense even sensible Germans will speak and print! With us a young lady, passing stupidly out of her teens, and thinking of moonshine and marriage, would be ashamed formally to enunciate such trash.

Let us now look to

THE UNIVERSITY.

“All the more highly educated Greeks exhibit a lively interest in the newly-erected university at Athens, which is formed entirely on the German model. The professors are chiefly Greeks, who have studied at the French and German universities. Since the revolution of 1843, Landerer the chemist, and Fraas^[16] the botanist, are the only foreigners in the university, but they, like the others, lecture in Greek. The teachers, with the exception of the private tutors, are paid by the state; they have, on an average, seven hundred dollars, but no honorarium for the lectures. The influx of students is very great, amounting to more than four hundred, which would be inconceivable in so thinly-populated a country, were it not that numbers come from Epirus, Thessaly, and Asia Minor; also from Turkish Greece, and even, (so great is the feeling of nationality,) from the Ionian Islands, although there is a Greek university in Corfu. The Athenian professors point with pride to this fact, alleging that their university forms thus the centre of all the Grecian countries, many of them now under foreign rule, and as such is perhaps the nursery of a future political union.

“No university in the whole world is placed on a site so rich in associations. When the student comes out of the lecture-room, and saunters in the open piazzas which form the entrance, he has before him the empurpled range of Hymettus, whose bees are proverbially associated with the glory of Attic wisdom and art; and the venerable Acropolis, with the towering pillars of the Parthenon, remind him of the ancient glory of his country. Where is the youth who would not feel his heart elevated by such noble recollections?

“And yet these wings are only the wings of Icarus; they cannot perform impossibilities. True culture and a national literature and art can only exist where there is material prosperity, and an education extending to all ranks of the people. There is, however, no sense of the importance of instruction; for in most places the lowest elementary schools are not to be found, scarcely even a few miserable attempts at such. Government has committed the fault of working from above downwards, instead of from beneath upwards, and has proceeded forcibly to engraft the most extreme points—even the excrescences of European customs and refinement—on the prevailing barbarism. They have erected four gymnasia at Athens, Syra, Patras, and Nauplia; but the people’s schools are still in the condition in which Capo d’Istria left them; indeed, general evil report says rather worse than better. How can we reap unless we sow? How can the building stand firm, when the foundation is awanting?

“It is, therefore, a quite fruitless and premature, though well-meant, endeavour that has been made by some of the more noble-minded Greeks, since the happy issue of the Liberation War, to found a modern Greek literature. The attempt, however, has had the merit of purifying the language, and assimilating it to the ancient Greek. But so long as Greek culture has no firm root in itself, all such endeavours must prove imperfect imitations of foreign models. I fear much that a hideous mildew is already nipping the blossom in the bud. Among the many discouraging impressions caused by the present state of Greece, the most so to me was, that the booksellers’ shops are almost exclusively filled with the worst sort of new French romances. It is here much as with the poor inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, who have gained nothing by their intercourse with enlightened Europe but the poison of whisky.”

