Hellas

“ Grecian art, like Grecian liberty, had lost its spirit and vitality, and the spoliation of public buildings and galleries, to adorn the porticos and temples of Rome, hastened its extinction.
We have now reached the close of the history of ancient Greece. But Hellas still lives in her thousand hallowed associations of historic interest, and in the numerous ruins of ancient art and splendor which cover her soil—recalling a glorious Past, upon which we love to dwell as upon the memory of departed friends or the scenes of a happy childhood—"sweet, but mournful to the soul." ”

“ The titles of the hills of Hellas smite our ears with echoes of ancient music—Olympus and Cithæron, Taygetus, Othrys, Helicon, and Ida. The headlands of the mainland are mountains, and the islands are mountain summits of a submerged continent. Austerely beautiful, not wild with an Italian luxuriance, nor mournful with Sicilian monotony of outline, nor yet again overwhelming with the sublimity of Alps, they seem the proper home of a race which sought its ideal of beauty in distinction of shape and not in multiplicity of detail, in light and not in richness of colouring, in form and not in size. ”

“ Once more Apollo, the genius of Greece, appears, and declares that no longer can Hellas dwell in desecrated Athens, but that, even as his mother Latona, she must seek shelter in an Ægean isle, and there, after long years, give birth to a supreme race, who will revive the ancient glories of violet-crowned Athens. Leading her by the hand, the god then conducts the newly liberated Hellas up the steps of the temple. The great doors are flung open to the sound of trumpets! and lo! appears the Acropolis of Melnos in all its beauty. ”

“ And now, as the sunset colours—gold, scarlet, violet, and purple—are glowing upon the immortal rock, over the marble ruins, I marvel at “tiny” Athens and her “vast” name.
Alas, for Hellas and modern Greece!
Had her own people been as faithful as Oxford to the traditions of ancient Greece, what would have been the Eastern Question to-day? And for some, no doubt, it is this very honouring of Hellas that has been responsible for our fatal pro-Greek enthusiasms. If we recognise the superiority of the modern Turk, loyalty to Plato, to Aristotle, and to Socrates must forbid speech ”

“ The sea, the hills, the plains, the sunlight of the South, together with some ruins which have peopled Europe with phantoms of dead art, and the relics of Greek literature, are our guides in the endeavor to restore the past of Hellas. Among rocks golden with broom-flowers, murmurous with bees, burning with anemones in spring and oleanders in summer, and odorous through all the year with thyme, we first assimilate the spirit of the Greeks. ”

“ Do you know that Sulla and Mithridates have gone slaying and pillaging over Hellas, so that science and art have fled to the Egyptian Alexandria or the growing Byzantium? Do you know that pirates, whose origin is unknown, from the East, have recently plundered every temple in Hellas, so that hardly any religious service can be held there? The oracles are dumb, the poets are silent like song-birds in a storm, the great tragedies are no longer performed; people rather go to see farces and gladiatorial shows. Hellas is a ruin, and Rome will soon be one. ”

“ Wherever men of Hellas have planted themselves on barbarian soil, the soil has become Hellas through their presence. The man who goes forth from Athens to Milêtos still remains Greek and Ionian; the man who goes forth from Rhodes to Gela still remains Greek and Dorian. The tie of national brotherhood, the abiding feeling of the oneness of the folk, lives on through physical distance, through political separation, through political rivalry and wasting war. ”

“ The point where the Eastern and Western seas most nearly touch is in truth the centre, the key-stone as the poet puts it, of the whole peninsular land south of Olympos. From the citadel of Corinth, if all Hellas does not itself lie within our sight, yet all Hellas lies within sight, as it were, by representation. Peloponnêsos and Attica, the land north and south of the gulf, the shores of the two great confederacies, the mountains of Arkadia and of Phôkis, and the snowy head of Aitolian Korax, stand there as if to speak of the lands north and south of them. ”

