Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

Thebes is remarkable for its excellent supply of water. Apart from the fountain Dirke,[99] several [pg 236]other great springs rise in the higher ground close to it, and are led by old Greek conduits of marble to the town. One of these springs was large enough to allow us to bathe—a most refreshing change after the long and hot carriage drive, especially in the ice-cold water, as it came from its deep hiding-place. We returned at eight in the evening to dine with our excellent host—a host provided for us by telegraph from Athens—where we had ample opportunity of noticing some of the peculiarities of modern Greek life.

The general elections were at the moment pending. M. Boulgaris had just échoue, as the French say; and the King, after a crisis in which a rupture of the Constitution had been expected, decided to try a constitutional experiment, and called to office M. Trikoupi, an advanced Radical in those days, and strongly opposed to the Government. But M. Trikoupi was a highly educated and reasonable man, well acquainted with England and English politics, and apparently anxious to govern by strictly constitutional means. He has since proved himself, by his able and vigorous administration, one of the most remarkable statesmen in Europe, and the main cause of the progress of his country. His recent defeat (1890) is therefore to be regarded as a national misfortune. Our new friend at Thebes was then the [pg 237]Radical candidate, and was at the very time of our arrival canvassing his constituency. Every idle fellow in the town seemed to think it his duty to come up into his drawing-room, in which we were resting, and sit down to encourage him and advise him. No hint that he was engaged in entertaining strangers had the smallest effect: noisy politics was inflicted upon us till the welcome announcement of dinner, to which, for a wonder, his constituents did not follow him. He told me that though all the country was strongly in favor of M. Trikoupi, yet he could hardly count upon a majority with certainty, for he had determined to let the elections follow their own course, and not control them with soldiers. In this most constitutional country, with its freedom, as usual, closely imitated from England, soldiers stood, at least up to the summer of 1875, round the booths, and hustled out any one who did not come to vote for the Ministerial candidate. M. Trikoupi refused to take this traditional precaution, and, as the result showed, lost his sure majority.

But when I was there, and before the actual elections had taken place, the Radical party were very confident. They were not only to come in triumphant, but their first act was to be the prosecution of the late Prime Minister, M. Boulgaris, for violating the Constitution, and his condemnation to hard labor, with confiscation of his property. I used to plead the poor man’s case earnestly with these hot-headed [pg 238]politicians, by way of amusement, and was highly edified by their arguments. The ladies, as usual, were by far the fiercest, and were ready, like their goddess of old, to eat the raw flesh of their enemies. I used to ask them whether it would not be quite out of taste if Mr. Disraeli, then in power, were to prosecute Mr. Gladstone for violating the Constitution in his Irish Church Act, and have him condemned to hard labor. The cases, they replied, were quite different. No Englishman could ever attain, or even understand, the rascality of the late Greek Minister. Feeling that there might be some force in this argument, I changed ground, and asked them were they not afraid that if he were persecuted in so violent a way he might, instead of occupying the Opposition benches, betake himself to occupy the mountain passes, and, by robbing a few English travellers, so discredit the new Government as to be worse and more dangerous in opposition than in power. No, they said, he will not do that; he is too rich. But, said I, if you confiscate his property, he will be poor. True, they replied; but still he will not be able to do it: he is too old. It seemed as if the idea that he might be too respectable never crossed their minds.[100] What was my surprise to [pg 239]hear within six months that this dreadful culprit had come into power again at the head of a considerable majority!

We were afterward informed by a sarcastic observer that many of the Greek politicians are paupers, “who will not dig, and to beg they are ashamed;” and so they sit about the cafés of Athens on the look-out for one of the 10,000 places which have been devised for the patronage of the Ministry. But, as there are some 30,000 expectants, it follows that the 20,000 disappointed are always at work seeking to turn out the 10,000. Hence a crisis every three months; hence a Greek ambassador could hardly reach his destination before he was recalled; hence, too, the exodus of all thrifty and hard-working men to Smyrna, to Alexandria, or to Manchester, where their energies were not wasted in perpetual political squabbling. The greatest misconduct with which a man in office could be charged was the holding of it for any length of time; the whole public then join against him, and cry out that it is high time for him, after so long an innings, to make way for some one else. It was not till M. Trikoupi established his ascendency that this ridiculous condition of things ceased. Whether in office or in opposition, he has a policy, and retains the confidence of foreign powers. I had added, in the first edition of this book, some [pg 240]further observations on the apparent absurdity of introducing the British Constitution, or some parody of it, into every new state which is rescued from barbarism or from despotism. I am not the least disposed to retract what I then said generally, but it is common justice to the Greeks to say that later events are showing them to be among the few nations where such an experiment may succeed. When the dangerous crisis of the Turco-Russian war supervened, instead of rushing to arms, as they were advised by some fanatical English politicians, they set about to reform their Ministry; and, feeling the danger of perpetually changing the men at the helm, they insisted on the heads of the four principal parties forming a coalition, under the nominal leadership of M. Canaris.[101] This great political move, one of the most remarkable of our day, was attempted, as far as I can make out, owing to the deliberate pressure of the country, and from a solid interest in its welfare. Even though temporary in the present case, it was an earnest that the Greeks are learning national politics, and that a liberal constitution is not wasted upon them. There are many far more developed and important nations in Europe which [pg 241]would not be capable of such a sacrifice of party interests and party ambition.