These remarks open up the whole question of education and intellectual culture in Greece—a vista far too wide for our detailed survey on the present occasion; but we must add a few remarks by way of necessary correction. We have met persons to whom the university of Athens was as much “a myth” as any of those nebulous allegories into which German scepticism weens that it has dissipated the solid traditions of an old Attic Theseus, and other classical monarchs. But the testimony of our traveller here is most decided to the point, that the university of Athens is an existing fact, and one of the most real and significant in the whole history of the restored nationality of this remarkable people. All persons who have lived even for a short period in familiar converse with the Greek people, have felt that, in a remarkable degree, they have retained that quickness of intellectual perception, that eagerness for knowledge, which was so characteristic of their ancestors. It is well known, also, to persons who have looked into the recent history of this people, that the political revolution, by which they threw off the yoke of Turkish oppression, was preceded by an intellectual revolution which taught them to shake off the night of Turkish ignorance; and Corais is, in fact, a name not less mighty in the history of Greek liberty than Miaulis or Mavrocordato. Under these circumstances, that education should have been a main concern with the new Greek government was just what was to have been expected. To have shown indifference in such a matter would have argued a complete blindness to the finest capabilities of the materials under hand. Nor has Bavarian Otho, so far as we can see, laid himself open to any charge of neglect on this score. Mr Hettner, in the strictures which he pays in the above passage, proceeds, we are afraid, on a very insufficient basis of facts, and is also vulnerable in point of logic. It is far from being true, as he says, that a people must be educated from below upwards. The upper classes are everywhere more open to educational influences than the lower; and in semi-barbarous countries, such as Greece and Russia, it is a necessity which cannot be avoided, that the elements of intellectual culture shall, in the first place, be imported from the more advanced surrounding nations; and the importers of such merchandise must be the upper classes. To enable them to appropriate, elaborate, and assimilate the materials thus thrown in upon them, a university is the natural and most convenient, if not the absolutely indispensable instrument. How, it may be asked, is the state to obtain well-informed statesmen, lawyers, theologians, physicians, and teachers, without a university? Surely the judge must be made wise before the attorney, and the parish priest rather than the parishioner. A peasant may hew wood and draw water without learning, but scarcely will a gospel text be well expounded, or a surgeon’s cut dexterously performed. There appears to us, therefore, nothing blameworthy in a government of a new country erecting a university first, and parish schools afterwards. But the facts with regard to elementary education in Greece are by no means such as our German reporter represents. It may be quite true that the educational law of the Greek kingdom, according to which there should be a primary school in every δημος or commune, has not yet been everywhere carried out; it may be true, also, considering the immense extent of desolate districts in Greece, that some of the miserable ill-peopled villages that compose a district are at very inconvenient distances from the δημος where their school is situated; but this is only a hardship arising out of the general state of poverty in which the whole country lies, to which familiar analogies are at hand in the ecclesiastical condition of many of our own Highland parishes. And with regard to the general state of education among the lower orders of Greece, the writer can state, from personal observation, that it is by no means suffering generally from any such neglect as Mr Hettner imputes to the present government. During a tour of several weeks in continental Greece, the present writer was constantly in the habit of conversing with the peasant boys, as a sort of pleasant amusement after the fatigues of equestrian travel in the hot days of June; and as the conversation, however it might start, often ended with schooling and school-books, he had frequent opportunities of observing, not only the remarkable quickness of their juvenile Hellenic wit, but the general prevalence of a fair school-training among the rising generation. The subjects with which they seemed most conversant, and on which they always produced three well-thumbed school-books, were Greek history, Scripture history, and general geography. They very often also produced a Romaic New Testament; and there seemed to be not the least shyness (as there might be in Italy) of exhibiting a familiarity with its contents. The New Testament, indeed, in the Greek Church, does not seem to be a forbidden book at all. A certain class of priests, no doubt, with Oeconomus at their head, will look with shyness on the preachings of Protestant missionaries, and exhibit more or less of that tendency to monopolise the Scriptures in the hands of self-authorised interpreters, which is so characteristic of Popery; but in general the Greeks seem to entertain no suspicion that there is anything in the Scriptures contrary to their “orthodox faith;” and a jealous sacerdotal tyranny never was established in the East during the middle ages, and is not at all likely to be carried through now.^[17]

As little of kindly or reasonable criticism do we find in Herr Hettner’s remarks on the influence of French literature on the living Greek mind, and on the existing literature of Greece generally. From the very nature of the case, as we have already said, the literature of Greece must, for a considerable period, be a literature of appropriation; and as the French language, for obvious reasons, happens to be the most generally known among the educated classes in that part of the world, it is as necessary that those who are in search of amusement should read French novels, as that those who are in search of strange philological erudition among ourselves should go to Germany. What our author means by his remark, that it is “a quite fruitless and premature endeavour in the Greeks to attempt the founding of a modern Greek literature,” it were hard to say. No literature, in the highest sense, can be founded till God sends forth original genius to found it; and it is true also that, except upon the basis of a certain degree of material prosperity, that extent of luxurious intellectual culture which we call a national literature cannot be expected to rise; but in the mean time, till the conditions favourable to such a higher development shall arise, the Greeks are busying themselves, and have been busying themselves since the time of Corais and Righas, mainly in appropriating whatever their need most loudly calls for, not only from French, but to a great extent also from German, Italian, and English sources; while, at the same time, they have not been averse to give whatever nurture was possible to the first germ and tender blade of an original and truly Hellenic modern literature. Into the details of this matter our limits do not allow us to enter; but were the purification of their language the only fruit which the renewed activity of the liberated Greek mind had produced, it would have deserved a more kindly mention than the cold sympathy of Mr Hettner allows. Those who know to what a state centuries of neglect and abuse had brought the fine language of Homer and Plato, will at once perceive the great public service performed by that band of patriotic translators and original writers who have, in the course of two generations, made Greek—pure Greek—a second time the grand organ of a national culture and a popular regeneration.^[18]