“ All the lowlands at their base are meantime covered, perhaps, with heavy mists, while lighter and more fleecy vapours hang here and there upon the mountain tops, augmenting their grandeur by allowing the imagination like a Titan to pile them up as high as it pleases towards heaven. The coasts of eastern Hellas, including those of Eubœa, along the whole line of Thessaly to the confines of Macedonia, are bold and rocky, frowning like the ramparts of freedom upon the slaves of the Asiatic plains. ”

“ They think that Hellas is dead!... And from every quarter of the compass black monks come swooping down, like ravens, on its marble body, and pick at it, joyously shrieking, 'Hellas is dead!' But they forget that Hellas cannot die, that Hellas is in our hearts! ”

“ At once we recall the almost incredibly vast and almost wildly “Romantic” mythology of Greece, the material and the inspiration of Greek poetry as it was the material and inspiration of Keats. Now the genuine mythology of Hellas first gathered shape in an age which believed in obvious magic, in the transformation of men and women into birds and beasts and trees and flowers, and in the living holiness of natural objects. ”

“ From among the Helli of the mountains, who nowhere appear among the contingents of the Greek army, must have proceeded the migratory bands who gave to the Thessalian plain the name of Hellas. Their descendants fix themselves as settlers there. Beguiled into civilization, they become Hellenes; they spread, by their inborn elastic energies, towards the south, and carry with them, only a little in their rear, the very title of their Hellenic origin, as well as their own peculiar name. ”

“ Fairest of preludes is the great name of Athens to whosoever will lay foundation of songs for the mighty race of Alkmaionidai and for their steeds. What country, what house among all lands shall I name more glorious throughout Hellas? ”

“ Down at the Peiræus there are a few shipmasters, perhaps, who can talk Egyptian, Phœnecian, or Babylonish. They need the knowledge for their trade, but even they will disclaim any cultural value for their accomplishment. The euphonious, expressive, marvelously delicate tongue of Hellas sums up for the Athenian almost all that is valuable in the world’s intellectual and literary life. ”

“ And so the soldiers of Marathon and the sailors of Salamis became the schoolmasters of Hellas; the one teaching and habituating the Hellenes not to fear the barbarians at sea, and the others not to fear them by land. Third in order, for the number and valour of the combatants, and third in the salvation of Hellas, I place the battle of Plataea. And now the Lacedaemonians as well as the Athenians took part in the struggle; they were all united in this greatest and most terrible conflict of all; wherefore their virtues will be celebrated in times to come, as they are now celebrated by us. ”

“ Early in the 5th century, Greece plunged into a struggle for life or death with the Persian Empire—a struggle from which she emerged covered with glory, united and free. Her triumph is straightway sung in immortal verse, and historians arise to record her exploits. Athens, who faced the enemy at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa, and drove him back crippled and disgraced to Asia, now becomes the leader of grateful Hellas, and the centre of literature and refinement. Blossom after blossom unfolds in her genial clime. ”

“ But do not dream Hellas is conquered by striding over her land. Before you shall possess the land you must first possess the men. And I say to you, Athens is still left, and Sparta left, free and strong, with men whose hearts and hands can never fail. I doubted once. But now I doubt no more. And our gods will fight for us. Your Ahura-Mazda has still to prevail over Zeus the Thunderer and Athena of the Pure Heart. ”

“ We have here not the Greece of mediæval Byzantine times, much less that of the Albanians, but the sunny Hellas of the days when the world was young, when these ardent colonists sailed westwards to perpetuate their names and legends in the alien soil of Italy. ”

“ At this crisis the Athenians took the lead, and
if anyone should say that the Athenians proved to be the saviours of Hellas, he would not fail to hit the truth; these were they who, preferring that Hellas should continue to exist in freedom, roused up all of Hellas. Nor did fearful oracles which came from Delphi and cast them into dread, induce them to leave Hellas.
The first thing the Greeks did was to hold a conference at Corinth, which was attended by envoys from all the leading states except Argos and Thebes, which stood aloof. ”

“ The whole of Hellas puts to sea; the ocean is burdened with the weight of continents; a protracted war breaks out, and fierce battles are waged, and the plains are crowded with dead: the barbarian assails the fleet with outrage ”

