Returning to Canea, my archaeological mission being abortive, I was told by the Christian secretary of the pasha that the difficulty had been that I had not offered to give to His Excellency the coins that might be found in the excavations, and that if I did this I might hope for a firman. As it was not in my power to give what, by the agreement arrived at with the proprietor of the soil, had been definitely disposed of, half to him and the other half to the museums of the island, and as the troubles had begun, there was nothing more to be done, and I made a flying trip to some parts of the island which I had not seen. Of this, the passage through the valley of Enneochoria (the nine villages) will remain in my memory as the most delightful pastoral landscape I have ever seen, and the ideal of Greek pastoral poetry. A beautiful brook, to the perennial flow of whose waters the abundant water-cresses testified, which is a very rare thing in an Aegean scene, meandered amongst mingled sycamores and olives, and gave freshness to glades where the sheep fed under the keepership of the antique-mannered shepherd lads and lasses; and in the opening of the bordering trees we saw the far-off and arid mountains, rugged and picturesque peaks. The Cretan summer for three or four months is rainless, and a valley where the vegetation is fed by the springs so abundantly as to sustain a perpetual flora is rarely to be met in one's travels there. I saw many new flowers there, and amongst them a perfectly white primrose, in every other respect like the common flower of the English hedgerows. The scenery had that attractive aspect which can be found only where immemorial culture, without excessive invasion of the axe, has left nature in the undiminished possession of her chief beauties, without a trace of the savage wildness—a nature which hints at art. It was classic without being formal, but no description can give an idea of the charm of it in contrast with the general aridity of the Cretan landscape.
As we rode through the villages we found the population animated by that joyous hospitality which belongs to an antique tradition, to which a stranger guest is something which the gods have sent, and sent rarely so that no tourist weariness had worn out the welcome. Something of the welcome was, no doubt, due to the reputation I had acquired in former times as a friend of the Christians of the island, but I found that in Crete, where the invasion of the foreign element had been at a minimum and the people were most conservative, ancient usages and ancient hospitality had retained all their force, as, to a lesser extent, I had found them in the Peloponnesus, while in continental Greece I never found hospitality in any form. The Cretans are probably the purest remnant of the antique race which resulted from the mixture of Pelasgian, Dorian, Achaian, Ionian, and the best representative of the antique intellect.
It was almost impossible to travel in the interior of the island, where the Christian element still held its own unmixed, without coming in contact with remnants of the most ancient superstitions. In one place my guide pointed out to me a cave where Janni the shepherd one day gathered his sheep in the midday heats to fiddle to them, when there came out of the sea a band of Nereids, who begged him to play for their dancing. Janni obeyed and lost his heart to one of the sea damsels, and, sorely smitten, went to a wise woman to know what he should do to win her, and was told that he must boldly seize her in the whirl of the dance and hold her, no matter what happened. He followed the direction, and though the nymph changed shape many times he kept his hold and she submitted to him and they were married. In process of time she bore a child, but all the while she had never spoken a word. The wise woman, consulted again, told Janni to take the child and pretend to lay it on the fire, when his wife would speak. He obeyed again, but made a slip, and the child, falling into the fire, was burned to death, whereupon the wife fled to the sea and was never seen again. This was told me in all seriousness as of a contemporary event, and was evidently held as history. I bought from a peasant one of the well-known three-sided prisms with archaic intaglios of animals on the faces, and had the curiosity to inquire the virtues of it, for I was told that it was greatly valued and had been worn by his wife, who reluctantly gave it up. He replied that it had the power of preventing the mother's milk from failing prematurely.
We passed through Selinos, where the riflers of the antique necropolis brought me quantities of glass found in the graves, and a few bronze and gold ornaments; and when I had loaded myself and my attendants with all the glass we could safely carry, the people begged me still to buy, if only for a piastre each piece, what they had accumulated for want of a buyer. But what is found in this district is mainly or entirely of a late period, that of the Roman occupation of the island, I suppose, for we found no archaic objects of any kind, or early inscriptions, and only a few in late characters. But the ride through this section of the island is one of the most delightful one could take, so far as I know, in classical lands. The kindly, hospitable Seliniotes, known for centuries as the bravest of all the Cretan clans, persecuted with all the cruelty of Venetian craft in the days when the island city ruled the island sea, always refractory under foreign rule and often unruly under their own régime, seem to have enjoyed in the later centuries of Roman rule and the earlier of the Byzantine a great prosperity, if one may judge from the evidence of the necropolis, the graves in which yield a singular indication of a well-distributed wealth. These graves lie for great distances along every road leading to what must have been the principal centre of the civilization, though there are no ruins to mark its location. This singular absence of ancient ruin indicates a peculiarity in the civilization of that section of the island which history gives no clue to. Northward, near the sea, there are the remains of great Pelasgic cities, of which when I first traveled in the island the walls were in stupendous condition, but of which at this visit I had found hardly a trace—the islanders had pulled them down to get stone for their houses. The site of Polyrhenia, connected in tradition with the return of Agamemnon from Troy, was one of the finest Pelasgic ruins I have ever seen when I first visited it, but on this visit I could hardly find the locality, and of the splendid polygonal wall I saw in 1865 not a stone remained.
