To the giddy words and the infectious tune, a dozen men sprang to their feet. They held out their handkerchiefs to each other, and instantly there was a garland of dancing brigands about the fire. It was our national dance, the Syrto, and they went through it with gusto and passion.
By the time that was over, the lamb was cooked. We were invited to sit round in a circle; the meat was torn apart with the hands, and a piece dealt to each person.
Each brigand crossed himself three times, and then fell to, ravenously. I enjoyed my dinner as much as they. My poor brother pretended to. As I learned afterwards, he was afraid that the brigands would kill us from mere annoyance, when they discovered that we were not the rich pair they believed they had in their possession.
The meal over, the brigands crossed themselves again devoutly, and thanked God, and His Son Christ, for the protection they had hitherto extended to them. Then they began to talk of their exploits. Far from being conscience-stricken, or in any way ashamed of their profession, they gloried in it; and being in constant warfare with the Turkish soldiery, they felt a really patriotic pride in their manner of life.
They told of running a certain Turkish officer through the heart without the slightest pity for the man, or shame of the deed. Was he not a Turk, their arch enemy, and the enemy of their race? Their point of view on the ethics of life was quite original to me, and as they boasted of the things they had done, something barbaric in me responded to their recitals. I loved them, and as for their leader, he was a real hero to me.
Again they passed from themselves to the heroic period of the Armateloi and Kleftai, when brigandage attained its apotheosis.
After the fall of Constantinople, the Greeks were powerless against the Turks. The other powers of Europe, during two hundred years, were too frightened to think of more than saving their own skins; and when, later, they did interfere in behalf of the Christians under the Ottoman yoke, they did so only as an excuse for their personal gain.
Thus the Greeks had to depend on themselves, and in time the flower of Greek manhood took to the mountains. Then the wrongs done by the Turks, to their weak and defenceless fellow-countrymen, were fiercely and brutally punished by these brigands. It was these Armateloi and Kleftai who put an end to the human tax which the Greeks had been forced to pay the conqueror. If a little girl was taken by force from a Greek home, the brigands would fall upon a Turkish village, and avenge the wrong on the women and children of the Turks.
It was a very rough form of justice; but gradually the Turks began to fear the brigands, and in this fear they became more considerate toward the Greeks.
That period, with all its ferocity and unspeakable brutality, was the period of modern Greek chivalry; for those men did not attack for money. They levied on the people merely for enough to live; but when they descended on them as avengers of their countrymen’s wrongs they were merciless—and they did rob the Turkish garrisons. In the Revolution of 1821, much of the powder used by the Greeks was Turkish powder, and many a Turk died by a gun he once had carried.