Where was the spirit of the victor-throng,
Whose tombs are glorious by Scamander's tide,
Whose names are bright in everlasting song,
The lords of war, the praised, the deified?
Where he, the hero of a thousand lays,
Who from the dead at Marathon arose
All armed, and, beaming on th' Athenian's gaze,
A battle-meteor, guided to their foes?
Or they whose forms, to Alaric's awe-struck eye,
[Footnote: GIBBON says: "From Thermopylæ to Sparta the leader of the Goths (Alaric) pursued his victorious march without encountering any mortal antagonist; but one of the advocates of expiring paganism has confidently asserted that the walls of Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva with her formidable ægis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles; and that the conqueror was dismayed by the presence of the hostile deities of Greece." But Gibbon characteristically adds, "The Christian faith which Alaric had devotedly embraced taught him to despise the imaginary deities of Rome and Athens."—Milman's "Gibbon's Rome," vol. ii., p. 215.]
Hovering o'er Athens, blazed in airy panoply?
Ye slept, oh heroes! chief ones of the earth—
High demi-gods of ancient day—ye slept.
There lived no spark of your ascendant worth,
When o'er your land the victor Moslem swept;
No patriot then the sons of freedom led,
In mountain-pass devotedly to die;
The martyr-spirit of resolve was fled,
And the high soul's unconquered buoyancy;
And by your graves, and on your battle-plains,
Warriors, your children knelt, to wear the stranger's chains.
—MRS. HEMANS.
III. CONTESTS BETWEEN THE TURKS AND VENETIANS.
Greece was long the scene of severe contests between the Turks and the Venetians. Athens was first captured by the Turks in 1456, but they were driven from it in 1467 by the Venetians, who were in turn expelled from the city by the Turks in 1470. But Venice, as a French historian—COMTE DE LABOURDE—has observed, "Alone of the states of Europe could feel, from a merely material point of view, the force of the blow struck at Europe and her own commerce by the submission of almost the whole of Greece to Turkish rule;" and this feeling survived many centuries. In 1670 the Turks conquered Crete from the Venetians, and in 1684 the latter retaliated by offensive operations against the Peloponnesus, which was soon reconquered by the Venetian admiral Morosini. In 1687 Morosini crowned his successes by the capture of Athens. The Turkish garrison had retired to the Acropolis, and the victory is principally of interest on account of the irreparable injury done to the works of art on that "rock-shrine of Athens." Although he subsequently sought to evade all responsibility for the desolation that ensued, it was Morosini who directed his batteries to hurl their fatal burdens against the Acropolis, and it was he who afterward robbed it of many of its treasures. Hitherto the alterations made for military purposes, and the slight injuries inflicted at various times, had not marred the general beauty and effect of its buildings; but when the troops of Venice entered Athens, the Parthenon and others of that gorgeous assemblage of structures were in ruins, and the glory of the Athenian Acropolis survived only in the past. Contrasting its past glory and its present decay, a writer in a recent Review makes these interesting observations:
"No other fortress has embraced so much beauty and splendor within its walls, and none has witnessed a series of more startling and momentous changes in the fortunes of its possessors. Wave after wave of war and conquest has beaten against it. The city which lies at its feet has fallen beneath the assaults of the Persian, the Spartan, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Goth, the Crusader, and the Turk. Through all these and other vicissitudes the Acropolis passed, changing only in the character of its occupants, unchanged in its loveliness and splendor. With a few blemishes and losses, whether from the decaying taste of later times or the occasional robberies of a foreign conqueror, but unaffected in its general aspect, it presented to the eyes of the victorious Ottoman the same front of unparalleled beauty which it had displayed in the days of Pericles. To him who looks upon it now, however, the scene is changed indeed—changed not only in the loss of its treasures of decorative art (for of many of these it had been robbed before), but with its loveliest fabrics shattered, many reduced to hopeless ruin, and not a few utterly obliterated. Less than two centuries sufficed to bring about all this dilapidation: less than three months sufficed to complete the ruin. If the Venetian, by his abortive conquest, inflicted not more injury on the fair heritage of Athenian art than it had undergone from all preceding spoliations, he left it, not merely from the havoc of war, but by wanton subsequent mutilation, in that state which rendered the recovery of its ancient grace and majesty impossible."
The Venetians evacuated Athens in 1688, and a few years subsequently the Peloponnesus was their only possession in Greece. In 1715 a Turkish army of one hundred thousand men under Al'i Coumour'gi, the Grand Vizier of Ach'met III., invaded the Peloponnesus, and first attacked Corinth. Historians tell us that the garrison, weakened by several unsuccessful attacks, opened negotiations for a surrender; but, while these were in progress, the accidental firing of a magazine in the Turkish camp so enraged the infidels that they at once broke off the negotiations, stormed and captured the city, and put most of the garrison, with Signor Minotti, the commander, to the sword. Those taken prisoners were reserved for execution under the walls of Nauplia, within sight of the Venetians.
In BYRON'S Siege of Corinth, founded on the historical narrative; a poetical license is taken, and the death of Minotti and the remnant of his followers is attributed to the explosion of a powder-magazine fired by Minotti himself. From the fine descriptions which this poem contains we extract the following verses:
The Siege and Fall of Corinth.
On dim Cithæron's ridge appears
The gleam of twice ten thousand spears;
And downward to the Isthmian plain,
From shore to shore of either main,
The tent is pitched, the crescent shines
Along the Moslem's leaguering lines;
And the dusk Spä'hi's bands advance
Beneath each bearded pä'sha's glance;
And far and wide as eye can reach
The turbaned cohorts throng the beach;
And there the Arab's camel kneels,
And there his steed the Tartar wheels;
The Turcoman has left his herd,
The sabre round his loins to gird;
And there the volleying thunders pour,
Till waves grow smoother to the roar.
The trench is dug, the cannon's breath
Wings the far hissing globe of death;
Fast whirl the fragments from the wall,
Which crumbles with the ponderous ball;
And from that wall the foe replies,
O'er dusty plain and smoky skies,
With fires that answer fast and well.
The summons of the Infidel.
The walls grew weak; and fast and hot
Against them poured the ceaseless shot,
With unabating fury sent
From battery to battlement;
And thunder-like the pealing din
Rose from each heated culverin;
And here and there some crackling dome
Was fired before the exploding bomb;
And as the fabric sank beneath
The shattering shell's volcanic breath,
In red and wreathing columns flashed
The flame, as loud the ruin crashed,
Or into countless meteors driven,
Its earth-stars melted into heaven—
Whose clouds that day grew doubly dun,
Impervious to the hidden sun,
With volumed smoke that slowly grew
To one wide sky of sulphurous hue.