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Mirage of Greek Continuity 269
these two groups share strikingly similar customs : the coffeehouse
of a Greek village is presented as ‘the modern equivalent
of the lesche’, and the travelling craftsmen of modern Greece
‘function in exactly the same way as Homer’s demioergoi’. 7
More generally, modern peasants’ attitudes towards labour,
honour, and shame carry us back to Hesiod’s Works and Days
and are to be explained as a survival from classical antiquity. 8 In
short, these modern Greeks, miraculously spared by the course
of history and uncontaminated by the encroachments of modern
civilization, have been transformed into living aboriginal
ancestors. One is reminded of the Braudelian definition of the
Mediterranean as ‘a collection of museums of man . . . a human
milieu which the most spectacular invasions have shown themselves
incapable of biting into deeply’. 9
1. the first wave
Long before modern classicists and ethnographers, such analogies
were drawn not only by Frederick Douglas, in his Essay on
certains points of resemblance between the ancient and modern
Greeks (1813) , but also by earlier French, English, and German
travellers who from Pierre Belon (1553) to William Eton (1798)
happened to visit Athens, the islands, and what they called the
‘Morea’ (the Peloponnese) and the ‘Levant’ (Asia Minor). 10
Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford, 1964); J. G. Peristiany,
‘Honour and Shame in a Cypriot Highland Village’, in J. G. Peristiany (ed.),
Honour and Shame: the Values of Mediterranean Society (London, 1965),
173–90. And see T. J. Bent, ‘On Insular Greek Customs’, Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1886), 391–403, with Herzfeld, Anthropology,
73.
7 Walcot, Greek Peasants, 27, 28.
8 Ibid. 25–44, 57–76.
9 F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de
Philippe II (Paris, 1949), 298 (not included in the revised edition, nor therefore
in the English translation).
10 On early travellers in Greece see D. Constantine, Early Greek Travellers
and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge, 1984); H. Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, The
Eve of the Revival: British Travellers’ Perceptions of Early Nineteenth-Century
Greece (London, 1990); R. Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and
Literature of Travel to Greece (Ann Arbor, 1991); O. Augustinos, French Odysseys
: Greece in French Travel literature from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era
(Baltimore, 1994). For a checklist of travel narratives see the end of this article.