Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 2

by Thomas De Quincey

I. The Greek People.—It is with a view to the Greeks personally, the men, women, and children, who in one sense at least, viz., as occupants of the Greek soil, represent the ancient classical Greeks, that the traveller will undertake this labor. Representatives in one sense! Why, how now? are they not such in all senses? Do they not trace their descent from the classical Greeks?' We are sorry to say not; or in so doubtful a way, that the interest derived from that source is too languid to sustain itself against the opposing considerations. Some authors have peremptorily denied that one drop of genuine Grecian blood, transmitted from the countrymen of Pericles, now flows in the veins of any Greek subject. Falmereyer, the German, is at the head (we believe) of those who take that view. And many who think Falmereyer in excess, make these unpleasant concessions; viz., 1st, that in Athens and throughout Attica, where, by special preference, one would wish to see the Grecian cast of face predominating, there, to a single family almost, you may affirm all to be Albanian. Well; but what is Albanian? For the Albanian race, as having its headquarters in regions once undoubtedly occupied by a Greek race. Epirus, for instance, Acarnania, &c., may still be Grecian by descent: but unfortunately it is not so. The Albanians are no more Grecian, and notoriously no more represent the old legitimate Greeks, who thumped the Persians and whom the Romans thumped, than the modern English represent the Britons, or the modern Lowland Scotch represent the Scoti, of the centuries immediately following the Christian era. Both English and Lowland Scotch, for the first five centuries after the Christian era, were ranging the forests of north Germany or of southern Sweden. The men who fought with Caesar, if now represented at all, are so in Wales, in Cornwall, or other western recesses of the island. And the Albanians are held to be a Sclavonic race—such at least is the accredited theory; so that modern Greece is connected with Russia not merely by the bond of a common church, but also by blood, since the Russian people is the supreme branch of the Sclavonic race. This is the first concession made which limits any remnant of the true Greek blood to parts of the ancient Hellas not foremost in general interest, nor most likely to be visited.

A second is, that if any claim to a true Grecian descent does exist extensively, it must be looked for amongst Mahometan clans, descended from renegades of former days, now confounded with our Mussulmans ejected from Greece, and living in Thrace, or other regions under the Sultan's sceptre. But even here the purity of the descent is in the last degree uncertain.

This case is remarkable. From the stationary character of all things in the East, there was a probability beforehand, that several nations—as in particular, four that we will mention: the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Affghans—should have presented the same purity of descent, untainted by alien blood, which we find in the children of Ishmael, and the children of his half-brother the patriarch Isaac. Yet, in that case, where would have been the miraculous unity of race predicted for these two nations exclusively by the Scriptures? The fact is, the four nations mentioned have been so profoundly changed by deluges of foreign conquest or foreign intrusion, that at this day, perhaps, no solitary individual could be found whose ancestral line had not been confounded with other bloods. The Arabs only, and the Jews, are under no suspicion of this hybrid mixture. Vast deserts, which insulate one side of the Arabian peninsula; the sea, which insulates the other sides, have, with other causes, preserved the Arab blood from all general attaint of its purity. Ceremonies, institutions, awful scruples of conscience, and through many centuries, misery and legal persecution, have maintained a still more impassable gulf between the Jews and other races. Spain is the only Christian land where the native blood was at any time intermingled with the Jewish; and hence one cause for the early vigilance of the Inquisition in that country more than elsewhere; hence also the horror of a Jewish taint in the Spanish hidalgo; Judaism masquing itself in Christianity, was so keenly suspected, or so haughtily disclaimed, simply because so largely it existed. It was, however, under a very peculiar state of society, that, even during an interval, and in a corner, Jews could have intermarried with Christians. Generally, the intensity of reciprocated hatred, long oppression upon the one side, deep degradation upon the other, perpetuated the alienation, had the repulsion of creeds even relaxed. And hence, at this day, the intense purity of the Jewish blood, though probably more than six millions of individuals.

But with respect to the Grecians, as no barrier has ever existed between them and any other [Footnote 3] race than the Turks, and these only in the shape of religious scruples, which on one side had the highest political temptation to give way, there was no pledge stronger than individual character, there could be no national or corporate pledge, for the maintenance of this insulation. As therefore, in many recorded cases, the strongest barrier (viz., that against Mahometan alliances) is known to have given way, as in other cases innumerable, but forgotten, it must be presumed to have given way? this inference follows, viz., that if anywhere the Grecian blood remains in purity, the fact will be entirely without evidence; and for us, the result will be the same as if the fact had no existence. Simply as a matter of curiosity, if our own opinion were asked as to the probability, that in any situation, a true-blooded population yet survives at this day, we should answer that, if anywhere, it will be found in the most sterile of the Greek islands. Yet, even there the bare probability of such a result will have been open to many disturbances; and especially if the island happen to be much in the way of navigators, or the harbors happen to be convenient, or if it happen to furnish a good stage in a succession of stages, (according to the ancient usages of Mediterranean seamanship), or if it possessed towns containing accumulations of provisions or other stores, or offered good watering-places; under any of these endowments, an island might be tempting to pirates, or to roving adventurers, or to remote overpeopled parts of Italy, Africa, Asia Minor, &c.; in short, to any vicious city where but one man amongst the poorer classes knew the local invitations to murderous aggressions. Under so many contingencies operative through so many centuries, and revolutions so vast upon nations so multiplied, we believe that even a poor unproductive soil is no absolute pledge for non-molestation to the most obscure of recesses.