“ In no other region of Europe could the independent city-states of ancient Hellas have grown up in shelter so safe, under skies so kindly, amid influences from the outer world so urgent and so strong. It is reasonable to say that these happy conditions had much to do with the shaping of the character and career of the Greek people as a whole. ”

“ With strains like these, men of Athens, ringing in the ears of your sires, they could emulate the deeds of old; rising to such heights of valor that not for their own native State alone, but for all Hellas as a common fatherland, they stood ready to offer up their lives. There on Marathon they went into line in the face of the barbarians, bore down all Asia in arms, the stake their lives alone, winning security for Greece at large; not puffed up with the pride of renown, but glad their work was worthy of its fame ”

“ All this by way of introduction to the thought that to visit Hellas is by no means a step aside, but rather one further step back along the highway traversed from east to west by the slow course of empire, and therefore a step natural and proper to be taken by every one who is interested in the history of civilized man, the better to understand the present by viewing it in the light of the past. ”

“ Oh! could we but bestow this precious gift on our mother-country and her colonies! would the tribes of our native land but forget their Dorian, Ionian or AEolian descent, and, contenting themselves with the one name of Hellenes, live as the children of one family, as the sheep of one flock,—then indeed we should be strong against the whole world, and Hellas would be recognized by all nations as the Queen of the Earth! ”

“ What is the cause of these things? [he asked] , for as it was not without reason that the Hellenes in old days were so prompt for freedom, so it is not without reason or cause that they are now so prompt to be slaves. There was a spirit, men of Athens, a spirit in the mind of the People in those days which is absent today, the spirit which vanquished the wealth of Persia, which led Hellas in the path of freedom, and never gave way in face of battle by sea or land; a spirit whose extinction today has brought universal ruin and turned Hellas upside down. ”

“ Indeed, the supreme monument of the matchless literature of Hellas bore witness to the fact that, prior to the beginnings of Greek history, there had existed on Greek soil a civilization of a very high type, differing from, in some respects even superior to, that which succeeded it, but manifestly refusing to be left out of consideration in any attempt to describe the beginnings of Greek culture. ”

“ The Hellas of which it speaks is a cluster of autonomous cities in the Peloponnesus, the Islands, and Northern Greece, together with their colonies scattered over the coasts of Italy, Sicily, Thrace, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and Africa. These cities care only to be independent, or at most to lord it over one another. Their political institutions, their religious ceremonies, their customs, are civic and local. Language, commerce, a common Pantheon, and a common art and poetry are the ties that bind them together. In its second phase, Greek history begins with the expedition of Alexander. ”

“ We pass from Athens and from Attica; one stage more, one bound rather, over the central sea of Greece, will lead us beyond the bounds of Hellas itself. One thought more comes across us as we pass from Athens, as we make ready to pass from Greece. Between the work of the earliest and of the latest Grecian heroes there is a strange likeness. Thêseus—that name will do as well as any other—brought together rival cities to form one abiding commonwealth, and thereby to create the Athens alike of archons, emperors, dukes, and kings. ”

“ It thus embraced all the Greek settlements on the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, on the shores of the Hellespont, the Bosporus and the Black Sea. Nevertheless, the Greek peninsula within the limits described above, together with the adjacent islands, was always regarded as Hellas par excellence. The continental area of Hellas proper was no greater than that of the modern Greek kingdom, which comprises but a small portion of the territories actually occupied by the Greek race. ”

“ And since the ideas that now float through the atmosphere of Hellas are not confined to the great, nay, perhaps are less visible to them, than to those whose eyes are not riveted on the absorbing substances of ambition and power, so I have learned something, I know not how, save that I have listened and reflected. ”

“ The immediate cradle of those Greek races, which possessed this primitive title and descent, was Thessaly; and of Thessaly Hellas was either a synonym, or a part.
4. The origin of the races thus ruling Hellas is to be sought among the Helli, who dwelt in the mountains around Dodona, apparently with those institutions which have ever been characteristic of mountaineers; and who represent, more faithfully than the inhabitants of lowlands, the earliest type of human society, cast at a time when its relationship to the family was still palpable and near. ”