But if your motive be to acquire thereby a commercial asset which may forward your future prospects, leave the work alone. You will, in the present state of feeling in England, forward those prospects much more effectively by other means.
In all work in Greece malaria is a factor which has to be very seriously reckoned with. There has been much both of exaggeration and of understatement current upon the subject. It so happens that many of the most interesting sites in Greece are in localities notoriously unhealthy —Pylos and Thermopylæ are examples in point. Of the rare visitors to Pylos, two have died there since I was at the place in August, 1895; and of the population of about two hundred fisher-folk living near the lagoon in that year, not one was over the age of forty. The malaria fiend claims them in the end, and the end comes soon. At Thermopylæ, in this last summer, I escaped the fever, but caught ophthalmia in the marshes. An Englishman who was with me, and also our Greek servant, had bad attacks of fever.
On the whole, I prefer the spring as the season for work. The summer may be very hot. During the four weeks I was at Navarino the thermometer never fell below 93° Fahrenheit, night or day, and rose to 110° or 112° in the absolute darkness of a closed house at midday. What it was in the sun at this time, I do not know. I tried it with my thermometer, forgetting that it only registered to 140°, with disastrous results to the thermometer.
At Thermopylæ in 1899 the nights were, in July and August, invariably cool, though the heat at midday was very great; so much so that you could not, without using a glove, handle metal which had been exposed to it.
The winter is, I think, a bad time for exploration,—in Northern Greece at any rate. Rain and snow may make work impossible, and the mud on the tracks in the plain must be experienced in order to be appreciated. Snow, moreover, may render the passes untraversable.
To one who undertakes survey work in circumstances similar to those in which I have been placed, the expense of travelling in Greece is considerable. Survey instruments are cumbrous, if not heavy paraphernalia. Moreover, as I have been obliged to do the work within the limits of Oxford vacations, and as the journey to Greece absorbs much time, it has been necessary for me to labour at somewhat high pressure while in the country. Twelve hours’ work a day under a Greek sun, with four hours’ work besides, demands that the doer should be in the best of condition. One is therefore obliged to engage a servant to act as cook and purveyor, since the native food and cooking are not of a kind to support a Western European in a healthy bodily state for any length of time. In case of survey, moreover, it is just as well to choose a servant who knows personally some of the people of the district in which the work is carried on, as suspicions are much more easy to arouse than to allay, and original research may connect itself in the native mind with an increase of the land-tax.
There are very few parts of Greece where it is dangerous to travel without an escort. Since the recent war with Turkey, the North has been a little disturbed, and brigandage has never been quite stamped out in the Œta and Othrys region. But it is not the organized brigandage of old times; nor, I believe, in the vast majority of cases, are the crimes committed by the resident population. The Vlach shepherds, who come over from Turkish Epirus in the summer with their flocks, are usually the offenders. Throughout nine-tenths of the area of the country an Englishman may travel with just as much personal security as in his own land.
The Greeks are a kindly, hospitable race. The Greek peasant is a gentleman; and, if you treat him as such, he will go far out of his way to help you. If you do not, there may be disagreeables.
I cannot acknowledge all the written sources of assistance to which I have had recourse in compiling this volume, because I cannot recall the whole of a course of reading which has extended over a period of ten years.
Of Greek histories I have used especially those of Curtius, Busolt, Grote and Holm; of editions of Herodotus those of Stein and Macan. Of special books, I have largely used the French edition of Maspero’s “Passing of the Empires,” and Rawlinson’s “Herodotus.” I have read Hauvette’s exhaustive work on “Hérodote, Historien des Guerres Médiques.” I have not, however, been able to use it largely, as I find that my method of dealing with the evidence differs very considerably from his.