A glimpse into the Greek Church, as it exists at Athens, will now gratify the just curiosity of many of our readers. Take the following graphic account of the celebration of Easter:—

“10th April.

“All is gaiety here to-day. It is Easter week, and Easter is the principal festival of the Greek Church. Athens presents at this season a remarkable appearance. The Greeks observe the fasts with great strictness, therefore they indemnify themselves on Easter morning by an exhibition of license, in which the paschal lamb performs the principal part. I was told as a fact, that at Easter, in Athens alone, from twelve to fifteen thousand, and throughout Greece more than two hundred thousand, lambs and sheep are slaughtered and eaten. The country people out of every part of Attica keep driving their flocks into the city the whole week. The city of the goddess of wisdom is now full of nothing but bleating lambs.

“When the Greek carries home his lamb, he slings it round his neck, holding it by the feet crossed over his breast. This is to be seen with us also; but the sight is especially attractive here, for it was in this manner the ancients represent Hermes as the guardian and multiplier of the flocks. So stood the statue of Hermes at Olympia, Oechalia, and Tanagra. Small marble statues of this kind have even come down to us, one of which is to be seen in the Pembroke collection at Wilton House; another, a smaller one, here in the Stoa of Hadrian. This representation, however, appears most frequently in the oldest works of Christian art, in which the laden Hermes is turned into a laden Christ, who often called himself the Good Shepherd, and expressly says in the Gospel of St Luke, that when the shepherd finds the sheep, he lays it joyfully on his shoulders.

“In Easter week a fair is also held, and much skill displayed in decking out the wares. Candles are the chief article of trade; for no Greek, on this occasion, enters a church without bearing in his hand a candle or taper. These candles are mostly painted in variegated colours, and prettily disposed in the booths according to their different colours—some alike, others in direct contrast. The Greek people are still sticking fast in old heathen customs and ways of thinking. These booths, and the greater number of the shops also, are decked out with all sorts of pictures and images on which the possessors can lay their hands. They display images of the saints, pictures of the battles of the Liberation War, portraits of Napoleon and Frederick the Great, and, not unfrequently, even modern French pictures of equivocal meaning, coloured and lithographed, all mixed up together without any attempt at order. Round these pictures hang lamps and candles, many of them adorned with gold tinsel and stripes of coloured paper, often artistically twisted together to represent chandeliers. In the midst of all this lumber stands a huge image of Christ or of the Virgin; and the object of this is manifest. In true heathen fashion, Christ and the Virgin are supposed to be really present in their images, and enjoying the sight of these motley groups, and lights are placed there that they may see them the better. How rude and childish all this seems, and yet how entirely corresponding to the most ancient image-worship!

“The remains of this ancient heathen tendency were especially evident in the solemnities of Good Friday, at least in the evening, for during the day the celebration was uniform enough. Morning and afternoon divine service. The whole church streamed with lights, for every one held piously a taper in his hand. In the centre of the church lay, under a high canopy, a wax figure of the dead body of Christ. Every one, without distinction of sex, age, or rank, approached this figure, and fervently kissed it. There was not a moment of quiet or repose, but a constant moving to and fro of the restless multitude. Added to this, the constant singing of a frightfully monotonous, mournful liturgy, in the usual nasal tone. Late in the evening the solemnity suddenly assumed a more imposing form. The canopy, with the figure of Christ tastefully adorned with flowers, was borne through the streets, priests and people, men and women, devoutly following, torch in hand—the procession flowing on like a moving sea of lights. A peculiar melancholy lay was sung, now in a low mournful tone, now breaking out into loud bursts of grief. This dirge is for the dead Christ, who is solemnly borne to the grave. The procession lasts for more than an hour, when at length the image is again set down in the church, and the former dirges and liturgies resound anew, only in a still more mournful and inconsolable tone.