For instance, the poorest district of the large island Crete, might (if any could) be presumed to have a true Greek population. There is little to be found in that district beyond the means of bare subsistence; and (considering the prodigious advantages of the ground for defensive war) little to be looked for by an invader but hard knocks, 'more kicks than halfpence,' so long as there was any indigenous population to stand up and kick. But often it must have happened in a course of centuries, that plague, small-pox, cholera, the sweating-sickness, or other scourges of universal Europe and Asia, would absolutely depopulate a region no larger than an island; as in fact, within our brief knowledge of the New Hollanders, has happened through small-pox alone, to entire tribes of those savages, and, upon a scale still more awful, to the American Indians. In such cases, mere strangers would oftentimes enter upon the lands as a derelict. The Sfakians, in that recess of Crete which we have noticed, are not supposed by scholars to be a true Grecian race; nor do we account them such. And one reason of our own, superadded to the common reasons against allowing a Greek origin, is this:—The Sfakians are a large-limbed, fine-looking race, more resembling the Wallachians whom we have already noticed, than the other races of Crete, or the other Greek islanders, and like the Wallachians, are often of colossal stature. But the classical Greeks, we are pretty certain, were a race of little men. We have more arguments than one for this belief. But one will be sufficient. The Athenian painter who recorded the battle of Marathon in fresco upon the walls of a portico, was fined for representing the Persians as conspicuously taller than the Greeks. But why?—why should any artist have ascribed such an advantage to the enemy, unless because it was a fact? What plausible motive, other than the notoriety of the fact, can be imagined in the painter? In reality, this artist proceeded as a general rule amongst the Greeks, and a rule strictly, if not almost superstitiously observed, and of ancient establishment, which was, that all conquerors in any contest, or at any games, olympic, or whatsoever they might be, were memorialized by statues exactly representing the living man in the year of victory, taken even with their personal defects. The dimensions were preserved with such painful fidelity, as though the object had been to collect and preserve for posterity, a series from every generation, of those men who might be presumed by their trophies to have been the models by natural prefiguration for that particular gymnastic accomplishment in which they had severally excelled. [See the Acad. des Inscriptions, about the year 1725.] At the time of Marathon, fought against the Lieutenant of Darius, the Olympic games had existed for two hundred years, minus thirteen; and at the closing battle of Plataea, fought against the Lieutenant of Xerxes, for two hundred, minus only two. During all this period, it is known for certain, perhaps even from far older times, that this rule of exact portraiture, a rigid demand for duplicates or fac-similes of the individual men, had prevailed in Greece. The enormous amount of Persian corpses buried by the Greeks, (or perhaps by Persian prisoners,) in the Polyandrium on the field of battle, would be measured and observed by the artists against the public application for their services. And the armor of those select men-at-arms, or [Greek Text: oplitai], who had regular suits of armor, would remain for many centuries suspended as consecrated anathaeyata in the Grecian temples; so that Greek artists would never want sure records of the Persian dimensions. Were it not for this rule, applied sternly to all real conflicts, it might have been open to imagine that the artist had exaggerated the persons of the enemy by way of exalting to posterity the terrors which their ancestors had faced; a more logical vanity than that inverse artifice imputed to Alexander, of burying in the Punjaub gigantic mangers and hyperbolical suits of armor, under the conceit of impressing remote ages with a romantic idea of the bodily proportions in the men and horses composing the elite of the Macedonian army. This was the true secret for disenchanting the martial pretensions of his army. Were you indeed such colossal men? In that case, the less is your merit; of which most part belongs manifestly to a physical advantage: and in the ages of no gunpowder the advantage was less equivocal than it is at present. In the other direction, the logic of the Greek artist who painted Marathon is more cogent. The Persians were numerically superior, though doubtless this superiority has been greatly exaggerated, not wilfully so much as from natural mistakes incident to the Oriental composition of armies; and still more on the Grecian side, from extreme inaccuracy in the original reports, which was so great that even Herodotus, who stood removed from Plataea at the time of commencing his labors, by pretty much the same interval as we in 1842 from Waterloo, is rightly observed by Colonel Leake (Travels in Greece) to have stated to him the Greek numbers on the great day of Plataea, rather from the basis of fixed rateable contingents which each state was bound to furnish, than of any positive return that he could allege. However, on the whole, it seems undeniable that even at Platsea, much more at Marathon, the Persians had the advantage in numbers. If, besides this numerical advantage, they had another in qualities of bodily structure, the inference was the greater to the Grecian merit. So far from slighting a Persian advantage which really existed, a Greek painter might rather be suspected of inventing one which did not. We apprehend, however, that he invented nothing. For, besides that subsequent intercourse with Persians would have defeated the effect of his representation had it reposed on a fiction, it is known that the Greeks did not rightly appreciate tallness. 'Procerity,' to use Dr. Johnson's stately word in speaking of the stately Prussian regiment, was underrated in Greece; perhaps for this reason, that in some principal gymnastic contests, running, leaping, horsemanship, and charioteering, it really was a disadvantage. And hence possibly arose a fact which has been often noticed with surprise; viz. that the legendary Hercules was never delineated by the Greek artists as more than an athletic man of the ordinary standard with respect to height and bulk. The Greek imagination was extravagantly mastered by physical excellence; this is proved by the almost inconceivable value attached to gymnastic merit. Nowhere, except in Greece, could a lyrical enthusiasm have been made available in such a service. But amongst physical qualities they did not adequately value that of lofty stature. At all events, the rule of portraiture—the whole portrait and nothing but the portrait—which we have mentioned as absolute for Greece, coerced the painter into the advantageous distinction for the Persians which we have mentioned. And this rule, as servile to the fact, is decisive for the Greek proportions of body in comparison with the Persian.