We left Thebes, very glad that we had seen it, but not very curious to see it again. Its site makes it obviously the natural capital of the rich plain around it; and we can also see at once how the larger and richer plain of Orchomenus is separated from it by a distinct saddle of rising ground, and was naturally, in old times, the seat of a separate power. But the separation between the two districts, which is not even so steep or well marked as the easy pass of Daphne between Athens and Eleusis, makes it also clear that the owners of either plain would certainly cast the eye of desire upon the possessions of their neighbors, and so at an early epoch Orchomenus was subdued. For many reasons this may have been a disaster to Greece. The Minyæ of Orchomenus, as people called the old nobles who settled there in prehistoric days, were a great and rich society, building forts and treasure-houses, and celebrated, even in Homer’s day, for wealth and splendor.

But, perhaps owing to this very luxury, they were subdued by the inartistic, vulgar Thebans, who, during centuries of power and importance, never rose to greatness save through the transcendent genius of Pindar and of Epaminondas. No real greatness ever attached to their town. When people came from a distance to see art in Bœotia, they came to [pg 242]little Thespiæ, in the southern hills, where the Eros of Praxiteles was the pride of the citizens. Tanagra, too, in the terra cottas of which I have spoken (above, [p. 59]), shows taste and refinement; and we still look with sympathy upon the strangely modern fashions of these graceful and elegant figures. At Thebes, so far as I know, no trace of fine arts has yet been discovered. The great substructure of the Cadmea, the solid marble water-pipes of their conduits, a few inscriptions—that is all. It corroborates what we find in the middle and new comedy of the Greeks, that Thebes was a place for eating and drinking, a place for other coarse material comforts—but no place for real culture or for art. Even their great poet, Pindar, a poet in whom most critics find all the highest qualities of genius—loftiness, daring, originality—even this great man—no doubt from the accidents of his age—worked by the job, and bargained for the payment of his noblest odes.

Thus, even in Pindar, there is something to remind us of his Theban vulgarity; and it is, therefore, all the more wonderful, and all the more freely to be confessed, that in Epaminondas we find not a single flaw or failing, and that he stands out as far the noblest of all the great men whom Greece ever produced. It were possible to maintain that he was also the greatest, but this is a matter of opinion and of argument. Certain it is that his influence made Thebes, for the moment, not only the leader in Greek [pg 243]politics, but the leader in Greek society. Those of his friends whom we know seem not only patriots, but gentlemen—they cultivated with him music and eloquence, nor did they despise philosophy. So true is it, that in this wonderful peninsula genius seemed possible everywhere, and that from the least cultivated and most vulgar town might arise a man to make all the world about him admire and tremble.

I will make but one more remark about this plain of Bœotia. There is no part of Greece so sadly famed for all the battles with which its soil was stained. The ancients called it Mars’s Orchestra, or exercising ground; and even now, when all the old life is gone, and when not a hovel remains to mark the site of once well-built towns, we may indeed ask, why were these towns celebrated? Simply because in old Greek history their names served to specify a scene of slaughter, where a campaign, or it may be an empire, was lost or won, Platæa, Leuctra, Haliartus, Coronea, Chæronea, Delium, Œnophyta, Tanagra—these are in history the landmarks of battles, and, with one exception, landmarks of nothing more. Thebes is mainly the nurse of the warriors who fought in these battles, and but little else. So, then, we cannot compare Bœotia to the rich plains of Lombardy—they, too, in their clay, ay, and in our own day, Mars’s Orchestra—for here literature and art have given fame to cities, while the battles [pg 244]fought around their walls have been forgotten by the world.

I confess we saw nothing of the foggy atmosphere so often brought up against the climate of Bœotia. And yet it was then, of course, more foggy than it had been of old, for then the lake Copais was drained, whereas in 1875 the old tunnels, cut, or rather enlarged, by the Minyæ, were choked, and thousands of acres of the richest land covered with marsh and lake. It was M. Trikoupi who promoted the plan of a French Company to drain the lake more completely than even the old Catabothra had done, and, at the cost of less than one million sterling, to bring into permanent cultivation some thousands of acres—in fact, the largest and richest plain in all Greece. I asked him where he meant to find a population to till it, seeing that the present land was about ten times more than sufficient for the inhabitants. He told me that some Greek colonists, who had settled in the north, under the Turks or Servians (I forget which), were desirous of returning to enjoy the sweets of Hellenic liberty. It was proposed to give them the reclaimed tract. If these good people will reason from analogy, they will be slow to trust their fortunes to their old fellow-countrymen. So long as they are indigent they will be unmolested—cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator—but as soon as they prosper, or are supposed to prosper, we might have the affair of Laurium repeated. [pg 245]The natives might be up in arms against the strangers who had come to plunder the land of the wealth intended by nature for others. The Greek Parliament might be persuaded to make retrospective laws and restrictions, and probably all the more active and impatient spirits would leave a country where prosperity implied persecution, and where people only awake to the value of their possessions after they have sold them to others.

What is now happening illustrates the views which I long since proposed. When the drainage works, completed in 1887, had uncovered rich tracts, the Government laid claim to every acre of it, and endeavored to fence off the old riparian proprietors. They on their side disputed the new boundaries, and claimed what the Government professed to have uncovered. Hence no sale to new owners is as yet possible. The dispute is still (1891) unsettled.