Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

The Greeks, compared with the hoary antiquity of the Egyptians, are late comers. The essential difference, however, is not a matter of centuries or millennia. The Egyptians, perhaps because the details are foreshortened by the vast distance, seem to possess a chronology, but no real history. There were revolutions, rather than evolution. The Greeks were young, too, individually as well as chronologically. From Homer down through the classic period we hear “the everlasting wonder-song of youth.” Plato makes an Egyptian priest say to the Athenian law-giver: “O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever children; no Hellene is ever old!” We find the Greeks of the historic period on the intellectual watershed between antiquity and the modern world. From data now well established we may push back their life far beyond recorded chronology, and, if we anticipate even by a little the nucleus of the Homeric poems, we possess a practically unbroken continuity of their history and language for three thousand years down to the present day. Greek history is often confined within perfectly arbitrary dates. In reality, the death of Alexander in 323 B. C., the closing of the schools of philosophy in 529 A. D., and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A. D. only break its course into convenient chapters.

The Greek language is itself one of the greatest creations of Greek art. Discarding some superfluities, retained or over-emphasized by others of our common Indo-European family, the Greeks developed an instrument for the expression of thought unsurpassed, if not unequalled, among any other people. “The whole language resembles the body of an artistically trained athlete, in which every muscle is called into full play, where there is no trace of flaccid tumidity, and all is power and life.” The “common dialect” already dominated the eastern Mediterranean before the Romans took physical possession. Its direct legatee is the modern Greek, that had sprung up in lusty independence some three centuries before the Turks put an end to senile Byzantium and its crabbed ecclesiastical speech.

Of creative literature the same unbroken continuity cannot be predicated. The early literature, beginning with Homer, extends through the first quarter of the fifth century B. C. It includes the great epic poetry, the elegiac and iambic, the beginnings of philosophy, and seven of the ten greatest lyric poets. No fact in Greek literature is more conspicuous than the shortness and the richness of the next period, which may be conveniently called the “Attic,” although some of the greatest writers came from outside of Attica—from Bœotia, from the islands, from beyond the Ægean, or from Sicily. Within this brief period of only 183 years, if we close it with the death of Menander in 292 B. C., all the additional types of the literature either culminated or originated.

The next period of 150 years, commonly known as the Alexandrian period, has within its early limits the name of Theocritus, whose quality entitles him to rank with the writers of the Classic period, as does that of his two legatees, Bion and Moschus, and also Herodas, whose writings, recovered in the fortunate year 1891, have now made him a part of the Greek Classics. But in the Alexandrian period, and in the Græco-Roman period from 146 B. C. to 529 A. D., the great names are, as a rule, not so great, and they are spread over a long time. Few of them, except Lucian in the second century of our era, and Plutarch immediately preceding him, successfully compete for a prominent place as writers of pure literature.

With a few exceptions, the great original work in Greek literature had been done before the death of Menander. The Greek anthology, however, must not be ignored. It ranges over more than one thousand years and leaves no century in all that time without at least some minor representative of great beauty. Like a cord twisted of dull strands and golden, it binds together the Attic age with the whole of the subsequent time down to the year 550 of our era, the golden strand reappearing sufficiently often to assure us of its continuity. The next nine centuries of Byzantine Greek, ecclesiastical and profane, are little known to most classical scholars. The contributions of the modern Greek, before and since the days of Byron, are significant, and the friends of the new kingdom await with cordial expectation the rise of new writers to give to the lore of the peasant and the struggles of the patriot a worthy literary form. Of the lacunæ in the literature, in spite of the continuity of the language, Professor Hatzidakis of Athens has well said: “The Greek language is as little to be blamed for this as could be the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus, because in those times no one fashioned from them a Hermes of Praxiteles or a Venus of Melos.”

A glance at the map will show how accessible was the mainland of Greece, upon the east and south, to seafaring visitors from across the Ægean, who would naturally find here their first landing-places. Except for the great gash of the Corinthian Gulf, the western coast is indented only with smaller, though good, harbours, while the whole southern and eastern seaboard from Messenia in the southwest to Thrace is a ragged fringe of promontories, large and small, welcoming into the interior the waters that suggested sea-business of war and commerce.

But this interlacing of land and water, that brought the insinuating “call of the sea,” was not the only factor that predetermined the character of the Greek cantons. The Greeks were mountaineers as well as mariners. One is, indeed, almost tempted to speak of Greece as consisting of only mountains and marina. There are of course some relatively large plains, notably the fertile granary of Thessaly, but the general impression of the land from any bird’s-eye view is a succession of lofty ridges, peaks, and spurs. Only by many shiftings of the place of outlook do these partially resolve themselves into ranges continuous in certain general directions, though with many sharp angles and curves and buttressed by uncompromising cross ridges. These mountain barriers make clear the history of the Greek peoples, both how they combined temporarily to resist foreign invasion and, above all, why they developed and cherished in tiny cantons their characteristic individualism, which has been by turns a bane and a blessing.

Thessaly and Mount Olympus to the north belong geographically to the Kingdom of Greece. On either side of Thessaly irregular mountain chains run southward and preserve a general connection through Central Greece and Attica, and, despite the submerging water, may be identified as reappearing in the islands far out in the Ægean. Olympus on the northeast—hardly interrupted by the river Peneius, which has rent its way through the precipitous cañon known as the “Vale” of Tempe—is continued along the east coast by Mount Ossa and Mount Pelion. Then across the narrow entrance to the Pagasæan and Malian gulfs the system is continued by the sharp dorsal fins of the island of Eubœa, that stretches like a sea-monster along the shores of Locris, Bœotia, and Attica, to reappear at intervals far to the southeast in the islands Andros, Tenos, Myconos, Delos, Naxos, Amorgos, and Astypalæa. On the west of Thessaly the great Pindus ridge, descending through the centre of northern Greece, details on the rugged system of peaks and ranges which fill central Greece southward to the Gulf of Corinth and which in general run from west to east. One of these ranges, called the Othrys Mountains, bounds the Thessalian countries on the south and ends at the Gulf of Pagasæ. Another, Mount Œta, is continued by the high mountains that shut off Thermopylæ to the north and runs on as the boundary between Locris and Bœotia. Still another range, running out of the central complex, has its culmination in Parnassus, 8070 feet high, and is continued, though more interrupted and with a more irregular course, by Mount Helicon in Bœotia and the frontier hills of Attica, from Helicon to Parnes, and bends around into the massive ridge of Mount Pentelicus, from whose summit the spectator can see the prolongation in the islands of Ceos, Cythnos, Seriphos, and others beyond.

The narrow neck that divides the Corinthian from the Saronic Gulf and connects Attica and Bœotia with the Peloponnesus, lifts up among its rugged hills in Megara the picturesque twin peaks of the Kerata. South of the isthmus itself, with its narrow plain and the deep cutting necessary for the canal, rises the splendid acropolis of Acrocorinth, keeping guard at the entrance to the “Island of Pelops.”

The Peloponnesus, or Morea, is a rugged complex of mountains that by turns shut out and admit the sea. Of its four irregular peninsulas, jutting out southward in the Argolis and in Laconia and Messenia, each has its mountain system; the more broken hills in the Argolid plain; the ridge of Parnon to the east of the plain of Lacedæmon; the imposing barrier of Taygetus between Sparta and Messenia. In Messenia itself are fertile plains. One is in the midland, as the name Messenia originally implied, among offshoots of the Arcadian Lycæus; while the great mountain fortress of Ithome, 2600 feet high, where crops could be reared and an army supported, towering above the hills and plains of central Messenia, looks down on another larger plain, almost tropical in its products, that stretches southward to the gulf.