on Philhellenism
Intro
For your reading pleasure: some considerations on modern philhellenism by three moderns and philhellenists (if so Byron would allow himself called). Maybe neither of those terms are quite right, except for philhellenism for Patrick Leigh Fermor. All three are quite good, though Byron is clearly more aggrieved. Durrell’s must be a rather provocative take on the Odyssey. A nod also to Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti, with always a nick of pleasant reading, where I first came across the excerpt from Byron, tipped by a friend, and whence I lift it (with gratitude rather than scruple). I leave it, of course, to you, reader, to agree or not with these views—whichever it is, they do provoke one’s reflection on the lovely activity of reading and rereading.
Robert Byron
“But how is it that the world, the barbarians, contemptuous as they are contemptible, are still concerned with the existence of the Greeks at all? Whence has the flood of their misrepresentation been unloosed? The source is found in that curious mixture of sincere and artificial enthusiasm, Philhellenism.
The most frequent manifestations of this peculiar mental state, both in print and life, are the outcome of that jejune philosophy of living, which is the last heritage of the classical scholar. Student, ultimately interpreter, of Greek texts; endowed with a kindred love of exact reasoning and exact representation, together with a kindred absence of historical perspective and emotional outlet; he has fabricated from literature and stones an ideal of humanity, which he and his following have pronounced applicable to eternity. It is the singular odium of this eternal comparison, for centuries the bane of European culture, which necessitates, once and for all, the relegation of classicism to its just place in the tale of human development.
In history alone, the paper Philhellenes may be held responsible for as great a volume of calculated misrepresentation as the priestly editors of the Old Testament. Fanatically jealous for their idols’ prestige, they visit the virtues of the fathers upon the twentieth-century children with a malignity so familiar that further mention of it is unnecessary. Flouting the rudiments of anthropology, dating a quarter of a century back, they continue to propagate the thesis that the ancient Greek was a Nordic giant, and that the modern is a Slav dwarf. In face of common-sense euphony, they persist in maintaining a pronunciation invented by the ignorant English scholars of the sixteenth-century, which utters “bazilews” for βασιλεύς instead of “vassilefs,” “kilioy” for χίλιοι instead of “hilii”—thus rendering moribund a language which, after two millenniums, differs from Euripides considerably less than modern English from Chaucer. Though aware, if pretending to culture (which they possibly do not) that a cursive Greek hand has existed for more than a thousand years, they still compel submissive pupils to perform their conjugations in a disjointed and hideous script, thus dissipating the short hours of youth, and the straitened incomes of its progenitors, in useless effort. Finally, they range themselves in support of a cynical world’s opinion that the twentieth century Hellene is no more than a negligible assemblage of human vices.”
The Byzantine Achievement, Robert Byron, 1929 (rp., pp. 16–17)
Patrick Leigh Fermor
“Now, a bit reluctantly, I must call a halt to these flashbacks and postscripts—high time, perhaps—and retreat several years, a few hundred miles in space and a score of pages, to the main thread of this narrative, from which we began to deviate among the tassels and the buttoned upholstery of the carriage rocking back with us through the Thracian darkness between Sikarayia and Alexandroupolis.
Not many minutes had passed before the guard worked his perilous way along the duckboard outside and climbed in; not to punch our tickets, but for a chat. We were his only passengers. He was a dark, jovial, round-faced refugee from Smyrna.
‘Well,’ he said cheerfully, offering cigarettes, ‘did you find out where they hide their pots of gold? Any for me? I could do with it, at this job.’
We told him about the wedding. As I had already absorbed one of two hazy notions about the possibility of the ancient descent of the Sarakatsans, I asked him what he thought about it.
‘I don’t know,’ he said amiably, ‘and, what’s more, I don’t care. I hate the ancient Greeks. We had to learn all about them at school: Plato, Socrates, Pericles, Leonidas, Aristotle, Euripides, Homer—Andra mi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon os malla polla and all that stuff. No, I don’t hate them: that’s too strong. But what have they got to do with me? Perhaps we descend from them, perhaps we don’t, what does it matter? And who did they descend from, pray? Nobody knows. They were Greeks and so are we, that’s all we know. I come from Smyrna—there’s an ancient Greek city for you—and I may be more Greek than the Greeks in Athens, more Greek than your Sarakatsans, for all that I know. Who cares? Greece is an idea, that’s the thing! That’s what keeps us together—that, and the language and the country and the Church—not that I like priests particularly, but we owe them a lot. And those old Greeks, our celebrated ancestors, are a nuisance and I’ll tell you why. They haunt us. We can never be as great as they were, nobody can. They make us feel guilty. We can’t do anything, people think, because of a few old books and temples and lumps of marble. And clever foreigners who know all about the ancients come here expecting to be surrounded by Apollos and gentlemen in helmets and laurel leaves, and what do they see? Me: a small dark fat man with a moustache and eyes like boot buttons!’ He laughed good-naturedly. ‘To hell with them! Give me the men of the War of Independence, who chucked out the Turks, give me Averoff, who presented us with a battleship out of this own pocket, give me Venizelos, who saved us all and turned Greece into a proper country. What’s wrong with them? If we weren’t such fools and always quarrelling among ourselves, if we could have no wars or revolutions for fifty years—fifty years, that’s all I ask—you’d see what a country we’d become! Then we could start worrying about the Trojan Horse and working out our relationship to Pericles and finding out whether the Sarakatsans descend from the ancient Greeks!’
I saw his point. For some, the ancients are a source of inspiration and vague pride; the outside world sets so high a price on them; to others they are a perpetual irritation. What about Byzantium? that’s where our traditions date from, a modern Greek may think; not from Pericles holding forth on the Acropolis, not from Diogenes’s barrel or the tent of Achilles.
What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”
Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1962 (pp. 62–63)
Lawrence Durrell
“Confused by our clumsy gestures of interpretation, history is never kind to those who expect anything of her. Under the formal pageant of events which we have dignified by our interest, the land changes very little, and the structure of the basic self of man hardly at all. In this landscape observed objects still retain a kind of mythological form—so that though chronologically we are separated from Ulysses by hundreds of years in time, yet we dwell in his shadow. Like earnest mastodons petrified in the forests of their own apparatus the archeologists come and go, each with his pocket Odyssey and his lack of modern Greek. Diligently working upon the refuse-heaps of some township for a number of years they erect on the basis of a few sherds or a piece of dramatic drainage, a sickly and enfeebled portrait of a way of life. How true it is we cannot say; but if an Eskimo were asked to describe our way of life, deducing all his evidence from a search in a contemporary refuse dump, his picture might lack certain formidable essentials. Thus Ulysses can only be ratified as an historical figure with the help of the fishermen who to-day sit in the smoky tavern of ‘The Dragon’ playing cards and waiting for the wind to change. The Odyssey is a bore, badly constructed and shapeless, dignified by poetry everywhere degenerating into self-pity and rhetoric; the characters are stylized to the point of irritation, and their conventionalized drama serves simply as a decorative frame for the descriptive gift of the author which is a formidable piece of equipment.
Yet with what delightful and poignant accuracy does the poem describe the modern Greeks; it is a portrait of a nation which rings as clear to-day as when it was written. The loquacity, the shy cunning, the mendacity, the generosity, the cowardice and bravery, the almost comical inability of self-analysis. The unloving humour and the scolding. Nowhere is it possible to find a flaw.”
Prospero’s Cell, Lawrence Durrell, 1962 (p. 59)