Our route brought us through Murnies, celebrated for its orange groves and for the horrible execution of many Cretans by Mustapha Kiritly in the "great insurrection"—that of 1837—to punish them for assembling to petition the Sultan for relief. It is one of the most ghastly of all the dreadful incidents of Turkish repressions, for the Cretans, pacifically assembled without arms, were arrested, and all their magnates, for the better repression of discontent and to overawe rebellions to come, were hanged on the orange-trees in such numbers that, as the old consul of Sweden, an eye-witness, told me during my consulate, the orchard was hung with them, and left there to rot. According to the statement of the consul, not less than thirty of the chief men of that district were so executed.
But the history of the Venetian rule shows that it was no less cruel and even more treacherous, and Pashley gives from their own records the story of the slaughter of many of the chief people of the same district to punish refractoriness against the government of that day. Read where we will, so long as there is anything to read, we find the history of Crete one of the most horrible of the classic world—rebellion, repression, slaughter, internecine and international, until a population, which in the early Venetian times was a million, was reduced in 1830 to little more than a hundred thousand, and during my own residence was brought nearly as low, what with death by sword and bullet, by starvation and disease induced by starvation, added to exile, permanent or temporary. Yet in 1865 it had been reckoned at 375,000, Christian and Mussulman. But it must be admitted that the Cretan was always the most refractory of subjects, and, though at the time of this visit the island had obtained the fundamental concessions which it had fought for, in the recognition of its autonomy with a governor of the faith of the majority, in a later visit in 1886 I found it ravaged by a sectional war of vendetta, Christian against Christian, in which, as Photiades Pasha assured me, in one year 600 people had been killed and 25,000 olive-trees destroyed in village feuds. But the evidence was at hand to show that the pasha himself, finding the islanders no less difficult to control for all the concessions made them, had been obliged in the interest of his own quiet and permanence in government to turn the restlessness of the Cretans into sectional conflicts during which they left him in peaceful possession of his pashalik. In eastern countries government becomes a fine art if not a humane one.
CHAPTER XXXVI
GREEK BROILS—TRICOUPI—FLORENCE
The troubles initiated at Gortyna increased until the eastern end of the island was drawn into them, and, as the Greek government at the same time began to agitate for the execution of those clauses in the Treaty of Berlin which compensated it for the advantages gained by the principalities through the war, I received orders to go to Athens and resume my correspondence with the "Times." Athens was in a ferment, and the discontent with the government for its inefficiency was universal; the ministry, as was perhaps not altogether unjustifiable under the circumstances past, allowed the King to bear his part of the responsibility, and discontent with him was even greater than that with Comoundouros, the prime minister, whose position became very difficult, for the King and his entourage opposed all energetic measures, and the people demanded the most energetic. Excitement ran very high, and the ministry was carried along with the populace, which demanded war and the military occupation of the territory assigned to Greece.
Comoundouros was, on the whole, the most competent prime minister for Greece whom the country has had in my time. Tricoupi, who was the chief of the opposition at the time, was an abler man, and a statesman of wider views,—on the whole, the greatest statesman of modern Greece, me judice; but in intrigue and Odyssean craft, which is necessary in the Levant, Comoundouros was his master. In 1868, when they were both in the ministry, they formed the most competent government Greece has known in her constitutional days, but it was betrayed by the King, who paid now in part for his defection, for no one placed the least confidence in him. The diplomatic corps pressed for peace, and the nation demanded war, for which it was not in the least prepared. The animosity towards the King was extreme. I saw people who happened to be sitting in front of the cafés rise and turn their backs to him when he walked past, as he used to do without any attendant. Comoundouros ran with the diplomats and hunted with the populace,—I think he really meant to continue running and avoid hunting at any risk, but he talked on the other side. I knew him well, and used continually to go to his house when he received all the world in the evening, in perfectly republican simplicity, as is the way in Athens, and he said to me one evening that the King prevented action, and impeded all steps to render the army efficient.