“I know not whether I am correct, yet I cannot help expressing what I felt, that this nocturnal funeral procession involuntarily reminded me of those grand processions by torchlight in the times of the ancient Athenians, made to Eleusis at the great Eleusinian festival. The ancient Greek origin of this peculiar celebration of Good Friday seems the more evident to me, as I never witnessed in Rome, on the same occasion, any public procession of a similar nature, at least not in the streets, or accompanied by the whole of the people. The procession in the Vatican on Good Friday, when the body of Christ is borne from the Sistine chapel into that of St Paul, lasts but a few minutes, and is only a piece of priestly pageantry, confined to the Pope and the cardinals.

“It is not difficult, however, to imagine how the same feelings and solemnities which marked the Eleusinian mysteries should have crept imperceptibly into the Christian services of Easter. The Eleusinian mysteries celebrate the grief of Demeter for the loss of her daughter Proserpine, who was stolen away by Pluto; and then comes loud rejoicing when this daughter issues forth again from the darkness of the infernal regions, and unites with the joy-dispensing wine-god in imparting to man the blessings of their mysteries. In the celebration of the Christian festival of Easter there is the same display of opposing emotions, the quick transition from grief to joy, from loss to restoration, from the interment to the resurrection. New gods have arisen, but the old worship is the same. As the ancient Greeks fasted and prayed and did penance while Proserpine remained in the lower world, so do the Greeks of Christendom fast and pray and do penance for the death of the Saviour. And just as in the Eleusinian mysteries, after these days of bitter mourning, there was the most extravagant rejoicing over the return of Proserpine, drinking, and dancing, when all

‘Beat the ground with violent foot—

For the unreined joy-intoxicated

Wanton celebration!

Each one danced the gracious,

Thrice graceful, and thrice holy

Mystical measure;’

so does now the Christian Greek pass at once from the rigid fasting of Passion Week to the most unbridled license. The moment the bishop at the midnight hour on Easter eve gives utterance to the much-longed-for words, ‘Christ is risen; yea, He is risen indeed!’ loud rejoicings are heard from all quarters, shrill screaming and shouting, constant shooting, and throwing of rockets, roasting and eating the lamb, and drinking unmixed wine. The first day of Easter is the only day on which the Greek drinks except for thirst; so uniformly temperate is he, indeed, that he detests nothing more than to see the German stranger swaggering along, without shame, drunk in the open streets.”

