A high forehead, rather a wide distance between the eyes, with the slightest possible depression at the top of the nose; this last straight or slightly aquiline; large eyes, opening widely and surmounted by a scarcely arched eyebrow; a short upper lip, a small or medium sized mouth delicately cut; and a prominent and well rounded chin.
[Fig. 66] represents the Greeks of Athens; [fig. 67] a Greek family and the interior of a house at Athens.
66.—GREEKS OF ATHENS.
To give an idea of modern Greek manners and types, we will borrow a few lines from an interesting work by M. Prout, “Journey to Athens,” published in “Le Tour du Monde” in 1862. Let us first listen to this traveller speaking to us of the inhabitants of Greece:—
“If Fallmeseyer is to be believed, there are no more Greeks in Greece, only Slavonians; it is beyond doubt that the inhabitants of Thrace and of Macedonia cannot boast so immaculate an origin as the mountaineers of Olympus or of Magnus; but it is equally certain that from Cape Malea to the Black Sea, and from Smyrna to Corfu, there are ten million individuals who speak Greek, mixed up with a population speaking Slavonic, and that in the plains of Athens, we easily distinguish the Albanian with the narrow temples and the prominent nose, from the Greek with the wide forehead and the high cheek-bones, although their dress is exactly the same. To converse for an hour with the latter is sufficient to satisfy all doubt as to the authenticity of his origin.
“His qualities of mind have remained the same as in the days of Homer: he has still the same aptitude for thorough and rapid comprehension, the same facility of graceful and metaphorical expression. These qualities give to the Greeks so great a superiority over the other races of the East, that they are liked by none of them. The Turks reproach them with being suspicious and dissimulating, because they have opposed craft to force; the Levantines accuse them of dishonesty in commercial transactions, because they themselves have taken lessons of them, and have often surpassed their instructors.
“There is no greater bond of sympathy between them and the other nations on the shores of the Mediterranean. Serious and deliberate in disposition, the tone of their mind is foreign alike to raillery and to the rapidity of dramatic intensity. Their grief pursues a peaceful and elegiac course; it is with them a latent sorrow, and not a sharp crisis leading to the ecstasies of madness. Whilst Cupid’s weapons, in Naples or in Venice for instance, inflict terrible wounds, the arrows of the Athenian god neither keep his victims from repose nor from the pursuit of business. The Greeks have preserved their tragic intonation, and are the true children of that wild Orestes who died at more than eighty years of age from the effects of an accident. In their minds, action always takes its course with deliberation and gravity, not without a certain amount of colouring, but never widely straying from reality; interrogating and holding council with itself, and taking time for reflection before making its decision.