But were not some tribes amongst the Greeks celebrated for their stature? Yes; the Daulians, for instance, both men and women: and in some modern tourist we remember a distinction of the same kind claimed for the present occupants of Daulis. But the ancient claim bad reference only to the Grecian scale. Tall, were they? Yes, but tall for Grecians. The Romans were possibly a shade taller than the Greeks, but they also were a little race of men. This is certain. And, if a man were incautious enough to plead in answer the standard of the modern Italians, who are often both tall and athletic, he must be reminded that to Tramontanes, in fact, such as Goths, Heruli, Scyrra, Lombards, and other tribes of the Rhine, Lech, or Danube, Italy is indebted for the improved breed of her carcasses. [Footnote 4] Man, instead of degenerating according to the scandalous folly of books, very slowly improves everywhere; and the carcasses of the existing generation, weighed off, million for million, against the carcasses of any pre-Christian generation, we feel confident would be found to have the advantage by many thousands of stones [the butchers' stone is eight pounds] upon each million. And universally the best prima facie title to a pure Greek descent will be an elegantly formed, but somewhat under-sized, person, with a lively, animated, and intelligent physiognomy; of which last may be said, that, if never in the highest sense rising to the noble, on the other hand, it never sinks to the brutal. At Liverpool we used to see in one day many hundreds of Greek sailors from all parts of the Levant; these were amongst the most probable descendants from the children of Ion or of OEolus, and the character of their person was what we describe—short but symmetrical figures and faces, upon the whole, delicately chiselled. These men generally came from the Greek islands.

Meantime, what is Mr. Mure's opinion upon this much-vexed question? Into the general problem he declines to enter; not, we may be sure, from want of ability to treat it with novelty and truth. But we collect that he sees no reason for disputing the general impression, that an Albanian or hybrid population is mainly in possession of the soil, and that perhaps he would say, lis est de paupere regno; for, if there is no beauty concerned in the decision, nor any of the quality of physical superiority, the less seems the value of the dispute. To appropriate a set of plain faces, to identify the descent of ordinary bodies, seems labor lost. And in the race now nominally claiming to be Grecian, Mr. Mure evidently finds only plain faces, and ordinary bodies. Those, whom at any time he commends for beauty or other advantages of person, are tribes confessedly alien; and, on the other hand, with respect to those claiming to be Greek, he pronounces a pointed condemnation by disparaging their women. It is notoriously a duty of the female sex to be beautiful, if they can, with a view to the recreation of us males—whom Lily's Grammar affirms to be 'of the worthier gender.' Sitting at breakfast, (which consisted 'of red herrings and Gruyere cheese,') upon the shore of Megara, Mr. Mure beheld the Megarensian lasses mustering in force for a general ablution of the Megarensian linen. The nymphs had not turned out upon the usual principles of feminine gatherings—

'Spectatum venit, venit spectentur it ipsae;'

and yet, between them, the two parties reciprocated the functions. Each to the other was a true spectacle. A long Scotchman,

'Qui sicca solus secum spatiatur arena,'