All this is very characteristic and interesting enough, considering how little is generally known in this country of the Greek Church; it is sad, however, to think that the facts here given present so little essentially different from that continental Rome with which we are so familiar, and so much of the outward and sensuous trickery of what our author recognises as mere heathenism. The low state of the Greek Church, indeed, will be most readily appreciated from the fact, that while the recitation of long prayers and litanies is going on diligently in a thousand churches and chapels every morning, it is the rarest chance in the world to find a Sunday or holiday when, even at Athens, such a thing as a sermon or Christian address of any kind is delivered to the people. This circumstance, which may be easily verified on the spot, is a plain proof that the ceremonial element in the Greek service has altogether overshadowed and almost absorbed the intellectual and moral: in other words, that an element characteristic of pure heathenism has been transplanted into the Christian soil, and allowed to grow to such luxuriance that the native vegetation, characteristic of Christianity, has almost entirely disappeared; for we never can forget that it was by the “foolishness of preaching,” and not by the nasal drone of drowsy litanies, that St Paul confounded the Epicurean philosophers on the Hill of Mars, and made the famous image of Diana of the Ephesians tremble in its silver shrine. A Christian church without preaching, is a Christian church without intelligence; and such a church cannot exist with any propriety in an age which prides itself in the general diffusion of knowledge, and among a people of whose character intellectual quickness has always been a more prominent trait than moral probity. Of all this, well-educated men in Greece—and of these there is no lack—are sufficiently aware. But over and above the fact that all churches are apt to display a remarkable obduracy in the matter of reform, in the case of the Greek Church an additional difficulty arises from patriotic and political considerations. In Greece, not only the devout believer, but the intelligent Greek who is not devout, is well aware that his Church is to the Greek, more than to any other people in Europe, the great bond of his nationality. It was within the bosom of this Church that freedom of mind, and of speech also, to a considerable extent, was preserved at Byzantium, in an age when the tyrannous spirit of imperial centralisation had choked every other utterance of individual life. It was the traditions, the service, and, to some extent also, the learning of the Greek clergy, which preserved the Greek language an inestimable heirloom to the Greek people during a long course of centuries, when Slavonic barbarism, Turkish bigotry, and Turkish oppression, successively threatened its extinction. It was, finally, a primate of the Greek Church, Germanós, the Archbishop of Patras, that in 1821 first planted the standard of independence among the mountain-peaks of the Northern Morea. Under these circumstances it is easy enough to understand how a certain amiable piety prevents the religious Greek from wishing to disturb his patriotic Mother Church with innovations, which, however plausible in their outset, might end in breaking up the unity of that venerable religious corporation which has hitherto kept together his disintegrated and scattered nationality. And if such considerations operate strongly with the devout Greek, the mere politician will, of course, feel them more strongly. To him the Church, even in its purest state, is only a convenient moral police; and an unreformed church which keeps a people together, is, as a political instrument, more valuable than a reformed church which disunites them. We see no likelihood, therefore, at the present moment, of any reform in the Greek Church, such as pious Protestant writers have hoped for. The political interest, not the religious, is at present the dominant power in the Greek mind. A single sentence from Lord Palmerston or Lord Aberdeen, pointing towards a division of Turkey, and a restoration of the Greek empire at Constantinople, would stir the whole nation much more deeply than did a late notable ecclesiastical pamphlet by Pharmacides, one of their most talented theologians. The painted candles and the gilt tinsel, the roasted lamb and the cracks of gunpowder, and, above all abominations, that inhuman nasal drone with which they chant their service, are likely to remain in the Greek ecclesiastical world a long season after the Greeks themselves have by a great majority voted them gone. Alas for poor humanity! So it happens in other churches also sometimes. The living are condemned to walk the streets with a dead corpse on their backs, and must call it an ornament.

In concluding these hasty notices of the present condition of so famous a city, may we be allowed to express a hope that the pedantic habits fostered by our schools and universities, of considering modern Greece and modern Greeks as things with which scholars have nothing to do, may forthwith be given up. Greece and the Greeks are no longer what they were under the Turks—very different, as we have seen, in some respects, from what they were when visited by Wordsworth. Like Pompeii, which slumbered for centuries within the ashes of Vesuvius, and then came to light suddenly one of these modern days, to astonish us with the resurrection of a lost people, and a forgotten epoch; so a Greek people and a Greek language have certainly risen from the dead since the commencement of this century, and their living presence cannot be ignored. We should advise our academical men, unless they are ambitious of imitating the obdurate conservatism of the Greek Church, to throw off at once the capricious pronunciation of the Greek language, which was imposed on Europe by the pleasant conceit of Erasmus, and take up again that living tradition of the Byzantine elders, from which Erasmus himself, and all our great early scholars, drew their inspiration. They will thus not only do a thing reasonable and scholarly in itself, but resume at once that direct connection with the living Greek language which the present bastard pronunciation renders on our part so difficult. In Europe the railways and steamboats, as we constantly hear, have annihilated space and time; and a scholarly trip to the Acropolis is neither so difficult nor so expensive an affair now as it was thirty years ago. Athens, no doubt, is a bad school for quantity; but there are many things in Greek as important as long and short syllables; and some very important things certainly there are which a scholar may learn in Athens, not so readily to be picked up at Oxford or Cambridge. We hope the day is not far distant when it will be considered as natural for a scholar to take part of his Greek education in Greece, as for a sculptor to drink in beauty from the marble treasures of the Vatican and the Capitol; and when no philologist will consider himself properly qualified for his work, who has not heard Greek lectures under the shadow of Lycabettus, and made classic vows at the tombs of Otfried Mueller on Colonus.

583